On Religion and Being Politically Stuck
A Lamentation
We’re Stuck
A few days ago, I returned from participating in a workshop at UCLA on "Faith, Flourishing, and the Environment." I was on the first panel of participants, flanked by the esteemed Judith Butler (UC Berkeley) and Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury).
While I won’t speak to all of the issues that surfaced throughout my time at the workshop, I do want to reflect on a beautiful exchange I had with Judith Butler insofar as it speaks to the issue of how to understand why societies get politically stuck and can’t find a way forward — and what we might do about this. This issue is arguably at the heart of the current cultural moment as we move towards the elections on November 5, 2024 ( a short 23 days from now, as of when I publish this).
My exchange with Judith Butler is related to the book I'm currently finishing, Whiteness: An American Lamentation (contracted with Yale University Press).
What’s Religion Got To Do With It?
Before saying something about our condition of being politically stuck and why, I want to locate my thoughts on this against the backdrop of my current book project. In my current book project, I argue that whiteness is a mode of religion. I make this claim as part of a broader argument, namely, that America itself is (a) religion. Precisely what I mean by religion is something I will not fully lay out here (I’ll save perhaps for another post). However, I will say that I'm convinced that our culture is saddled with a profoundly inadequate understanding of what religion is.
We tend to think of religion as what happens in churches, mosques, synagogues, and private institutions such as these. Hence, religion is private — perhaps of these institutions, certainly of “the heart.” By contrast, politics, public policy and such are, well, public. They are secular.
I will not delve into how we’ve generally come to think like this. Rather, I want to highlight that as a specifically Western concept, religion was produced as part of the general history of Western empires and as part of the workings of Western statecraft.
A key person in developing the concept of religion was the ancient Roman writer and rhetorician Cicero, who created the idea of religion as we know it to aid in the Roman Empire’s work of coalescing or binding together “the people” under its sphere of domination. The U.S. Constitution’s opening words, “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union . . . ,” echoes this Roman history of religion as the work of politically binding together a people who will be distinct of some other people — in the case of the ancient Romans, a people distinct from “the barbarians.” Indeed, one of the meanings of the Latin word religio is binding together. The Christian writer and theologian Tertullian eventually picks up Cicero’s idea to marry it to Christianity as Christianity fused with Empire.1
My point here is that religion, at its root, is a political concept tied to imperial rule and domination. Privatizing religion did not overcome this heritage. Under the veneer of the secular, it only masks even as religion continued to function, at the level of statecraft, as a politics of forging an imperial “We” over against a “Them.” This we-ing and them-ing is neither merely (private) religion, nor merely (secular or public) politics; its religio-political as a singular thing. It is the political as the religious.2 The United States is a distinct settler form of this.
America’s Melancholy
My current book project explores this in some detail. It considers this nation — with some forays into events beyond the U.S., for example, 20th-century fascism in Germany and the modern nation-state of Israel, which I argue extending James Baldwin is, in fact, a Christian nation-state — from the perspective of the nation’s refusal to lament the horrors that constituted and instituted it in the first place. This inability to mourn and lament has shaped us into a society bereft of what's needed to navigate the guilt that follows from the horrors that have shaped us. Whiteness: An American Lamentation will explain our current cultural sicknesses or dis-eases (from Trump and Trumpism to JD Vance and JD Vance-ism to the authoritarianism and neo-racial fascism sweeping Western societies to not being serious enough in addressing environmental and ecological devastation, and on and on) in light of this. I explain American society as a culture without a sense of the tragic and that, therefore, is stuck in a kind of societal and political quicksand, what with the help of Freud’s investigations into the psychic life of people and nations, we might call melancholia.
However, another name for this stuckness is, alas, whiteness.
What Can We Do?
Given this, tragedy and lamentation are not side issues. The social ethicist emilie townes recently gave a beautiful account of lamentation. She said, “Lament isn’t about saying, ‘Oh, woe is me.’ Nor is it about blaming.” townes continued, “Lament looks hard at what’s happened while looking with equal seriousness at what’s possible.”
What townes said is close to my interest in tragedy, especially lamentation. Tragedy and lamentation are collective rituals (you can’t do them by yourself) that affirm life as the radical entanglement of all things. The affirmation of life that lamentation affords occurs through inhabiting or otherwise dwelling in the horror or devastation or pain that’s at the root of the current order of things. Lamentation compels us to dwell in the horror, to discern from within the horror and devastation what, in fact, exceeds that horror or devastation. Or as townes puts it, to glimpse what’s possible.
A beautiful exchange during the Q&A with the renowned Judith Butler at the "Faith, Flourishing, and the Environment" workshop crystallized much of this for me and, in its own way, affirmed the direction I'm taking in Whiteness: An American Lamentation.
Given their remarks on grieving and grievable life, I asked Judith, "Is lamentation, such as we find in the book of Lamentations in the Hebrew scriptures, the same as the idea of grieving as we find it in Freud's psychoanalytic work? Is it the same as your notion of "grieving what should be grievable but often is not grieved" as you've spoken of here in this workshop and as you've spoken of most recently in your book, What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology?"3
Judith responded (and some of my own wording and way of hearing what Judith was saying is surely mixed in here) that lamentation is a grieving that affirms God and (or, more precisely, God as) the affirmation of life, the affirmation of possibility. Moreover, lamentation can only be done collectively. To lament is collectively to affirm the life that remains in the face of a ruin that is always remembered, even as the remembrance of that ruin, of that horror, is now a condition of Life’s ongoingness, a condition of re-membering Life.
I love this. It amounts to the insight that lamentation never stops. Lamentation is iterative and re-iterative. It is liturgical. It is social liturgy. A liturgy of sociality. Liturgy as otherwise sociality. It is a collective practice of re-membering, of putting things together otherwise, where we work to bring Life back into view in refusal to reproduce the operations of power that made for the ruin in the first place.
Ultimately, then, lamentation is poiesis or poetics, the practice of making or crafting. It is art-making, akin to what Zora Neale Hurston once spoke of as "making a way out of no way."4 Life (re)made beyond the conditions that made and brought forth the horror, the evil, the tragedy. This is Life. This is lamentation.5
Towards Lamentation
Judith concluded their exchange with me and the audience more generally by saying that for all of their interest in Freud’s famous essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (1914) this notion of lamentation is precisely what Freud’s theory lacks or does not understand. Bringing the issue of race explicitly into their remarks, Judith went on to say that not just race generally but whiteness specifically (and societies structured through it) are built on a refusal to lament horror and thus are unable to navigate inherited guilt.
Judith made this last statement about whiteness WITHOUT me introducing this idea into the conversation. I said to Judith, "This is the book I’m writing." Judith offered strong encouragement that I push forward on it. They said we need this book and that they look forward to reading it.
I look forward to finishing it. I will press on.
See Carlin Barton and Daniel Boyarin, Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham UP, 2016).
Much of this, I get into my recently published book, The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song (Duke UP, 2023), and I explore it more in the book on whiteness and America as religious projects that I'm presently finishing up.
Judith Butler, What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (New York: Columbia UP, 2023).
Zora Neale Hurston, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance (Amistad, 2021).
For more on this, see Kathleen O'Connor, Lamentation and the Tears of the World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004). Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann has worked extensively on lamentation in the form of the psalms of lament in the Book of Psalms. His work is germane to what I’m trying to think about. See Bruggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination in which he argues that “imagination” does not mean “irreal” but quite the opposite. He claims that the world we live in, the world where the empires of man rule, is a parody (I’d add, tragedy). All empires, he contends, are acts of imagination: they present a world that lures humanity into its false, power-driven hopes and lays claim to our hearts and souls as the unquestioned status quo. What O’Connor and Bruggeman have helped me understand is that lamentation is the gateway to alternate imaginations. It is the portal into what has been termed “Otherwise Worlds.” See the essays collected in Tiffany Lethabo Ling, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, eds., Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (Duke UP, 2020). See also, Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: An Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham UP, 2016).
Yessir man.