Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (review)

To begin, this is not a book to be condensed into singular argument or condensed summation. Authentic Fakes should not receive a review; it deserves a revue, a monumental spectacular reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin Keith or Baz Luhrmann. Since text functions without the three-dimensional vivacity of vaudeville, perhaps it is wisest to focus at the level of the chapter, to try to capture just a moment in the text. Consider, then, the beginning of “Monetary Religion,” the sixth chapter of Chidester’s rumination on U.S. popular culture, a chapter inserted between examinations of “Sacrificial Religion” (chapter 5) and “Global Religion” (chapter 7). “Monetary Religion” opens easily enough, with a description of Money Tracts, dollar-sized evangelical pamphlets meant to fool the greedy into salvation. “When folded,” explains the online advertisement, “these witness tracts look like part of a real bill and they are sure to get the attention of the person who discovers them lying on the floor, a shelf, a table, or other appropriate location.” (http://www.act-now-inc.com/html/ money-tracts.html) We do not linger long with these trickster tracts, however, turning quickly (perhaps inevitably) to the anguish of Max Weber circa 1915 as he negotiated the tension between religiosity and rational economy. Although it seems you could hunker down in the imagined dialectical space between Weber and Money Tracts, the train barrels forward: to the baptism of money among Colombian peasants, to the symbolic readings of Clifford Geertz, to a short reminder from first Timothy. “Money is at the center of a moral economy,” the author declares, now transitioning to the televangelist Reverend Ike (a reprise from chapter 4, “Embodied Religion”) and his gospel of currency (“the lack of money is the root of all evil”) (112). With money on our minds, we hustle past the Church of the Profit$, Masonic images on the one dollar bill, and Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). Durkheim is cited (along with E. B. Tylor) to be rejected; his definitions of the sacred are not satisfactory, but they do give us talk of blood. Blood and money are now paired underwriters of the sacred, of society, and with that, the author affirms generally accepted accounting principles as the best epistemological template for interpretations of the sacred. “Blood and money are central to the meaning of America in the world,” the author now decides, bidding you to accompany him on a tour of gang combat in Cape Town, South Africa (113). All this travel, all this invocation, and you have only read three pages.

Exhausted? Enthralled? Enraged? Admiration of Authentic Fakes depends entirely on your willingness to succumb to its speed, to its overabundance of object, and to Chidester’s dual penchant for dangling questions and contrarian declaratives. From the outset, the project seems to be both brilliant and belligerent: it takes cheek to declare the existence of “fakes” axiomatic in U.S. religious culture; it takes more presumption to seek the “authentic religious work” in pop cultural play. Chidester obviously seeks to boggle the prim and politically wary with his determinations of what is fake and what is not, of what conjures authenticity and what derides its sacral terms. “I always did have a hatred for shams and humbugs and cheats,” preached Sam Jones, a nineteenth-century American evangelist, “and of all the humbugs that ever cursed the universe, I reckon the religious humbug is the humbuggest.” Chidester’s revision of Jones is absolute: in humbuggery much religion can be found; almost all religion is humbuggery. To imagine that there is religious activity without humbug, without fabrication, is to miss the very humanity of religious life. Despite such a contumacious definitional posture, Authentic Fakes is alluring: the gait of its narrative and the sheer audacity of its convergences prods even the most provincial observer to loyalty. To be sure, the guiding inquiries are fustian: What is it to be a human being? What is it to be...