The rhetoric of the bishops’ statement is familiar to anyone who has followed conservative Christian activism around the cause of religious freedom in the United States over the last two decades or so, though the recourse of Catholic officials to such language is a relatively recent innovation. Meanwhile, their definition of “religious freedom” or “religious liberty” remains both opaque and expansive—again, in imitation of conservative Christian activism tout court. The bishops note the priority of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the priority of (“our first…liberty”) religious freedom among the freedoms guaranteed by that amendment. Acknowledging that Americans are not alone in their claims concerning freedom (“freedom is not only for Americans”), they nevertheless see the United States as exceptional in its relationship to it (“we think of it as something of our special inheritance”), seeing Americans as the particular guardians of freedom (“we are stewards of this gift, not only for ourselves but for all nations and peoples who yearn to be free”).

The bishops go on to enumerate specific examples of “religious liberty under attack.” By the logic of priority, the mandate issued earlier in the year by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring health insurance coverage for contraception (which the document calls “HHS mandate for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs”), part of the administration’s efforts to assure compliance with the ACA (aka health care reform), holds pride of place in the list of instances of religious freedom under siege. But the bishops cite a number of other domains of constraint: the refusal by state and local authorities to use the foster care or adoption placement services of Catholic Charities because of the organization’s unwillingness to place children with cohabiting or same-sex couples; the state of Alabama’s punitive anti-immigrant legislation; the denial of official recognition of a Christian student group at the University of California Hastings College of Law (because of the group’s requirement that its leaders be Christian and abstain from extra-marital sexual activity); New York City’s discontinuation of the practice of renting public school buildings in New York City to churches for weekend services. Religion (a category represented in the statement exclusively by Christian examples) is under siege, the argument runs, on the federal, state, and local levels, and on many different fronts.

But if the document seeks to catalog the wide range of threats to religious liberty, it is nevertheless primarily concerned with undergirding the bishops’ campaign against the inclusion of contraceptive coverage under the ACA. The document sets the terms of the debate agonistically and dramatically. Although the ACA (along with subsequent regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services in the spring of 2012 to assure compliance with the law) is nowhere named explicitly, it certainly resides behind the characterization of “an unjust law [that] cannot be obeyed,” a law that imposes the will of the state upon religious institutions and individuals. Arguing by analogy, the bishops juxtapose the need to disobey such an unjust law—a duty Catholics “must discharge…as a duty of citizenship and an obligation of faith”—to the religiously inflected arguments and actions of the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, using Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as their prooftext. Strikingly, the bishops also take care to distinguish between “conscientious objection” to a societal requirement (unspecified, but one might think of conscientious objection to military service) from the requirement to resist an unjust law. One can imagine that the bishops are seeking to sidestep the question of all of the other ways in which tax dollars, for example, are used to support militarism, capital punishment, or other forms of state-sponsored violence to which religious individuals or institutions might object. Opposition to these kinds of institutionalized forms of state violence does not apparently rise to the status of opposition to “unjust law,” which “cannot be obeyed.”

Framing their opposition to the health care mandate in terms of religious freedom, it needs to be emphasized, is a strategic move that narrows the terrain significantly: to oppose the bishops’ opposition to the health care mandate requires one to take a position against religious freedom. Well played, bishops.

The problem, of course, is that while the bishops speak of religious freedom and seek to portray a consensus that aligns themselves with evangelical Protestants and Orthodox Jews, they conveniently exclude from the conversation other co-religionists who do not share their ethical assessments of the particular issues under debate (e.g., access to medical services, reproductive freedom, etc.) nor their political agenda. (Consider, as just one example, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which includes the Episcopal Church, most of the mainline Protestant denominations, the Unitarian Universalist church, virtually all of the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jewish governing bodies, and numerous Christian and Jewish national organizations.) Moreover, while advocating for a public square in which religious arguments and actors move freely, the bishops disingenuously frame the issue as one that sets in opposition a “naked public square” (“stripped of religious arguments and religious believers”) against a “civil public square” (“where all citizens can make their contribution to the common good”), carefully disavowing any claim that they desire a “sacred public square” (“which gives special privileges and benefits to religious citizens”). “At our best,” they write, “we might call this an American public square.” Framed in this way, the very presence of religious arguments and believers is precisely what makes the public square “American.” Their absence is, on its face, un-American. And yet, if the public square is a space of deliberation and debate, a space where arguments are evaluated and contested, it seems as though “religion” itself remains somehow immune to contestation and critique—in the public square, but not of it.

One could engage in an extended exploration of the way in which the bishops’ framing of these issues, clearly beholden to nearly two decades of evangelical Protestant activism around religious freedom, depend upon a theoretical incoherency (whereby institutions protecting religious freedom must inevitably define and thereby delimit what counts as “religion”) and revisit debates over the uneasy truce between religion and politics, church and state, that has been forged by recourse to the Protestant secular. But what I prefer to do here is to engage in an imaginative exercise: What would it mean for the bishops to put their money where their mouths are and to defend religious freedom in their own polity—that is, within the Catholic church itself?

Because, on another Catholic horizon, the Vatican has decided that the exercise of what one might well call religious freedom on the part of American women religious—the exercise of conscience—is a problem requiring episcopal oversight. In other words, the sisters are in need of some church-sponsored discipline and a reining-in of their faithful enactment of their own conscience. This action has been undertaken by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Congregatio pro doctrina fidei), the modern incarnation of the Inquisition, which has issued a “Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious,” the culmination of a process of critical investigation initiated by the Vatican beginning in early 2009, focused on the LCRW, an organization that represents 80% of Catholic nuns in the United States. Accused of “a rejection of faith [that] is also a serious source of scandal and … incompatible with religious life,” objectionable “policies of corporate dissent” (on issues of women’s ordination and homosexuality), and “radical feminist themes,” the LCRW has become the target of disciplinary action.

This is not the place to parse all of the details of the Doctrinal Assessment, which seeks “to implement a process of review and conformity to the teachings and discipline of the Church, the Holy See, through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” But in the context of the US bishops’ expression of a deep commitment to the notion of religious freedom, it might be a worthwhile imaginative exercise to ponder the following question: What would a defense of religious freedom look like, if the LCWR were considered “religion” in this case and the Vatican were considered “the state”?

Of course, the authors of the Doctrinal Assessment—all American cardinals, I have been told—would reject the question as I have framed it since they insist that faithful religious life can only be lived in “allegiance of mind and heart to the Magisterium of the Bishops,” as they put it in the opening paragraph of the Assessment, where they quote from John Paul II’s 1996 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Vita consecrata. In doing so, however, they rather show their hand. Religious freedom emerges as nothing more than a mode of shoring up the authority of the Magisterium of the Bishops, not a set of values that shelters and protects the acts of conscience undertaken by Catholic women religious in the United States. Yet ironically, recourse to a robust notion of personal conscience is an unambiguously orthodox position in Catholic theology and a fully justifiable exercise of religious freedom on the part of the nuns.

The widespread outrage among Catholics in the U.S. in response to the Doctrinal Assessment’s attack on the LCWR—outrage that has produced numerous thoughtful essays about the profound value and integrity of the actual work of Catholic nuns, vigils of support in cities across the country, and even the satirical Twitter hashtag #radicalfeministthemes—has made it clear that the actions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does not pass a simple smell test.

In their statement on religious liberty, the Conference of Bishops writes, “The Christian church does not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all citizens.” To which the supporters of the Catholic sisters in the US might simply respond, “The Catholic women religious and their allies in the church do not ask for special treatment, simply the rights of religious freedom for all members of the church.”

Bangladesh is often lauded as the poster child of third-world development: the birthplace of microcredit, the harbinger of religious tolerance, and exemplar of a transition from turbulent politics to persistent democracy in the developing world. Different from its neighbors on the basis of varying post-colonial experiences and development trajectories, the religion question came to be written on the nation through a particular “secular” construction, referred to in the vernacular as dhormoniropekkhota, or “religiously neutral.” This construction initially argued for an absence of religious political parties and for equal treatment of religions by the state so that all citizens may enjoy “equal” opportunity. While the ban on religious political parties has subsequently been lifted, and greater allowances made to Islam in the constitution, these are widely considered by liberal-secular defenders of the original constitution as intrusions that have defiled the sanctity of secularism. Restoring the original secular constitution, with all its constitutive elements is, as many argue, essential for socio-economic development, successful indicators of which, such as decreased maternal and infant mortality, increased literacy amongst the poor, and innovative ideas such as credit for the poor, have garnered Bangladesh a certain degree of global visibility. These advances, many argue, have been made possible only because the language of development has steered clear of religion in an attempt to construct the ideal secular nation. In other words, pro-secular development advocates argue that development successes have occurred in spite of, rather than (in collusion) with religion and religious beliefs, practices, and sensibilities.

Parallel to the achievement of the state, donors, and NGOs in the field of socio-economic development, much of which has furthered the status women, are legal triumphs through which, unlike in the Pakistani case, the Islamist call to declare Ahmediyas apostates has not been vindicated. Thus, the state’s secular mandate NOT to define the content of Islamic belief and practice is seemingly preserved. However, this “secular” prerogative does not find equal resonance when it comes to minority populations, for whom struggles over property and other rights seldom even make it to the courts. The “triumph” of secularism thus manifests itself in keeping alive a “liberal” notion of life for the majority population. An example of this is the recent victory in which the High Court directed the Ministry of Education to take immediate steps to implement the Guidelines on Sexual Harassment and to ensure that no woman working in any educational institution, public or private, is forced to wear a veil or cover her head, and may exercise her personal choice whether or not to do so.

The privileging of a liberal notion of Islam was the raison d’etre of the secular construct whose original clause that no political party can operate in the name of religion was borne directly out of the independence struggle. The Pakistani state had asserted its hegemony on the pretext that Bengali cultural markers, on the basis of their similitude with (Hindu) West Bengal, were inadequate expressions of the “Islamic nation” that Pakistan felt it had to project itself as. The birth of Bangladesh was seen, by the ruling elite of the time, as an opportunity to construct a new national character where a monolithic notion of Islam that required purging Bengalis of their linguistic and cultural affinities would not prevail. The state, although certainly not neutral vis-à-vis Islam, thus created particular Muslim citizen-subjects, who, in order to be nationalistic, had to refrain from a public/political position on Islam. However, in the course of development and modernization, the citizen’s engagement with Islam could not be contained to rituals that linked one’s inner self to the supernatural world via pirs, mystics, sufi saints that serve as spiritual leaders in praying for and guiding one’s worldly problems, and the darga sharif, or shrine of a dead pir where prayers are believed to be better heard. Given the tensions around public expressions of religion and their presumed anti-Bengali, “anti-nationalist” affinities, how would a more “modern” engagement with Islam express itself in Bangladesh? The Islamist platform brings with it all the pent-up negativity of aggression and anti-nationalism. Other more “neutral” platforms such as the Tabligh Jama’at are just too “neutral”—almost ineffective if Islam is to deliver us from bad governance, corruption, and personal, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy.

Other “creative” and evolving ways are on the horizon. I encountered some of these modalities while conducting fieldwork in women’s taleem, or Quranic discussion circles, in Dhaka. While such circles are not entirely new to the cultural, religious, and political landscape of Bangladesh, the ones in which I participated, along with many others in the city, are somewhat different in their pursuit of “modern religious” engagements that refrain from affiliating with existing religious groups and political parties. While the women are conservative vis-à-vis gender and sexuality issues, they appear more open in their thoughts about the political import of their public actions.

The first explanation offered by secular liberals of this modality of mobilizing—which calls itself “a-political” in its refusal to stand on an Islamist platform while at the same time distancing itself from a Tablighi kind of personal piety—is that it is strategic, aimed at keeping at bay the anti-nationalist stigma attached to the Jama’at-e-Islami. Framing the women’s religious engagement as strategic is consonant with the secularized normative religious subject for whom religion and the public sphere do not and must not mix. Thus, it is convenient to see the desire to mix the two as an aberration, as the intransigence of secularism’s defiling elements, and therefore to predict that this must result in the women ultimately embracing Islamism. This argument, which retains for the liberal advocates of secularism their position of authority as creators and drivers of secular modernity, stems from a misunderstood notion that the secular and the religious represent distinct domains of national life, leading to distinct subjectivities. This view has been complicated through the works of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Wendy Brown, as well as in recent collective publications such as Rethinking Secularism.

What are the women’s perspectives? The women believe that they are engaging in da’wa, or proselytizing, and use the same term to refer to their modus operandi. Their methods of shaping and changing the self as well as taking those selves to the public space rests in reading and following other, often competing interpretations of the Quran and Hadith along with other exegetical material and constantly bringing the ensuing understandings to bear upon current-day realities and requirements. Through such methods, the women seek to inculcate in themselves and their families deeper faith and practice, such as wearing the hijab and being meticulous in the daily prayers, as well as to create “responsible and productive” citizens. They refer to many of their outreach initiatives as “secular operations with religious undertones” and argue that the ultimate objective of living in the world is not only piety “which has its ebbs and flows,” but responsibility and accountability in creating a productive society. This phrasing reflects the attempt to make a religious agenda appear secondary to others—an effective way to draw in many (young) people towards productive community work and to disarm potential critics.

In making Islam relevant to the cultural, political, and economic landscape of the country, the women must contend with what is out there—the achievements of the development sector, the failures of twenty years of democracy, a political system that has seemingly placed religion on the backburner, and a displacement of the enchanted from “God to Bollywood.” The women, and many of their male peers, are knee-deep in thinking through how to put religion back on the table. What would be the best possible routes to achieve this task? In “effectively and productively” putting Islam back on the table, how does one stay true to God, self, and society? Thus, while the “secular-liberal” suspicion that these newly religious men and women have an agenda is not completely unfounded, their plan also consists of positing religion as a choice, albeit a very desirable and beneficial one. Such desirability of religious engagement may not keep religion in the private sphere, but it also does not approach the formal political space of the public sphere. These engagements thus not only strive to create new intersections of the religious and the secular, but also redefine and alter religious belief and rituals through dialogues, debates, and adjustments to perceived requirements of the day.

By drawing attention to the similarities in the presupposed subject of the newly religious and the secular Bangladeshis’ worldviews, I do not intend to blur distinctions and subject these women’s initiatives to either pseudo-Islamist or secular readings. What I would like to draw the reader to is the particular ways in which worlds are created through exchange and sharing and the particular language and attachments that allow them to arrive at their goals. To think about religious engagement in light of embodied practices through different modes of engagement within and outside the religious repertoire is an important exercise not only for an understanding of how religion advances in the world, but also for insights into whether, to what extent, and how all that is apparently secular delivers upon its promises.

The stakes of this conversation, especially for the field of development, in contexts such as Bangladesh and other parts of the developing world are high. The development paradigm promoted by state, donor, and NGO partnerships, which has presupposed a universal citizen subject has long kept the question of religious identity at bay. Advocates of liberal development models stand vindicated when Bangladesh does not come up on the World Economic Forum’s list of the top-ten countries ranked by the Global Gender Gap (GGG) index. Since the development process had ensured that women in Bangladesh fare better than those in India, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, and Egypt, amongst others, to bring to the surface how the religion question has been subsumed under and shaped by development initiatives, thus, seems not only unnecessary, but even dangerous. “Why spoil a good thing?” secular, pro-development advocates ask. But would such an insight necessarily be spoiling a good thing? Instead of preserving certain existing notions, would not a critical examination of the development process and its handling of and negotiations around religious identities open possibilities for a deeper understanding of how transformations actually occur? After all, religious identities, especially in the context of South Asia, have long been a part of one’s political and everyday existence. Religion, as far as I am concerned, has always been on the table.

I understand that if such an exercise reveals that the shaping and mediating mechanisms of the development process have stifled religious life, then secular advocates will fear sharp critiques by religious quarters, as experienced in 2003-2004 through Islamist attacks on BRAC schools. Since these events took place, several development organizations have kept as far away as possible from dealing with issues around religion. This distancing has neither silenced radical, Islamist voices, nor has it enabled a greater understanding of the dynamics of the development process or the growing appeal of faith-based development organizations. What is “Islamic” about Islamic microfinance and why is it on the rise? As a development model, does it operate on similar principles and presuppose the same normative subject as secular microfinance? These are important questions—not only because they allow us to better understand new trends, but also because they may lead to greater clarity on the effects of institutional arrangements that work upon religious ideas and practices to produce certain tangible outcomes. Exploring these questions will take away the monopoly of those who think that their (religious or secular) approaches offer the only solution. Coming at the issue without presumed distinctions between the religious and the secular, and the animosity often bred by that distinction, can lead to a better understanding of the development process, and to qualify how and why, for example, Bangladesh has managed to stay out of the list of the ten worst countries to live in for Muslim women. This research is crucial to lifting blinders that have historically been placed on groups that advocate both religion and secularism in dire opposition to one another. The gains of such an exercise would be invaluable to thinking about secularism, its limits and dispensations, and about religion as an ever-changing component of a secularizing, modern world.

*  *  *

NS: I know you have been following the events in Egypt and have even been back a couple of times since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. How would you describe the situation?

SM: I think this is an incredibly interesting time in Egypt. The country is involved in a historic and heady process of political transformation. The stakes are very high, and it is unclear whether the kind of changes—political, social, and economic—that the January 25 Revolution envisioned will, in fact, be possible. Like any other revolution in modern history, this one faces immense challenges from both within and without.

NS: What exactly are those challenges, in your view?

SM: Well, after the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, as one would expect, the movement became divided over what the collective future of the country should be. Old differences that had been set aside to topple the Mubarak regime have come to the fore again—differences of class, ideology, and religion, all of which affect the vision of what a just society should be. Second, there is the issue of transforming the political system from within to create a democratic structure—which entails, not only promulgating new electoral laws and procedures, but also forging laws that address the demands of a democratic society. Then there is the challenge of how to dismantle the much-despised state security apparatus, with its bloated and corrupt bureaucracy of surveillance and vengeance, and the Emergency Law—in place for over twenty years—that has facilitated its operations. In recent months, protestors have taken to the streets again to demand an end to the military trials that have continued since the overthrow of Mubarak. (Some report that more than 10,000 people have been tried in military courts since the revolution.) These military trials are a symbol of the old system that is still intact, and which the protestors of the January 25 Revolution had sought to dismantle. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are economic issues that are systemic, and that are not simply Egypt’s but belong to the international system of finance and capital. Egypt, like any other Third World country, is hostage right now to the global economic crisis and the immense pressure put upon those countries by international institutions (like the World Bank and IMF) and geopolitical powers (the US and Western Europe) to resist the demand for socially progressive economic reforms. The Egyptian military is part of this system and has benefitted from it immensely. I cannot see how the military, as the primary institution in charge of this “transition,” is going to set aside its economic interests to yield to the popular demand for economic justice. This is in part why Egyptians from various walks of life continue to stage sit-ins and protests across the country.

NS: How do you think these challenges might be overcome?

SM: Well, I have faith in the Egyptian people and their thirst and desire to transform the status quo. None of us expected or predicted what the Egyptians were able to achieve on February 11, 2011, with their determination and political will. The unimaginable became imaginable. The same powers are in play right now, and I suspect we all will have a lot to learn from the developments that unfold in Egypt in the coming years.

NS: Without a doubt. But let’s back up a bit now. I first read your essay on “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual” when I was a freshman in college, and it had a big influence on how I came to think about the practice of religion. I still look back to it. In that vein, I wonder if you, too, had an experience early on that reoriented your own thinking.

SM: One thing that had a decisive impact on me was Talal Asad’s “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” I was a graduate student at Stanford at the time, and I was working on issues of religion at a moment when there was little interest in the subject within the discipline of anthropology. This was pre-9/11, and people didn’t think that religion was of great importance. I was reading a lot on my own, and this essay came up in footnotes. Our library didn’t even have a copy of it, so I had to request it through interlibrary loan. I sat down, and I distinctly remember reading and then rereading it several times. I was really challenged by the questions that the article forced the reader to ask, not just of Islam but of religion in general. It’s a very well-circulated paper now, and most students of religion and Islam tend to read it, but at the time, it was a buried treasure.

NS: Tell me about what brought you to anthropology in the first place. You were an architect before that?

SM: Yes, I practiced architecture for four years. At the time I was also involved in activism against U.S. foreign policy in Central America and the Middle East. When the first Gulf War broke out, I realized that there were many pressing questions, which the war had brought to the fore, that I hadn’t really resolved for myself. These were questions that had to do with the transformed political and social landscape of the Muslim world, the ascendance of Islamic politics and the challenge this posed to those of us who grew up believing in the promise of secular nationalism to forge a different future. Following the Iranian Revolution, in 1979, Islamic movements had become the primary expression of political dissent in a variety of Muslim countries. In order to think about the transformations this ascendance had caused in the social and political landscape of Muslim societies, I resolved that I would go back to graduate school. At the time, I did not really know much about anthropology; so I enrolled in a political science graduate program, which I found to be very Eurocentric. I realized that this discipline would not help me explore the kinds of questions that I was interested in. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to anthropology at the time, and it has been my disciplinary home since.

NS: Have you found anthropology to be a discipline in which questions that concerned you as an activist can be addressed?

SM: My activism would probably have been accommodated in any discipline. But what anthropology has allowed me to do in a serious way is pursue the question of difference. The traditional aim of socio-cultural anthropology was to study the primitive other in order to reflect upon the peculiarity—and often superiority—of Western cultural and social norms. In the late 1980s, anthropologists and others launched a robust critique of the essentialized and ahistorical notion of cultural difference that had served the discipline for so long. One important result of this critique was that the discipline moved to think critically about the question of difference—not just cultural difference but how different histories, traditions, and arrangements of power force people to live and experience life in heterogeneous ways. In general I find anthropology’s commitment to thinking critically about difference unique in the human sciences and worthy of engagement and exploration. So, in answer to your question, it is not so much that anthropology is especially open to activism, but rather its insistence that we engage with difference, while being attentive to relations of power that hierarchicalize and essentialize differences, that has enabled me to work productively in the discipline.

NS: On your website, you also say that your experience in architecture influenced your work as an anthropologist. Can you say something about how?

SM: That’s probably overstated! But when I was practicing architecture, I realized I wasn’t very happy with the elitist and technological bent of the profession. I started working instead with the homeless, designing, financing, and constructing housing for people who couldn’t afford to pay rent or mortgage. The work I did was mostly in dense, urban communities, both in the U.S. and, briefly, in Pakistan. This experience left me with an appreciation for the grit of urban life, the challenges it throws up to people, and how they manage them. In a sense, this is what Politics of Piety is about, too—people trying to make sense of a world that has completely undone the possibility of a wholesome life, but in which people still try to recreate that possibility through suturing various kinds of disparate practices and habits.

NS: Why did you choose Cairo as the site of your fieldwork?

SM: At first I went to Algiers, but it was in the throes of a civil war, which made fieldwork impossible. I also went to Fes and Casablanca but found that political debate was very guarded and muffled, making it difficult to pursue the kinds of questions I was interested in. In Cairo, however, I found a place that was very vibrant and alive with debates about the importance of secularism, Islamism, and what it means to live as a Muslim in the contemporary world. The city streets pulsated with these debates, and Egyptians generally did not feel restrained in expressing their religious and political views. I found the public culture of the city very conducive to the project I wanted to pursue, and so I stayed.

NS: What brought you to the theoretical tools that would help you interpret that experience in Politics of Piety?

SM: By the time I went to do fieldwork in Cairo, I was already very critical of how the existing literature analyzed Islamist movements, largely in functionalist and reductive terms. It seemed to subscribe to a hydraulic conception of politics: you squish something down in one place and it bubbles up in another. Islamic politics, in other words, was a displacement of something more fundamental—economic frustration, lack of democracy, and so on. But I was far less prepared to think about the range of embodied religious practices I encountered and how these inform or undergird politics. It was really a challenge for me to think about people’s preoccupation with the minutiae of bodily practices and not to read them as misguided or misplaced religiosity. Like countless other scholars, I initially tended to view them as inconsequential both to politics and to the substance of religion. It was really only after doing the fieldwork, when I came back and started writing, that I began to think more deeply about these issues and my own inadequate response to what I had observed in the field. This process of reflection and writing brought me to rethink the distinction drawn between ethics and politics in liberal political theory, as well as the centrality of affect and embodied praxis to political imaginaries and projects.

NS: In the preface to Politics of Piety, you speak very eloquently about the relationship between that project and your experience of coming of age in Pakistan. Does Pakistan continue to inform the questions that you pose and the ways in which you think about them? The country has certainly come to play a different role on the world stage in recent years. . . .

SM: The developments in Pakistan have been quite tragic. The Pakistani military has mortgaged the future of the country to fight a series of proxy wars for the U.S.—wars that have methodically destroyed its infrastructure, not to mention social and political life in the country. Politics of Piety is an analysis of a different kind of Islamic movement, in Egypt, that is transformative of social and political life but not destructive of its very possibility. In Pakistan, Islamist movements have largely played a very destructive role, especially with the ascendance of jihadi movements that have made a Faustian bargain with the Pakistani military, on the one hand, and U.S. strategic interests, on the other. It’s quite different in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood—the largest Islamist political organization in the country—has eschewed militancy at least since the 1950s, and the network of da’wa groups that I analyze in my book are reformist in nature, focused largely on proselytization and social welfare activities. The career of Islamic militants in Egypt was short-lived, and they do not command the kind of power that they do in Pakistan. As a result, the social and political profile of Islamism in Egypt is radically different from its counterpart in Pakistan. In my current project, I have begun to take up the question of how geopolitics transforms the ways religious coexistence is managed, produced, and transformed. But, while geopolitics has certainly transformed Pakistani life, in my current work I’m not thinking about it particularly in the Pakistani context.

NS: Can you tell me more about the project you’re involved in now?

SM: Well, I am engaged in a couple of related projects. My personal project focuses on how Christian-Muslim relations have been historically transformed through the introduction of the concepts of minority rights and religious liberty in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Egypt. Aside from this, I am also working on a three-year collective project with three other colleagues (Elizabeth Hurd, Peter Danchin, and Winnifred Sullivan), funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. It focuses on how religious freedom is being transformed through legal and political contestations in a variety of countries in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and South Asia. It’s called “Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Norms and Local Practices.” Most of the scholarly work to date tends to treat religious freedom as a singular and stable principle, enshrined in international and national legal documents. Others tend to focus on how different religious traditions are either amenable or resistant to the incorporation of liberal conceptions of religious liberty. Our project is distinct in that it asks whether religious liberty can indeed be treated as a singular or stable principle aimed at achieving shared goals and objectives, given the diversity of historical and political contexts. We will track the variety of claims made in the name of religious liberty, with the aim of mapping out modular disagreements that occur in a variety of national and international political contexts. We are interested in this because we believe that, in order to reach any sort of agreement in the human rights community, it is important first to understand what is really at stake in battles over religious freedom. It is also important to ask whether religious freedom, given its manifold deployments and limitations, is the best way to achieve co-existence for the variety of actors involved.

NS: A thread that seems to connect the earlier work with what you’ve been doing more recently is the issue of freedom—from freedom as personal autonomy, in Politics of Piety, to religious freedom in international law, now. Has the one informed how you think about the other?

SM: That is an interesting question. I agree that liberty and freedom are at the center of both of my projects. The right to religious liberty is often conceived in individualist terms—whether in the First Amendment, the European Convention on Human Rights, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the right to religious liberty has also been imagined in collective terms as the right of a group to practice its traditions freely, without undue intervention or control. This latter conception has been very important to religious minorities in claiming a place of autonomy and freedom from majoritarian norms and state interventions. In my current work, I am trying to think through how these alternative conceptions of religious liberty stand in tension with each other and the sorts of impasses it produces.

NS: What kinds of methods are you using? Are you doing fieldwork again?

SM: Fieldwork is an important part, but the project has historical, geopolitical, and legal dimensions as well, since I’m interested in tracking how notions of religious liberty travel across time and history, and also across the divide between Western and non-Western. So, I’m looking at the UN charter, the UDHR, international laws and treaties, as well as particular legal precedents in Europe that have traveled to the Middle East and have gained particular traction there.

NS: Tell me more about what the fieldwork is like. After all, I imagine that the usual way of studying international law is primarily textual. How does fieldwork inform these kinds of questions?

SM: I’m interested in the social life of the law, especially since many court cases about the right to religious freedom in the Middle East are fought, not just in courts, but through public campaigns launched on the cultural-political terrain. People’s sense of what constitutes religious liberty is shaped by how human, civil, and minority rights organizations end up contesting and arguing over it. Part of my fieldwork in Egypt entailed working with human rights practitioners, particularly those who are using international human rights protocols in their legal strategies and public campaigns.

NS: Can you say a bit, in turn, about how Is Critique Secular? came about and the kinds of problems that framed it?

SM: It emerged out of an event organized at UC Berkeley to announce the establishment of a new teaching and research unit on critical theory. This inaugural symposium generated a lot of interesting debate and discussion—not only on the Berkeley campus but here on the Immanent Frame as well. The Townsend Center for the Humanities, where the event was held, approached me and other participants about putting some of the papers together in book form. As we could not pull together all the papers from the symposium, we focused on the ones about the Danish cartoon controversy. Wendy Brown, Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and I decided that we would try to organize the book around this question while also retaining some of the original impetus for the symposium.

NS: More recently, the cartoon controversy seems to have repeated itself all over again with the Park51 complex in Lower Manhattan, or the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” And long before that, there was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses.

SM: Well, I think there are substantial differences among the issues involved in each of these controversies. I think the latter is quite straightforwardly about the right of a much-maligned minority to build a place of worship near a site invested with patriotic-national fervor, while the former controversies centered upon Muslim objections to how the prophet Muhammad was portrayed.

NS: What is wrapped up for people in these portrayals of the prophet?

SM: It’s not an accident that with both the Satantic Verses and the Danish cartoon controversies, what was at stake was the particular kind of affective and religious connection pious Muslims (but certainly not all Muslims) feel to the figure of Muhammad—to his iconicity and his exemplariness. This relationhip forces us to think about religiosity in more complicated ways than as privatized belief, or as a system of rules, regulations, and taboos. Both Muslims and non-Muslims must think critically about whether the sense of injury that derives from this sort of religiosity is translatable into a language of rights, and whether understanding this sense of injury is something worthy for the ethical and political life of a religiously diverse society. I think that there is an increasing tendency within the U.S. and Europe—on the part of the majority and minorities alike—to resort to the law and the state to settle ethical and moral issues. At the time of the Danish cartoon controversy, both sides wanted to defer to the law to settle their claims. But I think that such a turn to the law, or legislation, freezes positions and allows the state to intervene in domains toward which it claims to be neutral. My contribution to Is Critique Secular? lays these issues out in more detail than I can do justice to here. In sum, what I am suggesting is that struggles over religious difference cannot simply be settled by the heavy hand of the law. Insomuch as these struggles entail competing religious sensibilities as well as deep prejudices and intolerances, they must be engaged on other—cultural, ethical, visceral—grounds. This may not yield immediate or definitive results, but it is a necessary and important step in the creation of a multi-religious polity.

NS: So how do you think this plays out in the case of Park51?

SM: There, of course, even though the personage of Muhammad was not involved, the language of injury and offense dominated the debate. If you recall, in the Danish cartoon controversy, the claim was that the right to freedom of expression is also a right to offend anybody and anyone—and that this is a characteristic of an open, pluralistic, and democratic society. Some even argued that the cartoons served as an instrument to create offense, so as to engender a critical dialogue among Muslims about Islam. In contrast, in the Park51 controversy, it was argued that the complex should not be built because, even though Muslims have a right to do so by virtue of the First Amendment, building one so close to the World Trade Center would offend American sensibilities. The claim to offense and injury in each instance was being marshaled for very different purposes.

NS: And the players’ roles have been reversed, haven’t they?

SM: Right. I do think, however, that what is at stake in all these debates is the status of a religious minority within self-avowedly liberal societies, which claim to have in place the most robust mechanisms possible for accommodating the concerns of majority and minority alike. And yet, what we find is that the rights of minorities are actually framed by the norms of the larger community; it’s against those norms that minoritarian claims are judged and contested, and that is where the idea of religious liberty and freedom of expression as an individual right remains inadequate to grasping the situation. We have to start thinking in terms of how groups are weighted both demographically and politically, and how this conditions the context in which certain claims are made or heard. It’s not enough to refer to a right that exists in constitutions—such as the right to free speech or to religious liberty—and to track when it is applied or not. Far tougher questions are at play. One has to think about how the ethical, cultural, and social norms of the majority structure the possibility of the exercise of individual and group liberties differently for minorities. I should make clear that this structural problem characterizes all nation-states (premised as they are on the demographic calculus of minority and majority populations), and is not simply particular to Euro-American societies.

NS: When you approach these issues today, are you still coming to them as an activist as well as a scholar?

SM: No, I would say that I come to them more as a scholar than as an activist. My intellectual work has often led me to challenge and complicate my political stances—to complicate the very ground on which politics can be imagined and conducted. Politics, in my opinion, demands a certain closure of thinking, in order to judge and to act. Intellectual work requires a different kind of labor. In one sense, of course, all arguments are political when you’re thinking about such controversies, but I don’t start with a political position and then see how the argument unfolds. For example, during the Danish cartoon controversy, I was puzzled by the fact that the kind of injury expressed by ordinary pious Muslims did not find any voice in the polemical debates in either the Islamic or the European press. I tried to make sense of this silence, and it led me to suggest that the kind of religiosity expressed by most Muslims in response to the Danish cartoons was incommensurable with the language of rights, litigation, and boycotts that came to dominate the debate. And it was precisely because this religiosity could not be contained within the language of identity politics that it found no expression in the public debate. Needless to say, this argument did not win me friends in either one of the two camps.

NS: Is there something in particular that you think the West needs to know about the Muslim world, or about Islam, or about Muslim minorities? Is there some message that, above all, you think needs to be definitively stated—or is the questioning enough?

SM: I don’t think questioning is enough. But I do think that there is a desperate need to challenge the current way of framing things, as a civilizational stand-off between Islam and the West. This way of thinking is not only dangerous but also unsustainable in the long run. Those of us interested in stepping out of this overheated polemic have a responsibility to make people realize why this framing is inadequate and problematic, even dangerous. Despite important differences among political ideologies and religious traditions, I believe that we have the historical language and analytical skills to think differently, to imagine a future in which Islam and the West are not locked in some zero-sum game. To take a simple example, when I speak of the kind of relationship that many pious Muslims feel toward Muhammad, which was partly at stake in the Danish cartoon controversy, surely it is recognizable to scholars of Christianity (with its long and rich tradition of the Eucharist and Corpus Christi), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and late Antiquity? Surely we can think together about different conceptions of religiosity and what space they have in, and what effects they may have on, our political present without descending into the abyss of civilizational incomprehension and incommensurability?

NS: What about the concerns of Western feminists in particular? There sometimes seems to be especially little hope for common ground on women’s issues.

SM: Once again, feminism has a rich and varied tradition of thought and praxis. The current tilt toward painting an essentialized picture of feminism and Islam—as quintessential opposites—is inadequate to the complexity of both traditions. There are no doubt historical reasons for the great suspicion with which some Islamic symbols are treated in Euro-American societies, but I would hope that thoughtful people would be able to think through this history critically. Take the example of the current obsession with the veil in Europe: colonial discourse had long cast the veil as the essential symbol of the civilizational inferiority of the East, and of Islam in particular. It is not a surprise, therefore, that anti-colonial movements took up this symbol precisely to reverse the colonial judgment while embracing the practice—in the process, reifying the importance of the veil to Muslim identity. The current discourse is, in a sense, a re-enactment of this history. What is new, however, is the way in which the European and Turkish bans on the veil have been held up in the name of secularism, wherein secularism is equated with the principle of gender equality. For example, the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights that uphold the headscarf ban in Turkey and France rest on two interrelated claims: one, that the veil is a symbol of women’s oppression; and two, that insomuch as secularism is for gender equality France and Turkey, as secular states, cannot condone this practice. But, historically, secularism has hardly been on the side of women’s rights—otherwise French women would have been granted the vote long before 1945, and the separation of church and state would have yielded gender equality in the nineteenth century, when European states adopted this principle. Secularism and women’s rights have always had a troubled relationship, which is important to think about from within the history of feminism. This does not mean, of course, that one has to denounce secularism and embrace religion or vice versa. One has to be able to see the mutual imbrication of religion and secularism to even diagnose the problem correctly. Otherwise, I think we run the risk of dulling the critical edge of feminist thought.

NS: I found your essay about the mobilization of feminists behind the invasion of Afghanistan very powerful. I remember being so struck at that time by how American women were identifying with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which made some eager to support our military adventures over there. But is there a better way to ally ourselves with women in the Muslim world?

SM: The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.  We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

“I made a video asking people not to be scared, asking how long will we live in fear, that we should go to the streets and that there are plenty of men in Egypt, and we can protect ourselves from Mubarak’s thugs. Now I’m getting many threatening calls from Mubarak’s people ordering me not to leave my home, and saying that if I do I will be killed along with my family.”
——Asma Mahfouz, to BBC Arabic Television

A young Egyptian woman willing to put her life on the line used Facebook to issue this clarion call to her compatriots. On February 25, they went out by the thousands. During the following days, their numbers swelled into the millions. The Revolution of 2011 had started. On February 11, the eighteenth day of the Revolution, President Mubarak was ousted and the stage of building a new Egypt began.

The youth-driven Revolution of 2011, with its call for freedom and justice, is inscribing a new feminism, with a fresh lexicon and syntax. The new feminism—which does not go by the name “feminism,” but by its spirit—redefines the words freedom, liberation, justice, dignity, democracy, equality, and rights. It creates its own syntax, which, the dictionary reminds us, is the “arrangement of words to show their connection and relation.” It announces itself from deep within the Revolution, which aims to resurrect the fundamental principles and rights of citizens and human beings that were wantonly trampled down by the Mubarak government. The new feminism might be called, simply, “freedom, equality and justice for all.” It asserts itself in actions, straight-forwardness, and courage.

Over the course of eighteen days, Midan Tahrir, or Liberation Square, the geographical center of Cairo and the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, became a swirling kaleidoscope of images of freedom, equality, and justice in the making, with the whole world looking on. Saturday, February 12, the first day Egypt woke up without its harsh dictator of thirty years at the helm of a repressive regime, was the first day in the in the new life of this ancient country. Young women and men who had gone out to sweep away the tyrannies, inequalities, and injustices could be seen on this day with brooms in hand, now literally sweeping the streets clean. With bottles of detergent and brushes in hand, they wiped the walls around the square. They even scoured the pedestals of the lion statues at the Kasr al-Nil Bridge, where the “Battle of the Bridge” erupted on the first Friday of the Revolution, and where the police hurled tear gas at the peaceful demonstrators making their way to Midan Tahrir to practice democracy their own way, feet—not boots—on the ground, when all other avenues were blocked.

Embedded feminism

In the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the youth were joined by citizens of all ages—workers, students, professionals, women and men, Muslims and Christians. It was a populist movement mobilized in cyberspace and through local networks, and acted out on national soil. The new feminism is a feminism embedded in revolution. It is so fused with the revolution that to use the term “feminism” seems redundant or superfluous, even anachronistic, and we have just observed that the revolutionary actors themselves do not use it. Yet feminism possesses conceptual and explanatory power, and so we employ it analytically. At the core of feminism is a call for the practice of equality and justice for women, who as a group have suffered historically from systemic inequality and injustice. Women in different parts of the world—Egypt among them—have on many occasions organized to take for themselves the rights that have been withheld from them. They have done so both in their own feminist movements and within broader social and political movements and configurations. Early in the last century, for instance, Egyptian women formed the Egyptian Feminist Union, to fight for their rights as women while they worked simultaneously within the national liberation movement. In so doing, they set a precedent for multi-level activism. Egyptian feminists understood from the beginning that the equality and justice that they sought for women was of a piece with equality and justice for all.

Over the years, activists in Egypt seeking human rights, inclusive of women’s rights and social justice, pushed strenuously for reform. They tried to use classical methods—the vote, the press, television and radio, and public demonstrations—but elections were rigged, the media controlled, and public demonstrations met with violence, which for women often included sexual harassment, molestation, and rape. Reform movements typically involve campaigns focused on particular causes, including causes specific to women. In Egypt, as attempts to reform the existing political system were repeatedly thwarted—that is, brutally rendered impossible—by the state, revolution became the only way, and revolution demands a major overhaul of the political and social order, indeed, that the old system be swept away altogether.

In the twenty-first century, the tools of revolution have drastically changed, while the methods of state repression, as we have seen recently and vividly in Egypt, remain archaic and crude. The regime’s methods stemmed from the arrogant belief that an autocratic regime, with its vast power and violent means of repression, is unassailable. Autocrats take for granted that constitutions can be rewritten at will from on high to extend state power and impose their own rules for succession; that sham elections can produce compliant parliaments; and that the military, policy, intelligence, and security apparatuses possess limitless authority to muzzle citizens.

It is Egypt’s youth who have mastered the tools of the twenty-first century—information and communications technologies—and who are at home in cyberspace, a “country” in which they are free even while they remain shackled in their homeland. It is the youth who possess a belief in ideals, a vision, and a healthy impatience. Navigating the Internet, and with careful coordination on the ground, undaunted they mounted a peaceful assault upon the unmitigated, suffocating power of tyranny and oppression that had left no segment of society untouched.

Cairo’s Midan Tahrir has been called the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, whose topography extends to Alexandria, Suez, and cities and towns throughout the country, including even the oasis city of Kharga, deep in the Western Desert of Upper Egypt. The choreography of shouting, gesticulating, dancing young men and women, joined by Egyptians of all ages, was caught on live feeds and transmitted instantaneously across the globe. It was captured on film and videos and recorded on cell phones and digital cameras by demonstrators and reporters. This rich visual and oral album displays a gender pastiche of women and men side by side—clusters upon clusters of women amid seas of men, women and men shoulder to shoulder, and families with small children. The demonstrators and their supporters all craved the same thing: an end to the tyranny of the dictator and his corrupt regime, and the emergence of a free society with equal opportunity for all. They called for an end to the inequities of gender, class, and connection that formed the tight and insidious web of patriarchal hierarchy.

The downfall of authoritarianism and the building of a new egalitarian and just order

With the dismantling of the three-decade-old autocracy of Mubarak—itself a continuation of the previous autocracy—and the hierarchies that spawned spirals of injustice as people’s basic rights were hijacked, the people of Egypt, led by its youth, grabbed for themselves the chance to rebuild.

The builders of the new Egypt want nothing less than full equality in law and practice, justice, and dignity for all. As we speak, a special committee is drafting a new constitution (to supplant the previous one that was arbitrarily altered by Mubarak). Laws that undermine the equality, justice, and dignity of the citizens of Egypt must either go or be drastically overhauled. The Muslim Personal Status Code (also referred to as family law) structures a model of the family based on a patriarchal understanding of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This law, by formalizing male authority and power, shores up a system of gender inequality. The husband is cast as the head of family, with the attendant privileges and prerogatives, along with obligations of protection and support, while the wife, as subordinate, owes obedience to her husband and must render services in return for his support and protection, whether she wants it or not.

Feminists, as well as other reformers, have tried since the early twentieth century to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code. Over the years, they obtained only minor adjustments in the law, which did not disturb the patriarchal family model. A common excuse for this failure to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code is that it is religious law, part of the shar ‘iah, and therefore sacred and immutable. The confusion of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, which is man-made, with the shar ‘iah, which is the path to a virtuous life, ascertained from the Qur’an, has been a potent deterrent of change. However, it is possible to enact an egalitarian family law based in Islamic jurisprudence, as Morocco did in 2004, with the overhaul of the Mudawanna that recast husband and wife as equal heads of the family. It is also theoretically possible, if politically difficult, to enact into law a secular egalitarian model of the family that would reflect the spirit of religion and its ideals of equality, justice, and dignity, the ulemah, or religious scholars, in Turkey say their country’s secular family law does.

With the overthrow of the authoritarian state in Egypt and the dismantling of the buttresses of its power, and with legal reform already underway with the creation of the committee tasked with drafting a new constitution, equality and justice in law and practice now have a renewed chance at realization. The harsh inequities that authoritarianism enforces were there for all to see, in their starkest, most extreme form, in the practices of the regime that the youth eventually took down. Will the youth now be willing to accept patriarchal authoritarianism sustained by the old family law, a law so out of sync with contemporary social realities—with their own realities? It is very hard to see by what logic they could do so. Freedom, equality, and justice cannot be reserved for some only. For the youth, female and male, who raised this revolution, freedom, equality, and justice are surely non-negotiable, and dignity, the order of the day. This is the essence of the new feminism, call it what you will.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life.—ed.

*  *  *

NS: Tell me about what brought you to the study of Oprah. Was it fandom, or irony, or what?

KL: Undergraduate irony. As a student at the University of Chicago, my dorm had a communal room with a television, and Oprah repeated late at night on the local ABC affiliate. I would be sitting with a group of friends who were, because of the Common Core, all reading the same high-brow social and political theory and applying it colloquially to The Real World: Boston. Few were as captivated as I was by Oprah; I think it reminded them of their moms. But to me it was an intellectual playground, hitting on everything I was reading while also queering, contesting, and troubling those readings. Then, in graduate school, it became a dorky parlor trick for me to connect Oprah with almost any aspect of U.S. religious history, from Wovoka to Carrie Nation. As I began to teach courses in religious studies, I found she was a great way to test theories of myth, ideology, and ritual for students new to religious studies abstractions. So, since the early nineties, I haven’t been able to get her out of my head—she seemed pervasive in the world and persuasively central to any given narrative of the West.

NS: Speaking of ritual, of what did working on the book consist? Was it a lot of TV-watching?

KL: Starting in 1998, I began to take notes when I would watch. I have those notebooks, and they’re comic exercises in scientism. I started doing a very ordered appraisal, using different-colored pens for different kinds of claims that were being made. If she said “This I believe,” or “What I know for sure,” those would be in purple. If she complimented someone, I would put that in a different color. If she interpreted a text or something that was said, I would put it in another color. It was a rudimentary study of her language, as well as of the ways that other women she spoke with became converted to her language games. I have five solid years of notes for every episode and a ten-year archive of topics that the show covered, with key transcripts for the episodes that I thought were particularly emblematic. Meanwhile, I was reading along with the book-club, buying her magazine, and consuming her celebrity scat from tabloids.

NS: What is it about how American religious history is studied now that has left Oprah not well-enough understood?

KL: I would say that the “how” of what we study is less problematic than the way we cordon our topics, which is very much an inheritance of our role as seminary church historians. I want to see more books written about objects that seem unlikely for religious studies, such as those seemingly in the purview of pop culture, but also those from economic and political arenas. Moreover, I think our disposition toward our subjects is often too tender for our own good. If, on the one side, we’ve been formed by our seminarian genealogies, on the other, we inherit an abused mentality, one that flinches constantly at the possibility that elsewhere in the humanist ranks we’re being mocked for proximity to the religious subject. And so we appear, I think, often too defensive of our topics, believing they need caretaking before exposure to the imagined Marxist menace. So, if there is a critical edge to the book, it is to goad us to be less worried about explaining our subjects to their cultured despisers, and instead to pursue the mediations of their belief systems, the multiple functions of their ritual reiterations, and the social systems to which they reply and in which they participate.

NS: You made Oprah’s message and its delivery your focus. But what about the believers—in this case, the viewers?

KL: I briefly toyed with the idea of doing an ethnography, where I would look at how women consume and conceive of Oprah, particularly in the context of their religious lives. I thought I would then explore the sort of complicated descriptions of agency offered by Marie Griffith in God’s Daughters or Saba Mahmood in Politics of Piety.  I decided not to do that, though not because there aren’t a lot interesting things one could learn from that kind of study. Ultimately I decided that the interesting thing about Oprah was that such ethnography of her consumers was incorporated into the commodity itself, as lay piety (its failures and successes) is the central subject of her exhibitions. What I thought was intellectually and politically needed was a concise examination of her precisions and consistencies, of how Oprah explained a normal for her audience despite their possible idiosyncrasies. In an era in which mass mediation is the primary format for encounter with difference and experience, knowing what that mediation mediates seemed pretty exigent to me.

NS: As an American woman, do you feel some responsibility to confront what Oprah represents, in the form of an active, engaged social critique?

KL: It is incredibly important that we—women, men, believers, heathens, citizens—think, and think critically, about the female complaint, especially as it takes this specific form in the public sphere. Oprah is not just Oprah—she represents what has come to be a naturalized logic for women’s suffering. I would be lying if I didn’t say that writing this book was, for me, an act of feminism. But I would say that it is more important to me that it be understood as an act of criticism connected to the deep tissue of our national political and economic imaginary. So, yes, this is an act of social critique. For as much as the solo striving hungry female is the object here, it is the silence of her sociality—all the while making commodity of her social receipt and struggle—that disturbs me. On her message boards, everyone testifies, but they don’t form social communities, social insurrection, or social protest. The social is incredibly absent from Oprah, even as she praises the idea of girlfriends, of groups, of clubs. The social is a rhetorical formulation leaving women exposed in their extremity without any public held accountable.

NS: Oprah’s broadcast TV show is ending and now she is going on to her own cable network. Is this another symptom of fragmentation and over-individualization?

KL: One thing that’s said about Oprah is that she uses media so well. No, I don’t think that’s quite enough—she invents the medium. Now she is conjuring the very network that will represent, I would argue, the future of the way networks will be construed. Even as her physical self slowly evaporates, she becomes increasingly an icon, a brand. One Oprah will fade, and another Oprah will strengthen and redact, with her physicality dissolving to an eventual brand “O.” That kind of programming for the self—which seems highly particularized, but of course prescribes its own particularization—is the genius of Oprah Winfrey.

NS: Something that’s striking in your book is her insistence, always, that she’s going by her gut, that she’s not letting herself be bought, and that she’s putting herself right there in front of you. But if she becomes a brand and a caricature while she’s still alive, how much control could she actually have?

KL: Her first-person is always authentic in its anxieties and authoritative in its total control. Despite the fact that she hasn’t gone to business school, she leads one of the most successful companies in modern America and is the first black billionaire. All of these things testify to acumen, but her answer is, “There is no calculation. There is no logic. There is no plan.” It’s a very typical maneuver of the neoliberal moment, eschewing the monolith you maintain with smiling billboard nonchalance. She is inventing systems for women’s lives constantly: schedules, to-do lists, and prescriptions for everything from how you order your bedside table to your backpack to your child’s lunchbox. All the while, she’s chanting, “Girls, I’ll guide you to your total originality.” There are episodes where she goes behind the scenes, where she shows us Oprah in her natural state, without makeup. It’s tacitly revealing the marionette strings of her production, suggesting she’s all-access-to-you, but what access do you have to that natural state being broadcast? Cost is only one of the barriers, as she holds up her specific racial self, gendered self, psychological self as the only one who can really be Oprah.

NS: Do you think that when she moves to cable, among the Rachel Maddows and Bill O’Reillys, she might become more overtly political?

KL: No, I don’t. Barack Obama has had to move away from the vague generalities of campaigning, but Oprah never has to make those compromises; that’s why she never seeks political office. Notice Sarah Palin has finally come on Oprah’s show—and when? When Palin begins working for Fox News, adopting the very media gambit in which Oprah herself participates. She becomes acceptable once she too is forced to become formatted (however polemically still) for the masses. In her interview with Palin, Oprah definitely put Sarah through the ringer, but she gave her plenty of time to restate her memoir, to become irreducible and easy-to-consume—“Ladies, we all know her, the Working Mother.” When Palin comes on the show now, they can talk about hair and shoes and kids. Our practices of consumption are a universal form that allows us to discover other things we share. We love children. We want peace for mankind. We’d prefer if people didn’t starve. These values don’t have a particular party orientation, for Oprah would not allow herself to become exclusive to any ethnic or political marker. She speaks for women and children, which for her is a language of peace that should break down congressional impasses.

NS: We’re certainly in a time of congressional impasses. The president is calling for strength and pragmatism. Is the spirit of Oprah’s politics, which catapulted Obama during the campaign, able to stick with him? Does she offer a viable politics for passing health-care reform? Or does she throw up her hands and leave that business—I hate to say it—to the men?

KL: I would probably press back and say, who in the sphere of popular culture—who with her mass appeal and consumption—is, actually, politically consequential? Characters like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are in some ways allowed more extremity, more particularity, but they too become caricatures in that particularity, and thus again some sort of generic disenfranchised populist. These are two different forms of gargoyle, and neither one is more or less misshapen than the other. If the question is whether or not reformist politics are still best purveyed by a certain form of male embodiment—probably, but that doesn’t mean that women can’t ascend to it. Indeed, Oprah is a political formatting some women use—Sarah Palin is an Oprah kind of woman in a lot of ways. If the question is sustainability, Oprah’s politics are sustainable precisely because they aren’t contingent upon any legislation. They rest upon the discursive experience of pain and difficulty. Palin’s rallying cry as she enters the public sphere is, “I am a mother who made hard choices, I didn’t abort my child.” Hillary Clinton—less of an Oprah woman, but one corrected over time to become one—rides upon the coattails of marital misery. As long as the success of women in the public sphere depends on that narrative of personal discomfort, Oprah continues to control the game.

NS: Recently there has been a flurry of polemics fixing blame on the prosperity gospel and positive thinking in American culture for the financial crisis and much else, like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided and Hannah Rosin’s denunciation of prosperity preachers in The Atlantic. Do you locate Oprah in that milieu? Do you think the kind of neoliberalism she preaches is basically delusive, even dangerous?

KL: Oprah is a passionate advocate for a kind of prosperity gospel, insofar as she believes in a correlative relationship between one’s disposition and one’s materiality. However, to conflate her with the current market crisis would be to oversimplify the knotty doctrines of her empire. Her advice is ruthlessly pragmatic, even if it’s wrapped in mystical dreams of the miraculous Secret. Suze Orman appears in every other episode about money, a wry voice about balancing a budget, warding off credit card compulsion, and sensible planning for the independent woman. The liberation of women from economic ties that bind is an incredibly important message of the show and, I would argue, for the broader discourse of liberal economics. Women in particular are struggling over the issue of consumption, which was a key part of the economic crisis. But the brilliant wickedness of Oprah is that she’s simultaneously telling you how to save and how to spend. At the end of an episode, once a couple has gotten control over their credit cards, there has to be some way of finding a reward for them. Peace of mind is one thing, but wow, much better if they get to take a road trip with their new Hyundai! Whatever the counsel is, the glamorous and the visual are the conclusion, creating a tableau of success even amidst practices of austerity.

NS: So all else becomes subservient to the commercial?

KL: Her reply would be that, no, all else becomes subservient to the spirit. The first question everyone should ask is, “What is my spirit telling me to do?” How do you tap into your spirit? How do you re-enchant your spirit after being pulled upon, tugged upon, by the false pragmatism of men, family, work? The replies to that are frequently flattered by the commercial, but not solely comprised of it.

NS: And religion? Is she “spiritual but not religious”?

KL: Oprah is a hearty critic of religion, and her criticisms of religion echo a lot of people who self-identify as “spiritual but not religious.” She worries in particular about all the ways women are structured and institutionalized, religious and otherwise. Against such straps, she insists on “spirit” as some liberation from those strictures. I think, in the end, that my book is in part a study of the commercial contours of that sort of discourse—for Winfrey and, I argue, much of American religion. In the language of spiritual liberation I think a lot of other prison houses are encoded. “Spirit” silences almost every other kind of structural thinking. Not just religious thought, but also political, sociological, racial, and gendered thinking. For Oprah’s critics, she often comes across as this nouveau-riche spiritual mountebank: the endless decadence, the soft pillows, the candles, the overwhelming brocade. But what I’m more interested in is why this soft place?

NS: Your prose reads as scholarship inflected with rhapsody, as if you’re acting out—or even experiencing—the effect of Oprah. Does rhapsody count as scholarship?

KL: For me, the scholars that have been the most exhilarating and maddening have been these who were absorbed enough by their material to communicate its logic to the reader with an equal commitment to discipline and affective disquiet. I think, here, of Lauren Berlant’s astonishing trilogy on national sentimentality; of Robert Orsi’s intimate articulations of Catholic piety; and of the fiction and nonfiction of David Foster Wallace. While I could speak academically about a lot of academics, on the subject of Wallace I’ll probably quickly become obsequious. Suffice it to say that I think the best humanism pursues some version of what he accomplished in his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. So, to answer your question, I think rhapsody—passion—is something obsessively detailed, careful, and devotedly disturbing. If rhapsody is another way to describe the orgiastic demographer, then yes, I think it is scholarship, and I’m signed on. I will always cajole students to map their own objectivity as an important conjure, and to find ways to invite their imagined readers into the real, systematic, trickster-work of knowledge production.

NS: What would Oprah think of your book?

KL: This is not the sort of book she reads—or, rather, this is not the sort of book that the product Oprah endorses—since it neither prescribes a better reality nor posits an alternative reality to which you could escape.  If she and I were talking, though, the first thing she’d want to know is how this book fit into the first-person journey of my life. Then I’d find myself quickly formatted into her production as a signifying woman of one sort or another. This is her real legacy. After Oprah, what first-person iteration is not a commodity?

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.

*  *  *

NS: Can you tell me about how you first got involved in peacebuilding?

ML: Living amidst the conflict in Mindanao, if you’re concerned about changing the situation at all, peacebuilding almost automatically becomes a part of your mission. I started early in my university days with student activism work, using music and other forms of cultural outreach. During that time, the People Power Revolution was going on, and I wanted to explore the ways that I, as a student, could take part in it. I became involved in a church-based organization called Citizens’ Council for Justice and Peace, where the focus was on human rights education. Right after college, I joined the organization in order to do justice education with urban poor communities in Davao City. Then, because my degree is in agriculture, I tried to work with a government program assisting farmers in southern Mindanao. But I found that my passion drew me more toward non-governmental organizations, and so I joined Catholic Relief Services after that. My religious commitment and my professional life dovetailed and became integrated at CRS.

NS: How much does CRS, which is mainly an aid organization, see peacebuilding as a part of its purpose?

ML: When I began at Catholic Relief Services in 1991, our focus was on development. I worked on agriculture and enterprise development programs. In 1996 CRS decided to establish a peace and reconciliation program to help support the peace agreement signed between the Philippine government and the Moro National Liberation Front. I was very happy about this change in the organization, so I transferred from development to peacebuilding in 1997.

NS: How does CRS approach its peacebuilding work in Mindanao?

ML: We understand our purpose mainly in terms of bridge-building. We’re fostering relationships that, if conflict arises, will offer an alternative mechanism to fighting. This begins with governance at the local level, but we also keep in mind the larger peace process in the region. On the one hand, we help local governments implement the national government’s peace program, which they’re mandated to do anyway. On the other, we assist grassroots organizations in setting up and strengthening conflict-resolution mechanisms. As we understand it, the conflict in Mindanao is not just one between the government and rebel groups—there are also issues at a more local level, such as clan feuds over land and other resources. We try to address these small-scale disputes while, at the same time, helping to resolve problems facing the country as a whole.

NS: What are some examples of particular programs you have been involved in implementing?

ML: The current focus of our programs is making sure that village-level development plans account for the concerns of the most vulnerable groups in the community, which often include Muslims, indigenous people, women, and youth. For example, the indigenous groups don’t have a revolutionary front, so they are not as well-organized as the Muslims or the Christians. We’re helping to create a network of different indigenous organizations that will be strong enough to make their voices heard. We’re also working to promote peace education in schools and madrasahs, as well as in the mass media, in order to help make the peace process more a part of mainstream culture.

NS: And how do you measure success—or progress, at least?

ML: When we begin a particular initiative, one measure of success is whether it can actually sustain itself and grow. The indigenous peoples’ network that I was talking about started with small-level, core-group meetings. A number of indigenous leaders had brought up the concern that it was very hard for them to be heard in peace negotiations with the government and, for some of them, with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. We began setting up meetings and doing some consultations, and now it has become a network of its own. Our strategy is to use small activities as catalysts for larger ones. When tensions flared up between Muslims, Christians, and indigenous peoples about the Memorandum of Agreement in 2008, we were actually able to contain some of the violence, and that was only because of years and years spent nurturing relationships at the grassroots level.

NS: So, a little well-placed effort can go a long way?

ML: Yes. Part of what we do is nurturing “peace champions” in certain sectors. It was very hard at first to engage the military in the peace process in Mindanao, for instance. But we had an international peace training program, and in 2005 we invited a military official to attend. Soon, that official became an advocate for the peace process within the military structure. Because we are a small organization, we realize that we can’t instantly transform the whole system in Mindanao, or even the Philippines. But if our approach is to strategically target individuals in particular communities, we can help influence the system as a whole.

NS: Can it become problematic, especially in the eyes of rebel groups, that you’re helping to carry out the national government’s peace program? How can the government come to the table and call for peace without being perceived by some as wanting a peace that is unjust?

ML: We cannot build a sustainable peace if the critical stakeholders aren’t part of the process, and the government is a critical stakeholder. Of course, we have to maintain credibility among the various other stakeholders, which can be difficult. We’re not naïve about the unequal power relations among them. There are times when we need to act as advocates for particular vulnerable groups, as we have for the indigenous; if a vulnerable group is going to engage in negotiation or dialogue, they need to have the necessary preparation to do it.

NS: By the same token, does being a specifically Catholic organization make it difficult to work with other religious communities?

ML: In years past, we had real difficulties collaborating with Muslim communities because of our name. We had to reach out and build relationships with them to show we didn’t intend to convert anybody and that we only wanted to be a partner in the peace process. Over the years, we have been able to win their trust. We began with only a few Muslim partners, and then they became our spokespersons. Now, if we enter a Muslim community, it’s not just us; we do it together with a Muslim organization. We never enter any community without a local partner. This puts on display the kind of collaboration that we want to encourage. As we work with one group of people, we try to help teach them how to work with others.

NS: Is there strong support for what you’re doing within local Catholic communities?

ML: Because of the longstanding conflict in Mindanao, we have to foster this same kind of openness among Catholics as well. We’re continuing to do interreligious dialogue, but now we’re actually focusing more exclusively on bringing fellow Catholics into the peacebuilding process—exclusively, that is, so they’ll become more inclusive.

NS: Have there been secular organizations involved—organizations that aren’t affiliated with particular religious groups? Or do you think that peacebuilding can only succeed through efforts grounded in religious communities?

ML: The conflict in Mindanao is not a religious conflict as such, but it certainly has a religious component, and religious identity is very important for all the participants. But secular organizations might play more of a role in peacebuilding in other contexts. Take, for example, the communist insurgency elsewhere in the Philippines, which I’m also involved in helping to resolve; that conflict is founded in a grievance against the state, and the issues are very secular. But even in that case, religious leaders are taking part as well.

NS: When you say that this is not a religious conflict, what does that mean, exactly? How do you know it’s not, especially if the divisions are drawn along lines of religious identity?

ML: It’s not just religious identity, but ethnic identity also. When we think about the conflict in Mindanao, it’s important to look back to the history of colonization and how it affected the political, economic, and social challenges we’re now dealing with. It led to the marginalization of Muslims and indigenous people, not only at the political and economic level, but also in terms of demography. Religious or ethnic identity becomes a marker, but other factors are really responsible for the conflict.

NS: How has your time at Notre Dame affected how you think about and carry out your work?

ML: Well, I’ve only been back for three months—

NS: So you’re still getting over the jet lag?

ML: Yes, getting over the jet lag and trying to transition back into the CRS peace and reconciliation program. I was away for two years, but it also feels like I haven’t been gone very long. People in Mindanao are facing the same issues now as when I left in 2008. We did just elect a new president, actually, and there are high hopes for him. But part of what I have brought back is the desire to share with my colleagues and our partners the benefits of reflection. For the past decade or more, it has always been work, work, work, and practice, practice, practice. There isn’t enough value placed on stepping back, reflecting, and trying to gather lessons from what we’ve been through. I’d like to do this more intentionally and systematically than it has been done in the past.

NS: Did you feel that what you were studying at Notre Dame actually spoke to the situation on the ground where you are?

ML: Being exposed to various theories of peacebuilding certainly expanded my range of vision. As a practitioner I have always relied on a bottom-up theory of change. But, in the end, there are other ways of doing it too. Getting to know, for example, democratic-peace theory, which is a more high-level, elite approach, has helped me understand how those of us working on the ground can address elites. The experience, however, strengthened my own conviction that I am where I belong. On a personal level, the time at Notre Dame also helped reinforce my sense of identity as a woman and as a Christian.

NS: What does that awareness of identity help you bring to your work?

ML: Being conscious of one’s identity can make one stronger and more effective. I’m convinced that I, as a peacebuilder, need to touch the hearts and minds of people I work with, and part of doing that is being able to connect with who I am. When you do this kind of work, you’re in it for the long haul. You can’t just stop one day and change jobs. There is a lot at stake, and the whole person needs to become involved in order to endure disappointments and keep working for success. Self-awareness also helps me understand the power relations I’m dealing with. As a woman, my gender always becomes a constraint because of how my culture tends to view the role of women. Reflecting on that helps me to understand the constraints others feel.

NS: Are there many women involved in this kind of work in Mindanao?

ML: Many women are involved, but unfortunately not as visibly as men in the formal leadership structures. Women do a lot of work in terms of preparation and facilitation, but it is mostly invisible. The actual peace negotiations are done publicly and formally, and women don’t necessarily have access to them. Part of my own advocacy is to help give women more of a voice in the public processes. My research in the master’s program focused on the role of women in peacebuilding—both visible and invisible.

NS: Are there ways in which being a woman enables you to operate in a way in which, perhaps, a man in your position couldn’t?

ML: I think it does give me a distinct way of looking at things compared to others. I always work for complementation, which comes partly from my standpoint as a woman. Integration comes naturally to me. I’m always asking myself how I can connect people and groups, activities and initiatives. That, I think, has been my contribution as a peacebuilder and as a woman.

At a March 2010 conference, “Gendering the Divide: Conflicts at the Border of Religion and the Secular” (sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict), I had the great fortune to speak on a panel with groundbreaking cultural historian and gender theorist Joan Wallach Scott, the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. The conference was the fourth and final meeting of ASU’s Ford Foundation-funded project on “Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy

Scott is the author of numerous influential essays and books, including the widely cited 1986 essay “Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” as well as The Glassworkers of Carmaux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth Century City, Women, Work and Family (with Louise Tilly), Parité!: Sexual Difference and the Crisis of French Universalism, and, most recently, the timely and highly praised The Politics of the Veil. Scott’s books are regularly reprinted, and they have been translated into several languages, including French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Korean.

There will be a panel on The Politics of the Veil at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta, featuring commentaries by Carl Ernst and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, along with myself, as well as a response from Scott.

An indefatigable advocate for and defender of academic freedom of expression and speech, Scott served on the American Association of University Professors’ “Committee A” on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 1993-2006, which she chaired from 1999-2005. As Chair of “Committee A,” Scott helped to produce the 2003 report “Academic Freedom and National Security in a Time of Crisis.”

At the conclusion of the ASU conference, Scott and I met for the following wide-ranging conversation, part of the SSRC’s Rites and Responsibilities dialogue forum.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

* * *

DKK: Joan, because people know you as many things—as a theorist of gender, as a cultural historian, as an inveterate advocate for academic freedom and defender of the rights of the professoriate—I’m curious how you would describe yourself to someone who had never met Joan Scott.

JWS: That’s really hard . . . I don’t know. I would say I was a historian . . .  Somebody who—despite the fact that I’m at the Institute for Advanced Study—likes to teach, and has tried to keep teaching graduate students, even in this position where I’m not required to do so. I guess I think of myself as somebody who’s critically engaged with the work that I do, and whose work—even before I read Foucault and learned about the history of the present—always had a political dimension to it. There was always a reason, beyond just curiosity, that drove the work that I did.

DKK: Well, let’s pursue the question of what the work is. How would you describe the work that you do? Not just the topics, but the approaches you take, the methods you have adopted.

JWS: I would call it critical. I think we now have a term—more and more people are using it—which is “critical history.”

DKK: Yes.

JWS: And that suggests that the point of doing the history is to critically engage some conceptual or theoretical or taken-for-granted notion about why things are the way they are, and how they got to be the way they are. “Critical historian” is, in fact, what I call myself in a piece I did a couple of years ago in a volume edited by John Gillis and Jim Banner, which is called Becoming Historians. The University of Chicago Press published it. They asked twelve people to account for their lives! I called my chapter “Finding Critical History.” In it, I try to account for the way in which I came to do the sort of history that I think I do.

DKK: So that’s a really interesting question, about finding critical history. One of the curiosities I have about you concerns your influences. Who and what were critical formations for you? Not just ideas and texts, but the people who were formative for you: family, colleagues, students, and so on.

JWS: Right. Well, I talk about it a lot in that essay. First, I grew up in a political household. My father was a high school teacher in New York City, the president of the New York City Teachers’ Union in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He was called before various congressional committees, and he was among the first group of New York City schoolteachers to be fired in 1953, when I was twelve. So, you know, my life was defined by growing up as somebody in a kind of embattled family in the 1950s—”embattled” just vis-à-vis the political culture, not within the family itself. My mother was also a teacher, but she wasn’t ever fired. They were both history teachers—he, economics and history, and she, history.

DKK: So, from a young age you had an acute sense of what politically fraught conditions were like, but also of the significance of history.

JWS: Yes. Their bible was Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization. That was the way they taught their history. That was the history that we learned. And, you know, dinner table conversation was about politics and history and teaching, because both of them were dedicated teachers. But I think the reasons I became a historian have less to do with following in their footsteps than with the subsequent influence on me of teachers when I was in high school and college.

DKK: Wow.

JWS: But there was no question that I was going to teach, because teaching was the family profession.

DKK: Can you speak a bit more about that? How did they speak to you as a child?

JWS: About teaching?

DKK: Yes.

JWS: Well, my mother clearly loved to teach. She’d come home . . . it was the way she told stories about the kids she was teaching—about this one who was so smart but never did any work, and that one who asked these amazing questions. And my father was didactic!

(both laugh)

JWS: I mean, my father was a teacher. You know, you didn’t want to have to always be taught everything, and that was his mode, to always be teaching. So there was more of a kind of resistance to him and a kind of admiration for her. Teaching was not only about communicating things, not only “raising the young to become better than they otherwise might have been.” It was also—because it was history—about social change: there was some way or another in which communicating exciting ideas to young people was an investment in the future.

DKK: But in that context there was, first of all, the volatility of the situation around Left politics, and then, at the same time, there was the influence of, say, Dewey, on democracy and education. In other words, there was a concerted effort to say, “Education is in the service of democracy,” while, at the same time, there were events like your father’s firing.

JWS: Right, right.

DKK: Did you talk about that as a child?

JWS: No, we didn’t talk about it. But what went without saying . . . well, I actually have another article! It’s in that Louis Menand book on academic freedom, in which I say that from a very young age I heard the words “academic freedom” without fully knowing what they meant, because what my father always said when he was fired was that his academic freedom had been violated, that it had been lost. It was less the loss of his job than the loss of his academic freedom that was at the heart of his refusal to accept the punishment he got for refusing to cooperate with these investigating committees.

DKK: Did he ever get his job back? Or did he find that he could redeem himself as an educator?

JWS: Well, in different formats. For a while he worked for an educational filmstrip company, and so he got to teach in another way. And then, the last job he had was in some ways the most interesting: he was the administrator of a unit for the diagnosis and treatment of what are now called developmentally disabled kids. Then, it was “mentally retarded” kids. And he was doing that at the moment of de-institutionalization following the scandals around Willowbrook, when Geraldo Riviera was an investigative journalist, rather than a sensationalist journalist!

(both laugh)

JWS: And he was very active in those movements. I always thought that his political skills came to the fore around those kinds of things. He was somebody who worked very hard for the setting-up of group homes and all of that kind of stuff. There it was both the politics and his sense of commitment to kids—even though these were not kids whom he was teaching in quite the same way. Nonetheless, that was really exemplary and quite impressive.

DKK: You’ve maintained that co-incidence yourself between being a teacher and a scholar and an activist.

JWS: Yes, and that, I think, was the model. It was a model that somehow always made sense, and something that I always tried to do, or something that, without thinking about it consciously, I just did, as the fulfillment of the legacy of these parents who were doing both of those things at once too.

DKK: So, what are the forms, what are the expressions of that co-incidence for you, in terms of your teaching and your activism?

JWS: Well, for a long time, they were at odds. When I was an undergraduate in college—I went to Brandeis—I did my scholarly work and I did my politics, and I always felt divided. Schizophrenic is the wrong word, because I could do both, but I always felt that they were two separate things. Then I started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in 1962. William Appleman Williams was there; Studies on the Left was there. I found a world in which doing scholarship was of a piece with doing politics. I mean, we did anti-Vietnam War protests and Civil Rights activism. There was all of this political activity, but there were also people who were thinking about history in those terms as well. That was, I think, a hugely important influence for me—to be able to see that you could do the two together, and that history was relevant, not in the immediate sense of proving a political point, but in that there was the possibility of an engagement with history that could feed into politics or activism of one kind or another.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

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

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

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

On June 1st,President Barack Obama proclaimed June 2009 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month and called “upon the people of the United States to turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists.” If President Obama expected to be showered in lavender love in return for this proclamation, he was sorely disappointed. During June, grumbling about the Obama administration’s public stance on such issues as gays in the military, same-sex marriage, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) reached a crescendo. Candidate Obama had expressed his determination to overturn the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy and DOMA; now-President Obama is taking a decidedly more muted tack—in the name of pragmatism. At a White House reception for invited gay and lesbian leaders on June 30th, with wife Michelle prominently at his side, the President implicitly acknowledged the slow pace of change (critics might say the no-pace of change) and counseled patience: “I know that many in this room don’t believe progress has come fast enough, and I understand that. It’s not for me to tell you to be patient any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African-Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half-century ago. We’ve been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration.”

The timing of the reception was historically resonant, coming just two days after the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. “Stonewall” began on June 28, 1969, when patrons at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, upset by constant police harassment, fought back and resisted arrest. Their resistance is commonly set down as the beginning of the modern gay and lesbian liberation movement in the US. As numerous historians of lesbian and gay history have argued, this way of narrating lesbian and gay history leaves out of view the important activist efforts—of groups like the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis—that preceded the events at the Stonewall Inn. This is not a minor historical quibble: Stonewall as origin tale forgets that social change happens over time, sometimes over a long time. If this is what President Obama means when he counsels his gay and lesbian critics to be “patient,” then we are sympathetic to this long view of what it means to build and sustain a social movement. But it is not clear that this is what the President had in mind with his call for “patience.”

Instead, Obama was asking for time so that Congress could take the lead on gay issues like DADT and DOMA. Obama’s reticence to speak out for gay rights, let alone show leadership on them, is all the more glaring in light of his much-vaunted ability to redefine the terms of public debate on a number of other divisive issues. For example, his promotion of “abortion reduction” has been widely hailed for the way it eschews the polar oppositions “pro-choice” and “pro-life” to produce a new political center. This new political center has seemed to come at the cost of Obama’s retreat from his previous support—in the Senate and on the campaign trail—for the “Freedom of Choice Act.”  When it comes to sexual freedom, the center does not seem to hold much promise at all, neither for a broad array of reproductive rights nor for LGBT rights. What makes gender and sexuality, but especially homosexuality, such a stumbling block for this otherwise rhetorically and strategically nimble politician?  As Hendrik Hertzberg put the matter in a recent New Yorker column, “where gays are concerned [Obama's] fine-tuned ear for the emotional resonance of his actions has an alloy of tin.”

As we argue in a forthcoming article in Social Research, this strange hesitation is due less to some personal failing on Obama’s part than to the force of Christian secularism in US. How so?  Not only does it seem pragmatically difficult for the Obama administration to address an issue like gay marriage, which remains a rallying cry for religious conservatives even as it may be less so for many other Americans, Obama’s commitment to marriage as between “one man and one woman” is in line with both his stated personal religious commitment and his efforts to promote a new culture of responsibility—from corporate executives to unmarried fathers—as part of the answer to the country’s economic problems. This language of “responsibility” (variants of which he used fourteen times in his first address to Congress) is not itself directly religious. It is, however, deeply indebted to a Christian, and specifically Protestant, understanding of the individual’s role in society. This version of responsibility connects secularism to Christianity even for those who understand themselves to be fully secular, and it does so by using gender and sexuality as sites of “moral” suture between individuals and the state. Simultaneously, Christian secularism links some conservative religious constituencies to broader secular forces such as the economic neoliberalism of the last thirty years, the devastating effects of which Obama is so desperately trying to manage. The secular parts of this equation are crucial to recognize, because focusing on religion alone not only occludes the many religious people who are themselves gay or supporters of gay rights, it also perpetuates the idea that religion is “the” problem blocking gay rights and sexual freedom more generally.

This notion—that religion and sexuality are somehow in opposition—is one of the few beliefs shared by opponents and supporters of gay rights. Yet it has significant policy implications, particularly in recent moves to enact far-reaching “religious exemptions” as a condition of passing state laws permitting same-sex marriage. In New Hampshire, Governor John Lynch threatened to veto same-sex marriage unless state legislators also passed a bill framed as “protecting” religion and extending “religious liberty,” but that in practice exempts religious organizations and their employees from otherwise applicable state anti-discrimination laws. (Legal scholar Nan Hunter has predicted that the New Hampshire language could become a model for same-sex marriage laws nationally.)

In our 2003 book, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Freedom, we offer an extensive argument that religious freedom and sexual freedom are actually interdependent rather than oppositional. Unfortunately, the impact of “religious exemptions” like those included in the New Hampshire law is to codify a narrow version of religious freedom in which religious liberty and sexual freedom can only be seen as mutually exclusive. This is not just a loss for sexual freedom; it also significantly narrows the parameters of religious freedom offered by the US Constitution.

If there is a “religion problem” posed by gay marriage, it is not that some religious organizations might be “forced” to provide secular benefits to same-sex couples, such as healthcare or equal access to residential housing; it is rather the entanglement of the state with the business of any couple’s religious marriage. The problem here is that the state legitimates religious marriages, performed by members of the clergy, rather than only civil unions performed by representatives of the state, thus entangling, rather than separating, state and religious practice. When such entanglements are maintained in law, religious practice is not “protected” from the state any more than citizens are “protected” from the imposition of religious convictions they do not share. New Hampshire and other states could actually “protect” both religious practice and those who are not religious (or who are differently religious) by providing civil unions on the basis of equality and letting religious bodies provide for religious marriages. No secular benefits would then flow from religious marriage, and the secular benefits that follow on civil unions would be separated from religious debates over homosexuality.

This is not a matter of fine-tuning the President’s ear on gay issues. Instead, we call on him to take up a broad-ranging version of religious freedom as a means of reframing the entire debate over gay rights. Yes, of course Obama should repeal DADT—and suspend it immediately by executive order as is in his power. Of course he should move to repeal DOMA. But is this really the legacy of generations of activism for sexual freedom: gays in the military and marriage equality?  Or might sexual freedom implicate broader questions of social justice that exceed the frame of “gay identity,” per se?

In a recent issue of the Nation, Lisa Duggan highlighted Equality Utah’s proposal for an Adult Joint Support Declaration, which would allow a legal framework for caretaking—medical decision-making, health insurance benefit designation, and inheritance—among adults who are not necessarily related by sexual or romantic partnerships. Such a proposal separates secular benefits not just from marriage but from sexuality as well, further removing the current entanglement between state benefits and religious debate over sexual practice. As Duggan points out, such a measure could spark unexpected political alliances as well as expand the support for caretaking in our society well beyond the question of marriage or domestic partnership, getting, in her words, “the AARP on board to lobby for medical next of kin, tax and inheritance rights for ‘Golden Girls’ households, or attract libertarians who want to take the state out of the business of ‘recognizing’ sexual or romantic relationships entirely.”

This shift in framework—from gay rights to the basic ground of freedom and equality—would do much not only for gay people and for the Obama administration’s standing with the oft-invoked “gay community;” it could significantly alter how controversial issues are approached in American public life. We might move beyond the identity politics of rights-based movements, even as we preserve the ability to act on identity- and rights-based claims. Who knows, but we might even create the basis for one of the most promising possibilities invoked by the early Obama campaign: not just change we can believe in on given political issues, but the possibility of creating a “new majority” that goes beyond individual issues to larger questions and practices of liberty and justice for all. Achieving this new majority cannot happen if we trade off some people’s sexual freedom for some other people’s religious freedom (or vice versa).

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