There are concepts in the field of religion that have solidified, like water into ice, into a definitive, if not permanent, shape. In the conversations featured here between Barbara Sostaita, author of Sanctuary Everywhere, and Dana Lloyd, author of Land is Kin, several of these concepts—sovereignty, the sacred, religious freedom—are melted back down into a more fluid form. The result is that they are allowed to flow into passageways previously unimaginable, whether in applying the concept of the sacred to practices of resistance or to understanding Indigenous ways of relating to land and the people who occupy it. My reflections here build on the questions and answers raised by Sostaita and Lloyd in their interviews with one another and specifically highlight the conceptual innovations in their interventions into the study of religion, coloniality, and modernity.
Retheorizing the Sacred
In the same spirit as scholars like An Yountae and J. Kameron Carter, Sostaita understands the sacred—which the concept of sanctuary is linguistically linked to—as that which interrupts our normal ways of understanding the world. The sacred is a potential disrupter of hegemonic forms of domination such as White supremacy, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism. The people Sostaita accompanies in her book challenge the authority of border control agents to determine who does and who does not belong and who is and who is not worthy of value. They plant crosses where people have died migrating across the border; they give food and water to those ICE would prefer remain hungry, desperate, and easier to detain; they house those who would otherwise face death under unbearable conditions. As highlighted in Lloyd’s interview with Sostaita, such a study by nature meanders from place to place, topic to topic, in an effort to avoid fixing on one or another particular account of what is or is not sacred, the latter being a project in which the state is often invested. Sostaita, mirroring her subjects, is always on the move with the sacred, discovering and rediscovering it in unlikely places.
Sostaita traces her account of the sacred through classical theoretical sources such as Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, and others who saw the sacred as disruptive of the ordinary and thus a powerful means by which to challenge the status quo and traditional authorities. Of course, in the study of religion the sacred has often been understood as a uniquely conservative, even reactionary, force. For Mircea Eliade, one of the most influential twentieth century historians of religion, the sacred does interrupt our day-to-day experiences, but it does so in order to reestablish a premodern order to society. If scholars following in Sostaita’s genealogy seek to evoke the sacred in order to challenge modernity’s hierarchies, Eliadean-influenced scholars evoke it in order to reestablish a premodern hierarchy. For Sostaita, sacrality’s fluidity is to be embraced, whereas for Eliade it is to be resisted.
This challenge to the ordinary that the sacred represents in both Sostaita and Eliade is nonetheless one that scholars have mostly abandoned, as Sostaita briefly notes in the book and reiterates in the interview. Beginning with J.Z. Smith and becoming most pronounced in the work of Russell McCutcheon, the construction of notions of the sacred have been understood to stem from the specific interests of those defining the term rather than any essential content the term might represent. The sacred most often has served to universalize Protestant Christian visions of religion and their accompanying liberal humanitarianism. Thus its “analytical” value is seen as suspect and lacking in rigor.
For Sostaita, sacrality’s fluidity is to be embraced, whereas for Eliade it is to be resisted.
But scholarly critiques, like the concepts with which they engage, can become too set in stone, too resistant to new formations, especially when guilds and conferences are structured around either their preservation or deconstruction. Sostaita reminds us that a fluid conceptualization of the sacred need not serve reactionary purposes. Indeed, it might afford quite the opposite. This is a possibility that those who critique Eliade and other “historians of religion” foreclose when they treat the sacred as immutably tied to its previous formulations. The critique of the sacred, in this case, is parasitic upon what is critiqued. For critics of the sacred and its defenders, the concept is less like ice and more like stone.
Religious Freedom and Indigenous Sovereignty
Sostaita’s approach to the sacred is rooted in her desire to make sense of the actions of those she spent time with in the Sonoran desert during her fieldwork. Oftentimes, the sacred is a term she applies to their actions even when it is not one they themselves apply. It is a pragmatic tool used to analyze actions rather than an ontological claim about the reality of the sacred. Lloyd, in a slightly different vein, investigates the very real way religion and the sacred have been mobilized in the legal realm to manage and control Indigenous peoples and their land. Focusing on the Lyng Supreme Court case, she brings to light the way “religious freedom” was mobilized by Indigenous plaintiffs and government defendants alike to claim sovereignty over a portion of land that the national forest service hoped to build a road on in order to transport timber. The case was won by the Indigenous plaintiffs at the lower level on religious freedom grounds, but lost at the Supreme Court when it ruled that the government’s property rights superseded the right to religious freedom for the Indigenous population. In the majority opinion, Justice O’Connor made clear that the Indigenous claim to the land went beyond the religious freedom that the constitution was required to protect. In separating religion from the Indigenous worldview, Justice O’Connor in effect subjected it to an alien US/European colonial framework. As Lloyd makes clear in her interview, this framework is also ontological. As Sostaita’s questions and Lloyd’s response to them help unpack, treating Indigenous claims as ones that are “religious,” and therefore a matter of private belief, has the effect of Protestantizing Indigenous beliefs and removing claims to sovereignty over land from the conversation. In other words, it frames the conversation in such a way that the Indigenous worldview is excluded from the start.
But Lloyd also goes beyond this framework to show how resistance to practices of land theft by the US government require using, at times, the settler colonial framework of sovereignty and religious freedom. The Yurok people, she shows, use concepts like the sacred and religious freedom strategically, often to successful ends. What Lloyd shows then, like Sostaita, is that the concepts of religious freedom, the sacred, and sovereignty are not frozen in their genealogical ice mold. Rather, they are terms that hold possibilities for resignifying and reimagining. A binary framework that would see Indigenous and governmental claims to sovereignty as exclusive would be unable to account for this kind of creative agency among Indigenous actors.
What Lloyd shows then, is that the concepts of religious freedom, the sacred, and sovereignty are not frozen in their genealogical ice mold. Rather, they are terms that hold possibilities for resignifying and reimagining.
In the study of religion, modernity, and secularism, there is no shortage of attempts to frame the secular/religion binary and the modern/premodern binary as a good/bad binary, with the value attached to them dependent upon the motives of those employing the terms. Yet, by focusing on what the sacred does, as each of these books seeks to do, we see that that there are multiple ways of contesting authority, often in subtle ways that challenge those in power. In this manner, Lloyd and Sostaita show us how we might move beyond the sacred/profane binary that both its defenders and critics are parasitic upon. By treating such concepts as heuristics that are contingent upon the particular circumstances in which they are applied, they loosen the constraints of modern/colonial frameworks and chart new arroyos down which they may travel.
