Throughout the academy, a belief in the primacy of material phenomena enjoys the status of common sense. Yet many Western religions claim to proffer a means of resisting a banal or inimical secular hegemony constructed upon materialist foundations. Elsewhere (e.g., Iran, Turkey, Tibet), organized religions are associated with dynamic political movements of resistance to economic or secular imperialism.
Diane Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard University, writes that the United States is now a microcosm of the immigration-induced religious upheaval characterizing human experience during this era of globalization. Recognizing that multiculturalism has become an incontrovertible historical reality, Eck laments that “secular analysts” of difference all too often “leave religion completely out of the discussion, as if this new period of American immigration had no religious dimensions.”
But to those of us paying attention to the religious currents of America and the beginning of the 21 st century, it is clear that any analysis of civil and political life will have to include religion along with race, ethnicity, and language. Here, as in multireligious societies throughout the world, difference is often signaled by religious language and symbol. (Eck, 2001, 30)
The academy’s secular analysts are not alone in underreporting or marginalizing the significance of religious experience in contemporary life. Gloria Anzaldúa, poet, cultural theorist, and eloquent narrator of a spiritual journey that reunites her with aspects of the religion and philosophy of an ancient people with whom she identifies, praises the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, “the consuming whirlwind, the symbol of the underground aspects of the psyche, . . . the mountain, the Earth Mother who conceived all celestial beings out of her cavernous womb. Goddess of birth and death . . . “ (1999, 68). But at the same time Anzaldúa asserts that Catholicism and “other institutionalized religions impoverish all life, beauty, pleasure. The Catholic and Protestant religions encourage fear and distrust of life and of the body; they encourage a split between the body and the spirit and totally ignore the soul” (59). While objecting to the binary thinking that she believes characterizes white, European, heterosexist, male-dominated theory, Anzaldúa suggests that personally cobbled spiritualities such as her own, which is grounded in a now-defunct religious institution, are more authentic than spiritualities generated from the religious institutions of our own time, which are all-impoverishing. Perhaps she assumes that subscribers to organized religions have, by necessity, disempowered relationships with their own religions; I will examine this assumption in some depth later.
At least she is talking, frankly and provocatively, about religion. For an academician to attempt to engage in any such discussion, outside of religious studies classrooms and with the intention of regarding religious phenomena as respectable and believers as rational, can be to meet a wall of hostility, as Anne Ruggles Gere, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, realized when she and her daughter attempted to write a spiritual memoir:
I realized that current norms of personal writing, shaped as they have been by the values of the academy, militate against writing about religious experience. It is much more acceptable to detail the trauma of rape or abuse than to recount a moment of religious inspiration. Coming out as a Christian or an observant member of any faith can be as dangerous as making public one’s sexual orientation because the academy has so completely conflated the disestablishment of religions with secularizing higher education. (Branch et al., 2001, 46–47)
In Gere’s opinion, the lack of vocabulary with which to discuss not only religious experience generally but also conventional religious experience specifically, together with the lack of disciplinary interest in religious themes, have conspired to create a “DMZ” between her “own faith and the academy”:
I learned early in my career that it was better to keep some things to myself, especially religion. The first time I mentioned that I shared my life with a Presbyterian minister, a colleague did a double take and quickly changed the subject. As a new assistant professor, I wanted to ingratiate myself with senior professors in the department, so I stopped mentioning that I am a practicing Christian. Over the years this became a habit, and I have contributed to what George Marsden describes as the “near exclusion of religious perspective from dominant academic life” (6). (46)
Gere’s article appeared in the September 2001 issue of College English. This is a noteworthy conjunction. Exclusion of religious perspectives from the academy represents squandered opportunities to foster understanding among secularists and believers. Eck (2001) notes that immediately after 9/11, “the impetus toward [religious] education and outreach was nationwide” (xvi), but why, one might ask, were religious education and outreach contingent upon the unfolding of that calamity? Reading her accounts of brutal retaliations against Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus after 9/11 and bearing in mind that religious hate crimes are fixtures of U.S. history, I must ask how much longer the academy can afford to neglect the ideological implications of a world supporting 130 million immigrants, most from regions less economically developed and more religiously active—let alone of a religiously untutored nation, our own, the most powerful in the world, receiving one million immigrants a year and containing millions of its own religiously active citizens.
This essay examines how four women from different faith traditions used organized religion as a meaning-making tool and as a method of constructing identity in the face of often-hostile secular ideologies. Two of the women were immigrants to the United States; one was an international student; one had been born in the United States. Their stories are part of the narrative of globalization, for a religious worldview characterizes the lives of vast numbers around the world, including not only the world’s immigrants, who are likely to increase in number as local economies fray beneath the movement of global capital (Chomsky 2002), but also their new neighbors, so often diverging from them in religious outlook, on whom they must depend for tolerance, good-will, understanding.
A concept derived from Karl Marx’s uncompromising materialism, false consciousness has been invoked historically as the explanation for why individuals allow religion and other metaphysical figments to distract them from class struggle.
The phantasmagorias in the brains of men are necessary supplements also of their material life-process as empirically establishable and bound up with material premises. Morals, religion, metaphysics, and other ideologies, and the forms of consciousness corresponding to them, here no longer retain a look of independence. They have no history, they have no development, but men in developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter along with this reality of theirs their thought and the products of their thought. (Marx, 1959, 9–10)
Stuart Hall, whose theory of articulation answers Marx’s challenge to study individuals “not in some fantastic seclusion and state of fixation, but in their actual empirically visible process of development under definite conditions” (1996b, 10), contests Marx’s assertions that (a) “in the social production of their subsistence men enter into determined and necessary relations with each other which are independent of their wills—production relations which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces” and (b) “the sum of these production-relations forms the economic structure of society, the real basis upon which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite social forms of consciousness correspond.” Rather, arguing from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Hall posits the existence of agency.
The theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it; it enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position. (1996a, 142)
Such a revisioning of Marx suggests that Hall would be sympathetic to the assertion that religious ideology, for instance, may empower individuals. And Hall does admit that “religion has no necessary political connotation,” reactionary or otherwise:
As we look across the modern and developing world, we see the extraordinary diversity of the roles which religious formations have actually played. We also see the extraordinary cultural and ideological vitality which religion has given to certain popular social movements. That is to say, in particular social formations, where religion has become the valorized ideological domain, the domain into which all the different cultural strands are obliged to enter, no political movement in that society can become popular without negotiating the religious terrain. (1996a, 143)
But although Hall acknowledges that religion has no fixed, determined, eternalized essence, he writes that it evidences, nonetheless, what he calls elsewhere “tendential alignments” and so can be fixed, determined, and eternalized sufficiently to be knocked about in these terms:
You can’t create a popular political movement in such social formations without getting into the religious question, because it is the arena in which this community has come to . certain kind of consciousness [emphasis mine; whatever is meant by this?]. This consciousness may be limited, it may not have successfully helped them to remake their history. But they have been “languaged” by the discourse of popular religion. They have, for the first time, used religion to construct some narrative, however impoverished and impure, to connect the past and the present. (1996a, 143)
Ultimately, Hall’s attitude towards religion is not merely skeptical but negative; this can hardly be otherwise since, though differing from Marx in signal ways, Hall embraces materialism. “Marxism is surely correct, against all idealisms,” he writes, “to insist that no social practice or set of relations floats free of the determinate effects of the concrete relations in which they are located” (1996b, 45). And “ideological categories are developed, generated, and transformed according to their own laws of development and evolution; though of course, they are generated out of given material” (1996b, 44–45).
Why surely, and why of course? Realms of belief do resist these certainties. When I read Hall’s statement, I recognize power constructing its domain, excluding, in this instance, the religious as intellectually inept (“unsuccessful” and “limited”) and/or debased (“impoverished and impure”).
A key commentator in any discussion of religion and agency in the postcolonial context is Edward Said. Because Said has witnessed many of imperialism’s hardships firsthand and because he is intimately familiar with western prejudices against Islam, I expected to find him supportive of Islam and Islamic nationalist movements. A humanist and a student and critic of empire first, Said cites the “dangers of an untutored religious consciousness” (1994a, 307) and describes himself as possessed by an “anti-clerical and secular zeal” (305). At times, he inserts religion as a loose moral equivalent to totalitarianism and imperialism: he writes, for instance, that during “the exhilarating heyday of decolonization and early Third World nationalism . . . . the appearance of various mullahs, colonels, and one-party regimes who pleaded national security risks and the need to protect the foundling revolutionary state as their platform, foisted a new set of problems onto the already considerably onerous heritage of imperialism” (307). This critique echoes Lenin’s that “with regard to the more backward states and nations, in which feudal or patriarchal and patriarchal-peasant relations predominate, it is particularly important to bear in mind. . . .the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landlords, mullahs, etc.” (1970, 27).
Quoting Ahmad Eqbal in a discussion of newly independent states in the world’s economically developing regions, Said refers to the “optimism” and “feeling of hope and power,” which he believes is in large part the result of “rationalism . . . the spread of the presumption that planning, organization, and the use of scientific knowledge will resolve social problems” (1994a, 325). Like many academics, Said considers “optimism” and a “feeling of power” birthrights of rationalism and science, not of religion; not religious needs but the “brutality and indifference” of governments gives rise to “Islamic sentiment everywhere in the Islamic world” (1995, 392). Said’s distrust of religious forms is evident in the conclusion of The World, the Text, and the Critic:
To say of such grand ideas [as the Orient] and their discourse that they have something in common with religious discourse is to say that each serves as an agent to closure, shutting off human investigation, criticism, and effort in deference to the authority of the more-than-human, the supernatural, the other-worldly. Like culture, religion therefore furnishes us with systems of authority and with canons of order whose regular effect is either to compel subservience or to gain adherents. This in turn gives rise to organized collective passions whose social and intellectual results are often disastrous. (1983, 290)
In short, it seems that the notion of false consciousness has not been banished from cultural theory, as Hall and certain colleagues have suggested. But to speak of Marx’s base-superstructure analysis as an epistemological stepping-off place and not in the reductive sense that Hall disparages when he writes, “The analysis [of ideology] is no longer organized around the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘false.’ The obscuring or mystifying effects of ideology are no longer seen as the product of a trick or magical illusion. Nor are they simply attributed to false consciousness, in which our poor, benighted, untheoretical proletarians are forever immured” (1996b, 39), then agency must have the potential to emerge from ideologies claiming a nonmaterial basis.
Academicians’ prejudices against religious worldviews in some ways parallel the early anthropologists’ against “primitive” societies. Sweeping assumptions of false consciousness are based at least in part on a discredited theoretical framework which demands that standards of rationality be scientific and defines rationality in positivist terms. Science has in the past rejected all religion and metaphysics based on currently debunked standards of science. Using the standard criticism of logical positivism, Roger Trigg notes that the statement that “the meaning of a statement [is] to be understood by the way it could be scientifically verified” itself cannot be verified scientifically. Positivism is now widely acknowledged as a failed attempt to make “scientific rationality synonymous with rationality” (1985, 98).
One need not reject the possibility of false consciousness, mistakes, or deceptions in regard to religious belief. But the problem is a theoretical framework that systematically and preconceptually favors scientific explanations and disregards the otherwise rational explanations that participants offer. Trigg locates the roots of the academy’s prejudice against religion in a lingering positivism and in extreme forms of the sociology of knowledge. Sociological explanations often de-emphasize the importance of the reasons that participants in a social practice or discourse (here religious practice or discourse) have and give for their practices and instead emphasize larger sociological explanations (1985, 39–41). For example, sociologists of knowledge argue that certain rituals or religious practices create cohesion in society or lead to better functioning of social relations. But extreme and unqualified sociology of knowledge assumes the false consciousness of the people whose behavior it purports to explain, especially if the sociological explanation runs counter to what participants believe about their practices.
While writing this essay, I have attempted to respect the individual’s claim that her religion helps her live authentically by acting in opposition to prevailing structures of debasement and oppression. I have resisted the temptation to categorize any and all forms of religiosity as expressions of false consciousness and thus have avoided committing the reductive error of dismissing religious conviction as a potential source of agency.
In 1999, I interviewed four women about their religious beliefs. The main topics of the interviews were (1) the women’s class and religious backgrounds, (2) their personal commitments to their organized religions, (3) their feelings as religious people in the academy and/or in a foreign country, and (4) their opinions about the relevance of their religious practice to their social behavior. (See the appendix for a list of the questions used during the interviews.)
I met each woman in her home or office for an hour or more, taped our conversations, and followed up over e-mail or through casual unrecorded conversations. The women each read numerous drafts of this essay and had opportunities to clarify and to revise the passages based on their interviews. Issues of availability and variety aside, I chose to study these women because I believed that I could trust them and that they would be forthcoming. It was also important to me that none had ever witnessed to me about her religion. I avoided the more strident type of religious personality because I wanted to examine what people whom the academy would consider “rational” in most other respects believed. What the women said, then, about their organized religions should not be assumed to be typical of the opinions of members of organized religions. Nonetheless, as a close friend to many devoutly religious people, including those who do not necessarily have the credentials that the women I interviewed did, I am confident that deeper study of the interior lives of religious people from all walks will uncover the widespread reality of individuals empowered in regard to, as well as through, their religious institutions.
Lavinia was a 27-year-old African-American who belonged to an interdenominational full-gospel Christian ministry. She was earning her Ph.D. in education at a large midwestern university of science and technology. Regarding her own socio-economic background, Lavinia wrote privately to me that “through the years, [her] parents seemed to have jumped some economic brackets, but [she] would still not consider them ’comfortably’ middle class.” I met Lavinia in a course we were both enrolled in, and I occasionally attended her church. Pavithra was a 32-year-old Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist who was receiving her English M.A. from the same university that Lavinia attended. Her father had been in the Foreign Service, her family had been of the upper middle class, and she had been educated abroad at English schools. Both of Pavithra’s parents were dead, she had no relatives in the United States, and she missed Sri Lanka a great deal. I met Pavithra, too, in a course in which we were both enrolled. Deborah was a 58-year-old Canadian Jew from Montreal whose family descended from the Ashkenazi. She had completed the required coursework for a Ph.D. in child development and remained comfortably A.B.D. At the time of the interviews, Deborah was entering the last stage of Parkinson’s disease. Notwithstanding, she led an active social life and ran her own home, a neatly appointed ranch in a middle-class neighborhood in a small midwestern town. Deborah was an old friend of mine. At her funeral, friends remembered her by reading aloud passages from these interviews. Massoumeh was a 60-year-old Shi’ah Muslim born in Tehran, Iran. Her father, a conservative Muslim, removed her from school after the sixth grade. As an adult she studied at night to receive her high school diploma and had earned the equivalent of a ninth-grade education when revolutionaries seized power in Iran and closed her school. Massoumeh is an in-law of mine.
In describing and reporting the interviews, I did not define religion ahead of time. Instead, I tried to allow the meanings of the word to emerge from the interviews, though of course what I understood by the word did influence, if not shape, the problems I had identified and the questions I posed.
In this essay, the word religion does not necessarily indicate theism. As a Theravada Buddhist, Pavithra entertained no such belief. And although Deborah grew up in a Jewish home and was “proud to be a Jew,” she also said that her parents “never talked about God” and that though she “want[ed] there to be a God. . . , [she wasn’t] sure there [was one].” Nor does religion necessarily indicate attendance at church/synagogue/temple. Neither Pavithra, who considered herself a Buddhist, nor Deborah, who considered herself a Jew, nor Massoumeh, who considered herself a Muslim, regularly attended a place of worship. Pavithra stated, “I don’t go to temple and worship and do this mass hysteria.” And Deborah had chosen for private reasons to conclude her association with the small Jewish congregation she had once been a member of.
As a Christian raised by a Unitarian and atheist, I will borrow Unitarian theologian Pauls Tillich’s definition of spirituality and define religion in this essay as referring to “ultimate concern,” a definition supporting the ethically committed, politically minded personalities of the women I interviewed. In so doing, however, I recognize that I am placing my own faith system in a superordinate position in regard to the other systems and am neutralizing many of the ambiguities and critical opportunities attending this very contested ideological site.
Far from seeming paralyzed by false consciousness, these women claimed to use their religious beliefs to help them resist dominant ideologies. Lavinia summed up the relation between her beliefs and the ideologies of secular society as follows: Religion “is where my influence is from. Because, of course, the world, or television, or everything else that we have says that this [self-indulgent behavior] is OK; so where did I learn that this can be so damaging to your marriage, to you as people, to society in general? Well, through my religion. So anything that’s probably opposite from popular belief, I probably learned it from religion.” She illustrated how she had applied her religious beliefs to avoid office politics, and concluded that, “when things began to get very messy, [my coworker] felt I was still supposed to be a part of that. No. I resist that; that’s not where I’m supposed to go.”
An academic and African-American woman, Lavinia nonetheless found herself resisting certain aspects of both multiculturalism and feminism. Regarding the former, she stated, “some things, while they look very similar to, [as if] they match up with God’s intention, or the Word of God, then when they start going off. . . way. . . getting way off. . . then, OK, I can’t go there.” As for feminism, Lavinia stated that she was “all for us. . . you know. . . us women being lifted up and not being abused, and being viewed as second-class citizens. . . and all those things.” But she felt it necessary to resist what she perceived as the extreme positions that “women have to be dominant and the head of the family and they don’t need—children don’t need their fathers.”
Lavinia was an attractive, charming1 person and not occasionally felt the disadvantage of this in a culture so sexually driven. Again, she used religion to help maintain personal integrity in the social formation, or what Christians often refer to as the world:
I was in this other place, with my old paradigm, and trying to do things in the way that the world says we should do them. Into premarital sex with my boyfriend, and just “Looks good; do that!” All these things, just really tolerant, and letting any sort of evil into my life, anything that could destroy me. And I’m not knowing it. “OK, it’s wrapped in gold: It must be good.” And so, of course, what emerges from that, or who emerges from that, is a very fragmented person because you’ve been participating in all these things that are not for your good, not for your growth, do not provide any substance for you, no food, no nourishment.
Generally, she saw the social formation as requiring spiritual deconstruction. “It really helps if you’re spending time with God every day,” she says, “And you’re in His Word. It’s very easy to do, to have this love for people. But at the same time, it does help you resist, or not accept, things that are ungodly, and I don’t mean ungodly in this holier-than-thou sense, but I mean things that are damaging to us as people.” She was clearly resistant to the ideology of consumer culture:
Society is like. . . ”OK, you want it? Go after it. It’s OK. You can have whatever you want. And that’s fine.” But everything. . . but the Word of God says that everything that is good, or looks good, or. . . is not necessarily good for you. So some things should be resisted.
Pavritha mentioned how pressured she often felt in the United States to adopt industrialized modes of social behavior. In Sri Lanka, whose culture she described as “predominantly covered with Buddhist philosophy or readings or understandings from the religious tradition . . . . a person could take a few minutes off for another person, which I don’t see happening [in the United States] as much.” “In Sri Lanka,” she said, “the way we live our lives are not so much tied to time and not so much tied to achievement as being the ultimate goal of whatever you are doing in life. Which is something different here. I see time having a lot of influence on how people behave here.”
When I turned off the tape recorder, Pavithra spoke at length about her former boyfriend, a figure mentioned frequently in the transcripts. He had broken up with her because she would not convert to Christianity. Pavithra’s rejection of the arrangement provided further evidence of how deeply held spiritual beliefs can allow individuals to resist colonizing forces on an individual as well as a national level.
Deborah described how Jewish husbands had used religious tradition to ward off the encroachments of secular society: “The Jewish husband was supposed to be a student of—prayer—and a student of God’s work, and the wife was there to assist him—to take care of all the things of this world and free him so he could be a student of God. That’s the whole tradition.” Although the tradition may appear to the modern eye lamentably sexist, the flip side of the Orthodox arrangement was that Jewish women were, ideally, to be entrepreneurs. Not surprisingly, Deborah concluded, “The way I was raised, the values, have to do with how I feel very much that I have to control my own life.”
Like Deborah, Lavinia and Pavithra considered their spirituality a source of personal empowerment. Pavithra, who believed in karma, said that she “has control over what may happen in the future, if [she knows] how to think about those things [she is] thinking now.” And although Lavinia did not say that her religion allowed her to be in control, because she believed this to be a “man-centered” way of thinking, she provided me with numerous examples of how her religion allowed her to resist and described her life in a way that suggested a strong sense of empowerment: “I’m surrounded by God. And I am in Him, and He is in me.”
Each woman evidenced “ultimate concern” not only for her own spiritual growth, but for injustice, and in various ways saw her religion as engaged in the positive transformation of society. Lavinia described how her religion led her to act in a loving way towards others: “In that closeness with God,” she stated, “you develop a love for people. So as far as societal. . . like socially constructed things like racism and sexism and all that kind of stuff, they become obsolete.” Massoumeh described how Mohammed attempted to help widows and young girls by asking wealthy men to marry them, at a time when these women would have died in poverty. She also discussed how Mullahs had begun to create laws more sensitive to Persian wives, so that now, for example, if a husband wished to take a temporary wife2 , he must receive his first wife’s permission. Without his first wife’s approval, he can no longer divorce her on the ground of barrenness or take a second wife for that reason. Pavritha described how her belief in karma helped her resist thinking ill of, or doing ill to others:
I’ve had an ex-boyfriend. . . who I broke up, who I was thinking a few bad things. But I remember correcting myself and thinking, you know, that’s not what I want, that’s not how I want to think, and that’s because of how I perceive my religion, or what religion means to me, because it has taught me that even a bad thought is something that (a) it’s not good, (b) it’s not justified, and (c) it would be the same if somebody else did the same to you, so it has the ability to come back to you, so why are you doing this to somebody else?
Deborah narrated how a mutual friend, also a Jew, challenged a teacher who had, in a large lecture class, used the racist expression “to jew someone down”: “He stood up and confronted her,” Deborah said, “And she was very defensive. But, I mean, that’s the state of things. You know, she, an educated Ph.D. in sociology—sociology of all things. . . ”
All four women were resisting not only secular forces but what they considered oppressive or debasing forces present in their respective religions. Notwithstanding, each woman stated that her religion was extremely important to her, and the two I asked stated that they could not conceive of a situation in which they could renounce it. Deborah had grown up in a family that was itself engaged in a give and take with Orthodox Judaism. Although he had wanted to be a Rabbi, Deborah’s father had to work on the Sabbath, “so he couldn’t go to synagogue. So he felt exceptionally guilty. But he was a member [of the synagogue] and all that.” Deborah’s mother, although she kept a kosher home, “celebrated all the holidays as set out in the culture and in the religion,” and “welcomed in the Sabbath on Friday nights, at sundown, with a prayer and a joyful prayer and the lighting of the Sabbath candle. . . .religiously, every week, on time,” had nonetheless refused to marry Deborah’s father unless he gave up his plans to become a Rabbi. “She said she’d been a Rabbi’s daughter: she knew how hard it was, the life was [on the wife].” Deborah, on becoming an adult, chose to attend a Reform synagogue, which had a more feminist slant and allowed, for instance, the bat-mitzvahing of girls. “It’s not Orthodox,” said Deborah. “Girls never had any recognition [in Orthodox Judaism]. The wife was there to help the husband.” Deborah felt it necessary to break with the orthodoxy of her parents and grandparents in part because she felt that in that tradition women literally “do not count. . . In order to pray in a synagogue, you have to have ten men as a quorum. You [women] cannot pray alone.”
Pavithra and Lavinia both had a great deal to say about mainstream approaches to their faiths. According to Pavithra, for “the majority of Sri Lankans who are Buddhist, they follow this mass Buddhist philosophy that goes on in the country, and they meet in the temple and worship the statues. . . . Everyone goes to temple on full moon days. But I don’t do that”:
The rest of my family, they’re very much. . . public religious type way. You’re seen in the temple, you go to the temple, your usual thing, you say prayers, they rattle it off every single day, I’m sure it doesn’t even make sense what they’re saying, probably, to many people: They just say it for the sake of saying it.
She disapproved of this type of religiosity, calling it “mass hysteria.” “I don’t follow that,” she asserted: “That is not my idea of religion” (emphasis mine). Lavinia made similar remarks about the Christianity in which she had been raised and which she was expected to follow as an adult. Indeed, the first thing Lavinia said in her interview was that she was “aware that religion—and just the word carries different connotations for different people, and even in my beliefs, and my spiritual growth, when I think of religion, I think of more like rules, regulations, kind of legalism, ceremony, pomp and circumstance. . . But usually, when I’m talking about my faith, I’m talking about it more as my relationship with God.” For Lavinia, as for Pavithra, tradition could be a retarding factor in a person’s spiritual development and could “hold you back and keep you from growing.” And so Lavinia had stopped participating in a church where tradition was, for her, too great a focus. She believed that “the majority of believers or people who claim to have a religion are really walking in or are operating in the old paradigm, where God is somewhere way up there, unrelatable, unidentifiable, really not having a relationship [with Him].” The church Lavinia attended as an adult was “just the bare bones, the bare basics of following Christ without all the politics and the religion and the tradition that sometimes takes the focus off God, with all of that.”
But it was Massoumeh, surprisingly to me—since I had always supposed and still do suppose that she is a conventional Muslim, whose interviews seemed to indicate the most resistant, empowered relationship with her religion.
Although she once attended the mosque regularly in Iran, Massoumeh stopped doing so as a young wife “because every women talking about husband, clean home”3 there. After the revolution, she resisted numerous policies of Shari’a. For instance, she did not “agree with mullah[‘s prohibition of sexy television] because you must give to children everything and then [let them decide not to watch].” In her own home, she permitted such viewing. Nor did she agree with the idea that girls could marry very early because it was sanctioned by the Qu’ran: “I don’t like that because maybe that was good time Muhammed life. No yet.” In the presence of her husband and son, Massoumeh stated that she believed Persian women had been treated unfairly under the religious laws, arguing for a woman’s right to divorce if her “husband was angry and hit her.” Massoumeh had raised her daughter so that she was able to attend a university; the younger woman is now a successful architect and city planner in the midwestern United States. Massoumeh did not agree, either, with fanatical Islamic attitudes towards “kill people [in holy wars]. I don’t like; is not my religion [emphasis mine].” In the face of theocratic despotism, she and her husband sold their home in order to send their son out of Iran when he became eligible for the draft. In summary, Massoumeh claimed, and I believed her, that “Anything I don’t like, I never tell is my religion; I need religion because I like that religion I feel.”
Much of what I have just written will be read as an odious example of false consciousness. To this criticism, I would like to respond that by recognizing materialism and its ideological offspring as one set of socially constructed, generative views among many, members of the academy may have much to gain in terms of enriched theory and enhanced practice. The possibility is worth considering that the ascendancy of materialism in the West may have peaked at least for some time. “Just as the end of the Cold War brought about a new geopolitical situation, the global movements of people have brought about a new georeligious reality” (Eck, 2001, 4):
Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims are now part of the religious landscape of Britain, mosques appear in Paris and London, Buddhist temples in Toronto, and Sikh gurdwaras in Vancouver . . . . In the United States [add] to India’s wide range of religions those of China, Latin America, and Africa. Take the diversity of Britain or Canada, and add to it the crescendo of Latino immigration along with the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Flilpinos. This is an astonishing new reality. We have never been here before.
How long the academy will continue to proceed blinkered to the religious implications of globalization is a question that should concern us. The academy’s longstanding prejudice against religious forms will not be rooted out easily, however, for it serves at least two inevitable purposes. First, to consolidate power and to thrive as an institution, the academy must untiringly assert what it is not. If this involves “a world system of barriers, maps, frontiers, police forces, customs, and exchange controls” (Said, 1994a, 307), we need not be surprised.
Every culture requires the existence of another, different, and competing alter ego. The construction of identity—for identity, whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain, while obviously a repository of distinct collective experiences, is finally a construction in my opinion—involves the construction of oppositions and “others” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from “us.”
As for the second inevitable purpose served by the prejudice against religion, Said observes that the “modern empire requires, as Conrad said, an idea of service, an idea of sacrifice, an idea of redemption. Out of this you get these great, massively reinforced notions of, for example, in the case of France, the mission civilisatrice. That we’re not there to benefit ourselves, we’re there for the sake of the natives” (1994b, 66). In the paternalistic phrases of cultural theorists usually so enlightened and open-minded, the religiously attuned academic senses a residual desire to witness to the Truth.
This essay benefited from the perceptive advice of secular analyst Iraj Omidvar. The author would also like to thank Charlotte Thralls for encouraging her to take on this research and for helping her shape early drafts of the essay.
(1) Background
(2) Personal commitment torganized religion
(3) Feelings as a religious person in the academy and/or in a foreign country
(4) Opinions about the relevance of religious practice tsocial behavior
This paper is dedicated to the memory of D.L.
Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.
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1. When she arrived at this passage, she commented sweetly, “I didn’t know this was fiction.”
2. A Shi’ah practice much like prostitution in the West.
3. n.b. these women also were resisting.
4. Not all questions were asked of each participant.
Copyright remains exclusively with the author.