Subjectivity, Text, Interpretation, and Faith

This is a letter I wrote to someone dear to me after s/he asked about my faith, with only a little editing. Edits will be inside brackets.

 

“Hey [person who is dear to me]

Thanks for opening up what I think can be a fruitful dialogue. I’m composing this for you as well as for me so I can put down some thoughts […].

The subject line [‘Subjectivity, Text, Interpretation, Faith’] shows in an abstract way how I think we arrive at faith. Children are not born religious or really anything. The faith that they accumulate or don’t comes from life experience. Subjectivity in my model includes all that goes into making a person: habits, decisions, mistakes, parents, thoughts, relationships, abuse/acceptance, bodies, societies, communities, wars, money, education, livelihood, hobbies, etc. I wouldn’t say any one of these things are necessarily more important than any other [after further reflection, I find some of those elements far more influential than others] in self-formation; selves are an amalgam of things that become more or less stable over time.

We bring all (or sometimes only parts depending on how integrated we are as persons) of ourselves to the texts that we read. Based on our experiences we can reject or accept things in texts rather quickly. At other times there are texts that give one pause, particularly if they are eloquent, beautiful, jarring, peculiar, or any combination of these things. If I read a headline, I bring a political bent, previous thinking, as well as openness to the text at hand. More often than not it goes out of my mind by the next day because of the nature of that genre of text. Texts such as the Bible, which contain rich layers of genre and human interest, I […] give more time to.

When I told you today that I hadn’t really touched a Bible that much in a while, unless for class, [it] is because I have spent a lot of time […] ruminating over various passages. Some of these textual interactions have been with me since I was a boy: humans are special (image of God; even if I am probably more of an agnostic now, this value has continued to develop in me even after I left tradition), we are built for community and owe to our communities (brother’s keeper, not good for [hu]man[s] to be alone; the owing of ourselves to our communities is a more recent development), redemption (not so much in an orthodox understanding, but in a narrative sense, I have experienced redemption after Sarah’s and my relationship became better). Things that have moved me beyond reconciliation with evangelicalism (if one assumes inerrancy an integral part of that label): patriarchy as divinely ordained[…], death penalties for trivial things (blasphemy, sorcery, men having sex with men [note the lack of the same standard for women!- original brackets], Sabbath breaking [technically one is to be cut off from the people, but that’s essentially a death sentence in that context- original brackets]), proclivity to war, authoritarianism, embeddedness in monarchy and empire, the concept of messianism, the injustice of [substitutionary] atonement theory, racism/ethnocentrism, slavery, and choosing ambiguities of faith over certainties of reason (particularly when the two are in conflict).

On interpretation, I see it as organically springing from our persons as described above. We can be trained in various interpretive models–the more traditional ones that involve history, language, syntax, and sociology–or more avant guard [hehe, avant-garde] ones like feminist, queer, post-colonial, ideological/Marxist, reader-response, deconstruction, economic, and African-American (this could probably fit entirely under post-colonial approaches). The more avant guard [again, avant-garde] ones call into question the traditional historical-critical approach that understood there to be one inherent meaning per text. Scholars such as Dale Martin have demonstrated that when two scholars beholden to the same historical-critical methods approached one text, they arrived at diametrically opposed conclusions.

Probably where I fit in interpretation is synthetic. I think we have to make use of the building blocks of history, language, and syntax (kind of the historical-critical school in a nutshell) but texts tend not to just sit there as “fully interpreted” if we stop at “this verb means this in such and such tense when followed by the definite article in Hebrew and when used by the leader of a family household.” If that’s what it meant for such a person, what, if anything, has that to do with me? That question involves what I call the gap. There is a vast chasm between ancient literature and myself, of time, language, and culture. I can fill in some of that, but inevitably I fill in with tools from my training, my community, and my life experience. This is why there’s no such thing as a commentary on the Bible without an author. There simply is no such thing as a biblical interpretation without human subjectivity involved. At all. Some are uncomfortable with this. When I came to this realization, it was preposterously disconcerting, especially since I was raised with the idea that the Bible is the only authoritative rule for faith and practice. If that’s the case, we’re screwed. Tons of traditions agree on the idea of inerrancy, but then claim that they have the right interpretation in the bag, regardless of how much diversity of opinion there ends up being.

If God/Jesus/Spirit ruled as a physical personage, we would know who the right and wrong were, for then they could settle the dispute! They’re [the trinity] conspicuously silent when I really need them to come through. We could have real loyalists and real rebels. As we have it, we have a lot of people grasping at straws about the unseen and then holding people accountable based on that unseen thing that some apparently have access to[,] but [which] I don’t to corroborate it. I get along quite well with people even if they accept this. It gets hard when it gets political[,] though [,] for then the innocuous belief becomes a concrete political option that makes or breaks communities.

From my religious studies training, I was exposed to the debate between idealism and materialism. All religions have elements of both: you’d call one theology and one ethics, or the immaterial and material. Because of where I’m at, I focus on the material. If the Bible says, “If a man lays with a man as with a woman, that is an abomination,” (it says something similar to this in Leviticus; I’m just going from memory) and in the other form of that passage it adds the death penalty, I’m going to stop and think a bit before I do something [about the] concrete passage. Even if we account for genre and time, that is still present in the inerrant text. If two men happen to pork each other, and they aren’t doing it in public or to children, I see no reason why they should be stoned, particularly since passages like this one give no reason for the ruling other than “God said” or a sacred text said so. Such arguments from authority simply don’t do anything for me anymore. If there is not a rational basis and God is perfect, that [text] couldn’t have been spoken by God, for then it would be associating irrationality or tyranny with God.

This is getting long. Suffice it to say, I have access to God/Jesus/Spirit solely through a text and the person of Monte I bring to that text. The ONLY thing that would change that would be if they were to speak for themselves. Short of that, we are all gods […] since we end up being the final arbiter of which texts we find authoritative and which ones we don’t.

Love you. Thanks for speaking with me about this and for letting me speak candidly with you.

Even though some of the statements above are put pretty bluntly, or maybe as if I am hardened to change, that is not the case. I am open to dialogue. Challenge me on things. Question me. Ask what my narrative has to do with my interpretation. Ask for clarification. Provide difference of opinion. And defend it.

Again, love you
Mont”

Why We Are So Frustrated in Political Conversations

After reading some of Terry Eagleton’s Ideology: An Introduction, I’m beginning to look at political discourse differently. Eagleton not only shows the breadth of peoples’ understanding of the term “ideology,” but also strategies used by their ideology.

Two strategies of ideology (let’s for the sake of discussion assume that ideology means something like 1) certain propositions are true, 2) certain narratives are taken as good explanations, and 3) these two assertions both fulfill certain desires or resolve emotions) I want to hone in on are universalization and naturalization. Universalization means something like understanding one’s own position not as one among many, or as sectarian, but simply that from which one can generalize. Universalization is thus closely associated with naturalization, for that which one takes as universal can easily move into the category “natural,” casting any aberration from this frame as “unnatural,” “innovative,” or in moral casting “wrong,” “evil,” or maybe seemingly neutral like “irrational.” Universalization requires the move of naturalization to establish itself, so that competing narratives are considered fantasies beyond the imaginable

So let’s take this topic of ideological strategies and see how it could cast light on interchanges among friends from very different political persuasions. For the record, when ideology gets thrown around, one usually hears it lobbed at one’s opponents as something “they have”; we are the rational ones. If we take a cue from the strategy of naturalization, this makes sense for marking social boundaries. Our ways are so familiar to us, that how could anyone look at the evidence we’re looking at and not come to our same conclusions? This is one of the unfortunate legacies of the Enlightenment, that information speaks for itself, obscuring that information is never neutral. It is always and ever collected, maintained, explained, and brought to bear for certain reasons. Another word for “reasons” that will make its ideological nature more apparent is to replace “reasons” with “interests.”

The very sources we take as authoritative and the interpretations of these sources we take as authoritative are not native to the sources/data themselves, but constitutive themselves of our social groups. Who are we but the sources we cherish and the values we tell ourselves we value, the conclusions of which we have derived from sources we have already picked? To put this more plainly, let’s assume two people are talking about Donald Trump. What is obviously/naturally great to one person is puzzling or even evil to another. I definitely see Trump one way, and it wouldn’t be hard to track down how I feel about him, but that attitude is the result of what sources I already buy into, the friends I cherish, the communities I am in solidarity with, and ways of assessing I take as legitimate. If these fundamental elements aren’t discussed overtly, is it any wonder how our “obvious” talking points go over the heads of our interlocutors or infuriate us because they don’t play by our rules, just as we don’t play by theirs?

What prompted this post was a discussion some of my close family and friends have had over Trump, a recent post on algorithms, and another post on the use of language. Burge, in his article on algorithms, found that there was a strong correlation between being evangelical and being Republican. I asked my friend who posted this that if these identities were as “fused” as they appeared, would a Republican (who also happened to be an evangelical) take a critique of her political views as an attack on his faith. If so, “dialogue” would probably be nigh impossible, nigh if we always keep our prior commitments obscured in discussion. However, I only came to Burge’s article after reading a post by Nongbri concerning the use of language and the communities which constitute the language. Rather than try to look at ways in which “others” distort meaning, he pays attention to the rhetoric employed by groups to establish a stable meaning in the first place. In other words, he doesn’t see meaning as stable at all as much as the social boundaries/indentifiers of particular groups.

So what of all this? Without understanding how groups work, how they include and exclude, how they construct their own boundaries and deconstruct that of others, “dialogue” will be next to impossible, if it ever is. If we don’t understand the ways in which others groups establish themselves, we are quite literally speaking different languages, living different lives, smelling different air, and seeing different people.

Link Wednesday 6: Mucho Feminism…and Some Sexuality, Too

This Link Wednesday, admittedly doesn’t have a lot of feminism, but it does comprise the majority of the links. Here we go.

1. “An Update on the Gay Debate: evolving ideas, untidy stories, and hopes for the church

Julie Rodgers
Julie Rodgers
Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan
Julie Rodgers was a “Ministry Associate for Spiritual Care” at Wheaton College until she resigned yesterday. She is a celibate gay Christian whose shift in view on same-sex marriage seems to have been the reason for her resignation. If you are not used to reading gay Christian perspectives, check out her blog. Another gay Christian voice to check out is Matt Vines at The Reformation Project.

In other religio-sexual news, Reza Aslan encouraged his fellow American Muslims to fight for marginalized groups like the LGBT community in a public letter after the SCOTUS decision. In case you weren’t aware, 42% of American Muslims support same-sex marriage (21+21). Maybe you weren’t surprised by the figure. I was. It helps to look at data.

2. “Media Literacy 101

Here are the four takeaway questions quoted (except for the “And”) from the transcript:

  1. What is the content of this product? As in, what am I looking at here?
  2. Is it really selling what it’s advertising? Like, if you have a woman in a bikini in your commercial, it better be for swim wear and not for, ya know, hamburgers.
  3. Who made this?…
  4. Why do they want me to consume it? That is, which demographics benefit from me internalizing this message and which demographics are hindered by it?

My wife and I discussed this while we walked by Victoria’s Secret in the mall. She wondered why the store would have an image of a woman with no top, covering only her nipple (probably through Photoshop or a nude suit) when what it was selling was a bracelet. I speculated that marketing experts project that it will have a significant impact on the tastes of women’s significant others to push to buy that product so that their women can exude the image shown: free-spirited, virile, trophy, etc. But then I thought about it today, and realized that women (or men if they want the bracelet) don’t need other agents encouraging them to exude free-spirited, virile, trophy images; they have agency of their own.

3. “Is secularism still Christian?

This article talks about the origins of Western secularism. I modify it because not all secularisms are the same. Turkish secularism, for example, looks different from American secularism because of the different histories of the peoples. Even in the West, secularism in the United States differs from that in the United Kingdom which differs from that in France. For more elaboration on the various secularisms, see the interview with Tariq Modood at The Religious Studies Project.

4. “How the Justice System Hurts Survivors Through the ‘Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline‘” and “How ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Misrepresents Women’s Federal Prison (And Why It Matters)

Orange Is the New Black
Orange Is the New Black
These two articles discuss how women entering prisons are primarily non-violent drug offenders. The feministing article highlights that the major contribution to drug use/penalization occurs among sex-abuse victims. The everydayfeminism article highlights that while men’s prisons still have far more prisoners population-wise, women’s prisons are growing at double the rate of men’s: growth in prisons in general are fueled by the failed War on Drugs.

5. “An Explanation for Why It’s Not Just Men Who Pressure Women Into Feminine Norms

Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Celia Edell applies Foucault’s reading of Bentham to explain that patriarchal norms for femininity come from many directions (men, other women), including from the self. Gender expression is a show for everyone and no one. This was an article that gave me a check regarding my thoughts on the Victoria’s Secret ad.

6. “The Coming Gay Rights Letdown” (The Daily Beast)

While happenings in one place aren’t guaranteed to replicate in another, a Canadian LGBT activist warned American LGBT activists that marriage equality brings apathy among the public. It reminds me of the unfortunately failed Equal Rights Amendment. Women in the United States gained suffrage in 1920, gained lots of momentum in the 1960s and 1970s through second-wave feminism, but the culture at large seems not to have given that Amendment as much weight as they.

7. I’m going to wait on #PlannedParenthood. The story is still developing. Color me cautious (I guess you can color me cowardly if you want; I just think big stories need more development).


Because of Caitlyn Jenner in the news last month, I thought it worthwhile to cover a less well known group. Intersex persons are the little known group in the longer LGBTQIA acronym. Political recognition of them at times overlap with transgender persons, hence the upcoming post, “The Politics of Intersex.”

My Weird Views on “Religion,” Part 4: Institution

(Religion in Bruce Lincoln:

  • Discourse
  • Practice
  • Community
  • Institution)

4. Institution

Bruce Lincoln
Bruce Lincoln

According to Bruce Lincoln, religion as institution indicates regulation of communities, practices, and discourses. It reproduces these three elements over time, and manipulates them as needs arise but presents them as eternal and transcendent.

In sociological terms, religious institutions are churches. Emile Durkheim collapses (or rather, Lincoln expands on Durkheim) what Lincoln calls “community” and “institution” into “Church,” a group that has unified beliefs and practices. While the Catholic Church has official documents, regulation, and governmental structure that is ostensibly the same everywhere, it doesn’t take a social scientist to understand that Polish Catholics differ from Bolivian Catholics who differ from Ugandan Catholics. So we don’t get mixed up, the “Catholic Church” would be the institution, and Polish Catholicism (and breaking down into smaller divisions) would be a community. It’s like the difference between federal and state government in the United States: they both set norms, but one is more specific (community=state) and one extends further (institution=federal). But church understood as a sociological term is not the sole domain of Christianity. There would be the Muslim church, the Buddhist church, etc.

Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim

Institutions differ from communities in that they are larger and broader in scope. They are larger in that they contain communities. They are broader in scope because they regulate communities. The relationship between communities and institutions (and persons?) might seem more stable than it is. As Lincoln discusses in Discourse and the Construction of Society, the ties that bind communities and institutions together are not natural; they can be made, reformed, renegotiated, or dissolved.

Pierre Bourdieu offers some insight into institutions in his concepts of doxa, heresy, orthodoxy, and habitus. Doxa, according to Bourdieu, represents what is held by a society but at an unconscious level. These are norms that are actually arbitrary, but seem natural or <abbr title=”this word is funny; I think one of my favorite quotes is ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’ since it wasn’t self-evident until they articulated it; it definitely hadn’t been self-evident for centuries”>self-evident.

Pierre Bourdieu (Getty/BBC)
Pierre Bourdieu (Getty/BBC)

When someone articulates doxa, and then challenges it, Bourdieu calls this heresy. The process attempting (and at times succeeding) to reinstate the doxa he calls orthodoxy. Orthodoxy and heresy have a reciprocal relationship. There is not one without the other. Once doxa has been questioned, thereafter there is only orthodoxy and heresy; societies can never go back to “the way things were before.” (Some of this seems a rehash of how Emile Durkheim explained religion but in reverse. For him, societies would arbitrarily separate certain beliefs and practices from everyday life, understand those separated elements as ‘sacred,’ leaving the leftover things in life as ‘profane’)

Before this (at least in his Outline of a Theory of Practice), Bourdieu speaks of habitus. From this, I take Bourdieu to mean that every social marker contains certain normalizing structures that enable them to exhibit heavy influence on personal and social lenses of reality. These structures are both regulative and generative, meaning they inspire new behavior in the future: compliance or dissent. The structures also operate largely in the background of society though not always. Similar to Foucault, no one person pulls all the strings, but in a web, multiple actors are defining, forcing, negotiating, or negating social markers. Habitus is a web of actors contributing constantly to the structure, both changing it and being changed by it. So while rulers are influential actors in a web of actors, they are not the only thing exerting power.

Why do I employ Bourdieu’s concept of habitus—something largely unconscious and not the under the sole control of any one group or person—when I also present religious institutions as quite conscious of what they are doing? I’m not sure yet. I’m still mulling that one over. It may be that habitus includes institutions under its umbrella much the same as institutions include communities under its umbrella.

Chief Justice John Roberts
Chief Justice John Roberts

Recently, Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to wonder (“Just who do we think we are?”) that the Court could change what had ostensibly been an unchanged institution throughout time and across cultures. Take a class on history or anthropology and you might wonder at his wonderment. Yes, institutions are relatively stable; that’s what makes them institutions and not movements. But they do not remain the same over time or across cultures. The variety of actors entering and exiting the institution leave their mark.

Became God (and took whiteness upon himself soon afterwards) in 325 CE
Became God (and took whiteness upon himself soon afterwards) in 325 CE

Jesus wasn’t officially (=institutionally) God until actors defined him as such at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Let’s return to doxa, heresy, and orthodoxy. Probably the majority of Christian communities up until that council believed that Jesus was God until Arius of Alexandria proposed that “There was a time when the Son was not.” Since it ruffled enough feathers (and it helped that an emperor had taken special interest in Christianity), church leaders met, and simultaneously defined Arius a heretic and the doctrine of the trinity as orthodoxy. This is a ridiculous simplification of those events, but many church institutions that derive from those events don’t stop and consider Jesus’ divinity or lack thereof. For the vast majority of Christian communities, Jesus is God and it’s not up for debate. That is the power of institutions.

Institutions also have material concerns in addition to their prescriptive work on belief and behavior. Issues of education, employment, and state and community relations come to mind. Institutions of religion can differ markedly from individuals in a religion. Institutions provide accreditation to their imams/priests/ministers/etc., come up with architectural and sartorial expression, parlay with governments, and define what the believers are to believe to belong to their group. If you want to see a difference between institutions and individual believers, compare some Christian institutions’ worries that their tax-exempt status might be lost due to the SCOTUS decision on same-sex marriage with a single dad baking a pie for his sick neighbor out of love duty to him. Institutions and individuals differ in that they belong to the same group, but have different concerns.


 

Russell McCutcheon
Russell McCutcheon

I feel like this last post in my series on religion is kind of weak. I’m am still in the process of working out my thoughts on religion. Maybe I shouldn’t feel bad. There are authors who write in prefaces to their books that that book is the product of ten years of reflection; I have only been thinking about theories of religion for around a year. I also admit that my theory of religion is heavily tied to Christianity. Russell McCutcheon brings up that point in his intro to religion book, Studying Religion: An Introduction, in his chapter on resemblances between

Talal Asad
Talal Asad

religions. If a religion besides Christianity doesn’t fit my template for religion, is it then a religion? He cites Talal Asad in saying that a definition of religion that privileges certain aspects while ignoring (overlooks even?) others stigmatizes what it ignores (61-63). But I think it’s a good starting place for me. The little I’ve delved into Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism seems to bear the mark of Lincoln’s categories.

My Weird Views on “Religion,” Part 3: Community

I have been presenting how I view “religion” for the past two weeks. This is the third of four installments on it. While it can get maybe too theoretical, I have tried to make it like the dentist: touch on the essentials (but not essentialism) but as quickly and painlessly as possible.

3. Community

Religion is at least, though not necessarily reducible to the following, in Lincoln’s thought:

  1. discourse
  2. practice
  3. community
  4. institution

holyterrorsuofcpressRegarding “community,” Lincoln speaks of a group that defines itself upon certain discourses and practices. He really expands on this in another book of his I’ve already mentioned: Discourse and the Construction of Society with his concepts of affinity and estrangement based on social markers.

Part of my piece last week included a conversation with Russell McCutcheon about the use of rationality and persuasion in public “discussion.” He had remarked how public debates weren’t so much about rationality and persuasion (though they may include those) as gaining control of the rules to your side’s benefit (e.g., getting to define what is “fair”). Sometimes this last piece is not conscious on the group’s part. They have processes and modes of authorization that to them are universal, though in reality, they are contingent. It is not beliefs that make a religion but that things are believed. At least.

Russell T. McCutcheon
Russell T. McCutcheon
For a group to form, they must have an identity based on agreed upon markers. Social borders are maintained on what Lincoln calls affinity and estrangement. The former refers to “feelings of likeness, common belonging, mutual attachment, and solidarity” and the latter entails “feelings of distance, separation, otherness, and alienation.” You can probably easily fill in ways in which people set up markers for belonging or exclusion. He lists some, to which I added some more. The first list is his and those that follow are mine. I have tried to include as many real world religious examples of the following categories, but they can really apply to any sector of society. These are by no means exhaustive, as we humans seem boundless in contrasting and distinguishing from among themselves.

Lincoln’s:

  • language
  • space: physical or geographical
  • diet
  • economy
  • marriage
  • customs
  • aesthetics

Monte’s:

  • music
  • leisure
  • work ethic
  • access to resources
  • body composition
  • body alteration
  • type of job
  • accent
  • eloquence
  • dis/ability
  • ethnicity
  • sexuality
  • race
  • technological prowess
  • age
  • gender

I contend that group identification depends as much on what you aren’t at least as much (sometimes maybe more so) as what you are. Difference is inevitable, but in defined communities, an othering process sometimes starts, particularly among competing religions. Various strategies are available. Within a tradition, you can try to cast your competitors as not as faithful to the discourse (“original teachings”) as your group is. You can say that times have changed and the other group has not handled the change in a way your group sees as ideal. You can say your group is original and established and the other is aberrant or “heretical.” You can say the other is old and irrelevant while yours has its finger on the pulse of humanity.

Not a Muslim
Not a Muslim
Othering of groups outside your tradition is where things can really get nasty (though Catholic/Protestant wars in Europe weren’t exactly tame). Consider the treatment of Muslims post 9/11. At the time of this Pew article, 24% of the United States public viewed American Muslims increasingly supporting extremism, while only 4% of Muslims agreed; significantly, 48% of Muslim laity said their leaders had not spoken resolutely enough against terrorism.

If you are religious (or not: this is a rather human thing), think who and what you have affinity with and whom and what you estrange or are estranged from. Are those distinctions natural? Are they contrived? How often are they actively said over and over again as if not saying them would make the distinctions evaporate? Consider someone you usually think as quite different from you.

I’ll be honest: when I see a transgender person at Walmart, my bodily reaction is to stare. I do not mean to do this; I am simply not used to seeing transgender persons, and have unfortunately never had a conversation with one. My somewhat legitimate excuse is that my job and family situation limit who I see in any given day. If I step back and think about what differentiates me from a transgender person, I only notice one thing: they do not appear in the way that I would express my gender. However, like me, they are shopping at Walmart. They are purchasing food, games, clothing, medicine, electronics, decorations, office supplies, and diapers. How different does a difference make us? Are they unworthy of dignity and respect? Do they need to be forced toward assimilation? Does their appearance encapsulate their persons?


Groups are fluid. And yet they persist over time. What makes some elements stick around and others slough off? How often are group members included and excluded? How sharp is the inclusion/exclusion? I will be covering this next week in Part 4: Institutions.

Link Wednesday #3: Attack of the Transgenders!

This Link Wednesday is going to be short and sweet. It will be links, very quick intros, and questions.

1. Albert Mohler and the Transgender Attack on Women’s Colleges

Albert Mohler albertmohler.com
Albert Mohler
I’ve introduced Al Mohler here, so I will leave you to read about him there. He introduced a story that detailed how the last of the “Seven Sisters,” Barnard College, had admitted transgender students while still holding to its mission as a women’s only college. Notwithstanding that some of these colleges admit men, Mohler cast the decision as a moment of “conflicting absolutes” between feminism and the “transgender revolution.”

Questions:

  1. If elements within a movement shift on things are they no longer part of that movement?
  2. Are movements stable enough in the first place to be identified as one thing?
  3. Who gets to speak for a group and who decides? Is it within or outside the group?

2. Elinor Burkett: The Transgenders Are Coming for Your Abortions and Your Sororities!

Laverne Cox Author: Dominick D via Flickr
Laverne Cox

I found out about this article from Mohler. Elinor Burkett is a journalist, author, former professor, and producer. Her recent op-ed entitled “What Makes a Woman” appeared in The New York Times. Apparently a woman consists of a vagina and the ability to have children. Do with that what you will.

Questions:

  1. Burkett draws a parallel between former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers and then-Bruce Jenner: each said that men and women have different brains, while one was treated with scorn and one with bravery. Does who says something change what is said? If a white supremacist or an African-American rapper say the word “nigger” (and I record it), is it the same thing or not?
  2. Burkett claims that Jenner makes use of feminine stereotypes of appearance and emotionality; does the kind of woman Burkett lauds—liberated, with fuller agency—have room for the classically feminine woman she critiques?
  3. Burkett treats transgender women as a threat to women as a whole. How do you define woman? Is Caitlyn Jenner the same as Laverne Cox or Leslie Feinberg?
  4. Leslie Feinberg
    Leslie Feinberg

  5. Burkett says that Jenner does not get to define women, but then goes about defining women herself. Does Burkett represent women of all classes, politics, religions, races, and ethnicities?
  6. Burkett claims that transgender claims on womanhood trample her dignity as a woman. Did women’s suffrage trample the dignity of male votes? I don’t know how much Burkett would like that her position sounds similar to arguments like legalization of same-sex marriage would trample the dignity of traditional marriage.
  7. Burkett lists universal experiences that Jenner has never experienced, such as forgetting to take the pill. Can you name ONE universal female experience?
  8. Burkett remarks that Jenner has experienced privilege as a man, employing his sponsorship during the 1976 Olympics as an example of how he cannot understand the lack of privilege women experience. Is privilege static? Does the privilege of Bruce Jenner in 1976 match that of the 65 year old Caitlyn?
  9. Burkett is not without her points. Jenner does seem to buy into stereotypes of women as emotional and sex objects. Why did she transition to her current gender expression, and not the butch gender expression of someone like Leslie Feinberg?
  10. Burkett overtly links owning a vagina and working uterus with being a woman. Does having a non-functioning or absent uterus make one less a woman?

As June comes to a close, we will know the result of Obergefell v. Hodges. That case will determine whether or not same-sex marriage is legal. Next Link Wednesday will involve two strong cases each for and against same-sex marriage. As always, I hope for your interaction. If you do not feel comfortable commenting, please email me at ilostmyprayerhanky AT gmail. I truly enjoy conversation (I won’t berate you on differences of opinion) and seeing how people come to their conclusions. I thrive on what can occur when two people are open about where they are coming from and can open new possibilities beyond their current place.

My Weird Views on “Religion,” Part 2: Practice

Regarding last week’s post on discourse, I feel I was too dependent on Bruce Lincoln’s theory of religion. While I will continue to use his outline, I am going to expand it with my own stuff. This is part two of four.

Here is a review of the outline. Religion is at least, though not necessarily reducible to:

  1. discourse
  2. practice
  3. community
  4. institution

What is practice in religion? Lincoln defines practice as rituals and ethics which designate a proper world order/person as defined by religious discourse.

Bruce Lincoln Source: University of Chicago
Bruce Lincoln
Source: University of Chicago

I see practice as the primary identifier of religion, for it is what people outside the religion (discourse, community, institution) primarily encounter. You do not see beliefs or institutions unless you look at their texts, which are the result of the practice of writing and encoding ideologies with otherworldly authority. However, you can see clothing or grooming. You can also see texts or architecture if you are aware of it. You can hear certain music (or not hear it in its absence) or rhythmic recitations. You can taste different cuisines or items associated with a ritual. You can smell smells associated with a space, and you can feel the touch of objects or other persons.

You could argue with me about what should be primary in religion. Beliefs, or discourse in my presentation, is usually what is asserted as primary, if Protestantism is taken as normative for religion. However, even when it comes to discourse—in the construction, maintenance, replication, polemics, irenics, apologetics, destruction, or reformation of it—I see the activity of practice employed in it. Why? The act of discourse defines who is in a group and who is outside a group, a practice that is always more mobile than discursive text (though I do not limit discourse to text alone).

I am not using my religious upbringing as representative of all religion, but merely to demonstrate a point. It seemed sometimes that signing onto a belief was as important, if not more important, than enacting a practice connected with that belief. This ended up being a practice in itself. One of the practices closely identified with my group was the practice of glossolalia, or speaking in languages you hadn’t sat down to learn. While the group pushed the practice, it definitely mattered if you even considered it a possibility. Southern Baptists, who did not condone the practice, were seen as other to us because they did not even consider glossolalia a possibility. It didn’t matter that we had many in our group who did not themselves “speak in tongues” as glossolalia was referred to; it mattered that we took the practice of believing Acts 2 in a way that Southern Baptists didn’t.

Certain practices seem to have religious connotations associated with them: ingesting a limited amount of food and beverage in a communal setting (Eucharist/communion), stretching limbs in a communal setting (raising hands in worship or some settings of Hatha Yoga), dressing up (wearing a hijab, niqab, skull necklace, funerary ashes), or feeling an object in a stylized manner (prayer wheel in Tibetan Buddhism or rosary).

Lincoln goes on further to say that no practice is inherently religious in itself until defined by the discourse. I described some practices in a purely material way. If I said I was making you a cake, would you consider it religious? Consider the following. Cake-bakers mix flour, sugar, and oil together, bake this set of ingredients, and then design it. When religious discourse is added to it, some Christian bakers decided not to bake and design cakes for same-sex weddings, because they associate their practice of baking with their religious discourse.

This example brings up some important questions. Who defines practice: religious specialists or ordinary religionists? When is a practice religious and when is it idiosyncratic? Is religious practice and idiosyncrasy mutually exclusive? Is religion primarily personal or social? I’m not asking what should be, but but how practice functions in a particular time and place.

Source: norepealsgf.org
Source: norepealsgf.org
How are ethics colored by religion? Ethics here would describe interpersonal or public actions toward one’s own group and outside of one’s group (as defined by the discourse) based on discourse. This discourse can be reasonable or not, but what matters is that a group finds the discourse reasonable enough from which to authorize practice. So making cookies for your neighbor could be a way of consoling him when he’s sick (and you simply performing a practice for a friend) or a way of demonstrating care motivated by proselytizing (a religious motive). It could involve speaking with (or not speaking with) members considered outside your community and doing so in a specific way (conversationally, in a rebuking way, avoidance, etc.).

ksmu.org
Source: ksmu.org
Recently in Springfield, MO, there was an issue on the ballot (“Question 1”) of whether or not to include the LGBT community in the City’s non-discrimination ordinance regarding housing, employment, and public accommodation. Depending on how you approached this, it could be merely a political and civil rights issue or a religious (or religious freedom) issue (and religious discourse occurred on the “Yes” AND “No” sides of the issue). Who got to define whether it was political/civil rights or religious?

Russell T. McCutcheon Source: Twitter
Russell T. McCutcheon
Source: Twitter
Regarding Question 1, I lamented to Russell McCutcheon that it didn’t seem that persuasive/reasoned discussion was possible when people held fundamentally different views. It seemed to me that groups lobbed talking points at each other without hearing others’ points. He gave me the following: “They’re trying to play fair — it’s just that their mutually beneficial definitions of ‘fair’ either compete or even contradict one another. They’re not all playing the same game but each is trying to portray theirs as the only game in town…”

Even when practices are similar within a community-e.g., providing public discourse on why you should vote a certain way–they are carved out from general use to serve to the interests of your own group. This seems true to me, regardless of how libertarian you want to be.


Next Saturday I will go over “community.” You might be able to tell this from reading so far, but all of the features Lincoln lists-discourse, practice, community, and institution-are integrally related. It helps to separate them to discuss them, but they generally don’t operate apart from one another, unless a religion is extinct.

My Weird Thoughts on “Religion”

Here I would like to share my views on “religion.” It got pretty long, so I am breaking it into parts. This first part will cover classic definitions of religion, the instability in terms, and the concept of “discourse.”

1. Classic Definitions of Religion and Instability in Terms

Religion has classically been defined as:

  • The feeling of absolute dependence (Friedrich Schleiermacher)
  • Belief in spiritual things (E. B. Tylor)
  • A systematic belief and practice system that unites a community (Emile Durkheim)
  • A way of placating higher beings which control the universe (James G. Frazer)
  • A feeling of awe in the presence of the holy (Rudolf Otto)
  • An illusion or neurosis (Sigmund Freud)
  • An agent (“opiate”) that deadens peoples’ minds to accept their station rather than improve it (Karl Marx)
  • A state of being grasped by an Ultimate Concern (Paul Tillich)
Bruce Lincoln Source: University of Chicago
Bruce Lincoln
Source: University of Chicago

Let’s test some of those definitions. I consider myself religious, but don’t feel particularly dependent on God during data entry (contra Schleiermacher); I’m not really aware of material things, much less spiritual things, before my coffee has kicked in (contra Tylor); my mind doesn’t feel particularly numb when I’m thinking about religion (Marx could be brilliant at times and at other times preposterous); Buddhists who rely on self-power (some rely on beings to help them, such as Amitabha) aren’t placating higher powers.

Furthermore, I strongly insist that religion is colored by your time, place, and other identity markers. If you learn about the Five Pillars of Islam, or the Four Noble Truths and the Eight-Fold Path of Buddhism, or the Shema Yisrael of Judaism, do you think you have really encountered those religions in all their varied splendor? Is Christianity reducible merely to the Sinner’s Prayer? Do the previous general beliefs account for the subdivisions within each tradition which sometimes go to war with each other (literally), even when outsiders see each party as part of the same tradition?

You probably haven’t encountered a tradition until you’ve experienced a living, breathing member of that tradition, and then, one person does not represent an entire tradition. In the end, I don’t find religion to be a stable category. Here are some social factors that interplay with religion, so that even within the same tradition religion is never the same: gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, politics, economics, culture, family, age, region, education, ability, dietary habits, athleticism, or customs. Just as with religion, I don’t see how these nodes of identity can be defined apart from these other factors.

2. Working, Constructed Definition of Religion

Russell T. McCutcheon Source: Twitter
Russell McCutcheon
Source: Twitter

But saying that religion is hard to define doesn’t really help much. So what do I mean by religion? I approach studying religion from a constructivist and social perspective. That’s not the only way to analyze religion (I analyze religion theologically, too, but that’s within another context), but that’s how I approach it academically. I will employ some help from history of religions scholar Bruce Lincoln. He has written extensively, particularly on how communities in general (not just religious ones) form and maintain their cohesion. What follows is his minimal definition on religion, riffing off of Durkheim (who I also like). While I won’t say religion is merely these four things, it is at least these four things (taken from Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11):

A. “Discourse”

By religious discourse, Lincoln means truth claims that do not appeal to experience, experimentation, or human thought but that appeal to sources outside the human political (and other) interests. Many times this goes by the name of “revelation,” “scriptures,” “holy writings,” “sacred sayings,” “prophecy,” “oracles,” etc. Elsewhere, Lincoln remarks that discourse consists at least of myth, ritual, and classification used to construct, maintain, replicate, deconstruct, and/or reconstruct society. I will discuss myth here, ritual in the section on “practice,” and classification in the next post under “community.”

In his helpful primer, Studying Religion: An Introduction, Russell McCutcheon also offers a helpful definition, building off of Michel Foucault: discourse involves “the series of material as well as intellectual conditions, practices, institutions, architecture and conventions that make specific types of thought and action possible.” In other words, discourse is all about the background noise that influences your thought and action.

Source: michel-foucault.com
Source: michel-foucault.com
Source: demotix.com
Source: demotix.com

While Lincoln sees discourse employing myth, ritual, and classification to achieve its ends more overtly, it can covertly (or just less overtly) achieve its ends by means of “spectacle, gesture, costume, edifice, icon, [or] musical performance.”

So what are some examples of these subtle methods of discourse? If you think of a church setting, a costume can consist anywhere from a dress suit to clerical robes. Gestures can include raising one’s hands in Christian worship or bowing down on a prayer rug facing Mecca (which would also involve the icon of the prayer rug).

A word on “myth”

Roland Barthes Source: magnumphotos.com
Roland Barthes
Source: magnumphotos.com

Myth is typically used in a disparaging way toward beliefs you consider legend, fable, or something that just isn’t historical. Lincoln first explains myth by referencing Roland Barthes’ concept of myth: it involves ideas divorced from their original contexts/settings/histories and projected into a timeless story, or given “mystificatory” (that which obscures its origins) content. However, Lincoln develops a unique model of myth, by comparing it to the concepts of fable, legend, and history before plotting them on the axes of truth claim, credibility, and authority:

Fable Makes no truth claims, holds no credibility, and commands no authority
Legend Makes truth claims, holds no credibility, and commands no authority
History Makes truth claims, has credibility, and commands no authority
Myth Makes truth claims, has credibility, and commands authority

Adapted from Lincoln, Discourse, 23.

When Lincoln speaks of credibility and authority, he doesn’t measure it on the story/narrative itself, but on how it is received by a community. This means that the history of one group can be the myth or legend of another group (compare how typical American and British histories treat the American Revolution). In his book, Authority: Construction and Corrosion, Lincoln defines authority in the following way:

When these crucial givens [“right” speaker, speech, and setting] of the discursive situation combine in such a way as to produce attitudes of trust, respect, docility, acceptance, even reverence, in the audience, or – viewing things from the opposite perspective – when the preexistent values, orientations, and expectations of an audience predispose it to respond to a given speech, speaker, and setting with these reverent and submissive attitudes, “authority” is the result

Lincoln’s work can apply to religion as traditionally conceived or to social phenomena in general.


That’s it for now on my thoughts on religion. As you can see, I owe a lot of gratitude to Lincoln. It is also painfully theoretical. I apologize, but felt I needed to establish this before I start getting concrete. If you have questions of where I fall on something concrete, email me at ilostmyprayerhanky at gmail.

I will post tomorrow or Monday on the second part. I may include how I think my initial thoughts on gender and sexuality relate to religion in that second part, or I might make a third part.

Link Wednesday #1- Feminisms, Same-Sex Marriage, and Caitlyn Jenner

1. Rita Alfonso Surveying Feminisms

Dr. Rita Alfonso thinkphilosophy.org
Dr. Rita Alfonso
thinkphilosophy.org

ThinkPhilosophy is a philosophy website run by “Dr. A” (Rita Alfonso), who taught philosophy and gender studies at Grinnell College and U.C. Berkeley before retiring. She is now an independent scholar and professional photographer.

Alfonso’s first few podcasts seem aimed at making a general audience clearer thinkers through reading and writing practices. Her blog is a text-accompaniment to her podcast. (Also neat: if you subscribe to her site, you can get Feminism: A Very Short Introduction as a free download. Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series gives a quick survey of a topic by experts in the field. They run ~100-150pp and ~$10).

I came across Alfonso’s site when looking up gender studies blogs. Her first podcast that I heard was her explanation of three prominent feminist theorists: Simone de Beauvoir (existentialism/Marxism), Luce Irigaray (psychoanalysis), and Judith Butler (post-structuralism/queer theory). De Beauvoir pretty much kicked off Second-Wave Feminism with her The Second Sex. One of her most famous lines is “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” In other words, sex is not identical with gender, but gender has a cultural history. According to Alfonso, Irigaray takes de Beauvoir in an egalitarian direction while Butler takes her in a radical direction.

The audio runs ~38 minutes.

What do you make of de Beauvoir’s quote? Are women reducible to wombs or to what is called “feminine”? Is femininity something that is stable in a person or something that must be constantly maintained? How much is femininity a performance or projected image and how much of it is innate to a woman? Is woman simply the Other of man? How does liberal feminism differ from radical feminism?

How does Irigaray critique de Beauvoir’s “othering” (abbr- where you set up an opposite of yourself or your group to say “I’m not that” and use it as identity reinforcement) of women? Is Irigaray saying de Beauvoir sees women as simply non-actualized men in need of full (male) agency? How different does Irigaray find women and men as subjects?

Butler argues that if we take de Beauvoir’s sex/gender distinction seriously, we have no guarantee that a sex results in a given gender; if you always exists in a culturally expressed gender, do you ever exist solely as your sex? In other words, are bodies and biological sex ever interpreted free of cultural bias? In Alfonso’s questioning, does gender occur as naturally as a falling rock demonstrates gravity (every time)? Alfonso interrogates sex as a natural category: should it not result in a particular gender expression? Is the nature/nurture distinction itself a cultural product?

2. Albert Mohler on Attending Same-Sex Weddings

Albert Mohler is extremely influential in the Southern Baptist Convention and president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His output is prolific. He has an almost daily podcast called “The Briefing” where he analyzes current events from an evangelical perspective.

I started listening to him because I wanted to gauge where real evangelical leaders are coming from and rather than being filtered through various outlets like Salon or other media which focus more on sensational figures (thinking Pat Robertson here) rather than on what broader evangelicals accept.

Albert Mohler albertmohler.com
Albert Mohler
albertmohler.com

If you are unaware, sometimes religious leaders play with a supposed (from an outside perspective) or real party line (again, this is why I think essentialism is unhelpful). While holding to a traditional view of marriage, Mohler also claimed that the church was guilty of homophobia and aggression (rather than redemption) against homosexuals.

The podcast I listened to on Monday was dated. He analyzed Sen. Marco Rubio’s statement on attending a same-sex wedding. Rubio would attend one if he loved the people, even though he doesn’t support same-sex marriage. Mohler argued that based on the phrasing from the Book of Common Prayer (“If any of you can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married…”) one’s attendance of a wedding is silent consent to the marriage, and that therefore, Rubio’s statement doesn’t make sense.

The segment on Rubio is the first ~7 min of ~18 min.

What do you make of this? Does Mohler’s assessment work for you? Can one not attend a same-sex wedding, love the people involved, and still disagree with what they are doing? Does attendance or presence equal consent? Does Rubio’s statement conflate loving people regardless of their sin and what people affirm? If a mother-in-law doesn’t like the spouse her child has chosen, and she still attends the wedding, is she affirming their marriage or her child? How does Mohler employ the term “category”? What does Mohler mean by love? Does he define it?

3. “Bruce Jenner Is Not a Hero

Yesterday was a mixed bag on my Facebook feed. There didn’t seem to be much middle ground surrounding Caitlyn Jenner’s reveal on the cover of Vanity Fair. This post was a negative assessment of her coming out. When I tried to find out about the author, she didn’t have an “About” section. Scrolling through her posts, I gathered that she is a mother seeking to explain a Christian worldview in light of cultural (generally sinful) trends. What caught my attention in her post was the following quote: “I never want to shy away from speaking something that needs to be said even if I know it is not something people want to hear.”

What prompts someone to speak to an issue to the point of saying that their words “needs to be said”? I can think of some possibilities: everyone is doing it, your position hasn’t been heard, your position has been maligned, your position has been misunderstood, you like to hear yourself talk, imminent danger, etc. I think in this case she sees a societal danger, but you tell me what you think.

How is Emily Suzanne using gender? Does she buy a distinction between sex and gender, or are these two items even distinct? How is she characterizing arguments in favor of Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out? What sources of authority does she use? How and why does she use them? What does she mean by “common sense” when coupled with a Christian worldview? How does Caitlyn coming out as a woman constitute being “lost, sinful, and desperately in need of Jesus” in itself? According to her definition of a hero, has Caitlyn not sacrificed and risked? When Emily Suzanne uses “we,” who is included and who is excluded?


I plan on using Jenner’s case as a launch pad to talk about the biology and politics of sex in an upcoming post, possibly before Saturday. Again, in Saturday’s post I am going to discuss how I relate religion and gender in my studies.

What Is Religion?

I used to find this an easy question to answer: people worship their own god(s) with various ceremonies and rituals, think about him/her/them within a certain community of interpretation, and plan their lives according to the dictates of their god’s/gods’ commands. The first stumbling block to that definition is the atheistic strains of Buddhism. If I consider Buddhism a religion, do I merely need to hack off a significant portion of my definition, or go back to the drawing board? My working assumption now is so nebulous as to be almost useless. Religion is what people do in response to their understanding of transcendence, whether that involves divinities or not. This can involve the atheist who muses upon her meaning in life or the devout nun who considers her life under the umbrella of tradition. Religion as I see it transcends the self; if it involves merely the self, I attribute that more to a personal mission statement or philosophy. And the language I use still might preclude other religious understandings. I am one man on his way, trying to understand a lot of data out there. Religion is active, religion does, religion thinks. I won’t merely say that religion is. Mere nominal associations do not make a lot of sense to me. If someone does not act or think like X religion, they are probably a weak representation or non-representative of faith X. While I do have to account for the cultural expressions of religion, I tend to relegate these more to accidents than to essential elements of a religion. Again, these are working assumptions. I look forward to my time at MSU and elsewhere in developing my views toward religion and the religions of the world.