Contemporary Religiosities

Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation-State

Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, Annelin Eriksen, Bruce Kapferer, Kari Telle, Annelin Eriksen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857455345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The last decade has seen an unexpected return of the religious, and with it the creation of new kinds of social forms alongside new fusions of political and religious realms that high modernity kept distinct. For a fuller understanding of what this means for society in the context of globalization, it is necessary to rethink the relationship between the religious and the secular; the contributors - all leading scholars in anthropology - do just that, some even arguing that secularization itself now takes a religious form. Combining theoretical reflection with vivid ethnographic explorations, this essential collection is designed to advance a critical understanding of social and personal religious experience in today's world.

Chapter 1

THE POLITICS OF CONVICTION

Faith on the Neo-liberal Frontier

Jean Comaroff

The sacred, it seems, is becoming ever more prominent in profane places. Like the message beside a highway to Sun City, northwest of Johannesburg, reading “Jesus is the answer” in large, uneven letters, or the image of the Virgin Mary that revealed itself to construction workers in Chicago on a damp afternoon in April 2005.¹ The workers had been repairing a concrete underpass on the Kennedy Expressway, one of the city's busiest thoroughfares.² Fanned by avid television reportage from across the country, the news spread, and soon hundreds of people had gathered, wreathing the image with flowers and votive candles. Yet the gentle spirit evoked surprisingly strong emotions: watchful police were unable to prevent nocturnal vandals from scrawling the words “Big Lie” across her sepia visage.³ When the city fathers ordered the whole expanse to be covered in plain brown paint, her features shone through again, as if to confirm the irrepressible presence of the divine, even in the most inhospitable of locales. Such apparitions are hardly unprecedented, especially in popular Catholic culture. However, until recently, events of this sort have been less visibly a feature of mainstream public life in the US and in other contexts that are predominantly Protestant. But times are ‘a-changing’. In 2004, a toasted sandwich bearing the face of the Virgin fetched $28,000 on e-Bay.⁴ Soon after, a pro-life passion play that centered on hapless coma patient Terri Schiavo⁵ took control of the American mass media, refashioning Schiavo as a middle-aged fetus threatened by liberal abortionists and others willing to flout the letter of divine law (see J. L. Comaroff, this volume). The fervor spurred an effort in the US Congress to overrule the sovereignty of the courts, which, after due deliberation, had decided that Schiavo's existence on life-support machines should be brought to an end.

Like the ‘manifestation on the motorway’, these events underline the extent to which—amid ever more audible worldwide commitment to market rationalization—a new religious realism, whether in Pentecostal or Latin shape, is pervading mundane American life. Efforts to propel ‘creationism’ onto school syllabi in the South in the guise of ‘intelligent design’ have been accompanied by ‘born-again’ pastors issuing fatwahs against foreign heads of state. As the ‘Religious Right’ became a tangible influence on politics in the early twenty-first century, government itself resorted more overtly to the language of divine imperative. Theologico-politics, a concern of crusading seventeenth-century rationalists including Spinoza ([1670] 1883), is once again a lively reality. Returned, too, is early nineteenth-century “Christian Political Economy” (Norman 1976: 41), making cheerful fellowship with the spirit of neo-liberal capitalism: mass-merchandised hamburgers now come wrapped in biblical homilies, and Starbucks coffee cups have been graced with quotations from best-selling pastors like Rick Warren (Cave 2005). The Christian exercise chain, Lord's Gym, promises to build body and soul—without compromising a properly “Christian atmosphere” (Schippert 2003). Its logo is a pumped-up Jesus, bench-pressing a huge cross under the message “His Pain Your Gain.” Muscular Christianity is upon us, in unabashedly literal form. The erotic is also close to the surface.⁶ The aim is to turn you on—to the Passion of the Savior. Music that is simultaneously devout and brimming with worldly desire floods the pop charts. And Hollywood becomes Holywood as the likes of Mel Gibson re-present the Savior's suffering with the graphic hyper-realism of the action movie (Scott 2005).

Despite its vibrancy, much of this is not all that new. Faith has never been separate from commerce: “Jesus taught in the temple and the marketplace,” notes Starbucks’s Pastor Rick; nineteenth-century Italian wine merchants sought papal endorsements (Cave 2005); and Victorian Methodist missionaries deployed commodities and mass-marketing techniques to promote God's Word at home and abroad (J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff 1997: 168f.). Nor are we witnessing a simple growth in religious observance: recent US surveys report that despite all this evangelical activity, the numbers of those who profess no faith are also on the rise.⁷ We may well be caught up in the consequences of an epochal religious revival—Robert Fogel (2000) has controversially termed it the “Fourth Great Awakening”—but revitalizations of one kind or another have occurred repeatedly over the centuries. Nor is it even an matter of religion having ‘gone public’ in unprecedented ways, reconfiguring received definitions of the sacred and the secular with the rise of ever more state-like, faith-based institutions. Despite its protestations to the contrary, modernity never was truly disenchanted. This is less a matter of its revered institutions having taken on the status of sacred forms, as writers like Schmitt (1985) have argued. For while they may have been hallowed, these institutions were also assertively secular. It is more that, despite all this, as Asad (2003: 5) insists, religion proper has not actually been absent from the public life of most modern nation-states, although its precise place within them may have varied. Thus, while the British state has been linked to the established church, its population has been relatively irreligious—the reverse of the situation in the US.

The issue is that, amid a flourishing of confessions of all types, the hegemony of liberal humanism—what Asad (2003: 13) terms “the modern project”—has been assertively brought into question in recent times, largely in the name of revealed truths and divine imperatives. In some places, these confrontations have been explicitly framed as challenges to prevailing notions of the secular; thus, the prolific pre-millennialist pastor Tim LaHaye (1980) attacks the ‘hubris’ of liberal humanism, in so many words. But dissent often emerges as a less overt shift in sensibility, a loss of faith in key tenets of modernist ontology—like the taken-for-granted reality of the ‘social’ or the axiom that truth, morality, and progress flow from human action under evolving historical conditions (cf. Harding 1994). There is, in fact, an ever more audible appeal, both popular and scholarly, to absolutist truths. Nor is this limited to Pentecostals, those ‘born again’ through direct experience of God by means of baptism in the Holy Spirit. Benedict XVl, described by one critic as “a 14th century pope with a 21st century communications network” (Monbiot 2005: 31; cf. Flores d'Arcais 2006), put it like this: “We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism, which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires” (Monbiot 2005: 31). From this perspective, claims that norms may vary across time and space are a dangerous delusion, a slippery slope to meaninglessness, solipsism, and a Hobbesian state of nature. A deep suspicion of hermeneutics, of contextual understanding, and of the recognition of difference is shared by foundationalists across a range of creeds. They link in form, if not in content, to the concerns of other opponents of liberal humanism, from political neoconservatives to market fundamentalists. The latter are also partial to declaring the end of history and the treachery of philosophy, preferring a putatively literal reading of the law from pulpit and bench (Crapanzano 2000).

A related aspect of revitalized faith—no less in tension with the modernist project—is the growing salience of revelation as a legitimate basis for knowledge, action, and the definition of worldly space and time. Zionist settlers embrace their messianic mission with a zeal rivaled only by the youthful Muslim martyrs who seek to actualize their own sacred calling on the same terrain. Likewise, there is a host of other born-again believers across the world who suspend ‘free’ choice when acting on their convictions, manifesting a form of selfhood that is different from the idealized, deliberative Kantian subject considered by many as being at the core of modern rationalism (cf. Hansen 2007). Foundational texts and prophetic callings speak to a quest for absolute sovereignty, an unquestioned basis for law and order, and a fixed correspondence between signs and referents, all of which are seriously undermined by current social conditions.

But these revivified faiths do more than merely question from below the tenets of liberal modernist knowing and being. They aim, also, to counter the institutional arrangements that have embodied this ontology in its various, historically rooted forms: the arrangements canonized in the Euro-modern nationstate, with its putatively neutral public civil domain, clearly separated from the realm of private commitment and belief. Revitalized Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and nativist movements have all striven, if in distinctive ways, to reconstitute the order of things, to challenge the authority and neutrality of state law and the secularism of the market (J. L. Comaroff, this volume). Many late-modern faiths work to unify the fragmented realms and plural cultural registers of liberal modern societies, seeking to recover the profane reaches of everyday existence as instruments of divine purpose. Commerce, government, education, the media, and popular arts—nothing seems too trivial or debased to offer grist to the spiritual mill. The task, according to Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, is to put “God-in-everything,” so “anything-can-be-holy” (Newton 2006).

This impetus has special salience in an age of widespread deregulation. At a time when, under the sway of neo-liberal policies, many states have relinquished significant responsibility for schooling, health, and welfare—in short, for the social reproduction of their citizens—religious organizations have willingly reclaimed this role. It is a role that, in some places, they never fully lost to the grand disciplinary institutions of the welfare state. The recent expansion of faith-based social services has challenged the separation of powers that underlay the ideals, if not always the practices, of most twentieth-century liberal democracies. These days, the life of the spirit extends ever more tangibly to profane realms beyond the space of the sanctuary and the time of worship, heralding a significant reorganization of the modernist social order as a whole.

In fact, organized religion has made a vital place for itself in the world of politics, the market, and the mass media. Even more, it tends to take on their work, evincing a shift from the division of institutional labor that is described in signal modernist accounts, like those of Durkheim ([1893] 1947) and Weber (1930). This fact is made graphically evident by the large, luxurious mega-churches that flourish on the new frontiers of the post-industrial economy in the American West, where they are held to constitute new town squares and “surrogate governments” (Mahler 2005). Here Pentecostals deliberately blur received distinctions to encompass diverse reaches of secular life—business, schooling, day care, athletic facilities, counseling, gourmet dining. The pastor of one such center is quite up front about hitching God's business to the ordinary wants of the world: “If Oprah and Dr. Phil are doing it, why shouldn't we?…We want the church to look like a mall. We want you to come in and say, ‘Dude, where's the cinema?’” (ibid.: 33). Said a South African counterpart: “It might sound heretical, but we strive above all to make our services exciting, affecting. Our competition, after all, is the video arcade, the movie house, and the casino.”⁸

Pentecostal holism is even more vibrant in the global south, where it resonates with forms of spiritual pragmatism that were never really captured by Protestant orthodoxy. What Paul Jenkins (2002: 3) terms the “New Christian Revolution” is centered in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which together have a growing majority of the estimated 2.6 billion Christians worldwide. Evangelical Pentecostal churches are said to attract almost 20 million new members a year, having emerged as the major competitor of Catholicism, which is itself becoming markedly more charismatic (Nixon 2003). Here, too, it is not merely that faith-based initiatives are expanding, that their culture of revelation is having a major impact on ordinary understandings of self, identity, politics, and history. These movements are assuming a widening array of civic responsibilities, especially where state sovereignty has been compromised for one reason or another.

The mass media have played a vital role in extending the reach of faith in the world, not just because they radically amplify the scale, speed, and directness of its address, but because they have become integral to the way that revelation stages itself. To a large extent, the media have come to shape the very form in which the sacred is witnessed, especially in the growing number of so-called electronic churches across the planet (see Smith 2004). Recall here the quip about Pope Benedict's communications network (cf. Rajagopal 2001 on Hindu revitalization). Of course, the media have been used to spread the Word since the advent of the printing press, and evangelists in Africa and elsewhere have long been avid users of novel means of communication, from magic lanterns to movies. At the same time, the reach of popular religious broadcasting today seems unprecedented. In Africa, transnational Evangelical and Muslim groups (Hackett forthcoming; Meyer 2002, 2004; Schulz 2007) are taking advantage of the deregulation of state media to build broadcast enterprises that have a powerful impact on the circulation of images and the creation of subjects and publics. The means of communication in general are ever more under the control of faith-based corporations on the continent, and religious actors conduct a growing proportion of media-related business, from paid religious programming to Pentecostal videocassettes, gospel CDs, and tapes conveying the baraka of sheikhs (Soares 2004).

Religious vernaculars are also colonizing popular culture. In the huge West African video industry, best exemplified by Nigeria's ‘Nollywood’, movies range from crime dramas to witchcraft horror, but most tend to project a ‘Pentecostalite’ worldview in which the surreal meets the supernatural Meyer 2004). In Latin America, the airing of glossy, camera-ready spectacles on hightech neo-Pentecostal channels is said to be infusing the production values of televangelical drama with an understanding of local rites, for example, exorcisms (see Smith 2004). Similarly, in Africa local ritual practice is being significantly affected by these electronic genres: in South Africa's rural northwest, healers offer Internet and television divinations, while Pentecostal leaders urge followers to ‘download’ Jesus into their lives. In 2005, a Brazilian preacher told an audience of hundreds in the gleaming new Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in central Cape Town: “When the film credits roll at the end of your life, they will not acknowledge the South African government. They will thank us at the Universal Church.”

This creativity and exuberance defy easy explanation. The qualities displayed by revitalized faiths are both old and new, uniform and diverse, global and thoroughly domesticated. Movements of this kind, whether Christian or Muslim, hardly exhaust the contemporary religious terrain. But older, established denominations that tend to question their values and motives have also had to respond to the stunning effectiveness of their modus operandi and their seemingly irrepressible appeal, especially among the young. While there appears to be an elective affinity between Pentecostalism and the unruly vitality of economic liberalization, its style of pragmatic preaching has roots reaching back to the ‘positive thinking’ fostered by Christian Science in the late nineteenth century and to the ‘name it and claim it’ Word-Faith (now called the ‘Rhema’ doctrine), first popularized by Kenneth Hagen of the Assemblies of God in Texas in the 1930s (Albrecht 1999). What is more, while often associated with ‘free-market faith’, not all Pentecostals worship at the shrine of prosperity. Dubbed “the conscience of evangelical Christianity,” the Trinity Foundation of East Dallas “wages a fervent war against televangelism and what it terms the ‘Gospel of Greed’” (Bilger 2004: 70). Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, too literal a faith in the power of belief to produce riches sometimes puts Pentecostals at odds with the actual workings of market enterprise. This was the case with respect to ‘Miracle 2000’, a South African pyramid scheme whose born-again founder promised a 220 percent return on investments in 42 days. The promise drew crowds from across the land to the founder's East Rand home. When the police cracked down on the scheme, hundreds of outraged believers marched on the High Court in Pretoria to demand the release of their “Messiah,” carrying placards that read “Do My Prophet No Harm” (Bokaba 2000).

How can we explain the exuberant growth of ‘new Christianity’ in these times? What are its continuities with—and breaks from—the past? Talal Asad (2003) has argued that the process of defining the space of the secular has been essential to the modern state and its mode of governance. But how might we account for the widespread popular impetus, in the early twenty-first-century world, to redefine the place of religion in the civic order? How exactly have nat...