Truth, Sincerity, and Trump: A Brief Anecdote

Charles McCrary

Last December, I defended my dissertation, “Sincerely Held Religious Belief: A History.” I’m now at work on the book, and one of my first tasks has been mercilessly chopping the fatty bits out of the manuscript. So, I present to you today one such fatty bit, a short prologue. I wrote it because I didn’t think anyone would believe that my dissertation truly was written in 2017 if it didn’t include some reference to Donald Trump. Enjoy!

Promoting his then-forthcoming television show on Trinity Broadcasting Network, Mike Huckabee assessed the character of his first guest: President Donald Trump. Perhaps the president was a strange choice for Christian programming. Huckabee’s new show would incorporate politics—he had media experience as a Fox News host and political experience as a former governor of Arkansas—but he was a former Baptist pastor hosting a show on a Christian network. So, why Trump? “Nobody pretends that he would be an ideal Sunday-school teacher, to be fair,” Huckabee said. “I don’t think he is a person who is deeply acquainted with the Bible and he’s not known to set attendance records at church. But he’s very respectful of people of faith. And that’s really all people in the Christian community want. They don’t care whether or not the guy believes as they do.” One might wonder, then, why so many “in the Christian community” believed President Barack Obama was a Muslim, and why it seemed to matter. But Huckabee’s next answer might hold a clue.

Interviewer Emma Green quoted Huckabee’s book Character Makes a Difference: “character is that which causes you to make the same decision in public as you would make in private.” Green cited Trump’s private actions “that don’t necessarily show strong character,” but she missed the point. Huckabee responded that, although he would prefer if the President spoke “every day with the most extraordinary sense of faith,” that was not what character was about. He clarified, “To me, character is if you’re the same in public as you are in private, and I think that in many ways, that’s what’s appealing about [Trump]…Even his tweets, for example, are very transparent about what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling.” Character is when the inner and outer, the private and the public, the heart and the mouth, are in sync. For Mike Huckabee and the “Christian community” for whom he portends to speak, Trump’s public and private vulgarity are permissible. Sincerity, regardless of content, is a moral good in and of itself. They do not care as much about what Trump believes, as that he does not pretend. And Trump “has not pretended that he’s sitting on the front row of church or that he’s memorized any Bible verses. And I think they’re frankly refreshed by the honestly. But more importantly,” Huckabee pivoted, “they want a president who simply respects them—who recognizes that underneath all the Bill of Rights is religious liberty.” These two issues, sincerity and religious freedom, have an interconnected history in the United States. This is a story of secularization. It is not about the decline of religion, but the processes by which religion is relegated to the private and the importance of doctrine diminishes. Religious freedom, instituted through secular governance, protects the private consciences of individuals in public life. Sincere believers like Trump do not filter or misrepresent themselves. The public is the private. Among the perennial problems of religious freedom is sorting the sincere from the duplicitous.

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Paperwork Secularism and the Governance of American Religions

Charles McCrary

Today I want to offer a few brief thoughts toward a theory of “paperwork secularism,” inspired by some AAR panels and recent blog posts. But first, an anecdote.

In May 2010, the North Dakota Department of Transportation denied Brian Magee’s request for a personalized license plate reading “ISNOGOD.” Like many states, North Dakota had no specific legal restrictions for what type of messages may be included in a personalized license plate, thus opting to handle each request on a case-by-case basis. Explaining the decision to reject Magee’s plate, Department of Transportation representative Linda Butts said, “We are trying our best to serve the citizens of North Dakota and try to protect [against] what would be offensive.” But offensive according to whom? And, more to the point, who makes that call? According to state law, the Department of Transportation “may, in its discretion, provide special license plates marked with not more than seven numerals, letters, or ampersands, or combinations of numerals, letters, and ampersands, at the request of the registrant, upon application therefor and payment of an additional fee of twenty-five dollars per registration period” (ND State Law 39-04-10.3 “Personalized plates”). But whose discretion, exactly? Who were the agents of the secular state determining what was offensive?

Some years ago, I was writing a seminar paper about this case, and so I called the North Dakota Motor Vehicle Division to find out. The employee with whom I spoke told me that they had guidelines for what would be offensive, but they were not publicly posted. In fact, they did not have a digital copy, so far as she knew. She made a physical copy and mailed it to me. The document states: “The Motor Vehicle Division retains the right to refuse to issue any license plates with any combination of letters or numbers, presented in any language and when read forward or backward, that may carry connotations that are offensive to good taste and decency, or would be misleading, including but not limited to…” an eleven-point list. The list includes specific prohibitions, such as “a word or term that refers to illegal drugs,” as well as some less clear, such as “a word or term that is patently offensive or contemptuous, prejudicial, or incites lust, depravity, or hostility.” And, curiously, “a word or term that could be reasonably expected to provoke a violent response from viewers.” This anecdote leads me to two related analytical points: 1) The secular state is not a unified entity, so scholars should focus more on agents of the secular state; and 2) Secular governance often occurs at highly localized levels, and so these secular state agents should be found in perhaps unexpected places, like the DMV. We might call this “paperwork secularism.”

I thought about paperwork secularism a number of times at the recent AAR meeting. In an excellent panel on “America’s Bureaucracy of Transcendence: Government Legitimation of American Religion,” Kathleen Holscher, Mike Graziano, Brad Stoddard, and Sarah Dees offered papers on the bureaucratic procedures by which a variety of state and state-affiliate actors define, regulate, and govern religions. Mike McVicar’s thoughtful and thought-provoking response keyed on these dynamics in the creation and contestation of classificatory systems that are always intersectional, never isolable even when they purport to be (as religion often does). The response followed the themes of governance, ignorance, and bureaucracy. On the final point, McVicar noted that knowledge—or ignorance—has bureaucratic uses. When producing or consuming knowledge about religion(s), state agents have a reason, an application, a use. During the question and answer segment, someone (I’m sorry I didn’t write down who) proposed that we differentiate between administrative and judicial epistemologies. Judges have clerks, and they have time to think and write. They read other opinions and consider decades of case law. Other agents—Catholic hospital workers explaining the nature of “charity,” CIA agents trying to understand Buddhism, prison chaplains deciding whether there’s enough space to accommodate a Wiccan meeting, Bureau of American Ethnology anthropologists devising terminology to name Native American practices, North Dakota DMV employees determining what’s “offensive”—often must make these decisions on the fly, with the information available. And their purpose is often different. Courts have to interpret legislation, uphold the constitution, defend the principles of religious freedom. Other agents sometimes are just trying to finish their paperwork.

Recently, The Religion Factor, the blog of the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization at the University of Groningen, has been running a series on the legal mechanisms that shape religious practice. In the first post, Helge Ǻrsheim argued that this “machinery” of the bureaucratic state, often ignored by scholars, is where and how religious freedom is produced. “Far removed from the spotlight of the news cycle, critical scholarship or political discourse, civil servants from a broad and growing array of modern nation states determine the proper nature and scope of religion, oftentimes as a small, even happenstance part of their jobs.” In his contribution to the series, Richard Amesbury nicely summed up Ǻrsheim’s approach to bureaucratization: “God is in the machine, and the devil in the details.” The details can be boring. So Ǻrsheim calls for us to push through the boredom, for it’s “exactly because bureaucracy is massive, unwieldy and boring [that] it usually escapes the critical gaze of scholarship developed for more high-profile and immediately comprehensible cases involving controversy and conflict.” We should look at “paperwork secularism,” investigate the workings of what we might call the “deep secular state,” but not just to find some exciting, unexpected archival gem (though we’ll find those too), but because bureaucracy is important and massive, and a close, detailed, boring look at it will give us a sense of its import and mass.

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Thanks, RiAH: A Brief Personal Reflection

Charles McCrary

I have appreciated the reflections on and odes to Religion in American History posted this month. It’s been edifying to read of the blog’s role in the lives of many of my colleagues and friends and to consider its place in our field. I’ll add my short reflection here. Personally, I don’t know the field without this blog. And really, in many ways, I know the field through this blog. In the summer of 2007, when the blog launched, I was not a scholar of religion. I was 17 years old, and I delivered the Fargo Forum to doorsteps in the wee hours of the morning and Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity® pancakes to tabletops in the non-peak hours of the afternoon. Two years later, though, I was majoring in religion, entering my junior year, and trying to figure out what I would study in grad school. After various dalliances with Kierkegaard, Mādhyamikas, and early Christians (being an undergrad is great and weird), I decided to get serious with American religious history. But I didn’t know anyone who studied it. Or anything about it. My professors at the University of North Dakota, none of whom specialized in American religion, were willing to have very long office-hours conversations and work with me on directed independent readings. (It wasn’t until I went to another university, talked to new colleagues, and taught my own courses that I realized how truly and deeply generous with their time and patience my professors were. Shout out to regional state universities, small departments, and engaged teaching faculty.) But where did I find the books and articles to read? How did I know which scholars were working on this stuff? The short answer: the Religion in American History blog.

I started reading the blog regularly in the fall of 2009, and it shaped my earliest impressions of what it meant to study religion in America. Author interviews, book reviews, previews of new books, and conference recaps offered a window into a world I hadn’t yet entered. As I tried to figure out where I would go to grad school, I looked to the blog. I had read and enjoyed posts by Florida State students and graduates, especially Kelly Baker. So I looked up the program, read some of the professors’ books, and decided to apply. When I was an MA student at FSU, Kelly let me write a few guest posts. I worried that the posts weren’t good (looking back, I can confirm that they were not), but I’m grateful that the opportunity gave me the confidence to keep writing and keep working out ideas. And, more so, it made me feel like a part of a community, part of the “field.” After a very long guest post in spring 2014 about Ben Sasse (see a less typo-ridden, even longer version here), Paul invited me to join the regular roster. I’m always humbled and surprised and delighted when people contact me about my writing here, or mention a post at a conference reception, and I’ve made many friends and acquaintances through the community the blog fosters.

I don't think this blog should be taken, as the undergraduate me once took it, as a synecdoche for “the study of American religion.” It’s not that. But it is one prominent place in which those who study American religion have had their conversations. It’s where I and many others have been introduced to new books and ideas and people. It’s where we’ve self-promoted, tested ideas, and argued. Maybe it’s our field’s water cooler. Or the post office in our small town. I am not good at metaphors. In a post last year, I asked, “Are you talking to me?”, and I argued that this blog is one public, a discursive community organized by its own discourse, among many that constitute the larger public of “the field” (again, whatever that is). But the public is not just the speakers. More importantly, it’s the readers, the circulators (retweeters), those who are addressed. I’m grateful for the opportunity to write here, but I’m far more grateful for the opportunity to read, to be addressed. Thanks to Paul, Randall, Kelly, Cara, and everyone who has written here over the last decade. Thanks for talking to me.

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Voice, Irony, and Writing Seriously about Religion

Charles McCrary

A few weeks ago, at a dissertation defense, the discussion turned to the topic of voice. In his dissertation, as in many of his blog posts here at RiAH, Adam Park[1] wrote in a tongue-in-cheek, ironic, at times even sarcastic voice. But what does this voice imply or presume? This question exposed a central yet often under-discussed aspect of scholarly writing: Who is writing this? In Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction, Stephen Pyne defines voice as the “transtextual persona of the author” (48). What, or who, is this persona? What is your persona, scholarly writer? In this post I want to think through this question of voice, specifically ironic voice, and how it relies on readers’ and writers’ assumptions—and what this discussion might have to do with the injunction to “take religion seriously.”

Scholarly personas commonly take on ironic voices. Pyne notes, “Irony requires distancing. Literary irony results from an incongruity, a distance, between what a speaker says and what he means, a gap perceived by the reader. Historical irony involves an incongruity, or distance, between what is said (or thought, believed, or expected) and what actually happens” (48). Historians and other scholars often use this latter form of irony when discussing past events, since the writer (and, in many cases, the reader) knows how the story is going to turn out. This sort of irony is a great source of both tragedy and humor. We can write about what someone did to prevent the Civil War, or why Microsoft made the Zune, or how news media in 2015 covered reality-television-star Donald Trump’s spectacular presidential campaign.

Literary irony, to use Pyne’s term, might be opposed to sincerity. When a writer or speaker employs sincere discourse, she has no distance from her words. She says what she means. “Distancing” can happen not only at the level of content’s immediate meaning, but stylistically as well.[2] As Elizabeth Markovits has argued in The Politics of Sincerity, “hypersincere” speech is not only believed by the speaker, but it is presented in an unaffected style, since even affectation or rhetorical flourish might indicate a distance between meaning and text. Crucially, in ironic discourse, the reader perceives the gap. I, the reader, know that the author doesn’t really mean exactly what she writes.

I want to focus here on literary irony. In Adam’s dissertation, he often writes in his own voice, though the ideas are those of his subjects and/or the readers. “This was barbaric,” he writes. When I read this, I know that Adam does not think this (the “this” in this case being, say, a bloody mixed-martial-arts fight) is barbaric. But I know that certain subjects he’s writing about think that—and, importantly, he presumes that the reader might think that. During the defense, one question was, in so many words, if that move was fair. If we write in ways that play off our presumed audience’s assumptions, what are the implications of that scholarly voice? For one, we expect the reader to perceive the incongruity between what the speaker says and means. This might be easy if we know the speaker, but it’s more difficult, perhaps even unfairly so, if we don’t. Second, and more important, this type of ironic voice could be used to smuggle in normative assumptions about the validity of our subjects’ actions, ideas, and interpretations. This type of smuggling is quite common in the study of religion, and I think it’s a problem.[3]

Here’s an example. In 2013 at the Third Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture Valarie Ziegler discussed her research on evangelicals’ dating, courtship, marriage, and sex, and how these practices relate to their readings of the Bible (see pp. 51–52 here). In the room, scholars chuckled and gasped at descriptions of “Princess Bibles” and husbands practicing “Christian domestic discipline” (CCD) by spanking their wives. Why the chuckles? I suspect, for many in the room, they were produced by the perceived incongruity between Ziegler’s subjects’ interpretations of the Bible and the chuckling scholars’ own interpretations. That’s a weird way to read the Bible, right?[4] These chuckles bothered me, and I think about them often. We can see in the published version of Ziegler’s talk that humor, or at least incongruity, was clearly intended. In the last paragraph, she writes, “What is surprising, perhaps even shocking, about CCD couples is the loving intimacy and sexual ecstasy they associate with corporal punishment.” Why is that surprising? To whom? Were the people in the room shocked? Should we have been shocked? To conclude her piece, Ziegler lamented that “Christians who practice this theology are in cultural captivity to a variety of unlikely motifs, including…most of all, to two concepts that never appear in the biblical text at all: gender ‘complementarity’ and ‘biblical’ manhood and womanhood.’” Here, in the conclusion, Ziegler’s voice slips away from the ironic. Instead, she’s blatantly accusing her subjects of having ridiculous—that is, deserving of ridicule—theology. But still, even here, the motifs are “unlikely.” Again, to whom? Why are they unlikely? And who says these concepts don’t appear in the biblical text?

I don’t mean to single out Ziegler or this particular event as exceptional. I’ve seen this happen many times (including last week at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion biennial meeting), more often in conference settings than in published writing.[5] You will hear this voice in strategic uses of the word “actually,” as in “he actually believes Jesus is coming back in his lifetime” or “creationism is actually a sophisticated and complicated idea.”[6] Actually, this subverts your expectations. Here, the audience learns what expectations they are, well, expected by the writer or speaker to have.

Which brings me to taking religion seriously. Scholars often use this phrase, though its meanings are multiple and generally unclear. In her 2010 JAAR essay, “Seriously, What Does ‘Taking Religion Seriously’ Mean?”, Elizabeth Pritchard leveled a number of insightful critiques of the phrase. In concluding she argued, “Whereas these calls [to take religion seriously] are issued for the express purpose of creating public and scholarly places in which religious voices, qua religious (and not necessarily reasonable, familiar, polite, or liberating) may be heard, this goal is undermined by a tacit discomfort with, and ritualistic management of, difference and conflict” (1108). Scholars must authorize religious voices, create for them a “seat at the table,” and thus liberal secularism solves a problem created by…liberal secularism. Religious voices were marginalized, but now they’re welcome, because actually—contra your expectations—they should be taken seriously. This is analogous to, and sometimes identical to, the problem discussed above: When we write ironically, playing on our audience’s expectation that “religion” would or should be one way and is in fact another way, is that necessarily a theological or normative statement on our part? Or, differently, are we forcing our reader to make that judgment? Is that OK? Is it good scholarly practice? Is it good writing? The answer to each question, of course, is “it depends.” But considering the ironic voice, the distancing between a speaker and her speech, and the role the audience plays here, can bring to light familiar yet ever-important questions of positionality and authorial perspective. We’re confronted by our own “transtextual personas,” however carefully we’ve crafted them. Whose tongue? Whose cheek?


[1] For the record, Adam gave me permission to write about this and to “use names all u want” (text message, May 22, 2017).
[2] Pyne’s “essential point” in Voice and Vision is that “style and subject so intertwine that one cannot be disentangled from the other” (17). I agree with this!
[3] To be clear, I don’t think this is a problem in Adam’s dissertation. I think it’s more accurate to say that he was exposing his presumed readers’ normative assumptions, not his own. I do think it was a good critique to say that’s not a fair way to treat a reader, which is different from accusing the writer of sneaking in his own evaluations. Anyway, I just want to be precise about whom I’m critiquing here.
[4] I am using an ironic voice in this sentence (the one in the main text, not the one in this footnote; this one is very sincere).
[5] Perhaps this is because the ironic voice benefits from intonation, facial expression, and so on, and is thus harder to pull off in print. Furthermore, an audience can be cued by other members of the audience: once someone laughs or gasps, the crowd learns that this is indeed an acceptable or even intended response.
[6] My examples are all about (white) evangelicals, and that’s on purpose. In my experience, this is by far the most common topic about which you’ll hear this voice used. I’ll leave it to the reader to ruminate on why that might be.

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Police and American Religions

Charles McCrary

How can scholars of American religion incorporate police and policing into our narratives? I have been kicking around this question for a while, and I have a few very preliminary ideas and suggestions. In recent years the field of American religious studies has continued to expand the purview of what counts as data. So, I doubt many readers would say that police and policing do not fit within our narratives. But the question remains—as it does with so many other topics—how to bridge these questions and data sets with our existing frameworks and narratives. What follows are some disorganized thoughts about what a sustained conversation about police and religion might look like.

Scholars often study the police within the context of surveillance studies. Foucault’s ideas about policing have of course been influential here. I recommend Andrew Johnson’s piece on Foucault, the police, and neoliberalism. Johnson shows how Foucault moved from understanding the police as a state institution “isomorphic with the prison, both employing disciplinary techniques to control a free population and part of a carceral continuum” (5) in Discipline and Punish to, in the Security, Territory, Population lectures, “a ‘secret history of the police’ where greater attention is paid to public health, social welfare and regulating the marketplace than investigating and arresting criminals” (6). We can see how this tracks with the shift toward governmentality. This is one of a number of ways we can uncover the pervasive power of policing, though I wonder if an overly expansive definition of “police,” while probably advancing fruitful lines of analysis, might also distract from efforts to incorporate new characters into our narratives.

Many scholars of American religion have turned their attention recently to surveillance and related topics like intelligence and security. Sylvester Johnson and Steven Weitzman’s new edited collection The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11 offers various perspectives and case studies related to the FBI, and a number of scholars (some of whom are included in the volume) are at work on forthcoming projects related to the FBI and other agencies of domestic surveillance and intelligence. For a long time, scholars of new religious movements have studied the FBI, ATF, and other agencies, particularly in light of their violent encounters with NRMs. Also, scholars have studied American Muslims after 9/11 and, more recently, in light of targeted bans and rising Islamophobia (including anti-sharia legislation, for example). I’m particularly interested in how more attention to “religio-racial identity” might help us study the role of religion in the surveillance of racialized bodies (I have in mind here Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, especially the chapter on the TSA). Surveillance and intelligence gathering are of course not only domestic security practices, but that the United States and other imperial states have often used religion as a category of (colonial) governance, as a way to understand, control, and influence populations. With these questions in mind, scholars like Mike Graziano have turned our attention to the OSS and CIA and their uses for “religion” (and academically produced discourse on “world religions”). All of this is great work, and it certainly contributes to whatever nascent discussion we might organize around “religion and police.” The line between police and military is becoming ever hazier, but, still, what about local police and sheriff departments?

A few years ago, over at the U.S. Intellectual History blog, Tim Lacy opened a discussion on intellectual history and policing. He posted some great questions and garnered lots of helpful response and reading suggestions. I wonder how scholars of American religion can locate religion in these conversations, as we have done in, say, the history of prisons (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand’s dissertation focuses on “criminalization” and offers what she calls a “defendant-centered” account of religious freedom. Building on that, I wonder what stories of American religious life and freedom we might tell that focus on the perspectives and voices of arrestees, targets of state surveillance, and criminals. How do religious ideas and practices factor into people’s interactions with the police? What roles have religions played in police reform, or in philosophies of policing, or in movements against police brutality? Of course, both police and religion are central to many narratives of the civil rights movement. What about, say, Bull Connor’s religion? More generally, what about the religion of police? I can imagine a study, for example, about the religious composition of a certain precinct, its citizens and officers. What happens when there are religious differences between an officer and citizen? Are there instances of, say, a predominantly Protestant police department in a mostly Catholic neighborhood? How might be study that? Were there police officers in 1880s Mormon Utah? Were there any trends or correlations regarding the types of roles officers played in the church? What might religion scholars say about subcultures of police spouses? Who makes and buys these pieces of material culture?

One final thought. Is the study of American religion and policing—if we are to develop a conversation organized under this label—falling prey to the “religion and x” formula, which, linking two things by a limp conjunction, often fails to unsettle or interrogate either category? What is important, foundational, about religion here? What I have in mind is thinking through secularism studies about “religion” as a category of secular governance. Scholars of American religious freedom have focused on courts quite a lot, and they’ve posed and answered interesting and important questions. Can we apply some of these ideas to police? What can we say about religious freedom in the context of a police raid on a religious community? Sometimes these issues are litigated later on, in a First-Amendment case, where we often encounter them. In many encounters between the secular state and religion, though, there is no planning or later arguments or careful consideration of religious freedom. Take this example from last summer. While protesting Donald Trump, who was speaking nearby, Josie Valadez Fraire was arrested for burning sage (see the video here). As the officers attempt to take away the sage and the crowd chants “Let her go,” Fraire says, “This is indigenous spirituality. You are not allowed.” They took it away and arrested her anyway. This was not the end of the incident, of course (see more here), but it was the initial encounter. What is the context for this encounter? Focusing on police, are these police officers trained to understand the politics of religious freedom, indigenous rights, and the thorny definitional issues at work? Or the legacies and contemporary realities of colonialism and anti-colonialism that produced those laws? Probably not, but nevertheless, the police officers could either let Fraire smudge or not. This is the secular state operating at a micro-level, not with planned arguments in court, but in a street with a few historically located people acting quickly. Secularism happens there, too.

There is a lot more we could say about this, but I’ll leave off with a few questions. First, should there be a more sustained conversation, and venues for that conversation, within the field of American religions? Second, if so, what would that look like? What are the central questions a focus on police could help us articulate about American religion? And, the flipside of that, what questions are we already asking that attention to police might help us answer better? Third, what role should police and policing play in secularism studies, particularly with regard to religious freedom? And, fourth, which works in American religion already discuss police, and how might we place them in conversation with each other?

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