Deft as this is, there remains a certain ambiguity surrounding any such search for aspects of supposedly universal phenomena. His case studies have a sky-world and gods, and so do meet normal criteria for a religion, bearing within them an engagement with an Eliadean encompassing “non-ordinary reality.” But I have investigated another preconquest situation that appears not to. It is from one of the places Bellah does not write about, southern Africa. For South Africa in early times, I did not need religion in reconstructing how agropastoralists lived and how they apparently saw themselves living.

To rephrase: in the cases Bellah examines, the Carib- and Navajo-speakers and desert aboriginal Australians, it is the gods or spirits and an “other world” that allow us to easily attribute religion to them. But what to do in other cases? Bellah correctly refuses to call “religious” the basic (totemic) phenomena Émile Durkheim examined in Australia and repudiates the notion of a universal, primordial monotheism. Yet he is not so interested in the question of when religion is, or is not, and he recognizes religion in his argument, in fact, by many different criteria.

In southern Africa, ancestors were chiefs and other fathers in the past, whose presence had registered in men’s collective actions and fates. The personal movements of ancestors occurred in “greatness,” bogologolo, a space equally similar to Western “history” as it is comparable to the Dreaming of the Walbiri that Bellah discusses. It is problematic to see religion in it. For one thing, at first, in missionaries’ accounts, the notion of having an old religion was absent in South Africa. Only after basic translations were accomplished and rehearsed in rituals (in church), did the old religion appear as a concept. It therefore began its life as a disjointed series of improbable beliefs, customs, and rites, immediately preceding Christianity or Islam, their corrected versions.

To make this point in tangible form, consider the distance between two phrases, both originating in the same Sechuana words. The first is a phrase people heard from early missionaries, some version of the following: “The chief’s (or the ancestor’s) people will be gathered and their production made fertile and they will have a lovely settlement.” These words meant just that, and might be said in various circumstances, most straightforward, some metaphorical. After the old deployment of patriarchal terms connected to power and to ancestral chiefs uniting men was ended, however, leaving behind the Christians’ use of the same vocabulary, the above phrase became, “God’s people will be saved and dwell in a millennial kingdom on earth (or go to paradise after death).” The same phrase in a different context, so a different meaning: that shift defined the creation of religion in South Africa.

Missionaries had only local concepts and locutions in which to express themselves, and they had difficulties because they did not know the language right away, and because they had not yet enlisted Africans in group behaviors and rituals that would create their world. The vocabulary they wanted to use was already heavily trafficked, and had to do with past chiefs, fatherhood, ancestry, and larger forms of subordination with immediate import; it motivated men and women to endure hardship or go to war. Ancestors and chiefs of the past and in the present formed a latticework of possible affiliations, some of which were activated, and some of which were allowed to die over time. A communal ethos, a common body of oral lore, offered people (married men especially) a set of strategic choices, and in turn conditioned public memory. The life of this ethos blocked Christianity’s way.

Missionaries well grasped the necessity of constructing the sacred realm with existing terms, choosing underused words that might more easily take new meanings. Missionary Robert Moffat protested that he was frustrated because African people had no spiritual realm and were instead utter pragmatists, trusting only of what they could see with their own eyes. There were real forces binding people to the communities they lived in, under which they used the word ancestor (modimo); but no one, single [M]odimo (“God” in the missionaries’ lexicons) governed the world. Yet this was what Modimo was said to be! Thus its introduction as a concept used by Christians required their nullification of its meaning in ordinary interactions. From then on, ancestor and God diverged, two branches from a single concept and word.

The history of this working-out of religion and not-religion, insofar as we know it, unfolded from the later half of the nineteenth century, not before. It was only then that ordinary black peasants in the middle of South Africa midwived the religious domain among themselves, and the process was (in-line with Paul Feyerabend’s argument in Against Method) not instantaneous. After about 1840 one could adopt a new faith and meaningfully protest that one’s loyalty to a chief would continue; after 1880 one could preach as an Anglican and be a Sotho even during wartime (never before); after 1915, one could for the first time be a Christian and Zulu at the same time.

Talal Asad has shown how problematic colonialism makes the whole project of describing what people “believe,” as has Greg Dening. Among archaeologists, the category of cultic or religious (as is well known) is conveniently large, good for grouping together objects whose functions are mysterious. On slender evidence (it seems to me) whole lost societies are imagined to have operated as religious centers. It has often been much the same in ethnographies of African and Polynesian societies (on which archaeologists draw), wherein opaque chains of reference or ritual are grouped together as religion. My view is they may be better positioned within the realms of ideology, politics, and art. The danger in factoring in “religion” to political explanations of preconquest societies is that scholars sometimes imagine that their own lack of knowledge was a native opacity, and so a source of indigenous occult power. The sign of their ignorance slips somehow into the evidence pile.

First, as the entries by Noah Salomon, Mathijs Pelkmans, and Robert Hefner, among others, show, it is useful to step back from the US, and even from Western Europe, to consider alternative ways of organizing diversity. In northwest Madagascar, where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork sporadically over a couple of decades, there has been religious freedom in the sense that the boundaries between practicing Christians and Muslims are fairly open and, even more, insofar as it has been perfectly acceptable to be neither Christian nor Muslim, without thereby being designated as immoral or ‘primitive’ or subjected to undue missionary activity. As I’ve written elsewhere, some families might gently direct one of their children toward Islam, another toward Christianity, and a third to ‘ancestral practices,’ which are simply referred to as “non-congregating” (tsy mivavaka) rather than by any substantive definition. Some people engage in combinations of each. Although I would not advocate a causal explanation, the pattern fits nicely with the logic of bilateral kinship and wide exogamy. Most people can recognize at least four grandparents and probably eight great-grandparents (and beyond), each of whom may have a distinctive identity with respect to social, political, religious, and geographical affiliation. From among these senior living or deceased relatives people make choices of stronger or weaker identification, influenced by such factors as which grandparent one is sent to stay with on vacations as a child and ending with in whose tomb and which mode of burial one finds oneself.

This enables an open society with a good deal of mutual understanding and respect, in which no single identification or institution behind it is absolutized. In some respects one could say the individual has a good deal of freedom of choice. However many Malagasy do not experience things in quite this way. In explaining why they live in one place rather than another or carry out a particular set of ‘religious’ or ‘ancestral’ practices they would say they had been called to it by a particular ancestor, who by showing them signs, notably manifest as illness or troubling dreams, subjects them to prohibitions which align them more firmly with that ancestor rather than others. Servants at the ancestral shrines were forced some generations ago to work there. Today those who remain as their successors cite the wrath of their own ancestors as the reasons for staying on.

In all this there is also a logic of the negative. People are defined and define themselves in the first instance by what they don’t practice, by the kinds of praying they don’t do, the foods they cannot eat, the days they cannot work, or the kinds of work or acts of deference they cannot perform, rather than by positive attributions. This is a kind of freedom by restriction; in clarifying the boundaries of what you cannot do, it leaves wide open what you can do.

My second general comment is that however we want to define religion (and perhaps we could take a leaf from northern Madagascar and leave it open, specifying only what it is not), one of the general features, as the Malagasy ethnography also suggests, is a kind of submission to something conceived as larger, higher, or more powerful than oneself. Durkheim called it society; Maurice Bloch calls it deference to authority or to other persons; Roy Rappaport describes it as one of the entailments of engaging in ritual performance. In participating in a ritual, whatever one’s state of mind or ‘belief’ at the time, and irrespective of the semiotic ideology that Webb Keane rightly and compellingly points to, one is accepting the outcome (assuming that the felicity conditions of the performative event are met) and moreover accepting the meta-performativity, i.e. that acts and utterances of this kind, felicitously produced, have the consequences that they do. To perform a ritual is, in the end, to accept a certain liturgical order of which it is part (irrespective of whether this also entails deference to specific officials, like priests). In other words, the freedom to carry out certain kinds of acts is premised on subjection to an order that defines what such acts are, that puts things under a definition and regulates the changes in definition. As I elaborate elsewhere, the process is one of the instauration of ethical criteria and it is intrinsic to human speech acts. Insofar as what we refer to as specifically ‘religious’ includes the most formal and consequential kinds of performative acts (baptized or not, etc.) one might say that what religion is not is freedom.

Hence the very idea of freedom of religion is paradoxical; it is the freedom to be unfree in a particular kind of way. Judicial and legislative bodies need to take this point, call it the relativity of freedom or unfreedom, or the deconstruction of freedom, into account. They need to notice Sullivan when she points to “the reinstatement of the rights of religious authority by political authority—in the name of religious freedom.” They then need to make informed decisions about which versions of unfreedom to support—and we should all, as Saba Mahmood emphasizes, pay attention to the politics and ideologies that underpin such decisions (a skepticism I share with Lori Beaman, concerning federal government initiatives at the present time in, of all places, Canada). If Muslims were the ones taking the lead in the US courts asking for certain rights and freedoms, surely the self-same justices would have argued another way.

This is certainly not to say let everyone be free to do as they please. Not only is such freedom impossible in the human condition, but there is the matter of whether my freedom impinges on yours. To emphasize a point in Mahmood’s account and mentioned in some of the other posts, the freedom of religion we demand elsewhere (though the point applies internally as well) too often means the freedom to missionize other people. The freedom to practice my religion impinges on the freedom to practice yours in peace.

We need to be careful here. I am not a historian but I imagine that religious freedom once meant freedom from oppression by the proponents of a stronger religion rather than freedom from interference by the state or the right given by the state for specific religions to interfere in other peoples’ business. Certain proponents of religious freedom in the US now seem to want to have it both ways: the state is criticized both for being secular and for promoting a ‘religion’ of its own. What is missing in such arguments is attention not to one’s own rights or freedoms but the obligation to enable the rights and freedoms of others.

One of the key words in the religious freedom lexicon in the United States has been “establishment,” generated by the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”; Establishment has become the base criterion by which the possibility of religious freedom has been measured. Discussing the relationship between these two concepts has become something of an intellectual cottage industry, which has been transformed into a national export. Nations that do not espouse the sort of constitutional disestablishment embraced in the US example are often suspect, as is their ability to support any sort of meaningful religious freedom. But disestablishment as a conceptual touchstone and ultimate goal does not translate especially well into other contexts, nor, perhaps, even in the American context. A number of scholars, especially Sullivan, have seriously dented the establishment armor, pointing out that religious establishment has immobilized social institutions like law, preventing them from engaging in creative thinking about religious freedom. Nonetheless, the myth of disestablishment continues to hold sway as the place from which to begin discussions about religious freedom. Further, there is some evidence to suggest that religious establishment, defined in US terms, has created space in some jurisdictions for religious minorities in public discourse. And, equally important, it has created space for the non-believers, atheists, agnostics, humanists, and the indifferent. The UK provides perhaps the best example of this, although the situation there is informed by historical and global confluences and tensions over who has a voice that are too complex to review here.

My argument is not simply for a critical assessment of whether or not establishment exists, but for a shift in analytical focus from the constitutional discourse on establishment and its attendant discussion of church-state relations to one that begins with different assumptions and questions. If the state is always assumed to have a relationship with religion in one form or another it might then be possible to move out of the binary of establishment-disestablishment, which would in turn shift the focus to mapping the contours of the myriad and dynamic ways in which that relationship works. It might then also be possible to step away from the freedom-disestablishment association that stifles critical and creative analysis. This in turn could prompt a more sophisticated treatment of power that would embrace a relational understanding of power relations rather than a narrowly hierarchical one. Although it might be objected that an assumption of a relationship goes too far, evidence from a number of liberal Western democracies suggests that this sort of acknowledgement is realistic and accurate.

An example of the type of analytical shift in direction being suggested is illustrated by the work of James Beckford in “The Return of Public Religion? A Critical Assessment of a Popular Claim.” In this article Beckford reviews the relationship between the British state and organized religion. He reflects on the often heard yet contradictory statements that religion is enjoying a resurgence in the public sphere and that religion is systematically excluded from public life. Beckford addresses this contradiction by pointing out that the state, political society, and civil society have never been neatly divided in Britain. He then outlines the British government’s strategy for engaging with religion as a strategy for both blurring the line between state and civil society, and for managing religious and ethnic diversity. He doesn’t use the word “establishment” or “religious freedom” once in his article, and only a couple of times specifically mentions “church-state” relations. Yet the analysis is rich in insight in terms of the ways in which religion, spirituality, state, public, and private are layered through each other. Beckford also highlights the relational rather than hierarchical nature of these engagements.

It might be useful to complicate the discussion about religious freedom, then, by embracing two assumptions: first, that religious freedom means different things in different contexts, and thus an interesting analytical launching place might be engaging in an exploration of how (or whether) religious freedom is being used and by whom, rather than whether a state has an established religion; and second, that all states have a relationship with religion(s) and that it is not, in fact, always possible to make clear distinctions between the state and civil society in the first place. What emerges as being important, then, is the exploration of the nature of that relationship, the framing of interests, and the ways in which interests collude or clash. Does this mean that an analysis of (dis)establishment is never relevant or should be completely displaced from discussions of religious freedom? Not necessarily, but decentering establishment can yield some fruitful results. To illustrate, I’ll draw on a Canadian example.

Is there a religious establishment in Canada? Yes and no. The constitution does not explicitly address establishment, but instead guarantees religious freedom in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the preamble to the Charter states: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law,” and in Section 29 recognition is given to the historic compromise that supports state funding for Protestant schools in Québec and Roman Catholic schools in Ontario. Public discussions of religion sometimes casually mention that “we have separation of church and state” in Canada, even though this is not constitutionally true, and, in fact, evidence from the constitution itself as already noted would support the opposite conclusion. David Martin has argued that there is a shadow establishment, and others have suggested similar conclusions. I have argued that there exists a Christian hegemony, which is embedded in social institutions and which shapes not only the ways that religion is imagined, but also the construction of nation, values, citizenship, conceptual drivers like multiculturalism, and Othering discourse.

As Beckford argues is the case in Britain, in Canada too the divisions have never been clear between state and civil society. The services of religious organizations were called upon by the state, for example, to deliver schooling to aboriginal children. This was a collaboration that met the needs of both religion and state, the former to save the souls or missionize those they viewed as being uncivilized and in need of being saved, the latter to civilize and nation-build. Does disestablishment make sense in the Canadian context? Not really. The ongoing relationship between the state and religion, and their close intertwining to the point of being indistinguishable mean that religion is so embedded in the social structure and institutions of this nation that it is impossible to untangle them from each other. Therefore, any claim to disestablishment ignores the historically embedded power relations that shape contemporary developments. One of those developments has been the decision by the Canadian government to establish an office of religious freedom.

In its election platform released in April 2011 the Conservative Party announced that it would pursue the establishment of an office of religious freedom. In the June 2011 Throne Speech the (by then) conservative majority government announced that it was indeed establishing such an office. On October 3, 2011, the government held its first consultation meeting about the office. Subsequently the government came under criticism, primarily for its limited, conservative-Christian-heavy consultation process and for the suspicion that the office would be primarily aimed at securing and protecting Christian missionizing. Several things are of interest for the purposes of this discussion: first, one of the 6 people consulted was Thomas Farr, who was the first director of the US International Office of Religious Freedom; second, through ministers’ speeches the government has consistently linked democracy and religious freedom, stating that “The long history of humanity has proven that religious freedom and democratic freedom are inseparable.” Finally, both establishment and disestablishment regimes (Canada being the former, the US the latter) have been able to support the idea of an office of religious freedom. In the Canadian context the accusation that the inclusion of an office of religious freedom violated the principle of separation of church and state was countered with the fact that Canada does not, in fact, have a separation of church and state and that this idea is imported from the US. In the US, with its official disestablishment, the office of religious freedom has been justified as an expression of the commitment to this ideal. It is clear that establishment, quasi-establishment, or disestablishment are of little relevance in this. The more telling discussion relates to how religious freedom is being defined, by whom, and for what purposes. Preliminary descriptions of the Canadian office, for example, state that the office will “monitor religious freedom around the world, to promote religious freedom as a key objective of Canadian foreign policy, and to advance policies and programs that support religious freedom.” But it remains unclear what exactly this means: Will the office of religious freedom concern itself with Latter-day Saints who proselytize globally? Will it worry about Jehovah’s Witnesses forced into military service in South Korea? Will the office of religious freedom worry about Muslims in Switzerland who cannot build minarets, or Muslim women in France who cannot wear the niqab? Or will it concern itself with matters closer to home, like niqab-wearing women in Canada who must strip off their face coverings to take the oath of citizenship? Whose religious freedom will be defended and where?

Finally, while a critical analysis of the various ways in which religious freedom is deployed is important, equally crucial is suspicion about the ways in which religion is constructed by majorities as “culture,” thus displacing discussions about religion and religious freedom altogether. The 2011 Lautsi and Others v. Italy decision in the European Court of Human Rights, developments in the Canadian province of Québec, and case law in both the US and Canada serve to make the point. In Lautsi, a crucifix and Roman Catholicism were transformed in arguments by the Italian state from religious symbol and religion to cultural symbol and universal values. Thus, the crucifix in an Italian classroom wall was not ‘religious’ but ‘cultural’ and part of Italian heritage. A similar sleight of hand occurs in the Canadian province of Québec when the Bouchard Taylor Commission Report recommended that the crucifix be removed from the Salon Blue, which is the provincial legislature. The day the report was issued the National Assembly voted unanimously to keep the crucifix, stating that it was an important symbol of Québec’s heritage; Québec historically has had a Roman Catholic hegemony. Early post-Charter Sunday closing cases in Canada engaged in similar transformative exercises, most notably in R v. Edwards Books and Art Ltd., when the Supreme Court of Canada declared that Sunday as a day of rest had nothing to do with Christianity. A similar transformation of religion to culture occurs in the United States, perhaps most famously in the Lynch v. Donnelly case.

By constructing the practices of religious majorities as culture rather than as religion they become a benign presence in the face of the (dangerous, offensive, alien) religious practices of the Other or of the (also dangerous) godless atheist. By pushing past establishment frameworks and exploring the ways that particular religious traditions/practices/beliefs are woven though social institutions and practices, a richer exploration of religious diversity and religious freedom becomes possible.

I wonder, however, about two things. One is about form and one is about content.

1. The question about form: Is this a genealogy?
2. The question about content: What are the avenues of spirituality that the project maps?

With respect to the question about form, I wonder just what kind of genealogy the project traces, and if genealogy is the right word for the project at hand. The collection reads more like a buckshot of spirituality. Or a scatter graph of spirituality. It is—and maybe this is appropriate—too broad, too idiosyncratic, too peculiar, too diffuse to tell us anything at all about spirituality, except that those are the terms on which it makes itself clear to us. I could have written my essay about any number of things (to limit it to just record albums, I could have written about Radiohead’s Kid A or Coltrane’s Live in Europe 1964 or the seminal praise and worship recording: 1971’s The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert). If spirituality is really as vast, encompassing, and peculiarly populated as all that, then I’m not sure a genealogy is useful. Or even possible. It might be interesting, as the contributions here certainly are, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about spirituality as a singular phenomenon or as an aspiration or as a very real element of people’s lives.

Certainly, the general leaning of the project is toward the spiritual-secular, anyhow. But, if you’re really going to trace the genealogy of this thing, we might want to include more avowedly “religious” voices here too. Not because they have a monopoly on the stuff, but because those of us who are secularists might yet be able to learn a thing or two from our counterparts who occupy other pews. One might conclude that religion and spirituality ought to be joined at the hip or that they represent separate phenomena or maybe that they were separated at birth, but however you genealogize, they are certainly related. It’s one thing to hear spiritual overtones in books or people, historical events or concepts of our choosing, but it might be something else entirely when one attempts to square the spiritual with the theological.

To be sure, squaring the religious with the theological won’t answer the genealogical question, and I don’t mean to suggest that we might find a genealogical answer to spirituality’s questions by looking to religion. Instead, I hope that my invitation might open the investigation even further—beyond the boundaries of social secular culture and curios. If we’re going to lead this conversation with such loose reins, the discussion might benefit from looking or listening to voices from religion—where spirituality seems so genealogically related, but so difficult to find.

With respect to question number 2, I keep coming back to something I read in a New Yorker article a few years back. It was a profile of David Simon, co-creator of HBO’s The Wire and now, Treme. Simon’s brother, explaining their Jewish upbringing in Baltimore, observed that they felt traditional, but not religious. This spoke to me, growing up in an observant-ish Jewish household where we were steeped in ritual, but certainly not in spirituality. If God were to have shown up on some occasion or another, my mom would have set God a place at the table and asked if He or She had any food allergies.

Traditional but not religious. Simon was talking about avoiding pork or performing ritual, but without the trappings or limitations of religion. It’s a powerful inversion of the preference for things “spiritual but not religious” that has become a refrain of postwar American religious preferences. The taste for the spiritual over the properly religious (whatever that is) has become a nearly orthodox, practically fundamentalist statement of faith for both Baby Boomers and those who study them.

Somehow, opting for spirituality over religion seems to create opportunities that religion closes off. Spirituality seems to suggest syncretisms and recombinations and possibility, while religion appears to offer little more than dogma, discipline, and the routine denials of the syncretisms that we all kind of already know are there.

And so, we have spirituality manifest in everything from pubic hair to Mark Twain’s Palestine with a freedom and writerly panache absent from the literature of most houses of worship. This, I think is a good thing, but moving so fully toward the spiritual and leaving the religious behind seems to accept too readily the overtones of the “spiritual but not religious” chorus. What about David Simon’s formulation of being traditional but not religious? What about being religious and not spiritual? Surely there’s something beneficial, helpful, even redemptive in those recombinations—even if we don’t call them “spiritual.” But the decision to avoid connecting one’s affinity for certain behaviors to something called “religion” seems questionable. As my friend and teacher Steven M. Cohen once said, “God is too important to leave to the religious.”

Surely there are other ways into and through the currents of transcendence, depth, and meaning-making that don’t approach religion and spirituality as an oppositional pair, or that don’t privilege spirituality as religion’s younger, hipper, cooler sibling. According to the implicit logic of Baby-Boomer religious tastes (as articulated by those who don’t define themselves as religious, of course), and by the framing of Frequencies, we might want to sleep with spirituality, but we want to avoid waking up with religion.

My two questions—about the genealogical nature of this enterprise and about the other avenues that spirituality might take—led me back, almost inevitably, to a single concern: the separation of religion from spirituality. The multiplicity of voices and phenomena captured in the essays, the multiple frequencies and resonances of the broader project, the dualities of form and structure, have led me back to the singularity of my question. And what more could I expect from an investigation of spirituality than that?

Here’s a plausible solution to this paradox. We could say, roughly, that freedom of religion is in fact a sub-set of a broader class of freedoms. So instead of seeing religion itself as a special good, we say that religion is one of the ways in which individuals seek the good for themselves. Exercising one’s freedom of religion is one of the ways in which we exercise a more generic freedom—moral freedom. Let us call this an egalitarian solution to the paradox I started with. An egalitarian theory of religious freedom does not deny that religious belief is special and should be respected and protected. What it denies is that religious belief is uniquely special: it can and should be analogized with other beliefs and commitments. Many contemporary liberal philosophers are egalitarians in this sense. John Rawls argues that what the liberal state protects is our ability to form and pursue comprehensive conceptions of the good. Ronald Dworkin sees “ethical independence” as the core value protected by freedom of religion. Martha Nussbaum connects freedom of religion to a conscientious search for “ultimate meaning.”

It is in this context that Charles Taylor and Jocelyn MacLure’s little book Secularism and Freedom of Conscience is of considerable interest. In it, Taylor and MacLure put forward their own egalitarian theory of religious freedom, and a radically inclusive one at that: they argue that all “meaning-giving commitments” should be protected on the same basis as religious commitment. The volume is also fascinating when read as a statement of Taylor’s political theory—a normative companion to the more historical, epistemological, and philosophical diagnoses of our contemporary condition found in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age.

To put my cards on the table: I agree with Taylor and MacLure that normative egalitarianism is the right response, ethically speaking, to the deep moral pluralism of the secular age. What I shall suggest, however, is that they—like other egalitarian philosophers—have underestimated the profound tensions that beset egalitarian theories of religious freedom. And these tensions can be traced back to the difficulties of identifying a liberal theory of the good in the secular age—in a world where conceptions of the good are irreducibly pluralized, individualized, and subjectivized. In brief, the story I want to tell is also a very Taylorian story, for it is one that raises questions about liberal neutrality about the good.

Writing in the context of the Canadian debate about reasonable accommodations, Taylor and MacLure begin by defending the idea that members of religious minorities have a right, on non-discrimination grounds, to enjoy similar opportunities to practice their religion as members of the majority. I have no quarrel with this idea, and have argued along similar lines in relation to the affaire du foulard in France. But I’d like to focus on their second main point, namely that the question of reasonable accommodations raises a more fundamental problem: in virtue of what are religious believers entitled to special consideration in the first place? They answer that religious belief, for purposes of legal exemptions, should only be seen as a subset of a broader category of beliefs that deserve protection: “moral beliefs which structure moral identity”—what they call “meaning-giving beliefs and commitments.” And this also covers a broad spectrum of non-religious beliefs and practices—from secular pacifism to eco-centric vegetarianism, through duties of care to terminally-ill loved ones. The notion of meaning-giving commitments is broader than that used by other egalitarian philosophers: in contrast to Rawls, they do not insist that individual beliefs be ‘comprehensive’ in scope; and they reject Nussbaum’s emphasis on “ultimate existential questions.” It is a feature of the secular age, they point out, that people’s ethical commitments take the form of “fluid, eclectic set(s) of values,” which are not integrated into a comprehensive, integrated whole, and which are not perceived as ‘unconditional rules for action.” At certain times, however—such as the illness of a loved one—the pursuit of certain core values become paramount and gives meaning and shape to one’s life. In sum, we can say that Taylor and MacLure take the ethical pluralism of the secular age far more seriously than other egalitarian philosophers. Rawls and Nussbaum, it seems, still hold a traditionally religious understanding of the scope (comprehensive) and content (“ultimate questions”) of what counts as a morally weighty secular belief.

Drawing on Taylor’s rehabilitation of “ordinary life” in Sources of the Self, Taylor and MacLure detect pockets of moral depth in ordinary life—in the sudden encounter with finitude in the event of the death of a loved one; or in eco-centric vegetarians’ profound convictions about the wrongness of meat consumption—to take their two favourite examples. What makes those commitments particularly weighty is that they allow individuals to act with integrity—where integrity is defined as congruence between one’s perceptions of one’s duties and one’s actual actions. What the end-of-life carer and the eco-centric vegetarian have in common is that they both seek to act in accordance with their conscience. “Here I stand, I can do no other,” as Martin Luther is said to have said. Taylor and MacLure note that forcing someone to act against her deep conscientious convictions constitutes a “moral harm” equivalent to the kind of “physical harm” that justifies the special accommodation of citizens with disabilities. So, they conclude, citizens with intense categorical meaning-giving secular beliefs have a pro tanto claim to be considered for exemptions from burdensome laws.

So have Taylor and MacLure developed a plausibly egalitarian definition of morally weighty beliefs, which is not biased in favor of religious beliefs, yet adequately protects the underlying values expressed by the ideal of freedom of religion? My assessment is in two parts. In the first, I draw attention to one significant virtue of their account, which is that it implicitly relies on a very Taylorian idea of “strong evaluation,” In the second, I cast some doubts about the viability of the individualistic, Protestantized, subjectivist conception of strong evaluation that underpins their account.

First: Taylor and MacLure get to the heart of a key feature of freedom of religion—one that is strangely neglected by contemporary liberals. It is this: what Taylor said about negative freedoms in general—that they are empty without “strong evaluations” of what they allow the pursuit of—applies with particular acuity to freedom of religion. Freedom of religion, by contrast to more generic freedoms of thought, belief, and association, relies on a moralized distinction between valuable and non-valuable activities, and serves to protect a sub-set of the former. It is a freedom to pursue a specific end and activity: it refers to the pursuit of a conception of the good with a specific shape, content, and form, rather than the means through which any conception of the good can be pursued. Furthermore, in the case of exemptions and accommodations, which is our focus here, freedom of religion generates demands of positive assistance in pursuing those activities. This means that, when adjudicating such claims, it must be decided which claim correctly expresses the values underpinning the general principle. Even though they do not explicitly draw on Taylor’s earlier writings, Taylor and MacLure are open about the need to make “strong evaluations” about the values that freedom of religion is supposed to protect. This confirms the long-standing Taylorian view that rights protect substantive values: we care about rights because of the good that they protect, which cannot be reduced to individual freedom of choice. So our authors do not shy away from openly perfectionist evaluations, setting “trivial” against “central” commitments, and “mere preferences” against “core convictions.” Such perfectionist discriminations, it seems to me, are inherent to any serious reflection about the value of freedom of religion. Perhaps this is an obvious point, but it is one that contemporary liberals—punctiliously attached to an ideal of neutrality towards the good—have not fully come to terms with.

Who, then, is to make the strong evaluations required to distinguish between meaning-giving and trivial commitments? Taylor and MacLure’s empathic response to this is: the individual claimant herself. Here they anticipate the charge—often levelled at Taylor’s conception of positive liberty—that the idea of “strong evaluation” could give the state the authority arbitrarily to discriminate between better and worse ways to exercise one’s freedoms. Instead, Taylor and MacLure assert that “the special status of religious beliefs is derived from the role they play in people’s moral lives, rather than from an assessment of their intrinsic validity.” They defend what they call a subjective conception of freedom of religion, according to which only individuals—not the state, nor religious authorities—are in a position to explain which particular beliefs and commitments are key to their sense of moral integrity. Judges only have to assess whether such claims are made with sincerity (so as to rule out, when possible, fraudulent or pretextual claims). Yet ultimately, the subjective conception of freedom points to the sovereignty of private strong evaluations.

There is much to recommend in this account, to which I am very sympathetic. But I’d like to draw attention to two difficulties.

First, Taylor and MacLure effectively collapse religion into conscience, and implicitly assume that the latter category is more inclusive than the former. But we may wonder whether this is the case, or whether anything is lost in the re-description of freedom of religion as freedom of conscience. Assume I am a devout Muslim. I observe Ramadan, say my prayers every day, wear the hijab, give zakat, and send my children to Quranic school. Or assume I am a practicing Catholic. I observe Lent, try not to eat meat on Fridays, celebrate Easter, go to church every Sunday, have my children baptized and confirmed. For many Catholics and Muslims (but also other Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists) the religious experience is fundamentally about exhibiting the virtues of the good believer, living in community with others, and shaping one’s daily life in accordance with the rituals of the faith. Those rituals are meaning-giving and connected to believers’ sense of their moral integrity. Yet they are not duties of conscience—though they are often re-described as such. The good religious life is a life of constant, difficult, ritual affirmation of the faith against the corrupting influences of the secular world. It is not often one in which one single obligation (say, wearing a particular dress, going to mass) is so stringent as to promise eternal damnation if it is not fulfilled. Taylor and MacLure tend to re-interpret acts of habitual, collective, “embodied practices” of religious devotion as Protestantized duties of conscience. While such a description tallies with the individualization and subjectification of religious experience in contemporary societies, it also has two unanticipated consequences. First, it perversely encourages the most fundamentalist and rigid interpretations of religious dogma. It rewards those Christians who present their objection to homosexuality as a matter of conscience (“here I stand and I can do no other”) over and above those habitual believers who seek to accommodate their religious life to a secularizing world, often with considerable unease and forbearance. So here’s another paradox: in insisting that only beliefs that are intensely held, and experienced as categorical duties, should be candidates for “reasonable” accommodation, Taylor and MacLure accommodate those with the least “reasonable” beliefs.

The second unexpected consequence of the reduction of religion to conscience is that it seems to deny protection to the cultural, habitual, embodied, and collective dimensions of religion. Consider the following practices, which currently generate rights to exemption from general laws on religious freedom grounds in various countries: accommodations of religious dress in the workplace, the consumption of hallucinogenic drugs such as peyote in Native American ceremonies, church autonomy in the appointment of its leaders, tax exemptions for religious charities.

None of these activities are properly described as conscientious activities, and therefore it is unclear whether they would be entitled to accommodations under Taylor and MacLure’s theory. Furthermore, in a Canadian context, where cultural identities often feature as the archetypical meaning-giving, integrity-constituting commitments, Taylor and MacLure’s lack of reference to culture is perhaps surprising. They seem to underestimate the communal, cultural dimensions of religion itself and betray an (unexpected) Protestant bias in the interpretation of where the good of religion is located. Whether such a bias is compatible with the egalitarian impulse of the theory is open to question. Here is a heretical thought. Perhaps the ideal of conscience is not a thin, uncontroversial, neutral, liberal conception of the good. In line with the “social thesis” Taylor himself puts forward as a critique of Rawlsian liberalism, and of which a complex version appears in A Secular Age, perhaps our ideals of individualism and conscience are not what remains (but was always there) once the obscure, mystifying debris of traditional community and religion have crumbled away. Instead, we have become individuals—of a particular kind—through a contingent Christian and post-Christian trajectory. If that is the case, how suitable is this particular conception of individual conscience in the pluralistic secular age?

There is a second, connected difficulty with Taylor and MacLure’s subjective notion of freedom of religion. While they only consider examples of morally admirable commitments (pacifism, caring for the sick, protecting animal rights) it is not difficult to think of a range of conscientious actions that may be morally trivial, morally wrong, or morally bad. In those cases, should individual strong evaluations be supreme, or are different standards called for? One issue is how to distinguish trivial from morally significant beliefs. Taylor and MacLure assume there is a shared understanding of the difference between a morally trivial and a morally significant act. Yet, under conditions of deep moral pluralism, it is precisely those kinds of strong evaluations that are likely to be contested. Consider the standard defense of the smoking of peyote—an otherwise illegal drug—by US courts (post-Smith). While injecting drugs merely to “get high” would count as a trivial, frivolous purpose, injecting drugs for spiritual purposes, as practiced within some Native American groups, rightly fall under the category of a morally significant act deserving of protection. But what if individuals not belonging to a religion sincerely claim that they are also using drugs for spiritual purposes? Does “spiritual purpose” extend to dealing with depression, seeking higher truths through controlled intoxication, or coming to terms with existential pain? How far exactly is moral life in the immanent frame pregnant with spiritual purposes?

The other issue is whether freedom of conscience should permit individuals to do bad or unjust things. Taylor and MacLure avoid the difficult question of whether freedom of conscience positively protects a right to do wrong. One very preliminary hypothesis: In the philosophical tradition of thinking about conscience—whether Greek, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, or Kantian tradition, to name just a few—conscience is respectable and admirable, not only as a subjective individual faculty to live in conformity with one’s own good; it is, more deeply, respected as the faculty to live in conformity with what one sincerely perceives to be the demands of the good (which is why Antigone’s dilemma is so poignant). In the natural law tradition, conscience is the faculty with which individuals exercise practical judgement about how to apply a general objective moral law to concrete cases. Individuals are fallible, and consciences may err. But conscience is admirable because it is a sincere, though fallible, attempt to find the good. Conscience, therefore, cannot demand us to do evil, inhuman, or outrageous things, even though it can mislead us about the good. But if there is a deep (if complicated) connection between respect for conscience and a non-subjectivist assessment of its content, then individual strong evaluations will likely be an unreliable guide about what conscience really requires of them.

Where does this leave us? To conclude, I see Taylor and MacLure’s succinct but densely argued chapter as the most promising attempt to articulate the morally admirable human faculties traditionally protected by freedom of religion, in ways that respect the deep pluralism of the secular age. I have pointed to some problems, which are not so much fatal flaws as unavoidable tensions within the politico-legal philosophy of religious exemptions.

The suspicion is that liberal neutrality about religion ultimately “piggy-backs” on ideas, conceptions, and values that originally made sense in a world comprehensively structured by a broadly Christian ethics. In that world, where early liberal ideas of toleration and freedom of religion were articulated, Christian ethics provided the moral framework within which “strong evaluations”—between good and evil, significant and trivial, etc—were taken for granted. Then it could be coherently assumed that “religion” was a good thing; that any activity pursued under the aegis of religion was therefore also good, and that churches were alternative, self-standing sources of normativity to that of the state. Religion on that view operated as a normative “black box,” the content of which the state could try to ignore. It is when this box is thrown open by the egalitarian impulse of the secular age that the need for new “strong evaluations” re-appears. Yet those strong evaluations are inherently problematic in a world where there is no publicly validated religious or moral faith, and where the state is expected not to take sides between different ways of conceiving and living the good life.

Egalitarian liberals have struggled to define, in a way that is suitably non-sectarian and evaluatively neutral, the morally admirable faculties that traditional freedom of religion can be said to protect. Taylor and MacLure rightly seek to locate those human faculties in the moral predicaments thrown up by ordinary lives, and in the strong evaluations that individuals make in the process. Yet the emphasis on conscience tends to favor a Protestant understanding of what a religion is, as well as being parasitic on an implicit, unarticulated theory of the good. All of this only illustrates one of Taylor’s most profound contributions to political philosophy, pointing to the complex ambiguities that beset the liberal ideal of neutrality towards the good life. And I have sought to provide the sketch of a Taylorian critique of Taylor—a modest testimony of the astonishing fecundity of Taylor’s thought.

A version of this text was presented at “Charles Taylor at 80: An International Conference,” held in Montreal on March 31, 2012.—Ed.

And the possibilities, at least in those first days, were seemingly endless. Some stressed continuity with the past, riffing off the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM, the former southern rebel movement, then political party, and the current government of South Sudan) secretary general Pagan Amum’s comments at the independence ceremony when he lowered the old Sudanese flag for the last time—in preparation for the raising of the South Sudanese flag—telling the crowd that he would not be handing it over to Khartoum in a gesture of good riddance, but rather would hold on to it in the soon to be formed national archive, in memory of the shared history, the shared struggle, and indeed the shared future that northerners and southerners have and would continue to experience together. Others imagined a cleaner break. One bilingual sign held high at the independence ceremonies read, “From this day our identity is southern and African and not Arab and Islamic. We are not the worst of Arabs, but rather the best of Africans” (the sign was, I should note, in both Arabic, from which I translate, and choppy English, held up at an ceremony largely conducted in Arabic, still the de facto lingua franca of South Sudan despite official efforts to switch to English, and thus belying the difficulties inherent in making such a clean break overnight). The discursive historical reality of independence, of sharp bold-lines on the map, was matched in intensity by the sociological reality of entanglement (by choice and by force), of blurry lines. North and South could not be so easily disaggregated.

The tension between a model that stressed continuity with the past and one that proposed a break with what was certainly a painful history plagued Muslim South Sudanese perhaps most of all. Muslim South Sudanese, who make up a significant portion of the population, are individuals whose very identity challenges the distinct categories for which “clean break” models of partition strive. Islam came primarily from the North (from which the South was now separating), tying together families, trade routes, and pilgrimage networks, despite aggressive British colonial efforts to stop its spread. These links were not so easily sundered. While many non-Muslim South Sudanese had assumed that Islam was a political identity, somehow tied to the North, and imagined mass-apostasy coinciding with southern independence, South Sudanese Muslims insisted that to be southern and Muslim was not a contradiction in terms. Continuity with a past in which southern Muslims suffered discrimination in the North for being southerners and in the South for being Muslims at a time of rebellion against (at least in part) state-driven Islamization, did not seem like a good option. (I should note, though, that this latter discrimination was by no means universal: Muslims were part and parcel of the SPLM throughout the war.) Though the sentiment certainly was not universal, the vast majority of Muslims with whom I spoke in the summer of 2011 favored southern independence, a clean break from the North, and were actively debating how Muslim identity had changed under the new political arrangements they’d entered (South Sudanese Muslims had gone from being part of what demographers call a national majority, to being a “minority group” literally over night, and without traveling anywhere). The nature of “South Sudanese Islam” was being renegotiated, but most seemed to agree that the particular cultural stamp of the North would have to be transcended if the name of Islam was to wash out the stain of its bad reputation acquired during the war and flourish in the new state.

On the other hand, the notion of a clean break that sought to define South Sudan as explicitly non-Muslim (whether or not it was thereby “Christian” was a topic of debate, to which I will return below) and non-Arab made South Sudanese Muslims worry that the “New Sudan” imagined by John Garang, which was to embrace Sudanese of all religions and ethnicities, was quickly taking on an ethnically and religiously exclusive color. Muslim communities feared persecution in the new state after decades of civil war in which Islamization, if not Islam, was portrayed as a prime adversary to southern flourishing. The uneven (but active) banning of headscarfs in southern public schools after the signing of the 2005 peace agreement, which reverted control of the South to southerners, led to protests in at least one major Muslim center I visited (the city of Malakal) and the founding of a Muslim girls school there. The banning of religious political organizations forwarded by the new Advisor to the Presidency on Religious Affairs was taken by many Muslims to be directed at Islam, as Christian majority parties (under secular names) were certainly plentiful. Such incidents further raised suspicion that the equality and secularism that the new government was promising was a coded way of promoting “tyranny of the majority” and a state from which Muslim communities would be marginalized. The southern state’s resistance to a quota system (in which a certain amount of ministries or parliamentary seats would be given to Muslims qua Muslims), under the logic of blindness to religious identity, led to a short-lived but significant armed rebellion in Northern Bahr al-Ghazzal—active during the time I was in South Sudan, but now quelled—demanding 30 percent representation for Muslims in the new government.

The desire to “politically transform difference into sameness,” as Saba Mahmood has put it, has certainly been at the top of the state’s agenda in its quest to establish something called a South Sudanese citizen out of the dizzyingly diverse cultures, languages, and religions that make up the demographic landscape. What that “sameness” was to consist in, and what degree of diversity was still possible in spite of it, was a primary object of debate. My recent research—part of a multi-site project on religious minorities in Sudan and South Sudan following partition, conducted by Centre d’Ètudes et de Documentation Èconomique, Juridique et Sociale (CEDEJ) and the University of Khartoum—explores the mechanics of nation-building in South Sudan with particular attention to the fate of Muslim minorities following independence. Through field research in the national capital of Juba and the northern (South Sudanese) city of Malakal, I hope to understand what it means to be constituted as a religious minority under the regime of international religious freedom at the very moment in which this resignification—from “southerners” practicing Islam to a South Sudanese minority community of believers with a specific retinue of national rights and duties—takes place.

In a nation where neither tribes, nor regions, nor even individual families are traditionally divided on the basis of religion, how will South Sudan’s adoption of internationalist languages of religious freedom, and the concomitant constituting of Muslims as a distinct demographic, affect the existing social fabric in which it is easy to find households containing Muslims, Christians, and adherents of local traditions under the same roof? While there certainly have been Muslim communities across the South for some time, I was surprised to find that the vast majority of Muslim leaders did not emerge from those communities but were converts. Why have these “new Muslims” taken on such a prominent role in the organizational structures of the emergent Muslim minority? What makes them, rather than the entrenched Muslim communities, so much more suitable for the formation of a Muslim civil society that the state seems to both fear and demand?

Such individuals live in households that are extremely diverse (a father who follows the Prophet Ngundeng, a Christian Mother, and Muslim son is not at all uncommon) and one wonders how (or perhaps if) this status quo will be interrupted by the emergent notion of confessional community that is being forwarded by Muslim organizations and state demographers alike. I came to recognize early in my research that, though old established Muslim neighborhoods existed, the bulk of my work was being done not with Muslim communities, but rather with Muslim individuals and the associations they had joined. Most of these Muslims seemed to experience religion as a mode of being that did not necessitate the discarding of other modes of belonging (tribe, family, social class, etc.). Indeed, even the associational spaces themselves (Muslim councils and organizations, mosques, etc.) were not as restricted as one might assume. For example, at the Islamic Council for South Sudan office in Malakal, a good portion of the young men hanging out in the inner courtyard were in fact Christians and followers of traditional faiths: this space was by no means restricted as a Muslim gathering place. The modern state’s voracious appetite for categorization, and that of those who have been stamped by its logic, may have trouble coming to terms with the lack of neat lines demanded by international regimes of religious freedom in order to dole out their goods (protection from persecution, the development of networks with global “communities of faith,” etc.), neat lines drawn on a map wherein what constitutes religion and religious belonging are far more settled than they are on the ground.

One wonders what particular iteration “religious freedom” will take in South Sudan. The Transitional Constitution of South Sudan nowhere mentions “Freedom of Religion” but rather offers a very specific retinue of “religious rights” (Article 23). On the ground, the new government has not been shy about managing and taxonomizing religions, minority and majority—policing the line that divides religion and state, and even religious orthodoxy itself. Government offices registered “Faith Based Organizations” and often rejected applications of, for example, “Christian” organizations “if the constitution of a particular group is not lining up with the Biblical chapters or verses,” as one Inspector in the Bureau of Religious Affairs put it to me. This effort formed part of a program to protect the nation from what he called “cults,” although which groups would qualify as Christian and Muslim and which as “cults” was still in flux during the time I was there. One wonders if these inspectors’ interest in doctrinal purity might indeed be a coming to life of Beth Hurd’s notion that the prevailing “foreclosure on religion without belief” by international regimes of religious freedom “leave little room for dissenters and doubters on the margins of or just outside…‘faith communities’….[for] it endows hierarchical authorities with the power to represent and pronounce on what is or is not religious belief deserving of special protection or sanction.”

I do not wish to come to premature conclusions about what form “religious freedom” will take in South Sudan. I was there in the early days of the formation of this new state and the situation was still very much in flux. The intelligence and good will of the government servants I met—who had often left comfortable lives abroad to suffer much risk and hardship in service of building a new Sudan—suggests to me that a bright future is certainly not out of reach. The new state of South Sudan promised (and in its early days certainly has achieved) a very different approach to the relationship between religion and politics from that of the Sudan southerners had lived under until July 9, in which the central government in Khartoum had attempted to craft an “Islamic state.” However, the variety of secularism to be instantiated in the new state, particularly in a context in which voices calling for a Christian nation were still very loud, was still up in the air. As I walked the streets of Juba, listening to the new national anthem played over and over (“Oh God, we praise and glorify you, for your grace on South Sudan”), I wondered not only where Muslims would figure into the imaginings of this new nation, but where all the “African traditional religions” (or “ATRs,” as government officials called the variety of ancestor veneration, spirit, and divination practices extent in South Sudan) would figure into the national image. While there was an explicit attempt to give time to Muslim and Christian prayer in official fora, such as at the independence ceremony when a Christian benediction as well as verses from the Qur’an were recited, symbols of these traditional practices were not present at the podium. The official party line seems to be that ATRs should be represented within the state, constituted as distinct faith communities (“diin”s, as expressed in my Arabic-language interviews with government officials), minorities on the same footing as Islam and under the shadow of the dominant Christian faith. However, scholars of South Sudan (affirmed by a personal communication with Dr. Cherry Leonardi) point out that to think of such “traditional” practices as distinct confessions does not represent the reality of South Sudanese who may identify as Christians and at the same time see no contradiction in maintaining these rites and rituals. One wonders, then, what the state’s attempt to constitute such practices as discrete “religions” (and distinctly not part of what it means to be Christian) will have on those engaged in such practices, and whether it will make this kind of lived hybridity between Christianity and other modes of approaching the divine less sustainable, thus rendering Christianity and ATRs as much more polar forms of identity than they are currently. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether an official Council of Traditional Religions, constructed to represent ATRs, will indeed be forthcoming, as some officials promised me it would, for indeed others assured me that traditional religions had no place in South Sudan’s future, being relics of a past that Christianity had superseded.

The seal of the new Bureau of Religious Affairs (at right) expresses graphically what the national ideal may come to be: a large cross at the center, with a smaller hilaal (representing Islam) and a spear (representing “traditional religions”) at either side, indicating, it seems, a Christian-majority state in which other “religions,” safely construed and confined as minorities, would be protected. What exactly will have been freed through this arrangement, and what this freedom will entail for the newfound minorities and majorities, is yet to be determined.

I teach The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my introduction to religion class because it juxtaposes the racial exclusivity of the Nation of Islam—an exclusivity that the students judge as spiritually bankrupt—with the inclusivity Malcolm X claimed for Islam after his pilgrimage to Mecca—an inclusivity that is regularly hailed as the mark of genuine spirituality. Malcolm’s story is, in other words, a great way to start conversations about how we judge religion and how assumptions about spirituality affect those judgments. What did (and do) “real” Muslims think about the Nation of Islam, students often ask. There are many ways to answer that question. But none better than a story like this one. Listen to this, I say. The hat that Elijah Muhammad wore, with the symbols that defined the distinctively African-American spirituality cultivated by the Nation of Islam, was made by a doctor from Pakistan. Or by a seamstress in Lahore, as my friend pointed out last night.

Shakeela Hassan’s story is then also a story about Frequencies. Not (or not yet) a genealogy as much as a story about juxtapositions and materiality, or the juxtapositions that constitute the materiality of spirituality. It is in this form that spirituality gains contour and some specificity in 100 entries, each announced by titles that give little away, proclaiming the impossibility of containing the subject by opting for the elliptical, the obscure, the unusual, the surprising. The governing order is alphabetical; the encyclopedic logic turned inside out with series of entries that make no claim to totalizing knowledge.

Are you being ironic? A friend of mine, a musician and a funny man, is often asked because all his stories are true, and unbelievable. Are you being ironic? There’s no irony here, or there. No distance between what appears, and what is true. In Frequencies, spirituality is brought to the surface. It is all there to be seen. Described in the project statement as a digital compendium, Frequencies demonstrates the irrelevance of the weighty Latin etymology (com-pendere: to weigh together). By the same token, Frequencies rejects the linked metaphors of depth and transcendence that are conventionally understood to define spirituality. It instead presents spirituality as planar relations, a network of terms linked to one another by their coincident appearance on a screen and to other terms and images by whatever links the readers choose to follow and create.

As Jonathan Schorsch observes of the sexy angels in “The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh,” often enough “the visual metaphor of the spiritual subverts itself, leaving only carnal figures.” If this is true, Schorsch says, the joke is on high art. This could just as well mean that the joke is on religion. Teresa of Avila, designated a doctor of the Catholic Church, describes being pierced by an angel. But the marble statue by Bernini depicts an orgasmic woman. Émile Durkheim says that the totem is the sacred itself. This means the sacred is the fat of a kangaroo or the tail of an opossum. Religion doesn’t get the joke, though, because in religion the subversion often works the other way. Incarnations of Vishnu, like the discovery of a dead lama reincarnated in a ten-year-old-boy or the teaching that Christ was fully human and fully divine, are held up as fundamentals by religions that affirm that the profane subverts itself by revealing the sacred.

In Frequencies, however, spirituality is not rooted in a claim about the relationship between carnal and spiritual, or sacred and profane. Spirituality is not religion. As Kerry Mitchell says in his entry on “Paradox,” citing Niklas Luhmann, “In the realm of the observable (where else?), the difference between the observable and the non-observable must be made observable. [Religion] does not deal with the one or the other side of this distinction but with their form: with the distinction as such.” Religion is all about the distinctions that clarify relations.

By contrast, the spirituality we encounter in Frequencies leaves aside distinctions in favor of examples.

There is more than one kind of example. We could—as early modern Europeans loved to do—view examples as exemplary: understood in this way, the example is the fulfillment of what it represents. But it is now more common to understand example as exemplar: as one of many, demonstrative but not sufficient. The examples in Frequencies are of the latter sort. Avowedly idiosyncratic, these entries are presented as part of a proliferating series, requiring readers to do the all-important work of comparison to move beyond the singularity that might otherwise seem to be the only claim made on behalf of stories like Shakeela Hassan’s and the 99 others in Frequencies.

If each example is one of many, how do we understand the spirituality they are presented as examples of? Here I take my cue from Eve Sedgwick, the pioneering queer theorist whose last book, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance, explored an alternative to the critical practices her own earlier work had championed. Much of her own literary analysis (think here of her famous article “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”) was dedicated to exposing the hidden, the unseen, the unsuspected. Wearying of this endless cycle of exposure and wanting to find some way around the “topos of depth or hiddenness,” she focused instead on the “spatial positionality of beside.” This, I believe, is what the entries in Frequencies instantiate: the besideness of spirituality. Juxtapositions instead of depth, visibility instead of transcendence, and examples instead of distinctions. It is all on the surface, but it is not self-evident. Just as the seamstress in Lahore escaped my gaze—and my telling—so too spirituality itself as a concept might well escape the gaze of those caught in the rhythm of unexpected frequencies. The work is just beginning.

—Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, TIF guest editors

*   *   *

I have no doubt that freedom of religion or belief is attaining a prominence in international affairs unforeseen and unforeseeable even five, let alone ten years ago. The reasons are distressingly negative—based as it is on increasing levels of repression and violence against believers of many faiths.

—Malcolm Evans

The category of belief is not so easily transferred from one society to another, and…those who seek to do so are subject to the consequences of their deed.

—Donald Lopez, Jr.

Like a good movie, the story of international religious freedom offers something for everyone. It pits cowardly oppressors against heroic saviors. It is a story of the triumph of international law over those who fail to adhere to global norms and standards. It is a story of secular tolerance versus violent religion. And today especially, it is a story of the need for the U.S. government and its friends to “convince” others—particularly Muslims—that they should endorse a particular model of religious liberty as a template for organizing and democratizing their politics and societies. It is a story of human progress and emancipation, of transforming conditions of religious oppression to liberate individuals—particularly women—from their primitive, pre-modern, discriminatory ways. Working alone and in tandem, these narratives justify intervention to save, define, shape, and sanctify parts of people’s (religious and non-religious) individual and collective lives. The projects with which they are associated are diverse yet intertwined, at times supporting and at times vying with one another. It is a mixed bag.

One common feature of these accounts is the notion that belief is the defining feature of religion. Although occasionally paying respect to other aspects of religious life and belonging, belief as the core of religiosity is a powerful unifying trope to which religious freedom advocates return again and again. Rallying around religion as belief, and the assumption that there can be no religion without belief, plays a central role in international religious freedom campaigns. This post asks whether it would be possible to continue promoting religious freedom as a universalizable construct if this modern construct of belief were seen as a political discourse situated in history, rather than as the mark of the sacred. And if it isn’t possible, then what is religious freedom advocacy actually promoting?

In his contribution to the new Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Talal Asad questions the universality of the liberal democratic requirement that belief or conscience is what properly defines the individual and, for many liberals in particular, represents the essence of religiosity. His argument helps cast in a new light the position that belief is the defining moment of religion, underwriting protection of religious freedom as the right to believe by states as well as by various transnational actors and authorities.

Asad dates the requirement that belief be taken as the essence of religiosity to the religious psychology of seventeenth-century Europe. At that time belief came to be regarded as a privilege (a subject’s ability to choose her belief), a danger (belief’s likelihood of inciting violence), and something that cannot be coerced because it is located in the private space of the mind. Don Lopez has described this seventeenth-century notion as “an ideology of belief, that is, an assumption deriving from the history of Christianity that religion is above all an interior state of assent to certain truths.” This discourse of belief was accompanied by a particular understanding of the secular state. “Although the insistence that beliefs cannot be changed from outside appeared to be saying something empirical about ‘personal belief’ (its singular, autonomous and inaccessible-to-others location), it was really part of a political discourse about ‘privacy,’” Asad explains, “a claim to civil immunity with regard to religious faith that reinforced the idea of a secular state and a particular conception of religion.”

Asad draws attention to the shifting and lived (rather than theorized) orientations through which belief has been experienced historically. Words translated as ‘belief’ are always embedded in concrete and distinctive social relationships and sensibilities, he suggests, as illustrated by Dorothea Weltecke’s description of a young peasant woman named Aude Fauré, who was brought before the Inquisition:

She was unable, she said, to credere in Deum. What she meant by this, Weltecke points out, emerges from the detailed context: She took the existence of a God for granted. It was because, in her desperation, she couldn’t see in the Eucharist anything but bread, and because she found herself struggling with disturbing thoughts about incarnation, that she had no hope of God’s mercy. It is not clear that the doctrine of God’s body appearing in the form of bread is being challenged here; what is certainly being expressed is her anguished relationship to him as a consequence of her own incapacity to see anything but bread. In short, it is not that our present concept of belief (that something is true) was absent in pre-modern society but that the words translated as such were usually embedded in distinctive social and political relationships, articulated distinctive sensibilities; they were first of all lived and only secondarily theorized.

If international religious freedom advocacy projects claim as their object the need to secure freedom to believe, Asad’s argument points to some of the complications attending these efforts. Inasmuch as the protection and enforcement of religious freedom hinges upon, and even sanctifies, a religious psychology that relies on the notion of an autonomous subject who chooses beliefs, and then enacts them, such projects privilege particular kinds of religious subjectivity while disabling others. They contribute to the normalization of (religious) subjects for whom believing, in the sense historicized by Asad, is taken as the universal defining characteristic of what it means to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free, excluding other modes of living in the world, as bodies in communities to which they are obliged, without attention to individual “belief.”

Recent arguments by Malcolm Evans in favor of strengthening the framework of international legal protections for religious freedom illustrate the extent to which belief is taken as the essence of religiosity. Evans argues that legal protection for religious freedom should be seen no longer as “only an option, but it is fast becoming a necessity in order to prevent the further erosion of the position of religious believers in many countries.” The international community should start “developing a more precise understanding of what the freedom of religion as a human right actually entails, and … do so in a coherent and transparent fashion to which all interested parties can contribute” so that “we might then be better placed to develop the means by which it can be realised.” The idea is to settle on the norm, agree on a definition, and fix it in an international convention to move one step closer to ending violence. Such a convention would provide “a more detailed, comprehensive and rounded source of legal obligation concerning the freedom of religion or belief.” This reference to religion or belief explicitly includes non-religious belief as well. It is not only religionists but also non-religionists that are defined by belief. It is everyone. A convention would breathe new life into an anemic global consensus that to date has not offered the protection we all deserve, having “done little to combat the rising tide of restriction, hostility and violence experienced by many religious believers” by tackling “the overriding problem, which is how to hold States to account for their own failure to respect and protect the rights of all believers.”

This argument resonates powerfully in international legal and public policy circles.

Yet the historical particularities of the rise of a particular economy of belief and its close ties, and even constitutive relationship, to the modern notion of religion itself calls for a different reading of Evans’ ambitions. Perhaps contemporary international religious freedom projects should be seen as themselves engendering the formation of individual subjects and “faith communities” for whom believing, in the sense historicized by Asad and lionized by Evans, is seen as the universal defining characteristic of what it is to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free. To achieve this unity in freedom of belief, belief in belief, as it were, across communities of belief (and non-belief), is what it means to have achieved religious freedom. As Evans testifies, “Faith communities must reject the superficial attractions of claiming or accepting such freedoms for themselves alone, and unhesitatingly support the freedom of religion or belief for all. Unless or until religious communities are prepared to champion for everyone the freedoms that they wish their own followers to enjoy, there is likely to be little opportunity for seriously furthering the freedom of religion or belief at all.”

This identification of religion and religious communities primarily with belief and believers writes out of the picture alternative spaces and practices, such as those described in a recent post by Simon During, in which religion is lived as ethics, culture, and even politics, but without, necessarily, belief. Questioning the presupposition that religion implies belief, During calls for atheists to take over Church institutions from the inside, replicating what he describes as “older conditions and styles of at least Christian ecclesiastical practice, in which belief was not a prerequisite for episcopal ordination.”

The foreclosure on religion without belief also leaves little room for dissenters and doubters on the margins of or just outside those ‘faith communities’ described by Evans, whose voices tend to be subsumed or submerged by the institutions and authorities that speak in their name. It endows hierarchical authorities with the power to represent and pronounce on what is or is not religious belief deserving of special protection or sanction. Asad remarks on the instability of the notion of religious belief that underlies Charles Taylor’s vindication of the promise of religion:

The difficulty is this: What are to count as religious beliefs? Should beliefs denounced by the medieval Latin church as superstitio (wrongheadedness) therefore be regarded as secular beliefs? Or should they be pronounced religious on the criteria provided by those Enlightenment critics for whom all religion was superstition? Is the intention to carry out a particular act crucial to its religiosity? If so, how and by whom is that to be judged? Clearly how the phenomenon of belief that historians write about should be understood is a complicated question.

It may be worth inquiring into the extent to which a particular secularized Christian notion of the believing or non-believing human is being disseminated through international institutions and practices associated with the promotion of religious freedom “so that it is, to some extent, everywhere—translated, resisted, vernacularized, invoked in political struggles, and made the standard language enforced by power.” To what extent is the autonomous subject defined by his or her belief (or non-belief) normalized not only by secular states and (their) religious freedom activists, but now, also, through a rapidly proliferating series of transnational legal regimes and administrative initiatives that have eagerly adopted this template and have as their objective to protect and enforce the right to religious freedom?

Consider the crisis in Syria. Calls for the protection of persecuted Christians in Syria and neighboring countries are a cornerstone of religious freedom advocacy in the wake of the uprisings. Joe Eibner of Christian Solidarity International has lobbied President Obama to urge UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to declare a genocide warning for Christians across the Middle East. Howard Berman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has stated that the future of minorities is “on our agenda as we figure out how to help these countries” and their treatment of Christians and other minorities is a “‘red line’ that will affect future aid.” Habib Malik of Lebanese American University calls for Western nations to stand up for the rights of Christians, who he says may be cleansed from lands where democratic elections are used to oppress minorities rather than empower them. While this must be done “in a way that is not misperceived on the other end,” Malik concludes, “the West should not be cowed.” USA Today reports that “Christians in Syria, where Muslims have risen up against President Bashar Assad, have been subjected to murder, rape and kidnappings in Damascus and rebellious towns, according to Christian rights groups, including Open Doors, which helps Christians facing persecution.”

The momentum builds, as persecution of Christians takes on a life of its own and may, in some cases, come to define the conflict on the ground. The logic of the story is clear: when “Muslims rise up against Assad,” the result is Christian persecution. Yet the Syrian protests are not captured by the notion of “Muslims rising up against Assad.” This is the regime’s narrative. For decades the Assad family has relied upon the purported threat of sectarian anarchy lurking just below the surface of society and politics to justify autocratic rule. Defining the revolt “less as a popular uprising against a secular autocracy and more as an armed sectarian conflict pitting Sunnis against Alawites and their Shiite allies: Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah” hardens lines of religious difference and makes sectarian violence more likely. In this case, advocacy in the name of protecting Christians’ freedom of belief is adding fuel to the fire of the very religious and sectarian conflict that religious freedom claims to be uniquely equipped to transcend. In Evans’ words, the conflict is understood as directly resulting from a refusal to acknowledge the rights of “believers,” concealing the ways in which divisions cut across sectarian divides and the ways forward that emerge when the focus is not on beliefs but on shared needs and visions. The crisis in Syria calls for an approach to protecting human life and dignity that goes beyond these calls for ‘freedom of belief,’ and that loosens the grip of this construct on the political imaginary of the conflict.

Asad concludes his chapter by observing that “the modern idea of religious belief (protected as an individual right) is a function of the secular state but not of democratic sensibility.” In its strongest forms, the story of international religious freedom globalizes the secular state’s power over the individual. Appearing as a guarantee of the worth of the individual’s own desires, it is actually a story of telling people who they are, what to do and how to be. It privileges particular ways of doing and being as deserving special protection by the state or associations thereof, leaving others behind. Like other categories, it singles out authorized representatives of believers (and less frequently non-believers) for legal protection, reinforcing divisions and hierarchies within and between communities. And in its most insistent moments, it is a story of the costs in human dignity and diversity associated with the attempt to make “belief the measure of what religion is understood to be,” and the freedom to believe the measure of what it means to be free. Aude Fauré was brought before the Inquisition at the beginning of this modern attempt at mind control. Today it has become a global enterprise.