Congregational Studies, Selection 2: Talal Asad and Finickiness of Categories

To Talal Asad, the foremost anthropologist of modernity, “the secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity,” but “it works through a series of particular oppositions.”[1] Secularity, then, is best understood “indirectly” since the secular understands itself primarily through what it is not—or does not want to be. But these “nots” can become difficult to untie, for while the secular understands itself in opposition to the religious, in actuality it is impossible to separate the two—in part because of their confused (and confusing) generative properties.

According to Asad, the discourse of modernity presents religious thinking as “a form of false consciousness” that is doubly generated from the loam of “the secular”: first in its oppressive form, which was produced by premodern secular society, and second in its tolerant form, which is produced by modern secularity (192-193). “Thus,” concludes Asad, “the insistence on a sharp separation between the religious and the secular goes with the paradoxical claim that the latter continually produces the former” (193). This already complicated interrelationship is further complicated by the modernist claim that “secularism” (as a doctrine) and its contingent discourses, principles, and practices is itself the product of “religious” society—that “secularism” emancipates itself (or is emancipated by) religious discourse just as “religion” has its origin in secularity. Finally, to complete this self-devouring circuit, the ideology of secularism contributes to the usage and meanings of “the secular.”[2]

To put it briefly, the secular and the religious together occupy a distorted and paradoxically circuitous discursive space—modernity. Modernity itself generates their arbitrary meanings even as it necessitates their continued usage, but sufficient critical distance insists that their unclear, codependent relationship calls into question their descriptive efficacy as well as their continued usefulness as epistemic categories. Asad:

“[T]he ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are not essentially fixed categories. However, I do not claim that if one stripped appearances one would see that some apparently secular institutions were really religious. I assume, on the contrary that there is nothing essentially religious, nor any universal essence that defines ‘sacred language’ or ‘sacred experience.’” (25; emphases original)

There is a peculiar hesitancy here in Asad’s thought that suggests a protective impulse for “the religious” (or, in any case, the behavior and institutions customarily defined as “religious”). This is an impulse that would seem to clash with his constructionist view of “religion” as an anthropological category, and it is an impulse that is not displayed when Asad discusses the primary object of his critique—the hegemonic discourse of modernity.

Even if “modernity” has no essence, it is still useful to Asad as a way to conduct his anthropology of the secular. In response to the theory of multiple modernities propounded by many recent critics, who argue that “contemporary societies are heterogeneous and overlapping” and home to “disparate, even discordant, circumstances, origins, valences, and so forth” (12), Asad argues that the “integrated character of ‘modernity’” itself has been incorporated into political practice. Thus, proponents of modernization use this pluralistic language to “direct the way in which people committed to it [modernity] act”—these proponents still “aim at ‘modernity’” (13; emphasis original). My argument here is not that Asad is wrong about the non-essence of religion, nor is he wrong in maintaining that there is continued utility in studying and critiquing the objectives and practices of “modernity.” I agree with him that it is impossible and, indeed, not even worthwhile to attempt to construct a transhistorical, transcultural definition of “religion.”[3] My point is that people aim at “religion” just as people aim at “modernity” or “secularity,” and, additionally, there is particular “heuristic value” (as Asad argues) in “looking for necessary connections” (13).

NOTES

[1]

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25. Hereafter, page numbers are referred to parenthetically.

[2]
A UU service is a freeplay of religious and secular signifiers: I cannot think of any particular rationalization behind the singing of both Graham Nash’s 1970 post-Woodstock ode to hippie domesticity “Our House” and the twentieth century gospel hit “This Little Light of Mine” in the same service. Their usage in this context obscures their link to any external referent as it generates new meanings or functionalities for both songs, a fascinating process to which I cannot do justice in this footnote. In a future post, which will focus on music in the congregation, I wish to develop this thought.

[3]

For Asad’s most brilliant sustained critique of this project, see Chapter 1 (“The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27-54.

Congregational Studies, Selection 1: A few notes on social service

The theme of Sunday’s service (9/25/11), derived from the week’s message (“Discovering Your Ministry,”[1] a sermon written by UU minister Dennis Hamilton and read by a member), was social service. Though not every aspect of the service was explicitly tied to this theme, it was emphasized several times throughout. In the middle of the service, for instance, we were asked to rise and thank those around us for their contributions to the community and to the congregation. Later, the children, before they were dismissed to receive religious education, collected non-perishable foodstuffs brought in by various congregants in plastic grocery bags; the goods were all donated to Cross-Lines, one of four charitable organizations mentioned by name in the church’s September newsletter, along with Ozarks Food Harvest, the Community Blood Center of the Ozarks, and Adopt-a-Street.[2] Finally, after the service, a small group of volunteers got together to clean the heavily trafficked (and littered) Battlefield from the intersection at Lone Pine to the intersection at National.

These details confirm what Lynn Dalton, the president of the board of trustees of First UU Springfield, wrote in the September newsletter: “First UU Springfield is active in the community and will be increasing that activity as time goes on.” I do not know about the median level of involvement on an individual basis, but what strikes me about the efforts described in the newsletter is not only that they are largely dependent upon secular and governmental social service organizations, but that charitable efforts do not even have to start within the congregation: “Please let me know,” Dalton writes, “what organizations you volunteer time or donate to so we can share the joy of knowing the work we accomplish in the world… You might inspire another member to look at an organization you care about.” Social service is seen as both an integral facet of the UU faith as well as a somewhat unspectacular aspect of everyday life. Service is to be commended because it focuses the members’ practical efforts in the world and helps to found a particular idea of religiosity toward which the church can strive.

Mark Chaves, in analyzing the data from a nationwide congregational study completed in 1998, reveals that “Congregations typically engage in social services in only a minor and peripheral way.”[3] First UU Springfield—with a collection of congregants who variously self-identify as liberal Christians, humanists, pagans, and so on—can hardly be classified as a “typical” congregation by any stretch of the imagination, but that still does not explain why social service is emphasized so heavily in a weekly religious service. Perhaps the church leaders stress social service firmly because, in the absence of a coherent belief system, congregants must look to other means to affirm their collective religious identity. This strikes me as a reasonable but improvable and certainly contestable explanation for the prevalence of social service in this congregation, but I do not wish to argue for or against any theorized causative relationship between social service and religious identity. I am satisfied to point out that the church uses the idea of social service (if not its actual practice) to articulate its desire for a particular kind of religiosity.

However, Chaves suggests that when congregations do engage in social service, they “are not especially holistic—indeed, they are not especially religious—in their approach to social services.”[4] To this statement, I would rejoin that “religion” has proven itself to be a problematic category, especially when it is used to define or describe someone’s motives. Apparently Chaves means that “religious” social service is indistinguishable from “secular” social service in practice—and he can argue this because the motivations behind social service, whether they are religious or secular or some ill-defined, liminal space between the two, will remain, as they always were, inscrutable. In the following post, I will further Chaves’ empirical observation into the realm of theory by problematizing the very notions of “religious” and “secular” as categories for understanding congregational practice. For “religious” and “secular” should be seen as ideals that are aimed at through practice as opposed to distinct states of being that shade or define practice.

NOTES

[1]
This sermon, along with several others is available for download as a PDF file via the website of the Rev. Dennis Hamilton’s congregation, Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church in Carrollton, Texas (a suburb of Dallas). The sermon stresses the need for human beings to be fulfilled by useful, service-oriented work and relates this (somewhat ambiguously) to the concept of “ministry” in Christian religion. The sermon was originally titled "Spirituality for Atheists" and is accessible here: http://www.horizonuu.org/index.php/worshiping/past-sermons2.

[2]
After exploring the websites of each of the four organizations, I found that only Cross-Lines uses explicitly Christian language and symbolism. In addition to the organization’s logo, which incorporates a cross, their website (http://www.cross-lines.org) also explains that Cross-Lines was founded by a group of “ministers and concerned citizens” in 1963.

[3]
Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 46.

[4]
Ibid.; emphasis original. Chaves makes one more fascinating point about social service in congregations: congregations do not offer an “alternative to government or secular social services” (67) because congregations do not exist in an “organizational world that is separate from the world of government and secular social services,” nor do “government and secular social service providers…approach social services in a distinctive way” (67-68). Congregations practice social service in “collaboration” with government and secular organizations (68), a general rule to which First UU Springfield is not an exception.

Note

For the next few weeks, I will be posting material written last semester for a seminar in congregational studies. I studied a local congregation—the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Springfield—and wrote at length about the services I attended. First, I wrote five field reports, each of which dealt with a specific topic requested by our professor. I also conducted two personal interviews in preparation for culling my arguments into a single, coherent (I hope), sustained argument.

For the posts on this blog, I want to recreate, in collage fashion, the messiness of my original field notes by posting isolated segments and passages from my reports and final essay. So it's ok if you read some of the posts out of order or skip a few entries, and you won’t really miss anything crucial or foundational for the rest of the posts. At least I think not. Some of the posts will be lightly rewritten or doctored to reflect their presentation in a new medium.

By the way, I am presenting material from the final essay (and perhaps from the additional assorted fragments I will post here) at the MWAAR conference in Rock Island, Illinois this weekend. Go me.

My father’s dream: a monologue

Dramatis persona:
Gary King, a male mathematics instructor in his 50s, with the usual stereotypes and mannerisms associated with a male mathematics instructor

The setting is irrelevant.

GARY: I had a dream in which I was giving a quiz to one of my classes. The class was algebra, which is odd because algebra is a course I haven’t taught for some time. After handing out the quiz and returning to my desk, almost immediately one of the students got up and brought me his quiz. The student said, “This is what it’s like when you’re stupid.” I took the quiz and looked at it. All that the student had written was the number 44 under the first equation (the answer was, of course, incorrect, though I can’t remember what exactly the equation was now). The space for the student's name was left blank. I looked back up over the paper, which I held between my thumb and the side of my index finger at the bottom right-hand corner, bending the page slightly into the crook of my index finger so that it stood straight before my eyes, to tell the student that he had forgotten to write his name down but it was already too late. The student ran toward an open window in the back of the class and jumped. The significance of this act did not escape me, for in my dream I knew that our classroom was on the highest floor of the building, and that the student was leaping to his certain death. And I looked again at his quiz and thought to myself, He is right. This is what it's like when you're stupid. Then I woke up.

A strange confrontation in the bathroom: A short play

Dramatis Personae
HARRISON, a 23 year old male
GUY, a male in his early 20s inexplicably dressed in flannels

Setting: A men’s bathroom at a public university. HARRISON is washing his hands. GUY exits a stall, looks around with quick, jerky movements, as if to suggest unease or paranoia. He notices HARRISON. Approaching with awkwardly big, imprecise steps, he closes the gap between them (though not to the extent that the two are uncomfortably close).

GUY (with a loud but un-emotive voice): HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN IN HERE.

HARRISON (holding his dripping hands out in front of him): Umm…I guess not long enough to understand why the answer to that question would be important to you.

GUY inhales sharply and loudly through the nose, as if he has nasal congestion and is straining to force the air into his lungs. Pause, GUY'S chest all puffed-up from the intake of oxygen. Then, he breathes out with equal flair. Pause, in which GUY does not seem to be breathing at all. HARRISON remains motionless.

GUY: ALRIGHT.

Guy exits with the same awkward steps, without washing his hands. HARRISON, his wet hands continuing to drip water into the sink, takes a look to the door, followed by one quick look in the direction of the stalls. He exits quickly without drying his hands, kicking the door open with his foot in order to avoiding touching it.

CURTAIN