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).

I always find myself suspicious any time the word “authenticity” comes up. It is a bourgeois concept, apparently, to be concerned with whether what one does with one’s time is real enough. T. J. Jackson Lears, man of many initials and cultural historian at Rutgers, traces anxiety about authenticity and whether modernism had a role in its eventual demise to the shifting cultural climes of the America in the nineteenth century in his book No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture. His most useful argument is perfect, ironic schadenfreude: the antimodern sentiments of upper class white men was so contingent upon modern comforts, that it basically turned into neoliberal capitalism primed to run rampant on the twentieth century.

And yet, here we are, still picking through the forest looking for some comforting authenticity: rejecting the Brooklyn lit scene to grow pumpkins on an upstate commune, wishing for days of summer better remembered by an episode of Dawson’s Creek than by us, a sorry lot of workers. This is just as it was in the 1960s and 70s when biology majors dropped out of University of Chicago to join the bioregional movement in the Ozarks and folklorists in Louisiana tried to recapture a preAmericanized francophone culture along Bayou Teche. This is just as it was for the Shelleys and Byron and Polidori when they escaped to the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva for another impossible summer, telling ghost stories that refused—at the time—to be taxonomized by the hungry specter of the Enlightenment. Just as, as Lears tells it, Victorian men idolized the olden warrior spirit, promoted “traditional” craft markets, incorporated some of that old Catholic sensuality into their piety.

[jwplayer mediaid=”210″]

Lears makes a compelling case for why his Gilded Age boys turned against progress and towards earnestness, fantasizing about an older gilded age that was impossibly better. His discussion of the attraction of the European medieval period was especially interesting, the ability to imagine it the way Rabelais did: brimming with fat, vital energy, washed in primary hues. I can also imagine the playhouses now, full of pince-nez, brocade, and hoop skirts, clapping at Peter Pan for to raise Tink from the dead (see above video for a taste!). This book makes a fine argument as long as we concede to Lears that white bourgeois anxiety was the major cause of a cultural hegemony, one that cannibalized all the people Lears did not talk about—the working class people who were more concerned about their endless, industrial workweek than their foi banalisée, the newly freed African Americans, the women who were neither arbiters of cultures (a tricky feat even with the right to vote) nor yielding comforters.

Perhaps also the force of capital was going to continue to avalanche regardless of the hobbies of Victorian dilettantes, that the rejection of the now has not been remarkably absent from premodern times, that authenticity, the trial of living a life worth living, is a concept history keeps struggling with. We accept authenticity, but only at a remove, something in a former life maybe. I get the sense that Lears sympathizes (or at least did in 1981 when he wrote this book) with the plight of the 19^th century intellectual looking at the terror of the city—maybe from an office at Columbia looking eastward over Amsterdam Avenue wishing Frederick Law Olmsted would hurry up and drop an oasis on the rocky slope of hill between the college and Harlem, a professor who might wish for something natural in a world increasingly unreal.

Poussin was down with nostalgia for the good old days, but it did make him consider DEATH.

You get the sense that if only this bourgeois antimodernism wasn’t co-opted by industry, by a reaffirmation of Enlightment rationality and emphasis on individual will, then maybe we’d be in a better place, one not still plagued by neurasthenia, the 19^th century word for pervasive mental illness. But maybe we should look at antimodernist sentiments as affectations created by the discourse of capitalism, which gave us the economic structure of progress? Maybe antimodernism isn’t the best word because it includes too much: the rallying cry of the Tea Party activist alongside the antinomian punk today, and Walt Whitman and Hitler back then? It is hard to say because antimodernist rhetoric is so prevalent today, and, even as I, too, am caught in the fist of capital and love wishing and imagining, I reject rejecting the modern.

Can “authentic experience” be achieved by reviving practices of the past while simultaneously denying the fundamental commitments of their original practitioners?  In T. J. Jackson Lears examination of the American antimodernism movement, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, the answer seems to be an emphatic “No.”  The antimodernism that Lears explores expressed itself in many forms, including the arts and crafts ideology, the martial ideal, a fascination with the medieval, and a Protestant revival of Catholic forms, but each expression was divorced from its original time and place in such a way that it was easily assimilated into the service of emerging corporate capitalism.  Commenting on the eclecticism of the modern environment, Lears observes that, “Uprooting once-sacred symbols from their appropriate time, place, and purpose, the eclectic approach trivialized them” (33).  

The antimodernists seemed to want to protest the positivism, determinism, and progressivist optimism that pervaded the end of the 19^th century.  However, Lears observes a fatal flaw inherent in their various protests—a satisfaction with the products of the modern movement.   The Arts and Crafts movement bought into marketplace capitalism; the Martial Ideal was wedded to corporate imperialism.  Fascination with the medieval period was expressed through art and literature that could be consumed without the religion or the experiences that formed the foundation of the medieval world view.  Catholic forms were introduced with Catholic theology, as liberal Protestantism ran from notions of sin.  Although Lears points out that one of the fears of the Puritan and republican moralists who opposed the modern movement was the erosion of personal moral responsibility, the antimodern movement joined in the avoidance of responsibility by playing at what was once taken seriously. 

As Lears repeatedly observed, many antimodernist Americans shared the modernist assumptions about religion, they enjoyed the comfort that positivist science had provided modern Americans, and even if pessimism sometimes overtook their progressivist optimism, it did not last for long.  Plagued by the meaninglessness (or weightlessness) of modern life, they were searching for a cure to neurasthenia without being willing to give up any of its causes.  They tried to revive a sense of the terror inherent in life by reading about tragedy, to recover a connection with the divine by viewing painting of those who engaged in asceticism to achieve such unity while denying that such practices were necessary.  They wanted to regain a sense of usefulness in work by making products that could be obtained much more cheaply from the very factories they disliked, while acknowledging that “if handmade products could not pass the test of the market, they were not worth producing” (88). 

Those trying to recapture authenticity of experience by grasping at practices from the past while holding on to the larger frameworks of their own time seem doomed to the dissatisfaction that spawned the antimodern movement in the first place.  Lears points out that turn-of-the-century America “lacked resources for creating its own symbols” (33).  It seems that for an antimodern critique to have been successful, it would have needed to either revive the “larger frameworks of meaning” that accompanied these earlier practices, or have developed their own frameworks that were more than scaffolding on the dominant corporate culture.

This is the origin post for our class’s blog. Each week, two of us will post a response to the weekly readings here. For some basic instructions on posting, please read the following:

1. Login at scholarblogs.emory.edu.
2. Hover cursor on “My Sites” and click “Placing American Religions.”
3. Click “Posts,” then “Add New.”
4. Write excellent blog post.
5. Click “Publish.”

You will be able to save drafts and edit your posts. Also, note that this installation of wordpress allows you to embed pictures and video relatively easily. Just click the heptagram next to “Upload/Insert” above the text editor. Here’s an example:

A more elaborate version of the upload button, the "Sigillum Dei Aemaeth."

It is unclear why wordpress technicians chose the heptagram to symbolize “insert media,” though it is interesting to note the symbol’s interesting trajectory. It was adopted from the medieval Christian grimoire Liber iuratus, also called Grimoire of Honorius (sometimes attributed to Pope Honorius I or III), by John Dee to perform rituals of Enochian magic. It was called the Sigillum Dei Aemaeth, or Seal of the Living God. Dee, a sixteenth century magician and advisor to Queen Elizabeth of England, coined of the term “British Empire.” Aleister Crowley, a turn of the twentieth century British occultist who was once barred entry into Isis-Urania Temple in London by none other than William Butler Yeats, refashioned the heptagram as the “Star of Babalon.” Now most seen tattooed on fans of the television show Supernatural, created by Eric Kripke. The protagonists of that show use the heptagram to anchor demons to a physical, geographical location, to prevent them from being too diffuse to defeat.

In addition to posting, please take advantage of hyperlinking, especially to the class annotated bibliography. Right now, it is not clear whether ECIT will allow a wiki plugin on our website, but rest assured, there will be something to link to. For instance, this installation of wordpress does have a Zotero plugin, which would allow a type of integration with our blog if we decide to use that application (which is a browser add-on for Firefox) and its collaborative library function, which I’ve already set up for our class.