Religion 40 (2010) 296–299

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Religion

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“Experiences deemed religious”: Radical critique or temporary fix? Strategicambiguity in Ann Taves’ Religious Experience Reconsidered

Timothy FitzgeraldUniversity of Stirling (Scotland), United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Accepted 9 August 2010Available online 28 September 2010

E-mail address: t.f.fitzgerald@stir.ac.uk.

0048-721X/$ – see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd.doi:10.1016/j.religion.2010.09.005

a b s t r a c t

Ann Taves has written an interesting, lucid and informative book. In particular, the author’s suggestedreformulation of religious studies as the study of “things deemed special” indicates a critical alternativeto the dominant discourse. But such a reformulation implies that the ‘secular’ side of the mutuallyparasitic religion-secular binary also requires deconstruction. This in turn must surely lead to a critique ofthe representation of social psychology and related disciplines as ’natural science’, a representationwhich itself is already dependent on the wider, globalizing, ideological religion/secular binary, and itssupernatural/natural correlate. The author’s ambiguous alternation between things deemed special andthings deemed religious invites the discursive contours of ‘religion’ to re-enter through the back door,leaving the status quo substantially intact.

� 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Ann Taves has written a powerfully argued and informative book which made me even more aware of my own ignorance in the fields ofneuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence and psychology generally. But it is also a book which seems to have anambiguity of purpose. The author’s opening claim of solidarity with those of us in the critical religion tendency is, I suggest, a holdingoperation which slows down the dissolution of faith in religious studies and its object of knowledge through ingenious reformulation, butfails to plug the wounded artery. It acts as a powerful temporary fix, in a line of such emergency medical operations as family resemblancetheories, or claims that we can make ‘religion’meanwhatever we like for research purposes. I would say, using the author’s words for those“pockets” of bridging endeavor which she applies to psychological and medical anthropology, that it is an example of “some exciting newwork being done on religion” (Taves, 2009, p. 6). But it is repair work.

Despite the author’s apparent acceptance of critical efforts at deconstruction – “the critics are basically right about this” (p. 3), she issimultaneously re-inscribing the religious studies discourse, though with modifications. In Russ McCutcheon’s terms, Taves wants to becritic and caretaker simultaneously. She wants to be one of the ‘critics’ and to get the deconstructionists on board her train. But she alsowants to be a ‘caretaker’ of ‘religion’ discourse, to continue constructing andmaintaining the ideological parameters. This would fit with thedirection her train is moving in, for in 2010 she is the president of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). This is surely a job for caretakers.

Thus, for example, in the first few pages she agrees with those of us who hold (amongst other things) that ‘religion’ is a Christocentric,ideological category which has been projected (selectively) onto a huge range of different groups and their practices under a guise of objectivedescription and analysis. Religiondiscourses– or rather the specific interest groupswhooperate them– construct the object in Christocentric orEurocentric mode and then take the representation to be neutral and disinterested, factual, a description of what is there in the world. As onemethodological step indealingwith this problem, AnnTavesmakes theuseful suggestion that, instead of talking about ‘religions’, and inorder toside-step the problematic terminology of the ‘sacred’, we should talk about ‘special things’ or “things considered special”. To claim that peopleeverywhere accord specialness to things is intended to avoid someof thehidden, Christocentric, ideological baggage of ‘religion’ and ‘the sacred’.

Justice – a thing deemed special

The reason I myself would agree in general with this proposal is that ‘special things’ as a conceptual tool does not necessarily and intheory get sucked into the vortex of the ‘religion’ discursive field. It potentially subverts it, and opens the field up for reconfiguration. Forexample, justice is a special thing, courts the sacred (special) spaces, and judicial procedures the special paths to realizing justice in our lives,

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both individually and collectively. But the court systems in the US or Western Europe cannot easily be called ‘religion’ or things deemedreligious because they are constitutionally designated as ‘secular’. This strategy is onewhich tends to expose the religion-secular distinction(and the Constitutions that underpin it) as an ideological construct of modernity. Courts and their procedures are by constitutional defi-nition secular and non-religious; this disguises an equally plausible view that the system of justice is not essentially different from what“we” often deem to be religious.

Why does Taves stay so safely, in virtually all her examples, within the already conventionally-established contours of religious studies? Ifher move to “special things” is serious, then why not explore more fully special things deemed non-religious as well? As suggested, oneexamplemight be our faith in Justice through the ritual paraphernalia of the courts, and the life transforming experience of “Justice realized”in the solemn pronouncement of the Judge’s verdict. I suggest this example may have some points of analogy or family resemblances withRobert Sharf’s “Ascending the Hall Ceremony” which, along with the more usual suspects of ‘experiences deemed religious’ such as thePresence of Christ in the Mass, Taves includes under “Experience in Composite Formations” (pp. 51–53).

It seems tome that the logic of Taves’s proposal could be construed in this way. Justice and the pursuit of Justice through the performanceof various prescribed procedures (ritual practices), and conducted by special functionaries imbued with solemn attributes surrounded byprohibitions and taboos, are not essentially different fromwhat are typically called ‘religions’. Court rooms are highly ritualized spaces, andcourt procedures strictly controlled. Material evidence is wrapped in special plastic bags and handled with gloves to protect it from‘tampering’; police and witness evidence is set apart and subject to special procedures; juries are monitored for protection from thepollution of contact with sources of defilement such as the Media or the Mafia. Verdicts, pronounced by Judges wearing special costumesideally lead to the experience of ‘Justice done’ which transform the lives of those who have faith in the system.

To exclude from religious studies, or panels at the AAR, the experience of ‘Justice Done’, and the systems leading to the realization of thatexperience as special paths, would no longer appear justifiable. This would add to the punch of the interdisciplinarity that Taves rightlypursues. It would also raise interesting new perspectives on other special things typical of our modern forms of life, such as the democraticsystemof representative government, nationalism, or theworship of themodern god of Capital. These all have strong family resemblances towhat we normally call religions and the possibility of interdisciplinarity grows richer. For example, theologians, lawyers and economists rubshoulders at the American Academy for the Study of Special Things (AASST) in the realization that they havemany things in common: faith in,and devotion to, Intangibles – God, Justice and Capital – through religious attention to the detailed procedures and pathways of theirprofessions and confessions. To successfully deconstruct practices normally ‘deemed to be religious’ (including ‘experiences deemed to bereligious’) might in this kind of way lead to the interrogation of practices and experiences usually deemed to be secular as well.

Ambiguity between things deemed religious and things deemed special

Yet throughout the bookTaves re-inscribes thefield. She continually employs the language of religion and religious interchangeablywith theformulations of “things deemed special”. The examples she gives of religious experiences almost always fall within the well-worn grooves ofstandard representationsofwhat “we”deem religious. There are somepossible exceptions to this rule. One suchexceptionmightbe the researchdone on “the meaning of things in people’s homes” by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (cited by Taves on p. 49) who “asked people insuburban Chicago to identify what objects were special to them and then classified objects and meanings based on their responses” (p. 49).I confess I have not read this research andwill now strive to do so. I do notwish to putwords into themouths of such scholars. But assuming forarguments sake that a baseball trophy, or a framed ‘Certificate of Graduation’, or a photograph of Mum meeting The First Lady, might well be‘things deemed special’ in such a home, thenwe are presented with an opportunity to explore things deemed special which are not normallyclassifiedas ‘religious’. But this example isnot followed through, butonlymentioned inpassing.What she refers to as “the biological foundationsof specialness as such” (p. 34),while ambiguouslyopen to a radicalwideningof ‘what counts’, unfortunately tends to reinscribewhatwe thoughtshemight be radically questioning. It quietly tucks in the assumption that biology is essentially and unquestionably different from religion. Herdiscussion forges an alliancewith those scientists in biological and psychological disciplineswho, from their ownassumed standpoint of naturaland secular knowledge, themselves have a strong investment in discourses on religion and the supernatural.

Taves says “I have tried to be clear rather than relentlessly consistent in my use of terms, so the reader will find references to both‘experiences deemed religious’ and ‘things considered special’ as seems appropriate in any given context” (p. 10). For me as a reader thisbetrays the project from an early stage. It introduces a slippery ambiguity, a maneuver for having one’s cake and eating it too; forambiguously appearing to open up the reified domain from its essentialized boundaries while simultaneously allowing the domain to slipback in under cover. On the critical side of Taves project, it is intended to shift the weight from the problematic positing of a sui generisreligious domain, which has acted as the conceptual anchor of an essentialized academic field, to a less over-determined range of ‘whatcounts’ as valid research. The potentially radical implications of this shift are strengthened by the inclusion in her various tables (e.g. p. 45) ofsuch special things as Ideals. This potentially helps solve the conceptual dilemma for critics like myself, as against the dedicated religionists,that Justice, Loyalty, Equality, Nation, or Individual Self-realization through body-building are objects of faith, devotion and sacrifice whichsubvert the religion/non-religion binary.

But I suggest this shift fails to realize the objective, because the examples of ‘what counts’ throughout the book are typically (thoughwithambiguous exceptions) taken from studies which themselves do not share the critical agenda, but content themselves with conventionaldemarcations such as supernatural agents, spiritual beings, deities, spiritual energies, the Catholic Mass, Siddhartha Gautama’s enlight-enment experience under the Bodhi Tree, or Jesus’ Resurrection. Sometimes there are instances of what appears to be an unproblematicacceptance of a distinction between “secularized forms of meditation” and “religiously defined mental states related to a religiously definedpath (marga)” in “Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian traditions” (pp. 81–82). Taves may be claiming to share the critique of sui generis religion;but she leaves the ideological contours and contents of the field substantially where it has been.

Durkheim

Taves rightly says that “.we can avoid Durkheim’s problematic claim that religious thought divides the world ‘into two domains, onecontaining all that is sacred and the other all that is profane’.and refer simply to things that are more or less special, things understood to be

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singular, and things that people set apart and protect with prohibitions” (p. 27). I agree with this but her discussion could be pushed a littlefurther. For me the most interesting part of Durkheim’s great work is his insight into the formation and maintenance of categories and classi-ficationsystems.As I thinkTaves issuggesting, there isanyhowapossiblecontradictoryusage inDurkheim(asPaden,1994, citedbyTavesonp.16,has pointed out). On the one hand there is this over-essentialized division between the sacred and the profane. But the more interesting Dur-kheimian insight, as Taves suggests, is that the sacred (andby implication theprofanealso) is “purely relational andhasnoessential contentof itsown” (p.16). This point comes out stronglywhenDurkheimargues that the representation of the species ismore sacred than the species itself, orthanany individual thingclassifiedby the representation. In thefinal analysis it is the systemof representations– theway thegroupclassifies theworld –which is crucial. Representations are surrounded by taboos to a greater extent than any other things in the system.

What I think Durkheim does not do is to show how power operates to protect a contingent system of representations, through a processof mystification, and to transform one possible way of representing theworld as inescapably in the order of things. Taboos and prohibitionsfor instance operate to protect our own system of representations – such as our classification of the world into a modern religion-secularbinary – from radical questioning. The category ‘religion’ is protected in various ways; andwhen one protectivemechanism (such as the suigeneris fallacy) is exposed, another secondary elaboration is developed to plug the gap (such as family resemblances, or, I would argue,Taves’s own attempt to save the domain by reformulating ‘religious experience’ as ‘experiences deemed religious’). If Taves had resisted theambiguity indicated earlier, and stayed with ‘things deemed special’, then in my view she would have written a different book.

Secular positionality: ‘religion’ is not a stand-alone category

The sui generis construction of religionwhich Taves critiques has been oneway to disguise the power of the secular as an interdependentand parasitic part of the ideological field. Family resemblance arguments, which were developed in the nick of time to save ‘religion’ whenthe sui generis trope began to suffer fatal shell-holes beneath the water line, in effect re-instate and seek to protect the religion discourse ina more flexible way. Again, they act to disguise the ideological power of the secular, including the positionality of those pursuing the agenda.I suggest Taves is doing something similar.

Taves seems uninterested in the secular positionality of the scientists and their research agendas. Nor, for that matter, does she look ather own positionality. I suggest that any critique of ‘religion’ as a modern category must simultaneously be a critique of the non-religioussecular as the other half of one ideological discourse. ‘Religion’ is not a stand-alone category, but is mutually parasitic onwhat it is imaginedto be separated from.

One of the consequences of the modern invention of religion and religions, as typically deemed to be about belief in God, gods,supernatural agencies or energies, mystical experiences, churches or church-like institutions, priests and holy scriptures, has been thesimultaneous invention of the non-religious secular. Normally, in discourses that construct a discursive field of religion, the secular asa constructed domain either disappears into the background as the unacknowledged substratum from which we make our own authori-tative representations; or, when brought into explicit foregrounding, is represented in terms of ‘natural reason’.

Taves’s book has been very helpful in summarizing the work of social psychologists and those in related fields. Many of the academicsthat Taves cites, quotes, and utilizes would presumably see themselves as secular scholars working in the natural and social sciences witha special interest in religion and religious experiences (see for example her chapter on Explanation, and her well-informed summary of workdone in the social psychology of religion since the 1970s up to the present). But to critique religion as a category must surely be to raise thecritical issue of the non-religious secular ground of the scientist as well? To understand why some experiences and their contexts aredeemed religious but others are deemed non-religious seems to me to be an unavoidable part of the problem. As Durkheim seemed tosuggest, it is the classification system that needs to be protected from violation.

The implication of Taves’ text seems to be that the scientists who investigate ‘religious’ phenomena such as special experiences are notthemselves engaged in following a special path to a special goal of knowledge, a path imbued with ideals and values, surrounded byprohibitions and taboos, predicated on some very basic metaphysical constructions, and developed within a historically longer termideological project of progressive liberation from existing conditions of ignorance and superstition. Whatever individual scientists maybelieve motivates them as individuals at conscious or unconscious levels, their work is located in a historically constructed ideologicaldomain of enlightenment rationality and universal progress. In that sense I want to ask the question, in what way is the practice of the so-called natural science that claims to describe, analyze and explain ‘religion’ or religious experiences, essentially different from a religion anda collection of religious practices itself?Why dowe or they not deem the practices and experiences of scientists as religious too? Do they notpursue their practices with a religious attention to the detailed procedures that lead to Truth?

I cannot see why practicing social psychology or natural science should be considered to be any less noble and valid than other practices,such as devoting one’s life to nursing, or yoga and meditation, or prayer, or dance, or achieving self-integrity through body-building orgymnastics, or managing a successful bank or hedge-fund which brings benefits to many investors. True, I personally believe that some ofthese practices aremore valid than others in ethical terms, and I might in principle and in another context be called on to explainmy reasonsfor this. But my concern in relation to the issues raised in Taves’ book is why some of these are classified as acts of religious devotion but notothers. Again, I personally believe that stoning people to death because they are homosexual, or keeping people in solitary confinementwithout judicial charge and without providing access to lawyers, are immoral acts. But, given the topic of Ann Taves’ book, the issue for mehere is why we feel it necessary to classify some of these as acts of religious violence but not others.

Why is devotion to the noble and arguably sacred (certainly special) aims, practices, places and values of science not considered a religion,or a religious path? If scientists aremotivated by a search for truth, which I think the best are, why is this not normally classified as a religiousgoal and ideal? And this question seems to me to be especially pressing because scientific studies of religion and religious experienceactually embed the classificatory distinction in the formulation of the research topic. Furthermore, this embedding is achieved – in this bookand more generally too – by not drawing attention to it, by simply building in a set of largely undisclosed assumptions that the socialpsychologists as natural scientists are not part of what is being studied, that they are exempted, that they do not belong to that category of‘religion’ and ‘religious experience’ intowhich such a heterogeneous bunch of others is bundled.Why is there so little attention drawn to therepresentation, made more powerful by being tacitly assumed rather than argued out in Ann’s book and more widely, that the experiencesthat scientists presumably have in the course of their work are essentially different in kind from ‘religious’ experiences? How would one

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classify Newton’s insight into gravity, or Darwin’s insight into natural selection, or Einstein’s insight into relativity? But a similar questioncould be asked about Gotama Shakyamuni’s insight that all dhammas are essentially empty. Why has this insight, and the consequenttheorization of a path of carefully monitored empirical observation, been classified differently from the insights of Newton et al., that is as‘religious’ rather than ‘scientific’?

William Barnard’s personal testimony

I am hesitant to barge into a conversation which Taves shows in her useful summaries has been going on for many years betweensophisticated theorists such as Wayne Proudfoot, Phillip Shaver, William Barnard himself and many others, quite successfully without mypitch. However, it seems to me that the circularity of the religion-secular binary and its corollary the supernatural–natural, is so deeplyembedded in the way the discussion is framed that it requires attention.

Partly for personal, biographical reasons, and partly for more theoretical ones, I feel a strong empathy with Barnard’s dilemma (see histestimony on p. 172; see also the discussion on pp. 117–118). I do not doubt that something of profound significance happened whichretrospectively has been classified as ‘religious’. His dilemma, as he seems fully aware, is how to put the event into language and theavailable categories such as ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘experience’. From reading his description of what happened, it seems evident that languageimposes distortions and contradictions on the substance of what he wants to indicate. For example, to be compelled to refer to it as an‘experience’ at all is problematic, for reasons which I am sure he well understands and which has presumably been one of the central issuesin the debate. In ordinary English an experience implies a subject and an object of experience, yet his testimony strains against theboundaries. Even in ordinary consciousness the distinction itself is not self-evident, and seems to be a linguistic fiction, something whichwriters in Sanskrit and Pali have apparently understood for many hundreds of years.

Taves recounts that “In extending the argument of Proudfoot and Shaver (1975), Spilka, Shaver, and Kirkpatrick (1985) looked at meaningmaking in relation to the entire range of life events in order to explain when and why events are attributed to religious as opposed to non-religious causes” (p. 94). But this distinction itself already seems to have been imposed “top down” rather than “bottom up” because it isdifficult to see how one can derive a concept of ‘religion’ or a concept of ‘nature’ from research on brain processes. I am not questioning thepower of the models which psychologists and other natural scientists use. (But nor would I question the power of the models used inSanskrit or Pali for investigating and representing special states.) What I am suggesting is that the models of the natural scientists arethemselves already configured within the wider discourses that construct the distinction in the first place. It would be one thing toinvestigate reports of special ‘experiences’, something which has been done historically and, within the terms of its own criteria, author-itatively by the Catholic church-state, for example. But I cannot see how, to classify them as ‘religious’ as distinct from ‘non-religious’, can bepart of the data derived from tracking brain functions. It is the utilization of a modern Anglophone scheme of classification which itselffunctions in a wider ideological context of power. It seems to me that the distinction between religious and secular or natural causes cannotitself be derived from any amount of scientific observation or experiment. There seems to be an in-built circularity where the naturalsciences investigate in terms of categories which are already implicated in their own self-designation.

Ideological binaries which pre-configure the researcher and the research object

What I have said should be taken by the reader as a series of problems, briefly sketched, which deserve further discussion especially in thecontext of a book such as Taves’. To claim to critically deconstruct ‘religion’ and the category ‘religious experience’ cannot be successfullypursued as though religion is a stand-alone category. The ‘secular’ and the ‘natural’ need critical deconstruction simultaneously, because anargument can surely be made that – historically, discursively, institutionally, – these are mutually parasitic binaries which cannot be viewedfrom one side of the dichotomy alone. A series of binaries which are not themselves the product of empirical investigation are tacitlyembedded in the projects of natural scientists who study religious experiences: spiritual as againstmaterial; supernatural as against natural;metaphysical as against empirical; theological as against scientific; faith as against knowledge. These all stand in for religion as against secularrationality in a circular series of deferred meanings. Furthermore, these binaries are implicated much more widely in modern Anglophoneassumptions. They are underwritten in constitutions and judicial procedures which demarcate religion from the secular state. They arereproduced in liberal theories of economists who assume that such theories are in touchwith the real world of ‘markets’ and Individual self-maximers. They are foundational to the formation of the secular university and its disciplinary divisions. Looked at in the wider context, thesciences which are powerfully construed as ‘natural’ act as unintentional agents for the reproduction of an ideological configuration.

Taves’ potentially radical proposal of reformulating ‘religious experience’ as ‘experiences deemed special’ opens up the possibility of thiswider critique. But by ambiguously utilizing ‘experiences deemed religious’ as an equivalent formulation, the author lets in through the backdoor a powerful ideological discourse which, though modified, remains fundamentally unchallenged in its general contours.

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Michael Stausberg for his helpful suggestions in slimming down an already extended contribution to the review symposium.

References

Paden, W., 1994. Before the ‘sacred’ became theological: Durkheim and reductionism. In: Idinopolous, T.A., Yonan, E.A. (Eds.), Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade,Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion. Brill, Leiden.

Taves, A., 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton University Press, Princeton,Woodstock.