Religion's Power: What Makes It Work 0197652530, 9780197652534

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Religion’s Power

Religion’s Power What Makes It Work R O B E RT W U T H N OW

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​765253–​4 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197652534.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents Introduction: Religion and Power 

1

1. Power in Ritual Practice 

16

2. Religion’s Discursive Power 

48

3. The Institutional Power of Religion 

104

4. Religion and Identity Power 

142

5. Religion and Political Power 

186

Conclusion  Index 

219 227

Introduction Religion and Power

In 1903, a representative from the Salvation Army’s headquarters in London traveled to Canada to explore the possibility of relocating Britain’s poor overseas. Over the next three decades, a quarter of a million people were shipped to destinations in Canada, Australia, and Africa. More than a hundred thousand of those deported were children: abandoned, orphaned, and otherwise separated from their natural parents. Dozens of religious organizations took part in the effort: the Catholic Emigration Association, Church of England Society for Empire Settlement, Church of Scotland, Inter-​Church Immigration Committee, Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church, Society of Friends, St. Vincent de Paul, and the United Church of Canada, among others. The practice resumed on a smaller scale after World War II and continued until 1970. The agencies involved described their activities in the language of salvation, moral uplift, and service to God. “Carrying off the children of distress to the lands beyond the sea,” one of the organizers wrote, was a service “to religion, humanity and civilization.”1 Later investigations viewed the endeavor quite differently. The control and abuse of children whose “salvation” was inflicted upon them became a national scandal. It gained international attention in best-​selling books and television documentaries. Inquiries unearthed the emotional trauma the children experienced. “I cried non-​stop,” one of the child migrants sent to Australia at age seven recalled. “We were told that we were all orphans, that our country didn’t want us, and that this was our last chance. Beatings and sexual abuse were par for the course and there was never anything remotely close to affection.”2 1 Janet Fink, “Children of Empire: The Alignments of Church, State and Family in the Creation of Mobile Children,” Cultural Studies 21, 6 (2007), 847–​65, quote on page 850; Michele Langfield, “Voluntarism, Salvation, and Rescue: British Juvenile Migration to Australia and Canada, 1890–​ 1939,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32, 2 (2004), 86–​114. 2 Fink, “Children of Empire,” 857.

Religion’s Power. Robert Wuthnow, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197652534.003.0001

2  Religion’s Power The power exercised in religious practices prompts scrutiny whenever it oversteps its bounds—​when it inspires violence, when it excludes persons of color, when priests become pedophiles, when a pregnant teenager is shunned by her congregation, and when pious constituents foment hatred. When events occur in which people are harmed and forced to do things against their will and when outcomes run against the grain of public morality, then it becomes imperative to ask how religion manages to have such sway in our world. It is no less important to inquire about religion’s power in less troublesome contexts, as when it appears to motivate charitable efforts and encourage people to be responsible citizens. How do religious practices exercise power? Is it by threatening eternal damnation and promising eternal rewards? Is it by answering life’s ultimate questions? Is it, as religion’s critics argue, by deceiving the masses? Broadly defined, power is the asymmetric control of scarce resources: the unequally distributed capacity to accomplish desired ends. Max Weber defined it as the “probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance.”3 Ralf Dahrendorf added that these expectations become permanent features of social arrangements.4 Asymmetry is the key. It is a relationship of dominance and dependence. Whatever the valued resources and whatever the capacity to accomplish desired ends, the privileged few have more of it. It is the basis of getting what one wants even if that requires someone else not getting what they want and being pressured to do something they would not have done on their own.5 Power in religious practice is the asymmetric capacity that enables a person, group, or whole sector of a population acting in the name of religion to accomplish what it wants. Popular discussions of religion often conceive of it in other terms—​as a source of human solidarity and cooperation, altruism, the milk of kindness, and mercy. But power is integral to religion as well. A hierarchy that restricts priestly offices to men exercises power that imposes its domination on women. A congregation that persuades a reluctant newcomer 3 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 15. 4 Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Societies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 166. 5 Among numerous definitional discussions of power, asymmetric control of scarce resources is treated extensively in Richard M. Emerson, “Power-​Dependence Relations,” American Sociological Review 27, 1 (1962), 31–​41, as an early example, and more recently in Cameron Anderson and Sebastien Brion, “Perspectives on Power in Organizations,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 1 (2014), 67–​97.

Introduction  3 to join its numbers is exercising its power of persuasion. A faith-​based organization that raises money from donors and the government to help the poor is engaged in the asymmetric control of resources that enable it to accomplish its goals. A prophet who calls on disciples to abandon what they were doing and pursue a new cause is exercising power. Religious power can be exploitative, and it can be used for nefarious purposes, prompting armies to seize territory and to kill. Or it can be used for noble aims. People can willingly become adherents, pledge support, and donate time. Their willingness does not negate the reality of power. The scholarly study of religion has in recent decades developed a growing interest in power. This “turn to power” originated as part of the larger reorientation in the social sciences that emerged in the 1970s and subsequently advanced along several lines during the last quarter of the twentieth century. One line of inquiry was prompted by the anti-​and postcolonial scholarship associated with independence movements in developing countries and by the anti-​imperialist and anti-​statist social movements that swept through Europe and the United States during the unrest of the 1960s. How social movements mobilize and how they are suppressed shifted attention from cohesive theories of society in which values and consensus prevailed toward perspectives in which power and the contested nature of power took center stage. A closely related development in the United States was the struggle for racial inclusion and the emergence of the Black Power movement in conjunction with the advocacy for civil rights in which religious organizations were variously cast as proponents and antagonists. Feminist activism and scholarship played a significant role as well, including challenges toward patriarchy within religious organizations and arguments against the entrenched power of religion. The intellectual roots of scholarly interest in power were deeply embedded in Marxian and neo-​Marxian theory. While Marxian theory diminished the importance of religion relative to the material infrastructure of class interests, it nevertheless accorded religion significance as the ideological legitimation of economic power. Neo-​Marxian theory incorporated ideas from Weber about state power and gave greater weight to the role of cultural power, especially in the preservation of inequality under late capitalism in Western democracies. Neo-​Marxian arguments relevant to the study of religion were present in Louis Althusser’s treatment of ideological state apparatuses, Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony, Jacques Lacan’s adaptations of psychoanalytic theory, Jürgen Habermas’s emphasis on legitimation, Michel

4  Religion’s Power Foucault’s focus on discursive formations, Judith Butler’s focus on power in gender relations, and Talal Asad’s interest in the institutional power through which religious practices are assessed. A significant consequence of these approaches’ emphasis on culture was to broaden the scope under which power could be discussed. Instead of it being identified with the state, power could become a feature of institutional settings in which decisions of other kinds were made.6 Attention to the power of religious practices also increased with late-​ twentieth-​century political events. These included the resurgence of so-​ called Islamic fundamentalism in the Iranian Revolution, the presence of liberation theology as an ideological force in Latin America, the growth of Pentecostalism in conjunction with neoliberal economic development in Latin America and Africa, and the emergence of the Christian right as a pro-​ Republican partisan source of political mobilization in the United States. These developments prompted scholarly inquiries to question long-​held assumptions about secularization in which religion’s power was assumed to be weak and weakening. Contrary to those assumptions, religious practices appeared to be exercising their influence not only by offering solace in the private lives of the faithful but also by adapting to a more diversified ethnic and racial context, finding expression in nontraditional spiritual practices, and extending influence in the political arena. “Deprivatization,” as José Casanova termed it in his influential book Public Religions in the Modern World, signified this unanticipated re-​entry.7 Power in the interstices of religious expression became a focus of the “lived-​ religion” approach that developed in the 1990s. Building on ethnographic studies conducted in the late 1970s and 1980s in which power relations among leaders and followers and between men and women were emphasized, such as William Sims Bainbridge’s Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy 6 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2014); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from His Political Writings, 1910–​1920, trans. John Mathews (New York: International Publishers, 1977); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984); Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/​Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 78–​108; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); on the “turn to power” in religious studies, a valuable discussion can be found in Stephen S. Bush, Visions of Religion: Experience, Meaning, and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 7 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5–​10, 211–​33.

Introduction  5 Cult and Nancy Tatom Ammerman’s Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World, the lived-​religion approach scrutinized how ordinary people practiced their faith in everyday life, therein conforming to the social norms that exercised power over them and sometimes expressing agency through their choices of resistance and innovation.8 In Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, an edited volume that heralded and advanced the significance of work taking this approach, Robert Orsi called attention both to the “religious elites who claim and exercise real power over others, over their bodies and spirits, through their control of theological and moral discourse and worship protocols” and the “creativity and improvisational power of theology.” Any study of everyday religious practice, Orsi argued, should be attentive to “the centrality of issues of power.”9 The broader reorientation reflected in the lived-​religion approach to religious studies has significantly challenged essentialist views of religion. If religion was historically contingent, it could not be defined by a single substantive commonality, such as belief in the supernatural, or by a universal function, such as fulfilling a human desire for ultimate meaning. Its forms and practices—​indeed, what counted as “religion”—​were the result of social conditions and practices that leveraged some to advantage relative to others. However, essentialist views persisted and indeed gained new adherents. An approach drawn from utilitarian theory, for example, posited that hope for eternal salvation was the essence of all religion and thus provided the Rosetta Stone with which to interpret religions’ varying trajectories. An explanation for religious practices’ power that continues to be advanced in some quarters is that religion offers a unique set of beliefs and experiences that individuals want and that societies need. On this account, religion’s unique power is its claim over people’s beliefs about the supernatural, the transcendent, or some other notion of meta-​empirical reality. Some scholars who deny that religion can be defined in essentialist universalistic terms nevertheless define it this way. Religion provides ultimate meaning, explains life in extremis, addresses the mysteries of life, and constructs a nomos or worldview that offers a conception of a general order of existence. Religion’s power 8 William Sims Bainbridge, Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 9 Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3–​21, quotes on pp. 9 and 20; and for recent work on lived religion, see especially Nancy Ammerman, Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices (New York: NYU Press, 2021).

6  Religion’s Power is thus its unrivaled control of the beliefs and rituals upholding its claims and the forcefulness with which it connects individuals with the gods. In this interpretation, nothing is quite like religion’s extraordinary power. It inheres in the sacred, which is the essence of religion. Sacred power is more powerful than anything else—​watching, controlling, directing, shaping what people do; transcending their daily lives; giving them hope; and threatening them with ultimate punishment. Sacred power is expressed in rituals that strengthen participants. They experience it viscerally as well as mentally and emotionally. It gives them confidence that they can accomplish heroic feats on its behalf. They believe their gods are omnipotent, stronger than earthly rulers, and that by having these gods on their side, they can withstand any pain, conquer any fear, and find meaning in any endeavor. The key to understanding religion’s power, for those holding this view, is thus to emphasize how it differs from everything else. Religion’s power must be understood especially in contrast with secular power. How the sacred is conceptualized and worshiped is primary. Some gods are more powerful than others. Some religions are especially good at upholding the ancient myths and grasping secular authority for the control of religious functionaries. Power resides in the capacity to invent enduring stories about the gods and to persuade believers that these stories are uniquely true.10 This argument has support in treatments of religion that set the sacred apart from ordinary life. When the question is posed, as it often has been, as to why religion exists at all, the answer is that humans have a need for it. The argument makes sense in a counterfactual world in which something happened long before recorded history to spark humans’ imagination about what happens after death or, for that matter, how the world came into existence. The argument further specifies that the most important feature of religion’s power to be examined in contemporary scholarly studies is its inevitable decline. As a system of beliefs about the origins and meanings of reality, religion’s influence in the modern world was destined to diminish in proportion to the rise of rational thought. But the notion that religion’s power is mostly metaphysical and thus unique is difficult to sustain. One reason is that religion is not an idea or a belief that has to be invented anew by each person or by each generation to 10 Andre Droogers, Religion at Play: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2014), 71–​90, and Meerten B. Ter Borg, “Religion and Power,” in Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. Peter B. Clarke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 195–​209 are examples of works that largely take this particularizing approach to religion’s power.

Introduction  7 keep it from disappearing. Were religion simply a set of superstitions about the world, it might indeed decline against the onslaught of science. But religious practices are well institutionalized in every conceivable place, which means they are far more durable than might be true if the sacred were present only in the imagination. Religious practices exist in countless organizations, some large and some small, and in books and movies and on television and in government bureaus and pension funds and meeting houses and meditation centers. The power of religious practices consists in their control of loyalties and money and skills and discourse. It may well be less powerful than the modern nation-​state or the commercialized marketplace, yet even in these quarters its presence has been sufficiently evident such that scholars should not have been quite as surprised by its persistence as many of them were. A particularizing stance that regards religion as something different from everything else in the world is unnecessary; indeed, it is unhelpful. That does not mean that religious practice has no distinctive features. The beliefs it offers are the unique means through which some believers attain assurance of spending eternity in heaven or anticipate being uniquely blessed when they encounter difficulties in daily life. But those are only a fraction of what it takes for religious practice to have power once it is well institutionalized. How converts speak about their experiences and how religious leaders speak about politics matter. Religion’s power is expressed in what people do and say. The lives of people who do not believe at all are influenced for better or worse by those who do. Religious practices’ shaping of public opinion about morality and politics occurs amid ordinary life for everyone. Its power depends on manners of speaking, persuasion, money, and leadership.11 While attending to the particularistic aspects of religious practice, therefore, its power must be understood in terms common to other practices and institutions. The discourse that persuades persons to become members of a religious community is powerful in some of the same ways that discourse is in advertising and politics. Its power lies in the way narratives are told and images concretized and in technologies of communication rather than only in claims about the sacred. The same is true of institutional arrangements that exercise power over the people they serve or employ or ask for financial support from. Their power is enacted through the control of spaces, in status

11 Rogers Brubaker, “Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence,” Sociological Theory 33, 1 (2015), 1–​19, develops an argument contrasting “particularizing” and “generalizing” stances toward religion’s power.

8  Religion’s Power hierarchies, and in social networks. Religion’s power in social movements and in politics must be considered in terms that include organizational resources and strategies for mobilization. Above all, the question to ask is not why religious practice exists at all but how it exercises the power it does. This is not a question, though, of assessing the effects of religion: of determining if it influenced an election or kept someone from committing a crime. Sometimes those are valid measures of power. But often they are not. Indeed, they focus only on externalities, on the conceivable outcomes for something in some other realm that apparently matters more and therefore is in need of an explanation. That focus misses the fact that power exists within institutions as well, as an intrinsic and indeed constitutive aspect of their practices, in the social relations of which they are composed, in how they are conducted, in what the practitioners understand themselves to be doing, in the discourses that are foregrounded or silenced, in who sets the rules, and in the circumstances under which the rules are challenged. To miss these important manifestations of power is like asking only about the effects of medical treatments or scientific investigations while ignoring the procedures, decisions, constraints, habits, and improvisations that went into those treatments and investigations.12 My focus is on the power arrangements that constitute practices and thereby shape the opportunities that practitioners must have to achieve their desired outcomes. Practices are what people do and say, how they go about meeting the challenges they face. Practices are localized, taking place in concrete situations that include material affordances and in which cues trigger certain feelings and habits and preclude others. Practices are strings of temporal activity that have histories. The histories consist of shared memories about what worked in the past and what didn’t. Practices are embodied and thus include the power arrangements that exist because of ascriptions associated with phenotypical characteristics. They include power arrangements supplied by the rules governing social relationships. These are the arrangements we respect implicitly because of assigned roles, precedents, and skills. Skills include adeptness in the use of codified knowledge and 12 Steven Lukes, “Power,” Contexts 6, 3 (2007), 59–​61, stresses power as capacity and emphasizes not confusing it with consequences; Foucault’s emphasis on the internal dynamics through which power is exercised in institutional settings has of course been generative in this regard, e.g., Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 78–​108, and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1976); the approach I emphasize here is similar to the “internalist” one discussed in Silviya Lechner and Mervyn Frost, Practice Theory and International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Introduction  9 the greater status and agility that derives from its use. The influence that practices exercise over their practitioners stems just as deeply from the practical knowledge, the norms, and the “how to” that enable an effective performance of the tasks at hand. Moreover, practices are messy, uncertain, and improvisational, which means that power is infused in the dynamics through which practices endure and change. By locating the discussion of power in the literature on practice, I therefore delimit it in two ways: first, the individual practitioner is at the center of analysis, which means that power is enacted in the small circuits in which individual behavior takes place; and second, power arrangements are often durable, but their durability must be considered in relation to the uncertainties and improvisations that unfold over time. These limitations necessitate focusing on what individuals do, the agency they express in the actions they take, and the constraints under which their actions are taken. This is quite different from treating power as it is enacted by nation-​states, regimes, corporations, or whole systems of social arrangements, any of which may have religion as one of their components. However, this approach does not limit inquiry to the actions in which individuals engage on their own or in small places. The focus, rather, is on the contexts in which individuals do things—​in this case, things deemed religious—​and how power operates in those contexts. The idea of practice that provides the guiding approach to this discussion of power stems from several theoretical traditions. These traditions are distinct and offer ways of thinking about power that differ even though they are largely complementary. One is the tradition of virtue ethics articulated most notably in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom practice is a string of activities that conform to rules that therefore exercise power over those who practice and in which practitioners gain power as they master the rules of the game. Power also accrues to the practitioners in the form of transferrable skills and intrinsic qualities of personal virtue. American pragmatism is another source of the literature on practice, especially through the contributions of John Dewey in focusing on human conduct that is purposive, given to routine, and influenced by the resources individuals have at their disposal. Yet another source is what might be termed “historical anthropology,” as expressed in the work of Clifford Geertz, Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, among others. The common emphasis on power in this work is how it operates in social interaction situations, especially when social class, gender, race, and other

10  Religion’s Power distinctions are present. Of the various traditions, this one has given the greatest attention to the fact that power includes the control of bodies as well as of minds. This approach has also emphasized how power manifests itself in institutional settings, such as the workplace, families, academic disciplines, clinics, and prisons. The other tradition in which power has been considered in complementary ways is the constructivist approach. In this approach power is exercised in the formation of cultural categories and in how those categories constrain what individuals think and do.13 Conceiving of power as an aspect of social practice foregrounds the habits that individuals have in their control and can use to their advantage, as well as individuals’ capacity to adapt to new situations. Besides the habits individuals bring with them, power also resides in the special skills they have learned in previous situations, their memories, and the dispositions they have developed that govern their responses to new situations. These dispositions are relatively stable yet can be refashioned reflexively through the stories people tell about their experiences. Power then is a mixture of the constraints individuals face in the situations in which they find themselves and the free agency they have at their disposal for making decisions about what they want to accomplish. Power is unequally distributed among the social structures that guide the unfolding activity of which practices consist. These social phenomena of course center around the actual social interaction of individuals and groups in “real” situations, but they also include relationships depicted in stories and, in the case of religious practices, between humans and humans’ conceptions of suprahuman beings and entities. In all these relationships power differences are especially evident when the interaction consists of crossing, affirming, transgressing, and otherwise dramatizing social boundaries. Examples of 13 Among the many strands that guide this understanding of practices are those discussed in Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds., The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (New York: Routledge, 2001); Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, 2 (2002), 243–​ 63; Joseph Rouse, “Practice Theory,” in Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, ed. Stephen P. Turner and Mark W. Risjord (New York: Elsevier, 2007), 499–​540 and valuably discussed in the case of religious practice in Nancy T. Ammerman, “Rethinking Religion: Toward a Practice Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 126, 1 (July 2020), 6–​51. My work on practice, most recently in Robert Wuthnow, What Happens When We Practice Religion? Textures of Devotion in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), emphasizes the interplay of habits and improvisation, situational cues and material affordances, intentions in action, feeling rules, embodied routines and representations, and the evolution in social studies of religion from classificatory concepts to a focus on structuring processes.

Introduction  11 such boundaries include racial and gender differences, differences based on social class, and differences between skilled practitioners and amateurs. The constraints that individuals experience as forces exercising power over them consist in the first instance of other individuals but, more importantly, in rules. Rules are the operative norms to which individuals’ behavior conforms. Rules represent customs, social arrangements, and laws that are in place because of how power has been exercised in the past. Built into taken-​ for-​granted ways of life, many rules are obeyed without question. But rules are often challenged, passively resisted, and questioned. While the rules to which social practices conform are instances of the exercise of power, conformity to them is frequently in the interest of those who conform, if for no other reason than the risk of nonconformity being incalculable. As a feature of social practices, power exercised in immediate situations has ripple effects that extend beyond these situations. These effects are most evident within institutional settings or “fields.”14 It is within fields that resources affecting the distribution of power are defined and status hierarchies are present. What counts as power is governed by the institutional settings in which it occurs; however, spillover across settings also is an important consideration, as, for example, in the case of highly transferrable resources such as money, good health, influential social networks, and somatic-​based privileges. This understanding of practices puts an emphasis on mechanisms. Mechanisms are the resources and capacities—​the schemas, habits, norms, organizational skills, social networks, and tangible goods—​that individuals and groups have at their disposal to be used when it proves desirable to use them. The asymmetries pertain to these resources and capacities. Referring to them as mechanisms emphasizes that they are better understood as practices that are enacted temporally in dynamic situations than as an inventory of stable supplies. Practice theory regards mechanisms as strings of situated action in which habit as learned and as non-​deliberative responses and dispositions intermingle with improvisations that are deliberative and that take account of immediate circumstances. The interplay is aptly captured in Bourdieu’s term “regulated improvisation.”15 Mechanisms so conceived 14 Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, A Theory of Fields (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), regard fields as collections of actors who share a common understanding of what is at stake, who the other relevant players are, what the rules of the game are, and what broadly the field is about. 15 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 21.

12  Religion’s Power are agentic and intentional, meaning that actors’ practices take account of how they perceive the situation and the background beliefs of which their intentions are composed. The actions in which they engage reflect the opportunities and constraints in which the action takes place, and the action itself carries symbolic meanings that reproduce power relationships. In this understanding mechanisms are locally adaptable and temporally influenced rather than being pre-​specified means toward settled long-​term goals. Their power must be understood within the communities or groups in which they unfold.16 In this book I discuss five mechanisms that constitute specific means through which power is enacted. These mechanisms are the day-​to-​day practices in which we engage to accomplish what we want to get done. They are embodied and situational, governed by dispositions and memories, and shaped by the structures in which they take place. They include the particularizing aspects of religious practice but also reflect generalizing aspects of power identified in other contexts. The five mechanisms are: ritual power, discursive power, institutional power, identity power, and political power. Ritual power is the experience of interacting with some object, person, or force that seems imbued with special or extrahuman capacities, such as the ability to make unusual things happen and to evoke a response of awe, subservience, and obedience. It is understood in the social science literature to be constructed through the participation of those who believe in it, yet it is perceived by those who participate to be vested with power itself. Ritual is thus the means through which humans benefit from relating to it, gaining some of its strength or wisdom or goodness, and in some instances deriving powers themselves to achieve special feats of prowess, healing, and emotional resolve. In ritual the power relations participants bring from the outside world are temporarily bracketed, but never so completely that those asymmetries are also present in the conduct of the ritual. These asymmetries affect the material affordances on which all rituals depend and are often the occasion for disputes about how the ritual should be performed. I discuss ritual power in Chapter 1. Discursive power is the asymmetric control and capacity for the use of talk, symbolization, narrative, and framing. It is the mechanism through which habits and improvisations are verbalized in situated social interaction. 16 Neil Gross, “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms,” American Sociological Review 74, 3 (2009), 358–​79.

Introduction  13 Discursive power is evident in command over the styles of discourse, including the appropriate employment of registers and the capacity to elicit emotion, as well as in the substantive content of discourse. Examples of discursive power include negotiators being able to frame arguments to their advantage, the rhetorical uses of persuasive narratives, and the deployment of gendered and racialized speech. Discursive empowerment occurs through storytelling and the construction of alternative narratives. Approaches vary in emphasizing discursive power as consensus formation, mobilization, and resistance. I discuss the ways in which discursive power is present in religious settings in Chapter 2. Institutional power inheres in control over specific spaces of social interaction, the logics of action that routinely take place in these spaces, and the social networks and hierarchies that arrange the relations among persons into roles and positions. Organizations are the places in which specialized discourses are enacted (e.g., doctors’ offices, classrooms, traffic courts). As relatively enduring social arrangements, organizations confer legitimation on the asymmetric distribution and control of material resources. These resources include physical objects, technologies, and machineries of surveillance. Institutional power as a mechanism is the focus of Chapter 3. The capacity and control that inheres primarily in ethnic, racial, and gender classifications is identity power, setting privileged groups against marginalized groups. Identity power of this kind operates in intimate relationships but also on a large scale and is shaped by organizations, interest groups, and social movements. Nationalism functions similarly as a mechanism with which to assert the superiority of one society relative to others. National trauma is frequently the occasion for elevating the salience of distinctions setting one society against others. Classifications construct boundaries among religiously self-​defined subpopulations that variously correspond with or crosscut ethnic, racial, gender, and national distinctions. I discuss these identity power mechanisms in Chapter 4. I save political power for last because it is the topic most often addressed in discussions of religious practices’ power and is best considered regarding ritual, discursive, institutional, and identity power. Political power is the control of and capacity to use or to influence the use of coercion. Political power is typically monopolized by states that exercise coercion through the control and use of military intervention, laws, taxes, conscription, eminent domain, and incarceration. Power that implies something about religious practices is present in instances in which idioms and narratives that are recognizably

14  Religion’s Power “religious” are invoked in political discourse, at times when clergy hold public office, and when religiously mobilized constituencies exercise or are capable of exercising influence over public officials and policies. These are the focus of Chapter 5. How the power of religious practices works, I suggest then, can be understood by examining each of these mechanisms singly and together. The founders—​Max Weber especially but also Herbert Spencer, R. H. Tawney, and later Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah (in his early work), and others—​ got it mostly right when they identified religion as an institution, for it is as an institution that all these mechanisms come together: into the capacity to shape rituals, discourse, organizations, identities, and politics. What the early work did not do was push hard enough into these internal institutional mechanisms. It instead followed the structural-​functional logic of emphasizing institutional differentiation, the result of which was to treat religion as a distinct entity with a logic all its own and to emphasize its relations to other institutions. How the power of religious practices declines—​the question posed a century ago by scholars interested in modernization and by trends evident in treatments of twenty-​first-​century developments as well—​is also best considered in the framework suggested by the specific mechanisms through which religion is practiced. Its discursive power, for instance, may be strengthened by adopting rhetorical styles from advertising or from therapy, but doing so may weaken its claims to be presenting a message all its own. Similarly, the recent scholarship on religion and politics suggests the complexities of religious leaders seeming to have influence in electoral outcomes and yet experiencing pushback from having stepped so actively into the partisan fray. There are many reasons to investigate—​and perhaps to be concerned about—​religion’s power, among which several can be readily identified. First, like power in other domains, its functioning is characteristically invisible, masked under the guise of taken-​for-​granted norms. What we do not see we cannot resist or modify. It induces unwitting conformity. Choosing to think and act in certain ways is one thing; conforming because we can imagine no alternatives is quite another. Second, religion’s power distorts the beliefs and practices it facilitates. Power entices the powerful, whether they consciously intend to or not, to believe in ways that retain their power (for example, slaveowners’ theological defense of their interests). Third, religion is not reducible to individuals’ quests for meaning; its well-​organized, amply funded, strategically entrepreneurial institutions command vast resources and have

Introduction  15 far-​reaching consequences. And fourth, when religion is harmful, its harm must not be attributed to misguided beliefs alone but also to the power dynamics of religion itself. When British religious organizations early in the twentieth century deployed their political and cultural clout to deport indigent children, that was clearly an instance of religious organizations exercising their considerable power. The power of religious practices a century later may be different, even in some ways diminished, but it continues to be evident to such an extent that scarcely a day goes by without commentators raising their voices to applaud or condemn it, or simply to describe it. To understand it, description must start with sensitizing tools, and for that there is a rich and expanding assemblage of ideas on which to draw.

1 Power in Ritual Practice In this chapter we begin our inquiry into the relationship of religious practices and power by taking up the question of power in ritual. Ritual is the topic of so many discussions over such a long period that we need not attempt to cover all this territory. However, as I will try to show, there are aspects of rituals’ relation to power that must be examined anew if we are to grasp what is distinctive, and what is not, about religion’s power. In brief, these aspects concern how power is expressed in the practice of ritual performance itself. I discuss the power of specialists who conduct the staging of rituals, how rituals covert power into experiences of transcendence, and the difference it makes when some participants have more power than others. I illustrate these points with examples from contemporary preaching, ideas about transcendence expressed in laying on of hands practices, and an intriguing power struggle that became known as the Great Organ Dispute of 1827. Much of the early literature treated ritual as a discrete event that, when viewed from the outside, expressed something about power. We have Émile Durkheim’s discussion of primitive ritual, Clifford Geertz’s famous treatment of the Balinese cockfight, and Edward Shils’ and Michael Young’s illuminating sociological discussion of British coronation ceremonies.1 The value of treating rituals as events is that the focus can be on what the event symbolizes and how those symbols relate to the cultural systems in which they occur. In Geertz’s treatment, we see how the cockfight expresses and indeed resolves tensions in Balinese social relations; from Shils and Young, we learn about the majesty symbolized at each moment of the event. For more than a quarter-​century, though, the preferred approach has been to conceive of rituals as practices. Catherine Bell, whose work on ritual in the 1990s became the touchstone for much of the subsequent literature, was the principal architect of this approach.2 Bell drew widely from the most prominent 1 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1912]); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Edward Shils and Michael Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” Sociological Review 1, 2 (December 1953), 63–​81. 2 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Religion’s Power. Robert Wuthnow, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197652534.003.0002

Power in Ritual Practice  17 scholars but from none quite as extensively as Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s interest in practice had grown from his ethnographic research in Algeria early in his career and matured into his Outline of a Theory of Practice published in 1972.3 Practice provided Bourdieu with a way to hold in tension the complexities of human activity that prevailing analytic approaches tended to keep separate. This approach was particularly valuable in emphasizing both consciousness and embodiment, structure and improvisation, and actors’ dispositions as well as their goals. For Bourdieu, practices were the warp and woof of everyday life. Bell’s task was to settle the question of how ritual might be considered both as a practice and as a particular kind of practice. Her answer was that studies of ritual could more productively be focused on ritualization, by which she meant the process through which something came to be regarded as a ritual. Ritualization is the process by which certain activities are set apart, distinguished from everyday life, and thus differentiated enough to be recognized by those who participate (or observe) as rituals. However, this approach is somewhat disappointing, as Bell acknowledges, because it leaves indeterminate the many ways in which activities can be set apart. For example, Bell mentions that activities may use a delineated and structured space to which access is restricted; a special periodicity for the occurrence and internal orchestration of the activities; restricted codes of communication to heighten the formality of movement and speech; distinct and specialized personnel; objects, texts, and dress designated for use in these activities alone; verbal and gestural combinations that evoke or purport to be the ways things have always been done; [and] preparations that demand particular physical or mental states.4

In short, almost anything can be a way of setting something apart; moreover, activities can be set apart in ways that do not necessarily cause them to be regarded as rituals. Nevertheless, there is some value in Bell’s emphasis on the processes of setting apart. While the processes may vary, several of the ones she mentions appear frequently in studies of ritual. Formality of movement and speech that follows a standard script is often one of the

3 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977 [1972]). 4 Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 204–​5.

18  Religion’s Power distinguishing characteristics. Another is meeting at a specified time and place and wearing special clothing. Several scholars who agree that ritual is set apart from everyday practices have remarked on its similarity to play, which is a step forward in conceiving of ritual as a process. Robert Bellah, whose earlier writing was greatly influenced by Durkheim, turned in his last book, Religion in Human Evolution, to Johan Huizinga’s insights about play. In Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-​Element in Culture Huizinga emphasized how play differed from ordinary life and suggested it may have been the origin of culture, including myth and ritual, law, poetry, and science.5 For Bellah, Huizinga’s argument was attractive, not only because he (Bellah) was interested in cultural evolution but also because play and ritual seemed to be set apart from ordinary life in similar ways: both were enacted according to specified rules, both operated according to rules that could be repeated next time around, and the participants in both knew that what they were doing was different from work, personal grooming, and other daily tasks. Most important, play was something done for its own sake, not as a means to some other end.6 We find in Alasdair MacIntyre a similar argument, although MacIntyre was interested in virtue ethics rather than cultural evolution. MacIntyre in After Virtue emphasizes practices in terms like Bourdieu (although he does not cite Bourdieu), describing them as sufficiently complex arrangements of thoughts, rules, and actions that can be identified with certain skills, habits, and practitioners. Specifically, he defines a practice as any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result

5 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-​Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955 [1938]). 6 Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 76–​77, 91–​95, 109–​11. Improvisation is also an important feature of play, as illustrated in “ritual levity” that playfully mocks, parodies, embellishes, mimics, and otherwise makes fun of the scripts and rules of serious rituals and in so doing nevertheless communicates and reinforces those scripts and rules; an interesting example of ritual levity in a Jewish day school is given in Sally Anderson, “Going Through the Motions of Ritual: Exploring the ‘As If ’ Quality of Sociality in Faith-​Based Schools,” in The Study of Children in Religions: A Methods Handbook, edited by Susan B. Ridgely (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 139–​56.

Power in Ritual Practice  19 that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.7

The emphases on mastery and excellence reflect MacIntyre’s focus on virtue and differ from Bourdieu’s in this respect, most notably, as MacIntyre goes on to say, in denying that bricklaying is a practice while claiming that architecture is. The similarity with Bellah’s argument about play (Bellah cites MacIntyre) is evident in the examples of play that MacIntrye includes: football and chess. These practices are set apart in the same way that Bellah says rituals are set apart. They are done for their own sake (“intrinsic goods,” in MacIntyre’s terms), operate according to specified rules, are repeated according to the same rules, and function within a delimited time and space.8 What is implied in these discussions is that rituals are not merely set apart but are a form of communication or social interaction, an idea emphasized in Durkheim’s interpretation of the churinga or totemic object as a symbolic expression of society and evident in Geertz’s treatment of the cockfight as a symbolic representation of Balinese selves and status. For Durkheim, it is precisely this symbolic connection that unlocks the secret of rituals’ power. The ritual acts that surround an ordinary person or thing transform it into a symbol of the power that society imposes on its inhabitants. Similarly for Geertz, there is an understanding of ritual as a system of symbols that communicates something powerful. For Geertz as for Durkheim, this is how the sacred is set apart from the profane. However, much of what has been written about ritual in the intervening years since Durkheim and Geertz has been critical of this emphasis on symbolism. While it is certainly valid to say that ritual is more often expressive than instrumental, the focus on symbolism guides attention toward a holistic interpretation of what the ritual might mean. A ritual therefore has power because it stands for a power to which it gives symbolic expression. But this approach passes too quickly

7 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), 187. 8 Although rituals may be likened to games, the analogy breaks down when rituals are understood as practices that take place in ordinary life; specifically, rituals generally are not orchestrated around competition or the production of winners and losers, situational adaptations must be taken into account, the temporal horizon (history and projected future) is likely to be different, who the relevant practitioners (and bystanders) are is less precisely determined, and the rules and expectations about following the rules are less likely to be rigidly codified.

20  Religion’s Power from the ritual to what it stands for. Understood as practices, in contrast, rituals are a form of communication represented in the relations among the persons involved and the persons or things to which they are devoted. These relations, as Bourdieu especially has emphasized, are the principal locations in which power is present. The literature on ritual as practice sensitizes us to the fact that rituals are patterned sets of social relationships that, like other social relationships, have histories, expectations, and goals. Although there are wide variations, rituals of the kind that are of interest in studies of religion usually involve an object of veneration (a deity, supreme being, or ultimate value), the leader or leaders who function as ritual specialists, and the ordinary persons who adhere to the ritual (there also may be bystanders and other nonparticipants whose presence is relevant under certain circumstances). As it is to a degree in all social relationships, power is a feature of the relationships among these ritual participants: between the entity worshiped and the worshipers, the deity and the leaders, the leaders and the ordinary participants, and among the ordinary participants themselves. The asymmetries of power are implied by their roles: the deity is more powerful than the people, leaders are less powerful than the deity but more powerful than the people, and among the people some are more powerful than others. An understanding of ritual power therefore requires attending to the ways in which the ritual itself constructs, dramatizes, and affirms the power of these specific relationships. In the examples that follow, we will see evidence of how power is manifest in the staging and performance of religious rituals that occur in modern contexts in which religion is well institutionalized and thus more highly differentiated than the ones Durkheim studied and the literature from which Bell formulated her observations. While there are many rituals that practitioners may deem to be religious or spiritual in private life, the ones that occur as part of institutionalized religion are recognizably set apart by taking place—​indeed, being purposefully orchestrated—​in those settings or under the sponsorship of religious organizations. The specifics of how power is manifest mostly fall under the following: the staging of occasions for expressive behavior, the production and definition of power in ways that participants experience as transcendence, and the asymmetric interpersonal relationships among leaders and participants that reflect both their formal roles in the ritual itself and their roles external to the ritual.

Power in Ritual Practice  21

Staging Before turning to modern examples, a famous case from late antiquity will suggest several of the ways in which ritual is related to power. Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 ce is one of Christianity’s most notable early successes. With the emperor’s political backing, Christianity spread throughout the Roman empire as the empire’s official religion. But less than forty years later, paganism made a serious comeback under Constantine’s nephew Julian. Julian was raised as a Christian and became a lector in the church in Nicomedia, but as a young adult he rejected Christianity, persecuted its leaders, and promoted Neoplatonic Hellenism. For his efforts, “Julian the Apostate,” as he became known, earned a place in the history of Christianity that has continued to intrigue scholars of religion.9 Dying in 363 ce only two years into his reign during a campaign against Persia, Julian’s efforts to reinstate paganism failed. Yet the source of his attraction to paganism in the first place and the reasons for its failure have been the focus of continuing debate. Much of the debate has centered on ritual—​whether early Christianity and paganism differed, were similar, or had strengths and weaknesses because of their rituals—​and thus is a helpful example for thinking about ritual power. After the Protestant Reformation, Julian’s apostasy came to be interpreted as evidence that ritual, such as that practiced by the Catholic Church, was devoid of true spiritual power. Little wonder that Julian rejected Christianity when it was still purely ceremonial, propped up by the Roman government, and devoid of heartfelt conviction among believers. Christianity of that sort was no more powerful than pagan rituals, which had the advantage of being grounded in ancient practices and capable of arousing both fear and awe. Theological interpretations went so far as to suggest that God may have sent Julian to teach the church a lesson. Out of the persecution the church endured came the more thoughtful theology of Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, Jerome, and John Chrysostom. A later generation saw Julian’s apostasy as a lesson in the power of simple, unpretentious worship of the kind that prevailed among the common people in contrast with the overly ritualized and often corrupt pretensions of priests 9 These works include Glen Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), and H. C. Teitler, The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War Against Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Julian was also the focus of Gore Vidal’s novel, Julian (New York: Little, Brown, 1964).

22  Religion’s Power and their wealthy patrons. “Unhappy Julian,” a Methodist writer opined in 1849, could he have seen Christianity in the simplicity and purity with which it came from its divine founder, instead of beholding it as it was exemplified . . . in the courtly bishops who surrounded the throne, and who, in their rival contentions, more resembled wolves in sheep’s clothing than the lambs of Christ’s flock, his fate might have been far different.10

In this interpretation ritual had to be simple if it was to be powerful. A different interpretation that also features ritual has developed over the years. This interpretation is less concerned with why Julian rejected Christianity than with how he attempted to reinstate paganism. Taking account of the fact that he was well educated, wrote extensively, and had an intimate knowledge of Christianity, this interpretation regards him as an astute observer of what made Christianity strong. During the short time in which he was in power, Julian initiated a plan to modify paganism in ways that resembled Christianity. “Ritual and sacrifice,” one of his biographers emphasizes, “were of paramount importance.”11 Pagan rituals were perhaps powerful in inducing emotions, but they happened infrequently and were performed by priests who did not serve full-​time at the temples. Many of the festivals honored deities only once or twice a year, and the various deities competed with one another. The price of admission was high, limiting participation to privileged segments of the population. Participants came as visitors rather than as members of a worshiping community. Philanthropy supported the festivals rather than the poor and only the rich contributed. Christian rituals were less emotional but had the advantage of being held daily, included daily prayers, focused on a single deity, and represented communities of believers. The Christian communities were also well administered with a hierarchy of preachers and bishops and an ethic of service that encouraged the support of itinerant preachers as well as care for the poor. The fact that pagan worship lacked these features put it at a disadvantage. Julian’s hope of restoring paganism went unfulfilled.12 10 “Julian the Apostate,” Methodist Quarterly Review 1 (July 1849), 387–​407, quote on page 407. 11 Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, 86. 12 David Neal Greenwood, “Constantinian Influence upon Julian’s Pagan Church,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 68, 1 (January 2017), 1–​21, discusses the varying interpretations of Julian’s reforms as well as the specifics of his views toward Christianity; Rowland B. E. Smith, Julian’s

Power in Ritual Practice  23 For us these many centuries later, Julian’s observations are a reminder that rituals do not happen simply because people feel a need for them and that rituals’ power does not lie simply in their capacity to evoke sincerely held beliefs and intense emotions. It takes resources to stage them, and it matters how they are staged. Some of what matters is evident in Julian’s comparison of paganism and fourth-​century Christianity. Most of the important rituals that are celebrated to this day happen on a regular schedule: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim rituals on a weekly cycle, birthdays and Christmas annually, and national holidays annually. The regularity reinforces expectations about what they are and how the next one will be similar to previous ones. Religious rituals are usually performed by full-​time specialists. There are ways to solicit funds for their support. And there are rules governing who can participate. Fourth-​century paganism may have had the advantage of being rooted in Roman customs, but Christian rituals introduced all these other features that increased their effectiveness. Other aspects of ritual staging require a closer look. The relationship between the ritual specialists who serve as leaders and the persons who take part as ordinary participants is particularly important for understanding the power relationships involved. An asymmetry of power is present between the leaders, on the one hand, and the ordinary participants, on the other hand. Leaders usually hold an office that gives them the authority to perform their roles, they usually have advanced training, know ahead of time what is going to happen, and can interpret and explain what happens. In other words, the asymmetric power relationship between leaders and participants is not simply a difference of roles but is dramatized as the ritual is performed. “Staging” is an appropriate term for describing this relationship. Sometimes the leaders literally perform from a stage, platform, or pulpit that gives them an elevated position. As in theater, staging implies a planned performance that unfolds according to a script. It also implies that those who participate as an audience will conform to certain rules for showing respect and appreciation. Staging then is a contrivance through which the power relationships between those on stage and those not on stage are dramatized. But the power difference between leaders and other participants is itself subject to varying interpretations. For example, Julian thought it preferable for pagan priests to serve full-​time rather than part-​time, thus being more Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate (London: Routledge, 1995), 114–​138, provides a fuller account of Julian’s ritual practices.

24  Religion’s Power readily available when needed. However, the apostles and itinerant preachers who spread early Christianity prided themselves in having lay jobs that contributed to much of their support. Also, Israelite and pagan priests had enjoyed various privileges that demonstrated their power relative to the populace, but Julian and the early Christians agreed that leaders should be more like the common people in living exemplary moral lives. In short, the inevitable power distinction between leaders and ordinary people—​and how this distinction was understood—​had to be negotiated. In modern contexts, the relationship of ritual leaders to ordinary participants is inflected with an understanding of personal investment and community engagement. Leaders are expected to exercise power less by demonstrating how powerful they are and more by cultivating an affinity with those they serve. An inherent tension exists, therefore, between demonstrating exceptional power, on the one hand, and being a low-​key person with whom common people can identify, on the other hand. This understanding is evident in political rituals, such as campaign speeches and inaugural addresses, in which the speaker must exude leadership but also appear as someone who understands and empathizes with ordinary citizens. It is especially evident in religious contexts where the ritual leader necessarily holds power but must also conduct the ritual in a way that emphasizes the commonality among the community of believers. How this fundamental tension is resolved varies but is one of the important dynamics that informs how power is negotiated. Spatial staging serves this purpose in religion just as it does in theater. Spatial staging refers to the arrangement of people and things in the space in which the ritual is conducted. The use of an elevated platform, stage, podium, or pulpit from which the person in charge speaks is commonly practiced. The speaker’s elevated position symbolizes the leader’s power. The frequency of such practices led Erving Goffman to identify “platform skills”—​ speaking, gesturing, the wearing of particular garments, and following certain scripts—​as the acts that demonstrated the power of the platform’s occupants. The space itself confers authority on what happens in that space.13 Church architecture for centuries provided an elevated pulpit accompanied below by seating or standing room to orient addressees’ attention forward and upward. Later modifications paid greater attention to symbolizing the commonality of leaders and addressees. The Second Vatican Council in the

13 Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 165.

Power in Ritual Practice  25 1960s redirected the priest’s orientation during the mass from the altar to the people. Other practices include “worship-​in-​the-​round” seating, lay readers, responsive readings, and “call-​and-​response” worship. When speaking is a central part of the ritual, as it is in political events and in most Western religious rituals, the negotiation of leaders’ power with establishing a more intimate relationship with ordinary participants occurs in significant measure through rhetorical staging. Rhetorical staging refers less to the substantive content of what is said and more to the way it is said. Ideally, it conveys the speaker’s superiority but at the same time establishes “intimacy at a distance” with the addressees.14 Ronald Reagan’s photographic memory, for example, enabled him to give his speeches without notes, which awed many of his addressees, and by being able to maintain eye contact forged a closer relationship with them. Reagan’s extemporaneous “asides,” inserted periodically, furthered addressees’ sense that he was speaking from the heart. David Broder, covering Reagan’s early speeches for the Washington Post in 1957, wrote, “These were no more than the standard clichés of a thousand commencement talks, given by successful alumni to current classes. But coming from Reagan, they did not sound like boilerplate. Talking to students afterward, I could tell they had been moved—​their sights lifted.”15 Addressees of contemporary sermons are accustomed to similar rhetorical staging. The speaker’s authority is evident not only from an official title but also from his or her adeptness at public speaking and from the inclusion of words and stories that set the speaker’s education and experience apart from the addressees, such as explaining the Greek or Hebrew meaning of a word, reciting a biblical text from memory, and recalling a story from seminary. But the speaker also establishes intimacy with the addressees by inserting a seemingly extemporaneous quip about the television program that most of them will have watched, maintaining eye contact, telling a self-​ demeaning anecdote, referring often to the addressees as a “community,” and using “we” at least as often as “I.” An effective sermon is likely to be received with comments such as, “It seems he is talking directly to you as a person.” Particularly when just the right idiom and tone of voice are used, the distance between speaker and addressees is closed. For example, the poet Tony Hoagland describes hearing a radio preacher tell a self-​demeaning story with 14 Fiona Rossette, “Discursive Divides and Rhetorical Staging, or the Transcending Function of Oratory,” Journal of Pragmatics 108 (2017), 48–​59. 15 Quoted in Robert Mann, Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2019), 58.

26  Religion’s Power “I am so busted” as the punchline, about which Hoagland observes, “I am so busted, says the preacher, and the commonality between leader and flock is instantly evoked, renewed, and reestablished; the playing field leveled, the airwaves bathed in human warmth and intimacy. Time to pass the collection plate.”16 Staging then is a delicate balance between power and inclusion. However, an important feature of the ritual is that it does provide an occasion for particular activities to be defined as power and displayed as power. The markers that count as cultural capital—​knowing the Greek translation of a word—​are displays of power within the ritual but are unlikely to carry as much weight outside the ritual as having money, owning a business, or holding political office. Indeed, the ritual may be the occasion for debunking those other markers of power. A negotiated balance between the speaker’s power and the addressees’ involvement is likely to be accomplished as well by the ritual, which is more than an occasion for a speech. Depending on the group’s traditions, the addressees may engage in responsive readings, serve as lay readers, offer personal “joys and concerns,” and participate in group singing and holy rites such as Communion and baptism. Audience participation dramatizes an equalization of power, and at the same time the leader’s power remains evident as the person who has authorized the audience participation. The contemporary ideal that includes a construal of ritual intimacy through collaborative participation represents an evolution of cultural norms that differs from the ones that often prevailed in the past. Especially in “high-​ church” or liturgical traditions, ritual power was carefully prescribed in ways that demonstrated the power of the church’s administrative hierarchy. For example, the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, which affirmed the liturgical practices the Church of England had embraced since the sixteenth century while simplifying the process of investigating offences, stipulated as one such offence the “failure by an incumbent to observe, or cause to be observed, the direction contained in the Book of Common Prayer relating to the services, rites, and ceremonies” or the making of “any unlawful addition to, alteration of, or omission from the services, rites and ceremonies.” Ecclesiastical law also specified that “no person shall perform any spiritual office except he be licensed either by the archbishop or by the bishop” and 16 Tony Hoagland, “Idiom, Our Funny Valentine: Its Cunning, Its Romance, Its Power,” Kenyon Review 36, 2 (Spring 2014), 89–​105, quote on page 89.

Power in Ritual Practice  27 dealt with such matters as when and where services were to be held and the vestments priests were to wear.17 The authorities’ need to specify the rules so precisely illustrates a point about all religious rituals: they are subject to deviations of interpretation, and there is always at least a modicum of tension between the rules and improvisations geared to local circumstances. Sometimes these variations reflect the persistence of folk customs that church authorities have been ineffective at eliminating. For example, one of the customs the Church of England tried unsuccessfully to quash was a Welsh practice called “sin eating.” When someone died, a Welsh sin eater would come to the wake, pass food across the corpse, and eat the food, symbolically taking on the sins of the deceased. As someone who was therefore assumed to be unclean and possibly given to witchcraft, the sin eater was usually cut off from all other interaction with the villagers and was unwelcome at any church.18 During the nineteenth century, the formal conduct of worship services also came to be thought of as a skill that should be adapted to changing social expectations and benefit from the latest educational methods. “Sacred rhetoric,” as it was called, drew on science to provide detailed instruction about every aspect of the service, from how to handle difficult texts to dealing with different audiences and interests. One of the leaders in developing sacred rhetoric was Congregationalist pastor Austin Phelps, whose thirty-​one-​year career at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts instructed more than a thousand students in the practice, dozens of whom went on to teach other students.19 Phelps’s Theory of Preaching, published in 1881, was centrally concerned with how best to maximize the power of preaching and in turn the power of the Church. He considered preaching “a practicable business,” the predisposing ingredient of which was the “power of person.” The preacher “has certain advantages for gaining it which lie back of the pulpit,” Phelps wrote. “His personal character is known to his hearers [and] may be presumed to be favorably known.” Power also had to be communicated 17 Seward Brice, The Law Relating to Public Worship with Especial Regard to Matters of Ritual and Ornamentation, and to the Means for Securing the Due Observance Thereof (London: Stevens and Haynes, 1875), 29, 383. 18 Bertram S. Puckle, Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development (London: T.W. Laurie, 1926), ­chapter 4. 19 Michael-​John DePalma, “Austin Phelps and the Spirit (of) Composing: An Exploration of Nineteenth-​ Century Sacred Rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary,” Rhetoric Review 27, 4 (2008), 379–​96; Michael-​John DePalma, “Rhetorical Education for the Nineteenth-​Century Pulpit: Austin Phelps and the Influence of Christian Transcendentalism at Andover Theological Seminary,” Rhetoric Review 31, 1 (2013), 1–​20.

28  Religion’s Power in “an oral address to the popular mind”—​the sermon. “A good sermon is a popular production in the same sense in which a good drama is a popular production,” Phelps argued. The primary ingredient was the carefully crafted construction and delivery of the sermon. Its power was enhanced, Phelps believed, by abandoning the idea that spontaneous preaching that moved the audience emotionally was best. What might be perceived as “offhand” preaching, he advised, should be preceded by “laborious,” “masterly,” “mental processes.” It had to relate biblical truth, but it also had to relate the speaker to the immediate audience, taking account of the differences when speaking to Christians, other clergy, merchants, parents, children, and the unconverted. Among the techniques Phelps suggested for enhancing the power of sacred rhetoric were engaging with others in the community on a regular basis, practicing self-​improvement, reflecting on one’s mental processes, practicing “free writing” in ways that trained the mind for oral delivery, avoiding pedantry while attending to the “minuteness of exegesis,” appealing to addressees’ common sense, and incorporating examples from literature and science.20 Whether they knew of Phelps or came from different traditions, religious leaders knew instinctively that preaching was indeed a business. Historian R. Laurence Moore in Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture argues that the success of nineteenth-​century revivalism was in large measure attributable to the preachers’ skill in turning the spoken word into a gripping theatrical performance. He writes, “The spoken and sometimes shouted word provided the drama and the evidence of God’s presence. The words usually made sense, but that was not completely necessary, as in the groans, grunts, and barks that emerged. . . . The central attraction was the revival preacher. His were the words that riveted attention, that converted at the same time they entertained, and that gave people the sense of being present at something ‘theatrical.’ ”21 The preachers understood too that rhetorical staging and personal empowerment went hand in hand, perhaps in the reverse order of how Phelps conceived it. From the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century a growing share of the labor force worked in sales and marketing, held

20 Austin Phelps, The Theory of Preaching: Lectures on Homiletics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), 6, 9, 18, 42, 227, 492. 21 R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 45.

Power in Ritual Practice  29 positions as teachers and clerks, and aspired to become business executives, all of which depended on rhetorical skills and thus tightened the notion that a powerful person had to be good at public speaking and that public speaking was a mark of personal power. In 1941 an instructor in public speaking at Northwestern University interviewed more than three hundred students to find out why they were interested in taking courses on the topic. Ninety-​two percent hoped to gain self-​confidence and to reduce their feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. “To be able to speak effectively,” they reasoned, “is to have control of one’s self ” and therefore the capacity to participate in the “thresholds of power.”22 But if speaking effectively is a source of personal power, one must ask whether participants feel empowered or disempowered in rituals in which they do not speak, as in religious services staged as performances to silent audiences? One answer is that the “feeling rules” the ritual encourages suggest that whatever a participant feels—​uplift, inspiration, calm, devotion—​is empowering. Feeling inspired by the speaker or feeling close to God is in this sense enough. However, a different argument suggests that improvisation is the better source of empowerment, that is, expressing one’s agency by doing something to tinker with an established ritual or by devising a ritual of one’s own, perhaps at home rather than at a church or synagogue. For example, studies of yard sweeping and yard decorations in some low-​income African American communities have noted how these ritual acts and objects symbolize personally empowering improvisations as well as connections with spiritual traditions. Similar observations are made about home altars that combine creativity with religious practices.23

Transcendence Spatial and rhetorical staging dramatize the relationship of leaders and addressees. There is also a significant relationship of both toward that to 22 Irving J. Lee, “The Adult Courses in Speech,” College English 3, 2 (November 1941), 170–​79. 23 Grey Gundaker, “Tradition and Innovation in African American Yards,” African Arts 26, 2 (April 1993), 58–​71, 94–​96; Christopher P. Barton and David G. Orr, “A Practice Theory of Improvisation at the African American Community of Timbuctoo, Burlington County, New Jersey,” in The Archaeology of Race in the Northeast, edited by Christopher N. Matthews and Allison Manfra McGovern (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 198–​212; Gabriella Ricciardi, “Telling Stories, Building Altars: Mexican American Women’s Altars in Oregon,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 107, 4 (2006), 536–​52.

30  Religion’s Power which the ritual is directed. Theater directs attention toward something that inspires because of the artistic rendering of the story. Political speaking calls attention to a common purpose, heritage, or value. Religious ritual directs worshipful attention to a supreme being. In each case, the participants’ power is less than that of the object toward which the ritual is directed. The participants are subservient to it, weak in comparison with it, flawed compared with its perfection. The ritual provides an occasion for demonstrating their subservience. Religion is distinctive in this respect but not unique in that powerful humans can also be elevated to near divinity. But religious ritual is oriented toward a supreme being, reality, or presence that is eminently powerful. That supremacy is acknowledged as being given in the nature of things rather than being humanly constructed, as may be the case in theater and politics. Yet the acknowledgment is ritually facilitated. Participants are moved in its presence. The heightened emotion that classical theorists identified as rituals’ enactment of power is better understood as a feeling or conception of transcendence. Modern religious rituals rarely occasion extreme anger, emotional frenzy, or fear of the kind that more likely would be engendered by a horror movie, let alone ebullience of the kind fans experience at a professional sports event. The words participants at religious rituals use to describe what they have experienced or hope to experience are more likely to include “awed,” “uplifted,” “moved,” and “inspired,” or “worshipful,” “reverent,” “blessed,” and “sacred.” Transcendence covers the meanings associated with these words. It implies a connection with something that is above and beyond what is immediately and physically present in the ritual. The leader who assists in evoking this relationship serves what is traditionally referred to as a priestly function. The leader mediates between the people as a special participant in the ritual and the higher transcendent being or entity toward which the ritual is directed. In political rituals, the leader seeks to elevate the citizenry into a relationship with an idealized version of the community or nation. In religious rituals, the leader seeks to bring the transcendence of a divine being into the gathered community. Doing so supplements the relationship of the leader to the people with the additionally important relationship of the leader to the deity. This relationship, like the leader-​and-​people relationship, is asymmetric, is known to be asymmetric apart from the ritual, but is also publicly negotiated within the ritual. The negotiation consists of both elevating the superior power of the deity and of bringing that power into a more intimate relationship with those assembled.

Power in Ritual Practice  31 Scholarship on transcendence from the phenomenological tradition that informed the social sciences in the 1960s conceived it from the perspective of the individual who searched for meaning beyond the inherent discontents of everyday life. Transcendence was thus an experience in which a person’s consciousness of reality expanded, reaching from isolation and the meaninglessness of small accomplishments toward something grander and all encompassing. Alfred Schutz described it as the experience of living in a world that extends infinitely beyond one’s immediate here and now. That experience was achieved through symbolic acts and images that identified a fundamental alterity between the reality of the here and now and the infinite reality of the beyond. Though he did not associate alterity specifically with ritual, Schutz pointed to the role of events that were sufficiently jarring to challenge the “taken for grantedness” of everyday life, such as thoughts about death, suffering, mystery, the expanse of the universe, and prayer.24 In religion images of the deity stand apart from daily experience in these ways. Yet these images are themselves subject to becoming domesticated within the small meanings of the here and now, taken for granted as the household gods of routine speech and action. An empowering ritual must first set them apart, providing occasions for participants to be reminded of the deity’s supremacy in power, knowledge, and grandeur. The resulting alterity is magnified by the diminishing in comparison of everyday reality, its mortality, frailties, and discontents. An empowering ritual must then bring about a reunification of the participant with the divine. Theologian Herbert Richardson suggests that this is why so many rituals enact or narrate myths of separation and return. The modern person with a highly differentiated self-​identity ritually becomes separate from the divine power, feeling weak, alienated, and incomplete, and then returns to a state of unity with the divine power that is experienced variously as fulfilling, empowering, and achieving of wholeness.25 The phenomenological perspective adds the important caveat that ritual empowerment is never fully assured through the symbolic differentiation and reconnection of the worshiper and that which is worshiped alone. Ritual participants bring their own dispositions, habits, past experiences, beliefs, 24 Alfred Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality: Collected Papers I, edited by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 329–​31; Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Lifeworld (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 117–​31. 25 Herbert W. Richardson, “Three Myths of Transcendence,” in Transcendence, edited by Herbert W. Richardson and Donald R. Cutler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 98–​113.

32  Religion’s Power and distractions, all of which infuse the ritual with highly personalized meanings.26 Whatever transcendence is experienced depends therefore on the practices in which the ritual is embedded as well as the composition of the ritual itself. The ritual’s objective is to orient participants’ interpretations as much as is possible toward a common perception of the deity’s power, their common humanity in relation to it, and an experience of reconciliation. This is accomplished in the first instance through acts that bring to consciousness the deity’s power as evidenced in things, words, and deeds. Rituals provide the occasion for doing so on a regular basis within a structured context through the reading of sacred texts, the retelling of sacred stories, and engagement in sacramental acts. While a certain kind of power is implied in the Schutzian concept of infinite wholeness, power in religion is more often symbolized in the concept of a deity. Personalization has the advantage as far as symbolizing power is concerned of providing intelligible ways to talk about agency. A personalized deity can do things that demonstrate power and can exhibit certain personal characteristics that resemble human characteristics but in exaggerated terms. Deities can be physically strong and perform acts such as moving mountains and breathing fire that are imaginable in human terms and yet beyond human capacity. Those ways of demonstrating power are more difficult to imagine if infinite wholeness is symbolized abstractly as Being, Nothingness, Ultimacy, Life, the Cosmos, or the Universe. Power is by no means the only characteristic with which deities are distinguished. Modern conceptions of deity typically emphasize such admirable characteristics as love, generosity, benevolence, and goodness. Yet modern rituals also emphasize power, either directly or indirectly, as the capacity through which love, generosity, benevolence, and goodness are effected. In traditional contexts the deities’ power is evident in powerful things. In ancient Canaanite worship of Baal, the god of fertility, weather, and war, Baal’s power was symbolized by the bull. In Greek mythology power was symbolically visualized by the shield of Zeus and the sword of Damocles, and in Norse mythology by Mjolnir, the hammer of the god Thor. In the Upanishads fire is a symbol of power and is included in many Hindu rituals. In the Hebrew Bible Yahweh appears as a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day.

26 Michael Jay Stoltzfus, “Alfred Schutz: Transcendence, Symbolic Intersubjectivity, and Moral Value,” Human Studies 26, 2 (2003), 183–​201.

Power in Ritual Practice  33 Modern religious rituals include things deemed powerful, such as water, light, and blood, but more often employ words to draw participants’ attention to deities’ power. In the Hebrew Bible God is El Shaddai (God Almighty). Muslims praise Allahu Akbar, which means God is the greatest. In Hinduism Brahman is described as the supreme cosmic power. Christians claim there is power in the name of Jesus. Rituals also remind participants of deities’ power through accounts of powerful deeds—​annihilating Sodom and Gomorrah, rescuing the Children of Israel from the land of bondage, giving Moses the Ten Commandments. The deeds may be performed in real time, as in miraculous healings happening in response to prayers as onlookers watch, but are more commonly reported as events that happened in the past and warrant ritual commemoration. Passover commemorates Yahweh freeing his people from slavery. Easter celebrates Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Besides the power attributed to the deity in these commemorative acts, their power arguably lies in the fact that they are especially memorable. Recent scholarship in cognitive and evolutionary psychology is the source of this argument. When subjects in experimental settings are given various stimuli and later asked to recall details about what they saw, the most memorable stimuli are ones that included “domain violations.” Domain violations are events that contradict the cognitive schema with which we normally classify events. For instance, animals can move around but plants cannot, which means that a plant walking around would be a domain violation, and because it is, it stands a greater chance of being remembered than a plant that doesn’t move. Many of the acts that symbolize power in religion are domain violations, such as Jesus rising from the dead and the Buddha after enlightenment gaining the ability to levitate. Evolutionary psychology suggests that these domain violations may be one of the reasons that religion evolved over long periods of time and in this sense are an aspect of religion’s power.27 Other research suggests an important caveat to the idea that deities’ power can be demonstrated through the kind of supranormal acts that constitute domain violations. The caveat is that deities cannot be expected to perform on human command. They cannot, for example, be counted on to produce rain when humans pray for rain. The deities’ power must be beyond human control, otherwise it is subject to human power. In keeping with this understanding, research finds that prayers for divine intervention in human 27 For example, Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits, and Ancestors (London: Heinemann, 2001).

34  Religion’s Power affairs often stop short of asking deities to respond in ways that are easily disconfirmed. Asking God to heal a cancer, for example, would seem to confirm God’s power if the healing occurred but raise doubts if it did not. Many of the prayers routinely included in Christian worship services do not ask for God to respond in ways that could easily be confirmed or disconfirmed. “Prayers of the faithful,” common in many liturgical churches, for example, invite participants to repeat in unison “Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer” following petitions such as “may God inspire us to live with one another in peace,” “we pray for children in the world who are poor and hungry,” “bless those whose lives are closely linked with ours,” and “may we be steadfast in our obedience to you.” Without asking for divine power to be demonstrated directly, divine power is nevertheless expressed ritually through participants’ actions. Muslims signal Allah’s superior power by prostrating themselves when they pray. Christians and Buddhists often bow or kneel. Pentecostal Christians signal their belief that God is metaphorically above them by lifting their arms in praise. Rituals’ leaders model subordination to divine power through ritual acts of cleansing, by wearing garments that cloak their individuality with prescribed garb, and by conducting the ritual according to prescribed rules.28 Words heighten the alterity between humanity and the divine as well. A hymn that became popular in African American churches in the 1940s and became widely used throughout Protestantism by the 1960s, for example, was known by its opening line, “I am weak but thou art strong.”29 When it may seem pretentious to speak authoritatively about God, divine power may be expressed indirectly by emphasizing human petitioners’ weakness. Examples include instructions to come before God like children, as fallen sinners, and with humility. The penitential rite in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, for instance, invites participants to kneel as they say, “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. . . . We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.”30 The rite is an

28 Leaders’ training in ritual performance, their initiation, punctuates the division between the individuality of the self and the abjection of the servant leader in relation to the deity; initiation, Elizabeth Pérez writes in her study of Black Atlantic practices, “does violence to the stability of novices’ pre-​existing self representations,” Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 202. 29 Bernice Johnson Reagon, We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 334–​36. 30 Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 2007), 116.

Power in Ritual Practice  35 observance, something observable in the company of others, which serves its purpose in the act of ritual performance itself. Ritual power is incomplete, however, if it exalts the power of the deity without enabling the participants to gain a sense of empowerment from their participation. Transcendence in this respect is experienced as feeling stronger, uplifted, closer to God, or inhabited by the deity, or even as a mystical union with the divine. In addition to emotional empowerment the ritual’s power may also be experienced as ethical discipline of the kind that strengthens the practitioner’s moral character.31 These experiences require a mechanism through which a sense of power is transmitted from the divinity to the human participant. Possibilities include being spoken to audibly or inaudibly by the deity, viscerally sensing the deity’s presence, and hearing power words and interpreting them personally as in identifying one’s own strength with divine strength. The variety of these mechanisms suggests the importance of power being ritually expressed in the relationship between participants and the divine. The laying on of hands is one of the more interesting means through which divine power is transmitted to participants in religious rituals. Although laying on of hands is practiced in Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, and is present in some Navajo ceremonies, most of the scholarship on the topic has focused on Christian practices. Recent scholarship has been interested in the practice’s somatic aspects, and yet its history is rich with evidence of its value for understanding ritual power. The ritual consists of one or more persons laying their hands on the head or shoulders of a person during which a prayer is uttered that invokes divine blessings on that person. It is thus a physical act that symbolically represents the transmission of divine power, mediated in some manner by the other participants to the recipient. Its origin in Christianity derives from the New Testament book of Hebrews, ­chapter 6, verses 1–​3, which state, Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of

31 Saba Mahmood described the Muslim women she studied as feeling insignificant while imagining the immensity of God’s power but also experiencing an ethnical pedagogy of their inward dispositions, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 130–​36.

36  Religion’s Power hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment. And this will we do, if God permit.32

Despite its simplicity, its varying interpretations illustrate the multiple power relationships involved. Much of the variation centers on the fact that divine power is mediated by those who perform the laying on of hands and therefore poses questions about what that power represents. The historian of American religion William McLoughlin describes a controversy over the laying on of hands among eighteenth-​century New England Baptists. Six-​Principle Calvinistic Baptists held it necessary for all prospective members not only to be baptized but also to have experienced the laying on of hands by church leaders. Five-​Principle Baptists agreed about baptism but disagreed about the laying on of hands. With hindsight, the controversy can be viewed as a difference in interpretation of the ritual’s power. The Six-​Principle group considered it a sign of who was or was not sufficiently blessed to be a member of the faith community. The Five-​Principle group viewed it enough to be baptized. The difference also reflected the view among both groups that theirs was the authoritative interpretation.33 In other instances, church leaders debated whether the laying on of hands represented divine power passing directly to the recipient, the group’s power being conferred on the recipient, the group’s power being better symbolized by one person or a group, and the recipient representing only the recipient or the assembled community, and whether one hand, both hands, or the hands crossed were the best means of performing the ritual. There were even local adaptations through which the distinctive levels of authority in congregations were represented. For example, in her ethnographic study of working-​class communities in early-​twenty-​first-​ century Louisiana, Arlie Hochschild observed the following at one of the churches she visited.

32 Hebrews 6:1–​3 (KJV); precedents in Judaism and practices in early Christianity are discussed in Valeriy A. Alikin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering: Origin, Development and Content of the Christian Gathering in the First to Third Centuries (Leuven, Belgium: Brill, 2010), 260–​66. 33 William G. McLoughlin, “The First Calvinistic Baptist Association in New England, 1754?–​ 1767,” Church History 36, 4 (December 1967), 410–​18; the Five Principle position won after more than a decade of discussion in which its advocate depicted the Six Principle group as overly literalistic and insufficiently attentive to the historical context in which the instructions in the book of Hebrews were written.

Power in Ritual Practice  37 Facing the worshippers, assistant ministers lay hands on a head, a shoulder, an arm, firmly, for a period of time, with a gentle shake as if to loosen a spirit. Others in the congregation come forward to lay hands on a person’s back or arm, and still others lay hands upon those who have laid hands. Human layer upon layer, forming a momentary still life of human connection.34

The laying on of hands for healing purposes has further complicated interpretations of the ritual’s power. Healing was tangible evidence of divine power flowing into the recipient but was subject to questions of why it sometimes worked and sometimes did not. The healer’s power was at stake as well as the deity’s. When the healing failed, the account that best preserved the healer’s and deity’s power attributed the failure to the recipient’s lack of fervent belief. As twentieth-​century theories of alternative medicine gained interest, there were also questions about the kind of power that may have been involved in successful healing. Anthropologist Thomas Csordas, who studied healing among Charismatic Catholics in the 1990s, for example, found the group debating whether the power they experienced was energy from Jesus, a field of energy emanating from the healer’s hands, something that could be cultivated and set free, or what.35 The laying on of hands then is an example of the complex power dynamics that can be present in the rituals that participants associate with feelings of transcendence. While feelings of empowerment may result from a heightened state of emotional exuberance, the power relationships expressed within the ritual may be equally relevant. The deity or other object, person, or idea toward which the ritual is directed is likely to be elevated in superiority within the ritual itself. Powerful deeds are likely to be commemorated in narratives and in words explicitly expressing power, supremacy, and superiority, but it is less likely that deities will be called upon to demonstrate in real time that they are in fact powerful. Recipients may express their inferiority relative to the deity’s superiority in acts of subservience, confession, and humiliation. A transmission of divine power to the participants must also be part of the ritual.

34 Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016), 119–​20. 35 Thomas J. Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 25–​56.

38  Religion’s Power

Interpersonal Power The remaining relationship in which ritual power is enacted is the interaction that takes place among the ordinary participants themselves. These fall into two categories—​the ones that are staged as part of the ritual itself and the power relationships that are symbolically expressed by the ritual even though they are not an intentional feature of the ritual. The former are evident in the formalized roles and spaces that differentiate ordinary participants. They coincide with distinctions external to the ritual and yet reinforce those distinctions within the ritual. Examples include the tradition in early modern cathedrals of forward seating for the nobility and standing room at the rear for peasants, antebellum practices in the American South for White slave owners to be seated and the enslaved to stand at the rear or occupy segregated spaces in church balconies, and in some contemporary services for men only to hold lay leadership positions. The latter—​symbolic power relationships—​overlap with the former but require closer consideration, especially to illuminate how asymmetries of power among the persons who make decisions about rituals shape the content of rituals and how the rituals in turn dramatize those asymmetries. The Great Organ Dispute of 1827 is one of the most interesting examples of symbolic power relationships and can serve as an extended case study in which to examine the intricacies of the power relationships involved in ritual practices. The dispute focused on one aspect of Christian worship but had major implications because how it was resolved depended on several layers of church authority, each of which had a particular kind of power and a distinctive stake in the outcome. The dispute took place near Leeds in England, prompting five years of acrimonious debate, culminating in a huge secession of members, and becoming an enduring lesson in the politics of ecclesiastical disunity in British and American Methodism. Writing nearly a century and a half later, a Methodist minister described it as “the pioneer in methods of revolt and church organization which . . . furnished the vocabulary of protesting Methodists: the self-​styled ‘enslaved’ who fought for their ‘freedom,’ the ‘bondage’ and the ‘chains’ of pastoral, priestly and conference dictatorship from which they struggled for ‘liberation.’ ”36

36 John T. Hughes, “The Story of the Leeds ‘Non-​Cons’: The Reasons for the Dispute,” Wesley Historical Society 35 (December 1965), 81.

Power in Ritual Practice  39 To understand the dispute, we need to appreciate the context in which it occurred. Leeds was near the heart of the British Industrial Revolution. Located upriver from Manchester and Liverpool, the area specialized in the manufacturing of woolen cloth and, to a lesser extent, linen. Between 1775 and 1801 its population doubled and by 1831 with additional steam power and an increase in transportation along the Leeds-​Liverpool Canal more than doubled again. Leeds was also a center of the Methodist movement. The first meetings there were held in the 1740s, including several at which John Wesley preached, and by the 1750s it was known as a Methodist city. Later, it was the location of important meetings determining the direction of the movement in 1797 and 1820. By 1827 an estimated six thousand of the community’s residents were members of Methodist societies, and many more attended Methodist class meetings and Sunday schools.37 The organ dispute took place at the Brunswick Chapel in Bramley township immediately to the northwest of Leeds’ town center. The chapel, constructed in 1825 among a flurry of large and sometimes architecturally exquisite Methodist buildings in industrializing cities, contrasted sharply with the denomination’s working-​class identity. With amphitheater seating on two levels for twenty-​five hundred people, it became known locally as the Cathedral of Methodism. The organ on which the dispute focused matched the building in grandeur. When it was installed in 1828, its hundreds of pipes and elaborate wood casing towered over the pulpit, dominating the entire second floor at the front end of the sanctuary. Commissioned to one of England’s top organ makers, its initial cost was 1,000 pounds sterling, which was more than the cost of many church buildings, and over the next thirty years another 1,000 pounds was spent on upgrades and upkeep.38 37 R. G. Wilson, Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700–​ 1830 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1971), 202; Keith Cheetham, On the Trail of John Wesley (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2003), 126–​28. 38 E. R. Taylor, Methodism and Politics, 1791–​1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 153; Edward Royle, “From Philistines to Goths: Nonconformist Chapel Styles in Victorian England,” in New Directions in Local History Since Hoskins, edited by Christopher Dyer, Andrew Hopper, Evelyn Lord, and Nigel Tringham (Hertfordshire, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011), 186–​215, notes that unlike Anglican churches in which organs tended to be located at the side, Methodist organs were placed front and center to emphasize the importance of music in worship. At an 1838 meeting several of the region’s wealthiest merchants donated between £500 and £1,000 to the Wesleyan Centenary Fund, suggesting that the organ may not have seemed extravagant to them but would have seemed colossal to the average weaver, for whom it was equivalent to ten years’ wages, and the average farm laborer, for whom it represented forty years; David J. Jeremy, “Funding Faith: Early Victorian Wesleyan Philanthropy,” in Protestant Dissent and Philanthropy in Britain, 1660–​1914, edited by Clyde Binfield, G. M. Ditchfield, and David L. Wykes (Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2020), 129–​51.

40  Religion’s Power The dispute began in earnest in 1825. From evidence collected at the time from persons directly involved, the controversy unfolded as follows. No sooner was the building finished than rumors began that some of the members wanted an organ. Others responded with opposition. Wesley had spoken both against and in favor of instrumental music, leaving the question open when he died in 1791. His brother, Charles Wesley, had composed hundreds of hymns that were used widely in Methodist services with or without accompaniment. In 1800 organs were relatively rare in Methodist chapels but by 1820 were becoming more popular as buildings became larger and some of the members prospered. At Bramley, the two sides had different views of what Christian worship should be, and they knew that an organ would fundamentally coincide or conflict with their view. Those in favor said an organ would add the formality and beauty that worshiping God should include. They also argued that the acoustics of such a large building required an organ to enhance the congregation’s singing. The opposition said an organ would destroy the spontaneity that made worship meaningful. They also argued that worship should be conducted with simplicity like it was in the New Testament. That was the debate on the surface. Both sides insisted that the dispute was clearly about the proper way of conducting worship. But nearly everyone who took part in the debate and who commented on it later said it was also a dispute about power. In fact, there were multiple power relations that the organ symbolized. For some, it symbolized the conflict that had been smoothed over in 1797 and again in 1820 about the direction of Methodism. One side favored remaining within the Church of England as a reform movement; the other side favored becoming a separate denomination. To them, an organ now seemed more in keeping with the formalism of the Anglican Church than the spontaneity of the more separatist Methodists. A related division associated formalism with Catholicism, which was again an issue in national politics. The organ also symbolized power differences in the community. Brunswick Chapel was testimony to the region’s emerging wealth. There were dozens of mills, none on the scale of the ones at Manchester, but many utilizing steam power and on average employing between sixty and seventy workers. The mills made possible dozens of additional businesses engaged in the procuring and grading of wool, dyeing, warehousing, and supplying groceries, tea, and other merchandise.39 In stark contrast to the rising bourgeoise who 39 Robin Pearson, “The Industrial Suburbs of Leeds in the Nineteenth Century: Community Consciousness among the Social Classes,” PhD Dissertation, University of Leeds, UK, School of Economic and Social Studies, 1986.

Power in Ritual Practice  41 operated the businesses were the growing numbers of people employed in the mills, many of whom were women and children. A large study published in 1833 described stunted, pale children with limbs bent and women suffering from “an amount of human misery not conceivable by anyone but those whose avocations have led them to witness degrees of torture which humanity shudders to contemplate.”40 Brunswick Chapel’s organ posed hard questions for the Methodists. Although the dispute did not fall strictly along class lines, the questions it raised were about class differences. Those who favored the organ noted that nearly half the seats at the chapel had been set aside for the poor (meaning they were not paid for by subscription), and an organ would surely be uplifting for those who would attend. The other side wanted to see more done to raise money for poor relief and to teach children to read and write on Sunday afternoons.41 The political climate deepened the dispute. A downturn in trade resulted in weavers attacking the residence of at least one mill owner and on another occasion an estimated one thousand workers assembling against the corn laws. The corn laws, wool tax, and representational issues that led to the Reform Act of 1832 were at the forefront in the public mind. The organ’s opponents likened the issue to the demand for greater representation in Parliament, accusing the organ’s proponents of being heavy-​handed and exerting power that was undemocratic. There were also references to the abolition of slavery, which was part of the national debate.42 These allusions, though, were minor compared with the dispute about how power itself was involved in the case. Power in Methodism was divided to ensure that no faction was able to exercise the kind of authoritarian control Methodists perceived in Anglican and Catholic churches. That meant the Church’s rituals, including regular worship as well as the sacraments, necessitated the coming together of multiple holders of power, the result being that a decision about the organ brought to the surface the ambiguities and conflicts

40 Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1833), quoted in Thomas E. Jordan, The Degeneracy Crisis and Victorian Youth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 56. 41 Nigel Yates, “The Religious Life of Victorian Leeds,” in A History of Modern Leeds, edited by Derek Fraser (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990), 250–​69. 42 Martin Casey, “Yorkshire,” in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820–​1832, edited by D. R. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); online at historyofparliamentonline. org.

42  Religion’s Power among these holders of power. Specifically, power was held by four groups, each of which had both formal authority and informal power based on who they were: “trustees,” the “leaders meeting,” the “district meeting,” and the “conference.” Sorting out who these groups were and what each group had to say is the key to understanding how the question of having or not having an organ dramatized the power relations that went into the decision.43 The trustees or a subgroup thereof initiated the idea of installing an organ and by a majority vote approved the idea. The trustees’ authority to do so lay in the fact that they were legally in charge of the chapel’s property and its deeds. Their informal power was the fact that they were among the wealthier members of the community. Of the twenty-​four trustees, all but three (two gentry and one weaver) were business owners or managers. Their numbers included three wool-​staplers who procured and graded unprocessed wool and sold it to the manufacturers, a hat manufacturer, the manager of a recently opened cashmere mill, a linen merchant, the superintendent of a woolen mill, two owners of dying businesses, a foreign wool agent, a grocer, and an agent of the East India Company.44 Their vote to install an organ thus reflected their own capacity to contribute to the cost and solicit subscriptions and carried connotations of their informal power. Among other things, the organ came to be seen as “middle class,” which was admired by some and despised by others. The leaders who constituted what was known as the “leaders meeting” were almost unanimously opposed to the organ. Leaders were a mixed group of lay people composed mainly of “class meeting” leaders who met regularly with small groups of members and prospective members for prayer, singing, and Bible study. Their formal authority with respect to the organ was unclear and, in any event, ambiguous, serving as they did under the supervision of a district superintendent but also providing the superintendent with valuable advice and information. They visited the sick, helped the poor, collected money, monitored moral behavior, and reported their observations to the superintendent. Their informal authority lay in the fact that they knew best what ordinary members and their neighbors were thinking and could

43 The information summarized here and for purposes of clarity simplified is taken from the Report of a Special District Meeting of Wesleyan Ministers Held at Leeds on Tuesday the 4th of December 1827 and Continued by Successive Adjournments and Containing the Resolutions of the Meeting, 4th ed. (Manchester, UK: Love and Barton, 1835), and from Hughes, “The Story of the Leeds ‘Non-​Cons.’ ” 44 Occupations as reported in the General and Commercial Directory of Leeds (Leeds, UK: Edward Baines, 1826).

Power in Ritual Practice  43 speak on their behalf. To them the organ symbolized a lack of concern for common folk. District meetings were composed of ministers and local preachers under the supervision of the district superintendent. The thirty ministers and local preachers’ who met to discuss the proposed organ were divided: a handful supported the trustees, a larger number vehemently disagreed, and still others were aggrieved by the dispute itself. Their formal authority lay in the fact that they were responsible for making decisions about the content of worship services and administration of the sacraments. Their informal authority was like that of the class meeting leaders in that they claimed to know what ordinary people thought. Ministers and to a lesser extent local clergy (who were not ordained) also claimed authority based on having undergone a trial period, having been examined, and having been selected by the district superintendent. Several of the older preachers who were strongly opposed to the organ spoke with the authority of tradition. Nearly all the younger preachers earned their living by working at lower-​status occupations, such as carpentry, joining, cabinet making, and butchering. They were skilled workers, but not business owners and managers like the trustees. The conference was the body of clergy at the top of the denomination nationwide, or “connexion” as it was called, and chaired annually by an elected president. Its ordained members met periodically in London or another large city and had final authority whenever there were local disputes. They gave the organ the go ahead. Their formal authority lay in the fact that they were the highest decision-​making body in the church. They also enjoyed informal authority by virtue of education, ministerial success, and in some cases wealth. However, they were distant from local affairs and thus were subject to criticism for intervening in local disputes. The ultimate decision to install the organ carried with it the connotations about power and its ambiguities at each of these levels. The trustees’ authority to make decisions involving property conflicted with the district’s authority to make decisions about worship. The leaders’ felt their work with the poor and teaching children to read and write were hampered by the trustees’ lack of care for common people. The trustees’ claimed the leaders responded unfairly by including leaders outside the relevant circuit. The local clergy who opposed the organ resorted to newspaper editorials and pamphlets to press their case. They especially resented the conference’s interference. When it was determined that the organ would be installed, a quarter of the leaders,

44  Religion’s Power local clergy, and members seceded and formed a new denomination, calling themselves Protestant Methodists. The organ dispute illustrates an important fact about the symbolic representation of power. A ritual may, as has often been argued, symbolize power simply through the semiotics of the language and action itself, as, for example, when it connotes male dominance by referring to the deity as “father” or “lord.” But the symbolic representation of power also comes about through the power dynamics that shape the composition of the ritual. The organ dispute symbolized power not only because people vaguely thought to themselves that it represented something tasteful or distasteful. It also symbolized power because the various power holders argued about it, thereby making explicit claims and counterclaims that reflected their formal and informal authority. These were the claims that people remembered long after the dispute was settled. This example shows how the staging of modern rituals is a collective practice that involves multiple stakeholders. Decisions involving music, liturgy, preaching, and other aspects of public ritual are especially contentious because they depend on the decisions and cooperation of people with differing sources of power. Moreover, the ritual itself is the practice through which power differences are forced to be negotiated. This is why it is appropriate to speak of ritual power. Without the ritual, the various sources of formal and informal power could remain uncontested. The ritual is the occasion for them to be contested. An organ may provide the occasion, or it may be a particular hymn, style of singing, instrumental accompaniment, version of scripture, or manner of speaking. Looking at this early-​nineteenth-​century example from the perspective of the twenty-​first century, it is of course apparent that some things never change. For example, how music is conducted has remained a source of controversy in many religious communities. However, the fact that rituals are not more often a focus of dispute is also worth considering. The reason is partly that attendees’ power has increased substantially. Their power lies in the fact that they can leave if they do not like how the service is conducted. This is how the religious marketplace that gives attendees such freedom is relevant. The religious marketplace offers multiple options from which to choose, often differentiated less on theological grounds than in how their sacred rituals are staged. At the same time, those in charge of rituals remain subject to the power dynamics among those who choose not to leave. For example, when the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 necessitated social

Power in Ritual Practice  45 distancing in congregations, decisions about continuing in-​person worship services or shifting to online services were subject to the varying power dynamics of pastors, denominational officials, lay leaders, boards of trustees, and even the political persuasions of influential members. At an entirely different level of complexity, it is also worth observing that ritual staging occurs in ways that demonstrate interpersonal power in more intimate settings. Historian Sonia Hazard’s study of encounters between religious tract distributors and residents in early-​nineteenth-​century America provides an interesting example. Although scholars have regarded the American Tract Society as one of the period’s democratizing social movements (along with Bible societies and temperance organizations), Hazard shows that power was a significant feature of the interaction that happened between the “colporteurs” who delivered the tracts and the people who received them. The encounters were staged much like the ones staged by hucksters who went door to door selling vegetables and traveling salespersons hawking brooms and magazines. In those instances, the salespersons studied and followed the advice of instruction manuals that described appropriate clothing and grooming, rehearsed what to say, and knew how to bring just enough authority to the encounter to make the sale. The colporteurs delivering tracts knocked on doors, asked to be invited in, and spoke candidly with the recipient who in most instances was a woman. The encounters worked because they occurred in a domestic space in which the interaction that usually took place was casual and friendly, took the recipient off guard, paired a well-​dressed gentleman with a woman attired in everyday clothing, and followed a script delivered in a dignified manner that conveyed authority but at the same time led to personal questions about the recipient’s spirituality. Frequently the encounter brought the recipient to tears before a tract or book was finally offered for purchase. The book then was no longer merely a book but an object with which special power was associated. Its power—​ almost that of a sacred object—​derived from how the encounter had been staged. It was a strategic practice, Hazard says, “built around a ritualized scene of exchange that waged an affective power whose intensities materialized in the weeping body of the reader.”45

45 Sonia Hazard, “Evangelical Encounters: The American Tract Society and the Rituals of Print Distribution in Antebellum America,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, 1 (March 2020), 200–​34, quote on page 227.

46  Religion’s Power The dynamics evident in the colporteurs’ encounters are indicative of how rituals adapt to new situations. Both preparation and improvisation were required, the latter necessitated by the variations in the recipients’ domestic spaces, interests, and emotions. Similar adaptations are prominent in contemporary religious practices. Pastors, priests, chaplains, imams, and other religious leaders are expected not only to perform ancient sacraments (such as baptisms) following formalized scripts but also to create new rituals that respond to such life passages as divorce, adoption, and stillbirth, and to requests for multifaith weddings and christenings. Who has the power to determine what these rituals should include? How that question is answered reflects the changing locus of authority within religious practices. The individual or individuals creating the ritual are usually in charge. It is their story that matters. The ritual is the vehicle through which they display something about themselves. A key dimension of improvisational rituals, therefore, is narration. The acts themselves do not speak. They must be interpreted. The ritual becomes an occasion for the participants to tell their stories.46 The examples considered in this chapter, then, suggest that ritual power consists to a significant extent of power relationships internal to the ritual itself. The standard approach has regarded it differently. The scholarship on ritual is consistent in arguing that rituals are, or can be, powerful. Power is taken to mean what the ritual accomplishes—​it variously stirs the emotions, generates solidarity among the participants, resolves societal conflicts, affirms beliefs, and heightens loyalty to the community. What we have considered here is compatible with those arguments. However, the argument and examples in this chapter underscore the importance of looking inside of rituals to see who is doing what and with what authority. Rituals are staged, which means that planning is involved and people play differentiated roles. Power differences among those roles are inevitable. The power that is symbolized in the ritual is in some measure symbolic of the power differences among those who stage the ritual and participate in it. Religious rituals are distinctive in necessitating that leaders identify with the deities toward which the rituals are directed and at the same time identify with the ritual’s ordinary participants. Religious rituals are also distinctive in dramatizing divine power while also identifying mechanisms through which divine power is 46 The considerations involved in creating new rituals are described in Herbert Anderson and Edward Foley, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals: Weaving Together the Human and the Divine (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), 125–​48, and Susan Marie Smith, Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2012).

Power in Ritual Practice  47 transmitted to participants. Decisions about the laying on of hands, prayers, and music are made by the persons in charge. The decisions reflect their informal as well as their formal authority. Ritual power is thus constructed through these decisions. An approach that emphasizes practice focuses attention on the power dynamics that shape how rituals are constructed and how rituals, therefore, display these power dynamics.

2 Religion’s Discursive Power The linguistic turn of the 1960s that took its cues from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, and Suzanne Langer, and that made its way into the study of religion principally through the work of Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, and Robert Bellah, emphasized meaning and thus opened the path toward consideration of how meaning is socially constructed. Much to its continuing credit, the linguistic turn posited the importance of looking at the words, gestures, and other symbols of which language was constituted, rather than looking through them in search of underlying subjectivities. Moods and motivations were expressed in speech, texts, and rituals and could be known through investigation of utterances and idioms and in embodied practices and conversations. Reality itself was a perceived reality subjectively shared but actively constructed through the symbols available for making sense of it.1 The turn to power that focused greater attention on the asymmetries of practical influence through which symbols became institutionalized retained as a significant interest how power was evident in the symbols themselves. The scope of investigation in which power was present was thus broadened to extend into the pervasive spheres of everyday life in which symbolic interaction took place. Discourse became the preferred concept for the enacted practice of symbolic expression. Discourse was itself a reflection of the power arrangements shaping who could speak about what, and it was an expression that reproduced those asymmetries in its structure and content. Words themselves in their selection and use became mechanisms through which power was conveyed.2 And this was assumed to be true—​especially true—​of religion, which, as Geertz famously observed, established moods and motivations that were long-​lasting, pervasive, and powerful.3 1 Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Banton (London: Tavistock Publications, 1966), 1–​46. 2 Stewart Clegg, David Courpasson, and Nelson Phillips, Power and Organizations (London: Sage, 2006), 290–​98, provides a brief overview of the roots of discourse analysis in linguistic theories of culture. 3 Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” 94, emphasis added.

Religion’s Power. Robert Wuthnow, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197652534.003.0003

Religion’s Discursive Power  49 If there is one point on which both sympathetic appraisals and criticisms of religion agree, it is that religion, whether it is assumed to be powerful or not, is awash in words. Adherents listen to homilies, recite creeds, sing, and pray. They utter confessions, give testimonials, and memorize sacred stories. Many of the words are scripted, but many are on-​the-​spot improvisations. People converse over potluck dinners, offer congratulations at weddings, and give condolences at funerals. Much of the discourse is as ordinary as it would be at home or among friends. Yet it is somehow in the coded words and the frequency with which they are spoken that religious beliefs and meanings inhere. The practice turn has woven additional complexity into the study of discursive power by acknowledging the considerable extent to which religious discourse is entangled with other discourses and practices, whether in the street, the home, or a place of worship. The stories and idioms through which religious meaning is expressed do not emerge full-​blown in ordinary life as supreme narratives about the universe but as fragments that intermingle with the fragmented memories and performances of the people with whom one interacts. For Geertz, it was the pervasive, enduring, totalizing character of religion that made it powerful, but when religion is examined on the ground, as practiced in ordinary lives, its character is different. “A performative approach, attentive to the ambiguities and rhythms, to the moments of fading and glimpses of presence of the subject,” Stefania Pandolfo argues, “is better suited than a coherent narrative to grasp the complexity and the advent of possibility in the life of persons and collectivities.”4 But are words powerful? Hate speech is considered powerful enough to pass laws against it. “Trigger warnings” are invoked to curb microaggressions. Other words in being said—​love, peace, hope—​are taken to have meaningful effects. It depends, though, on the context. Words are embedded in conversations, stories, and situations. The challenge for understanding religion’s power is thus to examine whether and in what manner its discursive fragments are a significant aspect of that power. The challenge is difficult because it implies starting with words rather than with raw exercises of power such as converting large masses of people or influencing elections. It stands to reason that words are sometimes more powerful and persuasive than at other times. But how that may be the case requires looking closely 4 Stefania Pandolfo, “Testimony in Counterpoint: Psychiatric Fragments in the Aftermath of Culture,” Qui Parle 17, 1 (Fall/​Winter 2008), 63–​123, quote on page 111.

50  Religion’s Power at discourse—​paying attention not only to how it corresponds to events but also to its arrangement and structure. During the heyday of empirical positivism, which extended from the 1950s through the 1980s and during which the most highly rewarded approaches to studying religion in the social sciences were surveys and social psychological inquiries focusing on underlying attitudes and beliefs, people’s voices were surprisingly rare. The turnaround as far as research conducted by sociologists was concerned came in the late 1970s and 1980s, principally from two sources. One was the study of new religious movements, which was of necessity carried out by researchers using ethnographic methods and paying attention not only to recruitment mechanisms and leadership but also to the words, gestures, and rituals through which alternative belief systems were constructed and made meaningful. William Sims Bainbridge, for example, provided an instructive analysis of the discourse of a satanist movement by drawing on Claude Lévi-​Strauss’s structuralism to show the power of symbolic inversion, and Eileen Barker in The Making of a Moonie argued through a close examination of Unification Church members’ testimonies that the narratives they constructed provided persuasive rationales for their membership.5 The other was Bellah’s coauthored study Habits of the Heart, which consisted of a close reading of qualitative interviews with White middle-​class Americans discussing their lifestyles and values.6 Although power was implied in that the people featured in these studies appeared to have been persuaded that what they said and believed was meaningful, power as such received relatively sparse attention. Interest focused more on themes, values, and worldviews and how these may or may not have corresponded with dominant cultural motifs than on how power was discursively constituted and expressed. It has thus been from other theoretical work in which religion received less attention that discursive power has come to be emphasized. Marxian theory, feminist theory, postcolonial anthropological inquiries, studies of political discourse, and research on social movements have all contributed, as scholars of religion have borrowed from this work. Practice theory has been of value particularly in locating discourse within concrete social situations and thus redirecting attention from the supposed 5 William Sims Bainbridge, Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (London: Blackwell, 1984). 6 Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

Religion’s Discursive Power  51 abstract rhetorical power of discursive formations toward face-​to-​face interaction among speakers and the attendant representation of status relations in their discourse. Power is expressed in body language, facial expressions, clothing, and the accoutrements present in the situation as well as in what people say. This is also true when interaction occurs less directly, as through social media, where alternative means of communication add complexity to the relationships involved, for instance, by making it difficult to determine if emotions are spontaneous and utterances are sincere. The approach to religion that practice theory represents is interested in discursive power as the unrecognized and unacknowledged meanings through which asymmetries of status, resources, opportunities, influence, and convictions are produced and reproduced. The reason to investigate discursive action is to bring these unrecognized and unacknowledged meanings to the surface. And to do that requires taking a critical stance toward what people say, not in the sense of casting doubt but of probing more deeply. “Religious ideas and impulses are of the moment,” Robert Orsi argues, “invented, taken, borrowed, and improvised at the intersections of life,” by which he means to suggest that they must be scrutinized to understand why they communicate as powerfully as they do.7 The literature on discursive power divides broadly into two distinct and yet complementary approaches. The one, which we might term the encoded approach, treats the structure, syntax, content, style, and internal organization of the discourse itself as the object most deserving of analysis. The other, which might be termed the enacted approach, emphasizes the speakers and the relations among them that shape and are constituted by the discourse. Discourse as an encoded focus of study poses questions about the cognitive categories that are present in textualized and verbalized communication, the metaphors that demarcate those categories, and the narratives through which meanings are constructed. Enacted discourse foregrounds the questions that social scientists pose about power in terms of who has the authority to speak and what the circumstances are under which their speaking occurs. While the enacted approach puts the study of discourse closer to the social relations of greatest interest to social scientists, scholars of the encoded approach emphasize that social relations are also present in the content of what is spoken,

7 Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, edited by David D. Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3–​21, quote on page 8.

52  Religion’s Power written, and read. As Walter Benjamin remarked, “Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.”8 Conceiving of discourse as practice thus necessitates a twofold adjustment to earlier linguistic conceptions: putting context in speech and putting speech in context. As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life.9

Moreover, the power of discourse to persuade and to motivate action is contingent on the contexts in which it occurs. As practice, “discourse intertwines particular symbolic codes with social relationships and conditions,” Ann Kane argues, “thereby articulating meaning and understanding of specific issues and problems.”10 If discursive power can be defined as “the degree to which the categories of thought, symbolizations and linguistic conventions, and meaningful models of and for the world determine the ability of some actors to control the actions of others, or to obtain new capacities,” an emphasis on practice requires it to be investigated with attention to both its encoded and enacted aspects.11 Although Foucault’s arguments about the power of discourse focus on the power of those who speak, for example, Foucault also suggests that power resides in the discourse itself. Powerful people can assert certain things that subordinate people cannot, but what they say and how they say it matter too. Foucault terms these expressions of power “discursive formations,” which are influential because they convey authoritative understandings of the world that are largely taken for granted and thus obscure alternative perceptions and interpretations. Their power, he writes, is “to blind, to hinder, to prevent discovery, to conceal the purity of the evidence or the dumb obstinacy of the 8 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–​2000, edited by Dorothy J. Hale (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 361–​78, 367 (originally published in 1936). 9 M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–​421, quote on page 293. 10 Ann Kane, “Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation: Narratives as Cultural Structure and Practice,” History and Theory 39 (October 2000), 311–​30, quote on page 315. 11 Isaac Ariail Reed, “Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions,” Sociological Theory 31, 3 (2013), 193–​218, quote on page 203.

Religion’s Discursive Power  53 things themselves.”12 Totalizing assumptions about the sacred, freedom, individual rights, or slavery would be examples. This notion of discursive power is congruent with Durkheim’s idea that categories of thought become especially powerful when they are so thoroughly taken for granted as to never be questioned and thus enjoy the status of de facto taboo. Ironically, this kind of discursive power exists in the breach as a silencing of discourse itself. Its power is greatest when it remains unspoken, compelling conformity because no other way of thinking and behaving can be entertained. Yet, as Isaac Reed argues, power also resides in discourse that is spoken but imprecise, ambiguous, and referentially vague.13 “Liberty” and “the people,” for instance, are words that appear frequently in early modern political speech, just as words such as “miracle” and “mercy” do in religion. Their imprecision references and reinforces categories of thought even though those categories themselves are not spelled out. In what follows, I discuss three topics that have been generative in orienting research on discursive power: narratives, sincerity, and resistance. Studies of these topics have examined what it is that makes them more persuasive in some instances than in others and have compared how different usages contribute to the power of certain speakers. Recent work has used both ethnographic and experimental methods to sharpen the details identified in earlier discussions. Much of the research has been done in contexts other than religion, which necessitates considering how religion is similar to and different from these other contexts. While the most striking conclusion from this research is that specific ways in which discourse is powerful can be identified, there is evidence as well that how discourse is practiced in concrete situations brings together multiple factors that mix with one another to shape the outcomes.

Narratives We use narratives to tell about doing things and having things happen to us. They bring together a succession of events, allowing us the means of juxtaposing, rearranging, and redescribing them to form a meaningful

12 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 45. 13 Reed, “Power.”

54  Religion’s Power configuration.14 Gérard Genette says they should be understood in terms of relationships—​relationships among the words of which the narrative is composed, relationships between the narrative and what happened, and relationships between the narrative and the act of narrating through which it is produced.15 Narratives are in these respects acts of cultural production, like music, paintings, and photographs, which take shape in what Wendy Griswold calls a “cultural diamond” defined by the object itself, its creator, those who receive it, and the social context in which it occurs.16 Narratives, Jerome Bruner writes, organize the “messy domain of human interaction” by providing reasons for why things happen and for why the characters in the story do what they do.17 Narratives’ power lies in their capacity to make sense of events in ways that offer persuasive interpretations that have the capacity to guide action. Their power is reflected in the authority of the storyteller, how the story is constructed, what the story is about, the situation in which it is told, and the background knowledge the storyteller and the listener share.18 Narratives and narrating are among the most common forms of religious discourse. The texts of the major religions are replete with stories. They are the language in which events of cosmic significance are told, the means (verbal and written) through which the feats of saints and martyrs are remembered, and in which the joyous and troubling passings of ordinary life are shaped into a meaningful whole.19 Peter Berger famously argued 14 Paul Ricoeur argues that stories not only place us within time but also configure the succession of events into a pattern of punctuations, ruptures, repetitions, and reckonings (Paul Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, edited by Mario J. Valdés (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 99–​116. 15 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 25–​27. 16 Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2013), 1–​17; as cultural acts, narratives—​in contrast with private beliefs that are hidden and unlike cognitive schemas that can only be inferred—​are observable; this critique of beliefs is of course concerned with methodology rather than the standard complaint about belief being too much of a Protestant Christian derivation; a helpful discussion of belief (believing) as a practice is included in Benjamin Gatling, “There Isn’t Belief, Just Believing: Rethinking Belief as a Keyword of Folklore Studies,” Journal of American Folklore 133, 529 (Summer 2020), 307–​28. 17 Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991), 1–​ 20, quote on page 4. 18 Martin Kreiswirth, “Tell Me a Story: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences,” in Constructivist Criticism: The Human Sciences in the Age of Theory, edited by Martin Kreiswirth and Thomas Carmichael (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 61–​87; Stefan Groth, “Political Narratives /​Narrations of the Political: An Introduction,” Narrative Culture 6, 1 (Spring 2019), 1–​ 18; and Francesca Polletta, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, Beth Gharrity Gardner, and Alice Motes, “The Sociology of Storytelling,” Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011), 109–​30. 19 “A critically important mode of verbal symbolization is narrative,” Bellah writes, “the story or myth (we should remember that mythos is simply the Greek for ‘story’), which is important in almost

Religion’s Discursive Power  55 that they are modes of “world construction,” creating a meaningful stance toward the world.20 But worldviews, Andrew Greeley reminded us, “are not propositional paragraphs that can be explicated and critiqued in discursive fashion. Rather they are, in their origins and in their primal power, tenacious and durable narrative symbols that take possession of the imagination.”21 Sacred narratives wrap moral imperatives in the language of stories about divine interventions in human affairs and about human responses to the divine. Stories bring the mistakes of ordinary people, their struggles for redemption, and their suffering to life. Large transcendent narratives place events, miracles, and prophetic teachings in an encompassing progression of history. These and other templates supply the outlines for ordinary people to tell stories about their spiritual journeys.22 An approach that was more appealing in the past than it is today suggests that religion is distinctively powerful because it provides grand narratives. Grand narratives are stories about the ultimate meaning of life, how the world came into existence, what our place in it is, and where history is headed. This approach takes the view that human persons have a need for these totalizing worldviews and that grand narratives produce coherence both in individual lives and sometimes for entire societies. Grand narratives can be summarized in propositions such as “God created the world,” “humans sinned against God,” “we all suffer from sin,” and “God wants us to be saved.” These propositions compete with propositions in other grand narratives that deny the existence of God or that view ultimacy as a divine mystery. Greeley’s remark that “worldviews are not propositional paragraphs” is an explicit rejection of the approach that emphasizes grand narratives. Similarly, Alasdair MacIntyre imagines a world in which a unifying narrative existed in the past but no longer does and thus can be made sense of only through the fragments gained from practices that instill practical moral knowledge.23 all kinds of religion”; see Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 14. 20 Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 3–​28. 21 Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 133. 22 The concept of narrative templates is developed in James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and James V. Wertsch, “Collective Memory and Narrative Templates,” Social Research 75, 1 (2008), 133–​56, and enlarged in Carey Philpott, “Developing and Extending Wertsch’s Idea of Narrative Templates,” International Journal of Research and Method in Education 37, 3 (2014), 309–​23. 23 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]).

56  Religion’s Power Post-​structuralist criticism also comes at the topic this way, arguing less about grand narratives than about the impossibility of identifying universal structures of language and meaning, but focusing on the lived contexts in which narratives are articulated rather than on grand narratives. The point is that people are more likely to frame narratives about what is happening in their daily lives than in terms of what is happening in the universe.24 The simplest connection of religion to stories about everyday life occurs in accounts. Accounts are stories—​sometimes elaborate but often truncated into a few sentences—​that explain why something happened or why a person made a particular decision. We tell stories about why we fell in love, took a job, or got sick. Accounts include representations of power: the power of some structure (the job market) or circumstance (the weather) that was beyond the person’s control and the power that the person did control (training, networks, self-​confidence).25 Religion enters the picture in two ways. One is when the event being accounted for is itself religious: the decision to become a priest or join a congregation. The other is when the event can be accounted for in any number of ways, but the narrative offers a religious explanation, such as “I felt God was calling me to be a teacher.” The former kind of religious account is illustrated in studies asking Muslim women why they decide to wear the hijab. A study conducted in Malta, for instance, found that women explained their decision as an “affair of the heart,” meaning, the author argued, that they accounted for it as a voluntary act that reflected growth in their spiritual path rather than as an imposed form of female suppression.26 Examples of the latter—​religion as explanation—​are found in studies of career choices, such as one survey in which about a third of employed workers in the United States said they felt God had called them to their particular line of work. And, when asked to say in their own words how they made the decision, their accounts included details about seeking guidance from clergy and feeling that prayers were being answered.27 24 On post-​structuralist critiques of grand narratives, references are included in Molly Patterson and Kristen Renwick Monroe, “Narrative in Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 1 (1998), 315–​31; while there are significant epistemological differences at stake, one source of confusion is whether the “world” that people make sense of is their immediate world or the world in general; another is whether “make sense” refers to a provisional ad hoc narrative or “cohesion” that undergirds a large population. 25 C. Wright Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,” American Sociological Review 5, 6 (1940), 904–​13; Terri L. Orbuch, “People’s Accounts Count: The Sociology of Accounts,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997), 455–​78. 26 Nathalie Grima, “‘An Affair of the Heart’: Hijab Narratives of Arab Muslim Women in Malta,” Implicit Religion 16, 4 (2013), 461–​81. 27 Robert Wuthnow, God and Mammon in America (New York: Free Press, 1994), 39–​116.

Religion’s Discursive Power  57 Opinions differ about what to make of such accounts. One view is that they express deeply held values; another is that they vary willy-​nilly with the situation. Take Frederick Douglass’s famous account of becoming interested in religion while an enslaved teenager in Baltimore. Some biographers see the account as an indication of how powerfully Douglass’s faith shaped his entire life: his interest in reading the Bible, teaching Sunday school, becoming an abolitionist, and even the cadence of his speaking and writing. Others note that he includes the account in only some of his several autobiographies, does so to heighten the contrast with the despair he felt as a slave, and speaks critically of religion on many occasions. The disagreement is not in the facts but in how to think about the facts. It hinges on thinking that enduring values fundamentally shape what people do or on doubting that values are as important as is flexibly adapting to the situation.28 But there is no need to opt for one view at the exclusion of the other. When in the heat of the moment Johnny accounts for hitting Tommy by yelling “he started it,” this after-​the-​fact justification does not negate asking what values might also be present. Indeed, an account of this kind, even if it differs from one situation to the next, is governed by what can count legitimately as a justification and thus by the norms and values that bear on the situation. These are present in what the situation implies and in what the people involved bring to the situation. “He started it” is part of the repertoire of possible accounts known to pertain to these situations. Accounts are influenced by the accounts that have been given in previous situations and by the dispositions—​the self-​understandings—​that afford continuity. In combination, accounts give events meaning by suggesting that what did happen is what should have happened.29 To suggest what should have happened, Bruner says, “is inescapably to take a moral stance, even if it is a moral stance against moral stances.”30 The story’s moral flows from the movement of the narrative, which is why studies of narrative focus on how the story is constructed as well as its content. In a study 28 The account of his awakening to religion is given in Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855), 166–​67. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), emphasizes the long-​term influence of this event; Robert S. Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), emphasizes Douglass’s rhetorical skill in crafting narratives in different ways for different audiences. 29 Readers familiar with the sociology of culture literature will know the roiling currents of these waters, especially in discussions of Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, 2 (1986), 273–​86. 30 Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 51.

58  Religion’s Power of Protestant sermons, Marsha Witten drew from Northrup Frye’s discussion of the inward-​moving centripetal movement evident in some narratives and the outward-​moving centrifugal movement evident in others. Witten compared sermons in theologically conservative churches with sermons in theologically liberal churches. She found that skilled preachers in both contexts inserted personal anecdotes and used repetition to build the messages they wished to communicate. However, the flow from inward to outward and from outward to inward moved in different directions. Conservative sermons opened with statements about multiple and complex issues that required long sentences to convey and then moved incrementally by eliminating those varied interpretations toward a single simply summarized conclusion, such as “Jesus is the answer.” Liberal sermons moved in the opposite direction, opening with simplistic assertions (“you thought it was going to be easy”) and then adding nuances and multiple interpretations leading to a conclusion summarized in a lengthy sentence. There was no indication that one style was more powerful than the other, only that the styles appealed to different audiences and signaled different theological orientations.31 The movement that occurs in narratives is particularly evident in studies of “awakening” narratives. While these stories are rarely as elaborate as the ones Witten studied, they take a familiar form of describing movement from an initial problematic state toward a more recent state of resolution. Studies agree that awakening narratives are after-​the-​fact stories about what happened rather than factual accounts but that they are often powerful: helping individuals make sense of traumatic events, reinforcing important beliefs and moral convictions, and identifying desirable courses of future action. Awakening narratives that include religious content typically have a performative aspect that involves storytelling in the form of testimonials and witnessing and that incorporates templates from familiar scriptural accounts.32 In a large 31 Marsha Witten, “The Restriction of Meaning in Religious Discourse: Centripetal Devices in a Fundamentalist Christian Sermon,” in Vocabularies of Public Life: Empirical Essays in Symbolic Structure, edited by Robert Wuthnow (New York: Routledge, 1992), 19–​38; Nick Rogers, “Split Screens: A Content Analysis of American Liberals’ and Conservatives’ Respective Television Favorites,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 1, 6 (2018), 1–​20, identified similar patterns, notably in liberals’ preference for nuanced depictions of moral issues and, interestingly, in conservatives’ preference for stories that resolved problems in single episodes rather than extending beyond single episodes. 32 Wertsch, “Collective Memory and Narrative Templates,” 142, describes narrative templates as “abstract meaning structures not anchored in specific places, times, characters or events,” which points to the underlying regularities that in this context is implicit in awakening narratives; however, an important point about religious narratives is that they do provide details about specific places, times, characters, and events.

Religion’s Discursive Power  59 study of awakening narratives, Thomas DeGloma identified two prevailing patterns: accounts of abrupt transformation and accounts of incremental stairstep transformation. The discursive power of each depended on how well it aligned with the narrator’s actual experience and what the narrator’s community deemed desirable: the one fit well in contexts in which people in fact experienced sharp breaks in careers and personal habits, while the other held greater attraction in contexts emphasizing continuities and growth.33 A third pattern that illustrated discursive power was evident in a study conducted by Erin Johnston among Wiccans. Their narratives included accounts of incremental transformation but frequently added the notion that their turn to Wicca was a return to something they had known or felt intuitively as children; in short, they were coming full circle. Why might this construction have been compelling? Johnston suggests three possibilities: returning to something earlier in life that was only vaguely perceived at the time gave practitioners a way to identify an authentic self around which to orient future action amid multiple competing identities, it solidified their acceptance within the group, and it resolved questions about religious truth.34 The common aspect of these patterns is that people tell stories in ways that provide coherence to their lives by knitting together seemingly discordant events. One of the best examples of this is the narratives Lynn Davidman describes in Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism. The interviews Davidman conducted were with well-​ educated women who had been raised as secular Jews but as adults had become members of Orthodox Jewish communities. These decisions represented a radical departure from how they had previously lived and required dramatic shifts in how they dressed, what they ate, and with whom they associated. Their stories did two things: they bridged the transition and they affirmed the women’s decision. It was a matter of having always been Jewish, the women told Davidman, but now having come to a greater realization of what that meant. Whereas Judaism had once been merely an ascribed identity, it was now something they had chosen. The narrative affirmed the “rightness” of

33 Thomas DeGloma, Seeing the Light: The Social Logic of Personal Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Thomas DeGloma, “The Strategies of Mnemonic Battle: On the Alignment of Autobiographical and Collective Memories in Conflicts Over the Past,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 3, 1 (2015), 156–​90; Thomas DeGloma, “Awakenings: Autobiography, Memory, and the Social Logic of Personal Discovery,” Sociological Forum 25, 3 (2010), 519–​40. 34 Erin F. Johnston, “‘I Was Always This Way . . .’: Rhetorics of Continuity in Narratives of Conversion,” Sociological Forum 28, 3 (2013), 549–​73.

60  Religion’s Power their choice, expressed their “agency” in making the choice, and contributed to their sense of empowerment.35 But how is it empowering when someone joins a community that so obviously constrains what they do? This is the question studies of fundamentalist churches, Pentecostal groups, and conservative Catholic and Muslim organizations pose as well. The answer, John O’Brien argues, lies in what the narratives say about individual autonomy and individual agency. Narratives that stress autonomy identify empowerment with distancing oneself from the social constraints of a religious community. A person who says she is “spiritual but not religious” and feels stronger from searching on her own than from participating in a congregation illustrates this kind of empowerment. The story’s trajectory moves from images of pressure and burdens to ones of freedom and personal fulfillment. Narratives that emphasize agency locate empowerment in the decision rather than in the outcome. In Davidman’s study, this is the key: the narratives describe a process of achieving control over their lives by choosing to be members of Orthodox Jewish communities. Agency is expressed in the effort they make: the story moves from passivity toward activity, work, and struggle. Within religious communities that require high levels of conformity, agency is also expressed, O’Brien notes, in participants’ descriptions of gaining personal insights, deciding on how much to participate, saying what they like and dislike, experiencing changes in their feelings, and posing disagreements with other participants.36 In addition to studies in which people tell their own stories, research has examined how stories people hear affect listeners’ behavior by facilitating identification with characters. Expectations that this may be the case are a reason religious adherents are encouraged to learn stories about exemplars of faith. Experiments show that recipients do tend to adapt their self-​perceptions to resemble the traits of characters in stories to which they have been exposed; for instance, perceiving themselves to be more conscientious after reading a story about a diligent protagonist. Stories’ power to do this is greater to the extent that individuals are transported into the story, becoming, as it were, a “traveler” in the story world. Travelers more completely imagine the story events and do less critical questioning of the story. Research also suggests a caveat: many narratives fail to transport readers, 35 Lynn Davidman, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). 36 John O’Brien, “Individualism as a Discursive Strategy of Action: Autonomy, Agency, and Reflexivity among Religious Americans,” Sociological Theory 33, 2 (2015), 173–​99.

Religion’s Discursive Power  61 and when they fail, readers tend to develop counterarguments that distance themselves from protagonists’ traits.37 Susan Harding’s story of being “convicted by the Holy Spirit” illustrates the multiple dynamics through which a listener may come to identify with characters in a story. The event was an interview Harding conducted with a fundamentalist pastor that extended for approximately three hours, during which time the pastor successfully turned the interview into an attempt to convert Harding. Although Harding did not convert, she found herself responding to a near accident driving home from the interview feeling convicted by the Holy Spirit. Wondering how the pastor had gained so much power over her thinking in such a short period, she identified three aspects of the discourse that had taken place. First, the pastor had effectively positioned himself as an authority and placed her in a subordinate role by telling several stories about himself that demonstrated his authority. Second, he told a story about an accident in which he had been responsible for killing his own son, which made himself vulnerable and evoked an emotional response from Harding. And third, by relating this personal event the pastor also claimed authority to interpret it, describing it as a lesson about God’s grace. The circumstances of the discourse mattered too: the fact that Harding was exhausted and distracted after the lengthy interview and that her own near accident happened while the story of the pastor’s accident was fresh in her mind. It also mattered, though, that Harding almost immediately placed the event in a different narrative: she was there as a researcher and was not a religious person and thus quickly dismissed feeling convicted.38 Identification with characters in stories also fails when protagonists are too exceptional. An instance of this kind occurred when interviewees in a study of caregiving were asked about whether they admired Mother Teresa: few thought she exhibited traits they wanted to emulate, and many offered criticisms of her. They said her caregiving was too sacrificial. Yet in the same study there were few such reservations about the story of the Good Samaritan. People identified with the Good Samaritan and were able to do so 37 Markus Appel, “A Story about a Stupid Person Can Make You Act Stupid (or Smart): Behavioral Assimilation (and Contrast) as Narrative Impact,” Media Psychology 14 (2011), 144–​67; Emily Moyer-​Gusé, “Toward a Theory of Entertainment Persuasion: Explaining the Persuasive Effects of Entertainment-​Education Messages,” Communication Theory 18 (2008), 407–​25; Stefan Krause and Markus Appel, “Stories and the Self: Assimilation, Contrast, and the Role of Being Transported into the Narrative World,” Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 32, 2 (2019), 1–​12. 38 Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33–​60.

62  Religion’s Power by adapting aspects of the story to fit their own experience, for instance, putting themselves on a familiar highway in daylight hours and calling for help instead of providing it themselves.39 Such adaptations are what Richard Gerrig calls “narrative replotting.”40 When movie viewers are asked to discuss movies, Gerrig finds that they typically engage in replotting to resolve aspects they didn’t like or that didn’t make sense. Replotting draws from viewers’ personal experience to “complete” the characters and make the story more believable. The point replotting illustrates is that narratives are not objects that recipients passively respond to but are dynamically constructed and experienced by recipients, who actively interpret and transform them. Individuals may do this alone as they contemplate a movie or book, but replotting is often facilitated by group discussion, which is one of the reasons that book discussion groups are popular even though people read books alone. Similarly, in small religious groups, participants discuss narratives in inspirational books, replotting the narratives to create a stronger connection between their own identity and characters, situations, and events in the story. The process involves participants imagining themselves doing things, experiencing things, and feeling in certain ways.41 Research shows that group replotting of this kind facilitates participants learning new things about themselves.42 Another aspect of narrative power illustrated in the Mother Teresa example is the role played by the larger narratives with which specific anecdotes may be interlaced: Mother Teresa was harder for people to identify with than the Good Samaritan because they had a more detailed narrative about the Good Samaritan that allowed them to connect it with other familiar biblical parables in which desirable behavior was portrayed. In a study of handicraft markets in Thailand Frederick Wherry noticed something similar at work

39 Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 157–​220. 40 Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 65–​96. 41 An interesting parallel can be drawn with the imagining that occurs in responses to fiction, the arts, and play, as discussed in Kendall Walton, “Spelunking, Simulation, and Slime: On Being Moved by Fiction,” in Emotion and the Arts, edited by Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 37–​49. 42 Robert Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community (New York: Free Press, 1994), 289–​315. In another study, I found that postmortem group discussions among high school community service participants were the key to students connecting their short-​ term service participation with ideas about who they were personally and who they wanted to be; Robert Wuthnow, Learning to Care: Elementary Kindness in an Age of Indifference (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Religion’s Discursive Power  63 among artisans selling small, intricately carved “spirit houses” to Western buyers. Wherry found that anecdotes about good and bad sellers frequently invoked language about the sacred and profane, which in turn connected with a larger narrative drawn from Buddhism about the spirits who resided in the structures and the peace, protection, and balance they represented. Specific anecdotes, Wherry concludes, carry more weight when they are made plausible by more encompassing narratives.43 Literary studies suggest another aspect of narratives that facilitates identification with characters: social interaction within the story that includes conflict, danger, warnings, and evidence of good and bad behavior among the characters. The interaction puts lifelike characters that the reader doesn’t actually know and understands to be fictional in a believable situation that prompts and models an emotional response.44 Christine Lehnen notes, “If a liked character comes to harm because of, say, the institution of slavery (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), I as a reader will be likely to develop a negative attitude toward slavery.”45 The Good Samaritan story invites the reader to identify with the injured traveler, dislike the two passersby who fail to help, learn why they did not, and with benefit of that comparison overcome ethnic separation and better appreciate the Good Samaritan as an example of compassion. How well a narrative aligns with group norms and events is also a matter of how stories are told and how different versions of the stories are communicated. A rich tradition of research on storytelling addresses questions about who has the authority to speak about what to whom and in what contexts. Studies of storytelling, just as studies of narrativity, have grown in popularity among scholars of religion. The focus of this interest is the construction of identity, which is understood to be an ongoing process of weaving together storylines about oneself. Empowerment is thus associated with being able to construct a story of one’s choosing and of using that story to accomplish one’s goals in life, whether through direct action or from gaining self-​confidence by negating the scripts supplied by others in dominant positions. Marie Griffith’s ethnographic study of storytelling among Pentecostal women in God’s Daughters is an exemplary discussion of the processes 43 Frederick F. Wherry, “Performance Circuits in the Marketplace,” Politics and Society 40, 2 (2012), 203–​21. 44 Howard Sklar, The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013), 9–​62. 45 Christine Lehnen, “Exploring Narratives’ Powers of Emotional Persuasion Through Character Involvement: A Working Heuristic,” Journal of Literary Theory 10, 2 (2016), 247–​70, quote on page 259.

64  Religion’s Power through which the telling and retelling of personal narratives contributed to the women’s empowerment. Week to week, the women recounted their struggles to overcome psychologically debilitating experiences, gained affirmation from the group, revised their stories, and increasingly included in their accounts references to the Holy Spirit and divine power. The groups under the auspices of local churches and trained leaders served as discursive spaces in which intimate details of the women’s lives could be shared.46 Other research emphasizes that small groups establish norms that encourage participants to tell their stories and to expect that their stories will be affirmed, provide occasions for storytelling about ordinary life, validate the meaningfulness of personal opinions and experiences, and sacralize ordinary events by connecting them to prayers and quests for spiritual growth. The support participants experience is concretely demonstrated through the sharing and borrowing of one another’s words as well as from explicit verbalizations of support.47 Jody Davie says a kind of intimacy develops as participants share stories about the dailiness of life.48 Griffith and Davie emphasize that the women’s groups they studied were empowering by giving the participants opportunities not only to tell their stories but also to tell them in a particular way. The stories affirmed their power as women. The groups were discursive spaces in which male dominance could in small ways be challenged. It was possible to talk about frustrated career plans, inattentive and abusive husbands, and misunderstandings. The conversations recast stories in ways that provided new interpretations of the past and that in some instances prompted insights about new possibilities in the present. In addition, storytelling was a way in which the individual participants signaled their commitment to the group—​in some cases simply through being willing to “open up” and reveal vulnerabilities to the group, and in most cases by patterning their stories on the other participants’ stories. Signaling one’s commitment to the group in these ways, research in other settings shows, elevates a person’s status in the eyes of the group’s members. The group in a sense equalizes its participants, temporarily overcoming some

46 R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 47 Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey, 292–​94; the sharing and borrowing of words in discourse more generally is emphasized in M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293–​94. 48 Jody Shapiro Davie, Women in the Presence: Constructing Community and Seeking Spirituality in Mainline Protestantism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 88.

Religion’s Discursive Power  65 of the differences among the participants. This is one of the mechanisms through which storytelling is empowering.49 Research on the social psychology of self-​transformation describes the kind of narratives Griffith observed as life stories. Life stories are autobiographical accounts that situate major events such as career decisions, births of children, marriages, divorces, serious accidents, illnesses, and even societal events such as terrorist attacks and landmark court decisions in persons’ understanding of who they are. Life stories are shown to be an important influence on persons’ self-​perceptions of well-​being, which in turn contribute to happiness, self-​confidence, success in attaining goals, and avoidance of at-​ risk behavior. Effective life stories are in these ways empowering. To determine which life stories are more empowering, social psychologists have identified several key aspects of life stories: (1) the emotional trajectory of the narrative in terms of shifts from the beginning to the end being negative to positive or positive to negative, (2) agency as expressed in the narrative describing actions the person chooses and does or actions that happen to the person, (3) autobiographical reasoning that refers to evidence of the person reflecting upon and interpreting the narrative, and (4) the degree and complexity of detail through which narrative coherence is achieved. In studies analyzing hundreds of life story narratives elicited in writing and through interviews, narratives with a negative to positive emotional trajectory, greater indications of agency, more autobiographical reasoning, and greater complexity of detail proved to be significant predictors of independent measures of well-​being that included questions about physical symptoms, depression, happiness, and satisfaction with life.50 Life story research sheds light on religious narratives that focus on conversion and awakenings. Like other life stories, many of these narratives concern major events (illnesses, deaths of loved ones, personal crises, career moves) and their impact on a person’s self-​perception and outlook on life. Religious narratives are ways of making sense of both the low points of life (dark nights of the soul) and the high points (moments of supreme ecstasy): they give verbal expression to the visceral sensations that inhabit the body in these moments. The narratives often include up-​and-​down cycles, 49 Cecilia L. Ridgeway, “Status in Groups: The Importance of Motivation,” American Sociological Review 47 (1982), 76–​88. 50 Kate C. McLean, Moin Syed, Monisha Pasupathi, Jonathan M. Adler, William L. Dunlop, David Drustrup, Robyn Fivush, Matthew E. Garci, Jennifer P. Lilgendahl, Jennifer Lodi-​Smith, Dan P. McAdams, and Tara P. Mccoy, “The Empirical Structure of Narrative Identity: The Initial Big Three,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 119, 4 (2019), 920–​44.

66  Religion’s Power but the emotional trajectory overall is from negative (meaninglessness, isolation, despair) to positive (meaningfulness, acceptance, elation). In addition, there is an improvement in the person’s sense of agency, arrived at through having made an empowering discovery about oneself or from being infused with divine power. The group dynamics of telling and retelling one’s story contribute to autobiographical reasoning (self-​examination, reflection, entextual referencing). And these dynamics are facilitated by templates expressed in accounts of sacred events, saints, and heroes of the faith that increase narrative detail and complexity.51 The role of narrative templates (which for Christians include Paul’s conversion on the Damascus road and Saint Augustine’s Confessions) is illustrated in the bestseller Born Again by convicted Watergate conspirator Charles Colson. The narrative of Colson’s conversion provided a template with which thousands of evangelical readers could identify and became a model for participants in Colson’s prison ministry. It served well because the book was crafted to fit a template that was already popular among evangelicals: it characterized Colson’s conversion as a radical about-​face that took place in a single week and included a soul-​cleansing experience of total surrender to God and a sudden resolve to serve Jesus—​minimizing the doubts and detours that became known posthumously in Colson’s papers.52 Insights from the literature on embodiment add an important feature to the results of life story research. Storytelling is not only the process of crafting 51 Peter G. Stromberg, Language and Self-​Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Dan P. McAdams and P. J. Bowman, “Narrating Life’s Turning Points: Redemption and Contamination,” in Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition, edited by Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen Josselson, and Amia Lieblich (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press, 2001), 3–​34. Although self-​report studies of personal well-​being are limited by the fact that self-​narratives are also self-​reported rather than having necessary behavioral effects in real life, there is a literature indicating that perceived well-​being has behavioral manifestations in terms of such measures as academic performance and avoidance of at-​risk behavior. Some research also demonstrates behavioral effects of narrative constructions; for example, high school dropouts who constructed narratives describing sharp before–​after discontinuities had higher graduate rates from subsequent programs. Similarly, recidivism in some studies appears to be lower when convicts’ personal narratives describe changes in core values and transformations emphasizing personal agency; Betsy Rymes, Conversational Borderlands: Language and Identity in an Alternative Urban High School (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); Shadd Maruna, Making Good: How Ex-​Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001); Marieke Liem and Nicholas J. Richardson, “The Role of Transformation Narratives in Desistance among Released Lifers,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 41, 6 (June 2014), 692–​712. 52 See Kendrick Oliver, “How to Be (the Author of) Born Again: Charles Colson and the Writing of Conversion in the Age of Evangelicalism,” Religions 5 (2014), 886–​911, who argues that the apparent definitiveness of Colson’s conversion (a) further popularized the idea that authentic conversions should be sudden and complete, and (b) contributed to Colson’s authority to speak on many social and political issues.

Religion’s Discursive Power  67 words to describe experiences. It is an embodied experience in which the words and the feelings and physical movements interact. This is especially the case for storytelling that recalls and in a sense forces one to relive significant life experiences. The narrating gives expression to states of the body that are in turn affected by being given expression. Narratives of religious experience that include metaphors of the body are one example. “Embodiment-​ based research suggests that even the most transcendental experience will be expressed in language that reflects our embodiment,” theologian James Jones writes, “we will be lifted up to heaven, we will ascend experientially to heaven on Jacob’s ladder; we will see, taste, or touch the presence of God or the reality of shunyata; we will be moved by the experience.”53 As this example suggests, these are scripted words that a person hears and repeats rather than having to invent even though they convey accurately how a person feels. The role of embodiment is further illustrated in studies of religious revival meetings. In the 1830s, evangelist Charles G. Finney, whose widely publicized revivals resulted in thousands of conversions, invited repentant sinners to leave where they were standing or sitting, “come forward,” and take their place on the “anxious bench,” where they received prayer and instruction from Finney and publicly declared their intention to lead a godly life. Their narratives were in these ways enacted: physically setting converts apart from the audience in a symbolic separation from their old self, confessing their sins, and receiving absolution. So effective was the process, Kathryn Lofton argues, that something similar could be seen decades later in twenty-​first-​ century Oprah Winfrey Show enactments where guests would make public confessions of their faults and failures, receive affirmation from Winfrey and the audience, and tell how they were undergoing redemption. In Winfrey, as in Finney, Lofton notes, it mattered that someone in authority was guiding the process.54 The empowerment individuals attain from storytelling, these examples demonstrate, is influenced by the persons with whom one interacts and who play a role in shaping the narratives. The stories we tell are influenced by the fact that significant others (parents, spouses, teachers, clergy) had the power to shape the events that become the focus of our stories: they contributed to 53 James W. Jones, Living Religion: On the Possibility of a Spiritual Sense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 124. 54 Kathryn Lofton, “Public Confessions: Oprah Winfrey’s American Religious History,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 18, 1 (March 2008), 51–​69; Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 82–​117.

68  Religion’s Power the problems that had to be overcome and to the solutions. They and others (saints, martyrs, scriptural characters) exercise power as examples to be emulated or avoided. In addition are the interlocutors (friends, therapists, co-​participants, clergy) with whom the storytelling occurs: their conversational interventions, opinions, and professional advice. A narrative of personal transformation is not only shaped by these influences; it also reinforces them. The person who has been redeemed is indebted to those who facilitated the redemption: their ideas, support, techniques, and authority. To feel empowered is to be in service to that which has been empowering.55 An ethnographic study of British evangelical university students shows the extent to which these aspects of social interaction are integral to the personal empowerment provided by a strong religious narrative. The students’ evangelical identity, from one perspective, corresponded closely to the idea of a grand narrative formulated in propositional statements about God, Jesus, sin, and salvation. Yet in practice, the students’ sense of empowerment was maintained in conversations with other students in which they described challenges and uncertainties, received affirmation that they were not alone in these experiences, and discussed scriptural applications. Living as they did in a fluid, pluralistic cultural space, their personal narratives as evangelicals interlocked with the narratives of students with whom they agreed and disagreed. As one student remarked, “I don’t see Jesus, but I see little bits of him.” Their sense of self-​coherence was not so much a coherent narrative about the universe but a belief in the possibility of coherence that was maintained by the idea that God was consistent and by holding fellow students accountable. Empowerment was attained through habituated techniques of listening, reading, and speaking, which meant that participants were beholden to these techniques.56 Religion’s discursive power increases when the narratives identify techniques that are said to be uniquely effective. Storytelling accomplishes this in two ways. One is the narrative of false starts: an awakening that meanders along misguided paths and into dead ends before it reaches a 55 See Justin Waring and Asam Latif, “Of Shepherds, Sheep and Sheepdogs? Governing the Adherent Self Through Complementary and Competing ‘Pastorates,’” Sociology 52, 5 (2018), 1069–​ 86, which draws on Foucault’s concept of “pastoral power” to discuss the power of clergy, therapists, and medical professionals. 56 Anna Strhan, “Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 28, 2 (2013), 225–​39; quote on page 237; Anna Strhan, “The Metropolis and Evangelical Life: Coherence and Fragmentation in the ‘Lost City of London,’” Religion, 43, 3 (2013), 331–​52; and Anna Strhan, Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Religion’s Discursive Power  69 satisfactory destination. The sermons Witten analyzed led listeners to see that material goods, travel, sex, medicine, science, and philosophy were all dead ends before declaring that “Jesus is the answer.” Among the British students, it was more that studies, career plans, and unbelieving friends were not as supportive as their Christian friends. The other way is through unique descriptions of “the answer.” Many of the examples in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience describe the resolution of spiritual struggles as being unprecedented, overwhelming, and profoundly comforting, marked by feeling fulfilled, whole, and at peace. Other studies include examples of seemingly ordinary events being described as “miracles,” evidence of “divine grace,” and dramatically different from human frailty. Stories of unique and uniquely powerful experiences are one of the ways in which commitment to a particular outlook or group is affirmed. An alternative is to recast the narrative to be about something other than having achieved a satisfactory resolution. Instead of there being an “answer” waiting to be found, the story becomes one about searching itself, the path, small steps, explorations, the “journey.” In his research on spirituality among baby boomers, Wade Clark Roof found that “seeking” was a more common narrative than finding answers.57 Similarly, in a study of yoga and centering prayer groups, Erin Johnston found that teachers guided practitioners to reconceptualize failures and frustration as progress nonetheless in terms of learning patience and discipline.58 Learning patience and discipline is an empowering outcome that goes beyond feeling empowered. It can occur simply from engaging in the practice itself, as Alasdair MacIntyre suggests in discussing chess, but the role of narrative is to articulate the connections between the rules governing the practice and its wider implications, as in explicit moral instruction about kindness, generosity, and honesty.59 Practitioners are expected not only to feel better about themselves but also to behave differently: to manifest traits modeled in narratives explaining what it means to have been empowered. A study of recipients of faith-​based caregiving, for example, found that many

57 Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 58 Erin Johnston, “Failing to Learn, or Learning to Fail? Accounting for Persistence in the Acquisition of Spiritual Disciplines,” Qualitative Sociology 40, 3 (September 2017), 221–​35. 59 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), 181–​203.

70  Religion’s Power of the recipients interpreted what they had received as a gift for which they felt an obligation to help others if it became possible to do so.60 Although the empowerment that occurred in these groups pertained to the individual participants, storytelling also confers power on the group itself, especially when narratives are co-​constructed by multiple speakers.61 The Oakley Prayer and Sharing Group that Elfriede Wedam and Stephen Warner studied in the 1990s provides an interesting case study of one of the ways in which stories can generate empowerment for a social collectivity. At the time Wedam and Warner studied it, the group had been in existence nearly two decades. During that time members had come and gone, children had been born and raised, the format of weekly meetings had changed, and topics of discussion and prayer requests had varied, leaving a handful of participants whose role it was to keep the group going and hold it true to the spiritually formative vision of its founding. A key aspect of the group’s continuity despite the disruptions that prompted many such groups to disband or reorganize after a few years, Wedam and Warner argued, was its core members having formulated a story about the group that they told, retold, and embellished over the years. The Oakley story included a founding myth that explained how the group had originated and a narrative that described the group’s history broken into meaningful segments. It began with the spiritual awakening of the group’s first member and an informal meeting among several of the founder’s friends. Those intimate beginnings led to an assembly of more than a hundred people gathering regularly over a three-​year period, a new location and decisions about breaking into smaller units, the introduction of a formal worship service from which the informal weekly prayer group set itself apart, and a subsequent shift toward a Pentecostal-​type format with speaking in tongues that in turn led to an abandonment of that style. These were remarkable transitions in the group’s size, central activities, and self-​understanding. Yet the story tied them together and cast them in terms of an argument about divine guidance and growth. It preserved the group’s early charismatic excitement, institutionalizing that excitement not in the acts or memory of a particular charismatic leader but in a narrative about the group’s collective identity. 60 Joan Walling, The Power of Receiving: Finding Moral Meaning in Care-​Receiving Episodes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, Department of Sociology, PhD Dissertation, 2005). 61 On narrative co-​ construction and the formation of group culture, see R. Keith Sawyer, “Improvisation and Narrative,” Narrative Inquiry 12, 2 (2002), 319–​49.

Religion’s Discursive Power  71 What did this have to do with power? The group story served as a resource that fostered trust among the members, Wedam and Warner discovered, which in turn promoted cohesiveness, a sense of common purpose, and sufficient interpersonal understanding for participants to share intimate details of their lives. The story explained why the group had evolved over time from one format to another and told why former members had left and newcomers had joined. It was also a common project of sorts, like a quilt to which members had contributed. The story enabled the members to experience the group as something they had created, thus taking ownership of it, even pride in it. The group’s religious identity was reinforced by the story too. The participants experienced religious meaning not only from praying together but also from talking about how God was present in the group.62 Empowerment of this kind is also present in larger contexts, for example, in congregations where collective storytelling creates a shared narrative about the organization’s history, its major transitions, and its goals. The same is true in social clubs, community service associations, and environmentalist networks.63 Interest in this kind of discursive empowerment is grounded in “neoinstitutionalist” approaches that emphasize organizational culture, myths, and rituals.64 Research in this vein contributes to understanding discourse as a practice that interweaves narratives with the unfolding customs and implicit norms that develop as people interact with one another. Paul Lichterman’s ethnography of religious organizations engaged in community outreach in a Midwestern city, for example, found narratives giving each organization a shared identity (as “people of faith,” “prophets,” “Christian servants”) but that explicitly religious discourse was filtered through a

62 Elfriede Wedam and R. Stephen Warner, “Sacred Space on Tuesday: A Study of the Institutionalization of Charisma,” in “I Come Away Stronger”: How Small Groups Are Shaping American Religion, edited by Robert Wuthnow (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 148–​78. The Oakley group was a case in which both the group and the individuals in it were empowered, but the two levels of empowerment do not always coincide; for example, see Jatin Pandey and Manish Gupta, “Religion in the Lives of Hindu Widows: Narratives from Vrindavan, India,” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 10, 4 (September 2018), 1–​10. 63 Raul Lejano, Mrill Ingram, and Helen Ingram, The Power of Narrative in Environmental Networks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013) includes an excellent discussion of how narratives weave together the connections among events and people in social networks; and Karyn Stapleton and John Wilson, “Telling the Story: Meaning Making in a Community Narrative,” Journal of Pragmatics 108 (2017), 60–​80, show how narrative provides a resource for members of a Belfast nationalist group. 64 See John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, 2 (1977), 340–​63, and discussions emphasizing contention among multiple narratives in organizations, for instance: Andrew D. Brown, “A Narrative Approach to Collective Identities,” Journal of Management Studies 43, 4 (June 2006), 731–​53.

72  Religion’s Power distinctive “group style” in each case. The group style constituted the operative pragmatic set of shared expectations about what was appropriate to discuss, what was better left unsaid, and how to think about the group’s goals. These group-​building customs were empowering to the extent that they facilitated groups’ collective decision-​making processes.65 The power evident in this example and in Griffith’s research was associated with positive outcomes in that group solidarity and personal empowerment were the result. A more complex result was present among the female students Margaret Frye studied in Malawi. The girls were exposed to powerful moralizing narratives in the churches they attended about sexual abstinence. The narratives did reduce the girls’ chances of becoming pregnant and being exposed to AIDS. However, the narratives also conveyed implicit messages suggesting that being in school increased the chances of succumbing to sexual temptation. Even though the girls studied hard and did well in school and despite not actually becoming sexually active, the narratives shaped expectations that resulted in the girls dropping out of school. In short, the narratives included mixed messages that when combined with how they were told in families and schools had unintended consequences.66 In considering stories and storytelling as practice, recent scholarship also attends to the fact that narratives are contested: both by alternative narratives and by alternative interpretations of the same narratives. The sorting out that results is a process of piecing together snippets of discourse from personal experience, conversations, and the mass media, as well as from religion if religion is present at all, which is the reason narratives themselves sometimes acknowledge the limits of narration. An example of how religious discourse not only mingles with other discourses but also is self-​limiting is given by Stefania Pandolfo in her study of a young Muslim woman in Morocco struggling to recover from a devastating turn of events in her personal life. Roqiya was a twenty-​five-​year-​old psychiatric patient who spent her adolescence and early adulthood as a farmworker tending the trees and picking fruit on an orange grove plantation. Upon marrying, her new husband falsely accused her of not being a virgin, resulting in the marriage 65 Paul Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); on group style, see Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, “Culture in Interaction,” American Journal of Sociology 108 (2003), 735–​94; and on cultural pragmatics, Orlando Patterson, “Making Sense of Culture,” Annual Review of Sociology 40 (2014), 1–​30. 66 Margaret Frye, “Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi,” American Sociological Review 82, 5 (October 2017), 945–​76.

Religion’s Discursive Power  73 being invalidated and Roqiya becoming an outcast. During the months that Pandolfo interacted with her, Roqiya struggled to overcome the profound confusion, shame, and disorientation she experienced by seeking help from a psychiatrist, being hospitalized, becoming institutionalized in a psychiatric care facility, drawing on Islamic vocabularies, visiting sacred sanctuaries, hallucinating, considering legal recourse, entertaining the possibility that she was demon possessed, and talking with Pandolfo. Pandolfo’s analysis emphasizes the threads and knots that enter a narrative reconstruction process of this kind, showing that the fragments did not come together to form a coherent narrative but were a cacophony of voices that invalidated each other and left Roqiya without resolution. The most empowering aspect of the process was Roqiya’s hope that by talking with Pandolfo she was in a way providing a testimony about her struggle. Roqiya’s testimony, though, was not the creation of a new narrative about herself of the kind that is said to be the source of healing in much of the therapeutic literature. It was, rather, a move beyond narrative, an abandonment like those emphasized in poetry and music in which there is a turn toward imagery, non-​discursive speech, an affirmation of mystery, and in some instances silence. “I haven’t got any witness, not one person, who would testify for me,” Roqiya says. She cries. And then she sings, singing in the style of the songs she and the other girls sang in the orange groves. “Singing irrupts into her speech without warning; narrative gives way to fragment, to the visualization of rhyme,” Pandolfo writes. “The words chase and crisscross one another on the path of secret association. Her song is a precipitate of her life.”67 Roqiya’s story resembles what people say about the affirmations that come to mind when struggling with joblessness, domestic abuse, rejection, and bereavement. Pandolfo calls this the “empowerment of counterpoint.” The discourse is not singular but an ensemble of voices to which one gives expression and listens.

Sincerity How powerful a narrative is—​and even how persuasive a simple statement may be—​depends on how well it communicates the speaker’s sincerity. Consider the following. In 1939, the U.S. Senate and House Committees on

67 Pandolfo, “Testimony in Counterpoint,” 101.

74  Religion’s Power Military Affairs held hearings in advance of approving the nation’s first peacetime conscription bill. At issue for all the Protestant and Catholic leaders who testified at the hearings were recognition and protection of the rights of conscientious objectors. During World War I, conscientious objection rights were granted to members in good standing of the Historic Peace Churches—​ Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren. But in the intervening years, interfaith pacifist organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation had grown, and nearly all the largest Protestant denominations had approved measures supporting the rights of individual conscientious objectors. The question the congressional committees needed to answer, now that membership in Historic Peace Churches was not the only relevant criterion, was how to decide that persons claiming exemption on grounds of conscientious objection were sincere. This was an instance in which religion’s power was clearly at stake. Religion could effectively be a reason for someone to avoid serving actively in military combat by performing alternative noncombatant service or in some cases to not participate in wartime service at all. It all depended on demonstrating sincerity. If a person’s religious beliefs against killing were sincere, religion’s power to effect the desired results was efficacious. If the claims were deemed insincere, the result was different. The claimant was determined to be a slacker, which implied a serious moral deficiency. Those were the questions in 1939 and have remained the same to the present. Similar questions prevail in many religious freedom cases: special exemption from military service on holidays, military regulations about hairstyles, cases involving religious objections about serving gay people, and providing insurance coverage for birth control. Whether the claimants are deemed sincere influences the outcomes.68 The same is true in everyday life. We say things that we hope will be perceived as sincere utterances, and we make similar assessments about what we hear others say. These moment-​by-​moment performances and evaluations occur in casual conversations, when we say good morning to a neighbor, in classrooms, and in business meetings. We decide if what has been said seems sincere or insincere or if sincerity doesn’t matter. When face-​to-​face interaction is involved, we take cues from how things are said—​intonation, facial expressions, body language—​as well as from what is said. When interaction 68 Paul Barker, “Religious Exemptions and the Vocational Dimension of Work,” Columbia Law Review, 119 (January 2019), 169–​204; Anna Su, “Judging Religious Sincerity,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 5 (2016), 28–​48.

Religion’s Discursive Power  75 is not face to face (email, text messages, written documents), sincerity is still an important aspect of how we evaluate the situation. Sometimes the stakes are high, bearing on whether a witness is to be believed or a diagnosis is credible; much of the time, the stakes are low, although rarely so low as to have no bearing on what we do. How do we make these assessments? In writing about communicative action, Habermas drew on speech act theory to identify the conditions under which effective (one could say, powerful) utterances were likely to be perceived as valid. One of these was the sincerity of the speaker, or, as he also termed it, truthfulness. The others were truth, by which he meant accuracy in relation to the external world; comprehensibility in terms of language; and appropriateness or “rightness” in terms of social norms. For Habermas, sincerity was present when what a person said matched what that person thought. In short, sincerity has to do with the relationship between something about a person’s subjective state of mind and a person’s public utterances.69 This is how other writers have defined sincerity as well. Bourdieu, for instance, says that sincerity is achieved when there is “harmony between the expectations inscribed in the position occupied . . . and the dispositions of the occupant.”70 Sincerity is one of a class of topics that social scientists interested in the study of culture have found difficult to investigate. Whether someone meant what they said and whether what someone heard them say was indeed what they meant quickly get into murky territory. The problem is that subjective meanings cannot be observed directly, leaving researchers to posit that unconscious motives and hidden values exist and having to speculate about what those are. Having to make guesses about subjectivity is the reason many approaches focus instead on what can be observed—​talk, action, and practice—​rather than on meanings other than acknowledging that people tend to behave meaningfully. Habermas, on this account, can be taken as specifying conditions for meaningful communication to take place. Still, for an utterance to be meaningful, Habermas insists that the chances are greater if it is spoken sincerely. Moreover, although Habermas is principally concerned with rational deliberative communication, his discussion of sincerity pertains not only to congruence between specific assertions and thoughts

69 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984). 70 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 95.

76  Religion’s Power but also to how they reflect speakers’ underlying assumptions, beliefs, and self-​understandings.71 A practice approach starts by locating sincerity within the situations—​ fields, Bourdieu calls them—​in which it occurs. For example, Bourdieu suggests that journalism is a field in which several norms (“structures of perception”) encouraging the expression and reception of sincerity can be identified. First, there is a presumption of sincerity, meaning that journalists expect what they hear and read from colleagues to have been expressed truthfully. Second, this expectation is monitored in the sense that journalists are also critically on the lookout for possible deception (their “practical mastery” of the field gives them a “nose” for insincerity). Third, conformity to norms of sincerity is reinforced by punitive mechanisms, such as being publicly discredited. Fourth, norms of sincerity pertain specifically to thoughts about topics appropriately discussed within fields rather than to all possible topics (for instance, journalists’ thoughts about a recent publication in their field, not what they happen to think about baseball). Fifth, by implication, sincerity may be governed by different norms in other fields: doctors are expected to be sincere in making diagnoses but may withhold telling patients the most worrisome thoughts about the diagnosis, and lawyers, rarely known for sincerity, nevertheless are expected to speak sincerely about what they think is best for their clients. Finally, fields have special occasions in which rules are discussed and adjudication is determined. Tribunals, hearings, trials, and oversight committees are examples. These come into play when sincerity may be in question or have special implications for individuals and institutions.72 Just as in journalism, there is often a bias in religion toward speaking sincerely and expecting that others will also speak sincerely. Webb Keane says a distinctive feature of modern Protestant-​centric religion, for example, is its emphasis on making truthful assertions that imply a hierarchy in which belief comes first and determines what is said, which in turn is to be taken seriously (authoritatively) if spoken sincerely.73 In other traditions, sincerity may have less to do with belief but be a consideration in how ritual activity is understood and in how moral instruction occurs.74 Speaking sincerely 71 Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 72 Bourdieu, Field, 95. 73 Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 210. 74 Adam Seligman, “Secularism and the Problem of Sincerity: A New Approach to Ritual,” Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society 1 (2015), 1–​21.

Religion’s Discursive Power  77 may be further encouraged in teachings about the monitoring of an omniscient deity. Sincerity is expected to be a disposition, a practice to which one is habituated, an intrinsic virtue that facilitates trust.75 Moreover, the connection between what one says and what one thinks may be expected to reflect something about who one is—​not a role but the true self—​and thus affirms as normative a kind of religion in which subjectivity and belief are given priority. To suggest that sincerity prevails simply as a feature of modern life, though, is to overlook the deep extent to which sincerity is governed by situational norms. Just as situational rules guide the expression of feelings, sincerity rules define what counts and doesn’t count as sincerity. Sincerity rules are evident in the following example. In 1855, eighteen-​year-​old Dwight L. Moody decided he should join a church. He would later become the century’s most influential evangelist, but at the time was selling shoes at his uncle’s store in Boston. Apparently to garnish the young salesman’s reputation, his uncle insisted he belong to a church. Moody dutifully presented himself to the Mount Vernon Congregational Church’s leaders who examined prospective members’ knowledge of scripture and doctrine. Moody was woefully ignorant. He had no idea what “conversion” was and could give no particulars about Christ’s love. A year later Moody presented himself again but with little improvement. He was granted membership anyway. The committee was impressed with his sincerity.76 But what did that mean? What impressed them specifically were the emotion, candor, and intensity with which he spoke, which happened to be his mode of selling shoes. More importantly, those were also the sincerity rules that characterized the revival preaching that swept through New England during the Second Great Awakening and for which the preacher at Mount Vernon was a leading advocate. Emotional sincerity was in; doctrinal sincerity was out. Moody’s presentation of himself was just right. Later, sincerity rules came into play again as Moody’s fame increased. Moody’s admirers in fundamentalist denominations said the 1857 event proved that God smiled on this kind of sincerity: unlikely convert that he was, Moody’s sincerity made him a great evangelist. Critics in other

75 How insincerity undermines trust is demonstrated in an interesting study of product promotion employees; see Marko Itesa, Zen Goh, and Stefan Thau, “Mandates of Dishonesty: The Psychological and Social Costs of Mandated Attitude Expression,” Organization Science 29, 3 (May–​June 2018), 418–​31. 76 James R. Findlay Jr., Dwight L. Moody: American Evangelist, 1837–​1899 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 49–​50.

78  Religion’s Power denominations told it differently: his sincerity was the emotionalism that led people astray; true sincerity required biblical knowledge. Erving Goffman described something like sincerity rules in writing about “normal appearances.”77 When norms governing social interaction are well established, the persons involved have no reason to question one another’s intentions. They assume that people are acting in good faith, meaning that as far as sincerity is concerned, the sincerity rules are taken for granted, invisible, and nondeliberative. If there are conflicting norms, though, questions arise. In those situations, concerns about insincerity necessitate engaging in what might be termed sincerity work, which is performative, though it needn’t be deliberative, and is communicated both corporeally and discursively. Sincerity work is what we do in speech and action and through intonation and body language in conversation with ourselves and others to show that we are sincere. It is in the first instance a matter of interiority, aligning what others hear and see with what we feel and think. But it is facilitated by the rules through which sincerity is expressed and the materials (stories, texts, rituals, accoutrements) we have at our disposal.78 Magdalena Craciun provides an interesting example of the sincerity work that occurs when religious messaging occurs out of place. In her study of young fashionably veiled Muslim women working as entrepreneurs in Istanbul, she found that their perceived sincerity was important for the viability of their business. Operating high-​fashion boutiques as they did in an intensely competitive commercial market, they were on display as persons, selling an image of themselves that potential buyers needed to evaluate as sincere rather than as somehow put on for show. If buyers were skeptical, they simply turned to other sellers. Being veiled or wearing headscarves clearly identified them as Muslim and in the context was understood to be an expression of personal piety. But the fact that they were fashionably attired and working as entrepreneurs ran counter to that understanding. Had they been at a mosque, the sincerity of their piety would have more easily been assumed, but in the market it was piety out of place. The women understood this and were troubled by the incongruity not only for its impact on business but also because they wanted how they were perceived to be consistent with how they thought about themselves. To attain greater consistency, they 77 Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Basic, 1971), 239. 78 Examples of “doing” sincerity are discussed in Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel E. Smith, editors, The Rhetoric of Sincerity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Religion’s Discursive Power  79 practiced several kinds of sincerity work. They assiduously conformed to Islamic requirements for modesty in their personal demeanor and in selling clothing with appropriate neck, waist, and hemlines. They expressed their piety and their concerns with other sellers. And they gossiped critically about sellers who transgressed the rules, thereby affirming their own sincerity. At times, they openly confronted and directly admonished transgressive sellers and on other occasions posted comments on social media. In talking with the women privately, Craciun was impressed that they had also developed a personal narrative in which they described their piety as having become more reflective, honest, and authentic because of their work.79 Another example of religious messaging out of place demonstrates a different kind of sincerity work. Public officials are expected to convey sincerity about what they say when they give speeches, but these efforts tend to be discounted by widespread cynicism about politics in general and by the notion that whatever seems to be sincere is at best staged strategically for effect. It is thus a challenge when public officials are tasked with making nonpolitical speeches, such as in the aftermath of shootings and at funerals. This was the challenge British Prime Minister Tony Blair faced in 1997 when speaking about Diana, Princess of Wales, a few hours after her death. Blair’s remarks were widely perceived to have been sincere and indeed more so than those of the Queen and Earl Spencer who also spoke. An analysis of the speech identified several features of what was said and how it was said that appeared to have contributed to this perception. It was short on declarative statements that in more formal settings establish relationships between assertions and facts. It was instead, as the occasion required, long on expressive statements that established a relationship between assertions and the speakers’ feelings and beliefs. These expressive words furthered a sense of informality and intimacy that increased the importance of appearing sincere. The danger in that was appearing to be speaking strategically or adhering too closely to a prepared text, which was a flaw in the Queen’s speech. In contrast, Blair’s speech was filled with pauses and hesitations that gave the impression that he was choosing his words in the moment rather than mouthing others’ words. The speech thus succeeded in being received as an authentic expression of Blair’s subjective state.80 79 Magdalena Craciun, “A Seller’s Sincerity: The Fashionably Veiled Designer-​Entrepreneur in Turkey,” Ethnos 84, 3 (2019), 415–​35. 80 Martin Montgomery, “Speaking Sincerely: Public Reactions to the Death of Diana,” Language and Literature 8, 1 (1999), 5–​33.

80  Religion’s Power The challenges of demonstrating one’s sincerity exist even for religious professionals serving in religiously appointed institutions. One challenge is that religious organizations are businesses that in some cases richly reward the clergy who serve them, which raises questions about their intentions.81 Another occurs when religious organizations bring together people from diverse backgrounds whose instinct is to distrust one another. In a study of Catholic parishes in Italy served by immigrant priests from Sri Lanka, for example, the laity were uncertain about whether they wanted the priests and doubtful about the priests’ training. The priests engaged in special sincerity work to win the laity’s trust, demonstrating sincerity through a careful selection of liturgical words, choice of vestments, measured hand gestures, how they “moved across the altar during mass,” and how they “established eye contact with parishioners.”82 Religious leaders transgressing moral norms is another instance in which special sincerity work is required: when a “family values” pastor has illicit sex or an “impecunious” leader secretly invests in oil fields. The transgression may have been facilitated in the first place by an appearance of sincerity, such as cultivating sexual harassment victims’ trust by claiming to care for them. Darren Dochuk argues in Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America that evangelical leaders sincerely believed they were reaping God’s blessings: The allegories of deistic favor they deployed, the manifest destiny in which they enveloped society: oil’s elite wielded these sacred discourses in a quest to conquer, but their words also stemmed from sincere conviction that America’s guardianship of crude meant it was responsible for elevating all humanity.

It was the discourse that mattered, Dochuk says, words they spoke to themselves and to whoever was listening about praying, asking God to locate the oil, and fervently thanking God for blessing their ministries.83

81 Christian Smith, Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 228–​29. 82 Bernardo E. Brown, “In Search of the Solemn with Sri Lankan Migrant Priests,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 28 (2017), 180–​94, quote on page 191. 83 Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 10.

Religion’s Discursive Power  81 While sincerity hinges on others’ perceptions, it also requires persuading oneself that what one says is consistent with what one believes. Narratives that serve this purpose are evident in Craciun’s example of women telling themselves that their work has furthered the authentication of their beliefs as devout Muslims. Something similar has been observed among Christians who testify to their faith by witnessing to friends and neighbors or who repeatedly “go forward” at evangelistic revival meetings. The testifying and repenting serve as an occasion to affirm the sincerity of one’s beliefs. The need to do this is heightened by the fact that modern religion is so much about thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and private convictions, all of which are fleeting and subject to the influences of multiple contexts and roles, that opportunities to affirm and reaffirm the sincerity of one’s beliefs must be made use of to full advantage. The difficulty is compounded when a person’s inner identity is understood to be contextually contingent. As Lionel Trilling observed in arguing that sincerity is a modern problem, “we cannot say of the patriarch Abraham that he was a sincere man. That statement must seem only comical. The sincerity of Achilles or Beowulf cannot be discussed: they neither have nor lack sincerity.” Moreover, Trilling suggests, it is not enough simply to assert one’s sincerity, as in saying “I sincerely believe”; it takes work to persuade oneself of one’s sincerity.84 A study of two U.S. Protestant evangelical congregations found that all these concerns about sincerity were present. Despite knowing one another and worshiping regularly in one another’s presence, the members worried about whether they were truly sincere about what they believed and said. They wanted to feel authentic but had heard so often that people could seem to be Christians without sincerely believing that they were concerned. It especially bothered them to think that their prayers were insincere: words they recited from habit or because a group leader had called on them to pray. What resulted, the study found, was a kind of “normative frame” that generated implicit agreement about what was sincere and what wasn’t. The implicit agreement was manifested in discourse: the members learned to say they were praying “from the heart” and to criticize “empty” prayers, they shared intimate personal experiences and criticized themselves for not sharing enough, they discussed “warning signs” of impending hypocrisy, they expressed anxiety about what they were doing and used personal self-​referencing language 84 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 2, 6.

82  Religion’s Power in talking about God, and they intensified their discourse with statements about “really feeling” things and “meaning it” when they spoke.85 Apologies are one of the more interesting ways in which discourse attempts to persuade speakers and listeners of sincerity. Apologies include the person offended, the speaker, the speaker’s allies, critics, and the public. The speaker’s interest in being perceived as sincere includes alleviating guilt, being forgiven, and retaining whatever status and power that may have allowed the breach to happen in the first place. By acknowledging that a social norm has been violated, an apology also reinforces that norm’s power. Studies suggest that sincere apologies repair relationships and restore moral equilibrium.86 In contrast, lab experiments demonstrate an “insincerity aversion” when apologies are perceived to have been given for instrumental reasons.87 If a crime has been committed, some evidence also suggests that sincere apologies contribute to avoiding prosecution.88 When offenses occur in religious communities, several additional considerations are likely to be present. If the offense is perceived as having violated the community’s religious teachings, the sincerity with which an apology is given reinforces those teachings. If long-​term relationships are involved, the stakes are higher. And how the apology is expressed is likely to be shaped by familiar language, such as scripts about forgiveness and reconciliation.89 The discursive factors successfully communicating sincerity are like the ones identified in narratives of self-​transformation but with several exceptions. The emotional trajectory is reversed, now moving from high to low, as in having felt good about oneself and subsequently feeling sorrow and shame. Agency must be communicated clearly, as in taking responsibility for one’s action rather than blaming circumstances or the victim. Autobiographical reasoning in which the offense is named is demonstrated by the offender making statements about having struggled, prayed, or sought counseling or planned to do so, but the account of this reasoning is delicate

85 Daniel Winchester and Jeffrey Guhin, “Praying ‘Straight from the Heart’: Evangelical Sincerity and the Normative Frames of Culture in Action,” Poetics 72 (2019), 32–​42. 86 Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 87 Elias L. Khalil and Nick Feltovich, “Moral Licensing, Instrumental Apology and Insincerity Aversion: Taking Immanuel Kant to the Lab,” PLoS One 13, 11 (2018), 1–​24. 88 For example, drivers who apologize to police for speeding have been found to receive lower fines; Martin V. Day and Michael Ross, “The Value of Remorse: How Drivers’ Responses to Police Predict Fines for Speeding,” Law and Human Behavior 35 (2011), 221–​34. 89 Danielle Celermajer, The Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apologies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 8.

Religion’s Discursive Power  83 because, unlike self-​transformation, it has to reconcile acknowledgment of the offense with a self-​concept that has been modified but not fundamentally changed.90 Social support is shown by having someone present (such as a spouse or clergyperson) or by mentioning their support and by personally verbalizing an apology rather than apologizing through a written statement.91 And how repair and restitution will be enacted is expressed in statements about plans such as resigning from one’s position, doing community service, or assisting the victim. Enlarging the spatial and temporal frame is accomplished in several ways: confessing to and apologizing for other offenses; stating that true recovery and forgiveness take time and work; referencing language about therapy, recovery, and mindfulness; and bringing divine power into the narrative. The role of emotion and body language varies, although some research suggests that sincerity work is facilitated by appearances of self-​confidence, which in turn is indicated by speaking in higher volume and with greater variation in volume.92 Instances in which apologies are deemed to have been “botched” offer instructive examples of the norms governing expressions of sincerity. A study of two apologies in which religion was at issue—​Pope Benedict XVI’s apology for remarks about Islam and actor Mel Gibson’s apology for anti-​Semitic comments—​suggested the following: apologies are less likely to be perceived as sincere if they appear to have been issued under pressure than voluntarily, if they rely on formulaic or quoted speech rather than appearing to be spontaneous, if they in any way denigrate the victim, if too much time has elapsed since the offense, and if the wording of the apology appears to be hedged

90 On the issue of sincerity and falsification in reconciling events with self-​narratives, see Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Penguin, 1966), 180. 91 Some research suggests that sincerity is more likely to be perceived in face-​to-​face and in verbal communication than in written or online communication because speakers have a greater incentive to be honest for fear of being called out or that facial expressions may convey dishonesty; for instance, see Maryalice Citera, Russell Beauregard, and Takashi Mitsuya, “An Experimental Study of Credibility in e-​Negotiations,” Psychology and Marketing 22, 2 (February 2005), 163–​79; Alex B. Van Zant and Laura J. Kray, “’I Can’t Lie to Your Face’: Minimal Face-​to-​Face Interaction Promotes Honesty,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 55 (November 2014), 234–​38; and Roderick I. Swaab, Adam D. Galinsky, and Victoria Medvec, “The Communication Orientation Model: Explaining the Diverse Effects of Sight, Sound, and Synchronicity on Negotiation and Group Decision-​Making Outcomes,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 16, 1 (2012), 25–​53. 92 Alex B. Van Zant and Jonah Berger, “How the Voice Persuades,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 118, 4 (April 2020), 661–​ 82; Sanderijn Cels, “Interpreting Political Apologies: The Neglected Role of Performance,” Political Psychology 36, 3 (2015), 351–​60; Johanna Kirchhoff and Sabina Cehajic-​Clancy, “Intergroup Apologies: Does It Matter What They Say? Experimental Analyses,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 20, 4 (2014), 430–​51.

84  Religion’s Power by legal considerations.93 An analysis of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s 1988 handling of being discovered to have had relationships with a prostitute revealed similar dynamics. Swaggart’s initial apology to his congregation and television audience in which he tearfully showed remorse and described his behavior as sinful was positively received, but as he subsequently shifted blame onto the pornography industry and resisted calls for church discipline, his situation deteriorated to the point that he resigned.94 The other instances in which sincerity plays a role in religious discourse include religious organizations attempting to “sell” an idea, project, or cause. Selling requires projecting sincerity about what one is selling. But the same ambiguities that faced the Turkish sellers occur if religious organizations seek to communicate sincere messages of warmth, modesty, caring, and generosity but do so in lavish buildings. Research on commercial branding suggests why. When respondents in a large representative survey were asked to rate dozens of well-​known brands (such as Nike, Hallmark, Marriott, Maytag, and Sears) on more than a hundred traits, the results produced five distinct “brand personalities,” one of which was “sincerity” (the others were “excitement,” “competence,” “sophistication,” and “ruggedness”). The traits that signaled sincerity were ones that religious organizations wanting to be perceived as sincere would typically emphasize: honest, genuine, cheerful, wholesome, warm, accepting, family-​oriented, and friendly. In the study, being perceived as glamorous lowered the chances of being considered sincere. In a discussion of the study’s implications for Islam, scholars have also stressed the value of demonstrating modesty and simplicity as well as sincerity.95 “Cause marketing” is another topic in which the role of sincerity is evident. Cause marketing refers to efforts to persuade donors, clients, members, and customers that their participation contributes to a larger purpose. 93 Clyde Ancamo, “When Are Public Apologies ‘Successful’? Focus on British and French Apology Press Uptakes,” Journal of Pragmatics 84 (2015), 139–​53; on conflicts with legal discourse, see Lee Taft, “Apology Subverted: The Commodification of Apology,” Yale Law Journal 109, 5 (March 2000), 1135–​60. 94 Karen L. Legg, “Religious Celebrity: An Analysis of Image Repair Discourse,” Journal of Public Relations Research 21, 2 (2009), 240–​50. 95 Jennifer L. Aaker, “Dimensions of Brand Personality,” Journal of Marketing Research 34 (1997), 347–​56; subsequent research suggested that perceived sincerity also distinguished brands within a particular industry; Na Su and Dennis Reynolds, “Categorical Differences of Hotel Brand Personality: Identifying Competition Across Hotel Categories,” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 31, 4 (2019), 1801–​18; Muhammad Ahmed and Muhammad Tahir Jan, “An Extension of Aaker’s Brand Personality Model from Islamic Perspective: A Conceptual Study,” Journal of Islamic Marketing 6, 3 (2015), 388–​405.

Religion’s Discursive Power  85 Humanitarian, environmental, antipoverty, public health, moral, and religious causes promoted as organizations’ principal activities or as special programs are examples. The typical cause marketing narrative identifies a serious problem that appears to be so overwhelming as to make potential contributors feel powerless and then suggests that contributing is an opportunity to do good and will induce feelings of having done something useful, perhaps resulting in gratitude toward the organization for having made the opportunity possible. In experiments examining which narratives were most effective, the key proved to be sincerity: subjects were more likely to contribute or to say they would contribute when they perceived the narrative to be communicating sincere altruistic motives, and that perception in turn was more likely when the cause was being advanced by a smaller organization that was presumed to be more personal and committing more of its resources and when warmth and gratitude were present. Research also suggests that perceived sincerity is influenced by organizations’ and founders’ overall moral reputations, primary products and industry location, and innovativeness.96 A discussion of sincerity would not be complete without considering instances in which it is acceptable to not be sincere. A person who “plays devil’s advocate” announces that for the sake of debate what is about to be said should not be perceived as an assertion of what that person sincerely believes. This is an example of understanding the norm of speaking sincerely and deliberately signaling a “time out.” Quoted speech, followed by a statement such as “well, that’s what they said,” is a way to make an assertation without implying that it is what one sincerely believes. “I’m only joking” is another signal that what is being said is not being said sincerely. The “only joking” signal has an added benefit when it is said retroactively, allowing the speaker to be heard as having made a sincere statement but then being able to deny after the fact that it was sincere. A crude, hateful statement can thus be made with utter sincerity and then taken back once it has been called out. Opting out in these ways is contingent on the contextual norms governing expectations about sincerity. Playing devil’s advocate is obviously less appropriate in a church than in a lecture hall. Metaphoric language, such as “I’m swamped at work” or “the streets of heaven are paved with gold,” can also 96 Eline L. E. DeVries and Lola C. Duque, “Small but Sincere: How Firm Size and Gratitude Determine the Effectiveness of Cause Marketing Campaigns,” Journal of Retailing 94, 4 (2018), 352–​63; Ilya R.P Cuypers, Ping-​Sheng Koh, and Heli Wang, “Sincerity in Corporate Philanthropy, Stakeholder Perceptions and Firm Value,” Organization Science 27, 1 (2016), 173–​88; Nevena Radoynovska and Brayden G. King, “To Whom Are You True? Audience Perceptions of Authenticity in Nascent Crowdfunding Ventures,” Organization Science 30, 1 (2019), 1–​23.

86  Religion’s Power sidestep questions of sincerity by making it clear that what has been said was not meant to be taken literally and yet implying that some deeper meaning was intended to be expressed sincerely. Another method of opting out is avoiding making an assertion at all. The question of sincerity depends on how one has answered the prior questions, “Shall I have a belief about this?” and “Must I say anything about my beliefs?” If I have not expressed an opinion, then I cannot be accused of having spoken insincerely. This is relevant to religious discourse, which in its therapeutic manifestations encourages self-​disclosure. And yet, because religion is for the most part voluntary and because much of it occurs in spaces that privilege privacy, it is possible to avoid saying much about what one does or does not believe, which means a person can be a sincere “believer” without having to be sincere about anything specific (speaking only about how one “feels”). It is possible to go a step further and assert that one does not and need not have a belief about something, in which case the question about sincerity shifts to how sincerely a person can assert “I don’t know,” “don’t ask me,” “it’s impossible for anyone to know.” If what one truly believes about God, for instance, is that it is impossible to know anything about God, then a person can say that sincerely. The difficulty comes only when the group norms require a more explicit assertion of belief, as in the case of reciting creeds and other ritualized discourse in which believers publicly affirm their beliefs.97 Ritualized discourse poses another interesting question about speakers’ sincerity. On one account, ritual circumvents having to think about sincerity at all. What you think about it doesn’t matter, Adam Seligman says, “What you are is what you are in the doing.”98 But it may be hard to escape questioning if the performance is sincere. Because sincerity in ordinary life is communicated better by showing emotion and by varying intonation and facial expression, ritual speaking that consists of scripted words said in monotone or chanted would seem insincere.99 That it does seem insincere enough to generate pushback is evident in what writer Chris Haw terms “anti-​ritual sincerity”—​a style of worship at the large evangelical congregation where he

97 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 88; a practical implication is that polls in which people are asked to affirm specific religious beliefs often produce quite different results when a “don’t know” response is provided and when people who gave no response are queried or given the opportunity of saying what they think in their own words. 98 Adam Seligman, “Ritual, the Self, and Sincerity,” Social Research 76, 4 (2009), 1073–​96, quote on page 1078. 99 See Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 186, on this contrast.

Religion’s Discursive Power  87 served as a worship leader that deliberately encouraged worshipers to exhibit emotion as a means of showing that they were more sincere than people at other churches where staid textualized ritual was practiced.100 But this is also an illustration of situational sincerity. People at the evangelical church thought they needed to show emotion to be sincere, yet when Haw returned after having become a member of a liturgical church, the emotion at the evangelical church seemed insincere. Looking at the worship leaders on enormous screens with “expression-​loaded faces, eyes squinted and hands raised in pious communication,” he wrote, “I felt like I was being shown, for lack of better words, spiritual pornography—​too much and too close.” What had earlier seemed like sincere heartfelt worship now seemed like “apparent sincerity.” It was overexposure. People seemed to be trying too hard to exhibit sincerity. The point is that sincerity work is always performed within the constraints of sincerity rules, where the constraints supply the occasion for both conformity and transgression. The person who demonstrates sincerity by expressing joy depends on it being understood as such by those who perceive it. And in so conforming, they reinforce the rules. Sincerity is similarly evaluated according to the prevailing norms. The person who boasts sincerely of being a great believer (or having caught the largest fish) will be judged a fraud unless there is supportive evidence—​or an understanding that boasting is not to be taken seriously. Other circumstances may require that a person testify to the sincerity of the person’s beliefs—​or, better, say nothing at all.

Resistance If discourse is the repertoire of words, idioms, statements, and expressive practices through which we make sense of ourselves, then resistance can be an important part of that repertoire, operating in opposition to certain unwanted acts and against certain undesired understandings of oneself. The capacity to resist impositions of power through the creative improvisation of discourse is both appealing and frustrating. Its appeal resides in the possibility that small changes in what people say and how they speak can make big changes in power relations if conducted long enough and strategically 100 Chris Haw, “Ritual of Sincerity: A Response to ‘Worship at Willow Creek,’” America, February 6, 2014, www.amer​icam​agaz​ine.org.

88  Religion’s Power enough. Examples include challenges discursively expressed through anecdotes, stories, cautionary tales, feints, and aversions—​“weapons of the weak,” James C. Scott calls them—​against the built-​in inequalities perpetuated in language around wealth, gender, race, and sexual orientation.101 The frustration is that small challenges are difficult to demonstrate having much impact in the absence of other factors such as legislation, judicial rulings, and regime change. Nevertheless, much of the interest in discursive power in religious settings has been concerned with resistance and has been of particular interest in these settings because discourse rather than political power is primary. This interest, moreover, has been part of the larger reorientation in studies of power that focuses on unlikely, unconventional, small, local, everyday resistances.102 A distinguishing feature of religion in modern pluralistic societies is that the capacity to construct personal narratives is largely unimpeded by institutional controls. This capacity is strikingly reduced in many other institutional contexts. Legal settings, for example, demonstrate the extent to which lawyers control courtroom testimony, manipulating the order of questions, minimizing responses, and tailoring descriptions of events to fit prescribed narratives that differ markedly from how litigants would tell stories themselves.103 Examples of state authorities controlling narratives are also evident in studies of refugees: asylum seekers are besieged with questions rather than being able to tell their own stories.104 In other contexts, persons in power exercise control less by reducing narratives to prescribed formulas than by adding their own embellishments. For instance, research on university institutional human subject review committees has shown members frequently posing questions and making observations that extend well beyond their role in protecting human subjects.105 101 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 29; Robyn Thomas, Albert J. Mills, and Jean Helms Mills, “Introduction: Resisting Gender, Gendering Resistance,” in Identity Politics at Work: Resisting Gender, Gendering Resistance, edited by Robyn Thomas, Albert J. Mills, and Jean Helms Mills (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–​16; Pushkala Prasad and Anshuman Prasad, “Stretching the Iron Cage: The Constitution and Implications of Routine Workplace Resistance,” Organization Science 11, 4 (August 2000), 387–​403. 102 Lila Abu-​Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, 1 (February 1990), 41–​55. 103 Chris Heffer, The Language of Jury Trial: A Corpus-​Aided Analysis of Legal-​Lay Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Diana Eades, Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process (Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters, 2010). 104 Heba Gowayed, “Resettled and Unsettled: Syrian Refugees and the Intersection of Race and Legal Status in the United States,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, 16 (March 2019), 1–​20. 105 Laura Stark, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Religion’s Discursive Power  89 The closest to such institutional controls over religious discourse occurs in creeds to which persons are expected to confess consent and moral prescriptions that adherents are expected to follow. It is of interest in studies of religion to investigate how people manage to resist these controls. The simplest and most obvious connection of religious discourse and resistance, though, is how religious teachings themselves seek to empower adherents to resist certain kinds of behavior. Resistance is not against the teachings but against what the teachings say it should be against. Religion’s power manifests itself in implicit and explicit moral directives, guiding the faithful toward the good and away from evil. When Durkheim likened religion to the control that society exercises in ordinary life, it was this sense of moral authority that interested him. “Society requires us to make ourselves its servants,” he wrote, “it subjects us to all sorts of restraints, privations, and sacrifices,” not through “physical constraint” but with “moral power.” It was something that exercised pressure from the mental representations spoken “through the mouths of those who affirm them.”106 Religion’s moral authority is expressed in the many directives through which it seeks to guide resistance toward evil. These appear in scriptural directives against coveting, theft, adultery, and murder and in prayers for divine assistance in resisting temptation. They form a central part of religious teachings oriented toward spiritual perfection and the avoidance of sin. “Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscence from our carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality in all its forms, and the loves of worldly excitement and possession,” William James wrote in summarizing the ascetic religious teachings of his era. “All these sources of sin must be resisted.”107 James might also have referred to the powerful discourse of the temperance movement and the Comstock Laws that sought to suppress the circulation of obscene literature. What we know from the research on religious discourse is that narratives oriented toward mobilizing resistance against evil include the following: first, a definition that draws a moral distinction between good and evil; second, a rhetorical intensification of that distinction; third, a story or stories offering reasons for the distinction; fourth, examples of persons and events that illustrate the distinction; fifth, an extension of the temporal and spatial framing of the distinction; and sixth, a prescription for thinking about and doing

106 Durkheim, Elementary Forms, 209–​10.

107 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 231.

90  Religion’s Power things to engage in resistance. Consider what James writes about an individual whose tender conscience is religiously quickened: “Unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of one’s being and appointer of one’s spiritual fate.”108 For James, this is an interior battleground that results in “religious melancholy,” but it is equally an illustration of the perfectionist narratives that interested him. A tender conscience is quickened by teachings about concupiscence and other temptations. The distinction between righteousness and sin is amplified by words such as “vile” and by calls for “remorse.” The reasons for sin are attributed to moral failure. The expanded temporal and spatial frame is evident in references to the “author of one’s being” and “appointer of one’s spiritual fate.” And the call for reflection and action is present in the individual being unhappy and in need of remorse. Notably, these are the characteristics research associates with narratives that evoke empowerment when played out to their logical conclusion. The emotional trajectory is from unhappiness toward an anticipated state of happiness when temptation is effectively resisted. An increase in personal agency is implied as the narrative moves an individual from what James describes as “chaos within” toward knowing how to make a satisfactory resolution. Moreover, the religious narratives telling a person that chaos rules facilitate autobiographical reasoning about what one has been doing wrong and needs to correct. Resistance then takes on greater meaning as an act of personal redemption. In simple stories of self-​transformation, the narrative circulates straightforwardly around a problem, pitfall, or temptation that needs to be overcome. One of the perennial questions of religious instruction (as in parenting and education) is how to persuade children that evil should be resisted and goodness embraced. Stories have been the preferred method, whether in fables, fiction, biographical accounts, or age-​appropriate versions of scriptural narratives. In nineteenth-​century America, periodicals became a popular way of publicizing these stories. The typical story described a child with whom a young reader could identify who had done something reprehensible. The narrative then progressed toward resolution, variously dramatizing the seriousness of the wrongdoing, introducing a guide or role model, including remorse and reflection on the part of the child, and concluding with the child

108

Ibid., 130.

Religion’s Discursive Power  91 being restored to good graces expressed in parental and divine love. The story of Little Louisa, which appeared repeatedly in the 1830s and 1840s, was an example. According to the story, she was ten when her mother died, and, being raised by an “intemperate ungodly” father, she told lies, said “wicked words,” and was reliably reported by a neighbor, who said she was “one of the worst children he ever saw,” to have stolen things from his house. Her path to redemption was going to Sunday school, where she learned not to lie, to repent, and to speak (“it was truly delightful to hear her talk”) about heaven. As the story continues, her teacher takes her to tell a “little sick girl” about heaven. And to underscore the seriousness of repentance, the story ends with the death of the girl’s unrepentant father.109 The basic plot line of evil, resistance, and restorative action is evident in vastly different settings. At a 1983 meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, President Ronald Reagan employed a similar discourse about resisting evil. The speech, in which Reagan described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” expressed the president’s opposition to a verifiable nuclear freeze resolution under consideration in the U.S. Congress. Speaking as he was to a supportive audience of conservative Protestant leaders, it was an appropriate context to include religious language more than he often did. The speech referred repeatedly to God, the Bible, and prayer and mentioned temptation and salvation, as well as good and evil. It also described his support for issues of interest to the evangelical community (freedom of speech for campus ministries and restrictions on teen’s access to birth control). Having helped the churches, he now asked for their help in the crusade against evil. They should see the nuclear freeze proposal for the “very dangerous fraud” it was, resist the “temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all,” join the struggle between “good and evil,” and “pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness.”110 109 “The Wicked Girl Changed,” Pupil’s Monitor (Providence, RI), August 16, 1834. 110 Ronald Reagan, “Address to the National Association of Evangelicals [Evil Empire Speech],” March 8, 1983, www.nat​iona​lcen​ter.org. Terence Hunt, “Reagan Denounces Freeze as a ‘Fraud,’” Boston Globe, March 9, 1983; David Shribman, “Senate Rejects a Move to Make Nuclear Freeze an Immediate Goal,” New York Times, November 1, 1983. On sincerity (expressed through self-​ confidence, intonation, facial expression, and detailed content), word usage, and reciprocity language in the speech, see Juliana Vianna da Nobrega, “Discourse Analysis: Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire Speech,” Open Journal of Modern Linguistics 4 (2014), 166–​81. David O’Connell, God Wills It: Presidents and the Political Use of Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2015), 78, says the speech had no discernible results in terms of public policy. However, it was well received among evangelicals, assuring them as Reagan did in other speeches that they were important. Years later, Christianity Today (“Remembering Ronald Reagan,” June 1, 2004) called it “one of the most significant speeches of the 20th century.”

92  Religion’s Power Resistance in these examples is action situated in the struggle of good against evil. The narrative presents the protagonist as someone with whom the reader or listener can identify and who has a problem that must be dealt with (Little Louisa’s wickedness, Reagan’s evil empire). The danger is amplified as the story proceeds with images of death and destruction and with evidence that others besides the narrator recognize the danger. The threat is to truth, well-​being, and one’s very existence. The language locates the immediate struggle in the context of other narratives about good and evil. It brings home the contrast by personalizing it (Reagan’s speech included a story about a man who would rather see his child die than have her fall under communism). Lest the danger be paralyzing, the narrative presents a solution and invites the listener to act. Resistance is not only redemption; it is also an act of reciprocity, repaying the redemption by doing something the narrator asks.111 There is another kind of resistance, however, that has taken the study of religion’s discursive power in a different direction. The concept of hegemonic discourse that appears in Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Frederic Jameson, among others, points to the persistent presence of vocabularies that are so widely shared and so taken for granted that they exercise power in ways difficult to resist. Hegemonic narratives are not transcendent narratives that make propositional statements about the universe. They are localized stories in the background that define assumptions about personal worth, success, gender, race, and sexuality. Before they can be resisted, they must be recalled. Resistance in the first instance is therefore a matter of consciousness raising—​of bringing into awareness the lines within each story, Anne Norton says, “that enable it to be told again differently.”112 On the larger stage, resistance that raises consciousness is the work of organizations and movements and politics. However, the fine-​grained work of resistance is also a matter of discourse, which research demonstrates is more than simply rejecting taken-​for-​granted vocabularies. The reality that we live inside a world defined by hegemonic discourse poses several questions that are not answered by the simple resist-​evil narrative. If there is a hegemonic discourse, how does one even begin to draw 111 Building on Alvin Gouldner’s work, Robert Cialdini’s widely read book on persuasion identified reciprocity as one of the key ingredients; see Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: William Morrow, 1984). 112 Anne Norton, Bloodrites of the Post-​Structuralists: Word, Flesh, and Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4.

Religion’s Discursive Power  93 sharp distinctions? Is that possible or are there ambiguities? Does drawing sharp distinctions get at the main issue if the issue is something as all-​ encompassing as materialism or neoliberal democracy or the quest for personal fulfillment? What do we do when there are multiple distinctions to choose from that do not yield any simple path toward resolution? Is it possible for resistance to be framed in ordinary conversation, or does it have to be in formulaic credal directives? How does a person in the process of determining that something should be resisted deal with the subjective self-​ adjustments that happen? How does acting generate agency, and is there an embodied aspect to that? Are there subtle forms of resistance that involve reinterpretation of past events rather than actual behavioral changes? How might such reinterpretations from external sources be internalized? Because hegemonic discourse is so deeply woven into the fabric of everyday experience, implicitly constituting definitions of space and time as well as of bodies and emotions, the literature on resistance has drawn from insights about the social construction of reality and from discussions rooted in phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory. On the assumption that ordinary reality is constituted through ordinary social interaction, ordinary talk, and ordinary gestures, the focus is thus on what about these might be of interest as potential sources of resistance. More specifically, the question is: How can the background dispositions that inform social interaction be brought into conscious awareness? Leela Prasad’s anthropological research on the practical ethics of Hindu and other Indic religions in South Asia illustrates an approach that tackles this question. Prasad draws on Paul Ricoeur, who argued that there is a “pre-​narrative structure of experience” that is brought into consciousness and transformed through narratives that in turn shape our perception of the world. If that is the case, Prasad suggests, then a useful starting point is what she calls “conversational stories.” These are everyday accounts, sometimes original and sometimes recounted from textual narratives, that a person tells, another person listens to, and then are iteratively retold and connected to other stories. “As experiences are selected, synthesized, organized into narratives, and expressed in dialogue,” Prasad writes, “the question of ‘moral meaning’ becomes a zone of exploration for both the narrator and the listener(s) in different ways.”113 This is the relevance of 113 Leela Prasad, Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 183–​84.

94  Religion’s Power conversational stories to practical ethics. The moral meanings communicated in these narratives consist of messages about who and what is or is not worth admiring. Conversational stories are, in this understanding, more than the ways in which cognitive schemas organize and divide perceptions of reality. They carry prescriptive information about what is proper, desirable, and effective. Conversational storytelling happens paradigmatically over backyard fences, in pubs, and at work. When Prasad visited the small hill town of Sringeri in southwestern India, she listened to storytelling in families’ homes. Sometimes the stories mentioned encounters with swamis and at temples amid narratives otherwise about cleaning lavatories and pickling mangoes. The stories were not about religion but included references to religion that in passing conveyed something about the storyteller’s own stance toward religion. This was the same dynamic Courtney Bender observed while doing participant observation research at a soup kitchen in New York City. References to religion were ephemeral, occurring as fragments rather than in full narratives. They were oblique, euphemistic, polite, occasionally framed as brief disclosures of personal values, and more commonly linked to public events such as religious holidays.114 Conversational stories are difficult to interpret as powerful expressions of resistance. Indeed, quite the opposite. They do in many instances articulate a kind of personal agency, demonstrating that a person is not a passive receptable of religious training or an inert representative of a religious tradition but an individual with idiosyncratic interpretations, experiences, and disagreements. But in studies like Prasad’s and Bender’s the storytellers mostly demonstrate tacit acceptance of prevailing norms. The stories present events as having been interesting, memorable, perhaps peculiar, and yet reasonable. Resistance is more clearly present when the story draws from an external narrative and the storyteller is deliberately engaged in a performative act. The external narrative organizes familiar events in a new way, and the performative act demonstrates deliberateness in the use of the external narrative for that purpose. Resistance in these terms is much the same as in many narratives about conversion. The awakening represents an insight that enables the person to resist an earlier way of thinking. The new narrative is in 114 Courtney Bender, Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 90–​116.

Religion’s Discursive Power  95 effect a counternarrative. Its power lies in organizing ideas and experiences in a way that makes sense. This kind of resistance is illustrated in Ellen Corin’s study of psychotic patients in Quebec and South India. Although the study was not about religion, Corin found that the patients frequently made use of what she called “religious signifiers” to transcend and relativize the pressures of everyday life. The signifiers were detached from organized religion but consisted of idioms drawn from religion, such as statements about “God’s light,” “God’s name,” karma, meditation, prayer, the Bible, priests, healers, and religious festivals. Many of the statements were critical, registering turmoil and disbelief rather than belief. Yet, the religious signifiers provided the narratives with structure, serving in Corin’s words as “fixing” and “containing” elements in patients’ descriptions of experiences. They were public idioms that provided ways to express fears, pin down what otherwise seemed to be drifting and confusing events, and for some of the patients justify transgressive behavior.115 Resistance of broader interest in the literature on discursive power is shared, organized, and directed less at inchoate personal experience than at objectified manifestations of inequality and discrimination. Ann Kane’s discussion of late-​nineteenth-​century social unrest in Ireland offers an instructive example. Against the narrative promulgated by the British government that its arrests and threats of coercion were constitutional mechanisms for land reform, popular narratives of resistance articulated by local priests inserted words such as “vile,” “degrading,” “monstrous,” and “tyrannical” by drawing on popular stories about the British suppression of the Church.116 Although Kane does not say so, this is an example of what Judith Butler termed “resignification,” a transformation of meaning that confers agency on its subjects, here empowering the oppressed to speak with greater urgency and emotion about their oppression.117 In a more recent context, a familiar example is antiabortion narratives resignifying activists with meaning as “pro-​life” advocates and doing so with contrasting life-​and-​death depictions of babies and aborted fetuses. An ethnographic study of an interdenominational faith-​ based community-​ organizing movement illustrates the specifics of discursive 115 Ellen Corin, “The ‘Other’ of Culture in Psychosis: The Ex-​Centricity of the Subject,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, edited by João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 273–​314. 116 Kane, “Reconstructing Culture in Historical Explanation,” 323–​26. 117 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999).

96  Religion’s Power resistance. The leaders identified a “comfortable church” culture that emphasized self-​fulfillment and individual piety and that in their view supported a hegemonic discourse of White materialistic privilege as the narrative to be resisted. Furthering a counter-​narrative at a three-​day training session for clergy and laity involved, first, redefining the individualistic narrative that focused on charitable acts toward individuals by locating that approach in “the comfort zone” of “playing church”; second, identifying an alternative “social justice” narrative with biblical language about exercising a “prophetic voice” and being “prophets of resistance”; third, invoking images of empowerment and agency through statements such as “I’m here to exercise the power God has given me” and “every time we say, ‘I can’t,’ we slander God”; fourth, adding emotion to the narrative by asking people “to bring the sadness and the rage to speech” that had been “censored out of the church”; fifth, enlarging the spatial and temporal frame with statements such as “the promised land isn’t a fancy car” and “we must no longer be chaplains to an empire”; and sixth, putting words into practice in conversations with public officials. In these ways, the discourse sought to be empowering. Nevertheless, there is more to resistance than bringing in new words and images that alter the meaning and emotional salience of a prevailing narrative.118 Saba Mahmood’s ethnography of Muslim women in Egypt illuminates more clearly than almost any other study the layers of complexity involved in discursive resistance. Among the women she studied, four who were in their thirties and held full-​time jobs that required riding public transportation and working with both men and women met regularly as a group to study the Quran and discuss Islamic ethical practice. They faced not one but two challenges that evoked discourses of resistance. One was the secular ethos that challenged their desire to be pious Muslims. The other was Islamic standards of conduct for women that contrasted with their own sense of womanhood, especially the demand to exhibit shyness and modesty. It was impossible to resist either challenge simply by opting for the other. Instead, they engaged in an exercise of reinterpretation, learning, as Mahmood summarized in describing one of the women, “to be outspoken in a way that was in keeping with Islamic standards of reserve, restraint, and modesty required of pious Muslim women.”119 118 John D. Delehanty, “Prophets of Resistance: Social Justice Activists Contesting Comfortable Church Culture,” Sociology of Religion 77, 1 (Spring 2016), 37–​58. 119 Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 156.

Religion’s Discursive Power  97 Mahmood offers an interpretation of how this was possible and of why it functioned as resistance rather than as capitulation that seems widely applicable to other situations. A person in situations like this who resists prevailing social norms, perhaps especially when there are conflicting norms, inevitably struggles with worries about inauthenticity. And these concerns are heightened in contexts, of which religion is one, that privilege the seriousness of intentions. There is a mismatch between part of the person’s inner conversation that prompts one kind of behavior and another part that orients that person’s external behavior. This is a version of the insincerity problem: what a person says and does doesn’t seem to match the person’s thinking in terms of the person’s own self-​reflection. Mahmood says the solution is agency: a person acts and does so iteratively until there is a match between how one speaks and what one thinks. It is a deliberate practice of self-​manipulation. The lesson in this example is that resistance, whether on the part of one individual or a group, is a practice that involves not only discourse that shapes action but also action that shapes discourse. The inevitable disjuncture between what one says and what one thinks, the disjuncture that prompts doubts about one’s sincerity, isn’t limited to being resolved by changing what one says or what one thinks. It is also resolvable by changing what one does and thus how one speaks and thinks. The self-​narrative that one tells about a major transition of this kind isn’t simply a new narrative that discredits an earlier narrative by putting old events in a new light. It is a narrative that includes new events in which the person has exercised agency by choosing to participate. In Mahmood’s study, the new events were efficacious because they were embodied. The discourse of piety was interlaced with veiling and dress and bodily movement. As such, an agency of resistance was not something that could be adequately judged by a third party, such as an academic, but had to be understood from the perspective of the person directly involved in the practice and in terms of the sensations and desires that emerge from the practice.120 The facilitation of agency among persons immediately engaged in resistance is but one of the empowering functions of narrative. The other is to package acts of resistance for export to interested potential recruits. Storytelling in this sense is a means of interpretation and communication, which is why “controlling the narrative” is an important aspect of any effort 120 These points are valuably developed in Stephanie Clare, “Agency, Signification, and Temporality,” Hypatia 24, 4 (Fall 2009), 50–​62.

98  Religion’s Power at mobilization. An effective narrative provides an account of why an act of resistance was taken and why it succeeded or failed. An account further facilitates the reorganization of “what happened” to embellish the interpretation of who did what and how seeming setbacks may be regarded as triumphs. The act becomes an instantiation of a larger story about the event, and that story is possible to link with stories of other events. Religious narratives provide ready-​made vehicles for the transmission of such stories. A father’s story of the accidental death of a son, for example, takes on larger significance in relation to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. The narrative extends the spatial and temporal horizon of the momentary event, redefining the acts of individuals as instances of roles performed with lasting effects. There is a sense of empowerment that may be translated into mobilization, and the event may be the occasion for reflection about other manifestations of power.121 Yet the more widely known the stories of resistance are, the more they may be contested by other authorities and institutions.122 Few examples of discursive resistance have been as contested as feminist challenges to the patriarchal language of religious texts. In 1971, during the second-​wave feminist movement in the United States, two women in a class at Harvard Divinity School asked the class to include readings about women and religion and to refrain from using patriarchal language (such as referring to God as He). It was one of the many steps that led toward women’s studies programs in colleges and seminaries, women’s ordination, and inclusive language in liturgies and texts. But they did not go uncontested. Although the class at Harvard was successful, it was widely criticized in the national media. Opposition to the wider reforms came from religious leaders who insisted that patriarchal language was sacred. It also came from language experts who argued that male nouns and pronouns were simply generic terms that did not distinguish between male and female, any more than words like “lion” or “sheep.”123 Protest, whether in small incidents or in large movements, is resistance taken to the next level. To protest is to engage in concerted action directed 121 In a rather different context, Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, “Narrating Social Structure: Stories of Resistance to Legal Authority,” American Journal of Sociology 108, 6 (May 2003), 1328–​72. 122 Francesca Polletta and Beth Charrity Gardner, “Narrative and Social Movements,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, edited by Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 535–​53; see especially the examples discussed on page 539. 123 Christine Mallinson, “Language and Its Everyday Revolutionary Potential: Feminist Linguistic Activism in the United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women’s Social Movement Activism, edited by Holly J. McCammon, Verta Taylor, Jo Reger, and Rachel L. Einwohner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 420–​45.

Religion’s Discursive Power  99 toward effecting change. Discourse is the mechanism through which participants are aroused, grievances are expressed, and action is coordinated. It frames the story, providing an account of what has gone wrong and how it can be rectified. It motivates, telling participants why it is imperative to act. It shapes how those in charge of responding respond, and, later, why the protest succeeded or failed. Few examples are more familiar than the ones featuring religion. There is John Brown, larger than life in the John Steuart Curry mural at the statehouse in Kansas, rifle in one hand, Bible in the other, impugning slavery with the wrath of God. There is Martin Luther King Jr. in the Birmingham jail, writing, “Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ?—​“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist?—​“Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God.” Was not John Bunyan an extremist?—​“I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience.”124 It is these history-​defining moments that call for religious discourse to be viewed in a different light, as utterances profoundly and dangerously powerful: profoundly, because it seems that invoking the gods ineluctably raises the stakes; dangerously, because therein lies the fanaticism that leads to violence. Religion adds fervor that defies rationality. To protest in the name of divine justice is to motivate in such extreme terms as to risk death to achieve one’s aims. This is the message in studies of “radical religion,” from the millenarian cargo cults to present-​day terrorism. Radical rhetoric, casting raw events in cosmic terms, is, when coupled with an appropriate mix of leadership and favorable circumstances, a powerful tool. And yet, to set it apart this way is to miss the commonalities it has with the narratives that occur in unspectacular situations. What studies of discourse—​religious and otherwise—​ are showing with increased clarity is that the features making it powerful in well-​organized protest movements bear striking similarities with the ones that enhance its effectiveness in ordinary life. Take sincerity, where one of the marks of effective sincerity work is speaking in a manner that seems not to be calculated or contrived but uttered spontaneously. The same is true in some protest movements. In a study of 1960s student civil rights sit-​ins, for example, Francesca Polletta found the sit-​ins described by participants and sympathetic observers as spontaneous events: exploding instantly like spontaneous combustion, unexpected, 124 Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” August 1963; https://​kingin​stit​ute.stanf​ ord.edu/​sites/​mlk/​files/​lett​erfr​ombi​rmin​gham​_​wwc​w_​0.pdf

100  Religion’s Power miraculous, unplanned, and spreading like wildfire. Despite having been preceded by sit-​ins in other locations and by coordinated training efforts in those instances, the narrative that emerged portrayed the events that drew public attention in 1960 as driven by a sudden imperative to act. If spontaneity signals sincerity (Polletta does not make the connection, but if it does), then the discourse about student spontaneity furthered the perception that they were acting on something they felt they had to do. Moreover, the narratives Polletta examined crafted an account of spontaneity that discredited arguments about the sit-​ins having been orchestrated by professional agitators (communists) and, at the same time, inspired sacrificial acts of personal engagement rather than consisting only of spur-​of-​the-​moment impulses. As the sit-​ins progressed, the narratives also took on additional details, particularly in featuring the stories of individual role models whose actions served as inspiration for others.125 Accounts vary, though, sometimes highlighting spontaneity while at other times foregrounding deliberation, reflection, and planning. The commonality in these “myths of origin” is an explanation of what the problem was in the first place toward which the protest was directed. It was racial discrimination, to be sure, in the case of civil rights protests, but something more specific: apathy, inaction, White intransigence, fear, government indifference, economic interests, hypocrisy. Accounts featuring religion add narrative complexity. Religion links the immediate injustice of the situation to stories of injustice at other times and places: to laments, jeremiads, and historic encounters with oppression (to Martin Luther and John Bunyan). It challenges those who know the stories and who believe them to be of divine significance to ponder their own responses. In these ways, a myth of origin is an ongoing account that unfolds over time, incorporating interpretations of new events as they happen. It selects from the facts, leaving out details that don’t quite fit, and arranging what does fit to show how one thing leads to another. The literature on “framing” suggests that how protest is waged is considerably influenced by how the problem is framed, which is another way of saying how it is accounted for, and how an opponent who defines it differently is framed to diminish its interpretation. For example, a study of protests during the run-​up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 showed that officials promoting the impending war 125 Francesca Polletta, “’It Was Like a Fever . . .’: Narrative and Identity in Social Protest,” Social Problems 45, 2 (May 1998), 137–​59; further developed in Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Religion’s Discursive Power  101 characterized protestors as ignorant, uncivil, and disorderly. In this case, unlike the sit-​ins Polletta examined, spontaneity became defined as a defaming characteristic, an indication of fear, implying that protests were driven by feelings rather than by a reasoned understanding of the situation, and, indeed, that it was the protestors rather than the U.S. military that was prone to violence. The study underscored the power relations that gave officials the upper hand in pressing their interpretation.126 As stories of individual empowerment do, protest narratives depict movement from conditions “before” toward anticipated improvements “after”—​ from bondage to freedom, darkness to light, ruin to redemption—​and foreground the decisions, acts, and events that raise consciousness and inspire hope. They enlarge the framework by identifying previous incidents—​ often ones that are commemorated in ritual events—​in which the lead characters (martyrs, prophets, saints) serve as exemplars in the struggle of good against evil. The stories invite reflection about what succeeded (or failed) in the past. They create spaces for interpellation in which victims can be redeemed and unfulfilled promises can be realized. Reflection becomes the occasion for hope that agency can be expressed in acts of protest. A similarity with conversion narratives that appears in some protest discourse is the stairstep movement that DeGloma identifies: expressed in the adage “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” There is, however, an added feature in many protest narratives. The protagonist is an emblematic figure who, like the convert, repeatedly travels the distance between the old and the new, dramatizing the difference and indeed the struggle between the two in making the journey. The protagonist does not succeed at once in leading an effective protest but is tempted to give up the quest and return to an easier life. Moreover, the protagonist in some of the most complex narratives is not simply the hero who emerges triumphant on the side of good, but someone who lands somewhere in the middle, having wrestled dialectically with the issues and learned how to strike a more innovative path. Protest narratives typically evolve within a field of alterative narratives. The good exists in contrast with evil not only through abstractions but also in parallel constructions that pit the preferred discourse against its enemies. One version (abolition, for instance) defines itself in point-​by-​point refutations of counter-​narratives (defenses of slaveholding). In another 126 Ahmed Sahlane, “Dialectics of Argument and Rhetoric: Protesting the Iraq War in US-​British Opinion Press,” Discourse and Society 26, 6 (2015), 754–​74.

102  Religion’s Power version, there are alternative narratives appealing to radically different constituencies but with narratives featuring some of the same elements. A study of far-​right “football hooliganism” and Islamic-​inspired terrorism in Europe, for example, found similarities in how each viewed the danger posed by the other: both featured a sense of powerlessness as a major predicament to be overcome by exerting masculinity in the name of a besieged “socio-​spatial” ethnic identity. Both cast the danger in religious language that evoked concern about the larger decline of a cherished tradition. And both featured heroic individuals whose actions inspired confidence that the danger could be overcome.127 A larger point is that protest narratives evolve in competition with one another, gaining and losing constituencies as they selectively adapt to, borrow from, and refute components of other narratives. * * * An assessment of the trajectory that discussions of discursive power has taken over the past quarter-​century has to acknowledge that conceptions of discourse have become considerably more nuanced, which means in turn that how power may be exercised in and through discourse must also be understood in terms of specific situated discursive practices. The power of religious discourse resides in its well-​institutionalized textual and ritually enacted narratives of divine authority and at the same time varies in ways that narratives of other kinds do. Academic treatments of religion do well to move beyond assertions that narratives matter and to do more than offer simplified propositional reconstructions of what somehow appear to be the grand narratives that give ultimate meaning to people’s lives. There must be closer attention to the structure and content of what people say and to the situations in which these discursive practices occur. The structure and content that studies associate with narratives are of value for studies of religion because formal textual discourse about religious events casts them in temporal contexts and because the meaning-​work that takes place in ordinary life also consists of organizing events in narrative sequences. Narrative persuasiveness is empirically demonstrated to be affected by the intensity, sincerity, and perceived competence of speakers and is contingent on how closely the narrative conforms to group norms.

127 Tahir Abbas, “Ethnicity and Politics in Contextualizing Far Right and Islamic Extremism,” Perspectives on Terrorism 11, 3 (June 2017), 54–​61.

Religion’s Discursive Power  103 It bears emphasizing the extent to which the literature on religious discourse focuses on personal empowerment. It is the speaker whose discourse is persuasive rather than an audience of other persons. Moreover, much of what has interested scholars and practitioners alike has been concerned with questions of self-​transformation. Religious discourse in this conception is one of the machineries through which personal well-​being is achieved. The measure of its power is thus a self-​perception of happiness, adaptability, and self-​confidence. To this end, religious discourse, like other discourses of personal empowerment, is shown to be more effective when it includes an increase in positive emotion, encourages autobiographical reasoning, and facilitates a sense of personal agency. Conceived of as practice, discourse has become less a matter of symbolization that can be understood as arrangements of words and more as sequences of action that weave words together with subjectivities and events. Narratives replotted in storytelling are embodied both in the act of storytelling and in the bodily sensations and experiences narrated. The complexity of storytelling so conceived does not preclude identifying its specific aspects of variation, as social psychological studies demonstrate. There is nevertheless situational variation that is best examined in ethnographic research. The practical questions that animate discussions of religion’s discursive power turn out to be answered largely in the affirmative. Does it matter that people construct narratives that make sense of major events in their lives? Does it matter that religious leaders speak exegetically about sacred texts? Does it matter that religious communities perpetuate heteronormative speech and at other times negate these norms? It does. How and under what conditions that happens are what the literature on discursive power seeks to address. In examining these questions in vastly diverse contexts, the goal is not to predict what will matter most in other situations but to identify the heuristic tools that will facilitate understanding.

3 The Institutional Power of Religion Institutional power is the capacity to control and utilize valuable resources through formal and informal social arrangements that coordinate the activities of groups of individuals. Power of this kind has long been of interest to scholars of religion. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber focused not only on religion as an ethical orientation but also on the conditions under which religious organizations become bureaucratized and operate with rational rules administered by trained officials. Weber’s sect–​church distinction became the impetus for Ernst Troeltsch’s classic extension of the topic in The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, examining, as Weber did, the formal organization of religious bodies, although with less attention than Weber to these structures. At about the same time, W. E. B. DuBois offered an insightful analysis of the history and day-​to-​day ministry of Black churches in The Philadelphia Negro. With greater attention to the practical management and proliferation of religious organizations, H. Paul Douglass wrote extensively about the urban ecology of congregations, and H. Richard Niebuhr in The Social Sources of Denominationalism formulated an argument that attributed the divisions he described in American Christianity as much to societal and institutional factors as to theology.1 On a smaller scale but with greater empirical depth, the ethnographic studies that began with Middletown, published in 1929, and that continued during the 1940s and 1950s in community studies, such as Yankee City and The Levittowners, dealt with congregations as centers of local power and influence. In the 1960s, the growing use of survey research shifted attention to the beliefs and practices of individuals, as evidenced in such prominent publications as Gerhard Lenski’s Religious Factor and Charles Y. Glock’s Religion and Society in Tension, but interest in religious organizations 1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950); W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963); H. Paul Douglass, The City’s Church (New York: Friendship Press, 1929); H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957).

Religion’s Power. Robert Wuthnow, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197652534.003.0004

The Institutional Power of Religion  105 continued. E. Franklin Frazier’s 1964 Negro Church in America, for instance, foregrounded the church’s role as an agency of social control and as an influence in economic and political life.2 Popular interest in religion’s institutional power has been driven in recent decades by large religious organizations such as megachurches and international relief agencies amassing financial resources, making use of new communication technologies, and playing a more visible role in public affairs. This interest has been propelled, on the one hand, by eager promoters who wish to master its secrets and, on the other hand, by critics distrustful of religion’s extending reach. And while much of the academic literature has focused on church growth and decline, questions about institutional power are never far from the surface: how do religious organizations exercise control over their members’ time and pocketbooks, why are some more successful at this than others, and what sorts of “soft power” do religious organizations have at their disposal that other organizations may lack? Questions about discrimination against African Americans, Latinos, women, and gays and lesbians also guide attention toward institutional power. Of what is it composed? Why does it persist? How can it be changed? These questions are being addressed in new ways in studies that combine the insights of practice theory with neoinstitutional approaches to organizations that emphasize cultural norms, beliefs, and rituals. Studies in this vein focus less on the formal organizational structures that interested earlier scholars of religion and more on the pragmatics of daily life through which institutional power is exercised. As practice, institutional power manifests itself in how people interact with one another in organizational contexts, how their interaction is affected by the structures of organizational life, and how those structures in turn are affected. Interaction is thus situated, and what people do and the contexts in which they do it are mutually constitutive.3 Institutions are composed of rules that structure what people do in places and influence how they may improvise and develop new rules. The goals, intentions, and dispositions that people bring with them into their 2 Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929); Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967); W. Lloyd Warner, Yankee City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor: A Sociological Study of Religion’s Impact on Politics, Economics, and Family Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961); Charles Y. Glock, Religion and Society in Tension (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1964). 3 Martha S. Feldman and Wanda J. Orlikowski, “Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory,” Organization Science 22, 5 (September–​October 2011), 1240–​53.

106  Religion’s Power institutions are influenced by the social interaction in which they engage. Topics that have generated particularly interesting inquiries include studies of institutional power exercised through the control of space, manifest in practical and codified institutional knowledge, evident in status hierarchies, and as sources of collective dissent and societal reform. Institutional power is also illuminated in studies examining the subversion of power. The impetus for these inquiries has been a desire to understand in greater detail what happens in, near, and in relation to religious organizations when people practice religion and thus to go beyond what can be known by counting organizations, tallying membership numbers, and emphasizing the rationality or irrationality of bureaucratic structures.

Space Space is always more than a geographic location—​more than a plot of land or a point on a map, and even those are socially constituted in ways that reflect and reproduce power arrangements. Foucault refers to institutional sites that serve as the places in which particular people exercise power, doing so through the roles that are recognized as having legitimate authority to speak, to practice, and to effect action on the part of others. Hospitals, Foucault emphasizes, are the sites in which doctors speak in medical discourse and in which they expect to receive deference on the part of nurses, orderlies, and patients. In addition, hospitals legally confer on doctors the capacity to perform surgery and in other ways to treat patients’ bodies. Similarly, religious organizations consecrate the spaces in which priests conduct sacred rituals and in which the faithful are expected to convene in deference to the divine and to conform in small ways in what they say and often in how they dress. In consecrated space, the arrangement of material affordances—​chairs, lecterns, altars, windows—​and the rules governing these arrangements exert influence over the possibilities for thought and action.4 Just as studies of prisons, factories, assembly lines, streets, barricades, government bureaus, newsrooms, gardens, and labs do, so treatments of religious spaces in which affordances and practices mingle demonstrate the significance of seating arrangements that signal hierarchical or democratic control, divisions 4 Jeanne Halgren Kilde, Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

The Institutional Power of Religion  107 between public places and inner sanctums, dedicated or multiuse occupancies, and preferences for traditional or innovative worship styles, among other things, as well as the struggles that develop when claims over the uses of space are contested by religious authorities, zoning boards, preservation committees, and real estate developers.5 Much of the scholarly interest in sacred space has concentrated on the practices through which individuals devise places that personally provide a special sense of meaning. Home altars, candlelit meditation rooms, and favorite spots outdoors may exemplify such places. Much of the earlier literature, in contrast, dealt with the way organized religion constructed its places of worship, many of which exuded religion’s power in scale, grandeur, and ornamentation. It goes without saying that St. Peters in Rome, Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, and the Jokang Temple in Lhasa exhibit this sort of power. The same is true on an only somewhat diminished scale in the United States where such examples as St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, the Salt Lake Temple in Utah, the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh, and the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan, manifest a powerful presence in their respective cities. Most places of worship are considerably less obvious as manifestations of power. For their part, it matters more what happens within the space than how the space is constructed. The sacred is present simply by definition whether those in attendance feel moved by it or not. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and ashrams count as sacred spaces, acknowledged as such by those who participate and in many instances by zoning regulations and tax laws. The power they exert is the capacity to influence the lives of their practitioners, about which much has been written—​from research on morality and happiness to studies of charitable giving and health. Studies in which persons

5 Notable studies of the influences of spatial arrangements on social relationships and ideas include Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640–​1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Libby Schweber, Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and of course Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976); and the wide-​ranging discussion of the theoretical literature in Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan, “The Place of Space in the Study of the Social,” in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, edited by Patrick Joyce (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), 133–​68. Among treatments of the influences of spatial arrangements in U.S. religious organizations, see especially Gretchen Buggeln, The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

108  Religion’s Power who participate in varying frequencies are compared demonstrate that there are indeed differences. The differences are sometimes the reverse of what is expected but suggest one of two possibilities: that participants differ from nonparticipants for reasons having to do with their choices to be there in the first place, or that differences are the result of their participation. In one sense, therefore, the power of religion can be deduced from these effects. Gaining a better understanding of religion’s power has nevertheless directed scholarship increasingly toward what happens inside organizations, how they are structured, who has control, and what they do to orchestrate power. Unlike studies of “lived religion” that follow individuals into their private spaces or into the streets, these studies start with spaces within religious organizations and then complicate the story by acknowledging that religious organizations and their surroundings are intertwined. To control space is, among other things, to exercise power over who has access and who does not. In this respect it is also the key to managing time. Doris Kearns Goodwin in Leadership in Turbulent Times tells of Lyndon Johnson as a newly elected member of the House of Representatives visiting President Franklin Roosevelt in hopes of persuading the president to grant an exemption to allow Texas hill country farmers to qualify for rural electrification funds despite the region being sparsely populated. Roosevelt was a good storyteller and now used his storytelling skills to advantage in managing the presidential office. Not wanting to say no to Johnson, Roosevelt instead told a long story that took up the fifteen minutes of Johnson’s appointment. One could argue, as Goodwin does, that this was an example of an effective leader’s power through the skill of storytelling. But storytelling would have had no effect had it not been for the fifteen-​minute clock. It was the president’s power to enforce the clock that enabled storytelling to matter.6 Similarly, control of the clock is well evidenced in religious organizations. Preachers who draw large crowds through skillful storytelling benefit from the fact that religious organizations exercise power over the public’s expectations about clocks and calendars, just as religious communities have done for centuries. The Aztec calendars that marked the seasons and announced when fall and spring festivals were to be held; the Norse gods Woden, Thor, and Frigga, after whom Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are named; the second-​century controversy over the date for celebrating Easter; and much of the world’s present calendar dating from Anno Domini (in the year of our 6 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership in Turbulent Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 91.

The Institutional Power of Religion  109 Lord) are well-​known historical examples of religion’s control of space governing the passage of time. The ringing of bells at churches and in monasteries, which communication theorist Harold Innis famously credited with introducing regularity to Western life, was another way that religious organizations’ dominance of designated space shaped the meaning of time.7 For centuries church bells marked the passage of hours, days, seasons, and lives. Bells extended churches’ spatial reach beyond their perimeters, shading the wider community with an aura of sacred sound. Writers caught the bells’ significance in village life. Thomas Gray’s 1751 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, inspired by the death of fellow poet Richard West, for example, opened with these lines: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day /​The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea /​The ploughman homeward plods his weary way /​And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”8 Decade by decade, church bells became a symbol of a simpler time, receding into the past as a pleasant reminder of village life. A writer in 1826, for example, opined, I confess my fondness for the sounds of the village church bells: their simplicity has a romantic and imaginative soothingness, which steals over the awakened spirit. . . . Often have I seated myself on a retired stile in view of the country spire, and listened to the varying music of the distant bells—​ “sweet evening bells.”9

The reason for such nostalgia was that industrialization profoundly relocated the structuring of time, shifting it from villages to factories and thus diminishing the importance of church bells. Richard Arkwright in Lancaster and Francis Cabot Lowell in Massachusetts, for example, erected churches for the women and children who worked in their factories, but church bells set the days’ rhythms less than the machines. The power to shape what people did with their time as well as how they experienced time was signaled more by the factory whistle than the bells. Before long the bells were noise. Indeed, subsequent litigation against the nuisances that plagued urban residents’ ears demonstrated the change. The nuisances were steam engines, steam whistles, horns, rolling mills, stone cutters, circular saws, drop hammers, engine 7 Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951), 72. 8 Robert Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (London: R. Dodsley, 1751). 9 “Visit to the Parsonage,” The Inspector and Literary Review 1 (1826), 97–​109, 293–​302, quote on page 299.

110  Religion’s Power houses, sirens, circuses, and church bells.10 In 1913 a study in Baltimore revealed how much the role of church bells had changed. While some residents found the bells consoling, as one man did in remarking, “it done my soul good and I felt that God was near in each note,” most residents were simply annoyed. “The bell on the German Reformed Church almost drove me and my family frantic on Sunday mornings,” said one. Said another, “It stirs up unchristian feelings in the hearts of people for squares around. If you silence this bell, hundreds of sufferers will rise up and call you blessed.”11 A place where time was still in religious hands was the monastery. Ones that followed the sixth-​century Rule of St. Benedict ordered daily time by prescribing the hours when monks were to rise, work, and dine and when each of the eight Divine Offices (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline) were to be observed. Monastic life, Eviatar Zerubavel argues in Hidden Rhythms, established the pattern of living according to a schedule that was set, not by nature, but by religious convention. It imposed not only an order of time but also an expectation about the value of living an orderly life that upheld discipline and punctuality.12 Many religious organizations embrace something akin to the monastic ideal in encouraging members to pray regularly, more so in some traditions than in others, and adhering to certain standards of moral discipline, but do not enforce rigid expectations about time. The power to do this has declined to the point where it is limited largely to the spaces over which they have administrative control. At places of worship it remains possible to establish expectations about when services will be conducted, holidays observed, and special events arranged. Still, the expectation that services will be held on Sundays at an appointed hour has been noted to carry enough cultural significance to encourage many immigrant congregations, including Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs, to follow suit. Conceiving of space as an institutional resource is complicated, as the history of church bells suggests, and is thus more interesting as a focus of 10 Albert H. Putney, Torts, Damages, Domestic Relations (Minneapolis, MN: Cree Publishing, 1908). 11 William T. Watson, “Eliminating Noise from Baltimore,” Bulletin of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland 7 (1913), 112–​13; an instructive example in a quite different context of religious music defining space is discussed in Martijn Oosterbaan, “Sonic Supremacy: Sound, Space and Charsma in a Favela in Rio de Janeiro,” Critique of Anthropology 29, 1 (2009), 81–​104, which describes how the Pentecostal churches kept their doors and windows open, played loud gospel music, and thus competed with the music emanating from dance clubs and taverns. 12 Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), especially for a discussion of the Benedictine regulation of monastic life.

The Institutional Power of Religion  111 inquiry by virtue of the fact that space, religious or otherwise, is less clearly identified as a “site” than Foucault’s focus on prisons, clinics, and hospitals suggested. The space that organizations seek to control is increasingly dispersed, in the case of cities through global migration and trade, and in the case of religion through satellite transmissions and branch campuses and in ambiguities about what constitutes “religion” when religious organizations own hospitals and individuals practice meditation in public schools.13 The question is less about how religion is defined and more about who controls the process of defining it. Religious authority is in practice negotiated with interested stakeholders that include the state, for-​profit firms, the media, and ultimately the individual. Claiming control over some designated space—​ church, mosque, temple, library, classroom—​ nevertheless increases the chances of religion’s power extending beyond its own domain, principally by serving as a source of connection in larger networks of power. In addition, scholars of religion pay increasing attention to what Jade Lo and Nina Eliasoph in studying volunteer organizations have called border disputes. Border disputes are the practices in which members of different subunits within organizations engage as they seek to exercise power over the organizations’ goals, frequently through performative activities that dramatize different definitions of the situation and different standards of moral evaluation, for instance, in contesting what access chaplains and doctors should have to patients and determining whether a relief organization’s work should be validated in religious terms, as public welfare, or divided among competing subunits. In extreme instances, Daniel Cefai writes, “ ‘space’ shatters into multiple places, each clamoring for public attention, in an architecture of scenes; ‘time’ explodes into different ways of marking time, each with its own rhythms and qualities.”14 Border disputes sometimes focus on the physical organization of space itself. A notable example occurred in 1899 during a faith healing service in Chicago. The nationally acclaimed faith healer, Reverend John Alexander Dowie, was a colorful Australian-​bred Congregationalist who moved to San Francisco in 1888, where he founded the International Divine Healing Association and two years later, following a lawsuit in which he was accused 13 Manuel Castells, “A Sociology of Power: My Intellectual Journey,” Annual Review of Sociology 42 (2016), 1–​19, offers an excellent discussion of the increasing spatial dispersion of power. 14 Jade Lo and Nina Eliasoph, “Broadening Cultural Sociology’s Scope: Meaning-​Making in Mundane Organizational Life,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 764–​ 92; Cefai quote on page 778.

112  Religion’s Power of selling fraudulent securities, relocated to Chicago. By 1899 Dowie had disbanded the International Divine Healing Association, founded the Christian Catholic Church in Zion, launched a college, started a printing firm that spread his publications across the country, and was in the process of creating a utopian community outside of Chicago that would attract hundreds of immigrants and sustain itself by manufacturing lace. When he died in 1907, most of Dowie’s ventures had failed, but in 1899 he was at the height of his influence, drawing crowds of up to six thousand to his healing services. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who simply advocated the powers of faith for healing, Dowie’s preaching also excoriated scientific medicine, which did not sit well with the medical community. Consequently, on October 18, 1899, to show their displeasure during one of Dowie’s meetings, a group of medical students attacked the Westside auditorium where it was being held by pummeling the windows with stones and bottles, releasing ill-​smelling sulfur compounds into the crowd, and setting in motion a melee that took eighty police officers to quell. The incident prompted further disturbances and led to a two-​week attack on Dowie’s downtown headquarters. Historian Timothy E. W. Gloege writes that the incident was symptomatic of the wider late-​nineteenth-​and early-​twentieth-​century disputes about science and the professions in which religion participated. The disputes, he says, “included an explicitly moral dimension to buttress claims of expert knowledge and, especially, to vouchsafe the reliability of [the professions’] self-​policing and internal certification.”15 For our purposes, the dispute illustrates how the power to control physical space figures into the manifestation of moral claims. The border disputes between religion’s authority and the emerging twentieth-​century professions, such as medicine, teaching, and science, were marked by retreat and accommodation. Faith healing continued, but scientific medicine became the accepted authority in treating illness. Pastoral counseling adapted biblical ideas to newer approaches from psychology and psychiatry. Upwardly mobile young people went into the ministry, but far more pursued careers in business and engineering. Yet it misses the point to argue that border disputes amounted simply to an advance of secularity. The idea of border disputes is meant to capture how religious organizations also sometimes broaden the reach of their own authority. 15 Timothy E. W. Gloege, “Faith Healing, Medical Regulation, and Public Religion in Progressive Era Chicago,” Religion and American Culture 23, 2 (Summer 2013), 185–​231, quote on page 187.

The Institutional Power of Religion  113 A broadening of this kind is evident in early-​twentieth-​century responses to the growing affluence of certain sectors of the upper middle class. The leisure class, as Thorstein Veblen called it, was mostly urban, mostly in business and the professions, and mostly distinguished by its capacity to enjoy consumption and leisure that gave itself respite from the less desirable routines of standardization and mass culture. One of those escapes was through grander buildings, parks, and recreational outlets in cities. Another was a retreat to nature through travel, second homes, and summer cottages. Places of worship used a variety of techniques to enlarge the spaces over which they exerted control. Municipal laws prohibiting liquor dealers, theaters, bowling alleys, and prostitutes from conducting business within specified zones surrounding churches are well documented. Police were enlisted to enforce the laws and sometimes to set aside public spaces for religious events. Robert Orsi’s study of the Madonna of 115th Street Church in Italian Harlem, for example, mentions that police cordoned off the streets near the church for its outdoor festivals and arrested troublemakers intent on disrupting the festivities.16 Teachings requiring parents to conduct morning and evening worship services in their homes was in certain respects another way to extend the worship space beyond the church building itself. The use of available space at houses of worship was also in effect enlarged by encouraging members to attend twice rather than only once each Sunday, thus in effect doubling the role of religious space in their lives. A technique less often noted in scholarly studies was literally to enlarge the physical space over which religious organizations exercised control by constructing larger buildings. They were built in hopes of drawing prospective members and to display wealth, which was a way to demonstrate power. But there was an additional reason. Larger buildings made it possible to provide a wider variety of activities and thus to absorb more of the time and energy that participants would otherwise have spent elsewhere. This was not a strategy that small, underfunded congregations could use, many of which were better at setting up strict moral dictums against such temptations as dancing and going to the theater. It was a strategy, though, that upscale congregations could deploy. An interesting illustration of this kind of spatial enlargement occurred in 1910 when St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a congregation 16 Robert A. Orsi, Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–​1950, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).

114  Religion’s Power founded in the 1840s, decided it was time to replace the comfortable brick structure in which it had worshiped since 1873. In the intervening years, Cedar Rapids’ population had grown from 6,000 to 32,000, and the town had become an agricultural trading center and the site of a large Quaker Oats mill. Like many middle-​class churches, St. Paul’s decided it needed to adapt to its community’s growing population and prosperity. Probably figuring into its thinking was the fact that an impressive Gothic Revival Presbyterian Church had been built just across the street. The Methodists, for their part, hired renowned Chicago architect Louis Sullivan (“father of skyscrapers”) and budgeted $100,000 for the project, a staggering sum compared with the average Methodist church building valued at only $5,800. The new building, complete with a sanctuary, Sunday school classrooms, and a bell tower, was dedicated four years later. But its most distinctive feature, which upstaged every other church in town, was its large gymnasium.17 Church gyms had been experimented with to attract middle-​class families in the 1880s, but not until the early twentieth century did serious interest of these facilities take hold. Gyms were part of the “institutional church” movement that spread in cities as Protestant leaders sought to compete more effectively with Catholic churches and parochial and public schools by providing “open-​all-​week” activities that included such attractions as nurseries and educational classes, civic groups, and the arts. The impetus for such facilities stemmed from the “men and religion” movement that developed around the turn of the century in response to growing evidence that men were far less active in churches than women. A second impetus was the growing number of middle-​class youth who attended high school and participated in school sports. As urban high schools built gyms, churches did the same. A third impetus was the YMCA and YWCA, Boy and Girl Scouts, and Christian Endeavor movements that worked cooperatively with churches to provide recreational facilities. All of this took place against the backdrop of a rising urban middle class and the changes in work habits, lifestyles, and interests that accompanied it. The same year the church in Cedar Rapids dedicated its gym, Reverend Josiah Strong, whose leadership of the Social Gospel movement since the 1890s had positioned him at the forefront of progressive Protestantism, asserted that the modern “field of amusements” needed to be 17 Beth Heffner, A Brief History of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 1840–​1990 (Cedar Rapids, IA: St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 1990); the value of Methodist church buildings as reported in 1906 is from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies, 1916: Part II, Separate Denominations History, Description, and Statistics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 456.

The Institutional Power of Religion  115 rescued from the “forces of evil.” He wrote, “The church parlor or hall, often with a stage, church gymnasium, bowling alleys, and the like, are means today whereby the church can do most important work. Here she, at present, has both a sphere and a function.”18 The megachurch is the late-​ twentieth-​ century counterpart to these earlier adaptations. With upward of one hundred square feet of space, megachurches are by no means the largest houses of worship ever built, but they dwarf smaller churches and provide far more than cavernous spaces for weekly assembling. Most importantly, the space enlarges the activities that can be subsumed under the organization’s influence. The typical megachurch member can expect to find a full-​service nursery and elementary school, bookstore, coffee shop, sound stage, and television studio, if not also a bowling alley, gym, and indoor track. Amplified with social media and live streaming, the faithful can spend all their leisure time in the sanctity of the church’s space. Controlling organizational space has symbolic as well as practical implications. The symbolism is conveyed in imagery—​crosses, minarets, stained glass windows, altars, Gothic architecture—​and in naming buildings with words like “holy,” “saint,” and “ascension.” The symbolism implies tradition, power, ownership, and the capacity to determine what happens inside and is often meant to honor the memories of local luminaries. The building itself therefore represents the faith community’s identity. And the faith community may jealously protect the building from any incursion they perceive as a threat to their power over that space. In the late eighteenth century, few aspects of organizational space carried as much symbolic freight as lightning rods. These small appurtenances that are now taken for granted were, when they were first introduced, sources of considerable consternation about whose power it was to make decisions about them. Should they be installed on cathedral spires, which were frequently struck by lightning, or should they not? One side said no, the weather was in God’s hands and its consequences shouldn’t be interfered with; the other side argued, as an influential priest did in Venice, that “conductors are God’s gifts to preserve human life.”

18 “March 3 -​The Sphere of Action,” in Josiah Strong, The Gospel of the Kingdom: Studies in Social Reform and What to Do: No. 3 Christian Men in Social Action (New York: American Institute of Social Service, 1910), 35.

116  Religion’s Power The lightning rod controversies continued for years, often in discussions that symbolized the conflict between religion’s power and the rising influence of science. When a preacher in early-​twentieth-​century Minnesota warned farmers against installing lightning rods, pundits said this was just another instance of backward fundamentalists resisting new ideas. But lightning rod controversies had always been as much about organizational space as about science. Although Benjamin Franklin demonstrated that lightning rods could work, details about how high and where they should be placed, how they should be grounded, what they should be made of, and whether points or balls were more effective remained unresolved. Across Europe, where church towers were among the tallest edifices, experiments were initiated to answer these questions. Rarely was it the clergy alone who determined what should be done. Public officials with authority over local safety regulations, wealthy patrons on whose beneficence the clergy depended, and members of local technological institutes had an important role as well. Typically, what swayed the deliberations was evidence that the property could better be saved when lightning rods were installed. In short, lightning rods symbolized in small but important ways that religion’s power was partly vested in decision-​making about physical space.19 The symbolic power of sacred space is of course never fully under the control of religious leaders themselves, as fire codes, safety regulations, and zoning laws readily attest. However, building design is always an important means through which signals about sacred power can be expressed. In medieval Europe large stained-​glass windows, pointed arches, flying buttresses, ribbed vaults, and ornate decoration symbolized church power. That style was emulated well into the twentieth century on a smaller scale when even the humblest churches included steeples and stained-​glass windows. Over the course of the century church architecture also symbolized the power of prominent preachers.20 One of the most interesting examples of church architecture expressing a preacher’s power was televangelist Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in

19 Paola Bertucci, “Enlightening Towers: Public Opinion, Local Authorities, and the Reformation of Meteorology in Eighteenth Century Italy,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series 99, 5 (2009), 25–​44, quote on page 38; the Minnesota example is given in Frederick Ferré, Hellfire and Lightning Rods: Liberating Science, Technology and Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 27. 20 Edward A. Sovik, Architecture for Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1973); Edwin Teathcote and Laura Moffatt, Contemporary Church Architecture (New York: Wiley, 2007).

The Institutional Power of Religion  117 Southern California, the massive structure that was completed in 1980 at a cost of $18 million after an initial estimate of only $5 million. Constructed entirely of ribbed steel and plate glass, its architect Philip Johnson wanted it to be a monument to progress as London’s Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 had been, and, surrounded by flowers, fountains, and trees, a retreat from the urban world, like the Garden of Eden. Schuller’s millions of weekly television viewers were thus treated to uplifting images of the space. The “Hour of Power,” as it was called, featured Schuller’s signature “possibility thinking” message (a minor adaptation of Norman Vincent Peale’s popular “positive thinking” theology of a generation earlier). The outsized building, completed on such a grand scale and at such an exorbitant cost, was Schuller’s instantiation of possibility thinking. It was tangible proof that with God’s help a person brimming with enthusiasm could achieve wonders.21 Besides shaping the uses of space and time, religious organizations practice emplacement and respond to displacement. Just as universities do in “placing” graduates, religious organizations invite people in, welcoming them to membership, and send people out to be emissaries of good will. The British organizations that sent thousands of orphans to Canada at the start of the twentieth century is one example. The debate those practices evoked run through the literature that emphasizes religious organizations empowering people though placement and disempowering them through displacement. Timothy Helton’s study of early-​twentieth-​century Pentecostalism in Los Angeles illuminates how Pentecostal practices played up Angelinos’ displacement but also empowered them.22 A different picture of emplacement is given in Samuel Perry’s Growing God’s Family, which shows how twenty-​ first-​century evangelical international adoption agencies in efforts to provide homes for orphaned children also contributed to their disempowerment by

21 Conversations with Megan Eardley, then a Ph.D. student in architecture at Princeton University, were of enormous value in directing my attention to these aspects of the Crystal Cathedral; the best discussion of the building’s design as a broadcast studio is Lawrence C. Davis, “Philip Johnson’s Crystal Cathedral and the Rhetoric of Its Free-​Form Polyhedral Structure,” in Beyond the Cube: The Architecture of Space Frames and Polyhedra, edited by Jeano-​Francois Gabriel (New York: Wiley, 1997), 161–​88, a version of which was also published online as “Is God in the ‘Burbs’? The Broadcast Architecture of the Crystal Cathedral”; and on the Crystal Cathedral’s relation to Schuller’s possibility thinking message, see Mark T. Mulder and Gerardo Marti, The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020). 22 Timothy P. Helton, “Los Angeles Pentecostals: The Dislocation of a People and the Birth of a Movement,” Journal of Religious History 40, 1 (March 2016), 65–​81.

118  Religion’s Power failing to assess adequately the levels of financial and community support required.23 The most notable acts of displacement in religious organizations are excommunication, shunning, and ritual humiliation. In John Boyne’s novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies, for example, an Irish priest during Sunday Mass in the 1950s viciously berates a pregnant teenage girl, sends her home, and tells her never to return.24 The more common practice was for the girl and perhaps her entire family to leave voluntarily, knowing that the power of social norms would mark them for life. The writer Meredith Hall recalled that when she became pregnant during her junior year in high school, the church she had attended every Sunday since birth did not officially shun her. It did not have to because she and her family were too ashamed to continue participating. The effect was just as severe. “It feels like a murder and is baffling because there is no grave,” she wrote. “No hymns were sung to ease my going or to beg for God’s blessing on my soul. Shunning is as precise as a scalpel, an absolute excision, leaving, miraculously, not a trace of a scar on the community body. The scarring is left for the girl, an intense, debilitating wound that weeps for the rest of her life.”25

Knowledge Besides the empowering and disempowering practices associated with the religious organization of space, institutional knowledge is one of the most important mechanisms through which organizations guide and control what members do. Institutions exercise this influence in two ways: setting goals and specifying the appropriate means of achieving those goals. Religious organizations set goals such as worshiping, instructing members in spiritual practices, and serving the needy and specify as appropriate such taken-​for-​ granted means as attending worship services, participating in prayer groups, and contributing to relief budgets. The language in which these goals and activities are described are what scholars call institutional logics.26 The 23 Samuel L. Perry, Growing God’s Family: The Global Orphan Care Movement and the Limits of Evangelical Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 24 John Boyne, The Heart’s Invisible Furies (London: Hogarth Press, 2017). 25 Meredith Hall, “Shunned,” Creative Nonfiction 24/​25 (2005), 49–​70, quote on page 67. 26 See Roger Friedland and Robert Alford, “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 232–​63, in which beliefs, symbols, and meanings are emphasized, whereas in more recent formulations material

The Institutional Power of Religion  119 literature on institutional logics takes as given that societies are composed of distinct institutional orders that operate with different logics—​banks, universities, hospitals, equities markets, and architectural firms, to name a few—​an assumption that may be debated, but in the case of religion directs attention to the important roles that organizations play. As the term suggests, institutional logics are expressed in arguments that supply reasons and thus make it meaningful to engage in certain kinds of behavior. Members of many religious organizations, for instance, learn that attending services is important because it pleases God and that helping the poor is important because the scriptures say it is. The literature on institutional logics also suggests that legitimation is complexly layered, such that secondary and tertiary reasons may be given when primary reasons fail. A primary argument suggesting that people who attend religious services will live long happy lives, for instance, may well require a secondary reason, such as “it was God’s will,” to explain the death of a child.27 An emphasis on practice suggests that institutional logics should be conceived not only as arguments and reasons but also as the routines, habits, and improvisations through which these logics are learned, reinforced, and put into action. Institutional power, in this understanding, is the capacity to generate and maintain these legitimating practices.28 Religious organizations do this by providing the contexts, the resources for those contexts, and the rules that perpetuate the practices through which legitimation occurs. In simplest terms, what is deemed legitimate to do and say depends on the organization’s power to define the situation. How this works is vividly in evidence in studies of faith and healing. In one study, the entries written in a prayer book located in a hospital were examined; in the other, people who attended a church that believed in spiritual healing were interviewed. The hospital entries expressed thanks to doctors and nurses and concern for loved ones but rarely petitioned God for divine healing. The church interviews nearly always credited practices are also included; Patricia H. Thornton, William Ocasio, and Michael Lounsbury, The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 27 Legitimation as meaning-​making is the approach taken in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Penguin, 1966), 110–​46. 28 See Jürgen Renn, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 145–​69, who draws on practice theory in developing an argument about the ensemble of practices that produce and reproduce knowledge that in turn becomes the regulatory and structuring basis of social institutions.

120  Religion’s Power God with divine intervention. The differences, while unsurprising, illustrate the role of institutional contexts. The more interesting aspect of the church study, though, was what the author referred to as priming. Members were primed to interpret events involving health and illness in certain ways. They had ready-​made scripts at their disposal to articulate these interpretations because they had heard them many times in almost the same language in sermons, at Bible studies, and from conversations with other members. They spoke of trusting God, depending on God, obeying God, and thanking God, and they legitimated not seeking medical help because it would betray their faith. The congregation’s institutional power in this case was present in the scripts people knew and the opportunities for these scripts to be repeated and affirmed.29 There were, in fact, two kinds of knowledge—​practical knowledge and codified knowledge. Practical knowledge is what people know from imitating, from listening and speaking, and above all from doing. It includes non-​institutionally specific knowledge such as how to walk, sit, and eat, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, knowledge that is institutionally defined such as how to behave while working as a corporate manager, a preacher, or a spy. Practical knowledge is “know-​how” learned by observing and imitating people who serve as role models—​one’s parents, other managers, or spies—​and although the learning may involve being taught and having to think about correcting one’s mistakes, much of it is inscribed in habits, routines, and bodily movements that no longer require conscious monitoring and modification.30 It consists, therefore, not only of “how-​to” knowledge in the sense of technical skill but also of practical wisdom—​phronesis—​that implies discernment and moral judgment. Michael Polanyi called it “tacit knowing” to differentiate it from knowledge learned by studying, memorizing, and reciting.31 Tacit knowledge can be disaggregated into discrete ideas or skills, as one might do in dissecting each movement involved in riding a bicycle, but practical knowledge is usually woven into complex sequences that function together 29 Wendy Cadge and M. Daglian, “Blessings, Strength, and Guidance: Prayer Frames in a Hospital Prayer Book,” Poetics 36, 5–​6 (2008), 358–​73; Lindsay W. Glassman, “‘In the Lord’s Hands’: Divine Healing and Embodiment in a Fundamentalist Christian Church,” Sociology of Religion 79, 1 (2018), 35–​57. 30 Gilbert Ryle, “Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, new series 46 (1945–​1946), 1–​16; Gregory W. Dawes, Religion, Philosophy and Knowledge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 37–​42; Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962), 10–​11, who writes that practical knowledge is “imparted and acquired through imitation and apprenticeship” and doubts that it can be formalized. 31 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966).

The Institutional Power of Religion  121 so seamlessly as to defy dissection. Its power lies in the fact that it guides thoughts and action with an implicit force toward what seems to be right. It includes pragmatic norms that guide behavior toward managing, getting along, and getting things done. These are ways of knowing picked up “on the job” or “in the street,” and of the kind that differ from the formal norms that prescribe how things should work under ideal conditions.32 Practical knowledge in religion is present in the customs that govern participants’ behavior during worship. It consists of knowing how and when to sit, stand, kneel, and bow without having to think about it. Polanyi writes that the worship of supreme beings, as well as the knowledge of beauty and truth, “can be apprehended only in serving them.”33 A kind of “group style,” as Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman suggest, develops as people meet to worship, discuss ideas, make plans, and provide emotional support. Group style provides the cues participants adhere to, including small courtesies of when and when not to speak, what to discuss, how to affirm group loyalty, and how to separate that loyalty from other loyalties. Without being able to describe it exactly, people grasp what feels appropriate and adjust their behavior accordingly.34 Group style as practical knowledge is governed by the institutional settings in which people interact as well as by the dispositions and experiences they happen to bring to the situation. The one-​upmanship in academic discussions is unlikely to be an appropriate group style in religious settings where deference and reverence are the implicit norms, for example. In religious settings cues provide participants a sense of being among kindred spirits who share their beliefs or have similar backgrounds. A study of church decision-​making meetings among several churches, for example, found frequent references to God, Jesus, and the Bible at one, often voiced as expressions of conviviality, while at other churches the discussion dealt exclusively with procedures and plans. The groups were at conservative Protestant churches that shared the same theological convictions. The difference was group style.35 32 See Orlando Patterson, “Making Sense of Culture,” Annual Review of Sociology 40 (2014), 1–​30, whose argument about this draws on Morris Freilich and Frank A. Schubert, “Proper Rules, Smart Rules, and Police Discretion,” in The Relevance of Culture, edited by Morris Freilich (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1989), 218–​44. 33 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-​Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1958), 295. 34 Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, “Culture in Interaction,” American Journal of Sociology 108, 4 (January 2003), 725–​94. 35 John J. Nelson and Harry H. Hiller, “Norms of Verbalization and the Decision Making Process in Religious Organizations,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 20, 2 (June 1980), 173–​180.

122  Religion’s Power In a diverse society like the United States the practical knowledge associated with religion varies greatly from place to place. A core of practical knowledge contributes to a common heritage while local cultures provide texture. Anyone familiar with traditional African American funerals in certain parts of the South, for example, would recognize Thomas Long’s description of infants being lifted into the air and passed over the coffin of the deceased relative as a ritual affirmation of life. Anyone having gone to a Jewish summer camp would understand Philip Roth’s remark in Nemesis that “As for God, it was easy to think kindly of Him in a paradise like Indian Hill.” And anyone with experience at a Midwestern church potluck would understand Jane Smiley’s summary in A Thousand Acres: It was barbecued ribs, scalloped potatoes with ham, three kinds of potato salad, four meat casseroles, green beans with cream sauce three ways, two varieties of sweet corn salad, lime Jell-​O with bananas, lime Jell-​O with maraschino cherries, somebody’s big beautiful green salad, but with a sweet dressing.

Practical knowledge makes people feel at home.36 While practical knowledge makes people comfortable, it also serves utilitarian purposes. Organizations are more effective when people feel like they belong. When religious organizations fashion themselves as places to find community, feeling like an insider matters.37 Similarly, practical knowledge is part of religious organizations’ success in securing resources. Historians note such customs as sending solicitors to members’ homes to collect weekly payments, publicizing the dollars and cents of each family’s contributions, renting pews, passing metal collection plates to encourage paper money contributions instead of coins, requiring members to march to the front of the meeting hall to give offerings, inviting children to take up the collection, including hymns of thanksgiving during the offering, asking members to make special donations on their birthdays, hosting festivals, holding long meetings without intermission or adjournment until a specified amount was pledged, and respecting times of hardship when members had nothing 36 Thomas G. Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 11; Philip Roth, Nemesis (New York: Vintage, 2010), 177; Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (New York: Random House, 1991), 218. 37 Rodney J. Hunter, “Pastoral Theology as Practical Knowledge,” in The Wiley Blackwell Reader in Practical Theology, edited by Bonnie J. Miller-​McLemore (New York: Wiley, 2019), 287–​96.

The Institutional Power of Religion  123 to give. “Last Sunday morning when they passed the hat, it was still nearly empty back where I sat,” one of Johnny Cash’s songs lamented, “but the preacher smiled and said that’s fine, the Lord’ll wait until Pickin Time.”38 Codified knowledge is information about beliefs, values, and traditions that has been written down or in some other way formalized. Examples include legal codes, scientific documents, medical knowledge, architectural designs, blueprints, owners’ manuals, novels, musical scores, and sacred texts. Codified knowledge is nearly always associated with specific institutions because it takes institutional resources to agree on what should be formalized and to write it down. Codified knowledge is then an important part of an institution’s power, exercising control over what needs to be known and granting authority to those who have the requisite knowledge. Scripture is the most common kind of codified knowledge in religious institutions. Jeffrey Guhin describes scripture as “a written text that (1) codifies an overarching meaning system for an interpretive community . . . and (2) establishes and mediates authority among its community of believers.”39 The degree of codification can vary and indeed often does to the extent of disagreements about different versions, translations, or interpretations of what has been written.40 Thus, the power of codified knowledge exists not only in its persuasive authority but also in its capacity to evoke ongoing debates about its possible meanings and implications. Codified knowledge can also be a formalization of practical knowledge. A cohabiting couple that has developed tacit ways of behaving toward each other, for example, may formalize those understandings as wedding vows; similarly, stories told informally within congregations can result in codified bylaws and formal histories. In other instances codification may be directed against practical knowledge, such as a statute outlawing graffiti or underage drinking. Given the variation in practical knowledge about religion, codification of this

38 Johnny Cash, “Pickin Time,” as discussed in Frederick E. Danker, “The Repertory and Style of a Country Singer: Johnny Cash,” Journal of American Folklore 85, 338 (1972), 309–​29; Thomas F. Rzeznik, Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial Era Philadelphia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013); Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 166–​85; ; Donna H. Barthle, Acolyte Leader’s Resource Guide (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2003). 39 Jeffrey Guhin, “Religion as Site Rather than Religion as Category: On the Sociology of Religion’s Export Problem,” Sociology of Religion l75, 4 (Winter 2014), 579–​93, quote on page 588. 40 Peter J. Thuesen, In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

124  Religion’s Power information is sometimes available too, as in guidebooks about Catholic, Episcopal, Jewish, and Orthodox customs. The codification of religious knowledge, just as the codification of law, is generally considered to have been of enormous value to the institutions with which it was associated during the history of their emergence. Codified knowledge was better perpetuated from generation to generation, provided for populations to be subjected to standard practices over larger geographic areas, served as a means for settling disputes, and justified the role of specialists and educational institutions.41 Max Weber associated it with the rise of modern bureaucratic institutions whose power resided in their construction of written documents that made possible greater standardization and predictability.42 In contemporary life the importance of codified knowledge lies less in the fact of its historic emergence and more in how it functions in the practicalities of bureaucratic administration. “A decision made by aggregating dispersed knowledge, and implemented by aligning common knowledge, gains greater purchase on future behavior when it becomes codified knowledge,” political theorist Josiah Ober writes, explaining that “In the epistemic process of codification, a decision is incorporated into the action-​ guiding ‘rules of the game,’ with potentially substantial effects on the distribution of social rewards and punishments.”43 Formal organizations of all kinds generate huge amounts of codified knowledge that is meant to solidify, perpetuate, and spread their influence, whether in science, medicine, business, or religion, and in a sense provide the justification for their existence. Studies of codified religious knowledge focus on its uses as affordances that people interact with by engaging in acts of production, interpretation, disputation, and modification. Codified knowledge is thus a resource that people deploy to define membership in communities and to guide members in how to think and behave. Codified knowledge establishes traditions to which people can resort in making claims about what should be done. Religious communities that revere sacred texts, as nearly all of them do, draw inspiration from these texts to instruct adherents in what to believe, when to engage in ritual practices, and how certain standards of moral and ethical conduct should be observed in daily life. The fact that knowledge is codified in sacred 41 Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Cases (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 187–​214; Renn, Evolution of Knowledge, 151. 42 Aptly summarized as “domination through knowledge,” Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978 [1922]), 225. 43 Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 211.

The Institutional Power of Religion  125 texts makes it legitimate for religious organizations to require that clergy acquire specialized training in the study and interpretation of these texts and that lay practitioners read the texts, listen to expositions about them, and in some instances commit them to memory. Sacred texts have the further advantage of solidifying religion’s institutional power by being reducible to creeds that can be more easily remembered and ritually recited while at the same time being sufficiently complex to generate reams of commentary. What counts as “God’s word,” therefore, can shift flexibly from short-​form statements of belief to long-​form compendia of sermons, study guides, and theological treatises.44 One of the commonest effects of codified knowledge is the distribution of power asymmetrically toward those capable of claiming expertise in its study and application and, more broadly, toward those claiming to value the rational understanding and application of knowledge rather than relying only on feelings and intuition. Many of the historic disputes among religious factions as well as between religion and science have revolved around this distinction. The historian of science Margaret Jacob, for example, writes that the debate during the Scottish Enlightenment between moderate and conservative clergy and their lay associates included accusations on both sides that the other side was driven too much by emotion and too little by reason, which meant not only a deliberate manner of thinking but also respect for the Bible, law, and logic. Conservatives charged moderate clergy with being polite, good at conversation, and sociable but insufficiently knowledgeable of scripture and good literature. Moderates labeled their orthodox brethren as enthusiasts who did not appreciate the written word. David Hume, for instance, writing about the enthusiasm evident in the “anabaptists in Germany, the camisars in France, the levellers and other fanatics in England, and the covenanters in Scotland,” said this emotionalism rises “to inspire the deluded fanatic with the opinion of divine illuminations, and with a contempt for the common rules of reason, morality, and prudence.”45 The dispute between fundamentalists and modernists that dominated American Protestantism during the early twentieth century bore similar tendencies. Fundamentalists, as historian George Marsden emphasizes, 44 Brian Malley, “Understanding the Bible’s Influence,” in The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-​ Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism, edited by James S. Bielo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 194–​204. 45 David Hume, Essay 12 in the 1777 edition of Essays, Moral and Political (Edinburgh: R. Fleming and A. Alison, 1777 [1741–​42]), 77–​78, quoted in Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 133.

126  Religion’s Power combined a literal reading of the canonized scripture with a commonsense understanding of practical knowledge grounded in intuition, while modernists also argued for commonsense knowledge but called for greater attention to the historical details of the canonization process itself.46 Notably, the disputes in these examples pitted codified knowledge against unformalized ways of knowing, which meant that each side could make claims based on its interpretation of the two. Another relationship of power and knowledge exists in the processes through which certain texts become sacred. Although most of the texts that came to be regarded as scripture did so well before the modern era, new ones were periodically being discovered, drafted, and otherwise proposed. The early nineteenth century, historian Seth Perry argues, was one such period. As Bible printing and marketing developed and as more of the public came under the influence of revivalism, visionaries such as Isaac Childs, Chloe Willey, and Joseph Smith asserted the authority of new texts while other leaders vied to elevate the status of Bibles, verses, and methods of reading the Bible. Borrowing from religious studies scholar Vincent Wimbush, Perry terms the process “scripturalization.”47 Wimbush writes, The primary focus should be placed not upon texts per se (that is, upon content-​meanings), but upon textures, gestures, and power—​namely the signs, material products, ritual practices and performances, expressivities, orientations, ethics, and politics associated with the phenomenon of the invention and uses of ‘scriptures.’48

Codified knowledge therefore is powerful in and through the practices that bring leaders and practitioners together and that reflect their command of resources both in and beyond the text.49

46 George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-​Century Evangelicalism, 1870–​1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 14–​15. 47 Seth Perry, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 5. 48 Vincent Wimbush, “Introduction,” in Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon, edited by Vincent Wimbush (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 3. 49 See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993), who writes (page ix), “Scripture is not a quality inherent in a given text, or type of text, so much as an interactive relation between that text and a community of persons.”

The Institutional Power of Religion  127 From one perspective these and similar examples reinforce the criticism frequently expressed about sacred texts that they can be used to justify any side of any argument.50 That view derives from the fact that sacred texts are compilations of teachings, prophetic assertions, and writings that include ambiguities and contradictions, but this view is modified when sacred texts are understood as ongoing practices of scripturalization. Codified knowledge imposes limits on the terms of discussion while it makes flexible context-​ specific interpretations possible. An interesting example outside familiar North American settings is described in an ethnographic study of Muslim converts in Brazil. There were ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences in the community between Arab immigrant Muslims and native Brazilian Muslim converts. The Quran served as the common text that facilitated the imam’s ability to speak authoritatively to both groups. His sermons encouraged the attendees to follow its codes in daily life and to study the scripture for themselves. But he also told stories about Muslims in China, England, and other remote places, which puzzled the ethnographers. When they asked about it, he explained that it was a way of adapting the text to the Brazilians’ circumstances. “If a Muslim can be correct in China and in London,” he said, “why can we not be correct in Brazil?”51 This was an illustration of the dynamic interaction between formalized knowledge and the social spaces in which it occurs. The Quran was durable and portable but also meaningful because of the practices that included question and answer sessions between the imam and the participants. The power of the knowledge conveyed depended on both the text and the context. The text provided authoritative codified knowledge. The context was composed of practical knowledge that facilitated the participants’ interaction with the imam. A related dynamic is evident in religious services when speakers recite sacred texts. Because it is deemed sacred, the text conveys its own authority. Yet the speaker by virtue of speaking also means to convey a kind of authority that derives only in part from the text. This is like the dilemma preachers face in speaking on behalf of God but also from their own position

50 For example, see Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51(April 1986), 273–​86, who writes, “The reader of the Bible can find a passage to justify almost any act” (page 277). 51 Gisele Fonseca Chagas, “Preaching for Converts: Knowledge and Power in the Sunni Community in Rio de Janeiro,” in Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices, edited by Baudouin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, Paulo G. Pinto, and Kathryn Spellman-​Poots (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 71–​79.

128  Religion’s Power of authority. It exists in many other contexts in which people quote scripture during prayers and testimonials. In these instances it becomes necessary to draw a connection between the text that is acontextual and the context. An example of how this is done was generated in a detailed linguistic analysis of Assemblies of God members’ prayers. The prayers frequently quoted phrases from the Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms but used linguistic devices to detach the quoted phrases from their embedding in a text and to relocate them into the immediate context. Sometimes they put the text to a familiar song. They heard admonitions like “think about it this morning, right here, right now.” They surrounded the text with words like “we desperately look to you and we thank you Holy Spirit.” We “claim this,” they said, we “accept it,” we “give praise,” we “truly desire to be cleansed.” The text was thus present but modified to link its authority to the immediate context.52 Of course, scripture is not the only codified knowledge that infuses religious practice. Twenty-​first-​century religious services typically include quotes from newspapers and television, anecdotes from literature and sports, secular music, and other nonreligious sources. Critics point out that these are intrusions from the commercial world. The quotes may assist making worship services “relevant” and yet diminish religion’s authority. Closer investigation, though, suggests that “scripturalizing” or “sacralizing” practices are often invoked to deal with this problem. For example, anthropologist Will Boone in studying an African American church in North Carolina wondered why it so readily adopted a particular contemporary praise album that was clearly produced and marketed under commercial auspices. The answer, he learned, was partly that the album included a promotional video in which the artist described the album almost as if its production were divinely inspired. The artist explained, referring to the night the album was produced, “I believe that the Lord is saying something powerful to us as a church and as a people. . . . It is my desire that you would enter into the worship experience that we had that night.”53 This, then, was another instance of codified knowledge being adapted to the immediate situation.

52 Robin A. Shoaps, “‘Pray Earnestly’: The Textual Construction of Personal Involvement in Pentecostal Prayer,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12, 1 (June 2002), 34–​71. 53 Will Boone, “We Can’t Go Back: Liturgies of Worship and Consumer Culture at One African American Church,” in The Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-​Charismatic Christianity, edited by Monique M. Ingalls and Amos Young (State College: Penn State University Press, 2015), 247–​61, quote by Christian artist William McDowell, page 250.

The Institutional Power of Religion  129

Status From the foregoing, it is evident that the collective resources and beliefs of the organization matter, yet a closer look at any organization reveals the significance of internal status and power differentials. Practice theory acknowledges that some positions in organizations carry more status and power than others, but this approach also emphasizes that power within organizations is less stable than may appear at first glance. It unfolds over time, waxes and wanes, and is exercised through decisions, at meetings, and in conversations. Power within organizations is a practice through which people seek, acquire, maintain, and lose power.54 Status hierarchies in religious organizations are enacted in such myriad activities as recruiting and training professional clergy, soliciting contributions, honoring volunteers, rewarding philanthropy, praising faithful participation, developing lay leadership, and at the same time denigrating alternative practices that compete for scarce resources. None of these activities occur in a vacuum. The status hierarchies reinforced in religious practices register the imprint of differences in power, wealth, and prestige in the world outside of religious organizations. A person of the “preferred” race and gender who brings money, credentials, and a winning personality is more likely to achieve status than a person lacking these traits. People low in the pecking order sometimes find empowerment in the alternative realities that religious practices communicate, as in the many well-​known examples of widows and orphans, the poor, and the socially despised receiving succor from religion. Yet the stories of disadvantaged people feeling excluded or marginalized or having to provide their religious practices with alternative meanings are abundant as well. As an example, consider Sara Smarsh’s memoir about growing up as a “trailer trash” kid in the 1980s in a rural community. She tells of generations of her family going to Mass at St. Rose’s, the nearest Catholic church, and of some of her ancestors having built the church, others having renovated it, and many others being buried in the graveyard behind the church. They were as faithful as any of the families in the parish. But because they were poor and because they knew that anything they did wrong, whether it was drinking too much or being unable to pay their bills, would be met with disrespect, they dutifully obeyed the church’s teachings about personal morality to the letter, 54 Cameron Anderson and Sebastien Brion, “Perspectives on Power in Organizations,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 1 (2014), 67–​97.

130  Religion’s Power rarely speaking at meetings and never questioning authority. What made the services meaningful was not the hope that God would lift them from poverty. The services were powerful because the parish’s poorer members could find a connection between aspects of the Mass and their experiences in daily life. That was especially the case with references to Christ’s body and blood, which Smarsh related to viscerally from witnessing the slaughter of farm animals and even the wounds from farm work on her father’s hands as he knelt beside her at the Communion rail.55 Hers was less a story of being empowered than of finding a niche in which to feel at home. If individuals’ power in organizations waxes and wanes, two perennially interesting questions about religious organizations are: How a charismatic leader rises to power and what happens when the leader dies? While organizational succession has long been studied, recent scholarship takes a closer look at the tasks, discussions, and interpersonal dynamics involved. In a study of leadership succession in Nigerian Pentecostal churches, for example, Cephas Tushima documents the shifts in considerations about faithfulness, kinship, and membership as the movement grew and achieved financial success. The shifts did not follow a straightforward path toward routinization of charisma, as earlier scholars thought, but were a dynamic series of negotiations involving biblical templates, history, and practical considerations.56 Other research on charismatic leadership suggests that it should be understood as the collective power of the organization that develops around a charismatic leader rather than only the leader’s own power. For example, Benjamin Zablocki, who studied charisma in communes in the 1970s, argued that charisma represented the investment of members’ self-​identities in their communes, from which the communes’ leaders derived symbolic authority. Nevertheless, one must ask about the characteristics that made some communes more viable than others. The best answer to that question came from a study of nineteenth-​century communes, which also focused on members’ self-​investment in the collectivity and identified facilitating practices such as sacrificial acts, dietary restrictions, and austerity, in addition to which centralized authority and a leadership surrounding itself with reverence were the most important. Charisma in other settings varies, from 55 Sara Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (New York: Scribner, 2018), 44–​84. 56 Cephas Tushima, “Leadership Succession Patterns in the Apostolic Church as a Template for Critique of Contemporary Charismatic Leadership Succession Patterns,” HTS Theological Studies 72, 1 (2016), 1–​8.

The Institutional Power of Religion  131 instances in which a leader’s special training, experience, compelling personal narrative, and vision strengthen an organization to ones in which such features derail an organization’s trajectory.57 Because religious organizations rely heavily on voluntary participation, questions about status hierarchies are especially relevant to considerations about the recruitment and retention of participants. Whereas earlier scholarship conceived of participation as driven by cost–​benefit incentive structures, newer work emphasizes the performative aspects of participation through which behavior is affirmed in small ways or deterred in equally small ways. One of the challenges religious organizations face is giving volunteers sufficient recognition such that they feel rewarded, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, adhering to norms of equality, acceptance, and humility. The right balance is often achieved through discursive performances, particularly patterns of speaking about one’s contributions in ways that do not seem pretentious. For example, an Episcopal layperson who volunteered regularly for Meals on Wheels explained in an interview that people praise him in ways that “make me seem like such a great guy,” but he tells them he’s only doing it because “it makes me happy.” In short, he receives praise, which he relishes but knows how to deny relishing it too much.58 Lay leadership is an aspect of institutional power that has received particular attention because of its practical implications. Leadership is commonly thought of as something that talented individuals bring to the job as they initiate, guide, and strengthen organizations. In this view a powerful organization results from powerful leaders; hence, a strong religious organization results from a leader who variously is a visionary, an effective administrator, a skilled planner, a person of deep faith, and in the best scenario, all the above. This is a compelling approach that emphasizes good training, good recruitment, and good support as the keys to a successful organization. This view is understandable, especially when strong religious organizations—​ megachurches, for example—​ are known for renowned leaders who attach their names to books, videos, television series, ministries, and buildings. But there is a different way of thinking about it. That approach 57 Benjamin Zablocki, Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes (New York: Free Press, 1980); Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Jay A. Conger, Rabindra N. Kanungo, and Sanjay T. Menon, “Charismatic Leadership and Follower Effects,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 21 (2000), 747–​67; Haroro J. Ingram, The Charismatic Leadership Phenomenon in Radical and Militant Islamism (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013). 58 Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion, 65.

132  Religion’s Power starts with the organization, not the leader. It asks what organizations do and why it is in their interest to recruit and retain good leaders. From this perspective, organizations shape what a good leader is expected to do and what an effective leader finds possible to do. To ask about institutional power is thus to ask about how organizations influence leaders—​how the structure, history, and resources of which the organization is constituted create opportunities for certain people to occupy certain positions of leadership. It is to ask how these organizational opportunities train and constrain, guide, and facilitate but also exclude certain practitioners from leadership. Once those considerations have been examined it can be asked how leaders are empowered by their leadership roles and how that empowerment enhances the organization’s capacity to achieve its goals. For example, lay volunteers in studies of faith-​based service organizations frequently remark on how much their tasks depend on improvisation. The reason is that the clients served are racially and ethnically diverse, have diverse needs, and are best served by piecing together resources from a network of organizations. Knowing the rules is important, but so is knowing how to modify the rules.59 Lay leadership is interesting from this perspective because of the ambiguous status it occupies. It is neither the position of formal authority that clergy occupy nor the informal influence that an ordinary participant might enjoy because of prestige in the community or a winning personality, but somewhere in between—​a mixture of formal and informal authority. Nearly all local religious organizations create positions for lay leaders to occupy. A national study of U.S. congregations, for example, found that upward of 90 percent had administrative committees, education classes, choirs or other musical groups, and miscellaneous groups that met regularly for religious, social, recreational, or service purposes. Between a quarter and a third of regularly participating adults were reportedly involved in some sort of lay leadership role. Another study found that congregations imitate one another, suggesting that the near universality of committees, groups, and leadership roles is shaped by an expectation that this is what it means to be a congregation; moreover, the better a congregation can fill these positions, the more effective it will be regarded.60 59 Robert Wuthnow, Saving America? Faith-​ Based Services and the Future of Civil Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 60 Mark Chaves and Shawna Anderson, National Congregations Study: Cumulative Data File and Codebook (Durham, NC: Duke University, Department of Sociology, 2008); Mark Chaves and Shawna L. Anderson, “Changing American Congregations: Findings from the Third Wave of the National Congregations Study,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53, 4 (2014), 676–​86; R.

The Institutional Power of Religion  133 How congregations fill lay leadership positions depends on expectations about what it means to be a good organization. When congregations imitate and indeed compete with other congregations, they develop common expectations. Some of these are set by denominational traditions that give different names to executive committees (vestries, sessions, church councils) but have something that functions in this capacity. Others transcend traditions. Studies show, for example, that women are more likely to occupy lay leadership positions when congregations are larger, wealthier, and better educated.61 Lay leadership gives the occupants of these positions a sense of ownership, much like employee shareholder plans do in corporations; additionally, lay leaders are opinion shapers who influence the organization’s goals and activities, and they receive opportunities to develop skills and display talents—​public speaking, teaching, singing, playing instruments, operating audiovisual equipment, convening meetings—​that are transferrable to other settings and contribute to a sense of personal empowerment.62 Consider, for instance, a man named Rafael who spent much of his time as a lay leader at an inner-​city Spanish-​speaking church. He described in an interview how he spent Saturdays doing odd jobs at the church, served as the church’s treasurer, counted the money and paid the bills, helped put out a newsletter, and devoted several evenings a week to visiting families from the church. Although he spoke very little English, was a recent immigrant, had no friends, and had trouble finding a job, he said the church gave him a way to feel that he was contributing. “I became a new person,” he said.63 Lay empowerment, though, is a source of frustration for clergy whose own power is compromised, as candid memoirs sometimes recount. “By and by he offends one or two,” a pastor in the 1870s lamented, and “when he offends one or two, he may lose 40 or 50.” At least that was his experience when the Stephen Warner, A Church of Our Own: Disestablishment and Diversity in American Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 61 Todd W. Ferguson, “Organizational Resources and the Gender Gap in Congregational Lay Leadership,” Sociological Forum 35, 1 (March 2020), 126–​44; Brandon C. Martinez and Jeffrey A. Tamburello, “The Role of Whites in Lay Leadership Within Latino Churches,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57, 1 (March 2018), 39–​57. 62 See Lydia Bean and Brandon C. Martinez, “Sunday School Teacher, Culture Warrior: The Politics of Lay Leaders in Three Religious Traditions,” Social Science Quarterly 96, 1 (March 2015), 133–​47; and on civic skills, see Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 63 Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 125.

134  Religion’s Power lay leaders at his church defied his authority. He lamented, they “insulted me in the meetings till I decided to call no more such church meetings.”64

Subversion Subversive acts are the practices through which the power of organizations is undermined. Much of the foregoing exemplifies the important fact that institutional power is not entirely self-​maintaining. The literature on religious organizations is rich with discussions of decline: churches go out of business, denominations lose members, leaders struggle to keep from going under financially. An organization’s power will decline if it cannot attract members and money. That has been the point of studies likening religious organizations to businesses. Congregations must provide sufficient incentives to attract participants. But this way of thinking is quite limited. There are many ways in which organizations’ power may decline. It can decline even when there are plenty of generous adherents. This is because institutional power is more complex than organizational size. Power is an organization’s capacity to set forth its goals and the means of achieving its goals no matter its size. From studies that have looked more closely at organizational dynamics, four ways in which an organization’s power may be subverted can be identified, none of which may be entirely avoidable, but all of which should be of concern to leaders wanting to keep their organizations strong. The four are: dissent, noncompliance, displacement, and suppression. Dissent subverts institutional power from within. It consists of internal disagreements that result in conflict that includes organized challenges to authority. If the disagreements are not resolved through negotiation or internally quashed, the grievances lead to such outcomes as an ouster of those currently in charge, an impasse that prevents the organization from pursuing its goals, or secession that may include the formation of one or more rival organizations. The Great Organ Dispute of 1827 is an example of an internal challenge to an organization’s authority that resulted in secession and the founding of a new denomination. The most comprehensive study of secessions was an investigation of schisms in three U.S. Protestant denominational families (Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists) from 1890 to 64 Robert Christison, Church Defence by a Dissenting Minister (London: William Hunt and Company, 1874), 49.

The Institutional Power of Religion  135 1990. Using quantitative methods to measure possible factors influencing schisms, the study concluded that their most significant source was dissent arising from proposals to merge local, regional, or national organizations into a larger or different national organization.65 The study underscored the larger significance of secession in the history of American religion, at least for the three denominational families investigated, among which schisms occurred on average every two or three years. Indeed, the authors, John R. Sutton and Mark Chaves, suggested that religious diversity in the United States has more often resulted from schisms and mergers than from the founding of new religious organizations.66 While schisms are often lamented by religious leaders who regret the acrimony that may have accompanied them, they do represent from another perspective a means of preserving institutional power. There may in fact be an increase in loyalty among the splinter group to their leaders and traditions. Conflicts within congregations reveal the extent to which they result from, and exacerbate, weaknesses of institutional power. A generalization from quantitative research suggests that conflicts serious enough to result in members leaving are more likely when the congregation’s leadership is weak, either because the clergyperson in charge is younger or more recently appointed or because the congregation is composed of greater economic and racial inequality. Ethnographic research suggests that internal dissent also has to do with congregations’ histories and expectations. A study of congregations in Chicago, for example, found that conflict was frequent in congregations that vested authority democratically in members and expected them to exercise their say-​so by engaging in conversations and decision-​making meetings. Conflict was also likely in congregations with ambiguous models of authority. It was less common in congregations where the authority resided in set patterns of worship and education, thereby providing clear rules about who was in charge and why or how leadership transitions were to be handled.67 Dissent unfolds over time, reflects participants’ memories of past events, and engages people who interact with one another directly and behind the scenes. A study of an Episcopal parish in Northern Virginia that underwent a 65 John R. Sutton and Mark Chaves, “Explaining Schism in American Protestant Denominations,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, 2 (June 2004), 171–​190. 66 Ibid. 67 Hui-​Tzu Grace Chou, “The Impact of Congregational Characteristics on Conflict-​Related Exit,” Sociology of Religion 69, 1 (Spring 2008), 93–​108; Penny Becker, Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

136  Religion’s Power schism illustrates these dynamics. The schism involved disgruntled members of the parish challenging the authority of the priest. Four years of simmering disquiet broke into the open at a meeting called by the bishop to let anonymous letter writers air their grievances. “We fought so hard to keep [our parish] out of the clutches of Father Henry,” one of the letter writers shouted, “but I fear that we’re once again in the clutches of a dysfunctional priest! You are a control freak, justifying whatever you want to do by saying, ‘As your priest I have the authority!’ Authority or not, you can’t tell us what to do!” Another shouted, “This is our church! You are like a bully, bossing us around!” Yet another said in a loud voice, “Your presence here is an abomination!” His authority shattered, the priest left and with a few supporters started a new congregation. The study documented that the conflict had been brewing for four years, drew on meetings the aggrieved knew about at other churches, escalated because it focused on parish-​wide practices, occurred when splits in other congregations were in the news, and revolved around differing understandings of how a parish should be governed. The conflict was interpersonal but was fundamentally about institutional power.68 The passive-​aggressive counterpart of overt dissent is noncompliance. When an organization relies on voluntary participation, as religious organizations do, noncompliance is most noticeable as nonparticipation—​simply failing to show up. But noncompliance also happens in less obvious ways. In many instances a subversion of authority is impossible because participation is sufficiently involuntary such that departure would incur an enormous cost. “Weapons of the weak,” as anthropologist James C. Scott called them, are all that are available to peasants and serfs. They can only register dissent in gossip, innuendo, metaphors, euphemisms, and other veiled acts of verbal or bodily subversion.69 To a lesser extent the same may be true among the employees of contemporary organizations. When a healthcare organization attempted to introduce a new computer system, for example, an ethnographic study of employees’ responses found widespread resistance to the innovation. They did not refuse to use it or register their displeasure by voicing objections. They resisted by repeatedly asking thorny questions during training sessions, alerting managers to embarrassing flaws in the system, and posing difficult issues about efficiency and computer-​related ailments. 68 Joyce Ann Mercer, “Conflicting Identities: An Ethnographic Account of Conflict and Schism in an Episcopal Parish,” Ecclesial Practices 3 (2016), 210–​30, quotes on page 211. 69 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

The Institutional Power of Religion  137 Some raised grievances about separate issues that gave them an opportunity to interject critical comments about the computer system. The questions and comments changed nothing about the system but eroded the managers’ authority in the employees’ eyes as they (the employees) named what they were doing in behind-​the-​scenes conversations as resistance.70 Something similar happens in religious organizations when participants question procedures, raise troublesome unresolvable doctrinal issues, criticize the length and content of sermons, and pose doubts about the wisdom of administrative decisions. And yet the power of religious organizations, which resides in congregational norms as well as in formal authority, can work against these weapons, dampening them with teachings about consensus, neighborly love, turning the other cheek, and praying for guidance, all resulting in concerns being voiced through back-​channel networks that offer more leeway for disagreements to be expressed than at public meetings. Only later may the extent of displeasure boil to the surface. Displacement is the subversion of institutional authority through its transfer to a different organization. The hostile takeover of a business by another business is an example. Its owners’ power to make decisions is displaced. A financially struggling or scandal-​ridden religious congregation placed under the supervision of a denominational oversight committee is a similar example. Displacement in these instances transfers power to another organization that operates within the same institutional domain—​business or religion. The border dispute mentioned earlier between Reverend Dowie’s faith-​healing organization and Chicago’s medical community was one of many late-​nineteenth-​and early-​twentieth-​century examples of religion’s institutional power being displaced by the power of professional associations. Suppression is the most extreme subversion of institutional power. It destroys an organization’s power through formal or informal intimidation. The means through which intimidation occurs vary, ranging from negative publicity campaigns aimed at embarrassing, shaming, and discrediting an organization’s authority to surveillance, police investigations, lawsuits, coercion, and violence. Laws prohibiting all but Anglican churches in some of the American colonies, for example, suppressed the work of Presbyterians, Baptists, and Quakers. Recent acts of suppression include the intimidation of Muslims and Hindus through restrictive zoning covenants and the 70 Pushkala Prasad and Anshuman Prasad, “Stretching the Iron Cage: The Constitution and Implications of Routine Workplace Resistance,” Organization Science 11, 4 (August 2000), 387–​403.

138  Religion’s Power surveillance of mosques and temples by federal law enforcement officers. While much of the suppression is done through legal means, the history of religion is filled with instances of illegal suppression. The first recorded arson of an independent Black church in the United States happened in 1822 in South Carolina.71 Since that time, hundreds of Black churches have been burned, and dozens of synagogues, mosques, and temples have been vandalized and destroyed. In most of these cases, violence toward property is not expected to shut down the congregation, although it has in some instances. It is directed toward the symbolic power the organization represents, aimed at diminishing it by transgressing the space it occupies.

Collective Action Institutional power is most evident when it results in collective action, that is, when people organize to do something that they haven’t done before and that goes beyond the usual ways in which they maintain the spaces in which they meet and perpetuate the knowledge and status relations with which they have been familiar. Collective action can be divided broadly into two kinds: action directed inward toward reforming or inducing innovations within organizations, and action directed outward toward people and other organizations in the wider society. Collective action requires resources; hence, is often investigated under the rubric of “resource mobilization.” The resources mobilized include people, money, and the various habits through which people and money can be organized, led, and motivated toward achieving a common purpose. Because collective action differs from the status quo, these resources are often described as innovations—​new ideas, new leaders, and new motivation oriented toward new activities. However, it makes better sense if we are to understand the full implications of institutional power to begin by looking at what is already there, which, as we have seen, includes space, knowledge, and status. These aspects of institutional power are the resources that provide the basis from which collective action is mobilized. 71 C. Eric Lincoln, Coming Through the Fire: Surviving Race and Place in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Frank M. Howell, John P. Bartkowski, Lynn M. Hempel, and Jeremy R. Porter, “When Faith, Race, and Hate Collide: Religious Ecology, Local Hate Cultures, and Church Burnings,” Review of Religious Research 60 (2018), 223–​45; Carolyn S. Carter, “Church Burning in African American Communities: Implications for Empowerment Practice,” Social Work 44, 1 (January 1999), 62–​68; Nadia Marzouki, Islam: An American Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 69–​105.

The Institutional Power of Religion  139 The resulting action may be widely dispersed, but it happens in places that serve as its venues and in which membership is defined. It depends on practical knowledge and often on codified knowledge as well that forms the ideas around which people debate what needs to be done. Its leadership and principles of allocating status grow out of existing status relations. These are also subject to practices through which dissent is expressed. An example of collective action oriented toward internal reform was the Presbyterian Lay Committee, which emerged in the 1960s to steer Presbyterian doctrines and ministries away from what its organizers regarded as a radical heretical direction they feared was undermining the Christian gospel for which Presbyterianism had stood during its history. The organizers’ principal concern was a new doctrinal statement adopted by the Presbyterian Church USA that critics regarded as “stripping the Bible of its authority.”72 As its name implied, the group sought to organize lay leaders and use their power to challenge the power of clergy and professional staff at the helm of the denomination. On the surface, it represented something new in terms of a well-​organized group with a specific agenda. However, it was equally an example of the institutional power of Presbyterianism. The association met in church buildings and at convention halls during regional and national denominational meetings. It attracted participants whose common identity was the fact that they were Presbyterians and benefited from the fact that Presbyterian churches had formally organized groups of lay leaders with authority to make decisions in congregations and to be represented at regional and national meetings. The new association was able to rely on leaders who provided skill in running businesses of their own and funds for producing publications. Moreover, its knowledge base included familiar habits of conducting meetings and worshiping as well as the codified biblical teachings it sought to emphasize. These resources contributed significantly to its success in achieving its goals. Collective action oriented toward the wider society is similarly facilitated by institutional power. An example is the temperance movement that flourished in the United States from the 1820s through the end of the century. Early in these years, it became a national movement oriented toward abstinence from—​or moderation in—​the consumption of alcoholic 72 “The History of the Presbyterian Lay Committee,” The Layman, 2013, online at layman.org; James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 92; Jill K. Gill, “Caught in the Middle: Navigating the Clergy-​Laity Gap During the Vietnam War,” Journal of Presbyterian History 89, 2 (Fall/​Winter 2011), 52–​65.

140  Religion’s Power beverages. It held meetings at churches, which in many communities were the only places in which to hold large gatherings; adopted a federated administrative structure that linked local meetings with state chapters and the national leadership; scheduled meetings and shared information through this structure; and used it to solicit money and publish temperance tracts and newspapers. In many communities both in America and England it supplemented its church-​style meetings by organizing brass bands and temperance choirs modeled on church bands and choirs.73 The movement also benefited from practical knowledge such as that employed by the colporteurs in going from home-​to-​home selling religious books and from the codified knowledge it derived from its sponsoring churches. Michael P. Young, who conducted one of the most detailed studies of the movement’s ideas, found that it benefited especially from Christian conversion narratives, which provided templates giving people hope that they could quit drinking and join with others in the righteous cause of moral reform.74 “God moves in a mysterious way,” William Allen White, the celebrated Kansas journalist, wrote about the rising influence of the temperance movement in 1901: And when one considers what poor sticks of men have carried God’s banner—​the insane, the brutal, the ignorant, the lame and the halt and the blind, but always the brave—​one pauses before condemning even the most despised of creatures as unfit for the work.75

These words were about Carrie Nation, jailed for smashing saloons, but the description captured the religious impulse that underlay the entire temperance movement. Many of the reform movements that have roots in religious institutions bear similarities to these examples. The impact they have on the wider society is influenced by many factors, only some of which are controlled by religious institutions. But understanding why religion can organize these movements requires paying attention to the resources present in these institutions—​their

73 Charles Edward McGuire, “American Songs, Pastoral Nationalism and the English Temperance Cantata,” in Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-​Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley, edited by Bennett Zon (London: Routledge, 2016), 173–​94; S. W. Straub, Temperance Battle Songs for the Use of Choirs and Glee Clubs in All Kinds of Temperance Meetings (Chicago: S. W. Straub, 1883). 74 Michael P. Young, “Confessional Protest: The Religious Birth of U.S. National Social Movements,” American Sociological Review 67, 5 (October 2002), 660–​88. 75 William Allen White, “Carrie Nation and Kansas,” Saturday Evening Post, April 6, 1901.

The Institutional Power of Religion  141 material resources, to be sure, but also their habits, disposition, and time-​ tested organizational skills. What happens from day to day in creating and defining physical and symbolic space and how knowledge, status, and dissent are practiced are the resources from which collective action develops. Institutional power then is organized, emplaced, and characterized internally by practical and codified knowledge and by status hierarchies. Religion’s institutional power is exercised in practice by putting these resources to use in small, nearly invisible ways such as defining how time is understood and supplying cues about what to bring to a church potluck and by deploying them more deliberately toward regulating members’ beliefs about God and their habits of moral conduct. It bears emphasizing that institutional power is the capacity to exercise influence whether that capacity is effectively exercised or not. It consists of the structures that shape what is known, believed, and practiced. There is considerable inertia in these structures because they constitute tradition in the popular meaning of the word but more precisely because they guide the decisions participants make about how to invest their time and how to behave toward one another. These exist both as moral dicta and as implicit norms that evoke conformity simply because they seem appropriate.

4 Religion and Identity Power Identity power is the asymmetric capacity to control how large categories of people define themselves and relate to one another. It is commonly present in the categorization of people on grounds of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual orientation. Identity power based on religious categories is present as well, most notably in the capacity of large dominant groups or traditions to shape how people categorize themselves and thereby to influence who they associate with and what beliefs they hold dear. Asymmetric categorization lumps people together in terms of presumed characteristics that are made salient by those with the capacity to define the categories. Identity power is thus a mechanism through which the subordination of whole classes of people is achieved. This means it is also relevant to groups’ efforts to overcome their subordination. Contemporary discussions of identity power approach the topic from three principal directions. The first centers around the concept of symbolic boundaries, the second on cognitive schema, and the third on identity politics. Symbolic boundaries are socially constructed lines of demarcation, such as between men and women or Protestants and Catholics, that people recognize and reproduce in public discourse and in how they do or do not interact with one another. The boundaries are dramatized through ritual enforcement and transgression, through the separation of spaces and roles, through people interacting with one another across them, and through the differential allocation of resources. Cognitive schemas are mental maps that organize thought by lumping information into patterns, identifying salient features, and filtering the information processed to create and name categories that simplify and organize reality. Schemas create categories through pattern recognition and inductive generalization. Identity politics focus on social categories that are widely recognized, such as racial and gender categories, and are concerned with how these categories are culturally constructed and what they do to mobilize for political purposes. Whereas symbolic boundaries and cognitive schemas are generally thought of as mechanisms through which oppression is institutionalized, identity politics is more concerned with the Religion’s Power. Robert Wuthnow, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197652534.003.0005

Religion and Identity Power  143 means through which it is resisted. Together, these practices allocate people to social categories and distribute power unequally to these categories.1 These approaches to identity power exhibit agreement on several key points. First, identities are relational, meaning that categorization is always a matter of sameness and difference, of “compare and contrast.” Second, relational categories need not be but usually are asymmetric in terms of status and power. Third, categorization is mentally efficient as a way of organizing and making sense of complex bits of information; thus, the efficiency of categorization means that groups in power often utilize the categories that are already in place and that subordinate groups sometimes absorb the categorical definitions imposed on them. Fourth, the symbolic boundaries that define the edges of the categories are important as contested zones in which rituals and discursive performances dramatize differences in power. Fifth, categorization affects and is affected by social relationships, often serving as a source of internal solidarity within categories and reducing interaction or aggravating power differences across categories. And sixth, categorization supplies the context in which subordinate groups can resist subordination and mobilize efforts to overcome it. Practice theory’s contribution to the discussion of identity power is emphasizing that identities are not only constructed but that construction is an active, often contested process that combines the mental frameworks people bring to their social interaction with the power arrangements present in those situations and are reproduced and adapted as interactive situations unfold. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, illustrates this point when he writes, “If I am a Jew, I have to recognize that the tradition of Judaism is partly constituted by a continuous argument over what it means to be a Jew.”2 An emphasis on practice contrasts with approaches in which categories, classifications, mental maps, and symbolic boundaries alone are the central objects of inquiry. But studies focusing on such classifications increasingly come to terms with the fact that categories are often unstable and that even 1 On symbolic boundaries, see Frederik Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, edited by Frederik Barth (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1998, originally published in 1969), 9–​38; on cognitive schemas, Roy G. D’Andrade, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Douglas S. Massey, Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (New York: Russell Sage, 2007), 1–​30; on identity politics, Mary Bernstein, “Identity Politics,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005), 47–​ 74; and on inequality, Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). 2 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 60, 4 (1977), 460.

144  Religion’s Power the most durable ones are reproduced in bits and pieces of unfolding social interaction. Indeed, it is in the reproduction of categories that practices and the exercise of power come together as a dual connection: differences in power influence actors’ capacity to assert claims based on certain identities, and those identities in turn affect the disposition of privileges and opportunities. The value of the practice approach for understanding religion as a form of identity power can be readily suggested by briefly revisiting Durkheim’s notion of the sacred. For Durkheim, the sacred was powerful not only because it expressed something about the gods but also because it evoked a strong sense of solidarity among the community that worshiped the sacred. Through collective rituals and the accompanying sense of collective conscience, the community imposed its norms on individuals, causing them to conform to shared rules and differentiating themselves from outsiders while experiencing strong feelings of in-​group solidarity. Durkheim’s argument pertains in some respects to religious communities even today, as evidenced in the value many participants attach to the feelings of community they experience from bonding with coreligionists. Yet the Durkheimian approach is limited in two respects: in-​group versus out-​group distinctions are always matters of negotiation in modern pluralistic societies, unlike in aboriginal settings where that is less likely to be the case, and religious identities, no matter how strong, are always complicated by intersections with other identities, as complex terms such as “White evangelical Protestant” and “Latino Catholic” readily suggest. This is the reason discussions of identity in recent years have turned increasingly toward an emphasis on practice. Important as categories are, and as commonplace as identities such as Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and atheist are, the power of these categories lies at the edges of their interaction in daily life with the multiple additional identities that characterize individuals and groups. Power is a matter of salience and salience is active, intersectional, and dynamic. But if identities are as subject to interactive construction in practice, as some versions of practice theory suggest, how is it that categorization remains as important as it does? The answer, which has usefully been discussed in the literature on citizenship, law, education, and social media, is that categories’ salience in contemporary life has increased as the capacity to construct and disseminate information has expanded and as states and markets find it ever more useful in managing large populations to sort and divide; information, as it were, begets categories, exercising power by classifying

Religion and Identity Power  145 people in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, age cohorts, region of residence, and shopping preferences, among other things. Religious categories, similarly, are prominent features of the media landscape, emanating still to a degree from religious organizations (e.g., “Southern Baptist,” “Anglican”) but increasingly from public officials, pollsters, and journalists (e.g., “nones,” “radical Islamist”).3 The practice approach has been articulated among scholars interested in how people in ordinary life create self-​understandings amid the cacophony of publicly available labels that prevail in contemporary life. Identity as a practice, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper write, “is used by ‘lay’ actors in some (not all!) everyday settings to make sense of themselves, of their activities, of what they share with, and how they differ from others.”4 Identities in practice are cognitive and emotional, created as well as adopted. They are how people conceive of themselves in the world and what those conceptions enable them to do or hinder them from doing. Identities are powerful in these respects: in asserting their identity, people make claims about rights and privileges, in having identities imposed on them they are lumped together with people of similarly low or high status, and in identifying with persons deemed similar and against persons deemed different they use identities to make sense of their interests and predicaments and to persuade others to act accordingly. To the extent that religion in much of the contemporary world is deeply oriented toward personal life, religious identities are clearly associated with practices aimed at self-​fulfillment and the resolution of personal needs. Identity is an emergent feature of nearly every discussion of religiously inflected pursuits of self-​fulfillment, whether focusing on intentions, feelings, and bodies or dealing with conversion or directed toward race, gender, and sexuality. In the intimate settings in which individuals strive for personal fulfillment, identities that contribute empowerment can be constructed 3 On the construction of religious identities with attention to symbolic boundaries, see Penny Edgell, “A Cultural Sociology of Religion: New Directions,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012), 247–​ 65; Penny Edgell, Douglas Hartmann, Evan Stewart, and Joseph Gerteis, “Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders: Moral Boundaries and the Non-​Religious in the United States,” Social Forces 95, 2 (December 2016), 607–​638; Jared Bok, “Symbolic Filtering: Selectively Permeable Evangelical Boundaries in an Age of Religious Pluralism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53, 4 (December 2014), 808–​25; Mira Niculescu, “Boundary Crossers: The ‘Jewish Buddhists’ and Judaism’s Symbolic Boundaries in a Global Age,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 62, 177 (January–​March, 2017), 157–​76; and Jens Koehrsen, Inappropriate Spirits: Middle Class Pentecostalism in Argentina (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 4 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29, 1 (February 2000), 1–​47, quote on page 4.

146  Religion’s Power through care in managing friendships, experiences, and stories.5 Extending insights from these settings to questions about the intersection of religion with categorical distinctions in larger populations has necessitated bringing in additional considerations, especially of social networks. Relational theory is a complementary approach that emphasizes practice but adds the important fact that people relate to one another as self-​identified members of social categories, who in turn understand themselves as different from others. They are less in charge of their own self-​identities as in intimate settings, and they contribute in small and large ways to the perpetuation of categories that influence the livelihoods of others. They do this in decisions about who they talk to, what they say, how they vote, who they may hire, and with whom they may worship. The study of religion and identity has contributed to understandings of this relationship as one of the mechanisms through which religion’s power is exercised. Studies focus on specific kinds of identity through which categories of the population relate to one another; on the basis of which subordination, discrimination, and “othering” occur; and toward which efforts are made to resist these forms of disempowerment. In the following I discuss recent contributions to the literature on religious identity’s relationships with the construction of gender and sexuality, systemic racism, and nationalism.

Gender and Sexuality Studies of religion and gender have evolved over the past half-​century through several overlapping phases: comparisons of the religious practices of men and women and of attitudes toward their roles, research on women’s experiences and practices within the contexts of institutional religion, and studies of the gendering of religion and spirituality beyond as well as within religious institutions. The first originated early in the twentieth century with evidence compiled from churches and other statistics that women were significantly more involved in religion than men and then was furthered in the 1960s and 1970s by the availability of additional data on practices and attitudes from surveys in which comparisons of men and women could be made. The results confirmed what historians also observed: “Women 5 Stephen S. Bush, Visions of Religion: Experience, Meaning, and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), is a valuable source on the power invested in religious experiences and the quest for personal meaning.

Religion and Identity Power  147 provide essential support for the church and affirm its moral role,” Ann Braude writes, “but their work happens in the background and their support is invisible. It is the men who play the leading roles in religious organizations.”6 These studies prompted scholars to ask why the differences existed so broadly and generated arguments that often essentialized gender in terms of assumptions about women’s emotionality, natural subservience, exposure to risks from childbirth and caring for the sick, subjection to stricter moral supervision by one or both parents, need for comfort, and desire for intimacy with God.7 But, as part of the turn toward an interest in power that developed in conjunction with the Civil Rights Movement and feminism, scholars also asked why women were so disproportionately involved in religion when the power of religious institutions was usually held by men. This question led to the second phase in which studies sought to understand the impediments limiting women’s involvement in religious leadership roles and to examine possibilities of resistance against these barriers. These studies included inquiries into the dynamics within congregations and small groups through which religious practices sometimes challenged power structures. The third phase represents a more recent expansion of interest in the mechanisms through which gendered empowerment and disempowerment occur. If, as Braude says, men “play the leading roles,” attention must be directed to the fact that roles are played. They exist prior to the individuals who play them and are present as scripts, in precedents, and organizational arrangements, but they are also enacted and thus reproduced each time they are enacted. This emphasis on practice is also reflected in greater attention being given to the study of sexual orientation. The trajectory of interest has thus been away from studies taking gendered identities for granted and toward studies asking about the practices through which religious identities, gendered and sexual identities, and power come together. The focus has been on examining the socially structured situations in which power differences are inscribed, the cues and idioms involved, and the actions in which individuals and groups engage to resist or revise gendered power arrangements. To this end, studies of religion and gender and sexuality have drawn extensively from the

6 Ann Braude, Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1. 7 See Jessica L. Collett and Omar Lizardo, “A Power-​Control Theory of Gender and Religiosity,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48, 2 (June 2009), 213–​31; and Alan Miller and Rodney Stark, “Gender and Religiousness: Can Socialization Explanations Be Saved?” American Journal of Sociology 107, 6 (2002), 1399–​1423, who review many of these theories and suggest their own.

148  Religion’s Power literature on gender, sexuality, and power in other contexts, including families, the workplace, and schools. Asymmetries in power and the resources on which access to power depend are central to the literature investigating the relationships among and differences between men and women, straight and gay persons, and cisgendered and transgendered persons. These include differences built into the society’s power structures, such as differences in pay between women and men for equal work and differences in protections against job discrimination for straight and LGBTQ-​identified persons. Symbolic boundaries that reproduce gendered and sexual identities are present in both structural and personal forms of discrimination. People are sorted into preexisting socially constructed categories with markers that range from designations on birth certificates and driver’s licenses to social norms based on mannerisms and dress. Recent studies also pay greater attention to spatial distinctions, such as gendered bathrooms, which become the focus of controversy when accommodations for transgendered persons are provided, and the residential dispersion of gay families, which alters perceptions and relationships among neighbors and in churches. The cognitive schemas approach emphasizes how markers of gender and sexuality are “chunked” together to form packaged identities that categorize people as male or female and gay or straight and assign other characteristics to these categories, for example, differences in the physical size of males and females that come without conscious deliberation to imply differences in leadership abilities or differences in habits that are taken as markers of sexual identity.8 Some of the most telling examples of cognitive chunking occur in audit studies showing that employers pick up on cues about women being mothers and associate these with assumptions about women being less competent and dependable.9 Cognitive chunking of this kind is an example of “fast thinking” that occurs without deliberation.10 But it takes shape in practices that affirm or disconfirm its relevance in specific contexts. The identity politics approach stresses how social movements elevate the salience of gendered and sexual identities by framing and mobilizing around particular issues, such as equal rights and marriage equality. 8 Irene V. Blair and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Automatic and Controlled Processes in Stereotype Priming,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (1996), 1142–​63; Cecilia L. Ridgeway and Shelley J. Correll, “Unpacking the Gender System: A Theoretical Perspective on Gender Beliefs and Social Relations,” Gender and Society 18, 4 (August 2004), 510–​31. 9 Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik, “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?,” American Journal of Sociology 112, 5 (March 2007), 1297–​1338. 10 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

Religion and Identity Power  149 Identity politics is concerned with instituting practices that challenge the structures through which subordination based on gender and sexual orientation are reproduced. These approaches, while differing in emphasis, hold several arguments in common. Identities are both personal and transpersonal, meaning that individuals identify themselves as male or female, gay or straight, cisgendered or transgendered, and so on, and that these categories are also present in the wider culture beyond how any individual uses them (e.g., in newspapers, books, films, and government documents). Identities are relational in the sense that one identity is defined in opposition to the other, primarily in the “us” and “them” comparisons built into self-​perceptions and language. Identities are both situational and structural, meaning that we respond to cues about gender and sexuality in the immediate situation in ways that influence social interaction and we bring habits and assumptions to these practices. Identities represent a combination of constraints and choices, for example, in the limited resources that people with different identities have at their disposal and in the decisions they make about how to use those resources. Identities operate subjectively as well as objectively, meaning that durable self-​understandings, habits, and preferences can have powerful implications for what one feels capable of doing. And identities are asymmetric in the power they represent and thus in the outcomes that result, such as the likelihood of securing a job promotion or being elected to public office.11 Religion’s power to influence identities based on gender and sexuality derives from the beliefs, rituals, and language that are its core. Many of these beliefs, rituals, and uses of language focus on the body and for this reason emphasize gender and sexuality. Much attention has been given to the fact that in Western monotheism the deity worshiped is a male deity and that in Christianity the body “broken for you” in Communion is a male body.12 Similarly, in Buddhism the founder venerated is male, and in many Christian, 11 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Paula England, “Sometimes the Social Becomes Personal: Gender, Class, and Sexualities,” American Sociological Review 81, 1 (2016), 4–​28; Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Myra M. Ferree, Judith Lorber, and Beth B. Hess, “Introduction,” in Revisioning Gender, edited by Myra M. Ferree, Judith Lorber, and Beth B. Hess (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999), xv–​xxxvi; Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (2015), 1–​20. 12 Erin C. Cassese and Mirya R. Holman, “Religion, Gendered Authority, and Identity in American Politics,” Politics and Religion 10 (2017), 31–​56, shows the relationship between belief in a masculine God and preferences for traditional gender roles, taking account of other variables.

150  Religion’s Power Jewish, and Muslim congregations until very recently and in some to the present the persons officiating sacred rites must be male and heterosexual. The salience of gender and sexuality is increased as is the power implied in the distinctions. Religion’s power exists in its capacity to define as sacred tradition certain teachings in which these distinctions are emphasized, the ritual enactment of these teachings, and its control over who exercises leadership. These ritual enactments are the occasion for repeating stories in which the subordination of women is both implicitly taken for granted and explicitly legitimated in terms of divine ordination. Religion’s power is further expressed in its capacity to define as legitimate or illegitimate the kinds of experiences and communication women and men can have with the sacred and who has the authority to interpret these experiences. The opportunity for men to lead, whether in rituals or in classes and committees, is a performative opportunity in the moment to feel empowered and to be affirmed as well as to influence the occasion’s outcomes.13 The institutional control of space has received less attention but is also a source of gendered identity. In the past, examples of gender-​separated space included male monastic orders and female monastic orders and separate seating areas for women and men in some synagogues and churches, which excluded women from visible leadership roles and yet, as historians have noted, connected women with other women in patterns of reliance that furthered informal leadership and in some instances support for suffragist and temperance movements.14 Present examples of gender-​separated spaces include separate Bible study and fellowship groups for men and women. De facto gendering of space also exists in many congregations in which women care for children in an educational wing of the building while men preside over the preaching and administration of the sacraments in another part of the building.15 Gendered space of this kind informs gendered bodies where 13 Women comprised approximately 5 percent of U.S. clergy in 1976, a figure that rose to approximately 20 percent in 2016; by the end of the period, women clergy’s income was nearly equal to men’s, largely because of slow rates of income growth among male clergy; Cyrus Schleifer and Amy D. Miller, “Occupational Gender Inequality among American Clergy, 1976–​2016: Revisiting the Stained-​Glass Ceiling,” Sociology of Religion 78, 4 (2017), 387–​410. 14 See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–​1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), but also Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, “Introduction,” in No More Separate Spheres: A Next Wave American Studies Reader, edited by Jessamyn Hatcher and Cathy N. Davidson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 7–​28, who argue that spatial separation has been overemphasized in accounts of gender differences. 15 Gendered differences in spatial mobility also bear consideration, although the circumstances under which women and men are spatially mobile vary, as do the possible relationships among mobility, gender, and religious participation; geographic relocation is known to have at least short-​ term negative effects on religious participation, but further research is needed on how these effects

Religion and Identity Power  151 they should be, what they should do, and how they should appear, all in habits and dispositions that may not require much in the way of conscious thought or decision-​making. An adequate understanding of gendered religious space, though, requires looking beyond as well as inside congregations. The result until recent decades and even in some twenty-​first-​century settings of men-​only ordination was that denominational conferences, church councils, and boards of seminaries were men-​only affairs, as were decisions about the possibilities of women attaining leadership roles. Religious identity accorded men the power to discuss political policies, the economy, education, and their families without the presence of women as well as to decide on budgets and the future of the church.16 Something similar was evident among the evangelical Protestant CEOs Michael Lindsay studied for his book Faith in the Halls of Power. They networked with fellow Christian CEOs, sometimes more often than with members of their local congregations, met at conferences and in Bible study groups, and shared information about the issues they were facing in running large corporations. Their common religious identity was a source of solidarity—​solidarity that did not include women. Women were not among the CEOs who might otherwise have been welcome, and the fact of their exclusion was of insufficient concern for the men’s networking to reach across gender lines. Indeed, the few women Lindsay was able to locate in his research spoke of religious identity as a barrier. One woman put it this way, “When I would say something like, ‘You know, women are very good organizers and speakers, and we also know how to talk to people of power,’ [the men] would just laugh.” As for excluding women, “They might as well have a sign out on the door.”17 But how do situational factors like male-​led rituals and gender-​separated space result in women feeling disempowered? One possibility is that women perhaps do not feel disempowered even though they are in fact subordinate. In other words, what someone feels isn’t necessarily what matters, as in vary by gender and whether those variations might reduce or enhance women’s influence within congregations. 16 Lisa P. Stephenson, Dismantling the Dualisms for American Pentecostal Women in Ministry: A Feminist-​Pneumatological Approach (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1–​2, gives an example. 17 D. Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9; similar patterns with a few exceptions were documented in Bradley C. Smith, Baptizing Business: Evangelical Executives and the Sacred Pursuit of Profit (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), where the trade-​offs between promoting women’s rights and realizing profits was usually resolved in favor of the latter.

152  Religion’s Power the case of a person being poor without feeling poor. Similarly, the women who care for children in the nursery while their husbands sit on the church council may feel they are performing an important role, as indeed they are, but the major decisions of what the congregation teaches, how it spends its money, and who it relates to in the community are being made by the male-​ only council. A different answer is that how a person feels does matter. It does because identity consists not only of an external category in which one is placed (e.g., Christian, Jew) but how a person’s self-​concept relates to that category. The point was nicely illustrated in a study of Muslim converts in an American mosque. The women developed an identity of “self-​sacrificing femininity,” meaning that they acknowledged having less power than their male counterparts, especially in freedom of dress and association, but valued this lack of empowerment as a virtue. This example also illustrates the relational character of symbolic boundaries based on gender. The self-​sacrificing femininity the Muslim women learned contrasted explicitly with what they came to understand as appropriate behavior for Muslim men as well as through language about the errors of secular femininity.18 While inequality based on gender in religious contexts is characteristically reproduced in leadership and language, inequality based on sexual orientation in religious contexts has more often consisted of exclusion. Many Christian denominations disallow the ordination of gay or transgendered persons as clergy. Others have opened ordination to gay or transgendered persons, but only after struggles involving heresy trials and members seceding. Still others do not welcome gay or transgendered persons at meetings or as members. Unsurprisingly, congregations that do not allow women to hold positions as the top clergyperson also are less likely to accept gays and lesbians as members or leaders.19 Religion’s power, therefore, contributes to the marginalization of gay and lesbian identities both through physical exclusion and through the stigma that exclusion implies. The fact that congregations involve voluntary participation is one of the reasons they often reinforce social boundaries based on gender and sexuality. Being a voluntary organization means that people can self-​select based

18 Aliya Hamid Rao, “Gender and Cultivating the Moral Self in Islam: Muslim Converts in an American Mosque,” Sociology of Religion 76, 4 (2015), 413–​35. 19 Andrew L. Whitehead, “Gendered Organizations and Inequality Regimes: Gender, Homosexuality, and Inequality Within Religious Congregations,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52, 3 (September 2013), 476–​93, provides an analysis of congregational characteristics associated with welcoming gay and lesbians and an excellent guide to the literature.

Religion and Identity Power  153 on feeling more comfortable in a group of like-​minded and similarly identified people. Few congregations practice gender segregation as they did in the eighteenth century when men sat on one side and women on the other or when young men became priests and young women became nuns. But within congregations it is common for men to attend men’s groups or work on male-​only projects and for women to join women’s groups. People can also gravitate toward congregations they know to be on the strict side or the liberal side of such issues as women’s ordination or gay ordination. In most cases, the chances are high that a decision to become a member of a congregation is done with knowledge that the tradition it represents does or does not teach that women can be clergy or that gays and lesbians will be welcomed. However, there is also sufficient variation in the practical knowledge governing congregational styles of leading, teaching, and greeting such that further self-​selection is likely to be involved.20 Religious organizations are protected to a greater extent than other voluntary organizations from being legally coerced into practices that aim to promote equality and interaction across lines of gender and sexual orientation. Over the past half-​century religious organizations that believed homosexuality to be contrary to the Bible have resisted legislation and court orders aimed at protecting employment, health insurance, freedom to marry, and freedom to adopt children or care for foster children from discrimination based on sexual orientation. When the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges upheld marriage equality for LGBTQ persons, some religious leaders who opposed the decision declared that their rights were now being abused.21 If religion’s power so often contributes to male heterosexual dominance, how then does it sometimes work against subordination? Can it meaningfully declare in the language of the New Testament letter to the Galatians that “there is neither male nor female,” or does it assert the male headship of the household and church? For one, a scriptural declaration of equality offers possibilities for the exercise of discursive power. The codified knowledge of institutional religion includes imagery with which to craft stories of powerful female role models: Sarah, Rebekah, Ruth, Esther, Mary, and other 20 Cues about congregations’ stance toward gays and lesbians, for example, are often signaled in words such as “welcoming” on congregations’ websites, in whether a rainbow flag or banner is present anywhere on the grounds or building, and in how participants are invited to take part in Communion. 21 Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. (2015).

154  Religion’s Power powerful women. They provide canonically authoritative examples from which to draw lessons about agency and action. In similar fashion, modern role models have resonance because of exemplifying leadership in particular religious traditions, such as Mother Teresa and Dorothy Day, Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer, Hannah More and Francis Willard, or Regina Jonas and Sally Priesand. These examples provide models for navigating religious power structures by filling specialized niches. The social science literature extends these possibilities by identifying other connections among empowerment and the construction of identity. One possibility stems from the idea that the control of space is a significant form of institutional power. A space that is set apart from external hierarchies of power can provide a safe zone in which to cultivate an alternative identity. Studies of women’s religious groups demonstrate several ways in which this happens. First, most such groups have a leader or rotating set of leaders who use the group to cultivate their own skills, reinforce their own identity, and serve as models for others in the group. The group accords status to certain leadership traits that may correspond with or differ from status markers in other contexts. These may be stereotypically gendered (for example, caregiving, offering support, preparing food) but serve nevertheless as sources of empowerment within the group. Second, groups serve as safe spaces in which to tell and retell personal stories that can be the process through which an empowered personal identity emerges. Storytelling of this kind depends on a group style in which sharing of personal information is encouraged and rewarded with affirmative support. Third, the group’s power is further revealed in its members’ control over the physical affordances included in the space itself. Unlike meetings held in a building planned and governed by some other authority, members’ identities can be displayed by how they choose to arrange seating, provide materials for study, or bring food. This is an advantage for the many such groups that meet in homes. It also suggests connections between the control of space and the control of time. Within the specified hour or two set aside for itself, the group has discretion about how it uses that time. Fourth, groups sometimes provide an escape from or protection from abuse, dominance, or routine gendered activities, for example, as a “time out” away from husbands and children at a space in which other topics and skills are valued. And fifth, group participation is a form of social networking that can have beneficial consequences outside the group, such as learning about a job opportunity, getting involved in a community project, or simply feeling more comfortable meeting new people.

Religion and Identity Power  155 The Pentecostal women’s groups Marie Griffith studied illustrate several of these ways in which identity and empowerment come together. The women came away feeling stronger in their identity as women and as Christians because the participants oversaw nearly all aspects of the group, including when and where they met, how they structured their time, who brought refreshments, what they talked about, and above all whether they felt personally authorized to experience the sacred and to speak credibly about it. Their stories helped craft new identities not only because they conformed to a narrative style of rebirth and renewal but also because the women were the storytellers themselves and the stories were about their own journeys and self-​perceptions. The storytelling was also creatively syncretistic, mingling orthodox Pentecostalism with anecdotes, memories, imagery from books and television, and experiences from daily life.22 The evangelical women Kelly Chong studied in South Korea illustrate a different kind of empowerment. For them, church meetings with other women were a time to be in a different space, to do committee work that made use of their skills, and to talk about things outside of their homes. For some, it was especially empowering to get away from the patriarchal authority to which they were subjected in their homes. While it would perhaps seem trivial in the context of large-​scale power relations, simply the availability of a space separate from home and a reason to be in that space then were contributions to the women’s empowerment.23 Choosing a group in which to participate is itself a small act of personal empowerment, especially when it serves as an enhancement of one’s agency as a person. Choosing a group is even more empowering when the group provides an autonomous space in which to reflect on who one is and in the process for developing a narrative about oneself as a strong person.24

22 Griffith, God’s Daughters; creative synergistic storytelling is also emphasized in Monica Cornejo-​ Valle, “Individual Spirituality and Religious Membership among Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Spain,” in Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches, edited by Anna Fedele and Kim E. Knibbe (New York: Routledge, 2012), 62–​77. 23 Kelly H. Chong, “Negotiating Patriarchy: South Korean Evangelical Women and the Politics of Gender,” Gender and Society 20, 6 (2006), 697–​724; insofar as gender is constructed by things done to a person or things a person does, joining a religious group serves as a kind of “doing”; Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1, 2 (June 1987), 125–​51. 24 Carolyn Chen, “A Self of One’s Own: Taiwanese Immigrant Women and Religious Conversion,” Gender and Society 19, 3 (2005), 336–​57; a more extended discussion of group participation, self-​ reflection, and strong selves, including the example of Fatima Akhtar, whose role in a Muslim women’s group illustrates these relationships, is presented in Robert Wuthnow, American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 38–​78.

156  Religion’s Power The significance of autonomous empowerment in groups like this is further illustrated by a contrasting example in which autonomy was lacking. Reverend T. D. Jakes, whose multiple megachurches and media empire made him one of the most prominent preachers of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, was also known for something called “Woman, Thou Art Loosed,” which included sermons, Sunday school lessons, and books oriented toward women. The idea was to help women free themselves from the trauma of neighborhood and domestic violence, the victimization associated with being the targets of racism, and the stresses of ordinary domestic life. The program included opportunities for women of color to meet, talk, and gain a sense of personal efficacy. Yet, as Tamura Lomax observed, the program was so heavily branded by Jakes that it represented an external, almost voyeuristic view of women’s lives and in effect identified “woman” as a piece of merchandise rather than empowering women.25 Religious communities’ empowerment of men shares some of the same characteristics identified in studies of women’s groups: meeting in gender-​ separated spaces, convening under the supervision in this case of male leadership, reading and discussing literature in which ideal male roles are narrated, and rewarding male-​ identified jokes, anecdotes, and stories. Embodied spirituality is sometimes a source of empowerment as well. For example, Alyssa Maldonado-​Estrada’s research on the annual festival at the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, demonstrates the spiritual importance of physical strength among the men carrying the heavy statue of San Paolino through the streets as well as the gendered camaraderie throughout the year as men work on preparations for the festival. For these men, empowerment occurred, not in the usual sense of holding formal offices in the church, but viscerally in what their bodies were trained to do and for many of the men in the tattoos inscribed on their bodies. The tattoos, Maldonado-​Estrada writes, are material, fleshy artifacts of commitment to a local Catholic masculinity that is contingent on shared obligations to the parish. Moreover, tattoos are efficacious. . . . Tattoos do stuff—​they help men maintain devotional bonds to the saints and to each other and offer protection and closeness.26 25 Tamura Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 130–​68. 26 Alyssa Maldonado-​Estrada, Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (New York: New York University Press, 2020), quote on page 41.

Religion and Identity Power  157 As this example suggests, ritual power is another way in which identities normally subordinated based on gender or sexuality may be empowered. Bourdieu writes that practices sometimes lead to a “profound transformation of the subjective and objective experience of the body” that is experienced as gaining a sense of agency and ownership: “Instead of being a body for others it becomes a body for oneself; the passive body becomes an active and acting body.”27 Bourdieu is writing here about the intensive bodily practice involved in sports. But something similar can happen from religious practice, even though it is quite different from sports and often requires minimal physical skill. The analogy with sports is directly applicable in instances when ritual devotion does require intensive bodily participation, for example, as yoga does for some practitioners who experience it as an empowering spiritual discipline; in different ways, when wearing the hijab gives Muslim women a stronger sense of their identity; or when participating in the mikvah is similarly empowering for Jewish women.28 A second analogy is the training children undergo through involvement over a period of years in worship services and classes. Just as schoolchildren do in learning to sit still at desks while looking at books and writing, so children participating in worship services and classes do. They acquire bodily habits that become familiar in religious settings and are the reason adults often feel more comfortable with some styles of worship than others. A third analogy is the bodily discipline required of persons who become full-​time professionals in the observance and leadership of rituals. To become a Benedictine monk requires the ability to discipline one’s body according to the hours of ritual observance, prayer, and fasting. The power a clergyperson displays requires intensive training of the body of a different kind, perhaps especially the capacity to memorize and deliver a compelling message. Emphasis on embodiment in ritual implies the importance of anatomical differences between men and women but does not say what that may suggest about empowerment. In Bourdieu’s example the anatomical differences are sufficient such that men’s and women’s teams often compete separately. 27 Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 67. 28 Susan Leigh Foster, “Improvising Yoga,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol. 1, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 217–​25; Erin Johnston, “The Enlightened Self: Identity and Aspiration in Two Communities of Practice,” Religions 7 (2016), 1–​15; Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/​ 11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Lynn Davidman, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

158  Religion’s Power Each provides its own rewards, yet, as monetary differences between professional men’s and women’s soccer teams have shown, women still experience disadvantages. Anatomical differences are less likely to require separation of men and women in the performance of religious activities. Some concern has been expressed, though, that male dominance results in women having to imitate masculine styles to succeed in leadership, just as has been noted in politics and business. The reason then is less from masculine dominance due to anatomical advantages than from symbolic connotations associated with gendered mannerisms, speech, and tradition. A further complication is that competition between men and women for the same positions of leadership is shown on some occasions to result in hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity wherein the distinctive identity of each gender is magnified and power depends even more on arguments about which stereotypic expression of gender more closely resembles sacred teachings.29 Gendered roles within religious organizations are of course influenced by the roles men and women play in other organizations. Accommodating the society’s gender norms may lower the chances of conflicts erupting over gender roles and, for that matter, be a way to showcase congregations’ success in recruiting high-​status participants. For example, the writer Annie Dillard recalls the scene she witnessed weekly from her seat in the balcony at the upscale Shadyside Presbyterian Church she attended as a child in Pittsburgh: From their pews below rose the ushers and elders—​everybody’s father and grandfather, from Mellon Bank & Trust et cetera—​in tailcoats. They worked the crowd smoothly, as always. When they collected money, I noted, they were especially serene. Collecting money was, after all, what they did during the week.30

But Dillard’s remark is also a reminder of the need to be cautious about drawing generalizations. The match between males in banking and males among the congregation’s leaders reflected a particular time and place. Had those same bankers worked at banks in which women were rising through the ranks, they may have wanted the congregation’s leadership to mirror

29 For an illuminating discussion of the construction of hypermasculinity, see Alan M. Klein, Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993). 30 Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 196.

Religion and Identity Power  159 those changes. Or the congregation may have been forward-​looking enough to take the lead. A practice approach suggests taking generalizations as a starting point but then examining more closely the processes with which decisions are made that reproduce (or challenge) gendered inequality as well as the multiple factors—​social class, race, occupation, education, cultural norms, and authority relations in the immediate situation—​that shape these processes.31 Resisting the wider society’s norms may be difficult but can serve to strengthen the distinctiveness of the group’s religious identity. In these responses there may be differences between the gender norms officially prescribed in the religion’s codified knowledge and the practices present among the people involved. Wendy Cadge’s study of a Buddhist meditation center populated by non-​immigrant middle-​class White women and men provides an example. The center venerated the Buddha, a male figure; the teachers were more often men than women; and women did most of the cleaning and cooking. Yet few of the women perceived the practice to be inequitable. Their participation reflected the fact that they were women with considerable power over their own lives, familiar with making their own choices, and whose decision to practice Buddhist meditation was made with the expectation that they would be treated fairly. This expectation was reinforced by the center claiming to treat men and women the same even though in significant ways that was not true. Moreover, the study showed that this claim was frequently expressed in narratives contrasting the center with patriarchal Buddhist practices in Asia.32 Finally, the literature has devoted considerable attention to the identity politics involved in religion-​inspired feminist and anti-​feminist movements. Activists on both sides drew from leaders whose ideas were not inspired by religion but then amplified these ideas with religiously grounded arguments and through religious social networks. Feminist activism focused on empowering women within religious institutions by pressing for women’s

31 Todd W. Ferguson, “Organizational Resources and the Gender Gap in Congregational Lay Leadership,” Sociological Forum 35 (March 2020), 126–​44, shows how resources such as congregations having well-​educated and wealthy members can be conducive to greater gender equality among these congregations’ lay leadership; additionally, Todd W. Ferguson, “Female Leadership and Rose Congruity Within the Clergy: Communal Leaders Experience No Gender Differences yet Agentic Women Continue to Suffer Backlash,” Sex Roles 78 (2018), 409–​22, shows that gendered styles of leadership influence congregants’ perceptions of clergy. 32 Wendy Cadge, “Gendered Religious Organizations: The Case of Theravada Buddhism in America,” Gender and Society 18, 6 (December 2004), 777–​93.

160  Religion’s Power ordination and inclusive language in worship and scriptural interpretation.33 Within established churches and synagogues biblical models such as the stories of Sarah, Rebekah, and Ruth were emphasized in congregational initiatives and in small groups. In other settings women drew from ancient Greek, pagan, and Wiccan sources or practiced meditation or chanting or joined workshops about sacred sexuality. Studies of the participants in these groups have emphasized how being deliberately discordant with dominant religious institutions, and often explicitly critical of institutional patriarchy and misogyny, strengthened an alternative identity as a spiritual person who also felt a sense of agency, choice, and control, and thus empowerment.34 The concept of identity power that has emerged from these practices is personal, situational, embodied, and intentional. It emphasizes the empowerment that comes from making choices, reflecting, acting, rejecting conformity, and asserting individuality. It is not unmindful of the fact, however, that individuals who feel empowered are nevertheless subject to the power of group norms, leaders, and social structures, which require activism to reform.35 Anti-​feminist activism, for its part, developed and grew during the last third of the twentieth century in opposition to feminism and “New Age” practices perceived to be unbiblical and linked with sexual promiscuity and the decline of the nuclear family. The power of anti-​feminist arguments was enhanced by asserting the sanctity of language about “God the father” and “Jesus the son of God,” emphasizing traditional “family values,” capitalizing on women’s study groups in conservative churches, enlisting celebrities, and modeling activities on evangelism that involved traveling speakers, books, and conferences.36 Gay and antigay activism followed a similar pattern, with much of the emphasis focusing on rules about membership in congregations and ordination. Both sides used religious organizations for meetings and drew on religious 33 Susan Thistlewaite, “Inclusive Language,” Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, edited by Rosemary Skinner Keller, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Marie Cantlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1290–​95. 34 Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe, “Introduction,” in Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality, edited by Anna Fedele and Kim Knibbe (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–​27. 35 Rachel Koehler and Gwen Calais-​Haase, “Efforts by Women of Faith to Achieve Gender Equality,” Center for American Progress, May 3, 2018, https://​www.ameri​canp​rogr​ess.org/​arti​cle/​effo​ rts-​women-​faith-​achi​eve-​gen​der-​equal​ity/​ 36 Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christianity (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 155–​ 200; Emily Johnson, “How Prominent Women Built and Sustained the Religious Right,” Religion and Politics, April 16, 2019, https://​reli​gion​andp​olit​ics.org/​2019/​04/​16/​how-​promin​ent-​women-​built-​ and-​sustai​ned-​the-​religi​ous-​right/​

Religion and Identity Power  161 teachings about sexuality, marriage, and equality. Much attention has been given to the resources that activists have been able to command through the religious institutions they represent; for example, a suburban Kansas City megachurch that claims to be the largest Methodist congregation in the world has used its influence to argue for gay ordination in the denomination, while Dallas’s historic First Baptist Church has used its to oppose gay ordination. Both congregations’ arguments matter because of the resources they have at their disposal to influence denominational policies. Discursive power has also been examined, showing in conservative sermons and church publications, for example, how often heterosexual marriage is associated with godliness and happiness and how often women are mentioned only as heterosexual wives and mothers.37 While much of the literature on feminist and anti-​feminist and gay and antigay advocacy has identified beliefs, groups, and resources as the principal sources of power, some of the literature valuably suggests locating these sources within a larger constellation of power relations. For example, one argument is that traditional gender roles, patriarchal values, opposition to gay marriage, criticism of single-​parent families, tropes about “welfare queens,” and advocacy for “religious freedom” against the rights of gay and transgendered persons are all a “last bastion of power” for evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics in today’s increasingly secular society. In other words, these religious organizations have found it in their interest to stake out claims grounded in theology that favor certain kinds of traditional families and accept as part of their ministry defending the rights of those families and at the same time providing for the needs of deserving families through private charity. And a reason for this is that “secular society” actually means the “neoliberal” (i.e., fiscally conservative, free market) economy that happily favors big business rather than providing a social safety net for the poor. Thus, according to this logic, the secular state is glad to have the churches take care of the poor, and the churches are pleased to do so but on condition that they get to maintain traditional family values. Of course, in its details this is an argument difficult to pin down with compelling evidence, yet it illustrates how a practice approach that focuses on power in interpersonal situations

37 For example, Brian T. Kaylor, “Gracious Submission: The Southern Baptist Convention’s Press Portrayals of Women,” Journal of Gender Studies 19, 4 (2010), 335–​48.

162  Religion’s Power can also be extended imaginatively to entertain ideas about broader social relationships.38

Systemic Racism Racism is the dominance of one category of persons over another category and the privilege, preferential treatment, and influence the dominant category experiences based on culturally constructed understandings of race. Systemic racism is the institutional structure through which racial inequality persists, whether in the form of overt discrimination or from inequalities based on traditions and implicit practices. The writer Ijeoma Oluo describes systemic racism as “any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power,” among which she includes the institutionalized power of the police, courts, incarceration systems, corporations, and political parties through which racial inequality is perpetuated.39 In the United States systemic racism is present most enduringly in inequalities between Blacks and Whites but also between Anglos and Hispanics. Greater attention in the literature has been paid to the former than the latter, but studies also focus on ethnicity and immigration as bases for discrimination. Religion and race are so closely intertwined that in some sense, as Judith Weisenfeld observes, “all religious groups in the United States could be characterized as religio-​racial ones, given the deeply powerful, if sometimes veiled, ways the American system of racial hierarchy has structured religious beliefs, practices, and institutions for all people in its frame.”40 Most notably, systemic racism has often defined and spatially separated Blacks and 38 See Judith Butler, “Anti-​Gender Ideology and Mahmood’s Critique of the Secular Age,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87, 4 (December 2019), 955–​67, which weaves together an interpretation of “anti-​gender ideology” from several diverse sources, including Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), and Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 39 Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk about Race (New York: Seal Press, 2019), 26; Joseph Barndt, Becoming an Anti-​Racist Church: Journeying Toward Wholeness (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2011), 90, who similarly emphasizes race prejudice plus the power of institutions but from a theological perspective, writes, “Systemic racism is collective sin committed on behalf of White society and providing benefits, to one degree or another, for all members of White community.” An extended historical treatment is included in Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 2006). 40 Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-​Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 5.

Religion and Identity Power  163 Whites and Anglos and Hispanics in de facto segregated places of worship. Additionally, despite efforts to the contrary, religion often preserves racial inequalities through inadvertent means, such as focusing on interpersonal relationships in which friendships may be cultivated while ignoring the structural conditions that perpetuate racial inequality. Systemic racism constitutes a distinct set of relationships among religion, racial identity, and power. Systemic racism is sufficiently built into the hierarchy of power and status such that it can operate among those in power without them necessarily being conscious of the privileges they enjoy. This is especially true in the United States among White persons, for example, who may rarely think about themselves as being White and yet benefit from White privilege.41 Still, an important feature of systemic racism is that it imposes socially constructed racial categories on people and treats them differently on that basis. The power to define—​to name, label, and authorize certain categories—​is held by the dominant group and is stitched in place by all manner of mental and institutional mechanisms of enforcement, including racial designations used by government agencies, differences in policing and incarceration, de facto redlining of neighborhoods, and opportunities for educational attainment.42 Moreover, systemic racism is a practice maintained not only by structures put in place in the past but also by the day-​ to-​day activities and decisions of individuals. Identities in this respect are the categories through which actions have differential impacts. Examples include variations in arrests, school funding policies, job recruitment, college admissions, mortgage lending, and many other decisions that affect individuals’ and groups’ opportunities. Religion’s power—​its ritual, discursive, and institutional power—​is a feature of the ways in which systemic racism continues to be present in the United States. Among the more obvious examples are religious traditions associating whiteness with goodness and blackness with evil, pictures of all-​White patriarchs and matriarchs in illustrated Bibles, and depictions of 41 Notable contributions to the literature on the constructed “invisible” power of whiteness in which attention is given to religion include Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010); Malory Nye, “Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Whiteness,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 31, 3 (2018), 1–​28; George Yancy, Look a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); and Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). 42 Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Race: An Introduction (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 123–​47; and Naomi Zack, “Social Construction and Racial Identities,” in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 363–​68.

164  Religion’s Power a White Jesus in church art and iconography. These have included the many representations of White Christs that in the past decorated families’ walls and children’s books and, in only somewhat more nuanced manner, in artwork such as Warner Sallman’s popular “He Careth for You,” showing Jesus with tanned features but surrounded by White children.43 White imagery has also been a pervasive feature of public art. In her study of late-​twentieth-​ century public monuments, architecture historian Margaret Grubiak found numerous instances of large statues of Jesus, some of them rising 60–​75 feet on hilltops and along highways, all brilliantly White.44 Theological defenses of slavery and White superiority that populated Southern churches in the nineteenth century no longer prevail, but de-​racialized scriptures and antiracist interpretations continue to meet resistance from conservative White leaders.45 The study of religion has often been insensitive to its racial connotations as well, either by emphasizing majority—​hence White—​ religion to the exclusion of minority religion or by dealing selectively with religious history and ignoring recent developments that reflect religion’s growing racial and ethnic diversity.46 Religious organizations that disavow being racially exclusionary nevertheless are often places in which segregated worship occurs because of self-​selection. A White family in Atlanta, for example, may feel most comfortable attending a Southern Baptist congregation that just happens to be 43 Sally Promey, “Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman,” Religion and American Culture 3, 1 (Winter 1993), 29–​47; Edward J. Blum, “‘Look, Baby, We Got Jesus on Our Flag’: Robust Democracy and Religious Debate from the Era of Slavery to the Age of Obama,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 637 (September 2011), 17–​37. 44 Margaret M. Grubiak, Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). 45 Yanat Shimron, “Southern Baptist Seminary Presidents Nix Critical Race Theory,” Religious News Service, December 1, 2020 https://​relig​ionn​ews.com/​2020/​12/​01/​south​ern-​bapt​ist-​semin​ary-​ pre​side​nts-​nix-​criti​cal-​race-​the​ory/​ 46 See Richard F. Hamilton and William H. Form, “Categorical Usages and Complex Realities: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in the United States,” Social Forces 81 (2003): 693–​714, for examples of how changes in the composition of religious and racial categories is overlooked in textbooks; Rhys Williams, “Assuming Whiteness in Twentieth-​Century American Religion,” in Religion Is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-​First Century, edited by Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell (New York: New York University, 2020), 74–​93, discusses the tendency in work by sociologists of religion, including some of my own, to write about White religion as if it characterized all of American religion; Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson, “Decentering Whiteness in Survey Research on American Religion,” in Religion Is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-​First Century, edited by Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell (New York: New York University, 2020), 251–​74, discuss the tendency in media reports about U.S. religion to gloss over racial differences; in Robert Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 194–​96, I describe differences in survey results in which Black respondents are oversampled and questions are asked that reflect Black styles of religious participation rather than “White norming” being taken for granted.

Religion and Identity Power  165 95 percent White because they have friends there, enjoy the familiar style of worship, grew up in Southern Baptist families, and live in a predominantly White suburb that is White today because of exclusionary housing practices in the 1950s and “White flight” among families in the 1960s who fled to a White suburb where their children could attend better-​funded schools. We are “at ease with our own kind,” Timothy J. Nelson writes in describing how we follow the subtle and not so subtle cues of dress, mannerisms, social class, and race in deciding where we feel most at home attending worship services.47 “We are at ease” can be understood simply as a natural tendency to associate with people with whom we feel comfortable. However, there is a normative aspect to this tendency that says we should associate with our own kind or freely choose to do so. The normative argument was present in the 1960s and 1970s when church growth experts argued that the key to expanding the spread of the Christian gospel was to start congregations composed of people who resembled one another in social class, ethnicity, and (implicitly) race.48 An ideological argument was present as well, mostly in defending freedom to worship as one might choose as a kindred example of being free to attend segregated schools. For example, Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign asserted, “Throughout this land of ours, we find people forming churches, clubs and neighborhoods with other families of similar beliefs, similar tastes, and similar ethnic backgrounds.” No one would ask those groups to be racially integrated, he said, nor should children be asked to attend integrated schools.49 Racialized self-​selection has several unintended consequences, all of which contribute to systemic racial inequality and work against intentional antiracism efforts. The White congregation may be in the suburbs because its members were better able to afford housing there, which in turn was because their parents and grandparents were not subjected to Jim Crow laws and went to better-​funded schools that prepared them for better-​paying 47 Timothy J. Nelson, “At Ease with Our Own Kind: Worship Practices and Class Segregation in American Religion,” in Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics, edited by Sean McCloud and William A. Mirola (Boston: Brill, 2009), 45–​68; this is true in other contexts as well; J. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-​Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27, 1 (2001), 415–​44. 48 Darren M. Slade, “Religious Homophily and Biblicism: A Theory of Conservative Church Fragmentation,” International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society 9, 1 (February 2019), 13–​28. 49 Quoted in Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 85.

166  Religion’s Power jobs. Or the White congregation may have been like the ones historian Kevin Kruse studied in Atlanta that fled to the suburbs in the 1960s as Black families moved into their neighborhoods.50 In either case, a White congregation decades later may feel it is doing its Christian duty by supporting a food pantry in a Black community but have little understanding of the housing policies, police reform initiatives, and school funding referenda that they might also play a role in supporting if they truly wanted to combat systemic racism. Surveys suggest that the White congregation probably does support some kind of food bank or homeless shelter, yet the clergy and members may be oblivious to the task of tackling systemic racism.51 The White congregation may also be where members enjoy making friends with people who have greater access to money and power. These ties in turn may help in acquiring privileged information about getting a new job, gaining membership in the country club, locating a good pediatrician, and getting one’s children into a good college.52 Studies of Black, Hispanic, and immigrant congregations demonstrate, of course, that empowerment occurs in these contexts as well: through social networking with people in their congregation who can provide valuable support and information about jobs and services in the wider community, through teachings and practices that affirm racial and ethnic identities, and in some communities by insulating participants from negative influences. For example, Omar McRoberts’ study of Black churches in Boston emphasized the tension these churches established in various ways between the congregation and the culture of the surrounding neighborhood. Similarly, Timothy Nelson’s study of a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, showed how the congregation’s emphasis on fighting back against the evils of the world and the cathartic character of its worship services contributed to the spiritual empowerment participants experienced. For many of the participants, feeling that a powerful but inscrutable deity was in charge provided a way of

50 Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 89; meanwhile, as a study of Atlanta conducted by Nancy Tatom Ammerman in the 1990s concluded, “Black middle-​class Atlantans can choose where to live, but many find the realities of racism still alive and well in predominantly White neighborhoods”; Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 28. 51 Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 52 Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, 6 (May 1973), 1360–​80; Julie J. Park and Gitima Sharma, “Religion and Social Capital: Examining the Roles of Religious Affiliation and Salience on Parental Network Closure,” Religion and Education 43, 2 (2016), 162–​77.

Religion and Identity Power  167 making sense of incidents in their families and neighborhood over which they had no control.53 As a different example, Edward Curtis’s study of the Nation of Islam suggests that its empowerment involved rituals that instilled themes such as thrift, sexual propriety, industriousness, and temperance but did so in a way that differentiated members from African American Christianity.54 Empowerment also occurs through mobilization that opposes job discrimination and voter suppression, advocates for fair housing, and protests against police violence. Mobilization of this kind represents the institutional power of congregations and advocacy organizations, especially their capacity to bring people together, provide training in leadership skills, and create a discourse that frames issues in ways that identify paths of action. Religion’s discursive power is especially evident in studies of Black churches. For example, Mary Pattillo-​ McCoy’s study of the predominantly Black Groveland neighborhood in Chicago found church members frequently emphasizing power as they spoke about prayer, what their congregations were doing to fight drug abuse, and how the music and sermons they listened to each week empowered them with hope.55 Other studies of course have emphasized the significance of the Exodus narrative for Black empowerment. For example, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. writes that the Exodus narrative in its rhetorical and ritual commemorations “yielded a powerful paradigm” that helped constitute a “subversive countermemory” to the dominant story of America.56 The value of discursive power also lies in the fact that language can be adapted in ways that heighten both the agency of those doing the adapting and those responding to it. Although not in a religious setting, Paul Robeson’s revision of the words to “Ole Man River” is a famous example. Instead of singing, “Tired of livin’ and scared of dyin,’ ” he sang, “I must keep fighting until I’m dying.”57

53 Omar M. McRoberts, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Timothy J. Nelson, Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Church (New York: NYU Press, 2005); a good summary of the literature that shows how participants in immigrant congregations are empowered is Charles Hirschman, “The Role of Religion in the Origins and Adaptation of Immigrant Groups in the United States,” International Migration Review 28 (2004), 1206–​34. 54 Edward E. Curtis IV, “Islamizing the Black Body: Ritual and Power in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam,” Religion and American Culture 12 (Summer 2002), 167–​96. 55 Mary Pattillo-​McCoy, “Church Culture as a Strategy of Action in the Black Community,” American Sociological Review 63, 6 (1998), 767–​84, also is an illuminating study of how the discursive style of Black preaching translates into community mobilization. 56 Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Exodus! Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-​Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 85. 57 Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 34.

168  Religion’s Power Self-​selection depends on what the congregation teaches, how it leans theologically and politically, and the style in which it worships, including how the sermon is preached and the music it provides. In addition, Black churches and White churches often have different views about social justice because of their members’ different experiences with power and subordination.58 Compounding the differences, leaders may feel that a person of their own race will be more comfortable attending the church than someone of a different race. How eagerly they respond to inquiries, greet newcomers, show visitors where the children’s class is located, welcome them warmly into a home fellowship group, and invite them to serve on a committee may vary accordingly.59 One of the impediments preventing White churches from doing more to address systemic racism is emphasizing individual spirituality. To love one’s neighbor is thus to be loving in the way one treats one’s spouse, children, and next-​door neighbor: say a kind word, avoid angry confrontations, work on one’s attitudes, try not to feel guilty if you say or do the wrong thing, smile, send a donation to a charity occasionally, stay calm, pray, be nice—​all of which may be the norms that fit more comfortably in safe, advantaged, self-​confident, middle-​class communities than in less privileged ones. When these are the messages preached, it is possible to believe that religion is “transforming the world” without paying much attention to the forces of darkness that operate through the inequitable distribution of power. Even the idea that churches are challenging hearts-​and-​minds racism can be sidetracked into positive thinking and therapeutic self-​improvement that fails to connect with racism in the absence of much contact with people of other races or deliberate applications of theological principles to social and political policies.60 58 The comparison between Black and White Baptists in instructive in this regard; Bill J. Leonard, Baptists in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 183–​202. 59 An interesting attempt to investigate this kind of self-​selection is Bradley R. E. Wright, Christopher M. Donnelly, Michael Wallace, Stacy Missari, Annie Scola Wisnesky, and Christine Zozula, “Religion, Race, and Discrimination: A Field Experiment of How American Churches Welcome Newcomers,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 54, 2 (2015), 185–​204, in which responses to email inquiries from prospective members found higher rates of response to the ones with White-​sounding names than the ones with Black-​sounding names in five denominations, the opposite in three denominations, and insignificant differences in three denominations; the study did not examine the current racial composition of any of the churches, their size, or who at the church responded. 60 Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Eric Tranby and Douglas Hartmann, “Critical Whiteness Theories and the Evangelical ‘Race Problem’: Extending Emerson and Smith’s Divided by Faith,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, 3 (2008), 341–​59.

Religion and Identity Power  169 Another impediment is that the social norms of many congregations favor congeniality and community, demonstrating an easy if shallow patina of acceptance, and avoiding the kind of dissension that may result in disruptive disagreements, schisms, and secession. A White person who feels angry or prejudiced toward Black people may express those feelings at home but hide them at church. Or a White congregation that has adopted the language of inclusion and diversity may take pride in its diversity, when asked, by describing diversity in terms of gender, occupation, lifestyles, denominational backgrounds, and hobbies rather than in terms of race.61 Self-​selection, to its credit, is the basis on which religious organizations generate social capital, meaning the kinds of relationships that support individuals emotionally and socially and in turn strengthen the organization. Congregations take pride in fostering friendships and social networks that add up to a sense of community. Potluck dinners and after-​church coffee hours as well as fellowship groups and committee meetings forge the kinds of social ties that students of social capital identify among active participants in religion. Social capital can cross racial boundaries but is unlikely to do so in any significant measure when congregations are based largely on self-​ selection. Homophilous social capital can reinforce “us”-​ versus-​ “them” distinctions, and these can facilitate in-​group emotional support of the kind that depends on interaction within “safe” spaces.62 It can promote an ethic of genuine caring, but it can also encourage the idea that everyone should be happy, cooperative, and agreeable, rather than tackling potentially divisive issues. It can be a resource for low-​income and minority congregations whose members help one another, but it can also be a factor in isolating minority congregations and making them vulnerable to exploitation.63 61 The literature on dominant whiteness suggests some of these tendencies, for example, Edward Bonilla-​ Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997), 465–​80; Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and the discussion of “diversity” in Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel, The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40–​41, and examples of diversity talk in Sally K. Gallagher, Getting to Church: Narratives of Gender and Joining (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 62 For example, Dorinda J. Carter, “Why the Black Kids Sit Together at the Stairs: The Role of Identity-​Affirming Counter-​Spaces in a Predominantly White High School,” Journal of Negro Education 76, 4 (2007), 542–​54. 63 John A. Coleman, “Religious Social Capital: Its Nature, Social Location, and Limits,” in Religion as Social Capital: Producing the Common Good, edited by Corwin E. Smidt (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2003), 33–​48; Michael W. Foley, John D. McCarthy, and Mark Chaves, “Social Capital, Religious Institutions, and Poor Communities,” in Social Capital and Poor Communities, edited by Susan Saegert, J. Phillip Thompson, and Mark R. Warren (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 215–​45.

170  Religion’s Power An example of how social capital based on religious ties can contribute to systemic racism was evident in a study of predatory mortgage-​lending practices. In the 1990s the mortgage industry started using independent brokers and retail lenders to sell mortgages, who then sold them to investment banks that bundled them and sold them to investors. This became the “subprime” lending market that earned finance companies a profit by receiving interest rates from mortgagees that were higher than the prevailing interest rate. It gave brokers and banks an incentive to sell subprime mortgages at high interest rates to families who would have qualified for prime mortgages at lower rates had they known—​a form of predatory lending that became so widespread that within a decade and a half nearly two-​thirds of subprime mortgagees in some markets would have qualified for prime mortgages. The lenders preyed on homeowners in low-​income neighborhoods with little experience in the mortgage market, encouraged them to take out equity loans, applied high early payment penalties, and failed to disclose the risks of variable interest rates. When subprime lending became the principal cause of the 2008 financial crisis, hundreds of lawsuits were filed against the nation’s largest banks and mortgage companies. An analysis of testimony given in the lawsuits showed that only 11 percent of the statements revealed explicit racism, but 76 percent demonstrated systemic racism of the kind that involved “deliberate deception and misrepresentation of lending terms; the falsification of loan documents; [and] the recruitment of unwitting confederates within the social structure of minority communities.” The most advantageous of these unwitting confederates were the pastors of Black churches who the lenders regarded as influential leaders in Black communities and targeted by offering donations when contacts did take out mortgages. Black churches were in fact helpful in supporting families to secure housing, work with local and federal housing authorities, and deal with landlords or utility companies, so it was not unreasonable for mortgage brokers to think they were doing the right thing by appealing to Black clergy. One of the brokers explained it this way: The Emerging Markets Unit specifically targeted Black churches. Wells Fargo had a program that provided a donation of $350 to the nonprofit of the borrower’s choice for every loan the borrower took out with Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo hoped to sell the African American pastor or church leader on the program because Wells Fargo believed that African American church

Religion and Identity Power  171 leaders had a lot of influence over their ministry, and in this way would convince the congregation to take out subprime loans with Wells Fargo.

Thus, the difficulty lay not only in ill intentions but also in how the subprime lending system was orchestrated to exploit unsophisticated buyers.64 This was a striking counterexample to the prevailing argument that social capital generated in religious congregations is an assured benefit to congregations’ members. The literature on social capital gets at this issue by distinguishing between bonding social capital and bridging social capital. Bonding social capital that links people within a congregation with other members of their congregation can provide internal support, generate in-​group loyalty, and strengthen the group’s identity against attack from outsiders. Bridging social capital that connects members of a congregation with outsiders can bring in new ideas and resources even though it may weaken the group’s internal solidarity and sense of identity.65 But both kinds can work to the disadvantage of the group—​bonding social solidarity by cutting it off from new ideas and causing it to become ingrown and bridging social solidarity by exposing it to harmful and potentially exploitative influences such as predatory lending practices. Beyond congregations, the power structures of which religion is composed—​the hierarchies of priests, bishops, denominational officials, influential lay leaders, committee chairs, presidents of seminaries and colleges—​are sources of vested interests that can reinforce patterns of systemic racism. One reason is that power holders in religion, just as in other institutions, have attained power by promoting certain measures of social status (education, for example) or success in pressing for certain issues (foreign missions, for example). The measures and issues can then become the basis on which resistance is mobilized against different measures and different issues. The anti-​communism that many religious leaders championed during the Cold War, for example, was one such issue. Having gained popularity as outspoken anti-​communists, some prominent church leaders 64 Douglas S. Massey, Jacob S. Rugh, Justin P. Stell, and Len Albright, “Riding the Stagecoach to Hell: A Qualitative Analysis of Racial Discrimination in Mortgage Lending,” City and Community 15, 2 (June 2016), 118–​36, quote on page 32; on churches assisting low-​income families with housing negotiations, see Keeanga-​Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 184–​85; and helping during evictions, Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), 70–​77, 223–​28, 247–​48. 65 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 22–​24.

172  Religion’s Power who were sensitized to the issue then found it plausible to believe that Black leaders were promoting communism and should be opposed for that reason. White clergy along with White public officials who opposed Martin Luther King Jr., for example, were known to argue that his efforts were communist inspired. Another example involved African American feminist political activist Angela Davis, who was arrested in the 1970s when firearms registered in her name were used in a shooting in which four people were killed. Davis was held in jail, tried, and acquitted in 1972, during which time the case gained national attention, and the United Presbyterian Church’s Committee on Church and Race donated $10,000 to her defense fund as part of a larger initiative against institutional racism. But critics within the denomination led by the powerful Presbyterian Lay Committee interpreted the donation as evidence, as anti-​communists had charged since the 1950s, that communism was infiltrating the churches (Davis was in fact a member of the Communist Party). The criticism’s publicity widened the divide within the denomination between Black and White leaders and slowed the church’s efforts to combat institutional racism.66 The fact that religious organizations are embedded in power structures—​ economic, political, and ideological—​ necessitates carving out niches within these structures to mobilize activism against systemic racism. The Committee on Church and Race was one such example. Its funding and staff were in the short run insulated from the power of the conservative White business leaders running the Presbyterian Lay Committee. Another example was Koinonia Farm, founded in rural Georgia in 1942 as an intentional community devoted to pacifism, conservation, and racial reconciliation. Located where fervent segregation prevailed and where it was intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan, it succeeded because it was small, kept a low profile, and was economically self-​sustaining.67 Yet another example was the “renewal movement” of the late 1960s and early 1970s that worked through Black caucuses in mainline Protestant denominations to support interracial urban ministries and anti-​poverty efforts. In each of these examples, power was something achieved gradually, and it waxed and waned as leaders adapted to their

66 Bettina Aptheker, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Gayraud S. Wilmore, “Identity and Integration: Black Presbyterians and Their Allies in the Twentieth Century,” in The Presbyterian Predicament: Six Perspectives, edited by Milton J. Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville, KY: Westminster/​John Knox Press, 1990), 109–​22. 67 Hamilton Jordan, No Such Thing as a Bad Day: A Memoir (New York: Pocket Books, 2000), 118–​35.

Religion and Identity Power  173 surroundings and improvised practices that took account of the resources at their disposal.68 The interest in antiracism that scholars of religion have emphasized in recent years has focused on antiracism initiatives in congregations. If self-​ selection encourages Blacks and Whites to attend separate churches, then it has been of interest to investigate congregations in which Blacks and Whites worship together. The assumption behind this research is that greater consciousness of prejudice and systemic racism will result, either from explicit conversations and teachings about race, or from informal interaction, and that cross-​racial social capital will develop that can lead to people working together across racial lines in other contexts. A further assumption is that congregations are limited in terms of what they can do to address racism in other institutional contexts so are wise to exert their power by bringing people together in small ways within the normal practices of the congregation itself. The research has thus examined what it is about some congregations that results in persons of different races being present together. The results demonstrate the importance of making intentional use of the power that congregations have at their disposal: leadership that can itself be diversified and can shape the content of services, rituals that incorporate symbolism from diverse traditions, discourse that rejects racially biased language, and attention to the practical norms and status markers that signal racial inequality. For example, a racially diverse congregation may be characterized by a leadership team that includes Blacks and Hispanics as well as Whites, music and art that reflects different racial tastes, sermons that apply scriptural content to racial questions, and workshops that facilitate discussions of race. The studies then suggest that with effort some congregations have been able to facilitate greater diversity among their members.69 However, this line of research is subject to the criticism that it incorporates an implicit racial bias. Most of the studies have focused on predominantly White congregations in which the proportion of Black members has increased and have asked what the church did to make Blacks feel more 68 See Mark Wild, Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), which also discusses the institutional barriers confronting renewal groups. 69 Michael O. Emerson, People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Gerardo Marti, A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Gerardo Marti, “The Religious Racial Integration of African Americans into Diverse Churches,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49, 2 (2010), 201–​17.

174  Religion’s Power at ease worshiping in a still mostly White context. Less attention has been paid to how White attitudes may have changed because of greater diversity and even less to what might result from Whites participating in a predominantly Black church. “If there is this growing desire by White congregants to be in diverse religious communities, to experience ‘authentic’ multicultural worship and ministry,” sociologist Richard Pitt asks, “why do they only seek those things in predominantly or historically White congregations?”70 The problem is amplified when White leaders seek to manage diversity with tokens of Black identity. The authors who studied a new evangelical church in downtown Chicago whose White leaders lived in exurban Indiana noted, for example, “The fashionably clad bodies of Black members are given volunteer positions that highlight their visibility and silently scream for attention to their presence, even as the actual leadership staff remains all White.” The leaders wanted the church to be known as a “downtown” congregation that wasn’t totally White but wasn’t considered Black either. The messaging came across as insincere, as one of the Black members put it: “I just don’t like it when [the pastor], you know, tries to talk Black one week, then act like he knows what’s up the next.”71 The larger point was that the symbolism in the discourse and rituals failed to match the messages implicit in the location and the leadership and thus communicated intentions that seemed inauthentic. A further question left unanswered by the research on multiracial congregations is whether the efforts to promote diversity are effective in changing hearts and minds or whether self-​selection is still the prevailing dynamic: people who already are sensitized to issues of systemic racism because of their upbringing, the schools, their neighborhoods, and places of work are the ones who seek out multiracial churches. Or, because many of the studies have focused on megachurches, the attraction is the grandiosity of the place while its diversity is merely a minor feature that matters little anyway because the congregation is an audience that seldom interacts on a personal level.72

70 Richard N. Pitt, “Fear of a Black Pulpit? Real Racial Transcendence Versus Cultural Assimilation in Multiracial Churches,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49, 2 (June 2010), 218–​23, quote on page 222. 71 Jessica M. Barron and Rhys H. Williams, The Urban Church Imagined: Religion, Race, and Authenticity in the City (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 4; Jessica M. Barron, “Managed Diversity: Race, Place, and an Urban Church,” Sociology of Religion 77, 1 (Spring 2016), 18–​36, quote on page 24. 72 Melissa Wilde and Lindsay Glassman, “How Complex Religion Can Improve Our Understanding of American Politics,” Annual Review of Sociology 42 (2016), 407–​25, identify a number of factors, including race, ethnicity, region, and politics, that they call “religious segregation,” which result in congregations being quite homogeneous.

Religion and Identity Power  175 The literature on antiracism emphasizes that well-​intentioned religious groups, much like other groups, have difficulty talking about race across racial lines. Rather than acknowledging racial differences, groups avoid the topic by focusing on commonalities, for example, by talking about their favorite football team or even by asserting their common faith in God, which can be a positive development up to a point but can obscure the reality of different racial experiences and opportunities. The writer Gregory Ellison finds that people in intentional mixed-​race groups even find it difficult to make extended eye contact with one another.73 An additional problem is the tendency to focus on individual encounters, such as telling stories about the time a person felt awkward or perhaps recalled saying something kind to a person of another race, rather than acknowledging the structures of power that perpetuate racial inequality. While talking about race is something that writers like Ellison seek to encourage in church-​based workshops, a sociological understanding of talking requires emphasizing the power structures that influence the content of talking and how it is conducted. In her work on racial politics in Latin America Tianna Paschel identifies “discursive tactics” as one of the significant mechanisms through which antiracism activity is mobilized. A “racial equality” frame mobilized claims of integration, sameness, and equality, while an “ethnic difference” frame emphasized the right to a cultural identity distinct from the dominant society.74 The discursive tactics in antiracism mobilization in the United States include similar variations, ranging from the language of nonviolent confrontation emphasized by Martin Luther King Jr. to the language of Black Power that followed his assassination to the languages of systemic racism, racial inequality, and Black Lives Matter. Much attention in the policy literature is given to the implications of “color-​ blind” assumptions and racial distinctiveness assumptions. The salience and meaning of race as an aspect of personal identity varies with these differing discursive tactics. The research Paul Lichterman conducted on community outreach in a Midwestern city was instructive in this regard. One of the predominantly White church groups that attempted to reach across racial lines focused on helping individuals, emphasizing that everyone was special, deserving of 73 Gregory C. Ellison II, Fearless Dialogues: A New Movement for Justice (Louisville, KY: Westminster/​John Knox Press, 2017). 74 Tianna S. Paschel, “The Right to Difference: Explaining Colombia’s Shift from Color Blindness to the Law of Black Communities,” American Journal of Sociology 116, 3 (November 2010), 729–​69.

176  Religion’s Power “Christ-​like care,” and thus was in a sense “color blind” but failed to perceive racial inequality as a larger societal issue. The other focused on race as a category, which meant seeing and talking through perplexing differences in how people lived and what they valued and was thereby better able to think about community outreach in terms of social justice and inequality. In short, sharpening the salience of “White” and “Black” as categories was a constructive step toward addressing systemic racism.75 That study demonstrated one of the ways in which religious organizations’ tendency to focus on individualistic solutions could be overcome. But there are other ways. What if a group’s power to define how its members think of themselves—​its identity power—​is sufficiently strong that racial identities are secondary? Racial identities are so pervasively perpetuated by systemic racism in the wider society that such examples of racial erasure are unlikely, but they are not nonexistent. Congregations involved in church-​based community organizing are a familiar example. They include Black and White participants who meet regularly over an extended period, become personally acquainted, study theology and social issues together, and address social issues, usually in the local community, such as voter registration or housing and jobs.76 A rather different path toward racial reconciliation was illustrated in 2005 by a predominantly White church and a predominantly Black church in Vicksburg, Mississippi, that decided to merge. It was an unusual move, given their location and the fact that they considered themselves theologically conservative and belonged to a denomination that had resisted getting involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. But what brought them together was stronger than what kept them apart. They belonged to the Churches of Christ, a denomination of about thirteen thousand congregations totaling a million members, mostly worshiping in White churches or Black churches. But when historian Barclay Key studied the history of the denomination, he found three ingredients that when put together as the two churches in Vicksburg did contributed to their coming together: first, Churches of Christ separated themselves from other denominations through distinctive practices (for example, singing hymns acapella and abstaining completely from alcohol) and by labeling other groups as being different (calling them “the denominations”); second, they emphasized a theology of devout 75 Paul Lichterman, Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America’s Divisions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 76 Richard L. Wood, Faith in Action: Religion, Race, and Democratic Organizing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Religion and Identity Power  177 Christian commitment that set them apart and identified themselves as “the Lord’s church”; and third, while they had resisted involvement in protests during the Civil Rights Movement, they had initiated ongoing discussions about how true brothers and sisters in Christ should think about race. For most Churches of Christ, racialized self-​selection still produced de facto segregation, but the congregations in Vicksburg were able to draw from these traditions to facilitate their decision to merge.77 As this example suggests, religious organizations’ power to forge identities, convene meetings, bring people together, and create social capital is a resource that can be used in the interest of antiracism. However, one of the significant challenges antiracism research has identified is elevating White people’s awareness of White privilege. Korie Edwards’ research on multiracial churches, for example, found that White members generally took their whiteness for granted, emphasizing other identities (such as gender and occupation), which meant that they became more aware of Black congregants’ blackness without their own privilege becoming more salient.78 In her writing about how to talk about race, Ijeoma Oluo also suggests that awareness of White privilege is one of the most difficult topics to discuss. She suggests that individuals and groups interested in combating systemic racism take inventories of the advantages they have enjoyed, whether from being White or from having grown up in two-​parent families without health problems and having benefited from living in safe communities with good schools.79 Discussions of systemic racism for understandable reasons commonly focus on issues other than religion—​police violence, incarceration, job discrimination, and voter suppression, to name a few. The studies that focus on religion in congregations find much less to be excited about in recent years than the ones a half-​century ago that concerned the role some churches played in the Civil Rights Movement. Yet it is undeniable that much of religion’s power is in congregations, and whatever uses are made of that power start in congregations. This is why students of religion concern themselves with how people in congregations talk about race, if they talk about it at all, and how the self-​selection that sorts people into racially separate congregations poses large challenges. It also accounts for the growing 77 Barclay Key, Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2020). 78 Korie L. Edwards, The Elusive Dream: The Power of Race in Interracial Churches (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 84–​100. 79 Oluo, So You Want to Talk about Race.

178  Religion’s Power interest in antiracism dialogue aimed at raising greater awareness of systemic racism. The many questions that have yet to be adequately investigated concern how much or how little racial identities should be emphasized and what that implies for efforts to combat systemic racism.

Nationalism Nationalism consists of practices and beliefs that define the persons living in a territory in terms of their citizenship or submission in other ways to the governing power of the territory in which they live. It has both positive and negative connotations: positive in the sense of a moral obligation to the common good of one’s fellow citizens, negative in the sense of holding one’s nation and its traditions, progress, and security as superior to all other nations. Like other identities, it is relational: one’s nation and how individuals incorporate an image of that nation into their personal identity exist through comparisons with other nations and with other commitments that transcend or differ from one’s loyalty to the nation. These comparisons are effected through the placement and transgression of boundaries: nations are materially and symbolically represented in borders, border crossings, maps, passports, visas, and naturalization rites for new citizens. The nation’s identity is symbolically represented in its founding documents, national monuments, flag, and national anthem. Its identity is periodically dramatized through national holiday celebrations and on a daily basis in statements about its economy, culture, population, and relations with other countries. All these performances of symbolic boundaries include cognitive schemas that selectively organize bits and pieces of information to form a concept of the nation. For “Americans,” these create a mental image of America that in the immediate moment excludes other parts of North America and South America that are not the United States, overrides the salience of ethnic and regional identities, and suppresses many unthinkable aspects of the nation’s history. Whether individuals think much about it, national identity is both an expression of power and a form of power itself. It expresses the historical reality of a territory having been brought under the supervision of a single administrative state. As a form of power, it identifies who has the right to vote, to benefit from constitutional protection, and to bear the obligation of paying taxes and abiding by the laws. In addition to its relationship with the coercive

Religion and Identity Power  179 power of the state, nationalism is a cultural force that influences how people feel about themselves and how they feel about others. At the extremes, nativistic patriotism looks inward with pride and xenophobia and looks outward with suspicion toward foreigners and immigrants. Nationalism frequently reinforces racism and ethnocentrism, although it is often rooted in other distinctions such as territorial disputes and religious conflicts. A vast literature addresses the connections between religion and nationalism. In the United States variants of an American civil religion frame arguments about who should be included as citizens, what their responsibilities should be, and when it is appropriate to obey or resist the government. In simplest terms, civil religion can be defined as god language in reference to the nation. The literature on civil religion locates its existence in patriotic speeches that ask God to bless the nation, in the Pledge of Allegiance’s phrase “one nation under God,” and the phrase “In God we trust” on coins. More elaborate associations of “God and country” are in stories about the religious beliefs of pilgrim colonists, the faith of certain founders, and the convictions of certain advocates for peace, civil rights, and social justice. The production and reproduction of these stories depends on power: the power of ritual to commemorate them, the power of discourse to weave meanings and emotions together in narratives about struggle and redemption, and the power of institutions to provide the venues for teaching and observance. The importance of power is especially evident when social movements organize to press for certain stories to be included in textbooks and certain monuments, inscriptions, and symbolic buildings to be included in public places.80 When Americans on the morning of September 11, 2001, learned in horror of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it soon became evident that a great wave of nationalistic fervor would be one of the results. People waved American flags and agreed that all measures should be taken to punish terrorists anywhere they might be hiding. As Muslims became the enemy, some were beaten, mosques were desecrated, and Qurans were burned. The U.S. military waged wars over the next decade in Afghanistan 80 Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 117, 3 (Summer 1988), 97–​118, originally published 1967; civil religion in Bellah’s conception was singular, unifying, and implicitly White, which has necessitated critical evaluations of its usefulness to consider more closely its inflections along political, social class, and especially racial lines, for example, as discussed in Omar M. McRoberts, “Civil Religion and Black Church Political Mobilization,” in Religion Is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-​First Century, edited by Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell (New York: New York University, 2020), 40–​57.

180  Religion’s Power and Iraq. After a decade and a half, other issues had become more pressing, especially the economy after the financial crisis of 2008. Still, as the 2016 presidential election campaign got underway, the issue that attracted many voters to the Republican candidate was the idea of a border wall. It seemed like a good idea that a wall should be built along the U.S. border with Mexico, no matter what it cost, and no matter how ineffective experts on immigration policy said it would be. Why did a border wall seem like such a good idea? One answer was that people felt threatened. They felt their jobs were at risk from immigrants. Some were still worried about terrorist attacks, some thought their way of life was under siege, and others felt their religious beliefs being attacked. All those fears may have been present, but they do not explain the appeal of the border wall. If the issue was jobs, why would a wall that in most communities was more than a thousand miles away be more effective than a policy to promote job training or unemployment benefits in their own location? If the fear was about terrorism, why was a wall on the Mexican border more sensible than other efforts to strengthen national security or to combat gun violence within America itself? And if religion was threatened, why was that the case when most of the immigrants crossing the Mexican border were Christians? The border wall’s appeal to those who considered it a good idea is an example of how important the symbolism of boundaries and the crossing of boundaries is. The attackers in 2001 understood the importance of symbolism. There were other ways they could have killed as many Americans or more, but the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were symbols of America’s economic and military power. To inflict damage or destruction on these symbols was to demonstrate the attackers’ own power. The border wall similarly was a symbol. It was a physical protuberance of strength that stretched across the land, penetrating hills and valleys, making it known to any who approached it from the outside, Keep Out. Whether it successfully staunched the flow of immigrants was less important than the fact that there was now something much more tangible, visible, and media worthy at the border than ever before. If it endured, it could be a memorial to the president who built it.81 The border wall illustrates several points about nationalism that derive from the literature about the religious or spiritual symbolism of bodies. 81 Terence M. Garrett, “An Analysis of U.S. Custom and Border Protection’s Tripartite Mexico Border Security Policy,” Annales: Ethics in Economic Life 21, 4 (2018), 89–​111.

Religion and Identity Power  181 Embodied power most simply is the body’s protection against whatever diseases or physical threats to which it may be subject. But the body’s symbolic role is most evident in what passes into and out of the body—​food, excrement, breath inhaled and exhaled, sexual penetration and birth.82 A border wall’s symbolic power is similarly evident in what transpires across it. Paradoxically, its actual power of keeping people in or out is in reverse proportion to its symbolic power. A border that nobody crosses or cares to cross is less important than a border that people want to cross, try to cross, and sometimes do cross at great danger to themselves. Borders that people care about in these ways have symbolic value. This is why the Berlin Wall carried such symbolic power during the Cold War. The border wall on the Mexican border, though, is a better example because the United States and Mexico are not fundamentally driven by different ideologies, as the NATO allies and the Soviet Union were, but are divided by differences in economic opportunity, ethnicity, and language. A physical barrier at the border makes crossing and the desire to cross more of a public spectacle. It increases the chances that families will be separated, protests will be launched, and policies about immigration will include a symbolic emblem. It beckons interpreters to speak of the barbarians that must be kept out and the danger they represent to health and safety, and for alternative interpretations contesting those claims.83 The U.S.–​ Mexico border, with a presidential candidate’s supporters shouting “Build the Wall” and the 2016 candidate proclaiming himself a “nationalist,” was fraught with controversy. But studies of other territorial boundaries emphasize similar dynamics. For example, a study of the practices in which field diplomats engaged in negotiating relationships between the European Union and Ukraine found that the diplomats felt like boundary workers who were figuratively “sitting on the fence.” As they passed back and forth across the Ukrainian border, the differences in cultural identities were sharpened. Theirs was a “balancing act” undertaken daily, guided by official policies, but subject to emotional strain and a lack of objectivity. In short, the diplomats were heightening an awareness of national identity in the process itself of negotiating an agreement.84 82 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 83 Oscar Villalon, “Barbarians at the Wall,” Virginia Quarterly Review 83, 2 (Spring 2007), 277–​90. 84 Maren Hofius, “Community at the Border or the Boundaries of Community? The Case of EU Field Diplomats,” Review of International Studies 42, 5 (2016), 939–​67.

182  Religion’s Power Religion’s role in the study of nationalism can be simplified in polls identifying religious groups that favor or oppose immigration. Data of these kinds valuably inform the recent literature on White nationalism.85 But how people come to understand national identity is better understood in the situations in which people are directly involved. The best studies are the ones conducted in congregations and advocacy groups that work with immigrants and refugees. The people in these organizations serve as brokers or mediators, assisting in various ways, ranging from helping legal immigrants to advising undocumented immigrants. These relationships can be understood as the kind of social interaction that processes crossings of real national boundaries and is thereby directly involved in constructing the meanings of national identity.86 The identities that are shaped in these relationships are contested. They depend on the credentials applicants are asked to provide, the letters of support they may have with them (including from clergy), the pressure under which brokers operate, the bureaucratic practices to which the brokers have grown accustomed, and even such material conditions as the availability of detention centers. They show that although national identity may be an imagined reality for native-​born citizens, its shape is dynamically made and unmade for those at the borders. These are the practices, Jaeeun Kim writes, that “enable the state to render legible its population; naturalize its categorization schemes; shape people’s perception, representation, and performance of their own identities; and thereby constitute the population in whose name the state claims to exist and govern.”87 Less attention has been devoted to transnational and subnational identities than to nationalism, but if national identity is relational, then the relations with these alternatives must be considered as well. Transnational identities include ideas about the universality of God and concepts, some of which derive from religious ideas, about the universal commonality of humanity, universal moral law, and universal rights. Bellah’s formative treatment of civil religion, for example, argues that civil religion differs from worship of the nation insofar as it provides transcendent ideas from which prophetic 85 The bibliography in Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell, “Introduction,” in Religion Is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-​First Century, edited by Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell (New York: New York University, 2020), 1–​17, and the essays in that volume emphasize the interest expressed in White nationalism in recent studies of U.S. religion and call for greater attention to that issue but also to intersectionality, ethnicity, and immigration. 86 Grace Yukich, One Family Under God: Immigration Politics and Progressive Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 87 Jaeeun Kim, Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-​Century Korea (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 230.

Religion and Identity Power  183 criticisms of the nation can be made.88 Subnational identities include loyalties to regions of the country, states, cities, ethnic groups, and political parties. A person can readily identify as a loyal Southerner, New Yorker, Irish American, or Republican at the same time as identifying simply as an American. What needs to be investigated more fully are the many instances in which the holders of a subnational identity claim that theirs is the best, truest, or most authentic expression of what the national identity is, was in the past, or should be in the future. For example, rural Americans have sometimes claimed or been thought to claim that their communities and values represent the true America. Leaders of various Christian communities of course have been known to argue that they and their followers are the true Americans. Arguments of this kind have important implications for thinking about power. Asserting that a subnational identity is the one that is best and that the nation at large should embrace it is a cry to be heard and a rallying call among the faithful. Nationalism as an “ism” can also be thought of as an ideology that contrasts with liberalism, cosmopolitanism, or globalism. Its ideological uses for mobilizing power around certain causes and leaders are evident in White nationalism, jingoism, ethnocentrism toward foreigners, and cruelty toward asylum seekers and immigrants. Nationalism of this sort, though, is more than a set of attitudes. Like other identities, it is a social practice through which habits and dispositions are learned and social interaction takes place. It is communicated in racist epithets, speeches, graffiti, and demonstrations. Studies suggest that it increases when a society or group feels threatened: economic crises, pandemics, terrorist attacks, wars, or a particular leader or political party feeling under siege. Studies also point to the roles religion plays in elevating the rhetoric involved. To be besieged by evil personified demands a more powerful response than being attacked by an adversary. To conclude, then, I have argued with examples from the literatures on gender and sexuality, racial inequality, and nationalism that an understanding of religion’s power must include its capacity to shape and reshape the identities of large segments of society. Religion doesn’t have to do this intentionally or for nefarious purposes. Indeed, its power is often used in hopes of crossing, blending, merging, diminishing, and equalizing distinctions based on categories of separation. I suggest, however, that greater attention needs to be paid to the power dynamics involved and how religion exerts its

88 Bellah, “Civil Religion in America.”

184  Religion’s Power power. While it is obvious enough that inequality based on race, gender, sexuality, and perhaps religion as well involves an asymmetric distribution of power, it is not always evident in discussions of religion—​especially ones focusing on beliefs and congregations—​how exactly power is involved. I have suggested that the literature on symbolic boundaries, cognitive schemas, and identity politics provide helpful insights, but these too must be considered in relation to the more detailed mechanisms through which religion’s power is exercised. I have suggested especially that religious rituals and discourse are significant sources of the categories we use to carve history, beliefs, and social relations into meaningful chunks. It is for good reason that scarcely a day passes without a major media story referencing “evangelicals” or “Catholics” or “Muslims.” These are identities that have histories, distinct traditions, institutions, and adherents. Religion’s identity power at this basic level is the capacity to divide up the world into mental categories if not also into social categories. But these categories also reflect social distinctions that have within them institutionalized inequalities: “evangelicals,” as the term is popularly used, excludes Black Christians; “Catholics” for many years connoted persons of certain national origins; and “Muslim” today connotes a person who may be considered alien and dangerous. Religious identities sometimes map closely onto racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic categories and thus reinforce those distinctions by adding normative language about beliefs and sacred practices. Religion’s identity power is institutional as well as interpersonal and symbolic. Its institutional power is the capacity to collect time and money and to use those resources to attract constituents and support leaders. Therefore, institutional racism is an accusation that can apply to religious institutions: their power is often devoted to furthering the interests of the socially and economically powerful. The person who can make a large donation to the support of a congregation or college or seminary is more likely to be a wealthy White person than a Black person. The tradition of male leadership that excludes women may extend into the pragmatic knowledge with which congregations operate as well as into the formal principles of leadership selection. It is correct to observe that religion’s power is a conservatizing force that keeps in place and indeed honors traditions of belief and practice. It is only partly correct to say that, however. Religion’s power to challenge identities based on race, gender, and sexuality is evident as well. It consists of the power

Religion and Identity Power  185 to convene meetings, teach, and initiate new practices of ritual observance. Religion’s power also consists of the capacity to mobilize social movements oriented toward social change—​the Civil Rights Movement and the feminist movement being two examples. Religion’s power to shape and reshape identities, though, is limited, and it is well to end this chapter by being reminded of those limitations. The activities to which religious institutions devote themselves are oriented chiefly toward worship, prayer, and the teaching and study of scripture. Religious institutions do not engage directly in formulating public policies, imprisoning people, or giving public officials large sums of money and only in limited ways are involved in providing employment. For the most part, their role is to speak about spiritual and moral topics and then on occasion issue statements about public issues such as race, gender and sexuality, and civic obligations.

5 Religion and Political Power Political power is the asymmetric control of, or capacity to control, the coercive administrative apparatus of the state, including taxation, the military, and the passage and enforcement of laws. It is a mechanism through which religion’s power can be achieved, maintained, and increased even though religion does not directly exercise coercive power. Religious organizations whose personnel are exempt from paying taxes, for example, have resources and thus power that depend on political power. Similarly, a religious leader who receives praise from an elected official benefits in a small way from the prestige conferred. It is not at all uncommon for religious communities’ power to derive in ways small or large from political power. Nor is it uncommon for religious communities to use their power to influence the coercive apparatus of the state. In consequence, care is taken especially in democratic, religiously diverse societies to limit the extent to which religion benefits from political power. Understandings of political power itself have changed in recent decades. An earlier view regarded political power as something concentrated in the state, which was conceived as acting as an organized institution, rationally in pursuit of collective goals, and somewhat monolithically. The democratic state was in this depiction not entirely dissimilar from the eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century bureaucratic states that existed under constitutional monarchies. The more recent view regards political power as the dynamic web of practices through which social order is maintained and adapted to changing situations. In this view political actors and the leaders of other institutions bargain, improvise, and make decisions that reflect habits and dispositions, partial information, and the results of past performances. In short, they are constrained by the rules of the game, but they also game the rules. They do so in the context of institutional inertia but also against the backdrop of uncertainty, varying levels of trust, and instability. Their actions are performative, discursive, and directed at tension points that present themselves among the multiple layers and agencies through which governing takes place. The control of which political power Religion’s Power. Robert Wuthnow, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197652534.003.0006

Religion and Political Power  187 consists is thus imperfect, continuously negotiated, and adjusted to changing circumstances.1 My interest in this chapter is not to review the many debates that have addressed the American pattern of separation of church and state, but to examine the practices through which religious actors and political actors interact, in some instances as allies and in others as antagonists. My interest is in questions about how these interactions are influenced by the predominantly nonreligious character of contemporary social life, how religious groups mobilize to seek political power, what we know about their resources in this regard and the realities of religious pluralism, and how religious organizations accommodate to or resist political power. My focus is mostly on the United States and similar contexts in which religion does not exercise political power directly. When religion is excluded from exercising political power directly, it nevertheless has a stake in attempting to influence the political system. Its stake lies in the fact that it benefits from the resources over which the political system has control: exemption from taxes, exemption from many of the reporting requirements and regulations that govern businesses and nonreligious nonprofit organizations, exemption in some cases for persons who object on religiously based conscientious grounds to military service, protection under the First Amendment from being suppressed and from infringements on freedom of speech and assembly, remuneration from government for some of the expenses of operating parochial schools, police and fire protection, favorable zoning regulations, and access to taxpayer-​funded streets and highways, to name a few. Religion’s incentive to engage in politically oriented activities also includes a wide variety of social and moral issues about which faith communities feel strongly—​war and peace, abortion, homosexuality, crime, families, poverty, and homelessness, among others. If religion cannot directly pass laws or call in the police, what then can it do? As people (religious or not) confront problems they care about, and as they bump against political realities, they discover things about themselves and their world—​ new ideas, realizations, frustrations, and grievances. Things don’t work out the way they planned. Sometimes they work out 1 Christopher K. Ansell, Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Nicolas Jabko and Adam Sheingate, “Practices of Dynamic Order,” Perspectives on Politics 16, 2 (June 2018), 312–​27; Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, “Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,” in Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, edited by Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–​39.

188  Religion’s Power better than expected, sometimes worse. The unexpected provides an incentive to import what they have learned elsewhere, what they have grown accustomed to saying, and how they have acted in other spheres of their lives. Or it challenges prevailing habits. As people practice politics, Neil Gross writes, they find themselves frustrated when a problematic situation is encountered; draw experimentally on cultivated creative capacities to forge new paths; reshape macro-​social patterns through their experimentation—​via their influence and power—​and eventually come to take on the new practices as established elements of their political repertoire.2

For some people, these are resources—​ habits, repertoires, modes of adjusting to the unexpected—​ learned in their churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. This is the place to begin in thinking about religion’s political power. It consists of resources that people individually and collectively can make use of in grappling with social issues and sometimes in attempting to exert influence in the political arena. In many instances, religion’s power serves as a refuge—​an emplaced power over which they have control in their spiritual lives and within their congregations—​in a world that otherwise defies their capacity to influence it. In her study of fundamentalists in the 1980s, for example, Nancy Tatom Ammerman argued that “claiming that all power belongs to God” facilitated the congregation’s capacity to “appropriate some of that power as their own.” They worked in organizations too big to change and they felt disenfranchised politically, but through God’s power they gained a sense of agency in their own lives.3 In other instances, the power people find in their congregations extends beyond the settings in which they worship. It is a transferrable resource that can be used in other contexts, including by officeholders and political operatives. It resembles money in this respect, and, like money, its meaning and value is situational. How it works is relational and dynamic. Religion’s political power then is contingent on the situation, the people, their interaction with one another, and the improvisations to which it is put. In what follows, I discuss what can 2 Neil Gross, “Pragmatism and the Study of Large-​Scale Social Phenomena,” Theoretical Sociology 47 (2018), 87–​111, quote on page 108, drawing from the example of Peruvian populism in the 1930s discussed in Robert Jansen, “Situated Political Innovation: Explaining the Historical Emergence of New Modes of Political Practice,” Theory and Society 45 (2016), 319–​60. 3 Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), quotes on page 209.

Religion and Political Power  189 be learned about these relational, dynamic, improvisational expressions of power under four headings: signals, storytelling, political engagement, and protests. I choose these four because they identify key aspects of religion’s relation to politics that scholars have been addressing constructively in recent years and because they pose questions that call for further inquiry.

Signals Signaling is a form of symbolic politics that takes place between constituents who wish to influence the political system and the holders of political power who wish to influence their constituents. The symbolic acts of which symbolic politics is composed consist of words, phrases, innuendo, brief declarations of intent, and implied threats. They include references to acts, events, places, inscriptions, and monuments that carry symbolic meaning. They are in some ways the simplest, yet they are among the most powerful ways in which the symbolic boundary between the political sphere and the rest of society is bridged. An effective deployment of symbolism can be a powerful means of demonstrating officeholders’ loyalty to their constituents and of dramatizing the constituents’ real or imagined role in public affairs. Some of the most vivid examples of symbolic politics involve religion. Religion is hardly unique in its uses of symbolic power, but it is a frequent claimant of their use. Why this is so, what it consists of, how it works, and why it has power are questions that require consideration. The most notable examples of signaling in which religion is involved occur in officeholders’ and candidates’ speeches. Writing about civil religion in 1967, Robert Bellah interpreted President Kennedy’s references to God in his 1961 inaugural address as a signal of the generic faith in the divine to which most Americans ascribed. Every president since then has referenced God in one or more major public addresses. In recent years, with the ability to scrape information from millions of posts on Twitter and Facebook, scholars have documented that public officials frequently message something about God in these forums.4 But for what purpose? How do we understand the practices in which these symbolic acts are produced and disseminated?

4 For example, Brittany H. Bramlett and Ryan P. Burge, “God Talk in a Digital Age: How Members of Congress Use Religious Language on Twitter,” Politics and Religion (2020), 1–​23, which documented more frequent inclusion of God language by Republicans than Democrats.

190  Religion’s Power For Bellah, an inaugural address was a ritual event in which the beliefs and values of the nation were represented. He wrote, “What people say on solemn occasions . . . is often indicative of deep-​seated values and commitments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life.” Kennedy’s references to God were carefully couched in nonsectarian language, called attention to the nation’s founding myths, associated the new presidency with those of Washington and Lincoln, and, in stating that “here on earth God’s work must truly be our own,” invoked a transcendent blessing on the activist agenda Kennedy’s administration promised to pursue.5 If we were to ask how power was present, an answer consistent with Bellah’s treatment would be that a powerful person (the president) in the inaugural address brought religious idioms into a powerful space (the political arena). Implicit in Bellah’s treatment, we might also argue that the address and the religious idioms included in it had powerful effects, although that claim is harder to prove. It may not have changed the minds of any Nixon voters about Kennedy, but it was well received in the press and has been considered important ever since by historians and rhetoricians. A different approach would be to ask what made the speech possible in the first place, not in the obvious sense of all previous presidents having given inaugural addresses, but in how it was crafted and why it included these religious idioms. If the kind of signaling the speech illustrates is viewed as a practice, rather than as a static cultural object, then analysis requires breaking down the mechanisms that brought the speech into being. The questions those mechanisms imply include: What circumstances was it produced in response to, what rhetorical precedents did it draw on, and who was involved in creating it? Subsequent analyses that have delved more deeply into the circumstances in which the speech was written and delivered provide answers to these questions. It was of course carefully crafted, and its crafting illustrates the conjoining of situations, events, predispositions, idioms, and templates. Kennedy’s advisor, Ted Sorensen, was the speech’s principal architect. Sorensen studied previous inaugural speeches and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for content but also for rhetorical style, the latter modeled especially on Lincoln’s use of short phrases and words. Sorensen knew that how words sounded mattered as much as what was said. Among the rhetorical devices he 5 Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 117, 3 (Summer 1988), 97–​118, originally published in 1967, quotes on pages 99 and 101; John F. Kennedy, “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1961, https://​www.bartl​eby.com/​124/​pre​s56.html

Religion and Political Power  191 employed was the repetition of words in reverse order (the technique known as chiasmus), as in “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” The generic references to God were influenced by Sorensen’s family heritage, which included Reform Judaism, Unitarianism, and some exposure to evangelical Christianity. More importantly, the allusions to God signaled the nation’s popular Cold War refrain of opposition to “godless communism,” which had been emphasized repeatedly during the campaign by Kennedy’s opponent, Richard Nixon. Above all, the inclusion of God language occurred against the background of Kennedy’s campaign as the first Catholic president and his September 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in which he strongly affirmed the strict separation of church and state but which some felt went too far in excluding religion from public life.6 Bellah was intent on demonstrating that generic God talk that could be interpreted in many ways could convey common values. But the power of brief polysemic symbols communicated outside their institutional frames of reference can also reside in their capacity to be interpreted and reinterpreted in different ways by different audiences and in different circumstances. The Bladensburg Peace Cross controversy is an example. Erected and paid for by local businesses and veterans’ organizations in 1925 on private land near a highway in Maryland, the 40-​foot granite and cement cross was meant as a memorial to honor the predominantly Roman Catholic community’s World War I veterans. In the early 1960s the land was taken by the highway department, after which the department assumed responsibility for maintaining the grounds. A claim filed a half-​century later by the American Humanist Association, arguing that the monument’s presence on public land was a Christian symbol that violated constitutional separation of church and state, was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. To the plaintiffs nothing could more clearly symbolize Christianity than a 40-​foot cross—​an argument the Court could not deny. But the cross also had other meanings, which the Court argued should take precedence. Justice Samuel Alito explained, The cross is undoubtedly a Christian symbol, but that fact should not blind us to everything else that the Bladensburg Cross has come to represent. For 6 Ted Sorensen, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 27–​ 28, 72–​74; “Transcript: JFK’s Speech on His Religion,” NPR, December 5, 2017, https://​www. npr.org/​templa​tes/​story/​story.php?stor​yId=​16920​600; Shaun Casey, The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 175–​201.

192  Religion’s Power some, that monument is a symbolic resting place for ancestors who never returned home. For others, it is a place for the community to gather and honor all veterans and their sacrifices for our Nation. For others still, it is a historical landmark.7

The case illustrates several things about signaling. First, the monument itself was a statement about religion’s presence in public space. It differed from war memorials featuring soldiers and armaments in its unambiguous Christian imagery, “symbolic of Calvary,” as its dedication speaker said, and amplified by its size and location. In this it was indeed something that anyone who was Christian and who might have given it a second thought could imagine representing an ideal they shared, or, as a local resident who did not share that belief explained, “the cross implied that the city . . . favored Christians.” That it was regarded as “Christian,” though, rather than as “Catholic,” represented both the changing character of religion as well as efforts over the years to host interfaith memorial services at the site. Second, the Court’s decision reflected its understanding of twenty-​ first-​ century culture and politics. Its argument was not, as some conservative Christian groups hoped, that Christianity should be privileged, but that, as Alito put it, “destroying or defacing the Cross” would not further “ideals of respect and tolerance.” Third, even though the American Humanist Association lost, the case was an act of demonstrating the group’s power by challenging the power, as the group perceived it, of the religious establishment, and of showing, as the group hoped, that the U.S. Constitution was on its side. And fourth, the case was not a standalone event. It followed and occurred simultaneously with other cases filed by the humanist organization and by religious organizations, each hoping to achieve a favorable interpretation of the First Amendment, and in the process reminding themselves, their constituencies, and the court of religion’s presence in public life. Both sides also saw

7 American Legion v. American Humanist Association, 588 U.S. (2019); valuable sources on the legal aspects of religious freedom in others cases involving monuments include Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018) and Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager, Religious Freedom and the Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 121–​58; the role of public monuments as “heritage religion” is discussed in Marian Burchardt, Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020); controversies about American Civil War monuments, while rarely posing questions about religion and politics, sometimes do so indirectly and in any case provide another illustration of the symbolic role of monuments, as discussed in Thomas J. Brown, Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Religion and Political Power  193 the ruling as precedent setting, ensuring that hundreds of other monuments bearing similar meanings would stand. In short, the cross was a mode of signaling whose power was amplified by the very fact that what it signaled was subject to multiple interpretations and litigation.8 The signals that connect religion and politics need not be explicitly religious. Indeed, the only reason some are considered explicitly religious is that they have been defined that way by powerful institutions and usually over long periods. But if signals become religious because they are socially constructed to be understood that way, then in smaller ways ordinary objects can also be assigned meaning as religious symbols. For example, Paul Lichterman tells of a charity in Los Angeles that persuaded churches to donate money to purchase nails. The goal was to purchase seventy-​four thousand nails, each nail representing a person on an average night in the city who was homeless. The nails were practical (donated to Habitat for Humanity) but mostly symbolic. Nails are not intrinsically religious. But they became religious because churches defined them as such. And it was easy to do so because, once defined as religious, they also symbolized the nails in Jesus’s hands and feet on the cross.9 Colors are among the most used methods of signaling. They have no intrinsic meaning apart from how they have come to be defined culturally. Pink has been used to signal feminism, rainbow colors to signal LGBTQ identity, and red or blue to signal Republican or Democratic identity, and so on. Similarly, white, orange, and green have at various times signaled Christian, Protestant, and Catholic identities.10 It may be beneficial, though, for the signaling to be emotionally jarring, as many examples suggest. A fundraiser for needy children catches the eye more quickly if it includes a picture of an emaciated child. An appeal to send letters to Congress about Christians suffering persecution in China includes a description of a church being desecrated. An antiabortion rally includes a sign showing a fetus nailed to a cross. These are signals that religious groups define as having sacred meaning and deploy as mechanisms of making a political statement.

8 Jessica Gresko, “How the Fate of a 40-​Foot Cross in Maryland Ended Up in the Hands of the Supreme Court,” Baltimore Sun, February 26, 2019; “Legion Dedicates Bladensburg War Memorial Cross,” Washington Post, July 13, 1925. 9 Paul Lichterman, “Religion in Public Action: From Actors to Settings,” Sociological Theory 30, 1 (2012), 15–​36. 10 Marian Sawer, “Wearing Your Politics on Your Sleeve: The Role of Political Colors in Social Movements,” Social Movement Studies 6, 1 (May 2007), 39–​56.

194  Religion’s Power A further point—​best illustrated in the story about Kennedy’s speech—​is that it takes resources to produce effective signals. Signaling requires a platform from which to perform signaling and to have it witnessed (it helps to be president). Signaling also requires an understanding of the rules: the knowledge of what to say and when to say it, a mastery of rhetorical skill, a professional speech writer, experience in bending the rules. These are resources to which those with power have the greatest access. Few effective instances of signaling happen without them being deployed by a resourceful organization. Signaling is in this respect an instance of the reproduction of power.11 The converse can also be true. When David meets Goliath, the story shows the weak going up against the strong. It pleases the reader because David wins. But David does not have to win. If David can stay alive to fight another day, he gains stature for his display of courage. The recent history of American politics is rich with stories of modern-​day Davids. They are the preachers who went to jail in protest of segregation, nuclear weapons, or the government threatening to tax their television ministries or regulate their foster homes. These are cases of the weak facing the strong in the name of religion. Their symbolic value is in demonstrating that the less powerful have enough power to stand up to the more powerful. Their tangible results are sometimes to get what they want and on other occasions to gain sympathetic support.12

Storytelling Storytelling is the form of discursive power that provides an account of what is going on, why it is happening, and what should be done about it. As a kind of political power, it seeks to persuade by bringing ways of thinking and speaking into the contexts in which political issues are discussed, whether in the media, casual conversations, or deliberative meetings themselves. It resembles symbolic politics in introducing idioms freighted with symbolic meaning into the discursive field but is richer in the degree of elaboration it represents and thus in the attention to details of narrative structure, 11 Adam Sheingate, “Creativity and Constraint in the U.S. House of Representatives,” in Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, edited by James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 168–​203. 12 For example, William Martin, “God’s Angry Man,” Texas Monthly (April 1981), 152–​57, 223–​ 35, tells the story of evangelist James Robison, whose stand against the Federal Communication Commission elevated his stature among religious conservatives.

Religion and Political Power  195 embellishment, content, and expressions of power it requires. Much of how religious groups and their spokespersons seek to exercise political power takes the form of narrative framing. Lacking the authority to call forth the coercive powers of the state, and indeed lacking the capacity or will in most instances to mobilize organized physical engagement in the political process, narrative framing is the resource of choice. The rich stock of scripturally codified narratives that faith communities have at their disposal and the well-​institutionalized contexts in which these narratives are told, ritually enacted, and applied to contemporary public and private issues gives faith communities ample opportunities to deploy narrative framing in the hope of influencing public opinion. One kind of political storytelling is like the stories people tell about religious conversions and spiritual awakenings. The stories present a “before” and “after” image of the person, with intervening events and ideas providing an account of what changed and why. Accounts are stories of how and why something happened: the decision to marry, to pursue a particular career, to move to a different city. They are stories spun in real time, as a person makes the decision or has a decision imposed. They are also after-​the-​fact narratives, told in retrospect to make sense of what happened. These stories, told through the lens of hindsight, are usually what people remember, and what they report when they happen to be asked by a social scientist or journalist. The accounts that connect religion and politics do so by bringing religious language into the story and using it to explain one’s motives for doing something politically or holding to certain political ideas. “Why I got involved in politics” is the question that some of the most interesting religious narratives seek to answer. The question comes up for people who have never been involved before because their involvement is anomalous. It was something new and different that required in their view a justification. It may need special justification if they previously thought politics was a forbidden, impractical, or unseemly course of action. Religion poses just such a problem for leaders and laypeople in some faith traditions. They believe their time is better spent preaching the gospel, praying, showing kindness to their neighbors, caring for the sick, and letting God do the rest. An account for becoming political is needed. It is especially important if the person is well known and becomes visibly active in politics. Before Jerry Falwell became the leader of the Moral Majority, he was a successful fundamentalist preacher. Fundamentalists were known for staying out of politics. They were less likely to vote than other Americans. In some

196  Religion’s Power instances they attended schools and colleges that avoided taking government funding. If they were preachers, they believed not only that they should honor strict separation of church and state but also that politics was a diversion from the work of saving souls. Falwell’s account of how he became involved in politics is a before-​and-​after story that came in three different versions. Account #1 attributed his decision to the 1973 Roe v. Wade case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. It was one Falwell emphasized increasingly after founding the Moral Majority in 1979. Macel Falwell recounted the awakening in the biography of her husband this way: “On January 1973, the Lynchburg News & Advance announced the death of former president Lyndon Johnson. But it was another front-​page story that day that caused Jerry to push his morning coffee aside in dismay.” The story was about Roe v. Wade. It “threw Jerry into a dilemma of epic proportions,” she wrote. “He’d been taught that the role of all clergy was to spread the gospel and stay out of the political arena. However, this legal decision was unprecedented. . . . What will happen to this nation if no one who understands spiritual principles involves himself in government?”13 The story nicely set the scene by placing Falwell in a kitchen space with which readers could identify. The narrative also provided an account of Falwell’s emotions. The fact that Falwell’s first sermon about abortion did not occur until 1977, though, has prompted some writers to suspect the account was given mostly to serve Falwell’s increasing emphasis on abortion as leader of the Moral Majority. Account #2 was the one in which Falwell specifically contrasted his pre-​ and post-​conversion view of politics. “I had preached many, many sermons at pastors’ conventions,” he said, saying, “Fellows, don’t lead marches; don’t get involved politically; focus on your pulpit; don’t get caught up in the [temporary causes] of the day.” Later, when I got into politics personally, it was morally necessary for me to say out loud that “I have misled you on that issue. I never thought the government would go so far afield, I never thought the politicians would become so untrustworthy, I never thought the courts would go so nuts to the left, and I misjudged the quality of government that we have. Our lack



13 Macel Falwell, Jerry Falwell: His Life and Legacy (New York: Howard Books, 2008), 107–​8.

Religion and Political Power  197 of involvement is probably one of the reasons why the country’s in the mess it is in.”14

Any of the pastors who knew Falwell well enough would have understood that the “marches” he referred to were the civil rights demonstrations to which their mostly White Southern constituents had been opposed. Those to whom he spoke would also likely have known that some, even in Falwell’s church, had serious misgivings about his political involvement, hence the need for an account. They would likely have known, though, that several other influential pastors of evangelical megachurches were already regularly speaking about political issues. The narrative also displayed Falwell’s antagonism toward the government, the courts, and “the left,” which explained his entry into politics.15 Account #3 disclosed the clearest basis in religion for Falwell’s turn to politics. Unlike the other accounts, this one identifies something like a divine calling and a commitment to God. This is the narrative with which Falwell began his bestselling book Listen, America, published in 1980, in which he outlined the arguments, issues, and strategies for the Moral Majority. The story is set on an airplane, his son seated beside him, as Falwell is returning from a speaking engagement in Oklahoma and remembering an earlier trip to Cambodia in which he saw harrowing atrocities committed by the Pol Pot regime and the invading Vietnamese communists. “There in the darkness of the cabin of that plane, I looked intently at my son, who was asleep,” Falwell writes. I could not help but thank God that he has never gone hungry a day in his life. He knows little but what he has read about communism. As I looked at him while he slept, I prayed that God would turn America around so that he would know the America I have known. I vowed that I would never turn my back on the firm decision and sacred commitment I had made to myself

14 William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 198–​202. 15 Megan Rosenfeld, “Miller and Warner Attend a Lynchburg Happening,” Washington Post, October 23, 1978; Falwell was not quite as apolitical as his story suggested. In 1976 he attacked Jimmy Carter for being interviewed in Playboy. In 1977 he testified before the Virginia General Assembly against the Equal Rights Amendment. And in 1978 he mounted a campaign against a referendum that would legalize parimutuel betting and hosted the two U.S. Senate candidates, Andrew P. Miller and John W. Warner, at one of his televised worship services.

198  Religion’s Power and to God that I would preach and work and pray to stop the moral decay in America that is destroying our freedoms.16

Falwell had explained to his church while he was writing the book that he wanted it to appeal widely, both to fellow Christians and to other concerned Americans. This account does not say specifically why he turned to politics, but in a few sentences he evokes an image of himself as a father, person who has seen the world, an anti-​communist, a believer in God, and a person of conviction. These examples show several things about narratives that connect religion and politics. First, they sometimes are quite personal, similar in structure to conversion narratives in which an account is given of a person’s status before and after a significant transforming event, in this case a shift from an apolitical self to a politically engaged self. Second, the accounts may occur in multiples, telling the story in different ways at different times and for different audiences. And third, the stories are at once influenced by events, the contexts in which they are told, and the purposes for which they are told. In Falwell’s case, the narratives describe not only his decision to become involved in politics but also the religious commitment that oriented him toward particular issues and concerns. Whereas Falwell’s accounts explain why a religious person becomes involved in politics, the more common narratives are the ones in which a person in politics forges a link with religion. When narratives are involved, the connection is elaborated and personalized to a greater extent than when a public official merely mentions God in a speech. The narrative brings in something about divine authority to justify a person’s decisions, which in turn shows that the person identifies with people of faith. In his book Decision Points, George W. Bush tells of wondering if he should run for president and then being confirmed in his decision that he should while listening to a sermon by a preacher named Mark Craig: “Mark described God’s reassurance that Moses would have the power to perform the task he had been called to do. Then Mark summoned the congregation to action. He declared that the country was starving for moral and ethical leadership.” Bush said he wondered to himself if the sermon was telling him what to do.

16 Jerry Falwell, Listen, America! (New York: Bantam, 1980), 6, quoted in Michael Sean Winters, God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 147–​48.

Religion and Political Power  199 The story is interesting besides the fact that it provided Bush with an account of why he ran for president that drew from religion. The story continues: “There was no mysterious voice whispering in my ears, just Mark Craig’s high-​pitched Texas twang coming from the pulpit. Then Mother leaned forward from her seat at the other end of the pew. She caught my eye and mouthed, ‘He is talking to you.’ ” After the service, I felt different,” he added, “I felt a sense of calm.” The story then evokes a hint that God is speaking to Bush but avoids making that claim directly. Instead, it locates Bush firmly in Texas listening to an ordinary preacher, receiving an affirmation not from God but from his mother, and experiencing nothing more reassuring than a feeling of calm. In short order, the story suggests to anyone reading it that Bush probably shares their own faith in God and yet in a way that does not defy reason.17 A rather different use of narrative for bringing religion and politics together consists of stories having religious content that are included in political appeals and arguments. Here the narrative is not meant as an account that explains why a particular person has become politically involved, but to suggest a religious reason for why anyone listening to or reading the story might be motivated to accept what it says about a political issue. The Maryknoll Story is an example. It surfaced in the 1980s during the debate over U.S. funding for rebels fighting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. President Reagan was said to have told House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who was against the funding, that the State Department’s evidence favored it, to which O’Neill responded that his own information came from nuns.18 That part of the story may have been apocryphal, but a more complete account of O’Neill’s reliance on nuns was published in the New York Times. O’Neill’s story was that he was receiving regular letters from Maryknoll nuns in Nicaragua whom he trusted. He quoted a recent letter that stated, The war that is happening in Central America right now and which threatens to escalate and bring even more disaster, challenges us—​all of us who believe in Jesus—​to follow the word of Paul in Ephesians: “So stand your ground, with truth buckled around your waist and integrity as 17 George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 61; and for a detailed analysis of the story, John Wilson, Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 180. 18 Timothy A. Byrnes, Reverse Mission: Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011), 100, says the story may have been apocryphal and does not give a source.

200  Religion’s Power a breastplate, wearing for shoes on your feet the eagerness to preach the gospel of peace and always carrying the shield of faith so that you can use it to put out the burning arrows of the evil one.”19

The Maryknoll Story was an interesting example of a political leader attempting to wield power by telling a story that included something about religion. Like Bush’s story, it did not claim anything at all about divine revelation. Its claim was that the Maryknolls were there on the scene, had a trustworthy record, and were personally known by O’Neill. As an example of religion’s political power, it suggested that the members of a particular religious order could be a mechanism because of the story through which an important decision about U.S. foreign policy was made. Their power in this sense was put into play by the story. The story mediated the kind of power it was: not a claim about divine revelation but one that O’Neill took seriously and regarded as a possible means of persuasion. It included wording from Scripture but provided the context in which it seemed reasonable to do that, specifically by putting the biblical words in the letter that came from the letter writer who was a trustworthy source on the scene. The account that appeared in the New York Times further amplified the context by explaining that O’Neill had a long relationship with the Maryknolls and had many Catholics in his district, and that the Maryknolls were engaged in significant Christian work in Nicaragua. Whether the story itself made much difference is debatable, but two sources—​one in the State Department and one in the CIA—​were reported as saying that O’Neill’s relationship with the Maryknolls did influence U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. As the State Department official said, “Taking on the churches is really tough. We don’t normally think of them as political opponents, so we don’t know how to handle them.”20 This example shows that storytelling for purposes of political advocacy must be understood in relation to the events that make the story meaningful and the sequences of social relationships that lead to its construction, telling, and credibility. Storytelling as a political practice must also be understood as a dynamic process that generates opposing stories. The Maryknoll Story 19 Letter from Sister Peggy Healy to Tip O’Neill, quoted in Philip Taubman, “The Speaker and His Sources on Latin America,” New York Times, September 12, 1984 https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​1984/​09/​ 12/​us/​the-​spea​ker-​and-​his-​sour​ces-​on-​latin-​amer​ica.html 20 Gerry Fitzgerald, “Religious Groups Orchestrate Opposition to ‘Contra’ Aid,” Washington Post, April 23, 1985; the State Department official was Langhorne Motley, the CIA official was CIA Director William Casey; Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 380–​81.

Religion and Political Power  201 illustrates this process as well. One of the counterstories was told by conservative radio commentator Cal Thomas, who said, There is ample evidence that the Maryknolls are doing the work of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin more than they are the work of God. I spoke to a former Maryknoll, Sister Geraldine O’Leary DeMacias, who told me that, when she entered the order in 1964, the Maryknolls were conservative and anti-​ communist. But that began to change, she says, after the reforms of Vatican II.

She told him that some of the Maryknolls were joining not to do good works but to advance Marxism. “Somebody ought to get Tip O’Neill a new set of advisors,” he said. In the weeks that followed, prominent conservative Catholics, including Michael Novak and Pat Buchanan, published stories claiming the Maryknolls were weak and misguided and that O’Neill was naive to believe them.21

Political Engagement While the study of storytelling is rich with opportunities for investigating religion’s discursive interventions in politics, much of what interests scholars and practitioners about religion’s potential for political influence is concerned with political engagement. The questions that animate discussions of political engagement include how people vote and what incentivizes them to vote at all and to support particular candidates or policies, and to participate in the other conventional means of participating in politics, whether by issuing statements, circulating voter guides, hosting candidates, or attending meetings. Studies demonstrate that these kinds of political engagement often occur at higher rates among persons who are religiously involved than among those who are not.22 However, the studies also pose questions to 21 Theresa Keeley, “Reagan’s Real Catholics vs. Tip O’Neill’s Maryknoll Nuns: Gender, Intra-​ Catholic Conflict, and the Contras,” Diplomatic History 40, 3 (2016), 530–​58. 22 While earlier studies generally established a positive relationship between religious involvement and political participation, recent studies have emphasized variation in the relationship; for example, see David E. Campbell, “Acts of Faith: Churches and Political Engagement,” Political Behavior 26, 2 (June 2004), 155–​80, and Lauren E. Smith and Lee Demetrius Walker, “Belonging, Believing, and Group Behavior: Religiosity and Voting in American Presidential Elections,” Political Research Quarterly 66, 2 (June 2013), 399–​413, who observe different patterns among evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics; Alan S. Gerber, Jonathan Gruber, and Daniel M. Hungerman, “Does Church Attendance Cause People to Vote? Using Blue Laws’ Repeal to Estimate the Effect of

202  Religion’s Power which relatively little attention has been paid until recently. These include questions that get at the heart of how religion is practiced: What institutional resources does it normally have at its disposal, who does it authorize to speak, how does it assemble people and forge networks among them, and why does it influence political attitudes and engagement better in some situations than others? Political engagement is most noticeable to the wider public when it consists of marches and demonstrations, but it commonly takes less visible forms as groups work behind the scenes, hold committee meetings, solicit support, and address issues at legislative hearings and in the courts. This is true of religion-​based political engagement just as it is of other varieties. Religion’s political power in these instances includes making use of available venues, rituals, and leadership as well as forming coalitions and framing issues. Political engagement is rarely the kind of one-​off involvement captured in survey data. For any person who happens to be captured in a random sample, a yes or no response may provide a measure of who has voted or attended a meeting. But why there was a meeting to attend in the first place requires looking deeper into the dynamics involved. The practice of political engagement is oriented toward achieving a goal for which the means are shaped in the process of engagement itself and toward an outcome that itself is contingent on what happens. Engagement motivated by a particular issue is contingent on how that issue relates to previous issues and who is perceived as the opposition. The strategies of engagement depend on the power that interested parties can muster through discourse, institutional resources, and interaction with potential allies and opponents. The political engagement in which religious groups become involved often focuses on self-​interested claims. In the same way that businesses do, religious groups engage in lobbying, negotiating, and organizing to get what they want from government and to keep government from interfering with their affairs as much as possible. How they go about this is similar in many respects, including testifying at legislative hearings and filing lawsuits, but differs in that the free exercise of religion gives religious groups a special hand to play. An example that illustrates the contingencies involved is a piece Religiosity on Voter Turnout,” British Journal of Political Science 46, 3 (July 2016), 481–​500, in which British data suggest a causal relationship between attendance and voting; and Maria Sobolewska, Stephen D. Fisher, Anthony F. Heath, and David Sanders, “Understanding the Effects of Religious Attendance on Political Participation among Ethnic Minorities of Different Religions,” European Journal of Political Research 54 (2015), 271–​87.

Religion and Political Power  203 of legislation that came under consideration by the U.S. Congress in the late 1970s. The proposed legislation would have required religious organizations along with other tax-​exempt nonprofit organizations to file annual reports about the funds they solicited, the sources of these funds, and their disposition. The proposal originated from investigations of several charities in which it was learned that huge amounts of money were being received from donors who thought the money was being used for services to the needy but were in fact being used to cover high administrative salaries and to pay for additional fundraising. The Charitable Disclosure Bill, also known as H.R. 41, was introduced by Representative Charles H. Wilson, a Democrat from California, in 1976. The bill proposed that any charitable organization that solicits contributions by mail would be required to include information in the solicitation about the intended purpose of the contribution solicited and the “percentage of all contributions for the charitable purposes of the organization which remained for direct application to such purposes after deducting all fundraising and management and general costs.” The proposal was threatening enough to religious organizations that thousands of clergy, lay leaders, and ordinary members, especially Catholics and evangelical Protestants, sent letters opposing it. On the surface, their letter writing can be understood as a simple act of political engagement: an issue perceived of relevance to a constituency that expresses its opinion by sending letters to an elected official. How it developed and why it succeeded in persuading Representative Wilson to withdraw the bill are illuminated by considering the specific events and practices that were involved. In 1974 the incumbent governor of Maryland, Marvin Mandel, was re-​ elected by a 64%–​36% landslide. But Mandel, like his predecessor, Spiro Agnew, was widely suspected of corruption and indeed was convicted in 1977 of mail fraud and racketeering. As journalists began digging into his finances, they discovered that a Catholic organization called the Pallottines had loaned Mandel $54,000 in 1974 to help finance his 1974 divorce. The group had also invested $280,000 in a portable classroom construction firm with contracts from the state. The Pallottines were an order founded in Italy in 1835 by Roman priest Vincent Pallotti to assist the poor and the sick. Over the years, the organization had expanded into an international conglomerate of schools, missions, orphanages, clinics, and retreat houses in Europe, Africa, South America, and the United States, where it mostly ministered to Italian immigrants. Its principal mode of support was charitable

204  Religion’s Power contributions solicited through direct mail appeals. In Baltimore at St. Leo’s Roman Catholic Church, one of the parishes operated by the Pallottines, parishioners’ responses to the revelation about Mandel ranged from voicing disgust, to commenting that this was business as usual, to expressing support for the church’s ravioli dinners and its school, to not wanting to talk about it. As one man remarked, “I don’t give a damn about the Pallottines one way or another [and] I don’t give a damn about politics one way or another.”23 But in 1976, during the run-​up to the Charitable Disclosure Bill, an inquiry initiated by the Maryland Attorney General found that the Pallottines had mailed more than seventy-​five million fundraising letters at a cost of nearly $2 million. That was twice the amount the organization reported having spent on foreign missions. When this became public the Archbishop of the Baltimore Archdiocese called on the order to conduct an audit and publicize the results. However, the archbishop’s leverage was limited to the fact that the order had parishes in the diocese since, otherwise, the order was an independent entity. The Vatican’s influence was also limited, although the scandal gained wide interest in Italy, as much from the order’s apparent tolerance of divorce, which the church officially condemned, as from the fundraising and investment issues. A request for the order to cease fundraising went unheeded. When the audit’s results were released, it showed the order had raised $20 million in the past eighteen months but spent less than 3 percent on overseas missions. An attempt by state prosecutors to subpoena further financial information went into a lengthy dispute as to their ownership and their owners’ rights. In the meantime, the Pallottines voluntarily agreed to liquidate many of their assets in Maryland and drastically reduce their charity appeals.24 But the scandal was not over. Within weeks of the initial coverage, the Pallottine story became the impetus for other stories of fundraising deception and mismanagement in nonprofit charities, which in turn propelled calls for legislation to keep these problems from happening again. The Pallottines were members of a group called the National Association of Philanthropic Organizations, whose thirteen member charities opened an investigation in hope of forestalling a fall off of contributions to their activities. The Pallottines 23 Micharl Weisskopf, “Pallottine Fund-​Raising Meets State Law for Last Half of ’76,” Washington Post, December 15, 1977; the story of corruption under the governorships of Agnew and Mandel is detailed in Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz, Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-​Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House (New York: Crown, 2020). 24 “Pallottines Will Liquidate Many Assets,” New York Times, August 25, 1976.

Religion and Political Power  205 were also regular participants at the annual meetings of the National Catholic Development Conference, whose representatives found themselves having to answer questions about how their money was spent. It seemed, one commentator wrote, “as though a post-​Pallottine morality is evolving among Catholic fundraisers, the way a post-​Watergate morality has developed in politics.” The larger narrative in which the scandal figured almost as an anecdote was that charities were big businesses, taking in billions of dollars with hardly any oversight, a claim that ignored the laws, regulations, and self-​ policing to which nonprofit organizations were in fact subject. And yet it was one to which other instances of fraud and abuse contributed.25 What seemed like a large national problem evoking outrage from investigative journalists, lawyers, accountants, donors, and charities themselves prompted charities to institute closer control of fundraising practices and to establish voluntary guidelines for disclosing information. It also drew the attention of legislators. The hearings for the Charity Disclosure Bill initiated by Representative Wilson were held the last week of March 1977. “We all know of abuses such as the Pallottines which divert millions of dollars every year from worthwhile causes,” Wilson said. The bill, he argued, would “protect the American public and responsible charities from dishonest moneymaking schemes and grossly inefficient operations which can now flourish under a cloak of virtual secrecy.” Among the nearly forty participants who provided testimony or submitted statements, both for and against the bill, the ones addressing religious organizations’ concerns represented Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Latter-​Day Saints, the National Religious Broadcasters, and Presbyterians. To a person, they opposed how the bill would affect religion.26 One might have supposed that separation of church and state would have been the grounds for opposition. Several of the groups in fact did pose constitutional objections. For example, the National Religious Broadcasters said the measure placed intolerable burdens on religious organizations that created “excessive government entanglement with religion.” But none of the groups rested their arguments simply on the First Amendment. The most persuasive argument was simply that the legislation was impractical. It was impractical because it exempted from disclosure “any bona fide membership 25 John Montague, “The Law and Financial Transparency in Churches: Reconsidering the Form 990 Exemption,” Cardozo Law Review 35 (2013), 203–​65. 26 U.S. Congress, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Postal Personnel and Modernization of the Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, H.R. 41 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), Serial No. 95–​49; the subcommittee’s relevance to the topic was its oversight of the postal service, which included charitable solicitations through the mail.

206  Religion’s Power organization with respect to any solicitation for contributions by mail made by such organization exclusively to the members of such organization.” It therefore put the federal government in the role of determining the definition of membership. And for religious organizations, if not also for others, that was deeply problematic. The Baptist spokesperson illustrated the point this way: “Churches have different organizational forms. These include a hierarchical system, a presbyterial system, and a congregational system. In Baptist polity each individual congregation is an autonomous unit. Membership to Baptists is only in that individual congregation and not in an all-​encompassing body.” Thus, he explained, a solicitation to members of a congregation would be exempt but not a solicitation from the foreign mission board, whereas in a hierarchical denomination with membership from the denomination, a solicitation would be exempt. There were additional impracticalities. Did it make a difference if a congregation passed out offering envelopes with the church’s address at a typical worship service in which nonmembers were likely to be present? Would a hierarchical denomination be expected to disclose its national budget whenever a local solicitation might reach a nonmember? If an organization was expected to keep its fundraising expenses low, would that be inequitable for organizations needing to identify specialized interests within a large population? Or might it underestimate the administrative overhead of organizations operating largely on volunteer labor? And what did it mean when the proposal referred to the “integrated auxiliaries” of churches? In brief, in the interest of passing legislation meant to treat all religious organizations equally, their “disparate organizational structures” seemed inevitably to result in unequal treatment. In the months after the hearings, Catholic, evangelical, and interfaith groups held meetings to discuss how to respond if the bill went forward. In Lynchburg Jerry Falwell condemned it as yet another example of secular government persecuting Christians. Representative Wilson continued arguing for the bill for another year, but by spring 1978 it was evident it had no chance of passing. Two years later, in an ironic twist, Wilson was defeated for re-​election after being censured by the House of Representatives for financial misconduct of his own. Religious organizations remained exempt from the reporting requirements to which other nonprofits were subject, tightened their self-​policing, and faced periodic criticism sparked by new scandals that seemed reminiscent of the Pallottines. This example illustrates the value of thinking about religion’s political engagement as a practice that develops over time in interaction with

Religion and Political Power  207 unexpected contingencies and by advancing narratives that reflect its institutional resources. The Pallottines’ institutional power was relatively straightforward: its century and a half of successful expansion resulted in a massive infrastructure that was largely under its own control and was hardly restricted to purely religious activities, which meant that it intersected with the political system at multiple levels. The political engagement that evolved in opposition to the Charity Disclosure bill illustrates the more complex ways in which political engagement develops. First, the issues that become salient are often unexpected and unplanned, emerging as side issues from other investigations. Second, the narratives with which issues are framed are often built around single events but are shaped by multiple groups that bring different perspectives to the process. Third, the issues and the means of addressing them are rarely entirely new but, as in this case, bear similarities to issues that have been of concern in the past. Fourth, while voluntary engagement among large constituencies often provides an account of the outcome, specialized leadership is likely to be even more important. And fifth, the diverse organizational structures involved are likely to play a determining role. The last point is especially interesting in the Charity Disclosure example. A common assumption about political engagement is that coalitions are an important resource, which is evident in this example in the fact that religious groups representing all the major traditions spoke against the bill. Yet the less often recognized role of organizational structure is illustrated by the fact that its disparate forms were a resource in this example. It was this diversity that made it difficult for uniform disclosure legislation to be practical. And it was the spokespersons’ recognition of this diversity that gave them a strong argument. In one sense, then, what the groups’ coming together demonstrated was not that they all were in the same boat but that they were all in the boat differently or even in different boats.

Protest Religion’s political power is of interest in different ways when it extends beyond the relatively accepted modes of encouraging people to vote and help with political campaigns to the more contested modes of engaging in protests and joining activist groups or movements. These kinds of political activity pose questions about who joins, why they join, how they organize themselves, and what they accomplish. The answers to these questions fall mainly

208  Religion’s Power into arguments about the role of social networks, money, organizational skills, the media, timing, and the capacity to form coalitions. Protests and activism in which religion is involved bear the imprint of these resources just as other protests and activist groups do. But a clearer understanding of religion’s role as a practice comes from looking more closely at what happens in the situations in which protests and activism take place—​in what spaces do they take place, how does a place become a public space, what dispositions do participants bring with them, how do they craft stories about what they are doing, what role do religious templates play in these stories, how do activists deal with internal power struggles, how do they contend with opponents, how do they improvise, and how do their tactics evolve? Religion’s role in the major protest movements that have shaped American history is quite varied. The labor strikes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, involved some leaders who were clergy and received some support from churches, but there was considerable dissatisfaction among labor organizers with what they perceived as the churches’ favoritism toward business. In contrast, the Civil Rights Movement under the guidance of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference benefited from the support it received from some of the most powerful Black churches in the South and from a few prominent White clergy. Although the civil rights movement owed much of its success to the federal government and nonreligious organizations such as the NAACP and ACLU, and even though many church leaders opposed it, the support it received demonstrated religion’s potential to affect political outcomes. Its influence in educating and supporting clergy whose leadership skills could play a role was evident in Dr. King and many other civil rights activists. Churches provided the space in which meetings were held and from which protest marches were launched. Religion’s discursive power was evident in the movement’s biblical rhetoric. And religion’s involvement amplified the call for justice for which the movement stood. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which began in 2013 and by the end of the decade grew into national prominence, contrasted with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It did so deliberately, as its leaders sought to distance themselves from the church-​based resources and politics of respectability of the earlier movement. BLM was avowedly intersectional, appealing to persons of queer and trans identities, women, and the poor as well as Blacks. In differentiating itself in these ways, it attracted a younger generation, many of whom were religiously unaffiliated, and distanced

Religion and Political Power  209 itself from churches that it regarded as hierarchical, steeped in patriarchal traditions, and obligingly content with politics as usual. It also differed from the Civil Rights Movement in having social media as a mobilizing tool.27 As a social movement for which street demonstrations became known, BLM provides an interesting case in which to examine how religion and protest come together as a practice. BLM was from the start an intentionally decentralized movement that embraced a diversity of interests, local situations, and ideas about what goals should be pursued. Diversity was an ideal that fit well with the reality of its most visible activists’ varied interests in gender and sexual orientation as well as in the varied circumstances that propelled them into leadership roles. One of the clearest dividing lines was between those who focused on consciousness raising and those who favored working toward immediate practical solutions. The one emphasized the systemic racism that was perpetuated through inattention to the symbolic meanings of race, gender, and privilege, while the other stressed police reform measures such as community review committees, better education and training, and a reduction of federal military-​grade weapons and intervention. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and the months of street protests that followed brought the movement widespread publicity and support. Religion’s presence was evident in the clergy who participated in the demonstrations. In short, the movement exemplified all the ingredients for an effective mobilization campaign: leadership, a cause, an organizational structure, technology, social networks, and publicity.28 When protest is understood as a practice, a closer look at the details of who is involved and what they do is instructive. In particular, the contingencies of the situation as it developed stand out. Nobody knew that Michael Brown would be killed. But it was not unexpected that someone would be killed and that the person killed would be an unarmed Black male in police 27 Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-​First Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018); Keeanga-​Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016); Anthea Butler, “Black Lives Matter,” Christian Century 133, 6 (March 16, 2016), 24–​47, 29–​31; Dewey J. Clayton, “Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement: A Comparative Analysis of Two Social Movements in the United States,” Journal of Black Studies 49, 5 (July 2018), 448–​80; Monica Anderson, Michael Barthel, Andrew Perrin, and Emily A. Vogels, “An Analysis of #BlackLivesMatter and Other Hashtags Related to Political or Social Issues,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2018, https://​www.pewr​esea​rch.org/​inter​ net/​2018/​07/​11/​an-​analy​sis-​of-​black​live​smat​ter-​and-​other-​twit​ter-​hasht​ags-​rela​ted-​to-​politi​cal-​or-​ soc​ial-​iss​ues/​reported approximately 30 million uses of the hashtag between 2013 and 2018. 28 Jennifer E. Cobbina, Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Change America (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

210  Religion’s Power custody. The frequency with which these events happened meant that there were in existence organizations whose purpose it was to respond, including watchdog groups, citizens’ groups, antiracist groups, and of course the police department itself. Religious groups were among these organizations. Some were local, composed of congregations and interfaith alliances, and some were national. The people who filled the streets in protest included representatives of these organizations. Their roles were shaped by the organizations they represented and by the changing dynamics of the protest itself. Those dynamics shifted from day to day and during the ensuing weeks in response to statements by the police and other public officials, the use of militant enforcement by the police, the arrival of journalists and television crews, questions about charges against Officer Wilson, the formation of an investigative commission, and the eventual grand jury decision not to bring an indictment. Religion’s most visible role in the Ferguson protests was the advocacy of the clergy who participated directly. They knelt in prayer in spaces separating protestors and police, sometimes wearing clerical collars, and sometimes being arrested or injured. Participation demonstrated immediate support. It also gave credence to statements of support issued after the fact on television, through social media, to congregations, and at clergy conferences. These statements were the occasion for interpreting the protests through a theological lens that provided specific biblical narratives with which to enlarge their meaning. The most specific connection with Michael Brown and others killed by police was the biblical narrative about Jesus, who was described as a similarly marginalized person born in poverty and treated as an outcast, who ministered to the needy and afflicted, and who was the victim of oppressive state violence.29 Religion’s role was more interesting and varied than summary accounts suggested. Religious leaders did not substantially affect the course of the protests or their outcome, but their participation illustrates the multiple ways in which religion does exercise its influence. These can be seen most clearly in the roles played by the two most active clergy leaders: Reverend Traci Blackmon and Reverend Osagyefo Sekou. Blackmon was the senior pastor of Christ the King United Church of Christ (“a church where Jesus the healer meets Jesus the revolutionary”), located about five miles from the Ferguson 29 Rima Vesely-​Flad, Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017).

Religion and Political Power  211 Police Department, and was a registered nurse with years of healthcare management experience, as well as the head of her denomination’s Justice and Witness Ministries.30 Sekou was an ordained Church of God in Christ minister, former pastor of Baptist and Congregational churches in New York and Massachusetts, author, documentary filmmaker, musician, and activist. Both participated in the street protests in Ferguson.31 Blackmon led the singing at rallies, spoke against violence, called for de-​ escalation, asked her congregation to pray for both Brown’s family and the police, and worked for community unity. The governor, mayor, and chief of police spoke at her church, and she served as a member of the governor’s commission to investigate the events surrounding Brown’s death. She responded to the grand jury decision by calling for the churches to engage in peaceful protest and continue to stand together for justice against racism and economic depravity. Sekou was affiliated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interdenominational pacifist organization founded in 1915, edited its magazine, worked in New Orleans in the months following Hurricane Katrina, and led nonviolent demonstrations against the war in Iraq. He flew to St. Louis shortly after the protests began. By the time the grand jury ended its deliberations three months later, Sekou had held dozens of training sessions teaching participants how to engage in nonviolent protest and to remain calm during tense encounters with the police. During one of the encounters Sekou led faith leaders in drawing a chalk outline of a man lying on the ground as a memorial for the body of Michael Brown, calling it a sacred space. He then led the group in a face-​off with police, asking the officers to repent for the deaths of Black youths, after which the group was arrested while attempting to enter the police station. His response to the grand jury decision commended the protestors for the longest nonviolent civil disobedience campaign since the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the indictment of American democracy it had made.32 Both Blackmon and Sekou were quoted in newspapers, on national television, and in social media posts. Both spoke in theological language, were affiliated with religious organizations that had a history of supporting political 30 Christ the King UCC, ctk-​ucc.org; Jack Jenkins, American Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country (New York: Harper, 2020). 31 Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, God, Gays, and Guns: Essays on Religion and the Future of Democracy (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2012); . 32 The details in this and the following paragraphs are drawn from dozens of 2014 and 2015 news stories about the events.

212  Religion’s Power activism, and emphasized the Ferguson protests’ continuities with the Civil Rights Movement as well as its differences. Both continued after Ferguson to participate in activism and to speak about racism and police brutality in other states. When White supremacists marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, for example, Blackmon and Sekou were among the clergy who led a service there to provide a witness of love. Blackmon and Sekou were among a dozen or more religious leaders who participated in the Ferguson protests. They took part in varying ways. One drove in from Pennsylvania because he had gone to high school with Michael Brown. He went home resolved to work on racial inequality through his ministry in a predominantly White community. Another was a White woman who had two Black children and had gone to seminary at a nearly all-​Black institution. She came not knowing what to expect, was injured by a rubber bullet, and became an iconic image that circulated to hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter. One of the clergy who flew in from another state was part of an organization that had been formed to respond to similar situations to help plan practical next steps. A local leader was the head of a regional ecumenical organization that issued a statement calling for community unity. Yet another spoke to journalists of how he condemned the killing but wanted the public to know that belief in Jesus was the true path to overcoming hatred. Some were Christian, some were Jewish, one was Muslim, some were Black, some were White. They reflected the fact that religion is diverse and that the roles it is prepared to play bring diversity to the protests in which people participate. The events at Ferguson are not atypical. They illustrate several things about protests and religion. First, people get involved for multiple and varied reasons, including their beliefs, previous experiences, curiosity, emotion, knowing someone, wanting to help, and for reasons they themselves may not understand. This includes people who may have religious motives or feel they must be involved because of their roles as clergy. Second, the people who do get involved have unexpected things happen to them, including getting arrested or injured, and sometimes what happens steels their commitment. Third, the resources they bring with them constrain what they do and what they feel they can do. Some bring skills learned in previous protests. These skills increase their chances of playing leadership roles. Others bring institutional authority earned through local leadership roles. A person who comes in from a distance and can leave at any time is less constrained than someone whose power depends on the loyalty of the local community. That

Religion and Political Power  213 pertains especially to a clergyperson in charge of an enduring local institution or serving on an official investigative commission. Fourth, the media have an incentive to call on religious leaders as spokespersons, given the historic role religious leaders played in the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the fact that religious leaders, who are articulate in speaking to the media, may be assumed to hold views that represent their institutions. And fifth, religious leaders’ involvement extends beyond the immediate situation, reaching the congregations, campuses, denominational agencies, and activist groups with which they are affiliated through the rituals and language of those institutions. Involvement in protests such as at Ferguson and identification with those involved also shape the biographical narratives of religious leaders.33 The clergy’s involvement at Ferguson also reveals how the uncertain dynamics of protesting inform the actions of those who participate. The short-​term goal of the clergy’s involvement was to support but also direct how the community expressed its outrage. Joining the protestors on the street visibly demonstrated support. In addition, the two immediate goals were to deter looting and to limit the injuries that the police might inflict on demonstrators. Reverend Sekou’s training sessions were instances on short notice of instilling habits learned in other protests in the bodies and minds of the Ferguson protestors. The fact that the protests continued for weeks and were expected to increase when the grand jury announced its verdict made it possible to conduct these training sessions. The second means of turning protests from chaos into order is to organize marches. Marches convert public space into the place in which a familiar form of protest occurs. The longer-​term goal was to end the demonstrations and to communicate something to the community about police reform. These were signaled by the formation of the Ferguson Commission, which included Reverend Blackmon’s participation and her statement, along with other community leaders, calling for attention to shift from the present crisis toward community reconciliation and multiracial cooperation. In other words, what leaders do has to be understood in terms of what is happening in the moment. Actions reflect both the habits that have become legitimate from familiarity and the creative adaptation of these habits.34 33 Oneya Fennell Okuwobi, “‘Everything That I’ve Done Has Always Been Multiethnic’: Biographical Work among Leaders of Multiracial Churches,” Sociology of Religion 80, 4 (Winter 2019), 478–​95. 34 On civil rights marches as practice, see Eddie Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 137; on the controversy over

214  Religion’s Power The marches the clergy organized in Ferguson illustrate a point about this kind of activity that is often misunderstood. Marches, like other rituals, are commonly interpreted as means of expressing and indeed of amplifying emotion. For example, in his influential essay about the French Revolution William H. Sewell Jr. writes, “once the Bastille had been captured, the elated victors celebrated their feat by spontaneously forming a triumphal procession” in which they displayed freed prisoners, flags, and defeated soldiers, all in an act of dramatic, emotionally powerful celebration.35 And, while emotional fervor of this kind may be a feature of many such events, it is equally important to consider how ritual structures and thereby contains the raw emotion often generated during protest activities. This structuring of emotion was certainly the intention of the organizers of the marches in Ferguson. A practice approach highlights several additional aspects of religion’s role in movements like BLM. The literature on embodied spirituality, for example, emphasizes that it may not be what people say that matters as much as the fact of their bodily participation. BLM’s focus on bodies was expressed in arguments that marginalized bodies—​because of gender, sexual orientation, or race—​had much in common. Bodies were symbolically marginalized as if they were impure, polluted by criminal acts, and thus undeserving of respect. Bodies were emphasized through the physical assembling in street protests, in their being subjected to tear gas and rubber bullets, being handcuffed, and in symbolic gestures such as raising hands in imitation of Michael Brown or wearing hoodies. The representation of Jesus in Michael Brown was not in belief or purity but in brokenness. The literature on embodied spirituality underscores both the importance of somatic experience itself and the significance of visual representation. The visual imagery of a killing captured on a bystander’s or police officer’s camera or a photo of a demonstrator being beaten that circulates on social media is powerful. Some of the BLM protest images that circulated on social media drew explicit parallels with artistic renderings of Jesus, the betrayal of Christ, and the Crucifixion, but whether they inspire any thoughts about religion is beside the point. They become icons that speak to the deeper recesses of reflection about humanity, suffering, sacrifice, and injustice.36 multiracial leadership, see David Roediger, “Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past,” American Quarterly 68, 2 (June 2016), 223–​48. 35 William H. Sewell Jr., “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society 25, 6 (December 1996), 841–​81, quote on page 869. 36 Raymond Drainville, “Iconography for the Age of Social Media,” Humanities 7, 1 (2018), 1–​26.

Religion and Political Power  215 What people say and how they say it also matter. Ferguson leaders interpreted what they were doing and why they were doing it with references to Jesus, the Exodus story, Martin Luther King Jr., the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the death of Trayvon Martin, other killings, and their personal histories. One of the protestors said that while she lay on the ground for forty-​ five minutes during a “die in,” she recalled the words her grandfather had spoken many times, “Don’t let hate take you down.” The words echoed in her heart, she said, telling her, “There is so much work to do” and “You are strong.”37 This is an example of how experience and the words to make sense of experience come together. For many, “Black Lives Matter” was the phrase that prompted additional reflection.38 The literature on discursive power suggests that idioms and styles of speaking within families and ethnic groups benefit from repetition in familiar, trusted contexts. The same is true of religion. The familiar language may not motivate people to be involved in a protest movement. But it may heighten their support of those who are. As an example from a different social movement, here is an excerpt from one of Jerry Falwell’s sermons in the 1970s: We want to train up pastors, youth directors, music directors, television, radio and film people so they can use the media. We want to raise up school teachers, businessmen, all these things . . . I believe if we sow enough seed, if we saturate enough towns . . . I believe we can have a victory. . . . We’ve got to learn how to penetrate to get where the people are, using television and radio and the printed page and every available means to reach every available person at every available time, but we’ve got to work at it.39

This sounds like a recipe for political activism—​the kind of full-​court press Falwell wanted the Moral Majority to mobilize. But it was a sermon about evangelism, “winning people to Christ.” It illustrates the kind of aggressive, 37 Lena Gardner, “The Hope of Our Ancestors,” quoted in Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, 2nd ed. (New York: Fortress Press, 2017), 156. 38 Surbhi Godsay and Anne E. Brodsky, “‘I Believe in That Movement and I Believe in That Chant’: The Influence of Black Lives Matter on Resilience and Empowerment,” Community Psychology in Global Perspective 4, 2 (2018), 55–​72. 39 Jerry Falwell, “God’s Plan for World Evangelization,” February 13, 1977; Liberty University Digital Archives, Lynchburg VA.

216  Religion’s Power hardworking, no-​holds-​barred engagement toward taking over the world that could translate readily from growing a large church to guiding a social movement oriented toward conservative moral politics. Above all, the practice perspective on religion and protest makes evident the fact that religion’s resources for activism are diversely located and organized. They depend on grassroots participation in tens of thousands of local congregations. But they can rarely be understood by looking only at congregations. The most courageous protest movements develop in highly specialized congregations that earn a reputation for activism and that in turn link activists with other specialized organizations that extend religion’s institutional power. In the case of Black Lives Matter, these links included organizations concerned specifically with police reform, litigation, public relations, consciousness raising, voter registration, and several other issues. The same has been true in antiwar and antinuclear protests, protests against human rights abuses, and protests for immigrant rights. The variety of organizations has reflected the range of issues needing to be addressed and the expertise required to address them.40 Like Black Lives Matter, many of the movements in which protest occurs are composed, as it were, of outsiders looking in—​groups whose members have been excluded from power or for other reasons are not officeholders themselves. But, of course, this is not always the case, and to think so neglects the fact that an important way in which religion’s power is exercised is by persons and groups with strong religious identities who attain roles as public officials. For example, the first speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives—​Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, who served from 1789 to 1797—​was a Lutheran minister. At least nine members of the clergy served in the Continental Congress. During Reconstruction two African American clergy served in Congress. In the twentieth century clergy elected to Congress included Robert F. Drinan, a Jesuit; Reverend Floyd Flake, senior pastor of the Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral of

40 Legal expertise is one of the more important of these skills because of religion’s institutional power in activities beyond those of congregations, such as faith-​based hospitals and social service organizations, and because legal training is often the path toward election or appointment to public office; examples of programs concerned specifically with legal training from a Christian perspective include the Becket Fund, the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship, and the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom; background is discussed in Daniel Bennett, Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017).

Religion and Political Power  217 New York; and Walter E. Fauntroy, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington, DC.41 Clergy holding positions as elected officials at the national level—​and, more commonly, devoutly religious lay members serving on school boards, city councils, municipal task forces, and as mayors—​illustrates how porous the boundaries are between religion and politics. Although constitutional separation of church and state limits what religious groups can do to shape public policy, these limits do not preclude citizens who happen to be clergy or are deeply involved in religious organizations from participating in politics or holding office. Porous boundaries are an example of how practices construct and operate within fields. Fields are the spaces in which people come together to negotiate who has power to do what. Fields occur in the interstices between institutions as much as they do within institutions. Just as in the case of personnel from universities working with specialists from the corporate or nonprofit world on technological projects, so it is the case that religion and politics come together in fields in which leaders of religious organizations and elected officials negotiate with one another and sometimes occupy roles in both. In this chapter, then, I have organized religion’s political power under the rubrics of signaling, storytelling, political engagement, and protests and have selected these as ways in which religious groups, with increasing levels of involvement, seek to make claims on the political system. Religion’s potential influence is contingent on situations, resources, the topics at issue, and aspects of the political system over which religious groups likely have little control. However, the resources religious groups have at their disposal consist significantly of a repertoire of symbols and narratives that is widely enough known to be used in linking religious groups’ constituencies with public officials. The power of such linkages lies in demonstrating that constituencies and officials share a common identity and thus may be counted on to support common interests. Narratives are likely to have a more limited focus but contribute meaningfully as accounts of why something has been done in the past and should be done again. Religion’s institutional resources provide the occasion for people to hear the stories, adapt them to new issues, and network with like-​minded people. The communities of which religious

41 Religion’s institutional power is evident in each of these cases, Drinan’s as dean of the Boston College Law School, and Flake’s and Fauntroy’s as pastors of churches with large social service ministries in their communities.

218  Religion’s Power traditions are composed supply the leadership through which political engagement is often mobilized. Protests and activism are practices that adapt to the needs and opportunities participants experience. Religion provides repositories of stories, precedents, and values, as well as infrastructure and sources of solidarity. But I have also suggested through the examples I have included that generalizations about religion’s political power must take account of the complexities of the political system. Much of what we know about symbolic politics and political engagement, for example, assumes that the arena in which religion may make a difference is political campaigns and elections. It also assumes that elections are contested and that certain issues are of interest to religious constituencies. Yet the kinds of engagement in which religious groups become involved vary widely, from school board meetings to hearings about local zoning ordinances, to working on committees for affordable housing, to organizing consciousness-​raising groups in church basements. The God talk that political scientists study on social media is likely to be present in these situations as well, but less visible to the public and more specific to the situation. It is worth underscoring too that religion’s political power to effect social change is usually quite limited. Critics who worry that religious groups are swaying elections and influencing legislation or court decisions that have negative implications for civil liberties are correct to be concerned and to take action to oppose those influences. But their capacity to mobilize opposition is itself an indication of the strength of the democratic system that imposes limitations on what religious groups can do. To be sure, religious groups do what they can to maximize their resources and minimize the constraints on how they use these resources. But the fact that religious groups are divided in what they want and who they represent is itself a limiting factor.

Conclusion When religion is conceived of as a disparate assemblage of practices, power is present in the social relationships of which these practices are composed. It inheres in the asymmetries that characterize all such relationships: between leaders and followers, the skilled and unskilled, professionals and amateurs, men and women, Blacks and Whites, and, in the case of religion, between the deities that are worshiped and their human worshipers. These are dynamic relationships. Some are more durable than others, extending in basic form over the centuries, but they all exhibit spatial and temporal variation. Expressions of power are intrinsic to these immediate relationships. They are not determinative of actions or their outcomes. Rather, power is exercised within the limits of the dispositions actors bring to their situations and the rules and resources the situations make available. Theoretical reflection about the constraints that shape what happens in social life emphasizes the dynamic relationship between the resources people have at their disposal and the decisions they make about the use of those resources. Broadly speaking, resources include rules and goods. Rules govern what is appropriate to do. Goods are the material means with which to do what is deemed appropriate. The power to define rules and to allocate goods is differentially distributed. The decisions people make and the actions they take reflect these power arrangements, reproduce them, and adapt them to new situations. Much of what happens in the exercise of power occurs through the situated actions of individuals and groups. To practice religion is to submit to the rules and resources the practice provides, which serve as constraints on what practitioners do and which also play an enabling role. The practice can only be successfully pursued through submission. The rules can be adjusted but do not have to be invented from scratch. Nor must they be fully articulated. In fact, their power may be greater to the extent that they evoke nondeliberative submission. I have suggested that religion’s power, diverse as it is, can be usefully investigated by examining the mechanisms through which it is exercised. The power that runs through these mechanisms includes relationships that are Religion’s Power. Robert Wuthnow, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197652534.003.0007

220  Religion’s Power distinctive to religion, namely, the veneration of a deity, but are mostly indistinct, for even the power relations implied in worship are present in other kinds of veneration. In multiple ways, power relations are dually faceted: the superior party’s superiority is dramatized by the subordinate party’s deference, and yet the subordinate party’s status is often elevated by the relationship as well. There is also in most religious practices a norm that requires the superior party to show in some manner solidarity with the subordinate party. Religious practices are often simple to perform, requiring relatively easy gestures such as standing, bowing, and kneeling. The meanings of these gestures are constructed by the situations in which they occur. Yet the interpretation of exactly what they mean is given by the discursive histories that accompany them. Practices’ capacity to influence what individuals think and do is in this respect not as much up to the individuals but a function of the fact that practices are institutionalized. Through institutionalization, practices carry forward from one situation to the next the knowledge about what to do and how to interpret it. The mechanisms through which religion exercises power—​its ritual power, discursive power, institutional power, identity power, and political power—​ provide sensitizing concepts with which to examine what happens when people practice religion. Attention shifts from macro history to the details of social life. Power manifests itself in how rituals are staged, in how the persons staging them relate to the object of worship, and what they do to express solidarity with those assembled. It is expressed in the narratives that instantiate how speakers make claims and demonstrate their sincerity. The institutional resources through which it is communicated demarcate space and time, supply pragmatic knowledge, affirm codified knowledge, and reproduce status hierarchies. Religion’s power reinforces inequitable distributions of opportunity based on gender and sexual orientation, race, and nationality while also providing mechanisms for resistance. The mechanisms through which it influences politics include signaling, storytelling, and mobilizing constituents for political engagement and protest. All these mechanisms are constrained by the situations in which they occur. A few of the ways in which power is effected can be seen in the examples given in the preceding chapters. One of the keys to the power displayed in religious rituals is managing the setting to ensure that the power relations within the ritual are distinct to the ritual rather than being contaminated by participants’ status in other domains. Another is having adjudicatory mechanisms in place to resolve disputes about who is in charge and how

Conclusion  221 the event should be orchestrated. Both within and outside of ritual settings religion’s power is enhanced by the narratives that explain what people are doing. Many religious practices benefit from occasions in which testimonials are performed. What counts as a persuasive narrative is highly situational. However, the literature demonstrates the importance of markers that communicate sincerity in most settings. The institutional resources that contribute to religion’s power include the control of spaces in which to conduct religious practices and, more importantly, the capacity within those places to define what skills and activities are to be rewarded. I have also given examples of religious practices that heighten the salience of identities, such as gender and race, and that bring religious symbols and stories, as well as organized acts conducted in the name of religion, into the political arena. These mechanisms through which power is exercised are limited. They consist of relationships of dominance and subordination within the confines of religion itself and of symbolic gestures and discourse that influence what participants do in other contexts if the circumstances are favorable. Religious practices are sufficiently diverse that they are often capable of adapting to diverse circumstances. There are nevertheless limits on religious groups’ influence. These limitations are built into the structure of modern social life—​the laws, work habits, economic realities, and cultural orientations we mostly take for granted. They are the constraints that for many decades have been discussed under the rubric of secularization. Scholars of religion and many within religion itself have argued that religion’s role—​meaning the scope of its influence—​has declined, certainly since the high Middle Ages, and perhaps in the immediate past as well. In the long view, the comparison with an era of papal influence in public affairs and then the period during which Europe was convulsed in religious wars makes it abundantly clear that religion’s power is no longer what it once was. The shorter term is harder to judge, lending itself to competing interpretations of polls, elections, and court decisions. But these interpretations too often serve a rhetorical purpose, seeking either to demonstrate once and for all that religion is incompatible with the modern world or to warn the faithful that they need to work harder to shore up their convictions. Indeed, the question of decline is largely unhelpful. It reduces the realities of contemporary religion to data points that can be readily measured. Or it simplifies the issues with comparisons of a mythical past. To gain a better understanding of how contemporary religion is constrained by the social circumstances in which it presently exists, we need

222  Religion’s Power to understand what it is that reins in religion’s power on a practical everyday basis. Religious practices, as we have come to know them in settings such as the United States, are constrained—​but also enabled—​by social characteristics that for convenience can be grouped under several headings, namely, the multiplicity of institutional structures, the multiplicity of political arrangements, the multiplicity of church–​state relations, and the multiplicity of religious diversity itself. The multiplicity of institutional structures. Influential as it may be in money and membership, the collection of religious practices that are so prominent in the United States and most other societies pales in comparison with the total collection of modern institutional structures. The person who spends an hour each weekend worshiping, and even the person who spends an hour a day in prayer and meditation, is still a person who in most instances probably goes to work, has a family, worries about caring for loved ones, follows the news, watches television, and spends time with friends on social media or in person. The classical theorists summarized this reality by calling it institutional differentiation. Religion was institutionally different from the economy, the family, and the political system. That was a simplification of reality a century ago, and it is even less true to the complexity of social life today. There may be, as some theorists argue, distinct institutional logics, but these too are a simplification. The practices of which contemporary society is constituted range from medicine and law to urban planning and ice cream manufacturing. The institutional structures in which practices are carried out vary enormously: from highly specialized professions divided into more highly specialized subprofessions, to firms that operate for profit on a global scale, to local shops, to nonprofit service organizations, to networks of amateur enthusiasts, and so on. Religious practices butt against these other practices all the time. As much as a religious practitioner might wish to believe that the faith involved in that practice informs all realms of life, in reality life is pulled in many directions by the multiplicity of institutions of which society is composed. Religious practices then are constrained by their exposure to these other institutions. Much of the power of religious practices occurs within the spaces that protect their exposure—​the churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and private spaces within homes. But religious practices have tended not to stay confined in those set-​apart spaces. Some of them are in large buildings on large entrepreneurially led faith campuses that have required loans to purchase and managers with

Conclusion  223 administrative training to operate. Some of them are hospitals and clinics and nursing homes owned by religious organizations. Some of them are international relief organizations. And some of them are commercial firms whose owners happen to have deeply held religious convictions. The religious practices that take place in these settings exercise power through their reach into other institutional domains. Their power is also limited by the financial, legal, and administrative rules to which they are subject. These are sometimes the influences of modernity that religious leaders decry. They are, more accurately, the institutional structures that both supply and limit the resources on which religious practices rely. Examples of religious practices’ power being constrained but also enabled by these conditions are not hard to find. Just as the Great Organ Dispute of 1827 was guided by industrialization, so the “worship wars” of the late twentieth century between those who favored traditional music and those who wanted contemporary music were conditioned by a generational gap that reflected differences in education, entertainment, and technology. Religion-​ based charities have been facilitated by globalization, making travel and communication easier, but also constrained by regulations governing trade and financial disclosures. Medical treatments and therapeutic practices are under secular control, thus limiting what faith healing and pastoral counseling can do but leaving niches in which these practices can continue. The upshot is that religious practices have power in diverse ways because they adapt to diverse situations. The multiplicity of political arrangements. Journalists and social scientists have devoted far more attention over the past several decades to conservative White evangelical Protestants’ influence in national elections than to any other manifestation of religion’s power. That is because national elections have important consequences and perhaps also because this expression of power is worrying to those who study it. But the most searching investigations have also illuminated the multiplicity of political arrangements to which evangelicals’ efforts have been directed. In back of national elections have been the meetings in fellowship halls, testimony given at school board meetings, rallies at state capitols, newsletters, conferences, classes, and a host of other events. These exemplify the variety of practices through which power is exercised. While a few of the issues have been relatively stable (e.g., abortion and homosexuality), the issues have also been in flux, ranging from concerns about prayer in public schools to regulations on communications and from equal rights for women to balancing the federal budget.

224  Religion’s Power The political arrangements that constitute the United States’ form of government are multilayered, shared between the states and the federal government, and divided among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the latter. These arrangements are further complicated by partisan divisions, leaders’ personalities, backroom deals, discretionary spending, and entrenched economic inequalities that compound racial and ethnic discrimination. Religious practices are not immune to the shifting influences of these arrangements. Political power may be influenced by religious practices but is rarely driven by religious considerations. In the contemporary United States, the arrangements that constrain (and enable) what religious groups may feel compelled to do include, at minimum, the fact that partisan politics are polarized and yet subject to periodic elections that are close enough that it seems worthy of one’s time to find appropriate means of expressing support for candidates and policies. Further, some votes count more than others, some are suppressed, and some issues are more easily influenced by popular referenda than others. In addition, perennial fault lines in American politics focus on trade and foreign policy, taxation and the federal deficit, and entitlements and public welfare expenditures. Religious practices have low probability of shaping any of these perennial issues but can hardly escape being influenced by them. Faith communities’ practices take place in situations in which participants’ lives are favorably or adversely affected by the resulting economic, political, and cultural conditions. A common theme in the theoretical literature on religion is that its influence is primarily symbolic. What this means is that religion shapes the taken-​ for-​granted norms and understandings of society. For example, it provides the underpinnings for decorum, honesty, fair dealing, and respect. It does so through the complexities of childrearing, explicit training, and people imitating how others behave. It is reinforced through embarrassment, feelings of guilt, and shaming. But that all assumes a society much less complex than the ones in which most people live today. Societies are ethnically, racially, socioeconomically, regionally, and politically diverse. The media provides a stock of common knowledge that includes cues about how to behave. And yet these rules are more likely to be guided by advertising than by religion, and they do not override the prevailing ethos of lifestyle diversity and individual expression. Religion’s underpinning of common morality is further limited by the fact that publicity is frequently driven by explicit violations of the rules, such

Conclusion  225 as a public figure proudly boasting about lying and cheating. The pushback that results is supposed to reassert the power of the rules. But not if religious communities themselves are divided. If a public figure lies and cheats, for example, religious leaders may exploit the complexities of religious language to suggest any number of plausible interpretations: all humans are weak, minor sins are acceptable to avoid greater evil, God forgives everyone, and so on. Religion’s role in protest movements is one of the clearest cases in which its limitations are evident. In the Black Lives Matter example I discussed in the last chapter, the religious leaders who participated exercised all the power mechanisms at their disposal. The protests provided opportunities to pray, kneel, sing hymns, and chant. The leaders provided an interpretation of what was happening through biblical narratives. They drew on the authority they had earned by leading and preaching in congregations. Their social networks connected them with other churches and with campus ministries. But these resources also constrained what they could do. Clergy are experienced in speaking and leading, but their expertise in other important matters is limited. They may be appointed to review boards but occupy token positions relative to other appointees with formal authority. In short, what they conceive as possible to do may indeed be symbolic, not for lack of dedication but because of how political arrangements are configured. Separation of church and state. The usual way of thinking about the constraints on religious practices in politics is to focus on the separation of church and state. Religious organizations are precluded from engaging directly in lawmaking. They are also precluded at the risk of losing tax exemption from endorsing political candidates. In return, they are supposed to be protected from government infringement on the free exercise of religion. But like other institutional boundaries, this one is subject to continuous negotiation. While many religious practices are carried on without regard to these negotiations, the uncertainties provide numerous instances in which religious practices are shaped by perceived threats, opportunities, and ambiguities. The frequency with which these occasions arise has increased in proportion to the multiplicities of institutional structures and political arrangements. Examples include the partisan expansion and contraction of rights accorded to minorities and government-​funded programs for the needy. Religious practices that might otherwise seem unaffected if practice meant only private prayer and congregational worship take shape as lawsuits and symbolic dissent and in other instances as faith-​based but government-​ funded service ministries.

226  Religion’s Power The multiplicity of religious diversities. A final limitation on religious practices’ power is the diversity of religion itself. What one faith community proposes is likely to be opposed by another faith community. The desire for any one tradition to become a religious establishment is met not only with constitutional limits but also by resistance from other traditions. Diversity inhibits the formation of coalitions. But it also makes coalitions necessary and encourages groups to find allies to increase their influence. Religious diversities are themselves multifaceted, dividing groups along racial, ethnic, and regional as well as theological lines. They also represent differences in size, resources, and styles of leadership. None of these diversities are stable. Their salience shifts with the vagaries of national and local events. The enabling capacity of religious diversity is that religious practices are themselves adaptable to the varying niches that emerge as opportunities. When religion is conceived as practice, then, its power is multifaceted, taking place within the constraints of immediate situations and guided by the dispositions practitioners bring to those situations. The constraints are real, often guiding practitioners to use the symbolic acts and discursive power at their disposal. A focus on practice, though, also emphasizes the free agency that practitioners exercise in deciding how best to use their resources. That places the responsibility on their shoulders to understand what they can and cannot do. And to choose wisely.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abraham, sincerity of, 81 Abraham and Isaac, 97–​98 accounts, narratives, 56–​57 Achilles, sincerity of, 81 ACLU, 208 activism gay and antigay, 160–​61 political, 215–​16 protests and, 217–​18 religion and protest, 216 African American Christianity, 166–​67 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 18 agency autonomy and, 60 facilitation of, 97–​98 resistance, 97 sincerity, 82–​83 Agnew, Spiro, 203–​4 Alito, Samuel, 191–​92 Allah, 34 Althusser, Louis, 3–​4 Ambrose, 21 American Christianity, 104–​5 American democracy, 211 American Humanist Association, 191, 192–​93 American pragmatism, 9–​10 American Protestantism, 125–​26 American religion, secession in history, 135 American South for White, slave owners, 38 American Tract Society, 45 Ammerman, Nancy Tatom, 4–​5, 188–​89 Andover Theological Seminary, 27–​28 Anglican Church, 40, 41–​42 Anglos and Hispanics, systemic racism, 162–​63

Anointed with Oil (Dochuk), 80 antiabortion narratives, 95 anti-​Communism, 171–​72 anti-​feminist activity, 160 antigay activism, 160–​61 antiracism literature on, 175 religious organizations, 177 anti-​ritual sincerity, term, 86–​87 apologies botched, 83–​84 sincerity and, 82–​84 apparent sincerity, 87 Arkwright, Richard, 109–​10 Asad, Talal, 3–​4 Assemblies of God, 127–​28 asymmetry, power, 2 atheist, 144 Augustine, 21 autonomy, agency and, 60 awakening narratives, 58–​59 Baal, Canaanite worship of, 32 Bainbridge, William Sims, 4–​5, 50 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 52 baptism, 26 Baptists, 137–​38, 205 Barker, Eileen, 50 Basil, 21 Bell, Catherine, 16–​18 Bellah, Robert, 14, 18, 19, 48, 50, 182–​83, 189–​90, 191 bells, ringing of, 109 Bender, Courtney, 94 Benedictine monk, 157 Benedict XVI (Pope), 83–​84 Benjamin, Walter, 51–​52 Beowulf, sincerity of, 81

228 Index Berger, Peter, 48, 54–​55 Berlin Wall, 180–​81 Bible, 91, 95, 121, 125, 126, 139, 163–​64 Bible Believers (Ammerman), 4–​5 Black churches, 137–​38 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 216–​17, 225 language of, 175 linking organizations, 216 origin of, 208–​9 religions role in, 214–​15 Blackmon, Traci, 210–​12, 213 Black Power, 3, 175 Blacks and Whites empowerment, 166–​67 identity power, 176–​77 implicit racism bias, 173–​74 leadership of congregations, 173–​74 self-​selection, 165–​66, 168, 169, 173 social relationships, 219 systemic racism, 162–​63 Bladensburg Peace Cross, 191–​92 Blair, Tony, 79 BLM. See Black Lives Matter (BLM) Book of Common Prayer, 26–​27, 34–​35 Boone, Will, 128 border disputes, space, 111–​12 Born Again (Colson), 66 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9–​10, 11–​12, 16–​ 17, 75, 76 Boy and Girl Scouts, 114–​15 Boyne, John, 118 Brahman, Hinduism, 33 Braude, Ann, 146–​48 Brazilian Muslim converts, 127 Brethren, 73–​74 British Industrial Revolution, 39 Broder, David, 25 Brown, John, 98–​99 Brown, Michael, protest on killing of, 209–​ 10, 211–​14 Brubaker, Rogers, 145 Bruner, Jerome, 53–​54, 57–​58 Brunswick Chapel, 39, 40–​41 Buchanan, Pat, 201 Buddha, 33, 159 Buddhism, 35, 149–​50 Buddhist, identity, 144 Buddhist meditation, 159

Buddhists, 110 Bunyan, John, 98–​99, 100 Bush, George W., 198–​99 Butler, Judith, 3–​4, 92, 95 Cadge, Wendy, 159 Casanova, José, 4 Cash, Johnny, 122–​23 categorization, identity power, 142, 143 Cathedral of Methodism, 39 Catholic Church, 21, 41–​42, 129–​ 30, 203–​4 Catholic Emigration Association, 1 Catholicism, 40 Catholic leaders, 73–​74 Catholic organizations, 60 Catholic parishes, sincerity and, 80 Catholics, 142–​43, 161–​62, 203, 205 cause marketing, sincerity and, 84–​85 Cedar Rapids, Iowa, St. Paul’s Methodist Church, 113–​14 Cefai, Daniel, 110–​11 charisma, leadership, 130–​31 Charismatic Catholics, 37 Charitable Disclosure Bill, 204, 205, 206–​7 charities, 223 Chaves, Mark, 135 children control and abuse of, 1 deportation of, 1, 15 persuading goodness over evil, 90–​91 Childs, Isaac, 126 Chong, Kelly, 155 Christian, identity, 144 Christian Catholic Church in Zion, 111–​12 Christian Endeavor, 114–​15 Christianity, 21 American, 104–​5 Constantine’s conversion, 21 cross symbolic of Calvary, 192–​93 evangelical, 190–​91 gay or transgender in leadership, 152 gender and sexuality, 149–​50 paganism and, 22–​23 prayer in, 35–​36 symbol, 191 Christians, testifying of faith, 81

Index  229 Christ the King United Church of Christ, Blackmon of, 210–​11 Chrysostom, John, 21 Churches of Christ, 176–​77 church gyms, 114–​15 Church of England, 26–​27, 40 Church of England Society for Empire Settlement, 1 Church of God in Christ, Sekou of, 210–​11 Church of Scotland, 1 Church rituals attendees’ power, 44–​45 conference, 41–​42, 43 conference as body of clergy, 43 district meeting, 41–​42 district meetings, 43 leaders meeting, 41–​43 life passages, 46 organ dispute, 44 organ installation, 42, 43–​44 power in, 41–​42 staging decisions, 44 trustees, 41–​42, 43–​44 ultimate decisions for, 43–​44 churinga, 19–​20 Civil Rights Movement, 146–​48, 176–​ 78, 184–​85 advocacy for, 3 protest, 100, 208–​9, 212–​13 codified knowledge asymmetric distribution of power, 125 codification of religious knowledge, 124 definition, 123 dispute between fundamentalists and modernists, 125–​26 female role models, 153–​54 power and, 126 sacred texts, 124–​25, 126, 127 scripture, 123–​24, 126 studies of, 124–​25 cognitive schema, identity power, 142–​43 Cold War, 180–​81, 190–​91 collective action institutional power, 138–​41 Presbyterian Lay Committee, 139 reform movements, 140–​41 resource mobilization, 138–​39

temperance movement, 139–​40 See also institutional power colors, signaling, 193 colporteurs, 45–​46 Colson, Charles, 66 Colson’s prison ministry, 66 comfortable church culture, 95–​96 commercial branding, sincerity in, 84 communication, sincerity, 82–​83 Communion, 26 Communist Party, 171–​72 community outreach, racial lines, 175–​76 Comstock Laws, 89 Confessions (St. Augustine), 66 conscientious objectors, 73–​74 conservative sermons, 57–​58 Constantine, Christianity conversion, 21 conversational stories, resistance, 93–​95 Cooper, Frederick, 145 Corin, Ellen, 95 coronavirus pandemic (2020), social distancing, 44–​45 Craciun, Magdalena, 78–​79 Craig, Mark, 198–​99 cross, symbolic of Calvary, 192–​93 Crystal Cathedral, Schuller’s, 116–​17 Csordas, Thomas, 37 cultural diamond, 53–​54 cultural power, 3–​4 Curry, John Steuart, 98–​99 Curtis, Edward, 166–​67 Dahrendorf, Ralf, social arrangements, 2 Damocles, sword of, in Greek mythology, 32 Darnton, Robert, 9–​10 Davidman, Lynn, 59–​60 Davie, Jody, 63–​65 Davis, Angela, 171–​72 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 9–​10 Day, Dorothy, 153–​54 Decision Points (Bush), 198 DeGloma, Thomas, 58–​59, 101 deity concept of, 32 personalization of, 33 power of, 35 religion images of, 31

230 Index DeMacias, Geraldine O’Leary, 201 Democratic identity, colors, 193 deportation indigent children, 1, 15 relocating the poor, 1 deprivatization, 4 Dewey, John, 9–​10 Diana, Princess of Wales, 79 Dillard, Annie, 158–​59 discourse concept for, 48 power of, 52–​53 discrimination, 146 institutional power and, 105 racial, 100 resistance, 95 discursive formations, 52–​53 discursive power, 12–​13, 14, 220 assessment, 102 Black empowerment, 167 definition, 52–​53 enacted approach, 51–​52 encoded approach, 51–​52 literature on, 51–​52, 215 narratives, 53–​73 notion of, 53 religion’s, 68–​69, 103 resistance, 53, 87–​103 sincerity, 53, 73–​87 storytelling, 194–​201 study of, 49 systemic racism, 163–​64 discursive tactics, term, 175 disempowerment, gendered, 146–​48 Divine Offices, 110 divine power, 36–​37, 63–​64 Dochuk, Darren, 80 domain violations, 33 Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, 107 Douglass, Frederick, 57 Douglass, H. Paul, 104–​5 Dowie, John Alexander, 111–​12, 137 Drinan, Robert F., 216–​17 DuBois, W. E. B., 104–​5 Durkheim, Emile, 16–​17, 18, 19–​20, 53, 89, 144 Easter, 33 East India Company, 42

economic power, 3–​4 Edwards, Korie, 177 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Gray), 109 Eliasoph, Nina, 110–​11, 121 Ellison, Gregory, 175 El Shaddai (God Almighty), Hebrew Bible God, 33 embodied experience, narratives, 66–​67 Emerging Markets Unit, 170–​71 emotion, religious rituals, 14, 30 emotional trauma, children, 1 empirical positivism, 50 emplacement, 117–​18 empowerment Black, Hispanic and immigrant congregations, 166–​67 Exodus narrative for Black, 167 gendered, 146–​48 narratives, 67–​68, 69–​70, 71–​72 personal, 67–​68, 103 resistance and, 90 systemic racism, 166–​67 tattoos, 156 enacted approach, term, 51–​52 encoded approach, term, 51–​52 Episcopal Church, Book of Common Prayer, 34–​35 European Union, 181 evil empire, Soviet Union as, 91, 92 Exodus story, 167, 215 faith healing, 111–​12 Faith in the Halls of Power (Lindsay), 151 Falwell, Jerry Listen, America, 197 Moral Majority, 195–​96, 197 Moral Majority and, 215–​16 storytelling, 195–​98 Falwell, Macel, 196 family values, religious leaders, 80 fanaticism, 99 Faultroy, Walter E., 216–​17 Fellowship of Reconciliation, 73–​74, 211 feminism, 146–​48, 193 feminist activism, 3, 159–​60 feminist movement, 98 feminist theory, 50–​51

Index  231 Ferguson, MO, protest on Brown killing, 209–​10, 211–​14, 215 Ferguson Commission, 213 fields, sincerity and, 76 Finney, Charles G., 67 First Amendment, 187, 192–​93, 205–​6 First Baptist Church, 160–​61 Five-​Principle Baptists, 36 Flake, Floyd, 216–​17 Foucault, Michel, 3–​4, 9–​10, 52–​53, 92, 106–​7, 110–​11 framing, literature on, 100–​1 Franklin, Benjamin, 116 Frazier, E. Franklin, 104–​5 French Revolution, 214 Frigga, Norse god, 108–​9 Frye, Margaret, 72 Frye, Northrup, 57–​58 Galatians, 153–​54 gay activism, 160–​61 Geertz, Clifford, 9–​10, 16–​17, 19–​ 20, 48, 49 gender, 146 gender and sexuality, 146–​62 anatomical differences, 157–​58 anti-​feminist activism, 160 asymmetries in power, 148–​49 empowerment in religious groups, 156, 157–​58 evangelicals in South Korea, 155 female role models in religion, 153–​ 54, 159–​60 feminism, 146–​48 feminist activism, 159–​60 gay and antigay activism, 160–​61 gendered roles within religious organizations, 158–​59 institutional control of space, 150–​52 institutional power, 154 leadership of gay or transgendered, 152 literature on activism, 160–​62 Pentecostal women’s groups, 155 personal and transpersonal, 149 religion’s power, 149–​50 religious organizations, 153 resisting society’s norms, 159 voluntary participation, 152–​53 See also identity power

Genette, Gérard, 53–​54 German Reformed Church, 109–​10 Gerrig, Richard, 62 Gibson, Mel, 83–​84 Glaude, Eddie S., Jr., 167 Glock, Charles Y., 104–​5 Gloege, Timothy E. W., 111–​12 God’s Daughters (Griffith), 63–​64 Goffman, Erving, 24–​25, 78 Goldwater, Barry, 165 Good Samaritan, 61–​63 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 108 Gothic Revival Presbyterian Church, 113–​14 Gramsci, Antonio, 3–​4, 92 grand narratives, 55–​56 Gray, Thomas, 109 Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral, 216–​17 Greater Houston Ministerial Association, 190–​91 Great Exhibition of 1851, 116–​17 Great Organ Dispute (1827), 16, 38, 134–​ 35, 223 Greeley, Andrew, 54–​56 Griffith, Marie, 63–​65, 72, 155 Griswold, Wendy, 53–​54 Gross, Neil, 187–​88 Growing God’s Family (Perry), 117–​18 Grubiak, Margaret, 163–​64 Guhin, Jeffrey, 123–​24 Habermas, Jürgen, 3–​4, 75 Habitat for Humanity, 193 Habits of the Heart (Bellah), 50 Hall, Meredith, 118 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 153–​54 Harding, Susan, 61 Harvard Divinity School, 98 hate speech, 49–​50 Haw, Chris, 86–​87 Hazard, Sonia, 45 Heart’s Invisible Furies, The (Boyne), 118 hegemonic discourse, 92–​93 concept of, 92 White materialistic privilege, 95–​96 Helton, Timothy, 117–​18 Hidden Rhythms (Zerubavel), 110 Hinduism, Brahman, 33

232 Index Hindus, 110, 137–​38 Hispanics and Whites, 162–​63, 173 historical anthropology, 9–​10 Historic Peace Churches, 73–​74 Hoagland, Tony, 25–​26 Hochschild, Arlie, 36 Holy Spirit, 61, 63–​64 Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 18 “Hour of Power”, Schuller’s, 116–​17 Huizinga, John, 18 Hume, David, 125 Hurricane Katrina, 211 identity power, 13, 220 approaches to, 143 contemporary discussions of, 142–​43 definition, 142 gender and sexuality, 146–​62 nationalism, 178–​85 practice approach, 144, 145 practice theory, 143–​45 systemic racism, 162–​78 See also gender and sexuality inequality, resistance, 95 infinite wholeness, concept of, 32 “In God we trust”, 179 Innis, Harold, 109 insincerity aversion, 82 institutional church movement, gyms in, 114–​15 institutional controls, resistance and, 88–​89 institutional logics, knowledge, 118–​20 institutional power, 3–​4, 13, 104–​5, 220 collective action, 138–​41 control of space, 154 knowledge, 118–​28 multiplicity of structures, 222–​23 popular interest in religion’s, 105 practice theory and, 105–​6 space, 106–​18 status, 129–​34 subversion, 134–​38 systemic racism, 163–​64 institutional resources, space as, 110–​11 institutional sites, Foucault, 106–​7, 110–​11 Inter–​Church Immigration Committee, 1 interdenominational faith-​based community-​organizing movement, 95–​96

International Divine Healing Association, 111–​12 intimacy, 63–​64 Iranian Revolution, 4 Islam, 35 Islamic Center of America, Dearborn, Michigan, 107 Jacob, Margaret, 125 Jakes, T. D., 156 James, William, 68–​69, 89–​90 Jameson, Frederic, 92 Jerome, 21 Jesus, domain violations, 33 Jewish gender and sexuality, 149–​50 identity of women, 157 Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, 1 Jewish rituals, 23 Jews, 205 Jim Crow laws, 165–​66 Johnson, Lyndon, 108 Johnson, Philip, 116–​17 Johnston, Erin, 59, 69 Jokang Temple, Lhasa, 107 Jonas, Regina, 153–​54 Judaism, 35, 59–​60, 143–​44 Julian the Apostate, 21 apostasy of, 21–​22 reinstating paganism, 22–​23 Kane, Ann, 52, 95 Kansas City megachurch, 160–​61 Keane, Webb, 76–​77 Kennedy, John F., 189–​91, 194 Kim, Jaeeun, 182 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 98–​99, 171–​72, 175, 208, 215 knowledge, 118–​28 asymmetric distribution of power, 125 codification of religious, 124–​25 codified, 123–​24, 125, 126–​27, 128, 220 dispute between fundamentalists and modernists, 125–​26 institutional logics, 118–​20 practical, 120–​23 pragmatic, 220 priming, 119–​20

Index  233 relationship of power and, 126 sacred texts, 127–​28 Koinonia Farm, 172–​73 Kruse, Kevin, 165–​66 Ku Klux Klan, 172–​73 Lacan, Jacques, 3–​4 Langer, Suzanne, 48 Latter-​Day Saints, 205 leader-​and-​people relationship, religious rituals, 30 leadership charismatic, 130–​31 lay, 131–​34 lay empowerment, 133–​34 megachurches, 131–​32 religious organizations, 131 Leadership in Turbulent Times (Goodwin), 108 leaders meeting, organization, 42–​43 Leeds-​Liverpool Canal, 39 Lehnen, Christine, 63 leisure class, worship and, 113 Lenski, Gerhard, 104–​5 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude, 50 Levittowners, The, 104–​5 LGBTQ-​identified persons, 148–​49 LGBTQ identity, colors, 193 LGBTQ persons, marriage equality, 153 liberal sermons, 57–​58 Lichterman, Paul, 71–​72, 121, 175–​76, 193 life stories, 65–​66. See also narratives lightning rods, organizational space, 115–​16 Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 190–​91 Lindsay, Michael, 151 Listen, America (Falwell), 197 lived religion, studies of, 108 lived-​religion approach, power, 4–​5 Lived Religion in America (Orsi), 4–​5 Lo, Jade, 110–​11 Lofton, Kathryn, 67 Lomax, Tamura, 156 London’s Crystal Palace, Great Exhibition of 1851, 116–​17 Long, Thomas, 122 Lord’s Prayer, 127–​28 Lowell, Francis Cabot, 109–​10

Luther, Martin, 98–​99, 100 Lutherans, 134–​35 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 9–​10, 18–​19, 55–​56, 69, 143–​44 McLoughlin, William, 36 McRoberts, Omar, 166–​67 Madonna, Orsi’s study of, 113 Mahmood, Saba, 96–​97 Making of a Moonie, The (Barker), 50 Maldonado-​Estrada, Alyssa, 156 Mandel, Marvin, 203–​4 Marsden, George, 125–​26 Martin, Trayvon, 215 Marx, Karl, 201 Marxian theory, 3–​4, 50–​51 Marxism, 201 Maryknoll Story, 199–​201 material affordances, arrangement in space, 106–​7 Meals on Wheels, 131 megachurch, 115 megachurches, Kansas City, 160–​61 Mennonites, 73–​74 mercy, 53 Methodism, 40 American, 38 British, 38 power in, 41–​42 Methodist Church, 1 Methodists, 134–​35 Middletown, 104–​5 miracle, 53 Mjolnir, Norse mythology, 32 monastic life, 110 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 211, 215 Moody, Dwight L., 77–​78 Moore, R. Laurence, 28 moral authority, religion, 89 moral meaning, 93–​94 moral norms, religious leaders and, 80 More, Hannah, 153–​54 mortgage lending sub-​prime market, 170–​71 systemic racism, 163, 170 Mother Teresa, 61–​63, 153–​54 Mount Vernon Congregational Church, 77–​78 Muhlenberg, Frederick, 216–​17

234 Index multiracial congregations, 174–​75 Muslim gender and sexuality, 149–​50 identity, 144 Muslim organizations, 60 Muslim rituals, 23 Muslims, 137–​38 converts in Brazil, 127 September 11, 2001 attacks, 179–​80 Muslim women discursive resistance, 96 identity of, 151–​52, 157 religious messaging, 78–​79 story of Roqiya, 72–​73 myths of origin, 100 NAACP, 208 narratives, 53–​73 accounts, 56–​57 autonomy and agency, 60 awakening, 58–​59 constructing personal, 88 conviction by Holy Spirit, 61 embodied experience, 66–​67 empowerment, 67–​68, 69–​70, 71–​72 grand narratives, 55–​56 hegemonic, 92–​93 identifying with characters in stories, 61–​62, 63 incremental transformation, 59 life stories, 65–​66 moral stances, 57–​58 Mother Teresa, 62–​63 narrative replotting, 62 Oakley Prayer and Sharing Group story, 70–​71 personal, 88 persuading children for good, 90–​91 persuasiveness, 102 protest, 101–​2 providing coherence to lives, 59–​60 relationships, 53–​54 religious discourse, 54–​55 replotting, 62 resisting evil, 89–​90 sacred narratives, 54–​55 story of Roqiya, 72–​73 storytelling, 60–​61, 63–​65, 66–​67, 68–​ 69, 72–​73

Nation, Carrie, 140 National Association of Evangelicals, 91 National Association of Philanthropic Organizations, 204–​5 National Catholic Development Conference, 204–​5 nationalism, 146, 178–​85 border wall and, 179–​81 definition, 178 ideology of, 183 literature on, 183–​84 Pledge of Allegiance, 179 power and, 178–​79 religion and, 179, 182, 183–​84 subnational identities, 182–​83 terrorist attacks on U.S., 179–​80 transnational identities, 182–​83 White, 182 See also identity power National Religious Broadcasters, 205–​6 NATO allies, 180–​81 Negro Church in America (Frazier), 104–​5 Nelson, Timothy J., 164–​65, 166–​67 Nemesis (Roth), 122 neo-​liberal, 161–​62 neo-​Marxian theory, 3–​4 Neoplatonic Hellenism, 21 New Bethel Baptist Church, 216–​17 New England Baptists, 36 New Testament, 153–​54 New York Times (newspaper), 199, 200 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 104–​5 Nigerian Pentecostal churches, 130 Nixon, Richard, 190–​91 Northwestern University, 28–​29 Norton, Anne, 92 Novak, Michael, 201 Oakley Prayer and Sharing Group, Wedam and Warner study of, 70–​71 Ober, Josiah, 124 Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), 153 O’Brien, John, 60 Oluo, Ijeoma, 162, 177 O’Neill, Tip, 199, 200, 201 “one nation under God”, 179 Oprah Winfrey Show, 67 opting out, sincerity, 85–​86

Index  235 organ(s) district meetings for, 43 installation of, 43–​44 leaders meeting for, 42–​43 orphans British organizations sending, to Canada, 117–​18 deportation of, 1 Orsi, Robert, 4–​5, 51, 113 Orthodox Jewish communities, 59–​60 othering, 146 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu), 16–​17 paganism, reinstating, 21, 22–​23 Pallotti, Vincent, 203–​4 Pandolfo, Stefania, 49, 72–​73 Parsons, Talcott, 14 Paschel, Tianna, 175 Passover, 33 Pattillo-​McCoy, Mary, 167 Peale, Norman Vincent, 116–​17 pedophiles, 2 Pentagon, 179–​80 Pentecostalism 4, 117–​18 Christians, 34 churches, Nigeria, 130 groups, 60 identity and empowerment, 155 Perry, Samuel, 117–​18 Perry, Seth, 126 personalization, deities, 32 Phelps, Austin, 27–​28 Philadelphia Negro, The (DuBois), 104–​5 phronesis, 120–​21 Pitt, Richard, 173–​74 platform skills, spatial staging, 24–​25 playing devil’s advocate, sincerity and, 85–​86 Pledge of Allegiance, nationalism, 179 Polanyi, Michael, 120–​21 political discourse, 50–​51 political engagement Charitable Disclosure Bill, 203, 204, 205, 206–​7 marches and demonstrations, 202 Pallottines, 203–​5, 206–​7 religious groups and, 202–​3 political leaders, leaders of, 14

political power, 13–​14, 220 definition, 186 people practicing politics, 187–​89 political engagement, 201–​7 protest, 207–​18 religion and, 187, 188–​89, 218, 223–​24 separation of church and state, 187, 225 signals, 189–​94 storytelling, 194–​201 understandings of, 186–​87 politics, sincerity and, 79 Polletta, Francesca, 99–​101 Pol Pot, 197 positive thinking, Peale’s, 116–​17 postcolonial anthropological inquiries, 50–​51 power asymmetry, 2 definition of, 2 discursive, 12–​13, 14 distribution among social structures, 10–​11 distribution of, 11 identity, 13 institutional, 13 interpersonal, 38–​47 mechanisms, 12–​14, 221 political, 13–​14 religion, 5–​6 religious and secular, 6 religious practices, 2–​3, 4 religious rituals, 46–​47 ritual, 12, 35 ritual power, 12 rituals and, 16–​20 rules and, 11 social relationships, 219 power asymmetries, gender and sexuality, 148–​49 power distribution, codified knowledge, 125 power structures, systemic racism, 171–​73 practical knowledge, 120–​23 formalization of, 123–​24 group style as, 121 local churches, 122 religious organizations, 122 practice definition, 18–​19 MacIntyre on, 18–​19

236 Index practice theory, 11–​12, 50–​51 approach to religion, 51 institutional power and, 105–​6 status hierarchies, 129 pragmatism, 9–​10 Prasad, Leela, 93–​94 prayer, Christianity, 35–​36 preaching, staging, 27–​29 Presbyterian Church, 1 Presbyterian Church USA, 139 Presbyterianism, 139 Presbyterian Lay Committee, 139, 171–​72 Presbyterians, 134–​35, 137–​38 Priesand, Sally, 153–​54 priming, 119–​20 progressive Protestantism, 114–​15 pro-​life advocates, 95 protest activism and, 217–​18 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 208–​9, 214–​ 15, 216 Civil Rights Movement, 208–​9, 212–​13 Ferguson protests, 209–​10, 211–​14, 215 killing of Michael Brown, 209–​ 10, 211–​14 narratives, 101–​2 political power, 207–​18 religion’s role in movements, 225 resistance movements, 98–​101 Protestant churches, group style, 121 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 104–​5 Protestantism, 34, 142–​43 American, 125–​26 leaders, 73–​74 political engagement, 203 progressive, 114–​15 Protestant Reformation, 21 Psalms, 127–​28 public officials, religious messaging, 79 Public Religions in the Modern World (Casanova), 4 Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, 26–​27 Quakers, 73–​74, 137–​38 Queen, sincerity, 79 Quran, 96, 127, 179–​80

racial equality, 175 racism, 162. See also systemic racism radical religion, 99 Reagan, Ronald, 25, 91, 92, 199 Reconstruction, 216–​17 Reed, Isaac, 53 Reform Act of 1832, 41 Reform Judaism, 190–​91 reform movements, collective action, 140–​41 regulated improvisation, Bourdieu’s term, 11–​12 relational theory, 146 religion assessing effects of, 8 common morality, 224–​25 definition of, 110–​11 identity power, 184 influence in modern world, 6–​7 institutional structures, 222–​23 military combat and, 74 moral authority, 89 nationalism and, 179, 182, 183–​84 political power and, 187, 188–​89 politics and, 217 power, 5–​6 protest movements, 225 separation of church and state, 187, 225 social relationships, 219 systemic racism, 163–​64 theoretical literature on, 224 turn to power, 3 Religion and Society in Tension (Glock), 104–​5 Religion in Human Evolution (Bellah), 18 religion’s authority, border disputes, 112 religious discourse, literature on, 103 Religious Factor (Lenski), 104–​5 religious freedom, 161–​62 religious messaging, 78–​79 religious movements, 50 religious organizations Catholic parishes, 80 codified knowledge, 124–​25 community outreach, 71–​72 conflicts within congregations, 135 control of the clock, 108–​9 encouraging prayer, 110

Index  237 lay leadership, 131–​34 megachurches, 131–​32 physical space and enlargement, 113–​15 recruiting and retention of participants, 131 ringing of bells, 109 sincerity and, 84 sincerity in, 84 soft power of, 105 status hierarchies, 129, 131 subversive acts, 134 U.S. Protestant evangelical, 81–​82 “White flight” in 1960s, 164–​65 religious pluralism, 187 religious practices contemporary society, 222–​23 diversity of, 226 institutionalization of, 6–​7 political power, 224 power arrangements in, 8–​9 power in, 2–​3, 4, 219–​20 public opinion and, 7 religious rituals emotion in, 30 leaders in, 30 power relationships, 46–​47 religious services, sacred texts in, 127–​28 religious signifiers, 95 replotting, narratives, 62 Republican identity, colors, 193 resignification, 95 resistance, 53, 87–​103 agency and, 97–​98 comfortable church culture, 95–​96 conversational stories, 93–​95 good and evil, 89, 91–​92 hegemonic discourse, 92–​93 inequality and discrimination, 95 institutional controls, 88–​89 moral meaning, 93–​94 Muslim women and, 96 narratives against evil, 89–​90 protest movements, 98–​101 protest narratives, 101–​2 religious signifiers, 95 resignification, 95 storytelling, 97–​98 resource mobilization, 138–​39

Richardson, Herbert, 31 Ricoeur, Paul, 93–​94 ritual(s) asymmetry of power in, 23 Great Organ Dispute (1827), 16, 38 interpersonal power, 38–​47 literature on, as practice, 20 participants of, 31–​32 power of, 16–​20, 220–​21 power relationships, 46–​47 regularly scheduled, 23 religious, 20 sincerity, 86–​87 staging, 16, 21–​29 transcendence, 16, 29–​37 ritual power, 12, 35, 220 gender and sexuality, 157 systemic racism, 163–​64 Robeson, Paul, 167 Roe v. Wade (1973), 196 Roman Catholic community, 191 Roof, Wade Clark, 69 Roosevelt, Franklin, 108 Rosetta Stone, 5 Roth, Philip, 122 Rule of St. Benedict, 110 Ryle, Gilbert, 48 sacred narratives, 54–​55 sacred power, 6 sacred rhetoric, 27–​28 sacred space, 107 St. Leo’s Roman Catholic Church, 203–​4 St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, 107 St. Paul’s Methodist Church, enlargement of, 113–​14 St. Peters, Rome, 107 St. Rose Catholic church, 129–​30 St. Vincent de Paul, 1 Sallman, Warner, 163–​64 Salt Lake Temple, Utah, 107 salvation abuse of children and, 1 good and evil, 91 language for relocating poor, 1 Salvation Army, 1 Satan’s Power (Bainbridge), 4–​5 Schuller, Robert, 116–​17

238 Index Schutz, Alfred, 31 Scott, James C., 87–​88, 136–​37 Scottish Enlightenment, 125 scripturalization, 126 scripture, codified knowledge, 123–​24, 126 Second Great Awakening, 77–​78 Second Vatican Council, 24–​25 secular power, 6 secular society, 161–​62 Sekou, Osagyefo, 210–​12, 213 self-​sacrificing femininity, 151–​52 Seligman, Adam, 86–​87 Selling God (Moore), 28 separation of church and state, 187 sermon, preaching, 27–​29 sermons conservative, 57–​58 liberal, 57–​58 Sewell, William H., Jr., 214 sexuality. See gender and sexuality Shadyside Presbyterian Church, 158 Shils, Edward, 16–​17 Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 156 shunning, 118 signals Bladensburg Peace Cross, 191–​92 Christian imagery, 191–​93 colors for, 193 connecting religion and politics, 193 cross, 192–​93 David and Goliath, 194 political power, 189–​94 public addresses, 189–​91, 194 references to God, 191 references to God in speeches, 189–​90 symbolic power, 189 Sikhs, 110 sincerity, 53, 73–​87 apologies and, 82–​84 bias in religion, 76–​77 cause marketing, 84–​85 communication, 75–​76, 82–​83 conscientious objectors, 73–​74 constraints of work, 87 fields, 76 illustration of situational, 87

normal appearances, 78 opting out, 85–​86 opting out method, 86 perceptions of others, 81 playing devil’s advocate, 85–​86 protest movements, 99–​100 religious discourse, 84 religious messaging, 78–​79 religious professionals and, 80 ritualized discourse, 86–​87 situational, 87 situational rules, 77–​78 speech act theory, 75 study of U.S. Protestant evangelical congregations, 81–​82 sincerity work, term, 78 sin eating, 27 situational norms, sincerity, 77–​78 Six-​Principle Calvinistic Baptists, 36 slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 63 Smarsh, Sara, 129–​30 Smiley, Jane, 122 Smith, Joseph, 126 Social Gospel movement, 114–​15 social interaction, 19–​20 social justice, 95–​96 social movements, 3, 7–​8, 50–​51 social practice, power as aspect of, 10 social relationships, 143 social sciences, sincerity and, 75–​76 Social Sources of Denominationalism, The (Niebuhr), 104–​5 social support, apology and, 82–​83 Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, The (Troeltsch), 104–​5 Society of Friends, 1 Sodom and Gomorrah, 33 soft power, religious organizations, 105 Sorenson, Ted, 190–​91 Southern Baptist congregation, 164–​65 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 208 South Korea, 155 Soviet Union, 91, 180–​81 space, 106–​18 affluence and, 113 architecture and power, 116–​17

Index  239 arrangement of material affordances, 106–​7 border disputes over, 111–​12 church gyms, 113–​15 control for institutional power, 154 control of clock, 108–​9 displacement, 117–​18 emplacement, 117–​18 encouraging regular prayer by members, 110 enlarging physical, 113–​15 exercising power over access, 108 institutional control of gendered, 150–​51 as institutional resource, 110–​11 lightning rods, 115–​16 megachurch, 115 physical organization of, 111–​12 places of worship, 107–​8 religion’s authority and emerging professions, 112 religious organizations, 117–​18 ringing of bells, 109 sacred, 107, 116 structuring of time, 109–​10 symbolism in, 115 See also institutional power speech act theory, 75 Spencer, Earl, 79 Spencer, Herbert, 14 Sri Venkateswara Temple, Pittsburgh, 107 staging, 20 modern Church rituals, 44 power and inclusion balance, 26 preaching, 27–​29 religious rituals, 21–​29 rhetorical, 25–​26, 28–​29 spatial, 24–​25 term, 23 worship services, 27–​28 state power, 3–​4 status charismatic leadership, 130–​31 hierarchies in religious organizations, 129, 220 individuals in organizations, 129–​30 lay empowerment, 133–​34

lay leadership, 131–​33 recruiting and retaining participants, 131 storytelling, 60–​61, 63–​65, 66–​67, 68–​ 69, 72–​73 agency, 97–​98 conversational, 93–​95 conversions and spiritual awakenings, 195 Falwell, Jerry, 195–​98 Maryknoll Story, 199–​201 narrative framing, 194–​95 political power, 194–​201 See also narratives Strong, Josiah, 114–​15 structuralism, 50 subnational identities, 182–​83 subordinate groups, 143 subordination, 146 subversion, 134–​38 conflicts between congregations, 135–​36 displacement, 137 Great Organ Dispute of 1827, 134–​35 noncompliance, 136–​37 passive-​aggressive counterpart of overt dissent, 136–​37 suppression of institutional power, 137–​38 See also institutional power Sullivan, Louis, 113–​14 Sunday School, 90–​91 Sutton, John R., 135 Swaggert, Jimmy, 83–​84 symbolic boundaries, identity power, 142–​43 symbolic power, sacred space, 116 symbolism, organizational space, 115 symbolizing power, domain violations, 33 systemic racism, 146, 162–​78 community outreach, 175–​76 congeniality and community, 169 empowerment in congregations, 166–​67 individual spirituality, 168 issues other than religion, 177–​78 literature on antiracism, 175 mortgage lending and, 163, 170

240 Index systemic racism (cont.) multiracial congregations, 174 power structures of religion, 171–​73 predatory mortgage-​lending practices, 170 racial equality, 175 racialized self-​selection, 165–​66 religion’s discursive power, 167 religious organizations, 176–​77 self-​selection, 164–​65, 168, 169 social capital, 171 sub-​prime lending market, 170–​71 United States, 162–​63 tattoos, 156 Tawney, R. H., 14 temperance movement, 89, 139–​40 temptation, good and evil, 91 Ten Commandments, 33 theater, staging, 29–​30 Theory of Preaching (Phelps), 27–​28 Thomas, Cal, 201 Thor hammer of god, 32 Norse god, 108–​9 Thousand Acres, A (Smiley), 122 time monastery and, 110 structuring of, 109–​10 time out, sincerity, 85–​86 Tradition in a Rootless World (Davidman), 59–​60 transcendence, 29–​37 transnational identities, 182–​83 trigger warnings, 49–​50 Trilling, Lionel, 81 Troeltsch, Ernst, 104–​5 Tubman, Harriet, 153–​54 Tushima, Cephas, 130 Ukraine, 181 Unification Church, 50 Unitarianism, 190–​91 United Church of Canada, 1 United Presbyterian Church, Committee on Church and Race, 171–​73 United States, systemic racism in, 162–​63

Upanishads, 32 U.S. Constitution, 192–​93 U.S.-​Mexico border border wall, 179–​81 nationalism and, 181 U.S. Protestants, denominational families, 134–​35 U.S. Senate and House Committees on Military Affairs, 73–​74 U.S. Supreme Court, 191 Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 68–​69 Veblen, Thorstein, 113 voluntary participation, gender and sexuality, 152–​53 Warner, Stephen, 70, 71 Washington Post (newspaper), 25 weapons of the weak, 87–​88, 136–​37 Weber, Max, 2, 3–​4, 104–​5, 124 Wedam, Elfriede, 70, 71 Weisenfeld, Judith, 162–​63 welfare queens, 161–​62 Welsh practice, sin eating, 27 Wesley, Charles, 40 Wesley, John, 39, 40 West, Richard, 109 Wherry, Frederick, 62–​63 White, William Allen, 139–​40 White Christs, 163–​64 White Jesus, 163–​64 White privilege, 177 Wiccans, 59 Willard, Francis, 153–​54 Willey, Chloe, 126 Wilson, Charles H., 203, 206 Wilson, Darren, 209–​10 Wimbush, Vincent, 126 Winfrey, Oprah, 67 Witten, Marsha, 57–​59 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 48 Woden, Norse god, 108–​9 words discursive power of, 53 power of, 49–​50 world construction, 54–​55 World Trade Center, 179–​80

Index  241 World War I, 73–​74 World War I veterans, 191 worship, places of, 107–​8, 113 worship leaders, situational sincerity, 87

Yankee City, 104–​5 YMCA, 114–​15 Young, Michael, 16–​17 Young, Michael P., 139–​40 YWCA, 114–​15

Yahweh Hebrew Bible, 32 passover, 33

Zablocki, Benjamin, 130–​31 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 110 Zeus, Greek mythology, 32