Roommates out for a hike together. Photo Credit: Mohammad Sadiq.
Unlike the six other undergraduate students attending the Madrasa Discourses program from the University of Notre Dame, I did not have to suffer a long flight to get to Nepal, or struggle with jet lag upon arrival. I spent the month before the program just next door in India conducting research at the Indian Institute of Science. Even though the United States prides itself on its diversity, India has a depth of religious diversity that I have never experienced before. Every time I left campus in Bangalore, I passed at least three temples; each day in the lab I heard the mosque’s regular call for prayer, and from my window I could see the light of a cross at the top of a nearby church. Not to mention the Jain menus and the Buddhist monks I also encountered. My curiosity was piqued by the many new traditions. However, before leaving for Nepal, I expressed a concern to one of my closest friends. Despite the religious diversity I was experiencing, there was one thing that still caught me off guard every time: seeing a woman in a burka.
I knew my discomfort was a product of years of exposure to both explicit and subtle Islamophobic sentiment, but even though my mind knew this, my subconscious couldn’t shake its fear of the unknown. As the great granddaughter of a Syrian refugee, who fled from Damascus because his Christian faith was not tolerated by his Muslim community, I have always had doubts about my ability to be accepted by devout followers of Islam. Growing up in a post 9/11 era, the association of Islam to terrorism in the media, along with the offhand comments of adults at the grocery store or dinner table, only cemented my doubts and fears. While I later learned about Islam as a peaceful religion, it was hard to erase these early impressions from my subconscious mind.
Hospital in Dhulikhel. Photo Credit: Elsa Barron.
The first time I met my roommate from Pakistan, Haya, was at one o’clock in the morning on the day of our arrival in Nepal, five minutes before I threw up. Having gotten sick during a brief trip to Mumbai, I was certainly not the cheery face one might hope to see on their roommate of the next two weeks. In my miserable and nauseous state, even my subconscious didn’t have the ability to question or fear the veiled woman who was asking me if I was okay and if there was anything I needed. After falling asleep, still feeling as sick as ever, I had a terrible nightmare. Apparently, under the stress of illness and a new location, I sleep talked in my dream, yelling “Who’s there? Who’s coming?” in the middle of the night. While I have no recollection of this, Haya informed me in the morning of the terror I had caused her. This series of events was probably one of the worst first impressions I have ever offered. In spite of all this, I began to form a strong bond with my roommates, Haya and Meilin (another Notre Dame student).
At first it was difficult for me to tell the women in burkas apart when we sat in large group sessions, not being used to such intricate facial recognition. After a couple of days and a some experiences apart from the men, where the women uncovered their faces and I saw their full smiles, I was able to recognize those same smiles reflected in their eyes. I began to recognize the beauty, honor, and dignity of these women, and to understand their individual personalities.
Haya’s henna art. Photo Credit: Mahan Mirza.
One day I noticed a pin on Haya’s purse that said, “I don’t care” with a winking girl dressed in a burka. I laughed out loud because the pin represented so well the sassy and spirited personality of my new friend. The three of us giggled together telling stories, went on hikes together, went shopping together, ate meals together, sat on the bus together, and did all other manner of friendly things together. We shared snacks, rosewater, and stories. On one of the last nights, we took a walk to the store to get snacks and Haya picked up some henna to do for Meilin and me. Not only was this woman an incredible participant in Madrasa Discourses and a Quranic instructor to hundreds of people (for which she received an award from the President of Pakistan); she was also an amazing henna artist.
On the last day of the program, Haya convinced Meilin to try on one of her outfits and then wear it to the session. Sharing clothes like this was a beautiful moment of friendship and solidarity. Instead of focusing on the division of our different styles, we were unified as women who are not defined by what we might wear. It was also a fun way to trick Professor Moosa into momentarily believing there was a new student in the program.
Meilin showcases a new outfit, with Dr. Mahan Mirza. Photo Credit: Meilin Scanish.
As I was boarding the plane back to India, I noticed a woman wearing a burka sitting in row 17. I quickly checked my boarding pass with the hope that I was sitting next to her (sadly, I was not). This was the moment when I realized that my subconscious feeling of fear had been replaced with subconscious feelings of friendship and understanding.
The theological questions addressed by Madrasa discourses changed the way that I consciously think about Islam. They deepened my understanding of Islamic law, history, and teaching. They even changed the way I think about Christianity and its relation to the modern world. The discussions made me think about the Bible in the context of the time it was written, rather than as a universal text to be applied literally over all time. It was refreshing to know that religion does not have to remain stagnant, it can grow alongside our developing world. For me, these thoughts were revolutionary for my worldview. However, the friendships I built at Madrasa Discourses did something even more revolutionary. They changed the much more deeply rooted subconscious thoughts and attitudes I had towards Muslims, particularly Muslim women. This is something that no class, no book, and no effort of my own could have done. I left Nepal with the incredible gift of friendship with those I used to fear I might never understand.
The views from the plane of the Himalayas. Photo Credit: Elsa Barron.
A biology and peace studies major at the University of Notre Dame, Elsa spent the summer at the Indian Institute of Science before joining the 2018 Madrasa Discourses Summer Intensive in Nepal.
Pro-Refugee Rally in Sydney, Australia, 2013. Photo Credit: Newtown grafitti.
Even if the current ascent of populist parties turns out to be a transient development in the history of modern democracies, the centrality of national and religious identities for the success of populists’ “redemptive” politics (to use Margaret Canovan’s renowned notion) should be taken less as a sign of pathology of democracy and more as an indication of neglect of a vital social question—that of democratic formation of particular group attachments in complex, pluralistic societies.
The achievements of both progressive and right populist parties have greatly depended on the powerful unitary notion of the ‘we’ to which individual supporters attach their passions and commitment. While the latter, as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have argued, revitalizes democratic life by increasing agonistic engagements, it also affirms collective belonging in ways that ultimately constrict both democratic contestation and deliberation. Populisms thus raise the stakes in any attempt to reconcile several important democratic concerns: with that which binds individual citizens into one national community; with the responsibility citizens might have toward those outside their national group; and, with pluralism as a platform for citizens’ deliberation and disagreement about the ideals of national identity and common good.
Put differently, populisms compel us to probe contemporary languages and practices that would allow for individuals to bind themselves to national collectivities in ways that are particular while also being capacious. One way to do this is to explore the links between identity and solidarity, with the former referring to particular forms of group attachments and the latter denoting the imperatives of responsibility to those outside such allegiances. Many thinkers have reflected on these two notions—from Hannah Arendt and Pope John Paul II, to philosophers Anthony Appiah, Charles Taylor, and political theorist Amy Gutmann. For our present discussion, the work of American historian David Hollinger is especially instructive because he not only directly relates the two notions, he also asserts a divide between the ethics of identity and the ethics of solidarity. For Hollinger, the concept of identity is quasi-mystical, shaped by what we share with others, and can promote violence. Solidarity, on the other hand, is an “experience of willed affiliation” and entails “conscious commitment” and a level of deliberation and moral choice. Viewed this way, identity and community express a fated sense of belonging, while solidarity represents agency, that is, one’s choice of commitment to others and to a more expansive constitution of the ‘we.’
Hollinger’s arguments have ethical and political import: he suggests that solidarity is most needed when we have a choice whether to be bound to those with whom we do not share history or culture. This is a type of imperative that posits itself in situations such as the European “refugee crisis,” in which the EU and its member countries have to establish not only concrete policies but also reimagine the sources of solidarity with those outside the EU borders. If one is to follow Hollinger’s propositions, the ascribed forms of attachments—religious, national, cultural, civilizational—cannot but hinder the Europeans’ obligation to alleviate the conditions of suffering of others, and most concretely, of Muslim refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Hollinger considers identity and solidarity in a manner that states explicitly that which is often implicitly and unreflexively assumed in thinking about these two notions—the idea that particular attachments are irredeemable in relation to more universal ethical commitments. This way of thinking permeates, among others, the recent works on European Christianities, populisms, and Islamophobia—for example, the manner in which social scientists Olivier Roy and Rogers Brubaker write about the connections between contemporary European populisms and identitarian Christianity. They posit the latter as culturally particular, devoid of substantive (Brubaker) and positive, universal elements of Christian faith (Roy), thus as intolerant, and ultimately complicit in authorizing the contemporary European Islamophobia (both Roy and Brubaker). Here, Christianity as a particularized form of religious identity is straightforwardly attached to intolerance and rejection of different others.
Participant in Pro-Refugee Rally in Sydney, Australia, in 2013. Photo Credit: Newtown grafitti.
The relationship between particular attachments and ethical commitments beyond one’s own group, however, is a bit more complex. Take these two snapshots from the Polish and German debates about refugee crisis: For Archbishop Henryk Muszynski of Gniezno, one of the Catholic Church’s very few critics of the Polish government’s policy toward refugees, Poland has a “full right” to express its “religious, national, and historic identity.” But, in not accepting the refugees, Poland is “condemning itself, by its own choice, to total isolation” and is undermining “the foundation of social and international solidarity.” For Silke Radosh-Hinder, pastor of the Evangelical Church in Germany, German Christians have a moral as well as historical responsibility to fight far-right politics and to accept refugees. In these two instances, do particular national experiences and historical locations constrain or broaden one’s ethical commitments? Do particular attachments serve as a platform to reject or, rather, to embed a sense of solidarity of European Christians with non-Christian, non-European others?
The scholars of “multiple,” “vernacular,” and “contending” modernities—from Shmuel N. Eisenstadt to Nilüfer Göle—have long proposed that the encounters between traditional and the more universal forms of affiliation happen in a dialectic manner. The success of the populists’ redemptive politics also alerts us to the fact that, in a global capitalist world shaped by transnational ideals, interests, and institutions, matters of particular group identity remain as relevant as ever. One of the challenges of our times lies in identifying and affirming the democratic responses to narrow, anti-pluralist populist conceptions of the links between national, cultural, and religious identities. In my view, a forceful response to such conceptions can emerge if we attend to the convergences between identity and solidarity. Moving beyond the notion of their disconnect or inevitable conflict would highlight the productive relationship between narratives of particular identities (as these continue to provide the frameworks of social cohesion and give concreteness to various forms of moral commitment) and the more universally framed ethics of responsibility and solidarity (as it challenges the exclusionary nationalist and nativist narratives shaping so much of our contemporary moment).
Slavica Jakelić is the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Valporaisio University. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and nationalism, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Jakelić has worked at or was a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the United States—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia; the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University; the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame; and the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion & Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. She is also a Senior Fellow of the international project "Orthodoxy and Human Rights," placed at Fordham University.
Poster for a Jewish cultural festival in Krakow, Poland. Photo credit: Geneviève Zubrzycki, March 2011.
We know from a vast and rich literature that “secularization” is a much more complex phenomenon than the usual one-size-fits-all “decline of religion” proposition.1 But we still need to account for the persistence of religion and the diverse forms it takes, as well as analyze the specific ways in which religion infiltrates the making of secular national identities. What explains different configurations of religious-secular national identities?
My recent book Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec(2016) as well as my on-going research on Polish philosemitism focus on different configurations of religious-secular national identities. More specifically, I study the process of becoming secular—the aesthetic, bodily, social, and political practices of enacting secular identities. Becoming secular does not imply the total disappearance of religion in secular national societies; rather, it involves religious and secular configurations that are articulated and contested. This approach has the methodological advantage of investigating secularity as a dynamic process rather than a static state or more or less a fait accompli. I attend to the fissures and frictions entailed in becoming secular, the debates and contestation between social and political actors as they seek to socially, aesthetically, and legally institute secularism.
The Different Faces of Pluralism and Secularism
Perhaps the most politically salient way in which the religious and the secular have been interpellated in recent years is in relation to pluralism. In North America and Western Europe the “crisis of pluralism” refers to the challenges self-avowed secular societies face with the immigration of populations who are not only denominationally “Other,” but who also are markedly more religious in their world outlook and in the exercise of their daily activities than members of the host society. That is certainly the case in Quebec, as I show in my recent book.
Tablecloths are hung on clotheslines to recreate the look of a prewar courtyard during the May 2017 Day of Jewish culture, Chmielnik. Photo credit: Geneviève Zubrzycki.
In Poland, however, the crisis of pluralism is one of absence: how can Poland, one of the most ethnically, denominationally, and religiously homogenous nation-states in the world, counter the empirical absence of a plurality of ethnic, racial, and religious groups to meet the normative goals of pluralism and multi-culturalism, now enshrined as core values of modern polities? And how can liberal secular elites articulate and project an image of the nation other than that of Polonia semper fidelis, both at home and abroad? My newest work shows that non-Jewish Poles’ fascination for all things Jewish (“philosemitism”2) is part of a strategy from the center and the left to de-naturalize the dominant ethno-Catholic version of Polishness. It is also part of a broader effort to build a neutral space where Catholicism is only one among many other value systems (religious and non-religious) and where none is hegemonic. Philosemitism in the Polish context, then, is not simply anti-antisemitism. It is imbricated in a complex national project to build pluralism and secularity.
Why is that, and how does that work?
Two men eating at a “Jewish” restaurant, Lublin. Photo credit: Geneviève Zubrzycki, October, 2014.
In Poland, ideological deviance from the ethno-Catholic definition of Polishness is ethnicized such that individuals and groups who are not defending the prominent place of Catholicism and its symbols in the public sphere and are advocating a civic-secular Poland instead are turned into “Jews.” This logic and the multiple examples of its application in the public sphere—in both verbal and non-verbal discourse—provide rich exemplars of a phenomenon analyzed long ago by Jean-Paul Sartre (1986 [1946]), who famously claimed that “If the Jew did not exist, the anti- Semite would invent him.” Polish public intellectual Adam Michnik (1999:73) refers to this specific form of antisemitism as “magical antisemitism”: “The logic of normal […] antisemitism is the following: ‘Adam Michnik is a Jew, therefore he is a hooligan, a thief, a traitor, a bandit etc.’ Magical antisemitism however works this way: ‘Adam Michnik is a thief, therefore he is most probably a Jew.’” As Jewishness stands, for those on the populist Right, for a liberal, plural, civic, and secular project, Poland is claimed to be ruled by “Jews”—by symbolic Jews—who must be neutralized. Hence the antisemitism in a country with very few Jews.
The very process of ethnicization of deviation from the ethno-Catholic model of Polishness is also at the source of philosemitism. For if ethno-religious nationalists contend that “Jews” are contaminating the nation with their civic ideals, building a pernicious post-national, cosmopolitan world and must therefore be politically marginalized, “Jews” must for the same reason be resurrected and Jewishness promoted according to proponents of a civic and secular vision of the polity. Precisely because Jewishness carries specific significations and symbolic capital that other minorities in Poland (such as Ukrainians, Silesians, or the Vietnamese) do not possess, it is primarily through Jews and Jewishness that a modern, secular, and multicultural Poland is articulated. Hence liberal, leftist youth wear t-shirts and brandish posters in protests against clerical nationalists, subversively claiming that they are “Jews.”
Performance, Objectification, and Cultural Appropriation
Jewish dancing troupe, Krakow. Photo credit: Geneviève Zubrzycki, March 2012.
Wearing a “Jewish” sweatshirt; dancing to Jewish music, eating Jewish foods and drinking kosher vodka become embodied practices meant to challenge a restrictive definition of Polishness. These practices serve to de– and re-construct identity along new lines. Polishness is being challenged and redefined by activists and artists as well as by ordinary people in their mundane activities. Multiple forms of memory work, such as graffiti art, walking tours of formerly Jewish spaces, commemorative marches, or the cleaning and restoration of cemeteries, all serve to undermine the political claim and the dominant view that Poland is essentially, primordially ethno-Catholic. Ordinary Poles become involved in the revival and assimilate Jewishness, to the extent that it becomes “Polish,” through embodied and repeated actions. They remake Polishness by learning how to “cook Jewish” or how to serve and consume Jewish foods during a festival, at a café all year round, or at a Sabbath dinner at the Jewish Community Center; by singing and dancing; by learning Jewish paper cutting techniques; or by donating their time and energy to Jewish individuals and organizations. This implies a certain objectification of Jewishness and “Jewish culture” and its appropriation by non-Jews. But that “cultural appropriation” is motivated by a political project; a national vision defined by openness.
What this brief discussion highlights is that understanding anti- and philo-Semitism, or phenomena such as secularism, pluralism, and nationalism, requires that we take into account local meanings, historical narratives, and specific social and political dynamics. This means deep knowledge of empirical cases and critical examination of the assumptions contained in the very concepts we use to understand and explain the phenomena we investigate. This implies field-based research and a processual approach focusing on the multiple practices of enacting identities.
Endnotes
1. José Casanova, in his classic study Public Religions in the Modern World, argues that secularization is composed of “three very different, uneven and unintegrated propositions: secularization as differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms, secularization as decline of religious beliefs and practices, and secularization as marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere” (1994, 211). Philip S. Gorski (2000; see also Gorski and Altınordu 2008) also differentiated between types of secularization theories that address empirically different processes: the disappearance and the decline of religion on the one hand, and its privatization and transformation on the other. Mark Chaves referred to “secularization” as more specifically the declining scope of religious authority, a process rooted in concrete social struggles: “Secularization occurs, or not, as the result of social and political conflicts between those social actors who would enhance or maintain religion’s social significance and those who would reduce it” (1994, 752). Bruce Lincoln (2003) called these “minimalist” versus “maximalist” articulations of religion. The tension is between privatizing and publicizing forces, between opposed views of the role of religion and of the Church in the public sphere. In my own work I adopt the distinction proposed by Martin Riesebrodt, since it best allows me to disentangle processes too often lumped together: secularization (the separation of social and religious institutions), disenchantment (rationalization of consciousness), and deinstitutionalization (transformation of religious institutions, specifically shrinking membership and declining participation in religious practice) (2010, 174–81).
2. While the term “philosemitism” was coined by self-avowed antisemites in Germany in the 1880s to denigrate their opponents (Karp and Sutcliff, 2011: 1), I adopt it to denote a wide spectrum of practices motivated by a curiosity and desire to learn about Jewishness; attempts at uncovering and preserving the remnants of Jewish life and honoring the lives of millions of Jews (Polish and non-Polish) who were murdered on Polish soil. For a discussion of the history and theoretical underpinnings of the terms antisemitism, anti-antisemitism, philosemitism, and allosemitism, see Bauman (1998), Altfelix (2000) and Judaken (2008). For empirical studies see Mushkat (1992), Karp and Sutcliff (2011). On antisemitism in Poland, see Krzemiński (1996) and Bilewicz, Winiewski and Radzik (2012); on anti- semitism and opposition to it, see Blobaum (2005). On representations of Jews in Poland, see the now- classic study of Cała (1995), and the works of Michlic (2006), Tokarska-Bakir (2012), and Lehrer (2013).
References
Altfelix, Thomas. 2000. “The ‘Post-Holocaust Jew’ and the Instrumentalization of Philosemitism.” Patterns of Prejudice 34 (2): 41-56.
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1998. “Allosemitism: premodern, modern, postmodern.” In B. Cheyette and L. Marcus, Eds. Modernity, Culture, and ‘the Jew.’ Cambridge: Polity Press. 143-156.
Bilewicz, Michał, Mikołaj Winiewski and Zuzanna Radzik. 2012. “Antisemitism in Poland: Economic, Religious, and Historical Aspects.” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, 4: 2801-2820.
Blobaum, Robert (ed.). 2005. Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Cała, Alina. 1995. The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press.
Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chaves, Mark. 1994. “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority.” Social Forces 72: 749–74.
Gorski, Philip S. 2000. “Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1300 to 1700.” American Sociological Review 65: 138–67.
Gorski, Philip S., and Ateş Altınordu. 2008. “After Secularization?.” Annual Review of Sociology 34: 55–85.
Judaken, Jonathan. 2008. “Between Philosemitism and Antisemitism: The Frankfurt School’s Anti-Antisemitism” in Phillys Lassner and Lara Trubovitz (eds) Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Representing Jews, Jewishness and Modern Culture, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 23-46.
Karp, Jonathan and Adam Sutcliff (eds). 2011. Philosemitism in History. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Krzemiński, Ireneusz, (ed.). 1996. Czy Polacy są antysemitami? Wyniki badania sondażowego. Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa.
Krzemiński, Ireneusz. 2001. “Polacy i Żydzi: wizja wzajemnych stosunków, tożsamość narodowa i antysemityzm.” In Aleksandra Kania Trudne sąsiedztwa. Z socjologii konfliktów narodowościowych. Warsaw: Wydwanictwo narodowe Scholar, 171-200.
Lincoln, Bruce. 2003. Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Michlic, Joanna B. 2006. Poland’s threatening other: The image of the Jew from 1880 to the present. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Mushkat, Marion. 1992. Philo-Semitic and Anti-Jewish Attitudes in Post-Holocaust Poland. Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press.
Riesebrodt, Martin. 2010. The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna. 2008. Legendy o krwi. Antropologia przesądu. Warsaw: W.A.B.
Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds. 2010. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2006. The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2012. “Religion, Religious Tradition and Nationalism: Jewish Revival in Poland and ‘Cultural Heritage’ in Quebec.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51 (3): 442–55. Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2016a. “Nationalism, ‘Philosemitism’ and Symbolic Boundary-Making in Contemporary Poland. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58:1, 66-98.
Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2016. Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geneviève Zubrzycki is a comparative-historical and cultural sociologist who studies national identity and religion, collective memory and national mythology, and the contested place of religious symbols in the public sphere.
Her first book, the award-winning The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006) analyzes the reconfiguration of the relationship between Polishness and Catholicism after the fall of communism. Her second book, Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (University of Chicago Press, 2016) analyzes the discursive, ritual and visual genesis of a Catholic French-Canadian ethnic identity in the 19th century, and its transformation into a secular Québécois national identity in the second half of the 20th century.
Photo credit: Emmanuel Katongole. Burundian refugees graduate from vocational courses at the Oasis of Peace in Rwanda, 2018.
It was a bright and beautiful Saturday afternoon on a hilltop overlooking Kigali. There, on the site of a former hotel, Maggy Barankitse, who was forced into exile from her country of Burundi when she criticized the president for seeking to change the constitution so as to extend his stay in power, had established a community center—Oasis of Peace—to work with Burundian refugees. It was the graduation ceremony for the first class of refugees, who had been attending training in various vocational skills (culinary services, embroidery, painting, tailoring, and car mechanics). As the graduates and invited guests gathered for the procession into the hall, loud speakers hanging from the trees filled the air with the lively discotheque music of “maison shalom…nyumba ya mahoro…orakarange” (long live maison shalom, house of peace). Inside the hall, 74 young men and women graduates came up one by one to the stage as their names were called to get their diplomas. You would not have been able to tell, from the graduation gowns, the sense of dignity and confidence in their gait, and the radiance on their faces that all 74 are refugees, who, less than a year ago, were living in refugee camps, full of fear and bitterness from the painful memories of the loss of everything as they were driven from their homes. This is where Maggy, herself driven from her home in Ruyigi, found them and enrolled them in the various courses.
In her speech to the graduates Maggy spoke of her journey from the tears and darkness of exile to her determination not to allow hatred to make her “lose the tenderness,” but to live with the dignity of knowing that she is a child of God. “Love is our true identity,” she told the group. Reminding the graduates that “hatred will never have the last word” she urged them to always “work hard to change violence into peace” while inviting them to “celebrate today the victory of love over hatred.”
And a beautiful celebration it indeed was. The diploma service was followed by a sumptuous candlelight dinner in the beautiful gardens of Oasis of Peace—dinner for all the graduates and their invited guests, with plenty of good food, a live band, and at a certain point in the evening, Maggy dancing with her graduates. Throughout the evening my mind kept returning to a line of Psalm 23, “a banquet he prepares for me in the presence of my enemies” and to the image of rich food and choicest wine in the banquet God has prepared for all peoples according to Isaiah (Is 25:6). As if the image of “best of meats and finest wines” is not enough to evoke the sense of “excess” and being “out of place,” one is reminded that Isaiah is offering this prophecy to people who are facing difficult times and the threat of exile. In fact, just a few verses earlier, the prophet had predicted impending destruction in vivid images: foundations of the earth shaking (24:18); the earth mourning and fading, both heaven and the earth languishing (24:4); the inhabitants of the earth turning pale (24:6). It is in the midst of this terrible devastation where “all joy has disappeared, and all cheer has left the land” (24: 11) that the prophet now promises, “On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine—the best of meats and the finest of wines” (Is 25:6). Something is not right. Shouldn’t the banquet wait until after restoration, after the return from exile, after reconstruction, and after total reconciliation? But there it is. Not just a meal, but a banquet with the “best of meats and finest wines!” It is a similarly odd logic that I was witnessing on that beautiful Saturday in January. For right there in the midst of exile and displacement out of Burundi’s violence, an “oasis of peace” at a time of desolation, joy in the midst of loss and hatred, a banquet of good food, wine, music, and dance—a celebration of the victory of love over hatred.
What kind of victory is this? How does one account for its odd logic, and for individuals like Maggy who refuse to surrender to violence and hatred but are determined to not allow hatred to make them “lose the tenderness?” Maggy, who is not satisfied with giving refugees just some rationed food to keep them going and tents to sleep in within the refugee camps (that itself would be admirable), but invites them out of the refugee camps up on “this mountain” to give them diplomas, graduation gowns, rich food, music, dancing, joy, dignity, and possibilities right here in exile!
Photo Credit: Emmanuel Katongole. Katongole with Maggie Barankitse, Oasis of Peace founder, and Jonathan Zaragoza Christiani, volunteer administrator at Oasis of Peace.
I knew Maggy’s story and had visited her Maison Shalom center in Ruyigi, Burundi a number of times. She had survived genocide in 1993 and out of that terrible tragedy had discovered not only her “true identity” (as she calls it) but also a mission—to invite others into the gift of love and to live out the social, practical implications of the identity of being God’s children (see Katongole, The Sacrifice of Africa, 2001). When Nkurunziza’s government shut down Maggy’s Maison Shalom, confiscated the bank accounts, and forced Maggy into exile, Maggy responded to those who feared she had lost everything, “No, I did not lose everything, I fled with my treasure–love, and love makes us inventors.”
I had traveled to Kigali to find out if that was indeed the case and to try to understand what the ‘invention’ of love looks like in the midst of displacement and exile. In various conversations and interviews it became clear that at the heart of the logic of Maggy’s “out of place” love are two apparently contradictory notions: its “simplicity” and its “excess.” As one journalist who has followed Maggy and is working on a documentary on her explained to me: “What drives Maggy is a simple message (God’s love) that… keeps being played out in endless and rich practical manifestations of courage, beauty, compassion, and service to the least of these.”
Katongole, a Catholic priest ordained by the Archdiocese of Kampala, is a core faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Previously, he has served as associate professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke University, where he was the founding co-director of the Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation. He is the author of books on political theology, the Christian social imagination, and Christian approaches to justice, peace, and reconciliation. His most recent book is Who Are My People: Love, Violence and Christianity in Subsaharan Africa (2022).
Photo Credit: Ted Eytan. MAGA hats sold at Trump rally in DC in 2017.
One of the great puzzles of the 2016 elections in the United States was the extraordinary support that Donald Trump received from white evangelicals. Nearly 80% ultimately voted for Trump. It is important to note that most non-white evangelicals did not vote for Trump, and that most white evangelicals voted for other candidates during the Republican primaries. And yet, Trump was still the first choice of a plurality of white evangelicals.
One of the great puzzles of the first 18 months of the Trump administration is the steady increase in Trump’s approval ratings amongst white evangelicals. Over 80% now approve of Trump. During the presidential elections, many white evangelical leaders were prepared to publicly excuse Trump’s patently un-Christian personal behavior—including his ill-concealed racism and misogyny—and many white evangelical voters were evidently willing to overlook them as well. Now, they appear ready to overlook his ongoing assault on American democracy, too—including the rule of law, the freedom of the press.
This is not a uniquely American puzzle. The affinity between religious conservativism and right-wing populism is a phenomenon that antedates Trump and extends beyond America. That affinity is perhaps less obvious and less important in Western Europe, where the ranks of Christian conservatives have been in rapid decline for some time now. But even there, neo-populists often position themselves as defenders of “Christian civilization.” Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen did not borrow this move from Trump’s playbook. On the contrary, the opposite is more likely the case.
Elsewhere in the world, the connection between religious conservativism and right-wing populism is both striking and significant. In Hungary, for instance, Viktor Orban has promised to replace “liberal democracy” with “Christian democracy,” by which he evidently means an ethno-nationalist form of one-party-rule and plebiscitary democracy. Moving eastwards, to the inner boundary of Eurasia, we arrive in Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, where the “secular democracy” of the Kemalist regime has been supplanted by an Islamic version of the Orban model.
Any suspicion that Western analysts might harbor concerning the European origins of this phenomenon are however promptly shattered when we arrive on the Indian sub-continent. There, civilizationist discourse is nearly a century old. The Hindu nationalist movement has long had both religious and secular followers, and Hindu nationalist discourse has long claimed that Hinduism is a way of life or a form of civilization to which non-Hindu Indians can and indeed must belong.
While the origins of left-wing populism are usually traced to the American populist movement of the late 19th century, the genealogy of right-wing populism begins further South, in Latin America. There, too, authoritarian populist leaders found substantial support amongst Catholic conservatives.
Of course, not all religious conservatives feel attracted to the populist message. In the US, for instance, the ranks of the #neverTrumpers include a good number of conservative Christian intellectuals, Protestants as well as Catholics. The question, then, is which religious conservatives and why? The tentative answer that I’d like to advance here is: “religious nationalists.”
Until recently, of course, most scholars of nationalism would have dismissed the very concept as an oxymoron. Nationalism was assumed to be a wholly “modern” phenomenon, a kind of ersatz religion for secular modernity. Today, many scholars understand religious nationalism as a distinctive variant of modern nationalism, one that makes religious identity the litmus test of national belonging.
While religious nationalism may well be a modern phenomenon, the connection between religion and nationalism long antedates modernity. Indeed, one could argue—and many including myself have argued—that Western nationalism has religious origins. For the definitional triptych of “people, land, and state” is already sketched out in the Hebrew Scriptures, which speak of a chosen people, a holy land, and a Jewish state.
Academic analysts have often remarked on the quasi-religious character of modern nationalism. Some have explained this in functional terms. In this account, nationalism fills the “God-shaped hole” left by secularity. Others have explained it in instrumental terms. From this perspective, nationalist politicians invoke religious language to galvanize their followers. The genealogical account suggests a different explanation: modern nationalism has a religious “unconscious” that can always be summoned back to the surface again.
In “Western” versions of religious nationalism—by which I mean versions that are historically rooted in the Jewish and Christian scriptures—this religious unconscious has at least four key elements:
Blood tropes. Talk of blood is a red thread that runs through both the Jewish and Christian scriptures. There is talk of blood sacrifice, blood conquest, blood purity, and blood atonement, amongst other things.
Apocalyptic narratives. The histories of Judaism and Christianity are both replete with apocalyptic discourse. For most of these histories, literalist interpretations of the apocalyptic texts (viz., Daniel, Revelation) were confined to fringe movements. Today, they are a core element of evangelical Christianity.
Persecution/victimization narratives. The “pariah” status of the ancient Jews and Roman persecution of the Jesus movement left a deep imprint in the collective memories of both traditions. It is especially deep amongst present-day evangelicals, who expect to be persecuted for their faith.
Messianic expectations. Full-blown messianic movements have probably been somewhat more common in modern Judaism, but modern Christianity has certainly had its share (e.g., Mormonism) and the history of modern evangelicalism is of course rife with charismatic preachers who claim quasi-messianic powers.
These four elements are not “key” in the sense of being “unique” characteristics of Judaism and/or Christianity that distinguish them from other religious traditions. On the contrary, they are commonly found in “non-Western” versions of religious nationalism as well (e.g., Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamist). They are key, then, not in the sense of grounding a typological distinction between religious traditions, but rather in the sense that they underlie the elective affinity between religious nationalism and right-wing populism.
What do I mean by “right-wing populism”? There is widespread scholarly agreement that populism is not an “ideology,” at least not in the sense that, say, liberalism or communism are ideologies. Populism does not have a Mill or a Marx, a treatise or a manifesto, nor a program of reform or revolution (e.g., the expansion of individual rights or the abolition of private property). And yet, while it may lack the intellectual systematicity of these 19th century ideologies, it is not without a certain coherence. Some analysts have proposed that it is best understood as a political discourse centered around the notion of the “sovereign people” and related notions such as “popular will” and “popular unity.” This is why populist rhetoric often has a democratic ring. However, as proponents of this interpretation are quick to point out, right-wing populists also reject core elements of liberal democracy, such as the rule of law, the rights of the minority, and the internal pluralism of all peoples.
Building on Arlie Hochschild’s work, some scholars, including myself, have argued that populism is not just a discourse but a narrative. In her widely-read ethnography, Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild argued that her subjects interpreted the world through the frame of a “deep story,” a narrative that they were not always able to articulate themselves, but which they immediately recognized and affirmed as “theirs” as soon she articulated it for them. The central event in the populist story is “line-cutting.” Hochschild’s subjects imagine themselves to be waiting patiently in a long line that leads to the “American dream” of material prosperity. But the line is standing still. In fact, it hasn’t moved in years, decades even. Why? Up ahead, her subjects notice, other people are cutting in line, immigrants and minorities who just recently arrived. Not only that, the Federal Government is guiding them to the front of the line. This, they feel, is deeply unjust.
In my view, Hochschild’s deep story is just one variant of a more generic narrative that underlies right-wing populism. It features four actors: a pure people, a corrupt elite, an undeserving other, and a messianic leader. The people have been betrayed by the elite which is allied with the other, and the leader promises to restore the people to its birthright. There is also a left-wing version of this story. It features three actors: an oppressed people, a corrupt elite, and a social movement. In this account, the people are being exploited by the elite and have joined together in a movement of liberation.
Right-wing populist movements have at least two other common, if not universal features. The first—and the most important for our purposes—is a charismatic leader. Because the populist goal of popular unity can never really be achieved it is often performed. In left-wing populist movements, unity is usually embodied in “the movement.” In right-wing populist movements, by contrast, it is more often incorporated in a leader. The second common feature of right-wing populist movements (sometimes found in the left-wing variant, too) is the performance of “bad manners,” above all by the leader, but also by his (or, occasionally, her) followers. By “bad manners,” I understand ongoing violations of social norms of polite speech and sometimes also of dress and grooming. The speech of populist leaders is often impolite and profane. And their personal appearance is often unconventional. Bad manners serves two purposes: it distances the leader from the elite and signals his or her closeness to the people. But it also distances the leader from “ordinary” people and suggests extraordinary talents or superhuman powers.
Having enumerated some important characteristics of both religious nationalism and right-wing populism, it is now possible to identify some of the elective affinities between them. They run in both directions. Religious nationalists are attracted to right-wing populist movements and parties if and insofar as they:
Invoke notions of blood sacrifice, blood conquest, blood purity and, more generally, attribute mystical powers to human blood.
Paint the contemporary situation in Manichean and apocalyptic terms, as a cosmic struggle between good and evil, that is hurtling towards its final denouement.
Portray the dominant ethno-cultural majority as a persecuted, religious minority; in particular, a minority persecuted on account of its faith.
Are headed by a charismatic leader who makes messianic promises and claims messianic powers.
Conversely, right-wing populists are attracted to religious nationalism if and insofar as it:
Emphasizes the moral purity of the common people.
Blames national decline on cultural elites, and especially on secular intellectuals.
Clearly identifies moral and/or religious others who can never become full members of the people.
Sanctifies the charismatic leader, despite or even because of his or her bad manners.
Against this backdrop, the ongoing love affair between Donald Trump and white evangelicals becomes a good deal less perplexing. Trump has a peculiar (and possibly psychotic) obsession with human blood, particularly but not exclusively, women’s blood. He espouses a dark, “us vs. them” view of the world, always on the brink of disaster. He espies conspiratorial plots and nefarious enemies most everywhere he looks. And he imagines that he can easily fix difficult problems with simple solutions that have somehow eluded his predecessors. Conversely, Trump-supporting evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Franklin Graham envision the United States as a Christian nation that has been corrupted by secular elites, often on behalf of underserving others (typically racial, religious or sexual minorities), and they have not only given Trump a series of “mulligans” for his personal morality, they often seem to revel in his bad manners, particularly when they are aimed at those they dislike.
The goal of this memo has been to sketch out the cultural logic that underlies the elective affinity between religious nationalism and right-wing populism and, more broadly, to dispel the view, quite widespread among Western intellectuals, that the alliance between religious nationalists and neo-populists is purely instrumental or patently hypocritical. While I am confident that this framework can “travel”—i.e., that it gives us some theoretical purchase over other cases of neo-populism, Western and non-Western alike—I do not imagine that it would survive such a journey unscathed. Further comparative work is of course necessary, particularly comparisons that go beyond Europe and the Americas to include various regions of Asia and Africa. Nor do I wish to suggest that this cultural analysis constitutes an adequate explanation much less an exhaustive account for the rise of neo-populist movements or their relative success or failure. That would require a fuller analysis, not only of national-level factors (e.g., party systems, immigration patterns, religious demography etc.) but also of global and geopolitical changes as well.
Philip S. Gorski is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at Yale University, where he leads the Critical Realism Network. He is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods. His empirical work focuses primarily on religion and politics in early modern and modern Europe and America. He also writes on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. His most recent book is American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (Princeton, 2017).
Photo Credit: Global Partnership for Education. 5th grader in class in Mamakoffikro, Côte d’Ivoire, December 2015.
My previous blog focused on grassroots understandings of modernity in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) that emphasized the dimensions of “change” and “novelty” related to western influence on local patterns of life. Gender reform is another major concept of my current research. The cornerstone of contemporary gender theories is the idea that in any society, gender roles and categories are not given but constructed, and hence can be deconstructed as well. I dwell on the state’s working definition which shapes state gender policies today in Côte d’Ivoire. I take it for granted that “gender” reforms are a “modern” concern in the context of Africa, again if modernity is taken here to encapsulate western influence on local practices. The point I want to make is that, although Côte d’Ivoire embraces gender equality concerns, the state concept of gender does not include the LGBTQ community and focuses mainly on closing the gender gap between men and women instead.
Distribution of Power
Although structured by both matrilineal and patrilineal systems of kinship, like most West African societies Côte d’Ivoire is predominantly patriarchal in the distribution of power between men and women. It is generally assumed that in patriarchal societies women are ruled by men, but a differentiated approach to gender power relationships reveals a much more complex picture in Africa. Even though it is true that men hold more power than women in society, this is not the case in all sectors of social life. For example, regarding political power, the Baoule—a major Akan sub-group found in Côte d’Ivoire—venerate as their founding ancestress a female figure called Queen Abla Pokou who they claim led them from present-day Ghana to their current location. She then became their first ruler and was succeeded by another woman, Queen Akoua Bony, who ruled them from 1730 to 1760 before men took over the kingdom. The kingdom has lasted three centuries and has been ruled by twelve sovereigns, including three women. The third woman, Queen Monique N’ga Tanou, was consecrated in August 2017, taking the name Nanan Akoua Boni III.
Photo Credit: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations. Women and children at social services event in Côte d’Ivoire, 2013.
Some have argued that in pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Africa, gender differentiation and hierarchies were less rigid and therefore more flexible than those inherited from Islam, Christianity, and colonial legal systems that current gender reforms seek to correct. Africa, like many other parts of the world, has a long way to go to close the gender gap. But overall, as the data of the 2017 Global Gender Gap Report suggests, Africa is making progress, with some countries even doing far better than most Western countries. The best performance on the continent is that of Rwanda, which is ranked 4th in the world. Also doing well are countries such as Namibia, South Africa, and Botswana. The 2017 Global Gender Gap Report ranks Côte d’Ivoire 133rd out of 144 countries evaluated. Its overall score suggests that although Côte d’Ivoire is closing the gender gap in areas such as education and health, it still has a long way to go on the economic participation of women and their political empowerment.
Focus on Women
Let us now consider the state construction of gender and how it impacts social and economic empowerment.
Côte d’Ivoire’s major public policy document articulates gender policy as follows:
An approach to development which aims at reducing social, economic, political, and cultural inequalities between men and women, between boys and girls. It reveals injustices and discrimination which are encouraged or tolerated in various social contexts, very often against women. These include, among other things, opportunities, obligations, and rights awarded to any individual (man or woman) within a society. A policy that integrates the notion of gender is a policy that comparatively analyzes the situation of men and women, identifies the sources of inequality between the sexes, and attempts to reduce them. Gender is also defined as all the implicit or explicit rules that govern the relationships between man and woman on the basis of different values, responsibilities, and obligations.1
In terms of gender policy innovation in the last decade, the focus has been on the empowerment of women. To enhance the economic and political participation of women in public life, a Compendium of Female Competences project was launched in 2011 and has led to the production of a Directory of Competent Women in various domains. The concern about the economic empowerment of women is behind the creation in 2012 of the special “Fund for Women in Côte d’Ivoire” to facilitate the access of women to microloans. A Plan for the Implementation of the National Gender Policy was released in 2014 as well as a Roadmap for the Implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). But it is in the sector of education that much progress has been noted because education is seen a major driver of empowerment for women. The General Census of 2014 indicates that the rate of illiteracy in Côte d’Ivoire is about 56.1% of which 49.3% are men and 63% are women.
It is evident that the Ivoirian state gender policy does not include any concern about the forms of sexual orientation that characterize the LGBTQ community. Although the emergence and visibility of LGBTQ identities is still a hotly debated issue in Africa, heterosexuality remains the norm both institutionally and in collective representations. The question of the existence of homosexuality in precolonial Africa is highly debated in the public sphere, including among scholars. Whatever the case, the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa was instrumental in giving some visibility to African homosexuals as they came to be classified among the highly vulnerable groups requiring special attention. The Ivoirian Penal Code does not explicitly criminalize homosexual acts, but Article 360 in its second paragraph accentuates sanctions against public indecency involving people of the same sex. Although there are no laws in Côte d’Ivoire which explicitly criminalize homosexuality, LGBTQ Ivoirians can be targets of various forms of violence because of their sexual orientation, especially when they strive for more visibility.
The state concept of gender in Côte d’Ivoire does not include the specificity of the LGBTQ community. As an Ivorian member of this community rightly puts it, “In Côte d’Ivoire, the conception of gender is limited to the binary opposition male/female, the equality of man and woman. But they [state policy makers] should understand that the concept of gender is broader and evolving. So the national document on gender has a lot of deficiencies from this respect.”(Interview, Member of the LGBT community, Lesbian Life Association, Abidjan, 2017). This raises questions about the inclusivity of the state construction of gender.
[1]Framing of “Gender” in the Ministère de la Famille, de la Femme et des Affaires Sociales, 2009. Document de Politique Nationale sur l’Egalité des Chances et le Genre, Abidjan.
Photo Credit: Miguel Discart Photos. World Cup 2018–Belgium vs Japan. Notice Moroccan flag in center.
A video circulating on Facebook shows a crowd of men standing in front of a cafe cheering and dancing to the rhythms of a darbouka, a Moroccan tambourine. The video was shot in Molenbeek, one of Brussel’s nineteen communes, which recently gained international notoriety due to the implication of a few of its residents in international terrorism. Yet in this context, the commune was the setting for a more joyful event. A crowd of men of Maghrebi origin danced and sang while waving the Belgian flag as cars drove along, honking to the rhythms of the dancers. The crowd was celebrating Belgium’s advance to the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup—a historic event for the country, which had only reached that stage one time earlier when the team around the legendary Jean-Marie Pfaff managed to make it to the semi-finals of the World Cup in Mexico in 1986. But there are important differences between the team that qualified in 1986 and this one, differences which also explain why large parts of Molenbeek were celebrating this historical achievement. With the presence of Belgian-Moroccan star players Marouane Fellaini and Nacer Chadli, in addition to two players of Congolese descent, Romelo Lukaku and Michy Batshuayi, the composition reflected the highly diverse demographic realities of the Belgian metropoles. Furthermore, this victory comes at a moment when intense tensions about migration run through the country, providing a welcome counter-narrative to the doom and gloom scenario that prevails in the rhetoric of the leading nationalist political elites.
Photo Credit: Erik Drost. Romelu Lukaku at the Cleveland FirstEnergy Stadium, 2013.
Analysts have often held ambivalent views on the potential that soccer, and sports in general, have in overturning existing power imbalances and racial hierarchies within societies. The overrepresentation of ethnic-cultural minorities in various sports is not a novelty. Like other professional circuits, such as music, sports have traditionally been one of the spheres through which racialized minorities could progress and gain a degree of fame, wealth, and social mobility. One of the reasons often advanced to explain this overrepresentation of minorities in sports is the way in which it comfortably confirms, rather than disturbs, racial hierarchies and stereotypes: Black or Arab men are primarily seen as productive bodies, with entertainment value. This is also why many have warned against mistakenly seeing a diverse national football team as a sign of tolerance or inclusion. The victory of France in the 1998 World Cup, with a team coined “Black, Blanc, Beur” [beur meaning Arab in slang], did not stop the political advance of the National Front a few years later, nor did it stand in the way of rampant anti-Muslim rhetoric and strong secularist measures targeting veiled women that continue to this day. Furthermore, figures like Zinédine Zidane were even hailed as examples by some commentators of the success of the French model of laïcité and assimilation. Born to an immigrant father from Algeria, Zidane does not display an explicit identification with Islam. Another danger looms in the uncritical celebration of football as a carrier of diversity, in that players of foreign descent are only hailed when they are heroes, but are immediately castigated when they fail. The same football star, Zidane, who achieved a quasi-divine status in football and was celebrated as a model of integration, went overnight from hero to savage (Arab) during the historic confrontation with Italian player Materazzi in the World Cup final of 2006.1
There are, however, reasons to also consider another side of this story, particularly when it comes to the Belgian national team and the celebration of it. Due to its fragmented political and social history, Belgium never successfully managed to tell a coherent national story about itself. And it is precisely this absence of a unified national project that allows for a triumphant recuperation of national symbols by ethnic minorities and expressions of difference that are otherwise marginalised.
Since its establishment in 1830, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Napoleonic empire and as a result of a mobilisation of a Catholic and Francophone elite who were unhappy to live under the tutelage of a Protestant Dutch monarch, the small kingdom of Belgium, with its 11 million inhabitants, has been beset by a never-ending succession of tensions around language, religion (Catholic/secular), and economy—with postcolonial migration being the newest addition to the historical fault lines identified by the Belgian sociologist Luk Huyse. Most of these migrants are descendants of workers who came to the country after the Second World War from Italy, Spain, Morocco, or Turkey. The nineties saw another wave of immigrants, mostly political refugees from Belgium’s former colonies in Africa’s Great Lakes region (Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda). The result is a highly diverse reality where metropoles like Brussels, which are home to players like Fellaini, Lukaku, or Batshuayi, have become minority majority cities where Arabic eclipses Dutch as the most used language after French. This multicultural composition of the country sits uncomfortably, however, with the prevailing models of inclusion which, in contradistinction to France or the UK and the US, are not unified into a single national model. In Flanders, a region where separatist and nationalist parties represent more than one-third of the electorate, an ideology of linguistic and cultural purism prevails. The Francophone part of the country is, in turn, highly influenced by the French model and puts more emphasis on secularism, although its various attempts to inscribe laïcité in the national constitution have so far failed.
Photo Credit: Кирилл Венедиктов. Michy Batshuayi during the England-Belgium World Cup match, 2018.
Yet, and to the dismay of many, the players of the national team do not neatly abide by any of these scripts—just like many of the postcolonial minorities in the country who are currently challenging Belgium’s colonial legacy and white imaginary. On the evening that Belgium managed to secure a position in the quarterfinals, after an impressive come-back against Japan, Michy Batshuayi circulated a video recorded in the dressing room where he congratulated, in French with some Moroccan terms, the ‘draries’ for the victory, emphasizing the sentiment with expressions of ‘wallah’ [I swear in the name of Allah] and ‘shukran’ [thank you]. The word ‘drari’ [literally: boys] is a Moroccan word used in vernacular language to designate street kids, and has turned into a popular concept within youth culture, just like ‘wallah.’ Referring to the exploits of his teammates Chadli and Fellaini who were vital to Belgium’s win, Batshuayi’s performance reflects the importance of these ethnic and religious markers and the many linguistic crossovers found in youth culture across the ethnically diverse Belgian metropoles. Belgian flags, with the green star of the Moroccan flag added to the Belgian tricolour, circulated as a joke, as did the hashtag #valeurajoutée (added value): a response to the controversial Federal State-Secretary of Migration and Asylum Theo Francken, who openly wondered in 2011 what the added value of Moroccan or Congolese migrants was for the country. A similar event occurred after Belgium qualified for the semi-finals last Friday: Liège-born Nacer Chadli thanked his fans on his Facebook account, concluding with the words, “Allah is the greatest.” In a context where such a formulation, and in particular its Arabic variant (Allah-u Akbar), has become linked with violent extremism, and where public expressions of religion are met with suspicion, this public declaration of faith probably raised more than one eyebrow. And in a recent interview with The Players’ Tribune, star striker Romelu Lukaku opened up about his experiences of racism in Belgium, declaring that he would be surprised to find a single black person who hasn’t faced racism in the country, and challenging the general climate of suspicion that exists towards minorities and migrants in his birth country.
The so-called ‘golden generation’ of Belgian players is exceptional in several ways. Not only does it excel in technical skills and team play, but more importantly in the way it echoes many of the cultural and political developments within the country, not the least of which is the growing outspokenness of the descendants of postcolonial migrants who, by sharing their experiences of racism and openly challenging some of the prevailing colonial narratives, seek to carve out a space of their own. This also partially explains the immense enthusiasm and overwhelming support they elicit throughout the country. Each of the players seems, in his own way, to shed light on different compositions of Belgium, some of which does not conform to the more dominant nationalist or highly secularist narratives in the country.
A few weeks after the 22 March 2016 attacks in Brussels, the Federal Interior Minister Jan Jambon declared in an interview with the Belgian daily De Standaard that “a significant part of the Muslim community was dancing in the streets after the attacks.” His words prompted many angry reactions in the press with people denouncing these statements as an instance of fake news and demanding evidence for these claims while accusing the interior minister of polarising the country at such a sensitive moment. While the Interior Minister failed to substantiate his claims and never apologised for his statements, the expression “Muslims are dancing in the streets” has turned into a parody to mock the Interior Minister. So too with the dancing Molenbeekois who, through their dances and songs, were seen by many as reclaiming this victory as also theirs.
Photo Credit: Ebenezer Obadare. Christ Embassy Ibadan North “Night of Bliss” poster with comedians Buchi and Bishop Chikancy among others.
Dilemmas
Over time, Nigerian Pentecostalism has taken on many of the externalities of popular culture in Nigeria, creating a unique composite of spirituality and secular entertainment. This enfolding of Pentecostalism and popular culture is one of the more fascinating aspects of the continued evolution of Nigerian Pentecostalism. What accounts for this joining at the hip? What socio-cultural and economic dynamics are at work here? Whither the imperative in Nigerian Pentecostalism to outsource the work of inspiration to performers and jesters? What light does this convergence of the spiritual and the profane throw on both?
My answers to these questions fall under three not necessarily distinct rubrics, but before offering them, I will supply two vignettes to demonstrate the phenomenon.
Vignettes
In October 2015, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Lagos Province 20, was in the middle of preparations for a three-day outdoor crusade, and Pastor Toyin Ogundipe, who is also professor of Botany at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), needed a personality who could be relied upon to galvanize the audience. After weighing his options, Pastor Ogundipe decided that popular Fuji musician, Alhaji Wasiu Alabi, better known as Pasuma (or “Paso” for short), was the ideal candidate for the job, and he rang him up. Although a Born Again Christian, Pastor Ogundipe, a lover of Fuji music, apparently saw nothing wrong with inviting Pasuma, a practicing Muslim and one of the most famous faces in the Nigerian entertainment industry, to come and fire up a Christian audience. Pasuma would later confirm as much in an interview, pointing out that during the telephone conversation with Pastor Ogundipe, the latter had brushed aside his initial rejection of the invitation by reassuring him that all he needed from him, Pasuma, was to “come there… so we can get one or two or three people to change their lives. We want to use you to change some people’s hearts” (10:55).
Although Pasuma and Pastor Ogundipe clinched a deal, the crusade would not go ahead as planned, for hardly had the poster of the event featuring, among other things, a large picture of Pasuma sporting his trademark dark glasses gone into circulation when it ran into a storm of criticism. Most of the criticism centered on the propriety of inviting into the “sacred space” of a church “crusade” a “Special Guest Artist” who (1) happens to be a practicing Muslim, and (2) whose music is notorious for its profanity and ribaldry. As criticism mounted, the RCCG hierarchy intervened quickly by canceling the planned crusade and suspending the errant pastor.
As it happens, Pastor Ogundipe was not the first pastor of a major Pentecostal church to invite a secular artiste to, as it were, light up his congregation. In April of the same year, Senior Pastor Bolaji Idowu of Harvesters International Christian Church Center, Lekki, Lagos, had drawn flak for inviting emerging singer-songwriter Korede Bello to perform his hit song, ‘God Win,’ to the congregation in celebration of Easter Sunday. Of the many condemnations of Pastor Idowu, the angst-ridden statement by US-based Pastor Olusola Fabunmi of the RCCG, City of Faith in Maryland, went farthest in summarizing the concerns of those worried by what they saw as the latest instance of the church’s seemingly inexorable surrender to “the world”:
But it’s written here, that when we chose (sic) the way of the world, we have clearly chosen our paths; becoming an enemy of God. Please, there must be a clearly defined boundary of who sings, and/or ministers in churches. Some of the questions that come to mind are: is he born again? Sanctified with the spirit of God and baptized in the Holy Spirit? Also, let’s ask ourselves, what’s even the purpose of people singing in churches and Christian concerts? …. So I believe very strongly that one major purpose of choristers or Psalmists singing is to prepare the minds and hearts of the people for the word of God.
Since these two incidents, and for all the widespread condemnation, the entanglement of Nigerian Pentecostalism with Nigerian popular entertainment has in fact intensified. For instance, during field research in Ibadan in the summer of 2017, I observed that popular artistes were represented on a significant number of billboard advertisements for Pentecostal church events. In some of them, the entertainers in question were, like the aforementioned Pasuma, described as “Special Guest Artistes.” Like visual prompts intended to arrest the gaze and tantalize the prospective attendee (this being Nigeria, I often wondered whether some of the artistes in those advertisements were even aware of their presence in them), other billboards carried only the images of popular entertainers without any information as to their specific roles in the advertised events. The odds of sharing the pew with WizKid1 next Sunday? What better way to find out than to be physically present at Sunday service?
Gospel Comedy
Photo Credit: Ebenezer Obadare. Poster for hybrid church-comedy program featuring gospel entertainer Olarewaju Bolaji (Big B) and comedians Woli Arole and Woli Agba, among others.
Furthermore, and in a notable deepening of the trend, not only is it gradually becoming de rigueur to invite standup comics to perform at regular Sunday services (a practice that, similar to the invitation of Pasuma and Korede Bello, has drawn fire from a section of the Christian community)2 a new sub-genre of Nigerian comedy known as “Gospel Comedy” appears to have taken form. The leading names in this emerging comic form are, in no particular order Woli Agba (real name Ayo Ajewole), Akpororo (Jephthah Bowoto), Mazi Prosper, Bishop Chikancy, Buchi (Onyebuchi Ojieh), M.C. Crucsio, Woli Arole (Bayegun Oluwatoyin), DA 13thDisciple (Adefuwa Oluwagbemiga), Gee Jokes (Adejobi Omogbolahan), and Aboki 4 Christ (Olufemi Michael). By definition, if not practice, Gospel Comedy crystallizes the emerging convergence of Pentecostalism and popular culture in Nigeria. And because they are self-confessed Christians, hence speaking from within the fold, gospel comedians, unlike “regular” comedians, appear to enjoy greater artistic license regarding otherwise theologically sensitive material. As a matter of fact, such is their desire to emphasize the primacy of their identities as Born Again Christians that many of them (Woli Arole for instance) typically preface their commencements with the caveat that “I am not a comedian.”
Propositions
I propose the following explanations.
I.
One explanation is that such is the inherent permissiveness, some would say promiscuity, of Yorùbá metaphysics, that such an embrace could not be avoided. There is solid literature on the subject, notably the late sociologist J.D.Y. Peel’s oeuvre, which locates this permissiveness in the dynamic copresence of three religious traditions (Islam, Christianity, and indigenous Orisa) in the Yorùbá space and imagination. In a recent study, I drew on this scholarly tradition to argue that a culturally mandated amity among otherwise competitive religious traditions is a major explanation for Muslim adoption of Pentecostal devotional and evangelistic repertoires in western Nigeria. The point is that given the power and widespread acceptance of this metaphysics, the extension of an invitation to a popular entertainer who happens to be a Muslim is not the singular act of transgression it would appear to be at first glance. Nor is there any obvious contradiction in a Born Again Christian like Pastor Ogundipe being partial to Fuji music as many Yorùbás, Muslim and Christian, are. Indeed, not only has the Fuji scene always been the best place to judge the vitality or otherwise of popular culture as conducted in Yorùbá,3 the music itself has played an outsize role in the liberalization of the Yorùbá public sphere. One conclusion from this is that, in extending an invitation to Pasuma, Pastor Ogundipe was unwittingly validating two facts, one cultural, the other sociological.
The cultural fact is that although both the pastor and the entertainer profess allegiance to two different faiths, they remain, culturally speaking, sons of the same mother. Further, Pastor Ogundipe was validating the sociological fact of Fuji’s undoubted eminence as the most innovative form of popular music in contemporary western Nigeria. While a full development of this observation falls outside the ambit of this discussion, I note in passing that over time, and in part through a process of steady appropriation that is classic Yorùbá, Fuji music has transcended its religious origins in urban working class Muslim Ramadan ritual to become a transnational, class-neutral, crossover secular genre. As a crossover genre, not only has it internalized the Yorùbá idea of Jesus as a cultural figure for multi-purpose social invocation, which means that Christian songs of appeasement for heavenly intervention have been assumed into its repertoire; it has taken full advantage of Jùjú’s decline as a Yorùbá musical form.4 Pasuma is, if nothing else, the very emblem of this transition, arguably the most successful crossover artiste in the contemporary Nigerian music industry. Hence the appeal—Fuji’s and Pasuma’s—to Pastor Ogundipe. Nothing, it seems, not even Pentecostalism, a force of nature in its own right, can resist the propulsive energy of Fuji.
II.
A second explanation has to do with the specific character of Pentecostalism itself, especially as a form of mediation “taking place” in a public sphere underwritten by liberalization and commercialization of the media. Anthropologist Birgit Meyer’s astute observation regarding Ghanaian Pentecostalism’s transgressiveness applies to the Nigerian context: “Relatively undisturbed by the state, but all the more indebted to the emerging image economy, Pentecostalism has spread into the public sphere, disseminating signs and adopting formats not entirely of its own making and, in the process, has been taken up by popular culture. In the entanglement of religion and entertainment, new horizons of social experience have emerged, thriving on fantasy and vision and popularizing a certain mood oriented toward Pentecostalism” (308). Similarly, in his work on Malawi, anthropologist Rijk van Dijk shows how Pentecostal ideology unwittingly created “the space to experience witchcraft in terms of mockery, laughter and amusement” (99). In Nigeria, and as I have argued elsewhere,5 the incorporation of Pentecostalism into popular culture is indicated by, among other things, the celebrification6 and eroticization of the figure of the pastor; the appropriation of media technologies by Pentecostal churches; and the conversion of many popular entertainers to Pentecostalism (cf. anthropologist Jesse Weaver’s work on the religious conversion of comedians and musicians in Ghana), resulting in the further blurring of the boundaries between secular and religious entertainment. Significantly, not only are popular entertainers converting to Pentecostalism; in an emergent trend, a growing number of retirees from the Nigerian movie industry, Nollywood, are taking up pastoring. The list of retired movie stars who are now bona fide pastors of Pentecostal churches includes Eucharia Anunobi-Akwu, Ernest Azuzu, Kanayo O. Kanayo, Zack Orji, Larry Koldsweat, and Liz Benson. One result of all this, especially the appropriation of media technologies, is the transformation of the religious landscape across the African continent. A more directly relevant effect is what Hackett describes as the facilitation of “homogenizing cultural flows” (258). The mutual interpenetration of Pentecostalism and popular culture in Nigeria sits against this all-important backdrop.
III.
Photo Credit: Ebenezer Obadare. The Redeemed Evangelical Mission (TREM) Potter’s Place program poster featuring comedians Gee Jokes and DA 13th Disciple.
A third explanation for the convergence of Nigerian Pentecostalism and popular culture is the commercial imperative, i.e., the need by churches to adapt to the changing conditions of an intensely competitive religious marketplace. One effect of the success of Pentecostalism as the dominant form of Christianity in Nigeria and several key African countries is the sheer explosion in the number of churches. As Pentecostalism has exploded, so also has its appetite for space, as historian Olufunke Adeboye demonstrates in her analysis of Pentecostal appropriation of public spaces like nightclubs, hotels, and cinema halls in Nigeria. I propose (1) that the identified success of Pentecostalism has led to a glut in the supply of “religious goods,” and (2) that Pentecostal churches’ cultivation of popular culture, as illustrated by the overture to popular entertainment figures, is in part explicable by the logic of competition in a saturated religious marketplace. I argue that because the supply of what Robert B. Ekelund, et al., describe as “assurances of salvation” arguably now exceeds its demand in the Nigerian religious market, churches, especially Pentecostal churches, are forced to come up with all manner of “product differentiation” innovations in order to either hold on to loyal patrons (existing members of the congregation) or attract new customers. This is why, for instance, the billboard advertisement of the RCCG Lagos Province 20 that I referred to at the beginning not only features an image of Pasuma, but also tantalizes prospective attendees with “gift items” like flat screen televisions, motorcycles, mass transportation tricycles popularly known as “Keke Marwa” or “Keke NAPEP,” and electric power generators. A related and no less plausible argument is that, in a context of serious and persistent economic deprivation, “assurances of salvation” are no longer enough to draw crowds to church; accordingly, churches have to offer other products (entertainment, commodities, etc.) in addition to their core product.
Summary
The intertwining of Pentecostalism and popular culture in Nigeria is a complex phenomenon, and the foregoing is merely a sketch and a preliminary attempt to offer an explanation. While Pentecostalism is a global phenomenon, the power of local inscription means that general hypotheses must be advanced with caution. In the Nigerian Yorùbá world, a pragmatic cultural disposition gives rise to a Pentecostalism that is accepting of popular culture, generating new spiritual and artistic forms that warrant scholarly analysis.
End Notes
[1] Popular Nigerian entertainer. Real name Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun.
[2] The most vocal critic of this practice is Pastor Mike Bamiloye, founder of the Mount Zion Faith Ministries. See for instance http://naijachurchnews.com/bamlioye-condemns-pastors-invite-comedians-church-events/ Accessed June 3, 2018. Interestingly, as dramatist, actor, producer, owner of a television station—Mount Zion Television—and pioneer in the Nigerian Christian film industry, Bamiloye arguably played a leading role in introducing Nigerian Pentecostalism to popular culture.
[3] I thank Tade Ipadeola for this insight.
[4] Jùjú’s slow decline is due to many reasons, and awaits a full accounting. My tentative guess is that the decline owes in part to the conversion of one of Jùjú’s leading exponents, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, to Pentecostalism in the early 1990s, marking the importation of Jùjú into “the mainstream of Christian music” (see Kalu 2007, 25). Crucially, the importation was facilitated by the fact that in its basic identity as a form of popular culture, Jùjú was essentially “Christian”. If my guess is right, Jùjú is a victim of Pentecostalism’s success, insofar as Pentecostalism further blurred the line between Jùjú and Christian Gospel music.
[5] Ebenezer Obadare, “The Charismatic Porn-Star: Social Citizenship and the West African Pentecostal Erotic” Citizenship Studies, 22(6), 2018. Forthcoming.
[6] As opposed to ‘celebritization.’
Further Reading:
Olufunke Adeboye, “A Church in a Cinema Hall? Pentecostal Appropriation of Public Space in Nigeria” Journal of Religion in Africa, 42(2): 145- 171, 2012.
Rijk van Dijk, “Witchcraft and skepticism by proxy: Pentecostalism and laughter in urban Malawi” In Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, ed. Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (London: Routledge, 2001).
Olivier Driessens, “The celebritization of society and culture: Understanding the structural dynamics of celebrity culture” International Journal of Cultural Studies16(6): 641- 657, 2012.
Robert B. Ekelund, Robert F. Herbert, Robert D. Tollison, The Marketplace of Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006).
Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Charismatic/Pentecostal Appropriation of Media Technologies in Nigeria and Ghana” Journal of Religion in Africa, 28(3): 258- 277, 1998.
Ogbu Kalu, “The Big Man of the Big God: Popular Culture, Media, and the Marketability of Religion” New Theology Review, May 2007, pp. 15-26.
Birgit Meyer, “Impossible representations: Pentecostalism, Vision, and Video technology in Ghana” In Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, eds. Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Ebenezer Obadare, “The Charismatic Porn-star: Social Citizenship and the West African Pentecostal Erotic” Citizenship Studies, 22(6), 2018. Forthcoming.
Ebenezer Obadare, “The Muslim Response to the Pentecostal Surge in Nigeria: Prayer and the Rise of Charismatic Islam” Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 2/1: 75- 91, 2016.
Jesse Weaver Shipley, “Comedians, Pastors, and the Miraculous Agency of Charisma in Ghana” Cultural Anthropology, 24(3): 523- 552, 2009.
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington, D.C.; a fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute of Theology, and contributing editor of Current History. Author and editor of numerous books on religion and politics and state and civil society in Africa, Obadare’s most recent work is Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender and Sexuality in Nigeria (Notre Dame Press, 2022). He is editor of Journal of Modern African Studies, published by Cambridge University Press.
Photo Credit: Steve Wilson. Crossroads in Hampshire, UK.
“To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads” Gloria Anzaldúa
How do you know you are alive?
I have asked myself and others this somewhat unusual question, and “breathing,” “thinking,” “feeling one’s heartbeat,” and “relating to others” are among the answers I have received. These empirical responses align with Descartes on the importance of thinking to human experience, summarized in his famous quote “I think therefore I am” (2005:51). However, they also show a larger spectrum that includes sensorial, somatic, and relational aspects. As vital as thinking is for human existence, it is also important to acknowledge that it does not encompass life in its fullness.
Descartes’ famous saying, and the way subsequent generations have appropriated and developed it into what is referred to as modernity, poses many problems for peace. Using rationality as the main premise for identifying life prioritizes beings and things that can be rationally understood. In modernity, this rational understanding is restricted to things susceptible to mathematical or logical explanation, employing a conception of science that is mechanistic, quantitative, Eurocentric, and secularized (Martínez Guzmán 2000: 52). Peace, therefore, is understood as a singular and absolute concept, a predictable outcome of calculated steps. This leads to the troublesome view of peace as a product of universal applicability, developed by neutral experts, which could be exported to supposedly unpeaceful people in civilizing and development projects. The violent consequences of such projects attest the problematic premises upon which this concept of peace is based.
A modern understanding of peace, based exclusively on rationality, falls short in offering multifaceted perspectives of the world and appropriate tools to navigate it. This understanding stems from the observation that there are opposites in the world (Dietrich 2012). From the need to make sense of and thrive among these oppositions emerges the strategy of categorizing opposites and evaluating them. One is given precedence over the other, resulting in distinctions such as good and bad, right and wrong. Repression and suppression of difference results in the grueling effort to reach a self-referenced yet delusional ideal of goodness, righteousness, and purity.
One consequence of this logic is the exclusion of others who do not think like “I” do. Modernity’s use of reason as the premise to identify life, or to acknowledge the right to existence, lays aside a whole range of beings which do not correspond to its definition of thinking. Nature is seen as devoid of consciousness and therefore exploitable to serve the lives of beings who think. Furthermore, this logic lays aside all those human beings who do not share “my” thinking or abide by “my” worldview. Considering that this “I” is restricted to a normative combination of identities, it devalues groups considered as others, such as women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, some ethnicities and nationalities, and lower income classes. Intersectionality shows even more complicated nuances of this logic of exclusion. The consequence then is similar to that befalling nature: exploitation and an existence that serves the normative “right” identity, the one against which all other existence is referenced.
In the same vein, when thinking is elevated as the only valid source of knowledge, other ways of knowing are suppressed. Sensing, feeling, intuiting, and witnessing (Koppensteiner 2018) are denigrated as irrational and unscientific. Besides losing touch with the richness of human experience, the supremacy of thinking prevents balancing and complementing reason with insights coming from the body, the heart, intuition, and spiritual inspiration. Such balance contributes to an awareness of relationality and the interconnectedness of life. Without balance, the problematic combination of the claim to absolute truth, a rejection of otherness, and the striving for purity may reach extremes and threaten difference altogether (Koppensteiner 2009).
Scholars and practitioners of feminist, gender, and critical race theory have long engaged in questioning the self-righteousness and rigid categorizations of dominant discourse, denouncing violent structures and calling for change. They have developed deep reflections on the causes and structures of violence, questioning systems of oppressive power, and holding violent narratives accountable. This has been of vital importance for peace work. They have called attention to deeper dynamics of violence going on underneath mainstream conflict intervention models and contributed to breaking the modern monolithic interpretation of peace. This rupture found echo in the field of peace studies with the acknowledgment of many and imperfect peaces (Dietrich and Sützl 1997, Muñoz 2006).
Authors such as hooks (1984), Crenshaw (1995), and especially Anzaldúa (1999), to name a few, delved into the exploration of the uncertainties, fears, and suffering of human experience on the margins. My experience with these texts has been painful but also inspiring, as they showed that an investigation of the power dynamics and potentialities within them may open space for tapping into power contained in vulnerability and in the intersections of difference and belonging. In this process, alternatives develop, revealing a potential for different forms of relating, anchored to the vulnerability of an open-ended and constantly shifting subject (Echavarría 2008).
This call for exploring relationality in the processes of changing and being changed that accompany human interaction resonates with a transrational understanding of peace (Dietrich 2012). The transrational approach does not deny or transcend rationality, but crosses through it, integrating reason while weakening its harmful tendencies of absolutism with an emphasis on relationality. Therefore, it invites a twist[1], a reworking of modernity’s split between nature and culture, body and mind, observer and observed, us and them (Dietrich 2012). Twisting this split involves more than simplistic inclusion. It is not about a work of goodness, of integrating people from the margins to the center, while divisive dynamics remain untouched. It involves enlarging the landscape of perception, engaging with people in open relationality, and questioning the different roles that perpetuate violence, including one’s own. It involves shifting the ways power, love, and politics are understood and enacted. It involves acknowledging not only the academy as a locus of production of knowledge, but also schools, political and communal gatherings, and personal experiences. It involves dialogue among thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting, and witnessing, and dialogue among people with different worldviews.
Twisting this split and healing the wounds derived from it requires hard work, and a profound change in structures and cultural behaviors that perpetuate it. However, this is not an endeavor that is out of reach. It begins with changes in the way each person perpetuates violence, transforms her conflicts and relates to others, and more frequently opens and holds spaces that enable experiences of intra- and interpersonal peace. In a transrational perspective, peace is available as a potential within human beings, who are embedded in the pulsating relationality and connectedness of life. Therefore, while acknowledging the gifts and risks of rationality, it is important also to sustain the energetic remembrance of interconnectedness, or as Anzaldúa suggests: being crossroads in the borderless fabric of relationality.
[1] Wolfgang Dietrich derives the term twist from Gianni Vattimo’s verwindung. Distinct from overcoming, twisting refers to a process of deriving reflections while recollecting, taking into consideration earlier experiences (201).
Further Reading:
Anzaldúa, G. (1999) Borderlands = La frontera. The new mestiza. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Koppensteiner, N. (2018) ‘Transrational Methods of Peace Research: The Researcher as (Re)Source’ in Transrational Resonances. Echoes to the Many Peacesedited by Josefina Echavarría, Daniela Ingruber and Norbert Koppensteiner, 59-81, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Paula Ditzel Facci is a facilitator and lecturer in the Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and in the Graduate Diploma in Conflict Transformation and Peace Studies with emphasis on Emotional Balance at the Peace and Mind Institute, Brazil. She holds a PhD in Peace, Conflict and Development from Universitat Jaume I, Spain, and was a visiting research fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Previously, she worked with educational and social projects in the development field in Brazil. Her research interest is on methods to elicit conflict transformation, with a focus on dance and movement. Email: paulafacci@gmail.com
Photo Credit: John Seitz. Cleric-inspired fashion at the Heavenly Bodies exhibit.
The dominant templates for the designs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibit come from two different Catholic figures, the church’s ordained men (the clergy) and its angels. These two groups belong to what the curators call the “earthly” and the “celestial” hierarchies of Catholic tradition. The “heavenly bodies” in question are both ‘up there’ above and ‘down here’ below. The treatment of the first of the hierarchies, the celestial, is somewhat limited in the exhibit. This group—made up, according to Pseudo-Dionysius’ rendering, of the Councilors, Governors, and Ministers of Heaven—is represented at the Met mainly by its lowest-ranking members, the angels. The curators explain in the exhibit’s wall text that angels “feature most prominently in the imagination of fashion designers” because they “function as guides, protectors, and messengers to humans.” They have been a staple of Catholic art over the centuries. Borrowing from these referents, the exhibit includes a choir of angles standing far above the floor of the main hall. An adjoining hall features another cluster of angels. One or two angel-like figures hover over doorways, other impressively winged angels occupy prominent positions. They are gendered, almost exclusively, female.
Photo Credit: John Seitz. Met Heavenly Bodies exhibit.
But the real emphasis of the exhibit rests on pieces inspired by the church’s earthly hierarchy—a group that the curators tell us is made up of priests (of different ranks and religious orders), bishops, cardinals, and popes as well as “nuns and monks” who have elected a “deliberately modest position” (they leave out deacons). The existence of this clear earthly hierarchy is a boon to the fashion designers, who capitalize on the church’s eagerness to use dress to “reflect and reinforce divisions based on rank and gender.” A good number of the designs reference the habits of women religious, particularly habits that were more commonly worn before the late 1960s. More prominent, however, are pieces inspired by priests’ liturgical wear, items that have remained a steady presence in Catholic life, with some modest changes, up to the present day. Not only do the exhibit’s main rooms bristle with cleric-inspired clothes, but the entire collection on loan from the Vatican, pieces designed mainly with ritual functions in mind, consists of the couture of the ordained, specifically various popes. Hierarchy, and specifically the earthly hierarchy topped by clerics, could hardly be more central.
The exhibit, in other words, is about power as much as it is about beauty. More precisely, it is about the ways beauty inflects power. The question then becomes what kinds of power the exhibit marshals or interrogates and to what ends.
Visual Culture and the Power of Vestments
Photo Credit: US National Archives. Father (Major) Edward J. Waters, Catholic Chaplain from Oswego, New York, conducts Divine Services on a pier for members of the first assault troops thrown against Hitler’s forces on the continent. Weymouth, England. June 6, 1944.
There may be a clue in U.S. religious history. In recent years I have spent time viewing photographs from the Second World War. There too, priestly clothing featured prominently in the stories the image makers were telling. One of the most common visual motifs of the war featured a robed priest—often with arms aloft in the moment of consecration during the mass—surrounded by military equipment, especially weapons, jeeps, tanks, and ships. There were obvious reasons for a focus on priests as part of the U.S. effort to promote its cause during the war. Priests offered a clear signal of “religiosity,” a crucial part of the narrative that aimed to distinguish the Allies from their supposedly irreligious or anti-religious enemies. Priests lent an aura of moral righteousness to the U.S. cause, offering reassurance both of the justice of the war and the eternal security of those fighting it. Priests also allowed image makers to tell a story of U.S. religious pluralism.
The priests-at-war motif served other ends as well. These results can be discerned in part by reading Catholic responses to the images they saw being produced by the U.S. propaganda machine: they could not get enough. Military and civilian photographers put Catholics at center stage in the war effort, and Catholic image makers—editors of Catholic journals, books, and pamphlets who often drew on the storehouse of images made available by the government—loved what they saw. Based on the commentaries and captioning they developed to accompany the images, Catholic writers were particularly fixated on the intersection of “heavenly” bodies and objects—priests and the things they carried and wore—with military objects. To be sure, Catholics weren’t just imagining these overlaps. Photographers emphasized them as well through the formal decisions of their art. Led in this way, Catholic writers particularly relished these intersections, routinely pointing them out to readers who might not be aware that they were viewing, say, a mass being said atop an altar jury-rigged out of an ammunition box.
Photo Credit: US Marine Corps. US Navy Chaplain O. David Herrmann preparing to hold religious service for US Marines on Saipan, Mariana Islands, June 24, 1944; note wrecked Type 95 Ha-Go light tank used as altar.
War photographers showed U.S. Catholics to themselves in the context of global war. Catholics took those images and leveraged them into stories about the sublime resonance and holy solemnity of their distinctive ways of being religious. The specific materiality of Catholic ritual life was made to absorb, leaven, and sanctify modern means of death and destruction. Catholic objects, and especially Catholic priests, were not irrelevant remnants from a superstitious past, but potent mediators of sanctifying grace in a terrifying world. The war images gave Catholics a way to think their Catholicism in the midst of a destructive and shifting modern context.
A Mirror of the Church: Sex and Spirituality
Heavenly Bodies is likewise a vehicle for showing Catholics to themselves. This time the salient context is not war. The exhibit instead positions Catholic bodies and their special objects amid three volatile cultural touchpoints of signal importance to the church: gender, sex, and spirituality. First, the exhibit takes place amid widespread challenges to inherited rigidities around gender within and around the church. The case for resuscitating women deacons within the church recently gained attention when Pope Francis directed a commission to explore the issue. Non-Roman Catholics, a good portion of whom differentiate themselves from the Roman church mainly through their support for the ordination of women, have stirred up recent waves of scholarly and popular analysis. On questions of sexuality, a recent publication by exhibit consultant and popular author Fr. James Martin, S.J. raised storms within sectors of the church for its call for a caring ministry for and conversation with LGBTQ Catholics. The clerical sexual abuse crisis has not really abated, and continually reopens discussion of the sex lives of priests, with some wondering whether celibacy and the historic silences and repressions of seminary and rectory can be blamed for producing men willing to exploit their power over the vulnerable. Others have seen fit to conflate sexual abuse with homosexuality, thus creating a scapegoat out of gay priests and pushing silence about sexuality deeper into the fabric of the church. More widely, the exhibit takes place after the success of popular media exploring sexual orientation and gender identity, including television shows like Transparent, which dives into the life of a trans woman and her family. The exhibit also rests within the context of heightened awareness about the sexual exploitation of women by men, including accusations against the star of Transparent, Jeffrey Tambor.
Photo Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gallery View, Medieval Sculpture Hall.
“Spirituality” stands as the third dominant context within which “Heavenly Bodies” must be understood. An oft-cited Pew study from 2015 revealed that there are nearly half as many people in the country (9% of the total adult population) who consider themselves former Catholics as those that call themselves Catholic (20% of the total adult population). Another 9% are characterized as “cultural Catholics.” One might look at this positively, and note that 38% (45% if you count those married to Catholics) of adult Americans have been substantively shaped by the Catholic tradition. But interpretations have tended in the other direction, toward handwringing about decreasing affiliation. A rise in the number of people claiming no religious affiliation at all (23%) has aggravated such concerns. Again, the statistics might be misleading since the so-called “nones” definitively have “some” religion in the form of “belief in God” (61%), an affirmation that religion is “very important” to them (13%), and “daily prayer” (20%). But downward trends in these numbers since 2007, and high rates of disaffiliation among Millennials (in comparison with other generations at the same age), have heightened a popular sense that spirituality is supplanting religion. Indeed, if my classrooms at a Catholic university are any indication, the idea of being “spiritual but not religious” has had tremendous staying power. This notion permeates the exhibit (and the history of modern museums) as well. At the press tour before the official opening of the exhibit, the curator, Andrew Bolton, remarked that most of the featured designers were themselves Catholic, although not necessarily actively practicing. Bolton also remembered his own Catholic upbringing, but made no comments about his current relation to the tradition.
It is in these contexts—heightened scrutiny of rigid norms of sex and gender as well as the increasing feeling that religion is faltering before “spirituality”—that the exhibit reveals Catholics to themselves. What they will see, particularly the implicit pairing of official and imagined clerical clothing, has the effect of a kind of funhouse mirror which rather than distorting reality, brings latent or suppressed elements to the fore.
Showcasing a Countercultural Tradition
In this case, Catholics are being shown subversive sides of the tradition vis-à-vis U.S. masculinity, femininity, and idealizations of spiritual autonomy. In simpler terms, Catholics will see the ways the church is gender fluid, sexually playful, and resolutely hierarchical. Unlike many in the church, the designers do not shy away, but embrace and even make a virtue of the abiding anti-Catholic barb about a feminized priesthood. This observation, dating back probably to the beginning of the priesthood itself, has long entertained and riled the church’s critics (from inside and out) who see clerical men—celibate and yet with special access to both men and women’s deepest secrets—as disruptive to gender norms. Martin Luther was famous for reviling the non-procreative priesthood as contrary to nature and God’s law. Other critics of the priesthood have seized particularly on priests’ clothing, especially the long cassock and liturgical chasuble, to suggest that a fundamental perversion of standard sexual norms is woven into the church’s hierarchy (see Gary Wills’ Why Priesthood? A Failed Tradition, 25-27). The designers play with these kinds of gendered expectations, borrowing from priestly cassocks worn in the tradition only by men, for example, to dress a manikin with an Ava Gardner shape. A white and gold get-up topped by a tall mitre—the kind that would only be worn by a pope—rests on a form with an impossibly girdled waist and rounded bosom (Rihanna reinforced the look at the Met Gala). The prominent militant Catholic in the exhibit is Joan of Arc, a visionary woman famous for wearing men’s clothing in her pursuit of a role in the defense of France during the Hundred Years’ War. Ordained and vowed men, as well as vowed women, have long been told that they give up sex and the procreative family in order to be married to Christ or the church itself. In keeping with this standard, the mystical tradition, of course, routinely takes readers into saints’ erotic encounters with Jesus. In these ways at least, as Mark Jordan and Anthony Petro have also helped us see heterosexuality, gender rigidity, and sexual prudishness are norms that are not actually normative in the church.
Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Digital Composite Scan by Katerina Jebb. Mitre of Pius XI (reigned 1922–39) Italian, 1929. Courtesy of the Collection of the Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, Papal Sacristy, Vatican City.
Neither is spiritual autonomy. The tradition, the exhibit reminds us, is resolutely mediated, the opposite of “spiritual” in that it establishes specific and reserved hierarchical pathways through which one unites with God. This interpretation pushes back slightly against the interpretation offered in the exhibit’s curatorial framing. The exhibit’s subtitle, “Fashion and The Catholic Imagination,” borrows from the great sociologist-priest Andrew Greeley, and frames the exhibit as part of the church’s confirmation that God’s grace is available, potentially at least, through everything in creation. This spiritual reading of Catholicism is certainly woven into the tradition. But the centrality of Holy Communion and Confession as means of grace offers a competing notion. In ordinary circumstances these sacraments are required, and themselves require priests. Surrounded by clerical clothes and prominent talk of hierarchy, visitors to the exhibit encounter a profoundly mediated tradition, not a tradition of independent searching, God in all things, and spiritual autonomy.
They see, in other words, another strikingly countercultural feature of the Roman Catholic tradition. While corporate boardrooms and political offices make gestures toward gender inclusivity, the Roman Catholic priesthood resolutely denies it. And even though the theology of priests has moved fitfully toward collaborative, inclusive, and horizontal models over the last one hundred years, the fact remains, in the words of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), that priests’ ordination still impresses upon them a “sacred power” to “teach and rule” in a mode that is different from lay Catholics’ authority “in essence and not only in degree.” And this is still the way Catholics tend to experience priests; for better or worse, they add solemnity and sacred presence to any situation, they are not like “us.” This elevation, of course, is deeply resented, easily ridiculed, and readily abused. But it is also, as the wartime photos aver, deeply desired.
This desire for religious hierarchy, the fascination with and even need for divine intermediaries who stand apart from everyday people, is one of the most revealing lessons of the Heavenly Bodies exhibit. The Gala, where elite invitees walk the red carpet in front of the museum while sporting exhibit-inspired clothing of their own, is thus not at all out of step with the religious nature of the exhibit, but profoundly in keeping with it: they are not unlike priests in their elevation, their supposed transcendence of everyday life, their access to power, and their constant proximity to our adulation, derisions, and rejection. The fashions show Catholic (and Catholic-adjacent) people the abiding resonance of the idea of priesthood.
Photo Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gallery View, Cuxa Cloister.
In all of these revelations, the exhibit is restrained and relatively modest. There was even more room for play with the undersides of Catholic life had the curators wished to explore them. It is reasonable to assume that cooperation with the Vatican and the support of the Archdiocese of New York helped keep radically excessive themes in check. But this restraint has not stopped some interpreters from criticizing the exhibit as either unseemly in its embrace of church luxury or sacrilegious in its playful appropriations of sacred realities. What these critiques miss, and what I myself missed in my initial reactions to the exhibit, are the ways in which the collection offers Catholics a chance to think about their tradition, to see themselves anew, in a contemporary context of spiritual, sexual, and gender fluidity.
John C. Seitz is a scholar of U.S. religion. He serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and as an Associate Director for the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston’s Parish Shutdowns (Harvard, 2011) and of academic articles about the Roman Catholic priesthood in the U.S., U.S. Catholics in the Second World War, and the study of religion.
