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

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DKK: Jean Comaroff, tell us about the role of religion in your work.

JC: For me, as a scholar, religion has always been an exercise for a left hand. I started out working on these issues because I was interested in the relationship between politics and religion and the uneasy ways in which anthropologists at the time separated them. I was interested not least because, if you went to Africa in the 1960s to study religion, religion was assumed to be a matter of “tradition.” Already I felt that this term, in its then unproblematic usage, was less than helpful.

When I got to my field site, in rural northwest South Africa, the religious lingua franca was Christianity, African Christianity, which was inseparable from anything else you might call spiritual, religious, or moral life. I was Jewish in my upbringing, but the kind of Christianity I encountered was profoundly unlike the Christianity I had known about growing up in white South Africa, or when I subsequently lived in England.

There was concern among my advisors at the London School of Economics [LSE] because Christianity was regarded as a topic for comparative religion or sociology, not for anthropology. There was no anthropology of Christianity at that time, so it was really quite a struggle at that point to find relevant interlocutors.

At the same time, it was obvious that Christianity had long been a key dimension of local history. In South Africa, Christianity was inseparable from the whole logic of the way colonialism had been made and was then being unmade.

DKK: So was that the initial appeal of working on religion as an anthropologist for you?

JC: I grew up in South Africa under the apartheid regime and the universities were very depleted by the time we got there—they’d been segregated. In the universities, there was plenty social protest, but no access to intellectual radicalism, no Marx on the shelves. South African universities were an environment dominated by a larger story. In particular, the ethical problem of having the privilege of an education, by virtue of being white, bore in on us very heavily.

At that stage, there was already a lot of government repression of politics with a big “P.” Yet already there were forms of religious communal life stepping into the void, as it were. The churches, particularly some of the mainline, former mission churches—the Anglican Church, some Methodist congregations, many of the independent African churches—were places where people could aggregate to raise issues of social justice. By the time the 1960s rolled around, you needed special permits for meetings of more than 12 people; only religious gatherings and funerals were exempted, which was why funerals became such amazing politico-ritual sites.

Many of the churches stepped up. There was the sort of impetus you would find in Christian base communities in Latin America soon after: an effort to re-interrogate the message of Christianity from the point of view of the meek and the oppressed. This, of course, had deep roots. The founding of the African National Congress in South Africa in 1912-13 came out of the African Independent Churches, whose leaders had taken the Bible—which had entered the community as a colonizing, civilizing text—and read another message out of it. So they “liberated the message from the messenger,” and made of this a struggle for human dignity. This was a way of saying, “let us make this text live up to its promises, because there’s a dramatic contradiction between what we were promised when we were ushered into the global fraternity of the church, and what we have experienced as citizens of this racially segregated society.”

In the mid-1960s, when I was at university and studied a number of disciplines, I found anthropology especially interesting because it was relevant to these sorts of issues in Africa. Most other fields at the time —psychology, English literature—did not have one read a single writer from the Global South. You read Conrad on Africa, but you didn’t read African writers. That was soon going to change dramatically. In the mid-1960′s, anthropology was uniquely relevant in acknowledging the value of non-Eurocentric knowledge and life-ways.

The fine scholar who taught us anthropology, Monica Wilson, was a missionary’s daughter. She herself had been involved in quite explicit criticism of the government through her academic work, through documenting the implications of poverty in the countryside. She had made anthropology into a kind of vocation—to use the Weberian term—one that came from where she had grown up, on a mission station in the Eastern Cape.

Somewhere in our readings, which were largely about African traditional rituals, witchcraft, and kinship, there was something about “separatist” churches—African movements that had broken away from the mission churches in the name of another kind of religiosity. These churches had become communal sites for a kind of moral reconstruction in the countryside. Some were more overtly political, some weren’t. But they were amazingly inventive in terms of their ritual practices. The book Bantu Prophets in South Africa, by a very perspicacious Swedish missionary named Bengt Sundkler, explored the way that the prophetic, millennial possibility within the Christian tradition was being acted upon in the South African countryside. The acuity of this insight grabbed my attention and it never left me.

DKK: That’s fascinating. Even in this brief, rich background you’ve just given, you’ve brought up a number of the themes that we’re addressing in the forum: namely, questions about tradition, questions about authority, questions about inheritance, and questions about sovereignty. I want to come back to each of these. For the meantime let’s stay a little bit longer on the question of tradition. In describing your experience with African Christianity, you depict it as both constitutive of who you became and also as an object of study. It would be helpful if you could talk a bit about the difficult relationship in which you know and are embedded in traditions and cultures of inheritance, while at the same time these traditions and cultures also become the object of your intellectual work.

JC: What was so instructive about growing up in apartheid South Africa was that God was on everybody’s side. We had something called “Christian national education” when I was growing up, which was really apartheid as religious pedagogy. Of course, it was a cynical mode of maintaining power for a minority, an experiment in social engineering.

There was always a dimension of the enterprise that was highly theological, especially among national religious leaders who argued for a certain kind of Calvinist tradition. They tried to reconcile a rather literal sense of the Salvation of the Elect with the forms of modern “democracy,” which was ironic, because it came from descendants of radical Protestants, many of whom had come to South Africa as Huguenots in 1688, and who as followers of Calvin suffered severe persecution in Catholic France. In the context of the Cape Colony they had developed a mode of reading the Bible and an understanding of Protestantism that remained separate from some of the liberalizing tendencies that accompanied the impact of industrialization, and the rise of a class-based society and secular liberal democracy in Europe. I did meet people who sincerely thought that they could make it work in a relatively humane way, even though the more the system became entrenched, and its contradictions became apparent, the more people became invested in simply maintaining it against all odds, and terrible things were done in its name. So there was that specific tradition, and it had a great influence on apartheid theology.

My family, at least on my father’s side, was Jewish. They had run from the pogroms in Eastern Europe and had come to Africa. My mother was from a lapsed Lutheran family that had also known political exclusion in their native Bavaria. In my parents’ generation, there was a kind of accommodation to the fact that, while most had run from systems of ethnic-political-racial persecution in Europe, by the mid 20th century in South Africa, they were seeing forming around them just such a system: one being validated in theological terms and in terms of fidelity to “tradition.” Afrikaners often saw themselves as the more faithful keepers of a Calvinist “tradition” that had been watered down in secular Europe. But there was also another kind of African Christian “tradition”—a tradition in the sense that it stemmed from a particular kind of teaching of theology, and sought to perpetuate itself as such.

Most of the missionaries who came to southern Africa in the nineteenth century were not elites from the established churches. They were people often from working class communities in the north of England and Scotland. David Livingstone, after all, had been a mill worker, and had educated himself to become a doctor. So they were part of a dissenting strain, and there again you have tradition, but a reinterpreted, reformed tradition. This turns on the key question of where authority is located. This was a crucial matter in the non-European mission field, which required the adaptation of “tradition” to local circumstances. What accommodations pose no threat to established authority? At what point does one question that authority? Where does one draw the line and say: “This is a sovereign truth about which I/We can’t compromise?”

This is an especially salient issue within Protestantism, of course. The whole point about the Protestant tradition is that Providence has given you not only the means, but the obligation to constantly test sovereign truths against the world, against experience, and thus to bring it up to date, to make it speak truth to the world in which you live. This was how the liberal humanist tradition emerged within Protestantism in Europe. When the nineteenth century missionaries had come to South Africa, all of that gets left in Europe.

In Africa, they become the representatives of authoritative tradition in the church, declaring: “There can be no polygamy, there can be no ‘traditional’ ritual.” “Tradition” now gains special ideological meaning as that which is heathen, unenlightened. One has to put all that superstition behind one, leave the extended family, and become an individual believer, one who reads the text and takes a self-willed decision to convert. Now the missionaries represent orthodox, uncompromising authority. And it is Africans who struggle with this question: “How do we make that truth relevant to our lives? Are we indeed purely sinful, purely evil, and living in darkness? And how do we reconcile the fact that the church into which we’ve been brought doesn’t actually live up to formal tenets of its own tradition?”

And so it is that missionization is always a process of reform, some of it explicit, but a lot of it not explicit. Because in making real a “tradition,” in making it live in the world, in putting things into practice, in translating it (in every sense of the word translation), you’re also reforming that tradition, whether it’s an actual declaration of reform, or through the pragmatic re-vision of its components, which renders it almost the same, but not quite, to quote Homi Bhabha. So the key analytical question was: Is Africa becoming Christianized or was Christianity becoming Africanized? And what was at stake in that process? And the whole matter of what constituted a “tradition” was a complicated methodological problem, for both would-be theorists and their subjects were continually confusing ideological and analytical uses of the term.

Making claims in relation to “tradition” can be very powerful: Africans would oppose laws instituted by the apartheid government, for instance, by saying: “Look, everything I’ve been taught about justice, about equity, about any kind of sovereign truth in the Christian tradition is belied by what I see here. And on the authority of that commitment and conviction I protest.” But at the same time, they would resist certain other things that were done in the name of tradition, the Calvinist tradition, for instance.

This slipperiness of the term “tradition” weighed very heavily on me when I started my own research. There was a very strong sense in which both classic anthropology and our everyday colonial culture in South Africa accepted an overarching distinction between modernity and tradition. In colonial society, tradition was primitive, indigenous, something that had to be cast off. The missionaries sometimes referred to traditional African society as a state of “primitive communism,” from which the autonomous, self-determining subject had to be set free. Anthropologists reversed the signs, seeing traditional societies as valuable in and for their difference, even if ultimately doomed by the process of modernization. But anthropologists shared the basic idea of “tradition” as pertaining to an unchanging world, outside of history—not as a living tradition, one that would have acknowledged that African societies might have internal reform, or understood that “customary law” might evolve with social conditions, and so on. Tradition and modernity constituted a kind of Manichean divide—one that was integral to the ideological apparatus of modernity itself, especially as a rationale for colonization and “civilization” (and more recently, for “development”).

Beginning in the late 1960′s, many of us social scientists felt that such a concept of tradition had no place in social analysis. It was ideology parading as theory. We felt we had to show by every means that those putatively static “traditions” were live and that, in fact, they had been produced by modernity, that the very word “tradition” in this sense didn’t exist in African languages until called into being by a discourse of inter-dependent colonizing dualisms. As a discipline, anthropology was itself invested, not always willingly or wittingly, in the preservation of that idea of tradition, and even though they valued it positively, anthropologists were adding a certain kind of ontological legitimacy to the colonizing project because of that. What is more, in subsequent efforts to counter that effect, there has been a move to disestablish the status of “tradition” altogether. All tradition comes to be seen as “invented,” which throws out the baby with the bath water. We have tended to lose the recognition of how authoritative bodies of precept and practice are actually maintained and reformed over time in colonial societies and elsewhere.

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

When discussing the importance of sincerity in conversion, for example, Keane states: “real conversion requires that a speaker’s words be sincere expressions of ideas that are truly understood […]. At stake is not just the transmission of correct doctrine but also production of human subjects who are (relatively) free because they fully grasp the agency that is rightly theirs.” To a Calvinist, there was indeed more at stake in real conversion than the transmission of correct doctrine, but an important measure of sincerity was that the speaker’s conversion not be the product of the agency of human subjects. On the contrary, a sincere conversion could be performed only by the saving work of the Holy Spirit. To this end, some varieties of Calvinists developed extensive theories of signs designed to weed out apparent conversions attained by merely natural or human means. In short, human beings were free and responsible without being agents in their own conversion. If this sounds difficult to understand, Calvinists thought so too and spent lifetimes of intellectual effort trying to work out the technical subtleties and nuances that distinguished their view of Christian freedom from Catholic ideas of free will, or from the kind of individual autonomy advocated by Enlightenment liberalism or other varieties of Protestants.

To his credit, Keane is an insightful enough reader to understand this, and is careful not to impute his reading of Calvinist discourse about signs and agency to Calvinists’ own stated views about signs and agency. Thus, there are a number of statements in the text and footnotes that say something along the lines of: “Of course in some sense one defers to the agency of God.” But these concessions to ideas about human depravity, the sovereignty of God, and the saving work of the Holy Spirit are usually followed by qualifiers like “but in practice” or “however,” which reassert the connection to modern agency. Keane defends this on the grounds that he is “trying to make certain background assumptions easier to see.” This is a reasonable move, inasmuch as anthropologists should not be the passive amanuenses for historical actors, but it does bring up some tricky methodological problems for an assessment of Keane’s reconstruction of Calvinist semiotic ideology. For example, one could note that despite their critiques of institutional mediation, Calvinists in practice constructed coercive civic and ecclesiastical institutions designed to further their vision of a Godly society—just ask the residents of Calvin’s Geneva or the Puritans’ Massachusetts. But Keane decides to accept Calvinist critiques of institutions and chooses to doubt Calvinist critiques of human agency. To this end, he draws on the classical sociological theories of Weber and Troeltsch, but these theorists were working with their own background assumptions, which presumed that Protestants (as opposed to, say, Catholics) would have to have been the ones who shaped the process of historical development that bridged the gap between Christendom and secular modernity. Thus, what mattered was where Protestant agency ended up, and this made the sovereignty of God, the saving work of the Holy Spirit, and the critique of free will into vestigial ideas that were destined to disappear. But it is important to consider that the jury is still out about whether these classical sociological theories were necessarily right about the telos of secular modernity.

Furthermore, it seems to me that these assumptions are different from those guiding Keane’s own attempt to grapple with the complexity of Calvinist explanations of the relationship between words and things. Thus, Keane devotes careful attention to Calvinist views about the Lord’s Supper, in which he points to the rejection of Catholic and even Lutheran sacramentalism on the grounds that any such ritual should be regarded as merely symbolic. He then extends this insight to do a fantastic job of unpacking the semiotic ideology that Dutch missionaries used to attack idolatry and to convince the Sumbanese that their material objects and practices were symbols and metaphors. These symbols, in turn, were not innocuous, because external and counterfeit forms were the means Satan used to deceive people.

Keane’s account here is convincing, but it is important to contextualize this semiotic ideology. I could be misreading Keane here, but it struck me that he reads Calvinists’ views of the Lord’s Supper to glean how they imagined Christian truth. But I would argue that in the hands of Calvinists, this semiotic ideology would only be employed to explain other people’s false religions. The Lord’s Supper was downgraded to the status of metaphor because, like all works, it could play no instrumental role in salvation. What Catholics and idolaters shared in their formal prayers and ritual performances was an overvaluation of human agency and institutions at the expense of the sovereignty of God and the surprising work of the Holy Spirit, which could not be contained in any external institutional, material, or linguistic forms. Against empty forms and rituals, Calvinists sought the real, active, vital presence of the Spirit that animated and invigorated the human body and the social order. According to the Dutch Calvinist Abraham Kuyper (whom Keane often cites), “It is He who dwells in the hearts of the elect; who animates every rational being; who sustains the principle of life in every creature.” To this end, the Holy Spirit worked through what can be described as a metonymic operation that stressed immediate contact and presence. To return to the question of sincerity, words about conversion that were animated by the presence of the Spirit were sincere; words that were derived from natural or human means in the absence of the Spirit were counterfeit and insincere, even if they were the exact same words (and this goes to the point made in Michael Warner’s post about the significance of speech). The Calvinists’ message to Sumbanese pagans thus would not be that religious truth is metaphorical, but that “your spirits are fake; our Spirit is real.”

In Keane’s account, however, Calvinists sound a lot like Saussurean structuralists. The practical upshot of this might be that if Protestants are actually proto-structuralists, and as such have shaped modern ideas of signs and subjectivity, then poststructuralist anthropologists can dust off their old arguments against structuralism and direct them against Christian secular modernity. To be clear, I think there is something to this in that Keane does identify a semiotic ideology that is indeed operative and influential in modernity. I also realize that I’m quibbling: insisting that the work of the Holy Spirit should be described as metonymy instead of metaphor isn’t that different from what Keane is saying and actually strengthens his arguments about purification and the suspicion of mediation. But quibbling about theological distinctions is what Calvinists do, and I think greater attention to the insistence that human beings were not agents in their own conversion helps to explain Calvinist resistance to the kind of modern semiotic ideology that Keane describes.

This is important because spiritual immediacy works differently from assenting to “ideas that are truly understood.” For example, Kuyper makes what he thinks to be an important distinction between Calvinist and Islamic critiques of mediation. According to him, Islam is the ultimate purifier and functions as the perfect opposite of paganism: “Islam isolates God from the creature, in order to avoid all commingling with the creature.” What is important here is not the accuracy of Kuyper’s claims about Islam as much as to understand that it matters to him to make a distinction between different kinds of critiques of mediation. As he explains, “[Calvinism] does not seek God in the creature, as Paganism; it does not isolate God from the creature, as Islamism; it posits no mediate communion between God and the creature, as does Romanism; but proclaims the exalted thought that, although standing in high majesty above the creature, God enters into immediate fellowship with the creature, as God the Holy Spirit. This is even the heart and kernel of the Calvinist confession of predestination.” In other words, the critique of mediation is not an end in itself, but lays the groundwork for a positive assertion of a spiritual immediacy that is real.

None of this is to say that the Dutch missionaries weren’t modern, in the sense that one of the ways of being modern is to feel disaffected and alienated in a spiritless modernity (consider, for example, the anxieties about form, sincerity, and spirit in modernist art and literature). But where I do find Keane’s account of a semiotic ideology convincing is in characterizing the opponents of Calvinist orthodoxy in the early twentieth century. In the American context, for example, Calvinist stalwarts joined other theological conservatives to fight against the vagaries of modernist and liberal theological movements. One point of contention was the willingness of some to read the Christian Gospel in terms of symbols and metaphors. As the American Calvinist J. Gresham Machen argued in 1923, “the liberal theologian seeks to rescue certain of the general principles of religion, of which these particularities are thought to be mere temporary symbols, and these general principles he regards as constituting ‘the essence of Christianity’.” According to Machen, modernists and liberals compromised the uniqueness of the Christian Gospel by reading the biblical text in terms of metaphors, symbols, and theological principles (not all Calvinists were literalists, of course, but many at least had some sympathy with fundamentalist anti-modernism). While I would second Warner’s commendation of Keane for not attributing to Calvinists an advocacy of a singular, modern liberal subject, Keane’s account does make it tricky to explain why they thought of modernity as literally Satanic.

Interestingly, the fundamentalist insistence on the literal and historical truth of the Gospel is often cast as a deficit of metaphor. On this point, a valuable contribution of Keane’s study of Calvinist critiques of idols and fetishes is that it advances a genealogy that tracks how it becomes self-evident in modernity that someone who fails to recognize the metaphorical quality of religious truth is missing something essential about religion. But rather than see this as an extension of a Calvinist emphasis on metaphor to a prescriptive, normative model of religiosity, we might just as well describe it as a movement in the other direction. What characterized Protestant modernists was their willingness to see Christianity as one religion among other religions. Thus, a semiotic ideology used to condemn other people’s false religions became transformed into a supposedly neutral hermeneutics of symbols, metaphors, and meanings. The insistence that everyone’s religions were alike and comparable could then be the basis for a tolerance that could serve as one of the markers of secular citizenship in a pluralistic society. I am just not convinced that most Protestants around the globe shared this semiotic ideology, especially those who persisted in calling themselves Calvinists.

The gist of this fine book recounts a story of modernity that is imagined as a process of human liberation from false belief and drab materiality through the encounter between Dutch Calvinists and the inhabitants of Sumba, some of whom are Catholic, and some not. The Sumbanese use scripture for divination, presume that prayer produces material results, and think that words have real and inherent power to act in the world. The Calvinist reformers do not—they insist that language is the pure and transparent expression of inner thought, and believe in sincerity, not in magic.

At issue, Keane says, are different semiotic ideologies. For the reformers, there is a commitment to mastering one’s thought and a fundamental distinction between thought and word. For the Sumbanese, there is a fundamentally non-dichotomous engagement. Lucien Levy-Bruhl might have called it “participation.” Words act in the world by virtue of their inherent authority, which they acquire through their history and prior use by mighty beings. The Dutch reformers aimed to free the Sumbanese from these false beliefs, promulgated by illegitimate clerics and their feeble rites. They would liberate the Sumbanese by teaching them how to encounter the divine directly.

Yet they can’t, Keane says. Transparency is impossible and the project of purification doomed. We will never be liberated from the material entanglement of words.

But I don’t think that Keane believes that this dour vision of modernity is all we have. Smack in the middle of the book there appears an impish hero whom our author seems to really like, who neither abandons his magic nor rejects his Christianity, and who seems to be content in his skin.

I should back up and remind readers that the plot of the missionary encounter Keane recounts hinges on an awkwardness encountered in actually converting the Sumbanese. For the Sumbanese, the words which summoned the pagan spirits were still powerful. By contrast, the Dutch reformers didn’t believe that words in themselves could summon anything. They understood that their role was to transform the local custom and to draw in and convert the unredeemed, so they used local words and ritual phrases to convey the meaning of their new and different God. This made the Sumbanese Christians exceptionally uncomfortable, and they did all they could to avoid these local reminders on the grounds that they might bring the pagan spirits back to mind and possibly into active life. By the same reasoning, those who were not yet converted found it difficult to believe that it was possible to speak directly to a creator god. To reach that God you needed to travel by the paths of the ancestors, which prescribed the words and practices necessary to get through. As a result, it was not easy for the Protestant missionaries to achieve their goal.

Except, that is, for our puckish hero, Umbu Neku, who used the ancient rites which invoke supernatural powers in a way which did not, in fact, replicate them, and so could not really be thought to make the spirits angry. Umbu Neku did not attempt to be a pure and liberated soul—he was not bothered that he was caught within his tradition, his impure semiotic net, and his nonchalance disarmed both sides. Keane cautiously presents this case as a third semiotic ideology and I think that in his heart, as a modern Christian might say, he prefers it to the other two.

More to the point, I think a lot of Christians prefer it too. As this audience will know, many Americans describe themselves as born-again or evangelical. The current figure averages out at over 40 percent of all adults. (This includes about one fifth of all Catholics. Slightly less than 30 percent of Americans are white, Protestant, and evangelical.) About half of these born-again or evangelical Christians accept the reality of the so-called gifts of the Holy Spirit, identified in First Corinthians and elsewhere in the scripture, in which the Holy Spirit courses through the body and manifests itself in prophecy, vision, miraculous healing, tongues, and other supernatural phenomena. They want to experience God personally, to feel the Holy Spirit in goosebumps and spreading warmth, and to hear God speak to them in their hearts, or sometimes through their ears. Bob Fogel, who speaks with the Nobel Laureate’s authority, if not with God’s or the National Opinion Research Center’s, estimates that one in three Americans are involved in an experiential spirituality.

These are my people (I speak in the ethnographic register) and many of them are deeply involved in what could be described as a “let’s pretend” spirituality. By this I do not mean to diminish the seriousness of their intent or the depth of their commitment to their beliefs. Instead, the style they adopt is meant to remedy what they perceive to be the failure of modern fundamentalist spirituality, and they understand that failure in almost the same way that Keane does. These Christians position themselves between fundamentalists and traditional Pentecostals, although an outsider looking in might easily confuse them with both. They describe the fundamentalists as “dead,” because they think that no one can find God through simple inner assent anymore, and they claim that Pentecostals merely promise magic because they believe that prayer will always work. For these evangelicals, sometimes God gets through and sometimes he doesn’t, but the supernatural is nonetheless real and accessible in the everyday world. One might call this the “flickering lightbulb” theory of God: because Christ has not come again and the world is not yet redeemed, God is not always present in the present, although he is always present in the eternal (Christians would call this the theology of the “now/not yet”). God is really real, and you should practice hearing his voice by asking him what shirt you should wear in the morning. But if he tells you to wear the blue shirt and it’s really in the wash, it was probably just your own imagination. Try again tomorrow.

These evangelicals are both embracing modernity and reacting to it. They share with Keane the skepticism that an ordinary person can shake off the entanglements of the everyday and reach beyond to God. That is why they invite the “let’s-pretend” engagement, an explicit invitation to suspend disbelief, in order to persuade themselves to take seriously the God that they believe modernity has written out. In effect, they are doing what Umbu Neka has done. They are taking the traditions of the faith but using them nonchalantly, relaxed about the referential relationship between the word, the world, and the God who transcends them both. They enjoy being entangled in the web so long as they can make it one in which their God is also embedded. These choices are not so much an alternative to Keane’s bleak modernity, but created by it: created, that is, by the self-conscious perception that true transcendence is not possible for such materially earthbound beings as we are.

We really shouldn’t put belief in a no-fly zone. It’s far too interesting.

One of the core themes of Christian Moderns is an effort to denaturalize the privilege often accorded to a particular idea of agency in contemporary academic discourse and its neighbors. As many others have pointed out, this privilege has made it hard for us to take seriously people whose views of agency differ from our own, from which follows a host of political consequences. I am not a moral philosopher and my goal is not to establish a normative claim about what agency really ought to be. But as Philip Gorski’s comments make clear, there does tend to be an underlying ethical impulse to anthropology, and it does place a high value on self-consciousness. To the extent that Christian Moderns itself is, as Gorski says, “captive” to this value, it fails to escape its own implicit normativity. I accept this much: my own work does not aspire to a transcendental position. It has a genealogy, and as the book tries to make its case, it consciously and, no doubt unconsciously, presupposes certain epistemic values of the world within which it speaks. To acknowledge this openly is, I think, in accord with the style of critique that insists, for instance, that secularism is a discipline and liberalism a tradition. This is also consistent with a certain kind of pluralism: to admit that this tradition doesn’t supersede or encompass all others is to find, rather, that it takes its place amidst them. If there’s a paradox here, it’s in subjecting oneself to critical self-scrutiny, the universal pretensions of which rest on local justifications.

Gorski is certainly right to point out that there are competing semiotic ideologies, rival visions of moral agency, and multiple turning points within Euro-American history. Christian Moderns shouldn’t be taken as making the excessively strong claim that there is only a single possible semiotic ideology in such a complex world. So the book shouldn’t be reduced to a new version of “the West versus the rest.” Nor does it pretend that the moral narrative of modernity is sufficient in itself. Quite the contrary: the notion that history might be accounted for within a totalizing and unilinear narrative is itself a characteristic ideological feature of the moral narrative of modernity. Moreover, not all possible historical narratives eventuate in modernity. In that respect, those who turn to Thomist and Aristotelian traditions seem to me not so much to be working within liberal secularism, as Gorski puts it, as trying to establish counter-traditions to it. I would draw one point of contrast between historical-ethnographic work and the philosophical and theological texts he invokes. Those texts work within genre constraints that usually impose demands for consistency and coherence on their arguments that are quite distinct from the quite different kinds of demands (pragmatic, economic, political, emotional, cognitive, and so forth) imposed by the contingencies of social existence. Communities exist with degrees of logical and even moral contradiction that few purely theoretical formulations would permit.

Michael Warner pushes the argument of Christian Moderns in extremely valuable directions. First, by stressing the spatial dimensions of evangelical discourse, he productively generalizes the case beyond that of colonialism per se. The addressivity that is built into the pragmatic structure of proselytization is a fundamental basis for the modularity that facilitates both self-expanding publics and self-cultivating subjects. This observation situates the specifically evangelical project in the context of other mediated publics and “counter-publics,” to use Warner’s own term. Thus Warner helps draw together two threads of the story by suggesting how the mutual production of subjectivities and communities works. One outcome, he notes, is the denominationalist imaginary, in which we are surrounded by “others who believe otherwise.” This is certainly true, but it’s worth stressing something that I think Warner leaves only implicit. As is well known, colonialism inspired a host of typologies of human bodies, minds, moral and social orders, which usually involved varying degrees of invidious comparison. But the evangelical project is supposed to view that world of otherness through the lens of possible conversion. Therefore, those “others” who surround us are, at least in principle, if not always in practice, potentially “us.” (As Stephen Berkwitz suggests in his post, conversions may destabilize the relations of similarity and difference that colonial projects had to negotiate.)

Warner then raises the question of ethical agency. I fully agree with his two points about purification: that it cannot account for the whole story and that it inevitably results in new hybrid forms of subjectivity. (Perhaps the neo-traditionalisms that Gorski mentions might be considered in this light.) However, when he says that new hybrids are equally modern, I think he shifts the definition of “modern” away from its initial formulation in the book. If one defines modernity not as an objective description of the world at a distinct chronological moment, but rather in terms of a historical consciousness formed in relation to a certain moral narrative projected onto linear time, then those hybrids are by definition external to that ideological formation. They may, to be sure, point us to the existence of alternatives, such as counter-modernities. But I would resist calling them alternative modernities as some people do (though, it should be noted, Warner does not), for to do so would shake the idea of modernity loose from those totalizing claims that I take to be among the defining features of the narrative of moral progress. Not everything new should be called “modern.” If, as Warner proposes, the key is not purification but, rather, “the creation of modular, extractable, translatable forms”, then we might ask not just what produces those forms but also what gives them their normative weight. Purification, then, would be one way of describing both a key feature of that process of creation and the normativity that underwrites it. And one might say, with Warner, that the category of purification may ultimately be most useful not as an explanation but, rather, as a way of bringing together apparently disparate phenomena, and thence undertake a closer analysis of the forms, their metapragmatic presuppositions, and their conditions of circulation.

Stephen Berkwitz correctly notes that my attention to nineteenth and twentieth century Protestantism comes at the expense of very different themes apparent in the Catholic missions of several centuries earlier. Of course the Calvinists of whom I write were quite aware of the latter, against whom they explicitly defined their own ideology of moral progress. (In fact, one could also mention another omission, eastern Orthodoxy, which produced both its own iconology and iconoclasm, as well as its own mission strategies in the Russian east. And there are, in addition, the various Pentecostal and other evangelical missions that are thriving today.) But my goal is not to account for all colonialisms or all missions. Berkwitz has identified a crucial difference between two distinct periods of European colonialism, one dimension of which is the role played by kinds of missionary enterprise that differed markedly in their doctrines, organizational structures, financial bases, and relations to states. Indeed, states themselves were quite different sorts of things in these two historical periods. I justify my focus on Protestants working during the high imperial age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by the angle of approach mentioned above. Furthermore, history makes a difference in how that negotiation of similarity and difference described by Berkwitz could be carried out. This negotiation was a persistent feature of colonial encounters, and could be especially destabilizing in projects intended to transform subjectivities. By the late nineteenth century, the newly emerging anthropological sense of the concept of “culture” was available as one way of sorting out differences among people, and thus of defining “religion.” The peculiar relevance of this historical moment, in contrast to the first wave of imperial expansion, lies in the way that effort continues to shape our discussions today.

Berkwitz also rightly observes there is inevitably a political dimension to the hierarchies that missions and other colonial regimes of truth produce.  If I fail to elaborate on this theme, it’s not only because that has been the predominant focus of most previous anthropological discussions of missions, but also because that focus often takes so much for granted in its own political common sense, its own grasp of the players and their stakes. In choosing what to emphasize in Christian Moderns, I was trying to reflect on that very common sense, and hoping to elude the teleological narratives to which it can unwittingly give rise.

Like Gorski, Danilyn Rutherford hones in on the ways in which I seem to have been unable to entirely escape the very habits and assumptions on which I am trying to reflect. In her exemplary close-reading of the text, she shows how persistent the vocabulary of belief can be. So let me grant that the word “belief” may cast too broad a net. Perhaps we could speak of metabelief to identify the ideological privilege that certain traditions accord to the giving of assent to propositions, which is then taken to define a religion (thus Asad). But it seems this narrow definition tends to expand into a more general psychologism, by which a postulated inner state is required for any explanation of practices, which are themselves therefore seen to derive from it. As a general account of mind, this is peculiarly intentionalistic and self-objectifying. As an account of religion, it’s empirically dubious (for instance, it tends to ignore the bored pupil in confirmation class in favor of the pious and passionate) and politically suspect (it makes some people judges of the interior states of others).

But as Rutherford shows, it may be impossible to eliminate talk of assumptions, thoughts, and presuppositions altogether from our account of people’s actions. Thus, we need more complex and nuanced accounts of the relations between thought, imputed thought, unconscious presuppositions, and action. These accounts should remain suspicious of the inclination to grant primacy to interiority. Indeed, as Rutherford wisely suggests, careful attention to linguistic pragmatics and other aspects of signification will confound any effort to draw a clear distinction between inner and outer. My inclination is dialectical, that is, to say that tacit understandings help produce material practices, to which people respond with new understandings. This means we have to link the varieties of belief to the different material modalities they imply. We can displace to primacy of belief from our accounts and sort out its varieties.  By attending to the materiality of words, objects, and practices, if we don’t eliminate the inner/outer distinction altogether, we should at least put them into more dynamic play with one another. Practices may be only one dialectical moment of a process of objectification that will also include beliefs, but it is the moment that gives religions both their sociality and their historicity.

Given that my current research concerns the effects of Portuguese colonialism on Buddhist literature and culture in early modern Sri Lanka, I propose to structure my comments around, first, what Keane’s book teaches me and, second, what my research might, in turn, offer Keane. I will say here at the outset that I find Christian Moderns to be a stimulating and useful book. Its contributions toward theorizing the relationship between religion and colonialism are numerous and substantial. Since I lack the expertise to speak to Keane’s treatment of the exact semiotic nature of language and culture in Sumba, I will restrict my comments to his anthropology of Christianization. This book contains other subjects of significance, but I happen to find Keane’s discussions of morality and purification between and within religious communities to be particularly noteworthy.

One of the aspects of Christian Moderns that I find most interesting is the contested question of agency that resulted from the missionary encounter in Sumba. One often finds studies of missions that focus on the measures by which the missionaries themselves judged their efforts (i.e., the numbers of converts made). Less common are inquiries into the kinds of cultural conversions that take place alongside or in opposition to Christian proselytization. In other words, mission encounters do not simply result in the conversion of the faithful. They also spark debates over religious truth and cultural understandings. Keane astutely points out that one of the flashpoints in the Sumba missions concerned the question of agency. Who is responsible for action in the world? Whose will is made known? And where does agency lie? Such apparently philosophical questions assumed real-world relevance in the mission encounter, as Christians condemned the local ancestral ritualists for locating religious power in material objects—a practice often labeled fetishism by those who sought to replace such traditions with Dutch Calvinism. Keane analyzes how Christians employed the question of agency to condemn the fetishes of the unconverted Sumbanese. In this sense, Christian—specifically Protestant—conversion was thought to free the Sumbanese from their material entanglements to worldly objects. By mistakenly imputing power and agency to things, the so-called “fetishists” were seen as stricken by false understandings of where true religious power lies. Missionaries thus charged themselves with the task of getting the Sumbanese to locate true agency in the immaterial realm, through the power of God and the internal beliefs and piety of the individual Christian.

The issue of agency, in other words, becomes a point of contestation between missionaries and converts on one side, and the ancestral ritualists on the other. Keane’s insightful analysis points to how debates over religious truth may reside in cultural definitions of what makes us human and what humans are able or required to do. I have no doubt that concepts of freedom and fetishism are salient issues in the mission encounter in twentieth-century Sumba. But it is worth noting, and I’m sure Keane would concur, that mission encounters are not always structured around issues of human agency and the objectification of religious power. My work with Portuguese missionaries in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sri Lanka suggests that different dynamics could also be in play. The Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries sponsored by the Portuguese Crown tended to distinguish the “true faith” of Catholic Christianity from the “heathen” (infiel) traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. While the latter worshipped images (imagens), such practices were condemned as repugnant not for objectifying religious powers per se, but rather for the fact that they were false images linked to the work of the Devil. Early modern Catholic missionaries were perfectly willing to recognize divine power operating through crosses, holy water, and other material objects. And given the work of Portuguese and Spanish missionaries throughout much of the globe, it may well be that “fetishism” was an exceptional problematic in mission encounters more generally.

Another rich area for reflecting upon religion in colonial and missionary encounters is the manner in which language ideologies produce social difference. Keane’s remark that language ideologies “play a crucial role in producing—in objectifying and making inhabitable—the categories by which social difference is understood and evaluated” strikes me as a very fruitful line of inquiry, according to which the capacity that an individual or group possesses to express and describe what is “true” and “correct” can be used to distinguish and privilege some people over others. Keane goes on to point out how Christian missionaries and reformers in Sumba have often utilized acts of purification in order to make separations and distinctions between persons and things. For Dutch Calvinists and their Christian converts, purification entailed teaching people to abstract the immaterial meanings from material objects, to look beyond the fetishism of ancestral rituals, and to find power in a non-physical God and the interiority of individual faith. In short, acts of religious purification entailed denying material mediations of divine agency. And yet, Keane argues that the aim of complete purification always falls short, since the reliance on semiotic forms always entails some degree of material instantiation, whether it be a creed, a scriptural text, or something else.

Once again, I suspect that this analysis is more effective in the context of Protestant mission encounters than Catholic ones. Portuguese missionaries rejected the objects of so-called “heathen” traditions, but they rarely rejected material mediations as a whole. If the idea of purification is to retain broad currency across the colonial landscape, it may need to be defined differently, more in terms of separating out truth from falsehood, or the divine from the diabolical, than of fixing boundaries between the spiritual and the material. While questions of ontological difference could be salient in Sumba and certain other mission fields, the distinctions drawn between persons and things in acts of purification fail to account for other important distinctions drawn between persons themselves. In other words, it would seem that we should also attend to the creation of hierarchies in the context of missions. In Chapter 8, Keane does address how the Christians and the ancestral ritualists cast aspersions against each other—the Christians being seen as arrogant while the ritualists are cast as superstitious. But, in my view, these charges and exchanges also represent broader efforts to purify the religious field, that is, attempts at purification that are not simply or even primarily made with regard to fetishism and material objects. Other aspects of religious practice and expression that are either immaterial or not susceptible to charges of fetishism can become the source of contention and dispute.

Moreover, while the notions of difference constituted between Christians and “fetishists” may have precluded little, if any, similarity or commonality in Sumba, other colonial settings witnessed moments where efforts to construct difference for the sake of purifying and eradicating it became undermined by shared features and characteristics between groups. For instance, early modern Portuguese writers in Sri Lanka noted similarities as well as differences, and these similarities between Christians and Buddhists clearly gave them pause. One Franciscan missionary recounted how Buddhist monks wear robes, preach, give blessing, and receive alms in ways much like that of his fellow Franciscan brothers. And another colonial writer noted in the seventh century that the Buddha left a code of laws that were similar to Moses’s. But when such writers found similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, they quickly tried to reassert other differences in order to snuff out the threat posed by such likenesses of an erosion of the boundary between “true religion” and “superstition.” As such, the negotiation of similarities seems to be just as important to the missionary encounter as the negotiation of differences. So too is the somewhat ambiguous position of the native convert, an individual who appears both like and unlike the missionary, and whose religious and cultural identities can give rise to conflicts as they attempt to mediate between the colonial and local orders.

It is not my intention to find fault with Keane’s book for not addressing, or not addressing enough, the variety of religious and cultural conflicts in mission encounters around the globe. Rather, I find that it is his provocative analysis of what it means to be both “Christian” and “modern” in Sumba that leads me to want to interrogate further the conditions through which colonial and missionary encounters often transform religious practice and cultural understandings in various places and times. Clearly, we will need to use different lenses to examine how colonial agents worked with—and against—local religious practitioners to produce new identities and ideologies that reshaped cultural worlds over the last five hundred years. Keane’s book, however, shows that such scholarly work is both necessary and fruitful.

Taylor’s framework, however, is only a first draft.  While presenting a secular face to the West, many Asian states have what could only be described as religious pretentions. This is true of the Chinese state under Mao, and to a lesser degree even under Mao’s successors. Indonesia under Suharto was the guardian of a sacred canopy that was supposed to encompass Indonesia’s major religions. Taiwan’s state has taken a secular turn with democratization, but it still relies on religion to provide public stability and generate international recognition.

Although many people in these and most other Asian societies continue to practice religion, it is a different kind of religion than in most Western societies—more a matter of ritual and myth than belief, and deeply embedded in the social, economic, and political life of local communities. Religion has not undergone the transition from public practice to private belief that Taylor discerns in the West.

Finally, Asian religions are practiced under new cultural conditions of belief, even in an age of social mobility and global communication. The result is somewhat different than Taylor describes in the North Atlantic world.

Although religion in most Asian societies has been more a matter of communal practice than of individual belief, the meanings of such communal practice have been changing.  This is the result of social mobility, social differentiation, and the expansion of cognitive horizons.  Social mobility happens mainly when people move from countryside to city, from agricultural to industrial labor or to commerce.  Social differentiation refers to the separation of work (which is increasingly dependent on a globalized economy) and education from family and kinship.  The expansion of cognitive horizons is the result of the exposure to diverse people and ideas through exposure to modern media and to life in the metropolis. Most Asian societies have experienced all three of these processes, but the processes have unfolded in different ways along different paths.  The result is that these processes now intersect to form different contexts, which shape the specific transformations of religion in different societies.

When members of rural communities travel to the city, either within their own country or abroad (as with Indonesian or Filipino guest workers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea), often as low paid migrant workers, they do not leave behind the rituals that sustained their community life back home.  Often migrants travel through chains of relationships—extended family ties, regional associations connected with their local communities—and, once in the city, set up little shrines to the deities of their home.  Often, though, the pressures of industrial work make it difficult for them to reconstitute the full range of community liturgical life in the city. But they remit money back to the countryside partly to support their home community shrines and make pilgrimages home for important festivals.  While at work in a city or town they encounter many people with different gods, different rituals—including of course highly educated cosmopolitans.  Moreover, they have to conform to rhythms of work that do not fit their community’s customary patterns, and they try to educate themselves and especially their children in “scientific” education that contradicts folk practices but provides some hope for upward mobility.

Becoming all things to all people, they are skeptical with the skeptics, politely tolerant with those who worship strange gods, all the while never rejecting the ritual practices of their home communities.  As they do so the result must be a kind of hybrid consciousness. In Chinese culture, at least, there has been a long tradition in favor of such consciousness.  In different aspects of their lives, people could adhere to Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings without worrying much about their logical inconsistencies.  Such are the flexibilities of a non-monotheistic culture, rather than a culture that assumes that there is a single jealous God who demands that all things conform consistently to His will.

However, another result of the possibility to choose one’s own faith from among various options can be increasing demands for purified religion. If one is going to choose one’s own faith rather than simply adapt to the various practices that have been handed down through one’s corporate group, one may want a system of practices and beliefs that seem consistent.  This may be one reason for the attraction of Christianity (especially evangelical Protestant Christianity) among rising middle classes in South Korea and to some degree in urban China.  It may also be the reason for the embrace of reformed versions of Buddhism and Daoism in Taiwan, and of movements toward stricter forms of Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Western China.  The attempt to “modernize” religious practices by rationalizing and universalizing them may help to create new forms of religious fervor—and in turn inspire missionary tendencies.  Maintaining one’s religious conviction cannot depend on hiding within an enclosed community.  It requires getting other people to follow it as well. The stage is set for development of large scale religious movements that can then clash with one another in new ways.

Will this new cultural churning lead to syncretistic, hybrid practices that peacefully knit together various strands of traditional practice?  Or will it lead to sectarian struggles among those devoted to purified faiths?  Answers to such questions are highly context-dependent.  The restructuring of cultural boundaries between the religious and the secular will be influenced by a confluence of factors, such as the rate and pace of social mobility, the extent of and the pace of social differentiation, and the suddenness of expansion of cultural horizons—as well as the cultural resources provided by various traditions for reconciling diversity.

In an age of social mobility and global communication, Asian religions are practiced under new cultural conditions of belief, and the result is somewhat different than Taylor describes in the North Atlantic world.  There, modern people are presented with a stark choice between understanding existence through an “immanent frame” or a “transcendent frame.”  As I have noted, in many Asian societies, including China, the immanent and transcendent are much more mixed up in various hybrid combinations.  In accord with widespread traditions of syncretism, many people believe and practice many things at once.  But modern conditions of belief also impel some believers to purified forms of religious practice.  This is something like what happened in Europe during the Reformation, as Taylor describes it.  When it happens in the unsteady world of Asia today, this is not necessarily a good thing—at least for those who love peace, predictability, and order.

A purification of practice usually involves an attempt to recover the axial age roots of local traditions. (The term “axial age” was coined by Karl Jaspers to refer to the period in the first millennium B.C.E. when visions of a universally transcendent reality were created in Israel, Greece, India, and China.)  Buddhists, Daoists, Muslims, and Christians seek purified versions of their practice. This means rejecting the accretions of tradition and of all those practices that embed religion in local communities with particularistic loyalties.  Rituals are deemed to be efficacious not ex opere operato, but on the strength of the interior conviction that they express. Religious practice gets transformed into religious faith—a personal belief in world transcending ideals that demand universal loyalties.

These purified faiths grow up parallel with older, community embedded practices, but they often claim continuity with them.  Often they gain inspiration and energy through connection with global religious movements. At least when they are appropriated by ordinary people, these forms are never purely universalistic.  Under conditions of belief where one can never take one’s religious practices for granted, religious believers yearn for signs that their beliefs are on the right track.  One important sign is that their kind of faith is expanding.  There is thus a strong missionary impulse in all of these new universalizing movements.

Fearing that such faiths could inspire independent social movements, most Asian governments used some combination of suppression or co-optation to prevent such universalizing faiths from flourishing and to keep them firmly within bounds.  The collapse of such political structures after the Cold War has given a new impetus to such globalizing faiths.  They were attractive at least partly because they were once forbidden fruit. With the crumbling of political barriers that once confined universalizing, missionizing religions in place, there is now a global scramble for souls.

Depending on the particular contexts in which they develop, new expansionist religious movements can lead to serious social and political conflict or can provide resources for reconciliation and healing.  In China, the scramble for souls leads to relatively more conflict.  In general, the movements direct their adherents to otherworldly concerns rather than to this-worldly political activity.  But some of their beliefs give the government cause for concern—especially eschatological beliefs.  The Falungong believes that a great millennial transformation is coming in which the good will be saved and the evil punished.  Many Chinese Pentecostal Christians believe in Premillennialism, which holds that the Last Times are coming soon and that those who have accepted Jesus will be raptured up to heaven, while the world undergoes great tribulations which will end with the triumphant Second Coming of Christ.  The government also worries about the public health implications of practices like faith healing.  Thus it steps ups efforts of surveillance and sometimes suppression. But eschatological religious movements organized through ramifying networks cannot easily be suppressed.  If the government punishes particular leaders, the act only inspires members who revere martyrdom.  If the government cuts off a part of the network, other shoots can quickly grow up elsewhere.  The networks cannot easily be co-opted.  Members who expect otherworldly salvation do not need anything that the government has to give them. Despite government attempts to stop such beliefs and practices, the networks that foster them are expanding very rapidly.

In Taiwan, though, socially engaged Buddhist movements seem to have made a positive contribution toward healing the tensions of a democratizing society.  Their ideologies stress generous acceptance of all people and they motivate their members to build a better world through sustained, gradual effort.  By dampening the tensions that have come from Taiwan’s many conflict-producing forms of identity politics, the Buddhist movements have helped shore up the shaky foundations of Taiwan’s democracy.  In this context, the universalization of religious visions has led to confluences of care rather than conflict.

In Indonesia, on the other hand, the record is mixed.  In places like Aceh, newly energized Islamist movements have clashed with newly energized Christian missionizing movements. (Such clashes of course often are intertwined with clashes over the distribution of natural resources—in Aceh’s case, of petroleum.)  Fortunately, these clashes have subsided in recent years with the help of astute efforts at political compromise and reconciliation.  In the long run, though, sustainable reconciliation may involve a religious dimension.  This is the promise—and the challenge—of groups like Dian Interfidei which seek through ecumenical dialogue and creative common ritual to create “cross-religious persons.”

Internationally, the new scramble for souls can lead to intensified conflict, especially since the universalistic, world transcending impulses often get submerged quickly into worldly nationalisms, enlarged, ambitious communities created by expanded imaginations.   The newly universalizing impulses do not have to lead to conflict, however.  As we have seen, much depends on the content of the traditions out of which they arise and the specific context in which they evolve.

[Editor's note: This post draws from a draft chapter for the SSRC's forthcoming publication, Rethinking Secularism, co-edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, Craig Calhoun, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen.]