A few years ago, I created a new course for an upper-level undergraduate seminar called “What Does it Mean to be Religious?” I wanted the title to be a question to call attention to the fact that so many of us, especially those who don’t think of ourselves as “religious,” take it for granted that we just know the answer, if we ever truly ponder the matter. Most of the time, the question hardly comes up and one regularly runs into trite and cliched shorthand depictions of “religious people” in the media who are held to be responsible for all kinds of things including, singularly, for wars.
In the context of post-revolutionary Iran where the state lays claim both to the spiritual and political realms and uses all media and other means to define Islam, the question of what it might mean to be religious came up insistently and powerfully during my fieldwork—conducted between 2008 and 2016—for my book Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran (see CM’s symposium on the book here). In this period, I was spending much of my time with a group of women, some of whom were in friendship and kinship networks. I was following them to their social gatherings, poetry-reading nights, and their Qur’an and poetry classes. Listening to their conversations about divinity, prayer, religious obligations, the ups and downs of their relationships with God and so on, I was reminded of the work of a number of scholars—such as Robert Orsi, Ann Taves, and Talal Asad—who have argued with great insight for the necessity of re-thinking of religion and its relationship to modernity. This is also what Brenna Moore does in her recent book. Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism offers a great opportunity for returning to basic questions about how religion can be inhabited and enacted in ways that are far from “traditional” and/or “pre-modern.”
Moore’s biographies of a group of writers, poets, activists, and scholars makes the reader understand how personal and public lives and in particular friendships were lived in the context of Catholicism—a Catholicism beyond the Vatican and the Pope but still there and insisted upon by these individuals. She calls their way of living Catholicism an “alternative modernity.” I interpreted this description as stating that this form of Catholicism was an alternative to Protestant modernity, or the kind of modernity that is unquestioningly equated with Protestantism as the epitome of a modern religion. I then wondered about how members of the group that Moore discusses were viewed by their Protestant contemporaries and whether they had Protestants in their friendship networks. But I also thought perhaps what is being argued is that given the crucial role that friendship played in how members of this group enacted Catholicism, friendship is an alternative modernity to historically more established categories with which modernity is defined.
Moore’s meticulous archival research amply illustrates Robert Orsi’s insight that “human beings are always accompanied, and any account of a single human life must include these others that accompany that life, for better and for worse” (65). Given Moore’s biographies, it becomes hard to imagine their religiosity as apart from or even weakly linked to their friendships. And in the network of these passionate friends, there were both those who had passed away as well as those who were living—there were beloved saints and some contemporaries whose being seemed to emanate a certain blessedness (very similar to the concept of those who are seen to have baraka in Muslim communities). That members of this group saw sacredness as not limited to the divine and to saints and prophets is one of the most interesting discussions in the book. Among the various correctives that Moore’s book provides is to the widely held idea that doctrine plays a primary role in attracting individuals to religion. As an acquaintance of mine put it recently, this is how those “happy atheists” think.
Among the various correctives that Moore’s book provides is to the widely held idea that doctrine plays a primary role in attracting individuals to religion.
The stereotype is that religious individuals either get indoctrinated since childhood and then as a result lose all their critical faculties in the face of doctrine, or they learn about their (or some) religion’s foundational ideas and become devoted followers once and for all. But each of the individuals Moore discusses—including poets, authors, and scholars—engaged with Catholicism in a way that related its theology to what was going on in their own social and political contexts. Gabriela Mistral who “(re)turns” to Catholicism in her adulthood states, “Our form of Christianity has divorced itself from the social questions, indeed has even disdained it. . . . Catholicism must regain what, either by neglect or selfishness, she has lost, and this will be possible if Catholics show that they are capable of the very essence of her teaching. The hunger for justice awakened in the people cannot be satisfied by a few meager concessions. . . . If we are to be whole-hearted Christians, we will go to the people. Our religion must not restrict itself to mere worship” (41, emphasis added). Although Moore’s study is of a group of Catholics in the early decades of the twentieth century, there are a number of interesting similarities with what I found in my research in Tehran. The idea that religion cannot simply be limited to the mere performance of worship as Mistral put it, is one of them. The group of Shi’a Iranian women that I discuss in my book spent much of their time re-thinking the obligatory ritual prayer, namaz, its experience and its aims, posing questions such as whether prayer that does not prevent harsh judgements of others and lacks love has any worth. They asked, in effect, “Should we keep on praying if we do not become more generous toward the world?”
Returning to my course on what it means to be religious, I find Moore’s book as perfect reading material. In its ethnographic history, it offers many insights into the diverse ways in which members of this group understood religiosity. Besides the scholarly and academic interest of Moore’s book, it can go a long way in creating understanding for those who have turned resolutely against religion. In her book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Tanya Luhrmann explains the purpose of writing her book by saying, “I wrote this book because I think I can explain to non-believers how people come to experience God as real. This is an important story because the rift between believers and non-believers has grown so wide that it can be difficult for one side to respect the other” (xv). Brenna Moore’s fascinating narratives are compelling reading material in helping to lessen this kind of rift. By locating the importance of friendship, its spirituality, the ways in which it propels the creativity of those who were a part of such networks, she illuminates how individuals became and remained “Catholic” without losing their abilities to think critically or alleviate injustices in their societies. Kindred Spirits treats the reader to one of the most persuasive portrayals of how individuals’ religiosity is both public and private and is sustained over difficult periods of their lives and over a lifetime.
