Producing Knowledge about Religion: Spies, Scholars, and Their Approaches
by Charles McCrary
Edward Lansdale and Ngô Đình Diêm by manhhai. CC BY 2.0.
The study of American religion should include, as subjects, those Americans who produce knowledge about religion. Yet such inclusions run a risk of reproducing inward-looking intellectual and institutional histories. Who besides a scholar of religion would want to read a history of scholarship about religion? But scholars also run a more serious, destabilizing, and necessary risk of blurring the lines between scholar and their subject. And, in so doing, they encourage vital yet often uncomfortable self-reflexivity. How is knowledge about religion—in the US and abroad—produced? Who produces it? And whose interests are served by that production?
During World War II and the Cold War, a variety of actors, from jurists to religious leaders to scholars, theorized religion and its roles in the world. What religion was, in their minds and hands, was at least in part a matter of what it did—and, more practically, what could be done with and through it. Their knowledge about religion was, in other words, operational or operationalizable.
To this collection of operationally minded knowledge-producers, Michael Graziano adds intelligence agents. These officials and spies, working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its precursor the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), understood that religion was central to global politics and local cultures. To understand religion, then, and to operationalize that knowledge, could be the key to manipulating people around the world. Their theories and approaches, while related to familiar motifs—“tri-faith” America, “Judeo-Christianity,” or the “Protestant secular”—were original and perhaps unexpected. In Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors, Graziano details OSS and CIA agents’ various operationalizations, in turns bizarre, madcap, and tragic.
Like other American observers of world religions, US intelligence officials perceived religion and religions on Christian terms. Their frame of reference was, most prominently, Catholicism. Based on understandings and misunderstandings of the Roman Catholic Church, replicating anti-Catholic tropes when useful, the “religious approach” at the CIA understood religions as totalizing top-down systems, with devotees following charismatic and politically powerful leaders more or less uncritically. In this way and others, Graziano offers new angles on old problems, including the emergence of the “world religions” paradigm, global Catholicism in the middle of the twentieth century, and entanglements of US academics and empire.
This forum offers three pieces responding to Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors, followed by a response from Graziano. By way of further introduction, I want to write just a bit about each contributor’s scholarship and how I see their work as part of an exciting set of conversations about knowledge, empire, and Christian forms.
In The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire, Kate Moran shows how white US Americans grafted Catholic history onto US history, finding Catholic virtues among their vices—and, sometimes, finding both in the same imagined qualities. When the state of Wisconsin decided in the 1890s that one of their two statues in the National Statuary Hall would depict Fr. Jacques Marquette, they sparked intense debate about how a seventeenth-century French Jesuit could represent Wisconsin and the US. The answer, in so many words, was his imperialism. In celebrating imperial conquest—especially the “right,” “benevolent” kind in the way many US Americans would imagine their own burgeoning imperial violence in Cuba, the Philippines, Hawai‘i, and elsewhere—they affirmed the inclusion of Catholics in the American project. Decades later, as Graziano shows, US governmental officials would look to Catholics as pro-American, appropriately and usefully violent, model religious subjects in multiple senses.
Candace Lukasik has analyzed, through ethnographic and historical work, the complex politics of global imaginaries of Christianity. For instance, she shows how white US Protestants in the twenty-first century have imagined Egyptian Copts not as targets for missionizing but as co-religionists who, like them, are persecuted. Religious violence becomes currency in an “imperial economy of Christian kinship.” In this economy, sometimes Christian identity mitigates racial difference, just as racial difference structures the possibilities and impossibilities of national and religious belonging. For example, Egyptian Copts in the United States, Lukasik demonstrates, supported “Trump and Trumpian politics because of their experience as immigrants, not in spite of it.” Whereas Moran’s scholarship points to an earlier moment of imperial violence, foreshadowing the strange politics of inclusion Graziano describes, Lukasik’s work shows us twenty-first-century versions, made possible by these earlier historical actors, including the CIA.
Of course, strange mixtures of Christian, national, and imperial identities and histories are far from exclusive to the United States. As Elayne Oliphant details in her ethnography The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris, upper- and upper-middle-class French publics want to imagine Christian and French history—and, in so doing, imagine their own place in contemporary France—through particular aesthetics and forms. Among the many striking scenes in Oliphant’s book are those in which secular French citizens, certainly not church-goers or believers themselves, express strong feelings about what is appropriately reverent in the space of a once-derelict Cistercian monastery turned public event space. Why do they care? Or, as Oliphant asks elsewhere, considering the Notre Dame, why would ostensibly secular Parisians “insist upon the centrality of Catholic material forms in their city’s skyline?” Catholicism here is not quite an empty signifier but, really, a set of symbols and materialities and histories that signify quite a lot—although, for reasons of politeness and banality, are not always saying a lot.
Each of these scholars thinks critically and creatively about Christian forms—about aesthetics and institutional dynamics and useful histories—and how they are articulated through different political projects, and how people with various interests imagine the place of Christianity in the modern world. What Graziano’s work shows us is that CIA agents were active participants in the shaping of those very forms. In that way, their work was (and is) not only similar to the work of scholars but also, at times, intimately interconnected with it. As we craft our own narratives of American religion, wading inevitably into the politics of inclusion and exclusion, of taking and making exception, this history invites self-reflection. It is a cautionary tale, surely, but not a simple one.
Charles McCrary is postdoctoral research scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. He is the author of Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022). His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic.