How Oprah Became a Messiah: Prophet and Profit

Paul Harvey

As Oprah departs, to much media coverage, let us turn once more to our contributor Kathryn Lofton for a summing up of "What is Oprah"?

K. Lofton's book Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, has engendered a lengthy, multi-part, fascinating set of responses from numerous other scholars at Immanent Frame, and on the occasion of Oprah's departure from the network airwaves, Lofton's reflections on her career and meaning in the context of American religious history can be found at CNN Belief Blog, in the Los Angeles Times, in the New York Daily News, and in the Washington Post. Over at Killing the Buddha, Nathan Schneider also provides these links as well as a link to his own interview with Lofton, and gives his own thoughts, here.

Perhaps the easiest place to connect in to all this discussion is at the piece at the CNN Belief Blog, where our valued colleague writes:

As she departs from her ritual slot, there will be a vacuum for some. Yet if history has taught us anything, it is that the void will not be left gaping for long. “The false messiah is as old as the hope for the true Messiah,” wrote Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig. “He is the changing form of this changeless hope.”

Oprah represented humanity’s ceaseless interest in spiritual responses to personal problems. We now live in her world: one of first-person confessions, required makeovers, and spiritual consumption.

The measure of her consequence will be not in whether or not she mattered to you, but whether the world you occupy looks more like hers than you know.

Oprah: Gospel of an Icon

Paul Harvey

Another day, another author interview -- I was hoping to do this myself somewhere down the road, but no longer necessary as Immanent Frame's "Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life" has done it for me.

Kathryn Lofton's new book Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, is just out -- and just out in time for Oprah's new network, in what must surely be a divine coincidence. Check out the interview about the book here, where the author speaks with her usual panache. A little excerpt:

NS: What is it about how American religious history is studied now that has left Oprah not well-enough understood?

KL: I would say that the “how” of what we study is less problematic than the way we cordon our topics, which is very much an inheritance of our role as seminary church historians. I want to see more books written about objects that seem unlikely for religious studies, such as those seemingly in the purview of pop culture, but also those from economic and political arenas. Moreover, I think our disposition toward our subjects is often too tender for our own good. If on the one side we’ve been formed by our seminarian genealogies, on the other we inherit an abused mentality, one that flinches constantly at the possibility that elsewhere in the humanist ranks we’re being mocked for proximity to the religious subject. And so we appear, I think, often too defensive of our topics, believing they need caretaking before exposure to the imagined Marxist menace. So, if there is a critical edge to the book, it is to goad us to be less worried about explaining our subjects to their cultured despisers, and instead pursuing the mediations of their belief systems, the multiple functions of their ritual reiterations, and the social systems to which they reply and in which they participate

Read more about the book here, and more on the author here.

Unrelentingly Seeking the Mess: Another Accolade for Our Contributors

Paul Harvey

Don't miss introducing yourself (again) to my friend, Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale, and the most capaciously omnivorous intellectual that I know, Kathryn Lofton -- the latest "Top Young Historian." Her manifesto:

Every historian realizes, at some point or another, that what they do is something may be more interpretive, more imaginative, and more manipulative than chatter of "objectivity" suggests. But when Trouillot named my glee an innocence-and my "discovery" an imperial format-I think I began, finally, to commit to history. Not as a romance with data, or a story to unfold, or a voice to ventriloquize, but as a practice of powerful criticism, one in which we unrelentingly seek the mess, especially when anything presents too easily, too neatly, too logically, to be true.

Practical Matters, Prayer Pawns, and A Chat on We Shall Remain

Paul Harvey

Emerging briefly from the depths of senior theses and graduate seminar papers, before taking a deep breath and diving back down. Notes of interest on new opportunities for online explorations.

First, Practical Matters, an online journal of religious practice and practical theology published out of Emory, has just posted its first issue, on the theme "Engaging Imagination." Articles and reviews range from photography to dance to "ritual praxis inside the classroom," and a host of other ways to open up the religious imagination. The editors introduce the journal here, and explain further:

In this journal you will find digital scholarship that utiliz­es the capacities of the internet to ask and provoke new questions about religious prac­tices and practical theology. You will also find here a variety of content: peer-reviewed scholarship in several media and genres, reflections and essays by practitioners and teachers, video and audio interviews with scholars, reviews of current work in religious practices and practical theology, musical performances, photographic essays, and more.

Next, Katie Lofton has emerged from her cubbyhole at Princeton to deconstruct the recent nonsensical tit-for-tat about the "National Day of Prayer":

The irony of debates about national prayer is that they transform the experience of nationalism (worthy, perhaps) into a prescription of nationalism (failed, always). Despite our stories plurality (or perhaps because of them), the landscape of American hope and American need has become stunningly arid, silenced by prayer box sets and by rationalist relativism. What now to say before the dying soldier? What now to do during an epidemic of economic dismay? We reach for prayers, but they have become too precious by half, made by both squabbling sides something to demonstrate that you have done (he in the Oval Office, they on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue), rather than something that you seek to do. Beyond the glare of this hollow exhibitionism, we stretch for something real, we seek a prayer that isn't a pawn. And so I do what most mothers and fathers, lovers and workers, believers and atheists do: I squeeze the hand harder, and ask what I can do to see you better, to know you better, to serve you better. Then (I promise, I pray, I swear, I stand), I will do it.

Finally, I received this email about the PBS series We Shall Remain, a multi-part exploration of Native American History, which will interest some of you.

We would like to invite you to join us for a live chat with Julianna Brannum, co-producer of “Wounded Knee,” the fifth film in PBS’ “We Shall Remain” series. The films explore pivotal episodes in American Indian history. Tomorrow (Tuesday, May 12) at 2pm EST we’ll host a conversation about the film and Julianna’s behind-the-scenes perspective on this moving film. She'll answer your questions live in our hour-long chat.

Go to www.pbs.org/chat on May 12th at 2pm to join the discussion or leave a question for her today.

Lofton on Blum's W. E. B. DuBois

Paul Harvey

That omnivorous reader Kathryn Lofton reviews Ed Blum's W. E. B. DuBois: American Prophet, in Books and Culture's "book of the week" series. As with her previous review of Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption, we have here a meeting of the minds between compelling book and extraordinarily interesting reviewer, so be sure to check it out. A little excerpt:

Yet perhaps Blum's most important contribution is not a religious remapping for Du Bois but rather an academic reimagining of religious biography. A myopic modernism has informed a generation of Du Bois biographers. Blum's accomplishment is to lasso a widely scattered body of evidence showing that when it comes to religion, biographers of Du Bois (and, we fear, others) are routinely tone-deaf to subjects sacred. May Blum's biography stand as the necessary rejoinder, inspiring future writers to find ways between the drily agnostic and the inevitably sacrosanct Du Bois.

No God But Country

Paul Harvey

At Religion Dispatches, Katie Lofton provides an analysis of religious rhetoric and the election singlehandedly worth more than an entire year's stack of controversy-of-the-day political commentary. Dispensing with (while also explaining) the surface trivia of this or that campaign controversy flareup, Katie explores the strikingly areligious yet highly pietistic world of John McCain. So, turn off the TV and get busy with this substantive analysis instead. A brief excerpt here:

It matters very little to me (as a voter, as a thinker, and as a believer) that John McCain doesn’t articulate a deity familiar to any available denomination of Christianity (or Judaism or Hinduism or Islam). John McCain is, indisputably, a man of courage and intelligence. To suggest that he is not recognizably Baptist (nor ostensibly Episcopalian) is merely to demonstrate that our enterprise of discerning religion from political candidates misses, precisely, the realities of religion. In some contrast to the pursuits of journalism, the religionist does not anticipate the craven, presuming that all words of faith are pandering rhetoric meant to appease men with guns and girls with God(s). Rather, our job is to collect the available artifacts of religion (words and acts supplied in archive or public record) and render an analysis of the subject. For students of religion, this analysis is not an inherently apolitical exercise, but it is, at its best, one disentangled from theological prescription. Somehow, without a God (but not, as we will see, without a powerful creed) John McCain has forged for himself a moral mode, a discourse, a rhetoric of righteousness. What, then, ought it matter whether he is or is not, technically speaking, Christian?

The Theodicy of George Carlin

Paul Harvey

"Like so many of his cultural brethren, Carlin could not begin to uncurl his fingers from the rosary beads he spat upon," Kathryn Lofton writes in her piece Theodicy of George Carlin, just up at Religion Dispatches. Must reading as usual from our esteemed colleague, and must reading for all ambivalent fans (as I was) of Carlin.

"Evangelicalism Rebounds in Academe"

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Another day, another breathless report of the evangelical incursion. This time, our journalistic source is an admirable one: Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay (author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite) writing for the May 9, 2008 issue of The Chronicle Review. Of familiar pitch is the exclamatory that “evangelicalism is rebounding,” the statistical joy at evangelical Ivy League elitism, and the inevitable ethnic revelation (“I found that 90 percent of the members of the Yale chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ are Asian-American”).

After five paragraphs of such rehearsal, the article transitions to a narrative useful for any students of evangelicalism and fundamentalism seeking quotations on the mind(s) of those Christian men (and women, though fewer of those are imagined) pressing into hallowed halls. Lindsey serves up a summation of “evangelical scholarship” and its meeting of the “intellectual mainstream.” Included in the primer is an exuberant presentation of evangelical scholars, scholarship on evangelicals, and evangelical scholarship. The piece presumes an anxious readership, liberal and loathing of the menace that seems to have more money, more organizational power, and more disregard for plural postulates than the dominant academic mainstream. To that cohort, Lindsay supplies a comforting reminder and some clarification. His point is quelling: most of the evangelicals who have invaded liberal arts lands are of a cosmopolitan bent, and eager to keep the apple cart (his metaphor) upright. The question is whether the apple cart, frightened of its new handler, may collapse under the weight of presumptive infection. Lindsay says, rightly: probably not.

Proctor and Gamble, Out of the Closet

BY KATHRYN LOFTON
and the Burnt-Over District sisterhood

As a special end-of-the-semester treat, As The World Turns has finally given its viewers the demanded embrace between Noah and Luke. For those worried about super-delegates and electoral tallies, this is a story that gives hope again to the democratization of Christianity. Through Hershey kiss campaigns, online petitions, and wails to Proctor and Gamble, celebrants of on-screen love got the goods. Now the struggle will be that age-old drama: how to keep it hot. Fans of Moonlighting wish them well.

Opining Without Opinion

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Recently a student came to my office hours, asking about the upcoming exam. The class, “Nicole, Monica, and Katrina: An Introduction to American Studies” uses the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, and Hurricane Katrina as documents in a study of U.S. spectacle. Most of the class is spent making a mess of things: elaborating the disastrous aftereffects of an unnatural disaster, examining the labyrinthine illogic of the Starr Report, and enumerating the compromised evidence and conflicting argumentation of Brentwood bedlam.

The student asked a couple ferreting inquiries about test topics, then laid in for the real. “So, I don’t really need to talk about the exam,” he said, “What I really want to know is, what do you think about all this?” He told me that he hated how professors don’t give their opinions, how it’s all messiness and purported objectivity. As I write this, it sounds a little tough on the guy, and I don’t mean to be. He was sweet, if a little digging. What did I believe, anyway? And why wasn’t I telling them? Did O.J. slaughter his ex on one hot night? Was Monica to blame for all that brouhaha? And did I despise Michael Chertoff?

I thought about that student, and that inquiry, as I read the latest CNN contribution to the FLDS exile: “Psychiatrist: Disobedience Equals Damnation In Sect.” Inside, we learn that the aforementioned psychiatrist is “Bruce Perry” a man who “has worked with families involved with groups such as the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, as well as some smaller groups.” His role in this case is testimonial, helping to determine who gets custody of the over 400 children removed from the ranch. Among his sterling insights is this delightful self-revelation: “While Perry said he considered the FLDS a separatist group, he acknowledged doing little reading on their doctrine and said he has not spoken to its leaders.”

I don’t know what to say about Perry. (That’s not exactly true. I do have many things to say about and to Perry, but for now I’ll merely offer that association with the Branch Davidian situation strikes me as a rather Arthur Andersen sort of reference.) I don’t know, yet, what one should or could say about these women and children. It is a very real debacle: mysterious phone calls, eerie images, painful patriarchy, and assumptive oppression. The stuff seeking Charles Bronson circa 1974 stepping in, coolly, to rescue the dark-haired dames and their precious, innocent children. But this isn’t film and it isn’t yet clear that any heroism might be culled from this sprawling compound of a mess.

Religious studies offers only more clutter to the cause, endorsing insider compassion and explanation, as well as outsider adherence to the criminal code and civil expectations of a society adjudicated by taxes and judicial determination. These two strategies (explication and adherence, examination and classification) are not always collaborative or constructive for the given political moment. But it is constructive for the intellectual moment. One of the admirable things about this enterprise, religious studies, is that it isn’t just one thing or another, it isn’t just exoneration or condemnation. It is the wobbling space between understanding and conversion, the space best described (today, by these semester-weary hands) as compassionate critique. It’s too early, way too early, to offer any one opinion on this multiple set of matters. So we watch and see, hoping that the fate of these women, these human beings, does not rest in Bruce Perry’s hands.

Because It's Pure.

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

How often do we get a clamor for more, not less? In the world of soap opera sex, requests for sensual expression have always wobbled between romantic desire and daytime discretion. Intimacy during casserole prep is best capped a little pawing, maybe a fade to candlelight close-up. As the decades have droned on (drone indeed, since soap operas function about five years back in fashion, and ten years earlier in social stylistic), more appendages have been exposed, but still: it’s a lot more fantasy talk more than fantasy action.

Over the last month, however, new worlds of dreaming have entered daytime possibility. I speak of the clamor for more love (not less) between Luke Snyder and Noah Mayer, a love match spotlighted in As The World Turns. Since they officially united in September, the couple hasn’t kissed once on-screen, not even after a Christmas declaration of love (which included a climactic cutaway to mistletoe) or a Valentine’s Day ATWT couples round-up (in which everyone saw smooch save Luke and Noah, who hugged it out). Angry viewers began a kissing campaign, demanding more love action from this too-talky tale. The fans have constructed a large letter-writing campaign, posted an online petition, and developed a web site that counts the days, hours, minutes and seconds since last lip lock.

Any talk of homosexuality in this country necessarily turns to thoughts of religion, but in this case, we don’t have to press to any moral abstraction to find talk of God. ATWT makes it easy on us, as this particular opera is owned by one very special soap: Procter & Gamble Productions Inc. CBS executives consult on the series, but the creative direction is set by P&G, makers of (among other cleansing products) Ivory soap. Nearly 129 years ago, Harley Proctor sat in a little Episcopal church in Cincinnati, listening to the Anglican lesson. It was from thee forty-fifth Psalm: “All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad.” The Biblically-inspired Ivory suds propagated not only cleanliness, but also holiness: a color and a principle tied up in a new wave of national sale. Through a simultaneous invocation of scientific discourses (ads described Ivory as “99 and 44/100 per cent pure”) and moral imaginaries, Proctor and Gamble brought soap to the people. “Who wants pure soap?” asked one ad, “Pretty nearly everybody. Why do they want it? Because it’s pure.”

From the first ad for Ivory (published in December 1882 in a Christian weekly, The Independent) till today, P&G has meant more than quick clean. It has offered a baptism-by-product, a wash of sacred cleanliness. “Americans are the apostles of personal cleanliness,” explained the Cleanliness Journal, funded in part by P&G, “Ours is primarily a character building, Americanizing enterprise for all people and we continue strong in our belief that cleanliness is akin to godliness.” Today, the godliness suggested is a contested one, tugging between a culture in love with clean (boy kisses are impure kisses) and a culture infatuated with green (ATWT is one of the few soaps continuing to profit in an era of declining daytime ratings). “It’s always hard to please a diverse audience,” explained P&G’s PR rep, “and we have a diverse audience.” Which side will win? Harley’s prim Protestantism or Luke and Noah’s most profitable, if dangerously impious, lust? Fortunately for P&G, there is a precedent: their early ads sold nothing so happily as white male-on-male flesh. Christianity is indeed a confusing sexual arbiter.

“It Wears Me Out / It Wears Me Out”

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

You know who is really funny? Old people. You know what is even funnier? Old people singing disconcertingly ribald lyrics. I speak, of course, of the new documentary by Stephen Walker called Young@Heart, which tracks an eponymous vocal choir whose average age is 80 and whose choice of material does that thing (the thing Hollywood loves, Kodak loves, we love) where you smile wryly before despair. Sure, we’re all going to die and sure, death is pretty much always grotesque, and yeah, disease and dying are currently managed in an unbelievably cavalier way by insurance interests and, of course, every single other piece of this culture idolizes the flesh and voice and excess of youth but you know what? Old people are funny. They’re feisty and they’ve got weird vocal patterns and their faces squish in ways that make for sculptural screwball. And at Sundance Film Festival, the glitterati needed some comedy because Ledger was dead (youth lost too soon) and they needed to be reminded that it was going to be okay.

Enter Young@Heart. Like other feel-good documentaries (think March of the Penguins, or The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill), the purpose of this text is not to instruct structure, but to inundate with the sucker-like sweetness of sentimentality. Global warming and homelessness and health care are subtexts so sub as to be imperceptible. Front and center is the (wait for it) triumph of the human spirit. Just what is triumphed over is always cast as unchangeable and inevitable. Never is context or contingency identified (How does homelessness persist? Why is the glacier shrinking?). Don’t be such a drag: quit that Michael Moore talk and just watch grandma mumble Radiohead lyrics. “Fake Plastic Trees” never sounded so true.

We need a new word for the sort of role old people occupy in contemporary film, a word that could combine the condemnatory analysis of “Orientalism” with the permissive caricature of “slapstick.” I say “we” because religious life is hardly removed from such age imagery. Young@Heart previewed before my viewing of There Will Be Blood, and the images of infantilized seniors stuck with me throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic rumination on Daniel Day-Lewis’ eye muscles. There Will Be Blood has enjoyed such lavish praise that it can endure a little tough love, especially from those (us) whose responsibility it is to pursue the odd tropes wended into this little masterpiece. I speak not of an appraisal of historical accuracy (which seems to me a wrongheaded response to a film relying more on the history of cinema than an accurate history of evangelicalism) but an appraisal of archetypal dependency.

Not surprisingly (to any religionist, to any cultural observer) Anderson hunkers into two stock profiles to tug warmth from Day-Lewis’ shatteringly cold stare. I speak of the desperate elder and the wounded child (the latter which deserves more attention but suffice to say, “I abandoned my child”).You don’t need to have seen the film to imagine the geriatric minstrelsy that it included when panning clapboard church scenes and evangelical entourage. The history of movie religion is littered with audience shots of aching arthritics hungry for Aimee’s or Elmer’s or Steve Martin’s healing touch. But it’s hard to think of a scene quite like this one, where the Mrs. Danvers lookalike grasps his parishioner and pulls from her rheumatoid malaise. Eli Sunday (the young preacher, played by Paul Dano) caresses his old lady with an astonishing intimacy, and intimacy that presumes an easy convert, a needy geezer in desperate, easy-to-access hour. The scene would make a good launch pad for an in-class conversation about preaching, performance, and the truths of healing. But it would also make Exhibit A in a history of our moment, of the way we enjoy the impassive sexed bodies of the elderly to work our evangelical, and cinematic, magic. What miracles they do provide, singing songs of youth as they die before our eyes.

P.S. For those wondering how to incorporate film into their syllabi, a great starting place would be to pair the essays from Catholics in the Movies (2007) with screenings of their films. I have never read such an accessibly thoughtful text that so neatly fits undergraduate curricular scheduling. The Introduction, by Colleen McDannell, makes a fantastic argument for the preponderance of Catholic imagery in U.S. film production, even those films (like There Will Be Blood) which convey Protestant thematics. Highly recommended.

Why I Teach Religious (Not Environmental Or Naval Or Actuarial) History

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Waylaid for a later moment is my planned report on LDS film shorts, Sundance festival fun wear, and Daniel Day-Lewis’ living genius. Obama’s latest push toward hope and Gordon Hinckley’s sad demise lead one to the bigger questions, questions asked by this latest meme. The very frame of the question tempts long rambles into anecdote and personal reference. After all, exceptionalist narratives aren’t just needed by nations. Academic disciplines, too, rely on an exclusivity of import. Most military historians believe military history means most, most economic historians imagine theirs is the insight that matters. Everyone who writes or thinks about something (thinking about something perhaps more than healthy, more than makes any logical sense at all) must eventually create a tale that elects their humble isolation to global consequence.

Religion makes easy such subject sainthood. I used to say that I became a historian of religions (rather than a history of legislation, battleground, or plumbing principles) because it was the only subject that actively hated its observer (I’ll leave the question of the observers’ taste for the subject to other commentators). Although it would be delusion to presume that presidents savor their biographies or that unions love their labor histories, in an analytic loathe-off religions would win as those objects most inherently irritated by the sheer observation. The act of making history (placing in some sort of chronologic process the layers of human activity) is a heresy, making archival plot of divine dreams. We historicize against their immanent imminence, ritual presence, iconographic earnestness, and faith in the propositional constancy (it is as it shall be as it was) that our subjects assert. We offend them even as we footnote, even as we fly.

Which makes it seem all the more important to do it, and do it well. What other field of inquiry fights harder within stormy currents of counter-narrative and co-narrative, with scriptures, canons, and sacred histories outpacing our every interpretive hiccup. What we do is so obviously invasive as to be perverse, telling people time and again how the magic of the sacred was man-made, and how the miracle of divine encounter might be mere meteorology. These nitty gritty hermeneutics (as Anthony Pinn has termed them) are not so antithetical to religious experience. But they are (we must accede) a wicked posture from which to begin. The act of connecting the categories (“religious” and “history”) is just profane enough to keep us all (even as we do sin the subjects) fighting for our dignity, fighting for our professional practice, fighting for our analytic lives.

You Know You’re The Only One That Can Really Help

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

I stopped getting into scraps after a fourth-grade tussle regarding Potawatomi Indians. So it was surprising when I found myself getting heated recently on the California coast, sparring with a reasonably genteel gent about vocabulary. Not because I don’t make fetish of word (clearly) but because Midwestern pleasantry has, over the slow advance to adulthood, trumped cracker instinct. Save the squabble for righteous spaces, I tell myself. Funnel the fight into better productions.

Yet there I was, raging about the use of the word “cult.” “Why can’t we use it?” my interlocutor gently (genteel, after all) pressed. “I mean: they are cults.” He deployed the usage card, pointing to excellent ongoing application by observers intent upon venerated saints and ancient Gnostics. Moreover (he pressed) some things just are clandestine and weird, like Shakers and Henry Jaglom films. My resistance to the word “cult” is, under such a preponderance of cheery evidence, a well-intentioned but patronizing cling to political correctness, parallel to my relinquishing of “retarded” and “gay guy.” C’mon, already, (my discussant cajoled) the word is useful.

There are days when the words are on your side, and there are days when you sound like Porky Pig. This day, this important day of argument and defense, was a Porky day. I couldn’t lasso together what I wanted, which was, of course, a rehearsal of the history of this category, the way academicians eschewed its deployment because they realized, simultaneously, that it (a) wasn’t generative to classification, (b) relies on an antagonistic relationship between a (presumed to be) minority faction against a (presumed to be) dominant mainstream, (c) expects an exclusive spiritual adherence amidst sociological reality of the buffet believers and (d) was being enjoyed as an epithet—to truly destructive ends—by way too many people. (Note: For a recent rehearsal of this history and the nouveau resuscitation of “cult”, see the 2006 JSSR review essay by Marion Goldman, "Cults, New Religions, and the Spiritual Landscape.")

But my words weren’t with me, so I came off tinny and small (a perpetual condition for liberals and word whiners). If only I’d had patience. If only I’d merely say, “hey friend, let’s save the argument. Bide our time. And wait for the release of Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography.”

Then, I would have experienced the pleasure of non-argument exhibition. Anyone who thinks we can reclaim “cult” (like those who thought, hipster-like in the mid-nineties, that “Negro” would be fun to revive), do take a break and check out the responses to Morton’s religious history of Cruise, as well as the frightening replies to Cruise’s commitment video spinning throughout the web.

Don’t get me wrong: the video is something to see. (And something to use: religionists never had it so good). The man knows his way around onomatopoeias and crazed laughter. But, after all the chuckles at his gauntlet glee (“You’re either in, or you’re out.”) and the frets about Ms. Holmes’ captivity narrative, one does just have to say: “He believes.” Or, as the wise observers at Slate have it, this is only “moderately strange.” We’ve seen this all before. Impassioned faith should hardly be new to anyone awake on this here planet Earth yet off the bloggers soar, screaming and laughing and shaking with pleasure that this obviously “gay guy” is such a total “cult freak.” So now I, post-Pork, have my words to face my cultic foe: “we are the authorities,” and we say "no" to cults. Save that sort of devotion for (the oh-so-deserving) Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

Superhero Scholars and Manhattan Mormons

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Some days it feels like all I do is monitor Mormons. I thought for sure I’d stay on the fray with this one, leaving to smarter, more expert voices the daily LDS crime watch. But then Frank Rich had to make the compare and contrast maneuver, blessing Mademoiselle Oprah while mocking Mormon Mitt, and it was over: them was fighting words. It was perhaps unsurprising (for us, historians of U.S. religion) that Rich found a way to condemn Mormons as racist and applaud Oprah Winfrey as beneficent in the same column; the religiously observant have always been the source for uninformed censure. Likewise, African American entertainers have long enjoyed condescending white applause. Now, Romney and Winfrey had something in common: the prejudicial presumptions of their cultured despisers.

With this silly mid-December rant, Rich ripped me into action. Hours lost checking blogs for easy bigotry and tracking presidential candidates’ adjectival inferences about marriage and family. Someone (somewhere) is wounding a religious subject, and now we (students of religion, custodians of sectarian self-esteem) are superheroes to the cause, using pluralist slogans and large explanatory reference works (rather than invisibility or shifts in the space-time continuum) to protect Gotham from prejudicial talk.

We’ve made some friends along the way. Noah Feldman showed up with a lovely, if somewhat derivative, defense of religious freedom. The New Yorker, too, has patronized (patronizingly) the LDS back story, paralleling it in other issues with the Scientology Celebrity Center and the ironic development of New England megachurches. Sunday magazines and weekly cultural reporters alike have tuned in to watch, raptly, devotions done for the divine in this, our bright new un-secular America. Key tonal and topical shifts in such articles include the pursuit of the ironic contrast (they claim to love family but look at those divorcing Osmonds!), ironic invocation of capital (does God really want them to own hotel chains?), and the suspicious (paranoid, really) stare at familial portraits (how can anyone look that good all the time?). Sure, counterfeits and confidence men define the American experience, but c’mon: take a break. Just let the brothers (and sisters) believe.

But how can we, when they’re always up to hilarious self-contradiction? Gawker (evil beast) turned me to yet another anthropological tour of Mormonia. This time, the Mormons take Manhattan. Or, as the wily minds at the New York Observer put it: “Mormons of Manhattan!” (As a sidebar, I’ll just say: I’ve missed the headlining exclamation point. Glad to know that punctuation, once saved for murderous scandal and the sinking Lusitania, has returned in service of urban legends like, you know, Christians in Gotham.)

The article, posing as ethnographic report, is so deliciously self-satisfied that it should become required reading for classes on nativism (classes on anything, really: critical thinking never had such easy mush). This is how hate sneaks in: under the guise of charmed observance. See the young Mormon lass (Nobu waitress and stand-up comic) talk marriage to the unmarried, wear vintage over secret undergarments, trade Converse kicks for suede pumps! See the young Mormon lass talk loneliness and her Harvard education over fries and a (let us hope decaffeinated) diet Coke! See young Mormons seek other young Mormon singles! See young Mormons buy a pre-war classic six! See them never drink! Organize effectively! And taste the pleasures of our pleasure-soaked city without once (never once) breaking monetary stride. “If there’s one theme you hear over and over again from young Mormons, it’s that the Word of Wisdom ultimately gives them a leg up in the ultra-competitive New York business world—they’re never hung over, after all, and they never have to worry about STDs or being pregnant or blacking out and knocking their teeth out.” (As another sidebar, may I just beg young non-Mormon Manhattan to be wary of dental damage? Fun isn’t really fun that necessitates Novacaine.)

Finally (as climax) the article ends with a teaser quote, taking a turn every young bigot needs to make the cause go from potential to real. I speak, of course, of sexing the subject. “Then again, dating non-Mormons isn’t easy either, Ms. Baker said. ‘I’m a decently attractive girl, and guys immediately go to—well, they see it click in their head: Oh, my God, I’m talking to a virgin'.” All across the isle that morning, young boys (some young lasses) found a new fantasy, one to replace (temporarily, till someone else so tantalizes with their sultry oppression) faded pin-ups of Maria Monk and Sally Hemings. “Mormons Take Manhattan!” and our hearts, too. I just need to find my cape.

The Search for Solid Rock

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Millennial thinking needs new tropes. At the very least, it needs new energy, since plots for endgame take an increasingly absurdist slant (or they star Will Smith, whose apocalypse seems inevitable the longer he stands so near to Tom Cruise). What with war, Hillary Clinton’s criticized tableau, and holiday merriment straight around the weekly corner, we have ample material to fuel fantasies of new tomorrow (prefaced by bleak todays, but no matter: the righteous will survive).

To wit: the quest to free Joe Francis. What might be said about a world (any world, really, but let’s stick to ours, geographic and political) that worries so about a man (any man, really, but let’s stick to this one, this prescient pornographer) accused of (for real) more than 70 counts, including racketeering, drug trafficking, prostitution and promoting the sexual performance of children. Who is Joe Francis, you might ask (if, say, you lean more towards piano parties and Lutheran bake sales than late night infomercials or the pleasures of South Padre Island)? Well, to answer this question, you should take a trip to his website, a rattan- and bamboo-inflected wander through the genius of Joe Francis, the 37-year-old founder of the Girls Gone Wild franchise.

At that website, and in a Sunday New York Times article, we learn about Joe’s current incarceration and lavish lifestyle. We learn, too, about the location of the “hottest girls” (“My experience has been that anytime you go south of the Mason Dixon line, the girls seem to get more attractive.”) and the sexual options of a Peeping entrepreneur (in short, quite a wide array). Most importantly, though, we learn that constitutional rights are being infringed: “Girls Gone Wild founder and CEO Joe Francis has been sitting in jail for eight months, not because he’s been convicted of a crime, but because he’s been denied his 8th Amendment Constitutional right to bail. It seems certain officials in a small Florida town are intent on making some sort of example of him.”

Some sort of example, indeed. Exemplifying what? The details of the case are intricate and appealing, including as they do Larry Flynt self-analogies, lying teenage hotties, and tax evasion as the kicker. As is almost always the case in such sparkle-studded imprisonments, both sides have their fair share of idiocies and aggrandizements. Most critical, though, is Joe Francis himself, standing at the center, martyred to a democracy and an economy that gave him the opportunity to give to others so much (“Cassandra and Brittany know how to have a good time -- and all they need is each other!”) and all he wants to do is keep giving (“as you explore this site, I think you’ll come to find that my desires, dreams and disappointments aren’t terribly different from your own”). The problem is, of course, that government officials just can’t stand him (or for what he stands) and so they are violating his rights (and yours).

Constitutionality litters the airwaves this week. “What Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee,” explains Mr. Hitchens in another subtle rampage against religiosity. “Isn't it amazing how self-pitying and self-aggrandizing the religious freaks in this country are?” As posts on this blog have explored, and opinion pages nationwide have professed, this is a moment for religious inquiry to serve the spastic clatter of politics. Are we not, to some extent, called upon to respond, to leaven Hitchens’ monomaniacal bigotry and reflect upon Mr. Francis’ sacrificial sense of self? Some may say we should stay far from such talk; after all, to be an intellectual is to practice arts and methods too rigorous for punditry. Our footnotes will never make it, and so we will serve only the précis, not the proof. Yet. As we ponder Mitt’s Mormon mug and Hillary’s deepening lines, as we smirk at Jamie Lynn Spear’s baby bump and roll in our tinseled excess, a moment for messianism (or critical reflections on the need for messianism) wouldn’t be so outlandish. Because if Joe Francis is the only letter we’re getting from prison nowadays, then I think we have a real problem on our hands. Birmingham never seemed so very far away.

The Not-So-Very-Merry Melding

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

During the dog days of graduate school, a group of Tarheels sat around scheming. Whatever would we do if this plot line came to incompletion? Where would all this data (religious and analytic, holiday and humdrum) be put to admirable devotion?

The plan we landed upon was capitalist: Thresholds. This would be our business. Clients would come to us lost and bifurcated by their intermarriages and agnostic daily lives, seeking combination ritual packages. We would supply coming-of-age parties for boys lacking bar mitzfahs, multi-day marital processes for the Ganesh-worshipping non-Hindu, and time-sharing funeral rites for the man who was baptized Catholic, toyed with Zen, and loved well a Quaker. We would transform our encyclopedic morsels into American assimilative specificity: a made-to-order melting pot.

Unfortunately for consumers everywhere, each member of this fantasizing posse found happy employment and productive situation in the (somewhat) less mercantile academy. Yet, an article in last Thursday’s New York Times reminded me of what an awfully craven and perfectly profitable idea it would have been.

The article, “A Holiday Medley, Off Key,” would make for great end-of-semester talk in American religion classes (if your semesters haven’t ended, or you’re looking for final hour extra credit options), especially if paired with critical studies on the formation of these holidays (Schmidt 1995 or Forbes 2007). Several couples are profiled in their wrestling efforts to offer inclusive December holidays for their gift-seeking spawn. Interfaith experience has never been so combative. Words like “guerrilla”, “revenge”, and “assault” are used to describe wheedling manipulations of Santa Claus, menorahs, and present practices. Even silky-voiced Diana Krall makes a cameo as a crooning Christmas sales(wo)man.

Perhaps most delicious about this just-in-time-for-the-holidays report was the following comment, from Micah Sachs, the managing editor of interfaithfamily.com, a Web site that encourages interfaith couples to observe Jewish traditions: “The world is full of all these symbols: it’s full of Santa, it’s full of trees.”

Such a world, indeed (full of Santa, full of trees)! A world where scholars labor (mightily, for little profit, and much cost) to convey a world of diversity and abundance all while kinda-holy holidays are pressed into “festive” competition. The next time someone tries to sell me on the meaning of seasonal merriment (even you, Charlie Brown!), I am going to tell them the magical tale of the Minata Family’s Nintendo Wii. And to all a good night!

P.S. I'll pause from my humbug to offer one real reason to be merry: Edward Blum's W.E.B. DuBois: American Prophet received honorable mention from from the Gustavus Myers Book Awards. These awards are given to "authors and books that speak with great clarity, insight and creativity about rights and compassionate responsibilities within community." Congratulations, Brother Blum!

The Devil in 1965

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

1965 has always been a critical year for students of U.S. religion, including as it does the beating of James J. Reeb (March 11), the first SDS march against Vietnam (April 17) and the passage of the Immigration Act (October 3). 1965 is a chronologic crucible for students of American plurality.

Such a historical wreath insufficiently conveys the traumas of that year, the traumas supplied by supremacist fire hoses and Bob Dylan’s electric guitar, traumas caused by Hurricane Betsy and the sight of Hickock and Smith’s hangings In Cold Blood. Whatever histories write of the affirmative aftereffects of LBJ’s immigration gateway, they must also recall how absurd and awful it was if only to imagine, briefly, how all good things come at cost.

I’ve been thinking about 1965 a lot since I read that it was then that Evel Knievel began his daredevil career. “Evel Knievel’s Motorcycle Daredevils” offered a touring show that included riding through fire walls, jumping over mammals and reptiles, and nascent attempts by the show’s eponymous star to cross unbelievable space from atop a bike branded the “American Eagle.”

On December 10 a predicted 20,000 will attend Knievel’s funeral in Butte, Montana, a town host to one of America’s largest Superfund sites. Evel will be honored for many things: his jingoistic bicentennial costumes, his grandfathering of extreme sports, his Guinness record for most bones broken in a single stunt.

Religionists may find a way to work Evel’s 1965 emergence into their narratives. Few men embody better the combination of acrobatic charisma and bumpy biopic so familiar to students of evangelical leadership. He had a resume that was the story of a nation, including (prior to his motorbike hijinks) bank robbery and insurance sales, diamond drilling and alcoholism. Despite much sinful soil, it wasn’t until this year, at the age of 68, that he asked to be baptized at (no less than) Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral. “I rose up in bed and, I was by myself, and I said, ‘Devil, Devil, you bastard you, get away from me. I cast you out of my life.’ I just got on my knees and prayed that God would put his arms around me and never, ever, ever let me go.”

That a daredevil could renounce the Devil (while still engraving his tombstone: “MOTORCYCLIST AND DAREDEVIL”) is no surprise to any of us, anymore. It’s all just the world we live in, a world without Selma demonstrations yet overloaded with electric guitars, traumatizing hurricanes, and counter-insurgency. “This country is hard on people,” explains No Country For Old Men, “Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem to hold it to account.” Only in such a country could such a year, such a devil, be made:

The Civil Religion of Celebrity

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Today I did not weep because of war, but because of woman. The November 19, 2007, issue of US Weekly included no fewer than eight specific mentions of a specific sort of woman: Britney Spears. First, there was a financial reminder: Britney’s perfumes “Curious” and “Fantasy” have earned more than $84 million (a scented sale superior to Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sarah Jessica Parker). (p. 14) Second, there was the celebrity comparison: “The paparazzi kind of figured out that we’re quite boring and Britney’s far more interesting, so they go to her house,” remarked Victoria Beckham on owing her privacy in L.A. to Spears. (p. 18) Third, there were the “Brit Look-alike Winners!” (p. 20), the notification of her tanning salon visit on November 3 (p. 23), and the cover page declaration that her parenting coach had declared her “SICK!” as “mental illness signs worsen” and she “leaves boys in car while shopping” and “denies them trick-or-treating” and (inexplicably, it seems) “swaps clothes with bartender.” Deep inside, reporter Kevin O’Leary offered a 6-page answer to the headlining question: “Does She Even Care?” Pictures of “zombie-like” Britney “chugging” a Red Bull, shopping for two $18,000 chandeliers, and offering “interactions with her boys…that were not child-centered.” (p. 55) Her “deteriorating personal appearance” and “emotional disconnect,” her “delayed adolescence” and “prolonged apathy” were all are detailed with breathless glee. We learn: “She’s Wearing Tops As Dresses!”; “Runs Over a Cop’s Foot!”; and “Parties Till 3 A.M.” Pictures with neon outline blared the collapse of a national icon, the demise of a once-upon-a-time princess of bubble gum pop.

Remembering the before Britney will cause morning-after headaches, ones where you shake and shake but still can’t quite see how you got from there to here. Then, it seemed so shiny and pink: her dance moves, her teen bop boyfriend, her short skirts and chewy chorus lyrics. All of it seemed easy and inconsequential, purchased merely for the price of prime time years with Mickey Mouse and an exported, eviscerated southern lass from rural Americana: “Britney Spears was raised as a Southern Baptist in her home state of Mississippi, part of the Bible Belt, and supposedly entered the music scene as a relatively devout Christian,” explains another reporter, “supposedly” his way into snark.

Now, we gorge on her contrasting decline, watching every wig and whacked out maneuver (accessorized by two toddler children) with pleasure oddly explained. What could be so very good about this public snuff film, the viewing of a body mad maggot by self-mutilation and tasteless expenditure? Something is good. Something is very, very good, or else her face (and her boys’ faces, and her mother’s face, and her sister’s face, and her multiple ex-husbands' faces, and her current paramours' faces, and her personal assistant’s faces) would not become, for us, easy insignias, more quickly read than tea leaves or reversals in Iraq.

The October 30, 2007, issue of Christian Today gave some version of hope: “A megachurch in Kentucky is collecting letters of love and support to send to pop singer Britney Spears amid drugs and alcohol problems and a rocky battle with her ex-husband over custody of their two children… The pastor of the 8,000-member congregation said that Spears had made ‘devastating life choices’ but encouraged members of the church to offer the same compassion and prayers as they would to those with non-celebrity status.” Prayer pops up from a pastor's grocery cart, as check-out lines squeal about her absent underwear, driving delinquencies, and pediatric abandonment.

Someday, though, no matter the megachurch maneuver, we’re going to feel badly. Alongside our mute tolerance of an impossible set of guerrilla wars, we’re also going to wonder: how could we let her get this far gone? Someday we will place the most symbolic Britney Spears smack in the middle of our 21^st century decline; she will become a cruelly ironical counterpane to the claims of sacral nationhood and moral family re-making. As we squabble over religion in public discourse (the public display of religious ideation), it is well worth wondering where stands the religious imagination of this most public sacrifice.

Buffet Believers, Therapeutic Pluralism, and Theological Hybrids

By Kathryn Lofton

Americans have always been obsessively pastiche, tossing together a Mason's cap with Anglican marital liturgy, rosaries with hummed gospel tunes in single buffet-believer selves. But an CNN.com article posted October 31 about Scientology in lower-income African American churches reminds us that no accounts, even the most spectacular (Bellah 1985; Butler 1992; Schmidt 2005), can do justice to the absurd reconciliations that must take place:

I could pull many quotations from this piece, but I think I'll linger, momentarily on Kennedy's response when asked whether Scientology's values contradict the religion of Jesus Christ: "Sometimes yes. Sometimes no." The ease of religious assemblage is so graceful as to be possibly disturbing. Kennedy explains that his parishioners "relate" to Hubbard's /The Way to Happiness: A Common Sense Guide to Better Living/ (1981), a descriptive guide to the Church of Scientology's 21 keystone precepts. Alongside the expected "do not murder" and "honor and help your parents" there are the more Scientology-ish "safeguard and improve your environment," "fulfill your obligations," "be industrious," and (in a Gene Roddenberry tribute) "flourish and prosper." The limited scholarship on Scientology has offered one consistent sociological conclusion: it is the way to manna.

Reconciling therapeutic pluralism is so automatic as to be axiomatic among contemporary believers. Far be it from this blogger to command anything less than such play and combination (who wouldn't want, in age of the perfectly moral Prius, to be a "theological hybrid"?). Yet at the level of the academic, it does seem to vex our theoretical mechanisms. How do we explain religious practices or religious commitment in a nation so thrilled by the possibility of the combination platter? If religion is, in part, premised on exclusivity (I am /this/ because I am not /that/), can we properly call Kennedy's parishioners AME or Pentecostal anymore? What will be our new language (in phone surveys by Pew, in monographs by graduate students, in essays published by the /New York Times Magazine/) to profile religious free agency? This is hardly a new question, but it is interesting in an age of spectacular coverage of fundamentalists and new atheists we miss, constantly, the rarity of such pure subjects. I sit in mourning, today, for denominational clarity. It really made our work much easier (sometimes yes, sometimes no).