472

From American Religious Liberalism, ed. Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012)

Chapter 16

Religious Liberalism and the Liberal Geopolitics of Religion

Tracy Fessenden This essay was originally titled “Liberalism and Ambivalence.” The ambivalence

was my own, and in the company of the vibrant scholars and champions of religious

liberalism collected here it made itself felt as a kind of embarrassment, a desire to trot out

my own religious-liberal bona fides before proceeding further: I believe in gay marriage

as a religious as well as a civil right. I believe that Jesus would have shielded slain

abortion provider George Tiller with his body, and I found solace during the Bush

Administration in the hour a week I got to pretend, with other viewers of The West Wing,

that my president was really a Jesuit-educated Democrat played by Martin Sheen. My

nostalgia for the Berrigan-brothers Catholicism of my childhood, where the long-haired

seminarian strumming guitar on the altar was as likely to play from the Leonard Cohen

songbook as from Glory & Praise, is as real and abiding as any of an earlier generation’s

for the Latin Mass. I may not map perfectly onto the vivid historical schema given in

Leigh Schmidt’s Restless Souls, but my undergraduates don’t need convincing; the words

religious and liberal regularly show up on their official and unofficial evaluations of my

classes, the conjunction variously framed in curiosity, relief, or alarm.

So my students are often unsure what to make of my strong reservations about

473

what might be called a liberal geopolitics of religion, the ways in which the project of

bringing religions into line with a liberal, democratic world order has emerged as an

insistent feature of United States policy. An example would be the George W. Bush-era

strategy of Muslim World Outreach, a $1.3. billion program of enlisting both state and

non-state actors (the latter including “Islamic radio, Islamic TV, Islamic schools,

mosques, and monuments”) to promote the “values of religious tolerance” in the so-

called Muslim world.1 Another is the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), a

complex regulatory machinery signed into law by Bill Clinton that empowers the U.S.

government to patrol and to punish religious freedom violations in every other country of

the world.2 In a new set of recommendations to the Obama Administration, the former

director of the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom urged that

IRFA be integrated more fully into international security policy and retooled in the image

of Muslim World Outreach, its new focus less on targeting specific abuses than on

“facilitating the political and cultural institutions necessary to religious freedom.” This

would be a way for the U.S. to “tackle religious politics abroad,” he suggested, by

drawing “lessons from its domestic success.”3 “[America] is the spiritual home of modern

choice-based religion and pluralism” notes The Economist in an essay commending this

course; “It is also the world's most powerful country . . . . Why has a country so rooted in

pluralism made so little of religious freedom” in its statecraft?4

I’m not the first to note the irony in the way that the U.S. mandate to “tackle

religious politics abroad” is grounded in appeals to its vaunted tradition of non-

interference in the religious lives of its citizens, or that the goal of advancing a more

liberal Islam, conceived now as a state function, has been integrated into the agendas of

474

conservative Christian groups.5 Of more concern to me are the normative assumptions

such projects carry and enforce: their articulation of some religions and relations to

religion but not others as normal and salutary, some as compatible with democracy and

some as ominously incompatible. The imperative of rendering some forms of religious

subjectivity, association, and practice out of bounds within a liberal democratic world

order will thus on occasion justify the violence such regulation claims to deter: a military

and strategic analysis provided by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in the run-up

to the war in Iraq, for example, framed the pre-emptive strike on Iraq as a step toward

fulfilling “the Bush Doctrine's promise to liberalize the Islamic world.”6

My point here is not to debate the dangers or the merits of U.S. efforts to realize

its policy objectives through the cultivation of particular religious subjectivities as

normative, but to ask about the possible relationships between such projects and the

category of religious liberalism.7 This is to subject religious liberalism to the kinds of

questions I’m admittedly more used to putting to religious conservatism. When I teach

Marie Griffith’s God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission, for

example, I try to move the discussion of power in a different direction than the one that

her book’s title most often prompts. God’s Daughters has sparked rich debate on the

degree to which their participation in the activities of the conservative Christian group

Women’s Aglow empowers or disempowers these women within their families, faith

communities, and the broader culture. I encourage my students to think also about where

the practices and articulations of Women’s Aglow members situate them within larger

operations of power, among them the forms of juridical and state power that nurture the

particular configurations—of families, religions, and states—that their prayers and

475

advocacy inscribe as desirable, holy, and good. (To give a sense of what these are:

Women’s Aglow identifies as its three divine “mandates” 1) “to promote gender

reconciliation between male and female in the Body of Christ as God designed,” 2)“to

minister to the Muslim people, while bringing awareness of the basic theological

differences between Islam and Christianity,” elsewhere given as the mandate to “unravel

the garment of Islam” or to “unveil . . . the system [of Islam]” and 3) “to stand in loving

support for Israel and the Jewish people.”8) To invoke Foucault’s notion of

governmentality, or the means by which a particular form of governance produces the

subjects best suited to fulfilling its ends: how might the practices of Women’s Aglow go

to the creation of subjects for whom the desiderata of Aglow are self-evidently good, and

the means of their achievement presumed legitimate? My question for American

religious liberalism, then—a formation from which I cannot (nor would I wish to) exempt

or extricate myself—is: what is its relationship to the operations of power that would

cultivate as normative those forms of religious life that abet or at least do not obstruct

what the AEI policy paper I cited earlier calls the global “expansion of the American

perimeter”—a “liberal, democratic . . . world environment where the American system

can survive and flourish”?9

I suspect that to put this question to religious liberalism in this setting may be to

go against the grain. Given its underdog history in America, the variety of paths to human

flourishing it recognizes and supports, isn’t religious liberalism something we want

warmly to endorse? (And aren’t liberal regimes better than illiberal regimes, for that

matter?) I want to be clear that in questioning liberalism I have no wish to mount an

assault from either the right or from further left. Perhaps the force of liberalism is such

476

that to engage it at all is to feel compelled to stake one’s place on the left-right spectrum

that liberalism appears to organize, as though this were the only legitimate terrain of

critique. To note this, though, is also to confront both the capaciousness and the

slipperiness of “liberal” as a descriptor. If you search for the word “liberal” in the online

archives of the American Enterprise Institute or The Economist, for example, you’ll see

approving and derogatory uses about equally divided. In the first category you’ll find

terms like “American-led liberal international order,” “liberal international order of

nation-states,” and the “liberal foundations of global free-trade,” in the second “liberal

judges,” “liberal bias,” “liberal journalists,” “liberal pack-mentality” and the “liberal

solipsism of righteous Democrats.” In these contexts, “liberal” is a good thing to be if

you’re a democracy but a bad thing to be if you’re a democrat, salutary in international

settings and suspect in domestic ones. The international settings in which “good”

liberalism is to be found are nevertheless those where American values hold sway, or are

seen to have the best chances of success.

However differently The Nation or Mother Jones might weight the liberal

spectrum, the classical, free-market liberalism favored on the right and the just-society

liberalism associated with the left do share a set of foundational, normative commitments.

Foremost among them are a commitment to the autonomy of the individual and a

commitment to what might be thought of as the autonomy of liberalism itself. In the first

case, liberalism posits individual freedom as innate to personhood. Locke famously

assumed humans to be “naturally in . . . a State of perfect Freedom to order their actions .

. . without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any Man,” as well as in a “State . . .

of Equality, wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than

477

another.”10 In the second case, liberalism as the basis for democratic governance must

be what John Rawls called “freestanding.” As Rawls put it in Political Liberalism, the

goal is a not a “comprehensive doctrine” of human flourishing to compete with other

comprehensive doctrines, but instead a neutral framework for “reasoned, informed, and

willing political agreement” among citizens regardless of the comprehensive doctrines to

which they may or may not adhere.11 The principle of liberalism’s autonomy provides

the framework both for multiculturalism, with its promise of overlapping consensus

among differing comprehensive doctrines, as well as for the rule of law, for which the

rival claims of any comprehensive doctrine must stand aside.

Two features of liberalism in its broadest theoretical foundations, then, are that it

places freedom, conceptualized in individual terms, above other human goods, and that it

is something importantly other than religion. Not only is liberalism other than religion in

the sense that it stands apart from any comprehensive doctrine, but running through

liberal theory is the suspicion that religion itself represents a constraint on freedom that

cannot always be justified by recourse to liberal principles. For Mill, the “a priori

assumption . . . in favour of freedom” puts “the burthen of proof . . . [on those] who

contend for any restriction or prohibition.”12 Religious authority, like democratic

governance, can only be justified on the grounds that it is freely chosen, and that it

nurtures rather than constrains the freedom and equality of its followers. (Here we can

begin to see the complex historical articulations between liberalism and Protestantism,

particularly in America.13)

Leigh Schmidt’s genealogy of American religious liberalism documents myriad

ways in which liberal assumptions found vibrant expression in loosely religious idioms,

478

bent to the convictions and whims of the heterodox.14 Whitman’s point in Democratic

Vistas that “only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the

spirituality of religion positively come forth at all” sits comfortably with Mill’s near-

contemporaneous insistence in On Liberty that “the cultivation of individuality” alone

among “any condition of human affairs” “brings human beings . . . nearer to the best

thing they can be.”15 Liberalism’s vision of the self as free in relation to the

comprehensive doctrines from which it may choose its conceptions of flourishing finds

resonance in William James’s definition of spirituality as “susceptibility to ideals” but

“with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about them. A certain amount of

‘otherworldly’ fancy. Otherwise you have mere morality.” As liberalism seeks to nurture

a variety of comprehensive doctrines without identifying itself with any one, so religious

liberalism in Schmidt’s account is marked by a “cosmopolitan spirit that emphasize[s] the

appreciation of religious variety,” its “ecumenical pursuit of unity amid diversity”16 both

accommodating and provisionalizing particular traditions and creeds. It is egalitarian in

its agenda and global in its reach, identifying as what is most authentic, desirable, and

praiseworthy in religion a state of personal spiritual freedom available to anyone

(whether “in occident [or] orient,’ as the Rev. Robert Alfred Vaughan put it in 1856,

“whether Romanist or Protestant, Jew, Turk, or Infidel.”) From this newly globalized

conception of personal spiritual freedom, Schmidt argues, religious liberalism derives its

ethical commitment to progressive, justice-producing reforms.

We could continue to mark points of convergence between liberal theory and

religious liberalism as Schmidt portrays it. To do so however is to risk naturalizing a

relation between liberalism and religion that is this easy, this untroubled, when in

479

political practice the relationship between liberalism and religion is of course far more

fraught. Perhaps one function of religious liberalism in its canonical versions is to

smooth over these more conflictual relationships, to render them ideally unproblematic,

such that what problems do arise in the confrontation of religion with liberalism can be

ascribed to the former rather than to the latter. I want then to focus for the remainder of

this essay on five nodes or points of conjuncture between religion and liberalism that

suggest a less settled relationship between them.

1. Insofar as religion and liberalism are usually seen as potentially compatible but

intrinsically separate from one another, the conjunction of religion and liberalism might

instead direct attention to religious sources of liberalism that typically go

unacknowledged. The publication in 2009 of Rawls’s undergraduate thesis at Princeton, a

rich exercise in theological ethics he titled A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and

Faith, has now attracted a flurry of interest, but one wonders why it remained so long

overlooked, or why the theological undercurrents in his mature work have only recently

come in for discussion.

2. The conjunction of liberalism and religion (with its etymological resonance in

religare, to tie or bind) also condenses a key question in liberal political theory, which is

the extent to which selves can even be constituted as such apart from their attachments,

including attachments they do not or cannot freely choose.

3. The joining of the two terms in “religious liberalism” suggests a mode of

production: how does liberalism, by recognizing some forms of religion and relations to

religion but not others as compatible with its norms, go to the making of religion in

liberal societies?

480

4. The religion/liberalism conjunction also brings to mind what Mahmood

Mamdani has called the “culturalization” of conflict in liberalism, the transposition of

debate over what is liberal or nonliberal from the market and the state to “culture,” which

tends to shake out as another name for religion.17 To the degree that liberalism, as Stanley

Hauerwas suggests, “is assumed to be irreversibly institutionalized economically as

market capitalism and politically as democracy,”18 religion (a.k.a. “culture”) remains the

site where liberalism still has work to do.

5. Finally, “religious liberalism” suggests that liberalism operates as a party to

differences with or among religions and not merely as a tool for managing them. This is

not to say that liberalism is itself a religion, but that its own thick normativities, like those

of any religion, are culturally and historically situated and so something less than

transparent or freestanding.

To pursue the question of American religious liberalism in relation to a liberal

geopolitics of religion, let me move backwards through this list, and begin with some

ways in which liberalism operates as a party to religious debate even as it purportedly

maintains a strong form of autonomy in relation to religion.19

The principle of liberalism’s autonomy from culture means that liberal

commitments will typically be seen to operate as remedies or terms of analysis for, not

aspects of, the conflicts on which they are brought to bear. Recent liberal engagement

with issues of gender justice within a nonliberal or insufficiently liberal religious culture,

for example, will often start by describing a conflict internal to that culture, momentarily

reframe the tension as one between liberalism and its other, and then pursue the

encounter as a challenge for liberalism, a managerial or procedural problem to be solved

481

by getting liberal commitments in their proper axiological order. In her essay “Religion

and Women’s Human Rights,” for example, Martha Nussbaum begins by recounting

cases in which women are subject to violence or denied equality in global religious

contexts, including the corporal punishment of women in Iran who reject the Hijab, the

obstructions of conservative Hindu male members of the Indian parliament to legislation

that extends to women the right to divorce and remarry, and Chinese policies that justify

economic harms to women by appeal to Confucian norms. Each of these instances of

injury to women arises within a very different cultural system, but taken severally they

pose what Nussbaum calls a “liberal dilemma.” This is a dilemma for liberals—what to

do? —and also a dilemma within liberalism, namely, a tension between the liberal

commitment to diversity, including religious diversity, and the liberal commitment to

equality and the rule of law, both of which, as noted earlier, flow from the principle of

liberalism’s alleged autonomy from culture.20

Externalizing religious conflict in this way—rewriting the confrontation of

opposing desires, obligations, and appeals to authority within a particular religious

culture as a tension within liberalism —misses ameliorative possibilities that may inhere

in the terms of the conflict itself. Framing the problem as one of liberal vs. nonliberal

cultures, meanwhile (Nussbaum does both), insulates liberal principles from negotiation

or debate to the degree that they are seen as solutions for rather than strands within the

underlying conflict. (This may also be the case when liberal principles really are

external to a particular debate; as Peter van der Veer suggests, liberal concern for the

question of headscarves in French schools as one of fine-tuning the consideration of

parity —are Muslim girls disadvantaged by the headscarf; are crosses and yarmulkes

482

likewise prohibited by the ban on religious attire—is likely “to result in a strategic

essentialism on the part of Muslim girls who want to assert their difference.” Thus

liberalism becomes a part of the conflict it seeks to manage.21) In either case, putting

liberalism beyond or above religious difference allows liberalism to disown the regulative

force of its own interventions on religion to the degree that these are seen to flow from

commitments that are themselves religiously neutral. As Rawls put it, “The question of

equal liberty of conscience is settled.”22

But “liberty of conscience” suggests a certain relationship to religion, one in

which the individual stands back to assess, compare, evaluate, and make choices. Any

other relation to religion suggests coercion or false consciousness, an overvaluation of

received authority, a lack of critical distance. This is also a normative relation to culture

within liberalism—as Wendy Brown parses it, you either have a culture (in which you

reflect critically on its ideals, do not blindly follow custom, etc.) or else your culture has

you.23 To move up then to the fourth item on my list, the culturalization of conflict in

liberalism: a well known example is Susan Moller Okin’s essay “Is Multiculturalism Bad

for Women?” and the many responses it generated, which focus almost entirely on the

dangers to women of accommodating minority religions within liberal polities, even

though “culture” remains the operative rubric throughout. “Most if not all [cultures] have

patriarchal pasts,” Okin writes, “but some—western liberal culture in particular—have

departed from them far further than others . . . In the case of a more patriarchal minority

culture in the context of a less patriarchal majority culture, no argument can be made on

the basis of self-respect or freedom that the female members of the [more patriarchal]

culture have a clear interest in its preservation. Indeed, they may be much better off if the

483

culture into which they were born were . . . to become extinct (so that its members would

become integrated into the less sexist surrounding culture).” This is clearly the position

of many women who have found themselves unable to inhabit liberal majority and

religious minority cultures simultaneously, among them several whose passionate

denunciations of Islam have earned them international platforms, but Okin makes their

choice one that can brook, as she says, “no argument.” 24

In this respect Okin’s account of the optimal relation of women to culture—

stepping back from, appraising, reconfiguring or discarding to the degree that culture

does not accord with liberal norms—is also a normative account of the liberal state’s

relation to religion. Writing in support of Okin’s proposal, Katha Pollit relates a friend’s

shifting allegiance in the French controversy over headscarves: “A gentle, tolerant,

worldly-wise leftist, she sided with the girls against the government: why shouldn't they

be able to dress as they wished, to follow their culture? Then she came across a television

debate in which a Muslim girl said she wanted the ban to stay because without it, her

family would force her to wear a scarf. That changed my friend's view of the matter: the

left, and feminist, position, she now thought, was to support this girl and the ones like her

in their struggle to be independent modern women—not the parents, the neighbors, the

community and religious ‘leaders.’ I think my friend was right.”25 The point to be made

about this position—agree or disagree—is that the liberal state is seen properly to trump

the claims of religion and tradition, even when the state does precisely the opposite of

multiplying choice in religious observance and practice.

In this sense, the liberal production of religion—item three on my list of

conjunctures—proceeds as the production of a distinction between “good” and “bad”

484

religion, or between more and less autonomous relations to religious authority. Tisa

Wenger has shown how the state and juridical formulations of religion and religious

freedom in the earlier twentieth century U.S. both extended legitimacy to Pueblo Indian

ritual practice and retracted it, organizing ceremonial participation along “religious”

lines of individual conscience and choice while severing this religion from community

obligation and tribal governance.26 Saba Mahmood calls attention to a more recent

example of the liberal production of religion in a 2003 report by the National Security

Division of the Rand Corporation titled Civil and Democratic Islam: Partners,

Resources, Strategies. In its program of cultivating an Islam in which a “Western vision

of civilization, political order, and society” could be made to prevail the report rejected as

a potential partner what it identified as Muslim “traditionalists,” that is, those whose

habits of deference to communal authority are “causally linked with backwardness and

underdevelopment, which in turn are the breeding ground for social and political

problems of all sorts.” This problematic relation to religious authority, according to the

report, could be see in Muslim traditionalists’ 1) reluctance to regard the Quran as an

historical document; 2) their unwillingness to realize Mohammad was a product of his

time who offers little help to the solving of contemporary problems; and 3) their failure to

denounce the Quran for its contradictions.27

Note that a policy recommendation about Islam is also a normative definition of

religion to which only a minority of religious practitioners anywhere probably adhere.

The report does note that the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, “is not different from

the Quran in endorsing conduct and containing a number of rules and values that are

literally unthinkable . . . in today’s society. This does not pose a problem because few

485

people would today insist that we should all be living in the exact literal manner of the

Biblical patriarchs. Instead, we allow our vision of Judaism’s and Christianity’s true

message to dominate over the literal text, which we regard as history and legend.” 28

Now, the Rand Corporation is clearly wrong to suggest that all but a few who read them

regard the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity as “history and legend,” best

apprehended through the tools of historical and literary analysis. But I do. My better

students do. My guess is that you do, too.

One answer, then, to the question with which I began, the question of the

relationship between religious liberals and the liberal geopolitics of religion advocated in

the Rand report: We are its advertisers, its enablers, its apprentices, its dealers, its models

for export. We are what the liberal geopolitics of religion wants more of, our concern for

the flourishing of embattled forms of religious possibility counterbalanced, when

necessary, by the stronger claims for personal autonomy that sound from elsewhere on

the liberal spectrum, or from elsewhere in our own hearts. This would also be a “no”

answer to Mark Lilla’s question of whether liberal religion can ever do more in the end

than sanctify the purposes of the implicitly liberal state.29 I’d like however to retrieve a

different possibility.

In the conjunctions considered so far, liberalism works on religion, even as it

claims to float free of it. I’d like to think about how the exchange might work both

ways. I’m up to item two on my list, which is the question for liberal theory of whether a

self conceived of as autonomous in relation to various attachments, obligations, and so on

is really a self at all. Might it not instead be the case, as Mahmood puts it, that religious

and cultural norms and the varying modes of their articulation “are not simply a social

486

imposition on the subject” but go to “the very substance of her intimate, valorized

interiority”?30 Leigh Schmidt recognizes as a feature of religious liberalism the spiritual

disposition toward “searching and questing”; an “adventuresome embrace of the seeker's

endless curiosity . . . paired with a nostalgic longing for the finder's clarity.”31 This is

perhaps not so far from what Michael Warner sees as the propensity of the “liberal

framework for the construction of religion” to generate “a melancholic desire for strong

attachments, no matter what they are.”32 In either case, the figure of religious liberalism’s

“seeker” would seem to comport with liberal formulations of good religion as an

abstracted category of beliefs and practices from which the individual stands back to

assess, compare, evaluate, embrace or discard, and generally mix and match. It would

also seem however that even the most deracinated seeker is after something that feels like

roots, some connection or attachment without which she would not be authentically

herself. It’s worth noting too that in Schmidt’s canon of patron saints for religious

liberalism —among them Albert Schweitzer, Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin

Luther King, Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Howard Thurman—are some who hewed

pretty closely to particular religious traditions, traditions whose ways of thinking about

diversity and flourishing do not rely on a conception of the self as an autonomous

chooser and do not frame heteronomous sources of authority as unjust constraints.

To raise the possibility that non-autonomous relations to norms may go to the

making of the “valorized interiority” at the heart of liberalism is also to get to the top of

my list and to reopen the question of liberalism’s religious sources. To limit

consideration here, very briefly, to Rawls: The full title of Rawls’s Princeton thesis is A

Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept

487

of Community; it was recently republished together with several commentaries and a late

piece by Rawls himself on his move away from Christian conviction after serving in

World War II. The argument made by the undergraduate Rawls is that Christian faith

offers a basis for understanding what he called community and personality. Personality is

the uniquely human capacity to enter into relationships with one another and with God

that characterize community, a form of relation, Robert Merrihew Adams points out in

his commentary, that lies close to Buber’s I and Thou (1923). Faith, according to the

young Rawls, is the “inner state of a person who is properly integrated and related to

community,” a relation that sin severs and grace restores; thus “[t]here can be no

separation between religion and ethics, since the problems they deal with are in the same

nexus of relations.”33 The thesis concludes that the mistake of philosophers is to proceed

without a comprehensive account of human nature of the kind he sets forth here; the

mature Rawls, of course, would go on to proceed without a comprehensive account and

to insist on the necessity of so proceeding. In their commentary, Joshua Cohen and

Thomas Nagel elaborate several points of contact between the mature Rawls’s

conceptions of political liberalism and the unflinchingly theological ethics of the younger

Rawls. The interesting question then becomes: Did Rawls suppress the theological

foundations of his later thinking or did he abandon them? If the former, we might seek to

examine and extend what he insulated from consideration; if the latter, we might debate

whether the resulting account of the inviolability of personhood at the heart of just

communities is sufficiently grounded in a priori assumptions about freedom. Doing

either requires, again, that the conversation between religion and liberalism be a two-way

exchange.

488

In “Religion and Women’s Human Rights,” Martha Nussbaum explains her use of

violent examples drawn exclusively from beyond the “modern liberal regime” to

illustrate the problems religion might make for women’s human rights. “My international

examples manifest, I believe, what parts of most religious traditions will do when they

are not so shaped by liberal traditions [as they are in North America and Europe] . . . . [A]

focus on international issues is valuable to give us a vivid sense of the reality of our topic.

Without this focus, we might fail to acknowledge that religions (like many non-religious

actors) can propose atrocities; we might therefore fail to ask what liberals who care about

religion should say when they do.”34 But what should liberals who care abut religion say

when the non-religious actors who propose or wage atrocities include “modern liberal

regimes”? Imagined as a two-way conversation, a conjuncture of reciprocally unsettling

terms, “religious liberalism” implies that religion and liberalism might have something to

do with one other beyond submitting the former to the relentlessly global trajectory of the

latter. Liberals who care about religion have liberal principles to which to appeal in

order to regulate the legitimate scope of religious authority. Perhaps the same liberals

who care about religion can find in religion a productive terrain from which to question

liberalism’s ostensibly impervious grounding, its manifestly imperious reach.

489

Notes

1 David Kaplan, “Hearts, Minds, and Dollars: In an Unseen Front in the War on

Terrorism, America Is Spending Millions . . . to Change the Very Face of Islam,” U.S.

News and World Report, April 5, 2005, available at

www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050425/25roots.htm (accessed January 11,

2010). I learned of this program from Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and

Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture18.2 (2006), 323-347.

2 The full text of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 is available at

www.state.gov/documents/organization/2297.pdf (accessed January 11, 2010).

3 Thomas Farr, “Diplomacy in an Age of Faith: Religious Freedom and National

Security,” Foreign Affairs 87.2 (March/April 2008), 123. Among Farr’s

recommendations are that a “privately funded Islamic Institute of American Studies on

U.S. soil” be established to “bring the best jurists and religious leaders from across the

Muslim world to study U.S. history, society, politics, and—most important—religion”

(124).

4 “The Lesson from America,” The Economist online edition, November 1, 2007;

available at http://iep.univ-lille2.fr/lib/tele.php?chemin=../enseignants/fichier/530-

The_lesson_from_America.doc, accessed January 11, 2010.

5 See, e.g., Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire”; Winnifred Fallers

Sullivan, “Exporting Religious Freedom,” Commonweal 126.4 (26 February1999), 10-11;

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Beyond Good and Evil, Whither Liberal Sacrificial Love?”

Public Culture 21 (209): 77-100.

490

6 Thomas Donnelly, “The Underpinnings of the Bush Doctrine” (Washington, D.C.,

National Security Outlook, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1

February 2003, http://www.aei.org/outlook/15845, accessed January 11, 2010.) The

historical trajectories of liberalization also encompass the violence by which liberal

societies have sometimes literally cast purportedly undemocratic peoples out of bounds,

the struggles waged by those dispossessed by liberal regimes to gain legal and political

recognition within or outside of them, and the violence of imposing, resisting, or

acceding to the governance of liberal colonial powers. See, e.g., Tisa Wenger, We Have

a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious

Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), Saba Mahmood,

“Questioning Liberalism, Too,” Boston Review 28. 2 (April/May 2003), available at

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.2/mahmood.html (accessed January 11, 2010);

Wendy Brown, “Tolerance as Governmentality: Faltering Universalism, State

Legitimacy, and State Violence,” in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of

Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 78-106; Courtney

Bender and Pamela Klassen, eds., After Pluralism: Reimagining Models of Religious

Engagement (NY: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

7 Leigh Schmidt’s call for “more empirical research and less postcolonial prejudgment”

in the matter of American religious liberalism’s relation to “America’s varied empires—

colonial, commercial, educational, and missionary” would seem to narrow the scope of

permissible inquiry here to the collection of data, lest the project become dangerously

partisan. A richer grounding for the same inquiry comes however in Schmidt’s question

of “what kind of catchment remains” if we attempt to “break the all too prevalent

491

equation of American religious liberalism with American liberal Protestantism without

slighting the latter’s cultural force.” To pursue the possible links between “America’s

varied empires” and American religious liberalism is, in part, to ask what makes the latter

(no longer simply Protestant, but) American. For a minutely argued case for the

relationship between the administration of empire and the consolidation of national

culture see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in

India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)

8 “Aglow’s Mandates,” http://www.aglow.org/Default.aspx?id=140, accessed January 11,

2010. See also “Why Aglow and Islam? Unveiling the System . . . Loving the People,”

“Why Israel?” and “Why Aglow and Israel?” available for download at

http://www.aglow.org/resourceshandouts.aspx, accessed Jan. 11, 2010. R. Marie

Griffith’s book is God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

9 Donnelly, “Underpinnings of the Bush Doctrine.”

10 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988), 269.

11 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), 154-155, 9.

12 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. Edward Alexander (New Brunswick,

NJ: Transaction,2001), 2.

13 See, e.g., Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique

Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2009); Jared Hickman, “The Theology of Democracy,” The New England Quarterly, 81,

no. 2 (2008): 177-217; Elizabeth Fenton, “Birth of a Protestant Nation: Catholic

492

Canadians, Religious Pluralism, and National Unity in the Early U.S. Republic,” Early

American Literature 41.1 (2006): 29-57; Michael Warner, “Is Liberalism a Religion?” in

Hent DeVries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (NY: Fordham University Press, 2007),

610-617. In the present volume, Leigh Schmidt makes a case for broadening the

conversation about American religious liberalism “beyond the familiar interpretive tropes

of the modernist impulse and the social gospel—indeed, in many instances, beyond

Protestantism itself” while David Hollinger argues for the continued centrality of

“ecumenical Protestantism” to the story, suggesting in the latter’s “omnivorous”

“embrace [of] the diversity of the world beyond white Protestantism” the trajectory by

which American religious liberalism ceases to be identical with this self-transcending

Protestantism at its heart.

14 Leigh Schmidt is my source for the quotations from Whitman, James, and Vaughan

that follow. The citations here appear in Schmidt’s “The Aspiring Side of Religion:

Nineteenth Century Religious Liberalism and the Birth of Contemporary American

Spirituality,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 7.1 (Spring 2007: 89-92) and

are from: Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1996), 989;

William James, The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic

Monthly Press, 1920), 2:212, 214; Robert Alfred Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics: A

Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion, 2 vols. (London: Slark, 1888), 1:54.

15 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Basic Writings (NY: Modern Library, 2002), 63.

16 Schmidt, “Aspiring Side of Religion,” 91.

17 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim/Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the

Roots of Terror (NY: Pantheon, 2004), 18; Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion, 150.

493

18 Stanley Hauerwas, “Preaching as Though We Had Enemies,” First Things 53 (May

1995), available at http://thomerica.com/essays/hauerwas_preaching-as-though-we-had-

enemies.pdf ; accessed January 11, 2010. I am grateful to Michael Warner for this

reference. My thanks also to Arie L. Molendijk for pointing out in his comments on this

essay that the formula of a “transposition of debate” over what counts as liberal from the

state and the market to religion may miss the ways that religion is liberalized through the

“internal appropriation of ‘liberal’ principles” and not simply as a cultural manifestation

of political and economic developments. To press this observation, indeed, is to trouble

the assumption that the liberalization of religion, pursued as a goal of U.S. policy,

inevitably accompanies and advances the spread of economic and political liberalism.

19 My thinking here and in the paragraph that follows about the managerial and

“curatorial” functions of liberalism is indebted to Benjamin Berger, “The Cultural Limits

of Legal Tolerance, “ in Bender and Klassen, eds., After Pluralism, forthcoming.

20 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Religion and Women’s Human Rights,” in Paul J. Weithman,

ed., Religion and Contemporary Liberalism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame

Press, 2007), 93-137.

21 Peter van der Veer, “Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the

Netherlands,” in Hent de Vries, ed., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-

Secular World (NY: Fordham University Press, 2006); 538.

22 Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 206; qt.

in Nussbaum, “Religion and Women’s Human Rights,” 98-99.

23 Brown, “Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians,”

in Regulating Aversion, 149-175.

494

24 Susan Moller Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Boston Review 22.5

(Sept./Oct. 1997), available at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR22.5/okin.html; accessed

Jan. 11, 2010. Ates Altinordu notes the irony in the fact that American Institute Fellow

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born feminist and former member of the Dutch Parliament

whose best-selling memoirs Infidel and The Caged Virgin narrate her self-liberation from

Islam, together with her counterparts in Europe who have likewise abandoned and

bitterly denounced the Muslim faith in which they were raised, “are welcomed

passionately [in the West] as authentic ‘liberal’ Muslim voices” (my emphasis). Ates

Altınordu, “Varieties of anti-religious imagination,” The Immanent Frame.

http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/04/30/varieties-of-anti-religious-imagination/ (accessed Jan.

11, 2010).

25 Katha Pollitt, “Whose Culture?” Boston Review 22.5 (Sept./Oct. 1997), available at

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR22.5/pollitt.html; accessed January 11, 2010.

26 Wenger, We Have a Religion.

27 Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 329, 333 (quoting Cheryl

Benard, Civil and Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, Strategies [Pittsburgh: Rand

Corporation], 2003), 4, 34); 334.

28 Bernard, Civil and Democratic Islam, 37; qt. in Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics,

and Empire,”336.

29 See David Hollinger’s review of Lilla’s The Stillborn God in the London Review of

Books (January 24, 2008), 15-18.

30 Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2005), 23.

495

31 Schmidt, “Aspiring Side,” 91.

32 Warner, “Is Liberalism a Religion?” 617.

33 John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, ed. Thomas Nagel

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 113, 114.

34 Nussbaum, “Religion and Women’s Human Rights,” 98, 100.