Physicians, psychologists, and criminal codes (e.g., Texas state law) largely agree on what constitutes the sexual abuse of children by an adult. It includes, but is not limited to, the sexual touching of any part of the body, clothed or unclothed; penetrative sex, including penetration of the mouth; encouraging a child to engage in sexual activity, including masturbation; intentionally engaging in sexual activity in front of a child; showing children pornography, or using children to create pornography; and encouraging a child to engage in prostitution.

What I want to tackle, immediately, is the fraught relationship between effect and affect in this subject for those of us who seek to interpret it. It is difficult to write or think about sex abuse without being affected by its circulating effects, without feeling that the very practices of academic analysis do something suffocating to its experience. To think about sex abuse in an academic context could suggest that we might wish to think away its awfulness; to write about sex abuse could suggest that we seek to argue away its visceral trauma.

Scholarly practice replies to such worry with bravado, assuming that our studied neutrality will offer fair view to every contributing party. Yet this is the very neutrality that so troubles subjects of our analysis, since it suggests that everyone deserves understanding, regardless of their actions. This is a perspective to which few victims of such violence can accede.

Even if we bracket the voice of such victims in our academic work, we cannot imagine that we have bracketed their call for judgment upon their perpetrators. To be sure, scholars sometimes imagine that a responsible account is an account that withholds judgment. “I just try to explain what happened,” one historian tells me. “I don’t judge what they did.” This is an evasion of responsibility; interpretation is judgment. We cannot imagine that our default to historicism will spare us our job as arbiters. We are always in the story, no matter our attempt to abstract ourselves from it through various modes of scientism, humanist and otherwise. “For even a world equation that contained everything, so that the observer of the system would also be included in the equations, would still assume the existence of a physicist who, as the calculator, would not be an object calculated,” Hans Georg Gadamer writes, concluding, “Each science, as a science, has in advance projected a field of objects such that to know them is to govern them.” To know them is to govern them. This is the struggling work of all scholarship: to acknowledge that its very free enactment by a solo thinker is also a practice of governance with others. How do we do this? How do we do this especially in cases where our subjects have already been governed in abusive ways?

This is not a new challenge in the history of scholarship. Those researchers who spend their time in the archives of genocide, slavery, or war have often offered observations on the strange role they, as scholars, play in their hermeneutics of those events. The decision to pursue sex abuse as a subject for the study of religion is a decision to enter into this murky methodological terrain. To ask, again: How do we do our work?

As a general criminological problem, psychological trauma, and sociological data point, sex abuse has received significant treatment within the social sciences. Yet within the humanities its study has been comparatively anemic. Perhaps because criminal actions seem to emerge from a pathological inhumanity, the humanist is less quick to grapple with the murderer than the murdered. Or perhaps it is that in the realm of the humanities, categories like murderer and perpetrator do not survive our interpretive imperative to understand our subjects in their particularity, to discern the human within and beyond classification. To fail to do so is, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel suggested, “abstract thinking: to see nothing in a murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.” Humanists work against such abstract thinking, and thereby produce short bibliographies on criminal categories. But this cannot mean that humanists refuse to acknowledge criminality. Indeed, the vast literatures on the subaltern and the oppressed suggest that there is an implicit adjudication at work within the humanities that privileges certain parties through the attention of interpretation. That there is no significant humanistic analysis of sex abusers is its own form of passive chastisement.

Over the next several weeks, The Immanent Frame will post remarks from a conference held on the campus of Yale University, “Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion.” That event sought to connect leading scholars in the humanities with the emerging documentary record of the Catholic sex abuse crisis. Although other religious groups have struggled with patterned sexual abuse, and although headlines report abuse in any number of educational and recreational organizations, it is the Roman Catholic Church that has experienced the greatest public scrutiny for this crime. Government investigations and tort litigation have extracted hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from diocesan and religious order archives describing abuse and its covert management within the Church. This conference, and these posts, seek to begin an interpretation of sex abuse as a subject for students of religion.

In 2004, John Jay College released a study of priest molestation that was commissioned and funded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), to which all the U.S. bishops belong. According to the resulting report, 4,392 priests have been accused of molestation in the four decades covered by the study. In the last ten years (except 2003), annual USCCB updates through the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) have brought the U.S. bishops’ total number of priests to 6,115, or 5.6% of the priests who worked during that time between 1950 and 2011. The same studies have counted 16,324 victims and have acknowledged that actual priest and victim counts are higher. The final tally of victims can only ever be a guess, although activist groups point out that sexual abuse is rarely a singular crime; most abusers repeated their behavior with multiple victims, often in multiple parish locations. Sociologist Fr. Andrew Greeley estimated in 1993 that the victim population might be “well in excess of 100,000.”

Our goal was to explore the specifically Catholic cultural, theological, moral, even ontological, contexts within which this abuse took place, and then to consider the questions and issues this raises more broadly for the study of religion. To do this, we turned to an online archive developed by BishopAccountability.org, an organization that seeks to gather and preserve the archives emerging as a result of the sex abuse revelations in the Roman Catholic Church. Those archives pertain to sexual abuse and to many other topics of interest, from episcopal relations with Vatican congregations, to the implementation of Vatican II reforms and work with ethnic minorities in urban dioceses. Founded by Terence McKiernan, BishopAccountability.org is a Massachusetts non-profit corporation with approximately 125,000 pages of material posted online (and an archive of over 500,000 pages of material in their hardcopy library). BishopAccountability.org aims to facilitate the accountability of the U.S. bishops for their role in the abuse crisis, as they kept accused priests in ministry, failed to report abuse allegations to the authorities, and transferred accused priests to new parishes. To that end, BishopAccountability.org collects every conceivable document pertaining to sexual abuse in the Catholic church, including diocesan, religious order, and investigative files, grand jury reports, survivors’ accounts, and a wide variety of ecclesiastical documents, reports on church settlements, and journalistic accounts of the crisis. (Those interested in a survey of the kinds of materials available will profit from this introduction to their archives.) As their web site explains: “We document the debates about root causes and remedies, because important information has surfaced during those debates. We take no position on the root causes, and we do not advocate particular remedies. If the facts are fully known, the causes and remedies will become clear.”

If BishopAccountability.org defers the question of root causes, we begin with such interest foremost in our minds. Why did sex abuse occur? How did it occur? Why was it managed as it was by ecclesiastical authorities? What sacramental thinking and theological rhetoric has circulated during its duration? For example, how did Catholic understandings of the child and of the priest, or the distinctive Catholic construction of human sexuality—in particular the requirement of celibacy for leadership and prohibition of masturbation—contribute to the perpetuation of abuse? What sort of sexual politics, gender norms, cultural logic, and social facts contributed to the unmitigated persistence and slow diagnosis of abuse? And how does the very way we interpret and define abuse relate to its experience and practice?

Focused on bringing bishops to account and survivors to justice, BishopAccountability.org supplies an archive in service to the democratic, judicial, and therapeutic imperatives of the modern West. But archives do not interpret themselves. And this archive documents the very challenges facing the fulfillment of its activist ambition; BishopAccountability.org articulates democratic possibility while also recording in its files the various strategies and symptoms of democratic perversion.

Approaching the situation for this story requires acknowledging that certain interpretive shibboleths will be more problematic than assistive in our attempt to read it. Rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as documents of the clash between tradition and modernity; rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as profiles in criminality; and rather than only consider the sex abuse cases as tragedies from which individuals need justice, healing, and redemption, we also ask how the sex abuse cases are also cases of religion.

While it seems reasonable to imagine the celebration of the Mass or the substance of seminary education as subjects of analysis for the academic study of religion, turning to sexual abuse is a more awkward maneuver to make. However, scholarship pursuing popular religious experience offers some vocabulary to begin such a venture. “The study of lived religion focuses most intensely on places where people are wounded or broken, amid disruptions in relationships, because it is in these broken places that religious media become most exigent,” Robert Orsi has written. “It is in such hot cultural moments—at the edges of life, in times of social upheaval, confusion, or transition, when old orders give way and what is ahead remains unclear—that we see what matters most in a religious world.” Orsi invites us to observe the simultaneity of religious life and religious studies, how the scholar’s role to interpret what matters becomes especially important precisely when it seems that the system collapses in its effort to maintain what matters.

These “hot cultural moments” are rarely the ones accompanied by photographers’ flashbulbs or press releases. After reviewing the documentary record, the story of Catholic sex abuse that emerges is one of stunning intensity and intimacy. This was a series of crimes committed in quiet auspices, in recreational and domestic spaces, in vestries, campgrounds, and children’s bedrooms. This was a series of relationships that were, simultaneously, abusive and interdependent, public and private, possessive and devotional. Sexual abuse between priest and parishioner is, therefore, a form of lived religion. This is not only because religious contexts offer hierarchical social situations conducive to abuse, but also because abuse is, in this documentary record, shown to be an articulation of Catholic ecclesiastical authority, Catholic theological investment, and Catholic sociological change.

The religious aspect of this Catholic crisis only amplifies the ritual ecology of sexual abuse as a generalizable configuration. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry offers this description of the web of emotions that occurs in sexually abusive relationships:

The child of five or older who knows and cares for the abuser becomes trapped between affection or loyalty for the person, and the sense that the sexual activities are terribly wrong. If the child tries to break away from the sexual relationship, the abuser may threaten the child with violence or loss of love. When sexual abuse occurs within the family, the child may fear the anger, jealousy or shame of other family members, or be afraid the family will break up if the secret is told.

Within the documentary materials available, this standardized profile of abuse is rendered relentlessly specific to Catholicism. Sexual abuse is a practice within an existent relational dynamic, one that simultaneously transforms and calcifies the hierarchies and codes that determined the original affiliation. The psychiatric vocabulary above cannot begin to access the social economy and moral stakes of abuse within communities determined by parishes and families determined in part by ecclesiastical law. “Religion” as a category has no meaning if it is merely saved to designate ideal practice; it is a term that summarizes failure and fulfillment of prescribed relations. The essays in this series begin to access these peculiar relational enclaves of religious ideation and transgressing ritual.

No one is an expert yet on these materials. The scholars who will contribute to this series offer a wide range of perspectives to begin the necessarily long analysis of this phenomenon. To talk about sex abuse requires possessing as much hermeneutic nuance as humanly possible, since there is no escape hatch from its traumas for its survivors and the accused; for the perpetrators and the witnesses; for the children and their parents, their church and their broader communities. This is slow work. None of it will translate easily to a CNN crawl or abbreviated op-ed. But the answers supplied possess no less urgency because they are the result of careful close reading or hesitant hypothesis. Indeed, as I hope you’ll find, perhaps they are even more urgent, because they are more bracingly true, including as they do the ambiguity, contradiction, and self-deception inevitable in human action, yet often absent from our sloganeering about justice and consumption of scandal. While our conclusions are preliminary, our clamor for more work in this vein is absolute. There will be no true healing, no true reconciliation, and no true justice, absent the practice of humane interpretation.

Fortunately for her readers, scholarly and not, Bender does not make much of such dichotomous talk.  She offers instead the elegant reply of the dexterous cultural observer.  Hers is neither Prothero’s cultural interventionism nor Smith’s cultural healing.  Bender does not decide for us if her subjects are rational, authentic, well-sourced, or religious.  She simply observes, and observes, and observes.  This wouldn’t be so remarkable, or so readable, if it weren’t for the historiography that precedes her—a historiography of which Bender is acutely aware, as demonstrated in the categorical genealogies which appear in her every chapter.  The folks of The New Metaphysicals are those who previously might have been marked with categories like New Ager or Neopagan or seeker, collectives which have formed a repeatedly collaborative classificatory partnership, tying together loose affiliations of membership and individual skill to encompass proponents and practitioners of channeling, psychic healing, past-life regression, and holistic health.  In any textbook, survey, or monograph about these interviewees, the words ‘variety’ and ‘inconsistency’ are applied as scholars seek to use them as wacky outliers to denominationalism as well as demographic results of religion’s reply to, engagement with, and production of science, immigration, counterculture, and secularism.  These metaphysical believers have had a powerful discursive use-value in the history of religions, and it is through this manipulative precedent that Bender’s subject gains its valence despite its minority appearance.  Whatever these people are, they have been important to knowing exactly what religion is.

Those who have previously sought to categorize the average spiritual wanderer have found themselves stumbling for anchor within a set of formations seemingly resistant to any mean.  How could any scholar catalog the interviewee who tells Bender, “I’m a yogi, and an artist, and a singer and a writer, and a mystic—and who knows what else I might be becoming?” Those sociologists who have tried to classify this morphing subject may find some intentional communities, some patterns in workshop attendance, some signal texts, and some ritual practices (visualization, astrology, meditation, Reiki) that suggest a New Age outlook, a search for connectivity to the divine inner self through techniques earned and learned and bought from experts (articulated in texts, in classes, in small-group gatherings, and in late nights spent staring at the stars).  But at the end of the analytic day, it is the mess of these cultures that has maddened nearly every person who has stood before it.  If anyone can do and be and create anything at all and call it their spirit, then is that any real religion at all?  More privately worrisome: Is that any real sense at all?

For Bender’s subjects, this question is not to be avoided.  It is, always and ever, their question, too.  As Tina remarked:

“I don’t know. Is it the spirit of this energy, is it the human way that we choose to interpret it, is it the only way? Is it our own mental construct for the experience of energy moving in our body, or is it some spirit that is larger than our own mental construct? It’s kind of the old question with any religion. You know, is Christ a separate being from us, or separate from our myth, or is it something there that comes into us, or is it us, you know? Or is it our imagination?”

There was another pause before she added, “And where do you make that distinction? I don’t know—I don’t know.”

Historians of American religion have largely disposed of making too many distinctions, seeking to allow Tina and her brethren as much of their own confusion as possible without trying to resolve it categorically. And so, scholars of American religion have narratively situated the New Age seeker within a broader shift from denominational identity to self identity, from Presbyterianism to Sheilaism.  This world of scholarly analysis seeks less to point to structural relations between channeling and shape-note singing as much as to explain the epistemological logic of channeling within a modernity supposedly well past the Bay Psalm book.  Such analytic labor repeatedly pursues definitions of the spiritual seeker, perhaps best articulated by Leigh Schmidt in Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, where he argues that there are six practical and interpretive aspects emphasized by the seeker: mysticism, solitude, transcendence, cosmopolitanism, social conscience, and creativity.  The best work of spirituality historicism thus supplies a way to explicate the emergence of seeker spirituality alongside the triumph of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, to bring out the ways that spirituality (over and above Weber’s disciplining Protestantism) softened the edges of modern industrialization and incorporation, setting the factory laborers by a peaceful pond where they might remember social reform, divine immanence, and universal brotherhood.  Spirituality is hence conjured as the conscience of an unconscionably cruel industrial process, as the California animist waging spiritual warfare against the California environmental crisis.

Into this perceived plurality of liberal aspiration and incoherent practice wades Bender, bringing to bear her significant ethnographic skill and classificatory acumen to construct a profile of American believers ensconced in the Brahmin religious brasserie of eastern Massachusetts.  Her driving question is deceptively simple: What, if anything, does it mean for people to be “spiritual not religious”?  The answer, again and again, is provided through how it means for these practitioners to be, believe, practice, experience, and participate in the discursive, material, memorial, and institutional forms of spirituality.  This is a book that accounts for spirituality’s production and reproduction neither through the idealization of the liberal individual nor through the discovery of the social establishment of spirituality.  Rather, Bender demonstrates that the mystification of religious experience by social scientists has meant that the structural and narrative “reality of religion remains external to the human sciences.”  To bring this ‘reality’ to the fore, Bender acutely pursues the modes and structures of conveyance, of belonging, and of memory.  She tracks how congregational formats appear within these communities; how authority is constituted and criticized discursively; how bodies are instantiated to be denied; how space is configured and resoundingly co-opted for multiple new mathematical and fantastical possibilities.  The chapter on “Becoming Mystics” carefully examines the ways in which the individual develops a respectable profile within an ad hoc atmosphere of accreditation.  Bender explains how first-person narrative erases earlier experience and foreknowledge, replacing it with a proposition of experience known only through effects: “Not only does this protect the experience from certain kinds of reductive interpretation, it also works to place those who listen within an experiential-discursive milieu where they might come likewise to experience through listening to these accounts.”

Such examples reminded me persistently, not of the peculiarity of these subjects, but of their resonances with the very imagination cataloged in Bender’s subtitle.  To be sure, the historiography testifies to the ways these subjects and their communities have been contrasted by scholars and by other believers as intentionally, willfully different.  These Boston wanderers could therefore be seen as, say, overly individuated when contrasted with Kansas Catholics, or as elitist by the social mores of Minnesota Lutherans, or as white shaman mountebanks to some New Mexico Pueblo, or as colonial larcenists by some San Diego Hindus. Yet through her supple analytic work, Bender proposes something more devastating (by my rendering, not hers) to the demography of American religion.  She suggests that there are, possibly, structural insistences between what these Cambridge characters do and what those Catholics, Lutherans, Pueblo, and Hindus do.  In other words, her discernment—outlined at the level of the chapter, in the case of every interview, and in her every site description—is that there is, absolutely, something pervasively entangled at work in the spirituality of these (by her rendering, and mine) Americans.  This is not because spirituality itself is a corporate object, made ubiquitous for a slavish public hungry for its salve.  Rather, it is because the discursive fact of spirituality is that it has always been defined by and through its combinatory capacity, not in its discriminations.  If Bender does not prove that this is, in fact, the American religious imagination, then she has not done her work.

But I believe she has.  Bender’s lively description of the Boston Whole Health Expo presses us into the crevices of its various offerings, the spiritual hodgepodge, dreamy idealism, and consumerist genius of this gathering.  This is not, then, a singular event, but an event possessed by the resonance of remembered, lived, and invented events preceding its odd twenty-first century incarnation.  It seems difficult for me to find an event in American religious history that does not, like it, share a staggering multiplicity of identities, including those of ritual event, economic fact, intellectual awakening, professional association, social entertainment, theological intervention, and therapeutic possibility.  The condemnatory valence of such an observation—condemnatory in and through the social science classifications Bender reviews to refine—is not nearly as antagonistic to spirituality as it is integral to its propagation.  These are subjects—like, it seems to me, most human subjects—vibrantly, madly, quirkily holding on to their multiplicity in ways familiar, repeated, and not so very multiple at all.  They are wild in an imagination that is nearly predictable in its wildness.

At the end, The New Metaphysicals presses its readers to consider what, exactly, divides Bender’s subjects (who, as she writes, “come to know their energetic bodies through practice”) from those of R. Marie Griffith’s Born Again Bodies; or what separates them (reading and writing the books of others to discern the stories of themselves) from Lynn Neal’s romance-reading evangelical book clubs in her Romancing God; or what makes Doug, a subject of Bender’s research, so different (in his dream for a “spiritually based technology”) from those seekers recounted in Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life; or how are the mystical families of Bender’s reincarnating subjects contrasted with those heavenly genealogies of the Latter-day Saints.  The reader of this immensely thoughtful monograph wants, in the end, not to test the validity of Bender’s postulated American religious imagination, but to think deeper, with her and her ethnographic material, about an even more robust description of that powerful ascription.

If you want to be a New Atheist, first and foremost, you need to possess an unrelenting desire to help. The desire may seem at times cruel, but you have to start focusing on a higher good: the goal here is to get the cannibals to put down their wafer and wine glass. It’s not for your wellness, but for the good of mankind. As Georgetown University professor John Haught wrote in his diagnosis of the New Atheists, “To know with such certitude that religion is evil, one must first have already surrendered one’s heart and mind to what is unconditionally good.” The New Atheists may wrap themselves in torn one-liners and haggard scientism, but beneath their cynical swaddle there lies a charming Perfectionism. Charming insofar as it is usually in the body of admittedly sinning and struggling men—if you want to be a New Atheist, you’re going to be a man—so the Perfectionist tendencies will be transporting you from a particularly devilish here to a right-minded necessary there. “Religion must die,” Maher argues, “for mankind to live.” Their descriptions of religion may be flat-footed, but it’s all for an endgame that surpasses their previous personal struggles. They are not converting you to their model lives (every New Atheist will happily tell you of wayward days with hookers or Hezekiah), nor to their model educations (every New Atheist parlays a populist revolution). Rather, they are converting you—as swiftly as possible, as dramatically as possible—to their ontology of the now. Apocalypse is coming, and although the New Atheists name the source and form of this apocalypse differently, if you want to be a New Atheist, you had better pull on your Oneida pants and start shoveling in an Adventist diet, because these are some millennial folk. “The irony of religion,” Maher remarks at the end of Religulous, “is because of its power to divert man to destructive forces the world actually could come to an end.”

Like millennial believers everywhere, New Atheists don’t possess much interest in the historicity of their promises and prophesies. You won’t see New Atheists entering the atheist historical fray, positing, for instance, whether the tradition to which they are contributors began in ancient Greece or the eighteenth-century. Although atheist materials have multiplied in recent years, key debates in its historiography remain unsettled since its history is, save for some critical exceptions, relatively unstudied. Was the first atheist work Baron d’Holbach’s The System of Nature, or was it Lucretius’s De rerum natura, written the first century before the Common Era? Does atheism require the early modern classificatory tiptoes of the eighteenth-century, or can we label it whenever and wherever someone questions the location of the divine relative to man, and suggests maybe a doubting relationship is better than a devoted one? For the purposes of ongoing scholarship (not only on the atheist, but also on the related subjects of the secular and the invention of religion) let us bracket the necessary complexities of that archival conversation and say that whatever came before in the annals of atheism, in the last ten years the stance has pullulated. Due, in no small part, to the oddity of its prominence, this stance has been quickly cauterized under a categorical collective.

To gather anyone under any label—here, the New Atheist—is a violent turn, forcing coherence into a thinker’s resolutely individuating ways. And there are real differences among the New Atheists, since among them we count a physicist, an evolutionary biologist, a pundit, a graduate student in neuroscience, and a philosopher, each geographically and institutionally far flung. Their formal reception underlines the perceived and real differences of content in their productions. I think it is safe to say that there is a reason Richard Dawkins received the attentions of Terry Eagleton and Marilynne Robinson while Sam Harris did not, and there is a reason that Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon has received some reviews in academic journals, whereas nary a one has taken up Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. This is not to suggest a divide between acceptably geeky texts and popularizing, pandering ones; rather, it is to emphasize that these texts have been written by a set of observers with an array of licensure and accreditation commensurate, then, to the postulated audiences of their writing and the methodologies of their proofs. To dispense henceforth with any subtlety on that matter is not to dispense with subtlety—in the end, the differences among New Atheists are as intriguing as those among the fundamentalist dissenters in early-twentieth century America. But we’re dealing with a product that seeks to entertain and not equivocate, so let’s release our stuffy differentiations and join in the collapsing fun.

If you want to be a New Atheist, you are worried a lot. You are worried about the Bible and the Koran, about Talibans and new Inquisitions, about Jerry Falwell and, even more insidiously, Mother Teresa. You’re worried about the candy-covered comforts of hegemony dressed as salvation and you’re worried about mystical communion alone on a countryside ramble. You are worried about belief and practice and leadership and laity. “From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity,” a New Yorker review of Hitchens explained, and “those who would apologize for any of its forms […] are helping to sustain the whole.” But the form that worries the New Atheists most isn’t the makings of religion, but what it in turn makes. If you want to be a New Atheist, you have to be worried about the progeny. Like antebellum Protestants staring at the high walls of a hilltop convent school or homophobes advocating Prop 8, your worry is that Those People Have Your Children. Textbooks and curriculum, prayer circles and promise rings: the problem is less that adults adhere to such idiocy, but that they abduct our most precious natural resource, and then shove it back into the world reprogrammed. The problem is that we’ve abdicated our Progressive promises to fuse ethics and public education, allowing a certain pluralism to seep into our child-rearing and pedagogical philosophies. Difference is for hippies, the New Atheists say; what we need now is some sensible positivism. Don’t worry about capitalism—it is. Don’t worry about nationalism or science—they will be. These totalizing discourses contribute to the New Atheist’s dream of a reasonable public sphere with ordered laboratory tactics demarcating its every policy move. If unimpeded, science and capitalism work with predictable clarity and world-resolving peace, the New Atheists say; if unimpeded, religion elects morons to the presidency. As with homophobia and nativism, New Atheist antagonism to the religious is framed positively as a protective maneuver toward the little lost lambs, the children and citizens who haven’t had the time or money to think. “Being without faith,” Maher offers in a rare moment of reflexivity, “is a luxury of people fortunate enough to have a fortunate life.” The New Atheists transpose their fortune onto you: you, too, can be freer than you are, if only you’ll relinquish the belief that restraint does you any material good.

Not every New Atheist is a libertarian, but left to their own devices the whole lot would happily remove as many non-S&M ties that bind as possible. Dividing between what they know, and what they know nobody can know, the New Atheists argue that their new ideologies of truth might be more benign than theological ones, that the loss of religious faith in the modern period is a good thing, that the Holocaust is a sign that everything after has to be checked and checked again by doubters rather than believers. “I sell uncertainty,” Maher explains, cleanly. “I preach the gospel of I don’t know.” The good news of his knowing not to know—not to know, that is, despite his knowing of what it is to know—includes a patterned set of replies to the religious by the New Atheists. First, the compassionate reply: “It’s only natural.” Second, the materialist revelation: “It’s manmade.” And third, the medical intervention: “You’re sick from it.” If you want to be a New Atheist, you begin your reading of the religious with an expansively evolutionary sympathy. Of course you’re religious, they remark, it’s been around forever, and it seems nearly biological in its inevitability. Noting the persistence of beliefs makes you seem game, and historical—two things that will win you points from those who suspect you’re just a rabble rouser. You, the New Atheist, should nod with understanding. It is, after all, a very convincing mode, a restful spot on the developmental chart, like the bad posture of Homo neanderthalensis. Who would want to sit up straight when slouching is so much more, well, natural?

At some point you have to leave the Bronze Age, the New Atheists press, and realize that every slouch is caressed by something invented by other men to cradle you into political and personal submission. Remember: the manmade is manipulation. It tugs at your primal fears, and boxes you in like bike helmets, seat belts, and safety locks. We may, as David Hume long ago diagnosed, have a natural tendency to be bewitched, but such “solace,” Maher explains, “comes at a terrible cost.” Stand up, and be a man. Let go of manmade things, and relinquish the psychopathology that restricts you. What is religion? The New Atheists reply, with clarion diagnostic consistency: Religion is something that sells you something invisible so you may feel that which you cannot find elsewhere. It is something for which there is insufficient evidence. It is something people do because they have always done it, not because they know how to think about it. Religion is irrational, it is emotional, and it is instinctual. Religion is entrapment (the New Atheists say, explicitly). Religion enslaves you with its wiles, then forgets to remove the handcuffs. It is a mountebank fortune teller reading entrails, not a trustworthy captain consulting his compass. It massages and preys and toys and plays and screws you over, time and again, with a promise it won’t keep because of its irrationality and its whimsy. Religion is, by the definition of these New Atheists, a know-at-all with no knowledge. It makes “a virtue out of not thinking.” After reading a lot of New Atheist screeds on the subject, religion seems to be a lot like everything these virile pundits want most not to be. It sounds, actually, a lot like a girl.  And while no New Atheist would deny the possibility of female rationality, they would deny that anyone religious could evade emasculation before religion’s mountebank authorities and its invented gods.

Religion as effeminacy is nothing new. Nor indeed is the accusation that religion is socially sanctioned lunacy. Treating it as a neurological disorder, however, sets the New Atheists within a long tradition of critical misogyny. Under the guise of protecting your children, in the effort to best serve your sweet flock of idiots, if you want to be a New Atheist you have reclaimed a New Virility to counter your post-industrial masculine alienation.  This minstrel virility plays out in demonstrations of protective strength, plowing away at the big two nemeses (Christianity and Islam) in the interest of protecting the little guy. It is also exhibited in grand tours of scientific proof, or plodding expulsions of religious duplicity.  In The End of Faith, Sam Harris sets up a demolition cruise to contest headlining religious artifacts in some sort of obstacle course for logic: the Ten Commandments, creationism and intelligent design, anti-abortion stances, opposition to HPV vaccines, biblical prophesies, and the problem of theodicy. Harris and the other New Atheists establish situations to counter as if to build their own sense of strength. They design tests for which they made the questions and the answers. This is perhaps why Maher’s visit to the Institute for Science and Halacha inspires such wincing. It’s not exactly cheating, but it’s also not exactly fair. Hyperbolizing their efforts to “outsmart God,” Maher sets himself up as the only one seeing the irony. But, like noting that religions are inconsistent with their scriptures, or that money is made from a televangelist’s DVD, the debunker ends up coming off less knowing than megalomaniacal. “You’d think if you had the power to raise the dead, you’d have the power to jump a fence,” Maher remarks. If you want to be a New Atheist, you have to believe that there is no such thing as an easy mark, just an available one.

The fight for satisfying victory may have historical sources. Just as evangelicals co-opted the talk of war, New Atheists wrest it back. “In the bloom of resurgent Christianity,” James Turner summarizes, “these aging doubts sprouted with new vigor.” This is our New World Order, they propose, and you girly believers cannot have it. The contrasts between the New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Mark Lilla, and Victor Stenger) and the familiar Old Atheists (Robert Green Ingersoll, H.L. Mencken, Samuel Porter Putnam, Mark Twain, and Benjamin Franklin Underwood) are many, but in one thing they are united. Those Lyceum grandstanders practiced a similar parlance of entertainment and ruthless reasonableness in post-apocalyptic shutters of violence. In the wake of 9/11 (and the Civil War), atheism emerges in part to salve and armor emasculated Reason. If seventeenth and eighteenth century atheists were, in part, responding to revisions of and rebuttals to theological and ecclesiastical portraits of g/God, then nineteenth and twenty-first century incarnations responded to evangelical assertiveness. As James Turner has pointed out, evangelical culture in the nineteenth century played a critical role to provoking the development of a fulmination of unbelief. Robert Green Ingersoll described his late-nineteenth century moment as an “age of investigation, of discovery and thought,” in which the mere appearance of “science” would destroy “the dogmas that misled the mind and waste the energies of man.” But it was not so—religion continued. The “Golden Age of Freethought” debunkers relied upon the promises of Biblical criticism, Comtean positivism, and Progressive social planning to map their new worlds. If you want to be a New Atheist, you have to live in a world where those prophesies of demolished dogmas never came true, and when the evangelicals are still, to your shocked disbelief, still here.

And so, you do what every believer has ever done: you produce. In the nineteenth century, atheists and freethinkers produced grassroots newspapers to provoke a movement: The American Nonconformist, The Freethought Ideal, Freethinker’s Magazine, and The Truth Seeker among scores of others. Publishing presses (like Truth Seeker Company, Freidenker Publishing Company, J.P. Mendum, and Peter Eckler Company) were incorporated and associations were begun. Rarely, however, were such organizational collectives engendered outside of theatrical crowds. The American Humanist Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, the Atheist Alliance, American Atheists, American Secular Union, and National Liberal League never succeeded in drawing sizable membership rolls. If you want to be a New Atheist, you’ve given up on the development of a social movement. Instead, what you’re seeking is to sell a product that convinces your buyers of a substitution for their invisible products. If you are a New Atheist, you want your readers to buy you. In 2007, articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal breathlessly accounted for the New Atheism’s profitability. As Maher advocates repeatedly for what Jesus would and would not approve, as he decides that Puerto Rico would be an unlikely place for the Second Coming, what he really wants is for his voice to inspire your own to be like his. “You do not possess mental powers that I do not,” Maher explains. The worst part about Religulous—the worst part about being a New Atheist—isn’t, in the end, that you are sexist or simple or a little light on the science. The worst part is that if you want to be a New Atheist, you most likely will not be very winning. Would that Maher had convinced us in our comparative tour to consider the beliefs that sustain us and him in our smirks as much as those which prostrate us before false idols and Puerto Rican messiahs.  Would that he had shown us not only why they believe as they do, but how we come to laugh as we do.  “I don’t find this Jew funny,” the man in the mosque rants. “I know comedy. He’s never made me laugh and his show sucks.”  Wondering why myth works, or how scripture saves, seems less funny than desperate.  Would that Maher had sought to answer not merely why faith survives but also how humor functions, and why the man ever thought it would predictably emerge from this Jew.  Between his heckler’s ethnic expectations and Maher’s juvenile bigotry lies not only the territory of religious studies, but also the fodder for a higher form of incisive criticism and tragic hilarity.

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“I think Oprah is John the Baptist, leading the way for Obama to win.”
Iowa caucus voter

First, you need a name.  Not just any name.  A weird name: a Biblical misspelling, maybe, or an invocation of some distant land.  No matter what: the name needs an O.  The O will come in handy when you need to summon a common sphere, encourage chanting, or design a gentle logo.  Never deny the utility of its replication, never avoid its allusion, and never miss a moment for its branding.  An O is a space anyone can fill with anything.

Second, you need a life.  Not just any life.  A life that is ready to be a story, prepared for metaphor, assembled in advance by memoir, by professional mode, or by fictional expectation.  If Aaron Sorkin or Alice Walker is not available for its incantation, you must be prepared to tell your story yourself again and again, mentioning its familiar bits like tired ice-breakers to loosen the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, and the closet racists.  It helps if you can redistribute your tale by media cultures, through websites, television specials, and periodicals.  The more you say it, the more it will become the new normal.  Advertise your chronological or genealogical messiness: the hardscrabble youth, the absent parent, the non-nuclear family, the experiments with drugs, the cultural patois that produced your singular self.  Tell the story like it is utterly improbable that it happened, even as you knew, you knew from the beginning, that you were destined.  Your small, sweeping, rural, urban, abusive, tender, confusing, and familiar tale of ascent is what they have been waiting to hear.  The American Dream is no conjure.  It is you.

Third, you will need a crew.  Not many people, just enough to create a familiar circle of stand-up, saucy influences.  A truth-telling African American female intimate is a must.  So is a tall, experienced white man.  Whereas the white guy can be crass, even obnoxious, the woman must learn when to be silent, to relax her hair, and to look fantastic, always.  Keeping great people nearby is important, because you will often feel alone.  Being alone is strange, since it is your burden to be that which nobody can dislike, which everyone wants to be near.  Rick Warren and Gene Robinson must feel comfortable next to you.  Starlets and statesmen must respect you.  Bill Cosby must like you.  White women need to feel safe with you.  Homosexuals must love you, even as you sometimes co-opt their affections and ignore their causes.  Resist the temptation to call old friends who may infect with toxic associations.  Celebrate mothers but steer clear of feminists.  Mourn the loss of mid-century America even if it was the America that segregated you.  Wax nostalgic about a family life you never had, endorse the nuclear your biography belies.  Eschew any race reification, but embrace black institutions early.  Their loyalty will supersede your betrayals.  Connect personally with Africa.  Connect with Peoria.  Connect with the Bronx.  Vacation on the Pacific Rim.  But live in Chicago.  Be Chicago.  Attend Jeremiah Wright’s church.  Use the music of U2 and Stevie Wonder, and any high-spirited progressive-friendly country you can find.  Get a dog.

Fourth, you will need a style.  This manner will help you endure some hard knocks.  Inevitably, some people will call you the Antichrist.  Others will call you a sellout.  Some will call you a cult leader.  Take these assaults with nonchalance.  Make criticism about you seem petty, cynical, even bigoted.  Through it all, master the encompassing hold, the sense that you are accessible to everyone.  Yet retain an incommensurable mystery.   Keep people guessing.  Does s/he mean it?  What does s/he really believe?  Some will regard this as an admirable capaciousness, while others will see it as a shallow equanimity.  No matter: you will counter those claims with discipline, with consistency, with extraordinary prescience.  You will confound expectations constantly.  Your mistakes will be translated as incidentally brilliant.  You will possess a preternatural ability to give people what they want, to know what they need, to sell what they will buy.  Prepare yourself for this.  You have to get over any anxieties about your own assimilation, incorporation, and amalgamation.  Be the commodity.  Put your O everywhere.  Your iconography is how you brace against the disappointments of your humanity.

Fifth, you will need to be ambivalent.  You have always been neither here nor there, neither us nor them, and neither of or outside.  You have always been able to see from many perspectives, to appeal to many sorts of people, to believe many different things, even as you are fiercely moral, upstanding, near pious.  You are, as everyone knows, a Protestant.  But you dabble in everything, shying not away from the Koran or kabbalah, Jewish professors or Eastern spiritual advisers.  You will entertain anything that might embolden your O.  You are the ambiguity of your epoch, the middle that makes the mass, the crossroads of a country that excited your youth, raped your ancestral continent, and claps now for your children.  You are a global distribution suffused with spiritual truth.  You are motivated with missionary zeal to convert everyone, unrelentingly, to change.  You make them believe their best lives are yet to come.  You make it impossible to look away, to hate, to dissent, or to change the channel.  You make us feel good, finally.  You are our redemption.  You are our favorite smile. And you are our satisfaction at the possibility of a secular that made it all so.

The commentary surrounding Governor Sarah Palin’s creationism smacks of the same sort of pubescent snort. Indeed, the most cited Palin creationist factoid is a farce, an embarrassment to those who want to protect the methodological scrutiny of science. “God made dinosaurs 4,000 years ago as ultimately flawed creatures, lizards of Satan,” wrote one Internet blogger, satirizing Palin’s imagined fundamentalism. Not long after, many of America’s brightest cultural critics (and, of course, Matt Damon) began using the unverified “dinosaurs” motif as a comic embellishment. This is despite the fact that Palin had said little about creationism, or dinosaurs, other than what reporters borrowed from a 2006 Anchorage Daily News article. In that article, Palin presented a flagrantly nonpartisan position toward the subject. “My dad did talk a lot about his theories of evolution,” she said. “He would show us fossils and say, ‘How old do you think these are?’” When asked for her personal views on evolution, Palin said, “I believe we have a creator.” According to Alaskan reporter Tom Kizzia, Palin would not say whether her belief also allowed her to accept the theory of evolution as fact, saying instead that she thought both creationism and evolution should be taught in school. “Teach both,” she said in a televised debate. “You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

This pose of pedagogical equitability is, of course, a recognizable rally to those in the creation-science movement. But with such limited information, such inadequate first-person testimonial, we can say little, as analysts and observers, about the precise nature of Palin’s Christian faith and correlating evolutionary imagination. “I’m not going to pretend,” continued Palin in 2006, “I know how all this came to be.” Such relatable humility before divinity has been Palin’s main theological articulation thus far. That, plus her taste for martial metaphor, is all the RNC has allowed her to exhibit. Otherwise, she is mere suppositional window dressing, the zealot without yet ostensible zealotry.

But we’ll go after the subject anyway, deriving from scratchy YouTube clips complex preacher postulates and theological profiles. We do this because that’s what we do, squeezing from a single strawberry the dream of a full jar of blatherskite jam. For many academics, this is the precise reason participation in public intellectual work is so problematic, since it tugs one into that problematic process of pressing against nothing (shards of observation in the Anchorage Daily News, for example) for the deadline of something (anything, any thing at all). Yet the appearance of popular epistemologies in the public sphere tugs at academic attention, offering as they do moments of diluted intellectual commentary. To take another example: springtime observers of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign may recall the controversy surrounding his pastor and, in particular, the sense that beneath the veneer of genial Obama lay the raging heart of an Afrocentrist. This impression derived largely from secondhand tirades by Jeremiah Wright, former Senior Pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) in Chicago. Jeremiah Wright’s recorded race pride reintroduced Afrocentric discourse into the heart of the presidential contest, begging voters to wonder wildly about an epistemological system that seemed (from media representation) at best comically archaic and, at worst, violently provocative. As historians have explained, Afrocentrism is a continuous thread within African American popular and academic histories, with origins in the eighteenth century continuing well into the twenty-first, and including proponents from Olaudah Equiano to Cheikh Anta Diop, George Washington Williams to Asa Hilliard. What binds this long chain of (sometimes) folk narrative and (sometimes) careful historicizing is a commitment to reply, insistently, to Eurocentric outlines of civilization and progress. “The Afrocentric tradition,” wrote Wilson Jeremiah Moses in his 1998 study Afrotopia, “is related to utopian ideas of progress because it promises a glorious destiny for African people.”

The parallels between these two discourses—Afrocentrism and creationism—are not limited to the comedy they supply, nor to the censoriousness they inspire. Both Afrocentrism and creationism emerged from benighted populations seeking alternatives to ideas propagated by the modern (white) research (atheist) university. Both literatures developed heavy historiographies using discourses of reason, evidence, and analysis that mimicked selections from the scientific and historical processes which were being refined (and still debated) in those aforementioned universities. And both Afrocentrism and creationism were unabashed about the social ideologies which their research was to serve: uplift of the race among all oppression, uplift of God’s people among all creatures, great and Simian. Although “creationism” and “Afrocentricism” suggest concepts easily distilled into bullet point ideologies, their animating despair and disgust with white historiography and atheist science have produced wide-ranging and diffuse print cultures, infusing many local knowledge communities with new chronologies, debatable theories of civilization, and clever reworkings of postmodern epistemology.

My college teacher would call these ideologies myths, and would encourage us to seek the rituals concocted to enact (recreate and confirm) the substance of their binary oppositions and fantastical creatures. For our political leaders, a key rite of passage has become an interrogation of how thoroughly their myths, their “worldview” (to borrow from Palin’s language) affects and infuses their legislative actions. Barack Obama was forced to wrestle, publicly, with whether the myths of his pastor were evident in his aspirant political rituals. I remain uncertain as to whether this onslaught, and the sacrificial takedown of Wright, brought dignity or embarrassment to the history of ideas. It seems dangerous argumentative waters to imagine candidates must make transparent all their functioning myths, all their enduring premises. I say this because the correlation between what we believe and what we do (what we govern) has yet to be intellectually demonstrated as coherent or demonstrably consistent, across the political spectrum.

Nonetheless, there was Barack Obama, speaking on March 18, 2008 of his “former” pastor’s “distorted views.” Speaking, too, about the role of race in his own identity formation, in his own political consciousness, and in the history of his nation he wanted very much to lead. Obama’s speech on race was his counter-narrative to the Afrotopias of his forefathers. It was also his to explain how Wright’s Afrocentrism could not be deleted from the record. “To simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

There is something to be said for that command performance, for the candidates forced into a position where they must show themselves as thinkers, as believers, as members of social movements often inexplicable to those outside and estranged from the disappointment and alienation which congeals those enclaves. After all, that is the executive expectation set before their runs toward elected office. Now creationism makes a brief shadowy show, still unsubstantiated, mocked and feared by those flailing in the vagaries of Dover, Pennsylvania and the Institute for Creation Research. Sarah Palin owes it to her constituents, and to her critics, to account for this accounting, for the ways she reconciled her science teacher father and Pentecostal pastor. If she cannot make an argument as to what role her beliefs play in her framing of the world, in her imagination of the American (scientific, political, and evolutionary) possibility, then she will have not only demonstrated definitively (with verifiable evidence) that she should not be the vice president of anything, but also that banning her, from universities or intellectual exposure, does nobody—not her, not creationists, and not the religions that produce it—any sort of intellectual good.