Territories of Science and Religion by Peter Harrison, University of Chicago Press, 2014

The warfare between science and religion is a myth that, in the public imagination, just won’t die. It is most alive in public discourse about teaching evolution in schools or debates over climate change. It also lurks just beneath the surface of other hot button culture war issues like abortion or euthanasia. In these contentious debates, religion and science are almost personified, agents in a battle fighting to take hold in American minds. So pervasive are these forces that we just can’t imagine it any other way. Isn’t this a timeless, perpetual battle?

While we may feel that we have a much longer history of thinking this way, the categories themselves only arose relatively recently. This is what historian Peter Harrison sets out to prove in his new book, The Territories of Science and Religion. The book is an adaptation of his 2011 Gifford Lectures, a series of talks focused on science, religion and theology that has been running nearly continuously in Scotland since 1888. This text is highly readable and well-suited as an introduction to the field, especially since the lectures are pitched to be accessible to both scholars and the public.

John Hedley Brooke (Harrison’s predecessor as the head of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford, which Harrison headed while he prepared these lectures) revolutionized the study of science and religion by arguing for a shift in narrative away from the “Conflict Myth”—the aforementioned idea that science and religion are in a perpetual and timeless war—to the “Complexity Thesis”— basically, it’s complicated. Much of the scholarship that has since responded to Brooke has focused on classifying the types of relationships between these unwieldy categories.

In the face of complex categories, Harrison’s book’s thesis is simple, though not so simple that it reduces the subject matter to a caricature of a boxing match. Instead, Harrison’s approach is to tell a “historical cartography” of how the categories themselves have been mapped out and divided. The intellectual history traces a move from internalized virtues to externalized objectified systems of beliefs and practices. His intervention is as much about how history is told as it is about the historical story itself.

As Harrison argues, religion (by which he means Christianity in the European context) only emerged as we understand it today in the early modern period and science only in the nineteenth century. Earlier than this, then, Harrison’s narrative is of myths – stories projected onto the past for political purposes. The story that reaches to the present day is one of imagination and forgetting, or as he puts it, making the categories seem real, timeless, and perpetually at war. This happens through “historical amnesia” about the constructedness of the categories, a process that covers up any “historical realities that might challenge the integrity of our…conception, and projections of human agency onto them.” This is a process Harrison compares to the founding myths of nations: “Karl Deutsch’s similarly unflattering definition of a nation—‘a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors’—is not an altogether unfitting description for those who in recent times have sought to foment hostility between science and religion.” After all, categories cannot fight, people do (this is a point that Peter Gottschalk also makes in his Religion, Science, and Empire, recently reviewed here.)

Though we often talk about science or religion before the modern period, the meaning of scientia and religio then were internal virtues —“an intellectual habit” and “a moral habit,” respectively. This changed dramatically during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when “both religion and science were literally turned inside out.” The idea of cultivating internal virtues can be traced back to Ancient Greek philosophy, the subject of Chapter Two, “The Cosmos and the Religious Quest.” Harrison argues that the Ancient Greeks thought they were doing philosophical inquiry that combined with the study of nature, moral questions, spiritual practices, and the pursuit of the “good life.” They were not after a naturalist, rationalist investigation of the cosmos. Categorical classifications like “science” and “religion” can only be projected onto their work, not found within it.

The Early Christians incorporated many elements of this Ancient philosophy into their own nascent tradition. Harrison’s history of Christianity traces how those within the tradition conceived of their own epistemological boundaries. He argues that, though belief is a key component of Christianity today, it did not always have the same meaning for Christians. He explains, “Until well into the Middle Ages…the declaration ‘I believe’ was neither an assertion of the existence of some being nor the lending of assent to propositional truths, but was primarily an expression of trust between persons.” This would change only in the seventeenth century. As the Christian religion was emerging, it was not always shaped by the same tenets or limits.

The third chapter focuses on the shifting relationship between the “book of scripture” and the “book of nature.” Medieval thinkers understood the relationship between the world and the divine in two ways, through “Signs and Causes,” the chapter’s title. Here, Harrison describes efforts to understand the relationships between symbols in nature and in scripture as well as how observations of nature could shed light on truths about God. By the dawn of the early modern period, which is Harrison’s own specialty, these two “book”-based understandings of nature and theology fell out of favor.

The Reformation brought new skepticism about human reason and its ability to uncover truth. “Experimental” natural philosophy, developed by figures like Frances Bacon, replaced a symbolic or causal understanding of the world. It is here, in Chapter Four, “Science and the Origins of ‘Religion,’” that Harrison’s narrative really comes alive, as he turns to the moment he tells us is coming from the beginning: the appearance of religion through a great shift from internal virtues perfected through habitual acts to objectified categories. Protestantism posed theological challenges to the Aristotelian ideas of ethical cultivation. As a result, Harrison explains that “[t]he content of catechisms that had once been understood as techniques for instilling an interior piety now came to be thought of as encapsulating the essence of some objective thing—religion.” This process could not have taken place in isolation, but was always in a dialectical relationship with what are often considered the precursors to modern science.

His argument that there was a shift from the internal to external is supported with quantitative charts that show the shifting use of key phrases in English books. With the changes of the Reformation, the idea of “the Christian religion,” based on belief and creed, came into existence and its use grew exponentially during the seventeenth century. The externalization of religion, along with shifts in the powers of the state, gave rise to groups of men using ordered methods to achieve social improvements: what Harrison identifies as a newly externalized set of sciences, in the plural.

Likewise, with the expansion of colonial endeavors, European Christians identified parallel systems of belief and practice in the people they encountered, which gave rise to the idea of multiple world religions. As Harrison explains, the external features of religion (like texts or rituals) were much easier to compare than any interior state. A popular response to the emphasis on the external manifestations of religion was to turn to comparison, which easily turned into competition: which was the most true? The next move, then, was the development of standards for rational proof and evidence, which in turn affected the meaning of belief, at least among English Protestants. Here, religion comes to be based on a set of objectified, propositional beliefs. Natural Philosophers, like Newton, Boyle and Kepler, used scientific procedures and values like rationality as a means to worship God and prove the truth of Christianity.

The dialectic continues into the next Chapter, “Utility and Progress,” where Harrison explains a shift in power: science overtakes religion as the reigning authority over knowledge production. Religion began to lend legitimacy to science: “In our own age, which sees enormous investment in the natural sciences, and particularly those thought to yield economic benefits, it is hard to imagine that there was ever any question about the superiority of knowledge that yields practical and useful applications,” Harrison writes. But numerous examples, most famously Jonathan Swift’s satirical treatment of the new experimentalism in Gulliver’s Travels, show us just how skeptical people were of the new scientific methods. Defenders of the new sciences had to work to prove the utility of their methods, both to produce technologies and also to promote religious projects, such as charity. The usefulness of science and its technological products, however, end up undermining religion’s social legitimacy and authority. Science reigns in the end because of its utility to bring about material progress. (The idea of progress, as we know it today, arises during this period: progress came to describe the movement of history and identifiable results in the world, not just of individual people working on their internal worlds.)

In Chapter Six, “Professing Science,” Harrison shows how the category of science finally, in the nineteenth century, came to coalesce into a singular entity, instead of the plural sciences. Part of the explanation for this was the rise of a class of professional scientists. Harrison again charts the changes in how science is popularly understood by quantifying the use of relevant terminology, like “scientist” or “natural sciences,” in English books over time. To describe the process by which this happened, Harrison identifies three steps:

Modern science…emerges from a threefold process: first, a new identity—the scientist—is forged for its practitioners; second, it is claimed that the sciences share a distinctive method, one that excludes reference to religious and moral considerations; and third, following on from this, the character of this new science is consolidated by drawing sharp boundaries and positing the existence of contrast cases—science and pseudo-science, science and technology, science and the humanities, and most important for our purposes, science and religion.

This process of “purifying” science is where the argument of historical mythology comes in most strongly.

In his epilogue, Harrison deals with the science-religion relationship as it has been imagined in modern thought. In a climate where Sam Harris can claim that “Mother Teresa, voodoo, the pope, fear-ridden peasants of antiquity, Muslim suicide bombers, animists, arid monotheism, the arch-bishop of Canterbury, séances, Thomas Aquinas, an evangelical huckster dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, Muhammad, the tawdry myths of Bethlehem, the vapid and annoying holiday known as Hanukkah, Mormons, hysterical Jewish congregations, the sordid theology of Pascal, Martin Luther King, rednecks, cobbled-together ancient Jewish books, WWII-era Japanese emperor worship, and male circumcision” are all religious, and thus unreasonable and unscientific, Harrison calls for historical depth over polemical breadth.

Harrison’s answer to moving beyond the vitriolic politics of science-religion battles is not to get them to play nice—for that just reinforces the boundary patrolling that defines the conflict to begin with. Instead, Harrison argues that:

Science and religion are not natural kinds; they are neither universal propensities of human beings nor necessary features of human societies. Rather they are ways of conceptualizing certain human activities—ways that are peculiar to modern Western culture, and which have arisen as a consequence of unique historical circumstances.

This concluding point is useful in at least two ways. First, there is the literal reading: these politically potent categories are historically contingent. This is what The Territories of Science and Religion argues convincingly. There is also another layer of insight to be read into this conclusion about the power of inclusion and exclusion from the categories of science and religion: even within “modern Western culture,” there are forms of knowledge and practice that fall outside the bounds of elite, white, male activity.

For example, I am teaching a course at Columbia University this semester called “Atoms and Eve: Science and Religion in America” which challenges students to consider the power of the categories of science and religion in American life and movements that defy the structures of their authority. They are reading about feminist groups – from gynepunk cyborg witches working to decolonize the female body to Jewish women using the mikvah ritual bath as a site for holistic healing – whose work questions the “just so” stories that maintain structures of power. The overall lesson is that there are many more features of human society and peculiar propensities of human beings to consider as we draw new maps of the territories of science and religion.

Because of the political salience of the categories of science and religion, which are deployed in so many popular debates, I am trying to take work like Harrison’s and use it to give students the tools they need to analyze the ways in which science and religion are entrenched in systems of political power. While these categories often represent opposing sides in an intractable culture war, recognizing that categories are tools and not agents opens up possibilities for imagining alternative narratives that break the cycle in which a supposed timelessness of warfare justify polemics that perpetuate it.

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Cara Rock-Singer received her BA in Molecular Biology from Princeton (2009), her MSt in Theology with a focus on Religion and Science from Oxford (2010), and MA (2012) and MPhil (2013) from the Columbia Religion Department, where she studies Religion and Science in America. Her dissertation is a historical and ethnographic study of the relationship between religion, science, and gender in the lives of American Jewish women. In particular, it focuses on Jewish women’s claims to scientific and religious authority over their bodies.

The post Review: The Territories of Science and Religion by Peter Harrison appeared first on The Revealer.

Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins is greeted with applause from supporters as she begins her remarks during a news conference on Dec. 16, 2015, in Chicago.
(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)

By Ryan T. Woods

In a matter of days, news of Wheaton College’s suspension of Larycia Alaine Hawkins had spilled out of the rusticated corridors at Blanchard Hall, named for the abolitionist founder of the school, and into media outlets around the country. The affair furnished irresistible material for journalists and pundits: an evangelical college had placed a tenured professor on leave after she posted a picture of herself in a hijab on social media glossed by an expression of solidarity with Muslims. Supporting details – that Hawkins is a woman of color, that she cited papal dicta as justification for her activism on this stalwartly Protestant campus, and that she claimed Muslims and Christians worship the same God – only made this episode more attractive to commentators. But much of the coverage has missed the point, confusing the acute symptoms for the underlying tensions. What the affair has exposed is not necessarily Islamophobia, but the fragile status of diversity, academic freedom, and tenure at Christian colleges.

To understand why Hawkins’s Facebook post stirred controversy, one must take into account the unique position of evangelical institutions like Wheaton. Although many American colleges have religious foundations, most have relaxed their church affiliations or abandoned them altogether. Of those who maintain religious identities, few still require students and faculty to sign a statement of faith or a covenant regulating their conduct within the university community. This waning of commitment reflects the gradual displacement of character formation by knowledge production as the governing purpose of higher education. Forced to choose between these two seemingly incompatible ends, most faculty, students, and administrators decided to model their institutions on the ideals of the research university rather than on the paradigm of the religious college. So completely did the academy secularize these institutions that religious chroniclers of this development seek to outstrip each other in metaphors of decay: James Burtchaell ends up raging against the dying of the light, and George Marsden laments the total eclipse of the American university’s soul.

Yet the institutional retreat from evangelical conviction has not quite been inexorable. By any metric, Wheaton is a remarkable outlier to the trend of religious divestment among prestigious colleges. Kiplinger’s, Princeton Review, Forbes, and U.S. News and World Report all rank it in the top tier of liberal arts colleges. It attracts students with impressive credentials: the median standardized test scores for its admitted students rival those of their counterparts at Bucknell, Occidental, or Oberlin. It retains them at even higher rates. A conspicuous number of its graduates earn advanced degrees. Nor does this achievement come at the expense of piety. First Things, the publication of note for Christian traditionalists, recently placed Wheaton at the pinnacle of its rankings for its integration of faith and learning. Noting its reputation as the evangelical Harvard, Loren Pope suggests in his Colleges That Change Lives that this flattering sobriquet actually sells the institution short, since Wheaton is “head, shoulders, and heart above Harvard in its concern with good moral compasses and strong value systems, as well as in the percentage of future PhDs it has turned out.” The values fostered at Wheaton can be debated; its success in amalgamating academic rigor with its own brand of spirituality cannot be ignored.      

And yet there are cracks in the edifice that the recent contretemps with Hawkins has exposed. Buried under the headlines and screenshots of the selfie-in-headscarf was a striking detail that has not received much scrutiny: Hawkins is the only black woman with tenure at Wheaton. Not only is she the lone tenured African-American woman; she is also the first. It took nearly one hundred fifty years for a college founded by an outspoken abolitionist to promote a black woman to the ranks of associate professor. This century and a half void took place on the outskirts of one of the most concentrated populations of African-Americans in the country. While underrepresentation of minorities on faculties is a problem of national dimensions, the inability of a respected institution in the Chicago suburbs to recruit black female professors raises disquieting questions about the college’s valuation of minority voices.

To their credit, administrators at Wheaton have made significant strides in diversifying its professoriate from the monochrome homogeneity of two or three decades ago. They recognize that becoming a first-rate institution requires diversity, and have tried to cultivate it. Hawkins is the poster child for these efforts, the thumbnail photograph next to a bar graph quantifying their success. But what the chart leaves out is revealing: the ethnic complexion of this growth seems relatively uniform. Asian-Americans, who have come to assume a noticeable stature in American evangelicalism in recent years, account for most of the faculty of color at Wheaton. Their inclusion is a welcome development for those who value diversity. But other disparities persist. Blacks and Latin@s have failed to make gains commensurate with their demographic importance in evangelical communities and in the nation at large.

Numbers tell only part of the story. If it is to transcend a token presence in bar graphs and pie charts, diversity must serve deeper purposes. The educational imperative for creating a diverse faculty turns on the observation that teachers of different backgrounds enrich the learning environment – and particularly benefit minority students. In underscoring such contributions, however, this justification also points to their subversive potential. Women, people of color, and other underrepresented minorities often have experiences and ideas challenging to the dominant narratives that structure everyday life. So long as minority professors conform to expectations, matters remain predictable. Yet nonconformity can rapidly escalate controversy and invite intensified and disproportionate responses.

When Hawkins posted a photograph of herself in a headscarf and maintained that Christians and Muslims worshiped the same God, she was departing from the script of expected behavior, if not from the text of the college’s confession or moral code. At the same time, it is probably not coincidental that a person of color adopted this gesture of solidarity with members of another community that is encountering marginalization. Nor was it the first time Hawkins had courted controversy at Wheaton: her seeming embrace of leftist politics and more expansive views of human sexuality had alienated some at the college over the years.

It is worth considering to what degree race has amplified consternation in this episode. Other faculty members who acted in this way have also elicited disapproval, to be sure. In fact, as Time reported, Hawkins’s colleague Michael Mangis drew an enquiry from Provost Stanton Jones when he posted a supportive comment on her Facebook page noting that he would be leading his students in Muslim prayers in a spring class. English professor, Tiffany Eberle Kriner, ran afoul of the administration for a statement of reverence “for the same God” appearing in a note on college letterhead to a nearby Muslim center. Yet both were spared further scrutiny after further exchanges with Jones. By contrast, Jones placed Hawkins on leave after discussing the matter with her. The last faculty member sanctioned in this way had been charged with possessing child pornography. Hawkins’ own attempts to bring her position into conformity with the Statement of Faith were deemed insufficient, despite endorsements from her colleagues. She flatly rejected an offer of two years of probation, during which tenure would be revoked while an administrative committee evaluated her theology. Each circumstance was different, and Jones seemed to have lingering questions after his conversations with Hawkins. Still, the racial question is unavoidable: Mangis and Kriner are white.

These concerns seem more serious when one considers how unremarkable her actions were by community standards. Donning a hijab may make for poor optics at a Christian college, but it violates no sacrosanct community standards. This is where some of the national media and the commentariat got it wrong: Wheaton never claimed it had suspended Hawkins for donning a hijab or expressing concern for the treatment of American Muslims. Public rationalizations may differ from private machinations, but her sympathy for Muslims seems unexceptionable. A few pundits have scorned her for drawing attention to Muslim victimization while her coreligionists endure dangerous conditions in the Middle East, but theirs is a debate about how to prioritize sympathies. No one at the college seriously contends that Hawkins is wrong to care about how Muslims fare in our current political climate.

The official explanation for placing Hawkins on administrative leave cites theological grounds: asserting that Christians and Muslims serve the same God violates the statement of faith that each faculty member signs as a condition of employment. The notice to initiate termination proceedings follows this point: the provost recommended dismissal for the “unqualified assertion of religious solidarity with Jews and Muslims”.

While it sounds impressive, this religious justification seems threadbare on further scrutiny. Her affirmation that Muslims and Christians worship the same God was too amorphous to count as deviant. The statement of faith is devoid of provisions forbidding such statements, and the administration’s interpretation by no means follows as a necessary corollary. As Tobin Grant, a Wheaton-trained political scientist pointed out, Hawkins had violated a shibboleth that the administration had just introduced.

That acknowledged, few commentators have questioned her framing of the issue in these terms. In this sense, they have reproduced the administrator’s interpretation of the episode, focusing on questions of permissibility rather than utility. At Wheaton, this contentious claim about both faiths serving the same God was a tactical misstep that unnecessarily muddied the waters. Had she stuck with her headscarf selfie and a few anodyne expressions of support for American Muslims, she would have raised a few eyebrows but not focused the eyes of the nation on her college. Hawkins continues to insist that the politics of the “same God” controversy has been a distraction from her purpose and has obscured her intention of demonstrating solidarity, but she bears some responsibility for her failed gambit. Her appeal to comparative theology created fatal ambiguities that overshadowed her gesture, throwing into sharp relief the differences that separate Muslims and Christians rather than the commonalities that unite them. It also revealed how monolithic evangelical interactions with Islam tend to be. A better approach, as Joshua Ralston points out, would have focused on how these traditions know God, not what they deduce about God’s being from their canonical texts. Administrators correctly pointed out the unqualified character of her position; they might have also criticized its irrelevance to her concern for Muslims.    

Yet if her assertion of religious solidarity with Jews and Muslims is unqualified, so too are the administration’s assumptions about her position. The evidence permits a variety of opinions, even among evangelicals. Jews, Christians, and Muslims share Abrahamic roots. They may disagree about which Scriptures to canonize, but their common ancestry includes historical reverence for a single God. Consequently, Christians believe three persons participate in this divine nature, but debate whether this understanding undermines the conviction that Jews and Muslims serve the same God. As Bruce McCormack observes, this debate turns on the question of whether one emphasizes the unity of the Godhead or the diversity of its persons.  Some, such as Albert Mohler and Nabeel Qureshi contend that Hawkins’s “same God” ecumenism remains irreconcilable with the Christian understanding of God as Trinity—although both consider Judaism a closer relative than Islam. Others maintain that Muslims and Jews gesture toward the same God as through a glass darkly, even if they differ on their appraisal of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Affirming this latter position need not nullify Christian particularity or dissolve religious differences among these faiths. This is the stance of postconciliar Catholicism, and the argument of Yale theologian Miroslav Volf, who was invited to lecture on Wheaton’s campus in 2011. In her theological statement in response to the enquiry, Hawkins also references Timothy George (a lifetime advisory trustee of Wheaton) and John Stackhouse (a Wheaton alumnus and guest speaker) – each of whom possesses unimpeachable evangelical credentials. There is, then, reasoned disagreement within evangelicalism on this question. Presumably, she considered her statement compatible with the confession of faith; plausibly, she considered the thesis of an honored guest an acceptable model for her own thinking, even if others disagreed. Provost Jones apparently agreed: in a private email, he called her comments “innocuous.”

Even so, it must have been a calculated provocation on her part. Only eight years earlier, former President Duane Liftin and Provost Stanton Jones removed their signatures from an interfaith charter entitled “Loving God and Neighbor Together.” This prelude to the Hawkins affair followed a similar trajectory: an expression of solidarity with Muslims, alleged lack of theological nuance, and call for clarification or recantation. Liftin’s reflection reads like a template for the termination proceedings against Hawkins:

To speak unqualifiedly of “our common love for God,” as if the Qu’ran’s Allah and the God

and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ are one and the same, and as if what it means to “love God” in these two faiths means the same thing, is to say more than I am willing to grant. I do not criticize others who do not share these qualms. But as for me, I needed to back away.

Now charged with chairing the termination proceedings, Jones must be recalling Liftin’s statements and his own actions. Perhaps Hawkins is too. She had just accepted a tenure-track position at Wheaton when Liftin and Jones published their retractions.

What sets Hawkins apart from Jones are the protections that academic freedom and tenure confer –  protections this episode has exposed as increasingly tenuous. Here again, Christian colleges must navigate unique challenges. They strive to maintain fidelity to confessional commitments while honoring scholarly enquiry. To achieve this equilibrium, they must maintain unity on central articles and permit latitude on peripheral issues. Perhaps most importantly, they must have discretion to know when freedom trumps the desire for purity or uniformity. In the Time exclusive, Gary Burge, a senior New Testament scholar at Wheaton, sagely observes, “Christian colleges like Wheaton write statements of faith to protect what is essential, but they also need to discern where faculty are free to express private views. This is the very essence of academic freedom.” Historically, the ideals Burge enunciates have been hard to come by. Founded as a bulwark against liberalism and cultural accommodation, evangelicalism has struggled to find a place for intellectual freedom within the bounds of orthodoxy.

As curious as these doctrinal scruples seem to outsiders, concerns about religion have always shaped discussions of academic freedom. In Germany, where the modern understanding of academic freedom originated, its architects championed the autonomy of research and teaching. Friedrich Paulsen, a professor at the University of Berlin, offered this lapidary definition in 1902: “For the academic teacher and his hearers there can be no prescribed and no proscribed thoughts. There is only one rule for instruction: to justify the truth of one’s teaching by reason and the facts.” For Paulsen and his retinue, the purpose of the university was not to transmit dogma, but to pursue research without coercion or censorship.

Paulsen nonetheless hedged this ideal with provisions. He expected the state to suppress politically subversive teachings, and he directed professors of theology to maintain positive relations with religion and the church. For all his rhapsodies over courageous enquiry, then, Paulsen’s vision of the university as an incubator of state functionaries overshadowed his desire for academic independence. The disparities that resulted from these limitations nettled critics and religious dissenters: the professor of theology had to conform to ecclesiastical authority in a way that a professor of philosophy or natural science need not. What was good for the goose might not be good for the gander, at least when combustible topics of religion and politics were under consideration.   

In adapting this principle to their context, American champions of academic freedom dramatically expanded its scope while also licensing religious colleges to regulate the beliefs and behavior of its faculty. Historic protections of speech and religion made these twin developments possible; their historical entanglements have made them controversial.

The evolution of the canonical charter of academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, illustrates this tension. In 1940, the framers of this statement enshrined the right of a religious school to maintain the integrity of its mission by limiting the exercise of academic freedom – so long as the school disclosed these determining purposes and religious tests at the time of employment. The point of this limitations clause was to protect employees from the tyranny of contracts with hidden standards. On this understanding, a faculty member who agrees to work at a college requiring a confession of faith freely consents to horizons of expression circumscribed by these formulae. Yet this proviso hardly protects against arbitrary interpretations of a broadly-framed statement of faith by administrators and trustees – precisely what defenders of Hawkins have charged Wheaton of doing. Mindful of this, the AAUP abandoned its earlier support for this exceptional clause in 1970, reporting laconically in a footnote, “Most church-related institutions do not need or do not desire such a departure from the principle of academic freedom implied in the 1940 Statement.”     

For their part, Christian colleges like Wheaton prefer to redefine the contours of academic freedom as opportunities rather than to see themselves restricting it through religious tests. Recently, Azusa Pacific University promoted its confession as a means to deepen spirituality in the classroom, a privilege distinctive to academic communities united by common beliefs. They have a point. For those interested in pursuing religious enrichment, the integration of faith and learning many religious colleges feature can be liberating. But this consideration has more to do with religious devotion than with academic freedom. In cases where scholarly enquiry seems to conflict with religious commitments, faith usually trumps freedom. Consequently, the pivotal question becomes how much latitude professors have to investigate within the bounds of orthodoxy. The answer to this query varies, but turns on the consideration of which power brokers get to construe the statement of faith. “It has to do,” a representative of the AAUP observed, “with who’s the majority, who’s the minority.”

Neither Hawkins nor her foremost apologist, theologian Miroslav Volf, challenges the right of religious institutions to require a signed statement of faith from employees. On their understanding, Christian colleges must preserve the integrity of their learning communities by creating boundaries. Rather, a capricious reading of the statement of faith, the policing of discourse on a controversial topic, and the intransigence of administrators when presented with ringing affirmations of faith concern them. Strikingly, Hawkins has praised Wheaton’s ideals throughout her ordeal. She has expressed appreciation for the support of students and faculty. Even when speaking to the press, she has favored the language of theology, interpreting this controversy as part of the historical arc that bends toward justice. Absent from her pleas is any shred of antagonism toward religious conviction as retrogressive or incompatible with academic pursuits. Although she and the administration have their differences, they share the common ground necessary for continued dialogue, a fact that was not lost on observers hoping for reconciliation.

As termination proceedings opened, a rapprochement seemed in the offing. Citing procedural irregularities, administrative overreach, and even racial inequity, a swelling chorus of faculty called on administrators to reinstate Hawkins. Students collected petitions to reinstate “Doc Hawk,” started a hashtag, and massed in prayer and protest along with faculty. The college’s diversity committee alleged discrimination “on the basis of race and gender, and, to a lesser extent, marital status” tainted the episode. A number of professors indicated concerns about their job security as well as the college’s continued ability to attract talent in light of this treatment of one of its own. Michael Mangis, the psychology professor who had made similar comments about serving the same God as Muslims, donned academic regalia to teach his classes until administrators rehabilitated Hawkins. When a council comprised of nearly half the college’s tenured professors issued a unanimous recommendation to rescind the suspension and vacate termination hearings, it became clear that faculty sympathies lay with their beleaguered colleague.

Wheaton College students Annikka Bouwsma, left, Matthew Adams, center, and Josh Mangis, right, protest on Dec. 16, 2015, after the suspension of professor Larycia Hawkins.
(Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune)

Wheaton’s trial of Larycia Hawkins concluded as theatrically as it had begun, with all the reversals of a tragedy – or a farce. From the outset, administrators had maintained a steely resolve to conduct proceedings on their own terms: impervious to media scrutiny, faithful to the college’s mission, and suffused with the discourse of piety. Then, quite unexpectedly, Provost Jones withdrew his recommendation for terminating Hawkins, seeking forgiveness from the community for his treatment of his sister in Christ and his fracturing of the community. Although he acknowledged mishandling her case, he stood by his earlier concerns about her statements. Still, Hawkins seemed vindicated.

But any hopes of reconciliation Jones stirred by apologizing and revoking his charges ended in disappointment, papered over by legal and theological obfuscation. Hours after Jones abandoned his prosecution of Hawkins, the embattled professor and the college jointly announced they had reached a confidential agreement to part ways. While both sides offered compliments and best wishes in bidding farewell, the language of nondisclosure suggested a legal architecture underpinning these expressions of mutual respect. More jarring was their declaration that this denouement represented “resolution and reconciliation.” The sides organized a ceremony for “public reconciliation” at a Chicago church, but declined to discuss the matter beyond this event. In evangelical communities like Wheaton, it is not uncommon to exploit the lexicon of theology to gloss conflict, but describing what happened in this idiom seems inappropriate. This is like signing divorce papers and calling it reconciliation – an abuse of language. Moreover, the theological discourses of reconciliation and the legal discourses of nondisclosure compete with each other, producing a contradictory effect. The first rule of reconciliation, after all, is that you have to talk about reconciliation.

Whatever language and ritual is used to interpret it, the penumbra of deeper structural questions looms over this episode. Concerns over academic freedom at confessional institutions persist. Practical realities complicate questions about how religious colleges accommodate differences of opinion. As Mark Noll points out in his preface to a history of Protestant higher education, conservative points of view tend to be better funded at Christian colleges, tilting the balance of campus discussion. Perhaps most disquieting are the questions this incident raises about race and religion. Whatever their stated ideals, the custodians of academic freedom make distinctions of color in practice. A black woman expressing solidarity with Muslims will encounter more friction than a white activist. Diversity may be a boon to a university with ambitions of prestige, but it brings danger, too. This is evident from the administrators’ response. Suspending a tenured professor is the academic equivalent of filing for divorce. It was a disproportionate response to an open question, one that signaled discomfort with difference. Their perceptions of threat issue from what theologian Willie Jennings calls “extraction theology”: the mining of minorities’ experiences to affirm identity rather than allowing it to transform individuals and institutions.

Arguments like these test the mettle of an institution and reveal the depth of its commitments. This is as it should be. As a gloss on the AAUP Statement puts it, “Controversy is at the heart of free academic enquiry.” But how an institution deals with acute controversy often matters less than how it deals with systemic issues. A public relations campaign can reframe a narrative, and a compromise can alleviate immediate tensions. Structural problems are harder to deal with, and less glamorous, but ultimately more important. The trajectory of Wheaton’s status will depend on how effectively it remedies these issues. Its history proves how difficult and intractable this can be. But it also provides ample resources for engaging with difficult problems in a winsome way – starting with the founder, Jonathan Blanchard, the fiery abolitionist whose eponymous hall now houses the administrators charting the course into the future.     

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Ryan T. Woods earned his doctorate in religion at Emory University in 2013. As an undergraduate, he studied at Taylor University, a Christian college in Indiana. He now teaches at Georgia Gwinnett College, and serves as an Associate Editor for Marginalia Review of Books. His interests range from early Alexandrian Christianity to Cleveland sports.

The post Same God, Different Freedoms? appeared first on The Revealer.

In July of 2013, Kali Handelman became the third editor of The Revealer, a publication of The Center for Religion and Media, that has been running in some form or another since its founding by journalist and author Jeff Sharlet in 2003. Ann Neumann, the publication’s second editor, stepped down in 2013 to complete a book. But completely leaving The Revealer proved too hard to do. Neumann soon pitched a column to Handelman that became “The Patient Body,” a monthly plumbing of the murky grey areas between the disciplines of religion and medicine that has been published continuously since October 2013.

Every writer-editor interaction is collaborative. For the writer, the hope is that the editor will find the argumentative holes, unclear ideas, and clumsy language that escaped them in the writing process. For the editor, the hope is that the writer will bring new ways of looking at issues, old or new, something fresh and provocative—or at least compelling. Our work on this column has been fulfilling and instructive for both of us.

The first installment of “The Patient Body” jumped right into the fray with an examination of a case that ended in the arrest of a distraught daughter who had handed her dying father a bottle of morphine. Subsequent columns have continued to examine nuanced and controversial issues. But it is the dynamic between editor and author that makes “The Patient Body” exciting. “I feel like we have such a wide-ranging, ongoing conversation through your columns,” Handelman wrote when considering the possibility of sharing in a dialogue for this installment of the column. We decided that, on the occasion of the publication of Neumann’s first book, The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America — the writing of which unfolded as Neumann and Handelman worked through “The Patient Body” episodes each month — it was only fitting to invite you, our readers, into that conversation. They spoke via email about working together, the writer-editor relationship, and the religious, ethical and moral issues the column has taken up over the years.

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Kali Handelman: Let’s start with bodily autonomy. You do such a brilliant job of not only presenting but explaining what’s at stake in stories about how peoples’ decision-making rights regarding their bodies are limited by law, medicine, and religion. For instance, linking issues around the right to die and reproductive rights. You’re especially adept at the kind of intersectional thinking and reporting that brings issues of gender, race, and class into play when discussing these issues. Can you tell me more about how you came to see the connections here? Perhaps, because it’s The Revealer, especially religion?

Ann Neumann: I had a journalist friend remind me recently that knowing too much of the details of an issue can inhibit the writing, make it dull and flat, which I think is very true. A writer can get caught up in the detail and nuance and forget about the writing or the narrative. Because I’m not an academic and because I cut my teeth late and, for the most part, while editing The Revealer, I’m really lucky to have fallen into a kind of pidgin theory.

Ann Neumann

Where I’m best, perhaps, is when I can write from the experience of being in a room with people—which means close to bodies, and with an understanding of how vulnerable some bodies really are. But when I do bring a column to you that feels thin, all emotion or scene without substance, you refuse to let me get away with it!

Almost every time I send you a first draft I’m doing the strident equivalent of shaking my fist at something that perplexes or puzzles me. You, as a good editor, hold me still and make me write clearly what I mean. You make me do the work. To apply theory and language to an emotion. And I think that’s what’s so unique and productive to our editorial process. It’s a great bridge of journalistic and academic approaches to a problem, a thought, a question.

As a hospice volunteer, I began noticing who was in hospice, how long they had been enrolled, who was caring for them (in cash-paid jobs, with no sick days or security), who had access to dental care and preventative medicine. And then I was assigned a hospice patient who had been a doctor. The differences in how patients encountered their end of life experiences was stark and something I couldn’t ignore.

Religion and ritual are always present in conversations about bodily health and rights. And even choice of what faith practices to abide by can be coerced. It’s been so enlightening to ask people how they interpret their faith and to compare that to their faith’s teachings. We always pick and choose what behaviors we are willing to enact. I’m a Catholic who goes to Mass once a year, for instance. My last patient was agnostic but found incredible solace in her conversations with a Universal Unitarian minister who visited once a week. Everyone I’ve ever met who was facing down an imminent death questioned what they knew about belief. It’s humbling, then, to raise a fist in support of one cosmology, when you realize that we all have unique end of life needs and questions.

Yet, our public conversations about faith continue to collapse whole spectrums of ritual and faith under grossly inadequate headings: Protestant, Catholic, Hindu. I get a call from reporters about twice a month who are working on a story about the need to train doctors in religious understanding. Every time I throw my hands in the air. How will a doctor know whether a woman in a headscarf subscribes to all the tenets of her faith or not? Teaching him “what Muslims believe” is a futile objective. Better he do his job—medicine—and let the woman decide what options she is willing to pursue.

KH: When we’re planning your column month-to-month we do a lot of picking key terms, say, “hope,” or “dignity.” In your book, you focus on these issues, of course, but also on another key term in fights surrounding bodily autonomy, “choice.” For example, when you and Robb Miller (former Executive Director of End of Life Washington) talk about choice in dying and hospice. It seems like this discourse about “choice” is another bridge between end of life and reproductive rights. I wondered while reading, though, if you think that the rhetoric of choice still has the kind of political force it might have had, say, in the lead-up to and years following Roe v. Wade, or is it a term that’s lost some of that power and, thus, from which activists are moving on? 

AN: Certainly the movement to make abortion affordable and accessible (in keeping with the Supreme Court justices’ decision on Roe v. Wade, without “undue burden”) has shifted away from choice language. I think because they saw how little room it allowed for discussions of disparity. But also, how it blocked out community and support—something anyone in a health care situation desperately needs. No one makes decisions about family planning or the end of their life in a vacuum. The shift to a more inclusive umbrella—“reproductive justice,” for instance—has been helpful not only for understanding the challenges to medical choice but also in the ways we discuss and work for greater gender and racial equality. Which is one of the reasons why I squirm a little when I hear those affiliated with the movement to legalize aid in dying focusing on choice. If you look at the statistics of who uses aid in dying, if you look at the movement itself, it tends to be well-educated and quite white. If they’re approaching aid in dying as a right, then I think they’ll have to consider some of the history of abortion access to be as inclusive as possible.

That said, I love the big key words like dignity, hope and autonomy because when you hold them still and pick apart the many meanings that we each imbue them with, you find that they can be conversation stoppers rather than helpful descriptors or tools. They can prevent dialogue from reaching the important facts. A world like dignity, for instance, has a long and loaded history. It can mean pretty much what anyone wants it to, depending on the conversation. It can signify equality or superiority, an earned type of regard or an inherent right. But I’ve also learned, through the course of the column, that tracking how these terms are used is intricate work that almost always exposes a kind of moral or ethical evasiveness.

KH: Speaking of activism, you write in the book about many kinds of work that you’ve done, including that as a teacher, as a writer, and as a hospice volunteer. And you talk about your relationship with activist organizations like Compassion & Choices. Do you see yourself as an activist? How/why, how/ why not? 

AN: Oh god, I didn’t see this one coming. As always, probing question. In the sense that I desperately hope my work makes us all better see the inadequacies and injustices in health care (as well as society and the laws surrounding it), I’m much better at pointing things out and asking the right questions than I am at complying with the restrictions that activism requires. Here’s an example: my publicist sent The Good Death to Compassion & Choices to see if they would support it or promote it. But they came back to us with criticism of how I documented the movement’s history and criticism of my comparison of drugs used for aid in dying and execution. There was, for me, no other way to write about the aid in dying movement but to stray outside the boundaries of that movement—which must be disciplined, polished, savvy, and on message in order to achieve its goals. I get that. And I have switched from using “assisted suicide” in my writing because of the negative connotations that it has.

But I’m not willing to censor my research and curiosity for the sake of movement membership. And I shouldn’t have to. I certainly don’t think that journalists can be objective—we’re all writing from a personal history and belief system—but I’ve found that I can’t belong (be an affiliated activist) and still ask the kinds of questions that are most interesting to me. I’m ok with that. Institutions, whether they be faith denominations or rights movements, must by definition police their boundaries. I have much more fun learning what I can from cutting, pasting and associating the tools and stances that institutions take. Everybody’s a hypocrite. When and why? Now that’s the telling question.

KH: Can you tell me a bit about how you see the current climate around death and dying? Your book was recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review alongside a couple of other volumes on the subject. What’s the nature of current interest in these issues and how does your book engage that interest?

AN: I think we’re paying attention to aid in dying and other end of life issues because we have to. The looming crisis of how to care for so many aging elders, the economic challenges of meeting those needs, both at the national and personal level, have come to the public’s attention. Passage of the Affordable Care Act, which required a lot of national dialogue about the requirements of a health care system and the responsibilities of all involved, also helped. And I think editors—who are losing parents and deeply involved in their caregiving due to monetary constraints and elder institutionalization—have been more willing to assign articles about end of life care and aging. We also can’t discount the market share of seniors, who are very much vested in ensuring that they get the most from public services. This and so much more, like fantastic bestselling books like Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and Katy Butler’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door, have done a fantastic job of raising awareness. As has the movement behind aid in dying. In most states where it’s been legalized, the public conversation has led to greater hospice use and other end of life planning. There’s another aspect to all the interest in death and dying–the focus on burial and environmental issues, grieving, and the funeral industry. We see this in the proliferation of death cafes across the country, more being written about death doulas, and a public conversation among much younger citizens about the meaning of death. Some of this, I think, has to do with the way that religious affiliation has reshaped itself over the past few decades–we don’t have the assurance of the legacy denominations any more. So we’re searching.

KH: I’m really fascinated by the process of writing a book. It’s one of those things that, it seems to me, you can’t really learn how to do without doing it. What was it like to write this book? What were your goals while you were writing it? Both for yourself and for the project? What did you want to learn and to be able to share? And what kind of life do you want it to live now that’s out there in the world?

AN: When I started this research, I never anticipated that it would be public, that it would become a book. I was angry that my culture had let me down when Dad died, that it had failed to educate me about what was coming for him and for me. And so I just ran after my own curiosities and, being ridiculously meticulous, I tracked and filed everything as I went. When I started writing about these issues, I began to see that there might be a larger story to be told, one that strung together seemingly disparate stories–like my own experience, the history and evolution of hospice, elder care for prisoners, and disability issues as they intersected with aid in dying. I really didn’t know if others could see the connections–or if I could make the whole convincing. When I sat down to write–picking up loosely piled notes, interviews, newspaper clippings–I had already gone through the process of writing a book proposal. My incredible agent, Laurie Abkemeier at DeFiore & Company, helped me give the whole thing shape. The book proposal, as is often the case with nonfiction books, was a great blueprint for how to tackled it all. Then all I had to do was write. We both know what that process is like, riddled with doubt, puzzles, deletes, and more research. It was work! But it was good work. I had a calendar taped to my wall with a writing schedule. Laurie read every chapter as I wrote them. Of course it really helped to have so many author friends who could tell me I wasn’t crazy when challenges came up. I think I almost wrote the book too late–like I had been in the midst of the research, had talked about and written about so many of the topics from varying angles. It was a challenge to keep it fresh and exciting and not fall back on practiced ways to see something and think about it. But my editor at Beacon, Amy Caldwell, was a fantastic reader and thinker to partner with on this, and she helped keep it fresh and interesting. Which is to say: no author is on their own. This book was supported by so many people that it’s created its own community. And that’s the best kind of project.

Now that the book is no longer mine, that it’s out in the world and being read and made personal by people I won’t even meet, I can see it in a different way that is invigorating. I am so strongly engaged in the message that we need to not only discuss these issues but also address the systems that perpetuate injustice within them that I don’t see getting tired of talking about it any time soon. I’ll probably start trying to write my way into new areas of research, pursing new questions that take off from the work of this book. Which means you can count on “The Patient Body” addressing issues about religion and medicine that aren’t directly related to The Good Death.

***

Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann‘s book, The Good Death, was published by Beacon Press this month.

Kali Handelman is editor of The Revealer and program coordinator at the NYU Center for Religion and Media. She received her BA in cultural and media studies from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and her MA in religious studies from Columbia University.

The post A Conversation with Ann Neumann & Kali Handelman appeared first on The Revealer.

Battle of White Mountain, Peter Snayers, 1620

By Suzanne Schneider  

Judging from mainstream media coverage and policy reports, the world today is engulfed in the inextinguishable flames of something called religious violence. Though more often invoked than defined, “religious violence” appears to many as a self-evident phenomenon – a category of particularly barbaric behavior that is responsible for a wide range of atrocities, usually perpetrated in the name of Islam. Reflecting this sense of obviousness, notably few public figures have stopped to question whether religious violence is a useful category through which to apprehend upheavals in the world around us. For instance, is it possible to attribute the rise of ISIS to the Islamic textual tradition while leaving material factors—ranging from the location of oil resources to social media networks, insurgency theory, and the Syrian civil war—mostly unaccounted for? Posed in such stark terms, the absurdity of such an approach becomes evident, and yet the public still encounters a slew of self-appointed experts who read verses from the Qur’an as if there is nothing left to explain.

The obviousness of religious violence within popular discourse finds its inverse within academia, where many scholars of religion have abandoned “religious violence” as a meaningful or useful term on account of the ambiguities embedded in the concept of religion itself. How can we separate religious concerns from economic or political ones and thereby attribute acts of violence to religion alone? It is this difficulty of isolating religious motivations from all others that has led scholars like William Cavanaugh and Talal Asad to suggest that, as a concept, “religious violence” tells us more about the politics of Western countries than it actually explains the actions of al-Qaeda or Boko Haram. How then do we account for the enduring appeal of religious violence as an explanatory device?

In an attempt to address this question, this article—the first in a three-part series—will explore what we talk about when we talk about religious violence, and how this conceptual apparatus came to be. Along the way, we will examine the peculiar position of religious violence within the tradition of political liberalism, explore concrete historical case studies, and reckon with the different paths that politicians, pundits, and pontificators have followed in coming to terms the phenomenon.

***

Broadly speaking, we can group approaches to religious violence into four general categories, the rough outlines of which are no doubt familiar to many:

1) Religious violence is not truly religious, but a perversion of genuine religious truths. When President Obama states that ISIS does not speak in the name of Islam, or argues that “a small fraction of Muslims propagate a perverted interpretation of Islam,” he is merely articulating the widespread liberal sentiment that true religion is peaceful, charitable, and innately good;

2) Religious violence is particular to Islam, whose texts and traditions cultivate a “culture of death” that is uniquely fanatic. Ever popular among American neoconservatives and their intellectual heroes, this approach tries to erect an absolute boundary between good and bad religions, and argues for the exceptionalism of the Judeo-Christian tradition in particular. For example, Marco Rubio’s insistence on viewing politics as a “clash of civilizations” finds a natural corollary in his view of religious violence as a problem with Islam.

3) Religious violence is an inherent part of all religious systems, which are fundamentally irrational and divisive. That said, Western countries have advanced socially, scientifically, and politically because their residents have largely abandoned religion for secularism, and the inability or unwillingness to do the same plagues the Muslim world as a whole, leading to reactionary violence against the march of progress. So-called New Atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have done much to popularize this view; and finally,

4) Religious violence not a meaningful or useful term on account of the theoretical difficulties recounted above. This approach—which treats religion and thus religious violence as a historical object with no essential nature, an embedded phenomenon that is expressed differently across time and place—is as prevalent in academic circles as it is absent in popular ones.

Lest the reader think that this is a conceptual exercise of little concern to everyday Americans, we should remember that differing views of religious violence serve to justify very particular actions – whether it is a ground war in Syria or diplomatic relations with Iran. And while many social phenomena are characterized by a gap between academic and public discourse, the consequences of this particular gap, insofar as they relate to the deployment of American military power and diplomatic strength, threaten to be uniquely catastrophic.

Having established the lay of the land, this article will examine the liberal view that religious violence is a perversion of an otherwise upright tradition (The first view described above. The other views will be addressed later in this series). Where does this idea come from? What does it assume? And why does it matter? Answering these questions will take us far afield from digital caliphates and drone strikes, as this contemporary liberal view in fact has its roots in the capital-L tradition of Liberalism of which even Ted Cruz is (however unwittingly) a part. This is the liberalism of free speech and free markets, and of course, freedom of religion.

***

At first glance, it may not seem like religious freedom and religious violence have much to do with one another; indeed, they appear to most of us as antithetical. This fact makes it all the more interesting to note the way in which these concepts are historically intertwined. Briefly stated, we can trace the origin of both back to 17^th century struggles over who, or what, could exercise political authority. These conflicts (often erroneously referred to as Europe’s “religious wars”) were in fact less about dogma than the exercise of sovereignty, and more specifically, the early modern state’s attempt to wrest political control from the Catholic Church. It was only by depriving ecclesiastical authorities of their coercive powers that individual states were able to secure, in Max Weber’s famous terms, a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within their territories.

The long and bloody process of executing this power transfer necessarily entailed redefining, or rather inventing, religion as a distinct element of human experience: simultaneously inner-facing and other-worldly, i.e. defined in terms that did not compete with state sovereignty. Martin Luther’s theological revolution became central to this process, not least because he established the principle of separation between spiritual and temporal powers and emphasized the importance of private faith over public works. A person’s inner world, still an epistemological infant in Luther’s day, would become increasingly real as the decades passed. Most importantly for our purposes, it was in this emerging realm of individual consciousness that “true religion” would come to reside.

The term appears in two important works of seventeenth century political theory: Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1651 and 1670, respectively. It may seem that these seminal texts are completely incompatible: Hobbes has often been described as a theorist for despotism, while Spinoza is regarded as a proto-democratic thinker who holds a place of privilege in the history of liberal thought. There is much nuance lost in such descriptions, of course, but my primary interest at present is how Hobbes and Spinoza thought about the relationship between religion, state sovereignty, and individual freedom. In this context, I find fascinating their respective invocations of “true religion” to mean something quite different than the actual religious practices of their time. If the reader is willing to follow me down this conceptual rabbit hole, I think we will find that their propositions regarding the nature of “true religion” are still very much in circulation.

True religion, as the concept appears in both texts, is an abstract entity that is neither the possession of any single group nor reducible to any particular form of religious practice. As Hobbes famously defined his terms: “Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION. And when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, TRUE RELIGION.”[1] True religion is thus something quite distinct from either official creeds or popular practices, and Hobbes was revolutionary in his recognition that what we name something (e.g. religion vs. superstition) had almost nothing to do with innate truth and everything to do with power.

Of course the term itself is much older, appearing in the fourth century writings of St. Augustine, whose “Of True Religion” (De Vera Religione) argued that—amid the presence of pagans, Jews, Manicheans, and Christian schismatics—only the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church had right to this title. It is important to note that, for Augustine, the question was which group possessed the “true religion,” not (as for later thinkers) what true religion was composed of or where within a person it resided. It was only during the second half of the seventeenth century that the contemporary liberal view of religion—e.g. there is a universal category of human experience called religion that is essentially good even if its practitioners are sometimes confused—emerged in concert with a bundle of other ideas about politics, subjectivity, and sovereignty.

One of the most striking elements of Leviathan is Hobbes’ argument that, not only should there be no separation between spiritual and temporal authority, but that the sovereign ruler must also be the chief interpreter of religious doctrine within his kingdom. In other words, the state must establish and regulate its subjects’ religious practice in order to prevent competing allegiances from thrusting the commonwealth into civil war. In an obvious rebuke of papal claims, Hobbes argues that the true religion of Christ has no rightful juridical or coercive power. He structures this argument by first attributing to God “a twofold kingdom” composed of natural and prophetic laws:

natural, wherein he governeth as many of mankind as acknowledge his providence, by the natural dictates of right reason; and prophetic, wherein having chosen out one peculiar nation (the Jews) for his subjects, he governed them, and none but them, not only by natural reason, but by positive laws, which he gave them by the mouths of his holy prophets.

Yet the laws of Moses were obligatory for the Jews alone. Other peoples have no obligation to obey them, “by any authority, but his, whose commands have already the force of laws; that is to say, by any other authority, than that of the commonwealth, residing in the sovereign.”[2]

Indeed, he argues, nothing that Jesus did or taught “tendeth to the diminution of the civil rights of the Jews, or of Caesar… The kingdom he claimed was to be in another world: he taught all men to obey in the meantime them that sat in Moses’ [i.e. the lawgiver’s] seat.” True religion thus defined is indifferent to positive law and rather prescribes that the Christian obey his temporal sovereign, who alone could give religious doctrines the force of law. It therefore followed that no universal church existed that could claim authority over believers or meddle in the affairs of rulers. Rather, there were only individual Christians “in the dominions of several princes and states; but every one of them is subject to that commonwealth, whereof he is himself a member; and consequently, cannot be subject to the commands of any other person.”[3] Finally, lest anyone protest that such a political order might threaten the salvation of true believers, Hobbes asserts that the only religious doctrine one must uphold is that “Jesus is the Christ,” and thus “to die for every tenet that serveth the ambition, or profit of the clergy, is not required.”[4] Because “internal faith is in its own nature invisible” (and the true nature of God incomprehensible anyway), the subject could and should obey the outward orders of his sovereign.

The frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse

Thus Hobbes accepts Luther’s definition of religion as internal, faith-based, and non-juridical, but does so in order to subordinate the spiritual to the temporal and argue that such an arrangement represents nothing less than God’s true design. Simultaneously, he defines true religion in increasingly abstract terms as that which is compatible with natural reason, and whose dogma consists of little more than a belief in Jesus Christ. “We are not to renounce our senses, and experience; nor our natural reason,” but rather employ them “in the purchase of justice, peace, and true religion.”As Hobbes depicts it, true religion is both increasingly abstract and indifferent to the sovereign’s monopoly on the use of force.

“True religion” also appears prominently in Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. Far from a guidebook for absolutism, the text has been described as “a manual for the maintenance of a peaceful political community constituted by diverse religious beliefs.”[5] Yet, much like Hobbes, Spinoza also begins his argument with a presumed division between right reason/divine natural law and revelation/positive law, the latter of which was binding only on Israel during the period of the commonwealth. Importantly, divine natural law is synonymous with true religion, being nothing other than the dictates of right reason. The giving of laws through prophecy was thus intended to serve communities like the Israelites, who were deficient in the natural light of reason, rather than function as universal commands. “Since they did not know the existence of God as an eternal truth, i.e. that God exists and that God alone is to be adored, they had to understand it as a decree.”[6]

Building off this distinction, Spinoza argues that this prophetic positive law lost its binding status after the fall of the Jewish commonwealth; nor was Christ’s mission to replace the old laws with new ones. “Christ, as I said, was sent not to conserve a commonwealth and institute laws, but to teach a universal law alone.” This universal law is both simple and abstract: “that there exists a supreme being who loves justice and charity, and that, to be saved, all people must obey and venerate Him by practicing justice and charity toward their neighbour.”[7] However, as he argues, because “God cannot be conceived as a prince or legislator enacting laws for men,” justice and charity “can only receive the force of law and command via the authority of the state.”[8] It follows that temporal authorities are needed to promote the practice of both virtues, as “God has no special kingship over men except through those who exercise government.”[9]

Given this line of argumentation, it is not surprising to see Spinoza’s ultimate recommendation remains remarkably close to that of Hobbes: “those who hold sovereign power are the defenders and interpreters of sacred as well as civil law…they alone have the authority to decide what is just and what is unjust, what is pious and what is impious.” And similarly, Spinoza too questions “what if the sovereign commands something which is against religion and the obedience which we have promised to God by an explicit agreement?” Is the individual free, or at least morally justified, to disobey his ruler in such instances? Spinoza notes, much like Hobbes, that we must “obey God when we have a certain and undoubted revelation but that people are very prone to go astray in religion and make many dubious claims that result from the diversity of their understanding.”[10] As he continues:

“It is therefore certain that if no one were obliged by law to obey the sovereign power in matters that he thinks belong to religion, then the law of the state would depend upon the different judgments and passions of each individual person. For no one would be obligated by the law if he considered it to be directed against his faith and superstition, and on this pretext everyone would be able to claim license to do anything.”[11]

In other words, while Spinoza believes it is in the best interest of rulers to grant their subjects freedom of thought and expression, that freedom is limited by the stipulation that it not contest sovereign authority. Believe what you like, but do as your ruler says. Much like the argument in John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration,” the condition for religious freedom is that religion forfeit any right to legal or coercive power. In other words, religious freedom can exist only insofar as religious violence is forbidden.

As indicated in this brief survey, true religion was defined in these early modern texts as that which plays nicely with the state – stripped of its juridical function, its dogmas reduced to “natural law” and “right reason.” Hobbes’ social contract theory resides at heart of this conceptual rearrangement, namely, that entering into civil society requires the transfer to a sovereign authority of certain individual rights that existed in the state of nature, the private right to force being chief among them. Not only does “true religion” have no legitimate claim to temporal authority, but religion so defined necessarily becomes a private interest. Far from being a theological construct, true religion emerged from this historical period as that which the modern state will allow.

My goal here has not been to provide a definitive genealogy of “true religion,” as there are undoubtedly other ancestors to trace within Western political thought, to say nothing of the conceptual worlds of other traditions. Yet I do think these texts demonstrate the theoretical reconfigurations that were integral to producing the contemporary view that religions are essentially peace loving and directed toward the universal good. As far as I know, these two works were among the first to articulate the notion of true religion as an abstract entity that exists independently of people’s actual beliefs and practices. With time, this logic would of course find proponents within Islamic societies as well. It appeared most famously in the writings of the late nineteenth century Egyptian reformer, Muhammad ‘Abduh, who accused the Muslim masses of neglecting true Islam – which was, in his view, essentially rational, progressive, and just: “I went to the West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but not Islam.” Perhaps needless to say in the days of ISIS, the practice of differentiating between a pure, essential form of religion and the actual practices of its adherents can be a rather violent and intolerant one.

It has been with these reflections in mind that I have looked apprehensively on President Obama’s well-intentioned attempts to distinguish between ISIS and “true Islam.” Within the context of a pluralistic tradition—there are four recognized schools of Sunni law alone—that lacks a clear interpretive hierarchy, who could possibly adjudicate what true Islam is to begin with? Why must we still pretend that there is a unified, abstract thing called Islam that is essentially stable across place and time? In the context of a Donald Trump presidential run, there is an argument to be made that liberal appeals to “true Islam” may indeed be a pragmatic necessity. But the overarching logic of true religion is deeply flawed, assuming on one hand that religions are fixed traditions whose “truth” is easily identifiable, rather than hotly contested, and that this “truth” consists in acquiescing to the demands made by the secular state. Which raises the question as to whether anything that we label as “religious” could—no matter how justified the cause—oppose the modern state without seeming illegitimate.

I hope it is clear from this rather cursory overview that talking about religious violence, particularly that in the contemporary Middle East, is a practice that comes laden with discursive baggage about how religions are supposed to act, assumptions that were forged in the very particular context of the early-modern European state. This is not to say, for instance, that religions should have the coercive power of the medieval Church, or that secular politics are only available to Euro-Americans. But we should at the very least know the limits of our chosen vocabulary and unpack why religious violence seems so much more intolerable to many Western observers than the everyday violence, often equally unjustified, of the state: religious violence has come to represent both a violation of “true religion” (which is voluntary, peace-loving, etc.) and a threat to the social contract.

The next article in this series will examine rather different approaches to the question of religious violence, which nonetheless share certain foundational assumptions with the liberal view, particularly with regard to the idea that religions are abstract essences rather than embodied historical objects. It is on this conceptual territory that we find much overlap between figures whose ideological proclivities are otherwise quite distinct. Strange bedfellows indeed.

***

[1] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Edited by J.C.A. Gaskin. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 37.

[2] Ibid., 237.

[3] Ibid. 311-312

[4] Ibid. 334.

[5] Anya Topolski, “Spinoza’s True Religion: The Modern Origins of A Contemporary Floating Signifier,” Society and Politics 8:1 (15). April 2014. 43.

[6] Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise. Edited by Jonathan Israel. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 63.

[7] Ibid., 182.

[8] Ibid., 241.

[9] Ibid., 239.

[10] Ibid., 206.

[11] Ibid.

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You can read part 2 of “Approaching Religious Violence” here.

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Suzanne Schneider is the author Politics of Denial: Religious Education and Colonial Rule in Palestine(forthcoming) and is currently working on a book about religious violence and the modern Middle East. She is the Director of Operations and a Core Faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, a non-profit education and research center, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media. Suzanne received her Ph.D. in 2014 from the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.

The post Approaching Religious Violence: Part I appeared first on The Revealer.

We’re excited to read Saba Mahmood‘s new book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, but in the meantime, appreciated her introduction from the author herself over at The Immanent Frame in which she argues:

Through a focus on the case of Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahá’ís in Egypt… that in the postcolonial period modern secular governance in the Middle East has exacerbated religious tensions, hardened interfaith boundaries, and polarized religious differences. This will seem counterintuitive to those who believe that secularism is a solution to the problem of religious strife rather than a force in its creation. Yet secularism, far from separating religion from politics, has extended the sovereign state’s control over religious life, allowing majoritarian religious norms to striate national identity and the legal-political structures of modern polities. This feature is not exclusive to Middle Eastern states but is a globally shared aspect of political secularism deriving in part from the structure of the modern liberal state and its division of the citizenry into majority and minority population.

And in case you need more encouragement, Talal Asad called it “A thought provoking study” and said:

Her detailed analysis of the rich historical and ethnographic material she has assembled reinforces the conclusion that instead of regarding the secular state as the solution to discrimination against religious minorities, it must itself be understood as part of the problem. So I offer a few reflections prompted by her excellent study, first on liberal ideals that are commonly said to promote equal treatment for minorities, and then about the secular anxiety that preceded the 2013 coup against the elected president Mohamed Morsi.

Not too long ago The Immanent Frame also published an excellent series of articles about Samuel Moyn‘s new book Christian Human Rights. Now you can listen to Moyn discuss the book over at The New Books Network. While you’re there, give a listen to their interview with Timothy Snyder about his book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

Speaking of important authors, we appreciated this look at “Frameworks of Comparison: Benedict Anderson reflects on his intellectual formation” in the London Review of Books.

It was not until much later, in fact after I finally retired, that I began to recognise the fundamental drawback of this type of comparison: that using the nation and nation-states as the basic units of analysis fatally ignored the obvious fact that in reality these units were tied together and crosscut by global political-intellectual currents such as liberalism, fascism, communism and socialism, as well as vast religious networks and economic and technological forces. I had also to take seriously the reality that very few people have ever been solely nationalist. No matter how strong their nationalism, they may also be gripped by Hollywood movies, neoliberalism, a taste for manga, human rights, impending ecological disaster, fashion, science, anarchism, post-coloniality, ‘democracy’, indigenous peoples’ movements, chatrooms, astrology, supranational languages like Spanish and Arabic and so on. Recognition of this serious flaw helps to explain why Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2005) focused not only on global anarchism towards the end of the 19th century, but also on global forms of communication, especially the telegraph and the steamship.

While we’re on the subject of Nationalism of nationalism, Leah Falk has a very smart analysis of “The Fakelore of the Apache Wedding Blessing” in The Awl.

It’s easy to write off the rituals crafted for the modern wedding industry as just so much Portlandia, but the more troubling items in the trousseau of the traditionalesque are the ones with roots, albeit obscured ones. Mead’s book revealed that America’s wedding industry knew the “Navajo Prayer” better by the name “Apache Wedding Blessing.” Its origins were not Native American, as suggested by a number of anthologies and “officiant services” websites, but the imagination of Elliot Arnold, author of the 1947 ethnographic novel Blood Brothers, which later became the 1950 film Broken Arrow.  … Americans have embraced Arnold’s invented bit of culture as inoffensive but profound: just the right mixture for a “spiritual, but not religious” wedding.

Why has Arnold’s poem lived on and mutated when there is so much other, less appropriative poetry to go around? The sad story might be the poem’s ability to “pass” as Native American. For much of American history, native culture has appealed to non-natives, precisely because they have believed it was dead or dying, but also somehow simpler or more authentic than their own culture.

Speaking of “spiritual but not religious” Nalika Gajaweer asks”Religious, Spiritual, and ‘None of the Above”: How Did Mindfulness Get So Big?” in Religion Dispatches.

Yet, a theme that repeatedly emerges in my interviews and fieldwork among these groups is the notion that what they do is distinct and different from what they recognize as “religion.” For many it is part of a spiritual experience and practice, where Buddhism is at heart a rational philosophy consistent with scientific knowledge. Practitioners find evidence for this in the proliferation of cutting edge neuroplasticity studies that legitimize the uses of mindfulness within the broader secular “integrative health” scene. Moreover, the depth of Buddhist philosophy is recognized as emerging not through dogma or religious moral proscription, but rather through personal investigation and direct transformative experience.

Meera Subramanian also made art about and while mourning in “For Anna” at Killing the Buddha.

Writing is my form of prayer. It is all I can give him. No—it is all I can give myself. Movement can hinder the words as much as it spawns them.

And Lamya H. wrote a powerful “Personal History of Islamophobia in America” for Vox.

Suddenly people want to know if I’m okay; they tell me that they’re worried about me, ask if I’m experiencing any Islamophobia now.

“Don’t worry about me,” I say, but what I want to say is that this is not recent, this is not a trend, this is not going away because these incidents are being counted. Twelve years in this country, and I’ve switched to walking quickly down the middle of the subway platform, I’ve started pulling a hoodie up over my hijab and looking for exits when I enter a room. I’ve stopped being surprised, even stopped telling stories.

Speaking of bigotry and profiling: “Sikh actor and designer Waris Ahluwalia, known for Wes Anderson films, barred from Aero Mexico plane because of his turban” reported The Daily News with the help of our friend Simran Jeet Singh. 

Popular Sikh star Waris Ahluwalia was blocked from boarding a New York-bound Aero Mexico flight Monday morning after he refused to remove his turban for a security check. …

Wearing a turban is not optional. We don’t put it on and take it off when we please,” explains Simran Jeet Singh, senior religion fellow for the Sikh Coalition. “The turban represents our commitment to justice, to service and to faith.”

Meanwhile, “Trump’s religious bigotry is as American as Apple Pie” argues Stephen Prothero in USA Today.

As a religion professor, a believer in religious liberty and an American who would like to continue to host Muslim friends from abroad at my dining table, I too find Trump’s latest provocation abhorrent. As a historian, however, I have to say that Trump is no anomaly.

We first heard about “That Dragon, Cancer” on the podcast Reply All. We recommend giving the story about a Christian father who made a video game about parenting a son with terminal cancer, a listen or checking out the article about it, “Playing for Time,” by Jason Tanz in Wired Magazine. 

Green’s idea to make a videogame about Joel came to him in church, as he reflected on a harrowing evening a couple of years earlier when Joel was dehydrated and diarrheal, unable to drink anything without vomiting it back up, feverish, howling, and inconsolable, no matter how Green tried to soothe him. He had made a few games since then and had been thinking about mechanics, the rules that govern how a player interacts with and influences the action on the screen. “There’s a process you develop as a parent to keep your child from crying, and that night I couldn’t calm Joel,” Green says. “It made me think, ‘This is like a game where the mechanics are subverted and don’t work.’”

“Ammon Bundy and the Paradoxes of Mormon Political Theologies” by Benjamin E. Park for Religion & Politics.

Ammon is the son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who has previously led a standoff with the American government; like his father, Ammon defends his actions through religious belief and justification. Most importantly, as a Mormon, Bundy mixes LDS symbolism with a libertarian language of disgust for the federal government. He claims he prayed and received inspiration that guided his activities: “The Lord was not pleased with what has happening with the Hammonds,” he said. His protest against federal overreach, he believes, is an extension of his Mormon faith. In another interview, Bundy explained: “I have no idea what God wants done, but he did inspire me to have the sheriffs across the United States take away these weapons, disarm these bureaucracies, and he also gave me a little inspiration on what would happen if they didn’t do that.” This is as much a religious mission as it is a political action. If Ammon followed the example of his father from several years before, then prior to their quest, he would have fasted and prayed for the “spirit of their forefathers to be with them.” …

But this episode is also an important lesson in the danger of attempting to connect a straight line between traditions and individuals. Ammon Bundy is a product of Mormonism, but his Mormonism is also a product of his own making. His armed standoff is just another tale in the paradoxical history of LDS believers who have paved their own way by framing political beliefs through theological prisms. The Mormon tradition, like virtually any religious tradition, provides the material for both violent and pacifist strains, thus making it difficult, if not impossible, to simply connect the dots between the LDS faith and Bundy’s actions. Indeed, forfeiting superficial appeals to strict coherency or literal continuity within a faith tradition allows the true elasticity and dynamism of Mormonism, not to mention American religion, to come into view. 

Lastly, congratulations to our Pastafarian readers.

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-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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You can find previous “In the News” round-ups here.

The post In the News: Secularism, Nationalism, Pastafarianism, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

The biggest news around here has been that The Center for Religion and Media at NYU, our home and publisher, received funding from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs for a new project on  Religious Stakes in Digital Times: Scholars and Journalists in Conversation. We plan to invite one post-doctoral fellow each academic year for three years, beginning in September 2016. Our call for applications is here.

Another huge piece of news is that the brilliant Ann Neumann, former editor of The Revealer and current contributing editor and author of our monthly column, “The Patient Body” has a new book coming out next week! The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America is really amazing, and we hope that you’ll all order yourselves copies, or even better yet, come get a copy in person on its release date, Tuesday, February 16, when Neumann will be joined by founding editor of The Revealer Jeff Sharlet and current editor Kali Handelman for an event at the NYU Bookstore in New York City. If you can’t make it on the 16th, don’t fret, Neumann will be on book tour and may very well be coming to your town.

We’re also really excited about our upcoming spring event, the third in our ongoing series about religion and violence. On March 4th Patrick Blanchfield, author of our two-part series on religion and guns culture in America, will convene and moderate a panel discussion bringing together religious, academic, media, and activist perspectives on violence, community, and awareness. With Rev. Jeffrey Brown, Jennifer Carlson (University of Toronto), and Jennifer Mascia (The Trace). You can find out more about the event here and the participants here.

In related news, one of our cosponsors for the God & Guns event will be the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research where one of our authors and a visiting scholar here at the Center for Religion and Media, Suzanne Schneider is about to start teaching a course called “On Religious Violence.” A darned exciting and elegant example of NYC public academy synergy, if you ask us.

So, that’s what we’ve been planning around here. Now, for what we’ve been reading!

Some Friends!

Jeff Sharlet has some advice on how to respond “When a Self-Declared Genius Asks You to Read His Masterpiece” in Literary Hub. 

Another category of writer worth reading: Friends. “Oh, great,” you might say, “a chummy clique of established writers.” That’s true. But then, there’s the fact that we weren’t always “established,” and the reality that for all but the most famous or most self-satisfied writers, being “established”—published and sometimes paid—doesn’t mean you don’t depend on friends to ping back like sonar when you drop some new work into the abyss of public words.

Any friend of Sharlet’s is a friend of ours, including two of the comrades he lists in that gorgeous rebuke to wanna-be-writer trolls, Ann Neumann and Scott Korb. 

Neumann writes for The Guardian about how “David Bowie planned his end as he lived – on his own terms, blazing a trail.”

Like everything else Bowie made acceptable for his fans – fluid genders, flamboyant, outrageous clothes, dreams of equality and other worlds – this grand and surprising final exit may signal to the 76 million Baby Boomers now facing their own twilight that there’s no harm in going out your own way.

And Korb asks and finds beautiful answers to the question “What Makes a Happy Family?” in his essay “Good for You” in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Looking back, I realize I’d confused food not with the mind so much as with the soul. I hadn’t reasoned my way into goodness; I’d groped my way there, religiously. Nowadays, though, in a time when I no longer pray, the mind and the soul, both useful terms, are essentially the same thing, bound up as consciousness, or subjectivity, what Marilynne Robinson calls “the ancient haunt of piety and reverence and long, long thoughts.” 

Recently, another good friend (and co-author) of Sharlet‘s, Peter Manseau wrote about “The Great Christmas Strike of 1906” in The New York Times. 

Obviously, the 1906 boycott did not achieve its goal “to stop forever the practice of holding Christmas exercises in the public schools,” but contrary to The Jewish Daily News’s prediction, today there is nothing controversial about including Hanukkah songs along with Christmas carols in school holiday concerts.

In the long run, the distressed Christian parents in Augusta County will not put an end to schools’ teaching their children about Islam, as state educational standards require. These conflicts will probably come to be remembered, like the anti-Christmas strike, as signposts marking slow progress toward a greater inclusion to come.

This year, New York became the first major American city to close its public schools in recognition of a Muslim holiday. If and when others follow suit, it will rightly be a local decision, yet the negotiation of religious differences this decision represents is part of both the nation’s past and its future.

Meanwhile, also in The New York Times, Roy Scranton asks “We’re Doomed. Now What?”

Today, as every hour brings new alarms of war and climate disaster, we might wish we could take Nietzsche’s place. He had to cope only with the death of God, after all, while we must come to terms with the death of our world. Peril lurks on every side, from the delusions of hope to the fury of reaction, from the despondency of hopelessness to the promise of destruction.

Matt Sheedy asks Donovan Schaefer about his book Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power over at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.

The study of religion has always been fixated on the nonlinguistic aspect of religion. We’ve been trying to find ways to explain what moves us outside of language since the field began—whether you want to locate that moment with Müller, Schleiermacher, James, or Durkheim. But as Smith rightly points out, much of that early scholarship (other than Durkheim) conveyed us to the private affair tradition, which defined religion as a resolutely individualistic phenomenon that was unhooked from history and from power. For affect theorists, this makes no sense. Embodied affects, though they might seem to be private, are composed by histories: they come from a public somewhere and they do public things. Far from being irretrievably private, affect is part of the complex, uneven continuum of public and private forces—power.

And Sacred Matters has “Seven Questions for Anthony Petro.”

In writing this history, I also wanted to show one form that “religious power” takes in the modern United States, to borrow a term from Talal Asad: the power of the moral form. I found it helpful to think about religious power and morality through what Michel Foucault calls biopower, which included new ways that people were called to relate to norms in the modern period, including norms of sexuality and health. I show how biopower could not, in the case of the AIDS crisis in the U.S., be disentangled from older Christian rhetorics of sodomy, homosexuality, and national security. In other words, there is no easy divide here between the secular and the religious. Rather, I argue that morality—the languages of morality—became an empty form through which Christian rhetoric could be translated into the languages of nationality, citizenship, and public health. This is the most important form that Christian power often takes today.

While Samira K. Mehta  interviews S. Brent Plate about his new edited volume Key Terms in Material Religion over at the Religion in American History Blog.

In an age of massive human migration, the ebb and flow of cultures, ethnicities, and languages should challenge all of us to rethink our comfort zones. I think part of what “material religion” as a field of study can do is resituate our questions, to make us query the objects, spaces, and role of the body in comparative studies. We have to be attentive to the look and feel of others, to family rituals (right, Samira?!) not just some abstracted doctrinal ideas.

Some more Interviews!

Rukmini Callimachi joined the folks over at the Reply All podcast to talk about “communicating online with Islamic extremists in her role as a New York Times Reporter” in “#33 @ISIS.”

Kurt Anderson interviews Samantha Hunt  for “Studio 360: Samantha Hunt Wants You to Believe.”

You set yourself a lot of challenges for this book, like the religious sect you invent called the Etherists, where you not only invented their religion, but wrote their holy text.

I had recently moved to upstate New York and I started researching all the different religions that had started there — Mormonism, Spiritualism, the Shaker community, the Millerites — there’s so many religious communities in upstate New York. I thought, why not take everything that I love? I’ll take my fascination with Mormons, I’ll take my love of vinyl records, I’ll take Carl Sagan, and see if I can build a religion around these things that I value.

Jadaliyya interviews Ella Shohat about “The Question of Judeo-Arabic.”

While writing this essay, I found it harder and harder to speak of an “it” called “Judeo-Arabic,” wondering in effect: Is Judeo-Arabic really a language or just a conceptual chimera? As we know, relationships between dialects and language are embedded in power. But the suggestion of Judeo-Arabic as part of the family of “Jewish languages,” standing always-already apart from their (non-Jewish) Arab neighbors, was significant enough to prompt my questioning of this notion of a linguistic family as a kind of a Jewish national allegory.

George Yancy and bell hooks talk about “Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness” in The New York Times’ Stone. 

b.h.: Well, I would have to say my Buddhist Christian practice challenges me, as does feminism. Buddhism continues to inspire me because there is such an emphasis on practice. What are you doing? Right livelihood, right action. We are back to that self-interrogation that is so crucial. It’s funny that you would link Buddhism and feminism, because I think one of the things that I’m grappling with at this stage of my life is how much of the core grounding in ethical-spiritual values has been the solid ground on which I stood. That ground is from both Buddhism and Christianity, and then feminism that helped me as a young woman to find and appreciate that ground. The spirituality piece came up for me in my love of Beat poetry. I came to Buddhism through the Beats, through Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac — they all sort of gave me this other space of groundedness.

And religious studies superstars Kathryn Lofton and Tomoko Masuzawa sit down to discuss “Orientation, Comparison, History” for Sacred Matters.

And lastly, a smattering of writing we just plain hope you’ll enjoy reading as much as we did.

It may be obvious from our twitter feed‘s latest “What we’re reading” entries, but we’ve been on a bit of a New Yorker kick lately.

Rozina Ali gives a well-evidenced and considered explanation of  “How ‘Homeland’ Helps Justify the War on Terror

In the world view of “Homeland,” American characters are fighting people who always want to kill innocents. Muslims are aggressive and destined for death, either at the hands of their own or the U.S. Last season, the only two likeable Muslim characters were killed by other Muslims, which suggests a subtle, depressing commentary: the United States only kills the bad Muslims. But “Homeland” goes a step further, suggesting an underlying fatalism in the war on terror: Muslims will always be a threat to America because Islam itself is a threat.

An argument also well-made by Joseph Massad back in 2012.

Speaking of Orientalism, don’t miss James North piece in Mondoweiss, “Sophisticated Orientalism in The New York Times.”

Let’s try a thought experiment to see the absurdity of Orientalist analysis.  Let’s say Germany and France got into a dispute over the future of Europe.  Would the New York Times run a sidebar informing its readers about Martin Luther and the rise of Protestant Germany in the 16th century, and the religious differences with Catholic France?

Back in The New Yorker, Elif Batuman‘s “Cover Story: The head scarf, modern Turkey, and me” was personal, provocative, and poignant.

“No matter how hard I tried to be tolerant—no matter how sympathetic I felt toward Muslim feminists who didn’t want to be ‘liberated’ from the veil, and who felt just as judged by the secularist establishment as secular women felt by the Muslim patriarchy—I could never forgive Erdoğan for saying those things about women. And, because he said them in the name of Islam, I couldn’t forgive Islam, either.”

Ariel Levy recently wrote about Jill Soloway and her astoundingly good TV show “Transparent” in “Dolls and Feelings.”

Soloway describes herself as “seditious.” Her production company is called Topple, as in “topple the patriarchy.” Ultimately, this trait has contributed to her success: while “Transparent” is, at its core, a family drama about California Jews who have a standing order at Canter’s Deli and who bicker about which of the siblings should inherit the house where they grew up, it is also a radical exploration of gender and sexuality, unlike anything that preceded it on television.

(And while we’re on the subject of “Transparent” don’t forget to check out Geoffrey Pollick‘s exploration of “Rituals of Transformation in Jill Solloway’s Transparent” from our current issue.)

Speaking of Jews in Hollywood, we couldn’t get enough of Richard Brody‘s review of “The Coen Brothers’ Marvellous ‘Hail, Caesar!’”

The American religion of Hollywood is also, in the Coens’ antic view, the essence of American power. A sidebar involving Eddie with a big-time military contractor puts him in the face of a challenge—the confrontation of Hollywood’s “make-believe” with real life, of his “frivolous” work with “serious” businesses, of military might versus what ultimately will become known as soft power.

The core of the Coens’ recent film “A Serious Man” is the recognition that the real Jewish scripture for secular modern American Jews isn’t the Torah or the Talmud but “F Troop” (and other similar popular entertainments made for the mass market by Hollywood’s secular Jews). The story of “Hail, Caesar!” is the story of that same worship of secular images, but now, from one step further back, in mainstream Christian American society, and the Coen brothers offer brilliantly ironic parallels between religious belief—specifically, Christian doctrine—and the realms of Hollywood.

“Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, 1920

And speaking of yet one more Jew in Los Angeles, we loved stargazing with Ben Wurgaft‘s “Space Jew, or, Walter Benjamin Among the Stars” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

My fantasy about Walter Benjamin standing at Jantar Mantar involves a speculation about what a dead writer and critic might have thought about a site he never saw: what if astronomy and astrology were still allies, still lovers, my fictional Benjamin asks. What if the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment had not severed causation and meaning, the contingency of the universe and our sense of its purposefulness? My fantasy comes from a small but intriguing corner of the lively culture industry surrounding Benjamin: counterfactual fantasies about Benjamin successfully escaping Europe are a very real micro-genre.

Now we’re going to go get our copy of The Arcades Project off the shelf and head up to the planetarium. (Not really, we’re going to keep editing the next issue of this magazine, but you know, counterfactually…)

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-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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You can find previous “In the News” round-ups here.

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