Scholars of religion generally agree that belief is a Western, Christian, and even Protestant construction that obscures more than illuminates the lives of those who do not use the term themselves. Rodney Needham, for instance, argued that while some hypothesized psychological states, such as imagination, are indeed based in panhuman capacities, belief is not. Instead, our idea of belief is merely the product of the word “belief” and the conventions that grew around it through its lexical and ideational history in Judaism and Christianity. Malcolm Ruel further argued that the notion of belief as an emotional commitment to a set of values has been secularized and now extends to belief in human rights, democracy, and rationality. In a more recent treatment, anthropologists recognize some value in the term, but recommend thinking “against” rather than “with” belief in ethnographic writing.

The arguments against unreflectively using the term belief in cross-cultural work are convincing and have been discussed and illustrated by numerous anthropologists. My own experiences of the problems with Western ideas of belief took place in Tokyo, Japan in 2018. There, one of the most common responses to being asked whether one believes in the existence of kami was “I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it,” even by those who routinely visit shrines and temples. Religious practice requires no deep emotional commitment to the existence of the kami, though many would, if pushed, assent to their existence.

But to move from cautioning scholars that many of the Western assumptions about the nature of religious beliefs do not hold across cultures to jettisoning the possibility that there is a real psychological phenomenon (or phenomena) with some significant overlap with our folk notion of belief is unjustified. It would be to throw out a number of babies with the bathwater of the term belief.

This view comes from my disciplinary position within the cognitive and evolutionary anthropology of religion, where the majority of scholars have little problem using the term belief as a scientific object of analysis. This is not because they are unaware of the arguments of Needham, Ruel, and others (though many are), but because the term belief in the cognitive sciences did not inherit the problematic Western assumptions discussed above.

While only rarely systemized or precisely defined, something very much like belief has been an important element of cognitive science since its beginnings in the mid-twentieth century. With early computers demonstrating the capacity of material substances to take in inputs, process information, and produce outputs, and with subsequent developments in neuroscience, comparative psychology, and philosophy, researchers in the cognitive sciences routinely found themselves needing to understand what information a system or organism is assuming to be true as it acts in the world. Reading this literature, one can infer that the most widely held concept of belief in the cognitive sciences is treating some information as true in the generation of further thought and behavior.

In the cognitive sciences, then, belief is a general, and perhaps even necessary, feature of cognitive systems and, consequently, pertains to a much broader array of phenomena than the entities and processes traditionally thought of as religion. For some, such a minimal notion of belief may appear uninteresting and irrelevant for investigations of religion and secularism. However, the cognitive science of religion reveals that understanding how this more vanilla version of belief works has relevance for many of the phenomena studied by scholars of religion.

One example of this stems from the cognitive scientific insight that, just as there are distinct substances that share the label “jade” (jadeite and nephrite), there are distinct psychological types of belief. Or, in other words, there are distinct ways in which minds treat information as true. While the distinction has been made in subtly different ways, a key finding of the cognitive sciences is that some beliefs are typically produced unconsciously and operate quickly and automatically as we negotiate our worlds (e.g., people have minds, unsupported objects fall) while others are produced via slower, conscious deliberation and may not always have a strong impact on further thought and behavior (e.g., Paris is the capital of France, objects can spin in multiple directions at the same time).

This insight is relevant to the study of religion because 1) reflective beliefs often diverge from intuitive ones; 2) some intuitive beliefs may be very difficult to eradicate, regardless of reflective beliefs; and 3) some reflective beliefs are very difficult to hold intuitively. For example, Justin Barrett has shown that while reflectively believing God is omnipotent and omnipresent, Christians intuitively believe God is limited in space and time. Similarly, Deborah Kelemen and colleagues have shown that while reflectively believing in a mechanistic universe, Ivy League science professors intuitively believe natural processes exist for a purpose. Further, Shaun Nichols and colleagues have shown that monastic Tibetans, while reflectively believing in the lack of an enduring self, nevertheless have an intuitive belief in its existence and show significant levels of fear at the prospect of its annihilation. Nothing in this work necessitates that we view one type of belief as more “real” than another. Minds treat ideas and information differently for different purposes. This work on two different types of belief can help make sense of various field observations, including Tanya Luhrmann’s observations of Vineyard Christians having firm reflective beliefs in the presence of Jesus, but finding it very difficult to turn these into intuitive beliefs.

This example of intuitive versus reflective beliefs may strike some scholars of religion as a cold, outdated cognitivism that mistakenly treats religious beliefs as literal claims about what is true about the world, rather than as symbolic social commitments. Even if the Western construction of a deep, exclusive, emotional belief in some transcendent order isn’t a natural, cross-cultural phenomenon, there are many people strongly committed to the reality of a transcendental order and cognitive accounts of reflections and intuitions may seem to have little relevance in understanding their commitments.

While the distinction between intuitive and reflective beliefs alone may indeed have limited relevance to understanding such committed beliefs, other emerging accounts of belief in the cognitive sciences have significant implications. Philosopher of psychology Neil Van Leeuwen, for instance, has presented evidence for a partitioning of beliefs that directly bears on the matter of symbolic social commitment and, further, raises important questions for how we think about the influence of the content of a religious belief system on the sometimes extreme actions of its followers. Van Leeuwen outlines the different causal origins and behavioral effects of what he calls “factual beliefs” and “religious credences.” The opposition isn’t an antireligious argument about religious beliefs being false. Rather, factual beliefs 1) guide behavior in all practical setting in which their content is relevant; 2) cognitively govern other attitudes and inferences; and 3) are involuntarily prone to being extinguished if in conflict with perception or seen to lead to a contradiction. Religious credences, on the other hand, are none of these things. Instead, religious credences 1) have a normative orientation, such that believers view actions to be virtuous when guided by them; 2) are susceptible to free elaboration, such that believers can generate further ideas about the content of credences without clear support from induction or deduction; and 3) are vulnerable to special authority, such that credences are prone to extinction if seen as in contradiction to the dictates of the same special authorities from which they themselves came. For Van Leeuwen, religious credences are more psychologically similar to pretend play than to the web of factual beliefs our cognitive systems hold together to consistently navigate our worlds.

Van Leeuwen’s work has attracted criticism from those who argue that, for the “true believers,” religious credences are indeed treated as factual beliefs, thus explaining their willingness to fight and die for them. But I find his argument convincing, not least because other work in the field is demonstrating that psychological mechanisms having to do with group identity and cooperation, rather than ontological conviction, are responsible for the willingness of some individuals to die for social groups, including religious traditions. Further, while credences can be held with strong emotional fervor, there is nothing in the account that says they have to be. And in fact, in a great many social contexts (e.g., much of Japan), people do not hold their religious credences as central components of group identity.

In sum, the term belief should indeed be used with caution in ethnographic writing, as its Western connotations can mislead us. Irrespective of its ethnographic utility, however, the term belief has proven both rich and useful in better understanding the minds and actions of human beings.

Following in the steps of Talal Asad, scholars have produced significant knowledge on the Western origin of our dominant conceptions of religion, including its focus on belief. There is additionally very stimulating work on the challenges brought by the usage of Western Christian categories to study non-Christian religions. None of these studies, however, have been channeled into the social understanding of the religious experience of individuals or groups. In fact, most existing surveys of sociology of religion still define religiosity in terms of church attendance or observance of rituals, which is far from sufficient to capture the complex and multifaceted expressions of religion in people’s lives. To overcome this gap between critical studies and the understanding of religious experience, I suggest the systematic utilization of the belief-behave-belong triad.

Of course, the breakdown of religion into the three Bs is nothing new. For some time, sociologists of religion like Grace Davie and Danièle Hervieu-Léger have argued that exploring the relations between believing, belonging, and behaving is a more relevant way to understand modern forms of religiosity. A person can believe without automatically behaving and belonging; can belong without believing or behaving; or can behave without believing or belonging. Surveys have shown that many Christians in European societies maintain private religious beliefs but do not practice on a regular basis (i.e., believing without behaving). In other cases, Christian identity is a cultural or national marker rather than an indicator of piety. More generally, once we analyze religion along these three dimensions, we realize that the focus on belief does not reflect the most significant modes of people’s engagement with religion. In fact, religious belonging and behavior precede belief in the early stages of socialization through family, school, peer groups. etc. In other words, people forge attachments and behave according to family and contextual norms before being able to formulate their beliefs. Belief, especially in its reflexive and cognitive forms, may develop later in life, whereas it remains the major focus of academic research. Even when scholarship pays attention to belonging or behaving, it is done independently of the interactions among the three Bs: theology investigates religious ideas and doctrine, while the field of religious studies investigates beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. To date, there is no attempt to systematically explore the interactions among the three.

Qualitative research on Muslims in different contexts can illustrate how to better understand religiosity by focusing on the interactions among believing, behaving, and belonging. In the case of most Muslims in Europe and the United States, belief in God is a strong component of personal identity and personal connection with God. The content and truthfulness of the Islamic creed is generally not discussed, and debates over belief are infrequent (converging with statistical work that repeatedly highlights the belief gap between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe).1 Multiple monographs indicate that Muslims in Europe consider Islam’s values to be universal, meaning that Islam is compatible with other religions and cultures in the society in which they live. In fact, the majority of respondents consider the synergy between religious and national identities to strengthen their religious identity, as they rediscover religious meanings in the context of being a minority and experience a greater personal attachment to their tradition than they might have had in their country of origin. What makes Islamic practices distinctive and challenging for the believers are their social and cultural underpinnings and their reception in mainstream society. As a consequence, conflicts between personal and social identity arise.

The hijab controversy is central to these tensions. The headscarf is considered positively by Muslim women even when they do not wear it, with data suggesting that, in contrast to popular opinion, women are more in support of the hijab than men. Along the same line, belonging to Islam is strongly asserted, even in cases where individuals doubt or question their faith, or have no faith at all. However, a clear line exists between “being Muslim” and being a “practicing Muslim,” indicating that “being Muslim” is an identity lacking a clear relation to a set of orthodox practices. Along the same line, multiple surveys on American Jews have highlighted how being Jewish is first and foremost a sense of belonging to a group rather than holding certain beliefs or engaging in particular practices. In these circumstances, we are in dire need of a thorough investigation of the specific interactions among the three Bs in different religious and cultural contexts.

Additionally, the cultural environment significantly influences the individuals behaving and belonging. For example, the resistance against Islamic signs of piety in European societies (from mosque building to dress codes and dietary rules) illustrates such a context in which the dominant conception of religion emphasizes belief and choice on the part of the believer. It is therefore no surprise that conflicts erupt when Muslims exhibit religious markers that reflect their behavioral orthodoxy in societies where the engrained perception of religion is that it is personal and should not be visible in the makeup of one’s social self. This disjunction between private belief and public behavior is the outcome of several centuries of socialization that in European societies has associated modernization, progress, and individual empowerment with the decline of religious practices. It leads to significant variations in modes of behaving for Muslims according to the national contexts. For example, Sufis from Senegal may exhibit more “orthodox” practices in New York than in Paris because the visibility of religious practices is perceived as less conflictual in the former than in the latter context.

Another way to expand the study of religion beyond belief is to observe the interactions of collective forms of believing, belonging, and behaving in relation to the attachments and commitments to political communities or groups. In my work on political Islam, I have demonstrated that religious belonging is more relevant than belief for understanding the politicization of Islam by showing how Islamic and national belonging have been linked in postcolonial nation-state building.

Taking seriously the variations of the three Bs within the same religious group across different cultural contexts (or across religious groups), obliges us to consider religiosity as configurations of contextualized and fluid interactions. It is key to pay attention to the simultaneous changes of ideas, institutions, and contexts over time. Such a multilayered method deserves more substantial engagement, which is beyond the scope of this response but nevertheless worth considering.

“Belief” is difficult. Like all religion-related terms, it is overloaded with meanings from its past and overdetermined by its many uses in the present. Specific to Christianity, but also abstract and universal, belief is both too much and not enough. Its excess and excessive application make belief hard to do without. There are many Christian believers, and Christians aren’t the only people who believe. Some beliefs are so fundamental that those who believe them don’t know it, and people sometimes believe things they rather wouldn’t. Belief persists, despite attempts to avoid it. Stuck with it, as we are, this brief essay aims to help us think with belief and to do so with care.

Belief has at least two objects: truth and values. We can believe that something is true or real, and we can also believe in something. Belief in God is wonderfully ambiguous, as is belief in ghosts, science, and reality. Strangely less ambiguous are belief in people’s inherent goodness and belief that corporations are legally people.

Very secular people, whom I study ethnographically, usually tell me that they don’t believe anything. Belief, for them, is a name for the irrational, faith-based, and dogmatic. Paradoxically, a minority of nonbelievers insist that they’re believers because they want people to know they have a worldview, a life-stance, and a way of life. Nonbelievers, after all, are not nihilists. These nonbelievers not only believe in things—such as humanism or science—they are usually empiricists, meaning they have beliefs about knowing that determine what they believe is true. Though many would not acknowledge it, they participate in a discursive tradition, which shapes their practices, sensibilities, and feelings, as well as their beliefs and nonbeliefs. Secular people have long debated one another about what they believe or affirm to be true, and they have also debated what they believe in or value.

“Ideology” captures their ambivalent belief well because it can be both a rational, unifying system and false consciousness. Belief can also be unconscious and habitual. Doxa are beliefs that constrain belief; they are the stuff of critique, which is to say, a critical account of the grounds of criticism. Belief, so often, is also a conviction, an ethos, or a way of rephrasing creedal commitment.

Calling all of this “belief” is confusing, but semantic refinement can’t save belief from its excess; it can only conceal it. Part of the problem is that belief is rather Protestant. By this, scholars sometimes mean that “emphasizing belief” is Protestant, but because European languages are haunted by Christianity, the two senses blur into one another.

The strongest version of belief’s critique is a sober assessment of belief-centrism among scholars of religion and a warning against assuming that all people everywhere live with Christian-like interiority. Not everyone is especially concerned with beliefs or even claims to possess them. Belief-centered, Protestant-influenced assumptions about what constitutes religion and whose religious freedom deserves protection can facilitate wealth and land transfers and force assimilation in exchange for legibility.

Indifference appears to offer an escape. When I survey students in my large lecture courses about their beliefs, they can check, among other options, “I don’t really think about it.” Students in my courses, like all people, can be indifferent or fanatical or something in between. And throughout their lives, or even throughout a day, they can change. If scholars were indifferent to belief—which is to say, did not attend to differences among beliefs or the difference between belief and nonbelief—then perhaps among more than just a few of my students, belief would matter less.

True, not everyone “believes,” and lots of Protestants don’t believe in ideally Protestant ways, but what about those who believe themselves to be believers, or even seekers? Perhaps more troubling for scholars, who by vocation flee from insincerity, are playful ways of believing. Satanists, wizards, and pirate followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster blur the lines between belief and commitment. Trolling belief makes it mean far more than a narrow Protestant conception can hold. There’s nothing new about this cosplay. Reading Don Quixote, I can’t help but wonder: Does he really believe he’s a knight-errant? My curiosity about the sincerity of a fictional character is a testament to my credulity. Trying and failing to distinguish between the plausible but false and unbelievable but true can be fun and profound. It can also be lucrative.

Skeptics, from Socrates to Michel de Montaigne to Jacques Derrida, have encouraged us to question beliefs. Différance, after all, defers ontology and its assertion. Belief’s many meanings are stubborn, though, and they make belief capacious. Our Protestant-soaked English dares us to say that a skeptical discursive tradition itself entails beliefs, such as a belief about the proper relation to believing. It’s hard not to believe, in some sense of the term, so it’s hard not to be skeptical about the skeptic’s nonbelief.

The pragmatism of New Thought is still another way of believing, which resists the ambiguity of real and unreal in favor of the truth of efficacy. This was William James’s “over-belief.” The will to believe has the potential to render facts moot and remake the world in its mental image. This is poiesis: a kind of self-conscious world-making—a poetic believing as doing and doing as believing—that others like Martin Heidegger have also embraced. Donald Trump’s presidency, however, might be the first New Thought presidency, and his willingness to tweet reality into being embraces, however unsettling, a very ancient idea of poetry. Surely it’s no coincidence that Norman Vincent Peale was the Trump family’s pastor.

Belief’s excess—its persistent Christianity and its overwhelming vagueness—makes it difficult to use with precision. Still, thick with meanings, belief continues to matter. Avoiding belief means living in its remainder and risks losing sight of what people value and what they affirm is true or real. It also risks erasing our beliefs and pretending we don’t have any sort of them. Being indifferent to belief means not being able to see when beliefs make a difference.

Those who critique belief have shown clearly that it doesn’t always matter and that thinking with it drags forth a Christian inheritance. They have also shown that not everyone’s a believer in all senses of the term and that focusing too much on beliefs obscures bodies and their sensibilities. Rather than reasons to avoid belief, however, these are good starting points for thinking with it, and they demand that we think—and believe—with greater care.

When I was growing up, not far from New York City’s Bowery, which in those days was lined with soup kitchens and flophouses, my daily walk to elementary school took me through a park frequented by homeless people. From an early age, I would wonder, “Why are they there in the street and not me? What holds me afloat when they have sunk so far?” The Quaker milieu of my childhood (in the gendered lexicon of the time) had taught that “all men are equal.” Yet in many obvious ways this was manifestly not the case. How do we make sense of notions of justice that presume a human equality so absent from actual experience?

Reaching a more politically critical age, I came to think that my childish inability to understand poverty revealed a distinctly middle-class American naiveté, an inability to think beyond the individual. Rendering society or economy invisible, this ideology suggests that homelessness, like the condition of poverty in general, is at best a glitch within a mostly reasonable world—or worse, the result of individuals’ bad choices (a conclusion to which “behavioral economics” still risks leading us today, as I have written about elsewhere). And, one might conclude, if poverty is something the poor have brought on themselves, then it need not unduly concern the passerby.

Having spent the subsequent decades in large cities and college towns, where hard sleeping is difficult to miss, I can’t shake the question: “Why are they there in the street and not me?” Once, in the heat of adolescent argument, I exclaimed that people sleeping in our streets should matter to us because “We’re all in the same boat,” only to be told, “That’s communism!” I still occasionally ask friends how they deal with that most visible face of unequal lives. One replied that he carries loose dollar bills to hand over to beggars so he doesn’t have to think about it at all. A prosperous lawyer told me that she explained to her young son, when he too posed my childish question, “We’re just lucky.” A true and honest response in its way—at least it avoids taking credit for one’s position in the world. Most disappointingly, when I asked a moral theologian whose own university town is thronged with street people, he could only shrug his shoulders.

The homeless, of course, are an extreme case of a more general set of questions about the distribution of goods and our care for others, what was called in the eighteenth century the “moral economy” and which I have previously discussed. Stripped of the modifier “moral,” today’s concept of “the economy” is, in historical terms, relatively recent. Invisible, it must be postulated. But it can provide an Archimedean standpoint from which to see the world in a certain light—although it can thereby render other things invisible, explaining away both contingency and politics. It invites us to take up a third person stance, a position outside ourselves, in order to place our own particular circumstances in the context of large-scale forces and long-term outcomes. Certainly that stance yields real insights and benefits. At the same time, by demanding that we take the long view, it can undermine the situated claims coming from the first person perspective—for instance, of those whose jobs must be sacrificed for the sake of economic efficiency, or whose mental health care loses out to tax cuts.

But there is more than one such Archimedean standpoint. Consider again the Quakers’ egalitarian slogan. By the time I was an adult, and had thoroughly absorbed the truism in secular terms, I had long since forgotten the crucial clause that makes its truth unassailable for the faithful: “all men are equal in the eyes of God.” Given the obvious differences of condition and capacity among people, this proposition must posit a transcendental standpoint from which those distinctions vanish. To imagine what is seen by “the eyes of God” is to take the third person stance, beyond human limitations. The distant viewpoint is totalizing rather than partial, objective rather than perspectival, and, sometimes, disinterested rather than engaged. At the same time, as the notional equality of all humans suggests, it can prompt the ethical and political demands of moral economy: that justice requires an empirically unequal world be brought into alignment with that invisible equality. (Of course, some religious traditions see people as properly arrayed in hierarchies—but then secular meritocracy can do so as well.)

If the God’s eye viewpoint is only a metaphor when applied to the totalizing abstractions of sociology, economics, or, say, Marxist analysis, a more literal sense underwrites some versions of moral economy. Many religious traditions propose distributive responses to inequality through charity and alms. Although their underlying principles and procedures vary widely (Islam, for instance, distinguishes between obligatory and supererogatory giving; Buddhist donors sustain the voluntary poverty of monks), they share certain general features. One is that they bind unrelated people together across their disparate economic circumstances. Another is that they address a question that secular thought often finds hard to answer: why should I care about inequality? If all people are equal in the eyes of God, then the believer may find the demands of justice affirmed by a principle more unassailable and less fallible than the merely human reasoning behind Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative or Utilitarianism’s calculus, as I have argued previously.

Now, a common criticism of religious charity and alms (to say nothing of, say, prosperity gospels) is that they don’t address the structural or political sources of inequality. But religious traditions of moral economy sometimes do attempt this-worldly reforms, like the banks studied by Bill Maurer and Daromir Rudnyckyj, which try to observe Islam’s prohibition on interest. In doing so, they commonly ask, “What is the basis of economic value?” If the question is not always religious, even secular responses often take a metaphysical turn. Whether the ultimate source of value is thought to be gold, land, or labor, the assurance it offers turns on an ontological claim: that source is something real. The question commonly appears as semiotic anxiety: to what does money refer? For many reformers, the answer leads back to the question of justice. If money could only be securely and indexically grounded in the real sources of value, then the economy would be fair. For only then would there be no undeserved wealth, unlike, say the spurious gains of the gambler, usurer, or rent-seeker, and therefore no undeserved poverty.

To be sure, few secular observers today think that returning to the gold standard or banning usury will solve the problem of distribution. But the question of value persists. And removing “God” from the third person perspective doesn’t eliminate the question of justice. Many religious traditions propose (if rarely with success) that membership among the righteous, the chosen, the elect, the pious, the saved, or the tribe—even one’s mere humanity—should be sufficient to warrant others’ care and guarantee one’s due place within the economy. The scriptural assertion that “the poor you will always have with you” leads back from the God’s eye perspective to the second person of address, “you,” and its partner, the first person plural, “us.” And these pronouns bring us back to the street, where the most visible of the poor challenge the passerby to ask: do you count as one of us?

We routinely speak of the economy as a living being. “The Chinese economy is doing well,” we might say, or, “the American economy is suffering.” Such a fetishization of the economy—treating it as if it were a living being—brings to mind Karl Marx’s famous discussion of commodity fetishism. As Marx taught us, fetishization obscures human labor. In the case of “the economy,” this includes labor occurring in households and relationships, the labor of care, what James Ferguson calls “distributive labor,” such as begging and panhandling, and the labor that makes up so-called “informal economies.” Writing about the commodity, Marx used adjectives such as queer, metaphysical, theological, transcendent, mystical, fantastic, and magical (or, in the German original, vertrackt, metaphysisch, theologisch, mysteriös, übersinnlich, wunderlich, mystisch, rätselhalft, geheimnisvoll). To grasp how fetishization works, Marx proposed turning to the “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world [where] the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race.” In the process of demystifying capitalism, Marx sought to demystify religion, too.

Rather than following Marx’s demystification all the way, some scholars of religion have proposed a different move. In line with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s and Robert Orsi’s rethinking of “history,” they ask: What might it mean to think of the economy with the gods and spirits fully present? How can we take seriously the queer, mystical, metaphysical, and theological underpinnings (and iterations) of the economy? How can we think of the economy as a field of multilayered relations that draws together the material and immaterial?

One way of bringing the gods and spirits back into the picture is genealogical. One can dwell on the ways in which the term “economy” at some point referred to the method of divine government of the world, expressed in phrases such as economy of heaven, redemption, or salvation. Or one could reflect on how the “invisible hand,” which Adam Smith praised in the eighteenth century as leading to the well-being of all, was not simply the hand of the economy but rather the hand of God. Another way of grappling with the economy’s mystical underpinnings consists of sinking one’s teeth into (rather than undoing) the fetish by showing how capitalism is itself magical and messianic, thrives on iconic figures, or is itself faith-based. Research on money offered to ghosts in Vietnam and spirits in China shows how spiritual economies can harness the capitalist market toward their own projects of value production. Others have described how a religious tradition like Islam can become intertwined with neoliberalism.

In my own research on Islamic charity, I have grappled with God’s role in observable economic transactions. Giving charitably in an Islamic context means giving to God (li-llāh), and it means that God gives throughyou. Often when I accompanied charitable interlocutors as they distributed food to the poor, the same scene would repeat itself: We have run out of food. Someone crosses our path asking for “something for God” as one does in Arabic to remind the ostensible giver of the true source and destination of all giving. We say something to the effect of being sorry and that God will provide but nevertheless reach into our empty bag, and there it is: more food. These moments of miraculous multiplication, of baraka, are etched into my memory. Through charity, a divine economy manifests materially.

And yet: When I returned from Cairo to Toronto and created an index to make sense of my fieldnotes, I divided the entry on “economy” into two parts: 1) this-worldly, which included terms such as austerity measures, currency, gated communities, insurance, microloans, money laundering, nouveau riche, poverty, and World Bank; and 2) otherworldly, which included terms such as asceticism, baraka, divine gifts, rizq (divine provisions), tagāra ma‘ rabbinā (trading with God), and thawāb (divine rewards). Looking back, I think that this twofold division is not only an effect of my upbringing and training in a secular, quasi-materialist world that separates out the gods and spirits. It is also an effect of my interlocutors’ own ordering of the world.

Many of my charitable interlocutors treat “the economy” as a separate realm that uplifts or depresses the country but forms a distant backdrop to their trading with God. This strict division has to do with a historical process: the separating of the “economy” and “religion” into distinct realms. Accordingly, my charitable interlocutors do not see their distributive acts as part of al-iqtisād, the Arabic term for economy. If pushed, they might link charity to the goal of overcoming or reducing poverty but more often, rather than considering it an economic act with this-worldly goals, my interlocutors see their charitable giving as a pious act.

It is against the backdrop of such stark divisions between “economy” and “religion” that I took note of moments when the this-worldly and otherworldly converged. Shaykh Salah, one of my Sufi interlocutors who spends all his time cooking for the poor, calls food a “divine minimum wage”—a phrase that collapses the distance between national and divine economy. Scholars have noted that the Quran itself describes God-human relations in economic terms, echoing the language of trade central to the society to which Islam was first revealed. As such, not only is capitalism always already enchanted, as Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin noted, but Islam is also always already couched in a language of trade and calculation—a language that we today associate with an economic (if not, capitalist) rationality.

In my research on Islam, the ethnographic challenge has been to defetishize the economy without secularizing it. Defetishizing the economy means drawing into view people like Shaykh Salah whose labor is crucial in light of the harsh economic conditions, caused by “the economy,” that a large number of Egyptians face today. Not secularizing the economy means leaving space for the gods and spirits whenever and wherever they turn up. In Shaykh Salah’s case, it means thinking through how he himself erases his labor by continuously foregrounding how God gives through him. Here, divine action (and not a fetishized “economy”) decenters human labor. Doing justice to such economic theologies means defetishizing not only “the economy” but also “the human.”

In the twenty-one volume 1984 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, a reference set designed for children, the definition for economics begins, predictably, with a scold. “Most people want more than they can afford to buy. If a family buys one thing, they may not be able to afford something else they would like.” The reading child connects their desire for this or that toy with a broader equation of refusal and control. No, you don’t get that Cabbage Patch doll; the family needs to replace the oven.

It isn’t until the fifth sentence that we find something akin to a definition: “The field of economics studies the way the things people need and want are made and brought to them.” It’s the “need and want” that is the dramaturgical key, pulling that child into an estimation quickly freighted with geopolitical consequence. The encyclopedia formats every country profile with an assessment of how hale or not the economy is. “Denmark has a thriving economy,” World Book coos. “Tonga, an economically underdeveloped country, has few industries or skilled craftworkers,” World Book reproves. “Poverty is fairly widespread in India, but a few Indians have great wealth,” World Book decides. The reader of the encyclopedia knows that a thriving country must be good at managing the equation between need and want; the underdeveloped place has likely fell sway to a mistaken disequilibrium. The history of defining economy is a history of various chiding postures.

Economy is not about money or things. Economy is the practice of constraint toward money and toward things. Economy is a synonym for denial, for constraint, for restraint. To economize is to avoid waste; to be economical is to be frugal. If this seems at odds with the bankers, financiers, CFOs, or artisans of the economy you know, then think of economy as the performance of constraint’s practice. The first time I heard a Goldman Sachs employee tell me “economics is the science of constraints” during the years I studied them, I wrote it down. The twentieth time I heard it I sighed inwardly at how much their nerdy way of controlling the world included a thorough disgust at the undisciplined.

In the wake of these meetings, I found myself taking a cab when I could have taken the subway, or buying a thirty-dollar deep dish when I could have gotten a two-dollar slice, in an effort to shake off their ascetic hauteur and immerse myself again in the consumer gluttony that rimmed my most impoverished years. When I was poor, it was not that I did not understand the science of constraints. Nobody broke needs a lesson in budgeting. Running up credit card debt was sometimes simply the only middle finger to the universe that I could manage to make. “Because the poor have fewer options,” William Julius Wilson famously wrote, “and because they lack the economic resources to fulfill their aspirations, they are forced to develop behavioral norms that diverge from mainstream areas of life, even though they still retain many of the aspirations and values of the affluent society.”

When Wilson wrote about divergent behavioral norms, he sought to reframe criminal activity among the disadvantaged as a rational choice, given the options. The word “economy” is head shaking at such high-risk divergence. Yes, a life of crime might get you cash now, but you also might go to prison later. So irrational, the economist thinks. Why not just behave right, live right, and the good will inevitably follow? Economy is first a moral assessment of whether you are behaving right for future profits. Much later is it a stylized statistical portrait playing as nonfiction. As Rey Chow has brilliantly observed: the way an outsider finds entry into “global capital’s phantasmagoric flows” is not by becoming a scientist of dollars and cents, but through performing moral superiority, through (to borrow from Chow’s language) moral self-production, moral self-expansion, and moral self-proliferation. The key to being a good economic actor isn’t the money or things you have, but the reputation for behavior that knows how to economize and when to say, “no.”

If you look to find out what social scientists say is economy’s relationship to religion, you will quickly find a pile of studies that focus on the abundance religion can make for you in your life. You will find a study that suggests that faith-based enterprises make a lot of money. You will find a study that says people who are very involved with their religion have more happiness than those with lesser involvement. You will find a study that says religion makes you more mentally and physically healthy. You will find a study that suggests that religion contributes positively to economic innovation.

Religion’s manifestation of abundance is a split conceit, an Echidna that seems sweet and fair by one slant but monstrous from another. The purported abundance religion produces is because of its special capacity to instruct constraint, which in turn makes certain metrics of economy rise. Even the most mammon-delighted prosperity preacher prescribes attendance at his financial ministries, at which (as Kate Bowler tells us) the needful parishioner learns, “If you’ll do your part, God will do His.” Particular religions feel differently about payroll. But every religion counsels on how not to be controlled by coin.

Development economics is not a disinterested party to religion’s disciplinary role. One study shows that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies when that religion includes a strong conception of hell. According to these researchers, increased belief in hell, along with a given level of church attendance, can push growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita up by 0.5 percent per year, compared to the average growth rate of 2 percent for all countries studied. Living in fear of the next life will make you buy fewer Cabbage Patch dolls and deep-dish pizzas, and be the obedient saver Chase Bank reminds you to be.

The point here is not that religion and economy make happy companions, but that the work of one is integral to the operation of the other. In a 2013 interview, the renowned sociologist of religion Peter Berger said that religion drives economy because religion is culture. “For most of the world culture basically means religion. Religion drives culture; culture drives social forms; social forms drive development.” For Berger, “drives” is a chipper gait. He, like the World Book Encyclopedia, sees no problem in deciding that some things are better for drive, some people are better at drive.

This is, he wagers—the economists wager—a neutral valuation. The study of religion disagrees. It is not neutral to assess capacity and find something wanting. It is the most partial position a person can take, cheering on the sidelines as Denmark thrives, and booing as Tonga misses development opportunities. Raising the image of sports spectatorship makes clear that we can revise this dynamic and choose different fan cultures, and different ideas about what being a fan is. Religion is how we navigate the aspersion economy produces. It is also—it may exactly be— how we revise just what we mean when we name what we need and what we want.

Economy has been described as a practical and prudent art of household management; as a strategic arrangement of goods (broadly conceived) for a specific purpose and intent; as a reduction or accommodation for the sake of efficiency and expediency; as a market; and as a system of exchange. It is this latter association that I want to focus on here, without losing sight of the other valences. It is common today for economy, in a general sense, to be invoked in relation to exchange. At the heart of this exchange economy is often an assumption of reciprocity or balanced and equal swaps. I want to explore the conceptual challenge of thinking about such balanced or equal exchanges coupled with the fundamental inequality of exchange as such. This invites consideration of what just exchanges might involve.

When exchange is brought up, the question of reciprocity is also often raised. Yet, exchange and reciprocity do not appear to be the same thing. Exchange indicates the giving of one thing and the receipt of another, in ways that these two are related. The giving and receipt of one good somehow impel the giving and receipt of the other. Exchange does not speak to motivations or to background assumptions or conditions. It is the act, or the system that enables the act. Reciprocity verges into moral territory and partakes of a notion of adequate or acceptable balance and even fairness or justice. Reciprocity is one reason why exchange may happen, but reciprocity is not the only condition or driver for exchange. If anything, reciprocity seems to be an addition, a rider attached to exchange, to direct it in ways that appear fair.

Whether or not reciprocity is invoked, however, we tend to conceive of exchange in terms of equivalences. The language of “tit for tat,” for instance, conjures to mind a balancing act. One thing is given in exchange for another under the assumption that this exchange is somehow equal. We agree to exchanges with the assumption that we are getting back that which is equal to what we are giving. Reciprocity and the language of reciprocal exchanges underscores this.

But, as is plain, exchange is predicated on difference and inequality. An exchange is the swap of dissimilar objects, services, or goods. The basis for an exchange and the need that propels it are precisely that others have what we don’t have and what we need or want more of. It assumes we have something to give in return, which they lack or desire for some reason. Exchange would be meaningless if the items exchanged were actually identical and equivalent.

I’ve written elsewhere about the sense of false equivalence that money perpetuates, masquerading as a way to settle a debt but in reality carrying it forward. We think handing over currency in exchange for a good or service somehow satisfies that obligation and balances accounts. But what it really does is now obligate the recipient of money to undertake another exchange with someone else in order to get the value we were supposed to give them when we gave them money instead. In the case here of economy as exchange broadly construed, what I’m getting at is the misrecognition that appears necessary to partake of exchange at all. Exchange and the reciprocity that supports it are carried out under a pretense of equivalence.

This is, of course, the problem of exchange value, although it long precedes the age of commodity fetishism under capitalism. Before the money form and the market for seemingly identical, mass-produced commodities obscured the social relations of laborers behind them, humans sought to make sense of and make peace with the fact that mutuality and interdependence required the unequal give and take of material and nonmaterial goods. One longstanding way to accommodate to this inequality has simply been to misrecognize exchanges as equal—in other words, simply to believe exchanges can be equal despite the fundamental inequality at the heart of exchange, and to act as if this equality was so.

Since the advent of complex civilizations and the related, co-emergent concerns over balance, scale, and measurement, humans in society have long become accustomed to dealing with the ambivalences and lack of equivalences that exchange involves. Gifts, debts, and sacrifices are examples of ways we approach exchange with the acknowledgement that it “may” involve inequality and difference. Gifts invoke temporal delays and nonreciprocal or nonidentical forms of return; debts mark one-sided giving with explicit terms of repayment; and sacrifice can—although need not—indicate one-sided postures of giving where no return is guaranteed. But the problem of speaking in terms of gifts, debts, and sacrifices is that it perpetuates the misrecognition that there are some types of exchanges that are identical and equal. In other words, if we use gifts, debts, and sacrifices to speak of imbalanced and unequal exchanges this reinforces for us the mythology that there really is a realm of balanced and equal exchanges.

This opacity around the inequivalence of exchange appears to be part of the set of fictions necessary for social existence. Life together includes negotiating this absence of identity and equality and in some cases eliding very obvious differences and disjunctions in the name of stability and perpetuity. Evidence suggests that some of the earliest law codes, dating from around 2000 BCE, already establish equivalences between insults and injuries, on one hand, and the material objects of value accepted as compensation for them, on the other. In other words, silver, gold, or other precious objects could be given to balance out an injury or offense. The giving of one radically different item could conceivably equal the wrong committed. We as humans in complex societies apparently have learned to require a notion of equivalence and balance as a baseline in order for society to exist. We need to maintain the guise that our vulnerabilities, porous selves, needs from and for others, all net out in order for us to justify our presence in and participation in society.

It may be that this assumption of equivalence, which I have approached as something of a baseline for exchange, is actually an idea that has emerged late in the development of civilizations. Perhaps it’s a shift from millennia of living with patently unequal, qualitatively different, and non-quantified exchanges. In other words, things like gifts and sacrifices probably were the norm for exchange for a long time; exchanges were marked by clear imbalances in power and obligation. Perhaps the notion of equivalent reciprocity that now dominates our notion of exchange is the result of subsequent millennia of attempts at disciplining economy with the power of quantification and measurement, and accompanying aesthetics of balance and proportion. As the early law codes suggest, such measure and balance support a sense of justice.

Invoking this misrecognition and false notion of equivalence is not necessarily to speak of an injustice, unless our idea of justice always requires identity, balance, and equivalence. It certainly has included this as a core value for millennia. But the fact that exchanges can never be equal does not need to mean they are always unjust. At the same time, noting the inherent presence of difference and nonequivalence in exchange is not a license to abuse exchange relations and relieve oneself of the claims of just exchange. This invocation is rather to highlight the delicate social balancing act between the reality of non-equivalence as the baseline for all exchanges, on one hand, in relation to our commensurate insistence that exchanges can—and, very often, should—be equal, on the other. Whether this fiction is actually necessary for the social fabric or a deep occlusion that prevents other forms of sociality from developing remains to be seen.

In the Safavid empire, book workshops—kitabkhana—involved a complex network of artists and artisans in order to formulate a visual idiom for the court. Ranging from manuscripts, architecture, ceramics, and embroidery, the kitabkhana engaged images as part of a broader genealogy of visual, philosophic, and textual sources. In manuscripts, illustration as part of iconography was meant to evoke a cosmic order; letters, images, and bodies were all corporeal manifestations of incomplete signs pointing toward an essence greater than the material contents of a manuscript. Illustrations, in this sense, beckoned a network of information extending far beyond their immediate context.

The word universe, like cosmos, connotes the religious and the secular; that which is immediately around us and simultaneously larger than that which we can fully experience. When approaching A Universe of Terms I distinctly understood two challenges. The first was visually representing the abstract, and the second was generating a visual iconography capable of existing alone and alongside text. Once given the selected terms in the Universe, I was excited to create and engage with the project material in my own way. For me, engaging meant thinking beyond a term itself to consider how I could talk about these terms through images. To confront abstract, philosophically complex terms, the images could not be confined by a dictionary definition.

I generated a visual style for the Universe whose simplicity contrasts with the ostensible complexity each term embodies. I wanted to create a visual idiom capable not only of engaging each term critically as both the object and subject of scholarly debate, but also present each term in a form generic enough so as not to limit the possibilities of intersectional discourse. I desired an imagining that exceeds disciplinary limits. By this I mean to suggest how visual elements can encourage a multilayered and networked form of thinking about the terms of the Universe—a form that includes dimensions beyond the page of text. One where the pictorial (as well as the audible) can be part of the learning experience beyond conventional pedagogy. To encourage a visual understanding of interconnectivity, I gave each term a distinct form connected to the greater Universe through a variety of similar elements. As a tribute to the cosmic part of the universe, every term has a star, and every term is composed using additional illustrations such as the hand, the body, the square, and the circle.

The specific shapes and colors for the Universe are drawn from my appreciation for the creative processes of René Magritte, Henri Matisse, and Alexander Calder. I am inspired by Magritte’s complex enchanting renderings of the surreal (see Surrealism) and specifically the eye as the sky in “The False Mirror” (1929) [compare to term “enchantment, disenchantment”]. I resonate with Matisse’s colorful abstractions of the real (Fauvism) in shapes of warm vibrant colors, notably his cutouts such as “Jazz” (1943) and “Icarus” (1947). As for Calder, I am constantly drawn to an early fascination with his animatronic “Circus” (1931) as a form of art in movement. Ultimately, the style for the Universe reflects my own desire to contend with the abstract without losing the joy and excitement of thinking imaginatively.

The designs for some of the terms, such as “spirit” and “economy,” were further inspired by the written work of specific contributors (Emily Ogden on spirit; Kathryn Lofton on economy), whereas terms like “performance” and “media” draw on more conventional imaginings of the term. Though the terms in this project are often considered separately, I wanted to encourage readers of this project to explore how the terms are in discussion with each other, and how the visual can be integral to this discussion.

Incorporating other forms of expression, I wanted to further consider how words move in space and take up space and require space in order to exist. Therefore, for the page “About the Universe,” the two hands that circulate around one another signal the word for “universe” in American Sign Language (ASL). Though it is difficult to capture the physicality of words, sign language allows us to conceptualize utterance. Whether through ASL or dance, how do words perform, how do words extend beyond the conventions placed upon them by dictionary or encyclopedic definitions? Verbal and embodied language is ephemeral. And in this sense, no term can temper itself; its potential is located in all that a term cannot control, all that the term invites.

A Universe of Terms, as I have come to understand it, provides a platform for multidisciplinary thinking alongside scholars who invite contemporaries and students to enter into the worlds of each term. I think of this much like small looking glasses through which one steps in and only briefly begins to perceive the never-ending ways words and ideas connect to worlds around them, to objects, people, sensations, and memories.

The greatest privilege of working on this project, beyond the possibility to collaborate with Mona Oraby and The Immanent Frame, is the ability to draw from my love of interdisciplinary thinking and design. As a student of architectural studies and Russian, I often bridge the spatial and the linguistic in my daily practices. Either directly in my research or implicitly due to the constant presence of these modes of thinking, I have intimately considered the place of both the real and the evocative, the verbal and the physical. As a graphic designer, I know the images and forms I generate call upon both that which has been written and that which is embodied in physical space. Visual thinking is an essential part of my education. I observe my surroundings in terms of space and compositions, components and movements. The logic of spatial praxis through mapping and networks of information is central to how I make sense of the world around me. Creating visual elements allows me to engage with design as an intellectual exercise. Through this process, I explore a world beyond the purely visual or textual. In my own research, I concern myself with the relationship between law, property, and mapping (sociolegal geographies), particularly the visuality of (il)legal systems as they can be traced in urban infrastructure. In my thesis work, I explore the place of Soviet courtyards spaces in contemporary Russian cities as both public and private sites of connectivity and participation in everyday society. Especially in the case of Soviet cities, spatial and linguistic theories come alive in buildings themselves, with built typologies representing political eras and ideologies that can be read in the physical landscape. By working through the spatial, the visual, and the textual, I see how ideas come alive in the physical world and inform everyday experiences. 

Further reflecting on the dynamics shaping contemporary society, I immediately began to consider the tendency for Generation Z to engage with the world through mediated networks of information inside, and more formatively, outside of the classroom. The reality for Generation Z, and increasingly for the next generations, is a knowledge base that is visual, musical, documentary—a filtered lens or personal soundtrack accompanying us through the world as we discover it, and not necessarily for ourselves. There exists a constant multiplicity in what we interact with; that there is always a second image in a newsfeed, a page behind a post, a link to another source, a song for a specific moment.

Earlier I mention the limits of conventional pedagogy. Through this essay and through the design of the Universe, I hope to encourage educators in all disciplines to consider how they engage the plurality of information their students encounter on a daily basis. I challenge educators to consider how the content of a course or lecture can be connected to information in the broader learning environment students engage with. One that is felt and experienced in a multidimensional way, composed of different elements pieced together to make sense of the everyday.

In visualizing the Universe, I considered the way words are lived, felt viscerally, described in anecdotes of love and loss, and seen, often times, in the products of our own thinking. And in an era of immense documentation through social media and databases, I wanted to consider what it would mean to make images rather than draw from the real. In this sense, I think about how “the visual” and images can be productive for alternative, perhaps more interdisciplinary, modes of thinking. And I do not just think about how we research differently, but rather how scholarly discourse can connect differently to material. How can incorporating the visual into scholarly praxis allow us to foreground our own mediation of things, of terms, of bodies? How can we begin to bridge the gap of discursive limits that often bind our disciplines to themselves?

A musical call and response between brass and reeds opens the 1933 composition for Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, “Harlem Camp Meeting.” A voice asks, “What’s this comin’ off here?” and after a brief pause, reflects, “It’s more like one of them good ol’ revival days here. A camp meeting! Yowza, yowza!” Next comes a clarinet solo, and the inquiring voice assumes the role of a narrator in remarking, “There’s a dear brother got happy on that clarinet, look at him. Greeeat day!” As the clarinet solo continues, the narrator interjects affirmative responses: “Tell me all about it, brother. Tell me all about it, now.” The narrator then refers to the “brother” as “son” and tells him to “Get ready for this scat sermon I’m gonna give you here.” The narrator produces a wordless vocal melody, accompanied by syncopated chimes replicating the sound of distant Sunday church bells. Another “brother” follows his vocal solo with a muted trumpet solo, and the narrator encourages this man to “get happy there, get happy” with responses of “uh huh,” “yowza!” and “Shout it, Elder, shout it, Elder.” To this musical crowd, the narrator proclaims, “Get happy, get happy, all you sinners, and get happy here!” The percussion halts for a brass interlude before the beat resumes with an antiphonal chorus of clarinet “sisters” swinging with brass “brothers.” As the music climaxes, the narrator joyously proclaims with laughter, “This is the kind of camp meetin’s we have in Harlem, yeah, man!”1

Composed by the African American trombonist Harry White, this record takes the (foxtrotting) listener on a tour of the exciting sounds of a black Protestant revival setting. Through his musical performances, the African American singer, dancer, composer, and bandleader Cabell “Cab” Calloway, III (1907-1994) articulated andportrayedirreverence as a distinctive and commonplace mode of religious skepticism in African American religious history. His early career shed light on the formidable presence of comedy lampooning African American religious life byAfrican American men and women familiar with the subject matter. Calloway produced humorous irreverence by replicating the sights, sounds, and behaviors of black Protestant church settings, characters, events, and experiences. Although he used humor to depict his church life, such irreverence never took the form of full-throated maliciousness. Rather, Calloway attempted to convey through musical performance the humor he found with religiosity without denouncing religious persons or institutions. The music Calloway performed and recorded reflected his decision to withdraw from regular participation in the institutional life of black Protestantism. His music resonated with many other African Americans who preferred Saturday leisure to Sunday service.

With “Harlem Camp Meeting,” the key sonic distinctions from a traditional black Christian worship experience are the song’s instrumental “testimonies,” “yowza” exclamations, and the swinging sounds of a Harlem big band. When the narrator urges participants to “get happy,” or when he recognizes a clarinetist who got happy on his instrument, he evokes the charismatic Christian practice of shouting, crying, and dancing under the possessive influence of the Holy Spirit—but these participants are to be happy as “sinners.” The narrator speaks back to the soloists who provide their musical testimonies, behaving as a church member who vocally affirms the righteous speech of her or his sisters and brothers in Christ. In this three-minute recording, Calloway’s performance shifts rapidly from observer to interpreter to practitioner.

Calloway’s ascendancy to revival preacher comes with a “scat sermon” in the middle of the song. This forty second scat interlude is most interesting, for Calloway produces a rhythmic and melodic imitation of the “whooped” portion of African American “chanted sermons” with it. Scholar of preaching and preacher Martha Simmons describes whooping as “melody, one that can be identified by the fact that its pitches are logically connected and have prescribed, punctuated rhythms that require certain modulations of the voice, and is often delineated by quasi-metrical phrasings.” The “chanted sermon” originated in the rural South’s revivals and prayer meetings, spreading into urban areas through the United States with African American migrations in the twentieth century. Calloway was familiar with the form, despite having attended more elite middle-class African American churches in his youth, because the chanted preaching style as oral “folk” art was, according to African American religious historian Albert Raboteau, a “tradition of preaching [that] remain[ed] popular among literate and ‘sophisticated’ congregations.” Calloway’s “growling” portion (from 1:28-1:35) most exemplifies the whooping preacher’s monotone chanting sound and audible gasps for breath. The shouts near its beginning emphasized his rising emotional pitch, and the moans represented the shouted singing that many preachers use to conclude their sermons, displaying their physical exhaustion by this point.

As a religious profession, the black Protestant preacher involved artistic performance, the fashioning of dramatic personae, and the cultural authority to make moral, social, or political pronouncements. Whether the members of a younger African American generation, like Calloway, who were aspiring toward jazz music as a profession were dedicated church parishioners or not, they bloomed from a cultural garden that these dramatic, authoritative performers had tilled. Moreover, they inherited and brought into their entertainment profession the cultural leeway to fashion their work in such racially representative ways that were performative, dramatic or charismatic, and authoritative. “Harlem Camp Meeting” is one of many instances of musicians and composers creating humorous and familiar performances of black Protestant religious practice. Unlike the chanted African American Christian sermon, however, Calloway’s scatted message celebrates the jazz man’s existence: a recreational life that is at times sexual, inebriated, and raucous. And as a nocturnal life on the weekends that resulted in partiers sleeping late on Sundays, Harlem’s “camp meetings” were always in conflict with observing the Christian Sabbath.

Calloway, once referred to as the “Satanic Sultan of Scat Singing” by writer and journalist Vincent L. “Roi” Ottley in his New York Amsterdam News column “Radio Personalities” on July 27, 1932, employed irreverent humor to offer a clear alternative to religious calls for a return to “old time” African American Christianity that traded on expressions of “low church” religiosity. As a bandleader, flamboyant conductor, composer, singer, and dancer, Calloway often crafted and inhabited the identity of a pastoral figure against the backdrop of New York’s Cotton Club. If not the owners of radios, most African Americans encountered Cab Calloway’s jazz through phonograph records, thereby accessing the sounds of his artistry absent the racist professional context of the Cotton Club, in which white patrons consumed his performances. In the Great Depression era, the “hi de ho man” was the entertaining showman with a popular reputation for bearing a jubilant, often irreverent musical message for partying club patrons and for radio or phonograph listeners to partake in his celebration in their homes.

African American performers have irreverently presented criticisms of religious life that consuming audiences identify and recognize, but without an explicit dismissal overall of religious practices and beliefs in most cases. For performers to present compelling parodies of African American Protestantism, and for audiences to accept these productions as comical for their compelling authenticity, there must be some degree of sustained engagement with these black religious traditions as they evolved over the long twentieth century. Calloway’s performances reveal that various songs and musicians in the early decades of jazz captured the presence of this enduring link between religious familiarity and religious irreverence in African American entertainment.

In his 1976 autobiography, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me, Calloway wrote that he “converted in the 1930s” to the Episcopal Church and was “still a firm believer in church and in God. I don’t think of myself as a religious person. I love to live. I like the good life. I enjoy entertaining and I get as much satisfaction out of giving people pleasure as I do out of going to church. Maybe entertaining is my way of expressing godliness. Lord knows, there are worse ways.” For Calloway the Episcopalian, providing joy to others through entertainment was personally gratifying and an acceptable vocational objective in lieu of dutiful church attendance. But with the suggestion that there are “worse ways” of “expressing godliness,” is it possible Calloway was referring to types of religious worship he found either distasteful, insincere, or hypocritical? Ultimately, it is not difficult to misinterpret this brief reflection and overlook what Calloway offered: a constructive but vague appreciation for institutional religious life and a fundamental belief in the divine. He lived as if religious irreverence was compatible with religious belief and belonging.

While many black Protestants built churches, parachurch associations, denominations, schools, and print press outlets to preach their social, cultural, political, and theological goals, some African American Protestants, or the black Protestant mainline, or the black Protestant middle class, also employed artistic performance in their quest for long-term institutional space, recognition, and power. Jazz vocalists, including Calloway, and jazz instrumentalists preached through the artistry of their music profession and amplified Afro-Protestantism as a cultural and artistic presence in history. These preaching jazz professionals allow Afro-Protestantism to resonate as a mode of performance and vocalization to hear and interpret in the public actors it influences—when Cab Calloway and many other African Americans evoke preacherly traditions, sacred race histories, or ritual antiphonies in rhetoric, poetry, and music with sincere or irreverent appreciation. As performers, their voices and legacies call religion scholars toward both novel and conventional archives to respond to the fundamental artistry of religious thought and expression.

Erving Goffman once remarked that “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.” Therein lies much of the promise as well as the problematic character of performance theory: where are its boundaries—analytical or ethnographic? Sixty years later, the field of performance studies remains broad, but we can at least say it has encouraged us to look at the world in a different way, and to pose some fundamental questions: How do the dramatic arts of “everyday life” relate to those of self-conscious “art-forms”? How are we to compare the blueprints for much of what we do—plans, scripts, liturgies—with our actual abilities to carry out our intentions?

For both analysts and interlocutors, reflecting on performance often indexes not only what humans achieve, but also what they fail to do, or sometimes carry out inadvertently. Studying performance thus becomes less about plans and more about process, about the indeterminacies and contingencies of life, ranging from the most casual conversation to the most formal ritual. In the context of the study of religion, which is the area we both work in, it asks what might be meant by “lived religion,” which exists not only in the realm of the everyday, but also in the gap that always exists between aspiration and accomplishment.

A theme running through all of these concerns, and which scholars in religious studies, anthropology, and performance studies have considered in different ways, is that of repetition: as theoretical problem, methodological challenge, but also ethnographic ambiguity. From one perspective, all performances are unique. Yet, as performance theorist Richard Schechner states: “Performance means: never for the first time. It means: for the second to the nthtime. Performance is ‘twice-behaved behavior.’” One way of mediating between these positions, and also between performance as “life” and performance as “art,” is to think broadly in terms of Judith Butler’s discussions of iterability, which take in both the politics of observing and imitating others, and the sense that bodily identity is never truly fixed. Performance studies scholar Paige McGinley asks similar questions within the context of civil rights era activism in America, investigating the role that reenacting or rehearsing real-life political situations might play in shifting perceived boundaries of belonging. In the ethnographic example that follows, we highlight how the concept of repetition opens up lines of inquiry within the contexts of performance and religion.

Evangelical Christianity exists for much of the time on the cusp between positive and negative evaluations of recurring performance. On the one hand, “mere” repetition, “mere” ritual, are to be avoided: they evoke old worries about the theatrical, the routinized, the rote. On the other, the performative implies the visible and accumulative creation of difference through concerted action. One of us, Saliha, explores these themes in her examination of the performances of young Texan Pentecostals as both part of everyday life in the church and as marked aesthetic action in the context of staged performances put on for others. We emphasize two interrelated dimensions of this analysis, which we believe can be generative for other fields. The first is that the addressee of the performance is as much the Self as it is any assumed Other. The second is that the final “show” is significant, but so is the painstaking, repetitive, constantly “failing” yet striving experiences of rehearsal. Both of these dimensions make iterability a positive virtue of the evangelical life; and, in doing so, they form the evangelical subject in ways far more consequential, if much less spectacular, than conventional understandings of becoming “born again.”

In Saliha’s research, young Pentecostal youth at an Assemblies of God church in Texas participate in a now thirty-year tradition of running “Hell House” during the Halloween season. Each year, a team of pastors, church members, and youth volunteer to craft theatrical depictions of sin and punishment in order to offer audience members a way out: salvation in Christ. The sins performed in Hell House aren’t the likes of gluttony or pride, but are timely sociopolitical issues meant to resonate with young American audiences. In the years of Saliha’s fieldwork (2016-2018), these sins ranged from abortion to substance abuse, gang violence, sexual deviance (homosexuality, premarital sex, rape), drug trafficking, family violence, and spousal abuse. Since over ten thousand people attend this Hell House each year, youth actors repeat their weekend performances every seven minutes or so for audiences of ten to twenty people at a time.

Anthropologist Susan Harding famously argued that the repeated utterance of words—in her case, a reverend’s own conversion narrative—does a kind of disciplining work on the listener, who is constituted anew through the speaker’s performance. In the context of Saliha’s young interlocutors, we use repetition to turn the anthropologist’s gaze toward the performer or speaker themselves. In performance contexts such as Hell House, where youth create and negotiate the representation of a sociopolitical “sin” in rehearsal spaces and hundreds of live performances per week, how might youth actors themselves become disciplined as religious and political subjects? What kinds of knowledge are produced in these rapidly repeated performance spaces? And how do youth conceptualizations of their own identities as political subjects influence—or become influenced—by their participation in taxing, emotional, and at times highly personal performances?

A common assumption about Hell House on the part of lay observers and media outlets is that youth participants must be exceedingly devoted to activism (especially on the subject of pro-life/pro-choice debates in America) to enact such scenes hundreds of times each October. However, Saliha’s research finds a more complicated story, wherein notions of belonging and trust unfold in these highly controversial and politicized rehearsal and performance spaces. Saliha’s interlocutors repeatedly explained that while their involvement in events like Hell House was certainly motivated by their desire to walk in their God-given talents and the expectations of ministry, it was their wish to be with friends, significant others, and the broader youth community that kept them coming back each year. When asked why his yearly participation in Hell House was important to him, a sixteen-year-old replied: “If I don’t participate, I won’t see my friends for months, because they’ll all be here.” A twenty-three-year-old whose motivations were similar in her youth reflected that although religiopolitical activism wasn’t on her mind at all when she was a Hell House actress, her frequent participation is what she now credits as the reason she’s in favor of the criminalization of abortion today. While Saliha’s interlocutors are working to render certain sociopolitical and eschatological beliefs legible and plausible through the medium of performance, they’re not always attentively doing so at each stage in their participation.

What we are describing here is not an inevitable process of subject- or identity-formation: it can always “fail,” or be diverted in unexpected ways. However, repetition’s potential disciplining power, combined with the medium of performance, can be central to questions of commitment: not just religious, but also civic and political, in realms that include but also go beyond the boundaries of church life.

A performance is some kind of action that changes something in the real world. The Oxford English Dictionary says the word “perform” means “to accomplish an undertaking.” Even something you say can be a performance in this sense, like when a minister of the church performs a wedding ceremony. The words he speaks transform two unmarried people into a wedded couple. “O eternal God,” the minister of the English Church in Shakespeare’s time would have said, “creator and preserver of all mankind, giver of all spiritual grace, the author of everlasting life: send thy blessing upon these thy servants . . . whom we bless in thy name.” The people getting married also perform what philosophers of language call “speech acts”—utterances that are also actions. “I do” is one kind of utterance when your friend asks you if you really like pistachio ice cream; “I do” is quite another kind of utterance—it has binding force—when you say it in response to the minister’s question about taking this person (this person standing right beside you) as your life partner.

“Performance” also means play-acting, doing or saying something that changes nothing in the real world. Shakespeare, who thinks a great deal about performance and also a lot about the nature of belief, crafts a scene in As You Like It where Rosalind, disguised as a boy, stages her own wedding to Orlando. The vows they speak change nothing in the real world; after all, they are actors speaking lines in a make-believe world. Their words don’t even change anything in the world of the play since the characters are only playing at getting married. They are not married at the end of the scene; Orlando still thinks the person he’s been pretending to wed is a boy named Ganymed. Yet the scene is enchanting. When the two young people exchange their gender-crossing vows, we feel something like the presence of “the giver of all spiritual grace” moving between them. Together, Rosalind and Orlando (and Rosalind’s cousin, Celia, who is playing the minister) orchestrate the different kinds of performance—creating a performance of magical transformation (where something changes indeed) and also staging a performance of sheer playhouse make-believe.

Rosalind’s playful performance of the sacred marriage rite is thoroughly metatheatrical. Metatheatre, which is the level of meaning in a play that stands over and reflects ironically on the play’s unfolding narrative, enabled the playgoers to play with belief the way Rosalind invites Orlando to play at getting married: both to pretend to believe something they knew to be mere play-acting and to develop new understandings about how belief works. Shakespeare’s theatre, we might say, became something like a faith workshop.

Consider how metatheatre is able to translate supernatural events into the natural effects of theatrical performance and then translate those natural effects back into supernatural events. In the fifth scene of Hamlet, to take a famous example, the ghost of Hamlet’s father is crying out to his son and the others on stage to swear that they will remain silent about what they have just seen. Hamlet suddenly says, “Come on, you hear this fellow in the cellarage. / Consent to swear.” For a moment there is no ghost, there is only an actor under the stage who is making ghostlike cries, and then the ghost is back—a real ghost crying “Swear.”

How did Shakespeare’s theatre become a faith workshop, a place where people of all kinds, and especially of all confessional identities, could share their beliefs with others and also begin to understand the dynamics of faith? The playhouse emerged as a commercial entertainment industry in a time of religious struggle. Through the sixteenth century, England, in the throes of the Reformation, changed its national religion three times—moving violently back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism. A commercial theatre like the one Shakespeare created had to attract playgoers of all kinds if it was to thrive. So Shakespeare’s plays made room for both Protestants and Catholics and sought to engage playgoers across the wide confessional spectrum of Reformation England.

Shakespeare himself was born into a Protestant nation under the rule of Elizabeth, but his father and mother were raised Catholic; some scholars think his father died in what was called the “old religion.” Shakespeare put a version of his family history on stage in Hamlet. Here, the young prince, just back from university in Wittenberg—which happens to have been Martin Luther’s university and the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation—comes face-to-face with his father’s ghost. One of Luther’s key arguments, by the way, was that there was no such thing as purgatory, that the Catholic Church had just made it up. In the scene, the ghost tells his son that he is “confin’d to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away.” Recusant Catholics in the playhouse might have been gratified to see that purgatory does exist after all, at least in this play-world. Protestants might have remembered Hamlet’s own remark that the ghost could be a “goblin damn’d” (1.4.40), a figure, they might think, dressed up in the garb of Catholic doctrine to seduce the prince toward his damnation. So the play was able to engage playgoers with different family histories and different confessional identities. On this account, Hamlet at the Globe created a collective of different people able to share their ideas and feelings by way of the words they shouted at the stage, their gasps of horror or delight, even the timing of their laughter and weeping. To borrow from philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s ideas about how people can change the world by dint of communicating with each other, we could say that Shakespeare’s theatrical faith workshop became a space for “communicative action.”

Of course, the fifth scene of Hamlet translates across kinds of belief, not between belief and nonbelief, but in fact the play as a whole brings belief and nonbelief into persistent dialogue, mostly by the way it deploys metatheatricality. So not only did Shakespeare’s theatre seek to accommodate different kinds of Christians, it also took a step back from religion altogether and made available skeptical views about the supernatural and the divine. Hamlet crafts two kinds of performance—one kind representational and other-worldly and another kind metatheatrical and this-worldly. One features a prince who is charged by a ghost with the task of killing his fratricidal uncle, and it includes also speculation about the supernatural, about religion, and about salvation and damnation, all of which is to be taken with the utmost seriousness. The other kind of performance is about different styles of playing a revenger, how much of what anyone says or does is authentic or merely scripted, how far a person is really a king or only acting a kinglike part, how an actor under the stage can sound like a ghost.

The two kinds of performance translate the characters and their actions back and forth between belief and non-belief. They can sometimes be downright antithetical to each other, but the playgoers’ work in the theatrical space of communicative action must move creatively and with open minds between them. Shakespeare’s faith workshop, I suggest, invited the playgoers to give expression to their religious feeling and thinking by way of their responses to the action unfolding on stage, to recognize the different faith-based emotions and thoughts of other playgoers, and to begin to grasp how faith itself is performed—both accomplished as a real thing in the world and play-acted as an invention of the mind.

On Holy Saturday 1294, an Umbrian woman found herself in a sepulcher with Christ’s dead body. The woman kissed Christ’s breast, then Christ’s mouth. She placed her cheek on Christ’s cheek. Then Christ placed his hand on her other cheek. Christ pressed the woman’s body close to his in an embrace. Christ whispered lovingly to the woman, though Christ’s eyes and lips remained closed.1

The woman was Angela of Foligno (c. 1248–1309), a widow, a lay Franciscan, a mystic. Angela’s sepulcher scene came in the twenty-fourth step of her twenty-six-step spiritual itinerary. Her itinerary included other extraordinary scenes. Angela denuded herself before a crucifix. She saw eyes appear in eucharistic bread-bodies. She bathed lepers, then drank the bathing water. She drank blood from, and later entered, Christ’s side wound.

How might we make sense of Angela’s sepulcher scene? What ready-to-hand critical terms from the study of religion might we use?

Is Angela’s sepulcher scene an act of belief? Is it a ritual? Or a liturgy? Is it an ecstatic experience? A mystical experience? A transgression? Something else?

And is Angela’s sepulcher scene scriptural? Is it scripted? Or is it improvised, unique?

My response to each of these questions would be well, yes, but . . . None of these terms can contain Angela’s sepulcher scene. None of them really fits. So, well, yes, but . . . articulates incongruity. It also articulates excess. Even working together, these terms can’t contain Angela’s sepulcher scene. Parts of it seep out.

Or we could use the critical term “performance.” Angela’s sepulcher scene is, among other things, a performance. It’s a performance of Angela’s medieval, mystical, feminine, Franciscan, Umbrian, upsetting Christianity. For Angela, Christianity was, or became, a performance. And Angela might be the ultimate Christian performer, or performance artist. (I think she is.)

Considered as a performance, Angela’s sepulcher scene made, and makes, sense. And it made, and makes, sense in ways that it wouldn’t, or couldn’t, in other terms.

That’s partly because “performance” remains pliable. “Performance” resists programmaticity. It resists becoming a prefabricated formula. “Performance” remains, in Catherine Bell’s words, “broadly conceived, flexible, hospitable to difference and experimentation.”

It has to. Performances, Erika Fischer-Lichte tells us, “do not express something that pre-exists, something given.” Performances, Diana Taylor tells us, move “between the AS IF and the IS, between pretend and new constructions of the ‘real.’” And performances, Colette Conroy tells us, “can explore alternative cultural [and/or religious] forms of expression for people who do not fit easily” into existing norms.

So “performance” realizes Bell’s suggestion that critical terms “are best understood as a minimalist set of props with which we can begin to engage ideas and inquire into practices that may well modify the surroundings.”

“Surroundings” might also include critical terms, categories, forms. Performances deform and reform and transform these conceptual containers. Maybe that’s because a performance is a transformation. A performance, Richard Schechner tells us, is “an active situation, a continuous turbulent process of transformation.” This process and its effects—their transformations—linger long after a performance is over.

These effects are often messy. Performances mess with, mess up, make a mess of tidy constrictions of “religion” as a category, or of a religious tradition. Angela’s performances do. They mess with, mess up, make a mess of easy senses of “religion” and “Christianity” (and other terms, too).

What terms might we use to make sense of Angela’s sepulcher scene? How might we translate this scene—with its improvisations, its criss-crossings, its excesses—into the idiom of “religion”? And how might we fit Angela’s sepulcher scene into a tradition called “Christianity”?

These questions evoke the transformations that Angela’s performances, as performances, can make. Responding to these questions demands attending to the particulars of Angela’s performances.

Performances are particular. They live in their particularities. These particulars include contexts. “In performance,” Diana Taylor tells us, “context is all.”

One context for Angela’s performances was her spiritual itinerary. A spiritual itinerary is a performance. It’s a performance made of, and by, performances. And between 1292 and 1296, Angela confessed her itinerant experiences to her Franciscan confessor-scribe, who recorded her confession. (Her confession was another performance.) That made Angela’s performance(s) of her Christianity singular and plural.

Another context for Angela’s performances was her historical location. Angela’s particular performances happened in thirteenth-century Umbria. I’ve chosen these historical performances purposefully, to unsettle presumptions that “performance” is a metonym of “presence” or that a performance is ever unmediated.

The particulars of a performance matter. They show how a performance happened, or happens: in bodies, in contexts. And they show how—in bodies, in contexts—a performance entangles ways of being, ways of knowing, ways of judging, ways of deciding, and ways of living in a body and in a world. Attending to a performance as a performance calls for attending to all of these elements, together, in their messy, entangled particulars.

The particulars of a performance are what make differences. These differences might mean expanding, or maybe exploding, our sedimented terms. They might call either for refashioning existing terms or adding new terms, even if only temporarily, in relation to Angela’s performances.

Angela’s performances—as performances of, or performances that are, “religion”—raise more questions than they answer. They pose more problems than solutions for studying religion. They trouble our term-tools. They make studying religion messy.

These are good things. Critical terms, Bell reminds us, “are not critical because they contain answers but because they point to the crucial questions at the heart of how scholars are currently experiencing their traditions of inquiry.”

The Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal (RSDR) Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) aims to bring knowledge of the place of religion and spirituality into scholarly and public conversations about renewing democracy in the United States. These fellowships are offered by the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere with the support and partnership of the Fetzer Institute.

Applications are due March 16, 2020. Apply online at apply.ssrc.org.

The RSDR fellowship program invites proposals for research at the intersection of religion, spirituality, and democracy in the United States. The fellowships offer research support over a period of up to 12 months to doctoral students who have advanced to candidacy and to postdoctoral researchers within five years of their PhD. Doctoral candidates will receive up to $15,000 and postdoctoral researchers up to $18,000 toward research-related expenses. Applications are welcome from scholars at either of these career stages from any country around the world. We welcome proposals on all aspects and dimensions of religion and spirituality in its relation to democracy from across all fields in the social sciences, humanities, and theology.

More information on eligibility, research themes, and application materials can be found on the Program’s website.

Science—Latin, scientia—can signify an integrated corpus of knowledge as well as a systematic method of study that enables humans to wrest reliable knowledge from the world around us. A slightly more speculative etymology traces “science” to the Greek skhizein, “to split, cleave, or separate” and to the Latin scindere, “to cut, rend, or tear asunder.” As Peter Harrison argues, scientia understood as a body of knowledge, an exterior entity rather than an interior disposition or habit of mind, is of relatively recent vintage. This understanding emerged alongside intentional and sometimes zealous efforts to separate science from not-science. The quest for unity among the sciences fueled a “kind of negative definition in which science is understood by what it is not, or by what it is in opposition to,” Harrison notes. “Religion” came to stand in for that which science opposes, an external enemy around which a somewhat chaotic assemblage of practices and aims, vaguely referred to as science, could coalesce. So began a fictional historical warfare of science and religion that established territorial boundaries for science while lending it an appearance of internal cohesion.

This separating and consolidating move was abetted in the nineteenth century by the professionalization of science, and with it the creation of a discrete identity for its practitioners. Like the unity of science (real or imagined), professionalization was achieved through additional acts of cutting and separating, including the expulsion from prestigious scientific societies of women, hobbyists, and clergy. Science and its practitioners—freshly dubbed scientists—now stood in contrast to these less desirable elements. Over time, science and scientists similarly came to be defined against a host of things considered not-science, not-yet-science, or not-as-good-as-science: not only religion, but pseudoscience, technology, and the humanities.

And what of the arts? Is there no bloody strife between art and science? Here the story takes an interesting turn. The appellation “scientist” was famously coined by the Victorian polymath and wordsmith William Whewell at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1833. Prompted by a complaint from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge that practitioners of science—lowly fossil-diggers with dirt under their nails—were unworthy of the customary title “natural philosopher,” Whewell offered the term scientist “by analogy with artist.”

The term was resisted by many who felt it relegated science to precisely those utilitarian impulses and pedestrian activities hinted at in the poet’s complaint. “Scientist implied making a business of science,” writes Sydney Ross in a classic essay. “It degraded their labours of love to a drudgery for profits or salary.” How times have changed. In the modern university, “scientist” and “scientific” carry considerable prestige and authority. Many researchers in nonscience disciplines now strive to enhance their profile (and their salaries) by aligning themselves with methods and objectives of the patently useful and public-serving sciences.

In this context, Whewell’s wordsmithing surfaces yet again. He coined the word “consilience” to describe a felicitous “leaping together” of disparate classes of facts—independent lines of evidence whose convergence lends a scientific theory the “stamp of truth.” If the term is familiar to us today, it is likely due to its appropriation by elder statesman of biology E. O. Wilson, who dreams of a totalizing unity of knowledge. Scholars as diverse as evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, farmer-essayist Wendell Berry, and Thoreau and Humboldt scholar Laura Dassow Walls, have taken Wilson to task for perverting Whewell’s original meaning, and thereby perpetuating the subjugation of the arts and humanities to the sciences. Where Whewell envisioned a dizzying network of disciplinary connectivity, an elaborately interlaced river system of distinct knowledges, Wilson celebrates the simplifying subsumption of all disciplines under a handful of natural laws, a move otherwise known as reductionism. Wilsonian consilience is straightforwardly territorial in its ambitions, less in the sense of reinforcing the boundary between science and what it is not (though Wilson engages in that too) than in its imperialist aspiration to scientize and thereby incorporate into science the terrain of nonscience disciplines, including poetry, art, and literature.

Religion and art—defined either as the study or the practice of what they name—are effectively neutralized and coopted in these consilient arrangements. At its worst, scientized religion manifests as a religion of science, complete with science evangelizers seeking to convert adherents of other faiths, or those with no faith, to the “way of science.” As that which provides the most coherent and compelling account of the universe and our place within it, science (on this view) rightly assumes the accoutrements of myth—a true myth that ultimately supersedes religion by ingesting its sacred power.

What of art? The title of artist, like scientist, still carries cachet, even (perhaps, especially) in these utilitarian times. Both scientists and artists, we are told, are driven to ask “big questions.” The laboratory and the studio are the last bastions of genuine childlike wonder and open-ended inquiry. This portrait of scientists and artists as sharing rare and rarefied sensibilities is a commonplace among devotees of Jungian archetypes and purveyors of the academic fad known as STEAM (the addition of art to STEM education). Art, applied “early and often” to STEM endeavors, ensures that “creativity doesn’t fall by the wayside as we chase innovation,” urges the president of a premier school of design, who subsequently abandoned that post for Silicon Valley. A top-ten list of “STEAM heroes” cites Leonardo da Vinci (naturally), but also Aristotle, Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Byron who is credited with designing the first computer program. STEAM evangelists have calculated that Nobel Prize winning scientists are exactly 2.85 times more likely than the average scientist to engage in artsy endeavors. Pacemakers, they remind us in chiding tones, were inspired by musical metronomes, and stent implants by origami designs.

Recently, as I was assembling tales of art-inspired medical devices and the painterly origins of military camouflage, a story in my local newspaper caught my attention. It touted the study of film and theater for developing “soft skills” that give young people an edge in the professional market. Creating a new film is like starting a business, the article explained; storytelling skills translate into a sparkling “business pitch.”

Just as certain modes of science-religion rapprochement may actually position religion as a storehouse of mythic materials with which to enhance the prestige of science, the arts, in STEAM-y congress with science, may come to be synonymous with an entrepreneurial spirit, the fuel that drives innovation and venture capitalism. These unabashedly instrumentalizing trends instantiate features of our modern consilient ideal, an impoverished ideal made possible, historically, by both the unifying and cleaving activities of what we call science.

When tasked with writing about that most significant of terms—science—the mind stumbles to contain its conceptual expanse. But as I considered the many potential tacks for this essay, my mind kept coming back, as it often does, to those songs that, in the course of a few minutes, get right to the heart of the matter. Songs that conjure the biopolitics, the abstractions, and algorithmic imperatives that have made their way in, that broach the force of numbers and the sway of enumeration and offer a fleeting glimpse of the searing presence of systematicity both within and without. Science, as the children’s song would have it, has become a “a part of our everyday lives.”

*   *   *

An animal howls in the night, a synthesizer begins its rhythm, and a sole voice chants, “a-coo-a, a-coo-a, a-coo-a-coo / It’s cold outside.” In Laurie Anderson’s “Big Science” (1982), the hero’s journey begins with a mother’s rote warning: “Don’t forget your mittens.”

The fairy tale set-up. Curiosity in tension with filial deference. Intimations of a monstrous encounter.

The narrator then steps outside the comforts of home and asks the first person she meets for directions—“Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here?” This stranger is not innocent, we soon learn, for this stranger has things on his mind, schemes for deeds yet known. A perfect world in which each and every person has voluntarily chosen to take the measure of things from a distance.

The stranger, as it turns out, has a plan. His directions are indistinguishable from the new world under construction, a world with shopping centers, freeways, a sports complex, a drive-in bank, and mountains so that the “characters” have something “to fall off of.” Soon, no directions will be needed as all will be incorporated into a construction site for a celestial city spanning out into the celestial suburbs.

“You can’t miss it,” says the stranger after a noir-ish pause. The narrator moves on in her wide-eyed innocence. She is, at first, taken aback by these glorious visions but is soon at ease with the scene. “This must be the place,” she confirms. A new world is being born in the “cold outside”—a complex of Golden cities and towns—a strange twist on Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) in which the people read signs emblazoned with “Hallelujah” and live by the haunting dictum, “every man, every man for himself.”

In this clever origin story of “big science” and how it assumes its largesse, Anderson figures the beginning of techno-modernity in these United States as a mélange of curiosity, dread, and political desire, aided and abetted by a rugged sense of individualism and a movie camera to capture it all. “Let’s roll the film / Big Science / Hallelujah / Every man, every man for himself.”

Upon arrival, when the eyewitness to the creation of the universe steps back from it all she once again encounters the stranger who had set it all in motion. “Howdy stranger. Mind if I smoke?” Far away from home, old injunctions no longer apply. A new world is being born. Permission has been granted.

And he said:
“Every man, every man for himself.
Every man, every man for himself.
All in favor say aye.”

Such freedoms, particularly as they undergird what Max Weber called the secular vocation of science, are not unfounded. Nor are they unwelcome in this age of climate denial and retrenchment into various forms of political and religious patriarchy. Such freedoms, however, do not always cut progressively, as in Grinderman’s “Go Tell the Women” (2007), yet another mythic rendering of science—here an invocation of the end (and ends) of the grand project of knowledge rather than the beginning—that, according to singer Nick Cave, looks “at modern man in an ironic way” and judges him to be “morally bankrupt.” Over a moaning violin and peppy guitar, a voice—weary, defeated, defensive—declares:

We done our thing
We have evolved
We’re up on our hind legs
The problem solved
We are artists
We are mathematicians
Some of us hold extremely high positions

The men are seemingly in charge. Yet this monologue of progress has begun in hindsight. After the triumph of the “human” but just before the evacuation. For,

We are tired
We’re hardly breathing
And we’re free
Go tell the women that we’re leaving

The women, the listener is left to conclude, have not prioritized an approach to truth that would yield an objective result and demonstrate, for all involved, a consensus immune to personal whim and subjective dismissal. For as these truths accumulate and consensus is achieved, a new found clarity—defined as the only freedom that inevitably matters—is born in the moment of life’s exhaustion. So when the order arrives, it is as if the gendered directive were an afterthought and not that which conditioned, from the beginning, the present end-time scenario. For as the narrator later admits, the whole Western ideal of contractual rights as the guarantor of women’s equality with men was a sham to begin with, a cover for sexual violence and desperate tribalism in the name of science’s self-authorizing authority:

All we wanted was a little consensual rape in the afternoon
And maybe a bit more in the evening . . .
. . . We are scientists
We do genetics
We leave religion
To the psychos and fanatics

The triumph of Enlightenment, here, is not merely death, but the consummation of the death drive. For over the course of the narration the weariness persists and intensifies. Yet the voice remains steadfast. Doubt diffuses as the certainties of nihilism set in. The crisis is considered only long enough for the narrator to return to a form of original sin, that is, the privilege of his biology and the difference that his sexual difference makes.

But we are tired
We got nothing to believe in
We are lost
Go tell the women that we’re leaving

In the listless repetition of his command, even the narrator seems to doubt whether the women will even receive the message to pack up let alone give a shit when they do.

Just as the order, itself—to convey a message to “the women”—arrives exhausted, so, too, does a tragedy of the secular age—an inability to question our immanent frame despite THE FACT THAT WE KNOW IT’S IMMANENT AND THAT IT WILL SOON KILL US ALL. Indeed, one begins to sense that the situation evoked in “Go Tell the Women” is not simply one of moral failure or an unwillingness to come to terms with and provide terms for an accelerating descent. On the contrary, the situation seems little more than an embrace of death itself as comforting certainty to counteract the indeterminacies of gender, race, and democratic authority.

Every man for himself, indeed.

For even after the strategies of representation that undergird secular order are abandoned by the narrator, even after a moment of fleeting honesty about the dialectics of our Enlightenment, there remains his need to conjure the difference of sex:

We done our thing
We’re hip to the sound
Of six billion people
Going down
We are magicians
We are deceiving
We are free and we’re lost
Go tell the women that we’re leaving

*   *   *

These songs, of course, are neither scientific nor thorough in their excavations of the problem at hand, and may even fail to move anyone to reconsider what they understand to be science either in its idealist or pragmatic formulations. But these songs do capture something about science and its rhythmic influx into contemporary life. They capture something about science as it is understood, practiced, promoted, and criticized, something that remains difficult to isolate and measure in the laboratory or field site. For percolating within the bent narrations of Anderson and Cave is the outrageous conceit that science (as a method) has become indistinguishable from the structures of power in which science (as a habitus) operates. The world ushered in by this method does not lend itself to analysis. Hence, one must bend one’s narration to even suggest that science is so big, so blindly biased, and so excessively authoritative that it is has become a danger to itself—despite whatever tangible benefits have accrued in its favor. Science, or more precisely, the categorical imperatives of science, have become ecological confounds of the most pressing kind. Their discursive presence lives within and outside the laboratory. These presences are not strictly material nor do they necessarily announce themselves in the measured (and measurable) language of mathematics.

Which is to say that both of these songs capture something about what it is like to be living in these end times, in what might be called, more precisely, the last days of the cybernetic. For the difference between humans and machines, including the desire to overcome that difference, has long been sacralized and transgressed, poeticized, debated, and deployed. A flexible yet stubborn humanism has undergirded many agendas within the natural and social sciences for the past generation. But these are different times. The arrogance is lifting, or perhaps being lifted for us. For who amongst us can deny that now is the time before the difference between human and machines becomes utterly forgotten and written over, effectively erased by the desire to make whatever is human fungible to everything else in the world?

1.
One need not have phobia about science, while finding what has come to be called “scientism” intellectually distasteful. This is a familiar distinction, oft made.

What exactly is scientism? Very broadly, it is a kind of overreach in the name of science, taking it to a place beyond its proper dominion. This can happen in many ways. One way is in the making of large claims on science’s behalf, claims that are philosophical rather than scientific, yet relying—by a sleight of hand, a fallacious conflation—on the authority of science. I have written critically of one such claim in The Immanent Frame: there is nothing, no property, in nature that cannot be brought under the purview of science as a form of cognitive inquiry. The present contribution spells out some implications of these criticisms.

Those who deny such a claim—say, for instance, by asserting that nature contains value properties, which do not fall within the purview of science—are frequently dismissed as being unscientific. It is this dismissal that amounts to illicit outreach. It can only be unscientific to contradict some proposition in some science. But no science contains the proposition that science has exhaustive coverage of nature and all its properties. So, it cannot be unscientific to deny that it does.

What follows from denying it? If value properties (or more simply, values) are in the world, including nature, why does science not have full coverage of nature? Presumably because value properties are peculiar in that when we perceive them in the world (including in nature) they prompt our practical agency—not our theoretical agency; not our agency that seeks to explain and predict, but the agency that seeks to address the normative demands those perceptible values make on us. To give an example I have given before, if we see a phenomenon in the sky in meteorological terms, we might seek to explain it by invoking concepts such as H20, condensation, etc., and we might seek to predict its trajectory. But if we see the very same phenomenon at the very place in the sky in value terms—say, as a threat—it does not prompt our explanatory and predictive stances, it makes normative demands on us. We then seek to address these by exercising our practical agency, for instance by going to the local municipality to seek protection for our thatched dwellings. Value properties (such as threats) in nature1 thus fall outside the scope of science because they prompt what Immanuel Kant called “practical” reason and agency, the subject of his second Critique, quite outside the reach of physics and mathematics that are the explicit examples of the theoretical domain mentioned in the theme-setting Preface of his first Critique.

2.
In recent years, there has been a small but growing recognition of this idea that nature, even artifice or things, are quite properly describable in terms that do not exhaustively fall within the purview of natural science, but rather make normative demands on our practical agency. However, I want to strongly dissociate myself from certain philosophical commitments that seem to others to follow from the idea that nature and “things” make normative demands on us. What I want to disavow is the claim made by some (Jane Bennett, somewhat differently by Bruno Latour) that the use of the expression “normative demands” here is literally true. Bennett explicitly commits to such an intentional vitalism in nature; Latour, more complicatedly, attributes intentions to “assemblages” constructed around nature and artifice. It is both wrong and unnecessary to make any such reckless theoretical commitments.

First, wrong.

The idea that nature makes demands on us is a metaphor. Nature contains values but their normative demands are not intentionally made. The reason is straightforward. It is a mark of what we mean by intentionality that subjects who possess intentionality are potentially appropriate targets of a certain form of criticism. I can criticize you for doing something wrong or for having destructive thoughts, as you can me. More relevantly to our present topic, I can criticize you for making certain normative demands of me—unreasonable ones, by my lights. But we don’t criticize elements in nature or artifice in the same sense. We may say “a hurricane was destructive” but that is a “criticism” only by courtesy, not the sort of criticism that you and I make of each other’s doings and thoughts and demands.

The view I oppose seeks a wider application for intentionality than my restricted one. I don’t want to dogmatically rule this out. We may cautiously admit some cases of this, but only if we have sober grounds continuous with the grounds on which we attribute human intentionality. The possibly admissible cases are not those of the intentional vitalists. Thus, we might allow, for instance, that a group or collectivity of individual human subjects has intentionality. This is quite different from saying that elements in nature or “things” have intentionality. A group of individual human subjects might be said, qua group, to have intentionality, precisely because it can engage in the deliberative structure of thought and decision that individual human subjects do. This happens, say, when individuals in the group put aside their individual preferences and think from the point of view of the group, bestowing on the group a singular point of view. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contractualism may be read as viewing the general will to be the outcome of such a group reasoner and decision-maker. And that is precisely why we can criticize the group (a corporation) over and above criticizing individuals (its CEO). We may extend the criticism and even punish the corporation (rather than the CEO) by fining it. But elements in nature and things do not possess or carry out any such deliberative structure or process, so there is no similar ground for attributing intentionality to them, nor, as a consequence, intelligibly criticizing or punishing such elements. That is why talk of nature making normative demands on us is metaphorical in a way that it need not be in the case of a group, and certainly is not in the case of individual human subjects.

Second, unnecessary.

There is no theoretical advantage in multiplying notions of intentionality, one that human individuals (and perhaps groups of human individuals) literally possess, as well as another that things in the world (including nature) also literally possess; conversely, no disadvantage, nothing we lose, in conceding that the idea that nature makes normative demands on us is a metaphor. Why not? Because it is not a metaphor that can be paraphrased away without loss of meaning and information. It is not a dispensable metaphor. And the crucial point is that when we say a metaphor can’t be paraphrased away, we are not merely putting forward a linguistic thesis about a certain figure of speech. The linguistic thesis that a metaphor is not paraphrasable away has a metaphysical counterpart. To make the linguistic claim is simultaneously to make the following metaphysical claim: there is an aspect or a fragment of reality, which can only be captured by that metaphor. And the reality that is captured by the metaphorical attribution of intentionality to things, to elements in nature, when we say that they make normative demands on us, is as authentic as any reality that literal attributions of intentionality describe. It is just not the same reality. It is not intentionality.

Thus, without compromising at all the significance of the fact that value properties are in nature, making normative demands on us, I can still disavow intentional vitalism.

3.
I began by joining many in distinguishing science from scientism. Let me close with a vexing question, which must be left to another occasion, if for no other reason than that, at the moment, I have no answer to it, not even a useful way to think about it. Even so, it is a question that surely occurs to all who have reflected on the nature of science and scientism. If the point of the distinction is that one should be able to keep separate science itself from the overreach for science that scientism seeks, we can’t avoid asking: how separate can they be kept? It is certainly true that they are logically separate. There is no logical link between science and scientism of this sort. One does not entail the other. But might it be that there is a predisposition in the kind of thing science is that it leads to overreaching claims on its behalf. Philosophers ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger through Mohandas Gandhi to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, have written to suggest an affirmative answer to this question. In doing so, they take it for granted that the notion of a “predisposition” here is a clear and transparent one. Are they right? Noam Chomsky, too, has suggested that science is too often conceived in such a way that it is predisposed along these lines; and has sought to correct some of the assumptions that underlie such a conception of science. As I said, themes to be explored on another occasion.

The Political Theology Network invites applications from early-career scholars for its 2020-2021 Emerging Scholars in Political Theology program. Vincent Lloyd and Winnifred Sullivan will serve as mentors for the 2020-2021 cohort. Participants will meet in person three times: at Villanova University July 19-24, 2020, in Chicago in January of 2021, and again at Villanova in the Summer of 2021—in addition to online video conference meetings. All expenses will be paid, and Emerging Scholars will receive a $2,000 stipend for their participation. The deadline to apply is January 15, 2020. (Lloyd and Sarah Hammerschlag will serve as mentors for the 2021-2022 cohort, with an application deadline in January 2021.)

The Emerging Scholars in Political Theology program is looking for the next generation of creative and thoughtful political theology scholars. Political theology, as we understand it, is an emerging field that uses the methods of humanistic inquiry to study the intersections of religion and politics in public life. Scholars in political theology come from a variety of disciplines including religious studies, theology, law, political theory, anthropology, history, literature, and sociology. We share a commitment to building an academic field that is diverse along multiple axes (gender, race, geographical focus, religion, citizenship, and institution), to producing scholarship that is both rigorous and publicly-engaged, to incorporating voices traditionally excluded from the academy, and to the practical work of pursuing social justice. Scholars of traditions other than Christianity and of geographic areas outside of the United States are particularly encouraged to apply.

The Emerging Scholars in Political Theology program will involve facilitated discussions of shared readings, teaching and syllabus workshops, and training in public scholarship. Participants will share and discuss works-in-progress and will meet with academic and non-academic experts as we reflect on the state of the field.

Applicants should have the PhD in hand, but must have received their PhD after December 31, 2015. To apply, please send a CV and a brief (1 or 2 page) letter of interest to Richard Kent Evans at rkevans@haverford.edu by January 15, 2020. In your letter of interest, please consider addressing the following questions: 

1) How do you see the past, present, and future of the field of political theology, and how does your own research contribute to the field? 

2) Which key texts do you see as forming the “canon” of political theology and why? 

3) What role does political theology play in your teaching?

For more information on the program and the application, visit the Political Theology Network website.

The Fourth Annual Coptic Canadian History Project Conference will be held April 24, 2020 at the University of Minnesota. The theme is “Victim, Symbol, or Actor? Middle Eastern Migrants in Transnational Perspectives.” The conference aims to encourage scholarly collaboration and to unite junior researchers in the field of Coptic Studies, Middle East Studies, and those researching migration, transnationalism, victimization, and beyond.

The full call for papers and information on registration can be found on the CCHP website.

Applicants are invited to submit a 250-word abstract for individual papers. Submissions must be accompanied by a short biographical statement and contact information. CCHP will be accepting papers that engage with the theme of the conference and encourages interdisciplinary submissions on a wide range of topics. More information on potential topics as well as a more detailed description of the conference can be found on the website.

The deadline for submission is January 25, 2020. For more information and to submit proposals, please email cchpconference@gmail.com or visit the CCHP website.

In the field of religious studies, there are two main ways to think about what “body” means and why it matters. There is “the body” in the singular, as an idea and an ideal. The body can work as a metaphor, symbol, or generalization about the physical parts of what it means to be human. And there are “bodies,” plural. This second conception reminds us that there are individual people, each with their own distinctive bodies. For analytical purposes it is helpful to see each in its own light, yet these two modes of thinking about the body can and often do exist together within single studies.

There is also a third possibility, and that is not to consider the body at all. It can be tempting to think about religion apart from bodies. We can see this assumption in popular culture when we use “faith” or “belief system” as synonyms for religion: these terms suggest that the essence of religion is what a person believes or feels. But when we think about what happens in a person’s heart or head—in spite of those embodied metaphors—we can easily focus attention on textual sources and beliefs. Religious studies scholar Kent Brintnall writes, “it is easy to forget the body.” And some bodies are easier to forget than others.

Yet there would be no religion without people, and people have bodies. These bodies, moreover, are not merely incidental to religious practice, or even belief. How, then, should a scholar attend to bodies? It won’t do to ignore texts, beliefs, or nonhuman material things. The best studies that focus on the body or bodies embed those in a wider story that includes the other material and nonmaterial things with which bodies interact. These are the best studies because they can tell us how and which human bodies come to have meaning. They are stories about discourse, and they are also about flesh. They are also stories that include both marked bodies and unmarked bodies—normative bodies and non-normative ones.

Bodies don’t arrive with prearranged meanings. Nor do body parts. A penis doesn’t have a meaning by itself in isolation, but it means something significant (though not always the same thing) in most cultures. A circumcised penis means something, too. Facial hair doesn’t have a meaning by itself either, but in the context of Sikhism, or in the context of a woman’s face, it becomes clear how much it can mean. Skin color does not have essential meaning, but it can have deep cultural meaning, as theologians such as Kelly Brown Douglas and James Cone have shown in their classic works.

Even “the body” in the singular doesn’t come with a given, natural meaning. Is it good? Is it gendered, or genderless? Is it raced? Is it able-bodied? And what are its attributes and boundaries: Is it merely a meat sack for the soul? Does it include the mind? Is it a basically-unconscious medium for human existence? Should we see it primarily as the locus of desire? Do bodies reflect the inner dispositions, or even quality of faith, as in some Islamic traditions? The answers to these questions differ depending on the culture or the person imagining the body, and sometimes these meanings aren’t entirely transparent to the imaginer. The body also has metaphorical and symbolic meanings. As Mary Douglas wrote, “Just as it is true that everything symbolizes the body, so it is equally true that the body symbolizes everything else.”

Some religious traditions frame the body as sinful and fallen, such as the fourth-century African bishop Augustine. Most Buddhist communities see the body as a necessary component of a person, but its desires can also be targets of disgust. Other religious traditions frame the body as (mostly) a good thing. For Latter Day Saints, as one member explains: “you are more like God with a body than without.” Judaism’s embrace of human creation in betzelem elohim or “the image of God” also implies some godliness in the human body. Within each of these traditions, members dispute what the body means and whether it is good.

Even with a commitment to pay attention to the body, it can be easy to forget certain kinds of bodies, such as those that are trans, disabled, of color, female. What does it mean—to take the primarily Christian and Jewish example—that people are made in God’s image? Are all people equally Godlike? Or is it easier to imagine that a person who is able-bodied is more Godlike than someone who uses a wheelchair or is blind? Is it easier to imagine that a human body with a penis is more Godlike? When scholars ask questions that do not intentionally attend to bodies, it can be especially easy to overlook these marked bodies.

But it can also be easy to forget unmarked bodies because we take them for granted. White, cisgender men’s bodies often register for many Westerners as the default, and so the meanings of those bodies may not initially strike us as noteworthy. This is why gender is so often assumed to be about women, trans people, or genderqueer people: they are not the norm. For example, Carolyn Walker Bynum has famously shown how Christian women were told that having bodies, being physical, was their problem in particular. Marked bodies are special cases, and so when we are looking at those cases, it can be easier to see the body and to ask questions about what it means.

The key to understanding the body and bodies is to ask questions about their meanings: what those meanings are, how they came to mean what they do, how meanings are maintained, and how people challenge them. By attending to these questions, we can refuse to take those meanings for granted—and we can refuse to forget otherwise overlooked bodies.

There is no religion without the body; there is no religion that is not embodied.

I.
A few years ago, I found myself in San’a, trying to attend Jumu’a prayer at Jami’a al-Kabir. I’d been there before, for an off-peak prayer, and prayed in a corner somewhere that didn’t appear to be designated as “the women’s section.” But on this Friday, the men at the door turned me away, saying that today the masjid was reserved for men only, there was no space at all for me to pray. I had bathed and purified myself, worn fresh and clean clothes, perfumed myself before arriving. I was wearing a jilbab and hijab, but this believer was turned away from this masjid, on this Friday, because of her female body. The men had taken up all the space; there was no room for women.

I was feeling a lot of things on the walk back to my apartment—rejection, humiliation, sadness, anger, confusion. Why was I considered a second class believer? Why was my prayer so easily sacrificed for the prayer of men? I was in this general deflated funk when a young boy pulled up next to me and my partner on a bike. My partner had decided to forgo his prayer at the masjid out of solidarity. Where are you going? asked the boy. Well, we were going to pray jumu’a but there is no room for women to pray! I wanted this little boy to feel all the shame of a patriarchy that would deny me space to pray. I wanted his little shoulders to feel the weight of it all. I wanted to punish someone for the cruelties of patriarchy. He shifted his weight, moved from a seated position to standing on his pedals, brought himself up to eye-level and said coolly, The Prophet said, the prayer of the woman in the home is better than her prayer in the masjid, and her prayer in the closet is better than her prayer in her room. He recited the lines at me, putting me in my place, transferring all that weight right back to me.

Indoctrination begins young and it gets us all.

II.
Last year, I went to the Turkish masjid outside Sydney for Jumu’a prayer. I went with two brown men—my partner and our host in Sydney, a young graduate student. It was a hot, hot day. You sweated just standing without even moving. Our limbs moved slowly, as if through water. As we arrived at the street of the mosque, it rose before us, like a mirage through the wavy heat lines, impressive and beautiful. And out of place, given the squat suburban houses surrounding it. Still, it looked grand, with a dome and minaret and all. We were talking as we entered through the gate and into a verandah. Some light skinned, rosy cheeked Turkish men, their faces deeply lined, were lounging around, rosaries in hand, chatting.

The entrance to the masjid was on the right, and I figured the women’s entrance would be somewhere near there, so I set off in that direction. But suddenly, I was acutely aware that I’d walked through an invisible barrier. My feet stopped before several of the men jumped up—rather spryly for their age—speaking at once, telling me to stop, telling me the women would be praying in a separate building off to the left, away from the men, away from the dome and the minaret.

I followed their directions and went through double doors and immediately encountered a wall of mobile barriers designed to thwart the prying eyes of men. I had to walk around the barriers to see that, because I was a woman, I’d be praying in a vast windowless room, with fluorescent lights and, mercifully for this day, air conditioning. The floor was uncarpeted, and the rows of cloth sheets did little to protect our bodies from the hard floor. As if to counter the ugliness of this sparse multipurpose room used otherwise for community events, the women hurried in, often with children in tow, wearing beautiful, sparkly outfits, flowers and leaves and stems rising from their hems or their wrists, turning them into moving gardens.

After salat, I was set to leave, but our host negotiated permission from the imam for us to tour the actual masjid. He was surprised and upset that I, a Muslim scholar of Islam, might not even be able to see it, having come all this way. The imam relented, but only after demanding our credentials, ensuring that his concession was for someone from a particular professional class. But, wait for a while, he instructed, once all the men leave, then we can take her into the masjid. So, we waited for the men to leave, lest I pollute them or their prayers with my presence. As I stepped onto the plush carpet of the masjid, the imam called out, Wait! Put these socks on! The socks were meant to protect the carpet from my feet, which were presumed to be dirty. Our host bristled at this, too, pointing out that in his experience this rule was applied more vigilantly to darker skinned believers.

The masjid was beautiful. Grand, colorful, spacious, airy, light-filled. The walls were covered in hand painted art; Qur’anic calligraphy that looked lyrical, and flowers and stems and leaves with gold outlines. A garden. Which is the word for paradise in Arabic: jannah. A paradisaical garden. And like a garden, it felt like respite, a sanctuary, an oasis. Damn! It must have been nice to pray in here, I said. The imam looked a bit sheepish. He knew where I’d had to pray. But there’s no AC in here, he offered, trying to make me feel like I was the special one. But you don’t need an AC here, I did not say.

As we left the masjid, on a whim, I asked my host and my partner, Wanna see where I prayed? I took them to the adjacent building, into the main room, which was now empty and dark, as the lights were turned off, the barriers removed, along with the rows of cloth. We stood looking into this vast, empty, unadorned, windowless room. I was unprepared for how sad, even hurt, this room made these men. Oh, said one of them in a voice that felt like a heavy stone sinking into murky water. It’s like a desert, said the other. Yes. A deserted desert, compared to the garden that was the masjid. Except, even the desert has light.

III.
This past August, I joined my partner for Eid celebrations in Washington, DC. This was a new experience for me because I usually celebrate Eid with my family in Toronto. We were looking forward to the whole Eid namaz scene, the friends, the khandan—uncles, aunties, cousins, biryani, haleem, endless chai. But two days before Eid, I found myself waking fitfully from troubled sleep, consumed with terror at the prospect of some guy—some white guy, some white, likely Christian guy—shooting up the masjid. I mean, we were all going to be congregated there, dressed up in fancy and therefore un-sensible clothes; we’d be sitting ducks. Each time I descended into deep sleep, I would wake in a panic.

It was a new feeling for me, this fear of going to Eid namaz. And I wasn’t worried about being killed myself because, likely, I wouldn’t be praying in the main prayer hall. I’d be off to the side somewhere, shuttled out of view, in a basement or a balcony or a side room, or an adjacent building. Rather, I was worried about this potential white terrorist murdering my partner. We’d likely hear the shooting in the women’s section over the speakers, or see it on the closed circuit TV, if they had one installed for the women to see the men. How would I get to him, I worried. Would I even be allowed into the men’s section to find him?

We’ve heard that racism hurts everyone, even white people. The same is true for patriarchy—it hurts men alongside women and non-binary people. And here it was, the truth of this as clear as day: If a racist, white, misogynistic terrorist decided to shoot up a masjid in DC, he’d likely walk up to the main entrance of the masjid and start shooting, without knowing, or caring, that this was the men’s section.

Patriarchy hurts men. It kills them.

IV.
Religion is only ever embodied. Which is to say, religion is always about the body.

The body is an important topic in the study of religion today, as it is in other fields of social and cultural studies. Embodied experiences and physical practices, for example, related to food, sexuality, movement, or body modifications, are increasingly central to religious studies. Recent discussions about secularism often use the body as a lens for looking at conceptions of religion and its absence, for instance through the practice of circumcision, as will be discussed further below. Yet, this is a relatively recent development and something of a reaction, since the body has long been neglected or seen as inferior. This negative attitude is often attributed to the somatophobia, or fear of the body, which is characteristic of Western culture, including Western Christianity, and therefore also of academic thought on religion.

The negative attitude toward the body has its roots in ancient Greek thought, where the body was seen as separate from and inferior to the soul. While the soul made up the highest and immortal part of (male) human beings, the perishable body tied people to earthly existence and lower impulses. The relationship between the body and the soul—or, in later thinking, also the mind—was not imagined to be the same for everyone. Certain people were associated more closely with the body, rather than with any higher part, based on factors such as gender, ethnicity, and social position. In this way, negative attitudes toward the body in general went hand-in-hand with negative attitudes for particular groups of people.

It is partly as a challenge to this hierarchy, and as a result of the influence of social movements aimed at improving the positions of disadvantaged groups, that bodies have become such a central topic.

Insight into bodily experiences and practices has grown significantly, along with the recognition that such aspects have always been important for religions. Protestant Christianity, for example, often thought to be lacking a concern for anything physical, has had a consistent interest in policing bodies—whether in dancing, clothing, or sexual behavior—and therefore has attributed significance to what these bodies did.

Increased interest in embodied experiences has also led to a rejection of “the body” as a natural, stable phenomenon across history and culture. In the context of religion, bodies are therefore studied through a variety of disciplines, including the study of gender, sexuality, culture, politics, sociology, economics, and history. In addition, there is an increased interest in examining bodies from within, through disciplines such as neuroscience, where brain imaging techniques are used to analyze, for example, the effects of prayer and meditation. Increasingly, religion is seen as a product of the body. Some scholars argue that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that offers particular advantages, such as increased social cohesion, while others see it as merely an evolutionary byproduct.

Even though the body-mind opposition has lost considerable relevance in the field of religious studies, it still informs many popular conceptions of religion, and therefore continues to be important. In law, politics, and society generally, religion tends to be defined as belief in a higher being, or, as accepting unverifiable claims about an imaginary world. Religion is very much seen as something that is in your head, rather than something you do with your body. The distinction between mind and body is often interpreted as also a distinction between beliefs and practices. In this view, religious practices are seen as consequences of particular beliefs, rather than as an integral part of religious identity and experience in themselves. As a consequence, religious practices that are contested in society today—often practices associated with the body—need to be justified by arguments based on beliefs, in order to be seen as legitimate.

This is evident, for example, in discussions about the circumcision of boys, particularly in European countries. Here, the ritual is often taken by critics to be a secondary expression of a deeper, underlying religious faith. This hierarchy is explicit in the new Norwegian law on circumcision, which came into effect in 2015. This law “on the ritual circumcision of boys” (LOV-2014-06-20-40), defines ritual circumcision as a surgical procedure where the foreskin of the penis is entirely or partially removed, and where the “purpose” is “religiously motivated” or “religiously justified.” Under the law, a circumcision is not legitimated by the religious nature of the ritual itself, by the circumstances under which it is performed, its communal nature, or the participants involved, but rather by the purpose and motivations with which it is undertaken. Only when the rite is performed with a religious intention is it protected under the Norwegian law.

Governments thus implement standards about how religion can be expressed legitimately on and in the body. In this and other legislation, such as relating to head and face coverings, there is an implicit idea of what a nonreligious body, or a body that expresses religion in a legitimate way, looks like. This implicit ideal tends to be one that reproduces the understanding of religion as a matter of internal belief and, as these examples show, clearly has a gendered aspect. In this way, old conceptions of body and mind, and of certain bodies being more problematic than others, are still present in how bodies are governed today.

The contemporary mindfulness movement seems to sidestep the body; it appears as a technology of the mind, often in the service of psychotherapeutic protocols. The term “mindfulness” itself directs our attention rather unambiguously to the mind. However, there is a powerful sense in which the body is (and must be) the heart of mindfulness, even in its constant decay toward death. Failing to understand mindfulness as an embodied and bodily practice means failing to understand mindfulness at all.

Some of the nuances of this situation emerge from the simple fact that, in its current usage, “mindfulness” is a translation, which has developed a conceptual and methodological life of its own. Mindfulness approaches the simulacrum. In 1881, the (then) civil servant Thomas Rhys Davids first translated the Palī term sati as “mindfulness,” as he worked on contributions to Max Müller’s epic Sacred Books of the East. Even then this was not an uncontroversial translation of so important a term, which appears in Buddhism’s foundational Noble Eightfold Path. One concern is precisely that it appears to neglect the embodied force of alternative translations, like re-membering (bringing back to the body).

Today, other nuances of this situation emerge from the conflation of mindfulness with meditation, and meditation with concentrated introspection. That is, there is poor public awareness of relevant category differences and the distinctions between different forms of meditation. In other words, not all forms of meditation are intended to cultivate mindfulness, and not all mindfulness practices are forms of meditation. In particular, the focus of popular culture on samatha (single-pointed or concentrated) meditation and immersive jhāna (Zen) has encouraged the association of mindfulness with the “shedding” or “sloughing off” of the body.

However, unlike some other forms of meditation, mindfulness practices are intimately entwined with physicality, sensuousness, and the temporality of the body. Indeed, the Satipatthana Sutta (Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness), in which the Buddha elaborates a method for the destruction of suffering and the accomplishment of awakening, established the body as the first, foundational concern.1 The manner of approaching the body in the Satipatthana Sutta serves as the archetype for the contemplation of emotions, thoughts, and “mental events” (dhamma) that constitute the other foundations.

Like the vast majority of formal, contemporary mindfulness practices, the Satipatthana Sutta commences with a call to bring attention to the breath. It suggests that the practitioner might go out into the forest and sit cross-legged under a tree (presumably in the manner of the historical Buddha under the Bodhi tree), and there watch the breath, forming thoughts that echo the action of breathing itself—noticing the duration and depth of each breath, allowing the bodily sensations that accompany each breath to rise into awareness. At the same time, the sutta appears to invite the practitioner to make use of this focus of awareness to encourage a sense of physical calm into their body; awareness of breath and the sensations of physical calm tend together. For various reasons (associated with the therapeutic promotion of values such as nonstriving, acceptance, and nonjudgement), contemporary mindfulness protocols tend to sidestep this move toward deliberative bodily control.

The sutta proceeds to advocate the cultivation of awareness of the body’s deportment, recognizing the sensations that attend going as going, standing as standing, sitting as sitting, and so forth: “just as the body is disposed, so it is understood.” This flows into the promotion of the “clear comprehension” of all kinds of physical activities. It is here that we find the roots of a profusion of mindfulness practices, such as mindful walking, mindful eating, and mindful dialogue.

However, the section on clear comprehension also begins an important turn in the Satipatthana Sutta, which turns the practitioner away from beauty, calm, and elegance. Indeed, the turn is deliberately and explicitly toward the “repulsiveness of the body.” This is a turn that is almost uniformly ignored in contemporary mindfulness protocols, especially in clinical or therapeutic settings. The first clue arises from the account of activities to which clear comprehension should be applied; this not only includes walking, eating, and keeping silent, but also defecating and urinating. The Mindful Toilet.

The subsequent sections of the sutta, which emphasize reflection on the elemental, material qualities of the body (dhatu), have provided the roots of contemporary practices like the now-pervasive body scan, in which practitioners bring their attention to different parts of their body in turn in order to experience them as they are. However, the sutta’s clear emphasis is on the ostensible repulsiveness of the body. Rather than scanning cleanly through bones and muscles, the sutta calls on practitioners to reflect on the “manifold impurity from the soles up and from the top of the hair down,” also calling specific attention to the contents of the stomach, intestines, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, mucus, and urine. Such a practice would certainly be a twist on the largely sanitized contemporary body scan.

This focus on the repulsiveness of the body is only a stepping stone, guiding the practitioner toward the real goal of the sutta’s attention to the body: physical death and decay. Most contemporary practitioners of mindfulness as a mental health protocol will be unaware of the nine steps of the “cemetery contemplations” that serve as the capstone of the sutta’s attention to the body. These contemplations call on practitioners to witness a body as a corpse, cast into the charnel ground, in increasingly atrophied states of decay (ranging from being swollen and blue, through being eaten by crows and dogs, through reduction to a skeleton, all the way to the vanishing of crumbled bones), constantly reflecting that their “body too is of the same nature as that body, is going to be like that body and has not got past the condition of becoming like that body.”

In this way, the Satipatthana Sutta seeks to establish the body, the body’s mundane vulgarity, and the body’s inevitable transience as the centerpiece for the foundations of mindfulness. By constantly returning awareness to the body, practitioners come to understand the impermanence of all things, including themselves, and how to live accordingly. Attention to the body is the antidote to sentimentalism and idealism. Trust in the body is the basis of insight and remembering.

While there is considerable popular and scholarly debate about the extent to which contemporary mindfulness has sought to circumvent the ethical and religious content of sati (in order to enable its deployment as technology in healthcare protocols), there has been much less attention paid to its relative disembodiment, especially its eschewal of bodily atrophy and death. While various Buddhist (and other) practices encourage the contemplation of death and decay as basic to human health and wellbeing, contemporary mindfulness emerges as not only deracinated but also (quite literally) sterilized for a clinical environment.

Concepts like “spirit” or “matter” or “body” escape sharp definitions. They are productive precisely because of their indeterminacy. This makes it possible to put them to use in widely different contexts. They are suggestive rather than precise. What, for instance, has the Holy Ghost, part of Christianity’s trinity, to do with Hegel’s transcendental Geist of history, or with the various spirits that possess people the world over? At first blush, perhaps nothing. But, on the other hand, Pentecostals do speak in tongues, as if they are possessed, and there seems to be an almost Hegelian notion in Christianity that history is moved by a transcendental purpose. The rich traditions of spirits and spirit possession in Islam that find their fullest expression in Sufi cults have been under attack from some scripturalist movements that find them to be antithetical to the theological core of Islam. Nevertheless, one finds everywhere in the Muslim world a vibrant connection between religious healing and control over the spirit world. When we use the English word “spirit” we connect different semantic universes within the Western tradition, but also connect with other traditions and their debates outside of the West.

Spirituality, a term that is derived from spirit, is one of the most important terms for understanding modernity. It acquires a new significance in the age of scientific experimentation, and in the context of newly emerging nationalism and imperialism. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a huge rise in the interest in spirits and spirituality. In the 1850s in France Allan Kardec communicated with spirits through a planchette, a little plank with a pencil attached to it that allowed automatic writing guided by spirits. He wrote a series of books, collectively named the Spiritist Codification. Leading French intellectuals, like Victor Hugo, became enthusiastic followers of Spiritism. In 1878, Madame Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York. Olcott had been a colonel in the Union Army in the Civil War. Like so many others who had been in that war, he had become interested in communicating with the spirits of the dead. On a trip to Vermont in 1874 to visit the Eddy family, known to be successful in their communications with spirits, he had met Madame Blavatsky, a Russian who claimed to have visited Tibet. She could communicate not only with spirits, but also with the Masters who ruled the universe and were located in the East. Blavatsky made the brilliant move to connect the communication with spirits with spirituality, the unbounded tradition of mysticism.

Modern abstract art is a hallmark of modernity and the great pioneers of abstract art in the early twentieth century, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, understood the move from representation to abstraction as “spiritual.” Kandinsky refers in his Über das Geistige in der Kunst (The Spiritual in Art), one of the most influential texts by an artist in the twentieth century, to Blavatsky as a great inspiration. Similarly, Mondrian, in his use of geometric form, was directly inspired by reading Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. In 1909 Mondrian became a member of the Theosophical Society. For both Kandinsky and Mondrian spirituality provided an avenue to explore reality beyond the conventional methods of science and materialism.

Spirituality was (and still often is) thought to be more abundant in “the East” than in “the West,” which was thought to be materialistic and over-rational. The East was a site of spiritual imagination, made accessible for a Western audience by colonial conquest and orientalist translation. Asians were not passive recipients of this process of orientalization, but active promotors of it. The Indian Swami Vivekananda, who became famous thanks to his performance at the World Parliament of Religion in Chicago in 1893, was immensely successful in his propagation of Yoga as the scientific base of Hindu spirituality. His fellow Bengali, Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel Laureate of Literature, tried to go beyond national boundaries by promoting a Pan-Asian Spirituality. This endeavor stalled when Japanese intellectuals rejected Tagore’s pacifism as the sign of a colonized people and emphasized a Japanese spirituality with militaristic overtones.

Spirituality could be understood as a universalistic, unifying alternative for the religious, racial, and ethnic divisions between peoples, but it could also be made into a characteristic of a nation: the spirit of the nation. This tension is, in fact, never resolved. Spiritual leaders like Mahatma Gandhi or the Dalai Lama have been simultaneously spreading a universal message and fighting for national independence. Nationalism often combines a variety of religious and cultural traditions into a unifying spirituality that characterizes a particular people. Rather than the bounded traditions of religion, especially when institutionalized in churches, spirituality could be used to transcend divisions.

The modern Western “invention” of spirituality had to come to terms with the rich repertoire of traditions of spirits and spirit possession in the East. Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott tried to align themselves to Hinduism, but the spirits of the dead are to be pacified and avoided in Hindu India, not to be communicated with. This is very different in China. The earliest forms of writing in China were spirit writing. This kind of writing was not meant to put human speech into writing, but to communicate with the spirits. They were talismanic signs that enabled the writer to communicate with the hidden powers of the universe or even control them. Spirit writing cults were a crucial part of religion in Southern China until they were repressed by the Communist state in the 1950s.

Perhaps Edward Tylor’s Victorian definition of religion as the belief in spiritual beings is typical for the ubiquity of spirits in the world of our imagination. Spirit can be used as a contrastive term as the opposite of “matter” and of “body.” But the spirit is materialized in writing and embodied in spirit possession, connecting the immanent world with the transcendent in myriad ways.

I remember talking with Faith last fall about the field of law and religion. Faith, now a senior at Amherst, is a gifted pianist and dedicated member of the Amherst Christian Fellowship double majoring in Music and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought. She had taken two classes with me, had excelled, and was compiling bibliographic references for a new research project. I knew just the encyclopedia entry I’d suggest she read. Curious and not entirely sure of the answer, I wondered whether the Critical Terms for Religious Studies volume also included an entry on “law.” What were religion scholars writing about law in 1998? The absence of the term in that volume wasn’t entirely surprising. We know now that historically, religious studies and legal studies haven’t had much to say to each other in part because of what it meant to study religion and what it meant to study law at that time—but this is changing.

All encyclopedia and critical terms projects leave something or someone out. There is no way to enumerate or categorize discourse conclusively, whatever the time or mode of accounting, not least because inclusion is a distinction. Comprehensiveness is a failed project from the start. But there is something to be said about what such projects offer a novice, a non-expert, a newcomer wanting to know what all the fuss is about. Authoritative voices. Suggestions for further reading. The painstaking emphasis on when innovations in a field took place, and why, and what changed as a result. Yet, contributors to such projects are often expected to convey a near totality of what is known—burdening language and what it can be used to say. The typical scholar-to-term ratio, whereby each term is usually addressed by one scholar, means each scholar bears that weight alone. Expertise, too, is often equated with seniority.

If encyclopedia and critical terms entries are a measure of scholarly obsession with conceptual provenance, the sheer expanse of free online information challenges the pace and form of academic publishing and, some would say, its relevance. When college students have questions, they’re more likely to ask the internet than their research librarian. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even as college libraries are circulating fewer academic books, students are still consulting them online. Much of today’s digital landscape has been incentivized by funding agencies that require applicants to demonstrate the significance of their research for broader publics. A lot of what college students might find when they query the internet is public-facing scholarship grounded in sound research methods and excised of academic jargon. But that’s the best-case scenario. Increasingly, professors teach students how to unlearn what they’ve learned from mass media. How to read discriminately, think critically, evaluate rigorously, write persuasively, and argue convincingly. Question, in other words, what they know and how they’ve come to know so they can know differently—or embrace non-knowing.

*   *   *

What if we thought differently about the one scholar = total knowledge model? How might scholars advance the academic study and public understanding of religion and secularism in a way that meets college students’ demand for visual imagery, pithy prose, and compelling narratives? How would scholars talk about research if the task was to say something meaningful to Generation Z? What would it look like, pedagogically, to take seriously Gen Zers’ reverence for technology? Might it change what we do as scholars, and how we do it?

A Universe of Terms is one answer to these questions. It emerges from recent conversations at the Social Science Research Council about mobilizing The Immanent Frame to serve new publics. For over a decade, TIF has curated scholarly debates about secularism and religion that have shaped research trajectories globally. And yet entry into these original debates and those they have inspired remains inaccessible to many nonspecialists. Understanding them requires prerequisites. One must know the difference between a porous and a buffered self. What the secularization thesis is and why it was wrong. Appreciate how political secularism and secular sensibility differ and yet coemerge. Though graduate students are expected to demonstrate fluency in these languages, college students and others are more likely to admit, honestly, “We just don’t get it.” They search for answers elsewhere—on Wikipedia, usually, or Google. It all depends on the question, what they want to know.

The Universe addresses college students’ often pressing desire for the right answer by showing just how contested scholarly inquiry can be. Straddling the line between a critical terms volume and an essay collection, it begins from the premise that addressing and answering a question effectively requires multiple ways of understanding it in the first place. The Universe treats scholarship as the curatorial project that it is. It makes scholarly conversations more accessible to nonspecialists and encourages them to draw their own conclusions. Users of the project inhabit these conversations discursively, visually, and aurally. The purpose of knowledge, what counts as knowledge, and who participates in its dissemination and consumption remain unresolved questions throughout. The Universe lives on the internet. Its life there—here—stretching possibilities for use and adaptability over time.

*   *   *

The first iteration of this project was curated with the valuable assistance of Daniel Vaca, TIF editorial board member, and Olivia Whitener, TIF editorial associate. We did not decide the terms or the contributors from the beginning. We had a vision, but not yet a blueprint, and before committing to one, we sought feedback from colleagues. We surveyed contributors to TIF who had written our most read essays and who had not written for the “Is this all there is” project. The idea was to solicit feedback from the site’s loyal base while expanding TIF’s network of contributors. We considered the survey responses, including suggestions they provided for possible terms and contributors. A commitment to diversity underwrote the entire curatorial process. We wanted this project to model a kind of thinking that lives in and through continuously shifting voices, sites of inquiry, and interpretative approaches.

This iteration, published during the academic year 2019-2020, consists of fourteen terms and at least three unique 1000-word responses to each term (For a schedule of the staggered launches, click here). The response length would allow contributors to convey something substantive about a particular term, though they wouldn’t have the 10,000 words of a journal article or the 80,000 words of a monograph to do it. I wondered: Would these responses read more like tweets? One invitee called “the brief form tragic.” The contributors, it turns out found the invitation challenging and rewarding, an opportunity to convey the familiar in an unfamiliar form. Brevity proved remarkably productive.

Those numbers—three and 1000—capture a helpful range and limit. Two seemed too few; 2000 too long (although some responses clock in around 1500). Imagined as accessible and compelling entry points into a complex scholarly world, the responses when read individually and together introduce the reader to a range of approaches on a single object of inquiry. Though these objects, these terms, are enumerated discretely, as if unhinged from a broader lexicon, they resonate with other terms in the Universe. What makes “spirit” different from “race”? “Modernity” distinct from “science” or “economy”? Why are “human” and “body” not collapsed into one? Where do these distinctions come from? When do they fail? What purposes do they serve—historically, culturally, and politically? Users are invited to raise these and other questions.

The project additionally consists of more than 150 essays previously published on TIF that are listed on each term page under the “From the Archive” header. Some parameters guided the selection. I primarily searched for essays in which the featured term and/or a close cognate appears (so for “body” I also searched for “bodies,” “embody,” “embodiment,” etc.) and is used in ways that advance the pedagogical and conceptual aims of the project. On occasion, I included essays that do not include the term but that do important work in the spirit of that term (Mark C. Taylor’s 2008 essay, “Play,” is listed under “performance,” for instance, though the term “performance” does not appear in the essay). If authors previously published essays on topics similar to the terms on which they were invited to write, I did not include those among the accompanying essays to avoid duplication of contributors and topics within a single term. And finally, I chose only one essay per previously published forum, with the exception of essays from forums in which more than one book was featured or from the “Is this all there is” project.

In this first iteration, the project includes more than 200 individuals.

Each term is accompanied by a public Spotify playlist. The idea to include playlists emerged in a conversation with my colleague at Amherst, Marisa Parham, one afternoon as we were thinking how to enhance the project’s accessibility, a question that hinges on another: how is language experienced? It turns out that several project contributors—some known for engaging musical genres in their scholarship and others not at all—brought sound into their responses, primarily through the use of YouTube links and the analysis of transcribed lyrics. How intuitive that scholars writing on key terms drew on the stories that songs tell to tell their stories about these terms. And so language becomes further unburdened. The scholar unburdens herself. Language is permitted to do other things. The scholar, unburdened, writes differently. I thought to create a standing archive of sound within the project; one, like the essay component, that could be adapted over time. The selection criteria for the inclusion of songs mirrors that which guided the inclusion of the accompanying essays: the featured term appears in their title, lyrics, the album’s title, or in the name of the artists. Close cognates were also used. The playlist for “performance,” which consists of live musical performances, is the only one that deviates from this convention. For, what I hope, are obvious reasons.

*   *   *

The Universe has been informed from the start by my experience at Amherst, where I learned that effective teaching is a collaborative process between and among students and faculty—and often many members of broader learning communities. As the text-based component of this project was taking shape, so were ideas about its visual presentation, and I thought immediately of Emilie Flamme. Now a senior majoring in Architectural Studies and Russian, Emilie was among the very first students I met when I arrived at Amherst two years ago. I proposed that we collaborate on creating a visual identity for this project, a proposal she embraced and extended fully. The Gregory S. Call Academic Internship Program at Amherst provided the material support for her work, and I thank the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty for making that possible. I thank Emilie for her exquisite vision and insightful feedback on this essay.

This project has also benefited during its stages of development from conversations with Amherst faculty and staff to whom I extend my gratitude for their time and suggestions. Specifically: Marisa Parham (English Department); Laure Katsaros (French Department); Mohamed Hassan (Five College Arabic Program); Maria Heim (Religion Department); Paul Schroeder Rodriguez and Jeannette Sanchez-Naranjo (Spanish Department); Riley Caldwell-O’Keefe and Asha Kinney (Center for Teaching and Learning); and Dawn Cadogan, Blake Doherty, and Missy Roser (Research and Instruction Department at Frost Library).

To my students in this semester’s Law, Religion, and Politics seminar: Thank you for admitting, honestly, “We just don’t get it.” I hope things make more sense now.

PROJECT COMPOSITION

How were the terms chosen?

Are the terms listed on the project page the only ones you’ll cover?

Can I suggest a term for you to feature?

Who are the contributors?

How can I become a contributor? Is it possible to contribute to an existing term?

Where are the “From the Archive” essays drawn from?

EDITORIAL PROCESS AND TIMELINE

Were the responses to each term peer-reviewed?

When will the contributions be published?

Why isn’t the entire project being published at once?

CITATION

What do the hyperlinks in the project responses and accompanying essays mean?

Should I cite the project responses and accompanying essays? What about other material published on TIF? How do I cite them?

Can I publish pieces from this project on my own website?

Where did you get the artwork found on the pages of the Universe?

. . . with spirit at our sides, we seek its signs . . .

How does one bind, or draw the boundaries around, an inquiry into the term “spirit,” or “spirits”? Perhaps this is the challenge with all words. Any and every word, an iteration or artifact of language and culture. I’m stating the obvious here, hence the importance of a project such as this, “A Universe of Terms.” Yet even within the rubrics of an installation that revisits Mark C. Taylor’s 1998 edited volume, Critical Terms for Religious Studies, spirit(s) would seem especially unstable. Promiscuous in its refusal to be pinned down. We seek its signs, says Joe Wood, circa 1992. The spirit moves in mysterious ways, they say.

So much so that spirit somehow evaded inclusion in that original volume. How could that be possible, given the centrality of the term to the history of Western philosophy and theology? And thus to the field of religious studies? How do we account for its absence in Critical Terms, which was published the same year as the sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s now classic work, After Heaven, on American spirituality—a certain sign of the term’s prominence, which has only grown since, from discussions of spirituality to spirit possession? Important queries, but I’ll leave these for another day, I guess.

If not with the original volume or the state of the field, then where might one begin? Perhaps by returning to the particular iteration of this term that has preoccupied much of my own research: spirit preceded by the racial modifier. Or, as Joe Wood put it: black spirit. How might this configuration help (or hinder) our efforts to seek the signs?

First, a confession (and spoiler): I tend to loathe when dictionaries anchor an analysis. Yet I find myself making precisely this move, hoping to find a fixed point to begin (or conclude) this short reflection. Unsurprisingly, consulting Merriam-Webster at once confirmed my suspicions and frustrated me all the more. Fourteen different senses, several with two or more sub-senses within them; from “enthusiastic loyalty” to “an inclination, impulse, or tendency of specified kind: MOOD.” Twenty-three definitions of spirit in total; that is, for the noun form of the word. Spirit, it seems, is defined by a surplus of meanings. Spirit, then, is quite similar to the fourth definition of promiscuous: “composed of all sorts of things.” Spirit’s second sense, maybe, makes the most sense in the context of religious studies: “a supernatural being or essence.” Or not; as even this “essence” is broken down into four smaller sub-senses.

So, I turn to my bookshelves for better clues. Or at least a helpful prompt. A scholar of religion and African American culture, my books should at least limit the field:

• William L. Andrews, Ed., Sisters in the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (1986)
• Jason Berry, The Spirit of Black Hawk: A Mystery of Africans and Indians (1995)
• V. F. Calverton, The Newer Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature (1925)
• Judith Casselberry and Elizabeth A. Pritchard, Eds., Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora (2019)
• Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987)
• Pamela E. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (2011)
• Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (2008)
• Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983)
• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904)

No such luck. Random and unscientific, and by no means representative, this sampling shows much and tells little, in terms of settling us down. These nine titles, old and new, do offer a sense of how expansive the terrain, even as subtitles suggest clear paths that spirit has traversed.

What happens when spirit(s) is tethered to an adjective? A racial modifier, for instance? Does making spirit black help to clarify things? Or confound us further? No term has figured so prominently in the substance of my own work as spirit. The primary sources pushed me in this direction. So many of the artists and intellectuals I encountered in researching my first book, Spirit in the Dark, availed themselves of what I eventually came to call a “grammar of spirit.” Spirit, spirits, spiritual, spiritually. Negro spirit, race spirit, racial spirit, black spirit. Old-time spirituality and new spirituality. These were just some of their terms of choice. In turn, I argued that spirit (and this constellation of related terms) provided a grammar through which to debate black art and culture, and the very meaning of blackness, across much of the twentieth century.

Each time I’ve given a talk about my book I’ve been met, almost without fail, with a series of similar questions. How am I defining spirit? Is spirit, for me, a real thing? Am I talking about the Spirit? Do I understand spirit on literary terms, rather than literally (if such a distinction makes sense)? Is it a metaphor? A trope? My response has often been a simple, “Yes.” Better yet, “All the above.” Just as often, I’ve provided no answer at all. Redirecting attention back to the sources. Borrowing from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Love the questions!” But perhaps this refusal is unfair, or inadequate. Though I’ve imagined it as serving a pedagogical purpose—an invitation to think further, deeper, closer—maybe sometimes a simple answer is merited. Recalling my students’ abiding frustration with this approach, I reconsider. Even still, a hope was that, if by indirection, in attending to a grammar of spirit that has typically been marked as racial, we might find a novel, or distinct, entrée into our thinking about religion.

Much scholarly ink has been spilled in recent years concerning the co-constituted nature of race and religion. For instance, in her most recent book, New World A-Coming (2017), Judith Weisenfeld insightfully analyzes new black religions that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century, which she names as “religio-racial.” Or one might consider how Robert Jones calls attention to, for a more popular audience, the (often unnamed) long racial shadow cast by Christianity in the United States, in his 2016 book, The End of White Christian America. As Weisenfeld rightly notes (and Jones’s title suggests), all religions are racial formations. It’s just that the white ones tend not to be named as such.

At the risk of being called reductionist, the more I think about it I’ve come to believe that the study of religion in America is the study of race. Cited in the epigraph to this essay, meditating on Malcolm X and black identity and culture in the 1990s, the late writer and editor Joe Wood likened spirit to, most simply, “a shared ethos.” Notably, Wood’s definition overlaps with not one of the twenty-three offered by Meriam-Webster. Moreover, he writes, “Black spirit has never meant one thing, or anything concrete, which is its great power and failure.” Blackness and spirit, in Wood’s telling, befit one another. Spirit—in black and white—is perhaps the term that best mediates this fundamental entanglement of race and religion, as well as the asymmetries that animate and provide context for the term’s place in American history. It both illuminates and frustrates our best efforts to understand its countless configurations. And ourselves. Better yet, you could (and by that I mean, I would) say that the spirit of religion in America is, as one historian put it, “the encounter of black and white.”

Whatever spirit is—and the term has many meanings—you usually have to get rid of some other encumbering things in order to get at it. The encumbrances might be body and passion, as when spirit is willing while the flesh is weak. They might be matter, as when the essence of hartshorn is distilled from a buck’s massy antlers. The encumbrances might be contingent events as opposed to the indwelling spirit of history, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Or the lumbering inessentials may include just about every quality of a thing but its attitude. When we are told that Charles Lindbergh’s plane is called the Spirit of St. Louis, or when a deodorant smells like Teen Spirit, we are meant to remember only the loftiest and best parts of these things. A very partial list of what’s excised from our concepts of teen-ness and St. Louis-ness would have to include sweat, body, gender, city infrastructure, racial segregation, and politics—in short, everything that stinks. The spirit of Spirit, if you will, is demolition.

Spirit in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US trance experience is no exception. US spiritualists active in the second half of the nineteenth century contacted the beyond through a variety of mediumistic techniques. Mediums were people capable of making their bodies into conduits of otherworldly communication. Sometimes spirits wrote, spoke, or gestured using the medium’s body; at other times unusual events, such as disembodied tappings or guitars playing themselves, happened uniquely in the medium’s presence. Crucially, mediums were clear channels: they passed messages on without intervening in them. Mediumship was thus aligned with other forms of experience, such as Protestant awakenings, Shaker visions, and Quaker meetings, in which the direct receipt of Spirit appeared as the deletion of institutional encumbrances, whether clerical or textual, between the individual and the divine.

The spirits conveyed messages and performances of diverse kinds, including news from the beloved or the illustrious dead, hints on the location of lost objects, visions of a more equal society, and racist fantasias in which mediums channeled indigenous people, or in other words, played Indian. Among the many genres of spirit communication, one stood out for its direct tension with spirit’s anti-hierarchical reputation. This genre might be called the vatic org chart: it imagines the Summerland, the spiritualist heaven, as a place whose intersecting spheres, circles, and electrical connections are as difficult to track as the parts of a complex institution. How do we think about the fact that spiritualism reinstated hierarchy in heaven, when hierarchy was the very thing the practice had seemed explicitly designed to shed? Why, in other words, is the Summerland so bureaucratic?

Andrew Jackson Davis, who became spiritualism’s unofficial theologian, and the medium Joseph D. Stiles both had visions of this sort. While Davis’s anti-clericalism, in The Principles of Nature, leaves him calling clergyman the most “unenviable” and “corrupting” of professions, his heaven is a hierarchy of beings variously inhabiting at least seven spheres, some with sub-spheres, in which contact among parties is regulated according to degrees of enlightenment. Stiles describes at length the hierarchies of heaven, with levels, circles, and connecting lines of liaison represented by electrical charge. In one passage, the spirit of Samoset presides over one circle, predictably lower than the circle that has Benjamin Franklin at its head. Each circle lies in a different sphere, and independently of these levels, there are electrical interchanges between the two circles as Franklin shocks Samoset.1 Davis and Stiles envisioned heaven’s power dynamics and official channels even as spiritualists in their earthly practice apparently desired to clear such formalities away.

So deliverance from bureaucracy looked a lot like bureaucracy. Liberation looked like the metastasis, not the absence, of constraint. Is this very bad? Is it as bad as it sounds? At stake in the spiritualists’ copying of hierarchy is the question of their freedom: did they end up reproducing, symptomatically and in spite of themselves, the very thing they were trying to escape, because there simply is no way of getting outside our historical conditions? Questions of this sort have become quite familiar in the humanities. Viewing power in terms of a circulating discourse that cannot be located in a sovereign and that cannot, therefore, be escaped, scholars may feel as though their subjects—and themselves—are caught, in Rita Felski’s apt phrase, “in a spiderless web.”

Thus, because freedom from system is at stake for spiritualists, an affective situation is, I think, likely to be at stake for the scholars in the humanities who study them: an affect we could call Foucauldian melancholy. The state of Foucauldian melancholy is the one where you find yourself asking with some anguish, or maybe by now it’s with boredom, is there no exit from the system? Is there no character in the novel who escapes the general satire? Isn’t there one single moth who keeps his wings free? Is there no outside?

It both does and does not make sense that Michel Foucault’s work inspires these unpleasant states. It does make sense because he gives us the immensely influential model of modernity in which this period is characterized by the rise of the total institution, and by power that makes us in its timetables and its examinations rather than breaks us on its Catherine wheels. It doesn’t make sense because Foucault is rarely, if ever, to be found wringing his hands. If there is a Foucauldian melancholy, Foucault did not come down with it. He is an arch, a satirical, a lyrical writer, but ordinarily not an anguished one. In fact, he seems to take a certain pleasure in the poeisis of our responses to power; his Carolus Linnaeus “dreams” in “botanical calligrams.” Linnaeus’s reveries took him deeper into system, not out of it. So there is no freedom if you think freedom is finding the exit. But there is poetry.

Susan Stewart calls “the poet’s freedom” the capacity to make and destroy. Here, freedom is not an escape from the matrix but the adoption of the position of fantastical architect with respect to the matrix’s mirror image. Stewart describes a boy who builds a sandcastle with “turrets, moats, interior walls, indentations carved by a spoon’s edge to show where the windows would be.” His work complete, he suddenly destroys the castle—not out of pique, but with delight. Stewart comments, “Without the freedom of reversibility enacted in unmaking . . . we cannot give value to our making.” With his destruction, “the boy seemed to be returning the power of the form back into himself.”

If we think along these lines, the spirit of Summerland bureaucracy may be a certain kind of free spirit after all. Like a clerical hierarchy, a castle—a medieval fortress, after all—is a technology of power. Stewart’s boy claims this power as his own to use or to destroy. He makes it as brittle as it is unlimited. Brittle poeisis is to be found in spiritualist organizational fantasias, too. The fragility resides in the fact that the org charts seldom quite hang together. Are Davis’s spheres concentric, or what? Are Samoset and Franklin just floating somewhere? I have never yet successfully drawn one of these systems out on paper; maybe that’s just me, but I suspect that they are diagrammatic without actually being diagrammable (to his credit, Davis did try). The power to will these systems into being, then let them collapse under the weight of their own impracticality, is what Davis and Stiles claim in the name of spirit. The castle in the air is theirs to kick. The moth skates through the damaged web. Demolition actually works this time.

The Spiritual Exercises. The Spirit of 1776. Spirit of an age, Zeitgeist. We’ve got spirit! A spirited opposition. Spiritual awakening. Spiritual warfare. The Spirit of Christmas Past. Esprit de corps. Spirit possession. Spirit Airlines. Holy Spirit. Espírito Santo, Brazil. “Whoa, spirit / Watch the heavens open (yeah) / Spirit, can you hear it callin’?” sings Beyoncé. Karl Marx: We are infused by the spirit of the state. Émile Durkheim’s spirit of society. Conception among the Arunta, wrote Sigmund Freud, is experienced as a reincarnated spirit entering the mother’s body. Spiritism. Smells like teen spirit. Spirit-writing. Spirited away. Such a free spirit . . . That’s the spirit! Ancestor spirit. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. “Shop Esprit for dresses, tops, pants, skirts, shoes and accessories.”

Spirit gives a name to outside forces that impinge on inner will. Even more, it undoes the very idea of a discrete split between inner and outer. It renders the self elusive, as David Hume described: “when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself . . .” Spirit gives the lie to the North Atlantic myth of the autonomous solo agent. I am writing these words, but spirit serves notice that “I” am a crossroads of roles, an inheritance, a history, a language, a marketplace. Spirit demands that usually hard-to-see constraints, desires, and influences be seen. It remakes individuals as dividuals, multi-personated bodies. That it gathers all of this otherness into one lexical frame is, to be sure, a solution that generates new problems of interpretation. Spirit’s many forms spiral out like breath (pneuma, ruah), making it often hard to read. It seems we can only touch it when it’s held in things: in the body of a Pentecostal worshipper who “gets the Spirit”; in a lively Kongo statue (nkisi) that encloses the dead; in the sound vibrations of a voice from beyond. Like breath, spirits act on their surround even as they cover their traces, dissipating without ever really disappearing. Spirits condense, twist, and engage each other. Esprit-brand accessories are infiltrated by the Holy Spirit—purses and pants now move upon the face of the waters. Teen spirit is infilled by ancestor spirits and team spirit; spirit-writing holds spirited opposition in reserve. The spirit of the state is fortified by The Spiritual Exercises. Like wind or breath, spirits make ionic bonds, grabbing electrons from each other’s circuits to form new semantic clouds.

In this sense, spirit is never only gaseous or metaphysical. It always links up with things, like airline, writing, teen, face of the waters, pants. Then, too, spirit moves in verbs like incorporate, possess, descend, hover, fill, and have. And spirit settles near adjectives like holy, ancestral, or free. Verbs and adjectives materialize and spatialize an otherwise vaporous word. They turn spirit tangible, push it into text and flesh incarnate. The fact that spirits must “incorporate” or be “exercised” grounds the experiences and interpretations gathered under spirit. People who work with spirits describe the arrivals of gods or ancestors in equally physical terms: Spirits “manifest” or “descend.” Those possessed are described as “being turned,” “rolled,” “mounted,” or “leaned on.” All these metaphors of weight, force, and directionality remind us that spirit is rendered present through shifts in material form. Any ethnographic study of spirit should start with the stuff.

Spirit possesses, but it is also possessed of its own social histories. It was often leveraged to mark differences between supposedly permeable and bounded persons. Immanuel Kant began to work out his opposition to spirited bodies in early writings on the mystic visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, in a 1766 text translated as Dreams of a Spirit Seer. His complaint against Swedenborg focused on spirit’s seemingly antidemocratic, private interests, its special revelation. Why should only some receive it, and what kind of civil society would such unevenness build? Ongoing spiritual revelations to a select charismatic few, or “fancied occult intercourse with God,” might subvert values of equality based on equal knowledge available to all. What hope can there be for a public, shared standard of morality and truth, if spiritual elites hoard all the special knowledge?

The old notion of spirit as a marker of alterity and political risk has hardly abated. When the House of Representatives stenographer Dianne Reidy abruptly grabbed the microphone in Congress on October 16, 2013, possessed by the Holy Spirit, she was quickly dragged out by security. Such spirited hyperagency, the excess of persons in a given body acting in political or judicial space, was dangerously opaque. Legal or political personhood, it seems, can barely tolerate spirit, requiring instead the special effect of a singular person, a forensic individual, an autonomous, reliable, contractually and legally liable person. Law, not to mention academe, seems to desire a certain threshold of autonomous individual personhood, purified of the pernicious interference of spirit. When such autonomous individuals are lacking, they have to be made.

But if spirit marked difference, it also sometimes helped to establish a shared humanness across groups. The chief merchant of the Dutch West India Company, Willem Bosman, in 1705 described the port of Ouidah, in West Africa, as chock-full of spirit: “To conclude the Subject of their Religion, I must add, that they have a sort of Idea of Hell, the Divel, and the Apparition of Spirits. And their Notions, concerning these, are not very different from those of some People amongst us.” Bosman’s discovery of African “religion” depended on locating its likeness with European practices. He found a resemblance in their overlapping repertories of spirits. An overabundance of spirit allegedly signaled Africa’s difference—comprised of too-permeable, and thus irrational persons—but the presence of “spirits,” at least to people like Bosman, suggested that Europeans and Africans shared overlapping religious experiences.

Spirit as a capacious cipher of outside forces impinging on individuals’ interior lives (note the spatial terms that mark out a specific human physiology) has long divided and joined human kinds, fissuring allegedly autonomous and permeable humans, the latter category often applied to women, so-called primitives, or the criminally deviant. But spirit has also, if less often, cast certain persons or groups’ special gifts into relief and elevated such persons for special status, variously as shamans, possession priests, inspired warriors, and charismatic leaders. If spirit-knowledge could serve to distinguish and set certain leaders and specialists apart from the rank and file, it could also subvert and shuffle hierarchies. Hume, to wit, thought spirit and religious enthusiasm could be a friend to democracy, because direct revelations, or spirit-knowledge, could circumvent the priestly and political status quo. Think of all the mystics, especially women, who gained the right to speak through their visions.

Still, I’m not so sure. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Feodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor proclaiming that people want only to be relieved of their unbearable freedom, and ready to offer a “spirit of self-annihilation.” A plague of leaders claiming special dispensation now spans the globe, only too happy to unburden us of free will—in Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Israel, the United States, Great Britain, Venezuela, Russia, Zimbabwe, China, Turkey, the Philippines . . . Wielding the spirits of the state and an imagined gilded past, presidents, prime ministers, and dictators offer to relieve citizens of their individual powers of dissent. We should be wary of spirit as deployed to buttress authoritarianism or the evasion of accountability, compared with the mediations of spirits that allow the powerless to speak and act. The challenge is to recognize the difference.

But good luck with that! “Spirit” names an impinging, unknown excess acting in us, the clouds of input passing through us, and that we also pass through. The ability to name and define those inchoate forces remains an elusive goal. Oddly, it is for just that reason that spirit enlivens religious traditions, whose participants come together to disagree about spirits’ nature, place, and message. Because religious traditions are, among other things, loose agreements on what to disagree about, spirit is as usefully fuzzy as it is endlessly productive.

First, I must tell you that I am not a scholar. My language and technical terms are more from the street than from academia. I do not serve a traditional church and view my ministry as an interfaith, public, and hopefully prophetic one. I live and move and have my being in a little community of people called BeLoved Asheville in a small town in North Carolina. Three of us live together in intentional community, with a shared residence and in voluntary poverty with our neighbors in Asheville. The larger BeLoved community is a wonderful array of people from all walks of life who are building community with one another and sharing our skills, voices, and unique gifts to transform our city and world. We are working to cultivate a way of life rooted in creativity, community, and equity. Together, we are doing what Dorothy Day called “building a new world in the shell of the old.”

In my community at BeLoved Asheville, we are people directly affected by issues coming together and creating innovative solutions to our toughest challenges. We offer free healthcare anywhere via our first-in-the-nation Street Medic team, where homeless people are trained to medic those who often are the sickest and lack access to healthcare. We have a community art studio called Rise Up Studio where street and starving artists, as well as cultural artists and practitioners, can make art that reflects who we are. We are building our own deeply affordable microhomes that create equity so that local people will stop being pushed out. We do policy work on policing, homelessness, poverty, and racism. We are the first declared sanctuary in Western North Carolina. We teach youth their indigenous culture that is being stolen. We are people from the street helping with the free farmers’ market for elders. We are elders who knit hats and scarves for people on the street. We are undocumented people standing up for African Americans beaten by the police. We are Latinx people who cook traditional tamales to be shared for our Decolonize Thanksgiving celebration on Thanksgiving Day. We are people on the street who pack boxes of food, diapers, and Know Your Rights information for people trapped in their homes during ICE raids. And we are transgender people who speak out against the racist monument at the center of our city.

These little “experiments in truth” as Gandhi would call them, are where powerful change is already happening. At BeLoved, we would not call ourselves the religious left (though we are). We would call each other family because we know each other deeply and have each other’s backs. Seeing each other from every intersection as family and working together for change means we are creating a new possibility for the world.

Perhaps for this essay we might call ourselves the “religious left left.”

Recently, I attended a church gathering to talk about justice. A leader in my denomination had been brought in as an expert and led a group of us through a discussion of the struggles in Asheville. We easily completed his first task of defining the problems in our city. Everyone made the very long and accurate list. But when the second question came there was silence. How do we start to solve these issues? No one knew. I understood what that meant: the room had not made that second left. They cared. They knew injustice existed but they did not know the ground. They did not know people suffering from these problems. At BeLoved we know that people suffering through injustice know what they need but lack the tools and resources and the political will from the larger community to make the change. When we have not made that second left turn, when we have not gone to the ground to build community, we fail to be agents of change.

Many in the religious left have not made that second left turn. We talk a good game when it comes to justice, and yet our lives look almost synonymous with the dominant, consumerist culture. For too many of us, we live segregated lives of economic and/or white privilege. We do not know the ground or the people on the ground. Those suffering the injustices we talk so much about do not know us. And so the religious left is left impotent. We do not have what it takes to transform these death-dealing systems. But when we take the second left, and we build life together grounded, we become as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. named a “new and unsettling force” for liberation.

In Spring 2019, we marched on the White House—clergy, leaders of conscience, and people hurt by oppression, united in love and issuing a prophetic moral indictment under the banner of Jeremiah 22: “Go to the royal palace and deliver this Message: Attend to matters of justice. Rescue victims from their exploiters” (Jeremiah 22:1-5). That day, Secret Service blocked us from the park where we had a permit and we were blocked from the White House by a fence that was erected. As we were leaving the park, two fighter jets flew over in “closed” air space. When people affected by poverty, anti-migrant policies, environmental injustice, and racism link arms with faith leaders who have deep relationships with the people on the ground; and when they together march and speak truth to power; and when they mean what they say (backed up by the way they live their lives), it shakes the system. This is deeply sacred/religious work.

I helped to lead a sit-in at our police station when an African American man, Jerry Jai Williams (#SayHisName), was shot and killed by the police in our city. We ended up being in the station for thirty hours and were eventually arrested. As we sat for all those hours, a young anarchist asked if they could talk to me. I said, “Of course, what would you like to talk about?” They said, “Something strange is happening to me and I don’t know what it is.” “Can you describe it?” I asked. And they did in vivid detail. “Oh,” I said, “you are having an experience of the divine. I have deeply felt that here too. We are on holy ground because of our actions here.”

Even as many US mainline churches are closing their doors, an awakening is happening on the ground. There is an unmistakable experience of the divine on the ground with the people doing the sacred work of justice.

The “religious left left” is rising. It is bubbling up from small communities on the ground like BeLoved and thousands of others. It threatens the hollow claims of the religious right who bless nationalism, racism, militarism, and the epidemics of poverty, homelessness, and environmental destruction. The religious left left tears off the mask America has been wearing since its inception and offers a different way, a way that is true democracy. If we are going to have a real transformative movement, it must be grounded and spring from deep intersectional community located there. It must involve the ground of our beings, sacred and holy. The religious left left is a powerful hope for an America that we have never seen. An America that we can, on this sacred ground, build together.

Updated 12/13/2019. –Eds.

The SSRC’s Religion and the Public Sphere Program, with support from the Henry Luce Foundation, will host a Religion and the Public Sphere Summer Institute for Early-Career Scholars. This week-long institute will take place July 16-22, 2020 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The goal of the 2020 Summer Institute is to bring together early-career scholars conducting research on, or beginning new projects on, the ways in which religion intersects with two critical public issues: social justice movements and environmental crises. Through a series of small seminars and workshops led by senior scholars, and unstructured time for reading, writing, and reflection, the Institute provides an intensive but informal setting for cross-disciplinary dialogue, exploring research design, presenting research findings, and networking with peers concerned with the ways in which religious ideas, practices, actors, institutions, and movements engage the public sphere. Following the workshop, participants interested in pursuing collaborative projects with each other will be eligible to apply for small seed grants to develop their projects.

The Institute is open to advanced doctoral candidates (must have completed all requirements for the PhD degree except for the dissertation by June 2020) and recent postdocs (those who were granted their PhD during or after Spring 2015) from all fields in the social sciences, humanities, and theology. Applications are due January 31, 2020. Apply online at apply.ssrc.org.

Applications will consist of a narrative description of a current research agenda, a short application form, and a curriculum vitae. More information on the summer institute, eligibility, and application requirements can be found on the website.

“You put your hands on the Bible to swear yourselves into office,” Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II reminded members of the House Budget Committee at a hearing in June 2019 on “Poverty in America: Economic Realities of Struggling Families.” “You should hear what Jesus said.” He held notes in his hand, which he glanced down at occasionally while he spoke, but when quoting from scripture he looked straight into the faces of the committee members. “When I was hungry, did you feed me?” he riffed on Matthew 25. “When I was a stranger, an immigrant, did you receive me? When I was sick, did you care for me? Because every nation will be judged by God for how it treats the least of these.”

Since attracting national attention in 2013 as the leader of “Moral Monday” protests at the North Carolina General Assembly, Barber has become one of the most recognizable faces of the “religious left” in America today, although he avoids using this label. “Our campaign agenda is neither left nor right,” he told the Budget Committee in June. “It aims to challenge both sides of the aisle. It aims to reach toward the moral high ground.” Barber, in a clerical collar and a white stole bearing the words “JESUS WAS A POOR MAN,” was seated at the center of a long table facing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the members of the Budget Committee. His testimony was given top billing that morning. He was no economist or policy expert, but he was intimately acquainted with the “economic realities of struggling families,” having spent the past two years traveling the country as co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, which he and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis had relaunched fifty years after it was begun by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Their journey organizing the poor had led them to Washington, DC, and they had brought a plan: the Poor People’s Moral Budget.

With their Moral Budget, the Poor People’s Campaign highlights the intrinsically moral nature of the process through which a nation decides how to spend its money; and demonstrates what it would look like for the federal budget to express the movement’s moral values. It is often said that politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose, just as many religious activists speak prophetically but act pragmatically. The Moral Budget represents a bold act of translation between the two registers: a distillation of the prophetic and poetic into the pragmatic and prosaic; an insistence that politics is not a choice between math and morality, but rather that “mathematical facts are moral choices.”

The release of the Poor People’s Moral Budget calls forth decades of efforts to reframe the budget as a moral concern. This history sheds light on an active, if fragmented, network of faith leaders who reject the religious right’s decades-long monopoly on public morality. Their rising visibility during the Trump era has been interpreted by some as evidence of the emergence of a new religious left that could serve as a counterweight to the religious right. Others have dismissed this as wishful thinking, citing religious liberals’ small numbers among the electorate. But it is a mistake to reduce the religious left to a voting bloc alone. Historically, the influence of the religious left has not derived from its numbers, but from its ability to infuse issues with moral meaning and urgency, from slavery to war to racial and economic inequality. When effective, these moral frames help a broad array of citizens—religious and secular—to understand why progressive policies are necessary to solve social problems and consistent with American values.

“Budgets are moral documents”

By approaching the budget as a moral concern, today’s Poor People’s Campaign follows directly in the footsteps of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. In 1966, the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, along with other key participants in the 1963 March on Washington, released “A Freedom Budget for All Americans.” In the text of the Freedom Budget, Randolph is quoted describing the moral nature of the project. “Here in these United States, where there can be no economic or technical excuse for it, poverty is not only a private tragedy but, in a sense, a public crime. It is above all a challenge to our morality.” King concurred in his foreword to the document. Pledging his own and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s full support for the plan, he explained that the Freedom Budget “is a moral commitment to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded.” But the Freedom Budget did not merely reference abstract moral principles. “It is not visionary or utopian,” Randolph explained in his introduction. “It is specific. It is quantitative. It talks dollars and cents. It sets goals and priorities. It tells how these can be achieved.” According to a 2011 Working Paper on “The Freedom Budget at 45,” these ideas “provided the cornerstones for King’s ‘Poor Peoples’ Campaign’ and ‘economic bill of rights.’”

The idea that budgets are moral documents became a cornerstone of economic justice organizing in the early 2000s as well. In 2005, as President George W. Bush entered his second term in office, thanks (allegedly) to strong support from “values voters,” more than sixty faith leaders from around the United States signed onto “The Federal Budget as a Moral Document: A Letter from Religious Leaders.” “Despite its complexity,” they wrote, “the budget is essentially a moral document—the specific expression of the values of the nation.” Jim Wallis, the progressive evangelical leader, prolific author, and founder of the Christian social justice organization Sojourners, was among the signers of this letter. Today, he is the person most commonly associated with the idea that “budgets are moral documents.” For Wallis, this not only means that, practically speaking, “examining budget priorities is a moral and religious concern.” It is also an opportunity to broaden what counts as a “values issue” and who counts as a “values voter.” In a 2005 interview, Wallis took aim at conservatives’ tendency to “define ‘moral values’ narrowly, almost exclusively in terms of wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage.” As Wallis explained, this narrow framing allowed conservatives like Bush to say, “I’m a Christian and it applies to this, this and this, but it doesn’t apply to my budget.” Wallis called upon Christians to speak up and say, “Yeah, faith does scrutinize budgets, so let’s have a moral values audit of the budget.”

In late 2010, Wallis joined a group of sixty-five Christian leaders around the country as part of a new coalition, the Circle of Protection, which dedicated itself to conducting this moral values audit. As the newly Republican-controlled House of Representatives embraced the Tea Party movement’s calls to reduce the federal deficit, this coalition of Christian leaders released a statement of principles that declared, “We look at every budget proposal from the bottom up, how it treats those Jesus called ‘the least of these’ (Matthew 25:45).” In the almost-decade since its founding, the group has held prayer vigils on Capitol Hill, led fasts, and met with President Barack Obama and leaders in Congress. “What would Jesus cut?” they ask lawmakers to consider.

Around this same time, an interfaith coalition of thirty-six organizations—including Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and other faith communities—went beyond a “moral values audit” of the official budget and released a “Faithful Budget” of their own, which they have continued to release annually. As an “interfaith document,” the Faithful Budget references Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts to justify its call for the country to “act with mercy and justice as one nation under God.”

“What would Jesus cut?”

While people of faith disagree on the finer points of lots of political issues, caring for the poor and marginalized tends to be a place where a wide range of faith communities can find common ground. The Circle of Protection, the Faithful Budget Campaign, and the Poor People’s Campaign represent different models of faith-based coalition building to this end: the former is explicitly Christian but relatively diverse politically; the latter two are religiously diverse yet lean politically liberal. Despite their differences, these groups tend to agree on the broad strokes of what would make the federal budget “moral.” All would bolster government support for the poor, and pay for it with some combination of higher (“fairer”) taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and cuts to military spending (which some among them view as a moral good in its own right).

Of course, some religious groups have a starkly different vision of what “moral” budget and tax policies look like. In 2017, Donald Trump’s first budget called for severe cuts to domestic programs and an increase in military spending. These priorities, paired with the promise of lower taxes following the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, did not concern Trump’s Christian supporters. To the contrary, white evangelical Christian voters have remained steadfastly by Trump’s side, and prominent conservative Christian spokespeople have publicly defended the budget and tax cuts. Directly following the passage of the tax cut plan, Erick Erickson took to Twitter to insist, as the journalist Jack Jenkins summarized, that “the bill’s critics were trying to ‘pass off’ their ‘individual’ Christian responsibility to the poor to the ‘government.’” An article in the Christian Post describing the ensuing Twitter debate was titled, “Is Jesus Opposed to Tax Cuts?” Jerry Falwell, Jr. reprised the debate in an early-2018 tweet, “It never ceases to amaze me how leftist Christians twist the words of Jesus—who never told Caesar how to run Rome and never said to care for the least of these by voting to tax your neighbor to help the poor.”

Among the “leftist Christians” they were responding to was Wallis, who upon the release of Trump’s budget had called upon Christians to revisit the question, “What Would Jesus Cut?” Wallis’s answer to this question was unambiguous: “The priorities of this budget are not consistent with Christian, Jewish, or Muslim values. They are not only bad economics, they are also bad religion; as we say in the evangelical community they are unbiblical.” Sojourners underscored his point with a list of “Some of the More Than #2000Verses in Scripture on Poverty and Justice,” which formed the basis of a hashtag campaign on social media, and a protest in which “12 Christians were arrested reading #2000verses and praying in the senate office building calling on senators to oppose the GOP tax bill.” The praying protesters served as a vivid juxtaposition to the widely-circulated images of evangelical leaders encircling Donald Trump in the Oval Office earlier that year, their hands laid on his back as they prayed.

With their Poor People’s Moral Budget, Barber and Theoharis continue this prayerful protest. By the end of the three-and-a-half-hour Budget Committee hearing this June, Barber showed signs of frustration. “We came here to have a real conversation,” he said, dismissing Republican committee members’ denial of the government’s responsibility for alleviating poverty as “mythology and foolishness.” “We have a budget. You got your budget. Hold it up, Liz.” He and Theoharis lifted spiral-bound photocopies of the Moral Budget, turning them so the covers faced the cameras. “I’m going to speak to America now.” His voice slowed and he spoke as if he wanted each word to land. “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is,” he said, referencing Matthew 6:21. “Justice requires not just praying and going to church… Jesus said that people who engage in religiosity but do not care for justice, he called that hypocrisy. So let’s talk about investment.”

The Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University (ASU) invites applications for Postdoctoral Research Scholars for two projects:

1. Recovering Truth: Religion, Journalism and Democracy in a Post-Truth Era
This project encourages scholars, journalists, and students to deliberate on, and create new platforms for thinking and communicating about, the pursuit, meaning, discovery, and recovery of truth in democratic life. Under the direction of principal investigators John Carlson and Tracy Fessenden, both professors of religious studies, this project draws deeply from the methods of religious studies, theology, ethics, political thought, journalism, philosophy, and other disciplines to examine assumptions and initiate a new public conversation about truth in a “post-truth era.” It fosters collaborations between scholars and journalists that will help each group to write more richly and accessibly. More generally, this project encourages scholars and journalists to join one another in reflection about democratic life and the moral and civic principles on which it depends. We are especially interested in exploring the place of theology in democracy: the role that different beliefs about reality, transcendence, moral principles, and other truth claims have played—and might play—in animating democratic life. By exploring theology as a resource for examining truth claims, our project deepens the capacity of journalists and academics alike to seek and stand for truth.

2. Beyond Secularization: Religion, Science and Technology in Public Life
This project, led by Gaymon Bennett, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, seeks to document, analyze, and reflect on the interplay of science, religion and technology in the contemporary “post-secular” moment. The project will explore some of the way the categories of science, technology, religion and secularity and the boundaries between them are conceived, enacted and/or problematized in public life. The project is organized around three central research areas: (a) imaginations of “progress” and “innovation” that have informed science and technology in the public/political sphere; (b) communities and cultures of innovation in which hybridized notions of techno-scientific and spiritual progress shape social forms and practices; and (c) new religious/spiritual subjectivities, identities, and movements that frame social possibilities for and constraints upon new and alternative imagination of progress.

The anticipated start date for either position is as early as July 1, 2020 and negotiable to August 15, 2020. The deadline for completed applications for both positions is December 31, 2019.

For the full calls for applications, including job descriptions, eligibility, and application processes, visit the Center’s website.

On October 27, 2019, President Donald Trump announced, via a speech that was televised throughout the United States and the world, that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, had been killed in the course of an operation conducted by US special forces. What does this killing—an extraterritorial, extrajudicial assassination—mean for law in our post-9/11 world?

Conventionally, modernist and positivist thinking regards law as something boundaried and binaried, such that law’s other is “illegal” or “not law.” Against this conventional understanding of law, critical theorists perceive all that we embody and enact as expressing law and rules. As philosopher of law Margaret Davies writes in Asking the Law Question, law and rules “exist only in reality, that is, only because we live them, we continually create and transform rules as we exist.” What then are the law and rules brought into existence by the assassination of al-Baghdadi?

Assassination is not a new technology of state power, but up to 1975, the United States had not admitted to conducting extrajudicial killings. In the more recent post-9/11 climate, prior to the killing of Osama bin Laden, information on extrajudicial killings appears to have entered the public domain through leaks and comments from officials not authorized to speak. These news reports on killings in Yemen and Somalia are typical of the government’s tendency to minimize publicity and links to state authority. After 9/11, the United States argued that extrajudicial killings, now somewhat euphemistically called “targeted killings,” are permissible in military operations and self-defense.

But liberal legality—the version of law embraced by liberal democracies—celebrates due process, the presumption of innocence, the proof of guilt, and punishment in accordance with the law. Assassination is beyond the bounds of liberal legality. For one of the world’s leading liberal democracies to publicly proclaim its practice of assassination does seem to be a specifically post-9/11 phenomenon. And it is a phenomenon altering the parameters of law in that the very modality of a public announcement delivered by the head of state constitutes an assertion of state legitimacy. Indeed, it seems probable that Barack Obama’s May 2011 announcement on the bin Laden killing may represent the first instance of the United States making a celebratory public declaration with reference to a killing that arguably occupies the sphere of illegality.

In Trump’s speech, and in the new (and apparently staged) Trump Situation Room photograph, parallels to the assassination of Osama bin Laden abound. With the bin Laden killing, as with the al-Baghdadi killing, key members of the National Security Council sat in the Situation Room and watched some kind of video relayed from the scene of the assassination. A certain amount of media attention has dwelt on the differences between the two Situation Room photographs and the two very different speeches made by Obama and Trump.

But perhaps the similarities between these two events are far more significant than the differences. First, both presidents claimed justice had been served by the assassinations of these terrorists. While invoking justice, neither president invoked law. Law, it seems, can now be uncoupled from justice. Augmenting the absence of law (both as a lexical item in their speeches, and in the fact that these killings were extrajudicial), both presidents celebrated military and counterterrorism personnel and left law and legal institutions out of the picture.

Second, both presidents made a clear distinction between two categories of human beings: Americans and not-Americans. Both presidents were happy to report that no US personnel had been harmed in the course of these operations. While Trump claims “a large number of Baghdadi’s fighters and companions were killed with him,” and Obama said care had been taken to “avoid civilian casualties,” neither president counted the lives of non-Americans who had been killed or injured. At least four others were killed in the raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. According to US sources, three men and a woman were killed but Pakistani intelligence asserts that, in addition to bin Laden, four other men were killed. In his speech announcing the killing of bin Laden, President Obama said, “A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties.” The category “civilian” has, in the course of the continuing War on Terror, become especially contested and it is unclear what role was played by the others who were killed. We do not have reliable information as to whether these others were armed or not, for example. While some reports note the killing of these four others in the raid, the legality of these killings has generally not been questioned. Tellingly, while media has paid attention to the troublingly “celebratory tone” marking Trump’s speech, and to his deprecations of al-Baghdadi’s fear as he was pursued by dogs down a tunnel, media has participated in this distinction between the lives of Americans and not-Americans by omitting to question the legality of the killing of these nameless (and in the case of the al-Baghdadi raid, uncounted) others.

And third, both assassinations involved an expansive, extraterritorial reach for American military power, in keeping with the jurisdiction the 9/11 Commission Report has claimed for the United States. The Commission argues, “9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests ‘over there’ should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America ‘over here.’ In this same sense, the American homeland is the planet.” In short, for the United States, planetary jurisdiction maps onto homeland security.

I should note that, according to Trump, al-Baghdadi killed himself and the three children who were in the tunnel with him by detonating his suicide vest. The question therefore remains whether US special forces might have planned to capture rather than kill al-Baghdadi. Significantly, however, in the course of his news conference, Trump repeatedly said, “We kill terrorists,” and said that a “large number of Baghdadi’s fighters and companions were killed with him.” The assumption that this was a mission directed at killing rather than capturing seems to have been a shared assumption in that none of the reporters asked Trump about the possibility of a capture.

With extraterritorial, extrajudicial assassination normalized, and law’s foundational protection of human life selectively discarded, we are witnessing the unfolding of a new law. This law eclipses the values and institutions of liberal legality while fostering the secretive, belligerent values and institutions of the unending War on Terror. Key to this unfolding is a double move in relation to law.

First, liberal legality’s insistence on rule of law and what Grégoire Chamayou has termed the meta-legal right to life are notionally upheld even as a narrative of War on Terror exceptionalism scripts justification for departures from these principles. The meta-legal valuing of human life usefully distinguishes this conception of what it is to be human from the rights bestowed by liberal legality. Within the framework of liberal legality, exception and emergency might too easily strip people and populations of law’s protections. In the space between these two declared accounts of law—the rule of law and the right to life, and War on Terror exceptionalism—is an undeclared law invested in the discounting of some lives so that others may live: necropolitical law.

In naming necropolitical law, I draw on Achille Mbembe’s highly influential theorizing of necropolitics that relies on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the sovereign right to kill—a form of politics fostering not life, but death. This focus on death in necropolitics, Mbembe explains, accounts for “the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective.” Consistent with necropolitics, necropolitical law turns away from liberal legality’s exaltation of the right to life by scripting “the state of exception and the relation of enmity . . . [as] the normative basis of the right to kill.” Through the lens of necropolitical law, the extraterritorial, extrajudicial assassination becomes its own rationality. After all, necropolitics “continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labors to produce that same exception, emergency, and fictionalized enemy.” The assassinations of al-Baghdadi and bin Laden, and the presidential speeches announcing these events, simultaneously nurture and produce the unfolding contours of the necropolitical law of assassination.

In addition to dislodging the meta-legal principle that all human life should be valued and protected equally, this necropolitical account of law reconfigures the liberal legal understanding of nation-state sovereignty. Rather than the (notional) primacy of state sovereignty within a state’s own borders, and the (notional) containment of state sovereignty to state territory such that states rule only within their own borders, necropolitics, Mbembe suggests, is animated by sovereignty expressed “in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” This form of sovereignty—directed at bodies—is not constrained by borders or by liberal legality, as illustrated by the killings of al-Baghdadi and bin Laden. Under liberal legality, the categories sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, control, and law are tethered together as foundational pillars underpinning the same sociopolitical terrain. However, necropolitical tactics disaggregate sovereignty, territory, jurisdiction, law, and control such that power over populations and territory may be exercised without concomitant obligations to extend law’s protections to these populations.

Necropolitics, as Mbembe traces, has deep roots in the racialized logics of imperialism and colonialism. Within the immediate borders of the United States, Leti Volpp traces the redeployment of old Orientalist tropes in the post-9/11 racial profiling engaged in by government policy and practice, but also as expressed in the acts of violence generated by ordinary people. Does another connection between past and present mark the necropolitical law of assassination? As I read Trump’s speech, describing how dogs had been used to pursue the entrapped al-Baghdadi, I heard echoes of the way dogs had been trained to find and attack escaping slaves in nineteenth-century America. Even as state-of-the art technology has made so much of the al-Baghdadi assassination possible, old techniques of savagery have also been at work. Like necropolitics and Orientalism, the necropolitical law of assassination pulls together many threads of the past into our present. In the process, law as we know it has been displaced.

This fall there are events around the world to mark the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth. For those of us in the United States, Gandhi’s birthday is also an opportunity to reflect on how lessons from Gandhi’s organizing in South Africa and in India were integral to the US civil rights movement. That the greatest American movement of the last century was stimulated, in part, by international and interreligious exchanges affirms how democratic histories are always transnational and affirms the transnational history of the American religious left.

Beginning in the 1920s, black newspapers took special interest in Gandhi, and fostered debates about his tactics and whether nonviolence could stem racial terror in the United States. Gandhi’s blending of religious and political ideals caught the attention of black Christian intellectuals. In 1936, Howard Thurman, Sue Bailey Thurman, and Benjamin Mays traveled to India and met with Mohandas Gandhi. Sue Bailey Thurman was a YWCA leader and committed internationalist; Howard Thurman and Mays were Baptist ministers and then professors at Howard University’s School of Religion. Howard Thurman was a great twentieth-century theologian and social critic. Benjamin Mays is perhaps best known as president of Morehouse College. All three later became important mentors to Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Thurmans, Mays, and other black Christian intellectuals and activists embraced American democratic ideals and Christian egalitarian visions, even as they recognized that neither American politics nor American churches put them into practice. They looked in other countries and in other religions for political and moral sources to strengthen American and Christian expressions of freedom and justice. The Indian independence movement became a paradigm for an anticolonial freedom struggle that drew deeply from religious and moral resources, and a model for the kind of freedom movement they hoped to foster in the United States.

Lately, there has been important reevaluation of Gandhi’s work, prompted by questions like: Why did Gandhi exclude black South Africans from his movement there? Could Gandhi reconcile his service in the Boer War with his later anti-imperialism? Why did Gandhi oppose untouchability, but not caste? These questions suggest that Gandhi’s program was not as nonviolent as he insisted it was.

In 1936, the Thurmans and Benjamin Mays asked these exact questions to Gandhi himself. The Thurmans and Mays were well read on Indian politics, Indian religions, and the history of Gandhi’s organizing, in India as well as in South Africa. They were well-prepared to ask difficult questions. For five months in 1935-1936, the Thurmans traveled the length and breadth of what is now Sri Lanka, Burma, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, where they met with activists and intellectuals, and throughout lectured on American politics, history, and religion. Near the end of the trip, they met Gandhi. The Thurmans asked the Mahatma about noncooperation and how to train people in nonviolence. When Benjamin Mays traveled to India later in 1936, he also met with Gandhi and asked him to elucidate moral sources of nonviolence, which included Hinduism, Jainism, as well as close readings of Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy. Gandhi himself, Mays discovered, was influenced by ethical streams from across the globe.

As they sought wisdom from Gandhi, black Americans also criticized aspects of his program. Howard Thurman noticed that Gandhi did not collaborate with black South Africans, when, earlier in his career, Gandhi led protests against excessive taxation and free movement between South African states. Mays probed why Gandhi worked to end untouchability, but not caste, what Mays felt was an exploitative system that ensnared millions in poverty. The Thurmans and Mays brought these criticisms to Gandhi directly.

Mays and the Thurmans returned home and lectured widely about Indian politics and Indian religions in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They predicted that black American Christians could develop strategies inspired by the Indian independence movement, but only after they understood how Indian moral sources worked in the Indian context.

For instance, in the wake of his initial visit to India, Mays wrote a series of articles for the Norfolk Journal and Guide, a regional paper with a wide readership, about his meetings with Gandhi and with Jawaharlal Nehru, and about the Indian independence movement. Mays’s columns are models of interreligious engagement and offer astute democratic theory. He described the history and diversity of Indian anticolonialism and underscored the vast differences between the US and Indian contexts. Mays wanted American readers to know about Gandhi and his activism, and described Gandhi’s program in fine religious detail, for example, explaining how Gandhi’s use of ahimsa, the Sanskrit term for noninjury, emerged more from Jainism than from Hinduism.

In the early twenty-first century, we may not be surprised that Mays urged that Americans take Gandhi seriously. But the care and specificity with which Mays wrote about the religious context of Gandhi’s activism is uncommon. Mays, both an ordained Baptist minister and a religious studies scholar, described Gandhi’s work on its own terms and in its own context, and then made the case for how Americans, particularly American Christians, could apply these lessons.

Despite particular and deep criticisms of Gandhi’s program, the Thurmans and Mays were able to learn from a person whose moral vision was limited. This is a crucial skill as we look for moral and intellectual resources to address contemporary crises.

Mays and the Thurmans mentored many, including James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and Pauli Murray, who, as early as the 1940s, innovated noncooperation in the United States by integrating buses, organizing sit-ins, and staging multicity marches, sparked by Indian precedents, yet arising from a specifically black, Christian nonviolence. Mainstays of what Rustin later called the “classical” phase of the civil rights movement, their efforts laid the groundwork for the Rev. Dr. King’s leadership of a mass movement for racial justice in America.

After independence, India continued to be a beacon for black Americans. In 1953, Benjamin Mays returned to India, as a guest of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and leader of the world’s largest democracy. Mays marveled at how India’s new constitution enumerated rights for everyone in the multireligious and multiethnic state, including freedom of speech and assembly, equality in employment, and equal access to shops and accommodations, and underscored that women and children have rights. These protections, Mays noted, were not then available to black Americans.

Mays praised Nehru’s leadership, and he was, without seemingly knowing it, also commending B. R. Ambedkar, Dalit activist and primary drafter of the Indian Constitution, and one of the great democratic thinkers of the last century. (Mays would have appreciated talks with Ambedkar, who pilloried Gandhi’s and other progressive Hindus’ defense of the caste system as abetting inequality and violence.)

In midcentury, Benjamin Mays wrote there were “many wrongs” still to be corrected in India, referring to persistent caste divisions, yet Mays believed that “the moral leadership of the nations may come from the East” and not “from the so-called great powers.” The United States should not claim to be the defender of democracy around the world, Mays insisted, because America fails to provide democratic protections for its own citizens. Indian independence gave Mays hope, however, that the United States could become more democratic.

Recovering Howard Thurman’s, Sue Bailey Thurman’s, and Benjamin Mays’s early work reminds us of their remarkable international travel, their interreligious engagement, and their keen analysis of how lessons from one social movement could be used in an American campaign that would become the greatest American social movement of the twentieth century.

The great work of Mays and the Thurmans reminds us that American Christianity and American democracy are strengthened by engaging with liberatory political and religious movements around the world. Their writing and practice show us the great value of transnational and interreligious encounters. Their work affirms how our moral and democratic visions can be challenged and sharpened by people from other parts of the world and from religious traditions other than our own. It testifies to the importance of disputation and disagreement for learning to see ourselves in a new way, and that this is crucial for thinking and acting ethically. As Americans debate the role of religious progressivism today, we do well to heed the wisdom and lessons from this earlier generation of activists and intellectuals.

Amid the global rise of the Christian right, some intellectuals and politicians have emphasized the need to affirm a stronger religious left in the United States. The Democrats’ downfall in 2016, this argument goes, has shown the limits of ideological platforms that ignore matters of faith and belonging and stick to technocratic and secular jargon. From this perspective, in order to win the culture war against right-wing evangelicals, progressives urgently need to include religion in their strategy.

Since 2016, various attempts have been made at mobilizing religious progressives against the religious right. Vote Common Good, a group of progressive Christians, has worked toward bringing evangelicals closer to the Democratic Party. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) insistently speaks about his faith and how it inspires his political project. Journalist Jack Jenkins has suggested that Booker could be “a candidate for the ‘religious left.’” It has become quite trendy to blame Democrats and the liberal left for neglecting the importance of religion for the people, and to encourage progressives to try and emulate the political methods of right-wing populists and the religious right.

Such sudden injunctions to mobilize religion for political gains ignore the fact that progressive and radical religious movements have been a key part of social and political activism throughout American history—from the Social Gospel movement to the civil rights movements, to activists inspired by liberation theology, to Catholic Nuns today advocating for equal access to health care. More specifically, the now fashionable call to speak or act religious for political gains poses at least three problems.

The Diversity of Progressive Religion

First, it draws upon an instrumental and functionalist approach to religion, one that has long been criticized by scholars of religion and believers. Religion’s job is not to save the left by providing its politicians and leaders a quick fix to regain power. While religious groups may be key allies in the fight against populism, forming a religious left in the image of right-wing religious movements to better counter them misses the complexity and diversity of progressive religious movements.

As noted by Ruth Braunstein, Todd Fuist, and Rhys Williams, labels such as “progressive religion” define what these movements are not (conservative, right-wing, etc.), more than what they are. They exhibit a great diversity of organizational modes, objectives, and methods of action. These movements are confronted, just like the religious right, with internal disagreements around divisive issues. While progressive movements may provide crucial resources to activists, the temporality of their struggles differs significantly from the result-oriented temporality of politicized Christian or secular politicians. Their strategy is not oriented toward seizing political power; they do not evaluate a successful action according to its immediate results, such as the outcome of an election or a policy change, but on a much longer timeframe.

Even the most successful mobilizations, like the Moral Mondays, that bring together several hundreds of activists and faithful participants do not compare with the massive gatherings organized in Pentecostal megachurches. Online activism is equally much more sporadic. Progressive religious movements’ activism is centered around local communities, neighborhoods, and families, and not focused on the global Christian nation or the evangelical mass. This is why, after the 2016 election, some faith leaders have even insisted on the need to stop agitating, to take a pause, and described their activism as a form of breathing. This conception of action is different from, even contradictory to, the result-oriented action of the religious right lobbies and most secular activists who call for instrumentalizing the religious left.

Leaders of these progressive organizations, while they may have personal ties with members of the Democratic Party, stay away from openly supporting a political party and emphasize the negative impact of political polarization on the public good. Jim Wallis, the president and founder of Sojourners, has described progressive evangelicalism as an alternative to both the religious right and the secular left. In his 2005 bestselling book, he articulates a vision of the common good and public space that transcends partisan binaries. Likewise, Reverend William Barber, one of the most charismatic and active leaders of religious progressivism today, rejects the binary between right and left, and talks about a divide between what is right and wrong. On September 14, 2018, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a theologian and minister close to William Barber, reacted to a New York Times article by tweeting, “We don’t need a Religious Left to counter the Religious Right. If Christians who care about the common good vote w/ all our neighbors for a government that works for everyone, we can reconstruct democracy.”

The strength and originality of the movements and groups that are lumped together under the label of religious progressives comes from their diversity, their grassroots entrenchment, and, most importantly, their interest in mediating conflicts and building bridges across racial, religious, and ethnic divides. In November 2018, Reform Jewish leader Rabbi Josh Whinston led an interfaith group of Jews, Episcopalians, Muslims, and Disciples of Christ in the West Texas town of Tornillo to welcome asylum seekers from Central America. Since June 2018, Reverend Trey Hegar, former marine and pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, has offered support to asylum-seeking victims of ICE raids. The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Connecticut has given sanctuary to a Muslim Pakistani couple threatened of deportation for more than six months. While right-wing evangelicals continue to fascinate and steal the headlines, examples of this ecumenical activism that are not artificially using religion abound and remain largely under-theorized.

The Fallacy of Promoting Good Religion

Second, the call to constitute a united religious left comes down to promoting good religion against bad religion. As Winnifred Fallers Sullivan has argued, the United States was founded upon the rejection of a normative understanding of so-called good religion, and a commitment to a pluralistic, egalitarian, and horizontal religious sphere. While conservative groups have nevertheless and repeatedly tried to impose their understanding of good religion, progressives have often pushed back to defend the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities. Why, then, should they embark now on a project based on the same dubious binary between good and bad religion? Who is to decide what counts as good or bad religion?

Progressive Christian activists and leaders often denounce the theology of the Christian right as heresy or blasphemy. And yet, American progressives who seek to instrumentalize religion would benefit from considering how similar debates have played out in Muslim majority countries as well as in Europe and North America around the promotion of good, moderate Islam. Top-down attempts to manufacture a liberal friendly Islamic theology and “modern” Islamic piety, by promoting supposedly reformed Islamic leaders, schools, or curricula, have rarely accomplished what they set out to achieve. Not only have such attempts failed to provide a robust alternative to violent jihadist ideologies, but they have also been received either with indifference or suspicion by rank and file Muslims who see them as dubious attempts by state officials or elite intellectuals to interfere with century-long theological and cultural disputes. Since 9/11, the distinction between good and bad Islam has contributed to the securitization of Muslims and the shrinking of their rights much more than promoting plurality within their communities.

A Responsibility to the World

Third, the call to form a united front of the religious left reveals a nostalgic fixation on the civil rights era that is based on a partial, US-centered reading of how religion played out in liberation movements of the 1960s. The raison d’être of radical and progressive religious movements at the time went beyond their oppositional stance to right-wing policy and movements. Foundational to their theology was a strong commitment to global peace and justice, from Vietnam, to Latin America, India, and Africa.

Sarah Azaransky has demonstrated how black intellectuals and activists in the 1960s saw the struggle for racial equality as an inherent part of a global struggle for social justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about an “inescapable network of mutuality” that tied together different struggles: “So we are all concerned about what is happening in Africa and what is happening in Asia because we are part of this whole movement.” Scholars and public intellectuals such as Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays, or women’s movement leaders such as Juliette Derricotte and Sue Bailey Thurman, Azaransky argues, saw the movement for racial justice in the United States as part of a broader movement against colonization. “Their contributions to the American religious left,” she explains, “should be understood as emerging importantly from black internationalism.”

Similarly, radical Catholic priests who organized protests against US foreign policy in the same period were equally influenced by, and committed to, international freedom movements. Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, one of the most illustrious representatives of radical Catholicism in the 1960s, was profoundly inspired by the theology and activism of the worker-priests in the 1940s French underground. Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip, a Catholic priest and peace activist, explained the civil disobedience actions that they orchestrated in relation to the United States’ moral responsibility to the world. Just like King, they were convinced of the inextricability of the struggle against racism at home and the opposition to war in Vietnam. As Francine Du Plessix Gray recounts: “‘Do you honestly expect,’ Philip Berrigan asked, ‘that we could so abuse our black citizens for three hundred and forty years, so resist their moral and democratic rights, so mistreat, exploit, starve, terrorize, rape and murder them without all this showing itself in our foreign policy? Is it possible for us to be vicious, brutal, immoral, and violent at home and be fair, judicious, beneficent and idealistic abroad?’”

In other words, religious progressives and radicals in the civil rights era felt a strong responsibility to justice and equality at home and abroad simultaneously. That same idea inspires religious leaders such as Barber today, when he cites racism and militarism abroad as two of the most salient evils of what he calls America’s moral malady. Similarly, environmentalist activists, religious or secular, cite Pope Francis’s denunciation of the richest part of the world’s responsibility in climate change. Their call to a global collaboration draws upon the Pope’s plea to rich countries to act more responsibly and change their lifestyle and modes of energy consumption. Instrumental calls to use religion to win elections and counter the religious right often omit the importance of worldly commitment.

Toward a Faithful Social Justice Globalism

Instead of calling for the creation of a religious left, a more productive way to think about how to counter religious nationalism may be to better understand the nature and power of actions such as the ones cited above. Although they may come across as disparate, disjointed, or anecdotal, they express a commitment to a social justice globalism that brings together the faithful of all kinds. Movements and actions of solidarity that are organized by ecumenical groups are not interested in building an alliance of all “good” and progressive religions against bad religion. Whether a Dutch church service that protects an Armenian family from deportation, or the congregants of a church in Durham, North Carolina who surround an ICE van while singing “Amazing Grace” to prevent the arrest of Mexican immigrant Samuel Oliver-Bruno, such religious-inspired collective actions distinguish themselves by two important features.

First, they actualize a distinctive conception of, and relation to, religion. Religion is not a specific realm of activity or ideas, defined by specific boundaries, and placed outside of or next to the secular world. Rather, religion infuses questions of economics and politics. Many of these movements openly or tacitly draw upon the immanentism and mundane commitment called for by German pastor and anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), for whom God inhabits the secular world and manifests outside of sacred places—in the profane world and in human relationships with strangers and outcasts.

Second, these movements implement a particular form of cosmopolitanism, distinct from the universalist and potentially patronizing and elitist form of cosmopolitanism of Western political liberalism. Religious-inspired movements of solidarity with migrants are micro forms of cosmopolitanism that are deeply rooted in local communities. Interestingly, these micro and localized cosmopolitanisms emerge not primarily from New York, Paris, or Rome, but from Durham, Tornillo, the Hague in the Netherlands, the Italian region of Calabria, and the French Roya Valley.

If these movements truly want to resuscitate the internationalist spirit of the civil rights era, a key challenge for them will be to find a balance between providing safe spaces and protection to migrants and resisting catastrophist visions of the global south. They will need to figure out ways to work not just for people from the south, but with them. Sociologist Grace Yukich has shown the obstacles that the New Sanctuary Movement has faced in trying to build alliances between white and migrant activists. She argues that, at times, the movement has come across as a “pro-migrant movement without migrants.”

In the present context of moral panic around migration and refugee issues, while borders are being closed in Europe and walls built in the United States, it is very difficult for religious-based movements to resist the miserabilist vision of the global south as a mere place of death and war. Just as one should refrain from seeing religious progressivism as a tool for redeeming the political left, one should be wary of Christian-inspired visions of religious progressivism that more or less construct the persona of the migrant, refugee, black, Jew, or Muslim as a subject whose redemption will allow for reconstructing the Gospel. While the religious right imposes certitudes to its followers, it is important for religious progressives to offer more than sanctuaries to their own flock and instead keep building the “networks of mutuality” that MLK called for.

In the meantime, conservatives and progressives frame public debate through sophistic exchanges of Bible verses and descriptions of what Jesus really wanted. Instead of parroting and mimicking right-wing evangelicals, it may be more productive for progressives to initiate new conversations, establish new narratives, and enable new forms of collective actions.

I would like to thank Benjamin Naimark-Rowse and Mona Oraby for their helpful comments and suggestions for this essay. ]]> https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/10/17/does-the-united-states-need-a-religious-left/feed/ 1 https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/10/15/what-are-oaths-good-for/ https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/10/15/what-are-oaths-good-for/#respond Tue, 15 Oct 2019 16:27:02 +0000 http://tif.ssrc.org/?p=47161 As American statesmen and a US Supreme Court Justice in the ’90s were figuring out what to do with their words, music chart-toppers narrated the present in registers of uncompromising faith and temporal excess.

I first heard the term “the religious left” used by the Rev. William Sloane Coffin in 1994, and it sent my imagination soaring. Of course! The religious right had created the strategies for organizing masses of people around moral issues and for convincing them that one political party represented their beliefs on these matters. All that the left had to do to enjoy equal cultural and political power was to use those same methods in the service of its own agenda. If the right could motivate people against LGBT rights and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, the left could turn out at least as many people in support of AIDS research and the new, post-apartheid government of Nelson Mandela. But the last quarter century has not seen the adoption by the religious left of right-wing organizing strategies. It has not been possible, and it remains inadvisable.

It has not been possible for numerous reasons, beginning with the fact that the religious left is significantly more diverse than the religious right, including religiously. The evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics who anchor the religious right have important differences in terms of liturgy and polity, but their scriptural, historical, and cultural touchstones are largely the same. Their dominance of right-wing religious space creates a sense of uniformity and impermeability, despite the growing presence in their ranks of other conservative religious groups. These newer members of the coalition join in the opposition to issues like LGBT rights that have been focus points for decades.

The religious left, meanwhile, has long attempted to unite a variety of progressive spiritual communities, and the resulting diversity has worked, happily, against reductionism. Its early efforts were anti-war, beginning with the First World War, and arguably reached a peak of visibility in the United States with opposition to the Vietnam War. Religious differences can create frictions within interreligious coalitions, but so can racial differences within religious traditions. Who gets to speak, to lead? Whose organizational culture will prevail? What are the appropriate styles of leadership, and who is considered acceptable in such a role? What does this mean for whose agenda will ultimately be out in front?

The goal of progressive religious organizing is often said to be “community, not consensus,” or “unity, not uniformity.” If one truly respects religious differences this can be the only approach, but it works against the formation of bloc voters, bloc activists, and lock-step commitment to political platforms and candidates. My own experience in congregation-based community organizing with the Gamaliel Foundation is that religious communities join multifaith coalitions because a particular issue is critical to them and they are looking for support and collaboration. If their passion is for addressing gun violence, however, they may be less inclined to syphon off the energies of their membership toward activism for increased education funding. Coalitions shift their attention as issues gain traction (gun violence) or evolve in their expression (Black Lives Matter as part of the ongoing Black Freedom Movement). Groups’ commitments to interreligious organizing shift as well, in alignment with their own evolving priorities and their sense of how much support their issue is going to have within certain organizations in the current moment.

A second reason that the right’s organizing practices have not been taken up by the religious left is the variety of issues to which the left is committed. For almost fifty years the religious right has been blessed with a single, overarching nemesis that they (and the politicians who partner with them) mine continually, which is abortion. Other issues certainly exist for the right, but the organizing power of abortion in national politics provides a centralized focus and a point of accord that the left simply lacks. The focus of the religious left is broad—poverty, racism, immigration, sexual violence, LGBT rights, reproductive freedoms, and more. I respect the sincerity of the anger, grief, and dismay with which many religious conservatives view abortion; I also do not doubt the manipulation of these strong feelings by those Republicans who have turned people into “single-issue voters,” who may disregard other moral issues of importance to them, such as funding for health care, in order to vote a straight “pro-life” ticket. The religious left, meanwhile, has no single issue with which to galvanize and unify itself for the long term, to the frustration of people with very specific justice passions. The movement is simply too diverse. In fact, a major factor in the continuity of the progressive movement has been its decentralized focus.

The religious left has never sought to answer the right’s juggernaut issue of abortion with an equally dominating pro-choice activism. To do so would force the departure of some within the coalition, including a number of Catholics and African-American church groups. LGBT rights are another topic amongst those which a nun whom I know calls “pelvic issues.” Any number of multifaith efforts stick to particular topics or to related causes that steer clear of anything associated somehow with sex.

I know a multifaith organization that, in the days following the Pulse nightclub shooting, discussed placing a “we stand with Pulse and the LGBT community” statement on its website. It was the imam in the leadership group who said, “That would be difficult for me.” It would not have been difficult because he was anti-LGBT (he was most supportive). It would not have been difficult because the shooter self-identified as Muslim (the imam was very public in his opposition to the use of violence in the name of Islam). The statement would have been difficult because it would make him lose spiritual credibility with those members of his community who are not as supportive of LGBT persons. He faced a dilemma common to many religious leaders within multifaith organizing: how to ease their communities into a broader understanding of the oppression experienced by new partners, how to understand their own part in that oppression, and how to understand the interrelatedness of their own oppression to others’, and all without losing the legitimacy that makes them people to be listened to in the first place. The other leaders in the interreligious group thought it was more important to support their partner’s efforts within his community than to jointly publish an important message of solidarity and so they issued no statement.

Interreligious organizing is messy. Our partnerships can be ones of convenience, related to very particular shared goals, that avoid nervous discussions of sensitive issues. There are different levels of comfort with living with this ambiguity and tacit opposition. Multifaith partnerships sometimes dissolve from the pressure. There can be great differences of opinion on how patient to be with partners who have conservative opinions on particular subjects. I was once at a multifaith conference at which a woman minister asked the group’s opinion on whether she should accept an invitation to speak—but not to preach during a service—at a church that refuses to ordain women. I said she absolutely should do it, to provide her own undeniable example of faithful and gifted ministry, for if we are not in dialogue with those who differ from us we will not have the chance to change their minds. I was sternly rebuked by two young academics (who were not Christian) who insisted the minister must have nothing to do with such a disrespectful community and should not reinforce their prejudices by visiting them on their own terms. Any number of multifaith organizations experience tension between those who feel there should be, ironically, zero tolerance of the intolerant, and others who advocate for continuing the relationship because of the great value and potential of intercommunal friendship itself. Indeed, painful experiences of discrimination and injustice can be difficult to accommodate for the sake of staying in relationship.

A final major difference between the religious left and right is the reticence of the left to participate in anything that might taste of religious dominance, and the apparent enthusiasm of the right to do just that. The left is uncomfortable with promoting its own spiritual authority lest it work against the goal of an ethically diverse, respectful, responsive polity. There are also cautionary tales of when leftist religious muscle-flexing may have backfired. Many on the left experience the right as religious bullies, and are determined not to participate in any such behavior.

Religious progressives are a fractious family, making it difficult to adopt and adapt many of the successful strategies of the right that impose—or simply advertise—such a tight conformity. Progressives resist the homogenizing of their differences of human experience and spiritual belief. This messiness in the religious left is the very source of its integrity. The fate and the promise of the progressive religious movement reside in its efforts to build community in spite of differences while struggling to move all of society, itself included, toward greater justice. It is complicated work.

What is the “religious left” and what are its prospects for responding to the current moment of authoritarian populism? The short essays in this forum will probe the meaning, history, and relevance of movements and actors that may be grouped together under the label of a religious left, i.e., progressive political movements rooted in religion.

The resurgence of authoritarianism around the world—movements that are simultaneously populist and yet serve economic elites—represents both a challenge and an opportunity to the left. That is as true of the religious left as of other progressive political actors, and perhaps more so: Given the moral void now revealed at the core of the leading populist authoritarians, movements that ground their politics in a convincing moral vision may get a wider hearing than has been heretofore the case. Given the willingness of so many conservatives ostensibly concerned about morality to get in political bed with the authoritarian populists, progressives of moral integrity may be particularly credible. Thus, these essays explore a phenomenon that they show is historically important and currently significant, with the potential to be crucial for electoral and social struggles in the years ahead.

But before exploring this terrain, perhaps the very use of the term “religious left” must be justified. The forum contributors use the term loosely, without implying a set of unified or strategically coordinated actors who constitute anything like a single social movement. Whether the religious left ought to or is capable of acting in more coordinated fashion is a question worth exploring, but at present there exists no such coordination nor any entity capable of producing it. Rather, “the religious left” represents a convenient shorthand to describe a loose collection of entities generally seeking more egalitarian, democratic, liberationist, anti-racist, and/or ecologically responsive social policies while explicitly basing their political stance on their religious or spiritual commitments. In other words, the categories of religious left or progressive religion partake of all the ambiguity of the terms “progressive politics” and “religion.” Their political proclivities vary across a spectrum from quite radical to reformist, and their religious commitments vary from deep affiliation with major religious institutions, to movements seeking radical reform of those institutions, to highly personalistic spiritualities conceived as lying outside of institutions. The ambiguity of the category and the diversity of the movements within it simply reflects the real world today, in which longtime religious actors have discerned a new urgency to deep reform and political defense of democracies under the threat of authoritarianism, and longtime or newly-emergent political actors are seeking religious or spiritual roots to sustain their work in the face of contemporary challenges.

Thus, do not seek here a unified movement or closely shared political agendas. Rather, the religious left discussed in the forum will share a broad spirit of democratic egalitarianism, some kind of identity that prioritizes spirituality or religious belief—and a common threat in the form of the new authoritarian populism.

If we accept the category of religious left as a category for analysis, what do we see? First, the religious left certainly has an extensive history, from the “saints” who helped prosecute the English Revolution to many of the abolitionists who fought American slavery to many women’s suffragists to the civil rights movement to resisters against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons to the liberationist Christians of Latin America, the Philippines, Africa, and East Asia. Second, the religious left has significant meaning for many of its adherents: while the intertwining of religious belief and political commitment may be a marriage of convenience for some, for many it represents a strong identity regarding what spiritual commitment really entails in a world of inequality and injustice, and the radical calls of the founding figures across many religious traditions. Third, we see a widespread contemporary presence across a variety of societies, from the spiritual grounding of some leaders of Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights activists, and faith-based or broad-based organizers and spiritual progressives in the United States, to religious activists against white nationalism in Europe to ecological advocates motivated to defend the rainforest by a spiritual view of ecosystems, to the resistance to Communist Party authoritarianism in Hong Kong—and much more. Fourth, we also see vast diversity in their stances vis-à-vis institutionalized religion and institutionalized politics; no one way forward appears to appeal to the actors of the religious left.

How might we begin to dissect the likely future trajectories of these movements? Of course, if recrudescent authoritarian populism takes hold of political institutions for the long term, the immediate future of the religious left will be dire along with the rest of progressive political aspirations. More likely, the future trajectory of these movements will depend on how they answer and respond historically to a series of questions and dilemmas:

• Can the religious left globally project a compelling vision of a more egalitarian and democratic future that undercuts the populist appeal of authoritarians while simultaneously inspiring commitment from those excluded by white nationalist and male supremacist visions? That is, can these movements become effective alternative channels for the legitimate discontent of working people, thus severing populism from racism and its service to elite economic interests?
• How will the religious left respond to three simultaneous macrotrends: i) the continuing interest in and engagement with religion and spirituality in a wide variety of settings and across generations; ii) current alienation, especially of younger generations in Western societies, from institutionalized religion (even when many young people continue to identify with the tradition the institution claims to represent), and the concomitant decline of the very institutions that have sometimes supported the religious left; and iii) the deep secularity of contemporary life, in which non-belief and non-spiritual viewpoints are constantly available alternatives even as many people hunger for spiritual meaning in both the West and much of the world.
• Are actors on the religious left sufficiently committed to religious institutions such that they will engage in the hard work of cultural critique and organizational reform required to reorient those religious institutions in the progressive directions they believe represent the traditions’ ethical core? Or will actors on the religious left decide that the preferable route forward lies in abandoning institutions in favor of political work sustained by individual spiritual commitment?
• Alternatively, does the religious left need ongoing ties to religious traditions and institutions—as a source of new sympathizers, funding, credibility, shared spiritual disciplines, or spiritual support amidst the vagaries of political engagement? How does the answer differ in different societies?
• Can the religious left build organizational cultures sufficiently vibrant to provide grounding and leverage against the deep cultural assumptions that undergird vast swaths of contemporary culture, especially in Western and westernized societies but increasingly across the globe? Those assumptions include a radically autonomous view of human persons that severs individuals from the communal contexts in which they thrive as social animals, and a view of public institutions as inherently repressive.

Depending on how the religious left responds to these dilemmas and questions, one can imagine four potential trajectories ahead.1 Broadly speaking, the likely potential trajectories appear to be:

First, just as progressive political engagement has sometimes functioned for individuals as an exit door from religious engagement, it may become the exit door from religion for the religious left as a movement. If spiritual discipline and practice lose meaning or fade from prominence in the glare of intense political engagement, the religiously-engaged and spiritually-focused dimensions of the movement will wither. On this road, the religious left will ultimately merge with secular progressive politics.

But perhaps spiritual meaning can continue to be cultivated on the religious left in the absence of substantive ties to religious institutions or the spiritual practices typically embedded there. On this road, the religious left would bring together “spiritual but not religious” actors into some degree of coherent political action and sustain that work over the long term.

But this may represent an impossible task: perhaps history has produced religious traditions, orders, congregations, and larger institutions because sustaining spiritual meaning for the long term and across generations requires such structures. If this is the case, the above strategies must fail and religious left actors hoping to influence politics long term—at least those that survive to do so—will be those that pursue one of two strategies. On one hand, they might seek to systematically reshape existing institutions, striving to become not only progressive movements seeking political reform, but also spiritual revitalization movements seeking to reform their traditions as well. On the other hand, they might seek to systematically institutionalize themselves as new functional equivalents of traditions, orders, congregations, or denominations (albeit perhaps called something else)—the way much of “non-denominational Christianity” has become a series of major networks of megachurches that function like denominations.

Finally, perhaps the conditions no longer exist that made religious traditions, orders, congregations, and denominations the institutional carriers for religion and thus powerful partners for social movements—historically and in the very recent past. Perhaps the new social media technologies and smartphone capabilities have so changed human communication flows that alternative forms of stabilizing religiously-inspired political work can be found. If so, it might be possible to forge a sustainable religious left held together (i.e., institutionalized in an alternative mode) via cyberlinked networks of collaborators embodying a variety of spiritual commitments and religious traditions, each of whom carries their spirituality autonomously from religious institutions. On this road, networks of spiritually grounded activists committed to progressive politics become the future carriers of the religious left. On the other hand, such hyper-individualized spiritualities might be incapable of sustaining long-term work, of reproducing it across generations, or of pulling adherents out of the centripetal temptation of radical narcissism. In this case, this road would herald the implosion of the religious left, no doubt to be reborn in the future.

Thus, depending on how the religious left responds to contemporary challenges and on what turns out to be historically viable, a variety of alternative futures might play out—no doubt including some not contemplated here. But a great deal about the future of the religious left depends on answers to these questions, and the essays in this series explore various dimensions of the religious left that are relevant to such answers. What does the history of religious progressivism teach contemporary leaders? Does the Christian right offer a model for a religious left, or a counter-model to be avoided? What are the costs and benefits of building a relatively unified religious left? Should religious progressives invest primarily in electoral politics and current political institutions, or in prefigurative politics that critique and begin to envision better institutions? How should the religious left interrogate or redirect the current flow of populism in polities around the world? To what extent does religious progressivism offer a set of “bridging cultural practices” that can help stabilize and empower the interracial, interfaith, and cross-class alliances that can build a more democratic and egalitarian politics?

A final thought drawn from the North American context suggests why this conversation matters: If Alexis de Tocqueville had it right that US democracy depends upon the cultural toolkit and habits of the heart learned via religion, then answers to these questions will shape whether the new American authoritarianism changes the trajectory of history the way that the rejection of Reconstruction did in the late nineteenth century, leading to Jim Crow and segregation. More broadly, answers to these questions in societies around the world will determine whether religions have effective responses to authoritarian populism, and thus remain relevant for shaping contemporary human history. As Antonio Gramsci argued, political and economic struggles are partly fought on the cultural terrains that undergird human communities and shape human orientations across generations. Even in a secular age, those cultural terrains are deeply shaped by religious traditions and institutions and by the spiritual commitments of citizens. The essays in this forum will thus help us think about the shape of these struggles now and into the future.

This post was updated on 11/04/2019 and again on 12/02/2019.

Update 12/02/2019: These two calls for content are now closed. Check back in the coming months for additional opportunities.

The Immanent Frame has been a leading platform for groundbreaking public scholarship on secularism and religion since its founding in 2007. The past two years have seen expanded content on contemporary and global issues as demonstrated by our Exchanges, experimental projects (especially the tenth anniversary celebration “Is this all there is”), and emergent focus on teaching religion. We aim to further extend these innovations and to broaden TIF’s network of contributors and readers in ways that maintain its identity as a flagship scholarly forum.

Historically, TIF has recruited content only by invitation due to a limited editorial staff. The TIF editor and editorial associate work closely with invited authors to produce consistently high-quality scholarship. We have as a result fostered a loyal contributor and reader base that stretches across the Atlantic and English-speaking publics more broadly. In recognition of that tradition, and to intentionally widen the circle of potential contributors while maintaining our commitment to quality, we are issuing targeted calls for contributions. These calls will run for set periods of time with the expectation that selected proposals will be developed for publication within the academic calendar year. Broadening TIF in such a way is also intended to spotlight questions that have received comparatively less attention on the platform. By recruiting content from new contributors, we hope to expand our readership among a wider set of interested publics including scholars focused on public-facing work and practitioners, media, and policy audiences.

We opened two distinct calls for content to begin this process in Fall 2019. Whereas the Fall 2019 Call for Exchanges is for proposals on any questions related to the academic study and public understanding of secularism and religion, the Fall 2019 Call for Individual Essays seeks submissions that directly address religion and social movements around the globe.

To submit proposals for either of these open calls, complete the online submission forms found at the links below. Update 12/02/2019: These calls for content are now closed. Check back in the coming months for additional opportunities.

Fall 2019 Call for Exchanges (deadline 1 November 2019) — We are no longer accepting submissions for this call at this time.

Fall 2019 Call for Individual Essays—Religion and social movements (deadline 1 December 2019) — We are no longer accepting submissions for this call at this time.

Only proposals submitted through the online submission forms will be considered. Any questions regarding these calls for content can be directed to ifblog@ssrc.org.

Promises come in degrees. A promise to pay back five dollars is less serious than a promise to care for a friend’s child. A promise to cook dinner is far less serious than a promise to guard a president’s life. We can think of vows and oaths as the most serious types of promises. These promises often involve important responsibilities and are usually made in a public, ceremonial fashion. For instance, US presidents take an oath of office at an inauguration ceremony. Married couples usually commit to one another at a public wedding in which they exchange vows. While oaths and vows are essential and important, they are often fraught with uncertainty, ambiguity, and danger. Here I argue that these frightening features are a necessary element of all serious promises.

Consider how oaths differ from ordinary promises. In many cases, the breach of an ordinary promise is forgivable. Say Hank has promised his spouse that he will clean the kitchen, yet forgets. His spouse will be upset with him, but will also likely forgive him if he sincerely apologizes. On the other hand, if Hank breaks his wedding vows, his spouse will not forgive him as easily. Likewise, there are conditions under which we would forgive a political leader for failing to deliver on a campaign promise. But we are unlikely to forgive that same leader for an overt act of treason. An act of treason would be a direct violation of their oath of office.

Additionally, persons tend to identify with oaths in ways that they do not identify with ordinary promises. There is a sense in which taking an oath creates a new identity. In taking an oath of office, a person becomes a mayor, governor, or president. In assenting to wedding vows, one becomes a spouse. To breach an oath, then, is to act contrary to the identity that one has chosen for oneself. The breach is a serious matter.

These two features of oaths highlight why oaths are essential and important. First, there are some social statuses that we take to have great significance. The positions of president, soldier, or attorney are essential to a well-functioning nation. We want assurance that persons who occupy these positions will do so faithfully and consistently. The oath serves as a guarantee that the person taking the oath will not violate our trust. Thus, an actual violation is a serious matter. Second, oaths are personally significant because they allow us to express our deep commitment to a cause, office, or person. Wedding vows, for example, allow romantic partners to commit to one another in ways that cannot be captured by ordinary promises.

While essential and important, oaths can give rise to moral and personal tension. An oath may obligate persons to undertake actions that they would otherwise avoid or actions that they find morally compromising. In this way, oaths are dangerous. For instance, consider the following three scenarios and related questions:

1. A soldier has taken an oath of enlistment, by which he swears to follow the orders of his president and commanding officer. He finds himself under the command of a corrupt and selfish president who orders him to fight in a war that he finds unjust. Is the soldier required to fight in the war? Would he act wrongly in violating his oath?

2. A married couple has vowed to remain in the relationship “for better or for worse . . . in sickness and in health.” Does this vow require the wife to stay with the husband after learning of his affair? Does the vow require the wife to stay with the husband after he develops severe Alzheimer’s disease?

3. A man takes an oath to follow the commands of a god. In exchange, the god blesses the man with riches, fame, and health. One day, the god commands the man to murder his spouse and children. Would the man act wrongly in disobeying this command? In obeying it?

Oaths give rise to tensions because they are binding in ways that ordinary promises are not. The list of acceptable excuses for breaking an ordinary promise is long. Bad weather, sickness, and a family emergency can all serve as excuses for not making good on a promise. The related list for oaths is short, if it exists at all. Further, one can never be sure what one has agreed to in taking an oath. The content of an ordinary promise is relatively straightforward. A promise to pay back fifty dollars is just that. But the content of an oath of loyalty is indefinitely open-ended and thus potentially dangerous. Loyalty may require any number of actions that were not contemplated at the time that the oath was taken.

One may think that these drastic moral tensions are not a necessary feature of oaths, that they can be avoided. After all, an oath can be renounced. While this is true, breaching or renouncing an oath can carry steep penalties. To breach an oath to a god is to incur criticism from one’s religious community, and, even worse, to incur the wrath of that god. To renounce one’s oath as a soldier is to give up one’s identity as a soldier, and, perhaps, to face steep penalties from the government. And, to renounce one’s wedding vows is to give up on a marriage and one’s identity as a spouse. Thus, one can escape the duties entailed by an oath, but not without great cost. Breaking an oath can undermine one’s self-image and can be attended by steep social and legal penalties. In short, a solemn promise, an oath, is treacherous because it entails a great social and personal commitment that cannot be easily waived.

Alternatively, one may believe that the treachery of oaths can be avoided not by abrogating the commitments entailed by an oath, but by subjectively determining what those commitments are. One who follows this strategy would, in each instance, decide whether some course of action was required by their oath. The soldier in the above case would determine for himself whether his oath required him to go to war. The wife in the above case would consult her own judgment to determine whether she is obligated to stay with her cheating husband. Finally, the man who has committed himself to a god would selectively determine which of the god’s commands he was bound to obey.

In this way, it seems, the oath takers could maintain their identity and commitments, yet avoid any actions they deem problematic or unsavory. While seemingly promising, this strategy will not work either. To see why, we must first think in more detail about what it means to make a promise or to undertake a commitment. To promise or to commit oneself is to agree to be governed by certain norms. For instance, to agree to build a house is to agree to undertake those actions that constitute building a house. These actions are normative because one could either succeed or fail in undertaking them. They are also normative in that one can be praised or blamed for undertaking or failing to undertake them.

In short, there is a right way and a wrong way to fulfill a promise or an oath. If there was no right way to fulfill an oath, oaths would not be normative. Put differently, if anything counted as fulfilling an oath, nothing would so count. Under the current proposal, the oath taker subjectively determines the content of the oath, what is right and wrong according to the oath. This strategy is doomed to fail because if what is right according to an oath is simply what the oath taker believes is right, then there is no sense in which the oath taker is bound by a norm. In this case, anything goes!

This is a point that was emphasized by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. As Wittgenstein argues, there can be no private language—that is, a language governed by norms that are determined exclusively by a single person. Such a language, he argued, would have no norms and thus would not be a language. The point I make is similar: there can be no private oaths. To commit oneself by taking an oath is to commit oneself to something external, an external standard by which one’s actions can be judged. Thus, this second strategy will not work. Oaths are treacherous partly because their demands necessarily outstrip our subjective understanding.

We can ask where the content of oaths comes from. Following Wittgenstein, I believe that the content comes from a community of persons who agree upon and extend the meaning of any particular oath. The extent to which a soldier must be loyal to a president is determined by a political community. The degree of faithfulness one owes to a marriage is determined in part by the married couple themselves, but also by the married couple’s community. Commitments to deities are harder to understand. I tend to think that these commitments are determined by religious communities, but I will leave that question to the theologians.

Given that oaths are treacherous, that they may require us to do things that make us uncomfortable, one might conclude that it is better to avoid these solemn promises altogether. But, one need not draw this conclusion. We rightfully seek assurance that persons who hold vital social positions will execute their duties faithfully. Additionally, part of being human is making strong commitments about the content of one’s character and about one’s loyalty to other persons or causes. We would not want to live in a world without oaths. While oaths should not be avoided altogether, one should think long and hard before taking an oath. An oath can lead to places that one could never imagine.

“Our challenge is to remain true to the spirit of comedy in this play while not avoiding the difficult ending! How do we tell a story in which these guys can be credibly brought into a world we share?”

We are at an early rehearsal of my university’s summer production of Two Gentlemen of Verona. The director, Beth Lopes, is talking to the cast about performing Shakespeare’s earliest comedy in the age of #MeToo. And yes, the two gents ARE a problem. At the beginning of the play, Proteus pledges fidelity to his best friend Valentine and then declares his love to Julia. By the end of the play, Proteus has abandoned Julia for Sylvia, the beloved of Valentine. To get the new girl, he slanders his best friend and then, rebuffed by Sylvia, attempts to rape her in the forest. The patterned protestations that open the play track the progress of the plot as it veers into slander, perjury, and sexual assault. Such oaths in Shakespeare are like tennis balls thrown from one speech partner to the other, with an invisible reach that lands, bounces, and bursts later in the play. The prettier the oath, the more shit will be broken: laws, promises, hearts, trust.

In this play, forgiveness is as shocking as what is forgiven. Not only does Valentine release his chagrined and humiliated friend from his “shame and guilt,” but he offers Sylvia to him: “All that was mine in Sylvia I give thee” (V.iv.78, 89). Sylvia is silent, her consent not considered, and directors like Beth Lopes must decide how to frame her response.

Watching our actors struggle with Two Gents made me realize that Shakespeare himself would come up with new scenarios and new solutions in his later visitations of the play. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, once-devoted couples (devoted = avowed or committed) come apart and then return to their original positions, their lovers’ oaths chastened by the rumbling of desire. In Merchant, women secure pledges from their husbands and then mercilessly test them, reminding us that oaths are always a “joint action” requiring cooperation from both parties. In Measure for Measure, a woman forgives her would-be sexual abuser, but only because his pardoning will benefit another woman who has assisted her in her projects. In The Winter’s Tale, a slandered wife offers forgiveness through and on behalf of the next generation, asserting the reach of oaths beyond the individuals who contract them.

In none of these plays do guys offer to give their girlfriends away. Shakespeare definitely learned something.

I happened to be reading Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Harvard, 2019) the same weekend that we began rehearsing Two Gents. The basic rhythm of thought tracked by Brandom is this: commitment to an idea and to standards of reasoning; failure, confession, and judgment when fidelity to the idea is revealed to be compromised; forgiveness and the rebuilding of trust. This sequence of actions, Brandom argues, shapes the development of concepts in philosophy, the elaboration of precedents in common law jurisprudence, and the ethical stances (or “normative commitments”) implied by both. Brandom’s basic narrative also sounds a lot like a Shakespeare play.

The story of thought goes like this. A philosopher or judge arrives at an opinion, with regards, say, to rights. That opinion is then deemed inadequate, perhaps due to inherent bias in which women, or Catholics, or indigenous peoples count as less than fully rights-bearing. In Brandom’s colorful formulation, what the judge ate for breakfast has infected their judicial decision with “the aspect of individuality.” “Breakfast” goes far beyond green eggs and ham, to encompass a veritable kitchen sink filled with cultural presuppositions and attitudes of all kinds. The judge may be partly aware of their own prejudice and they come to confess their crime against truth, if not in their own lifetime then through a hermeneutic process that brings the limits and even violence of the original decision to light. This exposure is the moment of confession (“I got it wrong”), but also of judgment (“You broke your oath to be impartial”).

Confession and judgment are two sides of the same action in the drama of ideas; sometimes the confessor and the judge are the same person, though more often these elements are disclosed over time. But there is a final moment, forgiveness, when an interpreter of the tradition recognizes what the thinker was aiming to accomplish, what they in fact contributed to the unfolding shape of truth. Brandom calls this third moment “magnanimous forgiving recollection.” That basically means that the later interpreter gives the earlier thinker the benefit of the doubt, acknowledging what the forbearer’s initial formulation, however cringy, contributed to the development of an ethical truth or philosophical concept that remains in the process of formation today.

So what does this have to do with a silly little play like Two Gents?

1. Proteus makes promises, breaks promises, confesses his crime, and is forgiven by Valentine.
   
2. Valentine’s forgiveness of Proteus is a crime against Sylvia, whose consent is ignored in a second assault on her personhood.
   
3. Valentine’s crime is also Shakespeare’s crime, and he is confessing and judging that crime every time he returns to forswearing and forgiveness in his later works.
   
4. Directors like Beth Lopes are also practicing “magnanimous forgiving recollection” when they strive to recognize Sylvia as a moral agent, which means judging Shakespeare, while also offering the young men a way back into social life, which means forgiving Shakespeare.

Let’s take the case of Othello. Was the playwright ahead of his time in imagining an interracial romance between two characters endowed with extraordinary courage and dignity, or did Shakespeare betray Othello even more brutally than Sylvia, by setting his creation on a murderous path that pushes gullibility into barbarism?

Both perspectives are true, one from the vantage of judgment and the other from the vantage of forgiveness. Magnanimous forgiving recollection is not about apologizing for Shakespeare’s failures but rather about incorporating his works in both their failures and their achievements into a longer, ongoing search for truths—truths concerning human equality, the nature of social bonds, and the quality of mercy.

In Othello, Desdemona’s failure to produce the handkerchief eventually leads Othello to stalk off stage with a departing expletive:

Othello: The handkerchief.
Desdemona: I’faith, you are to blame.
Othello: ’Swounds! (III.iv.82-89)

Othello is no Jesus, but he is certainly being persecuted by the play’s devil, Iago, and he draws dignity from a series of biblical types that link him to Pauline ideas about universal humanity and to the shared values of the people of the Book. The instruments that Iago has used to torture Othello include his blackness, his marked physical difference from the white Venetians. When Othello swears ’Swounds, his pierced and pricked personhood opens up onto a world of woundings. Contemporary productions are most powerful when they respond to Othello in the modes of both judgment and forgiveness. Iqbal Khan’s 2015 production, which cast actors of African descent in the roles of Othello (Hugh Quarshie) and Iago (Lucian Msumati), spread out the dimensions of racial hatred and self-hatred that Shakespeare was struggling with in this play.

Brandom does not quote Shakespeare in his 835-page tome. He does, however, supplement tragedy, which belongs to crime, confession, and judgment, with comedy, which belongs to forgiveness. What Brandom calls the “spirit of trust” is also “the spirit of Shakespeare.” Although Shakespeare wrote great tragedies, he also searched for a dramatic form—call it tragicomedy, romance, or simply drama—that forgives broken oaths in a manner that aims to recognize the interdependent personhoods of everyone present on the scene in a tremulous new community.

Brandom’s book diagnoses our contemporary crisis of recognition as a crisis in trust. The kitchen sinks of political and cultural division are making the search for shared truths and the possibility of social trust increasingly vexed. How can we affirm and defend our own commitments while managing to recognize what motivates those with whom we disagree? Whether we are addressing the woundings of sexual abuse or the woundings of racism, what are the most promising and responsible interfaces between judgment and forgiveness? The tender, serious work that Beth Lopes initiated at that rehearsal in June reflects the challenges that face all of us today: how to judge fairly, forgive appropriately, and recognize fully, in a manner that affirms the processual character of both truth and troth.

The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics seeks applications from junior scholars and recent PhD graduates for up to four postdoctoral fellowships in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. The appointment is for one year, renewable for a second year. Eligible applicants must complete the PhD by July 1, 2020, and have completed it no earlier than January 1, 2015. In exceptional cases a qualified applicant holding a JD, without the PhD, may be considered.

Research associates will spend most of their time pursuing research and writing for their own projects. They will also serve the intellectual life of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics through participation in its biweekly interdisciplinary seminar and events hosted by the Center. Their teaching responsibilities will include: 1) developing one course per year to complement and contribute to the Center’s curricular offerings, and 2) possibly assisting in one additional course each year (depending on the particular teaching needs of the Center).

Washington University in St. Louis is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer and especially encourages members of underrepresented groups to apply.

Required Qualifications: Applicants should hold a doctorate in religious studies, politics, anthropology, law, philosophy, theology, American studies, history, area studies, sociology, or another relevant field. Scholars should be engaged in projects centrally concerned with religion and politics in the United States, historically or in the present day.

Applications are due in full by December 1, 2019. Applicants will be notified of fellowship decisions by March 2, 2020.

For the full call for applications, including application instructions, visit the Center’s website. With questions, contact the Center at (314) 935-9345 or via email at rap@wustl.edu.

This forum, Gospels of giving, is dedicated to discussing wealth and why it is given. One of my central research questions concerns how wealth is given. What tools or techniques do the wealthy use to dispense their charity and, as such, ultimately, their vision for the future?

Apart from a few tales about Howard Hughes giving a $100 tip, most stories of the wealthy are not of immediate or direct giving. Few “make it rain.” Instead, most of the wealthy use legal and financial instruments, and often teams of professionals, to grow, manage, and dispense their wealth. Or as the “Panama papers” show, people of means often use the mobility of their money to arbitrage favorable tax regimes, hiding their fortunes off shore, and allowing them to grow even further.

One key instrument the wealthy use to give and maintain their legacy is the trust, wherein an asset is entrusted for a specific purpose for beneficiaries and managed by trustees. As Daromir Rudnyckyj writes that the waqf is a possible instrument for the mobilization of capital, the trust, a parallel instrument, similarly holds the possibility to mobilize, pause, and accumulate capital over a very long period, with charitable giving, in perpetuity. My research in India is an ethnographic study of how Parsis, Indian Zoroastrians, utilize the charitable trust to create very particular property relations in the city of Bombay-Mumbai.1 It relates how this religious minority deploys the trust form in various ways to mark urban space and retain a particular sense of their ethnoreligious identity. In the city today, Parsis are synonymous with charitable giving even as their population is dwindling. Due to their early dealings with colonial powers, Parsis are some of the largest landowners in the city, both privately and communally, through their favorite instrument of giving, the public charitable trust.

Much of Parsi wealth accumulation resulted from the “country trade” between India and China in the eighteenth century. Wealth earned from trade in opium and tea, and then later from cotton, was then targeted to city improvements through charitable institutions such as hospitals, schools, and water tanks, but also lavish private estates. A merchant prince like Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy not only gave to his own religious community, but also worked with colonial authorities to build needed city infrastructure for all of Bombay’s inhabitants. By endowing his opium fortunes, Jeejeebhoy’s name still echoes through the city on the colleges, hospitals, and libraries he endowed, as well as through his descendants, still bearing his name and baronet title, as the trustees. He was able to execute his vision for the future by giving charity through the trust.

These charitable investments paid great dividends in reputational gains as well, bringing Parsis to the fore of elite Indians, and later to the Independence Movement. The British legal form of the trust was readily taken up by Parsis in the late eighteenth century. It resembled an already familiar endowment form, the Zoroastrian endowment, which can be dated back to at least Sassanian times in Iran. Most historians of the community in India turn to the Parsi Prakash, a kind of almanac of community events in Gujarati in ten volumes, initiated by Bahmanji Behramji Patel beginning in the late 1870s and ending in 1970. The Prakash is actually a compilation of benevolent practices and the concomitant successes and failures of this micro-community. Even within historiography, charitable giving therefore comes to stand in as a marker of community history.

One of the key techniques of the charitable trust, a legal instrument given perpetual status in India, is to hinge together capital, time, and a wish. For example, the Tata and Godrej families, among other prominent industry players, have bound charitable giving to their enormous corporate profits for the benefit of the Indian public since the founding of their companies in the late nineteenth century. For many Parsi donors, however, their express wish was to house and spiritually nurture their tiny community.

While charitable giving is an integral pillar of the Zoroastrian religion, the status of Parsis as an ethnoreligious minority in India has turned and targeted much of their giving goals particularly to build, maintain, and defend their community. Reflecting the shifting challenges over time, Parsi trusts over the last centuries support temple building, housing, and welfare programs, which now include an IVF clinic to aid infertile Parsi couples. Therefore, while giving is utilized to address education, medical care, and housing needs, it is also practiced as a particular mode of ethnoreligious survival.

This perpetual instrument, whether put toward public or communal benefit, is still intensely about how and whether one generation transfers its wealth to their kin. As Katharyne Mitchell writes in this series, giving creates interdependence and obligations. One prominent example in my work is the story of Jerbai Wadia (1852-1956), a widow of a hugely wealthy Parsi industrialist, who, instead of bequeathing her fortune to her living sons, chose to endow most of her wealth into several trust housing colonies. Wadia’s giving transformed the settlement of the Parsi community as she endowed enormous plots of land and built housing colonies with about 1500 charity flats. This subsidized housing remains very comfortable enclave living for thousands of Parsis, who were enticed to settle in the city from rural towns. It is rumored that Wadia disinherited her sons as they had converted to Christianity. Nevertheless, while divesting them of full ownership she did bind them to the trust properties as trustees. To this day, Wadia’s family continues to manage the properties that she left to the Parsi community. One of the key aims of my research is to analyze this configuration of endowment as it dissolves individual ownership into intergenerational obligation. Her descendants must disperse her capital according to her wishes. With her endowment, Wadia is able to retain her charitable wish through time and in perpetuity.

While endowing wealth has consequences to immediate kin, done on a larger scale, like we see with the Parsis, such endowments have critical consequences for fostering communal assets, but also for maintaining or even exacerbating long term inequalities within and between communities and within urban space. For instance, while there are many poor Parsis, most are fully supported by charity welfare programs run by Parsi trusts, offering highly subsidized housing, free education, and medical care. This has become possible only because the trust structures charitable obligations as a temporal hinge: connecting past and present, the beneficence of the settlor to all beneficiaries through time. Contemporary Parsis therefore continue to benefit from the ways that people like Jeejeebhoy and Wadia have bound their capital through time together with their wishes.

Relative to the average Mumbaiker, half of whom live in informal housing, this supportive web of charitable giving has kept Parsis, over the long term, within the middle class: housed, educated, and upwardly mobile. On the other hand, it has entrenched very specific notions of communal and gender propriety. Spatially, too, perpetual trust properties along with old rent control laws have further intensified housing inequalities in this megacity, removing properties from public circulation and reserving them only for specified beneficiaries. While the instrument allows for perpetual giving, the trust’s persistence in time, connecting capital with a wish, may constrain benefit, making some trustworthy and others not.

If the point of an oath is to swear truth, what does it mean if the truth is stacked against you?

This is a question I found myself thinking about as I sat in the National Archives looking at cart after cartful of documents that the archivist told me probably did not exist. I had come to Washington, DC to follow up on a fragment of a story: A Lakota woman named Emma Vlandry’s prize possession, a sewing machine, had been dumped into a nearby river by “hostile Indians” in the wake of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Vlandry’s experience seemed to indicate historical evidence of lateral violence, a particularly demoralizing effect of divide-and-conquer techniques used by agents of white supremacy against indigenous people.

Vlandry’s sewing machine was just one item amid a vast number of individual objects that were ransacked and destroyed by angry Indian people when the US Army descended upon Lakota homelands in 1890. Initially, the archivists presented me with a single box of material. Thanks to fellow historian R. Eli Paul, I knew there had to be more, so I kept asking. Within a few days, the single box had multiplied to something like forty-five boxes, stuffed onto three wheeled carts. The containers were filled with handwritten claims numbered 1 through 726. Each claim consisted of several pages, folded carefully into thirds. I took a deep breath and began to unfurl them, nervous that the fragile paper might crack or that my hands would smudge the 125-year-old ink.

Every claim included the same standardized language, with blank spaces that could be filled in with the particulars. Here is one example:

Lame Dog VS. The United States.

Lame Dog, the above named claimant, being first duly sworn, deposes and says, that he has been a legal resident of the Sioux reservation for the 13 years last past, and that during his absence from his place of habitation in obedience to the order requiring all friendlies and others residing on the reservation to report at the Agency he sustained a loss of $68.00 by the total destruction or appropriation of the following described property, to-wit:

To One house . . . . . . . . . . . . $15.00

“ Two Bedsteads . . . . . . . . . .$10.00

“ Three Trunks . . . . . . . . . . . $13.00

“ Six Loads of wood . . . . . . . $10.00

“ one horse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $20.00

                         $68.00

Affiant further states, that at the time, of the loss, on or about the 31st day of December 1890 he was the lawful owner of the above described property and the same was in his peaceable possession at his place in White Clay district, Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota.

And further affiant verily believes that said destruction or appropriation was done by a band of disaffected Ogalalla and Brule Indians and further that at no time during the late trouble among the Indians, has he been hostile, either by word or action, to the government of the United States. Affiant therefore prays that his claim be allowed.

Signed this 27th day of April 1891

Lame Dog his x mark, Ogalalla Indian

I found the lists of personal possessions almost as fascinating as the premise lurking behind the standardized wording of the deposition itself. Such details could be mind-numbing in their specificity. I imagined a huge pile—possibly the size of the archive itself—made up of all the objects listed in these claims: houses burned, horses stolen, lamps smashed, tools broken. The 726 claims were collected within the span of about a year under the oversight of special Indian agent James Cooper. I could feel the questions mounting as well: did Cooper work alone or did he have a team? How many of these testimonies given under oath involved a language interpreter?

Lame Dog’s answers to Cooper’s questions reveal that he had been employed as an army scout, and that during “the trouble,” he seemed to agree that his possessions were set on fire by “hostile Oglala and Brule Indians.” His claim, like all the others, includes the sworn statements of two witnesses, and a tally indicating the amount authorities agreed was reasonable compensation. In Lame Dog’s case, perhaps due to his service as a scout, all $68.00 were returned.

In the court of public opinion in 1890, those killed at Wounded Knee were themselves to blame for the chaos and violence. They had resisted orders to cease roaming about their homelands and come settle permanently near the reservation agencies. Remaining in the hinterland enabled them to violate another prohibition—that which forbade the practice of Indian religion. Many of those labeled “hostile” by the state were participants in the Ghost Dance, and their refusal to live on white terms was a source of deep anxiety for the US Army, who contrasted their actions to the seemingly more compliant “civilized” tribes in the Southeast. By December of 1890, it had come down to this: grown men in US Army uniforms hunting down women and children in the cold light of day. But just as “hostiles” had to be punished, Indians who obeyed orders had to be rewarded. And so the government scrambled to make concessions, lest someone start asking questions about genocide. Lakota cooperation with evacuation orders involved leaving what few possessions they held vulnerable to depredation. Out of fairness to those who had followed directions, Congress agreed to allocate $100,000 to compensate the “friendlies” for their losses.

For all of the things that could be said about these claims, one thing is clear: sworn testimony was critical to Cooper’s objective. The x-marks, interviews, and dollar amounts make claims to truth, opening the way for legal and financial restitution. A central problem of Cooper’s task was understanding which Indians could be trusted as friendlies and which ones were actually undercover hostiles seeking a fraudulent payout. Most of the claimants in Cooper’s investigation were granted considerably less than they sought compensation for. A handful received nothing. Deposition after deposition, Cooper and his team asked claimants to state their names, their losses, and who they believe to have caused the destruction. Most importantly, they were asked to state where they had been during “the trouble” at Wounded Knee. The answer to this last question held the key to determining whether or not the claimant could be trusted. If the claimant stated that they were at the agency—or with “the stampede” of Indian people who fled the agency in panic at the sound of cannon fire—they were verified as friendly. The vast majority met this criteria. Of the 726 claims, however, six were disqualified. In response to the question of “where were you during the trouble?” these Lakotas answered honestly or perhaps defiantly: “I was in the Badlands.”

Sitting in the archive next to the carts, I began to feel as though I were struggling for breath beneath the mass of information overflowing from the boxes. The pile of plundered objects kept growing to include wagons, clocks, plows, bolts of fabric, chairs, and stored food. I found Emma Vlandry’s claim, and thought again about the sense of sadness she felt upon returning home and finding her sewing machine dumped in the nearby river.1 It might seem odd that Ghost Dancers would target a sewing machine. But, after looking at list after list of the kinds of things that were destroyed, a pattern seemed to emerge. This activity echoes the kinds of actions taken by English Luddites or tool-breaking slaves in the Cotton Belt, as well as “looting” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other urban calamities. Such moments in American social life demonstrate that what might appear at face-value to be haphazard destruction is often, in reality, the visible and material evidence of profound social antagonisms.

There is much that is strange about the claims: The blank spaces left to fill with identifying information, the juxtaposition of handwriting with typeface text; the use of gender-specific pronouns to indicate property ownership and possession. Like the outer layer of a cast, the claims stiffened compound and pliable realities into rigid forms: that of discrete, settled, and property-owning individuals. Line by line, Cooper’s report rendered indigenous anger and frustration null and void, transforming complex entities and actions into legible, quantifiable data while hardening distrust and resentment among families and communities.

What truths do these claims contain? Somewhere inside the mountain of facts about the quotidian experience of regular people, the evidence of webs of relation, and traces of lives and traditions in flux, perhaps it is also possible to discern that swearing to tell the truth can also involve becoming tangled in a lattice of obfuscation and deceit.

The Immanent Frame is pleased to announce a few changes to its editorial board, which was first constituted in March 2016 and continues to work alongside Editor Mona Oraby and Editorial Associate Olivia Whitener to create intellectually provocative content for the site.

We wish to thank outgoing board members Carlo Invernizzi Accetti (City College of New York), Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Northwestern University), and Nancy Levene (Yale University) for more than three years of service, as their terms ended on August 31, 2019. Their commitment to the integrity and creativity of the site has helped TIF to flourish.

Further, we are excited to welcome the following three scholars to the editorial board:

• Helena Hansen is a joint-appointed associate professor of anthropology and psychiatry at New York University. Hansen earned an MD and a PhD in cultural anthropology as part of Yale University’s NIH funded Medical Scientist Training Program. She is the author of Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Ministries (University of California Press, 2018). 
• Iza Hussin is the Mohamed Noah Fellow at Pembroke College and University Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Hussin earned a PhD in political science from the University of Washington. She is the author of The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
• Lisa Sideris is professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Luce-funded IU Center for Religion and the Human. Sideris earned a PhD from Indiana University in religious studies and is the author most recently of Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017).

The full editorial board membership can be found here.

Who comes to your mind when you think of a philanthropist? Do you picture Bill and Melinda Gates or Warren Buffet? You may also think of corporations that support charitable causes to promote good relationships with their neighbors, to build their reputations, or to repair them. Or, maybe you think of an earlier generation of philanthropists. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrialists and robber barons such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller donated large sums of money to support institution building and research projects, among other things. The Philanthropy Roundtable reports that Rockefeller alone donated $540 million (unadjusted for inflation) during his lifetime. He still ranks among the wealthiest US Americans of all time.

Philanthropists like Carnegie and Rockefeller are most often remembered for their support of noble causes and contributions to stone, bricks, and mortar for timeless buildings marking the landscape of many US academic institutions. However, not all of their efforts contributed to the common good. For example, eugenics research in the early twentieth century received large contributions from both the Carnegie Institution and Rockefeller Foundation. Past mistakes and other problematic approaches to charitable giving have left philanthropic foundations open to criticism. A primary criticism is that they are not oriented toward justice and systemic change.

Albert Ruesga, a philosopher and former president and CEO of the New Orleans Foundation, summarizes critiques of philanthropy in his “Twenty-Five Theses.” Philanthropy can be undemocratic and preserves the privilege of the wealthy by allowing mega-rich donors to hold on to too much power. Charity comes at the expense of much needed systemic change, too often ignores the interests and needs of marginalized communities, and tends to promote the pet projects of a few individuals. Foundations fail to “address, in any significant ways, some of the most basic injustices of our society”—problems such as poverty, the growing wealth divide, racism, homophobia, and gender discrimination. If we look back at the history of movements for social justice such as civil rights and women’s suffrage, philanthropy, Ruesga argues, “played a minor role at best.” Ruesga, however, also suggests that if we are willing to ask challenging questions about what human flourishing should look like and grapple with past mistakes, then philanthropy can be oriented toward social justice.

As a scholar whose work bridges church and academy, I have served on several committees for my denomination that advocate for social justice through responsible corporate investing. I have also worked with nonprofits in different capacities by writing grants, providing introductory training for employees in the best practices of interfaith dialogue, and introducing nonprofit leadership to what religious traditions have to say about money, wealth, and debt. I am not alone in my effort to engage people across different sectors of society in order for our understanding of nonprofit leadership, investing, charitable giving, and economy to be reoriented toward justice and a larger common good. There are many good examples of organizations specifically working with foundations—Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society is an excellent resource.

To explore what a justice-oriented philanthropy might look like, I will first grapple with the original usage of the term “philanthropy,” which originally applied to a much larger web of life. I then identify the characteristics of justice-oriented philanthropy as it grounds itself in deep equality, care for one another, recognizes the interdependence of all living things, and seeks to do more than merely deal with problems that already exist, but also to analyze the root causes of human and environmental suffering. It also recognizes that collaboration and working with people across different sectors of society is the best way to address the fragmentation of local communities caused by growing gaps in income, wealth, access, and knowledge. Most importantly, just philanthropy emerges from the leadership of communities it intends to serve.

Swimming with the Dolphins Can Widen Our Moral Circles

Prior to the industrial revolution in the United States and Europe, the term “philanthropy” held a much broader connotation than used in reference to charity given by the wealthy on behalf of people in poverty or for the sake of projects chosen by individuals, committees, or boards. Philanthropy literally means friend or lover of humankind. Originally, the English term philanthropy conveyed more holistic orientation toward life for people and the planet. For example, in the first edition of British Zoology (1769), Thomas Pennant applied the term “philanthropists” to dolphins because of their “fondness for the human race” and their communal nature.

Philosophers today suggest that dolphins may challenge us to think differently about what makes human beings distinct from nonhuman animals and look to their relational nature to widen our own moral circles. Dolphins have their own rich cultures and societies and are incredibly social animals. Efforts began in the 1970s to use dolphin-assisted therapy because of how relationships with them increased speech and motor skills in people, particularly for those with developmental, emotional, or physical disabilities. You may be familiar with similar programs such as therapeutic riding, where human beings build relationships with horses to improve flexibility, muscle strength, and cognitive abilities.

The ancient Greeks considered the dolphin a sacred fish. In Greek, the root of the word “dolphin” relates to “delphus,” meaning “womb.” Dolphins live in pods, where they care for each other, work collaboratively to find food, play together, communicate with each other, and show empathy, particularly for those who are injured. Pennant may not have been thinking about dolphins’ ability to widen our own moral circles when he referred to them as philanthropists, but their behaviors can point us toward justice-oriented philanthropy.

Characteristics of Justice-Oriented Philanthropy

Just philanthropy begins with a particular orientation toward life that centers itself in the common good and assumes the essential relatedness of people and the planet earth. The great traditions of faith share with the dolphins commitments to sustainability, reciprocity, cooperation/collaboration, interdependence, and accountability to the commons. Dorian O. Burton and Brian C. B. Barnes, cofounders of TandemEd, outline a new framework for justice-oriented philanthropy that embodies these values in their essay on “Shifting Philanthropy from Charity to Social Justice”. This new framework acknowledges the social, economic, and political systems and structures that drive inequalities and orient philanthropic efforts from and toward the common good by identifying how certain groups and individuals gain privilege because of white supremacy, wealth inequalities, and lack of access and opportunity. A philanthropy that is oriented toward justice seeks to transform the systems and circumstances of inequality by working collaboratively and engaging the leadership of communities an individual or organization intends to serve.

Religious leaders also recognize the important role they can play in reorienting their charitable giving toward justice and working for systemic change. Although there are many more, one significant example that comes to mind is the contemporary Christian Food Movement. I encountered some leaders in this movement at a conference simply titled “The Churches Have Land” that was hosted by Wake Forest Divinity School in October 2018. The Christian Food Movement acknowledges God’s own relational ecology at the heart of their mission and the communal responsibility to ensure that all people are fed.

In the United States, about forty million people struggle with hunger, including twelve million children. Fifteen million US households are food insecure. Food insecurity disproportionately affects people of color and, in many cities across the nation, elected leaders and the food distribution system have failed black communities. There are also far fewer black farmers than there are white farmers, due to discriminatory practices in lending and access to land. At the same time, US denominational loyalties are declining and church properties are becoming financially burdensome. Congregational and denominational bodies own a lot of land. For example, the Catholic Church alone owns 177 million acres of land. The majority of church property across denominations is also in rural communities. These religious leaders are asking how church property can be used for the sake of feeding and justice.

The Christian Food Movement invites churches to think about how the use of their land can define the churches’ missions in new ways. Individuals and congregations are donating their land or leasing it to farmers in order to address food insecurity and to redistribute wealth within local communities. Some think of redistributing church land as a form of reparations when predominately white churches donate land directly to black farmers. The Black Church Food Security Network, another effort, emerged when Pleasant Hope Baptist Church began to cultivate the front lawn of the church to provide fresh vegetables to the surrounding community in Baltimore.

Our Challenge

The Greeks associated dolphins with the womb because of the care they exhibited for each other and their relational nature. The way dolphins model love to humankind challenges us to think about what philanthropy means when the efforts are organic, not from the top down.

What would you add to the characteristics of justice-oriented philanthropy outlined here? If you are part of a group, organization, or institution that can take part in crafting a response to the significant social, economic, and political problems we are facing, how can you orient your work and your gifts toward justice? Let’s challenge each other by sharing ideas here.

“Deprovincializing Political Theology: Postcolonial and Comparative Approaches” is a workshop organized by Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University) and Robert Yelle (LMU Munich), to be held October 26-27, 2019 at LMU Munich.

The Call for Proposals is pasted below and can also be found here. Proposals consisting of a brief vita and a 150-250 word abstract of the work to be presented are due September 9. Proposals should be sent to both vincent.lloyd@villanova.edu and robertyelle@hotmail.com.

Call for Papers

Having begun in the last century as a mode of reflection on the legacy of Christian traditions for the modern, ostensibly secular, European political order, the discipline of political theology has now emerged as an interdisciplinary project that links studies of religion across the humanities and social sciences. This expansion beyond its original cultural context provokes several questions. What does political theology mean outside of Europe and Christianity? What resources do other traditions offer for framing alternative theories of sovereignty, polity, and belonging?

From Carl Schmitt’s early observations concerning the analogy between monotheism and monarchy, to Ernst Kantorowicz’s explorations of The King’s Two Bodies in medieval Christian thought, to more recent work by such scholars as Giorgio Agamben, the questions of political theology have been posed and answered largely in terms of categories derived from biblical or at least “Western” traditions, including both their Jewish and classical pagan branches. Scholars from within Christian and Jewish traditions have responded to the critical discourse of political theology, and these responses have often remained centered in Europe.

As a mode of genealogical critique of secularism, this focus on Jewish and Christian traditions makes sense. Secular modernity emerged largely in and through the development of European cultures, including through the colonial encounter. However, growing recognition of the Christian genealogy of many European political ideas raises, at the same time, the question of whether other cultures also have political theologies and, if so, how these might differ from their Christian and post-Christian counterparts. This question becomes especially salient in cultural contexts where some of the foundations of a distinctively European political theology—most obviously, monotheism—would appear to be lacking.

Abrahamic monotheism has been identified as the ideological basis for several tendencies supposedly distinctive of political theologies derived from the Bible, including their exclusivity and intolerance (Jan Assmann); their iconoclasm; their concept of divine right, based on an analogy between monarchy and monotheism (Schmitt and many predecessors, including Robert Filmer); and their concept of divine omnipotence, as suggested by biblical accounts of miracles, divine command, and creatio ex nihilo. Arguably, none of these tendencies is present in the same way or to the same degree in some other major traditions. For example, some early Hindu accounts of the divine origins of kingship resemble medieval Christian notions of divine right. Yet overall, the “Mosaic distinction” would appear to be lacking in Hindu traditions. Does this mean also that the political corollaries of monotheism are absent? Even in the case of Islam, we cannot simply assume that monotheism has had consequences for political thought identical to those that have unfolded in European traditions.

Is it the case that the European political theology is indeed derived, not from the universal requirements of any sovereign order (as Schmitt sometimes claimed), but rather from specific Christian underpinnings? Or is it the case that a fundamentally similar political ideology, one which depends on the logic of sovereignty rather than on parochial cultural assumptions, can indeed be found elsewhere? How we answer such questions will have important consequences for the methodological focus and self-understanding of political theology as a discipline. And such questions can be answered, if at all, only by placing political theology in conversation with non-Western discourses.

The purpose of this workshop is to explore such questions by bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines who can speak regarding different traditions. These disciplines include history, religious studies, political theory, cultural and literary studies, anthropology, and critical theory. Examples of the kinds of approaches we would welcome are: the use of diverse archives and ethnographies to interrogate some of the categories traditionally addressed by scholars of political theology, such as sovereignty, the state of exception, and the representation of the body politic; novel readings of the intersection of religious authority and political power in different cultures; and reflections on the implications of the anthropological or postcolonial turn for political theology as a discipline.

We would welcome proposals from all who are interested in discussing such questions. Dissertation chapters and draft articles would also be welcome, as part of the workshop will consist of a focused reading of works in progress, as well as of key texts. Proposals consisting of a brief vita and a 150-250 word abstract of the work to be presented are due September 9. LMU Munich and Villanova University will provide accommodations for those who attend the conference, and will aim to defray their travel expenses as fully as possible. Please indicate in your proposal whether you are able to reimburse any portion of your own travel costs. Proposals should be sent to both vincent.lloyd@villanova.edu and robertyelle@hotmail.com.

Some of the papers will be included in a proposal for a special issue of the journal Political Theology.

I am happy to have been invited to participate in this forum on oaths—these powerful declarations—because I have been wrestling for some time with the question of how scholars in religious studies and across the academy might better identify and analyze one particular type of powerful declaration: martyrdom. Martyrdom (whether we mean the act of becoming a martyr oneself or the discursive configuration of an exemplary figure as a martyr) encodes values and ideals, declaring these foundational truths to an anticipated audience that is expected to understand and be affected by the martyrdom. Martyrdom connotes the ultimate “all-in”—the truth you would stake your life on and whose expression outweighs all else. Nonetheless, a definition of martyrdom remains elusive—like pornography and religion, we “know it when [we] see it” (see Sullivan, 2018).

This definitional attitude, as it pertains to martyrdom, is functional in its own way, allowing us to avoid a singular, fixed definition that would elide the vast differences in theologies of martyrdom that exist both between and within (and without) traditions. But “I know it when I see it” is also stymieing—it does little to prevent our preconceived notions about martyrdom from dictating what we register as martyrdom. Perhaps more dangerously, it provides no analytical framework for identifying martyrdom when the precise terminology is lacking (what Bryan van Norden terms “the lexical fallacy”). This is dangerous to historians because it conveys a false sense of the phenomenon’s etiology, and dangerous to observers of current events, who miss a substantial undertone of global discourses when we fail to note their martyrial inflections.

In this essay, I want to propose that thinking about martyrdom along the axis of oath’s quasi-cognate “witness” holds the key to a fruitful and functional understanding of martyrdom as a transhistorical phenomenon. Martyrdom, functionally speaking, can best be understood as sacrificial witness.

Why Martyrdom Is Not Simply “Dying for a Cause”

Martyrdom is colloquially and habitually defined as “dying for a cause.” Scholarly enhancements of this understanding attend to martyrdom’s discursive character, its reliance on narrative communities to construct and receive those identified as martyrs, the historical variety in (and disagreement over) who counts as a martyr, the origins of the terminology of “martyrdom” in the Greek concept of judicial witness (μάρτυς), and the concept’s development through various eras and cultural contexts. But despite their nuance and their salutary correctives to the colloquial understanding, all of these treatments operate on a definition of martyrdom that centers on death. Death is the necessary object of spectacle, discourse, narrative, and witness; it is martyrdom’s sine qua non.

But the martyrs I study do not die. Or rather, their martyrdoms are represented as having been earned without death. This is the reason for my wrestling with this definitional question and my impetus for attempting to develop a new analytical tool for identifying martyrdom in history and discourse. If we look at how various Christian communities in history have understood martyrdom, we see that martyrdom is, quite often, not configured around death.

Indeed, the third century North African poet Commodian chided his contemporaries for thinking that one could become a martyr by dying: “You offer so many empty words, who lazily seek in one moment to raise a martyrdom to Christ!” (Instructiones, 2.18.16-17).1 Instead, the Christian seeking martyrdom must engage in a daily, all-consuming war against sin (Instructiones, 2.18). If you purge yourself of envy, restrain your tongue, make yourself humble, use force against no one and have instead a patient mind, Commodian says, “Understand that you are a martyr” (Instructiones, 2.14.14-18). The Gallo-Hispanic poet Prudentius, writing in the late fourth century, used his poetry to train his contemporaries to be living martyrs by interpreting the world around them typologically; he also configured the virgin martyr Encratis as a powerful intercessor precisely because she had survived her martyrdom and lived to tell the tale (Peristephanon 4). Meanwhile, Paulinus of Nola, Prudentius’s contemporary, defended the martyr-status of his saintly patron Felix (who had survived persecution through miraculous subterfuge and died quietly of old age years later) by claiming that God “remits punishment of the flesh on account of proper piety” (Carmen, 14.9). Martyrdom by death, Paulinus implies, is a consolation prize for those servants of God whose piety was somehow lacking. Augustine of Hippo similarly eschewed death as a criterion for martyrdom. For Augustine, martyrdom indicated “witness”—he repeatedly reminded those attending his sermons of the term’s etymology and at one point declared: “Anyone who preaches wherever he can is, indeed, a martyr” (Sermo260E, 2). We can see the rejection of death as well in Augustine’s famous (and oft-repeated) formula for distinguishing between true and false martyrs: non poena sed causa, or, “it is not the punishment but the cause” that makes a martyr. If it is not the punishment but the cause that makes the martyr, would it not be possible for a Christian to be a martyr without any “punishment” at all? For each of these influential late ancient Christians, martyrdom is not defined by death.

Scholars cannot dismiss these martyrologists as “speaking figuratively” (as did Thomas Aquinas [Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae. 124, 4]); they all seem quite invested in their claims. And martyrdom without death is a tenacious idea: even after Aquinas’s declaration that martyrs must die, many have nonetheless claimed the title without expiring. The fourteenth-century English pilgrim Margery Kempe, for example, in characterizing her continuous public humiliations as martyrdom, truly understood herself to be surpassing the feats of martyrs who died. This opinion is confirmed for Margery by a vision she has of Jesus himself, who tells her, “Daughter, it is more pleasing to me that you suffer disdain and scorns, shames and censures, wrongs and distress, than if your head were struck off three times a day every day for seven years” (Kempe, Ch. 54).

Whatever Aquinas’s objections, it is the duty of scholars working outside or across confessional boundaries to make our definitions as inclusive, accurate, and functional as possible. The question, then, is how we might come to such a definition.

For this, I think, we can turn to the concept of witness.

Sacrificial Witness

To witness is to observe—to sense and register something as both true and known. To witness is to testify—to communicate in some fashion that which you know to be true. To witness is to enact—to be forever changed by the known and to embody it such that others, seeing you, see your truth made manifest. Witness aligns and commits one to a truth, to its performance, profession, and communication. The interplay between observing, testifying, and enacting is unsettled (as are the boundaries between them), shifting as the focus of our analysis shifts, but consistently results in constructions of reality that are simultaneously reflective and generative.

Using this polyvalent witness alongside an understanding of “sacrifice” that incorporates both forfeiture and sanctification (that is, we give something up and by giving it up render it significant), we can identify a stable conceptual phenomenon across historical contexts that can be labelled “martyrdom.”

Martyrdom does not consist in dying or sacrificing oneself for a cause; rather, it comprises having one’s representation subsumed into a larger “truth,” the realities, multiplicities, and infelicities smoothed away and subordinated in the service of representing that truth. Thus martyrdom necessitates sacrifice, but not in the literal, death-centered ways we commonly assume. It is, in effect, the narrative subordination of a character to a cause, accomplished through various manipulations of observing, testifying, and enacting witness.

This might seem too vague to be useful. How is this subordination of “reality” to narrative different from any other? How does it differ, for example, from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, or from the narrativization of experience that gets us through our days? This is where witness once again helps us: martyrdom requires an audience to whom the martyr or martyrologist is attempting to convey something they have identified as true.

But, then, is all persuasion-oriented communication martyrdom? How can we distinguish between a narrative about a hero and a narrative about a martyr? This is where sacrifice comes in. In a heroic narrative, whatever reality the hero has is subordinated to her representation in narrative, just as it would be for the martyr. But the subject of the narrative is the hero: the truth being conveyed and witnessed or witnessed to is the hero herself. The martyr’s witness points beyond the martyr to a larger truth. Sacrificial witness involves the subsuming of the person witnessing into the truth witnessed.

Understanding “martyrdom” as sacrificial witness helps us foreground the communicative and communal aspects of martyrdom, and to ask what values and what truths are being encoded and endorsed in the choice and representation of a martyr.

Any definition must, of course, survive repeated challenge and testing to be considered true. But in one area, at least, this definition of martyrdom has already had demonstrable success: my teaching. Students in classes where I introduce the idea of martyrdom as sacrificial witness come up with far better paper topics on martyrdom than students in classes where I have not. They more clearly see the declarative and communicative aspects of martyrdom, they ask far more sophisticated questions of their primary sources, they are more judicious in their use of secondary sources, and we have richer class discussions. I can think of few more powerful declarations of “truth” than that.

I work at a public university, and increasingly it feels like where I work also is what I study. In graduate school, I was taught the disciplinary distinctions between the field and the classroom, between religious subjects out there and academics who venture forth from university enclaves to visit them, observe them, listen to them, in order to understand the world their subjects make meaningful. For a few decades now, we have asked, “Who makes religion?” And we have assumed that someone else, not us, are the makers. Along the way, we have struggled to critique religion without denying the agency of our subjects. We recognize the institutional power of court systems and prison industries, for example, to define and make religion, while writing about our subjects as resisting, repurposing, and redefining religious structures through localized autonomy and purposeful piety. But in our search for moral agents, our quest for agentive subjects, out there, over there, anywhere but here, are we not, in the spirit of our intellectual ancestors, projecting proximate anxieties onto distant primitive worlds? Does this subjective search say something about who we are, not just as religious studies scholars, but as humanists who claim the liberal arts? Do we study our religious subjects in order to surface our discontent, to write out our concern that we have no agency, even as we inhabit universities that declare us self-determined researchers defining the subjects of our inquiry?

As a faculty researcher and teacher at the University of Texas at Austin, I am fascinated with how I am (and we are) complicit in an economic system of private giving that promises academic autonomy in the face of the institutional constraints of public defunding. By complicit, here, I don’t intend the moral measures of personal agency, of what I choose to do, but rather a societal possession, of how, in a Durkheimian sense, the institution moves through us and inhabits us, as a collective, beyond our individual free will. This isn’t an ethical question of whether I critique the system or try to resist it, because I’d like to think I do both. I’d like to think I’m on the good side of moral history. But what I believe, or whether I believe, as Durkheim instructs us concerning the study of religion, is secondary to what we collectively do, repetitiously, to produce the possibility of belief.

Somehow, we have come to believe that we can distinguish where we are from what we study, and where we are is in the institutional space of privatization and financialization—in higher education and beyond. Our belief in our ability to inhabit these spaces, to seek and accept private funds, thinking we can salvage our research, maintain our departments, and defend our disciplines, without being determined by outside influence, is a sign that we share the religious worlds we imagine for our subjects.

Administrators above us, at the college level, and among us, at the departmental level, tell us in meetings and through announcements to seek private funding. We ought to do this, we are told, because the legislators have cut funding. If we want to save the liberal arts, we have to find rich and ideally progressive people, and their foundations, people who believe in the liberal arts, and convince them to give their money to the university. In order to learn how to get the gifts, we are encouraged to go to workshops that teach us how to work with foundations.

It was in one of these workshops a few years ago, that I was struck by the realization that the sciences are the assumed model for funding throughout the university, that it is assumed we will seek out support from private funders like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At the time, I was reading about how food aid—excess crop production from industrial agriculture in western nation states, primarily the United States, that is donated to foreign nation states for the stated purpose of hunger relief—was used as an interventionist political tool in Africa in order to increase the power of private corporations, like Monsanto, to control and possess the food system through property rights. Perhaps I was slow to the game, but I was amazed how at that meeting the foundations of the key philanthropic players in agricultural and education reform in Africa, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, were the primary targets for private giving to the university.

Regardless of what you think about the politics or the science of genetically modified foods, biotech is an industry built on private property rights. Through its patented seeds, a biotech company owns the modes of food production. To give away seeds is an attempt to eradicate local foods systems, devour farmer autonomy, create dependency, and control the system. That is why farmers in Haiti burned the seeds.

What struck me in particular about that workshop was how private gifts for academic research maintain this model of private control, as grants are given in the name of the public good, to cure a disease, for example, with the intended outcome that the gift giver—here, the institutionalized presence of Gates or Zuckerberg—maintain the right to commercialize any and all research findings made by way of this funding. Gift giving, whether seeds given to African farmers, seeds that carry inside them the private property contracts of a multinational corporation, or money given to a public university, money that comes with legal conditions of intellectual property rights, is a religious practice of corporate power. Religious because we have been persuaded to believe there is no other alternative, that to save ourselves, to save the university, and maybe the liberal arts, this is what we must do.

To see this religious pattern of private giving, take funding. In 1985, the state of Texas general revenue provided 47 percent of the UT Austin budget. In 2018, the state provided 12 percent of the budget. Over that time, the amount of funding from research grants, gifts, and endowments increased from 36 to 57 percent of the budget. The net effect is an increased reliance on private funding to keep the university running. Much is made of how much oil money flows into the UT system. The year 2018 was a boom year for oil prices, and the UT system endowment rose to $31 billion, which was the second highest in the United States behind Harvard University’s $39.2 billion. Beyond the fact that the UT system has ten times the number of students than Harvard, the bulk of that oil money goes to administrative and construction costs, capital-intensive projects that include, for example, paving a stretch of the UT Austin campus with bricks the color of burnt orange. Many of those bricks turned out faulty. They cracked and needed to be replaced, and because of that the project never seems to end. Construction persists, the money is used to pay private contractors, all while administrative costs in the UT system continue to rise, quadrupling since 2011, according to the Texas Tribune.

The privatization of the public system demands more management, both inside and outside the university, to oversee the projects that demonstrate progress, to measure efficiency by the metrics of the market, to fund the future through financial instruments, and to bring it all together—public and private—in the name of educational reform. And in a post-Reagan neoliberal world, reform is just another name for privatization, moral slang for civic service that ultimately prioritizes corporate profits over public goods.

For those familiar with changes in higher education since the 1980s, the UT system is just another example of private corporatization combined with public defunding. Students pay more, and there are more of them, while there are fewer permanent faculty and state employees overall, relative to adjunct faculty and contract workers. By contrast, in addition to the swell in administration, the university has added to its number of development officers, who forge university relationships with private foundations and meet with wealthy donors across the globe. While fundraising campaigns carry forth, hands out to the private sector, consider that on the public-facing student side, from 1998 to 2018, the cost of in-state tuition at UT Austin went up 237 percent. During the same time, the value of the Permanent University Fund grew 503 percent. And to put that in some perspective, over the same span, the median household income increased only 4.7 percent nationwide. As wealth grows, the majority public, those below the middle class, see less of it. To this point related to UT, in 2017, only 0.1 percent of the Permanent University Fund went to financial aid for students. As of 2019, the university continues to expand financial aid to a wider range of UT students. Are such efforts signs of progress, or are they the better option in what is sold as the best of possible worlds, when in fact there are other options, other worlds to imagine—worlds where college is free and access to public goods, including nutritious food, comprehensive healthcare, and permanent housing, is a human right?

I work at a public institution possessed by an education market engineered to siphon tax money and funnel it to private businesses. I am learning, we all are learning, to speak the new slang of private funding, because what else are we supposed to do? We can’t burn the gifts; we must bury them in a foundation and watch them grow. If, like our religious subjects, we can’t change the system, maybe we can learn something from how we imagine they resist it, through small acts of everyday living. We can attempt to fight biotech in how we relate to food systems, and how we organize cooperatives and collectives. There are paths out. No system is closed. Our subjects imagine a different way, and perhaps we should too. Perhaps we can learn from the study of religion how to resist the religion we make.

The oath just isn’t what it used to be.

Here’s the lede that recently landed in my inbox (albeit against my own will-to-unsubscribe): “On Wednesday, Trump confirmed he treats his oath to serve the United States faithfully with the same contempt he’s given to his wedding vows and business contracts.” You will likely recall seeing similar sentiments expressed across the mediasphere. Again and again, we are told that a once solid, sacred commitment to truth and justice has succumbed to a pervasive culture of lying, deceit, and betrayal. The oath used to mean something. It used to ensure the rectitude of our politics and the integrity of our law. It used to be the guarantee of our words as well as the sign of our sincerity. Not too long ago, maybe just last Tuesday, the oath was the thing that made faith possible. Faith in the good intentions of doctors, faith in the judgment of jurors, faith in the testimony of witnesses, faith in the loyalty of new American citizens, faith in the love of spouses, and, yes, faith in the honesty of government officials. The question for today, the question for, say, Thursday, is this: Has the oath become irrelevant?

Certainly, you may find yourself quibbling with the details. At very least, you think, one should date the demise of the oath back to that specific oath uttered on January 20, 2017. But it is possible that this deep dive into the past fails to accurately assess the history of the oath’s decline. Over two decades ago, for instance, the late philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle chose to push the dating back a little further by asking: “Does a possible oath exist after the Shoah?” The Holocaust, so Dufourmantelle thought, was the first time that “speech has not only served to justify rationally the extermination of a people, but to destroy the very meaning of the oath, of the word given to the other, of the sacredness it carries in human language.” Never before in the West, she added, had “the very possibility of the dimension of the promise and the oath . . . been mutilated in this way.” Hannah Arendt, for her part, took a slightly different perspective on the oath and its banalization. Though, she, too, could hardly avoid the link with Nazism. In her 1963 report on the Eichmann Trial, she cites the defendant’s clownish vacillation between a renunciation of all oaths and a continued adherence to them: “What could one do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath . . . and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he ‘might do so under oath or without an oath,’ declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath?” Arendt was also pretty sure that Adolf Eichmann’s casual relationship to the oath was no mere exception, noting, shortly later, that under the Third Reich only a few people “still took an oath seriously and preferred, for example, to renounce an academic career rather than swear by Hitler’s name.”

For better or worse, then, the oath seems to have become a punchline, a laughable anachronism, whose persistence and apparent efficacy in the present only belies its substantive vacuity, fundamental frailty, and diminished consequence. It is, ironically enough, something that one can already glimpse in the constitutional formula for the US presidential oath of office, which, instead of insisting on the irrevocable necessity of the oath, gives its speakers the parenthetical option to solemnly “affirm” rather than solemnly “swear” to its faithful execution. The slippage is subtle and rarely invoked. But the choice may point to a legacy of ambivalence that precedes the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and could mark an epochal shift in that hazy movement known as secularization. Immanuel Kant presents it as an antinomy. On the one hand, the oath is a primitive superstition. On the other hand, a “handy” if lamentable feature of the modern juridical system. More contemporary scholarship, meanwhile, has agreed that the continued presence of the oath in legal institutions is an “atavistic survival” of an “ancient ritual” of self-cursing: a threat of punishment meant to secure the performance of a promise. Somewhere in between the archaic past and the enlightened future there is also Jesus’s critical contribution to oath-taking and its ends: “But I say to you, do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one” [Matthew 5:34-37].

Be it elegiac or optimistic, the discourse on the oath is a discourse on its loss and coming irrelevance. The oath is of the past. Either something to be retrieved or something to be buried. But in both cases, the fact is that we seem to have entered a post-oath society. We are now witnessing, says Giorgio Agamben, nothing less than “the irreversible decline of the oath in our time.” This is not the “age of the oath.” It is the “age of the eclipse of the oath,” where nothing remains to guarantee the union of words and things, language and life, speech and action. Agamben calls it the “age of blasphemy” because in it the possibility of benediction (speaking correctly) has been replaced by the proliferation of malediction (speaking badly), the telling of truth by vain and empty chatter. The waning of the oath—and this is Agamben’s summary argument—is the curse of an age that no longer bears responsibility for its speech and no longer knows how to assume its place within language.

So there you have it. The oath is in decline, has always been in decline, and until today still threatens one final decline into absolute irrelevance. But before I leave you to your mourning rites or memorial celebrations, let me offer one other formulation, one other translation, of the relevance and irrelevance, persistence and declension of the oath in “our time.” A preliminary version of the sentence could read like this: The oath declines relevance. It is a lesson that comes from William Shakespeare, by way of Jacques Derrida, who reminds us in one of his many reflections on the topic that Shakespeare was in fact “a great thinker and poet of the oath.” And this probably nowhere more so than in The Merchant of Venice. If you have read the play, or seen it performed, you know that oath-taking and oath-breaking traverse the various filiations, contracts, and bonds that make up its plot. In one famous scene, Shylock demands that the court of justice in Venice uphold the terms of his loan to Antonio: repayment in three thousand ducats or a pound of flesh. Those present at court try their best to dissuade Shylock from executing his strict interpretation of the agreement. They offer him alternative forms of remuneration and repeatedly implore him for leniency. Most eloquent is Portia, who gives an impassioned speech on the divine “quality of mercy”:

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Shylock listens and responds to Portia’s thoughts on justice with his own theological-political reflections. Not mercy, he says, but “an oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven: / Shall I lay perjury upon my soul? / No, not for Venice.”

Portia and Shylock. Christian and Jew. Two appeals to heaven, two definitions of God, and two calls for justice. As Derrida observes in his extended reading of this exchange, the dueling languages of mercy and oath end up echoing one another. Both place something “above human language in human language, beyond the human order in the human order, beyond human rights and duties in human law.” Portia wants to save Shylock from his literal-minded legalism. Her petition is a prayer for relief or, in Derrida’s French translation, relevance: a plea for the elevation and sublimation, interiorization and spiritualization of justice. Mercy is relevant because it at once cancels and preserves the law, exalts it and negates its, lifts it up and translates it, as Derrida puts it, “toward a height higher than the crown, the sceptre, and power that is royal, human, earthly, and so on.” Through an appeal to Christian grace, that is, Portia seeks to relieve justice from the violence of an all-too carnal, all-too-Jewish exegesis. Shylock plays the role well. He suspects that Portia’s interest in sovereign debt forgiveness is little more than another form of violence, a ruse to destroy the body of the law, incite perjury, and dispossess him of his word. His answer to the relevance of mercy is the oath. It binds him like a hostage to a divine justice which, far from by-passing the law, can only come through the letter of the law. Shylock’s “oath in heaven” is thus a staunch repudiation of Portia’s ultimatum: “Then must the Jew be merciful.” At the risk of losing everything, Shylock rejects mercy for the sake of fidelity. He balks at the chance to translate body into spirit and turns down the protocols of Christian justice. He swears by his contract and insists on his pound of flesh.

It is a theater of cruelty, to be sure. Shylock’s part in this is no doubt obvious. Portia’s less so. Which is why Derrida seeks to turn the tables on Shakespeare’s discourse and recognize the parallel “evil” at work in the play’s “semantics of mercy.” After all, Portia’s lofty sermon on the virtues of forgiveness rehearses all the codes of a Christian tradition that has long attempted to assert its relevance by making others irrelevant. This is what Shylock’s allegiance to the oath represents. His brutal intransigence lodges him in a superseded past. In his opposition to any form of sublimation, translation, or conversion, he turns himself into an obsolescent survival of a pre-Christian age. His oath is a fetish, a perversion, and a regression. But here, too, a kind of resistance. An unyielding obstinacy that chooses to read Portia’s “gentle rain” of mercy as a raging storm of progress. More and less than a decline into irrelevance, Shylock’s oath declines relevance. Shylock pursues a strategy that is nothing less than antirelevant. It is a tenuous, downright dangerous position. And one that ultimately leads him to ruin. Still, as Derrida suggests, it may also be the trace of an impossible ethics: the absolute refusal of relevance.

Or perhaps even a will-to-unsubscribe.