“White power is the very undeclared, silent, confident domination of the world.
They don’t have to assert continually because we live in their dictionary.”
–Haile Gerima, Filmmaker
Notes from a Rabbit’s Hell: Prolegomenon
The flaw in asking how far someone wishes to go down the rabbit hole is the assumption that we are not already trapped in the rabbit’s Hell. This becomes even clearer when a Black scholar is asked how deeply we intend to deconstruct the very disciplines that frame our writing and teaching. It assumes that we somehow landed upon these disciplines, rather than recognizing that the principalities and powers shaping the normative world foisted the terms of disciplinary order upon us. The fallacious notion that scholarly discourse can ever take place outside of this funhouse overlooks the fact that deconstructing these disciplines from a rabbit’s Hell represents, for many of us, a practice of emancipatory possibility. At the very least, it embodies a transgressive determination to keep our Black minds engaged in a profession and a world that functions as a kind of funhouse. This funhouse of academic disciplinarity order features shifting floors, trick mirrors, and other devices designed to scare and deceive those who teach, write, and establish our scholarly becoming within the region and shadow of disciplinarity. The arresting machinations underlying this funhouse ontology lead many to believe that the prize of legitimation is attainable—if only we can discover the door within the funhouse that truly offers something valuable for the Black scholar daring enough to enter while embracing the mantle of Black Theory.
It is within this Rabbit-Funhouse-Hell that I ask the question that will guide my brief contribution to this symposium: What is the relationship between disciplinarity, antiblackness, the demands of justice, the institutional study of lived religious experience, and the academic study of religion writ large in the United States of America in the 21stcentury?
During a panel at the 2024 AAR conference about his book, Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in America, I discussed with Jason how his generous sharing of the book allows us to explore these ideas. I consider any invitation by a colleague to tarry with their research a deep honor and a high privilege I dare not take lightly.
Tarrying with Lived Religion
Central to Springs’s argument is the claim that restorative justice initiatives can challenge and transform the racist system of mass incarceration in the United States. According to Springs, this transformative potential relies on restorative justice’s capacity to foster moral and spiritual associations among people. Springs asserts that a holistic approach to restorative justice can serve as both a theory of justice and a basis for concrete practices. This framework nurtures moral and spiritual connections, allowing individuals to envision integrated approaches to community life and societal structures. By exploring this framework, we can observe restorative justice embodied in practices that reflect the dynamic nature of everyday moral and spiritual sensibilities.
During my brief attempt as a panelist to present my reflection, I shared that, as someone deeply invested in the core themes animating his research, I am particularly intrigued by the conceptual methodologies underpinning the project: transformation, spirituality, structural racism, and mass incarceration. As a discussant, my aim was to invite a deeper consideration of the theoretical implications of Springs’s work for political theory and the Black study of religion. Specifically, I sought to explore how a robust account of Black theorizations of religion and politics—especially those focused on antiblackness as a structural antagonism inherent to modernity and the emergence of nation-states—can expand and challenge the frameworks that shape his argument. While I would love to elaborate on how Springs’s work gestures toward and could benefit from a deeper engagement with Black political and religious theory, I have chosen to devote the rest of this essay to the following line of inquiry I presented before the panel, which elicited the clearest—and most varied—responses: What do we gain by critiquing the systemic evils of mass incarceration if we do not also critique how the principalities and powers that produce mass incarceration shape the academic disciplines that scrutinize and promote our research? What is lost in an account of the relationship between structural racism (i.e., antiblackness) and restorative justice if it does not also explore the connections between antiblackness, governmentality, and the study of lived religion within academia?
What do we gain by critiquing the systemic evils of mass incarceration if we do not also critique how the principalities and powers that produce mass incarceration shape the academic disciplines that scrutinize and promote our research?
Specifically, we must critically tarry with power in all its visceral discursivity as we consider the disciplinary frameworks that dictate who can be recognized as engaging in “legitimate” theoretical discourse worthy of substantive engagement within the academic discipline of religion in the United States. Put another way, those who currently hold the levers of disciplinary power within religious studies departments must summon the requisite boldness to ask aloud who within the discipline possesses the power to center some theorizations at the peripheralizing expense others? Who among us wears the badge that polices and lies? This manner of forensic science is crucial for apprehending the racial logic that determines what is codified within disciplinary curricula and syllabi as “foundational to the study of lived religion” versus what is ghettoized, peripheralized, and ornamentalized as little more than “contextual,” “specialized,” “densely abstract,” and “highly stylized” Black stuff.
As I tarried with Dr. Springs’s crucial intervention, I immediately noticed that, while he specifically charges those committed to practicing, researching, and teaching restorative justice to “relentlessly” focus on the systemic and structural causes of injustice, that same charge does not appear to extend to scholars who view lived religion as the conceptual anchor guiding their research within the discipline. Although Critical Participatory Action Research is his primary methodology, Springs presents lived religion as a conceptual anchor for those seeking to study the practices aimed at transforming structural violence. As I reflected upon Springs’s treatment of lived religion—and the broader power dynamics producing the terms of disciplinary order structuring the study of religion in the United States—I found myself contemplating the degree of separation between the structural causes of injustice underpinning mass incarceration in the United States and the horror-soaked terms of order that continue to structure religious studies within academia today.
Religious Studies, Lived Religion, and the Peripheralization of Black Theory
The most promising quality of Springs’s book also serves as its most pressing growing edge. In the book, Springs offers scholars a form of radical (in the etymological sense of deep-rootedness) witness that, if not also directed back at the antiblack discursive formations shaping the disciplinary terms of order governing the field of lived religion and religious studies writ large, risks denying the full power thereof. Unfortunately for the study of lived religion in the United States, Black theorization and Black lived religious experiences continue to present an aporia within the discipline of religion, characterized by a profound disjunction between the voluminous contributions of Black theorists and their continued peripheralization to the second-order categorizations of “highly stylized,” “sub-fields,” and “contextual studies.” Aporia here refers to a state of perplexity or doubt, encompassing the contradictions and unresolved challenges within the discipline itself that it fails to engage with fully. This aporia illustrates a critical gap, where innovative perspectives that challenge established norms are often overlooked or excluded from codification with normative theoretical discourse. In an era where systemic inequities are under heightened scrutiny, the discipline’s failure to engage meaningfully with Black theorizations—beyond the pervasive trope of the “talented tenth,” sporadic epigraphs, or guest features in chapters reliant on often uncredited influences—reveals a troubling refusal among its gatekeepers to confront uncomfortable truths. This avoidance risks leaving the discipline of religion in a precarious state, teetering on the edge of hospice care, where it may struggle to justify its relevance and vitality in a viscerally disturbed and disturbing world. Religious Studies, from a disciplinary perspective, functions as a funhouse, captivated by its own distorted reflections, yet it neglects to confront the aporia that lingers in relation to Black theorizing. This refusal is rooted in the conceit that the methodologies and theories currently shaping the norms of the discipline meet the demands of a disturbed and disturbing world. As the embryonic study of religion took form in the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Black thinkers were also producing knowledge about and contending with the category of religion. These thinkers were constitutively foreclosed from the universities and lecture halls where the discipline was being codified. So they did what we have always done; they theorized outside. In the work of 19th-century abolitionists like David Walker and organic political theorists like Maria Stewart, we find a counter-approach—an anepistemological rejoinder to the formal study and practice of religion in the United States—not anchored in some Western, Euro-dominant academic delusion of political neutrality or detachment, but in the practice of abolition and the unfinished project of freedom.
If we produce an account of lived religion that conforms to existing disciplinary terms of order and does not constitutively engage Black theorists, restorative justice will merely become another room in Religious Studies’ Funhouse.
As we know, the discipline of religion structurally foreclosed such counter-approaches to study, both from the process of disciplinary canonicity and from the possibility of shaping methodological, pedagogical, theoretical, and publishing approaches. The haunting consequences of this exclusion continue to punctuate the discipline today. Accordingly, despite a genuine and commendable desire to use lived religion as a conceptual methodology to propel the discipline of religion out of its social and political malaise, I am concerned that if we produce an account of lived religion that conforms to existing disciplinary terms of order and does not constitutively engage Black theorists, restorative justice will merely become another room in religious studies’ funhouse.
To be clear, I do not believe that Springs is trying to assert some semblance of academic authority over the communities with which he spent a season building deep relationships. I honor that aspect of his work and commend him for it. My concern with Springs’s work and with lived religion in general is that academic scholarship centering non-White communities often makes the curious claim that theorists emerging from these communities do not need to anchor the theoretical account of their lives, their struggles, their striving. I am reminded of this every time I think about a moment when a White colleague earnestly told me they assign a White scholar of lived religion at the beginning of their course to provide students with the language and skills to engage the case studies that follow. It just so happens that one of the weeks they were covering Black-led protests against state-sanctioned violence. This colleague believed—and probably still remains convinced—that the only way to facilitate a conversation about Black protests in Mississippi is to have a White man provide the necessary terms of engagement.
The problem that I am emphasizing here does not originate at the publishing state but, rather, at graduate formation. Graduate programs are political in the sense that they are the site where individuals enter to engage in the struggle of knowledge production in the hope of generating knowledge that will impact, inform, shape, and challenge society. If grad students are not challenged to confront Euro-dominant epistemic biases or their reflective tendencies to center a White scholar when 15 Black scholars are ready, published, and available, then the discipline of religion will continue producing candidates who will stare at a hiring committee with a straight face and assert that Black students need to learn proper theoretical language from White experts before they can discuss Ferguson or South Central Los Angeles in a manner that is disciplinarily acceptable. The most chilling aspect of this is not the statement itself but the synchronized head-nodding and “mmmhmmm-ing” that are almost certain to follow. In the 21st century, Black lives, deaths, and afterlives are still brought into disciplinary order through white theorists who establish the boundaries and borders of the normative discourse. Of course, Black theorists are invited to join in, provided we understand the proper order of things.
Amusement and terror.
Welcome to the Funhouse.
