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Theorizing Modernities article

Northern Ireland’s Troubled Relationship with Religion: Structures, Practices, and Definitions


Banner,July 12, 2021 Orange Parades, crossing Donegall Square South, Belfast, Northern Ireland (Ballysillan Loyal Orange Lodge 1891). Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism addresses urgent concerns about the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence. The use of the terms religious claims and sacralize in the book’s title prompt readers to move beyond taken-for-granted assumptions that religion is inherently violent or that religion in and of itself causes conflict or makes conflict more deadly.

Such assertions have been put forward in the academic literature as well as in the public sphere, especially in discussions about Israel/Palestine, the case study that comprises the backbone of the book. After Rouhana and Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concise introduction, which includes a useful three-mode framework for understanding sacralized politics, the first five chapters delve into the case of Israel, while Khaled Hroub’s final chapter addresses the relationship between Palestinian nationalism and religion.

The focus on Israel allows the editors (and contributors) to argue convincingly for scholarship that pays close attention to the colonial roots of sacralized politics. Settler-colonial theory is at the heart of the book. But the value of comparative volumes such as this one lies in their ability to bring together different examples, identify commonalities and divergences, and impart lessons that can be learned about and applied across various cases.

The Trouble with Religion and Colonialism in Northern Ireland

The only other case that is addressed in more than one chapter is Northern Ireland, which is one of the world’s most-studied cases of religion and peacebuilding. It featured in R. Scott Appleby’s field-shaping The Ambivalence of the Sacred as a site “saturated” with effective faith-based peacebuilders. It also was the empirical laboratory for John Brewer’s theoretical framework that sought to explain faith-based contributions to peacebuilding.

The value of comparative volumes such as this one lies in their ability to bring together different examples, identify commonalities and divergences, and impart lessons that can be learned about and applied across various cases.

Apart from the work of scholars specializing in religion (myself included), however, scholars studying Northern Ireland’s Troubles (circa 1968–1998) have downplayed the role of religion, with John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary arguing strongly for religion’s insignificance. Their description of religion as an “ethnic marker” has been widely accepted. Such readings have been contested by Steve Bruce in his work on the impact of preacher-politician Reverend Ian Paisley and by Claire Mitchell in her emphasis on the social significance of religion.

Similarly, the extent that colonialism is a constituent cause of Northern Ireland’s twentieth-century violence has often been brushed aside, particularly by those advocating a “two communities” approach to understanding the conflict. This approach emphasizes internal differences between Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist (PUL) and Catholic-Nationalist-Republican (CNR) communities and underplays the wider role of the British state, particularly as a historic colonial power.  Moreover, PUL understandings of the violence are often framed in terms of terrorist violence and state responses to it, in direct opposition to settler-colonial interpretations of conflict. This volume’s foregrounding of settler colonialism helps us understand not only its explanatory power, but also contestation and resistance to it across different contexts.

At first glance, the tendency to side-step the religious and colonial aspects makes the Northern Ireland case sit uneasily in the volume. The titles of the two chapters reflect this: David Lloyd writes on “Protestantism and Settler Identity: The Ambiguous Case of Northern Ireland” (emphasis mine), while Liam O’Dowd’s chapter is titled “Does Religion Still Matter?”

Settler Colonialism and Religious Claims

Lloyd argues that a settler-colonial framework helps explain how Protestantism/Unionism/Loyalism dominated Northern Ireland from its creation in 1921. Unionist elites structured politics and society to protect their interests and religious claims were constructed to justify division (and superiority). This dovetails with other chapters in the volume, which emphasize how religious claims are used to legitimate already powerful political structures.

Lloyd’s chapter contains a striking photograph of a flag incorporating the Star of David with traditional Loyalist symbols: the red hand of Ulster and the British crown. There is another photograph of a mural proclaiming Catholic-Nationalist-Republican solidarity with Palestine. Of course, these images cannot be understood as popular endorsements of settler-colonial theory. But they do demonstrate how, on the streets of Northern Ireland, Loyalists identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.

Lloyd contrasts Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, which he characterizes as a post-colonial society in which Catholic and Protestant identities have lost their salience. I agree with Lloyd on this point to a certain extent, although he does not fully acknowledge that Protestants experienced real and structural violence in the early years of the Irish state, prompting the migration of some Protestants across the border. Nonetheless, this should not detract from Lloyd’s wider point that in Northern Ireland political and social structures have manufactured colonial mentalities.

On the streets of Northern Ireland, Loyalists identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.

There is an important lesson in Lloyd’s focus on structures: when structures change, identities and ideologies may follow and also change. More than two decades after Northern Ireland’s peace agreement this process has been halting and slow. But the dramatically reduced levels of violence and increases in those who identify as neither unionist nor nationalist nevertheless provide some hope for other violent contexts—especially if powerful external actors (like the British, Irish, and American governments, in the Northern Ireland case) incentivize structural change.

How Religion Still Matters

If Lloyd’s concerns are with structural changes in Northern Ireland, O’Dowd focuses more on drawing on the Northern Ireland case to critique the secular-religious dichotomy that has been prominent in global debates. He argues that a fuller understanding of the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence can be gained by understanding religion “primarily as a category of practice (as vernacular) rather than as a category of belief.”  O’Dowd’s conceptualization of vernacular practice is not rooted simply or solely in activities like churchgoing or other forms of religious observance. Rather, it is grounded in an urban geography of conflicted cities which contain religious sites that are important for place-making and marking territorial segregation.

In Belfast, such sites include church buildings, which remain focal points for marking territory in a still largely segregated city; memorial gardens and plaques for the Troubles’ dead (which are often in or near church buildings); the routes of Orange Order parades, understood as mechanisms for marking, maintaining, or claiming territory; and funerals and the memory of funerals, including those for members of paramilitaries. As such, vernacular religious practice helps keep the memory of violence alive in often divisive ways.

These observations resonate with my own research for Considering Grace: Presbyterians and the Troubles. While the book focused on the experiences of churchgoing Presbyterians, the importance of funeral practices and church-based memorialization for the wider PUL community shone through.

The concept of vernacular religion expands the category of religion to many who would not identify as religious or engage in conventional religious observance. For O’Dowd, this is how religion still matters—even as Northern Ireland becomes more “secular” in terms of adherence to Christian beliefs and practices.

But What is Religion?

O’Dowd’s contribution is valuable because it goes against the main thrust of many of the other chapters in the book: it is not describing how religious claims are used to justify state power. Hroub’s chapter also goes against the grain, concentrating on the lack of religious claims within Palestinian nationalism. These chapters provide a complementary perspective, inviting readers beyond the focus on religious claims to ask: What exactly is religion? In particular, O’Dowd invites readers to look beyond the religious-secular dualism and in doing so challenges the way that (primarily) western scholars have framed debates about religion and nationalism.

Likewise, my work on Northern Ireland resists the reduction of religion to religious claims and instead emphasizes how religion is embedded in everyday practices and assumptions about one’s own religious community. These practices and assumptions can be reinterpreted to drive transformation. For example, during the Troubles grassroots leaders in the social action organization Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland (ECONI) challenged assumptions about their own religious community, and disputed religious claims made by prominent politicians like the Reverend Ian Paisley.

Ultimately, O’Dowd’s contribution supports the book’s assumption that religious claims lie behind sacralized politics. But the question, “What is religion?” remains open throughout the volume, inviting further research.

Future Debates

My more recent research takes up that invitation, continuing to resonate with the “everyday” turn in the study of religion. It focuses on areas such as the role of prayer amongst faith-based peacebuilders and the role of clergy during periods of intense violence. For the late Fr Gerry Reynolds, the practice of prayer was intertwined with his peacebuilding activism, which was in part motivated by repudiating oppositional aspects of Catholic nationalist identity. My study of Presbyterians during the Troubles argued that reducing religion to high-level religious claims has meant that one of clergy’s primary roles in the aftermath of violence has been overlooked: acting as “first responders” who provide pastoral support for victims through prayer and presence. Many of these faith-based peacebuilders and “first responders” resist what this book describes as sacralized politics; and for them, religion is not “vernacular,” it is intense and personal.

To me, such distinctions lie at the heart of future debates in this field. This volume provides a great service in prompting us to begin thinking through them.

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Gladys Ganiel
Gladys Ganiel is Professor in Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. Her
specializations are religion and conflict in Northern Ireland, religion on the island of Ireland, evangelicalism, and the emerging church. She has published six authored/co-authored books and more than 50 articles and chapters, including The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (Oxford 2014), co-authored with Gerardo Marti, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland (Oxford 2016), and Evangelicalism and Conflict in Northern Ireland (Palgrave 2008). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland (Oxford 2024).  She is currently researching “Religion in Societies Emerging from Covid-19,” a Trans-Atlantic Platform partnership with Montreal, Bremen, and Warsaw, funded by the AHRC.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on When Politics are Sacralized


In the postsecular moment that the humanities now finds itself in, it is tempting to regard the questioning of the role of religion in politics as one that is old hat. Religion has always been political postsecular critics of liberalism and its secular framework have argued. In this instance, the postsecular represents the demystification of secular reason as neutral with regard to religion and invites renewed inquiry into the theological roots of secularity. Given this claim, our duty as scholars is to reveal the entanglements of religion with the state rather than contest them. And yet, without necessarily questioning the analytic truth of the co-constructed nature of religion and politics, When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, edited by Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian, reminds us that the concepts of the secular and sacred are mobilized in ways that often have devastating real world political and social consequences. More specifically, in this wide-ranging volume, Rouhana and Shaloub-Kervorkian show that religion has served states across the world in legitimating claims to sovereignty in order to justify oppressive policies.

Whether it is Zionist claims to an exclusively Israeli Jewish state, Hindutva claims to an exclusively Indian Hindu state, or Sinhalese Buddhist claims to an exclusively Buddhist Sri Lankan state, in various settings political leaders in ostensibly secular states have drawn on religious claims to shore up their authority and suppress dissent. In addition to these examples, others discussed in the book include Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, and Palestine. The risk in bringing so many different examples together under one volume is that any generalizable results will be lost in the details. However, by laying out a framework within which these essays operate in their introduction, the co-editors persuasively show how nationalism, religion, and the state have been forged in the fires of western modernity and spread around the world.

The contributors to the symposium on this important book toggle between providing their own examples of the sacralization of political claims and the wider theoretical claims with which the book asks us to reckon. Gladys Ganiel draws on her research in Northern Ireland to show the importance of analyzing political and social structures in changing political and social realities. She contends that future work on religion should also focus on the everyday, intimate experiences of religion. Joram Tarusarira, meanwhile, compares the cases in the book with that of Zimbabwe, especially in the religious rhetoric surrounding former President Robert Mugabe and the churches that shored up his authority. His claim, in the end, is theologically normative (and echoes the prophetic strain in Christianity): When Christians become more invested in shoring up political power, they risk forgetting their mission to challenge authority.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Raef Zreik move in more theoretical directions. Hurd engages with the risk inherent in the co-editors contention that secularization would lead to more peaceful societies. Unlike the postsecular critics mentioned up front in this essay, however, Hurd is keen to show that unravelling the theological roots of the secular is not simply an academic exercise, but instead is one that allows us to address substantial issues of inequality more directly. It does so by drawing our attention to different modes of religious interpretation that might otherwise be obscured if we were to assume that all religion is poisonous. Raef Zreik wrestles with the need for conceptual knowledge but also the need to tie conceptual knowledge to material contexts. He traces the desire for abstraction back to Immanuel Kant and follows it through to other major figures and trends in US and European philosophy. In doing so, Zreik asks us to reckon with the deeper theoretical stakes of comparative work like that carried out by the contributors to this book.

Given the genealogical turn that has no doubt also influenced the postsecular turn, comparative studies are often seen as inherently risky. Do they not obscure the particularities of a situation in order to advance a generalizable thesis? What Rouhana and Shaloub-Kervorkian, along with the contributors to this edited volume and symposium show, is that it is possible to engage in comparative work that is attentive to history, social and political complexity, and diversity without losing track of the more abstract concepts that are necessary to compare cross-culturally. In doing so, they remind us that we cannot restrain our work to one context. This is because even though modernity, secularization, and nationalism may have roots in the west, their effects have extended far beyond that origin.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Why is the Jewish Question Different from All Similar Questions?


Miniature showing the expulsion of Jews following the Edict of Expulsion by Edward I of England (July 18, 1290). Marginal Illustration from the Rochester Chronicle (British Library, Cotton Nero D. II.), folio 183v. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

This essay is based on a talk given during the “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Critique of Israel: Towards a Constructive Debate” conference held at University of Zurich from June 29–30, 2022.

To confront the relationship between antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the critique of Israel is a daunting challenge. In light of this monumental task, a remark from the Talmud comes to mind. Rabbi Tarfon said, “The day is short, the task is great. You are not obliged to complete the task, but neither are you free to give it up” (Bab. Tal., Ninth Tractate Avot, 2:20–21). This sums up my situation perfectly. My space is limited and the task is great. I could not possibly complete it, but neither am I capable of giving it up. Far from giving it up, the question of the Jewish Question is now at the center of my work on antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and the critique of Israel.

This post is divided into two parts. In part I, “Asking the Jewish Question,” I argue for one reading of the Question. I call it, for a reason that I hope becomes clear, “the antithesis reading.” In Part II, “Questioning the Zionist Answer,” I concentrate on an alternative reading, “the national reading,” which I see as underlying political Zionism in all its different forms. (In this essay, whenever I refer to Zionism I mean political Zionism and not the cultural Zionism associated, in the first place, with Ahad Ha’am.) There are many angles of approach to questioning Zionism. In Part II, I refer only to “the postcolonial critique” advanced by the Left —but I barely scratch the surface. (Barely scratching the surface is a good way to describe my essay as a whole.) I argue that, on the one hand, Jews who react against anti-Zionism (or come to the defense of Israel) tend to slip unawares between one reading of the Jewish Question and the other. On the other hand, the Left (including a section of the Jewish Left) tends to be too quick to dismiss their reaction when giving a postcolonial critique of Zionism and Israel. The combination of these two tendencies generates impassioned confusion—confusion that is not merely intellectual—on both sides. The analysis points to self-critique—on both sides—as a condition for the possibility of constructive debate.

I. Asking the Jewish Question

The so-called “Jewish Question” is a question in the sense of being a problem that needs to be solved. But who set the problem? For whom—in whose eyes—is there a problem about the Jews, the Jews as Jews? I suppose the first person who saw the Jews as a problem was Moses, who, time and again, complained to God about them; or maybe it was God who first saw the Jews as problematic. I don’t know. In any case, the problem they saw is not exactly the problem to which the so-called “Jewish Question” refers. The “Jewish Problem” is set by Europe: it is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews.

The term “the Jewish Question” became current in the 19th century. This was, says Holly Case in her book of the same name, “the age of questions,” by which she means questions with the form “the X question.” The X questions were a motley lot, but, by and large, they could be grouped under three headings: “social,” “religious,” or “national.” The Jewish Question, rather like the Jews themselves, had no fixed abode: it could be housed under any one of these headings. I shall focus on the view that, au fond, it was a national question, keeping company with such questions as the Armenian, Macedonian, Irish, Belgian, Kurdish, and so on. I do so because the national take on the Jewish Question is the one that is especially relevant to our conference, “Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Critique of Israel: Towards a Constructive Debate.” From Herzl to the present day, the Jewish Question has been construed in political Zionism as a national question; and Zionism lies at the heart of the current debate about Israel and antisemitism.

The “Jewish Problem” is set by Europe: it is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews.

The national take, however, is a mis-take. The Jews were not another case of a European nation whose future on the political map was the subject of debate. Rather, whether the Jews collectively are a nation in the modern (European) sense was up for debate: it was an integral part of the Jewish Question. Nor was there anything novel about querying their collective status: the status of the Jews was seen as problematic for a thousand years or more before the political formations that were the subject of the National Question in the 19th century came into being. And, while there were other groups in this period whose status as nations was up for debate, the case of the Jews was radically different. How so? The answer to this question gets to the core of the Jewish question.

I noted earlier that the Jewish Question is a question Europe asks itself about the Jews. But, although ostensibly about the Jews, ultimately it is about Europe: it is about Europe via the question of the Jews. It always has been, ever since antiquity and the days of the original European Union (as it were), the one whose capital city was Rome. Anti-Jewish animus is older than the Roman Empire, of course. But the story I have in mind begins with the conversion to Christianity of Flavius Valerius Constantinus, otherwise known as Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome. Constantine’s conversion on his deathbed gave birth, in a way, to the question that came to be called “Jewish.” From this point on, Europe has used the Jews to define itself. The question, which we might rename “the European Question,” was this: What is Europe? Answer: not Jewish. Down the centuries, as Europe’s idea of itself changed, this “not” persisted, though it took different forms.

Granted, in the “New Europe” that emerged after the shock and tumult of the Shoah and the Second World War, the role of Jews collectively has, to some extent, been inverted. We are now liable to function for Europe (as I have discussed elsewhere) more as an admired model than as a despised foil, with consequences for Western European policies towards the State of Israel. Furthermore, a thread of philosemitism runs through Europe’s history. Neither of these points, however, contradicts the account I am giving here of the negative role played by Jews down the centuries in Europe’s self-definition.

Clipping from The Jewish Chronicle of piece by Theodor Herzl entitled “A ‘Solution of the Jewish Question.'” January 17, 1896. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Thus, the Jewish Question existed as an issue for Europe avant la lettre. Seen as being in Europe but not of Europe, the Jews were the original “internal Other,” the inner alien to the European self, the Them inside the Us. First, in antiquity, Judaism was the foil against which Europe defined itself as Christian. Then, in the eighteenth century, the Jews were, as Adam Sutcliffe puts it in his book Judaism and the Enlightenment, “the Enlightenment’s primary unassimilable Other,” but no longer as the immovable object to Christianity ‘s irresistible force (254). Esther Romeyn explains: “For the Enlightenment, with its investment in universalism and civilization, the Jew was a symbol of particularism, a backward-looking, pre-modern tribal culture of outmoded customs and religious tutelage” (92). In the following century, the symbol flipped. Romeyn again (partly quoting Sarah Hammerschlag): “For a nationalism based on roots, the distinctiveness of cultures, and allegiance to a shared past, the Jew was an uprooted nomad or a suspect ‘cosmopolitan’ aligned with ‘abstract reason rather than roots and tradition’” (92; Hammerschlag, 7, 20). Europe now saw itself as a patchwork quilt of ethnic nationalities and the question arose: “How do the Jews fit in? Do they fit in? If they do not, what is to be done with them or with their Jewishness?” This was the Jewish Question in the 19th century, a new variation on a very old European theme: the theme of the anomalous Jew; or, more precisely, the antithetical Jew.

In short, the National Question was about ethnic difference and how Europe should deal with it. The Jewish Question was about the alien within—so deep within as to be internal to Europe’s idea of itself. Other groups and peoples, such as Arabs and Africans, have played the part of Europe’s external Others; this is written into the script of European imperialism and colonialism. They too have provided a reference point for Europe to define itself by way of what it is not. But Jews as Jews are not part of the colonial script. As Jews, we have been, ab initio, “insider outsiders,” a people who, in any given era, are the negative—the internal negative—to Europe’s positive: belonging in Europe by not belonging. Certainly, the Jewish Question, as it has been asked in different European places at different times, has features in common with other “X questions.” Moreover, the Jewish Question is not unique in being unique! Each “X question” is unique or singular in its own distinctive way. But the singularity of the Jewish case is such that it escapes the boxes in which other “X questions” are placed. Being seen as antithetical to Europe, like the alien race in the 1960 horror film Village of the Damned: this is what underlies the questionableness of “the Jews.” It is why (to allude to the title of my paper) the Jewish Question is different from all similar questions. I call this reading of the Jewish Question “the antithesis reading.” Whether it adequately describes the Jewish space in the European imagination, the salient point is this: this is how the Question sits in Jewish collective memory, continually working in the background of the Zionist answer to the Question.

II. Questioning the Zionist Answer

The mass of Jews, if only subliminally, bring collective memory to their embrace of Zionism and the State of Israel. They keep slipping, in the process, between two different readings of the Jewish Question, eliding the one with the other: the one I have just given and the one that Theodor Herzl gives in Der Judenstaat. Herzl’s (mis)reading has become a staple of the State of Israel as it defines itself (and, simultaneously, defines the Jewish people). In Der Judenstaat, he fastens onto the category of “nation.” He writes: “I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question …” (15). The subtitle of Der Judenstaat calls his political proposal, a state of the Jews, “An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question”; he means the national question. The indefinite article (“a Modern Solution”) is misleading. Herzl wrote to Bismarck: “I believe I have found the solution to the Jewish Question. Not a solution, but the solution, the only one” (245). Several times (four to be precise) the text refers to “the National Idea,” which, as Herzl envisages it, would be the ruling principle in the Jewish state and, as I read him, in the rest of the Jewish world too (see Der Judenstaat, 49, 50, 54 and 70). The latter idea, if not explicit, is coiled up inside Herzl’s text. I call his reading of the Jewish Question “the national reading.”

Zionism, both as a movement and as an ideology, has changed a lot since Herzl wrote his foundational pamphlet. It has developed two political wings (left and right); it has both secular and religious varieties; and it has produced a state: the State of Israel. But, fundamentally, Herzl’s take on the Jewish Question—figuring it as a national question, putting “the National Idea” at the heart of Jewish identity—has persisted to the present day. This is reflected in the Nation-State Bill (or Nationality Bill), which, upon being passed in the Knesset in 2018, became a Basic Law: Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish People. The law is “basic,” not only for the constitution of the Jewish state but also for the Zionist goal of reconstituting the Jewish people as “a nation, like all other nations” with a state of its own, as Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence puts it. This means reconstituting Judaism itself.[1]

Why do so many rank and file Jews across the globe appear to accept this reconstitution of their identity? Why did Britain’s current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, call Zionism “one of the axioms of Jewish belief”? How could he write: “Open a Jewish daily prayer book [siddur] used in any part of the world and Zionism will leap out at you.” Zionism, noch, not Zion. When exactly did Judaism convert to the creed of “the National idea”? in January 2009, when Operation Cast Lead was in full swing in Gaza, why was London’s Trafalgar Square awash with Israeli flags held aloft by British Jews? I witnessed this for myself. I was part of a small Jewish counter-demonstration that was spat at and jeered by some of the people—fellow Jews—in the official rally. How did people who are otherwise decent, people who uphold human rights, suddenly become ardent fans of forced evictions, house demolitions, and military violence against unarmed civilians? No doubt, there are zealots who would tick this box in the name of “the Jewish nation-state.” But zealotry is not what moves the mass of Jews to flock to the flag. If they identify with Israel (or defend it at all costs), it is not because they are persuaded intellectually by the “National Idea” (which is what underlies Herzl’s “national reading” of the Jewish Question), but because they feel viscerally the unbearable burden of the Question (which underlies the “antithesis reading”). When they wave the Israeli flag, it is certainly a gesture of defiance, and possibly hostility, aimed at Palestinians; but, at bottom, it is aimed at Europe—not just at the centuries of exclusion and oppression, but at the sheer chutzpah of Europe’s asking “the Jewish Question”—a question to which there is no right answer, because there is no right answer to the wrong question.[2]

But we Jews, understandably, are hungry for an answer that will put an end to the price we have paid for the nature of our difference. Political Zionism might appear to provide the answer. Paradoxically, the Zionist answer consists in taking Jews out of Europe to the Middle East in order to be included in the European dispensation. (Or you could say: normalizing by conforming to the European norm; it’s as if, by leaving, we’ve arrived.) Leading Zionist figures, from Herzl to Nordau to Ben-Gurion to Barak to Netanyahu, have placed “the Jewish state” in Europe, or see it as an extension of Europe.  As Herzl wrote, “We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia” (30).  More recently Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted saying, “We are a part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe.” So, the concept of the Jewish people becomes ethno-national—just like the real European thing; newcomers, who are largely from Europe, create a home for themselves by dispossessing the people who previously inhabited the land—just like a European colony; they turn their home into a state, just like certain former European colonies (such as the “White” dominions of Canada and Australia). Then there is the way their state—Israel—conducts itself in what is generally regarded as part of the Global South. It subjugates, à la Europe, the previous inhabitants of the land; it systematically discriminates against them; it expands its territory via settlers—a classic European practice; and it enters the Eurovision song contest. In all these respects (except perhaps the song contest), Israel courts a postcolonial critique. The Left are happy to oblige. In a way, the postcolonial critique is the ultimate compliment, the capstone on Zionism’s European solution of Europe’s Jewish Problem.

This prompts a surprising question, one that might seem ludicrous or at least redundant, but follows logically from the argument so far. It is this: Since political Zionism locates the state of Israel in Europe, and since Israel conducts itself in the manner of a European colonizing power, what is so objectionable to the generality of Jews—those who close ranks around Zionism and the state of Israel—about a critique that precisely treats Israel as a European state? The answer is that there is a piece missing from the stock postcolonial discourse, a discourse that folds Zionism completely, without remainder, into the history of European hegemony over the Global South, as if this were the whole story. But it is not; and the piece that is missing is, for most Jews, including quite a few of us who are not part of the Jewish mainstream regarding Zionism and Israel, the centerpiece. Put it this way: For Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (like my grandparents), the burning question was not “How can we extend the reach of Europe?” but “How can we escape it?” That was the Jewish Jewish Question. Like Europe’s Jewish Question, it too was not new; and it was renewed with a vengeance after the walls of Europe closed in during the first half of the last century, culminating in the ultimate crushing experience: genocide. Among the Jewish answers to the Jewish Jewish Question was migration to Palestine. But, by and large, the Jews who moved to Palestine after the Shoah were not so much emigrants as (literally or in effect) refugees. This does not, for a moment, justify the dispossession of the Palestinians, let alone the grievous injustices inflicted upon them by the State of Israel from its creation in 1948 to the present day. But it does put a massive dent into the story told in the postcolonial critique. We need another, more nuanced and inclusive, story.

For Jews in the shtetls of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s (like my grandparents), the burning question was not ‘How can we extend the reach of Europe?’ but ‘How can we escape it?’

In a sense, both the “national reading” of the Jewish Question, which Zionism assumes and Israel embodies, and the postcolonial critique of Israel and Zionism, are culpable in the same way: both take an existing European paradigm and apply it to the Jewish case, without so much as a mutatis mutandis. Neither passes muster. Moreover, the omission of what is, for most Jews, the centerpiece of the story behind Zionism and the creation of Israel erases a crucial feature of Jewish historical experience and collective memory. Not only does this erasure vitiate the postcolonial critique, it also feeds the suspicion that many Jews harbor that the critique is malign. It has a familiar ring. They feel, in their guts, that it is another slander against the Jews, a new expression of an old animus—antisemitism by any other name. To put it mildly, this is an exaggeration. The Left, in turn, are skeptical about this reaction. It has a familiar ring. They feel, in their guts, that it is disingenuous, a cynical ploy to suppress criticism of Israel. This too, to put it mildly, is an exaggeration. The more one side reacts to the other side, the more the other side reacts to them. This is not a debate. It is a bout, a wrestling bout, where the two antagonists are locked in a clinch, as inseparable as lovers.

The analysis in this essay suggests that each of the adversaries is in the grip of certain states of mind, connected to particular blind spots. In one case, it is confusion about the meaning of the Question that Europe has persisted in asking about the Jews, plus obliviousness to the injustices done to Palestinians by the Jewish “nation-state.” In the other case, it is confusion over the limits of a postcolonial critique, plus obliviousness to what it is that leads so many Jews to react understandably and, to an extent, legitimately, against that critique. The upshot, on the one side, is demonization of the Left; on the other side, demonization of Zionism. Accordingly, the question each side needs to ask is not “How can I break the hold of the other?,” but “How can I break my hold on the other?” “How,” that is to say, “can I loosen the grip that certain confused ideas and powerful passions have over me?” In short, if a futile bout is to turn into a constructive debate, what is needed is self-critique. This is not asking too much of ourselves. But the task is great, and life is short.

[1] The best treatment that I have seen of a cluster of questions surrounding Jewish identity, Zionism, and the state of Israel is in the work of Yaacov Yadgar, Professor of Israel Studies, University of Oxford. See especially his two books: Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism, and Judaism and Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East.

[2] My current work in this area is focused on developing the idea of unasking the Jewish Question.

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Brian Klug
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
Global Currents article

Religion, Politics, and Trump’s Christian Nationalism


“One Nation Under God Indivisible” poster from Stop the Steal rally in Raleigh, NC on January 6, 2021. Photo Credit: Flickr user Anthony Crider. CC BY 2.0.

A key paradox at the heart of American politics is that the United States is a deeply religious society with a secular institutional framework. This anomaly is rooted in a compromise embodied in the Constitution over the proper relationship between religion and state. Like most contentious issues, however, this debate remains a source of conflict. Moreover, those advocating a theocratic vision for the country have gained ground in recent years. The strength of this vision—and of the religious right—however, has less to do with an increased religiosity among Americans than with the conscious manipulation of conservative religion for partisan gain. Conservative donors, strategists, and politicians have long used religion and race to persuade working class Whites to vote along cultural lines, not class lines. While the intent may have been to elect pro-business Republicans (and to enable a hawkish foreign policy), the effect has been to normalize a right-wing vision of Christian nationalism. More to the point, the instrumental use of conservative religion has empowered a culture war dynamic that has taken on a life of its own and, in the process, transformed the Republican Party and facilitated the rise of Donald Trump.

Religion and American Politics

A key debate at the founding of this country was whether or not there should be an established church. Early Puritans (and their heirs) assumed that political unity required a high degree of religious uniformity and, thus, supported a close affiliation of religious authority and political power. From this view, the regulation of religious thought and practice was seen as a legitimate function of government. On the other hand, dissenting Puritans (such as Roger Williams), Enlightenment thinkers, and others advocated tolerance in matters of religion and belief. These individuals were critical of established churches and saw in the separation of church and state a means of protecting both politics from religion and religion from politics.

There was also the fact of religious diversity. The early American republic was characterized by a plurality of Christian denominations, so the question of establishment raised a related issue: Whose church? The framers of the Constitution found a compromise on the matter, which is embodied in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Despite this formal separation of church and state, American nationalism has always been intertwined with Protestant Christianity. Protestantism (and, later, the Judeo-Christian tradition more generally) provides the myths, symbols, and images of American national identity and has long provided a vernacular for American politics. The manner in which religion informs the country’s political life, however, has varied significantly over time. In the mid-twentieth century, modernist religious thought influenced the ecumenical secularism of the Kennedy/Johnson era, a trend which is captured in Robert Bellah’s notion of American civil religion. This interpretation of the American project was thoroughly religious, but it was also non-sectarian and at least theoretically inclusive (even if the historical circumstances were less so). During that same period, there was also an exclusive vision of religious nationalism that conflated conservative Christianity with a commitment to free market economics, segregation, and a deep anti-communist sensibility. This vision of religion and state—what Bellah referred to as the “American legion type of ideology that fuses God, country and flag” —was evident within the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the John Birch Society, and preached by evangelists such as Billy Hargis among others.

At issue in these competing visions of American nationalism were differences of both religious interpretation and political life. Modernist readings of the Christian tradition informed the ecumenical secularism of the mid-20th century, while a “literal” or fundamentalist interpretation informed the more exclusive notion of religious nationalism. Both provided a religious interpretation of the American experience, but in sharply contrasting terms. Politically, the question was whether the country ought to embrace an inclusive conception of American society—one tolerant of diverse communities and religions—or whether America was in fact a Christian nation that ought to privilege the ethnic motifs and religious beliefs of the dominant community. In short, should the state support an open or a closed vision of American society?  While secularism as neutrality was admittedly an unrealized ideal, it did provide the moral and conceptual framework for an inclusive, civic nationalism, and provided an opening for the civil and women’s rights movements of the 1960s. Significantly, such efforts to create a more inclusive society helped to fuel the conservative counter-revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

While secularism as neutrality was admittedly an unrealized ideal, it did provide the moral and conceptual framework for an inclusive, civic nationalism, and provided an opening for the civil and women’s rights movements of the 1960s.

These debates over both religion and politics informed the Culture Wars of the 1990s and have grown more intense over time. On the one hand, there is a genuine feeling among conservative Christians today that traditional values are under threat from an amoral secular culture that has ostensibly banned religion from the public square. Central to this argument is an assumption that secularism is invariably hostile to religion, never neutral. Moreover, it is the perceived demise of traditional values—and an assumption that religion has lost its influence in public life—that is argued to be the source of contemporary social problems. As former Attorney General William Barr noted in a 2019 speech, drug abuse, broken families, depression, and any number of other social pathologies are “the bitter results of the new secular age.” By banning prayer in school, legalizing abortion, and normalizing alternative lifestyles, American society had—according to Barr—allowed moral relativism to undermine the country’s traditional sense of moral order. The solution, according to Barr and others, is a more central role for religion in government and public life.

Opponents of this view argue that religious conservatives are trying to use the coercive power of the state to promote their vision of religion at the expense of all others. In the process, such activists are threatening democracy. The state promotion of conservative Christianity will necessarily infringe on individual rights and sanction policies that are inherently discriminatory. Central to this alternative perspective is a belief that the societal ills of which Barr and others speak are the byproduct of an unregulated market economy, not the loss of religion. Hence, insofar as there is a role for government here, it should focus on supporting education, providing healthcare, and ensuring the equal treatment of all citizens. Government should not be mandating prayer in public schools or limiting a people’s right to control their own body. The 2022 Supreme Court decisions striking down Roe v. Wade and expanding the use of public funds for parochial schools are indicative of where this debate stands today.

Positive Polarization

These are important issues and debates with deeply held views by people on all sides. However, America’s culture wars consume a disproportionate amount of attention in political discourse, particularly given the diminishing religiosity of the population. To understand the continued salience of these issues—and the outsized influence of right-wing religious organizations in American politics—one needs to look at the way in which the Republican Party has used conservative religion as a basis of populist mobilization. A key figure in this trend was Richard Nixon, who consciously used race, religion, and culture to appeal to White, working-class voters. Commonly referred to as the Southern Strategy, the intent of such appeals was to politicize divisive social issues in order to polarize society along cultural, not class, lines. Republican Party strategists believed that this type of “positive polarization” would diminish the salience of economic issues as a basis for voting and split the Democratic coalition that had dominated the country since the 1930s and 1940s.

In pursuing this strategy, Nixon (and later Republicans) readily conflated an evangelical reading of Protestant Christianity with conservative policy priorities, such as tax cuts, free market economic policies, and an assertive foreign policy. They also used racial “dog whistles” to court Southern Democrats and used the fear of communism to smear liberals, Keynesian economic policies, the media, and the educated elite. This type of rhetoric was meant to appeal to conservative Catholics (especially in the Northeast) as well as conservative Protestants by providing a priestly affirmation for traditional patterns of social order.  The Nixon strategy also treated the far right as a constituency to be courted, not shunned. In doing so, the instrumental manipulation of conservative religion helped to normalize the ideas of right-wing extremism and provided them a home within the Republican Party.

Richard Nixon, U.S. Republican nominee for President, smiles while standing on his motorcade car and giving a “victory” sign during a ticker-tape parade northbound on S. LaSalle St. at W. Monroe St. in the Chicago Loop, September 4, 1968. Photo credit: Flickr user GPA Photo Archive. CC BY-NC 2.0.

The basic contours of Nixon’s Southern Strategy have informed Republican campaigns at all levels for the past fifty years. Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution was premised on the same kind of right-wing populism, appeals to conservative Christianity, and racial dog whistles, as Nixon. George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign (and Pat Buchanan’s 1992 bid for the presidency) similarly used race, religion and culture to draw sharp distinctions between Republicans and their opponents. The election of George W. Bush—and the events of 9/11—had a profound impact on this dynamic and greatly strengthened the forces of an exclusive religious nationalism. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were clothed in a religious rhetoric that fused conservative Christianity with American militarism and support for the “war on terror” became a litmus test for American patriotism.

Significantly, there were two enemies during the George W. Bush era: those within and those without. On the one hand, there were the forces of so-called “Islamofacism” which were said to represent a civilizational threat akin to fascism and communism. On the other hand, there were the internal enemies—liberals, secularists, and critics—who were characterized as insufficiently patriotic and not serious about national security. In this way, the Bush Administration (and the Bush campaigns) used the war on terror as a culture war issue to further polarize the American electorate. Liberal policies and politicians were subsequently denigrated as culturally inauthentic and Democrats as hostile to “traditional values.”

While the election of Barack Obama seemed to indicate that America had turned a corner and returned to the ecumenical secularism of an earlier era, this proved illusory. Obama’s election generated its own conservative backlash and spawned a range of conspiracy theories about the pending “Islamization” of the West and a “stealth jihad” facilitated by the political left. In this context, activists on the right conflated the threat of terrorism with anti-minority and anti-immigration sentiments and identified multi-culturalism as a key threat to the unity of the nation. Donald Trump rode this anti-Obama backlash all the way to the White House.

Trump’s Christian Nationalism

This context helps to explain the Trump phenomenon. In many respects, Trump was the culmination of the Southern Strategy and the party’s emphasis on culture war politics. Trump was a lead voice in the “Birther” movement that was premised upon the lie that Obama was not actually born in the United States and that he was secretly a Muslim. Trump’s right-wing populism also fused American militarism with an amorphous appeal to “traditional values.” Where Trump differed from earlier Republicans was in his overt xenophobia and racism. While racist appeals had long been implicit in the strategies of positive polarization, they were explicit in the Trump era. It was also clear that Trump was far more in tune with the right-wing base than the Republican party leadership, indicating that the party had lost control of the forces which it had helped to unleash.

One perplexing part of this story was Trump himself. How is it that he would become a standard bearer of the Christian right when his misogyny, materialism, and “hatred for the other,” stood in such sharp contrast to the essence of Jesus’ teachings? As former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson noted, Trump’s ethos “smack[s] more of Nietzsche than of Christ.” And, yet, Trump had the overwhelming support of White evangelical Protestants, winning a greater percentage of that demographic in 2016 than either Reagan or Bush. White, conservative Catholics were similarly supportive and gave Trump an edge in key swing states in 2020.

There are a number of possible explanations for this anomaly, but a key issue can be found in the aforementioned conflict over competing visions of the nation. Although Trump—a thrice married casino owner who pays off his adulterous lovers—may not be an exemplary Christian, he is nonetheless seen as an aggressive leader in America’s culture war. According to individuals like William Barr or Franklin Graham (among others), Christians are an oppressed—and persecuted—population within an increasingly secular society. The country, in short, is in a state of civil war and Trump is seen as the strong man who is uniquely able to stand up to the “liberal elite.”

Although Trump—a thrice married casino owner who pays off his adulterous lovers—may not be an exemplary Christian, he is nonetheless seen as an aggressive leader in America’s culture war.

Hence, the call to “take back our country” refers to the idea that conservative Christians (Catholics and Protestants) need to take control of the pillars of American society—government, media, education, and the law—and use that control to end the separation of church and state and reshape civil society in a manner consistent with their interpretation of the Christian tradition. This vision of society, moreover, is one that reaffirms traditional patterns of social hierarchy and racial privilege. For all his faults, Trump was seen as able to deliver on this promise. In short, it was not a Christian ethic that drew conservative Christians to Donald Trump, but rather a sense of political tribalism and a base transactionalism. In exchange for their political support, Trump was willing to pass laws and appoint judges that would privilege their conservative, “Christian worldview,” and that would roll back legal protections ensuring racial, gender, and marriage equality.

Another reason why Trump became the standard bearer in America’s culture wars is that he stood for nothing else. The entire point of politicizing issues like abortion, bathroom usage, and/or trans athletes is to distract the American electorate from the ill effect of economic policies that have contributed to the country’s deindustrialization and concentrated the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few. Trump’s culture war politics, in short, were primarily about firing up the base and distracting the press and the public from the lack of an agenda beyond tax cuts, conservative judges, and self-enrichment. Disinformation and slander—from QAnon to the Big Lie—were an essential part of this strategy because they helped to create an image of Democrats as craven and hostile to the interests of working people.

Finally, the reason that Trump’s culture war politics plays so well is that Republican party operatives and conservative activists and media have been successful in pushing these narratives for over 50 years. In short, there was fertile ground for Trump’s scorched earth politics. The Republican Party’s politicization of religion successfully created a basis of popular support for itself, but the price has been high. The strategy of positive polarization has fueled the country’s divisive politics and talk of civil war and violence on the campaign trail is now shockingly common. The country also has a deeply politicized judiciary, where “renegotiating the boundaries between church and state is the [Supreme] Court’s current project.” America’s culture wars have also affected popular perceptions of Christianity. As one former Bush Administration official lamented, “the name ‘Jesus’ doesn’t bring to mind the things he said he wanted associated with his followers—love for one another; love for the poor, sick and imprisoned; self-denial; and devotion to God. It is associated with anti-abortion activities, opposition to gay rights, the Republican Party, and tax cuts.” For those who embrace Christ’s teachings on love, forgiveness, and social justice—and who are uneasy about the use of Christianity to glorify the pursuit of wealth and power—these trends will be deeply troubling.

This post is based on a presentation given at Valparaiso University in April of 2022.

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Scott Hibbard
Scott Hibbard is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at DePaul University.  He has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and advanced degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Georgetown University.  He is the author of Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India and the United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and co-author (with David Little) of Islamic Activism and U.S. Foreign Policy (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1997).
Theorizing Modernities article

A Conversation with Shaul Magid and Friends on Meir Kahane and Political Theology


In conjunction with the publication of the Journal of Religious Ethics’ special issue on Shaul Magid’s Meir Khanane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, Contending Modernities has partnered with the Kroc Cast Podcast to bring our audience a conversation on Magid’s book that includes leading scholars in Jewish studies and religious studies. Hosted by CM Co-Director and contributor to the special issue, Atalia Omer, this conversation features a wide-ranging discussion of the impact of Kahane’s life and work on political life in the US and Israel/Palestine. The panel includes Susannah Heschel, Robert Orsi, Yaniv Feller, Emily Filler, and Shaul Magid. Among the topics discussed are the challenges the book poses to how we think about the canon of modern Jewish thought, the critique of liberalism that Kahane posed, the continuing impact of Kahane’s thought on Israeli politics, and the way one’s own positionality is likely to impact the way one approaches the book. On the latter point, Omer draws special attention to the lack of surprise at Kahane’s more extremist and racist claims among Palestinians.

As Magid notes in his comments, the book is not a traditional intellectual biography, but is instead a book that uses the figure of Kahane as a lens through which to address what many would prefer to leave unaddressed, namely the racist and nationalist underside of Zionism. Given the European colonial origins of modern Zionism, Magid’s book and this discussion are in keeping with the Contending Modernities’ aim to draw attention to how coloniality and modernity, especially in their religious elements, continue to perpetuate racism, misogyny, and xenophobia today. We hope that after listening to the podcast, readers will take the time to explore each of the contributors’ response to the book in the Journal of Religious Ethics as well as the book itself.

 

 

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Global Currents article
Meghan J. Clark
Meghan J. Clark is Associate Professor of Moral Theology in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, St. John’s University in New York. She earned her Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College. Her research focuses on Catholic social thought, global development, human rights, peace, and justice. She is author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: The Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights (Fortress Press, 2014). In 2015, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Hekima University College, Nairobi, Kenya. In 2018, she was a Visiting Residential Research Fellow at the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham, UK. In 2017-2018, she was awarded a Vincentian Studies Grant to conduct fieldwork research with the Daughters of Charity in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. From 2010-2013, she served as a Consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Domestic Justice. Her research has been published in Theolgoical Studies, Journal of Catholic Social Thought, Journal of Moral Theology, Heythrop Journal, among others.
Global Currents article

Beyond the West: Nationalism, Religious Literacy, and the War in Ukraine


Orthodox priests saying offices during the Euromaidan protests, Jan 21, 2014. Image via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

Western interpretations on the war in Ukraine commonly ignore the importance of both nationalism and religion, even though such elements are arguably essential for understanding the sources of democratic resistance in Ukraine, the motivations behind Russian aggression, and the complex futures that confront the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. The following post critiques one example of western liberal reportage and offers an alternative reading that takes nationalism and religion seriously in the interpretive process.         

The War in Ukraine: Beyond Western Framing

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a campaign begun in 2014 and escalated with criminal brutality on February 24, 2022, many in the west began thinking about the political and social makeup of the Ukrainian nation for the first time. For millions, the New York Times’ flagship podcast The Daily became a place to hear expert analysis and reportage on the war in Ukraine interwoven with explanations of history and place in ways that are brief, digestible, and accessible. For instance, the episode of February 15—‘How Ukrainians View This Perilous Moment’—arranged a suite of powerful personal stories told from the capital Kyiv and several regional contexts into a narrative challenging President Putin’s assumptions about Ukrainian submission to the looming Russian takeover. How insightful such a report proved to be: since the 2022 invasion, the refrain Slava Ukraini (“Glory to Ukraine”) has evoked images of defiance in the face of tyranny, national sacrifice in the struggle against oppression, and of hope and despair on the outer edges of catastrophe.

The magnitude of western solidarity with Ukraine, both its military and humanitarian expressions, can arguably be explained by both the moral gravity and existential proximity of the conflict. These factors are embodied in how civilians have become collateral victims and strategic targets of Russian aggression. Of equal significance, I suggest, is the translatability of the Ukrainian resistance into the idioms of western liberalism. In particular, the discursive superstructure of “democracy versus autocracy” situates the war in Ukraine in a Manichean world that pits the struggle for freedom against the demagogic intentions of a tyrant. The name of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has become universally associated with democratic liberty, much as the names of others before him in different times and contexts. Such inspiring dynamics of solidarity-making are clearly welcome, especially as a sustained humanitarian response by the west toward millions of Ukrainian refugees will no doubt be required. 

Yet we are also provoked to ask what may be lost in translating the Ukrainian resistance through the discursive filter of “democracy versus autocracy,” and why this might impact the nature of our solidarity as well as long-term prospects for peace. How might the fight be reimagined beyond westernism and western interests? And how might this reimagining thicken our understanding of democracy and the resources that inform it? I return my thoughts to The Daily, the globally popular investigative podcast that also offers a portal into the liberal worldview, and arguably the best version of it. As its millions of followers would attest, The Daily is nothing if not highly scripted, tightly produced around dramatic pauses, metered interjections, the juxtaposition of serious content with tip-toe curiosity sound bites, evocative theme music, and the communication of mature and insightful analysis in tension with a kind of “explainer baby talk” where the listener is simultaneously informed and infantilized. The movement between these experiences, I suggest, mirrors liberalism itself, notably its nimble capacity to simplify collective phenomena for individual consumption via a reductively thin rendering of social space. In this context, what is left out of a story becomes as important as what is put in.  

The Heavenly Hundred: Religion, the Sacred, and National Belonging

Street Memorial to the Heavenly Hundred Victims, 2018. Image via Flickr user Adam Jones (CC BY 2.0)

The initial encounter in the podcast episode on February 15, 2022 illustrates this dynamic. The report first visits a memorial site in Kyiv dedicated to the 100-plus people who are remembered as the Heavenly Hundred. They were killed in a popular uprising, known as both the Maidan Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, that began in late-2013 against the Russian controlled government of Ukraine. Describing the site as “this black steel and granite monument with these kind of spectral faces taken from real life photos of individuals,” the Daily report accurately depicts the memorial as dedicated to a tipping-point event in the modern history of the Ukrainian nation, whose victims are lauded as heroes for the principles of democracy, human rights and freedoms. The podcast narrative twice emphasises the fallen as “individuals” who, collectively, “through the force of numbers, through the force of their own will,” overthrew the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Adding to the narrative is an encounter with “two elderly women there in headscarves, cleaning up the site.” As a final comment, the reporter conveys an explanation from one of the women about her actions. He says: “Every time one of the individuals who died during the uprising in 2014 has a birthday, she hangs their photos on a little holder here and rings a bell.”

End of scene.

The underlying emphasis of this brief account is one of civic defiance, of spontaneous ritualized choices by individual citizens, also depicted later in the report as “college students and history professors” joining volunteer brigades to fight the Russian incursion into Eastern Ukraine. Few would doubt the inspiration of such citizen courage, but as an educative process about the dynamics of resistance in Ukraine—of helping listeners to enter into a social and political space very different from their own; to understand, as the episode’s title suggests, “how Ukrainians view this perilous moment”—the Daily’s account at the memorial of the Heavenly Hundred is deficient in important ways. Such a criticism might seem unfair given the need to produce a fast-moving podcast, were it not that the missing elements in the story are also absent from all Daily reportage to date (again: what is left out is as instructive as what is put in). The elements to which I refer are those of religion and nationalism as formative resources of communal and institutional resistance to Russian aggression. Not coincidentally, I suggest, dynamics such as these also disrupt the ideological scripts of western liberalism. 

The Daily scene at the memorial of the Heavenly Hundred begins near what the reporter describes as a “small wooden chapel.” Such a detail provokes us to interrogate the religious aspects of the site, whether they are a central or ancillary dimension, and whether they are an original or a later addition to the lived practices of remembrance that occur there. In an essay titled “Commemoration and the New Frontiers of War in Ukraine,” Catherine Wanner offers an incisive answer:

A popular outpouring of grief over the deaths of protesters in February 2014 resulted in individuals creating vernacular memorial shrines, sometimes in the form of graves, to honor those killed … From the beginning, a prominent religious idiom was incorporated into commemorations, as it was in the protests themselves. Candles, icons, and prayer beads, which evoke the veneration of saints, are among the other objects with clear religious meaning that are placed near the shrines (334, italics added).

In 2014 I was invited to write about the place of religion in the Maidan Revolution, and was immediately confronted by how to interpret powerful images of Orthodox priests placing themselves at the deadly center of the protests, actions that added a more traditionally sacral dimension to the events that preceded the vernacular rituals of the post-revolution memorials. Functioning as a corrective to my initial interpretation that religion was indeed ancillary to the struggles for economic and democratic autonomy—and that these priests had less agency, for instance, than in the earlier anti-Communist struggles in Poland—Wanner attributes religion with both a primary and ongoing role in revolutionary sentiment. For instance, 

It has become a tradition for volunteers, soldiers, and others actively engaged in the war effort to come to the Maidan to light a candle near the portraits as a form of ‘blessing’ before they head to the front. In 2017 the exterior wall of St. Michael’s Monastery in downtown Kyiv, where the protesters notably took refuge during the Maidan protests, became the site of a ‘Wall of Remembrance for those Fallen for Ukraine.’ The notable presence of clergy during the protests gave way to a rapid expansion of the number of military chaplains who accompanied soldiers to the east (Wanner 334).

The Australian Stefan Romaniw, the first vice president of the Ukrainian World Congress and a participant in the Revolution of Dignity, recalls the coexistence of ecclesiastical leadership alongside grassroots activism at work in Maidan:  

I recall the street rallies—many hundreds of thousands of people started at Taras Shevchenko National University and marched to Maidan. I remember Patriarch Lubomyr Husar [Patriarch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church] in an open vehicle speaking to the crowd … Over the course of the revolution, politicians took to the stage, but slowly realized this was a civil revolution—a people’s movement. Civil society took charge.  

For scholars seeking to reinstate religious actors, interests, and practices within the political landscape, the reframing of the Revolution of Dignity through the lens of both vernacular and formal religious expressions would constitute an important finding. Such a reframing, to be sure, represents an advance in applying religious literacy to the Ukrainian struggle because we perceive something thicker and more culturally embedded in the modes of Ukrainian dissent. Specifically, many participants in both the 2014 revolution and the anti-Russian resistance today are buoyed by a sacredness beyond the temporal order just as much as they are motivated to uphold democratic sovereignty within it—and much less by the autonomous citizen-self as the sole occupant and hero of thinner liberal narratives. 

Yet the fusion of religion and national resistance could also be a legitimate cause for concern when applying perspectives more aligned with critical disciplines, such as the contribution of Diane Moore, which require religious literacy to include “an analysis of power and powerlessness” and ask, “Which perspectives are politically and socially prominent and why?” (384). Whatever roles history professors might have played, we do know for certain that the Maidan revolution was comprised of a variety of actors with a variety of interests, “from the liberal intelligentsia to hardcore nationalists.” The specter of a religious nationalism with strong affinities toward national chauvinism, therefore, creates interpretive dilemmas for understanding how some Ukrainians do indeed view this perilous moment. As Wanner observes, 

Religious institutions have tremendous political valence because of their ability to create and morally legitimate new cultural boundaries and the often unsavory emotions that lead to delineations of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ … Many supporters of the Maidan validate religiosity as a fundamental component of Ukrainian nationality (334). 

So we must ask, “nationality for whom”? Might religio-nationalist resolve not only galvanize resistance but also unlock historic legacies of social hostility toward religious minorities in Ukraine, including an increasing number holding to no religion? Critical approaches face a dilemma here: the recognition that religion has always been involved in the world of power has caused many to erase it as the mere epiphenomena of hegemonic structural interests, an inverted form of the modern liberal containment of religion as the mere expression of individualized ethics. In a departure from both approaches, and in solidarity with a scholarly tradition that wants to ask critical questions in-and-through religious beliefs, practices, and belongings, in what follows I suggest the legacies of religion in the war in Ukraine offer frameworks for understanding the broader constitutive forces of nationhood beyond western assumptions and a political hermeneutic guided by the frame of autocracy-democracy.

Religion in the Russian State and the Ukrainian Nation

It is important to briefly declare some of my assumptions and show how they apply to the context of the war. I understand the state to be a bureaucratic entity, and as a researcher more aligned to ethno-symbolic theories of nationalism, I part ways with modernist scholars of both a cosmopolitan and critical persuasion who assume that it is the state that creates the nation.1 While acknowledging the salient insights of a modernist like Siniša Malešević that states can powerfully mobilize nationalist sentiment via institutions, ideology, and networks of micro-solidarity, I also hold Benedict Anderson’s popular modernist idea of the nation as an “imagined community” to be far too anemic. To echo the writings of Anthony Smith, nations are not only imagined, they are willed, felt, remembered, and repurposed, and the deep cultural reservoirs from which such actions are often drawn predate the modern state and in some instances give rise to it. 

While states differ in polity and efficiency (for instance, often less totalized and more random [or aleatory] in their actions toward the vulnerable), the long held axiom of critical theory that states “see” a certain way remains important. In classical terms, the state is more of a Parmenidean entity—defined by unity, where all movement ultimately must serve the One. The state can assert religion as an archetype, as a “first form” indispensable to the reinforcement of a patriotic standard (or canon) and the upholding of sovereignty. The principal example of religion as archetype in the context of the war in Ukraine is the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and its relationship with the Russian state. In an important essay, Shakhanova and Kratochvíl examine the “patriotic turn” of the ROC via the discursive movements of nomination (naming key actors and concepts), predication (assigning value to actors and actions against a patriotic standard), and argumentation (the construction of a persuasive narrative), leading to the creation of key rhetorical topoi that are employed in the discourses of Russian education and politics. In education, the “topos of indispensability whereby (the Church as the only one who can protect Russia from moral decadence)” develops into a “topos of superiority (Orthodox patriotism is superior to all other kinds).” In politics, the “topos of moral supremacy (the Church’s moral tutelage of the state)” develops into the “topos of power struggle (Orthodox Christians have to be influential in politics)” (120). Religion as archetype is also seen in the authors’ appeal to a 2014 study by M. D. Suslov on the creation of the idea of “Holy Rus.” Here, the archetypal first form is violently imposed upon a geopolitical space, as forecast in President Putin’s now infamous essay of July 12, 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”

In contrast to the state, while different nations can be understood against common sets of ideals and concepts, the processes of their formation are both varied and dynamic. Thus, the nation is more of a Heraclitan entity—defined by movement and the possibility that the flows of history will yield new iterations at once recognizable and reconfigured. If the state can assert religion as a singular archetype, the nation can enable religion more as an ideal-type, that is, as a resource that can support multiple political forms. In the context of the war in Ukraine, religious traditions, practices, and interests have an ambivalent quality and can thus contribute to civil and political cultures of both inclusion and exclusion. Regarding inclusion, that President Zelensky is Jewish in a context shaped by histories not only of social hostility toward Jews but also their elimination as a people, becomes a powerful embodiment of democratic pluralism and the role that religious diversity plays to strengthen Ukrainian nationhood. The same can be said of the public unity in support of the Ukrainian resistance by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders on March 21, 2022 in the ancient port city of Odesa. 

Religion as archetype has been stridently challenged within the majority religious tradition of Christian Orthodoxy in the region. One such example can be found in the ideational texture of the recent statement, A Declaration on The “Russian World” (Russkii Mir) Teaching, by an international network of Orthodox scholars, clergy and lay people against the Russian ideology. First, the primary appeal is to interpretive practices of the Orthodox faith, notably the ethics that stem from situated readings of sacred text. Second, the affirmation of human equality (i.e. beyond confessional and partisan boundaries) is framed as a prophetic challenge to “all forms of government that deify the state.” Third, that a turning away (a metanoia) from the current conflict is also seen as a turning toward “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” The sentiments of the Declaration were also echoed in the Statement of Solidarity against Christian Nationalism signed by an international coalition of scholars instigated by a conference at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. The Tablet reports a detail from the conference that is relevant to the notion of religion as ideal-type:

At a public lecture during the conference, Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun encouraged Orthodox theologians to “weaken symphonia with the state, and strengthen symphonia with civil society.” The Ukrainian priest and academic used the metaphor of “symphonia” or musical unison to describe Orthodoxy’s relationship with the polity.

Religion understood as a set of both distinct yet malleable communal practices and a metaphor for civic unity encapsulates well the potential of religions as ideal-types in the service of the common good, the challenge to hegemonic injustice, and the building of nations.

Of course, symphonia also possesses an ambivalent quality. As William Schweiker has recently noted, in the case of the alliance between Putin and the ROC symphonia has led to belligerence over civility, thereby highlighting the importance of situating symphonia within the ideal-type of the nation rather than the archetype of a religio-state. Such a rejection would also restore transnational Orthodox unity. Notably, in a recent interview Fr. Cyril Hovorun appeals to Orthodox tradition for support of this idea:   

To restore such a unity, in my opinion, the Orthodox churches must condemn the ideology of the Russian world. Such a condemnation would be an update of the famous condemnation of “phyletism” (nationalism applied to ecclesiastical affairs) at the Council of Constantinople in 1872.

Latent within Hovorun’s appeal for a symphonia with civil society is a traditional rejection of the archetype of the religio-state in favor of a preferential option for the plural nation.

“Glory to Ukraine”: Religion and the Sacred Nation    

In the case of Russia’s war on Ukraine, we are arguably presented with a geopolitical adaptation of R. Scott Appleby’s prismatic and enduring concept of the “ambivalence of the sacred”: on the one side, “Holy Russia” founded on the archetype of a singular religio-political ontology; on the other, the Ukrainian nation in a resistance struggle understood by its citizens to be contextually and metaphorically “sacred.” The national exaltation of the Heavenly Hundred memorializes the Revolution of Dignity by infusing this sacredness throughout institutional and popular forms of Ukrainian resistance: the advocacy of traditional hierarchs—religious and civic—on behalf of an oppressed and endangered nation; and the accountability of those same hierarchs to the standards of sacred justice believed in traditional and vernacular ways by a citizen community. For the Ukrainian nation, therefore, the bifurcated discourse of “autocracy vs democracy” does not do justice to all that is at play in the circumstances of this terrible moment, nor to the multilayered and situated meanings of the refrain “Glory to Ukraine.” 

The dynamics of religion and nationalism are inextricably entangled in the scenarios that will unfold in the coming months and years, not only for Ukrainians but also for Russians. To not acknowledge those dynamics presents a serious deficiency in our understanding and our solidarity. When an elderly woman, whose history is intimately bound up in the story of both peoples, rings a bell at a grave of the fallen, it is unlikely that she intends to channel the powers of western liberal individualism to her cause; it is instead more reasonable to assume that she is releasing a sound that reverberates through spaces that are as primordial as they are modern, linked to communities of both the present and the past, and ritualized in the hope that the sustaining presences of a sacred social order will one day give rise to a renewed and better life for her people. 

Slava Ukraini.

____


1  For example, I have employed ethno-symbolic theory to argue that the constitutive dimensions of nationalism can be employed to counter the forces of national populism. See John A. Rees, “Religion, populism, and the dynamics of nationalism,” Religion, State and Society, 49, no. 3 (2021): 195–210. For a recent use of Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach in the study of religion and nationalism, see Gurharpal Singh and Giorgio Shani, Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Minority to an Ethno-Religious Diaspora (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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John Rees
John A. Rees, PhD. is Professor of Politics and International Relations at The University of Notre Dame Australia, where he co-convenes the Religion and Global Ethics program at the Institute for Ethics and Society. Dr. Rees was the 2022 Milward L. Simpson Visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Wyoming (January-May). This article is based on a public talk cohosted by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, delivered at the University of Notre Dame on April 28, 2022.
Theorizing Modernities article

Modernity, Coloniality, and Interiority in Kindred Spirits


Image of various archival materials discussed by Moore in Kindred Spirits. Image courtesy of the author with permission.

Thank you so much to my three generous colleagues, Kathleen Holscher, Niloofar Haeri, and Scott Appleby for their smart and thoughtful readings of my work, and to Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo for creating this space for a conversation about Kindred Spirits. It is an honor to see how the book has stretched to speak to scholars working in fields adjacent to my own, and engaging with them is a welcome chance to think more explicitly about shared themes in our field—modernity, colonialism, and spirituality—that may have been undertheorized in the book.  All of the thinkers have asked me to be a bit more explicit in my conceptual thinking. I’ll take this as an opportunity to deepen and clarify, and this is a most generous and welcome gift.

To begin with Scott Appleby’s essay, I must say that while reading it, I was seized with sudden flashbacks to my earliest semester teaching undergraduates fourteen years ago, when I would painstakingly try and define modernity for my students. I used Gustsavo Benievides’s Critical Terms essay, and would re-trace, whiteboard marker in my trembling hand, the various meanings of the Latin term modernus, and how it changed over time. More than a decade later now, I am in total agreement with Appleby that those debates seem to have fizzled out; I now rarely engage discussions about what we mean when we say “modernity.” Nonetheless I do appreciate Appleby’s point that I sometimes evoke the term more confusingly than maybe I should, sometimes descriptively, other times with a critical edge.

Grateful for the chance to clarify, I would say that my research relied on scholars of race and transatlantic modernity like Paul Gilroy to make an empirical point about the world that formed the protagonists of Kindred Spirits. Like those Gilroy writes about, some of the writers, poets, and activists in my book also experienced forced exile, fled violence, and lived rootless, vulnerable lives. This form of existence made friendship such an important anchor. This rootlessless also was something that writers like Claude McKay and Gabriela Mistral evoked in the art that give their works a wide, eclectic appeal and reach. This is a descriptive way of thinking about modernity: the global circuits carved from the violence of modernity—enslavement, wars, genocide—and the internationalist, eclectic art that came out of those same circuits. But the critical edge Appleby points to evokes the idea of the modern differently. One example here is where I suggest that male friendship offers an alternative to the dominant modes of male subjectivity that the modern world has on offer (think of the controlled, tough, independent “bottled up version of masculinity”).  I do think that modernity is a swirl of cultures, fantasies, hopes, and imaginations, but in the west, despite this empirical mix, there are dominate cultural ideals that define what it means to be modern. I would say that one of these is that men should be emotionally restrained, untethered, and unencumbered. This suspicion of male intimacy was also central to colonial ideologies. Fantasies of male intimacy and sexuality in colonial countries were recoded as sexual sin, in need of Christian intervention and restraint. Or, as Marie Griffith and others have shown, these fantasies became the grounds of elaborate romanticization of sexual freedoms unburdened by western religious constraints. In either case, the Christian west was seen to be the space where men lived lives of independence and restraint when it came to intimacy. Though living in Europe and the United States and Christian, the men I describe in Kindred Spirits lived lives in radical disjunction to that dominant norm. And much of the ideas for this alternative did come from medieval monks (whose affective lives were more “uncorked,” to use Appleby’s words). Marie Magdeleine Davy wrote on the elaborate love expressed among Cistercian monks and Brian Patrick Maguire has written beautifully on medieval male friendship. These were models of alternative ways to embody masculinity taken up by people like Jacques Maritain and Louis Massignon. The affective, even queer way Maritain and Massignon carried themselves is “modern” in a sense because modernity creates space for the perpetuation of hegemonic norms as well as their subversion. I hope this clarifies the point I was trying to make in the book.

I will add here that when Appleby writes that I exhibited a “reluctance to stand back from the reporting of  . . . richly detailed research” in some places, I felt he was peering into my soul a bit! The archival sources I used were so vast, so personal, so difficult to excavate, and the authors themselves were so prolific that it sometimes overwhelmed me. I feared I would never get out from under the sources. It is refreshing to now truly step back and bring these larger conceptual points into focus.

I do, however, depart from the conclusion that the “collective agency” of the men and women in my book “did not amount to much,” especially compared to “champions of the ressourcement such as Henri de Lubac and Marie-Dominique Chenu” and those like “Jacques Maritain….who interacted consistently with the Vatican.” I would emphasize here that the world I describe in Kindred Spirits includes Maritain and de Lubac, but by centering those more on the margins (like Davy, Massignon, McKay, Mistral) I move away from centers of Catholic power. White male priests like de Lubac or those White men loved by priests like Maritain were always invited into the halls of power. They looked like that power, and places like the Vatican and Notre Dame recognized them, applauded them, and welcomed them. Black writers like Claude McKay or the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral were illegible to the people in those places and operated in another sphere. As artists, McKay and Mistral worked at the level of imagination untethered to the levers of power in the 20th century. It is thus much harder to track what impact artists had on the cultural imagination than those invited to Geneva or Rome. But I would be reluctant to say they had no impact: McKay offered up in his poetry a completely new vision of what Black resistance could look like, and he is still read today.  Mistral won the Nobel Prize for literature. Louis Massignon completely transformed the study of Islam for Catholics and inspired many of the Dominicans who remain prominent and influential scholars of Islam today. But this is a different kind of power. One of their impacts was in dispersing Catholic spirituality to places beyond the reach of the Vatican.

And I am so grateful to Katie Holscher who raises the important issue of coloniality and friendship, especially in U.S. contexts. I had a long section on the language of friendship in relationship to colonialism, associations exactly like those Holscher describes as the “Friends of the Indians” that “worked to dispossess Native peoples.” But this ended up being too far afield from the figures in my book. Still, I don’t want to let the figures in the book off the hook too easily. I especially related to Holscher’s evocations of Catholic confraternities that prayed for the living and the dead, a mix of spiritual and social bonds, in the language of love. Despite the softness of the language and the depth of the mysticism and the fact that it was Catholicism in a secular-Protestant country like the United States, the Catholic mystical imagination in communities like Friends of the Indian still worked to further colonial dynamics. She is exactly right on this point. Although the figures in my book tended to be critical of state power, there is a range in their approaches to this issue. Early in his career, for instance, Louis Massignon’s efforts at friendship with Muslims entailed a mix of prayer and pressure for conversion and we can see the colonial dynamics at work in the way Holscher describes. The most tragic figure in my book is that of the young Muslim scholar Muhammad abd Jalil, who converted to Islam under Massignon’s friendship and care, and was more or less disowned by his parents. Jalil spent time in a mental institution and had a very difficult life. Massignon’s ideas evolved over time, but the issue of friendship as a language that can soften the sound of colonialism is part of the story indeed. As I was writing, I had to remind myself that friendship is much like any other basic human endeavor: eating, walking, play, childbirth, swimming, loving, talking, fighting – something so basic and universal that it can be invested with an almost infinite range of meanings. But a story of the spirituality and politics of Catholic friendship with ties to Paris is one that should never exclude the ways in which this world has been entangled with colonialism. I appreciate this point and could have done more to stretch this. I imagine the possibility of a rich and needed volume on friendship in modern religion, where one would see friendship’s range across geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts. When taken together, we could see what theoretical insights we could glean from a wide ranging set of data that reveals different stories friendship, spirituality, colonialism, and decolonialism in the modern world. This is so important with words like friendship, words that are warm, spiritual, and seemingly harmless. It is important to not simply show that there is always hegemony lurking there, but to open it up, explore it empirically, and be able to stretch our understanding of this important mode of human experience.

Shifting more from the political realm of structures and back into the inner domain, in terms of academic specialty, the scholarship of Niloofar Haeri, an anthropologist of Islam, is furthest from my own.  It means a great deal that she connected to Kindred Spirits, and her own scholarship on friendship, kinship, prayer, and poetry has been an important influence on my thinking. Her essay here reminds me why. The language she uses keeps us tethered to the spiritual and the interior, even if it is always, in her hands, entangled with the external realms of language, culture, and embodiment. But nonetheless it has its own kind of integrity. She describes my work on friendship in this way: “There were beloved saints and some contemporaries whose being seemed to emanate a certain blessedness (very similar to the concept of those who are seen to have baraka in Muslim communities). That members of this group saw sacredness as not limited to the divine and to saints and prophets is one of the most interesting discussions in the book.” Reading Haeri I am forced to confront my own habits. For example, I often emphasize the political nature of experiments and efforts of the friendship networks I describe. But for them, it was how friends embodied some part of the supernatural that was most fundamental. The beautiful phrase “to emanate a certain blessedness” (baraka) inspires in me a desire to learn more about the idea in Muslim communities.

Thank you again so much to Katie, Scott, and Niloofar for these incredibly helpful readings that pushed me at last to stand back and clarify my conceptual thinking.  I find myself now looking to future projects as a chance to be more explicit in my analysis of how experiments in Catholic spirituality worked to advance or undermine the French colonial project – I was too subtle on that point and need to tackle it more directly. I am also reminded too of the need for further elaboration of second, rather distinctive impulse to consider the experiential aspects of religion, the piety and devotion that requires a somewhat different set of analytic tools. In future projects I hope to go further with both of those rather distinct set of questions, both of which I find fascinating and can tackle more explicitly head on. Thank you again to my generous readers and colleagues.

 

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Brenna Moore
Brenna Moore is Professor of Theology at Fordham University. She works in the area of modern Christianity, with a focus on Catholic intellectual and cultural history in Europe. Dr. Moore’s teaching and research centers on mysticism and religious experience, gender, a movement in theology known as “ressourcement,” (“turn to the sources”) that paved the way for Vatican II, and the place of religious difference in modern Christian thought. She is most recently the author of Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This project explores a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Theorizing Modernities article

Modern Mystic Activist Scholars Resist Fascism, Colonialism, and Definitional Pigeonholing: A Comment on Brenna Moore’s Kindred Spirits


St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Ave in New York, NY. Photo Credit: Flickr User a.has. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Brenna Moore’s rich and rewarding analysis of the far-flung network of “spiritual friends” who anticipated and helped shape the ressourcement—the movement for Christian renewal that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s among French Catholic theologians, historians and exegetes—is a painstakingly researched work of historical recovery and interpretation. With the exception of the French mystic, philosopher, and political activist Simone Weil and the neo-Thomist exponent of Christian humanism Jacques Maritain, the protagonists of Kindred Spirits—the distinguished Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, the accomplished scholar of Medieval Christian mysticism Marie-Magdeleine Davy, the writer and catalyst of the Harlem Renaissance Claude McKay, the pioneering and yet inimitable Islamicist Louis Massignon—stand outside the circle of influential Catholic thinkers familiar to most American religious historians, not to mention students of modern Catholicism.

Yet the singular preoccupation of these institutional outsiders—their conceptualization and attempted enactment of the holy community as an inclusive, borderless spiritual fellowship of love—anticipated the retrieval of the Biblical model of the Church as a “mystical body” (endorsed in Pope Pius XII’s encyclical of 1943, Mystici Corporis Christi). In turn, their critique of “religious power” foreshadowed Catholicism’s decisive confrontation with secular modernity, which led to the Church’s accommodation of religious pluralism and to the abandonment of the long-held dream of establishing Roman Catholic states across the globe—these sea changes were ratified by the Second Vatican Council (1962–’65).

While Moore gestures toward a shared legacy of the “kindred spirits,” her focus is elsewhere. Accentuating her protagonists’ rejection of “the inherited ties of family, tradition and nation” in favor of a medieval and antimodern mode of belonging, Moore takes aim at the male clerics who narrowed Catholic theology in such a way as to authorize and reinforce their own institutional power (and who, until recently, dominated the historiography as well). The individuals profiled by Moore gravitated to the margins of this ecclesial arrangement. By situating her protagonists’ public careers and published works as well as their private and inner lives (as disclosed by their correspondences, diaries, memoirs, and fragments) in the context of their shared affinities, disagreements, and sometimes tenuous relationships with one another, Moore makes accessible their attempt at creating nouvelles familles spirituelles, a radically countercultural spiritual network. Strikingly, they deemed this “alternate mode of belonging” an appropriate response to the descent of European civilization into the darkness of racism and the chaos of war.

The book raises three meta-questions, each of which is telegraphed by its tantalizing subtitle: “Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism.” Moore’s way of dealing with these questions advances Contending Modernities’ exploration of how “identity” is constructed, contested, policed, and transformed under the shifting conditions of what we loosely refer to as “modernity.” While Moore focuses on religion, and Catholicism in particular, the story she tells of these boundary-dwelling thinkers underscores the necessity to resist facile reliance on gender, race, and nation as stable categories by which to understand the fluidity of the modern period and modern identities.

Grappling with Multiple Modernities

First, what do we mean by “modern”? Ah, modernity! Of the writing of essays, theses, tomes, blogs, and doggerel plumbing the depths—or the shallows, I begin to suspect—of our deployments of “the modern,” there seems no end. Alas: the more I read, the less I understand, and so I cling desperately to ready-at-hand conventions, whereby “modernity” signifies the condition of being modern, whatever that is, and “modernism” the distilled essence of the modern, raised or reduced to an aesthetic, a hermeneutical strategy, a political project, and/or a theological/philosophical cudgel. This formulation, of course, is completely inadequate.

Moore does little to clarify but much to complicate and perhaps (intentionally?) to confuse the question. In some passages the modern seems to refer to a historically specifiable period, and to events therein which helped to define that period as modern. Channeling scholars of African diasporic practices, for example, Moore ties the global circulation of ideas “in modernity” to “. . . the slave trade, the global history of the notion of race, and the making of transnational Black cultures all as key to the formation of the modern world” (234). Elsewhere modernity, the condition of being modern, is identified with certain (regrettable and recognizably American) cultural, social, and individual characteristics, such as “. . . the modern ideology of isolation that prioritizes the self-made man or woman, a bottled-up version of masculinity, and a world where we are better left alone, with our border sealed and gates locked, left to find pleasure in our own private family lives” (253). This connotative strategy becomes less useful when it takes on its own polemical and ideological shadings (e.g., “a bottled-up version of masculinity”) or when it specifies traits that do not seem distinctive to the modern period. (It is not clear, for example, how the medieval monks’ version of masculinity was, by comparison, uncorked.)

Portrait photograph of Claude McKay, 1920. Unknown artist. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

By contrast, relatively little attention is given to definitions and aspects of modernity pinned to the hubris of “modernization theory,” à la Weber and Parsons, which at the time correlated modernity with “development” driven by superior technical and scientific skill possessed by the “enlightened” West. Yet, this virulent intellectual strain reinforced the subjugation of supposedly benighted “pre-scientific” Black and Brown peoples, against which McKay, Mistral, Massignon, and other of the book’s protagonists railed. Their shared “resistance” against European imperial ambition, reductive materialism, the valorization of technocracy, and racialist theories underlying colonialism put them on the edges of modernity, in one accepted use of the term, and on the edges of modern Catholicism in its (soon to be contested) religious nationalist mode. And yet, their embrace of religious pluralism and celebration of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and indigenous artists, writers, poets, and scholars; rejection of the confessional state; and search for a middle way between the excesses of both capitalism and Soviet-era Marxism—these stances, too, were “modern,” and they prefigured Catholicism’s imminent theological and social transformations.  Not least, our heroes “on the edges” did benefit from at least one dimension of “techno-scientific modernity,” namely, the enhanced travel and communication among exiled peoples scattered across the globe, a convenience which enabled the spiritual friends to advance “various modes of internationalist belonging.” (The idealization of medieval mysticism notwithstanding, none of them were sedentary monks.)

Moore’s reluctance to stand back from the reporting of her richly detailed research and her quasi-biographical method in order to probe and clarify the ideological options present in the modern world and available to her protagonists—a tangle of ideas and values, some of which resonated with and shaped their political and aesthetic sensibilities—leads to some confusing (which is not to say inaccurate) claims. Opposed to Nazism and European colonialism alike, her protagonists, we are told, were “anti-modernists but not fascists.” The implication is that anti-modernism is compatible with and might even lead to fascism. Depending on how one defines modernism and anti-modernism, that implication may be correct. On the other hand, if one hews to the (plausible) dictum that fascism is a quintessentially modern evil, the consequence of a sterile, inhumane rationality empowered by the destructive prowess of the modern war-making state, then anti-modernism of a sort would seem not to buttress fascism but rather to discredit its pernicious assumptions. (The conflation of theological, philosophical, and political expressions of modernism adds to the confusion.) In any case, Moore tends to invoke terms like “anti-modernism” without much attention to their divergent meanings.

Thankfully, Moore attempts no recondite terminological treatises on “the modern” and, to be fair, she engages the admittedly squishy zeitgeist throughout the narrative. Still, her subjects had a complicated and sometimes confusing relationship to modernity and to modernism. To take another example, much is made of the anti-family bias of the Maritains, Mistral, Davy, Weil, and (the married father) Massignon, and Moore seems to associate their preference for spiritual rather than carnal relationships with a form of neo-medievalism. One unexamined assumption supporting this reading is a presumed radical discontinuity between medieval and modern gender roles, with an implicit idealization of the former. Moore’s admirable honesty about the failures of her protagonists to live up to the ideals they articulated—she notes that Mistral, McKay and Weil, for example, could be frustratingly aloof, self-absorbed, and isolationist for long stretches—raises the question of whether they really preferred any kind of “friendship” or “bond of love” sufficiently thick to endure the passage of time and the distance of place. Given the fragility of the friendships over time, can we really conclude that they “offer a striking alternative to many of the ideas that prevail in our own time” (253)?

Examined in its disparate manifestations across decades and centuries, Modernity—the condition as well as the term—eludes the precision of a good definition and upsets expectations.

In short: Were these inescapably modern figures also counter-modernists, anti-modernists, neo-medievalists, all of the above? Or were they merely “on the edges”?

Examined in its disparate manifestations across decades and centuries, Modernity—the condition as well as the term—eludes the precision of a good definition and upsets expectations: modern people are practiced in the selective retrieval and recombination of scattered bits of identity and ideas originally embedded in a specific time and place. For this reason, we need not be surprised to find modern would-be monks inhabiting metropolises and universities, theologates and factories. Nor should we be surprised that celibate marriages like that of the Maritains existed alongside traditional sexual practices and gender roles. All of these kinds of options, and more, can be said to be “modern,” but of course that is insufficient if we are to understand the variation and continual contestation that marks the era. Just when we label something “modern,” we find ample alternative practices, lifestyles, and ideas which can also be said to constitute the modern world.  Oh, the irony of it all!

The Political Implications of Spiritual Friendship

How are we to understand the relationship between political activism and spiritual friendship? Is “resistance” the residue of mystical experience or its very essence? How does holiness or perceived holiness shape power relations? Does “religious power” reverse or otherwise upend the experience and expectations of mundane political power?

Moore plants various clues to assist in solving such perennial puzzles. Describing the “spiritual power” of Massignon’s influence on Davy, she remarks that “. . .there has never been a time when intimacy between friends was possible in a context immune frow power and politics” (141). This is perhaps a cynical view, depending on whether “context” refers to interpersonal dynamics or rather to impersonal cultural currents. Moore seems to suggest that these two contexts are inseparable, given that the “. . . warmth of spiritually powerful friendship is no safe haven from other kinds of power, no magic circle protected from race, gender, and religious difference, but intimacy and friendship have their own specific religious power within these broader societal forces” (141). The sacred “is made real through the personal spheres of intimacy that happen always within, and alongside, the more diffuse networks of discursive and nondiscursive power” (142). One wishes for guidance as to what constitutes “religious power.”

Drawing of Simone Weil. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Is love, even interpersonal love, incapable of transcending power politics? Perhaps—especially if Davy and other of the book’s “heroes,” as Moore calls them, attempted to channel their intensely personal and mystical love for one another into “the more diffuse networks of discursive and nondiscursive power” by which bureaucratic systems are reformed and the suffering masses liberated (142). In that case, love is reduced from care for the individual person to generalized concern for the abstract masses, and the movements for reform and houses of solidarity come and go, vulnerable to the shifting social trends and political currents of the day. And, indeed, this was the fate of many of the activist organizations and movements founded or embraced by the kindred spirits.

The “concrete mysticism” (my phrase) of Simone Weil, for example, was a self-conscious attempt to place the radical attentiveness of person-centered mystical love at the heart of social action. Active in the 1930s in workers’ rights campaigns in Europe, Weil taught high school and subsequently worked in a Renault auto factory and then on a farm in Marseilles—all to avoid the abstractions of philosophy (even of “personalism”) and to experience poverty and quotidian suffering on the margins of society firsthand. Weil “placed her hope in the individual who cultivated the art of radical attention to those easiest to ignore,” Moore concludes (160). That Weil was at best a casual participant in the internationalist mode of belonging suggests that friendships kept alive by correspondences across time and space might help to inspire attentiveness to the person but cannot replace it. It is encouraging, then, when we learn in these pages of the heroes’ concrete commitments to the local poor, the student, the worker.

Which Modern Catholicism?

What, then, is “modern” about Modern Catholicism? Complicity with fascism or support of Christian Democracy? (Davy and others had doubts about both.) The Church presented as a divine and inerrant institution governed by the Magisterium and canon laws created by White European priests? Or, a mystical body incorporating all spiritual communicants of whatever religious or secular background? (The spiritual friends were inclined to give priority to the latter.)

The thesis of Catholic Modern, James Chappell’s masterful account of mid-twentieth century transformations in the Catholic countries of France, Germany, and Austria, is that the tragic encounter and debilitating alliance with totalitarianism led to the Church’s “turn to modernism.” Far from telling a singular, happy story of Church modernization, he writes, historians are tracking the emergence and historical agency of different forms of Catholic modernism, by which he means the ways people strive ‘’to make themselves secure in a constantly changing world.’” “If secular modernity is a state-sanctioned condition of religious freedom,” Chappel writes, “religious modernism can be understood as a set of tactics that religious communities use to conceptualize, mobilize within, and shape that modern settlement” (5).  Another irony of modern religion is that the “privatization” of religion once touted as constitutive of the modern settlement led not to the withdrawal of religions and religious actors from the public square and their depoliticization, but rather, as Chappell puts it, a movement toward “new forms of public intervention that can be legitimated in the name of that sacred private sphere” (5).

Can the loose network of spiritual friends pursuing their separate if interrelated vocations in different regions of the globe and corners of the world of ideas be called “pioneers” or merely fellow travelers on the road to a Catholic modernity?

Where did our heroes stand in this decades-spanning struggle to give birth to a new mode of Catholic presence in the modern world? Reading Moore’s authoritative account of their attitudes toward and engagement with the ideas and agents of this ecclesial, political, economic, and social evolution (e.g., champions of the ressourcement such as Henri de Lubac and Marie-Dominique Chenu, influential Catholic economists such as Theodor Brauer, etc.) one finds it impossible to generalize or to place the spiritual friends as a collective in a particular camp. Despite some shared political and intellectual convictions, their collective agency did not amount to much, and at times they seemed indifferent to, or openly skeptical of the Catholic modernization agenda as it emerged. Among them, Jacques Maritan was the one (the only one?) who interacted consistently with the Vatican, with major theorists of the modern state, and with influential European or American Catholics. Weil, we are told, dismissed the campaign for human rights, which became central to the new Catholic “modernist” identity. And if Europe was the epicenter of the emergent Catholic modernism, Davy, Mistral, Massignon, and McKay operated on the racial, regional, and cultural “margins” in provocative but also constructive ways.

Can the loose network of spiritual friends pursuing their separate if interrelated vocations in different regions of the globe and corners of the world of ideas be called “pioneers” or merely fellow travelers on the road to a Catholic modernity? Kindred Spirits waffles on this question and hesitates to provide an integrating motif or orientation that would situate Massignon and Mistral, the Maritains and Davy, and the others within a stable conceptual framework. In the final analysis, however, this resistance is perhaps the most eloquent statement Moore makes about “modernity” as well as “Catholic modernity.” For how can her subjects, or any of us, be said to operate on the edges of something whose boundaries are so permeable, ill-defined, and constantly shifting?

 

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Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1985) is the Marilyn Keough Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Appleby, a professor of history at Notre Dame, is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1978 and received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Chicago. From 2000-2014, he served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Appleby co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.
Theorizing Modernities article

Catholic Friendship, Porosity, and the “Coloniality of Being”


Catholic theologian Louis Massignon circa 1956. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA 3.0

Brenna Moore’s wonderful book Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism invites us to consider the ontology of Catholic friendships. While reading it, I found myself returning to one question: How do Catholic friendships exist amid the conditions of knowing, living, and relating that organize, and emanate from, modern nation-states? Here I’ll pose this question about the United States in a way that pays attention to the United States’ colonial underpinnings.

In Kindred Spirits, Moore recovers the spiritual friendship of Louis Massignon and Mary Kahil as it caught fire in 1934 on the day they rode by train together to a Franciscan chapel in Damietta, Egypt, and professed a shared vow to live their lives for Muslims (94). For the next three decades, Massignon and Kahil were radically altered by the porosity between them: their selves opening and mingling across distances, traversing boundaries of family, sexual mores, and the nation-state. This porosity collapsed, by extension, what Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” that secular order that renders political and social life as bounded human affairs. Their friendship dissolved the modern conditions that permit a person to distinguish themself as an isolable actor, apart from God. “Massignon’s increasing belief that God was present in the intimacy of their bond had a way of letting this love [between he and Kahil] off its leash,” Moore writes, “as they experienced a madder and deeper passion” (96).

The friendship between Massignon and Kahil, and other early-to-mid twentieth-century spiritual friendships that Moore carefully narrates in Kindred Spirits, were, as the author suggests, glimmers of holy light tended among Catholic intellectuals, artists, and activists who recognized their specialness amid a gathering darkness. This specialness was marked by the accumulating clouds of fascism on one side, and the assumptions of godlessness orienting liberal and leftist political thought on the other. These “extraordinary friendships” conjured worlds apart from predominant strains of nationalism and liberalism and accompanying formations of race and empire, even as they sometimes fell short of their ideals and replicated those systems. These friendships also nurtured activism, “sustain[ing] a spiritual and sensual undercurrent out of which political action seemed to flow” (12).

In their brilliance, the “special friendships” Moore recounts in Kindred Spirits also cast light backward and reveal hidden dimensions of the secular modern they exceeded and defied. Though Moore’s own focus remains upon the “wide, wild, and weird field of desire” that sustained these friendships (18), her book provides us a vantage point for approaching, in ways that de-normalize and critique, secular friendships from the same period. The text invites us to attend to the rootedness of secular friendships in time and place, the epistemological and political conditions they’ve relied upon, and their effects in the world (including perhaps their inability to change it). Relatedly, Kindred Spirits invites us to look for other varieties of modern Catholic friendship, and to ask questions about their ontologies and their political effects.

In their brilliance, the “special friendships” Moore recounts in Kindred Spirits also cast light backward and reveal hidden dimensions of the secular modern they exceeded and defied.

To think about ontologies of friendship, Sylvia Wynter’s account of the coloniality of being is useful. Wynter identifies a “de-godding” process—specific to Europe during the age of its imperial expansion—which produced a new mode of being human. This human no longer bent toward the heavens to know who he was, Wynter tells us, but instead turned inward to realize his humanness through the exercise of Reason, the allegiance to the modern nation-state as the apotheosis of Reason, and the differentiation (dehumanization) of racial others. Though culturally specific, this transformed ontology of humanness came to be “overrepresented” as universal and as part and parcel of empire. Reading Moore alongside Wynter, we might now ask: What instances of Catholic friendship persisted (and persist) amid modern projects of empire? What forms of Catholic relationship have conformed to this ontological shift, i.e. to the genre of humanness that has sustained these empires? And which, if any, have exceeded it?

In my research and teaching, I tend to approach the United States as a political formation that is at once modern and settler colonial. I am interested in the US nation-state as an entity that has expended enormous energy, across the centuries, to manage selves, and relationships among them, in ways that ensure deference to its sovereignty, and buy-in to the liberalism that is the medium for its manifestation. I try always to keep in mind how all this has worked to dispossess Native peoples. As a historian of Catholicism, I am interested in Catholic modes of being—and, now reading Moore, in Catholic friendships—that happened in relation to this settler colonial matrix. Reading Kindred Spirits helps me to ask new questions about porosity in these relationships, and specifically about how porosity—if and when it persists amid the modern settler colony—positions Catholic friendships in relation to the sovereignty of the U.S. nation-state.

I will not draw final conclusions here, but I will share a two-part example for consideration. While there is always some risk in drawing sharp contrasts between “Protestant things” and “Catholic things,” here it might prove useful. During the late nineteenth century, a group of prominent US Protestants extended friendship as a mode of relating to Native peoples. As Moore notes in Kindred Spirits, “Catholics were [..] not the only ones drawing from the language and practice of friendship to engage the political world.” Though when their Protestant counterparts did it, they often (if not always) did so with more optimism about liberalism and modernity (14–15). True to this form, to be a “Friend of the Indians”—in the nineteenth century US Protestant sense—was to commit to a relationship that would achieve for Native peoples what their White “friends” already enjoyed: full inclusion in the US political project. The work of assimilation that Friends of the Indians supported was, of course, intended to achieve this purpose. During this period, Protestants involved in crafting US Indian policy also included the federal government as a party in these “friendly” relations. Native children “should be taught to look upon [..] the United States government as their friend,” explained US Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Morgan in 1889 (223). The Friends of the Indians represent, I’d argue, a secular deployment of friendship: an imagined (if not actualized) relationship of care, extending between people who are themselves commonly oriented (again, in the imaginations of those friends) not toward God but toward the benevolent blessing of the liberal nation-state.

Father Marquette preaching to Native peoples (circa 1675) in a stereotypical painting of Catholic colonialism. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

During the same period of US history, settler Catholics also imagined friendship in relation to Native peoples. Sometimes, though, those friendships encompassed supernatural forms. In 1876, Catholic journalist James McMaster used his newspaper to launch a “Confraternity for Reparation to the Indians.” In Catholic worlds, confraternities are groups of lay people joined in common work of charity, piety, or both. Within the Confraternity for Reparation, US Catholic devout would form “bands” comprised of fifteen individuals, with each band collectively producing fifteen daily Hail Mary prayers, as well as forty-five cents (three cents per member), “for the poor Indians and their friends.” The plight of Native peoples, McMaster wrote, “is one that ought to alarm us all.” “We Catholics [..] ought to lay these things to heart; for we are part of the American people, and when their punishment comes, we, assuredly, shall not escape our full share.”[1]

Within the Confraternity for Reparation, friendships extended not only between devout Catholics and Native people they prayed for but—just as importantly—between the Catholic living and the Catholic dead. The dead “can be made partakers of the benefits of this Confraternity, by having living friends contribute [on their behalf],” McMaster explained.[2] The inclusion of departed friends, and building of a work of charity with them, was compelling and real for living Catholics who participated. One eight-year-old from Pennsylvania promised to provide prayers and alms for “ten living and five deceased.” “We [..] promise, ‘honor bright, to say fifteen Hail Marys daily, from our little brother’s box, who died one month ago today,” wrote a pair of siblings from San Francisco.[3] In this way, family ties—and friendships too—were nurtured, and boundaries between life and death dissolved. This all happened as Catholics committed to the work of funding Indian missions, which saved souls in line with theology and doctrine, but also enacted the US colonial dynamic of dispossession.

The Friends of the Indians represent, I’d argue, a secular deployment of friendship: an imagined (if not actualized) relationship of care, extending between people who are themselves commonly oriented (again, in the imaginations of those friends) not toward God but toward the benevolent blessing of the liberal nation-state.

How can we reconcile the porosity that permeated confraternities—the Catholic sensibility of selves reliant upon one another in the work of salvation, and of relationships of love, manifest in collective acts of charity, that ignored boundaries between natural and supernatural—with the modern colonial system they sustained through their devotional work?  Do episodes like this represent transitional moments in a history of US Catholicism that is a story of both secularization and settlement? Or are they evidence of a more complicated—and perhaps less evenly modern—US colonial reality? These are some of the important questions Kindred Spirits raises for me in its attention to spiritual friendships that not only survived but flourished in a modern and secular age.

[1] “The Prefecture Apostolate of Indian Country,” New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 37, no. 30 (October 10, 1876).

[2] “Union of Prayer and Alms,” New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 37, no. 32 (October 21, 1876).

[3] “Prayers and Alms in Reparation to the Poor Indians,” New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 37, no. 36 (November 11, 1876); untitled, New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 37, no. 38 (December 2, 1976).

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Kathleen Holscher
Kathleen Holscher is Associate Professor of religious studies and American studies, and holds the endowed chair in Roman Catholic studies, at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captive Schools Crisis in New Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her current research focuses on clerical sex abuse amid the history of US Catholic missions to Native peoples. She has written on that topic for Religion Dispatches, The Revealer, The Tablet, and the National Catholic Reporter, as well as for the edited volume Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories (eds. Tisa Wenger and Sylvester Johnson, forthcoming Spring 2022 with New York University Press)