Importantly, Kahn does not conflate popular sovereignty with democracy. The will of the popular sovereign is not identical to the statistical majority of people who happen to participate in the electoral process; it is a more elusive force, which Kahn locates in what he calls “the American political imaginary.” It is “the people” that authorizes the revolutionary violence that founds the state, and that then speaks through a constitutional legal framework that ensures that democratic institutions function only within the parameters set by an original sovereign decision outside of all ordinary law. One example of this phenomenon would be judicial review: “While the Court likes to appeal the rule of law to legitimate its exceptional role, political theology suggests that we look in a different direction: to the Court’s capacity to speak in the voice of the popular sovereign.” Ironically, then, the sovereign voice of “We the People” limits what the demos can decide.

Part of what makes this “political theology” is that the Constitution was produced and adopted in a state of exception and thus depends upon no prior legal norms. According to Kahn, the self-referential authority draws support from an imaginary that worships “‘self-evident truths’ set forth in the name of ‘We the People.’” It is an open question, however, how much this theological analysis tells us about American history. Jason Stevens, for instance, raises some important objections to Kahn’s use of historical evidence. As Stevens argues, “Kahn’s ‘genealogical’ technique yields no evidence persuading me that American political ideas originate in and are indebted to theological sources.” And I agree that, in his enthusiasm to explain so many aspects of the American political imaginary, Kahn occasionally lets slip historical claims that his methodology cannot support.

Genealogy, however, is not supposed to be a reliable method for getting to the facts of the matter of historical origins. Rather, a genealogical approach traces the selective reimaginings of the past that help to make self-evident the assumptions that pervade discursive or epistemic logics. For example, we know that the current vogue for Constitutionalism has little to do with reflection upon the actual historical circumstances that produced the document that is, perhaps, the quintessential text of bourgeois liberal democracy. For some reason, Tea Party revolutionary rhetoric has persuaded many Americans that it embodies a lost vitality that was present at the moment of foundational violence. One corollary of this view is that the ordinary political institutions established in the wake of the Revolution  have a diminished authenticity. The fact that such a sentiment continues to play a strong role in the imagination of sovereignty testifies to its persistence as a matter of belief and, in this sense, might be an example of the kind of secularized theology that Kahn draws on Schmitt to discuss.

My own quibble with Kahn is that, given his focus on the forces that compel obedience to the law, he underestimates the prominence of persistent hostility to the government in the way in which Americans imagine their revolutionary past. Take, for instance, the following statement:  “Americans―apart from the experience of the Confederacy―have not had to think much of capitulation, but they have never abandoned the idea of themselves as the inheritors of revolution. They intuitively understand that law is the product of revolution. Law and revolution together constitute the frame of our political imaginary.” Yes, though it may be that the experience of the Confederacy is more than just an aberration from the norm but, instead, a vigorous and persistent strain in American life that equates popular sovereignty with states’ rights, white supremacy, and the threat of armed insurrection against a tyrannical State. As Sanford Levinson has also noted, reserving the right to overthrow the government by force of arms draws on an implicit view of sovereignty whereby each householder decides on the state of exception. When Tea Party Patriots warn of “second amendment remedies” against an overreaching government, they insist that the final decision on when to suspend the law is made, not by the State, but by the armed American household. For this reason, threatening bloody violence against the State is seen, not as treasonous, but as a hyper-patriotic defense of popular sovereignty and a direct link to the authentic revolutionary violence that founded the nation. In this view, popular sovereignty refers, not to democratic policymaking, but to the right of the people—and not the government—to decide on the exception.

Asserting that the citizenry has the right to violently overthrow the government has nothing to do with any political or legal reality. As Kahn points out, “We no longer imagine violence among ourselves as a political possibility.” This is a fair point in that mere threats of violence would not necessarily be relevant to Kahn’s or Schmitt’s political theology, because rhetoric does not matter unless it has the genuine potential to become a decision that would then form the basis for real action. Following this logic, discussion of violent revolution absent the practical possibility of revolutionary violence might be interesting for some kinds of political analysis, but it would not extend to the question of sovereignty. And to the extent that it is hard to imagine an insurrection that could meaningfully threaten the armed forces of the United States, Tea Party rhetoric might simply be confused.

But it is nonetheless important not to underestimate the persistent preparation for armed insurrection in American life, inasmuch as it is deeply ingrained in the national narrative. For example, Kahn notes: “Popular history is shaped by a narrative of the successful use of violent force against enemies, within and without the nation. Much of this past remains vivid in our political imaginations, endlessly reinforced by both popular media and scholarly work. Americans take their families to Valley Forge and Gettysburg, and even to Omaha Beach.” Okay, but the message delivered at Gettysburg is decidedly different from that which one receives at Valley Forge and Omaha Beach. And Civil War battlefield memorials do not demonize the enemy so much as tell a story of “brother against brother.” In this narrative of an internally divided household, one army was defeated on the battlefield, but both sides nevertheless lay claim to the American heritage.

To take another example of how the legacy of the Confederacy participates in the national imaginary, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation presents the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War as a crisis of democratic sovereignty in which a disenfranchised white minority struggles under the supposed tyranny of African American rule. In one scene, before avenging the death of a white woman who took her life rather than submitting to the amorous advances of a newly uniformed African American soldier, the film’s protagonist performs a sinister ritual involving a Confederate flag and a fiery cross. The title card that precedes the scene reads: “Brethren, this flag bears the red stain of a life of a southern woman, a priceless sacrifice on the altar of an outraged civilization.” After performing this ritual, Klansmen capture and lynch the African American soldier. In other words, extra-legal violence rectifies the crisis of sovereignty brought about by Reconstruction. Within the logic of the film, lynching, as the exemplary form of aestheticized racial violence that exists apart from the normal legal order, performs the signifying work of giving birth to a new nation. Seeking to recover democratic institutions tied to a white biopolitical subject, such violence drew its force from passions outside of the juridical legitimacy of the State. In a way, this relates to Kahn’s observation that: “The closest thing we have today to the sacral-monarch’s power to create the exception to law may not be the executive pardon but jury nullification, which is best seen as a localized expression of the popular sovereign willing the exception.” On this point, it is important to keep in mind that one of the most visible forms of jury nullification has been the refusal to find guilty perpetrators of extra-legal violence, which corroborates perpetrators’ own experience of lynching as the authentic exercise of popular sovereignty in the face of ineffectual legal due process.

As two examples of the willingness of white householders to “take the law into their own hands,” lynching and armed revolt both share in the belief that the suspension of ordinary legal institutions can be required for the sake of the direct exercise of popular sovereignty. This leads to a reading of the Second Amendment as a kind of self-destruct button that allows people guns as a check against tyranny. Of course, this interpretation is historically absurd in many ways. As Garry Wills points out, in his A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, this interpretation ignores that in attempting to form a “more perfect union”the Constitution is a set of democratic guidelines and procedures that was adopted by an already existing polity in the interest of better governing itself.

To address this problem, the vision espoused by current Constitutional fundamentalists is far better articulated in the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was meant to replace. One increasingly prominent method of resolving the problem is to read the Tenth Amendment in such a way as to make the Constitution an only slightly revised version of the Articles. Thus, Tea Party Constitutionalism notes the similarity between the Tenth Amendment and Article Two of the Articles of Confederation, which states: “Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation, expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” This reading essentially argues that, while the Constitution adopted a new set of procedures for democratic deliberation, it reaffirmed the same conception of sovereignty as enshrined in the Articles of Confederation. This then leads to the conclusion that any liberal jurisprudence that has ignored the Tenth Amendment has distorted the text of the Constitution. Following this reasoning, the Constitution prescribes the rules and framework for democratic institutions but restricts the decision-making scope of those same institutions to a narrow window of government action.

One obvious objection to what I’m saying is that many who strongly endorse Second Amendment rights also deify the American military and, in this way, show their loyalty to the State. One of the cornerstones of Kahn’s critique of liberal self-interest is his reminder that the State can demand the sacrifice of life. As he notes: “The popular sovereign can always demand a life; it can demand of all citizens that they kill and be killed for the state. The fundamental character of the relationship of citizen to sovereign is not contract—as in the social contract—but sacrifice.” But how are such sacrifices really understood?  To remind Americans that they sacrifice their lives for the State sounds like a provocation, a deliberate profanation of a cherished ideal of American citizenship. Americans do not die for the State; they die for their fellow soldiers, their families, their communities, and their nation.

So what accounts for unquestioning loyalty to the military among the same people who also entertain the possibility of armed insurrection?  One answer is that the rhetoric of the Confederacy that calls for cuts in government spending and ridicules the bureaucratic waste, inefficiency, and incompetence of public institutions does not direct this criticism at the defense budget because the military is not a part of the government. As odd as this might sound, it might be one of the few points of relative consensus in the current American political climate. While conservatives uncouple the military and the State in their calls to shrink the government, progressive liberals often see defense spending as a destructive and wasteful drain on resources that otherwise would be directed toward the public good.

To be clear, not all Americans who have defended the Second Amendment have understood it as a check against government tyranny. For that matter, I am not saying that the national imaginary of this country has historically been uniformly anti-government. At times, on the contrary, populist movements have sought to empower the people by expanding democratic institutions. However, such movements sometimes (although not always) imagine the people as an organically unified body politic and seek to shore up perceived sources of shared identity. Such populist sentiments, especially those that imagine America as a white, Christian nation, can quickly swell in the face of the perceived loss of national integrity perpetuated by liberal reform that extends the benefits of American citizenship beyond the scope of the white household. This in turn leads to nostalgia for a lost nation as the grounds for abandoning political loyalty to the State. The reason that the conceptual vocabulary of political theology might be helpful here is that such movements make extensive use of the language of popular sovereignty.

Within the narrative of American political decadence and lost revolutionary vitality, the 2008 election only confirmed for many what they felt to be decades of wresting government from the hands of the authentic American people in favor of a tyrannical welfare state that reappropriates resources and distributes them to parasitic others by way of inefficient and decadent bureaucrats who despise Christian freedom. What liberals see as differences over policy that can, so they hope, be resolved through discussion, reason, negotiation, and compromise are felt by many Americans to express a crisis of sovereignty that calls for resistance to all practical measures of federal governance in favor of states’ rights and a protection of the sanctity of the home as the ultimate source of national legitimacy.

In response to the question of whether these spiritual practices constitute evidence for or against secularization, Bender deftly reframes the issue around how the production of spirituality “unsettles the logics of institutional differentiation that continue to lie at the heart of our theories of secularization.” Rather than restrict her focus to religion, she studies how spirituality is produced across institutions. As part of this project, Bender points to the historical and social contingency of what we classify as religious: “But studying spirituality seriously does raise questions about how social scientific practice distinguishes religion from other kinds of actions and organizations, and how such distinctions have mattered not only to sociological analysis but, more broadly, to scholarly and lay evaluations of what the religious is, and how various forms of religious activity mobilize or should mobilize action in the world.”

This is an important point, but it also means that we need to take seriously the insistence of many of Bender’s subjects that they are not religious. That is, to explore her claim that “the binaries of religious and secular institutional differentiation are inadequate to our analysis of religious life in America,” we have to explain why it is that many spiritual practitioners are invested in some binary that distinguishes between religion and nonreligion. One might object, of course, that nonreligious here does not equal secular. But what is the secular exactly, apart from the historically and socially contingent institutional space that is not religious? To put it another way, if we are making empirical sociological distinctions between matters spiritual and temporal, then the practices of spiritual seekers clearly unsettle binaries between religious and secular. However, if we are following Talal Asad’s invitation to take secularity to be a normative discursive and legal project that classifies and produces various social phenomena in terms of categories of religious and secular, it is less clear how unsettled this binary really is. As long as claiming not to be religious has discursive resonance, this binary impacts how institutional authority is legitimated and distributed in American society.

To be clear, I think there is analytic value in analyzing new metaphysicals in terms of a challenge to sociological definitions of religion. In claiming not to be religious, some spiritual seekers recognize that their commitment to spirituality occupies a space that many other Americans identify as religion. This seems to indicate that new metaphysicals feel that it is intellectually dishonest and spiritually inauthentic to subscribe to organizationally sanctioned credos or ritual practices. But to follow Bender’s suggestion that we look at how spirituality is produced across institutions, what would happen if, instead of calling this religion, we listened to the insistence of many of her subjects that they are actually practicing science? To this end, I would like to revisit some of the perceptive observations by Michael Saler and Andrew Perrin about the new metaphysicals’ scientific claims. While Saler and Perrin made distinct points, they both wondered why pseudoscience continued to have such a strong hold on the imaginations of people who invested so much in scientific legitimacy. In his post, Saler expressed his desire to resurrect binaries between “new metaphysicals’ concept of science, and its institutionalized practice around the globe—the version of science that is arguably at the core of Western modernity.” While I agree that the institutionalized practice of science is a core feature of Western modernity, I would like to consider whether Bender’s subjects might actually have a great deal invested in a religion and science binary. Without defending the rigor of the new metaphysicals’ scientific claims, I think it would be productive to assess instead how it would affect the book’s institutional analysis if the subtitle were “Spirituality and the American Scientific Imagination.” I am not trying to argue that this is really science and not really religion; my purpose is to consider what is at stake in the claim to be scientific and not religious.

One way of addressing this problem of classification is to open up the binary between religious and scientific to consider the larger process of institutional differentiation between religion, science, economy, and the state. This does not just line up secular politics, economy, and science on one side and religion on the other (although sometimes it does). In significant ways, these spheres of human activity are differentiated from each other. For example, something called “the economy” becomes its own distinct sphere of social life that should function autonomously from politics or religion. On this point, I would echo Pamela Klassen’s objection to Saler’s objection to Bender’s comparison of conceptual forces like “the economy” with “astral energy.” While I hope that social scientists think self-reflexively and contingently about economics, it is important to consider the discursive work that defines the economy as an aggregate measure of quantifiable activity while defining, say, sympathy for the material well-being of others as a distinct matter of moral or religious concern. And while there are real economic processes at work that allow us to say that the economy grew by 2.4 percent, that number often functions with the mystical potency of a chakra in the way it affects human attitudes, decisions, and behaviors.

The global scientific community also shores up its own sources of institutional authority by protecting it from religious, economic, or political encroachments. One of the many strong features of Bender’s book is how she captures the ambivalence that many of her subjects have toward this established scientific authority. Far more than churches, the institutional rivals in this story are the American Medical Association, National Science Foundation, peer-reviewed scientific journals, or any number of departments at MIT and Harvard. But in keeping with this ambivalence, spiritual seekers mixed their frustration about the condescension of conventional scientists with their proud recitation of scientific degrees and anecdotes about the inclusion of alternative healing classes in medical school curricula. Perrin speculates that this desire for scientific legitimacy might have something to do with the setting of Bender’s book: “In the heady environs of Cambridge, this probably played a dual role: at once claiming legitimacy among intellectual neighbors and distinguishing themselves from more traditionally ‘religious’ people whose spirituality is, by implication, incompatible with the scientific ethos.”

This is a persuasive point in that Bender’s subjects seem to grant greater legitimacy to science than to religion, but we also need to consider that they insist that their insights are superior to those of the mainstream scientific community. According to Bender’s interlocutors, conventional science is undermined by a myopia that proscribes observations about the spiritual energies that pervade nature. As she describes: “The energetic body, or astral body (or subtle body), is ‘energetic,’ and as my respondents told me frequently, is a scientific reality, subject to the laws and rules of energy (as well as some esoteric rules not yet proven by science) just as they understand the physical body to be always the same, subject to the same rules, proceeding with the same functions and capacities.” Spiritual scientists describe energies and processes that are not supernatural in the sense of miraculous interventions by a power who defies the laws or patterns of nature. Rather, they insist that their spiritual experiences tap into energies that inhere in the order of things and are empirically testable, repeatable, and even falsifiable. To this end, spiritual experiences function something like experiments meant to produce data that can be used to identify and measure patterns of spiritual energy. In a chapter entitled “Tuning the Body,” Doug describes his astral body’s ability to hear music during an out-of-body experience: “I could actually hear the music change. It felt like, I could hear it 20 feet in front of me and then at some point it was on my side, and then at some point it was behind me…. If I was perfectly stationary and I was hearing from my physical ears, the sound, the music would have stayed the same. My radio wasn’t moving. So what that means is that I was moving. And that I was actually hearing that music from my spirit body and not my physical body.” While this spiritual hearing might seem to challenge empirical observation, Doug sees the evidence gained from his spirit body, not as contradictory, but as supplemental to what he learns from his physical body. Instead of pointing to an astral body outside the purview of scientific verification, Bender’s subjects assert “that ‘scientists’ have indeed ‘recognized’ the body’s electromagnetism, and pointed furthermore to a variety of technologies that they understood to provide evidence of the astral body.” Any science that does not recognize this evidence is insufficiently empirical in that it fails to incorporate the full range of human perception and sensibility.

I am not saying that the manifestation of divine power that defies the laws of nature is an essential feature of religion, but I am saying that some people might think it is and want to assure themselves and others that what they are experiencing is not religious in this sense.  Thus, I think it is an open question whether at least some of the spiritual seekers in Bender’s book are working within a secular binary in which they want to align their experiences and insights with scientific proof rather than religious faith.  In other words, they seek to appropriate science’s institutional mojo by arguing that they understand science better than scientists.

To speculate on what this might mean for an American scientific imagination, it is possible to read the new metaphysicians as advocates for a privatization of science, in which people cite something like an empirical conscience that is competent to judge claims about the spiritual/natural order of things. Thus, no one should be in the position of judging someone else’s empirical experiences and observations. Scientific organizations that do this through their processes of peer review seem elitist, undemocratic, intolerant, and un-American. Investigating this kind of scientific imagination might help to shed light on why a supermajority of Americans find it reasonable for intelligent design to be taught alongside evolution in biology classes. Of course, intelligent designers and the new metaphysicals have very different motivations and ideas about religious authority, but there might be some similarity in the discursive logic that defends the right of every person to evaluate scientific data and arguments for him or herself. I’m only speculating about this, and one reservation I have in using the term privatization is that it implies a process in which authority was once stable but is now eroding. And as Catherine Albanese has exhaustively demonstrated, such alternative sciences have been a persistent presence on the American landscape.

If it seems odd to consider private intuitions and spiritual evidence as an institutional challenge to the scientific community, it would seem no less odd to the adherents of many of the things that we call religions for the claims of one’s personal conscience to trump the views of learned experts or traditional sources of authority. This is because sociologists accept that there is a distinction between true and false science in a way that does not exist for true and false religion. What this reflects is an institutional arrangement in which you can believe whatever crazy stuff you want as long as you call it religion. But many of the spiritual but not religious seem unwilling to accept this.

When discussing the importance of sincerity in conversion, for example, Keane states: “real conversion requires that a speaker’s words be sincere expressions of ideas that are truly understood […]. At stake is not just the transmission of correct doctrine but also production of human subjects who are (relatively) free because they fully grasp the agency that is rightly theirs.” To a Calvinist, there was indeed more at stake in real conversion than the transmission of correct doctrine, but an important measure of sincerity was that the speaker’s conversion not be the product of the agency of human subjects. On the contrary, a sincere conversion could be performed only by the saving work of the Holy Spirit. To this end, some varieties of Calvinists developed extensive theories of signs designed to weed out apparent conversions attained by merely natural or human means. In short, human beings were free and responsible without being agents in their own conversion. If this sounds difficult to understand, Calvinists thought so too and spent lifetimes of intellectual effort trying to work out the technical subtleties and nuances that distinguished their view of Christian freedom from Catholic ideas of free will, or from the kind of individual autonomy advocated by Enlightenment liberalism or other varieties of Protestants.

To his credit, Keane is an insightful enough reader to understand this, and is careful not to impute his reading of Calvinist discourse about signs and agency to Calvinists’ own stated views about signs and agency. Thus, there are a number of statements in the text and footnotes that say something along the lines of: “Of course in some sense one defers to the agency of God.” But these concessions to ideas about human depravity, the sovereignty of God, and the saving work of the Holy Spirit are usually followed by qualifiers like “but in practice” or “however,” which reassert the connection to modern agency. Keane defends this on the grounds that he is “trying to make certain background assumptions easier to see.” This is a reasonable move, inasmuch as anthropologists should not be the passive amanuenses for historical actors, but it does bring up some tricky methodological problems for an assessment of Keane’s reconstruction of Calvinist semiotic ideology. For example, one could note that despite their critiques of institutional mediation, Calvinists in practice constructed coercive civic and ecclesiastical institutions designed to further their vision of a Godly society—just ask the residents of Calvin’s Geneva or the Puritans’ Massachusetts. But Keane decides to accept Calvinist critiques of institutions and chooses to doubt Calvinist critiques of human agency. To this end, he draws on the classical sociological theories of Weber and Troeltsch, but these theorists were working with their own background assumptions, which presumed that Protestants (as opposed to, say, Catholics) would have to have been the ones who shaped the process of historical development that bridged the gap between Christendom and secular modernity. Thus, what mattered was where Protestant agency ended up, and this made the sovereignty of God, the saving work of the Holy Spirit, and the critique of free will into vestigial ideas that were destined to disappear. But it is important to consider that the jury is still out about whether these classical sociological theories were necessarily right about the telos of secular modernity.

Furthermore, it seems to me that these assumptions are different from those guiding Keane’s own attempt to grapple with the complexity of Calvinist explanations of the relationship between words and things. Thus, Keane devotes careful attention to Calvinist views about the Lord’s Supper, in which he points to the rejection of Catholic and even Lutheran sacramentalism on the grounds that any such ritual should be regarded as merely symbolic. He then extends this insight to do a fantastic job of unpacking the semiotic ideology that Dutch missionaries used to attack idolatry and to convince the Sumbanese that their material objects and practices were symbols and metaphors. These symbols, in turn, were not innocuous, because external and counterfeit forms were the means Satan used to deceive people.

Keane’s account here is convincing, but it is important to contextualize this semiotic ideology. I could be misreading Keane here, but it struck me that he reads Calvinists’ views of the Lord’s Supper to glean how they imagined Christian truth. But I would argue that in the hands of Calvinists, this semiotic ideology would only be employed to explain other people’s false religions. The Lord’s Supper was downgraded to the status of metaphor because, like all works, it could play no instrumental role in salvation. What Catholics and idolaters shared in their formal prayers and ritual performances was an overvaluation of human agency and institutions at the expense of the sovereignty of God and the surprising work of the Holy Spirit, which could not be contained in any external institutional, material, or linguistic forms. Against empty forms and rituals, Calvinists sought the real, active, vital presence of the Spirit that animated and invigorated the human body and the social order. According to the Dutch Calvinist Abraham Kuyper (whom Keane often cites), “It is He who dwells in the hearts of the elect; who animates every rational being; who sustains the principle of life in every creature.” To this end, the Holy Spirit worked through what can be described as a metonymic operation that stressed immediate contact and presence. To return to the question of sincerity, words about conversion that were animated by the presence of the Spirit were sincere; words that were derived from natural or human means in the absence of the Spirit were counterfeit and insincere, even if they were the exact same words (and this goes to the point made in Michael Warner’s post about the significance of speech). The Calvinists’ message to Sumbanese pagans thus would not be that religious truth is metaphorical, but that “your spirits are fake; our Spirit is real.”

In Keane’s account, however, Calvinists sound a lot like Saussurean structuralists. The practical upshot of this might be that if Protestants are actually proto-structuralists, and as such have shaped modern ideas of signs and subjectivity, then poststructuralist anthropologists can dust off their old arguments against structuralism and direct them against Christian secular modernity. To be clear, I think there is something to this in that Keane does identify a semiotic ideology that is indeed operative and influential in modernity. I also realize that I’m quibbling: insisting that the work of the Holy Spirit should be described as metonymy instead of metaphor isn’t that different from what Keane is saying and actually strengthens his arguments about purification and the suspicion of mediation. But quibbling about theological distinctions is what Calvinists do, and I think greater attention to the insistence that human beings were not agents in their own conversion helps to explain Calvinist resistance to the kind of modern semiotic ideology that Keane describes.

This is important because spiritual immediacy works differently from assenting to “ideas that are truly understood.” For example, Kuyper makes what he thinks to be an important distinction between Calvinist and Islamic critiques of mediation. According to him, Islam is the ultimate purifier and functions as the perfect opposite of paganism: “Islam isolates God from the creature, in order to avoid all commingling with the creature.” What is important here is not the accuracy of Kuyper’s claims about Islam as much as to understand that it matters to him to make a distinction between different kinds of critiques of mediation. As he explains, “[Calvinism] does not seek God in the creature, as Paganism; it does not isolate God from the creature, as Islamism; it posits no mediate communion between God and the creature, as does Romanism; but proclaims the exalted thought that, although standing in high majesty above the creature, God enters into immediate fellowship with the creature, as God the Holy Spirit. This is even the heart and kernel of the Calvinist confession of predestination.” In other words, the critique of mediation is not an end in itself, but lays the groundwork for a positive assertion of a spiritual immediacy that is real.

None of this is to say that the Dutch missionaries weren’t modern, in the sense that one of the ways of being modern is to feel disaffected and alienated in a spiritless modernity (consider, for example, the anxieties about form, sincerity, and spirit in modernist art and literature). But where I do find Keane’s account of a semiotic ideology convincing is in characterizing the opponents of Calvinist orthodoxy in the early twentieth century. In the American context, for example, Calvinist stalwarts joined other theological conservatives to fight against the vagaries of modernist and liberal theological movements. One point of contention was the willingness of some to read the Christian Gospel in terms of symbols and metaphors. As the American Calvinist J. Gresham Machen argued in 1923, “the liberal theologian seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting ‘the essence of Christianity’.” According to Machen, modernists and liberals compromised the uniqueness of the Christian Gospel by reading the biblical text in terms of metaphors, symbols, and theological principles (not all Calvinists were literalists, of course, but many at least had some sympathy with fundamentalist anti-modernism). While I would second Warner’s commendation of Keane for not attributing to Calvinists an advocacy of a singular, modern liberal subject, Keane’s account does make it tricky to explain why they thought of modernity as literally Satanic.

Interestingly, the fundamentalist insistence on the literal and historical truth of the Gospel is often cast as a deficit of metaphor. On this point, a valuable contribution of Keane’s study of Calvinist critiques of idols and fetishes is that it advances a genealogy that tracks how it becomes self-evident in modernity that someone who fails to recognize the metaphorical quality of religious truth is missing something essential about religion. But rather than see this as an extension of a Calvinist emphasis on metaphor to a prescriptive, normative model of religiosity, we might just as well describe it as a movement in the other direction. What characterized Protestant modernists was their willingness to see Christianity as one religion among other religions. Thus, a semiotic ideology used to condemn other people’s false religions became transformed into a supposedly neutral hermeneutics of symbols, metaphors, and meanings. The insistence that everyone’s religions were alike and comparable could then be the basis for a tolerance that could serve as one of the markers of secular citizenship in a pluralistic society. I am just not convinced that most Protestants around the globe shared this semiotic ideology, especially those who persisted in calling themselves Calvinists.