AT&T U-verse launched it’s “It’s Not Complicated” campaign last year, in which comedian Beck Bennet poses a simple question to a group of children.  Their imaginative, silly, and generally unscripted responses have resulted in advertising gold, as the commercials have “consistently ranked in the top three most talked-about spots” according to a recent article in Advertising Age (view the article here).  While the campaign garners ad world praise and water-cooler talk, it is emblematic of the nearly-universal acceptance of many of the principles critiqued by Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture.

In one of the spots, Bennet asks the children, “What’s better, faster or slower?”  The children respond with shouts of “Faster!” When asked what’s slow, one of the children observes that his grandma is slow.  The solution offered to make her faster is to “Tape a cheetah to her back.” The announcer at the end makes sure the message has been conveyed, saying, “It’s not complicated, faster is better.” (You can view the ad here.)  Others carry similar messages, including “Bigger is better,” as evidenced by the fact that a bigger treehouse can better fit a large screen t.v. than a smaller treehouse can.

Are the kids hilarious?  Absolutely.  Are the spots entertaining?  Sure.  But their messages are not only disturbing, they also carry an unarticulated threat against any who would question their presuppositions.  Since even children know that these value-laden evaluations are absolutely true, it must be obvious that only a complete idiot could ever question AT&T’s assumptions that faster is better, that bigger is better.  And while faster upload speeds and wider network coverage are certainly values for cellular providers, America needs no more reinforcement of its delusions that faster is inherently better than slower, or that bigger is inherently better than smaller.

Berry observes that, “What has drawn the Modern World into being is a strange, almost occult yearning for the future,” that led us to crave “things that were up-to-date,” rather than things that were excellent, or even adequate (56, 58).  This craving is perfectly illustrated in the cellular industry, which garners enormous profits off of the “built-in panic” that comes with the spectre of being out-of-date.  Apple released the first iPhone in June of 2007.  Five years later, they released the fifth generation of iPhone in September of 2012.  My unscientific guess is that the record earning posted by Apple were largely (although not entirely) fueled by those who purchased the newest model upon its release (which would amount to a new $600 phone every year), or at least long before the old phone lost its usefulness.  3G is better than 4G, slow uploading time slows down your life, the newest, fastest, biggest is the best, and you need it now in order to have a fulfilling life.  But as Berry notes, “our possessions cannot be up-to-date more than momentarily” (58).  Corporations thrive off the consumer’s need to have the latest model, and excellence disappears when nothing needs to last longer than the release date of the next iteration.

In response to the damage created by this model of consumption, Berry advocates that standards of health should replace standards of efficiency in deciding how to inhabit this world of ours.  I would argue that those who embrace Berry’s viewpoint should not surrender the word efficiency to corporations and politicians hell-bent on increasing profits at any cost.  Although in modern usage, efficiency is nearly universally concerned with time and money, its meaning can be expanded or its focus shifted to recapture Berry’s concerns as well.  As Merriam-Webster’s definition of efficiency points out, it has to do with a comparison of production with cost.  Cost does not have to mean only money or time–it can and should include the various injuries and illnesses that have long been left out of the equation when corporations and their economists argue for the efficiencies of size.  In the agricultural realm, this would include the pollution, erosion, and contamination that agribusiness often overlooks.  In the industrial realm, it would mean calculating the cost of pollution, waste, and contamination involved in production as well.  And in both the agricultural and industrial realm, it should include the impact of mechanization on human individuals, communities, and cultures. 

As Berry points out, agribusiness arguments to the contrary, “large farms do not produce as abundantly or efficiently as small ones” (166).  Their lauded “greater efficiency” comes in the greater production of food per employed human being, but not per square acre. In other words, smaller farmers produce more food per square acre than the giant corporate farms can.  Now, land is a limited quantity, and unemployment is a persistant plague.  Why should we continue to put people out of work so that we can produce less food on the same amount of land, while simultaneously harming it for future production?  Farming does not need to be done this way.

Pastured turkeys at Polyface Farms

In 1961, the Salatin’s purchased an over-farmed, broken-down piece of land in Virginia, and they have spent over a half century healing it while making a living, and even a profit, in doing so.  By allowing the animals they raise to eat the foods and live the lives they were designed for, the Salatins are able to produce many times more goods annually than those who follow factory-farm practices nearby.  They produce pork, beef, chicken, turkey, eggs, rabbits and lumber, and they do it while they increase the health and fertility of their land.  Featured in the documentary, Fresh, Polyface Farms provides an example of small farming at its best.  Their cows eat grass, their poultry spreads manure, the hooves and claws of the animals aerate the fields.  They do what they naturally do, and it forms an environmentally healing, healthful cycle.

We need to beware anytime someone tells us, “It’s not complicated.”  On one level, what Berry proposes and the Salatin’s enact is not complicated–it is the most natural approach to agriculture that there is.  But they are only able to take such an approach because they recognize that it is complicated, that agricultural problems have to be solved within agricultural environments and cycles, not abstracted from them.  The same holds true for other human problems as well–they are complicated, and they cannot be abstracted from human environments and life cycles, which are interdependent with the rest of the environment and natural cycles as well.  Sometimes, faster and bigger might be better.  But making such an evaluation would require calculating all of the costs for the benefits that are being lauded, rather than ignoring the catastrophic destruction that some innovations bring.  Sometimes, slower and smaller is better.  But that’s something the corporations would never want you to know.

It is impossible for me to consider Wendell Berry and his fervent plea for sustainability rooted in faith, family, and farming without contemplating my own family land in the Ozark foothills of Arkansas.  As the second generation “off the farm,” I am sympathetic to Berry’s claims about the possibilities for personal, collective, and ultimately environmental restoration within a “healthy farm culture” (43).  In many ways, I am persuaded by Berry’s emphasis on farming as a sacred ritual that preserves “essential experience” (45) within an “energy community” of production, consumption, and return (85).  While the correlation between production and consumption is perhaps self-evident in our consumer-driven economy, the “principle of return” is more complicated.

Describing a “succession” of  values, ethics, and attitudes “handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love,” (44) Berry defines farming as a seemingly closed circle of insiders, “culturally prepared” to perpetuate a rural lifestyle.  Critical to this agricultural vision is both the “old man” and the “young tree” that Berry finds and celebrates in Odysseus‘ epic homecoming (129).  But going home is problematic in the real world.  Berry historicizes the United States as the root of rootlessness, a country whose discovery “invented the modern condition of being away from home” (54).  In contrast to Homer’s grand narrative that, in Berry’s analysis, affirms a return to the land, twentieth century migration patterns in the United States document consistent movement out of rural communities into urban centers.  Today, Americans predominantly move from one urban center to the next, largely avoiding rural communities altogether.  As Berry astutely demonstrates, this movement is both social and geographic–the American “success story” often leads away from home (160) and doesn’t necessarily privilege a return.

Writing from the center of his world in the marginal space of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry asks for “confirmation, amplification, or contradiction from the experience of other people” (160).  My life’s journey thus far as a “world citizen” with rural farming roots both confirms and complicates Berry’s many assertions and ideals, but it is the “principle of return” that seems most complex.  In asking us to return to the “perfectly human possibility” of the “old man and his farm” (191), Berry reminds me of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic that offers a return to naiveté, but only after substantial suspicion and interrogation. In fact, Ricoeur’s model of return within a closed hermeneutic circle provides an interesting parallel to Berry’s cyclical energy communities and to other ecological and environmental philosophies.  While Ricoeur privileges educated critique, for Berry, education, specifically the land-grant college complex and its emphasis on specialization, has created a chasm between knowledge/experience and practical/liberal that precludes a valuation of “health” and “wholeness” (138) that might yield a “primitive” connectivity.

The disconnect between “traditional education” and farming has a long and storied history in my family.  The story, as we tell it, involves an epic migration of the Gray family and their seventeen children, from western North Carolina to Arkansas in the nineteenth century, where they settled and quickly populated what became Independence County. The Grays settled on a tract of land with a fresh spring that could sustain a large family. My great-great grandfather, Christopher Columbus Gray, was one of “the original seventeen” and his decision to become a doctor, as opposed to a farmer, continues to inform the complex relationship my family has to its farming roots.  Apparently,on their eighteenth birthday, each of the seventeen Gray children was given a choice between a college education and a tract of land. Some of the seventeen chose farming and today, many of their descendants continue to farm parcels of the original homestead. Others, however, including my great-great-grandfather, chose an education and profession that led them off the land.  It is perhaps my great-great-grandfather’s decision to chose a professional career that prompts ambivalence in my grandfather, whose life journey precluded formal education and has been grounded on a farm he and my grandmother purchased when they were first married.

My grandfather is Berry’s quintessential “old man.” In recent years, he set out acres of young trees on the farm, unknowingly following Laertes famous example. Rooted in topsoil he has painstakingly nurtured, my grandfather has a body of knowledge about the land, gardening, and animal husbandry that could be the basis of Berry’s ideal intergenerational succession. The only problem is, my grandfather doesn’t particularly want his children and grandchildren to follow in his farming footsteps.  Both of my grandparents pushed their children, my mother and uncle, off the farm, out of their small town, and right out of Arkansas.  The American “success story” of mobility is what they envisioned for their children and grandchildren; so much so that I have struggled to convince my grandfather to let me farm with him. While my husband and I lived in Arkansas for two years, my grandfather and I had many conversations about my own visions for the farm.  After two years of cajoling and pleading, my grandfather finally consented to the first step of what could have ben my “return:” we agreed that I would raise chickens in the back yard, potentially moving them (and, eventually us) onto the farm. That same week, however, I was accepted into the Graduate Division of Religion and, instead of learning to raise chickens and cattle with my grandfather, I am here, honing a different set of skills.

There are moments when I sense my grandfather’s regret and sadness that there is no one to continue his work on the farm.  I hear it when he asks me whether I might “come home” one day.  In that gentle question, I understand that my grandfather recognizes in his own body of knowledge a heritage and legacy of value. Nonetheless, neither he nor I know how to translate his experience into my future.  While Berry points to industrial agribusiness as the culprit in marginalizing the small family farm, in my experience, that marginalization dates to my great-great-grandfather’s decision to pursue an education, a decision that considerably predates the era of Berry’s critique.  It is that turn towards formal education that has my grandfather profoundly seduced. No matter how much I might want my grandfather to advocate for himself and his chosen lifestyle, he is no more required to encourage my “return” than I am required to enact it.  How can we understand Berry’s plea for a return when, as in my situation, it doesn’t convict both young and old? How do we maneuver both the reality and ideal of the farm gate that, for me, represents an opening to a lifestyle in which I recognize my cultural heritage, but to my grandparents represents a powerful closure to a world of possibility that lies beyond the farm?

“Khôra reaches us, and as the name,” says Derrida (On the Name, 89). In his classic work on American sacred space, Landscapes of the Sacred, Belden Lane reminds us that the Greeks had two names for place: topos and chôra (39-41; 221-228). Lane attempts to map topos and chôra onto the contemporary English terms “space” and “place,” respectively. This distinction follows clearly in the wake of Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, which all but inaugurated the study of human geography with its publication in 1977. But that distinction is too facile: it ignores the complicated philological and philosophical legacy of the Greek terms; and even the updated Johns Hopkins version of Landscapes fails to account for the growing dissatisfaction with this distinction among spatially-oriented social scientists. Can we rely on a space/place distinction in our study of American religious landscapes? There are several reasons that we should not.

First, τόπος and χώρα have complicated philological associations. While scholars like Lane and Tuan would map them onto space and place, respectively, their associations in Hellenic and later Greek often had the opposite associations. Liddell and Scott, for example, define χώρα as “the space in which a thing is” or “a land or country,” implying the open space of a region. They define τόπος as “a place,” and even offer that the Democritean phrase ὁ τόπος τῆς χώρας should be rendered “the local circumstances of the district.” Topos, in the Greek, seems to be more about locality and specificity than chora, which is associated with more expansive spaces. While much of the philosophical tradition has inherited these associations, social-scientific appropriations of these terms have tended to invert their earlier meanings.

In Plato’s Timaeus, chora is the openness (void?) that receives matter and creation. Heidegger, Derrida, and Irigaray among others (including several philosophers in the phenomenological tradition) have retained the notion that chora refers to an openness of sorts. Heidegger uses the category to refer to the “clearing” in which we encounter Being itself. And Derrida goes further to suggest that chora “would perhaps not only be the abyss between the sensible and the intelligible, between being and nothingness…between logos and muthos, but between all these couples and another which would not even be their other” (Derrida, On the Name, 104). That is heady stuff, but it shows, if nothing else, how freighted and contested these categories have been. No easy topos/chora distinction is tenable because both categories, of course, have the potential to disrupt the binary from within.

For that reason—as well as for the more practical reason that our spatially-oriented sub-disciplines in the social sciences need a unifying constitutive term—anthropologists and religious studies scholars have begun to abandon the space/place dichotomy. Among anthropologists, Setha Low has voiced particular exhaustion with the persistence of the space/place dichotomy, noting that both have been useful for her research. In her theoretical work as well as her work on enclosures and public spaces in Central America, Low continues to invoke “space and place,” and “space/place.” While social science may inherently list toward “space” and its attendant co-production models (think Lefebvre), philosophers and humanists have often been more interested in the category of “place” (and philosophers like Edward Casey suggest that it is primary in human experience (Low, “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Space and Place,” 22-23). It is interesting, then, that in a recent “Key Terms” edition of the journal Material Religion, historian and sociologist of religion Thomas Tweed advocated jettisoning the term “place” altogether. Tweed prefers the coherence of a single category and sees the social-scientific currency of “space” as a validation of its academic usefulness. Belden Lane’s retention of the space/place distinction is key to his method. In Landscapes, he does not so much resolve these categories into one another as he authors two separate works—one on “place” in chapter 1 and his several interludes, and another on “space” in chapter 2 and his historical case studies. His methodological reflections in Part III only confirm the fastness of this division.

–Sean T. Suarez, posted from Meredith Doster’s account

“…[I]s it possible to recover the power of sacred space for those today who have forgotten hierophanies and all signs of the sacred”(2001: 23)? Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality is Belden C. Lane’s way of answering ‘Yes, indeed. Mature re-enchantment is possible.’ Lane argues that moderns can move through uncritical naiveté and skepticism about the sacredness of particular places and finally “rediscover[] wonder in the deepening of discourse” (2001: 42) about particular geographies. Ritually practicing spatial narratives can bring people to spiritual maturity, to the peace of finding their existential dwelling place.  Lane claims such practices keep the human imagination open to being surprised by the transcendent.  The end of these journeys within sacred space “[is] ultimately a new way of seeing, rather than the place seen” (2001: 12).

But moderns might beg another line of questions: Is it actually necessary to recover the power of sacred space? Beyond Lane’s own clear enjoyment of spatial spirituality, what is the social human good of an individual’s feeling “placed in a mystery” (2001: 23)? Why is a new mystification of places so very important to, say, political stability or some other commonly recognized social good? Lane’s assumption that ordinary places ought to be looked upon as masks of the sacred (2001: 69-72) proceeds from his personal belief in the incarnation of Christ. He borrows Sir Edwyn Hoskyns’ affirmation that “ ‘at the supreme point, at Jerusalem where the Lord was crucified, the whole world—please notice, the whole world—comes back to us in all its vigorous energy, shining with the reflected glory of the God who made it and us’” (2001: 11). While I am sympathetic to his Christian convictions, a more general humanist argument for the narrative enchantment of places also presents itself.

A humanist might begin by asking, “what happens to human relations when the ordinary world and its ordinary places are understood in merely factual terms? What happens socially when the human imagination allows access only to topoi, “mere location[s],…measurable, quantifiable point[s]”? Topoi are known in terms of data, not in terms of memories and hopes; they have no narrative structures; they have no normative aesthetic or eschatological goals. Thus, topoi cannot provide people with a choreography for relating to others (2001: 39); they do not—to use Arjun Appadurai’s less transcendent term from Modernity at large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization—provide a neighborhood where social actions are patterned by “certain kinds of agency, sociality, and reproducibility”(1996: 178).  Thus, topoi cannot provide persons with a sense of social belonging.

Yet, humans desperately need this sense of sacred belonging, and desperate people will try extreme measures to achieve it. In Terror in the Mind of God, Mark Juergensmeyer presents religious terrorism as a strategy for consecrating sacred space and defining appropriate social roles in the midst of secular modern anomie: “Why is the location of terrorist events—of performance violence—so important? [Because] the control of territory defines public authority, and ethnic-religious groups have historically gained their identity through association with control over particular places.”(2003: 134) Furthermore, religious violence declares certain spaces as war zones, a morbidly handy designation “in which individuals know who they are [soldiers and martyrs], why they have suffered, by whose hand they have been humiliated, and at what expense they have persevered. The concept of war provides cosmology, history and eschatology…” (2003: 158). Ironically, imagining the world caught up in a holy cataclysm provides some people with a sense of moral order; it provides a blueprint for acting in particular locale.

In answer to the humanist question above, Lane and Juergensmeyer both suggest that people inevitably apply their imaginative energy to re-enchanting places; they inevitably work to imbue places with deep significance. But this imaginative labor produces a vast array of social forms, some clearly more life-giving than others. From a secular humanist perspective, Lane’s form of critical, spatial, religious imagination can be broadly valued because it keeps open the possibility of peaceful dissent, of discourse rather than dominance, as the model for spatial relations.

P.S. Just for fun I’ve included a poem by Wendell Berry which has little to do with my post but resonates with Lane’s project.

A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow-growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,

if we will make our seasons welcome here,

asking not too much of earth or heaven,

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides, fields and gardens

rich in the windows.  The river will run

clear, as we will never know it,

and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be

green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields.

In their voices they will hear a music

risen out of the ground.  They will take

nothing from the ground they will not return,

whatever the grief at parting.  Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament.  The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling

light.  This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.

Beldon Lane begins his preface describing wounds that never heal.  He writes, “Some wounds – we are grateful to confess—never heal.  They grow with us, festering and prodding, reminding us often that the wound is what grants the storyteller his (or her) narrative power” (ix).  Journeying further into Lane’s work, Landscapes of the Sacred, we sense his wrestling as he pursues the intersections between disciplines, while rejecting constructed boundaries between religion and culture, as Meredith describes.  I would argue that his interdisciplinary approach challenges the boundary between religious studies and theological studies as well.  While Lane teaches theological studies, he does not treat religious studies as threatening to theological discourse.  Instead, he uses the perspectives and theories housed within religious studies scholarship to challenge and examine sacred experiences, particularly the geographical and social placement of those experiences, while at the same time, acknowledging the personal and intrinsic value of those experiences.  He takes up a variety of lenses with which to analyze experiences and places, most particularly experiential, cultural and phenomenological ones, and he actively seeks dialogue with scholars from various disciplines.

Lane is not detached from his subject of study.  He is deeply invested and embedded in it. He often uses his own stories and experiences as his subject.  He continues to make use of his Christian theological heritage, though he is keenly aware of the limits of that lens.  Using Ricouer’s hermeneutic circle that Lane refers to multiple times in the book, Lane is not satisfied with a hermeneutic of suspicion.  Instead, he presses towards the second naiveté where wonder is privileged within theoretical discourse (bibliography).  By engaging this space between wonder and suspicion and weaving in the tools of storytelling and poetry, Lane offers a new way of approaching sacred places challenging previous tensions namely, between religion and culture, that have often been collapsed or abandoned.

As I consider the engagement of diverse religious communities making common cause in the same-sex marriage debate in California, perhaps Lane’s example should be followed, working from a place that is seemingly in-between disciplines.  Like Lane, I arrived at the intersection of religious pluralism and same-sex marriage out of my own passion and wounds.  Much has been written about religion and sexuality as well as religious pluralism in America.  Perhaps a place in-between disciplines needs to be discovered within the intersections among religion, politics, theological studies, pluralism, queer theory and congregational studies.  Perhaps, ignoring this in-between place leaves much important work undone.

What I have discovered is that the religious communities opposed to same-sex marriage  worked diligently to build collaborations, alliances and coalitions.  They overcame previous divides to work together on something they felt was important: protecting the family.  Unfortunately, no corresponding multi-religious coalition existed on the other side.  In fact, religious voices in favor of same-sex marriage were not prominent in the debate.  Apparently the decision was intentional.  The leaders in favor of same-sex marriage did not wish to engage religious debates.   Activists argued that the rift between religious communities and the LGBTQ community was vast enough already, and any discourse about religion among those advocating for same-sex marriage would have been misunderstood by both communities.

Now that I understand the unfolding of events in the same-sex marriage debate in California, the rationale is clear enough. I find it unsettling nonetheless.  I sense a growing need within myself to carve out an in-between place, to press into a scholarly place where religious pluralism, queer theory, and theological and congregational studies can co-mingle and engage in dialogue with one another.  And perhaps developing scholarship is not enough; direct engagement will also be a part of the journey, which seemingly was one of Lane’s primary points.

Lane shared many spiritual experiences of places that had become sacred to him.  I felt them pressing his scholarship forward even as he saw, understood, and wrestled with place as cultural fact, place as contested space, place as a phenomenological reality, and place “a hundred different ways“ (255).  Though the approach felt cluttered at times, his essays in-between the chapters often offered insights, new ways of seeing, that shed new light on my understanding of sacred place.  I am thankful that he stood his ground, that he continued to wrestle with his wounds, and that he risked placing himself inside his own research as he pressed to understand the Landscapes of the Sacred.  Perhaps his example is one to follow in what appears to be the great divide between religion and sexual minorities.

I am recently returned from a road trip to Arkansas, a place I have been traveling to-and-from for as long as I can remember.  In some ways, the journey itself provides a “destination-on-wheels,” a predictable pattern of gas stations, small town cafes, and soybean fields that leads to Batesville, Arkansas, a town with a population of just over 10,000 people (2010 Census Data, American FactFinder).  Sidney Mead once described Americans as a “people in movement through space,” exploring both “obvious highways” and “unexplored and devious byways” (ix). Understanding Wanderlust as a problematic birthright of sorts, I often feel most “American” when traversing the country by car, subconsciously moving through Chidester and Linenthal’s three interconnected domains; natural environments, built environments, and the mythic orientations that spaces engender (12).  While scholars of religion have moved beyond the stark binaries of sacred/profane and center/periphery, preferring terms that situate space within constellations of political, social, economic, and symbolic power, for me, traveling to Arkansas has become a ritual journey from an unspecified somewhere to a holy nowhere.

My grandfather remembers these debates primarily as opportunities for Baptist and Church of Christ preachers to promote their denominational doctrine.  In particular, he recalls that members of each denomination would sit on opposite sides of the courtroom, listening to the formal debate.  Often, local ministers would debate one another, but traveling preachers also participated and were celebrated for their mastery of scripture and denominational doctrine.  Two prominent preachers that held debates in the Batesville courtroom included Baptists Ezekiel “Zeke” Sherill (1875-1960) and Benjamin Marcus Bogard (1868 – 1951).

These two men participated in over 250 debates each, contributing to a complex network of local and regional conversations that took place in public spaces, including town and county courthouses.  There is no official record of the debates, as they were not part of any legal proceedings, but it’s possible to find traces of this inter-denominational “discourse” in local newspapers and in the memories of devout octogenarians.  In my grandfather’s memory, the debates were civil and never resulted in any actual change of opinion.  Instead, they functioned as an important community ritual that regularly defined the doctrinal spaces of each denomination. The debates were always scheduled for Sunday afternoons, when the courtroom itself became a shared space in which religious difference could be explored, although never overcome.  This marks an important distinction from the role that the courtroom plays as an arbiter of sacred space, as in the case studies of Michaelson, Taylor, and Glass.  While American courts have a long and complicated history of adjudicating sacred space outside of the courtroom, the sacred space of the courtroom itself also warrants investigation.

Vestiges of this specific use of the courtroom are hard to locate today, although one visual aid vividly reminds courthouse visitors of the building’s lasting legacy of civil-religion. While some religious images and references in public spaces have generated national attention and controversy, most notably the Ten Commandments monument erected in the rotunda of Alabama’s state judicial building, others go quietly unnoticed, such as this sign located at the corner of Batesville’s courthouse.

Understanding the three spatial domains that Chidester and Linenthal introduce as co-existing realities that map onto and across spaces, I wonder what it means to inscribe words onto a courthouse and to “claim” it for a specific ideology.  I also wonder what it means that no one seems to object.  If we take seriously the “contested character of sacred space” (16),  Batesville’s courthouse provides a contemporary example of a seemingly bygone era of assumed, homogenous religiosity.  In traveling through Chidester and Linenthal’s “itinerary” (31), I am struck by the relationship between regional religious experience and competing national identities.  In my own travels, through Arkansas and beyond (most notably Appalachia), I will continue to investigate both real and imagined spaces and their often contentious designations as “sacred” in the American landscape.

The colon is the most indicative punctuation mark in academic titles. It screams, “here is what this book is really about, this is my point!” American Sacred Space, a masterful volume edited by David Chidester an Edward T. Linenthal, lacks a colon and corresponding subtitle. So allow me to give it a shot. American Sacred Space: The Final Frontier of Legal Pluralism. While the editors identify the collection of essays as demonstrating that “American religious history can be narrated in terms of the contested zones of space it has inhabited” (x), the true message appears to be that legal pluralism—as a goal and philosophy—breaks down in the face of conflicts over space.

Legal pluralism is the notion that multiple legal systems can exist alongside state law on equal footing, and that citizens have a wide amount of discretion to choose which legal system should govern their lives. These non-state legal systems can have a variety of sources, including national, ethnic, or religious norms. Drawing on Chapter Two of the volume, Native Americans seem to present an extreme example of legal pluralism because they have expansive rights of self-governance and “de jure sovereignty” (67).

Regardless of this government-sanctioned autonomy, Native Americans have almost uniformly lost court battles when the conflict surrounds the use of land—i.e., space. Courts hold that giving tribes certain land rights, even when their claim is based on the constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of religion, amounts to “de facto beneficial ownership” of public property (48). One can blame the persistent loss of court battles on the fact that certain Native American conceptions of property and land are distinctly different from American legal notions of property. For example, Robert S. Michaelsen goes so far to compare the relationship of Native Americans and U.S. Courts in property battles to the protagonists in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit: They are “bound to live together in apparently everlasting tension” due to their different views of land (50).

However, the entire point of legal pluralism is to negotiate and balance distinct differences in normative orders. Thus we are ill served by an intermediary conclusion that the failure of Native Americans to win property rights in court is due to their distinctly different understandings of land. Legal pluralism anticipates such difference. It perishes without it. Thus I am inclined to draw a more disheartening conclusion from this story: Legal pluralism is impossible when plurality creates a conflict over the use of space. Michaelsen gives us some rationale for this gap: “Control of land is seen as essential to control of culture—to nationhood.” (79). Thus, if courts are willing to respect legal pluralism to the extent it doesn’t challenge control of culture—and space and land are intimately tied up with control of culture—space truly is the final frontier (of legal pluralism).