Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways by Olivier Roy

We made the pilgrimage at dusk. Our small car twisted through narrow mountain roads. The kids slept. I watched out for deer. Then as we made a turn in the road we saw it in the distance: Mt. Rushmore. 

More vehicles joined our processional as we came closer. Cars and trucks and RVs chugged up the road. “Welcome to Mt. Rushmore,” said a cheerful greeter. We walked from the parking lot through majestic buildings, a forum for souvenirs and ice cream. An arcade flanked by columns and flags brought us to the top of an amphitheater. Looking down we saw the spectacle of thousands gathered at night before shrouded faces of our former presidents. 

A hush fell over the crowd when a park ranger stepped out. She spoke of liberty as an enduring value of our country. The testimony ended with a video montage on the four great presidents, stories of how they stood for liberty at moments of peril. The images on screen changed to the present, the music soared, we rose to our feet, and sang out with pride, “Oh, say, can you see?” 

Our words poured down before the presidents and then their faces lit up. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt: they seemed to smile down on our offering of praise. The ranger returned, now to call forth all of the veterans in the audience. Men and women of all ages responded to the call. “These and many who did not return made sacrifices for our liberty,” the ranger reminded us. Behind her the screen showed a flag waving; we knew how to respond: “I pledge allegiance.”  

I was moved but also struck by the way the patriotism of the night was filled with religious ethos. Not so much Christian as pagan; from the neo-Roman architecture to the imperial cult-like invocation of the presidents to the gathering of the legionaries. We were one sacrificial goat short of full-fledged paganism. 

Olivier Roy’s Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways offers many insights into the contemporary state of world religions. His work draws on his rich perspective as a scholar of Islam. Roy, while never addressing American patriotism, gives one the tools to see in new ways how the spirituality of patriotism varies greatly from Christian spirituality.  

For all its grandeur, patriotism is rooted in a particular place: a territory, Roy would say. Any of the transcendent or spiritual claims of patriotism always refer back to the geography of a specific area. In contrast, Christianity operates without regard to territory, making universal claims. Universality increasingly characterizes every religious movement. Throughout the modern era, national religions reformatted themselves into global religions. 

Roy values the local—specific practices embedded in particular geographical settings—and regards the universal as unnaturally rootless. Faith can tend toward either end of this spectrum: imagine an old urban congregation where the names on the stain-glass windows testify to its roots in the historical fabric of a community contrasted to a suburban mega-church that could be anywhere in the country, or indeed, the world. In our globalized world, religious movements reformat themselves to de-emphasize territoriality.  

Roy’s focus on territoriality may reflect his own French identity, where the agricultural origin of foods matter because of a sense that the land itself imparts a certain je ne sais quoi to the wine or cheese. One senses in this book a Frenchman longing for his favorite Cotes du Rhone when all that can be found is a Gallo, bottled in California out of grapes grown in Chile.  

A second dichotomy concerns “religious markers” and “cultural markers.” The relationship between these two markers continually shifts, buffeted by historical situations. Thus, as Roy explains, at certain times in Scottish history identity as a Scot was determined by language (a cultural marker). When English replaced the indigenous language, Scottish identity was recast around Presbyterianism (a religious marker).  

Often these two markers overlap in seemingly inseparable ways; how does one tease out cultural markers and religious markers in much of Jewish history? Yet in the modern era, these markers separate; as Roy notes, one can make aliyah—immigrate to Israel—regardless of religious markers (atheists and Orthodox welcome alike) so long as one is culturally Jewish.  

These markers play out in the difference between the neo-paganism of American patriotism and Christianity. Patriotism’s transcendent claims—such as the great value of giving one’s life for the state, the eternal quality of values like liberty—unabashedly embrace American culture in every kitschy souvenir. But modern religions, Roy notes, strive to divorce religious markers and cultural markers. Many Christians across the political spectrum worry about the “comprise with culture” in their churches, whether it is equated with LGBT acceptance or American militarism. Roy writes extensively about the movement of people to create pure religions, stripped of cultural markers. It seems there is a John Howard Yoder or a Stanley Hauerwas in every world religion. 

These two continuums—universality vs. territoriality and religious markers vs. cultural markers—shape Roy’s understanding of the affects of globalization. Religious movements today de-emphasize their territoriality and shed their cultural markers. In a Christian context we might call the result the “church of the strip mall” phenomenon. Roy longs for something else; to borrow from the Saturday farmer’s market, he seeks “heirloom Christianity.”  

Holy ignorance results when religions lose a sense of place and culture. The phrase captures both his critique—holy people ignorant of culture—and his disgust—ignorance! Throughout his book Roy makes his case for the market-place’s transformation of religion with examples drawn from around the world. 

One affecting story concerned a scandal caused by a video showing a Moroccan man dancing dressed as a woman surrounded by other men. Many in Morocco thought it depicted an Islamic same-sex wedding. The video itself probably captured the local veneration of an Islamic saint invoked through dance in order to exorcise demons. As Roy explains,  

Suddenly, something that was both marginal and accepted becomes the subject of scandal and is no longer understood as the expression of a popular culture on the margins (margins in every sense of the word: social, as it is associated with bad boys and the socially relegated; psychiatric, as it is linked to healing; and lastly religious as it is connected to the “worship of a saint” which the dominant Salafism condemns). 

A religious movement divorced from its cultural markers and territoriality cannot appreciate its own cultural celebrations: holy but ignorant. 

Yet more happened in that moment than a religious movement forgetting its own past practices. The protesters, upset by the video of a purported same-sex marriage, adopted a western model of human sexuality, moving from a more traditional Moroccan view of homosexuality as a sexual act to a western idea of homosexuality as a sexual nature. A local Islamic practice of cross-dressing exorcism condemned by an Islam built on universalized western norms. The protesters rallied against an intrusion of western values but did so on the basis of how the west defined homosexuality (nature instead of act).  

Further, the protesters assumed western culture inherently accepted LGBT people. One often hears this in developing world critiques of the west, but, historically, LGBT acceptance in America and Europe dates only to the 1960s and even then acceptance remains contested. The protesters not only acted out of a misinformed conception of their own culture (that is, failing to recognize a traditional Moroccan exorcism) but were equally misinformed about western culture.  

Cases such as the Moroccan video lead Roy to suggest an alternative to Samuel Huntington’s famous clash of civilizations thesis. Huntington asserted culture created fundamental human divisions which, with the end of the cold war, would become locked into conflict: Western vs. Islamic vs. Hindu. Instead of a clash of civilization, Roy sees a clash within civilizations as global religious movements turn against local cultural manifestations, much in the way that Moroccan protesters denounced a traditional, if marginal, practice in their culture. (Such a thesis does better than Huntington’s to explain the modern problem of Islamic terrorism, which kills far more Muslims than westerners). The effort to establish a purified religion leads to conflict and even violence within a civilization. 

At times the pressure to drop cultural markers in favor of religious ones comes from the state. European countries discuss their “Muslim minorities,” amalgamating many distinct cultural groups. Much is lost: what of Bengali Muslims with Hindu names, or Arab-speaking Christians, or simply the cultural differences between a Yemini Sunni and an Indonesian Sunni?  

Statecraft demands drive the process as well. Over the last half-century the heterodox Alawite community in Syria increasingly dropped its unique cultural markers in favor of a more normative Shiite identity. The al-Assad dynasty, Alawite religiously, pushes this change to strengthen ties with Shiites in Iran and Lebanon.  

More typically, the motivation for religions to reformat themselves by dropping territoriality and cultural markers comes from our globalized market place; religions compete for customers. Roy summarizes the religion marketplace: “this concept of a market, borrowed from the economy, postulates that first of all there is a demand for religion (invoking a human nature that, in any case, has a religious ‘need’) which seeks out what is available on the market.” If people shop for church then are disciples reduced to consumers? 

Modern forms of Hinduism provide an example: traditional Hinduism centered on the Ganges (territoriality) and the caste system (cultural marker). First Sris, master teachers, and later migrating populations brought Hinduism to new locales by de-emphasizing the Ganges and caste. Only a reformatted Hinduism could effectively compete for customers. 

As in other industries, religions operate in a deregulated market—fewer and fewer state protected monopolies, an internet and media leveling of access—that allows them to reach greater audiences. But like all products shipped afar, the product must be simplified. One can easily ship Rick Warren’s sermons from California to Uganda, but it’s harder to ship Catholic sacramental elements from an American parish overseas. Bringing religion to market involves reformatting to what can ship most easily in our global marketplace.  

The market place of religion favors forms of faith most ready to be “shipped.” Roy suggests Pentecostalism does better than Catholicism because the Holy Spirit is more mobile than the Virgin Mary: the spirit blows where it will but Mary is always of some place, Częstochowa or Guadalupe. The Salafist insistence on Shari travels far better than the Shiite devotion to shrines. 

Now the religious products compete head to head, increasing competition between religious groups but also forcing them to adapt their products so the consumers can reasonably compare them. Thus, Roy describes, “The Arya Samaj movement, which was founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand Saraswati, who rejected the caste system, promoted monotheism and placed great importance on the Vedas, or sacred texts. Universalism, monotheism, revealed book: this is clearly a theological and ‘ecclesiological’ formatting process based on the Christian template.” The pressure works both ways of course; one hears silent prayer sold as Christian mediation, complete with scriptural mantras. 

There is a bit of a counter-trend in terms of cultural markers. Some cultural emblems serve as helpful branding in the market place—a saffron robe, a Celtic cross, a sprinkling of foreign words: teasers for the imagination which simultaneously testify to the authenticity of the spiritual product. At times these cultural remnants can become decisive signifiers of identity. “Visibility is characteristic of contemporary religion,” Roy notes. One hears in that comment years of French debate about the headscarves of young Muslim women. But it resonates in the public but shallow expressions of Christianity in America. Sometimes the most visible markers are not clothing, but issues worn on the sleeve: anti-abortion positions among evangelicals, Shari among Salafists, both apparent non-negotiables with little historical depth in either tradition. Visible culture issues to define a brand identity. 

The genius of Roy’s book lies beyond its trenchant analysis of the global markets effect on religion. The book infects the mind. One begins to wonder about those continuums of territoriality versus universality and religious markers versus cultural markers. Is mainline Protestantism declining because it’s still so connected to historic, ethnic, cultural markers? Have decades of critiques of Constantinian Christianity led us into a market-driven faith? Can religious shoppers ever become faithful disciples? Have we lost an essential terroir in our drive to universalize our religions? Did our congregations shed something important when we moved away from the cultural sentimentality of Mt. Rushmore? Holy Ignorance makes one wonder how much our faith and our institutions are shaped for the worse by globalization.

—Andrew B. Warner

Born This Way by Lady Gaga

If there was a soundtrack to Summer 2011 in my car, it was Lady Gaga’s new album, Born this Way. My daughter and her friends are Gaga-devotees, known in Gaga-world as a “Little Monsters.” Lady Gaga calls herself “Mother Monster.” I broke down and bought the CD for my daughter. It was played incessantly all summer. I began to really like the album, fell in love with the beat and mix of music. My daughter and I crank up the music in the car sometimes and sing along at the top of our lungs. There is pure fun in this album, something we all need. It was then I realized that I was becoming a “little monster” too.  

Some of the lyrics in the album can be raw and offensive. Yet there is a theological undergirding to the album. Sprinkled throughout are questions about our relationship to God and specifically to Jesus. After the release of the album this spring, some religious leaders panned it—offended in part by the lyrics of the song “Judas”. As I listened to “Judas” I heard something else, an age-old theological discussion set to a new tune about good vs. evil. Gaga sings: