Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work explores how people come to experience nonmaterial objects such as God as present and real, and how different understandings of the mind affect mental experience. She is the author, most recently, of When God Talks Back (Knopf, 2012), which The New York Times Book Review called “the most insightful study of evangelical religion in many years,” and of other books including Of Two Minds (Knopf, 2000), The Good Parsi (Harvard, 1996), and Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Harvard, 1989). Her latest project, supported by the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, builds on and extends her research for When God Talks Back, taking her to India and Africa. On a recent rainy afternoon in Palo Alto, I spoke with Luhrmann about her work and its new directions.

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Steven Barrie-Anthony: In the final chapter of When God Talks Back, you argue that God for evangelicals is not a rejection of modernity but rather an expression of what it is to be modern. How is this the case?

Tanya Marie Luhrmann: I think that the two big characteristics of modernity are the availability of science, and pluralism. And these make the uncertainty of your own cognitive position much more available to you. So using the imagination to make God real helps to make God real. Doing this also has characteristics that we associate with postmodernity—the playfulness, the uncertainty, the sense that there is a there there but maybe we don’t really get to it directly. From what I know of early Christianity, the idea of seeing through a glass darkly was extremely salient in the first and second centuries, was less salient to a faith that was very confident, and is highly salient to modern people. It allows you to imagine God walking by your side. Are you just making that up or is it real in the world? C.S. Lewis is sure that God is real, but then, he’s also writing a novel about it. The availability of disbelief is a condition of modernity. You cannot but be aware that other people think differently—that they may disbelieve your belief. And the evangelical walking with God is a sort of suspension of disbelief, which is not really relevant unless disbelief is relevant.

SBA: And yet the evangelicals you study do not often turn away from their disbelief or doubt or skepticism; they are constantly returning to it.

TML: They don’t think of themselves as doubting God, but they are extremely articulate about how God is present through the human. They know that there are Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims, and it’s very difficult for a smart, university-educated person to say, “Hindus have culture, but we don’t, we have truth.” So you are committed to having truth, but you also have culture. You also know that if God is talking to you in your mind, first of all you have God. But at the same time, you are aware that you are mistaken some of the time. Holding both of these simultaneously is the modern predicament—the awareness of the uncertainty of your knowledge.

SBA: That’s fascinating. And it runs up against the typical critique of evangelicals, especially by Dawkins and the new atheists, that evangelicals are turning away from the modern predicament, away from ambiguity and rational discernment.

TML: Yes. And the new atheists are not exceptionally articulate about the limitations of human knowledge. These guys are just seeing a different beyond, a different more, whatever it is. It took me a while to recognize how sophisticated people were about belief. My own preconception was that belief was a proposition rather than an attitude. And I remember doing research for When God Talks Back and being in this prayer group with a bunch of women, and they were all so clear about their awareness of the possibility that they were wrong—not about whether God exists, but about whether God is present right here. So in fact as you bring God closer you become more aware that He might not be present. You allow yourself to tolerate the uncertainty, because the uncertainty is very clear. You give yourself the real literal text, but you interpret it in a way that makes it flexibly fictional even though it’s nonfiction. You are saying things like, “this is a love letter written to me,” but you’re sitting in a room with ten people, all of whom cognitively see the same text, but also believe that it is God’s specific, unique love letter written to each individual self.

SBA: I’m reminded here of how for Robert Orsi belief is less important than relationships. And for you as well, equating religion with belief seems inadequate.

TML: That’s right. It’s about attitude. Wilfred Cantwell Smith is my lens here. We think of belief as propositional, and of faith as an attitude, an orientation, a way of committing to a sense that the world is good despite all evidence to the contrary. So from that perspective, I resonate with faith. Belief is tough for me. Adopting the idea that the world is good despite evidence is almost an emotional attitude, a way of being in the world. The evangelicals are certainly strong on belief—but their practice is about changing faith.

SBA: A major form of the evangelical practice is kataphatic or “imagination rich” prayer. How does this prayer work in terms of altering the mind and helping evangelicals achieve an interactional relationship with God?

TML: It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good. Kataphatic prayer helps you to do this. You are allowing yourself to live in a daydream, to walk with God, talk with God, hang out with Mary. And by treating the daydream not as ephemera but as something real in the world, it becomes a skill on which you can improve.

SBA: Thinking about religious experience in the language of daydreams and the like, how do you walk the line in your research between psychological reductionism where there is no such thing as God, and the reverse?

TML: Well, I think that if there is a God, then God speaks to us through our minds. So you need to accept and understand the psychology to understand the process. You can read When God Talks Back from different perspectives. From the purely secular angle, you might say that these people are just making it up, which demonstrates that it is all imagination. But from a religious angle, you might see the puzzle as: If God is always speaking, why doesn’t everybody hear? It’s really helpful to walk that line. I genuinely don’t think I have the right to pass judgment. And I don’t think that passing judgment is the point. Given that the question of ultimate reality is fundamentally undecideable, it’s more interesting to ask what we can know if we treat that seriously.

SBA: Readers persistently try to gauge your relationship to your evangelical subjects. Joan Acocella in her The New Yorker review of When God Talks Back observed that your attitude toward your subjects is “wavering,” difficult to pin down. Is this intentional?

TML: It is intentional. And I also probably do not have control over all of it. I think that the question of whether God is real is undecidable—but I still have a decision about it. I have a view. I struggle with the idea that there is this external ontology, but I have a lot of sympathy for the idea of faith. People do say things that are sort of ridiculous, and I cannot not hear those stories. I don’t tell a lot of those stories because I want readers to pay attention to these amazing experiences. But I also think that Joan Acocella struggled with the ambiguity of the anthropologist’s role. My duty as an anthropologist is first to understand. And as a journalist you are also trying first to understand—but judgment is much more part of the story that you’re telling. The Boston Globe called this “a curiously polite book.” And I mean, I do have a lot more to say about politics, but I didn’t want the book to be about politics because in my world it is such a powerful idea that their politics are wrong and therefore that these people are foolish. Of course, now I’m thinking that perhaps I should have included more on politics—but the book was so long already.

SBA: Non-evangelicals may view evangelical religion as weird, but politics often seem the bigger sticking point. Does introducing readers to evangelical religion absent politics allow outsiders to then begin approaching the politics in a way that is less divided?

TML: That is my hope. Since spending time in this world, I have come to understand how one could become so agitated about government programs.One of the things that is so striking about this world is that people imagine themselves in a relationship with God in which they are both changing.God is interacting with you, and you are becoming a better person, and your understanding of God is changing over time. There is a real aspirational quality to evangelical Republican politics. For many but not all evangelicals, this translates into the idea that government programs that encourage dependency are wrong: “We aren’t going to need entitlements. I’m not going to be an entitled person. It’s weak to want entitlements.” And now I have a much richer sense of how you could take that position. I still get driven up the wall; I find that my own political convictions are still as they were when I began. But I am less angry. When somebody says that we should cut welfare, at least I can appreciate more of where they are coming from.

SBA: Your project for the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative seems to emerge from and extend the research you did for When God Talks Back. You are looking at similar prayer practices, but comparatively across cultures that you view as having different “theories of mind”?

TML: Yes. I noticed two things from this book. First of all, the way people paid attention to their mental events changed their mental events. Giving significance fundamentally changed those experiences; the mental images felt sharper. And at the same time, there’s also something about the way people think about their minds. Americans think of thoughts as basically ephemeral, flighty, contradictory, and chaotic. And so in the American context what kataphatic prayer practice does is to teach people to take certain kinds of those thoughts very seriously. Now, when you look across the world, there are different conceptions of mind, different theories about the way that thoughts act on the world. And so I began to wonder: How would this affect the experience of God, the experience of prayer? I worked together with one of my postdocs looking at unusual spiritual experiences. One of these experiences was sleep paralysis or “night terrors,” a physiological experience where you are sort of awake but your body is sort of asleep, paralyzed. I talked to evangelicals in America, and something like 30 percent reported experiencing this, but it wasn’t a very rich category for them. Then my postdoc went to Thailand to research these experiences. Everybody in Thailand knew what sleep paralysis was, and they gave it a name. Two thirds had experienced it. And so it seemed to me that there was a story to tell. My hypothesis is that the way you pay attention to your mind and body probably shapes the experience of the mind and body.

SBA: You chose to extend your research on evangelical prayer in two places where you have also conducted research on schizophrenia—Accra, Ghana, and Chennai, India. What have you gathered so far about the operative theory of mind in each of these places?

TML: Very quickly and naïvely—part of the project is to become more confident about this—in West Africa, there is a sense that thought affects the world independent of the thinker. And so there seems to be this really powerful concern to scrub the mind clean. Negative thoughts are bad, and consequential. People are clear that prayer is about organizing the mind into the right position, about having the right thoughts and getting rid of negative thoughts. If you talk to Americans about talking to God, they’re hanging out with God, jumping with God, cuddling with God. And they have this idea that the mind is private, walled-off. Thoughts come and go. Their presumption, which even many psychologists share, is that it’s bad to ruminate about thoughts; that you make thoughts real by thinking about them. In Accra, evil is real, and it matters. And it is in part generated by the mind, so you have to clean out the mind. Thought is substantial; it’s not mere thought, it is more important than mere thought.

SBA: And in Chennai?

TML: In Chennai, thought is much more transactional. You are in some ways made as a person through interactions with other people. I haven’t yet figured out how this works religiously. But it’s clear from talking with people with schizophrenia that other people show up in your mind. Your relatives tell you what to do, they give you all these commands, good commands—You should do this, or don’t do this, or clean up, do chores, and so forth. There’s an interactive quality. It’s as if other people have the right to know what’s in your mind, or they do know what’s in your mind. So that’s very different.

SBA: What is the central hypothesis that you’re testing?

TML: That different local theories of mind change the experience of spiritual experiences, of God. I anticipate that people in these different locales will report differently their audible experiences of God, the presence of God, mystical experiences, out of body experiences. That people will talk very differently about prayer, about this daydream-like conversation with God. That there will be a shift in the topography of mental experience.

SBA: I wonder how your own spiritual or magical experiences have shifted your perspective or your desire to do a particular kind of work? You wrote an essay for Frequencies about an experience you had while doing your dissertation research on practitioners of magic in Britain—

TML: I had what I would call a hallucination. I was reading a book about a priestess of Avalon, and there was a lot about druids. And I woke up early in the morning and looked out the window—on the second story—and there were six druids standing there. I saw them. Then I did a double take, and they vanished. But the perceptual experience was a kind of veridical sensory experience. And that really impressed me. It wasn’t the only unusual experience I had while hanging out in that world, but it was the most vivid one. And it persuaded me that this was not about acquiring discourse. I was coming of age in the linguistic turn in anthropology, which focused on the way people used language, how they used and acquired words, the narratives they used, rather than talking about the psychological experiences that their words might represent. There was a shift against psychological experiences. And this was also at the dawning of cognitive science. If I were to describe what I went in looking for, back then—although I didn’t have the words then to describe it—I would say that I went into the world of magic looking for prototypes and schemas and heuristics and narratives and ways in which people cognitively organize their ways of understanding themselves so that they come to experience magic as working. But as it turned out, this was not about heuristics. This was something quite different. And that has altered the course of my intellectual life. I became really interested in training, and the way that spiritual and prayer practices change mental experience.

SBA: How do you think that coming from this position affects your ability—or whatever word you want to use—to yourself have experience while you do this research, and how do you think it colors your interpretation of that experience? Is it less real for you?

TML: I’ve sort of allowed my imaginative experience to become more real. I feel like I have given myself a little bit more freedom as a result of doing this research. But I am not right up there in the high absorption world. I am certainly not somebody through whom words march of their own accord. Really good novelists feel the story move through them, they don’t feel that they are in control of the story—the story happens to them. So, I’m impressed by the capacity to change mental habits, but I am also impressed by how difficult it is. I was part of a prayer group for a couple of years, and I enjoyed the prayer experience a great deal. I would not say that I am now an active pray-er. But I do give myself more freedom to pause and engage in the garden. It’s not as if I have created my own spiritual discipline. When I was doing the experimental work for When God Talks Back, I created a couple of these spiritual discipline tracks that I would use for myself and try to get caught up in the experience. I’m not doing that currently. I probably should.

SBA: You have written that walking and talking with God is “a process through which the loneliest of conscious creatures can come to experience themselves as awash with love.” Does this translate into addressing or beginning to heal late modern or postmodern alienation and anomie, or all the rifts and impoverishments that somebody like Robert Putnam talks about?

TML: I think so. There’s a lot of pushback against Putnam’s data, but I think that there is enough support to feel confident about it. God works as a social relationship in people’s emotional worlds; they hold God as what you might call a “self-object.” We know that when you pop people into a brain scanner and ask them to talk to God, the part of the brain that lights up is the same part of the brain that lights up when you have them talk to their friends or when you engage them in social activity. And I have done quantitative work that shows that the more strongly people affirm the statement, “I feel God’s love for me directly,” the more their loneliness and their stress decrease. So, does this God arise because of increased loneliness? That’s a stronger question. But I’m certainly persuaded that intimacy with God decreases loneliness.

SBA: I wonder if there are any social effects? If all of us were to begin walking and talking with God, would we enter a world that is just as disconnected socially but is experienced as far less lonely, or would that somehow translate into concrete person-to-person connectedness?

TML: In the church it certainly translates. If you go to one of these evangelical churches, one of the things happening is that you are creating very strong social bonds. A third to half of the church, depending of course on the church, meets together in small house groups. And those groups are powerful social engines. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece arguing that membership in the small group was the most powerful predictor of whether people donated money to a church. We at least know that people who are able to imagine God and to have a relationship with God also show up as more empathic, and my guess is that the more able you are to represent God, the more able you are to represent other people. That’s probably socially conscribed—you are probably imagining people in your group rather than other people around the world. This is one way of thinking about different kinds of political stories. People are often struck by the fact that I’m arguing that you can increase your empathy as you increase your relationship with God—but it doesn’t necessarily increase your commitment to social justice politics. What happens if somebody is by themselves and does these prayer practices, do they become more connected to other people? I don’t know. The kind of Dalai Lama-driven, Richard Davidson, Zen Buddhism-is-good-for-you approach would say “yes.” But we do not have that kind of data on kataphatic prayer practices.

SBA: Perhaps this falls under a lack of data, but what do you think about a connection between kataphatic prayer and ethics? I’m thinking of Jeffrey Kripal’s argument that there is no necessary connection between monistic mystical experience and ethics. Do you see ethical frameworks emerging from kataphatic prayer?

TML: I think that the more you feel loved, the more loving you become. We know this from human psychology. There is probably a certain amount of variation in what counts as the person to whom you become more loving. Being able to use your imagination is a content-free activity; you can use your imagination in various ways. If you are using your imagination in a Christian setting, and you’re doing Christian kataphatic prayer, you do more strongly connect to the Jesus of the gospels. Of course, there’s a lot of ethical variation in what that means to people. There probably is a story of increasing your empathy and compassion and concern, and again that’s the Richard Davidson story. But I think it is up for grabs toward whom you increase your compassion. It’s not obvious to me that just because you engage in spiritual practices, that you feel more compassion toward somebody who is not like you.

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HK: Now, if you don’t mind, I will commit a crime against my health. [Takes out a pack of cigarettes, lights one up, and begins smoking.] I only smoke once a week—despite the fact that I had been in Nicotine Anonymous when I was living in California. I went to four different groups and even gave up smoking, but I learnt a lot about religion there, too, or better, the instrumentalization of religion as an  American way of systematically applying belief to control one’s life-conduct.

JB: Last year, The Immanent Frame co-produced a sort of compendium on uses of the word spirituality, and one of the contributors wrote about another 12-step program, Alcoholics Anonymous.

KH: One of the essential points is that spirituality is self-empowerment, as Winfried Gebhardt puts it. It is not self-sacralization in the Durkheimian sense. It is a means to autonomously administer transcendence on a personal level and yet, at the same time, to permit transcendence to happen. That is the point of spirituality. Spirituality is not simply a matter of instrumentalization and subjectivation; rather, the subject accepts an other without it having to be a specific other, a personal other. It doesn’t have to be specific, but it has to be something the self can relate to.

JB: But the self occupies the central point in spirituality?

HK: Heelas uses the term self-religion. But I think this Durkheimian notion that it is about self-sacralization, that the spiritual plays a self-referential role, ultimately misses the essence of the spiritual. The spiritual has to refer to the subject, the subject has to be experienced, it must be in relation. But it retains the character of religiosity because it exceeds the subject and relates to an other. I am not talking about “the Other,” because that insinuates the Levinasian understanding. The other I am referring to must not have a personal structure, it is, in a sense, the anything related to, anything intentionality can refer to, or, what is meant by Luckmann’s notion of transcending.  Even in 12-step programs and in the most abstract esoteric teachings we find something that is experienced as exceeding the subject. That is transcendence in the phenomenological sense. That is why I find the concept of self-religion—which suggests that the self is only concerned with the self—misguided. Again, the point of spirituality is that the subject experiences itself in surpassing itself. That is a trait of religiosity, of transcending. Transcending remains an essential feature of spirituality.

It is not just an instrument of subjectivation, as the Foucauldians believe; it’s not about producing closed selves. Intentionality remains, even when it comes to nothing. In the case of popular forms of spirituality the referent is often empty. One can only suspect that it relates to something. But there has to be a reference to something else (etwas anderes), and that’s what sets spirituality apart. It cannot simply be reduced to consumption or the like.

JB: Perhaps this is a good point to address your book on popular religion. In the book, you argue that spirituality has become the dominant social form of religion.

HK: I argue two things. The first is that religion is becoming popular. That’s actually a general sociological thesis, and I find the concept of the theoretical discussion about the popular very unsatisfying. I’m still working on it, but I think that the concept of the popular refers to a broad phenomenon that we can describe in sociology of knowledge terms as the destructuring of knowledge (Entstrukturierung von Wissen). What we take to be religious changes as religious knowledge becomes universally accessible and ceases to be delimitable. The substantialist understanding that religion in itself can be distinguished is challenged. That’s what the popular refers to.

Boundaries between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge aren’t dissolved, but they are blurred. You can see that very clearly with New Age or creationism. The boundaries between specialized areas of knowledge are cancelled out to the extent that knowledge in these areas no longer needs to be tied to clearly marked experts. This social de-structuring of knowledge is a phenomenon that is not unique to religion. It is taking place in many areas, including the sciences and particularly in the arts since the 1960s. The popular refers to this kind of situation, where in principle all knowledge becomes generally accessible and can be appropriated by—again, in principle—anyone. I have to stress, however, that this understanding of the popular differs from the way it is used in cultural studies. It doesn’t refer to knowledge that is popular in counterdistinction to hegemonic knowledge. The popular encompasses that which was hegemonic. Thus, these days, the Berlin Philharmonic goes pop, as does the pope coming to visit.

JB: So religion becoming popular does not mean it is democratized?

HK: No. Universal accessibility makes it possible that everyone can appropriate knowledge individually and in the manner they see fit. That’s where the term “seeker” used to come in—Winfried Gebhardt speaks of “spiritual ramblers.” It’s an old theme, but the seeker is just a social figure that speaks to our reality in which religious knowledge and religious action orientation are widely accessible and the boundaries of what counts or doesn’t count as religious are no longer clearly marked.

I think all so-called “fundamentalist” movements are counter-movements to this reality. They seek to re-establish boundaries around what is to be understood as religion, to make the distinction from the popular clear. This distinction can remain ambivalent so that groups can respond to the market while declaring, “We are somehow different.” That way groups can attract people while at the same drawing boundaries.

My second argument is that, in popular religion, the subject appears as an actor. So a kind of a double subjectivation does in fact take place. On the one hand, the subject is, as systems theory or discourse theory believes, produced by being addressed through communication, and constructed according to the forms of communication—be it at least the possibility to make choices; on the other hand, the subject is constituted as a resource which makes, at least, a difference in communication by making one’s own experiences (and thus being transcendent to society). The thematic alignment of popular religion with the subject is responsible for the fact that spirituality is becoming the social form of religion. I prefer the notion of subjectivation to individualization because individualization would mean that what is at stake is a person’s uniqueness or, perhaps, isolation. We are dealing with a society that uses subjects as points of contact (Ansprechpartner). Thus, in the case of the eventization of religion, the goal of religious spirituality often is the community itself—or rather, the experience of community. This shift from community to the experience of community, that is, subjectivity. What one desires isn’t community, but the experience of community. This is a development we have been able to observe in the German Church Congresses (Kirchentage) since the 1970s. People don’t attend to be in a community; they go in order to experience community. That’s also what the instrumentalization of religion is based on. Self-governing religion requires the self to govern the connection with the other, and to define and identify itself as subject in connection with the other.

One of the unique characteristics of religious movements is the emphasis on the experience of the self. What phenomenologists have been saying all along is has now become a historical reality. What counts as evidence of the religious—even in traditions that foreground dogma—is now a phenomenon of experience, and this experience doesn’t have to be individual, but in the best case it is authentic, as one’s own experience (which, due to communities and communication, may be and often is quite the same as the experience of others).

JB: It sounds to me like you are describing a historical development. How would you compare today’s religious movements with the revivalist movements of the nineteenth century, for instance? They also placed a strong emphasis on experience.

HK: Yes, but these movements always emerged in areas already marked as religious, so what counts as religious was already unambiguously marked. What sets these current movements apart from others is the becoming-unbounded (Entgrenzung) of religiosity. Spirituality was already a part of these earlier movements. What’s new isn’t religious experience—religious experience has long been a topic—but that the experience itself, the capacity to experience something, has become the criterion for religiosity, rather than religiosity being a given and experience coming second. That’s the difference from Billy Graham, for instance: In his rallies, there were clear prescriptions of what may be experienced as religious. The point of spiritualization is that the criterion for religiosity is your subjective experience. You can experiment with a variety of things—even things that are formally not religious—and then you take your experience of those things, whatever you feel to be transcendence, as the criterion, regardless whether it is marked as religious or not.

I don’t want to exaggerate the rupture. Religious experience is perennial, and subjectivity always plays a role. But the fact that subjectivity becomes the decisive criterion of what is perceived as religious, and isn’t just brought into religion, that is the decisive difference. You don’t have to be integrated into a religious cosmos (Weltbild), you only have to transcend subjectivity. That is what minimally constitutes the religious or the spiritual. You don’t call it religious because it is fixed to a specific religious system of symbols or social structures of specialized religious organizations. Imagine a spiritual Marxist—Marxists of the nineteenth century were religious in the sense that they believed in utopia. (The same argument could be made about nationalists.) But if you were to find that they don’t believe in something—namely utopia—and are therefore religious, but that they want to transcend the totality and experience utopia for the sake of experiencing it, then they would be spiritual in the modern sense, as it were. For this to happen, a subjectivation has to occur that doesn’t need to sacralize the individual, but that relates to the subject. That is a pretty recent development, but it certainly isn’t without precedent. The combination of popularity and subjectivation is certainly unique.

JB: Do you think the subject seeking spiritual experience could eventually become fatigued?

HK: Do you mean, could the wave run its course?

JB: On the one hand, spirituality bears this promise of healing and regeneration, but if subjective experience becomes an end in itself, can that lead to a fatigue of being a subject?

HK: Well, it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. The subject doesn’t necessarily expend energy. It is also not a search for meaning. The subject still gets a payoff from religiosity. The question is whether the subject can be placed into this spiritualization on a permanent basis, which raises the question whether there are other orientations the subject could assume. Meaningful orientation towards transcendence (sinnhafte Transzendenzorientierung) is a defining characteristic of human existence. Are there any structures that could enable collective orientations—such as neo-nationalisms, new utopian movements and the like—that could step in? Islamic movements are a good example. In contrast to the global popular Islam described by Olivier Roy, which is also based on subjectivation, could we imagine collectivist movements stepping in to take its place? Structural conditions would have to be fundamentally transformed. My thesis is that these religious movements don’t just function as religious movements, but that you have to view them in the context of a social development in which what we used to call individualization has been furthered into subjectivation. If the structural conditions for this development were to disappear or change—I don’t know whether we have to assume a different orientation in Southeast Asia, China, and elsewhere—then such new orientations are imaginable. But you would have to reconstruct society in order to do that.

For instance, you would have to change the fact that we are called on as decision-makers from the age of nine months onwards. Parents turn toddlers into decision-makers on a lot of questions. We are decision-makers in the market, we are administrators of our entire life, etc. The subject is always the addressee of society. That would have to be reversed.

Some in the spiritual movement are trying just that, and they are trying to create artificial collectivizations in the shape of communities. Some political movements attempt this as well. The internet movement in some sense is a collectivist movement, but it doesn’t seem to create any particularly strong new forms of social structures (aside from “communities” in inverted commas). Be that as it may, basically you would have to change the social-structural preconditions—for instance, liberalism’s market model, or the model on which our systems of communication are based. If the computer people had formed collective groups, and not “personal” computers that address individual users, things would have run a different course, but everything is running in this direction.

I want to elaborate on the background again. What I’m describing is connected to the entire setup. I do not regard it as a development specific to the religious realm. On the contrary: religion is just a part—presumably a fairly advanced part—of a broader social development. In a way, religion forms the vanguard of a development that will eventually affect science as well and that has been going on in the art world for a long time. In art, however, the development has been ambivalent: we have seen the closure of institutions, but this has been happening on the background of a full dissolution of boundaries. Those developments are also parts of a development affecting society as a whole.

JB: If we can no longer clearly distinguish between religious and secular forms of communication or knowledge, does it follow that we have become “postsecular”?

HK: The issue of postsecularity depends on whether we can assume a clear division in the past. I tend to agree, but then I’m not a historian. What I hear from the historians as an objection—Keith Thomas, for example—is that we have reason to doubt the narrative of clear-cut modernization. It may well have been an ideal-typical construction.

My first research project (for my PhD) was on dowsing and the development of occult physics. What’s interesting is that at the same time that religion was losing its power to offer interpretations of natural phenomena, it wasn’t simply replaced by science. Instead, we saw the development of all kinds of hybrid forms—Mesmerism, occult physics, parapsychology—that do not merely blunder through the nineteenth century but immediately arose as mass phenomena. In Germany, Goethe, Hegel and many members of the educated bourgeoisie took an interest. In England and the United States, parapsychology became a popular movement among the working class. There was also the English movement of spiritism, and much more. Like I said, I’m no historian, but I would change the narrative along those lines. These hybrid forms attest to one of the great insights of Berger and Luckmann. They claimed that religious knowledge is not substantially separate from other forms of knowledge. Thus, when authority over religion is lost, others can step in.

Postsecularization insinuates this narrative of a clean break as a matter of fact. I find this doubtful, even if I can’t put it to the test historically. My research on dowsing led me to first doubt Max Weber. It’s the reason I’m not a Weberian, because in his eyes, dowsing would clearly be an act of magic (Zauberwerk). I was conducting ethnographic research, but I also studied the institutional development, and to my surprise I found that, at the same time that theological dissertations on dowsing (which condemned the practice) stopped appearing, physicists started attending to it. The practice spread to the middle class and it urbanized. It did not die out. The practice is modernized along with modernization. I think that’s a development we can observe in a whole host of movements. Psychologism seems to fit the bill, as does Mesmerism and the adoption of its therapeutic techniques. I simply don’t believe the narrative of secularism. I believe it is based on the flawed premise that there are substantial differences between religion and other things.

JB: So, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, we could say that we have never been secular. At least not in a pure form.

HK: Probably not. I find it astonishing—to me, it is one of the greatest puzzles to this day—how the natural sciences were finally able to kick out alchemy and astrology. Particularly the Royal Academy. Apparently they were able, after all, to draw sharp boundaries between the empiricism of empirics and the empiricism of alchemy. I still find that to be a very interesting question because it is the last remnant of a potential substantialism of knowledge.

At the same time we probably have to stress that secularism undoubtedly plays the role of the dominant ideology of modernity juxtaposing “rationality” to the irrational or “religious”. Even if secularization must not have been realized, secularism has been the dominant ideology of modernity and modernization. It is what helped to define rationality. Without this ideology, modernization would not have happened. In a sense, rationality is the faith of modernity, and although—or because—I assume that rationality is not opposed to religion and transcendence, this faith is, I guess, also what I still believe in.

* * *

JB: About fifteen years ago, you wrote that the distinctive contribution of German sociology of religion is theory, and that at times sociology of religion in Germany is even subsumed under “grand theory.” Is that still the case?

HK: Well, perhaps we now have to say that theory was the distinctive contribution of German sociology to the sociology of religion. I doubt one could still claim today that the distinguishing feature of German sociology is its theoretical contribution. This is in part connected to its international visibility: German sociology of religion does not particularly stand out at the international level. We are now talking about a time long after the formulation of the theoretical contributions of Niklas Luhmann, Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Luckmann, and others. Since then nobody has come forward with a distinct contribution on the international level.

However, in principle, German-language sociology of religion—I would include Switzerland here—still places high value on theory. The reason is—and I suspect this is a bit different than elsewhere—that it regards religion as part of general sociology. I believe that is a characteristic perspective that stands out in comparison to other national sociologies of religion and the International Society for the Sociology of Religion. Religion is treated as part of a broader concept of society, not just as the object of a subdiscipline.

Of course, we have subdisciplinary departments, but they are relatively few and relatively indistinct. Even in comparison to other European countries, the sociology of religion in Germany is very weakly institutionalized, but that is also a consequence of the principle that religion is regarded as a part of sociology and as a social phenomenon.

If you are asking what has happened since that time, what you find are continuations, further developments of existing approaches. Matthias Koenig builds on the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt; Detlef Pollack practices classical church sociology with the addition of some Luhmannian theory; Monika Wohlrab-Sahr is strongly in the line of Ulrich Oevermann; and I stand in the tradition of Thomas Luckmann. These are all connected to classical German grand theories that we, in the second or third generation, run through empirically. I think that is what sets the current generation apart. We don’t pursue grand theory as our main vocation. We have rolled up our sleeves and attempted to apply theory empirically in a number of different ways.

I would even go one step further and claim that our main contribution is our quite sophisticated methodological discussion. Methodology has become the focus of discussion. This debate has come quite far and has even been incorporated in religious studies (Religionswissenschaft).

JB: Does the sociology of religion in Germany have any input into issues that touch on religion that have high public visibility, such as the current debate around circumcision?

HK: [Laughs] German sociology of religion—well, perhaps I should first clarify what we are talking about here. We are talking about a mere handful of professorships that deal with religion among other areas. In other words, we are speaking of an institutional nullity compared to other countries. That has a lot to do with the fact that, in Germany, we have religious studies, which is far more institutionalized and also has a sociology wing, much like religious studies in the United States. But even religious studies is hardly present in public discourse.

Another factor is that the churches play a far different public role than in the United States. The churches are official interlocutors of the state and the public, and they fill this role using highly professional means. So no, the sociology of religion does not play any public role. We are a purely academic enterprise—though, considering how few of us there are, we are still amazingly effective.

JB: Your book on popular religion is written for a wider public audience. How do you view the potential public role of sociological research on religion?

HK: I had Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s book Religion as a Chain of Memory in mind as a kind of form to emulate, and I was surprised that my book wasn’t particularly noted by the public and that the public did not seem able to handle it. My book on near-death experiences, Reports from Beyond (Berichte aus dem Jenseits), got a much more popular reception, but I basically only slipped the sociological debates into it.

I assume that this has something to do with the role of religion as a public topic. In Germany, this topic is influenced much more by the interested parties than by scholarship (Wissenschaft). Scholarship on religion plays an astonishingly minor role. Similarly, religious education in public schools is not scholarly instruction; it is instruction by the actors, although it is still seen in connection with the state.

In summary, I don’t believe sociology of religion is a big topic in the German public. That was a bit of a surprise to me, because I know that the older church sociology often resonated with the wider public because it was seen to confirm the public’s prejudices about religion.

JB: Let me attempt a somewhat crude comparison of intellectual traditions in the sociology of religion. In France, for instance, the factor of integration has been very important since Durkheim, and we can see that as an expression of the French republican social model. In American sociology of religion, the main innovation has been the rational-choice approach, and we can read that, too, in parallel to the social model: live and let die. Would you say that in Germany there is a similar parallel between the theoretical approach and the social model?

HK: Roughly speaking, it is the model of secularization. Not only more recent scholarship in the sociology of religion, but Weberian and Simmelian sociology also asked what remains of religion after secularization, what secularization does to religion. Presumably, the answer is the expulsion (Austreibung) of religion from society.

That is German sociology of religion’s main preoccupation, whether in the shape of a Luhmann’s theory of differentiation, Overmann’s secularization theory, or in Habermas’s work. That, in any case, was the big topic until the early 2000s. Since September 11, 2001, and its consequences, other aspects of religion have surfaced as public interest has turned. But throughout the twentieth century, secularization has been the keynote.

Religion was regarded as the Other of modern society, if you will, something that had to be kept in mind because of modernization. That’s the reason why those among us who theorized on the basis of the life-world—the anti-rationalist basis, so to speak—were among the few that were perceived as “pro-religious.” That applies to Luckmann as well.

Nobody ever doubted structural secularization, despite the considerable institutional presence of the churches, and I believe that is a unique trait of German society—a trait that is often overlooked.

JB: I would like us to return to the question of what has changed since 2001, but first could you tell me a bit more about the extent to which secularization theory is still accepted?

HK: That also has to do with the role of the sociology of religion. When I began working in this field in the 1980s and 1990s, the tenor in German society was that the churches would die out, that religion would phase out, and that negative growth would continue apace. When sociologists were asked, they just had to confirm the image of empty churches or, in our case, the reshaping of religion in a modern cast.

Since September 11—not any earlier—this has changed in an ambivalent manner. Since then, it’s not religion that is being taken note of, it is Islam. That was the “double shock” that happened in Germany. People started noticing the presence of a new, vital religion. Of course it was already there before, but the Twin Towers really raised awareness. It took a few years, but awareness of Islam and its establishment are now underway.

I think the perception of non-Islamic religion is a very different story. In Berlin you notice that religion is not seen as a considerable vital force, but in parts of west Germany that is markedly different. There, religion often has a direct, local influence.

When the pope was in Berlin we observed that he traveled between specially prepared islands, and the routes in between were heavily guarded, like when the president of the U.S. paid a visit in the cold war era. In Vienna, in contrast, the pope really was in the city.

Public discourse has changed considerably, however. Journalists and public opinion began recognizing religion and valuing it differently. Whereas before they perceived religion as the Other of modernity, now journalists are interested in what is happening in this area, and they are able to report on it in ways that are marketable.

The ambivalent thing is that, on the one hand, the belief based on modernization theory in religion’s expulsion continues to influence society as a whole—including the churches, which continue to shrink. On the other hand, it is evident that there is this dynamic—in Islam as well as in other religions—that is somewhat surprising, and in trying to name it, the concept of spirituality comes up. The concept has become established in a somewhat murky way as a stand-in to name something that has nothing to do with the established forms.

But the way these issues are represented in public has in fact turned around in a manner that probably is hardly understood in the U.S. because there is little awareness of the fact that the idea of secularization was backed by everyone, even the churches, into the late nineties.

JB: The manner in which religion is present in public has a lot to do with church–state relations, and I think many Americans are surprised to hear that in Germany we have religious education and church taxes.

KH: Yes, exactly. I cannot emphasize enough that we have one of the highest levels of institutionalization in our church structures, even when compared to other European countries. The hiring process for professorships at public universities, not just in theology but in sociology as well, involves bishops. We don’t see this state of affairs as a scourge, but I assume that elsewhere it is difficult to imagine that professors for secular subjects at public universities would be hired in this way. That’s just one example of this institutionalization. The concept of religion in Germany is strongly pegged to these enormously strong institutional structures.

JB: So the concept of spirituality enables one to say, there is religion, which is administered by the Roman-Catholic and Protestant churches, and then there is spirituality, which is anything else that is going on.

KH: Yes, precisely, and it has far-reaching ramifications. When I was conducting interviews on near-death experiences, many people denied that the experience had anything to do with religion. Religion is something that only has to do with churches, and they didn’t see any kind of connection. The word “spirituality” fills this void which we once referred to with the term “invisible religion.” It fills this void in a positive manner instead of leaving a negative absence. That’s one of the big changes, and I think from an American perspective it is difficult to understand.

JB: Let us get back to what has changed since 2001. To scholars of religion and public life, Habermas’s Peace Prize speech in October 2001 stands out. The speech is widely perceived to mark a turning point in Habermas’s œuvre: Ever since, religion has played a bigger role in his thinking. That is a dimension of his current work that is getting a lot of international attention as well.

HK: Yes, I agree. There was also his conversation with Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger.

JB: Perhaps you could say a few things from your vantage point about the impact his thinking is having here and about the research or public debates it has stimulated.

HK: Habermas is the leading intellectual at this juncture. Habermas is more of a symptom for a social development that he anticipated. I’m a bit ambivalent. Habermas has really gone through two turning points, and the most recent one that you refer to was the smaller of the two. In my view, the bigger one was his transformation from a sociologist into a philosopher—from the author of The Theory of Communicative Action seeking to describe social developments to the ethicist who wants to help shape social reality (though, I have to add, that was part of his ambition earlier as well). His most recent turn falls into this second phase in which Habermas is working as an ethicist and defines himself as such. The sociologist and the philosopher are two different Habermases, if you will, so I would first want to make that distinction.

But even coming from The Theory of Communicative Action his turn toward religion is not a big stretch. He says so himself. He begins his reading of Durkheim recognizing that religion bears the resources of communicative action and that religion is a means to transcend the subject. By the way, my own stance is not very far from Habermas’s. I hold him in high regard, because I think that the work he is doing on the recognition of the other dovetails with a Schützian concept of transcendence. His belief in the rationality of language follows a thoroughly religious motif—a secularized, Greek-philosophical variant of religious conceptions.

Habermas doesn’t only think that we should be able to understand each other; he thinks we can understand each other. Our ability to understand resides in the rationality of language. As such, he has religious traits from the outset. If you read The Theory of Communicative Action and then his speech, you’ll find that, in his speech, he concedes what he previously only expounded in evolutionary terms. In other words, he weakens his modernization theory and concedes that religion plays a role that he ascribed to it all along.

The fact that he can do so “out loud,” and that he does so in 2001, is a symptom of the reversal in public debate. Religion isn’t just recognized as a public player in the sense that José Casanova meant, but as a modern contemporary. That’s the reversal in the German debate, and Habermas is an expression of it—possibly even the first noticeable expression, and possibly even somebody who carried this reorientation forward.

In 2001, Habermas was the intellectual of the Federal Republic, much in the same way Adorno was in the 1960s. Habermas is one of the few to epitomize the classical image of the intellectual, that is, somebody who doesn’t just appear as an antitype, but as a representative. As such, he is a symptom. His debate with Benedict was a logical consequence.

JB: And then they “agree in operational terms,” or how did they put it?

HK: Yes, I think their premises are similar because they are both based on special forms of communication—the “mysterium fidei” in the case of Benedict—except that Habermas thinks that it is built into  linguistic communication.

JB: You said that Habermas’s position likely was a symptom of changes that were already underway rather than something that stimulated change. Even so, has his position stimulated debate, whether in the wider public or in more specialized circles?

HK: I’m not sure Habermas had that kind of effect. It’s clear that the terms of debate have shifted. Something has indeed happened, and Habermas signals it as a symptom: It is possible now to talk about religion and to take it seriously, not merely—as Casanova sees it—as a voice in the public canon, because that is a role the church in the Federal Republic has played since the days of Adenauer, but as something that impacts present-day society.

Habermas insists we refer to present-day society as “modern,” not “postmodern.” But it is a different modernity from the one he describes. So postsecularism was a kind of attempt to do something with “post” after all. He rejects postmodernity, so he has to introduce a different “post.” He sees religion as a sign of modernity. But I feel I must point out—and this is where the “provinciality” of the Habermasian debate becomes apparent—the notion that religion is a force of modernity is a theoretical line that I was already acquainted with by way of Berger and Luckmann’s work from the 1960s. They always emphasized the productivity of religion for modern society, albeit in a transformed shape. In any case, all this was certainly a novelty for the public-critical discourse that was long dominant in Germany, by which I mean the critical theory-influenced discourse. In fact, the religious situation in Germany isn’t what has changed—it actually remains largely unchanged, religion hasn’t become any more fashionable—but public discourse has changed. The fact that one of Germany’s leading intellectuals raised his voice to acknowledge religion certainly played a big role in this. There’s no doubt about that.

Habermas is not a critical theorist, or only to a degree, so that may be why he was able to make his most recent turn rather easily.

JB: Often the first turning point in Habermas’s work is seen to be his transformation from critic to state-supporting (staatstragend) thinker.

HK: Yes, but that was already Adorno’s function in the 1960s. You will hardly find anybody who was more present on public television than Adorno, who served as the Federal Republic’s conscience. The Federal Republic had to put its conscience on display. Habermas is also present in this function, as the intellectual who epitomizes this good conscience on an international scale, the sincere German, morally unencumbered in a way that Arnold Gehlen and others were not. That’s the role Habermas plays, and that is the source of his high national and international visibility.

JB: In the case of Berger, many speak of a turning point as well—between 1969, when he published The Sacred Canopy and was a clear defender of secularization theory, and the late nineties, when he recanted.

HK: Yes, Berger undoubtedly had to change his views, but Luckmann wrote an essay about the “myth” of secularization as early as 1969, and The Invisible Religion goes a different path and asserts the productivity of religion. By the way, it’s not a coincidence that The Invisible Religion has not been reissued in English for several decades. It’s an argument that works better in the continental European context—the book is still very successful in Poland, for example, though not in France.

In part 2 of the interview, Professor Knoblauch will talk about his own work on popular religion and spirituality, as well as his relationship with smoking.—ed.

Philip S. Gorski

 ***

JB: You’re working on a book on civil religion at the moment. Could you tell me a little bit about that project?

PG: Sure. It wasn’t really the book I had planned or expected to write. It was more occasioned by hearing certain things in Obama’s campaign rhetoric that reminded me of ideas about civil religion that I had picked up from Robert Bellah at graduate school. He was my adviser, so it was something that was parked in the back of my brain, and I remembered in particular his rather despairing line in The Broken Covenant where he said that American civil religion is nothing but “an empty and broken shell.” Suddenly it seemed like it was reappearing, so I wrote something about this for The Immanent Frame, and an editor from a press saw it and said, “Oh, you should write a book about this. It’s very topical.” It’s something that I was really quite engaged by at that time, more than some of the other things I’d been thinking about working on, so I started digging more deeply into it. The starting point was really Bellah’s argument that he develops in the Daedalus article from ’67 and then the Broken Covenant book. In reading some of the reactions to his argument, I pretty quickly saw that a lot of people fundamentally misunderstood—or maybe also intentionally misunderstood—what he was up to and accused him of being a proponent of some kind of political idolatry, or national self-worship. I knew this wasn’t at all what he intended, but it made it quite clear to me that one had to draw some sort of a conceptual distinction between what he wanted to call civil religion and then something else, which I decided was best called religious nationalism. Eventually, I started to conceptualize civil religion as a mediating tradition in between two other alternative traditions within American political culture, the third being some form of radical secularism. The easiest way to conceptualize it is to imagine religion and politics as separate fields or arenas, and there’s an ongoing argument about what the proper relationship between them should be. It re-erupted most recently in reactions against Rick Santorum’s remarks about the JFK speech. You can imagine three basic modalities: these spheres are completely separate, they’re completely fused, or somewhere in between. There’s some sort of overlap or tension between them. So that’s the sort of underlying thought for these three different traditions: civil religion, radical secularism, and religious nationalism. But of course that’s a very formal way of thinking about it. One has to think about this more substantively, as well. I guess what I realized when thinking about religious nationalism is that it draws on a very different set of texts. So it draws in particular on the kind of blood sacrifice and apocalyptic tropes within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; it draws on tales of conquest in the Pentateuch or Kings; it draws on the apocalyptic prophecies in Daniel and the book of Revelation. Civil religion, by contrast, draws much more on the prophetic tradition: the Hebrew prophets proper, and one can certainly put Jesus in that same group in certain ways—you can see him as part of that prophetic tradition. The other difference is that civil religion also draws on a non-theistic tradition, which is civil republicanism—something that had been rediscovered in American political culture during the 60s when Bellah was writing the civil religion book, and it finds its way into his argument. So in essence, I agree with Bellah about what the two central threads of the civil religious tradition are: there’s a prophetic tradition within the Bible and civic republicanism as it grows out of the American Revolution. Where I diverge from him is in trying to be much clearer that this is not the only tradition, but that we need to think about there being at least three competing and sometimes opposing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship of religion and politics in the United States.

JB: And what can this tell us about civil religion in American today?

PG: The contemporary relevance of this is fairly clear. Our current politics is in many ways defined by the people on the edges, by radical secularists on the Left and religious nationalists on the Right. Not to say that this is all that’s going on in American politics, but if you take this religious slice of it, I think that’s a lot of it, with the culture wars and so on. The two feed off one another to a certain degree. The radical secularists become a stand-in for anybody who’s on the Left and anybody who’s not the religious nationalists, and the radical religious nationalists become a stand-in for everybody who’s religious. When people look at religious people from the Left, you get this kind of undifferentiated and polarizing picture, so there is this rather unfortunate synergy between the two positions. That’s the political thrust of the project, to say that there is this other mediating tradition. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody’s just going to get along, but at least there is a tradition that might actually bring people together again into more of a common argument. I think one of the big discoveries of this that’s also most relevant to the present is the way in which the conservative movement in the last few years has completely written equality out of the American political tradition. It’s actually quite foundational. I think the tension between liberty and equality is one of the defining tensions of the American political tradition, and people disagreed about how to define equality. Certainly political conservatives tended to define it more narrowly. They had a very narrow understanding of equality and opportunity, but they didn’t pretend that it was unimportant. Now if you listen to the rhetoric of many political conservatives, all they talk about is liberty: liberty, liberty, liberty. It’s quite amazing to think how much of an impact that a once-fringe group of libertarians has had on the conservative movement. This also involves a very particular reading of the founding documents, for example. It’s not coincidental that they constantly cite the Constitution and not the Preamble to the Constitution, and surely not the Preamble to the Declaration, which is where the values of national solidarity, “We the people,” and equality, “Created equal,” are to be found. These are the governing principles of the American tradition; the Preambles express the higher aspirations. There’s this kind of originalist, literalist reading of these documents, which of course resonates with a certain kind of scriptural hermeneutic for a lot of these people, too. This is also of course the way that they read the Bible. Part of the more immediate political message of the book will be to reclaim and to reassert equality as one of the central values of the American republic.

JB: In Montreal in 2009, I had the good fortune to go to the AAR [American Academy of Religion] panel that you were on with David Kim, David Morgan, and Ebrahim Moosa. Among you and the other panelists, there was optimistic talk about Obama’s role in civil religion, but the tone was tentative. I’m wondering now if you think Obama’s been able to establish a new rhetoric of this kind of civil religion that you’re talking about.

PG: Definitely not. I, like a lot of people, have seen some of my higher hopes disappointed. I think that’s just what happens in politics, and it’s a good reason not to invest all of your hopes and all of your energies in politics. There is a sort of curious way in which I think some of the jibes from the Right were correct about the almost messianic fervor around Obama at the time. I was talking with a conservative colleague a couple of weeks ago, and he told this very funny joke: “I hear the Obama team is actually in Jerusalem. Oh, really; what are they doing? Oh, they’re visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. What is it that they’re doing there? Well, they’re actually trying to get a burial plot for Obama. You’re kidding. They actually want to have him buried there, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher? Yeah, that’s what they’d like. Is this going to work out? Well, they had to do a lot of hard negotiating, but in the end, they worked it out. Well, what were the terms? It’ll cost a billion dollars. They reported this back to the President, and he wasn’t entirely on board. He said, ‘A billion dollars? Just for two nights?’”

JB: [Laughs]

PG: It’s true that I think there were some messianic hopes invested in Obama, and a lot of folks, including myself, were swept up in that. But on the other hand, I think without that kind of over-reach in our aspirations, you never get anywhere. I’m not as critical of his administration as a lot of people are. I think he basically hasn’t done much that I wouldn’t have expected him to do. There are certainly some disappointments. Guantanamo was certainly a big one. But a lot of this just turned out to be much harder than he realized, or than any of us thought. Within the constraints of American politics and the world we live in, I think he’s done a reasonably good job. In terms of the civil religious tradition, I think part of the problem there that I’ve come to realize is that the prophet is actually somebody who’s supposed to stand outside of politics. The prophet’s not supposed to, him or herself, be somebody who’s an actual political actor. This has always created a performative contradiction for American presidents, in enacting the discourse of civil religion. The way that it’s usually been handled consciously or unconsciously is by creating a fairly sharp divide between certain occasions: campaign speeches and the high ritual of events like the State of the Union and the Inaugural Address, where they speak much more in poetry. But you can’t talk like that all the time and govern, I don’t think. So it’s actually quite difficult to manage that from a purely performative standpoint. I guess the bigger question it raises is, “Why do there seem to be fewer voices,” or, “Why are the voices that are out there that do speak in this kind of prophetic tradition not being heard?” The carrier of that tradition for the last hundred years has been the Black Church. I’m no expert on this. I just throw this out there. There are people like Cornel West, for example, who continue to try to keep this alive, but are there younger voices that we don’t know about? Are they just not getting heard? America’s becoming a more complicated place, a more pluralistic place. Clearly there would have to be voices. You can’t expect this aging generation of Civil Rights leaders to do the heavy lifting forever.

JB: This leads to an interesting question: who’s going to take up the mantle of theology? In your essay in The Post-Secular in Question, you ask, “What’s the role of sociology?” Your answer is that it could be a moral science that recovers the idea of “the good.” What would that moral sociology look like? Is there a relationship that you see between the creation of a civil religion and the creation of a sociology that’s more concerned with the good?

PG: That would certainly be a hope of mine, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately, whether there’s a limited kind of moral realism that we could defend, and that we might actually be able to contribute to through social science or at least through academic reflection of some kind or another? My suspicion is that there is; I just don’t know what the scope of it is. It would have to be premised on some understanding of human flourishing—that human beings are put together biologically, neurologically, in a certain way—that they have certain kinds of capacities or propensities—that their flourishing and well-being in general involves the development and cultivation of these propensities and capacities. Of course I’m simply channeling a lot of research that’s being done in neighboring fields. There’s recent work in positive psychology, for example, which is starting to get a great deal of attention by people like Jonathan Haidt and Marty Seligman. There’s a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition that people like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Kraut have revived and defended in recent years. Even some folks like Amartya Sen have tried to make a basis for a different way of thinking about economics and development policy. So the question is, “How do you develop a theory of the human good which doesn’t become a kind of hardened dogma, a sort of a one-size-fits-all understanding of what a life well-lived is going to mean?” We don’t live in Athens anymore. We live in a much more diverse, much more egalitarian, much freer society. Clearly there has to be a great deal of room for people to act freely. Part of flourishing is also making mistakes and learning and developing, so it’s not the idea that you simply prescribe some kind of a lifestyle. I think this notion that Nussbaum has developed, a kind of capacities approach to justice—that you need to create a basic set of preconditions for people to explore their own particular talents, capacities, inclinations—that that probably strikes the right balance between liberalism and a more robust form of moral realism. I think where sociology might contribute to this is in thinking harder about how you create the preconditions for the sorts of social connections and communities that are clearly part of human flourishing. We know that this is one of the clear results of recent work in positive psychology: that relationships to other people are critical. There’s a lot of confirmation for this in evolutionary biology and psychology, the mounting evidence of pro-social characteristics of human beings. But most of these disciplines are really focused on the human organism, or they’re focused on the human psyche. They don’t really think deeply about the social, per se, so this is where sociology might actually step in and make some kind of a contribution to this, I think. But I expect there’ll be a lot of resistance. One of the first things that you learn in graduate school in the social sciences is about the fact/value distinction, that there is no way of knowing or discovering what’s good. I don’t think people really believe that. I think that’s why most people go to graduate school, because they think this will help them answer these kinds of questions. But you get professionalized and socialized out of this during your first few years in graduate school. It’s salutary to the degree that we learn to establish a certain kind of reflexive distance to our tacit assumptions about what’s good, but I think the next step is to return to those basic practical questions that really animate people and get them interested in academic life and scholarship in the first place.

JB: That’s really interesting. So in some ways it’s breaking down the limits of what an objective science can discuss. It makes me think of the ways in which sociology and economics can articulate with people who do governance. I can’t help but think about this sociology of the good as theology for technocrats, or something like that.

PG: [Laughs] Right.

JB: Do you think there’s any way to push an agenda through sociology that could speak to something much broader, or are we very insular in the way we work with disciplines, in the way that, in a Weberian sense, we compartmentalize our society, secularize it?

PG: I guess I would say two things. First, I think one of the theological virtues that any technocrat would have to learn first is some measure of humility. [Laughs] Yeah, I think perhaps one of the most important things is to make room for people who do work that’s more publicly engaged. Again, there’s a lot of resistance to this, sometimes motivated by resentment of people who get attention from the wider public or have some kind of non-academic success. It’s not to say that you can go to the other extreme. I don’t think that everybody in the academy should suddenly become some kind of activist or public intellectual. There has to be some sort of balance struck between the autonomy of the scientific community and its engagement with the public, which is probably difficult to maintain. It certainly seems to me that this is a moment where there is a lot of academic capital or knowledge that’s been stored up within the research university, which just gets ignored, gets drowned out. Nobody pays any attention to it. This is partly an institution-building question, too, of course. It’s not just a matter of a particular individual deciding, “I’m going to speak to the broader public.” Well that’s not going to get you heard. You have to figure out ways to reach a broader public, and that’s a huge problem in and of itself, obviously. Non-academic intellectuals have figured this out.

JB: I wonder if we can talk about Émile Durkheim a little bit. In that same essay on recovering the good for sociology, you talk about Aristotle’s influence on Durkheim. If Durkheim is this figure at the birth of sociology, and he’s able to influence government and morality and science in the Third Republic, is there anything in Durkheim that we should be thinking about now, that we can use to create a sociology that’s more concerned with the good, or eudemonia? What can we take from Durkheim?

PG: That’s a very good question. Certainly one thing that I would say, which is an obvious point to make about Durkheim and civic life, is the importance of different forms of collective ritual. That’s something of which there’s actually very little in the United States. To some degree, I think this is just a long-term influence of a culture shaped by dissenting Protestantism, which is very leery of ritual and representation of any kind, which has an iconoclastic MO. But ritual is important. Going back to civil religion and the Obama campaign, that was part of what generated the excitement. We all know about the big crowds that turned out, the rallies, and the stadium events. For a lot of people, that was one of the first times that they had really experienced a kind of classic collective effervescence, in Durkheim’s terms, in a political arena. It used to be that there were a lot more of these political rituals in US culture, and they’ve really declined over the last forty or fifty years. I know it sounds kind of hokey, but it probably wouldn’t be a bad thing, for example, if there were some kind of National Service Day, where as many people as possible pledged to volunteer a day of their time to do something for the community. Or if there were more opportunities for young people, for example, to do something like Americorps, that there were forms of involvement in service that weren’t just military service, which kind of defines what we talk about. “Have you served your country?” That tacitly means, “Have you been in the military?” That’s fine; it’s one way of serving your country. But I worry sometimes that it’s kind of the only one.

JB: You framed your concern about the lack of collective ritual within the past forty or fifty years, and I think collective effervescence is a very nice way to put it. But even in some of the critiques of Bellah’s civil religion, there’s a fear about interwar and WWII Germany. How do you avoid the idolatry of nationalism, and how do you find a civil religion that’s not idolatrous?

PG: The civil religion that’s not idolatrous is one that’s prophetic in the sense that it sees the American project as defined by a set of ideals, as opposed to being defined by a set of accomplishments. So if you imagine America as this great nation which has achieved all of these things, and you list all of the things that it’s achieved, in a way you’re already a little bit on the slippery slope toward idolatry. That always has to be held in balance with a recognition of how often and how much the US falls short of its central ideals that are part of the project. The United States, because it’s a nation of immigrants and because it’s so deeply pluralistic, can’t be defined in terms of some shared background culture or in terms of some kind of ethno-national descent. It’s not Sweden, where they can disagree, but at the end of the day, they’re still Swedes. The only way in which you can really have any kind of coherence to an American project is to have it based around some set of ideals. But one has to always be somewhat critical. I think the real danger sign that you’re slipping toward some form of potentially dangerous state idolatry is when you start to hear too much about blood and blood sacrifice. This is a very dangerous kind of rhetoric, which one hears inevitably in times of war and conflict. It tends to redefine national belonging in the United States around race, around lineage, clearly to exclude more recent immigrant groups. That, I think, is the danger, where an attempt at a civil theology can degenerate into some kind of state idolatry.

JB: With the time we have left, maybe I can ask you about your experiences writing for The Immanent Frame. When you answered my first question, you talked about how that’s been productive, and I wonder if you can reflect on that a little bit.

PG: I would have to give a shameless plug for The Immanent Frame. I’ve posted on it three times, and two times it’s led to major publication invitations. It’s very clear to me that The Immanent Frame does fulfill a little bit this function we were talking about earlier, interfacing to some degree between a broader public and the scholarly community. I realize it’s not people all over America waking up, and the first thing they do is click on The Immanent Frame, but clearly there are folks in the world of journalism and publishing and public policy who tune in occasionally and look at what’s going on. So it does perform a really great function. I think it’s been great. It’s been highly successful. I am one of these guys who reads it almost every day, just to sort of see what’s new. It’s endlessly interesting.

JB: Have you ever assigned any articles from The Immanent Frame to students, or has it ended up on a syllabus yet? Or is that domain still for peer-reviewed articles?

PG: That’s an interesting suggestion. The answer is, no, I haven’t done that, but I probably should think about doing that. I do mention it to people, graduate students and undergraduate students who have a broad set of interests in religion and politics that The Immanent Frame tends to talk about. And I do know graduate students who read it, too. That’s a good idea because a lot of these things would be very good vehicles for discussion in an undergraduate seminar or lecture class. I’ll take that under advisement.

Alfred Stepan

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JB: You recently co-edited a volume, Rethinking Religion and World Affairs, that emerged from an SSRC working group you chaired. You have an essay that appears in the volume, “Religion, Democracy, and the ‘Twin Tolerations,’” that’s an updated version of an article you published in the Journal of Democracy in 2000. The article was clearly prescient; it’s still relevant for republication today. What got you thinking about democracy, secularism, and religion in the late 90s?

AS: I had recently finished co-authoring with Juan J. Linz our book, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, and was thinking about the status of democracy in the rest of the world. Many analysts were saying that without Western secularism, along the lines of French läcitė, democracy would not take root elsewhere, especially in the Islamic world. I was not then a specialist on comparative religion but I had traveled frequently to India, and I was absolutely certain that you don’t need secularism in the classic social science sense of declining religious belief and complete emptying out of religion from public space, in order to have democracy. Indeed, the only place in the world where the French type of 1905, aggressive, religiously unfriendly secularism co-exists easily with modern democracy is in academic texts. In fact, 1905 French secularism doesn’t now exist in any democracy in the world, including France. In 1958, de Gaulle came back and in essence said “the old argument was that all French citizens would go to our public schools and learn everything about French Citizenship and history—they don’t. About 25% of all our school children are in Catholic schools, so let’s give some money to the Catholic schools so long as they include a lot in their curriculum on French history.”

The word “secularism” carries a lot of negative baggage in Arab countries because for many speakers of Arabic the word has a connotation that is anti-religious. So if the argument is “Democracy must be secular,” and if people are parsing that in their heads in an Arabic speaking country, they may be understandably putting some version of the following question to themselves: “If secularism means being anti-religious, and if to be a democracy you must be secular, then as a good Muslim should I support democracy?”

JB: So you saw problems with secularization theory and the prevailing theories of democratization.

AS: What I was increasingly convinced about was that the relationship between democracy and religion as theorized in the classic studies of secularism was not the norm in many countries that were actually democracies. Classical secularist arguments often entailed an empirical prediction that the role of religion would inevitably decline with modernity, and a normative prescription that it should. In the contemporary world neither the prediction, nor the prescription, seemed defensible to me. What is imperative for democracy, however, is some degree of “differentiation” between religion and the state. But I was convinced that there are many ways to arrive at sufficient differentiation, despite this not having been adequately thought about or documented. I was also aware that among the “first generation” of democratization theorists, such as Adam Przeworkski, Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, Laurence Whitehead, or even Juan Linz, none of us was then writing on religion and democratization; but this had to be done. I was personally aware of the possibility for theological and political change within religions because Vatican II and Catholicism’s “aggiornamento“ of the 1960s had a significant positive impact on three democratic transitions I had written a lot about: Brazil, Chile, and Spain.

JB: Was there a catalyst in the 90s that got you thinking about religion when not a lot of other people were?

It is hard to say there was one catalyst. But I do remember a conversation with Ernest Gellner in the mid-90s in Budapest that encouraged my pursuit of the possibility for arrangements like the twin tolerations. I was the first president and rector of Central European University and Gellner was the director of our Center of the Study of Nationalism. Gellner was one of the most famous theorists of nationalism and one of his many specialties was Islam. We disagreed on many issues but had numerous friendly exchanges. Gellner had a theory that Muslims were “secular resistant,” and if you’re going to have democracy in a Muslim-majority country you needed a version of secularism rather along the lines of French läicité. For this to endure, the military had to be the “reserve power” and the meta-constitutional force upholding secularism. So, if democracy is to exist in a Muslim country it’s got to be like Turkey. Turkey had a series of military coups d’état, many of them to control Islam, in 1960, 1971, and 1980. I felt uncomfortable with Gellner’s conclusion because I had often been exposed to such essentialist arguments about Catholicism being “secular resistant.” I had also written a number of books on transcending military-controlled regimes and disliked any idea of the permanent indispensability of the military.

My current research leads me to many anti-Gellernian findings. I show how Indonesia has had a “twin tolerations”-friendly approach to religion, the state, and democracy since 2000 and, unlike Turkey, no coups. Senegal’s version of “twin tolerations,” involving democracy and mutual “rituals of respect” between secular state officials and Sufi religious leaders, is also unlike Turkey; again, no coups. Turkey itself, in some important ways, has become less Gellnerian. In the 80s and much of the 90s, the Turkish army was pro-Western Europe and most Islamists were anti-Europe. However, once the moderate Islamist AKP became the ruling party in Turkey, in 2002 via elections, many of their leaders realized that they had a chance to rule Turkey democratically. They also saw that the norm among European Union members was that religious people have some legitimate role to play in civil society and even in political society. Also, the book by Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe, and my writing on “twin tolerations” reinforced this view. More and more, AKP leaders realized that European countries had a religiously-friendly form of democracy, but that Turkey, since Attatürk, had a form of authoritarian secularism imposed from above with military help; and they came to believe that joining the European Union would be better for religious freedom in Turkey. For the same reasons, the military became less pro-Western Europe.

JB: What does a healthy relationship between democracy and religion look like?

AS: My reflections on the ten-year book project I recently published with my co-authors Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State Nations: India and other Multinational Democracies, increasingly guided me toward thinking about the “multiple secularisms” implicit in the concept of the “twin tolerations.” The book is principally a “primal scream” against the French idea of a nation-state with one hegemonic language and one hegemonic culture for countries that are in fact multinational. Some of the findings in the book, from one of the largest census-based surveys in the world (27,000 individuals in India, 10,000 in Pakistan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, and 10,000 in Bangladesh) are illuminating. Again and again we document that “multiple and complementary identities” are often the norm. Concerning religion, we created an index of the intensity of religious practice, with three dimensions to the index, and we also created another index of intensity of support for democracy, again with three dimensions taken into account. We did this to test an increasingly accepted hypothesis in India that the more intense the practice of Islam, the less the support for democracy. Many analysts were also worried this was happening among the Hindus, given the Hindu nationalist BJP. We found that in India, among each of the four major religions, the greater the intensity of religious practice, the more the support for democracy. How solid is this finding? It is a Pearson Chi-squared three-star finding, which means that there’s one chance in a thousand that this pattern happens by chance. It’s been replicated in Indonesia; Indonesia is the same.

Elsewhere I have looked at compulsory paid religious holidays in “separatist” pattern countries (France and the United States), in countries with “established church” patterns (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), and in countries with what I call a “positive accommodation” pattern (Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland). In these eight democratic countries there are sixty-one compulsory paid religious holidays for the majority religion, which is Christianity. They have zero for any minority religion—Judaism, Islam, etc. In Indonesia, the majority religion is Muslim, but they have six such Muslim holidays and seven for other religions. In Senegal, it’s seven holidays for Muslims, but six for Catholics, who represent less than ten percent of the population. Senegal also pays for some Catholics to take a pilgrimage to Rome. In India, where the majority religion is Hindu, there are five Hindu holidays and twice as many for minority religions. The Indian government also grants some subsidies for Muslims to make the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. This is because religion is accepted as a normal part of people’s lives. The state thus deliberately goes out of its way to show respect for the different religions in the country.

JB: In April 2012, you published an article, “Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations,” in the Journal of Democracy. The article does a great job contextualizing the current transition to democracy, in view of Tunisia’s political history, and of producing information that was not, until your article, in the public domain. Indeed there is an element of almost “breaking news” journalism about the piece.

AS: I am honored at the thought that a comparativist can occasionally give “breaking news “to the world. In fact I started my career as a special foreign correspondent for The Economist in West Africa and South America. That was a long time ago, but I still approach research with the tenacity of a journalist and with the aim of discovering new material. I don’t think some political scientists are aggressive enough. I am too often told that “nothing exists on the subject” when what is correct is that nothing is on the net about this. Much of my most interesting new contacts and materials emerged out of interviews with leaders. Two of the most important Islamic political theologians and party leaders, Rachid Ghannouchi, the head of Ennahda in Tunisia, and Adurrahman Wahid, the head of the 40-million member NU in Indonesia, spoke to me several times, which of course was interesting in itself, but since my time with The Economist, such interviews also lead to talks with their rivals. Some scholars are surprised that so many key political activists are willing to talk at length. I work on the assumption that if I can get in the door, and if I seem an informed listener, no one is bored by the story of his or her life. They talk, and if they want to demonstrate a point, they may search in their papers and give me a copy of what turns out to be a little known historical document.

JB: Did anything like this happen while you were working in Tunisia?

AS: The most original and important insight I gained into why secularists and Islamists were able to make a democratic coalition in Tunisia, unlike their counter-parts in Egypt, emerged precisely like this. Ghannouchi had told me a number of times that he, and other major Ennahda leaders, had talked to major secular leaders about overcoming the obstacles so as to enable them to jointly resist the dictatorship of Ben Ali and possibly pave the way to a democratic transition. But no documents were forthcoming in my first visit in March 2011, or my second visit in June 2003, but on my third visit, after the successful elections that produced a Constituent Assembly, four of the five largest parties in the Constituent Assembly—moderate Islamist Ennahda and three secular parties—gave me documents, often signed and with their Party leadership position. I have written about this in my Journal of Democracy article and in a previous contribution to The Immanent Frame. Here I only want to stress that these parties had met regularly and often secretly since their first meeting in Aix-en-Provence in France in June 2003 and hammered out “twin toleration” types of agreements on the formation of a sovereign space for democratically elected officials and a space in civil and political society for democratic Islamic activists.

The process was surprisingly like the one in Chile in the eight years before the defeat of Pinochet. In Chile, the socialists deeply distrusted the Christian Democratic party, which had supported the coup by General Pinochet in 1973. For their part, the Christian Democrats felt that the Socialists had contributed to what they saw as growing violence under Salvador Allende. But in the early 1980s both the Christian Democratic and the Socialist parties were in opposition to Pinochet and began meetings similar to those that occurred later in Tunisia. From my conversations with key participants in the Chilean talks and in the Tunisian talks, the continuing dialogues made possible the democratic coalitions that followed free elections in both countries. To date in Egypt, no talks comparable to those that began in Tunisia in 2003 have yet taken place. Given the enduring mutual fears of secularists and Islamists in Egypt, both sides, in lieu of dialogue with each other, have frequently made what I call “Brumairian” compromises with the military.

In this installment of the Rites and Responsibilities dialogue series, I met with the Boston University anthropologist and scholar of Islam Robert W. Hefner. A world renowned expert on Muslim culture, politics, and education in Southeast Asia and beyond, Hefner is the author or co-editor of more than a dozen books, including

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: If we consider concepts like “Muslim democrats” or “Muslim democratic formation”—I don’t know if you use that phrase—it seems clear that these concepts have either been under-acknowledged or under-recognized. Given these conditions, can you give us an example of democratic formation in a Muslim-majority country that would be an instructive example to and for the West? An example that says, “Here is a vibrant form of democratic life, and it took place or is taking place within the Islamic world, not despite Islam.” I think one of the bad-faith narratives about Islam says that democracy happens in the Muslim world despite Islam, despite what Islam wants for itself.

RH: Well, I think there are two striking examples. And then there are a number of still important but, for a variety of reasons, less salient examples. But the two most striking examples of Muslim democracies today are Indonesia and Turkey. People will point out that the Turkish state was until recently Kemalist, and was therefore a largely laicist state. On these grounds some would say that the Turkish case is too exceptional to figure in any discussion of Islam and democracy. But since the 1970s Turkey has experienced an Islamic resurgence comparable to that which we’ve seen across most of the Muslim world. In Turkey, as the political scientist Ahmet Kuru has so insightfully argued, the state structure that was put in place during most of the twentieth century was more aggressively secularist than that in the great majority of Muslim societies around the world. Inevitably, then, Turkey’s democratization shows some path-dependent contingencies and imperfections, not least of all with regard to ethnic minorities like the Kurds or religious minorities like the Alevis. That said, the continuing relaxation of military controls, the growing openness of electoral competition, and the preference among observant Muslims for an ethicalized profession of Islam rather than a woodenly formalistic implementation of sharia codes—all this bespeaks a political development of global importance.

The path-dependent nature and imperfection of democratization in Indonesia is somewhat different. Indonesia is sometimes described as a secular-nationalist state, but the reality is more complex. The country’s constitutional framework is a multi-confessional, “confessionalized” state, in the sense that the state is actively committed to the promotion of religion as a public good.

But the way in which this confessional commitment has been realized has varied over time, in a manner that both expressed and influenced Indonesian politics. From ‘65-‘66 until 1998, Indonesia was ruled by an authoritarian and, at first, conservative, nationalist ruler, President Suharto. However, in the last fifteen years of Suharto’s New Order government, the country witnessed an unprecedented resurgence of Islamic observance in society. Although, in the last five years of his rule, Suharto attempted to deflect the growing opposition to his rule by cultivating ties to anti-democratic Islamists, in the 1990s the country nonetheless developed a lively pro-democracy movement at the forefront of which were Muslim activists and intellectuals. Since Suharto’s fall, conservative Islamists have been consistently rebuffed in national elections. But small alliances of radical Islamist militias have taken advantage of the post-Suharto spring to press, sometimes violently, for curbs on Christian church-building as well as non-conformist Muslim groupings like the Ahmadiyah. So yes, there are path-dependent peculiarities and imperfections to democratization in Indonesia, as in Turkey, but this is par for the course in the democratization game, including here in the West. Democratization is always characterized by heightened levels of public participation, and at times this participation may result in massification that undermines rather than strengthens citizen rights and democratic institutions.

DKK: By massification, I assume you mean, not just popularization, but a sort of populism that can infuse democratic systems. As you know, there is an anxiety even among democratic theorists that thoroughgoing democracy—not quite radical democracy—in that sense, isn’t necessarily a good thing, insofar as there are popular formations that are primarily concerned to establish the authority of a particular mindset.

RH: That’s right. Indeed, I use the term to refer to a situation in which one sees, in whatever sphere—be it religion, politics, cultural life, the economy, etc.—heightened rates of popular participation, but without that participation necessarily being regulated or regularized by democratic or pluralism-embracing norms. So, massification can lead in some instances to democratization, but it need not: it can team up with highly uncivil and anti-pluralist movements or imaginaries. The challenge in any modern democratic system, then, is to take that heightened mobility and mobilization that characterize so much of modern society and canalize them in ways that reinforce a culture of democratic proceduralism and citizen rights for all. The history of mass politics in the mid-twentieth century West reminds us that the outcome of efforts like these is never a foregone conclusion.

DKK: You have written that Suharto had, at one point, sought out either moderate or even liberal Muslim leaders as he was trying to re-think what Indonesia was as a nation. And then he moved away from these moderates and liberals toward more conservative, traditionalist, and dogmatic figures. How do you explain this move? Would you ascribe Suharto’s shift in policy to anxiety about massification, and the anxieties about the loss of control?

RH: There were issues related to massification, but Suharto, actually, was a fairly effective administrator and, more importantly, a brilliant if at times ruthless tactician, a master of selective mobilization, which in many instances took the form of “divide and conquer.” As the Islamic resurgence gained momentum, in the mid-1980s, he realized that it posed a threat to his rule. Indeed, as one of his advisers told me in 1992, he looked at what had happened in Iran, and he realized that, for tactical reasons, he’d better engage the organized Muslim community more effectively. But his first tack, as you said, was to reach out to Muslim moderates, if you will—indeed, even Muslim liberals, such as a dear friend and teacher of mine, Nurcholish Madjid, who died a few years ago, and who was really one of the great thinkers of late twentieth-century Islam. So, Suharto first reached out to Madjid, as well as to other Muslim reformers who were linked to mass organizations, thinking that intellectuals and leaders of Muslim mass organizations would allow him to co-opt and control the Muslim community.

DKK: Normatively speaking, in terms of these moderate or liberal Muslim political theorists, what were they telling Suharto, particularly in contrast to the conservative views he sought out later on? I’m curious about that difference.

RH: What those leaders told Suharto is that he had to take steps to contain corruption, including that of his children, and to transition to a democratic political order. Nurcholish Madjid was quite explicit about this in his speeches and writings, though he was not a vociferous, street-fighting opponent of Suharto—other people, like Abdurrahman Wahid, the now-deceased head of Nahdlatul Ulama, and the man who was president of Indonesia from late 1998 to 2001, played a more complex and mass-politics game. Both men, however, spoke of the importance of free elections, a deepening of citizen rights, religious freedom, and civil society, and both too saw parallels between Indonesia and the earlier processes of democratization in Taiwan and Korea.

DKK: “Five Tigers.” That sort of rhetoric.

RH: That’s right. Indonesia has always been unusual in that, although it is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, on matters of politics and economics many in the political class have looked as readily to East Asia as they have the Middle East for political and economic lessons.

In any case, because Madjid, Wahid, and others continued to press for democratic reforms, from about 1994 to 1998 President Suharto reached out to hardline Islamists who had earlier been his critics, and he succeeded in winning them to his cause by alleging that the democracy movement was really a kind of Christian-influenced organization, and that democracy itself was antithetical to Islam. But the great majority of Muslim leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s had already concluded that constitutionalism and democracy were not merely compatible with Islam but required by the circumstances of modern life and politics.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

In May of 2010, I sat down for a conversation with the legendary human rights advocate Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. Jones and I had just come out of an intense two-day workshop at the SSRC on religion, peacebuilding, and development in Mindanao, organized in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Participants in the workshop included scholars and peacebuilders from the United States, Mindanao, Japan, and Indonesia.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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David Kyuman Kim: This is David Kim from the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. And I have the pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Sidney Jones from the International Crisis Group, in a segment for the Rites and Responsibilities series for The Immanent Frame. We have just come out of a two day SSRC workshop on the crisis in Mindanao, funded by the Luce Foundation, and part of the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Sidney, before we get into your work, and because the conversations from workshop are still fresh in our minds, I’m curious to hear your perspective on and your characterization of what the Mindanao crisis is. Speak, if you would, not just as someone who’s been involved with the Mindanao crisis for some time. How would you describe the situation to someone who knows nothing about it?

Sidney Jones: I would say that, in some ways, we’re dealing with a fundamentally ethno-nationalist insurgency, but what makes it so much more complicated than many other areas is that there are several insurgencies going on at the same time, including the old Communist insurgency, which spills over into Mindanao. We have three guerilla groups that identify themselves as Moro, plus the NPA [the National People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines], which is still active. We also have three different peace processes going on at the same time, and any success on one track will have negative implications for the others. So, trying to fit all those things into some kind of overarching peace process is extraordinarily difficult. And on top of that, even if you were to settle all of those insurgencies, you would still be dealing with clan conflicts and structural problems of warlordism and feudalism, which would continue to account for what is currently 30 or 40 percent of the violence in Mindanao even if you got the peace processes signed, sealed, and delivered. So, that’s what the crisis in Mindanao is about.

DKK: As you know, the Rites and Responsibilities series is focusing on questions of sovereignty and authority and religion. And among the things that the folks in the workshop seemed to be wrestling with was how to account for the religious factors and influences in Mindanao. You yourself had very portrayals of the religious factors and influences, specifically, your insistence of not wanting to stick to an account in which the portrait was primarily about the disputes between Muslims and Christians. How would you describe the role that religious groups play, how religious actors play in Mindanao? What language would you use to describe them? What are the inadequacies of the characterizations that have been put forth?

SJ: There’s no question that there is a fundamental issue of religious identities involved. But it’s also true that the fundamental conflict is not religious. It’s about control over power and resources. And that control issue extends beyond Christian and Muslim communities to different ethnic identities among people who are Muslims. It also, like many of the conflicts in Indonesia, has an overlay of “indigenous-versus-migrant.” Some of these fundamental power relationships relate to people from upland areas in Mindanao who have been displaced by people from northern parts of the Philippines, who are mostly Christian, coming in and taking over land and political power from the Muslims themselves. The problem, for instance, in the agreement that failed in August 2008, which was trying to define “the Bangsamoro homeland,” was that the MILF [the Moro Islamic Liberation Front] was basically including Lumads, or indigenous people, in their definition of Bangsamoro. And the Lumads objected to this! They didn’t want to be part of the Moro concept of who was defined as a Moro. They wanted a separate identity. There were very definite ancestral land issues that were at the root of why they wanted a separate identity, and the MILF didn’t understand, or didn’t appreciate it fully. So that’s another part of the complexity of the whole process. And it’s why it’s a mistake to see this conflict as “Christian versus Muslim,” or to believe that appealing to religious leaders, such as the Catholic Church or Muslim ulama, will somehow be able to settle it.

DKK: As I hear you describe it, and also and on my reading of the white paper that Myla Leguro and Scott Appleby wrote for the workshop, there seems to be a structural problem that is fed by religion. Right? In other words, there is the structural problem that determines which groups are recognized, and which are not recognized. I think you objected at one point, in your response to their papers, saying “Well, it’s not even simply questions about conversion, but it’s claims about re-version.”

SJ: Yes.

DKK: Which is to say, it is a set of disputes over claims about original identities, originary identities. And these disputes involve appeal to religion to fortify the respective claims about identity. I guess I’m a little stuck, then, on the following. It’s one thing to say, “Well, there are all sorts of mischaracterizations of and misuses of religious identities.” But there are certainly resources in religious communities and religious traditions that could be used as sources of resistance––sources that don’t have to subsumed under the broad dichotomy of “Muslim v. Christian.”

SJ: Yes, let me give you a couple of examples. We had a major massacre in Maguindanao, in central Mindanao, in November 2009, in which one clan killed fifty-seven people—actually, fifty-eight, but one victim was never identified. And there was a sense that, first of all, it was Muslim-on-Muslim violence, in that this one clan leader carried out the massacre as a way of sending a message to his political rival, who was head of another Muslim clan. But there were thirty journalists killed in the process, and most of the journalists were Christian. And some of the Muslims in Mindanao were saying, “If there hadn’t been Christians killed, this issue never would have gotten the international attention it did, because there’s a sense that Muslims are always killing Muslims. So it would have been a horrendous massacre, but it wouldn’t have gotten the same level of attention.”

DKK: There’s a difference in the moral indignation or moral valence in the global community in response to violence against Muslims versus violence against Christians.

SJ: Yes! And then, afterwards, I was talking with the Archbishop of Cotabato, who was saying that there was a sense among his parishioners that the massacre intensified stereotypes of Muslims as violent.

DKK: Hm.

SJ: And therefore it would intensify resistance to any peace agreement that involved power-sharing with the Bangsamoro. So, in that sense, there was definitely a religious element, and stereotypes, involved, and it suggested that there was a role for the church, for example, to try and diminish the force of those stereotypes.

DKK: Yes.

SJ: But it was also true that there was a clear issue of clan rivalry among Muslims that wasn’t necessarily going to be able to be addressed by Islamic ulama. One of the people at this workshop was saying last night that he is a victim of one of these blood feuds among Muslim clans, or between two Muslim clans, I asked him if there was any way that the ulama could play a role in settling those feuds. And he said “No, because the ulama are all situated within the clans. And they wouldn’t accept somebody coming in from outside the clan.” So where is the role of religious leadership in settling that aspect of the violence in Mindanao? And it’s a critically important part of the violence, because the clan structure perpetuates it.

DKK: But when you say “religious leadership,” do you mean local religious leadership? Do you mean transnational religious leadership?

SJ: When I talk about religious leadership in Mindanao, I’m talking about local leadership—except that there’s a big difference between the Islamic and the Christian leadership, or at least the leadership within the Catholic Church. And I think it’s also important to underscore that inasmuch as we’ve been talking about Christians, we’ve only been talking about Catholics. There is also the whole issue of Christian evangelicals, which is a growing community within Mindanao, and their impact has been completely ignored. But when we talk about Catholic leadership, we’re often talking about priests or bishops who come from outside the community. The Catholic Church has a way of posting priests where they’re not necessarily native sons. But within the Islamic clergy, if it’s fair to use that term, there’s no tradition of having anybody from outside the community. And not only that, but one’s sphere of influence is much, much more limited than that of the equivalent role of a priest in the Catholic Church, because the priest, by definition, is part of a broader hierarchy. One of the problems I often see is that Catholics tend to view their Muslim counterparts in their own image, and to assume that Muslim leaders have the same ability to exercise this hierarchical chain-of-command structure, down to the village level, that the Catholics do. It’s a huge mistake to see it in those terms—and it’s one of the weaknesses of the Bishops-Ulama Conference—because they’re not equivalent.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

*  *  *

NS: What exactly do you mean by the sacred in All Things Shining?

SK: Usually when we talk about the sacred, we punt the question and kick it off to Nietzsche. He said that the sacred is whatever you’re not allowed to laugh at in a given culture. One of the ways that you might characterize our age is to say that there’s almost nothing left that people aren’t allowed to laugh at. You can take a kind of ironic distance with respect to almost anything. That gives us a certain kind of freedom, of course. You might think of that as progress over what we had before. On the other hand, it also destabilizes lives, because it makes it very difficult to know on what basis one should make decisions. In a sense that I think we owe to Charles Taylor, we call this a secular age, an age without a notion of the sacred. That doesn’t mean there are no religious believers in it—obviously there are a lot of religious believers in America, for instance. Instead, it means that the role of religious belief in a person’s life today is different than it was in earlier epochs in the history of the West.  Our commitments, including our religious commitments if we have any, seem to take place in the general social context of what is always and essentially retractable, and for that reason they cannot ground our lives in the way they might.

NS: How does it differ, would you say, beyond everything being potentially funny?

SK: As a matter of caricature, for instance, you could say that in the Middle Ages, if you came across someone who didn’t share your religious beliefs, then it was socially justified for you to think of them as less than human. This was a justification for all sorts of religious wars. But this move doesn’t seem to be socially sanctioned in the modern West. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who make that move, but we call them fanatics. I think this is a kind of progress. But such progress has an undermining effect. If it’s true that you have to take seriously the possibility that someone who doesn’t share your religious beliefs is nevertheless living a life worthy of your admiration, then you can’t think that the life that you aspire to live is a life whose principles can be gotten from your religious beliefs alone.

NS: Then is the kind of polytheism that you call for structured by the condition of pluralism?

SK: Yes, I think it is. But this polytheism is importantly different from relativism. It is not the view that any set of values is equally good as any other set of values. Rather, it’s the view that there’s a plurality of possible good lives that people could aspire to live—some of which are incommensurate with others. It leaves open the possibility that some lives are just objectively bad and not worth living. But we’re not in the position, and don’t want to be in the position, of identifying what the objectively bad lives actually are.

NS: Does this polytheism address the existence of gods?

SK: That’s a really good question. And a hard question. I think the book is neutral with respect to that question, at least on one interpretation of it. What the book is against is the idea that the only source of meaning in life is the individual. That’s the view that we think ultimately leads to a kind of destructive nihilism, of the sort that we find in David Foster Wallace, say. In a certain way, we’re against the Enlightenment ideal that the most basic characterization of us is as autonomous agents who can freely give meaning to our own lives. You can’t make something be meaningful for you just by deciding that it’s going to be meaningful. There’s something psychologically plausible about this. If you’re going to experience certain aspects of your life as mattering more than others, you can’t expect that to happen just by deciding it will be so on your own.

NS: But you can expect it from gods? Are your gods really there in some sense?

SK: It would be silly for us to say, for instance, that Athena really exists. Almost nobody would accept that. But there’s a genuine phenomenon that Homer understood, which is the phenomenon of human excellence taking place in the context of masterly, skillful activity, which, when you perform it, isn’t experienced as having you as its source.

NS: Such excellence has to be, even in a vague sense, given to us?

SK: That’s right. Especially if a culture is in danger of nihilism—that we’re going to experience nothing as having any more meaning than anything else—then the conception of human beings that characterizes us essentially as autonomous is going to be inert. We need to look somewhere else. And no other epoch prior to our own was characterized so centrally by the threat of nihilism, precisely because no other epoch rejected so totally the importance of experiencing the meaning of a situation as in some sense given to us. So the question is, is there something in earlier epochs that we could appropriate, consistent with the progress we want to hold on to, that would give us the resources for resisting that threat?  One thought in the book is that it may be worth retrieving and appropriating from our history the various accounts it offers us of how one might cultivate in oneself the capacity to experience the demand for a certain type of excellence as given to one in a life or a situation

NS: It’s common for Western philosophers to go back to the ancient Greeks to answer these sorts of questions, but it’s less common for them to turn to Homer, rather than to Plato. Why do you turn to Homer?

SK: The Homeric age was one in which people stood in wonder at the amazing things—and awful things—that could happen to them in their lives. That’s something like the opposite of the nihilistic threat that many say characterizes our contemporary age. This led us to ask what is operating in the background of Homer’s understanding of the world that motivates him to emphasize this mood of wonder. One thing seems especially important for him: that human beings can’t be acting at their best unless they’re in a situation that is drawing them to act, in which the gods are present in their acting. In the Odyssey, at any rate, in example after example, when the heroes do something extraordinary, it is explained by Homer as involving the work of the gods in the agent’s activity.  That doesn’t mean that the gods are responsible for the agent’s action, but it doesn’t mean the agent’s action was performed autonomously either.  The two need to come together in a kind of Homeric middle-voiced action for human excellence to emerge.  Even when characters are acting at their worst, Homer seems to explain it in terms of characters having provoked the gods to abandon them. This runs directly counter to our age, in which being at one’s best is understood as making free decisions, rationally and autonomously. Of course, we can’t endorse everything Homer said. There are ways in which our culture has made progress over Homer’s culture—abolishing slavery, for instance—and that make us want to hold it at arm’s length. A long arm’s length.  But there’s something interesting in this central thought of his culture nevertheless.

NS: So where does that leave the thinker? You mention passages like—quoting the Odyssey—“Be silent; curb your thoughts; do not ask questions.” Isn’t this antithetical to the very philosophical task you’re engaged in? How does one think about not thinking?

SK: It’s true that thinking of the sort that is central to Western philosophy doesn’t seem to play a central role for Homer. He was interested in a paradigm of human excellence that happens in skilled activity, in one domain or another. When you’re at your best in that domain or activity, you don’t experience yourself as the source of the activity. That’s the phenomenon that we’re interested in. Now, I think you could say that this kind of masterly, skillful activity can happen in the context of thinking. Homer doesn’t say that; his paradigmatic characters are characters of action, not contemplation. But when the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century French mathematician Poincaré talks about the moment of insight, he talks about working really, really hard on a problem, and banging his head against it for days and weeks on end, until some moment when he’s not thinking about it at all and the answer finally comes. He doesn’t experience it as having himself as its source, but as having been given to him. That’s parallel to what Homer was talking about.

NS: How does one cultivate this kind of orientation toward the world, if not by just rationally assenting to it?

SK: In order to put yourself in the position of being able to experience these moments of excellence, you have to acquire certain skills that allow you to navigate certain domains. Whether it is Achilles’ domain of being a great warrior, or Odysseus’s domain of being a great adventurer, or the domain of being a great pianist, there’s some kind of skill—often a bodily, physical kind of skill—that you need to perfect before you have the experience of being drawn to do what the domain demands. I think we’re with Pascal on this. He realized that even if you’ve come to be convinced by his Wager—his argument that it is better to believe in the existence of God than not—it doesn’t mean you’re a believer yet. You can’t make yourself a believer by deciding you should be. Rather, you need to find people who are believers and cultivate in yourself the skill of doing the things that they do. Partake in their rituals; learn their skills. Through that, you at least open yourself up to the possibility that you’ll experience some non-identical authority that leads you to act in certain kinds of situations.

NS: How, then, do you choose which domains are worthy of cultivating?

SK: That’s a difficult question, and I don’t think there’s any general answer to it. We don’t have a substantive proposal in the sense suggested by the question. But what we do think is that, insofar as you’re a human being, you’re the kind of being that already cares about particular domains. One way that you could try to figure out what those domains are is by asking yourself whether your life would be as full if you gave up a certain practice for another one of equal functional value. If you think you could make that substitution without loss, then the domain isn’t really one that you care about. But if you feel somehow that it wouldn’t be right to make that substitution, then you’ve discovered that it’s a domain you care about, and that there’s more you could uncover by developing the skills for navigating it.

NS: So, it’s a process of discovery.

SK: It’s a process of discovery, that’s right. We’re the kind of beings that already care about stuff. But we can fail to recognize that about ourselves by taking an ironic distance from everything. To the extent that we’re successful in achieving that kind of distance, it will eventually become the case that nothing matters for us. It’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. But it also means that we’re the kind of beings that can undo that by coming to recognize what we do care about and allowing ourselves to rediscover the distinctions of worth that are already there.

NS: The subtitle of the book speaks of “rereading the Western classics.” But it also seems like a lot of the classics get tossed out, or at least harshly criticized—everything from the advent of Greek philosophy to Herman Melville is stricken with a kind of blight in this account.

SK: Well, Melville is the savior.

NS: That’s what I mean. So, how would one go about reading Western literature on this account? What do we do with the thousands of years in between? What do we do with Shakespeare?

SK: We don’t talk about Shakespeare in the book, of course. It would take another whole book to talk about Shakespeare.

NS: What, then, are we to get out of the authors you do consider?

SK: On our reading of the history of the West from Plato forward, there’s an increasing emphasis on seeing people as rational, autonomous agents, until it finally becomes the central characterization of ourselves in the modern age. But to the extent that earlier works of art still have in them a sense of us as beings open to an already-given meaning, we think they’ve got something important. Interestingly, different epochs in the history of the West articulate this kind of openness in radically different ways. The wonder Homer has in describing the beauty of Odysseus when he encounters Nausicca, or in describing Helen’s beauty, is a completely different way of being receptive than the sort you find in Dante. Dante thinks that what you’re receptive to is God’s love, which grounds a very different kind of conception of how to live an admirable life than the one we find in Homer. Indeed, their views about the life worth aspiring to are so different that in Dante’s account of the universe Odysseus is consigned to one of the lower circles of Hell. Yet despite this difference, Dante shares with Homer the idea that trying to give meaning to our lives autonomously is what makes things likely to go awry. For him, the people inside the city of Dis are full autonomy freaks, so to speak. They really believe—and Satan is the worst of them all—that the meanings in the world come from the decisions they make rather than from God. Some aspects of Dante’s story are hard to be devoted to, on our view, but he got this really right.

NS: What do we do with the ways in which they fundamentally differ, though? Do we have to choose one over the other—Homer’s Olympians over Dante’s Christ?

SK: The polytheism of the book is a polytheism that runs across Western history. In it, there are lots of different modes of receptivity, and some are incommensurate with each other, but each might nevertheless ground a life that’s worthy of our admiration. It’s up to you and me and every one of us to ask ourselves whether there is anything in a given story that we can appropriate. Each represents a possible way for us to resist the threat of nihilism.

NS: Might this kind of polytheism threaten to bring us around full-circle? You call for “a life attuned to the shining things,” yet this sounds to me suspiciously like a really good description of modern consumer culture.

SK: Those are shiny things, not shining ones!

NS: What, then, is the difference between shining things and shiny things?

SK: David Foster Wallace, for one, was concerned about all the shiny things. He was concerned about the massive amounts of entertainment that we find in our environment, things which won’t let us stop looking at them, and yet looking at them undermines our ability to be at our best. Those are shiny things. Shiny things attract us to themselves, but make us less worthy of people’s admiration in the end. Shining things, as I take it, are the opposite. They’re the kind of things it takes work to be attracted to. You have to cultivate in yourself a skill for recognizing them as attractive. Once you do, they draw you to act in ways that are worthy of admiration.

NS: One of the great aspirations of modern, autonomous reason is to universalize ethics, to agree on what is valuable and what we reject. How does one go about thinking about ethics in your view? There’s a worry among people reading the book that you don’t quite give us what we need to stay away from Hitler rallies. Maybe they see the ghost of Martin Heidegger in what you’re doing.

SK: The Hitler rallies are an important issue; we don’t underplay that. But it’s true that the book doesn’t offer a prescription one can follow that will allow us to distinguish between rhetoric it’s worthwhile to allow yourself to get caught up in and rhetoric it’s dangerous to allow yourself to get caught up in.  We don’t think there is any general rule that will distinguish these cases from one another, and so we don’t think there’s a general principle to apply.  Still, we’re committed to the idea that there is such a distinction, and that one darn well better learn to develop the skill for recognizing it—just as a wheelwright can recognize the distinction, through his skill for working with the wood, between a piece that’s worth using and one that should be thrown out. This might sound risky. It might sound safer to just avoid rallies altogether and stick to just dispassionate rational discourse. But if you are worried about the threat of nihilism, then dispassionate, rational discourse is never going to help. Besides, it really seems as though progress wouldn’t have been made on various issues of social importance if people didn’t allow themselves to get caught up in the passionate rhetoric of an articulate leader devoted to the cause of change.  The example we use in the book is civil-rights legislation.  If there weren’t lots and lots of people who allowed themselves to get caught up in the passionate rhetorical discourse of Martin Luther King, Jr., then it seems likely that the important social changes he provoked would never have occurred. The danger of never allowing yourself to get caught up in those kinds of situations, therefore, is that it keeps changes for the better from happening. That’s the danger that our critics have to confront.

NS: But I don’t think you necessarily have to choose between a King rally and dispassionate, rational discourse. You could think of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose response to Nazism was by no means cool and rational, but was still predicated on a kind of universalism. He felt that the one God was speaking to him through history, telling him to assassinate Hitler. Could you claim Bonhoeffer as representing what you propose as well? Or even King himself?

SK: Universalism might be a red herring in this case. In a secular age like ours, nobody really wants to deny that, at least on the surface, there’s an apparently incommensurate range of admirable lives. Universalism, in this context, is just committed to the idea that there is a single, unifying principle that brings them all together. But this is a kind of eschatological hope that I think we can step back from, at the moment. Given that we’re not at the end of time, how are we supposed to live in the context of apparent plurality? It seems to me that even somebody who is committed to an ultimate universal story has to deal with this question. So, yes, maybe Bonhoeffer is the kind of figure we could appropriate.

NS: So, to be clear: you’re not requiring people to abandon their monotheism to partake in your polytheism?

SK: I don’t think our position should require anyone to give up their commitment to monotheism—though it puts pressure on monotheism when it’s interpreted in a particular, fanatical way, and most people in our culture can agree that such fanaticism is something more or less to be avoided anyway. Take, for instance, Ishmael in Moby-Dick. He confronts the character of Queequeg, whose way of life is radically different from his. He’s a cannibal! He eats fifty people before breakfast, he’s tattooed all over, and he’s perverse in all sorts of ways—as far from the Christian way of life as you could possibly imagine. Yet Ishmael, who says he was “born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church,” concludes that he needs to take seriously what he finds to be admirable in Queequeg’s life. It’s Queequeg’s coffin that finally saves Ishmael. Melville seems to be describing a kind of Christianity open to what is admirable in other ways of life.  This kind of open Christianity may still be committed to the idea that, in ways we cannot fathom from here, there is a kind of unity to the apparently incommensurate goods with which we are confronted.  We have nothing to say against that kind of monotheism.  But we are against Ahab’s idea that the meaning of a life cannot be grounded except in an ultimate understanding now of that eschatological unity.

NS: I’m curious about your reflections about how the book has been discussed and received. What do you think was at stake, for instance, in the vitriolic response from Garry Wills?

SK: It’s a good question.  I’m afraid I don’t really understand Wills’s personal background well enough to know what’s at stake for him. It seems to me clear that something rubbed him the wrong way early on in his reading of the book.  Sometimes when that happens a person loses interest in finding out what the book is really about and starts reading it instead for whatever examples he can find of how to win points against it.  I think that something like that must have happened, since that’s the only way I can explain the huge range of mis-readings that the review promulgates.   I will say that on our blog, Charles Spinosa has written an essay analyzing Wills and David Mikics’s responses as motivated by the very commitment that the book is trying to diagnose as what leads to the danger of nihilism.  That seems to me an interesting possibility.

There are a range of other interestingly motivated responses to the book as well.  I recently discovered, for example, that some people are misreading our appropriation of the Homeric Greeks as something like what Nietzsche did: admiring nobility and strength instead of weakness and humility. Nietzsche thought that the noble warriors of the Greeks were worth admiring because they were noble warriors. But that’s not our position at all. We’re admiring them for almost the opposite reason. We’re interested in the idea that you can’t become noble on your own, that there’s a sense in which we require for our excellence non-self-identical authority, and that, in moments of excellence, we experience that what is not-us as drawing us to act in the way we do.

NS: Since we started on Nietzsche, maybe that’s a good place to end.

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Eduardo Mendieta: Brother West, what is philosophy and do you think we need a new definition of it today, in light of what we can call, in shorthand, a globalized planet?

Cornel West: I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South. But what I mean by that is that I begin with “humando,” which means burial. I begin with the humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens—very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about “humando,” you’re talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis. The question for me is, how do we love wisdom—philosophia—in the face of impending catastrophe, given the kind of thinking, loving, caring, laughing, dancing animals that we are?  So, it’s a very, very historicist, contextualist, fallibilist, concrete, fleshified conception of philosophy.

EM: So philosophy is a response to human finitude?

CW: That’s right.

EM: But does globalization impact the way in which we live, experience, and confront that finitude?

CW: Yes, because when we think of globalization we are thinking in part of structures and institutions that have been developed over time and that have allowed us to become more interdependent and interrelated. But the development, the extraordinary development, of those structures and institutions has not fundamentally transformed our humanity. We are still those animals with fears and anxieties and insecurities in the face of death and dread and disappointment and disease. So that’s my connection to what I’m calling this long, grand humanist tradition, which goes all the way back to Socrates and on through Augustine, through Erasmus, through Vico, through Marx, through Gadamer. . . . It’s an old style of humanist tradition, but it’s one that I take quite seriously.

EM: You use the word style. Could you say that it is a practice? In Democracy Matters, you talk about parrhesia, and parrhesia as a practice—so philosophy itself is a practice. What is your practice?

CW: I would go with Pierre Hadot and say that the love of wisdom is a way of life; that is to say, it’s a set of practices that have to do with mustering the courage to think critically about ourselves, society, and the world; mustering the courage to empathize; the courage, I would say, to love; the courage to have compassion with others, especially the widow and the orphan, the fatherless and the motherless, poor and working peoples, gays and lesbians, and so forth—and the courage to hope. So, it is a way of life, a set of practices, no doubt, but, at the same time, I call it a kind of focus on the funk. And what I mean by that is—you remember that wonderful letter by one of my great heroes, Samuel Beckett, where he says “Heidegger may talk about being and Sartre may talk about existence, but I talk about the mess. And my fundamental aim as an artist is to try to find a form that accommodates the mess?” Well, Beckett’s mess is my funk. And by funk, what I mean is, wrestling with the wounds, the scars, the bruises, as well as the creative responses to wounds, scars, and bruises—some of them inflicted because of structures and institutions, some of them being tied to our existential condition, in terms of losses of loved ones, in terms of diseases, in terms of betrayals of friends, and so forth; all of these are wounds and scars and bruises. And it’s at that very concrete level that my concept of philosophy operates. That’s one reason why I spend as much time with poets and musicians as I do with philosophers in my love of wisdom, in my particular conception of philosophy. So, it’s Chekhov, Beckett, and Kafka as much as Beethoven, Stephen Sondheim, and Curtis Mayfield. These are persons who in their conceptions of their vocations are trying to make sense of the world at this very, very—what would be the right word?—ground-level engagement with the mess, Beckett’s term, or the funk, my own term.

. . .

EM: You’re also a man of religion, of theology. Are there any German theologians that you’ve been influenced by? And what about the political theologians?

CW: I think Moltmann hit me very hard early in life, going all the way back to his theologies of hope. Who would be some of the others?

EM: Dorothee Sölle?

CW: Dorothee Sölle was my colleague at the Union Theological Seminary. We talked together for many years. She and I had a common interest in the Frankfurt School, and I would teach a lot of Walter Benjamin—the ninth thesis of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and history as catastrophe and so on. She was very, very much influenced by the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Benjamin, being herself a German theologian in New York City. I was very blessed to be a colleague of Dorothee Sölle. I shall always remember her. Moltmann and Sölle are probably the two most influential—probably because, you know, I have such a profound suspicion of theology.

EM: I was going to ask you next about that, about the relationship between philosophy and theology.

CW: Absolutely, because my suspicions of philosophy, of course, are very deep, given my Gadamarian sensibilities and Wittgensteinian proclivities—of the ways in which philosophy becomes a form of escape, a form of abstracting from our lived experience. And how do we sustain our critical engagement with the everyday, with the quotidian, with the commonplace, with ordinary sense, with common sense, in Wittgenstein’s language? So theology, for me, becomes even twice removed; it’s a kind of double pretentiousness. Here you’re talking about God, oh my God. It reminds me that, at the very end of Aquinas’s life, after writing the Summa, after writing these volumes of theology, he had a mystical experience and said, “it all seems like straw.” It’s like straw in the wind, and he’s almost wishing that he’d never even embarked on it. Theology as a science, but there’s no living scientist to get at. Now, what does that mean? What it means is that when you’re talking about theology, you’re essentially talking about the fallible claims of mortals who generate various kinds of stories and narratives to impose some kind of meaning on a world of profound mystery, stories in which God is an agent. There’s a whole host of other kinds of stories, in which God is not an agent, but God is an agent in those stories that constitute religious traditions, and that accent our intellectual humility and try to get us to be much more preoccupied with the kinds of persons we are, rather than with the kind of transcendental claims that we make about the world. And, again, I’ve got a kind of historicist, contextualist, fallibilist, anti-foundationalist stance that pushes us toward the kinds of persons we are, the kinds of praxis we enact, the kinds of context in which we find ourselves.

EM: But don’t you think that religion requires something like theology to articulate that experience of, to use Schleiermacher’s expression, “utter dependence”?

CW: Yes, I think that theology is indispensable for religious communities to make sense of themselves and their changing views about the world in light of what is perceived to be revelation, but, at the same time, that theology can have a pretentiousness, or double pretentiousness, if it is acontextual as opposed to contextual, if it is foundationalist as opposed to antifoundationalist, or ahistorical as opposed to historicist, you see.

This interview is excerpted from a longer dialogue between Eduardo Mendieta and Cornel West that will appear in German in Y. Arisaka, E. Bohlken V. Drell, A.M. Hauk J. Manemann, eds., Tragik und Hoffnung – Die Phil von Cornel West. Mit einem Interview: E. Mendieta im Gespräch mit Cornel West (Spring 2012).—ed.

 *  *  *

NS: Can you say a bit about what you’re hoping to tell us with Religion in Human Evolution?

RB: The purpose of the book is to show how deeply historical—beyond what we normally think of as history, or even prehistory—and how biological human religion is. We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and “history” took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

NS: Reaching so far back in time, how did you go about marking your story’s beginning?

RB: The advent of helpless infants who require intensive, long-term parental care as long as 200 million years ago is an absolutely critical first step. I don’t say that religion appears there, but without it the religious culture that appears much later just isn’t possible. Think about it. The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past. For much of evolutionary history, the period of helplessness was very brief. Most animals become autonomous and able to fend for themselves very quickly. Reproduction comes in a matter of months for many mammals. In larger and more complex mammals, the period of parental care grew longer and longer. There was a quantum leap among the great apes, and with us it became really long. Imagine, an animal that can’t take care of itself until age 21! It’s a weird thing, biologically. But it allows for the development of what the ethologist Gordon Burghardt calls the “relaxed field”; relieving the more brutal pressures of the struggle for existence and opening the possibility for a great deal of experimentation, creativity, and innovation.

NS: And what about the story’s end?

RB: The book actually ends two thousand years ago, and some people may wonder why I would do that. Christianity and Islam aren’t even in it. Between you and me, I’m so glad they’re not, because I don’t have to fight any stupid battles of the culture wars. But the real reason it ends there is that life is finite. I just couldn’t get through the last two thousand years without writing two volumes, and that was more than I could imagine, but I hope to write a smaller book dealing with the recent past.

NS: Still, you insist, almost as a refrain, that “nothing is ever lost.” What does that mean about the connection between this distant past and the present?

RB: “Nothing is ever lost” means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are. We’re running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can’t adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn’t a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

NS: How would you characterize the progress of your own thinking between the 1964 “Religious Evolution” paper and Religion in Human Evolution?

RB: Well, that paper was one of the first things I ever wrote. Actually, the first draft of it was written when I was a postdoctoral student at McGill around 1955. In the back of my mind, religious evolution was the thing I cared about most. It always structured my most frequently-given and most well-received undergraduate course on the sociology of religion. I referred to evolution from time to time, but between that 1964 essay and this book, although I was thinking and learning about religious evolution, other things became more urgent. I finally retired at 70 in 1997, and for the first time in my life I could devote myself to this book as I have for the last thirteen years.

NS: How did those other more urgent concerns present themselves?

RB: I was pulled by external forces. The whole preoccupation with America was particularly ironic because it was the one society I didn’t want to study. I chose to be a Japan specialist in graduate school to get as far away as I could! But once the “Civil Religion in America” paper came out in 1967, all kinds of nonacademic groups wanted to hear from me. I thought, well, this crazy country is all mixed up, and if I can help clarify things I should respond. That led to The Broken Covenant, and then the Ford Foundation asked to fund Habits of the Heart. They were worried about what was happening to the American middle class. I didn’t ask for money for Habits; they pushed it on me. I found four really amazing younger colleagues who did most of the fieldwork. In that way, I got distracted by various things that were intrinsically important—so important that I gave them high priority—but that kept me from doing what my life’s work was meant to be.

NS: What has occupied you most during the last thirteen years that you’ve been working on this book?

RB: I was learning an enormous amount. All my life I have been deeply interested in ancient Israel and ancient Greece, and my graduate degree was in sociology and Far Eastern languages, so I knew a lot about ancient China. Back then I read Confucius and Mencius in their original classical Chinese. Since, I’ve had to catch up with current research in each of those fields. India, though, was the one place where I really started almost from scratch, like an undergraduate. That turned out to be utterly fascinating. I knew a lot about Buddhism because Buddhism is important in East Asia, particularly in Japan, but I didn’t know early Buddhism, and I didn’t know much about what we call Hinduism. Then I discovered the cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s notion that human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic—that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing. So it’s a deeply interdisciplinary study. I’m drawing on biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and child-development researchers all in order to understand the deep roots of what would ultimately become religion. I’ve learned so much. It has been a deep pleasure to write this book.

NS: What about Jaspers’ notion of the “axial age,” that crucial period in the first millennium BCE when each of these civilizations flowered? Has it been framing your thinking since the beginning?

RB: It’s already there in the 1964 article. Benjamin Schwartz, a leading scholar of ancient China, organized the first discussion of the axial age in American academic life, I think, in an issue of Deadalus quite early on. Ben was my teacher and my colleague, and I was very influenced by his reading of Jaspers. So Jaspers goes all the way back, but of course I never really applied his insights in detail until I wrote this book. More recently, there was a conference in 2008 at the Max Weber Center at the University of Erfurt in Germany, for which my axial age chapters were provided as a base for discussion.

NS: Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation has recently helped renew public interest in the axial age concept too. What do you think of that book?

RB: I’ve been with her up on the platform, and I know she’s a very intelligent person. But she doesn’t know much about the axial age. For her, it’s all about compassion. Compassion is a great thing, but that just won’t do! When she ends up excluding Greece from the axial age because there was no compassion there, I thought I would pull my hair out. It’s so simple-minded. In terms of the big picture, I don’t see any other book that does anything like what I’m trying to do.

NS: Comparisons like axial theories can allow differences between cultures to be obscured by ostensible similarity. How do you address the danger of such universalism?

RB: The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand. But if you read my four axial chapters you would never think that these cultures are all the same. They are very, very different. I never want to talk theory without giving really detailed ethnographic examples. Here, I learned from my friendship with Clifford Geertz. From our graduate school days on, I always admired Cliff as an ethnographer. Do you know Talal Asad’s essay about Cliff?

NS: The one in the Genealogies of Religion volume?

RB: It’s full of things that are just plain false. It attacks Cliff as an Orientalist and cites Edward Said. I went back and looked carefully at Orientalism. Cliff Geertz is one of the few people whom Said completely exonerates, but you wouldn’t dream that this was the case by reading Asad. I’ve actually been warned by former students not to make Geertz so important in my preface because Geertz is in the doghouse now. Well, I want to bring him out of the doghouse! Cliff always insisted on the really deep detail—the “thick description”—and there’s a hell of a lot of that in this book. I had to educate myself on every one of these societies, both theoretically and in terms of ethnographic details.

NS: Religion in Human Evolution is an incredibly broad and ambitious work, so unlike much of the scholarship being done right now. Do you think there is too much pressure to narrowly specialize in the academy today?

RB: Tell me about it. The pressure to have articles in the primary reviewed journals of your profession in order to get tenure is really awful. The economics of the academic world today makes it all the worse. Who can take thirteen years to write a book like this? Fortunately, I’ve been in good health. But Cliff died at 80. I was very angry at him for that—I wanted him to read this book!

NS: I wonder if you have an opinion of journalist Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, which offers, in some ways, a comparable story about the development of religion in evolutionary perspective.

RB: I think Wright is a very bright guy, and he has some interesting things to say. But he’s very hung up on the notion of gods and, particularly, God. His book overwhelmingly focuses on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You would hardly know that half the world is not there. Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren’t monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism—either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture—and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing. But it’s clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary. I’m not saying that you can’t learn something from Wright and other journalists like him—Nicholas Wade, for instance.

NS: Yes, Wade’s latest book is The Faith Instinct. You’ve read it?

RB: I read that in advance for Penguin. I told the editor that I admire a lot in the book, but there’s so much I can’t agree with. Wade says at some point that Christianity is the first universal religion. Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it’s not a universal religion I don’t know what a universal religion is. There’s also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It’s not so simple. One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate—obviously you couldn’t be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it’s not always there in the foreground. If you don’t understand that, you’re missing a lot.

NS: As someone trained in the social sciences, how did you go about engaging with scientific material? How did you weed through the current research and find insights that could help your project?

RB: In part it goes back to the fact that I became a major in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations in the second year of its existence. My whole undergraduate and graduate training brought me into clinical and social psychology, and anthropology. I’ve never been one of these boundary-guarding sociologists who thinks that if something isn’t sociology I can ignore it. This is also very much the spirit of Talcott Parsons; he was the quintessential sociologist, but he never drew any boundaries. Jerome Bruner, a developmental psychologist, was an important early influence. More recently, I did it just by finding who the best people are and reading their books. I’ve had colleagues who helped steer me, but it has really been self-help all the way.

NS: It is rare to see someone lately so informed by both the humanities and scientific research. You seem to be doing very much what Barbara Herrnstein Smith is calling for in her Natural Reflections.

RB: It’s a wonderful book that came just at the right moment for me.

NS: Say more about how it impacted you.

RB: Well, she makes the strong case that an explanatory science and an interpretive science are not incompatible, that they’re working at different levels, that they are revealing different kinds of truths, and that we can learn a lot from each. I wouldn’t say that this was totally new to me. Again, this was very much a part of Cliff Geertz’s thinking too. He wrote an early essay on the evolution of culture and the brain in the 1960s, before most people were talking about it. But Smith writes so eloquently. It’s really more the way she said it. She isn’t interested in bitter diatribe or polemic, and of course neither am I.

NS: Over the course of your career you’ve been able to do a unique kind of public theology within social science. Do you think that that kind of role is still open to younger sociologists?

RB: Christian Smith is an example of a younger person doing that. At one point I very much wanted to bring him to Berkeley, but it was precisely that side of him that my colleagues didn’t like, and he wasn’t brought. Nonetheless, he’s certainly one of the two or three most influential sociologists of religion today, so he hasn’t been excluded from the discussion by any means. Even Bob Wuthnow—though you could hardly call him a public theologian—has a very sensitive ear for religious reality, and his writings are always full of sympathetic understanding of the things he’s writing about. I think it’s possible. But whether I should have included three sermons in The Robert Bellah Reader is still an open question, because I think it did foster a degree of prejudice against a book that has a lot of other things in it. I did that partly deliberately.

NS: To what do you attribute that prejudice?

RB: The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we’re politically correct on everything, but it’s still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong. It’s astounding to me to hear what some people can say with the assumption that everyone would agree with them, based on nothing whatsoever.

NS: An important part of your message has been the famous concern expressed in Habits of the Heart about “Sheilaism”—the kind of individualistic spirituality that you and your colleagues saw at work in the United States. Some have suggested recently, including your former student Harvey Cox, that some of these nontraditional spiritualities are finding a place in social and political life in a way that wasn’t quite recognized before. Is the way you think about new kinds of spiritualities evolving?

RB: I certainly think that so-called spirituality can have social and even political consequences. I’ve seen this among environmental activists, who often have some kind of eco-spirituality and who are very organizationally loose. They switch from one group to another, and if one group isn’t pure enough they go to another. And yet they spend a long period of their lives doing good work in a cause. In the end what I feel is most problematic about “I’m spiritual but not religious” is: what the hell are you going to tell your children? I’m allergic to the notion that so-called institutional religion—by which people mean organizations such as churches and synagogues—is bad. Institutions are very important and if you think you can get along without them, you’re putting yourself on the wrong line; you can’t.

NS: So your conclusions in Habits of the Heart stand?

RB: If you think about what has happened in American society, or even just today with what is going on with the Tea Party movement, Habits of the Heart was so right on. Radical individualism is even more evident today than when Habits was published twenty-five years ago. It describes the default mode of this deeply misguided society beautifully—horribly, but beautifully.