Bad Religion, or Bad Faith?

In his recent polemic for The Chronicle Review, Jacques Berlinerblau testifies to a revelation: “The presence of more than 20,000 heavily armed National Guard troops at the Biden/Harris inauguration suggests the potency of the Christian right has advanced well beyond the ‘lurk’ stage.”

If you encounter Berlinerblau’s words out of context, you might think he means that the Christian right somehow displayed its “potency” by mustering thousands of National Guard soldiers in Washington on Inauguration Day. As Berlinerblau watches this “heavily armed” presence, you might suppose, he sees the Christian right’s hitherto lurking power manifested, under the open sky, in broad daylight. With this image of a weaponized force, you might imagine, the Christian right, in all of its spectacular and undeniable reality, has come out of hiding, to be reckoned with at last.

If you read the rest of the essay, though, you know that this is not what Berlinerblau means. Berlinerblau identifies the threat of violence not with the National Guard but with the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. He calls the would-be insurrectionists “religious believers gone wild,” and he interprets their mission as one of “trashing the marble HQ of liberal democracy.” The attempted coup, Berlinerblau is saying, was the Christian right in its aggressive essence, finally revealing the true nature of its faith. His essay is a call to arms against two particular enemies: armed Christian insurgents and the scholars of American religion who, according to Berlinerblau, have failed to take them seriously.

Berlinerblau does not imagine the troops, “heavily armed” though they may be, as figures of potential violence at all. Instead, he treats the military presence as an essential security measure, the necessary response required to defend the U.S. government against a violent threat — the threat to secularism posed by the Christian right. In the various episodes that Berlinerblau calls up for us, secularism and its institutions are always under assault, always encroached upon, always on the defensive. In his scenarios, when liberal democracy defends itself, it is not doing violence; it is keeping the peace.

Some critics of U.S. military power in this century have also been critics of secularism. They have shown how government officials use the language of secularism to make certain distinctions — between, for instance, irrational violence and reasonable security. These critics have shown how such distinctions are sometimes used to justify far-reaching wars, torture, and the world’s largest prison system. The critics have also asked whether such programs should themselves be understood as rather more aggressive than defensive, more violence than security.

Berlinerblau takes special issue with one of the most prominent theorists of such problems, Talal Asad. He accuses Asad of receiving “massive investments” from wealthy private foundations that are hostile to American secularism. Asad’s “dense, esoteric, and theoretically sophisticated work,” according to Berlinerblau, serves these shadowy interests by pointing “to one clear policy implication: Secularism should be immediately eradicated.” This fantasy of a dangerous threat — against which, Berlinerblau is telling us, an insecure secularism must defend itself — is, for me, the most troubling moment in his essay.

Berlinerblau casts other strange aspersions, too. “Many who study the intersection of religion and politics,” he tells us, follow an “olden rule” requiring the scholar to “posit religion at its best, secularism at its worst.” There is a partial truth in Berlinerblau’s intuition. We critics of secularism do sometimes romanticize spiritual practices and religious communities under whose authority, in the end, we would not want to be governed. But Berlinerblau’s reaction against the critique of secularism wrongly casts it as an orthodoxy, and this mistake leads to contradiction and confusion. His main point seems to be that religious-studies scholars have failed to apprehend the Christian right’s violent potential. Professors of religion should have foreseen the events of January 6, Berlinerblau claims. The true threat was hiding in their “blind spot,” and they were not prepared to confront it.

What has he been reading? One major religious-studies scholar and critic of secularism whose work has informed my own, Gil Anidjar, recently published Blood, a volume of over four hundred pages, with Columbia University Press. Anidjar’s subtitle is “a critique of Christianity,” and his analysis never looks away from violence. “As for evangelicals and white supremacy,” Berlinerblau acknowledges, “the subject is getting the attention it deserves.” He respectfully cites Sarah Posner and Anthea Butler; he might also have mentioned many others: Ann Burlein’s Lift High the Cross; Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne; Willie James Jennings’s The Christian Imagination; Khyati Joshi’s White Christian Privilege; Donald Mathews’s At the Altar of Lynching. This is just a sampling from an expansive bibliography. Even as Berlinerblau recognizes some of this work, however, he insists on its marginality, perhaps because he is so invested in a sense of his — and secularism’s — own self-image as a marginalized party, under siege. The feeling of fragility provokes a sharp defensiveness. The other side probably sees the political economy of its situation in a different light.

Secularism, as Berlinerblau defines it, signifies “a political position on how government should relate to religion.” He does not quite explain exactly how secularists think government should relate to religion. Presumably, they hold that government and religion should be kept separate, when possible, and that the interests of liberal democracy should prevail if the two come into conflict.

But secularism is more than a “position” on the relation between government and religion. It is the whole way of thinking that imagines “government” and “religion” as separate things whose relation needs managing. As critics often point out, secularism entails a set of presumptions, an “immanent frame” (Charles Taylor’s term), that secularists never fully acknowledge. As an intellectual movement, not only a political one, secularism divides the world by introducing its own conceptual oppositions, then takes sides. One of secularism’s crucial distinctions is the one between government and religion, and Berlinerblau’s own unacknowledged distinction between security and violence proceeds from there. He is waging a conflict while also trying to adjudicate its terms.

In my own work, especially in The Oracle and the Curse, I have tried to show how, historically, the American legal system’s disavowal of both religion and violence helped create the conditions for such conflicts. In the 18th and 19th centuries, judges and other religious officials began to justify their decisions, including decisions violently enforced, in nominally nonreligious ways. This change in legal culture, I argue, effectively freed up religious justifications — a divine sanction or “higher law” — for use by protest movements, including violent movements, with many different kinds of political commitments. Christian abolitionism was the fiercest and most famous example, but proslavery activists also claimed that God was on their side when the government moved against them. Appeals to a justice higher than the law are most common in situations when the state power’s legitimacy is shaky, in times when the normal functioning of legal systems is exposed to direct political action.

In those circumstances, the state itself is likely to revert to religious rhetoric and ceremonial legitimation. Under siege, secularism buckles and lapses. A sense of being threatened by irrational forces — sometimes sincerely felt, sometimes deployed in bad faith — has been expressed by many well-armed organizations in the United States, such as the government. White Christian nationalism was a real, awful, violent force in American life and politics before Trump, and it will continue to be so after him. If the Biden administration responds to the menace mainly by expanding its own military, surveillance, and penal systems, many people viewed as threats will find themselves in the grips of these systems, and most of the people who suffer will not be white Christian nationalists.

For a long time, as it happens, American Christians have been invoking God’s justice to explain why they break laws in acts of civil disobedience. The acts play out in many ways, in the name of many different causes, violent and nonviolent, Black and white, left and right. A powerful example from recent years was Bree Newsome Bass’s protest at the South Carolina State House, reciting the Lord’s Prayer as she took down the Confederate battle flag. White supremacists have also put on a religious mantle. That said, in my research I have not yet come across anyone making one particular claim that Berlinerblau finds himself arguing against — namely that lynching is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — when he writes of “white Christians for whom ‘free exercise’ entitles them to do anything, from lynching to ransacking the United States Senate.” I think his essay lacks a theory of legitimation.

The truth is that neither secularism nor its critique is necessarily on the side of justice. The conflict over Biden’s swearing-in should not be mistaken for a struggle between secularism and the Christian right. It was a crisis of political legitimacy, and both the party of Trump and the party of Biden invoked a divine sanction as they made their claims for power. Consider, for example, the inauguration ceremony. What happened there? The president and vice president were sworn into office, placing their hands on Bibles. A prayer was spoken. “Amazing Grace” was sung.

In his inaugural address, Biden himself took up the question of violence: “On this hallowed ground where just days ago violence sought to shake this Capitol’s very foundation, we come together as one nation, under God, indivisible, to carry out the peaceful transfer of power.” Contrary to Berlinerblau’s formulations, Biden set violence and religion against each other, not on the same side. In other words, Biden described his own inauguration as a ritual, performed in a sacred space. He saw his own swearing-in as an occasion to reclaim “hallowed ground” that had been profaned. According to the president, at least, this is what the National Guard protected on that peaceful day.