NOTE: In Graduate Center, room 5109.

Abstract:

The notion of “religion” as a coherent concept and sphere of human life, as conceptualized in liberal theory from Locke to Weber, has been problematized from numerous perspectives in the past generation. Critics have argued that “religion” must be viewed as a historically and culturally contingent category and as an artifact of identifiable contexts of power (Smith, Asad, Boyarin, etc.). This critique of “religion” has an oblique relationship with an older wave of critique, an integral part of the cultural modernist assault on the detachment of the elemental sources of human energy from the rest of social life. This wave took heterogeneous forms, from the theological to the vitalistic to the anarchistic (Tillich, Barth, Simmel, Buber, Bataille).   This paper argues that reflection on the relationship between these two waves of critique can be productively engaged by revisiting the Supreme Court’s conscientious objection cases from the mid-60s, the moment of fierce escalation of the American war in Vietnam, as well as of antiwar resistance, a moment in which the seemingly arcane question, “what is religion?”, entailed direct life-and-death consequences for draft resisters. The paper argues that these cases not only explicitly participated in shifting constructions of “religion” by state power, justified with reference to empirical cultural contingency, but also confronted theological questions of what should count as religiosity. In expanding the notion of religiosity for the purpose of conscientious objection, the Court relied on leading figures of then-dominant liberal Protestant theology, particularly a sanitized version of Paul Tillich. In widening the scope of “religion” that could justify conscientious objection, the Court ignored the ways Tillich had found “religion” in heretofore unexpected places, such as Cubist art, while finding the very opposite of “religion,” indeed, the “demonic,” in seemingly impeccable places, such as mainstream churches. Taken in all its heterogeneous sources and multivalent logics, and particularly the “demonics” of one of its key authorities, the Court’s decisions provided the resources for thoroughly reshuffling the categorization of what should count as religiosity in law and theology. They thereby potentially undermined the basic conceptualization of conscientious objection as a narrowly drawn category of exemption from a quintessential exercise of sovereign power. The consequences of these dynamics for current controversies, both in the US and elsewhere, are only now in the process of coming to public awareness.

Bio:

Nathaniel Berman is the Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture at Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities.  He also co-directs Brown’s Religion and Internationalism Project.  Berman’s work focuses on the modern construction of the “nation” and “religion” in dialectical relationship with that of the “international.” His work draws on law, literary criticism, post-colonial theory, and religious studies. He is the author of, among many other studies, Passion and Ambivalence: Nationalism, Colonialism, and International Law (2011) and “The Sacred Conspiracy: Religion, Nationalism, and the Crisis of Internationalism” (2012). Berman holds a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in Jewish Studies from University College London.