Mode over Matter: Response to Hughes,From Seminary to University

My own disciplinary background in English introduced me to literary theory very much in terms of mode rather than matter. With what became known in the literary criticism world as the canon wars still in the rearview mirror, my coursework in an English PhD program was forged in their wake and was steeped in the tensions between tradition-touting academic conservatives and those who questioned the erstwhile paradigm of “Western civilization” as a pedagogical starting point. The stakes were as methodological as they were ideological, and my graduate cohort and I came to know our primary texts by way of the debates that placed them in proximity to the fault lines in the field. In order to learn the “what” of African American literature, for instance, we read the rows among scholars who grappled with the formative methodologies for its study. ¹ In the approach most of my professors took, Their Eyes Were Watching God (2006) was as much about Alice Walker’s famous search for Zora Neale Hurston as it was about Janie Crawford’s journey back to Eatonville.

The interdisciplinary discourse of religious studies is, of course, borne of visions and revisions in its own right. One of the primary strengths of Hughes’s study of the field’s formation and evolution in the Canadian academy is the attention paid to the inevitable debates and anxieties that shaped that history, specifically in relation to concerns of country. “[D]iscourses on religion cannot be delinked from discourses on nationalism,” Hughes suggests, “since the very idea of the liberal individual (be it as citizen or consumer) functions as the cornerstone of the nation. The study of religion, be it confessional or non-confessional…is heavily invested in the modern nation-state” (173). Focusing on the formative framework of nationalism allows Hughes to demonstrate some broader analytical points, even if obliquely. His descriptive history that stretches from colonial interventions through the latter half of the twentieth century carries important implications about how boundaries come into existence by virtue of their perceived transgressions and subsequent policing. This claim is a familiar refrain within the critical arenas that informed my academic training—queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies—but it is applicable to the discourses themselves as well. So inasmuch as my own formative scholastic years saw me normalize the notion that the best way to learn about a scholarly discipline is to learn about its skirmishes, I appreciate the moments in the book that create a narrative arc along those very lines. The book is a rich history, to be sure, but it is also a prompt to think about the structural and ideological contours that took shape for Canadian scholars of religion at the crucibles of reactive anxiety in the face of perceived precarity. In this way, Hughes’s data-driven descriptive history bears out an important axiom of social theory: our studies are better directed not at the ostensible thing but at discourse on the thing—not the “what” but the “how.”

The prepositions in the book’s title may seem to suggest a transformation of one thing into another, but Hughes takes pains to cut that interpretation off at the pass: “I certainly do not want to imply that the movement from seminary to university was an evolutionary process, let alone a teleological one. On the contrary, in telling the story of the study of religion in Canada, it was necessary to tell it in its many contexts” (13). To that end, the book maps some key points on a trajectory that begins with a discussion of colonial religious aims at “civilizing” First Nations peoples and ends with the mid-1960s formation of religious studies departments. Along the way, we encounter a case study about the University of Toronto, which existed for about sixty years as an Anglican institution (established in 1827 by Royal Charter as King’s College) before becoming formally secularized by way of the legislation like the Baldwin Act and the Hincks Act. Hughes progresses with discussions of scholarship in the late Victorian era (and the rise of “higher criticism” that introduced comparative questions and analysis into the mix), as well as the important interventions of the Canadian Pacific Railway (which incorporated the US land-grant model of university-building) and the United Church of Canada (which centralized and diffused the erstwhile denominalization that governed theological studies). Additionally, he examines a couple of Canadian journals that illustrated some of the intellectual upheavals happening in scholarship about religion for the better part of the twentieth century, as well as the demographic shifts that characterized Canada in the 1960s and overhauled a theological vision of monoculturalism.

Undergirding these epochs in Canadian history is the connective tissue of conflict. Important battles were fought intellectually, ideologically, and politically in the process of securing the academic study of religion as it has come to be understood. The book’s central intervention comes in explaining how those understandings of the field were forged in specific fires particular to the Canadian nation-state that should not be confused with or consumed in those ablaze elsewhere, particularly in the US. Those debates were not distractions from the formation of the field; indeed, they were its pillars. As such, they deserve to be considered contextually. As Hughes suggests, “[W]e need to take seriously the various localized contexts in which modern nation-states come into existence simultaneously with the production of various discourses on religion. The anxieties generated as a result of this coexistence constantly reappear in the way religion is taught—where, by whom, to whom, and about what” (173–174).

Because this response is so brief, I will spend the rest of it highlighting just one of the many debates described in the book, cast it in relation to a contemporary vision of the American Academy of Religion as presented by its leadership, and look to a local example of a how nation-states might be thought otherwise in academic discourse and programming.

In order for “epistemic space…to be carved out” for a secular study of religion, “real intellectual battles would have to take place to force the structural changes required” (93). Even after the social and political upheavals that shaped the 1960s–1970s and Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s formal positioning of multiculturalism as governmental policy, ² the matter of how academic studies of religion should proceed was far from settled. This tumult is evident in one of the stories Hughes tells about the early years of the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses (SR), that manifested “[t]he anxiety over whether the new study of religion should be theological, objective, or some combination thereof” (145). Specifically, a debate emerged in the mid-1970s, prompted by Charles Davis’s provocation suggesting a reconvergence of theology and religious studies. Hughes pays particular attention to Donald Wiebe’s response, one that argued “that so-called methodologies used in the academic and ostensible secular study of religion have a propensity to fall back on the insider language and categories of theology” (147). While Wiebe was offering his critique within a specific context of the still-burgeoning academic discourse on religion, his point remains a useful one today. In so many ways the field seems to represent a changing same, with disputes continuing to play out about whether privileging insider rhetoric and perspectives constitutes progressive scholarship or crypto-theology.

We might think, then, about what debates are happening now, which never quite finished, and which likely need to happen still. For example, Laurie L Patton’s 2019 AAR Presidential Address, “‘And Are We Not of Interest to Each Other?’ A Blueprint for the Public Study of Religion,” asks, “What is a guild of scholars in 2020?” (640). Suggesting that “The city of the artisanal guild has been replaced by the continent of North America in the American Academy of Religion, with a more and more international bent and population and…multiple patrons” (640), Patton looks not to nation-state but to a more expansive sense of scholarly reach and service, inasmuch as the AAR mission statement now articulates a commitment to “the public understanding of religion.” This perspective, especially as issued at the helm of the field’s largest scholarly organization, surely invites a worthwhile debate that examines the possibilities and limits of theorizing new publics of “a more complex and contemporary guild” while maintaining the “American” moniker (640). Leaving alone questions regarding the power dynamics and methodological implications involved in public intellectualism, one might ask—with Hughes’s focus on nationalist discourses in mind—to what extent (or, at what point might) ambitious visions of re-examining public engagement present or impose a universalizing apparatus, collapsing a world of nuance within an American academy. Patton’s approach extracts religion from its specific contexts and elevates it as something whose importance we can agree upon before proceeding to locate “it” in this or that place. Hughes inverts that impulse, looking to the place in order to think about how the “it” is made and evolves over time. For my own part, I think that the specificity that Hughes’s study emphasizes through its contextual deep dive is extremely important and goes a long way toward facilitating the broader analytical questions—a better chicken–egg ordering, to my mind, than that of asking broad conceptual questions that presume a host of starting points and then looking to apply them into contexts that help reinforce our claims.

After all, multiculturalism on the order presumed in Patton’s appeal to “a poetics of a new public sphere” is never an easy destination or foregone conclusion (642). ³ Even if it were, the American signifier being left untroubled in the process is not an innocuous oversight. Indeed, multiculturalism and expanded visions of public reach are themselves reliant upon particular framings of nationalist ideology. Productive work lies in troubling such framings, engaging more directly in analysis not of a nation-state “itself” (the “what”) but of the mechanisms by which social and institutional realities are fashioned in its name (the “how”).

In the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, my colleagues’ approach to the grant-funded “American Examples” (AE) workshops we host for emerging and early-career scholars makes use of exactly that analytical shift. Calling something “American” does not offer a geospatial descriptor that says something useful on its face about what’s contained inside its borders. Instead, as the initiative’s webpage suggests, “AE approaches specific case studies of religion in America as opportunities for investigating larger theoretical questions.” ⁴ Little insight comes from shining interesting lights on traditions and group practices within national contexts themselves left untroubled. Instead, a little productive anxiety can go a long way. Demonstrating just some of the manifold ways in which “the study of religion—whether as theology or as religious studies ⁵ —has played a prominent role in the shaping of Canada,” Hughes helpfully removes the boundary between context and content, between origin and object of study (177). Pursuing questions in terms of “how” rather than of “what” provides a helpful way forward in a field framed so often as a transitive study of religion as a direct object. While a straightforward history can imply a “what,” Hughes’s project asks us to think of how that “what” came to be.

From Seminary to University showcases how intellectual anxieties also serve so much of the time as institutional engines. In so doing, it embraces the challenge of taking historical and national contexts seriously enough to accept and even pursue the occasions that they undermine received narratives about the past. In reference to African American literature and class analysis specifically, Kenneth Warren (2019) describes that challenge like this: “The task at hand…is not to try to produce an African American literature adequate to the current moment, but to recognize that any attempt to limn the contours of an African American literature—however one tries to define it—cannot escape being the incoherent, class-inflected project that such an effort has always been.” If this is true about race and class, the same goes for our productions of religion and nation. So, another way of putting that might be, “The task at hand…is not to try to produce religious studies adequate to the current moment, but to recognize that any attempt to limn the contours of an academic study of religion—however one tries to define it—cannot escape being the incoherent, nationalist project that such an effort has always been.” Or, put even more simply in the old swing standard, “It ain’t what you do. It’s the way that you do it.”