And indeed in American media the question is taken at face value and given opposite answers, with strong normative implications. In the “Yes” camp are people like Susan Jacoby, whose book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004) argued that America, contrary to the claims of the then-ascendant religious right, had been founded in rationalist skepticism about religion. (Despite its subtitle, which might promise some inquiry into historical conditions, the book is a narrative of heroic secularists and a digest of their “heritage.”) In the “No” camp are evangelical historians such as David Barton, who believes that America was founded as a Christian republic, with no presumption of equal participation by Jews, or atheists, let alone Muslims; even Jefferson’s “wall of separation,” he argues, was meant as a “one-directional” wall (if one can imagine such a thing), blocking government out of religion but not the other way around.

The disagreement between Jacoby and Barton has become a classic example of an echo chamber effect. Both have websites and enthusiastic followings (especially Barton, who essentially self-publishes), and both are likely to remain indifferent to anything that might be said here. (Jacoby’s is a simple author site but Barton’s is much more extensive; it also attracts rebuttals on many counter-websites.) Both positions, though stated in their extreme and polemical form in the nonacademic press, have more or less respectable versions that hold considerable power, especially in law.

Barton is a former Vice Chairman of the Republican Party in Texas, and his historical narrative is designed to show that party politics and Protestant piety go hand in hand. Indeed, he thinks that America was founded on just that idea, before it was betrayed. His website, Wallbuilders, leads with a news section before promoting its own historical justifications. In the summer of 2012 one lead news item was this:

Conservative historian David Barton, in his outstanding new book, “The Jefferson Lies: Exploring the Myths You’ve Always Known About Thomas Jefferson,” has once again presented an opus that shines the light of truth on the lies and propaganda of atheism, progressivism, liberalism, humanism and secular elites who possess a venal hatred for American exceptionalism…

The others were all Fox-style headlines about gay people and Obamacare. The historical items included a Daniel Webster statement, marshaled on the website as “arguing persuasively . . . for requiring a profession of belief in the Christian religion as a qualification for holding public office.” In fact it doesn’t, if you read it carefully, but that isn’t my point. The point is that historical questions about antebellum secularity tend to bear strong normative burdens generated by presentist understandings of the stakes.

The recent critical literature on secularity, as many readers of this blog already know, has broken with the questions and assumptions of Jacoby and Barton alike, in a series of ways. One of the most basic themes in the literature is that modern secularity—in the Euro-American North Atlantic and in the colonial contexts that these nations created—gets much of its meaning from the consolidation of “religion” as a special form of belief and experience, a process that accompanied the development of rival modes of legitimacy and moral feeling. What came to be the privileged markers of religiosity, moreover, are characteristic of Christian (even Protestant) self-understandings. The key questions are what you believe (with the assumption that you attach yourself to propositional attitudes) and how strongly you believe it (since “conscience” has trumping force). Other modes of religiosity are either sidelined (as with ritual practice, collective worship, or legal observance, where belief in the usual sense may not be at stake at all), denigrated (as in the pejorative meaning now given to “piety”), or recognized only as a social or political function only incidentally associated with religion (as with family law or the provision of welfare services). One of the effects of secular governance, both in how it regulates and in how it recognizes, has been to reshape all forms of religion in this mold, with greater or lesser degrees of success. In recognizing religions, it establishes equivalences; sets norms; and sometimes even acts as an ecclesiastical authority deciding what is or isn’t a legitimate exercise of religion. As a consequence of this process, we cannot answer questions about how religious or how secular a culture is by measuring the extent of religious belief. Despite powerfully enduring institutions and long-durée patterns of culture—not to mention the active and constant work that so many parties devote to preserving the illusion of permanence in categories like religion—what counts as religiosity changes, both in legal-political spheres of elite power and in the organization of ordinary life.

Once we begin to think of secularism as the background created by the foreground of “religion” so conceived, secularism no longer seems the right word. Secularism suggests indeed something on the same plane as religion: a body of beliefs and doctrines more or less present to consciousness as a distinguishing and optional affiliation. But most of the work of the last decade or so has not been about secularism in that sense, but about the secular conditions that structure even the religious once religiosity has become one option among others—conditions to which some forms of religiosity are much more adapted than others. For this reason Charles Taylor speaks of secularity rather than secularism, though the distinction is not always sharp. Secularity refers to a variety of social/cultural/political conditions that structure the question of religious adherence in ways not usually present to consciousness, even though our decision in response to that question is said to resolve our relation to the fundamental conditions of our existence. Whenever we seem to confront a choice between religion and secularism, in short, we may be sure that the form of the choice is not ours.

The new literature on secularism, then, for all its analytic distance on the presentist stakes of conflict, is not without normative implications. It’s just that those implications are deeply unsettling. What normative stances are available to secularism so named? What do the secular norms of the legal-juridical sphere have to do with my personal resolution of the demands made on me to commit to some scheme of belief or another? Are the available options of religiosity or “spirituality” themselves ordered by this regulatory discourse? It is difficult to be a conscious human being in mediatic societies without meeting this demand for commitment; but since that demand arises most often in a field defined by political antagonism, what are my chances of prescinding from the given forms of antagonism?

Few books illustrate this tension between analytic distance and normative involvement more than John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America. It is an imaginative and intelligent engagement with the critical literature I have been referring to, including the very different intellectual programs of Talal Asad and Charles Taylor. Modern’s book is also argumentatively elusive, presenting itself as a series of studies rather than consecutive exposition. The case studies are not what one might predict, given the title: evangelical understandings of mass media; the development of the category of “spirituality” in the matrix of phrenologists and spiritualists; prison reform at Sing Sing; and fantasies about machines—with fragmentary comments on Moby-Dick throughout.

A reader who has not been following the recent literature on secularity will be surprised to find that Secularism in Antebellum America is mainly about evangelicals and spiritualists. The organization of the book would seem to put him in the “No” camp in response to the question of my title, with David Barton. But in Modern’s book the dialectical relation of the terms takes the form of paradox. Perhaps too much, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

Modern’s most compelling chapter, titled “Evangelical Secularism,” lays out the paradox; even its title to most readers will seem oxymoronic. Modern beautifully analyzes one side of the semiotic ideology of antebellum evangelicals : its imagination of media and the social field. (I say “one side” because he does not take up the language of sincerity, conversion, and experience, as Webb Keane does so well in Christian Moderns.) Modern examines the tract and Bible societies, with their massive projects of publication and colportage, as well as the tracts themselves and such statements of evangelical theory as Robert Baird’s Religion in America (1842). Following such scholars as David Nord and Candy Brown, but giving their work a new critical analysis, he examines the imagination of the social behind the evangelical obsession with networks, technology, and communication. Evangelicals of the period equated true religion with a conversionist public discourse, which of its own logic required mass dissemination at the same time that it pointed to its own omnipresence as a sign of its spontaneous authenticity. Evangelical religiosity was fused with a modern semiotic ideology of connectivity and circulation as progressive forces capable of establishing a broad social and religious order by the unfolding of their own immanent dynamic principles. (Here Modern intersects with, but does not discuss, important recent analyses of evangelicalism as modern social movement; see Craig Calhoun’s The Roots of Radicalism or Michael Young’s Bearing Witness Against Sin.) If America was in many important ways secular by the antebellum period, he concludes, it was so largely because of evangelicals themselves.

In making this argument, Modern amplifies a theme of Charles Taylor, who has argued in A Secular Age that the long history of secularity consists more of unintended consequences to reform movements within Christianity than to a hostile campaign of suppression or emancipation from without. In the American case my own current research has led me to go further and say that the evangelical normalization of conversionist discourse as a criterion of religiosity directly construed society as secular even before there were any secularists in the modern sense of that term. Evangelical conceptions of conscience and conversion, together with evangelical practices of the public sphere and the voluntary system, are not only the markers of evangelical modernity but the very conditions from which the default secularity of the social is projected.

The effects went beyond the evangelical organizations themselves; Modern notes that the antebellum period, far from being a “flowering of religious pluralism,” was marked by a shared resonance of such themes among “conservative evangelicals, liberal, experimental, and erstwhile Protestants” (15), partly because evangelicalism was “an imperial discourse” that colonized its rivals, setting the terms by which people could recognize themselves as religious. If that is true, it seems to follow that a history of the secular in the period should look beyond the surface differences and conflicts among these different branches of Protestantism. Because of the way they imagined their social world, they all benefitted from the embedding of a “nonspecific Protestantism,” as Tracy Fessenden calls it, at the same time that they understood their own religiosity fitting their own voluntary affiliation into the normative order of large-scale networks and publics. For Modern, the close relation between evangelical forms of religiosity and a secular social imaginary points us to what is most intractable and analytically challenging about modern secularism: the way it resides not just in overt doctrinal positions of political or ethical philosophy, but in the fabric of modern sociality, at such a deep level that the manifest conflict between religion and secularism, while real, is also structured by misrecognition.

I have somewhat adapted Modern’s argument in summarizing it this way. Here’s the way he puts it: “I have chosen the name secularism to refer to that which conditioned not only particular understandings of the religious but also the environment in which these understandings became matters of common sense….To make inquiries into secularism is to ask how certain concepts of religion (and the social formations that revolve around them) became consonant with the way things were—in essence—as portrayed by a secular political order” (7-8). This sounds a lot like some concepts of ideology, though Modern also thinks that secularism “cannot be approached as an ideological ruse” because “it neither deceived nor promulgated inaccurate representations of reality. On the contrary, secularism has been part and parcel to the very constitution of the real” (9).

While the intellectual ambition in this argument is formidable, and identifies a key conceptual difficulty in the analysis of secularity, two very significant problems arise from Modern’s decision to use “the name secularism” for this comprehensive formation. The first is that the forms of antagonism disappear from analysis; they look epiphenomenal. But anyone familiar with the intense antebellum conflicts among different versions of religiosity will no doubt feel that something is lost in an analysis that focuses only on the shared background. Modern expresses understandable dissatisfaction with the disciplinary norms of historians, who seem to feel that historical analysis must be rooted in and faithful to the self-understandings of all its actors; he wants instead to tell stories about the taken-for-granted or the misrecognized. But surely the very field of religious competition is part of that taken-for-granted background. That field was both delimited by violent forms of exclusion, as in the killing of Joseph Smith, and at the same time expanded throughout the public sphere, as in the overturning of blasphemy laws in the same period. This is, after all, a period dominated by rivalry between Southern and Northern versions of religious nationalism; the Confederate Constitution has a preamble polemically designed to counteract the godlessness of the Union counterpart. The different parties of religious struggle might have shared elements of a secular metaphysics, but they certainly put competing spins on its political implications. To what degree did secularity get its shape from antagonisms and spaces of competition rather than agreement?

A second problem is that secularism itself disappears. Those versions of secularism that are localizable as projects of governance, ethics, or struggle are so flattened as to be barely distinguishable from their background conditioning. I would suggest that a distinction between secularity and secularism is analytically necessary here, though to say this is to open two very large problems: what is the relation between secularity (as background) and those projects of secularism that can appear as specific positions against that background? And second, how are we to understand the apparent contradictions between those versions of secularism that reside in governmentality or liberal politics, and those that, like religion, orient persons to their existential conditions in an ethical problematic?

I take these as elementary questions about secularity, but it is astonishing how often they are obscured. The currently fashionable talk of the “post-secular,” for example, rests on a conflation of secularity with a specific program of political secularism; the latter may be in crisis, but there is no way of telling how deep that crisis is without understanding how political secularism is only one manifestation of secularity.

We are so accustomed to thinking of secularism as a body of doctrine deriving from the highly rationalizing elites of law and politics that we might forget that such elites do not simply form themselves.

Just as there is always a gap between theological discourse and “lived religion,” so there is a gap between legal-political secularist discourse and ordinary secularity. Take disestablishment—apparently the simplest doctrine in the whole repertoire of secularism. But what, in practice, did establishment mean? The range of variation in the colonial and early national period was wide, but often included: levying taxes for clerical salaries, choosing ministers, allotting land and labor for meetinghouses, compelling attendance, dividing time through sabbath laws, mapping the local hierarchy into the seating charts of the meeting house, ritually organizing government functions such as elections and meetings, recognizing legitimate forms of private life through personal and family law, monopolizing public ritual discourse, maintaining a joint church/state monopoly of consecrations for marriage and other functions, joint keeping of birth/death records, delivering care, etc. These elements were not fused by principle; all were highly variable in practice, and differently in different jurisdictions. Each was contested in some cases, and could sometimes be suspended or adapted for special arrangements, as when Baptists or separate Congregationalists secured meetinghouses in territories theoretically covered by another congregation. In what contexts did people try to philosophize or rationalize the field of variation in light of a consistent principle? And in what contexts did people intervene to change practices in order to make them conform to a conception of principle? Even on this basic question, doctrinal discourse is no reliable map to the practical questions it tried to codify. Disestablishment in the discourse of elites sounds like a clear matter of principle; disestablishment on the ground came by fits and starts over a very long period and was often significantly out of sync with common dogma.

Although Modern makes no distinction between the background conditions of secularity and secularism, the complicated relation between them is central to his argument. He puts it, rather oddly to my mind, in the language of enchantment. Against those who think of disenchantment as a force that battered religion and reduced it to private belief, he suggests that disenchantment “has been one of the most significant enchantments of the secular age, registering its effects from a distance and in the process conjuring a host of normative assumptions about how reality is in essence. Consequently, what is most remarkable about spirituality in the antebellum period is how it reflected the impossibility of distinguishing between disenchantment and enchantment even as this division was relentlessly pursued in its name” (124). By “enchantment” Modern seems to mean the forces that impinge on subjects and condition them in ways they do not control. The very technologies that put us in control—or so we assure ourselves—are themselves things we do not control; Modern takes this to mean that the disenchanters are the most enchanted of all. Further, he notes another dimension of enchantment in the self-confirming loops between those political projects we generate for establishing a right order of religion and the epistemic frames that have already made it seem inevitable that such an order of religion should be the only true one. Think for example of the contradiction of Christian nationalism: we inhabit a Christian nation but at the same time we must convert it from secularism to make it a Christian nation. The same relation holds, in Modern’s view, for the kind of secularity that confirms itself as a default condition by means of a disciplinary discourse on religion.

I think he is pointing to something important, but I would put it in a different way. This use of the term enchantment has almost nothing to do with what it means in Max Weber’s work. As I’ve noted elsewhere, most scholarly discourse in English about enchantment suffers from a translation problem. Weber’s term is closer to “demagicalization.” In English, “enchantment” is associated with positive affects such as wonder and reverence, and only under the sway of such associations, I think, can anyone imagine that “reenchantment” would be a good thing, let alone a change that could be willed into being. Taylor has usefully expanded the contrast with his analysis of the “buffered” self of modernity, reminding us thereby of the gains that make disenchantment invaluable to modern subjects, to the point that in many ways we cannot imagine giving them up. (Simon During’s excellent study of secular magic can be taken in this sense as an account of the performative production of a buffered self by means of an entertainment industry of enchantment.)

Modern may have that analysis in mind, since the point seems to be that the freely affiliating and buffered persons of evangelical/secular religiosity are themselves conditioned and disciplined by the normative sociality in which religion shows up for them. And this is a profound insight. But to call it enchantment lacks the specificity of demagicalizing projects within religion, and of the distinctive achievements of buffering. And by identifying disenchantment simply as a higher form of enchantment Modern leaves the analysis in a frozen paradox, with more than a hint of a familiar style of intellectual pathos. When the object of critique is generalized and removed from the space of antagonism, critique itself seems powerless against it; or rather, critique projects from its own powerlessness a problem that cannot be addressed, and before which one can only stand in a vaguely radical appreciation of the tragic. Modern is much given to the Derridean language of “haunting” to perform this pathos.

Modern detects enchantment in the heavy reliance—across both secular and evangelical contexts—on the progressive unfolding of impersonal machine culture and the circulatory smoothness of a networked society as forces guaranteeing that the shape of social reality would inevitably conform to the wished-for ideal. This dependence, he thinks, entailed haunting; and although he does not connect the dots (and even repudiates causal narrative) he implies that the literal hauntings of spiritualism were at root the realization of the metaphorical haunting he sees in technological society.

I have taken this detour through Modern’s argument partly as an advertisement for a book I admire, partly as a caution about its analytic terms, but also as an invitation to think about the complex relations among secularity (constituting the real in a social imaginary and establishing religion as a category), political secularism (a project for regulating religion so conceived), and various forms of ethical secularism. These are clearly not identical. In fact, they can be contradictory. Political secularism of the liberal kind is defined by its eschewal of normative ethical projects; it presents itself as the procedural neutrality necessary to plural societies but minimizes its claims on the kind of personal affiliation by which it defines religion. The kind of ethical secularism we see in Whitman, on the other hand, eschews that structuring contrast of neutral procedure against personal commitment. It presents itself as a project for becoming the kind of person who can rightly recognize the conditions of existence, and although it is an attempt to overcome Christianity it does not secure its stance as a privileged default against the particularities of religion.

It is probably beyond anyone’s grasp to write a fully satisfying history of secularism in antebellum America, and Modern no doubt wisely emphasized the partial and speculative character of his own project. He has certainly deepened our understanding of the field, and his book illustrates strikingly how rapidly the analysis of secularity is emerging. The more we understand, the more problems we see.

I also have a number of questions about what we are, or should be, looking at—the proper boundaries of the object of our inquiry.

Is this a particularly American phenomenon? After all, clerical sexual abuse has been reported in many parts of the world, even if nation-wide inquiries have been instituted in just a few places, such as the U.S. and Ireland. And is this an exclusively Christian (or even Catholic) phenomenon? In fact, a Chicago Tribune story from 2011 reported the laxity of control over Buddhist monks who engage in sexual abuse in the U.S., though interestingly the tenor of the story implies that the problem was the lack of central control of such priests, whereas in the cases we’re looking at here there are clear problems with the center itself.

But can we even say that this is an exclusively or an especially religious phenomenon and be sure that the levels of abuse we’ve witnessed in the archive greatly exceed those in society at large? That last question has to be asked, even if the answer seems likely to be in the affirmative.

A more historical question relates to the framing and trajectory of the issue in the archive itself and whether, for instance, we can discern a shift away from an exclusively spiritual framing of behavior by church officials towards one where both legal and psychiatric languages are being brought in, if sometimes also conspicuously ignored.

Thinking about the archive in terms of the history of Christianity prompts another question for me. I wonder about the extent to which invoking history suggests both causality and context. In other words, does locating these sexual acts in the context of the history of Christianity or Catholicism either explain them or explain them away? The answer to both of these questions should, I think, be “no,” but we still need to look for patterns and shifts in the trajectories of opinion or activity that we might deem to be significant. In what follows, I use different histories to show how they inflect my readings of the archives, though I do not attempt to connect these four historical fragments in a systematic way.

1.

My first fragment is one that I’ve derived both from my reading of the BishopAccountability.org materials and from a posting I remember from Katherine Ewing to The Immanent Frame on the subject of religion, spirituality, and sexual scandal. Ewing refers to the scandals around the Catholic Church but also to those relating to Independent Baptists and Muslims, noting that we are currently seeing a number of different religious institutions being rocked by such sexual episodes of accusation and outrage. This focus on the current situation invokes the need for historical consciousness: we need to be aware of how the scandals of today might, as Ewing implies, “articulate the sexual ‘orthodoxies’ of modern secularism and its discursive operations by locating specific structures of sexual desire, activity, and prohibition (such as the religious functionary who has sex with underage members of the church)….beyond the secular pale,” in other words highlighting acts that are considered “unthinkable for the liberal, secular subject.” Perhaps the scandalous, so defined, is dependent on certain definitions of childhood, of the legitimacy of the nuclear family, and of a modern sexual politics where spirituality marks an interior terrain parallel to and linked with sexuality—with both being seen as immanent sources of self within the liberal agentive subject. This is not for one instance to deny that Catholic conservatives might themselves be outraged by what has happened, but it is to point to wider and, to some degree, more historically specific dimensions of the character of current outrage and scandal.

2.

My second fragment is also recent but is more specific. As an anthropologist of evangelical Christianity as well as of varieties of Catholicism, I find it difficult to avoid reading these accusations and counter-accusations through the frame of the scandals amongst U.S. televangelicals of the 1980s and 1990s. To some degree, there are parallels—homosexuality features prominently in both forms of embodied submission and exchange, as do understandings of the power of sacred touch. In both cases, unsurprisingly, we see initial institutional attempts at concealment. But there are also some significant differences. Pedophilia does not feature particularly in televangelical discourses of the scandalous, for instance. Also significant is the way in which respective institutional discursive resources redefine and refine the scandal in the longer term. The Catholic archives tell a story of chronic, serial concealment and neutralization of morally reprehensible behavior through the creation of discursive disconnections, legal blockages, and so on. The rhetorical apparatus remains precisely private and in-house—or intra ecclesiam—as far as possible. But evangelical scandals often develop along a very different rhetorical and moral trajectory, eventually becoming grist to an evangelical mill of publicity and redemption for the perpetrator. Susan Harding remarks insightfully that scandals became part of the cultural instability that is an integral and productive force in American Protestant evangelical preaching, whereby preachers narrate and act out strategic indeterminacies—gaps, excesses, anomalies, breaches—that their followers harmonize and critics intensify. Such publicization and democratization of sin seems utterly different to that which we see in these archives.

3.

My third fragment is one I find harder to use as a frame in reading the archival material, and yet it’s surely relevant. It emerges out of my ethnographic and archival work on the Marian pilgrimage site of Walsingham in England. Walsingham is hardly alone in the Roman or Anglo-Catholic world in being a site where, from the medieval period to the present, we see morally and politically charged action carried out in relation to changing geographical and political landscapes but also—at the same time—to shifting ideas of the body, sexuality, gender, and family. Throughout the last century in particular Walsingham has encompassed battles between sites of celibacy, sexual repression, and explicit forms of mostly, but not exclusively, homosexual identity that, according to Dominic Janes, have combined to allow Walsingham to be imagined precisely as a space of queer desire—where the notion of queerness both includes and exceeds its sexual connotation. Of course, queerness must not be conflated with pedophilia, even as it mediates at Walsingham between the potent and the “merely” picturesque. There’s also the problem of how to avoid anachronisms in looking at the serial sexualization of such a Catholic site over the longue durée. But perhaps more relevant here is the fragile boundary between orthodoxy and transgression that we see at a site such as Walsingham and in the BishopAccountability.org archives. The question becomes: Does a religious context combining touch, co-presence, incarnation, hierarchical authority, and compartmentalization of spaces of action lend itself to catalyzing certain forms of sexual activity? Again, causalities cannot be asserted, but we should at least ask whether the kinds of sexual contacts we see in these archives form an unofficial and yet patterned form of what Webb Keane sees as a semiotic ideology, a coming together of words, objects, and bodies—in particular configurations that constitute and define different religious groups and their worlds. Sexual actions in this sense are both transgressive and somehow resonant of a religious world, constituting its semiotic make-up in patterned though not determined ways.

In a roughly similar semiotic vein, I would also invoke a historian of Walsingham, Susan Signe Morrison, who has written fascinatingly of how the figure of Ophelia in Hamlet, created not so many decades after the Reformation and the destruction of much of Walsingham, can be shown to exist as a trace of the Virgin of the pre-Reformation shrine: profaned, laid waste, destroyed. Ophelia becomes detritus through rhetorical and dramatic idioms of trash and sexualization. In turn, thinking of how some priests engage with and then drop their sexual prey, I confess that images of the making of waste, the creation and then discarding of matter and memories seen as out of place in relation to the institution of the church, kept coming to my mind as I perused the archive.

4.

My final fragment is both historical and ethnographic, and it’s one that is, I suppose, a typical knee-jerk reaction from an anthropologist to this kind of material. The history of anthropology and Christianity is riven with questions of how to deal with witchcraft but also with witchcraft accusations—with the epistemologies as well as the social and institutional arrangements behind episodes, moral dramas of allegation, accountability, and resolution. Much could be said about this, but I’ll confine myself to just two points, leaping off from how the material we’re looking at compares with the type of witchcraft accusations described by E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

Evans-Pritchard stresses that accusations among the Azande, if they are to become socially and culturally salient, should take place among broad equals, often rivals. The cases we’ve been looking at raise complex questions concerning the very lack of equality—in relation to the respective ages of victim and accused, status within the church, perhaps also class. But we also see two institutional systems of determining status combining and clashing: that of the church and its sense of spiritual hierarchy and that of secular human rights, where equality before the law is more likely to be asserted. Secondly, Evans-Pritchard makes an epistemological point: the Azande do not allow individual cases where their system of explanation and accountability seems to fail to actually challenge their assumption that the system itself is to be relied upon. What strikes me about the archives is the way we see episodes of abuse leading us in two rather different moral, religious, and perhaps epistemological directions. On the one hand, episodes of abuse find lay victims losing faith in both the church and its system of accountability; on the other hand, following episodes of abuse many of the priests involved seem to gain in their faith in the system.

What these four fragments have in common are not only worries over how we make comparisons but also the conviction that a focus on the Catholic Church alone is not enough; not if we want to understand both the particularities and the banalities of its construction and response to abuse.

—Sister Mary Ignatius, in Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You

*   *   *

A bad joke such as this title expresses a great deal of nervousness. Ever since I was first asked to offer reflections on the study of religion and the Catholic sex abuse crisis, it has not been apparent to me that one could treat these events in a scholarly manner without cheapening them. How could one give a paper on this issue and not commit another violent act, by depersonalizing an act of abuse and transforming it into an abstract concept? One of the participants in the conference at Yale from which these posts to The Immanent Frame arise began by claiming “a scholarly response does not preclude a human one.” The force of this sentence comes from the scholarly audience’s wry knowledge that all too frequently a humanist scholar can be inhuman, as a result of giving a frame to complexity and flattening it so that life fits neatly into a conceptual scheme. In one of my favorite texts in the Jewish philosophical tradition, Moses Mendelssohn’s 1783 Jerusalem, Mendelssohn complained about the university professor who simply declaims “dead letter” from a podium. I am nervous that I am—that I cannot but be—that professor.

Nevertheless, there are words on this page following the period at the close of this sentence. Part of the reason is being a scholar of religion contains its own imperatives. Those of us who regularly profit from and teach the work of Jonathan Z. Smith know the persuasive power of that paragraph in the opening pages of his famous article about the 1978 Jonestown massacre, “The Devil in Mr. Jones,” in which Smith summarizes the study of religion as an Enlightenment discourse by stating, “as students of religion, we must accept the burden of the long, hard road of understanding. To do less is to forfeit our license to practice in the academy, to leave the study of religion open to the charge of incivility and intolerance.” Smith went on to compare the Jonestown massacre to Dionysiac cults and cargo cults in order to “reduce” Jonestown to something familiar. Nothing that humans do or have done can be foreign to any humanist inquiry.

Yet why should acts of abuse be transformed into papers that inevitably are about scholars’ own intellectual identity? How can I retain a commitment to the abused when my scholarship is the expression of a commitment to my tribe that takes it as a categorical imperative to analyze them? In adding my voice, the flesh is made word; people—suffering people—become dead letter.

Both as a way of defending this worry and coping with it, I want to turn to some documents from the Catholic sex abuse crisis; these are the ones that I am least able to understand. They pertain to one case from the extensive abuse of Midwestern boys by Fr. James Janssen and others in the 1950s and 1960s. (At the Bishop Accountability website, these documents can be found in the extensive archive of documents pertaining to sex abuse in the diocese of Davenport, Iowa.) In 1957, Janssen had left the diocese of Davenport, Iowa, for a brief period of time, and was ministering in a church in Hinsdale, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. In 1958, Janssen returned to the Davenport diocese, serving at a church in Holbrook, an exurb of Iowa City. There is sexually explicit correspondence with a fourteen-year-old boy he had been abusing in Hinsdale. On one occasion, the boy’s mother found both a letter from Janssen to her son, as well as a sexually explicit reply. The boy’s parents gave them to the pastor of her parish, who forwarded them to the bishop of Davenport.

As best as I can make out—I am grateful to Kathryn Lofton for clearing up some of my difficulties transcribing the letter—Fr. Janssen’s letter to the boy reads as follows:

Hello J.O. King:

Hi ya man. Getting much? I am sure you are. It was nice visiting you at Proco that day.

Glad you like high school. I sure hope to be there next year this time.

You were giving old Ogan a hard time that noon hour.

We are having a hay ride this Wed. Too bad you can’t be here for the big event.

Going to Dav[enport] tomorrow. Fr Bass [Francis E. Bass, made the director of vocations in Davenport the day after the Davenport bishop received a copy of this letter; Bass was also an accused priest] got a new car with air conditioning. We should drive up + see you soon hot dog man.

You are still the champ. You got the most. Keep up the good work.

Be sure + type up one of your good letters. Take it easy. Say hello to Jon [?]. Are [?] you Shell [?] informed on the facts of life.

Solong L.S. P.L. J.O.

C.S.

Your pal

Tear up ==                             F.J.

The boy’s response was typed, as promised. It therefore does not need transcribing. But even though the hyperlink appears above, it might be more convenient for the reader to see the text of the letter here.

HI BIG DICK HOWS YOUR PRICK MINES GRATE

I HAVE JACKED OFF 3 TIMES SOFAR.

THAY SPLIT THE TRROP THERE IS 30 GUYS

IN MY DAD’S TROOP AND 20 IN BELCHERS

TROOP.I CAN’T WATE UNTIL WE JACK OFF

AGUN IT’S SO MUCH FUNN .REMBER KEEP IT

SLIDING YOUR DICK THAT IS.   IF YOU

GET MOVED BE SURE AND TELL ME YOUR NEW

ADRESS. [Name redacted] DIED ALL THE SCOUTS

WERE AT THE WACK.KEEP A JO RAGE ON Y OU

A T ALL TIMES YOU MAY NEAD IT.

DON’T SHOUT TO MUCH YOU MIT RUN OUT.

O.K. NOW WUUS LOST IT

DON’T GET TO MUCH

SAVE SOME FORE ME

I have one thing, and perhaps only one thing, to say about the boy’s letter. Its meaning, and its motivating forces, are opaque. The letter requires commentary; such commentary only became publicly available almost fifty years later, in 2004, when this man filed an affidavit detailing his abuse by Janssen, including being passed around by Janssen to other priests on trips to Davenport as a boy. He stated: “When he [Janssen] left Hinsdale, I would write him sexually explicit letters and he would write them back. One of the letters I wrote him was not addressed well and my mother, who was sending him a letter, decided to put my letter in with hers and she opened my letter.”

Perhaps one’s instinct, when looking at this letter, is to invoke a certain kind of language of altered consciousness to describe this dynamic between Janssen and this boy in the late 1950s; “Stockholm syndrome” comes to mind. (Indeed, this is the language that a graduate student in my department, John Crow, used when I showed him the letter.) Another boy abused by Janssen almost a decade later uses the language of being “emotionally dependent” upon Janssen in his affidavit. I certainly know what these words mean. The affidavit of the boy who authored the typed letter perhaps allows the scholar to spin out a brief narrative articulating how those words might be appropriate in this case, starting from the statement that Janssen “was popular with the kids in school and my association with him made me feel accepted.” Yet this only occludes a void from my understanding; it does not provide any understanding to fill that void. The affidavit implies, from its “I would write…he would write back” syntax, that the boy initiated the correspondence. It never says that Janssen demanded sexually explicit letters after he left Hinsdale. (Janssen’s request to the boy to “be sure to type up one of your good letters” may have been understood as a demand. But why was it taken as such?) And it never says that Janssen demanded correspondence that, at least from the basis of these two letters, may have been far more sexually explicit on the boy’s side than on Janssen’s.

There is something occurring, signaled by these documents, that the documents themselves do not and cannot show. There is no boundary-crossing to be made, from our world to this boy’s world in 1958, unless we go outside the text to “culture,” to theory, to dead letter, which authorizes one to generate some hypothesis as to why the boy wrote numerous letters of this nature, why the boy felt such a need to keep Janssen in his life after Janssen’s return to Iowa, for why Janssen continued to hold authority over the boy after Janssen left Hinsdale.

This hermeneutical poverty is at the core of why these letters are so disturbing. They are extraordinary documents, and yet I worry that they are not extraordinarily teachable. The language of “Stockholm syndrome” (including the one scholarly article I found that hypothesizes that Stockholm syndrome can explain why victims of child sexual abuse do not report abuse to authorities) is something that identifies a pattern of behavior of empathy with a captor or an abuser. It does not identify a cause of that behavior. The words are nothing more than signals to the reader that what is on the table is radically foreign.

Yet one cannot remain in this position that would assert, in effect, that the desires and acts that are signaled by the words in this letter cannot be conceptualized. If those acts cannot be conceptualized, then it becomes impossible to develop an account of those acts as deserving of blame. Moral language—language of praise or blame—requires a full understanding of the nature and mechanism of an act, in order to give reasons why the act deserves the normative vocabulary associated with it. Our judgments, if they are to be just, should be justified. However, they can only be justified with recourse to the data at hand. When we use the language of “Stockholm syndrome” or “emotional dependence” to describe the lack of autonomy in the authorship of a letter (in other words, as a signal of abuse), and in so doing depart from any claim found in that letter or in the letter to which it responds, we are no longer talking about an act of abuse. We scholars are talking about us. And the dead letter returns. One may want to blame Janssen himself, but as long as the subject of discourse remains mired in discoursers’ desires, the “Janssen” being blamed is a Janssen who exists only in the mind.

Smith may show a way past the two unsatisfactory options of silence or narcissism. In “The Devil in Mr. Jones,” Smith “reduced” Jonestown to something familiar through acts of comparison of that massacre to Euripides’s The Bacchae and cargo cults. This reduction served to open up a normative language about the massacre that did not rest on hysterical judgment about Jones and his community; the comparison to The Bacchae grounds Smith’s judgment that “the most proximate responsibility” for the Jonestown massacre was borne by Congressman Leo Ryan, who violated Jonestown’s utopia when he arrived in Guyana to investigate charges of fraud and abuse against Jones. If comparison was a path to normative evaluation in that case—to being able to blame someone and give a reason as to why that person acted in a blameworthy manner—perhaps it can be of help here also.

And so I would like to turn to another example of same-sex eroticism for comparison to the correspondence between Janssen and the unnamed boy. In the early months of 1982, Michel Foucault gave a course at the Collège de France that has been published under the title Hermeneutics of the Subject. There, as in other works written in this time period, Foucault attended to the Alcibiades (improperly credited to Plato) and its language of “care of the self” or self-cultivation. In the dialogue, Socrates persuades Alcibiades that such care for the self is necessary for him to be able eventually to govern himself and govern over others. Self-care is part of becoming a subject, of expressing oneself. Socrates teaches Alcibiades this because he is in love with him. However, readers know from the very first lines of the dialogue that Socrates’ love for Alcibiades is a love that, so Socrates says, differs from that of other men: “I was not the first man to fall in love with you, son of Clinias, and now that the others have stopped pursuing you I suppose you’re wondering why I’m the only one who hasn’t given up.” I find Foucault’s gloss on this—and I regret that I do not have the time to reconstruct Foucault’s analysis of the dialogue at greater length—to be incredibly helpful.

Can we say that Alcibiades’ suitors take care of Alcibiades himself [as the directive of Socrates at 127e would require]? Actually, their behavior and conduct proves that they do not care for Alcibiades but merely for his body and its beauty, since they abandon him as soon as he is no longer absolutely desirable. To take care of Alcibiades himself, in the strict sense, would mean therefore attending to his soul rather than his body, to his soul inasmuch as it is a subject of action and makes more or less good use of his body and its aptitudes and capabilities, etc. You see, then, that the fact that Socrates waits until Alcibiades has come of age and has lost his most dazzling youth before speaking to him shows that, unlike Alcibiades’ other suitors and lovers, Socrates cares for Alcibiades himself. More precisely, Socrates cares about the way in which Alcibiades will be concerned about himself.

From this passage, I only want to make the simple point that it is this kind of attending to someone whom one desires—to care for the other’s self-care—that is absent in the correspondence between Janssen and the boy from Hinsdale. It is not there in Janssen’s horrible pun on “joking” with which he opens his letter to the boy. It is not there in the request to type a sexually explicit letter. It is not there in the promise to come up and see the boy soon in Fr. Bass’s new air-conditioned car. Indeed, a desire for such care might be justifiably inferred from the boy’s curious decision to intersperse news of someone’s death (and the scouts’ presence at the wake) among the various sentences in his letter about masturbation.

Now this act of comparison between Foucault’s account of Alcibiades and Janssen does not make it possible to understand what is actually occurring underneath these documents; it does not make them as familiar as The Bacchae might make Jonestown. Nevertheless, it does become possible to move past the inability to blame Janssen for some action that the documents cannot narrate. An act of comparison can make it possible to blame Janssen for not performing an action that is missing from this correspondence, for not caring for the boy who, decades later, testifies that this correspondence is abusive correspondence. Through this comparison we are able to say it is abuse because Janssen does not show the boy how to govern himself. (The affidavit closes [par. 10] with the man describing a photo taken two years after the abuse had begun, when he was in the eighth grade, in which he is giving the finger, “something Janssen encouraged me to do,” to the photographer.)

Indeed, one could take the Foucauldian analysis further and analyze abusers’ language and adult survivors’ language about abusers to show how the way in which abusers rule over their victims might have elements in common with Foucault’s analysis of the confessor in sixteenth-century practical manuals in the 1975 Collège de France course published in English as Abnormal, in which governing always properly belongs to the confessor, because a penitent’s subjectivity is always mediated through him. This is not to say that confession is a form of abuse. But it is to say that when selfhood only has meaning when it passes through what Foucault described as the “domain of confession,” in which “the priest’s empirical powers of the eye, the gaze, the ear, and hearing are developed in support of his sacramental power of the keys,” there is an alienation produced that makes self-government impossible because all the power of governing the penitent’s soul belongs to the priest. (Analogously, the power of governing the priest’s soul belongs to his spiritual director.) These manuals about confession are manuals about the production of “emotional dependence,” to use the phrase that the boy abused by Janssen in the 1960s used in his affidavit. They may be helpful in producing a narrative of causation that makes these affidavits clearer, and from which one might blame a priest for those practices that may have produced what is attested as “emotional dependence” because one has shown how such practices could have produced it. But I use the optative and the conditional purposively. Documents such as these will forever retain secrets that no scholar can force into the open.

In conclusion, when looking at documents relating to the sex abuse crisis, there is a temptation to want to reconstruct the mental states of the abuser or the victim. That can only lead to dead ends, and to dead letter spoken about those dead ends. The language of an affidavit to sexual abuse, or of a letter that might signify such abuse, is eternally in flight from the acts it narrates or signals. The enterprise of the historian is therefore exceptionally fragile when the documents in play are those found at the Bishop Accountability website. Yet scholars can point to what this language is like and unlike in the history of religious and philosophical thought. In that process, we can perhaps unveil how sex abuse ends a victim’s sense that his or her life could ever become self-directed and thereby falsify Sister Mary Ignatius’s claim that the passage into adulthood is not a worthwhile one. Comparison is therefore the most formidable technique of those who practice an ethical art of speaking with the victim of abuse, and not about him or her.

I begin with this observation about our contemporary moment’s deep commitment to the child as an essential identity position. I note that this commitment exists despite the dramatic, really unprecedented, variability in those individuals who are categorized as children—and despite the way that aging is always already inflecting, transforming, and finally eroding the child such that someone can never be a child in the way that they can be male or female, black or white. I do so because the corpus of material related to sex abuse and the Catholic Church uniformly relies on this cultural commitment to the child. Cardinal Bernard Francis Law apologizes for his failure to see that the protection of children must be the church’s single focus and top priority, and his admission that he has only recently come to understand this fact—to see that the child’s need for protection trumps the church’s need to avoid scandal—points to the extent of the problem and of the church’s perceived gross negligence. Therefore despite the church’s historical emphasis on the child as a privileged vehicle of faith (in other words, having the faith of a child) and the significant place that childhood sexual innocence has in Catholic tradition (immaculate conception, for example), real children, as the documents compiled by BishopAccountability.org tell us time and again, bear the violent brunt of the lived distance between Catholic theory and practice—between the mandate that priests remain celibate and the stark reality of sexual need.

It is therefore specifically the sexual abuse of children that is the thrust of current social critique and moral outrage directed against the Catholic Church—a moral outrage so intense as to even motivate recent efforts to bring charges against the Vatican for crimes against humanity. While I do not want to minimize the magnitude of these crimes, I would, for a moment, like to bracket single-focused attention on them in order to add a few salient observations that might help us make sense not so much of the events but of what can appear in some of these documents to be an outraged and increasingly shrill response to them. I do so in the spirit of one trained as a literary and cultural theorist not as a religious studies scholar, and it would be my hope that the questions someone with my training might ask would shed productive light on the issues, precisely because of my discipline’s critical distance from the core fracture lines and questions that have tended to shape popular debate.

First, it is useful to remind ourselves of something that we all know—that the child has long been the privileged occasion and overwrought site for scientific, social, and personal narratives of sexual development and deterioration. We need look no further than psychoanalytic theory itself to be reminded of the child’s longstanding and foundational importance to our contemporary understanding of sexuality and to the burgeoning fields of sexuality studies. From Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, to recent queer theorists and cultural studies scholars like James Kincaid, Lee Edelman, and Chris Nealon, the child has long been the point of origin from which to think and rethink narratives of individual sexual identity and development. The child is the scaffolding on which we tend to build our stories of sexual identity, replete with its minor chords of transgression and regression, as well as progression. In The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, Kincaid explores the social implications of this tendency to infuse the child with sexual content and meaning. The practice he terms “child-loving” has, from the nineteenth century forward, carried a latent erotic dimension for adults in ways that both belie and inform the heavy, overwrought artifice of innocence that we have constructed supposedly to protect children from the contaminating forces of the adult world.

It is provocative, of course, to insist that our love for children is not always nonsexual in nature and motive, that there is a continuum rather than a binary opposition between sex abuse and platonic child love. On the one hand, psychoanalytic theory encourages us to turn to the child to find traces and to see the origins of a ubiquitous, inchoate sexuality of which we attempt to make sense throughout our lives; on the other hand, we insist that children are sexually innocent and hermetically sealed from these very enduring, at times chaotic, sexual forces. Even as we commit to the idea that the child is innocent, sexually passionless, and in need of protection, we increasingly weigh this child down with fraught sexual meanings and content.

The large-scale social, cultural, and political implications of this fact are fleshed out nowhere more provocatively than in the work of Ian Hacking. His foundational 1991 essay “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse” summarizes the current situation in which we find ourselves as follows:

Some evil actions are public. Others are private. Child abuse is the worst of private evils. We know we want to put a stop to it. We know we can’t, but we must protect as many children as we can, and help those who have been hurt. Anyone who feels differently is already something of a monster.

And yet, even as we believe that child abuse means something definite, the behaviors that fall under the rubric of child abuse have changed dramatically over the last hundred years, such that many of the things that we currently identify as abusive were standard practice in the recent past. In other words, we’ve unwittingly and gradually been changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our moral codes accordingly.

The reason I bring Hacking up in detail here is that he reminds us of an important aspect of our urgent and visceral impulse to protect children from abusive behavior, in this case, from the abuse of priests and the church they call home. We can see that this impulse, powerful as it is, is itself indicative of our particular historical moment, and socially constructed to effect particular social transformations at the current time. It isn’t that the abuse that the children suffered in the various Catholic dioceses is warranted or acceptable or that we should overlook or minimize it as church authorities have tended to do. But how we respond to and understand these events—the outrage we feel and the emotions we let loose—are inevitably part of larger social and political processes of which we need to be aware. And, whether or not we would agree with Hacking’s conclusion that the historically unprecedented number of behaviors that now ‘count’ as child abuse are part and parcel of a larger reallocation of social responsibility from the state onto the individual (in this case the abusive adult priest and an institution that stands in uneasy relation to the state), his assertion that child abuse is one avenue through which the state negotiates and reallocates social responsibility is useful for thinking about how the child that is the centerpiece of these cases of church abuse might be operating, in this case, in the larger push and pull between church and state.

As the documents compiled at BishopAccountability.org make clear, children are the rope in the ongoing tug of war between church and state. The conflict would have an inherently different feel if the sexual abuse of power were between adults. Popular antebellum narratives in the form of the escaped nun’s memoir (I think here of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures or Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent) claimed to document women’s sexual abuse within convent walls. However subsequently disproven they were, these accounts were so effective as to result in riots—in angry mobs, for example, literally burning down the Ursuline convent that Reed wrote about. At the particular time in which Monk, Reed, and others told their sensationalized stories of sexual abuse at the hands of nefarious priests, the public felt great dis-ease with the pressures that the influx of new Catholic immigrants were exerting on civic resources. Outraged readers who stormed convents looking for proof of nuns’ sexual abuse at the hands of corrupt priests were animated by a desire to regulate and bring under public control what was going on within the privacy of the convent or confessional, in an effort to manage and control a perceived threat to the sanctity and very durability of the state.

If these accounts of women’s sexual abuse at the hands of priests were the subject of violent social outrage in the nineteenth century, children seem to be functioning narratively in a similar way in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In addition to their truth value and the accuracy of their content, these contemporary accounts of sexual abuse of power have a secondary and collateral effect of vilifying a church that stands in uneasy relation to the hegemony of the nation-state. By contextualizing the current narratives within a longer history of popular depictions of the Vatican’s complicity in priests’ abuses of power, we can begin to see how these contemporary allegations and abuses of power might inadvertently work to further a state agenda of bringing Catholic church practices and those individuals who implement church authority under state control, surveillance, and regulation.

This effort to exert state authority over church life—and church resistance to the encroaching state control—shapes the very language that both constituencies use to narrate recent history. When victims say that they don’t accuse abusive priests of sin, but rather of crime, they are drawing a crucial distinction between spheres of influence to insist that priests, like all citizens, are subject to state authority. Conversely, when Bishop Thomas Daily says he is not a policeman but a shepherd, he is insisting on the church’s distance from such authority. And when the 2002 grand jury report on the Rockville Centre describes the abusers as “predatory, serial, child molesters working as priests” rather than “priests troubled with the human frailty and sinfulness in need of succor and protection,” they are insisting that state definitions and the law that upholds them precede and preempt the logic of the church.

Children’s significance to this negotiation and struggle for control extends beyond their role as victim of abuse, and the child—as metaphor, imaginative construct, and developmental stage of life—is a powerful referent that molds how those on all sides of the conflict conceptualize, describe, and understand the current situation. Church leaders often narrate the course of events surrounding their response to abuse reports in ways that associate themselves with childlike qualities—as ingénues who didn’t have the knowledge, the experience, or the wisdom that they needed in order to contend with issues of such magnitude. If these leaders self-describe as being developmentally immature, inexperienced, and innocent at the time the abuse surfaced, offending priests are often described as being like the children they abuse. John Geoghan, for example, is described by the rector of St John’s Seminary in 1954 as having “a very pronounced immaturity,” with psychological testing showing an “immature and impulsive nature.” The Grand Jury Report of the Rockville Centre includes a facility report that observes that Priest C “was still attracted to adolescents and indeed strongly considered himself to be one.” Even congregants who welcome priests into their homes explain their misplaced trust by describing the priest as being like one of their children. Perpetrator as well as victim reach for the cultural category of the child in order to explain and mitigate their culpability and to lay claim to the position of innocent victim rather than pernicious perpetrator.

And so it is not simply that children were systematically abused under church authority, but that the idea of the child as a vulnerable subject in need of special protection and succor has seeped into every aspect of the narratives we are generating around these events. In other words, the child’s privileged status as a person in need of special protections and advocacy is being utilized by every constituency at the table—from the adult priests’ and bishops’ claims that they are child-like to adult victims’ ongoing self-identification as children—and is the unacknowledged driver in the tense struggle over authority that is ensuing between church and state. A scan of the powerful materials compiled by BishopAccountability.org reveals how much of the current debate about sex abuse and the Catholic Church depends on a sharp opposition between child and adult. Not only do victims and their families emphasize victims’ minority (even when victims exceed the child’s legal age limit) but priests repeatedly liken themselves to children, as part of an effort to self-understand as victim rather than perpetrator. It is this dimension of the debate—so often unrecognized—that gives accusations and refutations of abuse such emotional force and power.

As you can see, the questions that literary and cultural studies might productively bring to the child abuse and study of religion analytic field are ones concerned with relations between individuals, institutions, and the state and the way that the complex meaning-making that the child occasions as an identity category is integral to that process. Further, focus on the child as a powerfully constituting dimension of this analytic field helps to tease out the delicate dance in which church and state are both involved about authority, privacy, financial resources, and ultimately the legislation of bodies as well as selves. Literary and cultural studies scholars have paid all too little attention to religion in textual analysis. We, and I include myself in this, have tended to conceptualize the child’s significance to cultural formations in secular terms—to see the child as a complex identity category interfacing with a state pried loose from spiritual concerns. The intellectual challenge that this archive offers is one that asks us to revisit this assumption and to see the child as embedded in the crosshairs of spiritual, sexual, and secular concerns. Doing so offers us the possibility of seeing the full implications of our current abiding commitment to the child as our last essential identity category. It also offers us the possibility of seeing the way that church as well as state turn to this last bastion of pre-postmodern humanism in efforts to shore up their constituencies. And, finally, it offers us the opportunity to perceive how the child for whom we urgently advocate operates in the struggle for authority, power, market share, and resources between the two.

Born in 1931 to a working-class family in Dorchester, Shanley is one of the most notorious abusive priests from the Boston archdiocese. His case garnered national media attention. In February 2005, after being summarily laicized, he was found guilty of raping a member of his parish, beginning when the boy was six and ending when the boy was eleven. Shanley appealed, challenging the prosecution’s reliance on “recovered” memories; the state supreme court affirmed his 12-15 year sentence. Roderick MacLeish, a civil attorney, claims that at least 30 people contacted him claiming abuse by Shanley. The archdiocese settled several of these claims, some in excess of one million dollars. According to affidavits and news accounts, Shanley’s abusive behavior began in 1961, the year after he was ordained, and continued until the early 1990s. His victims ranged in age from 6 to 21, with most being 14 or older. With one exception, they were male. Accounts contain allegations of oral and anal sex; many include claims of physical coercion or spiritual manipulation. There is substantial evidence that church officials and local police knew about these allegations. In 1994, Shanley admitted to having had sex with four adolescent males.

Ordained in 1960, the year Kennedy was elected, Shanley’s first decade of parish ministry coincided with the heady, turbulent time of Vatican II, the civil-rights movement and school-busing controversies, the anti-War movement, and the sexual revolution. By the late 60s, Shanley had developed a well-regarded ministry to Boston’s massive homeless youth population. In 1970, Cardinal Cushing affirmed this ministry as Shanley’s primary assignment. By 1972, Shanley operated the city’s first mobile VD clinic. And by the end of the decade, he had helped build a residential facility for gay youth and their families and a retreat center for others engaged in urban ministry.

As Shanley’s ministry shifted to focus on sexually alienated young people, he also began to challenge the church’s teachings on homosexuality and birth control. He did this through popular live and taped lectures, as well as a widely circulated newsletter. He traveled to Wichita, Kansas, to fight the repeal of a gay-rights ordinance at the height of Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaigns. In both the mainstream and gay press, Shanley was celebrated as a charismatic, hardworking, radical priest. Although Cardinal Humberto Sousa Medeiros, Archbishop of Boston, initially approved this work, after complaints from members of the diocese and pressure from the Vatican, he assigned Shanley to a pastorate in St. John’s parish in Newton, where the events that led to Shanley’s conviction transpired.

Shanley’s previous celebrity would likely have been sufficient to generate notoriety when accusations surfaced, but the sensationalism was magnified by the fact that many of the allegations were leveled by men who had participated in his ministry to homeless and gay youth. They claimed that Shanley made them recount their sexual exploits, look at pornography, strip naked, masturbate, perform oral sex, or be anally penetrated. Some accounts leave open the question of whether a teenager can meaningfully consent in such circumstances; others explicitly state that Shanley physically coerced or spiritually threatened his charges.

One incident from Shanley’s advocacy days received enormous attention in later news stories. In December 1978, Shanley was one of three clergy members who attended a meeting of approximately 150 men and boys, held in a church basement, to consider the legal, psychological, moral, and social issues related to man-boy love. A separate caucus, which did not include Shanley, met the following day to found the National Man-Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA. Many commentators collapsed these events and identified Shanley as a co-founder of NAMBLA, an organization dedicated to repealing all age-of-consent laws. According to a contemporaneous press account, Shanley told those gathered about “a boy…rejected by his family.”

When his parents found out about [his] relationship [with an older man], [they had] the man…arrested…. “It was only a brief and passing thing, as far as the sex was concerned, but the love was deep and the gratitude to the man was deep, and when [the boy] realized that the indiscretion…had cost this man perhaps 20 years…[he fell] apart.” Shanley concluded, “We have our convictions upside down if we are truly concerned with boys…the ‘cure’ does far more damage.”

It would, of course, be equally plausible to describe this relationship as exploitative rather than edifying, and to characterize the boy’s “love” as identification with an abuser. At the same time, we must remember that Shanley’s mutual interrogation of the condemnation of homosexuality and man-boy love was fully consonant with gay liberationist discourse in 1978. This gathering, in fact, had been organized in response to a massive police sting, in which 24 men were indicted for their sexual involvement with teenage boys. Understood as Boston’s Stonewall, these arrests galvanized the city’s gay community. The protests eventually cost the Revere district attorney his job. Efforts to end police harassment and brutality were endorsed by the local homophile chapter, the Libertarian Party, the ACLU, Dignity, and the Metropolitan Community Church. Two organizations came into being as a result: NAMBLA and the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, which recently secured same-sex marriage rights in Massachusetts.

This dual genesis, and its Ishmael-Isaac legacy, must be part of any adequate account of American gay politics. Although contemporary LGBT activists are quick to distinguish homosexuality and pedophilia, in the years immediately after Stonewall, broad and general challenges to state involvement in citizens’ sexual lives were more common. Given the number of sexually active young people in urban areas who were coming out, these challenges were raised by many who had not achieved the age of majority. The press account quoted above includes statements by two teenage boys; 2002 coverage of Shanley’s case includes statements by adult gay men who had sex with older men as teenagers without overt coercion or subsequent regret.

This admixture is also evinced by criticism of Shanley. Summarizing a talk by Shanley that “disturbed [her] greatly,” Wilma Higgs reported the following “outlandish statements”: homosexuality is not a sin or illness, but a gift from God; it is immoral to try and change a person’s sexual orientation; “homosexuality,” as we understand it, was not known until about 100 years ago, and, therefore, the Bible has nothing to say about it; when adults and children have sex, children are the seducers; children may regret causing an adult to go to jail, knowing they are the responsible ones.

Since Higgs considered these statements to be “so blatantly untrue…[and] misleading,” she challenged Shanley during the lecture and wrote to Cardinal Law after. According to Dolores Stevens, after making similar statements about homosexuality, and claiming that gay people were not angry enough about their treatment by society, Shanley then “spoke of pedophilia (which [he characterized as] a non-coerced…manipulation of sex organs…between an adult and child). He stated that the adult is not the seducer—…and…the kid is not traumatized by the act per se…, [but by] the police…‘drag[ging]’ the kid in for questioning.” When confronted with Stevens’s letter, Shanley stated that she had misunderstood him, which is certainly possible—and plausible.

Let me be clear: sexual relationships between adults and teenagers, especially between those with institutional authority (teachers, therapists, priests) and those over whom they have authority, are rife with the possibility of subtle—and egregious—forms of coercion, abuses of power, and violations of trust. They may be so fraught with damaging possibilities that we must insist on bright-line rules, even though we know such prohibitions are, in the final analysis, over-broad. But when assessing what transpired between Shanley and his accusers, when telling the tale of a closeted priest who went to seminary at the height of the McCarthy era and then developed a successful youth ministry at the height of the sexual revolution in a social and religious context where homosexuality was being both celebrated and vilified, we must exercise a finely tuned sensitivity to contextual detail.

Accounts of Shanley’s abuse include reports that he told young men that homosexuality was not a sin and that having sex with either men or women was okay. While these statements are usually presented as a sexual predator’s sinister machinations, some auditors surely experienced a sense of relief and hope hearing these pronouncements. Given that press accounts claim Shanley had a reputation for cavorting with a different young man every night, mustn’t we pause over the relatively small number who came forward to complain? Given that Shanley is routinely characterized as “perverted” and “disgusting,” that the hotel he purchased with another priest in Palm Springs was described as “Sodom and Gomorrah,” that accounts of Shanley’s—and the church’s—degeneracy appear on blogs entitled “The Rise of Sodom” and “Book of Gomorrah 2,” shouldn’t we consider the possibility that he might have received strong moral condemnation from some quarters even if he had never touched an under-age boy?

A July 2002 cover story on Shanley from The Advocate—a glossy, mainstream gay magazine with a national circulation—bears the headline “Paul Shanley’s compassion was just part of a scheme to abuse vulnerable boys and young men.” The story tells of William McLean, who met Shanley in 1973, when he was a 20-year-old college junior, by responding to an ad in the Boston Phoenix that read, “Gay? Bi? Confused? Need someone to talk to?” Although McLean found Shanley’s willingness to have sex confusing, given the priestly vow of celibacy, he found his time with Shanley “incredibly helpful,” and observed that Shanley was the first person to tell him it was okay to be gay. While he found the sex enjoyable, McLean expresses regret that his first experience was with an older man who was a priest. Although McLean makes no allegation of physical coercion, was of age when he met Shanley, and was not a member of Shanley’s parish, I wonder whether a similar kind of retrospective regret might not color victims recollections of, and claims against, Shanley. For example, John Harris, who currently characterizes Shanley’s acts as rape, met Shanley when he was 21, quite confused about what it might mean to be gay. Harris’s tale of confusion, pain, shame—and even physical pain accompanying the sex act—is similar to many coming-out stories. Like many of Shanley’s accusers, McLean and Harris maintained contact with Shanley over several years, often reinitiating the relationship. In her Vanity Fair piece, Maureen Orth reports that “Harris is on permanent disability and has undergone shock treatments.” She fails to note, however, that electroshock therapy was a common “treatment” for homosexuality throughout the 70s. She implies that Harris’s debilitation rests solely on Shanley’s shoulders, not at the doorstep of larger institutions. In Orth’s gothic tale, the church is negligent and uncaring, but never homophobic.

I am not suggesting that Harris was not raped or that he misremembers what happened to him. I am also not suggesting that Shanley’s actions did not cause Harris—and many other men—psychological damage. But I am suggesting that coming to grips with a gay identity is an incredibly difficult process. In fact, coming to grips with one’s sexuality, regardless of its content and character, is a difficult process. And this process was undoubtedly even more difficult during the period in which most of Shanley’s “abusive” actions allegedly took place, given the kind of discourses—and silences—that encircled (homo)sexuality in the 1970s. I am also suggesting that the editors and authors of national magazines, especially those that cater to gay audiences, in the 2000s should understand such matters.

I would like to find a way to speak about Shanley as both a sexually abusive priest worthy of disdain and a pioneering voice for gay rights worthy of admiration. I would also like to develop a sufficiently broad understanding of social context and an adequately nuanced account of individual motivation to explain the Catholic sex abuse cases, their causes, their meaning, their effects, their remedy. Most importantly, however, I want a history of homosexuality and Christianity in America that can place Shanley—and the Catholic sex abuse cases generally—squarely in the center. Because, in the final analysis, to understand these cases—or homosexuality, or Christianity—we must keep in mind the complex embroilment of Christianity, homosexuality, power, desire, and human frailty, as well as the on-going contest between radical queer voices and palatable gay visions.

I find mangled lives among those we now call the abused, but also among the abusers. I don’t say that lightly, abstractly. There are, in the identified abusers, some men who seem so far beyond our ordinary talk about ethics that they are “monsters” according to one old sense of the word. But there are other men—perfectly familiar, much sadder—who now get swept up into the same category of abuser.

I remember a former student. Once ordained a new priest, he began in his mid-20s what he viewed as a consensual sexual relationship with a 17-year-old.

Is it wrong for a Catholic priest to begin a sexual relationship with anyone committed to his pastoral care? Yes, it is, and for a number of reasons—including, in my view, because it violates a public vow of celibacy that underwrites claims to holy authority.

Is it worse when the person under care is below the legal age of consent? Yes, though I am less concerned with the legal age of consent than with the age of ethical agency. Both of these ages vary astonishingly by time, place, and person.

Is the sexual relationship in such a case always monstrous? Must the offending priest be treated for the rest of his life on the assumption that he is violently insane and irredeemably corrupt? Here I stop, not least because I remember that the rhetoric of monstrosity has regularly been deployed in church campaigns against sodomites—and in medico-legal judgments against a whole array of perverts that includes homosexuals. The current stigmatization of sex abusers in the Roman Catholic clergy is sometimes uncannily like old ecclesiastical or civil campaigns that most of us would deplore—campaigns against sodomites, witches, heretics, against child masturbators or hysterical mothers or congenital homosexuals.

Am I suggesting that we should tolerate or even affirm those who commit sexual abuse? No. I am suggesting that we should listen to the rhetoric of our condemnations, because whatever their justice, they often echo condemnations that would have been applied to many of us fifty years ago—that still are applied to many of us by the Catholic magisterium.

Let me raise three sorts of questions about the rhetoric in some appalling documents from the dossier of Robert Meffan—in regard to pathology, mysticism, and authority.

I begin with the wholesale incorporation into these documents of psychiatric or psychological categories and models, especially with regard to sex or sexuality. You can see this in the Review Board finding on Meffan, which not only cites as decisive a “personality profile,” but which deploys various psychological categories to describe him. You can also see, as in so many cases, an abuser being handed off to the therapeutic system. Indeed, the review board overrules the recommendation that Meffan be allowed to live with his cousin in order to enroll him in a “structured aftercare program.”

You discover here, as in other dossiers, the models and the mechanisms of various psychiatric theories. The models entered Catholic discourses in the last century without much reflection. There is a first wave shortly after 1900, when late nineteenth-century sexology is incorporated into some advanced confessors’ manuals. Then, from the 1940s on, pathological categories like “homosexuality” begin to appear in essays of moral theology, especially those written under the influence of psychoanalysis. Beginning in the 1950s, “homosexuality” and related categories figure in canonical documents—e.g., in the expert opinions submitted to diocesan tribunals or to the Roman Rota. From 1960 on, there is also a growing reliance on psychological testing of applicants to seminaries and religious orders, especially when it comes to sexuality. Increasingly, the clinician, not the spiritual director, is asked to render an expert judgment on a candidate’s suitability.

You are reading, then, a historically recent and variously motivated incorporation of clinical languages. I’m not suggesting that these languages have no place in talking about abuse or that church authorities should never rely on them. I do note that the institutional authority of the clinician functions incoherently beside older theological categories and traditional claims about church authority. In Scholastic theories, there was supposed to be a clear delegation of responsibility: the clinician could investigate natural pathologies empirically, but the spiritual director reserved for himself supernatural knowledge of the soul’s true condition and destiny. In hurried practice, church officials often deferred to prevailing psychiatric authority—especially when it came to sexual disorders. But how exactly was a pathological model of sexual abuse supposed to cohere with Scholastic theologies of sins against the sixth commandment?

To address this question well, a reader would need other documents not in Meffan’s dossier. For example, there should be samples from the history of the category “pedophilia” in other institutions, both the short history (say, the influence of the work of David Finkelhor) and the longer history (say, the 1867 case of Jouy described by Foucault in Abnormal and History of Sexuality Vol. 1).

A reader would also need to ask about the contrast between the ecclesiastical bureaucracy’s acceptance of clinical conclusions about pedophilia and its rejection of clinical conclusions about homosexuality—or masturbation. According to the letter on the “problem of homosexuality” published by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1986, “the Church can not only convert scientific discoveries to its use, but also transcend their perspective,” since its perspective is so much larger than the scientific. By what reasoning does “the Church” transcend the scientific perspective so completely on homosexuality as to reverse basic conclusions, while remaining within the perspective so completely in the case of pedophilia? Is this difference a matter of theological reasoning—or rather of the realities of legal liability and popular opinion? Would “the Church” prefer to “transcend” psychiatric accounts of pedophilia too if it could get away with doing so?

Maybe not. Church officials sometimes want to transcend psychiatry, but sometimes they want to use it. They have deployed various strategies to deflect blame for failing to restrain clerical abusers, not least by pinning abuse on the admission of gay candidates to seminary and the religious life. This deflection can be crude (as when it was floated at a Vatican news conference in February 2002) or indirect (as in the recently released second Jay College report). Either way, the strategy relies on the assumption of an immutable pathology: Homosexual men snuck into the priesthood. They suffer from a pathology that makes them commit sexual crimes. Everyone knows that we can’t be blamed for their pathology. We can’t do anything except kick them out—while we establish strict screening procedures to prevent any more of the sick perverts from sneaking in. In plainer English: We reject 1990s science about the natural origin of healthy homosexuality in favor of 1890s science about homosexuality as a fixed, criminal pathology. Is reverting to discredited scientific theories “transcending” science?

From questions raised by pathological language, I turn to more traditional theological rhetoric. In Meffan’s dossier, there are reports that he relied on the rhetoric of mystical theology. You can read his language for yourself in the startling statement signed “Prisoner of Love.” The use of theological or liturgical language to cover prohibited sex is nothing new. There are hints of it in the accusations Peter Damian makes against sodomitic priests in his Gomorran Book (from 1050 CE), and there is a surprising parallel to Meffan in the inquisitorial records from a convent in Pescia in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The Theatine abbess, Benedetta Carlini, not only channeled Jesus’ commands that she should marry a younger nun in an elaborate wedding, but took on the person of a handsome angel, Splenditello, to conduct an erotic relationship with her (for all of which see Judith Brown, Immodest Acts).

I wish it were so simple as saying that Meffan abuses religious language to procure sexual gratification. That is what Peter Damian, patron saint of the theology of sodomy, wants us to believe, and it is suggested again by some of the testimony against Meffan. But I find the plea from the Prisoner of Love more troubling than that. Some parts of the text seem all too sincere: “I could still say Mass privately each morning, becoming one with my loving Christ. I could still tell Him over and over again that I loved Him.”

The possibility of authorizing abuse theologically follows too easily from the always exceptional status claimed for modern church power. In modern Catholic contexts, official languages often pretend to be exempt from qualification, questioning, or appeal. They are absolute languages. They function in a state of exception. When that rhetorical character is extended to traditional images of a masculinized God or angel who ravishes—rapes—souls that are gendered as feminine, then erotic domination seems to receive divine blessing. I’m not objecting to mystical writing. I’m pointing to a consequence of moving older mystical or liturgical languages into a modern system that endows some church speech with an incontestable and literal authority. Under a regime that claims divine exemption for its decrees, mustn’t erotic metaphors of divine domination sometimes seem to authorize sexual demands by priests? Turn the question around: imagine what you would have to change in present claims for church language to prevent the violent misapplication of old metaphors for God’s love.

Which brings me to the last rhetoric I want to mention: the homoerotic undertone of ecclesiastical obedience. The documents from the Meffan case are not homoerotic in the obvious sense—they are not about male-male or female-female abuse. They concern sexual acts between a man and girls or young women. But the male and female bodies here allow us to notice another level at which the homoerotic can appear in church speech. Take as an example Meffan’s letter to Cardinal Law, with its touches of studied obsequiousness, its acts of enticing submission. Those rhetorical gestures reveal desires sedimented in now standard forms of clerical power.

Whenever I was asked to contribute a sound-bite to the news coverage of the Boston cases in 2002, I tried to insist that the real scandal was not that there were abusers in the priesthood, but that they had been protected by church authority—not out of concern for their well-being or, God knows, for the safety of parishioners, but because of the hierarchical system’s imperative to protect itself. The scandal, I used to repeat, is the system.

Even that sound-bite has two meanings. It means that there is a large institution with all sorts of urgent motives for wanting to insure its authority, to keep its secrets, to protect its accumulated treasure. But the sound-bite also means that sexual abuse is coded into the system itself. It is expressed within the system before it is inflicted on those outside. We must listen to those who are abused by priests, but we should listen then for the cries of the abuse by which many priests are formed as priests. Abuse—not infrequently sexual, typically erotic—is required for this late-modern system of clerical power. It operates on the bodies of many children and adolescents, some of whom are being groomed for priesthood and religious life. Father says, “You have a vocation.” What appalling words those can be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But writing for an audience that includes non-specialists and specialists alike—and specialists from many different fields at that—risks raising expectations for what we will cover. Jon Butler, for example, takes us to task for not including enough history; Molly Worthen suggests that we need more theology. Similarly, other reviewers have called for more constitutional law, political philosophy, and organizational sociology. Not to mention the members of many different religious groups who have written to ask why their group—the Quakers, say, or the Eastern Orthodox—are not featured more prominently. We readily concede that American Grace does not cover all of these subjects in depth. Perhaps, however, other authors will build on the themes, arguments, and data of American Grace to examine these other subjects in greater detail. And one of us (Campbell) is currently engaged in another project to go deep in examining one such topic discussed at length by Jon Butler—Mormonism.

David Hollinger, in contrast, does not call for anything, but instead hints at a lament for the state of religion as we describe it. We have been struck by his comment that the form of religion we describe is “bland” or, more pointedly, that blurred religious boundaries mean that Americans do not take their religion very seriously. Other critics, too, have commented on the tolerant religiosity described in American Grace, but unlike Hollinger, argued that such a religion is hardly worthy of the name. Wilfred McClay, writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted that “Surely there is something ironic about preferring a form of religion that asks us to admire and study the great prophets and preachers while warning us against imitating them and their true-believing faith.” Like Hollinger, theologian Charles Mathewes accepts our empirical description of American religion, but unlike Hollinger, he rejects the idea that “bland is beautiful.” In a panel discussion at the 2011 American Academy of Religion annual meeting Mathewes argued that “American Grace is very bad news for American religion and civic life, because churches seem unable to offer a thick counter-narrative to contemporary society.”

If Americans do not take their religion all that seriously, or fail to insist on its superiority to other religions, does this mean that religion has lost its ability to inspire change—either for individuals or society as a whole? Of all the questions to arise in the commentary surrounding American Grace, this is perhaps the most interesting, important and, ultimately, impossible to answer. Have we reached the end of prophetic religion? Is ecumenism ineluctably unable to stir souls? Must a prophetic religion be intolerant of those who disagree? Our own history suggests not. The civil rights movement certainly involved a prophetic call for personal and social reform, yet united Americans of many different faiths. America would be a meaner place without the recurrent challenge to accepted ways that religiously-rooted social movements have posed throughout our history, but we’re unconvinced that prophetic religion is intrinsically incompatible with religious pluralism.

It would be churlish of us to offer point-by-point responses to such thoughtful and generous commentaries. But one point has come up in the discussion of American Grace, including the essays of both Worthen and Butler, that warrants a reply. Both raise a red flag over the following sentence in the book:

The First Amendment to the Constitution says that Congress shall pass no law to curtail the free exercise of religion, but these sparse words do not fully reflect the way in which religious diversity is encoded in America’s national DNA.

In a recent symposium on American Grace, another commentator suggested that there are historians waiting to attack us in a dark alley because of this line, and that we probably regret ever having written it.

To the contrary, we have no regrets—although we have both decided to avoid dark alleys, at least when we know there might be historians around. At the risk of straining a metaphor to the breaking point, our point is simply that just as humans have a genetic code that shapes, but does not determine, their growth and development, so too was America set on a path that eventually led to our current state of—relative—religious harmony. For the Founders, religious diversity might have meant Presbyterians and Episcopalians, but the constitutional architecture they designed has enabled the conditions for harmony among a much wider array of religions. While constitutional guarantees are undoubtedly a necessary cause of religious tolerance, they probably are not sufficient. This is not a story of nature only; nurture mattered too. The constitutional prohibitions on the establishment of religion and wide protection for the free exercise of religion have interacted with other features of American society—immigration, civil society, public schools, the Cold War—to bring us to the point where, to borrow again from the language of genetics, the latent potential for religious tolerance has been “expressed.” None of this is to ignore the deadly manifestations of bigotry directed toward specific religious groups in America’s past, nor the current (albeit muted) antagonism toward Muslims, Mormons, and atheists. Just as our genes do not determine our destiny, these examples remind us that America’s DNA does not guarantee religious tolerance.

In his essay Torpey reminds us of the tensions arising from Islam’s presence in America, obviously a flashpoint of controversy for the current state of inter-religious relations. We say only a little about the public’s attitudes toward Muslims in American Grace but are now able to say more. Since the publication of our book we have collected another round of data, by returning to the same people we interviewed in 2006 and 2007. (Results from our latest round are soon to be published as an epilogue in the forthcoming paperback edition of American Grace). In this latest survey we dug deeper into Americans’ feelings about Muslims, by asking our respondents if they would approve of a mosque being built in their neighborhood. For comparison, we also asked how they would feel about a Christian church or Buddhist temple. The results are a classic case of interpretation hinging on perception. On the one hand, one could say that Muslims are welcomed. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say that they would be fine with a mosque in their neighborhood. Yet on the other hand, Muslims are less welcome than Christians or Buddhists. More Americans object to a mosque (35 percent) than a church (8 percent) or Buddhist temple (25 percent).

While it presumably comes as no surprise that a mosque evokes a more negative reaction than other houses of worship, those who—like us—care about the state of inter-religious relations should still be concerned about the negativity toward Muslims. We are even more concerned, however, about the partisan flavor of anti-Muslim feeling. When we employ an arsenal of demographic, social, religious, and political characteristics to predict unease with a mosque, we find that politics matters most. One’s level of religious commitment matters not at all, while there are only slight differences across religious traditions, with evangelicals slightly more opposed to a mosque than anyone else. It is partisanship—whether someone identifies as a Republican or Democrat—that has the biggest impact on attitudes regarding a mosque and thus, by implication, toward Muslims. When holding everything else constant, 56 percent of strong Republicans are bothered by a mosque, compared to 24 percent of strong Democrats. That is a huge gap.

The overlap between partisanship and anti-Muslim sentiment is a potentially explosive combination, especially if opposition to Islam were to become a regular feature of conservative political rhetoric. While, today, such sentiments are only on the fringes of acceptable discourse, more incendiary anti-Islamism might very well inhibit the inter-religious bridging in personal relationships that, for other religious groups, has led to their place in the religious mainstream (cf. Catholics, Jews). Non-Muslims might be reluctant to befriend Muslims, while Muslims might be socially marginalized and thus radicalized.

In other words, there is nothing inevitable about religious tolerance, in spite of the nation’s metaphorical DNA. Mormons are an especially timely example. They are one of the most religiously insular groups in America and, accordingly, face opprobrium in some circles (cf. Mitt Romney).

Our newest data also reveals a second major finding—“creeping secularism”—which also raises questions about the future trajectory of religious tolerance in America. In American Grace we detail the growth in the Nones, the religiously unaffiliated, who are concentrated among younger Americans. Now, with our latest data, we see evidence that the rise in Nonery is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. What we term “the second aftershock” has, in fact, measurably strengthened since the first of our Faith Matters surveys in 2006. Secularism is surging among the Millennial generation. The youngest Americans—18 to 25—are far more secular than even those age 26 to 30. Not only are they the most likely to disclaim a religious affiliation, they are less likely to attend religious services, believe in God, believe in hell, and say that religion is not important in their lives. Young people are drifting, maybe even running, away from religion. And the public has noticed the slow and steady creep of secularism; just in the last five years, more and more Americans report a diminished role for religion in American society.

We also find further evidence for a key claim in American Grace, namely that America’s receding religiosity, especially among the young, is largely due to an allergic reaction to the mixture of religion and conservative politics. As a result, the religious-secular divide has a partisan flavor, suggesting a parallel with the partisan nature of anti-Muslim sentiment.

There is, however, a big difference between attitudes toward Muslims and the non-religious. While only a small percentage of non-Muslim Americans are personally acquainted with a Muslim, a growing percentage of religious Americans know someone who is “not religious”—rising from 44 percent of Americans in 2006 to 51 percent in 2011. Just as homosexuals coming out of the closet and revealing their sexual orientation to family and friends is one cause of the increasing support for gay rights, so too as more secular and even atheist Americans express their views to close acquaintances, tolerance for secularism seeps through the broader population. This degree of bridging seemingly bodes well for the health of relations between religious and secular Americans.

On the other hand, the label of “atheist” remains anathema to most Americans. While younger Americans are more favorable toward atheists than their elders, on average they still view them negatively. Like attitudes toward Muslims, the negative perception of atheists can be explained by the simple fact that very few Americans know a self-described atheist. There just are not that many atheists to go around, although the creeping secularism in American society suggests that their ranks are growing.

Just as growing acceptance of Muslims is not a given, neither should we assume the inevitability of full inclusion for non-religious Americans, whether atheists or not. Mutual tolerance would suffer if heated rhetoric about the “other side” were to separate Americans into religious and secular bunkers. In American Grace, the basic story is that while our politics may be polarized along religious lines, our personal relationships are not. If polarization at the personal level were to replicate the polarization of our politics, hostility would replace acceptance.

How likely is it that America fractures along religious lines? Notwithstanding the alternative scenarios we have described, we are optimistic enough to think that, in time, Mormons, Muslims, and atheists will be fully accepted into the mainstream of American society. But likely is not the same as inevitable.

Which brings us back to public sociology. While our primary objective has been description and explanation of the state of religion in today’s America, we are also willing to offer a prescription. It is our hope that Americans continue to forge interlocking personal relationships across religious—and non-religious—lines. If American Grace nudges its readers toward building more such bridges, so much the better. A house divided cannot stand, no matter our national DNA.

This is the chief, if probably unintended implication of American Grace, which I take to be the most successfully argued, comprehensive sociological study of American religion in more than half a century. Robert Putnam and David Campbell harvest a generation of research and mature reflection about how religious affiliations of all kinds divide and unite Americans of different generations, regions, sexes, educational levels, and ethno-racial groups. Will Herberg’s endlessly discussed Protestant-Catholic-Jew, a book of 1955, was not remotely as methodologically self-conscious and as empirically grounded as is American Grace, but one must go back to Herberg to find so striking a single volume purporting to explain the religion of an author’s contemporary Americans. If this coming generation of scholars and journalists allow Putnam and Campbell to define the terms of conversation to the extent that our predecessors allowed Herberg to perform this role, we will be in fine shape.

Why does this book prompt the suspicion that bland may be beautiful? Because Putnam and Campbell argue that the decline of intense, sectarian devotion to any particular faith enables religious believers to be more tolerant and appreciative of ideas and practices different from their own. Putnam and Campbell’s central, data-driven theme is the fluidity of American religion. Americans move in and out of religious affiliations with dizzying frequency. While in other societies religious identity is more often perceived “as a fixed characteristic,” they explain, in the United States “it seems perfectly natural” to refer to one’s religion as a mere “preference.”

All this mobility in an immigrant-receiving society with multiple ethno-religious groups creates, especially in recent years, high levels of religious diversity within families. One half of Americans today are married to someone who came from a religious tradition different from their own, and when you start counting cousins and in-laws you have extended families in which most people are intimately connected with several individuals from a variety of communities of faith. This reality leads Putnam and Campbell to their charming “Aunt Susan Principle.”

Just about everyone has an Aunt Susan, the kind of relative who is so saintly that you know she will get to heaven (if you believe there is such a place, but let’s put aside differences of opinion about that), even if she is an atheist or a Presbyterian or a Buddhist or something else that you are proud not to be. Familiarity and love conquer sectarianism and breed tolerance. The “My Friend Al Principle” encapsulates the same situation for non-family acquaintances. You greatly admire Al, your office co-worker. So, you have no doubt he’ll make it to heaven even though he happens to be a Jehovah’s Witness (horrors!) and you are an Episcopalian.

Putnam and Campbell well understand that American society is sharply polarized by religion, and that this polarization often parallels political polarization. They believe they have solved the paradox of how a religiously polarized society can also be a religiously tolerant society. The answer is that Americans do not get too deeply entrenched in any one, particular religious affiliation.

But some people do. “True believers” is American Grace’s term for those who are intensely religious, and as a result have little use for folks with beliefs different from their own. Putnam and Campbell insist that only about ten percent of Americans are true believers, but the true believers turn out, predictably, to be among the least tolerant of same-sex relationships, non-marital co-habitation, abortion, divorce, and of all kinds of pluralism. Even apart from these extremists, however, conservatism of this type is more prevalent within the most homogeneous and stable of religious groups, such as Mormons and evangelical Protestants, than among the most fluid, such as Jews, ecumenical Protestants, and agnostics. Here, American Grace is consistent with Robert Wuthnow’s findings concerning “exclusivist Christians” in America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity.

This demonstrable tension between intensity of belief and pluralistic tolerance is where the beauty of blandness becomes visible. Putnam and Campbell are not as forthright as they might be about the implications of their work. Clearly, they understand religion as a fine thing, providing needed networks of belonging and systems of meaning. Indeed, American Grace is a relentlessly generous book, filled with hope that the intolerance and sectarianism found among the “true believers” can be contained. The authors warn that the future is far from certain, and that the current association of religion with conservative politics might well be reversed. Religion in this book is, by and large, warm and wonderful. But their research leads to the conclusion that the warmest and most wonderful kinds of religion—and the kinds most compatible with a diverse, democratic society—are the kinds of religion that adherents regard as disposable, as something one is willing to trade away.

I hasten to acknowledge that American Grace offers an imposing and altogether welcome array of detailed information and wise reflection about countless aspects of religious life in the United States today. This very rich work’s value should not be reduced, as I risk doing here, to its most obvious and most general implication for the sociology of religion.

American Grace reminds me of one of the most striking findings in another recent sociological study, Christian Smith and Patricia Snell’s Souls in Transition: Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. Invoking H. Richard Niebuhr’s legendary put-down of liberal Protestantism’s drift away from doctrinal particularity, Smith and Snell remark that today’s younger Christian believers apparently feel no objection to “a God without wrath” who “brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” Harry Emerson Fosdick “would be proud,” Smith and Snell allow mischievously, to listen in on the religious chatter of today’s young adults, including evangelicals whose grandparents hated Fosdick, because even if they’ve never heard of Fosdick they talk just like him.

Putnam and Campbell offer their own families as both normative and representative of life in our own time, which might be called “the era of Fosdick’s revenge.” Campbell is a Mormon with Protestant and Catholic ancestors. Putnam was raised a Methodist but converted to Judaism, while his sister married a Catholic and had three children all of whom are now evangelicals. Will all these Putnams and Campbells, like Aunt Susan and friend Al, get to heaven? Only if they remember the chief lesson of this book: don’t take your religion too seriously.

Pervasive presence—or just ordinary ubiquity—is one of the main strategies in Oprah’s attempt to serve as a guide through the jumble of consumer choices, spiritual makeovers, and “original individuality” that is “secular” living in contemporary North America. Reading The Gospel of an Icon gave me a heightened awareness of this ubiquity, a new recognition of the way in which Oprah really is everywhere. As Lofton puts it in one of her clarifying turns of phrase: “She is the divine pervasion.” Some have mused about and imagined what this divine pervasion might entail—Oprah as Messiah, or as saviour of Chicago. Others have pointed to Lofton’s impressive analytical insights: how thinking with Oprah allows her to brilliantly juxtapose “religion,” commodification, and mediation, while also thinking carefully and creatively about how this African-American woman has become so remarkably successful by drawing from, while transforming, Christian testimonial genres and emotional practices.

My own “public” reading of the book is, like those of other contributors, part confession and part analysis—one small step away from Oprahfication itself, perhaps? According to Lofton, when Oprah encourages her viewers and readers to embark on a perpetual “journey” of self-improvement through self-examination, she also counsels them that to make such change happen, they need to surround themselves with the right goods and services. To best participate in the “rituals of reading” prescribed by her Book Club, for example, readers need to create their own private libraries-cum-“sanctuaries” filled with stuff they love: candles, scented oils, bound copies of O Magazine. Reading the Book Club book, like watching the TV show, is supposed to “change your life,” but that can’t happen without the properly decorated “ceremonial space.”

Keeping in mind Oprah’s eye for detail and Lofton’s thesis of divine pervasion, I started thinking about the various environments of my own reading of The Gospel of an Icon—a book that sticks with you even when you’re not turning its pages in a comfy chair with a hot cup of pomegranate green tea at your side. While reading Lofton’s conclusion and epilogue in my favorite, resolutely independent, non-franchised coffee shop, the grey-haired man sitting next to me told his friend of a recent trip to Chicago to visit his new girlfriend. Amid other details that I tried to block out with one finger in my ear, he told his friend about driving along the parkway and hearing the drone of a helicopter overhead as it circled in the sky. There were only two options as to who the passenger might be, the man said with a laugh: Oprah or Obama. This overlap of Os was uncannily—or maybe just coincidentally—the very subject of Lofton’s concluding words, which I was reading at that moment.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been listening so closely to another’s conversation, you might suggest. But isn’t the coffee shop the alternative confessional, where we tell our companions our latest troubles, regardless of who can hear? Baring your soul over a latte in a cheek-by-jowl café is perhaps not quite the same thing as what Lofton calls “Oprahfication,” namely, “the makeover that happens when individuals agree to subject their private selves to public display.” But the coffee shop confessional (along with streetcar cell-phone tell-alls) is a remarkable testimony to how comfortable people are with revealing the details of their personal relationships, medical procedures, and workplace conflicts to both friends and complete strangers. The difference perhaps lies in what you hope to get out of a coffee shop confession in contrast to submission to Oprahfication: a jolt of high quality caffeine, the understanding of a friend, the prurient interest of a woman reading a yellow book, or abundant gifts of cars and iPods, along with a new and better you.

But Oprah was not only in the coffee shop. Earlier in my reading, at a point when I was about midway through the book, I cycled down a neighborhood street to find a watchful Oprah beaming at me from a billboard high above. “OWN TV,” the message trumpeted, is now available in Canada. Having once been one of those smug people proud to say that they do not even “own” a television, and remaining someone who denies her children the joys of cable, the message didn’t have its full effect on me. But then I realized that, despite never having watched an episode of Oprah from start to finish, I felt a familiarity with Lofton’s descriptions of the narrative arc of Oprah’s version of televised “confessional production”: the extraction of a secret, weakness, or insecurity, the revelation that change is possible, and then the consumer goods that provide the path to realize that change. “At every turn,” Lofton reveals, “there is a hug of self-love and the slap of self-scrutiny.”

Inevitably, it might seem, even reading Lofton’s book did the work of effecting Oprah’s pervasion. Not only did I notice her on the streetscape or in the coffee shop, but I also found her, channeled so convincingly by Lofton, turning up in that running inner dialogue that comes along with reading. Maybe a footstool of just the right height, in a pleasing color would actually help me to concentrate more fully on my reading; maybe a better closet solution would help me de-clutter, or even change, my life. Even with the distancing aid of theoretical scrutiny to hand—the frame of Foucault’s “pastoral practice,” or the revealing but maybe not entirely true insight of Erving Goffman that “a coerced show of feeling is only a show”—Lofton never quite exempts her reader, or herself, from being implicated in the confessional production that is Oprah’s work. Though Oprah as a subject of scholarly analysis may be both a sitting duck and a curiously “profane” choice of focus, Lofton shows us that Oprah’s “spiritual revolution” is part of a larger shift that most North Americans have bought into, to varying degrees: “one of the great success stories of Oprah’s years has been the complete conversion—the conversion of a nation—to consumption as the adjudicating determinant of our relative freedom.”

There are, however, limits to Oprah’s O. I saw them when I raised her as an example while teaching an anthropology course in Germany this past winter. None of my students had heard of her. She was a complete unknown. Recalling this, I realized that The Gospel of an Icon, is a continental, American story, not a fully globalized one, despite the global aspirations of Oprah’s “missionary gifts.” Maybe Oprah really is “provincial.”

Writing from and within a collective “we” that she both scrutinizes and calls to account, Kathryn Lofton offers her book as scholarly analysis and humble jeremiad (if such a genre is possible). The Gospel of an Icon is a historically learned account of how and why Oprah has resonated with Christian traditions of self-improvement, at the same time that she has entertained a diverse public, encouraging them to achieve more with more. She is, as Jason Bivins already intimated, an anti-Nietzsche, who declared in his own autobiography, “I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different.”

But then again, in that same book, Nietzsche, in a spirit that Oprah could recognize, also gave a great deal of morally intentional diet advice, such as: “No meals between meals; no coffee, coffee spreads darkness.” Who is the prophet and who is the charlatan? How to speak from the self and of the self? These too are circling questions that none of us can ever entirely escape.