The Burnt Over Era

Just a few years ago, faced with mounting evidence of the inadequacy of classical theories of secularization, scholars were struggling to understand and theorize the “return of religion,” something represented, on the one hand by movements on the political and cultural Left such as liberation theology and the New Age and, on the other hand, by movements on the Right such as Christian and Islamic fundamentalism.  This “return of religion” has been the occasion of numerous theoretical innovations, from deconstructionist Acts of Religion and “weak theologies” of the sort undertaken by the late Derrida, Badiou, Zizek, Agamben, and Caputo through the very different critiques of secularism (different from deconstructionism and from each other) mounted by John Milbank and myself.  It is not without interest, therefore, that the WIN-Gallup International “Religion and Atheism Index” shows a drop of 9 percentage points in the number of people globally who regard themselves as “religious” (from 77% to 68%) between 2005 and 2012, as well as an increase of 3 percentage points in the number who consider themselves “atheists.”

 

There are, to be sure, numerous problems with such studies, which, among other things, shed no light at all on what people mean when they say they are “religious” (or not). And of course being religious and believing in God are two quite different things. Nor does the survey address the widespread phenomenon of people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” This said, I am inclined to believe that the data point to something real, something which I have sensed diffusely over the course of the past six or seven years. People are tired. They are tired of being preached at and judged and manipulated politically by religious leaders who claim to offer a solution to the crisis of modern, secular civilization but who in reality offer no such thing, and are simply exploiting their longing for meaning and their spiraling despair. And this is true both on the cultural left and on the cultural right and is reflected across most of humanity’s great spiritual traditions, if perhaps most intensely in Christianity and Islam (where the “return of religion” was most evident).

 

There are a number of reasons which might be cited for this change in mood. The first, of course, is the “new atheist” offensive of people like Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, and Hitchens. This seems unlikely, however. The new atheism is intellectually thin and misses the fact that religion asks different questions than science (why? rather than how?), a fact that this is admittedly also lost on most fundamentalists. At most the new atheism has made it a bit more difficult for scientists to engage religion (partially countering the very large religion and science literature produced mostly by scientists during the immediately preceding period, much of which was intellectually sloppy), challenging them to rally to the defense of more or less established scientific results, such as evolution. But this is, in my experience, largely a phenomenon of biology and has had much less effect in physics, which was always the center of the religion/science dialogue.

 

More relevant, I think, is the gradual recognition on the part of the people of the scope and depth of the sex abuse scandal in the planet’s largest single religious institution, the Roman Catholic Church.  It is no longer possible to deny that the sexual abuse of children, if not universal, is at least pandemic in the Catholic Church and deeply bound up with longstanding patterns of recruitment and initiation into the priesthood and religious communities of men.  It is not that all or most or even very many Catholic priests are pedophiles; it is that so many who are not have tolerated or even been drawn into practices which are universally abhorred by every or nearly every tradition on the planet, including their own. And this dynamic is, in turn, deeply bound up with the misogyny support for which the party in power in the Vatican has made the condition for continued communion with Rome.

 

And the crisis of the Roman Catholic Church is the crisis of every religious institution. Catholicism has cooked up its own particularly potent psychosexual brew, but it has no monopoly on misogyny or psychosexual abuse. The crisis of Rome can only draw attention to the extent to which Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism and so much of the rest of the religious right is about oppressing women.

 

This is not, however, sufficient by itself to explain the turn away from the return of religion. Coming from a Sicilian family I was raised, in significant measure, within an anticlerical milieu which was founded as much or more on the clergy’s reputation for sexual misconduct as on any political or philosophical considerations. My parents monitored my relationships with priests carefully and investigated any lingering in the sacristy during my tenure as an altar boy as carefully as they would have a similar lingering in a public restroom in a seedy neighborhood. Many of my relatives had nothing to do with the institutional church except at rite of passage ceremonies. Others, like my father, made their peace with it, but never lost a skepticism that seemed directed exclusively at priests as opposed to specific doctrines or devotions. But even those who kept away from churches entirely were deeply religious, their homes filled with statues of the Virgin and the lives with private devotions. Or perhaps it would be better to say that they were “spiritual but not religious” avant le mot.

 

And it is not like the recognition of religious misogyny is either new or the private monopoly of the militantly secular. On the contrary, the most penetrating critics of religious misogyny (e.g. Mary Daly) have themselves been feminist theologians and much of the spiritual awakening of the past few decades has centered around the recovery of the feminine expressions of the sacred.

 

The scandal in the Catholic Church –and its official reaffirmation of its commitment to misogyny—along with parallel developments in other traditions has catalyzed some significant withdrawal from engagement with religious institutions. But I doubt very much that it has affected spirituality or religiosity at a deeper level.

 

A third explanation for the turn away from the “return of religion” is the fact that first the political movements of the religious left (e.g. liberation theology) and now the political movements of the religious right (Christian fundamentalism and Islamism) have been more or less soundly defeated. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the crisis of the socialism deprived the liberationist trend of the strategic reserve it needed to mount a credible contest for power and thus undercut the eschatological fervor which drove the movement in between, say 1968 and 1985. Being effectively silenced by Rome, and accepting the silencing, didn’t help. And it is increasingly clear that the efforts of al Qaeda and the like are not going to lead to a restored Caliphate leading a united Dar-al-Islam in commanding right and forbidding wrong through the world.

 

Or have they been defeated? There is, in fact, evidence that they have met a worse fate still: modest, incremental success.  Liberationists of one stripe or another, or leaders sympathetic to them, govern more countries now (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, and until recently Paraguay), on the basis of more or less free elections, than they had any reason to believe they could  take and hold by insurrection or popular war in 1980. And electoral Islamism of various stripes is proving itself quite effective in the wake of the Arab Spring, building on its success in Turkey.

 

The problem is governing.  People embraced liberation theology and Islamism because they had rejected the modern, secular ideals of deification by means of scientific and technological progress or the construction of a collective political subject and sought to re-situate the human civilizational project in a broader spiritual context which could at once ground their innerworldly aspirations for social justice and point beyond them towards authentic transcendence.  But governments do not create new civilizational ideals, much less a “new humanity.” At their best, they carry out land reforms and build roads and schools and clinics and create the conditions for economic development. If need be they defend their countries against aggression and oppression. At worst they shamelessly serve as the henchmen of the already wealthy, leverage political power to create private wealth, imprison and torture dissidents and occasionally carry out genocides. The only thing more disappointing than military defeat at the hands of the Empire is modest success at the polling place and a resulting obligation to meet eschatological expectations with mundane public policy initiatives.

 

This disappointment takes a particular form for the Christian fundamentalism which has been so influential in the United States. For three decades now the Republican Party has relied on the militance of Christian fundamentalists of various stripes who have worked the precincts for them, literally and figuratively, in the expectation that, once in power, they would outlaw abortion, draw a firm line against gay marriage, and in general save them from the chaos and social disintegration of late modernity. This group remains powerful enough that it is essentially impossible to win the Republican nomination for any major office outside of Maine without passing their (increasingly stringent) litmus tests. But in spite of many years of Republican government, abortion remains legal, the cause of gay marriage continues to advance, and the world is as frightening and chaotic as ever (at least to those who found it so in the first place).  The core of the religious right has responded by calling the bluff of increasingly more conservative “mainstream” Republicans, so that the people they are now targeting (e.g. Richard Lugar) are the very people who came to power on the first iteration of the social conservative strategy in the late 19060s and early 1970s. Opposing abortion is no longer enough. One must promise to outlaw contraception as well.  But in the process the religious right has scared its base, which is looking for stability and security, not upheaval.

 

Another way of looking at this is to say that the changes which the “return of religion” in both its left and right forms proposed to forestall have now largely taken place. The global market is triumphant. Another wave of peasants have been ripped off the land and thrown or lured into the cities.  Nation states and national cultures have been weakened, as have traditional institutions such as marriage. But the world has not come to an end. Second generation liberationists manage the integration of their economies into the global market, making at most a few modifications in the terms of trade. Next gen evangelicals, much to their parents’ dismay, are fine with gay marriage and can’t really understand what all the fuss is about. Whatever one thinks about these changes, one can only remain enraged for so long. Eventually you adapt or die or both.

 

The “turn away from the return of religion” is, from this point of view, just a very ordinary case of eschatological disappointment.

 

But is this all that is going on? Does the weakness of the ideologies of the “return” (again, both on the left and right) consist exclusively in the eschatological, or at any rate unreasonable political expectations that they created among their constituencies?

 

I think that the reality is, in fact, more complex. As I have argued elsewhere, humanity is in the early stages of a civilizational crisis. The modern secular ideal of transcending finitude and/or contingency by means of innerworldly civilizational progress (an ideal which is secular because it is innerworldly, but also spiritual or religious in the sense of ordering humanity towards a transcendental end) has largely been rejected, but nothing has emerged to take its place. Both liberationism and fundamentalism are ideologies of the earliest and, I think, now largely past stages of this crisis. Catholic liberationism, in its founding text, Gaudium et Spes, attempted to situate innerworldly civilizational progress in the context of a larger transhistorical vocation: participation in the life of God. Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and dao xue liberationisms, such as they were, attempted something similar with respect to their own specific understandings of humanity’s final end and highest Good. In this sense, liberationism really did represent an attempt to transcend modern humanistic and positivistic secularism and achieve a higher synthesis. But in practice, as Roger Lancaster pointed out in his 1987 book Thanks to God and the Revolution, it functioned as a linking ideology, binding social strata that were resisting or seeking to transcend modernity to what was essentially a still unreconstructed modern, secular, socialist project. That is not to say that nothing good came out of, or is currently coming out of, the regimes the movement helped create. On the contrary. But where people thought they were getting something radically new –a society ordered to the full development of their latent potential, rather than to using them as batteries to fuel economic development, instead they got a somewhat better deal as batteries.

 

The situation with fundamentalism is rather different. While it is a commonplace that fundamentalism is antimodern, as I have indicated elsewhere I do not believe that this is the case. Fundamentalism, rather, represents an attempt to return to early modern civilizational patterns centered on the ideal of divine sovereignty. It is an attempt to invoke this ideal as a replacement to the failed ideals of human political and technological sovereignty. This is why there is no Buddhist fundamentalism, in the strict sense (no God, no fundamentalism) and why Hindu fundamentalism is rather weak. But early modernity’s focus on divine sovereignty dissipated for a reason. Democracy and the market order both undercut the basis in experience for a single, univocal sovereign God. And while it might, at first, seem more meaningful to serve as a battery for God than for a large corporation or party-state, what people really want is not to be treated like batteries.

 

So what does this all imply, especially for those of us who have been a part of the “return of religion,” who reject not only theories of secularization but secularism as a civilizational ideal?

 

Let us begin by making it clear that religion did not, in fact, return, because it never really went away. Secularism, as we have noted above, is an attempt to transcend finitude and contingency by innerworldly means. If one wants to call this a spirituality, rather than a religion, that is fine, but various religions, in the sense of structures and institutions ordered to achieving this end accompanied the spirituality (Capitalism, Socialism). Pitting itself against religion was part of secularism’s way of concealing its real identity as innerworldly godbuilding. We might, to be sure, object that “late” modern or “postmodern” secularism is different, and itself represents first and foremost a rejection of the modernist godbuilding metanarrative. But when it is extended into a rigorous deconstruction of all metanarratives (itself just a generalization of Marx’s commitment to “a rigorous critique of everything existing”), it terminates, as the late Derrida demonstrated, in the undeconstructible, the demand for Justice which is just another name (Israel’s name, to be precise) for God.

 

Spirituality and religion, furthermore, will never go away. Being human means, as Sartre put it years ago, (noisome atheist that he was) the desire to be God. Even if we conclude that this is impossible, (as do Buddhists and existentialists) we must come to terms with that conclusion in the light of the underlying aim. And we seek God, or come to terms with God’s absence or impossibility, through definite structures and institutions. When people say that they are spiritual but not religious they are simply marking the beginning of a civilizational crisis. They are still seeking to transcend finitude and contingency, or to come to terms with the impossibility of doing so. It is just that no existing traditions or institutions provide them with a satisfying way. And so they window shop or free lance or seek using a private and idiosyncratic discipline.

 

This said, what I call the current Burnt Over Era offers us very precise lessons. The term (originally Burnt Over District), for those not familiar with it, is due to Charles Grandison Finney, founder of Christian perfectionism and sometime president of Oberlin College, who used it to describe conditions in Western New York in the 1830s, after so many revivals and reform movements had been through that there was no one left to convert. More broadly the term marks the profound disappointment which accompanied the realization that the visionary spiritual and civilizational project of the Second Great Awakening, after years of revival and reform and Civil War, led ultimately just to modern industrial capitalism. And this, of course, was the matrix out of which Christian fundamentalism (which rejected the identification of Kingdom building and civilization building in favor of a pessimistic premillenial eschatology) was first born.

 

If we are to respond effectively to the spiritual searching represented by the so called “return of religion,” and by the growing numbers who describe themselves as “spiritual” even as they distance themselves from “religion,” then we need to offer something which is authentically different from the modern secular ideal which makes human beings into batteries. This means situating innerworldly civilizational progress in a broader spiritual context, to be sure. But it also means redefining innerworldly civilizational progress in a way which makes it fundamentally about human development, technological, economic, political, and cultural but also and most importantly spiritual. We must, in other words stop using spiritual authority to advance innerworldly ends, and begin to organize and reorganize this world in a way that actually cultivates human excellence. Just what this means, of course, depends on how we answer some of the most fundamental questions which divide humanity’s great spiritual traditions. But I suspect that at least some of the answers will come as those traditions engage each other, thinking together about how to articulate the “innerworldly” (e.g. the demand for Justice) and the “otherworldly” (the pursuit of an Enlightenment which carries us beyond ordinary humanity) in a way which makes neither merely an instrument of the other.

 

Subsequent articles will explore this question in greater depth. It is, in fact, one of the principal aims of the Convivencia theology which I will introduce in this space shortly. In the meantime I invite continued dialogue.