Lofton tells me she shares with Jonathan Z. Smith the view that difference is the beginning of any good conversation. I am going to take her up on that notion and dwell here on a point of disagreement rather than those points, about the wild commingling of religion and consumption, upon which we agree. (Full disclosure:  she and I have been involved in two collaborative projects as well as a handful of other professional ventures together, so we have discussed Oprah, among other subjects, quite a bit already.) The difference here, while an issue of significance, is only a matter of collegial counterpoint. Given the respect I have for Lofton’s interpretive skills, I place my remarks in the category of friendly banter or yakking, not criticism.

Lofton has a grand sense of Oprah’s power. At one point early on she remarks that her gaze is fixed upon the mass media’s “omnipotence”—Oprah’s especially—not on the trivialities of personal idiosyncrasy or the illusions of consumer improvisation. Even those who claim no affinity with Oprah—those who never watched an episode of her talk-show, never followed her book recommendations, never felt compelled to pick up a copy of her magazine for makeover advice, never imagined a celebrity to be a particularly reliable authority on the good life, let alone the “best life”—all remain in her thrall. “Even if you want to avoid her, even if you have avoided her, you have not (you cannot),” Lofton writes. Big Sister Oprah “looms”—not exactly as a panoptic warden, but as a pervading presence and power. She is among the great puppet-masters of American consumers; she formats their desires, hopes, tastes, and feelings; she determines them; she occupies them. Oprah is our Zeitgeist, the very Spirit of the Age. That all certainly sounds portentous. It also sounds, I think, like a rhetorical splurge in excess of Lofton’s otherwise nuanced argument.

To be fair, this Foucault-derived vision of the “discursive production” of a disciplinary system is not Lofton’s main point, which consists far more in a fine-grained analysis of the persistent tropes of Oprah’s media empire. Still, it is the scaffolding, and that scaffolding allows her to censure certain historians, ethnographers, and qualitative sociologists as pointillists, dot-dot-dot empathizers with their subjects, unaware of the powerlessness of those they imbue with such quaintly romantic attributes as creativity, individuality, or agency. These scholars are up so close to the canvas that they cannot see the big picture of determining structures. I find the options so presented to be artificial; one can surely attend to both structure and agency at the same time, to the mindless predictability of consumer behavior as well as its annoying unpredictability to its corporate managers. I agree with Lofton that there is all too much about Oprah’s world and her devotees to make one wonder—at least from a certain highbrow academic standpoint—about “the intensity of their shallowness.” Call me an unreconstructed humanist, an overly hopeful liberal, but I doubt that banality is the sum of the matter, even for Oprah’s most frivolous (or lighthearted) fans. I am all the more hesitant to accept that judgment when it is derived from a methodological stance that finds it unnecessary—even sycophantic—to attend to the devotees themselves, to their yawns and misgivings as much as their amens and hallelujahs. Do we want to swing in pendulous fashion away from reception history and ethnographic intimacy to an all-knowing scholarly view of what social determinants and discursive formations really count? That would be quite a makeover, perhaps one worthy of Oprah’s “transformation circus.”

I happen to be writing away—yakking, confabulating, whatever—on Lofton’s Oprah on the day after Mother’s Day. Now, if there was ever a merchandized ritual, this American-made holiday would be it. In all kinds of ways, it was scripted for us by American florists and greeting-card manufacturers. No doubt we have been formatted to observe the holiday in very particular ways, which serve the interests of quite particular industries. That said, I have never been able to convince myself that this commercial trap is the only story—or even the primary story—to be told about the ritual cycle in which so many Americans gladly participate. Our three-year-old came home from his preschool with a craft project for the holiday this year. The teachers had provided this line:  “My mommy is special because . . . .” Our preschooler had provided the finishing phrase: “she tickles me.” Anna Jarvis, the syrupy yet somber Methodist inventor of the holiday, would have been proud. That’s banal sentiment for you, but even puppets (to borrow a titular phrase from Victoria Nelson) have secret lives. Even the ventriloquist’s dummy is not quite as dumb as it seems (hence the recurrent nightmare of the puppeteer’s mouthpiece turning on its master).

Lofton has incisively depicted the ways in which Oprah imagines freedom for her viewers—as a facility they gain from her to choose among handbags, seasonal colors, shoes, books, spiritual paths, and the like. Yet, it is telling that one of Lofton’s best examples of what it means to acquiesce to Oprah as an arbiter of fashions, relationships, and spiritual well-being is a performance artist who decides to play at submission and blog about it. An artist (with an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago) cannily letting Oprah’s prescriptions dominate her is camp, a theatrics of irony, not one more sign of Oprah’s omnipotence. In short, where I look for signs of resilience, if not resistance, Lofton sees signs of docility, if not surrender. That’s a difference worth some banter, but not worth depreciating Lofton’s achievement. Oprah is one shrewd remapping of where we need to look for religion in contemporary American culture.

As is so often the case, the asylum patient would seem to be saying something that the psychologist is predisposed to suppress.  In these reflections, I intend to play the asylum patient to the mystical present of Courtney Bender’s Cambridge metaphysicals. What does a historian have to say to the historyless?  This, of course, is a relatively familiar question in the academy. A generation ago it was a standard question that history posed to anthropology, so much so that, in all kinds of ways, the two fields converged (Bender’s mix of ethnography and history is certainly one good indication of that merger). It was also a question that historians put to historians of religion of the Chicago school—again, a generation or so ago—often with a sneering tone: When is history not history? When it is the history of religions. In this instance, we have a very particular version of this question: What does a sometime historian of American spirituality have to say to an ethnographer of the same?  It is very much a two-sided question in this case: one posed by the historian to the ethnographer, and one posed by the historian to the ethnographer’s subjects.

The question is indeed given a distinct doubleness with Bender’s mystics. In them, we have a cadre, as she suggests, that consistently obscures its own history—and in, of all places, Cambridge, the very stage of Emerson, James, Sarah Bull, and company. Confronted with these historical resonances, as well as historical narratives that have emphasized such continuities, Bender nevertheless began, as she says, “to wonder in earnest whether such histories mattered at all to the people I met at Seven Stars bookshop or whom I witnessed ‘soul singing’ at a local arts festival.”  These Cambridge adepts seemed “wholly uninterested” in any immediate past, in any “real” historical narrative that might shed light on their own preoccupations. They were pursuing the timeless and everlasting on James’s terms, and they could not care less about joining a historicist sensibility to their metaphysical projects. They have no problem with ancient pasts, however fictive—with, say, Stonehenge USA—but by and large they yawn over local and more proximate histories. It is a fascinating question that Bender’s account raises: How can a history, purposelessly made invisible, be said to affect the texture of Cambridge’s spiritual present?

I have four observations to make in relation to that overarching query:

First, Americans are notoriously bad at history, especially in any modern historicist sense. “Don’t know much about history” could be a national anthem or mantra, as the case may be. Fretting again over cultural literacy, though, is not the point—or, at least, not the point here. Instead, the issue is: What has made the American capacity to elude history so pronounced, or, put more positively, what has made the American religious imagination so expansive in its invention of mythical pasts and in its denial of contiguous traditions?  Is there, as Bender suggests, a deeper “anti-nostalgic premise” at work—one in which Americans have repeatedly imagined themselves as free of the aristocratic, cultural, and religious weight of Europe?   As the pamphleteer Tom Paine famously put that revolutionary premise, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

The dehistoricizing disposition, in other words, is clearly characteristic of much more than the American metaphysical movement. These Cambridge seekers leapfrog over William James, Charles Leadbetter, or Swami Vivekananda into medieval mysticism or pagan mysteries in much the same way that restorationist Protestants jump right over Barton Stone, Jonathan Edwards, or John Calvin into the primitivist world of Jesus and the apostles. So many American Protestant projects seem built on denying history, on obliterating more than a millennium and a half of church history in order to return directly to Pentecost or the River Jordan or Calvary. When these latter-day mystics and metaphysicals go zooming around, empty cosmopolitans oblivious to their own cultural inheritances, as Bender suggests, they share in a historical naivety that knows few religious bounds in American culture.

Second, because of the “spiritualized imperialism” in which their dehistoricized mysticism allows the Cambridge adepts to engage, Bender would like to burden the metaphysicals—and the rest of us—with history again. Without that ballast, we all are in danger of zooming about, as Bender eloquently puts it, “freed from our pasts and thus from our sins.”  But I detect an unresolved tension on this point in her book. Should metaphysical fantasies of past lives be unmasked, baring the hubris of imperial expansiveness?  Or, should the scholar blur the distinction between real and mythical histories, emphasizing instead how—in Bender’s phrase—“myths and fictitious histories become real”?  Bender straddles that interpretive divide, simultaneously indicting the metaphysicals for a failure of historical awareness and defending their mythic historicity as a kind of real history. All histories are living practices of memory; all are invented; and hence one needs to see metaphysical past lives as on a continuum with, say, Robert Richardson’s biography of James. Indeed, Bender aims to unsettle the distinction “between religious and secular histories” by emphasizing the “temporal play” between the real and the mythical, between history as an empiricist endeavor and history as imaginative fantasy. Bender rightly sets aside the criticism that these new religious experiments—the elaboration of past lives, for example—don’t deserve serious regard because they lack authentic or real histories. That argument seems about as helpful as the common ethnological claim in the nineteenth century that one of the things distinguishing the civilized from the primitive was that “the savage . . . has no history.”   Still, whatever temporal play we might find between real history and historical fantasy—for example, one subject’s belief that in a past life he was Hildegaard of Bingen—does not relieve us of the responsibility of making distinctions between good history and bad, between modest empiricism and dreamy storytelling.

A third point that follows from the last one: Historians are not paid to worry about the disenchanting effects of their historicism. Bender writes in her conclusion that: “The puzzle of spirituality in America cannot be solved by locating it within a history it refuses. . . . Narrating spirituality in a way that gives it a past and affords it a tradition makes it unrecognizable to those who practice and produce it.” I suppose this is a problem the ethnographer has that the historian has a harder time fathoming. Our subjects, being dead, are in no position to refuse the history we offer; the ethnographer’s subjects, being very much alive, can vociferously object.  But there is something else at stake here than the familiar divide between the archive-digger and the fieldworker. Bender treads delicately in the conclusion. She can hardly forswear historical narrative, especially after her own beautifully historicized renderings of reincarnation and the gospel of relaxation, but, if nudged just a little to be less polite, I think she would say that historical accounts of metaphysical religion and American spirituality have gotten in the way of good sociology: namely, they have obscured the social, institutional, and economic networks that are most important to understanding the production of today’s spiritual practitioners.  Not that Bender pushes this as a stark choice or agonistic battle—nor would I—but it remains an underlying methodological rivalry in her work. One choice, though, we can hardly offer the metaphysicals: Today’s spiritual practitioners have a proximate past whether they find it recognizable or not.

Fourth and finally, I want to return to Bender’s serious doubts that Cambridge’s transcendentalist history matters at all to the spiritual practitioners she meets. As she writes, “the various traces of Cambridge’s spiritual pasts” hold “no thrall” whatsoever among the vast majority of contemporary mystics she encounters. To be sure, that history surfaces from time to time—as shards that occasionally come up like fossils from the ground. “Who is this Blavatsky, a psychologist?” one seeker asks an adept who is trying rather helplessly to explain what the Theosophical Society is. “No,” he says, she is “our founder,” but he really prefers to drift off into the timeless mystical canon: St. John of the Cross and Edgar Cayce, side by side.  Sometimes the practitioners get caught in their own historical evasion by the prying ethnographer. That would include Connie, the Christian Scientist who is hiding Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health behind the catchall Spirituality.com. Pressed by Bender to acknowledge the historical specificity of what she is offering attendees at the Whole Health Expo, Connie relents and actually embraces the more proximate history. “We were the ones,” she says with some justification and understandable satisfaction, “who started all this!”  Occasionally, the American lineages are still more forthrightly embraced. The story told here of Marcia Moore, the Concord yogi, is about as clear as it gets: “Growing up she steeped herself in the transcendentalists. She lived in the libraries where their works were, and in the woods where they drew their inspiration,” her biographer says. Marcia Moore’s story has its own mythologizing fancies, of course, but it also suggests that sometimes whole American skeletons could still come up from the dust. Moore’s self-conscious New England lineage remains the exception in Bender’s book, but it is a reminder that not all metaphysicals prefer fanciful pasts—Oriental, medieval, or ancient—to Yankee tales.

But, should we really expect history to hit us over the head like Moore’s story does?  Like the social forces that the sociologist makes apparent, history, too, is all the more powerful for being an invisible force. It structures and delimits the religious imagination as much as it does any other aspect of culture.

Here’s a closing example to embody that point: Bender and I have the rare distinction of being the only two scholars of American religion to have written extensively on belly dancing—for my part, on the last decade of the nineteenth century; and for hers, on the first decade of the twenty-first.  When I hear, in these pages, Tina tell her story about belly dancing and women’s spirituality, or Julia discuss her awakening to the same vibrational art, I do not need to know if they know anything about the Chicago’s World Fair of 1893, about Anthony Comstock, Little Egypt, Loie Fuller, or Ruth St. Denis. Whatever Oriental or Arabic imaginings they elaborate for this spiritual turn, that more proximate American history is invisibly present.  One does not have Tina’s story or Julia’s story without that history.

My last word is one of appreciation for just how much I relish Bender’s compelling and original book, as well as the opportunity it affords of engaging in some interdisciplinary play between history and sociology.

As my own mind was being massaged with images of Richard Dawkins having his temporal lobes stimulated, an odd notion popped into my head: namely, when it comes to religion, history and culture trump neurology. I quickly noticed that the same neuroscientists who were experimenting on Dawkins, among other more amenable test subjects, were also enfolding American religious history into their neurotheological data. One of the neurologists involved in the Dawkins stunt suggested in an interview, for example, that Ellen G. White, nineteenth-century prophet of the Seventh-day Adventist movement, suffered a childhood head injury that affected her temporal lobes in such a way as to produce her subsequent religious visions.

That example immediately struck me as a curious incursion of history into the laboratory. To be sure, even as an outsider, I was aware that a thriving set of conversations exists on the borders of neuroscience and religion. There are the theological questions, the God-spot questions: can the places of divine-human encounter, or, at least, the places of the felt-experiences of divine-human encounter be scanned and visualized? There are the ethical questions: for example, can the lying brain be mapped, detected, and exposed? Or, can compassionate affects be imaged and reproduced—in effect, is altruism a mental skill that can be trained? There are also, of course, innumerable psychotherapeutic questions; prominent among them is whether prayer and meditation are effective allies in the healing arts and medical sciences. But, here was the prolific visionary, Ellen G. White, suddenly thrust into the speculations of a pediatric neurologist studying temporal lobe epilepsy, all because she had been hit in the face by a rock when she was nine years old. Perhaps there is, indeed, a conversation to be had not only between religion and neuroscience, but also, more specifically, between American religious history and American neuroscience.

By way of proposition and broad outline, I want to suggest three conversational pivots for that kind of discussion.

1) The first is the historical interchange between religion and technology. It is useful, I think, to step aside for a moment from the religion-science nexus and to foreground the religion-technology relationship. The use of MRI brain imaging techniques to study religion displays an exuberant confidence in a new technology’s ability to render the invisible visible, to materialize the spiritual dimensions of human experience, whether as a source of naturalistic explanation or empirical validation. The instrument itself is culturally freighted with metaphysical significance, the power to expose religion as an illusion or, conversely, to manifest its reality. Brain imaging techniques participate in this larger historical framing of technology in those terms. Neurotheology, in other words, is one more species of what we might call techno-theologizing—a phenomenon that has flourished in Western culture, especially since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Take examples from both sides. The magic lantern was widely used by the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century to produce ghost shows, and one of the prevailing morals of such techno-exhibitions was the ease with which the superstitious were duped. The flickering projection of spirits was an emblem of the benighted credulity of the religious imagination. When presented in this light, magic-lantern shows were a kind of performed skepticism—as Ludwig Feuerbach demonstrated. The technology made visible the illusion of the supernatural, the mechanisms of religious misperception.

On the other side of the aisle, technology was regularly seen as a conduit of empirical proof for divine realities. Was not the telegraph, for example, a herald of spiritualist communication? The Society of Psychical Research, on both sides of the Atlantic, was enamored with the notion that the new auditory technologies could well yield spiritual dividends. When the telephone appeared on the scene, some in the SPR threw themselves behind a new contraption called the “psychophone” through which the inventors claimed to be hearing the voices of angels. The psychophone no doubt sounds absurd, but I can’t say that it sounds much more far-fetched than a transcranial magnetic stimulator. Both demonstrate the enduring cultural impulse toward techno-theologizing. However much neuroscientists might want to forswear an interest in the metaphysics of their brain-scanning technology, it is clear that such brain-imaging techniques are inevitably framed by precisely those kinds of religious and cultural debates: is MRI brain imaging finally a technology that reveals absence or one that reveals presence? Is it a mechanism that shows religion to be fully reducible to and determined by biological materiality or is it one that ultimately reveals the God-spot, the hard-wiring of divine-human encounter? Asking those kinds of techno-theological questions has been a recurrent cultural theme since the Enlightenment.

2) The second pivot point is recognizing the way that the nation’s religious history shapes the way the mind has been and continues to be imagined, even in many of the study designs on meditation that emerge among contemporary neuroscientists. As novel as it may sound to be monitoring the brainwaves of Tibetan Buddhist monks in university laboratories, it is certainly not the first time that American psychologists have been drawn to meditation and its salubrious effects. It is in the tradition of Harvard’s William James, pioneering psychologist, psychical researcher, and philosopher of religion, that the current turn to the contemplative mind is best understood. Counter to the popular image of Americans as endlessly enterprising, agitated, and restless—all busy Marthas, no reflective Marys—James discerned a deep mystical cast to the American psyche and pursued that strain with uncommon intellectual devotion. Yet, when it came to what he labeled “methodical meditation,” James saw little of it left among American Christians and turned instead to homegrown practitioners of various mind-over-matter cures. He particularly accented those New Thought metaphysicians who were pushing forward a dialogue with far-flung emissaries of yoga and Buddhist meditation in the wake of the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893.

Among James’s favored practitioners of these newly improvised regimens of meditation was Ralph Waldo Trine, a Boston-based reformer with a knack for inspirational writing. In his classic account The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) James used Trine’s blockbuster, In Tune with the Infinite (1897), as an epitome of the emergent practices of concentration, mental repose, and healthy-mindedness then percolating in New England and elsewhere across the country. Though an unabashed popularizer, Trine was not a light-weight. With an educational pedigree that ran from Knox College to the University of Wisconsin to Johns Hopkins University, he moved easily in Boston’s wider metaphysical circles. In much the same way that current studies promote the clinical applications of meditation, Trine emphasized the healthful benefits that accrued from cultivating a calm yet expectant mind. He had no scanners or electrodes, but he had the same hopes about improving the mental and physical health of Americans through elaborating a universal practice of meditation, one that transcended the particularities of any one religious tradition and represented a kind of essential composite of all faiths. And while Trine did not have the Dalai Lama at hand, as some neuroscientists now do, he did have extended contact with a similarly well-traveled Sinhalese Buddhist monk, Anagarika Dharmapala, with whom he compared notes and devotional habits as he was putting together his own system of meditation for Americans, a practical antidote to American nervousness and the then newly identified disease of neurasthenia.

The real pay-off for Trine, it should also be said, was not established through a calculus of productivity or cheerfulness: would encouraging meditation or other visualization techniques make people more alert and proficient at the office or on the playing field? Would it make them feel happier and less disgruntled? Trine, like James and some current neuroscientists, was finally more interested in saintliness and compassion than helping stressed-out brainworkers relax and concentrate. It is hard not to hear a hint of Richard J. Davidson’s pursuit of altruism in Trine’s contemplative emphasis on the “Spirit of Infinite Love.” And it is hard not to see that the world of William James and Ralph Waldo Trine is alive and well as American investigators wire up Buddhist monks in a search for the powers of the concentrated mind, the mental disciplines of harmony, compassion, and peace that might make the world a marginally kinder, less selfish place. That optimism about human nature—that the mind has deep reservoirs of potential for empathy and altruism—had a lot more backing among religious liberals and progressives in 1900 than it does today. Still, the considerable hopes now invested in meditation suggest that the old Jamesian aspirations continue to flourish, especially among members of the mind-preoccupied knowledge class.

3) The third point is how the broader cultural equation of religion with “spirituality,” with “mystical experience,” and with the “search for meaning,” has shaped the research concerns of neuroscience when it turns its attention to religious questions. At least in the popularized image of the intersections of religion and neuroscience that filter out of the laboratory and into, say, Newsweek, the focus seems inevitably to be on “Tibetan monks lost in meditation” or “Franciscan nuns deep in prayer.” Such images of brain imaging convey an essentialized romantic picture of religion as mystical absorption, as immediate personal experience. Despite the institutional and monastic structures that shape the lives of monks and nuns, under the scan of current cultural assumptions, they might as well all be bearers of what William James called “personal religion pure and simple.” In other words, we have in the current popularization of neuroscientific studies of prayer and meditation a near perfect mirroring of James’s definition of religion as “the experiences of individual men in their solitude.”

It is a stretch to say this, but the very image of the MRI scanner appears as a kind of hermit’s cell, a withdrawal into a narrow cave of isolation and bodily stillness. Would anyone ever expect such technology to generate a picture of the devotee’s commitment to ecclesiastical organizations, social solidarities, sacrificial systems, or gendered hierarchies? While this is a technology that James might well celebrate right along with Abraham Maslow, would it be of any use at all to Durkheim or Mary Douglas or Talal Asad? One of Andrew Newberg’s popular books on religion and brain science, for example, carries in its subtitle the equation of religion with “Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth.” We still need the companion volume on power, violence, and the construction of truth, but those brain-science images of religion are going to be a much harder sell in a culture still hungry for William James’s particular variety of religious experience—the joyous expansions of soul, the momentary gifts of intensity and calm repose, the exalted feelings of presence, and the serenity of meditative well-being. William James, a century later, remains a dazzling writer on religion, but I wouldn’t want to build a science of religion—or, a neuroscience of religion—around his fascinations alone.

Taylor, in this wondrously encyclopedic work, concentrates especially on the British and French cases, though he is deeply aware of the problem of the “American exception” in debates about the rise and triumph of secularism. He admits that “a fully satisfying account of this difference” between Europe and America eludes him, despite this being “in a sense the crucial question facing secularization theory”: “Here I confess that I am making stabs in the dark.” The problem is not merely that Americans remain peculiarly religious with high rates of church membership, but that the statistical trend in American history has largely been the reverse of what secularization theory would have predicted (at least, in terms of Taylor’s secularity 2: the decline of religious belief and affiliation). By most calculations church membership at the time of the American Revolution hovered around a mere 15% of the population, only to climb steadily over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. There is little demographic evidence, in other words, for a decline from Bible commonwealth to post-Christian nation. This means that many historians of American religion see the narrative trajectory as one of Christianization rather than secularization. The prevailing question is not how did the United States become irretrievably secular, but why has the country been so religiously vital?

There are, of course, many ways to re-insert secularization into heart of the American story and one way certainly is to define secularity in terms of Taylor’s secularity 3: that is, a society is secular when religion becomes optional, voluntary, and pluralistic; when religion becomes defined in terms of expressive individualism and authenticity; when religion as communal norms gets trumped by spirituality as privatized alternatives. If those “conditions of belief” constitute secularity, then no doubt the United States is a profoundly secular nation. This is not to question Taylor’s secularity 3 as a useful analytic tool for thinking about the dilemmas of Christian belief amid modern social, intellectual, and political structures, but it is to wonder how far it can take us in elucidating the enigma of American religion.

In addressing the puzzle head on, Taylor examines five explanations for the oddity of American religion (though, as he well recognizes, from a perspective broadened beyond the North Atlantic, Europe is the exception, not the United States). These five are: 1) the repeated impact of the immigrant experience in which religion is used to negotiate ethnic identities amid the pressures of cultural dislocation and assimilation; 2) the greater authority of elites in European societies, including secular intellectuals and freethinking academics; 3) the absence of an ancien régime in the United States, and, with that, weaker forms of anti-clericalism and Enlightenment critique; 4) “the reigning synthesis between nation, morality, and religion” in the United States offers more effective resistance to the destabilizing effects of the cultural revolution of the 1960s—in effect, the ongoing strength of the evangelical Right; and 5) the combined force of religious liberalism and Whitmanesque romanticism in which individual freedom, choice, and expressiveness have come to make up the American gene pool (“their whole religious culture was in some way prepared for the Age of Authenticity”). These five points are clearly much more than stabs in the dark, but number five turns the American case into a supreme example of Taylor’s secularity 3. So, despite the ostensible vitality of religion in the United States, secularism quickly comes back to dominate the scene. On these terms, modern forms of religion will always lose out (at least in the scholarly imagination): why bother attending to such anemic imitations of the real thing—a religion of transcendence and fullness? The secular age is all-consuming.

Mark Twain tells a freakish tale of “Extraordinary Twins,” Luigi and Angelo Capello, “a double-headed human creature with four arms, one body, and a single pair of legs.” It is a story worth recalling as a parable about religion’s fate in a supposedly secular age. These conglomerated twins were terribly divided on matters of faith: Luigi’s tastes ran to Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, pipe tobacco, rum shops, and the Freethinkers’ Society. Angelo’s ran instead to Protestant devotionals, temperance, Methodist meetings, and eventually to Baptist full immersion (a miserably wet day for Luigi). Being inseparably joined to his irreligious brother was a trial to Angelo, who, in despairing moments, wished that “he and his brother might become segregated from each other and be separate individuals, like other men.” Then he shuddered at the thought: “To sleep by himself, to eat by himself, walk by himself—how lonely, how unspeakably lonely.” Troubling it was to be bound together, but Luigi and Angelo required one another. And, so it is, we must pair our narratives of modern secularization with narratives of modern sanctification. To see Luigi’s humanistic alternative as creating the secular conditions of Angelo’s faith would be to mistake the weight of this relational dynamic. Only on such doubled terms will we discern the fullness of “that weird strange thing,” America’s uncanny twins.