This paper also highlights methods and orientations that we believe are germane to the concerns and questions that motivated our recent project on spirituality, public life, and politics in America, but that also extend beyond them. It draws into relief the space that has been opened up by recent analyses of spirituality and identifies the new questions and problems that are taking shape as a result. These novel directions in scholarship offer challenging and potentially powerful new ways of understanding the role of both spirituality and religion in shaping American civic and political life. The methods highlighted below do not treat either spirituality or religion as core or stable identities or qualities, nor do they assume that “spirituality” is in some way to be contrasted or opposed to “religion” (as in the formula “spiritual-not-religious”). Indeed, they do not operate on the presumption that “spirituality” necessarily holds any particular categorical relation whatsoever to “religion” (cf. Bender 2007; Taves and Bender 2012; Ammerman 2011). Instead, we propose a robust investigation of the historical and contextual specificities of those relations, such as they are enacted in scholarship and in the world. What these methods provide, accordingly, are ways of illuminating the relationships that develop—within particular political, civic, and other settings—between “religious” and “spiritual” identities, discourses, and concepts.

But why, first of all, is this subject a significant one? And why does it appear especially pertinent at precisely the present moment? To begin with, growing numbers of “religious nones,” that is, people who have limited or no religious affiliation yet still claim to believe in some kind of divinity, signal an unprecedented shift in the American religious landscape (Hout and Fischer 2002), and many scholars who have sought to understand this phenomenon have indicated that something like “spirituality” might capture an important aspect of their outlook, if not their “identity” (Vargas 2012; Lim, MacGregor, and Putnam 2012; Baker and Smith 2009). We, for our part, certainly agree that this is a socially significant shift. Yet we also note that much of the interpretation and ensuing discussion about the “religious nones” draws upon and continues to assert uninvestigated understandings of religion and spirituality, where we would argue that the shifts underway should elicit some reconsideration of the terms that are deployed to analyze and interpret this allegedly “new” phenomenon.

Social scientists frequently juxtapose spirituality to religion and identify the former by way of what it lacks in comparison to the latter. In particular, spirituality would appear to lack institutions, authority structures, community, and even history—all of which are considered integral to religion, such as it is widely understood today. Congregational identity, membership, and attendance are key markers for studies of Americans’ religious convictions, and the congregation, therefore, is taken to be an especially important, if not the definitive, site for the political and social mobilization of religious Americans. Against this backdrop, the rising number of “religious nones” (as well as shifts in congregational styles [see Chaves 2009]) emerge not only as new empirical facts but, insofar as their presence is measured against a norm of voluntary participation, also appear to engender a certain anxiety on the part of the scholars who study them (e.g., Olson 2010; Putnam and Campbell 2010). Though “religious nones” may be believers, they appear to lack the kinds of social connectivity that are recognizable to scholars, and that the latter have deemed essential to voluntary political participation. Insofar as spirituality emerges as a term associated with such individuals—and one that seems to sound the alarms about the problems of individualism—it appears as either the weak cousin or the crazy uncle of the norm that continues (or that should continue) to endure (see, e.g., Bellah et al. 1985), or as the spark of regeneration and the movement toward a “new” social order (e.g., York 1995).

Rather than take sides in the debate over the political possibilities of spirituality, we have decided to take a closer look at the way in which it has been framed and mobilized. We observe, for example, that social scientific definitions of religion have been and remain tightly interwoven with ideals of civic participation, putative and legally enforced distinctions between private and public life, the historical development of voluntarism, and discourses of individual and collective rights. “Spirituality,” in this respect, is often used to mark religious forms that do not ostensibly align with these norms. In other words, it is used to designate what are perceived to be extra-social or anti-social modes of religion, which in turn reinforces norms of both sociality and political mobilization. It is fair to note that this use of “spirituality” also carries some positive associations, however: some of those who take on a spiritual identity, it is said, are actively choosing to opt-out of political and institutional-religious interactions, in favor of something that they imagine to be more real, more personal, or more authentic than what they understand by religion—or, for that matter, by politics.

By focusing our attention on the emergence of various uses of “spirituality” and the intersections between its scholarly and public acceptations, we are orienting our investigation toward the relational work that religion and spirituality do in shaping our perception of individual, religious, and political possibilities. We might then ask, for example, how the continued preponderance of an academic discourse on American religion that enshrines voluntarism, religious freedom, and civic participation as essential (and essentially American) virtues determines our view of the spectrum of possibilities for political action. If as a result of closer attention to the phenomenon of spirituality scholars are able to view “religion” and its intersections with American politics in more complex ways than those sustained by the conventional lore centered on congregational life and voluntarism, the payoff would be significant..

Spirituality, we also note, is challenging to study, not so much because it lacks definition (or a relational counterpart, like “religion,” to make it meaningful), but because it suffers from an excess of definitions, each of which shapes a particular set of discourses and empirical investigations into various social phenomena. Scholars and journalists, religious and secular people, clergy and laymen, and even politicians invoke spirituality in numerous ways. For example, some identify it as a component of religion (whence people can be both “spiritual and religious”), which implies a contrast between the two, though it may also suggest that the former is an underlying, universal element that religious communities or individuals draw upon or are inspired by (e.g., Berger 1979). Closely related are descriptive uses that frame “spirituality” in terms either of emotions or of an ethically developed habitus that may operate both within and outside of formal institutional frameworks (Stanczak 2006; Roof 1993, 1999). Spirituality is also a term that some philosophers have used to gesture toward an unarticulated “more” (e.g., C. Taylor 2007; Connolly 2005a), and in such cases it takes on the connotation of something relatively inchoate or undefined, yet present and powerful in human life. Others have defined it in a less favorable fashion, conceiving of it as a post-religious and narcissistic drive to self-improvement, in contradistinction to religion, which (unlike spirituality) is able to intervene significantly in matters of the commons (Carrette and King 2004; Ehrenreich 2009; see Mitchell 2010 for a critique). Spirituality’s apparent ubiquity and its multiple meanings, but also its oft supposed “self-evidence,” make it difficult to employ with precision either as a descriptive term or as the index of a particular type of subject. Sometimes this fuzziness makes spirituality seem weak and limited in its effects, while at other times this same fuzziness lends it a sheen of pervasive and untapped power. Even those who appear to endorse or embrace this or that articulation of spirituality give vent to such concerns (e.g., E. McAlister 2010; van der Veer 2009; Connolly 2010). In short, the efflorescence of spirituality—its multiple concurrent uses and interpretations—makes it difficult to identify what spirituality is or to classify the people who identify themselves through it, let alone to understand its effects.

Much of the “problem” of analyzing spirituality in the social sciences emerges from and reflects the perpetually unresolved business of defining and understanding religion. But the question of whether spirituality is categorically distinct from, somehow connected to, or merely a weak mirror of “religion” bespeaks, above all, the sclerotic scholarly and “religious” framing and boundary-marking that, whether for strategic or analytical purposes, distinguishes the category of religion from some things while associating it with others—in ways often belied by empirical observation (Bender 2012a). We do not believe that investigations of spirituality will settle the definitional issues that continue to shape social scientific discourse about it, and we do not plan in this paper to offer a definition of what spirituality “is” or what it “does.” Rather, having observed that recent work on spirituality has paid very little attention to its history (either as a term of scholarly investigation or as a set of experiences in the world), to the relationships that it connotes (between itself and religion, as well as other things to which it is or may be compared), or to the broader landscape in which the arguments about spirituality and politics take on relevance and force, we advance an approach that demands that these problems be placed front and center in any analysis, in such a way that new studies of spirituality (and religion) maintain the critical and analytical depth that is called for in this moment of apparent religious change.

Read the full SSRC Working Paper “Mapping a Field: Why and How to Study Spirituality” (pdf).

Readers interested in Bellah’s work obviously remember his 1964 paper on “Religious Evolution” (Jonathan Z. Smith gave us an interesting reading of the differences between the two works), and some may even know that he wrote a first draft of that essay while in Montreal in 1956—that is, 55 years before he published Religion in Human Evolution. Students of Bellah also know that his undergraduate course on the sociology of religion always included a historical section in which two or more world religions were compared to show the development of religious symbols, actions, and organizations within different societal and cultural contexts. In fact, Bellah’s attempt at casting a theoretical narrative of the evolution of major religions was never just an academic topic or an intellectual interest: it was the task he assigned himself at the very beginning of his scholarly journey.

As Talcott Parsons’s beloved student at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard in the 1950s, Bellah was subject to high expectations—one could even say the highest of expectations—as his teacher considered him to be the best theorist he had ever had among his students. As he internalized these expectations as one of the keystones of his self-image as a top-achieving intellectual, Bellah devised for himself an ambitious scholarly program. A couple of quotes from a letter sent by Parsons to Harvard President Nathan Pusey on January 24, 1961, will suffice to illustrate the point. In his note Parsons described his 32-year-old colleague as “a special modern variant of the older style of universal scholar,” and spoke of Bellah having “developed a life plan of research” of “comparative historical studies of the relations between religion and society in the areas of the principal great world religions.” According to Parsons, in order to accomplish this “basic program of scholarship” Bellah had equipped himself with an astonishing amount of historical and theoretical knowledge, and the outcome of his inquiry was going to be of primary importance from both a scholarly and a practical point of view. As early as 1961, Bellah had pledged himself to a lifelong agenda that greatly exceeded his published work on East Asia and modernization.

This personal commitment—which one may all too easily evoke with Puritan ideals of “duty” and “calling”—explains, at least partly, why Bellah went back to his original plan after thirty years of silence on evolutionary matters. As most readers know, Bellah’s long “holiday” was due to the unexpected success of his 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America,” which brought him away from his earlier concerns and made him into a specialist in American religion and politics; this second phase of his career reached its peak with the publication of two co-authored books, Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, which firmly established him as a public intellectual. After his retirement from UC Berkeley in 1997, Bellah went back to his roots and, even if he has never given up writing on American matters, he successfully resumed his original plan and brought it to a (provisional) end. I will return to the relationship between Bellah, the American civil religion, and Religion in Human Evolution in a moment.

The roots of Bellah’s “life plan of research” also help to make sense of some of the basic theoretical decisions he took forty years later. As the readers of Religion in Human Evolution know, for example, the book unexpectedly starts…from the start, that is, from the Big Bang and the origin of the universe. Even if the strictly non-sociological stuff fills barely 40 pages within a 700-page book, some critics have paid it a disproportionate degree of attention, often without trying to understand its place within the wider line of reasoning; one such critic is, regrettably enough, Alan Wolfe, who in his New York Times book review wrote: “I never thought I would read a work in the sociology of religion that contained a discussion of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. I now have.” In the book, Bellah vindicates his comprehensive and deep narrative out of a more general sense of universal connection, according to which “we, as modern humans trying to understand this human practice we call religion, need to situate ourselves in the broadest context we can, and it is with scientific cosmology that we must start.”

From the point of view of the sociology of ideas, this strategy might be seen as both a homage to a venerable sociological tradition—going all the way back to Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer and the incredibly vast array of interests of 19th-century sociology—and as an attempt to bring Talcott Parsons’s work to a higher level of complexity and explicative power. Many may not know, but Parsons was a biology major and remained a voracious reader all his life, eager to make almost everything fit inside his signature “theory of social action.” Given Parsons’s charismatic personality and influence, these interests repeatedly impacted the members of his inner circle. Edward Tiryakian, who was a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1950s together with Bellah, told me an anecdote about Parsons’s interest in decidedly non-sociological themes that I would like to share: “In one of his discussions… [Parsons] was talking about the evolution of species. So he looked at people and he said: ‘Do you realize the evolutionary significance of the worm having a hole from mouth to anus?’ And he looked at people. Now what do you do when Parsons looks at you? People just went,‘Wow!’” Twenty years later, when Bellah had found his own scholarly voice and only tangentially participated in the development of Parsonian theory, Parsons tried to make sense of the whole human condition devising a comprehensive AGIL (Adaptation, Goal Attainment, Integration, Latency) scheme covering almost everything from the ultimate ground of the “telic system” to the material (i.e. chemical and physical) bases of all living systems. This time the audience’s reaction was much different from Tiryakian’s “wow,” as Parsons had irreparably gone out of fashion and his more mature efforts went almost unnoticed outside the circle of his disciples and connoisseurs.

Parsons, however, was saying something of the utmost importance: reality is an almost endless succession of levels and layers, each one emerging from simpler ones—whatever “simpler” means in this context—and giving rise to more complex ones, which possess new, emerging properties. Likewise, Bellah’s point is that biological, psychological, social, and cultural structures combine without any clear causal primacy in creating new capacities upon which further changes build endlessly. Within this framework, religion as a distinctive societal sphere of symbols, practices, and institutions both draws on capacities developed elsewhere and shapes other orders of reality. Bellah’s analysis of the interplay between religious action and the social structure(s) and psychological factors that focused attention on a single leader—a development that in turn allowed the shift from tribal to archaic religion—is, from my point of view, one of the most electrifying sections of the book. Incidentally, this also means that, pace Smith, the burden of mechanism, agency, bearer, and so on never falls entirely upon “the biological” or “the genus Homo.” As a matter of fact, Bellah’s use of Merlin Donald’s typology becomes fully clear when evolution starts to take place outside the human organism (and the human brain)—that is when, after the invention of writing and the creation of external memory, societal and cultural forms become full and irreplaceable partners of human evolution. At the end of the day, and pace Wolfe, the point is that the non-sociological stuff is there precisely so that the sociological and anthropological can properly shine without any reductionistic innuendo.

This also explains why it might be pointless to look for any strictly sociological mechanism in Bellah’s book. As David Martin has noticed, there is no Spencer—and no L. T. Hobhouse, Gerhard Lenski, or W. G. Runciman—in Religion in Human Evolution. Émile Durkheim’s evolutionary thinking is wholly absent, and general models such as the differentiation and re-integration process sketched by Parsons in Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives are nowhere to be found. Martin is right in saying that Bellah is not even interested in tracing the diffusion of ideas or roles; that is, in the historical paths that bring society from one kind to another. In both regards, Religion in Human Evolution might be compared with another exceptional sociological work, Niklas Luhmann’s Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft , which included a neo-Darwinian evolutionary model based on the variation, selection, and stabilization of adaptive characteristics. The model, however, was not applied to explain the shifts between the four main forms of societal differentiation (segmentary, center-periphery, stratificatory, and functional differentiation): according to Luhmann, all social science could say was that only a handful of types of society have existed in human history and that the basic structures of social systems never emerge or change randomly. Luhmann’s, as well as Bellah’s, silence about historical change in general should not be mistaken for lack of scholarship or courage: on the contrary, it comes from a lucid understanding of the promises and the limits of theory vis-à-vis the study of individual historical facts and processes that takes Parsons’s tendency to over-theorize seriously and tries to find a way to transcend its shortcomings.

The story of Robert Bellah and Religion in Human Evolution can thus be told as the quest a hero had to bring to an end against all odds and impediments, and as the dutiful effort of a metaphorical son to resume and further the work of his metaphorical father within a long line of ancestors—even putting the clear Weberian inspiration aside, Bellah’s decision to go back to pre-axial and axial-age civilizations after a life of work on modernity and modernization might be read as parallel to Durkheim’s decision to focus on Australian aboriginals after The Division of Labor in Society and Suicide, a choice that Bellah himself once interpreted as a journey into the unconscious sources of social existence analogous to Freud’s work on dreams.

But I would like to conclude by telling the story once again as an attempt to finally break a spell. As I said above, the major obstacle between Bellah and the completion of his life-task was the success of his 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America,” and his decision to engage in the discussion on American politics, morality, and religion for the following thirty years. This proved to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, thanks to the American civil religion debate Bellah became a renowned and respected intellectual within the academic world and the wider public sphere; on the other hand, the strict identification of all his efforts with that famous essay was, at times, hard to bear, especially when his ideas or interests changed and he wanted to break new ground. As it happens with famous actors or singers, Bellah had been typecast and remained trapped in the gilded cage of success. Moreover, as he came to learn after some attempts to disengage himself from the identification with “Civil Religion in America”—in the late 1970s Bellah even stopped using the phrase “civil religion”—labels are hard to remove. After an interlude when he was mainly acknowledged as the author of Habits of the Heart, Bellah was again tied to “Civil Religion in America.” Religion in Human Evolution might then be read as an attempt to break the American civil religion spell forever—Bellah has put on our desks a larger-than-life work that dwarfs everything he did and wrote in his long, extraordinary career. I would make a fool of myself by saying that the main thrust beyond Bellah’s latest work is the resentment of the unappreciated intellectual. No need to call Nietzsche into question: I am just saying that besides the aspiration to bring his self-assigned life plan of research to an end, Bellah might have had another, all too human, desire to fulfill.

At the heart of great scholarly and literary works stands a handful of delicate threads connecting erudition, creativity, commitment, and a dense, meaningful life. I have tried to show some of these threads, and in so doing I narrated a couple of stories that make no justice to the theoretical argument of Religion in Human Evolution, and that might disappoint its readers. All I can say is that, just like anything else, they are simply small pieces of a much bigger and intricate mosaic.

This emphasis on practice leads to a different style of exposition than Weber’s. Much more than Weber’s (or Durkheim’s or Parsons’), Bellah’s expository style is dominated by narrative. Religion in Human Evolution is a grand story, what Bellah calls a “deep history,” that extends all the way from the Big Bang to the axial age (with suggestive implications as to how the story will unfold in modern times). This leads to a much more fluid account of the origin and development of religions than Weber’s. In Bellah’s telling, religious practices emerge gradually over centuries, in constant interaction with social and political transformations. A good example is his account of the slow and tension-filled development of monotheism in ancient Israel. Weber tends to construct large ideal-typical constellations of ideas and then connect them with class structures and political processes. The effect is to freeze big chunks of historical time and to show how ideas and social structures are interrelated within those chunks, rather than to amalgamate meanings and social processes in the flow of history. Bellah’s privileging of process over structure through narrative makes his work more congenial to the academic currents of this new century.

Another important difference between Bellah and Weber is that Bellah is more inclined to emphasize similarities rather than differences between the great religious traditions. On the one hand, Bellah repeatedly emphasizes that the major religious traditions are different, they ask different questions about life, they arise out of different historical experiences, they are shaped by all the particularities of their origins. Nonetheless, Bellah goes to great lengths to argue that the great traditions of the axial age (precisely those which Weber spent most of his career exploring) share in common certain aspirations to transcendence. The historical, archeological, and textual evidence about the life world of those times contained great ambiguities in Weber’s time and many of these have not been cleared up in the past century. But Weber tends to spin the ambiguous evidence in favor of contrast between the traditions, while Bellah spins it in favor of an emphasis on commonalities. An example is their treatment of ancient China. Weber saw Confucianism and Taoism as religions/philosophies of adaptation to the world that lacked the sense of transcendence that could eventually produce the inner-worldly asceticism of Western Protestantism. Bellah on the other hand, assuredly does see an important aspiration to transcendence in Confucius and in other major philosophers of China’s Warring States Period. But he clearly admits that there are some respected Sinologists who do not see that transcendence. There are ambiguities in the evidence and respected experts on both sides. Bellah stands with the side of transcendence, but Weber could have made a case for the other side.

Part of this difference is connected with their style of exposition. Weber’s ideal types are built around distinctions. Bellah’s narrative style pulls phenomena together. But the difference is also linked to the differences in the grand meta-narratives than underpin each project. Weber’s story is about the rise of capitalism out of the religious traditions of the West, and his work on comparative religions is structured to show that capitalism could not have arisen initially in societies with different religious traditions. Bellah’s narrative rejects the “Rise of the West” story. Rather, he is concerned with parallel developments of human cultural creativity across the whole breadth of the human species.

Bellah’s more ecumenical story better resonates with the ethos of the twenty-first century. Intellectuals in both the west and the rest have discredited any reason for triumphalism about the rise of Euro-America. Meanwhile we are all faced with the urgent political necessity of finding commonalities in the human condition that might help us avoid planetary catastrophe.

Bellah’s account also evokes the pathos of our current condition. In the history of sociology, one can trace a long arc from optimism to pessimism: Comte thought that positive science would create a better world for all; Marx envisioned a brutal revolutionary struggle leading eventually to the promised land of communism; Weber put us in an iron cage; Bellah ends his deep history by evoking the possible extinction of the human species.

This pessimistic pathos is also congruent with the mood of the times. In an era when global capitalism is tearing itself apart while socialism presents no viable alternative, and when the world seems powerless to avert global warming and other ecological catastrophes, the extinction of our species seems for the first time possible, even if we hope not probable. The mood is dark, and will remain so for a long time. Just as earlier generations were drawn not only to Weber’s luminescent brilliance but also to the dark shadows in his portrayal of a spirit-stifling rationalization, so may future generations be both inspired by Bellah’s conceptual brilliance and strangely attracted to his darker thoughts about the fatal flaws in our modernity.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
—Steven Weinberg

When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied, “Deep desire to know everything: what the universe is and where we are in it.” I don’t deny that I said it—it’s just that I would have thought I would have given a more pedestrian reply, because I am a sociologist, with a Ph.D. in my discipline and some 40 years experience as a professor at Harvard and Berkeley. And I am quite aware that early in the last century Max Weber, in a famous 1918 talk called “Science as a Vocation,” warned that “science has entered a phase of specialization previously unknown and this will forever remain the case.” It does seem that he didn’t apply this dictum to himself, but he was talking about the future when huge projects like his own would no longer be possible. So what is this “deep desire to know everything” in a world of super-specialization? When I look at books like Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. and Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, recent books that might seem parallel to my own new book, I can only say Weber was right—these books should not have been written, or, to be charitable, they may be good journalism but they are not serious contributions to understanding.

Weber was certainly right that we are in a world of specialization, and dangerously close to the point where specialized work is only intelligible to other specialists. A few years ago a study found that over half of sociology professors couldn’t understand many articles in the ASR or the AJS. Are we living in a world of ever increasing knowledge and ever declining meaning? In the end all that specialized knowledge has to be put together again if it is to be of use. Yet, as I have suggested many of the books that purport to give the big picture are shockingly shallow, based on tertiary sources that only repeat tired clichés or on novel claims that have not been adequately evaluated. We have an enormous “external memory,” as Merlin Donald calls it. It is potentially part of our very selves if we know how to access it. But therein lies our problem.

I’m sure there will be some who will gladly throw my book on the same heap as those I have criticized, but I will try to show a third way, a way that could possibly overcome the split between knowledge and meaning. This way would be to take Weber seriously about specialization but to follow him in not giving up the search for the big picture. What that means is to try to learn a lot about quite a few things. We have more information available about biological and cultural evolution than anyone has ever had before. We have resources to access that knowledge, but it cannot be done quickly or on the cheap. The resources we now have, and I very much mean the web but also e-mail, and books, ever new books, allow us to become quasi-specialists in at least several fields.

It is now possible not only to find out a lot about many areas, but to find out if the real specialists  think you are crazy or not. Some of these are people in the academic world one happens to know—for example the greatest specialist on Shang China in the world, David Keightley, Professor of Chinese history at Berkeley and an old friend, went over my section on Shang China with a fine-toothed comb and saved me from serious mistakes. I had read Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species when it first came out in 1997 and had been very impressed by it, but when I realized over 10 years later that he actually teaches at Berkeley I went to hear him lecture and got acquainted. He and his group were especially helpful in reading my chapter on religion and evolution, giving me some advice, but telling me I was on the right track.

But when it is a field where you know no congenial specialist, you can make friends on the web. Since I wanted to situate religious evolution in the deep biological past I had to learn a lot of biology—rather late in life to say the least. Stephen Jay Gould’s enormous The Structure of Evolutionary Theory of 2002 was a marvelous introduction to many things for me, but Gould was already dead by the time I got to his book. It turned out that animal play was going to be quite important in my argument and the greatest specialist on that subject, Gordon Burghardt, whose splendid book The Genesis of Animal Play would be invaluable to me, is alive and well at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I have never met him in person but to this day we have a continuing e-mail friendship and, as I note in Chapter 2, Religion and Evolution, he made many suggestions to me about what I wanted to say about play. Equally important for my whole argument is the evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald, whom I have met but who has been especially helpful with e-mail comments. For early Greece Ian Morris, the historian and archaeologist of ancient Greece, but also the author of the stunning and breathtakingly ambitious new book, Why the West Rules—For Now, gave me several pages of single-spaced comments on my chapter on ancient Greece, and since he is at Stanford we did meet for coffee once when he was in Berkeley. Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist at Harvard and a great historian of early India was equally helpful with many pages of comments on my ancient India chapter, where of all the four axial cases I had most to learn, but we have never met in person.

Of course there are people who will turn you down—I have had my share. But what is more surprising is how many busy, productive scholars will help, especially if your questions indicate that you have already prepared yourself in the field. Becoming a quasi-specialist in several fields takes time, but becoming a super-specialist in one field also takes a lot of time. And what are all those juicy monographs waiting for if no one is going to take them seriously enough to show their theoretical and comparative importance? I have 12 case studies in my book, several of the axial age chapters being long enough to be small books in themselves, but I have one case of tribal religion, the Kalapalo of the Amazon Basin, about which there exist exactly two books of only one anthropologist, Ellen Basso of the University of Arizona. I know as much as anyone knows about the Kalapalo, except for Ellen Basso and the members of the tribe itself. But even for my other two tribal cases, the Australian Aborigines (though I did focus on a Central Australian group, the Walbiri), and the Navajo, there are thousands of publications.

So from early on in my book I had to develop strategies that would give me more than superficial knowledge without taking over the rest of my life. Obviously you have to use the best of the most recent books, and if possible, as in the case of the Navajo, consult specialists (and I started out studying the Navajo for my undergraduate honors thesis, Apache Kinship Systems, over 60 years ago). Without any guidance the amount of material available on any one case is overwhelming. Even finding the best recent secondary works often requires help or maybe luck and you also need to look at the classic secondary works. And you can’t just rely on secondary work where good translations are available as they usually are for most cases (Shang China being a notable exception). There you have to find out which are the most reliable, also not an easy task. It is claimed that the Daodejing is the most translated book in the world, but 99% of those translations are worthless. You need to find the reliable ones. When working on ancient China I regularly used five translations of the Confucian Analects because they had different virtues. It also helps to know enough Chinese to check key terms in the translations against the Chinese original. I don’t mean to discourage scholars from pursuing similar studies; I’m just trying to describe what is involved in serious comparative work.

But of course, if you are a sociologist, you are doing more than describing fascinating cases, though you have to do a lot of that as Weber and Durkheim already showed us; you have to have a theory, maybe a multi-stranded theory, since so much is going on in each case and there is no simple one fits all formula. Before discussing my theoretical resources let me give you another example of the kind of work I did in my new book: one of the finest books ever written by an American sociologist is Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies, a book even longer than mine. And Collins is not just talking about Classical Greek and modern European philosophy—he includes Islamic, Indian, Chinese and even Japanese philosophy. I may think he is sometimes wrong but I never think he is stupid. How he read so much while carrying a full teaching load staggers me. I had to retire to write my book, even though retirement is not so retired as you might think. And Collins’ approach is theoretical all the way through. He uses his micro theory of interaction ritual chains amazingly well to understand the macro development of philosophy in a variety of very different traditions. I might have added Collins’s interaction ritual chains to my theoretical took kit, but I have to admit that I didn’t read every last word of this great book until after I had finished my own.

So let me just list some of my theoretical frameworks and address them as thoroughly as I can here.

I start with Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion in his “Religion as a Cultural System,” which I should give in my abbreviated version to clarify what I mean and don’t mean by religion: “Religion is a system of symbols which, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.”  I should point out that neither Cliff nor I use the terms gods or God. What Geertz meant by a cultural system is very dependent on his reading of Alfred Schutz, particularly his paper on multiple realities or multiple worlds, terms which Schutz took from William James. Besides what Schutz called the paramount reality, the world of daily life, what Weber called “the everyday,” Schutz distinguished the world of science, the world of religion, and the world of art.

After describing what kind of multiple reality religion is, I wanted to look at the major forms of religious representation, the ways in which people engage in religious action and religious thought. Here I turned to the field of child development, not to look at the ways in which children become religious, though some have worked on that, but to look at the way infants and then children acquire the various capacities to relate to the world. Here was another big field to master, but one in which I have long been interested—especially the work of Jerome Bruner, one of my teachers in graduate school, who is the most important cultural psychologist still living and whose categories for the cognitive development of the child turned out to be remarkably relevant for my purposes. Bruner, himself adapting ideas from Piaget, sees the child as moving from enactive to symbolic to conceptual representations. I prefaced these with the idea of unitive events rooted in the original unity of mother and child but emerging later as religious experiences, usefully described by Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley’s psychology department in her recent book The Philosophical Baby. So Piaget, Bruner, and Gopnik were my anchors but I looked at a lot of other things as well, particularly the work that links cognitive development in human children with comparable development in the great apes and other mammals.

The major stages of ontogeny turn out to parallel the major stages of phylogeny as described by Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Donald prefaces his three stages by referring to episodic culture which we share with other higher mammals and that I see as analogous to unitive events in ontogeny.

I should note that in both Bruner and Donald stages are never left behind, but are reconfigured in new contexts when subsequent stages emerge, leading to my general rule that “nothing is ever lost,” by which I don’t mean cultural content which is all too easily lost (most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for example) but the cultural capacities themselves, which never lose their essential and indispensible nature. Donald’s three stages are mimetic, mythic, and theoretic, paralleling Bruner’s enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

I want to describe what Merlin Donald means by mimetic culture because it makes intelligible what happened during a long period of human evolution, most likely the period between the appearance of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens, during the last two or three hundred thousand years. Mimetic culture involves a kind of bodily communication more elaborate than anything comparable among the other great apes, lacking language but probably involving spoken or sung communication, what some evolutionary musicologists call musilanguage. Mimetic communication almost certainly led to ritual, though as yet without myth, which requires language capacities that were lacking.

In modeling the society itself as well as its constituent roles, mimetic culture provided the necessary resources for moving beyond the rather anarchic chimpanzee band to a larger group capable of controlling in-group aggression such that pair bonding and same-sex solidarity in various contexts could result. In-group solidarity did not mean these mimetic-culture based societies were peaceful. There is every reason to believe that they were not, that there was endemic conflict between groups and probably in-group aggression was only relatively successfully controlled.

The limitations of mimetic culture are evident. Donald writes:

Mimesis is thus a much more limited form of representation than symbolic language; it is slow moving, ambiguous, and very restricted in its subject matter. Episodic event registration continues to serve as the raw material of higher cognition in mimetic culture, but rather than serving as the peak of the cognitive hierarchy, it performs a subsidiary role. The highest level of processing in the mimetically skilled brain is no longer the analysis and breakdown of perceptual events; it is the modeling of these events in self-initiated motor acts. The consequence, on a larger scale, was a culture that could model its episodic predecessors.

It is well to remember that we humans are never very far from basic mammalian episodic consciousness, the awareness of the event we are in. Mimetic culture is an event about an event. Narrative, which is at the heart of linguistic culture is basically an account of a string of events, organized hierarchically into larger event units. But the moment when our predecessors first stepped outside episodic consciousness, looked at it and what was before, around, and would be after it, was a historic moment of the highest possible importance. Other higher mammals, although they are social, are more tightly locked each in their own consciousness. They are, as Donald says, almost solipsists. But humans, once mimetic culture had evolved, could participate in—could share—the contents of other minds. We could learn, be taught, and did not have to discover almost everything for ourselves. Mimetic culture was limited and conservative; it lacked the potential for explosive growth that language would make possible. But it was the indispensable step without which language would never have evolved.

Further, mimesis is, though in many respects less efficient than language, indispensable in its own sphere. As Donald writes, mimesis “serves different functions and is still far more efficient than language in diffusing certain kinds of knowledge; for instance, it is still supreme in the realm of modeling social roles, communicating emotions, and transmitting rudimentary skills.”  Maybe not just rudimentary skills, for mimesis is basic for the teaching of quite complex skills in such fields as athletics, dance, and possibly other arts. Finally mimesis remains indispensable in “the collective modeling and, hence, the structuring” of human society itself. That is what ritual does, and if Randall Collins is right, it is micro-ritual moments that make our lives bearable whenever we interact with others.

So far I have been talking mainly about where religion came from so I must say a little about where it was going. Where it was going was toward language, what Donald calls mythic culture, and beyond that theory, though it would take a long time to get there. But remember we are still in the world of egalitarian foragers. Most of my book deals with hierarchical class societies, yet they all derive from egalitarian forager societies. That’s where it all begins and that is where our most basic capacities were formed.

We are so fascinated with ourselves as language users that we think discovering the origin of language is the key to understanding human evolution. It is one of the great virtues of Merlin Donald’s work that he takes culture—the ability to escape our solipsism and connect with a larger shared consciousness—as the key to what makes us unique. It is in this context that his idea that language “piggybacks” on culture makes sense. Language acquisition in the individual is social: even if there were such a thing as a language module, which neither Donald nor I for a minute believe, it could only become operative in a socially provided linguistic context. Isolated children do not learn spontaneously to speak. Jerome Bruner, as Donald reminds us, has shown convincingly that language learning requires an external support system, a linguistic milieu, to be effective. The question is, what was the “external support system” that made language possible in the first place? My answer would be ritual, which provides the security, intensity, and redundancy without which language would not emerge. Donald writes:

Linguistic universals spring from the context in which real-world languages are learned and, more important, in which they evolved. Like any other set of conventions, linguistic conventions are shaped by the situations in which they originated. They have mimetic origins. Thus, once we change our paradigm, the features of universal grammar emerge smoothly from a close analysis of gesture, mime, and imitative behavior. The “language instinct” exists, but it is a domain-general instinct for mimesis and collectivity, impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification.

But why this drive toward conceptual clarification? Donald suggests that there was a need for a more coherent representation of the world than was possible through mimesis. “Therefore,” he writes, “the possibility must be entertained that the primary human adaptation was not language qua language but rather integrative, initially mythical, thought. Modern humans developed language in response to pressure to improve their conceptual apparatus, not vice versa.”  Myth is a profoundly ambiguous word, so it would be well to be clear what Donald means by it:

[M]ythical thought, in our terms, might be regarded as a unified, collectively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors. The mind has expanded its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic reconstruction of episodes, to a comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe. Causal explanation, prediction, control—myth constitutes an attempt at all three, and every aspect of life is permeated by myth.

It is because of, in a sense, the primacy of myth over language that Donald calls the stage after mimetic culture, mythic culture.

Donald, in emphasizing the cognitive role of myth, approaches the view of Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist who, more than any other, has emphasized the intellectual function of myth. Levi-Strauss, nonetheless, does not think of myth as a form of science, or a primitive precursor of it, but as having a different cognitive function:

To say that a way of thinking [myth] is disinterested and that it is an intellectual way of thinking does not mean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking. . . It remains different because its aim is to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universe—and not only a general but a total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinking which must imply that if you don’t understand everything, you can’t explain anything.

That is a view of myth that would indeed see it as “impelled by a deep drive for conceptual clarification.”  So Aristotle was not wrong when he wrote the first sentence of his Metaphysics: “All humans by nature desire to know.”  And what did Aristotle want to know? Everything. But for him it wasn’t myth but theory that would get us there, and we can see how well we are doing with that right now by looking at the institution in which most readers of this blog are presently situated:  the university.

Most academic discussions in political science and international relations presuppose a fixed definition of the secular and the religious and proceed from there. Most realist, liberal, English school, feminist, and historical-materialist approaches treat religion as either private by prior assumption or a cultural relic to be handled by anthropologists. Even constructivists, known for their attention to historical contingency and social identity, have paid scant attention to the politics of secularism and religion, focusing instead on the interaction of preexisting state units to explain how international norms influence state interests and identity or looking at the social construction of states and the state system with religion left out of the picture.

This disciplinary convention fixes in advance key definitions and terms of inquiry, with some of the most vital aspects of contemporary world politics systematically excluded from consideration. The presumption that religion has been privatized and is no longer operative in modern politics or that its influence can be neatly encapsulated in anthropological studies of a particular religious tradition and its external influence on politics has led scholars of international relations to miss or misconstrue some of the most significant political developments of our time. This narrow vision is in part attributable to a rigid and dehistoricized secular/religious binary that prestructures the field of academic political science and international relations. This academic practice, in turn, mirrors and reinforces particular kinds of limits on political practice, as suggested by the Egyptian example discussed earlier. Expressed and reproduced through both forms of practice, this binary polices the borders of what counts as politics and what counts as religion and how they relate to each other. It has played a critical role in the global production of knowledge. As Alasdair MacIntyre has observed of the fluid relation between theory and practice, “there ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action.”

To be clear, I do not want to suggest that the categories of the secular and the religious fluctuate so wildly that they lack any analytical, political, or metaphysical salience, depending on one’s perspective, but, rather, that from the perspective of deep pluralism that underlies my argument, these categories cannot be taken for granted in their fixity. Failing to account for the power and limitations of the category of the secular and its shifting and contested relation not only to religion but to other political phenomena cast in opposition to it risks imposing a simplistic and distorted template on world politics. A rigid secular/religious divide stabilizes particular, historically contingent, and often hegemonic definitions of both politics and religion. This makes life easier for social scientists looking for answers in the short run but is costly in a world in which the way these categories come to be defined, what they come to represent and not represent, is critical to understanding how they operate politically.

At the same time, the category of religion is no more obvious than the category of the secular. Reconsidering the fixity of the secular/religious binary opens new epistemological spaces for the identification of forms and locations of politics that fall off the radar screen of conventional secular rationalist approaches to politics and conventional religious approaches to politics. It makes room for alternative instantiations of the secular/religious divide to work their way into political theory and practice, as is occurring today in Turkey and is discussed below.

A second qualification is that not all social scientists are cut from a single mold, and the degree to which any individual, institution, party, state, or international organization unthinkingly reproduces any particular secular/religious binary varies. It would be inaccurate to suggest that everyone approaches these questions in the same way. Yet particular varieties of secularism, like varieties of religion, have had an organizing influence on the ways in which most Europeans and Americans define and relate to basic categorizations involving religion and politics. These categorizations also change over time, as Charles Taylor argues in chapter 1 of this book, with the secular coming to refer in our time to that pertaining to a self-sufficient immanent sphere. The practices, institutions, and ways of being designated as secular sustain and shape the contours of public life and the modern organization of social-scientific knowledge. These traditions do not merely reflect social reality; they help to construct it. They embody attitudes, sensibilities, and habits that facilitate closure and agreement around cultural, political, and legal settlements of the separation of church and state, the definition of religion, and what constitutes normal politics. There is in many contexts an identifiable secular “pattern of political rule,” helping to generate and sustain the category of religion and setting preconditions for particular kinds of academic and political practice.

The unthinking adoption of a rigid secular/religious binary in the social sciences has had at least three consequences for the study of world politics. First, social scientists are encouraged to define research questions, select methods, and present results that fall squarely into the “secular” half of the binary, understood as the domain of rational humanism. They are taught to avoid religion, the domain of the supernatural, superstitious, otherworldly, metaphysical, and so forth. This encourages social scientists to approach religion either not at all or as a particular, emotive (as opposed to secular, rational, and universal) dimension of politics alongside others such as gender, caste, and (at times) nation. The secular/religious binary operates such that not to be secular is to be emotional, irrational, unpredictable, and behind the march of progress. Quietly at work here is the notion that only the West, with its narrative of secularization, has found its way out of the woods, while other civilizations continue to cast about in a desperate search to answer the questions that the West resolved centuries ago. Lodged within this narrative is the assumption that the secular is the natural domain of rational self-interest and universalist ethics. The secular thus comes to stand not only in an oppositional relation to religion but also as the natural counterpart to other dimensions of politics that do not fit comfortably within the categories of either rational self-interest or universalist ethics.

This suggests that the secular is a more powerful and capacious category than one might assume when it is taken to stand only in contradistinction to the religious. Loosening the hold of a fixed secular/religious binary opens up a broader field of inquiry into modern formations of authority than may be apparent at the outset. The secular grounds and secures a place for the good, rational, and universal in Western moral order, which is then opposed to series of nonrational or irrational particularisms, aberrations, or variations. Religion often, though not always, appears as one of these particularisms. It is not the only candidate: institutions and identities associated with (ethnic as opposed to civic) nationalism, race, caste, and gender all have been cast in an oppositional relation to secular rational self-interest and/or universalist ethics. This is the sense in which it is possible to glimpse the capacious power of the category of the secular above and beyond its extraordinary capacity to define and delimit the religious. I return to this below.

A second consequence of the naturalization of the secular/religious binary is that the study of religion and politics tends to focus not on secularism in relation to religion or the other categories discussed above (the binary has effectively segregated these categories) but on predefined religious traditions taken as independent objects of inquiry and the degree to which they infiltrate or influence politics. This division of labor divides inquiry into mainstream (secular) studies on the one hand and studies of religion or religion and politics on the other. A fixed understanding of religion in relation to the secular supports an understanding of the secular as that which is associated with normal, rational politics. Religion becomes a repository for a range of nonrational and nonuniversal dimensions of politics that fall outside the range of “normal” politics, including belief, culture, tradition, mood, and emotion.

A third consequence of the stabilization of the binary is that a particular (often monotheistic) definition of religion is often taken as the norm. This definition constructs an object of study and defines religious actors and institutions according to a particular set of parameters. These limitations press those trained in the traditions of European and American international-relations scholarship to read the world in a particular way, with an emphasis on European religious history and experience, and to misconstrue or miss entirely a whole spectrum of political actors, histories, and processes. Perhaps most significant among these are the intense political struggles, historical contingencies, religious ambivalences, and philosophical uncertainties surrounding the practices associated with and legitimized by claims to the secular itself.

The study of religion, secularism, and international affairs requires a suspension of (dis)belief to address these limitations and move toward new paradigms for the study of global politics. It requires suspending disbelief in the particularity of the secular (or suspending one’s belief in the universalizing potential of the secularization narrative, depending on how you look at it) and approaching the secular/religious binary not as fixed but as shifting, evolving, and elusive. This suspension of (dis)belief can be uncomfortable for those socialized in Euro-American secularisms, which are kept afloat by a high degree of certainty surrounding the stability of these categories. But I hope to show that it is worth the effort. Suspending the assumption that any secular/religious binary is fixed and universal and approaching it as an unstable, historically contingent construct that is capable of sustaining a broad discursive field that goes beyond the maintenance of a distinction between the secular and the religious allows the ground that supports this distinction to shift in intellectually fruitful directions.

And the ground is shifting. Developments in late-modern international relations, such as increasing pluralization within societies, rising global interdependence, the retreat of Christendom, the questioning of the universality of the Enlightenment, and a rise in religiously inspired forms of collective political identification, demand a destabilization of the fundamental terms and binaries (secular rational versus religious irrational, philosophical versus theological, reason versus faith) that have structured inquiry on this subject for decades. Understanding the politics of secularism requires this suspension of (dis)belief. Like their counterparts in philosophy and political theory, international relations theorists need to hone their capacity to pose research questions that do not presuppose fixed definitions of these terms or relations between them. What claims to the secular and the religious signify in different circumstances and what political effects these claims have in various settings are precisely what needs to be explored.

The expectation that Islamic studies scholars were prepared to “cover” the Islamic tradition and speak to its beliefs and practices on a normative, global basis was stressful for many of us. The idea that we could speak with authority about the practices of 1.4 billion people who speak dozens of languages and have inhabited the planet for the last 1400 years is absurd, of course. Like other academics, Islamic studies scholars are trained in certain fields of knowledge; in the best of programs, they are trained to be exceedingly careful about claiming too much. The pressures to become the academic voice of Islam both on campus and in the media frequently led scholars to abandon caution. We reached for our copies of the Encyclopedia of Islam and sent out queries, sometimes quite urgently, to the AAR Study of Islam listserv. “What does Islam say about x?” was the way questions were often framed. We were not allowed to answer, “It depends.” What was generally desired, it seems, was a fatwa, an authoritative ruling on what the Qur’an, the Sunna, and the ulama say about “x,” not a lecture on how the historical practices of real people refuse easy generalization.

The pressure to come up with one-liners and sound-bites was particularly acute when Islamic studies scholars were asked or permitted to participate in media outlets. Here the line between professor of Islamic studies and practitioner of Islam was often blurred, as Muslim professors offered answers that reflected, not only their considerable knowledge of the topic, but also their personal opinion or practice of Islam. Not all of them did so, of course, but autobiography was one strategy for dealing with questions about Islam’s position on x or y. At the least, these scholars could answer questions about what Islam says about love, war, life, and death by giving their own views as Muslims. It was as good as any other way of trying to answer impossible questions. But explaining one’s personal beliefs and practices was not a viable strategy for non-Muslims. In both cases, Muslim and non-Muslim scholars were forced to develop strategies, or simply to improvise, to deal with questions about veils, terrorism, churches in Saudi Arabia, Ibn Taymiyya, and a whole host of topics that were bubbling up, especially among anti-Muslim hate groups and in online forums.

My opportunity to participate in national debates over these questions came with the Ground Zero mosque controversy in the summer and fall of 2010. This controversy took the spotlight away from Islam abroad and shone it on Muslim Americans. Like many other Americans, I was angered by the intolerant tone of the debate.  I was especially maddened by the idea that building a Muslim community center near Ground Zero would be insensitive to the hallowed ground of the 9/11 attacks. I didn’t like the conflation of the 9/11 hijackers with the Muslims of lower Manhattan and one of their leaders, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who happened to be the single most prominent proponent of interfaith dialogue in New York City. I decided I had to do something.

So, I wrote an op-ed.

Rather than discuss issues of freedom of religion or the politics of contemporary Islamophobia, I wanted to stress the idea that Muslims have lived and worshiped in Lower Manhattan since the Dutch first arrived in the New World. I don’t know, in the end, if shedding light on Muslim contributions to the history of the United States helps to reduce contemporary prejudice against Muslim Americans or Muslims more generally; but if I am to participate in public scholarship, this is one area in which I can do so with intellectual integrity. Even if history is boring to a lot of folks—as some people have gingerly admitted in response to my speeches about Muslim-American history—I also know that this is a novel approach to Islam in America, and I still get a lot of “I didn’t know thats,” “wows,” and “goshes” when I outline the imprint of Muslims on the thirteen colonies and the United States in both public and academic forums.

The editorial that I penned included descriptions of the Muslim slaves who lived and worked either on or just blocks away from the Ground Zero site when New York was still New Amsterdam. It mentioned the escape of Muslim slave Mahommah Baquaqua from a Brazilian ship on Manhattan’s docks. It reminded New Yorkers of the Arab-American Muslims who lived in the very neighborhood where the twin towers were eventually built. I sent it to a few papers and heard back from The New York Daily News—to be sure, not The New York Times, but still, a New York daily with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. The editor didn’t think he could run it, but he did ask if I had references for all of my claims. Yes, I told him, I did, and I sent him a very long list of peer-reviewed references. The take-home line of the piece was, “It may be a strange, even perverse fact of history, but Islam in New York began on or near Ground Zero.”

The first draft that I sent to the Daily News was informational. It largely avoided direct criticism of the anti-Muslim activists who opposed the building of the community center. My goal was to make it impossible to talk about Muslims as new or foreign, thinking, perhaps, that if Americans thought of Muslims as part of their shared past, they would be less inclined to perceive them as threatening. But my editor encouraged me to take a stronger stand and to criticize the Islamophobia that animated much of the opposition to the community center.

Thus, my third draft used the word “troubling” to describe how politicians had exploited the pain of 9/11 victims to advance their own anti-Muslim agendas. I even used the word “lie” to label the argument that the community center would be a “9/11 victory mosque.” But this still was not enough for the editor, who added the following lines himself: “Comments by [Gubernatorial candidate Rick] Lazio and [Sarah] Palin are mere drops in an ocean of right-wing vitriol over this issue.” And: “Rhetoric that treats Muslim Americans like hostile foreigners fundamentally—and intentionally—skews the story of New York and its Muslim community.”

My reaction to these edits was, “Yes, exactly! But . . . I didn’t know that I was allowed to write that way.” My first draft, which attempted to relate the long history of Muslims in Manhattan as an antidote to Islamophobia, assumed that the reader would understand my larger purpose. I was writing history without explaining why I thought that history was so urgent to expose, and I had forgotten that I was writing for an editorial page. It was a form of self-censorship. In order to find a publisher, I had unconsciously written in the dispassionate tone of the so-called objective academic, trying to avoid the expression of my own feelings. I never expected that an editor for The New York Daily News would help me find my voice, but he did, and he made the op-ed better as a result.

But if working with the Daily News helped me to find my voice, my next experience with a major media outlet, The Washington Post, was a different story. In this case, I lost my voice, or at least a part of it. The Post contacted me to become a one-time contributor to a regular feature of the “Sunday Outlook” section called “Five Myths.” They wanted me to identify and then correct five myths about mosques in the United States. I pointed out that religious studies scholars use the word myth to mean more than misconception, but that was just the name of the feature, they said. I accepted their offer and submitted the five myths that I wanted to correct.

One was that “all Muslims pray in mosques.” I hoped to point out that Muslims also pray in private homes, Sufi lodges, Shi‘a imambargahs, Isma‘ili jamatkhanas, and Nation of Islam temples. There was too much focus on mosques, I thought, and not enough on other Muslim-American sacred spaces. But this suggestion was rejected on the grounds that it was “interesting, but maybe not worth devoting a full myth to.” In its place, a new myth was suggested by the editors: “Mosques seek to spread shari‘a law in the United States.” One editor wrote that “this one has been coming up so much in conversation . . . in particular, people have been raising the status of women under shari‘a law.” I went to work correcting the five myths—in 1200 words or less.

Following the scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl, I responded to the myth about shari‘a by writing that shari‘a is an ideal, that it is not codified, and that the human attempt to realize this ideal is called “fiqh,” or jurisprudence. I said that most contemporary mosques don’t actually teach the shari‘a because it is too dry, too pedantic, too arcane. I stressed that mosques devote their weekend classes instead to discussions of the Qur’an and the Sunna and how they apply to everyday life.

But my answer had sidestepped the question. In retrospect I realized that I was trying to respond to the negative feelings of Americans toward shari‘a by downplaying its importance in American mosques. I didn’t want to leave people with the idea that lots of Muslims were busy learning when and how to take the law into their own hands and apply hudud penalties, such as the stoning of adulterers. Working on a deadline and with space for two paragraphs or so, perhaps this was the best I could come up with. I was much more pleased with the other parts of the piece, but I had to move on.

In any case, it did not seem to hurt the piece’s reception. Whereas the Daily News op-ed about the history of Muslims in Manhattan received about 500 likes on Facebook and a few dozen comments, this piece received 4000 likes on Facebook and 523 comments. It was syndicated in papers around the world, and more people read this short piece than anything else I have ever written. It led to two subsequent interviews on NPR’s Weekend Edition and Tell Me More with Michel Martin; a harrowing call-in to a show on a Pittsburg Fox radio affiliate (during which my wife almost took the phone away from me to tell off some callers); several speaking engagements; some severe criticism by Stop Islamization of America leader and professional Islamophobe Robert Spencer; and some very angry emails. I got a lot of compliments, too. All of this attention and feedback made me nervous, excited, and scared.

I also received an email from a colleague who wanted to quibble about my claims regarding the teaching of shari‘a in American mosques. Yes, he said, I was technically right that the whole shari‘a is not taught in mosques. That would be impossible. But some of it is, he said. That’s how Muslims know when and how to pray, how to observe Muslim holidays, how much money to give to charity, etc.

He was right. My answer hadn’t exactly been wrong, but my response to the question was not sufficient. In addition, it did not respond explicitly to the public’s biggest fears, for instance, about the cutting off of hands and stoning. When a Middle East studies newsletter asked for permission to reprint the piece, I kept some of my original answer but added the following: “most mosques in the United States teach only those parts of the shari‘a having to do with religious rituals and obligations. They do not teach the part of the shari‘a having to do with criminal law.” And further: “Few Muslim Americans advocate a shari‘a-based theocracy. Instead, most Muslim Americans insist that democracy is the most Islamic system of governance in the world today.”

During the brief course of my five minutes of high-profile public scholarship I came to realize just how difficult such work is. Many of the topics on which I was queried and the ways that I could write about them were already determined in such a way that I felt like I was making an appearance in a largely pre-written script. Responding to the public’s misconceptions about Islam is part of what we do.  But if we cannot question the assumptions on which questions are posed, we cease to be critics. We must retain the ability to ask questions as well as to answer them. The problem with my Washington Post piece was that I did not explicitly name the prejudice that was animating the question about the shari‘a in the first place. As recent legislation passed in Oklahoma demonstrates, there is a special animus on the part of millions of Americans toward shari‘a, which is viewed, like Islam more generally, as particularly dangerous.

As I reflect on my moment of high-profile public scholarship, and on teaching religion more generally, I want to conclude with two further responses to the “myth” that “mosques seek to spread shari‘a law.” First, perhaps my response to the myth should have been: Yeah, but so what? Most American religious organizations seek to educate others about their ethics and rituals, and that is exactly what most of the shari‘a taught in American mosques is all about. Second, most Muslim Americans are not “spreading” shari‘a; they are trying to figure out how to apply it to their own lives.

The final point I should have made is that public discussions about shari‘a and other aspects of Islam are inevitably influenced by and reflect anxieties about the nation’s war-making in Muslim lands. A supermajority of the American public thinks that Islam is more violent than any other religion. As I wrote the original version of this piece, which I delivered as a talk at a recent meeting of the Midwest AAR, Congressman Peter King was holding hearings on what he calls the “radicalization” of the Muslim-American community, demonstrating that it is far easier to project blame onto either the Muslim foreigner abroad or the Muslim other in our midst than it is to acknowledge and reflect on American culpability for the deaths of thousands.

To be sure, foreign Muslims who resist U.S. dominance in their own countries utilize their religious traditions in so doing. But analyzing this religious violence in isolation from U.S. foreign policy, economic dominance, and military interventionism renders us mute as critics of our own societies and serves—however inadvertently—to normalize the secular nation-state’s monopoly on legitimate violence. There is a clash of interests between the U.S. and those whose lives it seeks to shape, often in its own image. But this story does not begin in Mecca; it begins in Washington. Middle Easterners, including Osama bin Laden, were not fantasizing when they saw the U.S. establish military bases in the Gulf region nor when it restored the Kuwaiti amirate to power in 1991, when it intervened on behalf of both the Iraqis and Iranians in the Iraq-Iran war, when it shelled Lebanon in the 1980s, and the list goes on. This is not primarily a story about religious fanaticism but a story about secular, imperial power.

It may be tempting for religious studies scholars to take advantage of this historical moment by deploying one-dimensional explanations of religion to justify our own usefulness to the academy and to the nation. But even if we have to admit our ignorance, or just say that it’s complicated, it is better to resist further propagating or reinforcing simplistic conceptions of Islam, or of religion in general. Instead, we should spend more time exposing the political contexts in which popular understandings of Islam and religion more broadly are generated, disseminated, and used. And if we must produce a sound-bite about Islam’s role in making violence for the media, then let it be this: “Islam is not the cause of violence, but it does offer one means of resistance to U.S. political, military, and economic domination in Muslim lands.”

The question matters because historically liberal arts colleges have liked to think of themselves as places where students can ask the big questions (hereafter BQs): “What is the meaning of my life?” “How do I understand death?” “Does evil exist?” “What are my obligations to my neighbor, my country, my world?” And finally, “How might my education—in whatever field I study—help me assimilate these questions?” The authors were struck, they report, by how discussions of the secular re-invigorated these BQs, and one in particular: what is an education for, anyway?

Kahn and his co-investigators come out in favor of a sensible distinction between secular and secularist. To be a secularist is to want to rid a pedagogical space of religious commitments; to be secular is, to quote Jeffrey Stout, to recognize a condition in which participants cannot “take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are.” This is the condition that Charles Taylor refers to as “fragilization,” and it is quite close to his general account, in A Secular Age, of the secular as our often implicit knowledge that, under the shared conditions of modernity, we often bump into people whom we respect and yet who do not share our own deepest commitments. (Whether there was ever a time when we could assume that our interlocutors were making the “same religious assumptions” we were is of course another question.)

If “the secular” in this sense is indeed the condition of our intellectual life together, what should we do about it? How can we thin the ranks of narrowly ideological secularists and develop more epistemically-generous “seculars”? Here is the beginning of an answer: “When the authority of knowledge is less important than the things that can be done with knowledge,” the authors write, “the secular becomes a discussion between religious and non-religious citizens who are acutely aware that the demands of secularized democratic life require an extraordinary balance between cherishing one’s own convictions and holding to the awareness that these same cherished convictions are contestable and that they may at times act as a bludgeon against other democratic citizens.”

Call me naive, but this just looks like good pedagogy to me. Most of us who teach for a living lay down a few ground rules—basically: talk, but also listen, and don’t be an asshole—and then try to model for our students the reflexivity that we all internalized somewhere along the way in our own educations. We try to get them to articulate not just what they think, but why they think it. What does their knowledge reveal, and what does it obscure? Are there other possibilities? If there are, do they matter? If the other fellow is right, or even just different and interesting, then what? Teaching students to take these questions to heart is our job. Does anybody really subscribe to the notion that teaching should “arrogat[e] authoritative forms of knowledge”? I doubt it. Of course, if the topic is quantum mechanics, then there are right answers and wrong answers, and it’s important to be able to spot the difference. If the topic is the history of science, by contrast, then the wrong answers might be as interesting as the right ones. In practice, this is not a very difficult distinction to keep track of.  So Kahn et. al.’s category of “secularist” here, like its supposed corollary “enlightenment reason,” seems something of a straw person.

In any case, Kahn and his colleagues discover a more subtle and interesting problem: “What appeared glaringly conspicuous to us is the lack, across academic fields, of adequate models and examples of constructive exchange between conflicting deep commitments.” Here, the theory/practice problem reasserts itself. Kahn and his colleagues channel William Connolly’s accounts of deep contestability, but it is easier to say that we should simultaneously cherish our convictions and acknowledge their contestability than it is to actually do it.

I think this is also what James K. A. Smith is after when he writes, over at his blog, that Kahn’s “model still refuses to think about education as formation. It’s willing to make room for a variety of “views” and “perspectives” to help students ask ‘the big questions’—giving them lots of options to consider.” But this is still quite different from the task of forming a person, a “thick task … that constitutes inculcation in a tradition, habituation to a particular vision of the good.”

Wittgensteinian “form of life” arguments of this sort have gotten a certain amount of traction in recent years, and for good reason. Smith, in a nice little twist, is in fact suggesting that his own unabashedly sectarian approach is truer to the secular ideal proffered by Connolly, Kahn, and Stout than is their own pluralism. Just asking the BQs, or even exploring them historically and culturally, isn’t enough: it still tends to flatten out into liberal tolerance. I think that Smith wants his students to be able to say: “well, yes, we understand that our view on this BQ is ‘contestable’ and we can even imagine how our view might look from somewhere else, but we’re arguing from a comprehensive vision of the good that, for a whole host of reasons, we’re pretty sure is right. That’s how we do things around here.”

Smith is picking up on one weakness of Connolly’s account in Why I Am Not a Secularist: it’s long on recommendations, but it doesn’t really provide a robust-enough account of the subjectivity required for putting those recommendations into practice. (For an account of Connolly’s shortcomings on this point, see my essay “After the Secular: The Subject of Romanticism.”) We could put the disagreement like this: Does multidimensional pluralism derive from a comprehensive vision of the good (Smith’s position)? Or can multidimensional pluralism itself be a comprehensive vision of the good (Connolly’s position)? And if it’s the latter, could the account of how we foster multidimensional pluralism be thickened enough to avoid the charge that it is reducible finally to some version of tolerance and anodyne respect for “difference”?

This matters for two reasons. First, most of us don’t teach at sectarian institutions, so we need an account that builds in competing definitions of the good at the ground level. And second, most of us also don’t teach at elite secular liberal arts colleges, so we need an account that “pluralizes” Kahn and his colleague’s somewhat rarified sense of what happens in the classroom. I want to address both of these needs by describing two pedagogies that derive from the romantic-era writers. (As I’ve suggested elsewhere on this site, the romantics offer remarkable resources for thinking through the problematics of the secular.) One I’ll call “Soul-Making,” and the other, “Careless Steps.”

Soul-making

The phrase comes from a famous passage in John Keats’s letters, this one written in 1819 to his brother and sister-in-law. It’s a long and rambling (and grammatically irregular) passage, but here is the gist:

Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making” Then you will find out the use of the world … Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. . . . how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? . . . I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—and yet I think I perceive it—that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible—I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! . . . —As various as the Lives of Men are–so various become their souls. . . .

Note, first, that this is a deliberately post-Christian vision: Keats calls the idea that “we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven” a “little circumscribe[d] straightened notion!” And note, second, that it assays something like a multidimensional pluralism: identities or souls “possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence.” But note, third, that Keats is also trying to figure out how that pluralism comes into existence. Multidimensional pluralism is not a fact of life, nor is difference to be celebrated simply for itself; Keats thinks that we begin merely as “intelligences,” sparks of potential. As such, we are not that interesting, and not really worth taking seriously. The whole point of the world is to take those intelligences and turn them into something; the world is a classroom, and its pedagogical method is to make us “feel and suffer” until we have become the souls that we would not otherwise be. There’s a bit of stoicism in there, but there’s also a commitment to transformation that draws its energy from (post-) Christianity. As a result, it cuts considerably deeper than, for example, Stout’s rather obvious acknowledgement that we cannot take for granted that our interlocutors share our religious presuppositions; at the same time, it begins to address, from a non-sectarian perspective, Smith’s focus on character formation. Soul-making is character formation, but uncoupled from the comprehensive theory of the good to which Smith wants to wed it.

Careless steps

At the good but underfunded and underappreciated state university where I teach, Kahn and his colleagues’ description of the undergraduate classroom as a place that “promote[s] education as a way for students to consider larger questions of meaning and value” seems an almost unattainable goal. My brightest students are, I am sure, as bright as theirs are. But, almost to a person, they are also out of time. Far too many of them work virtually full-time jobs, and they often take an overload of classes so that they can graduate in 3 years. Many live at home to save on expenses or to help care for younger siblings; commuting to campus in the New Jersey traffic, and squeezing their classes in between everything else they have to do, too often they arrive late, frazzled, happy just to get there and have most of the reading done. Larger questions of meaning and value? Sorry: they don’t have time for that stuff.

Really great teaching can overcome some of this general harriedness, some of the time. And like many, I have my moments. But it also seems to me that I’m combating forces over which I have little control: the obsessive marketing and branding of the academy, the casualization of academic labor, what Randy Martin calls the “financialization” of everyday life, and the juggernaut of economic neoliberalism: all these are pressures that transcend the classroom and the university, and they combine to make the BQs luxuries rather than necessities, the kind of thing that only a few students, on a few leafy campuses, have the privilege of debating. The rest of the world careens down a path increasingly dominated by outcomes and assessments: if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t count. (For my own further thoughts along these lines, see my essay “The Demands of the Day.”)

So while I wholeheartedly endorse Kahn et. al.’s call to put the BQs back at the center, this requires more than drawing a careful distinction between secularism and the secular.  Lately I’ve been thinking that my main job in the classroom is to create a space in which something unexpected can happen. I’m inspired by a project of the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in 1794 planned to leave England and start a radically egalitarian experiment in communal living in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. For this crazy scheme Coleridge coined the word “Pantisocracy,” or “all-governing society.” In a letter to his friend Robert Southey about his efforts to drum up support for the plan, Coleridge writes that he “preached Pantisocracy . . . with so much success that two great huge Fellows, of Butcher like appearance, danced about the room in enthusiastic agitations.” Coleridge linked Pantisocracy to bodily movement again in a modest poem written the same summer, in which America appears as a place

Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,

And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay

The Wizard Passions weave a holy Spell.

Both passages used verbal invention to link a political project with unscripted movement. The “careless steps” in the poem are, among other things, a reference to practices of land management in eighteenth-century England, whose picturesque enclosures, ditches, and hedges make it impossible to move freely across a landscape. Coleridge’s sense of Pantisocracy as a rhetorical exercise with radical possibilities, something to be preached, poeticized, and invented, makes it a pedagogical exercise that rewards straying, stepping out of line, moving in enchantment and agitation. Those “great huge fellows” dancing around the room are figures for the kind of political subjectivity that might, under the right conditions, come into being simply through the power of words.

What does this have to do with secularism? If Talal Asad is right and secularity is about many things other than “religion”—a point that Kahn and his colleagues don’t seem quite to have grasped—then branding, casualization, financialization, and neoliberalism are all ways in which secularism reshapes our experience of time and of embodiment. The “empty, homogenous” time of modernity that Benjamin described has now been filled to the brim: in a world of metrics and measures, no one ever has enough time; we are all too burdened with what Coleridge calls “care.” If we really want the BQs to come back in all their richness, then we may have to recapture a different, non-secular relationship to temporality. Coleridge’s pantisocracy project suggests that we begin by considering the possibilities of carelessness. And if a secular body is in some sense an inexperienced body unable to dance with “Wizard passions” because it can no longer hear the music, then a non-secular body might be one that has been re-tuned to such sensory possibilities. Who among us wouldn’t want our students to dance?

I assume that the students referred to are predominantly Christian. If that is the case, because American culture remains to a large extent Christian, in many tangible and intangible ways, and, since there are other institutions on campus in which students can gather to express and probe their confessional beliefs, I fail to see the great harm done to them if they feel they must keep their confessional identity out of the classroom, or, at the very least, that that identity needs to be channeled into a common language. It might in fact be a very good thing for Christian students to understand, à la Kierkegaard, that having a passionate commitment is not the same as being part of a mainstream or even of a minority, but requires honing the ability to resist cultural trends and to stand on one’s own. One might retort that they are young and impressionable and may not have that ability yet. But they are not blank slates, and they have already, to a large degree, been formed.

The problem as I see it is not that students in the liberal arts are somehow forbidden to argue their religious views but that, whether they are religious or secular, they do not get sufficient exposure to religious texts. These texts contain many strange and interesting things—often surprising to religious and unreligious students alike. They uncover possibilities of being human. But in order for these possibilities to emerge, they need to be approached in a secular spirit. That is, their specifically theological language needs to be translated into a conceptual language through which people can imagine a given possibility without a prior or subsequent adherence to it as the absolute truth. This act of translating is, in fact, what great philosophers of religion in every tradition have done. Pascal, for instance, manages to paint a picture of sin and grace in many Pensées without using these words, except in choice places. All he has to do is point to the infinite ways in which we are wretched. Only in a second movement does he explain this wretchedness as a consequence of original sin. Original sin becomes a possibility for understanding the human condition, one not necessitating adherence to dogma. Similarly, if one reads Franz Rosenzweig on Messianic hope, it ceases, in his language, to be “belief” and becomes an urge to insert one’s own activity into the flow of time in a way that brings about the transformation of the world. The problem for him becomes not believing or lack of believing but how one can do this without causing more harm than good. We who study these texts, students and teachers alike, need to find our own language when speaking about theirs. So the secular, the process of bringing into the times, and into a world that is not already divided along the religious/secular lines we know, has religious resonances. The commitment of the humanities, “nothing human is foreign to me,” should lead to a kind of transcendence of time and space. It is fleeting, but it is one way of making concrete the oneness of the world, which somewhere in our religious traditions remains a central hope.

This sounds awkwardly old-fashioned, and maybe even dangerously religious, I know. If it does, it might be because to be secular in the academy has come to mean looking through religious claims as if they were transparent, in order to reach underlying causes. The latest such explanation seems to be biology, but political and economic forces or psychological motivations will do just as well. This way of engaging with the documents also envisages one world, since these forces presumably operate on everyone without exception, but there is often an exception—an important exception, since the adherent of this view has seen through and presumably been freed of the illusions of the people depicted in the religious documents. It is this attitude of seeing through religion rather than taking religious claims as possibilities that, I assume, prompts the question “what would campus life look like if these secularists assumptions were dropped?” The problem is that these secularist assumptions are passionate commitments. They cannot be discarded at will. If the secularization thesis really is on its way out, professors should have already started to train students in a way of entering into texts that makes much more central the art of sympathetic understanding, including understanding the great theorists of causes. Sympathetic understanding is not just passively accepting what is being said. It is straining to bring something to life, by finding the right language, situating this something in a larger context and, having done so, asking questions about its merits. A whole metaphysic undergirds sympathetic understanding, and my claim is that it does more to break down the religious/secular divide than arguments from first principles, which can never be decided, and which create, at best, a window dressing for tolerance.

If our first task, as I see it, is to recover this metaphysic, then closely allied with it is finding a way of articulating opposition to a pervasive current trend. Rather than naming it, I will toss out three examples. The first involves a candidate for a job in another department who reported that in teaching a course in ethics, she was taught to stop before the end of every class so that students could evaluate in written form what had been clear and what unclear in her presentation. She reported great success, as she was able to clarify in a subsequent session the concepts that had not come across the first time. This seems a model of efficiency, and yet it gives one pause, especially when it is seen in the context of the pervasive culture of measuring everything in sight. Recently, The New York Times reported an increase across the country in clickers that students are obligated to use every fifteen minutes, as described in one class, in response to a question the professor is asking. The answers are tallied and then a conversation begins, once the student knows he or she is not an outlier. Again, what should be wrong with this? In large classes, it seems a way to keep students attentive and engaged. Yet the whole experience of time changes. Homogeneous clock time is imposed as the only time. Clock time might be inevitable on an assembly line, but teaching and learning depend on a notion of time in which one moment does not resemble the next. The desire to learn awakens at one moment for one and at another for someone else; connections are made at one moment for one and at another for someone else; and internalization and appropriation happen over many uneven moments in the course of a lifetime. Of course, we expect students to write papers and take exams on our schedule and not theirs, but usually there are swaths of time in between, in which something uncontrolled has a chance to happen. The mania for immediate results makes of learning something that has lost its secret. How do we articulate that secret, or at least not forget that it is there?

The appointment of Cathleen P. Black as the next Chancellor of the New York City public school system echoes the same fascination for measurement on another level. She is well known as an efficient manager at Hearst Magazines. The appointee neither went to public schools herself nor has any experience in the classroom or in school administration at any level. The latest news is that a compromise was worked out so that her immediate subordinate would have such experience. Her qualifications for the job appear to be her success in making various magazines profitable and her tough-minded attitude toward staff. She made her goals clear and got results. In the early 1970s, Ivan Illich published a book, Deschooling Society, in which he claimed that the school in the West was a kind of church, whose hidden curriculum reenacted the rituals and myths of capitalism, not through actively preaching it but in its striving for measurable results. He no doubt wrote it expecting people to vehemently deny it. Now, forty years later, who needs to hide it? If someone protests, surely she is a socialist.

It seems in bad taste to sound a moralistic note like this. One is always reminded at this point that no educational institution can survive without financial investment and that one’s own salary depends on it. But isn’t the task of the liberal arts, while remaining aware of the economic realities that are the conditions of its own practice, also to strive to articulate a human world in which certain kinds of profits, whether measured in rising test scores or in their eventual use in competing with China, are shown to be inadequate to educational efficiency itself? It appears, for instance, that the government of Iran has imposed a ban on the Western humanities in its universities. This would indicate that the humanities are efficient in quite a different way from the measured results currently prescribed. Is not the true secular mission of the liberal arts to remain alien to what Alisdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, called the “metaphysical belief in managerial expertise,” and to remain wedded instead to that other efficiency, recognized by the government of Iran in its very act of banning? In this mission, both “secular” and religious” need to join forces against the religion of our times.

There’s nothing like a Great Recession to set off a storm of conversation about the nature of liberal arts education. Sites such as The Chronicle of Higher Education’s and The New York Times’ have conducted vigorous and multifaceted debates about whether students can afford to “indulge” in a “non-vocational” undergraduate education: an education where students prioritize what interests them in the here-and-now, regardless of whether these interests can obviously be “monetized” (as the phrase goes) immediately upon graduation. Varied defenders, such as David Brooks, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Roth, emphasize the palpable and practical value of a liberal arts education, urging us to think more critically about how a broad and searching education can indeed yield immediate and obvious effects—economic, social, and political—even if these do not come with direct-deposit six figure bonuses.

To these defenses of liberal arts education, we would like to add our own voices. Between 2006-2009, with the support of the Teagle Foundation, four self-identifying secular liberal arts campuses—Bucknell University and Macalester, Vassar, and Williams Colleges—engaged in a project, “Secularity and the Liberal Arts,” that tried to get at the purpose and nature of liberal arts education by asking what it means for a liberal arts campus to unabashedly call its practices “secular.” Is there a way, we wondered, that by spending some time thinking critically and honestly about this crucial term—one that ostensibly governs our practices—we might get a better handle on the nature of liberal arts education?

From the start, this project was motivated by the tremendous reevaluation that the notion of the “secular” has undergone over the last two decades. It is now well acknowledged that the American academy, at least from the standpoint of theory, has been in a full-blown period of recovery from the dominance of the secularization thesis. One of the remarkable things about this conversation has been the tremendous variety of theorists—of different political and religious convictions—who have come to agree on one thing: that it is both philosophically incoherent and phenomenologically inaccurate to posit a secular scrubbed free of religion and committed to a neutral and rational public discourse. On this, Stanley Hauerwas, Jeff Stout, William Connolly, Wendy Brown, John Milbank, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Taylor (to name just a few) all unite.

Our “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” group wondered whether, or how, these theoretical moves had made their way onto our campuses.  Did the practices and ways of liberal arts life reflect the theoretical work that has been done of late on the secular? We suspected that life on liberal arts campuses, both in and out of class, did not reflect this profound eclipse of the secularization thesis. Our institutions have long valued a notion of the secular that limits and restricts religious expression in order, ostensibly, to promote tolerance and critical thought, to sustain democratic institutions, and to foster civic engagement. We suspected that our campuses’ underlying commitments to critical thought, tolerance, and political engagement were actually creating a public discourse that carefully polices the types of rhetoric and reasons allowed into play. Time and again, our reading group conversations as well as the qualitative research we conducted confirmed that students and faculty feel compelled to drop their religious commitments in many public spaces on campus: certainly at the classroom door, but also in places ostensibly more “private,” such as dorm life, and even in casual conversation. Indeed, at the start we encountered stiff resistance to the very idea that these discursive boundaries might be policed less rigorously; many faculty members and students have grown comfortable with hard-line—if under-articulated—secularist assumptions, which restrict the free airing of religoius commitments. After all, our colleagues reminded us, such assumptions are historically responsible for more good than bad—say, a great deal of intellectual freedom and iconoclasm—and remain, if flawed, the best available model. Did we not recognize our campuses’ secular self-identification as a hard-won accomplishment? What had changed, some of our colleagues wanted to know, that this accomplishment now needs to be challenged?

At the same time, religious groups also resisted our work because they felt that any conversation about the secular represented the promotion of a staunch secularism. For them, the very word was horribly tainted (think, for example, of Pope Benedict’s use of the term), and these religionists could not see any way that talking about the secular might prove helpful to them. Did we not see, then, following George Marsden et al., that the academy has successfully established secularism as its norm, and that it is not likely to give up this ground?

If, at first, asking questions about both the strengths and limits of our secular assumptions elicited anxious responses from secularists and religionists alike, over time we built trust by focusing on student learning. We wanted to consider whether these types of uncritical assumptions about the secular were stripping some students and faculty of fundamental aspects of their identities—in particular, their religious identities. We were moved to ask, what would campus life—both in and out of class—look like if these secularist assumptions were dropped? (For an account of the project in toto, see the group’s White Paper as well as “Varieties of Secular Experience,” a November 2008 conference headlined by Princeton Professor Jeffrey Stout’s keynote address, “Secular not Secularist,” and Swarthmore College President Rebecca Chopp’s lecture, “Secularity, Meaning and the Liberal Arts.”)

For liberal arts colleges, the stakes of this question are important. The mission of liberal arts education is not simply the conveyance of certain bodies of information or technical skills that are useful in a market economy. Liberal arts colleges understand themselves as places that promote education as a way for students to consider larger questions of meaning and value. Liberal arts colleges are places where students are not thought naïve to ask so-called big questions: “What is the meaning of my life?” “How do I understand death?” “Does evil exist?” “What are my obligations to my neighbor, my country, my world?” And finally, “How might my education—in whatever field I study—help me assimilate these questions?” We were struck by the way that considerations of the secular had the profound effect of renewing discussions of what might be called the deeper purposes of liberal arts education. Talk about the secular in general quickly turned into much more specific talk about what liberal arts colleges are for and how they are to serve their purposes.

Is a liberal arts education no longer secular when it allows this sort of deep commitment into public view and discussion? That depends on what is meant by the secular. What our project calls for is a revalued concept of the secular and secularity. The notion of secularity that emerges from “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” rejects the Enlightenment conception of universal reason and the idea that religion is a discourse that should be subject to special rules restricting its expression. Rather, it encourages the expression of views guided or governed by religious commitments. To be sure, liberal arts colleges are not going to pick up the mantle of any particular set of religious commitments. Nevertheless, under this version of the secular, it is reasonable to be religious. In short, the notion of secularity that emerges from our project is at odds with secularism conventionally or commonly understood.

Our notion of the secular has been heavily influenced by Stout’s understanding of secularization as the emergence of a discursive condition in which “the tendency of the people participating [is not] to relinquish their religious beliefs or to refrain from employing them as reasons,” but in which, rather, “participants [. . .] are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are.” On these terms, secular institutions such as liberal arts campuses would excel at anticipating and navigating differences among their citizens. What Stout means by “secular, not secularist,” we suggest, is just this. A secularist seeks to rid democratically and pedagogically orientated spaces (e.g., campuses and classrooms) of religious commitments in the pursuit of arrogating authoritative  forms of knowledge. Someone who possesses a revauled understanding of the secular as a discursive condition and practice seeks knowledge that helps us, as Stanley Hauerwas describes, “to act wisely in a context of conflict, ambiguity, and change.” When the authority of knowledge is less important than the things that can be done with knowledge (i.e., explicate its logic, argue with it, follow its implications, explore motivations for holding it, and reflect on how it shapes moral formation), the secular becomes a discussion between religious and non-religious citizens who are acutely aware that the demands of secularized democratic life require an extraordinary balance between cherishing one’s own convictions and holding to the awareness that these same cherished convictions are contestable, and that they may at times act as a bludgeon against other democratic citizens. A further type of knowledge emerges in this secular: a self-critical consideration of how one’s own commitments might be heard by citizens with differing ones, a knowledge required for acting compassionately, civilly, and democratically.

The result of our work led us to the following claims: When a liberal arts education is framed in terms of questions about life’s purposes, students express an unmistakable pent-up desire to introduce deep commitments, including religious ones, into public arenas, including the classroom. In turn, liberal arts colleges work best and allow students to become who they are when students are afforded the room to search and interrogate their commitments—especially their religious commitments—in public ways. The fear and, as the social scientific work of the group found, the reality is that liberal arts colleges are failing this mission insofar as students and faculty feel that when they step onto liberal arts campuses they have to bracket or repress just the sort of deep commitments, religious or otherwise, that might be crucial to addressing these sorts of questions.

What we also found, however, is that students and faculty are deeply unsure of how to express deep commitments more freely and fully. Confusion, uncertainty, and even hostility here remain the norm. What appeared glaringly conspicuous to us is the lack, across academic fields, of adequate models and examples of constructive exchange between conflicting deep commitments. Beyond flatly making room for the airing of these views (in the name of a notion of tolerance), faculty and students alike were perplexed by how to substantively engage with and learn from deep commitments different from their own.

One critical effect of this revalued notion of the secular is that it disrupts the dominant metaphor of “space” that is commonly used to talk about the secular. During the November 2008 conference, Bob Connor (whose essay, “The Right Time for Asking Big Questions” breathed life into many of our working groups) observed that spaces are conventionally referred to as secular (or not), and that when a space (such as a classroom) is normatively termed secular, it shuts down conversation that dwells upon deeper commitments. It seems clear to us that the space metaphor is tied to secularist tendencies; spaces are secular to the degree that they conform to a set of norms restricting free expression. But when the epistemological rules are relaxed, the metaphor changes. The secular becomes a type of conversation or discussion occurring in a wide range of venues. In other words, revaluing the secular turns the focus away from where certain discussions are allowed to happen (a secularist tendency) and, more substantively, toward the difficulties of the discussion itself.

Indeed, here is where work remains. With this revalued understanding of the secular—now properly understood as a set of discursive practices operating among differing a/theological perspectives—lots of questions remain. Our understanding of how to conduct these discursive practices is rudimentary at best; most of us lack the experience. Some of us worry that a more open-ended, free-wheeling notion of the secular creates a mess that we do not know how to clean up. Are our liberal arts institutions equipped to meet the demands of this notion of the secular? Have our institutions adequately reflected on questions about what a liberal arts education is for and how they are to best serve those purposes? More, are there limitations to this model of secular education? One of the stock criticisms of secularism is that it doesn’t understand the ways in which it wields power. We thus also need to think critically about the ways in which our suggested secular traffics in power. The tendency is to think that, because our understanding of the secular is more democratic than secularism (in that it invites more views into play), it is somehow innocent of “sins” or problems. This seems unlikely. In the end, all of us remain confident that these natural questions and concerns should not hold us back from proceeding and seeking (in our own small way) to reshape the truncated discursive practices that currently define the practice of liberal arts education on most liberal arts campuses.

Thus, the next steps in our program: Last fall, we four members of “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” felt a great desire to take the conversation, its readings, and our distinctive point of view to other liberal arts colleges and universities. With continued support from the Teagle Foundation, we developed a one-day workshop, “Reconceiving the Secular and the Liberal Arts,” to take on the road, as it were, to other liberal arts colleges and universities.  The workshop would introduce our revised secular ideal and begin to interrogate what this ideal might mean for the practice of liberal arts education. Like the first introductions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and culture as aspects of student learning, we insisted that redefining secularity as a flexible ideal and diverse set of practices would help campuses better reflect their increasingly cosmopolitan character.

Judging from the response to our call for applications, it seems that liberal arts campuses are ready for and deeply interested in this conversation. We received fifteen applications from a remarkably diverse set of institutions. Some were religiously affiliated, some were not; they hailed from all corners of the country and ranged from large universities to small colleges. The point is that there seems to be a strong demand in our modern moment to address this set of questions about the role and place of religion in the ostensibly public life of liberal arts education. More, given the diverse set of schools that responded to our workshop, there is clearly a demand for a conversation that challenges conventional notions of the secular. Schools with historically different ways of structuring the secular and the religious are eager to reach out to each other.

During the fall of 2010, we will visit seven of these institutions to conduct our workshop. We’ve invited four more members of our original “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” project and divided ourselves into teams of two, each comprising one faculty member and one religious life representative, to conduct these learning-based conversations on reconceiving the secular and the liberal arts.

We cannot emphasize enough the notion of “learning” here. We will travel to these campuses pretty confident about how we have come to revamp the secular, but we are genuinely uncertain and seeking to learn how this notion of the secular will play out in different liberal arts settings. We feel like we’ve cleared the brush away enough that having this new conversation about the secular is possible. But how this conversation will go and what it will lead to as yet remain unknown.

To us, “Secularity and the Liberal Arts” and the response to our current workshop, “Reconceiving the Secular and the Liberal Arts,” uncover vacant and fertile ground for a conversation about religion and the secular other than the rancorous and well-worn debate between “wall of separation” secularists and political theologians—largely Christian ones—who want to turn America into a theocratic state. Unlike these antagonists, we don’t offer one set of substantive norms for being an American citizen. Believe in religion, small-government, taxes, same-sex marriage, or not. The goal of our project is to develop better models of how citizens in a democracy can engage with their counterparts despite deep and abiding differences. Our final conceit, in other words, is this: Reconceiving the secular can lead to reconceiving the practices of citizenry. That these conversations are beginning to happen in thoughtful and inventive ways on liberal arts campuses only speaks to the enduring practical value of liberal arts education.

At a March 2010 conference, “Gendering the Divide: Conflicts at the Border of Religion and the Secular” (sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict), I had the great fortune to speak on a panel with groundbreaking cultural historian and gender theorist Joan Wallach Scott, the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. The conference was the fourth and final meeting of ASU’s Ford Foundation-funded project on “Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy

Scott is the author of numerous influential essays and books, including the widely cited 1986 essay “Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” as well as The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth Century City, Women, Work and Family (with Louise Tilly), Parité!: Sexual Difference and the Crisis of French Universalism, and, most recently, the timely and highly praised The Politics of the Veil. Scott’s books are regularly reprinted, and they have been translated into several languages, including French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean.

There will be a panel on The Politics of the Veil at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta, featuring commentaries by Carl Ernst and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, along with myself, as well as a response from Scott.

An indefatigable advocate for and defender of academic freedom of expression and speech, Scott served on the American Association of University Professors’ “Committee A” on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 1993-2006, which she chaired from 1999-2005. As Chair of “Committee A,” Scott helped to produce the 2003 report “Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis.”

At the conclusion of the ASU conference, Scott and I met for the following wide-ranging conversation, part of the SSRC’s Rites and Responsibilities dialogue forum.

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

* * *

DKK: Joan, because people know you as many things—as a theorist of gender, as a cultural historian, as an inveterate advocate for academic freedom and defender of the rights of the professoriate—I’m curious how you would describe yourself to someone who had never met Joan Scott.

JWS: That’s really hard . . . I don’t know. I would say I was a historian . . .  Somebody who—despite the fact that I’m at the Institute for Advanced Study—likes to teach, and has tried to keep teaching graduate students, even in this position where I’m not required to do so. I guess I think of myself as somebody who’s critically engaged with the work that I do, and whose work—even before I read Foucault and learned about the history of the present—always had a political dimension to it. There was always a reason, beyond just curiosity, that drove the work that I did.

DKK: Well, let’s pursue the question of what the work is. How would you describe the work that you do? Not just the topics, but the approaches you take, the methods you have adopted.

JWS: I would call it critical. I think we now have a term—more and more people are using it—which is “critical history.”

DKK: Yes.

JWS: And that suggests that the point of doing the history is to critically engage some conceptual or theoretical or taken-for-granted notion about why things are the way they are, and how they got to be the way they are. “Critical historian” is, in fact, what I call myself in a piece I did a couple of years ago in a volume edited by John Gillis and Jim Banner, which is called Becoming Historians. The University of Chicago Press published it. They asked twelve people to account for their lives! I called my chapter “Finding Critical History.” In it, I try to account for the way in which I came to do the sort of history that I think I do.

DKK: So that’s a really interesting question, about finding critical history. One of the curiosities I have about you concerns your influences. Who and what were critical formations for you? Not just ideas and texts, but the people who were formative for you: family, colleagues, students, and so on.

JWS: Right. Well, I talk about it a lot in that essay. First, I grew up in a political household. My father was a high school teacher in New York City, the president of the New York City Teachers’ Union in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He was called before various congressional committees, and he was among the first group of New York City schoolteachers to be fired in 1953, when I was twelve. So, you know, my life was defined by growing up as somebody in a kind of embattled family in the 1950s—”embattled” just vis-à-vis the political culture, not within the family itself. My mother was also a teacher, but she wasn’t ever fired. They were both history teachers—he, economics and history, and she, history.

DKK: So, from a young age you had an acute sense of what politically fraught conditions were like, but also of the significance of history.

JWS: Yes. Their bible was Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization. That was the way they taught their history. That was the history that we learned. And, you know, dinner table conversation was about politics and history and teaching, because both of them were dedicated teachers. But I think the reasons I became a historian have less to do with following in their footsteps than with the subsequent influence on me of teachers when I was in high school and college.

DKK: Wow.

JWS: But there was no question that I was going to teach, because teaching was the family profession.

DKK: Can you speak a bit more about that? How did they speak to you as a child?

JWS: About teaching?

DKK: Yes.

JWS: Well, my mother clearly loved to teach. She’d come home . . . it was the way she told stories about the kids she was teaching—about this one who was so smart but never did any work, and that one who asked these amazing questions. And my father was didactic!

(both laugh)

JWS: I mean, my father was a teacher. You know, you didn’t want to have to always be taught everything, and that was his mode, to always be teaching. So there was more of a kind of resistance to him and a kind of admiration for her. Teaching was not only about communicating things, not only “raising the young to become better than they otherwise might have been.” It was also—because it was history—about social change: there was some way or another in which communicating exciting ideas to young people was an investment in the future.

DKK: But in that context there was, first of all, the volatility of the situation around Left politics, and then, at the same time, there was the influence of, say, Dewey, on democracy and education. In other words, there was a concerted effort to say, “Education is in the service of democracy,” while, at the same time, there were events like your father’s firing.

JWS: Right, right.

DKK: Did you talk about that as a child?

JWS: No, we didn’t talk about it. But what went without saying . . . well, I actually have another article! It’s in that Louis Menand book on academic freedom, in which I say that from a very young age I heard the words “academic freedom” without fully knowing what they meant, because what my father always said when he was fired was that his academic freedom had been violated, that it had been lost. It was less the loss of his job than the loss of his academic freedom that was at the heart of his refusal to accept the punishment he got for refusing to cooperate with these investigating committees.

DKK: Did he ever get his job back? Or did he find that he could redeem himself as an educator?

JWS: Well, in different formats. For a while he worked for an educational filmstrip company, and so he got to teach in another way. And then, the last job he had was in some ways the most interesting: he was the administrator of a unit for the diagnosis and treatment of what are now called developmentally disabled kids. Then, it was “mentally retarded” kids. And he was doing that at the moment of de-institutionalization following the scandals around Willowbrook, when Geraldo Riviera was an investigative journalist, rather than a sensationalist journalist!

(both laugh)

JWS: And he was very active in those movements. I always thought that his political skills came to the fore around those kinds of things. He was somebody who worked very hard for the setting-up of group homes and all of that kind of stuff. There it was both the politics and his sense of commitment to kids—even though these were not kids whom he was teaching in quite the same way. Nonetheless, that was really exemplary and quite impressive.

DKK: You’ve maintained that co-incidence yourself between being a teacher and a scholar and an activist.

JWS: Yes, and that, I think, was the model. It was a model that somehow always made sense, and something that I always tried to do, or something that, without thinking about it consciously, I just did, as the fulfillment of the legacy of these parents who were doing both of those things at once too.

DKK: So, what are the forms, what are the expressions of that co-incidence for you, in terms of your teaching and your activism?

JWS: Well, for a long time, they were at odds. When I was an undergraduate in college—I went to Brandeis—I did my scholarly work and I did my politics, and I always felt divided. Schizophrenic is the wrong word, because I could do both, but I always felt that they were two separate things. Then I started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in 1962. William Appleman Williams was there; Studies on the Left was there. I found a world in which doing scholarship was of a piece with doing politics. I mean, we did anti-Vietnam War protests and Civil Rights activism. There was all of this political activity, but there were also people who were thinking about history in those terms as well. That was, I think, a hugely important influence for me—to be able to see that you could do the two together, and that history was relevant, not in the immediate sense of proving a political point, but in that there was the possibility of an engagement with history that could feed into politics or activism of one kind or another.

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