Finding a thing means finding a problem, a hook, an angle. Is this what we look for when we look for the spiritual? Or is this collection more accurately seen as an opportunity for a fairly small group of (mostly) scholars to flex just a bit, to entertain a different style or genre for a weekend dalliance? We seek scholarly effervescence with and through the investment in projects like these, with their promised new formats and genres. Some authors are perplexed to find or not find “the spiritual,” while others are (sometimes frustratingly) un-perplexed. Some seek to close the distance between subject and object and context, others to widen it, each approach proclaiming itself a felt register of something called “spiritual,” where the most minute detail becomes luminescent or, alternately, very nearly lost in the vastness of things.

To make this observation, though, is not to find in these writings the conceit that anything non-institutional that “smells” spiritual is fodder for rumination. But nonetheless, there is some interesting signifying with the terms archive and genealogy. The boundedness of an archive suggestively contrasts with the openness of this project, while the Nietzschean/Foucauldian resonance of genealogy is largely absent from these considerations. Frequencies also describes itself as “collaborative,” even though it seems more accurately to be an anthology of individual reflections that might constitute a family tree of styles, subjects, and angles all wrestling with a related thicket of questions. These efforts generate a varied offspring that only occasionally wrangle with officialdom (traditions, boundaries, etymologies).

What, then, is preserved or can be read among these outpourings from a hundred authors? First and foremost, the authors preserve themselves by foregrounding their own presence in their considerations. Littered through the contributions are scholarly self-locations of the sort that is de rigueur in the humanities: an academic tell whereby we establish authenticity and methodological non-causality by performing an experiential collusion with those we study. Omri Elisha says “I’ll pray for you.” Susan Harding returns to Thomas Road, and finds there the “spiritual” practice of ethnography (that gives one “entry into another reality”). Yet these normalized practices of religious studies are paired alongside a different kind of self-location, functioning in many ways more like a journal entry. Many entries focus on a personal remembrance of moments of intense sensation or aesthetic piety: this band, novel, painting, landscape, exchange, or drug changed my life. Many are captivating and marvelously written, miles away from the kind of dull re-enchantment parable one might encounter in scholarship or Sunday papers’ magazines. And while many entries here cannot refrain, also predictably, from referring to the author’s current research (perhaps this is our own form of prostration to a cosmos which would swallow up yet another chunk of text read by a tiny cloister), I found so many others quite arresting, especially Chip Callahan’s musings on highway travel, Finbarr Curtis’s piece on his father’s death, Vietnam, and the American dream, and Julie Byrne’s gorgeous “Saint February” (among the many I could possibly name).

A second impulse moving through these wavelengths is the lure of new objects. What is it (if indeed there is an “it”) that connects Allan Chumak, the Burning Man, fast food chicken, iPhones, espresso, LSD and dope, automatic writing, pubic hair, and Avatar? What imagined properties does the adjective “spiritual” possess, enabling us to recognize something common to Alcoholics Anonymous, yoga, Philip K. Dick, school retreats, companion animals, German women’s magazines, and Neutral Milk Hotel? Perhaps we might think not of substance, locable object, or essence but instead, digesting these offerings, consider whether the “spiritual” archived here is this very impulse to locate the new and escape the confines of the recognizable. While there are still plenty of texts here (some, like the Whole Earth Catalog, we might have expected and others, like John Lardas Modern’s obsession with the DeLillo corpus, less anticipated in an index of things “spiritual”), what is more common is a focus on the investment of meaning in objects and lifestyles.

But what does the move outside of conventional objects of study portend? Does a redirected attention impel us to the dazzling, the quirky, the hip, or does it provoke new questions that might be formulated when reliable contexts and connections are absent? Does the authorial attempt to locate the new—that overtone you hadn’t heard before, that detail tucked in the corner of the canvas—represent our own search for authenticity, paralleling the search for the real, the élan of connectedness, the ontological authority of either roots or rootlessness? Yet though it might be reasonable to think these questions alongside Frequencies, it’s also reasonable to wonder what is not a potential topic. The coffee I drink has been written about (though not craft beer). The music I listen to has not been written about (though other tunes have). The academic questions I pursue resound in this expanding discursive universe of secular/spiritual studies too. So perhaps it is the very superabundance of the category that is this archive’s most salient feature.

What really compels me, though, is the problem and possibility of medium and genre. If something about the “spiritual” recedes continually despite the urgent use of authorial radar, perhaps we might think less about shared properties and connections and more about common breakdowns of signification. David Morgan writes about the “aura” of the spiritual. Jeremy Kessler meditates on “secret connections” between things. We read about unseen networks of the uncanny, paradoxes, and aporiae. Amidst such ruptures and breakdowns of signification, some of these pieces flirt with new forms and new genres.

There are poems, literary recreations, a lovely Top Ten list, and a healthy variety of photos and graphemes. But still I wonder why there isn’t even greater playfulness and abandonment of customary authorial gestures. Why, to put it bluntly, has nobody played around more mischievously (but also perhaps literally) with the notions of frequency and resonance in pursuit of the “spiritual”? After all, as Nancy Levene so cogently writes, this very project amounts to chasing an impossibility, exploring the tensile relation between thinking about something while simultaneously trying to experience it.

So what would happen if, instead of looking to a different kind of writing that would provide release for the author and diversion for the reader, we thought seriously about the vibratory, circulatory dimensions of this project and dove headlong into the possibilities of this format. Perhaps a second 100 might avoid words altogether. Let there be sculpture, sound, and dance. Let there be video, collage, and cooking.

Duke Ellington once responded to an Icelandic student’s overly serious question about “art music” by reaching into his pocket and unwrapping a pork chop he’d stashed there. This is a gesture that does what words cannot. And something about the “spiritual,” with no stable referent available to us, invites us to think about improvisation. What if we were to propose only in sound, not trying to recreate its sensualism through our words or document its structure but to offer sound and nothing more? Is such confidence in sound’s power, or submission to its inevitable disappearance, the spiritual?

Keith Rowe spins the radio dial alongside his tabletop guitar and, amidst a swirl of noise, he stops on “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” These echoes within echoes, scramblings of signals and receivers, seem as evocative of something I would call “spiritual” as any combination of words could be. Does the abundance and everywhereness of “spirituality” create a kind of discursive overdrive, a distortion of the signal (referent)? What are the means by which we amplify, creating feedback and ghost tones, exulting in their release while at the same time craving their capture in the drive of a lone medium (whether sound or image or word)? The spiritual aspirant becomes a no-input mixing board, a resonating wire, a struck membrane through which such questions project.

These speculations of course are themselves analogical and rhetorical, and hence trapped in the very thing I aim to question. But playing with that is partly the point and possibility, and one inspired by the richness of these contributions. Note how Thomas Tweed’s piece on John Cage focuses on the composer’s sense that a good question shouldn’t be spoiled by an answer. Of course Cage probably had in mind Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” and what a fitting resonance that is. Like Ives’s weird vernacular juxtapositions and declamations, these entries jar the senses and scramble convention, evoking in the process their own sources and limits. But these limits, these limits, there’s something to them. Ives: “Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason are we not too easily inclined to call them beautiful?” “Spirituality” may be a category unable to escape its over-determination, no matter the beauty or sizzle an author intends. But in the very “ugliness” of its inevitable frames we might find the questions that bother us.

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What a strange, provocative experience it has been to dwell with Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon during these unsettling months. The seams of public life seem especially frayed of late—a precariousness underscored by disasters natural and political that keep coming. And yet ours is the radiant moment of endless possibility so central to Lofton’s subject, whose chief promise is that of a self that matters, that experiences abundance and becoming. It was with this coexistence in mind that I plunged into Oprah’s world.

The book’s many levels are only partly reflected in the conversations it has begun to generate. Lofton’s most widely discussed contribution is her reading of Oprah as “religious,” and the implications this identification has for the way we think about “religion” and “secularism” and something fuzzier called “spirituality.” Lofton urges us not simply to see in the story of American celebrity dreams an outline of secularism’s frames; she insists on both the collaboration of these categories and the hypertrophy of the religious, spilling beyond the limits of what she calls the “blaring data of tax-exempt religiosity,” whose supposed gravity and grounding in something called “real” religion constrain the scholarly imagination. Rather than seeing in the rituals that attend Oprah a formulaic “empowerment” by which consumers “make meaning” in their lives (one of the duller formulations of the 1970s, still on academic life support), Lofton locates and traces Oprah’s productions to explore the “great divide between what is properly religious and what is not.” Both empty signifier and placemarker of abundance within the “pulverized space” of American dreaming, “religion,” Lofton reminds us, is that by which the projects of the self reach beyond their material limits only to be sold back to us as lifestyle, makeover, transformation, and community. The expressions by which this “religion” takes shape are not just those of celebrity charisma and national fantasy but the stories we tell about ourselves, and which we see writ large in O. Her productions posit for themselves a world in need of their care.

The book is also, however, a critical engagement with its subject and with scholarship. Appearing during a period of reappraisal in Religious Studies (whether or not the field recognizes it happening), the book lays bare certain aversions fundamental to the way (American) religions have been analyzed. While the field grows continually more aware of the collusion of categories once held distinct by the modernist imaginary that still haunts our analytic—not just secular/sacred, but market/home, or self/other—Lofton argues forcefully and correctly that scholars of religion often shield themselves from the implications of this entanglement. More than simply kneading in ever more layers of nuance to pad our tender accounts of our subjects—or expanding what she calls “a checklist of classifications premised on a scientific posture complicit with religion’s eradication”—Lofton reminds us that no method or tone, however fervently defended, can avoid the fact that we are always, already, from the moment we begin, complicit with our subject. This intimacy is never more powerful than when we disavow or overlook it: the scholar in imagined distance or the secular’s disenchantment.

What does this entail? On the one hand, scholars no longer have the comfort of a kind of shallow critique (which Lofton identifies as either reflexive anti-consumerism or blunt constructions of Oprah’s “trap”). Neither, however, can we afford the luxury of scrutinizing these things forever at a distance—always Hegel watching Napoleon’s armies from Jena’s hills. The implications are great here, because of the way the field is haunted by one chief identitarian assumption, rooted equally in the old politics of representation and in methodological caution: authenticity. Lofton is concerned that “in our scholarly ambition to translate our subjects—to, as the phrasing often goes, take our subjects seriously—we have become sycophants to our subjects, reframing every act as an inevitably creative act.” In this she is part of a growing, and welcome tendency in the field.

But why are these considerations of “religion,” “spirituality,” and “the secular” important to us now? It is not simply the case that O makes for provocative material, though she surely does. Indeed, Lofton demonstrates her subject’s superfluity as her powerful cultural production captures themes and concerns central to American religions. But what Oprah provides is not simply data to confirm certain modes of study, nor merely an exemplification of a trend. Lofton urges us to see Oprah as a context in which certain languages and sentiments are conjured and sustained. Beyond the complex weave of the religious and the secular, Lofton practices her own critical arts subtly, by attending to the drab architecture of cultural desires instead of merely hacking away at their most obvious expressions. Religions are everywhere, mirroring (and driving) the excess that gives shape to us, outracing the conventional legal and scholarly disciplines that hope in vain to pin it down. Of Oprah the metonym, we “make of her pieces what we need,” gathering her multiplicities into us. In our relentless optimism, our dreams “programmed into analogy,” our “ideally accessorized moment,” and our “straight-backed righteousness of the spiritually assured,” we are “stunned before her plenty” as before the excess of the secular in which we all float, suspended adrift on common dreams of having it all.

Consider Lofton’s chapter on Oprah’s book club, with its wonderful performance of alternate textual strategies amidst a dazzling reading of reading. What do we learn from what Oprah does to texts? We learn about Chautauqua, and Franzen too. But what seems far more important and illuminating is how Oprah “manages literature’s subversive potential.” As reading and “religion” collapse into one another, Lofton reads literature’s reduction to a heroic overcoming of personal struggles, a sentimental gesture that dovetails with “novelistic retellings of their life stories.” All narrative, all consumption, all expression devolves onto the self in an endless enhancement. And yet, Lofton reminds, these individual projects of accessorization as meaning turn “inevitably, unstoppably, back to her.”

If O becomes “history by the sheer will of her narrations, by the hegemony of her sway,” her readers and viewers may be left only with the relentless quotidian within which the injunction to make oneself over is intoned. Lofton reveals a world in which we find alluring the templates to which we are fitted, a melancholy whose song of empowerment sells us resignation as the hope we know will be dashed. The unreality of the ☺ contained in O’s regimens of reading, dreaming, and self-fashioning leaves us weighed down, as it were, by the sheer abundance of possibility, frozen in a moment of prescribed, radiant optimism. We change our experience of a world which seems built to constrain us.

But, as mentioned at the outset, I wonder if Lofton’s critical project can be so neatly summed up, as before a commercial break. Surely her reading of the strange joy in the impossible endless possible can have no relevance for drab materialism or a culture with its blood up, right? Oprah links up to the American religious past, and to the world of The Secret and the fluid discourse of journeys of self-discovery, but surely she cannot tell us about worldly disorder and rage. Yet Lofton reminds us that Oprah is “the one picture that tells the whole story,” a story broader than her corporate brand, with greater reach than the historical predecessors Lofton deftly names, or even than the first level of Lofton’s own critical discourse. These formulations of the “spiritual” exceed even Oprah’s excessive condition, and tell us more about our own. While we might look to Oprah “to determine the spiritual ambition of her secular conveyances,” we might also look to Lofton’s formulations as a way to understand how apparently non-O modes of public expression come to be, and on what they draw their energy.

We think of the purity of O’s joy and possibility, and the rage of the world they seek to enliven. What accounts for the coexistence of this supreme spiritual assurance and the furors of Fred Phelps, Rep. King, and Governor Walker? It is not simply that dumbfounded joy and hyper-aggression exist in an interesting tension. Somehow, Lofton helps us see us how Winfreyan radiance inexorably bleeds into the toxic, fact-averse, combat-soaked tone of things. These modes held apart share the love of an endlessly primary, endlessly revisable self, which is to all things the only thing. Lofton does not tell us about or describe directly the simultaneity of these impulses; nor do I highlight this possible critical engagement in order to collapse all expressions into a single muddle of religious affect of simulacra. But her work gives us a way of thinking about how affront is the co-conspirator of joy, outrage the outcome of the self’s bubble pricked. At stake in this cartography of O’s endless expanse is the ironic occlusion of the self in these self-assured projects. If Lofton is right that O’s production constitutes “the culmination of the religious now,” this “now” is one in which the triumphant self of autonomy and abundance and make(O)ver is constantly undermined by its own impossibility. As with our heavily mediated social worlds more broadly, Oprah’s generative existence reveals how what it means to be an “I” is to become both subjects and objects of what Bruno Latour calls “belief in belief.” This malleable modern “I” is always within and out of our reach, our certainty of its existence leaving us precisely where we are, with all the disappointments and powerlessness and fury that sometimes entails. But then there is that swelling soundtrack chord, a new dream dreamt for us, always a new now to believe in. Our wishes cannot be the problem, can they?

Lofton writes that Oprah “conjures a religious space in regard to her country’s mythic dream, becoming a site of ritual and moral transaction for a nation possessed by the idea of a plural marketplace for everyone’s dreams.” Oprah’s traces and makings are not simply those of a conjoined spiritual and secular; they are simply ours, whether we like it or not. They are, perhaps improbably, a necessary condition of the shapes of public life today. And they resonate powerfully in the context into which the book is published, one in which the book’s comparative possibilities and implications deserve careful elaboration. Lofton shows us the scope of their influence through her study of O, in the breadth and suppleness of her comparisons.

I was asked after the 2008 Presidential election to make some loose predictions about the future of conservative political religions in the United States. As any handicapper would, I’ve kept tabs as the Town Halls grew first loud and then armed, as cries of outrage were heard in legislatures, as conspiracies once the province of Lyndon LaRouche were given a national airing, and as tea parties were held. I’m not surprised, of course, having written two books about the recrudescence of religious antiliberalism. But I found it very interesting that Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age—a wonderfully rich collection of reflections on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age—should appear in the thick of revived public panics regarding the perceived value of secularism. As bumper sticker-length slogans are hurled like grenades from various corners—celebrating the “divinely-inspired” vision of the Founders or defending their cautions against religious presence in public life—it seems obvious that secularisms are precisely what we should be scrutinizing. Right?

The very prospect of assessing the future vitality of particular religiosities, plotting a moment when they may become more anomalous, seems intimately linked to a long-standing dream in Religious Studies: the ability to name the differential quality, to draw a bright line isolating some special property that makes the things we call “religious” religious. John Milbank writes, in fact, that behind Taylor’s thesis about secularism is a story about the emergence of “religion as such,” of that same bright line’s use in demarcating those spheres central to the modern social imaginary, each containing things “fitting” and things “anomalous.” I found this parallel—between my field’s methodological itch and the historical narrative debated by Taylor’s interlocutors—fascinating to hold in mind as I read these pieces.

Taylor’s evocative narrative describes how the world we live in—but which he claims we recognize and understand imperfectly—came to be, and the ways in which it is characterized by complexities still emerging. His generous, tough-minded interlocutors have pushed Taylor, and readers, to think not only about omissions in his narrative but beyond it, to consider how religious and non-religious identities are generated and articulated inside secular formations. Certainly, as several authors have already noted on this blog, there are expressions of religiosity all around us that seem to demand we reassess Taylor’s contribution. Yet, as we take stock of what Akeel Bilgrami describes as the “distinctive anxieties” of modern life, or the rupturing power of apparent anomalies, what seems to be at stake is not just the continued vitality of religions, despite erstwhile modernist confidences about the compartmentalization of pious identities. Rather, beyond speculations about future faiths, about the place of religions in public space or argumentation, what seems also to be at stake is a kind of relationality and epistemology made possible by the secular, but made urgent, made wrathful, by supplemental forces in an age that is also hyper, excessive, and fearful.

The clangor and intensities of the contemporary United States reveal the textures of Taylor’s argument, suggesting that the long fetch of secularisms in the West continues to deposit new things on our shores. While it is not news that even religions are informed by unspoken and deeply rooted assumptions about persons, politics, and culture that derive from “the secular,” or that secularisms are lived from multiple positions, both explicit and unknowing, what seems to me radical about Taylor’s conceptualization is the way his formulations of living in a secular age—whether accepted or debated in all of its varied resonances—invite us to think imaginatively, not simply about his frame, but about frames as such, what they crop out, make room for, or place dead center.

Colin Jager writes vividly of philosophy’s “shadow” song, whose tune isn’t transcribed in Taylor’s historical composition. So too perhaps do things hidden, unexpected, or “anomalous” continue to echo in our thinking about the relational qualities of things we name “religious” and things we name differently. Anomalies of my own imagination continually intruded on my reading of this volume during the first fractious months of 2010. I found myself preoccupied with two images: one of a horse, the other of tears. Friedrich Nietzsche, in Turin near the end of his life, threw his hands around the neck of a horse he had spotted being whipped, collapsing thereafter into madness. Bellicose Fox News personality Glenn Beck, apparently so impassioned about his country’s proximity to the maw of the beast, has wept frequently on camera over the past year. Both images seem to demand that they be read as anomalous, perhaps because they appear outrageous, or perhaps because their truth has been disputed (the Nietzsche anecdote remains apocryphal, while Beck has apparently been caught applying Vick’s Vapo-Rub to enable his sorrows). Yet, just as the horse-hugging seems to capture something about Nietzsche whether or not it occurred as told (perhaps the violence and vulnerability he had long seen in modern notions of reason and respect), Glenn Beck’s tears seem not only to capture something of the strangeness of the way discourses of religion and secularism get articulated, but also the importance of simulacra and affect.

These images—and others like them, from Alice’s looking glass words to the President endlessly photo-shopped (as crisp a metaphor for secular epistemologies as we could dream up)—seemed surely to underscore the urgency of reconsidering secularisms. Yet they also bid us to look elsewhere, to change the subject. These essays thus had a clarifying effect for me, one which pointed to the limits of the very project of interrogating secularisms, a project that wrestles within its own frame by inviting us to think beyond it. Several contributors claim rightly that “religion” as category and as practice can exceed—through intensities, elusiveness, or sheer surplus of power—or flow beyond the frame of Taylor’s social imaginary. Even though religions may be unknowingly shaped by the rules of the game—as options among many, rather than the obligations or ubiquities of the past—the rules also permit, even necessitate their violations. So religions (especially the volatile political religions of the United States, as with Beck’s tears and tea party shouts) compel us to reconsider the implications of the very frame which alerts us to religious presence as such.

Certainly, this holds true for the ways religions have contested the developments Taylor describes. The obviousness of widespread religiosity in the United States and elsewhere is one factor in accounting for the antagonisms that flourish amid what Wendy Brown calls the “phenomenology of secularism” and its “peculiar way of being in the world.” Yet, precisely because the “secular”—no less than the religious—calls attention to its limits as experience and as category, I found it provocative to think about the ways in which the related phenomena of this season—Tea Parties, the varied expressions of conspiracy thinking (e.g. birthers), Texas curriculum controversies, and the ever-predictable claims that Speaker Pelosi or President Obama are hellspawn—were more than simply secularism’s “remainders” (to use Bonnie Honig’s term). That is, beyond the antagonisms that help constitute the secular, there are further implications for thinking and talking about public, political religions, and their expressions in a neoliberal order.

These “anomalous,” “othered” religious experiences, which thinkers past may simply have dubbed reactionary, unable but to proclaim their defiance of the secular, are, in perhaps less obvious ways, its most perfect expression. Their most abundant quality seems to be the desire for their own prolonging, to sound out their own existence in culture’s resonance chambers and to proclaim triumph on hearing the echoes. But why are such soundings ever more prevalent? Is it simply because religious citizens grow less comfortable with the frame’s dimensions? As the boundaries separating the spheres of market, state, and private life—so central to the liberal-constitutional social imaginary—grow ever fainter or more porous, we must think not simply of the ongoing Fort/Da between things named secular and things named religious, but about additional, perhaps more salient qualities of our secular: the epistemology, speed, and emotional resonance by which secular modes of being become ours in a hypertrophy of sentiment and simulacra.

While Brown writes that there is no “global outside” of capitalism, the acceleration of what Jodi Dean has elsewhere called “communicative capitalism” subsists in its endless communications loop, which accelerates the circulation of the affects, intensities, and simulations that seem more than anything else to characterize the space, time, and relational density of our secular. We see this in the way that informational density somehow reduces the possibility of dialogue between secularisms and religions, which instead are buoyed along in shared isolation by the communicative roil of endlessly streaming text, updates, links, and errata. Because everything now resonates in the same endless, edgeless context, there may be nothing particularly special about religious voices or identities aside from the attributions given to them (to wax Tavesian for a moment). The intimacy between the flow of data and emotional catharsis is such that no space, whether public “square” or social media, is free from collective self-disclosure, whether in Beckian tears and dreams of revolutionary gravitas or in their opposites, the jumpy liberal terror that fundamental freedoms are at risk and the impulse to psychologize (even the customarily sanguine Alan Wolfe recently suggested that Tea Partiers need a shrink).

The secular makes possible, perhaps even demands, such fantastic imaginings of the other, those self-satisfied dismissals that always follow recognition. And yet it is precisely the point that such fantasy is no longer fantastic, and such sensible nonsense is now our personal reason. Rather than being troubled or changed by the other, and the doubts it may engender, the outraged selves given life by our secular acknowledge what is other to them—a horse, a liberal, a fact—as a necessary stage of the endless return to authenticity and validation that is the telos of our politics. The velocity of the communicative context—whether one experiences it as “religious” or not—collapses epistemology into emotion, where we acknowledge as true that which fits our experience.

The maximization of choice in our relentlessly commercialized everyday now extends to epistemology, with every fact available for every use no matter how urgently we insist on the singularity and non-contingency of our truths.

Instead of the fussiness and lack of closure in doubt, or drab realpolitik, we reassure ourselves that we are on “journeys” made meaningful either by historic assaults on our very being or by the transcendent pleasures of seeing our selves mirrored everywhere. Religion matters, in the way Taylor suggests and according to his interlocutors, but what matters equally is that public life is now shaped by the sheer volume of voices and the range of outrages that confirm an overwhelming desire for selves to mean something in the world historical sense—to matter like the founding generation, for every blog rant to constitute revolution. This is perhaps as important to understanding agonistic religions as is their relation to the secular.

It strikes me that this desire manifests what Jean-Francois Lyotard described, in The Differend, as “maximum performativity,” which turns away from reasoned reflection not because it is seen as threatening—a potential quashing of the anomalous—but because it “is ‘good for nothing,’ it is not good for gaining time. For success is gaining time.” The powerful expressions of public religion in our midst—inescapable, urgent, foreboding—cannot be understood simply as antagonisms, or as anomalous “nonsense,” as Alice said of her tea party. One of the most surreal and chilling moments in Lewis Carroll’s tale comes when we learn that the Mad Hatter has actually been punished by time, which remained ever fixed at the same hour. In our own racing performativity, eager to gain time in its successful conquest of pleasures, we certainly might see Alice throwing up her hands at the nonsense surrounding her. But we might also see, beyond our attempts to locate the differential, a Mad Hatter tucked away somewhere inside the frame, no longer trying to contain excess and spillage, but instead redrawing the faded line between “secular” and “religious.” But now as a circle.

I can imagine no image more apt when considering our own tea time, when political stasis dons the mask of engagement and we too seem fixed at the same hour, a continual apocalyptic that can be known, not only by its relation with secularisms, but by a fragile epistemology made in velocity and emotional abundance. So what we see peeking from behind Glenn Beck’s tears, beneath the masks of the Hutaree, or at the fingertips of the indignant leftist blogger is in some sense our own complicity in the transformations of a politics increasingly defined by the languages of domination and humiliation (sustained in part by cell phone photos of epic fails, taunting bumper sticker art, those entertainments that Nicolas Lehmann calls “humiliation TV”). This, too, is the secular that produces us and our relations, all absorbed into its swarm of discourses.

So our challenge is to think not only about how identities are categorized according to their genus—“secular” or “religious”—or simply about their mutual imbrications and/or antagonisms (as if that told the tale). Whatever we say about the relations among things religious or secular, this politics—its mood, its ways of knowing, its velocity—saturates the frame. Taylor and his interlocutors urge us to think about framing and its excesses, and to rescope questions about secularisms, not because they are wrong or unsuggestive, but because they are vaster than we thought. As we shuttle continually beyond the moment, desperate to gain time, we live not in the measured pace of contemplative modernities, but inside an experiential velocity that seeks to outrun its own stasis. Its failure to do so is what binds us all in, and to, the secular as surely as it spawns our fantasies of ourselves and our others. And it is here that we might see not just beyond Taylor’s frame, but deeper into it.

Many have taken this as an opportunity to reflect on the fate of the Christian Right, a complex coalition of cultures that has constituted the most powerful expression of American political religion of the last thirty years. D. Michael Lindsay’s recent contribution is a sharp analysis of the organizational shifts—in the recent past and the likely near future—among evangelicals, conservative and otherwise. And his ruminations about the coming shapes of conservative Christianities in America seem to me to be spot on (I share his expectation of Bobby Jindal’s ascendancy, for what it’s worth).

These kinds of measurement tools and transformations (those occurring among leaders and public organizations) are well worth monitoring, of course. But, if we seek to track possible change, we must look also to a certain kind of enduring culture of complaint, one that has been sustained not just in conversations surrounding the unceasing campaign cycle but also in persistent exchanges that grow louder near elections, mutterings and complaints that are amplified in the resonance chambers of American public life. The “conceptual grammar” of religion discourse in public life has been shaped—broadly since the 1970s and explicitly since the 2000 elections—by the categories “bigotry,” “oppression,” and “victimhood.” These tropes are not exhaustive of conversations about religion and politics, but they have emerged as powerful indices of claims to political authenticity that depend on the languages of combat, resentment, and violence.

This critical mode has long animated and sustained portions of conservative religious culture (exemplified but not limited to Christian Right politics), but it is also part of a broader context which nurtures such resentments. In the broadest historical sense, such discourses and sensibilities partake of familiarly American forms of demonology. More specifically, their origins are located partly in what Michael Sandel calls the “recrudescence of virtue”: “the attempt, coming largely but not wholly from the right, to revive virtue, character-formation, and moral judgment as considerations in public policy and political discourse.”

Since the flowering of identity politics beginning in the 1970s, and the reemergence of heavily politicized conservative Christianities during this same period, these moral considerations have reached their apotheosis in constructions of “religion” as a political force through recourse to the languages of violence and oppression. Both advocates and critics of politically engaged Christianities have invoked these categories as a means to establish political legitimacy. These tropes have been invoked consistently to shape a specific religio-political identity through symbolic and rhetorical constructions of an Other. Those who speak this language suggest that they are an “embattled majority,” representatives of a “real” America undone by interlopers. Such protestations—from powerful institutions and heavily-funded individuals, in mass media, and in the 2008 campaign—posit that Christians are victims of “religious bigotry,” an unjust marginalization of the “faithful” from public life at the doing of secular liberals, activist judges, and Hollywood elites, among others, who oppose America’s Christian heritage. Over decades, a narrative has been advanced to suggest that a purported Golden Age in the mid-twentieth century had been disrupted by hostile “elites” and antagonists, and by assertions that America’s true heritage and true citizens needed to “take back” the mantle of legitimacy by reasserting their authority and their values against those who would make them victims of illegitimate taxation, immoral legislation, and selective use of the discourses of rationality and neutrality.

Naturally this is far from the only public Christian narrative advanced during this period, nor even the only conservative Christian one. But it has been powerful, influential, and enduring. Nietzsche famously described how those who perceive themselves as “victims” use this status to become oppressors and “killers” themselves. Political theorist Wendy Brown writes, in States of Injury, that politicized identities depend on ideals of inclusiveness “as well as their exclusion from it, for their own continuing existence.” In like fashion, contemporary uses of categories like victimization and oppression shape an orientation to public life that privileges combat rather than conversation, where Others are posited as those whom we must domesticate via the exercise of power, where laments replace deliberation. As Jeffrey Stout writes, “the expression of anger, grief, and disappointment is essential to democratic politics.” While such expressions are recognizable parts of American history, as are various strains of demonology, the construction of enemies and victims has increasingly become a surrogate for deliberation. The more such themes are articulated, the greater the shift away from shared institutions and mutual investment in the democratic process in favor of a language of scorn, persecution, and triumphalism, traits manifested in expressions as disparate as talk radio, home school curricula, and James Dobson’s fearful letter from 2012.

So as we look to the future, it is the health of this narrative, this tendency I will be watching. There is little evidence that the power of such claims will abate. While Sarah Palin’s or Samuel Wurzelbacher’s articulations thereof may not have yielded electoral votes, part of the power of these claims—and those like them, issued by different constituencies—is that they are nurtured in a context shaped by the absence of reasoned discourse and historical vision. Something about the surrealism of this unreason is captured in Jodi Dean’s writings about alien abductee claims: “Their efforts to defend themselves become further manifestations of the virtuality of contemporary reality.” Similarly, no corrections to accusations of palling around with terrorists or socialism can really be effective, since they are always announcing themselves in a context which defeats them, which contextualizes them as yet more chatter, and where to chatter is to be guilty of protesting too much. It seems, at times, that one can only add to the din. Political power is achieved through volume and repetition rather than suasion.

So while we may see a shift in representative figures, a recalibration of strategies, and so forth, the larger political context will likely prove far more intransigent, unless and until the quality of public discourse and participation changes. I expect that the rhetorics of embattlement and violence will remain powerful, and their clangor lively in the resonance chambers of American public life. And yet this moment may also become what Robert Orsi calls an “abundant event,” “characterized by aspects of the human imagination that cannot be completely accounted for by social and cultural codes.” It is possible that, despite how overdetermined Obama as signifier has already become, his presence in American public life may yet become some kind of countersign to the drab, cranky tendencies that have flourished these last decades, like embers rekindled from earlier moments in American demonology. Perhaps just the further cooling of these embers might be enough to restore lost faiths.

“It’s complicated.” That’s what we, scholars of religion, often say when asked to comment on challenging, possibly unsavory topics like the now over-determined public presence of Palin. We hurriedly, and rightly, remind our audiences that there exists a more modest, respectable religion, one more quotidian than those shrill voices that titillate and terrify liberal bloggers in their rush to link “Christo-fascists” to Palin. In making this point, we fall back on well-worn responses and qualifications, reflexive reminders that identities are contested and traditions diverse. Yet those winks continue. What “fleck of culture” is revealed? Is it Palin’s own, a sign of her magnetic hold on the “commentariat”? Or might it also reveal “specks” of Religious Studies behavior, some of the deepest assumptions underlying our scholarly practice?

Such questions can’t be answered by focusing on what Palin believes or endorses; her winks shouldn’t tempt scholars to indulge in a game of “gotcha!” We distance ourselves from Tina Fey’s and Keith Olbermann’s engagements with Palin’s beliefs in the efficacy of exorcism, the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs in Eden, or the justice of trickle-down economics. Yet while we are right to reject the snarky tone of such engagements, Palin’s ocular flutters reveal something of our own “structures of signification.” Palin has become the ultimate intellectual signifier, a shifting context, a dazzling surface on which manifold projections reflect back to us as confirmed truths. She is a “true feminist,” Clarence Thomas, a “sexy Puritan,” the ultimate creation of the Roveists, or, closer to home, she is a counter-sign to the “respectable” religion we in the field seek to privilege.

Kathryn Lofton, John Schmalzbauer, Randall Stephens, and others have done fine work—often on this very website—in complicating the ways in which Palin’s religiosity is misrepresented. In some ways it is unsurprising that such back and forth exchanges between journalists and professors, that mutual dance around academic “authority,” have proliferated in the wake of the GOP convention. After all, it seems almost impossible, in the years since the panicky post-election spasms of 2004, to talk about political religions without being sucked—often against one’s will—into the insider baseball haranguing about representational violence and evangelicals.

So our public qualifications of Palin-talk are also winks to ourselves about scholarly conventions, specifically proclamations (against all evidence) that the Right is dying (no, really, it’s for real this time), and assertions that, if conservatism lives on it does so as a kind of zombie category, a dead construct of an intransigent critic’s imagination, something far outnumbered by and with far less vitality than moderates and progressives (who presumably will shoot the zombie in the head, figuratively speaking). Writers like E.J. Dionne (whose mid-1990s forecast of a Progressive revival has now reinvented itself as the prediction of a resurgent religious “left”) and Alan Wolfe (who finds that most Americans want a flexible faith, one linked to tolerance and reason) surely have a point, just as the important works done since the 1980s—by George Marsden, Grant Wacker, Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and Randall Balmer—have surely taught us all about the complexities of evangelicalisms.

But consider the following “structures of signification.” Nancy Ammerman wrote recently (in “Telling the Old, Old Story”) that “researchers in the evangelical world have listened for a strident hellfire message and heard instead the everyday stories of people who want to be liked and don’t want to make waves, who translate their story about eternal destiny into a more visible story about kindness and honesty.” While no one would disagree with her larger point, the words “in,” “the,” and “instead” wink actively. This point about acknowledging complexity and pluralism seems to smuggle in a singularity: “the evangelical world.”  There may also be an implication that only those commentaries produced by those in this world matter. While those written by researchers outside this world would surely look different—they might not be ethnographic, for example—would they thereby be illegitimate? And what of that tricky word “instead”? No one in the study of American religions would possibly find fault with the notion that “kindness and honesty” are present in the “everyday stories” of many evangelicals. But does this really mean, as the word “instead” suggests, that these are the only qualities generated by the stories? Wouldn’t a more accurate word be “also” rather than “instead”?

There are good reasons for emphasizing stories of kindness and compassion that emerge from a culture so over-determined and frequently mocked. Ammerman, Corwin Smidt, D. Michael Lindsay, Christian Smith, and others have exposed the caricature of an evangelical monolith which is sometimes given pass in national media, seemingly undergirded by the anxiety New York Times readers feel after reading reviews of Jesus Camp. We know, of course, that evangelical identities have always been complicated, and that new evangelical voices are expressed through concerns about the environment and the economy. But there are good reasons, too, to remember that other stories still exist, powerfully nurtured in a political culture shaped by discourses of persecution and combat, and still preoccupied with the imagery of hellfire and the rhetoric of pluralism. Even if we take for granted that the words spoken to researchers are the ones that count (as if there are no back stories), “strident hellfire messages” clearly still exist and one doesn’t have to look very hard to find them. This story must be told as well, for this enduring vein of tropes and criticisms—even as we all know it does not speak for the whole of “the evangelical world”—continues to shape a shared world of politics, religion, and culture.

I am not suggesting that when Palin winks when saying “I am opposed to gay marriage,” she is alerting armies of “theocrats” to readiness. Yet our guild’s sensible point about not collapsing Palin’s policies into a “Pentecostal wink,” or locating them in some mythically antediluvian Christianity, should not lead us to look past the enduring power of conservatism (evangelical and otherwise, in all of their complexity) as a cultural, political, and religious presence. While those of us in the academy know that the gleeful snarkiness of a Salon article on faith healing is off-base as a window onto Palin’s politics, we know too that the mutual resonance of political and religious conservatism remains loud, and we ignore it to our intellectual discredit, and possibly to our political peril as well. There remains much to say about hellfire, after all, once we have all accepted—as we all have long ago—that not every evangelical speaks its language. And there remain a great many stories to tell about it, once we have all accepted—as we all should have done long ago—that not everyone who tells such a story is a Sam Harris, a Christopher Hitchens, or a Richard Dawkins.

So while I don’t necessarily disagree with what Ammerman and others have written (nor am I suggesting they’re engaged in protectionism, false consciousness, or anything of the sort), I invoke their writings as an opportunity to muse on a tendency that may have unconsciously flourished in the field. It is worth engaging in a kind of self-inventory so that, in the name of cautioning against misrepresentation, we don’t narrow our political and intellectual conventions (and integrity) until we are neutered, bland, an immobile knot of endless qualifications of what we want—but cannot bring ourselves—to say: in other words, the very caricature of the professoriat circulated by the likes of Gov. Palin.

Is there more for us to say of winking than simply, “it’s complicated.” Are there new responses that can, or should, be added to the din? Do the winks signify beyond this? If anything, they tell us that Palin represents—whatever else may be made of her “meanings”—the need for fresh narratives of religion in public life, since she vexes and unsettles conventional ways of thinking about political religions. I say this because the reactions she has generated cannot be captured simply by resorting to ideological explanations, no matter how energetically Palin stays on message. Nor is her candidacy simply another occasion to cry wolf before the inevitable triumph of theocracy or to bemoan how the incredulous masses vote against their own interests while in thrall to the passions of identity, to cite Thomas Frank’s widely-known formulation. I say this, too, because despite the evident presence of voter polarization, the ready-to-hand “culture wars” musings do little to clarify what is interesting or politically significant about Palin.

Aside from talking points and party affiliation, Palin is in some ways what I have elsewhere called, building on the work of James Scott, politically illegible. And her complicated, multifarious demonology cannot be adduced to her religious affiliation. She exists in the “viral” dimension of our mediascape as a singular concoction of politics as telegenics (the sportscaster’s zingers recast as political argument), emotional self-creation (Hockey Mom cum canine), frontier survivalist (the Alaska Independence party is almost a distant echo of Gingrich-era conservatism, when separatist militias briefly denounced “socialized” roadwork and the like), and a gifted practitioner of the erotics of fear. So while somewhere a graduate student may be contemplating a thesis comparing Palin’s charisma with Sister Aimee’s, the way she captures some of the darker impulses of our political moment strikes me as having little to do with her religiosity.

So yes, as I and others have suggested in writings about political religion, there are both normative and practical goods to be achieved by evaluating religio-political practitioners according to the policies they favor, or their specific orientations to political life. Meet them on the shared space of politics and demand accountability in political registers, rather than shrieking about the perils of theocracy. All to the good. Yet it is important to keep in mind more than one thought—that conservatism remains powerful, and that it is not ubiquitous, and that Palin’s policy positions are more important than her Pentecostalism—as we consider the opportunities and risks opened up by considerations of political religions.

While the pundits miss the point, perhaps we, the scholars, miss a different kind of point. No academic should feel obligated to criticize Gov. Palin, even if they detest her politics. But, in the name of a much-needed conceptual self-inventory, it is worth wondering if the intellectual and political integrity we seek to defend, calibrated to the lived messiness we claim to document, is well-served if we are lulled into thinking that a lone wink fits all audiences, genres, and occasions.