AUFS at the AAR/SBL

Philosophy has long critiqued Enlightenment notions of progress. However, there is a perhaps deeper problem now confronting philosophy – what does it mean to think about ethics and politics in the absence of the future? ‘Absence of the future’ does not designate the cessation of time, but rather the absence of a horizon of possibility. This question confronts us, most significantly, in terms of anthropogenic climate change. In seeking a critical, creative response from philosophy of religion, I turn on the one hand to recent engagements with Hegel’s philosophy by continental thinkers concerned to redeem its potential for thinking through the power of contingency and negativity. On the other, and advancing this thesis, I revisit Ernst Bloch’s concept of the Not-Yet as source of a peculiar hope – a hopeful nihilism, or at least a hope that is difficult to distinguish from nihilism.

Religious pluralism is one of the major fields of study within philosophy of religion, and yet it has a spurious history with race. With the widest cast net, missiology and colonial exploitation joined together in support of exclusivist arguments in religious pluralism throughout the world. In the most liberal academic circles, religious pluralism advocates the peaceful cooperation and understanding of different religious traditions across the boundaries of incommensurate truth claims. Within the school of thought that David Griffin and John Cobb refer to as “genuine religious pluralist,” philosophers of religion argue theories of pluralism with the assumption that individuals locates themselves within one specific religious tradition or another. Practices of multiple religious belonging have literally stumped and befuddled most theorists into condemnation or special exemption. If philosophy of religion interacts with racial theories as thoughtful interlocutors, new possibilities emerge.

Only as theories of religious pluralism are able to engage thinkers in cultural and gender studies are they able to incorporate the complexity of multiplicity in religious identification and practice. Some feminist thinkers in the field of religious pluralism critique the way that what Laurel Schneider calls “the logic of the one” operates within conversations of religious pluralism. Yet many areas of racial-cultural studies have long histories of theorizing about methods of navigating cultural multiplicity. In this paper, I draw from African American studies to help understand a key challenge in theories of religious pluralism – multiple religious belonging. With over one hundred years of theory about the ways that African Americans negotiate oppressive minority status in the United States, African American Studies is well positioned to suggest similar modes of being in the practice of religious plurality. This paper focuses on three terms from African American Studies: passing, code-switching and double-consciousness. While these practices are not particular to African American experiences, they have been deeply explored in the theory and literature of African American Studies.

For obvious reasons, the problem of evil has been especially vexing for Black religious communities. Given the extreme, unprovoked suffering of Blacks in the United States (and more broadly) from the slave trade through to our current era of mass incarceration, the philosophical question of how God could allow such suffering has often been asked and answered – though not often in systematic treatises. W. E. B. Du Bois addressed the problem of evil, as did James Baldwin, as did Toni Morrison, as did Louis Farrakhan. The problem of evil has frequently led Black religious thinkers away from Christianity, towards a humanistic religiosity, most famously in the case of William R. Jones’ Is God a White Racist? and more recently in the work of Anthony Pinn. Emilie Townes’ Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil pushes conversations about evil from the conceptual to the material but, like Jones and Pinn, essentially arrives at an embrace of humanistic religiosity.

In this paper I will revisit Black theodicy from a perspective that takes Blackness as a metaphysical condition, from a perspective that takes the foreclosure of Black humanity to be fundamental to Western metaphysics. Frank Wilderson has coined the term Afro-Pessimism to describe such a perspective, synthesizing strands of Black existentialism and critical theory. From such a perspective, I argue, the humanistic religiosity embraced by Jones, Pinn, and Townes is not responsive to the depths of the problem of Black suffering. When Blackness is understood as a metaphysical problem, a metaphysical solution is necessary. For that, I turn to Kant, exploring how his notion of radical evil aptly characterizes anti-Blackness. Exploring Kant’s responses to radical evil in dialogue with theological responses to Black suffering promises to invigorate both conversations in philosophy of religion and in Black theology.

A still widespread view of the meaning of “race” and “racism” links these terms, and the forms of prejudice connected with them, exclusively to attitudes and behaviours based on perceived biological differences among human beings. As commonly understood, “racism” includes aversive or discriminatory acts towards people of a certain skin color, for instance, and its modern history is told in terms of now discredited theories about supposed links between the typical biology and character of distinct human groups. In truth, however, that history is one in which constructions of race are interwoven with ideas about culture, and in which racism consequently cannot be separated from Eurocentrism. The latter, moreover, is not merely an instance of ethnocentrism as a universal human tendency. It is, rather, a historical process that must be understood in terms of the effects of European power on the minds and societies of colonized peoples.

In light of this analysis of race and racism, I begin by examining Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion as representative of a certain European view of the religions of other peoples, and the superiority of Christianity. Drawing on the work of Hoffheimer and Bernasconi, I point out the racial dimensions of the association of Christianity with advanced culture, in contrast to allegedly primitive or less advanced forms of religion. I note also the effects of such colonial discourses about religion on Asian intellectuals, as traced by Peter van der Veer, giving as an example the assimilation of a highly specific monotheistic idea of religion by Indian philosophers like Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan. Finally, I argue that these highly racialized ideas about different forms of religion have colluded to construct an idea of religion, which in turn has shaped the dominant preoccupations of philosophy of religion. Thus, while it might initially seem odd to describe this sub-field of philosophy as being in any way “racist,” the fact is that its approaches and topics continue to revolve around an idea of religion constructed through a privileging of European culture. And the history of this concept of religion is intimately connected with ideas about more and less advanced races, ideas whose shadows can still be discerned, I maintain, in the positions on religion of many contemporary philosophers.

In the modern West, and especially in the context of the United States, there has been a concerted effort, as part of the Enlightenment project of rationalization and specialization, to partition the two spheres—of sacred and secular—as functionally separate, at least in the realm of public life and political practice, as seen in the principle of separation between church and state. Of course, this policy is a rather simplistic metaphor intended to define the relationship between these two realms even as it has often served to conflate the nation’s commitment to allowing the free practice of religion with its desire to prevent the establishment of a religious state. Additionally, at least until the 1960s the common belief (and intellectual claim) was that “the West” was becoming an increasingly secularized society. The secularization thesis argued that modern society would be progressively governed by science and reason; and religion, as a residue of a premodern, primitive past, would gradually give way to these modernizing forces. In short, modernity and secularism assumed each other. Of course, the fervor of religious life in the contemporary United States, and around the world, has proven this secularization thesis inaccurate, to say the least; and much of American public suggests a fluidity between sacred and secular. However, even when and where theories of secularization were in vogue, a different view was often held concerning black communities. In fact, African Americans were often understood as the exception to the rule of a secularizing modern citizenry. Not only were they considered hyper-religious, but many of their religious practices (i.e. what Du Bois referred to as “the frenzy”) were viewed as leftovers from a primitive past and anathema to the aims of modern society.

Assumptions such as these—about a certain racial recalcitrance to a historical narrative of secularization—have yet to be interrogated within the more recent robust debate about secularism and post-secularism, for that matter. Rather than figuring as the foil to an American story, the significance of religion in black life and the history of theories of secularism and secularization are stories best told in tandem. I attempt to do precisely that with this chapter. More specifically, I offer a genealogy of the study of African American religion that is organized around how scholars have negotiated the prevailing logic of a sacred-secular divide, and the narrative of secularization, and sorted through the relevance of such claims for their analyses of black religious and cultural life. Ultimately, I refer to the pattern of describing black culture as somehow distinct from or immune to shifts in the broader society as the trope of black sacred/secular fluidity. By this I mean that scholarly (as well as popular) claims of a particular sacred/secular configuration unique to black communities serve as a shorthand for a host of more specific arguments regarding African American religion and culture. Furthermore, such claims reveal just as much (if not more) about the individuals who make them as they do about any particular characteristic of black religious life. In fact, this trope of sacred and secular in black has been employed to endorse a range of widely diverging ends, including arguments for the significance of African cultural retentions, condemnations of the consequences of segregation, and to assert the natural religiosity of black people, to name just a few. Ultimately, by calling attention to multiple arguments and aims at play in each invocation of the trope of sacred and secular in black, I hope to both contribute to recent efforts to explore the politics at work in the history of “the field” and to offer a novel account of the meaning(s) of “the secular” in African American cultural history.

This paper will examine the relationship between secularity and security, and will take a particular interest in how current discourses about religious freedom work in tandem with the expansion of private and public techniques of surveillance. I will suggest we need to rethink the centrality of individual autonomy to secular models of personhood. While individual freedom is a crucial feature of secular liberal rhetoric, protecting religious freedom in practice depends upon securing the privacy of corporations, churches, and families. Part of the imagined social function of these private institutions is to enforce forms of personal and sexual discipline necessary to keep people from becoming morally threatening creatures. Secular forms of privacy, then, threaten freedom at the same time as they offer a defense against these threats.

Over the past decade, scholars have argued that secularism does not entail the separation of religion and politics but rather the state’s administrative and legal regulation of religious life. While much recent analysis focuses on law, other work explores the social, aesthetic, bodily, and ethical norms that work together to produce not just a discrete notion of religion but also the embodied sensibilities of the secular. Drawing on my own research in France, my paper similarly argues for attending to the materiality of the secular, its grounding in certain spatial and bodily forms. I discuss two cases: first, the construction of the Institute for the Cultures of Islam by the Parisian municipality as a way to understand the normative spatiality of proper (i.e. secular) religion; and second, the critique of veiling as a way to understand the sexual, aesthetic, and bodily norms of the properly secular woman.

The core ideas of Existentialism are attempts to translate the ascetic logic of Protestant piety into the idiom of a modern secular philosophy. Repentance gives way to choice, sin to finitude, conversion to authenticity. But what does it mean to see Christianity as a normative and conceptual context for interpreting existential thought? Does existentialism become a religion? Does Christianity itself become less religious? Existentialism is a fertile context in which to think through problems of the secular, I argue, because it asks us to think about the secular in terms of self-conscious historical agents. It asks us to pose questions of legitimacy and efficacy, and not only of genealogy. By examining the intimate link between the devotional ideals of Pietistic reform and philosophical ideals of existence, I show how that in the context of modern European thought, philosophical secularization and theological reformation are best understood together, rather than apart.

Taking up Hans Blumenberg’s claim that analyses of secularization should recall the material realities that undergird the term (after all, secularization denoted the transfer of ecclesial property to state control), this paper inquires into the economy of the secular. From the rationalization that purportedly drives worldly disenchantment, to the reification of social relations, to the technical desacralization of traditional modes of representation, economic dynamics appear integral to the processes and postures denoted by ideas of the secular and secularity. As an inroad into examining such economic materiality, this paper claims that money plays a critical yet underexamined role in conceptualizing such formations. Money is centrally implicated in mass production and reproducible representation, interiority of values and subjective buffering, and conceptions of immanence, which apparently characterize the secular modern, raising questions about the “secularizing” power of money and its role as a heuristic for genealogies of modernity.