Importantly, Kahn does not conflate popular sovereignty with democracy. The will of the popular sovereign is not identical to the statistical majority of people who happen to participate in the electoral process; it is a more elusive force, which Kahn locates in what he calls “the American political imaginary.” It is “the people” that authorizes the revolutionary violence that founds the state, and that then speaks through a constitutional legal framework that ensures that democratic institutions function only within the parameters set by an original sovereign decision outside of all ordinary law. One example of this phenomenon would be judicial review: “While the Court likes to appeal the rule of law to legitimate its exceptional role, political theology suggests that we look in a different direction: to the Court’s capacity to speak in the voice of the popular sovereign.” Ironically, then, the sovereign voice of “We the People” limits what the demos can decide.

Part of what makes this “political theology” is that the Constitution was produced and adopted in a state of exception and thus depends upon no prior legal norms. According to Kahn, the self-referential authority draws support from an imaginary that worships “‘self-evident truths’ set forth in the name of ‘We the People.’” It is an open question, however, how much this theological analysis tells us about American history. Jason Stevens, for instance, raises some important objections to Kahn’s use of historical evidence. As Stevens argues, “Kahn’s ‘genealogical’ technique yields no evidence persuading me that American political ideas originate in and are indebted to theological sources.” And I agree that, in his enthusiasm to explain so many aspects of the American political imaginary, Kahn occasionally lets slip historical claims that his methodology cannot support.

Genealogy, however, is not supposed to be a reliable method for getting to the facts of the matter of historical origins. Rather, a genealogical approach traces the selective reimaginings of the past that help to make self-evident the assumptions that pervade discursive or epistemic logics. For example, we know that the current vogue for Constitutionalism has little to do with reflection upon the actual historical circumstances that produced the document that is, perhaps, the quintessential text of bourgeois liberal democracy. For some reason, Tea Party revolutionary rhetoric has persuaded many Americans that it embodies a lost vitality that was present at the moment of foundational violence. One corollary of this view is that the ordinary political institutions established in the wake of the Revolution  have a diminished authenticity. The fact that such a sentiment continues to play a strong role in the imagination of sovereignty testifies to its persistence as a matter of belief and, in this sense, might be an example of the kind of secularized theology that Kahn draws on Schmitt to discuss.

My own quibble with Kahn is that, given his focus on the forces that compel obedience to the law, he underestimates the prominence of persistent hostility to the government in the way in which Americans imagine their revolutionary past. Take, for instance, the following statement:  “Americans―apart from the experience of the Confederacy―have not had to think much of capitulation, but they have never abandoned the idea of themselves as the inheritors of revolution. They intuitively understand that law is the product of revolution. Law and revolution together constitute the frame of our political imaginary.” Yes, though it may be that the experience of the Confederacy is more than just an aberration from the norm but, instead, a vigorous and persistent strain in American life that equates popular sovereignty with states’ rights, white supremacy, and the threat of armed insurrection against a tyrannical State. As Sanford Levinson has also noted, reserving the right to overthrow the government by force of arms draws on an implicit view of sovereignty whereby each householder decides on the state of exception. When Tea Party Patriots warn of “second amendment remedies” against an overreaching government, they insist that the final decision on when to suspend the law is made, not by the State, but by the armed American household. For this reason, threatening bloody violence against the State is seen, not as treasonous, but as a hyper-patriotic defense of popular sovereignty and a direct link to the authentic revolutionary violence that founded the nation. In this view, popular sovereignty refers, not to democratic policymaking, but to the right of the people—and not the government—to decide on the exception.

Asserting that the citizenry has the right to violently overthrow the government has nothing to do with any political or legal reality. As Kahn points out, “We no longer imagine violence among ourselves as a political possibility.” This is a fair point in that mere threats of violence would not necessarily be relevant to Kahn’s or Schmitt’s political theology, because rhetoric does not matter unless it has the genuine potential to become a decision that would then form the basis for real action. Following this logic, discussion of violent revolution absent the practical possibility of revolutionary violence might be interesting for some kinds of political analysis, but it would not extend to the question of sovereignty. And to the extent that it is hard to imagine an insurrection that could meaningfully threaten the armed forces of the United States, Tea Party rhetoric might simply be confused.

But it is nonetheless important not to underestimate the persistent preparation for armed insurrection in American life, inasmuch as it is deeply ingrained in the national narrative. For example, Kahn notes: “Popular history is shaped by a narrative of the successful use of violent force against enemies, within and without the nation. Much of this past remains vivid in our political imaginations, endlessly reinforced by both popular media and scholarly work. Americans take their families to Valley Forge and Gettysburg, and even to Omaha Beach.” Okay, but the message delivered at Gettysburg is decidedly different from that which one receives at Valley Forge and Omaha Beach. And Civil War battlefield memorials do not demonize the enemy so much as tell a story of “brother against brother.” In this narrative of an internally divided household, one army was defeated on the battlefield, but both sides nevertheless lay claim to the American heritage.

To take another example of how the legacy of the Confederacy participates in the national imaginary, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation presents the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War as a crisis of democratic sovereignty in which a disenfranchised white minority struggles under the supposed tyranny of African American rule. In one scene, before avenging the death of a white woman who took her life rather than submitting to the amorous advances of a newly uniformed African American soldier, the film’s protagonist performs a sinister ritual involving a Confederate flag and a fiery cross. The title card that precedes the scene reads: “Brethren, this flag bears the red stain of a life of a southern woman, a priceless sacrifice on the altar of an outraged civilization.” After performing this ritual, Klansmen capture and lynch the African American soldier. In other words, extra-legal violence rectifies the crisis of sovereignty brought about by Reconstruction. Within the logic of the film, lynching, as the exemplary form of aestheticized racial violence that exists apart from the normal legal order, performs the signifying work of giving birth to a new nation. Seeking to recover democratic institutions tied to a white biopolitical subject, such violence drew its force from passions outside of the juridical legitimacy of the State. In a way, this relates to Kahn’s observation that: “The closest thing we have today to the sacral-monarch’s power to create the exception to law may not be the executive pardon but jury nullification, which is best seen as a localized expression of the popular sovereign willing the exception.” On this point, it is important to keep in mind that one of the most visible forms of jury nullification has been the refusal to find guilty perpetrators of extra-legal violence, which corroborates perpetrators’ own experience of lynching as the authentic exercise of popular sovereignty in the face of ineffectual legal due process.

As two examples of the willingness of white householders to “take the law into their own hands,” lynching and armed revolt both share in the belief that the suspension of ordinary legal institutions can be required for the sake of the direct exercise of popular sovereignty. This leads to a reading of the Second Amendment as a kind of self-destruct button that allows people guns as a check against tyranny. Of course, this interpretation is historically absurd in many ways. As Garry Wills points out, in his A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, this interpretation ignores that in attempting to form a “more perfect union”the Constitution is a set of democratic guidelines and procedures that was adopted by an already existing polity in the interest of better governing itself.

To address this problem, the vision espoused by current Constitutional fundamentalists is far better articulated in the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was meant to replace. One increasingly prominent method of resolving the problem is to read the Tenth Amendment in such a way as to make the Constitution an only slightly revised version of the Articles. Thus, Tea Party Constitutionalism notes the similarity between the Tenth Amendment and Article Two of the Articles of Confederation, which states: “Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation, expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” This reading essentially argues that, while the Constitution adopted a new set of procedures for democratic deliberation, it reaffirmed the same conception of sovereignty as enshrined in the Articles of Confederation. This then leads to the conclusion that any liberal jurisprudence that has ignored the Tenth Amendment has distorted the text of the Constitution. Following this reasoning, the Constitution prescribes the rules and framework for democratic institutions but restricts the decision-making scope of those same institutions to a narrow window of government action.

One obvious objection to what I’m saying is that many who strongly endorse Second Amendment rights also deify the American military and, in this way, show their loyalty to the State. One of the cornerstones of Kahn’s critique of liberal self-interest is his reminder that the State can demand the sacrifice of life. As he notes: “The popular sovereign can always demand a life; it can demand of all citizens that they kill and be killed for the state. The fundamental character of the relationship of citizen to sovereign is not contract—as in the social contract—but sacrifice.” But how are such sacrifices really understood?  To remind Americans that they sacrifice their lives for the State sounds like a provocation, a deliberate profanation of a cherished ideal of American citizenship. Americans do not die for the State; they die for their fellow soldiers, their families, their communities, and their nation.

So what accounts for unquestioning loyalty to the military among the same people who also entertain the possibility of armed insurrection?  One answer is that the rhetoric of the Confederacy that calls for cuts in government spending and ridicules the bureaucratic waste, inefficiency, and incompetence of public institutions does not direct this criticism at the defense budget because the military is not a part of the government. As odd as this might sound, it might be one of the few points of relative consensus in the current American political climate. While conservatives uncouple the military and the State in their calls to shrink the government, progressive liberals often see defense spending as a destructive and wasteful drain on resources that otherwise would be directed toward the public good.

To be clear, not all Americans who have defended the Second Amendment have understood it as a check against government tyranny. For that matter, I am not saying that the national imaginary of this country has historically been uniformly anti-government. At times, on the contrary, populist movements have sought to empower the people by expanding democratic institutions. However, such movements sometimes (although not always) imagine the people as an organically unified body politic and seek to shore up perceived sources of shared identity. Such populist sentiments, especially those that imagine America as a white, Christian nation, can quickly swell in the face of the perceived loss of national integrity perpetuated by liberal reform that extends the benefits of American citizenship beyond the scope of the white household. This in turn leads to nostalgia for a lost nation as the grounds for abandoning political loyalty to the State. The reason that the conceptual vocabulary of political theology might be helpful here is that such movements make extensive use of the language of popular sovereignty.

Within the narrative of American political decadence and lost revolutionary vitality, the 2008 election only confirmed for many what they felt to be decades of wresting government from the hands of the authentic American people in favor of a tyrannical welfare state that reappropriates resources and distributes them to parasitic others by way of inefficient and decadent bureaucrats who despise Christian freedom. What liberals see as differences over policy that can, so they hope, be resolved through discussion, reason, negotiation, and compromise are felt by many Americans to express a crisis of sovereignty that calls for resistance to all practical measures of federal governance in favor of states’ rights and a protection of the sanctity of the home as the ultimate source of national legitimacy.

Each country in Western Europe is a secular state and while each has its own distinctive take on what this means, there are, nevertheless, two main historical strands of secularism, a main and a lesser strand. The latter is principally manifested in French laïcité, which seeks to create a public space in which religion is virtually banished in the name of reason and emancipation, and religious organizations are monitored by the state through consultative national mechanisms. The main Western European approach, which I call moderate secularism, however, sees organized religion as a potential public good or national resource (not just a private benefit), which the state can in some circumstances advance—even through an “established” church. Its public benefits can be direct, such as a contribution to education and social care through autonomous church-based organizations funded by the taxpayer; or indirect, such as the production of attitudes that create economic hope or family stability, or that contribute to conceptions of national identity, cultural heritage, ethical voice, and national ceremonies.

Western Europe has often been a site of struggle between historical public churches and political secularists, yet during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially during the latter and especially in Protestant-majority societies, this has not been deeply conflictual and has taken the form of various shifting compromises. The compromises consisted of a successful accommodation of an expanding number of Christian churches within the actual and symbolic workings of the state, yet were marked by a gradual but decisive weakening of the public and political character of the churches. From the 1960s through the end of the century, there was a particularly strong movement of opinion and politics in favor of the secularists. In Western Europe, the cultural revolution of the 1960s has been broadly accepted; not only has there been no major, sustained counter-movement, but it has expanded beyond north-western Protestant/secular Europe into Catholic Europe. So, for example, the national system of ‘pillarization’ in the Netherlands, by which Protestants and Catholics had separate access to some of the state’s resources, emerged in the nineteenth century, declined sharply in the middle of the twentieth, and was formally concluded in 1983. The Lutheran Church in Sweden was disestablished in 2000. In the UK, disestablishment of the Church of England was embraced in the early 1990s by key sections of the center left. Catholic countries—Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland—in the 1980s and 1990s rapidly showed signs of the secularization characteristic of Protestant Europe.

There is no endogenous diminution of secularization in relation to organized religion, attendance at church services, and traditional Christian belief and practice in Western Europe. Whether the decline of traditional religion is being replaced by no religion or by new ways of being religious or spiritual, neither mode is inspiring an attempt to connect with or reform political institutions and government policies. There is no challenge to political secularism there.

This is the context in which non-Christian migrants have been arriving and settling and in which they and the next generation are becoming active members of their societies, including making political claims of equality and accommodation. As the most salient post-immigration formation relates to Muslims, some of these claims relate to the place of religious identity in the public sphere.

It is here, if anywhere, that a sense of a crisis of secularism can be found. The pivotal moment, 1988-89, of this “crisis” was marked by two events. These created national and international storms, and set in motion political developments which have not been reversed, and they offer contrasting ways in which the two Western European secularisms are responding to the Muslim presence. The events were the protests, in Britain, against the novel The Satanic Verses by Sir Salman Rushdie; and, in France, the decision by a school head-teacher to prohibit entry to three girls unless they were willing to take off their headscarves on school premises.

The Satanic Verses was not banned in the UK, so in that sense the Muslim campaign clearly failed. In other respects, however, it galvanized many to seek a democratic multiculturalism that was inclusive of Muslims. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was established and has been very successful in relation to its founding agenda. By 2001, it had achieved its aim of having Muslim issues and Muslims as a group recognized apart from issues of race and ethnicity and of itself being accepted by government, media, and civil society as the spokesperson for British Muslims. Another two achieved aims were the state funding of Muslim schools on the same basis as Christian and Jewish schools and getting Tony Blair—in spite of ministerial and civil service advice to the contrary—to insert a religion question into the 2001 Census. This meant that the ground was laid for the possible later introduction of policies targeting Muslims to match those targeting groups defined by race, ethnicity, or gender. The MCB had to wait a bit longer to get the legislative protection it sought, yet by the time New Labour left office in 2010, it had created the strongest protection against religious discrimination in the EU, including a law against incitement to religious hatred, the legislation most closely connected to the protests over The Satanic Verses, though there is no suggestion that the novel would have been banned by the legislation. Indeed, the protesters’ original demand that the blasphemy law be extended to cover Islam has been made inapplicable as the blasphemy law was abolished in 2008—with very little protest from anybody. These developments have taken place not only with the support of the leadership of the Church of England, but in a spirit of interfaith respect. (Given how adversarial English intellectual, journalistic, legal, and political culture is, religion in England is oddly fraternal and little effort is expended in proving that the other side is in a state of error and should convert.)

That is one path of development from 1988-89. It involved the mobilization of a minority group and the extension of minority policies from race to religion in order to accommodate the religious minority. The other course of development, namely, that which arose from l’affaire foulard, was one of top-down state action to prohibit certain minority practices. From the start, the majority of the country—represented by the media, public intellectuals, politicians, and public opinion polls—was supportive of the head teacher who refused to allow religious headscarves in school. Muslims either did not wish to or lacked the capacity to challenge this dominant view with anything like the publicity, organization, and appeal for international assistance that Muslims in Britain brought to bear on Rushdie’s novel. The threatened ban against the headscarf was passed with an overwhelming majority by Parliament in February 2004. A few years later, the target of secularist and majoritarian disapproval was focused on full face veils that leave just the eyes showing (the niqab or burqa), as are favored by a few hundred French Muslim women. This was banned in public places in April 2011. Belgium followed suit in July 2011 and Italy is in the process of doing so. Similar proposals are being discussed by governments and political parties across Western Europe.

Another example of this broad anti-Muslim coalition is the majority that voted in a referendum to ban the building of minarets in Switzerland in 2009. Analysis of this majority has explained that it ranges from individuals whose primary motivation is women’s rights to those “who simply feel that Islam is ‘foreign,’” who may have no problems with Muslims per se but who are not ready to accept “Islam’s acquiring of visibility in public spaces,” or who generally did not vote “out of a desire to oppress anybody, but because they are themselves feeling threatened by what they see as an Islam invasion.” So, prejudiced or fearful perceptions of Islam are capable of uniting a wide range of opinions into a majority, including those who have no strong views about church-state arrangements, as indeed has been apparent since Muslim claims first became public controversies.

This means that the current challenge to secularism in Western Europe is being debated not just in terms of the wider issues of integration and multiculturalism but also in terms of a hostility to Muslims and Islam based on stereotypes and scare stories in the media that are best understood as a specific form of cultural racism that has come to be called Islamophobia and is largely unrelated to questions of secularism.

The crisis of secularism is best understood, then, within a framework of multiculturalism. Of course, multiculturalism has few advocates at the moment and the term is highly damaged. Yet the repeated declarations from the senior politicians of the region that “multiculturalism is dead” are a reaction to the continuing potency of multiculturalism, which renders obsolete liberal takes on assimilation and integration with new forms of public gender and public ethnicity, and now public religion. Muslims are late joiners of this movement, but as they do so, it slowly becomes apparent that the secularist status quo, with certain residual privileges for Christians, is untenable as it stands. We can call this the challenge of integration rather than multiculturalism, as long as it is understood that we are not just talking about an integration into the day-to-day life of a society but also into its institutional architecture, grand narratives, and macro-symbolic sense of itself. If these issues were dead, we would not be having a debate about the role of public religion or coming up with proposals for dialogue with Muslims and the accommodation of Islam. The dynamic for change is not directly related to the historic religion nor to the historic secularism of Western Europe; rather, the novelty, which then has implications for Christians and secularists, and to which they are reacting, is the appearance of an assertive multiculturalism which cannot be contained within a matrix of individual rights, conscience, religious freedom, and so on. If any of these were different, the problems would be other than they are. Just as today we look at issues to do with, say, women or homosexuality not simply in terms of rights but in a political environment influenced by feminism and gay liberation, within a socio-political-intellectual culture in which the “assertion of positive difference” or “identity” is a shaping and forceful presence. It does not mean everybody is a feminist now, but a heightened consciousness of gender and equality creates a certain gender-equality sensibility. Similarly, my claim is that a multiculturalist sensibility today is present in Western Europe, and yet it is not comfortable with extending itself to accommodate Muslims, nor able to find reasons for not extending itself to Muslims without self-contradiction.

Political secularism has been destabilized, and in particular the historical flow from a moderate to radical secularism and the expectation of its continuation has been jolted. This is not because of any Christian desecularization or a “return of the repressed.” Rather, the jolt is created by the triple contingency of the arrival and settlement of a significant number of Muslims; a multiculturalist sensibility which respects “difference”; and a moderate secularism, namely, that the historical compromises between the state and a church or churches in relation to public recognition and accommodation are still in place to some extent. To speak of a “crisis of secularism” is highly exaggerated, especially in relation to the state. It is true that the challenge is much greater for laïcité or radical secularism as an ideology. As many social and political theorists are sympathetic to this ideology, and in any case, being more sensitive to abstract ideas, they are less able to see that the actually-existing-secularism of Western Europe, with the exception of France, is not the radical variant. They thus mistakenly project the incompatibility between their ideas and the accommodation of Muslims onto the Western European states. Indeed, as applied to Western Europe, “crisis of secularism” is not only exaggerated but misleading. As I hope I have shown, the problem is more defined by issues of post-immigration integration than by the religion-state relation per se. The “crisis of secularism” is really the challenge of multiculturalism. Far from this entailing the end of secularism as we know it, moderate secularism offers some of the resources for accommodating Muslims. Political secularists should think pragmatically and institutionally about how to achieve this, namely, how to multiculturalize moderate secularism, and avoid exacerbating the crisis and limiting the room to maneuver, by pressing for further, radical secularism.

A longer version of this essay was first presented as the Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture, delivered in Las Vegas on August 19 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

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What does political theology describe that at the same time eludes political theory? Political theology begins with the existential, and thus pre-legal, moment of revolution and sacrifice to make sense of modern political experience; for revolution, as a form of war, entails sacrifice. That is to say, in war, sovereignty, or preserving the life of the people at all costs, is affirmed. But at the origins of political experience, life, or society, is not merely defended. In the beginning, or, in theological language, at the “Creation” of sovereignty, the community of the living is constituted, as are the structures put in place so that it can be maintained. This constituting moment is called revolution. It is the exceptional moment, the moment of the (declared) exception, the moment of (popular) sovereignty.

But is this just an example of an incomplete break from “premodern forms of religious influence on political order”? No, says Kahn: political theology argues instead for “the discovery of the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies upon God. [It] argues that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.”

Here we are at the heart of Kahn’s argument. Indeed, it is the key point that Kahn insists must be taken away from Carl Schmitt’s classic Political Theology: Four Chapters on Sovereignty, around which his own book is structured. First published in 1922, at the dawn of the Weimar era in Germany and on the heels of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which effectively subordinated Germany to England and France (its two main rival European powers) and stripped it of its colonial holdings—forcibly rendering it, as one theorist has said, “a postcolonial state in a still colonial world”—Schmitt’s Political Theology offered an account of contemporary political experience given the crisis of (German) sovereignty, or the collapse of German peoplehood. Schmitt saw this moment of political crisis as an existential crisis tantamount to death, and as a threat to which liberal political theory as such could not respond. Surrounded by perceived enemies without (its revival European and imperial competitors) and within (the Jew as abject), Germany faced an existential crisis that could be summed up in the Shakespearean phrase: “to be or not to be . . . .” Thus, Schmitt took the question of the political to be at best only secondarily a question of law or constitutionalism. It was principally a question, rather, of authenticity, of being. Hence, “the political,” as Kahn explains, “begins with the distinction of friends from enemies. This is a world in which subjecthood—who you are—makes all the difference.” Schmitt understood that the future of Europe would develop in accordance with such a concept of the political.

Kahn’s objective is to seize upon Schmitt’s deepest insights precisely at this juncture. Now, while I wish he would have done more reflection on the issue of identity (i.e., identity as subject and object, and even more, as abject, as Jews came to be figured within the political field, of which he says nothing at all; I will return to this below), Kahn is surely right to attend to this part of the Schmittian description of politics, sovereignty, and the exception in his effort “to develop a political theology for our [post-Cold War, post-September 11] time.”

When political theology takes the Western political imagination as its object of inquiry—in Schmitt’s case, post-World War I Germany; in Kahn’s and our case, the United States in the age of the war on terror—what is discovered? Kahn argues that one finds an imagination of the exception, or of exceptionalism, as a practice of “ultimate meaning.” Exceptionalism functions within a political and social imaginary fueled by a quest to secure national life by holding at bay an imagined death (think of the ticking time bomb scenario, which the television series 24 put on cinematic display) at the hands of a perpetual if undefined enemy.

This imaginary thus includes as a basic possibility the suspension of law and the use of violence. Exceptionalism, in other words, functions within an imaginary that rests, beyond the rule of law, on the sovereignty of the people, which, before being legal, is first and always existential, a sovereignty that decides who lives and who must die for the sake of life itself, or the preservation of the people. Within this framework for understanding modern political experience, sovereignty is what enables law (not the other way round) and law is shaped by sovereignty, which, as a logic of sacrifice, is invested in securing life over death—by means of death.

The experience of political sovereignty for the sake of life over death, or for the sake of the life that at all costs must stave off death, exceeds theory and discourse. It is a matter of authenticity and freedom, through which the sacred—our own sacredness—appears in history. This is what political theology describes as it looks back to the originary moment of sovereignty, and it is what liberal or political theory cannot describe, and cannot describe because of what might be thought of as its own melancholic disavowal and reinscription of its origins.

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From my perspective as a theologian and critical theorist of religion, one of the great gifts of Kahn’s book, as a constructive interaction with Schmitt on the notion of the exception, are the possibilities that it opens up for understanding what’s at stake in the discourse of theology as a mode of humanistic inquiry into the current political machinations of our world, and of America as a state of exception/alism. With Kahn we begin to understand why theology ought not to be reduced to being the parochial or fideistic pursuit of like-minded, if at times fractious, believers and increasingly inconsequential theologians, though far too often, certainly, it is this too. As Carl Schmitt once said, in a letter to Jacob Taubes, “everything is theological, except what the theologians are talking about.” Zeroing in on the heart of Schmitt’s thinking about the political (despite that he put his insights to fascist ends), Kahn calls attention to the form of political life that is coordinated with Christian theological and doctrinal ideas. And it’s worth saying again that I speak of the Christianity that has been collapsed into the project of West. Kahn has put his finger on how the political in which we have come to “live and move and have our being,” as St. Paul put it (Acts 17:28), is a theological field, a field, as I would put it, whose deepest operations remain “Christian”  (again, as it came to be bound up with Western hegemony), though it functions between the denial and the forgetfulness of its ongoing theological being.

Political theology refuses to dwell in such forgetfulness and denial. It attends to sovereignty as the alpha and omega of modern political experience.  It calls attention to the moment of destruction and construction, the moment of apocalyptic eschatology and sovereign creation, that lies at the heart of lived political experience, an experience that also lays claim to the sacred. The political is a sacred field. Inasmuch as it is a correlate of Christian theology, it sovereignly posits itself as “a joint community of gods and men” (Cicero), the community of the God-Man. This is the moment of sovereignty, the constitutive moment of We the People.

Moreover, political theology understands that mediating between eschatology (the telos of such a community) and creation (its origin), between death (as a threat to the community) and life (as its preservation at all costs), is atoning sacrifice. Therefore, atonement is at the heart of the political. Kahn notes, “Our tradition of the theological—in both its religious and political forms has always modeled that double moment of destruction and creation as sacrifice. Sacrifice has been our tradition in the democratic revolutions of the past, on the battlefields of the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and perhaps now in the sites of confrontation with the terrorist.”

Kahn’s final chapter brings the argument home by turning to the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac. This story of sacrifice is the singular narrative of the preservation of the father(-land) in the person of Abraham and the appearance of the divine or the sacred in history to authorize or legitimate self-preservation. History, Kahn notes, unfolds as sovereign sacrifice for sake of the life of the people. This biblical story is at the root of modern politics. It portrays our politics as a politics of sacrifice, which is to say, as a politics that carries out a logic of atoning death to preserve the nation. It is a story in which the human is conceived of as fundamentally a sacrificial animal, a being caught within a kind of “death contract” (Abdul JanMohamed), or within a politics that is always and fundamentally a “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe).

Theologically, this way of understanding the story of the sacrifice of Isaac eventually became a hermeneutical key for interpreting the death of Jesus Christ, who in classical Christian thought is the God-Man, the head of the ecclesial community. In this way, modern political experience, as the experience of sovereignty, acquired footing in the life of Jesus Christ (i.e., Christology) and in his death (i.e., soteriology, or atonement theory). All of this is to say that death is a most strange political gift, as we have learned from Jacques Derrida, a gift in dialectical relationship with life.

To grasp the deep architecture of the political today, therefore, is to venture into the theological domains of Christology and especially atonement, that area of theology (particularly, Christian theology) that deals with the logic of (redemptive) death. But the journey cannot be simply phenomenological in the way Kahn carries it out. Or, put differently, it may need to be phenomenological, but in a way that Kahn himself has not considered. Atonement thinking, and the “death contract” that binds politics, must, from within a different phenomenology (and therefore from within a different approach to political theology), be redirected. There must be a new future of death and the political.

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I have only scratched the surface of Kahn’s richly provocative and, indeed, on so many levels, clarifying text, mainly in celebration of what he has accomplished in it. But I have also just suggested that we must not rest with his phenomenology of the political. I want to conclude with a few thoughts meant to gesture toward what I mean.

Earlier I mentioned that I wish Kahn would have reflected more on the issue of identity formation (i.e., the making of subjects, objects, and abjects) in the constitution and in the telos of the politico-theological field of political experience. This is an important matter, for it provokes the question of what an account of modern political experience, generally, and U.S. exceptionalism, particularly, might look like if it were tied to actual bodies in the world. It is precisely here that Kahn’s account of political theology does not go far enough.

For the most part, Kahn carries out his fine analysis of political theology from a vantage point that privileges those constituted as subjects in the political field of the sovereign We the People. What might a politico-theological examination of the political look like if it were carried out from the vantage of those constructed as “enemy,” or, moreover, (and this is what I’m most interested in) from the vantage of those deemed “abject”?

My colleague Rey Chow (see The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism), drawing on Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, notes that abject is that which is neither wholly a part of the body nor wholly apart from it. Examples of abject substances are tears, saliva, feces, and urine. In terms of political theology as a description of the field of the political, the abject is neither friend (subject) nor enemy (object). The abject exists in the zone between life (full citizenship) and death (the enemy as one who must be killed). As with tears and similar substances that are never fully expelled from the body but that it rather produces as waste matter to maintain itself as a “clean and proper body,” so too is the abject within the field of political theology. Thus, even more than the enemy, it is the abject, as that which is produced in order to maintain the cleanliness and propriety of the body politic, that might prove to be key in understanding the field of the political as a sacred field of sacrificial sovereignty.

Thus, the abject is a figure neither of life nor of death but of living death, or, as Orlando Patterson has put it, of “social death.” This space in-between is both a precarious space of brutality and a flexible space that can be the harbinger of new possibilities. Kathleen McKittrick, in her work on black women in modern social space, has called this “the space between the legs” (see Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle). It is a space that crushes, but also a space that functions as a “loophole of retreat” (Harriet Jacobs), where the project of the human is carried out in a different key. In its flexibility, it is the space of the death of death itself and the space of new human life. The quintessential figure of this political space is the figure of the slave, modernity’s abject par excellence. Could it be that this is the sacrificial figure, along with this figure’s unassimilable progeny, who actually funds sovereignty or peoplehood in the making or constitution of normalized social and political space? And could it be that this is the figure who offers an alternative site, a space “to be” politically otherwise?

Most accounts of political theology today do not approach the political from the vantage of abjection. A qualified exception—no pun intended—can be found in the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben, however, theorizes the homo sacer (the abject) as passive, without agency, and therefore does not consider the possibility of an agency particular to the homo sacer—an agency through death itself. Put somewhat differently, death, according to Agamben, is that which acts upon the homo sacer, and not that through which it acts to risk transforming the political structure and experience of death itself. It is perhaps this mode of “abject agency” that Frederick Douglass, to cite but one example, gave voice to in his 1845 Narrative, in which, after his fight with Covey, he declared a “resurrection” of the abject self in the transformed subjectivity of the slave with the words, “I rose.”

My point in positing this other possibility is to suggest that the political experience of abjection, as a mode of being politically otherwise, can supplement, if not reorient, Agamben’s as well as Kahn’s (and others’) work on political theology. But for Kahn to have pulled off a phenomenology of this sort, one that begins with the lived experience of abjection and incorporates the friend-enemy-abject distinction as it has been pressed into the flesh, he would have needed a different set of interlocutors. Among these could have been transnational black intellectuals (or similarly positioned figures), a number of them contemporaries of Schmitt, who in thinking in terms of their own position of abjection, and the position of black folks more broadly in the socio-political and cultural world of modernity, were themselves engaged in reflections on political theology, though many of them did not use the term “political theology” to describe what they were doing. They had to think and act from within what W. E. B. Du Bois often referred to, in an allusion to the psalmist of the Hebrew Bible, as “the Valley of the Shadow Death.”

Besides Du Bois and Douglass, in this group we find thinkers like Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley, David Walker and Maria Stewart, and others like Richard Wright and Caribbean intellectuals Amié Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Édouard Glissant, and, contemporarily, Sylvia Wynter, Paul Gilroy, and Toni Morrison. This tradition of wide-ranging thinkers has approached the concerns of political theology, concerns over sovereignty in the creation and telos of the field of the political in colonial modernity (which of course is not apart from the field of the social and the cultural), from the sites of abjection and “social death.” Such abject sites are those of the slave ship, the transatlantic slave routes, the slave plantation, the black body itself, or what Fanon called “the lived experience of the black.” These were the sites where sacrificial sovereignty, or normalized peoplehood, was constituted—and contested—in modernity. These were sites of the death-world—the excremental sites, wastelands, archipelagoes (Wynter), and uninhabitable zones of under- and uneven development that helped maintain and regulate Western political life-worlds, worlds like the United States and the European metropoles.

In providing phenomenological descriptions of political sovereignty from the vantage point of abjection, black intellectuals of the sort just named have been involved in a project similar to the one Kahn embarks upon in Political Theology. They have been about the task of both describing and renarrating death, of trying to think toward a new future of atonement and therefore toward a new future of the political itself.

Perhaps the next horizon of political theology as a mode of inquiry is to learn from these and similar kinds of intellectuals. Perhaps it is to begin the work of political theology (understood as a phenomenology of the political) neither from the subject (the citizen) nor the object (the enemy), but from the abject (the one who is “both-and” and “neither-nor”). Until then, we have been given much to think about with Paul W. Kahn’s fine and timely book.

What, then, in Schmitt’s text is worth reiterating? First, Kahn rightly emphasizes Schmitt’s claim that secularization has not abolished the sacred but entails, rather, its remaking and relocation: “Political Theology is best thought of as an effort to discover the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies on god.” Kahn thus elaborates Schmitt’s theory of the state and sovereignty as a modern site of the sacred: the point of political theology is not to endorse fundamentalism or subordinate the state to “religious doctrine or church authority, but to recognize that the state creates and maintains its own sacred space and history.” Second, Kahn is also right to emphasize how Schmitt’s articulation of “the political” is a credible and still necessary critique of “liberal political thought.” In this regard, he compellingly lays out Schmitt’s view of the dimensions of “the political” that are avoided by liberal thought but undeniably present in state practices and political experiences that liberalism lacks the vocabulary to acknowledge.

Whereas liberal political thought imagines “law without end” through the self-evident application of moral norms or legal precedents, Schmitt (and so Kahn) instead emphasizes the inescapability of “decision” about “exception” to signal the constitutive role of interpretation, judgment, choice, and commitment in the making, interpreting, and enacting of the norms (or precedents) that actors invoke as authorizations. Kahn thus follows Schmitt in insisting on the impossibility of escaping “the political,” as the practice of fraught, and to some degree self-authorizing, “decision,” which is also an experience of freedom situated between the norms whose meaning we must interpret and the exceptions we must declare. Kahn also draws on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, which defines “the political” as constituted by the distinction between friend and enemy; thus, any association of human beings achieves a specifically “political” existence at moments of existential definition that articulate experiences of intensified attachment and enmity. Kahn, too, finds “ultimate meaning” in such moments, which call us beyond mere living as we judge and declare a life worth dying or killing for. Invoking Heidegger alongside Schmitt, Kahn insists that only if an individual or collective confronts the possibility of its death can it achieve the “authenticity” that he links to “freedom.” Because liberal political thought imagines a foundation of contractual relations and posits a horizon of dispositive consensus, Kahn follows Schmitt in arguing, it displaces this experience of chosen sacrifice, which, in joining the political and the sacred, endows human life with ultimate significance. Like Schmitt, therefore, Kahn links the political—as decision about the exception, about friend and enemy, and so about mortal sacrifice—to the state and/as a sovereignty relocated by war or revolution but never escaped. But, like other theorists who would democratize Schmitt, Kahn thinks of sovereignty as a revolutionary (constituent) power to declare an exception and (re)found a regime, and as “popular sovereignty,” a sacred but never fully manifest “presence” recurrently invoked to authorize political action.

In sum, because “liberal political thought” emphasizes reason, interest, and contract, and in these terms seeks a foundation for rational deliberation about justice, Kahn claims that it cannot grasp the political experiences—of decision, exception, state violence, revolution, and chosen sacrifice—crucial to constitutive political moments in American history, like the Civil War, the Cold War, and the “War on Terror,” while it is precisely such moments that Schmitt’s emphasis on “faith,” “will,” “decision,” “identity,” “authenticity,” and (sacrificial) violence can help us to understand. “We will always be surprised by the violence of which the state—even the liberal state—is capable. Liberalism as a theory of the political fails when political practice turns to killing or being killed, whether that violence is turned inward in the form of revolution, or outward in the form of war.” In this sense, Kahn is not replacing a liberal orientation that relates freedom to contract and justice but contesting it by way of a Schmittian supplement. In other words, he would maintain the ideal of the lawful, as well as the freedom he affirms in the liberal ideas of contract and consent, but would have it avow rather than disavow the phenomena of decision, exception, and violence that exist in tension with it.

Though he retains Schmitt’s emphatic investment in the state, violence, and sacrifice as the loci of the sacred in political life, Kahn offers his reading of Political Theology, not as a theory of the state and of sovereignty, but as a “phenomenology” of the political as it is experienced in modernity. Whereas Schmitt makes a structural argument about the character of the political—as depending on decision, as opposed to rational deliberation, and as incorporating a secular correlate of divine sovereignty in the figure of “he who decides”—Kahn addresses specifically how the political is “experienced” by the subjects of the state. That is, he follows a “phenomenological” approach that emphasizes the perspective of the subject and the terms and narratives that construct its experience of the political. Accordingly, he defines “the work of political theology” as giving “theoretical expression to those understandings that already inform a community’s self-understanding,” to expose how “our political life remains embedded in a web of conceptions that are theological in origin and structure” and how these form “the common background of the political imaginary which is shared” even by ostensible adversaries. Thus, as a phenomenology of political experience, political theology parallels cultural anthropology. But Kahn insists, surprisingly, that his account of “experience” is simply descriptive, and that his phenomenology has neither normative premises nor direct worldly implications. One must ask, however, what is hidden and what is justified by his “description” of the “imaginary” that frames “our” political perception and experience?

If the drawback of a phenomenological approach is that it gives the first and last word to the subject and its imaginings, rather than interrogate the conditions of its experience, then it can be said that Kahn, too, fails to critically examine the discursive, institutional, and, I would add, unconscious determinants that shape how subjects perceive and experience the political. Similarly, just as the historic danger of cultural anthropology was that analysts imposed and yet effaced their own perspectives in the name of a pure ethnography that would disclose the authentic experience of the native, Kahn likewise casts his particular interpretation as a neutral description. And by interpreting culture as “experience,” he denies how culture involves hegemony, whereby a “common sense” reflects unequal social power.

My claim and concern, then, is not only that Kahn is captured by Schmitt’s particular view of political theology as a disclosure of the sacred in modernity, but also that he de-politicizes culture by imagining it as consensual, while he also disowns the positioning and perspective that drive his “description” (as if from nowhere) of a foundational “imaginary” defining (indeed sacralizing) national identity. What premises constitute his avowedly Schmittian, but also “American,” position? And how do the blind spots of this position—what it implicitly disavows, excludes, or fails to acknowledge—reemerge into the theoretical framework that Kahn elaborates? Here, I will pursue these questions from two vantage points, first by way of canonical political theorists who share Schmitt’s critique of liberalism but depart from his view of the sacred and the political, and then by reading Kahn’s “political theology” through American racial history and African-American responses to it.

One way in which Kahn is captured by Schmitt is exposed by his selective use of Hannah Arendt. Rightly arguing that Schmitt’s emphasis on decision and sacrifice is a theory of freedom, Kahn invokes her as an ally. Granted, Arendt also refers to the “miracle,” as the exceptional moment that ruptures linear, mechanical causality, bureaucratic rationality, positive law, and the ordinary, as routine “behavior,” to use her word. But, while Schmitt conceives of freedom as the decision that establishes sovereignty over an unstable and heterogeneous political field, Arendt depicts freedom as natality, or the capacity to initiate a novel sequence of events, links it to what she calls “action-in-concert,” and insists that it depends on renouncing, not resuscitating, the very idea of, and aspiration to, sovereignty. In her view, political freedom arises out of human plurality and generates “boundless” reverberations among agents who cannot master their actions, whereas sovereignty entails the violent domination of the plurality both in the self and the world, in the name of securing the rule (and, for some, the rationality) of a “free will.” In Arendt’s phenomenology of the experience of the political and its place in “the human condition,” the sacred (as the miracle rupturing the routine of life) thus appears in and as a political freedom that is antithetical to sovereignty. For her, modern experiences of the sacred occur horizontally, through the action-in-concert that reveals its own foundation in plurality and natality—not vertically, through the state as a transcendent power vested with the task of consolidating the identity of the nation.

More recently, however, some political theorists have objected to the investment in exceptionality that joins Schmitt and Arendt in relating the sacred and the political. In contrast to Christian (or perhaps Pauline) juxtapositions of law and grace, or deadening routine and its miraculous rupture, Bonnie Honig (in Emergency Politics), for instance, elaborates a “Jewish” political theology, drawing on Franz Rosenzweig, for whom the miraculous is not a violation of law but an as-yet-undisclosed possibility (Jonathan Lear calls it “a possibility for new possibilities”) for which people are prepared by immersion in—not by rupturing—the ordinary (liturgical) practices of life. And whereas for Kahn, “in politics as in ordinary life, the ordinary is first of all and most of the time a domain of inauthenticity,” some have used Cavell or de Certeau to show how capacities for creativity and change, for risk, sacrifice, and self-overcoming, are embedded in “the ordinary” and can be cultivated only by practices seen as liturgical in character. They locate—and would engender—experiences of faith, commitment, and sacrifice, as well as the freedom to initiate the new, in sites and practices that resist Schmitt’s state-centric account of the sacred and the political and its inflection by Kahn’s nation-building civil religion.

In the very way he theorizes the sacred and the political, then, Kahn is not describing the world so much as advancing a political theology that is selective in what it renders visible, and how. In doing so, however, he repeats but obscures the interpellation of subjects into the particular imaginary of the American nation-state. He is surely right that, in the American case, experiences of the political are framed by a “civil religion” that joins nation and state; if the task of theory in this context is to examine the foundations of that civil religion, as Kahn says, then any such effort has to attend to the structures of power that it sustains as well as the refractory plurality and alternative voices that it de-legitimizes. Otherwise, the theorist risks sustaining hegemony in the name of describing “culture.” Likewise, Kahn is surely right that the American regime enacts “Schmittian” dimensions of politics—the return of what liberal theory represses—by defining existential threats, declaring exceptions, and demanding violence. But in this regard, his account bespeaks only the privileged or enfranchised position of one standing with the state as a “friend” and not with those declared its enemies. Invested in instructing “us” in the necessity of such distinctions to the constitution of “our” identity, he does not register the contingency or judge the credibility of specific antagonisms, let alone “visit” an alternative perspective on that identity.

Indeed, if we focus on the politics of race, the problem in American liberalism is not the denial of what Schmitt calls political theology. For white supremacy in American is a political theology: the declaration of a (racial) state of exception, and so of friend and enemy, to mark a constitutive outside and an internal enemy is constitutive of a republic that repeatedly defines itself and defends its freedom by declaring certain people and practices to be existential threats. For Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, or James Baldwin, for example, democratically authorized racial domination founded the liberal-nationalist regime, and racialized demarcations continue to define the meaning of a popular sovereignty and normative citizenship. Demonological obsession with existential threats—what Michael Rogin calls “counter-subversive” politics—is thus Schmittian decision in American drag. Here, then, is the paradox: Schmitt calls liberalism anti-political because an inclusive, pluralist, consensual creed defers the decision and avoids the antagonism that he defines as properly political; whereas in the American liberal state a racialized language of exception and antagonism criminalizes black agency, and thereby demonizes many features of the political.

Contra the formalism of Schmitt and Kahn, decision on the exception and the enemy neither embody “the political” as such nor give access to the sacred, for their meaning (even as forms of disavowal) is contingent and situated. Likewise, Kahn makes sacrifice—killing or being killed, he repeatedly says—central to the political and to the (American) imagination of the sacred. But, for Ralph Ellison (see “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”), lynching, and not, as on Kahn’s account, revolution, was that very sacramental act—surely, if ironically, a black Sabbath—whereby popular sovereignty constituted a republic through the sacrifice of actual blacks and, therewith, the exorcism of what blackness represents. Like Kahn, Ellison sees a structure of disavowal in liberalism, but one allied with the very political theology that Kahn articulates. Ellison would agree with Kahn that “we” need to acknowledge what we already practice, but for Kahn this “we” must learn to accept a logic of necessity and exception in the exercise of state power and the formation of identity, whereas Ellison calls for whites—those enfranchised through the exclusion of blacks—to acknowledge, rather than demonize and exorcise, the mortal finitude and inescapable politicality signified by blackness. The specifically political meaning of acknowledgment changes radically as we shift from the formalism by which Kahn justifies violence to what Ellison calls “the lower frequencies.”

In naming the state of exception enabling liberal nationalism, critics of white supremacy must at once depict how the grammar of political theology is racialized and take  exception to it its exceptionalizing logic, and to the American exceptionalism that it sustains. But what kind of politics could suspend the states of exception that sustain the liberal rule? Kahn’s themes—faith, love, commitment, and sacrifice, as well as the necessity of persuasion—figure prominently in African-American thought, but they problematize his insistence on the state as the center of sovereignty and violence, as well as his investment in the nation and popular sovereignty. Political circumstances, and a prophetic genre, seem to have fostered a characteristically agonal relationship of black politics to states and nations; renaming America a Babylon, critics of white supremacy repeatedly imagine a political space between nation and empire, where the miracle of freedom might appear through practices of steadfast labor and abiding love, in tension with both state sovereignty and the unmarked whiteness of popular sovereignty. Ideas of decision and exception, as in civil disobedience and violent self-defense, and themes of sacrifice in practices of communal solidarity and non-violence do intersect at points with Kahn’s Schmittian meditations, but they question his fundamental assumptions about state and nation as the sole sites at which the sacred and the political intersect in modernity.

Perhaps it is a matter of tone: whereas Kahn concludes his book by depicting “us” as inescapably conscripted in a war on and with terrorists, we instead might see him as conscripting readers into a project that replenishes state sovereignty and unifies a national subjectivity by declaring an existential crisis. And whereas he locates the sacred in a sacrificial relation to this violent state and the national subject it represents, we instead might invest the meaning of the political in practices that resist violent sovereignty, partly by refusing the language of necessity and sacrifice by which he, like Schmitt, sacralizes it.

“Under what conditions does freedom of speech become freedom to hate?” Judith Butler recently asked. Here I will explore these issues in light of recent developments concerning the freedom of speech in Norway. I will argue that applying a cosmopolitan liberal approach to freedom of speech (i.e., along U. S. First Amendment lines) in a European context in which anti-Muslim and anti-immigration discourses are becoming ever more poisonous and pervasive risks underestimating the power dynamics inherent to the practice of free speech in contemporary Europe as well as overestimating the “mainstream” political and intellectual will to mobilize against the populist right-wing’s instrumentalized Islamophobia.

In an op-ed for The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash recently argued that “for reasons both of free speech principle and political prudence,” Dutch politician Geert Wilders “should not be on trial for what he says about Islam.” Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), is being prosecuted under Dutch hate speech regulations for his comparison of the Qur’an to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and for referring to the former as “a fascist book.” In opting to indict Wilders, Dutch prosecutors, according to Garton Ash, are “guilty of blurring the line between attacking the believers and criticizing [their] beliefs.” He argues for instead moving the struggle against contemporary European populist articulations of xenophobia from “the court of law” to “the court of public opinion,” calling upon “mainstream politicians and intellectuals” to mobilize in defense of the liberal rule of law and equal rights of citizenship for all individuals.

Similarly, Andrew March has argued that in a Europe that is often discriminatory and imbalanced in its approach to Muslims citizens, “Muslim minorities in particular have a strong interest in “securing a more fundamentalist and formalist culture of defense of free speech.” Garton Ash’s and March’s motivations for advocating more free speech in response to hate speech are not identical. Whereas Garton Ash invokes the “slippery slope” argument (by which “a purpose to protect individual human beings” turns into a ban on criticizing “any belief”), March makes the valid point that religiously motivated speech has the same innate capacity to injure as non-religiously motivated speech, and that the religious therefore cannot claim any special privileges in regard to protection against injurious speech. The slippery slope argument, most famously articulated by Ronald Dworkin, holds that since free expression is a necessary condition of political legitimacy in any democratic society, we risk unduly interfering with political legitimacy and ultimately undermining democracy if free expression is curtailed. Dworkin is a strong and articulate defender of what may be characterized as contemporary U.S. First Amendment understandings of freedom of speech in their most absolutist incarnations. Yet the available evidence from liberal and democratic countries with hate speech legislation quite simply does not support the contention that such legislation paves the way for more wide-ranging restrictions on speech.

March and Garton Ash do, however, share certain basic assumptions. The first is that the distinction between speech directed against religion or belief of any sort and speech directed at individuals professing a particular religion or belief is easily identifiable. The second is what can be broadly defined as a desire to universalize, or at least to “Europeanize,” an understanding of the freedom of speech rooted in the U.S. First Amendment. Under U.S. First Amendment principles, as elaborated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the course of the twentieth century, the only legitimate restriction of speech pertains to any utterance functioning as an incitement to “immediate” violence against particular individuals, if and when the listening audience is in fact liable to act upon such speech. This interpretation of the constitutional protection of free speech is an outlier in global and comparative terms. But in light of legal, societal, and political developments in the past decade, on the national as well as the supra-national level, European states, and Scandinavian states in particular, seem more and more to be turning toward contemporary U.S. First Amendment understandings of the freedom of speech. For now, formal legal protections against various forms of racist, hateful, or discriminatory speech instituted as a result of international conventions remain in the statutes of numerous countries. Under these conventions, certain restrictions on free speech are permitted under the condition that they are “prescribed by law” and “necessary in a democratic society.” In Denmark, for instance, The Free Press Society’s Lars Hedegaard was recently prosecuted successfully for racist speech. In France, TV personality Éric Zummour was convicted under similar laws. But in Norway, hate speech legislation is more or less a dead letter. For laws that are merely symbolic and seldom, if ever, applied soon lose both their effectiveness and their legitimacy.

The character of racism in Norway shifted significantly in the course of the 1990s, in line with developments elsewhere in Western Europe. The racism of biological markers was replaced by various forms of cultural racism, and overt anti-Semitism became anathema while more or less subtle forms of Islamophobia became palatable. It is noteworthy in this context that the figure of “the Muslim” as an embodied threat to everything from freedom of speech to gender equality and from gay rights to the sustainability of the welfare state means that Islamophobia in contemporary Norway has wide cross-sectional and cross-political purchase. Even overtly xenophobic and racist organizations in Norway now claim on their websites to be opposed to all forms of racism and xenophobia, and merely to be engaged, rather, in a “critique of Islam” and efforts to ‘stop the “Islamization of Norway.” With the tacit support of Norway’s political, legal, and intellectual elites, racism is narrowly construed as relating only to biological markers of difference.

In principle, more free speech and more open access to various media means an increased potential for Muslims to respond to popular stereotypes and stigmatization. And it is, in fact, by no means unusual for young Norwegian Muslims to do so. But to do so under current circumstances requires very thick skin indeed. In interviews with me, young Norwegian Muslims active in the mediated public sphere very often report receiving abusive and threatening letters and emails. At the same time, mainstream liberal editors, who act as gatekeepers to major media outlets, often have their own scripts requiring those who get privileged access to visible positions in the mediascape to play particular roles—specifically the heroic “secular feminist Muslim” and the vilified “conservative Muslim,” or, in other words, the Muslim woman in need of freedom (from “Islam”), and the Muslim man denying her freedom (in the name of “Islam”). “Power speaks only to power,” in J.M. Coetzee’s words, and to be able and permitted to express oneself in public does not entail actually being heard.

Furthermore, many Norwegian mainstream—and supposedly liberal—editors cast themselves as “critics of Islam”—some to the extent of regularly recommending Islamophobic “Eurabia literature” of various kinds to their readers. Their Kulturkampf against the threats to freedom of speech emanating from ‘Islam’ often invoke the 3.0 percent of Norway’s population that is of Muslim background as a stand-in for this generalized other. In these editors’ constant clamor to be at the forefront of the heroic struggle for the freedom of speech, the editorial restraint of mainstream media in the U.S. is often virtually absent. In a reversal of Enlightenment creeds, it is now the powerful rather than the powerless that the freedom of speech is expected to protect. Many of these editors have also expended much energy on attempts to publicly discredit and discourage use of the term Islamophobia in Norway in recent years. It was not entirely coincidental, then, that, in 2009, Norway’s technocratic and influential Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, described the very concept of Islamophobia as “substanceless rant.”

In early January, 2011, the secular feminist Hege Storhaug, of Human Rights Service (HRS), in an op-ed in the mainstream liberal-conservative newspaper Aftenposten, by far the most influential newspaper in Norway, compared Muslims in prayer during a demonstration at Oslo’s University Square the previous year to “quislings.” Not to be outdone, Kent Andersen, a board member of the Oslo section of the populist-right wing Progress Party (PP), on a personal blog some weeks later, compared Islam to Nazism, and rhetorically asked his readers whether they thought that there could be “moderate Muslims”—as if there were ever “moderate Nazis.” The implication of such analogies, as Ian Buruma suggested in a 2009 New York Times op-ed, is that those who happen to believe in the Qur’an are like Nazis, and that an “all-out war against them” would therefore be legitimate. This is where Garton Ash’s approach would seem to run into some difficulties, for it is hard to see Storhaug and Andersen’s declamations as anything other than speech that deliberately blurs the line between a legitimate critique of Islam and hateful speech targeting individual Muslims. Andersen works in marketing, and, like Storhaug, has close links to some of the Progress Party’s most influential MPs. Once the Progress Party was on the fringes of Norwegian politics, but since 2003 it has governed the capital, Oslo, in a two-party alliance. In the parliamentary elections of 2009, the PP got a record 22.9 percent of the vote. Established in 1973 as an anti-taxation and anti-bureaucratic party, the PP first discovered the popular appeal of anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric in 1987.

Anti-Muslim and anti-immigration discourse has long been part of the political mainstream in Norway—effectuating what the late Tony Judt described as a “social democracy of fear.” Norway’s governing Labor Party has managed to remain in power, in a tripartite alliance of the center-left, by taking ever more stringent measures on immigration and integration, thus echoing the PP’s policies, if not their rhetoric, in recent years.

As a direct result of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) of 1966, Norway introduced a racism paragraph (135 (a)) into its penal code in 1970. In its current formulation, the racism paragraph may be used to penalize public utterances or symbols of a hateful or discriminatory nature based on attributes such as skin color, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, or homosexual orientation and lifestyle. In spite of numerous racist incidents during the 1970s and ’80s, the paragraph was never much used. As a result of public utterances he made during a march in the small Norwegian town of Askim, in 2000, Terje Sjølie, a Norwegian member of Boot Boys, a neo-Nazi gang, was charged under the racism paragraph. In his speech, Sjølie proclaimed that “every day, immigrants rob, rape and kill Norwegians.” One year later, a gang of Boot Boys brutally stabbed to death Benjamin Hermansen, a fifteen-year old boy of mixed Norwegian-African parentage, in a southeastern suburb of Oslo. Hermansen’s murderer had been present at the march in Askim the previous year. On an extremely cold winter evening 40,000, Norwegians took part in a commemorative anti-racism march dedicated to Hermansen and his family; it was the largest demonstration ever held in the Norwegian capital. Nevertheless, in 2002, a divided Norwegian Supreme Court acquitted Sjølie of the charges brought under the racism paragraph. The Court’s majority argued that the freedom of speech overrode the right to protection from hateful and discriminatory speech. Various Norwegian civil society organizations appealed the Supreme Court’s verdict to the UN’s ICERD Committee. In 2006, the ICERD Committee found the verdict in the Sjølie case to be in violation of ICERD articles 4 and 6. Norwegian state officials have repeatedly asserted to the European Commision against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) that the Sjølie verdict would now be inconceivable. Yet, with the exception of the Norwegian Supreme Court’s 2008 conviction of Norwegian Neo-Nazi Tore Tvedt for having declared in a 2003 tabloid newspaper interview that Jews were “parasites whom we must cleanse,” there have been no successful legal prosecutions under the racism paragraph in Norway in recent years. Charging and prosecuting Norwegian citizens on the basis of hate speech against Muslims—as the Dutch and the Danish have recently done in the Wilders and Hedegaard cases—now seems relatively inconceivable.

Freedom of speech debates are often construed by free speech proponents and opponents as a zero-sum game—that is, it is assumed that one either is, or ought to be, for or against free speech. Here I must make clear that I am inclined neither to support blasphemy laws nor to defend the dubious concept of “defamation of religion.” Exempting the beliefs and practices of people whose beliefs and practices happen to differ from my own is not a way of demonstrating respect or treating others as equals. The public sphere is an impure place, and so it must be. The current “fetishism of law” makes many attribute the most magical of effects to the mere letter of the law. It is an open question, however, whether the law is an appropriate instrument in the regulation of expression. For, in plural and heterogeneous societies, it is doubtful that any Rawlsian “duty of civility” can be instilled through law, and the emergence of various largely unregulated social media on the web makes it even less likely.

When restrictions on racist, discriminatory, and hate speech were introduced in Europe, in the aftermath of World War II, it was because European political and intellectual elites had come to the conclusion that there had to be some such restrictions in place in order to prevent “fighting words” from turning into “fighting actions.” It is hard to see that when Islam is compared to Nazism, and ordinary Muslims to Nazis, it constitutes a mere “critique of religion” rather than hate speech. The last racially motivated murder in Norway took place in 2008, when a Norwegian-Somali Muslim father of six, Mahmed Jamal Shirwac, was killed. There is solid evidence from Germany to India and from Rwanda to Bosnia that fighting actions are usually preceded by fighting words. Even though history does not repeat itself, in the current circumstances, it would be prudent to uphold a modest defense of European restrictions on hate speech.

The central impetus for Payne’s essay, however, was not to introduce an unfamiliar religion to the American public but to clarify the “truth” of Islam’s Sunni orthodoxy in the face of “the rise of the black Muslim sect” in the U.S. The teachings of the black Muslims of the Nation of Islam, under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, the author emphasized, “are directly opposed to the teachings of Islam”—in particular, their stance on “race hatred” against whites. Payne closed the piece by unequivocally placing the NOI and its adherents beyond the pale of an authentic Islam, saying that the organization’s beliefs were “unthinkable” to “the true Moslem” (italics added).

In the almost half-century since, the Times appears to have done little to shift the Good (Orthodox) Muslim-Bad (Black) Muslim paradigm asserted in Payne’s article, which paints stark dividing lines between the “good” racial universalism of a “global” Sunni Islam and the “bad” racialized parochialisms of the NOI, and of African American Islam more broadly. Indeed, this very same logic was at the heart of David Lepeska’s April 10 article regarding current NOI leader Louis Farrakhan’s recent support of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. Leading with the unsubstantiated claim that Farrakhan was championing Qaddafi to bolster the dwindling ranks of his organization, Lepeska stated that the NOI had lost its appeal in black America, and that African American converts were now more “likely to join traditional sects led by Arab and South Asian immigrants.” Like Payne five decades ago, Lepeska and the Times found it necessary to situate black Muslims beyond the pale of Islamic orthodoxy, this time via a quote from Islamic studies scholar Ihsan Bagby, who stated, categorically: “The theology of the Nation contradicts the basic tenets of Islam.”

In his response to Lepeska’s piece, Edward Curtis aptly addresses many of the article’s shortcomings, pointing out the sharp racial divisions between black, Arab, and South Asian communities in the nation’s mosques, and thus contradicting Lepeska’s notion that most African American Muslims join through immigrant congregations. In addition, he contextualizes Farrakhan’s support of Qaddafi within a long history of Pan-Africanist politics and activism, which have always been at the heart of African American Islam, thus refuting the idea that Farrakhan is suddenly pandering to the black masses to regain his limelight (as well as the almost laughable notion that support of Qaddafi would somehow galvanize black Americans to join the NOI). Finally, he rightfully emphasizes how the NOI has always been, not simply a political, but a deeply religious organization and criticizes the media’s attempts to “shape and constrain what constitutes legitimate Islam.”

As a scholar who studies the intersections of race and Islam in the contemporary U.S. cultural imaginary, my concern with media narratives such as Payne’s and Lepeska’s is not so much how they portray the teachings of the NOI as contradictory to Islam’s Sunni orthodoxy (which they are), but how charges of the group’s lack of compliance with this orthodoxy are somehow linked to acts of racial betrayal, an equivalence used to diffuse and discredit the NOI’s (or any other offending organization’s) critiques of state-sponsored racism and/or U.S. military aggression and intervention. In the 1963 piece, the NOI’s black nationalist position is summed up as “race hatred” of whites, a stance that must be exposed as anathema, not only to the integrationist rhetoric of the civil rights movement, but to what Payne portrays as the universalist and egalitarian ethos of orthodox Sunni Islam, whose teachings, interestingly enough, dovetail nicely with the fundamental tenets of U.S. liberal democracy.

Lepeska merely updates this formula for the post-9/11 era; Farrakhan’s support of Qaddafi is dismissed as the ego-driven ranting of a fringe religious figure, as have been his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and calls for slavery reparations over the course of the last decade. Indeed, the bulk of the article is spent discussing Farrakhan’s and the NOI’s fading relevance, as opposed to addressing the NOI leader’s specific objections to the U.S. intervention in Libya, including his concerns over our “meddling in another country’s internal affairs and calling for regime change” and his indication of America’s failure to intervene in other conflicts between a state and armed groups, such as in Israel-Palestine, or in the other democratic uprisings in the Middle East—e.g. Yemen, Egypt, Syria, etc.

It’s an interesting discursive strategy for the Times to dredge up during a time when Islamophobic rhetoric is at an all-time high, to champion the “orthodox” Islam of “traditional sects led by Arab and South Asian immigrants” in order to delegitimize the internationalist and antiracist spirit of black protest that has long been the hallmark of African American Islam. Whether Farrakhan’s teachings are legitimately “Islamic,” or whether the NOI is an “authentic” Muslim organization, is not the issue here—let’s leave that to the theologians, as opposed to a media establishment that continues to exhibit a stunning ignorance of the intertwined histories of race and Islam in America. A more productive question might be: why is the NOI’s “unorthodoxy” still news?

More than anything, the Good (Orthodox) Muslim-Bad (Black) Muslim paradigm reveals the media’s seemingly willful ignorance of the longstanding diversity of Islamic practices within black America and of the consistently worldly, heterodox, and syncretic legacies of African American Islam. The contemporary landscapes of Muslim America have been inexorably formed through processes of cultural interaction and exchange, both between black and “immigrant” Muslims and amongst various African American Islamic organizations themselves, since “Islam,” in its many forms, began its spread through African American communities in the urban landscapes of the post-Reconstruction North. Since the early twentieth century, in places like Detroit and New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Milwaukee, both “orthodox” and “heterodox” Islamic organizations such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, the NOI, Darul Islam, the Hanafis, Ansaru Allah, the Five Percent Nation, the American Society of Muslims (founded by Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammad, after he assumed leadership of the NOI, in 1975), and many others, have all been a part of the making of a distinctly African American—and thus, distinctly American—Islam. Each of these organizations, one can safely argue, has in one way or another advanced its Islamic engagements through discourses of black liberation and the spiritual quest for black humanity—what African American Sunni Muslim scholar Sherman Jackson has called the “cosmic no” of black Religion.

This “cosmic no” to the U.S. intervention in Libya was also expressed by African American Sunni Muslim leader Imam Zaid Shakir. Shakir (along with Shaikh Hamza Yusuf) is among the most prominent Muslim American leaders in the contemporary U.S. and seeks to revive in the West the “traditional” study methods and sciences of the classical Sunni tradition. (The two, along with scholar Hatem Bazian, recently founded Zatyuna College in Berkeley, which is seeking become the nation’s first accredited Islamic college.)  On March 24, Shakir posted a widely-circulated essay on his blog, New Islamic Directions, entitled “Why I Oppose the US-Led Intervention in Libya.” In it, he stated that while he knew that his position “may be perceived as an unpopular one, not least because the Libyan rebels themselves called for—and have received military assistance from the West,” he nonetheless warned against the dangers of “a US-led invasion of another Muslim country,” predicting that U.S. intervention “will likely lead to far more civilian deaths than would have occurred [in] a strictly Libyan affair.” He also pointed out, as had Farrakhan, that the ouster of Qaddafi was likely a high priority for the U.S. due to how Qaddafi had long been “leading a Pan-African movement under the auspices of the African Union,” in which Libya’s oil revenues were being used toward Africa’s economic empowerment. In his concluding remarks, Shakir wrote: “I do not believe western intervention is solely motivated by humanitarian concerns, nor do I believe it will succeed. I cannot support it.”

Unsurprisingly, Shakir’s views received no coverage in the mainstream media.

I was a source for the story, but an exchange of twenty-three emails seems largely to have failed to convince the reporter of my analysis of the phenomenon as an example of pan-African politics. The article is organized instead around the supposition that, because there has been a decline in membership in the Nation of Islam since the mid-1990s, Farrakhan needs to regain the spotlight. Though the Times mentions that Farrakhan “sounded sincere in his efforts to come to the aid of the embattled Libyan leader,” its headline proclaimed: “Farrakhan Using Libyan Crisis to Bolster His Nation of Islam.” Black Americans interested in Islam, it claims, “are likely to join traditional sects led by South Asians and Arabs.”

This statement is most likely incorrect, since most black Muslims seem to follow black Muslim leaders. Mosques, like churches, are divided by race in the United States. Precious few numbers exist on the racial composition of American mosques and other Muslim American institutions, but a 2001 report on American mosques sponsored by the Council of American-Islamic Relations indicated racial division in the mosqueing of America. The reporting of the Times’ own Andrea Elliott has also revealed the importance of black Sunni leaders, such as the late W.D. Mohammed and Siraj Wahhaj, to the growth of “traditional” Sunni Islam among black Americans. To these well-known names, you can add those of African American imams who are Sunni in every major city around the country.

African American Muslim academics, such as Aminah McCloud, have frequently pointed out that the mainstream media largely ignore the presence of African American Muslims in defining what constitutes American Islam in the post-9/11 era, and this recent piece is further evidence that their complaints have a basis in fact. The brown, “foreign” Muslim is the media face of American Islam now, a sharp reversal from the 1960s, when Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X were America’s “Moozlims.”

But perhaps what is most important here are the ways in which the article sets the limits of “true” Islam. Minister Farrakhan, the analysis says, is as much a “nationalist leader as a religious one.” Religion is never defined, but it is constructed as something other than politics by insisting that Minister Farrakhan is really motivated by black liberation. The idea that black liberation could also be religious is never considered, ignoring the claim that black religion, or at least a part of it, has been politically radical.

Instead, the article continues the long and troubling tradition, which began with sociological and FBI explanations of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s, of denying the movement its legitimately religious elements. Such reductionism is a stunning dismissal of the religion right at the surface of the Nation of Islam’s activities. Farrakhan’s comments in the speech about Qaddafi indicate just how much his vision is simultaneously religious and political: In the speech he reiterated his own importance as a prophet meant to warn America about the impending apocalyptic doom due to its hypocritical foreign policies. It doesn’t get more religious than that.

Another example of the article’s delimiting of legitimate American Islam is its claim that the Nation of Islam’s theology “spurns traditional Islam,” whatever that is. Ihsan Bagby, a professor at the University of Kentucky, is quoted as saying that the “theology of the Nation of Islam contradicts the basic tenets of Islam.” No mention is made that Bagby has served as the secretary general of the Muslim Alliance in North America, a rival group to the Nation of Islam. His decades-long career as an African American Sunni leader is omitted in favor of stressing his authority as a “professor of Islam.”

Invoking the myth of a monolithic traditional Islam, this framing of Farrakhan as black nationalist leader erases the memory of indigenous forms of Islam. Minister Farrakhan’s jeremiads are classic expressions of American religion; their roots can be found in a long tradition of American prophecy and particularly the tradition of black messiahs. But Farrakhan is not just another American prophet; he is a Muslim American prophet in the tradition of Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Muhammad.

There is yet another effect of the article’s dismissal of the Islamic dimension of Farrakhan’s politics. The portrayal of the Nation of Islam as an exclusively nationalist movement led by a charismatic leader obscures the historical links between African American Islam and Muslims abroad. The ties of the Nation of Islam to foreign countries and groups have always expressed a larger identification of African Americans with foreign Muslim leaders, Afro-Asian anti-colonialism, and the non-aligned movement. Minister Farrakhan is pro-Qaddafi because he believes that Qaddafi is an ally in the struggle against global racism. Qaddafi has given millions to the Nation of Islam just as he has given significant aid to Sub-Saharan African states. Failing to see Farrakhan’s support for Qaddafi as pan-African Islamic politics seems almost a wish to ignore the questions that American interventionism poses for the continent and those in the African diaspora who associate themselves with it. The U.S. entrance into this fight may affect racial politics at home more than we can currently imagine, especially if African American Muslims come to see U.S. intervention as unjust.

At the same time, Minister Farrakhan’s support for Qaddafi has been criticized on various African and African American blogs, another aspect of the story that the Times missed. Such criticism is an effort to convince other African Americans to reject Farrakhan’s support of Qaddafi. Critics have pointed to Qaddafi’s racist views and his support of fellow African dictators. Libya itself has a long history of racial discrimination, and this current crisis creates possibilities for further abuse of its most vulnerable populations.

Whether Farrakhan is right or wrong about Qaddafi, his questioning of U.S. support for the no-fly zone over Libya raises an important question: what impact will U.S. aid to rebels have on racial politics in Africa and the African diaspora? Though Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi has tackled the issue of Middle Eastern and North African racism in a post on Al-Jazeera, the question of racial politics elsewhere has yet to be adequately considered by mainstream media and academic analysts. Maybe we should forget who brought up the question and just try to answer it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly, Oprah’s product endorsements have had a huge impact on sales, which is no doubt galling for us critics of neoliberal capitalism, who are often ashamed to admit how much we ourselves buy and consume in the privacy of our own lives. Most of us are not strangers to the act of buying to help us feel good, but members of the intellectual elite disavow their commodified selves as a mark of class status and taste.  Watching Oprah, we enact this disavowal, and Lofton herself performs it when she writes: “We’re happy for the woman and glad for her good tidings, but we are left with the itching uncertainty that we don’t feel very good at all about all this commodity fetishism.” Criticizing Oprah’s blatant embrace of shopping performs a deeply entrenched scholarly identity that has its roots in Marxist intellectualism. It thus reproduces old political ideologies and dichotomies, such as the (often implicit) idea that political action to create a better world requires personal austerity and social upheaval.

Oprah makes people feel good. Scholarly critics fear that Oprah is anaesthetizing the masses. Lofton asks us to be surprised at how Oprah blends spirituality with the real world of commodities, but she does not as readily examine or challenge the common assumption that spirituality-cum-commodified self-improvement is antithetical to social/political action. In fact, the criticism of Oprah’s political effects seems oddly misplaced. There are at least three arenas that Lofton discusses in which Oprah’s acts have had significant social and political effects that go well beyond passive self-improvement: the election of Obama; transformation of the reading practices of the wide public that participates in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club; and the refashioning of gender. Within these three arenas, Oprah has arguably contributed significantly to the fashioning of a new middle-class subject and made it a performative possibility for millions of viewers. Oprah’s iconic performances have had important political and social effects that most liberal academics would be expected to applaud, including the encouragement of reading and the promotion of religious, racial, cultural, and sexual tolerance, by downplaying difference. Yet Lofton presents these Oprah effects in prose that often oscillates between a balanced review of scholarly and historical sources and conclusions tinged with disparagement. It is this tone, which belies her analytic neutrality, that might lead Oprah’s audience members to wonder what Lofton is doing to “their Oprah.”

Lofton’s epilogue focuses on the “‘Oprahfication’ of Obama,” by which she means the way that Oprah put Obama into the mold of a “familiar sort of savior,” a commodified product of neoliberalism.  She and some of her more socially progressive readers are disturbed by this commodification—including Deidre English, who calls such Oprahfication “chilling.” Yet the effect of Oprah’s decision,to come out and take an explicit political stance—not only aligning herself with a Democratic political candidate, but also actively promoting his presidency—was enormous. Oprah’s decision to openly endorse one candidate was quite a contrast from her usual practice of even-handed inclusiveness. One effect, of course, was to alienate some of her most conservative viewers, producing a small drop in Nielson ratings. But another effect was to create a huge base of support for Obama among people, especially women, who otherwise might not have imagined voting for a black presidential candidate. Some have argued that she may have influenced the very outcome of the election.

Oprah has this power to shape middle-class American discourse precisely because she does not take an overtly radical political stance focused on upending the current economic and social order from the outside, which would alienate people who are worried about rapid social transformation. She instead operates from within, performing and promoting a middle-class subjectivity grounded in a form of spirituality that has deep roots in American religious practice. She made it conceivable to identify Obama with the mainstream middle class—an effect that goes well beyond shallow, commodified “Oprahfication.”

The concept of depth is another one of those Oprah inkblots that exposes academics’ anxieties about the contradiction between their elitism and their egalitarianism. Lofton herself is uneasy and noncommittal about the concept of depth, presenting arguments that are critical of Oprah’s lack of depth, while aware that the criticism of spirituality as “thin” raises the question of what “thick” or “deep” might be. What is needed is a more systematic analysis of the politics of “depth,” beginning with its deployment by academics.

The association of Oprahfication with lack of depth is clearest in critiques of Oprah’s effects on the reading public. Lofton, like others, is skeptical of the interpretive approach to reading that Oprah encourages in her book club: she stresses that Oprah’s interpretations, which encourage readers to react emotionally to a book and relate its characters to their own lives, lack depth and reduce books to their ability to “return women to an Oprah way of life,” reiterating the core theme of Oprah-as-icon. Lofton is one of several scholars who have engaged in the classic highbrow-lowbrow debate and either bemoaned the loss of “depth” in an Oprah reading or celebrated how Oprah’s approach is a new style of reading that has encouraged the middle class to engage with both new authors and classic tomes that otherwise may have been inaccessible to most readers. Cecelia Farr, for example, compares the book club to an introductory English class: the first step is to reach students. One could also draw a comparison with Sesame Street, which uses the idiom of commodities to “sell” reading to kids.  Both Oprah and Sesame Street effectively reach and shape a self who always already inhabits a commodified world. Furthermore, Oprah’s book recommendations brought many female and minority authors the kind of visibility and respect that otherwise might have eluded them, effectively forcing a widening of the literary “canon.”  Surely, a “deep” reading is not precluded by a form of reading that first grabs people emotionally and gets them to buy and open the book. But Oprah stimulates our class anxieties surrounding taste and the discernment of quality as manifest in our ability to interpret a novel “deeply.”

I turn finally to the question of gender and to scholarly anxieties about Oprah as an icon of womanhood. Why would Lofton say that “women and femininity in Oprah’s empire are . . . served up to be sacrificed”?  What are the effects of Oprah’s use of gender?  Are women being sacrificed or rendered powerless by Oprah’s embrace of feminine style?  Feminists may well be concerned that this sort of emphasis on the feminine deprives women of their political voice and plays into the hands of an arch-conservative like Glenn Beck, the only talk show host who rivals Oprah’s popularity. Beck is the antithesis of Oprah in so many ways—a white male whose commentary plays a central role in shaping conservative political discourse as it is articulated by many middle-class Americans. Yet he himself has stated on his show that his wife watches Oprah. Though he denigrates Oprah, his comments imply the following peculiar analogy: Oprah is to women what he, Beck, is to conservatives. In this analogy, the domestic doings of women can be safely ignored. Beck asserts a form of divisive but beleaguered masculine culture that must be protected from the incursions of foreigners, government, elite liberals, and uppity women. If Oprah is painted as merely promoting feminine distractions, then she too can be safely mocked and ignored.

Lofton’s reading of Oprah unwittingly participates in a similar class- and politics-based denigration of the feminine that involves a problematic conceptual slippage. Many feminists of a certain age, who recall their bra-burning resistance to gender inequities in the workplace and the home, have been critical of an upcoming generation of women who seem to have forgotten these hard-won social gains as they subject themselves to a feminine style and impossible shoes. But a large proportion of this younger generation doesn’t necessarily recognize the bra or the shoe as a symbol of male domination as they dress for their successful careers. Furthermore, their concern with style needn’t mark them as politically apathetic or conservative, as both Beck and Lofton appear to assume. Beck uses a specific form of masculinity as the emotional juice for his political conservatism and tries to paint women’s world as apolitical and powerless. Assuming that he is correct reproduces this assumption.

Denigration of feminine political action has a long past. The temperance movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mocked as a bourgeois woman’s concern before it moved into mainstream politics and became the powerful force that resulted in Prohibition. Discussing how Oprah was directly influenced by the multiple strands of spiritualism that developed in the nineteenth century, scholar Trysh Travis has suggested that these forms of spiritualism were marginalized both by the general public and by the academy because they were judged to be “pathologically bourgeois and feminized.” They were criticized as being vague and superficial—a concern that Lofton herself expresses about Oprah’s approach to Obama, to books, and to spirituality. Historically (and, from an anatomical point of view, rather paradoxically), the feminine has been seen as lacking depth. Lofton’s criticism of the way Oprah encompasses both style and personal autonomy in her vision of self-improvement rests on a similar unease with feminine style and bodily practice, which is shared by many scholars. Yet, in our time, neither femininity nor masculinity can be detached from commodified bodily practices. Oprah’s entanglement of spiritualism and feminine commodities, which Lofton so powerfully demonstrates, can instead be viewed as an ethical discipline that not only embraces forms of embodied feminine pleasure but links these pleasures to forms of power that have the potential to recast the political process by reshaping the middle-class subject into one who is tolerant of the racially, culturally, religiously, and sexually other.

Focusing on the ways in which Oprah’s performances make scholars uneasy exposes the silent ambivalences and contradictions that shape our own discourse. These contradictions emerge from tensions between our egalitarian ideologies and our entrenched intellectual elitism. Oprah preaches a more egalitarian and tolerant social order, just as do many liberal scholars and other members of the intellectual elite, but she goes about it very differently. She disrupts intellectual elitism by making aspects of elite culture—ranging from lifestyle to literature—visible and accessible to everyone.  Unfortunately, efforts of the intellectual elite to promote a better world often backfire, foundering on the political polarization of liberals and conservatives. Conservatives attack liberals, especially those at elite research universities, for being out of touch with mainstream America. In some respects, they are right. Our uneasiness with Oprah arises precisely at those moments when we draw the line and pass judgment on her appeals to the lowbrow middle-American consumer. And yet Oprah has figured out how to transmit her message of tolerance even into the home of Glenn Beck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

DKK: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

DKK: Wow.

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

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

JWS: About teaching?

DKK: Yes.

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

(both laugh)

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

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

JWS: Right, right.

DKK: Did you talk about that as a child?

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

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

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

(both laugh)

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

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

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

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

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

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