Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion 149856562X, 9781498565622

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Manufacturing Distance in the Study of Religion
1 Method as Identity: The Battle for Identity in the North American Academic Study of Religion
2 Ghost Stories: How Method Reveals Identity in the Study of Religions
3 Long Division: How Identity Reveals Method in the History of Religions
4 What Is “Black” about “Black” Religious Studies? Distinction and Diaspora in the Maintenance of a Field
5 What Identity Is Your Method? Tracing Co-Constitution in the Twilight of (White) Normativity
6 Categorical Miscegenation: Strange Bitter Fruit and Uncertain Branches in the Field
7 N-Words and M-Words: Switching Codes, Shifting Realities, and Trading Metaphors of Authority
Conclusion: Ghostbusters and Paranoiacs
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors

Citation preview

Method as Identity

Religion and Race Series Editors: Monica R. Miller, Lehigh University; Anthony B. Pinn, Rice University The local/global connections between religion and race are complex, interrelated, ever changing, and undeniable. Religion and Race bridges these multifaceted dimensions within a context of cultural complexity and increasing sociopolitical realities of identity and difference in a multidisciplinary manner that offers a strong platform for scholars to examine the relationship between religion and race. This series is committed to a range of social science and humanities approaches, including media studies, cultural studies, and feminist and queer methods, and welcomes books from a variety of global and cultural contexts from the modern period to projects considering the dynamics of the “postmodern” context. While the series will privilege monographs, it will also consider exceptional edited volumes. Religion and Race seeks to impact historical and contemporary cultural and sociopolitical conversations through comparative scholarly examinations that tap the similarities and distinctions of race across geographies within the context of a variety of religious traditions and practices.

Titles in the Series Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion, by Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller The Religion of White Supremacy in the United States, by Eric Weed The Power of Unearned Suffering: The Roots and Implications of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Theodicy, by Mika Edmondson

Method as Identity Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion

Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Driscoll, Christopher M., editor. Title: Method as identity : manufacturing distance in the academic study of religion / edited by Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller. Description: Lanham : Lexington, 2018. | Series: Religion and race | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018040854 (print) | LCCN 2018046247 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498565639 (electronic) | ISBN 9781498565622 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Religion—Methodology. | Identity (Psychology) | Identification (Religion) Classification: LCC BL41 (ebook) | LCC BL41 .M393 2018 (print) | DDC 200.72—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040854 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

In memory of Rev. Dr. James Hal Cone (1938–2018) To the inimitable Dr. Cone, who sagely imparted that method cannot escape identity, and identity cannot escape experience. First teacher to so many of us, your groundbreaking defiance in the face of a field (and world) whose methods had not prepared them for the audacious “NO!” to the white theological and religious establishment. You taught us first that voice is method, and method reveals voice. That those voices already authorized might simply call “it” method; but those attempting to authorize new kinds of authorizations harness “its” power to build and destroy, to make otherwise worlds, voices, and discourses possible. Most of all, that method is identity. And has been all along. May our efforts travel down a similar path. In your fierce and unapologetic words: “The methods one employs for analysis must arise from the sources themselves.” (1969)

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Prefacexi Introduction: Manufacturing Distance in the Study of Religion

1

1 Method as Identity: The Battle for Identity in the North American Academic Study of Religion

25

2 Ghost Stories: How Method Reveals Identity in the Study of Religions

49

3 Long Division: How Identity Reveals Method in the History of Religions

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4 What Is “Black” about “Black” Religious Studies? Distinction and Diaspora in the Maintenance of a Field

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5 What Identity Is Your Method? Tracing Co-Constitution in the Twilight of (White) Normativity

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6 Categorical Miscegenation: Strange Bitter Fruit and Uncertain Branches in the Field

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7 N-Words and M-Words: Switching Codes, Shifting Realities, and Trading Metaphors of Authority

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Contents

Conclusion: Ghostbusters and Paranoiacs

203

Bibliography219 Index229 About the Authors

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Acknowledgments

Method as Identity is made possible by incredible mentors including Anthony B. Pinn, Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, Juan M. Floyd-Thomas, John L. Jackson, and Russell T. McCutcheon, each of whom have helped shape our research methods and interpretive horizons over the years. Across a range of topics, and various nodes of significance, they’ve nurtured our interest in theory and method, and they are equally responsible for cultivating our audacity to speak with authority on the topics and thinkers engaged throughout Method as Identity. We are also grateful for such a wonderful and collegial home department, Religion Studies at Lehigh University, where we’ve spent time thinking about, discussing, and curating this work. Our gratitude and humility go out to our dear colleagues, Jodi Eichler-Levine, Annabella Pitkin, Lloyd Steffen, Dena Davis, Hartley Lachter, and Rob Rozehnal. A very special word of thanks, and much affection to our dear colleague and friend Michael Raposa, who has served as an incredibly adept and vital conversation partner at crucial stages of this work, and to Marian Gaumer, both of whom know as well as we do that this book would not exist without them. And, to the “Cabal” crew, Benjamin Wright, Khurram Hussain, William Bulman, and Raposa for their very helpful comments and critiques on major parts of this work. Additional thanks and gratitude to Kashi Johnson and Jackie Krasas for always so faithfully (and lovingly) encouraging us in the work we do, and the intellectual paths we set before ourselves. We are lucky to work and think with each of you. The same is true of the support we have received from Jürgen Manemann and Anna Maria Hauk of the Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover, Germany. Our time there while in residence at the Institute for the 2016–17 academic year gave so much life and energy to this book that would not have been possible anywhere else. Additional appreciations are owed to ix

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our wonderful and meticulous editor Carol Ross, with whom we have had the great privilege of working with over the years. And to our closest interlocutors Elonda Clay and David Atwood, who have walked with us through nearly every idea presented throughout these pages. Lastly, we would like to note our wonderful pleasure working with Sarah Craig, Julia Torres, Michael Gibson, Mikayla Mislak, Joseph Gautham, and Lexington Books. We owe our family as much apology as thanks. Thank you for putting up with our strange preoccupation with the study of religion. The schedule we keep is as taxing on them as it is on us, and we thank our mothers, grandparents, siblings, and Mia, Phoebe, and Sita for all of your grace (the Baldwinian kind). We love you all, even more than studying religion.

Preface

The annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) are magical. This “magic” could signify on countless meanings, yet two such meanings stand out for us. First, whether young or old, seasoned or neophyte, participants in our guild’s Hajj are able to fill their bellies with enough contemporary discussions tackling and debating the who, how, what, and why informing (what comprises) the field of religion that by the last Monday of most Novembers, our cups of theory, method, and data runneth over. In a notso-subtle irony, the event is unique, singular, “sui generis” for the academic study of religion, and we’ve heard it rumored that ours is in fact one of the larger annual academic conferences in any field. We dare not inquire if this is true, for fear of treading too heavily on the “specialness” debate and running the risk of a premature resolution that would spoil the fun of debating. But we can attest that no other event (or set of professional experiences) in the academic study of religion offers the range of magical tricks (or more properly put: techniques) to be found at our annual meetings. The second magical quality of our annual meetings involves the rejuvenating and renewing effects of time spent with the like-minded. The philosophers of religion over here; the sociologists of religion over there. The black historians across the hall. The Latinx theologians around the corner. The womanists and black theologians in a location they won’t tell you about. The critical theorists at a NAASR (North American Association for the Study of Religion) meeting (that you weren’t invited to)—you get the idea. Confederations of this sort, among the like-minded, are not accidents and neither are they altogether problematic. They restore our energy reservoirs and motivate many. That is, they have an effect of structuring our professional identities, our academic “sense of self,” in addition to serving as a good excuse to drink with old friends. xi

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These two alchemical qualities have fascinated us for a number of years. How is it that so many people can come to so large a gathering of so many different types of individuals, and yet gravitate toward the ones who look and sound and act (and think) like them? In 2009, in an effort to foster conversation across various “silos” of engagement at these meetings, and in hopes of giving attention to the (then) understudied area of religion and hip-hop, we set about creating a standing AAR group, “Critical Approaches to HipHop and Religion.” Our aim was to foster a space where assumptions about who (or whose) hip-hop was could be critically interrogated, at the same time as hip-hop itself would be a forceful, abrasive, and beautiful experiential intervention into a rather pedantic set of discourses within the study of religion. We wondered if it would be possible to study hip-hop and religion critically—without rhetorical reliance on confessional postures of race or theism. However, we didn’t realize that not everyone agreed with us that race and theism are both expressions of what we would end up—thanks to Russell McCutcheon’s Culture on the Edge Scholarly Collective (of which Miller has participated)—referring to as “operational acts of identification.”1 In fact, we invited McCutcheon to serve as the first respondent for the group, and a version of his response was later published as “I Have a Hunch” in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.2 We initially thought that McCutcheon’s trademark brilliance and clever wordplay deconstructing the academic reliance on “hunches” (i.e., experiential nods to the sui generis by way of the phenomenological) had been well received, based in no small measure on his comprehensive claim that such reliance was cross-cultural. In other words, he was fast to emphasize that “we all do it”—lean on hunches, that is. It turned out that we were naïve. Not a few scholars made it clear that a breach of some social coding or norm had occurred. An inordinate number of black folks were mad, while an all-too-typical number of white folks did not care that some folks had been offended by the response (and by McCutcheon’s apparently obvious ontologized distance from the cultural formation of hip-hop). In so many ways, Method as Identity began developing then, as an effort at reflexivity (on our part) and out of our intellectual curiosity about who would say what to whom in the academic study of religion. We took it as our “critical” mandate to turn such world-making realities and techniques (of scholars) into our data. Fast-forward to another professional pilgrimage, this time the 2015 International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) Congress held in Erfurt, Germany. Our coauthored proposal for “Method as Identity” had been accepted. We packed our bags to present the earliest version of what is here included as chapter 1, which at the time consisted of little more than a “hunch” of the sort McCutcheon had warned us of some years earlier. Our “hunch” was that something about what scholars of religion have been

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calling “method” was somehow a categorical proxy for talking, debating, or even battling about our social identities and locations. Could it be that all the talk of “method deficits” in the field were rooted in the crisis of (one or more) social identity? And if so, whose? We expected to present the paper, receive critical engagement, and leave having refilled our batteries by talking theory and method with old and new friends and colleagues. To our surprise, we soon learned we’d be presenting alongside the formative Donald Wiebe, longtime (vocal) proponent of the “scientific study of religion,” and one of the founders of NAASR. We were honored to share the stage with him, and not a little nervous about how he would receive our paper. As irony would have it, our papers sounded awfully similar to each other, yet with some drastic differences. As to the differences, his interests were what they have seemingly always been, following the positivist Karl Popper right off the empiricist cliff in hopes of carving out some tertium quid for the (disinterested) “scientific study of religion.” Our interpretive posture, on the other hand, was of the social constructionist and discursive sort. Despite this theoretical gulf between us, our papers shared one thing in common: an ardent critique of critical assumptions. Again, we were presenting an early argument of what you will find here—that the discursive brand of critical method (argued for by Jonathan Z. Smith, Russell T. McCutcheon, and so many others) is necessary for the study of religion, yet ill-equipped to handle the complexity of identity as it relies on (and structures) the category of experience—leaving (established) critical approaches hopelessly “white” in allowing no room for experience to augment the relative “color” (i.e., operational acts of diverse identification) enacted in (this) critical approach. Wiebe, for his part, seemed upset with the provocation initiated by our use of/reliance on McCutcheon, the then president of NAASR, for having taken the Foucauldian, discursive turn toward logocentric analyses. What Wiebe (and presumably some of the other founders of NAASR) had wanted (by now) was the scientific legitimation of the academic study of religion as a reputable human science; what McCutcheon offered was (in their view) little more than postmodern mumbo jumbo. By our estimation, Wiebe was happy that McCutcheon had retained the assumption that there is a wide gulf between the doing of religion and the academic study of religion, but also upset (to our amazement) because the discursive field (as opposed to a scientific one) leaves open the prospects of unstable, interested, vested observation. In short, it seemed as if McCutcheon was too close to allowing the possible siphoning of meaning from the category of experience (and therefore the “methods” that catalogue them). There we were, in our presentation, critiquing ourselves and critical approaches for being, at times, too closed off to such possibilities, while Wiebe was suggesting that the critical camp (as represented today) doesn’t go far enough in protecting itself from experiential

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claims. What’s more, Wiebe offered the content of a strict positivist while his expressed tone was more decidedly identity invested. Can any observer truly remove themselves or their social identifications from either the methodology or motivation sparking critique? Isn’t “scientific” method just as subject to the instabilities and scrutiny of discursivity as the unscientific “method” that originally spurred critical interest in analysis? Wiebe’s presentation, consistent with his corpus, operationalized “method” as data, with the ardor seen so often in discussions over more traditional notions of “identity.” Soon, the occasion turned into a vigorous debate between Wiebe and us as the audience mostly watched. The “what” of the debate would help shape the final product of Method as Identity. Here was a white male scholar who had just argued for a disinterested, objective scientific study of religion, while it seemed drastically obvious to us that his motivations were about him. Importantly, we’re not even suggesting that such a solipsism is necessarily avoidable; only, that the not-so-disinterested interests3 of the analyst remain all but invisible in what has come to be called the critical method or approach espoused by Wiebe and championed as the “proper” approach to the academic study of religion by various voices in the field today, even while those interests exert influence in practice. Wiebe’s stated concerns about the academic study of religion did not jibe with his counterexamples that included references to NAASR going in a direction he didn’t intend, and even more general statements about the state of contemporary social life (various significations on identity) and the contemporary academy. The debate proved popular enough with the IAHR audience that we were approached by folks at The Religious Studies Project to participate with Wiebe (and Luther Martin, another founder of NAASR) in a podcast that would continue the debate, on location in Erfurt. We quickly agreed, anticipating in the experience the potential for more data. Wiebe had all but embodied our thesis in the first discussion, so we thought it might be cool to double down on data during the podcast. We were wrong. It was a shit show. There is fieldwork and then there is field work. Somewhere, someone at the Religious Studies Project has a copy of the podcast. At our request, it was never published. MAKING METHOD CRITICAL Our experiences at IAHR were epistemologically validating, yet existentially troubling. We left Germany with a much broader sense of the politics informing the establishment of NAASR, that inform (to this day) the shape and tone of “critical” debates in the academic study of religion.4 In an attempt to make our “strange” experience at IAHR “familiar” rather than unique, we began

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mining ongoing and earlier discussions of “critical” method as an epistemological starting point. We hoped to address and examine what we perceived as a not-so-tacit assumption in the study of religion that something called “method” is somehow, presumably by degree of observation, immune to critique of identity-interested particularity from assumed “objects of study.” In this way, in the pages that follow, we argue that what cultural theorist JeanFrançois Bayart refers to as a “battle for identity”5 forces a necessary confrontation with the (impact of) social identities (and their histories) haunting our fields of study, that shape both the data of scholarship and the scholarship of data. These complex categorical specters make it nearly impossible to untether the categories of identity that we come to study from the identification of categories shaping the theoretical and methodological assumptions concerning the properly “academic”6 in the study of religion today. As everyday social identities comprise what we call data in the field, some scholars have demonstrated difficulty with acknowledging that much of the interests informing the data we come to take up is likewise organized and represented by us, and for us, according to the very interests and experiences scholars seek to theorize and analyze. Today, many scholars know well that what we often claim to study (when we claim to study religion, race, etc.) is hardly, after all, (really about) belief, or faith, or meaning, but rather, myriad human interests organized by and thus organizing, the categories themselves. However, very rarely do we set about to reverse this trajectory. If the object of our study (e.g., religion) is not immune from the social interests that create it (and its manifold definitions, uses, etc.), then neither, really, can a critical method provide prophylaxis against the impact of similar interests on our handling of that data. Suggesting otherwise would be, well, sui generis. The abbreviated over-determinacy at work in academic shorthand(s) and catchphrases (e.g., “critical method and theory”) are rhetorical techniques that manufacture discursive milieus of (a kind of) unmoored and universalized vagueness that unduly smuggles in the categorical Others marking what it is not—unique, particular, specific, authentic, and so on. Such rhetorical devices curate environments of fabricated generalizability whereby suppositions or implications of theories x and y, or methods y and x are distant (enough) from the social identities (race, religions, etc.) making such discourse, in the first instance, possible. For instance, in their 2015 call for proposals, NAASR took up the trouble with the contemporary proliferation of “method and theory” in the study of religion, “Theory in a Time of Excess,” writing that Although the terms “method and theory” can now be found in course titles, curricula/degree requirements, area/comprehensive exams, and listed as competencies on the CVs of scholars from across a wide array of subfields, and while a

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variety of groups at annual scholarly conferences itemize theorizing among the topics that they routinely examine, it seems that few of the many examples of doing theory today involve either meta-reflection on the practical conditions of the field or rigorously explanatory studies of religion’s cause(s) or function(s). So, despite the appearances of tremendous advances in the field since NAASR’s founding as the lone place for carrying out theory in the study of religion—when “theory” was indeed a rare word and was often replaced with the more neutral “approach”—it can be argued that little has changed.7

Beginning in a cautionary manner, the “although” presumably serves to distinguish the core of issues NAASR identified at the beginning of its founding in 1985, that it had become apparent to a number of scholars, especially those engaged in the history of religions, comparative religions, or the scientific study of religions, or simply those who [felt] the need for theoretical work in the field, that the American Academy of Religion [had] become such a complex and competing repository of interests that the academic study of religion was in danger of being lost in the process.8

In their retrospective “Establishing a Beachhead: NAASR, Twenty Years Later” (2005) authored by NAASR cofounders Luther H. Martin and Wiebe, they return to former AAR President Claude Welch’s 1970 presidential address noting that although Welch announced “that the new AAR had selfconsciously committed itself to a scholarly-scientific agenda, the Academy had not, in his view, moved very much beyond the hegemonic liberal Protestant framework that had dominated the NABI.”9 NABI, here, refers to the National Association of Biblical Instructors, the predecessor organization to the AAR. Martin and Wiebe go on to suggest that the alternative organizational necessity for NAASR emerges among those upset by the AAR’s regressive relapse into the “arms of religiously oriented interests” and “frustrated with the Academy’s inability to transform itself into an institution that was able to encourage the development of a genuine scientific/scholarly approach to the study of religion, free from religious influence.”10 It is understandable that an early 1970s AAR might not have come as far as members had hoped in the (then only) several years since its reinvention from NABI, and even conceivable that the AAR’s “academic” identity was still in the balance of professional uncertainty, at least enough to convene an alternative venue such as NAASR in 1985. Martin’s and Wiebe’s (perpetual) dissatisfaction, however, was still well on display in their 2005 reflection of NAASR’s twenty-year anniversary. And yet, presumably, in 2005, hardly could they have anticipated the 2015 call for proposals. Beyond “religiously oriented concerns,” it is hard to imagine what all Martin, Wiebe, and others

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have in mind when they invoked the dangerous predicament of “complex and competing repository of interests” in the (then) AAR structure that so gravely challenges the “academic” study of religion. Note how the academic study of religion is here categorically distinguished from “interests” that prevent rigorous work free of “influence.” Not only does the method/theory interchangeability that begins and ends the 2015 NAASR call emphasize the discursive contexts of vague abstraction noted at the outset of this section, but also, it unapologetically maintains a hermeneutic of suspicion about the proliferating culture industries of “method and theory” as signaling “academic” arrival for the study of religion. On the contrary, they assert that “despite the appearances of tremendous advances in the field since NAASR’s founding,” these times of “excess” should not be confused with the kind of academic progress originally anticipated. Such clarion calls and battles for the “identity” of the study of religion in North America—whether sounded in 1985, 2005, or 2015—are just as much about the competing economies and interests of identity and the manner in which such identities ultimately reveal method (and theory), as it is about scholarly concern over academic respectability. While nothing about theory and method is inherently, or selfevidently—critical or confessional—NAASR’s origin narrative regarding the absence (or brevity) of theory and method in the Academy, and how it provides that alternative space among crypto-academics, helps to situate its own interests in raising alarm over the mass “academic” appeal of theory and method, for what else would continue to legitimate its necessity as an ad hoc space doing something different? Does mass inclusion of a (once) marginalized identification with a particular methodological posture in the Academy ultimately render its incorporation futile? The 2015 NAASR call, we suggest, telegraphs the sorts of anxieties fueling the revealing and concealing nature of academic proxies such as theory (or, method) and their attendant “battles” over the naming, defining, and determining of the look, posture, and style of the “proper” academic identity in our field today. Additionally, Method as Identity takes up interest in the categorical conflations, confessions, and confusions that currently exist in the academic study of religion around how particular brands of knowledge formation are classified within the field more generally. While “method” has somehow come to serve as a rhetorical placeholder for “theory” (so much so that shout-outs to method often presuppose theory), the converse also occurs, where go-to thinkers for method happen to be those already turned to for theory in the field (e.g., Durkheim). Taken together, the “theory and method” shorthand or, the more popularly condensed moniker “critical approaches” is often deployed as a proxy for method and theory. We consider the authorized contexts (and, contexts of authorization) of its uses for what they have come to mean, obscure, address, signal, and so on. In this way, it is our hope that

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this work begins an ongoing exchange about the ways in which burgeoning concerns over proper “theory” and “method” tend to be deployed when experiential claims to identity are foregrounded, and thus targeted, for methodological (and, theoretical) critique (assuming that these techniques are free from the social interests of social standpoints). Thus, claims to identity are often subject to one-directional critiques by the “operational acts” of critical methods (and methodologists) that are assumed to be free from experiential interests informing the identity-interested data they seek to deconstruct. What informs the idea that method is a more reliable technique free from the same economies of human influence and interests—or put differently, that when we apply method we are not also applying identity? While indeed “everything is data,” the data and interests that make up our critical methods and theories are often taken-for-granted and thus left un-interrogated. DEMYSTIFYING METHOD What do we classify, and what is being classified, when we go about the work of method? In various ways throughout the pages that follow, we argue that the work of classifying, in fact classifies and telegraphs more than the effects of mere approach (i.e., the how) to data (i.e., the what). For many in the “academic” study of religion, an approach such as the phenomenological (by way of theology) is assumed to lack the necessary merit as a “scientific” category in its perceived inability to parse claims to identity under its confessional moniker, on one hand. On the other, an asymmetrical overreliance on the notion of “religion as a human science” continues among a second wave of scholars (paradoxically) persuaded by both postmodern thought and the modern promise of pristine method. Such a posture takes the notion of identity’s instability seriously enough to see it organized by/at work in (the category of) religion (as identity) insomuch as the “operational acts of identification” endemic to the strategies (such as nostalgia, authenticity, etc.) enabling religion, invariably signify on the human interests of identity. However, this critical accounting is most often followed by an appeal to methodological rigor assumed to hold promise for identity-free “critical” claims or descriptions on/ about the data and techniques under analysis. Here, sui generis critiques of religion function as critiques of identity’s strategic mechanisms of claiming/ maintaining identity, whether subsumed under categories of belief or social identity. In this formulation, religion (as identity) is recursively influx and ever changing, and analyzable by some immutable, stable, teleological, and sui generis “critical” method. Yet these postmodern analyses of religion as social formation or process, tightly held as they are, do not hold up to deconstructive inquiry when it comes to the how of their (assumed) methodological

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security. And, it is here where we cite the most palpable slippage in the way identity is maintained, obscured, and highlighted. The historical prevalence of “theory and method” as necessary for doing “proper” work in the academic study of religion tends to homogenize “all other” approaches as doing “religious” (read: identity-based) work. For these reasons, we suggest that there exists a deep disciplinary segregation that, despite approach, structures how discourse in the field is classified based on the what of the identity of the data (e.g., theologically assumed approaches of black religion, black theology, womanist theology, etc., vs. the academic study of religion—e.g., history of religions, social scientific approaches, etc.) In this way, perception of data (e.g., blackness) and distance among one’s objects of study (e.g., approach) seem to determine discursive placement in the field based on normative methodological/theoretical presumptions. With projects of (identity-based) “special interest” on one side, and the “rest” of the study of religion on the other, social normativity is seemingly maintained as a default identification further obscured under the more general identityfree categories such as “the academic study of religion.” Such problematic assumptions tend to take it as given that certain approaches to religion already categorically say something about identity, identification, and claims to it. In the 1971 inaugural issue of the journal Religion, well-known historian of religions and authority on the comparative method Eric Sharpe reminded of the stakes at work in discussions about method, writing: When questions of methodology begin to bulk large in the transactions of any field of scholarship, it is likely that one of two things is happening: either its members are suffering from what is elsewhere called a failure of nerve, because old certainties have abruptly collapsed and the future of work within that field seems threatened; or those same members are energetically getting to grips with the problems posed by a new situation, problems for which the old methodology (always supposing there to have been one) has been proven inadequate. These two alternatives are not necessarily mutually exclusive.11

Without a doubt, the academic study of religion is marked by veritable moments of panic (over its credibility and identity) wherein concerns over method or theory arise as critical anxieties about the shape and direction of the field. According to Sharpe, moral panics arising from “old certainties” produce and inform debates about method in ways that figure crises about professional identities as emerging from a failure of “old methodology” to meet contemporary demands. The exaggerated referent often attached to such moments of panic are often categorical scapegoats for what, in reality, are subjugated anxieties often correlated with social difference (religious, racial, cultural, or otherwise). The severity of moral-panic-prone-and-laden debates

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and battles rarely, if ever, reflect the actual severity or reality of the social crisis (if such a problem as named exists at all). As is pointed to in Sharpe’s thinking above, these “two alternatives” convey confused tension between personal motivations and modes of professional conduct. On this point, sociologist C. Wright Mills’s concept of the sociological imagination is helpful in understanding better the relationship binding individual lives and the history of a society—which, according to Mills, cannot be properly understood apart. Mills encourages us to consider the ways in which our personal or private situations are intrinsically linked to the public forces of history, enabling subjects to connect their social realities to historical forces otherwise assumed to be remote and impersonal. Responding to a set of interconnected blind spots associated with the social sciences, Mills reminds that public issues are often secured and stabilized in ways that both mitigate and deny (their roots in) personal and private troubles, whereas personal issues are often encouraged to remain in the domain of the private—without social or structural roots. Scholars in denial of this interconnectedness do not, “by the assumed neutrality of his techniques, escape this problem—in effect, he allows other types of men to solve it for him.”12 Mills offers a useful frame for unpacking the reliance on—and impact of—social norms, contexts, and interests on debates about method and approach within the academic study of religion. Remarkably similar in tone to Sharpe, Mills notes that “even when they do not panic, [white] men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. That—in defense of selfhood,”13 could it be that scholars of religion are “trying to remain altogether private men?” We do not want to overemphasize motives, but if method debates evoke a sense of public/private confusion, then “we must ask what values are cherished yet threatened, and what values are cherished and supported, by the characterizing trends of our period.”14 And, “in the case both of threat and of support we must ask what salient contradictions of structure may be”15 eliciting such panic. Perhaps, the professional identity crisis that arouses, err, guides so much ado over proper method in the study of religion is best understood as a feeling of panic evolving from personal concerns over a perceived impending threat to the reputation and well-being of a professionally situated identity that becomes deployed as a public concern over the identity of the field in which one works (in a linked-fate sort of way). Or, maybe battles posed as “professional” are in fact a series of private crises of authority among white European men in particular, further projected onto a narrower set of professional concerns. Suggesting the avoidance of fetishism of method and critique, Mills encouraged sociologists to be better intellectually unpretentious bricoleurs—or, as he put it, let every person be their own methodologist, their own theorist, and let “theory and method again become part of the practice of the craft.”16

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Mills’s groundbreaking work encouraged a better understanding of how public issues often lead to private crises of authority that through the guise of “method,” “theory,” or “professionalization,” ultimately transmute back into narrower, public issues that arouse particular kinds of concerns which often involve an antagonist at the center of (and responsible for) the moral panic drama. What has been packaged (or often passes) as a professional problem in the academic study of religion in many ways can be viewed as discursive and credential-based distance-making responses to the perpetual social crises of white male authority. To the extent that we can speak of a critical, comparative method hailing from the history of religions, in many ways highlights the nostalgic impulse for a fabricated and usable scholarly authoritative past that would assuage current private troubles. Has the identity crisis played out in-and-through methodological debates served as rhetorical means at maintaining or cultivating illusory assumptions concerning the possibility of (objective) distance, or “a degree of detachment from one’s own religious tradition” to borrow from Sharpe?17 Across decades of debates about methods and “principles, assumptions and presuppositions,” Sharpe reminds that seldom is it asked “by whose authority the principle is given.” (emphasis in Sharpe)18 This is the work we want to suggest needs to happen within “critical” discourses on method within the academic study of religion, and we hope Method as Identity contributes to such efforts. In a variety of ways, we tend to treat method as an always-been category that has remained constant, when, much like concepts such as “religion” and “authority,” it is too, in the end, both manufactured product and effect. Put differently, like the idea of god, method is neither universal nor immutable. As such, it is not universally regarded as critically necessary or beneficial for determining the status of a field’s academic import, identity, and professional status in private or public universities. In fact, explanatory efforts at discussing method reveal its constitutive reliance on the manufacturing of distance between an observer and that which is observed. Postcolonial philosopher and methodologically trained psychologist Frantz Fanon left “methods to the botanists and mathematicians,” noting that “there is a point at which methods devour themselves.”19 Some would relegate Fanon’s perspective to the voice (and effect) of his politics, which would be both dismissive but somewhat accurate. Method, as it so grossly did at the inception of the modern study of religion, undercuts its utility if unable to situate itself historically and internalize its historicity with respect to goals, limits, and motives. Such a failure or incapacitated method is not the result of the inability to do it properly, but rather, the consequence of our belief in the neutral (scientific) name we have assigned to the ideological circumstances whereby a European world became “modern” by the “anti-modern” it sought so obsessively to mark as its antithesis. Plainly put, the shape-shifty identity

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work we have come to call method is (and has always been) quite good at producing semblances of knowledge, but not so productive in turning the social theoretic mirror of analysis onto its own operative rationales and logics of practice. OUTLINE OF THE BOOK The book you hold is made up of a variety of chapters written across four years. Now revised into one consistent voice throughout, some of the chapters were initially essays penned individually for specific public lectures and presentations, while others have been written in collaboration for this book. They work to outline different parameters for the cultivation of a critical posture that might be better informed and more judiciously reflexive when making proscriptive pronouncements concerning our data, and how we handle them as they handle us. In these ambitions, Method as Identity is inspired by an admonition offered by Alain Locke: Whatever the tentative service and value of objective studies of the Negro problem, its effective and final discussion must come in terms of a school of critical approach and method, and further, one that insists more strongly on the integration of the race question with the other vital issues of current social maladjustment and reform.20

Here, Locke admonishes scholars to allow the interpretive postures brought forth from black data, black thinkers, and black thought to inform a critical approach and method to the study of identity, writ large. His ambitions are larger than ours here, though we do hope Method as Identity contributes to his aims, by demonstrating the interventions made possible by taking social identity as seriously as we are told we must take method. Our question is not, will “critical” approaches make space for a black standpoint (after all, we trouble any stable notion of what that would mean), but would a “critical” method have the capacity to account for standpoints that know very well of their instabilities, and would it have the dexterity or courage to account for its own experiential standpoint? Charting connected and overlapping but somewhat distinct topics including whiteness, colonialism, diaspora, categorical miscegenation, philosophical and embodied limitations, code switching, and more, these chapters work to establish certain frames and trends possible for a critical approach to the study of religion that recognizes the difference between studies of the “Negro” as a problem, and the “service and value of objective studies of the Negro problem”—the former with precedents set in the thinkers we bolster as

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our theoretical and methodological gods today, the latter something scholars of African American religion have been doing for a very long time. Through interdisciplinary discussions that draw on thinkers including Charles H. Long, Bruce Lincoln, William D. Hart, C. Wright Mills, Russell T. McCutcheon, Laurel C. Schneider, Theodor Adorno, Tomoko Masuzawa, Anthony B. Pinn, bell hooks, Roderick Ferguson, John L. Jackson, James D. Faubion, Jacques Derrida, Jasbir Puar, and Jean-François Bayart, among others, Method as Identity intentionally blurs the lines classifying “proper” scholarly approach and proper “objects” of study. With an intentional effort to challenge the de facto disciplinary segregation marking the field and study of religion today, we hope Method as Identity will be of interest to those working at the intersections of identity, difference, and classification—and the politics thereof. In this way, Method as Identity, to borrow from historian of religions Lincoln, seeks to “recalibrate categories and redistribute privileges”21 so that burdens of representation are more equitably distributed across authorizing discourses in the field, thereby expanding the range of voices authorizing how investigations ought to unfold, in the adjudication of what is or is not a “proper” method for scholarly investigation. Additionally, we also mine snapshots of Western intellectual history for both uncovering and revealing instances of categorical conflation between social identity (of the thinker), and oscillating theoretical and methodological postures. We suspect that much of the longstanding suspicion surrounding the phenomenological (experience-laden) impulses often promulgated by sui generis theological frames reveals as much as it conceals in the posture it takes toward the role of identity in the “irreducible” spaces of perceived selfevidences. As a result, subjugated critical sensibilities in certain discourses have tended to go unrecognized and misrecognized in areas of thought presumed to be burdened by the excess of (its own claims to) identity to the extent that (external) concerns over it result in categorical over-determination, methodological misplacement, and misrecognition. The unending recursive loop of hyper-categorization and dislocation at work in determining the “proper” form and content in the study of religion have, we argue, largely excluded and analytically segregated race-based projects in the field as incapable of procuring the proper methodological postures necessitated by (critical definitions of what constitutes) the academic study of religion. Our “Introduction: Manufacturing Distance in the Study of Religion” provides certain technical, interpretive, genealogical, and theoretical scaffolding used throughout Method as Identity. To talk of “method” is to signify on modes of travel, and to talk of “identity” is to signify on locations traveled. Method is how one travels, and identity is where any travel begins or ends. Such travel, and claims to identity, in the academic study of religion (and maybe, beyond it) have roots dating back at least to colonial contact

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and to the safeguarding of particular, historically authorized, comparatively validated, “white” European identity. Here, we tell an incomplete, albeit necessary story of the general Western construction of distance through the category of religion, and the specific relationship to that construction of distance we hold today as scholars of religion. Chapter 1 is eponymously titled “Method as Identity: The Battle for Identity in the North American Academic Study of Religion.” Here we argue that what French cultural theorist Jean-François Bayart has referred to as the “battle for identity”—that we acknowledge identities as culturally constructed but that they remain as politically potent as ever—has become a defining trend in the North American study of religion. One of these “identities” belongs to scholars of religion who maintain some form of confessionality and allow their methods to be shaped by assumptions held and claims made by the adherents they study. Another “identity” belongs to those labeled “critical” scholars who deconstruct and abhor reliance on sui generis claims claiming to be self-evident. This “critical scholar” attempts to apply a single methodology applicable across all domains of inquiry. We outline features of this North American “battle” waged between academic “identities” as a new iteration of a longstanding struggle between historicizing and transhistoricizing, understanding both as “operational acts of identification,” before concluding by characterizing this “battle” as a question of our method as an identity, or our identities as methods. Chapter 2, “Ghost Stories: How Method Reveals Identity in the Study of Religions,” tells a story about priests of a “critical” gaze studying “lesser” scholarly “species” for how they study what they study and why, even while the pendulum of scholarly criticism in religious studies never swings back to return the gaze onto the “critical” classifiers themselves. We refract the debates over “Revolutionary Love” as a thematic choice for the 2016 AAR annual meeting through the prism of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Here we are indebted to social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who so persuasively suggests that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.”22 The “theoretical and methodological tastes” that some of us scholars might have and advocate for classify others into particular groups— yet such classifications, following Bourdieu, might say less about the actual tastes of the group being classified, or how those tastes might classify them into a certain social group, than they might indicate about the one doing the classifying. Thus classification, in this sense, returns the favor of the gaze. In the resulting taxonomical system, we are left with a small privileged camp of “critics” studying “caretakers” of their prized identities, and the

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data thereof. The field of religion has been transformed—for some—into the colonized, ethnographic field, keeping the field subject to identity in a manner promoting the escape from identity for only a few. Chapter 3, “Long Division: How Identity Reveals Method in the History of Religions,” gives attention to several moments in the history of the history of religions wherein concerns or interests in social identity give way to the methodological choices of particular scholars, particular groups of scholars, and even entire discourses within the field. We give attention to the “religious” origins of the comparative method, the impact of the 1958 Tokyo IAHR Congress on debates over method, the socially focused work of Joachim Wach, and the space that the category of experience provided for historian of religions and father of African American religious studies Charles H. Long to find his methodological voice. Without a doubt, the critiques of unverifiable experiential appeals that have come from the “critical” camps over the last decades have appropriately worked to offset theological hegemony within the study of religion, but is the choice over “proper” method really so simple, and is any purported “objective” distance ever, actually, objective? Chapter 4, “What Is ‘Black’ about ‘Black’ Religious Studies? Distinction and Diaspora in the Maintenance of a Field,” emerges from numerous encounters with scholars and discourses on both sides of the Atlantic that simultaneously render “black” religion as a priori guilty of frontloading scholarship with a confessional identity posture, even while often sporting a remarkable lack of critical awareness of the manner in which such arguments render white, European modes of religionswissenschaft as somehow, merely, the study of religion. In these encounters, the academic study of “black religion” is always seemingly designated as its own distinctive “thing,” “field,” or “area of study” apart from the field proper. Meanwhile, “religion” gets to be, just (white) religion, after all. As long as “white religion” can go without naming, without a contextual designator, “black religion” will always, in many ways, champion its own distinction, and thus be regarded as nostalgic for naming its distinction under a cloak of uniquely styled difference. With this in mind, if “white” religion is a redundancy—a distinction upon or within a distinction-making apparatus—“black” religious studies historically is the rejection of the weight of white dominance but also a reification of the very distinction posed, a distinction that the field of black religion has come to celebrate and privilege as its “experiential” own. Thus, at its very “core,” “black” religious studies is historically a rejection of certain appeals to the sui generis vis-à-vis normativity by way of other sorts of normative claims. Chapter 5, “What Identity Is Your Method? Tracing Co-Constitution in the Twilight of (White) Normativity,” demonstrates that the Western preoccupation with religion—whether the practice of it, or the study that would come to see itself as studying those things so conceived—has always been

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inextricably connected to the modern invention of race. Much like the many (pseudo) academic projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the curiosity to obsessively study, document, and archive the spirituality, essence, animism, totemism, effervescence, gods, and deep structures of twothirds of the world’s subjects (not yet as “advanced” as the places from which such scholars hailed) passed as the approach of scientists with decidedly neutral interests and academic objectives setting out on scholarly adventures of great intellectual promise and merit. Put bluntly, race, as an idea, reality, social construction, or essence, was and is not a bastardized appendage of our academic field, smuggled in at the outset of that long and slow process of desegregating institutions of higher learning—when entrée into the hallowed halls was finally offered to those others, whose bodies and religions had been used as academic objects of study for hundreds of years prior. Rather, race may be far more fundamental to the academic study of religion than contemporary scholars would wish to admit, emerging in through the category of religion. As such, analysis of one necessitates analysis of the other. Chapter 6, “Categorical Miscegenation: Strange Bitter Fruit and Uncertain Branches in the Field,” brings theologian A. Roy Eckardt’s notion of the strange field of religion, and novelist Lillian Smith’s notion of “strange white fruit” to bear on the conversations about a “critical” posture’s prospects for critique of various expressions of social normativity. The strange self-consciousness of religious studies as a discipline historically—that is, our anxiety about being taken seriously as a distinct academic “scholarly” field of inquiry—can be partially mitigated by naming and embracing its largely normative, historically dominant social identity, while that very selfconsciousness and the theoretical and methodological discussions emerging from it over these last decades, mark religious studies as particularly suited to address questions of normative white identity and singular logics unduly shaping scholarship in our field and extending to the very fields that for so long have served as strawman for our disciplinary anxieties. Religious studies is strange; social normativity is strange—and yet the strangeness of each can speak back to the other in strange, productive ways. Chapter 7, “N-Words and M-Words: Switching Codes, Shifting Realities, and Trading Metaphors of Authority,” borrows from the discourses of code switching to explore some of the unstated (and unacknowledged) limits to both critical methodological postures, and the transmission of analyses gleaned from such postures across mediating lines of social difference and classification. A cursory analysis of the moves made in contemporary race studies reveals analysts of all “pre” and “post” persuasions (blackness as the focus of discussion for the purposes of this chapter) and of a variety of theoretical/methodological influences (from phenomenological essentialists to postmodernists/poststructuralists) circuitously shifting categories and

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switching approaches to avoid either (very public, passionately contested) political incorrectness, or an over-simplified “one-size-fits-all” approach. Taking a cue from recording artist Goodie Mob’s 1998 song “The [Nigger] Experience,” we argue that the switches and shifts evidenced in current studies and commentary on race today—largely concealed under metaphor, theory, method, and more explicitly revealed in strategic claims to experience—animate a recurring and citational shifting, switching, and trading of codes and strategies for identity-making and maintenance. Identity is what is at stake in both the strategic acts and mundane performances of code shifting and (seemingly uncoded) coded identity maintenance. Our “Conclusion: Ghostbusters and Paranoiacs” asks two interrelated questions: Would the academic study of religion have tools at hand that might aid our efforts to address the limits of our field’s analytic powers, our self-consciousness at only ever studying “ghosts” of one sort or another, and the crisis of authority that sees our field (and other fields in the humanities) exerting scant influence on the broader society and culture? Might our paranoia surrounding those ghosts and hauntings—those “specters” of Marx and all the others (as Jacques Derrida calls them), in their permanence—suggest movement to a methodological posture of the paranoiac? Rather than fight against such hauntings, we conclude Method as Identity by suggesting that taking ownership of these impulses toward identity, through the methodological prism of the paranoiac, might offer the academic study of religion a word on responding to our method(s) as an identity. In total, Method as Identity is as much a thought experiment as it is an effort to continue a conversation that for us is at least as old as the AAR’s Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion group, and as we have learned, much older than that. In some sense, Method as Identity might be read as a sort of rules for engagement for cross-silo discussion inside of the AAR and extending beyond it. Others might read it as a warning and explication of why the siloing has taken place and is probably for the best. We can hardly blame women for organizing their own professional spaces separate from oh, so many WASPy men. It makes obvious sense that African American voices, Hispanic voices, queer voices, and many more would seek spaces of like commitment and intellectual interest. And really, what we see as the proliferation of difference inside of the AAR is microcosmic of our institutions, with resources slowly (but firmly) shifting away from traditional disciplines and toward area-based, interdisciplinary programs and specializations. But who is really doing the “traveling” here? It is important to remind that not all the black scholars hanging out together represent ideological or methodological homogeneity, and we are as equally curious to wonder whether many of us stop to ask if all the white men in a particular “wing” of the AAR tend to think and act alike. They, too, have created self-interested silos of (professional/social) identity-based interest.

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In many ways, the primary aim of Method as Identity is to trouble our scholarly confidences that somehow method is free from the interests, demands, claims, and influences of social identity. Despite our overconfidence in it (and in method’s most classic and iconic representatives) we cannot presuppose that all method is (or, was) created equally, and prepackaged for universal transposability. Failure to treat method as of the same sort as “religion” and other categories of identification is befitting the well-worn, now clichéd notion of a failure of nerve. Such postures fail to consider that the TV dinner branded as method is always-and-already (the making of) identity. The underlying process of method entails the continual measurement of object-related proximity as a tool to gauge when proper method is being exacted, in a way that (still today) allows comparative projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that so well “studied” the identities and practices of Others (and their identities, cultures, and claims thereto) to be harkened back to as the “methods” giving birth to the academic study of religion. NOTES 1. Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 92. 2. Russell T. McCutcheon, “I Have a Hunch,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 81–92. 3. Russell T. McCutcheon’s more recent work has emphasized that the scholar (of religion) is hardly disinterested, and that theories and methods emerge from the “data” we find of interest. This work has helped to clarify the manner in which scholars manufacture, fabricate, authenticate, and legitimate, our objects of study, and the theoretical approaches we take up out of our own self-interests. Yet, very little, we argue, of the recognition of such “self-consciousness” has been applied to the method, as such. See, Russell T. McCutcheon, A Modest Proposal on Method: Essaying the Study of Religion (Brill, 2014). 4. We treat the category of religion as signifying modes of distinction-making, social classification and formation, and taxonomic tendencies structuring and structured by various manipulations of, appeals to, or denials of sui generis status. The negation of specialness is its own brand of specialness. 5. Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, 252. 6. More generally, the nomenclature “academic” study of religion is a field-specific way of distinguishing the academic study about religion, and being religious, or a religious practitioner. The former has historical roots in nineteenth century Western “contact” with non-Western cultures. In 1964, the preeminent association for Religious Studies scholars in North America, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) was formed. The AAR’s formation as a scholarly guild emerged in the

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United States soon after academic departments dedicated to the study of religion were emerging in public university settings. The strong “academic” distinction rhetorically advocated for in the phrase the academic study of religion was especially significant in light of the 1963 U.S. Supreme Course case Abington vs. Schempp (Pennsylvania) which challenged the constitutionality of daily prayer in school. Ultimately, the court found that the school’s (in queston) practice of daily prayer was unconstitutional, thus concluding that mandated religious “exercises” in public school settings violated the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. Particularly vital for the field of religious studies in the United States was a sharp distinction drawn by the court between religious instruction and instruction about religion— whereas the former was deemed unconstitutional, the latter rubric was encouraged in public school settings. In his write up of the “Opinion of the Court,” Justice Tom C. Clark notes that the court insists that, “unless these religious exercises are permitted, a ‘religion of secularism’ is established in the schools. We agree, of course, that the State may not establish a ‘religion of secularism’ in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus ‘preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.’” Clark goes on to assert that “one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion” as it concerns religion’s “relationship to the advancement of civilization.” Despite the lingering protracted debate regarding the professional “identity crisis” in the study of religion, and the divergent scholarly opinions concerning proper approach to, and definition of, the “scholarly” versus “religious” approach to this field of study—many scholars of religion have long taken pride in, and quipped about, being professionally part of a Supreme Court “mandated” field of study. School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp (no. 142) 374 U.S. 203 https​://ww​w.law​.corn​ell.e​du/su​preme​court​/text​/374/​203# w​ritin​g-USS​C_CR_​0374_​0203_​ZO, (accessed December 8, 2017). 7. “NAASR Annual Meeting, Atlanta, 2015,” https://bulletin.equinoxpub. com/2015/04/10044/ (accessed December 8, 2016). 8. Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe, “Establishing a Beachhead: NAASR, Twenty Years Later,” https​://na​asrre​ligio​n.fil​es.wo​rdpre​ss.co​m/201​4/01/​estab​lishi​ ngabe​achhe​ad.pd​f (accessed December 8, 2016). 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Eric J Sharpe, “Some Problems of Method in the Study of Religion,” Religion 1, no. 1 (March 1, 1971): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1016/0048-721X(71)90003-0, 1. 12. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Cary: Oxford University Press, 2000), 51. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. Ibid., 12. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 142. 17. Sharpe, “Some Problems of Method in the Study of Religion,” 3. 18. Ibid. 19. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, 1986), 14.

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20. Alain Locke, “Review of Review of Race Relations: Adjustment of Whites and Negroes in the United States, by Willis D. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson. International Journal of Ethics 45, no. 4 (1935): 481–82. 21. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 216. 22. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 6.

Introduction Manufacturing Distance in the Study of Religion

INSIDER POLITICS Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion emphasizes the inexorable influence that social identities exert in shaping methodological choices within the academic study of religion, as witnessed in sui generis appeals to particularity and reliance on (or rejection of) identitybased standpoints. It considers how various locations of identity shape and ultimately reveal methodological choices by considering the oft-examined entanglements connecting our social identities, and their influence on our methodological standpoints, uses, and advocacies. Rather than merely asking, “What identity is your method?” and thereby assuming identity is necessarily a priori to method (as if method magically buffers socially invested interests/ stakes of our manifold identities), Method as Identity treats method as an identity-revealing technique of distance making. Such that method involves (and reveals) travel. This travel can be geographic, ideological, economic, and so on, but importantly, it always occurs across fields infused by and with power relations. Thus, distance making, or method, enables location and orientation that in turn provides a certain security of thought or power to scholars of religion. Identity signifies the “locations” traveled and traversed, our figurative ports of embarkation, call, and disembarkation. Oriented as we are toward a method that is both “critical” and yet vested in a standpoint that studies African American religion, we understand religion as a mode of distinction making that cross-culturally organizes, classifies, and compares human interests, social formations, and processes. If “method” is how one travels, and “identity” where one goes, then “religion” is the ranking of one location against another, the use of various classifying techniques to mark an arbitrary, mundane location as unique. 1

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Throughout the study of religion today, there exists a widespread and prevailing assumption that certain (critically oriented) methodological approaches are best suited to stave off subjective/ideological dangers emanating from unbridled social interests and privatized experiential realities. In short, such a methodologically induced posture of experiential abstinence works to conceal particular human interests impacting our analyses by manufacturing “critical” distance through various theoretical and methodological techniques that seek to buffer the battle between academic duty and the encroaching demands of proximal subjective identity and experience-based interests. In such an arrangement, it is presumed that method proper (e.g., the study of religion as a human science) properly enables the distance necessitated between where we are, what we study, and who we are based on the adjudication of how we do what we do. The continual “critical” assessing of how a particular scholar (or discourse) organizes their objects of study, and makes claims about what they know about their data based on how close they might be to it, does not inoculate the scholar from the weight of social identifications. Though seldom acknowledged in this way, perceptions of measuring, manufacturing, and buffering experiential and identity-based proximities/distances on academic analyses are shaped by illusory selfevidences that the human science of method can reliably buffer the relationship between the who (e.g., scholar’s identity, beliefs) and the what (e.g., their data) by managing how a scholar travels between them. Longstanding determinants determining the who-what-how or what-who-how relationship often governing the what and how of ones’ scholarly work has long marked ongoing theory/method debates in the study of religion (e.g., confessional vs. critical; theological vs. academic; insider vs. outsider; public vs. private) and shaped and manufactured field-based classifications and value-laden taxonomies in the field, such as the identity-interested academic versus the identitydistanced analyst. Such categorical proxies tend to obscure the longstanding and ongoing identity crisis in the study of religion as a battle over method (or, theory) rather than (the experiences of) identity itself. The obfuscation of identity concealed by the categorical proxies deployed in such debates often masquerades as a scholarly debate concerning the proper management and demarcation of boundaries between private (identity-based/insider) stances and public (objective/outsider) roles that ought to guide and govern the contemporary politics of the profession—assumed both determinable and manageable through “proper” method. Various methodological constructions (and the durable academic traditions they represent) serve to distinguish not so much what one studies, but rather, how one studies as a marker of the perceived distance marking the who one is in the field (e.g., an essentialist vs. a postmodernist; a critic vs. a caretaker) by assessing how one does what they do. For brief example, in the contemporary

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study of religion, an “Eliadian” (i.e., a follower of famous historian of religions Mircea Eliade) might regard “religion” as something irreducibly different from other social formations and processes, that is, sui generis. As such a claim cannot be confirmed through evidence, the “Eliadian” might be ­rendered academically suspect for their sui generis and phenomenologically oriented perspective on the category of religion. Conversely, a ­­­­­“Durkheimian” (i.e., a follower of famous sociologist Emile Durkheim) in the field might be portrayed as more methodologically trustworthy in their scholarly capacity to set aside their own identity-based (religious, racial, social or otherwise) interests by way of their chosen methodological techniques (and the accretion of various sorts of “academic” capital associated with particular theoretical and methodological brands) which invariably serve to “locate” and “identify” the professional “identity” of scholars, and their attendant scholarship. If it is possible that the externalized professional trust placed in, or stated allegiance to, (the identity of) a scholar’s particular method (or theory) identifies the associated academic standpoints, credentials, camps, and scholarly traditions, or brand of scholarship in our field, then it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that what we have come to call method (or theory) has served, in many ways, to measure and identify (distance from) identity, all along. What is the relationship between our social identities (and the particular claims that bring them into formation) and the methodological tools and techniques with which we find affinity? What observable patterns might be noted when we hold social identities constant as significant spheres of influence informing methodological uses, perceptions, and debates? What, if anything, can be said of identity’s impact on field-specific patterns of classification or categorization (e.g., academic study of religion vs. religious studies), scaling (e.g., black religion vs. religion), referencing (e.g., citational uses), authorization (e.g., primary reading vs. supplemental reading), location (objectivity/ subjectivity), and legitimation (e.g., critical vs. experiential)? Are not constructions of identity, more specifically the “operational acts of identification”1 making claims to identity possible a feature of the very production of this organized category we have come to call method? Method as Identity argues that there is a way in which one could read the “critical” crucible against experiential appeals to specialness as a technique that seeks to challenge the legitimacy of particular claims to specialness from speaking back to those already taken-for-special by way of relatively recent historical circumstance, beginning with (yet not exhausted by) the colonial encounter and its varied expressions today. For an inchoate example elaborated in the chapters that follow, across methodological camp of thought or scholarly tradition (e.g., phenomenological vs. critical)—and, despite the great historical and contemporary diversity of thought/thinkers in our field— a curious feature connecting many of the authorized (and thus, authorizing)

4

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“methodologists” in the academic study of religion today is that they tend to reify and oscillate around a transatlantic white male identity (e.g., Max Müller vs. W. E. B. DuBois; Jonathan Z. Smith vs. Charles H. Long). Both Smith and Long are historians of religions who in their own ways called for scholars of religion to become more critically reflexive, and the field, more doggedly self-aware. Smith famously argued that religion is a product of the scholar’s imaginative self-consciousness, and Long admonished that religion cannot be understood apart from the situation of colonial contact.2 Both suggestions are indeed befitting the status of “critical” authorities in the field, yet only one of these thinkers have come to occupy such a position and authoritative reputation in the field today. How might the classification of, and what counts as, methodological authority, and authorization of method, both reveal and moderate (perceptions of) identity? Might the perception of difference between a (scholarly) “critic” and a (crypto-scholarly) “caretaker” somehow (consciously or unconsciously) rely upon the (assumed) capacity to distinguish between/among perceivable identity-based distances separating or connecting the “identity” of the scholar and the “identities” represented by the scholar’s identity and the identities of their chosen objects/data of study (e.g., European white Christian studying South Asian Muslims vs. black American male historian of religions studying black religions)? Might this identity-revealing-method-revealing-identity process somehow enable illusory scholarly assurances, preferential options, or suspicions concerning methodological capacity, rigor, reliability, and ultimately, authority? Are not the scholarly acts and politics of determining, classifying, and authorizing what (and therefore who) counts as proper method(ologists) just as implicated within, constitutive of, and marked by the same self-serving interests, demands, and economies of identification despite the manufacturing optics produced by faulty assumptions of identity-based distance measurement? What difference might (the difference of a particular) method make in differentially determining the (academic) merits of a purportedly (white) self-conscious scholar of religion (e.g., Smith) and an admittedly conscious (black) scholar of religion (e.g., Long) who is seemingly without methodological relief for preventing external presumptions of a (particular kind of race-based) socially vested identity-politic from motivating his scholarly interests? The presumed interest-laden continuity connecting the identity of the scholar and the identities comprising their data of study presuppose method and scientific analyses as value-neutral. Here, the weight of particularity (as it concerns the scholars’ identity and the identities comprising their objects of study) becomes heightened to the extent that methodological capacity (as a human science) is dependent upon the external assessment of if and how much distance exists between the identity of the scholar and the data of identities marking the scholarship thought to reveal ideologically vested

Introduction

5

interests of personal standpoints, politics, and claims. Whether a particular scholarly posture and approach is classified as insider (e.g., a black religion approach) or outsider (e.g., religion as an object of the theorists’ imagining), both scholarly trajectories (despite identity and presumed distance/proximity to data) are still, in the end, studying themselves and the interests that make those selves possible. If (what comes to organize) “method” is just as categorically vulnerable to the same discursive processes as (what we come to name as) our objects of study (e.g., race as religion or religion as race)—then how might identity (and the human interests that shape and define it) ultimately reveal method (and the stakes thereof) in the academic study of religion? How would attention to such queries disorient the assumed parameters and stakes of ongoing debates concerning method (and theory) within the academic study of religion? Commonly utilized terms of categorization, such as the “academic” study of religion, signify on a particular politic of approach properly used to measure proximity from/to/between the scholar and the identity-based politics said to consume the descriptions, definitions, and explanations of so much scholarship. Such assumptions inform how critical approaches tend to figure and rely on reiterative debates featuring categorical (antagonistic) and conceptual others (e.g., theological, confessional) in or dominating the field to ultimately distinguish “scientific” projects (read: academic) from “religious” (read: identity interested) ones. Assumed or perceived closeness between the identity of a scholar and the identity of the scholar’s data are seemingly demonstrative of the politics of theoretical and methodological classification as “proper.” Thus, we can imagine the asymmetrical ways in which the category of blackness, for example, might be over read as too operative, whereas the category of whiteness, which often operates unrecognized, unstated, and unmoored, is at first glance assumed to be not operative at all. In the latter case, any stated concerns over the motivations of whiteness in and where it is already assumed to not exist (therefore not made public for the study of it) means that critiques of if and how standpoints of whiteness might inform and impact “proper” approach, description, or explanation are more often than not cast as identity-based concerns and politics overriding the apropos scholarly task. Thus, concerns over if/how whiteness informs a critically oriented “proper” method, for example, are rarely authorized or legitimated as a (critically) proper scholarly concern, and instead, reduced to a phenomenal reaction to a phenomenological appeal (to blackness). Here, such concern is ultimately returned to sender. Such categorizations, we argue, whether informed by scientistic or discursive methodological appeals, end up homogenizing the diversity of critical contributions in the academic study of religion, and its attendant sub-fields (such as the history of religions), for the sake of, or perpetual quest for, a “proper” method. As demonstrated in the

6

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following chapters, such analytical errors, we argue, not only confuse and obscure the classifications of theory and method (and the oft-concealed role of identity therein) but likewise fail to take a serious (scholarly) accounting of the obscured yet long identity-laden historical quest for European origins (that passes as theory and method) giving birth to our field, and that still dominates what we classify as methodologically and theoretically rigorous (i.e., distance from identity). If religion, as per the “critical” turn, is nothing more than an assemblage of always-changing social and rhetorical techniques enabling and ensuring operational acts of identification, then what of method? It is the latter, we believe, that (too) traffics in an assumption of identity as a stable and unchanging category—one not solely specific to an academic identity locatable in general (or particular) theories and approaches. Now, as to the “what” of that identity maintenance we are not fully sure, but Method as Identity attempts to thwart perceived assumptions of centering or overstretching expressions of social normativity in a metaphysical way, or as a type of postmodern divinity. That said, we are concerned with how authorized approaches to the field of study obscure (their own) claims to identity, often (though not always) paying lip-service to the scholar’s standpoint, while nevertheless remaining closed off from the (same kinds of) critiques it takes up when holding constant that all standpoints (of method, data, etc.) are equally vulnerable to (and, invested in) the fabrications of identity—be they critically confessional, or confessionally critical. AN INTEREST IN HISTORY In the academic study of religion, especially given the purchase it has placed historically in the rigorous work of comparison, description, and so on, the sub-field of “History of Religions” has long served as a methodological model for the disciplinary what and how constituting the “academic” study of religion. It is the method of methods for the academic study of religions, treated here as synonymous with its German-equivalent religionswissenschaft and its translation into English as the “science of religions.” The original method of the field was the establishment of a priori theories of one sort or another by way of and giving birth to “comparison.”3 Responding to this tendency, and also no doubt the sociopolitical events of the twentieth century, scholars from the 1950s onwards have turned to history (as method) to more adequately address the ongoing challenges to method in religious studies (generally). In short, though religious studies was to make use of multiple methods, it would eventually turn to the “human science” of history as the authority on the use of other methods. Hence, the ongoing relationship between the history of religions (as a specialization) within the study of religion and the

Introduction

7

voices from within that specialization that we continue to authorize as leading methodologists, today. Consequentially, the history of religions serves as a running case study in Method as Identity, while “religious studies” serves as an umbrella term connoting scholars and divergent methods affiliated with the AAR. In the inaugural 1971 issue of the journal Religion, well-known historian of religions Eric Sharpe articulates the history that links the history of religions (as an area of specialization) to the comparative study of religion (as a method), such that by the 1970s up through to the contemporary moment, the history of religions and the comparative method work hand in glove providing academic legitimation for religious studies as a field. He immediately notes that this method has always been more (and less) than “academic,” by way of proliferating historical, national, personal, and semantic concerns shaping methodological approach and approach to method, noting that “the field of religious studies is at present of sufficient size and complexity to be able to offer hospitality to scholars of very different backgrounds, presuppositions and inclinations.”4 Our initial hunch presented in Germany had involved an awareness that the “critical” study of religion (and we owe so much to McCutcheon, in particular, for his trailblazing efforts here, authorizing us to be more critical of our own field of study) had a blind spot concerning the critic’s own experiences and/or their assumed relationship to history, points highlighted in some of the critiques of certain critical approaches by some contemporary voices in the field, such as Kevin Schilbrack, Martin Kavka, Kathryn Lofton, and Nancy Levene, to name a few.5 After meeting and talking extensively with Wiebe, our hunch had grown into an academic argument (in the strict and general senses of the term), supported by findings (presented throughout this book) that suggest these critical blind spots are not (methodological) accidents, even if they are not always volitional. Such blindness is learned behavior inherited from all of our Doktorvaters who inherited them in like manner from theirs. For brief example, Levene suggests that the history of religions is “anxious . . . to align itself with other disciplines in the human sciences,”6 leading to an overreliance on history as an un-interrogated, self-evident, (scientifically) reliable, methodological safeguard. Levene articulates that “the history of history, like the history of something like gender or religion, is not only about dissolution and dispersal; it is also, simultaneously, about construction.”7 Her efforts involve cultivating a “concept of history that can account for both the instability and the power of a standpoint that, one could say, negates its negation.” In this way, Levene raises a critically valuable question concerning the discursive manufacturing of history’s history—and the manner in which certain critically oriented scholars have failed to consider this discursive impact on the method (of history) so vociferously advocated for

8

Introduction

and relied on. This overreliance, for example, is on full display in historian of religions Bruce Lincoln’s “Theses on Method.” Offering a position paralleling ours, Levene notes that Lincoln’s manifesto “significantly underplays Marx’s concomitant view that history is also the ‘object,’ the very product of the conditions it documents.”8 Levene usefully notes Jay Geller’s position “that Lincoln’s ‘Theses’ are not ‘on method’ at all but are rather intended ‘to inculcate an attitude’ of critique in the field.”9 In fact, the very word “method” doesn’t really appear much in the various texts of those we hold up as the field’s authorities on method. Attitudes are not, ipso facto, identities, but we are in agreement with Levene and Geller’s suggestion that more is happening in Lincoln’s “Theses” than meets “methodological” eyes. Although it has long been treated as a predetermined and uncaused entity, history is also an effect taking-for-granted the authority of referential claims to the past. History is accessible in a way that the category of “meaning” is not accessible within the category of “religion,” but this accessibility should not be taken as authoritative or value neutral. This makes the problem of history the worst kind of problem for the history of religions and for the study of religion in general. There are technical, epistemological reasons contemporary voices like Levene and Lofton have worked in recent years as methodological iconoclasts; it is necessary to the extent that certain overconfidences about what we do as scholars and how we are to do what we do in our field becomes transmuted into a discourse of academic respectability—the “proper” scholar of religion. As Sharpe clarifies, there isn’t something unique to the history of religions that has historians of religions more methodologically reliable, certain, or capable than interdisciplinary scholars trained in religious studies. Those who advocate for a singular “scientific” method in the study of religion rarely, if ever, articulate the scientific process of their own approaches.10 In short, we learn from Lincoln that authority isn’t so much an entity as it is an effect11; and, we learn from Lincoln that authority isn’t so much an entity as it is an effect. History authorizes and “reveals” an already operative logic of judgment. Judged appropriate, then so too will be proper our “method.” For contemporary critical approach discourses in the academic study of religion, this logic might actually involve a concern to cultivate what R. H. Roberts referred to as a “prophylactic against superimposing alien and inappropriate conceptualizations” onto “Western” categories of comparison including religion, history, method, and even critique.12 CRITIQUE AS COMPARING OTHER WORLDS The comparative method, so much a part of the academic study of religion, has its geographic and ideological roots in “Germany.” Karl Marx famously

Introduction

9

wrote, “For Germany, the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,”13 suggesting that criticism would have a necessary bearing on what scholars of religion understand as our task. But where ideology is concerned (as it was for Marx), criticism of religion may also militate in the direction of blindness to other modes of ideology shaping our analyses and motivations, and conclusions drawn about “Germany,” a place that no doubt serves as an axis mundi that many scholars locate as the Ur-Heimat (original homeland) of the field. Germany gives birth to the critical study of religion, and it also gives birth to the comparative method, a hallmark of academic studies of religion. As a result, here and at times throughout the book, “Germany” signifies a particular history for the field (i.e., the country of Germany), and the abstract field-specific notion of home, place, and disciplinary origin (i.e., the idea of “Germany”). In the 1950s, German scholar Karl Rudolph suggested that the history of religions had been slow to internalize the “ideology critique” (à la Marx et al.) because doing so would risk deconstructing its identity. Critiquing ideology would invariably mean critiquing religion. But Rudolph cautioned that the epistemological challenge to ideology critique is that it runs the risk of ignoring the historical and institutional expressions of ideology enabling the critique.14 Put differently, “Germany” always defends Germany, and Germany always defends “Germany”; ideology defends particularity through the critique of “its” problem somewhere else, and particularity defends ideology through the willful ignoring of “its” particularity. Hence, Marx’s words are both epistemologically helpful but tragically blind to the future impact of unrelenting ideology meted out by Germany in the twentieth century. German historian of religions Gustav Mensching addressed this topic during the 1958 IAHR Congress in Tokyo, Japan. A native of one axis power speaking on the soil of another axis power on an occasion hosted largely by members of ally nations, Mensching noted: Criticism is a symptom of distance from the religious tradition. This distance, however, can mean either complete detachment, or critical preservation of the essential. Therefore there are, in respect of the traditional religion and its forms of expression, two possibilities of criticism: on the one side, criticism without a sense of the Holy, together with a misunderstanding of the principle of the essence of religion, as in the case of Rationalism and all materialistic, anti-religious propaganda. Or else criticism is the expression of a creative distance from tradition. The forms of criticism of degenerated aspects of religion, with which we have dealt here, signify a creative protest, and serve the true religious life.15

As we have gestured thus far, criticism in many ways can be understood as effort to increase distance from religious (or racial) tradition. The illusions

10

Introduction

enabled by such distance risks reifying ideology, as indicated in Mensching’s not-so-subtle jab at “anti-religious propaganda.” It can, however, also work in creative service to (various kinds of) tradition. Like Marx, Mensching’s thinking exemplifies the double-bind of this twoness of critique, in that he concurrently expresses an unexplained trust that the critiques of “degenerated aspects of religion” coming from historians of religions are of the creative sort, in service no less to “the true religious life.” That his latter point rings as anachronistic to contemporary readers is of less concern than Mensching’s self-reliant and authorized assumption of (his own) distance. Such a presumption of distance both to and from our (self-selected and carefully organized) objects of study, and the tools we (claim to) use to study, is a stance still very much methodologically alive in the academic study of religion. Although method may serve some as meta-referential means of social identification, its distance-making tactics do not belong to any one particular domain of social identity. Much of the discussions over critical methods, or criticism of methods, especially suggestions about a “critical method” evoke similar wisdom yet blindness as expressed by both Marx and Mensching. In effort to make sense of this twoness, we follow Monica R. Miller (coauthor here), who in a 2014 roundtable conversation on the term “Critical” with members of the Culture on the Edge collective wondered, “if there is a point at which the moniker ‘critical’ starts to function in place of the ideological assumptions and methodological and theoretical blind spots exposed by a ‘right’ or ‘orthodox’ rendering of the term ‘critical?’”16 Finding this point is not terribly difficult, if only we likewise ask in what direction do we orient our criticism within the academic study of religion, and for what purposes? In 1935, a German immigrant to the United States and Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago until his untimely death in 1955, Joachim Wach wrote that “Quantitatively and qualitatively, religionswissenschaft thus has a field of study distinct from that of theology: not our own religion but the foreign religions in all their manifoldness are their subject matter.”17 In distinguishing their own theological commitments (personal belief) from (the scientific work of) studying the “foreign” religion of the Other, historians of religions have, in many ways, sought quarantine from theological contact as the guiding boundary framing their academic and professional identity. Presuming the “strange” religion of the Other lacking epistemological capacity or acuity for theology-making, Wach confesses the historian of religions’ awareness of how usurping social location, identity, and context produced its own illusions and impulses demarcating the who, what, and how. Here, Wach is well aware that the subject of the “Other” comprised history of religions’ proper object of study which required further subjecting of methods, and methodological subjecting, so long as the subject

Introduction

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and subjects of study were foreign to the scholar, the belief in science was there in the midst. This sign of the empirical Other served as an authorizing signifier of scholarly reference, like an embodied citation reminding and ensuring the scholar that they were doing science and scholarship, not myth. Elaborated in subsequent chapters but important for orienting readers is that historian of religions Charles H. Long, a central theoretical (and methodological) guidepost for Method as Identity, who studied under Wach, recognized both promise and peril at the field’s reliance on what he termed the “empirical other,” defining “a cultural phenomenon in which the extraordinariness and uniqueness of a person or culture is first recognized negatively.”18 These others are “empirical from the point of view of those disciplines and sciences which take these peoples and their cultures as the data of their inquiry—for example, anthropology, ethnology, and history of religions.”19 Further, “the significance” of these empirical others “lies not in their own worth and value but in the significance this other offers to civilization when contrasted with it.”20 Reminding that for a time during the middle part of the twentieth century, the history of religions at the University of Chicago consisted of figures representing these empirical others, the “negativity of cultural ideology,”21 Long referred to himself, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Kitagawa, and Jonathan Z. Smith as “the other” and “the others,” emphasizing that they represented the data of the history of religions—now equipped with tools of method and theory. Discussed in greater depth in chapter 3, as those representatives, their methodological and theoretical perspectives were “challenges to the same kinds of theories developed during Western colonialism,” which “called forth a peculiar and different form of discourse concerning method in the study of religion.”22 The moral failures of academic, epistemological reliance on the empirical other were obvious and included in much of Long’s work, but Long’s primary concern was epistemological, indeed, methodologically prophetic. “Religion,” and the study of it, had been born through an overemphasis on the strangeness and otherness of nonwhite others, the distance between “them” and “us,” between “ideology critique” and critique of the “negativity of cultural ideology.” As such, “because the recognition of the person or culture [i.e. empirical others] is necessary for interpreters of cultural identity, various strategems of description and/or diagnosis are employed to represent the other in the relationship.”23 Whatever else may be said of reductionism as ideology critique, for Long, both are strategic essentialisms. Long, and the cadre of scholars at the University of Chicago at that time, ostensibly closed that distance between subjective claims to identity and objective means of travel enabling those claims. In other words, their very ontology exposed the “distance” critique maintained between critiquing Others and critiquing itself: Germany, finally, had to take responsibility for “Germany.” In this sense, these empirical others-turned-historians of religions come to serve as

12

Introduction

quasi-“theological” voices in that for the history of religions, theology had represented the study of the (Western, white) self, while the “proper” history of religions studied the folks who were now doing the studying. Data was speaking back, in a different dialect albeit the same “religious” language of uniqueness. In many ways, theologies of many kind begin in the constructed realities of ones’ own context, and so “theology” is also a term describing appeals to one’s (own) social location. Hence, the “look” of theology’s methodological emergence in revealing its own constructed identity-method-identity process (i.e., constructive theology) is a radically different human-centered norm than the one that has shaped the “science” of history of religions. In the former, there exists an impenitent acknowledgment that the theological scholar studies the science of self, whereas those in the case of the latter, do science because they (claim to) study (the data of) cultural others. What does this imply for those historians of religions who through their methodological training arrive to a study of themselves? In many ways, contextual theologians critique normative theology for not recognizing that theology can occur in other social contexts; a boundary that historians of religions have policed and manipulated for the shaping of their own professional and scholarly identities vis-à-vis “empirical others.” In a historical sense in keeping with Wach’s suggestion above, the history of religions de-theologizes “them” (e.g., primitives, foreigners, etc.) to keep “us” (i.e., white, Western, male) theological (i.e., confessional about “our” epistemological capacity); methodologically then, history of religions doesn’t do theology because they are already (constituted as/by) theological subjects whose reiterative confessionality about “us” and “them” is somewhat like the dusty white knight guarding the chalice in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We, in the academic study of religion, cannot get close to theology/confessionality because our task is to undercut any “theological” claims made by “them,” the “foreign religions,” the empirical others. Hence, we tend to locate our data elsewhere, and thus, reduce that data out of fear of (the specialness of) irreducible difference. And, when we fail to reduce adequately enough, we are thus deemed confessional, meaning we are not doing our job preserving theology as a special European cultural artifact of belief and thought. Despite the brevity of its popularized shorthand, “Confessional” doesn’t so much telegraph overidentification with our data, as much as it signifies on the distance we profess (or protest) between ourselves and our data. For instance, if we decided to write a book on queerness and we “locate” ourselves in the preface as heterosexual women, and someone decides to manufacture and give a name to our approach 150 years from now, what they’d (come to) call the science of what we were up to may not actually reflect (or correspond to) how others interpreted the work we were doing then, or what we understood

Introduction

13

ourselves to be doing (then), and how we saw ourselves accomplishing what we intended. Signifiers ought to internalize that the relationship between the signifier and signified is arbitrary. What “theology” meant for Wach, but especially his predecessors like A. Eustace Haydon and other early twentiethcentury historians of religions (discussed at various points throughout) was something akin to what we refer to today as the scholars’ work of contextualizing and socially locating ourselves as part of the critical task of discourse. Perhaps, “confessionality” did not (later) become a (field-specific) problem merely because it smuggled ideology into scientific investigation; rather, perhaps it became a problem because it enabled the bracketing of ideology out of scientific investigation. This is an especially salient point, considering Wach’s candor that our (scholarly) data is the Other, so conceived. Debates about our methodological or professional proximity to theology have roots in social classification, regardless of how one feels about those classifications. In a historical sense, religionswissenschaft then is the name given to the archaeological study of written records assumed to say something about human progress (to think, and thus, to be) and thus, civilizational advancement measured by socially constructed markers of development providing the raw “data” for the marking of particular experiences epistemologically codified through culturally specific taxonomies and techniques insider to the analyst. In a word, religion. Hence, historians of religions study “Other” experiences, but do not contextualize or locate themselves as they, as a methodological principle, do not study their own identity. OPAQUE WHITE WINDOWS In the same 1971 article linking religious studies’ foundation in the history of religions, and comparison the foundation for the history of religions, Sharpe describes what he calls the “motive” of the history of religions, which “is meant the predisposition to investigate religious traditions other than one’s own.”24 Sharpe stresses that this motive was a result of decreasing “religious authority” in Europe and a simultaneous proliferation of cultural expressions unknown to Europeans at the time. These events produced in the nineteenth century a tendency on the part of theologians to be skeptical of the early comparativists’ motives, not the other way round as the contemporary concern over theology might lead some to believe. Additionally, Sharpe notes that the nineteenth century witnessed a vast expansion of the scholar of religion’s data, leading to a need to “organize and classify it.”25 Sharpe temporalizes the moment as part of Europe’s movement from a transcendent ontology to an immanent ontology, following an evolutionary model of secularization. Sharpe notes that “much of our modern vocabulary, made up of terms like

14

Introduction

Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism—not to mention animism, preanimism, animatism, totemism and the rest—is almost entirely a collection of nineteenth-century abstractions, each one in fact representing a stage, or part of a stage, along the evolutionary path.”26 Yet, as a feature of the evolutionary model that takes hold on the establishment of the sciences, transcendence and immanence (à la Weber) amount to the same story of not human progress, but European social ascendancy vindicated by the manufacture of scientific authority. From our vantage point, the “evolutionary path” so described works as a compass, orienting “theories” (i.e., “empirical others”) as further or closer in distance to “us” (whatever “us” might mean). As a field, Germany’s religionswissenschaft (and by heritage, the academic study of religion) begins with the myth of the axial age, the discursive construction made popular by philosopher Karl Jaspers who posits the evolutionary beginning of the historical record as the moment when myth was first transcribed as written text. The Enlightenment will provide to these interpreters a false sense of authority, and a temporalization of the “end” of cultural access to “religion.” “Religion,” for the scientist of religions, starts with the materials and traditions expressed in written language, and therefore centered on traditions with written sacred texts. Thus, cultures reliant on oral history are, for example, written out of the possibility for “religion”; they were classified as “pre-religious,” empirical “others.” These twin concepts of the axial age and the Enlightenment become the means through which Africa is written out of the discourse through the relegation of the history of religions’ data to texts, and the norm by which it is an open question for one hundred years of scholars of religion who does or does not “have” religion (e.g., the topic of world religions). The discourse surrounding the axial age sets in motion this issue of manufacturing distance through the twin concerns over “studying religion” and “being theological.” Thought of as if on x and y axes, the axial age “moves” in space and time, quite literally for Jaspers’s theory, but here we mean to suggest it as a kind of ideological border or gatekeeper for the scholar of religion. Recently, religionswissenschaftler David Atwood has worked to destabilize the ongoing academic reliance on the notion of the axial age, deconstructing academic dependence on this discursively constructed marker marking the periodization (of a rather wide-range of subjectively significant moments and experiences) of various thresholds.27 Atwood’s effort to historicize and demythologize (the socially vested and curated moments of what gets later read and taken as) “history” methodologically informs our interests and approach here, serving as an example of the point at which data and method are not synthesized so much as they serve as different conceptual markers marking discursive thresholds that organize and signify on an always-andalready assemblage of human interests, oscillating around an ongoing—yet

Introduction

15

often denied—effort to secure European identity and identification with epistemic authority. The movement through “history” in the history of religions becomes the means of adjudicating who is “empirical other” and who is “scholar,” “primitive” or “civilized.” Considering that the framework of prehistory and history relies on texts and language, then scholars of religion are in a methodological sense, literally prevented from seeing “religious” capacity in those rendered as “empirical others.” Here, both the religious and the theological (as indicative of something about human possibility, epistemologically, experientially, or otherwise) was perpetually reserved by European scholars for themselves and their own cultures of particularity. These motives and limits may have been forgotten or ignored in recent years by many scholars, but they were very much understood and internalized by our predecessors, begging the question: If the historian of religions studies the “foreign” religions, but there are no foreign religions, then what, exactly, was or is the rationale for the history of religions (as specialization) and the study of religion, generally? The lack of the African text transmutes into a perceived lack of relationship to history that in turn, preempts the possibility of a shared (non-foreign) ontology, rendering empirically quantifiable bodies as perpetual “other,” justified because there is no corresponding written mythology that would signal the empirical other’s escape from reliance on myth alone, according to these white frames of reference, interpretive “windows” defended by method. Method becomes the means of moving along the evolutionary path described by Sharpe, but that path includes immanent frames working in lockstep alongside “transcendent” ones. Both of these “white windows” follow a pattern of situating the axial age as the scholar of religions’ axis mundi and the Enlightenment its eschatological event; “religion” cannot be found before the axial age and “religion” will not be found after the Enlightenment: religion is bound in time as Europe’s. It can be whipped or fondled; it is, in this sense, the sole property of white men. Religion is pure experience for the scholar of religion; the only thing in the history of the history of religions that has ever been propagated as empirical is the “other”; without which there exists little need or utility for so forcefully charting, refining, and debating method. The study of religion doesn’t so much become a means of marking a story of human progression, but it is from its inception organized around the propagation of a white myth of progress positing white men the most advanced at studying and classifying earlier forms. As a result, it will be archaeologists who end up telling us the sources of “religion,” not folks like Max Müller, the father of the comparative method as applied to a “scientific study” of religion, (discussed further in chapter 3). When archaeologists come across burials and other sites, place and time come to mean something

16

Introduction

more concrete in Western imaginations, but philology and comparison—as usual suspects setting these issues in motion—can only tell us about our relationships to one another. “Proper” method for the field is not politically disinterested, but it is the active distancing of “us” from “them” by any methodological means necessary. The scientific study of religion doesn’t study this “battle for identity.” It is this battle. For scholars of religion, “religion” was something arising from some earlier primordial moment in human progress such to the extent that religionswissenschaft becomes one of the primary sciences of transcribing civilization, and human progress. Archaeologists will find artifacts; civilizational scientists then will decide whether these artifacts are (worthy to be) “religious” or “not,” with all voices in the affirmative or negative playing a game of manufacturing distance between “us” and “them.” As “comparativists,” historians of religions have always employed a method of social valuation. The burgeoning science of religion emerges as a science of marking “everyone but us.” The (subject-obsessed) distance-making method of method is concretized in the nineteenth-century European stance on religion as euphemism for “civilization.” A process which, as briefly discussed above, heavily relied on the “empirical other” to study the thing they had already rendered absent in the “empirical other”—“religion.” Müller admits in the 1870s that all social actors might have mental capacities for religion; which is perhaps equitable in some respects, yet this basic proposition becomes a study of whether or not those “others” have “it” too. Nearly every classic theory of religion has its roots in a debate over the appropriate interpretation of nonwhite peoples, cultures, societies, and worlds. From this purview, every theory of religion we have is, ostensibly, built on nonlocal and nonwhite experiences. The field’s theories arise and are tested, rejected, and/or embraced by scholars on the basis of where (and to what degree) the foreign nonwhite other is in proximity to the white cultural and civilizational (thinking) world of “religion.” Empirical others, then, are the actual theories of religion— Tyler’s animism, Durkheim’s functionalism, and so on—our data is our theory whereby the scholar becomes the theorist, cataloguers, translators, and/or interpreters of Other worlds; never our own (that is reserved for theology). Theory then has always been (constituted in and made possible by) the data of brown, yellow, red, and black (worlds); and Method the mode of (distance making), the movement toward or away from data, from social identity. Hence, when the distance between theorists and the exotic within cultural archives closes down, then folks like Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (discussed further in chapter 2) will manufacture a primitive mentality to be at a permanent distance from the theorist. The salience of the notion of the “primitive mentality” arises because it enables travel without travel. Reliance on the notion of the empirical other through the ideal-type of the “primitive

Introduction

17

mentality” means distance is obtained even in one’s own location. Distance, as discussed throughout this book, does involve distance from empirical others, but the measure of such distance is not geography or physical space. Reliance on the “primitive mentality” engenders distance from one’s own context, without leaving one’s context, by instrumentalizing the Other as an interpretive chasm between the white scholar and the white context. Given these dynamics, “religion” can never be deployed as a means of travel by the empirical other, never able to procure a return on this investment or on the manufacture of meaning via interpretation by European others of other worlds. This is to say, the empirical other never gets to make use of the utility of claiming “religion” or of rejecting “religion.” By this estimation, the move to deconstruct categories is less historical outgrowth of the Enlightenment, and more an ongoing program of social distinction making authorized by some through claims to the Enlightenment. Lab rats cannot be scientists, too. It isn’t so much that religion has been race or race has been religion; rather, religion has been white identity. Today, we may define “religion” as an abstract, mundane process of social formation and process, but historically it is a uniquely particular marker of European social identity. Religion has been a particular cultural experience packaged as a universal option, while scholars of religion have been priests closing off actual access to that universal option. Our posture toward method as distance making forces us to confront the complexities of our specialized area of training, black/Africana religions. One possible orientation may perceive black/Africana religions as a redundancy. Black is always causally related to the “religious” vis-à-vis “confessionality” and the category of religious experience because the semiotic value of any religious experience begins in the primordial encounter between Westerner and the rest of the world. Another/an Other orientation could suggest black religion is an oxymoron, in that “religion” is the totem of the odd confederation of tribes known as white Europeans, and the history of religions (and its comparative approach) is the making of white European identity through the ongoing questioning of the rest of the world’s similarities to white European identity. Yet, these possibilities are shaped by the concern over the object of religion, not over distance making via method. Method, for black religion, is wide-open with possibility, even if claiming a confessional posture is complicated by the weight of history. Our specific task, as scholars of black religion, therefore require performing/existing in the liminal space between repetition and aporia, the “aporetic flow”28 theorized by Miller as a feature of black religious expression. The fact that the politics necessitated by our chosen specialization would require of us a kind of professional, academic mimesis of black religious expression (as theorized) was prophesied by Long and is largely the impetus of this book.

18

Introduction

DISTINGUISHING DISTANCE If the academic study of religions is the technique of race (or social identifications), then it could be useful to consider method as a colonial enterprise, part of an effort at procuring a particular brand of social superiority through the use of other bodies, other resources, and other “worlds.” If such a premise is plausible, it stands to reason that such efforts have succeeded in, ironically and tragically, distinguishing white social life and identification as unique, as special, and sui generis. Brief, disparate proxy examples are in order. Think about the contemporary category of the “nones.” Scholars could track the rise of the “nones” as “spiritual but not religious” in terms of the decentering or death of whiteness, with “spiritual” signifying on the manufactured closeness to the “empirical other” and the manufactured crisis of “religious” affiliation a crisis of method failing to ensure the adequate distance that would protect the centrality of whiteness. “Spiritual” amounts to a change in politic. “Spiritual” signifies on a particular orientation toward the “other.” The death of Christianity gets read as the death of whiteness. Next, consider the recent public relations facelift of the Neanderthal. In effort to condition white folks into accepting Neanderthals as ancestors, scholars are wanting to “religion” them, giving both rationality and symbolic thought to them. As of the twenty-first century, Neanderthals buried their dead, used tools, and painted, when in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were hardly regarded as intelligent. The difference: our knowledge (through DNA sequencing) today that Neanderthals contributed to the genetic make up of white Europeans. Talk of “whiteness” is an effort to outline the parameters of a cultural archive that has largely yet to be written precisely because method has fought against the construction of this archive inside the history of religions (specifically) and the academic study of religion, generally. It would be fascinating to imagine what a taxonomical assessment of white Europeans would look like, if Tyler or Durkheim were to archive NOT nonwhite cultural practices, but the white preoccupation with nonwhite cultural practices. Wouldn’t this sort of study actually take seriously Smith’s mandate that we study ourselves? Smith’s assertion is radical if we read the history of the history of religions in one particular way. But in another way, it has always been a product of the theorist’s imagination, and his claim—rooted as it is in the ideal-typification of an abstract, “primitive” mentality—is nothing that hasn’t also been intimated by Auguste Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, and others: some version of, “we know we’re manufacturing distance but we’re going to keep on doing it.” Smith’s dehistoricized presentation of that claim is the closure of distance, but also the manufacture of new distance (through this closure of old distance). If a person moves in two directions at once, do they move at all?

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In many ways, the history of religions has never actually been about seeing or identifying “religion” in the Other, but about not seeing religion in the Others as to preserve it for the European. To this extent, Smith’s infamous claim that there is no (longer) data for the study of religion as it is a category that only exists as an object of the theorists’ imagining is an autoethnographic, experiential claim much more so than it offers a cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary methodological blueprint. Lofton notes that “to read Smith on any of his selected topics is to find oneself sharply jostled from any easy presumptions about religion. He wants to bring his readers and his students from a place of assumption to a place of documentation, to move from one’s own imagining about religion to right regimens of religion. This movement is his business; it is the method of our study.”29 Lofton reminds that Smith is both radical, and yet still seemingly unaware of just how right he is, or maybe, of what to do now that he has it right: Religion is only an object of the white scholar’s imagination, and in the white scholar’s imagination will stay that notion of “religion” and the constituent notion of the “primitive.” This puts an interesting spin on what is “black” about “black religion”; and what is “religious” about black religion, questions first astutely posed by scholar of religion and theologian Anthony B. Pinn (and discussed at length in chapter 4).30 The answer is nothing, “black religion” for the academic study of religion is an oxymoron. As Long has long suggested, black scholars of religion will always be “primitive” in the minds of white scholars of religion on the very grounds of the distinctions assumed between what we each do (by way of what we study) as scholars and who we are as social actors telegraphed by how we study. The contexts authorizing an individual scholar as a theorist come to be constructed when a community (authorized as scientific) comes together to debate, in abstract, veiled terms, how close that person is to their data; “are you ‘us’ or ‘them’?” This preoccupation with the distanced, and distinction-making data of “empirical others” gives way to the general notion of the “primitive.” The comparative method follows along a routine pattern of asking how approximately reflective is the theory to the data (or, to the ideal of the “primitive mentality”)—a social concern over identity presented as an academic discussion about measurable empirical distance. This epistemological foil for what is otherwise a socially driven query about difference is not really about measurable distance for knowledge sake, but rather, an ideological act of determining just how close another person is to one’s own theory of the other, which is to say, the comparative method is identity formation and process. Whose identity, then, are we (re)producing when we engage in “proper” method? It would take Edward Evans-Pritchard, Ruth Benedict, and other scholars working from U.S. cultural anthropology and (what becomes) British social anthropology to begin troubling the field’s reiterative and obsessive reliance

20

Introduction

on the notion of the “primitive mentality.” Yet, the trace of this taxonomic impulse is well at work today, functionally expressed not merely by those who name the space of the sacred, but also those preoccupied with what is not sacred. After all, “classifications,” as Lofton so brilliantly suggests, “is not ultimate control. And yet classify we do—dangerously, excitedly.”31 Classifications upon classifications upon classifications produce various distances organizing and orienting “civilized” from “primitive.” We, as scholars of religion, become interpreters of other people’s worlds as a means by which to demarcate, stabilize, and render real the myths we have told to ourselves about our own. How does the twenty-first-century self-conscious scholar methodologically “show and prove” without the necessity of (making and manufacturing) the empirical other as our data making comparison possible? This is the contemporary problem of critical method; the understanding of what we do as the manufacture of distance was met with voices who would seek to authorize the movements of others. Yet, many of them remain in the same location. Critical approaches, perhaps out of recognition that manufacturing distance isn’t as easy as it once was, turns the field into its empirical other. This keeps the colonizing taxonomical impulse in place, allowing critiques of method to transmute into a critical method policing the borderland between “civilized” scholar of religion and “primitive” threat to civilization. It makes a kind of obvious and deeply tragic sense that academic debates would erupt with increasing regularity as Europeans were increasingly becoming confronted with their former “data”—their empirical others whose (once fixed) role as proper data ensured their interpreters’ social location (European; white; Western) and function (scientist; scholar; analyst)— speaking as authorities on “religion” (theorists) and studying back those long studying them (methodologists). The fact that the word “religion” itself—as used today—does not have a precolonial translation in non-European languages, despite long positing the history of religions as the study of the religions of the others, is to say the least, quite remarkable. Understanding the historical manufacturing and use of a term as a means of policing boundaries by manipulating distance, however, is not the same as responding to the weight resulting from such policing mechanism of regulation. Critical approaches to the study of religion have persuasively and productively helped to situate and refine the position that religion is a European construction. Yet, as Daniel Dubuisson has reminded, historicizing religion doesn’t necessitate deconstructing it as empty (of history, meaning, experience, etc.), as if there is nothing that corresponds or continues to be signified by the term. In fact, you will find no such approach that posits social construction or social formation and process only to categories like race or gender—as such efforts would immediately be called out as fundamentally flawed, and futile. It would be impossible, and irresponsible,

Introduction

21

to act as if “blackness,” despite its variable and constructed nature—must be analytically approached, at all times, as a concept empty of any empirical corollary or material basis. In fact, we would be hard pressed to find any scholar of religion today—critical, confessional, or otherwise—publicly situating or explaining any category of identity in such a manner. The act of “historicizing” doesn’t suggest the refutation of religion as sui generis, but rather, the recognition that it is an idea made legible in the desires and interests for distinction (of their own identity) in the hands of its makers and users. On this point, Dubuisson notes that “what the West and the history of religions in its wake have objectified under the name ‘religion’ is then something quite unique, which could be appropriate only to itself and to its own history.”32 Dubuisson continues, And with this notion, it was those very intellectual categories of the West that were objectified, raised to the dignity of points of reference or unassailable norms. This is why we can affirm that such an objectification is arbitrary, since it is content to generalize, to extend to all humanity the utility of a concept that is autochthonous as well as narcissistic—to the extent that it recognizes and integrates only its own notions and ways of thinking.33

This recognition limits the horizon through which the history of religions can operate, rendering “itself totally powerless when it attempts to conceive of the anthropologies of other culture.”34 He goes on to suggest that “religion” produces within the West a rather narrow set of interpretive and analytic models at the scholar’s disposal—rarely applicable to/available for cultural expressions found outside of Europe despite their longstanding epistemological reliance on the (data of) empirical others’ for the comparative work of distinction making—vital for the sui generis identity Europeans crafted for themselves in the making of their models and categories (narcissistically reserved for themselves). The results have all but ensured the history of religions has effectively held as a method of history the social maintenance and regulation of the “primitive” as a clearinghouse for new meanings that must be deconstructed as if not “primitive” then “sui generis.” Ever-marching along the path described by Sharpe, yesterday’s non-theologically capable “savage” is today’s “confessional scholar”—a category for which many, if not most, scholars of color in religion are placed. This perspective can be read (or we’d suggest, misread) as if “religion” is a premodern or precivilized vestige of a scientifically oriented contemporary Western world. Many European scholars admit that it is “ours,” so long as it remains in the past, from an unenlightened bygone era, part of a time when Europeans were also “primitive” despite thinking themselves to be scientists. Yet, we (the field) have taken with us the security of these methodological trials and

22

Introduction

experiments as self-evidently worthy of use, maintenance, and cultivation. We want to push more forcefully, perhaps, than Dubuisson, and suggest that such a reading would be an expression of distance making at the heart of our critique. Secular, Enlightenment logics are not antithetical to “religion,” but are part of the same autochthonous cultural expressions that gave identity and meaning to the very category. It is the debate over how to study, conceive, define, and classify “religion” or “irreligion,” “science” or “myth,” “Confessor” or “Critic” that permanently marks the (academic) category of “religion” as sui generis, of a distinctly white, Euro-American sort (much like Chattel Slavery of North America). In particularizing the world through obsessive study used to determine what it is not by determining, classifying, and defining those things it feared, fetishized, and objectified—the European and those who became white in North America unrelentingly and irreversibly made themselves a special and a particular sort the world over. Method, as distance making, has both manufactured and safeguarded this specialness, but as is demonstrated in many of the pages that follow, when forged with an eye on the authority of former data, method can also close these colonizing distances and manufacture new modes of travel in the academic study of religion. NOTES 1. Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, 92. 2. See, for example, Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago Press, 1982); and, Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, 2nd edition (The Davies Group Publishers, 1999). 3. Sharpe, “Some Problems of Method in the Study of Religion,” 6. 4. Ibid., 2. 5. See Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto, 1st edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); Martin Kavka, “Profane Theology,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 27 (2015): 104–15; Kathryn Lofton, “Religious History as Religious Studies,” Religion 42, no. 3 (July 2012): 383–94; and, Nancy K. Levene, “Sources of History: Myth and Image,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 1 (2006): 79–101. 6. Levene, “Sources of History: Myth and Image,” 79–101, 86. 7. Ibid., 88. 8. Ibid., 86. 9. Ibid. 10. Sharpe, “Some Problems of Method in the Study of Religion,” 8. 11. Bruce Lincoln, Authority: Construction and Corrosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 12. R. H. Robinson, qtd. In Sharpe, “Some Problems of Method in the Study of Religion,” 12.

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13. Karl Marx and Richard A. Davis, “‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’: Introduction,” in  Joseph J. O’Malley, Trans., Marx: Early Political Writings, 57–70. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 14. Kurt Rudolph, “Die ‘Ideologiekritische’ Funktion Der Religionswissenschaft,” Numen 25, no. 1 (April 1978): 17–39, 22. 15. Gustav Mensching, “The Phenomenon of Criticism in the History of Religions,” in Japanese Organizing Committee for the IX I.C.H.R. Science Council of Japan, International Association for the History of Religions, Proceedings of the IXth International Congress for the History of Religions, Tokyo and Kyoto 1958 August 27th - September 9th (Tokyo: Maruzen Co., LTD, 1960). 16. Monica R. Miller, in Craig Martin et al., “Keeping ‘Critical’ Critical: A Conversation from Culture on the Edge,” Critical Research on Religion 2, no. 3­ ­(December 1, 2014): 299–312, https://doi.org/10.1177/2050303214552576. 17. Joachim Wach, “The Meaning and Task of the History of Religions (Religionswissenschaft),” in Joseph M. Kitagawa, ed., The History of Religions; Essays on the Problem of Understanding, Essays in Divinity (University of Chicago Press, 1967). 18. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of ­Religion, 90. 19. Ibid., 101. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 27. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 90. 24. Sharpe, “Some Problems of Method in the Study of Religion,” 2. 25. Ibid., 3. 26. Ibid., 5. 27. David Atwood, “Preconditions of the Post-Theoretical: Periodizing the Study of Religion,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 46, no. 1 (2017): 12–14. 28. Monica R. Miller, “Real Recognize Real: Aporetic Flows and the Presence of New Black Godz in Hip Hop,” in Monica R. Miller, Anthony B. Pinn, and Bernard “Bun B” Freeman, eds., Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain in the US (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 198–213. 29. Kathryn Lofton, “On Teaching Religion. Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith. Edited by Christopher Lehrich,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 (June 1, 2014): 531–42, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfu027, 537. 30. Anthony B. Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003). 31. Kathryn Lofton, qtd. in Su’ad Abdul Khabeer et al., “Theorizing Africana Religions: A Journal of Africana Religions Inaugural Symposium,” Journal of Africana Religions 2, no. 1 (2014): 125–60, 158. 32. Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 90. 33. Ibid., 90. 34. Ibid.

Chapter 1

Method as Identity The Battle for Identity in the North American Academic Study of Religion

A curious feature of many North American social introductions involves the way a person’s occupation quickly follows behind their name, as if something about the way people spend their day-to-day lives has an impact on our ability to assess the “identity” of those we are meeting. On the North American frontier, identity has often been determined by utility (i.e., what we do), with the effect of at least partially concealing other sites/techniques of identification at work. This tendency remains palpable in the North American academic study of religion today. Our efforts at naming are ostensibly functional, active moments of identification working to secure a kind of authority used in what Theodor Adorno calls a “doctrine of adjustment.”1 Culture on the Edge, an international scholarly collaborative, organized by critical theorist of religion Russell T. McCutcheon, has brilliantly offered a series of theoretical/methodological interventions concerning the historicity of identity and common scholarly assertions that are often ahistorical, self-evident (i.e., experience), and static in nature, when charting change in identity over time and place. This international collaborative is, in many ways, one of the first in the academic study of religion to rightfully place “identity” (and its operational acts) at the center of the study of religion. Following French social and cultural theorist Jean-François Bayart, who suggests “there is no such thing as identity, only operational acts of identification,”2 Culture on the Edge has been for many scholars a refreshing infusion of critical methodological sensibilities with a clever cultural panache producing remixed perspectives on a host of topics of interest to those in the academic study of religion and extending beyond those disciplinary borders, too. One feature of these critical correctives has involved continued deconstruction of sui generis claims to religion and/or experience. Another feature has been application of the deconstructed category of “religion”—at worst an 25

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unwieldy floating signifier and at best a storing house for various rhetorical strategies—to other analytic categories often assumed as self-evident by not only scholars of religion, but intellectuals and academics of various stripes. Critical attention to, and divesting the self-evidences of “identity,” “experience,” “history,” “tradition,” and other such categories central to many in the humanities and social sciences have been central to the efforts of Culture on the Edge. This critical divestment of self-evidences and the turn toward identifying strategies/techniques of identity is (in part) an effort at methodological adjudication: the use of critical method to analyze the social and rhetorical techniques enabling sui generis and self-evident logics accompanying much of subjective or experiential appeals at work in discourse and larger public debates surrounding religion and identity; it is an effort to keep the “critical” in “critical method,” by mitigating the ideological weight of subjective or experiential appeal. Theodor Adorno describes the relationship between identity and ideology this way: Identity is the primal form of ideology. . . . We relish it as adequacy to the thing it suppresses; adequacy has always been subjection to dominant purposes and, in that sense, its own contradiction. After the unspeakable effort it must have cost our species to produce the primacy of identity even against itself, man rejoices and basks in his conquest by turning it into the definition of the conquered thing: what has happened to it must be presented, by the thing, as its “in-itself.” Ideology’s power of resistance to enlightenment is owed to its complicity with identifying thought, or indeed with thought at large. The ideological side of thinking shows in its permanent failure to make good on the claim that the non-I is finally the I: the more the I thinks, the more perfectly will it find itself debased into an object. Identity becomes the authority for a doctrine of adjustment, in which the object—which the subject is supposed to go by— repays the subject for what the subject has done to it.3

Larger efforts at methodological adjudication and critical rigor are never, more generally, far removed from the social positions, motivations, and assumptions held by those on either side of a critic/caretaker divide. In fact, such motivations might be considered as the primal form of ideology described by Adorno. Recognition of “identity” as “operational acts” does not, ipso facto, ensure safety from the effects of sui generis claims. Bayart suggests this when concluding his study of cultural identity with a warning: Today nothing threatens the “stability of the social order” more than the illusion of cultural identity. It needs, as never before, to be contested by a modern philosophical ethos that unravels the roles of the contingent and the universal, now that political parties in Europe and elsewhere have seized the initiative in what they call the “battle for identity.”4

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Though Bayart makes reference to this battle with respect to European concerns over globalization and social stability, we want to suggest that the contemporary North American academic study of religion finds itself, if not directly in this battle for identity, then at least homologous to the “now” referenced by Bayart. Today, identities have been effectively demystified by analysts, but their mystical effects and the power procured from them show no signs of waning in influence on the social world or on our reception of academic endeavors. Can the weight of an identity, this “primal form of ideology,” really be escaped? Does not Adorno tell us that the “non-I” militates in the direction of objectification, of an identity? Perhaps, the decades-old debate over method in the North American study of religion is an expression of this battle. The curious self-consciousness of the field regarding its academic professionalization and the inclusion of scholarship emanating from traditionally underrepresented “identities” (much of which relies heavily on the category of experience) has created a climate wherein many of us have grown exceptionally adept at identifying social/rhetorical techniques and theological sleights-of-hand, but whether we’ve done well to connect the dots between our criticism of certain groups’ theological sorcery over and against a “critical” method remains to be discussed. Regarding identity, the field’s longstanding effort to critically assuage the identity crisis through methodological refutation of the confessional/experiential enterprise has potential to turn the “critically minded” into “theologians,” or rather priests “worshiping” a translucent image of ourselves via/as our methods, thus safeguarding and obscuring the real/imagined power wielded from within what Pierre Bourdieu describes as the “relatively autonomous religious field.”5 Taking such an action-oriented outlook on identity seriously requires recognizing that we may now be lodged between two interpretive strategies for our (critical) work: our method as our identity or our identity as our method. We can seek to escape the perilous claims to experience that have plagued academic rigor by localizing our energy into “method” to such an extent that it serves as proxy for the identities whose influence on knowledge production we often deny. Or, we can transform experiences into a method undercutting methodological applicability across domains with a simple, politically charged rejection of such an effort. In the first option, if we maintain that identities amount to “operational acts,” how do we prevent the methods employed in the revealing of such acts from slipping into a replacement-like logic for the “identity” we’ve thusly deconstructed?6 To wit, “identity” is replaced by identity. In the second option, social, political, and other sorts of experiences weigh so heavily for some scholars that it becomes fundamentally incongruous to buy into the prospect that all categories fit within one methodological rubric. Qualitatively speaking, there are no “critics” or

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“caretakers,” just scholars of religion—at least with respect to the current professional constellation of the North American field—who are engaged in ideological/identitarian “battle.” In this chapter, our aim is to outline the manner in which the concern for a critical methodology—applicable across many domains of data—evinces a concern over the “properness” of its own identity in ways that are seldom interrogated. We suggest that there is scant discursive probing of the scholar’s “operational acts of” method-ification that manufacture the illusion of method (to play on Bayart’s claim about identity). Here, we take to task our own impulses toward entering the contest over identity (even if via the universal appeal to method). As historian of religions Bruce Lincoln suggests is true of theorizing myth, “the story I would tell . . . is [like all others] a story with an ideological dimension, conditioned by its author’s interests and desires.”7 The same ideological connection, and a similar set of experiential conditionings, might be shaping the demand for a critical methodology, as well as the content of such a method. CONFESSING THE CRITICAL—CRITICAL CONFESSIONS A genealogy of North American critical approaches to religion might find its “origins” in two places, with Jonathan Z. Smith à la Russell T. McCutcheon, and with the efforts of Donald Wiebe (and others) to establish a scientific study of religion. Smith famously argued, “there is no data for religion.”8 “Religion” is created for “imaginative acts of comparison and generalization,” necessitating a method treating self-consciousness as one’s “foremost object of study.” In an assertion remembered in shorthand form as “map is not territory,” Smith emphasizes that “it is a mistake to confuse one’s concepts with the actual world.”9 Since (at least) the 1980s, many scholars have worked from the position Smith put forth, but few as extensively and formidably as Russell T. McCutcheon, who has emerged as a leading critical scholar whose work turns to discursivity and rhetorical deconstruction so as to redescribe and refocus attention to this object of study—self-consciousness. His groundbreaking text Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, published in 1997, offered a wide-sweeping and persuasive genealogy of the competing, yet always stable antagonisms of “study” still haunting much of the field today: the systematization and domination of the study of religion, as theological apprehension of, and investigation into the “objects” of moods, feelings, and motivations recursively marking the logicae of religion, and the study of it, as identifiable through distinction-making

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mechanisms of the sui generis whereby the field is presupposed to study a unique thing of its own kind—be it an idea, entity, or reality. Although categories of the “it”—the “object of study”—in any discursive battle after apprehension of “the” (or a) guiding etymology of “fundamental reason” for (in this case) a discipline, a field, will no doubt approximate in contingent and always/already changing and shifting contexts over time. In a word, Manufacturing Religion pulled back the veil on the longstanding disciplinary smuggling of categories (and their politics) fraught at the fragmented cohesion of a “field” (of religion) that buys, sells, imports, and trades with/ in epistemological commodities of “categories” (e.g., meaning as religious) that, over time, become and are seen as “objects” (e.g., religion as study of the “good”) of study. Here, McCutcheon accomplishes a compelling feat by bringing into sharp relief the illusion of disciplinary heterogeneity (e.g., varying approaches and methods to a field) projected in the long history of importing and exporting homologous functioning centers that effectually conceal the perpetually unending task of marking the study of religion as always, and already, self-evident. The perpetual search for “the order of things,” by way of the always-in-motion quest for the proper object of study, manufactures just the right amount of (seeming) fragmentation to legitimate the “field” as a “Field” sui generis—for which we now have the right to “free trade” in “agreement”—even if the products being peddled market a different (god, meaning, reality, truth, belief, impulses, motivations, etc.) kind of same (objects of religion) in perpetuity. The making of a discipline’s “objects of study” ought to focus the practice (which is, quite literally, the definition of a “discipline”) with discipline, while making possible enough room for “scholarly approaches” which often borrow from, and incorporate, aspects of multiple disciplines. Such multi/ inter/cross/trans-disciplinarity, as it is often referred to, attempts to offset and stave off the challenges that often accompany narrow concentrations in specialized fields of study. Scholars ought to be able to identify variability in approach (the scholarly consensus of a field’s breadth) with enough clarity to mark and historicize the residual traces marking the “development” (the scholarly consensus of a field’s depth) of branches of knowledge (academic disciplines). Such activity of presumed growth, or progressiveness (no pun intended), presupposes and necessitates the incorporation of, among other features, inquiry and challenge (for the making of sturdy branches) formed at the seams of spirited debate, where sighted/cited lines of departure, flight, and landing are authorized in/by the “holding patterns” dubbed as “movement” in the field. Movement overdetermines the feeling of a continuous looping arrested by the circuitry of “replacement-like logic.” One of these “holding patterns” is evinced in what has, in a shorthand way, been classified as the “confessional” approach. This method is said to be animated by a

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“caretaker” style to the study of religion whereby unapologetic apologetics work to preserve the “what” (its object of focus) in the study of religion (such as belief) as normative inquiry for the “scholarly” sum total guiding a field’s existence. As one might imagine, keeping any academic field beholden to the neuroses of perpetual quests for prescriptive certainty risks cutting short the capacity and potentiality for creation and growth of a field, as such. By most accounts, a field develops in and by its ability to grow beyond its constitutive elements (e.g., the “particle discovery” phase of identifying “objects” of study”), thereby attaining disciplinary autonomy within its own institutional context and setting. Much of what has come to comprise the ever-expanding arena of “Theory and Method” in the study of religion today relies on well-known shorthand phrases and popular buzzwords as proxy for the heavy lifting necessitated by the act of marking one’s critical stance, where one stands amid various orientations and theoretical and methodological postures. Presumably crafted for easy consumption, vaunting soundbites of “theory and method,” followed by use of few notable and pioneering names, are seen as “sufficient” to pass as critical without having to “show the work.” These debates widen with the proliferation of a growing set of rhetorical contingencies supplemented with and by other discursively oriented and augmented distinction-making reductions in an effort to move away from the presumably indistinguishable longhand of “the study of religion” as a field proper. Thus, these reductions of difference powering such processes of academic distinction-making culminate in the illusion of “a” field now challenged by growing lists of guidelines made possible in stable (as in rigid) yet multiplying (as in growing) debates guided by concern over (what ought constitute) proper study. The back-and-forth of the “what ought” debate played out in publications and scholarly dialogue becomes, over time, catalogued as a traceable branch of knowledge springing forth among other growing branches, the fields which enable a discipline. Holding constant here the suggestion above that variability in approach is understood to represent a scholarly consensus of a “field’s breadth,” it seems plausible then that one ought to be able to catalogue and archive (that is, historicize) an accounting of a usable past that becomes concretized in what we call “disciplines” within fields of knowledge. Although much of the spirited debate in the field today, or at least a palpable slice of it, circles around deconstructing what the “study” of religion ought to entail through qualification of what has (all but) resulted in a resounding soundbite of discursive marketing: theory and method. Pushing this thought-experiment even further, scholarly plausibility is assumed to be acquired in and through a recursive peddling of deconstructing (long held) uncontested “object(s) of study” subsumed under newer-yet-not-so-new shorter shorthand of longer hooks—“critical approaches.” This phraseology of difference assists in maintaining assumed

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association between larger efforts of “Theory and Method” as the antithesis of other scholarly labors of seeking out “the” stable (yet always changing) object(s) (e.g., god => meaning => impulse => motivation) of study. The utility of divergent and multiplying catchphrases (even when deployed in sloppy ways) for the burgeoning visibility of “theory and method” goes without saying, yet this domesticates the intellectual labor of doing the work of any theory and method, seeking the optics of legitimation vis-à-vis rhetorical nepotism. Effectually, it is a move to be seen as a player in the game (where stakes/interests would be all too evident; where players are forced to keep their eye on the object of the game), rather than an analyst watching the game in the company of other scholarly companions. With the “role” of the scholar/ analyst in mind, as well as their purview, consider the hustle-and-bustle of a crowded sports stadium where one’s perspective (what one is doing, what others are doing, as well as awareness thereof) is in a constant state of shift and flummox. At one (and potentially the same) moment we have an observer interested in studying the techniques of contest which make up “the game”— the data that are recorded, quite literally, as notes from the field. And, a participant observer, should the observer have any “skin in the game” or strong interest in maintaining brand loyalty or consumer affinity (all dependent on who is playing within the game). Or, one could imagine a lively conversation among analysts in the stadium bleachers, thinking themselves outside of the game they are watching but whose disciplined focus of study (of what one thinks one is doing) is, in reality, challenged by the ongoing distractions emanating from the “noise” of spirited debate emerging among those (analysts) discussing their data and field notes as the game is being played. Sports aficionados know only too well, after all, what one can miss when a quick beer run happens outside of the halftime intermission. Borrowing from the title of one of Judith Butler’s formative essays, the insatiable quest for, and question of, “what” constitutes a “field’s” proper object (which she challenges in the pages of “Against Proper Objects”10) might also be framed as identifying “the heart” of the scholarly method. In his review essay “A Gift with Diminished Returns: On Jeff Kripal’s The Serpent’s Gift,” McCutcheon beautifully animates what kind of posture the “heart” of the critical method ought to enable: Rather than taking sides in this debate over meaning, agency, experience, and identity (and thereby entering the contest over the limits of what counts as legitimately or authentically human), perhaps scholars ought to shift the ground and study the contest itself and refrain from seeing the results of their work as a gift to humankind; if we make such a shift, then we might notice that the same tools are being used by those on either side of this debate: we hear the familiar pairing of West vs. East—as if this analytic helps us to understand something

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about the world rather than about our need to demarcate it into zones of local and exotic—we find the distinction between distorted vs. pristine as well as experience vs. expression.11

Studying the contest rather than entering into it effectively distinguishes the work of the critical methodologist. And, we know well that the contest under study continually shifts and approximates in tandem with recursive and reworked citational moves enabled by social, cultural, and rhetorical techniques among the social actors competing in the game. But, for those of us on the scholarly sidelines and in the bleachers who have shifted the ground of our study and refocused our gaze on the match—it is the what that holds together the “ground” of this shift, keeping us firmly situated in the assurance of the durability of method(s) in the face of human interest. Pressing the metaphor a bit further—with our gaze projected onto the field, what exactly is being studied, when we have already long accepted Smith’s famous claim that what we scholars study are objects of our own imagination? In-flight holding patterns are never forever—they are, as we know, beholden to preflight decision on the ground, which cannot be undone midair. Whether in the plane or not, one need not ruminate long on (this other) metaphor before fear and anxiety of the “what if” begins to set in—quickly set back down when we remind ourselves that such disasters are not as frequent as we might think. Holding patterns were never designed, and are not made to, remain suspended in air, indefinitely. Unlike the spatial distance afforded the analyst studying the game between the “stadium” and “field,” no such distance is available for human manipulation in the realm of “air-space.” Unfortunately, history bears witness to the awful truth that pilot, passengers, and crew go down all the same, in the tragic case of a plane wreck. And, one team’s fans always leave the Superbowl feeling like losers (even though they never played). Back for a moment to “the Field” beyond the somber metaphor above: with analytical purview cast onto the contest making the game, we are studying ourselves as well as involving ourselves in a lively exchange as we compare notes about what we think we see at work making the contest and the moves made in it possible. The old adage “stay in the game” comes into sharp relief when thought over and against an “outside of the game” disinterested subject position, or the occupation of territory beyond the optics of the geographical terrain from which it is carved. In and from self-reserved space set aside for the expertise of the specialized, analysts become cartographers themselves, space-makers, where place becomes marked as space beyond territory of the field where the public games are played out. And yet, following the logic that the data which becomes the data of the scholar is not merely an “object” of one’s imagining (as commonly cited using Smith) but rather, entails something more complex of what brings certain analysts to certain

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games played out in the fields where the “doing” of what we (claim to study) is not really happening, after all. Attempts to relegate the occupation of the “scholarly task” quite often sidestep an accounting of why those others (presumably analysts) have come to watch this or that game. If those occupying the scaled bleachers of the stadium have also come to study the contest, our likely conversation partners rarely, if ever, publicly trade the private parts of their scholarly imagination as cast on the field where the games are played out. In holding the concept of some sort of joint project holding together critical approaches to the study of religion, we arrive at the reality that in the act of observing the contest, or the imaginations we bring to the game, the cartographical work of charting territory and mapping guides is always ever present. New matches and contests are inevitably arising from the benches of the “here” in the battle over the “identities” at work guiding and shaping the what on the field, and from the discursive incongruities emerging among the how of the how of the what. In concert with a remarkable array of critical thinkers in areas such as literary theory, philosophy, religious studies, and other “sites” of engagement, McCutcheon astutely charts and provides context for how certain approaches have come to dominate the study of religion, through a forceful consideration of the ideological strategies that have enabled such a hegemony—an assessment of the techniques that have, for so long, enabled such a sociopolitical and discursive consensus in traditional religious studies in North America. Most demonstrative of such a “larger discursive consensus,”12 in face of which the field has continued to maintain its phenomenological and confessional impulses over the last century, is Mircea Eliade—who in part builds upon Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy to demonstrate the manner in which religion, sui generis, begins with a hierophany where human experience of the suprareal splits time and space bifurcating sacred from profane. If we take seriously McCutcheon’s claims about how religion is methodologically managed, described, and organized today in most of what constitutes the field of religion in North America—then, we need not look far to see just how influential the claims and paradigms of Eliade (and other thinkers among this tradition) have been, and remain. What the discourse on sui generis religion has classified as humans—believers (in gods, creeds, dogma, and so on)—is, in McCutcheon’s work, redescribed products of the historical, social, economic, and political. In short, they are social products, bound by all sorts of contingencies, material social interests, motivations, and of course needs. As such, according to the critical methodologist, the academic study of religion does not study objects of interiorized essences and structures of meaning, but rather, nonunique social formations and processes in culture and human history that manufacture its objects of study. Despite whether one is left persuaded or not about what religion is and how scholars ought to study

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it in academic context, McCutcheon’s groundbreaking work in Manufacturing Religion and the continued unfolding debate in the field document and bring into sharp relief the undeniable reality that the North American study of religion is marked by and fraught with an ongoing and seemingly unending battle over the how and the what. Well before the publication of Manufacturing Religion, the founding and establishment of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) in 1985 by E. Thomas Lawson, Luther H. Martin, and Donald Wiebe had at its core the aim “to encourage the historical, comparative and structural study of religion in the North American community of scholars.”13 As noted in the initial letter of invitation to prospective members in October 1985, it had increasingly become apparent to a number of scholars, especially those engaged in the History of Religions, comparative religions, or the scientific study of religions, or simply those who [felt] the need for theoretical work in the field, that the American Academy of Religion [had] become such a complex and competing repository of interests that the academic study of religion was in danger of being lost in the process.14

For Martin, “the founding of NAASR represented a response to . . . the possibility for a scientific study of religion” while it also corresponded to what was perceived by them as a shift in the American Academy of Religion to an “explicitly non-scientific . . . anti-theoretical direction.”15 Wiebe’s major contention, the editors of the 2012 quasi-festschrift for Wiebe, Failure And Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion, tell us, is “his thesis that the academic study of religion suffers from a failure of intellectual nerve,” a failure that “comprises an unwillingness to continue to distinguish sharply comparative religion . . . from confessional, even broadly humanistic, studies that ought to be carried out only in denominationally affiliated institutions.”16 We do not want to rehash Wiebe’s arguments, as they are already well known, but to situate such arguments as representative of ostensibly onehalf of what has come to be regarded as the “critical approach” within the academic study of religion. It is, however, important that we note the initial impetus motivating Wiebe’s 1984 article, “The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion.”17 As Wiebe begins the essay, he tells us that “it is, rather, the methodological problems implicit in that relationship [between theology and the academic study of religion] that interest me,” a “problem” that, he then tells readers, “jeopardizes the very existence of such an academic study for it opens to debate once again who or what it is that ought to set the agenda for, and therefore to control, such a study.”18

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In one footnote, he offers examples of the “failure of nerve” by citing C. W. Kegley and Gordon Kaufman. Of interest to us, however, is his subsequent analysis of these thinkers as “problems,” as he writes: The image of “attack” regarding the opposition to a scientific study of religion is quite appropriate given the level of hostility expressed by a number of authors. Much of the literature degenerates into invective and is hardly worth analysis, but it does indicate the vehemence that lies behind the reaction to which I have referred as a “failure of nerve” and the extent of the fear generated by the Enlightenment that the academic life might be alien to the intellectual life of faith, or that it might transcend it.19

The irony of Wiebe calling out other scholars for invective notwithstanding, Wiebe very rightly notes the “fear of the Enlightenment” shaping much of the work of theologians and ethicists at the time. Wiebe seems to gloss over the pernicious consequences of the Enlightenment, or of modernity writ large. He reinforces this position a bit later by characterizing this “fear” as a “disturbing trend in religious studies that would jettison the gains it has inherited from and since the Enlightenment.”20 Again, Wiebe is seemingly operating as if completely detached from or disinterested in historical contingency. There are very real, very specific reasons for scholars to hold suspicion about the Enlightenment, and any suggestion that these scholars are somehow throwing the empirical baby out with the a priori bathwater belies Wiebe’s own “faith” in the autoimmunity of the Enlightenment project he so doggedly defends. Essentially, he’s succumbing to a slippery slope demonstrative that a “failure of nerve” rests with him, in that if the science he champions is worthy of the very celebration given to it by Wiebe, then said science does not need defenders. His defense of a “science of religion” looks eerily similar (in form) to Christian apologetics. So, who, really, is the theologian? Wiebe foresees such criticism of his argument and spends time lambasting Robert Bellah and other well-known scholars for their reinforcing some version of the “identity thesis,” the position that what happens in the study of religion is, to varying degrees, “religious.”21 Wiebe leaves no room for such positions. Working to draw his essay to a close, he tells us his perspective on the field to this point: “We have here a return to religion under the pressure, it would seem, of the breakdown of our culture.”22 Here, we see what is motivating all of this, fears over cultural decay. Wiebe hides this concern over culture in the back of his article. In bringing it to the fore, along with his initial comments and claims about controlling the agenda of religious studies, we are suggesting that much of this concern over a “science of religion” is an effort to find some sort of authoritative mechanism that might facilitate Wiebe’s authority in the field. As Bruce Lincoln tells us, “authority is not so much an entity, as it is an effect.”23 Here, Wiebe treats authority as an

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entity (e.g., science), through engaging with two procurative effects: use of rhetorical authority so as to feign disciplinary or professional authority, and an effort to procure authority through the hard and fast presentation of a narrative about lost authority. Although Eliadian-like approaches and methods still structure/guide much of what largely comprises traditional scholarship (and the politics of it) in the (North American) study of religion today, we would be grossly remiss to not point out the significant and weighty impact that critical approaches to theory and method, and NAASR’s rising intellectual influence, have had on shaping a critical edge in classrooms, syllabi, scholarship, job searches, annual conferences, working groups, departments, ongoing debates, and publications. As discussed briefly in the Preface to Method as Identity, the theme for NAASR’s 2015 conference sought to take stock of NAASR’s impact on theory, and where it was headed. “Theory in a Time of Excess” was focused on investigating what it means to “do theory” in the study of religion today. One might wonder what exactly this theoretical “excess” refers to in a field still largely dominated by the study of beliefs, impulses, and inward feelings and emotion. While such “excess” still shapes the field, the rhetorical use of “theory and method” meant to highlight something of a critical stance/posture is so rhetorically utilized in the academy today that the term “theorizing” has come to designate everything and nothing, all at once. NAASR’s 2015 conference description does a fine job of depicting this present-day predicament: For although the terms “method and theory” can now be found in course titles, curricula/degree requirements, area/comprehensive exams, and listed as competencies on the C.V.s of scholars from across a wide array of subfields, and while a variety of groups at annual scholarly conferences now regularly itemize theorizing among the topics that they examine and carry out, it seems that few of the many examples of doing theory today involve either meta-reflection on the practical conditions of the field or rigorously explanatory studies of religion’s cause(s) or function(s). So, despite the appearance of tremendous advances in the field since NAASR’s founding 30 years ago as the lone place for carrying out theory in the study of religion, it can be argued that little has changed, for the term theory is today so widely understood as to make it coterminous with virtually all forms of scholarship on religion. Spending some time re-examining just what we ought to consider theory to signify therefore seems to be a worthwhile focus for our annual meeting.24

According to this description, with a new concern over the “competing repository of interests” of “theory and method” now at work today (to play on an initial concern of NAASR at the outset of its formation), the once-posed danger of “losing” the academic study of religion is made more complex by current multifarious and all-encompassing uses/categorizations of theory.

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Despite significant developments in the field since the founding of NAASR, “little” since the early days of vigorous efforts to distinguish the critical from the confessional in the study of religion “has changed.” But, what of the “little change” is posited as being used to measure how “theory/method” is now conterminous “with virtually all forms of scholarship on religion?” For his part, Wiebe has also directly addressed the relation between methods and motivations, arguing in 1988 that “the emergence of the desire for objective knowledge of ‘the world,’ that is, constitutes the introduction of a radically new value into human culture.”25 Presumably, he is referring to the same “culture” he feels is under threat, and his hope is for the Weberian notion of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” to guard against such threats. He calls for the “academic/scientific study of religion” to mediate understanding through an “intersubjectively testable set of statements about religious phenomena and religious traditions.”26 Following such a scientific method, he suggests, will prevent personal motivations from determining “the results of research.”27 But doesn’t Wiebe’s reliance on a narrative of cultural decline suggest he hasn’t adequately disentangled his personal motivations from his own work? Even if operating under, and working with, the guidelines set forth for the “self-conscious student of religion”—as per Smith, cited as one of the most formidable of critical scholars in the field—much of what seems packaged as theory or method today lacks attention to the very conditions demanded by the “primary expertise” of the student/scholar, their (according to Smith) “foremost object of study.” Smith’s admonition bears repeating here in full: If we had understood the archaeological and textual record correctly, man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interaction within them. But man, more precisely Western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion. That is to say, while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion—there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy. For this reason the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study. For the self-conscious student of religion, no datum possesses intrinsic interest. It is of value only insofar as it can serve as exempli gratia [or e.g.] of some fundamental issue in the imagination of religion. The student of religion must be able to articulate clearly why “this” rather than “that” was chosen as an  exemplum. His primary skill is concentrated in this choice. This effort at articulate choice is all the more difficult, and hence all the more necessary,

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for the historian of religion who accepts neither the boundaries of canon nor of community in constituting his intellectual domain, in providing his range of exempla.28

If the ability to “articulate clearly why ‘this’ rather than ‘that’ was chosen as an exemplum” is what constitutes our foremost scholarly expertise (and object of study), then the tragedy of not subjecting our approaches to the same analytical conditions of why “this” rather than “that” renders impossible any so-called tragic assumptions that the “inherent value of the free-floating signifier has been lost”29 in “critical approaches.” To the contrary, the kind of analytical precision that Smith situates as the scholarly task fails to take stock that like religion, there is too, no data for method. Put otherwise, there is no seeming escape for the slippage of “experience” motivating the imaginative acts of our own analytical and comparative claims. For self-consciousness also organizes, reproduces, and imagines its own “proper objects” of study (interests, strategies, identities). Does bracketing the how of method stave off, with analytical precision and certainty, the field’s longstanding problematic categories, which remain somehow invisible at the center of the field? Stated more bluntly, the functioning centers of meaning, experience, and the impulses/interests self-consciously driving our analytical game watching voyeurism appear to be rarely, if ever, discussed. And, even if cast in the opposite direction that all scholars study are the things by which we imagine—even these ruminations rarely, if ever, make it to the published page and public discourse in the academic study of religion. Whether field/stand, players/analysts, or playing/spectating—territories and maps (however conceived) are never outside of the carving, sifting, and shaping endeavors belonging to the processes of the social. The making of approaches, and the spirited and long debates such contests produce, is indeed germane to the making of fields and disciplines as we know them. But, turning the contest in on itself into a game of contingencies whereby “ought” is deployed as that which ought to govern the rules occupying the games scholars play, culminating in “a field,” seems eager to control for much more than what laboratories of method are designed to endure. In fact, threats to the discursive rules, “theses on method” attempting to control for sterility in the labs of experimentation, and concerns for maintaining pristine procedures when doing the scholarly work of our field, seem lightweight in view of the ever-lurking dangers of cross-contamination when researchers trade in the precision of distance (method) for remembering their exuberant interests in the study itself unfolding in the hallowed and sacred labs of the specialized: identity. The discourse of social theory, on which critical approaches rely so heavily, has done much to turn the “private” parts of discourse (like ideology,

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beliefs) into “public” social products up for critique and social assessment. The study of religion then might now be in danger of losing its maps which have provided, for the critical scholar at least, firm navigation if shaky footing. But, maps too are inventions—and what we come to call “methods” of one form or another are organized by “interests, curiosities, assumptions, and discourse” which effectively allow us to talk about some other “thing”—a “y.” Method guides how we put x in conversation with y so as to guard against grand assertions of unconstrained and unrestrained depth. Critics and caretakers alike come to be determined by acceptance that we study ourselves (tacitly or overtly) or carve out “territory” by telling others to study themselves, which then provides the critical cartographer with the means to not study oneself. It is too easy to assume that some of those in the benches with us, seeing ourselves doing similar work (method), are just ­posers—pretending to have their eye on the stadium. The reality is that we have had our eyes on ourselves, and each other, the whole time. Because of this arrangement, critics have remained cartographers, who at this point more or less agree that we don’t have access to territory, but we have seemingly failed to take full stock of how our overreliance on the certainty of previous maps (e.g, functionalism) failed to orient our response to the recognition that there is, in fact, no territory—that is, no “ground” from which we can shift; what we have perceived as “ground” all along has simply been “imagination”—an imaginative act. This is as true for the “critic” as for the “caretaker.” To this point, Smith’s turn to imagination and Wiebe’s efforts at scientifically studying religion have been universalist/objectivist foundations upon which a critical methodology might be constituted. This reliance on Smith has turned the category of experience into an even bigger problem because it ensures that any critical methodology ends up resting on a particular experience of imagination, not representative of all of those occupying the bleachers, taking notes as we watch the contest in tandem.30 Even reliance on empiricism is an “operational act of identifying” map as territory. As to Wiebe’s turn to science, it has also been predicated on bracketing experience out of study, but this has had the effect of bracketing “in” the particular experiences of (almost exclusively) white men to all others. In short, Wiebe has made an accidental Heideggerian and all-too phenomenological move, precisely by championing the jettisoning of a phenomenologically based method: quite the theological audacity. Given such a situation, critical approaches have never strayed far from their colonial roots—so focused on maps that the (ongoing) concern over and experiences of conquering territory are obscured from view while they continue. The foundation for a critical methodology has inadvertently rested on the shared experience of white men.31 Scholar-critics in the stands have

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beautifully demystified the illusion of our objects of study (over there), but we have yet to decipher what is concealed under the singular identity of the critic that strangely keeps our maps so homogenous and unchanging over time and space. Map is certainly not territory, and neither is it as reliable and stable as we think. After all, we don’t use maps from 1865 to navigate terrain in 2020. What, then, of this ideological trace that still haunts concerns over perspective and situativity of scholarly method, in terms of both how to understand it and how to respond to it? DE-MYSTIFYING “CRITICAL” SCHOLARSHIP Understanding such an ideological trace as ever-operative within critical approaches, and following this critical accounting of critical method, it seems the debates over self-evidences and the place of experience is not about “religion” one way or another, but about procuring capital and authority. Interestingly, this “critical scholar” interested in maintaining the distinctions between really critical and not-so-critical enters into the very contest of what is religious and what is not religious. Effectually, this “critical scholar” interested in maintaining pristine distinctions of method has unduly replaced the contest over what religion is and is not with what method is and is not—or in NAASR’s recent language what theory is or is not—for the “proper” enactment of the academic study of religion. Following Bourdieu, distinctionmaking is precisely the function of religion: Religion contributes to the (hidden) imposition of the principles of structuration of the perception and thinking of the world, and of the social world in particular, insofar as it imposes a system of practices and representations whose structure, objectively founded on a principle of political division, presents itself as the natural-supernatural structure of the cosmos.32

Bourdieu goes on to state that the effort to transform an individual perception of the social world into a collective, “explicit consensus, of the whole group”—that is, “a labour of categorization, of making things explicit and classifying them”—is a thoroughly “ordinary” endeavor, and occurs “continuously” as “agents clash over the meaning of the social world and their position in it, the meaning of their social identity, through all the forms of speaking well or badly of someone or something, of blessing or cursing and of malicious gossip, eulogy, congratulations, praise, compliments, or insults, rebukes, criticism, accusations, slanders, etc.”33 By this reading, where capital is concerned, scholars of religion earmark their perceived “identities” by constructing them over and against refutations of the claims of others, and/or

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in concert to their celebrations of the efforts of yet other scholars. Authority is performed through the rhetorical exercise of naming, of distinguishing. Social identity (e.g., academic, intellectual identity), or any perception of it, is both byproduct of and raison d’être for this process of distinction. The “failure of nerve” among “identity thesis” proponents like Bellah does not involve a failure to demystify method, but a failure to realize that whether the study of religion is “religious” or not, is not a factor in pushing the study of religion further. Wiebe’s “failure of nerve” involves not realizing that success in demystifying religion or method would mean little to anyone outside the discipline. Hence, demystification would not ensure academic authority for the field. As Jacques Derrida might remind us, our efforts to demystify are also efforts to remystify ourselves in the face of the “other.” Imagine if we, as “critical” scholars of religion, kept this methodological approach but proceeded to the field of economics. Our efforts at eidetic qualification are akin to an economist walking into a classroom and saying: “Look, I teach economics; but I am in no way involved with economics.” If the “confessional” camp has had difficulty exorcizing the theological trace from their work, the “critical” camp has had an equally difficult time exorcizing a (Protestant) protest ethic from their work. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude as emblematic of a critical approach to the critical approach: the critic doth protest too much. There exists no exclusively autonomous field unencumbered by questions and issues of capital and power. The political struggle in the social world is waged by “preserving and transforming the categories of that world,”34 meaning that scholars are not simply thrust into the “battle for identity” because they are social actors, but because scholarship, to the extent it explores “knowledge of the social world,” is effectively an ideological ammunition factory.35 Within the academic study of religion, our methods end up a primary means of division organizing whose interests/experiences are engaged, concealed, and legitimated. “Critic” is not simply a marker of action signifying a particular method, but a designator used to transmute symbolic capital into economic capital. As Bourdieu makes clear, “Symbolic capital—another name for distinction—is nothing other than capital, of whatever kind, when it is perceived by an agent endowed with categories of perception arising from the incorporation of the structure of its distribution, i.e., when it is known and recognized as self-evident.”36 Critical scholarship, like all scholarship, relies on a distinction or a series of distinctions, academic versus ordinary, objective versus subjective, critic versus caretaker, this versus that, up versus down, and so on. Relying on principles of division and classification that Bourdieu calls “ideological alchemy,” some of our critical approaches to the study of religion look like

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religion. Both amount to symbolic systems that blur the line between gnosiological, social, and political functions.37 There is little wonder why those who study it—critics included—can’t escape its impact.38 Bourdieu’s discussion of “religious specialists” is ironically applicable to critical scholars of religion and/or identity, in that they “must necessarily conceal that their struggles have political interests at stake . . . because the symbolic efficacy that they can wield in these struggles depends on it and therefore . . . they have to hide from themselves their political interests.”39 So what to do? Coming from a different theoretical angle—much more critical of the Marxist reductionism that shapes Bourdieu’s thinking—but making a similar point, Adorno says, If mankind is to get rid of the coercion to which the form of identification really subjects it, it must attain identity with its concept at the same time. In this, all relevant categories play a part. The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle of identification. Barter is the social model of the principle, and without the principle there would be no barter; it is through barter that nonidentical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical.40

Any demand to secure capital and/or authority is rooted in a recognition that capital is not already distributed equally. The rationale for methodological adjudication in the academic study of religion deconstructs its attendant promise of equality. Resultantly, only by naming the self-conscious interests animating the critical concern will a critical perspective take broader root. For the critical scholar, “attaining identity with its concept” might involve the critical gaze turned inward and toward the political, examining not simply our “academic” identities, but the impact of our social identities on our methods. Critical scholarship might better define its critical edge by situating itself as a method for identifying certain experiences in/of the social world. Adorno continues with a direct mandate to (and warning about) critical theory: From olden times, the main characteristic of the exchange of equivalents has been that unequal things would be exchanged in its name, that the surplus value of labor would be appropriated. If comparability as a category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality which is inherent in the barter principle—as ideology, of course, but also as a promise—would give way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques. When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only a pretext. Its realization alone would transcend barter. Once critical theory

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has shown it up for what it is—an exchange of things that are equal and yet unequal—our critique of the inequality within equality aims at equality too, for all our skepticism of the rancor involved in the bourgeois egalitarian ideal that tolerates no qualitative difference. If no man had part of his labor withheld from him anymore, rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking.41

Bourdieu helps to demonstrate the hidden behind the obvious. Adorno gives attention to how a response to this hidden dimension of critical discourses might move forward. Critical theory is both equal and unequal, in that it is always in part a response to our alienation from labor. Yet, critical theory often ignores the various distances posed between different groups and their respective labor. This blindness means critical theory never “transcend[s] the identifying mode of thinking.”42 Until all objects behind the identities (in any given field) are afforded their full labor, folks on both sides of this battle for identity will feel alienated and will be forced into coercive methodological measures. As it relates to the academic study of religion—and why this issue matters so fundamentally to our contemporary work—the “others” coerced in such situations (i.e., caretakers of race or belief or meaning, etc.) are of much less consequence than the critic, for whom coercion shapes the imagination to such lengths that they see the world with a certainty only afforded those whose acts of identification find them standing outside the world—alienated yet further. “Method”—like religion—conceals (and reveals) identity.43 It is, as we know, not void of experience. Hence, any “system of undiscussed questions setting the boundaries of the field of what merits discussion” is not sui generis, but of the same sort as the object of its investigation or even disdain. Objectifying method gives us a way to understand the mystifying behind the mystical; critical approaches to the study of religion bring this structuring, structured trace with us, as if always a mirror held up to our data. In this way, our overreliance on a “rational” (aka, critical, scientific) method turns us into vampires, invisible to ourselves in the very mirrors we hold. Blinded by feelings of alienation (i.e., not seeing ourselves in our mirrors), we under-examine our own power and authority because of the difficulty of recognizing it, given that it does not compute with our affective feelings of alienation and resentment. Alongside the already structured effects at work in the social world, this critical “stance”—the rejection of (having a particular) experience—“consecrates” our social position and identity as not rooted in the categories we reject but as a feature of the naturally ordered rational world. Whether “critic” or “caretaker,” our social identities, the experiences of the critical scholar, are what ostensibly “absolutize” and “legitimate” our methodological perspective. Paradoxically, the social power and authority of the critical scholar is absolutized and legitimated by the critical rejection of

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that power and authority vis-à-vis the category of experience.44 By treating “experience” as relative and arbitrary, critical “method” legitimates itself and absolutizes its import. Through this “ideological alchemy,” the critical scholar retains a plausible deniability of the impact of their identity and experiences on their work and their impression of others’ work. Foreclosing the impact of experience on the critical method, the critical scholar inadvertently prevents realization of what motivated them in the first place: taking stock of the scholar’s self-consciousness. PRELUDE TO PARANOIA The move toward identity is part of the effort to demystify our academic study of religion by showing that there are no ghosts or mysteries behind “religion,” but only haunting desires and motivations to make identity legible, equitable, and in the end, tolerable. The “critical scholar” of religion/ identity has long claimed that any analysis of their data requires attention to historical contingency. This contingency allows meaning (of the data) to be bracketed by historical context. But this also has the (unstated) implication of transhistoricizing the method itself, not only across differences of categories of identity but also across historical context—meaning that the move to methodologically adjudicate religion and the study of religion in demystifying ways away from the overwhelming weight of experience, is, in fact, a mystical experience. A structured symbolic system functioning as a principle of structuration constructs experience (at the same time as it expresses it) in the name of logic in the state of practice, the unthought condition of all thought, and of the implicit problematic—that is, a system of undiscussed questions setting the boundaries of the field of what merits discussion as opposed to what is outside of discussion, therefore admitted without discussion. (emphasis in Bourdieu)45

What work is being done by the experience of rejecting the category of experience (as properly legitimate) for the academic study of religion? What experiences and interests are being concealed behind the transhistorical reduction and application of method over identity in various historical, social, and cultural contexts? What’s more, do we not find it ironic that the stable identity of the methodological gods of the study of religion utilized and cast forth by critical scholars in the North American academic study of religion embody a particular sort of racially normative identity? The transhistoricized normative experience of whiteness—the inability to accept uncertainty—among these white gods is rarely a self-conscious consideration. Moreover, would a critical approach to the study of religion (by other sorts of methodological gods)

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be constituted by all female, all black, or all queer subjectivities? In a word, this no doubt would not be considered “critical” at all, but rather exemplary of the experiences of these marginalized “gods’” identities overdetermining the method they put to work. In effect, this produces a common thought-structure guiding the logic of what is perceived to be a critical method, whereby the identities of the others cannot be trusted as not influencing their critical gaze. Do not white men, in modernity, also have an experience? We are hardpressed to find—with the exception of a few revered female and/or queer postmodern theorists of identity most impacted by the same very white gods used among the critical scholars of religion—any mentioning of a black critical methodologist. Beyond intent, the optics thus assume that the black methodologists cannot step out of their identity enough to be just as “objective” as the white methodological gods. Such honorable mentions seemingly hinge on the ritual rejection of that black category of experience, for only then is their voice or position upheld or given attention—as methodologically trustworthy. In effect, feeling alienated from their own labor’s power and authority (i.e., not seeing themselves in their own mirror), critical methodologists under-examine their own power and authority because of the difficulty of seeing it. The result, however, is that the critical method overdetermines its reliance on the “ideological alchemy” at the heart of issues related to social power and authority. This is how Bourdieu explains such a process, and he offers further wisdom regarding how we (all) might see this white, male experience in action: The effect of consecration (or legitimation) exercised by explanation also causes the system of dispositions toward the natural world and the social world inculcated by conditions of existence to undergo a change of nature, in particular transmuting into ethics as a systematized and rationalized ensemble of explicit norms. Thus, religion is predisposed to assume an ideological function, a practical and political function of absolutization of the relative and legitimation of the arbitrary. (emphasis in Bourdieu)46

Effectively, “religion” doesn’t allow for the scholar’s escape from the structured and structuring effects of the study of religion, any more than it allows for movement away from structure or experience, or structures of experience. Suggestions that method might flatten experiences have the effect of naturalizing the critical scholar and critical methods as above the social and experiential fray through their own “explanation.” Given the already structured effects at work in the social world, this critical “explanation”—the rejection of experience—“consecrates” the critical scholar’s social position and identity as not rooted in “experience” but through a reliance on the world as “naturally” ordered. In the end, we’re left to recognize that our critical methods are but mystical expressions of identities.

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NOTES 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Routledge, 1990), 148. 2. Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, 92. 3. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 148. 4. Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, 252. 5. One can talk about religion as its own sort of thing but only after admitting that it is never actually distinct from other domains of social and cultural significance. See, Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” Comparative Social Research 13 (1991): 1–44. 6. That is, the need for some normative footing for a critical method so as to not all throw our hands up and say “it is all strategy.” Yet, we know that this thing called theory is not foolproof; it too is shaped by the scholars’ curiosities, interests, and—to borrow from Steven Ramey—“accidental favorites.” See Steven Ramey in Monica R. Miller, ed., Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion: Social and Rhetorical Techniques Examined (Sheffield, UK, and Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2016). 7. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, 1st edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 216. 8. Smith, Imagining Religion, xi. 9. Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 91. 10. Judith Butler, “Against Proper Objects,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 2–3 (1994): 1–26. 11. See chapter 6, in Monica R. Miller, ed., Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion. 12. Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 1997), 58. See, also, Armin Geertz, “Review: Manufacturing Religion,” The Journal of Religion 79, no. 3 (1999): 508–9. 13. Martin and Wiebe, “Establishing a Beachhead: NAASR, Twenty Years Later.” 14. Ibid. 15. Russell T. McCutcheon, William Arnal, and Willie Braun, Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion (Routledge, 2014), 2. 16. Ibid., vii. 17. Donald Wiebe, “The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 13, no. 4 (December 1, 1984): 401–22, doi:10.1177/000842988401300403, 401. 18. Ibid., 401. 19. Ibid., 411, n. 55. 20. Ibid., 412. 21. Ibid., 418. 22. Ibid., 419. 23. Lincoln, Authority, 10–11. 24. “NAASR Annual Meeting, Atlanta, 2015.” 25. Donald Wiebe, “‘Why the Academic Study of Religion?’ Motive and Method in the Study of Religion.” Religious Studies 24, no. 4 (1988): 403–13, 406.

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26. Ibid., 407. 27. Ibid., 408. 28. Smith, Imagining Religion, 1. 29. McCutcheon, “I Have a Hunch,” 81–92, 87. 30. This reliance on imagination has roots in Wilhelm Dilthey’s efforts to design a philosophy of the human sciences and later Ernst Troeltsch’s efforts at presenting theology as a human science. The problems with the latter need not be discussed, but the more general effort at a human science relies on the very category of experience that has proved so problematic. 31. For background on Dilthey and Troeltsch’s efforts in this regard, see Wolfhart Pannenberg and Francis McDonagh, Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976), 104; Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49; Christopher Driscoll, White Lies: Race and Uncertainty in the Twilight of American Religion (New York: Routledge, 2015), chapter 3. 32. Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” 5. 33. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, reprint edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 236. 34. Ibid., 236 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 238. 37. Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” 2–3. 38. Whether relying on self-evident categories or relying on a method meant to deconstruct such self-evidences, both telegraph the social relations and social positions of those making the claims. On both sides of the equation, our efforts to escape experience (either understood as a problematic category or as a problematic social reality) require self-imposed experiences (i.e., actions) that work to construct or reinforce a semblance or perception of an identity already exposed based on social position, but nevertheless often denied. 39. Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” 20. 40. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146. 41. Ibid., 146–7. 42. Ibid., 147. 43. Interestingly, this “critical scholar” interested in maintaining the distinctions between really critical and not-so-critical ends up entering into the very contest of what is religious and what is not religious that they claim to be outside of, in what can be described as a theological sleight-of-hand toward “method”—or in the case of NAASR’s 2015 call for proposals, “theory.” 44. Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” 15. 45. Ibid., 13–14. 46. Ibid., 15.

Chapter 2

Ghost Stories How Method Reveals Identity in the Study of Religions

Somewhere between the academic tendency to treat experience as a philosophical category and experiences of objective categorization, the following words of two formidible historians of religions, representing two successive generations of scholarship, tersely formalize and lay bare the subsumation into and reality of myth for the scholar of religion. Historian of religions Charles H. Long writes, If the cargo cults point to the impact of an alien culture on the religious imagination of an aboriginal culture, then we must at least ask the meaning of this structure in the Academy. There is surely no other imperialistic culture threatening the American Western culture. We may in fact be experiencing the impact of the accretions of the West upon the West, the impact of America on Americans. . . . It is an alienation of Westerners from the West and of Americans from America. The center does not hold! There is no longer that privileged position that is the West or America. . . . Just as the explorations of Westerners from the fifteenth century to the present violently forced millions of human beings and hundreds of other cultures into the dangerous and terrifying reality called history, we are experiencing the descent of America into the reality of the myth; for the Westerners, historymaking reality has lost its effectiveness.1

For Long, the study of religion is an outgrowth of the construction of “religion” as a mode of orientation within the historical and cultural milieu we shorthand refer to as “Modernity.” Long understands the study of religion as deeply hermeneutical and historical, in that, as Louis Benjamin Rolsky remarks, “the objective observer becomes as much a part of the contact and exchange as the observed, thus rendering the categories created to study ‘the other’ both dependent upon the non-West and revealing of the West as provincial.”2 Another historian of religions, Bruce Lincoln, suggests, 49

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As students of myth, we can turn our attention to the mythmaking of our scholarly, as well as that of other, ancestors, secure in this knowledge that our descendents will one day return us the favor. In short, the story I would tell—and like all others, it is a story with an ideological dimension, conditioned by its authors’ interests and desires—is one that recalibrates categories and redistributes privilege, encouraging a move away from projects of “reconstruction” and towards those of criticism.3

Across (what initially appears as) two vastly different sets of scholarly data, be it victims into the violent terrain of Western scientific rationality on one hand, or the mythmaking endemic to the “theoretical disciplines” of the West on the other, the ruptured codes of myth’s ideological structures are synergistically revealed in the longstanding tales of origins in the West, and the fields making up the West, as such. Despite data, and standpoint, both Long and Lincoln find common terrain in the mythic structure of the Academy and our scholarly discourses. Between category and experience, a critical analytic of myth methodologically equalizes a discourse long seperated by the data of identity, and the identification of data. With the words of Long and Lincoln as but a brief example, what among these approaches would be classified as method, theory, and data? Who among the two might be methodologically classified as “critical” or “phenomenological”; or “non-critical,” “objective,” or “confessional,” and for what reasons? An asymmetrical and disparate misallocation seems to arise at times when (the category of) race is made explicit, thus oft-rendering such analyses as data devoid of method or theory (or, a critical posture over-and-against a racialized standpoint). Thus, the (seemingly) immutable appearance and rendering of myth in discourses (already authorized as critical) is more often than not somehow de-identified of laying claim to identity, as such. Hence, to some it would seem that the “religions of the oppressed” (so invoked in Long’s words above) end up caught within a response-flight-response mode that leaves the specter of racialized normativity passing as critical discourse itself and indiscernible from yesterday or the to come of tomorrow. As it concerns method, rarely would both Long and Lincoln be read as offering complementary critical analyses concerning the encounter/contact of identity (be it the referenced proxies’ of cargo cults, or myth, or origins, or academic mythmaking, etc.) and/or their ideological structures as encounter among categories yet to be calibrated. “Your language is more pretentious than mine,” a student once told Lincoln. Pressing himself and subsequently the field further, Lincoln gives bold articulation to the illusory distinctions among logos and the Logos of the scholar: “If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes,” he concludes.4 Understanding well the power that engines catgeorical sleights of hand, Lincoln notes how “once, a particularily puckish student put it somewhat different”:

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“Isn’t logos just repackaged mythos?” she asked, and the multiple ironies hung heavy. Her question was itself a logos, but logos in the epic sense: a shrewd, guileful, eminently strategic discourse through which the structurally weak undo those priviledged to speak in mythos (once more in the epic case), the arrogant, bullying discourse of the structurally strong. By equating the two she effectually said: “You and I speak the same language, with a single exception. Your language is more pretentious than mine.”5

And, that single exception for which the student determined that a certain pretensiousness of language on one side gave the effect of a difference in logos, is not only true of the classroom, but also, of “strategic” discourses privileged enough to be granted the freedom to speak in terms of mythos, that which Lincoln refers to above as “the arrogant, bullying discourse of the structurally strong.” What’s more, although thirty years of the field separate the words of Lincoln from those of Long, the first African American president of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and mid-twentieth-century pioneer among the formidible thinkers at the University of Chicago where Lincoln was later to appear as student and faculty member, their common investments in the what, who, and how of the field share resounding resonances and synergies. And yet, the udeniable methodological synergy fusing the concerns of two such scholars working in the same field, has long remained unthought, in a recursive disciplinary segreation that seemingly classifies sholarship according to an almost unconscious identity politic whereby areas such as African American Religious Histories, Black Religions, and their contributions to growing discourse in what we’ve come to call “Theory and Method in the Academic Study of Religion” have conceptually masked and concealed what these terms reveal through a close consideration of what we refer to throughout the pages that follow: method as identity. Simply put, the study of religion as a legitimate field of study has made great strides of inclusion since its “official” formation and recognition in American institutions of higher learning in the twentieth century and beyond, and while the advent of Civil Rights and other movements for social change would radically explode the once monochromatic identity of scholarship, and identities of those counting as scholars, the theoretical and methodological assumptions of “proper” scholarship seemed to uphold and maintain a certain kind of disciplinary segregation—old battles would now come to be fought under new and notso-new categories. Identity, its proliferating promise and risks of peril, ceaselessly saturate a now global and mass-mediated world. Scholars, institutions, and the larger thinking and listening public know this saturation all too well. If there were ever a time where the public—a space often seen as the other world outside of the bubble of ivory-towers of academe—understood best the high stakes

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of the economy of signification, the 2016 election that ushered in a Donald Trump presidency demonstrated that demographics of identities—whiteness, brownness, blackness, muslimness, queerness, and so on—can be triggered through the pithy success of methodological strategies that smuggle and traffic in histories of triump and catastrophe: “Great Again.” Great. Again. For instance, this strategy of signifying exhortations to and about whiteness was on full display during the 2016 presidential election between Senator Hillary Clinton and President-to-be Donald Trump. In a November 12, 2016, piece for The New York Times, titled “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era,” historian Nell Irvin Painter persuasively demonstrates the manner in which otherwise arbitrary catchphrases such as “Great” or “Make . . . Great Again” are already, and always, coded as an agenda item for whites, one which signifies on some foreign (ontological and material) threat, posing great risk to not what one might become, but rather as a prophylaxis safeguarding the need for how one ought to retain who one already is, has been, and expects to be. Those on the margins and outside of the category of whiteness need no fancy analytical tricks or rhetorical alchemizing to know, full well, that such seemingly banal and mundane words have way more often than not meant danger and death for the many subjectivities whose past means returning to a time in which they are literally, on many counts (social, judicial, political, economic, religious/theological, cultural, etc.) invisible. For those who were (and perhaps remain) the not-yet-recognized humans of these past eras, any do-over is a bad idea, and the sheer notion of combining “great” and “again” registers as an absurd oxymoron. Note the categories present in Painter’s astute analytical foray into the “what” of whiteness in a Trump era: Donald J. Trump campaigned on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” a phrase whose “great” was widely heard as “white.” Certainly the election has been analyzed as a victory for white Christian Americans, especially men. Against Mr. Trump were all the rest of us: professionals with advanced degrees and the multiracial, multiethnic millions.6

As noted by Painter, whiteness has always ostensibly had an excess of categorical options despite its ability to (where it perhaps doesn’t matter, or even worse, matters too much) feed from, and thereby operate off of, a metaphysical excess.7 This excess is able to go undetected, uncoded, and invariably unmarked. Not only does Painter highlight the obvious, namely that an intentional provocation toward whiteness had been made during this past election, one that was successfully responded to via an eternal return to “better days,” but she also notes a more radical accomplishment that offers a different kind of naming than the variegated refractions of an unnamed category.

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A new scenario has emerged among what is already a murky game of naming identity and pointing toward its operational acts of identification8: “Thanks to the success of ‘Make America Great Again’ as a call for a return to the times when white people ruled, and thanks to the widespread analyses of voters’ preferences in racial terms, white identity became marked as a racial identity. . . . The Trump era stamps white Americans with race: white race.”9 This naming takes place alongside the disappointing results of the election for those still on the underside of a now decidedly explicit white identity. Some consolation and comfort might be afforded those who’ve spent countless hours, who’ve dedicated whole spans of careers, trying their hand, with pen to page, at this process of naming, classifying, and analyzing the elusive assemblage of whiteness and white identity: it has, perhaps for the first time on such a large scale in nearly one hundred years, decided to “come out” of the closet of postracial passing. Whiteness is not a stable category. In fact, we want to guard against that impression as much as possible, but we do want to draw attention to the assumption of stability at work among what gets classified as method/theory, and why the examples, the data, for what gets catalogued as “confessional” or “phenomenological” or “noncritical” disproportionately arise at times when race is explicit/implicit in the data being critiqued, without proper attention to the identity-based homogeneity or social interests among the approaches used to bring those critiques to bear. On the other hand, as Painter would likely agree, there is also a way in which whiteness is often treated as something immutable in the discourses where race is made explicit, insomuch as “religions of the oppressed” end up caught within a response-flight-response mode that leaves the specter of whiteness the same and indiscernible from yesterday or the to-come of tomorrow. What’s more, in Painter’s brilliant analysis of what whiteness means in a Trump era, there is something eerily familiar. With method in the study of religion on our mind, and reading for identity, the ruckus attending the choice of “Revolutionary Love” as theme for our 2016 AAR meeting brings to the forefront a resurgent academic identity that is manifesting in our profession now (as before), where critical postures are hearkened to, and heralded as, structurally indicative of a pristine “era” (of thought) such as has never yet existed and will never, in fact, exist. “REVOLUTIONARY LOVE” IN THE TIME OF METHOD AS IDENTITY This chapter would be incomplete without a longer consideration of one striking example of the “look” and “style” of what we’ve been discussing

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above, with specific attention to the academic study of religion. Without coincidence, “Revolutionary Love” brings us to the heart of the matter, the very epicenter of our field’s professional organization that elected Long as the first African American president in 1973. Within this very heart, in a consciously unconscious and deliberately unknowing manner, talk of method—or what has more popularly come to be seen as the “critical approach”—situates itself as conjurer of rationality: the Captain Cook debate for a new generation and field, or the packaging of a red parrot as a red herring. Almost shamanistically styled “critical” scholars move about the field rendering themselves methodological “gods,” seeking to detect and decode sinister signs of emotional caretaking masquerading as scholarly and professional. In the days immediately following the 2016 election, this much had become clear among journalists, academics, experts, and the like: most if not all got it wrong. We can only imagine the future explosion of research, studies, and sholarship that will set about attempting to demystify the winning tactics utilized by Trump and his team. Such phenomena and work are in no way confined to the larger publics and counter-publics of American electoral politics. Academics are witnessing similar trends as concerns both the politics of scholarship, and raging battles around identity—the who and what such work speaks to, with, and about. As such, what’s a scholarly equivelent to a “Great Again” shorthand of “method as identity” in the academic study of religion today? Perhaps not so coincedentally, both examples noted above unfold in the tumult of 2016, a year where the high stakes of identities come yet again into sharp relief. The rhetorical codes of whiteness used to signify during Trump’s election in no way serve to suggest that this practice is new, or novel in useage and utility. Indeed, quite the contrary. But, we are suggesting that the 2016 election serves as a pivotal clarion call that clarifies without dispute what words do based on how they’re arranged, and the degree to which social, cultural, political, and material interests shape rhetorical construction, showing who talks to whom and how. The question of standpoint theory shaping the who can say what has produced a wide-ranging and variable discourse that is as significant as it is unwieldy, regarding the politics of identity, and the identities that shape such politics. While vital insomuch as groundbreaking discourses and sub-fields have emerged from this methodological intervention, this task itself is not the concern of Method as Identity. Rather, we are interested in peeling back the discursive layers of the battles emerging from our own fields’ shorthand classifications and scholarly refrains, to more closely consider what social interests inform these nods of authorization and delegitimation concerning classifications of the critical. In her groundbreaking 1997 book, Beverly Daniel Tatum asked “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?,” brilliantly

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suggesting much more to that which, far too often, appears self-selectively arbitrary: the “inner-logic” and coherence of (self)-segregation is never a simple effect or consequence of uncritical group-think and clustering.10 Rather, Tatum goes on to argue that such everyday occurrences reflect much more than a banal appearance of group affinities. Method as Identity doesn’t consider the actual spaces of faculty meetings and lunch cafeterias as our field of investigation, but to borrow from Tatum’s powerful intervention, the where of our query is not all that dissimiliar: Why are all of the method and theory books white, and sitting together on shelves and press lists? Why are all of the books on race sitting with theology, and all those other “confessional” scholars? Simply put, how do the scholarly shorthands for classifying what is “critical” (read: properly scholarly) end up so racially normative and homogeneous, while scholarship on and by all others (read: sub-fields of specialty) more often ends up marked and set-apart in ways that have the academic study of religion looking just as, if not more, segregated than ever? With this in mind, we turn finally to the brouhaha concerning the conference theme for the 2016 American Academy of Religion meeting. “Revolutionary Love” was viewed by some as bellwether of a “return to theology” takeover demonstrating a resurgent identity in our profession, where consideration of “theory and method” is seen by many as the opportunity to make operational a sort of glorious, methodologically pristine human science. Set by then AAR President Serene Jones, also president of Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City, the theme immediately elicited a host of negative responses guided mostly by an explicit concern over “theology” and its confessional caretakers. Jones characterized the theme in the following way: This year’s annual meeting theme is Revolutionary Love. Neither word captures the complexity of the theme, but I use the word “love” in the broadest possible sense, including love as a social and political force, a structural reality, a collective endeavor, a shared social practice, a language, a relationship, a moment, a gesture, an identity, a quest. The membership of the AAR includes scholars who study religious traditions and historical moments of enormous variety. It’s hard to imagine any area of study, however, that does not reflect on the topic of “love”—again, defined as broadly and creatively as possible—in one form or another. I use the term “revolutionary” next to “love” to turn our attention to love that seeks to transform the world, which includes love that both tears down and builds up. To provoke our thinking, let me offer the prophetic words of James Baldwin, “I use the word love here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”11

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The context for this announcement was a mounting tumult of racial unrest— sparked anew by the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, murderer of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin—with the unending and proliferating state-sanctioned violence against black and brown bodies resulting in the mass black social protest movement of “Black Lives Matter” whose global reach and indefatigable public presence exerted pressure on American officials, authorities, and institutions, such as may not have been seen since the height of the Black Power Movement. The AAR theme seemed to provoke a sense of excited anticipation of critical dialogue and debate that would surely follow such a conference theme, especially given the overwhelming mundanity and oscillating breadth and/or narrowness of prior years’ calls. Known to many, Union is the literal and figurative home of black liberation theology, the place where father of black theology James H. Cone served as professor from 1970 until his death in 2018, working at various times alongside other towering minds including Cornel West, Emilie Townes, and most recently, civil rights attorney and law scholar Michelle Alexander, to name but a few who have been associated with UTS over the decades. Thus, UTS has cultivated a long, active, and unapologetic stance of championing diversity and inclusion, and an intersectionally informed praxis-oriented public profile rooted in social justice. With an institutional mandate to struggle against all forms of inequitable life options in both larger society and academia, UTS has a history of refusing the ready mix of disembodied Enlightenment mandates that have long defined institutions of higher learning in North America, and beyond. Epistemological assumptions rooted in Enlightenment logic serve to maintain distance from “experience,” resulting in an objectification of anyone’s experience but one’s own. These modern modes of being discomforted by Being leave a disproportionately pernicious effect upon marginalized scholars, all in the name of an illusive posture of objectivity, neutrality, and impartial detachment. It is no coincidence that UTS is home to the same black theological tradition that in 2008 would be used as a political red herring to challenge Barack Obama’s presidential ability to serve “all” (a former member of Trinity United Church of Christ—an institution rooted in black liberation theology). Obama’s detractors questioned whether they could trust him to execute “method” properly by way of being the rational-objective president for all, not just the president of black people. He was “guilty” by association. This fear was a fallacy of imagination and expectation, as many know too well that the requisite purity of method has never been fully seen, realized, or executed in the United States’ pantheon of presidential leaders. Indeed, the larger listening and thinking public also capitlizes on the manner in which (the technique of) method represents and signifies on identity. In this way, we might imagine certain aspects of critical postures in the

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academic study of religion as methodological probes into, and about, “problematic” aspects of the field: theological studies, confessional approaches, phenomenological claims, standpoint theory, and reliance on the category of experience as lacking a scholarly (read: scientific) technique. We often come to construct those problematic positions as “caretakers” of the field (rather than critics) who masquerade under a “scholarly” identity.12 But, there is a fine line, we might imagine, between scholarly accountability to hard questions of what ought to constitute the professional duty of our guild, and vigilante-styled academic attempts to locate and render docile scholars wearing theological hoodies. Many of us identifying with, and identified by, the critical camp under that ever-expanding tent of theory and method, assume that caretakers of the field (still) wield an undeserving extent of “field-defining” power, politics, and authority. The quickly unfolding public melee concerned all of the ways in which this 2016 AAR theme was seen to be too theological, too therapeutic, too closely aligned with Jones’s institutional direction, too contradictory (e.g., “revolutionary” love as antithetical to Jones’s fiduciary decisions involving UTS housing in the surrounding area of Harlem). Despite being overhwelmingly read as “Christocentric” the theme’s making no explicitly stated preferential option for any one religious tradition or approach, holding little stake in upholding normative definitions, and voicing an overwhelming call for definitional and tradition-based variety, the theme and Jones’s hand at constructing it were attacked with remarkable enthusiasm. More fascinating still, a good bit of the responses to the theme seemed less concerned with “proper” method, or what ought to constitute professional boundaries in the (non-secterian) guild for the academic study of religion, but rather with what was percieved as a theme too narrowly dominated by Christian visions of justice to be inclusive, and representative of all scholars outside of the Protestant pale. Noting the subtle irony that no conference theme and range of interests could really, after all, be applicable across all of AAR’s program units, Craig Prentiss reads a uniquely situated unfolding division over method in the responses perhaps somewhat unique to the study of religion, “few are so divided over the issue of what counts as a legitimate method of study”:13 those who find themselves in similar “culture wars.” It was precisely into this methodological chasm that “Revolutionary Love” would sojourn. The immediate response in anticipation of “Revolutionary Love” started in December 2015 and continued through December 2016, resulting in early open letters to the AAR and other scholarly organizations14 such as the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). The almost immediate post-conference online follow-up offered a tragic clarity surfacing above the abstracted, proxy-laden background of post-conference critical blues. Much to the displeasure of the critics was the participation of both

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Michelle Alexander and theologian Kelly Brown-Douglas, two prominent female scholars of color, who were invited to join Jones on stage for one of the three major plenary events. While space precludes the thorough and necessary attention that the following example deserves, the sound-bites and snippets highlighted below (the “something more” occurring in what would otherwise be a less reactionary routine “scholarly” objection), accompanied by our brief attempt at reading such commentary through a method as identity and identity as method analytic, will serve to animate, in appallingly explicit ways, how certain charges of Jones’s “controversial” call to reflect on such commonly troped categories as love and revolution simulates and mimics an unfounded anxiety, in a fullon frontal-attack that cannot be described as anything less than a moment of academic stop-and-frisk. METHOD POLICE POLICING THE METHOD Hosted by the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog (Equinox), the series of responses concerning the 2016 AAR theme received over forty pieces written by scholars from early to senior career levels, as well as graduate students, from within and outside of the United States. Their theme on the theme was pitched like this: In this new series with the Bulletin, we’ve asked a number of scholars to weigh-in on the theme of this year’s upcoming annual conference for the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio, TX, “revolutionary love.” Our aim is to provide a forum for multiple voices to weigh-in on what some consider a controversial theme in the interest of engaging not only this question, but how it relates to broader concerns and divisions within the academic study of religion.15

While the critical tone of the preconference commentary is no doubt apparent despite some slight variability, and although some of the perspectives take “the critical” as an explicit point of departure, it is the affectively inflected sardonic tone of these post-conference follow-ups that decidely signifies on a battle for identity. Some responses to the theme seemed mostly guided by a method of identity-based policing that already, and at once, is made possible by way of signification where assumed signifiers are subsumed in an anticipated, and presumed signified, believed to be (to borrow from the anthropological wisdom of Mary Douglas) “matter out of place.”16 Here, we offer attention to one of the more disconcerting pieces, penned nevertheless by a senior scholar, and published almost nine months before the conference (where knowledge of who would join Jones on stage for a plenary event was

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presumably not yet announced). But the following example requires a bit of context. Founded in 1985 by “forefathers” of the critical turn to method—E. Thomas Lawson, Luther H. Martin, and Donald Wiebe—with the idea of providing a scholarly alternative to frustrations and concerns over the trajectory of the field, in light of the direction of the AAR at that time, NAASR set out to encourage the historical, comparative, structural, theoretical, and cognitive approaches to the study of religion among North American scholars; to represent North American scholars of religion at the international level; and to sustain communication between North American scholars and their international colleagues engaged in the study of religion.17

NAASR is now home to those touted as founders, methodological heavyweights, early and mid-level career, emerging scholars, and a robust contingency of graduate students, working in an organized effort to clean up a field tainted with too much talk of god. As important for its founders as for its current membership today—much like the unmarked and unchecked capacity of whiteness, as, too, an identity—NAASR’s identity from its inception has been apophatically marked in contradistinction to theological studies, by what it is not, as evident in the above description’s near-universal appeal to any methodological purvue other than theology. In this regard, NAASR inherits an older presumptive trace of a disembodied Enlightenment association of “rational” and “objective” science that will usher in a disinterested (scientific) study of religion. Among those with membership in the third space of scholarly partisan options is Aaron Hughes, author of one response to “Revolutionary Love” and no stranger to confrontations vociferously defending the critical approach to theory and method in the field. Hughes was also the vice president of NAASR in 2016. “Oh, AAR, the things you do when we turn our backs!” he begins, which ends with a less playful, decidedly angry statement doubling down on his subjective bitterness that seems inchoately contradictory to a disinterested critical method (i.e., if we understand method as moving analyses beyond subjective impressions toward that which is measurable, as noted by Prentiss). Hughes laments, “It seems that the AAR has allowed back in that which many tried to force out—theology. This theologizing is not even smuggled in through the back door, but greeted warmly and allowed to enter ceremoniously through the front door.”18 Sadly, such phrasing conjures to a “back-in-the-day” scene featuring Jim and Jane Crow, and continuing throughout de jure and de facto racial segregation, where Negro patrons and customers were served from the back door of establishments rather than the front, if served at all. Of course, the image of blacks sitting in the “back of

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the bus” comes also to mind. Buried deep among the clumsy, or loosely made connections lie hidden prejudices among the “arbitrary” auspices of a theological proxy—the study of religion and the doing of theology. While just who constitutes the emphatic “we” in the opening lines is unknowable, we can only assume that Hughes sees himself, somehow, speaking for and on behalf of those scholars within a more critically oriented camp (e.g., NAASR?) who go about the business of the field in a particular manner. Animating what we have in mind with the idea of “the battle for identity in the study of religion,” Hughes reminds his readers that “So many intellectual battles have been fought to make the academic study of religion respectable . . . have we already forgotten these battles?”19 More bluntly put, perhaps Hughes has in mind a not-so-silent, atrophying majority of those in the academic field, who do real scholarship for the sake of the larger scholarly good of the larger field, and the sub-fields in which they carry out their work. In what reads as a haphazard summation of subsequent claims penned with more heart (emotion) than head (critical thought), Hughes’s quick turn to batting “religious” identities accomplishes a good bit of the conceptual signification he is after at the expense of exposing his nostalgia for a long-lost time in the academy. This champion of the critical turn quickly forgets how to maintain the methodological illusion of the neutrality he so much expects in the wider field. In what we can only see as an unfortunate telling on oneself, resulting from an affective incapacity to keep pristine cover, over just what is concealed under the revealed academic tropes, a sleight of hand that transmutes issues over identity underneath a concern over “proper” method or form, comes into view, revealing the who under the what. Withholding little, as if the task at hand disappears, Hughes centers his ultimate concern in a manner so undisciplined that any concern over what exactly is being exacted reveals itself. Relying on popular historical tropes, Hughes asserts that just as he had “reluctantly gotten over the fact that the organization likes to play a politically correct Noah when it comes to election time by providing us with two of each species: two Jews for treasurer, two evangelical theologians for Vice President, and so on, . . . they threw me another curveball: our 2016 annual meeting is to be guided by the theme of revolutionary love. This suggestion comes courtesy of our new seminarian president, Serene Jones.”20 Although Hughes postures as having his scholarly status and his field’s reputation at heart, the honesty of his hand seems to be working in contradistinction to his stated concern. Hughes relies on an almost cosmogonic method as he takes a signifying leap into the myth itself. It seems as if little effort is put forth toward concealing such concern over an “identity” undoubtedly not as ancient as Noah. We can only hope Moses comes down from the mountain sooner rather than later. As methods of specification and mythically motivated taxonomic impulses have tragically done so effectively and productively in the past, Hughes

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unduly reduces Jones’s motivation to the consequence of her (theologically oriented) institutional (Christian) identity when he refers to her as “our new seminarian president.” A jab concretized in his third shot, which has as its target Jones’s rhetorical reliance on the formidable James Baldwin, whose words close out the 2016 theme. Signifying on and past Baldwin’s words in the theme, Hughes prophetically attempts to situate Jones’s motivations, “She does not mean this term ‘in the infantile American sense of being made happy . . . but as a state of being, or a state of grace.’”21 This is indeed what Jones had in mind, an idea she would go on to further situate and nuance in her plenary address. Not doing himself any favors toward what little might be left by way of keeping his “scholarly construction” from crumbling, Hughes neither acknowledges nor properly engages Jones’s descriptive reliance on Baldwin to animate the (non-theological) “grace” she had in mind (especially considering Baldwin’s critical stance on religion more generally, and the church, and Christianity in particular). Not even a paragraph into his commentary, both Jones’s intent and what he perceives to be her poor methodological use of “scholarly” proxies as method for identity, have organized his sentiments into a foray of thoughts that are anything but critical, anything but disinterested. Not all of the responses to the AAR theme echo the same sense of being lost in the wilderness of methodological identity. One early-career scholar with enough wisdom to cipher on what he was deciphering in the responses, and enough skill to beautifully enact the art of signifying the unfolding significations for what they were, Richard Newton says it best and most powerfully when he raises the following question amid all the chatter: “What exactly is our guild afraid of? Full disclosure seems warranted here. Themes do preempt relevance. Revolutions forestall extinction. Love staves off loneliness. The pressure to prove our quality is great.”22 Thanks to the empirical data compiled in Prentiss’s response, after scouring the 180-page PDF of the 2016 “Call for Papers” it turns out that the impact of the call affected only one-fifth of total groups. More telling, it seems that the noted imperial Christian dominance of the theme impacted non-Christian traditions and regions, which saw only seven of the thirty-two groups incporating the theme into their solicitation of papers.23 Thus, it seems safe to say that rather than having an impact on skewing the respectability of AAR’s academic properness, Jones’s call seemed to have most disparate impact on traditions within contexts of marginalized particularity (e.g., Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Daoism, Judaism, Paganism, and Islam). Consider the revolving suspicion that swirled around Obama’s Americaness (in light of his blackness), Christianness (in light of his affiliation with black theology), and Citizenry (in light of his paternal African ancestry): similar techniques are reflected in an approach of method as identity and

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“concerns” of identity as method in the study of religion. The need for such critical contingencies seems to always, in some way, create a preferential path for pristine gods of method who get to pass as decidedly neutral and theoretically fit (such as Smith, Emile Durkheim, Michel Foucault, among a host of popularized others). The moments when method emerges as a concern says just as much about contexts of data, as it does about impending threats to the nostalgia of a “disinterested” past present. The next section addresses what this nostalgia may seek to commemorate or recuperate. SACRED (WHITE) GHOSTS OF COMPARISON Nearly everywhere the white people who disembarked were taken for ghosts. In the Wallis Islands, “several natives still have a vivid recollection of that event, and an old man whom I always enjoy questioning tells me that at the first appearance of the European vessel, they did not doubt but that it was a dominion of the gods floating on the waves. The people were confirmed in this impression on seeing the masts, which they took for coco-nut palms.”24 —Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Walter Capps’s suggestion, in his well-known history of religious studies,25 that the field follows a Cartesian and Kantian reductio et enumerato method, can help situate the contemporary traces of our methodological impulses as rooted in modern and Enlightenment thinkers easily posited as preoccupied with Europe and not at all concerned with anyone else. Capps divides the field of religious studies into its constituent efforts of essence, origin, description, function, language, and comparison. His historical account is welcome and we aren’t alone in our appreciation. Yet, one thing present in its absence from Capps’s effort is a connective thread crossing the methodological borders he poses. We are wont to call this thread “whiteness,” but supposing readers are still unsure of such a term, this thread can also be regarded as an overwhelming preoccupation with white European culture and thought, often deemed “civilization.” Importantly, this connective tissue is not of our own inclination. It occurs among many of the earliest scholars of religion: race was always religioned, and religion was always raced, as were our objects and tools of investigation simultaneously. Attention to Method as Identity is not a euphemism or exaggeration when considering the manner in which many of the approaches representative in the study of religion share a similar method: conflation of normative identity categories by way of maintaining (and promoting) distinguished categories for all others. Here, we are not demonstrating “racism” but we want to emphasize the preoccupation with Europe and the racialization of religion/religionization

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of race operative among “Fathers” of these approaches, such as Lévy-Bruhl. Among other ideas, the following demonstrates a point already made by Eric Sharpe and others, that the comparative project shaping so much of religious studies begins with the creation of the category of “primitive.”26 In 2016, NAASR pondered on this fact of history, “having survived critiques of comparison as ethnocentric, what is the future of comparative studies and how ought they to be carried out? Given the once dominant, but for some now discredited, place of hermeneutical approaches what is entailed in the interpretation of meaning today?”27 Perhaps, interpretation might begin with memory. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl can be regarded as the father of the fathers of anthropology, what will become a social science, and a philosopher-cumethnographer remembered for application of binary logic to the ethnographic field. He is equally remembered as a poster boy for ethnocentrism shaping the social sciences (and hence, comparative studies). Lévy-Bruhl sets in motion a rendering of the “primitive” distinguishing first between white and primitive, then religion and magic, then science and religion/theology, a binary still in use today thanks to folks like Donald Wiebe and others.28 Wiebe’s 1991 Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought defends Lévy-Bruhl’s most pernicious elements. Wiebe writes, “Nevertheless, [Lévy-Bruhl] still maintained, and I think correctly so, that ‘there is a difference between the primitive mentality and ours: not only that of the cultured scientific man with a critical mind, but also that of the average person.’”29 It is one thing to want to move beyond critiques of ethnocentrism, as noted in NAASR’s comments above; it is another to defend the ethnocentric element in a field, which is exactly what Wiebe does here. Both amount to shades of a shared white religious sensibility peddled today by priests of critical theory and method in either “scientific” or “discursive” guises. Important to note here, Wiebe is “racing” theology and theologizing the “primitive,” conflations begun by Lévy-Bruhl and other “fathers” of our field. Insidiously, in fear of essence, the nonessence/nonsense of whiteness emerges as the primary motivation for the construction of collective representations. LévyBruhl taught that “collective representations have their own laws, which—at any rate where ‘primitives’ are concerned—cannot be discovered by studying the ‘white, adult, and civilized’ individual,”30 and that “everything proceeding from white people participates in their mysterious and superhuman character, and is consequently ipso facto sufficiently explained [by the primitive].”31 The comparative method has smuggled sacred white essences all along: “Primitive mentality is, above all, inclined to the concrete, and has little that is conceptual about it. Nothing astonishes it more than the idea of one universal god.”32 Lévy-Bruhl’s point wasn’t taken by the theologians that our “critics” seem so doggedly afraid of. But his broader point demonstrates his incapacity to separate that which was always one category, race and religion,

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from the earliest comparative studies, except when it concerned the “primitive.” Empiricizing another as Other is easier and is how one guards against distinguishing oneself. Polytheism is linked to black bodies via cognition, and monotheism is linked, by way of “conceptual” cognition (i.e., rationality/ science), to him and the other whites. For those in the academic study of religion who might render Long’s interest in the colonial encounter and cargo cults as “political,” Lévy-Bruhl demonstrates why attention to the colonial encounter is vital to anthropological and sociological studies, devoting an entire chapter of Primitive Mentality to the “mystical” qualities of the “white man’s appearance” at the colonial encounter and the impact such a mystical experience had on “primitive” thought.33 To paraphrase the more subtle Long, a literal and metaphoric chapter of our field of study rests on an apotheosis narrative. In some respects, anthropology has come to acknowledge this; has the field of religion? To give Lévy-Bruhl his rhetorical due, he is arguing that the conflation of the categories of race and religion takes place in the primitive mind. In other words, he blames them for the categorical confusion. After all, Lévy-Bruhl is writing the book, not the “primitives” he quotes. And the story he pens as a hierophany—the colonial encounter—is likely remembered very differently by folks on the other side of the page. In short, Lévy-Bruhl is constructing a story of white male gods: “Whether they be ghosts or spirits, white men belong to the world of unseen powers, or at least are in very close relations with it. The mere appearance of them . . . may be a portent—and consequently a cause—of misfortune.”34 Indeed, contact with whites was and remains a cause of misfortune for many. “It is not the colour of Europeans alone,” says Lévy-Bruhl, “which gives rise to the idea that they are ghosts.”35 This much is surely true. It might also be a project of mythmaking that we have learned to call “Enlightenment” scholarship, or better still, rationality. Lévy-Bruhl goes on to address the claim of white infection of black and brown populations with disease, which he dismisses as “primitive” fears with roots in the primitive mind’s relationship between white men and the “unseen world.”36 Today, we know these fears (and the realities behind them) were all too real, as many white Europeans were responsible for spreading disease across the globe during the age of conquest and colonization. Lévy-Bruhl, however, wants to argue that “inferior societies” were afraid of white folks because of a “fatal” connection to “the unseen world.” On this point, ironically and tragically, he is probably right but for deadly reasons. His characterization of primitive mental processes is eerily similar to what will become phenomenology’s turn “to the things themselves.” Noting both magical white men and the methods employed by “primitives” to address them, he writes: “If white men are wizards and can dispose at will of the forces of the unseen world, their weapons

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and instruments also must possess magic properties. Instead of noting their construction and mechanism, primitives attribute the effects they produce to these same magic properties.”37 Part of his method for gleaning evidence denigrating black and brown folks as “inferior societies” will become the last major contribution to the field of philosophy, what we know as the turn to phenomena produced as opposed to essence or origin producing. One is left to wonder if Lévy-Bruhl informed Husserl or Heidegger. Long, for his part, is undoubtedly familiar with Lévy-Bruhl. We might also imagine a more complex trouble among “critical” scholars with the influence of phenomenology on the study of religion: it exposes the (white) wizard as no technological magician, but as something much more pernicious. To animate further our point about the perpetual interchangeability of the categories of race and religion, Lévy-Bruhl specifically connects education to race and religion. Extensively quoting nineteenth-century Scottish missionary/explorer and favorite son of Victorian Britain, David Livingstone, and in seeming agreement, he writes: “To all who have not acquired it, a knowledge of letters is quite unfathomable; there is nought like it within the compass of their observation; and we have no comparison with anything except pictures to aid them in comprehending the idea of signs of words. It seems to them supernatural that we see in a book things taking place, or having occurred at a distance. No amount of explanation conveys the idea unless they learn to read.” “Sekhome . . . asked me one day whether Mr. Price had started on his return journey to the Mission. I told him I did not know. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘ask your books; they will tell you.’” “In the Matebele country ‘the books’ were regarded at the time of my visit, and by almost all with whom I came in contact, as the ‘sacred things’ or the ‘divining things’ of the white man’s religion. ‘To learn the books’ was therefore regarded as a formal entrance upon the practice of the white man’s mode of worship. It occupied an initial position in their minds similar to that our baptism really occupies. They had no idea that a man might learn to read and yet choose to remain a heathen.”38

This passage is dense, and is presented as such, us quoting Lévy-Bruhl who is quoting Livingstone, who is quoting two different “inferiors.” Given the layered complexity of the passage, it ought to be noted that “white man’s religion” is Livingstone’s own voice, as is the normative reference to baptism. Lévy-Bruhl (through Livingstone) and both of them relying on the very primitive mentality Lévy-Bruhl constructs (without sufficient evidence) and that is denigrated. Lévy-Bruhl situates the “white man’s religion” as a thing, as a “proper object,” and renders the process of writing and reading books as that of the “white man’s religion.” And here is the white man’s magic: they do all that by claiming that the “primitive” is the one doing it. “Sekhome” proves prophetic in that what comes to pass as rational scholarship is undertaken with

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the assumption that methods can examine the past, unfold the present, and foretell the future with scientific precision. What could be more mystical than a predictable method: our field’s cloudy crystal ball, the religion of rationality. The point made here is more than analogical, but historical and literal as well. Lévy-Bruhl goes on to explain something many scholars of religion know still, but that few consider the implications of: literacy and religion (leaving race aside, analytically, here) went hand in hand with colonization and conquest. That is, “he who is converted to Christianity learns to read” and “he who learns to read is being converted.” Consider, too, the postmodern rule: an attempt to free up the agency of marginal identities to speak for themselves would at the same time construct and reinforce a new rule transmuted under a new name, the discursive. It is no wonder how productive it must be to turn to a realm where words ensure that the death of the author becomes the death of the “primitive,” who—by white religion’s standards—could not “read,” as such. Given this colonial account, “Christianity” and “Literacy” become the white man’s name for his own religion based on a magical process we call rationality, while the white man’s name for the name of this process used by “primitives” was “white man’s religion.” “They” only had the fleeting presence of speech; but he, to borrow from Derrida, mined the difference obtained from the transmutation of mythos into logos. What LévyBruhl considers a defense of white superiority ahead of “inferior societies” is also a defense of this white religion. As he reminds: “Books are mirrors.”39 Later, Lévy-Bruhl relays a story from Papua New Guinea of a missionary’s daughter who died. The missionary wants to blame a local sorcerer. The sorcerer replies, “to the effect that ‘you are white men, and do not understand the New Guinea medicine. I am a New Guinea native, and I know it.’” In effort at analysis, Lévy-Bruhl concludes that “his apparent conversion to the white man’s faith was in vain; his solidarity with his social group was stronger still.”40 To say nothing of The Mental Faculties inside the Inferior Societies (whose well-known English title, How Natives Think, does more to conceal Lévy-Bruhl’s intent than to give clarity) and the rest of his corpus, by the later stages of Primitive Mentality all manner of rhetorical pretense is missing: “White people are certainly mighty wizards.”41 As if to demonstrate the manner in which white lies42 inevitably come undone, Lévy-Bruhl quotes one C. Coquilhat, who had spent time in the Congo: Some of the natives assert that I get cowries, pearls, and mitakou from the depths of the earth. Others say that these fine things come from the bottom of the sea; to them the white man is an aquatic being, and I myself sleep beneath the waves. But they are all agreed in considering me related to Ibanza, a god or a devil of whom they often talk. The more I deny my supernatural ancestry, the more firmly do they believe in it.43

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White religious scholars have always known that claims to their objective disinterestedness reinforce their own sense of divinity. Only, through construction of the “primitive” (whether Trobriand Islander or Union Seminarian) as the storehouse for this apotheosis, ownership of this logic guiding the formation of religious studies as a field goes unclaimed. Perhaps, Long had passages like these in mind when reminding that “opaque ones were centers from which gods were made.”44 Lévy-Bruhl’s work is often outright vile. He even turns the case of rape into a joke: In many tribes of Northern Australia, “the existence of half-castes, given unwillingly by their mothers, speaking in pidgin-English is ‘Too much me been eat em white man’s flour.’ The chief difference that they acknowledge between their life before and after they came into contact with white men was, not the fact that they had intercourse with white men, instead of, or side by side with, blacks, but that they ate white flour and that this naturally affected the colour of their offspring.” The negroes were not long in finding this explanation insufficient, but at first they accepted it as their wives did, and it was the first that occurred to their minds.45

Lévy-Bruhl relays the story of an angry “primitive” from Vana who tells a group of missionaries, “Well indeed! You white men have no shame!”46 As often occurs with Lévy-Bruhl, the stories he tells deconstruct the story he wants to tell. Indeed, “what strange things you white men are!”47 you white men have no shame. All but one of Lévy-Bruhl’s books include “primitive” in the title, and his later in life recanting of the theory behind the primitive mentality does nothing to exonerate his having helped set in motion an academic, “critical” relationship to nonwhite persons that remains in use today at logical, and epistemological, levels. Black bodies were his panacea. Indeed, “the savage mind totalizes.”48 As another brief instance of this white religious imagination’s totalizing tendencies, Lévy-Bruhl, in making concluding remarks on the totalizing “primitive mentality,” suggests “that the invention of the white man saves his life, in the European and entirely objective sense of the word.”49 Elsewhere, and often, Lévy-Bruhl also treats “white man” and “European” as synonyms.50 Surely, Lévy-Bruhl is not the only scholar to make such a categorical error. Many of us do it all the time, in shorthand terms rendering Europe white. Another father of the academic study of religion, Bronislaw Malinowski, for his part, rendered Europe a religion: But the fact is that a savage community has obtained its religion as the product through centuries of natural development, and that it suits savage mentality and their social organization perfectly well, whereas European religion cannot be grafted on to an entirely different social, mental and moral soil, and requires an absolute upheaval of all the natives’ own civilization before it can be introduced at all.51

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How is it that “European” and “entirely objective” are so deeply connected? Would not such a connection demonstrate a subjectively vested interest in something like “method”? The white magician’s sorcery seemingly involves the initial reliance on such assumed connections. Some scholars have long seen the connection between identities and methods; others have not. Late mother of American cultural anthropology, and professor at Columbia University, Ruth Benedict rebuked Lévy-Bruhl and his Primitive Mentality in 1925, noting that the assumption is everywhere implicit that all the acts and beliefs of modern Europeans have been built up from the beginning on a basis of dispassionate investigation and scrupulous logic. . . . [Lévy-Bruhl] does not see that acceptance of ideas on authority, an intense emotional coloring of the trivial, and a blindness to self-contradiction, are part also of our own mental and cultural processes.52

Benedict is an outlier at the time, though her Patterns of Culture will do a lot at the time (and after it) to refute such lazy intellectual postures as produced by reliance on the notion of the “primitive mentality.” Many prominent Western scholars during this time saw value in Lévy-Bruhl’s work; he would not have had such an impact, otherwise. In 1924, The Philosophical Review praised Lévy-Bruhl’s work as “an indispensable part of the equipment of future missionaries, military and civil administrators, and all others who have to deal in any way with the savage races of the world.” Reviewer William Kelley Wright added that it “should be studied by all who are interested in comparative religion and ethics, anthropology, social psychology, and the problem of the origin of the categories and of logical thinking.”53 Edward Scribner Ames, longtime University of Chicago pragmatist, University Christian Church pastor, and Dean of the Disciples (of Christ) Divinity House said that Lévy-Bruhl was “right in his insistence that the primitives live and move in a radically different system of ideas and emotions from those of civilized man.”54Ames’s words are nearly identical to those of Donald Wiebe posed nearly seventy years later in Wiebe’s effort to escape the very methodological training guiding so much of Ames’s work. TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT Indeed, the academic study of religion has suffered as a result of a failure of nerve to consider the robust work begun by historian of religions Long (and, by extension, subsequent scholarship in this field of thought) as “serious” authorities of method in the academic study of religion. This, in spite

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of Long’s arduous effort to explain to incredulous scholars of religion that “careful attention” to the data of religious history (those subject to identity), and histories of “science” written about that data (e.g., “primitives,” “Proto-Indo-European Origins,” “philology”) would produce “a new interpretation of American religion,” writ large.55 The field has suffered from an insurgent force of self-labeled “critical” thinkers who through “scientific” quests of properly academic respectability prove themselves emblematic of the Westerners’ fall into their own terrifying history of triumphant “scholarly” methods. Thanks in no small part to these thinkers, the primary association many scholars of American religion make with Long, and many historians of religions who followed, is not his role as past president of the AAR or brilliant contemporary theorist and methodologist, but as participant undertaking projects of professional development wherein they’d come to be obsessed with their own (scholarly) identities, and annexed to their own internal “subfield” critiques and dialogues. Consider that Long is foremost remembered as having offered one of the strongest critiques of black theologians of the 1970s and 1980s, as if his intellectual legacy rests soley on his capacity to keep “his” “methodological” house in order. By this estimation, we are left to wonder if at least one contemporary white hermeneutical posture in the field remembers him as the most intellectually gifted of “them,” able to keep his white intellectual street creed insofar as he maintained an ardent critique of those who happened to look like him in the field. Long, who carries the paradoxical honor of being the AAR’s first black president, we might imagine as holding in the stillmajority-white pantheon of the field a reputation as the history of religions’ first black friend, enabling a white duplicity for the history of religions so that it has never had to wrestle with or deeply engage his scholarship, let alone his powerful critique of the field as overwhelmingly relying on the notion of the “empirical other.” Yet, such an interpretation would shortchange the legacy of Long in significant ways. Long’s critique of black theologies was not of the idea of god or even a critique of some sort of “emic” posture within the study of religion. His critique was much more “critical” than that, suggesting to scholars like James Cone and Joseph Washington that the world had had enough of the Christian god, and therefore, theology’s only worthwhile task was the deconstruction of itself.56 Some would snatch his critique of black theology and black religions as an excuse, in perpetuity, for their own “theological” self-segregation in the wider field, akin to Don Imus or Delores Tucker blaming hip-hop culture for a broader social problem over method. Many in the field, by way of proximity to Long’s person (and not his ideas), doubled down on their rationale for both their disciplinary distances posed and the subsequent example-making of “you’re doing it wrong.” Additionally, whether thought about in terms of Brer

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Rabbit and High John, or Blaise Pascal and Mircea Eliade, we would do well to remember that Long, like his colleagues in history of religions, studies trickster figures and trades in economies of signification—logos and mythos. It may very well be that Long’s critique of black theology was a purposeful effort to signify on the larger white field. Long, even if misinterpreted, has the last laugh. Most importantly, Long has always maintained that any adequate study of religion will necessarily involve the study of black religion. On this point, Long notes, “It is not strange that in the nineteenth century, when the Western world admitted the death of its god, that at just this moment Western man sought him not in his own traditions and cultures but in the cultures of primitive and archaic peoples.”57 Here, his point seems larger than a politically correct democratization of the field. He is not talking about the god or a god to whom he or the world holds allegiance. Rather, in situating a distinction between Western man’s “god,” along with its traditions and “the cultures of primitive and archaic peoples,” Long signifies that the primary object of study consuming the Western world has been itself as god, studying itself by studying those unlike it. And thus the god remains self-consciously alive, well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries when the data object begins to return the favor of study: The great language of creativity which [modern Western man] used to subdue and exploit his world has been placed in jeopardy; its mighty words are overwhelmed by the silence of the pauses between the words. This language has been prostituted by the very techniques which brought it into being; after having been used and misused for so long by so many, this language has come to be distrusted by Western man himself.58

The façade of what “Modern Western Man” has called his scientific theories and methods is all but crumbling. As if to both critique and celebrate the work of his friend Mircea Eliade, he offers a telling truth, now becoming reality, of the white disenchantment that would surely follow the loss of divine orientation. What, we might ask, is left of creativity if no longer able to mesmerize “the savage” with cargo, while studying them as they enjoy gifts with diminished returns? Modern Western Man, no small euphemism for “white man,” has proved parasitic of its creative impulse and narrowed its field of vision. Methodological advice to “narrow” one’s aims and projects is good, but it may also signify social and cultural atrophy. It is little wonder why the scholarly crisis unfolds in the field in the way it does: it has just lost its own object of study, and perhaps for the first time, is being told “NO!” to studying “them” any longer. If such a case is plausible, there is in fact nothing left to do for those inheriting such a loss but to begin studying their own self-consciousness—as called for by both Long and Lincoln at the outset of this chapter.

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The sort of self-critical posture called for is one that “exposes us to a new kind of reality and existence,” one that might move “us beyond conquest, enslavement, and exploitation.”59 We might wonder what we have done with such huge gaps of silence—or, we might even consider the possibility that new techniques for studying the Other have only been reinvented under newer, more “scholarly acceptable” categories. “Signifying is worse than lying,” we might remember hearing as children, but we might also remember the colloquialism with a resignified meaning thanks to Long. When Long writes that “in acquiring this understanding, we may recover that patience and sensibility which lie at the heart of a religious attitude: ‘Be still and know that I am God,’”60 he may not be leaving open an Eliadian space for religious experience, and he does not speak of “the heart of a religious attitude” as a methodological option for his field. Rather, it may be that he is reminding an academic audience, enamored with either loving or hating Eliade, of something more fundamental about a feature of the field’s creation. Insomuch as the Western academy has always believed in itself, as rulers over and makers of its divine tools of method, its self-referential taken-for-grantedness has always been of a sui generis nature: its worship of itself, as god, matter and maker of rationality, going about the fields making converts of objects now turned subjects. Of course, “Be still and know that I am God” is more than a mild reference to scripture. Long’s critical signifying efforts have been about the business of forging critical conversations in the style of signification so endemic to and emblematic of the larger field. Writing on the topic of method in his retrospective genealogy of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, Long suggests that “methodological discourse” ought not to be treated as an effort at “ideological purity,” but that it represents—at Chicago, at least—“a concern for self-conscious reflection about what one is doing and why.”61 If so, and here Long and Smith echo each other, this would mean that method involves something of reflexivity, not just heightened objectivity. Long characterizes the positions set forth by A. Eustace Hayden, Joachim Wach, and later Eliade at Chicago as those privileging the phenomenology of religion (as hermeneutics) as the leading edge of any science of religion or discourse. Wach’s primary ambition was a kind of methodological adjudication of interpretive variability, while Eliade’s emphasis on method operated a bit more under the surface. Long suggests that Eliade emphasized method as a form of disciplinary reflexivity. The field had become “timid,” a coward born of its limited cultural impact, rendered cowards precisely “at the moment when the confrontation with Asia and the ‘primitive’ began.”62 We might emphasize these exchanges and queries as characterizing the method wars in the field past and present. What’s more, Eliade made it clear that any “science of religion” ought not to follow the tired model of humanist

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disciplines stealing from other areas such as the natural sciences. Not only would such perspectives mimic a prior colonizing model for the field, it would also mean that the history of religions would arrive at conversations and debates of cultural value only after other fields that we would borrow from. Following natural sciences would virtually ensure an end to any cultural impact or audience at all. Characterizing Eliade’s thoughts on method, Long concludes that “the science of religion was thus to be an autonomous discipline that integrated not only the data but also the various methodological approaches. This kind of integration represented the autonomy of the discipline.”63 As readers may know, and as discussed more fully in chapter 3, Wach’s multi-modal method of Verstehen did not have the last say on the legacy of the Chicago School, nor did Eliade actually galvanize Chicago or the field around a particular method. But, neither did their emphases on (what we now call) interdisciplinarity and the uniqueness of the study of religion fall by the wayside. Instead, Smith and others would help to usher in a discursive turn toward analyzing discourse and rhetoric. And, Long would continue to ask the questions of whose interpretation scholars of religion are dealing with, or ought be listening to. In a strange turn, critical approaches to the study of religion have nearly fetishized the person and corpus of both Smith and Lincoln, and pay a fair share of homage to their patriarch, Donald Wiebe, while few seriously consider Long’s formidable contributions. Less Long and too much of Smith maintains an overemphasis on the white flight to the discursive—a resounding reality in the constant reminder of Smith’s now famous soundbited quote that “there” is no data for the study of religion because religion is only an “object” of the theorist’s imagination.64 It certainly is. For so many “critical” scholars still suspicious of theology’s confessionality, one has to wonder what is happening with so many “rational” scientists wandering about with religion in, and always on, their mind. Now, with the object of history of religions widely seen as discursively turned inward, little hope is held out for the call to the field’s self-consciousness, with the past present in mind, as echoed by Lincoln, Smith, and Long. Both Smith and Long represent the continuance of a new disciplinary space made manifest by the work of Wach and Eliade, and their consideration of possible responses to the stultifying, vulgar mundanity of modernity: It is this world of homo religious that has attracted students and researches to this discipline; it has at least attracted me, for I had tired of the rather banal sociological and historical studies of the “unofficial groups” in Western society put forth by the conventional “classical” disciplines devoted to their interpretation. There was an other world, a heterocosm whose echoed resonances reminded me of a world I had known but which was now distant from me. However, in making the strange familiar, it had paradoxically become more intensely Other.65

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Here, Long is doing more than waxing eloquent on the beauty of the study of religion. He demonstrates a defining feature of the intellectual marketplace and offers a means for responding to even the contemporary crises in the field, and the humanities more broadly. In short, Long viewed the field of religion as a space of social as much as ideological diversity and competing claims of signification. What happened? In answer to the question, and in offering the ground on which Method as Identity rests, Long offers wisdom: “The logical and aesthetic dimensions of system as scientificity prevent the critique implicit in the knowledge of the Others from flowing back into the normality of one’s cultural life” (emphasis added).66 Few could better articulate the disciplinary othering taking place amid some elements of the field today than he who has watched the field ebb and flow concerning its reception to difference as well as the self-correcting, autopoietic dimension of the field. Focusing on the notion of system as scientificity, we might imagine two modes of response to the proliferation of difference that has marked the AAR since the 1970s, both expressions of white flight and a systematizing of “critical” as scientific; or a scienfitication of critique as the only authoritative voice for the academic study of religion. These two trajectories that we have in mind here are the (postmodern) discursive and (modern) scientific empiricist formations in the founding of NAASR, which unfortunately still speaks to and with a mostly, if not exclusively, racially normative membership, preventing “the critique implicit in the knowledge of the Others from flowing back into the normality of one’s cultural life.” This shortcoming seems to not only mark a failure to take seriously the critiques made by Long, but also a failure to see that Long and Smith were (and remain) working toward similar methodological goals from two different vantage points. Yet, to be critical in our field has somehow come to mean an eschewing of methodological heterogeneity for a much more homogenous project of (critical) reduction and repetition. This might not be what Smith, Long, Eliade, or even Wach had in mind. However, it is scarily reminiscent of what their Doctorfathers and grandfathers like LévyBruhl—and those after, like Wiebe—did. Long emphasizes that amid the human sciences—among which the study of religion was to fashion itself a part—or as a result of its constitution of objects for investigation and objects of investigation as investigators, the study of religion is also responsible for the constitution of the identity of the Other or the interpreter, as a social identity, itself. Whether in scholarship or one’s personal life, “the desire to make sense of the meaning of the Others” causes “confusion or conflation of what is Other in the culture and history of the interpreter with the reality of the Others who are the object of interpretation.”67 Human sciences leave space for the objectifiers to feel themselves

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objectified, and in turn, by way of feelings objected, come to regard themselves as the outcast. “This,” Long says, “is a central problem in the study of religion as a science of religion.”68 Amid other suggestions about the state and future of the field, Long leaves readers with what is perhaps his most lasting theoretical insight for the field today: “the religious situation of contact.” In this space we have our fiercest and most urgent intellectual work to do: work that promises to enable “a new kind of discourse in the study of religion.”69 Method as Identity may or may not contribute to the sort of discourse or vision Long had in mind, but at the very least, only upon more lasting “contact” with him might a critical study of religion be worthy of the name critical, “when the shadows surrounding the interpreter and his culture as ‘otherness’ are made a part of the total hermeneutical task.”70 NOTES 1. Charles H. Long, “Cargo Cults as Cultural Historical Phenomena,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42, no. 3 (1974): 403–14. 2. Louis Benjamin Rolsky, “Charles H. Long and the Re-Orientation of American Religious History,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80, no. 3 (2012): 750–74, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23250723, 769. 3. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 207. 4. Ibid., 209. 5. Ibid., 207. 6. Nell Irvin Painter, “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era,” The New York Times, November 12, 2016, http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​16/11​/13/o​pinio​n/wha​t-whi​ tenes​s-mea​ns-in​-the-​trump​-era.​html (accessed December 4, 2016). 7. Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Y. Levin, “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’” New German Critique, no. 36 (1985): 121–31, doi:10.2307/488305. 8. Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity. 9. Painter, “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era.” 10. Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997). 11. Russell McCutcheon, “Revolutionary Love?” Studying Religion in Culture, December 10, 2015, https​://re​ligio​n.ua.​edu/b​log/2​015/1​2/10/​revol​ution​ary-l​ove/ (accessed August 30, 2017). 12. Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (SUNY Press, 2001). 13. Craig Prentiss, https​://bu​lleti​n.equ​inoxp​ub.co​m/201​6/03/​revol​ution​ary-l​oves​chola​rs-re​spond​-to-t​he-aa​rs-20​16-co​nfere​nce-t​heme-​craig​-pren​tiss/​ (accessed October 25, 2017).

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14. North American Association for the Study of Religion website, https​://na​asr. c​om/20​16/08​/23/u​pdate​-on-r​espon​ses-t​o-the​-aar-​annua​l-con​feren​ce-th​eme-f​or-20​16/ (accessed December 9, 2016). 15. Bulletin for the Study of Religion Blog website, http:​//bul​letin​.equi​noxpu​b. com​/2016​/02/r​evolu​tiona​ry-lo​ve-sc​holar​s-res​pond-​to-th​e-aar​s-201​6-con​feren​ceth​eme-a​aron-​hughe​s/ (accessed December 4, 2016). 16. Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 17. North American Association for the Study of Religion website, https://naasr. com/about-2/ (accessed December 4, 2016). 18. Aaron Hughes, http:​//bul​letin​.equi​noxpu​b.com​/2016​/02/r​evolu​tiona​ry-lo​vesc​holar​s-res​pond-​to-th​e-aar​s-201​6-con​feren​ce-th​eme-a​aron-​hughe​s/ (accessed Decem­­ber 9, 2016). 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Richard Newton, http:​//bul​letin​.equi​noxpu​b.com​/2016​/02/r​evolu​tiona​rylo​ve-sc​holar​s-res​pond-​to-th​e-aar​s-201​6-con​feren​ce-th​eme-r​ichar​d-new​ton/ (accessed December 4, 2016). 23. Prentiss. 24. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, 1st edition (London and New York: George Allen & Unwin LTD; MacMillan Company, 1923), 358. 25. Walter H. Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline (Fortress Press, 1995). 26. Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion (Bloomsbury Academic, 1994), 190–91. 27. “Announcement: 2016 NAASR Program,” March 13, 2016, https​ ://na​ asr. c​om/20​16/03​/13/a​nnoun​cemen​t-201​6-naa​sr-pr​ogram​/ (accessed December 9, 2016). 28. See Randee Ijatuyi-Morphé, Africa’s Social and Religious Quest: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis of the African Situation (University Press of America, 2014), 68–9, note 7, as instance of scholars drawing a connection between LévyBruhl and Wiebe. 29. Donald Wiebe, Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 62–3. 30. Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, 6. 31. Ibid., 307. 32. Ibid., 320. 33. Ibid., Chapter 11: “The Mystic Meaning of the White Man’s Appearance and of the Things He Brings With Him.” 34. Ibid., 360. 35. Ibid., 359. 36. Ibid., 362. 37. Ibid., 364. 38. Ibid., 368–69. 39. Ibid., 369. 40. Ibid., 405–6.

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41. Ibid., 375. 42. Driscoll, White Lies. 43. Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, 377. 44. Long, Significations, 211. 45. Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, 388–89. 46. Ibid., 411. 47. Ibid. 48. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 49. Lévy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality, 429. 50. Ibid., 432. 51. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Ethnology and the Study of Society,” Economica 6 (1922): 208–19, doi: 10.2307/2548314. 52. Ruth Benedict, “Review of Review of Primitive Mentality, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl,” The Journal of Social Forces 3, no. 3 (1925): 557–58, doi: 10.2307/3005034. 53. William Kelley Wright, “Review of Review of Primitive Mentality, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Lilian A. Clare,” The Philosophical Review 33, no. 2 (1924): 216–17, doi:10.2307/2179403. 54. E. S. Ames, “Review of Review of Primitive Mentality, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Lillian A. Clare,” International Journal of Ethics 36, no. 4 (1926): 429–30. 55. Charles H. Long. “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States,” History of Religions 11, no. 1 (1971): 54–66, 66. 56. Long, Significations, 209–10. 57. Charles H. Long, “Silence and Signification: A Note on Religion and Modernity,” in Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long, eds., Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 58. Ibid., 147. 59. Ibid., 149. 60. Ibid., 150. 61. Charles H. Long, “A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions: Retrospect and Future,” in Joseph M. Kitagawa, ed., The History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985), 87. 62. Ibid., 95. 63. Ibid. 64. Smith, Imagining Religion. 65. Long, “A Look at the Chicago Tradition in the History of Religions,” 98. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 100. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 102. 70. Ibid.

Chapter 3

Long Division How Identity Reveals Method in the History of Religions

Comparative mythologist Mircea Eliade is widely remembered as the leader of the “Chicago School” of the history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Eliade eclipses the name and reputation of colleague Joachim Wach, who is arguably more responsible than Eliade for establishing the reputation of the “Chicago School” as a methodologically focused study of religion at the Divinity School. In fact, Wach influenced discourses on method in the history of religions around the world, his perspective cultivated in Germany and only later brought to Chicago. Importantly, by “Chicago School,” we follow an “emic” definition by citing the Divinity School’s HREL 41100 2006 course: Readings in the History of Religions: the “Chicago School” which lists A. Eustace Haydon, Joachim Wach, Joseph M. Kitagawa, Charles H. Long, Mircea Eliade, and Jonathan Z. Smith, each of whom are discussed to varying degrees in this chapter, though we would also include Bruce Lincoln to this roster, along with Christian K. Wedemeyer (who taught the seminar in 2006), Wendy Doniger, and so on. Additionally, by this usage we do not mean to emphasize an abundance of continuity, but a concern over method and comparison. We are not members of this “school,” neither do we wish to enter into a debate about whether it exists or who should be included among its ranks. For our purposes here, the “Chicago School” provides a frame for a case study that helps to demonstrate certain impressions of the impact of social identity on method in the history of religions. In many ways, Eliade’s reputation and fame eclipse the reputation of the “Chicago School” and exceed the bounds of his focus on “method,” yet we begin here with his thoughts on method as they represent a basic, longstanding perspective held in the history of religions suggesting a relationship between method and social identity. 77

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For Eliade, method was inextricably linked to identity. In one of his journals, he writes of the Japanese “passion . . . for ‘methodology.’ Just like my students at Chicago, they have an almost religious respect for ‘methods.’”1 He continues in writing that a frontier sensibility marks the American students who work from the standpoint of “give us the tools we need and we will extend settlement and farming to the Pacific.” His students, Eliade opined, “seem[ed] to be saying: give us a method and we will explain everything, we will understand everything.” In comparative fashion, Eliade bounces between “American” and “Japanese” perspectives and concludes, Exactly like the young Japanese scientist from the University of Kyushu who asked me: “What is your method in the study of the history of religions? Up to now, I’ve used the method of X and that of Y, but to judge from the results, I have the impression that yours is better. What is it?”2

From our perspective in these early years of the academic study of religion in the twenty-first century, Eliade sounds like an old white man disabused of any concern over contemporary political correctness. But in fact, it could be that our interpretation of him is the exception to a rule of generalization. Do his words have a concrete history in the field? Eliade seems to have recognized that U.S. students were preoccupied with method, at least his students. In one 1976 seminar on the high gods of Australia and South America, Eliade recounts that “three of [his] students inquire about ‘the best way to study primitive religions.’”3 Their impetuousness has him “note once again to what extent American students are anxious to know, as early as the first lesson, the ‘best methods,’ no doubt from fear of wasting their time in using outdated methodologies.” This connection between method and culture (elsewhere expressed as concern over ethnos/nationality, and especially between primitive/lived religious traditions) seems a central feature of Eliade’s perspective on the study of religion. Though his system of thinking—and the politics behind it—are not of primary concern here, Eliade’s method (no doubt, not all would want to even call it such) assumed and generalized as a matter of departure. Worlds are only given credibility if able to attend to qualitative distinctions between cultures, ethnicities, geographies, and temporalities. Eliade was perfectly content generalizing. In fact, in 1963 he writes that it is a “necessity” for the academic study of religion. Using the now well-worn analogy of cartography, he suggests that we therefore have the right to generalize in the history of religions. On the condition that we present the essential on the scale on which we are working, and that we be coherent. (A map would lose its value if, claiming to be an economic map of the regions under consideration, it added extraneous and useless indications: archaeological excavations, or linguistic boundaries, for example).4

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These generalizations served a higher purpose. Eliade was convinced that the history of religions—what he ultimately came to call a humanist endeavor—would serve a vital role in translating across the many cultural and ethnic worlds continuously colliding across the shrinking globe in the wake of World War II. Of course, we now know Eliade’s relationship to these goals of harmony was far more complicated than his journal writings indicate, and we don’t want to ignore the totalizing techniques of his method or his politics. In spite of his past, or his lack of candor and remorse for such a past, Eliade understood that “no fruitful dialogue is possible as long as the white partner in the discussion does not understand the mythology (camouflaged or not) of the ‘native’ that he wants to help today (after having oppressed and exploited him for centuries).”5 The history of religions mattered to the world because through its methods, it had a necessary role to serve in the semantic and semiological transmission of information from one “world” to the next. So sure was he of this point he opines that “the history of religions and religious ethnology are of a much more urgent usefulness in the politics of today than are economics or sociology.”6 To say the least, Elaide’s humanism is ambitious and hyperbolic, although not exactly unique for the field. Further, its wedding of method and social identity is not anomalous to the history of religions. Were we to assume “method” and “identity” are unrelated—as our contemporary liberalized senses of universal sameness and options for social affiliation suggest—we would fail to recognize that this relationship between method and identity has more often than not been of the sort described here. These perspectives from Eliade demonstrate the ease with which historians of religions once wed the methodological personas and identities with geographic, ethnic, or national identities, along with the sociopolitical realities impacting or emerging from those social identifications. Even if his characterization of particular social identities as particularly methodologically inclined (or disinclined) is something we would want to trouble, this chapter reminds that for the study of religion and for the use of the category of religion in the Western imagination, our contemporary perspective is the exception to the rule. Eliade may be our field’s old, fascist uncle, but if we assume him the anomaly and that method has never been thought of as related to identity, then perhaps we are the detached progressive commentators who have trouble going home for holiday meals. Eliade’s words center the concerns discussed in this chapter, concerns that include efforts to demonstrate the relationship between identity and the comparative method as expressed in the history of religions as a field within the broader academic study of religion. This chapter is not a history or a genealogy, but a series of brief cases drawn from the history of religions

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that demonstrate how social identity reveals method. The relationship between method and identity is neither arbitrary nor accidental, and neither is it causal; it is tendential. To make this case, we turn to Max Müller and a brief discussion of the comparative approach and the advent of world religions, following Tomoko Masuzawa, to demonstrate the initial relationship between comparison and social identification. We then discuss the advent of the preoccupation with “method” as it emerges under the leadership of Joachim Wach and his students. Then, we give inchoate attention to the impact of the 1958 Tokyo, Japan International Association for the History of Religions Congress on the Western preoccupation with “method.” We then turn back to the work—and life—of Charles H. Long, whose doctoral choice of the history of religions over theology (at the Divinity School) distills identity shaping methodological choice, and offers attention to the ongoing importance of hermeneutics to the history of religions and the academic study or religion, in general. The Chicago School’s ongoing emphasis on comparison and hermeneutics, and mid-twentieth century priorities by figures like Haydon and Wach enable a seismic shift in orientation of the history of religions toward its former “data,” and that former “data” toward the history of religions. Under Wach’s leadership, the history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School makes possible the sort of intellectual and social commitments described and elaborated by Long, leading up to the possibility of both the application of critical methods within the study of religion, and ultimately, our efforts here to apply such methods to key themes and concepts within “critical” debates about the “proper” way to study “religion.” Our critique of “critical” approaches is made possible by the history of religions. To this point in the book, readers would be mistaken in assuming we find comparison and the critical approach arising from it as more trouble than its worth. This is not at all our perspective. What follows is an incomplete story of a concern over methodological rigor, excellence, and systematicity providing the possibility for embracing social difference as professional obligation and methodological necessity. The comparative method trades on the manufacture of divisions and distinctions that work in service to a Western taxonomical impulse, a kind of “If, at first we do not understand, then we shall quarantine and name so as to assuage our anxiety.” This comparative method has thoroughly social origins. At times, comparison has enabled some to occlude these social stakes, while in other instances, it reveals such stakes and enables new possibilities and participants in the field. To these ends, this chapter also considers the underengaged Long, his person and scholarship, as a kind of remainder, more than a trace but discursively rendered less than his face value, and far less than his potential value to the study of religion.

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Long represents the highest degree of the methodological rigor that gave the “Chicago School” in the study of religion its initial reputation, while his reliance on his own subject standpoint in his work—reminds of the remainder left from the social foundations undergirding the comparative method. As already discussed in previous chapters, comparison, as it emerges in the nineteenth century as a method for the study of religion, is predicated on a binary logic that postulates a “primitive other” so as to provide a basis for comparison. This reliance is both tragic and enabling. It is tragic (and epistemologically fallacious) because it maps an ontological ideal-type onto nonwhite, non-male bodies in the social world, a perverse fetishizing of the innate human complexity found among the world’s populations. Such mapping, orienting, or constructing of the category of the primitive other, or as Long prefers to name it, reliance on “empirical others,” manufactures assumed distance between an observer and an observed data set, under the auspices that distance promotes objectivity. This distance only produces a visage of objectivity that conceals a more vested formation of social identity. But this “method” is accessible to more than white men, and all social actors can reap the fruits of seeds sewn with comparison. The comparative method has been enabling for those whose social identities have been victimized by this distance-making method. Comparison enables those who have been rendered merely as the scholar’s data to show up at the table of scholarship, complicating the reliance on empirical others as the means of academic identity formation. Comparison opens up the possibility that data might speak back to the scholar. It does not stop relying on the “primitive,” but it enables a conversation about who will serve as this “empirical other.” Comparison, it would seem, is value neutral, even if it is used to orient and reify assumed differentials of value in the social world. For instance, in mathematics, all integers hold the same ontological value—that is, a 1 and 2 and 3 are all of the same sort. They are integers. Yet, as we know well, the social world ascribes differential meanings to 1 and 2 and 3 based on a variety of contextual factors. As used in the study of religion, the comparative method is a bit like mathematics in that it compares objects that are like in ontological kind. Additionally, comparison enables a kind of renegotiation of socially ascribed values through multiplication and division. As we emphasize here, comparison is not a euphemism for a particular social identity, but it forcibly impacts and is impacted by power and authority operating in the social world. To drive home this relationship, comparison is not guilty of determining that a 3 is greater than a 2 in many social interactions; neither is it necessarily complicit in deciding when 2 is company, but 3 is a crowd. As a tool, comparison can build or destroy social norms of various sorts. In essence, the comparative method reveals identity and identity reveals comparison as a tool or method. Comparisons of objects and people in the

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world can tell us much about the world, but the comparative approach is not the only means by which scholars or social actors glean useful knowledge of the world. Next, we give attention to the world (or worlds) giving way to methods chosen by scholars. COMPARING OTHER WORLDS The impact of “method” on the social world and on “data” is not arbitrary nor is it figurative, but a feature of the comparative method’s social locatedness. As it develops in the history of religions, the comparative method assumes distinctions between us/them rooted in social concerns (as opposed to “epistemological” ones). Wach reminds that “historians of religions willingly cultivated their reputation as discoverers of a new and highly promising method of inquiry. Everyone was looking for ‘parallels,’”7 characterizing the penchant for comparison in the study of religion. Looking for these “parallels” became much easier upon development of the approach. Many consider the person and text of Max Müller’s 1872 lectures on the science of religion as the origin for the history of religions as a science of religion (Religionwissenschaft) guided by a comparative method. Müller’s work underscores our emphasis on the impact of identity on the method of comparison. “Religion” has two definitions for Müller.8 The first definition concerns the doctrines and traditions emerging from Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism, and his focus on these three traditions arises from logocentrism; these are the traditions with attendant sacred texts or canons. As a trained philologist, Müller’s emphasis on language orients distance and perceptions of distance from his second definition of religion as a universally (available) impulse to apprehend the ineffable. The comparative approach is both outgrowth of an orientation (i.e., logocentrism) and is a means of orienting/locating—that is, manufacturing distances to or away from what we study. Müller wanted to know, along with many of his colleagues, what made Christianity unique, what made it more advanced than the other world religions. The science of religion, he thusly divides into comparative theology and theoretic theology, understanding the history of religions to work in service to the “queen” of the disciplines, theology. “Critical,” for Müller, amounts to historicizing and contextualizing sacred books, in the style promoted by the historical critical approach in biblical scholarship.9 As Müller presents this science of religion, every dimension of it is “Christian,” understanding “Christian” and “Theology” as markers of a perceived sui generis cultural identity. A case can be made that Müller locates the origins of the comparative approach in a kind of proto-comparison, Ur-vergleichen, in the longstanding theological comparisons between Christianity and Judaism.

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This binary pairing of Christian and Jew “served as the first lesson in comparative theology,” with the disputes that obtained between them signaling Judaism as unique, but also instrumentalized for setting in motion “the allembracing religion of humanity,” that is, Christianity.10 The first comparison undergirding the comparative method is that which divides Jew from Christian based on the taxon of Semitic and Indo-European/Aryan languages. This first distinction amounts to the first strategic essentialism used by scholars in the field, Müller assuming the category of the “Semite” in order to then postulate the category of the “Indo-European.” The “Semite” is the first “empirical other” for Europe (at least, as applied to the comparative method). The second comparison, for Müller, is that between Jew/Christian and the religions of Greece and Rome. Comparisons follow from these initial two, proliferating as a matter of both interpretive scale and normative judgment with Christianity serving as that norm, and only the Enlightenment eventually replaces Christianity and Theology in value as a marker of European cultural identification. Müller’s first comparisons are social comparisons that he situates as scientific. His method does include application of science to religion, emphasizing intellectual objectivity; but, his motive is anything but socially disinterested and it is predicated on social generalizations. Müller’s method helps to set in motion what becomes the Western preoccupation with world religions, a discursive frame for talking about and teaching cultures not traditionally associated with Europe. As many readers are no doubt already aware, Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions11 brilliantly characterizes the early days of the history of religions articulating a dialectic between white Western chauvinism and white Western curiosity that synthesizes into an orientalist pluralist doctrine of “world religions.”12 This “invention” occurs against the co-constitutive set of social questions arising at the turn of the twentieth century in response to colonialism and the various questions of what to do with/about nonwhite social actors. This invention of world religions marks shifts in the Western interpretive posture toward various communities, from irrational to rational, a shift in the meanings associated with various social actors within the colonial encounter. In white minds, nonwhite populations were moving from holding the status of purely “empirical other” to holding the status of “civilized” (in general). The ascription of religion—as proxy for civilized—served as a tacit recognition that these communities are capable of studying themselves. Each time a new “world religion” galvanized in the academic mind or in discourse, it served as a temporalization of the acceptance by white scholars that a nonwhite culture had adequately acculturated, having oriented itself appropriately to the Western Enlightenment. This proliferation of different “religious” groups can be thought about as the proliferation of social difference increasingly recognized as “civilized.”

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“Religion” was, and really remains, euphemism for signifying ethnic passing through a comparative mode of engagement that adheres to particular social valuations of those communities. The question of whether a community has religion or religious experience (or not), Masuzawa helps to demonstrate, is a question of how alike or different a group is from “us.” The “world religions” material gives an account of the manufacturing of the placement of others, the production of a social taxonomy that is scaled in the social world based on perceived distances of ethnic communities toward or away from what Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age” and the Enlightenment. Comparison served as a constant method of negotiation of which social actors pass (in the white imagination) as civilized, with “religion” the term connoting the line between primitive or civilized. The category of religion is an empirical placeholder and the key to a taxonomic cipher within the professional study of religion. Or, as Long suggests, it is a particular “stylization of discourses of difference” serving “as the basis for description and observation as well as the source of critical principles for the new understanding of the human.”13 Comparison, by this estimation, enabled the white Western scholar the possibility for ascribing social status to social actors through use of the term “religion.” WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE The notion that scholarship can happen in a detached, objective fashion is contraindicated by the history of the history of religions. Contemporary discussions of the “critical” posture would understandably leave many with the impression that “good” method is detached from the doing of religion. The social world cannot have a normative impact on our findings, in other words. To quote historian of religions R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, promoting objective distance from what we study is an aspect of “the basic minimum conditions for the study of the history of religions.”14 On all these points, we agree. But could it be that in our concern for method to safeguard us from these normative judgments, that we have underestimated and ignored the possibility that method is as equally impacted by social conditions and social norms. Scholars have written already about the impact of world congresses on what becomes the academic study of religion, Masuzawa is one of these examples. These voices tend to posit the initial world congresses at the turn of the twentieth century as an inchoate space that cultivates a desire among some scholars at the time to interrogate who we would be as scholars of religion. Would we be promoters of various religious traditions, working as interreligious advocates? Or, would we be detached from those traditions and fashion ourselves as objective, disinterested scholars?

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Discussions of these early world congresses temporalize the issue of “confessionality” as a problem of method that will impact the professional identity of the field. But, the world congresses are not the only moment within the study of religion centered around the issue of method. We want to focus on a lesser-known case of a method crisis, born of a situation of social contact between different worlds, concerning the first truly international gathering of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) Congress that took place in Tokyo, Japan, in 1958. This congress set in motion method debates in the late 1950s and early 1960s within the study of religion. These debates arise from a situation of “contact” between Japanese and other Asian scholars, and white Westerners. Every five years, the IAHR hosts its congress in various locations around the world, and the first to be held outside of Europe was the Tokyo meeting in 1958. The Tokyo meeting was “special” in that it did not correspond to the typical five-year timeline, and because it was made possible through a collaboration between the IAHR and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The impact of this Tokyo congress on Western scholars was so significant that at the following IAHR meeting of 1960 in Marburg, Germany, leading voices in the history of religions signed a methodologically focused best practices statement written by Werblowsky under the auspices of lionizing “the basic minimum conditions for the study of the history of religions.” The international group of signatories included Eliade, Kitagawa, Long, and other leaders in the field. Various writings reflecting on the Tokyo Congress found in Numen (the professional journal associated with the IAHR), in congress proceedings, and the 1960 Marburg Statement suggest that a crisis of authority—in the sense of the public issues described by C. Wright Mills—create “private troubles” for Western scholars in the form of epistemological and other sorts of deficits of method.15 The debates over method in the history of religions grow in importance and urgency in the wake of the Tokyo Congress because Asian scholars had demonstrated that Westerners still had a great amount to learn about the traditions the Westerners perceived themselves the experts of—Shintoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and so on. Westerner scholars had thought that they were the experts of these traditions, thanks in no small measure to them having been the ones who manufactured the categories of these “world religions.” Western scholars were forced to confront the possibility of a loss of epistemic authority. And to add insult to injury, thanks to their use of method, Asian scholars could study Asian cultures and also continue on identifying with their particular Asian cultures of origin and affinity. Eastern scholars were making use of various research methods without a concern over confessional identification one way or another. Sheer cultural contact with Asian scholars had caused a crisis of authority that’s played out as a method problem.

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Written by Werblowsky, Numen’s initial write-up of the Tokyo Congress is filled with signifying praise for the Japanese hospitality, even including a reference to the shoe bags available for all Congress participants. Werblowsky writes that “there was certainly more to the Congress than the papers and discussions; there was Japan, the country, its landscape, its people and its culture.”16 Despite the fawning acclaim, “the East has not yet fully recognized” the distinction between the study of religions and religious studies.17 The write-up is explicitly patronizing, but also epistemologically telling, in that Werblowsky waxes on the “absence, as an immanent growth, of the decisive cultural phenomenon known in European history as the ‘Enlightenment.’”18 “Religion” is Europe’s, but to the extent historians of religions ask “Is religion over there?” Werblowsky’s words exemplify a common feature of discussions over “proper” method: former “empirical others” come to be assumed more religious and also not quite religious enough. Why would the “Enlightenment” matter lest on grounds of social and cultural identification? Werblowsky is engaged in a process of adjudicating the being of religion from the doing of religion. Stated differently, if differentiating social identities is the historical root of comparison, upon marking sameness in/as “religion,” then the new mode of distinction becomes the “Enlightenment.” The orientalist position maintained by Werblowsky is untenable, not only on political grounds but on empirical and epistemological ones, as well. Not only is the self-evidently assumed “Enlightenment” up for deconstruction, it also does not provide the epistemic authority nostalgically sought. Considered as nostalgia, the Numen write-up signals method debates as possibly rooted in concerns over identity. Werblowsky even suggests that his concern doesn’t involve vindication of the scientific method, but the procuring and securing of the IAHR’s professional authority (in the face of a shrinking world). Tokyo is enough for Werblowsky to mourn that “the I. A. H. R. still has to fight for its character.”19 What comes to be understood as a concern over proper method has its origins in culture clash. The IAHR’s interest to host the Congress in Tokyo was a result of the IAHR deciding it should live up to its namesake, “international.”20 There was even an ad hoc committee set up consisting of Afro-Asian countries to serve as a kind of quality control, acculturation through confederation. Representatives of various countries would work to create national organizations that would then apply for membership to the IAHR, upon inspection that what scholars were doing lived up to “Western, scientific standards.” Interestingly, although numerous references to this Afro-Asian contingency exist in the archive, we have not found any evidence that there was actually African representation, at all. The work of the ad hoc committee and the general aftermath of Tokyo were such that “it became apparent that rich religious traditions do not automatically produce Religionswissenschaft . . . efforts of the I. A. H. R. to

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enlarge the scope of its activities whilst preserving strictly scientific standards will involve some long-range up-hill work.”21 By our estimation, Werblowsky and those he’s representing were moving the proverbial “goalposts.” To the extent “religion” had served to signify “Civilization,” after Tokyo the new marker of passing becomes religionswissenschaft. The communities of the East are “Religious,” which is why they came together for the Congress. But that cultural contact demonstrated to the Westerners that the Easterners are not yet religionswissenschaft. What is couched as a “method” concern seemingly amounts to interpretive differences in the degree or magnitude (of perceived distances between East and West), the manufacturing of distance between white Westerner and whoever is Other in a given contact zone. In this case, Asian scholars. Greater attention to the difficulties of diversification, in concert with the concern to maintain “scientific” standards, would be discussed two years later at the Marburg Congress. Whether travel to Tokyo produced a hit to personal white egos or to a collective Western sense of authority, the Tokyo Congress led to certain “recommendations,” methodological in their focus. Marburg was fashioned as a time to reflect on Tokyo, and it resulted in the Marburg Statement penned by Werblowsky and signed by numerous scholars already noted. But between Werblowsky’s write-up of Tokyo and the Marburg Declaration, a discussion unfolded between C. J. Bleeker and Werblowsky in the pages of Numen. Bleeker was of the opinion that diversification is important, and recognized that doing so would have an impact on “the aim and method of our studies.”22 The presumption guiding these possibilities was that “Everybody who knows the Orient even superficially will realize that the subjects of the history of religions are approached in different ways in the East from that in the West.”23 Bleeker even borrowed from one Henry van Straelen who suggested that “the Westerner arrives at his conclusions by means of the logic of Aristotle, whereas the Easterner approaches the truth by intuition, after which he arranges his knowledge, however without using reason.”24 Are these postures Orientalized and antiquated? Of course. But more fundamentally, they historicize the method debates from the 1960s, and indicate that identity reveals method, in the sense that social identifications predispose certain social actors to choose certain methods based on social settings and social concerns. Werblowsky and Bleeker were quick to suggest this was occurring among the Asian scholars; we are emphasizing that it was definitely occurring for these Western scholars through their instrumentalization of the “Asian Scholar” as an object. Bleeker would have it that the Westerner is not the only group generalizing, so he turned to a quote from scholar Masaharu Anesaki, which states that “the scientific investigation of religion has brought a new science, the

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science of religion. This science is a step ahead of comparative religion or the history of religions . . . I want to . . . see through the investigations of various religious phenomena that religion is an expression of man’s natural desire.”25 Bleeker suggested Anesaki’s words indicate a radical departure from the historically focused Western scholar of religion. The difference is debatable. Nevertheless, he quoted Anesaki to vindicate his own Orientalist assumptions. Bleeker laments that “though it is dangerous to generalize, I may perhaps take it for granted that Anesaki has expressed a general feeling among scholars in the East. If this is true, we have found an excellent starting point for a discussion about the principles of our science.”26 Identity revealed this specific concern over method. Again, we are not interested to make an anachronistic moral critique of Bleeker or Werblowsky, but to demonstrate that orientalist and orientalizing and generalizing logics (which ascribe certain attributes to certain groups of people) shape the scope of concerns about method in the field, at least as they emerge in the 1960s. For the white man, Bleeker suggested that the “ideal of a fully disinterested pursuit of knowledge is one of the highest goods of humanity,”27 while concomitantly writing the Asian voice out of the possibility of making use of that “disinterested pursuit of knowledge.” This claim toward disinterestedness is used to vindicate Western sui generis ownership of the authority (i.e., distance) made possible through disinterested observation. Bleeker and Werblowsky are turning debates about proper methods into a method for engaging in a culture war while maintaining plausible deniability for participation in that same culture war. Despite the ontological difficulties, Bleeker is of the opinion that a synthesis of East and West will benefit the study of religion. The same cannot be said of Werblowsky. Writing what becomes the Marburg Statement, he wanted to make it clear that the IAHR is not in the business of cosmopolitanism or of promoting religions of any sort. The task of the IAHR was self-promotion. His writings related to Tokyo or Marburg are not preoccupied with epistemological certainty or moral clarity, but the preservation of the perceived authority of the IAHR as a professional, authorizing body. His concerns over professional validation are couched in the Marburg Statement as involving method. “Three principle dangers” that concerned the IAHR in the wake of Tokyo included “invasion by dilettantes,” the “theological preoccupation of many participants,” and a concern to ensure that “religiously motivated” concerns did not take precedent over the “specific and narrowly defined programme of the IAHR.”28 These issues sound familiar. Further, Werblowsky stressed that historians of religions cannot, necessarily, be theologians when he uses it as strawman to secure a “historian of religions” identity. Additionally, he implied that some of the prominent scholars missing from Tokyo and Marburg were missing because of this invasion by dilettantes, which can be read as a kind of ethnically oriented dog whistle, an

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effort to make method great again after having been distracted by concerns to increase non-Western participation. He also understood acculturation as a purely one-directional affair, saying that Tokyo exhibited an Eastern ignorance of Western methods of scholarship. It is hard to not psychoanalyze Werblowsky’s concerns as rooted in white crocodile tears. His writings drip with anxiety over the cultures—or “worlds,” in Eliadian language—colliding. But he serves as prime ethnographic evidence of much of what may be at stake in some of our debates over “method.” In the case of the Tokyo Congress example, increasing contact between East and West created a crisis of authority in the minds of some of these voices within Numen. This contact and the consequences of it did not bear on “the future of religionswissenschaft” but on “the future of the IAHR as a useful instrument.”29 Since at least the Tokyo Congress, the IAHR’s concerns to diversify and internationalize itself has had the consequence of transforming “proper” method in the history of religions from one of presumed disinterested scientific observation toward that of adjudicating epistemic authority within the study of religion. Since at least this time, conversations about method have occurred under the aegis of concerns over data, and who it is that is speaking about that data. Boundary maintenance, in the sense of anthropologist Mary Douglas, is what’s at stake in the method debates that unfold in the wake of Tokyo. Notions of “proper” method emerge here as a series of existential crises prompted by merely traveling to Japan to have a conference about the study of religion. The actual Marburg Document or Statement does a lot to whitewash the motivations telegraphed so wantonly by Bleeker, Werblowsky, and others at the Tokyo and Marburg Congresses, and in the pages of Numen. The Statement is far more equitable in its verbiage than the debates precipitating the Statement (as told briefly here) would suggest. That the statement was drafted and signed is far more significant than its contents, in that those signatures can be understood as an expression of belief in method’s promise to complicate the overwhelming whiteness of the history of religions. Of course, one can also draw the opposite conclusion. Some of these signatories hailed from the University of Chicago Divinity School’s program in the history of religions, each of them arriving to Chicago thanks to the methodological concerns of Joachim Wach. UNDERSTANDING VERSTEHEN Long before Tokyo, one of the preeminent methodologists of the twentieth century began to think deeply about what the proliferation of social difference required of the historian of religions. Joachim Wach had made a career in

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Germany as a “method man” and brought his work on method to the United States. He was one of the earlier scholars of religion to turn his field into his data, working on questions of method at a breaking pace. In 1935, the Nazi administration of Saxony, Germany, forced Wach from his teaching post at Leipzig on the grounds of his Jewish heritage.30 After teaching for some years at Brown University, Wach arrived to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in 1945. His time in the United States had included consideration of the tremendous grief and social precarity Jews faced in response to the specific situation of the Holocaust and World War II, but also the general state of social life truncated by totalitarian ideologies and politics. Though he died in 1955, his methodological approach of Verstehen (Understanding) left a lasting impression on his students, and it worked to cultivate the reputation that the “Chicago School” was about the business of method making and maintenance. Verstehen is an idea taken from German hermeneutician Wilhelm Dilthey, who some would argue is the father of the “human sciences.” Certainly, Dilthey is father to the notion of the human sciences. Dilthey distinguishes between purely scientific knowledge obtained through experimentation and the knowledge obtained through human experiences. The human sciences signify on taking epistemological account of both aspects of knowledge production and understanding. Wach applies this notion of verstehen (understanding) to the history of religions crafted from twin commitments of scientific and hermeneutical approaches. This “understanding” always pointed in the direction of salvation, insofar as “the idea of salvation stands [for Wach] at the center of religious thought and activity,” with this salvation understood as a catch-all term for “all concepts of rebirth and immortality.”31 Wach understood salvation as “constitutive of all religion,” arising from the angst and melancholia associated with human finitude.32 Wach’s interest in soteriology provides rich ethnographic data about the Western academic tendency to make quick jumps from the particular to the universal. The need for salvation to be a universal feature of “religions” is empirically untenable and ethically problematic, as many contemporary readers would agree. But Wach’s existential moorings expose a social actor perceiving the need for a savior from one’s self as a particular dimension of white masculine Christian identity in the modern and postmodern periods. If history of religions was not itself “theological,” as we’d want to trouble any assumed ability to distinguish one from the other anyway, Wach had it of mind that the discipline could work alongside the other disciplines (especially theology, as had also been the case for Müller) as well as in the world generally, in service to a salvation that was inextricably Christian in its origins and unapologetically white, Western, and chauvinistic in its explicit suggestion that all the world’s peoples were in need of (and preoccupied with) salvation of one sort or another.33

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Wach understood all of his work as a soteriological enterprise. Eliade seems to have agreed. Eliade’s position was that the history of religions enables the understanding of religious experiences. This understanding creates a “change, you are modified,”34 and promotes “self-liberation”35: “you realize that you are more free, that you are delivered from an illusion, from a weight, from an inhibition, that you get rid of ‘something which oppresses you.’”36 Whether or not Eliade’s claims about religious experience are verifiable through method or theory is of less significance than noting that Wach’s (and Eliade’s) senses of method are that it is at least partially directed toward social (and psychical) interventions. In short, Eliade and Wach wanted to ensure that the history of religions made normative political interventions. Wach is also instrumental in emphasizing the task of the history of religions. In 1935, he wrote that “Quantitatively and qualitatively, religionswissenschaft thus has a field of study distinct from that of theology: not our own religion but the foreign religions in all their manifoldness are their subject matter.”37 “Religion” is not the subject matter of the history of religions; the “Other” is the subject matter for the history of religions. That the field would understand itself as rooted in a bifurcation of “us” and “them” suggests that the field has been in the business of manufacturing distances, social and ideological ones, any manner of distances, working to ensure some expression of “us” and “them” might be maintained. Eliade, the field’s posterboy for sui generis appeals to the sacred, may have worked to dissolve the distinction between “sacred” from “profane” through an emphasis on the ubiquitous sacrality of “them.” Generally, we as scholars of religion may be guilty of a basic interpretive failure to recognize that the sacred and profane has always only signified on social difference. Yes, reinforcing distance between “us” and “them” can occur through a valorization of the sacred and a rejection of historical contingency, but it can also occur through a reduction of “them” to performative utterances and “operational acts of identification.” Critical methods have aided in our capacity to analyze the political and cultural motivations shaping Wach’s concerns, but not done as well to enable us to hold in tension these statements as empirically false but ethnographically useful. Such concerns over salvation are not only true of Wach, but many within the Enlightenment imagination. We can learn more from them if we are not so quick to merely deconstruct but take interpretive stock of the distance such claims are meant to produce. The predilection for overgeneralizing and universalizing unproved concepts and predicates may be a constituent feature of a particular cultural inheritance. Our efforts to dismiss such claims on empirical grounds ought to enable us to expose the politics behind these statements as well as the politics that guide our methodological efforts to deconstruct them, lest deconstruction

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and reduction become a means of sweeping cultural inheritance and history under the rugs of “method.” Both positions negate the causal relationship between “them” and “history,” synthesizing white Western men with history. Our preoccupation with the “sacred” in the Other (as the history of religions) can be reduced to a manufacturing of distance between “them” and “us.” It is not hard to recognize the possible utility of Verstehen for its impact on helping to deconstruct white, male intellectual hegemony within the U.S. study of religion, in part because it is an explicit concern for Wach. To read him today gestures that those scholars who would uncritically appeal to religious experience, as well as those scholars who would reduce the object of our investigation to floating signifiers, both fail in recognizing the thoroughly social dimensions of the object of our study. Wach did not reduce the object of the holy or the sacred to social identity—as we do in this book—but, he (and the moment he helped to usher in for the history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School) helps to enable our capacity today to recognize the need for such efforts. He recognized that “Western students have begun to show increased realization of the need for help from those who grew up in another religious tradition in order to do full justice to the meaning of the phenomena to be investigated.”38 Wach respected Rudolf Otto’s multiplicity of experiences of the holy and therefore socially/culturally situated them within the assumed “world religions.” Since manifestations of the Mysterium tremendum et Fascinans are contextually distinct, greater understanding of the holy and of religious experience (generally) requires what Hans-Georg Gadamer will eventually call a “fusion of horizons.”39 Importantly, Wach’s statement is about intellectual rigor, not “politics.” To this extent, Wach is not so distant from Donald Wiebe, in that both suggest that a concern for epistemological precision should determine the distance between “method” and “politics.” Both Wach and Wiebe see something of value in the scientific method, but the similarities end there. The break between them (e.g., Dilthey vs. Karl Popper) involves whether or not science is the only authority. Wiebe wants science to adjudicate interpretive variability, to dictate which interpretation (of experience) is right and which is wrong. If “science” wasn’t the authority, then who would be? Wach’s Verstehen doesn’t solve these interpretive challenges, either; but it emphasizes interpretation as the foundation for the study of religion and stresses that dealing with these challenges is the responsibility of scholars of religion whether they like such a responsibility or not. Verstehen turned to “experience” to consider what different interpretations could mean for understanding a shared universal reality that different peoples experienced (and expressed) differently. Wach reminds that

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in the era of positivism a sovereign disregard for and suspicion of the “native” commentaries was not infrequent. Only Western critical techniques could be admitted. There can be no doubt that the eagerness with which the techniques of Western critical studies have been appropriated by Eastern scholars promises highly significant contributions from them in our field.40

Wach indicates a concern for concrete political response to any “disregard” and “suspicion” of indigenous commentaries. He also describes “critical techniques” in such a way that help to provide clarity over the history of the term within our field (as it is increasingly used to quarantine scholars who make explanatory claims about their data from scholars who profess or repeat the normative claims made by their data). Any hard distinction between “caretaker” scholars and “critical” scholars is a fallacy; we’re all taking care of these or those social identifications. The terms of these debates over method, however, leave little room for attention to both possibilities, the doing of scholarship and simply being nonwhite. Method gives way to a fight over authority; and, method enables the procuring of authority. For instance, undergirding the proliferation of young scholars listing “theory and method” on CVs is an awareness that the academy is still locked between poles of Western masculine policing techniques and waning white authority, the path to the latter is bound by mastery of the former. This proliferation of authorities in “theory and method” doesn’t amount to heresy or the multiplication of imposters and “dilettantes”; rather, at least two generations of scholars have now heard that a critical approach matters most for academic legitimacy. That some read this proliferation in teaching and research expertise as evidence of duplicity ought not surprise anyone. And ironically, such incredulity only endangers the authority of those purported gatekeepers. In fact, Wach—in as problematical, normative fashion as we might expect—warns of this incredulity and a subsequent mode of “critical” response when he writes, “As both Christian and non-Christian religions reassert their convictions it becomes increasingly difficult to safeguard the positive results of the age of liberalism in terms of scholarship and knowledge. The newly won freedom has to be guarded against any form of tyrannical authority.”41 Contemporary impressions of Wach as representative of a Christian hegemonic posture are true, but they tend to ignore his explicit reliance on method as a means of mitigating hegemonic ideological postures. Of course, “liberalism” and “Christianity” produce ideological postures, too. And in fact, Wach prefers “open hostility” toward religion than worry over the “noncommittal attitude” of “modern historian[s] of religion who use strong words only when he wants to convince us that he has no convictions.”42 Other moments in Wach’s work bear on the politics of critical postures today:

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But in this day and age there is no avoiding the challenge which the pluralism of religious loyalties and its relationship to the problem of truth poses for individuals, groups, and governments. As long as detachment was regarded as the highest virtue and commitment was looked on with suspicion, there was no great occasion for disagreement. There were no minorities to be protected and tolerance was no issue, inasmuch as the frequent presence of indifference made such “tolerance” possible at no high cost.43

Both prior to and while at Chicago, Wach was part of a zeitgeist responding to broad, multicultural demands that fascism never again emerge as a response to the proliferation of social difference. To these ends, he made use of the tools available to him as a scholar, his theories and methods. Verstehen, for Wach, was a double-entendre, signifying on moral and epistemological motivations. He tried to cultivate a program that would enable folks to study themselves and then come to a table and share information about each other. Verstehen, ostensibly, fostered a conversation framed around the question, “what do we do with each other in a shrinking world, in this contact zone?” This conversation began with his students. WHEN DATA SPEAKS BACK The Chicago School during the early to mid-decades of the twentieth century seems to have provided space for respect of and rigorous engagement with social difference. Wach knew of social marginalization intimately, having fled from Germany, and it is also likely that he lived in a sexual closet.44 His arrival to Chicago saw him amid a sea of additional European refugee scholars that included towering figures in their respective fields meeting at the University of Chicago, which had for decades fostered an ethos that considered the utility of the “other” for intellectual endeavors and that matched this interest in what George Herbert Mead described as the “generalized other” with a decidedly U.S. pragmatic approach. Thinkers that included physicists Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller (among many more) did not cultivate professional anxiety, but motivated Wach to secure the fate of the comparative study of religions as a sui generis discipline through the balancing of the historical by way of scientific and hermeneutic concerns. Many of Wach’s students, especially some of the more prominent ones, came from marginalized and precarious backgrounds, and found themselves drawn to Wach’s work. Many members of the history of religions club Samgha at the Divinity school had been negatively impacted by fascism, whether of the European or North American variety. In Joseph Kitagawa’s case, he spent time in a U.S. internment camp during the war. Long was an

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African American from Arkansas who grew up during the Jim Crow south where lynching of black folk by white folk were common. And Kees Bolle had lived for a time in Oostvoorne, the Netherlands, under Nazi occupation. The Divinity School in general and the history of religions specifically seem to have offered the means for interpretation of and pragmatic responses to social issues, including racism, sexual repression, anti-semitism, and fascism. The comparative method may have had a problematic origin, but it had also helped to cultivate a response to cultural hegemony and ideology. In describing various shifts in approach to comparative religion at the Divinity School, Kitagawa posits the work of Haydon as having already ensured social difference was a consideration at Chicago even before Wach’s arrival. Haydon, a former “fundamentalist” (Christian), had embraced the humanism of the Ethical Culture movement, leading him to seek an “alternative to affirming Christian faith as the only religion of humankind’s salvation.”45 These efforts included an emphasis on science as a means of exploring human social and existential “need” creating various “forms” of religion. Haydon is responsible for moving the “Department of Comparative Religion from the Humanities to the Divinity School.”46 Haydon’s priorities expressed themselves in his writings but also through conference organizing. In 1933, Haydon hosted “the World Fellowship of Faiths,” which “dealt with Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism and tried to generate discussion on four topics: (1) World-Religions and Modern Scientific Thinking; (2) World-Religions and Modern Social-Economic Problems; (3) World-Religions and Inter-Cultural Contacts; and (4) the Task of Modern Religion.”47 The conference foci demonstrate an emphasis on the practical need for a method that would adjudicate between individuals/communities and their specific cultural inheritances (i.e., “religions” or “myths”), across these cultural inheritances, and between competing claims to the particular and the universal. Haydon wanted the comparative study of religion “to help people overcome the anti-scientific bias and to show them the religion of tomorrow, a synthesis of science and idealism. ‘The whole world,’ [Haydon] said, ‘wrestles with the same problems, aspires toward the same ideals, and strives to adjust inherited thought-patterns to the same scientific ideas.’”48 Haydon’s perspective is as naively ambitious as it is obviously focused on responding to the challenges posed by the proliferation of social and cultural difference and the attendant proliferation of epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic options propagated by social difference. Wach built on Haydon’s work and stressed a shift from the history of religion (singular) to “religions,”49 emphasizing Verstehen as a methodological foundation for the pluralist history of religions. From the portrait provided by his writings and left to us by Kitagawa, Wach would have been the first to admit that this emphasis on “religions” was culturally situated and invented. He would have

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stressed that religious experience (i.e., “confrontation by man with Ultimate Reality”50) is sui generis to particular cultures/religions, and that the study of religion required attention to the variety of these experiences. Among the various “religions” counted in the ranks of “proper” data for the field, Wach “lamented . . . the lack of interest in the so-called primitive religions in North America.”51 Wach had in mind increased attention to Native American traditions (in the vein of Claude Lévi-Strauss and later, Eliade). A variety of factors connected to the University of Chicago, alongside much broader social challenges occurring in the 1950s and 1960s in the West, along with intellectual life shaped so heavily (at the time) by memories of the war and the effects of fascism, would all necessarily impact Wach’s understanding of method and his method of understanding. The erosion of old certainties met with new energies in the academic study of religion.52 The presence of Kitagawa, Long, Bolle, and others in Wach’s Samgha club testifies to an intellectual energy working at the Divinity School that understood the history of religions as both inculcated in the death of old, fictive certainties, and enabling a method of intellectual inquiry that would augment epistemology on the basis of new information continuously contacted as the world continued to grow smaller. LONG FINDS THE REMAINDER American religious historian Louis Benjamin Rolsky posits that Long’s work implicates American scholars of religion in an “inability . . . of imagination” and a concomitant “ability to suppress and conceal in the form of a willed American innocence.”53 In some senses, Long’s work can be understood as responding to Wach’s challenge that scholars pay more attention to “socalled primitive” religions. As noted elsewhere in Method as Identity, Long is considered by many the father of African American religious studies. His theory of religion as outgrowth of signifying processes that responded to cultural contact during the age of discovery and during colonialism has shaped the perspectives of many in the field. His work demands that any scientific or “critical” posture toward religion take responsibility for the manufacture of that posture through this signifying process, understanding knowledge production writ large as an outgrowth of social interaction with difference.54 Long finds his authorial voice, and his methodological authority, in the space provided by Wach’s interest in religious experience. Is the category of experience dangerous to the history of religions? It damn sure is. Wach recognized that something we’d today call diversity or multiculturalism was a priority for methodological rigor. Others saw that in him—and his method—too. In an interview conducted with Long’s student David

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Carrasco (now, Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard Divinity School), Long recounts the first time he ever met Wach. Leaving Swift Hall (at the Divinity School) one day, Long noticed Wach in the hallway. He knew Wach by reputation, but had never met the man. Wach’s hands were full, and Long helped him with the door, eventually offering to carry some of the professor’s papers. A conversation ensued as they walked toward Cottage Grove. Upon hearing that Long was a student at the Divinity School, Wach inquired of his status and area of concentration. Long relayed that he was a first year, and that he was enjoying the classes but found it “strange” that during class, historical theologian Wilhelm Pauck referenced “Paul’s idea of Revelation, or Augustine’s idea, or Origin’s idea.”55 Long explained that such qualified references were “strange” because where he came from, “people don’t have ideas of Revelation. They have revelations.”56 To which Wach replied, “Ah so, religious experience” (emphasis in Long).57 Reflecting on the occasion, Long describes the impact of his experience meeting Wach: Now that impressed me. . . . It impressed me because this is the first time—see, you have to understand what it means to be a black person in America. Almost everything you are about is either extra—extra or pathological. So that, if you are going to study black religion, it’s going to be extra. It’s not a part of what you regularly study. Or, if you’re going to study society, you don’t study black society. You study the pathology of black society. Now what I heard in Wach when he said “religious experience” is that we were all in. This was not extra. . . . It wasn’t pathological. It was just what human beings do. My focus was already there. Now, there was no other discipline in the humanities or social sciences at that school, at that time, at that university . . . where a black person is, “well, this is what human beings do. That’s what I do, see.” And that got me.58

Long’s autoethnographic recollection suggests that the category of “experience” is both an empirical problem and a space where empirical problems are able to be solved through the introduction of new data and analyses of data— through attention to the remainder (that which “method” is not designed to include). Long had posed a rather sophisticated analysis to Wach over method (even if clumsily stated by the young grad student). Wach responded as any seasoned professor would, turning to what he knows and spends his time thinking about. But it is hardly imaginable that Wach was not at some level aware of the impact his method could have on Long. Long is here describing both empirical and professional issues arising from what today most would refer to as DuBoisian double-consciousness, worth reminding, a theory of black life attentive to black live inside of academia. Being black in the United States and European academies force an

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acute awareness of how blackness is pigeonholed as superfluous to “proper” data—a trend that remains in place to a large degree in the academic study of religion.59 By and large, if you are black in the academic study of religion, professional options include focusing one’s expertise in “normative” data, or be willing to police black bodies through various appeals to various politics of respectability.60 These politics, for the study of religion today, might very well also play out through discourses associated with “critical” method; the “look” of empirical others may (or may not) have shifted, but policing and disciplining through modes of quarantining certain scholarship as ancillary to the academic study of religion or rendering scholars as “methodologically” pathological remain a powerful politic within the academic study of religion, including but extending far beyond “critical” conversations. For Wach, Verstehen was a means of adjudicating interpretive difference, as well as instrumentalizing that difference for the sake of added knowledge production. The need to adjudicate this difference results from an ontological outlook that posited one shared reality, with different interpretations of that reality aiding ultimately in “understanding” in an epistemological and in an ethical/moral sense. Verstehen attended to an ontology where various contextually specific “religious experiences” occur, and therefore, Long saw himself in this ontology, and in Wach’s method. This ontology, for Long, legitimated blackness and justified the authority of blackness to speak. Long and Wach shared the same world. Blackness was part of this world. Wach’s interest in religious experience provided fertile ground for addressing the particularities of studying religion in the United States and being black in the United States (or globally). Here, Wach is not so much responsible as is the more abstract category of experience. Methodological focus on experience, mediated by shared concern for scientific, objective distance, made possible the focus on a host of hermeneutical challenges that have defined Long’s corpus. Long emphasizes in his work that on the heels of colonialism came “the theoretical and practical problem of another kind of difference. The former ‘sources of our data’ have become speaking voices in our conversations about the human sciences.”61 This “another kind of difference” looks at the world differently, seeing sameness in the already assumed variety of colonialism, and recognizes difference where normative white perspectives register sameness. The formerly colonized understand this inherent hermeneutical challenge, while “the cultures of the colonial powers having relinquished their rule have not yet come to terms with the intellectual and theoretical implications of de-colonization.”62 Wach’s approach to the study of religion has its challenges, to be sure. But for Long, it provided an opportunity for him (and others alongside him and after he’d left Chicago) to recognize the epistemological stakes of the construction of the “empirical other” not as a social taxon, but as an empirical

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norm undergirding the comparative approach. Hence, Long’s work demonstrates the impossibility of a comparative method that does not take account of the “content” of experience, religious or otherwise. “Critical” quarantining has its place, insofar as it enables the recognition that many constructed categories signify on simply social sameness or difference; but this technique has its ethical limits in the form of not “objectifying” or orientalizing others. Long’s point is more empirically motivated, however, and partly demonstrated through a brief reference to both Jonathan Z. Smith’s famous dictum that “there is no data for religion” and Michel Foucault’s deconstruction of the category of the Western construction of “man.” Long notes that neither of these claims “place the origin or the construction of these data within a proper historical cultural situation . . . one must go a bit further and ask, which scholars and in whose studies and for what reasons?”63 While noting his admiration for much of postmodern thought, Long warns that it risks “‘provincializing’ itself.”64 The particular usefulness of thinking about the “Chicago School” and the provincializing irony of Smith’s statement in light of it taking place within this school, is that the “school” was preoccupied with hermeneutics, understanding itself and the history of religions as a hermeneutical endeavor, forcing the “school” to confront early on the paradoxes and contradictions shaping the “Enlightenment meaning of the human sciences.”65 It would take a career for Long to articulate the meaning of that first meeting with Wach, but it was enough that he specialized in the history of religions, much to the chagrin of the systematic and process theologians at the Divinity School during this time. Schubert Ogden was apparently quite upset and said Long would be wasting his time with history of religions. We are left to wonder why Ogden was frustrated, but the incident is not the first or last time a white scholar expressed scorn or resentment toward Long.66 Ogden’s frustration also reminds that what we are describing of/for the history of religions is not unique to it; the subfield is a case study for comparison outside of that specialization and, in fact, outside the academic study of religion. At times, our discussion of “theology” may seemingly rehabilitate its image as a field and as a generic mode of inquiry. As a field in the United States across the twentieth century, one can find examples of theologians and manuscripts that seek to quarantine social difference while other examples (especially contextual theologies) exist that give voice to and make use of social difference to staggering degrees. The fields of theology and history of religions can follow “parallel” continuums on this point because the method debates involve whether or not methods are able to handle experience in an abstract sense. The methodological problem with experience is not that “religious experiences” are not true (though that very well may be the case). Rather, the problem for method is that experience necessitates an openness that militates against certainty and security. “Religious” experience may or

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may not be a problem for the scholar of religion (depending on one’s methodological standpoint—à la standpoint theory). Religious, philosophical, and social experiences, and especially our appeals to them, can never be verified through scientific testing. But the veracity of them, whether they are “real” or not, whether “religion” is real or not, is not a methodological question, but an ontological question connoting what epistemological parameters we value. Theology, as a mode of inquiry, is the distance we place between what we know and the data we cannot handle not knowing enough about. Hence, when data speaks back, some of us work hard to silence the noise. Academic decisions about whether or not methodological standpoint will attend to the category of experience is a political choice motivated by a decision about where we prefer to situate epistemological uncertainty; all of us are methodologists in this sense—distance-makers—we embrace uncertainty in our work, or we externalize it onto other social actors. Theology, like the history of religions, offers no singular notion of where to adjudicate this uncertainty. But a case can be made that Wach, and the set of commitments his attention to method helped to bring about, at the very least sought to be honest about these troubles. Long found his methodological identity in the space of Wach’s method. WHAT IS THE TOTAL? Ultimately, a disciplinary emphasis on world religions, a preoccupation with routinizing a method that balanced both hermeneutics and the scientific method, and a special zeitgeist occurring at the University of Chicago in the first half of the middle of the twentieth century enabled a disproportionate number of creative and capable thinkers to study religion in the light of intense social variability. Wach’s crew of students amounted to a veritable X-Men of understanding social difference in the history of religions through a preoccupation with cultivating a critical “method.” That said, this group was overwhelmingly male; their powers had limits. Even still, today, not only does “critical” signify a different relationship to social difference, the very existence of a “Chicago School” is questioned even by some of its own representatives. What happened? In a 1978 Numen article working to destabilize the centrality of Eliade’s “theory” in the study of religion, Ninian Smart bemoans that “it is unfortunate that in certain areas schools take over subjects. A school can be seen as a movement within a field which defines methods against the background of a theory which itself should be open to scrutiny by independent methods.”67 Additionally, he begins his article on Eliade by naming both Kitagawa and Long as cosignatories (along with Eliade) to the IAHR Marburg Statement

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of 1960. It is curious that Kitagawa and Long are not cited nor referenced again in the article. The suggestion seems clear, guilt by association, while a fact that Smart’s worry over the weight of the “School” ignores is that Eliade was not the methodological substance of such a school, neither has it ever been demonstrated empirically that Eliade’s theory of religion is normative for the field. At best, Eliade was the literally famous, outward representative of that school. In short, Eliade represented the school (to the public), but did not represent the method that had been fostered by Wach, Haydon, and even beyond the Divinity School by figures like Mead, and others. By 1980, Smart will be referring to the “Eliadian ideology,”68 a hegemonic blindness in the work of Eliade that ostensibly operates through transhistorical claims and represents the “Chicago School.” Smart’s concern is that even though Eliade does well to give attention to other voices, he has trouble historicizing his own voice. The critique of Eliade here is well formed, and necessary. However, it would be deeply arrogant and simply misleading to assume that hegemonic ideology is only transmitted through transhistorical claims or that it cannot be transmitted even through efforts to curtail them. Eliade’s method invites anyone to the table of participation in the study of religion. He flattens any qualitative distinction between the emic and the etic through the emphasis on the sacred, which is at the same time a flight from history. This is his method. It is irritating to certain “critical” sensibilities, and it did rely on an internalized, quazi-totalitarian hubris large enough to buck up against scientific certainty; the results provided new space for some and made other scholars feel pinched. But as Smart notes in 1978, Eliade is actively rejecting historicism “as a typical product of those nations ‘for which history has never been a continuous terror. These thinkers would perhaps have adopted another viewpoint had they belonged to nations marked by the “fatality of history.””’69 Smart’s emphasis on refuting the transhistorical in Eliade is appropriate. Eliade’s “method” may leave us then, as now, feeling uncomfortable in a way similar to when an uncle makes a racist comment at Christmas dinner, but orienting ourselves away from Eliade and toward history is redundant: Eliade is that history. Racist uncles are that history. Along these lines, as happens in the complicated space of contact, Long would eventually become a dear friend of Mircea Eliade, even eulogizing him; but Long was Wach’s student. Much of the ideal-typification of “confessional” postures within the academic study of religion have centered Eliade, relegating much of the “Chicago School” as indebted to him. And certainly, these arguments can be made. Nevertheless, Long’s position is that Eliade basically didn’t have a method. There is little wonder folks find fault with Eliade’s work, Long included. It does follow a pattern that at best is unilateral and at worst is eerily similar to totalitarianism, with Long suggesting that “[Eliade] would just presuppose. He never thought he had to defend this stuff.

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He never said, ‘They think the god appears.’. . . He takes it right there: ‘And then the god appears.’”70 If folks responded to Eliade by saying that there is an emic world (where the god is) and an etic theory of truth “where gods cannot appear,” Eliade would merely emphasize the limits of understanding across those worlds, leading Long to suggest that “Eliade never took on that great big old methodological issue,”71 the very one that Wach sought and taught to his pupils. For Wach, Verstehen was a methodological means for the fusion of multiple horizons (“worlds” in Eliade’s terminology). But Eliade shucked Wach’s concern to synthesize different worlds through method. Relatedly, historian of religions Daniel Dubuisson notes that “Eliade’s work . . . wisely kept itself a good distance from any serious or difficult epistemological debate.”72 Long finds Eliade’s dismissal of the need to synthesize different worlds useful. So much of the black experience in the West has involved “oppression” on the grounds that the Western “form and mode of knowledge is superior to every other form and mode of knowledge.”73 All other things being equal (including the limits of method, anyway), Eliade’s lack of a method made possible recognition of the semiotic meanings associated with different “worlds,” and the recognition of multiple truths was far more useful to Long (and many others) than overly certain methodological claims made by folks whose paucity of attention to hermeneutical theory and method found them not recognizing that all of this was part of a signifying battle that had been taking place at least since colonial contact. Verstehen remained most central to Long’s work, but Eliade’s lack of method was like oxygen; if Wach’s balance isn’t available, then it is better to have too much oxygen than not enough. Wach, and Long too, remain “guilty” of maintaining that religion is real, but to characterize them as “confessional” would be to misunderstand the manner in which Wach thought method might ensure that “confessionality” would not inhibit the study of religion. The very notion of methodological “guilt” speaks to the failure of understanding that method ought to be attentive to both scientific verification and social difference. Whatever else can be said of Verstehen, it was motived by these twin pulses. We ought not mistake Eliade’s dismissal of methodological rigor to imply Wach’s Verstehen was a failure on these fronts (whether or not it had been is another issue). This chapter has been about the social origins of the comparative approach in the history of religions, as seen through various moments when social identifications give way to methodological commitments. This relationship means that the distance manufactured by method is both necessary but also dangerous. Distance produces a different kind of travel, as in Wach’s method of Verstehen and Long’s entry into the history of religions through the category of religious experience. Maintaining adequate distance between scholar and object, when the object is a person (or a scholar), requires a totalizing

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treatment of the object. Comparison does not only totalize, but it does totalize some others always. Much has been noted of Eliade’s fascist affiliations, leanings, and his apparent apathy toward his past decisions. These critiques of Eliade—and of the phenomenological approach that he represents in the minds of many scholars—must continue. Long is an important voice to consider in these debates and critiques because he is attentive to the social costs of the Western construction of knowledge. Whether we define our professional identities with terms like “phenomenological” or “critical,” many of us remain unified by a decidedly white ontology that feeds a taxonomic impulse to catalog (as a mode of knowing) through binary structuring of “us” and “them,” “critics” and “caretakers.” Worth remembering, Eliade isn’t the only historian of religions guilty of totalizing logics and fascist reliance on the manufacture of “empirical others” in service to our comparative approach: Anybody who is supporting fascism, including Mircea and most of my compatriots, let’s get on with that conversation . . . what bothers me about Americans, as an American, is that they don’t understand that most of them are fascists, that I grew up under fascism, that most black people know fascism. And they don’t seem to understand that. And it’s right below the surface—white power . . . the one conversation you cannot have in this country, on an ordinary level, with most white people, is a conversation about race. They will not talk to you about it.74

NOTES 1. Mircea Eliade, Journal II, 1957–1969 (University of Chicago Press, 1989), 29–30. 2. Ibid. 3. Mircea Eliade, Journal III, 1970–1978 (University of Chicago Press, 1989), 215. 4. Eliade, Journal II, 202. 5. Ibid., 117. 6. Ibid. 7. Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions (Columbia University Press, 1958), 3. 8. Friedrich Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Religion (New York, C. Scribner and company, 1872), http:​//arc​hive.​org/d​etail​s/lec​tures​onsci​enc00​mlle,​ 11–12. 9. Ibid., 16. 10. Ibid., 23. 11. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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12. Ibid., 12–13. 13. Charles H. Long, Ellipsis... (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2018), 289. 14. Annemarie Schimmel, “Summary of the Discussion,” Numen 7, no. 2 (December 1960): 235–39. 15. Mills, The Sociological Imagination. 16. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “The 9th International Congress for the History of Religions,” Numen 5, no. 3 (September 1958): 233–37, 1. 17. Ibid., 234. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 235. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. C. J. Bleeker, “The Future Task of the History of Religions,” Numen 7, no. 2 (December 1960): 221–34, 223. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 225. 25. Masaharu Anesaki, qtd. In Bleeker, “The Future Task of the History of Religions,” 225–26. 26. Bleeker, “The Future Task of the History of Religions,” 226. 27. Ibid. 28. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Marburg: And After?” Numen 7, no. 2 (December 1960): 215–20, 217–18. 29. Ibid., 219. 30. Joseph Kitagawa, “Introduction,” in Joachim Wach, Essays in the History of Religions, ed. Joseph Kitagawa and Gregory D. Alles (Macmillan, 1988), ix–x. 31. Joachim Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions (Macmillan, 1988), 185. 32. Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions, 189. 33. For a succinct though comprehensive overview of Wach’s perspective on salvation, and its relationship to his method in the history of religions, see Wach, Introduction to the History of Religions, 179–196. 34. Eliade, Journal II, 310. 35. Ibid., 309. 36. Ibid., 310. 37. Wach, “The Meaning and Task of the History of Religions (Religionswissenschaft).” 38. Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions, 6. 39. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Crossroad, 1982). 40. Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions, 6–7. 41. Ibid., 7. 42. Ibid., 8. 43. Ibid. 44. For more on this theme, see Steven M. Wasserstrom, “The Master-Interpreter: Notes on the German Career of Joachim Wach (1922–1935),” in Christian Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger, eds., Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 1st edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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45. Kitagawa, “Introduction,” in Essays in the History of Religions, 1988, xv. 46. Ibid., xvii. 47. Ibid., xvi. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., xvii. 50. Wach, Essays in the History of Religions, 139. 51. Kitagawa, “Introduction,” in Essays in the History of Religions, 1988, xvii. 52. Sharpe, “Some Problems of Method in the Study of Religion,” 1. 53. Rolsky, “Charles H. Long and the Re-Orientation of American Religious History,” 750–74, 760. 54. Rolsky, 754–5. 55. Long, Ellipsis…, 313. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. See, Sylvester Johnson, “Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions,” and Kathryn Lofton, “The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography,” in Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler, eds., The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions (Indiana University Press, 2009). 60. Much of Miller’s previous work attends to the sort of boundary-maintenance described by Long, Johnson, and others. See, Monica R. Miller, Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012); and, Miller, Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion. 61. Long, Ellipsis…, 289. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 288. 64. Ibid., 291 n5. 65. Ibid., 287. 66. For another example, see Thomas J. J Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); for analysis of Altizer’s relationship to Long, see, Driscoll, White Lies: Race and Uncertainty in the Twilight of American Religion. 67. Ninian Smart, “Beyond Eliade: The Future of Theory in Religion,” Numen 25, no. 2 (1978): 171–83, https://doi.org/10.2307/3269786, 172. 68. Ninian Smart, “Eliade and the History of Religious Ideas,” The Journal of Religion 60, no. 1 (1980): 67–71, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202336, 67. 69. Eliade, qtd. In Smart, “Beyond Eliade,” 181. 70. Long, Ellipsis…, 314. 71. Ibid., 315. 72. Daniel Dubuisson, “Political and Rhetorical Structure of the Eliadean Text,” in Christian Wedemeyer and Wendy Doniger, eds., Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade, 1st edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 141. 73. Long, Ellipsis…, 315. 74. Ibid., 318.

Chapter 4

What Is “Black” about “Black” Religious Studies? Distinction and Diaspora in the Maintenance of a Field

In his path-blazing effort to outline a theory of black religion, Anthony B. Pinn’s Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion begins by asking two seemingly basic yet insightful questions: What is “black” about black religion? And, what is “religious” about black religion?1 These central organizing questions helped Pinn to establish the thesis that black religion is a quest for complex subjectivity, complex in no small part as it is “made” of the stuff of history and a deeper, inner impulse. Elsewhere, we have relied on, built upon, and deconstructed various aspects of Pinn’s useful theory.2 But we have not yet considered the way that Pinn’s thesis, and the study of African American religions generally, begs the question, in more senses than one. “Black,” as an operationalized identification at work in the social world, is a floating signifier. “Religion,” as Method as Identity holds in tow, is in like manner a rather empty signifier, able to be filled with an assortment of imaginings. Held together as “black religion,” critical awareness of one militates toward the deconstruction of the other. What is black religion, then? One “critical” answer would be: nothing. Yet, the academic study of black religion philosophically begs the question in a different sense, too. This different sense is the topic of this chapter. In order to answer the question of what is “black” about black religious studies, it’s important to begin by addressing its ominous, incendiary, ­co-­constitutive counterpart: white. What is white about religious studies, and what is white, then, about black religious studies? What is black about white religious studies? Asked differently, what is “white” about (white) religion? It is the final one of these questions that animates a certain sort of strangeness in the explicit naming of something that we are not used to naming: normativity. 107

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Take for instance the unfolding public debate that occurred in response to the proliferation of university courses focused on whiteness. One such social “flap” involved “Studies in American Literature/Culture: U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness” offered in 2015 at Arizona State University (ASU) through the department of English. Fox News, among many other constituents on- and off-line, called the course a “disgrace” and “racist.” In fact, the instructor of the course, Assistant Professor Lee Bebout, received hate mail and dozens of hostile communications, with some proposing that the course “suggests an entire race is the problem.”3 In a statement released in January of 2015, ASU indicated that the course “uses literature and rhetoric to look at how stories shape people’s understandings and experiences of race. It encourages students to examine how people talk about—or avoid talking about—race in the contemporary United States.” Calling the course “antiwhite,” one hate mail sender wished this upon the professor: “I look forward to your suicide.” Another suggested: “Maybe just kill yourself and get it over with.” Naming the “other” (blackness) which the big “Other” (whiteness) has co-constitutively produced (similar to assumptions often made that talk of gender = women, or talk of class = poor folk or talk of sexuality = homosexuality, and so on) keeps “the order of things” in their place. It is only when the other’s Other gets named, when the shuffling of categories and classifications get out of place, that the dust of normative comfort becomes shaken and unsettled. No doubt, the distinction is false, implicating as it does a discursive manufacturing that is anything other than innocent (on both ends). Back to the questions posed at the outset of this chapter. When we teach courses such as “Introduction to Black Religions,” “African-American Religious History,” and “Whiteness and Religion,” it is precisely the inside-out question we first ask our students to consider. This question, “what is white religion?” is always met with blank stares and a sense of bewilderment. With the chalkboard split in half—one side black religions and the other . . . white religion—the conceptual familiarity represented by a fast and long list on the former side is always met with hardly anything on the other. It is from this point that we have both argued elsewhere, and will continue to press, that we must come to understand that like the manufacturing of all binaries and oppositions, such creations are always co-constitutive and political in nature.4 The academic study of “black religion” is always seemingly designated as its own distinctive “thing,” “field,” or “area of study.” Meanwhile, “religion” gets to be, just religion, after all. As long as “white religion” can go without naming, without a contextual designator, “black religion” will always, in many ways, champion its own distinction, and thus be regarded as nostalgic for naming its distinction under a cloak of difference. Until white religion—what we might comprehensively regard as a complex of exaggerations of one’s relative distance to social and existential certainty5—is sighted and cited, scholars

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focused on discursive deconstruction will always see a surplus of meaning on the “black” side and have difficulty seeing such abundance on the “white” side. Scholars working from the discourse of critical whiteness in the study of religion have begun to address this oversight by naming “whiteness,” “white religion,” or “white theology,”6 but we are still hard-pressed to find courses in white religion on the roster in many academic departments of religion across the nation. Meanwhile, many of us would agree that today, a department isn’t quite complete without courses on black/African American/Africana religions. This does not mean white religion is not taught. “White religion,” to quote a telling answer from many of our students, “is just religion.” With this in mind, if “white” religion is a redundancy—a distinction upon or within a distinction-making apparatus—“black” religious studies, historically, is the rejection of the weight of white dominance7 but also a reification of the very distinction posed, a distinction that the field of black religion has come to celebrate and privilege as its “experiential” own. At its very “core,” “black” religious studies is historically a rejection of certain appeals to the sui generis vis-à-vis normativity by way of other sorts of normative claims. As examples, in its uses of diaspora, the category of experience, and the past, black religious studies has often allowed the dominant, who are also coded, to go unnamed and decoded. By what strategies does black religious studies “have it both ways?”8 Experience, authenticity, blackness—appeals to these categories are not necessarily outright appeals to a sui generis arrangement, but also a cipher to the past: a rubric, or key of entry of sorts, determining who recognizes “white religion” as a redundancy, and who does not. Stated differently still, when “blackness” or a “black experience” is appealed to, such appeals foreground those who have decided to tell the historically dominant group “NO!” This is not to generalize the motives of folk who study African American, Africana, and black religions. Wide variety exists therein. But an effect of even naming “blackness” or “Africana” necessarily reinforces the marginalization some scholars suggest it seeks to escape by carrying a discursive burden that was and is not of its own making—one that the field has come to celebrate and recast as a historically and experientially specialized space of its “own.” This “NO!” does not mean that black religious studies, or its emergence, is without theoretical or methodological fault or is not often over-reliant upon its own claims to nostalgia, experience, space, place, authenticity and so on, in order to maintain and make its identity possible. The field of black religious studies, we argue, would come back to make various uses of the sui generis as its own tactic and strategy of nostalgia, distinction, and relevance. Indeed, such practices are constitutive features of any identity formation, be it cultural, academic, or otherwise.9 Father of the academic study of African American religion, Charles H. Long suggests that

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the cultural reality of blacks in the United States has been created by those who have the power of cultural signification—and the range of this power in the language of political, social, and cultural reality is enormous. In this regard, blacks are a part of the same structures of cultural categories that create the categories of the primitives and colonized peoples of the contemporary world.10

Scholars interested in assessing or studying black religious studies as data must first come to terms with the notion that this very thing spoken of, studied, and examined would not be possible without assumed white normativity—or alternatively articulated, the privilege for nostalgic appeals that go unrecognized as nostalgia: the ability to create one’s others for one’s own identity in a process that doesn’t have to be named. Structurally, such unmitigated white nostalgia (for a pristine and proper scholarly study) in the study of religion mimics theologically rooted rhetorical appeals and social techniques to “Make America Great Again!” And, for Long, it is precisely by confronting “the religious experience” that scholars are forced “to come to terms with these modalities, affirmative and critical.”11 Thus, as will be addressed in this chapter, it would make sense that black religious studies remains so tethered to and with the great variety of strategies learned from dominance and domination, namely the elephant in the room that is hardly called by name: whiteness and that thing rarely called white religion. This chapter also considers the collective strategies of identification and the creation of “proper objects” of study that lead to identifying the study of black religion as an insider discourse that seemingly transcends discourse on the larger African diaspora by maintaining identity as an immovable and durable signpost, something involving the “orientation” described by Long.12 Such signposts come about in tension: political tensions, epistemological tensions, ethical tensions, racialized tensions. The historicity of such tensions, the veracity of emotional or numinous appeals, the choices of who and what to study against the how and why anyone studies, are all contestable and contested as black religious studies arises out of structural realities where normative “yeses” are met with marginal “nos.” Distinction and diaspora (i.e., strategically using the fabrications of a coherent, recoverable, and nameable past) are two categorical “nos” that have helped to produce this thing called black religious studies. How would analyses and critical discussions about blackness or black religion be altered if we began to consider “diaspora” as not unidirectional, linear, or even geographic (per se), but about the manipulation of distinctions operative (already) in the social field? Focusing on how scholars treat identity/religion in the study of black religion, this chapter rethinks distinctions and diasporic nostalgia as social products—objects of discourse for the maintenance of the field of black religious studies and constituting a religio-racialized13 grammar in talking about

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the social world and social agents. How might a reimagining of “black” as an object of discourse, disconnected from the ontology of blackness, the expectation of “prophetic activism,” and the myth of diasporic homogeneity, retool how the field is fashioned and understood in light of features such as ontology, activism, and origins? Could such a reimagining be possible given the presumed stability of blackness in the development and direction of the field? And for whom would such reimaginings matter? DISTINCTION: BLACKNESS AND THE CREATION OF A “PROPER OBJECT” OF STUDY “Blackness”—treated as a real identity grounded in “experience”—remains an immovable and durable signpost that makes possible the field of black religious studies and holds it together today. In our desire to repurpose and retain the folktale that “black religion” is racially metaphysical in nature— and maintains its uniqueness in and through its refusal of, denial within, and push against whiteness—the identity of the field ultimately relies upon the stability of blackness (as the perpetual marker and signifier of distance) with little interrogation of its socially constructed and discursive edges. A reliance that, above all, perpetuates the nonidentity of whiteness, or (white) religion, and keeps black religion arrested to and confined within a prism of black presence, ultimately denying the discursive naming of that very thing so privileged as to not be named. As the field has emerged, blackness has remained central to both more methodologically traditional theological endeavors as well as black religious studies. Indeed, the lines have been blurred between these disciplines, in part out of a long tradition of using theological language as signification, as seen in Henry McNeal Turner’s pronouncement that “God is a Negro”14 all the way back in 1898, and in even earlier references to “Heaven” or “Canaan Land” in the Spirituals15 referring not to a metaphysical reality, but the geographic North where enslavement was illegal. This is not to suggest that such significations did not come from the lips of “believers,” but that “believing” is a complicated social practice when historical realities and human limitations and possibilities are considered. In African American political history, theological rhetoric and metaphysical appeal have always done more than undergird ontologies of otherworldliness or transcendence. They have worked toward the establishment of an ontology of blackness pushing against normative white arrangements, be they theological or political. Indeed, ontologies of blackness trouble such traditional binaries by recasting a racialized binary in the direction of opposition, Deleuzian plateauing, and other forms of atmospheric occlusion.16

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There is little wonder that the field of black religious studies would be built through an ongoing dialogue proffered by explicit theologians trained in systematics, as well as religious studies scholars trained in the “covert”17 theology of Eliadian religious studies. Even if one were to comparatively explore some perceived difference between black theologian James H. Cone’s Doctrine of God and historian of religions Long’s theory of the first and second creation binary of the oppressed, and barring belief here in something like god, the primary distinction for black religious studies in all its stripes has been this blackness. A couple of focused examples are in order. In one of the first and perhaps most caustic instances of a refutation of white religion, theologian James H. Cone states of his Black Theology and Black Power (1969) that it situated “blackness as the primary mode of God’s presence.”18 Aside from the possibility of any theological pronouncement, Cone’s early work helped to constitute this metaphysics of blackness distinguishing epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic possibilities as no longer housed solely within the purview of a white religious register. Such efforts worked to rescue the capacity to make use of the capital procured through appeals to “divinity” from the hegemony of white normativity. It tapped into the capital of the category of “god” among the normative population to direct attention toward racialized needs, goals, and possibilities. Inspiring a host of intellectual disciplines outside of theology proper, Cone’s efforts continue to inspire and situate the preeminent theme of black religion today: blackness. And despite the still-popular idea that Cone is no theological technician, he knew exactly what he was doing. Extending beyond the disciplinary housing of theology, Long’s work in the 1970s and 1980s might rightly be responsible for setting in motion the study of African American religion as distinct from black theology. Simultaneously validating the “black” study of religion within the larger field of religious studies, while critiquing black theological discourses for reinforcing a white religious sensibility through misrecognition of the limits of theology as an exercise or discipline, Long called Cone and others to task for having not realized that the new “theologies opaque” (represented by Cone) had something to say about the “opacity of reality.”19 Long simultaneously suggests that “these pronouncements by the opaque ones deny the authority of the white world to define their reality, and deny the methodological and philosophical meaning of transparency as a metaphor for a theory of knowledge”20 while also calling these theologians to finish the battle by giving up this thing called “theology.” In short, Long was doing (then) what critical theorists of religion are telling us needs to happen now. For Long, “opacity” served as a marker of blackness, while “transparency” spoke to the purported redundancy of something like “white religion.” Opaque theologies told “theology” its transparency was a farce; “white theology” was exposed in this moment.

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For Long, “theologies . . . are about the hegemony of power,”21 and consequentially Long called Cone and others to the task of not simply possessing “the theological battlefield wrested from their foes” but of providing “deconstructive theologies—that is to say, theologies that undertake the destruction of theology as a powerful mode of discourse.”22 Long at once calls for a rejection of traditional theological methodological approaches precisely because the lines of whiteness and blackness, or “oppressor/oppressed” (to use Long’s more common language), cut more drastically on the conditions of those at margins, those “opaque” thinkers, social actors, humans. Such opaque bodies, for Long, “were facts of history and symbols of a new religious depth.”23 Taken together, Cone and Long set in motion the discourses that have shaped and continue to shape what we call black religious studies. Effectively, they worked to create the field’s proper object of study: race vis-à-vis contact. Whether theologically or ethically instituted, or hermeneutically suspicious, black religion has been operating according to the “new religious depth” offered by the category of blackness weaponized by Cone, Long, and other thinkers writing in the wake of the turbulent 1960s.24 Blackness remains axiomatic for the field of black religious studies, its presumed “proper object” of study and attention. Theological source material investigations, historical examinations of lesser-known religious practices, and philosophical and theoretical attempts to sight “black” religion work together in an ongoing effort to produce a better sense of what this blackness is, what it can do, how it should be approached, and its intense variety. Further, today, the field divides along the theological/religious studies distinction, with blackness binding those divisions. Two scholars well known for having worked to trouble certain dimensions of this major distinction are (the already noted) Anthony Pinn and also philosopher/ethicist Victor Anderson, both of them serving as translators of sorts, trickster figures moving between the two camps within the study of black religion. African American humanist theologian Pinn represents a shift away from traditional theological appeal and has sought to define black religion historically as a “quest for complex subjectivity,”25 an attempt to transform oneself and community from having been an object of history, into a shaper of history. Inspired by Long as to the import of intellectual enterprise dislodged from the maintenance of the god idea, Pinn’s characterization of black religion nevertheless reinforces a rather rigid, and unexamined, understanding of blackness. His theory of black religion brings together an already unstable category of history with an equally unstable (if not more so) elusive “inner impulse” driving this quest, with the impact of reinforcing the purported stability of the black experience as transferable from one person to the next, given a set of underexamined contingencies of history. In short, Pinn’s work has been vital for demarcating and distinguishing African American religious

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studies from its confessional origins and cousins, but this success has come from reinforcing historical circumstance as something knowable, usable, and more certain than close scrutiny of these categories suggests. Pinn’s analytic turn to history and this inner impulse have had the paradoxical impact of reinforcing a troubling appeal to the black experience as something distinct (albeit variable), even while, in that turn, he has been instrumental in carving out intellectual space within the academy for a wealth of contemporary scholars to craft arguments, find teaching positions, and attend to the business of speaking back—firmly—to white religion and its ecclesial as much as intellectual “priests.” In short, Pinn’s work marks a moment of growth and expansion for the field beyond the confines of Christianity or theistic belief made possible by a concession to the normativity and acute hegemonic weight of the category of blackness. An alternative trade-off has also taken place. Arriving on the intellectual scene at around the same time as Pinn, and trained as a philosophical ethicist, Victor Anderson in his first book Beyond Ontological Blackness set about to articulate many of the epistemological— and most importantly, ethically troubling—dimensions of reliance on monolithic notions of blackness within the field, historically.26 More concerned with such racialized ontological categories than the troubling dimensions of the theological categories confronted by Pinn, Anderson argued that the field of black religion has been dominated by a reliance on the notion of ontological blackness. This “ontological blackness is a covering term that connotes categorical, essentialist, and representational languages depicting black life and experience.”27 For Anderson, reliance on ontological blackness was (and is) troubling because it falsely assumes that something called “blackness” or the “black experience” is monolithic, knowable, and somehow distinct from its constituent other: whiteness. Anderson’s work sought to trouble the propensity for ontologization of experience, an intellectual tendency learned from “European intellectuals” who “defined their age and themselves as heroic, epochal, and exhibiting racial genius.”28 To these ends, his refutation of ontological blackness was a refutation of “the blackness that whiteness created.”29 Anderson’s efforts to trouble the stability of blackness as the proper object of study or orientation for black religious studies shifted attention away from black religion as a field motivated by self-definition to a field still wrestling with the definitions imposed onto black bodies by a white religious sensibility and propensity for distinctions based on fabrication. His problem with this arrangement was that black religion inevitably reinforced what had been learned from white religion. One might argue that Anderson exchanges one (inaccessible) proper object for another, opacity for transparency, and his training in philosophy and ethics certainly leads normative claims to color some of his positions. But more helpful here is to recognize Anderson’s work,

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and the work of Pinn and Anderson in tandem, as representative of the give and take, the push and pull, the epistemological back and forth emblematic of a field of study wrestling with the limits of its inherited Western rationality to do anything more (or less) than presuppose some sort of transcendental signifier so that knowledge, or “meaning,” might be found, made, or deconstructed (depending on one’s training and vantage point). Black religious studies is born and has grown out of a reliance on, and wrestling with, adherence to ontological markers (e.g., “god,” “blackness”) making possible the refutation of yet other (often unnamed) ontological markers that reinforce the primacy of white religion as normative and yet concealed through purported transparency. More might be said of the implications of this characterization. The beginning of this chapter suggests that blackness and black religious studies as a discipline are treated thematically and heuristically as conceptual markers for those scholars of religion who tell white religious studies “NO!” This point can now be fleshed out more fully. As the proper object of study for the field, blackness can be understood either experientially or ethically. Experientially speaking, blackness might be conflated with historical circumstance (with history fully unknowable and uncertain, no doubt) wherein the proper object of the field is understood as the embodied representation of thinkers, scholars, writers and the like, whose very presence shifts the terms of intellectual debate and knowledge production. Ethically speaking, blackness might rightly be dislodged from any appeal to history or a collective experience and simply be understood as a solid posture of defiance against normative, racialized proscriptions (as equally unquantifiable, elusive, impossible to verify) that purport to know what to know, how to know, and when to know or act. Qualitatively speaking, parsing these possibilities might bring about greater analytic clarity or epistemological certainty, but it remains an open question—for black religious studies, at least—if such efforts would characterize growth of the field—or would these efforts dismiss the field as somehow relying on faulty racialized presuppositions that merely mark black data as “tainted,” black voices as “suspicious,” or black gains in social power as questionably achievable. Shifting attention away from blackness as a proper object of focus, study, orientation and the like (for this field, anyway) might then be paradoxically welcome news for some and a warning sign for others. For, as the “proper object”30 distinguishing the field of black religious studies from the larger religious studies academy comes into greater analytic focus, having been exposed to the intensified scrutiny of critical engagement, then the qualitative central distinction marking the field is the quintessential “NO!” That is, blackness was and remains—whether theologically housed or invoked by disciplines more influenced by the social sciences—a marker rooted in rationality itself. It is the rejection of the assumption that an assumed ideological

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distinction might be grounds for the proliferation of yet other intellectual, social, civic, aesthetic, and ethical distinctions. However, the nostalgic dimensions of these arrangements and sentiments call for further analyses and interrogation. NOSTALGIA: “STANDARD NARRATIVES” AND THE MAKING OF AN IDENTITY Both amnesia (forgetfulness) and nostalgia (false memory) are tactical and dangerous. By no means is the academic study of black religion alone in the manner in which it tropes such strategies to forge distinctions, create linear and connective pasts, and maintain—to use philosopher William D. Hart’s term—a “standard narrative” that aids in stabilizing a field that is unified and coherent, grounded in the recovery of black bodies and an “evidenced” black past. After all, is this not how histories of all types are manufactured and maintained—with amnesia assisting in forgetting certain aspects of a history in order to perpetuate and market the history of our own making, so conceived? The making of the field of black religion has relied upon the heavy lifting of nostalgia wrapped in the guise and discursive tropes of “longings,” “strivings,” “yearnings,” and “memory,” to name a few. While some cite black religion as pointing toward and representative of charting the movement of black bodies, the black experience in and through time and space, along the coordinates of a flat and teleological history, scholars such as Hart warn that we are often confused between the ontological and the discursive. He notes that “there is a powerful nostalgia in this narrative for the same volksgeist that animates the Soul Narrative: a principle of black identity, unity, and essence, that traverses space-time and yet somehow remains the same.”31 Hart then offers the notion of Afro-eccentricity as a means of naming this peculiar twoness of blackness in the study of religion, suggesting that “AfroEccentricity is a trope for ways of being that deviate from the normativity of the Black Church narrative: a critical pun on the notion of Afrocentricity, a burlesque of the way that this notion reproduces the Standard Narrative under the figure of ‘ancestor.’”32 Hart pushes this even further when he states outright that black religion must be seen, above all, as a “discursive artifact.”33 The discursive longing for a coherent and stable black past is made possible through a variety of strategic “standard narratives” that often confuse aspects of time (recovering a “black past”), space (linear motifs of black bodies moving from oppression to liberation, object to subject), and travel (nostalgia vis-à-vis diasporic travel beyond time, made possible by revisionist history). So a critical perspective on nostalgia, then, where black religious studies is concerned—taking seriously blackness’s propensity for the “NO!”—would

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be understood as ‘“the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetitions and denies the repetition’s capacity to define identity’. . . . To unearth the fragments of nostalgia one needs a dual archeology of memory and of place, and a dual history of illusions and of actual practices.”34 The material (what counts as data/proper object of study) and discursive (how we use such materiality to theorize the discourse) domains of black religions (and their diasporic edges—as in embodied movement, discursive trope, and rhetorical ritual), both “here” and “abroad,” rely upon the manner in which time and space are understood through such technical designators. “Actual practices” noted through a critical register would not amount to something in the past or present that is findable or knowable, but rather would demonstrate the practices of nostalgic longing and distinction-making, reinforced by the unknowability of a proper object (i.e., blackness) and the continuous “mourning” of the ineffectiveness of longing with nostalgic appeal. What’s more, notions of “lived reality,” “functional necessity,” “existential wrestling,” and the search for a more complex “identity” associated with paradoxical multiplicities of being both black and religious, would see time and space as placeholders for recuperating a lost identity adrift in the annals of history. This process becomes concretized when scholars respond to the arbitrariness of the category of “religion” by ignoring the arbitrariness of the category of “blackness” and when responding to the arbitrariness of the category of “blackness” by ignoring the arbitrariness of the category of “religion.” We have argued elsewhere that talk of “orientation” (by way of Long) and “ultimate concern” (by way of Paul Tillich) becomes inherited in the study of black religion as proxy for both religion and identity.35 These seemingly competing narratives strive to chart the nature and meaning of the movement of black bodies across space and time, hemispheric realities, geographies of difference, and cartographical shifts in changing patterns of religiosity for the study of black life. In the ever-growing economy of markets and ideas, differentiated conceptions of designators such as “Diaspora,” “Africa,” “Origins,” “Religions,” “Blackness,” and the like are exchanged, bought, and sold for a variety of different social, cultural, disciplinary, and political reasons promulgated by broader publics, scholars, mythologists, and everyday social actors. So, what goes into naming and classification? How do we establish and regulate relationships of significance? Just as a signifier such as “religion” or “blackness” or “gender” often gets used to depict a certain trait as universal, cross-cultural, experiential, and stable—these same mechanisms can serve to distinguish one thing from another—religion is “this” and not “that,” and so on. Ethicist Peter Paris’s 1995 work The Spirituality of African Peoples comes to mind as an example of how signifiers attached to “Africa” are then applied to a similarly constructed concept of “Religion.” His turn to

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“Africanisms—beneficence, forbearance, justice, etc.,”36 operate in the classificatory manner we are describing here. How might “diaspora” function as means of “absolutizing the relative”37 cultural artifacts of a (yet still arbitrary) data set, even while simultaneously “legitimating the arbitrary”38 relativization through discursive power arrangements (diasporic studies, religious studies, and so on)? In what follows, we chart representative intellectual moves and strategies that manufacture distance by way of nostalgia in the academic study of black religion—discursive tactics that bind together the past and the present in manufacturing a stable identity and field; in short, the making of the “black” of black “religion.” USING THE PRESENT TO CREATE A PAST “I once was lost, but now I’m found / Was blind but now I see.” These words from the old spiritual “Amazing Grace,” quite often cited among and rehearsed in circles of black religion, provide insight into the manner in which the field of black religious studies is fundamentally undergirded by a powerful desire and longing to create a stable past in search of a present identity. Designators such as the “X” (i.e., Malcolm X) and names given to organizations such as “The Lost Found Nation of Islam” highlight a shared sense of cultural recuperation through discursive nostalgic means. This is accomplished in a variety of ways. Let’s begin with a widely used “standard narrative”: that of black bodies historically moving from object to subject. In order to make possible a coherent and stable present, one strategy has been to show and chart the manner in which black bodies have gone from kings/queens (fully human) to chattel (less than human) struggling their way back to five-fifths human (full subjects). In such a constructed trajectory, history becomes flattened, and the back-and-forth movement of black bodies in and through time and space becomes theorized as seeking and desiring recuperation and reclamation of that which was lost in the pernicious history of marginalization. In his examination of African American religious life, religious studies scholar Derek S. Hicks focuses attention on “the manner in which Christianity has functioned as a solvent of oppression for African Americans.”39 With such a concern in mind, Hicks takes as his point of departure the “antebellum enslaved experience.”40 Pushing the metaphor of recovery further, Hicks points to the “underlying black Christians’ struggles for social transformation” as “a unique spirit of reclamation oriented by a concern with healing and desire for wholeness in the face of oppression.”41 Over and against a trope of “therapeutic recalibration,” Hicks begins from the narrative of “fractured identities”42 and the impact of chattel slavery and the maltreatment of

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enslaved black bodies, historically. What does beginning in and with deficit and loss over and against fractured histories and identities accomplish? Does it not provide an impetus, a rationale, a logic of practice from which then a story from trauma to wholeness can be established, ultimately marking and making the narrative of black religion as something exclusively transformative, therapeutic, affirmative, and justice-oriented? The academic study of black religion is not alone in this respect. The sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, whose The Souls of Black Folk (1903) serves as proto-black religious study begins with a similar point of reference, asking, “How does it feel to be a problem?”43 Such a question is firmly rooted in and grounded upon the historical reality of black bodies being constructed and seen as inferior. Let us be clear: at stake here is not historical “truthfulness” or “accuracy” regarding how black bodies were actually seen and treated, but rather the manner in which the repetition of particular standard narratives such as “loss” and “recovery” become powerful discursive tools in maintaining a particular description of what the study of black religion is and what it ought to be—how it is to be maintained. In the constant quest to find something of black identity, vis-à-vis blackness, a kind of mourning is exposed through the nostalgic appeal, not in a longing for a return to a problematic past, but in the longing for a less problematic future. In this first part of DuBois’s chapter titled “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” we more clearly see how the precariousness of being a (black) problem, historically, is given weight and authority by binding together the moral and the political. Such an interweaving of these two domains becomes imbued with rhetoric of crisis, struggle, and an intense historical search for closure and full retrieval—that which would come to be understood as the spiritual strivings of black folk, namely black religion. It is here that something like black religion becomes powerful proxy and mode for identity, politicization, and prophetic democratic sensibilities. For DuBois, a peek behind the “veil” of blackness (i.e., those color lines made visible and invisible) provides insight into the twoness of black life in America. The binding together of the material and psychological “realities” of slaves (less than human) as canvas for the “spiritual strivings” of people of “African descent” becomes a hallmark feature of and cornerstone supporting how the field of black religious studies unfolds today. Manufacturing a coherent and stable past of less than assists in the discursive making of a field ultimately concerned with and situated between recovering a past to create the present, and using the present to tell the story of the past. Here, time and space become collapsed, and travel takes place at the site of “historical memory.” In discussing the archaic structure in the religious consciousness of black religion in Long’s formulation, Hart notes that it retains within it an “alpha and omega” and “beginnings and endings” sensibility that “appears to be a historical phenomenon” in charting the traces of the involuntary presence

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of black people in America—but yet, “on the other hand, it appears to be an ahistorical phenomenon, a Kantian thing-in-itself that persists across space-time and in the face of cultural transformations.”44 According to Hart, such problematics arise at the site of the manner in which Long constructs his datum and understands history of religions: “If Long had only said more about this datum. What is its status?”—referring to Long’s take on the “archaic structure in their religious consciousness” in his talk of both religious and secular black religious expressions, such as Moorish Temple, Black Jews, and Black Muslims.45 Long is not alone. Take for instance the apt point made in the classic text Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans by historian and theologian Gayraud S. Wilmore when he writes, Since the early 1960s black believers—Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews and African traditionalists—have attempted to express what they believed were some of the distinctive attributes of African American religion—the “spiritual strivings” (DuBois)—of oppressed and scattered Africans who refused to surrender their humanity under enslavement and never lost sight of the freedom and justice they believe were God-given.46

Although not exhaustive, such claims and statements are quite representative of the creation of the shared and common underlying trope within the study of black religion—namely, racial oppression and a history of regaining a lost identity (i.e., Africa, blackness, etc.). History becomes figured as fragmented and the movement of black bodies (diasporic travel) as recuperating something lost. Then, nostalgia works in the very form and guise of black religion (for Wilmore and many after him) as that which is prophetic and justice-oriented—a socially interested intellectual move which not only gives an impression of all black people (who seek social change and full recognition) as religious; but also, that black religion, in form, content, and structure is always about the work and business of social transformation and political change: prophetic witness. Posturing the “black” in “black religion” and the work of the “religious” in “black religion” in such essentialized ways homogenizes the more mundane yet no less important strategies and techniques that include but also extend beyond recasting the category of religion. Does this logical fallacy not maintain and obscure, in part, the normativity of white religion and theology as uncoded, thus ultimately perpetuating the very nostalgia that it relies upon in its admission of guilt? No way out, black religious studies, as much as black religion, as such, are cast perpetually in a cloud of distinction and nostalgia, efforts at distinction through nostalgia, and still further distinctions.

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From such figurations of a reconstructed history, diaspora and appeals to diasporic travel become constructed and strategically troped as the means and ends of black religion—the reason for its making and the very “thing” it seeks to “get back to” and recuperate. This is poignantly articulated by the prolific black literary genius, American exile, and transatlantic commuter James Baldwin in 1972 in No Name in the Street: One day they were going home, and they knew exactly where home was. They, thus, held something within them which they would never surrender to France. But on my side of the ocean, or so it seemed to me then, we had surrendered everything, or had had everything taken away, and there was no place for us to go: we were home. The Arabs were together in Paris, but the American blacks were alone. The Algerian poverty was absolute, their stratagems grim, their personalities, for me, unreadable.47

It is within this very fragmentation and feeling of loss that black religion and its reliance upon a (re)constructed past then seeks to forge its identity through these (and many other) operational acts of identification. Such acts are not separated from the inventions of black studies, black religion, and so on, which became popularized in the 1960s and 1970s in U.S. institutions of higher learning. In “The Uses of Diaspora” Brent Hayes Edwards notes that during the period when black studies departments came online in U.S. universities, “invocations of diaspora were central and strategic in almost all of the mission statements of black studies and African American studies departments,”48 bringing our attention to how the definition of diaspora was often split in ways that separated the “African past from a U.S. present” grounded in the diasporan Africans spread across the world.49 Edwards goes on to rightly note the very tensions produced in the having-it-both-ways of uses of diaspora as both a necessary intervention and a strategy of reification: “The discourse of diaspora is both enabling to black studies, in the service of such an ‘intervention,’ and inherently a risk, in that it can fall back into either racial essentialism or American vanguardism.”50 In the widely cited essay “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Rogers Brubaker notes that classical uses of the term are more often than not employed historically to reference ideas of conceptual homeland, despite the explosion of its universalized applications, thus diminishing the concept’s discriminating power and ability to make diasporic distinctions.51 Brubaker goes on to suggest three core elements and criteria that make diaspora semantically and conceptually possible, among them are what he refers to as “Homeland Orientation,” as “a real or imagined ‘homeland’ as an authoritative source of value, identity, and loyalty,”52 wherein notions of return and collective myth and memory prop up and animate what

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diaspora proposes to be and do. Referring to the bulk of diaspora studies in the mid-twentieth century in the United States, anthropologist Deborah A. Thomas notes that “this body of work, on the one hand, elaborated an analysis of cultural continuities, retentions, and syncretisms—in other words, an analysis of Africanisms within American societies. On the other hand, it focused on comparative diasporic cultures, the kind of ‘black folk here and there’ approach often associated with St. Clair Drake.”53 Thomas goes on to argue that the “epistemological violence” produced in and through the culturalist turn placed more attention on “how blacks in the West were connected to roots in Africa” rather than “where black populations stood in relation to states”—which, she suggests, ultimately became secondary in diaspora studies.54 With this brief and truncated history of diaspora in mind, in thinking through what makes black religious studies “black,” the shared “experience” of loss and struggle in what cultural theorist Paul Gilroy calls the “black Atlantic” (depicted as a zone of cultural contact) is precisely the very designation that almost always tethers the discourse today—a “double consciousness” of wanting to be the thing that was snatched away (historical memory of identity) and having to reconcile with being that thing that was forced upon one (Americanness, Westernness, etc.). This narrative, likewise, became an important experience in the remaking of life options (black religion). Worth quoting at length, Gilroy gets at the tension in this way: The problem of weighing the claims of national identity against other contrasting varieties of subjectivity and identification has a special place in the intellectual history of blacks in the West. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness . . . is only the best-known resolution of a familiar problem which points towards the core dynamic of racial oppression as well as the fundamental antinomy of diaspora blacks. How has this double consciousness, what Richard Wright calls the dreadful objectivity which follows from being both inside and outside the West, affected the conduct of political movements against racial oppression and towards black autonomy? Are the inescapable pluralities involved in the movements of black peoples, in Africa and exile, ever to be synchronized? . . . Does posing these questions in this way signify anything more than the reluctant intellectual affiliation of diaspora blacks to an approach which mistakenly attempts a premature totalization of infinite struggles?55 This legacy conditions the continuing aspiration to acquire a supposedly authentic, natural, and stable “rooted” identity. This invariant identity is in turn the premise of a thinking “racial” self that is both socialized and unified by its connection with other kindred souls encountered usually, though not always, within the fortified frontiers of those discrete ethnic cultures which also happen to coincide with the contours of a sovereign nation-state that guarantees their continuity.56

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Thus, this (desire for) stable and rooted identity (or, the search for its kind) is often cast as the dilemma by which black religious studies seeks to isolate, locate, recuperate, recast, and remake, often following a linear and teleological trajectory that follows a loss => gain (crisis => resolution) logic whereby black religion becomes both the question and the answer grounded in a nameable, observable, unified experience of the past that all peoples in the African diaspora can identify with. Such a diasporic tactic (of reclamation) comes to overemphasize and overdetermine black identity, making what is in fact both discursively co-constitutive with white identity and other identifications, and heterogeneous, seemingly homogenous and stable—no doubt, cases of “mistaken identity” in the strategies to recreate and represent fragmented identities are sure to emerge. Through such diasporic tactics, black religion becomes the conduit by which “home” or “homeland” is found again—a tall order which thereby gives black religion and the performance of it the power to continually create and recuperate the lost/found identities of the African diaspora in the Americas. But what happens to the “black” in “black religion” when this diasporic formula and assumption is troubled? In Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, queer theorist Jasbir Puar poignantly and rightly notes that diaspora discourses create the homeland, they do not arise from it. Maps can be used to build territory. Puar suggests that the connective tissue of a queer diaspora is initially affective, and such a shift allows for recognizing that diasporic connections are made, and that diasporic bodies can exist, in multiple times and places at once. Hence, her move toward a notion of “queer diaspora” was intended to keep the useful aspects of diaspora theory, but not situate any cultural affinities or identities in terms of a “common ancestral homeland.”57 Returning to the proxy offered to black religion by the data set of her text, she argues that the assemblage of the “monster-terrorist-fag” “troubles queer diasporic exceptionalisms, but also impels their exponential fortification and proliferation.”58 The origin narratives usually attached to diasporic discourses carry baggage that we ought to consider jettisoning, as these origin narratives assume fixed identities in troubling ways. But people are certainly on the move (and always have been, some by choice, force, and circumstance which requires varying levels of attention and specificity), and part of that movement involves the forging of relationships of affinity and emotion (affect) through diasporic discourse. One might be Sikh, meaning one (is thought to) come from South Asia, but really might be from Brooklyn, but either way, that doesn’t necessarily matter. One might really be from South Asia, or one might be from Brooklyn too, or both. But, who really cares? What we know, however, is that while this sort of appeal to origins “works,” there is, in reality, no proper way for one to act like one is really from South Asia, Africa, Central Europe, or the center of Brooklyn,

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NY. “Home” is where you make it. It is “this shift from origin to affection, from South Asia as unifying homeland to contagions . . . that troubles queer diasporic exceptionalisms.”59 Reminding us of the complexity and multiplicative nature of identities, always shifting over time and space, Puar offers the example of a Pakistani man who says his sexuality has had to take a back seat to his ethnicity; thus, she shifts to assemblage theory in considering the “turbaned body” as a move from what these “real” bodies or objects purport to carry with them in the way of identity or identities, and toward a series of affective “lines of flight,” as she calls them. Puar says it in this way: My aim is to rethink turbaned terrorist bodies and terrorist populations in relation to and beyond the ocular, that is, as affective and affected entities that create fear but also feel the fear they create, and assemblage of contagions . . . sutured not through identity or identification but through the concatenation of disloyal and irreverent lines of flight—partial, transient, momentary, and magical.60

Puar is interested in making sense of the way such bodies serve as storing houses for “data.” That is, there is nothing, no signifier actually marking or connecting them—the “terrorists,” save our projection of “data” onto them. Therefore, to talk of the identity as real or fake is beside the point. The “terrorist” is assuredly “real” and many “Africans” were certainly stolen and made slaves, and the Middle Passage was absolutely a very real thing, which impacted the life options, identity, and well-being of blacks (and whites) around the world. But such an object or identity is also made from the combination of the attributes we project onto it, and the flights away from those attributes. We have “data bodies”61 and there is nothing intrinsic to them save the data they present to other data bodies. Such a tension is posed, captured, and noted in Baldwin’s words cited above from 1972’s No Name in the Street, where he described the import and impact of the notion of “home.” Baldwin’s exile didn’t mean escape, not for himself or for others in France. In fact, his words give voice to the manner in which his travel made it more difficult, not less, to see the “personalities” of Africans in France. Does the “black” in “black religion” become a discursive space to travel and reclaim that which was lost? What happens when one person’s escape (i.e., Baldwin in Paris62) is another’s surrender, such as French Algerians in France, Syrian refugees in Germany, Muslim communities in Switzerland, undocumented immigrants in the United States, some of whom have commuted, others of whom who characterize their situation in these places as a “diaspora within a diaspora”? How ought areas of specialization such as black religion come to use, explore, and chart diasporic travel and movement without positing ahistorical points of origin? And, what happens to the theory and mobility of diaspora,

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when movement, traditionally conceived, is impossible given protracted life options under continued neocolonial practices? Under conditions of the latter question, how is “home” forged, how does one know where to go when there is seemingly nowhere to go? Attention to such questions will assist in identifying and (re)theorizing the very strategies and tactics that secure and make possible the illusions (and perpetuate the material effects of) distinct, coherent, and unified bonds and affinities of group formations and practices (upon which theories of diaspora heavily rely, and which essentialist assumptions of blackness require). With one-way notions of travel abandoned, and the mirror turned on the complexity of escape/surrender dichotomies, it is our hope that additional attention to such queries in the study of black religion will assist in a more robust understanding of the cultural tactics, strategies, and manipulations that racialized social actors use to navigate the legally and culturally protracted options of life under the rubric of diasporic flows. In his widely formative essay “Perspectives for a Study of African-American Religion in the United States,” Long notes that Africa (geographically and symbolically) serves as both “historical reality” and “religious image” in the study of black religion.63 Diasporic strategy becomes geographically tethered to “the” place where black bodies were stolen—the “place” of one’s physical being and origins. Here we get a sense of the immense role black religion is said and expected to play in the life of the African diasporic subject, such that, even if he had no conscious memory of Africa, the image of Africa played an enormous part in the religion of the black man. The image of Africa, an image related to historical beginnings, has been one of the primordial religious images of great significance . . . a place where the natural and ordinary gestures of the black man were and could be authenticated.64

Long goes on to remind the reader that this functioning center of the image of Africa is symbolically sui generis for black religion, namely because this diasporic troping of and connecting to home, connects black people to land/ place—a coup for a community of people in America who see themselves as both without home and without land. Thus, land is given a “religious” importance and orientation, and fabricates and authenticates the perceived absence and lack. This image is pregnant with signification, historical and religious possibilities which then become projected onto what it means to be black in America and the vital role religion plays in the finding and fortification of identity, as such, whereby the “involuntary presence” of black being in America, according to Long and many others, becomes theorized as religious. In a strident effort to assert the agency of black bodies, to demonstrate the manner in which they were not fully determined and rendered docile under such historical conditions of limitation, the “black” in black “religion”

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becomes the object of the field’s study: “He had to experience the truth of his negativity and at the same time transform and create an-other reality. Given the limitations imposed upon him, he created on the level of his religious consciousness.”65 “Black” as that which was “lost and (now) found” tethered to place, space, and home (image of Africa), functions as the perpetual thingin-itself whereby the mundanity of human practices of signification, recuperation, and recasting come to be understood as religious in nature. In this sense, black religion is not an oxymoron; it is (at least) the raw surplus fueling knowledge production in the academic study of religion in the wake of the study of white religion’s provincial limits. The image of Africa would no doubt come to ebb-and-flow in the field of black religions, with some religious sensibilities outright rejecting claims to Africa as “home” (e.g., the African Hebrew Israelites of Dimona), but what has remained a discursive constant is the diasporic tactic of representing and repurposing blackness premised upon an arbitrary lost/found relationship whereby racialized identity becomes foregrounded in “black religion” as operating on the level of utmost significance and serving as a logic of practice for the field of study. Such authenticating devices sometimes operate at the level of explicitly naming racialized identity, debating particular monikers (such as “Black Religion,” “African-American Religion,” “Diasporic Religiosity,” “African Traditional Religions,” “Africana Religions,” and so on) in the field—debates that tell us less about the black identities forged, and more about the politics of blackness at stake in these areas of study. The “black” in “black religion” provides a discursive time-travel (diaspora) of ontological recuperation/adjudication while “religion” serves the purpose of metaphysical significance and social transformation, allowing subjects to become diasporic through conversion and membership. This perpetual prefix to “religion” maintains, however, the difference that difference produced, highlighting the marginalized burden of naming that which was “lost,” and further obscuring the normativity that is named-without-naming in the academic study of religion (i.e., whiteness). What would happen to the “black” in black “religion” if diaspora comes to mark not actual or (only) single-directional travel (i.e., Africa => Middle Passage => New World => Syncretism) but rather, the manipulation of distance (while in a place of limitation conceived as “home” or “exile” or “surrender”) so as to address the challenges of yet other distances imposed on people in space and time? THE PAST IS PRESENT Moving once again to the pioneering work of Long, his well-known rendering of the interpretive lens characterizing the religions of the oppressed

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provides concrete and proxy examples of the sensibilities of black religion and black religious studies, alike. That is, in the wake of the above argument, Long’s theory helps to demonstrate just why black religious studies has the tendency to look like black religion: “These movements of the oppressed cannot be understood in the terms of the older movements of the world, for they presuppose the specific nature of modernity, and modernity itself is a form of critique; these movements thus constitute a critique of the critique.”66 A few pages later, Long offers one of his more well-known passages: The oppressed must deal with both the fictive truth of their status as expressed by the oppressors, that is, their second creation, and the discovery of their own autonomy and truth—their first creation. . . . The oppressive element in the religions of the oppressed is the negation of the image of the oppressor and the discovery of the first creation . . . for in seeking a new beginning in the future, it must perforce imagine an original beginning.67

Here, the “oppressive element” described by Long might be understood as the “white” of black religion. That is, in responding to the nostalgic longings of a normative arrangement wherein certain voices are cast as silent, certain sorts of appropriation of that initial arrangement are necessitated. Whether theorizing “religions of the oppressed” or situating a critical perspective on the scholarship of those oppressed by the intransigencies of (white) religion, nostalgia and distinction rule the battlefields of both, and are nostalgically presumed between the two. Nostalgia, where black religious studies is concerned, is about finding justifications for telling white religion “NO!” This final point offers a critical rejoinder, then, to a critical assessment and rendering of what’s “black” about black religious studies. If white religion is to be registered as a redundancy, then black religion’s propensity for nostalgia and distinction (hallmarks of the field) foregrounds awareness of this sleightof-hand tactic of Modernity, of rationality—and, what can be learned from white religion and white religious studies is increasing awareness of its own nostalgic durability. NOTES 1. Pinn, Terror and Triumph. 2. See, Miller, Religion and Hip Hop; and, Christopher Driscoll and Monica R. Miller, “Niggas in Paris? Traveling between the ‘Who’ and ‘What’ of Diaspora in the Study of African American Religion,” Journal of Africana Religions 4, no. 1 (2016): 28–53, doi:10.5325/jafrireli.4.1.0028; Driscoll, White Lies. 3. http:​ / /www ​ . usat ​ o day. ​ c om/s ​ t ory/ ​ n ews/ ​ n atio ​ n /201 ​ 5 /03/ ​ 3 0/pr ​ o f-re ​ c eive ​ s hat​e-mai​l-ove​r-pro​blem-​of-wh​itene​ss/70​69739​4/ (accessed May 22, 2015).

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4. Miller, Religion and Hip Hop, see Chapter 1; Driscoll, White Lies, see Chapter 3. 5. Driscoll, White Lies. 6. See, James W. Perkinson, White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); See, also, Jennifer Harvey, Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 7. Popular progenitors of this thesis on black religion include Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans, revised 3rd edition (Orbis Books, 1998); and, Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer, African American Religion: Varieties Of Protest & Accommodation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002). 8. Miller, Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion, 87–96. 9. See Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity. 10. Long, Significations, 8. 11. Ibid., 9. 12. Ibid., 7. 13. Initial drafts of this chapter predate the publication of historian Judith Weisenfeld’s 2017 New World A-Coming. Weisenfeld articulates a longstanding practice of African Americans appealing to religion as a means of troubling protracted, circumscribed racialized identifications, and provides rich documentary evidence of this practice. Such a practice fits within the notion of religio-racial identity (as used here) but does not serve as an exhaustive representation of the deeply co-constituted nature of these identifications. Our point here is meant to convey that “racial” or “religious” acts of identification always signify on the same sets of bodies. Any sacred/profane distinction is a social distinction. See, Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: NYU Press, 2017). 14. Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (Yale University Press, 2008), 231. 15. Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2001). 16. Contemporary examples of the ongoing reliance on ontologies of blackness at the interstices of critical and social theory include, but are not limited to, Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014); Joseph R. Winters, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016); C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University Of Minnesota Press, 2017). Not to mention scores of trained theologians and ethicists who make more explicit use of ostensibly “theological” categories of identification, such as Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2015); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010), and so many more. 17. Russell T. McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (Routledge, 2003).

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18. James H. Cone, Black Theology & Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), vii. 19. Long, Significations, 207. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 209. 22. Ibid., 210. 23. Ibid., 211. 24. For more on these thinkers, see James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). 25. Pinn, Terror and Triumph, 173. 26. Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (Continuum Intl Pub Group, 1999). 27. Ibid., 11. 28. Ibid., 13. 29. Ibid. 30. Here, we are working with the notion of “proper object” articulated by Judith Butler, in “Against Proper Objects,” 1–26; and, we are also following the path set by historian Sylvester Johnson’s powerful essay “Religion Proper and Proper Religion.” 31. William David Hart, Afro-Eccentricity: Beyond the Standard Narrative of Black Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 33. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid., 1. 34. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2008), xviii. 35. See Miller, Religion and Hip Hop. 36. Peter J. Paris, The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse (Fortress Press, 1995). 37. Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” 1–44. 38. Ibid. 39. Derek S. Hicks, Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4. 40. Ibid., 4. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 5. 43. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Dover Publications, 1994 (1903)). 44. Hart, Afro-Eccentricity, 68–9. 45. Ibid. 46. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 23. 47. James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, reprint edition. (New York: Vintage, 2007), 24. 48. Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 66 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 45–73, 56. 49. See Maulana Karenga’s Introduction to Black Studies as a formative example of this. Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, 4th edition (Los Angeles, CA: Sankore, 2010). 50. Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” 57.

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51. Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (January 2005): 1–19, 3. 52. Ibid., 5. 53. Deborah Thomas, “The Violence of Diaspora: Governmentality, Class Cultures, and Circulations,” Radical History Review, no. 103 (Winter 2009): 83–104, 83. 54. Ibid., 92. 55. Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, eds., Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, 1st edition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 49–80, 66–7. 56. Ibid. 57. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 171. 58. Ibid., 172–73. 59. Ibid., 173. 60. Ibid., 174. 61. Ibid., 151. 62. Driscoll, White Lies and Miller, Religion and Hip Hop. 63. Charles H. Long, “Perspectives for a Study of African-American Religion in the United States,” in Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds., African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (Routledge, 2013), 21–36. 64. Ibid., 26. 65. Ibid., 27. 66. Long, Significations, 179. 67. Ibid., 184.

Chapter 5

What Identity Is Your Method? Tracing Co-Constitution in the Twilight of (White) Normativity

In many respects, the presumption that religion (whether defined as institution/tradition, belief in the supernatural, ultimate orientation, or otherwise) is raced and has race, is a seemingly absurd notion. But it is important to first situate this possible “absurdity” within a larger, much more absurd, social situation we can call the American frontier. While longstanding discourses on intersectionality have helped to enable what is (almost) now a common and necessitated understanding of intersecting identities across a range of disciplines and topics, identity-based social categories such as “gender,” “sex,” “race,” and so on still quite often retain an illusion of categorical (silo-like) singularity. Our scholarly shout-outs to the obscuring, diminishing, hyperlegible, illegible, and otherwise aspects of such categories of social difference have become, in many ways, a rite of scholarly passage into the postmodern landscape of critically oriented expectation. In the formidable 2004 volume Disrupting White Supremacy from Within: White People on What We Need to Do, theologian Laurel C. Schneider raises the provocative question, “What race is your sex?” adding that “the question . . . may seem nonsensical at first, particularly to white people. When I pose it to students, regardless of their race or ethnicity their faces tend to go to a startled blank.”1 While Schneider’s aims differ from ours here, we find instructive her turn to method as a prodding and productive way forward. On this point, she writes: But it is difficult for everyone fully to digest the co-constitutive qualities of race, sex, gender, or the utter dependence of one upon the others for meaning and existence. It is this co-constitutive quality of race, sex, and gender that I am interested in, primarily because of the support each construction gives in the modern West to the tenacity of white supremacy.2 131

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At the risk of doubling down on the (to use Schneider’s apt terminology here) “grotesque conflation of ‘natures,’”3 she is able to highlight both the limitations and the efficacy of method as useful in critically interrogating unmoored assumptions of social categories, as such. The reader is challenged to read categories anew for their mutually reinforcing function, while being offered the tools by which one might begin such a task: the methodological application of co-constitution. Here we are offered a moment in which to think further about the “functionality” of method, the how and why of its performance—to realize not only that categories are “constructed for particular purposes of social order but that to contemplate them in isolation from each other is to perpetuate their more insidious social and political effects and to ignore their more profound theological implications.”4 It is to the complicated terrain of the theological that we turn next. It is impossible to disconnect, untether, and disassociate concepts such as religion and race among the methodological space of co-constitution which concurrently not only keeps our categories in check, but likewise helps to focus the scholar’s gaze on such categories in multidimensional ways of seeing. We might further imagine such an approach not so much as foolproof, as a process of adjudication and oversight seeking to maintain checks and balances between the scholar and the page in which they create worlds. Pushing the thesis forward and further, Schneider reminds readers that such an approach will not result in “a reliable and consistent explanation of human difference but a set of . . . ideologies that serve to keep individuals in place”5—thus, a moment to assess more deeply the context and strategies of production, to unravel the tactics and processes of obfuscation that, more often than not, conceal the means of co-production, immutably and in seeming perpetuity. In doing so, Schneider argues that we can begin slowly to pull back the curtain of “white” evasion and its attendant acts of elusion. Of value here, is not only Schneider’s thesis, but likewise, the critical intervention into method, persuasively calling for its absolute necessity, and limitations, in a way that never leaves method untethered, nor unhinged, from its role and construction in the pervasive economy of constitutive (identity-based) reliability and reinforcement. Both race and religion emerge together, co-constituted, bound to/with/ by the other, structured and structuring each other in what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the “relatively autonomous religious field.”6 In what follows, we don’t as much intend to suggest that religion makes race, and race does not make religion; as that which such notions rely upon, and rear their limits and possibilities in and through, a mutually reinforcing economy of method which keeps the social identity of method obscured from its identifier. While method helps to unpack, unfold, and uncover the oft-obscured relations of identity-based productions (e.g., co-constitution), it also, as Schneider aptly highlights, is implicated in the same co-constitutive qualities of the very

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social categories it intends to analyze. If “white is what woman is,” Schneider posits, “then the co-constitutive qualities of race, sex, and gender are such that each becomes nonsensical apart from the others.”7 We might imaginatively posit, then, although such a hypothetical query exceeds the scope of Schneider’s aims, “If white is what method is, then the co-constitutive qualities structuring and structured by the social world become nonsensical apart from the socially interested reality of the objects they seek to study.” Unequivocally, few would deny that (the construction of) whiteness played a formative role throughout the Middle Passage and the making of American slavery within a context of black bodies as strange fruit, whereby the production of white normativity in a New World was never separate from its reliance upon religion, and its powerful ability to metaphysically determine race. Thus, it was possible to methodologically racially determine, and classify, the social world. If gender and race have long been co-constituted forces, and if co-constitution both methodologically focuses and situates the approach of such terms and is never divorced from the constellation of identifications for which it sets about its work, then it too, as we imagine Schneider might attest and agree, is both identity and process of identification. While the binding together of “religion” and “race” might, no doubt, irritate and disrupt certain “rational” sensibilities, if we (scholars) can get comfortable with the work of “identifying” method’s “identity” (which will no doubt strike readers as a strange if not impossible task), then we are better prepared to uncover the manner in which categories (such as religion and race) are often used as proxies for the other. Thus, we can begin to peel back how religion is always and already raced, and how race is always and already religioned— or co-constitutive. In the 2013 groundbreaking ethnography of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, anthropologist John L. Jackson profoundly offers, and uniquely notes, a critical word on method that precisely implicates, performs, and ciphers the identifying work of method we have in mind: At the same time, writing about a group like the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, an organization on guard against hostile criticism of their atypical theories and increasingly capable of challenging an anthropologist’s seemingly privileged ability to package their saga for outside audiences, helps to illustrate something noteworthy about the changing nature of social science today, about how the ethnographic branch of human research is made to bend and twist (and maybe even break) in shifting twenty-first century winds.8

What marks the notable efforts of Jackson’s intervention here is a careful balance among his acute awareness of the complex identities comprising his data, their layered performances and rehearsals, along with his own scholarly

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methods and means of going about such ethnographic work—even while recognizing that those comprising his field of scholarly vision (in this case, the African Hebrew Israelites in Dimona) are likewise intelligible of, and privy to, the application of similar methods and means. Jackson’s work is a critically oriented cipher that keeps his social-scientific task of ethnography attuned to the multiple layers of his research group (and their many ways of social knowing) as well as the methodological “thick” and “thin” of the operationalized means by which anthropologists conduct their work. In this way, Jackson situates Thin Description as “also a response to a certain kind of overconfidence in anthropology, an arrogance borne of the powers that ‘thick description’ (one of its most famously borrowed terms) is believed to grant adherents.”9 Jackson is not so much interested in contesting the validity of Clifford Geertz’s (or, we might imagine similarly Mircea Eliade in our own field of study) most prized categorical possession, as in having us consider more fully the contemporary investments in such a notion as thick description. What, Jackson asks, of the magical powers that seem to prop up method as enabling scholars’ abilities to morph into untethered “flies on the walls” possessing the ability to “see” their way through, around, and above the logics of practice shaping what they study? Jackson’s brilliant and reflexive methodological mulling over the “how” of the thickest and strictest of Geertzian inheritance, animates the larger question of the who (scholars) and the how (full social knowing). Jackson notes an almost religious-like belief in method’s ability to see through and beyond, on the part of scholars employing such methods—who seem somehow to remain cosmically suspended external to their field, data, and subjects. Jackson writes: “And these days, even shorn of its strictest Geertzian moorings, ‘thick description’ is used like a mystic metaphor or methodological talisman that denotes an attempt at—an ambition for—rich, rigorous, and even full social knowing.”10 As a provocative take on method, Jackson boldly asserts a critical word useful in thinking further about the academic study of religion. Worth quoting at length, he writes: Thick description, in a sense, has always been thin . . . there is thin and then there is thin. One tries to pass itself off as more than it is, as embodying an expertise that stimulates (and maybe even surpasses) any of the ways in which the people being studied might know themselves. . . . It is a thinness invested in an occulted version of anthropology, one that would pretend to see everything and, therefore, sometimes see less than it could. What’s left to see or say once a “thick description” has purported to decipher the definitive meaning of something, even the faux conspiratorial plots of would-be-fake-winkers. Geertz’s classic example, multiple levels of self-conscious eyelash-batting tomfoolery, is offered up with a sense of explanatory finality. Thick descriptions can even unmask the byzantine intricacies of convolutedly fake conspiracies, an unmasking that seems to leave little need for alternative interpretations.11

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Our collective contemporary reticence to pair “religion” with “race,” or “identity” with “method,” assumes that (the academic study of) religion or method (the critical means of going about our work) somehow maintains a categorical singularity marking the distance between/among its data (objects and subjects of study). While riveting scholarly discussions concerning “how” we ought to set about the scholarly task of studying religion abound, we seldom interrogate the authorizing props of identity that enable the assumed capital to transmute into method. The (explicit) marking of method in the study of religion is (more often than not) assumed as already and always doing the inherent work of criticality, unless otherwise noted or highlighted. Such a scenario is akin to the maladaptive presumption that something like a “black President” is already imbued with radical racial inclinations and politically progressive prowess. In fact, method, it seems, is unable to pass as method unless outfitted with the proper and legitimate “sacred” pantheon of those already iconized as the methodologists. We might ask, who is authorized with such authority? If historian of religions Bruce Lincoln is correct in his assertion that authority is not so much an entity, as an effect,12 then such legitimation emanates from the already converted scholarly community of “believers.” What makes the citation, performance, and noting of “method” inherently scholarly, professionally sui generis, immune from, and disinterested in the socially interested problematics we assume to be motivated by, and implicit within, the categories (such as race) and their social realities we come to study? From our perspective, it is very difficult to rationally hold method and identity or race and religion (as but another example) as distinct when looking at American religion or the academic study of it, while adequate attention to American religion (however conceived) necessitates attention to history in ways that do not always square well with a transhistorical critical approach homogenously applied across various domains of inquiry. The history and contemporary social reality of the American frontier is one wherein we are, all in North America, already born and raised into the social conditions of identity and their identifications. Keeping these categories separated within a rhetorical linguistic system is akin to maintaining a categorical and ideological caste where “race” (or, identity) can never be anything other than an atrocity from the past, and “religion” and the study of it (or, method) is sacralized as having no role in the construction, maintenance, and policing of the borders of social identity. Our relative comfort with the category of Religion (vs. Race) or Method (vs. Identity) seems to suggest it to be a more universally applicable (and appropriate) designator for x, y, or z. Since the dismissal of religion as a construction of the scholar’s Western imagination—à la Jonathan Z. Smith, Daniel Dubuisson, and others—also dismisses analyses of data at the level of such data impacting and being impacted by “race,” it has the

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additional effect of hamstringing the scholar’s capacity for reflexive critical engagement with their own sensibilities on “race” and how “race” might be shaping both data and interpretive/methodological posture. Although here we are using “race” and “religion” as a small case study animating the conjunction of “identity” and “method,” we note that similar discussions characterize the longstanding debates surrounding theology versus the study of religion, or confessional versus critical, as well as continued debates that seek to magically observe and discern one’s (stated or otherwise) intentionality (e.g., believer-based identity politic) and standpoint (self-identification and situativity). If the study of religion is effectually the study of identity (insomuch as the academic study of religion oscillates between a purported self-consciousness that our object[s] of study are constructed and of our own making), and if we actively recognize “religion” as a category that organizes social interests, formations, and processes in the social world—then, any study of such a topic is already, and would necessitate an (at least) intersectional approach, if not a full-scale Deleuzian assemblage model of the overlapping lines of flight that identities make up, and pass through.13 Here, and throughout Method as Identity, we stress the inescapability of this intersectionality through attention to the two categories popularly relied upon as exemplary data, “race” and “religion,” while knowing well that gender, sexuality, class, queerness, bodily ability, and so many other operationalized acts of identification14 are always at work in such assemblages. The historical connection between the constitution of race and religion, which ultimately becomes subsumed yet obscured in the field of its study, yields diminishing returns in understanding its role as much bigger than a “sub” field of study among the larger discipline. Contemporary scholars’ efforts to dismiss the category of “religion” (by way of methodological critique) unduly promote the dismissal of the category of “race,” leading to a decidedly “colorblind” critical method. THE WESTERN CHAINS THAT BOND US As but a brief example by way of data, the Aristotelian Great Chain of Being offers an older, and geographically, historically, and philosophically expansive frame for understanding the intrinsic connection between the making and scaling of “social” and “religious” identities. In this paradigm, all of human life is scaled, including gender, religion, geography, and so on. For Aristotle, as for much of the Western world, these categories have never been separated, but held together through a universally applicable ontology. The categories are “born” when threats to this ontology arise. These classifications and categorizations are not the (clumsy) result of method;

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rather, this method of organizing human life, and the social world in which we find ourselves, is a result of identity and its normative default(s) in the Western world. To borrow from the opening of Schneider’s provocative 2008 text Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity, she notes that “The Logic of the One” governed the context of European expansion—and yet, it is a logic that is “simply not One. There is always less, and more, to the story.”15 What’s more, Schneider bears witness to the social fact that despite attempts to metaphysically suspend a notion such as “God” into the timeless and spaceless world of metaphysics, “God” cannot “pretend distance” nor be divorced from the everyday world. While we often struggle to imagine them as connected, the figures above visually animate best the intertwined, mangled, and co-constitution of religion, race, and identity so endemic in the methodological work of scaling, identifying, and situating. Other strands of discourse would seem to suggest acceptance that such an ontology is flawed, and that merely changing our theories about the social world or universe would see an end to the consequences of an ontology that ensures the stasis of “matter” by keeping in place. In the Great Chain of Being, we see best the manner in which identity (racial normativity untethered from/represented in theological properness) guided method (classification/placement of the social world), which in turn guided and solidified the (racially normative and hence dominant) ontology of identity in mutually reinforcing and transmuting ways. If we ignore the role of a particular kind of idea or category, such as “method,” as represented in Figure 5.1, then we become unable to analyze how the identity-based features in Figure 5.2 are organized and shaped by the shared obfuscation of (the racially dominant) classifier that binds these two portraits together. To see (only) identity at work in Figure 5.2, and an arbitrary (religious) work of social engineering in Figure 5.1, means that we ultimately render these categories socially illegal by design and illegible in orientation. To deny the mutually reinforcing work of method/identity is akin to what we refer to as “categorical extermination.” Such an extermination effectually renders those who register or hold some relationship to the (obscured) category in question, hyper-marked by the excess of identity while denying the work of method’s invisible hand as identity. Such a misrecognition would be comparable to keeping capitalism’s role in American slavery separate from the identitybased interests that not only make capitalism possible, but also that motivated the logic of racial domination. If the Western chains that bond us are the missing link that connect the “what” of the figures above, then we must contend with the competing social, cultural, political, economic, and other interests that decidedly limit/enable the “how” of what is seen, and the “what” that is determined in such ways of knowing. Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, social theory (as

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Schneider does well to remind readers in her earlier work Re-Imagining the Divine: Confronting the Backlash against Feminist Theology) and the subsequent knowledge of historical malleability and social construction “gave birth to a new breed of scholarship concerned entirely with the evolution and maintenance of human societies.”16 Notorious, and notable, among the “Theoretical

Figure 5.1  Representation of the Great Chain of Being, from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana (1579).

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Figure 5.2  Representation of the Great Chain of Being, adjusted for Human Scale, from Ernst Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Georg Reimer Verlag, 1868).

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and Methodological” pantheon were thinkers such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and later Peter Berger. Differences in approach to and definition of the study of religion aside, these epistemological revolutions laid the “final pieces of the modernist foundations,” foreshadowing and enabling the underpinnings of feminist theologies; they “fell into place with the contributions that sociological theory made to the evolution of the idea that gods are social constructions serving political and sociological ends,”17 sparking rich comparative studies of human nature and society. Durkheim’s work pushed the burgeoning field to consider the ways in which the objects of “religion” are “wholly fabricated in the social sphere for the maintenance of social meaning and order.”18 Durkheim’s functionalism helped to spark a supposition widely accepted in the field today—and indeed a hallmark of critical approaches to the study of religion—that notions of religion, and religious ideas in society, do not emerge out of belief, or confessionality. Rather, they ascend from the social world to serve competing social interests. While Durkheim’s functionalism and reductionism remains among the most commonly redescribed in the academic study of religion today, there is, one could argue, a way in which Durkheim’s assertion that critical attention to religion and theological notions as foundational and utterly necessary in assessing culture and society runs the (clumsy methodological) risk of hyper-religioning society and centering religion as the primary mode that funds “all others because religion is the first act of human communal consciousness.”19 But, Durkheim would not disagree that assessing basic social features of society require attention to the realm of the theological. Thus, the durable and mutually reinforcing connection among cosmic construction and social formation as products of being human, and acts of human activity, make the “identity-based” bonds in the Western world undeniable. In fact, Schneider pushes such a supposition further by keeping Durkheim’s infamous construction and functionalist critique of religion tethered to, and with, identity. The oriented “classifying” at work in Figure 5.1 naturalizes the ontological “naming” represented in Figure 5.2 as ordained by the universe, if not god. Hence, while religion (as an object) is not sui generis, naming is indeed a religious act. On this point, Schneider persuasively writes: The moment a group sets itself up as a primary entity of identification for its members (such as family, a clan, or a nation) and names itself thus is the first transcendent and therefore the first religious act. . . . The group name, or totem, therefore takes on a necessarily sacred quality and becomes the very basis of the existence and identity of the society. Once group identity has formed, ideas relevant to identity, orientation, world, and group can then come into being.20

It is not difficult to imagine the unfolding of this transmutation, as it concerns religion and race, in the Western world. In fact, it is this very process which enabled and made durable, in perpetuity, the religio-racial21 bonds that bind

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us together. While critical approaches to theory and method in the study of religion have done well to argue that (the study of) religion is (the study of) and indeed organizes identity (the culmination of attendant social, cultural, political, economic, and historical interests), we have been slow to appropriate the reality of social formation and process to the human production of method. For if the object of study comprising the field of religion is indeed a human product (of the scholar’s imagining, or, emerging from communities under study) in constructing and orienting identity in the world, then what makes something like method free from the same socially invested interests of identification and classification? And if such scholars would have us believe that method is a constituent influence on identity (regardless), then a more direct question is in order: What identity is your method? Barring a belief that the scholar is somehow vested with magical properties of disinterest and (seeming) neutrality, what could possibly shield the presumed “how” (of Figure 5.1) from the assumed “what” of (Figure 5.2) but a discursive categorical extermination whereby the former is illegible in the latter to the extent that the hyper-legible excess of the latter unduly bears the full burden of representation by consequence and effect? Considered in this way, it is not difficult, therefore, to see “religion” or “theology” (absent of identity) in the former, but always and already present in the latter. As such, while “method” may therefore be identifiable in the unfolding acts of classification among both images, the image of humanity scaled in the former does not yet bear comparable pockmarks of racialization as on display in the latter. Most pernicious, if not violent, is that the racial domination and normative situativity of whiteness in the former, as method, remains conspicuously and asymmetrically undetected, while the almost self-evident permanence of “blackness” in the latter remains unextinguishable, in perpetuity. This is to say nothing of the manner in which these erasures leave little room for equitable arrangements or even intellectual confrontations to those who have suffered (and continued to do so, discursively or otherwise) under the actual weight of illegible and hyper-legible categories of identification. The result, as it were, ends up that our efforts to reappropriate history, as contingent and arbitrary as it may be, do little but mirror that same history and find expression as the whiteness born in/as that history. It is to history that we turn now. WHITENESS AND THE MAKING OF RELIGION; RELIGION AND THE MAKING OF WHITENESS What does it mean to make whiteness in American religion? The examples that follow provide at least a brief moment for touching base, pending a

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fuller consideration ultimately necessary. Whether using the analytic tools provided by the study of religion to situate the Middle Passage as a kind of “religious” experience, or the practice of lynching as an ostensibly “religious” ritual or performance of social identification—and in so doing cultivate a new interpretive posture toward the contemporary social world—certain historical snapshots of American (and European Transatlantic) history amount to “rituals of reference” shaping the totality of ontological possibilities for those involved then as for us, today. Following the work of African American humanist theologian Anthony B. Pinn on “rituals of reference,” the Middle Passage, the slave auction block, and the practice of lynching all work to create and “protect” white and black identities, alike. Pinn argues that such rituals amounted to sheer terror, stripping away “early self-perceptions and meaning, imposing in their place ‘otherness’ and historical irrelevance.”22 If identities are operational acts of identification,23 set by and enacted in and through historical circumstance, black bodies were historically rendered identityless while imbued, concurrently, with an excess of identity—predicates to the “white man’s” subjectivity (in history). The dread these rituals imposed worked at both individual and collective levels (and for both sides of the racial divide), ensuring an ontology as equally scaled as Aristotle’s but without such intense variety, uniquely suited to creating for some participants a feeling of being socially secure. These rituals of reference created identities in black and white, but were themselves acts of identification, creating an ideological foundation for social settings marked by heterogeneity: “repeated, systematic activity conducted in carefully selected locations intended to reinforce the enslaved’s status as object,”24 working to (methodologically) order the life options and points of orientation25 for both white and black, alike. Despite the co-constitutive emergence linking white and black, one important exception rendered them distinct. Through these rituals, white folks were left to feel themselves walking alone through history, while black folks were treated as necessary objects for the white journey of being human. Thus, black bodies were excluded from history while at the same time their labor instantiated them the “proper” shapers of it, even while white men took the credit. Black was erased as historical subject—a belief that dies hard considering that as recently as 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy found himself able to say, “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history.”26 The mechanisms of denial that we are describing are not exclusive to the American frontier but connect at least the white West across the last five hundred years. In the case of Germany, for example, a population that bears the historical guilt of mass extermination, what does it mean to respond to that guilt through another kind of erasure, as seen in their categorical extermination of the term “Rasse” through (a generalized but also specific) appeal to social conformity?27 Cultural “evidence” of crime is destroyed—out of

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respect for the past, or fear of repeating it—in response to a population’s collective sense of guilt or responsibility. Whether or not we ought to continue such uses (redefined), it should be noted that erasure itself enacts a functioning within the population concerned. Closer to home, the contemporary unease with or denial of “race” on that side of the Atlantic is perhaps akin to the U.S. Constitution’s blatant use of “peculiar institution” as a euphemism for slavery. As both function and effect, “white” emerges as part and parcel of these structures of denial, erasure, and illegibility. We can also think about the creation of such categories popular to the study of American religion in more didactic, sociological terms. Here, too, race is no less present. Whether talking about (white) Christian churches (“religion”) or black Christianity (“black” religion), our comfort with such classifications that erase and identify the very demographics of these institutions bears the point we are making. It is commonplace in the field of American religion today that we are able to talk easily of “churches” or “religion” with no mention of “whiteness,” even while we continue to name the assumed hyper-legibility of racial particularity as it concerns all other religions that are not, well, just white. What’s more, such a disciplinary segregation means we are unable to talk with much precision about “Methodist” or “Episcopal” churches without (first) foregrounding (their) identity-based specifics—as if it alters or impacts the work scholars set out to do in our scholarly study of religion. We are forced, by order of precision and history, to speak of “white” and “black” religion and institutions, “Methodist churches” and “African Methodist churches,” whereas the white institutional corollaries remain largely unnamed and therefore, unmoored (in other words, untethered and un-representative of nonwhite, non-Christian perspectives). Along these lines, that segregated (identity-based) sub-fields, or religious organizations and institutions, exist at all in the United States is telling of the lop-sided burden of identity entrenched and inherent in our theories, methods, and ad hoc classifications. “Black religion” or “black churches” are not the exception; but follow from the rule which was, and is, that those spaces rendered the norm in the United States or in the discourse of American religion have never simply been “religions” and “churches” all along. They have always been white religions and spaces that organized racial normativity to the point of knowable unknowability, specifically and purposefully. Yet, in the critical academic study of religion today, this white element is rendered so illegible that it frustrates our senses even to name the category to begin with. Historically, little space existed in the United States for black bodies to come together and “worship” outside the purported need for white surveillance, which is partly why black congregations (of various sorts) continue to remain of interest to local, state, and federal law enforcement.28 Black religions and organized “religious” spaces have long been a problem for

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white Americans. In this sense, “black belief,” too. Historically, a black body (identity) that has been through baptism (method) has been alchemically offered anew a particular version of black humanity as somewhat acceptable and proper for social inclusion. Here, whiteness becomes epiphenomenal with (the religion of) Christianity and further epiphenomenal with American, culminating in the production of a full and proper American: white Christian men. It is therefore not a stretch to wonder whether structurally similar vestiges of this same white sensibility mark the scholarly qualifications of legitimation as the litmus test for what counts as properly “academic” in the study of religion, and what gets used as data to highlight the field’s uncritical and confessional traces. It is no wonder then that the recursive, almost ritualistic use of identity-based (gender, race) examples of theoretical/methodological slippage in the academic study of religion disproportionately and overwhelmingly overlook examples of whiteness. In this way, “critical” assessments tend to veer away from outlining interest in the assumed interest-free zone of methodological and theoretical scrutiny (assuming such an ability in approach results in the study of religion as a human science), a move which reverberates with echoes of white (historically Protestant) surveillance. Lacking conscious reflection of—or seeing ourselves free from the titillation of—essentialism, authenticity, origins, roots, and standpoints, the work of the “critical scholar of religion” (the critic) is seemingly free of the haunting and beckoning of social interests, just as interested investments in identity (or experiences thereof) are somehow free from the critical task. As scholars of religion with investments in the critical approach, we too are implicated in a politics of disciplinary respectability whereby to be “scholarly” means to be “critical” means to be “methodologically situated and theoretically attuned” means to be “white”—other than in cases where white scholars are under critique or scrutiny for a presumed theologically or phenomenologically oriented “confessionality” of belief (rather than race). Even the charge of confessionality renders identity both illegible (an uncritical white scholar is so due to a quasi-believer-based inclination) and hyper-visible (an uncritical scholar of color is so due to a quasi-believer-based inclination presumably motivated by their racial/ethnic identification). Are not our continued debates over method (in the field and in institutional hiring practices) rooted, ultimately, in discourses and perceptions of “stock”? Even our somewhat compulsive and subsequent desire to mark “theory and method in the study of religion” on CVs might be a noisome suggestion that we have been trained to assess and make purchases of those young scholars standing vulnerable in front of us. While the aforementioned activity unfolds in open view, Hush Harbors are the most prominent representation of the “secret meetings” organized among black folks during American slavery. Their existence, however, did not end

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with the peculiar institution itself. Not necessarily in the stereotypical sense of some whispering negroes creeping around a backwoods holler, but in the sense that black folks have rarely sought white authorization to be—even and especially from critical gatekeepers. Yet, the cacophony swirling about the riveting debates that take place in our academic guilds, as in society, sounds eerily similar to the frustrated Massas of old, unable to come to terms with bad negroes. For all of its confessional and believer-based problematics, rejecting theology (and the data of its purported impulses) ends up not an option for certain areas of thought (such as black religion) given the manner in which theology historically made possible a troubling of identity-based assumptions (such as a white, or male, god). Put otherwise, the “academic” space that launched and enabled black, female, queer, postcolonial, and so on (beyond first-world) footing in a white Western world and academy. Such spaces are also largely responsible for having cultivated, and provided scholarly platforms for, white critical impulses reflexive of themselves, some for the first time. That is not to say that on accounts of identification, rhetoric, and quantification, demographics such as black Americans are consistently described to be among the most religiously oriented (more than ninety percent) believer-based demographic, represented as overly religious in ways that render black as naturally religious, religious by nature. Such a portrait perpetuates and maintains the notion of black bodies as “feeling” (emotional, confessional) subjects, rather than “thinking” subjects (secular, critical), a product of an academy where white identity helps foster a critical chain of seeing through unending trust in the Great Chain of Being. Unlike social-scientific surveys that mark black folk as overwhelmingly believers in god and as Christian, it is important to keep in mind that many Africans enslaved and brought to the New World practiced non-Christian religions. Some were Muslim, some Yoruba, and many more practiced versions of what we’d today regard as atheist, humanist, secular, and freethought.29 And, yes, some were indeed Christian. Lines blur between the use of statistics (method) and the unending telling of history (identity). We are largely still left with the impression, however, that enslaved Africans were brought here as (or because they were) some version of a spirituality that was savage or primitive. Here, again, we can see early historical battles over (white) identity being waged at the site of classifying religious and theological categories. For the sake of argument, and if readers will forgive a brief reliance on a “Great Chain of Being” logic, a basic fact of history lost on many today is that the overwhelming majority of the enslaved had versions of what we would call “civilization.” White Westerners have now spent hundreds of years teaching and being taught that slaves were first “primitives,” or in today’s parlance, we might say savagely “uncritical” in their inability to “rationally” reflect, in an acceptably “critical manner,” on their own beliefs, or demonstrate intellectual

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agility in the litmus test of comparative analyses. We now know better than to reinforce such scaled ontological values. But it bears noting, that even the notion that the enslaved were primitives (per those already deeply problematic frames) is a literal white lie. In fact, “primitive” is a far more recent concept than enslavement, part of a constellation of Enlightenment and Modern ideas meant to reinforce whiteness as normative and dominant. The popular notion of the enslaved as generally primitive, juxtaposed to the noble savage, is further connected to a Modern effort to relegate black bodies as only able to feel (believe), not think (critique). At the risk of conflating thinking with rationality and thus with critique, as a secular and therefore more critical ability, it is of little wonder why critiques of a belief-based standpoint almost always allude to unreflected, and therefore uncritical, modes of emotion. In this scheme, believers (or, feeling scholars) can be nothing more than caretakers of their own beliefs; whereas the critic (or, the thinking scholar) is able to accomplish serious and legitimate academic work. Thus, certain notions (or, talk of) “black” belief run the risk of reinforcing a historical assumption that black folks’ penchant for the emotive reflects/refracts uncritical cognitive abilities: that black bodies are expressive subjects unable to do the necessary work of rational discernment, and that proper theological or religious “thinking” happens within (racially) “proper” institutions, whereas the “frenzy” described even by W. E. B. DuBois is embodied, unbridled, spontaneous, and lacking in reasoned organization. An interpretive shorthand noted years ago by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., probably makes our point best: “So, in response to the line in Robert Penn Warren’s ‘Pondy Woods’—‘Nigger, your breed ain’t metaphysical’—Sterling Brown is fond of repeating, ‘Cracker, your breed ain’t exegetical.’ This signifyin(g) pun deconstructs the ‘racialism’ inherent in such claims of tradition.”30 Decades ago, Long prophetically signified on how academic concerns over black-belief and/or an over-belief in blackness at the contact zone of the study of religion runs the risk of an active primitivization of black bodies through a latent fear of the improperly believing black primitive, signaling a failure to explicate signifying processes that make the erasure (of Long) and the primitivization and paternalism toward black religion tragic. Even if rejoinders to such a critique remind us that “we aren’t critiquing who they are, but what they say,” the effect remains the same insomuch as the “who” is too inextricably linked to the “what” to so easily feign post-racial, or antiracist motivations or consequences. In this way, black data and the data of blackness are rendered vulnerable to disproportionate critique in critical assessments in the study of religion, where the legibility and burden of identity claims is relegated, once again, to one (racialized) side. We might call the “thinking subject concern” a secularized version of being, where the proper study of

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religion (and its religions) will express more secular, more critical, and hence propagate the illusion of detached (academic) work of method. In more global terms, we might ponder such realities within contemporarily situated realities of the social and political upheaval in various parts of Europe (e.g., the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote) over and against (what is assumed to be) an ever-marching threat of migrants and a totalitarian white effort to overthrow the United States republic lest it be polluted. We might also ask what is happening in Europe with the increasingly explicit discourse over “religious diversity”? We hear a lot of talk among European colleagues and in European newspapers about religious diversity, interreligious dialogue, and religious literacy, with grant money available for such studies and civic, technocratic social work positions on the rise as a means by which to manage social difference within institutions and nation-states. In this way, the cultural work of managing racial/ethnic difference is seemingly undertaken under the cover of more properly acceptable categories such as “religion.” What is the relationship between the rise of this discourse, and people coming to Europe who do not look like those who have traditionally represented Europe? In this way, brown and black foreigners become hyper-religioned to the extent that diverse religious identities (as if they had not, until then, existed at all) are seen and fashioned as being smuggled into Europe for the first time. Here, where it is (still) in many places (socially) unacceptable to name/foreground race/ethnicity, religion (as though free from a pernicious history of identity-based violence, extermination, and oppression) becomes the operative category of choice, always and already racialized enough to do the heavy lifting of “identity” without (explicit) mention. Such a scene reifies (the already present, native) dominant religion(s) as not only proper, but also as less (dangerously) religious and serving thus as indicative of national identity and citizenship, more generally. For example, a Muslim refugee from Syria might be assumed to be guided by more feeling, passion, and emotion (than “Enlightened” white German Christians), producing a false image of heightened confessionality (i.e., their religion can really make them do things because they really believe) confined by a penchant for radicalism among those arriving from certain geographies for which racial/ethnic features become used as placeholders of geographical and hence religious classification. Over and against this backdrop, as identity-based excess and categorical interchangeability become more prominent on one end (e.g., for the Muslim Syrian refugee), identity becomes more obscured/veiled for the white German Christian to the point where “German” encompasses and subsumes “white” and “Christian.” The consequences of this scenario are seen throughout the discourse of European pessimism, wherein a packaging of the historical white European identity continues through concealed categorical conflations, while contemporary cosmopolitan liberalism sees to it that these

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white Europeans cannot tap into the existential and social resources that come from the reified image of white Europeans. If that which one is not is socially projected and inculcated in the hyper-elucidation of markers that keep in place the socially marked, less and less illumination becomes needed to note those taking note of everyone else (outsiders) but themselves (insiders). Insiders and outsiders remain, as they’ve been, structured, while “insiders” increasingly feel alienated from the “inside.” Might it be more than a coincidence that many of us on both sides of the Atlantic still make use of “religion” as proxy for other social identifications? The “categorical” scene in Europe, as it were, positions religious diversity in a way that distances race from the origins/making of European history. Thus, scripts concerning the historical “origins” and “roots” of race in Europe become an increasingly “absurd” supposition emanating from the distances posed among such correlations and possibilities. Of course, any assumed distance among, and proximity from something like “Europe’s” or more specifically, “Germany’s” “race problem” is uprooted from historical beginnings and contingencies, and anachronistically posited into a contemporary context, ultimately masking earlier time-points of such social concerns by rerouting old problems through departures of names, categories, and concerns. The question here may or may not be one of religious difference as a defining marker of European history since the Thirty Years War (as an arbitrary starting point), but a preferential option for talk of religious difference most certainly seems to be covering more, and less, ground than “religion,” as such. At the risk of over-religioning the not-so religious segment of even their new neighbors, at the least, it seems as if the “religious” (as a diverse reality) provides relatively safer cover than does “race” (as a vestigial artifact of their tragic history as racial/ethnic exterminators). Is not a cosmopolitan body politic well suited to embrace a variety of religious orientations? Why, then, the rise of Pegita in Germany, or of UKIP and Brexit in the United Kingdom, or of Trump in the United States, each championing anti-immigrant, pro-white policies couched as anti-Muslim sentiments (as if “Muslim” and “European” or “white” are somehow antithetical categories)? Could it be that race or ethnicity, concealed behind the veneer of “religion,” is playing a more prominent role in these populist movements than many would want to suggest? And as scholars charged with organizing analyses of social life, whether “religious” or otherwise, how will it be possible to adjudicate actual categories of difference, and the ways they overlap, if reticence to naming (the unnamable) race (whiteness) is such that usable categories are obscured, or written out of our analytic toolkits? In short, Europe seems to be experiencing a simultaneous racialization of religion in the form of populist backlash, while scholars and politicians are left unable to articulate this very process because we’ve somehow erased the categorical

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slippage from our vocabularies in an effort at “critical” precision. By this estimation, the critical study of religion has even preempted its capacity to speak (back) across the Atlantic in any substantive way. That doesn’t sound like the kind of critical precision needed to do the work of a human science today. Suppose that a German scholar of religion who crosses the Atlantic to find North American scholars doing our thing, should consider it strange that we use the designator “religion” to talk about something “out there” or “over there.” Where uses of “religion” might be more relatable, such a scholar might find our use of the term “race” inappropriate if not downright pernicious (given the historical weight of “race” in Germany)—although a subjugated transatlantic, dare we say diasporic, whiteness might find parallels between international scholars and (a goodly number of their) American colleagues. Obvious geographic and comparative distinctions aside, how did we arrive at this categorical bind? What logics of practice might be guiding how we think about these designators? Has an effort at categorical extermination taken root in the critical discourses on religion in the United States that look like the popular non-discourse on race in Germany? If we think it absurd to flatten these categories around such absurdity, or if we conflate them too much to the point of finding no difference between them at all, then what else remains undetected, and what remains of value and efficacy? What remains beyond a game of overdetermining or overcorrecting the wheel of meaning? Suppose we (two American scholars of religion) are in Europe. When there, we notice calls for papers and grants and strategic hiring initiatives that mention gender as an explicit category. However, excepting the United Kingdom in some instances, race is not considered (at all) as an explicit category for hiring initiative. In the United States, we do not consider the naming of gender to function differently than the naming of the socially constructed category of race, even if not everyone would be ready to ask “What race is your sex?”31 In the United States, such terms signify on divergent and convergent histories; we name them both although the function and object (of signification) approximate. Yet, in Europe, there is an explicit comfort with naming “gender” alongside an almost equal discomfort in naming “ethnicity” as something to be marked at all, much less something we might call “race.” “Nationality” does all the work of “race” that many would be comfortable discussing in public, working to package meanings of race while concealing the packaging in ways similar to the category of “religion” discussed above. To add greater confusion to the process (and suspicion), all resumes and job dossiers in Germany require a facial photograph to be included. Such photographs suggest that race serves as a category for hiring, after all. We can only imagine that it, unfortunately, plays more of a role than otherwise considered. Indeed, the same difficulty would presumably unfold with binary assumptions around gender. In short, and as a mandate to the academic study

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of religion, erasing and concealing troubling, problematic categories does not erase the problems; it merely avoids the problems inherent in naming. NAMING IS INHERENTLY “THEOLOGICAL” If we hold categories of “race” and “religion” as intrinsically related, and relatable, we’re then better able to assess, and see a decidedly political and social function unfold within the synergistic dynamics of naming, and thus classification. Without which, for example, the field of study will continue to regard the “black” in black religion—this experiential naming—as an ostensibly theological task, while “the study of religion” moves about unnamed. What’s more, outside of the racialized particularity subsumed under something like a “theological task” of (ontological) blackness, critical critiques of theology’s more confessional side will continue to maneuver as strictly a concern over belief (in a strict sense), further occluding the noting and marking of identity, its limits and possibilities, already endemic to that category. Indeed, the postulation of a sui generis position for the sake of some sort of social gain or use of history is commonplace, as is the utility of functionalism in social theory, making critical approaches possible, and historically enabling and empowering constructive theology’s identity-based discourse early on. But here, the curious case of black religion sheds new light on how the categories of “god” and “religion” both function, historically and today, for many Americans. Whether we talk about “god” or “whiteness,” American religion has been about the business of setting certain groups apart, of organizing the social world in terms of data-based belonging. For example, Max Weber’s lesser-known “The Sects of American Protestantism”32 demonstrates that American religious affiliation was never about theological orthodoxy or piety, but rather involved an effort to organize those who had access to economic resources on the American frontier. Religion, then, was about the business of moral righteousness and sectarian belonging so as to organize the upstanding citizen from the unscrupulous citizen. What might such a perspective (coming from black religious studies discourse or from Weber) suggest about our dogged efforts to safeguard “religion” as a category distinct from “race,” or “method” at a safe distance from the social investments of “identity?” Perhaps, we might imagine these efforts as our ongoing collective penchant for a type of crypto-theological sorcery under the banner of theoretical and methodological critique. In the Translator’s Introduction to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Karen E. Fields gives voice to a seldom mentioned Durkheimian tid-bit: “As a scholar and teacher, I advocate the dignified excitement of studying religion with discipline—and Durkheim’s shuttling between science positive and the high

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wire of faith exemplifies a sort of discipline that we can cultivate.”33 Perhaps Durkheim’s exemplary discipline, as a human scientist, helped to authorize him as a theorist of the highest order, albeit one with faith-like and religious hunches. Or, it could be the case that his widely accepted and utilized method (reductionist functionalism) and socially situated critique of religion help quell concern over capacity and ability to keep his (religious) identity at bay from his scholarly task. Whether it be talk of deity, method, god, totem, divinity, or identity, Durkheim made clear that these and other constructions serve human needs which ground the centers, and borders, of identity. Schneider concurs when she suggests, “For Durkheim, social theory is therefore theology; and vice versa. ‘If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society,’ [Durkheim] argues, ‘it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.’”34 Although all such categories, for Durkheim, are limited by and reduced to social construction, including the theological enterprise, “without them, we are lost. . . . In his final writings, Durkheim left behind ideas of social construction that neither ridicule nor eliminate the necessity of divinity in the work of being human.”35 So how might we respond—at analytic/epistemological levels as well as political levels—to our own proclivities for theologizing (or, not), through our rhetorical compartmentalizations? How might we ensure that our chosen and relied upon categories—as social actors as much as scholars of religion—do not end up in ghettos or have us place others in ghettos? In many ways, while theology and Christian theological language, in particular, have functioned to allow others to speak a word about racial (and otherwise) realities vis-à-vis coded signification—akin to the manner in which whiteness, as an idea, is able to be harkened to, and rhetorically activated by both historic and contemporary veiled mythological refrains and mantras, such as “Make America Great Again.” In her 2016 Op-Ed “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era,”36 historian Nell Irvin Painter draws our attention to the asymmetrical categorical options for racial identity at work in the first federal census of 1790, where Americans, according to Painter, began counting people as “White.”37 Methodologically, three categories were operative for white identity (two for “Free White Males” and one for “Free White Females,” with age being noted for white males but not white females), leaving no option to identify as anything other than white. Rather, the census tabulated the remaining identities according to their status as free or not, thus leaving black racial identity categorically unmarked, yet overwhelmingly marked in a totalizing way, the penultimate barometer of measuring and distinguishing unpermitted and unrecognized ontologies (self-evidently, already, niggerized): “All other free persons” and “Slaves.” The naming of whiteness according to three categories (illusion of variety) did little to threaten what was an already durable and palpable ability

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to continue unmarked as a racially normative marked default. To paraphrase Barbara Fields and Karen Fields’s notion of racecraft38, Painter helps expose something we can call method-craft in the making and marking of identification, enabling whiteness to emerge as identity, while limiting its racial others to their social condition of freedom and bondage (identified though not yet “properly” identifiable vis-à-vis identity, as such). We are not alone in our call for a closer consideration of a more complicated stance on clarifying what (the study of) religion is, and how it ought to be studied. In Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto, philosopher of religion Kevin Schilbrack calls for what he refers to as a critical realist position that understands religion to be a social construction, a socially dependent fact, but one that is likewise “performed, rather than spoken . . . as it is performed . . . [it] transforms bodies.”39 As Schilbrack goes on to note, the “anti-realist critic” relying on a J. Z. Smith-like interpretive frame—one of the most cited definitions of religion among critical studies in religion today—might suggest that “religion does not exist because the term is only an abstract term created by academics for their own sorting and comparing.” Schilbrack goes on to articulate a more specific scenario that dives headfirst into the contemporary look of method’s most critical edges in the field of religion. He writes: In a well-known statement that is often read in this way, Jonathan Z. Smith says, “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.” Russell McCutcheon, who often cites the Smith quote just given, agrees, saying, “the category of religion is a conceptual tool and ought not to be confused with an ontological category actually existing in reality.” Here “religion” exists as a way of thinking and speaking, but—to use Smith’s slogan—map is not territory, and it is a mistake to confuse one’s concepts with the actual world. From a critical realist perspective I am developing, this claim that “religion” is only a scholar’s word is doubly misleading. It is misleading in the first place in that the word has a history of employment. . . . More importantly, this claim is misleading in the second place because religion is not merely a word or a concept or a taxon or a label. This latter point deserves some discussion. What is the ontology of social realities?40

It is here, in this last question raised by Schilbrack, that the work necessitated by method as identity rests; it is also where method-as-method alone breaks down in the face of the kind of self-consciousness (of the scholar) pointed to by Smith (himself) and others. If map is not territory, as Smith proclaims, then at the least, the two objects share a relation of production, function, and social reality. Much of the methodological debate concerning the definition of religion in the field has entailed pushing the “so what” of religion as a social

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construction (a human doing) away from presumed self-evident objects of identification (such as “real” belief, or “religiosity”), to the extent that the job of the scholar of religion is not an attempt at adjudicating claims to “the real” so much as unraveling “what” (of social interests) gets organized under the naming of “religion,” as such. In pressing his point further, Schilbrack likens the shortsightedness of using social construction (method) as a way to bracket, limit, and deny an identified “something real” (belief) by turning to the social facts of history, and identity: “Or, to take cultural examples, ‘gender’ and ‘sexism’ and even ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ are social constructions but nevertheless indicate social realities that exist in the world. This view is what makes critical realism a form of realism.”41 Schilbrack’s turn to identity-based violence and historical trauma by way of example is of little surprise—for who, after all, would argue with the salience of its persuasion? Perhaps one might attempt to, at the risk of downright intellectual dishonesty at best, and “bad faith” at worst. Struggles at the site of method over and about identities (of many sorts) do not always and explicitly foreground (social) identity. Thus, while critically oriented “theoretical and methodological” debates in the study of religion often make use of social identities (what they are, what they can do, what they can say about themselves, and others) in exemplary ways, the concern over bracketing their more phenomenological dimensions more often than not takes the shape of, and becomes obscured in, debates concerning “experience” in religion, and “confessional impulses” in the theological domain. In his 2015 essay “Profane Theology” Martin Kavka, having been brought to his “self-consciousness” in the field of religion by thinkers such as McCutcheon and William Arnal, among others, raises the question of whether that realization of “why” he does “what” he does, as a scholar, is at odds with self-identifying as a theologian. Holding similar commitments to the profane nature of scholarship, he asserts that he is less interested in some kind of retrograde stance, doubling down on a traditional academic approach in religious studies that McCutcheon and Arnal (and J. Z. Smith, and Bruce Lincoln, and many others whose work have appeared in this journal) have threatened. Rather, what [he wants] to do is resist some—but not all—of the polarizing force of McCutcheon’s argument on that evening between legitimate and illegitimate approaches in the field of religious studies.42

Animating the typical assumption of theology’s identity among the critical ilk, Kavka writes, “typically, the scholar who self-identifies as a theologian is a person who takes belief to be the most salient aspect of ‘religion’ (whatever that might be),” hoping to show throughout his essay that he does not “claim to be a typical theologian, and that a different approach to theological

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work—one that is not invested in protecting the sacred from the profane—is possible in the academy.”43 Kavka has in mind to demonstrate the manner in which the “centrality of belief” does not organize his scholarly motivations at work in the theological task, and that doing theological work, or his work as a theologian, is not antithetical to “its insistence that self-consciousness about religion requires describing it in terms of its functions within various historical contexts.”44 Those unfamiliar with such questions might wonder, what risk does believing in belief (any more than say believing in categories of gender, race, sexuality, or method) pose to the scholarly conditions of critical scholarship in the study of religion, if, by “believing” we mean that such ideas have a history, and social reality so conceived? Scholars such as McCutcheon and Arnal might remark that the problem lies in the presumed “authorizing” work done by experiential accounts of religion (whereby those who believe, use their belief in defining what religion is and does), uncoupled from the larger forces of structural (social) realities (such as human interests). Thus, it is not difficult to see why theology—along with its subsequent constructions presumed to enable and legitimize scripts of “real” talk about faith (among those espousing them), religious experience, and the divine—is of major concern for those in the field who take issue with such an approach defining the academic study of religion, what it is, and how it ought to be studied. As such, while social identity is no less present in such representative debates as briefly sketched above, categories of “experience,” “meaning,” “belief,” “authenticity,” and so on are among the most prominent and prescient of such critical examinations, much of which is highlighted as most notable, and notorious, in the domain of theology and claims to identity. From what religion “is,” to “who” is a proper scholar of religion, to an attempt to re-legitimate and adjudicate theology’s critical capacities, Kavka moves into the “how” of religion: “To approach the study of religion in this way is to follow Bruce Lincoln’s oft-quoted rule in the final of his ‘Theses on Method’: ‘When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one’s interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between ‘truths,’ ‘truth-claims’ and ‘regimes of truth,’ one has ceased to function as historian or scholar.’”45 The kind of “thin description” advocated for in Jackson’s work reminds us that scholars are not the only ones studying and being studied. The kind of “overconfidence” and “hubris” Jackson alludes to as operative in the field of anthropology—when compared to the strict methodological guidelines for what/who a legitimate scholar is (and, is not) as expressed in Lincoln—seemingly makes anthropological attempts at Geertzian “thick description” look like ethically situated self-conscious efforts. As Jackson does well to articulate, they are not. But, for the sake of imaginative comparison, if an overconfidence engines an approach like “thick description,” then what ensures the

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“scholarly” certainty so endemic in Lincoln’s (highly cited, and widely used) manifesto on method?46 In the midst of human interests, it is all too easy (and, commonplace) to query in ways that simplify the complex equations of human existence and logics of practice; much more difficult is to consider the co-constitutive logics that have been arrested to, and confined within, a theological monopoly of conceptual causality. No, we know well that “god” did not really tell Christopher Columbus (and other well-known colonizing European vagrants) to “stretch his hand from sea to sea” to make his (and those thinking they were white) destiny manifest, just as much as this “god,” despite what white American Christian slaveholders and masters concocted, likewise did not sanction hundreds of years of black genocide in the Americas. Only in keeping “religion” and “race” separate, or “method” at bay from “identity,” would such absurdities even seem likely, or possible at all. NOTES 1. Laurel C. Schneider, “What Race Is Your Sex?,” in Jennifer Harvey, Karin A. Case, and Robin Hawley Gorsline, eds., Disrupting White Supremacy from Within: White People on What We Need to Do (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2004), 142. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 144. 5. Ibid., 145. 6. Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” 1–44. 7. Schneider, “What Race Is Your Sex?” 146. 8. John L. Jackson, Jr., Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 8. 9. Ibid., 13. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 14. 12. Lincoln, Authority. 13. Of the Deleuzian options, we consider Jasbir Puar’s assemblage model of identity/identification to be a highly useful model for scholars of religion interested in addressing intersecting identities, but with a critical gaze that opens to new political, empirical, and social possibilities for scholars and our data, alike. See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. 14. Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity. 15. Laurel Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London, England; New York: Routledge, 2007). 16. Laurel C. Schneider, Re-Imagining the Divine: Confronting the backlash Against Feminist Theology (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1998), 33. 17. Ibid.

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18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 34. 20. Ibid., 35. 21. See, Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming. 22. Pinn, Terror and Triumph, 48. 23. Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, 92. 24. Pinn, Terror and Triumph, 49. 25. Long, Significations, 7. 26. “Africans Still Seething over Sarkozy Speech,” https​://uk​.reut​ers.c​om/ar​ticle​/ uk-a​frica​-sark​ozy/a​frica​ns-st​ill-s​eethi​ng-ov​er-sa​rkozy​-spee​ch-id​UKL05​13034​62007​ 0905 (accessed September 3, 2017). 27. Contemporary German social and intellectual discourse rejects the rhetorical and empirical use of “Rasse,” the German word corresponding to the English “Race,” on grounds of its historical connection to National Socialism and the bastardized version of “scientific” observation the word enable. As scholars of race and religion who spent nearly a year in the country doing various modes of ethnographic and textual research, upon our arrival we were informed to not use the (German) word “Rasse” in public lectures, because of its history, and thus, its terminated use in public, in research, and so on. We were encouraged to use the English word “race” as if its (American) history was somehow less pernicious; as if the word’s possibility for multiple meanings is obscured by, and limited to, the German context, and to Germans—who, in the end, quite often see themselves as doing more radical work through the citational reminder of its (race’s) past in Germany. While, generally speaking, German academicians tend to not recognize the manner in which the social death of the word’s use, this categorical extermination, reifies discursive and ontological illegibility (such as “seeing” people of color; or allowing scholarship on race and difference to flourish within the confines of German academic and intellectual spaces). 28. For discussions of this surveillance, see Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman, eds., The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11 (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017). 29. For an introduction to this variety, see Anthony B. Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998). 30. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (Basic Books, 2012), 215. 31. Schneider, “What Race Is Your Sex?” 32. Max Weber, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in Max Weber, Hans Heinrich Gerth, and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford University Press, Galaxy, 1958). 33. Emile Durkheim, A New Translation by Karen E. Fields, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1995), xxvi. 34. Schneider, Re-Imagining the Divine, 36. 35. Ibid. 36. Nell Irvin Painter, “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era,” The New York Times, November 12, 2016 https​://ww​w.nyt​imes.​com/2​016/1​1/13/​opini​on/wh​atwh​itene​ss-me​ans-i​n-the​-trum​p-era​.html​?mcub​z=0 (accessed November 15, 2016).

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37. Ibid. 38. Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. 1st edition. London and New York: Verso, 2012. 39. Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 91. 40. Ibid., 90–91. 41. Ibid., 92. 42. Kavka, “Profane Theology,” 104–15. 43. Ibid., 105. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 106. 46. Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 17, no. 1 (2005): 8–10.

Chapter 6

Categorical Miscegenation Strange Bitter Fruit and Uncertain Branches in the Field

Likely, we are in easy company with readers if we suggest that the academic study of religion has been, for a time now, strange. By strange, we mean to signify on having no sense of our unique identity, or having alienated ourselves (or been alienated) from the means of procuring a unique sense of identity. For over half a century at least, as a field religious studies has wrestled with its disciplinary identity to such an extent that the wrestling has, for some, served as the defining feature of its identity.1 For others, a lack of methodological grounding and having no isolatable thing appropriately called “religion” to use in service of a disciplinary identity has not stopped them from exploring the various ideological and philosophical dimensions, cultural traditions and rituals, and institutional housings of things haphazardly labeled as religion, religions, or religious.2 Such labeling has also given rise to a dedicated few eagerly and earnestly critical of assumed theoretical and methodological commitments that presume cohesive identities, data sets, and uniqueness for those things we study, how we study them, or even that there is a “we” where the field of religious studies is concerned. Collectively, the work we do is often strange in these and so many other ways. Longtime chair of the department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University and first president of the American Academy of Religion, A. Roy Eckardt responded in 1956 to this strangeness by reminding that “As Karl Marx stated, the ‘criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,”’3 followed with a suggestion that “the professor of religion is a kind of walking embodiment of the strangeness of religion. He cannot grant that religion is just one more separable aspect of human life, and yet he has to teach religion as though it were precisely this.”4 He admonishes the field that our epistemologies and general theories cannot admit that religion is a unique dimension of human experience, but to keep our jobs and undergird our presence on universities, 159

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we must act as if it were sui generis. Perhaps, this strange statement from Marx, channeled through a theologian, poses a question to us about our strange professional identity: Are we critics of religion or religious critics? In numerous respects, this professional paranoia—or as Ninian Smart calls it, schizophrenic5—is strange; yet, the strangest thing of all might be that our many efforts to identify with or escape from this thing called “religion” might have a lot to teach us about ourselves. By “religion” we do not mean to signify innate uniqueness, but a process of distinction-making wherein a sense or function of uniqueness is obtained for “adherents.” It is not the distinction, but the distinguishing. On both sides of the break between debates about what religion is, many scholars have grown very good at the criticism of others, but not so good at self-criticism. Here—in an effort to take seriously this strangeness inchoately rendered in Marx’s causal linkage of criticism and religion but also that strangeness evinced in their retelling by a theologian, we can attest that the strangeness of the field of religious studies involves its resemblance to a religion of criticism, or the sense that to critique is historically and ideologically rooted in secular critique of ecclesial institutions and empires. Borrowing again here from the work of social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, “religious” refers here to distinctions that produce a discursive floating signifier and work to legitimate that signifier (at a social level) as more than the sum total of the arbitrary, relative distinctions that produce it.6 As such a social process, religion creates a semblance of distinct identity or identities, and then suggests that it did not just create those categories. As a signifier in our field, “critical” has come to serve as another kind of floating signifier (able to mean anything or nothing), when in a normative sense it ought to mean both productively antagonistic and vital, aiding in the testing of claims through experimentation and necessary for addressing pressing social concerns. Given these parameters, the recitational troping of “critical” in the field of religious studies (of late) has the quality of structuring and being structured by arbitrary criteria while also being taken by folks on both sides of many debates as a “gold standard” for adjudicating and “legitimating” unfolding scholarly concerns. In a different sense, the strangeness of our discipline has been met by the embodied strangeness of “professors of religion,” strange in the sense that, historically, most of them look alike, come from the same sorts of places and spaces, and consequentially bring a rather provincial and singular white, male, Protestant, straight, “rational” sensibility to their efforts. Rather than emphasize crypto-theological currents in the study of religion, here we consider “critical method” functioning as camouflage concealing a not-socryptic normative identity in the study of religion, “method” as a kind of invisibility cloak. In effort to reveal “method,” we apply Eckardt’s emphasis on the strangeness of religion toward a “critical” critique of white, male,

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normative social identity in the academic study of religion. “Strange Bitter Fruit” denotes historically socially dominant academicians’ particularity, and connote it as a kind of specialness that has very limited (recent) experience with rendering, registering, or naming itself as particularity, and it remains skeptical of the methodological stakes gained for itself by taking off the cloak that “critical” method provides. “Uncertain Branches” meanwhile refers to the universal claims, however cleverly concealed, made by scholars of religion and upon which our arguments often “hang” and from which “critical” method cannot escape. In what follows, we look first to Eckardt’s essay on the strangeness of religion, to begin thinking through the ways that the study of religion might embrace the task of critically engaging those who, through the “critical” adjudication of “method,” would or do reinforce the hegemony of historically dominant social identifications. The strange disciplinary self-consciousness of religious studies historically—that is, its anxiety about being taken seriously as a human science, an academic “scholarly” field of inquiry—makes it particularly suited to guard itself against methodological totalitarianism in our own field and extending to the very fields that for so long have served as strawmen for our disciplinary anxieties—anxieties that have all along been their own “illusions” concealing and sealing white normative identity as invisible condition, instead of a visible illusion. In short, the anxieties over our professional identity have equipped us with tools that can offset an undue “methodolatry” as likely to emerge from racialized or gendered blindness as it is from undue emphasis and trust in universal rationality or logic. In fact, we might imagine that for many readers who maintain a disdain for theology, even a rhetorical reliance here on “idolatry” might ring as too “theological”; we’re interested in how such knee-jerk reactions to “theology” or suspicions about its covert usages may have something to do with the danger sui generis appeals to the category of experience (e.g., “god,” “blackness,” “queerness”) pose to historically dominant social identities today (due in large measure to theology’s culpability in constructing this dominance historically). As argued elsewhere in Method as Identity, the trouble with theology may have something to do with the distance it cultivates between open and closed systems of meaning by way of other operationalized acts of identification occurring in/as “religious” experience. In order to demonstrate Eckardt’s utility, and in a way that might be testable and repeatable with other thinkers and by other researchers—in a word, “critical”—we introduce the idea of “categorical miscegenation,” the intentional moving of categories of social identification “out of place”7 in order to comparatively gauge their relationship to one another. By “categorical miscegenation,” we mean the strategic practice of decontextualizing a category from its structured location and replacing it with a seemingly disparate

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category, so as to elucidate the structural social relation between categories. For our purposes here, what’s true of “religion” may very well be true of historically dominant social identity, and what is said of/about “white/Christian/ male/straight/wealthy” identifications may say something stark concerning “religion.” By way of both constructive and critical conclusion, we look to white, Southern, lesbian essayist and novelist Lillian Smith to demonstrate what a critical intervention into this hegemonic relationship between method in the study of religion and this dominant set of identifications might teach religious studies as a field, drawing some uncertain conclusions about epistemological and professional uncertainty. We are not interested here to argue that critique of dominant social identity is worthwhile. We take this significance for granted for the sake of space; also, because anyone who would need convincing of why working to establish a “critical” critique of dominant social identity is necessary won’t be convinced by this book, anyway. Second, as to the imposter syndrome, or debates about the anxiety of professionalization, we are following arguments made by folks like D. G. Hart and others, wherein professionalization led to an identity crisis where our identity as “religious” became merely its subject, its data, causing the field of religious studies to be marked by two major components, (1) no methodology and (2) an inferiority complex.8 “Religion” for the scholar of religion (per a critical posture) is a present absence, a paradox, present to us today in/as history, even as it (as an object) may be a theoretical fiction. Socially dominant identifications follow a similar aporetic structural logic. “Identity” here is a floating signifier where our uncertain branches hang—an illusion borrowed from cultural theorist JeanFrançois Bayart, who suggests that “there is no such thing as identity, only operational acts of identification.”9 The closer in distance an act of identification is to social normativity, the heightened its expression as a nonentity or nonidentity. To the eye of the scholar of religion, it looks like religion and religion looks like it from an analytical and structural standpoint. The strange self-consciousness of religious studies as a discipline historically—that is, its anxiety about being taken seriously as a distinct academic “scholarly” field of inquiry—can be partially mitigated by naming and embracing its largely normative “white” identity, while that very self-consciousness and the methodological discussions emerging from it over these last decades, mark religious studies as particularly suited to address methodological questions of normative identity and dominant experience as they relate to scholarship in our own field and in others. For example, and to paraphrase and contextualize Eckardt and also to foreshadow some of what will follow, the white scholar of religion “cannot grant that [whiteness] is just one more separable aspect of human life, and yet he has to teach [whiteness] as though it were precisely this.” Most scholars of

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religion know what the going “party line” involves with citing social normativity: that it must be acknowledged at the least; but even so, an altogether harder task is knowing what to say or write so as to not be called out by the “gotcha” guardians of political correctness. Only now are some scholars of religion seemingly having “to teach” white identity, whiteness, or give some sort of lip service to historically dominant social contexts at all. In a sense, the strangeness of religion or religions, taught as distinct, has meant a certain sort of indistinguishability between its disciplinary identity and its nearly exclusive white identity. Religious studies is strange; the transparency of normativity is strange— and the strangeness of each can speak back to the other in strange, productive ways. In less metaphoric terms, we are arguing that the imposter syndrome of religious studies offers a model for what a multiplicative, non-totalizing intellectual posture could look like, and we are suggesting that if religious studies critically engages normativity in qualitative and quantitative ways (converging with our relationship to and treatment of “religion”), then we might also begin to realize that we have been studying identity and identity formation—serving as priests and scribes defending certain constellations of identities—all along. THEOLOGY AND THE HARVESTING OF BITTER FRUIT A. Roy Eckardt was for many years chair of the department of Religion Studies at Lehigh University, and was instrumental on the national stage in intense service for the National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI), the professional precursor to the American Academy of Religion. Space does not permit an intellectual biography of Eckardt here, but his prolific publishing and service clearly place him as one of many mid-twentieth-century white, male Protestant theologians who were fundamental to the establishment of North American religious studies as an academic discipline. Eckardt is remembered as a theologian and for his efforts at Jewish-Christian dialogue, and much of his early and later writings have an intensely reflexive concern for what we now call “religious studies.” He was a scholar interested in his professional identity, and his areas of research necessitated a wrestling with questions of social identity as well. In December of 1956, Eckardt delivered the presidential address of NABI held at Union Theological Seminary. He sought to make sense of the intellectual as well as professional anxieties arising from the proliferation of departments of religion, and the address was meant to serve as a platform for shepherding NABI in a more “respectable” direction that eventually becomes the American Academy of Religion. Eckardt’s address suggested

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that the study and teaching of religion on university campuses—in distinct departments of religion—was strange because these departments “embody ambiguity of meaning and a tension in substance which reflects strangeness,”10 because although they “cannot grant that religion is just one more separable aspect of human life,” professional distinctiveness for the field or departments is predicated on the divestment of the special status of its object, religion. Professionalization will be aided through an embrace of this ambiguity and paradox. Turning a necessity into a virtue, our assumed distinctiveness produces functional distinctiveness. Eckardt’s argument is irritatingly circular, but nevertheless reveals something useful. In trying to justify this strangeness, Eckardt initially offers four overlapping types of religion found on campuses and society more generally: (1) implicit—humans are inevitably religious and we guard against anxiety wherever there are humans; (2) explicit—easy-to-spot rituals and practices; (3) finite—those less than ultimate things that lead, in the end, to ultimate things; and (4) ultimate religious expressions—think Paul Tillich.11 Although a bit anachronistic by today’s standards, this typology provides a rhetorical vehicle for Eckardt’s argument and we might even begin to think of these types as “operational acts of identification”12—the typology manufacturing the categories in the ritualistic, citational practice—adding to the strangeness of Eckardt speaking to a phenomenon he is actively involved in producing during his NABI address. Through various suggestions about who on college campuses treats each of these categories best or worst, Eckardt sets about discussing certain problems of inclusion (as distinct departments) that include questions of insider/ outsider allegiances, such that the distinct academic study of religion often leads to a breakdown of what we regard as “religious” versus “non-religious.” Eckardt, being a Christian theologian, suggests that Christianity leads to the end of religion anyway, so to take the gospel seriously should at face value signal the end of the need for departments of religion. Next, he describes certain problems of exclusion, suggesting that many scholars outside of religious studies would likely give an incomplete portrait of religion, out of ignorance or disdain for the subject matter. These scholars, ill-equipped to deal with all four types of religion, would be unable to interrogate their own and others’ world views and assumptions guiding their study of religion. He goes on to suggest that “without a department specifically charged with instruction in religion, there will probably remain a certain omission of subject matter.”13 Without a department of religion, matters of ultimate concern, value, worth, and other humanistic concerns would not receive adequate attention. This topic of ultimate concern takes center focus for Eckardt, but it should not simply be regarded as Eckardt’s concern for “god” but for cultural expressions of what Eckardt regards as an idolatrous sort. For Eckardt, criticism

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begins with and is in the business of confrontations with the false idols too easily held as ultimate by scholar and social actor, alike. He offers two analogies helpful to his argument. The first is that we can better understand the relation of departments of religion to universities by looking to the distinction between church and state in the United States: A department of religion may serve as critical guardian against the easy habit of idolatrizing particular human insights into the nature of truth (including philosophical insights founded in the claims of reason) . . . the relation of religion and the university, like that of church and state, may embody a built in check upon the idolatries of either of the two sides. . . . To afford academic respectability in the form of a department may be to keep the barbs of faith from inflicting too much pain.14

Claims to reason (or from reason) often express as idolatry because they come in a sort of bad faith made possible by the dismissal of data that would cause one to question one’s rational conclusions. Whether a scientific method, supposed critical method, or specific disciplinary method, the things we study as well as the ways we study them can easily serve as idols, if and when those data sets and methods produce a semblance of completion or certainty through distinctions that leaves out other data or other ways of approaching data. Ostensibly, where ultimate concern is taken into account, the most central import of departments of religious studies involves the way the strangeness of our lack of method and agreed-upon data guards us against this idolatry and allows us to become “critical guardians” against the “easy habit” of academic idolatry. As if to hold at bay the tendency to take this “critical guardian” task too seriously and reproduce another kind of idolatry in the form of shifting from an identity marked by strangeness to one marked by bloated necessity, Eckardt offers a somewhat self-deprecating analogy for departments of religion, that of the court jester: In the court of learning there is always need for a court jester, practitioner of a most serious art. The court jester can do much to prevent professors and educators from taking themselves with undue seriousness and from assuming that, by the exercise of thought, they can add cubits to the stature of existence. On the other hand, the court jester is immediately driven to the essential paradox that speaks of the saving and losing of one’s life.15

Taking oneself too seriously risks idolatry, as much as does an unchecked assumption that the rational tools at our disposal are enough to make sense of those things and tensions arising from a culture or community’s ultimate concern. On the focus of ultimate concern, and its expression in strangeness

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of a sui generis sort, Eckardt concludes by suggesting that of two polemical options—“making higher education ‘religious’” or charging departments of religion to deal with the “problem of ‘religion in education’”—Eckardt contends that the tension is productive, creative.16 This “strangeness of religion, like religion itself, is inevitable. For it lies deep within all of us, ‘strangers and exiles on the earth.’”17 Dominant social identity may also be marked by this strangeness, insofar as social identification (dominant or otherwise) serves many as an “ultimate concern” in the form of self-preservation, the sort of idolatry Eckardt warns about and charges us (as scholars of religion) to defend against. When scholars replace “religion” for “identity” while keeping structural relations in place, it becomes easier to recognize how concerns over social identity are often expressed as exaggerations of a particular as a universal; hence, idolatry. This position leads to the irritating (if obvious) conclusion that claims to social identity without evidentiary or logical support can actually transmute social activism into idolatry, too. So a “critical” concern for the field would include methodological mitigation of exaggerated appeals to experiences of culture that render identity as idol. But as we divest meaning from assumed objects and categories, “method” has not to the same degree been divested of its assumed a priori value. This strangeness necessitates attention to the possibility that our “critical” methodology not also become an idol. MITIGATING EXPERIENCES OF SOCIAL DIFFERENCE OR DOMINATION? How are scholars of religion implicated in idolatry, not in the sense of worship of false gods, but in the manufacture and defense of social normativity? Feminist theologian Mary Daly offers a typology of “devices available both to women and to men for refusing to see the problem of sexual caste,”18 useful for critique and reflection on academic defenses of normativity. Her typology does not fall along a caretaker/critic (i.e., sacred/profane) divide, unless we account for who is caretaking what, and what is critiqued and by whom? The typology19 includes trivialization (of social issues) by way of reminding that X issue under scrutiny is only one of many social issues. The next is particularization, where X social issue is said to only apply to a particular space. A third is spiritualization, not shorthand for a kind of “giving the problem up to god” (though that would be included), but for Daly this refers to the mystification/metaphysicalization of “concrete oppressive facts.” An example would include the scenario wherein upon a charge that the study of religion is oppressive toward women, the response involves the quick deconstruction of the category of gender, writ large. This point of deconstructing gender also

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demonstrates the tensions posed by either/or, mutually exclusive thinking and reminds that the refusal to see public issues (as related to personal troubles) is more often defended with “true” propositions, not outright fictions. The fiction rests in the refusing and denial of alternative worldviews, and then the insidious denial of the refusing on grounds of appeal to an assured shared ontology. “So does this mean we must maintain that gender is fixed?,” one might ask. Hardly. It merely means that social issues necessitate application of current knowledge to those issues, rather than current knowledge guide our attention to this or that social issue. Daly’s last type is universalization, for example, “But don’t questions of method affect us all? Don’t sui generis claims to religion negatively impact everyone in the study of religion?” Yes, perhaps so, but if we can agree that Enlightenment, Modern tendencies to universalize have proven problematic, it stands as a matter of simple common sense that we might avoid suggestions that seek to universalize method. Daly’s work is well known for its purported severities (e.g., calling for a method of castration, not allowing men in classes), but less known and evaluated is that her efforts to liberate from patriarchy and theology forced her to confront, first, method, or what she understands as the universalization of a particular set of methodological commitments: what in a technical sense she describes as “methodolatry,” the taking of a particular particular for a universal.20 In a most basic manner, this “false god of theologians, philosophers, and other academics” ensures that method dictates research questions rather than research questions dictates the most appropriate methods. According to Daly, The tyranny of methodolatry hinders new discoveries. It prevents us from raising questions never asked before and from being illumined by ideas that do not fit into pre-established boxes and forms. The worshippers of Method have an effective way of handling data that does not fit into the Respectable Categories of Questions and Answers. They simply classify it as nondata, thereby rendering it invisible.21

Referring to the preoccupation with method as axiomatic of erudition as “tyranny,” this chapter follows from Daly’s suggestions. We are questioning the intellectual costs of efforts to monopolize one normative method as more useful than all others. As “critics” of religion, do our critiques maintain any sense of the stakes involved in academic claims about method that reinforce totalizing logics that, Daly warns, inhibit the growth of knowledge in service to the protection of current assumed knowledge? Or in Daly’s words, we’re trying in this chapter and in Method as Identity to emphasize that the scholar of religion’s “god Method is in fact a subordinate deity, serving Higher Powers.”22 These powers involve not a high god, but the social stakes of patriarchy applied (for a long time) to the notion of a high god. Yet, it is

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important to bear in mind that Daly may or may not have anything to say about an external deity; “god” is a trope for situating the historical locus of these “Higher Powers”: patriarchy. There is little wonder many would have it we reduce the sacred/profane distinction to a discursive creation; doing so protects against recognizing that the tyranny of intellectual normativity has neither admitted “religious experiences” any more than “women’s” experiences. Because of method, “women have been unable even to experience our own experiences.” There is belief and then there is belief. Daly does not seem to be worried about otherworldly metaphysics. This is social theory in a theological vernacular. The siting of patriarchy, or heteronormativity, or whiteness within the academic study of religion ensures that “the servants of Method must therefore unacknowledge its nonexistence (a technique in which they are highly skilled). By the grace of this double negative may they bless its existence in the best way they know. High treason merits a double cross.”23 What Daly helps set in motion in the way of critique of method in the study of religion is brought to more contemporary relief in the work of Laurel C. Schneider. Schneider’s body of work seeks to outline the intellectual, institutional/traditional (i.e., Christian/theistic), and social roots of the one, singular logic and rational framework that relies on a binary tension in service to the promotion of intellectual homogeneity and the protection of social normativity. As discussed in chapter 5, Schneider’s notion of the “logic of the One” is coterminous with monotheism, meaning the sacred/profane divide does not fall along a traditional metaphysical binary. This logic undergirds “scientific methodology” as much as it has its origins in monotheism. Whether or not we spend time looking at whether its epistemological ends justify its historical means (and she does give considerable attention to this), the basic point is that “the logic of the One simply doesn’t work well enough anymore to satisfy far-reaching questions about either divinity or the world.”24 As it concerns the study of religion, Schneider’s work attests to the productiveness of not disciplining a hard boundary between the two areas of “theology” and the “academic” or “scientific” study of religion. Theology, for its shortcomings, enables multiplicity. Indeed, Schneider labels the constructive dimension of her work “divine multiplicity.” The logic of the one is exemplified by the public issue raised by Daly of patriarchy, and equally exemplified in ongoing conversations that trouble social normativity, whether involving theologians or scientists. Thinking in terms of geospatial models and movement, the logic of the one has as its axis something of an assemblage of multiple acts of identification, an intersectional cadre of identities predicated (historically and structurally) on opposition toward bodies and any unfamiliar ideas. It also evades responsibility for maintaining this particular logic of practice.

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If both theology and science can reinforce the logic of the one, how are we to understand the disciplinary locus of a “critical” approach? In Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion, Monica R. Miller describes an ongoing issue in the academic study of religion when it comes to both uncritical as well as strategic reliance, tactical or arbitrary sui generis appeals to experience and appeals to experience as sui generis. Miller notes that this trend could be thought of as a kind of “have your cake and eat it, too” critical position, critical caretaking as it were. In the field of religious studies, even in expanding to new geographies and topographies of method and theory in useful ways, there remains an often tacit connection between escape from the sui generis and reliance on cultural affinity. What often results is a doubling down on a sui generis thought structure and academic classificatory arrangement through an appeal to “culture.”25

When claims to uniqueness are under attack, the tendency is for those criticized to particularize in the direction of culture and render such culture(s) as unique. Miller continues in suggesting that this tendency amounts to shifting from one sort of irreducibility to another. Scholars concerned that they do not call religion its own thing still run the risk of reinforcing this similar position through a turn to cultural experience or identity—seemingly distinct in their own right, though not so distinct when distinction-making propensities are taken into account.26

We might imagine that the tendency described by Miller ultimately fits within a worldview manufactured through the logic of the one, a totalitarian logic militating ultimately in service to sameness. One ultimate sameness = ultimate uniqueness. Worth attention here is addressing the not-so-tacit claim that such findings or analytical techniques are only possible through a “critical” method able to distance itself from the “stakes” of claims to social identification. K. Merinda Simmons articulates the position well when suggesting that a critical method for the study of religion as a human science is useful to the extent it both does not treat our data as what matters, and to the extent it “applies to anyone’s work, no matter the data set.”27 Russell McCutcheon, in the same conversation, situates the stakes of a critical method in “the ability to treat all instances of human behavior, organization, claims, etc., no more or no less interesting and deserving of study . . . whatever tools we adopt to do our work ought to be applicable to any situation anyone else, would also opt to study—that’s what makes our work part of a science.”28 Simmons and McCutcheon move from deeply useful critique toward defense of that critique as dominant and normative.

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Schneider’s work serves as an example that there are multiple methods attentive to the adjudication of social identification and difference, while the specific attention she gives to the history of ideas enables recognition that claiming our work as “part of a science” is also to claim a normative identity (in the face of reflexive discussion about the identity of a critical approach). As Miller indicated at the time of this “Keeping ‘Critical’ Critical” discussion and as we seek to articulate and elaborate in the pages of Method as Identity, What often passes these days as the “human sciences” sort of deconstructs itself in that the over-determined, positivistic certainty granted to the empirical (much of what we see in sociology of religion, for example, or the large-scale assumption that “science” gets us closer to what is “really” going on, even if just in a methodological sense) follows a similar logic seen in the uncertain “certainty” or the certain “uncertainty” that so dominates the phenomenological enterprise . . . power is cast vertically and horizontally in this thing called human sciences, both with respect to experiments as well as analyses . . . .The measure or rubric of what is critical (over and against the model of the human sciences) can never be disconnected from a “scientific” register, broadly conceived, but neither can it ignore or negate the strategies at work between scholar and data, on the one hand, and between scholars across data, on the other.29

How is it that we are so easily able to admit that theology totalizes, and have trouble admitting that Western notions of science also totalize and both arise from totalizing forces in history? Schneider’s deconstruction of the logic of the one offers a model for answering this question, as well as for accounting for the vertical and horizontal dimensions of power expressing itself in scholarship (i.e., how we position ourselves/our work and how others position our bodies and bodies of work). Sciences of the human were inventions arising out of specific monologics associated with particular cultures and traditions. Consequential of the provincialism of the origins of science, and the deconstruction of the order of knowledge made possible by science through the various claims made by former objects of scientific investigation, and occurring chronologically alongside the end of colonialism, the academic study of religion has relied on a logic of binary opposition and such is our figurative cross to bear. Escaping or quarantining theology won’t fix this reliance; the effort to escape is the expression of the binary logic. As Charles H. Long reminds, “to the extent the discipline admits of an ultimate signifier, whether God in the theological traditions, science in the human sciences, or a form of rationalism or common sense in the historical and political sciences, the nonrational will be located in the objects of investigation.”30 Do claims to critical reduction of data in the study of religion attend to a recognition of rationality located in the data? The scientific method, sought to service the “human

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sciences” by critical voices in the study of religion today, was never designed to handle the semiotic meanings associated with the human, in no small measure simply because those methods were predicated on discursive fictions. Yet, many of us are now hoping that “critical” method might save us from myth or experiences that rely on myth? This history is the history of critical method. As Marx reminds, critique begins with the critique of religion. Science, as Schneider notes, fits within a larger worldview or ontology at work in Western Europe predating modernity. To this extent, we are all victims of a totalizing logic of practice. Yet, how are our intellectual pursuits historicized to point critique in the most productive direction? The logic of the One is dualistic, demanding a process of reasoning that absolutely and certainly separates truth from falsehood, just as it demands that God be clearly and absolutely distinguished from not-God. It should be no surprise therefore that scientific reasoning, pulled like a brilliant thread from the fabric of monotheistic teaching and learning, makes this same demand, although its orthodoxies lie more in method than in conclusions. The very point of early modern scientific reasoning was to pursue the “truth” by separating fact from fiction, an estrangement that relied on the prior assumption that the two are separable.31

Whether we are describing Western rationality or critiquing claims made in the study of religion, the thing about science is that it relies on experience, it doesn’t negate it. Theology is definitely guilty, but it had a very capable accomplice in appeals to science. In fact, knowledge is only expanded (or even tested) through attention to experience. As Schneider recognizes, “modern science as a methodology is therefore much more flexible and open to multiplicity than it is as a defense of truth. It is only in the realm of ideology that boundaries between true and false cannot be permeable, regardless of the offense such ambiguity might give to some.”32 When method comes to be an end unto itself, or when the “Higher Powers” described by Daly take method as camouflage, method becomes a form of idolatry, the means are taken for the ends, and what we call “method” transmutes into a defense of the faith of a particular set of provincial epistemological conclusions. By this estimation, and in the effort to flatten and quarantine “experience” as heterodox, calls for a critical method and the manufacturing of an anxiety about belief as a crisis of professional identity are not only claims to social identification, but propagate worn out social arrangements in both form and content. Eckardt, Daly, and Schneider are theologians, and are interested in questions of ultimate concern probed out of various “confessional” allegiances. Such variety holds our experientially based epistemological anxieties for certainty at bay, enabling a more equitable relationship to social scientific and

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rational appeal. By situating ourselves in light of our recognition that what we study and how we study it do not provide us with the surety we seek, we better guard against unmitigated arrogance. Analogically stated, method can either serve to build border-walls or the ladders to climb over walls. Relied on at various moments in Method as Identity, anthropologist John L. Jackson’s ethnography of the Hebrew Israelites in Dimona, Israel, helps to elaborate our position.33 Jackson’s aptly titled Thin Description is a treatise on intellectual humility for the field of anthropology, in that although Geertzian “thick description” remains a useful methodological principle, it might be more valuable if anthropologists shifted their interpretation of its potential outcomes. Rather than adhere to ever thicker modes of description trusting in the promise of greater knowledge (i.e., turning method into idolatry), Jackson argues that a more honest approach would realize that findings from thick description proliferate at the level of the unknown, with ever increasing degrees of uncertainty and mystery. Where the field of religion is concerned, closer proximity to theology (rather than fear of it) would make for stronger critical theory, not weaker scholarship, just as a shifted interpretive posture toward “thinness” gives new life to an old Geertzian method rather than arguing for its erasure. In Jackson’s fieldwork, through the tensions posed between method and data, the categorical confusions that haunt so much of scholarship were cast into clearer relief. It is not that thick description (as a method) takes too much for granted, but that Geertz had taken the utility of method for granted. What we don’t know is not a mandate that we know it, whether our not knowing it is something that we may want to call the strangeness of “religion” or “bad method.” We have, according to Jackson, cultivated a relationship to method based on our assumptions about what it offers. Now, our task involves recognizing that with every new insight or explanation produced by our methods, we increase the size of our horizon and concomitantly decrease our knowledge base. Jackson’s perspective finds somewhat of a parallel in the earlier work of Eckardt. Eckardt’s court jester analogy offers a way to hold our own arrogance in denying uncertainty at bay. Our self-consciousness cannot become self-righteousness as we take up this task of our strangeness informing those areas and disciplines outside of our own, whether our soapboxes have us shouting about whiteness, patriarchy, or “improper” distance from the scholar’s object of study. Following Eckardt’s typology, we can turn old ways of talking about religion into new ways of describing and deconstructing social normativity. But for many of us, especially if method is in fact identity, this will mean we’re all still simply talking about ourselves. Our neurotic solipsism is funny, no doubt; but it also might offer our greatest gift to colleagues across departmental and disciplinary boundaries, as Jonathan Z. Smith seems

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to suggest when noting that our self-consciousness is our defining feature.34 We underscore our utility to other departments and disciplines by doing the theoretical work on identity that we are, in this strange sense, uniquely suited to accomplish. Remembering Eckardt’s comments about the “checks and balances” afforded to the overall university by departments of religion, the same is certainly possible—and true already at many institutions: that departments of religion are on the front lines of critical evaluation of scholarship’s concerns over a variety of social identities and public issues. Here, we mean that many departments are very good at pointing out racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like—although not always good at pointing out their own. Calls for “scientific” methods in the study of religion that emphasize a hands-off (experience) policy may be well intentioned, and it is plausible that appeals to deconstruct all manner of sui generis reliance arise from an awareness of hegemonic social structures, perhaps in certain cases even born out of a concern that power not overdetermine scholarship. Yet, they also run the risk of stabilizing dominant normative social identity as if it is fixed in time and space as a logos and locus of power, in part through the very suggestion that authority is malleable. “Science” did not protect black bodies from white bodies or protect women from exploitation in doctor’s offices; “science” exacerbated these modes of marginalization alongside “religious” cultural production.35 “Objectivity” has never been experienced as objective save for a select few. Categorical miscegenation, exemplified in our treatment of Lillian Smith below, helps to develop a critical posture toward that “select few.” Our point is epistemological, involving how scholars of identity study “operational acts of identification,” rather than an ethical intervention into the “gotcha” critiques of racism, sexism, and homophobia prevalent on social media or the “gotcha” critiques of sui generis appeals prevalent in the field today. For instance, Eckardt suggests, “religion is the most idolatrous area of human life, for so often in religion ultimate sanction is sought for dubious ideas and reprehensible policies.”36 The same might also be true of dominant social identifications, in that an undue need for certainty of a social and epistemological sort has justified both horrific and mundane sorts of violence historically. Examples of the former include nuclear arms and drone strikes, while the latter, mundane sorts of violence include dictating who would say what and legislating the tools at a person’s or scholar’s disposal. Examples of this categorical blurring are countless, as seen throughout this book (and elsewhere in our work), and aid in both naming and responding to the various dimensions of domination shaping our classifications of social identifications, and more generally, the vast array of assemblages and constellations of operationalized acts of identification as they intersect.

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UNCERTAIN EPISTEMOLOGICAL BRANCHES Here, we turn to white, lesbian, cisgender, Southern novelist Lillian Smith who, more than most white Americans, sought to sight and cite a normative social identity as an intersectional matrix of white, Protestant Christian, male, and not only straight, but repressed through a preoccupation of religion. In this section, we suggest that by coming to terms with its historic and contemporary normative identity, the field of religion would be more adequately equipped to embrace certain contemporary findings about identity and religion more generally. We point to the ways in which features of identity-based scholarship, and what many now call “critical” approaches to the study of religion, each have got part of their efforts right, although each has much to teach the other. To this point in the chapter, the category of “religion” has served as proxy for “social normativity;” In Smith, talk of normative “white identity” is instructive of how the study of religion might understand itself and its contemporary theoretical tasks. Throughout the book, we treat dominant identity as an assemblaged constellation of different operational acts of identification (e.g., race, gender). To be attentive to the particularity of white identification cutting against the particularities of gender, geography, and sexuality, we follow Smith’s usage of whiteness as an intersectional term inclusive of gender, sexuality, religion, and other co-constituted categories working to galvanize a dominant identification and repress any act that might threaten (at social or psychical levels) that domination. We encourage readers to consider why she stilts the particularity of whiteness to subordinate other operational acts of identification. If all identifications are strategic, when (and where and how) is it appropriate or necessary to scale one against the next? In a host of projects, Smith set about to demonstrate that white Americans have crafted their identities by othering nonwhite bodies and through the sexual and gender repression of all bodies. She takes the symbolic imagery of strange fruit hanging from Southern trees—black bodies hanging from lynch ropes—and recasts the idea onto white bodies to demonstrate that “we are the strange fruit of that way of life, we who are white”37 based on a demand to circumscribe life, to take an identity, for the sake of creating through mimesis (i.e., denying) a historical or cultural identity. This arrangement has had the effect of Othering white folk from any social context at all, because it never actually worked to produce what Smith understands to be the point of an identity: to hold in creative balance the particular with the universal, and sameness with difference. Where this strange normative identity is concerned, a particular context has been thought to be universal for so long, that the only particular placement of normative identity or experience at the disposal of whites today is universal in its orientation, which is of course a paradox.

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For an example focused on race, what would a “white” identity “look” like for the field, considering both that professional guilds are on the one hand less white than ever before, and that representatives of “critical” methods are not all white, while on the other hand professional guilds continue to be overwhelmingly demographically “white” and men continue to exert disproportionate power. Smith’s recasting of whites as this strange fruit suggests that based on past and contemporary manipulations of particular and universal, individual and collective, in service to the logic of the one, whites have hung themselves (metaphorically and existentially from a certain context) as they hung others (literally and socially in a quest to ensure certainty). Whites remain lodged in paradox, based on the awareness that they must now situate themselves and their context for the sake of epistemological or ethical focus, but are seemingly unable to do so because they are not very good with paradox, uncertainty. Today, scholars at social centers hang on uncertain branches above the ground—dying (culturally and as an orienting ultimate concern for the field of religion), unable to find firm footing, yet they are tied to uncertain branches that cannot be escaped. And so there they remain aware that they must now situate themselves and their context for the sake of epistemological or ethical focus, but unsure of how to develop a method that would make such situativity possible. Scholars at social racial centers are strange, uncertain of their identities or the intrinsic values and abilities of those identities; told by “others” of a prepackaged privilege while simultaneously perceiving themselves as increasingly irrelevant through no direct fault of their own. Today, and perhaps more so than ever before, scholars of religion near to social centers find themselves on intellectual as much as existential and social uncertain branches, which is to say, increasingly human. One of these “branches” involves what we do with the strange categories of god, experience, and other categories that have been effectively deconstructed of their metaphysical merit within the dominant ontology, but still seemingly exert immense value when related to other contexts. These categories still hold a vast amount of psychological and social merit, however, and so where identity is concerned Lévi-Strauss is right that “theology is a human science” because where we fall on the god/idol (god-idol) debate correlates to our reflexive ability. That is, we either “believe in god” (in the sense of the category of experience’s ability to rupture our trust in theory and method) and in the sense of god-talk offering ethnographic data about our data sets as well as about ourselves the researchers, or we open ourselves to the charge of methodolatry. In her 1949 Killers of the Dream, part memoir and (by our reckoning) part social theory, Smith sets about describing the strange confluence of repressions regarding gender, race, and Christian theism that worked to constitute a “white” identity in the Southern United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She writes of the formation of her own identity in this way:

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We were taught in this way to love God, to love our white skin, and to believe in the sanctity of both. We learned at the same time to fear God and to think of Him as having complete power over our lives. By the time we were five years old we had learned, without hearing the words, that masturbation is wrong and segregation is right, and each had become a dread taboo that must never be broken, for we believed God, whom we feared and tried desperately to love, had made the rules concerning not only Him and our parents, but our bodies and Negroes. . . . Each was tied up with the other and all were tied close to God.38

Important here is the analytic as well as the functional work that “god” is doing in this arrangement, along with Smith’s final comments about each of the identity-based categories being “tied to the other.” These categories of identity are connected and rely on repressions and responses (i.e., acts) as easily enacted socially as in our scholarship. In an explicit way, she is talking about the practice of segregation and sexualized forms of repression in the South. Similar sorts of repression are at work with respect to the “what” and “where” of academic ultimate concerns, the idols of our own making. What issues are we not willing to address for the sake of a contemporary methodology or intellectual identity that seemingly addresses the past failings of our biological or intellectual parents through a totalizing logic rendering all the world’s data homogeneous? Are we really that far removed from Mircea Eliade, E. B. Tylor, or even Lucien Lévy-Bruhl with respect to our identitarianbased self-consciousness? Perhaps, fear of god/experience is a repressive mechanism rooted in fear of squarely confronting normative identity that exposes many of us to new experiences of uncertainty. Or, perhaps our academic fear of “confessional” approaches is not about thinking the study of god as scientifically suspect, but about fearing social difference? In a social world made of gods and idols—identities—those ritualistically rejecting these categories (as something different from proper “academic” [scientific] study) render themselves unnecessarily anxious of an idol-exposing process. To such an extent, if theological/phenomenological approaches/experiential scholarship enacts the standpoint and location of the scholar in relation to their objects of study, then we might likewise ask how do these inevitably interested positionalities show up on the other side of the methodological domain when in fact all scholarship is ideologically vested. As mentioned above, Eckardt and Daly offer much on the topic of method by way of a concern over idolatry. Smith is also interested in the topic. She writes: As Erich Fromm once said, in the search for God we can only make sure of one thing: that we are not substituting an idol for the Creative Spirit, the I Am

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That I Am, the Nameless, the Forever Unknown which always eludes comprehension. But an idol—I am paraphrasing Fromm—can be recognized for what it is: something we can name. It may be called race, or success, or money, or power, or the machine, or science. We have our choice: for we are surrounded by crude forms of idolatry. It is not merely the poor and ignorant who have lost their way.39

“God” remains an operative analytic category even when we’ve jettisoned our traditionally theological identity and subsequent concerns, and especially when considering those who sit at the right hand of social privilege and those who do not. A critical posture for the study of religion would take seriously past and contemporary influences from some of its “gods”—the idols of whiteness, patriarchy, heteronormativity, religion, god and, perhaps, even identity—the “idol of idols” for those in the human and social sciences.40 We might add ambition, self-righteousness, and certainty to Smith’s list, and note reflexively that even in deconstructive or critical fashion, various expressions of normativity might remain idols for even those interested to name and respond critically to them, as this “sacred way of life put[s] us on our knees in idol worship”41 anyway. Such worship is blinding.42 The critical response, in this perspective, involves finding ways to challenge these idols of certainty and mitigate the social effects of our worship of them. Ironically, or perhaps poetically, “god” serves in this capacity. Efforts to jettison the experiential dimensions of “god” however conceived—more precisely, the uncanny dimensions of experience as a category—runs the risk of reinforcing social normativity as a strange omnipresent modifier to our methodological efforts. Strangeness also marks criticism of this “idol of idols,” identity, and its effects. Bayart’s contention that identities are actually “operational acts of identification” enacted by various appeals to a cultural imaginary is useful in that it helps to “demystify”43 our idols. But depending on how we interpret Bayart, we run the risk of his efforts reinforcing the invisibility of (blindness to) normativity. Demystifying identity ought not lead to abandoning concern for the experiences shaping and organizing the category, but to our clearer recognition that it “proves to denote a dimension of practice and the organization of practice that no other term . . . appears to register as precisely.”44 We should not confuse “imaginary” with “invisible.” Smith asks, “Is there a tendency to blindness in those who overvalue their whiteness? I think so; even in those who cannot be called racist there is blindness. . . . For the sake of a mythic belief in the superiority of their ‘whiteness’—a strange mad obsession—they are willing to drag us to the edge of destruction because they have lost touch with reality.”45 What’s true

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of whiteness might be true of the study of religion. “Is there a tendency to blindness in those who overvalue their” data sets, methodologies, or definitions of religion? “I think so; even in those who cannot be called” theologians “there is blindness. . . . For the sake of a mythic belief in the superiority of their” method, the claims of god or adherents, definitions, and so on. Many of us, following this logic of the one (as expressed in racial terms), seem increasingly “willing to drag [ourselves] to the edge of destruction because [we] have lost touch with reality.” Smith goes onto to suggest that even if this white identity formation is largely dead “today,” a “bitter struggle goes on . . . tying us to a past where ghost battles ghost.”46 Whether in the wake of a social setting that is anything but postracial, or in an academic milieu where exaggerated descriptions of religion (i.e., the category of religion being real by way of belief or experience) warrant exaggerated responses that we come to call “critical method” (simply imagined as an object of the scholars’ imaginations), both sides are at work in adjudicating the proximity/distance of the scholar as a tool to legitimate the merits of explanation: “How strange! For we all cling to meanings we cannot prove just as we cling to love and hope, and to art whose importance to the human being in us, though unproved, we are somehow sure of.”47 REMAINING CRITICAL OF “CRITICAL” PRIESTS Do not the strange bitter fruit who call religious studies home now find themselves trying to make sense of themselves, their work, and broader social life as “ghost battles ghost”? And is not the ghost, the specter, an apt descriptor of these things called “identities”? Smith’s warning from the 1940s about ghosts and battles is echoed in Bayart’s assertion many decades later: Today nothing threatens the “stability of the social order” more than the illusion of cultural identity. It needs, as never before, to be contested by a modern philosophical ethos that unravels the roles of the contingent and the universal, now that political parties in Europe and elsewhere have seized the initiative in what they call the “battle for identity.”48

Smith and Bayart both hold in tension the deconstruction of the identities discussed while noting the tensions and “battles” continuously waged by (and because of) these “ghosts.” Eckardt was on a similar theoretical page. One of the central ambitions of Eckardt’s 1989 Black-Woman-Jew, one of his last books, is to respond to the zero-sum logics of particularity and universality by foregrounding the interdependent “requirements of scholarship” and “moral responsibility.”49 These requirements involve holding in creative tension a

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“dynamic of particularity and universality.”50 He writes: “For the integrity of any particularity means nothing apart from the integrity of every particularity. What could be a worse tragedy than a movement for liberation that turned itself into a foe of the liberative cause? A potential war of all against all would mean the death of liberation itself.”51 Not letting talk of “liberation” scare us away from the methodological wisdom lodged in these thinkers’ concerns over particularity, contingency, and universality, each recognizes that not holding in balance the particular and the universal leads to violence—to war, catastrophe. That the term “liberation” would even give us pause or anxiety indicates that our past efforts at criticism have often lacked a vital edge. As Eckardt continues, “we are met by a paradox that is strange indeed: The fragility of experience may point toward a potential of experience that begins to break the fragility. The declaration that there are limits to experience is itself experiential. And this declaration directs us to potential universality.”52 Moving back to Bayart, identities might more adequately hold in balance the particular and universal if regarded as “operational acts of identification,” while this balance also includes remembering that acts are lodged within and are themselves “experiences.” Bayart rightly points out the “common error” of those who “attribute” the “irreducibility of difference to the exclusive relationship each individual is supposed to have with ‘his’ culture.”53 But as he also makes clear, responding to the “illusion of cultural identity” involves a “modern philosophical ethos that unravels the roles of the contingent and the universal.”54 That is, an awareness of action, and the acts required, is now in full view of identity as constellations of these acts. This ethos includes the ability to sight the social identities we work from as visible “illusions,” with these illusions serving as the uncertain foundations, the loose, rocky soil where our arguments take root and grow. Bayart’s emphasis is on ethos, ethic—and this point is important: he is not unraveling the categories of contingent or universal, but their traditional “roles.” Such roles have involved the creation of certain identities. Such an ethos, with the acts that would be part and parcel of it, does not involve abandoning claims to the particular and universal, or contingent, but embracing them in such a way they do not produce their past effects. Our flights from identity constitute an experience in their own right, and as such, whether embracing experience, running from it on epistemological grounds, or finding ourselves the victim of it (or others’ projection of it onto us)—the constellations of ideas, discourses, and artifacts engaged when engaging “religion” are (and ought to remain) strange indeed. The final uncertain branch upon which a critical response to dominant social identity within the study of religion hangs is that of the ethical domain. This branch recognizes the impossibility of escaping ethical consideration or responsibility in our theories and methods because (as many of the thinkers

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discussed above make clear in their own ways), ethics serves as the bridge between the universal and the particular, where operational acts take place, and thus must be addressed if we are to have a fuller description of identity— our own and those we study. We are not talking about “ethics” as a professional discipline, and especially not as any semblance of moralism or “right action,” but an ethical domain55 transmuted in the history of philosophy into something seemingly distinct from epistemology or aesthetics, something involving the motivated movement of our bodies and ideas with the capacities we have at our disposal. This domain does not govern norms, but produces them between various exchanges and manipulations of the individual and collective, the universal and particular. Attention to this domain allows for recognition of the impact of biopower on considerations about critical propositions, useful theories and methods, who has access to venues of publication, how our work is read and received, and the subjective norms to which we hold ourselves and others accountable. Scholars of religion can ignore the ethical domain (i.e., the malleability and manipulability of the tension between the universal and the particular), leading to certain conclusions/distinctions that allow for an ultimate identity of certainty to be enacted. Or, they can situate themselves firstly in terms of their social and disciplinary identities, a move attentive to uncertainty and unknowability. These are our uncertain branches. A critical critique of social normativity in the study of religion would not avoid these branches, but allow them to (more adequately) unearth the uncertainties embedded in the things we teach and write. Within this ethical domain where epistemology is inextricably linked to the social world despite the empirical demand that it remain untethered, embracing these “branches” can help guard method from totalitarian presumptions and impulses. Critiquing normativity begins with the operational act of treating operational acts of identification as greater than the sum total of their construction—for in the social world, they take on qualities of this sort whether we like it or not: gods and idols believe in us, whether or not we believe in them. WHEN STRANGENESS IS FAMILIAR AFTER ALL Looking to Herodotus and Ionian ethnography, but with an ever-present eye toward the scholar’s role, Jonathan Z. Smith suggests that “in such a context [as Herodotus’s ‘traveler’s impressions’], comparison becomes primarily a means of overcoming strangeness.”56 There’s a link between our comparative method and a basic demand to demarcate, delineate, and to distinguish this from that, is from ought, up from down, black from white, and so on. Critique in the study of religion would not throw out this distinction-making

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baby with its viscous transparent water, but it would drain the tub through a critical reflex that keeps multiple forms of normativity in focus precisely by retaining the strangeness of our discipline. In this sense, a “critical methodology” not holding in tension the weight of contextual difference and identities (even if understood as acts or effects, not entities) is critical of the wrong things. Unreflexive, or unsituated, critical identities run the risk of becoming the “gods” of our data sets, rather than the critical voices holding the effects of these gods at bay. And again, such gods and idols are exemplified as much by whiteness as by theism, patriarchy, nativism, heterosexism, or reliance on rational or logical cohesion.57 We guard our discipline against erasure by noting, but not being apprehensive of, difference—expressed either on the written page, or through an incarnation of subjectivity manifest through difference of opinion. Again, if any shift in orientation is demanded, it is a shift toward strangeness—or, depending on perspective, an embrace of an already strange normative identity. Religious studies scholars William Arnal and Russell McCutcheon suggest that a historicized and theoretically reflexive definition of religion (now) would name it “the space in which and by which any substantive collective goals (salvation, righteousness, judgment, condemnation, etc.) are individualized and made into a question of personal preference, commitment, or morality.”58 Such a reflexive definition of religion would mean that the task of religious studies scholars and the context of dominant social identity mark them both as ostensibly “religious.” For cursory examples, think for a moment about the silos maintained every year at the AAR annual conference, the organizational ruptures and distinctions posed (in decidedly Protestant fashion)—these are religious acts precisely because they are “operational acts of identification” relying on the cultural imaginaire spoken of by Bayart. More generally, the intense individualism of white U.S. social life, the desire to be unique, ironic—these mark whites as “religious” if we are to take seriously the claim that identity amounts to acts of identification. Therefore, we want to recast Arnal and McCutcheon’s definition to demonstrate the stakes of such a perspective. A “critical” critique of social normativity reflexively understands itself as a “space in which and by which religion (salvation, righteousness, judgment, condemnation, etc.)” is collectivized “and made into a question of” collective reflexivity, co-constitution, and social awareness. In this sense, it would be a movement in the opposite direction. We are not suggesting some sort of escape from this arrangement, only a reversal of sorts— the effects of “religion” as defined by Arnal and McCutcheon offset by a structurally similar but inverse move from effect to source/essence. Rather than a flight from either source (believed) or essence (created accidentally), “critical” approaches require the establishment of categorical particularity, the operational act of treating such operational acts as greater than the sum

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total of their construction, for in the social world, they take on qualities of this sort whether they like it or not—again, gods believe in us, whether or not we believe in them, as it were. Perhaps, it is time we let go of our demand to find, escape from, or deny our disciplinary identity, and understand ourselves as strange. Uncertainty and strangeness mark us as scholars of religion, scholars of identity. Indeed, Eckardt is right in suggesting that “it almost seems the right hand of the university does not know what its left is doing—here is modern education at the height of ambiguity—ambiguity of meaning by no means unrelated to tension of substance.”59 If the substance of religious studies is identity, and we think it is, then the substance of our efforts is and will remain ambiguous, uncertain, and strange. And in a world where “ghosts battle ghosts” and methods—all of them, critical or otherwise—break down, then religious studies scholars would do well to realize that any criticism at all will begin with discerning when, who, and what necessitates critique. NOTES 1. D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 2. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies, reprint edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–84. 3. A. Roy Eckardt, Black-Woman-Jew: Three Wars for Human Liberation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 100. 4. A. Roy Eckardt, “The Strangeness of Religion in the University Curriculum,” The Journal of Bible and Religion 25, no. 1 (January 1957): 3–12, Footnote 14. 5. Ninian Smart, Secular Education and the Logic of Religion, Heslington Lecture, University of York, 1966 (Humanities Press, 1969). 6. Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Comparative Social Research: A Research Annual 13 (1991), 1–45. 7. Here, we are thinking with Mary Douglas (both her notion of bodies out of place, and her grid/group analysis), in that categorical miscegenation works to demonstrate various boundaries (or lack thereof) by assuming a proximate location to those boundaries, intentionally swapping categories behind opposing boundaries, so as to draw analytic attention to where, how, and through which means such boundaries are created and reinforced. For background, see Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo; Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (Routledge, 2003). 8. Hart, The University Gets Religion, 203, 225.

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9. Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, 92. See, also http://edge.ua.edu/ (accessed October 10, 2014). 10. Eckardt, “The Strangeness of Religion,” 3. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Bayart, 92. 13. Eckardt, “The Strangeness of Religion,” 8. 14. Ibid., 10. 15. Ibid., 11. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 4–5. 19. Ibid., 5–6. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid.,12. 24. Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism (Routledge, 2007), 1. 25. Miller, Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion, 4. 26. Ibid. 27. K. Merinda Simmons, in Craig Martin et al., “Keeping ‘Critical’ Critical: A Conversation from Culture on the Edge,” Critical Research on Religion 2, no. 3 (December 1, 2014): 299–312, https​://do​i.org​/10.1​177/2​05030​32145​52576​, 307. 28. Russell McCutcheon, in Craig Martin et al., “Keeping ‘Critical’ Critical,” 303. 29. Miller, in Craig Martin et al., “Keeping ‘Critical’ Critical,” 306. 30. Charles H. Long, Ellipsis... (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2018), 49. 31. Schneider, 74. 32. Ibid. 33. John L. Jackson, Jr., Thin Description (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 34. Smith, Imagining Religion. 35. Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, reprint edition (New York, NY: Anchor, 2008). 36. Eckardt, “The Strangeness of Religion,” 9. 37. Lillian Smith, in Suzanne Niedland and Anberin Pasha, Miss Lil’s Camp (BusEye Films, 2008). 38. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 83–4. 39. Ibid., 174. 40. James D. Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 13. 41. Smith, Killers of the Dream, 221. 42. Ibid.

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43. Faubion, 13. 44. Ibid. 45. Smith, Killers of the Dream, 17. 46. Ibid., 235. 47. Ibid., 236. 48. Bayart, 252. 49. Eckardt, Black-Woman-Jew, 166. 50. Ibid., 166. 51. Ibid., 183. 52. Ibid. 53. Bayart, 9. 54. Ibid., 252. 55. Faubion, 36, 115. 56. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 246–47. 57. Driscoll, White Lies. 58. William Edward Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 29. 59. Eckardt, “The Strangeness of Religion,” 6.

Chapter 7

N-Words and M-Words Switching Codes, Shifting Realities, and Trading Metaphors of Authority

Closely consider the current terrain of shifting codes, competing realities, and the dizzying back-and-forth between metaphorical, experiential, and rhetorical moves making possible race-based claims—about blackness in particular—in the United States today. Our current public commentary on and scholarly analyses of ongoing and recurrent events, cases, celebrations, and tragedies related to the state, condition, understanding, and (always shifting) definition(s) of blackness is replete with analytical inconsistency, theoretical and methodological confusion—regression, even—producing a palpable case study, in and of itself, in the ever-competing, always shifting, strategically interested turns that seemingly substitute metaphor for experience, experience for metaphor, method for identity, identity as method, among a host of other tactically invested efforts. Some high profile moments over the last few years have generated an ongoing (public and academic) commentary regarding the dizzying nature of shifts in identity more generally and race talk in particular: the President that whiteness elected; Charlottesville; Black Lives Matter; Obama; Rachel Dolezal’s brazen attempt to self-identify as black, an identity she lived while concealed from the public for years; a deep lament of public mourning over the deaths of the “Charleston 9” (and the domino effect burning of black churches in the South) who were murdered by self-proclaimed white supremacist Dylann Roof; hailing the historic decision to legalize gay marriage and the role President Obama played in those efforts; celebrating the historic takedown of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol in Charleston, SC, and Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and other locations across the United States; and reveling in the “black superwoman” efforts of Bree Newsom for being the “real” one who took it down first; challenging the backlash of racialized 185

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sexist public commentary that masculinizes the build of Serena Williams’s body in the wake of her Wimbledon win; a #MeToo movement holding some more accountable than others; and a vigorous reminder by many constituents that the “symbolic victory” animated by the removal of the Confederate paraphernalia is not proxy for “real” racial progress and change, especially in light of so many U.S. citizens’ efforts to “Make America Great Again.” Figurative takedowns of symbols of white, heteromasculine, cis normativity shall never replace concrete “on-the-ground” commitments. The overwhelming number of dedicated news segments, ongoing blog posts, opinion pieces, news articles, relentless social media conversation, identity-politic-inflected hashtag wars, partial twitter debates, and attempts to “keep it real” through virtually-mediated shifts (in one’s profiles, handles, and “likes”) on matters related to race, sexuality, class, and gender—reveal and highlight not only the shifting public divide on such topics, but also, the methodological confusion of “switching” codes and “replacing” categories that is currently representative of (and represented within) talk of race today. A cursory analysis of the moves made in much of contemporary race studies reveals analysts of all “pre” and “post” persuasions (blackness as the focus of discussion for the purposes of this chapter) and of a variety of theoretical/methodological influences (phenomenological essentialists to discursive postmodernists/poststructuralists to even mythological determinists) shifting categories and switching approaches to either avoid (very public, passionately contested) political incorrectness, or to promote an over-simplified “one-size-fits-all” approach. Taking a cue from rap group Goodie Mob’s 1998 “The Experience,” which challenges, “I thought you said you was the G-O-D, sound like another nigger to me, ha ha, yeah,”1 this chapter argues that the switches and shifts evidenced in current studies and commentary on race today—largely concealed under metaphor, theory, method, and more explicitly revealed in strategic claims to experience—animate a recurring and citational shifting, switching, and trading of codes and strategies for identity-making and maintenance. Identity is what is at stake in both the strategic acts and mundane performances of code shifting and (seemingly) uncoded coded identity maintenance. Back to the contemporary debates raging in our publics hinted at above, what is one person’s celebration has become another person’s loss. The agency to transition to, and self-identify as, a different gender from the one assigned at birth works well as long as “race” is not given the same (logical) opportunities at the kind of agency that would make possible a transracial discourse. Feminism has become a largely uncontested discourse and a taken-for-granted posture within postmodern studies, yet analysts working from such critical postures and positionalities of social constructionism rarely call out the moves many feminists make that rely on some “real experience”

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of patriarchy. Some of whom are, however, ostensibly ready to call out racial essentialists. And the same is true in reverse. Scholars and commentators working from postmodern sensibilities have (depending on the topic at hand) demonstrated that when it comes to analyzing race, a sui generis methodological/perspectival/theoretical shift from the structural to subjective/experiential level must take place—by any means necessary. And, poststructuralist scholars have done well to argue the “arbitrary” nature of meaning but in a manner that exposes their reductionist inability to do more than “make an obvious claim of social construction” while failing to see their own approach as also embedded in identity in the making and claiming of identity that they have so come to study. One could take the word “nigger” as used by Goodie Mob and replace it with any other category of salient identity or academic catch-phrases, and still come to the same conclusion: from rappers to academics, we are all indeed coded and shifting—whether we know it or not. We are all operating within coded social arrangements, and making possible new codes, modes, and performances of maneuvering in and around identity. In this sense, experience has become metaphor on the everyday level; method has become identity on the academic terrain; identity and one’s politics are sometimes one and the same, and in other moments diametrically opposed; metaphor conceals yet masquerades as experience; and method has become another way to manufacture and posit experience of a different sort. Goodie Mob’s “The Experience” off their sophomore album Still Standing (1998) begins with an ardent critique of our collective preoccupation with particular categories, as such preoccupations brush up against Christian categories informing much of Goodie Mob’s operational norms at the time the song was written and produced. “I thought you” were “G.O.D.,” lead member of the group Cee-Lo Green (later of Gnarls Barkley, “The Voice,” and sexual assault fame) asks, before retorting that what he hears “sounds like another nigger to” him. The song then asks a litany of questions concerning the who, what, when, where, and why of niggerdom, as it were. Posed rhetorically, Cee-Lo is simultaneously critiquing folk linked to the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGEs), whose male members profess themselves gods, while admonishing the broader public that “nigger” is a state of mind. CeeLo’s (then) Christian sensibilities necessitated a confrontation with idolatry, and so Green tells the NGEs that they aren’t gods, they’re more than likely “another nigger.” This critique is leveled against these gods as a kind of geographically inflected iconoclasm; Goodie Mob’s roots in the Bible Belt make what Arthur Huff Fauset referred to as “Black Gods of the Metropolis”2 a hard sell. Yet, in a strangely deconstructive manner, Cee-Lo moves to deconstruct the very category “nigger” he’s just relied on to critique the gods of urban Northern centers.

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“Sound like another nigga to me” says something about the borrowing of the masters’ tools. Cee-Lo is relying on switch-making to ensure social passing and capital accumulation reinforces the viability of dominant codes to go seemingly uncoded. Cee-Lo, like the methodologically astute analyst, has something more strategic in mind. Much of the analytical moves making possible the fraught discourses discussed at the outset of this chapter are caught between those who want to make more of the category of experience—using it as a placeholder for ideology—and critical analysts who demonstrate the arbitrary “magic” behind the “trick” of appealing to experience, yet likewise fail to consider the manner in which their own use of such techniques is not objective, without code, but always coded and coding. In this way, methods aimed at deconstructing the illusion of the “doer” behind the “deed” are not without—and can never escape—the associated baggage of identity and experience. As we’ve demonstrated in preceding chapters, a brief inventory of “leading voices” and “authorial” sources used throughout much of what constitutes postmodern studies and approaches to identity today yields a list that is homogenously coded as white. In religious studies, for example, a disproportionate number of the sources used among critical approaches to the academic study of religion are white males—here, the illusion of methodological flight from subjectivity (and concerns over subjective experience) unduly conceals the coded social interests of the (dominant) identity maintenance that is obscured under rhetorical codes, such as method. In fact these detached concerns over method operationalize in very similar ways that often have as their method, even if critical, simply replacing categories (such as experience for metaphor) and claiming something of identity—even if through effect rather than intention. In a word, women of color are underrepresented among those authorized and legitimated (and cited) as scholars doing “critical” work on race in our field of study, yet the recurring examples and data often scrutinized and used in such critical postmodern spaces as demonstrative of the need for a critical approach proper, mimic the subjectivities of those who’ve gone academically unengaged and underengaged. The “N-Word” experience described by Goodie Mob, and highlighted among some of the examples provided throughout this chapter, points to the aporia of the move toward, and flight away from, subjective experience (i.e., “nigger”) and the socially constructed resignificatory potential of critical methods (and their distance from the category of experience as something apprehendable and recoverable—that is, “nigga” and “N-Word”). The moves made when the phrase “The N-Word” is employed (by social actors writ large and academicians) amounts to a politically correct abbreviation and shorthand for those who need to demonstratively use the phrase yet find themselves unable to

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(because that is not their experience), or for those who think its use perpetuates the ontologized historical violence of its rhetorical emergence. This experience as metaphor amounts to a bracketing of the trauma of a “real” experience by folk of color and an acknowledgment of the “real” differentials in ontological experiences between the marginalized and the dominant culture, as such. The “dash” works to bracket, or remake, experience one way or another, whether by rhetorical, imagined, or ontological means. This double-injunction, to borrow from philosopher Jacques Derrida, is also evinced in the “M-Word” experience where method and metaphor (seek to) replace experience, yet end up recursively recoding the already coded veiled identities of mode, function, and approach. In short, and to riff on Derrida once more, the dash hijacks variegated, different experiences for a singular experience of “white space.” Derrida says enough that the text’s white spaces tell a story inside of themselves; “through these words, and the whiteness of a certain veil that is interposed or torn,”3 an angle of interest unfolds before the reader. The hyphen, the dash, has the effect of whitewashing the presence of white in “nigger” or “nigga,” concealing the significance of the words through the manipulation of the white background from which they emerge. No amount of nuanced “dashes” or qualifications made can provide an escape from the category of experience and politics of identity—whether decoded as “method” or coded as “subjective reality.” The dash, in both uses, confirms distance-making flight from, or toward, the very thing that fuels the contestations in our present discourse on race. There is always a code at work, an encryption taking place, and no flight from recoding that which many of us critical scholars seek to decode is able to handle the demands placed on metaphor in these experiences. That is to say, there is, no doubt, always a reconstitution (of something) even in the deconstruction itself. No method guards against the limits of method. SHIFTING CODES: THE CATEGORY OF EXPERIENCE AND EXPERIENCES OF CATEGORIZATION In his not-famous-enough essay “White Mythology,” Derrida suggests that metaphysicians err on the side of polish rather than reinvention, suggesting that there is a rule of economy: to reduce the work of abrasion, metaphysicians would by preference choose the most worn of words: “They go out of their way to choose for polishing such words as come to them a bit obliterated already. In this way, they save themselves a good half of the labor.”4

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Derrida continues by situating a possible route/root of the limits of Western method: What is metaphysics? A white mythology which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own mythology (that is, Indo-European mythology), his logos—that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason. It’s not so easy to get away with this.5

Derrida demonstrates the difficulty of, and the stakes involved with, dismantling the category of experience, an experience that itself can be recoded as remythologizing method with identities, even and especially under the guise of logic, reason, and objective distance. In the first passage, Derrida establishes that metaphysics makes use of loaded words for the sake of expediency of thought and action. “Saving themselves a good half of the labor,” scholars of religion often make use of categories like salvation, atonement, sexuality, race, god, religion, meaning, and spirituality as proxies for experience—magically hoping that such terms might be regarded as significant or intellectually valuable and viable through the simple fact of having claimed them as such. And where metaphysics and metaphysicians are concerned, the naming does a good bit of this work as it taps into the historical circumstances that have “worn” these “words” into dull hammers (for some listeners) and into piercing daggers for others. The category of “experience” is to the category “nigger” what the category of “metaphor” is to the phrase the “N-Word.” Just as the “N-Word is a euphemism for “nigger,” “scholarship” (critical or otherwise) is often a euphemism for dominant mythology (or, “white mythology” to use Derrida’s words) procuring distance from particular experiences. Both euphemisms are experiences of metaphors concealing the impact of experiences and identities, as such. Critical scholars make easy work of deconstructing theories of meaning which the categories of experience sustain; but perhaps they often ignore that “the question of metaphor” also “belongs here to a theory of value.”6 The second passage gets to the thrust of Derrida’s essay, suggesting that such a “rule of economy” gets right down to the “order of things” for Western culture. That is, logic and reason are not immune to the honing stone of history, and precisely because of this influence, an immunology is enacted in the form of myth bound by, and binding, philosophy writ large. To this we can most certainly add many other fields in academe, including the academic study of religion. Largely to Derrida’s point, philosophy does not escape metaphysics because philosophy is metaphysics, and metaphysics involves metaphor (as he quotes Aristotle), and metaphor ultimately involves substitution: “Metaphor (metaphora) consists in giving (epiphora) the thing a name (onomatos) that belongs to something else.”7 And again:

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Metaphor here consists in a substitution of proper names having a fixed sense and reference. . . . This referent is the origin, the unique, the irreplaceable (so at least do we represent it to ourselves). . . . The proper name is in this case the first mover of metaphor, itself non-metaphorical, the father of all figures of speech. Everything turns on it, everything turns to it.8

Domains such as “metaphysics” have assisted in assembling and reflecting the experiences and identity of a Western white culture universalizing his identity as both mythos and logos (hence “god” and “belief” being much at the center of debate in the academic study of religion). Reflecting on our own identities and scholarly experiences within various camps in the academic study of religion amounts to a certain sort of “code switching” that each of us (as authors and researchers) is left to do, often by way of appeals to (a) our social identities and (b) our professional “data”—a double-consciousness, bound between niggerized experiences (vis-à-vis identity-politic expectations) and experiences of “N-Word” know-hows which expect a dash of bracketing. Stuck at the crossroads of the critic and caretaker approaches (to borrow from scholar of religion Russell T. McCutcheon), “experience,” in the study of religion (and identity) today, has been niggerized—an identity projected onto Otherness where (those) others are forced to take the identity on but who, through experience, have learned to both accept and reject it in critical ways. Such shifts are disregarded (as anti-critical) by the “master skeptics” and misrecognized by the academic caretakers who eschew intellectual threats of heterogeneity and abjure the perception of deviance (as in the moniker “nigger”) for acquiring respectability as a strategy to be seen and accepted as beyond or without code. But—if critical scholars of identity are not relying on the category of experience—what do we make of the (obscured) experiences animating and grounding our stated approaches? Methods are not protected from “experience” or from the experiences giving life to these categories. It is one thing to champion the cause of turning us, the scholars, into our own data; it is a wholly different thing to simultaneously work toward a method that ensures white masculine transparency remains the marker of intellectual excellence. Scholars—whether critics, caretakers, critical caretakers, or something inbetween—know all too well the heavy hand that “experience” plays historically in the making and authorizing of scholarly fields, and the traces of this inheritance in the politics of scholarship today. No doubt, the ongoing influence of thinkers such as Mircea Eliade, William James, and Rudolph Otto, among others, in the academic study of religion remains palpable. In fact, much of the contemporary conversation related to how to study religion—which in like turn determines if scholars remain scholars or priests (or

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imams), if such a distinction can be made—speaks to our professional and personal anxiety about the inability to distinguish among, the absence and/ or presence of what we think religion is, as determined by what intellectual merit we extend to the category of experience: a core and essence, an inexplicable thing, an ethic, a social formation, process, and construction, an object of our imagining, a neurosis, and so on. A complex regarding the manner in which it is tossed and served up in our classrooms and scholarship—a bit of this, and a dash of that. Here now is such a dish. NIGGER BY ANY OTHER NAME IS STILL NIGGER: THE DEMAND FOR DIFFERENCE IN ACADEME There exists in the contemporary Western academy a palpable demand to pimp out social difference. In The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick A. Ferguson opens with an example of an “experiential artistic archive” representative of the plethora of documentations like it that “typical depositories” refuse to document.9 The referent here is Self-Portrait 2000, a collage by an African American philosopher and conceptual artist, Adrian Piper for which Ferguson brilliantly analyzes the histories archived therein. The collage, as a retrospective collection, methodologically signifies in multiple registers. The binary of experience and metaphor is grounded in the analogy of a collective tragedy using the plane crash of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Carolyn Bessette. Two columns are contrasted wherein the left side includes excerpts of a letter from Piper to the President of Wellesley documenting her experience wherein Piper laments her inability to professionally flourish and be successful in this space of academe, not as a result of lacking motivation or neglect; rather, the effect of an imposing twoness—the niggerization if you will—where scholarly norms become transmuted by the scholars into realities for Others. For Piper, the critical professional task quickly translated into an insurmountable and disproportionate experience of (racialized) experience preventing the rational efforts to keep the embodied and experiential grind at bay. Thus, Piper was expected to be able to maintain the load of “both careers” (i.e., black and critic). Her letter notes that Wellesley has knowingly sabotaged [both careers], by standing by and watching as I get buried in an unending avalanche of visibility-related demands that have made it virtually impossible to produce and publish the anti-racism work it purportedly brought me here to do. Wellesley has used my public visibility to enhance its multicultured public image while in reality actively preventing me from doing the multicultural work it publicly claims to welcome. (emphasis in Ferguson)10

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Piper’s collage is a complex, painful, archive, bookended by possibility and limitation—and a certain sort of experience in the academy among certain sorts of individuals impacted by structural asymmetries. The piece artistically traces the shaky arch of promises of recognition in counterpoint to catastrophe, wreckage, and the like. On the left of Piper’s image are remnants of the notes written bemoaning and detailing the “punitive limitations” that come with being other (i.e., black) while trying to do the scholarly work of otherness (i.e., a critic who happens to study the data of blackness). That is, the institutionalized market demand for switching codes and shifting identities where and when needed. The right column is a poem to “God,” representative of power and authority—or in Ferguson’s language, “modes of power exercised upon the daily lives of minoritized subjects and knowledges.”11 Piper asks God, “Where do you think you’re off to? You get back to that lab right now and shake up those test tubes one more time. Don’t you dare turn tail and run. . . . Screw that big bang shit, God you fucked up big time, now you fix it.”12 Piper reacts to an experience of niggerization, a code, a shift in code, a metaphor substituting “God” for guilty colleagues, administrators, and the academy. Kennedy’s plane wreckage on the bottom of the collage signals catastrophe and disaster; white men in hard hats going about their scientific work of inspecting the scene, experts distanced from their object of study, analyzing the data unaware of the context and details of wreckage before them. The crash represents a conflagration of metaphor: an experience of white mythology and the limits of the methods that make it possible to be coded yet go uncoded—excavating the wreckage from its own limitations. Ferguson reminds his readers that JFK, Jr., died in a small plane named “Piper” manufactured and owned by Piper Aircraft Company—a company founded by the great uncle of this collage of calamity. Piper’s mom, Ferguson writes, was an “upstairs maid” for JFK, Sr. during the 1960s; Piper was the product of both the black experience and the critiques of it, and unfortunately, the (eventual) victim of a code-shifting environment that demanded to control and systematically reproduce the institutionalizing of difference in the academy and technologies of power so common in the 1960s, and today.13 Of these relations, Ferguson suggests that institutional power is impersonal, “derived from the ways in which hegemonic investments in minority difference and culture are distributed across institutional and subjective terrains during and after the period of social unrest.”14 Self-Portrait 2000, according to Ferguson, “exhibits” “critical possibilities” for going beyond these “betrayals of institutions” and toward “provisional forms of freedom and insurgency.”15 With the “archived histories” of Self-Portrait 2000 and the many other histories of minoritized difference in mind, Ferguson goes on to suggest the need for “analytic models that will help us imagine ways to maneuver taken-for-granted contradictions so that their economies are not

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constantly tilted toward identification,” but rather, “disidentification” and “sustained embodiments of oppositionality,” warning that “oppositional critiques of difference [also] run the risk of a totalizing depiction of power’s relation to difference.”16 On this twoness—the seeming unstoppable necessity for the nigger academic and nigger critic (our words)—Ferguson writes, “Despite all that we think we know about difference and power via poststructuralism, Self-Portrait 2000—read as the archive of the attempts to manage the student movements and theoretical outcomes—divulges a story not captured in the taken-for-granted analytics of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, or their descendants.”17 The taken-for-granted analytics in the academic study of religion indeed involve something of the twoness of experience where the representative example of Piper’s story shows out the self-evident institutional, theoretical, analytic need for both the nigger academic and nigger critic. In this state, “experience” (and the absence of it) becomes something, a thing, leveraged by subject, field, and institution—all of which manage “difference” in their own self-interested ways. The complexities involving the “category of experience” and “experiences of categorization” are not strange to an academic field like ours that for so long has understood itself to be studying self-evidences, impulses, meaning, mysteries, and the like, of strange Others (rather than its own). These strange field notes—similar to the ones strewn about the wreckage being surveyed by the hard-hat scientists in Piper’s collage—have been (in our field) made familiar through the scholarly task. Yet, the naming of “experience” as it concerns identity—across academic fields—has been largely described as the work of identity-based assumptions in the gendered and raced spheres of differences. Thus, this archive and storehouse of data supplies an excess of examples that bear witness to the dangers, impossibilities, and scholarly fallacies on both sides of experience—those succumbed to/by it (Piper), and those structuring and structured by it (hard-hat scientists) that the significance of their relation to it, and culpability in it, get lost in the work of cleaning up the scene (analysis of data). Before the “institutional arrival” of the pantheon of “diversity representation” in the 1960s U.S. academe, there were other experiences (before the student movements that led to what we now call “identity-based” area studies) seeking representation—even if only discursively. Ferguson recalls Foucault’s thesis on the “origins” of the human sciences: that the rise of the human sciences comes at a historical moment when, according to Foucault, “man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known”—namely—“Man as an event in the order of knowledge.”18 That is, the domain called the human sciences—both the creation thereof and the impetus for it—discursively concretizes “man” thus, situating him socially, Ferguson writes, as a “living being” assembled

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in/by those fields so oriented around “man.” With such a construction and constellation orienting the center of the human sciences, “those distinct and specialized knowledges designed for the production and evaluation of man . . . what we properly know as the disciplines.”19 This “biological, linguistic, and economic” event-turned man would thus require a sui generis intellectual specialism as a methodological mean and mode of recognition, production, and evaluation of those like him.20 Thus today, the making of the human sciences, and its attendant disciplines, obscures the metaphysical work of “man” making knowledge rather than knowledge, a priori, making (the event of) man and imbuing his power in (yet more than) the discursive.21 THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF THE “M-WORD” At conferences, across presses, and in the pages filling the annals of journals alike, it is clear that critics in the study of religion fumble about the “category of experience” and the residual analytical challenges of identity. The costs have much to do with the reality that (those seen as) critics, and the theoretical traditions in which they authorize, are most often white, male, and straight—those who historically represent what it means to be a rational subject and actor in what we call the human sciences. An older provocation, yet one nonetheless relevant, bell hooks asks, “should we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the ‘subject’ when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time?”22 And because the experience of treating a white mythology as rationality has been largely unnamed, and uncategorized in the academic study of religion, what theoretically or methodologically passes as (the human science of) “reason”—has already been discursively untethered from a category of experience—in the “biological, linguistic, and economic” transmutation of his flight and resurrection into disciplines of the human science. Hence, there is a methodological enabling in the substitution of agreed upon (theoretical consensus) and uncontested experiences (human) passing as normative (science) going uncoded behind a particular (discursive) experience behind a myth behind a metaphor. Thus, the subjugated experience that informs most critical methodologies’ flight from experience fails to take into account that what constitutes and organizes much of our own “rational” approach is, too, an experience, an event, that passes as—and under the guise of—method. Difference and otherness have become acceptable critical theoretical domains in the academy, thanks largely to a postmodern discourse that has productively and rightfully troubled experience and claims to it. Difference, alterity, heterogeneity, decentering, otherness, and the like have become

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and remain acceptable philosophical and theoretical categories among the postmodern critical territories, which have indeed been vital to and necessary for a critical redescription in the academic study of religion. The ritualized qualification of distance from “experience” or the experiences of our objects of study by overemphasizing method seemingly reifies the (white) fragility of our categories to actually occlude or quarantine experience. Or, put otherwise, without implication in the essentialist charge against it. We do deconstructive detective work as if we are not in on the crime. The anxious urge to overemphasize the discursive assumes, even in form, the reality of the “something more”—an experience. What critics fight on the front of “experience” obscures the process and location of it as somehow not also endemic in the metaphoric “curtain” of the human sciences so concealing the Wizard of Oz. Either metaphor works, where metaphor is at work. This process is emblematic, and metaphoric, of the metaphoric substitution as described by Derrida. The failure to discuss the niggerized experiences of subjugated “minoritized” discourses revealed in, and concealed by the code shifting of it, inevitably leads to a failure of nerve—or plane crash, as it were. Such an arrangement, however, is not dissimilar to the maneuvering of critical discourses or possibly the Western intellectual project more generally. Philosophy is metaphysics, which is, in the end, metaphor. This includes dialectical materialism’s children. The specific branch of metaphysics within philosophy proper is, for Derrida, the proper metaphor for philosophy writ large. We use and employ metaphors to protect ourselves from ourselves. We fight the daily experiences and recognitions of affective, experiential potentialities like anomie, diremption, and niggerization (choose your metaphoric imagery) by building a world of metaphor. Many of us seek cover from such experiences of ourselves through the rational and philosophical projects altogether, a Western taxonomic impulse to replace every who for a manufactured what. A need to know becomes the grounds to know; the way to know becomes the thing needing to be known; what is known becomes the ground for judgment (of others). Our categorizations of experiences are thusly experiences of categorization made possible by and insulated through metaphor and discourse. If experience is rendered as discursive—is not experience then already metaphor for experience? The fear or celebration of the category is always and already in the service of a metaphor, seemingly telling everyone at the party that they are talking about different things when, in fact, they are talking about ordinary experience, which for some people is rather extraordinary— that is, extra ordinary metaphors evoking greater or lesser quantity and severity of the mundane. Hence, when it comes to the category of “experience” in the academic study of religion, we find ourselves at a methodological crossroads, of sorts: one camp that overdetermines and homogenizes the category of experience

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(of this and that) in unproductive, transhistorical and revisionist ways; and the other, a group of folk who have helped to keep the academic study of religion alive and well through its critical interrogation—yet, who have also slipped into a “master narrative” of certainty that perpetuates an identity and experience of mastery over the “objective” and “rational.” Identity and experience still inform the “M-Word” as much as the “N-Word,” as categories that shape critical curiosities and assumptions about how scholars ought to study the objects we claim to study. In writing about the “conditions of possibility” that allow for a critical stance on religion, William Arnal and McCutcheon persuasively point out that this includes the discourse critical of the category “religion,”23 and we would add to this, discourses critical of the category of “experience.” Critical stances are made possible by metaphoric substitution of myth for experience, and metaphysics for myth, and philosophy for metaphysics. In somewhat clearer terms, as it concerns race, the Western “order of things” (e.g., “method”) is to conceal a particular experience (that largely goes uncoded) behind concentric circles radiating outward and often actively militating against the category of experience lest the circles come undone. That is, scholars of the postmodern inflected critical persuasion in the study of religion (which we are indebted to) are right to shirk analyses and intellectual moves that over rely on experience. Yet, if we fail to use the data of the designators and experiences of those identities that often go unnamed and unmarked—the “things” that often precede the category of religion (i.e., white religion)—then something like “black” in front of “religion” or “queer” in front of “sexuality” gives an impression that the domain of experience—or subjectivity—is something that uniquely marks other sorts of projects as disproportionately overrelying on experience—thus denying both identity and the experience of it among the unidentified. Less apparent are the normativizing and blinding effects of utilizing coded designators such as “science” in “human science” and our reliance on norm-structuring assumptions that the ability to do “proper” method is somehow guided by disinterested rationality. Those who laud such classifications share in common still historical experiences of one constitution or another; to riff on a contemporary, popular metaphor, they are efforts to (re)make the (academic) study of religion (proper) again. Phenomenological thinkers such as Mircea Eliade—whose push for experience à la identity would come through the category of “the sacred”—was not expected to posit “whiteness” or “maleness” as a functioning center, but someone such as Charles H. Long is obliged to place at the center of the study of black religion, the experiences of religions of the oppressed and opaque.24 In fact, the opacity of black religion inevitably demonstrates the incapacity of many within the academy to take seriously its own experience of “a knowledge that does not correspond to what these others wish to know, nor does it

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reflect a meaning of truth in method that is consistent with their understanding of human possibilities.”25 In the very denial, the metaphor of method comes to reveal the method of distance as a “denial structure.” Indeed, thinking reflexively for a moment about an aspect of our methodology that so often turns the field of religion into data, Long is one of the earliest in our field to tell the academy, “yes, you are my data.” Long’s critique of “opaque theologies” sited and relied upon black theologians as metaphoric substitutions in order to make a broader point about white significations: those who would deny “the methodological and philosophical meaning of transparency as a metaphor for a theory of knowledge.”26 Along similar lines of identification, Ferguson seems to imply that opacity and/or experiences of niggerization (of one sort or another) offer certain “critical possibilities” rendered as the potential of those cultural forms to offer accounts of institutional modes— not simply the disfranchisements and betrayals of institutions, but also the rules of inclusion and the anatomies of recognition and legitimacy; not simply how we are entrapped, but also how we might achieve provisional forms of freedom and insurgency.27

THE DIFFÉRANCE BETWEEN NIGGA CRITIC AND NIGGER ACADEMIC As cited earlier in this chapter, in her essay “Postmodern Blackness” hooks suspiciously raises the question of why blacks should have any interest in postmodern theory and thought—especially its philosophic critique of modernity, which celebrates abstract domains of otherness and difference while remaining skeptical of what many see as “rigid” identity claims and categories. Generally speaking, we have done well in the academic study of religion to situate the critical thinkers we love so much, such as “Marx,” as “master skeptics” who provide the intelligible theoretical and methodological tools of critical analyses. hooks asserts that postmodern discourse and practice, in rhetoric, celebrates difference and alterity yet excludes the very sources of those whose subjectivity has been a product of, and helped give shape to, such concepts. hooks writes that “If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact, then a critical break with the notion of ‘authority’ as ‘mastery over’ must not simply be a rhetorical device. It must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter.”28 Postmodern discourses instrumentalize the concerns of nonwhites in a manner that merely reinforces long-standing patterns, charging that “any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the

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implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups . . . I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of ‘identity’ as one example.”29 And make no mistake, hooks is equally as critical and suspicious of concepts of essentialized blackness, whether imposed externally or promulgated internally: “We have too long had imposed upon us from both the outside and the inside a narrow, constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static overdetermined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of self and the assertion of agency.”30 hooks code switches here by holding a concern for the Western “master narratives” without affronting the merit of those who want to manage and claim the “authority” of “experience.” In the end she finds a home in the concept of “postmodern blackness.” Although much of hooks’s essay requires both updating and critique, she is helpful in underscoring how “the idea that there is no meaningful connection between black experience and critical thinking must be continually interrogated.”31 A quick survey of syllabi across the study of religion bears witness to this sad but all too common reality that a “white” religion is, and always has been, regarded as authoritative in its transparency. This plane has crashed. Much of this speaks to the weight and shifting codes of the experience that universities, departments, and disciplinary agendas require of—and impose on—one whose experience (and historical experience of group members) helps to check the “institutional” box, and after all, substantiate discourses situated upon the experience of identity—and the silence of those who are free to be free of experience (code, skill, know-how). That is, those distant enough from (having to utilize) the codes of experience, to shirk and deny the very category that maintains the illusion of identity without code. Both, in our opinion, are misguided and deconstruct one another. The problem, it would appear, is one Ferguson is right to point out: that there exists a fuzzy relationship between the European deployment of difference, theoretically, and the recapitulation of a certain sort of “internalist narrative” when mapped onto the Western subject, and American difference in particular.32 On this point, he rightfully notes, “While difference in the French context often meant the suppression of the worker and the colonial militant as revolutionary figures, difference in the U.S. setting meant calling for the presence of those subjects deemed to be outside the American academy and its systems of representation.”33 Either way, we are caught in an aporetic chasm where the struggle to abstract and theorize away experience is demanded in a field, in fields, in a larger university context that promotes the institutionalization of experiences of difference through the instrumentalizing of different experiences. Postmodern critical theories seem neither existentially ready nor intellectually sophisticated enough to balance and account for the auto-immunity of these disabling warring ideals.

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METHOD TO THE MADNESS Borrowing once again from Derrida, “our present position, then, is that metaphor is what is proper to man,”34 which is of course a metaphor that telegraphs a particular dialectic between metaphors and concepts, attending to both intellectual courage and social cowardice. Looking to Friedrich Nietzsche’s critical reliance on metaphor, Derrida posits the technical, epistemological stakes of confronting white mythology when he suggests that “to avoid ending up with an empiricist reduction of knowledge and a fantastic ideology of truth, we should no doubt have to substitute for the classical opposition (maintained or eliminated) between metaphor and concept some other articulation.”35 This Other articulation would attend to the “gaps which cannot be ignored in epistemology between what it calls metaphorical and scientific effects.”36 Derrida chocks such an articulation up to “a redistribution” bearing definitional witness to a “figure” that will “necessarily continue to leave its ‘mark’ on a ‘concept’ after such rectification, after the abandoning of such a model ‘which perhaps, after all, was no more than a metaphor.’”37 Nigger. This “experience” highlights and exemplifies the twoness of its very complexity—being forced to experience something not of your own making— the inquisition of a metaphor forced upon a body, upon certain bodies, the accepted risk of promoting “continuity between metaphor and concept” over there, for “Them,” and then rhetorically recasting that continuity as an imposition arising from “those” bodies. For it is impossible that black folk (or any other historically marginalized group), at all, could actually bear witness to the categories imposed upon them (such as blackness)—classifications not of their own (initial) historical making. Hence, the nigger experience represents more than a passive use of experience—whose strategies and tactics of niggerdom offer those wrestling at the precipice of the code switching impasses of strategic essentialisms, critical approaches, and redescription, a useful way into (or out of) the quagmire of this thing called experience itself. Niggers, if we are to believe the philosophical wisdom of Derrida, are here to stay, but all his talk of “redistribution” begs an uncanny question. This critical question, once critique of silent, hidden white spaces has produced the recognition we hope to connote here, might engender a shift from philosophical elaboration on the “what” and toward the “who.”38 Who is the nigger? In 1963, during an interview with KQED for the film Take This Hammer, author James Baldwin reminds the interviewer and the “white” listening public that they created the nigger—not him, noting that he knows and has always known that he is not the nigger. Toward the end of the interview,

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Baldwin shifts the codes at the metaphorical table of experience and gives “America” back its problem by ending with, “You’re the nigger baby, it isn’t me.”39 He reminds the dominant group that yes, they too are coded and engaged in acts of encoding—in this way, the “nigger” was, as Baldwin so eloquently reminds his host, necessary, not for himself, but for the making of whiteness and the white experience. Pushing Baldwin’s logic further, ought not white folk be the main interpreters of the “Nigger Experience?” As a general thought experiment, perhaps men should be the primary analysts on gender since we know all too well there is no “women’s experience” that exclusively tethers “female” voices to women’s and gender studies; male recitations of myth discursively tie “women” to gender, wedding “concept” to “metaphor,” as if men were genderless. It was the making of something so essential and endemic as racial and gendered coding that cultivated and shaped their experience of transparency. In such recognition, the metaphoric “dash” in the “N-word” will no longer be necessary, understanding that methods, strategic or otherwise, code experiences and identities as does the category of experience itself: the “-” only reifies the (false) reality of it. White space will not be concealed any longer. It will be contested. Shifting the data and objects of study in the discourse on code switching (i.e., from marginalized subjects as the main performers of code switches and correcting the assumption that dominant groups are without code, and finally toward recognition of white coding) allows us to make legible and recognize the strategic, sometimes innocuous, mundane everydayness of shifting and switching codes that so maintains the identities—discursive or otherwise—of those who would act as if they really did have the power to be read otherwise, without code. NOTES 1. Goodie Mob, “The Experience,” Still Standing Audio CD (LaFace Records, 1998). 2. Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944). 3. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, 1st edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 178–9. 4. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 5–74, 9, http://www.jstor.org/stable/468341 (accessed August 30, 2017). 5. Ibid., 11. 6. Ibid., 16. 7. Ibid., 31. 8. Ibid., 44.

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9. Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, unknown edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 10. Ibid., 1–2. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. Ibid., 3–4. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. Ibid., 15. 16. Ibid., 17. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid., 29–30. 19. Ibid., 30. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 31. 22. bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Routledge, 2015), 425. 23. Arnal and McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane, xiii. 24. Long, Significations. 25. Ibid., 201. 26. Ibid., 207. 27. Ferguson, 15. 28. hooks, in Williams and Chrisman, 423. 29. Ibid., 423–24. 30. Ibid., 425. 31. Ibid., 421. 32. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things, 46. 33. Ibid., 49. 34. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 47. 35. Ibid., 64–5. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. For more discussion on the relationship between classification and the manufacture of distance via diasporic travel, see Miller and Driscoll, “Niggas in Paris?” 28–53. 39. “Who Is the Nigger?—James Baldwin (Clip)—YouTube,” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=L0L5fciA6AU (accessed August 30, 2017).

Conclusion Ghostbusters and Paranoiacs

WE AIN’T AFRAID OF NO GHOSTS Thanks to the genius of thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida, the Western academy can no longer hide (even if it still runs) from the interpretive weight of metaphor, symbol, and sign. The grand illusions giving life to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West— white mythology rested on and wrested from metaphor—led the twentieth century to become the bloodiest in human history: by some counts, over two hundred million people were killed via war and oppression.1 These spirits hang heavy over our twenty-first century. Effectively, they cover our shared world as a shadow overtaking the horizon of Western “progress.” Derrida tells us that metaphor, then, always has its own death within it. And this death, no doubt, is also the death of philosophy. But this “of” may be taken in two ways. Sometimes the death of philosophy is the death of a particular philosophical form in which philosophy itself is reflected on and summed up and in which philosophy, reaching its fulfillment, comes face to face with itself. But sometimes the death of philosophy is the death of a philosophy which does not see itself die, and never more finds itself.2

We want to conclude Method as Identity with talk about a select few of the hauntings left in the wake of the death of philosophy, which of course Derrida here uses as a metaphor for the death of white meaning, an always present absence with attendant (white) ghosts, crafters of what Derrida calls “white mythology”3: the totalizing nature of Modern scholarship, and the nature of its conceptual totality. This white mythology has taken itself, because it takes the self, literally, as an already there; a thing-in-itself; a self-evident subject 203

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born from the ex nihilo magic of faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”4 Such ghosts inevitably impact our interpretive postures, our methods, our resources, and our data in the academic study of religion, as well as the more general field of letters and the humanities. At such a point as this, we might be as fearful of repeating these ghosts’ moral and epistemological errors as we are afraid of someone else turning to these ghosts as haints used against us. Both possibilities are scary. Both options seem inevitable, and leave us looking over our shoulders wondering when, if, and how we might finally shake off our white intellectual heritage. Western philosophy is our inheritance as scholars in the academic study of religion. It, and our efforts by way of reliance on its sorcery, hinge on an economy of usury which trades in “gains and losses” using the coins of “value” and “meaning.” This is as true for the constructive theologian as it is for the deconstructive critical theorist, and the natural scientists, too. There are many shades to this white mythology, a pantheon, to be sure. These ghosts of our history bear witness to what Walter Benjamin calls a “single catastrophe”5 and our reliance on these ghosts see to it that we experience history only as that single catastrophe. Our intellectual forebears, these metaphysicians of whiteness, turned tricks of identity-based substance, promising us the world if only for a minute of their time. It is indeed wonderinspiring that, despite the histories of catastrophe that followed from the euphemistically labeled “Enlightenment,” this faith in ghosts and gods—in the unseen suspended above and beyond time and space—manages to productively peddle and sell its Gospel of Absolute values and ideals. In our reliance on these metaphysicians today, we remain charmed by phantom charlatans who live on through our recursive citation and our overwhelming belief that somehow, their truths would not become our lies. At the risk of stating the obvious, we need no reminder that ghosts, for what they’re worth, are white as life before, after, and beyond the scandal of death. Such hauntings offer the ability to continue life after death, and to live life before one’s birth: and that is perhaps the magic of modernity’s metaphysics, more than the persistence of an attribute such as whiteness in the colorless ghost. Recall that the ghost, for the child, remains durably white amid a universe of possible colorations; whereas if the idea had any room for contestation, the imagination of a child would most certainly produce alternative ideas and constructions. Amid these ghosts, we might begin again. Jewish philosopher Derrida writes that “in order for there to be any sense in asking oneself about the terrible price to pay, in order to watch over the future, everything would have to begin again. But in memory, this time, of that impure ‘impure impure history of ghosts.’”6 And what, we might ask, is that cost, that terrible price to be paid for the securing of these ghosts of future certainty? To conclude Method as

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Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion, we want to consider what such a project necessitates by way of excision/exorcism. Derrida himself described the project of exorcism as not so much to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome— without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out of a concern for justice. Present existence or essence has never been the condition, object, or the thing [“chose” in the original French] of justice.7

“One must constantly remember,” Derrida continues, “that the impossible (‘to let the dead bury their dead’) is, alas, always possible.”8 At the site, the juncture of such impossibility, the task at hand, a project of academic critique (to say nothing of social critique) must begin again—not least because the ghosts of whiteness, the pervasive white identity of the Western academy’s (and hence Western history’s) ghosts, have evaded the sting of death from birth. Such ghosts have never had to die because they’ve been granted eternal life in their grand schemes of metaphors and myths and methods treated as certain and treating the all-but-being as expendable, when being, it seems, is only a problem for ghosts. The lifeline of their eternality resides in our inability to turn from the childish myths and fables housed in the ghosts of white mythology’s undying logocentric metaphysics of presence, a metaphysics as common among theists as theorists including Freud, Heidegger, and Marx, too. Derrida describes such work in this way: If Marx, like Freud, like Heidegger, like everybody, did not begin where he ought to have “been able to begin” (beginnen Konnen), namely with haunting, before life as such, before death as such, it is doubtless not his fault. The fault, in any case, by definition, is repeated, we inherit it, we must watch over it. It always comes at a great price—and for humanity precisely. What costs humanity very dearly is doubtless to believe that one can have done in history with a general essence of Man, on the pretext that it represents only a Hauptgespenst, arch-ghost, but also, what comes down to the same thing—at bottom—to still believe, no doubt, in this capital ghost. To believe in it as do the credulous or the dogmatic. Between the two beliefs, as always, the way remains narrow.9

To begin with haunting is to reflect on our intellectual gods as accessories to crimes against humanity. If Socrates reminds us that philosophy is learning to die, white philosophy is an extended program of learning to kill without getting one’s hands dirty. Derrida was an inheritor, a perpetrator and perpetuator of white myth, as well as a victim and scapegoat of it. He still musters the

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courage to speak a truth in which he himself is indicted: “by definition” the fault (as he puts it) is “repeated” because “we inherit it, we must watch over it. It always comes at a great price—and for humanity precisely.”10 For this “capital ghost” that Derrida describes, despite its known incredibility and untenable dogmatisms (which we, no doubt, still believe, beyond belief), can still excise itself for and on behalf of itself, in the flesh (rather than Spirit, Geist, the “General essence of Man”) for the first time, in the space where the victims of Western knowledge production and history have been fixed to live their truth alongside our white lies. It is here, in this space, where “coins” of theoretical and methodological precision are granted “inestimable value” whose “exchange value is extended indefinitely” vis-à-vis the “Great” metaphysicians of history. This is the work of the “great knife-grinders” who grind away to “make a language for themselves”: putting “coins,” emblematic of objects of history, to the grindstone for effacement. Great, or small, the act of expunging is no doubt a hard task, a herculean effort of stripping away detail, slowly but surely. The slow effacement leaves nothing visible remaining in these coins, these crown pieces that Derrida reminds are not held in the purse of any single Western nationality or context at all, “these pieces have nothing either English, German, or French about them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space . . . they are of inestimable value, and their exchange value is extended indefinitely.”11 Taking the “usury” of the sign, here posed metaphorically as the coin, we can see how whiteness has, and is, able to transmute itself using the “inestimable value” and the value of its exchange through the West’s magic of metaphysics. To date, this has ensured that we need “big men” and we want them to be white. What else but the blackness of a president would send so many of us searching for apparitions promising nothing but continued catastrophe? In the shadow of these ghosts, whiteness remains god, the maker and destroyer of being whose exponential fungibility ensures that even the whole of its property and the tiniest of its individual units remain being-substituted, in place of one another, in perpetuity. Constructions of identity continue to feed off the surplus value of the abstractions of absolutes—which are now, today, all but crumbling into a pile of “worn-out” metaphors, the details of the defiled and defaced coins unable to ever again live but still not die, the origins and original face of the coins’ “finite values” snuffed out by Western knowledge-makers who have, in their place, substituted and lived off of the abstract and vague ideas “of the meaning-images that may have been present in the originals.”12 The supposed limitlessness of Western knowledge’s surplus value has today all but come to an end. As the erasers and evaders of history, the makers of these ghosts can do nothing else but critique in the tenor of a universalized abstracted negative. White Westerners have never actually traded in god or substance, but in the not-god made from knowledge that

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one’s own substance has been neglected for so long it may be tainted beyond repair. Here within a haunted philosophical forest (among the fraudulent apparentness of its logocentrism of consciousness ensconced within the lie of its coherence) hides a white mythology, whose primitive and tribal identity is masked by the illusive plurivocity of Being. Anton Wilhelm Amo was the first black man to receive a PhD in philosophy (1734). He did so in Germany, the land that would take another one hundred and fifty years to unify under its “big man” Otto von Bismarck. Amo says, “It does not suffice to tell the truth, if the cause of untruth is not determined.”13 In effort to articulate an explanation of certain “causes of untruth,” we want to conclude Method as Identity by naming some of the ghosts we inherit by way of white mythology’s perpetual haunting. In this regard, three Original Ghosts (the “OGs,” as it were) are worth brief remark here for their influence on all the pantheon. Undergraduate students of philosophy and religion cannot escape learning about the many Meditations of Rene Descartes. Yet, Descartes’s “First Meditation” (1641) relies on a thin, if poetic, rendition of the Ontological Argument. How can he be sure god is not a deceiver, if not that deception is antithetical to the very idea of god? So goes his argument toward rationality. The “Second Meditation” celebrates idealism and offers a compelling, promising definition of rationality, what we might call the first white ghost of Western scholarship: “I will set aside anything that admits of the slightest doubt, treating it as though I had found it to be outright false; and I will carry on like that until I find something certain.”14 Later, in his “Fifth Meditation,” Descartes offers another glimpse of this ghost: “I see plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends strictly on my awareness of the true god.”15 These arguments are old hat to many of us in the academic study of religion who know well the limits and/or dangers of idealism, but even for those who would disagree with Descartes, we tend to render his arguments normative in our interpretations of them or in our ongoing reliance on “rationality.” Transforming the certainty of uncertainty into the foundation for rationality, what many regard as the birth of rationality is based on an experiential appeal to god. Descartes offers little more than a vulgar religious experience. Lies become magic method tricks. Ironically, many scholars end up the very deceivers Descartes worried about, in that they go to great lengths in the application, and concealing of, his theological sorcery: coin effacement. Western scholars have never had too much trouble with the idea of god or ghosts, so long as they hail from Europe. Descartes is making a theological and rhetorical claim about his capacity to know even shared knowledge by way of his awareness of the true god. This mythology uses the idea of god so that we might worship him and the white ghosts to follow as “god.”

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Another ghost shows up in that prized Prussian Emmanuel Kant. Philosopher Cornel West has a rather well-received genealogy of modern racism demonstrating that rationalist philosopher Kant, along with the Scottish empiricist David Hume, were racist.16 More recently, philosopher Justin E. H. Smith circled back to the charge against Kant made famous by West: Writing in the Observations of 1764, and plainly echoing Hume, Kant asserts that it is impossible to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and that “among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world.”17

If you’ve spent any time around many white scholars, you’ll know that many are quick to defend big men moral reprobates (regardless of field) with something like, “Just because he was racist doesn’t mean his ideas” or “Yes, even though he was a Nazi, he gave us phenomenology which would usher in existentialism, hermeneutics, and pave the way for all these critiques.” The latter is common defense of Heidegger, though similar postures are maintained for Paul Tillich, so we are not picking on “philosophy.” Modern philosophy teaches that an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy, after all. Do we really need to wonder why generations of college-educated white Americans elected a “big man” after a black man? As to his method, we are inclined to consider Kant honest in his presentation of a white need for the transcendental signifier. Kant, too, had an inheritance (in both economic and mythic senses); we fake it until we epistemologically make it. By the definitional and categorical standards we set today, couldn’t we argue that Kant’s transcendental signifier is the first strategic essentialism? We teach students how he did it yet deconstruct when black women do it. We give a certain kind of scholarly credit to Kant not extended to nonwhite scholars. Yet for his concern over things-in-themselves and transcendental subjects, his transcendental deduction is made possible by way of the subjects he held in active disdain. Reread anything he writes and where he references the transcendental subject, replace it with “black” or “African” or “Negro” or “Moor” and you’ll see that his system has never appeared so clear. Signifying has a long, white history, and awareness of that history helps to identify Kant’s preoccupation with categories as (at least) an expression of his outright fear of social miscegenation—the blending of the races. In fact, as more research is done on Amo, it becomes “hard not to suspect that Kant” is specifically referencing Amo in the racist passage cited above, out of “an

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interest in denying what he has heard of the Halle philosopher.”18 Smith’s work on Amo reveals that a dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who praised “the natural genius” of Africa, its “appreciation for learning,” and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs” and of “divine things.” Kraus placed Amo in a lineage that includes many North African Latin authors of antiquity, such as Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine.19

Letters like these publicly celebrating Amo work to suggest that Kant was not merely regurgitating worn-out racist stereotypes born in an increasingly Pietistic Germany; it is likely that he was actively refuting the (then) somewhat well-known reputation of Amo: coin effacement. Rather than the big man who outlines what we can and cannot know, we might begin to regard Kant as a white crybaby mad that a black man was a better philosopher, and better German than he. Philosopher Roger Scruton, one who (we guess) would not like to give attention to the appearance of whiteness-in-philosophy, suggests that in Kant, “All philosophy must begin from the question ‘How is metaphysics possible?’”20 By virtue of the priority Kant places on the a priori transcendental deduction, all philosophy hinges on who decides upon the categorical gods. In good mythical fashion, Kant does. But to the degree that the Critique of Pure Reason is a masterpiece, it achieves such status by turning the impetus behind the Critique of Practical Reason into its Logos. That is, Kant promises certain knowledge in exchange for moral bankruptcy. It takes a great deal of audacity and a whole lot of coins to trade future moral possibilities for current epistemological clarity and certainty. There is little wonder Emil Fackenheim, Hannah Arendt, and others have reminded us that “Eichmann in Jerusalem invoked, not entirely incorrectly, the categorical imperative.”21 Kant’s honesty about white men so easily trading right action for closedminded certainty is one of the uglier white ghosts in modern academia. To round out these Original Ghosts, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for his part, was well trained at Tübingen Seminary.22 Trained during a time of nearly ubiquitous anti-semitism run amuck in much of Europe, the great Hegel would steal Jewish messianic history and turn it into the most preeminent philosophical movement of the nineteenth century. His logical idealism—also his sense of Geist unfolding in/as history via perpetual synthesis, and especially the central focus conflating god and history via Spirit—is but his packaging of anti-Jewish, anti-intellectual Lutheran Christian supersessionism as a solution to philosophical mysteries. His “system” is literally our Western mythical inheritance packaged as truth. God in/as history was and

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remains a Jewish idea. Yet, such a triumphal synthesis would help to usher in a series of events where the owners of the very idea stolen were executed en masse: coin effacement. Hegel gave us the ability to argue that what will happen will be god’s unfolding will. In Hegel, a longstanding effort to escape the uncertainties posed by death and social difference was made possible when a white gentile European philosopher proved clever enough to steal from the smartest group of folks in Europe at the time, the Jews. It is not unreasonable to draw a causal connection between Hegel’s “Oldest System Programme of German Idealism” (1797) and Western fascism: Monotheism of reason and the heart, polytheism of the imagination and art, that is what we need! . . . We must have a new mythology; this mythology must, however, stand in the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. . . . No power will be suppressed any longer, then general freedom and equality of spirits will reign—A higher spirit sent from heaven must establish this religion among us, it will be the last work of the human race.23

These three ghosts, these OGs, inform theology and social/critical theory alike. They cannot be escaped. Surely, some scholars of religion are as scared to stop citing these voices (and their intellectual descendants), as others are that they might continue to be cited. We are not interested, necessarily, in disrupting the citational or recitational rituals that bind us as scholars in (and of) the “human sciences,” but some context seems appropriate. How can ghosts dictate the conclusions we draw about humans? And, posed as a prolegomena to any “critical” method in the academic study of religion, how can a ghost be acknowledged as a ghost, if we ignore or deny that we live—metaphorically speaking—in a haunted house? On the other hand, ghosts don’t exist. MOVING TOWARD OUR PARANOID IDENTITY Identifying “ghosts” is an attempt to focus attention on the interpretive space wherein history meets myth. Ghosts, like gods, have a way of believing in us even if we don’t believe in them. By this, we mean that we simply cannot escape a degree of continued engagement with these entities. For some, this may look like an ongoing full-frontal assault on the ideas and characters of these figures. For others, it may look like defense of them. The academic study of religion finds us bouncing from one position to the other, teaching Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity while ignoring that his The Essence of Religion is little more than an anti Semitic screed. Or, in popular culture, we confront the ghost of a Martin Luther, who is responsible

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for the 95 Theses and the German language, but also On the Jews and Their Lies; Luther is a father of Protestantism and anti Semitism. At times, it seems that the academic study of religion, in terms of both data and theory/method, is a veritable who’s who of white men who would better be left in the past. Could we even do what we do as scholars of religion without reifying these ugly structural dynamics? No. Yet, a contemporary critical posture would (and must) move in such a direction. Yet and still, such efforts leave us feeling like ghostbusters without belief in ghosts; scholars without data; Americans without god. Altogether, these method compromises leave us paranoid. Our considerations are not so much about casting blame, but taking our inheritance seriously—intellectually and epistemologically, and only then socially—for how our methods are constructed; about what we can do, not to flee from the effects of experience on the study of religion—their experience (adherents) or ours (scholars)—but instead to increase our field of vision wide enough to not allow ourselves to be overdetermined by either experience or a critical method that tries to escape experience through erasure and effacement. One possible response that might be in order for scholars of religion is a conceptual shift toward embrace of our critical self-consciousness as a method. In a time when the “battle for identity” forces many of us into situations that leave us paranoid—paranoid about what a person may think of us by way of “our” identification with a marginal identity; and, paranoid about not being perceived as holding a preconceived notion of a marginal identity. Perhaps paranoia is precisely the kind of methodological rejoinder that might free us from overdetermined fears (ultimately rooted in fears of uncertainty). Rather than push for the academic study of religion to look more like the social sciences or the natural sciences (two polar options, respectively), we might wrestle with who we already are. And who we are is paranoid about our identity. Paranoia seems to mark critical approaches to the study of religion—not fear of any one or a few sets of concerns, but conspiratorial, panoptic surveillance that runs the gamut of our discipline. We adopt our field’s identity as essentially self-referential and self-conscious, reacting to the myths we’ve created, either by undue reliance on other myths or by overcorrected rejections of them. We’ve constituted ourselves as self-reflexive by virtue of our field. So, let us take a final reflexive look at the contemporary experience of critical scholarship on religion. Theodor Adorno, progenitor of so much of critical theory, for his part, is not sympathetic to paranoia in the slightest—suggesting that “paranoia is the shadow of cognition.”24 Indeed, we live in these shadows today. Even still, his and Horkheimer’s ruthless critique of paranoia seems to have certain features akin to the contemporary interests and motivations shaping the critical scholar of religion:

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Paranoia is the symptom of the half-educated man. . . . The explanation in which the wish of the individual appears as an objective force is always as external and void of meaning as the isolated occurrence itself; it is both foolish and sinister. Today the obscurantist systems do just what the satanic myth of official religion did for men in the Middle Ages: they provide an arbitrary meaning for the external world interpreted by the solitary paranoiac in a private manner, which is shared by no one and therefore appears totally mad. Hence the fatal conventicles and panaceas which claim to be scientific and at the same time are remote from thought: theosophy, numerology, natural healing, eurhythmics, vegetarianism, yoga, and innumerable other sects, competing and interchangeable, all with their own academies, hierarchies, and special jargons, the fetishized forms of science and religion.25

They further suggest: Paranoia takes root in that abyss of uncertainty which every objectifying act must bridge. . . . Because truth implies imagination, it can happen that distorted personalities take the truth for fantasy and the illusion for truth. The distorted individual draws on the element of imagination residing in truth by constantly seeking to expose it. Democratically, he insists on equal rights for his delusion because in fact truth too is not stringent. Even when the bourgeois admits that the anti-Semite is in the wrong, he still demands that the victim be shown to be guilty too. . . . Like every paranoiac individual he profits from the hypocritical identification of truth with sophistry; the division between the two is overlooked, however strict it may be. Perception is only possible if the thing is perceived as something definite, e.g., as an example of a species. . . . By it, the subjective is blindly transferred by it into the apparent obviousness of the object. Only the self-conscious labor of thought can escape from this hallucinatory power.”26

Although Adorno and Horkheimer’s reliance on normative claims to truth should be troubled, their insights about “self-conscious labor of thought” stand out when thinking about “critical” methods’ deeply useful ability to deconstruct empirical others and near wholesale inability to deconstruct oneself. Their efforts help to ground our paranoiac methodological styling against the creativity-crippling paranoia that arrives with totalizing regimes of truth and politics, alike—in that alienation leads to the “hallucinatory power” afflicting both “religion” and “politics.” If we are to prevent ourselves from shallow sophistry or outright authoritarianism—both surefire methods of increasing our alienation—then perhaps we might embrace self-consciousness as paranoia, and paranoia as a method that would ensure continued self-consciousness. If we have, to this point, been uncertain of our scholarly identity and/or authority, and if paranoia takes root in such moments, then we might embrace the uncertainty of the label “paranoiac”—and effectively employ it as our method. Failure to do so would reinforce an inability to see

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the subjective anxieties of alienation shaping our work, anxieties growing from a crisis of authority. “Authority rests with a discipline,”27 and so the field’s effort at a critical approach is, in some way, undoubtedly tied to its anxiety at being found out to have no discipline, no method that would stave off our former data from speaking back—some are losing authority while others are expressing it with increasing regularity. Turning once more to one of our favorite talking partners in Method as Identity, Bruce Lincoln offers a three-part definition of authority as a discursive conjunction of the (1) right effect, (2) the right capacity for producing that effect, and (3) commonly shared opinion that a given actor has the capacity for producing said effect.28 Lincoln’s typology assists in suggesting that the history of the self-consciousness of the North American field of religion and the broader academic study of religion has been marked by anxieties over having had (1) relatively little effect—either on popular matters or on academic ones, (2) a frustrating paucity of capacity for producing that effect (given a variety of circumstances outside its control), and (3) increasing division (within the field) over who does/doesn’t have the capacity to produce said effect. The lens of the paranoiac offers one way we might chart the effects of this anxiety of waning authority. Did the ghostbusters bemoan those who laughed at them, or did they keep fighting ghosts and in so doing, save Manhattan? A bit of caution and humility, in fact, might just transform such paranoid stylings into an intentionally shaky, critical methodological footing. Anthropologist James Faubion, while doing fieldwork with a survivor of the Branch Davidian conflagration in Waco, Texas, was reminded of his academic self by the survivor, who happened also to be paranoid schizophrenic. In a reflexive twist, Faubion underscores the manner in which his informant reminded him, uncannily, of himself: “In her political and semiotic suspicions, in her alienation, in her passion for making sense, in her scholarly devotions, I could not but recognize emphatic expressions of my own.”29 He became paranoid of so easily overdetermining and reducing the paranoia of his informant as psychological pathology, and the results of his paranoia became a meta-methodological offering to the field of anthropology, a kind of “method acting” as critical method. This (auto)ethnographic method helped to ensure that he treated his data—his informant—with “rational” gloves, instrumental though they may have been. At the time, Faubion was studying a particular version of millennialism that many critical scholars of religion would dismiss as irrational, a false consciousness, or a collection of folk categories of representation. In this respect, his desired distance from millennialism is homologous to the critical study of religion’s distance from those “confessions” who rely on the category of experience to such an extent that we cannot trust their stories. We might not even want our colleagues in other social and hard sciences to

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know that we spend our days thinking about such “irrational” things. Which of us has not been made paranoid by colleagues “giving it up to god” in the course of daily campus business? We might be equally paranoid that such colleagues have, in fact, considered critical perspectives and still find reason to signify. Paranoia is reasonable in such atmospheres, and in Faubion’s case, he realized that the methods he had brought to the field protected neither of their reputations, nor did they enable comprehensive analyses that would include attention to power, authority, hegemony, and the structural asymmetries linking scholar to data. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, anthropologist George Marcus suggests that contemporary paranoid stylings of thought and analysis can be very reasonable. These paranoid expressions are well within the reach of highly influential frameworks of social theory. Frameworks that have at their core notions of game, self-interested motivation, fields of contest and struggle, and generally a valuation of cynical reason (Sloterdijk 1987) as the most reliable posture from which to interpret human action are ones in which the reality of conspiratorial activity is well within reach of their common sense.30

Paranoia is both “reasonable and legitimate” so long as it is “restrained” and “distinguishable” from “extremist or fundamentalist paranoia” marked by “a panicked sense of clear and present danger to a valued or privileged way of life.”31 Marcus aids in discerning productive paranoia from pathological paranoia. The first would lend itself to keen critical engagement with data (including the situating of oneself as one’s own data), while the latter would express itself as undue concern to police the disciplinary and methodological borderlands of the field. Paranoia is indeed “self-interested”—it’s a hunch, in the gut, not the mind—but through the same ideological alchemy that creates it, paranoia dilates those aspects of ourselves that are so terribly difficult to see and yet so demanding of and for “method.” It is, according to Marcus, the “positing [of] conspiratorial agency.”32 It arises in situations either presenting no “facts” with which to speak, or when reliance on those “facts” does not secure the desired authority. It cannot be proven as a fact. “The paranoid,” according to Faubion, are the inheritors of Cassandra’s curse: their suspicions meet with bemused dismissals; their knowledge falls on obstinately deaf ears. It is not truth from which they are alien but from what Michel Foucault has called the “regime of truth,” or what might more broadly be called the “regime of signification”—the social organization of the production and the distribution of the truth, of epistemic authority, of intellectual and moral legitimacy.33

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The fight over method inside of the field is a fight over legitimacy and authority. Yet, the anxiety becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of us are locked between tensions of duty and desire, where we feel obligated to try and tell the good news of the story of the study of religion’s authority, but also simply to feel that authority in our fingertips. This tension, according to Faubion, occupies the structural interstices, the little rifts that thus appear in the practical web, as do its closest sentimental companions—the half-surprised, half-scornful tingle that comes when fusis (nature) is unveiled as mere nomos (convention); the egoistic irritation that comes with unnecessary burdens, the slightly aggressive resentment that comes with distrust, the hollow cheer that comes with skepticism.34

Tellingly, functionalism may be partially responsible for our academic paranoia, reduction as compulsion. Faubion suggests that by focusing attention to the manner in which “social facts” arise from a “force” imposing itself “coercively” and as a “constraint” from without, we can understand Durkheim’s thesis on the sacred origins of social facts as an “experiential model of paranoia.”35 For functionalism/functionalists, powers of coercion and force are effectively the “mystical,” sacred origins of all social facts. Faubion notes that “the phenomenological proximity of social and paranoid experience does not merely suggest that paranoia is itself a social not a psychological, phenomenon. It further suggests that each of the two modalities of experience implicates the other . . . having been internalized, having become an aspect of the habitus, external coercion has the feel of personal implication.”36 Personal troubles exposed as public, professional issues, “method” debates deconstructed finally. As scholars of religion, those things that we understand as our duty or obligation (in/to the social world as much as the academy) bely a sense of coercion unacknowledged by the social actors emboldened by this sense of duty or obligation. Indeed, following Bourdieu (whose theory is well within range of paranoia, Marcus reminds us37), habitus ensures that unless critical reflection of paranoia is intentionally augmenting the logic of practice, social actors will be unable to see the operation of their paranoia in practice—shaping taste, decisions, actions. We should feel paranoid. All of us. Lodged and lost in “the tension between duty and desire (between what one is obliged to do and what one wants to do),” the critical scholar and/or the paranoiac are thrust into a constant “semiotics of suspicion.”38 Importantly, such suspicion is not a diagnosis, per se, but an account of wrestling with a variety of duties and desires found in the intellectual forest we find ourselves in now, where objective certainty is inversely proportional to subjective authority. Given these “structural interstices,” the person of the paranoiac might serve

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as our persona, a self-conscious operational act of identification for scholars of religion committed to a “critical” method. This theoretical prognosis and prescription framed in terms of the paranoiac is a model for representation, offering us freedom from our own misguided methodological policing, and from the omnipresent ghosts that haunt us still. NOTES 1. Matthew White, Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century (2010), http://necrometrics.com/all20c.htm (accessed November 23, 2016). 2. Derrida, “White Mythology,” 5–74, 74. 3. Ibid. 4. King James Bible, Hebrews 11:1. 5. Walter Benjamin, Thesis Nine, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257. 6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (Psychology Press, 1994), 175. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Derrida, White Mythology, 210. 12. Ibid. 13. Jacob Emmanuel Mabe, Wilhelm Anton Amo interkulturell gelesen, Interkulturelle Bibliothek 31 (Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2007). Original phrasing: Es genugt nicht, die Wahrheit zu sagen, when nicht auch die Ursache der Unwahrheit bestimmt wird. 14. Rene Descartes, “Second Meditation,” Meditations, http:​//www​.earl​ymode​ rntex​ts.co​m/ass​ets/p​dfs/d​escar​tes16​41.pd​f (accessed 20 November, 2016). 15. Rene Descartes, “Fifth Meditation,” Meditations, http:​//www​.earl​ymode​rntex​ts. co​m/ass​ets/p​dfs/d​escar​tes16​41.pd​f (accessed 20 November, 2016). 16. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). 17. Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 228–29. 18. Ibid., 229. 19. Justin E. H. Smith, “Anton Wilhelm Amo in the New York Times,” 15 February, 2013, http:​//www​.thea​mopro​ject.​org/2​013/0​2/ant​on-wi​lhelm​-amo-​in-th​e-new​york​-time​s.htm​l (accessed November 22, 2016); “The Enlightenment’s ‘Race’ Problem, and Ours.” Opinionator, 1360541741. https​://op​inion​ator.​blogs​.nyti​mes.c​om/ 20​13/02​/10/w​hy-ha​s-rac​e-sur​vived​/ (accessed September 2, 2017).

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20. Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2001), 141. 21. Emil L. Fackenheim, “The Holocaust and Philosophy,” The Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 10 (October 1985): 505–14, 511. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Antichrist offers a rather scathing, disjointed diatribe against the theological impulse inside of German philosophy; but lost in a sea of selfpity and illogic, Nietzsche’s rant does little more than occlude his (or our) capacity to name and address whiteness. See Section 17, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley, trans. Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 23. Attributed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, et al., “The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism,” http:​//phi​losop​hypro​ject.​org/w​p-con​tent/​uploa​ds/20​13/ 01​/The-​Oldes​t-Sys​tem-P​rogra​mme-o​f-Ger​man-I​deali​sm.pd​f (accessed November 20, 2016). 24. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso, 1997), 161. 25. Ibid., 196. 26. Ibid., 193–94. 27. James D. Faubion, The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiv. 28. Lincoln, Authority, 10–11. 29. Faubion, The Shadows and Lights of Waco 32. 30. George E. Marcus, Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3. Marcus is engaging Peter Sloterdijk, A Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 31. Marcus, Paranoia Within Reason, 3. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Faubion, The Shadows and Lights of Waco, 18. 34. Ibid., 13. 35. Ibid., 12. 36. Ibid. 37. Marcus, Paranoia Within Reason, 10. 38. Faubion, The Shadows and Lights of Waco, 12–13.

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Index

Abington vs. Schempp (Court Case), xxixn6 Adorno, Theodor, xxiii, 25–27, 42, 46, 211–12, 214 Alexander, Michelle, 56, 58 American Academy of Religion (AAR), xi, xii, xvi, xvii, xxiv, xxvii, xxviiin6, 7, 34, 51, 53, 55–61, 69, 73, 159, 163, 181 American religion, 69, 135, 141–46, 150 Ames, Edward Scribner, 68 Amo, Anton Wilhelm, 207–9 Anderson, Victor, 113–15 Anesaki, Masaharu, 87–88 anti-semitism,95, 209, 211 Arnal, William, 153–54, 181, 197 Atwood, David, 14 Baldwin, James, 55, 61, 121, 124, 200–1 Bayart, Jean-François, xv, xxiii, xxiv, 25–28, 162, 177–79, 181 Bebout, Lee, 108 Bellah, Robert, 35, 41 Benedict, Ruth, 19, 68 Benjamin, Walter, 204 Berger, Peter, 140 blackness, xix, xxvi, 5, 21, 52, 61, 98, 107–16, 128n16, 141–46, 150, 161, 185–86, 193, 198–200, 206

black religion, xix, xxv, 3–5, 17–20, 69–70, 97, 107–14, 116–27, 143–45, 150, 197 black theology, xix, 56, 61, 69–70, 112–14 Bleeker, C. J., 87–89 Bolle, Kees, 95–96 Bourdieu, Pierre, xxiv, 27, 40–45, 132, 160, 215 Brown, Sterling, 146 Brown-Douglas, Kelly, 58, 128n16 Brubaker, Rogers, 121 Bulletin for the Study of Religion (Journal), 58 Butler, Judith, 31, 129n30 Capps, Walter, 62 Carrasco, David, 97 categorical Extermination, 137, 141–42, 147–50, 156n27 categorical miscegenation, xxii, xxvi, 161–63, 173, 182n7 co-constitution, xxv, 131–41, 181 Comparative Method, xix–xxi, xxv, 6–22, 62–65, 79–83, 84–86, 95–99, 152–54, 180 Comte, Auguste, 18 Cone, James H., 56, 69, 112–13 critical theory, 42–44, 63, 172, 210–16

229

230

Index

Culture on the Edge(scholar’s collective), xii, 10, 25–26 Daly, Mary, 166–68, 171, 176 Derrida, Jacques, xxiii, xxvii, 41, 66, 189–91, 194, 196, 200, 203–6 Descartes, Rene, 207 diaspora (as analytic), xxv, 109–10, 117–18, 121–26 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 47n30, 90, 92 Doniger, Wendy, 77 double-consciousness, 97, 191 Douglas, Mary, 58, 89, 182n7 Drake, St. Clair, 122 DuBois, W.E.B., 4, 97, 119–20, 122, 146 Dubuisson, Daniel, 20–22, 102, 135 Durkheim, Emile, xvii, 3, 16, 18, 62, 140, 150–51, 215 Eckardt, A. Roy, xxvi, 159, 161–66, 171–73, 176, 178–79, 182 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 121 Eliade, Mircea, 3, 11, 33, 70–74, 77–79, 85, 91, 96, 100–3, 134, 176, 191, 197 Empirical Other, 11–13, 14, 15–18, 19, 20–21, 69, 81–83, 86, 96– 103, 212 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 19 Fanon, Frantz, xxi Faubion, James D., xxiii, 213–15 Fauset, Arthur Huff, 187 Ferguson, Roderick, xxiii, 192–99 Fermi, Enrico, 94 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 210 Fields, Barbara, 152 Fields, Karen E., 150–52 Foucault, Michel, 62, 99, 194, 214 Freud, Sigmund, 205 Functionalism, 16, 39, 140, 150–51, 215 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 92 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, 146

Geertz, Clifford, 134, 172 Geller, Jay, 8 generalized other, 94 Germany (relationship to the study of religion), 8–12, 14–16, 77, 85, 90, 94–95, 142–43, 147–50, 156n27, 207–9 Gilroy, Paul, 122 Goodie Mob, xxvii, 186–88 Great Chain of Being, 136–41 Green, Cee-Lo, 187 Hart, D. G., 162 Hart, William D., xxiii, 116, 119–20 Haydon, A. Eustace, 13, 77, 80, 95, 101 Hegel, Georg, 209–10 Hicks, Derek S., 118–19 History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, 10–11, 51, 71–74, 77–78, 80–81, 89–90, 92, 94–103 History of Religions (relationship to the study of religion), xvi, xix–xxi, xxv, 6–8, 10–22, 34, 69–73, 77–103 hooks, bell, xxiii, 195, 198–99 Horkheimer, Max, 211–12, 214 Hughes, Aaron, 59–61 human science (the study of religion as), xiii–xviii, 2–7, 47n30, 55, 73–74, 90, 98–99, 144, 149, 161, 169–73, 194–97, 210 Hume, David, 208 Idolatry/Methodolotry, 161–66, 171–78, 187 International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), xii–xiv, xxv, 9, 57, 80, 85–89, 100–1 Jackson, John L., xxiii, 133–34, 154–55 James, William, 191 Jaspers, Karl, 14, 84 Johnson, Sylvester, 105n59, 129n30, 156n28 Jones, Serene, 55–61

Index

Kant, Emmanuel, 208–9 Kaufman, Gordon, 35 Kavka, Martin, 7, 153–54 Kegley, C. W., 35 Kitagawa, Joseph, 11, 77, 85, 94–96, 100–1 Kripal, Jeffrey, 31 Lawson, E. Thomas, 34, 59 Lehigh University, 159, 163 Levene, Nancy, 7–8 Levinas, Emmanuel, 203 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 96, 175 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 16, 62–68, 73, 176 Lincoln, Bruce, xxiii, 8, 28, 35, 49–51, 70–72, 77, 135, 153–55, 213 Locke, Alain, xxii Lofton, Kathryn, 7–8, 19–20 Logic of the One, 136–41, 168–71, 175, 178 Logos, 50–51, 66, 70, 173, 190–91, 209 Long, Charles H., xxiii, xxv, 4, 11, 17, 19, 49–51, 54, 64–74, 77, 80–81, 84–85, 94–103, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 119–20, 125–27, 146, 170–71, 197–98 Luther, Martin, 210–11 Malcolm X, 118 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 67 Marburg Statement of 1960, 85–89, 100–1 Marcus, George, 214–15 Martin, Luther, xiv, xvi, 34, 59 Marx, Karl, xxvii, 8–10, 159–60, 171, 198, 205 Masuzawa, Tomoko, xxiii, 80–84 McCutcheon, Russell T., xii–xiii, xxiii, xxviiin3, 7, 25, 28–29, 31–34, 152–54, 169, 181–82, 191, 197 Mead, George Herbert, 94, 101 Mensching, Gustav, 9–10

231

Method and Theory in the Study of Religion(Journal), xii Miller, Monica R., xii, 10, 17, 105n60, 169–70 Mills, C. Wright, xx–xxi, xxiii, 85 Modern Western Man (idea of), 70 Müller, Max, 4, 15–16, 80, 82–83, 90 Mythos, 50–51, 66, 70, 190 National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI), xvi, 163–64 Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE), 187 Neanderthal, 18 Newton, Richard, 61 Nones, 18 Normativity (social), xix, xxv–xxvi, 6, 50–53, 107–16, 120–26, 131–43, 161–63, 166, 168, 172, 174, 177–81, 186 North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR), xi–xvii, xxix, 34–40, 47n43, 59–60, 63, 73 Numen (Journal), 85–89, 100 Ogden, Schubert, 99 Opacity (as analytic), 112–14, 197–98 Orientalism, 31–32, 78–82, 84–89, 92–93 Otto, Rudolph, 33, 92, 191 Painter, Nell Irvin, 52–53, 151–52 Paranoiac (as method), xxvii, 44–45, 160, 211–16 Paris, Peter, 117–18 Pauck, Wilhelm, 97 Pinn, Anthony B., xxiii, 19, 107, 113–15, 142 Piper, Adrian, 192–94 Popper, Karl, xiii, 92 Prentiss, Craig, 57, 61 Primitive (empirical reliance on), 12, 15–18, 19–21, 63–71 Proto-Indo-European (PIE), 69

232

Puar, Jasbir, xxiii, 123–24, 155n13 Religion (Journal), xix, 7 Religionswissenschaft, xxv, 6, 10–16, 82, 86–89, 91 The Religious Studies Project, xiv “Revolutionary Love” (2016 AAR Conference Theme), xxiv, 53–62 Ricoeur, Paul, 203 Roberts, R. H., 8 Rolsky, Louis Benjamin, 49, 96 Rudolph, Karl, 9 Samgha (History of Religions club), 94–96 Schilbrack, Kevin, 7, 152–53 Schneider, Laurel C., xxiii, 131–40, 151, 168–71 Semite (as classification), 82–83 Sharpe, Eric, xix–xxi, 7–8, 13–15, 21, 63 Simmons, K. Merinda, 169 Smart, Ninian, 100–1, 160 Smith, Jonathan Z., xiii, 4, 11, 18–19, 28, 32, 37–39, 62, 71–74,77, 99, 135, 152, 172–73, 180–81 Smith, Justin E. H., 208–9 Smith, Lillian, xxvi, 162, 173–78 Tatum, Beverly Daniel, 54–55 Teller, Edward, 94 Theology, xviii, 10–13, 16, 34, 47n30, 55, 59–63, 69–72, 80, 82–83, 90–91, 99–100, 112–13, 120, 136–41, 145, 150–51, 153–54, 161, 163, 167–75, 210 Thomas, Deborah A., 122 Tillich, Paul, 117, 164, 208

Index

Townes, Emilie, 56 transparency (as analytic), 112–15, 163, 191, 198–99, 201 Troeltsch, Ernst, 47n30 Turner, Henry McNeal, 111 Tyler, E. B., 16, 18 Union Theological Seminary, 55–56, 163 Ur-Heimat, 9 Verstehen (method), 72, 89–94, 95, 98, 102 Wach, Joachim, xxv, 10–13, 71–73, 77, 80, 82, 89–102 Warren, Robert Penn, 146 Washington, Joseph, 69 Weber, Max, 14, 37, 140, 150 Wedemeyer, Christian K., 77 Weisenfeld, Judith, 128n13 Welch, Claude, xvi Werblowsky, R. J. Zwi, 84–89 West, Cornel, 56, 208 whiteness, xxii, 5, 18–22, 44–45, 52–53, 54, 59, 62–63, 89, 108–11, 114, 126, 133, 141–52, 162–63, 168, 172, 174, 177–78, 189, 197–98, 201, 204–6 white nostalgia, 52–62,86, 109–10, 120, 127, 147–52 white religion, xxv, 66, 107–12, 114– 15, 120, 126–27, 143, 197–99 Wiebe, Donald, xiii–xiv, xvi–xvii, 7, 28, 34–35, 37, 39, 41, 59, 63, 68, 72, 92 Wilmore, Gayraud S., 120 Wright, Richard, 122 Wright, William Kelley, 68

About the Authors

Monica R. Miller is currently associate professor of religion studies and Africana studies, and director of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A scholar of religion and identity, particularly black religious expressions, Miller’s work has been instrumental in the advancement of religion and hip-hop scholarship, and she frequently travels across the globe speaking about hip-hop, social and cultural identity, and humanisms. Author of numerous books, some of them include Religion and Hip Hop (2012), The Religion and Hip Hop Reader, coedited with Anthony B. Pinn (2014), and Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion: Social and Rhetorical Techniques Examined (2016). Christopher M. Driscoll is a Louisiana native, a rock climber, and a race traitor. He is currently assistant professor of religion studies, American studies, and Africana studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Scholar of religion, race, and culture, his primary areas of interest include whiteness studies, existentialisms/humanisms, and hip-hop culture. He is the author of White Lies: Race and Uncertainty in the Twilight of American Religion (2015), coeditor of the forthcoming Kendrick Lamar and the Making of Black Meaning, and other writings.

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