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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'Do you believe God will save you from your own ridiculousness?'

The "processing" scene in P.T. Anderson's The Master:

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How New Atheists are like Victorian-era bishops

The secularization thesis -- the most traditional version, rather crude, which predicted religion would disappear from the modern world -- is dead. I don't know that there's a generally agreed upon moment when that theory died. Certainly by the late 90s it was clear to sociologists that while certain social relationships, such as that between the general population and religious authorities, were changing, and that many religious beliefs and practices were morphing and diversifying, religion itself wasn't going away.

About a decade later, there were the New Atheists. While of course this movement made arguments about the validity of theistic beliefs, a major emphasis was actually on the moral imperative of secularization. The argument was that religion was a destructive, negative force that should disappear from the modern world. The New Atheists didn't rely on secularization as an empirical claim, particularly, saying that religion was, observably, disappearing (though sometimes they said that too), but made, more, a normative moral claim that religion ought to disappear.

Is there a connection between the demise of the sociological theory of secularization and the emergence of New Atheists' arguments for secularization?

Philosopher Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, said that there might be during an international, interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of Tübingen this last week.

Asked about the New Atheists during a question-and-answer period, Taylor said:

They are people who are really in a position where they’re, where they have a feeling ... of being besieged. I think I understand why they’re so upset. They had this sense that history was on their side and then this didn’t happen. It’s rather like bishops in the Victorian church and then there was Darwin.... That’s a very interesting phenomena. It used to be the picture, where dogmatic views were dying and freethinkers felt they owned the future. I don’t really understand this development. I’m just reporting on it. But it’s very interesting that there’s been this reversal, so that they now feel besieged.

Taylor's suggestion was that the much commented-upon style of the New Atheists -- the "militancy" and aggression -- comes from a sense that history is arcing in the wrong direction. In that way, if not in any other, these public atheists might be compared to American fundamentalists.

For their part, at least some of the New Atheists remain committed to the sociological thesis of secularization that sociologists have now either completely abandoned or dramatically modified (into various neo-secularization theories, including Taylor's own). In an interview to promote their recent documentary, both Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss said they thought theistic beliefs would, eventually, come to an end.

Krauss said, "When I was a kid in the ’60s, I was sure that by now there would be no religion. In a way it’s very surprising that there are these momentary resurgences. I think it’s going to be a long road."

Dawkins was more adamant that religion is vanishing, even if not as evenly and as quickly as was once commonly predicted. He said, "If you look at the broad sweep of history, then clearly we’re on the winning side. I think things are moving in the right direction, probably not as fast as I would like to see."

Only time will tell "who owns the future." There's an interesting question, though, that could be further explored, about how the sense of whether or not historical trends are tending towards or against one's position shape the way that position is articulated and the tenor of the general arguments.

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What 'Mormon' means to the media when you're murdered

Travis Alexander was a Mormon.

He converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in high school. He did his two-year mission in Denver. He abstained from alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, in keeping with the common understanding of the church's health codes, and cared about eating nutritional meals, which isn't always true for financially successful 30-year-olds. He wanted to live in a community with a strong Mormon presence. That was part of why he moved to Mesa, Az. He wrote a spiritual self-help book, titled Raising You, and was trying to get it published when he died.

When he died, the Arizona Republic said Alexander was a "a devout Mormon." It was the first sentence of their first story about how he was murdered in his shower: "Travis Alexander was a young, successful businessman, a well-known motivational speaker and a devout Mormon."

It's never really clear what news reports mean by "devout." It's often a kind of content-free intensifier, like "really" or "literally." The stylebook for religion reporters discourages use of the word, since "It's a subjective term without a precise meaning to all readers." Sometimes it seems to mean the person adheres more to a religion's teachings than others do (with the journalist sweeping right by the always-present internal struggles over the right understanding of a religion's teaching). Sometimes it seems to mean measurable practices, like prayer or proselytizing, are practiced by this person -- practiced, sometimes, vaguely more, or a lot, or even at all. Sometimes it doesn't even mean anything observable, but is a gesture at how the person presented themselves as if religion and religiousness were important. Or maybe the word works to justify religion's inclusion in a story, since after all the vast majority of people in America identify with

In any case, it's all very hand-wavy.

When Travis Alexander was murdered, though, the Arizona Republic made mention of his Mormonism and did the hand waving, and dubbed him "devout."

That was five years ago, though. In more recent stories, covering the high-profile trial of Alexander's girlfriend, who is charged with murdering him, the man's Mormonism has been described a bit differently. On Jan. 2, for example, as the trial began, the paper summed up the court case this way:

An outwardly religious young man is shot down and slashed apart by the angry young woman who was his secret sex partner. Prosecutors call it first-degree murder; [...] defense attorneys call it self-defense. The network TV news magazines call it the trial of the year.

On Jan. 30, as the defense phase of the trial began, the Arizona Republic repeated the description of the murdered man as an "outwardly religious Mormon." The story reads:

[Jodi] Arias is on trial in the 2008 killing of Alexander, 30, an outwardly religious Mormon who was found shot and stabbed in the shower of his home. Arias, his secret sex partner, admits killing Alexander but claims it was in self-defense.

Presumably Alexander's piety -- his Mormon-ness -- has not changed in five years of being dead. How the major Arizona paper describes that piety has changed, however.

Why?

It is still true that Alexander converted in high school, did a mission, didn't smoke or drink alcohol or caffeine, wanted to live in a place where there were lots of other Mormons, wrote a spiritual self-book, etc., etc. What's different now is that with the trial, information about Alexander's relationship with Arias have come out, and there's lots of evidence that lots of that relationship did not conform with his church's teachings. There's evidence, too, that he lied about the church's teaching in order to manipulate his girlfriend, a new convert, to perform certain sex acts.

As the Associated Press reported, "Alexander's religion and sex life have been a constant theme throughout the trial."

More precisely: the contradiction between how this man apparently believed he should live and how he did live, have been a critical aspect of the accused's defense. And a critical aspect of the trial. The very first witness called in this case -- herself described as a "devout" Mormon by the Arizona Republic -- was grilled about "what constitutes sin in the Mormon religion."

She ranked sexual immorality the second worst Mormon sin, right after murder.

Whether or not Arias is guilty of the worst sin is still up to the jury to decide, but there's a lot of agreement that Alexander was definitely guilty of the second worst sin. In one report, Alexander is said to have convinced his girlfriend that sodomy was not frowned on by the church. Arias testified "She believed the Mormon vow of chastity, based on Alexander's interpretation, meant that most sexual acts were 'more or less OK' as long as they did not involve premarital vaginal intercourse -- which they eventually engaged in." In the accused's testimony, she further said Alexander gave her her own copy of the Book of Mormon the same day he asked her to perform oral sex on him in a parking lot. He had sex with her the same day he baptized her into the faith. He apparently also lied to another girlfriend about being a virgin, and pursued multiple women at the same time.

There was also a phone sex recording, nude photos, and claims of public sex, acted-out fantasies, pornography, and day-long trysts. Alexander and Arias were, of course, also unmarried.

As the Arizona paper glosses this: "although they both professed to be faithful Mormons, their relationship was anything but chaste."

This is what it means, in the paper's estimating, to be only outwardly Mormon. Inwardly -- or, perhaps, better, privately -- Alexander wasn't really Mormon, because he behaved in ways disapproved of by his church. When they didn't know about his sexual behavior, the paper deemed Alexander devout. Now that they know, his faith is seen as just for show.

It's certainly true that the Latter-day Saints actively teach against the behavior that this murdered man was engaged in. Alexander likely would have agreed, if asked by his bishop, that he was sinning. The church does not teach, though, that one somehow ceases to be Mormon when one sins. Acting badly, by ones own lights and even in the judgement of the church, doesn't delegitimize one's conversion, or undercut one's Mormon-ness. The church teaches morals, but it doesn't simply equate being a part of the church with consistently living in accordance with the morals that are taught.

Inward and private struggles to live up to the standards of one's religion do not mean that one only has that religion outwardly, at least not in Mormonism, not in how it's understood by Mormons or by the church hierarchy.

The paper, however, has confused a moral code for the whole of a religion. Adherence has been interpreted as hypocritical, or even fraudulent, unless it means perfectly doing what you say you believe you're supposed to do. This is a misunderstanding of Mormonism, and more than that a gross overreach on the part of the paper, going well beyond the bounds of what a newspaper has the authority to say.

Alexander himself could have said whether or not his was a devout Mormon, or whether he was only one outwardly. Other Mormons could judge his piety, based on their understanding of Mormonism. The church has authorities who, as part of their job, do make such judgements.

A newspaper, though, is not a religious authority, and shouldn't pretend to speak as such. According to the rules of American newspapers, reporters are only allowed to say what's verifiable, what's known to be fact or can be attributed. Really, in this case, the Arizona Republic should have avoided the evaluations of the murdered man's piety, and kept it simple:

Travis Alexander was a Mormon.

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An interpretive endeavor

Jason N. Blum, "Retrieving Phenomenology of Religion as a Method for Religious Studies," in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Dec. 2012:

Phenomenology of religion is not keyed to offer explanations of religion, and especially not in naturalistic or social scientific terms. However, it is well equipped to offer an interpretation of religion, or of religious experience and consciousness. It is this interpretive function that should define phenomenology of religion, and which sets it apart from social scientific or naturalistic methods that seek to explain religion. The category of explanation is privileged by McCutcheon, Proudfoot, and others, and may be regarded as the style of analysis that characterizes a good proportion of social scientific work. An economist or sociologist may, for example, seek to explain why conservative or fundamentalist types of religious identification tend to increase in the face of economic hardship, globalization, or intecultural penetration. In this sense, “explanation” consists of proposing a causal relationship wherein certain observable, natural factors are identified as providing reasons for related religious phenomena.

By contrast, the phenomenologist of religion attempts to interpret or understand religion, which is to say that he seeks to disclose the meaning or meanings of it as they are constructed, perceived, and experienced within consciousness, or from the perspective of the religious subject. While this interpretive task is distinct from the explanatory one, it is not necessarily opposed to it, and may in fact represent a guide or aid in the explanatory endeavor.

[.... It is] an interpretive endeavor designed to disclose the meaning of religion, as understood and experienced from the perspective of religious consciousness."

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When a Nazi converts to Islam

He wore a beard, but not a full beard.

He walked to prayers at the nearby mosque.

He read the Quran, but in his own native German rather than the original Arabic.

These are the hints we have to the content of the new-found faith of a dying Nazi. The few facts. They are cryptic, almost incidental, and stubbornly ambiguous. The Nazi doctor known as Dr. Death and the Butcher of Mauthausen spent the last dozen years of his life as a Muslim. He converted, and declared himself changed, a man of faith. What that means, though, is anything but clear.

The 50-year hunt for Aribert Ferdinand Heim ended last week when a German court in Baden Baden decreed he died in Egypt in 1992. Evidence Heim died in Cairo emerged three years ago, but was only confirmed by district court judges on Friday, as reported by Der Spiegel and the New York Times.

With that ruling, certain facts about Heim's years in hiding become clear:

It's known he fled in 1962, abandoning his wife and son and his gynecology practice in Southern Germany when investigators came to his house while he wasn’t home, escaping prosecution for war crimes. He went to France, then Spain, Morocco, Libya, and finally to Cairo on a tourist visa. He changed his name to Tarek Hussein Farid. He learned Arabic and lived in a hotel, away from the other Western ex-pats and the small community of Germans in the more middle class neighborhoods. He converted in Islam in 1980.

But “he converted” meaning what, exactly?

Aribert Heim, as shown in his passport.

For the last few years, though we know now he was already dead, Heim has been the most wanted Nazi. He was named "Dr. Death" for his brutality in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. According to witnesses, he was more than an eager participant in the Third Reich's machinery of death. A Wafen-SS doctor, Heim tortured the concentration camp inmates with impunity. He "experimented" sadistically. Witnesses said he removed organs without anesthesia, timed deaths on his stop watch as his victims screamed in pain, and preserved Jews’ skulls for use as souvenir paperweights. He injected water, gasoline and various poisons into people's hearts, and watched while they died.

In the words of the court ruling closing the case last week, Heim was wanted because,

"als Revierarzt im österreichischen Konzentrationslager Mauthausen im Zeitraum Oktober bis November 1941 in zahlreichen Fällen Häftlinge durch Spritzen oder nicht notwendige Operationen grausam getötet zu haben."

"as district physician in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen, in the period between October and November 1941, in numerous cases, detainees were cruelly killed through injections or unnecessary operations."

As late as 1979, Heim was actively denying these charges. He said it was all a conspiracy, that Germany just wanted a scapegoat, and that the witnesses were lying, as he’d only been a doctor for the soldiers. He was reportedly seriously considering returning to Germany to face the charges. Notes and documents found in 2009 show Heim was trying to work out and solidify his defense. He appears to have spent some considerable amount of time in his Cairo rooms, attempting to make his case on paper. "What crueler deed could one accuse a doctor of than these brutalities and bestialities?" he wrote.

At least part of his defense, however, some 30 years after the end of the war, was a rant about Jews. He saw Jewish conspiracies at work in the world, and thought, apparently, his own innocence was proven by such anti-semitism. Weren’t the Jews to blame for student uprisings in 1968, when “the young Khazars Dutschke and Cohn-Bendit propagated their anarchist ideas”? Was no one paying attention to the atrocities of Zionism in Palestine? Weren’t the Jews really to blame for the Holocaust? It was, after all, the old Nazi scribbled, “The Jewish Khazar, [and the] Zionist lobby of the U.S. [who] were the first ones who in 1933 declared war against Hitler's Germany.”

During these years, Heim was working a series of reports on “Antisemitism,” “a general review on the true identity of the Khazars.” Between 1977 and ’78, using a pseudonym, he sent this to German media outlets and German leaders, such as Helmut Kohl, to several American media outlets, and a long list of U.S. leaders, starting with the First Lady at the time, Rosalynn Carter. Heim’s notes say copies were sent to more than a dozen U.S. Senators, including Tip O’Neil, Robert Byrd, Edward Kennedy, John Glenn (“Astronaut,” Heim noted), Orin Hatch, Mark Hatfield and Bob Dole.

In a cover letter to Newsweek, Heim claimed he wrote the reports because “historic facts should get the upper hand and justice should prevail in the politics.” A postscript demanded an answer as to why the news magazine was suppressing the truth. “Why we can not read the true history and true Identity of the Jewish-Khazar’s in your weekly, or are you under Zionist observance ( see report by G[eorge] Will 28.11.77)?” Heim wrote.

A young Egyptian who knew Heim at this time as “Uncle Tarek” reported it wasn’t clear to those around him why the German was in Cairo. He was, however, thought to be “in dispute with maybe the Jews.”

It was a year after these notebook rants and anti-semitic missives that Heim became Muslim. The documentation of this was confirmed by the Baden Baden court. As far as the court is concerned, his conversion was real, legally speaking.

Whether it marked a change in him is harder to ascertain.

In the news reports, this detail is presented in the context of his hiding. It’s one of the ways he stayed underground, hidden from the Nazi hunters who were following shreds of rumors around the globe, looking for Heim in Finland and Chile, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia.

Or was it more than a ruse?

There seem to be three possible interpretations of Heim’s conversion to Islam:

1. He didn’t change in his “conversion,” as it was merely as a matter of disguise. 
2. He changed. 
3. He did change, but not in the ways that might matter to those morally opposed to Fascism and the Holocaust.

It seems that 1. is essentially an intuitive position, and would be very hard to support and very hard to falsify. Any detail that could support a conversion could just as easily be read as disguise. Each fact of religion and detail of practice can be actively doubted and alternatively interpreted as disingenuous, as a part of Heim’s façade. The question, it seems, is simply whether one believes it possible a Nazi – especially a Nazi who was as much of a Nazi as Heim – can change.

Conversely, 2. would seem to need to be based in optimism, an intuition, a strong belief that people can change. That optimism could be general, or attached to religion in general, as a place where people are transformed or empowered to be different than they are, or it could be attached to Islam in particular. If Islam is submission and order, jihad a “technology of the self,” then it could be the case that Heim found in this new faith a new habitus, a chance to be otherwise than he was. Whether or not his conversion is taken as “real” may depend just on whether or not one holds that conversion, in any important sense, is really possible.

But perhaps that change, if Heim changed, would have to be visible. Would have to mean an important change. Isn’t it the case, after all, that with “Dr. Death,” the change one would be interested in is very concrete, very specific? What one wants to find, if religion, Islam, or just people are to be thought of optimistically as able to become better, is not simply some “change,” but a change in the aging war criminal’s orientation towards his own horrific actions. A change, possibly, in his attitude towards Jews. A change, really, in his ability or willingness to acknowledge his own evilness.

The question is whether or not Heim found a new faith. To answer that, though, one has to decide what “conversion” is supposed to mean.

What is known about his conversion and his dozen years of Muslim piety, really, mostly, doesn’t serve to answer the question of change. The question just repeats: what would conversion really look like? It’s known that Heim “never missed a prayer at the mosque.” He fasted during Ramadan, when Muslims purify themselves in extensive fasting. He had his beard and read his Quran. He “was very ordered, exercise in the morning, then prayers at the main Al-Azhar mosque, and long sessions spent reading and writing while sitting on a rocking chair.”

In the end, thought, what does that tell us? Are those details the answer to the question?

At least in this instance, “change” and “conversion” and “faith,” to be worthwhile concepts to talk about, are going to need to mean something like a change of heart. A change of beliefs and practices too, to be sure, but more especially, more importantly, a reorientation towards the most important facts of Heim’s life, his participation in the Holocaust.

There is one important detail in the available information that supports the thought Heim didn’t change in this way, and didn’t abandon his ideology and anti-semitism. From that cache of documents, discovered in Cairo storage in 2009, there’s a letter dated to 1987, seven years after his conversion. Heim is writing to the Vatican on behalf of the Palestinians, arguing Jews have no right to a homeland in Palestine and have misrepresented their ethnicity in an elaborate, media-supported conspiracy, “this greatest 2nd millennium’s hoax,” in order to seize Palestine. The paranoia, the anti-semitism and theories of conspiracies of Jews are the same, here, as they were before his conversion.

Heim’s new faith apparently left at least this essential aspect of his Nazi outlook on the world untouched.

In the Vatican letter in 1987, Heim is even attempting to marshal evidence that the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated. He claims conflicting census reports on the number of Jews in the world show there is a Zionist conspiracy, “a calculated mistake to demonstrate the colossal number of Jewish Khazars killed in WWII.”

So perhaps it was all a ruse, Heim’s conversion. Perhaps it was just one more way he integrated into the culture where he was hiding. Or, perhaps, after 18 years in Cairo he really did mark some difference and some change in his life, and did “really” convert, in the ways conversion is usually described, but it had no relation, no effect, no bearing on his anti-semitism, or his own actions as a Nazi doctor. Maybe he became a Muslim but still stayed a Nazi.

There are of course those who might see this as evidence for an intrinsic link between Islam and fascism. The intransigent anti-semitism of one Nazi convert says nothing, though, about the diversity of faiths that go under the name “Islam,” or even about the essential nature of the Islam that Heim claimed. His conversion can’t reasonably be interpreted as tarnishing the religion of more than two billion people, any more than the fact there were Nazis who were Catholics can be considered an important point about Catholicism.

What it does show is some of the ways in which “conversion” is thought of. And some the ambiguity in that concept. It can mean something strictly legal, something a document like the one the court examined and authenticated in Baden Baden serves to prove real. It can mean, also, the adoption of certain habits, and a habitus, things the converted do with their days. Or, alternatively, it can be demanded that the change, to be important, must be more than that: More than prayers and beards, more than “Muslim” written on a form.

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What good does religion do in politics?

"Current distrust of the role of religion in politics, is focused upon the divisive force of hot button issues, such as abortion, gay and lesbian rights, school prayer, 'family values,' the putative 'secularization' of American society, the role of the religious right in electoral politics, all polarized by the intemperate, and emotional, if not vitriolic, language of print, radio, television, and internet commentators, who increase the size and arouse the emotions of their audiences by frequently belittling, ridiculing, and demonizing those with whom they disagree. In this atmosphere, comity, trust, civility, and fellow regard, necessary habits for democratic discourse cannot thrive. Recently, I was browsing in my local bookstore, when two clerks, who knew I taught courses in religion, confronted me with an urgent question:  'What good does religion do in politics?' They clearly were agitated by some issue of the so-called 'culture wars' featured in the news that morning. As I paused, they added 'in 25 words or less.'

"'I don’t need 25,' I replied. 'My answer is Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.' 

"They were surprised and then nodded, 'O.K. but they were exceptions,' as if I'd cheated. They were, of course, right King and Parks were exceptional, but they are exemplary of the values of citizenship which we ought to try to emulate. And both were inspired and motivated by the religious institutions and values of African-American social Christianity."

-- Albert J. Raboteau, a leading scholar of African-American religion and winner of the James W.C. Pennington Award, on the hope of religion in politics.

Read the full speech: "Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: As Precedent for Religion in U.S. Politics."

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Ritual, money, & the death of a pet

By some accounts, the function of religion in daily life, and especially of religious ritual, is to lend solemnity to otherwise puny, pallid human moments.

I think of this as the Peter Ivanovich theory of religion, named after a character in Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Iliyich. Ivanovich, at the start of the story, finds himself at a funeral and "like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself."

This is religion as a response to what could be called existential awkwardness. Ritual being what you do when you don't know what to do. The idea is that religion and/or ritual serve to mark, to recognize the seriousness and importance of a moment that would, without that mark, not seem that important at all. There is, in the act, an insistence that something is important and meaningful, despite how it might seem.

This is how I would see pet funerals, the practice of treating deceased pets to the same processes and ceremonies traditionally reserved for humans.



In a mostly horrid bit of journalism, Business Week recently re-discovered the industry of pet funerals, as seems to happen somewhat regularly. Mostly this piece is a baseless trend story, written up as a will-you-believe-this-ridiculousness?, without actually demonstrating much interest in understanding what might explain this "phenomena" or why people, apparently lots of them, want funerals for their cats and dogs and pot-bellied pigs and hamsters.

There's one interesting moment of insight, though. At the very end, Bob Walczyk, the apparently empathy-less owner of Forever Friends in Green Bay, Wisc., notes that services such as his allow people to solemnize their pets' deaths and lives, and to do something, perform some act, that declares the importance relationships with their pets.

Except, for Walczyk, what allows people to mark out meaningfulness in the face of apparent meaningnessless isn't religion, and isn't ritual. But money.

As the reporter writes,

"the most valuable secret he’s learned after years in the business, Walczyk says, is that selling a pet funeral means never offering the lowest price. Customers aren't looking for value; they're looking for quality.  

 "'We're the most expensive place in town,' Walczyk says with a laugh. 'And everybody still comes to us.'"

Maybe one should update Tolstoy: "All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to spend money."

One way to think of this would be as a market essentially functioning to replace religion in modern life. I wonder, though, if it might not be more helpful to broaden the standard understanding of ritual, to think about how consumption can also be ritualistic, and how, whether people are religious or not, there's still this need to mark out aspects and moments of life as different, and rituals still serve this important, Peter Ivanovich-function in people's lives.

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Wallace, writing fiction for God, the Cosmos, the Unified Field

“Fiction for me is a conversation for me between me and something that May Not Be Named—God, the Cosmos, the Unified Field, my own psychoanalitic cathexes, Roqoq’oqu, whomever. I do not feel even the hint of an obligation to an entity called READER—do not regard it as his favor, rather as his choice, that, duly warned, he is expended capital/time/retinal energy on what I’ve done.”

-- David Foster Wallace, pre-Infinite Jest, before the break down and the half-way house time that would inform the ethics of Infinite Jest (the ethics both of & in the text), according to an excerpt from D.T. Max's forthcoming biography of Wallace.

My concerns Max's bio will ignore Wallace's religious aspects and efforts still stand, but this excerpt looks really good. 

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Ignoring David Foster Wallace's religion

The forthcoming biography of David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max's Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, seems very unlikely to shed any light on Wallace's faith or spirituality.

Though it's known that, at one point, Wallace belonged to a church in Illinois -- maybe a Mennonite church -- and also he reportedly twice attempted to join the Catholic Church, there's not much more information about his religiousness. Beliefs, practices, problems or questions, affiliations -- it's all question marks. A lot is known about his life, but not about this. His life fascinates people, and moves people. His ethical-religious reflections especially.

But no one in the position to find out more about his religious beliefs or practices seems to have been interested in doing so.

Either that or the information just isn't out there.



The question of Wallace's relationship to Christianity came up again in a panel focused on the Wallace archives. Max was on the panel, as well as two other writer's who know more than a little about Wallace's life. But the question wasn't answered:

Douglas Brinkley: "....And also, I always felt it a little odd, but not that odd, but he would always go to church constantly throughout his life. And I was wondering if that came from his childhood and kinda the routine of church? Was he going to church for lightness? Or was he looking for literary material?

Seth Colter Walls: "There's not a great deal of that that I've seen in the archive, but maybe you can speak to that."

D.T. Max: "Well, I was actually think of again of the archive and the things archives don't or can't contain .... What the archive is really really good at (and you probably know this better than me), it has a lot of Infinite Jest gestations .... It's amazing to me, and wonderful and fascinating that there are people, many people who feel close enough to David's work, that they actually want sort of see what made this work. That's -- On one level that's an absolutely normal, typical. You read anyone's novel. But I don't think that that comes up a lot with most writers. I don't think -- I mean, as much interest as there is in, say, Don DeLillo, I don't know, I would be surprised, if there are people who are really, well, I don't know. Let's just say that the scope of people who care about this seems to me unprecedented. And says something. I think, as a biographer I'm always saying, well what does this say. Well it says something really interesting to me, that David touches people not just with his finished work, which he clearly does, but also with the sense of that struggle to create that work."

It is very interesting, from the stand point of biography, that Wallace's writing struggles are so important to so many. I wish, though, that Max found Wallace's struggles with and attempts at religion important too. What does that say? What does it say that Wallace dedicated some time trying to be a part of church communities? How did that work and how did it play out?

Max tacks around the question, as if he either doesn't know the answer or doesn't find it interesting.

Asked directly, in another context, he went with "banal," an assessment he attributes to Wallace.

"Wallace once wrote to his friend Jonathan Franzen that his thoughts on religion were 'banal.' He did go to church, and my assumption is that this practice began after he stopped drinking and smoking pot as part of getting clean and may have continued either because he felt it centered him or merely out of habit, as part of his sense of himself as a middle-class Midwesterner."

Maybe Wallace's thoughts on religion were banal. I doubt it, though. Unfortunately, Max seems to assume that's the case with out investigating any deeper or even being interested. The rest of his answer is just speculation -- and, really, even if his Illinois church attendance was best explained by those things, there's still plenty there to explore. None of those answers specifically would be boring, though Max seems to take them that way.

It's like a terminal disinterest in religion. David Lipsky's extended interview with Wallace was the same way. Wallace talked about religion and God several times, but Lipsky let every statement pass, never following up, always pursuing other questions.

I will read the upcoming bio. I expect it to be good, though for other things and other reasons, but I wish, with all the religious themes and threads in Wallace's work, that those writing about his life would take his religious efforts and endeavors seriously.

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Let me root, root, root for the home team: When sports replaces religion in the rites of death

"It was such a big part of her life, why not be a part of her send off too."

Errol Morris' latest short documentary, on sports funerals:



As a reporter, I covered one of these in Georgia in 2007 or '08. The viewing was set up as a tail gate party, and everyone wore University of Georgia Bulldog gear in accordance with the will of the man who'd died. A large bulldog was inflated in front of the funeral home, bulldog flags were flown from the hearse, and the man was buried with two tickets to the next game in his hand.

Morris doesn't get into the specifically religious aspects of these funerals, though he does ask one Cubs fan if there will be sports in heaven.

The Georgia funeral director I spoke to saw sports funerals as replacing traditional religious rites. For these people, he said, religion was too dour, too somber. They didn't want organ music and a rented minister. What they wanted was a celebration, and for their friends and families to enjoy at their deaths what they had enjoyed in their lives. Religion wasn't an important part of their lives, wasn't what gave their lives meaning. Sports was. So they designed these non-religious rites of passage around that idea.

The widow at the viewing I attended agreed with that. She said she hadn't known of her husband's plans until he died and she read his will, but that he'd done what he knew would comfort her and everyone who cared about him.

"All this," she told me, "is him saying to me, 'don't cry, now. I don't want no crying.'"

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