Performing Religion in Public ed. by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, and Joshua Edelman (review)

Critically shifting Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, Performing Religion in Public turns toward performance, that “essentially contested concept” (17), to investigate the slipperiness of Habermas’s sequestering of the public sphere from religion. As an anthology, these essays contribute to recent conversations on religion and publics demonstrated by works like Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen’s The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011) and Christopher Balme’s The Theatrical Public Sphere (2014). Performing Religion in Public stands apart, however, by framing performance studies as equipped to engage the “un-translatability” between the sacred and the secular, asking: “How do we not understand each other?” (13; emphasis in original).

Taking up Habermas’s assertion that religious speech ought to hold sway in public discourse only when rationally translated, Performing Religion contests the limitations of insider/outsider binaries, noting the inseparability of performance from public world-making. The bracketing of publics and self from experience disregards existence with and as the world (15). Performance studies, then, through reflexivity and its “use of an analysis of performative events and practices as a means to gain access to the network of relations” (16) engages untranslatability by troubling the disentanglement of the private from the public. Performance subverts conventional ways of thinking through its processes of knowing, producing, and encountering difference: “reason’s lack is supplied by performance” (18).

Drawing from a spectrum of religious traditions and theorists, Performing Religion boasts varied voices and topics, including generous discussions among contributors ending each section. The book is organized into four theoretically driven parts: “Publics and the Non-Democratic State”; “Visceral Publics”; “Publics and Commodification”; and “Ephemeral Publics.” Each part is made up of three chapters, and while a quarter of them treat geographically English religious practices or personalities, all chapters weigh factors of space, identity, world-making, and performative economies.

The first part principally addresses how governing bodies regulate or appropriate religious discourse to maintain influence. Simon du Toit examines the sixteenth-century Puritan preaching of John Stockwood and Richard Greenham in “The Market for Argument,” contending that performances of spiritual interiority and prophetic (and anti-theatrical) speech produced a counter-public competing for religious authority, blurring boundaries of public and private, and essentially politicizing Puritan zeal. Similarly analyzing embodiment, Joy Palacios’s contribution on France’s early seminaries shows how seventeenth-century communal prayer carefully regulated publics to form religious community. South African political and racial conflicts come alive in Michael Lambert and Tamantha Hammerschlag’s chapter, “The Durban Passion Play,” which questions the publics that these performances sanction in the pluralistic and postcolonial nation.

Part 2, “Visceral Publics,” investigates how performances generate fear, joy, and sacrifice in the service of religious rhetoric and public hailing. Challenging Habermas’s concept of public reason, each chapter illuminates how religious discourse functions beyond reason and agreement. Tom Grimwood and Peter Yeandle distinguish the “entextualizing” rhetoric of preacher and theatre director Stewart Headlam (1847–1924) from moral ontological structures of the fractured English Christian community. An outstanding project awaits them in addressing Headlam’s productions. Joshua Edelman’s essay on American street preaching probes the practice’s offensiveness and formation of “intolerable publics,” challenging the criteria of “willingness” in defining publics. He demonstrates the necessity of rejection, tracing the affective potential of street preaching’s awkward and ineffective means, and details how intimate publics can arise beyond public debate and consent. Kris Messer documents the intermixing of personal and public discourse in “Faith, Fright, and Excessive Feeling,” inviting deeper reflection on communities informing and performing idealized publics and identities through a look at three separate hell houses.

Part 3, “Publics and Commodification,” presents three cultural contexts whereby capitalism, choice, and secularisms infiltrate and redefine religious publics. Jo Robinson and Lucie Sutherland expose the emerging fierceness of religious competition in “Congregations, Audiences, Actors: Religious Performance and the Individual in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Nottingham.” Mapping religious and...