Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation

Abstract

207 resurgence of Islamophobia, wherein reason was supplanted by unchecked emotion. Schaefer engages with Imani Perry’s book, More Beautiful and More Terrible, in which Perry wrote that racialization “that leads to the practice of racial inequality is influenced by visceral responses to [feelings about] assumptions that operate within the process of reason and analysis and that insidiously lead to inequitable and illegitimate discrimination” (42). Perry demonstrated that racialization can and will infest and contaminate the rational process itself. Schaefer then engages with the scholarship of the late Saba Mahmood, in her famous discussion of religion and secularism as defined by emotions. Schaefer points out that secular critique aspires to an unrealized ideal of the absence of feelings, whereas portraying religion embraces a “thrall to emotion” (96). But science is “engineered by living bodies, saturated by culture, power, and history, and enfolded within feeling” (231). This is evident in considerable debate amongst practitioners of various religious traditions regarding the beginning of fetal life, while American legislation and policy are victims to the “thrall of emotion” of the contemporary Religious Right. Hence Schaefer makes clear that science and scholarship are not objective while recognizing that there is a difference between social sciences and hard sciences. Schaefer argues that scholars in the social sciences tend to acknowledge the blind spots and limitations that inevitably shape how they conduct research, but those working in the hard sciences may cling to an unrealized chimera of objectivity. This artificial division between the social sciences and hard sciences does not obviate the fact that both disciplines are influenced by emotions. But the division suggests that social science is not readily adaptable to direct observation that withstands the rigorous measures of the hard sciences, thereby creating a different context for scholarship and knowledge-making. Even Einstein, arguably one of the most preeminent scientists, “believed religion and science spring from the same emotional root” (237). Hence it is surprising that certain secular scholars insist on demarcating the two, placing science and religion as adversarial, thereby excluding scholarship on subjects such as “the God hypothesis” from scientific discussions. Schaefer argues that the “conflict thesis” between science and religion has long been rejected in learned contexts, positing that it is perpetuated among a certain group of scientists, especially those who are least knowledgeable about either the history of science or the history of religion. He highlights how the conflict thesis continues unabated outside the academy, especially in popular culture, because specialists have failed to communicate the message effectively to the public. Wild Experiment discusses embodiment, interweaving the study of secularism with materiality by identifying a role of embodied affects in thought. It discusses case studies such as the visual culture of the Scopes Trial and the secular architecture of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. It addresses conspiracy theory, which previously was studied through the prism of material culture, to embodied effects. Wild Experiment is an indispensable addition to any course syllabus on race, religion, affect theory, and any interdisciplinary topic on the intersections between feeling and thinking.