Commentary On "Siting Pluralism": Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

nnn
Commentary on “Siting Pluralism”
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
It is only the practice of daily living which produces results as the truth.
— Dubravka Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies
There are some things we seem to need to learn over and over and over. Among them are the
ways in which modern legal efforts to expel the sacred—or, perhaps more pointedly, as Neena
Mahadev shows in her article, interventions to end it—condemn us to its constant reproduction.
State secularism results not in the evacuation of the sacred but in an almost neurotic picking at
the scab of the wound—and the continuous management of what Hussein Agrama (2012: 186)
has called the “problem-space of secularism.”
The four articles collected here are exemplary in their fine-grained analysis of this reality, both
of the often pathetic inadequacy of regulatory efforts and, even more interestingly, of the glimpses
we have of religious life lived in the in-between spaces of formal policing efforts, whether of
church or state. The spatial gesture uniting this collection—siting pluralism—proves particu-
larly potent. Sometimes imagined as uncompromisingly singular (i.e., spatial ‘locative’ religion as
opposed to utopian portable religion) and at other times as spatial in a plural, less exclusive sense,
the spaces/places of these articles are teeming with contradiction and multiplicity.
In “Adjudicating Religious Intolerance: Afro-Brazilian Religions, Public Space, and the National
Collective in Twenty-First-Century Brazil,” Elina Hartikainen reveals the messy impossibility
of laws protecting religious freedom. Efforts over the last half-century to valorize and protect
Afro-Brazilian religious practices are being countered by a growing and increasingly confident
Evangelical-Pentecostal polemic against devil worship, couched as “spiritual warfare.” Three
recent legal contexts show us judges, prosecutors, and legislators struggling to balance new laws
prohibiting intolerance with other competing public order claims, including the importance of
maintaining public spaces as secular. Greater legislative protection has not resulted in greater
judicial protection. Yet Hartikainen wants us to understand that these are not just examples of the
failure of law and majority imposition, but sites of performance and renegotiation.
Melissa Caldwell begins her article, “Sacred Spaces and Civic Action: Topographies of Plural-
ism in Russia,” with a recollection of Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance in the Cathedral of Christ
the Saviour in Moscow (available for viewing on YouTube). She then takes us on a tour of less
familiar Russian spaces where an interesting mix of religious communities and others are at
Religion and Society: Advances in Research 10 (2019): 168–170 © Berghahn Books

doi:10.3167/arrs.2019.100112
Commentary on “Siting Pluralism” n 169
work on various projects of social service and reform. Political and religious pluralism and
progressivism appear in unexpected places. One sees the remarkable flexibility of sites and an
astonishing transformation of spaces originally constructed for any number of other purposes.
She then returns to Pussy Riot and explains that their performance should not be understood as
a sacrilegious transgression of the sacred space of Russian Orthodoxy, but as the violation of a
civic space of a certain Russian nationalism, one that in many ways is quite secular. The Cathe-
dral of Christ the Saviour is not a diocesan church but a monument built with private funds
and maintained by the state, not by the church. In the memorable words of Bruce Grant (2001:
351), the Cathedral can be described as a “stratagem of innocence” in which public monu-
ments and other forms of monumental architecture “tranquilize or freeze time” (ibid.: 335). It is
not there but in other distinctively post-Soviet improvised spaces—former office buildings and
factories—that religious and political work is actually being done by any number of appealing
characters. As Caldwell, puts it: “Robust cooperative partnerships have emerged between other-
wise competing religious communities and between religious and governmental organizations
and even security agencies.”
Neena Mahadev’s article, “Post-war Blood: Sacrifice, Anti-sacrifice, and the Rearticulations
of Conflict in Sri Lanka,” describes how, in post-conflict Sri Lanka, ethnic conflict has given way
to inter-religious conflict. The morality of animal sacrifice, long practiced not just by Hindus
and Muslims, but also by Buddhist Sinhalese, has become the site for a majoritarian-nationalist
polemic on behalf of the ‘bio-moral superiority’ of modernist Buddhism in relation to Hin-
duism, Islam, and Christianity, and even for what she terms violent “anti-sacrificial vigilan-
tism,” including self-immolation. In delineating the geography of sacrifice in Sri Lanka today,
Mahadev offers a subtle reading of the complexity of the logic of sacrifice in the study of religion
more broadly, and as manifested on the ground in Sri Lanka today: “It appears that the question
of sacrifice, however implacable, must be ever-negotiated to ensure the vitality of inter-ethnic
and inter-religious harmony in the post-war context.”
Lastly, in their article “On Institutional Pluralization and the Political Genealogies of Post-
Yugoslav Islam,” Jeremy Walton and Piro Rexhepi teach us to see how the differences in the
ways in which Islamic life is organized among the republics of the former Yugoslavia stem
not principally from theological divergence but from differing institutional and political his-
tories and contexts. In a careful and fascinating account, one learns to see how the common
post-9/11 pressure to express ‘local’, ‘European’ Islam (as opposed to ‘Arab’ or ‘Middle Eastern’
Islam) has produced distinctly different institutionalizations of Islam in Kosovo, Macedonia,
Croatia, and Slovenia. Ottoman and Habsburg legacies, demographic distribution, and current
politics all structure the possibilities for collective Muslim life in post-Yugoslavia. But this is
not just a dry comparative account of abstract arrangements. It is an account peopled with
energetic individuals, many dedicated to the lives of those they serve and creatively seeking
ways to maintain the diverse ways of Islam and to live and resist collaboration with state cen-
tralization and management.
Each of these articles offers grounds for fascinating comparative conversation about how
religion works today. We also see how the flattening formatting of religion for law and politics
belies a rich and complex reality. In many ways, the composite picture is reminiscent of that
offered by Benjamin Kaplan (2007) of post-Reformation Europe in Divided by Faith: Religious
Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. The ending of religio-political
monopolies then as now leads to a bustling ‘do-it-yourself ’ quality to the fragmented afterlife of
Christian life in Europe. As with Nicolas Howe’s (2016) Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion,
and American Sacred Space, we see the stubborn and protean creativity of religious logics in
their occupation of an ostensibly secular modernity.
170 n Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
n Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies

and Affiliated Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington. She studies the intersec-
tion of religion and law in the modern period, particularly the phenomenology of modern
religion as it is shaped in its encounter with law. Her publications include Paying the Words
Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (1994), The Impossibility
of Religious Freedom (2005), Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution (2009),
A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law (2014), and Church State Cor-
poration: Construing Religion in US Law (2020); she is a co-author of Ekklesia: Three Inquiries
in Church and State (2018). E-mail: wsullliv@indiana.edu
n References
Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2012. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern
Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Grant, Bruce. 2001. “New Moscow Monuments, or, States of Innocence.” American Ethnologist 28 (2):
332–362.
Howe, Nicolas. 2016. Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Kaplan, Benjamin J. 2007. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Mod-
ern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Commentary On "Siting Pluralism": Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Commentary On "Siting Pluralism": Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Commentary On "Siting Pluralism": Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

nnn

Commentary on “Siting Pluralism”

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Religion and Society: Advances in Research 10 (2019): 168–170 © Berghahn Books

n Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies

You might also like