Imperial Imagination and Religious Thinking: A Response to Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors
by Candace Lukasik
Cross at Coptic Church overlooking a Los Angeles freeway, February 2018. Photo by author.
Shadows of Coptic crosses, Upper Egypt, January 2017. Photo by author.
In his article “What is Political Islam?,” anthropologist Charles Hirschkind provocatively asks his readers to ponder the scholarly proclivity to focus on the “illegitimate extension of the Islamic tradition outside of the properly religious domain.” Instead, Hirschkind asks us to consider the “contemporaneous expansion of state power and concern into vast domains of social life previously outside its purview—including that of religion.” He holds a mirror to scholars (and in parallel, policymakers and government officials) who have focused on the militant violence of political Islam without pondering the “extensive coercion and torture” practiced by governments. Intriguingly, Michael Graziano’s Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors aids us in thinking about that “extensive coercion,” most especially by the United States security apparatus but also other government sectors and broader pop culture. The book spotlights how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), understood and instrumentalized the category of “religion” in the expansion of imperial intelligence gathering (using the Catholic Church, for example, as a model). Graziano focuses on the scholarly emergence of the “world religions paradigm” and the institutional development of the “religious approach” in such organizations, but he also offers an account of US empire from the perspective of its burgeoning intelligence apparatus and post-World War II / Cold War domination. He does this by thinking about “religion” as a salient category of connection, space for control, and ultimately a problem to be solved for the purposes of imperial expansion (especially in regard to Muslim or communist/atheist contexts).
Graziano notes in his introduction that assumptions of what religion was, what it did, and what it could do were “folded into an existing and powerful tradition of American exceptionalism,” which saw “religion” through American empire—as “fundamentally anti-Communist, pro-democracy, capitalistic, and supportive of human liberty and freedom” (4). While the “religious approach” to OSS and CIA intelligence gathering and missions was important to their imperial strategies, I am also intrigued by how this approach more broadly categorized (and racialized) traditions and geographies.
The OSS and eventually the CIA, Graziano argues, “viewed global political power as aligning neatly with relatively well-known and long-established religious identities: Christian Europe, Hindu India, Buddhist Southeast Asia, the Muslim Middle East, and the atheistic Soviet Union” (6). During the Cold War, the United States relied on these religious/geographical categories to imagine global power and domination. Graziano provides an excellent account of this institutional expansion. In this short response, though, I’d also like to ponder “what that meant for people around the world” (183) and the contemporary stakes and dangerous reverberations of this thinking for different communities across the Global South.
Empire Top/Down
Throughout the book, Graziano varyingly focuses on the position of Muslims and Islam in the “religious approach.” OSS officers, for example, thought that Muslims and Arabs were “substantially ‘different’” and required unique targeting. One memo claimed that the “Arab mind” could only be swayed by the “leaders-sheiks” and religious leaders “to whom the masses of the Near East peoples still look automatically” (59). Orientalizing approaches proliferated within these organizations, but what is consequential in this case was the conflation of Arabs and the Middle East, more broadly, with Islam. Graziano writes that these OSS officers and informants (and subsequent CIA officials) saw Muslims “through the lens of Christianity” (59), most explicitly through missionary networks informing the OSS office in places like Cairo, Egypt. The way these (Western) Christian informants understood Islam shaped OSS’s strategies for working with Muslims. And the most dangerous part of this strategy came through the influence on intercommunal relations in the region. For example, OSS officers in North Africa circa 1942 were told that the best time and place to target Muslim minds was after Friday prayers at the mosque, when the men “are in a more religious frame of mind” and “more receptive to rumors and propaganda unfavorable to non-Muslims” (59). These assumptions and the imposition of US (Christian) government officials and intelligence organizations had far-reaching consequences for the local, indigenous Christian populations of the Middle East.
As a sociocultural anthropologist who works with Middle Eastern Christians, I have seen how these strategies continue to hold weight within the region, shaping the lived experiences of such communities embattled under the logics of Western Christianity and US empire. Among contemporary American Christians, Egypt’s Copts (as well as other Middle Eastern Christians) have been constructed as religio-political symbols—caught between an idealized Christian West and a demonized Islamic East. For instance, in the video documenting the beheading of twenty Coptic migrants and one Ghanaian migrant on the shores of Libya in February 2015, the Islamic State-affiliate leader comments in English to the camera: “Here we are, south of Rome…The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama bin Laden’s body in, we swear to Allah [we] will mix it with your blood.” The Coptic martyrs wore orange jumpsuits, an index to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, as they awaited their fate. The twenty-one migrants were configured as a medium between an “Islamic East” and a “Christian West,” and their in-between character (the majority of them being Middle Eastern Christians) has continued to be shaped by imperial imagination and religious thinking—unable to unpack the monolithic categorization of a racialized geography like the Middle East.
Among Graziano’s historical interlocutors, this civilizational divide was generative and spoke to European colonial antecedents. For example, the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) undertook a major study of Islam during the first year of Eisenhower’s presidency, concluding that Islam could be an ally in the Cold War but was lacking in its conflict with the “modern world” (79). Muslims were described as “irrational” and “insecure” because they knew they were “not as advanced as Christendom” (79). The PSB was also dismissive of other groups specifically—describing Kurds as “a group of children” and Iranians as “incapable of self-discipline” (79). In many instances throughout the book’s rich examples, Graziano outlines the perpetual conflation of Arab and Muslim identity, as well as the identification of distinct groups with their negative civilizational characteristics. Yet, while distinct groups are named with specific negative attributes, they are made monolithic by their racialized and timeless difference from the West, whether these groups are Christian or not.
My work has examined how these Euro-American legacies affect marginalized communities like Coptic Christians and specifically focuses on how imperial knowledge production has impacted their legibility as both Christian kin and non-white Others. It particularly traces the intersections between imperial imagination and religious thinking, described by Graziano, in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Cold War focus on atheistic communism as the arch-enemy of US empire shifted to the fight against fundamentalist Islam, in which Middle Eastern Christians became a central node of its exemplary persecution. Yet, the strategies, aesthetics, and passions of this shift held precedent, as well. Chapter 5 of Graziano’s book, entitled “Baptizing Vietnam,” traces the work of Thomas Dooley, writer of Deliver Us from Evil (1956), on Vietnamese Catholics persecuted at the hands of Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in Southeast Asia. Dooley’s book is full of testimonies of martyrdom at the hands of communists. As Graziano describes, Dooley wanted to make apparent for his readers that what these Vietnamese martyrs fought and sacrificed for most was religious freedom; the retelling of their stories was meant to “influence how the average American viewed the conflict in Vietnam” (99). In doing so, Dooley’s book aided in the exoticization of Vietnamese Christians, focusing on their racial difference in the religious service of US empire.
Dooley portrayed Vietnamese Catholics as possessing a “simple, powerful faith” to make it relatable to a US audience (106). As Graziano writes, “Vietnamese Catholics were exotic, yes, but even in their strangeness they could be made understandable in reassuring ways” (107). They became “empty signifiers,” made familiar to US audiences through their fight for religious freedom—the center of the Cold War battle against godless communism. In Dooley’s telling, the stakes were immediately clear: the Vietnamese were dying for religious freedom, an idea that the United States was sworn to protect. In this way, the US was the leader, the savior, the example for the world. The US could bring freedom to other parts of the world, where persecution and devastation prevailed. While certainly the Catholicism of Vietnamese Christians marked by Dooley was distinctive, the passions and aesthetics he conveyed in his writing that convicted US audiences was a precursor for the broader Christian-persecution movement that developed over the latter half of the twentieth century. In varying ways throughout this book, Graziano gestures to how denominational difference was inconsequential in the broader battle against imperial opponents of (American) freedom.
The strangeness and “irrationality” of Catholicism (as well as Orthodox Christianity) in American religious history derives from a duality of religious inclusion and racial exclusion in the service of empire. Without denying the theopolitical critique of non-Protestant Christian traditions, imperial Christian kinship has continued to shape how the United States sees allies and enemies. Graziano frames this through “world religions” and the imagination of seeing them as “strategic tools for American power” (110). I would argue that is quite true, but the underlying (Western) Christian character of this perspective—of seeing different communities as conscripts of empire—offers a new window into how non-Western Catholics (as well as Orthodox) could be understood as “one of us.” In an early Reader’s Digest article, cited by Graziano, about Vietnamese Catholics fleeing the North, a little girl was given a bath by a US sailor on-board a navy ship headed for South Vietnam. “Mama, the big American is a priest,” she told her mother. “First he blessed me and then baptized me American” (125).
Conclusions
Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors subtly gestures to the forging and dismantling of imperial kinship ties through cultural transformation, geopolitical reconfiguration, and social destruction—from Iran to Vietnam. One of the major “errands” of the “religious approach,” Graziano reminds us, was to shape sensibilities about the United States as a leader of (religious) freedom and to promote it as a beacon “radiating outward into the world” (10). Informed by racialized ideas of the non-West, with Orientalist/colonial genealogies of intelligibility, the OSS and the CIA deployed a religious approach that understood “religion” as a cipher to be decoded and ultimately manipulated for imperial ends (118). Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors pushes us to consider the cynical itineraries of understanding and “cross-cultural communication” at the heart of spreading the gospel of US empire. The category of religion organized communities into and away from this transnational empire at home and abroad. The grasp of the “religious approach” within US intelligence circles and beyond had and continues to have devastating consequences for the peoples under its geopolitical spotlight.
Candace Lukasik is a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and an incoming assistant professor of religion at Mississippi State University. She holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her research focuses on transnational migration, Middle Eastern minorities, racialization, and US empire. You can follow her on Twitter @lukasik_c.