Donovan Schaefer’s Religious Affects is an important book, rendering helpful therapy for some of the myopic methodological tendencies that can afflict the field of religious studies. Rather than pursuing a kind of intellectual scorched-earth policy, however, Schaefer’s theoretical admonishments are circumspect. He seeks to stretch and reimagine the intellectual horizons of the discipline, adding to our conceptual repertoire and broadening our collective field of vision on religion, rather than pretending that all theory that has come before should now be jettisoned in favor of some new panacea for all our field’s ills.

There are two points about Religious Affects on which I will focus. Both provide opportunities to highlight some of what I regard as Schaefer’s most valuable contributions, and to pose what I hope will be productive questions for both him and his readers.

Beyond the Linguistic Turn

First, Schaefer must be thanked for helping to herd theory in religious studies past the linguistic turn. Far too often, religious studies has succumbed to methodological monomania, a contagious malady within the academy. The condition arises when a new theoretical approach gains traction and gathers a sufficient number of adherents who construe that approach as the definitive paradigm for the study of a given subject, in need of neither supplementary concepts from other approaches or disciplines nor future refinement of its own assumptions or foundations. Symptoms include not only the explicit and sometimes a priori rejection of other paradigms, but a blinkered understanding of the subject matter, artificially tailored to the contours of an unnecessarily rigid theory.

The “linguistic fallacy,” as Schaefer calls it, has been just such a sickness in the study of religion. Back in 1988, Sallie B. King warned of the detrimental effects of the condition, specifically with regard to the study of mysticism, writing that the infatuation with language “reduces mystical experience to mystical language for reasons of methodological convenience.”1 As Religious Affects makes clear, however, the problem instantiated by the linguistic strain of methodological monomania is not merely an artificially delimited view of mystical experience, or even religion more broadly, but a truncated view of the human subject. Schaefer consistently challenges the self-serving and politically-laden view of humans as essentially linguistic, troubling the (for some) comforting fantasy that we are fundamentally different from other animals. He shines a spotlight on the array of non-discursive ways that we are situated in networks of power that act not merely by cognitive means, but via affective channels flowing through us every moment of every day.

I am grateful to Schaefer for complicating the resilient perspective that insists on shoe-horning all that constitutes the human engagement with the world into a linguistic box (a box that cannot help but bloat and distend, anyway). Schaefer should also be complimented, however, for resisting the temptation to throw the linguistic baby out with the monomaniacal bathwater, choosing instead to position his contribution as a helpful complication of and addition to—rather than a replacement of—more cognitively- and linguistically-inclined approaches. “The social-rhetorical method,” Schaefer writes, “and other linguistic models for religion are indispensable components of the religion theorist’s toolkit. Affect theory adds to the critique of power by supplementing the linguistic turn, not erasing it.”2 Rather than reinscribing yet another form of theoretical essentialism, Schaefer seeks to productively complicate our understandings of religion and animals’ production and experience of it, fleshing it out in ways that render it both more subtle and supple.

One question that I would like to pose with regard to this dimension of Schaefer’s program is the following: is the linguistic fallacy only or primarily about power? At various moments in Religious Affects, Schaefer seems to suggest that the linguistic fallacy is primarily a mistake in how the operations of power are conceived, defining it at one point as “the myth that the medium of power is language.”3 This would seem to suggest that the primary benefit of moving beyond the linguistic turn is the capacity to perceive alternative modalities of the operations of power. At other moments, though, Schaefer suggests a broader conception of the linguistic fallacy—for instance, when he questions “the humanistic notion that language is necessary for depth, complexity, and power.”4 Phrased thus, moving beyond the linguistic turn would seem to mean not only discerning additional modes of power’s operations on us, but something bigger—a broader phenomenology that reenvisions the importance of affect not just in terms of power, but in terms of humanity’s entire engagement with the world.

In my own attempts to wrestle past the linguistic turn, I have fallen back on the much-maligned term “experience,” a term that Schaefer seems to avoid in Religious Affects.5 I am not invested in arguing that “experience” is preferable to terms such as “depth” or “complexity” (both of which strike me as quite fitting)—that issue is trivial at best in comparison to the importance of Schaefer’s effort to complement the overarching cognitive-linguistic trend in religious studies scholarship with an affective-animalistic one. I am curious, however, as to what language (irony intended) Schaefer thinks would be best to describe the broadened perspective he constructs for us. Once we move beyond language, how could we best refer to that wider domain of human activity to which he would like us to attend, a domain that—if I understand him correctly—is meant to include both affect and language? Does the term “power” capture all that Schaefer thinks is important here? Is the term “experience” laden with too much baggage? Or, do we need new terms, perhaps like “depth” and “complexity,” in order to map out this new terrain?

Insights or Obfuscations?

Schaefer’s reinstantiation of the affective and his repudiation of the ubiquity of language are welcome revisions to the shape of religious studies methodology. It seems possible, though, that these positions could provoke familiar objections.

The discourse of experience and references to subjective, interior states have been criticized as obscurantist moves, allegedly rendering dimensions of religion impervious to scholarly inquiry. Such accusations have a history in religious studies scholarship. Wayne Proudfoot makes this kind of charge in his 1985 Religious Experience, specifically with regard to the category of “experience.”6 Similarly, Russell McCutcheon complains that the use of “beliefs, meanings, experiences, and impulses” as explanations functions to obfuscate the social forces that interpellate subjects.7

In the current scholarly climate, the predominance of social theory has resulted in a pervasive skepticism concerning even the implication of privacy or references to interiority. Such claims are sometimes regarded not merely as mistaken, but as aiding and abetting the insidious power of social forces to surreptitiously form and influence subjects.8 Even Stephen Bush—whose recent Visions of Religion challenges the regnant theoretical orthodoxy of religious studies in numerous ways—is not willing to counter the ubiquity and near-omnipotence of the social, insisting simply that “religion [is] a social practice.”9

In this context, Schaefer might make himself vulnerable to charges of obscurantism at moments like the following:

Although affect theory’s introduction of biological accounts and deprioritizing of structures of intentionality could be seen as opening doors to hard determinism, affect is much better understood as sketching bodies that are much more complex, much fuzzier, and all around less predictable than determinist or adaptationist models accommodate.10

Schaefer’s position is a moderate one. He is not simply rejecting the logics of Darwinian evolution and social theory tout court. There are degrees to which behavior—human and non-human, individual and collective—are guided by knowable forces and precedents, and therefore not only explicable but predictable. Schaefer is too circumspect a thinker to deny this. But he is also skeptical that any such logic or combination of logics can bestow omniscience. There is a degree to which the affective dimension of behavior renders all animals partially inexplicable and somewhat unpredictable. We will always be capable of surprising ourselves.

Chapter 6—entitled “Accident”—begins with a discussion of the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s meditations on the seemingly strange behavior of the coyotes who howl outside of his Maine cabin at night. Dennett wonders at the behavior, which would seem to reduce their chances of survival: why advertise their position to potential predators, or frighten off potential prey? He assumes, however, that the behavior must serve some adaptive function—the coyotes’ behavior must be rationally explicable. Schaefer, however, muses:

But what if [the coyotes’ howling] is an accident? . . . What if rather than an attempt to get ahead in a rational economy, coyote song is a by-product of an affective economy? . . . What if, rather than a cui bono, it is a bonus, a windfall, an accident of landscape? What if, rather than a steady striving in a sharply organized meritocracy, it is, perhaps, a glitch, an inassimilable remainder emerging out of a shape-shifting accidentocracy? What if they didn’t do it to survive, reproduce, or get ahead, but because they felt like it?11

Schaefer’s closing question—“what if . . . they felt like it?”—feels almost impertinent, brazen in its refusal to bow to the expectations of pure theoretical transparency and rational lucidity. And that, likely, is the point. Schaefer means to question the assumption that one or another logic—rational choice theory, natural selection, social theory, or some combination thereof—will necessarily be able to explain behavior in its entirety. Without rejecting it entirely, Schaefer deploys some healthy skepticism about Enlightenment-inflected presumptions of the final transparency of things to rationality.

A bit of healthy skepticism is almost always, of course, a good thing. As I suggested, however, I would not be surprised if Schaefer’s efforts in this regard are met with cries of “obscurantism” and “mystification”—charges that he is protecting some corner of human behavior or niche of religion in the attempt to preserve it from the denuding and demystification of the scholarly gaze.

I am not convinced that the kind of skepticism Schaefer expresses is necessarily protectionist. As King suggested back in 1988, it would be preferable to admit that some phenomena or aspects thereof remain beyond our theoretical reach than to indulge in willful misrepresentations for the sake of method.12 If Schaefer is correct that affects will, to some degree, remain forever intransigent to our rationalizing inquiries, it would be best to acknowledge this, rather than to comfort ourselves with illusions that misconstrue the nature of things. I wonder, though, how far Schaefer is willing to go in defending this claim: to what degree does affect name a dimension of behavior that will and must remain ultimately inexplicable? And if it is the case that affect will always resist our demands for transparency, why is that so?

Affect Theory and White Supremacy Domination1

W. E. B. Du Bois begins his celebrated treatise The Souls of Black Folks as follows:

Between me and the other world, there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half- hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, “How does it feel to be a problem?” they say, “I know an excellent colored man in my town;” or, “I fought at Mechanicsville;” or, “Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?” At these, I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” I answer seldom a word.

How does it feel to be a problem? Du Bois spends the entirety of Souls attempting to answer this very question. Du Bois, like many social scientists, framed this examination of inter- and intra-racial conflict from the perspective of Euro-American white culture, the dominant culture in the United States. Generations of black academics have continued this trend in part because it is necessary to attain employment; we must frame our work such that white people (or white academe) can digest it. This framing is often done unconsciously given that, as post-colonial theorist Franz Fanon noted decades ago, the modern paradigm of academic training for people of color is designed to produce “colonized intellectuals.”2 Moreover, until the presidential election this past November, I too framed my work so that it could be digested by white people, my writing did not challenge the underlying problem of our society—white domination and its subversion of justice.

The invitation to write a response to Donovan Schaefer’s Religious Affects has given me the opportunity to continue rectifying my mistake, and I am grateful for this possibility. Schaefer’s text is an examination of how human-animal affects might inform our understanding of what we call religion. After reading Religious Affects and being (1) convinced of the importance of the affective turn in religious studies and (2) excited by the depth of his description of the embodied nature of racialization, two thoughts came to mind. First, the bodily technologies that emerge within white people when they create and defend their racial identity and cultural dominance seem similar to some of the bodily technologies that emerge when we practice “religion” as it is commonly understood. In this way, affect theory enables us to explore how the unconscious practice of white dominance can feel religious, and therefore feel like the right and normal way of being in the world. In this way, as black theologian Howard Thurman noted in regards to the white oppression of black people: “if normal, then correct; if correct, then moral; if moral, then religious.”3 Second, Schaefer’s arguments on race and affect immediately brought me back to Du Bois’s question and the necessity of asking it of white people as it relates to the affective dimension of racism and white domination—how does it feel to be a problem?

Our minds are often drawn to extremist positions when thinking about race, racialization, and religion; the Ku Klux Klan and the use of Christianity to justify the oppression of blacks and people of Jewish descent; or Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s critique of the German Lutheran Church’s complicity in Hitler’s Reich. It is helpful to examine religion and racial oppression in light of extremes such as these, and yet, if we limit our exploration of religion and racial oppression to extremist examples would not we be falling prey to Schaefer’s linguistic fallacy? The linguistic fallacy, as he defines it, “misunderstands religion as merely a byproduct of language, and misses the economies of affect.”4 In this way, affect theory helps us move past extremist positions to explore the way lived religion among whites generates economies of affect which produce bodily technologies that enable and encourage the oppression of minoritized people to continue. Rather than studying extremists, I contend that it would be more beneficial to explore the religious worlds of regular white people, particularly those who believe they are not prejudiced toward people of color. In other words, the vast majority of white people.

You may be wondering, “How can practicing white dominance feel like practicing an embodied religious belief?” Schaefer offers a helpful example in the Christian group he profiles in his chapter “Teaching Religion, Emotion, and Global Cinema.” In the documentary film Jesus Camp, we see Becky Fischer and other leaders of the Christian camp teaching the children at the camp what it “feels like to be us.” Through her use of the pedagogy of affect, the “us” that Fischer constructs is an us that is rooted in the base qualities of the virtue of courage, the extremes of excessive fear and excessive confidence. In this way, she teaches the students to live in fear of losing their identity as “true believers” because temptations in the form of practices that are not consistent with their religious ideology are everywhere. Simultaneously she teaches the students to feel confident in and be willing to fight for the freedom to feel confident and domineering in how they practice their religion. When considered in light of colonial and settler Christianity (i.e., the type of Christianity that the majority of Christians unknowingly still practice) which misused Christian teachings to elevate whiteness over and above people of color, the distinguishing lines between the affective economies produced by white domination and those produced by this type of Christian practice are at best blurred, and at worst almost identical. If Schafer is correct in his assertion that racialization is more contagious through affects than through discourse, then it is in spaces such as these where the experience of white dominance begins to feel religious as such.

Affect theory allows us to move beyond a difference in phenotype and to take seriously the realm of affect in regards to race. Indeed, to be an insider, to be white, is to feel a certain kind of way about yourself relative to others. I agree with Schaefer that racialization is not just about race, it is also an “attempt to disdain an outsider—national, religious, class—as savage.”5 This barrier between human and savage has historically been understood as being both the melanin differential between white people and people of color and the elevation of Christianity above all other religions. The affective turn in religious studies deconstructs this myth that European/settler religion (Catholicism and Protestantism) as it has been handed down to white people is the perfect conversion of religion and reason. Schaefer uses affect theory to explain how the production of white religion and consequently white dominance is itself a global, animal process.6 As such, within the framework of white dominance, I argue that full humanity is only available to those classes of whites who have the capacity to exercise the social, economic, and political autonomy that white dominance has defined as normative. In this way, whiteness is perhaps best understood as what Schaefer describes as a cruel optimism: “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object, an attachment that in some way stands in the way of itself.”7 In this way, whiteness is a cruel optimism because within the worldview of white dominance, the majority of whites, along with people of color, are best categorized as savages.

To be sure, this does not mean that white people understand themselves to be savages or feel as though they are in fact savages. The affective economies produced by the practice of white dominance seem to be strong enough and feel religious enough that they are unable to see how upholding white dominance undermines the confidence and freedom they long to feel through their affects. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse argues that under a repressive regime freedom “can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. . . . Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”8 If Marcuse is correct, as I believe he is, then this is how whiteness and the seemingly religious affects white dominance produces can be understood as cruel optimisms, the quest for whiteness and the perpetuation of white dominance prevents most white people from attaining it. As such, the pursuit of the affects that whiteness and practicing white dominance promise to provide secure un-freedom for all people, including the majority of white people.

I am not arguing that all white people don’t benefit from white domination. However, the majority of white people only get to feel the psychic and psychological benefits of white domination, and only a small minority get to experience the full measure of these benefits. The affective economies produced by these racialized feelings could be understood as what Schaefer, borrowing from Sharon Holland, describes as the “erotic life of racism,” a dimension of racism that “flourishes not because of ignorance or lack of information, but because of a set of compulsions that drive bodies to generate and police the boundaries of their social worlds.”9 In this way, despite the unfulfilled promises of white domination, the erotic life of racism enables the production of economies of affect that encourage white people (and people of color) to maintain the system of white domination because it feels right, it feels like the common sense thing to do.

Rather than ending this brief essay in the stereotypical doom-and-gloom fashion, or the Marley-esque everything-is-gon-be-alright placation, I would like to discuss an area of hope that I found in Schaefer’s analysis of the religious and affective dimensions of racism. I found hope in his description of the economies of affect produced by racialization as erotic. Although, as I will describe below, following black feminist Audre Lorde, in regards to racism I believe that pornographic rather than erotic is a more accurate term. Lorde defines the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”10 Moreover, once we have “experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling [the erotic] and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”11 Conversely, pornography emphasizes sensation without true feeling and thus suppresses and denies the power of the erotic.12 It is in this way that the affective dimension of racism is better understood as pornographic rather than erotic. The pornographic life of racism becomes an answer to Schaefer’s second and deeper question about the relationship between affect and ideology: What do we do for affects?13

The affective economies produced by the practice of white dominance discourage the oppressor from truly feeling the pain and suffering they are causing themselves and others. The vast majority of white people are instead encouraged to be satisfied with the affective sensations produced by the psychic and psychological dimensions of white dominance. As in all forms of pornography, white people must be awakened to the fact that what is bringing them pleasure is not actually real, i.e., you are not really dominating in the way that you think you are even though you feel otherwise. Moreover, like pornography, racism severely handicaps our ability to have an intimate relationship with ourselves and others because we lose the capacity to discern between what is real and what is imagined, or what has been created to feel as though it is real.

The invitation to experience the affective dimension of race as erotic is an invitation to feel in such a way that we become aware of how our affective economies around race actually impact our actions and how our actions effect the others. As Lorde notes, the erotic is not a “question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”14 Using the power of the erotic to feel in this way requires courage and demands an intimacy, vulnerability, and compassion toward the self. The erotic enables us to share deeply with other persons and “forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and, lessens the threat of their difference.”15

Racial difference has been and continues to be a threat to white people since European colonial expansion. As such, racism was created by whites for white domination over other racialized groups and in this way it is a problem that can only be solved by white people. To be sure, there has been an increased intellectual awareness of the fact that white people need to play a larger role in dismantling racism and I believe that many (likely the majority of) whites consider themselves to be in solidarity with people of color. However, the education and economic gaps, mass incarceration, and the general devaluing of black and brown lives tell another story. The problem, I believe, is that people tend to intellectualize race and view it as either a human construct or genetic fate. Race as an intellectual construct enables white people to have the privilege of avoiding developing the capacity to feel race in the ways that people of color have to feel it every day of our lives. As such, I believe that white people developing the capacity to feel their racialization is among the most important steps in our pursuit of developing an anti-oppressive society. For whites, then, exploring the affective dimension of race as erotic rather than pornographic opens up the possibility of fashioning an accurate answer to the real question on racism and white domination posed by Du Bois over one hundred years ago. How does it feel to be the problem? Until such time as the majority of white people can answer this question, our pursuit of an anti-oppressive society will be handicapped.

Is effect the correct/intended usage here?

The title of Donovan Schaefer’s book gives the impression that one is going to learn a great deal about animal religion. But despite the enriching examples of primate rituals (chimpanzees dancing at the base of a waterfall), the main tenet of the book is not nonhuman religion per se, but the very animality of the human religion itself. The author provokes the reader by suggesting a shift in focus from text to affect. This poses a profound critique to current religious studies, which has hitherto been mainly concerned with belief and transcendence as the ultimate elements of religiosity reserved uniquely for human beings with cognition. Schaefer undertakes the ambition to implement—or at least offer for consideration—an “animal turn” within the field of religious studies. This would add on to the “linguistic turn” while going beyond language, which he considers to be just one element of religion among many others—and definitely not the most privileged.

One of the main arguments of the book is that “religion, like other forms of power, feels before it thinks, believes or speaks” (8). Religion is therefore definitely more than a way of thinking, or conceptualising. But what, then, is religion? Schaefer admits honestly that he does not know, but what he knows and convincingly argues for is that the answer to this very question can only be provided through an understanding (even feeling?) of affects. In that vein, he sketches a thorough consideration of the two traditions within affect theory: the Deleuzian understanding of affect, on the one hand, which emphases the “autonomy of affect” in the singular, and phenomenological/feminist affect theories, on the other hand, which treat affects in the plural—necessarily akin to emotions, feelings and sensations. He embraces the second conception of affects as articulations of feelings and emotions, hence the title—religious affects—in the plural. The animal affects, argues Schaefer, constitute a semi-stable phenomenological structure of embodiment that emerges out of the deep history of an expansive evolutionary dynamic, longue durée historical developments (which the author names culture), as well as singular experiences, memories and histories of subjects within a lifetime.

One of the strengths of Schaefer’s book is the fitting empirical analyses that accompany his enriching theoretical insights. Relying on theories by Sara Ahmed and Teresa Brennan, he tackles the documentary film Jesus Camp as an example of affective pedagogy. Pedagogy, in Schaefer’s usage, means that proximity enables the transmission of affects that circulate through bodies. For Brennan, senses—olfactory, tactile, sonic, or visual—play a crucial role in transforming the body when it enters the atmosphere. Ahmed builds upon Brennan’s idea of “atmospheres,” but shifts the emphasis from passivity to the active role of the body in making and reshaping them. To Schaefer the bodily movements in the documentary are expressions of affects—for instance, religious shame—that are part of the vivid religious architecture of the space. The affects in the movie are shown to be both intransigent and pedagogical. Jesus Camp affectively informs not only the evangelical religious camp but also the postsecular, which invokes competing but equally intense feelings. The film also challenges the idea that white Protestant religion is self-containing and rational, when the rest of the world dances—like an animal.

Another important example Schaefer treats is the Ground Zero Mosque controversy in the United States and the hate economy created around this event. In the entire controversy, Islam becomes the site for the creation and distribution of affects within the language of a religious war between “Judeo-Christianity” vs. “Islam.” Schaefer describes it as “erotics of racialization,” a site where anti-Muslim groups savour their hatred and desires. The examples of Pamela Geller (a Jewish woman opposing the Ground Zero Mosque) and Terry Jones (an Islamophobic preacher, who organises Quran burnings) are, according to Schaefer, driven by animal religions more than ideologies. It is interesting and illuminating to see the references to primate war-like behaviors and moral sentiments as affective compulsions that prevail in recent racist desires. But although the book underlines over and over the importance of both evolutionary and material historical and individual roots of affects, it is surprising to see almost no historical references to centuries-old Christian prejudices against Muslims or to the recent history of Nation of Islam in the United States that certainly contribute to the making of the semi-stable phenomenological embodiments of the “Muslim Question” and Islamophobia in the West. Is racialisation not also as much in the embodied culture of the American nation, or necessarily in all nations, as it is within the animal religion?

The evolutionary biology plays a pivotal role in the way Schaefer conceives of religion, namely not primarily linguistic, textual or cognitive but rather embodied, animal and affective. Contrary to some evolutionary theorists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who construct evolution as intelligent, efficient, and rational, the author turns to post-Darwinian biologists, such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, who take up “another” Darwin less known to the public. Darwin himself, states Schaefer, believed that natural selection may be one strong component of evolution, but definitely not the only one. Evolution is a historical and accidental process that can in no way be demonstrated or traced back with perfection.

At this point Schaefer follows Elizabeth Grosz in drawing attention to sexual selection, a process shaped by compulsions, nonreason, and contingency. Evolution is a partial accident and the source of the accident is affective. There does not have to be a “reason” for why we do what we do. Our bodies repeat the accidents of landscapes, which made them. Power is not intelligent, neither controllable. “Religious affects are not random, but they are accidental” (177). According to the author, like art, dance, and play, which has no purpose or use, religion is pre-linguistic and part of a constant dance. Going beyond a mere metaphor, dance enables Schaefer to capture the embodied experience based on history and evolution that is beyond and above, before and under language at the same time. In that sense, dance becomes life itself, as well as our experiences of a particular time and space. Schaefer explains the dance of the chimpanzees as a dance of emotion, of awe, whose roots are in evolutionary biology. According to him, we carry a biophilia for the landscapes, which may have been prompted by survival needs at the outset, but after being carried through our embodied histories as affective compulsions has been “replaced by awkward economies—sliding, queer economies of affect” (197). Science, signification and language become also part of the human dance that we have in our bodies. This dance can happen to be a dance (in the sense we understand it) but can also remain an invisible dance where bodies moved by compulsion move through affects.

Although I find most of the propositions and theoretical undertakings of the author very innovative and rather convincing, I had difficulties understanding the “religious” character of the economies of affect with respect to racism for instance in the United States. It is all the more puzzling when we consider Schaefer’s own reading of Islamophobia as a form of racialisation. It seems like everybody is animal and religious at the same time according to the author. Can we then talk about the affectivities of a particular realm—namely the “religious”—when it’s completely mingled with the “political,” even in the case that we follow the internal logic of genuine religious affects? I could not stop wondering if the religious character of this affective controversy actually reposes on the supposed Christian roots of universalism as the basis not only of human rights but of the nation state (Badiou 1997). Or were the seeds of racism planted by the Christian missionaries first in the colonies (Stoler 1995)? Or is it that the racialized just happened to be Muslims as Islam at times “gets to be called a religion” yet at times considered a wholly political project? Although Schaefer does not explicitly refer to the (in)famous Schmittian argument that all political concepts are secularised theological concepts, might he be arguing that all political struggles are at the same time religious (and thus animal) struggles?

Schaefer’s clever selection of the primates—and not the dolphins or elephants whose practices after the death of a group member can be compared to a ritual, expression of awe or even a dance—as the prototype animal with religion enables him to create an affective resonance at the same time with the centuries-old political struggle between Evolutionist and Creationists. This very inner Christian debate of nineteenth-century Europe and North America still remains irrelevant or has only recently became relevant in non-Christian countries. It is hard not to wonder if one has to inhabit or inherit the Christian affective arrangements in order to literally have a sense of the provocation of the “animal religion” and the enormous challenge it poses to the field of Religious Studies. Are not non-Christian “world religions” already animal religions from the beginning of their conception?

In the final parts of the book, Schaefer explains the political implications of attributing religion to non-humans as it permits him to claim joy, dignity, and desire for animals, placing them on the same level of capacity to have religions as human beings. He also insists that similar to the religious, the secular and the rational are equally animal, equally affective productions. While putting the rational and the secular within the animal religion, he simultaneously discards the necessity of the secularisation theories, as there can be no going beyond animal religion. “Do all bodies have religion?” asks Schaefer, as an open question (217). I truly believe that the answer to this question should concern not only “what gets called religion” but also “who gets to call something religious.” What kind of an affective and historical charge might calling something religious instead of tradition or life entail? Schaefer takes also the responsibility of calling the affects in question religious and that courageous act is not without risks of reviving the colonial and national oppressions of carving proper religions out of life.

Bibliography

Badiou, A. 1997. Saint Paul: La Fondation de l’universalisme. Paris: Collège International de Philosophie.

Stoler, A. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Bees have long served as a paradigm for thinking through ideals of human sociality and models of social arrangements. For the ancient Greeks, bees often symbolized perfect political community, a paragon of cooperation and commitment to the common, civic good. Bees have also operated as a screen upon which to project human moral aspirations and strictures. One eighteenth-century English clergyman, following the shocking scientific discovery that the king bee was, in fact, a queen, insisted she must be a virgin. Otherwise, this implied she took the many males of the hive as her mates, making her a “common prostitute, a base, notorious, impudent strumpet, the most hateful and abominable whore with gallants by the hundreds.”1 Clearly, the presumed king’s harem was morally unproblematic. More remarkable is the reduplication of immaculate conception and virgin birth within the hive, necessitated by patriarchal moral codes. The Virgin Mary was transmuted into a bee.

Bees have also functioned as a prime exemplar for a particular type of community centered on work and incessant industry. Bees eschew idleness. Busy as a bee, the laudatory saying goes. The eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher and satirist, Bernard Mandeville, famously relied on bees in his reflections on human society and modes of exchange. Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees is a commentary on his earlier published poem: The Grumbling Hive or, Knaves Turn’d Honest. The poem describes a kind of social experiment where self-interested exchanges and pursuits are done away with in the name of honesty and virtue.

While the beehive was productive and prosperous, its inhabitants complained about the lack of honesty and fraternity within. Crying out to the gods, they precipitate a change in which comradery, mutuality, and noncompetition become the norm, and where self-interest and selfishness evaporate. The economy of the hive collapses. None are motivated to work, Mandeville opines, and the economy of credit and debt contracts (since the virtuous dare not borrow nor lenders call in the loans due). The hive’s prosperity declines such that they become vulnerable to attack from without, and die defending their virtuous if enfeebled community.

Mandeville’s tale serves as a paradigmatic and classic celebration of market efficiency. It proclaims the faith that selfish motivations accumulate to the net good of society. The tale provided founding figures of capitalism, such as Adam Smith, with an example of the “invisible hand” and offered a fantastical meditation on the miraculous power of human sin and self-interest to benefit society.

Mandeville was aware of concurrent theological debates about God’s providential management of nature and society. Theologians clashed around interpretations of the divine gratuity that “works all things together for good” (Rom 8:28) in society despite human failure. Many extended this to the marketplace. Theological arguments about divine benevolence and communal redemption undergirded later claims about market calibration.2

For Mandeville, then, bees are the consummate capitalists avant la lettre. They fervently devote themselves to a virtuous work ethic that even Weber’s Calvinists would envy. Despite arguably being an obvious example of cooperation and mutual support, they emerge with Mandeville as ideal rugged individualists, all seeking their own gain in a way that unexpectedly, fortuitously, and providentially works for the benefit of the hive. Bees come to symbolize fervent, self-interested industry, the necessary affective posture of early capitalism.

Yet, bees don’t only work. Bees dance, as well.

As I write this review, I’m sitting on the third floor of the Robbins Public Library in Arlington, Massachusetts, where, just out the window beside me, they’ve installed a beehive on a small balcony. Lost in thought, I gaze absently at the hive, watching the endless comings and goings of its residents. The entrance is a congested runway, with a nonstop cycle of takeoffs and landings. The bees adeptly navigate one another and the narrow opening. Certainly, the bees appear to be a model of industriousness. Pollen must be harvested; honey must be made. The hive is awash with incessant activity, ongoing labor.

As I watch the hive, my focus shifts. My sight is drawn away from the hubbub at the entrance of the hive to its surface. I notice the mass of bees gathered there. I had at first taken them to be simply waiting their turn to enter. As I pay closer attention, however, I notice the rows of bees undulating back and forth, pulsing rhythmically. Their wings buzz and their legs tap, as they take a few steps forward and then shuffle backward. The movement is hypnotic and mysterious. In my mind’s eye, I’m transported down to the bees’ level and perspective, and I find myself in the fray, as the deafening vibration rises up around me. The beating of their wings—the snare drums—and stamping of feet—the bass—fill the air. Their lines heave forward and rock backward in imprecise unison (video).

Surely, this is a dance.

Inasmuch as Donavan Schaefer has offered a provocative and fruitful reimagining of the study of religion, his book also functions as an extended meditation on elements residing at the boundaries of intellection, of palpable and perceptible surges and flows that rise up into consciousness (or not), but which defy or elude the linguistic frame. His book is an invitation to pay attention. My response is an effort to think together with him along such lines.

Schaefer’s inquiry leads to questions about the launching point in the dialectical inquiry between human and animal in terms of religion. Do we start with human presumptions about what is religious and look for analogues in the animal kingdom? Or do we consider animal religion qua animals and use this to refine and redefine its presence in humans? Such a question and quest may be doomed from the start, for what would it look like to begin with animal religion on its own?

Considering the bees’ dance as potentially religious helps raise this problematic. After all, science has provided its own utilitarian explanation: bees dance to communicate the location of pollen to be harvested. The dance is pragmatic, an ingenious survival mechanism that takes the location of the sun and magnetic polarities into account. Yet, this may not be as troublingly reductive as it seems. Certainly, the dance is communicative and serves a purpose, but this need not take us out of the realm of religion, since rituals do the same.

Furthermore, the dance is an elaborate and one might dare say excessive method of conveying basic information. This reveals the layers of chaotic imbrications, randomness, and sedimentation that, Schaefer reminds us, characterize evolutionary processes. One might suggest that the dance, while conveying crucial information about food source location, includes so much more. Just as bees have been successfully trained to play soccer, who are we to say that they might not derive a sense of joy and play in this rhythmic exultation, directing their comrades to sources of sustenance that will extend the life of the hive? In demarcating these gratuitous and apparently useless embellishments, are we now in the provenance of the religious?

This raises the question of the sine quibus non of religion, a question with which Schaefer’s study admirably grapples. Is the potential presence of an excess beyond the pragmatic and utilitarian sufficient? Is religion the remainder?

This is why the chimpanzee waterfall dance is both a helpful and perilous entry into such considerations. The question of animal religion is raised in the minds of Goodall and others in the first place because the activity of the chimps before the waterfall looks a lot like what we as humans might do. Starting with human assumptions about terror and awe before the holy or wholly other (Otto) or matters of ultimate concern (Tillich), one then moves to the animal realm and sees correspondences. Or, beginning with assumptions of practical needs, religion serves as a cipher for what appears excessive, unnecessary, or unproductive.

But, to be on the side of dance rather than angels means inquiring into animal religion as a source for that which might disrupt conventional, anthropocentric demarcations. Schaefer’s study walks this line well, duly taking up and critiquing foregoing scholarly approaches while limning the sites “beyond” language and clear conceptual categories. Are we to approach animal religion with traces of what we as humans imagine it must include?

Considering the bees’ dance as religious helps blur the lines of the religious and economic, the sacred and the mundane and practical. For, surely religion is not simply a response to awe and terror, as the HADD theories of cognitive and evolutionary psychology might have it. Neither is religion only the activity of mammals that are conveniently homologous to humans before frightful sheets of tumbling water. Furthermore, religion might be more than the excess, the remainder, the wasteful, useless, and impractical.

Religion is also the everyday, the expedient, and the ordinary. Furthermore, might religion denote a function as well—not in the typical structural functionalist sense of a mechanism of communal equilibrium or crisis management—but in a more basic, functional and pragmatic sense of, e.g., telling another where to find sustenance? After all, if singing to community members about the purported “bread of life” or proclaiming in song and dance how one might procure “eternal springs” welling up within both count as religion, why not repetitive rituals of obtaining basic needs for survival? Life may be “more than food,” and perhaps “one cannot live on bread alone,” but certainly one needs as much as a baseline.

Schaefer’s emphasis on the random and chaotic sedimentation of evolutionary processes helps recall that this dance is anything but efficient in the orthodox economic sense. There should be much more direct ways to communicate in this bee economy. The tendency for economic theories of equilibrium and competitive advantage to elide with and rely upon caricatures of evolutionary theory is brought to light. Evolutionary results may not, in fact, be the most efficient. This serves not to relegate religion to the impractical and excessive, however, but to note that all such activity (the purportedly religious and the economic) are of a piece in this web of chance repertoires and embodied, ossified practices.

Thinking the bees’ dance as religious, and as a counterpoint to the waterfall dance, issues the reminder that the religious may include the ordinary and everyday. Again, while both dances may be on the same level within the animal world—equally mundane, practical, and religious—the tendency from a human perspective is to marvel at the apparently useless, extraordinary, and sanctified (as in clearly set apart and demarcated) activity of the chimps, while missing the everyday, practical, and necessary religion of the bees. The materialist and politicized phenomenological turn, which Schaefer extends and applies, requires attending to both.

The possible dancing joy and potentially religious affect of bees returns us to matters of hive economies. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments was the foundation upon which many of his later claims in The Wealth of Nations were based. As the title suggests, we might here be very close to the realm of affect. Indeed, talk of sentiments, passions, and affections was prevalent in eighteenth-century philosophy (Smith, Montesquieu, Edwards). Somehow, these discourses have been suppressed. One might even venture the suggestion that it was the (affective) fear of affect that helped found modern economics.3 Ironically, the model of rational choice individualism brackets out affect, even though it is affect that governs such “decisions.” Schaefer’s study helps recall the affectual nature of economy itself, and rightly deems affective exchanges one appropriate site for theorizing the religious.

Perhaps what is called for now is a new fable of the bees. This one would not exalt selfish individualism. Rather, it would highlight the ecstatic dance of survival. Such a ritual provides important information about locating sustenance, and inefficiently and gleefully communicates this to other community members. Through the pulses, surges, and flows that lead, randomly and clumsily, calculatedly and delicately, to life’s flourishing, the religious might be glimpsed.

Are angels a kind of animal? Is language a kind of embodiment? Is rationality a kind of affect? These are a few of the questions I scrawled in the back pages while reading Donovan Schaefer’s Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, Power. Perhaps provoked by Schaefer’s own rhetorical approach of posing multiple questions throughout the book, such as “What do affects do?” and “What do we do for affect?” (128), the feel of my readerly questions ranged from the curious to the concerned, and sometimes ventured into the cranky. In what follows, I offer some brief answers to these questions as my response to Donovan Schaefer’s ambitious project.

Religious Affects is a helpful tour through the debates enjoined within what Schaefer describes as phenomenological affect theory, with detours into scholarship on evolutionary theory and animal behaviour. Schaefer argues that the study of religion needs to be oriented more by an anthropology of affect and animality than by a concept of the human defined by language. Closing his argument with another question, Schaefer asks, “What if religion makes us animal?” (204).

A set of parallel dichotomies, namely between angels and animals, language and affect, shape Schaefer’s argument throughout the book. He begins with a quote from an 1864 Oxford lecture by Benjamin Disraeli, the British novelist-politician, who grew up Jewish and became a Church of England member at 13 when his father decided to have his children baptized. Mocking Darwin’s new-fangled theory of evolution, Disraeli defended what he considered to be the scientific teachings of the Church with this quip: “The question is this—Is man an ape or an angel? My lord, I am on the side of the angels” (1). With frequent reference to this dichotomy, Schaefer wrestles with angels throughout his book, insisting that a better answer is one that understands human bodies as animals and not as “fundamentally light, uncomplicated, shadowless, and floating” angels.

In Schaefer’s reading, angels become a stand-in for what he describes as the liberal “sovereign self” in which language, rationality, and book-reading are prized modes of being human. Animals, by contrast, are cut out of the sphere of religion in the liberal mode, as another of Schaefer’s questions suggests: “If religion in the Protestant key that underpins the Enlightenment axioms of Western culture is a matter of belief—the cognitive manipulation and the autonomous affirmation of a set of propositional assertions about the nature of reality—how could animals, who are prelinguistic bodies who don’t fit the mold of speaking, reasoning, choosing, subjects, be religious?” (2–3). Placing language, belief, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment on the side of the angels, Schaefer faces them off against affect, embodiment, and the “globalized self” in the corner of the animals (66).

The “myth of angelic self-sovereignty” (117) has not only led to a mistaken anthropology that misunderstands the animality of humans, according to Schaefer, but also to a misconception of what “religion” is. At the crux of this mistake is the “linguistic fallacy,” or what he defines as “the humanistic privileging of logos, language, and rationality as the only possible loci for producing meaning, complexity, depth, and systems of power” (155, see also 35). Schaefer draws on an impressive array of poststructuralist and feminist theorists of affect to argue that “religion grows out of a pulsing network of embodied affect” (134), which can be better understood with recourse to a cautious use of what evolutionary theory reveals about the animality of the human. As he writes in his conclusion: “There’s an enduring risk in religious studies and in humanistic work generally that we get sucked into Bookworld, that we think the only way to understand our bodies and the only way to understand religion is by flipping pages. Affect theory, following the materalist shift, tries to think of religion as dance, a surging of multileveled, deeply stratified bodies into the world that is not reducible to language” (217). Schaefer sees his task as bringing the affective, animal body into the orbit of the study of religion, concluding with the optimistic claim that recognizing the animality of religion in a “postsecular context” will enable it to flourish as a “horizon of respect” (215).

The books’ chapters are rooted in diverse analytical settings such as: his pedagogical approach to teaching Jesus Camp, a movie about children becoming passionate and performative Evangelical spiritual warriors; how to analyse Islamophobia in the United States as a process in which solidarities are formed both through espousing hatred of Muslims and through contesting such racialized hatred; and a reading of solitary confinement as a technique of power and governance that breaks human beings through denying their need of sociability. Overall, Religious Affects seeks to provoke a theoretical pivot away from language and textuality and toward affect and bodies.

Schaefer is a generous reader of a wide range of theorists, including a truly noteworthy number of women (this may seem an unusual thing to say, but I became aware while reading his book how uncommon it is in a work of religious studies theory—that is not about gender—to find careful analyses of the work of so many theorists who identify as women, and as feminists). His approach to reading affect theory through the lens of animality will enrich critical engagement with the concept of religion as a theoretical tool and as a word of power in the world. I particularly appreciated his call to include within the compass of religion a focus on how human bodies are always shaped by some kind of biological necessity, or what he calls “compulsion.” Though what this “animality” compels people to do may not look the same everywhere in the world, it is always in some way shaped by what Schaefer calls a model of “global religion,” or “the circulation of intransigent embodied affects—bodily technologies created by evolutionary forces in deep time” (62). At the same time, I wondered if his argument would have been even more convincing without the dichotomies of angels vs. animals and language vs. affect orienting the story and its temporality.

Take the question of angels. Are they really so immaterial and uncomplicated? If we consider only the Jewish and Christian traditions—or even the “post-Christian” reading of the novelist Philip Pullman—angels turn out to be rather more complicated as material beings. In the book of Genesis, Jacob wrestled with an angel of God all night long, who left his groin “out of joint” (Genesis 32:25 KJV). In the “Animal Apocalypse” of the apocryphal book of Enoch, likely written in the second-century BCE, angels mate with animals to cause all sorts of problems.

In early Christianity, both angels and demons were considered to be material beings, requiring nourishment that they were thought to find in the smoke of animal sacrifice. As Gregory A. Smith argues in “How Thin Is a Demon,” the “material turn” in the study of early Christianity requires twenty-first-century readers to put aside any assumptions about angels and demons, in order to realize that in the late antique Mediterranean region, these spiritual beings were thought to share a similar kind of matter with the human soul: “Like the thicker bodies of ordinary animal life, they are subject to depletion and renewal. In other words, they need to eat.”1 Similarly, as Stanley Stowers has shown, the perspectives of early Christians on matter and spirit were shaped by their experiences of living not in “pre-linguistic” but in “pre-biomedical” bodies.2 All this is to say that to be on the side of angels does not necessarily mean to have spurned materiality, embodiment, or even affect.

This leads me to reflect on my second question: is language a kind of embodiment? This seemed to be the case for some of the women I spoke with in the course of my research on the home birth movement in northeastern United States in the late 1990s. Some women understood an embrace of their animality to enable them to let their bodies do the work of giving birth. Placing their experiences of childbirth on a continuum with those of horses, dogs, and cats, these women understood birth as an animal act spurred by a kind of evolutionary instinct, but also best guided by the support of experienced midwives, backed up by medical training. Language was a critical pathway that led these women to experience their animal bodies. Reading books that presented birth as a “natural” and not a “medical” act and sharing stories of their experiences of childbirth with friends and family was a process by which they retrained their bodies into new affects shaped by excitement and not fear for giving birth.3 The home-birthing women who embraced the animality of birth encompassed a diverse range of religious commitments, including sharply divergent perspectives on women’s reproductive rights. And they all came to their animal acts as what I called “post-biomedical” bodies, who knew they could count on medical assistance if their births became complicated.

In contrast with an analytical frame that sees the mutual imbrication of language and embodiment, affect theory often seems to require drawing clear lines between the pre-linguistic and the linguistic body, with the “pre” signifying an urge to search for origins of everything from morality to religion. As Schaefer puts it in his discussion of evolutionary theory that supports a “prosocial” vision of the human: “Prior to language, moral decision making—in humans and other animals—is produced from embodied regimes of affect” (133, see also 15). This pre-discursive temporal frame is often laid on top of the unfortunate metaphor that many seem to live by, which asserts the underlying “hardwiring” of the human.4 I’m not convinced that the language of priority or of hardwiring really helps us to better understand—as scholars who write books—how affect, embodiment, and language combine to make religion into specific “systems of power” (39).

What if, instead of placing angels and animals in separate corners, or opposing rationality as articulated in language with affect that surges through bodies, we thought of rationality as an always social practice shaped by affective dispositions? Reason is an ideal that requires accountability between human beings and to the empirical—the natural and the animal—world. Here the work of Monique Scheer and her colleagues in the history of emotions is particularly instructive. Scheer, drawing from Bourdieuian practice theory, argues that emotions are a “form of practice, because they are an action of the mindful body.”5 One way to read her article in conjunction with the claims of affect theory would be to ask: is affect theory another approach to hashing out the never-ending question of what, in late-twentieth-century parlance, went by the name of the conundrum of structure and agency?

Insisting that the physiological body is simultaneously a “socially prepared” body, Scheer develops a historically-informed theory and method that can help scholars of religion to understand rationality as a particular kind of emotional practice shaped by the ideal of reason. (Scheer does not use the concept of affect, as she also notes how affect is often given an apriori “precultural” status.)6 Conceiving of rationality as a kind of emotional practice also helps scholars to see how claims to reason often work to the advantage of some, rather than others. This approach to rationality would be consistent with Schaefer’s argument that understanding affect helps to reveal how power works. At the same time, we would do well to remember, along with the musician St. Vincent, the ongoing sexism enabled by the trope that “women do emotions but are incapable of rational thought.” Those who seek to speak truth to power would lose a great deal if they were to banish rationality to the politically suspect and disembodied realm of what Schaefer calls “Bookworld.”7

Affect theory without the history of emotions—and the history of angels—leaves us without the powerful tools of analysis that come with rational dispositions. Our abilities as scholars to describe, critique, and even perhaps change the systems of power that have depended on stereotypes, tropes, and even lies, demands that we make use of all the rational passions at our fingertips.