Introduction

Science, Bodies, and the Christian Secular

The first section, Science, Bodies, and the Christian Secular takes up these questions by examining and deconstructing the strict binary often assumed between religion and science/secularism. Ann Burlein, in “The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular,” starts off by asking, “what happens to Foucault’s contention that the soul is the prison of the body when sexuality gets routed not through confession but through molecular biology and the so-called ‘revolution in genetic medicine’?” Further, “how does the market in knowledge-products and services that this revolution has helped produce change expectations regarding the body and its truths?” Despite the fact that genetics makes biology conditional, linking body and soul in non-linear and non-reductionistic ways, Burlein argues the “family” still remains the primary point of access to the production of this (genetically variant) de-standardizing body. The genetic revolution relentlessly re-inscribes conventional relations toward belonging, intimacy, sexuality, and even life itself. Why? As Burlein fleshes out in her paper—employing Foucault’s concept of secularism as “in-depth Christianization”—largely because of the influence of the Christian Secular.¹ In other words, the idea, as Asad puts it, secularism in the West is “neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it … nor a simple break from it.”² Instead, religiosity and the secular co-constitute one another. Nowhere is this demonstrated more fully than in modern medicine, which, in Burlein’s words, “provided crucial justification for secular governance” through its “rational” aim to end pain, rather than justify, inflict or palliate it. “Despite medicine’s use of this legitimation narrative to assert its status as empirical science”, Burlein argues, physicians have “relied on and even strengthened religious sensibilities regarding sexuality and shame.”

In a new twist of the co-constitution of the religious and the secular, while ‘sexuality’ is still key to the molecular body—though differently, insofar as the molecular body develops logics of variation without norm that proliferate individual differences, evading the shame medical norms engender—Burlein shows how molecular medicine “curtails and contains these radical possibilities by foregrounding the domestic family as the primary point of access and production”; realizing its “dream of tapping directly into the forces of life itself” by “backgrounding reproduction and stigmatized forms of identity in favor of foregrounding the lyrical and allegedly liberating discourses and practices of romantic love.” Drawing on Melinda Cooper’s work on the rise of the biotechnology industry, and its aim to generate “surplus value from life’s capacity for future capacity,” Burlein argues that while molecular medicine, “still tells sexual sermons (as did eighteenth century sexology), its preaching works not by implanting shame or stigma, but rather by inciting us to invest in the possibility of future growth, not in spite of uncertainty but because of it.”

Crucially, for Burlein’s argument, it is the capacity of molecular medicine for “smart touch” and screening of potential maladies and genetic errors that ironically re-inscribes the familial romance back at the center. Somatic individuals “seek to anticipate and shape ‘nature’ before it actually comes to pass,” yet, paradoxically, “despite the talk of DNA as ‘uniquely you,’ and despite the flattening of mommy-Daddy-Oedipus that molecular memories enable, genetic medicine insistently embeds the individual within ‘the background-body, the body behind the abnormal body … the parents’ body, the ancestors’ body, the body of the family, the body of heredity; in today’s clinic … it is the intimate, domestic family that provides the obligatory passage point to knowledge about individuals as well as citizenship.” For Burlein, even artificial reproductive technologies work by “backgrounding reproduction in favor of routing ‘sexuality’ through the gendered romance … it is the way that molecular medicine preaches ‘the domestic family’ that explains why the new technologies for artificial reproduction have not troubled traditional notions of gender and family in the ways that feminist activists and scholars once thought they would.” Just as Luther and Calvin “disciplined sexuality through marriage,” the “care for the ‘self’ that is emerging across the various sub-disciplines of molecular medicine is always already care of familial others.”

Today, Burlein argues: “Sex still stands in for material relations. Its disciplines still provide support for lyrical forms of preaching and promise. In a world that dreams of rendering even waste productive, medicine’s sexual sermons authorize specific expectations regarding what makes life worth living and dying for”—such as the West’s supposed sexual “freedom” in contrast with its Islamic “other”. Burlein concludes:

Molecular medicine acts as (what Lauren Berlant calls) an intimate public: juxtaposed to the political without necessarily going there, medical discourses deploy ‘sexuality’ in ways that promise us freedom—especially vis-à-vis our bodily fate(s)—even as these same sexual sermons re-structure the conjunction of experiences that we call ‘sexuality.’ To call these discourses ‘sexual sermons’ is not to argue that sexuality ‘functions like’ a religion. It is, rather, to pinpoint particular practices through which secular expectations surrounding the body and its vitality draw force from long-standing religious sensibilities in which sexuality stands in for ethical relation to the material world. We respond to their force, believe in the body (as Nietzsche put it), whether or not we profess or practice Christianity.”

While Burlein focuses on the (typically denied) co-constitution of the religious and the secular within molecular biology, Melissa Wilcox in, “Bodily Transgression: Ritual and Agency in Self-Injury,” seeks to open the binary between religion and the scientific (Christian) secular by exploring what each might learn from each other via dialogue about mutilation and self-injury. While religious traditions have a long understanding of self-injury as a form of asceticism, Wilcox points out that the clinical definition of self-injury includes the specification that self-injurious practices include only those that are “socially unacceptable.” Yet, at what point does “pathology end and normativity enter?” Why, for instance, is piercing one’s own ears not self-injury? Or body piercing or tattoos? How does scarification differ from self-injury? Wilcox goes on to explore the different ways in which self-injury, seen from science’s standpoint mainly as pathology, with aid from religious theories of ritual and postmodern feminism can be seen as a “symbolic means of giving voice to pain, as a paradoxical form of agency, and as ritual.” Where science and modern psychology may primarily see pathology, ritual theory can see voice and agency, even if (often) self-defeating. Conversely, self-injury offers to (potentially romanticizing) theory about religious ritual how agency and voice can be interwoven with potentially self-defeating “misrecognition” of its ultimate aims:

What self-injury offers to the study of ritual is the question of external misrecognition, which fundamentally influences the meaning and concrete social effects of a ritual. The potential for misreading of self-injury leads to a potential for re-victimization of those who self-injure by people whose interpretations of the practice diverge from those of the self-injurer herself. The flip side, though, of the ambivalence of self-injury is that it is in fact empowering—and for very good reasons—despite how self-destructive and maladaptive it may seem from an outsider’s perspective. Other rituals may share this fundamental ambivalence. This should alert scholars to be sensitive, in the analysis of ritual, to practitioners’ claims of empowerment, even in cases where the ritual appears from our own perspective to be disempowering, and it should also alert us to the risks inherent in the misrecognition of ritual.

Expanding on her reflections of self-injury as a technology of the self or gender, Wilcox concludes by proposing the concept of “technologies of the sacred” as a tool for transgressing simplistic religion/science binaries to see their co-constitution and what each might have to offer each other:

Technologies of the sacred, then, might be defined as those practical, religious ways in which the self is brought into being, shaped, and maintained. They would include the ways in which social power comes to expression in the everyday sacred practices and experiences of the subject, and also—showing the ambiguity in self-injury as a technology of the self and a technology of the sacred—the religious ways in which such subjects redeploy power to undermine existing structures of domination. Technologies of the sacred can also be understood as those practices that bring a sense of the sacred into being, that construct the sacred, and that shape the self in response to such experiences of the sacred. In this way, self-injury as a technology of the sacred evokes an experience of the sacred, marks that experience clearly on the body, and at the same time reinforces—or, in some cases, subverts, or both—structures of power and domination.

Pivoting from these reflections on individual bodies, the science/religion binary and the Christian Secular, Laura Levitt, in “Shedding Liberalism All Over Again,” focuses more closely on the role of the Christian Secular in the “exclusionary inclusion” of different kinds of social bodies in liberalism in the U.S., focusing in particular on the example of the historical experience of Jews who emigrated to the United States. While on the one hand, America has served as a welcome respite for Jews, particularly Eastern European Jews like her ancestors, this has not come without a cost. Like today’s Islamic cultures in the U.S., or yesterday’s Catholics, the Christian Secular is ostensibly welcoming, but only to the extent outside groups fit into and conform to the frame of its Protestant structure and outlook. It is “okay” to be different, as long as you are a recognizable variation on its theme. For Jews, Levitt argues, this has been recognition of inclusion only to the extent that Jews are seen as “religious” and belong to a “church” (synagogue). “Secular,” unbelieving, or merely “cultural” Jews are excluded from acceptable recognition in today’s ostensibly “neutral” public sphere. One can argue as well that this dynamic functions in regard to today’s relations with atheists, or nonbelievers. When was the last time an atheist ran for President? Or a Catholic won? (Yes, Kennedy did get elected, but only Protestants have been elected President in the fifty years since his historic victory.³ Engaging with Saba Mahmood’s reflections⁴ on how liberalism regulates difference through the idea of religious tolerance, Levitt aims to create dialogue between different “excluded” factions, recuperating (while mourning) liberalism’s “revolutionary” promise of inclusion in a “more inclusive collective future, a future that risks imagining inclusion in new and more powerful ways that just might bring Jews and Muslims into a more productive alliance with feminists and other others.”

1. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds.,”Introduction: Times Like These,” Secularisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008): 1-35. [↩]
2.  Asad, 25. [↩]
3. Michael D. Lindsay, Faith In the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). [↩]
4. Mahmood, The Politics of Piety. [↩]