Because religion is about mediation, it naturally refuses any duality of nature and culture. Reality, as the true nature of things, is sacred, but it must be mediated by particular human relations and practices. Culture, therefore, can be neither merely arbitrary nor totally opposed to nature, since it is what truly discloses the latter. Since all, or nearly all, human cultures have been religious, it is therefore unsurprising that, as Marshall Sahlins has pointed out in The Western Illusion of Human Nature, they do not recognize a nature/culture divide. Instead, they define themselves in groups of kinship with other natural beings and with the gods, animals being typically defined as types of human, not humans as types of animals.

Sahlins rightly sees the divide as pernicious and as of Greek origin, but he does not make it clear that it is a specifically secular divide. He slightly obfuscates this point by tracing it to the duality of Greek cosmogonic myths, with their stories of battles between chaotic titans and more rational deities. But this duality can be paralleled in many, if not most, cultures—the great exception being the Hebraic one. In the Greek case, as in others, it depicts merely a duality within nature, not between nature and culture. It only becomes the latter after the rationalization of myth, when the “Titans” have been allegorized into warring natural forces, and the gods, demythologized as projections of human law-making capacities. After that we get the legacy that Sahlins traces with such devastating accuracy: nature seen as determining human beings as egotistical; this egotism being something that must be either oligarchically controlled or else democratically and capitalistically manipulated, or, yet again, in the Rousseauian inversion, seen as the source of an asocial innocence. But in all these cases, culture, whether regarded as the remedy, conduit, or problem, is seen as something inherently non-natural, as pure artificial contrivance.

This peculiar Western legacy has a naturally universalizing thrust. All nature is one, because it is the site of laws of struggle, or, in the minority report, of isolated integrity. And all culture is also one, because every culture is equally arbitrary. Most typically, the universal culture is seen as the one that channels the universal laws of natural egotism: the culture of bureaucracy, utility, human rights, representative democracy, and the capitalist market.

In this light, one would have to regard the Western globalization of the planet as a secular phenomenon. It stands in contrast with most societies, which are religious, and which know of no division whatsoever between culture and nature. By this token, they tend to be local, because they invest with ultimate, sacred significance the surrounding features of their landscapes, both natural and cultural—and they link the two together. Tokens of these features are exchanged as gifts, and it is this exchange that constitutes society as such.

These societies were disrupted and violated by the arrival of the West. Its vehicles of violation were the capitalist market, which desacralizes both place and gift and turns them into commodities, and the sovereign national state, which is an inherently anarchic reality, no longer subordinate to the international authority of Pope and Holy Roman Emperor. The West’s creation of empire is at once a manifestation of its own anarchy and a slight restraint of the yet more extreme anarchy of the international market. In its relationships with other nation-states, it once more seeks to distill order out of disorder through agonistic balance and Grotian rules for international combat.

But is this really all that has been going on since the dawn of the modern imperial age? If a nature/culture divide is self-delusion, then how can a polity based upon this illusion really operate? Here one needs to discuss the possibility that Christianity is the joker in the Western pack. The white man brought not only guns and money but also bibles and crucifixes. The latter were shamefully used to justify the former, as we know all too well, but was there not also always a structurally inherent limit to the possibility of that process?

What I mean by this is that religion is not necessarily just “secondary” in the modern story of empire and globalization. The “British School” of International Relations, and most notably Hedley Bull in his The Anarchic Society, long ago argued against the “American Realists” that, in reality, the “anarchic” nation-states system worked at all only because of hidden cultural factors operating at a transpolitical and transeconomic level. And amongst these factors, religion necessarily looms large. One can add to this analysis that, as Benno Teshke has shown, even in the eighteenth century, dynastic unity continued to help hold Europe together, while, in the nineteenth, essentially religious alliances performed the same purpose. At least at the outset of the twentieth, the same was true of the European Common Market (now the European Union).

In fact, most experts on IR agree that the crucial influence of religion has never really gone away, especially in the international sphere, because of its unique ability to traverse borders.

In this respect, not just Christianity, but all world religions are “jokers,” because they seek universal relevance, or even universal sway, without investing in a strong duality of nature and culture, which no religion can really sustain. Rather, they seek to insinuate one universal culture that will organize the earth as one specific sacral domain. However, it is arguable that Christianity is uniquely able to combine this with a greater global fluidity: its specific markers are both more mobile and more translatable. It orders no specific laws or sets of unalterable customs. The gifts it proposes to exchange may possess almost any content, for what renders them sacred is their binding gift-character as such. Yet, what is sought through this exchange is not an abstract organization of supposedly “natural” forces, but rather a network of specific bindings of humans to place and of human-place to human-place.

Sahlins himself recognizes that, in the main, the Western religious legacy rejects the nature/culture duality inasmuch as he mentions both that for Plato, psyche determines human existence more than phusis, and that for Augustine, humanity is defined by kinship. This case is augmented if one realizes, unlike Sahlins, that the doctrine of original sin does not augment the idea that there is something evil “by nature.” For clearly it is the most radical possible denial of this very common human view.

The “missionary project” is therefore also in tension, as well as collusion, with the imperio-capitalist project. It seeks to weave one culture out of many, in order to manifest true human nature. In this respect, one can note that Sahlins is vague about how to overcome the nature/culture divide, both metaphysically and politically—if, that is, one seeks to escape the merely local level and its inevitable substitution of an us/them dichotomy for a human/animal one.

Metaphysically, to say that our nature is to be variously cultural still leaves culture arbitrary and in implicit contrast with nature—albeit an impossible nature. Only if there are cultural idioms that are “supposed to be” in some ways hierarchically preferable to others, belonging to our very teleology, can they be said truly to belong to our nature. This requires an invocation of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which uniquely disacknowledges any ontological region of chaos, and which sees nature ‘as “contrived” and human culture as part of a divine, and so natural, “contrivance.” It is for these reasons that it is only the Hebrew/Greek-derived monotheisms that offer any prospect of overcoming the nature/culture divide on a global scale.

Politically, Sahlins is acute in assaulting ancient Greek isonomia as either monarchic/aristocratic imposition upon chaos or else democratic recruitment of natural agonism. But might not this suggest that “mixed government” is the natural mode of natural-cultural unity, since it involves both the aristocratic “proposal” of a culture and the popular adaptive assent to this proposal, which sediments it as natural? If indeed Mauss was right to say that gift-exchange composes the social fact before either law or contract, then one can see how such “mixed government” is always more basic than the former. For if all social formation begins with a gratuitous gesture—a “proposal”—then this is neither consented to nor merely imposed. It is rather “received” and “reciprocated,” or not. One can think of this reception and reciprocity as “democratic”—yet there would be nothing for democracy to agree to were there not the prior moment of “aristocratic” and time-derived “traditional” offering, which necessarily escapes all liberal theorizing, even though this moment is supremely “liberal” in the etymological sense.

It is arguable that workable and just politics and economics should try to ensure that the state and the market remain predominantly “social” in just this mixed sense. Indeed, this may be what the new, anti-neoliberal politics of “the primacy of the social,” as in the case of Saul Alinsky’s “citizens organizing” (now very important in London, for example), are all about. For, to the horror of both left and right, they usually involve entirely “self-appointed” political forces, answerable to no one, who nonetheless achieve a local political footing through popular acclaim and pragmatic success.

The example of mixed government that Sahlins gives is viewed negatively. But that is because it is John Adams’s view of the U.S. constitution, and Adams saw the latter (accurately) as an attempt at balancing class forces. One should view this, however, as a perversion of both the British and the Harringtonian Republican constitutional legacies (which were far better adhered to by Thomas Jefferson). For this more genuine organicism, the “oligarchic” component has to do with sustaining a tradition of wise senatorial “proposers” not concerned with the manipulation of votes, while the “monarchic” element has to do with final non-negotiability of equity and the need for justice in response to arising emergencies. It is arguable that it is the British (but also the Scandinavian, the Swiss, and the Italian civic) adherence to such classical mixture that has provided us today with a long-term legacy of stable constitutionalism, of which one has to regard the United States as an excessively revolutionary—indeed, “Marxist” and bastardized—version, which has led to a peculiarly economistic and tyrannical mode of imperialism. By contrast, it might be remarked that the “archaism” of modern political Britain and the relative “modernity” of medieval political Britain are not in opposition, but are rather signs of the stability of mixture and its guarantee, at least until recently, of a relatively greater measure of liberty and justice. (This may be true even if the “relatively greater” is a pitifully small amount. One should note here also that the same set of observations apply to modern France, though to a lesser degree.)

Therefore, I would argue that still at work, albeit faintly, in the Western global hegemony are the counter-currents both of Christian religion and of a classical “mixed” politics of virtue, and that only these counter-currents can avoid falling prey to xenophobic localism, on the one hand, or to capitalist imperialism, on the other.

But how, in this context, is one to assess the current renewed global spread of the Christian religion? What is one to make, in particular, of the new dominance of Pentecostalism? Here, I fear, my views are less sanguine than those of most of the contributors to Global Christianity, Global Critique. It is true, as remarked in this volume, that Pentecostalism can be regarded as the most successful worldwide movement for the improvement of working people. And here the left has much to learn from its almost total neglect of the way in which cultural liberalism (drugs, sexual permissiveness, etc.) has combined with economic liberalism to drag so many poor people into conditions of abjection. Liberation theology tried to address economic liberalism and got nowhere, because ordinary people could do little about this. Charismatic religion tried to address cultural liberalism and got somewhere, because ordinary people could do something about that. A life of increased self-discipline indeed spells liberation for many, even though this should not imply a forgetting of the structural factors leading to inequity.

However, Pentecostalism has by and large endorsed the capitalist market and the gospel of success, even if it has also developed many compensating voluntary welfare ventures, which should by no means be despised. Yet Charismatic Christians simply are not Badiouian Maoists in exotic tropical disguise. Matthew Engelke is far more on the right track when he notes that they have tended to combine religious ecstasy with a very worldly and “situational” (in Badiouian terms) preoccupation with numbers and statistics.

But the really important question is, how do they relate to the question of mediation? Protestantism has tended to track the modern secular refusal of mediation, which divides culture from nature, by a non-mediated religion. Here we are compensated for a sacramentally drained world by a direct contact with the divine.

Is Pentecostalism in continuity with this? In some ways, yes, as some contributors point out: it can be seen as a lust for an ecstatic, unmediated contact with God. But in other ways, no. Catherine Pickstock mentions that its allowance of post-apostolic miracles removes a pillar of the magisterial reformation. And by refusing Protestant sobriety, it also embraces new modes of supposedly spontaneous, flamboyant ritual, which soon become routine. One is tempted, of course, to say that it is the one possible Latin mode of Protestantism. What I think can be argued is that by increasing the emotive and collectively effervescent dimension, the public ethical conscience of Protestantism that got rid of slavery and sometimes supported modes of socialism is downplayed. Pentecostalism, after all, commenced as an evolution from ethical “holiness” to emotional ecstasy, in terms of the manifestation of the signs of the spirit. Through this move, the world of the market is left still more drained of any spiritual resonance other than as proof of spiritual favor. On the other hand, religion becomes more of a compensating refuge from the bleak meaninglessness of this world, with its “labyrinth of solitude.”

This is not to say that charismatic religion is not redeemable. But Jamie Smith is right: it needs to be Catholicized. One could even say that it has recaptured one half of genuine liturgy—namely, spontaneity—because, as Catherine Pickstock has shown, the idea of a strictly “fixed” liturgy is not medieval. But we need the other half, too—the aesthetic half, which is the dimension of non-identical repetition. Only a complete liturgy can then start to pervade and to challenge all the structures of modern life, and to mediate through all of global culture the natural and the divine.

In my own experience, it is already the case that when southern Protestant Christians begin to receive a theological education, they start with astonishing speed to join in global conversations of Western origin. The coming together of southern numbers and Western intensity of intellectual religious revival may well serve to promote much further in future the counter-currents that lie nonetheless at the heart of contemporary globalization.

If anything will undo the neoliberal “reign of non-mediation,” it is the Christian project of universal gift-exchange, the subordination of the economic and the political to the social, and the renewal of a polity of mixed-government on a world-scale.

I don’t doubt that this interesting focus is quite different from mine, though I think it would be wrong to represent my view as being focused on the theological. In my analysis, the theological had only a central genealogical role to play in the process of “disenchantment.” But, I had argued that the fallout of the theological—once the theological transformations were exploited in alliances forged between established religious interests, commercial interests, and the mandarin interests of organized scientific bodies (such as the Royal Society)—was impressively diverse, ranging from transformations in political economy to political governance and, further yet, to the mentalities of human culture in its relation to the natural world. So the focus, if any, on the theological was intended wholly to emphasize that, unlike purely materialist accounts, I was following more refined Marxists like Christopher Hill, who had written of the importance of the conflict of religious ideas in shaping the period of history in which I had invested my genealogical efforts.

I may have misled Bennett with the remark she quotes in her comment: “The point is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” One theme in my essay was to ask the question: “When and how did we transform the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources?” But, having raised the question, I had worried that it may seem to some that my interest in raising it was a narrow, ecological one. Because I didn’t want to ghettoize the question of nature into just this narrow self-standing concern, I wanted it to relate the “natural” with larger issues of politics, history and culture, and the quoted remark was only intended to convey that broader interest. The idea was not to deny—indeed, it was to assert—that material nature was suffused with value properties that made normative and affective demands on one. It’s just that nature was not to be seen as merely the value-laden material elements among the “actants” that Bennett describes, but also the relations between the actants and human actors and a tradition and history of those relations.  The idea was never to say that the latter in some way canceled the possibility of the former.

I think if there is disagreement between us, it is not about the relevance of the material elements and their normative status but about whether the fact of this circulatory mood that she describes as central to her idea of enchantment can support her claim that there was no loss of enchantment in the modern period. She says: “There is thus no need (contra Bilgrami) to  ‘re-enchant’ the secular world, though there remains the task of becoming more sensitized to the enchantments, the callings, already at work.”  But, in my view, there can be no understanding of the fact of our having become desensitized to enchantments without conceding what she doesn’t want to concede to me, which is that the world is viewed by us in ways that are properly described as disenchanted in just the way I had expounded.

Disenchantment, in my understanding of that process, was a result (a fallout, as I said above) of our having (among other things) over-intellectualized our relations to the world (including nature) as a result of having come to see it in a certain way: as not containing the properties that would make normative demands on us. Because of theological changes that led to viewing the world (including nature) as desacralized, one fundamental source of seeing the world as containing the value properties (good or bad, hostile or benign) that make normative demands on us was removed from our conception of the world. And this played a central role in seeing the world as alien to our sensibilities of practical engagement, something which became for us something either to be studied in a detached way or, when practically engaged with, to be engaged with as something alien, to be mastered, conquered, and controlled for our utility and gain, as in the extractive economies that were systematically generated first in that period.

I’ve italicized “conception” and “for us” in order to make clear that disenchantment cannot be understood as a process without understanding the desensitization that Bennett opposes when she says she wants us to be more “sensitized.”  She can’t have what she wants here without also opposing “disenchantment,” as I understand the term and, therefore, equally proposing “re-enchantment,” as I understand the term.

I would diagnose this misunderstanding of “disenchantment” on her part as perhaps reflecting a rather deep philosophical disagreement between us on how to conceive of nature and matter, when we conceive of it in the non-mechanized way that we both wish to do. My stress on “conception” and “for us” are meant to convey something like the following conception of nature and matter. When one views nature and matter as not merely mechanized, as not merely something that we study in the natural sciences, i.e., with relative detachment, one views it as essentially containing properties that can’t be understood correctly unless one sees our capacity for responsiveness to them with our practical agency (that is what the “for us” was doing in my use of it above, stressing the relevance of this responsiveness) as built-into the kind of properties they are. They are not properties that are anyway there, independent of the kind of sensibility (our sensibility for practical normative engagement) that we, as agents, have. This does not mean that we mentally construct and project these properties onto the world, which in itself is brutely material (in the sense that “mechanized” is supposed to convey). It is a non-sequitur to say that, just because a certain property (value properties) in the world can only be viewed by a certain kind of sensibility (the one that subjects or creatures possessed of a certain self-conscious agency possess), the subjects who possess that sensibility must be constructing these properties and projecting them onto the world. That is what Hume and others influenced by him think to this day, and they were first systematically encouraged to do so by the transformations that I was calling “disenchantment” that began in the late seventeenth century. In my view, the properties are really properties of nature and matter, they are not constructed by us. But they are properties in some sense “for us,” since those who do not possess the kind of self-conscious agency that is moved by normative demands would see darkness in the world where we might see it as containing values making those normative demands.

If her “actants” are not conceived this way, then what she means by “actants” is not what I would have meant by them, had I used that word.  In fact, I would have thought one has not gotten past mechanization, if one didn’t think of nature and matter as containing properties of the kind I am suggesting, over and above the properties studied by natural science.

Thus, when Bennett says we should be more sensitized to the participatory role of material “actants” (that is, to what I, in my terminology, call the normative demands of the value properties in nature and matter), she is precisely saying what I, in my terminology, mean when I say that our angle on the world should be less detached and more responsive to its normative demands. But this predominance of detachment was exactly what was generated by the process of disenchantment, as I understand that process. Hence, there is no avoiding “re-enchantment” if ‘sensitization’ is what you seek.

There may also be something to sort out between us (a possible disagreement, I mean) on the subject of agency, though I rather think it may be more verbal than substantial. Bennett says: “There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency. The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman collective. Bilgrami himself makes a gesture toward the distributive quality of agency in his notion of an external calling from tradition and history, two complex assemblages formed by many different agents at work over different times and places. But these assemblages are not ones in which nonhumans qualify as real participants.”

I am going to put aside what I have already clarified, viz., I am not emphasizing history and tradition with a view to denying that material and non-human elements of nature can make normative demands on us.

Nor do I want to deny that there may be collective and distributed agency of various sorts. So, I don’t think that is the issue between us either, if there is one at all.

I gave an argument in my essay for saying that we wouldn’t be agents if there were not such things as “actants,” as I would use that term. In other words, we would not be agents if there were not normative demands being made on our agency by value properties in matter and nature, that is, value properties in the world that we inhabit. And when I say that these value properties and actants make demands on us, I suppose that I am asserting that they are “real participants,” to use her expression. But there are ways to be “participants” in “assemblages” (these are all her and Latour’s terms, not mine, but I am using them in a way that I find plausible, which may not be what is intended by them) without possessing the kind of self-conscious agency we possess. I would deny that value properties in nature and matter that make normative demands on us are themselves agents in this self-conscious sense. So their demands on us are not intentional demands. They do not intend to make those demands since they don’t have any intentions.

She might even grant this and say that intentional agency of a kind that implies the capacity for self-consciousness of the sort we possess, is not the only kind of agency that there is. I would have no objection to that, so long as one keeps different uses of the word agency apart and makes clear which one is in play. But, in the passage I have just cited, Bennett denies that we (human beings) have “real” agency. Well, in that case, she and I must mean different things by agency. And it is not credible to me that she is denying that we possess something that has been called “agency” for centuries by philosophers, and not just philosophers. So she must be stipulating a use of the term agency (let’s use her term for it, “real agency”) that is different from this. It is supposed to be something that has a more distributed locus than being located in either us, human actors, or in non-human “actants.” I think the interest of that stipulated use of the word agent (“real agent”) would depend on what systematic philosophical use it was put to. Bennett, in a short blog, doesn’t say enough for me to assess that. But, however that assessment may turn out, what we would be assessing can’t be something that stands in disagreement with me—if disagreement means that she says something that I deny or vice versa. I have not said that no one can find any form of agency in the world other than of the sort that I am discussing with the term agency.  And since it is not credible that she is denying that there is something of the sort I mean by the term agency, which human beings posses but pharmaceuticals or bacteria (to take just two examples of the “actants” that “participate” in her “assemblages”) don’t possess, we can resolve all these issues amicably in the word, by disambiguating the term agency in these ways. The disambiguation, it would appear, goes three ways. There is the kind of agency we possess. There is the kind of agency that “actants” possess. (If we see them, as I do with my metaphor, as “making normative demands” on us, or if we see them, as Bennett does, as “participants,” I suppose they must be allowed some “agency,” even if not ours).  And then there is the distributed agency that Bennett calls “real agency,” which is neither of the above. I look forward to reading her book, which, judging from the hints given in this blog, brings the third of these to centre-stage. But with this disambiguation in place, I cannot see that I have to withdraw anything I said on the basis of anything that is allowed in allowing this third notion of agency.

One final point of what seems like a more substantial disagreement. Bennett ends her blog with the following comment on my notion of enchantment: “But it [her idea of enchantment] seems also more attentive than Bilgrami is to the fact that an emergent and generative universe is not pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness, is not fully predictable, and does not necessarily tend toward equilibrium. Thus Bilgrami’s quest for ‘a life of harmony between the demands of an external source and our dispositional responses to its demands’ seems not quite right.   A certain disharmony is built into the world at large and also into the mood of enchantment, which includes discomfort in the face of forms of material agency that one can neither master nor ignore. Thus it is that I find ethical utility in the experience of alienation, whereas Bilgrami seeks ways for secular moderns to live an ‘unalienated life.’”

I think this is a rather basic misunderstanding of my view. Indeed I think there is a straightforward and unnoticed double movement with which the words “harmony” and “unalienated” are used in this passage that leads directly to this misunderstanding.

There is one sense or use of the term harmony in which I was not suggesting that a world that was enchanted would induce an unalienated or harmonious life within it. Suppose we saw the world as enchanted, in my sense of the term. To do so is to see it as, not merely mechanized, but containing value properties that make normative demands on us. Let’s work with a simple example, simpler than the ones that involve her more complicated “actants,” though nothing that I will have to say is such that it can’t be extended to more complicated examples. Let’s say that there is a meteorological perturbation off the coast of Bangladesh. Now, if there is to be enchantment of the sort I have in mind, that fragment of the world (nature, matter) is to be described, not just in that detached way (“meteorological perturbation”), as natural science would, but also as a fragment of the world which contains a “threat.”  Threats are value properties in nature. They are not constructions of our vulnerability, which are then projected onto nature, as the disenchanted worldview would have it. But even though they are in nature, the natural sciences don’t study threats. Threats make normative demands on our practical agency, not demands for detached explanatory study, as meteorological perturbations do. Notice, however, that this particular value property off the coast of Bangladesh is certainly not harmony-inducing (in this first sense or use of the term, “harmony”) to the Bangladeshi fisherman living in a thatched dwelling on the coast, seeing it come in his direction. It is a threat, after all. It is, if you like, just what Bennett describes with her term “hostile.” It is a hostile part of the enchanted world. So, no harmony in one sense or use of the word “harmony,” despite enchantment.

Even so, it might be that that value property in that fragment of the world makes a normative demand, let’s say on the municipality of that Bangladeshi locality to do one or another thing to remove the threat to the fisherman and his hut. If there were a suitable agentive responsiveness on the part of those on whom the normative demand was made, that would be a small and, as I said, very simple example of human agency being in sync with the normative demands of appropriate properties of matter and nature. When there is such responsiveness to such demands, there is “harmony” in a second, quite different sense and use of the word than the sense I mentioned above. And this harmony is a harmony between human agency and non-human properties of matter and nature.

It seems apparent, then, that there need not be any disagreement between Bennett and me on any of this. I have accommodated what she means by hostility and disharmony in the relations in her “assemblages,” and I have shown how it is quite compatible with what I had in mind by talking of harmony generated by seeing the world as containing value properties (threats over and above meteorological perturbations) and our suitable agentive responses to them. All we need to do is avoid a conflation of two different uses of words like harmony and alienation.  Let there be all the hostility and disharmony she finds in these relations. It does nothing whatsoever to register disagreement with my points about a quite different notion of an unalienated life.

My notion of alienation is, if I understand her views, probably very close to a state of affairs that results from a too great “desensitization” to the elements of enchantment that she finds in the world. By this criterion of what is and is not alienated, one partly (though not wholly) overcomes alienation by even so much as recognizing (becoming “sensitized” to) the enchanted elements in the material environment, including what she describes as the “hostile” elements. To move from this partial to a more complete overcoming of alienation would require being responsive with our agency in the way I was describing above to the normative demands of the enchanted elements, including the hostile ones. The value properties in an enchanted world, as I said earlier, are defined upon our capacity to recognize them, but they are not defined upon our actually recognizing them and certainly not defined upon our being responsive to their normative demands in our practical agency. So she is very wide of the mark when she describes my view as being committed to something “pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness.” I dare say, it is no more pre-designed to do so than her notion of enchantment.

She is right, however, to point out that I do stress the moral, perhaps measurably more than she does. That is already evident in the fact that my rhetoric is the rhetoric of value-properties (some of which are bound to include normative moral demands on us) whereas her rhetoric is restricted to talk of circulating “moods and affects.”  My view derives from an Aristotelian picture of morals (if some recent interpretations of Aristotle, owing to John McDowell, are correct in their interpretations), where values in the world prompt our moral agency, rather than moral agency emanating entirely from a self-standing psychology, as in Hume and the very widespread Humean legacy of contemporary Ethics, which sees the world beyond our subjectivity as evacuated of anything that is not within the purview of natural science. It looks to me as if Bennett has no interest in seeing enchantment as, in this way, being part a wider metaphysics in which the metaphysics of morals is one embedded element. I detect only phenomena such as mood, affect, and the political implications of seeing enchantment along those lines, in what she has to say.

I can’t myself see a way to a politics that flows from questions of enchantment without also seeing morals as flowing from it. Politics, in my view, can’t be in an orbit entirely of its own, independent of considerations of moral and other values. There is nothing moralistic in claiming this. It is not as if, in saying that the politics generated by recognizing such things as “actants” must be related to the normative moral demands that those things make on us, one is identifying the “politics of things” with those normative moral demands. Still, relating them together may put some theoretical constraints on how we are to understand the “politics of things.”  I don’t know if Bennett would want to impose such constraints on the politics she would want to embed in a notion of enchantment. Her rhetoric in general and her criticism of me in particular (the criticism that, unlike her, I stress the moral) doesn’t make it obvious how she would permit such a constraint. But I say all this with some hesitation. I would need to read more of her work in detail to be able to say anything more confidently.

I want to begin my contribution to this discussion on the politics of spirituality by highlighting the tension-fraught relationship between theoretical self-reflexivity and empirical study. The issue concerns the tendency to run in the circle of one’s own definitions, on the one hand, and the efforts to encounter the otherness of the world, on the other. I would like to suggest that this divide between running in circles and moving out into the world betrays an underlying unity, and not in an ontological sense, but rather as a result of historical circumstance. Specifically, I suggest that the circular and tautological character of self-reflexivity has become increasingly more prominent as a feature of the (“empirical”) modern world, and specifically of spirituality. And as the circular logics that ground themselves increasingly inform the make-up of both quotidian life and the broadest arenas of power and discourse, the opportunity to understand and explore the productive capacity of self-involvement grows increasingly ripe. Further, I would suggest that this ethos of autology resonates with certain political traditions that embed self-sufficient self-service into their conceptual armature, notably the liberal democratic one. Freedom and the self. Individuals that choose their own way, breaking away from tradition. Spiritual and not religious. It is in this sense that circular definitions of spirituality and more linear, “objective” studies of spirituality in the world can come together. If one admits the nebulous swirl of self-grounding groundlessness as a feature of the world and not simply a feature of (misguided) analysis, then one may come closer to understanding the social construction of spirituality and the role that spirituality can play in the formation of the polis.

I take as my foundation an interest in and commitment to understanding religiosity in its more unconscious, habitual, automatic, instinctive, and just plain unclear dimensions. I start here not only because of the implausibility of the image of the human as a theoretically transparent, self-aware, self-possessing entity (who believes that or ever did?), but because equally implausible, or at least incomplete, is the characterization of knowledge through terms of transparency, awareness, and possession. If one instead follows the lead of, among others, Herman Melville in his suggestion of the enormous, illusory, powerful, and spectral presences as the “defining” features of the current human condition, then an interest in religion will not look to its clearest dimensions but to its vagueness. And this has driven my interest in spirituality.

Inquiring into the politics of spirituality requires, in my view, an investigation of the way that instincts, tendencies, and proclivities shape and are shaped by political ends. I propose that the political effects or ramifications of spirituality can be “seen” in the most essential dimensions only in a back-handed way. Or perhaps this relationship between spirituality and politics is, in some of its most powerful dimensions, inherently obscure. That is to say, politics works on spirituality and vice versa through obscurity. The obscurity does work. So the question for scholars becomes, how does one study this obscurity without removing it? How does one study the power of obscurity as obscurity?

One can treat this question in the abstract, and others have done so thoroughly and quite well. I hope here to yield a certain concreteness to the back-handed manipulations that link the spiritual and the political. For this a case study can be helpful. In another piece I treated the techniques for managing spiritual experience in national parks. Here I turn to the self-reflections of park visitors on their spiritual experience, focusing particularly on the implications of that experience for their relationship to the collectivities of community, nation, and state.

In one respect, the characterizations of the spiritual dimensions of park experience accord with traditional categories. With regard to a biblical tradition, one respondent pointed to “the whole thing that God created that is just so amazing.” Or, as explained by another interviewee, “There is something about being in a national park, and you can see what God created without – with very few effects of man diminishing things, that it truly is more spiritual and more and more drawing you closer to God.” The numerous respondents that made reference to a creator or creation suggest the enduring power of shared story and belief for bringing people together and charging their lives with energy and significance. The spiritual experience framed in this way feeds back into the communities that disseminate these stories and beliefs (i.e., congregations) and into their sacred texts.

Diverging slightly but significantly from these traditional categories, a number of respondents found spiritual significance without reference to a creator, focusing more closely on the perceptual and perspectival shifts that park experience evoked. Here references to God took a broader form with no identifiable location in tradition, as it did for this “spiritual,” religiously unaffiliated respondent: “To me I think that when you’re out in nature like that, you’re one with God. It’s totally the closest I ever feel to him or her or whatever that spiritualness is. I just always feel a connection because it’s quiet and it makes you be quiet within yourself. So you get to really spend some quality time within.” Whether this sense of quiet referred to the concrete perceptual environment, a general perspectival shift that informs self-reflection, or a combination of the two, the primary emphasis lay in an experience recognized as individual and personal. Again mixing the perceptual impact of the park with more abstract shifts in perspective, another respondent stated, “I’m not alone in this, a lot of people feel connected with something powerful and great and mighty. You can describe it as God if you want to. It’s a feeling of awe. And also with the ocean—you just feel like there’s something so powerful and so wonderful. It’s very healing. It puts everything into perspective.” This respondent located her spirituality in a powerfully emotive and embodied experience. As for its social dimension, she left it up to the listener to fashion it as s/he chose. But here, too, the individuality of her experience locates her socially: she said that she “is not alone in this.” Her offer to leave open the identity of the transcendent thus became an orientation to others, part of a social code that labels her as a tolerant individualist. Or, more to the point, she displayed through her words a liberal sense of collective identity, one that did not reside in a sense of bonding with a group, but in an experience that each person had the freedom to interpret in her or his own individual way.

Whether displaying connection to smaller collectivities of congregations or larger ones of a liberal tradition, these relations of these expressions of spirituality to public life can be understood in relatively conventional ways. But I would highlight a subtler, more circular dimension to the shaping of spiritual experience, one in which the hand of the state, here manifest in the management of the park, operates strongly, obscurely, and in a very concrete way. Note the implication of a managed environment in the phrasing of one of the above respondents: “You can see what God created without – with very few effects of man diminishing things.” This respondent stopped short of asserting a state of “pure” nature in the parks, and in correcting himself he suggested the importance of management in allowing him to feel closer to God. In elaborating on his spirituality he commented on the importance of a person’s perceptual environment, particularly the way that the concrete demands on his attention within civilization (“there’s traffic and there’s people and there’s pollution and there’s the roads and your job”) distracted him from a spiritual focus. Even though he suggested that the parks offered a contrast to such an environment, the fact is that parks contain much of what distracted him in civilization. The difference, in addition to his release from the obligations of work, lies in the effectiveness of management in minimizing the sensory impact of traffic, and people, and roads.

Hints of the influence of management on spirituality can be seen in references to the atmosphere of the parks. One respondent said, “I just feel that national parks are just such a beautiful example of God’s handiwork and God’s creation. And even just driving into a park, somehow you can just feel that; it’s like you can breathe it in the air and you can hear it in the sounds around you.” The one-way design of the road leading into Yosemite National Park, to which the respondent referred, eliminates the need to deal with oncoming traffic and minimizes the attention demanded by traffic moving in the same direction. When this respondent referred to breathing and hearing a manifestation of God, one need not explain such a statement as a purely metaphysical claim. These metaphors of embodiment suggest an appreciation for the way the park is organized as a perceptual environment. This respondent suggested as much in her elaboration of her spirituality: “A lot of times we let the little things in life get us down or pile up. And when you’re standing in someplace that’s really majestic and just really beautiful, all that little petty stuff, like whether the mail came on time or not, just doesn’t matter. And so it’s much easier then to focus and clear your mind of the clutter. You really just get back in touch with your spirit and with God’s sense of beauty.” Traffic, of course, constituted some of the “little petty stuff” that this interviewee found as a distraction from spirituality outside the park. When management operated in such a way as to minimize this kind of distraction, it opened avenues toward self (“your spirit”) and God (“God’s sense of beauty”) at the same time.

Some respondents asserted a heightened sense of collective identity as Americans or an appreciation of government as part of their experience in national parks. But I would characterize these as the tips of the iceberg of the social and political significance of spiritual experience in the parks. The state works most powerfully in the parks through absences: through managing space in such a way as to remove or minimize polluting stimuli, including its own speech (interpretive panels and ranger talks obey a strict principle of economy, of not getting “in the way”). In those absences and silences, circles form. Perceptions of the environment, however intensively managed that environment may in fact be, turn into experiences of nature, self, and god. The political dimension of such experience is largely unspoken. But in its particular embodied characteristics, such experience is structurally dependent on a certain exercise of state power. In this way the politics of spirituality may have little to do with thoughts about elections or particular government officials. But it has much to do with creating a space for significant governmental presence in both personal and collective life.

Dark green religion, as I have constructed the term, involves the perception that nature is sacred and has intrinsic value, the belief that everything is interconnected and mutually dependent, and a deep feeling of belonging to nature. Often rooted in an evolutionary understanding that all life shares a common ancestor, dark green religion generally leads to a form of kinship ethics that entails ethical responsibilities to all living things. From this stance, all life is, quite literally, related—a belief that leads naturally to empathy for other living things, who, like us, have evolved through what Darwin aptly called the struggle for existence. Such perceptions generally lead people to see more continuities than differences between their own and other species, and this perception generally leads to humility about one’s place in the grand scheme of things.

I will presently say more about what a civil earth religion might involve. But, for comparative purposes, I will first summarize some conceptions about civil religion in the United States, including those presented in the preceding reflections. As Catherine Albanese noted in her essay, these reflections have run along both descriptive and normative lines.

Descriptively, some argue that the theory of civil religion has explanatory power, as it helps to account for citizen loyalty to the United States and other nation-states that justify their existence with some putative divine establishment, approval, or mission. Others find the theory empirically wanting and wish it would be abandoned. Some of those who value the proposal descriptively also consider it from an ethically normative perspective. Of these, some consider civil religion to be a pernicious social force that has legitimated imperialism and sometimes racism, first through the conquest of the continent’s aboriginal peoples, and later by promoting military adventurism abroad and economic injustice both within and beyond the nation’s borders. They contend, moreover, that by establishing the boundaries of citizenship and thus moral concern, civil religion is inevitably exclusionary, despite its pretensions of respecting pluralism, fostering unity, and promoting a higher, common good.

Defenders retort that, despite civil religion’s history and dangers, such condemnations are too categorical. For them, civil religion is not static, rooted only in an imperial mission: it also has resources for self-correction, including prophetic voices. According to this point of view, civil religion provides a basis for community that would be absent without its ability to inculcate shared values. Its defenders aver that by rooting such values in deep cultural streams, including the republic’s founding documents, and within the religious traditions of its inhabitants, it provides a basis for moving toward a culture that respects diversity, promotes justice, and creates sufficient unity to enable an ongoing struggle for authentic democracy.

For my part, I am ambivalent about civil religion. I agree that the notion has explanatory power. Both in the USA and in other nations, there is strong evidence that a generic, non-sectarian religiosity has often been used to reinforce patriotism and even, sometimes, virulent religious nationalism. I think, however, that the critics often ignore or downplay times when oppressed individuals and groups have turned the tables on those in power by demanding consistent application of the nation’s own stated ideals, whether these echo Abrahamic traditions or natural law philosophies that have advanced specific freedoms from arbitrary state power. The archetypal figure in this regard is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. In promoting civil rights, King drew on the soaring rhetoric of the nation’s founding documents, which were steeped in European notions of natural rights, as well as on prophetic streams in the Bible and principled non-violence, the origins of which he attributed to Jesus and Gandhi.

It may also be, however, that the root of civil religion’s power lies in the human need to belong, whether to tribe, nation, or holy cause. From an evolutionary perspective, we can even plausibly postulate that this trait is deeply rooted in our genome because it has adaptive or survival value. In any case, since the best known version of civil religion theory has focused on the United States, and given the robust debate about it that has followed, it should be obvious by now that categorical normative assessments, whether positive or negative, cannot easily prevail.

What, then, if we change our frame of reference to include the fundamental shift in human understanding of our place in the world and how we got here, which is exemplified by the Darwinian revolution and has been spreading globally ever since? What, then, if we speculate, based on currently observable trends, not just a few years or decades into the future, but a century or more?

Trends easily discernible since the middle of the nineteenth century, and that began to intensify in the middle of the twentieth, reveal that, while nascent, the “dark green” nature religion that I introduced at the outset of this essay, and have detailed in a recent book, is spreading rapidly, if unevenly, around the world. While some devotees of the world’s largest and best known religious traditions are grafting dark green perceptions and values onto their own traditions, this trend is unfolding more dramatically outside of long established religious traditions. Indeed, it is most powerfully expressed within the ecological milieu, namely, those social spaces where diverse individuals and groups encounter and mutually influence one another as they struggle to understand and respond to an increasingly alarming global environmental crisis.

Participants include environmentalists and scientists, politicians and diplomats, artists, writers, filmmakers, business people, professors, and museum curators, as well as mountaineers, surfers, gardeners, and many others. Some of these actors believe in the existence of non-material divine beings, others are agnostic or atheistic, but they all affirm an evolutionary, ecological worldview. Those who are good examples of dark green spirituality have often had experiences of awe, wonder, and belonging to nature. Some add that they understand, personally and/or scientifically, the possibility of communication, and even communion, with non-human organisms. Their most common shared value is that all organisms, and the environmental systems upon which life depends, should be treated with respect, if not also reverence. Among those with dark green perceptions and values, however, the overall trend appears to be toward more secular forms.

Is it possible, then, at least when thinking long-term, that such perceptions and values could provide an affective and intellectual basis for a planetary civil earth religion? If so, can such a civil religion (spirituality, or worldview) withstand the criticisms typically leveled against civil religion, at least when it is associated with nation-states?

When speculating about the future on the basis of current trends, it is possible to conceive of the emergence of a planetary civil earth religion. Such a religion would shift, or supplement, current identities and loyalties linked to nationality, ethnicity, or religion to those inspired by allegiance to the biosphere. With such a shift, one’s identity as an earthling would come to trump other identities. The political theorist Dan Deudney has even argued that a planetary civil religion, for which he cleverly coined the term “terrapolitan earth religion,” is not only possible but needed as an affective basis for environmental values as well as for a federal-republican Earth Constitution. Such a constitution, he contends, is a prerequisite to the construction of an international political system capable of reversing the global decline of environmental systems. It is Deudney’s view, and that of many environmental and social scientists, that environmental decline is already causing the collapse of many ecosystems around the world, with corresponding—and intensifying—stresses on the human societies that depend upon them.

To those who fear that terrapolitan identities and political institutions represent totalitarian perils or utopian fantasies, Deudey’s comments about nationalism provide a counter-argument. Nationalism, Deudney notes, involves “an identity and loyalty based upon the experiences and feelings of connectedness to a particular place or area.” Since civil religion reinforces place-based national identities, then it is at least conceivable that the consecrated place could be the biosphere, rather than one or another nation.

Concrete evidence of just such a possibility can be seen in those whose primary identity is, already, as an evolutionary and earthly being, and whose preeminent political loyalty is to the biosphere, rather than to any human political system. We can also consider whether Yi-Fu Tuan’s notion of topophilia, E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, or other theories purporting to uncover people’s natural connections to nature, might also lend plausibility to the terrapolitan vision.

(As a quick side note: Those I have mentioned as pioneers of such a terrapolitan vision are not guilty of charges that they are environmental determinists, for they recognize that ecosystems and human cultures are mutually influential. They are, therefore, best understood as theorists of bio-cultural evolution, even though, as natural scientists, they generally have more insights into biological influences than cultural ones. For such theorists, any evolutionarily shaped predisposition to value nature is not causal; it also requires cultural reinforcement. This would not be the case were these theorists environmental determinists.)

In addition to providing provocative thoughts that address the possibility of terrapolitan spirituality and polity, Deudney contends that what he has also called “Gaian Earth Religion,” “Earth Nationalism,” and “green culture” would be significantly different and far less dangerous than other forms of political religion. Green culture would “replace or moderate state and ethnic nationalism rather than make it more truculent,” Deudney believes, because “environmental awareness brings with it awareness of the interconnected and interdependent character of the earth’s diverse inhabitants.” Expressing sympathy for James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Deudney also suggests that unlike religions established long ago, earth religion has “a moderate worldview with a scientifically credible cosmology.” It could, therefore, have greater staying power in the modern world and eventually, “underpin the social norms and behaviors of restraint that are necessary to achieve a sustainable society [. . .] providing a system of meaning that can span generations and foster a sense of transgenerational communal identity.”

This is a plausible argument because the traits typical of what I have labeled dark green religion, and which I see as exemplary of the earth religion Deudney envisions—such as a stress on ecological interdependence, an affective connection to the earth as home and to non-human organisms as kin, and resistance to anthropocentric hubris—are unlikely to promote cultural homogenization, xenophobia, or jingoism. This unlikelihood is evinced by the concrete examples of such spirituality that have already emerged and spread widely, encouraging terrapolitan earth identities, undergirding the global sustainability movement, and promoting humane and environmentally responsible public policies and institutions. Moreover, while many involved in these efforts consider themselves secular and eschew beliefs in non-material divine beings or forces, still others retain conventional religious beliefs while grafting onto them either a newly invented or ecologically enriched reverence for nature. So, for the most part, the more conventionally religious involved in these movements, and those whose spirituality is grounded in more naturalistic understandings, coexist with little friction, for they recognize that they share more with those who understand the biosphere as sacred, and who are working to protect and restore its environmental systems, than with those who are indifferent or hostile to such objectives.

In 1990, when we first met, Professor Deudney and I discussed the possibility that a few shared values, understood as spiritually significant, even if in different ways, might eventually provide a basis for new forms of environmental and political cooperation, both within and between nations. We were not the first to wonder if a form of civil religion might emerge that would support international cooperation, promote peace, and provide an antidote to virulent religious nationalisms. Early on, Robert Bellah had envisioned such a possibility, and in a September 2008 interview with Mark Jurgensmeyer, Bellah even approvingly observed that the sacredness of the human person and of the planet “is a view that transcends any nation and is shared by millions all over the earth.”

I have sought through my ethnographic and historical analysis to show that these trends are assuming an increasingly naturalistic/secular orientation, and that they are gaining traction much more rapidly than has been commonly recognized. I have also argued that dark green religion has characteristics that can function in ways that resemble what scholars have referred to as civil religion. What Deudney has illuminated especially well is that the perceptions and ideas inherent in earth religion make it unfriendly to religious nationalism, while suggesting hopefully that earthen spirituality might well develop in ways that are both ecologically and politically salutary.

I conclude in a more speculative direction. I think that profound changes began with the publication, 150 years ago, of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species that will eventuate in a decisive watershed in human culture and religion. For the first time there is a cosmogony capable of being compelling, in its main outlines at least, to the world’s intelligentsia (including educators and other thought leaders, economic elites, and political decision makers). There are also communicative technologies ubiquitous enough to spread this evolutionary cosmogony wherever powerful political and religious forces allow it to propagate. This evolutionary cosmogony is generally fused, as well, to an ecological understanding of the interdependence of life. This hybridized, evolutionary/ecological worldview is spreading widely and rapidly. Sometimes it is being grafted onto existing religious worldviews, but for an increasing number of human beings, it provides a self-sufficient meaning system, one that is often also considered a source of spirituality and ethical guidance.

This perceptual revolution has faced incredulity and resistance, of course, yet it is no different in this regard from earlier cognitive shifts that decisively changed the way most people who are reasonably well educated view the universe and the human place in it. The evolutionary/ecological revolution will continue to win minds in a world that, at least if we extend the time horizon well into the future, will most likely be far more secular than it is today, for this worldview does not require beliefs in invisible beings or cosmic processes, but rather, on ordinary human senses (as enhanced, of course, by our increasingly clever gadgets). That this trend is present wherever educational systems are relatively strong also provides evidence that this revolution is here to stay and will continue to gather strength.

Another reason the evolutionary/ecological revolution must continue to strengthen is that, without an understanding of ecological interdependence, human beings will not succeed, long-term, in developing economies and social systems that can live within the carrying capacity of the habitats upon which they depend. Put bluntly, human societies that do not understand population dynamics and the human dependence on ecological systems will eventually collapse, taking with them their maladaptive cultural systems, including the religious beliefs and practices that hindered or prevented such understandings. Ecologically maladaptive cultural systems, religious or not, eventually kill their hosts.

Whether we are interested primarily in the descriptive aspects of the civil religion thesis, or more in the variety of moral issues that the phenomenon raises, or are concerned about the long-term viability of our species, we would be wise to broaden the geographic and chronological range of our analysis as we consider its characteristics, impacts, and future. When we do so, we may well discover that powerful new forms are emerging in which it is not the nation but the biosphere that is considered sacred and worthy of reverent defense. We would also be wise to wonder whether such developments constitute an ecologically and socially adaptive form of bio-cultural evolution.