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.

And yet, while Lofton is very skillful at contextualizing, she rightly refuses to reduce Oprah to a mere fetish, a mere epiphenomenal expression of social realities. The causal arrows do not point in a single direction, from base to superstructure, as the geological model of society that modernist social scientists persistently use when dealing with religion. As Lofton writes, “Oprah encompasses more than a therapist’s couch, or a woman’s purse, or the revival preacher’s bench.” If there is anything that names the surplus that Oprah’s “flexodoxy” entails, it is the intra-activity between the materiality of the spirit and the spirituality of materiality in late, thoroughly-mediatized capitalism. Through her careful product recommendations or her selection of particular books for her reading club, Oprah spiritualizes materiality, saving us from drowning in the seemingly inexhaustible profane sea of commodities and images that assault us virtually 24-7. In Lofton’s words, “[i]n the loneliness of daily disconnection and the paralysis of abundance, Oprah pervades with selective, incorporated, reliable, ritual regularity. She soothes and she sifts.” The purchase and consumption of these products, in turn, allow for the materialization of spirituality, whether in the achievement of financial success or a good sex life, as befit a fully realized self.  This is precisely what Lofton aptly calls a “spiritual capitalism.”

Here Lofton takes us beyond Weber and his notions of disenchantment and elective affinity that are still predicated on a dualistic understanding of spirit and matter, religion and society, and the sacred and the secular. Again, Lofton puts it well: “Oprah offers to us a way to see a mechanism, up close, strings demonstrably exposed, of how contemporary mass culture convinces us of its conveyances. Is it a religious culture? A mass consumer culture?  Simmering beneath the particulars of this study is the proposition that to force a difference between the two is to compel a false distillation from a quagmire of commingling processes.” Or, more dramatically, “I have found that whatever distinguishing marks we make between commodities and religion, they are, for all practical purposes, arbitrary.”

This insight into the intense and extensive contemporary intra-activity of materiality and spirituality is a powerful explanatory tool. For example, it helps explain the explosive growth of global Neo-Pentecostal networks and cultures, which operate through mass media and popular culture to spread a gospel of health and wealth based on the notion that spiritual salvation, economic success, and physical well-being are mutually implicative. In my work on Brazilian transnational Neo-Pentecostal churches, which—along with Nigerian and Ghanaian churches—are spearheading the growth of the gospel of health and wealth, I have referred to this spirit-matter nexus as “pneumatic materialism.” It is a non-reductive materialism that has emerged through an intense cross-fertilization of non-dualistic autochthonous traditions and a global postmodern re-enchantment of the world, most dramatically expressed by the challenge to the “metaphysics of presence” posed by rapid changes in communications and transportation technologies.  I use the term pneumatic, which comes from the Greek word pneuma, meaning literally “breath,” the spiritual force that animates matter, not only to characterize forms of Christianity that make the Holy Spirit central to the experience of the sacred, but also a diversity of global religions, ranging from Spiritism and Santería to Neo-Shamanism and Neo-Animism, which deal with a variety of seen and unseen agents that are not reducible to narrow parameters of rational naturalism.

Latin American and African Pentecostalisms are not only pneumatic but thoroughly materialist, in the sense that they reject the European (Cartesian) dichotomy between soul and body and its denigration of the latter. Drawing from indigenous traditions that link natural forces with the spirits of ancestors, these Pentecostalisms see the world in non-dualistic terms: the “supernatural” realm of the spirits is not other-worldly; it does not stand separate from or above the natural world. Rather, spirit and flesh are constitutively intertwined, as are transcendence and immanence. For these non-dualistic vernacular Pentecostalisms, individual salvation operates through a personal relation with God and is manifested in this-worldly health and wealth. Conversion entails a new, highly malleable “spirit-matter” nexus, a holistic re-articulation of the self and its surroundings. This new pneumatic materialism is able to bridge, in multiple contexts, the tension between the seen and the unseen, among the personal, the local, the transnational, and the cosmic. This accounts for the great portability of Latin American and African Pentecostalisms.

The notion of pneumatic materialism has obvious connections with Lofton’s spiritual capitalism. Both terms seek to express complex, fluid, power-laden-yet-open-ended relations that constitute practices and discourses that have come to be constructed as religious and/or spiritual in our present age. But what does it mean that Brazilian or Nigerian Neo-Pentecostalism share a common epistemology and modus operandi with Oprah and Harpo Inc.?  While Oprah provides a particularly striking example of the spiritualization of materiality and the materialization of spirituality, she is but one expression of a global polymorphous hyper-animism that is emerging out of the ruins of Western modernity, particularly out of the crisis of overproduction and overconsumption in contemporary “casino capitalism,” as Jean and John Comaroff term it.

I would thus argue for the need to de-provincialize the U.S., to rephrase Dipesh Chakrabarty. We need to resist the trap of American exceptionalism that has dominated the study of American religious history. Lofton takes an important step in this direction with a perceptive chapter on Oprah’s missionary forays into Africa. Lofton is mindful that Harpo Inc. is a global player, “superseding the provincial borders of Winfrey’s native nation-state, foisting the O brand as a circulating object of the new international economy.” This is surely a good starting point, but it is not enough. In order to understand the specificity of Oprah’s iconicity, it is necessary to place her within global religioscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, ethnoscapes, and financescapes (to draw from Arjun Appadurai), alongside other pneumatically materialistic phenomena. Otherwise, we risk replaying the old provincial narrative of “only in America,” a narrative that, with the rise of alternative poles of economic, cultural, and religious production, such as Brazil, India, China, and Nigeria, has become increasingly myopic. The great virtue of Lofton’s book is to give us tools and insights to study the intra-activity of religion, popular culture, media, entertainment, and economics, not only in the U.S., but in this new polycentric cartography.

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.

Because religion is about mediation, it naturally refuses any duality of nature and culture. Reality, as the true nature of things, is sacred, but it must be mediated by particular human relations and practices. Culture, therefore, can be neither merely arbitrary nor totally opposed to nature, since it is what truly discloses the latter. Since all, or nearly all, human cultures have been religious, it is therefore unsurprising that, as Marshall Sahlins has pointed out in The Western Illusion of Human Nature, they do not recognize a nature/culture divide. Instead, they define themselves in groups of kinship with other natural beings and with the gods, animals being typically defined as types of human, not humans as types of animals.

Sahlins rightly sees the divide as pernicious and as of Greek origin, but he does not make it clear that it is a specifically secular divide. He slightly obfuscates this point by tracing it to the duality of Greek cosmogonic myths, with their stories of battles between chaotic titans and more rational deities. But this duality can be paralleled in many, if not most, cultures—the great exception being the Hebraic one. In the Greek case, as in others, it depicts merely a duality within nature, not between nature and culture. It only becomes the latter after the rationalization of myth, when the “Titans” have been allegorized into warring natural forces, and the gods, demythologized as projections of human law-making capacities. After that we get the legacy that Sahlins traces with such devastating accuracy: nature seen as determining human beings as egotistical; this egotism being something that must be either oligarchically controlled or else democratically and capitalistically manipulated, or, yet again, in the Rousseauian inversion, seen as the source of an asocial innocence. But in all these cases, culture, whether regarded as the remedy, conduit, or problem, is seen as something inherently non-natural, as pure artificial contrivance.

This peculiar Western legacy has a naturally universalizing thrust. All nature is one, because it is the site of laws of struggle, or, in the minority report, of isolated integrity. And all culture is also one, because every culture is equally arbitrary. Most typically, the universal culture is seen as the one that channels the universal laws of natural egotism: the culture of bureaucracy, utility, human rights, representative democracy, and the capitalist market.

In this light, one would have to regard the Western globalization of the planet as a secular phenomenon. It stands in contrast with most societies, which are religious, and which know of no division whatsoever between culture and nature. By this token, they tend to be local, because they invest with ultimate, sacred significance the surrounding features of their landscapes, both natural and cultural—and they link the two together. Tokens of these features are exchanged as gifts, and it is this exchange that constitutes society as such.

These societies were disrupted and violated by the arrival of the West. Its vehicles of violation were the capitalist market, which desacralizes both place and gift and turns them into commodities, and the sovereign national state, which is an inherently anarchic reality, no longer subordinate to the international authority of Pope and Holy Roman Emperor. The West’s creation of empire is at once a manifestation of its own anarchy and a slight restraint of the yet more extreme anarchy of the international market. In its relationships with other nation-states, it once more seeks to distill order out of disorder through agonistic balance and Grotian rules for international combat.

But is this really all that has been going on since the dawn of the modern imperial age? If a nature/culture divide is self-delusion, then how can a polity based upon this illusion really operate? Here one needs to discuss the possibility that Christianity is the joker in the Western pack. The white man brought not only guns and money but also bibles and crucifixes. The latter were shamefully used to justify the former, as we know all too well, but was there not also always a structurally inherent limit to the possibility of that process?

What I mean by this is that religion is not necessarily just “secondary” in the modern story of empire and globalization. The “British School” of International Relations, and most notably Hedley Bull in his The Anarchic Society, long ago argued against the “American Realists” that, in reality, the “anarchic” nation-states system worked at all only because of hidden cultural factors operating at a transpolitical and transeconomic level. And amongst these factors, religion necessarily looms large. One can add to this analysis that, as Benno Teshke has shown, even in the eighteenth century, dynastic unity continued to help hold Europe together, while, in the nineteenth, essentially religious alliances performed the same purpose. At least at the outset of the twentieth, the same was true of the European Common Market (now the European Union).

In fact, most experts on IR agree that the crucial influence of religion has never really gone away, especially in the international sphere, because of its unique ability to traverse borders.

In this respect, not just Christianity, but all world religions are “jokers,” because they seek universal relevance, or even universal sway, without investing in a strong duality of nature and culture, which no religion can really sustain. Rather, they seek to insinuate one universal culture that will organize the earth as one specific sacral domain. However, it is arguable that Christianity is uniquely able to combine this with a greater global fluidity: its specific markers are both more mobile and more translatable. It orders no specific laws or sets of unalterable customs. The gifts it proposes to exchange may possess almost any content, for what renders them sacred is their binding gift-character as such. Yet, what is sought through this exchange is not an abstract organization of supposedly “natural” forces, but rather a network of specific bindings of humans to place and of human-place to human-place.

Sahlins himself recognizes that, in the main, the Western religious legacy rejects the nature/culture duality inasmuch as he mentions both that for Plato, psyche determines human existence more than phusis, and that for Augustine, humanity is defined by kinship. This case is augmented if one realizes, unlike Sahlins, that the doctrine of original sin does not augment the idea that there is something evil “by nature.” For clearly it is the most radical possible denial of this very common human view.

The “missionary project” is therefore also in tension, as well as collusion, with the imperio-capitalist project. It seeks to weave one culture out of many, in order to manifest true human nature. In this respect, one can note that Sahlins is vague about how to overcome the nature/culture divide, both metaphysically and politically—if, that is, one seeks to escape the merely local level and its inevitable substitution of an us/them dichotomy for a human/animal one.

Metaphysically, to say that our nature is to be variously cultural still leaves culture arbitrary and in implicit contrast with nature—albeit an impossible nature. Only if there are cultural idioms that are “supposed to be” in some ways hierarchically preferable to others, belonging to our very teleology, can they be said truly to belong to our nature. This requires an invocation of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which uniquely disacknowledges any ontological region of chaos, and which sees nature ‘as “contrived” and human culture as part of a divine, and so natural, “contrivance.” It is for these reasons that it is only the Hebrew/Greek-derived monotheisms that offer any prospect of overcoming the nature/culture divide on a global scale.

Politically, Sahlins is acute in assaulting ancient Greek isonomia as either monarchic/aristocratic imposition upon chaos or else democratic recruitment of natural agonism. But might not this suggest that “mixed government” is the natural mode of natural-cultural unity, since it involves both the aristocratic “proposal” of a culture and the popular adaptive assent to this proposal, which sediments it as natural? If indeed Mauss was right to say that gift-exchange composes the social fact before either law or contract, then one can see how such “mixed government” is always more basic than the former. For if all social formation begins with a gratuitous gesture—a “proposal”—then this is neither consented to nor merely imposed. It is rather “received” and “reciprocated,” or not. One can think of this reception and reciprocity as “democratic”—yet there would be nothing for democracy to agree to were there not the prior moment of “aristocratic” and time-derived “traditional” offering, which necessarily escapes all liberal theorizing, even though this moment is supremely “liberal” in the etymological sense.

It is arguable that workable and just politics and economics should try to ensure that the state and the market remain predominantly “social” in just this mixed sense. Indeed, this may be what the new, anti-neoliberal politics of “the primacy of the social,” as in the case of Saul Alinsky’s “citizens organizing” (now very important in London, for example), are all about. For, to the horror of both left and right, they usually involve entirely “self-appointed” political forces, answerable to no one, who nonetheless achieve a local political footing through popular acclaim and pragmatic success.

The example of mixed government that Sahlins gives is viewed negatively. But that is because it is John Adams’s view of the U.S. constitution, and Adams saw the latter (accurately) as an attempt at balancing class forces. One should view this, however, as a perversion of both the British and the Harringtonian Republican constitutional legacies (which were far better adhered to by Thomas Jefferson). For this more genuine organicism, the “oligarchic” component has to do with sustaining a tradition of wise senatorial “proposers” not concerned with the manipulation of votes, while the “monarchic” element has to do with final non-negotiability of equity and the need for justice in response to arising emergencies. It is arguable that it is the British (but also the Scandinavian, the Swiss, and the Italian civic) adherence to such classical mixture that has provided us today with a long-term legacy of stable constitutionalism, of which one has to regard the United States as an excessively revolutionary—indeed, “Marxist” and bastardized—version, which has led to a peculiarly economistic and tyrannical mode of imperialism. By contrast, it might be remarked that the “archaism” of modern political Britain and the relative “modernity” of medieval political Britain are not in opposition, but are rather signs of the stability of mixture and its guarantee, at least until recently, of a relatively greater measure of liberty and justice. (This may be true even if the “relatively greater” is a pitifully small amount. One should note here also that the same set of observations apply to modern France, though to a lesser degree.)

Therefore, I would argue that still at work, albeit faintly, in the Western global hegemony are the counter-currents both of Christian religion and of a classical “mixed” politics of virtue, and that only these counter-currents can avoid falling prey to xenophobic localism, on the one hand, or to capitalist imperialism, on the other.

But how, in this context, is one to assess the current renewed global spread of the Christian religion? What is one to make, in particular, of the new dominance of Pentecostalism? Here, I fear, my views are less sanguine than those of most of the contributors to Global Christianity, Global Critique. It is true, as remarked in this volume, that Pentecostalism can be regarded as the most successful worldwide movement for the improvement of working people. And here the left has much to learn from its almost total neglect of the way in which cultural liberalism (drugs, sexual permissiveness, etc.) has combined with economic liberalism to drag so many poor people into conditions of abjection. Liberation theology tried to address economic liberalism and got nowhere, because ordinary people could do little about this. Charismatic religion tried to address cultural liberalism and got somewhere, because ordinary people could do something about that. A life of increased self-discipline indeed spells liberation for many, even though this should not imply a forgetting of the structural factors leading to inequity.

However, Pentecostalism has by and large endorsed the capitalist market and the gospel of success, even if it has also developed many compensating voluntary welfare ventures, which should by no means be despised. Yet Charismatic Christians simply are not Badiouian Maoists in exotic tropical disguise. Matthew Engelke is far more on the right track when he notes that they have tended to combine religious ecstasy with a very worldly and “situational” (in Badiouian terms) preoccupation with numbers and statistics.

But the really important question is, how do they relate to the question of mediation? Protestantism has tended to track the modern secular refusal of mediation, which divides culture from nature, by a non-mediated religion. Here we are compensated for a sacramentally drained world by a direct contact with the divine.

Is Pentecostalism in continuity with this? In some ways, yes, as some contributors point out: it can be seen as a lust for an ecstatic, unmediated contact with God. But in other ways, no. Catherine Pickstock mentions that its allowance of post-apostolic miracles removes a pillar of the magisterial reformation. And by refusing Protestant sobriety, it also embraces new modes of supposedly spontaneous, flamboyant ritual, which soon become routine. One is tempted, of course, to say that it is the one possible Latin mode of Protestantism. What I think can be argued is that by increasing the emotive and collectively effervescent dimension, the public ethical conscience of Protestantism that got rid of slavery and sometimes supported modes of socialism is downplayed. Pentecostalism, after all, commenced as an evolution from ethical “holiness” to emotional ecstasy, in terms of the manifestation of the signs of the spirit. Through this move, the world of the market is left still more drained of any spiritual resonance other than as proof of spiritual favor. On the other hand, religion becomes more of a compensating refuge from the bleak meaninglessness of this world, with its “labyrinth of solitude.”

This is not to say that charismatic religion is not redeemable. But Jamie Smith is right: it needs to be Catholicized. One could even say that it has recaptured one half of genuine liturgy—namely, spontaneity—because, as Catherine Pickstock has shown, the idea of a strictly “fixed” liturgy is not medieval. But we need the other half, too—the aesthetic half, which is the dimension of non-identical repetition. Only a complete liturgy can then start to pervade and to challenge all the structures of modern life, and to mediate through all of global culture the natural and the divine.

In my own experience, it is already the case that when southern Protestant Christians begin to receive a theological education, they start with astonishing speed to join in global conversations of Western origin. The coming together of southern numbers and Western intensity of intellectual religious revival may well serve to promote much further in future the counter-currents that lie nonetheless at the heart of contemporary globalization.

If anything will undo the neoliberal “reign of non-mediation,” it is the Christian project of universal gift-exchange, the subordination of the economic and the political to the social, and the renewal of a polity of mixed-government on a world-scale.

Given the apparent centrality of religion to much of the modern world, and what now appear to be the limitations of the secularization thesis, we should welcome any sign of a revival of the fortunes of the sociology of religion. However, I have serious doubts about its annunciation. We will need more than research into which religions are figured as independent variables, or which receive some positive evaluation from social scientists, in order to herald the birth of a strong program. Jeffrey Alexander’s development of a cultural sociology at Yale is held out as a model of how the sociology of religion might develop—and rightly so. But Alexander’s program (along with the work of his colleagues, such as Phil Smith and Phil Gorski) is important because it puts culture at the center of sociological analysis of major contemporary issues around politics, social movements, and the civil sphere (Alexander’s The Civil Sphere being the obvious example). What areas of public concern might a revival in the sociology of religion embrace? These would appear to include, minimally: the crisis in multicultural (and therefore multi-faith) societies, the relationship between religious and secular identities in the framework of national citizenship, religious courts and legal pluralism, and the political role of religion in shaping the globalization of the economy in India and China.

A strong program also needs a robust and relevant theoretical framework. This theoretical component would need to concern itself with some basic issues: how does the religious relate to the social in modernity? So, what specifically might the research agenda of a strong program entail, other than tracking the fortunes of religion as an independent variable? The major task facing contemporary sociology of religion is how to engage significantly and successfully with globalization, and yet the issues around globalization have hardly surfaced explicitly in recent sociological work, apart from contributions from Roland Robertson, Peter Clarke, and Peter Beyer. One can recognize significant contributions to the study of religious radicalism and terrorism as aspects of globalization from Mark Juergensmeyer, and clearly the sociology of Islam continues to flourish (with Saïd Arjomand, Olivier Roy, and Christian Joppke). But a strong program has to hang on more than a fashionable (and therefore possibly fleeting) focus on Islam or, even more narrowly, on the veil. We have no real answers to the question: how does religion relate to globalization?

A preliminary set of answers points to the need “to provincialize the United States,” to look at post-institutional religion, and to engage with the post-secular debate. These objectives are certainly important, but let us unpack them somewhat. I have never understood the apparently total separation, at least at a professional level, between anthropology and sociology—and surely the former has been busy provincializing the ethnocentric assumptions of the sociology of religion all along. One can think of a significant assembly of anthropological contributions from Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Melford Spiro, Talal Asad, and Peter van der Veer. How can one do sociology of religion without a comparative and historical framework? And how would that be possible without engaging with social anthropology? One truly amazing feature of American sociology of religion is the almost total neglect of native American religions in any discussion of either the history of religion in America or its current revival. Why? Only, I assume, because indigenous religions are arbitrarily given over to anthropology; but in a global and urban world, such disciplinary boundaries look increasingly bizarre. If we are going to provincialize, let us at least do it in the company of our colleagues in anthropology, archaeology, history, and religious studies.

On the issue of post-institutional religion, or spirituality, it is true that this development is certainly characteristic of modern societies—and not only in the West, of course. Once more we have to ask ourselves how new such a phenomenon actually is. There is a battery of extant concepts from the sociology of religion that show an earlier recognition of this development. One can think of Thomas Luckmann’s “invisible religion” in the 1960s, or Edward Bailey’s ‘implicit religion’ in the 1980s. The study of post-congregational religion has been around a long time. The real issue, however, is whether spirituality (in some broad sense) can exert significant influence on modern society—if you like, act as an independent variable and a positive force. In my view, such a social development is unlikely for at least two reasons: its extreme subjectivity and individualism, on the one hand, and its compatibility with a commercial, secular lifestyle, on the other. The Great Awakenings in America, or the Protestant Reformation in Europe, or the Islamic revival of the twentieth century were collective religious manifestations that changed society as a whole and gave rise to new and powerful institutions. It is extremely unlikely that modern spirituality could ever play a transformative, let alone revolutionary, role in society.

With regard to post-secularism, this development has more to do with political theory and philosophy of religion than with sociology as such. The debate has been driven by Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, and Jürgen Habermas. It is directed primarily at the issue that, according to Habermas in Between Naturalism and Religion, in complex multicultural societies we will need to go beyond John Locke’s notion of tolerance, and one step in that direction is to take religion seriously in the public sphere, where both secular and religious citizens can be obliged to give public reasons (and not private excuses) for their beliefs. Sociologists have caught onto this debate and transformed it into the assumption that secularization is a thing of the past. However, it is important to make a distinction between political, or institutional, secularization (the separation of church and state) and social, or everyday, secularization (the transformation of belief and practice). José Casanova made a brilliant contribution to the study of this institutional differentiation in his Public Religions in the Modern World. However, these two dimensions do not develop at the same rate or in tandem. There is plenty of evidence that everyday religion is not an independent variable, but is subject to secular—mainly commercial—pressures. The global growth of the mega-church is, according to this definition, a secular development, because it transforms religious belief and practice according to the strategies of the modern corporation.

In my view, the real issue in the secularization debate is not whether religion is treated as an independent variable, or whether it can be studied in a post-secular and post-institutional form. The underlying problem was captured by Thomas Luckmann in the observation: “shrinking transcendence, expanding religion.” Is the sacred eroded in modern societies through urbanization, the collapse of community, and globalization along with the erosion of the social? This question—the religious roots of the social—can be regarded as the starting point of the sociology of religion in Durkheim. Perhaps the new sociology of religion will still develop as a variation on a classical theme, as illustrated by the current revival of Durkheimian sociology. One can observe a flood of recent publications around Durkheim and religion, such as Massimo Rosati’s Ritual and the Sacred and Edward  Tiryakian’s For Durkheim. This issue—namely, the relationship between the sacred, the religious, and the social—constitutes the basis of the strong program.

It is recognized, at least implicitly, that the phrase ‘strong program’ is a code for the rejection of the ‘weak program,’ where the latter typically refers to the legacy of European sociology, with its acceptance of the secularization thesis, its implicit critique of religion, and its emphasis on the crisis of meaning in modern life. It is alleged that the European tradition assumed that the crisis of meaning (with the disenchantment of reality by science) would translate into the decline of religion. The strong (or American) program directs scientific attention to the supply side of religion, claiming that the demand side can be regarded as constant. I have never really understood these strong/weak, supply/demand, and American/European dichotomies. On the first page of The Sociology of Religion, Weber said that the most “elementary forms of behavior motivated by religious or magical factors are oriented to this world,” and such behavior is predominantly rational where the ends of religious action are “predominantly economic.” There isn’t a lot here about the problem of meaning, only the satisfaction of secular needs. Of course, the pious rise above this secular everyday world, but the mass, in the context of scarcity, are motivated by the quest for health and wealth. It turns out that Weber was, all along, part of the (really) strong problem in his post-provincial comparative sociology.

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

Slowly, some humanists are recovering from a professionally sanctioned amnesia about the original mission and scope of our field.  The current enterprise of the humanities began as the core curriculum of the first modern university, established by the Humboldt brothers in Berlin in 1810, to prepare republican citizens. For the first time in European history, future professionals would have to interpret the dangerously unstable and exciting world that followed from the French Revolution. They studied history, languages, and philosophy as disciplines that acknowledge cultural differences and that suggest the power of art to achieve freedom through imagination and through disinterested pleasure. Today, humanists continue to interpret arts and culture in classrooms, scholarly publications, and in institutions devoted to conserving and promoting creative practices.  But the founding mission of civic education is shrouded under the assumption that art is inconsistent with practical concerns. Universities and art schools teach us to worry whenever instrumentality is mentioned, for fear that questions of usefulness will vitiate the free and disinterested quality of aesthetic experience.

For a while, Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted that pall of concern about the concrete effects of art, through his massive WPA program of national recovery that built roads, schools, and also supported artists from a range of modalities and ideological persuasions. Too little is known about their work in light of the recovery, as if their art was discounted for collaborating with government programs.  But now is the time for a revision of artistic contributions to democratic and economic development, for factoring in the constructive work that creative arts do in reframing paradigms and in breaking bad habits. Formalist art theory, in opposition to instrumentalism, underlines the defamiliarizing quality of good prose, poems, and paintings. For formalists, art doesn’t promote programs; instead it interrupts expectations. In doing so, art revives the perception of people and things we had learned to overlook.  It rekindles a love for the world. Without art, Victor Shklovsky writes in “Art as Technique,” “life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war….And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.”

In this spirit of freedom from anaesthetizing habit we can, and urgently should, take up the torn threads that tie humanism up with civic education. We humanists can join artists as cultural agents who promote creativity and interpretation as resources for social development. The objective is not a partisan victory but the formation of “thick” civic subjects who are alive to the world and exercise the free judgment that we learn, as Kant taught us, through developing a disinterested enjoyment of beauty. Democracy depends on sturdy and resourceful citizens able to engage more than one point of view and to wrest rights and resources from limited assets. In other words, non-authoritarian government counts on creativity to loosen conventional thought and free up the space where conflicts are negotiated, before they reach a brink of either despair or aggression.

Aesthetic education, Friedrich Schiller explained to the Humboldt brothers who turned the advice into an academic institution, is a necessary part of civic development. Schiller’s program for modern citizenship is The Aesthetic Education of Man (1759). He wrote the Letters to open dead-ends in politics through art that wrests freedom from contradiction.  Sentimental, tormented art like Schiller’s, unlike Goethe’s naïve genius, can be taught; it thrives in the very distance from nature where poets have freedom to maneuver. Freedom’s dependence on self-consciousness, and the promise of a new spontaneity based on reflection, became the themes of Schiller’s pedagogy. It turned Kant’s lessons about the differences between beauty and the sublime, love and respect, nature and artistic genius, into a progression of before and after aesthetic education. Yet the sometimes delayed social effects of an aesthetic education can rush skeptics to conclude that one thing has little to do with another. But hasty conclusions misprise the gradual process of subject formation.

While defensive humanists worry about subjecting art to practical uses, I used to worry about the ethical dimension of the work we do. Sometimes I’d get so sore from the everyday ethical barbs that interrupt a literature teacher’s chain of thought that thinking would get derailed from aesthetic questions to questioning why these mattered. The times that haunted me most were when graduate students would wonder out loud why—when the world was so urgently in need of practical contributions—they should write a dissertation about this or that genre, or motif, or formal property of literature. They did not doubt that preparing for a teaching career in the arts is an enormous pleasure and also a privilege.  But what good does it do in the world? What direct or indirect outcomes could justify the resources of time and money, the intellectual passions that can replace sleep at night, the dedication to writing books that (by my hardly admirable example) can trump even a mother’s attention to her children?  Can we, in good faith, counsel students to pursue humanistic careers when they sense that the same barbs that bother us will prick their own conscience if they are lucky enough to land a job?

Yes, we can, I’m relieved to say, now that President Obama has refreshed the memory of FDR’s creative years along with hopes for increased attention to arts education. Among the inspirations have been Schiller, Hannah Arendt’s lectures on Kant’s aesthetics, Antonio Gramsci, Antanas Mockus, Augusto Boal, and countless other cultural agents. Teaching about art and training a disposition to engage and admire creativity can make their contributions visible in ways that turn lessons into opportunities (read: obligations) to work constructively in the world. I’ll say why, very briefly.

At the beginning of her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt jokes that of course he never wrote in that genre.  He didn’t have to, because he wrote indirectly, on aesthetics, as the most certain way to get to politics. For one thing, with the French Revolution as a backdrop for his 1790 Critique of Judgment, indirection was prudent for a cautious man.  But caution and care also encouraged Kant to build a theory of the public sphere from the buy-in of individual citizens.  This was not an appeal to the “general will” that Arendt recoils from in the French and in the Bolshevik revolutions, but a foundation in particular subjectivity that could be trained toward agreement with other subjects through exercising the faculty of judgment. Judgment is an innate faculty, like reason and imagination, but one that went almost undetected or flaccid from under-use during long centuries of pre-modern authoritarianism. Subjects of a king, devotees of a church, serfs, slaves, and students of classical curricula don’t need to exercise judgment because they don’t make choices.  But the intellectual freedom that the Enlightenment defends makes choice possible and therefore an obligation. For the first time in Western history, Arendt says, common people need to develop their faculty of judgment.  And the training program is none other than aesthetic education. Because they are free from interest, subjective observations regarding beauty and the sublime depend on a faculty that has nothing to do with reason, or morality, or any pre-established concept of right or wrong, good or bad. An aesthetic judgment is a second order response to pleasure or displeasure: after we register the immediate feeling, we judge if the feeling is free of interest; in that case we imagine that others might share the same pleasure because it does not depend on concerns that may affect us differentially.  Through aesthetic judgment, subjectivity makes a bridge to other subjects and promotes a shared sense of freely acknowledged value. This “common sense,” Kant’s clever resignification of everyday wisdom in every man, is enabled through aesthetics and becomes the foundation for a public sphere.

Kant kept free of too much involvement; he preferred to observe, not to engage with the world. His student Friedrich Schiller would insist that aesthetics demands hands-on achievement of form, not only the judgment of existing objects. The modern subject is an agent in creating a cultural and political environment, so that arts education was practically a redundant and urgent project for Schiller. In ways that I only intuit and hope to develop soon, Schiller is an inspiration for Antonio Gramsci, a fellow traveler of the cultural agents I most admire.

Take Antanas Mockus, for example. In 1995, the newly elected mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, proposed a bold program of “Cultural Agency.” Simply stated, he put culture to work in a city so violent and corrupt for over a decade that it was the one place in the Americas banned to tourists by airport advisories. What could be done in a place so troubled that investments of money and force would have magnified, not mitigated, the disaster?  If civic spirit had worn so thin it would not sustain a body politic that could take fiscal cures or demand security, the first prescription was to revive the spirit through art, antics, and accountability. First a philosopher and then a public servant, Mayor Mockus made theory yield practices that would themselves yield more reflection. He sidestepped conventional sites of struggle that stayed stuck between fear and opportunism. Like Gramsci, Mockus refused to wait for better conditions and instead promoted a “passive revolution” through the power of culture. Gramsci’s response to unbeatable odds makes him something of a patron saint for cultural agency. Using culture as the wedge to open up necessary civil conditions for decent politics and economic growth, workers would get beyond economistic deadlocks and move toward the goal of emancipation.

For Mockus, civility was goal enough, and getting there became an experiment that mixed fun with function (imagine combining Schiller’s playful education for self-made subjects with Kant’s appeal to inter-subjective judgment inspired by aesthetics).  For example, the municipality’s inspired staff hired pantomime artists to make spectacles of good and bad performances at traffic lights. Suddenly, skeptical subjects became an interactive public of spectators.  The mayor’s team printed thousands of laminated cards with a green thumb-up on one side and red thumb-down on the other, for drivers to flash in judgment of their fellows.  Vaccination against violence was one city-wide performance-therapy against the “epidemic” that had become a cliché for aggression. Arts programs in schools, rock concerts in parks, a monthly “ciclovía” that closed streets to traffic and opened them to bikers and walkers have, among other civic games and alongside rigorous educational programs, helped to revive the metropolis.

Citizens soon paid their taxes, often above what they owed in order to support a particular library, or park, or senior program. Between 1993 and 2003, the end of Mockus’s second term, one stunning indicator of change is the rate of homicide, reduced by sixty-five percent. Today, Bogotá feels the strain of migrants who flee zones of conflict for this newfound haven. As they overload the city’s systems, planners suggest that migration might slow down if cultural agency stepped up in still troubled areas of the country.

Throughout the Americas, culture is a vehicle for agency.  Photographers are teaching visual literacy and whetting young appetites for other arts and sciences. In theater, improvisations foster collaboration and find dramatic outlets for frustration while rehearsing roles that rise to daunting challenges.  Without the “Teatro campesino,” César Chávez could not have organized the United Farm Workers’ Union. Perhaps the most far-reaching case is Augusto Boal’s “Theater of the Oppressed.” The multiplier effect of his lessons in listening to disadvantaged social actors and encouraging them to take the stage resulted, for example, in his two-term election to the City Council of Rio de Janeiro.  There, he promoted legislation suggested by audiences and actors in marginal neighborhoods; thirteen laws passed, and several were adopted at the national level. Alongside these artist-activists are many others. Musicians, dancers, poets, painters, of the past and at present, do not yet figure as subjects of many academic studies, but they might inspire the kind of creative reflection that amounts to a civic contribution.

In Bogotá, no one asks what “cultural agency” means.  The concept resonates with a variety of public practices that link creativity with social contributions. But elsewhere the term can beg definition. Maybe this shows a lack of activity, but I suspect that activity is almost everywhere. What we lack instead is perspective on the family resemblances among a variety of repertoires and remixes. Recognizing these resemblances, promoting replication of artful interventions can be on our professional agendas as humanists through at least two standard professional approaches to the arts: we highlight particular creative practices, and we give those practices a theoretical spin.

The first value added by humanists follows from simply noting and commenting on examples of arts that build society. Drawing attention to undervalued creative practices offers them as models to inspire variations and choices for research projects.  Research begins by locating or formulating a topic; we choose which text, phenomenon, or practice, which perspective or approach, merits extended consideration in a scholarly essay. Allow me to mention my own choice as a literary critic. Instead of focusing on popular cultural studies topics such as violence, necrophilia, consumerism, or abuse of human rights, I chose to focus a book and course on “Bilingual Aesthetics” to reframe bilingualism, from the barely tolerated transitional condition of minorities and immigrants, to an intellectual and emotional advance over monolingualism.

Cultural agency is an invitation to notice “felicitous” engagements as well as frustrating performances. And since the approach privileges the surprise of ingenious responses to difficult challenges, it can sustain the attention of humanists trained to value art for producing uncommon effects.  Alongside the end-game of critique, humanist agents can play the gambit of reflecting on an inexhaustible range of creative moves and on their immediate or delayed effects. In the end, results will be important, as talented administrators like Mockus maintain. He developed innovative, often indirect, measures for changing attitudes of youth and mature citizens, before and after experimenting with particular cultural programs. Among his fans, artists and teachers may be cured of an allergy to numbers.

I, for one, was also cured of sleepless worries about what art has to do with ethics and social development.  With FDR as an exemplary leader and model for new civic investments in the arts, I know that new investments along with more attention to interpretation will channel the power of arts from mere contestation to engagement.  Alongside that engagement young humanists can pursue a passion for literature, hopeful that their faculty of free judgment and their creative engagement with their own students will amount to the bricks and the mortar to rebuild a strong civil society.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame]

“It’s complicated.” That’s what we, scholars of religion, often say when asked to comment on challenging, possibly unsavory topics like the now over-determined public presence of Palin. We hurriedly, and rightly, remind our audiences that there exists a more modest, respectable religion, one more quotidian than those shrill voices that titillate and terrify liberal bloggers in their rush to link “Christo-fascists” to Palin. In making this point, we fall back on well-worn responses and qualifications, reflexive reminders that identities are contested and traditions diverse. Yet those winks continue. What “fleck of culture” is revealed? Is it Palin’s own, a sign of her magnetic hold on the “commentariat”? Or might it also reveal “specks” of Religious Studies behavior, some of the deepest assumptions underlying our scholarly practice?

Such questions can’t be answered by focusing on what Palin believes or endorses; her winks shouldn’t tempt scholars to indulge in a game of “gotcha!” We distance ourselves from Tina Fey’s and Keith Olbermann’s engagements with Palin’s beliefs in the efficacy of exorcism, the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs in Eden, or the justice of trickle-down economics. Yet while we are right to reject the snarky tone of such engagements, Palin’s ocular flutters reveal something of our own “structures of signification.” Palin has become the ultimate intellectual signifier, a shifting context, a dazzling surface on which manifold projections reflect back to us as confirmed truths. She is a “true feminist,” Clarence Thomas, a “sexy Puritan,” the ultimate creation of the Roveists, or, closer to home, she is a counter-sign to the “respectable” religion we in the field seek to privilege.

Kathryn Lofton, John Schmalzbauer, Randall Stephens, and others have done fine work—often on this very website—in complicating the ways in which Palin’s religiosity is misrepresented. In some ways it is unsurprising that such back and forth exchanges between journalists and professors, that mutual dance around academic “authority,” have proliferated in the wake of the GOP convention. After all, it seems almost impossible, in the years since the panicky post-election spasms of 2004, to talk about political religions without being sucked—often against one’s will—into the insider baseball haranguing about representational violence and evangelicals.

So our public qualifications of Palin-talk are also winks to ourselves about scholarly conventions, specifically proclamations (against all evidence) that the Right is dying (no, really, it’s for real this time), and assertions that, if conservatism lives on it does so as a kind of zombie category, a dead construct of an intransigent critic’s imagination, something far outnumbered by and with far less vitality than moderates and progressives (who presumably will shoot the zombie in the head, figuratively speaking). Writers like E.J. Dionne (whose mid-1990s forecast of a Progressive revival has now reinvented itself as the prediction of a resurgent religious “left”) and Alan Wolfe (who finds that most Americans want a flexible faith, one linked to tolerance and reason) surely have a point, just as the important works done since the 1980s—by George Marsden, Grant Wacker, Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and Randall Balmer—have surely taught us all about the complexities of evangelicalisms.

But consider the following “structures of signification.” Nancy Ammerman wrote recently (in “Telling the Old, Old Story”) that “researchers in the evangelical world have listened for a strident hellfire message and heard instead the everyday stories of people who want to be liked and don’t want to make waves, who translate their story about eternal destiny into a more visible story about kindness and honesty.” While no one would disagree with her larger point, the words “in,” “the,” and “instead” wink actively. This point about acknowledging complexity and pluralism seems to smuggle in a singularity: “the evangelical world.”  There may also be an implication that only those commentaries produced by those in this world matter. While those written by researchers outside this world would surely look different—they might not be ethnographic, for example—would they thereby be illegitimate? And what of that tricky word “instead”? No one in the study of American religions would possibly find fault with the notion that “kindness and honesty” are present in the “everyday stories” of many evangelicals. But does this really mean, as the word “instead” suggests, that these are the only qualities generated by the stories? Wouldn’t a more accurate word be “also” rather than “instead”?

There are good reasons for emphasizing stories of kindness and compassion that emerge from a culture so over-determined and frequently mocked. Ammerman, Corwin Smidt, D. Michael Lindsay, Christian Smith, and others have exposed the caricature of an evangelical monolith which is sometimes given pass in national media, seemingly undergirded by the anxiety New York Times readers feel after reading reviews of Jesus Camp. We know, of course, that evangelical identities have always been complicated, and that new evangelical voices are expressed through concerns about the environment and the economy. But there are good reasons, too, to remember that other stories still exist, powerfully nurtured in a political culture shaped by discourses of persecution and combat, and still preoccupied with the imagery of hellfire and the rhetoric of pluralism. Even if we take for granted that the words spoken to researchers are the ones that count (as if there are no back stories), “strident hellfire messages” clearly still exist and one doesn’t have to look very hard to find them. This story must be told as well, for this enduring vein of tropes and criticisms—even as we all know it does not speak for the whole of “the evangelical world”—continues to shape a shared world of politics, religion, and culture.

I am not suggesting that when Palin winks when saying “I am opposed to gay marriage,” she is alerting armies of “theocrats” to readiness. Yet our guild’s sensible point about not collapsing Palin’s policies into a “Pentecostal wink,” or locating them in some mythically antediluvian Christianity, should not lead us to look past the enduring power of conservatism (evangelical and otherwise, in all of their complexity) as a cultural, political, and religious presence. While those of us in the academy know that the gleeful snarkiness of a Salon article on faith healing is off-base as a window onto Palin’s politics, we know too that the mutual resonance of political and religious conservatism remains loud, and we ignore it to our intellectual discredit, and possibly to our political peril as well. There remains much to say about hellfire, after all, once we have all accepted—as we all have long ago—that not every evangelical speaks its language. And there remain a great many stories to tell about it, once we have all accepted—as we all should have done long ago—that not everyone who tells such a story is a Sam Harris, a Christopher Hitchens, or a Richard Dawkins.

So while I don’t necessarily disagree with what Ammerman and others have written (nor am I suggesting they’re engaged in protectionism, false consciousness, or anything of the sort), I invoke their writings as an opportunity to muse on a tendency that may have unconsciously flourished in the field. It is worth engaging in a kind of self-inventory so that, in the name of cautioning against misrepresentation, we don’t narrow our political and intellectual conventions (and integrity) until we are neutered, bland, an immobile knot of endless qualifications of what we want—but cannot bring ourselves—to say: in other words, the very caricature of the professoriat circulated by the likes of Gov. Palin.

Is there more for us to say of winking than simply, “it’s complicated.” Are there new responses that can, or should, be added to the din? Do the winks signify beyond this? If anything, they tell us that Palin represents—whatever else may be made of her “meanings”—the need for fresh narratives of religion in public life, since she vexes and unsettles conventional ways of thinking about political religions. I say this because the reactions she has generated cannot be captured simply by resorting to ideological explanations, no matter how energetically Palin stays on message. Nor is her candidacy simply another occasion to cry wolf before the inevitable triumph of theocracy or to bemoan how the incredulous masses vote against their own interests while in thrall to the passions of identity, to cite Thomas Frank’s widely-known formulation. I say this, too, because despite the evident presence of voter polarization, the ready-to-hand “culture wars” musings do little to clarify what is interesting or politically significant about Palin.

Aside from talking points and party affiliation, Palin is in some ways what I have elsewhere called, building on the work of James Scott, politically illegible. And her complicated, multifarious demonology cannot be adduced to her religious affiliation. She exists in the “viral” dimension of our mediascape as a singular concoction of politics as telegenics (the sportscaster’s zingers recast as political argument), emotional self-creation (Hockey Mom cum canine), frontier survivalist (the Alaska Independence party is almost a distant echo of Gingrich-era conservatism, when separatist militias briefly denounced “socialized” roadwork and the like), and a gifted practitioner of the erotics of fear. So while somewhere a graduate student may be contemplating a thesis comparing Palin’s charisma with Sister Aimee’s, the way she captures some of the darker impulses of our political moment strikes me as having little to do with her religiosity.

So yes, as I and others have suggested in writings about political religion, there are both normative and practical goods to be achieved by evaluating religio-political practitioners according to the policies they favor, or their specific orientations to political life. Meet them on the shared space of politics and demand accountability in political registers, rather than shrieking about the perils of theocracy. All to the good. Yet it is important to keep in mind more than one thought—that conservatism remains powerful, and that it is not ubiquitous, and that Palin’s policy positions are more important than her Pentecostalism—as we consider the opportunities and risks opened up by considerations of political religions.

While the pundits miss the point, perhaps we, the scholars, miss a different kind of point. No academic should feel obligated to criticize Gov. Palin, even if they detest her politics. But, in the name of a much-needed conceptual self-inventory, it is worth wondering if the intellectual and political integrity we seek to defend, calibrated to the lived messiness we claim to document, is well-served if we are lulled into thinking that a lone wink fits all audiences, genres, and occasions.

Before I begin, I can’t resist noting that the characterization of “Buddhism” upon which the piece is premised—one that is suspiciously amenable to a modern western liberal lifestyle—gives scholars of East Asian religions fits. I am glad to see that Don Lopez has tried to introduce some historical perspective here. I’ll say no more about this topic, other than to note that a similarly deracinated, Protestantized version of my own focus of research, early Confucianism, has also enjoyed wide currency since the Enlightenment. What I’d like to focus on, instead, is the apparent confusion about what brain imaging technologies tell us about ourselves, and what, precisely, materialism is and is not.

To begin with, Brooks reports that Andrew Newberg’s neuroimaging work “has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain”! Of course they can: all mental experiences can be identified and measured in the brain, or they wouldn’t be mental experiences. This says absolutely nothing about the existence or non-existence of metaphysical entities in the world. A “friend of mine” (for the purposes of maintaining plausible deniability) recalls experiencing mystical states of oneness induced by a variety of hallucinogenic substances consumed in his 20s, including physically flowing into and becoming one with Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County and dissolving into the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know much about the psychopharmacology of LSD and psilocybin, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they, like certain meditative practices, are able to suppress activity in the parietal lobe, among other things. This may explain why both meditators and drug users report Freud’s famous “oceanic feeling” (their monitoring of ordinary spatial boundaries is being altered). While this is interesting—and the fact that it feels so good is even more interesting—it says absolutely nothing about the ontological status of the mystical Ocean.

Brooks’s conclusion that “people are equipped to experience the sacred” would more accurately read, “people are equipped to appear to themselves to experience the sacred.” Moreover, similar mediation- or drug-induced repression of the parietal lobe in practitioners prepared with other cultural primes (for instance, Catholic nuns) would probably result in very different reported experiences: not merging with some indefinite “larger presence” or Mt. Tam, but being physically embraced by a very concrete and vividly perceived Jesus, complete with flowing beard and a retinue of horn-blowing angels. The idea that “God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at [moments of transcendental love], the unknowable total of all there is” is a fairly accurate expression of a vague “spirituality” that is now quite widespread among modern, educated people who eschew the religious beliefs of their parents, but it is in no way “proven” or even suggested by experimental work in the cognitive science of religion.

This confusion of neuroimaging data with some sort of magical report about the true nature of the world, typical of the breathless manner in which the popular press covers this topic, is actually the product of a deeply seated cognitive bias in humans, our innate folk dualism (on this, see especially Descartes’ Baby by Paul Bloom). Intuitively, we think of ourselves as something other than our brains, even though this intuition appears to be empirically wrong. Our folk dualism gives us the feeling that there is a huge gap between “mind”-like activities, which are individual and subjective, and physical events, which are objective and measurable. We then get very excited when we discover that thinking about or experiencing X is accompanied by physical activity in area Y of the brain—X must be real! Properly speaking, though, “our” thinking about or experiencing X is, in fact, nothing more than activity in area Y of the brain (or, more likely, a network of regions).

Brooks’s piece is also characterized by a confusion concerning what “materialism,” as an ontological claim about the world, might be. This seems to be the result of conflating the philosophical position of materialism, or physicalism, with the common use of the word “materialist” to refer to people or beliefs that are perceived to be selfish, unemotional, or unloving. For instance, emotions are not, as Brooks suggests, any more “squishy” than anything else: they are reactions subserved by an entirely material body-brain system. “Hard-core materialism,” like that of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, does not preclude the existence of emotions, love, or unselfishness—in fact, quite the opposite is true. Recent work on the apparently hard-wired nature of altruism and fairness are entirely compatible with, and indeed predicted by, the neo-Darwinan, physicalist model of the self. It is often in the interest of selfish genes to build selectively unselfish “hosts” to get them into the next generation, and these hosts work best when pre-loaded with a spectrum of fast, “emotional” responses to their environments, including the all-important environment of other people. Human beings, as well as other social primates, seem to be built by their genes to be guided primarily by reactions we would characterize as “emotional,” to have the capacity for deep familial and romantic love and attachment, and to perform great acts of apparently selfless altruism for kin or ersatz-kin (such as co-religionists and fellow soldiers). Similarly, there is no reason to think that because consciousness depends upon “idiosyncratic networks of neural firings,” the relationship between neurons and consciousness is “mysterious” or somehow non-physical: the collection of dust particles I see on the floor next to my desk is idiosyncratic, but not non-physical. Again, Brooks’s conclusion here seems to involve unexamined, and unjustified, folk beliefs: if my neural network is “idiosyncratic,” then it’s unique to me, and I am non-physical, something other than my brain or my body; therefore, idiosyncratic neural networks mean that hard-core materialism is wrong.

Finally, Brooks is right that behavioral neuroscience is having a lasting impact on culture, but it isn’t going to prove that Alan Watts was right and that big bad atheists are wrong. It’s that physicalism—the idea that we are nothing more than our body-brains—fundamentally contradicts deeply-seated folk ideas that we have about free will and responsibility. This in turn has profound legal and social implications. As more and more studies come out concerning the correlation of brain state X with certain undesirable behavior Y, we are seeing more and more instances of what Michael Gazzaniga calls the “my brain made me do it” defense in legal cases. Paul Bloom is one of the people who has articulated most clearly what is wrong with this type of thinking; as he notes in a recent commentary:

Micheal McGough, reporting on a 2005 conference on law and neuroscience, outlines [the "my brain made me do it"] logic very clearly in his first paragraph:

“Suppose you’re a juror in the trial of an accused child molester. A medical expert called as a witness for the defense says that magnetic resonance images of the defendant’s brain show unusual activity in an area that lights up in many—though not all—pedophiles. Are you now willing to acquit the defendant on insanity grounds?”

For anyone who is not a Cartesian dualist, this is all seriously confused. There is no immaterial conductor using the brain to accomplish its will. And the notion that pedophilia involves the brain is not a bold empirical hypothesis; it is a truism, and if it leads to the conclusion that the pedophile is blameless, then it follows that everyone is blameless for everything.

The “everyone is blameless for everything” position is not one likely to be widely embraced, but it does raise challenges. How to get our intuitive notions about free will and moral responsibility to peaceably coexist with a materialist conception of the person—which, pace Brooks, is in fact the consensus coming out of modern cognitive science—is the real intellectual and cultural task that still needs to be accomplished.

In the economy of marriage (the exchange of women) under conditions of polygyny—which FLDS members so infamously practice and which was the catalyst for its schism from mainline Mormonism—there will inevitably remain a “surplus” of unmarried, unmarriageable men. The situation is intensified by the hoarding of wives at the elite level: some churchmembers report that Warren Jeffs had taken scores of them. And such demographic conditions will persist unless males leave or are pushed out of the local marital economy. (Or else, according to Freud’s vision in Totem and Taboo, the boys might violently displace the patriarchs and inaugurate a brave, new—wrenchingly ambivalent—order.) In any case, the structuralist interpretation of the necessity of ejecting a surfeit of males from a local marital economy is often cited as the argument that makes sense of the dynamics that produce the Lost Boys: they are the innocent victims of their fathers’ patriarchalist polygyny.

Yet this structuralist account seems inadequate. After all, in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss used the same logic to account for occasional homosexual pairings among the Nambikwara of Brazil as a “substitute solution,” an aberration necessitated by a scarcity of women created by the traditional perquisite of the office of chief: polygyny. It did not occur to him to think of monogamous homosexuality as anything but a “substitute” for heterosexual monogamy. But when we think of male homosexual pairings among the Nambikwara as a structural side-effect of the chiefly exception that proves the rule of the exchange of women, then we are likely to ignore its specific pleasures and desires and the forms of self-authorization it cultivates.

Because, epistemologically, we ought to see the individuals belonging to the aberrant “surplus” population of Nambikwara men intimately associating in the “normal” way (here, heterosexual monogamy for everyone but the chief), we cannot see—politically, say—that they may be citing the norm as an alibi by which to authorize themselves to form variant intimate associations. So the structuralist interpretation blinds itself to its own normative operations in two interrelated ways, in terms of knowledge and of power: it cannot recognize Nambikwara homosexuality as intelligible except as aberration, and it cannot see Nambikwara homosexual partners as empowered but rather only views them as radically constrained. When we call members of homosexual unions among the Nambikwara “victims” of chiefly polygyny, then we ignore the practices of authority that these supposedly “aberrant” forms of intimate association cultivate with and against chiefly sovereignty and Nambikwara gender regulation.

Similarly, it is unhelpful to see these boys as “victims” of structural effects of FLDS polygyny. To be clear: I am not suggesting that the Lost Boys engage in gay sex; Nambikwara-like homosexual pairings among the Lost Boys have gone unmentioned in news stories of them. (Fraternity is the trope invoked. “The kids I took in were like little brothers to me,” one Lost Boy was quoted as saying in a salon.com piece. “I loved them and I was doing everything I could to help them, but it was like trying to fill up the ocean with a teaspoon.”) Rather, I am analogizing the Lost Boys to Nambikwara same-sex partners because the ejection from FLDS communities of the former and the homosexuality of the latter have both been interpreted as “solutions” to “problems” in local marital economies. It is the unspoken politics of such interpretations that interest me.

To interpret the Lost Boys as “victims” of polygyny is misdirected for at least two reasons, and knowledge and power are wrapped up together in them both. First of all, many news reports coyly intimate, or at least they lend themselves to the suggestion that Warren Jeffs and his henchmen were seeking mere pretexts to eject teenage boys in order to stave off a surplus of men that would interrupt the smooth machinations of their polygynous designs. In such a story, even though the boys may have been caught red-handed with a DVD of a nearly soft-core Hollywood film, say, then the boys are still only “victims” of a bad, unsupportive culture. Such an interpretation eclipses the real contestations of power at work. There seems at work, namely, the implicit and later explicit partial rejection of Jeffs’s political-theological sovereignty by way of these boys’ performative struggles of self-authorization. Again, in and around the Lost Boys’ ejections, there is not only constraint; there are also trials of power and freedom, which we ignore when we acknowledge the boys as nothing other than victims.

Much more deeply troubling, though, is that heterosexual monogamy is the tacit norm that governs the very rhetoric of victimization. The Lost Boys are victimized by polygyny, which can only be understood as “wrong” in its divergence from those norms organized by heterosexual monogamy. Moreover, the very idea that the young men represent an aberrant “surplus” suggests another aspect of the norm at work: they are not productive within the local “fringe” marital system (and are only productive within dominant American society as negative examples to shore up the workings of the norm of monogamy); the Lost Boys are being wasted; their manhood is not being used. Having been ejected as surplus or waste by their own fringe community, then they must be made to fit in elsewhere. And here is how dominant liberal democratic American society can both express its moralizing intolerance (for polygynists) and its welcoming tolerance (for polygyny’s victims) in the same double gesture, while at the same time masking the power of its own regulatory norm of monogamy.

In short, it is incorrect to see the Lost Boys as victims of polygyny without also seeing them as victims of a dominant form of hegemonic heterosexual monogamy. For it is not the case that culture does its dirty work only in Colorado City, Arizona and other polygamous communities, but never in mainstream America. It is not the case that constraint and terror operate only there in a fringe community and that freedom reigns here in dominant American society. Marriage is not an illiberal and involuntary institution there and a liberal and voluntary one here. Just because the sovereignty of Warren Jeffs in his community is rendered visible by the terror of his rule does not mean that power is non-existent where it is less visible. Violence and terror are very much in evidence on “this” side of FDLS too: although racist lynching as an instrument for regulating intimacy across color lines is—barely—a thing of the past, violent bashings of lesbians, gays, and transgender persons are on the rise.

Hence, monogamy regulates the lives of the Lost Boys in another way. Not only does the norm of monogamy implicitly generate them as victims of polygyny, but also monogamy structures the very field of intelligibility of their lives together “outside” of FLDS. This is what I meant when I suggested earlier that their lives together—the intimate association that a butt hut represents—could be rendered invisible even to themselves. For, with regret, I cannot but conclude that so much about our dominant culture of intimacy in the United States—the norms that regulate intimacy and render only some versions of it intelligible—is stacked against the Lost Boys’ coming to see their relationships of love, support, and mutual dependence as anything but a way-station to “normal” lives in heterosexual monogamous marriage.

These boys especially—bearing the full brunt of all the moralizing discourse around polygamy’s abuses that circulates in American mass media—would be the most unlikely candidates for viewing their butt huts as (non-sexual) polyandry. Their form of intimate association is polyandrous—it is polyandrous now—but a hegemonic culture of monogamy renders it invisible as anything other than a temporary aberration. The butt hut as a mode of intimate association ends up looking like a structural aberration of both polygamy (of which it is a contingent expression of a necessary side-effect) and of monogamy (to which it is simply abnormal) rather than an enduring possibility.

And no amount of successful agitation for state sanctioned same-sex marriage could ever create the conditions for non-normative intimate associations, such as that found in butt huts, to thrive. For even an expanded institution of marriage only gives the force of law to altered norms—it therefore does not disrupt normativity but rather further entrenches it. When a norm is fortified with the force of law, operating through the late modern nation-state’s police and administrative powers, then citing the norm (marriage) as an alibi to authorize oneself to associate differently is difficult at best—especially when the regulative powers of governmentality work alongside the force of law as supports to the state. After all, historically, the modern nation-state has built itself up by colonizing and/or zoning out of existence and intelligibility other forms of association.

What could advance both state sovereignty and extrastatist governmentality more readily than inviting state institutions and law to define and to regulate more forms of association? The pluralization of associative forms earned Carl Schmitt’s censure in The Concept of the Political because “pluralism consists in denying the sovereignty of the political entity by stressing time and again that the individual lives in numerous different social entities and associations . . . [that] control him in differing degrees from case to case, and impose on him a cluster of obligations in such a way that no one of these associations can be said to be decisive and sovereign.” Hence, extending Schmitt, we can say that the late modern nation-state secures its political sovereignty by calling into existence a pluralism of associative forms and arrogating to itself a monopoly on enforceable decisions about which forms of association are licit and which illicit, how the licit ones are to be subordinated and disciplined, how the illicit ones are to be policed and punished, and so on. And, ironically, state institutions do not by themselves do this work of constituting the sovereignty of the political—the quasi-depoliticized normalization and regulation of intimacy and sociability saturate the social field “beyond” or “underneath” the state.

The desire for same-sex marriage, expressed as a yearning for official “recognition” for some lesbian and gay couples, willfully misrecognizes the operation of the powers of political sovereignty and governmentality. And since homophobia continues to pervade dominant American culture, legalized same-sex marriage might very well render butt huts and other homosocial intimate associations less available, not more. Because legalized same-sex marriage would participate in the sanctioning and codification of monogamy (merely making different combinations of the sexual identity of the partners possible so long as the partners number only two), it would contribute to rendering singles and queer non-monogamous intimate associations less visible and materially less available. Paradoxically, at the same time, legalized same-sex marriage, working in tandem with homophobic regulatory norms, would make some forms of same-sex intimate association too visible and therefore render them more coherent as objects of disavowal. (I can’t live with other guys like this—I don’t want to be associated with that.) In any case, legalized same-sex marriage, far from pluralizing the forms and diversifying the practices of intimate association, would narrow and diminish them.

Lost Boys in butt huts contend not only with the visible sovereignty of Warren Jeffs but the spectral sovereignty and governmentality operative in the United States, and I fear that, although they have reached a kind of impasse with the regime of FLDS, they are on the losing end of the battle against the hegemonic norms of intimate association in mainstream American society. I do not mean to glorify the lives of the young men keeping house together (after a fashion) in butt huts. By all accounts, the Lost Boys are subject to intense financial, emotional, legal, and other pressures. The circumstances which they endure seem in many respects unlivable, even as the intimacy they have cultivated is what allows them to survive. But we aid them not at all—indeed we do them and many others greater harm—by advancing and strengthening a normative conception of personhood that dismisses their now polyandrous bonds as nothing more than a mere rest stop on the road to a normal future.

Texas authorities say they were worried about the “culture” at the ranch. The Supreme Court of Texas, in its May 29 decision ordering the return of the children, said that the state was concerned that the ranch had “a culture of polygamy and of directing girls younger than eighteen to enter spiritual unions with older men and have children.” What is a “culture of polygamy”? Is it separate from or the same as the rest of the culture of the Yearning for Zion ranch? How are they related to what Texas authorities called “mainstream culture”? During the time that the Yearning for Zion children were in the care of the state, first held as a group with some of their mothers in a sports arena in San Angelo, Texas, and subsequently in individual foster homes, while the Texas authorities condemned the ranch for its “culture,” it also was at pains to demonstrate that it was respecting the children’s religious freedom and accommodating what they termed their “unique” cultural needs. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services quickly produced a “Cultural Awareness Guide for Children from Eldorado” and a “Model for Care for Children from the Yearning for Zion Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints Sect,” which they posted on their website. The color red was eliminated from state facilities where the children were staying out of respect for the community’s aversion to the use of the color before the coming of Christ, who will be robed in red. Providers were reminded of the FLDS’s rules: no alcohol or tobacco; no T.V.; only organic food; modest clothing. In their periodic online news briefs, the Department assured the public that the children “would be allowed to worship freely,” that the Department “respect[s] and value[s] their strong sense of faith,” and that the children would not be “exposed to mainstream culture too quickly.” These children apparently needed both to be rescued from their culture and “affirmed” in their culture.

Culture, it appears, is both part of the problem and part of the solution. In any event, the word is indispensable. The word is used throughout the Texas filings and reports. Why culture? Tomoko Masuzawa has reminded us in her masterful essay in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, that the term “culture” has had many meanings since it first appeared in its modern sense in the eighteenth century. It is “dangerously capacious, semantically vague and confused, and finally taken as a whole, inconsistent.” And yet it is also, she acknowledges, “remarkably serviceable,” even foundational to our sense of reality, and “thoroughly naturalized in our everyday discourse.” Culture has, over this time, also strangely and ambiguously been linked to “religion,” as Masuzawa discusses. Sometimes religion is the same as culture; sometimes it is a part of culture; sometimes it precedes culture; sometimes it comprehends culture. The word has arguably only become more unglued in the ten years since Masuzawa wrote her essay. Thoroughly discredited by anthropologists, it is now everywhere. Culture both makes us whole and keeps us in bondage. And it also continues to be ambiguously related to religion. Together, perhaps, they appear to keep naturalistic explanations at bay and preserve a space for values, while enabling social engineering. The language in court filings in the Texas case moves uneasily among different accounts of what is wrong: a “pervasive system of belief”? A culture? Forced underage sex masquerading as “spiritual” marriage? Social pathology or bad religion?

For legal purposes, characterizing a practice as cultural, rather than religious, is arguably a useful way to limit legal restrictions on the regulation of religion; religion then can be reserved for what is good while culture can be good or bad and regulated accordingly. (Thus, the insistence, for example, that female circumcision is cultural rather than religious.) In U.S. law, it is the distinction between opinion and act that has permitted the regulation of unpopular religious practices. In 1879, in Reynolds v. U.S., the Supreme Court announced that constitutional protection for religious freedom was limited to opinions, while acts were punishable by law. Confirming the conviction of Mr. Reynolds on a charge of bigamy, the Court announced that “polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people . . . Polygamy leads to the patriarchal principle, and which, when applied to large communities, fetters the people in stationary despotism.” The 1879 Court refused to condemn as prejudicial the trial judge’s charge to the jury that “you should consider what are to be the consequences to the innocent victims of this delusion. As this contest goes on, they multiply, and there are pure-minded women and there are innocent children—innocent in a sense even beyond the degree of the innocence of childhood itself. These are to be the sufferers; and as jurors fail to do their duty, and as these cases come up in the Territory of Utah, just so do these victims multiply and spread themselves over the land.” The Utah court then, like the State of Texas today, was worried about the “culture of polygamy”—an insidious and infectious disease-like phenomenon that loomed over children like a monster from a horror movie.

The opinion/act distinction that enabled the legal reinvention of Mormon religion in the late-nineteenth century faltered briefly in the twentieth century. In 1972, the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right of Amish parents to withdraw their children from high school, in violation of state compulsory schooling laws, and to teach them instead the pre-modern skills of housekeeping and farming. Supported by the expert testimony of John Hostettler, a leading scholar and activist on behalf of the Old Order Amish community, the court lovingly recounted Amish history: “The history of the Amish sect [begins] with the Swiss Anabaptists of the 16th century who rejected institutionalized churches and sought to return to the early, simple, Christian life de-emphasizing material success, rejecting the competitive spirit, and seeking to insulate themselves from the modern world.” Full of admiration for the simple life and strongly affirming the rights of parents with respect to “religious training,” the majority opinion in the Yoder case makes clear that what is characteristic of really religious people is that their religion and their culture are coextensive: “Broadly speaking, the Old Order Amish religion pervades and determines the entire mode of life of its adherents.” The “culture” of Jefferson’s yeoman was ironically protected in the Yoder decision as religion. In Yoder, the comprehensiveness of culture seemed beneficial to children.

But Yoder has had no successors. While we continue to permit home schooling, we have drawn back from whole-hearted approval of the promise of insular communities to save us from ourselves. Not all religious people are the Amish. Indeed perhaps even the Amish are not the Amish, in the Yoder sense. Religion as coterminous with culture has proved a dangerous legal idea. In 1990, in an opinion denying constitutional protection to the use of peyote by the Native American Church (Employment Division v. Smith), the Court returned to and reaffirmed the opinion/act distinction made in Reynolds. Culture is now divisible again, legally speaking, and religion is thereby subject to extreme makeover by the government just as Mormon life was in the nineteenth century. Now we can protect FLDS culture insofar as it is like our imagined Amish community—foster families interviewed on the radio after the children were returned spoke admiringly of the girls’ maturity, of their cooking and sewing skills and deep religious faith—and condemn it insofar it is “odious”—FLDS women were mocked on YouTube for their “creepiness.” And still, we can insist—as Texas authorities have insisted to the media—that there is no threat to religion. We are not changing religion. Just culture.