Stephen A. Marini. Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
With Sacred Song in America, Stephen A. Marini constructs a romanticist’s roadmap of American religious history through an exploration of the forms and functions of sacred song. To entrench this study in history, the first half of the book presents five case studies of musical traditions ostensibly selected for their far-reaching antecedents, while the second half of the book presents six additional case studies, in a point/counterpoint arrangement, that focus the reader’s attention on contemporary issues in American religion. The range of Marini’s writing is certainly striking—from richly textured ethnographic accounts to personal interviews to notes on theory and method—and the scope of his book is equally impressive; however, I find that Marini is a mediocre historian, and I am bothered by the shallowness of his secondary research and his superficial use of theory. Since my emphasis is in critical theory of religion, I wish to contain my discussion to the latter two points.
In an unanticipated reassertion of uncritical phenomenology, the ectoplasmic residue of comparative theology that still taints religious studies, Marini dismisses formalist analyses of music like Peter Kivy’s Music Alone and instead emphasizes the ability of music to evoke emotional and experiential response: “Despite the vogue of deconstructivist [sic] theory, emotivist or symbolic views of music remain attractive to Americans when applied to sacred music because of the importance we have traditionally attached to the emotions in interpreting the nature of religion itself” (4). Unfortunately for Marini, his attempted jab-in-passing at post-structuralist theory amounts to an embarrassing orthographic error: “Deconstructivism” is a movement within postmodern architecture that is a depoliticized response to Russian constructivism, while “deconstruction” is a term developed by Jacques Derrida to characterize his approach to reading text. Peter Kivy and Malcolm Budd, whose writings on music are concerned primarily with formal aesthetics, are not adequately identified by either of these terms. Such a basic mistake in identification should not come as a surprise, however, since for Marini critical theory of religion has not improved upon Clifford Geertz.
Geertz’s five-part definition of religion (which is reproduced on page 10) boils down to the equation of religion with “meaning,” a conception that is a lazily secularized version of Tillich’s theological definition of religion as one’s ultimate concern. Reading Geertz with particular interest in what Geertz called “moods and motivations”, Marini gives primacy to meaning, experience, the meaning of experience, and the experience of meaning, but, as Talal Asad has noted about Geertz’s crystalized view of culture, he ignores the processes by which meanings and experiences are generated and legitimized. Thus, in answer to the question of what gives a song its “sacredness,” Marini writes, “For a song to be sacred, it must possess not only belief content but also ritual intention and form.” (7) It is clear from the previous paragraph that Marini equates “belief content” with “mythic language” (6), and in the next paragraph, now channeling Turner, he explains what he means by “ritual”: “By ‘ritual action’ I mean symbolic behavior that moves participants out of everyday awareness into a state of shared mythic consciousness and creative community” (7).
Here, Marini is suggesting that sacredness is not an intrinsic value of music, but his sui generis conception of sacredness implies that there is a specific and universal set of conditions that allow music to be sacralized and experienced as “sacred.” The politics of religious experience in consumer capitalism is irrelevant when it comes to defining what sacredness is and what it does. Materialist analysis is only relevant to Marini inasmuch as it disturbs his ability to retain an uninterrogated ideology of sacredness, a tension in his thesis that becomes increasingly apparent in the later chapters of the book when he is led to discuss the problems commercialization and popularization pose for sacred song as a category. Even then, this body of theory is either dismissed as overly reductive or merely tentatively engaged (see, for instance, his simplified use of Adorno in chapter 11).
Despite its numerous problems, I would insist that there is some value in Sacred Song in America, for even if it is buried in a meaning-centric Geertzian framework, Marini’s text, especially when it focuses on contradiction and performance, actually consistently undermines this approach. Marini, too, briefly recognizes this point: in the conclusion, Marini bemoans theories of religion for a perceived inability to “address the problem of how different aspects of religion might relate to one another” (238), despite the promise of Geertz’s theory to do just that. What the author is getting at here is a fundamental flaw in Geertz’s theory of “cultural systems,” which defines “religion” as an ideologically enclosed text that is penetrable from the outside and logically coherent in the inside rather than a jumbled profusion of competing, overlapping discourses and power relationships. On the other hand, when Marini speaks, in his closing paragraph, of an irreducible, untheorizable “voice” whose “archetypal power” speaks through sacred song to guide religions with messages of “order” or “change” and guide scholars to “think about religious culture as a dynamic whole” (239), he introduces an unwelcome, deeply problematic metaphysic of teleology that is hardly an improvement over the “mechanical” theories of religion he dislikes. In the end, the contradictions Marini finds in the history of American religion cannot overcome his desire to manufacture a perfected image.
