What is the religious

Preface:

My interest in these two terms derives from an interest in their manifestation within a “public” context. To the extent that my primary source material is nearly all derived from the American public culture I observe and participate in, I must acknowledge the often contradictory and painful contortions of both religious discourse within the public sphere, and the sublimated—and frequently violent—aspects of the sacred in the formation of the modern, secular state. I do not mean to deny, (and in fact I fully celebrate), the tempering influence of religious discourse throughout history, as well as the power of the sacred in the everyday experience. I only mean to preface my comments with a recognition of their place in a larger context of religion and the sacred in discourse.

On “the religious”:

The persistence and increased visibility of religious fundamentalisms around the world, and the continued co-mingling of the “New Christian Right” in U.S. politics in particular has confounded many predictions on the part of political theorists and sociologists alike. As a result, Peter Berger’s conception of the “sacred canopy” (religious belief conceptualized as an overarching, immobile social construction to weather against the anomie and terror that comes with an aggregate crisis of a society’s faith) has been reinterpreted by sociologist Christian Smith in the form of multiple “sacred umbrellas” defined as “small, portable, accessible relational worlds under which. . . .beliefs can make complete sense”.[1]

It is within this context that strains of Christian fundamentalism have been revived and often captured in the form of new social movements that demand a voice within formal political deliberations. A legacy of sectarian suspicion in America leads to concern over determining the proper “place” for faith-based appeals and value claims within a political discourse that appears to privilege pluralism and diversity in keeping with conventions of liberal democracy. At the same time, the Constitutional mandate to protect religious and state institutions from one another has produced an often baffling jurisprudence and political culture of “secularism” that has been equally lauded as it has been lamented. Those who lament have relied upon provocative rhetorical strategies; they assume a position of marginalization as they assert their status as a “moral majority”, while simultaneously calling the secular establishment out on its contradicting perspective regarding plurality and secularism. As political theorist Jason Bivens notes, “By refusing to bracket religious belief, and by insisting that its religiosity is what is most politically relevant, [a politically active religious counter/public] challenges the liberal state’s moral and political authority by disregarding the rhetorical and practical limits that are placed on speech and action.”[2] The “religious” in a public context, has come to be considered as such a near pejorative term, with the more rhetorically savvy altering their vocabularies of faith to include terms such as “spiritual” or “contemplative” in its stead.

On “the sacred”:

Unlike “the religious” in public life, which public actors take conscious pains to not pronounce, the sacred in public life is intrinsic and pervasive. It pronounces itself within our deliberations. It may be considered something close to what Longinus defined as “the sublime”, a quality that effectively renders ideas and individuals that represent those ideas as outside the boundaries of the observable, everyday, and corporeal. The sacred—the quality of that which/who can be sacrificed--is perhaps one of the greatest occasions to invoke the sublime, due to the incomprehensibility of calculating rationally what risks it entails, what rewards may come, and its place amidst the eternal.  Ned O’Gorman recent QJS article defines the sublime as that which “grounds the national, epistemological, ethical, and political claims by placing their ultimate source beyond mundane knowledge and in the realm of the transcendental.”[3] To tap into the sacred/sublime is to tap into rhetorical, aesthetic, and historical shifts and alterations having to do with the way peoples and cultures have imagined themselves, others and the world. As O’Gorman continues, “Indeed the sublime is perhaps best characterized by a reflexive process, wherein an aesthetic concept comes to inform a great variety of cultural practices, from tourism to reading, and these culture practices in turn shape new conceptual approaches to the concept itself.”[4]

When do we see the sacred in our contemporary discourse?

In The Enigma of the Gift, Maurice Godelier revisits Emile Benveniste’s distinction between the kratos—the hero associated with god-like qualities and krateros—the qualities of the animal. The dual nature of the sacred/sacrificial, and the violence held within, requires the language of sublimity to raise acts of violence from the base and animal to the ultimate act of selfless defense of the innocent. This dual nature then denies the capacity for redemption in both the afterlife and for those who have survived, to the warrior-hero, the acts that are committed in the name of higher ideals for the necessary purposes of maintaining the integrity and vitality of the greater community. [5] Yet kratos, it turns out, conceals as much as it reveals in contrast to its related terms. As Nicole Loraux points out, kratos was used almost disparagingly in Athens to denote an ability to wield godlike power over others, (in contrast to the more familiar term arkhe which described the institutional power vested in the city-state) and when forged into the label more familiar to our modern eyes, demokratia, was used as a disparaging label that actual democrats avoided using. [6] The scaffolding of words crafted skillfully together by Classical orators to raise their subject to great heights precisely in order to distinguish it from the most transgressive and criminal of actions that have little (or everything to do) with nature. The paradoxical qualities of the sacred/sacrifice then, (at once both the iconic representation of the Gods/ and personification of Nature) must be reconciled for a public to accept the connection between acts of necessary violence and senseless, violent outbursts.

Playing on this Janus-faced quality of violent/sacrifice, Rene Girard conceptualizes sacrificial rituals as violent impulses requiring a productive means of expression that does not threaten complete annihilation to a community. Girard goes on to posit that while primitive social systems lacked central means of administrating justice, modern nation-states offer an “automatic brake against violence” realized through “powerful institutions whose grip grows progressively tighter as their role grows progressively less apparent.” As Girard concludes: “As soon as the judicial system gains supremacy, its machinery disappears from sight.. .Like sacrifice, it conceals—even as it also reveals—its resemblance to vengeance, differing only in that it is not self-perpetuating and its decisions discourage reprisals.” [7] He concludes that while we may recoil at such an inhumane logic, it is this very logic that is embedded within the practices of secular modernity today. “The aim is to achieve a radically new type of violence, truly decisive and self-contained, a form of violence that will put an end once and for all to violence itself.” [8]

This strain of cultural critique is not unique to Girard, and has in fact found a great deal of academic and cultural currency in the critique of liberalism common to Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and more recently Giorgio Agamben, who utilizes the Roman conceptualization of homo sacer to bring attention to those who suffer outside the margins of the liberal state in order to perpetuate its reasons for existence. [9]At once both profane and divine, the “sacred man” lives outside the margins and space of normal social interactions, and was therefore beyond the reach of the law. This dual quality is what makes the homo sacer such a prime candidate for the sacrifice of a nation.

It is within these paradoxical relationships (between management of life and extinguishing life, between granting rights and granting rights to exclude) that the sacrificial subject becomes both the instrument of a sovereign, the “homo sacer” left to languish in states of limbo and routinely denied resources that would make it possible to reintegrate into civilian life. The way in which the sacrificial subject is embedded within the very logic of the modern nation-state (and clearly visible to us in the reproduced images of refugees, enemy combatants, and wounded soldiers returning home from an increasingly horrific battlefield with increasingly severe injuries) becomes more than we can contemplate—it is nature bursting through the frame of our late modern rituals that seem to conceal more meaning than they reveal. For what is more “supernatural”: our own development of technologies that sustain life past its “natural” end point, or a geopolitical system that severs people from their rights to be present in a territory with at least a sense of where their place is within a given community?

The dissolution of the draft, the building of the military industrial complex has produced a curious break between the soldier of old and the solider of today. The modern soldier has been loosened from the archetype of the “citizen-soldier” romanticized as a part of the “greatest generation”. Catherine Lutz and many other anthropologists have noted this issue of the soldier being slowly separated from the civilian (going so far as to make them a “super-civilian”, with special rights that seem to abruptly end upon re-entry to civilian life) due to the dissolution of the draft, and the resulting intersections of class, race, and gender that the all-volunteer military reveals in its stratification and often creation of desperate circumstances.[10] At the same time, civilian society has become “militarized” with whole economies often dependent upon weapons and other support manufacturing, or supplying services to bases. Far from being a “supercivilian”, veterans return from deployment often feeling “subcivilian”, routinely denied access to medical services, left to manage crippling conditions of mental illnesses independently and overall “managed” to the point of “self-extinguishment.”[11] Lutz writes that despite this increasing bifurcation between civilian and soldier and even between officer and enlisted, is the “Achilles’ Heel” of the American military. [12]

This project deals with the presence of “troops” within American discourse, during a time when a war has been fought in our names that we have been nearly oblivious to in comparison to earlier periods of wartime. It is my argument, that the competing interests of a modern state keen to avoid the “Body Bag Effect”, Vietnam Syndrome, etc. has exacerbated a long and lingering contradiction that exists within all public discourse on war--how do we venerate those who have been touched by venality? How do we pay tribute to our war heroes when their heroism is plucked from the most base and animalistic of our natures? If war is hell, what do those who engage in it become when they find their way back?

Below are visual fragments that I believe represent the contradictions and lacunae of the sacred in our public life: the “censored” images of Honor Guard ceremonies revering the casualties of war at the Dover Air Force Base. These images were obtained only after several individuals filed Freedom of Information Act requests, after which the photos were released with a curious progression of edits. The Dept. of Defense appears to be protecting the living by erasing their distinguishing features, and finally rendering those who touch the dead as equally moribund (black boxes carrying another box).

Why can we not gaze upon the costs of war? Why are those tasked with the public receipt of the fallen concealed, masked, rendered faceless in the wake of a war that has never been fully acknowledged as one with a very human cost? What does this say about our understanding of sacrality and modernity, if anything?