Religion, Interdisciplinarity, and Cultural Studies: Response to Mizruchi

Having spent a good bit of my adult life trying to avoid "getting religion," Susan Mizruchi's provocative essay, along with my own current research on Joan of Arc in American literature and culture, has convinced me that I must give in and "get" it. In fact, Mizruchi's elucidation of a post-Enlightenment distrust of the emotionality of religion matched by a failure to comprehend rationally "an alternative language of indeterminacy and horror" helps explain to me my own reluctance to take religion more seriously: current uses of religion (notably from the religious Right) rank low on the rationality register, and, because they are pervasive and visible, easily come to stand in for all uses of religion.

A look at recent popular surveys of the current US religious scene uncovers some pretty amazing details: Ninety-six percent of US adults believe in God or a "universal spirit"; three percent believe they are God. One in three says that God speaks to them directly. Sixty-nine percent believe in miracles; 58 percent believe God answers prayers often. Fifty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants think poor people have it easy; 56 percent of Catholics think so; and 39 percent of Jews think so. Three in five believe in a final judgment day; in 1997, 20 percent believed that a second coming of Christ would occur around the year 2000. Forty-two percent think the Bible is the actual word of God. Ten percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.¹ Two more examples from my home state of Texas (which I like to think of as uniquely weird): in Kleburg County (near Corpus Christi), the official greeting is not "hell-o" but "Heaven-o." In March 1999, a billboard in West Texas displayed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) saying "Jesus Was a Vegetarian" was removed after an anonymous caller threatened to burn one cat per day until the sign was gone. Other residents protested-- the billboard, not the threatener--not because of some almost reasonable argument about inappropriateness, but because Jesus surely was a carnivore ("Animal-rights" A11). Although most of the time I am convinced, with Mizruchi, that there is nothing exceptional about current religious expressions (recent millennial fever notwithstanding), these figures and events make it difficult at times to hang on to that conviction. Certainly, evidence for the necessity of getting religion abounds in contemporary popular culture, as "The Place of Ritual in Our Time" makes abundantly clear, and Mizruchi argues convincingly that we cannot ignore religion as a category for understanding culture.

Why, then, has cultural studies been rather reluctant to engage such a deeply layered and socially significant topic as religion? Some of the important early American studies scholars recognized its centrality: think of Perry Miller or Kenneth Murdock.² In recent years, at least part of the reason, perhaps, has been the overwhelming visibility of the Religious Right, with its talent for capturing the discursive center stage. As with aesthetics--another topic being wrested from cultural conservatives (who have enjoyed pretending that they are the only ones who can really appreciate literature qua literature)--maybe it is only now, when the Religious Right retreats as often as it advances (I am thinking here of Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America? [1999], the new book by former Moral Majority members Cal Thomas and the Reverend Ed Dobson, who now say they were misguided), that work in cultural studies can focus on religion without instant distortion by right-leaning critics. It has been hard to bring up the word "religion," much less analyze its cultural importance as a subject, without using terms set by the Right.

There have been recent exceptions, of course--Mizruchi's work among them.³ In "The Place of Ritual in Our Time," with her theoretical premises that religion is central in the US contemporary cultural scene, that "interdisciplinary concepts" are...