US Religious History, the Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity

US Religious History, the Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity Anthony M. Petro* “IF YOU’RE OFFENDED, please say so. I think it would be important to discuss that.” This is how Saba Mahmood opened the room to questions following a talk at Boston University in March of 2015. She had been invited to deliver our Fifth Annual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Memorial Lecture. Mahmood’s talk, “Moral Injury and Muhammed’s Cartoons: Thinking Reparatively with Eve Sedgwick,” built on her earlier analysis (Mahmood 2009) of polarized public reaction to the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammed. Those responses, she notes, rehearsed the all-too-common script pitting religious against secular worldviews. Working against this script, Mahmood examined the sense of “moral injury” that some Muslims expressed in regard to the cartoons, thereby shifting the terms of this controversy away from the two narratives to which it was most often assigned: an instance of blasphemy or a case about the importance of free speech. I start with this moment to signal Mahmood’s importance to the study of religion and the promise of her work for studies of gender and sexuality. This story also recalls Mahmood’s commitment to addressing offense. Whether discussing texts that have caused offense or making arguments herself that have offended scholars and political activists, Mahmood became an expert in dealing with offense—not because she downplayed the potential for offense, but because she consistently challenged the rhetorical *Anthony M. Petro, Department of Religion, Boston University, 145 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215, USA. Email: apetro@bu.edu. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, December 2019, Vol. 87, No. 4, pp. 968–981 doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfz080 Advance Access publication on November 16, 2019 © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 After Saba Mahmood: Examining Sexual Difference, Secularism, and the Study of Religion Petro: US Religious History, Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity 969 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 terms through which offense could be taken while also inviting discussion of that very offense. In this particular talk, Mahmood drew on Sedgwick’s (2003) essay on “paranoid” versus “reparative” reading practices to explore the range of readings that might become available in times of controversy. In that essay, Sedgwick softened the lure of what she called paranoid readings. Such readings work through what Paul Ricoeur named the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a common spirit running through the work of our great debunkers, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Paranoid readings draw their affective and political charge from the power of exposure. The limitation of paranoid approaches, Sedgwick worried, is that they “may have had an unintentionally stultifying effect: they may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller” (Sedgwick 2003, 124). Although often politically or affectively satisfying, these readings often stop just after telling us what it is we already suspected, what we already knew, about larger structures of power: that everything is awful (granted, awful in different ways and at different times but most often due to the social barriers erected by patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, or capitalism). In response, Sedgwick asks, “What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?” (Sedgwick 2003, 124). She suggests alternate ways to read, such as remaining open to surprise rather than anticipating the terrible thing you already know or suggesting several possibilities, rather than a single, strong theory. “The desire of the reparative impulse,” Sedgwick writes, “is additive and accretive” (Sedgwick 2003, 149). This is precisely the kind of reading that Mahmood offers when she addresses the rhetorical terms that posit religion against secularism, religion against modernity, Islam against democracy, Islam against freedom. If the rhetoric of blasphemy versus freedom of speech conjured paranoid arguments from both sides, then Mahmood sought to find another angle and move the conversation beyond the paranoid impasse of a cultural logic that pits an ostensibly secular, modern West against religious (read premodern) Islam. But it is difficult to work against this framing, especially the paranoid arguments bolstering secular assumptions about religion and freedom. Even to suggest an alternative framing—as Mahmood does, as Sedgwick might—risks offense. Why so? Partly because we have come to like dramatic arguments and the simplicity of binary poles. You are either with us or against us. And if you are against us or even appear to be so, as anthropologist Susan Harding (1991) found when she presented her research 970 Journal of the American Academy of Religion Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 on Christian fundamentalists, then you risk being marked by the same “repugnance” that secular moderns reserve for those devout religious others. The reparative reading refuses the comfort of this norm, the enticement of its easy rage. Mahmood was keen to broach that discomfort. Here I want to pick up a specific thread in Mahmood’s work: her examination of cultural production, which serves as a site rich for inciting discomfort as well as for observing forms of secularity. In Religious Difference in a Secular Age, Mahmood explains that “secularity exists at the level of sensibilities” (Mahmood 2016, 181). In the final chapter of this book, as in her previous work on the Danish cartoons, Mahmood closes with a series of generative questions: What is the work of secularity in cultural production (and the controversies that sometimes ensue)? What, if anything, is different within genealogies of secularity about cultural production itself? What do these particular sites of contestation teach us (or teach us differently) about religion and secularism? How is the cultural in this production defined, and against which others does it take form? These questions remain critical to the study of religion generally—and to the study of US religion and of religion, sexuality, and politics in particular. What does it mean for secularity to cohere in sensibilities? In her chapter “Secularity, History, Literature,” Mahmood describes how embodied, affective, and aesthetic responses “come to the fore when controversies erupt over works of cultural production that engage religion, such as the fury over the photograph ‘Piss Christ,’ from 1987, by the American artist Andres Serrano, the publication of novels such as The Satanic Verses and The Da Vinci Code, and the depiction of the prophet Muhammad in the Danish cartoons in 2006” (Mahmood 2016, 181). She focuses on debates that erupted in Egypt following the publication of Youssef Ziedan’s novel Azazeel (Mahmood [2005] 2012). A work of historical fiction set in fifth-century Egypt, Azazeel ignited criticism from Coptic Church leaders and other Christians who accused its Muslim author of distorting Christian history and fueling Muslim-Christian conflict. Mahmood argues that comprehending the standoff as a “clash between religious taboos and the right to literary freedom” (Mahmood 2016, 182)—or as yet another installment of ongoing inter-religious conflict—limits our understanding. She shows instead how a common “secular episteme” shaped both poles of the debate over Azazeel. Ziedan and the church leaders shared a “secular conception of temporality and history” (Mahmood 2016, 183, 206), one that understood religious texts to record events that occurred in “empty, homogenous time” (Mahmood 2016, 182–83). Although arriving at different interpretations of religion, in other words, arguments positing religious offense as well as those calling for literary Petro: US Religious History, Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity 971 RELIGION, ART, AND THE CULTURE WARS IN THE UNITED STATES Debates over cultural production in the United States have ranged from popular music to high art, from the purported scourges of heavy metal and rap music to the sacrilege of films like The Last Temptation of Christ and the television show Murphy Brown, from Ice T and Madonna to Judy Chicago and David Wojnarowicz. Much of the most heated rhetoric has focused on issues of sexuality and sacrilege, especially in publicly funded art. Such debates have centered on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federal government agency formed in 1965 to support artistic excellence by providing grant funding to artists and arts institutions. Conservative criticism of the NEA came to a head in the late 1980s and early 1990s, sparked by a series of public outcries over what one Supreme Court Justice would dub “provocative” art (O’Connor 1998, 574). In the spring and summer of 1989, two instances exploded in mainstream news media and on the floor of the US Congress. Conservative Christian leaders and politicians decried Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ as sacrilegious and targeted a retrospective on the gay photographer 1 For an especially helpful discussion of this chapter, see Castelli (2016). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 freedom emerged from a shared understanding of historical time, one indebted to the secular age.1 Mahmood’s work on the Muhammed cartoons and on Azazeel underscores how secularity takes form in European and Egyptian debates. I want to take up her reference to Serrano’s Piss Christ as an invitation to consider secularity in the US context and to rethink how we narrate public debates over art and religion that have become constitutive of what historians and sociologists call the US “culture wars” (Hunter 1991; Dubin 1992; Hartman 2015). Mahmood’s attention to cultural production helps us to think through the US culture wars debates over “provocative” works of art, especially artistic work by feminist and queer artists, that have come under fire from leaders of the religious and political right. She provides a model for unpacking the work of secularity in these debates, for understanding alignments of religious freedom versus sexual and gender expression that have taken root during the age of cultures wars. Along with Sedgwick’s work on reparative reading, she also offers a model for opening these debates to other possible readings in our efforts to understand the entanglements of religion, politics, and representation in the historical present. 972 Journal of the American Academy of Religion Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 Robert Mapplethorpe called The Perfect Moment for including pornography. Serrano had received a $15,000 grant from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which had itself received NEA funding. The University of Pennsylvania received $30,000 from the NEA to fund the Mapplethorpe exhibit, which traveled to several museums. Conservative Christians such as Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association and Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network quickly mobilized their bases to oppose what they labeled state-funded blasphemy and pornography (O’Connor 1998; Steiner 1995). Congress responded. South Carolina Senator Jesse Helms called Serrano “a jerk” during public debate, while New York Senator Alphonse D’Amato ripped up the exhibition catalogue containing Piss Christ on the Senate floor. Helms told one reporter that he had shown the Mapplethorpe catalogue to his wife, Dorothy, who responded, “Lord have mercy, Jesse, I’m not believing this,” before slamming it shut (Dowd 1989). Joined by other conservatives, they sought to limit the NEA’s ability to fund such work. Congress cut the NEA’s budget for the following year and enacted an amendment declaring that no NEA funds “may be used to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which in the judgment of [the NEA] may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (quoted in O’Connor 1998, 575). This amendment was overturned in Federal District Court in 1991, but in anticipation of that decision, members of Congress had already debated alternative measures. Members of the House dismissed a proposal to dismantle the NEA altogether, but Congress eventually adopted a “bipartisan compromise” (O’Connor 1998, 576), what is commonly called the “decency clause.” The key language appears in Section 954(d)(1): “Artistic excellence and artistic merit are the criteria by which applications are judged, taking into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” Many artists worried about the vagueness of this idea of “standards of decency.” Whose standards? How do we define decency? And how does one weigh the demand for decency against the freedom of expression? The mobilization of conservative opposition had a chilling effect on art dealing with themes of gender and sexuality, especially work by feminist and queer artists. That summer, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC canceled their showing of Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment only weeks before it was set to open. Museum leaders worried that exhibiting his work could lead to further cuts to NEA funding and to their own institution Petro: US Religious History, Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity 973 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 (Steiner 1995). East Village artist David Wojnarowicz would also find himself at the center of these art wars debates. In November of 1989, NEA Chair John Frohnmayer revoked a $10,000 grant given to Artist Space for a show focusing on the HIV/AIDS crisis called “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” He pulled the funding after language from the exhibition catalogue came to the attention of rightwing religious and political leaders. The text in question came from a catalogue essay by Wojnarowicz, in which he denounced conservative leaders such as Senator Jesse Helms and Cardinal John J. O’Connor (Carr 2012, 442–61). Wojnarowicz, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1992, would once again spark debate in 2010. That fall, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery hosted a landmark exhibit focused on gender and sexual difference in the work of socially marginalized artists, especially queer artists. Co-curated by Jonathan Katz and David Ward, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” included Wojnarowicz’s unfinished film A Fire in My Belly. This four-minute cut of the film shows an image of a crucifix laying on the ground with ants crawling on it. Wojnarowicz reproduced images from this footage elsewhere, including a black and white photo of the cross for Untitled from the Ant Series (Spirituality) (see Petro 2018, 238–40). Congressional leaders, including House leader John Boehner, and conservative media, much of it led by the Catholic League’s William Donohue, quickly attacked this stand-alone image as anti-Catholic “hate speech.” Under fire and fearing retribution from Congress, the National Portrait Gallery pulled the film from the exhibit, an act that drew equally loud criticism from those on the left denouncing it as an act of censorship (New York Times Editorial Board 2010; Cotter 2010; Dwyer 2010). What was anti-Catholic hate speech to some was to others just another case of queer art being silenced by religious conservatives, with public institutions falling into line. Indeed, we might ask: Is it immediately and universally obvious what ants crawling on a crucifix would mean? For many conservative leaders, the answer has been yes. I am interested in the history of that yes, in the confidence of its pronouncement, and in the interpretive habits it takes to make it. We should also note a new line of comparison that had entered both liberal and conservative rhetoric by the time of the debate over A Fire in My Belly. Speaking to the New York Times in 2010, the Catholic League’s Donohue compared purportedly secularist (because queer) critiques of Christianity to attacks on Islam. “It would jump out at people if they had ants crawling all over the body of Muhammad,” he explained: “except that they wouldn’t do it, of course, for obvious reasons” (Itzkoff 2010; also see Dwyer 2010). Donohue pointed to an inconsistency: that artistic community (and the general US public) would never condone assaulting 974 Journal of the American Academy of Religion One: The reduction of feminist and queer art to a stable set of offenders against religion is itself a tool of the Christian secular, which cannot imagine the work of feminist and queer artists aside from their antithetical relationship to religion, to “decency,” to morality, and to proper citizenship. The rhetoric of the culture wars is not merely descriptive of deep-seated moral and political differences but actively constructs these differences through its very power of categorization. We need to understand better the logic by which an artist like Andres Serrano is grouped together with David Wojnarowicz, or Renee Cox, or Chris Ofili, or Karen Finley, or Ron Athey— all targets of political and moral attack—as if their art does the same work. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 Islam in the way that it allows attacks on Christianity, such as that allegedly depicted in Wojnarowicz’s film. In 2015, following the shooting at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper that republished the Muhammed cartoons, LGBT activist and media pundit Dan Savage offered a similar comparison, but from the left. Writing for SLOG, part of the Seattle-based newspaper The Stranger, he mocked the reticence of US news media to re-publish the controversial Danish Muhammed cartoons in coverage of the attack. Even more, he recoiled at news that, in the wake of the attack, the Associated Press removed images of Serrano’s Piss Christ from their website and visual archives (Savage 2015). The removal followed criticism from the conservative Washington Examiner that the AP readily blurred the Muhammed images but continued to show Piss Christ despite outcries that it too was sacrilegious (Carney 2015). Why bow to Muslim demands but not to those of Christians, the argument went. Savage blasted both the mainstream press and conservative Christians: “The fact that cartoonists, publishers, editors, photographers, artists, comedians, and satirists aren’t afraid of ‘you’—the fact that they’re not afraid to mock Christ, Christians, Christianity—is something that Christians, conservative and otherwise, should be proud of.” Indeed, he continued, “It is a credit to Judaism and Christianity that both are safe targets of satire in Western societies” (Savage 2015). Mahmood’s work on secularism, secularity, and cultural production proves helpful in making sense of this historical and contemporary debate over religion, representation, and politics. In her analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, Mahmood pushes against “the limited vocabulary of blasphemy and freedom of speech—the two poles that dominated the debate” (Mahmood 2009, 841). Following her lead, we might step back to observe how this logic comes to dominate discussion and ask what alternative readings it obscures. Here, I want to offer three hypotheses about the culture wars debates in the United States, admittedly more provocative than conclusive, that Mahmood’s work helps to elucidate. Petro: US Religious History, Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity 975 Two: The rhetoric of the culture wars deployed in the United States operates with a specific habit of interpretation that tends to reduce visual culture to the model of language and to assume that language is both representational and sincere. The rhetoric of the culture wars operates with what Mahmood (2009), following Webb Keane (2007), diagnoses as a “Protestant semiotic model” that has shaped normative understandings of modern life by taking language to be representational. Notice, for instance, how Donohue and Savage reduce visual culture to the model of speech. Of course, such understandings of “hate speech” or free speech emerge from a particular legal discourse active in the United States in which “speech” covers a wide range of speech acts and behaviors. But I want to suggest that the model, especially in popular use, nonetheless largely reduces artistic work to the logic of language and to a specific hermeneutic at that—one that understands language, now including visual images, to be easily readable, partly because it is fundamentally representational Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 We might step back from the way the culture wars frame battles over art to ask how such categorizing works—and in whose interests. How do “moral” issues become issues of gender and sexuality and how has this become the privileged province of “religious” debate? How has art come to occupy a social sphere that is normatively different from where “religion” takes place? How have religion, gender, and sexuality become the most visible issues in the US culture wars? And how does the history of racism shape this rhetoric? According to Mahmood, both religion and sexuality were privatized in modern societies “under the sign of the secular” and thus “are haunted by a similar paradox: even as both come to be interiorized in secular modernity they are also subject to an unprecedented regulation and normalization under the modern state and its various political rationalities” (Mahmood 2013, 50). Like sexuality, in other words, modern religion becomes “subject to regulatory control.” “This, in my opinion,” Mahmood writes, “is a testament to the deep-rooted secular belief that the modern state, after circumscribing religion rightfully into its own sphere, has left it largely alone” (Mahmood 2013, 50–51). Mahmood helps us to understand how issues of sexuality and gender, as issues of morality, become the province of “religion,” which itself in some secular narratives has been relegated to the private sphere and to personal conscience. The adoption of religious iconography in contemporary art thus becomes a matter of religion out of place. That such work is produced by feminist and queer artists signals, in turn, that this artistic work is not only not doing religion but must be actively debasing religion in some way. 976 Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2 Arguing for the substitutability of artistic images of Jesus and Muhammed, as Savage and Donohue do, thus ignores the historically and theologically different roles these figures occupy. Granted, this logic runs a bit differently in Savage than it does in Donohue. For Savage, both Jesus and Muhammed are merely religious symbols, signs of belief (and, for him, incorrect beliefs), that we should have the freedom to mock as we see fit. For Donohue, Jesus and Muhammed are both religious symbols and, if we grant him maximum generosity, he might claim both should be respected, though he certainly finds one to be true and the other false. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 rather than expressive or performative. This approach also presumes representation is either sincere or insincere.2 This underlying way of interpreting images has allowed for two things to happen over the history of the US culture wars. First, it provides the cultural logic by which Islam and Christianity— and Muhammed and Jesus specifically—become interchangeable terms in debates over representation. Their substitutability stems in part from how we talk about and compare religions, a discourse that has its own long history (Asad 1993; Masuzawa 2005). Even short of saying that “Islam” or “Christianity” cannot exist apart from particular historical and local traditions, we should at least note the very different roles that Muhammed and Jesus occupy within these diverse traditions. Most Christians in the United States consider Jesus both fully human and fully divine. For Muslims, of course, Muhammed is not Allah but rather his messenger. We could also ask how Christians and Muslims have oriented themselves to these figures, what roles they play, and how they have or have not been represented visually, aurally, materially, and textually. At the least, we should note the long history of depicting Jesus in painting and other artistic forms, of embodying Christ in dramatic and filmic productions, or understanding Jesus as one among “us.” Different habits of representation have shaped Islamic understandings, where written depictions of Muhammed have been common, but visual representations, although not absent, have been considered forbidden by many Muslims (Gruber 2019). Given this history, to consider Muhammed and Jesus not only as mere symbols, but also parallel symbols, requires an understanding of discrete religions as variable permutations of a common kind, and it requires a misunderstanding of the roles of these figures within Islamic and Christian histories. Second, the rhetoric of the culture wars implicitly figures sincere forms of representation against either sacrilegious (for Donohue) or satirical (for Savage) ones. Following Mahmood, we might say that this approach both limits us to a representational model in terms of how people relate to signs and also forecloses relations to representation that do not conform to the demands of sincerity or insincerity. In her essay on the Danish cartoons, Mahmood describes the “rather impoverished understanding of images, icons, and signs [that] not only naturalized a certain concept Petro: US Religious History, Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity 977 Three: In the age of the modern culture wars, possibly even before, we tend to privilege religion as a site of identity and to overlook alternative ways that religious power operates or what it might mean to live under the shadow of something like Christian culture or Christian secularism. As the example of Wojnarowicz suggests, a tension emerges in debates about religion and the culture wars around the question of appropriation versus resignification. It is part of a broader set of questions about the relationship between religion and identity. What I mean by this is that studies of religion often presume an identity-based model of religion. This could take several forms, but one common version appears when someone explains how they decide who is or is not religious in their work through 3 In a similar vein, Melissa Wilcox (2018) has written a fascinating account of what she calls the “serious parody” of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 of a religious subject but also fails to attend to the affective and embodied practices through which a subject comes to relate to a particular sign—a relationship founded not only on representation but also on what I will call attachment and cohabitation” (Mahmood 2009, 841–42). Mahmood sets aside the terms of blasphemy versus free speech in analyzing the Danish cartoon controversy to understand, instead, the sense of “moral injury” that some Muslims felt in seeing these depictions of Muhammed. To build this argument, Mahmood looks not to histories of representation—and not to claims that these cartoons broke a prohibition against representing Muhammed—but rather to the ways that some Muslims relate to Muhammed. Here in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Petro 2017), I have examined how queer activists and artists like Ray Navarro dressing in Jesus drag offer examples of religious expression in public that move outside the binary between sincerity and insincerity, often by playing on rich traditions of queer and Catholic camp.3 We might also look to the work that artists like Serrano or Wojnarowicz are doing when they draw on Christian images. Wojnarowicz’s artistic work is replete with Christian iconography, which he often combines with a rich catalogue of other symbols repeated in his work: clocks, trains, industrial machines, images of sex, maps, newspapers, money or coins, Jean Genet, and many elements from nature, especially frogs and ants. He arranged these symbols into grand visual mythologies, works that are meant to shake us out of our present sleep and to conjure new worlds. It takes a great deal of interpretative work to reduce Wojnarowicz’s art to the binary rhetoric of the culture wars or the terms of sincerity, sacrilege, or satire. We need to know more about that interpretive work, and we need more readings of this art itself. 978 Journal of the American Academy of Religion Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 self-definition—if a research subject identifies as Christian or Jewish or none, then the scholar takes that descriptive claim at its word. I am by no means suggesting we ignore the claims of our subjects, but building on Mahmood’s work, I want to suggest that this model of identity is not the only way we can or should understand religion, including the question of whether one is inside or outside of religion or of a particular religion—especially when it comes to people living on the margins of society. Let me offer an example. When I teach Serrano’s Piss Christ, my students’ immediate worry is that the photograph insults or offends Christians. After looking at the photograph, I show them this quotation from Serrano: “I had no idea Piss Christ would get the attention it did, since I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I’ve been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ. But I’m an artist, and the role of the artist is to break new ground for himself and for his audience” (quoted in Nunes 2017). For most of my students, that Serrano identifies as an insider, as a Christian, is enough to diffuse most of their worry. It seems far worse for an outsider to appropriate a religious symbol than for an insider to subvert one. And this is fair—it opens a space to consider the differences between appropriation and subversion. But I also want to hold space for other ways of thinking about what it means to fall “within” Christianity. Here, I find Wojnarowicz a more interesting example. Although he grew up with some connection to Roman Catholicism, Wojnarowicz not only distanced himself from the idea that he was a believing Catholic but also actively criticized organized religion and the Catholic Church in particular. If we step away from identity-based approaches to naming the Catholic—if we open space to ask how people who might not name themselves as Catholic and who certainly would not be named Catholic by many of their enemies—then we might see how Catholicism has nonetheless provided a visual and ritual vocabulary for much feminist and queer art. This is the Catholic vocabulary I want to know more about. In this sense, Catholicism is not merely a matter of how one identifies oneself but rather a language one speaks, the chill one gets walking into a cathedral, the fear one has as his body shakes and tears run down his cheeks when he crumbles a consecrated communion wafer, as one AIDS activist did when protesting at St. Patrick’s. I want to suggest that taking “Catholic” outside the register of identity opens up many rich ways to consider and expand the terrain of Catholic (or Christian or religious) history, but only if we can learn to see it. As a queer man living under the cultural authority of the Archdiocese of New York and within the Christian culture of the United States, Wojnarowicz seems not to be living “outside” of Christianity, even though he does not understand his relationship to it Petro: US Religious History, Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity 979 For those with well-honed secular-liberal and progressive sensibilities, the slightest eruption of religion into the public domain is frequently experienced as a dangerous affront, one that threatens to subject us to a normative morality dictated by mullahs and priests. This fear is accompanied by a deep self-assurance about the truth of the progressivesecular imaginary, one that assumes that the life forms it offers are the best way out for these unenlightened souls, mired as they are in the spectral hopes that gods and prophets hold out to them. (Mahmood [2005] 2012, xi) One lesson we can learn from her work is to chasten such sensibilities and to explore other imaginaries. In the United States, feminist and queer artists have so often been reduced by the logic of the culture wars to the status of secular, anti-religious, or even creators of sacrilegious art. For some, this designation works. But for many, as I suggested here, it reduces to the binary of religious versus secular these diverse and creative engagements with religious symbols and iconography, engagements that suggest a progressive imaginary not only hostile to some forms of Christianity but also haunted by those same forms, reworking them into alternative myths, alternate ways of imagining the world. Mahmood taught us to see past the obvious framings and into those campy, funky, haunted spaces in between. REFERENCES Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Carney, Timothy P. 2015. “Associated Press Censored Muhammad Cartoons While Selling ‘Piss Christ.’” Washington Examiner, January 7. Available at Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/87/4/968/5626536 by AAR Member Access, apetro@bu.edu on 04 January 2020 as one of identification. Moreover, it would not make much sense to claim that his appropriation of Christian iconography is that of an outsider—he is most certainly not an outsider to the cultural and political power of Christianity nor to the ways its visual and ritual vocabulary have shaped modern subjectivity, including sexual identity. My goal here is not to settle the question of which characters in the culture wars are secular and which religious. In fact, following Mahmood, that is not the most helpful question, because it boxes us into an unnecessarily delimited set of options, ones that tether secularity and religion too easily to identity and, moreover, to a form of individual identity that is particular to and in the service of normative forms of modern liberal subjectivity. There are better questions. In the preface to Politics of Piety, Mahmood writes: 980 Journal of the American Academy of Religion Carr, Cynthia. 2012. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. 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