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.
