Encountering Religion, by Tyler Roberts

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Religion is about what is always slipping away.

—MARK TAYLOR 1

“I have to begin with this”

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Rowan Williams, shortly to become Archbishop of Canterbury, published a brief meditation on grief and mourning entitled Writing in the Dust. Williams had experienced the destruction and the dust firsthand, having been near the World Trade Center when the planes hit. He begins his reflections by invoking the “last words” of farewell from those on Flight 93, sent by cell phones to their loved ones. For Williams, these “nonreligious words are testimony to what religious language is supposed to be about—the triumph of pointless, gratuitous love, the affirming of faithfulness even when there is nothing to be done or salvaged.” From these “secular” words of others, Williams moves to grapple with his own words, the “religious” words he will use, as a Christian, to respond to these horrific events. The words do not come easily—they hang, hesitatingly, on the verge of silence and the “void”: Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void. The more closely we bind God to our own purposes, use God to help ourselves avoid our own destructiveness, the more we fi ll up the void. It becomes very important to know how to use the language of belief; which is why the terrible simplicity of those last messages matters so intensely. And why also we have to tread so carefully 1

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in not making some sort of religious capital out of them. Ultimately, the importance of these “secular” words has to stand as a challenge to anything comfortingly religious we might be tempted to say. This is what human beings can find to say in the face of death, religion or no religion. This is what truly makes breathing space for others.

Words like “transcendent” hang around uneasily in the background of my mind. Careful again. But that moment of pointless loving communication is the best glimpse many of us will have of what the rather solemn and pompous word means. I have to begin with this.

I know I shall be feeling my way towards making some verbal shape out of it all in terms of my Christian faith. But there is nowhere else to start except with that frightening contrast: the murderously spiritual and the compassionately secular.

Williams comes to his “religious” words slowly and only in the shadow of the “murderously spiritual.” And the words he does come to are words “written in the dust,” words that are written in the spirit of those “sand mandalas made by Tibetan monks for festivals, made to be broken up.”  They are words not meant to draw attention and arrest us and accrue capital, but rather to slip away, releasing themselves, and us, into the midst of grief and so into the midst of life.

But words never do just what we want them to. Williams’s words are a gift, an offering to those in mourning. As such, they are caught in the bind of all human gifts. The gifts we receive seem always demand something of us. It is difficult, perhaps “impossible,” as Derrida puts it, to treat them as wholly gratuitous. Williams is aware of this, hence his desire to “tread carefully.” But all his care cannot prevent the fact that with his gift, in the form of the judgments and beliefs of a recognized religious authority, he will make “religious capital” out of his words.

And by invoking Williams for my own purposes, I, too, will play my role in the circulation and accumulation of such capital. What kind of problem does this pose for Williams? For me?

Mark Taylor has written extensively about religion and capital, and his words about religion, quoted in the epigraph above, help us with these questions. Religion, he says, is about that which slips away, about the fact that as we pursue and try to articulate and grasp the things most important to us—whether “meaning,” “value,” “identity,” “love,” “God”—they elude us. I would add that they don’t slip away because we 2

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are not going after them correctly, but because it is in some sense in their “nature” to do so. Or to take this line of thought further—further perhaps than Taylor would go—there is a way in which meaning and value take place precisely in this elusiveness, in this slippage, thus existing only as a kind of excess in those things we can and do grasp.

We can observe, in Williams’s meditation, numerous kinds of slippage: between one’s own purposes and God’s, between the possibility and impossibility of giving gifts, between self-aggrandizement and selfeffacement, between self and other, between the “religious” and the “secular.” What strikes me is the way his words, in both form and content, acknowledge and accept this slippage. Williams cites his concerns about capitalizing on the words and on the tragedies of others, yet he neither mourns nor defends the purity of his own intentions. Nor does his writing manipulate. Rather, it creates what he calls “breathing space” for the response of the reader, not so much to his words, but to the events of which he writes. Williams practices a kind of self-effacement in his writing that in the counsel to breathe, to take the time to allow the void its “presence,” absolves the reader of an expected, demanded response. To my mind, what makes Writing in the Dust powerful and exemplary of a basic Christian and—if we follow Taylor—religious gesture is that he does not try to halt, explain, or apply too much friction to this slippage. In this, I think, he helps enact Taylor’s claim that, since religion is about that which slips away, it is impossible to grasp what religion is about “unless . . . what we grasp is the impossibility of grasping.” Before going on too long with this line of thinking, though, it is necessary to give voice to an objection. Against the notion of religion as the impossibility of grasping, many will argue that religion is all about grasping, even more, that in its claims to the Divine or the Truth religion is the most grasping of human discourses. Religion, that is, makes claims about the ultimate nature of things and in doing so claims ultimate authority for a particular and ultimately very human vision of life.

This, we must admit, is also true: if we consider the wide range of human religious behavior through history, there is little question that religion is never just or even primarily about what slips away; it is also, perhaps much more often, about locating and fi xing, about assigning things to and keeping them in their place, about boundaries and identities, about the power that accrues to people, institutions, and traditions that control this process, and, all too often, about the “murderously 3

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spiritual.” We should acknowledge, then, that neither Williams nor Taylor captures the “essence” of Christianity or of religion and we should not assume that Williams is more of a “real” Christian, or “really” religious, than any number of contemporary “fundamentalists.” As Williams himself recognizes in the opening pages of Writing in the Dust, he is responding to terrible religious violence, violence the likes of which, as we know, religious people of all sorts—Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh—have visited on those they call heretics, apostates, or unbelievers. To my mind, both the attacks of September 11 and the response to these attacks by Christians such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are as much real religion as Williams’s powerful and admirable words.

This is a book about how scholars study and represent religion; more precisely, it is about how scholars and others use the concept “religion,” a concept with a long, complicated, and still obscure history, to make sense of the world and themselves. I have opened with a step that will court the suspicion of many of these scholars. By invoking Williams, a theologian and, until recently, one of the world’s most powerful and influential religious leaders, I have ceded some authority for thinking academically about religion to a religious thinker. Th is violates a boundary that many of my colleagues consider to be absolutely necessary if the study of religion is to take its place as a legitimate academic enterprise, that is, the boundary separating secular academic thinking about religion from religious thinking about religion. This is, in some contexts, an important distinction to make. For example, it is one that I myself emphasize in my introductory classes. But it also is a distinction that when pushed too far becomes, or so I will argue, extremely elusive.

And when we try to chase it down and force our studies of religion to hold to it, especially when we try to define and theorize religion in what I will describe as a “secularist” or “locativist” fashion, we lose sight of important matters and subtle differences. For one, we fall into a tendency to focus on how religious beliefs, practices, discourses, and institutions seek to grasp the world or bind God in ways that create and support forces of domination and violence and we tend not to explore in nuanced ways the possibility that religion has something to teach us about the impossibility of grasping. We become suspicious of religion— and of scholars who are not suspicious enough.

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Suspicion does have its place, but after the Enlightenment and after the hermeneutics of suspicion we tend to see the grasping and binding aspects of religion everywhere. Has this led to a different type of grasping, a secularist “binding of God”? I think this, along with other factors that I will discuss below, leaves some of us who think and write about religion in a difficult place. I am not a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, or an adherent of any other “religion”; for all sorts of reasons, I would never describe myself as “spiritual.” I am, though, compelled by the depths of beauty and insight I see in Writing in the Dust, and I have spent a lot of time wondering and thinking about how I might respond to it and other instances of religion like it. Perhaps I could simply say that I am compelled by Williams’s humanity, but then I want to ask whether, and if so how, religious beliefs and practices are a force for cultivating such humanity. As a scholar and teacher of “Religious Studies,” what can I say about such beauty, insight, and humanity without being an apologist for religion and without trying, again, to grasp it?

And then, should I even be thinking about religion in such apparently vague and ideologically loaded terms as “beauty,” “insight,” and “humanity”?

My academic expertise is in modern, Western religious thought. I am trained, then, to read “theological” words such as those we find in Williams in terms of their logics, their histories, and their rhetorical strategies. In addition, as a scholar of religion, I also think theoretically about religious thought as an instance of “religion” and inquire into the different disciplinary and inter- or transdisciplinary approaches we can take to religion. What do such lenses allow us to see and what do they prevent us from seeing? Finally, I also am trained to ask questions about this training, or, more generally, to be aware of and reflect on the historical and social contexts, the interests and ideologies, that have shaped the study of religion itself. Why do we even use this concept, “religion”? Where and who did it come from? What does it mean to study religion in an academic setting? It is precisely this self-consciousness about “religion”—and the increasingly prevalent self-consciousness about the “secular”—that leads me to wonder whether it has become too easy for scholars today, at least for those who take pride in their critical and theoretical consciousness, to grasp—that is, to historicize, contextualize, theorize, explain—the kinds of words Williams offers us.

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Today we are exposed to an avalanche of books and articles, popular and scholarly, on religious ideology and religious violence. And many influential scholars of religion, reflecting on theoretical and methodological approaches to religion, argue, as I demonstrate below, that the defining characteristic of religious discourse is the kind of claim to absolute authority that is so effective in inspiring and rationalizing such violence. In such a context, it becomes easy to dismiss as mystification or cheap sentiment Williams’s “pointless loving communication.” And even if we “feel” the need to acknowledge and honor such words, it can be hard to know what, from an academic perspective (if that means a critical perspective), we can usefully say about it. But I believe that it is imperative that we do find ways to acknowledge, analyze, and evaluate such words, to think carefully and constructively about the way a thinker such as Williams combines compassion, hope, and theological commitment with realism and critical consciousness. This is not to say that we should not also continue to develop tools for analyzing the destructive power of religion. There are good arguments to be made that these tools are essential, today more than ever. But “more than ever” does not mean “exclusively,” for such exclusivity may well lead us to ignore, among other things, powerful religious resources for responding to violence. This would be a double failure, one ethical and one academic. That is, it would be a failure to attend to practices and ideas that may offer alternatives to dominating and destructive ideologies, whether religious or not, and it would be a failure to know religion in all its complexity and power.

Stories Ordinary and Extraordinary

Religion After Religion, Steven Wasserstrom’s fine study of Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin, and Mircea Eliade, tells a story about modernity and the study of religion. According to Wasserstrom, what brought these great scholars together in the middle of the twentieth century was a desire to “return religion to its original splendor.” This desire was shaped in and by the violence and chaos of their times, which Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade viewed as symptomatic of the dominance of modern rationality and technology. For them, to “return religion” was to recover religion’s essence: those symbols and myths that connect us 6

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with the “depths” of the human spirit. This was not simply a matter of identifying and understanding something about religion, to remind us of its splendor, but to reestablish it as a vital cultural force, even if only as a “religion after religion.” As Wasserstrom tells it, these scholars forged a kind of “secular esotericism” conducted outside of traditional religious contexts, “a soteriologically vibrant conversation of likeminded intellects, a transcultural circle of intensively learned but entirely nonpracticing believers, an invisible congregation of the very few.” And, in doing so, they gave birth to the “History of Religions” not simply as a discipline, but as a discourse of resistance to modernity.

Wasserstrom expresses deep admiration for the figures at the heart of his story, yet he is critical of their project. Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade, he claims, were brilliant writers of religious history, but in their efforts to be both scholars and adepts, to write history about religion as part of an effort to challenge and change secularism, they pushed the history of religions in problematic directions. By reading religious history in a way that privileged myth and symbol as the key elements of a mystical transcendence of history, these thinkers deemphasized, even lost sight of, historical difference and the multiple ways religion works in history and society, in other words, the rich and disturbing detail and ambiguity of human religiosity that Wasserstrom contends must be at the center of any viable history of religions.

In this, I think Wasserstrom is right. It is necessary, though, to specify just how we approach the question of “historical difference.”

Here, let me pursue this question by juxtaposing Wasserstrom’s story of the study of religion with two others.

There are many versions of the next story, but I will focus on the one that frames the introduction to one of many “guides” and “companions” to our discipline that have emerged in recent years, Guide to the Study of Religion, edited by Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon, a volume to which I will return in some detail in chapters 1 and 2. In his introduction to the volume, entitled simply “Religion,” Braun appeals to a common narrative about the development of critical, theoretical consciousness as an accomplishment of Western modernity. As the story goes, the establishment of the modern university, and of the human and social sciences, made possible the social-scientific and naturalistic theories of religion developed by Durkheim and others in the late nineteenth century. However, something went wrong in the middle 7

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of the twentieth century when Eliade and others (this is where Wasserstrom comes in) developed quasi-theological approaches to religion, for these came to dominate the field just as many of the independent departments of Religious Studies were being established in the United States. Consequently, so Braun and many others argue, the study of religion was established as an independent enterprise in the academy on very weak academic foundations and it is now long past time to rebuild the field from the ground up. Thus, Braun unapologetically dismisses paradigms for the field built on the concepts “sacred” and “holy,” such as Eliade’s, arguing that because they ultimately appeal to unverifiable, private experiences, they in fact only serve to mystify the way religion functions in human life, limiting the “uncensored curiosity” that should be the hallmark of academic study. Scholars of religion can and should protect and foster such curiosity by taking two steps.

First, they should give up efforts to defi ne the field in terms of some essential referent for religion—such as the “sacred”—and instead selfconsciously construct the concept in a way that can produce real knowledge about human behavior. The concept of religion, rightly understood, is a scholarly tool “used to allocate the stuff of the real world into a class of objects so as to position these objects for thought that is aimed toward explanation of their causes, functions, attractiveness to individuals and societies, relationships to other concepts, and so on.” As a second step toward academic respectability, scholars should study religion as a social phenomenon, not as a matter of individual religious experience. The mission of the Guide is therefore to offer a variety of perspectives on an explanatory, naturalistic paradigm for the study of religion, one that views religion as one among other means by which human beings organize worlds, societies, and identities for themselves— in other words, as a key element in what Burton Mack, a contributor to the Guide, calls “social formation.” For Braun, this approach makes the scholar of religion a social theorist and makes possible a research strategy that will allow the study of religion to become “a contributing partner in the pursuit of a science of human social life, an exercise that could be credible within the family of human and social sciences in the modern university.” Before commenting on Braun’s story, let me briefly turn to a third story, this from Robert Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth. Like both Wasserstrom and Braun, Orsi claims that certain problematic “reli8

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gious” assumptions and perspectives have had an undue influence on the study of religion. But where our first two stories focused on the resistance to modernity and secularism in Eliade and others, Orsi argues that in the early twentieth century a “domesticated Protestantism” adapted itself to modernity in a way that allowed it to retain a place in university culture, initially as the morally uplift ing element of undergraduate teaching (often identified with the “Humanities”) and then, as the study of religion emerged, as the paradigm of “religion” studied in the academy. For Orsi, this paradigm not only has led to the establishment of a (particular form of) Christianity as the model against which other religions are defi ned and measured, but has impressed upon scholars the idea that religion is basically “good.” Excluded from the discipline, then, or relegated to the margins as “primitive” or “immature” are those religions that don’t measure up to the rationality, tolerance, peace, and “spirituality” of this domesticated Protestantism. Although we are a long way from having fully excavated all the assumptions and presumptions that limit the field, we are at a point where we can at least recognize that a primary challenge for scholars of religion is, as Orsi writes, “not to stop at the border of human practices done in the name of the gods that we scholars find disturbing, dangerous, or even morally repugnant, but rather to enter into the otherness of religious practices in search of an understanding their human ground.” The stories I have summarized here have some obvious affinities. For my purposes, the most important of these is that each sees the academic study of religion as marked by a problematic slippage between religion and the study of religion. As Wasserstrom puts it, “here the subject and object of the study were confused, conflated, confounded.” Where Wasserstrom identifies a more or less conscious effort to recover a generalized form of religiosity in response to historical circumstances, Braun and Orsi, though in different ways, identify a kind of unacknowledged theological remnant that has decisively shaped the field up to the present day. For all three, this confusion needs to be eliminated, for it has prevented scholars from addressing religion in all its complexity and from taking a properly academic perspective on it. The field is thus saddled with a problematic conceptual apparatus, one that deters scholars of religion from studying, for example, the ideological dimensions of religion, as Braun argues, or the dangerous and violent dimensions of religion, as Orsi argues. In a crucial sense, the moral for all 9

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three stories is that we need to pay more critical attention to the genealogy of the concept “religion” and to the theological and ideological forces that have exercised such influence on its past and that continue to shape our studies in the present.

These stories also are significantly different. Note, first, a further, though ultimately superficial, similarity: working through each of these stories is a distinction between what I will call ordinary and extraordinary religion. Wasserstrom shows how “religion” for Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade was an esoteric discipline that could interrupt the historical.

He wants a History of Religion, however, that will direct us to the historical, ordinary, local forms of religion, where the abstracting and generalizing force of concepts such as “myth” and “symbol” will not obscure differences between religious traditions, ideas, and practices.

For Braun and his coeditor Russell McCutcheon, the premise of their naturalistic, historical, and social approach to religion is, as McCutcheon puts it, that religion is “utterly ordinary.” Th is means that scholars of religion should focus their attention not on exalted states of mind and experience or on some posited transcendent referent, but on the everyday, ordinary activity of “social formation” (which, of course, often utilizes and appeals to extraordinary experience and transcendent referents for its authority). Further, because religion is utterly ordinary, academics should not accord it special consideration or give it any more respect than they grant any other kind of human activity they study.

Finally, Orsi urges us to fi nd ways to think beyond a particular idealized vision of “good” religion so that we can examine it in all its complexity; further, as a historian of “popular” or “lived” religion, Orsi takes as the object of his own research the everyday religious practices and relations of ordinary people, as opposed to the ideas and texts of religious elites.

But if each of these scholars directs our attention to everyday lives and everyday religious behavior, they do so with different purposes in mind. McCutcheon’s appeal to the ordinary is a disciplinary move: it allows us to distinguish between the proper object of study for scholars of religion (ordinary activities of social formation) and the improper (extraordinary religious states or experiences). Moreover, it is a reductive move, one in which “ordinary” means “natural”: McCutcheon advocates a naturalistic approach to religion that seeks to explain claims to the extraordinary in terms of the way these claims function socially, 10

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politically, or biologically. For Orsi and Wasserstrom, by contrast, the appeal to the ordinary is more limited, simply pointing us to modes of being religious that often, and for various, sometimes “religious,” reasons, are overlooked: ordinary people in their everyday lives. They do not claim that this is the only place to find religion, and they do not exclude the possibility that in and through religious practices extraordinary things can happen to ordinary people.

This difference suggests two ways of thinking about “extraordinary” religion. The first sees the proper role of the scholar of religion as reducing the extraordinary to the ordinary in a reduction or “redescription” that renders what is strange and perhaps extraordinary into concepts and processes that are familiar, understood, and worldly. It seeks to explain the extraordinary in ordinary terms. The second is not necessarily reductionist in this sense. Rather, in what seems to me a more expansive and richer fashion than the first way of thinking about the ordinary, it attends to the intersection between the ordinary and extraordinary in peoples’ religious lives and to the play of life, power, and imagination at this intersection. Even though Wasserstrom does not think that the esotericism of the scholars he studies should be the sole focus of the study of religion or should in any way control the development of the concept of religion, he also does not claim that we should reduce extraordinary religion to ordinary culture and social formation.

To bring history back into the History of Religions, he writes, is “not to denude [religion] of its mystery.” For his part, Orsi seems to relish stories of the extraordinary. Some of these involve extraordinary things that happen to him in the context of his work as a scholar and observer of religion. For example, in his preface to Thank You, St. Jude, a study of devotion to the patron saint of lost causes, he tells of being on a plane circling LaGuardia airport when the pilot announced they were being diverted to Philadelphia. Orsi spontaneously prayed to St. Jude for intervention. Soon, the pilot informed the passengers that, surprisingly, they were going to be able to land after all. We might wonder whether the prayer worked, but this is not Orsi’s concern. So even as he reports that he does not “believe in” St. Jude, he asks us, “What does belief have to do with it?” Orsi’s obvious purpose here is to raise questions about the way scholars of religion have traditionally privileged belief over practice. But he also seeks to dislocate the reader, to upset his or her assumptions and convictions, and so to push the reader to adopt what he 11

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elsewhere describes as “a disciplined suspension of the impulse to locate the other (with all her or his discrepant moralities, ways of knowing, and religious impulses) securely in relation to one’s own cosmos.” Orsi’s histories do locate peoples’ religious practices in rich webs of religious, cultural, and social networks, but he is not interested in the question of whether St. Jude “really” intervenes or not, or in explaining the belief that he does intervene in naturalistic terms. Instead, he adopts a stance that, as he puts it, is “in-between” his own as a person and scholar, on the one hand, and those of his subjects, on the other. From this position, he believes he can reflect usefully on the play between the ordinary and the extraordinary, earth and heaven, and so come to a better understanding of how religious people give shape and texture, meaning and value to their lives.

Religion and Responsibility: A Humanistic Approach

Social formation theory, naturalism, and the turn to the ordinary have a lot to offer the study of religion. Today we can think about “religion” in ways that are no longer exclusively textualist, we study prosaic or popular religion as well as the religious expressions of elites, we have rigorous cognitivist and structuralist theories of religion, and, perhaps most important, we can analyze religious forms of power that are not beholden to the claims of religious actors and ideologies: these are all signs that the field has advanced. But in my view, too many scholars who embrace these advances have failed to pay enough attention to Orsi’s claims about the impulse to “locate the other . . . securely in relation to our own cosmos.” Consequently, in their quest for academic legitimacy, they end up locating both their religious subjects and themselves too securely and are not nuanced enough in their explorations of the power of religion. I make this argument in the first part of the book; in parts 2 and 3, I take steps in the direction of a different approach to the field.

Part 1: Locating Religion

I begin with the concept “religion” itself, which most scholars and historians view as a product of Western modernity. A crucial element of 12