Snake handlers embrace media attention

The National Geographic channel is planning a show on two Tennessee men and their communities struggling to keep the snake-handling faith. Titled Snake Salvation, it's scheduled to debut in September.

Bob Smietena of the Tennessean reports:

A crew from National Geographic Television followed the two preachers in the fall of 2012 and the spring and summer of 2013. Sixteen episodes are planned so far, said executive producer Matthew Testa.

Testa said that because their faith is dangerous and illegal to practice in most states, serpent-handing congregations have been wary of the media in the past. By getting to know [Jamie] Coots and [Andrew] Hamblin, he said, viewers will get a view into a unique religious culture.  

'We live at a time when, because of the Internet and television, we are all becoming more and more alike,' he said. 'To find a really distinct American subculture is incredibly rare.'

Coots, for his part, told the Tennessean that he hopes the show helps people realize there's more to snake-handling churches than handling snakes, featuring the day-to-day struggles of living out their faith.

Only about 15 percent of church members actually handle snakes, according to Ralph W. Hood Jr. and W. Paul Williamson, psychology professors who have extensively studied snake handling churches. They write, "All members believe in handling, but some have not yet been called by God to do so or have not experienced sufficient anointing to practice the sign."

Snake handlers believe the religious practice demonstrates the power of God, their commitment to God, and their commitment to a literalist hermeneutic of scripture. A.J. Tomlinson, one of the founders of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), a church which stopped practicing snake handling by the 1940s, once wrote, "you say that the disciples did not handle serpents? You cannot read it anywhere in the Bible? I wonder what kind of reader you are!"

A desire to demonstrate that commitment has driven these Tennessee pastors -- part of a younger generation of snake handlers seeking to revitalize the movement -- to open their arms to the media. In a profile of the believes last year, Smietena noted that "these younger believers welcome visitors and use Facebook .... They want to show the beauty and power of their extreme form of spirituality."

For them, the show is part of an evangelization effort.

"If one person sees it," Coots said, "and it converts them or causes them to go to a church, then it will be worth it."

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Robert Bellah and the 'religious turn'

A little noted episode in Robert Bellah's career, from the New York Times obituary:

As a result of Professor Bellah’s abiding concern with religion, his work did not find favor in all scholarly quarters.

In 1973, after he had been named to a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., many of the institute's faculty -- whose members were overwhelmingly scientists and mathematicians -- called his scholarly credentials into question.

The apparent reason, Professor Bellah's colleagues said this week, was that in the ardently secular canon of the hard sciences, religion was deemed an insufficiently rigorous subject for scholarly scrutiny. Professor Bellah renounced the appointment and remained at Berkeley.

Steven Tipton, professor at Candler School of Theology at Emory University and one of Bellah's co-authors on Habits of the Heart, told the New York Times that Bellah's work "shows how religion is enacted in history and cannot be grasped outside it," which is to say, it's a real subject for scholarship.

It's common to hear talk of the "religious turn" in academia. Not sure there's a better example of the dramatic difference in how religion is treated in academia now than the distance between Bellah's conflict at Princeton in '73 and his reputation at his death in '13.

"Modern America has a soul, not only a body," Tipton said, "and Bellah probed that soul more deeply and subtly than anyone in his field or his time."

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Religious art's religious (?) evocations

When is art religious? When is art religious art?

According to some recent reviews, the religiousness of art resides in its ability to put an audience in a particular emotional state, a state similar to that of a church service. Art is deemed religious, by these critics, because it has the power to move people in ways similar to how people are moved in a church.

One example of this: Morgan Meis, writing on the recent art installation "Aten Reign" at the Guggenheim in New York City, finds a link between art and church in the way the art turns observers into practitioners. Meis writes:

The direct connection between [James] Turrell’s art and the practices of Quaker worship are obvious.

So obvious, that I’d like to suggest that the best way to approach and interpret Turrell’s installation at the Guggenheim is to say it is a Quaker meeting. Observe, if you will, what happens when people enter the ground floor of the museum. They stop and look up. They see that the spirals of the Guggenheim have been transformed into a glowing light installation. They roam around for a minute or so looking up. Then they find a space to lie down on the floor. Generally, they stop talking. They watch the glowing lights and the luminescent egg. This silent watching goes on for many minutes. More than ten minutes. More than fifteen minutes for many people, and more than that for others.

In other words, James Turrell has managed to get people in New York City to lie on the floor silently meditating.

For his part, Turrell has been more hesitant on the "obvious" connection between his faith and his art. I share that hesitancy. It seems to me to be too easy to make too much of the connection.

In a 2003 interview Turrell said, "I’m not sure whether that has impacted my art-making, because my work is not about specific issues -- perhaps being a Quaker influences how I live my life and what I value. People tend to relate any work in light to the spiritual. I don’t think this is actually correct."

Meis persists, though. It's not the issues that make this art religious, it's the effect:

It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether the people who view 'Aten Reign' believe in Turrell's Quaker God. It is not even clear exactly what are Turrell's beliefs regarding this God. The point is to sit or lie down and submit to the light. If you allow yourself to stare at that light for a few minutes you will inevitably have some experience of meditation. You will enter a quieter, more contemplative space. The light will do its work.

Emotional efficacy is also cited as key to the religiousness of Robert Randolph's "sacred steel" music. This is another example. Randolph is quoted as saying in the Pittsuburgh Tribune-Review last week, that his music has an energy "that's kind of from my background, growing up in church, where music was like this big rock 'n' roll show. We were all singing and dancing. Everybody singing together and interacting and having the music bring about this joyous feeling."

The New York Times went to Randolph's church, a black Pentecostal church, in 2001. The reporter, Neil Strauss, also made note of the evocation of joy:

The loud, unmistakable sound of vintage rock 'n' roll blared one recent Sunday afternoon from the open windows of an unlikely location, the House of God, Which Is the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth Without Controversy Inc., in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.  

Inside, parishioners banged tambourines against their palms and hit drumsticks against church pews in perfect rhythm. Even the children joined in on toy tambourines and plastic drumsticks. In front of the long, narrow, wooden-floor room, just to the right of the pulpit, Robert Randolph sat alongside a large purple pedal steel guitar, fingers flying across the strings to tease out lead lines that sounded like John Lee Hooker and rickety rhythms reminiscent of Bo Diddley, two musicians whom he claims never to have heard.

According to Strauss, Randolph's music also had the effect outside of church of bringing people into a church-like experience, even if there were differences. The "churchgoers made noise to praise the Lord, the clubgoers to express their individuality and enthusiasm."

Are those experiences so radically different?

In a review of the latest album from Randolph and The Family, PopMatters critic Neil Kelly says this steel guitar music only makes sense as "the fury of true black gospel music," and that it's success is its ability to induce religious states in the not-church-going crowd.

"I've seen them live," Kelly writes.

The gospel-infused funky rock roots band that commandingly whips a crowd of drug-laced earth muffins and hopheads into some sort of a revivalist frenzy ... that’s the Family Band I’ve seen. If you haven’t witnessed the fury of true black gospel music (from ANY denomination) in the church house on any given Sunday morning in the South, then think of the effect James Brown had on Joliet Jake in The Blues Brothers .... This ability to move the crowd to that level of excitement is why Randolph’s name is frequently in huge font on the posters of the festivals he and the Family Band play. This is the bread and butter of what makes him a superstar.

The "frenzy" of the crowd, for Kelly, is religious, or religious-like, and that response makes the music religious, not in and of itself, but in its effect. In its evocation.

The emotional state of Randolph's audience is pretty markedly different than that of Turrell's. One wouldn't mistake the one audience for the other. Contemplation and meditation wouldn't easily exist in the same space as concert enthusiasm and a whipped-up crowd. But both of these responses are seen as "religious," for producing responses similar to those of their creators' respective religious traditions.

That biographical info might be key to these interpretations, though.

Unless all art, any art, is going to be judged religious for evoking emotions and moving audiences, it's hard to see how these emotions thus moved are specifically religious.

Interpreting Turrell via reference to Quaker practice makes sense because he's Quaker. But there are many art exhibits by many non-Quaker artists that cause similar reactions in the museum-going public. Randolph's music is certainly Pentecostal, and it's useful to think about it and talk about it in that context -- but that's a historical fact one couldn't deduce just from watching the audience. Many other concert crowds could be described in the same way as the crowds dancing and singing with Randolph, and if all of them are thought of as religious, then that's not really a meaningful description anymore.

People tend to relate certain works that evoke emotions to religion, but that doesn't seem right. They use the creator's biographical information to make claims that, while they're not wrong, seem to be too strong.

Visual art produces a response that's analogous to the response one gets at a Quaker meeting. Music in a secular space produces a response that's pretty similar to the response that the same music gets in a dedicated religious space. It's possible to make too much out of these similarities.

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Robert Bellah, 1927 - 2013

Robert Bellah, a sociologist whose work deeply informed the study of American religion, died on Wednesday from complications following heart surgery. He was 86.

Bellah's original work focused on Japan, but his work on modern individualism and civil religion -- a term he's credited with popularizing -- have been absolutely critical to those thinking about religion in the contemporary American context. According to Jeffery Alexander, of Yale's Center for Cultural Sociology, Bellah was the last living founder of cultural sociology, and "there's a sense in which every contemporary sociologist is Bellah's child, niece, or nephew." Something similar could be said for those studying 20th and 21st century American religiosity as well. In an important way, thinking about religion in American public life and thinking about spirituality in Americans' private lives is thinking after Bellah.

A significant thrust of Bellah's work was a moral critique of the forces that prevent and undermine group belonging, paired with a critique of what he saw as misuses of such group belonging.

He told the Berkeleyan in 2006 "group belonging is inherently a fulfillment of our humanity, [and] the idea of living totally alone, totally in isolation, is totally unnatural." For Bellah, that belief was undergirded by both the Christian practice of communion and the sociology of Emilé Durkheim.

"The great danger," he said of modernism, "is radical individualism -- 'I'm in it for myself,' 'I'm my own brand,' as somebody said. This is a kind of terrible reductionism of an ethical individualism to pure self-interest."

The problems of individualism, for Bellah, could be seen in the rise of "spirituality." The individualism of much of the spirituality of Western Buddhism, for example, contributes to the pathologies of the modern age, rather than ameliorating them. He told the Buddhist magazine Tricycle,

The way 'spirituality' is often used suggests that we exist solely as a collection of individuals, not as members of a religious community, and that religious life is merely a private journey. It is the religious expression of the ideology of free-market economics and the radical 'disencumbered' individualism that idolizes the choice-making individual as the prime reality of the world.

At the same time, Bellah believed that certain forms of group belonging were horrible. He described religious nationalism as "something I above all hate," and rejected his youthful Marxism -- for which he suffered -- in part because of the authoritarianism of the American Communist Party. Writing about the American taboo on socialism in 1975, Bellah argued,

Socialism has often seemed to compound the evil that is contained in capitalism. Rather than releasing the autonomous individual and placing him in a context of genuine participatory community, socialism has been seen as a system that crushes the individual under a centralized bureaucratic structure even more effectively than corporate capitalism. With the example of state socialism in the Soviet Union since 1917, that argument has been especially hard to refute. But there are concepts of socialism and socialist movements in the world that reject the Soviet model

Bellah believed that what was necessary was to "come to terms with the balance between dependence and independence, solidarity and autonomy." He believed that group belonging is good, but not free from moral ambiguity. This was the point he tried to make with his account of American "civil religion." He concluded that that set of symbols and themes and sacralized values making up the "religious dimension of political life" in the United State had been and were being misused, but that the civil religion could also be a great moral force. As he concluded, in that famous essay:

[Civil religion] has often been used and is being used today as a cloak for petty interests and ugly passions. It is in need-as any living faith-of continual reformation, of being measured by universal standards. But it is not evident that it is incapable of growth and new insight.   

It does not make any decisions for us. It does not remove us from moral ambiguity, from being, in Lincoln's fine phrase, an 'almost chosen people.' But it is a heritage of moral and religious experience from which we still have much to learn as we formulate the decisions that lie ahead.  

Taking a communitarian stance lead Bellah to critique rightist defenses of free-market economics (he clashed with the editors of First Things on this point) and also leftist dismissals of the importance of religion and tradition and liberal constriction of moral concerns (he clashed with The Nation as well).

Not all of Robert Bellah's "nieces and nephews" accept these normative claims and moral arguments, of course. To think after Bellah has, in important ways, been to argue with Bellah. Wherever one positions oneself on the values of individualism and group belonging, though, his sociological descriptions of these phenomena as he observed them in private spirituality and public sacralization have been critical to analyses of contemporary American religion.

One important aspect of Bellah's work was this exploration of the "profound tension between individualism and commitment to community, as Mark Juergensmeyer, sociologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes at Religion Dispatches.

According to Juergensmeyer, Bellah "founded a whole new enterprise for religious studies scholars: probing the political significance of religious ideas and the religious significance of political ones," and, "promted religious studies scholars to take seriously the social dimensions of religious belief, even -- or perhaps especially -- when they seem so personal and devoid of social significance."

Many examples of Bellah's work can be found at www.robertbellah.com.

Late last year, Bellah came to Heidelberg, Germany, as part of the promotion of his last work, Religion in Human Evolution. He spoke on the Axial Age, and lead a graduate seminar (which I was lucky enough to attend) on the possibility of a global civil religion, and also gave a long interview at the German American Institute. In the video, he is frail with age. He had recently lost his wife of 61 years, and talked openly of the work he knew he wouldn't finish.

"The temptation is despair," Bellah once said of getting older.

I have to fight this degree to which I'm gloomy. When I speak to undergraduates, which I still do from time to time. I'm never gloomy. Undergraduates are at a fragile emotional stage, and they're easily depressed, and they're easily elated. But if you want to encourage them to be active citizens, the worst thing you can do is tell them that everything is going to hell. 

Still, as the video attests, even at the end he still very much evinced the sprightliness that infused all of his work:

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