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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New Atheism didn't beget the 'nones'

New Atheists can take credit for the recent increase in religiously unaffiliated people, the so-called "nones," according to Daniel Dennett. The movement of best-selling books and their readers took a country where religious identity was de rigueur and made is possible to announce one didn't have any such religious identity.

In a recent five minute debate with Guardian editor Andrew Brown, arguing for New Atheism's accomplishments, Dennett says:

It was important to turn the tide and I think we've done that. I'm really very proud to say that the New Atheism has changed the face of America, as far expression of religious belief or disbelief .... What we gave [the religiously unaffiliated] was permission to declare their lack of interest in religion, which was something people were rather afraid to do before we wrote our books. 

There are several obvious problems with this claim.

The first and most obvious problem with saying that New Atheism made it possible to "declare a lack of interest in religion" is that significant numbers began making that kind of declaration a full decade before New Atheists' wrote their books. As a matter of simple chronological fact, the claim of a link is hard to support:

There isn't a New Atheist book that can take credit for a social trend that started in the 1990s.

Dennett should know this. After all, when he was arguing people should come out and call themselves "brights," he noted that a significant number of people -- 27 million -- already didn't consider themselves religious. He was attempting to organize those people with a new name, and encourage others to take on this name too. But it wouldn't have made sense in 2003, just when New Atheism was becoming a thing, to take credit for those people's freedom to be not religious.

Nor does it really make sense now. The evidence doesn't support it.

For another thing, religious disaffiliation isn't the same thing as "lack of interest in religion." This has been extensively documented. Belief hasn't notably declined; affiliation and identification have. It's easy to misrepresent this demographic, and Dennett seems to listing into that territory.

Thirdly, it doesn't seem like an accurate representation of Dennett's own ideas to say that he worked for or was interested in getting people to not be interested in religion. In his book Breaking the Spell, one of the main targets is actually tolerance of faith. He doesn't just want people to not have faith themselves, but to reject the idea that other people's faith is good or even benign. He writes,

Are we like families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors to the point of getting run out of town, or worse.  

If this is the precious meaning our lives are vouchsafed thanks to our allegiance to one religion or another, it is not such a bargain, in my opinion. Is this the best we can do? Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence.

It's not at all clear how that argument connects at all to people saying they're not religious.

Even if the "nones" were, as Dennett implies, disbelieving, rather than just disaffiliating, and even if it were possible that a movement that started in the early 21st century could be credited with social change that started in the end of the 20th century, the New Atheists weren't advocating religious disinterest. They worked to end religious accommodation, the casual acceptance that faith is a fine thing to have.

To say that New Atheism "changed the face of America," making it socially safe for "nones," is a misrepresentation of the facts, a misrepresentation of the "nones," and a misrepresentation of New Atheism. Dennett's just wrong here.

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Reza Aslan's outrage

Among scholars of religion, there's no consensus on the relevance of scholar's personal religious beliefs and practices to their scholarship.

Some scholars are quite open. They mention their religious identity in the classroom, affiliate themselves in their books, explain their interests in terms of their religious identities, and even on occasion write from the position of a believer. Others are open but private. They're willing to talk about themselves and their beliefs, but keep it separate from their scholarship. This is where I'm at: I sometimes talk with students or colleagues about my own faith and religious history, but it's not something I talk about in class or in my writing, mostly because it seems like it would cause more confusion than clarity. Others, still, are entirely private, and simply refuse to answer any personal questions.

When scholars are open about their religious identities, though, it is entirely fair to ask them about their religious identities.

This seems to me to be commonsensical, but perhaps it isn't.

There's a big loud kerfuffle right now about a recent FOX news interview with Reza Aslan, author of a popular book about the historical Jesus. The interviewer, Lauren Green, started the interview with the question, "you're a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?"

Aslan was outraged at the question and went on the offensive. The clip went viral. People got pretty excited ("Reza Aslan is superhuman"; "Hats off to Reza Alsan"), and expressed their outrage at the question.

It's bullshit.

There was nothing wrong with the question.

One can assume, as many have, that the subtext of the question was that Muslims don't have the right to write books about Jesus, but that's an assumption. One can assume the question is Islamophobic, but that's an odd assumption that would need to be defended. There's nothing necessarily biased about mentioning a scholar is Muslim, especially when the scholar has regularly talked about his own religious biography in relationship to his work.

The question could also be taken at face value, as a question about this scholar's personal interest.

Aslan choose to treat the question as hostile, but he didn't have to.

He could have responded by talking about how historically important Jesus is, or talking generally about how he's interested in various religions' origins, including Christianity's. He could consistently defer personal questions, as many scholars do (saying something like "my personal beliefs aren't that interesting or important; what I want do is try to understand this subject in it's historical context").

Aslan also could have talked about his own changing relationship to Jesus -- which he has, actually, in numerous interviews. On Fresh Air, he told Terry Gross that he grew up a secular Muslim and converted to Christianity when he was 15, but left the faith shortly thereafter. On The Daily Show, he told John Oliver that his mother and wife are Christians and his brother-in-law is a Christian minister. Aslan told the Huffington Post he's been "obsessed with Jesus for a very, very long time," adding "I heard the Gospel when I was 15 years old and it just blew me away." On NPR's Weekend Edition, he explained his current religious position by saying,

I wouldn't call myself a Christian because I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was God. But I am a follower of Jesus, and I think that sometimes, unfortunately -- I think even Christians would recognize this and admit it -- those two things aren't always the same, being a Christian and being a follower of Jesus.

Aslan is clearly open to talking about his own religious beliefs, and talking about how they shaped, informed, inspired and contextualized his scholarship. He's repeatedly said that his own biographical position -- for instance, that his wife and mother are Christians -- should inform readers' opinions. It's reasonable, then, for him to expect to be asked how his religious beliefs should affect readers' opinions.

In this case, though, he opted for outrage.

It's feigned bullshit.

It's another manufactured scandal, which makes for good TV, I guess. If you're into that. It appears to be pretty irresistible on the internet, where we all apparently troll around looking for clips and snippets that confirm the stupidity and/or evilness of those we believe to be stupid and/or evil. Smugness reigns, as always, and controversy is good for sales.

This isn't an example of attacks on Muslims or attacks on scholarship. It's evidence that this is an age of viral marketing, and that publicity stunts are pretty effective marketing tools, even if they are pretty tiresome and generally shady, conning people into an emotional response that makes someone money.

The outrage, if there is an outrage, is that so many people bought into fake outrage.

"Bought" literally.

Forgive me if my distaste for FOX and for right wing anti-intellectualism doesn't compel me to rush to Aslan's defense. If he doesn't want his personal life and religious identity to be a factor in how his scholarship is seen, he's entitled to keep those things private. If he talks about them sometimes, though, and other times acts like it's outrageous to ask about what he regularly talks about, I'm going to be fairly short with my sympathies. When that inconsistency isn't just idiosyncratic, but appears to be part of a book marketing scheme, I'm not going to share the "outrage."

When, in addition to all that, the man misrepresents his scholarly credentials, he's not a hero of academic freedom. He's not a champion of scholarship in the face of the forces of anti-intellectualism. He's yet another creature of the culture of fake outrage, manipulating cultural divisions for the sake of sales of his book.

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