Anthropology,theology,critique

Introduction

This article reflects on one potential relationship the anthropological study of religion might enjoy with a critical orientation to religion. To do so, I highlight a burgeoning (but tenuous) dialog between anthropology and theology (e.g. Lemons, in press; Robbins, 2006). Ultimately, I propose that critique—as a mode of scholarly social practice—is one wavelength by which a meaningful engagement between anthropology and theology might thrive. We begin by sketching the intellectual space staked out by Critical Research on Religion (CRR).

CRR was born from two premises. First, there is a recognition that religion is neither eroding nor privatizing in modernity; if anything, it is expanding in global presence and ambition. Religious actors are increasingly engaged in public life, actively occupying public space and shaping the contours of public discourse (Casanova, 1994). Second, there is a recognition that our late modern capitalist world is increasingly defined by imbalanced distributions of power. What results is a series of devastating effects felt across the globe: rampant inequality, oppression, and exploitation. With these two social facts at hand, the journal poses a question: what role does religion play in upholding or upending hegemonic orders, in resolving or reviving sociopolitical conflicts?

Obviously, religion is not inherently “good” or “bad” in this scenario. Religion can be mobilized toward every end imaginable. The real dynamic is a process of discernment: we must determine how religion exerts positive and/or negative effects on individuals, communities, institutions, networks, and societies. Put differently: how is religion used to foster human and social flourishing, and how is it used to hinder such flouring? We might make two observations about the nature of critique in this scenario. First, critique is not an act but a process of learning, evaluating, claiming, reevaluating, and continuously refining one’s understanding of how human and social flourishing can flourish most abundantly. Second, critique is active, efficacious, and performative. It is calibrated for change, aimed at altering the social order.

With this organizing mission, CRR cultivates distinctive intellectual space for reflecting on fundamental questions. How is human and social flourishing defined in religious and secular contexts? How do we go about discerning and differentiating what fosters from what hinders? Whose language and categories will we use to frame and articulate positive and negative evaluations? Given the normative orientation, it is easy to imagine a journal like CRR having an uneasy relationship with a field like the anthropology of religion. While scholars working in the anthropological study of religion are quick to prioritize description, analysis, contextualization, comparison, interpretation, and explanation, they may not be so quick to embrace critique as an imperative. But, critique and the anthropological perspective are not incompatible, and this article explores an area of productive convergence between them.

The pressing questions that organize CRR demand an interdisciplinary hearing. Moreover, they demand that disciplines work together in collaborative configurations, not merely engage in dialog that is mutually informed and informing. Here, I place the interdisciplinary engagement between anthropology and theology into the intellectual space staked out by CRR. My suspicion is that the journal’s focus on religion and human flourishing provides a wavelength on which an anthropology–theology collaboration can thrive. By leveraging the journal in this way, I follow anthropologist Jon Bialecki’s (in press) observation that anthropologists and theologians are united by concern with shared problems. If human and social flourishing is one such problem, then what might a collaborative configuration look like? The example I consider below is how ethnographic evidence of religion in public life can be mobilized to advance prophetic theological critiques of injustice.

Anthropology, theology, and prophetic critique

In Anthropology and Theology (2002), Douglas Davies attempted the first serious integration of the two disciplines. Juxtaposed with previous works that sought theology as an object of anthropological inquiry—such as Salamone and Adams’ “anthropology of theology” (1997)—Davies places anthropological and theological knowledge and methodology in dialog. He explored how each discipline construes related concepts, such as incarnation and embodiment. While pioneering, Davies’ book did not create significant traction.

A more successful effort to instigate a dialog between anthropology and theology arrived with Joel Robbins’ article “Anthropology and theology: An awkward relationship?” Robbins asked what potential theology might have to transform anthropological practice, for theologians to push anthropologists “to revise their core projects.” The subtitle plays on an earlier inquiry into the relationship between anthropology and feminism, in which awkwardness means that each dialog partner “achieves quite easily something that despite serious effort often eludes the other” (Robbins, 2006: 287). His argument was that anthropologists could learn from theologians’ success in articulating how otherness galvanizes the imagining of alternative (read: more hopeful, redeeming, edifying) ways of living.

Written in step with a prospering anthropology of Christianity, Robbins’ call to be open to being transformed by theology has been fertile. To cite a few examples, we have seen responses in the form of special journal issues (South Atlantic Quarterly (Robbins and Engelke, 2010); The Australian Journal of Anthropology (Fountain, 2013)) and edited books (Lemons, in press; Meneses and Bronkema, 2017). In this Robbins-shaped strain, the primary emphasis is on epistemological borders and modes of knowledge production. As an alternative, though not a mutually exclusive challenge, I reapproach the relationship between anthropology and theology focused on the imperative of critique.

This approach has a practical, even strategic, edge. The core idea is to interrogate how anthropology and theology might work in collaborative configurations to address questions of shared concern. This shifts the focus from “dialog” to “collaboration” and shifts the ambition from mutual learning to achieving a complementary working relationship. The particular configuration I highlight is this: mobilizing the empirical rigor of anthropology to refine and advance the public success of prophetic theological critique.

An early CRR editorial observed that “part of what makes religions evolve is criticism and reformation from within” (Goldstein, Boer, and Boyarin, 2013: 4). Religions can be defined by modes of self-critique that circulate throughout institutions and permeate individual language and subjectivity. This penchant for critique as an engine for cultural change has been observed ethnographically in multiple Christian contexts, from megachurch evangelicals (Elisha, 2011) to “emerging” churches (Bielo, 2011) and Vineyard charismatics (Bialecki, 2009) in the United States to denominational schism in Papua New Guinea (Handman, 2015).

Within any theological network, there are prophetic voices speaking truth to power. This prophetic tradition is exemplified by liberation theologies (Latin American, African American, Palestinian), feminist, and womanist theologies. The prophetic theological voice seeks to expose domination, oppression, injustice, inequality, and suffering. The hope is not merely to reveal these obstacles to human flourishing but to search committedly for reconciliation.

Cornel West claims the mantle of prophetic religion, describing it as “a fugitive affair—an empathetic and imaginative power that confronts hegemonic powers always operating.” “For prophetic religion,” he continues, “the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak” (West, 2011: 99). As a performance of critique, this subject position resonates with CRR’s commitment to human and social flourishing. Conceiving Christian theology as restricted to the formation and policing of orthodoxy and orthopraxy is mistaken. Christian theology encompasses—and, many theologians might say demands—prophetic voices of transformation. The Church has a long tradition of birthing critics at home, critics from within who call the Church to account for its complicit role in, and active reproduction of, human suffering. Prophetic critics call to accountability the forms of structural violence that obstruct human flourishing and make it difficult for humans to be human, to love one another and love mercy. They confront the status quo of injustice, and say to all those (religious and secular) individuals and institutions that actively aid and passively enable the reproduction of inequality: “fuck no, not forever.” As West (2011: 99) asks: “can we imagine having a public discourse without there being voices—not just echoes, voices—keeping track of the catastrophic, so that unaccountable elites at the top don’t run amok with greed and narrow empathy and truncated imagination?”

I highlight West’s articulation of prophetic critique because of the context in which his words appear. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere is a philosophy-centered examination of postsecularism, gathering luminaries such as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, and Judith Butler to debate what role religion could have in shaping public life. In contrast to earlier articulations of the public sphere, which either bracketed or denied the appropriateness of explicitly religious contributions, “the postsecular stance looks to religious sources of meaning and motivation as both a helpful and even indispensable ally in confronting the forces of global capitalism” (Mendieta and VanAntwerpen, 2011: 4).

If postsecular proponents are making the case that religious voices should be part of public dialog, then those committed to critique will be keen for prophetic voices to secure a position of permanence and legitimacy. Enter the anthropologist of religion. How might the anthropologist come alongside prophetic speakers? How does the anthropologist say: “we are with you”? One path might be to conduct rigorous fieldwork and write vivid ethnography about prophetic critics, that is doing the anthropology of theology. This remains productive, but it is not the only option. As anthropologists, we can also bring to the table what we know of religious actors active in the public sphere: how orders of discourse are established and what are the dynamics of jostling for legitimacy.

Prophetic critics can learn from our understanding of “religious publicity.” I draw this term from Matthew Engelke, who presents it as a critical reassessment of how to study the presence of religion in public life. “When we talk about ‘public religion’ today we are often actually talking about ‘religious publicity’” (Engelke, 2013: xv). By this he means that the status of religion being public should not be taken for granted. “Public” should be understood as a status that is actively pursued, achieved, promoted, and managed by socially positioned religious actors who are possessed by particular strategic aims. If prophetic critics hope to achieve the kind of presence in public discourse West calls for, then they must be familiar with other (often, opposing) ways in which religious actors seek to claim public presence, legitimacy, and authority. Consider an example, which emerges from anthropological research I conducted from 2011 to 2017, focused on the cultural production of a creationist theme park (Bielo, in press).

Ark Encounter is a $92 million attraction that materializes the biblical story of Noah and a worldwide flood to teach young earth creationist theology, Protestant fundamentalism, and argue against evolutionary science. Set on 800 acres of Kentucky rolling hills—40 miles south of Cincinnati—the park’s centerpiece is an all-wooden re-creation of Noah’s ark, built to creationist specification from the text of Genesis 6:9. If the park is profitable, subsequent stages will be added to feature other materialized biblical replicas, such as the Tower of Babel. The completed ark required nearly four million board feet of timber, stands 51 feet tall, 85 feet wide, 510 feet long, and contains more than 100,000 square feet of themed exhibit space.

Ark Encounter is a project of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a creationist ministry based in northern Kentucky. Since its founding in 1994, AiG has fashioned itself as a “popular” complement to other “creation science” organizations, advancing the same mission of teaching creationism grounded in biblical literalism but aiming to reach a broader audience. The populist strivings of AiG garnered national attention in 2007 when it opened the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. The 75,000 square foot facility was a $30 million project, materializing the creationist worldview through interactive exhibits, multimedia shows, gardens, and a petting zoo. While dozens of creation museums exist on North America’s landscape, AiG’s museum is the largest and most technologically sophisticated. By mid-2015, the museum had welcomed over two million visitors and had emerged as the primary public face of modern creationism in the United States.

With the museum as its epicenter, AiG functions like other influential fundamentalist organizations—as an empire of cultural production (Harding, 2000). They publish books and periodicals, coordinate a research journal, produce films and radio programs, curate an extensive online library of resources, design Christian homeschooling curricula, host summer Bible camp retreats for kids, and organize creation science teaching tours on Alaskan cruises and Grand Canyon expeditions. The ministry’s most recognizable face, Ken Ham, travels extensively to speak at churches and conferences, maintains an active weblog, hosts a daily online radio program, and is often asked to speak as a representative voice for Christian conservatism on major media outlets. The museum, Ham, and all of AiG’s materials are anchored by two pillars: a fundamentalist reading of scripture and a vehement critique of evolutionary science as a moral danger to the world.

From the Creation Museum to Ark Encounter and their numerous productions, the religious publicity of AiG is defined by several interlaced ambitions. First, they seek to educate the public about creationism. This is essentially about circulating distinctive creationist claims grounded in a strict fundamentalist literalism, such as a six-thousand-year-old earth, the reality of a global flood that killed all humans except Noah and his family, and the historical coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. This basic ambition props up two further aims: to generate and foster doubt about the authority of evolutionary science, and to simultaneously bolster the legitimacy of creationism. This double-edged strategy of detracting and producing authority supports other political efforts of fundamentalism, such as changing public school science curricula. AiG also hopes to create alternative digital and brick-and-mortar spaces of pedagogy, devotion, and religious entertainment. The Creation Museum is a safe haven for committed creationists who are wary and suspicious of evolution-based science and natural history museums. Finally, the religious publicity of the ministry is evangelistic. They seek to proclaim a fundamentalist Protestant message, hoping that nonfundamentalists will (immediately or eventually) experience a conversion to the theology and politics of fundamentalism.

Religious publicity is established as a comparative area of inquiry, from Engelke’s British Bible Society to a creationist theme park in Kentucky, ecumenical Christian radio DJs in the Caribbean (Guadeloupe, 2009) and the use of mass media entertainment by Pentecostals in African nations (Meyer, 2015; Pype, 2012). This work addresses a range of Christian contexts, and in turn does not present a singular expression of Christian public presence. This multiplicity is central to the anthropological contribution. When prophetic voices enter the public sphere and claim the mantle of “authentic” Christianity, they must reckon with the social fact of divergent claims to the tradition. Moreover, while the content of religious publicity is important, the media and cultural registers used to claim public attention are equally vital. Religious actors entering the public sphere do not rely solely on reasoned discourse; they also focus on sensorial attunement and the mobilization of popular culture (from theme parks to melodramas). The sharp edge of prophetic critique is dulled when it joins the public sphere ignorant of, or deaf to, how and why other (at times, antagonistic) religious actors have their own public ambitions and strategies.

Conclusion

In his proposal for a dialog between anthropology and theology, Robbins (2006: 287) writes that “anthropologists would have to imagine that theologians might either produce theories that get some things right about the world they currently get wrong or model a kind of action in the world that is in some or other way more effective or ethically adequate than their own.” The complementary proposal I have forwarded here imagines that theologians have a tradition of prophetic critique that anthropologists equally interested in human flourishing might support. If a relationship between anthropology and theology is to blossom, each would do well to think less about dialoguing and more about collaborating. As an example, I highlighted how anthropological research on religious publicity could help advance the public success of prophetic theological critiques.

My hope is not to make anthropology into theology’s sidekick or vice versa. I mean only to say that meaningful collaboration between the two disciplines is possible, and the broader project of human flourishing could advance as a result. I claim an anthropology of religion that uses its empirical insight to bolster prophetic voices whose ambition is to abolish injustice, wage peace, and dismantle oppressive and prejudicial orders. In this collaboration between anthropology and theology, the moral imagination is inspired and the value of anthropological knowledge is celebrated.