The Problem of Religious Authenticity
by K. Healan Gaston
Reading Jolyon Thomas’s remarkable book Faking Liberties has sensitized me to key dynamics at the heart of my own Imagining Judeo-Christian America. Thomas does for “religious freedom talk,” as Tisa Wenger calls it, what I do for Judeo-Christian discourse by showing that it has always been “constructed, contingent, and contested” (12). Taken together, in fact, these books raise the prospect that the same can be said of all universalizing frameworks—an insight strongly implied by much recent scholarship on human rights, tolerance, and related concepts.
Yet Faking Liberties also stands out from the existing scholarship due to Thomas’s very personal, unflinchingly honest account of where this endemic slippage leaves him as an interpreter. Researching the book, he writes, taught him that religious freedom not only “solves problems of inequity and oppression” but also “engenders new ones,” and that this is as “true in international contexts, when occupying armies free religion at the point of a gun” as it is “in domestic contexts, when majoritarian claims often serve as tools for the suppression of religious minorities” (xi). In the face of this realization, however, Thomas does not disavow religious freedom as an ideal. Rather, he declares that religious freedom is “worth striving for,” even as he warns that it is more often “a project rather than a principle,” one that often falls far short of the ideal in practice. Thomas qualifies his “personal embrace” of religious freedom as a principle with an acute awareness that, “like all projects,” religious freedom is “only as effective as the people pulling it off” (xii).
It is refreshing to see a book grapple so forthrightly with both the power and the limits of human ideals by tracing the problems caused by their fraught but indispensable role in political change. We see such dynamics on all sides, in discourses of human rights, religious freedom, and tolerance as well as secularism and religious pluralism. Even democracy itself is a universalizing principle, constantly betrayed in practice despite its many contributions. We can thus see the importance of the question these two books raise in the present political moment: Where does recognizing the inherent impossibility of religious freedom—or democracy—leave us?
Thomas is unsparing in his description of “freeing religion” as an inherently infeasible—even “brutal”—project (3): “While religious freedom language theoretically guarantees freedom to all, in practice policy makers and police prioritize the rights and privileges of some groups over others” (46). In other words, religious freedom inevitably offers “protection to some religious practices” even as it renders “others unassailable matters of ‘custom’ or ‘civil ritual,’ ‘conventional wisdom’ or ‘common sense’” (3). But Faking Liberties largely brackets, for analytical purposes, the question of whether religious freedom is “a universal principle or a culturally specific ideal.” Thomas focuses instead on illuminating what the “historical archive” reveals—namely, that “competing interest groups understood ideal relationships between religions and the state in myriad ways” (36).
My own work suggests that a key source of the injustice in our ideals is the capacity of language to do both intended and unintended violence by enforcing potent claims about religious authenticity. Thus, Imagining Judeo-Christian America and my article “The Cold War Romance of Religious Authenticity” show that contributors to Judeo-Christian discourse advanced competing accounts of religious authenticity, each account authorizing social inclusions and exclusions and rendering certain phenomena visible and others invisible. The foil of secularism played—and continues to play—a crucial role in Judeo-Christian discourse. Just as Thomas seeks to “know who made the religion/not religion distinction that lies at the heart of religious freedom talk, how they did so, and for what reasons” (36), I seek to know who made the religious/secular distinction, how they did it, and to what ends. (Thus, for example, I show that Ronald Reagan not only used the term “Judeo-Christian” more often than any US president before or since but was also the first president to use his bully pulpit to deplore “secularism” and “secularists” [16]). I note the intimate ties of Judeo-Christian discourse, invocations of secularism, and potent understandings of religious authenticity in my book’s introduction. The various forms of Judeo-Christian discourse reflected competing models of religious authenticity—of which modes of belief and practice are genuinely religious and which are not. What I call Judeo-Christian exceptionalism and pluralism each embodied a version of the religion/secular binary that has long anchored European and American thought (13). Emphasizing religious authenticity works to humanize and personalize observations about the disciplining power of the category of religion that characterize much recent scholarship. This angle of approach exposes the violence that our concepts so often authorize and the concrete stakes in such struggles.
Of course, as I underscore in Imagining Judeo-Christian America, assumptions about religious authenticity are closely connected to visions of both religious freedom and religious pluralism—concepts that often go hand in hand with one another as well. Shortly after the passage just quoted, in fact, I identify “religious freedom” as a key component of the argumentative structure underlying Judeo-Christian discourse. Whereas pluralists equated secularism with religious freedom and identified it as the religious counterpart to democracy, Judeo-Christian exceptionalists saw secularism as a direct rival and existential threat to religion (13). Amazingly, however, the term “religious freedom” never recurs in my book, even though I discuss church-state relations at length and offer a new account of how postwar figures interpreted and balanced the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Conversely, “religious authenticity” appears only once in Faking Liberties: in the opening pages, where Thomas discusses the nefarious way that “[i]nformal understandings of religious authenticity creep into legislation, law enforcement, and jurisprudence” (3). Yet these points of connection help to explain why our books remain in such close conversation with one another despite their different focal points.
I have thought long and hard about how best to describe the interplay of such discourses with social structures. I deliberately chose “Imagining” for my title in order to avoid the strong implications of the now commonly used “inventing.” Indeed, I consciously avoided the term “invention” for reasons related to the underlying assumptions about religious authenticity it conveys. All traditions, religious or otherwise, are in fundamental ways invented. The goal in calling a religion “invented,” however, is typically to cast doubt on its authenticity. After all, true believers seldom describe their own traditions as invented. But if we want to say that some traditions are more invented than others, then we must take recourse to some sort of standard—one that typically goes unstated. Does a tradition’s degree of “inventedness” have to do with being more or less popular or consensually shared? Older versus newer? More or less representative?
In seeking to narrate the decades-long emergence of America’s culture wars, I ultimately decided that it would be neither particularly original nor especially helpful to call one of the nation’s most powerful religio-political discourses “invented.” Thus, like Thomas, who shows “that religious freedom was invented in Japan, over and over and over again” (36), I show that a Judeo-Christian America has been imagined again and again throughout modern US history. My main goal is to expand our collective thinking about the work that Judeo-Christian discourse has done and is still doing in American politics, not to pass judgment on its authenticity. Labeling Judeo-Christian discourse “invented” from the get-go would have compromised my ability to describe competing claims about its meaning and legitimacy. The term makes sense in the international contexts discussed by Thomas and scholars such as Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, where imperial powers oversaw the creation of entirely new conceptual and legal categories. In domestic contexts, however, one often finds instead the pattern described in my book. As I explain there, Judeo-Christian constructions were simultaneously descriptive and aspirational, offering both portraits of the nation as it putatively stood and normative programs for the nation as writers and speakers believed it should be. That quality routinely generated an is/ought slippage that gave Judeo-Christian language much of its distinctive power (2).
Whether we speak of inventing, imagining, or faking, however, the most important questions have to do with the relationship between language and power. How do linguistic and interpretive categories take concrete forms? Why do some visions of social order become real-world arrangements while others simply fade away? Faking Liberties focuses outward on the mobilization of religious liberty claims in international relations, whereas Imagining Judeo-Christian America looks inward at how Judeo-Christian discourse has structured America’s costly culture wars. But both books suggest that our language matters a great deal, even as it can distract us from the potent affective dimensions of political life. Whether a genuinely inclusive, power-free position is possible or not, we must seek to understand the entanglements of our familiar, taken-for-granted phrases with patterns—local, national, global—of inclusion and exclusion. It is at once a scholarly imperative and an ethical obligation to do so, for such an understanding may offer the best hope of making our ideals truer to themselves in practice.
K. Healan Gaston is Lecturer on American Religious History and Ethics at Harvard Divinity School and the author of Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is currently completing Beyond Prophetic Pluralism: Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr on Democracy and Difference. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of American History, the Harvard Theological Review, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America, and the Christian Century, among others.