Religion in 50 Words

A Critical Vocabulary

Aaron W. Hughes, Russell T. McCutcheon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000427462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religion in 50 Words: A Critical Vocabulary is the first of a two-volume work that seeks to transform the study of religion by offering a radically critical perspective. It does so by providing a succinct and critical examination of the key words used in the modern study of religion. Arranged alphabetically, the book explores the historic roots, varied uses, and current significance and utility of the technical terms used within the current field of religious studies. These are the terms that both students and scholars routinely deploy to think about, describe, and analyze data—sometimes without realizing that they are themselves technical tools in need of attention.

Among the topics covered:

• Belief
• Critical
• Culture
• Definition
• Environment
• Gender
• Ideology
• Lived religion
• Material religion
• Orthodoxy
• Politics
• Race
• Sacred/profane
• Secular
• Theory

This book submits all of its terms to a critical interrogation and subsequent re-description, thereby allowing a collective reframing of the field. This volume is an indispensable resource for students and academics working in religious studies.

1 Affect

DOI: 10.4324/9781003140184-2

In recent years, the term “affect”—as opposed to saying that something has an effect, i.e., consequence or practical implications—has received considerable attention in the Humanities in general, and the study of religion in particular. This is on account of the late-twentieth century rise of “affect theory”—an approach in culture studies and social theory that is seen by some as indebted to the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930–1992) and their collaborative reading of the work of the earlier Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). The latter understood “affect” to name a body’s capacity for action and as a site on which action is exerted. This approach (one that critiques the once widely held position that saw mind and body as unrelated domains, with mind taking the more prominent role, or the so-called mind-body problem) draws attention to and thereby understands a broad range of what at least some might describe as the possibly subconscious feelings that people— and perhaps even entire social groups—experience. These can include such dispositions as emotions and moods, which, in turn, are presumed to impel us toward action, thought, and ever-changing forms of social relation with others. The propensity for theoretical overdetermination, and the problem of researchers sometimes relying uncritically on texts and participant self-reports to mediate between such overdetermination on the one hand and the presumably active, inner lives of social actors (whether living or long dead), on the other, however, may raise as many questions for the critical scholar as a focus on affect attempts to solve. That scholars in other fields approach these issues differently, must be noted of course. We think here of the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant, and her work on how sentimentality in American popular culture (i.e., identifying with the feelings of others) functions socially and politically (e.g., The Female Complaint [2008, 100]), as well as the contemporary literary scholar Frances McDonald, and her work on representations of laughter in American literature. But, at least for some in the study of religion, affect theory has taken a perhaps predictable path toward studying the inner world of the social actor.

The English noun that stands in for this approach, “affect” (obviously related to such other words as “affectation” and “affection,” along with its opposition, “disaffection”) derives from the classical Latin affectus. The latter term is used to denote a mental or emotional state or, significantly, a perceived inner reaction (notably one that is passing, better captured today by the word “effect” [Latin effectus], as in a result or a consequence of a previous prompt). The term can also name a physical state (sometimes used to designate one that is thought to be a result of a disease). Among its synonyms are: influence or impression, disposition, eagerness, zeal, purpose or even devotion. We see this in the modern usage of Pope Francis’s so-called apostolic letter, dating from September 2020, entitled Scripturae sacrae affectus (English: Devotion to Sacred Scripture), a document that marked the 1,600th anniversary of the death of Jerome, a fifth-century Roman Catholic theologian. In post-classical Latin, the term was sometimes given a valence, thus signifying not just desire but evil desire, as used in, for example, the Vulgate (the later fourth-century Latin translation of the Christian bible, whose New Testament was originally in the Greek that was commonly used during the Hellenistic era—called Koine Greek). Consider, for example, 1 Thessalonians 2:2, “sed ante passi et contumeliis affecti.. .” (rendered in the so-called Douay English translation of 1582 as: “But having suffered many things before, and been shamefully treated. . .”). Early on, the English term was used to refer to the manner in which one is inclined or disposed toward something. Thus we arrive at Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus & Criseyde (1385): “And therto dronken hadde as hoot and stronge, As Crassus dide for his affectis wronge” (Book III, line 1391). Consider also the pamphlet, The Supper of the Lord (1533)—originally attributed to the fictitious Nicholas Twonson of Nuremberg but, by 1573, credited to the English Protestant Reformer, William Tyndale (1494–1536)—“God is searcher of heart and reins, thoughts and affects” (266, quoting the 1850 edition), or, as late as Francis Bacon’s 1626 work, Sylua Syluarum Or A Natural History in Ten Centuries: “The affects and Paffions of the Heart and Spirits, are notably difclofed by the Pulfe” (25, section 97, quoting the 1670 edition).

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the term began to take on a more technical and specialized meaning. This was especially the case in what were then the nascent social and biological sciences, and to such an extent that all of these more general uses of the term had, for the most part, by then become obsolete—especially evident in what were then the new academic fields of Psychology and Psychiatry. We see this change, for instance, in the American philosophy and evolutionary psychologist James Mark Baldwin’s Handbook of Psychology: Feeling and Will (1891): “Affects therefore are the feeling antecedents of involuntary movements; as motives, including affects, are the inner antecedents of acts of will” (vol. 2, 314, quoting the 1891 edition). Baldwin (1861–1934)—after whom the “Baldwin effect” is named—argued that an organism’s ability to learn new behaviors can affect its reproductive success and, thus, influence the genetic makeup of its species through the Darwinian process of natural selection. The still noted philosopher and psychologist from roughly the same time, William James (1842–1910), who was himself a key figure in the early formation of the study of religion, also employed the term in his Collected Essays & Review (1894): “We may also feel a general seizure of excitement, which . .. German writers call an Affect, and which is what I have all along meant by an emotion” (358, quoting the 1920 edition). This is how the term continues to be employed to this day, where an affect is used, primarily, though by no means exclusively, in psychology and among some affect theorists to refer not simply to emotions but also to the observable expressions, gestures, postures, that are said to accompany (and thereby publicly signal) the presumed presence of inner states and dispositions. Affectations, in other words, allow the observer to infer the existence of such inner states. Sometimes, of course, such affectations can be read pejoratively, as gestures or flourishes that are judged as unnecessary, ostentatious, or, simply put, showy. In Henry Fielding’s novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), we read in the Preface: “Now Affection proceeds from one of two Causes, Vanity or Hypocrisy. . .” (6, citing the 1967 edition).

On account of its presumed ability to signify events or states present only in the internal life of individuals, the private domain associated with experience, it was probably only a matter of time before the term became associated with religion, itself understood during the modern period as naming a unique inner disposition expressed outwardly. Here, we see it relate to the already well-established efforts to protect religious claims from Enlightenment-era critique by asserting it to be a non-rational sentiment— a point shared with Donovan Schaefer’s well-received book, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (2015), inasmuch as it is aimed at addressing what he understands as scholars’ over-emphasis on studies of belief. We therefore see the term employed in close relation to religion as early as the American theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), such as in his A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), a work that played a key role in what is often referred to as the “First Great Awakening” of the early- to mid-eighteenth century, and which sought to renew individual piety and religious devotion in England and in the colonies that would soon become the United States. For example, Edwards argues in the book’s first section, “On the Nature of Affections, and Their Importance in Religion,” that Christians do not pray in order to “declare our wants and desires, in order to inform God,” but, rather “to affect our own hearts, and so to prepare ourselves for the reception of the blessing we ask” (34), adding: “If the things of religion are rightly understood, they will affect the heart”— while those unaffected are characterized as “spiritually blind” (40). We also think here of the once influential work of the German pietist theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834):

true religion resides very much in the affections . .. God has given to mankind affections for the same purpose as he has given all the facul ties and principles of the human soul, that they might be subservient to the great business for which man was created—the business of religion.

(41, quoting the “somewhat abridged” 1824 edition)

Within the academy, the term initially was mostly confined to the realm of psychology, but in the 1990s we witness a crossover to the fields commonly grouped together as the Humanities, with the rise of what later comes to be known as “affect theory” (often dated to the early 1960s). This approach groups feelings, emotions, and moods—i.e., a set of subjectively experienced and self-reported dispositions—into discrete categories of analysis, to then determine the ways in which they are exhibited within or projected onto social, cultural, and political contexts. Or, as phrased by Schaefer in the Introduction to his above-mentioned book: “Affect shapes this interaction between knowledge, religion, and power.” Affect theorists thus seek to approach the study of culture, history, and politics in such a manner that attention is placed on what they understand as the expression and motive force of a set of prior, non- or pre-linguistic, and thus interior, forces or dispositions. They do this, moreover, as a way to account for how collections of individuals come to agree on, say, the cultural conventions of their lives—though, to be fair, there are no doubt those who would agree that language and culture shape or condition affective states and responses (as does Schaefer in his more recent The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power [2019]). It is not immediately clear, however, whether many would hold the further position that situation and setting (i.e., discourse and structure) produce what members of groups subsequently internalize as pre-social sentiments. The latter position has been suggested by the cultural anthropologist at the University of Tübingen, Monique Scheer, in a 2012 article entitled “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion.” She argues there that because habitus (a term derived from Pierre Bourdieu’s [1930–2002] sociological work, naming the internalization of our cultural setting and its standards) “is the precondition for subjectification . .. [i]t can and does produce the behaviors and thought patterns of intentionality or a ‘free will,’ if that is what a specific community demands of its subjects” (History & Theory 51/2: 206). She continues: “The ‘interior’ as the locus of ‘true feelings’ and the self is also a product of a habitus that daily engages in denigrating the ‘exterior’ and ‘emancipating’ the subject from it.” However, should one not follow Scheer’s more thoroughgoing social theory—something akin to Bruce Lincoln’s own early interest in the discursive context of what he termed sentiments of affinity and estrangement (see the second edition of his Discourse and the Construction of Society [2014], 8–9, 74, 94, 103)—then although they may be influenced by setting, intuitive, pre-ideological affects are instead assumed to make us (and by us we no longer just mean human beings as distinct from the animal kingdom) what and who we are. Now they are neither under our rational control nor even necessarily within our conscious awareness and, as such, they can only sometimes be captured or adequately expressed in language. In fact, an over-reliance on not just conscious belief but also on the role of language is among affect theory’s targets. It is somewhat ironic, however, that such studies in the field today are often represented as part of a larger materialist move found in such subfields as embodied religion (e.g., Elaine A. Peña’s work, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe [2011]), or what is sometimes also termed religion on the ground (in that they both aim to move away from traditional studies of texts and elite practitioners’ self-reports)—thus affect theory’s focus on what is assumed to be a pre-expressive inner sentiment or experience that is only secondarily materialized or embodied, as it were.

One might therefore see how this approach can signal a set of problems that have plagued the study of religion since its inception. We refer, namely, to the basic question: what is the nature of, and how do we study, such seemingly inner states as religious experience? As will be the case with so many of the keywords that follow, there exists an overwhelming tendency in the academic study of religion to conceptualize, and then study, religion (and by extension that which is often designated as the sacred) as existing either before or beyond language and history. The study of affects, it would seem, is no different. How, after all, can one understand that which is considered to exist beyond or prior to our categories of analysis? Affect theory, whether intentionally or not is not really the issue, thus provides a new way to talk about old issues in the field—issues that we maintain have little or no place in the study of religion—such as common presumptions about religion being based in non-rationale experience. While the latter term, experience, may play a role in managing the social sphere—i.e., as a discourse to legitimate certain political or social choices as opposed to others—there is no way, despite the claims of colleagues in the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), to study the internal thought, experiences, and motivations of social actors, especially those of people living hundreds or thousands of years ago. It is for this reason that we propose to discuss claims of experience rather than experiences themselves. For instance, in an article titled “Affect and the Study of Religion” (published in Religion Compass 9/10 [2015]: 335–345), Jenna Supp-Montgomerie maintains that affect theory, in turning attention from the individual as the bearer of emotion to the social lives that emerge between bodies and things, offers new insights into theorizing about religion. Regardless how this approach is adopted in other fields, the move from texts, beliefs, and practices to such things as corporeality and materiality may not so much represent a new way to theorize religion as stand in for an updating or even rebranding of the status quo in the field, which emphasizes experience and emotion over history, politics, economics, and other material condition.

It is also interesting that the generally recognized founder of at least one strand of affect theory, the psychologist (and not scholar of religion) Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991)—whose writings influenced the literary critic and early queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1950–2009) own work in the mid-1990s—argued, in his multi-volume Affect Imagery Consciousness (1962–1991): “In Christianity the covenant is less exclusive and more loving and thereby provided a purer and more universal love as a model and as an ideal for all” (vol. 3, part 2, 774, citing the complete edition from 2008). Though the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in America, Tomkins here taps into a much earlier and well-known set of normative Christocentric tropes. Not unlike an earlier generation of scholars of religion, who unthinkingly used Christianity (let alone certain of its denominations) as their lodestar to compare and contrast other religions, Tomkins echoes a certain structural bias in a field where his theories are now applied and elaborated. We also witness this in some of the applications to which affect theory has been used in the study of religion. For example, Peter C. Hill and Ralph W. Hood, Jr.’s “Affect, Religion, and Unconscious Processes” (Journal of Personality 67/6 [1999]: 1015–1046), tries to use a Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory (CEST) model to explain religious experience by showing how the latter represents the need to manage pleasure and pain, the need for a coherent conceptual system, the need for self-esteem, and the need for relatedness. Or, again, consider the collection of essays edited by John Corrigan, Feeling Religion (2018), in which contributors demonstrate how an understanding of emotion sheds light on equally problematic—though they would, of course, likely never use the term “problematic”—categories such as religion, spirituality, and the secular. In many ways, however, this is tantamount to using an unknown to explain yet another unknown. And if these examples are all concerned with modern issues, then we see how affect theory can be used to make sense of the past in, for example, the American historian Barbara H. Rosenwein’s Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (2007), which argues, in a rather circular fashion, that religious beliefs affected emotional styles even as those same styles helped to shape religious expression.

Problematic in all of this, at least for the critical scholar, is the widely shared assumption that we can somehow use either written texts or people’s self-reports as a gateway to understand the pre-expressive, emotional world of living or long dead people. If this is difficult to do with a living author, just imagine how much more difficult (if not impossible) it is to do so with someone who lived close to 800 years ago. Texts, let alone participant responses to an ethnographer’s queries, we maintain, should not be regarded as directly mediating some authentic and non-textual experience or emotional state, as some affect theories claim. Instead, both should be approached as specific and always situated discursive moments, with each using a host of rhetorical devices, grounded in particular social, political, historical, let alone class, racial, and gendered contexts. We would therefore do well not to look too quickly beyond each of these to some pre-social and presumably universal sentiment.

Affects, and the modern approach used to understand them, may very well be little more than a repackaged way to talk about the ever problematic category in the field known as experience. Like the latter, affects are difficult to ascertain, largely unrepresentable and unpresentable, and therefore given to theoretical incoherence despite claims concerning their priority or originality—all features that, unfortunately, are still all too common in the field. That we, as researchers, no doubt presume ourselves to have them (whether affects or experiences) strikes us as a flimsy basis to then infer their existence elsewhere and in other people, especially if we have failed to take seriously the larger structured settings in which we live and work and which may very well have—recalling Scheer’s argument—produced this impression in us in the first place.

In this volume see: authenticity, belief, culture, experience, gender, history, material religion, politics, race, religion, sacred/profane, secular

In Religion in 50 More Words see: immanence/transcendence, meditation, mysticism, piety, soul, spirituality

2 Authenticity

DOI: 10.4324/9781003140184-3

T...