Out in Public

I recently learned that I next year I will be participating in a seminar at the UChicago Divinity School Martin Marty Center. In keeping with Marty's critical project, as a seminar fellow, I will be expected to write a few pieces about religion in the public sphere on topics that have attracted less attention in the broader media.

I had hoped I would use this space for that purpose, among others, but looking over the blog, I realize that by and large I have not. So, I am searching for good examples of non-academic writing about religion and public discourse.

I ran across this article on the Economist's blog Democracy in America about religious responses to Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover.

Of course, this article is about an overreported issue as opposed to an underreported issue, at least as far as trans experiences and religion are concerned.

And, as this magazine does so often, it over-credits a conservative public intellectual with an idea that is much older. Harold Bloom was not the first one to conceptually connect Protestantism, modernity, and the hermeneutic or "true me" model of the self, even if he is original in calling it specifically American. Is it his typical condescension to assume no one in our country has heard of Heidegger, Gadamer, or Foucault?!

More to the point, the article does nevertheless present an insightful expression about public religion in the US that is not buried in obtuse and self-important academic prose.

"In the Washington Post, Josh Cobia relates what Ms Jenner, then known as Bruce, taught him about Jesus, and life, at a non-denominational evangelical church they both attended. "Jesus wasn’t one to turn away from those the world had labelled broken," Mr Cobia concluded. "He was the one who would walk toward them with open arms."

The tolerant Jesus of Mr Cobia and Ms Jenner may not be the Jesus of Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther or John Knox or John Wesley. He is a Jesus perhaps more thoroughly invested in the "autonomous eroticised individualism" of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman than any first-century reinterpretation of the Judaic law. But that is the American and still-Americanising Jesus of many millions of believers who, like Caitlyn Jenner, attend non-denominational evangelical churches, and who, like Caitlyn Jenner, vote Republican."

*The picture above is of the Zócalo in Mexico City. A friend once told me this place is the best example of the early-modern idea that the public square is bounded under the supervision of the church and the state. This is the archetype for towns throughout the Spanish empire.

Enforced Intimacy

This post is a theoretical and historical exploration of the themes touched on in my post called "Conscience and Civility".

That post was limited to considering businesses' religious objections to serving queer people in intimate ways such as weddings.

I argued that the way the public sphere is legally and socially configured in post-civil rights America leaves the objectors no real way out of an obligation to provide for everyone.

Here, I want to think more broadly about how that intimacy is imposed and enforced the extension of the domain of the public.

Recently, I have been writing about the development of mass education in Egypt. Scholars like Marwa Elshakry look at the beginning of modern schooling in the influence of Western missionary institutions on different confessional communities in the Middle East.

When indigenous Christians wanted schools of their own similar to the missionaries', some among the Muslim elite wanted their children to study in them as well. Not all modern schools developed along similar confessional lines, but across modern contexts, state intervention ultimately defined a school as a space where everyone was supposed to access the same learning as equals.

The prospect of learning alongside those with different commitments troubled the Christian leaders in the 19th century. Though this is different from the panic that racially integrated schools caused in the US in the 20th century, a similar pattern is clear.

In schools, the state enforces a kind of intimacy that used to be seen as a moral transgression. The right to teach is closely connected to the kind of religious authority that was the basis of long-lived institutions in the West and in the Islamic world.

Those institutions were maintained by assumptions of a common purpose and mutual fidelity that teachers and students could expect from one another, and in those expectations, there was an intimacy that the public, collective, and undifferentiated education transgressed.

This was not limited to spheres of religious difference; Kathryn Gines writes that segregated African-American schools demanded political commitment of their teachers, and this purpose could not be the same in integrated schools. The spirit that strived through the repression of segregation had lost its place.

Public spaces maintained by public law and configured through conscriptive kinds of order are a marker of modern states. Though the marketplace I discuss in the last post is distinctive of the modern world like conscriptive education I discuss in this one, it has clear antecedents.

Unlike the schools, older kinds of marketplace were spaces for any number of private transactions. It's not that the transactions had no public rules: the Islamic marketplace had its muḥtasib, an officer responsible for maintaining fair dealing to the standards of the sharīʿa.

It is rather that older kinds of public space like the market allowed for interaction among very different people where each was more in charge of his exposure. Pious Muslims like Taqī al-Dīn ibn Taymiyya, who died in 1328, worried over this exposure in places like Mediterranean agoras where everyday traffic was mixed.

In Distinction from the Companions of Hell Ibn Taymiyya specifies rules of engagement for these situations. What is interesting though, is less the rules for how Muslims are to encounter unbelievers but the assumptions of personal discretion characteristic of a context that was less rule-bound. No one had to do business with anyone.

Modern norms of equality and access structure a very different kind of marketplace, as they do a new kind of education. My goal in these contrasts is not to say conservatives who do not want to serve gay people are beholden to the ideas of 14th-century Damascus any more than I am commending these ideas as more moral than the modern political concepts that have replaced them. 

I am suggesting, though, that the institutions we disagree about are the product of commitments and assumptions that reflect modern processes of conscription into and extension of the public.

What we might do in thinking about the older norms of interaction is that when one demands service of a business in the public sphere, as I would say is their full political right, one could imagine what another person might mean when he says he is made vulnerable by the demand to serve us. 

Some kinds of refusing contact are simply hateful and demeaning, as few would disagree about racial segregation in US.

However, some kinds of enforced non-intimacy like women-only train-cars or worship spaces, historically black colleges, or immigrant discourses opposed to assimilation may be difficult for outsiders to understand but can ask of us a recognition of a moral other.

Though sometimes that recognition is imposed on us by modern politics, I would argue it can be a force for creative moral imagination. As we are more and more enforced into intimacy with those who are more meaningfully different from us, we will have more serious need for that kind of imagination.

Memories of Things

Last week was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the yearly commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day, something I did not realize but for Facebook.

Timed with this anniversary, BBC Films' Woman in Gold premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. The movie is about Maria Altmann's 2004 court case against the Austrian government and its significance for restituting art looted by Germans from wealthy Jews.

When some friends showed me the preview for this movie, I had an instinctive repulsion. It seemed to extend the schmaltzy sentimentalism and triumphal moralizing of the Anglophone Holocaust film to a part of that destruction that is personal to me.

My family's participation in art-restitution issues is detailed in the 2004 book Was einmal war among other sources, and The Hare with Amber Eyes popularized the story of family-self discovery through the art scene in Vienna before the war for English readers.

Stories like these frame my connection to the genocide, which is a material one. I am connected by things to this lost world of Jewish Vienna. That is to say, I have never felt connected by something more human, in the sense of a standing and distinct community.

There are a few reasons for this. For one, I am descended on the "wrong" side for purposes of Jewish law to be a person of that tradition.

More personally, the ancestors with the most stuff I know about were disenchanted folk who were intellectually part of the world of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Leopold Weiss, whose secularism he repudiated when he became Muhammad Asad.

The material and historical evidence suggests they did not maintain strict borders of the Jewish community, and so they would likely be liable to be called "assimilationist". This term became polemical in Hannah Arendt's famous rebuke to humanism that a Jew must only respond to anti-Semitism as a Jew.

This definition of Jew-as-pariah she adapts from Marx is essential to the claim of difference vital to the modern Zionist state, but is embraced by critics of Israel as thoroughgoing as Judith Butler.

Once, I was exchanging family stories with an older Israeli academic, a cosmopolitan and a true leftist, and I remember her remark that after the Holocaust there was one choice for Jews: Jerusalem or New York. 

Rather than questioning the "Jewishness" of those who chose the latter as my people did, she was making a point about the rhetoric of that concept as it was understood at Israel's foundation. 

Seen that way, the choice of destinations is between hardship and ease, defiance and assimilation, capitulation and authenticity. It is not hard to see which has been rhetorically the "right" choice.

That was reflected in my scrolling Facebook last week. Most all commemorations of the Shoah, if they did not explicitly mention Israel, stressed that this would never happen to us again; we are a vibrant nation; the Nazis failed.

As much as I try to understand this perspective, that of people living their connections to that terrible time, I was made aware that that just wasn't me.

Thinking of the material world, my orientation to reconstruct through stuff and the assimilationist privilege that generated it, I think of the lost context of sophistication and transgressions that's just not conceivable now in one particular sense. What the foundation of the state of Israel, as much as the war itself, accomplished was a foreclosure of a senses of belonging that are not national.

In that sense, the Nazis, and the national project that generated the Jewish question and Jewishness in the modern sense, have achieved success.