Routing my response through a close reading of Bilgrami’s secularism thesis, I aim to achieve a few interrelated goals: first, by examining a few worldly and literary examples, to problematize the concept of religious homogeneity that constitutes the tacit alternative to pluralism in Bilgrami’s essay. Second, I try to suggest both that the world is more plural than we often take it to be and, more controversially, that in terms of religion, all societies manifest deep and significant internal pluralism—a form of diversity at least as important as inter-religious differences. Finally, I try to clarify the shift in Bilgrami’s thesis from individual subjects and objects—the “we” of Bilgrami’s proviso—to corporate and conceptual ones, a slippage symptomatic of the way Bilgrami describes the kinds of things religion and pluralism are.

“The ‘qualifier’ that (S) opens with,” writes Bilgrami, “is there to point out that secularism is a doctrine that may be relevant even in societies where there is no religious plurality” (emphasis added). We can imagine possible worlds (utopian and dystopian) that display the technical characteristics of capitalist global modernity, and might, in a superficial sense, qualify as being religiously homogeneous. The scholarly literature on ethnoreligious monocultures, a term adopted by sociologists from modern agribusiness, disputes their supposed advantages and disadvantages, but generally accepts their existence. Most examples of homogenous societies, however, are located problematically in the distant historical past (thus apt to be tinted by nostalgia, as are many yearnings for the apparent security of naïve belief), or amidst uncontacted, preliterate rainforest tribes—they are not societies in which “we” might be living, let alone ones that have written constitutions and “stated fundamental rights.” As with nostalgic yearnings for the pleasures of an enchanted world, we would do well to regard most claims about religious monocultures as the likely product of projective fantasy. As Bilgrami himself acknowledges, even ostensible religious monocultures will eventually fracture through internal sectarian conflict. History, meanwhile, makes it clear that in nations appearing (or claiming) to be religiously homogeneous, people are very likely living in tyranny or its recent shadow. As with total consensus on any major issue, a great deal of bloodshed or repression is the likely cause and cost of a religious monoculture.

One of the main problems with monocultures is that frequently invoked contemporary examples—like Japan, a nation whose high degree of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity is often remarked upon by Japanese and visitors alike—turn out to be more diverse upon closer inspection. Indigenous groups like the Ainu, whose histories resemble that of some Native American tribes, have long inhabited the islands of the Japanese archipelago. Readers of Haruki Murakami’s recent novel IQ84 may recall the extended account of Ainu village life on Sakhalin and Hokkaido the protagonist reads aloud in an interpolated tale from a Japanese translation of a story by Anton Chekhov, or his descriptions of Ainu villages on the northern Island of Hokkaido in A Wild Sheep Chase. Far more significant in numeric terms, the population of Korean Japanese, often called zai-nichi, constitute an undocumented minority numbering perhaps several million living as an underclass with problematic citizenship status, a reminder that Japanese ethnic homogeneity is part of the machinery of social hierarchy. Large non-citizen laborer populations of industrial and post-industrial nations clearly should be—but most often are not—recognized in data on ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity.

When James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus collects his teacher’s wages at the end of book two of Ulysses, he endures a lecture on Anglo-Irish history, fiscal responsibility, and the Jews from his headmaster, who chases after him to offer the following coup de grâce on the question of Irish religious homogeneity:

Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews [sic]. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?
He frowned sternly on the bright air.
—Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
—Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

Even if Deasy is convinced, erroneously of course, that Ireland is a uniformly Christian society, the long history of “the Troubles” should immediately emphasize the important denominational differences occluded by the category of “Christian.” As political scientist James Fearon emphasizes, “it rapidly becomes clear that one must make all manner of borderline-arbitrary decisions” in the process of ethnic categorization; “constructivist or instrumentalist arguments about the contingent, fuzzy, and situational character of ethnicity seem amply supported” by the character of taxonomic decisions. If ethnic and linguistic monocultures are always already problematic, claims about religious homogeneity are further complicated by the nature of religious belonging. Even in a hypothetical society where 100% of the population might name the same group when asked to state their religion—answering “Christian” or “Muslim” to the question marked “religion” in a Pew Research Center survey, for instance—individuals within the society will differ widely in the intensity, sites, and modalities that define their experience of religion.

Before I get deeper into what is at stake in the proviso through which Bilgrami seeks to limit secularism’s problematic claims to universality, I want to summarize a few of the key points along the fast-paced itinerary of his argument. As an effort to nail down the slippery terminology of the secular and its various cognates, Bilgrami’s essay represents an incisive intervention in the critical study of secularity. While Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age dismantles oppositional conceptions of religion and secularity, Bilgrami aims to restore secularism’s oppositionality but limit its applicability. He asserts that there are three “invariant forms” characteristic of secularism as a political stance: first, that secularism is a structural relationship or an attitude toward religion rather than a thing in itself; second, that secularism is a political doctrine about, but not against, religion; and third, that secularism is not a good in and of itself. For Bilgrami, secularism simply isn’t justifiable on rational grounds: “there are no…secure universal grounds on which one can base one’s argument for secularism.” What’s more, he warns, secularism “is only a good in some contexts, and therefore not always to be embraced even in temporal modernity.”

Each of these points is contentious in its own right; by defining secularism in opposition to religion (secularism has for him only “parasitic meaning”) Bilgrami charts a course that departs from recent trends in the field, represented by Talal Asad and Taylor, both of whom conceive of secularism as a complex, historically specific set of ideologies and disciplines rather than in opposition to religion. Asad in particular has aimed to uncover the various ways secularism operates as a set of disciplinary and disciplining practices that produce and police the modern category of religion. Narrowing his focus to legitimating state secularism, Bilgrami’s thesis reads:

Should we be living in a religiously plural society, secularism requires that all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be evenhandedly treated except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve (ideals often, though not always, enshrined in stated fundamental rights and other constitutional commitments) in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first. (Italics his)

The concept of lexical ordering—a final propositional jab in a series of subordinate clauses—is Bilgrami’s attempt to offer a principle for adjudicating questions of moral priority, here by ranking religious practices lower than those that result from those of a polity’s ideals. Put more simply, lexical ordering is the process by which we weigh competing goods. For Bilgrami, the way to reassert secularism’s ethical mandate, despite its relativism, is not to redefine it, as Taylor and others have suggested, but to assert the importance of respecting a particular group’s vision of its own ideals, which can be, at least according to Bilgrami, articulated without reference to religion.

One of the strengths Bilgrami identifies in his argument is the way it helps him to negotiate several hot-button issues in what he calls “the present cold war being waged against ‘Islam.’” Quoting Taylor’s concern that secularists might misguidedly, to Taylor’s mind, “attack ‘Islam’ for instance for female genital mutilation [FGM], and for honor killings,” Bilgrami defends his version of the thesis (S) on the grounds that “when female genital mutilation or honour killings are identified as practices to be placed second in the lexical ordering, [i.e. to be objected to] Islam, as a generality, is not ‘under attack.’ Rather, the claim is entirely conditional: If there be a claim by those by those who practice them that these practices owe to a religion and if that claim is correct,” and so on. Lexical ordering allows Bilgrami to avoid being charged with attacking religion without adopting a position of neutrality towards its claims. Though neither Taylor nor Bilgrami intend it as such, female genital mutilation offers a good example of the internal diversity and syncretism of all religious traditions and of the difficulties one encounters when attempting to define what constitutes a religious practice. In Egypt, where over 99% of the population identifies as ethnical Egyptian and 94% as Sunni Muslim (a statistic growing higher, I fear, given recent violence against Egypt’s Coptic Christians) the U.S. Department of State reports that female genital mutilation is “nearly universal among women of reproductive age.” This is a sobering and distressing statistic, but FGM, which is practiced extensively across Africa and the Middle East, is not “Islamic” in origin; it seems to have originated in Ancient Egypt long before the rise of Islam. The prevalence of FGM in North Africa and its relative rarity in many Asian Muslim communities underscores the complex processes of local accommodation and syncretistic cultural absorption attendant to Islam’s globalization and indigenization.

It is rare point of agreement between Euro-American academics and practicing Muslims that, relative to other religions, Islam is a total way of life; similarly, both groups acknowledge the singular importance of the ummah. Even admitting that mainstream Islamic traditions place more emphasis on ritual observance than their contemporary Christian counterparts, the notion of a homogeneous “Islamic world” is, of course, highly problematic. According to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religious and Public Life’s 2009 analysis of global Muslim populations, Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Tunisia, Western Sahara, and Yemen all report that Muslims constitute over 99% of the population, but to assume that the result of even this high degree of apparent religious uniformity is a meaningful religious monoculture would be to fall victim to what Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adiche calls “the danger of a single story.” In her 2009 TED talk, Adiche critiques the powers that reduce a society’s pluralism to a single story, as European stories forged Africa as “a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness.” For Adiche, the problem is not that stereotypes are untrue but that they “flatten [our] experience and overlook the many other stories that inform” our sense of self and that they blind us to the importance of internal diversity.

One way to clarify the deeper philosophical issue at stake here is by appealing to Hannah Arendt’s theory of action, in which plurality and freedom are ontological conditions on which any meaningful concept of agency must be predicated. For Arendt, the ability to act, to introduce something new and unexpected into the world, can only arise in a condition of pluralism. In a famous passage at the beginning of The Human Condition, Arendt describes the human condition as one of plurality owing “to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world…this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.” By linking action to freedom and freedom to plurality Arendt means to emphasize that the capacity to introduce novelty into the world depends upon a quality of openness antithetical to a monoculture. On a practical level, as we adopt increasingly flexible and, as Amartya Sen calls them, “robustly plural” senses of our own identity based on multiple, overlapping, and shifting modes of belonging, the purely hypothetical nature of a religious monoculture becomes increasingly apparent.

Because modern world religions aggregate individuals often lacking other common bonds in custom, language, or ethnicity, it seems particularly problematic that the grammatical object of Bilgrami’s thesis (S) becomes “religion” itself: “[Secularism] requires that all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be treated evenhandedly” (emphasis added). Why are “religions” as such, and not “religious individuals,” the agents bearing the “privilege” (not the right?) to free exercise? Returning to the example of Japan provides clarification on what is at stake here. It is important to note that Japan’s high degree of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity does not correlate to religious uniformity. Indeed, in addition to its Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian communities, the modern period has seen the explosive growth of new religious movements in Japan and a rise in multiple religious affiliations (self-reported membership in religious groups totals nearly twice the nation’s population). There are almost two hundred thousand religious organizations registered under Japan’s 1951 Religious Judicial Persons Law, which secures corporate legal personhood and various tax benefits for registered religious movements, but also entangles religious organizations with state power. Murakami’s Underground examines the legacy of the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyo, Japan’s most notorious new religious movement, a trope that reemerges in the alter-reality of IQ84 as the cultish Sakigake organization, a messianic new religious movement with a charismatic leader, a heavily armed military compound, and an elaborate network of political and economic influence. IQ84’s dystopian possible world highlights (and sensationalizes) the danger of a system where rights accrue to religions rather than to individuals. Sakigake’s mysterious “Leader” raises the question of who speaks for a religion. When an elected official in a democratic government speaks on behalf of a community, her legitimacy and sovereignty is contingent upon the consent of the governed, at least in liberal political thought. The question of who speaks for a religion, by what right and chosen by whom, is another matter; before granting Bilgrami’s claim that religions should have rights, we need to think more about the processes and systems that legitimate those who speak for a religion.

In a relatively recent essay in Critical Inquiry “Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment,” the subject of a heated exchange on the popular blog Three Quarks Daily, Bilgrami makes some very confident claims about what “ordinary Muslim people” think and feel. Bilgrami writes:

Ordinary Muslims on the street are clear and perfectly precise about what they claim and want: that they are fighting back against centuries of colonial subjugation; that they want the military and corporate presence of the West (primarily the United States), which continues that subjugation in new and more subtle forms, out of their lands; that they want a just solution for the colonized, brutalized Palestinian people; that they want an end to the cynical support by the west…of corrupt regimes in their midst…that they will retaliate (or not speak out against those who retaliate) with an endless cycle of violence unless there is an end to…endless state-terrorist actions.

I am in no personal position to dispute the accuracy of this list, but I am struck by the relative confidence with which Bilgrami takes the pulse of the Muslim street. In his working paper on secularism he makes a strikingly similar claim: “The right thing to do is not to ask that secularism be redefined but to demand that one should drop talk of secularism and focus instead on trying to improve matters on what is really at stake [in relationships with the Muslim world]: the effects of a colonial past, a commercially exploitative present, unjust wars and embargoes, racial discrimination against migrants in Europe, and so on.” I see at least two issues at stake here. The first is practical: for Bilgrami, the “right thing to do” centers on addressing violations perpetrated by Euro-Americans in the name of secularism against Muslims. One thing made clear by the slogans and demands of the Arab Spring, however, is that its supporters are motivated by issues like government injustice, economic decline, and restrictions on basic freedoms—a list more in line with the demands and deficits identified by recent UN reports on human development in the Muslim world. The second is more philosophical: I am wary of confident generalization about the Arab street (or even about people down the street, for that matter). The kind of clean distinctions between politics and religion, public and private implicit in the idea of lexical ordering are likely to be available only to those who are already secular.

Mindful of the fact that a course on modal logic was the reason I changed my undergraduate major from philosophy to English, I conclude with an amendment to Bilgrami’s thesis, which incorporates the revisions to (S) that might follow if my critique of modern religious monocultures is convincing, in a thought-experiment I call (SN):

Should we be living in a religiously plural society, s Secularism requires that all religious people religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be evenhandedly treated except when a religion’s religious person’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve (ideals, often, though not always, enshrined in stated fundamental rights and other constitutional commitments) in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jager is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University and is currently at work on a second book, After Secularism: Romanticism, Literature, Religion.

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NS: What makes modern sociological terms like “secularism” and “secularization” useful for interpreting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature? Is there a danger of falling into misleading anachronism?

CJ: There’s always that danger when we use a term from one historical period to describe aspects of another one. “Secularism” first emerges in Victorian England as a self-description, a way to avoid being labeled an atheist, and it has a long history within Christianity before that, as the secular, or worldly, time before the Second Coming. “Secularization” is a bit trickier, since it aims to describe a process and to give that process the aura of scientific neutrality, like the weather. I think the danger is not so much anachronism—which, frankly, I don’t think is a bad thing anyway—but rather forgetting that terms are never merely descriptive. So, I use the term, and I try to be reflexive about it. It’s comforting for many people to see themselves as living on the far side of a secularization process, and it’s that sense of comfort that I’d like to disrupt a bit.

NS: What does it mean for you to be reflexive?

CJ: What I mean by “reflexivity” is really just a critical consciousness that whenever you invoke a term, you are also invoking its history—the conditions under which it was forged and the uses to which it has been subsequently put. At the same time, we need these terms: something has changed over the course of modernity, for instance, and I’m comfortable with calling that change “secularization,” as long as it’s defined very carefully and I know what the stakes are in a given definition. Reflexivity is just my shorthand for the process, which I take to be central to serious intellectual practice, anyway—to strike the balance between using a term or concept or idea and simultaneously being aware of what you’re doing when you use it. It’s a mental habit of disembedding from the stuff you really care about—which, appropriately enough, is a pretty good definition of the secular!

NS: If I may speak of anachronism again, is this kind of secular reflexivity foreign to the texts you’re dealing with?

CJ: Of course not. In The Book of God I discuss a remark made by one of Jane Austen’s characters—Mary Crawford is her name—who hears that prayers are no longer said in the family chapel attached to the large mansion that she’s visiting. She says, “Every age has its improvements.” What she means most immediately is that family prayers are unpleasant and boring, and in the context she’s being clever and rather arch. But, by linking her personal feelings about family prayers to a theory of history as progressive secularization, she’s also invoking a whole range of historical processes. In England at the time, “improvement” meant a certain kind of landscape design that improved the view but neutralized or buried the actual historical presence of people within that landscape: moving the tenant farmers out of sight, maybe building a fake ruin or two. Mary may think that you can just invoke historical processes to further your own agenda—in this case, she’s trying to flirt with another character—but Austen’s narrator is simultaneously telling us something else: you can’t invoke historical processes without also invoking the history that those processes claim to describe but also inevitably distort, marginalize, cover up, re-write, and so on.

This is reflexivity in action, and it’s on the page: as readers, we’re being asked to see that what Mary sees as the whole truth is only a partial truth. Her easy assumptions about historical progress cause her to miss a great deal that is going on in this scene and in the book as a whole. She knows she’s being clever, but she doesn’t realize that she’s coming off as insensitive and really kind of clueless. All this that I’ve laboriously explained happens in just one line in the novel! That’s a wonderful example of how literary experience can do all kinds of nuanced intellectual work.

NS: The design arguments for God’s existence that you address in The Book of God are typically treated by philosophers and the public as sheer abstractions, or even scientific hypotheses; why treat them instead as literary creations?

CJ: No one discipline owns the design argument and its critiques. Historically, the distinctions that people typically draw today among literature, philosophy, and theology just don’t hold up. Professional literary study, especially, has only been around for a hundred years or so. A thinker like David Hume, who is very important to the story I tell about design, did not think of himself as a philosopher but as man of letters: he wrote history, philosophy, and theology, and he served as a diplomatic secretary. This was a typical “literary” career. I try to restore some of that broad range to the topics I write about—though no diplomats have signed me up yet!

NS: What’s an example of how you, as a scholar of literature, can shed light on a philosophical debate?

CJ: In Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo, who is skeptical of design arguments, wins the battle, but Cleanthes, who supports them, wins the war. One thing Hume might be suggesting is that if you’re on Philo’s team, you’d best give up your belief that better arguments can win the day all on their own. Yes, the philosophical or conceptual idea of design seems rather abstract, but, at the same time, those arguments are lived and experienced by real people in real time. This is one thing Hume figured out—and it’s a literary point, if you want to put it that way: the rhetoric, the habits of mind, the practices of sociability that accompany what we could call the culture of design aren’t just window-dressing for some philosophical argument. Those things are the argument. That’s why the culture of design is easier to come at through literature rather than the history of philosophy—through practice rather than theory, if you will. We’ve misunderstood the way secularization works if we think that better arguments drive the discussion.

NS: How do you square the Intelligent Design movement’s design arguments today with the narrative of secularization? One often hears them described as an anomaly in a modern society, but they’d have to be a pretty gigantic anomaly, demographically speaking.

CJ: Hardly anyone signs up just for a given argument—the design argument or any other. They sign up, rather, for the worldview and value-system, along with the habits and communities in which they understand those arguments to be embedded. The fact that Intelligent Design hasn’t yet produced a single creditable scientific claim is regarded as devastating by most in the scientific community, but it’s unlikely to faze the folks who have latched onto it. What they’ve latched onto is an articulation, however poorly conceived or executed, of the kind of world in which they want to understand themselves as living, one presided over by a powerful and benevolent force. At least for some, design arguments mark a compromise between science and faith. Lots of folks who hold to some version of theistic design also benefit—especially when it comes to medicine—from sciences that take bottom-up evolution for granted. At this level, design is very much a contributor to secularization. There’s a certain pathos and poetry to being caught in what Charles Taylor calls these cross-pressures of modernity.

NS: What drew you, originally, to the study of romanticism and, with it, to the question of secularity?

CJ: Romanticism and the secular really began as two separate interests for me. My interest in romanticism goes a long way back to my undergraduate years. What excited me then, and still excites me, was the heady, ambitious mix of philosophy and literature. You don’t have to read very far in Shelley or Coleridge or the Schlegels before you realize that the most extraordinary kinds of conceptual claims are being made. I liked the idea of “literature” doing the work of “philosophy”—and doing it better, because it takes in a wider compass of the human experience. My father was a philosopher, so maybe there was a little bit of healthy oedipal competition there, too! Later, in graduate school, I read Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s book The Literary Absolute, which argues that literature completes the task that philosophy had begun but couldn’t, on its own, finish. I liked that idea—it put literature at the top of the heap!

NS: And the secular?

CJ: The secular as such came a bit later for me. I wanted to find a way to write about religion, mostly because literary critics tend to write about it so unintelligently. Eventually it dawned on me that you can’t really write about religion without writing about the background against which it appears. Religion is not a thing that you can study apart from its surroundings. Most literary scholars still are not asking about the background against which something gets to count as “religious.” And then it was reading and hearing the usual suspects—Talal Asad, Michael Warner, William Connolly, Charles Taylor—that convinced me that the secular was itself an appropriate object of study, analysis, and critique. At some level, I think I was writing about secularism before I knew it, since one of the things that always appealed to me about the romantic moment was its promise of this-worldly redemption. Why wait for heaven when you can have it now? Now, when I look at romanticism and secularism, I have a hard time telling them apart.

NS: But wasn’t romanticism at least as much a reaction against excessive this-worldliness in the kind of society that was then emerging?

CJ: That’s why, for some people, it’s way too “religious”—by which they mean Christian—because it holds onto so many redemptive tropes even as it displaces and transforms them. They believe the critique of religion learned from Feuerbach and Marx needs to be applied to romanticism, or perhaps even to literature tout court—we’re not yet secular enough. I incline to the opposite position, namely, that secularism isn’t so much a break from Christianity as a process internal to it. Romanticism is a huge part of this story because it’s the moment when writers like Herder and Coleridge try to preserve the spirit of Christianity by universalizing it. For me, the fact of romanticism as a historical phenomenon shows that you can’t separate out the religious and secular, either historically or conceptually. You’ve got to speak of them together. And it’s the “literary,” once again, that finds a way to do that.

NS: You suggest that romanticism has often been identified today with “a failure of nerve.” What do you mean by this?

CJ: One thing that “romanticism” supposedly gave us was cultural relativism. For defenders of the Enlightenment, even chastened defenders, the idea that culture goes all the way down, and that it has to be evaluated not against a universal yardstick—reason, progress, whatever—but against itself, looks like weakness. But this is hardly “relativism” of the banal “I’m OK, You’re OK” sort. At its best, it is anti-dogmatic, open to new information and new ways of seeing the world. Far from weak, it has the courage and confidence of its own convictions. It says that the way I see the world and the way the world is are probably not the same thing. By contrast, the current shouting about “Islamofascism” suggests a real fragility and lack of confidence underneath all the bluster. This doesn’t mean that an inspired romantic multiculturalism is the answer to all our problems. But part of what the writers and thinkers of the romantic era figured out was that the world was filled with lots of different people, and that secularism—whether a state-ordained policy or a theory of procedural liberalism—just wasn’t going to be able to deal with all of them non-coercively.

NS: What alternative to cries of “Islamofascism” do you think the romantics might suggest to us, in terms of the West’s encounter with others?

CJ: Once again, I would say that romanticism is valuable for us today precisely because it offers a much more complex picture of the actual situation. To be sure, for romantic writers, the Muslim is a largely exoticized, Orientalized figure—as in Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge. But even that is useful, since it tells us a great deal about the cultural depictions available today; it’s no accident that Edward Said’s Orientalism spends so much time on romanticism, nor that the recent work of Akeel Bilgrami has unearthed a romantic counter-Orientalism that ends with Gandhi. Moreover, so much romantic-era writing returns to the figure of the outsider, very often figured as some kind of Semitic other: the Jew, the Turk. And what one sees over and over again, in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, for example, or DeQuincey’s Confessions, is how intertwined are the histories of “Aryan” and “Semite,” “Christian” and “Turk” and “Jew.” They already understood that these distinctions can be made only through acts of violence.

NS: Is cross-cultural reflexivity, in this way, a discovery we owe to the romantics?

CJ: I would put it like this: when we come against our own internal limits, and we know there’s a territory beyond that limit, but we don’t have a map—the romantics give us the language for that feeling.

But of course, like all scholarly analysis, Geroulanos’s has its limits. It does indeed embed atheist antihumanism into its social and historical setting—but rather as a backdrop than as a shaping force. Which is to say that Geroulanos’s analysis is incompletely sociological. In the end, it belongs to a mode of intellectual history that recoils from imputed, provisional, typologically grounded theses upon which the classical sociology of knowledge depends. This is especially worth noting since Heidegger’s nonhumanist existentialism needs to be read, not just against neo-Kantianism, but against Marx and Weber and their heritage, including precisely that sociology of knowledge developed by Karl Mannheim, in dialogue with Lukàcs, from about 1917 on, one of whose polemical purposes was to reveal positive “intellectual history” as reductive. The young Mannheim (to stay with him for a minute) insisted that the modern era was primarily politically regulated, and it’s a sign of the particular limits of Geroulanos’s method that his interest in the politics of antihumanism is never allowed full extension, even if he offers an illuminating account of interwar left-wing humanism, for instance.

So we don’t really find an answer to the obvious question: what were atheist anti- humanism’s politics? Geroulanos does note that after 1945 these politics tended to switch from right to left, but that seems a more mysterious and important phenomenon than is here quite allowed for. One specific problem in this context is that Geroulanos’s sense of the prewar French ultra-right is too indebted to Zeev Sternhell’s partisan analysis, which means that he uses the term ‘fascism’ too vaguely and readily.

Likewise, while Geroulanos shows that atheist antihumanism developed in dialogue with French Catholic antihumanisms, he shows little interest in the politics and institutional bases of irreligion in the period. Presumably, for instance, it was partly the extraordinary difficulties involved in institutionalizing atheist antihumanism that kept alive what we might call the nonhumanist irreligious inhabitation of religion (i.e., either irreligion that affirms ecclesiastical structures or doctrinal truths, or irreligion under the guise of a religious persona or mask), and which we sometimes find encouraged by Leo Strauss or, in France, by Charles Maurras and his followers.

Even were this a place to pursue such historicist enquiries, I would be incapable of taking them far. But let me open a way by making a couple of observations. The atheist antihumanism that Geroulanos describes is both philosophical and programmatic: it is consciously and strategically antihumanist. As such, it emerges from a looser, larger constellation that we might call irreligious non-humanism. By that I mean all those forms of art and thought that were neither religious (in the Judeo-Christian sense) nor humanist, that is, which, while rejecting theism, neither conceived of the human as a value nor thought of history as the gradual and progressive realization of human potential. Such irreligious non-humanism reaches back into classical antiquity—from this point of view, classicism is not a humanism—but takes a recognizably modern form after about 1830 in figures (who otherwise may share little) like Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Henry Adams, Samuel Butler, Wittgenstein, George Sorel, etc. Although Geroulanos would appear to think otherwise, I’d contend that it first becomes programmatically antihumanist in Nietzsche (who declared himself insufficiently Saint-Simonian to “love humanity”) and in Proudhon, although he uses the concept of “human dignity” against bourgeois liberal and statist humanisms, and so can be described as a humanist antihumanist. At any rate, irreligious non-humanism is structurally connected to anti-enlightenment conservativism simply because it implies the rejection of progress, and by the same stroke, and no less determinedly, the rejection of democracy. This is true even if many irreligious non-humanists did not identify themselves as conservative at all.

Observation number two: One important moment in the mutation of irreligious non-humanism into atheist antihumanism occurred in 1911, when T.E. Hulme had a meeting with Pierre Lasserre in Paris. T.E. Hulme was then an obscure English critic, attached to Orage’s avant-garde little magazine New Age. He was becoming Henri Bergson’s leading proselytizer in Britain, and he was soon to translate Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. He had published the poems that would help to define imagism. He was also a polemicist for a new kind of Toryism: one removed from Disraeli’s Burkean appeal to King, Church, and people, and aligned instead to anti-romanticism and to what would later be called “modernism.”

For his part, Lasserre was then Action Française’s leading literary intellectual, Action Française being a powerful ultra-rightist movement, at the time still loosely allied to the Catholic church but led by the irreligious Maurras, and which simultaneously affirmed royalism and popular nationalism against republicanism, socialism, and democracy. It did so under the banners of order, hierarchy, and classical French civilization. In effect, it too detached conservatism from romanticism, as well as from a de Maistrean political theology that interpreted the struggle between revolution and reaction primarily as one between Satan and God. But it never solved the problem of how conservative irreligious non-humanism might make of itself a political, as well as an intellectual, force. Although it could mobilize violence on the streets, it never attracted meaningful electoral support.

Lasserre was then most famous for his book on French romanticism, which was to popularize the notion that romanticism began with Rousseau and that it energized progressive revolutionary action. As Hulme himself was to put it, in his proto-Orwellian journalese, romanticism fomented the mindset in which “you don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a God. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth,” and which, therefore, “falsif[ied] and blur[red] the clear outlines of human experience.” Within this strand of conservative thought, then, human experience could be posed against doctrinal humanism. And for it, characteristically, human experience was most lucidly and finely delineated in the seventeenth-century literature of the passions, most particularly, for the French, in Racine. Lasserre’s argument had a transnational impact: the young T.S. Eliot drew upon it in his wartime extension lectures, for instance.

Indeed, after the meeting with Lasserre, Hulme was gradually to turn away from Bergsonian philosophy of life to embrace a more antihumanist political Toryism, now not just a modernist classicism, but what he thought of as the new objectivisim that was being worked out in thinkers like Husserl, George Moore (of the Principia Ethica), and Maurras himself. This move would prefigure, and probably influence, his friend T.S. Eliot’s gradual conversion to an English rendition of Maurras’s politics (and his turn to English seventeenth-century poetry).

Hulme, Maurras, and Eliot’s antihumanism is important because it takes us to the border where atheist antihumanism, in its search for an institutional base, meets orthodox and reactionary Catholic antihumanism. Little illuminates the difficulties of occupying this border more than Action Française’s highly charged relation to Catholicism, which, despite the breadth of the movement’s support among French Catholics, would culminate in its formal prohibition by Pius XI in 1926 (the same year, interestingly, that Carl Schmitt broke with the Church). And I think it likely that the antihumanism that develops in and out of Heidegger and Kojève, and which Geroulanos illuminates so well, is also, at certain moments, shaped at this border.

One remembers, in particular, Maurice Blanchot. As a young man, he had been a radical, sometimes terror-embracing ultra-rightist in Action Française’s slipstream. But, as Geroulanos shows, he receded into post-Kojèvean antihumanism from about 1942 (in a world where the institutional barriers to secular nonhumanisms were breaking down). But, while a “negation of God,” Blanchot’s thought is famously hard to call irreligious. Let’s say that it is as if Blanchot chooses the other side of Pascal’s wager: he makes a bet against God, a bet that the world is not just immanent and Godless but “catastrophic.” That’s a wager that can’t pay out—it’s staked in a kind of madness—except insofar as it rescues you, if not exactly from atheism, then from mundaneity. At this point, maybe “atheist antihumanism” can be conceived of as positioned against ordinary social being, and belongs in that sense to the right, even where (as was the case for Blanchot in the 1960s) its sponsors join the radical left. At the very least, it is where the world is judged catastrophic in terms that Maurras and Racine and Pascal, those conservative nonhumanists, share.

*  *  *

NS: Natural Reflections has been the subject of a lively debate (here and here) on Stanley Fish’s blog at The New York Times. Have you found the exchange productive?

BHS: One-shot retorts, or seesaw exchanges on blogs, are rarely models of intellectually productive discussion, but Stanley Fish’s columns attract thoughtful readers, and I found the responses to his column on Natural Reflections instructive. Two related anxieties were repeatedly voiced on the basis of Fish’s description of my evenhanded—or, in fact, determinedly symmetrical—treatment of religious beliefs and what we take as scientific knowledge. One is that I am flattening out important differences between them. The other is that I’m refusing to take a stand on a major issue of our time, and thus—wittingly or unwittingly—giving aid and comfort to the wrong side.

The first of these worries is unwarranted. While I locate the differences between “science” and “religion” on multiple levels, I don’t diminish either the significance of such differences or the stakes that may be involved in identifying them accurately.

The second worry is, I think, misplaced in principle, and reflects increasingly oversimplified public views of science, religion, and the relations between them. Most of the commentators anxious about what side the book comes out on are concerned, I think, about such issues as the promotion of creationist ideas in science classes, or the clerical condemnation of contraceptive devices or homosexuality—that is, public issues in which noisy literalist convictions clash with established scientific accounts, or where informed secular attitudes are confronted by uncompromising ecclesiastic doctrine. Such concerns are understandable and I share them. But taking a clear stand on such issues does not require choosing sides between Science and Religion, conceived as monolithic adversaries in an epic battle.

NS: How does this kind of discussion compare with what your previous books have generated?

BHS: Though I think of myself as a peace-loving scholar, what you call “lively debate” seems to be my destiny—or, perhaps, addiction. Virtually all of my books have been involved in lively enough intellectual clashes: value wars, theory wars, culture wars, and science wars, among others. In the late 1980s, at the height of the so-called canon wars, a writer for The New York Times described Contingencies of Value as “a bible of relativism”—and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. Indeed, it was my initially surprised encounter with such overheated reactions to my account of literary value that led me to think more closely about such head-on intellectual collisions—what I came to call “the microdynamics of incommensurability.” I describe how they play out in current debates over belief, knowledge, truth, and science in two subsequent books, Belief and Resistance and Scandalous Knowledge.

NS: Well before the publication of the book, videos of the Terry Lectures on which it is based were available online. Did responses that you received from the public or other scholars on the basis of those videos affect how the book developed?

BHS: Some people who watched the videos told me about it and murmured general appreciations, but what affected the development of Natural Reflections most significantly were the responses of students to presentations of my views in seminars that I gave at Duke and Brown while turning the lectures into a book. The groups included, at various times, the daughter of a rabbi, two strenuous secularists from abroad, a devotee of Daniel Dennett, and at least five people reexamining their relation to the Catholic Church. I found, without quite planning it, that my efforts in each session were directed in large measure to keeping everyone on board—engaged, active, talking, and thinking, rather than grandstanding or sulking—as we went through the readings. By the conclusion of each semester, there seemed to be a way of putting things—of describing and understanding the nature of “religion,” “science,” “belief,” and the relations among them—that was acceptable to virtually everyone (though I lost the rabbi’s daughter early on, and one of the hard-line secularists held out to the bitter end). It was the process of reaching that way of putting things, and especially discovering what made it go well or badly, that was crucial for what I came to see and want as the ethos of the book.

NS: What first brought you, as a scholar of literature, to matters of science and religion?

BHS: As it happens, one of my first published works (in a magazine of undergraduate writing at City College in New York in the 1950s) was on the psychology of religious conversion. I was much taken by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, though I also kept a copy of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in my pocket. Matters of science, particularly biology and psychology, occupied me centrally during my school years and, though I went on to receive degrees in literature and have worked in such fields as Renaissance poetry and critical theory, those interests have remained strong and are reflected in virtually everything I have written.

As for matters of religion, they were there all along, though I didn’t always identify them as such. Of course, when Renaissance poetry isn’t about love, it’s about religion. My experiences studying and teaching works such as Donne’s Holy Sonnets and, for several years, Milton’s Paradise Lost stood me in good stead in my recent encounters with Christian theology, contemporary biblical exegesis, and the complexities of religious sentiment. Also, critical theory has always been concerned with the nature of truth and the operations of rhetoric, imagination, illusion, and belief—think of Aristotle’s Poetics—all questions that are central as well to the study of religion.

NS: The Times posts mention your once having worked with the great psychologist B. F. Skinner. Did he influence you, and has his influence borne itself out in your career?

BHS: The answer is yes, but it needs some context. What brought me into Skinner’s orbit was not behaviorism. It was a summer job as a technician in his laboratory when I was already a student in literature at Brandeis.  But I learned a lot about behaviorism along the way—certainly enough to know that it was not manifestly absurd or Satanic. Most significantly, as it turned out, I had the chance to read Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in manuscript—which is to say, before Noam Chomsky’s review of it. Few people have actually read the book, which has nothing to do with rats, pigeons, or Pavlovian-conditioned children. In any case, the account Skinner develops there helped form my sense of language-use as a dynamic, embodied, context-sensitive social practice. Other major influences on that view were books I was reading around that time by anthropological linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf and literary theorist Kenneth Burke—both home-grown American originals, I might note, like Skinner himself.

All of this inclined me to be skeptical of what I saw as Chomsky’s impoverished conception of language and implausible account of how it is acquired and used—and also, for related reasons, of Habermas’s notion of communication ethics. These and other skepticisms deriving from, among other things, my undergraduate work on the psychology of perception, early encounters with William James and Dewey, and that pocketful of Nietzsche put me at odds for the next fifty years with widely held views in language theory, value theory, epistemology, and, most relevantly for this conversation, what is now called cognitive science.

NS: What, in particular, about recent cognitive science of religion caught your attention?

BHS: In spite of the skepticisms just mentioned, I approached works such as Lawson and McCauley’s Rethinking Religion, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained, and Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust with considerable interest, viewing them initially as contemporary continuations and updates of the great naturalistic tradition in the study of religion—works by figures such as Hume, Weber, and Durkheim. The up-front association with evolutionary theory was intriguing, and I hoped to find out what was new in both anthropology and religious studies, and perhaps have something to report about it all for my Terry Lectures.

In the course of working through several shelves of volumes and numerous articles and reviews, I learned quite a bit about the institutional politics of religious studies and about some exceedingly bemusing beliefs and practices exhibited by people around the globe. But what ended up engaging my attention most significantly were the no less bemusing beliefs and practices exhibited by these contemporary researchers of religion themselves. So, I decided to frame my report on these developments from my perspective as a part-time sociologist of knowledge and to include, in my assessment of the now self-dubbed “cognitive science of religion” (I call it the New Naturalism), some duly critical and cautionary observations.

NS: How much do you think cognitive science, when shed of its more ideological exaggerations, can really tell us about religion?

BHS: What seems right to me is the idea that many widespread and recurrent types of belief and practice associated with religion reflect the operation of quite general human cognitive and behavioral tendencies. That idea doesn’t originate, of course, with cognitive science. Expressed in different terms, we find it in Hume’s Natural History of Religion and the work of many later theorists of religion. What’s more original in the new approach is the idea that many of those tendencies reflect the evolutionary history of the species. To the extent that the cognitive science of religion elaborates those ideas and connects them to other ongoing work on religion, culture, cognition, and human behavior, its contributions can be substantial. What seems dubious to me is the claim that the tendencies in question reflect the activation of specific Stone Age mental mechanisms that can be, or already have been, identified by cognitive scientists. What seems utterly stultifying is the attendant suggestion that everything else said about religion is irrelevant, superficial, or pre-scientific.

NS: How much does this New Naturalism share with the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins and, for instance, Daniel Dennett, whose Breaking the Spell calls for a new, naturalistic science of religion?

BHS: It’s important not to confuse the project I refer to as the New Naturalism—that is, cognitive-evolutionary studies of religion—with the so-called New Atheism. The New Naturalists are attempting to explain religion; the New Atheists are seeking to discredit it. Not all New Naturalists are atheists, and the project does not arise from an antipathy to religion. Boyer, a cheerful Frenchman, generally maintains an anthropologist’s neutral distance from the beliefs he describes. Atran, a serious American, expresses an ambivalent appreciation of religion throughout his book. Dennett’s efforts in Breaking the Spell, which would qualify as New Naturalist as well as New Atheist, are limited in both regards by a very narrow understanding of religion and a correspondingly dubious conception of beliefs—religious and otherwise—as static, discrete items of cerebral furniture.

NS: By holding up the work of classicist Walter Burkert above cognitive scientists like Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer, are you arguing that scientists should leave explanations of religion to humanists?

BHS: Not at all. Burkert’s Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions figures in my book, not as a humanistic explanation of religion, but as an evolutionary-biological explanation of it that is duly historically informed and otherwise intellectually spacious—as many New Naturalist explanations are not. My point is not that humanists can explain religion (or anything else) better than scientists but that, if your objective is to develop empirically responsive, intellectually connectible naturalistic accounts of religion, then the resources of humanistic scholarship—including its archives, objects of study, participant perspectives, and techniques of analysis—should be recognized as valuable and necessary ingredients.

Burkert’s explanations of various features of religion—he deals with sacrifice, oracles, priests, prayer, moral commandments, and many other things—are often more compelling than Boyer’s or Atran’s not because they’re softer or sweeter but because, among other things, they are better grounded empirically. All three invoke evolutionary biology, primate studies, genetics, and game theory. Typically, however, Boyer’s and Atran’s explanations come down to speculations, offered as facts and findings, about hypothetical, unobservable mental mechanisms. Burkert’s accounts come down to observations (and, to be sure, also speculations) about recurrent patterns of human behavior as evidenced in manuscripts, inscriptions, historical records, and archeological artifacts.

Of course Burkert’s experience as a scholar of ancient civilizations probably made him especially attentive to political and institutional aspects of religion, and also to imaginative elaborations of religious beliefs and practices, all of which are significantly neglected in New Naturalist accounts. But such experience need not be confined to humanists. It is available to anthropologists and psychologists if they think it is significant for the project at hand. After all, Burkert, undertaking pretty much the same project as Boyer and Atran, made himself familiar with a considerable array of new research and theory in the sciences before offering an account of the psycho-biological springs of religion. The trouble is not the cognitive scientists’ limited knowledge of art, literature, or political and social history, but their failure to grant the relevance of such fields of knowledge to the ongoing project of “explaining religion.”

NS: How compelling do you find the recent trend among those trying to bring science to bear on literary theory? Should humanists generally be striving to draw more from the “hard” sciences in their work?

BHS: The question is apt. I’ve been thinking about that “trend” (as you put it) quite a bit lately, and I hope to write about it. I’m always mindful of my own early participation in such efforts—for example, in Poetic Closure, by making use of gestalt psychology to describe the perception and experience of literary forms. My models at the time—admirable ones, I still think—were E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion and Leonard B. Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music.

I’m certainly sympathetic to projects involving interdisciplinary incorporations and extensions and could point to an array of achievements, current as well as past, that attest to their value. Work by a number of Duke colleagues come to mind (Mark Hansen and Robert Mitchell, among others), along with Elizabeth Wilson’s recent book, Psychosomatic. As such work illustrates, relevantly informed scholars in literary studies and other humanities-based disciplines may incorporate concepts and findings from natural-science fields in ways that can be subtle, original, genuinely illuminating, and sometimes significantly transformative for their own fields. Burkert’s Creation of the Sacred is, of course, another example.

I would have to add, however, that some of the current efforts to bring science (under some very limited views of it) into literary studies are energized by extremely dubious aims and motives. I think especially of hapless offerings by people who are persuaded that their discipline has gone to the dogs (the major alleged agent of that dissolution being some vague menace called “postmodernism”) and who think it can be redeemed only by large, duly stiffening, injections of natural science. These convictions have a surprising degree of uptake among minimally informed people outside the field of literary studies, including, I’m sorry to see, some distinguished scientists.

NS: How can humanists—particularly after incidents like the Sokal Affair—make their voices heard by those in the scientific community in a productive way?

BHS: Alan Sokal is not a good representative of the scientific community in that regard, but his hoax was an effective piece of mischief that did much to deepen an already existing chasm created by a century of mutual ignorance and mutual caricature. I would stress the mutuality of that ignorance and those caricatures. Humanists and scientists are inevitably divided by significant—and, I think, by no means undesirable—differences of intellectual training, intellectual temperament, and intellectual idiom. They can converse productively with each other, however, when both recognize their own limits and provincialisms, and when each grants due respect to the worthiness of the other’s projects and achievements. The readiness of some publicly visible scientists to dismiss humanities scholarship as trivial or unenlightened is, of course, painful. But if humanists, including scholars of religion, seek to be heard across the two-culture divide, they must be willing to give ear to reports of relevant developments in the natural sciences and to acknowledge—and, I would say, challenge—the readiness of many of their colleagues to cast scientists in correspondingly demoting, not to say demonizing, roles.

It could be that heteronomous thinking is bad because it leads to unpleasant things. This would be a kind of consequentialist argument and would therefore live or die on the empirical evidence. This is Christopher Hitchens territory. Rightly recognizing that this is not where he wants to go, Gourgouris opts for the other kind of answer, which is to insist that heteronomous thinking is problematic in itself—a kind of formal argument. But at some point any argument along these lines will beg the question, for it will need to assert that thinking for oneself is a good in itself. And that assertion can’t in turn be justified without appealing—heteronomously, if you will—to some scheme of values outside the mode of thinking in question.

At stake here is a certain kind of intellectual posture. In his debate with Mahmood, Gourgouris bases his argument on two suppositions that Mahmood wants to question. Those suppositions are that enlightened reason (“secular criticism”) can be purged of its own heteronomous tendencies, and that religion is an archetypal example of heteronomous thinking. If this description is right, then the dispute is really over the Enlightenment and its legacies—a point that Charles Taylor alludes to in his post in this thread. Like his enlightened forbears, Gourgouris thinks that the critique of religion is the archetype of critique as such, and he thinks that the critical project, while itself at constant risk of becoming arrogant or disconnected, can correct itself from the inside so long as we exercise sufficient care. Mahmood has a different understanding of what “critique” entails. Her more Foucaultian approach involves asking questions about how particular assumptions (that the veil is a symbol, for example) produce particular kinds of subjects, enable and dis-enable certain kinds of work, and so on.

Must we choose sides? Gourgouris apparently wants sides to be chosen. Mahmood wants to question the drive to choose sides. But I would rather try to inflect these choices differently by reading them through a category that has not received enough attention in the debate about secularism. That category is the literary.

***

If we follow Gourgouris and assume for the sake of argument that heteronomy/autonomy is the best scale we have for thinking about the question of critique (though I’m not sure it is), we can see immediately that a certain picture of the intellectual life follows naturally. In this picture, intellectual activity at its best involves the rigorous guarding against the temptation toward heteronomy. If we relax our guard, it seems, we’re going to find ourselves mired in some appeal to external authority. In this way certain values are brought into rough equivalence: reflexivity, critique, and the secular (in its proper, non-doctrinal, form).

This picture of the intellectual life as a rigorous guarding against the temptation toward heteronomy is what Chris Nealon in the initial post on this thread called “a left-secular structure of feeling.” And its dynamics should be pretty familiar. It is striking, for instance, that this picture is formally very much like the Christian life as it is imagined by St. Paul (“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”) and by Augustine. Both of these thinkers call their flocks to vigilance against patterns of worldly thought and behavior understood to be always just around the bend. Worldly criticism reverses the poles (where before the picture was of people pulled away from divinity and toward the world, now the picture is of people pulled away from the world and toward divinity) but it doesn’t alter the basic pattern. To note this similarity is not to say that secularity is “like” religion. It’s just to remark on our widely shared picture of what the intellectual life looks like: we’re on a hair-trigger, concerned above all never to relax our guard.

But we do relax our guard, or take a nap, or just get distracted for a while. Reflexivity is exhausting, after all. And so things sneak in: unexamined presuppositions, various essentialisms, historical blindspots, moments of “heteronomy.” We trust in authorities when we shouldn’t; take things on faith because we’re too tired or busy to run all the background checks that we might. And then we startle awake, and realize what’s happened. This may, in turn, inspire us to build better defenses and bigger data-bases. But we might also be led to reflect on the inevitability of such moments, and to confront the fact that despite our best intentions we will always betray the rigorous demands of our calling. This is the melancholy of criticism—let me say, melodramatically, of criticism in the aftermath of Enlightenment.

No one practiced this critical melancholy with more effect than Paul de Man. Consider two brief examples from his 1969 essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” which was for a time perhaps the single most influential essay in literary studies. Discussing the romantic symbol as an attempt to resolve the split between subject and object introduced by Enlightenment reason, de Man dissents from the humanist critics who came before him. Following some hints in Coleridge and elsewhere, those critics had proposed that the symbol repairs the breach between subject and object. De Man, on the other hand, says that subject/object is the wrong problem; the real problem is that we can never escape from time, but by focusing on the pseudo-problem of subject and object the romantic symbol simply encourages us to deny our “authentically temporal destiny” (ie., death) and flee into timeless universals. The symbol, he says, is thus “a temptation that has to be overcome.” Then, later in the essay, having produced an impressive comparison between allegory and irony, de Man writes that “this conclusion is dangerously satisfying….Things cannot be left to rest at the point we have reached.” These are two examples of the kinds of critical restlessness for which de Man is famous. The act of reading itself is the purest form of that restlessness; throughout his critical oeuvre reading appears as dreadful, as painful, as adding up to nothing. The only thing worse than reading, for de Man, is not reading, for that would mean giving in to temptations like that of the symbol, whose “dangerously satisfying conclusions” encourage us to forget about our temporal predicament.

Note that this is not criticism undertaken in the name of liberation. As de Man pictures it, all that reading can do is tie us ever more intimately to the object of our critique. Having seen through the “dangerous satisfactions” that emerge when we stop reading, the critic cannot then take refuge in those satisfactions without bad faith. But having also recognized that the pull of such satisfactions is so great that no amount of criticism will ever fully emancipate him, the critic finds himself plunged ever more deeply into a condition both intolerable and necessary. The only way to resist the temptation to stop reading is to keep reading, but the reading simply reconfirms the power of the temptation to stop. Loving what you hate; hating what you love: this melancholy predicament becomes the critic’s professional identity.

***

De Man was not especially interested in religion or in the secular, though he did assume that modernization meant secularization, and he wrote of religion as a typical example of the “dangerously satisfying” conclusions against which he set his critical project. So in that way he was a secular thinker, though I think he understood pretty well that criticizing something is not the same thing as leaving it behind. Indeed, one might read most of his writing as a continual rediscovery of the stubborn fact that the thing you most want to leave behind is also the thing you can’t leave behind—like St. Paul, who cannot do what he wants to do, but instead does the thing he hates to do.

For de Man–and for many of the literary critics writing in his wake—this kind of vexed melancholia simply was the literary experience. It is a secular experience, but of a tragic kind. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the picture painted by Edward Said, in his “Secular Criticism” essay, of the heroic worldly intellectual, resolutely suspicious of anything that might entice him to rest. Said’s metaphors in that essay, as throughout much of his work, contrast the “the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home” with the exile and homelessness that is for him the mark of the critic. Because he is not at home, the critic is able to take the measure of modernity and its loss of filiation: “because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we might also call criticism,” Said writes. The critic is permanently homeless in this conception—and once again there’s an interesting inversion of the Christian imaginary here, something of which Said was very much aware.

Said’s more programmatic statements may lack the melancholy quality often found in de Man, but Said’s own body of work attests in manifold ways to his deep attachment to the very objects whose siren call he must nevertheless resist. And in this way Said’s secular criticism, like de Man’s version of deconstruction, foregrounds the relationship between secularism and the literary without ever quite saying so. To be sure, Said makes it clear that by “criticism” he means more than simply “literary criticism.” Yet it is also evident that he is modeling habits of critical attention upon the forms of attentiveness solicited by literary writing. “Obviously I’m not suggesting that everybody has to become a literary critic,” he once noted in an interview. “[T]hat’s a silly idea. But one does have to give a certain attention to the rather dense fabric of secular life….” Note the elective affinity among secularism, criticism and literary “attention.” And of course, the importance of literature to Said’s image of criticism has been further reinforced by the fact that many of those currently writing under Said’s influence are located in departments of literature.

***

Gil Anidjar’s recent book, Semites, pushes this line of thinking as far as I’ve seen anyone take it. One project of the book is to mediate between the positions of Talal Asad and Edward Said. (This is one of the things at stake in the Mahmood-Gourgouris debate. In the background, meanwhile, stands the legacy of Foucault and Said’s own critical use of Foucault.) So we get an interpretation of Orientalism in which it emerges that Said’s real target in that book was secularism. I don’t have room here to go into the complexities of Anidjar’s counter-intuitive argument, and in any case what’s relevant to my discussion here is the shape of the book rather than its local engagements. What is that shape? The first half of the book traces, in genealogical fashion, the complicated histories of the categories of Jew and Arab, Semite and Aryan. Having established how fraught and entangled those histories are, Anidjar turns in the second half of the book to “Literature.” The publisher’s description on the back of the book, in fact, says that the book “turns to the literary imagination as the site of a fragile and tenuous alternative, the promise of something like a ‘Semitic perspective’.”

As I understand it, the political resonance of that last phrase is found in the book’s historical argument that “Jew” and “Arab” where once jointly “Semitic,” so that a “Semitic perspective” would be an important alternative to prevailing contemporary narratives of “Jew vs. Arab.” The stakes, then, could not be higher: the “literary imagination” holds out something like the promise of reconciliation, in the sense of which Said spoke of it (see the essays collected in The End of the Peace Process). As Anidjar writes, “I attend to the way in which the texts of Arabic and Jewish literatures undo the narrow limits to which they are confined by the topological imagination and by the disciplines.” And later: “throughout and against history, literature resists.”

What the book largely offers, however, are discussions of that confinement—by the discipline of comparative literature, for example—rather than of literary resistance to it. I confess that I’m still trying to follow Anidjar’s argument, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but it seems to me that in the places where we might expect discussion of literary texts, we are given instead a resonant picture of the kind of critical brooding I have been discussing. That is, it is the critic’s relation to his object—anguished, anxious, treasonous—that interests Anidjar. The idea is that any such relationship will betray the most important thing about literature, indeed the only thing that matters about it, namely its resistance to history. The critic, who is institutionally located and bound by networks of affiliation she can never quite escape, can only ever be a representative of history, and of the disciplines, can therefore even at her generous best—again with the largest stakes in mind—only imagine a “two-state” (that is, institutionally and historically determined) solution to such intractable questions as that of Palestine. The one-state solution for which Said advocated and which he turned sometimes to literature in order to imagine—that is destined to remain out of reach, though not out of mind for the critic aware enough of her own failings.

It is Paul de Man who becomes the guiding figure in Anidjar’s account. Riffing on de Man, Anidjar writes of “The [critic's] treason, which is also an active joining (a treacherous obedience), a belonging without allegiance, perhaps.” This, he concludes enigmatically, “is the promise, no more than a promise and, equally, the threat of another future, if not of another modernity.” What I take this to mean is that the critic’s treason is the promise of another future because it holds out the possibility of breaking definitively with the past. But this promise is also a threat, because any true break will throw all cherished categories out of the window. And this will be true not only for our illiberal/facist/fundamentalist opponents but for us too, no matter how progressive, generous, and reflexive we imagine ourselves to be.

But this is for the future. What does critique looks like now, in the aftermath of enlightenment? For de Man and Anidjar (and possibly Said) it seems to be a reflexivity so crosscut with humility and tragedy that it keeps generating, as if in compensation, a concept of literariness that is always just around the bend. I think it is not accidental that de Man’s own critical career continued to circle around those texts loosely termed “romantic”—the works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that were striving to come to terms with the secular horizons opened up by the Enlightenment, and striving to find a voice for ways of being that those secular horizons were unable or unwilling to recognize. What I think de Man sensed in those texts and writers is what Anidjar senses in de Man. If we had to label it, we could call it “non-heteronomous critique.” Or, we could just call it “literature.”

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

This passage comes quite early in Charles Taylor’s new book, while he is still assembling the pieces of the “story” that he will tell over its almost-900 pages. The passage is perhaps most easily read (allegorically, as it were) as a defense of the sheer length of the book. Stories, at least good stories, are full of details that demand time and space in a narrative. They are worth it, though, because they make narratives more like real life: good stories are thick and messy rather than thin and sterile. They take surprising twists and turns, double back on themselves, try things out from another angle.

What is the other option? According to Taylor, the opposite of a history is bare conceptual analysis: “But why tell a story? Why not just extract the analytic contrast, state what things were like then, and how they are now, and let the linking narrative go? Who needs all this detail, this history?” (28). The implication is that a shorter, more strictly analytical book would have missed the heart of the matter. Why is this? Because “this detail, this history” is not just an optional extra, not just a set of examples or illustrations. Rather, details are where the action is. This is a normative anthropological claim: details are where we live, because details are where history lives, and we are historical creatures.

The question that remains, then, is how best to capture this sense of history. Now one answer to this question, which began gathering steam during the period of which Taylor writes, is literature. Literature is frequently praised for bringing abstraction down to earth, fleshing it out, making it live and move. An oft-quoted example of this claim comes from Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “[T]he poet’s pen,” he writes in Act V, “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”

By far the most sophisticated attempt in this direction, however, belongs to a group of German thinkers briefly gathered at Jena in the late 1790s and known to posterity as the Romantics. This group—principally Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and Schleiermacher—came of age in a Germany intellectually dominated by Kant and Fichte. Against what was rapidly hardening into a battle of systematic philosophies, Friedrich Schlegel in particular argued for an anti-systematic approach that he linked to the literary genre of the fragment. Philosophy had run stuck in the wake of Kant, Schlegel argued, because it mistakenly assumed that thinking must begin from a first or unconditioned principle, a still point in a turning world. Schlegel thought this was exactly backwards: philosophy should begin in medias res, with the place where we find ourselves, conditioned creatures that we are. The fragment is the only form capable of answering this requirement, Schlegel proposed, because it reflected the state of incompletion and partiality from which we inevitably begin our reasoning. And part of that incompletion, of course, stems from the historicity of our situation. Thus, writes Schlegel in the famous Athenaum Fragment 116, “Other genres are fixed and capable of being classified in their entirety. The romantic genre is, however, still in the process of becoming. Indeed, that is its essence: to be eternally in the process of becoming and never completed.”

Taylor’s book is hardly a romantic fragment, of course. In its sprawling ambitiousness it is more like a nineteenth century novel by Tolstoy or Eliot. Still, Taylor’s defense of his method is a romantic one precisely insofar as it is literary—precisely insofar, that is, as its emphasis falls on the story that it has to tell.

One characteristic of romantic theories is that aesthetic productions cannot be paraphrased, because to paraphrase them inevitably distorts or misses everything worthwhile about them. (This idea was elevated into a theory of literature as such by the American New Critics, who for the most part hated romanticism but adopted this fundamental tenet into their thinking; see for example Cleanth Brooks’s famous essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase”.) That is the point of the romantic fragment—if you ask what a particular fragment “means” you are asking that it be translated into philosophy’s conceptual language, which is precisely what Schlegel and company were trying to avoid. There is a story about the composer Robert Schumann: after he was finished playing a new piano piece, someone in the audience asked him what it meant. For answer, Schumann simply played the piece again.

In a roughly analogous way, Taylor’s book is unparaphrasable: the level of detail and richness—the story—is so great that any attempt to extract a single thread from it inevitably mars its fabric. It would be better, given world enough and time, to simply read the book again.