The Discipline of Religion

Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric

Russell T. McCutcheon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134477999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Discipline of Religion is a lively critical journey through religious studies today, looking at its recent growth as an academic discipline, and its contemporary political and social meanings. Focusing on the differences between religious belief and academic religious discourse, Russell T. McCutcheon argues that the invention of religion as a discipline blurs the distinction between criticism and doctrine in its assertion of the relevance of faith as a credible object of study. In the leap from disciplinary criticism to avowal of actual cosmic and moral meaning, schools of religious studies extend their powers far beyond universities and into the everyday lives of those outside, managing and curtailing specific types of speech and dissent.

Part I
Genealogy of credibility

There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness. Flaubert was fond of saying that it takes a lot of hard work to portray mediocrity. Sociologists run into this problem all the time: How can we make the ordinary extraordinary and evoke ordinariness in such a way that people will see just how extraordinary it is?

Pierre Bourdieu (1998a: 21)

Chapter 1

Form, content, and the treasury of devices

In bidding a gracious farewell to Neville Chamberlain, Churchill nobly called him “the packhorse in our great affairs.” Accepting the compliment, Chamberlain pointed out that the line comes from Richard III and not, as Churchill had alleged, from Henry VI. But no matter. The thing is not to be right about Shakespeare. The thing is to be Shakespearean.

(Hitchens 2002:123)

A couple of years ago I watched part of a U.S. Memorial Day celebration broadcast from Washington D.C. From the perspective of its participants, this is an annual celebration of benign patriotism, a ritual on the nation’s so-called civil religion calendar, that commemorates those long since past who gave their lives for the sake of freedom and democracy. Although I would never contest those participants who characterize such holidays in just this manner – judging by my father, who is a Canadian World War II veteran, they quite sincerely intend to remember and thus memorialize fallen youths and, perhaps, their own fallen youth – Memorial Day, even “civil religion” itself (see chapter 12) can easily be theorized in a rather different manner than that which is offered by its participants. If the work of scholarship is something other than paraphrasing participants’ self-reports (see McCutcheon 2001b: chs 8 and 9), then one might problematize the abstract notions of freedom and democracy, taking into account such things as the fact that, although representatives of various marginalized or minority groups do indeed win U.S. elections today, power and ownership are still reserved for a relatively small, privileged group whose sphere of activity is not limited to public office and the halls of representative democracy, then the rhetoric of freedom and rule of the demos that is celebrated on Memorial Day takes on new significance. Instead of seeing past wars as the defenses of abstract, inalienable freedoms and rights – as our politicians and the representatives of our official media-speak continually persuade us – we come to see them as the concerted exercise of imperial right and might, part of the inevitable clash of nation-states in a world of scarce resources. All the bells and whistles of nationalism – the fireworks, the flags, the uniforms, the somber speeches, the sentimental anthems played on lone bugles, and the effort to package it and present it back to ourselves benignly as mere patriotism – heighten emotions (i.e., Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”) and make possible the egalitarian illusion so essential to our modern sense of self and nation. After all, if a population is to be mobilized to risk great public expenditure, as well as risking the deaths of huge segments of its younger membership (traditionally drawn from the lower classes) in the service of private enterprise (after all, are not wars often fought over private ownership of productive land, private ownership of and access to trade routes, private ownership of and access to natural resources and trading markets?), then the material gains and losses to the privately owned system must be mystified, universalized, and thus dehistoricized, thereby represented as moral gains and losses credited to some abstract “public good.” This is democratization in an ideological sense (perhaps in its only sense!): the gains added to, and the losses inflicted upon, the various parts must be portrayed as gains/losses to the Whole. Or, as Noam Chomsky recently phrased it in a lecture, with regard to public support, via tax dollars, of the high tech sector of the economy, the costs are socialized while the gains are privatized.¹

I open with this brief reflection on the rhetoric of the Whole to make a simple point: what appears to the non-participant gazing in from the margins to be the playfulness and an ad hoc-ishness that characterizes all human attempts to know and act, appears to the participant as self-evident, universal, and utterly legitimate. To rephrase it, people go to extraordinary lengths to decorate, and thus make meaningful, that which is entirely ordinary. Instead of owning up to the mundane fact that people generally act in accordance with a set of specific, tactical and all too changeable interests local to our own social group, groups decorate and universalize these local interests by attributing them to everyone – everyone from our family, our class, our gender, and our race, to our nation-state, and finally, even to Human Nature itself. People even go so far as to attribute them to beings from other realms (e.g., the will of Allah) and even to time immemorial (e.g., Fate, Natural Law, Luck, Karma, Manifest Destiny). But the marginal viewpoint that allows an insight into some of the workings of culture, value, and social identity is the same marginal stance that ensures this critical insight will receive only a brief hearing, if at all, and then be either dismissed or demonized. Although all social formations are founded on contradictions of various sorts – something Marx told us so very long ago – their institutions function in concert to gloss over and constrain such social selfdestruct mechanisms; they will not suffer gladly critics who are foolhardy enough to stick their fingers in the collective social eye by pointing them out.

As you by now might have no doubt guessed, containing social contradictions and gaps is made possible by something I term the rhetoric of religion – be it the work of the theologian or the liberal humanist, they both work tirelessly to avert our gaze from the local to the universal, from this specific, conflicted human actor (whose subjectivity I take to be a function of complex and competing structural constraints) to the Holy/Human Spirit writ large and timeless.²Despite the theological and humanistic pre-occupation with conceptualizing religion as the realm of ahistoric and deep meanings which must be respected, decoded, and then appreciated, religion, in this book, is more an issue of discursive form, medium, and structure. In the background of each subsequent chapter is precisely this issue: how contestable rhetorical form makes possible certain specific meanings and social institutions. Specifically, the institution examined herein is the North American study of religion as it has taken shape over two academic generations. While it may be so obvious as to make mentioning it unnecessary, the book’s title – The Discipline of Religion– is therefore an explicit and unoriginal Foucaultian double entendre, for the topic of the book concerns both the institutionalized academic pursuit variously known as religious studies, the academic study of religion, comparative religion, the history of religions, etc., as well as the rhetorical technique whereby “religion” acts as a normalizing constraint, thus playing an important role in helping to reproduce large-scale social identities. Of crucial importance is that readers recognize the perhaps subtle, but nonetheless significant, difference between my title and, say, such a seemingly related title as Disciplining Religion– as in Ellen Messer-Davidow’s recent book, Disciplining Feminism(2002). As Messer- Davidow’s subtitle, From Social Activism to Academic Discourse, makes evident, her study documents the process whereby a dynamic form of cultural practice (specifically, a type of political critique) becomes an institutional practice, maybe even an academic commodity. Such institutionalization is evidence of long sought after legitimacy, some might argue, or, as others would no doubt counter, sufficient evidence that a form of potent oppositional speech and practice had been thoroughly co-opted and brought within the fold. Regardless which side one takes, both presume that a dynamic element of social life preceded its institutionalization, such that Disciplining Religion would connote that the spontaneity, creativity, authenticity, etc., of this thing we call religion was somehow constrained by its reinvention as an academic pursuit. Nothing could be further from the point argued across the following chapters.

Regardless of whether this academic pursuit is described by its members as a discipline proper (often defined by appeals to a common method or theory, as in the sociological method used to study a host of different social phenomena) or a cross-disciplinary field (in which a shared object of study unites scholars each employing different methods of inquiry to study it, as in such area studies as Women’s Studies or Culture Studies), it is the normalizing, political role played by both of these discourses and their tools that is the object of my attention, thus making the onetime heated discipline vs. field of studies debate of minor consequence to the chapters that follow. In collapsing this discipline/field distinction, I hope to press the work of such important contemporary writers as the University of Chicago’s Jonathan Z. Smith a little further; for, when Smith rephrases his (in)famous words from the opening lines of his book, Imagining Religion(1982) and writes that the concept “religion” is a “second-order, generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as ‘language’ plays in linguistics or ‘culture’ plays in anthropology” (1998: 282–283) I agree completely, yet I am curious about the political “disciplinary horizon” that such conceptual tools help to establish outside of the strict intellectual and social boundaries of the university. In other words, while I believe that Smith is entirely correct in concluding that “[t]here can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon” (282), I am left wondering if there can even be a social sense of “we” – whether the “we” denotes a group of scholars who study religion theologically, humanistically, or even social scientifically or, more importantly perhaps, a group of people who think they share deep-seated, non-empirical commonalities capable of minimizing their obvious, empirical differences – without the concept religion and the self/state complexes it makes possible. The Discipline of Religion, then, connotes both an institutional site of intellectual toil as well as the practical effects of the concept itself, effects that make possible certain forms of political organization and selfconstitution.

In stressing this wider, disciplining effect of homogenous form over supposedly free-floating, pre-social, competing content or meaning (with this chapter’s epigraph in mind, one might go so far as to maintain that content [e.g., text] follows form [e.g., context]) I think both of the late Marshall McLuhan’s wellknown and oft-repeated dictum, “The medium is the message,” as well as Frits Staal’s more recent conclusion that Vedic ritual (indeed, ritual per se) is meaningless, patterned activity (1989; cited in McCutcheon 2001b: 205, 209–210) that takes on meaning only in hindsight. As Staal concludes, rituals are not about anything(i.e., they have no referential meaning or content); if they signify anything at all, it is simply following the rules (form) properly. Meaning is thus a hindsight production and more importantly perhaps, an inherently contestable concoction. Meanings are social artifacts, the tips of changeable and long since past worlds. As the journalist Christopher Hitchens concludes in his criticism of Churchill, “the thing is not to be right about Shakespeare. The thing is to be Shakespearean.”

This alternative approach can be applied throughout culture studies, ensuring that the critic’s gaze consistently falls on what Roland Barthes once termed “that which goes without saying” – the constraints within which meaning can be made to happen – rather than on the search for meanings or what the participants say about their own meanings. To make the point, take the example of a popular song which flirts with the issue of structure and meaning: Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 hit, “Born in the U.S.A.” The first two verses read:

• Born down in a dead man’s town
  The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
  You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
  Till you spend half your life just covering up

• Born in the U.S.A.
  I was born in the U.S.A.
  I was born in the U.S.A.
  Born in the U.S.A.

• Got in a little hometown jam
  So they put a rifle in my hand
  Sent me off to a foreign land
  To go and kill the yellow man

• Born in the U.S.A.
  I was born in the U.S.A.
  I was born in the U.S.A.
  I was born in the U.S.A.
  Born in the U.S.A.
  

For some listeners, it is difficult to hear this song’s simple, hard-hitting chorus – repeating “Born in the U.S.A.” to the steady, lone drum beat – as anything but a celebration of unbridled national pride. This reading is confirmed when you take into account the album cover, picturing in the foreground a white t-shirt and jean-clad man – presumably Springsteen himself – from behind, with a red ball cap sticking out of his back pocket and the U.S. flag’s broad red and white stripes in the background. Perhaps this is why, as described by Chris McNulty, the song caught the attention of U.S. President Ronald Reagan – and/or his handlers – during his successful 1984 re-election campaign. As McNulty tells it, “On a campaign stop in New Jersey,” Reagan

cited a local hero named Bruce Springsteen, who had released a hugely popular rock album earlier in ’84 called Born in the U.S.A.“America’s future,” said Reagan, “rests in the message of hope, in the songs of a man that so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. Helping you make these dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about”. (“Reagan and the Record Business,” available in 2000 at http://users.drew.edu/~cmcnulty/)

Whether or not Reagan had actually heard the song is not really important. Given the rhetorical context inhabited by politicians, either he or one of his handlers clearly understood the meaning of this hit – and thus profit-producing – song: it is a “message of hope” in the American Dream. After all, what else could being born in the U.S.A. stand for? In the light of such a reading, the album cover thus bears an uncanny resemblance to George C. Scott’s wellknown film portrayal of the U.S. General George S. Patton, addressing troops with an enormous U.S. flag in the background.

Well, as might be expected, McNulty finds a rather different meaning/reference in the song, derived largely from his reading of its verses’ content, not the chorus’s catchy hook.³

While Reagan may have been correct in commenting on Springsteen’s popularity, his remark on Springsteen’s “message of hope” was way off target, as his music contained no such message. However, Reagan was not alone in this error, and the popularity of Bruce Springsteen had as much to do with the nationalist fervor encompassing the nation as it did with the content of his music.

Although I appreciate this one writer’s attempt to interpret the song, and thus explain its success in light of larger structural factors (e.g., resurgent U.S. nationalism in the mid-1980s), what catches my eye in the above statement is his claim that Reagan had misread the song. Reagan’s reading was “way off target” he says, for the song “contained no such message” of hope. Reagan and others were simply wrong in hearing the song as they did. In a similar vein was the Chicago Sun-Times rock critic, Richard Roeper, who wrote:

Is it even worth trying one more time to point out that, while Springsteen indeed has written and performed songs about his love for this country, his most famous anthem, “Born in the U.S.A.,” was not the jingoistic parade anthem Ronald Reagan’s people claimed it to be, but a heartbreaking, lungripping wail of anguish from a disillusioned Vietnam veteran.

(2000)

So, what do we have here? On the one hand there is a “jingoistic parade anthem,” and on the other there is “a heartbreaking, lung-ripping wail of anguish.” On the one hand we have strong allusions to General Patton and on the other we have a disillusioned Vietnam vet parading his ass in front of the flag. Despite the distance between these two readings, in both cases it comes down to a matter of politics and hermeneutics and, whether you acknowledge it or not, you simply pick the reading that accords with your previously held interests. “To each their own,” “There’s no accounting for taste,” and “Live and let live” thus become the mottos of social groups intent on containing these essentially unmanageable and arbitrary interpretive and political differences.

Unless we, as supposedly enlightened liberal intellectuals, are willing to assume that Reagan’s handlers were, well, let’s be honest, complete morons, we must change our gaze and try to account for how the benign arrangements of words and sounds can take on such divergent meanings. Rather than thumping our chests with national pride while singing along with, say, John Mellencamp when, at a mid-October 2001 concert to raise funds for victims of the September 11, 2001, air attacks on New York City, he sang his 1983 hit, “Pink Houses,” we could instead be asking how it is that a song which includes verses that certainly appear to lament the lack of opportunities for many inner city blacks, the plight of women in dead-end marriages, as well as the apparently fleeting, if not outrightly misguided, dream that anyone can indeed grow up to be president could be sung (almost twenty years after it was written) as a rousing, nationalist anthem for the working classes. The apparent irony was all the more profound when the television cameras panned by the crowd attending the concert, as it enthusiastically joined Mellencamp in singing the song's final words which, in another context, would be difficult to hear as anything but a stinging indictment of the crowd itself – of how the very people who suffer from domestic economic and political policies are also the ones who continually pay the costs for the state's military conquests. The easily found pessimism, even cynicism, of the lyrics meant little to the cheering audience of simple, working...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The discipline of religion
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface: A dispatch from the provinces
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Genealogy of credibility
• Part 2: Techniques of dominance
• Part 3: Reworking the residue from our imperfect past
• Afterword
• References