Re-enchanting the world: Religion, desire and the crisis of modernity

My dissertation, Re-enchanting the World: Religion, Desire and the Crisis of Modernity, combines theoretical, historical, ethnographic and cultural analysis with memoir to examine the ways in which "renewalist" religious movements with charismatic practices reflect both a sense of disenchantment with modernity as well as a desire to "re-enchant" it in a technological, postmodern era. Long assumed to decline with the onset of modernity, the unexpected "revival" of religion reflects the rationalization, commodification and authoritarian tendencies of the larger society, calling into question Harvey Cox (1995) and others analysis of it as an upsurge of "authentic, primordial" spirituality. Focusing on the Pentecostal-influenced Catholic charismatic movement, with which my family was affiliated, it utilizes a feminist, queer and critical theory perspective to attain a "social physiognomy" of American society through an "immanent critique" (Adorno 1983; Cho 2002) of charismatic and apocalyptic literature, practices and culture to discern its "negative utopian" desire for a better world, here or beyond. Social physiognomy seeks "contradictions within the cultural object that express and contest the contradiction of the social totality" through the method of "immanent critique" - which seeks to both decipher the "secret code" according to which an object expresses and reproduces social domination - while at the same time recognizing the object's "enigmatic" and utopian denunciations of injustice (Adorno 1983; Apostolidis 2000). In a time of particular crisis in the Catholic Church, it tries to make use of immanent critique to understand the troubled conjunctions of sexuality, gender, politics and religion in the contemporary moment, and what they reflect about the larger social totality. It also examines the unexpected revival of religion in relation to the crisis of modernity's "dialectic of enlightenment" - where the overcoming of superstition and myth by science and technology results paradoxically in a dominating bureaucratic and technological rationality that renewalist religions reflect, even as they may seek to resist it.;The raging debates over secularism and secularization - given the rise of political Islam and the Christian Right, and the postcolonial critique (Asad 2003) of the (largely unacknowledged) Christian bases of Western secularism - have led some to call for the "opening up" of secularism to religion, in a recognition of their "blurred" historical and boundaries and interdependencies, to get over the stale "church-state" debates (Taylor 2007; Habermas 2006). My work tries to go the extra step of trying to re-imagine and re-think the ways that secularisms' more progressive histories might also be renewed as an alternate yet empathetic path to the "renewal" offered by conservative, politicized religious movements.;To this end, on the one hand my work situates itself in a tradition of progressive, secular critique of contemporary religiosity, for its commodified (and hence secularized) nature, as exemplified by Adorno's study of the Christian Right radio addresses of the 1930s, Apostolidis' study of Focus on the Family (2000), and Dong Ho-Cho's unpublished study of Korean Pentecostalism (2002). Such an approach runs contrary to the contemporary dominance of the triumphalist "rational choice" approach of the Christian "religious economies" school in the sociology of religion in the US. While critical, it also tries to decipher the "negative utopian" desire of contemporary religiosity - albeit often manifested in a commodified, regressive, and repressive form - for a different world, by trying to understand the ways in which it offers a putative resistance to the bureaucratic rationality of an often threatening, technological, postmodern world, where more progressive secular options, post-Cold War, seem unavailable.;The study explores such themes as the Intelligent Design debate and science skepticism (and its implications for action around such pressing issues as climate change) through a re-thinking of the class and cultural conflicts of the original Scopes Trial; the "negative utopian" desire for change of the best-selling, apocalyptic Left Behind novels and their violent, high-tech battles against the Antichrist; the increasingly dominionist and authoritarian nature of both fundamentalist and charismatic religion; the apocalyptic piety of Marian apparitions and its image of a "militarized Virgin Mary battling a feminized Devil" (Cousino 2006); and the popularity of charismatic practices of being slain in the spirit, healing masses, speaking in tongues, and demonic possession - interpreting them as emanations of sexually repressed, alienated and regulated bodies as well as, somewhat paradoxically, attempts at somatic and communal engagement. Ultimately, the work is a sympathetic, symptomatic reading of the unexpected renewal of religiosity in the modern world. It interprets this emergence as an attempt to re-enchant what is perceived as a stale, lifeless modernity, amidst a largely defeated horizon of radical secular possibility, and argues for the re-engagement and re-imaging of the radical secular imaginary, one that could learn from - and perhaps channel in a more fruitful way - the "negative utopian desire" of contemporary conservative, politicized, renewalist religious movements for a "re-enchanted" world.