Before I got my hands on a copy of Agents of God, I had a chance to read something else by Guhin: a chapter that appeared in a recently published edited volume on sociological theory. I found the chapter quite intriguing, and I had it in mind as I read Guhin’s new book. In the chapter, titled “Why Study Schools?,” Guhin makes the convincing case that research in the sociology of education has been guided by a stratification mandate, or a concern for how schools are engines of inequality and reflect and reproduce power dynamics outside of schools. A path less taken, according to Guhin, has been the study of schools as sites of moral education. This is a path that animates the writings of Emile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others. This view of education considers how schools have goods internal to them: in other words, as having a kind of value on their own terms, and not an instrumental value where, for example, schools exist mainly for students to accrue capital and credentials.

With this perspective in mind, one of the better ways of approaching Guhin’s exciting book is to consider the importance of moral boundaries at religious schools, which were Guhin’s fieldsites. Like in the chapter I just mentioned, Guhin makes it a point to say that the schools take part in symbolic boundary work: the kind that creates conceptual and moral distinctions. As Guhin’s astute observations revealed, these schools—two Christian and two Muslim—despite being different, defended the idea of the freedom of religion, one often rooted in conservative and orthodox principles. They also found common threats in the internet and in public schools. The persistent, perceived danger of these spaces—which constitute what Sarah Diefendorf has called “the imagined secular”—could be rationalized by deferring to what Guhin calls “external authorities,” or the semi-autonomous sources of authority including scripture, prayer, and most paradoxically but compellingly, science. An excellent study, I think, names something important that you know about but have taken for granted and helps you to see it an entirely new way. The idea of “external authorities” does that for me. Reflections on authority have a long history within sociology, anchored by Weber’s foundational writings on the topic. Guhin’s concept manages to add nuance to this literature without being beholden to a Weberian tradition.

I approached this book with a mix of professional and personal interests. In graduate school, I started training to be a sociologist of education and gender just as I decided to become a Christian (though I can’t say I resemble much of one today!). I find myself wanting to share this book with others who study these fields and also with religious folks I know who are suspicious of public schools and wonder if Catholic schools are a better alternative for their children. The study of Christian (mainly Catholic) schools is familiar to the sociology of education. I am reminded of the influential text Catholic Schools and the Common Good (1993), by Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland. While that book and Guhin’s share certain themes, they diverge in important ways. Bryk and colleagues advanced the idea that Catholic schools support forms of democratic education which promote the larger good; Agents of God, meanwhile, reveals that the idea of a common good is itself fraught and contentious, and that religious schools operate in a deeply polarized political environment where persistent boundary work greatly restricts the idea of the “common.” The study of Muslim schools has a much shorter history in the sociology of education. And so the comparative angle of Agents of God, with data drawn from four schools, allows Guhin to draw out intra-religious distinctions as well as how these schools together differentiate themselves from nonreligious spheres marked by their many clear and present dangers and temptations. Since the book is so conceptually rich, it would be easy to miss the book’s methodological sophistication, and I’d be curious to hear more from Guhin about the ups and downs of doing a complex comparative study of schools.

Agents of God makes several major contributions. First, I think that in a time of lean and theory-lite ethnographies, Guhin’s book embraces theory and invites readers to learn about and love theory just as much as the author clearly does. It’s a very teachable book for this reason, and Guhin has a special talent for connecting conceptual dots that will teach readers many things even if they aren’t especially interested in schools, religion, or culture. In her recent book, Dear Science and Other Stories (2020), Katherine McKittrick asks us to consider endnotes and footnotes as sites of labor and love and dreaming, when it’s more common to toss these aside as secondary and distracting. Some of the best stuff in the book are contained in Guhin’s endnotes, and any graduate student studying religion, schools, or culture for their exams would be wise to seek counsel in the book’s final pages.

This leads to a second major contribution. The book is steeped in details concerning religion—from interpretations of scripture, to what it means exactly that people think that the Bible is actually God’s divine word—without ever feeling insular or off-putting. This is because Guhin accomplishes the goal of, in his words, “using religious sites to answer cultural questions.” This achievement is more than a simple matter of what a few unique schools can tell us about moral issues and questions that affect all of us. The book also showed me that cultural questions matter in a way for subfields like education, race, and gender which have historically at times had an awkward or uncomfortable relationship with the topic of culture. To put it differently, Agents of God helped me to see that some of the more important questions I’ve been asking in my own scholarship have been fundamentally cultural ones. I am grateful to Guhin for this basic but important insight.

I was disheartened to read about how public schools continue to be a punching bag for so many. But not surprised. I’ve found many of the same patterns in my own research, and you don’t have to search far to find studies showing that parents, students, stakeholders, and others deride public schools as immoral, pits of failure; and then seek out any number of alternative schooling options, from charter schools to religious schools. Guhin’s concluding chapter is titled “It’s Dangerous Out There,” and I felt that it was here that the symbolic and moral boundaries that Guhin speaks of most interfaces with social boundaries, or those distinctions that reveal material inequalities. Christian and Muslim schools, and people across the political spectrum, all repudiate public schools for being unsafe and lacking compassion. As these people retreat from public schools and find alternative options to work or to send their own children, the perceived dangerous thing “out there”—public schools—grows weaker and less legitimate, with very real consequences for what the schools can and can’t do to help young people. Guhin’s own language allowed me to see that this anti-public-school narrative is a kind of external authority, as it were, we’ve collectively created as a society, a self-fulfilling narrative where sacred spaces build walls between them and the profane space of public schools. As Guhin ends his book by saying, the idea of an external authority isn’t “uniquely religious,” and I think he’s correct. I’m eager to see how other researchers use and build on the idea of external authorities. Within a volatile political climate bracketed by identity politics and culture wars, education is emerging as a top priority for Republican legislators. Through the use of old strategies like book banning and dark money, progressives see the culmination of a years-long GOP effort to dissolve public education entirely. It is more important than ever to understand how authority works in the lives of American schoolchildren.

I have a few questions for Guhin. I am curious about these Evangelical schools in the wake of Trump’s presidency. I wondered how the graduates of the two schools voted if they chose to vote. Much has now been made about Evangelicals as an influential voting bloc for the Republican party, but I want to know more about the kinds of political conversations taking place inside these classrooms. How might, for example, the power of external authorities help to guide thinking on contemporary targets of conservative disdain, from transgender identity to critical race theory? Guhin’s research on schools will only become more important given that education has recently catapulted to the top of issues that matter for voters, motivated by the backlash to the perception that critical race theory is being taught in schools. As a product of Virginia public schools, I watched with great interest and dismay as education and critical race theory emerged as priority items in the recent governor’s race won by the Republican Glenn Youngkin. The new Virginia governor owns a foundation with properties across the state that are home to Evangelical congregations and retreats. With Guhin’s insights in mind, I was able to track how he and his supporters have turned to external authorities—in particular, the Bible and certain strands of science—to defend a particular view of traditional, conservative education.

And speaking of science, I would also love to hear more from Guhin about the role of science as an external authority today. While this fascinating chapter tells us much about how religious communities engage certain strands of science—creationism and evolution, biology and biochemistry, the lab sciences—I am curious what these schools thought about the social sciences and history, and the critical conversations that happened or were muted. We hear less about these subjects in Agents of God, but they would seem to matter in other sections of the book; for example, in chapter 3, where the schools held a tenuous relationship with feminism, believing that girls should have the same academic opportunities as their male peers but also expected those young women to be the main care providers for their families one day.

In the opening chapter of Agents of God, Tomas Lopez, a Bible teacher at a Christian school, explains how he goes about dealing with students who bring ideas into his classroom with which he disagrees. Lopez states that his general strategy is not to push back directly against the students, but, rather, to redirect them: “I’d ask you to just keep reading the word [the Bible] and let it act on you.” The supposition is that over the course of the semester it will be the text itself, rather than Lopez’s guided discussion of it, that will steer students towards the proper biblical interpretation.

It is statements such as these—where the teacher’s agency is concealed behind an abstract power—that animate the puzzle at the heart of Agents of God, Jeff Guhin’s exploration of religious education in the midst of a highly secular New York City. Based on ethnographic immersion into four religious high schools (two Christian, two Muslim), Agents of God provides an astute analysis of the commonalities between two very different communities seeking to shepherd students through adolescence in a fallen city. It also makes a more general theoretical argument about the role that scripture, prayer, and science play in religious education—the way these abstract institutions serve as sources of legitimacy, authority, and power.

Guhin’s principal argument throughout the book is that scripture, prayer, and science operate as “external authorities”—Guhin’s Weberian-inflected term for institutions that are “semi-autonomous sources of authority, allowing communities to . . . solve problems, make decisions, and develop meaningful, coherent lives” ( 7). In particular, it is the institutions of prayer and scripture—and the sense that such things “act” upon religious individuals—that are the “agents of God” for which the book is titled. One of the book’s most crucial insights is that appeals to such external authorities obscure the role of actual authorities in social reproduction. As Guhin states, “instead of a teacher commanding a student to do or believe a certain thing, the command comes instead from some other authority, one that is external to either the teacher or the student or even the community itself.” Invoked in this way, these institutions serve as the ultimate argument from authority.

In articulating external authorities, Guhin raises the question of how, precisely, the concept of “external authorities” differs from the more general sociological concept of “institutions.” To a certain extent, the two concepts appear synonymous. After all, externality and authority are already deeply embedded in institutional theory. To the extent that institutional theory enjoys any theoretical consensus, it tends be with respect to institutions’ coercive “rule-like status” (Meyer and Rowan 1977)—a status which is, definitionally, based outside the actor in question, typically in law or tradition (Dobbin 2004). Are external authorities particular subtypes of institutions or do they refer to an underappreciated aspect of how institutions function more generally?

The answer to this question is critical to our attempt to define external authorities’ theoretical scope conditions. Do all institutions have the potential power of the external authorities Guhin cites to provide rhetorical legitimacy for their own self-perpetuation? Or are there certain facets of these particular institutions that render them especially likely to become personified representatives for institutional actors?

In concluding, Guhin gives two possible answers to this question, arguing that the difference between external authorities and institutions comes down to experience on the one hand and action on the other. First, external authorities are experienced by actors as having particularly “explicit agency and authority” (205). And indeed, scripture, prayer, and science exert their coercion more conspicuously than the “taken for granted” institutions that often populate institutional studies. For Guhin’s respondents, prayer and scripture are constantly front and center, active participants in everyday conversation. If sociologists have spilled a lot of ink convincing others that their seemingly autonomous decisions are in fact guided by institutional rules and conventions, then Guhin’s respondents have, in a way, already openly embraced this notion.

Second, Guhin argues that external authorities are maintained by practice: “Beliefs as such were only important as evidence of practices” and “it was practices that helped to maintain the authority and agency of external authorities . . . [and] . . . their felt agency and power” (206). Yet while Guhin convincingly demonstrates that practice and habit are required for external authorities to exert their power, I wondered here if the importance of beliefs to external authorities was being undersold.

That is, external authorities—scripture, prayer, and science—seem to be institutions that are primarily aboutorganizing belief (or a method of arriving at beliefs, as is perhaps the case with science). Viewed through this lens, I oftentimes found myself wondering if external authorities had not only Weberian origins but also, importantly, Durkheimian. After all, it is Durkheim who, in the Rules of Sociological Method, wrote about the beliefs of groups as a type of social fact, that are “independent of their individual manifestations” and which contain a certain “authority” over their subjects (Durkheim 2013: 27). Such beliefs, referred to as “collective beliefs” by some contemporary philosophers (e.g., Gilbert 2013), allow one to say things like “Catholics believe in transubstantiation” in a way that is neither a statement about every Catholic’s belief nor even a statement about the average Catholic’s belief but instead a statement about what members of the Catholic church are committed to believing. From this, what seems important to Guhin’s case is that communities that are organized around a set of beliefs require some mechanism to coordinate these sorts of joint commitments. Here, prayer and scripture are institutions with external authority but a very particular kind of external authority—the authority to coordinate and align group beliefs into a consciously held, collective identity. It seems to be this kind of coordinated collective belief that allows one of Guhin’s respondents in a Muslim school, when asked whether she believed in evolution, to ask another, “We don’t believe that, do we?” and then immediately confirm, “No, we don’t believe that” (181).

Crucially for Guhin, the coordination of belief by these institutions is experienced by these communities as agentic. Scripture and prayer, in particular, are always acting and are regularly rhetorically personified, such as when the students were prompted to think of how they would address salah, the Muslim form of daily prayer, as if salah were a person (144). Beyond this extreme example, the students and teachers regularly talk about their relationship to abstractions like prayer and scripture—how prayer has changed them, how scripture speaks to them.

The insight that individuals must animate abstract institutions in order to interact with them is one of my favorites of the book, and there is a lot of overlap between Guhin’s observations about inhabited institutions and research in organizational sociology on organizations as agents. Yet the differences may say something instructive about the conditions under which individuals attribute agency. For organizational sociologists, a key reason for organizations like companies to be discussed as if they were agents is that such rhetoric is necessary for predicting future behavior (e.g., King 2015). Treating Facebook as an agent not only allows individuals to assign actions to a collective entity but also allows individuals to draw inferences about how Facebook is likely to act in the future. For Guhin, by contrast, imagined interaction with abstract institutions seems to be based not on the need for coordination or prediction, but rather on the need for formation of one’s collective identity (again, Durkheim). External authorities not only guide individual action, but allow individuals to develop, align, and affirm their group belief.

Ultimately, Agents of God raises fundamental questions about how social reproduction takes place, particularly for groups that find themselves swimming against the cultural tides. For such groups, authorities are necessary: providing not only a source of knowledge and legitimacy but a kind of institutional totem around which collective beliefs can be articulated and experienced. At the same time, one of the great insights of Agents of God is that external authorities are not limited to the realm of the religious; in his discussion of science, Guhin suggests their potential role in more secular circles. Indeed, it is difficult to read the chapter on science and not think about covid-era invocations to “believe science.” Institutions, Guhin reminds us, are not merely taken-for-granted conventions that quietly guide our actions but can—for certain groups and in certain times—become active participants in our conscious shaping of our selves.

References

Dobbin, Frank. The New Economic Sociology: A Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Durkheim, Emile. The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013.

Gilbert, Margaret. Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

King, Brayden. “Organizational Actors, Character, and Selznick’s Theory of Organizations.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 44 (2015) 149–74.

Meyer, J. W., and B. Rowan. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 83.2 (1977): 340–63.

One important contribution of Agents of God is an exploration of the ways in which educators appeal to “external authority.” The author points out that authority figures often frame their demands as coming from elsewhere. Doing this allows them to claim they are acting as interpreters or representatives for a third party, rather than as independent agents enforcing their own will. In the case of the four religious schools that he studies, the teachers often frame their religious demands as coming from God or, more directly, scripture. As he points out, this framing obfuscates both their interpretative power and discretion in how to apply God’s word.

When dealing with external authorities the level of interpretation and discretion left to the representative is something of a continuum. One extreme might be a direct and clearly worded command—“Mom says you are supposed to do the dishes now.” Or prophet Abraham being commanded by God to sacrifice his son. In the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions God gives a direct, unambiguous command to his prophet. There is no interpretive ambiguity and little discretion short of outright disobedience. On the other extreme, the representative may be invested with full power and discretion. If one accepts the author’s assumption that “the meaning of scripture is never obvious or clear absent a certain interpretive community” (113, emphasis mine) then the teachers are in a situation much closer to the latter. The implied source of the authority, the scripture, does not (and cannot) restrict the representative.

Though the teachers would probably object to the assumption that the scripture is something of an empty vessel, they probably would concede that they are left with more interpretive authority than prophet Abraham. Despite this fact, the teachers use phrases like “The Bible requires . . . ” or “The Quran says . . .” in a way that implies they aren’t doing any interpreting and have no discretion. By framing of their interpretations as the necessary result of the text, the teachers create a strong but brittle understanding of the scriptures specifically, and God’s will more generally. This is apparent in the story of Leslie, a student who has a crisis of faith when she decides she believe in evolution (139). Like Abraham, the students are left with but two choices—submit to God or reject him. That this can be a consequence of the teachers’ approach is a powerful insight, but it is not clear to me that this is a necessary result of their reliance of external authority. As the book point out, appeals to external authority can mask the exercise of power in democratic or quasi-democratic contexts. But the context in which the book focuses isn’t particularly democratic.

When a teacher appeals to scripture as an external religious authority they are really making two claims. First, that the scripture is an authority that we, as members of the faith community, all agree to accept. Second, and just as importantly, I, as the teacher, have intrinsic authority to decide what interpretations my students learn (not just when it comes to scripture, but also of history, science, math, and whatever other subjects I teach). Student are required to accept these interpretations (or at least pretend to long enough to pass the class). A teacher would have to work very hard to prevent the second claim from bleeding into their appeals to external authority.

In the book we occasionally see teachers trying to separate their own authority from that of the scripture. Brother Yaqub, a teacher at Al Haqq, does this when he discusses the debate among Muslim scholars on whether or not women can be prophets. In this exchange the teacher appears to call into question the interpretive authority of the school’s teachers, with statements like ,“If you learned it in Islamic History, it doesn’t mean it’s true” (67) and “Islam is much vaster than 11th grade Al Haqq” (68).

A recognition of the teachers’ interpretive authority (and its limits) can also be seen when a teacher’s interpretation is contradicted by another authority. Mr. Lopez, a Bible teacher at Apostles, describes this situation when talking about students who push back on his interpretations using those they have learned from their parents (who, in many cases, are not only Christian but also preachers). In that situation he appears to back away from his own interpretive authority with statements like, “I’m not going against your father. I’d ask you just to keep reading the word [the Bible] and let it act on you” (9). Rather than start a (probably unwinnable) fight over his own authority to interpret the Bible, he removes himself from the equation and goes back to the shared external authority. Interestingly, for at least some students, the limits of the teacher’s interpretive authority seem intuitive. When asked who they would turn to for help interpreting scripture, parents and pastors are mentioned spontaneously, but the school’s Bible teachers are not (138).

Which is to say the book makes a powerful analytical point about external authority, but in a context where the person relying on external authority also has an independent source of authority. When those two are decoupled, an appeal to external authority might offer room for disputation within the shared framework. As the author points out, “there is an important difference between saying the Quran and hadith require interpretation and saying they are wrong” (140).

Not surprisingly, some teenagers are anxious to grasp this opportunity, when it is available. We see them attempting to do so when probing around long-day creationism, though the teacher steps in and uses his authority as a teacher to invalidate relying on one part of the Bible to explain another, with the assertion, “You would never do that with any manuscript science or study of a document” (2).

In contrast, we see this dispute over interpretation flourish more freely when peers disagree with each other. At one point the book describes students challenging the other’s interpretive authority with retorts like “who are you to say. . .?” (141). When the peers are scholars, rather than high school students, we might expect them to be more articulate and sophisticated in their disputation. Such a sentiment appears to be present in the (perhaps apocryphal) saying of the classical Muslim scholar Imam Shaffi’I, “I believe my opinion is right with the possibility that it is wrong, and I believe the opinion of those who disagree with me is wrong with the possibility that it is right.”

In these cases, the commitment to scripture as external authority is strongly present, but is decoupled (at least to some extent) from nonreligious authority. Presumably, this decoupling has the potential to create much more flexible commitments. Though the author may be correct in implying that theologians and sociologists will disagree on whether or not any clear and obvious ethics are left in the wake of this flexibility.

In what is arguably the central thesis of his book, Dr. Guhin explains that “boundaries and external authorities . . . have a mutually constitutive relationship” (15). Put simply: “The external authorities help to legitimize boundaries, just as the boundaries help to demarcate the external authorities” (15). This is absolutely true, and the rich examples Dr. Guhin provides are compelling.

But in this brief essay I want to extend Dr. Guhin’s argument by focusing on an empirical case the author only mentions in passing, namely, the curious importance of certain Bible translations to the teachers at Good Tree. What Dr. Guhin correctly identifies as a concern over “modern” translations that were “too liberal” was in fact a concern about preserving patriarchal gender roles—a central boundary to this school and conservative evangelicals more broadly.

Knowing something about that particular controversy reveals that “the Bible” is not just an external authority that helps communities police gender boundaries, but the boundaries themselves shape that external authority both in the ways Bible translations are produced and how they are promoted by specific communities. Thus we’re able to see more clearly the “mutually constitutive relationship” between boundaries and external authorities Dr. Guhin describes.

Gender Boundaries and (Only Certain) External Authorities

Almost more than any other symbolic boundary, beliefs about gender are central to these communities. Dr. Guhin explains, “Women’s lives and actions were the boundaries of communities. Communities know they are different based on what their women do” (62). He also shows how “the Bible” was an important external authority for his evangelical schools because it enables those who want to inculcate an appreciation for patriarchy among the students to do so without claiming it’s what they want. Rather, it’s just what “the Bible” says.

But the kind of Bible obviously matters among his evangelical participants. Dr. Guhin makes passing references to this, explaining, “Translations were quite important at the Christian schools as certain more ‘modern’ translations were considered far too liberal. The Evangelicals in the schools I studied tended to use two common translations of the Bible, the New King James Version and the New International Version” (117–18). But it was not just any old New International Version, Dr. Guhin later points out. In discussing the practice of Scripture memory, he recalls students “are also asked to memorize from one of two translations: either the New King James Version or the New International Version, though the latter must be from its 1984 version and not the more ‘liberal’ later version” (128).

Thus in two places, Guhin identifies that “modern” translations are “far too liberal,” and specifically the newer edition of the New International Version. But what exactly made this updated translation “far too liberal” for the students to use? The answer is its violation of the deeply held gender boundary.

Evangelical Gender Wars in Bible Translations

Other than the venerable King James Version (KJV) which is still the best-selling Bible today, the 1984 New International Version (NIV) has dominated the evangelical Bible market for decades. Average evangelicals in the pews loved the NIV because it maintained a balance between readability (as opposed to the antiquated vocabulary and Shakespearean English of the KJV) and translation accuracy.

Historically, part of this “accuracy” was the tradition of English Bibles translating gendered words even when addressing mixed audiences (e.g., adelphoi as “brothers”) or generic masculine third-person pronouns (e.g., “He does not come into judgment . . .”) or generic references to men (e.g., “Man shall not live on bread alone . . .”) literally to preserve the masculine gender construction. Though other Bibles that evangelicals had already rejected as “too liberal” began adopting more inclusive language in their translations in the 1980s, the NIV had always maintained its traditional gendered language.

In the late 1990s, a firestorm erupted as complementarian evangelicals discovered the NIV was planning on updating its translation to adopt more “gender neutral” language in its text. Leaders in these circles decried the move as capitulating to the “feminist agenda” and “political correctness.” I’ve recounted this controversy more fully elsewhere (see Perry 2020; Perry and Grubbs 2020), but what transpired after was essentially ten years of negative attacks from influential complementarian evangelicals against an updated version of the NIV called Today’s New International Version or TNIV (New Testament published in 2002; full Bible published in 2005). The outcry against the more inclusive TNIV was so great, in fact, that evangelicals largely rejected it and it became a complete sales failure. It was thus discontinued in 2011 when the publisher simply released an updated NIV under the old name.

Another consequence of the NIV controversy was the commissioning of two new Bible translations that would be marketed to evangelicals, both of them committed to translating gendered language as literally as possible. The English Standard Version (ESV) would be published by reformed evangelicals through Crossway. And the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) would be published by LifeWay, the curriculum arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Explaining the importance of the HCSB, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary stressed that the emergence of the gender-inclusive TNIV has “convinced me that in the end this is an important thing for Southern Baptists to do—if for no other reason than that we will have a major translation we can control” (emphasis added).

Mohler gives away the ballgame there. The “liberalism” of the updated NIV that evangelicals were combatting was specifically egalitarianism. The solution was (1) to stigmatize the TNIV so severely that no evangelicals considered it a viable option and (2) produce and promote alternative translations that evangelicals fearful of creeping liberalism and feminism would read instead. The point isn’t just so they could have a translation they could control, but to maintain control over the boundaries of “who we are” as evangelicals—namely, gender traditionalists.

Gender and Bible Practice in Evangelical Schools

When Guhin was doing his ethnographic fieldwork at Good Tree and Apostles in 2011 and 2012, these Bible translation controversies had already transpired. The 1984 NIV (along with a modest update to the KJV in the New King James Version) was acceptable as conservative and reliable, while the more modern version of the NIV was rejected as “far too liberal.”

Guhin astutely points out that the Bible is a critical external authority for policing and reproducing the boundaries of gender, both through the practices of formal teaching (e.g., the Bible teachers connecting biblical texts to gendered interpretations) and reading/memorization. But we ignore several critical insights by assuming “the Bible” is essentially uniform on issues of gender. The teachers at the evangelical schools, in fact, know that this is not the case. That is why they demanded students ignore the updated NIV and use the 1984 edition instead.

What are some differences? And why might they matter?

Guhin points out that students internalize the teaching that wives are to submit to their husbands (74). This comes from Ephesians 5:22, but there are significant word differences between the 1984 and 2011 NIV. I highlight these in table 1 below.

Table 1: Ephesians 5:21-23 in the 1984 and 2011 NIV

The 1984 NIV starts the passage under the heading “Wives and Husbands” with v. 22, which says, “Wives, submit to your husbands.” Reading in this version one would get the impression that “the Bible says” the marriage relationship is to be characterized by wives submitting.

But notice where the 2011 NIV now puts the heading “Instructions for Christian Households.” It has included v. 21, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” The interpretive conclusion readers are more likely to draw from the 2011 NIV is that Christian households are to be characterized by mutual submission. This flies in the face of traditional complementarian teaching in which only wives submit; husbands love and lead.

Here’s another example. In Guhin’s conversation with a female student, she references the story of Eve not doing what she was told to illustrate the sin of female insubordination (62). There’s actually a subtle difference between the 1984 and 2011 NIV in reference to Eve and women sitting in authority over men (see table 2). I’ve underlined the key differences.

Notice in the 1984 translation, the subordination of women is much more absolute. Paul does not permit a woman to “have authority” over a man, and she must be “silent.” But the 2011 version is changed slightly. Paul says a woman shouldn’t “assume authority” over a man, which could be interpreted to mean that she’s not supposed to undercut the authority of male teachers or her husband in public. The problem Paul is trying to address, in other words, isn’t women having authority per se, but perhaps a specific problem in that church of women interrupting or overpowering men.

Moreover, in the 2011 version, women are not to be “silent” as if they couldn’t speak at all. But they are to be quiet. This perhaps refers the reader back to v. 11 where Paul instructs them to learn in quietness.

Table 2: 1 Timothy 2:11–13 in the 1984 and 2011 NIV

My point isn’t to say either construction in Ephesians 5 or 1 Timothy 2 are “better” or “worse” by the standards of feminists today. Rather I mean to point out there would be clear reasons why teachers interested inculcating students with an appreciation for patriarchal gender roles would prefer the 1984 NIV over the “far too liberal” updated NIV.

Knowing this background helps us understand precisely what the teachers at Good Tree and Apostles are objecting to and why they mandate students use one version for Scripture memory and reading over another.

Conclusion

Through countless examples, Dr. Guhin elaborates how boundaries and external authorities mutually constitute one another. But one clear example where this takes place is in the production of Bibles, in which a community identity as “complementarian” or “egalitarian” literally guides the translation decisions of committees resulting in quite different Bibles. Gender boundaries then guide the selection and promotion of such Bibles by evangelical communities, resulting in some Christian leaders (e.g., like Bible teachers in Dr. Guhin’s schools) prohibiting the use of certain objectionable Bibles (i.e., the ones that violate the cherished gender boundary) and promoting others that more suit the communities’ needs to reinforce its own cultural identity.

Thus boundaries (gender) constitute external authorities (Bibles) which reconstitute boundaries (gender).

Works Cited

Perry, Samuel L. “The Bible as a Product of Cultural Power: The Case of Gender Ideology in the English Standard Version.” Sociology of Religion 81.1 (2020): 68–92.

Perry, Samuel L., and Joshua B. Grubbs. “Formal or Functional? Traditional or Inclusive? Bible Translations as Markers of Religious Subcultures.” Sociology of Religion 81.3 (2020): 319–42.

I will not summarize Jeffrey Guhin’s excellent and fascinating ethnographic study of two evangelical and two Sunni Muslim high schools. My own expertise is in the sociology of religion—Christianity in the United States in particular—and even more narrowly on the interaction of religion and science. I will focus upon these areas of specialization and know very little about Islam. Reading Guhin’s book led to me wanting to see more, so I will tongue in cheek propose that Guhin conduct another stint of ethnography to dig even more deeply into the questions that his work evoked for me.

One generalization is that the power of Guhin’s study is because it is ethnographic (also called participant observation). Due to methodological limitations, much of social science is required to use bold categorical distinctions. For example, in a survey a respondent might get classified as having individualist or collectivist beliefs. More importantly, most methods allow only a snapshot in time, but with ethnography you do not look at static states, but at process. Ethnography is therefore able to see the messy reality between the categories where people are actually a mix of two, or one is used to mobilize another, or the categories run in sequence—pick your metaphor. When the reader encounters Guhin’s book they should start with the categories they know and then look for Guhin to complicate them in interesting ways.

God Is Not an External Authority?

I start with one of these sets of categories about which I wanted more detail. I want to play with something that really struck me halfway through, which is that Guhin has chapters titled “scripture,” “prayer” and “science” as external authorities. External authorities act—they do certain things. It is kind of surprising that there is not a chapter titled “God as External Authority,” and I am curious to hear why. After all, all of the substantive definitions of religion (in contrast to the functional ones) posit supernatural entities that act in the world.

One reason why the ethnography does not talk about God as an external authority may be, as suggested at various points in the discussion of the other authorities (e.g., 159), that God is behind at least prayer and scripture, and that there does not need to be a chapter on God as authority because Guhin is focusing on the more proximate authority. Is God the external authority, mobilized by prayer? Prayer, at least, “has an independent power all its own” (159). This would reflect the relationship between categories I write of above.

Or, is it taken for granted that they think God acts and it is just ethnographically surprising that scripture and prayer have agency? In this version, the students all think God acts in the world, but that is an uninteresting background condition of the field site, like saying that the desktops in the school are all white. Or, since this is an ethnography of the practices of teachers and students, maybe God is not seen as an external authority because we only see these human practices, which do not include God acting independently of these teachers and students in the world.

To return to relationships between categories I do wonder if God’s authority is mediated through the other external authorities Guhin identifies. If so, this is more consequential to other studies in the sociology of religion. To overstate the point, this would be the domestication of God, where God acts if prodded by us humans. As I will further ask below, is this the further decline of the transcendent?

The Bible in Conservative Protestantism

I want to highlight another tidbit of his ethnographic report and encourage Guhin or others to take up the deeper issue to which it points. This is also one of those “combining two categories” contributions of ethnography. At least my sense is that there are two impulses within Christianity—between the transcendent and the immanent. In conservative Protestantism, the transcendent is represented by the Bible and the immanent by prayer.

That is, one of the boundary objects in conservative Protestantism is that the word of God is fixed in place by God and does not change, and thus the Bible is timeless and wholly transcendent. (The changing Bible was the idea of their original “other” conservative Protestants drew boundaries against in the late nineteenth century—the modernist or mainline Protestants.)

Therefore, while you can use your God-given brain to see what it is telling you, what it is telling you is not from you, but revealing the everlasting truth that has always been there. Prayer in contemporary conservative Protestantism, and seemingly by the students Guhin observed, is not about worship or adoration of a transcendent God, but rather where an immanent God listens to your prayers and cares about what is happening to you. I think of this type of prayer as the bookend to the transcendent God of the biblical word.

But Guhin, in a tantalizingly short section, shows both groups of students, and particularly the evangelicals, saying that scripture interacts with prayer—“prayer is you talking to God, and scripture is God talking back” (168). For the students, scripture constrains your prayer requests to biblically legitimate asks. More importantly, reading scripture gives you a particular emotional response to a prayer which is God telling you what to do. The answer to your prayer can be found in your reaction to scripture.

I find that very interesting. I wonder whether this is another example of the growing immanence of evangelicalism. Much has been written about a change in evangelicalism from a group that worshipped a transcendent God to one that now wants God to solve their personal problems. In extreme form, this version of God, found among the young, is what Chris Smith has called “moralistic therapeutic deism” (Smith and Denton 2005). If this is right, then God is so fixated on answering your prayers that the one seemingly nonhuman transcendent voice of God (the Bible) is actually in service of communicating prayers with humans in need. I would like to hear more about how the Bible and prayer interact.

Individualism and Collectivism

The ethnographic gaze on the space between the categories also got me thinking about the combination of individualism and collectivism, in this case with biblical interpretation. Of course, this tension goes back to the Reformation, with the question whether each individual was really interpreting scripture apart from the collective.

It is interesting to see Guhin’s students struggling with this tension. On p. 138 we see the students going to other sources to help interpret the Bible, but simultaneously claiming that “revelation came through individual experience.” I would be interested in seeing more on this topic. Put more broadly, this exact experience is the crucible of the admixture of individual and society that has been such a tension within Protestantism.

This is an important question not only for Protestant hermeneutics but because, as many have argued, the high level of individualism within conservative Protestantism more generally has hampered the ability to see society. For example, studies have shown that evangelicals see racism as a problem of individuals, not society (Smith and Emerson 2000). If an ethnographer could show how the individual believer is not as individual an interpreter as the narrative of conservative Protestantism suggests, perhaps conservative Protestantism could have an easier time seeing the collective. I would argue that the challenges of American society such as systemic racism, climate change, economic inequality, and much more are social, collective problems and not individual problems.

So, I would love to see how it is that conservative Protestantism maintains the idea that everyone is an individual in their biblical analysis when in actuality they are not. Could learning how the individual is invented in this most central of Protestant tasks show us something similar for other times when conservative Protestants are convinced that everyone is just an individual and not a part of social structure?

Religion and Science

Guhin’s ethnography is also an important contribution to the literature on religion and science. At the most top-level it confirms what people who largely rely on surveys and in-depth interviews have claimed, such as that Muslims are primarily concerned about Darwinism as a boundary drawing mechanism with secular society (Hameed 2015). What I have been more concerned about is the claim that the epistemology of science for conservative Protestants is descended from nineteenth-century Baconian science and Scottish Common Sense Realism. In short, this idea is that science is the use of your God-given senses and rationality, that anyone can do, and for which you most emphatically do not need theories and other abstractions. Thus, as it says in the influential fundamentalist biology textbook Of Pandas and People, legitimate science is “inductive” and concerned with how the present world operates. The “historical sciences” are not observable—and the origins of humans falls into that abstract theoretical category. The origin of humanity, of the universe, and so on, is not observable and is thus a religious question (Evans 2018: 131ff.). Microevolution of viruses can be observed and is thus legitimate science. I think Guhin has the first ethnographic data that shows this is true.

I want to finish by elevating one of Guhin’s contributions as heading toward the future debate in religion and science. When sociologists reengaged with the study of the relationship between religion and science about fifteen years ago (Evans and Evans 2008), the debunking focused on the claim of scientists, also dominant in the public sphere, that religion and science were in conflict because they are distinct ways of knowing the natural world. The stereotypical claim was that to know how old the earth is, scientists would supposedly use their radio-carbon dating tools and religious people would read their holy texts. The sociological literature quickly showed that for the vast majority of scientific claims, religious and scientific ways of knowing the natural world are the same. The pendulum then swung far toward the other category with the claim that any conflict was not about facts about nature but about morality. I later summarized these points in a book titled Morals Not Knowledge (Evans 2018), which reflects the extreme opposite of the traditional claim.

But, as critics pointed out, my book should have been called “Morals and Knowledge” (Crick 2019). The actual relationship between religion and science is not morals or knowledge, but their combination. Crick, using the pragmatist tradition that Guhin also utilizes, points out that knowledge (facts) will shape a moral conclusion or the reverse: a priori morals will shape what are thought to be true knowledge (facts). More specifically, morality determines how we organize our knowledge into clusters upon which we act (Crick 2019). Again the action is between the categories.

How facts and morals mix is, in my mind, the future question in the sociology of religion and science. But this mix will be very difficult to empirically observe with a survey or even with in-depth interviews. The analyst needs motion, not a snapshot, and Guhin hints at combinations of morals and knowledge with this ethnography.

We see that one combination used by the students is approving of science as a method but not approving of the morally blinkered scientists (173). Another is that the students are motivated to challenge certain fact claims (evolution) due to concerns about morality (182). Guhin observes a relationship long seen by historians of science and religion: if you support Darwinism you reject the Bible, which will in turn lead to rank immorality (194).

But, the most prominent contribution of the ethnography in this area is thinking of these groups as drawing boundaries. It is clear that being opposed to evolution is a belief of the two religious groups. Is it so because they have a different means of assessing facts of the world? Not really. The groups focus on this one scientific fact claim in service of the grand moral project of drawing moral boundaries with the secular world. This is a version of the fact claim in service of moral agenda mechanism, but screams out for additional ethnography, for which I am volunteering Guhin. I want to know why this particular factlet about the natural world serves this function. Is it because it is seen as the heart of the other side? I have speculated that this fact claim is emphasized because it draws a large moral distinction with the other. Is that true? Guhin’s work offers the first steps down this new direction. It is through close ethnographic work that these questions can be answered.

Works Cited

Ammerman, Nancy. Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World. 1st paperback ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Crick, Nathan. “Morality through Inquiry, Motive through Rhetoric: The Politics of Science and Religion in the Epoch of the Anthropocene.” Zygon 54.3 (2019):648–64. doi: 10.1111/zygo.12539.

Evans, John H. Morals Not Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.

Evans, John H., and Michael S. Evans. “Religion and Science: Beyond the Epistemological Conflict Narrative.” Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008):87–105.

Hameed, Salman. “Making Sense of Islamic Creationism in Europe.” Public Understanding of Science 24.4 (2015): 388–99. doi: 10.1177/0963662514555055.

Smith, Christian, and Melina Lundquist Denton. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Updated ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Smith, Christian, and Michael O. Emerson. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Nowadays there is no shortage of news media and public discourse about the dangerous depths of “political polarization” and “the culture wars” in the United States, exacerbated by the social disaster of the pandemic and evidenced in the January 6 insurrection at the Capital by right-wing extremists.1 University of Southern California Correspondingly, there is abundant scholarly work that thinks about where the roots of societal atomization lie and their consequences for democracy. In many scholarly accounts, Christian evangelicals emerge as fixed cases, entrenched in deep commitments to God and his authority that transcend the nation and its democratic projects. It was through this lens that I was so struck by Jeff Guhin’s brilliant book, Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools, as a study that offers deep insights not only into how religion matters in religious schools but also how it matters for political culture.

Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of four conservative religious high schools—two Christian and two Muslim—Guhin shows that the way schools practice boundaries between “us” and “them” shapes students’ identities as members of a religious community and more importantly, their behaviors, which in turn reify those boundaries between, for example, “us” as evangelical Christians and “them” as “American society. These repeated, habituated practices make these boundaries “real” and consequential for how students make decisions, interact with one another, and imagine their futures. Critically, in Guhin’s account, it is not just “God” that empowers these practices, it is the “agents of God,” the external authorities imbued with power—scripture, prayer, and science—that are continually enacted to legitimize these boundaries. Guhin describes how habituated practices give the “agents of God” a sense of power, as if they are “doing” things on their own. Yet by showing how these practices are shaped in relationship to boundaries—whether of school, of religion, of culture, of nation—the larger system of power that circumscribes these boundaries outside in turn shapes what practices are habituated inside the schools.

Where the word boundary typically implies a sort of demarcation that limits thought or action, what Guhin shows is that boundaries between “us” and “them” are both enabling and constraining. While they may limit students to particular conceptions of who they are, what they can do, how they ought to think, these boundaries also enable students to organize their moral commitments and lives in meaningful ways. They offer students a sense of community as “sacred canopies” (203) yielding safety from “outside” influence. Yet Guhin also shows that boundaries are not simply given. Rather, there are “sites of boundary contestation,” whether gender, politics, or religion, that render boundaries a continual negotiation both between those “within” the group and those on the “outside,” meaning the way society ascribes the group with particular meanings and identities.

I summarize these arguments to suggest that, by offering a comparative perspective on two differently-positioned groups in the popular imagination—Christians and Muslims—Agents of God helps us think about how the alternatively enabling or constraining nature of boundaries—the sites of boundary contestation—matter beyond schools and into the civic sphere. Specifically, I want to pick up on Guhin’s observations of the different ways boundaries mattered for Christians and Muslims. Understanding how systems of power—the sociohistorically-embedded institutional and cultural structures that constitute society2—shape these boundaries externally is essential for making sense of how these groups are negotiating and practicing them internally. So how might these different configurations of “how they see us” and “how we see them” matter for religion in the public sphere, specifically how we understand political and cultural debates over religious freedom?

First, it helps to think about whether and how external conceptions of “how they see us” matters for Christian and Muslim students in their everyday lives and what these differences tell us, distinctions Guhin theorizes through “essence” or accident.” As Guhin argues, the extent to which these boundaries are enabling or constraining really matters for the types of practices schools institutionalize and students take up, in the ways they imagine their place in society. He writes:

Sometimes they felt boundaries were more their own work, and sometimes they felt boundaries were forced up on them. They often disagreed with how they were distinguished from the rest of the world, believing people got something essentially wrong about them. But they also felt—sometimes in agreement with mainstream America and sometimes not—that there was something essentially different about the rest of the country. (37)

In Muslim schools, perceptions of exclusion were shaped through experiences of societal Islamophobia, which rendered Muslims as homogenized threats in the popular imagination. Meanwhile, in Christian schools, perceptions of victimhood were shaped through the conception that America had “lost its way,” lost its Christian character, that Christians “nowadays” were unjustly persecuted. As a Bible teacher ominously warns his students, “If you’re a Christian, the world is against you, like literally the world is against you!” (52). Another Bible teacher rues that “people [in the United States] will eventually be punished—even killed—simply for being Christian” (54). Where Christian students imagined the ideal future as a return to the Christian past, a reality they understood as essentially American, Muslim students imagined the ideal future as a reality that had not yet been realized—the inclusion of Muslims in the popular imagination as “also American.”

These differences in how Christian and Muslim schools contend with and contest boundaries are not just descriptive, they are also infused with power. After all, the Islamophobia that Muslim students grapple with is not just about “how society sees us.” It is also in how these Muslim students and their communities are categorized and treated by legal, political, and cultural structures, whether through surveillance, policing, media representations, or politically sanctioned discrimination (35). As Guhin describes, during his fieldwork, the Associated Press uncovered widespread surveillance of Muslim communities by the NYPD and FBI. In these reports, traditional religious practices like performing salah, praying five times a day, was flagged as “extremist” activity deserving of suspicion. As one teacher noted with frustration, the pressure Muslims felt to “prove” they were practicing “moderate Islam,” that they were patriotic Americans first, limited their capacity to embody Islam freely.

In this sense, the Christian communities’ perceived persecution through, for example, restrictions on prayer in public schools is not—in practice or consequence—equivalent to repeated racial profiling by agents of the state for simply practicing one’s religion. Put more simply, being positioned as an outsider fighting against one’s own societal exclusion as Muslims do to be seen as “American” is a different type of boundary work than being positioned as an insider fighting for the exclusion of “others,” as evangelicals do to preserve the “purity” of Christian America. Strikingly, the conservative Christian communities described here do not only see “secular” America as a threat to this purity, they also see nonwhite “outsiders” like Muslims as a threat to Christian America.

So, as Guhin shows, the boundaries for Muslim students are not only “symbolic,” they are also “social” and bound in material structures,3 which constrains Muslim students in ways that powerfully shape their internal negotiations of boundaries between “us” and “them” andtheir freedom of religious practice. As a result, for the Muslim students and their teachers, religious boundary work is practiced in direct relationship to the constraining nature of societal boundaries that demarcate “who Muslims are.” Guhin provides rich descriptions of these moments. He describes how

women who wore the hijab told me they often felt profiled and stereotyped before they ever talked to anyone. . . . Sister Jannat Shahid, a science teacher at Al Haqq, she told me, “I walk in the room as a hijabi. . . . I have to prove that I’m not a terrorist. . . . So as a Muslim it’s trying to prove that I’m an American. I feel that in today’s society, it’s hard to be an American Muslim and feel that they [non-Muslim Americans] look at you as a member of society.” (48)

Similarly, Muslim men in Guhin’s study described being characterized as “terrorists” based on their brown skin and facial hair, as one student named Radi described, “I’m a brown person . . . so for the media most terrorists are brown. I’ve got somewhat of a beard and most likely, if someone sees me, they’ll probably—they’ll know I’m a Muslim. They can easily just categorize me as a terrorist” (48). Religious practices that, for these Muslim students and teachers, constitute being a “good Muslim,” being “at home” in Islam (150)—whether mode of dress, style of facial hair, even behaviors like gender intermixing or shaking hands—become constrained against external boundaries of “who Muslims are” and “what Islam is.” Religious freedom, in this case, is contradicted by racialized boundaries around “true Americans,” a paradox Guhin describes through the complex intersecting boundaries of nation and culture. In the case of the United States, a national context founded on racial capitalism,4 these boundaries are constituted by racial meanings. Though Guhin’s cases show schools with diverse student bodies, he points out that the racial ideology in the Christian schools consistently unfolds through the dominance of whiteness. Meanwhile, though the Muslim students more often find themselves grappling with the limits of whiteness, it is worth pointing out that anti-Blackness often emerges as South Asian and Middle Eastern Muslim students distinguish themselves from “other” marginalized Americans, despite almost 30 percent of American Muslims being Black Americans. For Muslim students, the boundary work of demonstrating “American” (“like white”) identity means they must continually “prove” their religious practice is not “extremist” or anti-American, Muslim women must “prove” they are not oppressed by Islam, this boundary work is continually performed against the rigid constraints of “how they see us.”

In contrast, Christian students and their teachers see the country as essentially theirs, so the perception of victimhood and persecution is decoupled from material constraints. Here, the perception of threat by nonwhite, non-Christian “others” generates a tightening, a doubling down of conceptual boundaries between “us” and “them.” Religious practice works in service of maintaining that exclusion and generating power in that exclusion. Guhin describes how these Christians perceive themselves on the frontlines of the culture wars, drawing on the agents of God to batten down the hatches among students, to go to battle. This is all to say that the way boundaries are arranged by systems of power—about who this religious group is in relationship to “the nation”—shapes the way they are enabled or constrained in religious practice.

Ultimately, Agents of God helps us better understand both how religious freedom is differentially experienced among different conservative religious groups, and—more consequentially—how religious freedom is unequally distributed among them. While “both sides”—Christians and Muslims alike—may perceive their religious freedom to be violated through America’s growing secularism, Guhin shows that these perceptions emerge out of incongruent social positions—one positioned within the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation, seeking to contract the boundaries more and more to maintain Christian purity—another positioned outside, sacrificing religious practices in exchange for the provisional expansion of boundaries, to include them in the promise of the multicultural civic project so long as they “comply” with the system of power. It is through this lens that we can make better sense of the divergent meanings of religious freedom in the civic sphere, namely, how power is legitimized, habituated, and vigilantly guarded through the agents of God. As many evangelical Christian groups are celebrating the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the anti-abortion Heartbeat Act in Texas, a perceived preservation of their religious freedom, the reproductive rights opposition is mobilizing swiftly. Their argument? That the Heartbeat Act is a violation of religious freedom. As the ACLU attorney David Donatti explained of the lawsuit challenging the act, “SB 8 could very well violate our First Amendment rights, because if it is restricting . . . the ability of clergy or religious individuals—a congregation—to provide that kind of counseling, which is fundamental to their faith, then that violates their religious freedom.”5