Why think about religion and the body together? In one way, the connection between religion and the body is so naturalized that it is odd to even ask this question. Political life in the United States, for example, is saturated with discussion of the body, particularly of gender and sexuality, in terms of religion. Marriage, (whether gay and to be regulated or heterosexual and to be promoted) is the object of much policy-making and much religious invocation on the floor of both state and federal legislative bodies—as is abortion, gender identity, and sexually transmitted disease (whether with regard to HPV or HIV).

Yet, the oddness of the political pairing between religion and the body in a country that is supposed to separate church and state is rarely remarked upon. High level cases over the display of religious symbols on public property may make it to the Supreme Court, as may conflict over discrimination in hiring within religious institutions, but the Court has never heard a suit claiming that the regulation of gender and sexuality should not be a matter of state concern because it imbricates the state in religion.

Nor is the oddness of presuming a link between religion and the body necessarily commented upon in academic circles in the U.S. In fact, presuming a link between conservative religion and issues of gender and sexuality has often passed for scholarship—and this is true in both religious studies and queer studies. If some religious people (and sometimes religious studies) have been willing to see gender and sexuality as the appropriate purview of religious regulation, queers and queer studies have also been willing to attribute to this relation the status of common sense. At its most direct, the idea that religious people should promote the regulation of sexuality or intolerance on the basis of gender and sexuality comes down to the common sense formula, "of course they hate us (women, queers, whoever else); they're religious." This formulation not only ignores the diversity of religious understandings of gender and sexuality, but also reinforces the idea that the appeal to religion provides an explanation in and of itself. Henry Abelove, one of the founders of queer studies, who wrote an early book on religion and sexuality, The Evangelist of Desire, debunked this presumption long ago. Through a study of the development of a religious movement around John Wesley, Abelove shows how commonsensical presumptions about religion come to be treated as historical fact. When asking the central question of his book, "Why did Wesley's religious movement develop a following?" he provides a particularly devastating opening, which shows that the basic historiography of his question depended on the presumption, "Of course Wesley had followers, he was religious." Abelove shows that not only is there no such, "of course" about it (plenty of religious innovators did not have followers), but he makes a strong case that the power of desire had something to do with it. If you read those opening paragraphs of The Evangelist of Desire, it's clear that the "of course: they're religious," analysis is not particularly illuminating.

But if not commonsense, then what does bring the body into such close proximity to religion? After all, the United States is not the only country where the pairing of embodiment and religiosity is central to culture and society, including the workings of the state. This pairing is one of the central concerns of transnational politics. A strong strain of thinking about global politics after the end of the Cold War in 1989 has focused on religious conflict as a driving force in politics (this theory is most often associated with Samuel Huntington's 1996 book, Clash of Civilizations). Major religious traditions do not necessarily provide simple sites for civilizational conflict, however. Those traditions called "world religions" cover large geographic areas, have long histories, and are internally diverse with many different denominations, sects or strands of thought and practice. Given this diversity and complexity, one of the ways that both scholars and pundits have marked religious difference is through an emphasis on differences with regard to gender and sexuality. Commentators often read a range of qualities off of gender relations or sexual practices: binaries like that between freedom and oppression; modernity and the archaic; reasonableness and fanaticism are interpreted based on interpretations of social norms about gender identity, the treatment of women or sexual freedom and conservatism. Differences in gender and sexual relations become the cultural sign of supposed civilizational fault lines as we are supposed to be able to read a whole range of political positions and commitments from marriage practices or norms about women's clothing.

Yet, as Sadia Toor shows in detailing just two cases of legal conflict over gender and sexuality in Pakistan, we cannot very easily predict the contours or the outcome of such conflicts simply by knowing that Pakistan is officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Through a reading of a case where a legal and religiously acceptable marriage becomes the subject of state intervention on behalf of disapproving parents in relation to a case where the state steps in to protect the marriage of a female-to-male transsexual, Toor details some of the inter-related factors that come into play when conflicts break out over how individuals enact and embody their lives. These multiple factors include the desire among the parents of marriageable children for class status and mobility, the effects of World Bank structural adjustment policies, the lingering effects of policy choices made during the Cold War, and a surprising openness to transgender lives, showing that religion may be just one textural element in the social fabric that makes some marriages subject to legal intervention and others to legal protection—regardless of the predominant religion in the country. Instead of focusing on religion, Toor suggests that we look to competing patriarchies as a possible point of explanation for how and why marriages that push the boundaries of acceptance are regulated in contemporary Pakistan. Competition among the forms of patriarchal regulation associated with different classes within Pakistan or between the forms of patriarchy in Pakistan and the forms associated with the United States and European countries may be as likely to be the driving force of these conflicts as is the religious identification of different classes or nations. When enquiring into why some person, group or nation-state is conservative about gender and sexuality, the answer, "because they are religious," tells us next to nothing. We may want to consider the role of religion, but we should be leery of seeing religion as determinative of what happens to either the individual or the social body. In other words, the association of religion and the body is a question, rather than an answer. In asking questions about why so many scholars, politicians and individuals are willing to attribute embodied regulation to religious causes, we might learn something about how our world is constructed as well as about possible alternatives.

Theories of religious difference grounded in embodiment also shade over into theories of difference between the religious and the secular. Unlike religious codes and strictures, secular approaches to embodiment are presumed to be based in science. Yet, as Ann Burlein details in her essay, even the most advanced science can depend on religious ideas. Burlein explores the language and metaphors of the human genome project in order to show how religious and secular understandings of embodiment remain intertwined. In contrast to Biblical religion, genetics promises to provide a completely scientific "book of life," but the sermons of embodiment produced by this science amazingly remain focused on gender, sexuality and normative ideas of the family. It is not surprising that the science of genetics is focused on heredity, but, as Burlein points out, this focus is maintained even though social inequalities can "exert greater impact on biological processes" than does genetics. Within genetic science the family is seen as determinative of one's prospects for health and happiness, and so the "family romance"—and its religious overtones—returns to provide the structure for a highly scientific, highly secular discourse. Sexual identity may become less important, even as family-formation becomes more so. The willingness to organize one's life into families with clearly delineated biological heritage—whether gained from a sperm bank or the old fashioned way—remains crucial to social organization. As Burlein says, "One can see ... a shift that backgrounds both reproduction and identity in favor of foregrounding the domestic romance in the changing status of homosexuality. In its recent Lawrence decision, the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly argued against identifying non-procreative sexuality with death (the argument of Bowers v. Hardwick). But, Lawrence is far from protecting sexual relations as sites of dissent for the invention of unforeseen models of life .... Lawrence decriminalized sodomy only in the private space of a domestic couple." In other words, the division between religion and the secular is not the end of the story any more than religion is a fully explanatory variable in social life. It is no more an explanation to say, "Because they're secular" than it is to say, "Because they're religious."

The real breakthrough of the essays in "Religion and the Body" is that they push beyond the boundaries created by the need for simple divisions and singular explanations. Take, for example, Melissa Wilcox's essay on the contemporary practice of self-injury. Wilcox explores the various meanings that may be operative when individuals cut or otherwise injure themselves. She looks at expressive and functional understandings, while also placing these practices in the context of religious ritual. She points out that ascetic practices that can damage the body, like fasting for one's beliefs, can be highly validated in the context of religious practice. Wilcox suggests that the lens of religious meaning offers leverage for understanding a form of action that is considered pathological within a solely psychological framework. In this case, instead of narrowing possibilities for understanding, a framework provided by an understanding of the body in relation to religious practice might provide an insightful means of approaching and responding to a complex bodily practice.

Rather than providing a new frame for understanding an embodied practice, Minoo Moallem looks at how bodily practice can displace frames of reference. Moallem considers Iranian films that use motifs of passing, whether cross-gendered passing, a pop singer passing for a classical musician or a criminal passing for a clergyman. In these films, passing dislocates embodiment. Visibility and corporeality are often used to provide anchors for identity. One may display one's relation to others, to a political position or even to one's nation in the way one comports one's body—such that we know a criminal or a clergyman by how he carries his body, how he dresses, whom he stands close to, and his bodily capabilities (for either prayer or prison-breaks). Films about passing, however, show that embodiment is as unstable a ground for identity as aspects of human life that are considered more internal and ephemeral. By refusing the "straight" reading of the body (in which one can move interpretively from bodily comportment to respectable dress to religious conservatism to support for the nation), Moallem hopes to open the door to the idea that the connections among politics, religion and embodiment might not be so straightforward. One might even find allies for secular political reform amongst those who are religious. And, importantly, enmity between religion and secularism not only makes it difficult to find such allies, but can cut back on the social space in Iran for a wide range of secular practices. If all that is secular is the enemy of the religious, any secular act can be configured as a social problem. Films of passing cannot fundamentally subvert these relations. Such films may simply be a lighthearted means of showing up some of our daily presumptions; in the end they may even come around to reinforcing the presumptions that make for their humor. But, on Moallem's reading they may also provide a parable for how to live in a world that is open to all kinds of possibilities, embodiments, and alliances.

Dominic Wetzel's reading of John Greyson's film Fig Trees, similarly works through dislocaiton to undo the strict division between the secular and the religious. Fig Trees does so by appropriating the religious imagery of saints and sinners into a narrative about the struggle to make AIDS treatment available around the world. We might ask why a global struggle for AIDS treatment was necessary once the scientific battle of developing effective drugs had been won, (even if the war of preventing and curing the disease had not). How can treatment for an otherwise fatal disease be available and yet not be accessible? Why would life-saving treatment be out of reach for millions and millions of people? To truly take on such questions requires capabilities—for conceptualization alone—that are nearly otherworldly, and Fig Trees turns to religious imagery in ways that are admittedly dislocating of that imagery, but that also reconnect it to the struggle for life. Just as passing can open doors to new possibilities, this dislocation of religious imagery onto the ground of an all too secular battle to make the fruits of science available on an equitable basis, helps us to remember the stakes of life and death over which that battle has been fought. Moreover, such dislocations open the door not just of our memories about the AIDS epidemic, but also of new ways to change the world.

Laura Levitt analyzes some of the reasons that the stakes of how we understand the relation of religion and secularism can be so high. She argues that accepting the commonsense story of secularization can lead us to participate in and even promote forms of inclusion that actually box in those who are different from dominant norms. She shows, for example, how inclusion in the dominant U.S. narrative that separates the secular from the religious or the church from the state, actually makes it difficult to be a secular Jew: if Jews are secular, they're like everyone else, making the claim for distinctive Jewishness harder to maintain. To be included in the dominant narrative of secularism can erase distinctiveness, and to be included in the dominant narrative of religion can have similar effects. Levitt shows, for example, that when Jews are included in the Judeo-Christian religiosity of the United States, the distinctive text and the specific interpretive tradition of the Hebrew Bible are ignored in favor of incorporation into the dominant arc of Judeo-Christianity. For Levitt, the response to these conundrums of liberalism in which inclusion is also exclusion, is to not to deride the promise and allurement of such dominant narratives, but to take up embodied practices that can address the affective aspects of the longing for inclusion. Neither analysis nor critique will do away with the allure of inclusion in dominant narratives. Embodied practices at both the individual and social levels—including grief and mourning—might offer hope for alternative possibilities. Levitt advocates opening "a space that allows for more than simply a melancholic iteration ... [and] risks imagining inclusion in new and more powerful ways." Here taking up embodied practices can shift our ability to conceptualize the relation between religion and secularism.

In the end, "Religion and the Body," concludes that there is much to be gained from undoing settled understandings of the relation between religion and the body. Certainly, refusing the standard divisions—that between religion and secularism and many, many more—might create new ways of understanding social relations, including relations that are currently conflictual, difficult and painful. But, this striking collection of essays also suggests that we take a step beyond simply refusing to go along with the usual narratives and the divisions that they enforce on our understandings of the world.

So, why think about religion and the body? Because, these essays propose, to think about religion and the body together opens up multiple possibilities for new understandings of the world around us and for new imaginings of how that world might be differently organized. And these possibilities do not run down any single path. In fact, these essays demonstrate the variability of relations between religion and the body: embodied practice might loosen our presumptions about religion (Levitt), while understanding embodiment in a framework of religious ritual might loosen our presumptions about bodily practices (Wilcox). Filmic representations might shift our sense of embodiment and its possibilities (Moallem) or they might take up religious representation to new ends (Wetzel). Religious expectations of how the state will respond to issues of embodiment may be confounded (Toor), even as science may turn out to be more religious than originally expected (Burlein). "Religion and the Body" advocates new critical practices, including practices that are embodied. Along with analysis and critique we might consider passing and playfulness, as well as mourning and militancy, openness and vision. In so doing, the topic of religion and the body (and the world itself) may get a whole lot more varied, more inclusive, and more interesting.