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

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

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

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

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

1.

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

2.

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

3.

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

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

4.

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

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

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

As is so often the case, the asylum patient would seem to be saying something that the psychologist is predisposed to suppress.  In these reflections, I intend to play the asylum patient to the mystical present of Courtney Bender’s Cambridge metaphysicals. What does a historian have to say to the historyless?  This, of course, is a relatively familiar question in the academy. A generation ago it was a standard question that history posed to anthropology, so much so that, in all kinds of ways, the two fields converged (Bender’s mix of ethnography and history is certainly one good indication of that merger). It was also a question that historians put to historians of religion of the Chicago school—again, a generation or so ago—often with a sneering tone: When is history not history? When it is the history of religions. In this instance, we have a very particular version of this question: What does a sometime historian of American spirituality have to say to an ethnographer of the same?  It is very much a two-sided question in this case: one posed by the historian to the ethnographer, and one posed by the historian to the ethnographer’s subjects.

The question is indeed given a distinct doubleness with Bender’s mystics. In them, we have a cadre, as she suggests, that consistently obscures its own history—and in, of all places, Cambridge, the very stage of Emerson, James, Sarah Bull, and company. Confronted with these historical resonances, as well as historical narratives that have emphasized such continuities, Bender nevertheless began, as she says, “to wonder in earnest whether such histories mattered at all to the people I met at Seven Stars bookshop or whom I witnessed ‘soul singing’ at a local arts festival.”  These Cambridge adepts seemed “wholly uninterested” in any immediate past, in any “real” historical narrative that might shed light on their own preoccupations. They were pursuing the timeless and everlasting on James’s terms, and they could not care less about joining a historicist sensibility to their metaphysical projects. They have no problem with ancient pasts, however fictive—with, say, Stonehenge USA—but by and large they yawn over local and more proximate histories. It is a fascinating question that Bender’s account raises: How can a history, purposelessly made invisible, be said to affect the texture of Cambridge’s spiritual present?

I have four observations to make in relation to that overarching query:

First, Americans are notoriously bad at history, especially in any modern historicist sense. “Don’t know much about history” could be a national anthem or mantra, as the case may be. Fretting again over cultural literacy, though, is not the point—or, at least, not the point here. Instead, the issue is: What has made the American capacity to elude history so pronounced, or, put more positively, what has made the American religious imagination so expansive in its invention of mythical pasts and in its denial of contiguous traditions?  Is there, as Bender suggests, a deeper “anti-nostalgic premise” at work—one in which Americans have repeatedly imagined themselves as free of the aristocratic, cultural, and religious weight of Europe?   As the pamphleteer Tom Paine famously put that revolutionary premise, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

The dehistoricizing disposition, in other words, is clearly characteristic of much more than the American metaphysical movement. These Cambridge seekers leapfrog over William James, Charles Leadbetter, or Swami Vivekananda into medieval mysticism or pagan mysteries in much the same way that restorationist Protestants jump right over Barton Stone, Jonathan Edwards, or John Calvin into the primitivist world of Jesus and the apostles. So many American Protestant projects seem built on denying history, on obliterating more than a millennium and a half of church history in order to return directly to Pentecost or the River Jordan or Calvary. When these latter-day mystics and metaphysicals go zooming around, empty cosmopolitans oblivious to their own cultural inheritances, as Bender suggests, they share in a historical naivety that knows few religious bounds in American culture.

Second, because of the “spiritualized imperialism” in which their dehistoricized mysticism allows the Cambridge adepts to engage, Bender would like to burden the metaphysicals—and the rest of us—with history again. Without that ballast, we all are in danger of zooming about, as Bender eloquently puts it, “freed from our pasts and thus from our sins.”  But I detect an unresolved tension on this point in her book. Should metaphysical fantasies of past lives be unmasked, baring the hubris of imperial expansiveness?  Or, should the scholar blur the distinction between real and mythical histories, emphasizing instead how—in Bender’s phrase—“myths and fictitious histories become real”?  Bender straddles that interpretive divide, simultaneously indicting the metaphysicals for a failure of historical awareness and defending their mythic historicity as a kind of real history. All histories are living practices of memory; all are invented; and hence one needs to see metaphysical past lives as on a continuum with, say, Robert Richardson’s biography of James. Indeed, Bender aims to unsettle the distinction “between religious and secular histories” by emphasizing the “temporal play” between the real and the mythical, between history as an empiricist endeavor and history as imaginative fantasy. Bender rightly sets aside the criticism that these new religious experiments—the elaboration of past lives, for example—don’t deserve serious regard because they lack authentic or real histories. That argument seems about as helpful as the common ethnological claim in the nineteenth century that one of the things distinguishing the civilized from the primitive was that “the savage . . . has no history.”   Still, whatever temporal play we might find between real history and historical fantasy—for example, one subject’s belief that in a past life he was Hildegaard of Bingen—does not relieve us of the responsibility of making distinctions between good history and bad, between modest empiricism and dreamy storytelling.

A third point that follows from the last one: Historians are not paid to worry about the disenchanting effects of their historicism. Bender writes in her conclusion that: “The puzzle of spirituality in America cannot be solved by locating it within a history it refuses. . . . Narrating spirituality in a way that gives it a past and affords it a tradition makes it unrecognizable to those who practice and produce it.” I suppose this is a problem the ethnographer has that the historian has a harder time fathoming. Our subjects, being dead, are in no position to refuse the history we offer; the ethnographer’s subjects, being very much alive, can vociferously object.  But there is something else at stake here than the familiar divide between the archive-digger and the fieldworker. Bender treads delicately in the conclusion. She can hardly forswear historical narrative, especially after her own beautifully historicized renderings of reincarnation and the gospel of relaxation, but, if nudged just a little to be less polite, I think she would say that historical accounts of metaphysical religion and American spirituality have gotten in the way of good sociology: namely, they have obscured the social, institutional, and economic networks that are most important to understanding the production of today’s spiritual practitioners.  Not that Bender pushes this as a stark choice or agonistic battle—nor would I—but it remains an underlying methodological rivalry in her work. One choice, though, we can hardly offer the metaphysicals: Today’s spiritual practitioners have a proximate past whether they find it recognizable or not.

Fourth and finally, I want to return to Bender’s serious doubts that Cambridge’s transcendentalist history matters at all to the spiritual practitioners she meets. As she writes, “the various traces of Cambridge’s spiritual pasts” hold “no thrall” whatsoever among the vast majority of contemporary mystics she encounters. To be sure, that history surfaces from time to time—as shards that occasionally come up like fossils from the ground. “Who is this Blavatsky, a psychologist?” one seeker asks an adept who is trying rather helplessly to explain what the Theosophical Society is. “No,” he says, she is “our founder,” but he really prefers to drift off into the timeless mystical canon: St. John of the Cross and Edgar Cayce, side by side.  Sometimes the practitioners get caught in their own historical evasion by the prying ethnographer. That would include Connie, the Christian Scientist who is hiding Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health behind the catchall Spirituality.com. Pressed by Bender to acknowledge the historical specificity of what she is offering attendees at the Whole Health Expo, Connie relents and actually embraces the more proximate history. “We were the ones,” she says with some justification and understandable satisfaction, “who started all this!”  Occasionally, the American lineages are still more forthrightly embraced. The story told here of Marcia Moore, the Concord yogi, is about as clear as it gets: “Growing up she steeped herself in the transcendentalists. She lived in the libraries where their works were, and in the woods where they drew their inspiration,” her biographer says. Marcia Moore’s story has its own mythologizing fancies, of course, but it also suggests that sometimes whole American skeletons could still come up from the dust. Moore’s self-conscious New England lineage remains the exception in Bender’s book, but it is a reminder that not all metaphysicals prefer fanciful pasts—Oriental, medieval, or ancient—to Yankee tales.

But, should we really expect history to hit us over the head like Moore’s story does?  Like the social forces that the sociologist makes apparent, history, too, is all the more powerful for being an invisible force. It structures and delimits the religious imagination as much as it does any other aspect of culture.

Here’s a closing example to embody that point: Bender and I have the rare distinction of being the only two scholars of American religion to have written extensively on belly dancing—for my part, on the last decade of the nineteenth century; and for hers, on the first decade of the twenty-first.  When I hear, in these pages, Tina tell her story about belly dancing and women’s spirituality, or Julia discuss her awakening to the same vibrational art, I do not need to know if they know anything about the Chicago’s World Fair of 1893, about Anthony Comstock, Little Egypt, Loie Fuller, or Ruth St. Denis. Whatever Oriental or Arabic imaginings they elaborate for this spiritual turn, that more proximate American history is invisibly present.  One does not have Tina’s story or Julia’s story without that history.

My last word is one of appreciation for just how much I relish Bender’s compelling and original book, as well as the opportunity it affords of engaging in some interdisciplinary play between history and sociology.

Much of the last century of the sociology of religion can be thought about as orderings and re-orderings of emic and etic concepts. Twentieth-century secularization theory amounted to an imposition of etic onto emic, as secularized scholars were sure that the people they studied would soon think and act like they did. And the current move towards a “strong program” strikes me as the converse: a projection of emic onto etic. Religiosity based on autonomous moral orders of beliefs and values has come to be viewed as “religion” in general—or worse yet, a fundamental characteristic of human nature—rather than as a historically particular form of intellectualized Western Christianity.

The dilemma only becomes more complex when one realizes that social scientists are not alone in categorizing the categorizers; they in turn get categorized by the categorizers. The portraits social scientists create get appropriated by their subjects, used, and fed back to social scientists. Like a Cherokee Indian wearing a headdress to fulfill tourists’ stereotypes, respondents can make etic meanings emic when these meanings fit their purposes.

This is precisely the “entanglement” that Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals masterfully addresses. Few books so adroitly and so fruitfully work through the interplay of emic and etic, not merely as a methodological obstacle, but as a substantive issue. Bender’s study of the social structure of American mysticism reveals a sort of collusion between academics and metaphysicals to occlude the fact that mysticism has a social structure and a history, and that it has been and still is an important part of the American religious experience. Bender traces the way early twentieth-century social scientists developed conceptualizations of religious experience as individual, pre-cultural, and ineffable in order to remove it and thereby protect it from spaces that were then regarded as inherently (or at least soon-to-be) secular. Metaphysicals themselves push this portrait as part of their own emphasis on pure, otherworldly mystical experience existing outside of mainstream culture (although thoroughly modern and scientific).

Bender sets out, not to narrate an untold, hidden history, but rather to portray a loose culture of American mysticism consisting of practices that are inscribed in bodies, times, and spaces, and are carried in discourses and embedded in institutions. This portrait is a remarkable synthesis of the lived religion perspective with field theory and Wuthnowian neo-institutional analysis of culture. The result is a sort of heavier, more robust version of practice theory that succeeds in providing a portrait of a loose, yet durable, social structure. Among its virtues, this portrait of the social-structural embeddedness of mysticism, its historical continuity, its centrality in the American experience, its non-marginality, and its non-ephemerality, de-naturalizes the view of religion as a body of beliefs belonging to a collectivity, which guides the behavior of individuals and provides the foundation of society. Bender shows us that there are alternative forms of spirituality that are viable, enduring, and widespread. Understanding this “spirituality in non-spiritual places” helps undermine the attempts of cultural conservatives to pose a conflict of the “faithful” versus the “faithless.”

I am strongly sympathetic to Bender’s focus on practices, discourses, and institutions, as it explains the constitutive power of culture without relying on over-rationalized structuralist images. But let me suggest another—not incompatible—possibility for understanding cultural continuity: metaphor theory.

The centerpiece of most metaphor theory is simply that one of the most basic ways human beings make meaning is by attaching images or symbols from a better known “source domain” to an inchoate “target domain.” For our purposes here, the inchoate target domain can be a predicament—or “situation” in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the term—and the source domain can be a set of religious symbols (including not only ideas but bodily practices). So, for example, among the Evangelicals I study in Venezuela, a common inchoate predicament such as “I want to be a good husband, but I lose control when I drink” is made meaningful through meanings from the Evangelical source domain, which says, “The Devil seeks to control human beings and has ready access when they consume alcohol.” This metaphoric coupling leaves an educated, middle-class professional like myself a little flat. But for many lower-class Venezuelan men whose unviable pater familias cultural ideal gets bifurcated into a marginal home life versus a macho male drinking culture, this metaphoric solution is compelling indeed.

In Bender’s case, it seems to me that there are certain characteristics of the American experience in general, and the Cambridge experience in particular, that produce a common, recurring set of “situations” to which mysticism provides a satisfying metaphoric solution. Cambridge entails some pretty unique conditions of collective living when seen in comparative historical terms: a population with a lack of ethnic or any other common narrative ties to space; many people with the high educational levels associated with skepticism of traditional beliefs; a post-materialist context in which basic necessities are fulfilled, and questions of identity are addressed in abstraction; a mobile and transient context that spurs spiritual seeking. All of these long-term social-geographic characteristics produce a common set of predicaments that make people receptive to the practices that Bender rightly portrays as embedded in institutions, literatures, and discourses. To be more concrete, when Bender s enjoins us to “investigate how those [sacred] irruptions take place and work to locate the institutions and practices that contribute both to their occlusion and to their continuation,” I would add a third question: We should ask how these irruptions fit into the lives and struggles of those experiencing them. What situations and predicaments do these irruptions give answer to? What life projects do they facilitate? My guess would be that many in this context confront an accentuated version of the classic American predicament that asks, “How can I be an individual, yet part of a community?” Others in this context of higher education are certainly faced with the desire to be spiritual yet scientific; still others in this space of life-course transition want to be culturally deep, yet break with their cultural past.

Bender’s focus on how institutions and practices provide continuity over time is a much needed expansion beyond the strong program conceptualization of continuity through cultural autonomy. But bringing metaphor theory in could have enabled a more complete conceptualization of the thought-as-action and practice-as-project that one actually sees in Bender’s ethnographic descriptions. And this would not have undermined the emphasis on culture and history. Of course, existing cultural formations both structure the predicaments we confront and provide a repertoire of solutions. But focusing just on the structuring power of culture is like focusing on the structure of the professional Chess world to understand the Fischer-Spassky “match of the century.” It will explain a lot, but probably not what is most interesting. In Bender’s actual ethnographic storytelling, she indeed focuses on the concrete situations and practices of her respondents’ lives-in-the-world. But the conceptual framework provided in the conclusion is more supply-side than the actual empirical analysis.

Pointing out what else could have been done is, of course, a weak critique, and it ought to be taken as evidence that the book is good to think with. Indeed, my overall emotion in reading The New Metaphysicals was awe at the amount of fieldwork that must have taken place to obtain this ethnographic material, at the level of erudition needed to reach this conceptual depth, and at the amount of head-in-hands thinking that must have gone into developing this argument. In our book-a-year academic culture, such examples of scholarship-as-craft are far too few.