Why was this event so special? It was not just the distinction of the members of the panel themselves, beginning with Bellah, arguably the country’s best known sociologist of religion and author of such seminal essays as “Civil Religion in America” and “Religious Evolution,” and groundbreaking books, including Habits of the Heart and Tokugawa Religion. Rather, the significance of the event lay in its recognition of the importance of the book’s project, a breathtaking survey of the whole sweep of the history of religiosity, which is nothing less than the history of humankind.

It can be said that no one else would have dared to write such a book, nor could anyone else have written it. Comparisons have been made to the wide-ranging explorations of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, early pioneers in social thought who also found in religion the key to understanding much about the social imagination. Bellah’s book is that kind of project.

The wonder is that it is written so well. It reads like a travelogue of ideas, a captain’s diary of a long exploration of uncharted intellectual seas. Bellah asks some simple questions: Where did religion come from? How did it develop? These are questions that have no simple answers, though the voyage of his discoveries through different disciplines and schools of thinking are fascinating, from physics to biology, from ancient history to classic texts. Through it all Bellah maintains a wonder about the questions and their possible answers—a humility towards the vastness of the project—that is both endearing and seductive. The reader is easily brought along for the ride.

Though the 746 pages of the book cover much, and will be mined for their varied insights for some time to come, there are roughly three foci. One is the engagement with scientific theories about evolution. Here Bellah explores the literature on the Big Bang, the beginning of the time/space continuum, and the emergence of self-sustaining life. The evolutionary physical and social development of humans is linked with their cultural development, and Bellah is aided by the theories of Merlin Donald, who outlines three major stages in human cultural history: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. Bellah views the religious dimensions of this development, seeing in them three types of religious representation—enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

Fully half of the book is devoted to the axial age, one of the most significant stages of religious change in response to the enlargement of human societies’ cognitive and social capacities. Here, in a way that is reminiscent of Max Weber’s comparative project on the religions of India, China, Israel, and Protestant Christianity, Bellah takes each of several ancient cultural traditions in turn, revealing an exhausting study of historical detail. He looks at ancient periods of Greece, China, Israel, and India. What Bellah explores is how—in four cases that are in many ways quite different from one another—they each have developed some of the characteristics of what are the hallmarks of axial age religiosity: individualism, critical thinking, and theoretical and reflective observation.

The third focus of the book is religion itself—what it is, and how it came to be. Unlike many contemporary thinkers who find the idea of religion to be a puzzling and difficult invention, Bellah seems confident in asserting that it is something—a stretch of human imagination that can be set apart from the other, more material aspects of human occupation. He regards it as an alternative perception of reality. It is one of the “other realities,” which, like poetry and science, “break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances.” But the ability to perceive these alternative realities does not come easy or early to the capacities of living species. He searches for those moments in the early development of conscious life when basic material needs are sufficiently met, and the mind can roam freely to imagine distant forms of order and other ways of understanding reality. Bellah sees this not just as a cognitive but as a physical activity, and finds the early origins of ritual and religiosity in the simple acts of play.

The critical comments about Bellah’s book tend to be related to these three foci—the relationship of religion to scientific theories of evolution, the historical cases of ancient religion during the axial age, and the conceptualization of religion and how it emerged. Regarding the scientific aspect, Luke Johnson raised the issue of the connection between biological evolution and cultural evolution. Johnson observed that Bellah meant to use the term “evolution” in more than a metaphorical sense, but he questioned to what degree that is possible. Religious dispositions are not, of course, genetically transferred traits, so this makes commentators such as Johnson question to what extent the exploration of scientific evidence is relevant to developments in religious expression, and to what extent religion can be said to evolve as opposed to simply change. In the subsequent response, Bellah made clear that religious evolution was real enough, though it was related to the evolving capacities of humans and their societies for different kinds of religious representation.

Regarding the specific case studies that Bellah explores as examples of axial age religiosity, specialists such as Wendy Doniger raise significant questions of their own. Doniger pointed out that changes in ways of thinking are gradual, and that elements of the reflective, philosophical ideas associated with the Upanishads are also present in early Vedic writings. Luke Johnson added that theoretical thinking is the privilege of elites, and for the masses, narrative and mimetic forms of religiosity continue to reign supreme. Jonathan Z. Smith questioned the very notion of the axial age, and suggested that Bellah’s book would have worked just as well without mentioning it. Bellah appreciated these insights, while affirming that different strands of religious representation can exist together, that change often does not work in steady increases but in paradigmatic leaps, and that such moments require observation and explanation.

Finally, there have been questions about the way in which Bellah thinks about the notion of religion and its origins. Jonathan Z. Smith asserted that he was intrigued with Bellah’s suggestion that religion is associated with play, but he wondered whether it was even more related to a certain kind of playfulness—games, which are guided by rules as well as by spontaneous creativity. In responding, Bellah affirmed that play and games are closely related to each other, and for that matter both are associated with another form of familiar human activity, work—and that these three often overlap. The religious impulse is related to all of them, though probably more essentially to the activity of play.

Each of the commentators couched their remarks in the context of an enormous appreciation for the immensity of Bellah’s project, and the value of the book for a wide range of subjects in the study of the role of culture in human evolution. It is a book that is large in many ways, a culmination of a lifetime of diligent analysis and fertile reflection, and it sets a new landmark in the efforts to understand the nature of religion in social life.

For these reasons, there is a deep and important relation between the social sciences and theology, which goes beyond the secular emancipation of the social sciences. Christianity has produced both the vocabulary into which non-Christian realities are being translated and part of the reality to which Christians and non-Christians alike have to relate. This calls for a reflexivity that cannot be captured by an “Anthropology of Christianity” if that narrowly confines itself to the study of Christianity. Such reflexivity is part of a conceptual project that received its inspiration from Durkheim and Mauss, and which was developed further at Oxford by E.E.Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, Rodney Needham, and Louis Dumont. Under the influence of Foucault, Talal Asad and others have connected this inquiry into the nature of knowledge to the study and critique of imperial power. It deals with the conflicts and contestations that arise from the field of (colonial and postcolonial) power in which religions are constituted. It cannot restrict its analysis to Christianity, since Christianity is an element of these encompassing imperial interactions. Theologies of dialogue that have been added to pre-existing theologies of Christian superiority and triumphalism have emerged out of the postcolonial situation and have to be engaged at the same time as theologies of evangelical warfare. Christianity’s claim, in both liberal and evangelical forms, to be the foundation of Western civilization has never disappeared and continues to form the battleground on which cultural encounters all over the world take place.

It is doubtful whether what we are seeing today is simply a new global prominence of Christianity. Rather, it depends on where one looks. Europe is quite rapidly becoming secular, in the sense that Christian churches are losing their membership and church attendance is generally in decline. In Europe and other parts of the world, one also sees a mobilization against Islam. The new prominence of discourse on religion in Europe is directly caused by the unease felt by secularized Europeans about the presence of Islam in their midst. It is certainly not to be taken as a de-secularization or a renewed prominence of Christianity. If one looks at China, one can see that a larger space has been opened up for religious practice after a century of oppression, but also that Christianity is only one of the elements of a complex religious scene. If one directs one’s attention to South and South-East Asia, one may see the mobilization of Hinduism against Islam, Islam against Christianity, Buddhism against Islam, and Confucianism against “folk religion.” In parts of the Global South, Christianity’s conflictual expansion should be understood as part of this wider phenomenon. It is important not to be too “presentist” about this aspect of globalization. Many of the religious phenomena we see today have their roots in the nineteenth century. The secular onslaught against religion in the Communist world had its roots in evolutionism and historical materialism. And the struggles around Christian missionary activity also have their roots in the nineteenth century, as does the deep secularism of European intellectuals.

Philosophy has never been able to completely shed its roots in Christian theology, despite the deeply anti-metaphysical project of analytical philosophy. What is called continental philosophy continues to be heavily invested in theological thought, as the work of Teilhard de Chardin and Jean-Luc Marion (or, in the Jewish tradition, that of Levinas and Derrida) testifies. However, it is the global challenge of Islamism that has forced deeply secular philosophers, like Jürgen Habermas, to at least partly engage their Eurocentrism. The secular project in the West has been so successful that Christian philosophers like Charles Taylor think that they live in a secular age. The fact, however, remains, that the majority of humanity lives in the Global South and is not secular, although secularism as a political project can be found everywhere.  At this juncture in world history, philosophy needs to critically engage not only the traditions of Europe but also those outside of Europe. This has hardly happened, and therefore it is anthropology rather than Western philosophy that continues to be the disciplinary site of that engagement.

By far the greatest problem for the anthropological study of Christianity today is that it is not part of a comparative endeavor that examines the interaction of religious movements and projects in different regions of the world. In South, South-East, and East Asia, we find extraordinary competition between different religious movements: Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and others. Also, within these religions this competition is intense—for example, between Shi’as and Sunnis, or between Protestants and Catholics. Since Christian missions were the first modern endeavors of their type in the world, many of their tactics and strategies have provided models for other religious movements. Education, health care, and social welfare are the fields in which these movements are competing with each other, often without much presence of the state. In refugee camps in Asia, one finds also a heated competition for the souls of the displaced.

An element that needs careful consideration in the study of religious networks and competition between religious movements is the issue of religious freedom. The U.S. in particular is at the forefront of attempts to enlarge the space for Christian missionary activity in countries that limit possibilities for proselytization. It brings the issue up during trade negotiations, like those around entry to the WTO. While one can sympathize with efforts to make the exercise of religious practice and belief more free in countries that have long faced suppression of religion, the fact that there are close connections between such clamors for religious freedom, American evangelism, and American politics makes it into a highly contested issue. Perhaps the anxieties surrounding Saudi Arabian support for Wahhabi mosques in Europe can be referred to for a better understanding of the anxieties that surround U.S. supported Christian evangelism in Asia.

One way to explain Christianity’s return to prominence is to make the now banal observation that the validity of secularization theory—particularly when understood as a theory of religious decline—has been greatly exaggerated. Starting in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, with the Iranian revolution, the rise of the Christian right in the United States, and the important role played by the Catholic church in the development of the Solidarity movement in Poland, it became clear that religion was not destined to leave the public sphere to itself in most modern states. In response, thinkers began to pay more attention to the ways religion shaped not only private live but social life more broadly. By the turn of the millennium, it was hard to ignore the force of religion in the world without coming off as naïve.

But there is more to say about the recent upsurge in intellectual interest in Christianity than that it predictably follows from the failure of the secularization paradigm to explain how the world works now. We recently edited a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled Global Christianity, Global Critique. Our motivation for the project comes from the sense that two broad fields of argument stand out among current intellectual discussions of Christianity. Although both of these fields of argument might be taken to be relevant to discussions of the failure of secularization theory, they in fact go far beyond it, by making claims about how Christianity is and perhaps should be transforming both itself and the world.

One of these fields of argument is being constructed primarily by historians, anthropologists, theologians, and popular Christian writers, and has taken shape around notions such as “world Christianity” and “global Christianity.” Those participating in this discussion hold that while Christianity has always been global in its ambitions and self-conceptions, there is something about its recent growth, particularly in the global South, that is transforming it in important ways. The scholar who has had the most success in harnessing the energy of this conversation into a single coherent narrative is the historian Philip Jenkins. In his widely read book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Jenkins deploys a knack for making dramatic demographic arguments and an eye for the telling vignette to craft a story of Christianity as a religion whose greatest growth is still ahead of it. This growth will, however, not be in its traditional European heartland, but rather in the global South. Southern Christians tend, on Jenkins’s account, to be far more theologically and socially conservative than Northern Christians, and certainly more conservative than the kinds of liberal Christians who, until recently, have been so central to elite theological debate in the West. This means that as the center of Christianity moves South, so too will its dominant ideas and expressions become more conservative, leaving many Northern Christians to reckon with a kind of global marginality that they would never have predicted for themselves several decades ago. The current crisis in the Anglican communion over issues of homosexuality—a crisis in which conservative African Bishops are playing a key role—is taken by those who follow Jenkins to be paradigmatic of the kinds of strains that will beset Christianity more generally as its power centers move South. Those who contribute to the global Christianity discussion do not all agree with Jenkins in their reading of global Christianity’s origins, shape, and probable future course. Some scholars, for example, see a growing interest in social justice and a progressive politics emerging out of the rapid growth of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity around the world—or, at least, they note the development of a set of positions that does not conform easily to a conservative/liberal frame. But all scholars who speak about global Christianity do see themselves as making important empirical claims about the changing nature of the contemporary faith.

The second current discussion of Christianity to which we draw attention is primarily philosophical and has moved to make Christian categories and materials central to new projects of philosophical and cultural critique – projects once thought to be firmly rooted in secularist (and largely atheist) assumptions. The most prominent names connected with this discourse are Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, and Slavoj Žižek. Out of this group, the contributors to Global Christianity, Global Critique attend principally to the three continental philosophers who have written on Paul: Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek. All three share an interest in reading Paul as offering a model of a subject committed to radical change, and in drawing from Paul’s story non-determinist models of how such change can come about. Peter Sloterdijk has these philosophers in mind when he writes, in God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, of Paul as “an idol for lovers of abstract militancy to this day […] the first Puritan, the first Jacobin and the first Leninist all rolled into one.” Drawing on Paul’s abrupt conversion, and on what they understand as his commitment to making Christianity a universal religion, these philosophers have put Christian categories back at the center of debates over how to think about society and its potential transformation. Although their relationships to the truth claims of Christianity are varied, they have made it possible for philosophers and other kinds of critical thinkers, not just to think about religion, but also, in important respects, to think with it, or at least with some of its conceptual, and sometimes its narrative, resources.

Both the debates over contemporary changes in Christianity and those over the political potential of Christian models of change have contributed to the new prominence of Christianity as a focus of intellectual discussion. But to this point, those involved in these two conversations have spoken little to each other. The philosophers (and some theologians) who consider the resources Christianity offers for rethinking trajectories of social and political change often disregard the discussions of existing forms of Christianity carried out by those participating in the discussions of global Christianity. Similarly, those studying Christians around the world often set aside the kinds of broad arguments about the social and political import of the Christian heritage laid out by the philosophers and those in dialogue with them. Our contention is that these parallel emerging discourses could benefit from some cross-fertilization. Global Christianity, Global Critique aims to initiate a conversation toward this end, bringing together essays by social scientists who study existing Christian communities (represented in the SAQ volume by those from our own field of anthropology) with efforts by theologians, philosophers, and historians of religion to reconsider the critical potential of Christianity.

In bringing these two conversations together, we ask some new kinds of questions. For example, is the philosophical shift to Paul only contingently related to what is happening among Christians both inside and outside the West? Or, might the global Christian discourse help make the philosophical one seem important or plausible? Put otherwise, is it the currently very evident global reach of Christianity that makes it a reasonable candidate to provide the foundation of what we gloss in our title as the philosophical effort at “global critique”? Looking from the other direction, does the new global organization of some forms of Christianity require of those who study it a different kind of attention to the political and broader social stakes involved in the transformations they track? Might a deeper engagement with philosophical discussions of Paul, and of Christianity more generally, help to sharpen debates that unfold along these lines?

In this forum, we invite discussion of these and related questions raised by the contributors to Global Christianity, Global Critique. The forum will feature posts by some of the contributors to the SAQ project, but provides an opportunity for others to join in, too. Some of these posts will respond to the SAQ essays, but we will also welcome the exploration of new issues, questions, and problematics alongside those already broached—ones that push forward the effort to understand and shape the public intellectual discussion of Christianity in the contemporary world.

In the social sciences, this sort of issue has mostly been treated under the heading of relativism. As I have described it elsewhere, “our ability to be comfortable with relativism oddly depends on, or slides inexorably toward, a thin but broad universalism. But this universalism, this sense that through a less judgmental and more dispassionate gaze one has grasped the most truly general characteristics of human being, human civilization, even ‘human rights,’ as the Abbé Sieyès and others obviously thought they had [. . .] can be explained away [. . .] as a fiction embedded in certain kind of Judeo-Christian culture, that is, the kind that believes in the secularizing narrative that entails a latitudinarian tolerance based on individual rights rather than communal duties, on a putatively dispassionate separation of private and public beliefs,” and so forth. In the humanities, the dilemma of the ”frame” or structure that always somehow needs a larger one that it can never do more then gesture to “off the stage,” so to speak, was captured for many by Jacques Derrida’s very influential essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” which he delivered as a lecture at The Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and which was basically an account of the failure of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s attempt at a universal method. (Niklas Luhmann refined the argument under the heading of “systems theory,” and I think mathematics discovered the problem rather early in the twentieth century.) The problem David Buckley is confronting, along with the skeptical gazes of those he interviews, is thus in many ways a problem that defines so much humanist reflection on method after 1945.

And yet, the fact that the problem is real—and I believe it is—should not be allowed to reduce intellectual work to an unending reiteration of the problem, as happened to “deconstruction” in the literary fields, or to the unending performance of the contradiction into which mise-en-abîme the Frankfurt School fell. It does seem to me, moreover, that the question of “religion” in a “post-secular” age raises this issue in a most intense way, since for modernity the most common way to deal with the comparison of religious systems is by methodologically stepping back (whatever one’s own beliefs may be) into a space that, in many cases, is hard to distinguish from the secular reason that dominates the Western academy (as Dipesh Chakrabarty has quite elegantly noted). In this sense, I think Buckley’s instincts are correct: to pursue the comparison on the widest possible historical grounds, though (I would add) with as much awareness of the “frame” dilemma I outlined above as possible. To do less would be to stop thinking altogether. But to ignore the dilemma would reduce thinking to the imposition of Procrustean beds, and we have enough of those already.

Fortunately for her readers, scholarly and not, Bender does not make much of such dichotomous talk.  She offers instead the elegant reply of the dexterous cultural observer.  Hers is neither Prothero’s cultural interventionism nor Smith’s cultural healing.  Bender does not decide for us if her subjects are rational, authentic, well-sourced, or religious.  She simply observes, and observes, and observes.  This wouldn’t be so remarkable, or so readable, if it weren’t for the historiography that precedes her—a historiography of which Bender is acutely aware, as demonstrated in the categorical genealogies which appear in her every chapter.  The folks of The New Metaphysicals are those who previously might have been marked with categories like New Ager or Neopagan or seeker, collectives which have formed a repeatedly collaborative classificatory partnership, tying together loose affiliations of membership and individual skill to encompass proponents and practitioners of channeling, psychic healing, past-life regression, and holistic health.  In any textbook, survey, or monograph about these interviewees, the words ‘variety’ and ‘inconsistency’ are applied as scholars seek to use them as wacky outliers to denominationalism as well as demographic results of religion’s reply to, engagement with, and production of science, immigration, counterculture, and secularism.  These metaphysical believers have had a powerful discursive use-value in the history of religions, and it is through this manipulative precedent that Bender’s subject gains its valence despite its minority appearance.  Whatever these people are, they have been important to knowing exactly what religion is.

Those who have previously sought to categorize the average spiritual wanderer have found themselves stumbling for anchor within a set of formations seemingly resistant to any mean.  How could any scholar catalog the interviewee who tells Bender, “I’m a yogi, and an artist, and a singer and a writer, and a mystic—and who knows what else I might be becoming?” Those sociologists who have tried to classify this morphing subject may find some intentional communities, some patterns in workshop attendance, some signal texts, and some ritual practices (visualization, astrology, meditation, Reiki) that suggest a New Age outlook, a search for connectivity to the divine inner self through techniques earned and learned and bought from experts (articulated in texts, in classes, in small-group gatherings, and in late nights spent staring at the stars).  But at the end of the analytic day, it is the mess of these cultures that has maddened nearly every person who has stood before it.  If anyone can do and be and create anything at all and call it their spirit, then is that any real religion at all?  More privately worrisome: Is that any real sense at all?

For Bender’s subjects, this question is not to be avoided.  It is, always and ever, their question, too.  As Tina remarked:

“I don’t know. Is it the spirit of this energy, is it the human way that we choose to interpret it, is it the only way? Is it our own mental construct for the experience of energy moving in our body, or is it some spirit that is larger than our own mental construct? It’s kind of the old question with any religion. You know, is Christ a separate being from us, or separate from our myth, or is it something there that comes into us, or is it us, you know? Or is it our imagination?”

There was another pause before she added, “And where do you make that distinction? I don’t know—I don’t know.”

Historians of American religion have largely disposed of making too many distinctions, seeking to allow Tina and her brethren as much of their own confusion as possible without trying to resolve it categorically. And so, scholars of American religion have narratively situated the New Age seeker within a broader shift from denominational identity to self identity, from Presbyterianism to Sheilaism.  This world of scholarly analysis seeks less to point to structural relations between channeling and shape-note singing as much as to explain the epistemological logic of channeling within a modernity supposedly well past the Bay Psalm book.  Such analytic labor repeatedly pursues definitions of the spiritual seeker, perhaps best articulated by Leigh Schmidt in Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, where he argues that there are six practical and interpretive aspects emphasized by the seeker: mysticism, solitude, transcendence, cosmopolitanism, social conscience, and creativity.  The best work of spirituality historicism thus supplies a way to explicate the emergence of seeker spirituality alongside the triumph of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, to bring out the ways that spirituality (over and above Weber’s disciplining Protestantism) softened the edges of modern industrialization and incorporation, setting the factory laborers by a peaceful pond where they might remember social reform, divine immanence, and universal brotherhood.  Spirituality is hence conjured as the conscience of an unconscionably cruel industrial process, as the California animist waging spiritual warfare against the California environmental crisis.

Into this perceived plurality of liberal aspiration and incoherent practice wades Bender, bringing to bear her significant ethnographic skill and classificatory acumen to construct a profile of American believers ensconced in the Brahmin religious brasserie of eastern Massachusetts.  Her driving question is deceptively simple: What, if anything, does it mean for people to be “spiritual not religious”?  The answer, again and again, is provided through how it means for these practitioners to be, believe, practice, experience, and participate in the discursive, material, memorial, and institutional forms of spirituality.  This is a book that accounts for spirituality’s production and reproduction neither through the idealization of the liberal individual nor through the discovery of the social establishment of spirituality.  Rather, Bender demonstrates that the mystification of religious experience by social scientists has meant that the structural and narrative “reality of religion remains external to the human sciences.”  To bring this ‘reality’ to the fore, Bender acutely pursues the modes and structures of conveyance, of belonging, and of memory.  She tracks how congregational formats appear within these communities; how authority is constituted and criticized discursively; how bodies are instantiated to be denied; how space is configured and resoundingly co-opted for multiple new mathematical and fantastical possibilities.  The chapter on “Becoming Mystics” carefully examines the ways in which the individual develops a respectable profile within an ad hoc atmosphere of accreditation.  Bender explains how first-person narrative erases earlier experience and foreknowledge, replacing it with a proposition of experience known only through effects: “Not only does this protect the experience from certain kinds of reductive interpretation, it also works to place those who listen within an experiential-discursive milieu where they might come likewise to experience through listening to these accounts.”

Such examples reminded me persistently, not of the peculiarity of these subjects, but of their resonances with the very imagination cataloged in Bender’s subtitle.  To be sure, the historiography testifies to the ways these subjects and their communities have been contrasted by scholars and by other believers as intentionally, willfully different.  These Boston wanderers could therefore be seen as, say, overly individuated when contrasted with Kansas Catholics, or as elitist by the social mores of Minnesota Lutherans, or as white shaman mountebanks to some New Mexico Pueblo, or as colonial larcenists by some San Diego Hindus. Yet through her supple analytic work, Bender proposes something more devastating (by my rendering, not hers) to the demography of American religion.  She suggests that there are, possibly, structural insistences between what these Cambridge characters do and what those Catholics, Lutherans, Pueblo, and Hindus do.  In other words, her discernment—outlined at the level of the chapter, in the case of every interview, and in her every site description—is that there is, absolutely, something pervasively entangled at work in the spirituality of these (by her rendering, and mine) Americans.  This is not because spirituality itself is a corporate object, made ubiquitous for a slavish public hungry for its salve.  Rather, it is because the discursive fact of spirituality is that it has always been defined by and through its combinatory capacity, not in its discriminations.  If Bender does not prove that this is, in fact, the American religious imagination, then she has not done her work.

But I believe she has.  Bender’s lively description of the Boston Whole Health Expo presses us into the crevices of its various offerings, the spiritual hodgepodge, dreamy idealism, and consumerist genius of this gathering.  This is not, then, a singular event, but an event possessed by the resonance of remembered, lived, and invented events preceding its odd twenty-first century incarnation.  It seems difficult for me to find an event in American religious history that does not, like it, share a staggering multiplicity of identities, including those of ritual event, economic fact, intellectual awakening, professional association, social entertainment, theological intervention, and therapeutic possibility.  The condemnatory valence of such an observation—condemnatory in and through the social science classifications Bender reviews to refine—is not nearly as antagonistic to spirituality as it is integral to its propagation.  These are subjects—like, it seems to me, most human subjects—vibrantly, madly, quirkily holding on to their multiplicity in ways familiar, repeated, and not so very multiple at all.  They are wild in an imagination that is nearly predictable in its wildness.

At the end, The New Metaphysicals presses its readers to consider what, exactly, divides Bender’s subjects (who, as she writes, “come to know their energetic bodies through practice”) from those of R. Marie Griffith’s Born Again Bodies; or what separates them (reading and writing the books of others to discern the stories of themselves) from Lynn Neal’s romance-reading evangelical book clubs in her Romancing God; or what makes Doug, a subject of Bender’s research, so different (in his dream for a “spiritually based technology”) from those seekers recounted in Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life; or how are the mystical families of Bender’s reincarnating subjects contrasted with those heavenly genealogies of the Latter-day Saints.  The reader of this immensely thoughtful monograph wants, in the end, not to test the validity of Bender’s postulated American religious imagination, but to think deeper, with her and her ethnographic material, about an even more robust description of that powerful ascription.

Instead, the new metaphysicals travel long distances to stand on “power spots” far away in Sedona or Stonehenge, journey back in time to live in the spiritual skin of a past incarnation in a distant land, and spin out of their own flesh and place to see the world from an astral body. “Refusing,” or at least ignoring more local metaphysical pasts, the new metaphysicals are not intrigued in the same way as Courtney Bender was (an intrigue, by my guess, that many of her readers will share) by their proximity to the power spots of Cambridge: William James’s study, for instance, or the salon of Cambridge matron Sarah Bull, who hosted earlier spiritual crossings with, among others, Swami Vivekananda.  That the new metaphysicals feel a lack of history and a dearth of “religious culture” in such a storied place is more than just ironic for Bender. This sense of rootlessness and loss is in fact at the heart of their spirituality: “To the shopworn question of how contemporary spirituality shapes a response to feelings of alienation that attend to modernity, we must necessarily ask how contemporary spirituality itself articulates social alienation in the center of its projects.”

Before going any further, I should acknowledge that I have lived in parallel to The New Metaphysicals for quite some time, as I talked with Courtney Bender about her fieldwork—reading a chapter here and there—and shared references with her while writing my own book on Protestant “supernatural liberalism.” Shaped by our conversations, and perhaps a little synchronicity, my reading of her book was nevertheless an experience of both surprise and recognition.

First, the surprise. Even though I had read some of this material before, I was startled anew by the confidence of some of Bender’s interlocutors, especially the educated woman who believes that past life regression demonstrates that she was a Nobel Prize-winning Jewish scientist who avoided the fate of Nazi death camps. Strong in her own conviction, she then goes on to convince a woman she meets at a mystical discussion group that in her past life she was the scientist’s depressed wife. Akin to Mormons baptizing your dead whether you asked them to or not, believers in past lives use metaphysical/theological warrants to pluck the dead from the past, invigorating their own lives in the present. Like Michael Saler and Andrew Perrin, I wanted Bender to “prod” them on their assertions and the implications of their willful appropriation of the pasts of other—very specific—people.

Bender, with her evocative and gentle prose, however, is not interested in exposing either naiveté or vampirical spiritual resurrections. Instead, throughout all the chapters of The New Metaphysicals, she works tirelessly to show why the practices of contemporary spirituality—however bizarre a scholar or skeptic might find them—make a kind of sense that we should find, not just surprising, but also uncannily similar to our own.

And this is where the recognition comes in. With reference to both theory and methodology, Bender makes a strong case for why the line between her secular self and their metaphysical selves was always potentially breachable, despite the fact that she persisted in holding to her own ways of thinking, exempt from the chains of enchantment that linked the stories of her respondents. The overlap occurs in the shared sense that interpretation is the key to “freedom”—a freedom that is not an “escape from the system,” but an ability to understand how and why we are in the predicaments we inhabit, whether a personal debt crisis or a crisis on an international scale. As Bender writes: “To live within metaphysical projects is to accept the reality of forces that work on everyday life and to learn to interpret things in the world as results of their effects. And while there is no reason for us to collapse the difference between popular sociology’s invisible forces (“the state,” “the economy”) and metaphysical forces (“karma,” “energy,” “soul clusters”), metaphysical practitioners had no difficulty in doing so. Each system articulates individuals as embedded within systems, social processes, or “forces,” and each domain presents moral stories about how these can be changed, resisted, and lived within.”

Michael Saler challenges Bender for suggesting, if not actually claiming, that soul clusters and the economy share a certain kinship as conceptual “forces.” Saler insists that there really is a difference between the forces of “astral energy” and “the economy,” since the “latter tends to be employed self-reflexively and contingently, whereas the former tends to be buttressed by mere assertion and blind faith.” Having just lived through the G20 meetings in Toronto, however, I find it hard to credit that talk about “the economy” is either self-reflexive or contingent. Though perhaps not as easy to join as a mystical discussion group, this most recent power spot gathering of “world leaders” was full of assertions and blind faith. A day after pledging at the G8 to devote $1.1 billion to global maternal and child health over five years, Canada’s government went on to spend $1 billion over three days as they hosted the summit in the heart of downtown Toronto. And after dispensing this extraordinary sum, much of which was spent on the visibly invisible force of “security,” the Canadian Prime Minister proudly announced that the G20 nations had all agreed that they would cut their deficits in half (or would at least try to do so) by 2013. Self-reflexivity was not the first word that came to mind in this latest performance of economic reasoning and expenditure.

On the level of methodology, Bender’s insights are equally unsettling of boundaries, as she describes the disjuncture between what she considers an “interview” and what her interlocutors consider a “conversation.” Just as her new metaphysicals resisted history, Bender resisted synchronicity; similarly, just when she thought she was “interviewing them,” they thought they were conversing.  Well aware that the attention of a social scientist was a potential path to credibility—whether in the eyes of their own community or on the stage of science—the people who spoke to Bender were not willing to accept her views or experiences as outside of their webs of interpretation. At its boldest, conversation could become a “penetration of the self,” in which interlocutors could access each other’s “energetic interiors,” as when Wes, an “energy intuitive,” attempted to intuit the quality of energy inside Bender’s mother’s womb when she had carried her, and invited Bender to return the favor.

Though Wes does not succeed at teaching Bender the techniques of energetic intuition, he does get her thinking about just what kind of social (and) scientific encounter the interview might be. If metaphysicals (and other religious practitioners) use the interview as a form of testimony, in which they confide their “religious experience” to a questioning scholar, it is also the case that scholars have long used the interview to pin down “religious experience.” As elicited in narratives, religious experience also ends up being a concept “shared” and worked at by both metaphysicals and social scientists alike. Whether willing or unwilling, the shared nature of this project can be keenly demonstrated in the classic crossover book, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, a scientific text with a popular appeal—in Bender’s words, “a pedagogical textual environment in which it is expected that readers will encounter the residue of others’ strongly resonant, singularly authoritative experiences and thereby seek their own.” Pointing to these shared conceptual spaces elicited both through our methods, in which “experience” is signified, and through our theories, in which we imagine active forces that we cannot see, Bender goes a long way toward confronting what she calls “the deep mystifications of our secularisms.”

The New Metaphysicals is an elegant book that does the work of shoveling fog with remarkable concision. The book’s stories do not convince me that embracing the promise of the moment frees anyone from the burdens of the past—at least when looked at from the vantage point of the social scientist or humanist. However, sitting with these stories of chakras, power spots, and synchronicity should be enough to convince anyone that to ignore or deride their tellers is to close one’s ears to modalities of thought and experience that resonate across a wide range of “religious” and “secular” frames, including those that we are more accustomed to thinking with, whether Protestant, Catholic, or capitalist. Listening to the new metaphysicals, as Courtney Bender channels them, is an experience in retuning the scale of analysis, not in its scope but in its key.

And for many observers, surfaces are all there are to these new age sorts of faith. Bender’s study—based on a sensitive ethnography of metaphysicals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and solid historical understanding—gives the lie to such assumptions. She accomplishes this by tackling head on precisely the characteristics of these religions that make them appear to so many scholars as unappealing or even unworthy subjects of social scientific research. She acknowledges at the outset that, in their own understandings, the people she spent time with are deeply invested in their personal journeys and experiences. They have very little interest in the histories of the traditions from which they build their personal faiths—and this despite the role denizens of Cambridge have played in the development of many of them. Likewise, they evidence little awareness of, or concern for, the social institutions that make their religious quests possible. As Bender makes clear, they are not in any respect lay sociologists—not even bad ones.

But the lack of sociological awareness these metaphysicals display does not mean that their beliefs and practices do not have histories, are not housed within institutions, and are not profoundly shaped by cultural patterns of thought and action that present-day practitioners did not in fact make up. Bender teaches us how to identify the hard social skeleton that makes possible even the very amorphous-seeming spirituality that the metaphysicals promote. She shows how their religious endeavors depend on various religious, medical, and arts organizations to give them space; on more or less established cultural models of phenomena such as past lives and subtle bodies to teach them what is possible by way of spiritual encounters; and on the shared narrative structures they use to make sense of their experiences to themselves and to one another. By rendering visible the social machinery of metaphysical spiritual lives, Bender makes those she studies finally social scientifically tractable. In doing so, she also manages to trouble the distinction between religion and spirituality that currently shapes so much of popular and sociological discourse alike. If the spiritual is just as socially embedded as the religious, she points out, the usual distinction that makes religion a matter of institutions and the spiritual one of personal experience turns out to need rethinking.

For many, this argument about the social grounding of the spiritual will be a key takeaway message of Bender’s book, and it is an important one. But since she makes that case so well herself, I want to focus in the rest of my remarks on what I take to be one of her equally important, but less foregrounded, findings. For Bender not only shows us that metaphysical religion is, in reality, just as social as any other. She also shows us how, despite this fact, the metaphysicals manage to imagine their lives in profoundly unsocial terms. She documents the work they do to boil their worlds down to nothing (or almost nothing) but personal experience. We see in Bender’s work the efforts metaphysicals make to disregard the social history of their practices, to place their current social relationships in the shadow of imaginary past relations, and to live in a spiritual geography that makes the real geography of Cambridge largely irrelevant to them. It is through this work that they create themselves as highly individualistic religious selves—selves who are free to direct their own religious development to meet their own ends.

All of the work metaphysicals do to understand their social lives in non-social terms should alert us to something important: living as an individual in modern fashion—as someone who at least feels him- or herself to be a self-creating, self-developing free-mover—is an accomplishment. Sociologically speaking, individualism of this sort does not just happen to people. In fact, sociologically speaking, it is rather society that just happens to people. The sense of living as an individual, by contrast—this one does, as individualist ideology would have it, have to apply effort to develop. We social scientists might find metaphysical religion, and the religion of other spiritual practitioners, a bit more interesting if we were quicker to register how neatly these faiths enable those who follow them to inhabit individualism. Perhaps this is what religion looks like when it has perfected its ability to do just that. No doubt, Protestant Christianity made contributions to the development of individualism; but it has never been so fully able to support it as have these new faiths, which can thus teach us a good deal about how individualism is rendered livable in contemporary societies.

And the seeking after individualism that the metaphysicals Bender writes about display in their pursuit of self-development also raises a final point: many Americans want to live as individuals, and they want their religion to help them pull this off. Social scientists tend to imagine that Americans don’t really want this. They suspect that bowling alone and Sheilaism are bad things that happen to otherwise good (read: “social”) people. But the spiritual practitioners that populate this book don’t help us make that argument. Instead, they remind us that many times, those who live very individualistic lives are getting just what they want and what they work toward. We might wish this were not so, or even seek for ways to change it, but it is important to recognize how well the goals of these practitioners line up with the religious formations through which they have tried to pursue them. For me, that is one of the most arresting conclusions of Bender’s important social scientific reckoning with a kind of faith that our disciplines so often fail to comprehend.

Much of the last century of the sociology of religion can be thought about as orderings and re-orderings of emic and etic concepts. Twentieth-century secularization theory amounted to an imposition of etic onto emic, as secularized scholars were sure that the people they studied would soon think and act like they did. And the current move towards a “strong program” strikes me as the converse: a projection of emic onto etic. Religiosity based on autonomous moral orders of beliefs and values has come to be viewed as “religion” in general—or worse yet, a fundamental characteristic of human nature—rather than as a historically particular form of intellectualized Western Christianity.

The dilemma only becomes more complex when one realizes that social scientists are not alone in categorizing the categorizers; they in turn get categorized by the categorizers. The portraits social scientists create get appropriated by their subjects, used, and fed back to social scientists. Like a Cherokee Indian wearing a headdress to fulfill tourists’ stereotypes, respondents can make etic meanings emic when these meanings fit their purposes.

This is precisely the “entanglement” that Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals masterfully addresses. Few books so adroitly and so fruitfully work through the interplay of emic and etic, not merely as a methodological obstacle, but as a substantive issue. Bender’s study of the social structure of American mysticism reveals a sort of collusion between academics and metaphysicals to occlude the fact that mysticism has a social structure and a history, and that it has been and still is an important part of the American religious experience. Bender traces the way early twentieth-century social scientists developed conceptualizations of religious experience as individual, pre-cultural, and ineffable in order to remove it and thereby protect it from spaces that were then regarded as inherently (or at least soon-to-be) secular. Metaphysicals themselves push this portrait as part of their own emphasis on pure, otherworldly mystical experience existing outside of mainstream culture (although thoroughly modern and scientific).

Bender sets out, not to narrate an untold, hidden history, but rather to portray a loose culture of American mysticism consisting of practices that are inscribed in bodies, times, and spaces, and are carried in discourses and embedded in institutions. This portrait is a remarkable synthesis of the lived religion perspective with field theory and Wuthnowian neo-institutional analysis of culture. The result is a sort of heavier, more robust version of practice theory that succeeds in providing a portrait of a loose, yet durable, social structure. Among its virtues, this portrait of the social-structural embeddedness of mysticism, its historical continuity, its centrality in the American experience, its non-marginality, and its non-ephemerality, de-naturalizes the view of religion as a body of beliefs belonging to a collectivity, which guides the behavior of individuals and provides the foundation of society. Bender shows us that there are alternative forms of spirituality that are viable, enduring, and widespread. Understanding this “spirituality in non-spiritual places” helps undermine the attempts of cultural conservatives to pose a conflict of the “faithful” versus the “faithless.”

I am strongly sympathetic to Bender’s focus on practices, discourses, and institutions, as it explains the constitutive power of culture without relying on over-rationalized structuralist images. But let me suggest another—not incompatible—possibility for understanding cultural continuity: metaphor theory.

The centerpiece of most metaphor theory is simply that one of the most basic ways human beings make meaning is by attaching images or symbols from a better known “source domain” to an inchoate “target domain.” For our purposes here, the inchoate target domain can be a predicament—or “situation” in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the term—and the source domain can be a set of religious symbols (including not only ideas but bodily practices). So, for example, among the Evangelicals I study in Venezuela, a common inchoate predicament such as “I want to be a good husband, but I lose control when I drink” is made meaningful through meanings from the Evangelical source domain, which says, “The Devil seeks to control human beings and has ready access when they consume alcohol.” This metaphoric coupling leaves an educated, middle-class professional like myself a little flat. But for many lower-class Venezuelan men whose unviable pater familias cultural ideal gets bifurcated into a marginal home life versus a macho male drinking culture, this metaphoric solution is compelling indeed.

In Bender’s case, it seems to me that there are certain characteristics of the American experience in general, and the Cambridge experience in particular, that produce a common, recurring set of “situations” to which mysticism provides a satisfying metaphoric solution. Cambridge entails some pretty unique conditions of collective living when seen in comparative historical terms: a population with a lack of ethnic or any other common narrative ties to space; many people with the high educational levels associated with skepticism of traditional beliefs; a post-materialist context in which basic necessities are fulfilled, and questions of identity are addressed in abstraction; a mobile and transient context that spurs spiritual seeking. All of these long-term social-geographic characteristics produce a common set of predicaments that make people receptive to the practices that Bender rightly portrays as embedded in institutions, literatures, and discourses. To be more concrete, when Bender s enjoins us to “investigate how those [sacred] irruptions take place and work to locate the institutions and practices that contribute both to their occlusion and to their continuation,” I would add a third question: We should ask how these irruptions fit into the lives and struggles of those experiencing them. What situations and predicaments do these irruptions give answer to? What life projects do they facilitate? My guess would be that many in this context confront an accentuated version of the classic American predicament that asks, “How can I be an individual, yet part of a community?” Others in this context of higher education are certainly faced with the desire to be spiritual yet scientific; still others in this space of life-course transition want to be culturally deep, yet break with their cultural past.

Bender’s focus on how institutions and practices provide continuity over time is a much needed expansion beyond the strong program conceptualization of continuity through cultural autonomy. But bringing metaphor theory in could have enabled a more complete conceptualization of the thought-as-action and practice-as-project that one actually sees in Bender’s ethnographic descriptions. And this would not have undermined the emphasis on culture and history. Of course, existing cultural formations both structure the predicaments we confront and provide a repertoire of solutions. But focusing just on the structuring power of culture is like focusing on the structure of the professional Chess world to understand the Fischer-Spassky “match of the century.” It will explain a lot, but probably not what is most interesting. In Bender’s actual ethnographic storytelling, she indeed focuses on the concrete situations and practices of her respondents’ lives-in-the-world. But the conceptual framework provided in the conclusion is more supply-side than the actual empirical analysis.

Pointing out what else could have been done is, of course, a weak critique, and it ought to be taken as evidence that the book is good to think with. Indeed, my overall emotion in reading The New Metaphysicals was awe at the amount of fieldwork that must have taken place to obtain this ethnographic material, at the level of erudition needed to reach this conceptual depth, and at the amount of head-in-hands thinking that must have gone into developing this argument. In our book-a-year academic culture, such examples of scholarship-as-craft are far too few.

*  *  *

Several decades ago, well before there had been any concerted effort among historians and sociologists of religion to trash the standard model of the “secularization thesis,” Jürgen Habermas famously pronounced modernity an “unfinished project,” and then proceeded to outline both the conditions needed to complete the project and the barriers that the twentieth century had thrown up in its way. This is obviously not the place to rehearse Habermas’s ideas, especially since so many others have done it well. (I am especially fond, still, of Anthony Giddens’s quick and reductive, yet incisive, overview of Habermas in Social Theory and Modern Sociology.) But, for the present purposes, I think we can usefully boil the conditions down to two. First, there is the completion of the process of the differentiation—or rationalization—of social spheres that had been emphasized (though not entirely happily) by Max Weber: the distinction of “state” from “society,” or the public from the private, that has become the hallmark of the liberal capitalist nation-state, and with it, the concomitant distinctions between the economic, the legal, and the political, along with the separation of science, morality, and aesthetics that is the legacy of the Enlightenment. Second, in order to prevent the undeniable effectiveness of “steering mechanisms”—essentially, the purposive, means-ends rationality that has proven so successful in the areas of science and economics, and even, to a large extent, in utilitarian reformations of the law—from becoming “reified,” and thus overpowering all other potential social aims, the “life-world,” that is, the everyday world of lived traditions and customs, including the “semantic potentials” of religious beliefs and their ethical systems, would need to be preserved through a process of “communicative action” that based such beliefs on rational argumentation alone.

Nevertheless, Habermas posited that the major barrier to this happy (and still devoutly Weberian) synthesis, or balancing, of disenchanted managerial technocracy and charismatic life-world was the same one that had bedeviled the Enlightenment: myth. Again, this is not the place for detail, but it would be fair to say that Habermas is very much in the mainstream of Western thought in making a sharp distinction between religion (which is, in this view, rational in its own way) and myth (which is not), and then in assuming that the sorts of “semantic potentials” that could usefully be provided by religious tradition in the life-world of modernity were those that were already largely “rationalized” (that is, reformed), Protestant (or Judaic, in Hermann Cohen’s sense), private, individual, and directed toward ethical action in this world, rather than salvation in another—essentially, Judaic “justice” and Pauline “love.” In this sense, myth, from the dogmas and totalitarianism of the Right and the Left to what Habermas has called “idle postmodern talk,” is the primary enemy of the unfinished project of modernity.

It is obvious, from the vantage point of the present, that Habermas’s quite influential theory is in many ways a theory of secularization, and in the classical sense of that term. Those social spheres already emancipated by purposive rationality—by self-interest, that is—were the leading edge of a secular modern world. But they needed to be countered by residues of ethical tradition—in particular, it turns out, the belief set that came to be defined in the twentieth century as the “Judeo-Christian tradition”—until such time as such vestiges could be translated into the language of secular philosophy. In Habermas’s words, “As long as religious language bears within itself inspiring, indeed, unrelinquishable semantic contents which elude (for the moment?) the expressive power of a philosophical language and still await translation into a discourse that gives reasons for its positions, philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will neither be able to replace nor to repress religion.” Bracketing off the circularity of this statement—for example, are the contents of religion “inspiring” because they are “unrelinquishable” (that is, perhaps, innate), or “unrelinquishable” merely because they are “inspiring,” if obviously contingent?—Habermas’s Hegelian faith in the power of philosophical reason eventually to “translate” religious ethical contents into language with a firm (materialist and scientific?) basis is clear. That would, presumably, finish the project of modernity once and for all. Not incidentally, it would mean the end of all processes of “secularization,” and the full instauration of “secularism” as a lived, quotidian experience.

There is no way, I think, that Habermas, in his earlier work, could have predicted the return of religion in its more public forms in recent decades, any more than he could have foreseen the re-opening of the question of secularization within social theory since 1990. But these are empirical questions, and there has been a fair amount of debate about the factual reality of the oft-cited resurgence of religion, or “desecularization,” and about how to measure it. I am more interested here in the theoretical questions that Habermas’s work raises: What would a fully secularized world mean? What would the “project of modernity” look like if it were, finally, finished? What philosophy could achieve the thorough extirpation of all religious, or mythical, or irrational elements, and how would we respond to it?

Such questions remind me of a smart comment made by Barbara Johnson years ago—I now forget where—in reference to the voluminous amount of criticism leveled at the way the realist novel encoded and sustained gender inequities. Could the novel as a genre even exist, she asked, without the inequities? Johnson’s question is a properly deconstructive one, and I have no desire to re-open here the question of the utility of Derrida’s work. But even on historical grounds, she is right: the ongoing conversation that we call the novel in fact depends on certain kinds of irrationality, and gender is one of them (there are many others). But the same could be said about “philosophy”—indeed, I think that is, finally, what Habermas is getting at once you subtract the Hegelian teleology (itself attenuated by a question mark) from his work—or about “ethics” or “justice” or any of the other big ideas that are inevitably raised by social theory. Considerations of this sort have traditionally led people back to a kind of neo-Kantianism, that is, a sense that what matters most is the method by which we approach such questions, not whether we are able to posit a fixed endpoint to the discussion. Hans Blumenberg, for my money, has it about right when he insists, in a neo-Kantian vein, that the idea of progress—ethical, legal, and political, and not just scientific or technological—can be treated as an infinite project without positing any sort of “finish”: “If there were an immanent final goal of history, then those who believe they know it and claim to promote its attainment would be legitimized in using all the others who do not know it and cannot promote it as mere means. Infinite progress does make each present relative to its future, but at the same time it renders every absolute claim untenable. This idea of progress corresponds more than anything else to the only regulative principle that can make history humanly bearable, which is that all dealings must be so constituted that through them people do not become mere means.”

I hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth already: Blumenberg leaves us with a Kantian “regulative principle” and nothing more. Worse, he hardly sets the bar very high. A history that is merely “humanly bearable” is a long way, in my book, from the one that would hold out the promesse du bonheur that Stendhal attributed to art, and that legions of Marxist thinkers in later decades demanded from society. (Indeed, even the reference to the “pursuit of Happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence would be, for most people, a substantial improvement over Blumenberg, I think.) Still, regulative principles can be extraordinarily useful—think of them as procedural “checklists” of the sort that Atul Gawande has recently promoted in medicine. In effect, Blumenberg’s regulative principle has two consequences. It not only demands that we eschew the willingness to tailor all means to predetermined ends promoted by dogmatism, from the religious to the scientific to the professional—a refusal of dogma that is the essence of what Edward Said once meant by “secular criticism,” and that is in many ways an echo of what Matthew Arnold meant by “Hellenism.” It also insists that the pathway to the ideal of “secular criticism” (or “Hellenism”)—that is, the pathway to secularism, in the terms I have set out in this post—is itself without end. No one, as far as I can tell, has yet been able to describe what a fully achieved secularism would mean. Were lives today to be lived only according to the latest scientific evidence, devoid of allegiances to that hodgepodge of ideas we call custom, tradition, religion, and (even) myth, we would need a new Jonathan Swift to capture the likely result; the eighteenth century was already fertile ground for his satire. And those “projectors” who subsequently tried to implement such a world—from Fourier with his phalanstery to J. B. Watson with his scientific child rearing—hardly inspire any more confidence. (Swift’s religion was, at its core, a stinging rebuke of mortal hubris.) My point here is not to resurrect Habermas’s “semantic potentials” under another guise, for these emotive elements of the life-world are “potentials” precisely in the sense that they would eventually be “translated” by rational actors who could then provide good reasons, based on sound evidence, for what they believe and do. Rather, I want to insist that “secularization,” in all its polymorphous perversity, is all that we have ever had, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and that this is, strictly speaking, an unending process, even if it is one that, for many reasons (such as the “regulative principle” against dogma), is worth pursuing. In this sense, as I have argued elsewhere, contra Habermas, the only modernity that any rational person should want is one that will remain both historically unnecessary and never complete. Finishing the project of modernity is precisely the oxymoron we want to avoid.

Finally, I believe that the proposals submitted for this year’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in the “After Secularization” field suggest approaches to secular modernity that are quite congruent with what I have outlined so far.

First, there is a very clear interest, shared by about half the group, in empirical questions—that is, questions that have to do less with theoretical issues of, say, the meaning of secularization, or religion, or what (if anything) one might imagine “after secularization,” than with how a specifiable collectivity of persons responds to such questions in practice, in everyday life, and in the kinds of moral or political decisions they make. In one sense, this is not surprising: much of the work in the first wave of revisionist scholarship on the secularization thesis, from 1990 to the present, was theoretical in nature. When empirical considerations were taken into account, this was done largely through superficial surveys of population samples in given societies that could then be used for comparative purposes. What was evident in many proposals was a desire to dig deeper, to work especially via interviews and ethnographic investigation toward a more thorough and complex understanding of how and why secularization in particular societies occurred, and to elaborate more fully the kinds of resistance, or the types of return to religion, that might accompany this process. In particular, it seems that many younger scholars are concerned to view the boundaries of the secular and the religious as being far more porous than surveys might suggest, even in those instances when there are measurable claims to either strong belief or strong skepticism.

Second, it is clear that the wide range of problems that have been discovered in the “secularization thesis” over the past two decades equally unsettle the term secularism. The difficulty of defining “religion” in any comprehensive way, or with any pretension to universality, is a long-standing one. Indeed, one might say that the entire history and sociology of religion in the modern period, since their emergence in the late eighteenth century, have been built in large part around this difficulty. But it is now impossible to avoid the conclusion that secularism itself is not simply a word that defines a negative condition—the absence of religious belief, whatever that might be taken to mean—but rather a term that occasions almost as much ambiguity and difficulty as “religion.” Whether we consider the work of figures like Ashis Nandy, for whom secularism represents a particular imposition of Western values in non-Western religious communities, or that of Talal Asad, for whom secularism is the agenda of a specific regime of what Michel Foucault called “governmentality,” we no longer have the luxury of seeing the secular in some neutral, non-historical, non-political, and purely rational light. Many proposals demonstrated a fairly sophisticated awareness that, whatever “secularism” might mean, it was not going to be easily reduced to the sheer invisibility of religion, and that this was true, not only for some putative era “after secularization,” but also for the entire history of secularization itself.

Third, there was a manifest interest in the ongoing, yet also quite newly inflected, interrogation of the underlying theories of religion and secularization. This is particularly salient in the degree to which the broader set of questions once posed on the peripheries of mainstream secularization scholarship by “political theology” has now become far more central, whether in the work of early figures such as Carl Schmitt or in that of contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben. But even here, there is a real desire to push the boundaries of, say, what “political theology”—a term with an essentially Christian frame of reference—might mean. Most significant is the widespread desire to re-situate theorizing about religion and the secular in global terms. No matter how limited by geography or confession individual projects may be, there appeared to be a fairly consistent sense that, even on theoretical grounds, new revisionist work on secularization and its history could not be done on Christian terms alone, no matter how one regards fairly entrenched claims—claims made with equal force from Max Weber to Peter Berger to Bernard Lewis to Talal Asad—about the overwhelmingly Christian origins of secularization in history.

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

* * *

NS: The New Metaphysicals is a study of a particular time and place, but one that means to speak about much broader currents in American culture. Why Cambridge? Why these people?

CB: In all honesty, I started fieldwork in Cambridge because I was living there, transplanted from New York for a few years. I initially approached Cambridge more as a lab than a field—that is, not as a specific place, but rather a kind of place: an educated university town, with lots of people whom I presumed would fit the sociological model of the liberal spiritual seeker or consumer. For a long time I resisted any urge to think or write about Cambridge as a particular place, a unique place. But I eventually realized that I could make more of the study, and develop a better way of addressing the significance of spirituality in America, if I addressed Cambridge as such.

NS: Cambridge is a place with so much history for American metaphysicals, yet your subjects seem much more concerned with the future than the past. Do you see them more as a relic or as a vanguard?

CB: They can be either, depending on whom you talk to. Certainly, many people who live in Cambridge think that they’re in the vanguard!

NS: How do you do scholarship—and, in so doing, take account of history—about a community that denies its own historicity? I was struck by your claim that “the puzzle of spirituality in America cannot be solved by locating it in a history it refuses.”

CB: It is important to talk about and investigate the various historical links and pasts of contemporary spirituality. History is extremely important, and its elision is an ongoing problem with so much of the popular discourse about spirituality, which tends to suggest that it is a condition rather than a tradition. Sociologists and scholars of American religion need to have a better understanding of the complex religious and cultural pasts that form our present. There are lots more things to be written on these subjects, and while I was writing this book I was able to draw on a number of exceptional new volumes that focus on aspects of these ungainly histories. I’m thinking of work by Christopher White, Leigh Schmidt, Catherine Albanese, Molly McGarry, Alex Owen, Ann Taves, John Lardas Modern, and the list goes on.

But what is puzzling about spirituality is that, even as the number of monographs on the topic grows, these histories don’t seem to resonate with contemporary people who call themselves spiritual, or with most scholars who look at its present manifestations. One reason for this is that the living practices of spirituality allow people to cultivate ways of being in time that are future-focused, or that situate practitioners in perennial time. All religious practices place people in time and in space. In this case, the spiritual practices that I trace do interesting things to the kind of narrative history that most historians write, so paying attention to these practices, and chronicling how they unravel and decouple from most recognizable historical narratives, is just as important. That’s what I have tried to do.

NS: What, then, does it mean for you to tackle, in the words you cite from John Dewey, “things in their complex entanglements”?

CB: For a long time I’ve been interested in the effects of social scientific methods on our understanding of religious life in the U.S. Despite the great strides in theorizing religion and religious complexity—with heterodox arguments about secularism and secularization, or the emphasis on practice, for example—almost all of the social scientific studies of religion in America begin in unquestionably religious places, like churches. As I’ve argued, it’s these methods that effectively leave out social processes that are not so clearly separate or distinct from the religious in social life. They make it difficult to develop the theoretical potential that many of us aspire to consider. Even with a few stellar exceptions—Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s work comes to mind—the whole corpus of scholarly work tells us that religious groups and individuals are appropriate and adequate sites of inquiry into the shaping of religion in American life. Other kinds of religious production are regularly judged or measured by the standard reproduced by these methodological choices.

As a consequence, religion that is generated elsewhere doesn’t appear to be religious. This has very powerful consequences. An entire apparatus of critique—that spirituality is disorganized, individualized, corporatized, commodified—reinforces the view that “spirituality” is both ubiquitous and socially problematic.

Looking at all of this, I embraced a study of entanglements because it demands different starting points for analyzing religious life: experience, discourse, meaning, and practice. We can ask how religious practices are produced or carried in secular contexts, and we can think about how to conduct research on religion in those settings in ways that do not presume that everything is sacralized, but that recognize that things are often a bit more complicated than we have made them out to be—I’d say a bit more interesting too.

NS: If not in such traditional, formal contexts, where does one find the markers of spirituality?

CB: Well, first I should say that we do indeed find markers of spirituality in traditional religious institutions. In an early chapter, I focus on a variety of sites in Cambridge where spirituality is produced: alternative medicine, the arts (particularly amateur arts), and also various religious groups. There is a lot of interaction among these.

But in The New Metaphysicals, I don’t focus serially on those settings or spaces. Rather, I followed a number of practices that are sometimes spiritual, sometimes religious, and sometimes secular. Yoga is one, but a more intriguing case, and a favorite of mine, is the transformation of medium- and spirit-writing, and automatic writing (popular in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spiritualist circles), to “flow writing” and cathartic writing. An even more intriguing practice that sits at the core of the book is the emergence of “religious experience”—which is taken up in legal and psychological literature, then carried and reproduced in secular discourse about the self and private belief. In other words, these practices are not firmly or primarily located within “religion” or “science” or “health” or “artistry.”  Part of their power for my respondents is in the ways that their multiple locations, and multiple linked sites of reproduction, add to the sensation that they are “everywhere” and universal.

NS: You point out that these ways of speaking about the spiritual also play a part in the story of American secularity. How does spirituality affect the usual narratives of the secular and, now, the post-secular?

CB: “Spirituality” is a word that resonates in all of the usual narratives of the secular; it’s a word that pops up everywhere. It does different kinds of work in Charles Taylor’s and William Connolly’s works on secularism; it is valued and promoted in Sam Harris’s various books, and he makes it consistent with atheism; it is embedded in psychological discourse, which is itself disembedded from any religious tradition; and so on. So, “spirituality” doesn’t affect the narratives of secularity from the outside, but is already part and parcel of them. For me—and for those of us who are working in various ways with the SSRC’s initiative on spiritual forms—the questions then turn to why and how these forms, or formations, work: what they do, what they make of the secular, and how they fashion it.

NS: Your subjects see academic scholarship as a legitimating presence, one that they’re comfortable in and eager to engage with. What do you think your book will do for your subjects? What will it legitimate and what will it challenge?

CB: Presence is the key word here. I unexpectedly found myself participating in and engaging a religious culture in which academics have from time to time played a peculiar role. Within the Cambridge milieu, skeptical academics, in particular, are considered to be people who carry the weight and authority of “science.” I realized after the fact that sometimes just asking questions performs an act of legitimation; it was a sign for my respondents that we were pursuing a common goal of learning “the truth.” I never used words like “truth,” “science,” or “proof” in my questions, but I often found myself answering questions about my work that suggested that my respondents thought of what I was doing in those terms.

That said, I’m not sure that the book is going to either provide a measure of legitimacy or push buttons any more than my presence already has. Every writer hopes that her book will challenge someone somewhere, but I make no predictions. Sociologists aren’t very good at predictions anyhow.

NS: Science and American spirituality have always had a complex relationship, and this is no less the case today, with widespread interest in, for example, the neuroscience of religious experience and research on alternative medicine. What work does science do for your subjects? Do you think they misconstrue it?

CB: My husband is a biologist, and we spend a lot of time at home talking about the innumerable ways that people misconstrue scientific evidence, facts, and data. Most Americans have outsized hopes and fears about what science is able to do now, or will be able to do soon. Therefore, it’s hard for me to argue that the people I met in Cambridge are unusual by virtue of the mere fact that they misconstrue science. We all do. Yes, some of their ideas are often uncritical mixtures of nineteenth-century Theosophical ideas, what they learned from any number of alternative health practitioners, and whatever David Brooks says about neuroscience in his New York Times column. But most Americans hold some combination of ideas about science that include heavy doses of misunderstanding, rumor, hope, and imagination.

NS: For many religious Americans, though, sins against science come rooted in suspicion and omission. Those in your book seem prone, instead, to an overzealous embrace.

CB: Perhaps it would be fair to say that the people I met in Cambridge are aware of the fact that they are drawing on unorthodox combinations of science, religion, and philosophy—probably more so than many others. The unorthodoxy of their expectations about science’s possibilities, and its relation to the character and quality of the universe as a metaphysical whole, makes them more aware than others that the science they think about is an imagined one. That said, the great majority of them also insisted that their views would some day be vindicated. As they see it, true spiritual laws never change, and given their universality and generalizability, they will someday—soon—capture the attention of mainstream physicists and neuroscientists. That is where they believe true legitimacy and authority ultimately rests—with the “real” scientists and, I should add, not the social scientists!

NS: If not ultimate legitimacy, what does a social scientific study such as yours propose to tell us? In particular, do you mean to offer a critique, as sociological accounts of American metaphysical spirituality often have in the past?

CB: Offering a critique is not what gets me out of bed in the morning, to be honest. Of course critique is a quality of much scholarly writing, and readers will find that I do offer several. I’m aware also that the book opens itself up to several lines of critique—both old and, I hope, new. With that in mind, I’d like to imagine it as a gentle provocation—something that stimulates and unsettles, rather than tidies things up.