5. I owe this formulation to Yi Shen Ma.

6. I have argued elsewhere that the meaning of religion in this context has gradually expanded, but that
the newer pluralist imaginary finds itself in competi-

tion with competing visions, including that of Christian

America. See, for example, Secular State, Religious Nation? American Civil Religion and the Paradox of Democratic Belonging.

Speaking the Impossible No

Robert Anthony Orsi, Grace Craddock Nagle Professor of Catholic Studies, Northwestern University
r-orsi@northwestern.edu
doi:10.558/bsor.v43i1.7
For the past twenty years Talal Asads The Construction of Religion as an Authorizing Discourse
(1993) has been inevitably and regularlyby now
some might say exhaustinglypaired in seminars
on theory and method in the study of religion with
Clifford Geertzs Religion as a Cultural System
(1973). The conversation between the two thinkers, as students were encouraged to imagine it, attained the status of a canonical debate in the field.
The ostensible aim of this exercise was to think with
Geertz and Asad about the origins and contemporary usage of religion as a critical category, with
professors maintaining a pedagogically provocative
neutrality. But increasingly over time the real point
of the pairing was to deploy Asad to deconstruct
Geertz and with this to expose at last an entire way
of thinking about religion as it had developed in
the modern West since the seventeenth century for
exactly what it was. Religious studies as a discipline
embraced Asads essay as enthusiastically as it had
embraced Geertzs in the mid-1970s. The movement
from Geertz to Asad in this way tracks the inner history of the discipline of religious studies in the period.
One irony of the Asadian moment in the study of
religion is that Asad hit his mark aiming at the wrong
target. As many commentators and more than a few
of my students have pointed out over the years, Asad
does not do justice to Geertz. There is not enough
space here to review the question of Asads reading
of Geertz fully. Suffice it to say that Geertz was not
a symbolic anthropologist but a critic of this subfield
and developed his account of religion in explicit opposition to it; that he was not proposing a universal
theory of religion but instead offering a definition
. . . carefully enough constructed [to] provide a useVOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014

ful orientation, or reorientation, of thought, such that

an effective unpacking of [the definition] can be an
effective way of developing and controlling a novel
line of inquiry (1973, 90) to be empirically tested;
that he did not assume the thinking, imagining, understanding, and feeling dimensions of religion were
antecedent to practice but situated them in necessary
dialectical relationship with the relevant social environments out of which they arose and to which they
addressed themselves; that he was as fully interested
in bodies as he was in minds; and that while he did
not foreground the question of power he was not inattentive to it.
Asad frames Geertzs view of religion as post-Enlightenment in the sense that Geertzs supposedly
cognitive theory locates religion within the bounded
and authorized space liberal modernity allots to it.
But Geertz pointed beyond the paradigmatic move
of modern theories of religion, which is to make religion a function of something else, towards a view
of religion as constitutive of the social order. Finally,
by identifying the tension between the models of/models for aspects of religion, Geertz created a productive opening for further theoretical reflection in the
study of religion, for example on the role of religious
imaginaries in the interstices between the world as
it is found or imposed and the world as it is hoped
for or imagined. Much of what was exciting and innovative in religious studies in the 1980s and 1990s,
in particular the anthropological turn that so revitalized the discipline, may be traced back to Geertzs
inspiration.
***
This was not the Geertz of Asads chapter, however.
Largely as the result of Asads interpretation of him,
Geertz came to stand for the historical and ideoBULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 7

logical inheritances of which the discipline of religious studies was just then becoming aware. Using
Geertz as his foil, Asad showed how belief had
moved to the center of the study of religion in liberal modernity and how meaning-making became
religions primary function. It was this trenchant
critique that hit the mark. Genealogies of Religion:
Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam served as another reminder that the discipline
of religious studies could no longer proceed with a
complacent naivety about the history and politics of
its categories.
I especially appreciated that Asad developed his
critique of religion with reference to Catholic practice. I used Genealogies of Religion in classes to assist
in surfacing and exploring with students the deeply
embedded anti-Catholicism that I saw as fundamental to the making of the modern and contemporary
study of religion. Apparently scientific or descriptive
terms such as fetish, magic, or superstition
had their origins in Protestant polemics against Catholicism. The emergent modern study of religion,
whose early practitioners included amateurs, scholars, missionaries, archaeologists, pastors, and atheists, used this theoretical language to erect and police the borders between us/them, now/then, and
good/bad religion. All of these binaries were constructed around the Catholic other. Catholic ways of
being in and imagining the world were said by theorists of religion to be at odds with modernity, evidence of an enduring psychological primitivism
destined to pass away with the further development
of the species. Or at least some of the species: E.B. Tylor and others maintained that primitive peoples
had the capacity to outgrow this way of being in the
world whereas Catholics did not, thus making Catholics modernitys once and future primitives. The
academic study of religion had developed within an
ideological context that represented modern Protestantism as religion itself and designated this as the
authentic shape of humankinds religious past and
future. Homo Catholicus was the necessary counterpart to homo religiosus.
***
Nowhere was Asads challenge to the study of religion clearer than in his query, How does power create religion? (1993, 44). Asads answer was the notion of the authorizing discourse. Asad contrasted
the modern privileging of belief as an inward matter
of the autonomous subject with an account of the
8 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION

power and rationality he saw as intrinsic to the

formation of medieval Catholicism. Power ranged
over an enormous domain in the Catholic Middle
Ages, Asad wrote, a territory that included doctrine,
theology, canon law, specific types of Christian consciousness, the preconditions and effects of confession, and the locations and virtues of shrines
(1993, 3738). It comprised as well what might and
might not be experienced, by whom, when, and
where. To understand how this authorizing discourse achieved its end, which was the subjection
of all practice to a unified authority, to a single authentic source that could tell truth from falsehood
(1993, 38), scholars of medieval religion, Asad argued, must attend to the entire range of disciplinary activities, of institutional forms of knowledge
and practice, within which dispositions are formed
and sustained and through which the possibilities
of attaining the truth are marked out (1993, 50).
Religious knowledge is what the medieval Catholic religious subject was disciplined to know within
structures of authority.
Asad insisted he was not introducing a new theory of religion, but this is how he was read. The key
question of religious analysis, in Asads account, had
to do not with the meanings men and women made
as they contended with existential dilemmas (pain,
death, and evil, for instance) but with the discursive
regimes that created these meanings and beliefs. Religious believers were recast as religious subjects
constituted by disciplines of mind and body. The
mind of the religious practitioner did not move
spontaneously to truth, Asad wrote. It is power
that creates the conditions for experiencing that
truth (1993, 35). Ways of thinking do not precede
the workings of power. They are the products of it.
Genealogies of Religion encouraged a greater attentiveness to forms of religion other than those sanctioned within the modern paradigm and to ways of
being religious other than those organized around
normative antinomies such as autonomy/submission, empowerment/disempowerment, and interior/exterior. This is why as a scholar of Catholicism
(or as a scholar who thinks about religion and culture
from the perspective of Catholicism as practiced and
Catholicism as polemically constructed by Catholics and others) I read Asad with such enthusiasm.
Genealogies of Religion aligned with my project of
evolving out of the study of Catholicism theoretical challenges that might speak back to reigning noVOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014

tions of religion in such a way as to move beyond

unreflexive and normative liberal understandings of
agency; for example, in discussing womens relationship with the Virgin Mary.
The problem in my view is not that scholars of religion took critical perspectives on Catholic practice;
rather, the problem is that unexamined assumptions
about the nature of religious practice and religious
subjectivities shaped by an unacknowledged antiCatholic inheritance in the field impeded further theoretical inquiry and critical self-reflexivity and narrowed the range of questions that might be asked. It
also made it difficult for the discipline to approach
the religious practices of most of the planet, which
invariably have greater phenomenological affinity
with Catholic idioms (as countless missionaries have
discovered) than they do with Protestant modernity,
without translating them into its normative and anxious categories.
***
At the same time I cannot help but see in talk of authorizing discourses the reproduction of the old dichotomy in the study of religion between those who
think (us) and those whose religious lives are about
embodied practice, disciplined bodies, materiality,
and authority (them). In such theories of religion
as constituted by discursive regimes, the various
mental activities, conscious and unconscious, of ordinary people in their everyday worlds matter only
as indices of social power. Religious practitioners
need not be consulted; it is enough to know the discourses within which they are both constituted and
function as religious subjectivities. Thus the familiar
hierarchy between mind and body, between those
who think and those who act, is reinscribed in the
study of religion. Religious studies is a field always
in danger of losing its subject matter to its methods
and ideologies, and it is inevitably drawn to theories
that endorse this abandonment. The greatest irony
of the discursive turn is that it reproduces the very
idealist view of religion it set out to deconstruct. If
in the earlier Protestant/modernist regime religious
practitioners disappeared into their own interiority,
this time around they disappear into the operations
of power and discourse.
But religions are as much about thinking, imagining, reflecting, and dreaming as they are about discipline and power, and these activities of the embodied
mind, at various levels of consciousness, are never
fully or securely in the grasp of power nor do they
VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014

exist completely within the limits of discourse. Religious imaginaries are outside, inside, at the border,
to borrow psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicotts
famous phrase (1971, 2). The Catholic imaginary
includes ideas about God (theological conceptions
forever changing over time in response to different
life circumstances); memorized and internalized
prayers; catechetical questions and answers; stories
of the saints and of family members and the saints;
visions and imaginings; memories; things barely apprehended or fleetingly glimpsed; improvisations
and misunderstandings; and inconsistencies. The
activities of the embodied Catholic imaginary take
place on a crowded, extended field of interpersonal
relationships, real and imagined, on earth and between heaven and earth. The self that imagines and
thinks is multiple, knowing and experiencing itself
only in relation to others and only in ways that are
transient, fleeting, contingent and partial.
There are two points to be underscored here. First,
granted that power plays a role in the creation of
religion, this act of creation is never direct, untroubled, or complete. Second, saying that power creates
religion gets us only to the beginning of the discussion, for then we have to ask what becomes of religion thus constituted by power. What is its unfolding
fate in the world? Theoretical inquiry into religions
social, political, and psychological destinies ought
not to be constructed around polaritiesstructure/
agency, subject/object, mind/body, resistance/submission, the autonomous subject/the fully constituted subjectbut dialectically, as Geertz among others suggested, so that what we study is the fraught
and unpredictable movement in the seams between
these polarities along with whatever social and psychological factors make such movement possible in
some social and historical circumstances and not in
others and at different kinds of cost to the humans
involved.
***
An episode from fieldwork I have been doing recently among adult survivors of childhood clerical sexual abuse in the United States provides an empirical
context for elaborating what I mean here. As part of a
larger project on modern Catholic childhoods, I have
been meeting for nearly two years now with a group
of men and women, all of them over fifty years old,
who have been coming together on the third Monday
of every month since the late 1990s to support and
encourage each other. They offer mutual recognition
BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 9

of each others abuse by priests, of its enduring consequences, and of their struggles and achievements.
The group exemplifies the truth that we come to
knowledge of ourselves only via the detour to the
other. I attend these meetings every month and meet
with individual members at other times. Several
people in the group are secondary survivors who
were not sexually abused but became victims of the
efforts of Catholic authorities to cover up the crimes
and punish those who exposed them.
One of the women in this latter category took pains
at our first meeting to inform me that once upon a
time and for many years she had been a conservative Catholic. Brenda, as I will call her, described
herself as following all the rules of the tradition
for most of her life. Brenda was recognized at the
Catholic college she attended for her piety and devotion. She went to Mass daily and was active in the
Catholic prolife movement, a clear sign in a liberal
academic environment of her being a good and obedient daughter of the church. Brenda embraced this
identity. She exemplified, in other words (but not
in her words), the religious subject as constituted
by structures of discipline, authority, and power.
Church doctrine determined what she thought;
what she knew to be true; and what she judged good
or bad. She lived fluently but definitely within these
limits. She held leadership positions in her parish;
sent her children to Catholic school; read avidly in
Catholic theology, doctrine, and spirituality. Her Catholicism was deeply embodied by a repertoire of
corporal disciplines, among them saying the rosary,
making frequent confessions, and practicing daily
devotions. Brenda was not much different from the
medieval Catholics Asad describes.
Then came the crisis. When two girls in her parish disclosed that they had been sexually abused by
one of the priests assigned there, Brenda set out, as
a parish leader, to mobilize the church in support
of the girls, to show them love, in her words, and
openly to acknowledge the priests wrongdoing.
Brenda was quickly marked as a pariah in the parish and neighborhood. Fellow parishioners wrote
derogatory and hurtful things about her body (she
is a little overweight) on a website she and a friend
created to express solidarity with the girls. This persistent and rude commentary on her body seemed
intended to disembody Brenda as a Catholic and reembody her a physically unattractive, even sloppy
woman subject to her uncontrollable and undisci10 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION

plined appetites. The pastor forced her out of all the

positions she had held for many years in the parish.
A regime of silence and denial was imposed on the
parish. It extended even to what might be said to
God in prayer before the assembled congregation.
One Sunday at the parishs main Eucharist soon after the girls had come forward, Brenda and a friend
very respectfully offered a petition for the girls
wellbeing during the time of the liturgy reserved for
common prayer (known as the Prayer of the Faithful). The next day the pastor prohibited the public
expression of personal intentions ever again during
Mass.
The reason Brenda was so profoundly dismayed
by the hostile response of her fellow parishioners
was that she believed it was the faith she shared
with them that had led her to her sense of shared
responsibility for the abused girls in the first place.
She was moved to act by her Catholic formation. As
Brenda put it, Arent we as Christians supposed to
want to live in the light? Not to stand with the girls
was unforgiveable. In her eyes, then, Brenda found
herself being punished and ostracized for her faithfulness to church doctrines and in particular Christs
call to love and protect children. Now a crisis in the
community had become an inner one as well and the
authorizing discourse lost its power of compulsion.
Brenda no longer goes to church. The survivors she
meets with once a month are her worship community, she says.
Not long ago the pastor who had silenced public
prayer consecrated an Adoration Chapel for the parish. Adoration Chapels are part of the movement in
contemporary Catholicism to revive pre-Vatican II
para-liturgical devotions. The consecrated Host is
exposed in the Adoration Chapel in a golden monstrance; this permits an especially intimate encounter with Christ really present. Many Catholics describe prayer in this setting as extraordinarily sweet
and profoundly moving; many survivors, including
Brenda, felt this way too, once, about the exposed
presence, but now they suspect such piety as being
part of a larger plan to revive a spirit of uncritical
obedience and submission to the church in the wake
of the sexual abuse crisis.
A friend talked Brenda into visiting the chapel.
Brenda had been a devout and pious Catholic, after
all, and her friend thought this devotional renewal might appeal to her (perhaps because this other
woman knows that the disciplined body remains
VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014

Catholic even in opposition to the mind and heart

that reject the church). But the sight of people prostrating themselves before the exposed Host, as is the
custom, was upsetting to Brenda and made her so
angry that she turned her back on the real presence
and stormed out. Then she added an unexpected
coda in her account of this incident to me. There was
probably an unconsecrated Host in the monstrance
anyway, she said. Why would the priest do this, I
asked her. Because he is that sort of priest, she answered, leaving just unspoken the judgment that
this may also be the kind of illusion Catholicism is.
The betrayal of what she knew in her body to be
the truth of her Catholicism, first by the actions of the
sexually abusive priest, then by the dioceses failure
to respond, finally by the congregations determination to deny the predator-priests guilt, which added
another level to the girls pain, brought Brenda to
this pass. She does not explicitly deny the real presence. Perhaps her formation does not permit her to
go this far, which is very far indeed even for an exCatholic. But Brenda suspects there is absence in the
place of presence.
One of the challenges of the study of religion is to
identify the events, circumstances, and relationships
in particular times and places that unsettle the givenness of religious worlds and thrust practitioners into
a certain kind of space, neither inside nor outside,
where they are compelled to rethink and reimagine
religious givens and where the religion in their bodies becomes experientially intolerable. This is not an
absolutely free space. Is the body ever fully liberated
from its formations? But circulations of power have
been short-circuited. Authorizing discourses break
down, from within and without, and the breaking
down offers the dangerous and unsettling opportunity for reimagining the world in new ways. Or not.
Noting her inability to see the good in any religion,
another survivor told me (in what seems to be an
unconscious allusion to The Wizard of Oz), Its like
watching the Technicolor go out of something . . .
[until] its all gray.
Brenda was not an autonomous subject acting in
resistance to authority (as she would have acknowledged). Her resistance arose within the tradition and
was expressed in its language, as she recognized.
This was precisely the problem. The network of relationships on earth and between heaven and earth
that had sustained her for so long had frayed and
she was forced to find a way to live without them,
VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014

but at the same time it was within this network that

she worked out her resistance and that she still lives.
Among the relationships that faltered was her relationship with God. Brenda says now she no longer
believes in the God she had believed in before the
crisis, yet at the same time she says she finds God
in the company of survivors of clerical abuse. God
is neither fully real to her nor fully not, a potent ambivalence she struggles to live with.
I believe discursive, structuralist or constructivist
theories of religion must also account for the circumstances of their undoing. Brenda is saying an impossible no to a structure that one critiques but inhabits
intimately, to quote Gyatri Spivaks elegant phrase
(1999, 191). The holy as Brenda knew it in her body
and mind becomes the ground of the dissenting and
resisting imagination. This no was not created by
the tectonic movement of the plates of power, but
by the encounter of Brenda, a person formed within
a particular religious traditionwhich is to say a
thinking, imagining, feeling, envisioning person never fully constituted by powerwith the realities of
her social world as these had become intolerable to
her because of her formation within that tradition.
There is not much to celebrate here, if one were looking for an occasion to exult in the autonomous subject, or at least this is not how I would see it. Brendas
decision occurs in the register of the tragic, which is
to say it occurs in the inevitable register of everyday
life. The tragic is not synonymous with power. Humans are at different times both subjects and objects
of their worlds, and most of the times, and at some
times more than others, most of us know this in our
flesh and bones if not in our theory.

References
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: The
John Hopkins University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected
Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Spivak, Gyatri. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 11