Individuals: The Queerist Possibility: Introduction

A Somatic Theory of Religion

NB: I struggled with the form of my introduction. It is common in modern scholarship to write the introduction as a sort of précis to your argument. “In Chapter 4 my argument will do this, and in Chapter 5 my argument will do that…” I understand the utility. There are too many things to read. It’s a kind of professional courtesy. But the style, inspired by 19th century German scholarship and adopted by Anglo-Americans in the 20th century, is too close to an instruction manual to induce pleasure. It’s like including a warning label at the front of your book that says “not intended for recreation.” So I’m not doing that.

My introduction is thematic, and flirts with apologia. However, I have too many friends who do this for a living to discard the practice altogether, so I’ve done my best to leave you some sign posts in the footnotes. I hope it’s worth the trip.

Introduction

There’s a good chance that whatever you imagine the secular academic study of religion to be, it isn’t that. Perhaps you’re thinking about God, fate, death, reincarnation, enlightenment, good and evil? Or perhaps you’re thinking about the historical Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed? The early church? The final, true utterances of Bahá’u’lláh? You imagine, maybe, the people who do this professionally are grappling full-time with the doubts that fire your brain when your anxious desires collide with the insouciance-cosmic at 1 o’clock in the afternoon on some fateful Monday.

It’s understandable. Why not, after all? Meaning, purpose, the good life, with even minimal levels of economic security, these questions arise unbidden—even if always shaped by the times and places of our births. But that’s not, usually, what scholars of religion do. Yes, some do. The Dead Sea Scrolls still pop up in news stories, and even some serious scholars are still trying to find the historical Jesus, or decipher what, exactly, has been “lost in translation” over the centuries. But those are sectarian projects, edifications of legitimacy. Not altogether different from the activities of the Chinese and Indian governments’ attempts to strengthen historical claims of ethnic continuity. Not altogether different from the migrants whose Atlas-sized aspirations coalesced into Mormonism: how better to transmute the brutal travails of Western expansion into glorious mission, than to discover your prophet had visited that very Bounty two thousand years before you were born?

We all crave authenticity. In certain psychic registers, it’s as important to human habitation as oxygen and light are to the body. It’s true for people and it’s true for nations. It’s true for scholars and it’s true for martyrs. It’s true for Mormons and it’s true for indigenes. It’s one of the core insights of the Mahabharata: “Doing one’s own duty imperfectly is better than doing another’s well.”¹ The consonance between invisible purpose and public performance is critical to understanding the religious daemon that permeates history. We’ll discuss it at length, but until then its immediacy and universal appeal shouldn’t be far from our minds.²

Setting aside the scale and negative consequences for the disenfranchised, I have no quarrel with the scholars who pursue sectarian projects. I hope they find what they’re looking for. Of course, some of you reading this may not want to “set aside” the “negative consequences for the disenfranchised.” For you, this is a euphemism too far. You’re highly attuned to slavery, misogyny, colonialism, indigenous suffering, the moral imperative of the disenfranchised. I understand and appreciate that urge. I’ve learned a lot from you, and will continue to. But this too is a sectarian project. You’re also an acolyte of an otherworldly order. Your indoctrination to this order, however, involves a mystification of your origins so it is obscured. Mary Douglas called this mystification “structural amnesia” in a brilliant, dense little book called How Institutions Think, and we’ll touch upon this process of mystification when we discuss otherworldliness.

Right now we’re talking about scholars who study religion itself, the phenomenon, the category, the impulse to discover meaning.³ Moreover, we’re talking about a particular kind of study of religion, humanistic study. It might not appear so, but humanistic study is not altogether different from scientific study. But where the sciences work with the artifacts of the material world, the humanities work with the artifacts of subjective experience. Its data aren’t, as in the sciences, scalars and vectors, but observation and interpretation, what happened and why it happened, or, if you prefer values from another domain, fact and intent—the bedrock of every legal system since Ma’at emerged from the orb of King Menes mace circa 3150 BCE.

Indeed, for most of our written history, all of human knowledge was part of the humanities. The law was metaphysics was philosophy was science was religion. Science’s sympatric speciation from the humanities during the Enlightenment produced a new set of cultural norms, and the disciplines have grown more isolated since then. This severance is often opined upon, and less often seriously examined. But either way it’s a familiar moment in world history.⁴ I have nothing to say about that here, except to echo C.P. Snow’s observation that the split between the two cultures benefits no one, and to reassure you I have no intention of abiding it.

So what can we say about the humanistic study of religion? What has it learned about the elemental human impulse to transmogrify animal ejaculations into spiritual emissions?⁵ Quite a lot, actually. The state of knowledge is deep and wide. There are clear patterns, and there are meaningful insights, but they’re not the kind of insights most people want to hear. And they’re not, unfortunately, the kind of insights that have advanced the field as a whole—as happens, sporadically, in the sciences. On the contrary, they’re insights that have blown the field apart and marginalized it within the academy. As a consequence, the study of religion is a hot mess.

A drone’s-eye view of the scholarly study of religion/“religion”/[religion] would reveal a smoldering disarray of meticulously articulated cultural and intellectual skirmishes, a microcosm of every philosophical upheaval of the last 50 years.⁶ No other academic field labors further from its lay root than religious studies. Thousands of freshmen walk into “Intro to Religion” lectures each fall wondering about the big questions, and they leave having flitted through every disciplinary mote: politics, scriptures, syncretism, colonialism, ritual, literature, sociology, psychology, ecology, philosophy, architecture. It’s roughly equivalent to walking into a Star Wars movie titled Yoda Says, and being shown a documentary on the history of the making of documentaries about the making of animatronic puppets.

The same can’t be said for “Intro to American History,” “Intro to Archaeology,” “Intro to Sociology,” or most other humanistic disciplines. “Intro to Philosophy” probably approximates religious studies’ ability to frustrate the laymen, but only because of its perceived proximity to religious concerns—enlightenment, wisdom, finitude.⁷ But, in general, other domains of knowledge just aren’t this helter-skelter. Their objects of study don’t suffer from the same confluence of elite disarray and common misperception.⁸

Yes, other disciplines have questioned their predicates. For the most part, all of the humanities do at the highest levels.⁹ Each dissipates into ether when probed assiduously, much the way the ego dissipates under scrutiny in Vipassana meditation. It’s the degree to which the study of religion is unsettled by these questions. Sociologists accept that social fact precedes psychosocial shape. Psychologists accept that psychological process precedes psychosocial conduct. Archaeologists accept the law of superposition, that deeper undisturbed artifactual layers precede later historical developments. But religious studies has no such grounding. Many scholars are not even convinced “religion” is denotative. For them its incantatory, something summoned into being through academic ritual and colonial litany. Humans donning divinities and masking mortality is just something humans do. It’s not necessarily “religious.” For these scholars, and even those who don’t go quite so far, religion obfuscates more than it illuminates.¹⁰

I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek, and, yes, I’m also telegraphing. But I do take this perspective seriously. This is an observation, not a diagnostic. When I say the study of religion is “a hot mess,” this isn’t the prelude to a normative argument. It’s a data point, a place to begin. This is a feature of the discipline, not a bug, and it’s critical to understanding religion per se. As many scholars have argued, it is true that there are times and places in human history in which it wouldn’t have made sense to refer to some social phenomenon as a “religion” in the common sense, as separate from the “secular.” At least not from within that selfsame inertial frame—from the perspective, say, of a 16th century BCE Egyptian brewmaster. In Ancient Egypt the Pharaoh was Horus in life, Osiris and death, and the axis mundi around which Egyptian law and society spun (maat). Religion was the nation, and nation was the religion.¹¹ And so it’s not useful to use “religion,” as the member of a binary pair, because it obscures our understanding of that time and place.

But there’s a curiosity here. One constitutive element in this ancient atomic structure has taken on far greater weight than the other. The “nation,” the ethnos, has not been so easily dispelled by intellectual trends. Even though the argument that nations are a new kind of political organization has been around for half-a-century—dependent on the dissolution of imperial hegemonies, the rise of local languages, and the advent of mass media—the impact of this argument has been altogether different. Take area studies, things like German or American studies, for example. No student of German or U.S. culture questions the reality of the nation. Sure, particularly in the United States, students of a certain ideological disposition may question its legitimacy, but not its reality. Constructed or not, imagined or not,¹² most people who care to study these things agree that nations exist. It’s coherent to talk about them. It’s a useful framework—a valuable map.

There are proto-nations, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia, who were catalyzed by Napoleon’s imperial conquests. And there are failed nations, like Catalonia and Kurdistan and Palestine, who have not, yet, emerged as nations. And there are quasi-imperial nations, like Russia and Turkey, with their subordinated peripheries and centralized ethnic hegemonies. And there are, undeniably, violent disagreements around the morality of national authority, such as with Israel and South Africa. But even accounting for scholarly nuance, and hot confrontations, nations are.¹³ They have borders, eras that begin and end. They have enemies and allies. They are not universal.

That’s not true of religion. And that’s the curiosity. Why did the same roughly parallel insight 50 years ago lead to two very different outcomes. Yes, the argument that nations are new is probably overstated, as we’ll see, but it’s also probably true. That insight advanced multiple fields. Why did it have a different impact on religion? Why are religious studies scholars marginalized even within the humanities? Why is the field so balkanized?¹⁴ Ironically, the answer to this fragmentation is not incoherence, but universality. Scholars of religion have a real problem—ubiquity.

Most scholars of religion I know, both personally and through their work, who have thought about religion as opposed to particular “religions”—like Christianity or Sikhism—nurture, guard, or forcefully reject a profound and disorienting insight. Religion is everywhere. It is absolutely everywhere. Forget what you learned in history class, or intro to sociology. It’s not marginalized. It’s not dying. It’s not a vestigial remainder of our pre-secular past. It’s not chilling behind church doors, or inert between the bindings of bibles and canonical anthologies. It’s not abiding silently in statuary or slumbering in icons.

No. It’s everywhere. And not only that. It has been everywhere for tens of thousands of years. The Sumerians and Egyptians had it. The pre-state tribes who built Göbekli Tepe had it. The hunter-gatherers who painted the Sulawesi caves in Indonesia had it. Looking back over the vast savannah of Homo sapiens’ history there’s nowhere you don’t see it. But this is a real problem. Because if something is everywhere, it might as well be nowhere. It’s useless as an analytical tool. Moreover, most definitions of religion prove to be either tautological or arbitrary: religion is the list of religions, an open set of accidental properties whose sum defines its substance¹⁵; or, the list of elements in the set is limited ad hoc, fitted to the analysis in a kind of just-so framework.¹⁶

This is why many scholars have turned to critical theoretical analyses instead, scrutinizing things like power and discourse, deploying terms like “social formation,” and “regime” to describe the communities that construct meaning out of the material world’s enormous facticity. Their arcane language and dense analysis isn’t an end in itself. It’s a good faith effort to draw some kind of circle around a very, very large problem. So the language takes on a life of its own, becomes a kind of private cant so that a devoted coterie of readers can manage this otherwise overwhelming problem. I take this problem seriously too. Indeed, I think it’s the most serious problem there is in the humanities: to draw out the warp and woof of religion’s “sacred canopy” without perpetuating the delusion we dwell beyond it.¹⁷

We are talking about the elemental stuff out of which communities larger than the Dunbar number,¹⁸ that is to say communities of strangers, reproduce meaning for themselves in the world. It is the substance of the grail and the stupa, the pyramid and the Word, by which time turns into space. It is the thing that transforms anxiety and death into a ritual for life and shapes your collective purpose. Nations, influencer communities, international student movements, Marxism, woke right, woke left, antisemitism, covid culture, gun culture, scientism, MAGA, sports, 9/11 truthers, environmentalism, all of these movements contain social dynamics and moral hierarchies that are largely indistinguishable from those that describe traditional religions: Baptists, Druz, Pure Land Buddhists, Shia, Śaivite, Hassids, etc.

If this comparison is startling or implausible to you, please be patient. What is stated plainly will be supported later. Rather than retreat from religion’s ubiquity, we will don it, drawing on its essential strands not to escape from it, an impossibility, but to weave a new canopy fitted to this time of twilight and renewal.

Those of us who study the processes by which communities discover, construct, and defend a common purpose within an implacable universe are hermits. But those who are curious about the processes are legion. We are partners in this. I want you both to draw near. The urge to understand how the communion wafer was made does not change the fact that someday you're going to want the wafer too, or want the chant, the benediction, or want for it in a bottle, book, or bong. Maybe not on your death bed, but maybe when your wife or mother dies, your father, son, or husband, your best friend—cancer, dementia, a broken heart, a bomb. One day you’re going to lament, and wail, all your complexity, sophistication, and learning, stropped to a razor’s edge of terror and loss.

We are all alone together in this magisterium. It took our species 300,000 years to establish the flimsiest institutional purchase on this truth. We are each alone. We are each together. Griots, shamans, and prophets have bled for millennia to keep this truth alive. It is our responsibility to help them.

The most miraculous transformation that the universe has yet abided was not turning God into a man, a wakan into a wolf, or hominids into astronauts, it was turning you into a you. A one and only you, an individual against all probability, against a phalanx of political pressures and evolutionary urges, somehow you emerged—the queerist of all creatures. No theory can capture you. No state can put you to death. As long as you remain, you will always be the open heaven.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

1. “śreyān sva|dharmo viguņah para|dharmāt sv|anușțhitāt;” [italics mine] Unfortunately, my Sanskrit has rusted after decades of disuse. But the Clay Sanskrit Library mercifully parses the sandhi, and nicely reveals the repetition of the “dharma,” the elemental, invisible order to which one is bound in the South Asian cosmos. We’ll find other insubstantial anchors across cultures, when we get to it a little later on in Chapter 4.

For the professionals among you, quoting “scripture” as support for a claim might read as a silly specious genuflection. But I’m not pandering, and it isn’t strategic. It’s tactical—tactical in the sense de Certeau uses the term. I will address that tactic in Chapter 2, when I discuss taking up the term religion, and return to it in Chapter 3 when we discuss the body.

2. There is only one germ in my theory, one thing out of which the religious impulse will always grow, and I haven’t hinted it, yet. We will save that for Chapter 10. But authenticity, along with a few other elements, always attend its emanation. We’ll explore this element at length in Chapter 6.

3. Why the italics, you might wonder? I could have said, “make meaning,” or “create meaning.” But I didn’t. We’ll get to why in Chapter 1, when we talk about evidence, but for now, I do mean to imply that there are truths to find.

4. It remains to be seen whether this divergence, or “speciation” in my extended analogy, is permanent. Stripped of its morality, power’s defining characteristic is cohesion, or subsumption if you’re on the other side of its exercise. This drive will seek out ways to mend (or erase) the differences between the two cultures.

The political unities that subsumed older epistemological frameworks during the covid pandemic in the early 2020’s is suggestive. Between them, these two cultures were able to reproduce new facts (“hybrid” immunity, viral genesis as original sin, structural racism as public health emergency), and birth a new unified system of knowledge. The long term effects of this circumstantial unification are unclear.

5. The doubling is, obviously, intended, but it is not a degradation of the spiritual impulse, or a dimunition of its potency. I intend the full meaning of transmogrify. If you’re not mystified by the human capacity to transform base animal appetites into a globe spanning network of Red Cross and Crescent hospitals, and the (even if often performative) labor that lifts up strangers, preserves their lives, and ameliorates their diseases and sufferings, you're taking miracles for granted. We’ll discuss one aspect of the miracle, as it relates to hope, when we talk about abjuration in Chapter 5.

6. That is to say religion as quiddity, “religion” as functional stipulation, and [religion] as mystified referent for elemental sociocultural processes like power.

7. Does any other humanistic discipline aggress its boundary as enthusiastically as philosophy does against religion? Many a school has been split in twain because the philosophy department doesn’t want to commingle with the “zealots” down the hall. There are several reasons for this, but their enumeration are better suited to a conversation than an essay.

8. This observation doesn’t hold for religious studies discipline’s whose subject matter is defined by historical quiddity: Buddhist Studies, Islamic Studies, History of Christianity, etc.

9. I promise not to do this too much, but every once in a while I want to reassure you that I’m not just vibing here. Here are some books that interrogate their disciplinary presumptions. I’ve included a few books I own or have owned. You can feed them into your LLM of choice and scry for others. Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past (ed. Ian Hodder et al., 1995), Outline of a Theory of Practice (Pierre Bourdieu, 1977), Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Loïc Wacquant, 2004), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (ed. Talal Assad, 1973), The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Elizabeth A. Povinelli, 2002), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Hayden White, 1973), The Fantasy of Feminist History (Joan W. Scott, 2011), The Making of Buddhist Modernism (David L. McMahan, 2008), African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (Vincent L. Wimbush, 2000)

10. A footnote here would be appropriate, but also pedantic. There’s a large and unruly congress of writers who fill out this genre. At the end I’ll include a bibliography organized by topic for those who are curious to see what books I’ve read, glossed, leafed, touched, or ChatGPTed. For the most part, my footnotes are intended for pleasurable digression, or necessary explication.

11. A prevalent assumption amongst many scholars is that “social formations” like nations and religions are modern phenomena, socio-political forms that emerged from the soup of technological innovation, linguistic diversification, and secular aspiration. In other words, for them it doesn’t make sense to refer to “nations” or “religions” before the 18th century. To use these terms for Egypt signals one vector in my argument.

12. I’ll have a more to say about Benedict Anderson’s argument in Chapter 7.

13. Of course there are scholars who question the reality of the nation. Given the nature of 21st century academic trends, how could there not be? They’re usually some flavor of Foucault or Bourdieu, who are focused on discourse and post-Enlightenment classificatory regimes. Rogers Brubaker’s Nationalism Reframed (1996), and Ethnicity Without Groups (2004) are masterful examples. Their scholarship is usually impeccable. But the moral value of this literature is dubious. Intellectuals have grappled with the constructed nature of our social reality since, at least, Book III of Plato’s Republic in which Socrates evangelizes the noble lie that all men are brothers, born from the earth with different spiritual qualities—rulers, warriors, and craftsmen.

To emphasize the constructed nature of the nation in the 20th and 21st centuries isn’t a revelation. It’s a disciplinary strategy. It’s a techne used to create an antipodal elite class that has, unfortunately, become historically severed from its vital social function. This should be someone’s initiation into the secular priestly class, not its culmination, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 8, when we discuss the axialogical.

14. In fairness, nearly every humanistic field is balkanized. But the epicenter of this crack-up is here, in the dynamics you and I are exploring together. They are manifestations of a perduring pattern.

15. Accident and substance in the Aristotelian sense.

16. For those who are curious, Kevin Schilbrack provides a reasonably complete overview of the contemporary and historical attempts to conceptualize and define religion at the Stanford Encyclopedia: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/.

I’d spent a lot of years after my PhD reading other things, so it was a nice refresher for me. His provisional conclusion that religion, as a category, arises when two or more otherworldly orders exist in tension, is reminiscent of Catherine Albanese definition of religion in America: Religions and Religion (1981), in which religion is what we call the ordinary and extraordinary symbolic systems humans develop to manage biological and sociological boundaries.

17. Unlike many, I have never been averse to critical theory or its rhetorical style. Two of my most important teachers, Andrzej Warminski and Vincent Wimbush, use close reading, or thick description, to unmask received categories of experience: for Warminski, it is the always-unsettled tension between philosophy (lógos) and literature (gnōsis); and for Wimbush the signification and sacralization, what he calls scripturalization, of social hierarchies. Like Keats, I can’t begin to understand how I might say something true without their negative capacity.

18. Russel Dunbar’s original argument in “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates” (1992), that humans can maintain stable, durable relationships with up to approximately 150 individuals, has been challenged and refined. The number is largely irrelevant to my argument. My point is intuitable, if not a bit banal. There is an upper limit to the number of people you can know. And beyond that number, whatever it is, you’re relying on signifiers to guide you.