Public Religions in the Future World: Postsecularism and Utopia

Public Religions in the Future World

SERIES EDITORS

Lynn Itagaki, University of Missouri

Daniel Rivers, Ohio State University

FOUNDING EDITORS

Claire Potter, Wesleyan University

Renee Romano, Oberlin College

ADVISORY BOARD

Mary Dudziak, University of Southern California

Devin Fergus, Hunter College, City University of New York

David Greenberg, Rutgers University

Shane Hamilton, University of Georgia

Jennifer Mittelstadt, Rutgers University

Stephen Pitti, Yale University

Robert Self, Brown University

Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia

Susan Ware, General Editor, American National Biography

Judy Wu, University of California, Irvine

Public Religions in the Future World

POSTSECULARISM AND UTOPIA

David Morris

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

Chapter 2 previously appeared, in slightly different form, as "Intellect and Activism: The Secular Authority of Left Behind," Cultural Critique, vol. 90, 2015, pp. 64–87, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Chapter 3 previously appeared, in slightly different form, as Octavia Butler’s Revolutionary Movement for the Twenty-First Century, Utopian Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 2015, pp. 270–88. © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University. This article is used by permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morris, David, 1980– author.

Title: Public religions in the future world : postsecularism and utopia / David Morris.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2021. | Series: Since 1970: histories of contemporary America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021022951 | ISBN 9780820360621 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820360645 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820360638 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | Utopias in literature. | Religion in literature. | Neoliberalism in literature. | Religion and literature—United States. | Christianity and culture—United States. | Postmodernism (Literature)

Classification: LCC PS374.U8 M67 | DDC 813/.5409372—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022951

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The project that would eventually become this book began years ago. Backed by the resurgent power of American fundamentalists, George W. Bush promised to rid the world of evil in 2001. Religious visions of the future were everywhere, and I felt they warranted more attention. Many things changed since then, but the power of these visions is not one of them.

With insight and patience, Susan Koshy guided me through my earliest efforts to produce something out of a disparate set of texts and a disorganized group of ideas. Trish Loughran gave my work its closest reading and sharpest criticism; further, she was instrumental in the project’s greatest leaps toward its current form. I can’t thank either of them enough.

Several friends, colleagues, and former teachers of mine provided help at various stages of this project. Special acknowledgment goes to John Claborn and Lisa Oliverio, who read countless drafts and provided helpful comments and encouragement. Further reading and support were offered by Jonathan Ebel, James Engelhardt, Patrick Fadely, Waïl Hassan, Jamie Jones, Bob Mark-ley, Justine Murison, Kimberly O’Neill, Bob Parker, Christopher Simeone, Michael Simeone, Derrick Spires, James Treat, Jeff Tucker, and Ted Underwood. Kay Emmert, Dana Kinzy, Kristi McDuffie, and Andrew Moss all helped create a work environment wherein I had time and energy to research and write. Additionally, this project would not have been possible without the librarians of the University of Illinois library.

Lynn Itagaki approached me at a conference and introduced me to Mick Gusinde-Duffy. I want to thank them and everyone at the University of Georgia Press for their capable support as I completed this book. Thanks to Kaelin Broaddus, Jon Davies, Michelle Martinez, Thierry Ramais, Merryl Sloane, and Beth Snead for helping me prepare for publication.

I started thinking seriously about utopia after attending the Midwest Conference on Utopian Studies in 2012. I want to thank Carter Hanson and Mardy Philippian for organizing that conference and welcoming me into its intellectual community. The scholars in the Society for Utopian Studies were equally stimulating and welcoming. Similarly, interacting with members of the American Religion and Literature Society of the American Literature Association was immensely helpful in making final revisions to this manuscript; special thanks to Kathryn Ludwig for welcoming me into that community.

Academic research in the humanities and the career paths that support it are undergoing a dramatic change. It’s in this context that I want to recognize the Non-Tenure Faculty Coalition (Local 6546) for securing for my colleagues and me health insurance, a living wage, and a small research fund. Much of the foundation for their work was laid on our campus by the Graduate Employees’ Organization (Local 6300) over the past four decades. In a rapidly changing profession, organizations like these crucially protect research and teaching by securing and supporting academic workers.

I have the privilege of working in a large, intellectually diverse department of professors, adjunct faculty, grad students, academic professionals, English majors and minors, and indispensable staff. Utopian thinking energizes my department’s greatest publishing achievements, its best teaching, and its most rancorous conflicts. Our tiny island of the academy positively crackles with utopian energy. For better and worse, this environment made me the scholar and teacher I am now. With respect and love, fear and frustration, and hope and dreams, I dedicate this book to my colleagues and students. May we with vision and humility work toward a better world while we live in this one.

Finally, to my brilliant partner, Gwen Rudy. Thank you for your encouragement, your engagement, and your belief that the world can be better. It’s my great joy to live with you in the world as it is—even if that includes a long quarantine.

Public Religions in the Future World

INTRODUCTION

Religion in the Social Dreams of the Present

Early in Tom Perotta’s 2011 novel, The Leftovers, the city of Mapleton gathers for the first annual Departed Heroes’ Day of Remembrance and Reflection (12), the anniversary of the Sudden Departure, a worldwide Rapture-like event wherein 2 percent of the world’s population disappeared in an instant. As one of the main characters, Nora Durst, delivers a speech mourning her husband and two children, several members of one of the many new post-Departure cults, the Guilty Remnant, appear behind the other spectators and unfurl a banner: STOP WASTING YOUR BREATH, it declares (Perotta 27). The Guilty Remnant members dress all in white, live communally in houses, observe a vow of silence, and disrupt public events and private lives with their constant presence. They even keep surveillance records of all the town’s citizens so that they can intrude at maximally disruptive times (115–19). The Guilty Remnant organization has no clear or consistent theology or religious mission: it had no priests or ministers, no scripture, and no formal system of instruction (208). Instead, the Guilty Remnant disrupts all settled human relations: the post-Rapture world demanded a new way of living, free from the old, discredited forms—no more marriage, no more families, no more consumerism, no more politics, no more conventional religion, no more mindless entertainment. Those days were done. All that remained for humanity was to hunker down and await the inevitable (208). By showing us the lives of many of the characters, The Leftovers makes clear that the Guilty Remnant’s mission to dismantle relationships is helping along a process already well under way.

The confrontation between the secular, civil religious Heroes’ Day ceremony and the nihilistic religious devotion of the Guilty Remnant embodies a central problem for literature of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the dissolution of meaning and the frustration of social connections under the fragmentary logics and material practices of neoliberalism. The novel’s two central protagonists, Nora Durst and Kevin Garvey, try to find meaning through public and personal rituals. They also try to connect to each other but have difficulty doing so; Nora’s grief and Kevin’s bafflement in the face of it stand in the way. While official community events in Mapleton—Heroes’ Day parades, city council meetings that remind Kevin of church with their set liturgies (Perotta 231), and city recreational events—try to bring people into community, they routinely fail. At the same time, new post-Departure religious movements like the Guilty Remnant only mark the absence of meaning and community rather than restoring it. Indeed, the Guilty Remnant even enacts a sadistic ritual wherein it allows friendships to form between adherents before forcing them to murder each other. Meanwhile, Matt Jamison, Mapleton’s mainline Protestant pastor, spends his time in pointless theological disputation, trying to prove that the Departure was not the biblical Rapture (an argument almost no one is making).

The novel offers a small glimmer of hope for the characters at the end, one that suggests the possibility for new models of kinship within the nuclear-family-oriented symbolic order of the suburb. Kevin’s son, Tom, brings home a baby (the abandoned daughter of the disgraced charismatic faith healer Holy Wayne and one of his spiritual brides, an underage woman). He leaves the baby on the doorstep of his father’s house and drives away. Nora, on her way out of town, finds this child (abandoned, mixed race, without a name) and waits for Kevin, ending the novel with a simple exclamation: Look what I found (355). Nora, Kevin, and the child suggest a new model of kinship: a pair of people who have lost their families adopting the child of a fraudulent spiritual movement. A visitor from outside the insular suburban community (a child without history and without clear origin) potentially shatters the very notion of the normal. Nonetheless, the appearance of the child and Nora’s inclination to immediately care for it with Kevin suggest a happy Hollywood ending—a restoration of the nuclear family and of the same symbolic order they had lost in the Sudden Departure.

In The Leftovers, the Sudden Departure exacerbates the absence of meaning that cements functioning publics and private relations. Community rituals and aggressive fundamentalist cults equally serve as simulacra that mark the absence of secure publics rather than reviving them. To see The Leftovers as engaging with religion is easy enough, with its cults, its civil religion, and its Rapture-like event. It’s harder to see it as a dystopian text with a backward look: loss of meaning, the novel seems to say, dissolves human connection. The novel expresses doubt that such meaning can be restored. This hasn’t stopped other authors of utopian literature, however, from looking for that meaning in one of the chief sources rejected by The Leftovers: religion, at least in some form. A significant portion of contemporary utopian literature, I argue, finds in some version of religion keys to reviving and reimagining publics in the face of their neoliberal dissolution.

Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopia as social dreaming: the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live (Three Faces 3). Sargent’s broad definition allows him to address utopia as both a literary genre (with its cogenre, dystopia) and as a real-world political ideal.¹ While the term comes from Thomas More’s 1516 satire, Utopia, utopian fiction, proposals, thought experiments, and communities can be traced at least as far back as Hesiod in the West and perhaps further elsewhere. Many of these real and imagined utopias from the early modern period on (especially in the New World) were religious.² But in the case of contemporary utopian writings, the religious elements have only sometimes been included in scholarly examinations of utopian literature. Conversely, while religion has received intensified scrutiny since the mid-2000s by scholars of American literature, utopianism has made only brief appearances.³ Remedying this gap, in this book I argue that contemporary literary utopianism is deeply inflected with diverse religious ideas, with the visions, values, and ambitions of Christianity, mysticism, Buddhism, Islam, and other traditions. This religiosity in turn resonates with and underwrites a range of competing political projects, including imperialism, globalization, neoliberal capitalism, ecological action, and the pro-migration movement. While these texts are religiously and politically diverse, their engagement with the broad logics and organizations of neoliberalism unites them. They all use religion to reimagine publics within and against the multivalent tendency toward privatization under the dominance of late twentieth-century neoliberalism.

Public Religions in the Late Twentieth-Century United States

Contemporary utopian thinking engages with the desire to rethink and recreate publics in a neoliberal environment that defines publics primarily in economic terms. Surprisingly, utopian literature since the 1980s has turned to religion as material to build imaginative alternatives to neoliberal public degradation. Scholarship on postsecularism in literature, however, has largely left the utopian underpinnings of religion in literature unexamined. Instead, scholars in postsecular studies tend to work within a binary opposition: on the one hand, postsecular, weak religions inflect progressive secular ideas with religious affect. Two particularly influential works in postsecular literary studies, John A. McClure’s Partial Faiths and Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief, both take on religion as private and weakened—that is, as individual, non-organized, even detheologized manifestations in postmodern novels. Both Hungerford and McClure emphasize how individuals think and feel through partially religious affects and ideas.⁴ On the other hand, strong religions that reject doubt and invest in concrete structures remain just as present in American life and literature. Taking up strong religion in new and old forms, Melani McAlister, Erin A. Smith, Amy Johnson Frykholm, and a variety of others have engaged the organized networks of literary production and consumption in American fundamentalist churches. Further, in a particularly insightful 2014 article in American Literature, Danielle Haque shows how the tendency to ignore recognizable, organized, strong religion in literature totally erases a good deal of American Muslim literature, which often does not fall easily within the weak and strong categories conceived mostly with Christianity in mind.⁵ If nothing else, the striking political power of religious fundamentalism in the 1990s and 2000s has established the urgency for a continued examination of strong religion, yet John A. McClure, Amy Hungerford, and others show that partial and secularized religious forms occupy a powerful place in American culture. Moreover, much like separating religion from the secular, drawing an absolute distinction between strong and weak religions would require artificial and limiting separations too. Therefore, I want to cut across the strong-weak distinction, because I think it has in some way prevented scholars from excavating the complex interaction of religious and secular forms in contemporary culture. Like Tracy Fessenden in Culture and Redemption, I worry that the distinction has, perhaps accidentally, enabled a tendency to categorize religions somewhat simplistically as good or bad, liberatory or oppressive (Culture 2).

Instead, I want to use the category public religion, a term I mean to cover the myriad, networked ways people use religion to influence cultural and political economies. I’ve borrowed the term public religion from one of the founding works of the postsecular turn, José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994). Casanova argues that seemingly dramatic appearances of religion across the world in the late twentieth century—from the Islamic revolution in Iran to the anticolonial movements of South America to the rise of the New Christian Right (NCR) in the United States—represent not an increase in religion but a deprivatization of religion. For Casanova, a public religion is a deprivatized religion—that is, religious practice and expression that leave the private spaces of conscience, home, and house of worship and enter the public arenas of politics, economics, and culture (5–6). Further, according to Casanova, these religious movements enter public arenas both to influence public policy and in response to secular invasions into their religious lifeworlds (145–46). Casanova’s deprivatization thesis alerts us to two important things: first, he counterintuitively suggests that much religious organized public action aims to influence the regulation of the private sphere (home, family, and related matters, such as education). For example, members of the NCR in the United States organized in part for the right to teach their own curricula in private and home schooling (145–57). Second and relatedly, Casanova’s work calls for careful attention to the power dynamics of the relations between public and private.

Deprivatized religions carry ambitions that might cause discomfort among more secular-minded readers. In The Leftovers, for example, religions occupy no positions between the cultish Guilty Remnant and the inadequate, frustrated mainline Protestantism of Matt Jamison. However, in utopian literature that imagines future social alternatives, public religion often provides bases to imagine new modes of social organization. Further, utopian and dystopian fiction imagines futures with new models of publics, plural, just as literary texts hail and circulate within publics, plural. Throughout this book, I use public in two senses: first, as opposed to private; and second, in Michael Warner’s terms, wherein publics are multiple, overlapping, and held together by circulating texts.⁶ That is, making utopian, democratic publics requires extending influence beyond a given public and into something more like Jürgen Habermas’s public sphere. However, as the ongoing civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements (among others) have clearly shown, this has never worked as well as Habermas and others have hoped.

This volume begins in the late 1970s, a key moment in the co-arising dominance of neoliberalism and postsecularism. The shape of inequality that privileges some people and publics over others changed dramatically in the latter half of the twentieth century with the dominance of neoliberalism as a system of political-economic philosophy and practice. While neoliberalism has many faces,⁷ for my purposes, three important developments in the 1970s are paramount: the shrinking of the public sphere under privatization; the shift in values structures from political citizenship to economic participation; and the atomization of social activism and responsibility. In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously declared, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem, a succinct mission statement for privatization. Reagan’s electoral victory represented the coalescing of a variety of economic shocks, cultural shifts, conservative organizing, and the creation of a new Republican coalition.⁸ While the Reagan administration is well known for its efforts at shrinking the public sphere, it was a small part of nationwide attempts at the state and local levels to roll back New Deal and Great Society reforms (Schaller 50–51). These moves toward privatization matched with a growing shift away from political participation and toward economic thinking. Bruce J. Schulman notes, for example, the rise of the yuppie as a figure in the 1980s representing an economic philosophy that entrepreneurship and the profit motive produced better social results than public policy and programs did (243–44). Not unique to the yuppies by any means, this change both economized social benefit (measuring programs first by their profitability and second by their social benefit) and atomized responsibility by directing it toward small groups and individuals rather than the common good.

These developments in the late 1970s fit neatly within neoliberalism. In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown defines neoliberalism not just as a set of policies, but as a normative order of reason that transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic (9–10). Brown argues that under the cultural economy of neoliberalism, the public in a Habermasian sense privatizes into fragmented, narrowly defined economic interests. In classical liberalism, albeit selectively, state and ideological apparatuses privilege Homo politicus, the human person as political actor and entity with rights, interests, conflicts, and so on. Neoliberalism, she says, centers Homo economicus, the human as economic actor whose worth and status are determined by their economic activity. Further, Brown argues, neoliberalism in the present privileges two interrelated things: investment, where Homo economicus does all things to invest in themselves entrepreneurially, and economic growth, where it is the duty of citizens and communities to sacrifice themselves for the sake of economic, rather than political, health (32–35). Under neoliberal logics, a restructured political economy produces harsh economic effects for the least protected people but through responsibilization makes their struggles a matter of personal morality: Responsibilization tasks the worker, student, consumer, or indigent person with discerning and undertaking the correct strategies of self-investment and entrepreneurship for thriving and surviving (132–33).

The utopian visions I examine in this book offer different responses within and against neoliberalism. While I’m interested particularly in religion, broadly, the novels in this study offer a range of reactions that in some way mimic the range of available political responses to neoliberalism. In Undoing the Demos, Brown offers a thorough description of how this ruthless neoliberal logic infects and changes the culture and institutions of a democratic society. She argues that liberal arts education (something increasingly sacrificed under neoliberal dominance) offers the kind of citizenship preparation needed by people to oppose this economization of society (178–79). Other responses include Bonnie Honig’s argument for investment in material objects and spaces that anchor people together into a broad public even as symbolic and social orders change; Jodi Dean’s argument for a revival of the Communist Party and revolution; and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s redefinition of public toward the common, the non-ownership of resources and spaces.⁹ All of these possible democratic structures (publics, commons, liberal education, revolution) provide material for Sargent’s social dreaming. All of these models consider the relations among people, texts, and objects. The texts that I examine in this study similarly build their imagined futures not just on human words and actions but also on nonhuman factors: lands, resources, objects, technologies, environments, and even supernatural realms and new planets.

Postsecular Responses to Neoliberalism

My purpose here is not to select one of the theories in this debate and side with it or use it extensively. Given the range of competing political projects represented in the texts with which I engage, all of the theories are useful, for some utopias imagine fluid publics, others rigorously differentiated publics, others commons, and still others revolution for good and ill. Taken together, however, they raise three important items for attention when reading religion and utopian fiction. First, beginning in the late 1970s, politically conscious texts unavoidably engaged the ubiquitous logics of neoliberalism (whether indirectly or in an intentional effort to resist those logics). Second, just as there are various models of the public, a public, or multiple publics, texts imagine publics in a wide variety of models and combinations. Third, people, texts, and nonhuman objects network in complex and overlapping ways to constitute publics, commons, and demoses. Given this, understanding how utopian fiction uses religion to respond to neoliberalism requires that we rigorously contextualize each piece. In other words, religious or otherwise, utopian responses to neoliberalism vary widely in orientation and scope. There is no one identifiable set of qualities or outcomes that religion produces. Rather, religions represent one source of contribution to the building of utopian visions.

Religion energizes, underwrites, and inflects utopian reactions to neoliberalism in a wide variety of ways, partly due to a religious dialectic that intensified in the late 1970s. On the one hand, unofficial and partial religious forms proliferated. On the other hand, the New Christian Right grew in power and influence nationally. Schulman shows new religious forms to be largely personal rather than communal yet nonetheless connected to environmentalism and other political movements (78–91). Similarly, McClure examines the presence of preterite spiritualities in postmodern literature from the 1960s onward (20). On the surface, these largely unofficial religious beliefs and practices would seem to be at odds with the strong religion of Christian fundamentalists and other groups in the NCR. However, Susan Friend Harding shows that the NCR is a theologically diverse movement of fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and other groups united around the common label born-again Christian (xvi, 10–13). In a monograph on evangelist Billy Graham, however, Steven P. Miller shows that some of what unites the NCR is also what allows the movement to match up with the spiritual and individualized practices of the 1970s: a set of beliefs that Miller terms evangelical universalism. Miller names three features of evangelical universalism: a belief in the individual as the primary theological and political unit of society; confidence in relational solutions more than legislative solutions to social problems; and a trust in law and order as governmental institutions maintain them (9–10). The rise of NCR power resulted in part from its pitching of stricter social control in terms of individual empowerment and relational solutions. Moreover, while the match is not perfect, NCR attitudes fit within neoliberalism: