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  • Religion and Secrecy

Two Things Have Conspired to make the present a particularly auspicious time for this focus issue—and The Da Vinci Code is not one of them. First, geopolitically, questions about the secrets that religions keep, or may keep, are on the table across the world. Second, there has been some very high-quality work on religion and secrecy in recent years, work that promises to challenge some of the received conceptions of the relation between religions and other material interests. Not everyone has recognized the value of that work. We hope that this issue of the JAAR encourages scholars to think anew about religion and secrecy.

Historically and at present, religious secrecy has simultaneously captivated and threatened religions and the cultures and states they inhabit. Many religions acknowledge a certain degree of "hidden knowledge," whether hidden to those outside the faith or to those outside the elite of the faith, or some combination thereof. And such claims have sometimes provoked curiosity, inquisitorial interest, and at times violence. The connections between religion and secrecy are manifold, complex, and at times contradictory.

How do states manage their interest in the "secrets" of religions? How do religions reconcile conflicting tendencies toward secrecy and publicity or transparency? These are fraught questions, as Michael Barkun's essay suggests; but they must be asked. Furthermore, as Paul Johnson's piece details, states' interest in religious secrets may well be co-opted, not by the state but by religions, in ways that fundamentally shape the nature of the state itself; scholars must be attentive, then, to how religious secrecy is not only used by actors—but may itself use those actors in turn. This raises a further [End Page 273] question: How should the connection between religion and secrecy be represented and confronted culturally? After all, the reality of secrecy as a social phenomenon seems at times, even in explicitly nonreligious settings, to eventuate in situations that scholars of religion can study with fruitful results. Secrecy is simultaneously a taboo and a fetish in modern societies. As the essays by Julius Bailey, Michael Lindsay, and Hugh Urban point out, some political and cultural institutions and agents may manifest true zealotry in their desire to keep their secrets hidden, or to ferret out others' self-proclaimedly "religious" secrets; and certainly secrecy itself, even in its most secular and mundane aspects, may take on the shimmer of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum that most definitely also fascinans.

Furthermore—and lurking behind every essay in this collection—is the question of the nature of the scholar's obligations vis-à-vis secrecy. As Urban and Barkun ask, what responsibility—if any—do scholars have for protecting the privacy of religious groups we study while accurately illuminating the phenomena and trends we seek to address? And are the inquiries of purportedly nonnormative scholarship, made queasy by secrecy, themselves shaped by a hidden (Kantian) normativity, as Jonathan Malesic's essay argues?

Finally, asking questions about secrecy inevitably raises issues related to analogous concepts such as privacy on the one hand and mystery on the other. Can privacy be (mis)perceived as secrecy, as Michael Lindsay suggests? Is secrecy always reducible to a cultural hieroglyphic, or does it suggest some sort of recognition of transcendence—a transcendence that always carries with it an irreducible character of mystery? The essays of Malesic and Maria Dakake, in their different ways, seem to imply the latter. Furthermore, is secrecy finally inescapable in religious traditions that are rooted in particular histories, and is in fact our principled suspicion of secrecy itself the bastardized product of Christian universalism, come to fruition in Kantian philosophy?

This issue of the JAAR makes no pretense of answering any of these questions definitively. But it seems worth our while to try to advance the discussion. Recent years have seen a slew of good work on secrecy in religious studies, much of it done by authors represented here. The final piece of the issue is a bibliographical review essay, composed by Ann Williams Duncan, meant to introduce interested readers to the breadth of the literature on secrecy and religion, in the hopes that by ventilating our bibliographies we may further enrich...

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