Schmitt’s basic idea, in the Theology, is that any normal constitutional order of “sovereignty” presupposes the abnormal, the exception, and the right to decide when that condition exists. Beyond the norm and the normal, then, there is no super-norm that informs all the others; there is only the lurking decision about the exception of existential emergency. That “space” becomes the overdeterminant of sovereignty. What makes this “theological” in a hidden way is that (i) actual historical developments turned Christian/religious notions into secularized concepts of the state; and (ii) those concepts, by analogy, include the premise of the miracle, here turned into the “exception.” Deism and liberalism eventually banished both God and the miracle from the proceedings, creating an agreeable façade of order, normality, rationality, science, legitimacy, and civilized conversation amongst those of requisite, recognized competence. The transcendent power is bracketed, the immanent will of the people or nation becomes constitutive.

Kahn’s riff on this is, strictly speaking, not a gloss; he has not set out to expand the contended body of Schmittiana. He wants instead to argue the case for Schmitt’s decisional exception and political theology in a contemporary U.S. liberal frame—a tall order. Moreover, he insists that such a Schmittian Ansatz inevitably serves to reveal “the sacred” element in the political. Rewriting the individual chapters of Political Theology in a dialogical (the “we”), and sometimes digressive, way, he makes many other points that I shall have to leave aside, such as his fascinating claims (to my amateur eye) about law and Hans Kelsen.

Nonetheless, I was surprised at the direction of Kahn’s argument. I had expected a reflection on the problem of sovereignty as such in the United States, viz. where it might reside. Schmitt himself invokes the well-known passages from Tocqueville to the effect that “the people” assumes the character of God, the beginning and end of all. Tocqueville, however, considered that religious element an optical trace of a moment that had, in world-historical terms, passed, whilst Kahn maintains the postulate of popular sovereignty (the premise, in a way, of the whole exercise), and thus the case for a political theology to account for it, that is, for the continued relevance of the very problem of sovereignty.

Yet this is where the U.S. itself (or, before the Civil War, themselves) famously becomes the “exception.” Who decides? “The people” is variously embodied in the United States, a purposely decentered system whose only nationally elected person/office is that of the president. It has never been obvious where the unity of the union actually lies. Massive violence in the form of a civil war, during which the great emancipator himself took the decision to suspend habeas corpus, decided the matter (if only partly). Still, the state is one thing, sovereignty another. The quasi-monarchical presidency is indeed the closest authority to embodied decision. Symptomatically, it is an authority conceived explicitly in the space of foreign relations. “We the people,” in the form of the president, have in fact decided on the exception—following from exigencies real and imagined—on many occasions, often with astonishing license and arbitrariness. This, quite clearly, is in line with the European model that forms the historical reference point for Schmitt: the advent of territorialized state sovereignties whose existential being is determined chiefly, not by domestic dangers, but by foreign ones. Let us call it the geopolitical imperative.

One might then grasp the trajectory of the United States as a jagged line of increasing “sovereign-presidential” power, a process whose very uneveness was conditioned, up to a point, by remarkable security, or the relative absence of the geopolitical imperative. A combined, dual “abnormality,” then, marks the normality of the United States, with some punctuating exceptions, all the way up until the 1940s: a relative “lack” of geopolitically charged institutions, along with the domestic state apparatuses that usually (meaning in the European context) go with them. Most states, well into the twentieth century, are, after all, all about war or the preparation for war. Inescapable invocations of Hegel to the contrary, the kind of state (as opposed to sovereignty) that did emerge in this case was actually effective, with law, mostly as autopoetic process, serving as state. Exceptional moments were typically occasioned either by the few events, sometimes artificially created, of foreign crisis (1798, 1812, 1846 [?], 1898, 1917-20), or by the domestic incapacity to deal with states’ rights and/or slavery (e.g., the nullification crisis of 1831, the Civil War).

World War II changes everything, creating the opening for what will become, after 1947, the national security state, based on the notion of a permanent exception in the name of global cold war, a peace that is no peace but no overt war either. In a word: the imperial presidency, we-the-people as articulated sovereignty in a battle of life and death. I myself think that this was objectively over (in an abstract, Schmittian sense) by 1963, but not many agree, choosing instead to parrot endlessly the conventional formula that “the end of the Cold War” is the same as the end of the Soviet Union, in 1989-1991. We-the-people, in any case, is up for grabs because of Vietnam and the cock-ups in the sovereign name of exception perpetrated by the Nixon regime. Whatever one’s periodization, however, it is obvious that the permanent “emergency” begins to fade structurally, what with regularized great-power management and the relative stability of mutually assured destruction (which Kahn takes, to the contrary, to be the very essence of the Cold War). Two attempts at abnormality, which I sometimes imagine as irrevocably postmodern, have thence been made to regenerate the exception: Reagan’s second Cold War, in the early 1980s, and W. Bush’s “War on Terror/ism.”

The former was really pastiche, but the latter offered up some novelty from our present viewpoint. For what, seemingly, could be more Schmittian than George W. Bush’s claim to global supremacy? We, the United States (meaning “I”), have the right to decide on the exception, the state of global emergency, and what can and must be done above and beyond the existing norm: that is about as straightforward a claim to sovereignty on a global scale as one can imagine. (Schmitt has indeed been accused, anachronistically, for having provided a frame for the neocons of recent times, though his name, of course, was never invoked.) Obama’s explicit pragmatism can then be seen as a return to “normality”—the judicious weighing of pros and cons in a spirit of multilateralism—if not to the financialized normality of Clinton’s globalism.

I think this is right up to a point but ultimately wrong: Obama’s pragmatism is a departure from exceptionalism (not a term I like, but that’s another story) in that the United States appears as a product of contingent historical circumstances having nothing inherently to do with any transcendent designs or predestined functions; but, at the same time, and by the same token, it is what it is, namely, the indispensable nation, the guarantor of order in the last instance, and so on. The end result is in some ways a more interesting Schmittian condition than the posture of George W. Bush: the last instance never comes, but it still exists; it is not dominant but still overdeterminant; the exception and the right to decide on it still hover above the proceedings of pragmatic bureaucracy.

All of which is both arguable and (at least to me) of the greatest interest. Kahn, however, is only intermittently concerned with the geopolitical imperative, because his central endeavor and argument is about Schmitt and the liberal political community, the existence and existential phenomenology of “the people,” and, above all, the character of “popular sovereignty.” Schmitt is famously anti-liberal, so Kahn recasts sovereignty specifically as “popular sovereignty.” His whole effort is grounded in the thesis that this kind of sovereignty still exists (in the United States), and that, contrary to received opinion, this condition is in turn not accountable for in simple terms of reason, contract theory, or interest group politics: the kind of “normal” perspectives that find rules, norms, law, adjudication, and interests at the heart of politics but leave no space for sovereignty or the exception. Kahn thinks the popular sovereign entails an irreducibly mystical element that has to do with faith rather than reason. The state (the nation-state, in fact) can demand in the last instance that its citizens sacrifice themselves on its behalf, that one be called upon to kill and to risk death in its name. Normative communities such as churches, Wall Street firms, and what not can do no such thing: “The state remains a site of life and death; its territory remains sacred ground; its history is a narrative of the self-revelation of the popular sovereign.” Hence, theoretically and methodologically, we need a political theology rather than mere political science of the purely secular kind. The state, incomprehensible in a solely secular frame, should be approached in two conceptual ways: genealogically and analogically. The first refers to the historical “translation” of religious (chiefly Christian, in effect) categories into secular ones (viz. God/the People), while the second locates atemporal, structural identities such as that between miracle and exception. (Kahn does not use the terms, but one might see this as a combination of the diachronic and the synchronic.)

The United States, against this background, appears in sharp contrast to Europe—more precisely, to ‘‘the European Union,” which so often arrogates the continental name to itself. Whereas the popular sovereign survives in the United States, the EU has become, or was always conceived to be, a normative compound of law, regulations, and ideology without any ultimate sovereign. No one will die for the EU. It is not sacred. The United States is sacred. One reason is that, unforgettably, it was created in and by Revolution, the ultimate exception. It is a nation-state under law created by the kind of faith, decision, and sacrifice that are expressed in Revolution (the experience of creation ex nihilo, as well as destruction). Decision of this order is thus not extralegal but intrinsic to the whole operation.

Kahn, then, wants to recover, or perhaps construct anew, a particular notion of the popular sovereign by using a political-theological frame without the anti-liberal politics—a Schmittian way of doing political theory but not a Schmittian politics to go with it. Hence, he departs most explicitly from the script once he reaches Schmitt’s arch-reactionary fourth chapter. The argument has now turned to Faith and Freedom, not to mention Choice. Faith precedes doctrine and theory; faith involves decisions and the exceptional; faith therefore involves freedom, which is what Kahn—rightly, in his own terms—assumes liberalism to be about.  Sovereignty in a Schmittian frame, then, becomes a way of reconstituting the liberal community of citizens, the authoritative voice of the people, choosing in freedom amidst the ultimate, sacred commitment to, and necessity of, sacrifice. But, to use Kahn’s operative notion of rhetoric, how persuasive is this?

There is, initially, a combined archaeological and conceptual objection, or, at least, a question mark. Schmitt’s thinking is more genealogical than analogical. He wants to know how it is that liberal modernity ends up with such an anodyne theory of politics. He wants to know what it is about the translation of Christian frames and categories into putatively secular ones that renders the normative approach so pleasing and agreeable. So it is a two-pronged attack: demonstrating, procedurally, the antinomies of proceduralism (the decision on the exception is occluded, but it is nevertheless constitutive of the norm and the normal), and demonstrating, historically, how this occlusion came to be. Schmitt’s delineation of sovereignty is a polemic, most immediately against the bourgeois legalism of Kelsen and the neo-Kantians, against their timeless normativity and proceduralism. Like Hegel and Marx, he insists, against Kant, on the historical (or genealogical) as opposed to the timeless. Unlike them, however, he does so not by introducing the social, which inevitably cuts across formalism by injecting substance and actual content, but by revealing the theological origins and translations, the historical analogies, of current political concepts. The limitation of this approach is also its virtue: the relentless stringency of its peculiarly anti-sociological “sociology” of concepts. What it reveals is the typically depoliticizing and “normalizing” nature of bourgeois politics. I myself find that demasking operation useful from a socialist standpoint; but Schmitt can be useful from any number of standpoints, because his account does not take, or presuppose, a normative or ideological stand as such. Thus, while in the Theology he invokes, in the different idiom of original sin, de Maistre and Donoso Cortes, this is only one possible response—and not a necessary one—to his own genealogical diagnosis.

Notably, that response does not center on sacrifice and the sacred. In fact, this problem is not Schmitt’s. His opus contains no elaboration of it. Kahn thinks, by contrast, and almost by slippage, that all political theology presupposes the sacred. (His overlapping interlocutor here is Giorgio Agamben, whose take, however, goes in other directions; René Girard, meanwhile, is oddly absent, as, incidentally, are Hardt and Negri.) The obviousness of this connection strikes me as dubious. Natural law in the Thomasian tradition certainly presupposes sacred authority; but is the sacred/sacrifice its constitutive feature? In any case, Kahn’s account is less genealogical and more analogical: his political theology is one of contemporary identity, synchrony, its rhetorical aim being to assert the contemporary relevance of sovereignty and the sacred nature of politics. The focus on sacrifice and the sacred fits his phenomenological and existentialist orientation (ultimately with Kahn, we are in the realm of “experience”). A different kind of political theology, that of original sin or Hobbesian dastardly deeds, makes no sense to Kahn in the contemporary world, at least in the context of popular sovereignty. This dismissal may well be a little hasty, what with a Commander-in-Chief who likes to invoke Reinhold Niebuhr (not mentioned in Kahn) and the inevitable moral ambiguities of politics. The enabling uses of “ambiguity” and notions of ever-present “shortcomings” in moral fortitude and epistemological command have been well-known since the heyday of the Cold War, in the 1950s. Our current “pragmatics” are, from that angle, eminently theological in a Niebuhrian sense, though the rubric “Christian Realism” has predictably gone out of fashion.

One is confronted, then, by the liberal Kahn exalting the sacred nation/community as popular sovereignty, while the reactionary Schmitt says nothing at all about it. Schmitt’s preoccupation, seemingly a perfectly coherent Catholic one, is in fact not the nation, whether in its conservative, organic form or its liberal, popular one; it is the nature of the political and the sovereign, wherever. Arguably, part of the exercise of bringing sovereignty to the fore is precisely to unsettle notions of “the people” in any shape or form, and especially the kind that Kahn advocates. Kahn then complicates the picture. He recognizes that the postmodern condition—what he also refers to in quotation marks as a “post-epochal age”—militates against any Grand Analogy. Nevertheless, he insists, as he must, on the last instance of the sacrifice and the sacred, a last instance that actually comes or might very well come: the exception, our popular-sovereign decision to put our lives on the line.

I am sympathetic, in a way, to that argumentative impulse, but life (or “experience”) in the United States has gone in a very different direction since the 1960s. The ever-present notion of sacred territory corresponds inversely, one might say, to the willingness to sacrifice on its behalf. Ritualistic evocations of “America” (where else would politicians of all ilks end their perorations with the equivalent of “God bless America”?) and the deep-seated sense that somehow the United States is sacrosanct space—war, by definition, taking place elsewhere—are ways of being toward the world that mask an overwhelming desire, sometimes ferocious, to avoid all sacrifices: professionalized (class-based) military, ridiculously low taxes (especially for high earners), lax popular engagement, minimal obligations, a dislike for central authority bordering on hatred. The “exception” was extended into the 1950s by means of the Cold War (which was in fact the intention), but the last time the sacrifice was generally accepted was indeed the last: Vietnam. From then on, the geopolitical imperative has looked different. Accepting the globalism of the U.S. in one form or another is one thing; sacrificing for it is an altogether different one. Sovereignty, the right to decide on the exception, has thus typically resided in the geopolitical imperative, and it has been experienced on the outside. Few foreigners make any mistake about the importance of U.S. geopolitics and the “right” that it seems to embody.

Kahn is right not to see political theology as an attempt to read politics as a theologian (along the lines of Schmitt’s favorite reactionary, Donoso Cortes) but to insist on its analytical place in any account of the U.S. as a political entity. It is impossible to grasp the United States without a (genealogical) account of its secularized Christian frame. The United States is radical Protestantism writ large. To me, however, destinarianism, chosenness, messianism, covenantalism (to name but a few of the most obvious tropes) seem more pertinent than sacrifice and the sacred. I also agree with Kahn about the conceptual myopia of “the normative metaphysics of liberal political theory” as regards the non-secular. Permit me a personal anecdote, about a seminar talk on “European integration,” a perennial model-building topic of political science. A senior scholar in the field told us why his particular model explained it and others failed. Eventually, trying to be historical, I made bold and asked whether the model could account for the fact that the founders of what would become the EU were Catholics with a pronounced, postwar devotion to the civilizational and integrational precepts of a neo-Carolingian “west.” Nervous laughter ensued, intimating that this irrelevant comment was nothing less than a breach of etiquette.

Political theology, that being said, is never the whole. And Kahn recognizes this. When it comes to the whole, however, I must ultimately place myself, contra both Schmitt and Kahn’s own Rousseauian sovereignty, in line with the Hegelian-Marxist insistence on the centrality and determinacy of class and capitalism.

Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon is a work, first and foremost, of cultural anthropology. The back cover confirms this fact. Yes, the book is about the incorporations of Oprah. But more significantly, it is an ethnography of “American astonishment,” of what it feels like to live before screens that enlighten and advertise and encompass (the virtual counterpart of living within the effervescent glare of studio lights and perpetual applause). Lofton captures, as few writers can, the everyday magic of our viral time—what, in the ritual grammar of Oprah, are referred to as “Aha! Moments.”

Caroline, for example, witnessed Oprah’s immanence by way of Skype, beamed up and in from a remote location. This forty-one-year-old from Pacific Grove, California, who had once made a decision to be a stay-at-home mother, spoke of her spiritual struggle during the “Best Life Week” that inaugurated The Oprah Winfrey Show in January 2009:

Hi. Twelve years ago I decided to give up my career and stay home with my kids, and I feel very blessed to do that, but there are times when I’m doing laundry and chauffeuring them around that I don’t always feel appreciated. And what I realized after reading the Eckhart Tolle book [is] that I am identifying with being a mother. That was a big aha moment for me. And I would like to create a larger space between realizing when I’m in ego and identifying with the role of being a mother, so that I can be in the present moment and find the peace and the happiness that I would like to be able to attain while I’m doing laundry or having to clean the bathroom and that type of stuff.

Caroline is a sophisticated analyst of her own identity, reading the push and pulls of her own psyche against a structural backdrop of gender and class formation. She is not bitter or resentful over her decision to be a stay-at-home mom as much as she longs to make the decision again, more decisively. After different layers of self-interest have been acknowledged, Caroline seeks to reconcile these differences by integrating them from afar. She is looking for that space that is both inside and outside simultaneously, performing her life but also directing the performance. This is the deferred sense of control that ‘spirituality’ has promised since the antebellum period, born aside the genre of the novel.

The sense I get from Caroline and Lofton’s other informants is that they take a certain pleasure in feeling out of sorts or misplaced or altogether some place else. For this combination of heightened consciousness and soft alienation is both strange and potent. It turns on a dime. It drags down even as it makes way for a transcendental perspective. For whether on stage with Oprah, in the studio with Oprah, or doing any manner of things—from a distance—with Oprah, these individuals receive a narrative gift that perfectly frames their sense of their own individuality.

And this is what I take to be the object of Lofton’s ethnography—the “Aha Moment,” the sense of being part (or is it a part?) of the time of the now. Such absorption, of course, is not new. Dare I say, rather, that such absorption is universal, is the very premise of being a subject in the world. We all gotta serve somebody. And so it is with a million screens of “Change Your Life TV” (and its consummation in OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network). There is both wonder and sanity to all of this enclosure. There is also a powerful congruence of structural possibilities. There is safety and security in Oprah’s sway. For it—Oprahfication—keeps the swift jig of subjectivity from spinning out of control.

What is so incisive about Oprah is its account of onto-commodification and the work involved in “being possessed by possessions.” As Lofton writes, “Oprah offers to us a way to see a mechanism, up close, strings demonstratively exposed, of how contemporary mass culture convinces us of its conveyances.” The mechanism of this particularly virulent strain of biopower is seemingly simple: show, tell, idealize, and sell the spectrum of individuations. A gateway drug that is all but given away. Yet there is always a debt. For, in her “spirit-filled capacity,” writes Lofton, “Oprah supplies an array of products connecting you to the life you want and, more specifically, to the self you need to become to create the life you want.” Spirit, here, refers as much to an impersonal moral force as it does to a vehicle of the will and attendant self-knowledge. This is not so much a point of theological contention for Lofton as an operating assumption that allows her to spin a rather disturbing tale about our late, great secular modernity.

The spirit of the O generates the Emersonian desire of our time: You want to feel that nothing can befall you in life—no disgrace, no calamity—that Oprah could not repair. Standing on the bare ground, your head bathed by blithe light and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism will vanish. You will become transparent to yourself and the world. You will see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulating through you. You are nothing. You are part and particle of Oprah.

This enclosure of the O is a moment of transcendence shared by Oprah, her guests, and her studio and worldwide audiences. It may never really happen. But it doesn’t matter. For what does happen is the overwhelming promise of mediation, the moment when something else will pulse through you and all of you will pulse through it. Complicity, yes, but also the potential for precision and the renewed struggle for leverage.

Over the system the studio announcer announces to the studio audience: “the grim business of your audience lives” is about to end. “I summon you to a hyperlife of laughter and tears and tenderness and rocking socking sensation. Note well. Delfina draws literal life from her audience.” This is Delfina Treadwell, the not-unlike-Oprah talk-show host from Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso (1999). Delfina is a subject who is also a commodity, who gives life to others in order to satiate herself. Delfina understands intuitively, as does Oprah, this cycle of life, referring to her live performances as “my private moments.” “The studio audience restores my life force,” she confesses. “You have to understand. I live in a box in a state of endless replication.”

It would be comforting to know that Oprah, in her Delfina-like knowingness, was in charge. But she is not. She determines us only insofar as we determine her ratings. Her omnipotence feeds upon our improvisation; her cultural agency is not an either/or proposition, and neither is the freedom of those who watch or do not watch her. Whatever Oprah is depends, absolutely, on the freedom of each of her audience members. The self-consciousness of her subjects is Lofton’s working assumption. “Aha!” she exclaims, he exclaims, you exclaim, they exclaim. For Oprah’s audience demands the demonstration, the exposure, and the strings. These are complicated people, epistemologically speaking, as are we all.

Consequently, a necessary exactitude pervades the pages of Oprah, on each a clinical dissection of what Jenny Franchot once called “the interior life.” For everything pivots on the intimacy involved in the rituals of exposure and response. Oprah winks. She nods approvingly. “Aha!” she exclaims, over and over again, looking deep into the camera each and every time. Oprah is in on the joke. Oprah’s audience is in on the joke. We are all in on the joke. And yet we continue to buy.

There is a negativity in all of this Oprahfication, though it is no via negativa but something else—familiar and phantasmagoric. For Oprahfication is, among other things, the shadow cast by centuries of religious history and therapeutic culture, a point deftly made by Lofton in her discussion of such things as the anxious bench of Charles Finney and the World’s Parliament of Religions, New Thought, the Black church, and Protestant journal keeping. Lofton’s analogies between Oprah and American “patterns of religious productivity” are born of a sense of analytic implosion. Acknowledging that Oprah exists in the “excessive specifics” of her “vagaries,” Lofton has no choice but to dwell within her shadow. Oprah, here, is neither liturgical referent nor doctrinal vessel. For this is no mere “metaphoric transference,” David Chidester’s phrase for the fraught act of pulling the so-called secular into the light of religious meaning. On the contrary, Lofton insists upon the impossibility of ever resting easy with either the metaphors or their transference.

Whatever is religious about Oprah, then, is fleetingly glimpsed, seen only when she appears in drag, a preacher queen whose Whitmanic largesse and benevolent hand secure the diversity of (and circulations within) an American order.

In Oprah, Lofton is practicing cultural criticism in a world that does not (and never did) fit into the neat boxes of profane and sacred, lifestyle and liturgy. At a time when “truth” and “cute” serve increasingly similar functions and amount to increasingly similar things, Lofton’s is no mere examination but a relentless documentation of the conceptual vortex from which new categories of thought emanate, new styles of reasoning emerge, and new gods are born.

From a 2003 studio encounter:

Winfrey: It is all yours, Fannie. God bless you.

Fannie: God bless you.

Winfrey: God bless you.

Fannie: God bless you.

Winfrey: God is blessing me right now. He’s blessing me right now. It is a blessing to be able to do this for you.

Fannie: God bless you. Oh, my God. My God, this is unreal, Oh, my God.

Winfrey: I know. But you have the tape. See, you can play it back. It’s really happening.

Whatever is really happening, here and elsewhere, is preserved in Lofton’s kinetic wordy precision—but also resisted, of course, which I take to be at the heart of her discussion of the ‘us’ who live in Oprah’s post-Empire. For it is in and through the line-to-line delight of these pages that an argument is forged. Lofton’s is not a voice crying in the wilderness but one that speaks of and from the mesh of the O. It is representative rather than authoritative, offering neither comfort nor clarity but, in the end, leverage. Words accumulate, circulate, and forge strange ontic indices—supply chain of self, smothered in sale, possessed by its own plurality. But such jest, energy, and unexpected sentence structure offer insight into living after the ruse of privacy has been exposed, self-consciously and celebratorily. For in the course of our modernity, Oprah—herself, her wares, her minions, and the connections between—has come to inhabit, if not altogether suffuse, the space of our psyche. This psyche, of course, does not refer simply to what is going on inside your head, or even to the reality that you posit outside.

Cut to The Delfina Treadwell Show. The studio announcer beckons:

The cameras will swing toward the audience in the course of the show. Not once but many times. Point to yourselves on the giant monitors. I understand the need for this. I encourage this. Wave to yourselves. See yourselves cross that critical divide into some plane of transcendence.

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

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

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

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

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

But the scene that stands out in my memory, and the scene that crystallizes the arguments of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton’s arresting new study of “the good news” delivered and commodified by the “symbolic figure” that is Winfrey, is one in which the talk show host looked out tearfully across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia and registered her awe at seeing a garnet red “O” emblazoned in lights at the center of that country’s national landmark. O-vercome with emotion, Winfrey turned the magnitude of that gesture into a teachable moment with her audience the following day, by describing how this was the symbol of what it means to work hard and dream big.

And so O goes. As Lofton brilliantly observes (and I quote at length here, as it is my favorite passage in the book),

She is capitalist and capital; she is a commodity and consumer. Oprah is a product, but Oprah’s product is not individual objects. Her patents are not mechanical innovations or engineering improvements. She does not design fabric or copyright personal recipes. Rather, her taste is her product. Her O is what sells. The O is her signature, her initial, and her trademark. It is a sound, a reminder of her televised exclaimations: “Oh, no.” “Oh, yes.” “Oh, please.” “Oh, I never.” “Oh!” “Oh?” “Oh.” Awed, orgasmic, thrilled, worried and converted, an O is the noise of emotional presence and ready delight (what I feel right now, right here, before this new thing, new experience, or new encounter—Oh!) should not confuse the consumer with its earthy sheen. The O is never unscheduled or chaotic. It is cadence. For every girly (womanly, interviewing, ministerial, listening, awakening) “oh,” there is a corporate O labeling a magazine, a book, a bracelet, or a piece of stereo equipment. The O circles her consumer selections with her emboss, bequeathing her halo upon her beloved choices. The O envelops the commodities that she has chosen expressly for herself and now, expressly for you. She is a pitchwoman of her own consumption; her consumption is her commodity.

I have been enveloped by the O for some twenty-five years now, at once seduced, delighted, and irritated by—and yet drawn to—the image of a profoundly self-assured, brash, and at times entertainingly ego-driven baby-boomer African American woman who climbed the ladder of extreme wealth, fame, and social and cultural power in the post-Civil Rights era just as I was coming into intellectual and political consciousness as a black feminist scholar in the 1980s and ’90s. For me, Oprah Winfrey took the “temple of my familiar” (to borrow a line from brilliant novelist Alice Walker, a Winfrey “legend,” whose Color Purple opened a key chapter in her own self-professed spiritual awakening odyssey)—multicultural, middle-class woman-centered popular culture—and transformed that experience into universalized self-reckoning and a mega-million dollar empire. She invented, as Lofton’s book suggests, her own late-twentieth-century, commodity-driven version of a Great Awakening, and then rode it hard all the way into the new millennium.

My fascination with Lofton’s book, then, sits at the intersections of the personal and the professional, a uniquely liminal position that Oprah herself has turned into an artful and profoundly profitable state of being. And so, in the spirit of the confessional and the performative, and in a bid to pay homage to the porous boundaries between the personal and the communal that Oprahfication celebrates, endorses, and demands, I begin, then, with a few points about my own engagement with this phenomenon.

I have been—and perhaps in some ways will always be—one of the denizens, the followers, the 100% skeptical and yet 100% “true believers” of and in the Oprah Nation. I have been both captivated by her programs about white supremacy in all-white Forsyth County, Georgia (which aired in 1986, my freshman year in college) and the Little Rock Nine’s steely and yet graceful fortitude (which aired in 1996, when I was in graduate school) and embarrassed by her ostentatious obsession with the material (see the “My Favorite Things” episodes from any year). Still I can’t deny that O’s consistent engagement with the cultural memory of the Civil Rights movement and her equally consistent obsession with spectacular consumerism are somehow entwined. These two sides of Winfrey and, by extension, her entire empire articulate the imbricated legacies of black historical trauma and the access to quotidian privileges that define my own intersecting racial, class, gender, and generational identifications. Lofton’s book makes this clear: an Oprah can and did emerge out of the chrysalis of this late-capitalist moment—the summation of multiple liberation movements, globalized economic shifts, and media technology booms. O is the sum of all of these parts, the answer to an equation, and the promise of a new beginning for all who believe and have hOpe.

I first made the “Oprah connection” during my mother’s ultimately—thankfully—triumphant journey through battling breast cancer in the winter and spring of 2006. We were both drawn to the comfort of the ritual of watching “Lady O” every weekday, and we structured our days around that 4pm release. Chemo in the mornings, lunch in the early afternoons, a nap, a run to the pharmacy, Oprah, and the shift into dinner and bedtime. She was the voice of frivolity and quotidian delight in the midst of anxiety about my mother’s condition. She was affective energy—faith, comfort, joy, Aretha-charged “spirit in the dark” release in the face of the unknown.

For the first time in my life, I couldn’t get enough of Oprah, and thankfully that season marked the release of the twentieth anniversary DVD collection of the show—seventeen hours and six DVDs worth of footage from The Oprah Show—endless footage of car giveaways, South African girls school specials about the wall color and linen in their dormitories, Tom Cruise hallucinating on a couch, and Sidney Poitier tributes. Oprah began to bleed into our evenings and weekends. I carried her with me back and forth between California and New Jersey and watched her on my laptop in lonely airport terminals.

I stopped making the connection with O once my mother had come through her treatment. But there was one other moment when her empire drew me in—when I sought solace and relief from my personal pain.

Spring 2008: I had been numb for many months from a nasty break up with my partner and was trying to find my way again. And there in the pages of O: “A Bicycle Built for You.” I had to get it, and only the shiny mint green model—O’s favorite color—would do. It was my own path out of “the darkness,” a new lease on life. And it remains my prized possession, one that I became obsessed with buying as a result of (whether I’d like to admit it or not) O’s encouragement and the way that I’ve enjoyed the pleasures of depending on Oprah to “light my way” and make me feel good—especially through the pleasures of consumption.

What to do with all of this? To be sure, Lofton’s scholarship is—whether she knows it or not—forging its own self-help meta-empire of scholars trying to come to terms with their own Oprah addictions in this, her first book. And what a tremendous study she has produced: ambitious and imaginative, critically cogent and rigorous, and yet (and quite delightfully) as quirky and unpredictable as popular culture itself. This book is in and of itself a pleasure to read, and clearly pleasure is a concept that lies at the heart of this study. Lofton consistently gives her readers new ways of considering the intersecting spiritual, cultural, and social politics of pleasure that dominate Oprah’s universe and that sustain and nurture her legions of followers.

More than anything, this fascinating book inspired me to keep asking questions of the Oprah phenomenon and its relationship to spirituality. As a scholar of literary studies, I am particularly fascinated by the role of the literary in Oprah’s brand of religiosity, and thus I was drawn to Lofton’s lively chapter on the book club phenomenon. Given the fact that Winfrey has maintained a well-publicized and in some ways career-altering connection to Toni Morrison’s work and consistently refers to Maya Angelou as “her mentor,” I’m continually interested in the significance of literary tropes and narrative symbolism in Oprah’s religious aesthetics.

Indeed, Lofton’s study makes me think of the ways that Winfrey’s film adaptation of Beloved itself operate as a spiritually redemptive tool in the transformations that the program underwent as it evolved into “Change Your Life TV.” As fans of the show may recall, it was after the summer that Oprah shot the film adaptation of Morrison’s classic meditation on slavery and cultural memory that she returned to her program and began proselytizing about the changes that she aimed to make to mark how she had distinctly “reformed” her show and re-defined her brand of programming as distinct from that of “trash talk TV.” One wonders to what extent a postmodern, magical realist text like Beloved operates at the level of religious conversion in the form and content of Winfrey’s program. In Oprah’s universe, how is the literary configured as a kind of spiritual experience in the pursuit of self-knowledge? (Just as well, serious fans may recall how her post-Beloved era leads to the moment when our host tries on her hat singing a new theme song backed by a choir—a version of a gospel song entitled “I Believe I’ll Run On.”)

The Beloved connection to Oprah’s spiritual politics is a powerful one, in my opinion, for one other key reason, and that is this: There are ways in which we might read the religious iconicity of the Oprah that Lofton details with great care as perhaps in some ways analogous to her role as an actor and her longtime interest in acting. In the introduction to the book, Lofton argues that an “Oprah is that which stands in, filling a space where before there was something missing or something needed.” This sort of a claim beautifully overlaps with the landmark arguments made by Lofton’s Yale colleague and performance studies scholar Joseph Roach, who argued influentially, in his work Cities of the Dead, that the figure of the actor operates as a “surrogate” and an effigy: a figure that stands in for the hopes, fears, and desires of a community, a figure that “evokes an absence,” bodies something forth, and “carries within [it] the memory of otherwise forgotten substitutions.”

These sorts of comparisons between the actor, the talk show host, and the religious icon might also force us to think in new ways about the always present place of the body in Oprah’s religious culture. Clearly her own corporeality is the site of fan identification, the expression of her imperfections, as well as the key symbol of the all-important makeover, and Lofton’s study encourages readers to think more about the spiritual relationship Oprah is forging (or not forging) with the body.

The Gospel of an Icon also got me to wondering if we can draw any connections between Oprah’s brand of spirituality and nineteenth-century spiritualist practices. Works like Molly McGarry’s really fine book Ghosts of Futures Past and P. Gabrielle Foreman’s groundbreaking research on the black spiritualist medium Hattie Wilson (known by literary scholars as Harriet Wilson, author of Our Nig) challenge readers to consider the intersecting politics of celebrity and women spiritualist leaders (from Wilson to someone like the Anglo trance medium Cora L.V. Scott). Given the ways that spiritualism plays with the boundaries of the religious and the secular, and given the ways that Lofton alludes to Oprah’s ability to appeal to cross-racial audiences (as did Wilson, in particular), it would be fascinating to consider how O’s performative aesthetics tap into this cultural tradition.

Most people who read Lofton’s study will, however, probably be most intrigued by the ways in which she grapples with the spiritual politics of Oprah’s material world, a world in which spectacular scenes of mass audience hysteria (fainting! sobbing! dancing!) generated by gift giveaways have become something of a seasonal pop culture tradition. Lofton suggests that we might read the material world of Oprah as a portal through which to best understand her spiritual ethos. As she argues, “we must agree that 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.” One of my dear friends and colleagues and I have had many a conversation about Oprah, and she has stated that she can’t reconcile Oprah’s deep obsession with materialism and her putatively altruistic philosophies—and this is something that she’s struggled with (as in, “Why don’t I like Oprah more? Maybe it’s because of what seems like a conflict in ideals”). For me, her question led to more questions. For instance, are there particular types of marketplace objects (like bicycles!) that are particularly spiritually resonant? Readers will find themselves engrossed by the ways that Lofton traces the dialectic between materialism and Oprah’s religiosity.

This material world, Lofton suggests, is one that is deeply entangled with gender politics. As she contends, “this book addresses imperatives applied outside the realm of the sect, into the imperatives of comfort nestling modern women in a language of self-service. That language (‘I just like to feel good, I just want to feel safe, I just deserve to be whole’) is the secular an Oprah creates.” Lofton’s book is seemingly unique to religious studies in that it addresses a gendered religious space that is interracial, inter-class, and transregional, and it is provocative to consider how O’s world compares to other American religious subcultures and the ways in which they do or do not encourage woman-centered desires and identifications.

Lofton concludes her study with a provocative wink by asserting that “an Oprah never says you HAVE to do anything. What you do, and who you follow is your choice.” I was struck by this assertion and wondered whether Lofton might be nudging her readers to think more about Oprah’s deep investment in celebrity culture and her personal tension between embracing her own exceptionalism and encouraging others to follow the path that she has taken. (And I’m thinking here of Oprah’s deep determination to get The Color Purple gig, and how she loves repeating the line about how she was going to have to “let go and let God” finally make the decision about whether she would win the part.) Lofton’s book thus ends on a note that urges us—however obliquely—to consider Oprah’s own very public obsessions with celebrity and the cult of celebrity as it relates to religious culture.

At the heart of this imaginative, daringly whimsical, and critically persuasive study, though, is Lofton’s magnificent style as a writer and the form that her work inhabits. In many ways, the form of Lofton’s prose manifests the object of her inquiry. Throughout The Gospel of An Icon, her prose resonates with a kind of playfulness and a spirited engagement with “the collective.” But however ludic the “we” in her study may seem, this strategic invocation of the first person plural allows Lofton to perform a style of writing that, like her perpetually alluring object of inquiry, pulls her audience into the realm of contemplating their own collective desires.

Clearly, Oprah’s product endorsements have had a huge impact on sales, which is no doubt galling for us critics of neoliberal capitalism, who are often ashamed to admit how much we ourselves buy and consume in the privacy of our own lives. Most of us are not strangers to the act of buying to help us feel good, but members of the intellectual elite disavow their commodified selves as a mark of class status and taste.  Watching Oprah, we enact this disavowal, and Lofton herself performs it when she writes: “We’re happy for the woman and glad for her good tidings, but we are left with the itching uncertainty that we don’t feel very good at all about all this commodity fetishism.” Criticizing Oprah’s blatant embrace of shopping performs a deeply entrenched scholarly identity that has its roots in Marxist intellectualism. It thus reproduces old political ideologies and dichotomies, such as the (often implicit) idea that political action to create a better world requires personal austerity and social upheaval.

Oprah makes people feel good. Scholarly critics fear that Oprah is anaesthetizing the masses. Lofton asks us to be surprised at how Oprah blends spirituality with the real world of commodities, but she does not as readily examine or challenge the common assumption that spirituality-cum-commodified self-improvement is antithetical to social/political action. In fact, the criticism of Oprah’s political effects seems oddly misplaced. There are at least three arenas that Lofton discusses in which Oprah’s acts have had significant social and political effects that go well beyond passive self-improvement: the election of Obama; transformation of the reading practices of the wide public that participates in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club; and the refashioning of gender. Within these three arenas, Oprah has arguably contributed significantly to the fashioning of a new middle-class subject and made it a performative possibility for millions of viewers. Oprah’s iconic performances have had important political and social effects that most liberal academics would be expected to applaud, including the encouragement of reading and the promotion of religious, racial, cultural, and sexual tolerance, by downplaying difference. Yet Lofton presents these Oprah effects in prose that often oscillates between a balanced review of scholarly and historical sources and conclusions tinged with disparagement. It is this tone, which belies her analytic neutrality, that might lead Oprah’s audience members to wonder what Lofton is doing to “their Oprah.”

Lofton’s epilogue focuses on the “‘Oprahfication’ of Obama,” by which she means the way that Oprah put Obama into the mold of a “familiar sort of savior,” a commodified product of neoliberalism.  She and some of her more socially progressive readers are disturbed by this commodification—including Deidre English, who calls such Oprahfication “chilling.” Yet the effect of Oprah’s decision,to come out and take an explicit political stance—not only aligning herself with a Democratic political candidate, but also actively promoting his presidency—was enormous. Oprah’s decision to openly endorse one candidate was quite a contrast from her usual practice of even-handed inclusiveness. One effect, of course, was to alienate some of her most conservative viewers, producing a small drop in Nielson ratings. But another effect was to create a huge base of support for Obama among people, especially women, who otherwise might not have imagined voting for a black presidential candidate. Some have argued that she may have influenced the very outcome of the election.

Oprah has this power to shape middle-class American discourse precisely because she does not take an overtly radical political stance focused on upending the current economic and social order from the outside, which would alienate people who are worried about rapid social transformation. She instead operates from within, performing and promoting a middle-class subjectivity grounded in a form of spirituality that has deep roots in American religious practice. She made it conceivable to identify Obama with the mainstream middle class—an effect that goes well beyond shallow, commodified “Oprahfication.”

The concept of depth is another one of those Oprah inkblots that exposes academics’ anxieties about the contradiction between their elitism and their egalitarianism. Lofton herself is uneasy and noncommittal about the concept of depth, presenting arguments that are critical of Oprah’s lack of depth, while aware that the criticism of spirituality as “thin” raises the question of what “thick” or “deep” might be. What is needed is a more systematic analysis of the politics of “depth,” beginning with its deployment by academics.

The association of Oprahfication with lack of depth is clearest in critiques of Oprah’s effects on the reading public. Lofton, like others, is skeptical of the interpretive approach to reading that Oprah encourages in her book club: she stresses that Oprah’s interpretations, which encourage readers to react emotionally to a book and relate its characters to their own lives, lack depth and reduce books to their ability to “return women to an Oprah way of life,” reiterating the core theme of Oprah-as-icon. Lofton is one of several scholars who have engaged in the classic highbrow-lowbrow debate and either bemoaned the loss of “depth” in an Oprah reading or celebrated how Oprah’s approach is a new style of reading that has encouraged the middle class to engage with both new authors and classic tomes that otherwise may have been inaccessible to most readers. Cecelia Farr, for example, compares the book club to an introductory English class: the first step is to reach students. One could also draw a comparison with Sesame Street, which uses the idiom of commodities to “sell” reading to kids.  Both Oprah and Sesame Street effectively reach and shape a self who always already inhabits a commodified world. Furthermore, Oprah’s book recommendations brought many female and minority authors the kind of visibility and respect that otherwise might have eluded them, effectively forcing a widening of the literary “canon.”  Surely, a “deep” reading is not precluded by a form of reading that first grabs people emotionally and gets them to buy and open the book. But Oprah stimulates our class anxieties surrounding taste and the discernment of quality as manifest in our ability to interpret a novel “deeply.”

I turn finally to the question of gender and to scholarly anxieties about Oprah as an icon of womanhood. Why would Lofton say that “women and femininity in Oprah’s empire are . . . served up to be sacrificed”?  What are the effects of Oprah’s use of gender?  Are women being sacrificed or rendered powerless by Oprah’s embrace of feminine style?  Feminists may well be concerned that this sort of emphasis on the feminine deprives women of their political voice and plays into the hands of an arch-conservative like Glenn Beck, the only talk show host who rivals Oprah’s popularity. Beck is the antithesis of Oprah in so many ways—a white male whose commentary plays a central role in shaping conservative political discourse as it is articulated by many middle-class Americans. Yet he himself has stated on his show that his wife watches Oprah. Though he denigrates Oprah, his comments imply the following peculiar analogy: Oprah is to women what he, Beck, is to conservatives. In this analogy, the domestic doings of women can be safely ignored. Beck asserts a form of divisive but beleaguered masculine culture that must be protected from the incursions of foreigners, government, elite liberals, and uppity women. If Oprah is painted as merely promoting feminine distractions, then she too can be safely mocked and ignored.

Lofton’s reading of Oprah unwittingly participates in a similar class- and politics-based denigration of the feminine that involves a problematic conceptual slippage. Many feminists of a certain age, who recall their bra-burning resistance to gender inequities in the workplace and the home, have been critical of an upcoming generation of women who seem to have forgotten these hard-won social gains as they subject themselves to a feminine style and impossible shoes. But a large proportion of this younger generation doesn’t necessarily recognize the bra or the shoe as a symbol of male domination as they dress for their successful careers. Furthermore, their concern with style needn’t mark them as politically apathetic or conservative, as both Beck and Lofton appear to assume. Beck uses a specific form of masculinity as the emotional juice for his political conservatism and tries to paint women’s world as apolitical and powerless. Assuming that he is correct reproduces this assumption.

Denigration of feminine political action has a long past. The temperance movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mocked as a bourgeois woman’s concern before it moved into mainstream politics and became the powerful force that resulted in Prohibition. Discussing how Oprah was directly influenced by the multiple strands of spiritualism that developed in the nineteenth century, scholar Trysh Travis has suggested that these forms of spiritualism were marginalized both by the general public and by the academy because they were judged to be “pathologically bourgeois and feminized.” They were criticized as being vague and superficial—a concern that Lofton herself expresses about Oprah’s approach to Obama, to books, and to spirituality. Historically (and, from an anatomical point of view, rather paradoxically), the feminine has been seen as lacking depth. Lofton’s criticism of the way Oprah encompasses both style and personal autonomy in her vision of self-improvement rests on a similar unease with feminine style and bodily practice, which is shared by many scholars. Yet, in our time, neither femininity nor masculinity can be detached from commodified bodily practices. Oprah’s entanglement of spiritualism and feminine commodities, which Lofton so powerfully demonstrates, can instead be viewed as an ethical discipline that not only embraces forms of embodied feminine pleasure but links these pleasures to forms of power that have the potential to recast the political process by reshaping the middle-class subject into one who is tolerant of the racially, culturally, religiously, and sexually other.

Focusing on the ways in which Oprah’s performances make scholars uneasy exposes the silent ambivalences and contradictions that shape our own discourse. These contradictions emerge from tensions between our egalitarian ideologies and our entrenched intellectual elitism. Oprah preaches a more egalitarian and tolerant social order, just as do many liberal scholars and other members of the intellectual elite, but she goes about it very differently. She disrupts intellectual elitism by making aspects of elite culture—ranging from lifestyle to literature—visible and accessible to everyone.  Unfortunately, efforts of the intellectual elite to promote a better world often backfire, foundering on the political polarization of liberals and conservatives. Conservatives attack liberals, especially those at elite research universities, for being out of touch with mainstream America. In some respects, they are right. Our uneasiness with Oprah arises precisely at those moments when we draw the line and pass judgment on her appeals to the lowbrow middle-American consumer. And yet Oprah has figured out how to transmit her message of tolerance even into the home of Glenn Beck.

This brings me to a second characteristic of the idea of spirituality as exemplified by Oprah: its ties to the idea of freedom and well-being. As Winnifred Sullivan and others have pointed out, contemporary American spirituality is a point of convergence between religious or ethical views of well-being and medical and psychiatric ones. (It’s neither irrelevant nor, I think, trivial to note how moralized is the vocabulary around sinful desserts and virtuous exercise.) Again, I think we can see here inflections of a moral narrative, insofar as, in this view, well-being is something for which, ultimately, only the sufferer can be responsible, and that responsibility is inseparable from choices. The freer the choices, the greater the responsibility.

This brings us to one of the other major themes of Lofton’s book: commerce. After all, Oprah is not only an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur; she also offers herself as a guide to successful consumer choices for the beleaguered. Now, the interesting question here, I think, is not about “materialism.” It is no longer surprising to note the ubiquitous materiality of religions (for details, see any issue of the journal Material Religion), which purification movements often problematize but can never eliminate. Perhaps it would be more productive to explore the links among Oprah’s commercialism, spiritual agency, and the idea of freedom. If spirituality is what’s left when you have eliminated the institutional and theological authority of religions, the purification process must also emancipate something that those authorities had suppressed. In the context of the commodity, the resulting freedom is manifested as self-enhancing choices. Oprah’s success depends on her capacity to anticipate—or create (a vexed question, this)—and appeal to the desires of her viewers and readers. She isn’t in a position to command adherence, and it’s not too hard to imagine her undergoing a precipitous fall from grace. Her shopping advice includes cashmeres and soaps, candles and chocolates. But to the extent that these commodities are posed as responses to problems of well-being, they are not ends in themselves. That is, they are not inherently good. Their purpose is to enable the consumer to manipulate her inner states. They are material vehicles for the mastery of immaterial dimensions of the self. Thus, the consumer goods are offered up as more or less emancipatory instruments in the hands of the spiritual person, who is thereby enabled to become an agent over his own self.

A final question concerns the place of American spirituality in the current historical context. If we are in the midst of a global religious revival similar to earlier great awakenings, it is strikingly cross-denominational. And if we glance at the side of the globe opposite to Oprah’s America, we find remarkably similar spiritual celebrities. Indonesia’s Aa Gym and Ary Ginanjar, to mention only two of the best known (well studied by James Hoesterey, Daromir Rudnyckyj, and Julia Day Howell), have been hugely successful in purveying a spiritualized, highly commodified, mass-mediated form of Islam. Like Oprah, their media empires are vast, they sell a wide variety of goods, and offer branded advice on everything from business management to parenthood. (Interestingly, Aa Gym’s loss of popularity came after he took a second wife in 2006, a misstep in which reliance on the letter of Islamic legality was insufficient to protect him from the wrath of his female followers, whose expectations of marital sentiment he had betrayed.) Like Oprah, they promise both personal well-being and worldly success to a nervous, privatized middle class. Certainly these celebrities and their audiences have been influenced by the Euro-American North (some have even hired consultants from the ranks of American televangelists), but they can’t presume, as Oprah might, a shared history of national Protestant exceptionalism and optimism. Gone global, spirituality’s success should be taken very seriously but not explained too quickly.

Lofton is cagey about what to make of this religious project, which might be to say that she maintains a critical distance. Hers is part of a larger body of work that responds to the secularization theory by demonstrating that religion has not died but been displaced into a complex range of capitalist cultural practices. Lofton is fascinated by Oprah and her followers, and she describes their spiritual project in great detail. At the same time, she sees what is shallow about them and their quest. The unspoken questions seem to be, Is this “really” religion?  And, if so, is it a religion that merely blesses the culture of consumption and celebrity? Can it deliver the deep meaning and confirmation of self-worth that contemporary seekers seek? Lofton makes no explicit response.

It is worth briefly rehearsing Lofton’s argument. Winfrey reveals much about the current nature of the religious. Oprah, a black woman, has become immensely successful by making herself acceptable to white people. She claims the authority of her racial identity while proclaiming a post-racial culture. She speaks of growing up in the Black church, but as an adult she leaves Jeremiah Wright’s Afrocentric congregation as part of a spiritual quest that incorporates New Age eclecticism, bodily improvement, and self-care. She consumes and markets luxury goods as expressions of identity and self-worth. She is compassionate and generous without challenging political, economic, and social structures. Hers is a “gospel of change,” but the change is entirely personal. Oprah never speaks the collective “we”; she is eternally focused on “I.” I believe. I consume. Yet Oprah is more than a highly visible individual.

The complex phenomenon of O—Ms. Winfrey, her corporations, TV show and network, magazine, book groups, and charity—is a model and source of this eclectic spirituality. The O universe of products and experiences gathers a particular audience: female, middle class, inter-racial. Oprah confirms their bourgeois feminism, articulating a sisterly sense that their late-modern lives are over-busy, stressed by the demands of family and career, and filled with a sense of inadequacy. Oprah models two conjoined pathways to arrive at one’s integrated religious self: one is through the gathering of spiritual insights from diverse and potentially contradictory sources; the other is the consumption of aesthetically satisfying goods as a source of meaning and confirmation of self-worth. Oprah, as woman, media presence, and corporation, rolls these things up into herself.

Experts and celebrities give voice to therapies and spiritualities that can be integrated into the emerging Oprah vision. Oprah’s “gift is not her interviewing strategy but her confessional promiscuity.” While claiming only to tell you what she herself believes, Oprah “converts you to an idea, to the idea of her biographical revelations as a model for the world. She is the divine pervasion.” This is a largely passive religious practice. One watches the consumption and eclectic conversation of Oprah and her guests. The viewer participates by buying into Oprah’s interpretations and by buying the goods that Oprah offers and affirms. Paradoxically, the sure pathway to valuing oneself and finding one’s own truth is to follow in the way of Oprah, believing what she believes and possessing the cashmere sweater sets, elegant journals, and teak serving trays that she recommends. It is, in Lofton’s words, “the hegemony of her sway” that is the core of Oprah’s spiritual power.

Curiously, Lofton tells us little about the consumers of the products and ideas that are swayed by the O. The cost of this disinterest is that it is easy to dismiss Oprah’s audience, their dissatisfactions and desires. From her description of the TV show and magazine, it is easy to see them only as white, bourgeois, vapid, and self-absorbed.

In an earlier University of California Press book (Authentic Fakes, 2005), David Chidester argued that even the practice of charlatans serves a religious function, that it responds to real religious hungers. What are the hungers of Oprah’s audience?  If we knew more about them, might we be less dismissive of their dissatisfaction with their lives? Might we understand more fully why they feel so divided, and thus why they are so hungry for an integrated spiritual self? What is there about contemporary mass-mediated culture that is so alienating, so fixed even as it changes, that they can imagine only individual projects of conversion and improvement? This individualized spiritual construction is widespread in American culture. We find it not only among the followers of Oprah and the believers in the Super Bowl, but also among those who continue to attend churches, synagogues, and mosques. What are they seeking? Will it sustain them? And are their practices an index of some emerging patterns of religion that we cannot yet clearly identify?

How will we study these things? Lofton accomplishes a great deal. The study of contemporary American religion is challenged in several ways by her work. In the late twentieth century, scholars of religion turned from the synthesis of the religious practiced by Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell to follow J. Z. Smith in focusing on what is distinctive about specific religions and religious traditions. We argue that religious synthesis distorts actual practices and carries a colonial agenda, interpreting the other’s faith in light of that of the dominant group. As Lofton’s study of O illustrates, in the same period, American popular religion has moved in the other direction. Individual practitioners function as bricoleurs. They fashion systems of personal spiritual meaning from the détritus of various traditions, products, and narratives. Tradition and internal consistency matter little in the process of Oprahfication, “a dialogical idiom in which the interviewer restates what the subject has said in order to affirm its truth through a universal that she, Oprah, represents.”

In the same period, we in the academy have resisted the popular discourse of “spirit.” We are frustrated by the term’s fluidity, by the range of meanings it seems to carry, and by the inability of those who use the term to say more precisely what they mean. For all the complexity of what religion might mean, we are more comfortable in talking about it than about spirituality. But O and countless others regard religion as that which they reject. Rather, they assert, it is spirit that emerges from their assemblages.

If scholars of religion are to understand these constructed spiritualities, which so resist our lenses and categories, we will have to think in new ways. Lofton points us toward the location of much of this work, for which I am deeply grateful. As we go forward, it will take more attention to the audience and to their critique of both religion and culture if we are to comprehend what they are constructing.

For the past eight years, I have been studying the emergence of what might be referred to as “post-secular development” in Southeast Asia. I have documented initiatives in contemporary Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore that have formulated a mode of Islamic practice conducive to corporate success and transnational competitiveness. In documenting this phenomenon, I have argued that, whereas much of the post-colonial history of what were formerly called “developing nations” was characterized by what the anthropologist James Ferguson has referred to as “faith in development,” recent efforts to merge Islamic practice with scientific and technical knowledge instead represent efforts to develop faith. On the one hand, faith in development refers to the nationalist projects of facilitating economic growth through state-led industrial modernization that occurred in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the postwar period. In this configuration, the nation-state was to bring prosperity to its population through massive investment in industrial technology and production. On the other hand, developing faith refers to concrete initiatives designed to intensify religious practice under the presumption that so doing would bring the work practices of corporate employees into line with global business norms and effect greater productivity and transparency. Developing faith is not a complete break with faith in development, however, because both share the similar conviction that worldly problems can be solved through the proper application of technical and scientific knowledge.

The shift from faith in development to developing faith in contemporary Indonesia was particularly notable at state-owned Krakatau Steel, a massive steelworks in western Java where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 2003 and 2005. Historically, Krakatau Steel was absolutely central to the developmentalist ambitions harbored by Indonesia’s former authoritarian president, Suharto. The company was a focal point in the nationalist project of modernization. According to the prevailing developmentalist logic purveyed in blueprints for modernization like Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth, Krakatau Steel was part of a complex of institutions that would deliver progress, in the form of industrialization, economic growth, and increased living standards, to Indonesia.

The 1998 Asian financial crisis, the end of the Suharto regime, and the increasing integration of Indonesia into wider global economic circuits have called faith in development into question. From the 1970s until the mid-1990s, Krakatau Steel had been the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in state development funds. For years state investment guaranteed the company’s viability, as it was able to keep up to date with advances in steel production technology. However, such investment was brought to an end in 1998, after the near bankruptcy of the Indonesian government. Tariffs on imported steel that had long protected the company from international competition were fully eliminated in April 2004. Finally, and perhaps most ominously for some employees, the Indonesian government has proposed privatizing Krakatau Steel, which could trigger sweeping job losses for members of a workforce that had previously been able to count on lifetime employment.

Given the wide-ranging changes taking place, the company’s existence could no longer be justified according to its status as a symbol of modernization, development, and industrialization. One foreman in the slab steel plant explained to me that, prior to the late-1990s, the “the social was the most important and profit was secondary,” but “now profit is number one and the social mission [misi sosial] is number two.” He said that this “social mission” was premised upon “padat karya,” which literally translates as “dense work” and refers to the practice of hiring more workers than necessary to operate businesses. The tension between the company’s social mission and its business mission was becoming increasingly acute. One general manager told me that a Booz, Allen, and Hamilton management-consulting audit of the company advocated releasing one-quarter of the company’s total workforce, corresponding to at least 1500 (out of roughly 6000) permanent, full-time positions. Some Krakatau Steel employees suspected that privatization would lead to the elimination of a substantial number of jobs. Managers often cited the practice of work spreading as the underlying reason for poor job performance at the company, claiming that employees at the company lacked motivation because they knew that they were superfluous.

To address the problem of employee motivation and prepare for privatization, Krakatau Steel managers sought to (in their words) “develop” the Islamic faith of employees by contracting a Jakarta-based company, the ESQ Leadership Center, to implement Emotional and Spiritual Quotient training at the company. The brainchild of the charismatic businessman Ary Ginanjar, ESQ asserts that a work ethic conducive to business success is present in the five pillars of Islam and the six pillars of Muslim faith (iman). He has drawn other ideas for the program from business management and life coaching sessions, like “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” that have greatly expanded in North America, Europe, and Asia in recent years. Through the multi-day training sessions that his company offers, Ginanjar stresses that Islamic piety should not only be restricted to religious worship. Rather, Islamic faith should animate all of one’s worldly activity, from interactions with one’s family to everyday work in the world.

At Krakatau Steel, ESQ training sessions were held once or twice per month. They were most often held in the large multipurpose room of the factory’s education and training center. The sessions usually ran from Friday through Sunday. The first two days started at 7:00 a.m. and lasted until just before the maghrib prayers, which usually begin around 6:00 in Indonesia. The third day included the program’s dénouement, which consisted of a simulation of three of the events that take place during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca: tawaf, the circumambulation of the kaaba; the sa’i, a ritual that consists of running seven times back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwah in Mecca; and finally the stoning of jamrat al-aqabah, in which pilgrims hurl rocks at three representations of the devil, symbolizing the rebuking of demonic temptation.

The training was structured through a sophisticated Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, consisting not only of graphs, charts, tables, and a litany of bullet points, but also with spliced film clips, colorful photographs, and popular music. The information conveyed was culled from a variety of web sites, including that of Harvard Business School. The training was delivered primarily as an interactive lecture in which the main trainer would alternate between engaging with the audience in the familiar style of a television talk show host and proceeding to deliver fiery and profoundly emotive lectures asking for collective redemption from Allah.

Ary Ginanjar draws evidence for the commensurability of Islam and what might be called the ethics of globalization by instructing participants in these programs that the five pillars contain lessons for business success. Thus, the fourth pillar of Islam, the duty to fast during Ramadan, is reinterpreted as a model for “self-control.” Based on this principle, ESQ seeks to inculcate the duty to constrain this-worldly desires in order to ensure other-worldly salvation. Corruption was a chronic problem at SOEs and was attributed to an uncontrolled desire for material wealth. ESQ sought to represent self-management as a divine injunction to remedy this rampant corruption. The third pillar, the duty to give alms (zakat), was taken as divine sanction for “strategic collaboration” and exercising a “win-win” approach in both business transactions and relations with co-workers. This principle was illustrated with an interactive exercise in which each participant paired up with another, shined his or her shoes, and then reciprocally paid the other for the service. A common critique of employees of state-owned enterprises was their poor customer relations. The exercise was intended to illustrate the importance of serving, rather than being served, for employees of a modern corporation.

In just seven years, ESQ grew spectacularly: by the end of 2010, over one million people had participated in the program. Although Krakatau Steel was one of the first companies to embrace it, the program has now spread across Indonesia to some of the country’s most prominent governmental institutions and state-owned firms, including Pertamina (the national oil company), Telkom (the country’s largest telephone company), and Garuda (the nation’s flag air carrier). Current and former military generals also are avid participants in ESQ, and several sessions have been held at the Army’s officer candidate training school in Bandung (SESKOAD). Recently, ESQ met its goal of becoming a national movement, having established branch offices in 30 out of 33 Indonesian provinces. In late 2005, the ESQ Leadership Center broke ground for a 25-story office tower and convention center in south Jakarta, funded in part through investment shares sold to past participants. When I returned to Indonesia in December 2008, large-scale spiritual training programs were being conducted in the already completed conference center portion of the building. Finally, ESQ has also “gone global”: the first overseas ESQ training was held in April 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, and, in 2007, regularly scheduled ESQ trainings were being delivered in Malaysia on a bimonthly basis. Mahatir Mohamed, the former Malaysian Prime Minister, recently endorsed the program. In addition, ESQ programs have been held in Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, Brunei, and in 2008 Ginanjar brought the program to Houston and Washington, DC.

The spiritual training program was extremely popular at Krakatau Steel. According to one human resources manager, Sukrono, efforts to develop faith were the result of an updated reading of the Qur’an. He explained:

When we were a small developing country in the 1970s we thought that worship (ibadah) meant praying, giving alms (zakat), or going on the hajj, but this is not true. Now from studying the Qur’an we know that passages dealing with these things are only about 20 percent of the content, the rest of the Qur’an is about human relations. The crucial thing is that in everyday activity—waking up and going to work, doing family errands, and so forth—one’s intentions (niat) are toward worship.

Here Sukrono illustrates how the faith in development that had guided Indonesian modernization during the New Order had proceeded under the secularist presumption of the separation of religion from work and commerce. In contrast, after the end of the Suharto regime, managers like Sukrono have recast the Qur’an as a human resources management manual and seek to develop faith. In so doing, he echoed how Ary Ginanjar had transformed the five pillars of Islam into recipes for corporate success—for example, by rebranding zakat as “strategic collaboration.”

In response to what was conceived of as a “moral crisis,” spiritual reform reconfigured the relationship between faith and development in Indonesia so that faith itself became development’s object. During the New Order, development was the raison d’être of government policy and practice. However, after Suharto’s spectacular collapse, the logic of enhancement and growth that underlay the project of modernization was applied to the religious practices of industrial employees who were supposed to be the purveyors of development. Islamic practice, previously relegated to the background in Indonesia, was seen both as a means to revive economic growth and as something to be developed and enhanced.

Developing faith did not represent the end of faith in development, but rather a reconfiguration of its rationality, creating what I refer to as post-secular development. The same modernist logic that had guided the project of Indonesian development was still at work. Implicit was the assumption that worldly problems could be addressed through technical intervention and the application of human knowledge. Thus, faith was not viewed as a mystical or irrational practice, but as something that could be instilled through design. Developing faith and, in so doing, creating new patterns of human life, was executed according to the same logic that earlier guided building bridges, toll roads, and factories. Religious practice was something to be enhanced through a series of technical interventions. For many citizens in contemporary Indonesia who had come of age during the heyday of faith in development, Islamic spiritual reform appeared to resolve a number of oppositions that had plagued the project of modernization. ESQ spiritual training offered a recipe for living that was simultaneously Muslim and modern. Thus, post-secular development enabled one to be both an engineer and a devout adherent of Islam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

NS: Why is capitalism the focal point of your recent book? And what about capitalism is “postsecular”?

SD: Can I begin with the “postsecular”? It’s a rather confusing term. Mainly it points to a ceasefire—or, anyway, a slowdown—in the long battle between secular reason and religion. That’s ultimately what it implies in the recent work of Habermas, for instance. And that’s also what it means in the kind of intellectual history that uncovers the religious prehistory of secular concepts. But I suspect such work can usually be understood as secularism proceeding under the flag of its own decease. I am more interested in two other possibilities that occur when we think about a zone that is neither secular nor non-secular. The first appears when the limits of the (secular) world become apparent in everyday or mundane life, outside of religion. The second appears when we are compelled to radical leaps of faith—again, outside religion.

Both of these have a direct relation to democratic state capitalism. That’s because democracy and capitalism have each become compulsory and fundamental. They ground everything we do, including religious practice—so we can only get outside them through the kind of postsecular leap of faith that I am talking about. That realization is one of the things that is important about Alain Badiou’s thought. Such leaps may also be relevant to situations in which we encounter secularism’s limits—when secularism can’t contain the ethical and epistemological demands we make of it.

NS: Why can’t secularism itself contain leaps of faith? Why do we need to move past it, to the postsecular?

SD: Of course, there are all kinds of secular leaps of faith. But the will to get outside democratic state capitalism requires something else. It’s true that secular reason is useful in adjudicating upon the current system. You can at least attempt to measure its benefits—the joys, capacities, wealth, and opportunities that it does indeed provide us, and the way that it makes so much seem “interesting,” for instance—against  the insecurities, inequalities, restrictions, and controls that it also imposes.

NS: Why should we want to get outside secular, democratic state capitalism in the first place?

SD: It falls way short, and for two reasons. The first is simply that democratic state capitalism is now the only fully legitimated social system; for that very reason, it has become a limit. Second, and more importantly, we have no rational and secular means of adjudicating the possibility—often adduced in the lead-up to modernity—that we live in a regime of relative experiential poverty. We can’t compare the qualities of past lifeworlds to present ones; we just don’t know whether they’re better or worse. But we do know that the system we have is not as good—I prefer to say not as “perfect”—as we can imagine a society to be. To align oneself with that idea of perfection, and to acknowledge the poverty of contemporary experience, implies a postsecular leap of faith.

NS: What do you mean by “interesting,” specifically in the context in which you used it before?

SD: “Interesting” is a criterion of value that is important historically because it smoothed the path towards democracy and secularism. It first appears as a category early in the eighteenth century alongside sentimentalism and the notion that sympathy is a social tool, and basically being interesting ends up by swamping its rival criteria of value. We all still use interestingness as a category of judgment. But it’s a peculiarly undemanding category.

NS: How is it that an undemanding category like this—one used so casually and so habitually—leads the way to social change?

SD: It has so much power precisely because it is so casual. It’s the ideological air we breathe. And the great thing about interestingness is that it is so democratic: anything at all can be interesting, anyone at all can be interested. But that kind of indifference to distinction is also corrosive of experience.

NS: You suggest that humanities departments may be sites for developing alternatives to the capitalist order. But how can they do that while forced to justify their existence in universities increasingly defined by that order?

SD: Good question—I don’t know. I am now working in Australia, where the process you refer to is much more advanced than in the States. Universities here appear to be servants of the state, which, at its best, seeks merely to protect capitalism from itself. I suspect that we in the humanities have to try to detach our thought from the institutions that nurture us. More challenging, we have to return in a new spirit and with new tools to the conservatism—not to be confused with contemporary right-wing politics—that is the humanities’ default position, whatever the post-1968 generation (including me) came to believe. It is actually the orthodox churches, born before capitalism and democracy, and before the modern nation-state, that—potentially, at least—store the most social power against democratic state capitalism.

NS: What about digital spaces? Can they offer a route around what you call “endgame capitalism”? Or have they already been too thoroughly colonized by it?

SD: No, I don’t think digital spaces offer routes around endgame capitalism. On the contrary, they help expand and integrate the system. They may, however, occasion new paratactic associations that don’t fit the models of collectivity that our formal political categories—like democracy and liberty—depend upon. Freedom is easier in cyberspace, for instance, but only to the degree that it has less content there—although, admittedly, the Wikileaks affair, ongoing as we talk, does indeed show that the internet enables new possibilities for calling state power out.

NS: Why do you think the victory of the neoliberal order coincided with recent religious revivals—from the religious right in the US to militant Islamists?

SD: Islam and the American religious right have very different purposes and constituencies. They certainly don’t like each other. Islam, probably more than the other religions that predate modernity, stands outside the democratic state capitalism of which the US is the primary global missionary power. It appeals to those who most cleanly reject the dominant secular order, often because that order damages them. Why otherwise would Islam be the fastest growing religion among Australian aborigines? As to the rest of the question: why Islamic violence on top of belonging and faith? I’d guess that it’s mainly a matter of opportunity. Violence may be chosen according to a banal rational logic when its benefits seem to outweigh its costs. Political groups routinely take to terror in the face of their enemy’s overwhelming power. Perhaps militancy can also become a way of life for some.

NS: But what about the logic of religion? Is it really fair to say, as you do, that revealed religion is, “under modern truth regimes, false, unverifiable, or unproven”? What accounts, then, for its social force today?

SD: I don’t think there’s a close relation between what is true in the sense I intend and what has social force. It isn’t true that there is an internal sea in the middle of Australia, or that Jews are inferior to Aryans, or that monarchs are God’s emissaries on earth, or that Jesus is the son of God, or that there’s a life after death, or that sacrificing three oxen to Zeus helps assure safe passage on a sea journey, or that America is in Asia, or that hoarding gold makes a country more prosperous—but all these beliefs have had real social consequences, even though they traffic in untruth.

NS: If religion really does “traffic in untruth,” where does it stand with respect to literary fiction?

SD: Literary fiction has always been at home where the borders of the secular can be breached in ordinary life, outside of any supernaturalism—that is, in the postsecular. This breaching often happens when imagined characters have moments of rupture from the secular order. As a randomly chosen example, let me point to that passage in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time when Nick, the narrator, suddenly realizes that the run-down military accommodation in Cabourg where he is lodged at the height of World War II is the very hotel where Marcel holidayed during his affair with Albertine in Proust’s novel. It’s a dizzying moment in which the frontiers between the real and imaginary, the ordinary and the exceptional, are broken in a way that can’t be accommodated by a non-secular lexicon. It’s not sublime, or an epiphany, or a visitation of grace. But it carries its own ecstatic and unworldly charge.

NS: Can this kind of “charge” have anything like the social force of religious ideas? Can it compete with them, or even replace them?

SD: I don’t believe so. The example I have chosen is literary, and only a tiny (and declining) sector of the population is open to literature’s postsecular intensities. Of course, somewhat equivalent intensities can happen in other cultural domains, like art and film and dance and theater and video. None of these offers what Christianity and Islam can: the possibility of a collective life organized around the promise of salvation. But, of course, to be educated into modernity is, by and large, to lose the ability to believe in salvation.

NS: And—to turn to your earlier book, Modern Enchantments—where does religion stand with respect to magic?

SD: Secular magic, which is more or less equivalent to entertainment magic, is a popular instrument of secularization. It is spiritualism’s antagonist—and religion’s as well, if less so. Real magic is not secular at all, obviously. In general, religion and magic have to be thought of as opposed to one another, even if religion sometimes engages in magic too.

NS: The early nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists and sociologists of religion were especially anxious to distinguish the two. But that’s not a concern one comes across much anymore. Why is that?

SD: Could it be because in the nineteenth century they still took religion seriously? They could not, or did not, write from a position of total unbelief. Since Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, until very recently, that position of unbelief has been required of social scientists. The interest in magic’s relation to religion might thus be considered a stage in the social sciences’ perhaps merely provisional march to secularity.

NS: Does magic offer another alternative space to the mechanics of capitalism? Or, perhaps, is capitalism itself a kind of magic?

SD: No. Magic offers no alternative to capitalism. And capitalism is not a form of magic. It’s only too unmagical—although it is true that the extension of secular magic depends on the development of commodified leisure markets. And it’s a bit true that in capitalism, as in some magic tricks, “all that is solid melts into air.” But not capitalism itself—it doesn’t vanish.