Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere

5. Prayerful Reading

 Chapter Five Prayerful Reading Religious Affect and the Secular Public Sphere Public Sphere Conversions Susan Sontag observes, rather surprisingly at first blush, the similarity of religious and pornographic reading: In some respects, the use of sexual obsessions as a subject for literature resembles the use of a literary subject whose validity far fewer people would contest: religious obsession. . . . Pornography that is serious literature aims to “excite” in the same way that books which render an extreme form of religious experience aim to “convert.” (Styles 47) The parallels between the pornographic and the religious are perhaps only at first surprising; on further reflection, they are not particularly difficult to understand. A long and well-known tradition of religious reading, one partially outlined in chapter 2, seeks to short-circuit the distance from text to reader in ways similar to the pornographic. In such situations, the words on the page are meant to disappear, the consciousness of mediation to dissolve. To “excite,” as Sontag puts it, is to “call forth” (from the Latin ex-, “out,” and ciēre, “to set in motion”)—to call the reader forth directly. To excite is to awaken or convert the reader from one state to another. Excitation and conversion are the same in the sense that to convert isn’t simply to change one’s way of thinking but to change one’s way of being. Converting the self from one state to another—from sleeping to waking, from stasis to motion—extends far beyond changes in ideas. { 121 122 } f e v e r r e a d i n g The idea of conversion does not fit neatly with the usual idea of the public sphere. Where conversion customarily entails a converting from one identity to another, the public sphere, at least in theory, involves an ongoing questioning of positions, especially when they are tenaciously held as identities. Conversion is not usually understood as a process that is enabled by the public sphere, whereas persuasion, argument, and opining are. It is hard to imagine conversion reading, which often emphasizes transcendence, having much to do with public-sphere reading, which emphasizes the concerns of the here and now. Habermas himself thought of the public sphere as posed against the authority of the church. The philosopher Richard Rorty—in general supportive of Habermasian public conversation—called religion a “conversation stopper” and suggested its privatization (168). John Rawls called for the bracketing of religious commitments when participating in “public reason” (at for instance 458). In other words, the religious public sphere, in an important sense, seems like a contradiction in terms. It is not that a sphere of religious publication doesn’t exist, but rather that the idea of a discussion and debate that will lead to a pragmatic kind of truth seems deeply at odds with such a sphere of publication. Perhaps for these reasons public-sphere theory has not played a substantive role in the scholarship on the great public upswells of religion in American history.¹ For their part, public-sphere theorists have been little interested in religion. How, for instance, could reading that produced “weeping” and “awakening” during the Second Great Awakening (or, for that matter, sermon listening that generated yelling, shrieking, rolling in the aisles, crying and screaming)² possibly be understood as part of a critical public sphere? These are not unfamiliar modes of religious reading, but they are most often understood as outside of the public sphere, part of a very private relationship with a transcendent power. From the perspective of the public sphere, they are just examples of reading badly. But what would happen if such reading—reading that was understood as conversion and awakening, as producing weeping and an opening to the spirit—was approached as participating in a critical public sphere rather than as diametrically opposed to or outside of such a public sphere? This chapter takes up this question by examining a specific public sphere that developed around religious print culture in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey during the 1840s. Ultimately, one of the central goals of this chapter is to break down the too-easy alignment of the public prayerful reading { 123 sphere, secularism, and critical reason on one side and private ritual, religion , and uncritical belief on the other. While familiar, this dichotomy is, I suggest, not historically accurate and more an ideological formation than an actual one. Several bene...