Robert Wuthnow. Growing Up Religious: Christians and Jews on Their Journeys of Faith. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
In Growing Up Religious, Robert Wuthnow takes as his starting point the idea that spirituality finds its source in “personal histories,” such as the (heteronormative) family (see esp. 56-65) and congregational life (see esp. 69-84). But by “personal histories” Wuthnow signifies much more than a static backlog of memories and familial/social conditioning: as Wuthnow later insists, the act of memory—the ongoing processes of reconstruction, revision, and reinterpretation of one’s past—is the primary way for spiritual people to “mak[e] sense of their lives” in their “continuing quest for the sacred” (xxxi). Growing up Religious, then, is the narrative Wuthnow constructed of the narratives his interviewees shared, which he organizes into a series of thematically-linked chapters dealing with different topics in memory, life, and religion. In the reflection that follows, I wish to discuss briefly an aspect of Wuthnow’s book that I find troubling: Wuthnow’s hesitancy to engage his ethnographic research in a critical capacity.
To his human subjects, Wuthnow romantically attributes an unanticipated amount of agency in constructing their identities through the act of memory. Conceptualizing these narratives as generated from (and therefore belonging to) no one but the individual is an attempt by Wuthnow to convince his readers of the authenticity of the narratives—to endow them with “aura” in the Benjaminian sense. To achieve this level of authenticity, Wuthnow feigns objectivity and thus deemphasizes his (and his interviewers’) role in shaping the content and context of the interviews and molding those interviews into the book he subsequently authored. However, I do not wish to argue that Wuthnow is necessarily being dishonest. What is lacking in the book is not honesty, for Wuthnow’s beliefs relative to his subjects are mentioned, at least in passing, several times throughout the text; rather, it is critical awareness of his role as a scholar that seems to be lacking.
Of all places, I find the most helpful analogue for this situation in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which, among other things, states that the more one knows about the current position of a particle, the less one knows about its momentum (and vice-versa), for the very act of measuring one of the particle’s properties inhibits our ability to measure the other accurately. Wuthnow’s investigation into the spiritual lives and backgrounds of some 200 “ordinary Americans” has effectively caused him to reshape (perhaps subtly) those lives and backgrounds—and not just in the process of writing the book; the act of inquiring about those stories at all affected the way the participants presented and communicated “their” stories. The resultant book, which masquerades as the objective reportage of unfiltered, undistorted human voices, is quite different from the book Wuthnow thinks he has written. This is not to say that Wuthnow is intentionally misleading his readers; it is just to say that Wuthnow, apparently, hasn’t been studying his quantum physics.
In addition to underestimating his sphere of influence, which I argued betrays a lack of critical self-awareness, Wuthnow likewise downplays the importance of critical theory in making sense of his findings. For example, Wuthnow mentions in the preface that most of his respondents were middle class (xii), but his research does not seem to show any intimation of class consciousness. In one irritating passage (18-23), Wuthnow states that, based on his interviews, “there is still an important material dimension” to his respondents’ religious memory (19), going on to mention jewelry, paintings, statues, and plaques with religious significance (21-22). Those items are not just symbols of spirituality, however; they are also symbols of capital. But far from interrogating the relationship between social class and how religion is lived, Wuthnow’s catalogue of bourgeois articles allows a particular kind of (privileged) practice to construct a normalizing judgment of American religious culture. Wuthnow’s lack of critical engagement with his research causes him to miss the opportunity to discover economic disparities and relationships of power that are subtly embedded in the fabric of religious experience.
Reading this book has made me realize how cautious scholars of religion must be when dealing directly with human beings. Though it is tempting to grant qualitative studies like Wuthnow’s Growing Up Religious preponderance over quantitative analyses (if only for the idea that qualitative studies somehow intrinsically preserve an authentic “human voice”), both qualitative and quantitative studies can be exploited as a platform for making generalizations and confirming the author’s biases. Of course, the scholar’s biases will always be reflected in the object of his or her analysis, but this resultant parallax view decisively points to why theory is necessary—not relegated to a handful of slapdash endnotes but in the center of scholarly inquiry. Still, theory should not be conceived of as a screen that protects the world from the destructive impulses of scholars; rather, theory is the only means scholars have of interacting with the world and producing meaningful results. What I suggest, then, is that good scholarship is always interrogative—not only of the object of study but of the scholar’s own ability to apprehend and comprehend that object.
