At ten years of age I walked onto a large, grassy field at Colorado State University where the kids in my summer camp were already playing. A few of them recognized me from previous years and ran up to greet me. Strangely, they did not say, “Hello, how are you?” Rather, they opened our summer with a direct inquiry that challenged my coolness: “Have you seen Star Wars yet?!”

It always sucks to be the last one in on something, and I had to confess that I had no idea what they were talking about. My friends began to explain how there were lasers and spaceships and a really bad guy named “Death Invader” or some such. Before long, one of the camp leaders came over and he too began excitedly trying to explain the film to me. It sounded like the strangest, most mysterious, magical thing I could imagine.

I immediately went home and convinced my mother of the dire magnitude of the situation. By the time I actually saw the movie a few days later, I had the key names memorized, and had a working familiarity with the “death star” space station and something about a “life saver” laser sword. I learned this without McDonalds franchising. Now, thirtysomething years later my six-year-old daughter has her own plastic light saber, a Clone Wars lunchbox, and a Lego® Echo Base Station. She can also talk a good Wookie. All this knowledge even though she’s never seen any of the films. We’ve become so much more efficient at acquiring our mythologies in the thirty-five years since the original.

The Auratic Galactic

Star Wars proves that Walter Benjamin might have been wrong when he argued that the aura of art withers when artworks are mass reproduced. Benjamin’s idea was that artworks (particularly those before photography and film) could possess a presence that was seemingly natural despite its socially constructed setting. There’s only one Mona Lisa, only one leaning tower of Pisa, and people travel to bask in the particular space and time of their highly charged presence. For Benjamin, the power of this locatable “authenticity” was not so much intrinsic to a unique artwork, but was created through collective, social feeling. This was often evoked through ritual, pulling viewers toward that feeling from great distances.

Film was supposed to change all that, as feature films would arrive “at a theater near you.” The unique, authentic appearance of the work of art was dispersed across theaters, throughout time and space, and thus an aura could not surround one singular, unique, separate work. The journey was now proximate, and mass distributed. What authenticity was there in that?

Films like Star Wars confirm that some semblance of an aura is alive and well in this dispersed, postmodern, postindustrial world. These films tell us something too about our ongoing desire for the sacred mysteries and ritualistic events that, increasingly, have been fulfilled by mass media for masses of people. Here, even when a film is shown and watched in theaters around the world (i.e., there is no “one” Star Wars) an aura has been established around some seemingly single work of art, at least one that many people can collectively discuss. Each of us hundred million or so who have seen the original or sequel Star Wars films in our own places and times, respond, react, and register our own likes and dislikes across continents and generations.

When new installments of the Star Wars series have been released, thousands of people in all corners of the globe have set up camp for days at a time outside the box office waiting for tickets to go on sale, dressing in appropriate costumes, and speaking in intergalactic lingo to their fellow fans camped out alongside them, and basically having a good time in their neo-rituals. Others plan for Star Wars theme weddings and bar mitzvoth (like Mark Zuckerberg). And when the 2001 Australian national census resulted in 70,000+ people marking “Jedi” as their religion, Chris Brennan, director of the Star Wars Appreciation Society of Australia, responded, “This was a way for people to say, ‘I want to be part of a movie universe I love so much.'” Fans declare their allegiance to an alternate reality, one posited to be in contradistinction to mechanically reproducible office cubicles, mortgage installments, and traffic commutes. The mass distribution of Star Wars does nothing to diminish its aura—if anything, it offers a new terrain to diagnose the sacred and profane of their postindustrial lives.

Mythical Mashup

The “camp” where the Star Wars aura began for me in the summer of ’77 was really a two-week babysitter as our parents attended talks and sessions as part of “staff training.” This was the annual gathering of Campus Crusade for Christ staff members from around the world. In other words, my primal cinematic experience occurred in the midst of a bastion of a budding brand of evangelicalism, just then filtering across the country. Many of these evangelicals had been to the conservative-Christianity-meets-pop-culture event called Explo ’72. Many of them were interested in the “born-again” Democrat Jimmy Carter, then in office, but had yet to fall under the spell of thespian-evangelical trickster, Ronald Reagan.

Nobody seemed to care much about the potential theo-politics of Star Wars. Only a few seemed to identify usable theology in it. Some deployed the film to repeat Christian-sounding messages (The Force is God), or to capitalize on the mythic parallels between Obi-Wan and John the Baptist, Luke Skywalker and Christ, Darth Vader and Satan. Even the original movie posters displayed a distinctly Renaissance Christian iconography with Luke and cruciform light saber forming the apex of the triune-triangle, Leia as Mary, the droids in a Johannine stance, and Vader pervades the background in a Fatherly role.

There’s something about Star Wars that triggers a variety of religious experiences, from sci-fi eager adolescent male to warrior evangelical. In part, this is because it participates in the ongoing process of remythologizing, or what I’ve elsewhere called a mythical mashup. Myths only last if they are retold and acted out through ritual, updated for a new day and age. An old story is mixed with a few other old stories as it is retold, repackaged, and repurposed, resulting in something both familiar but also brand new.

George Lucas and his film participate in such mythical mashings. At first look, Star Wars seemed wholly new even as we quickly recognize the elements of the story: damsel in distress, a young hero-to-be whose family is killed, wise elder, and some talkative sidekicks. Lucas right away gets the nuances of myth right, starting with the opening epigraph: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . . ” which conjures up the ambiguous setting of so many lasting stories, of “Once upon a time, in an enchanted forest,” and “In the beginning . . .” All such stories, when well told, give us the time and place setting, but are likewise not so clear about it all: how long, exactly, is “a long time ago”? Ten thousand years? Or, maybe just ten minutes if you’re my daughter in the car running errands. At the same time, Lucas pushed the technology and computer-generated imagery in unheard of new ways, but he also continually came back to the decidedly low-tech: farmers in a desert clime, a jazz bar, meeting up with traveling merchants, and the interaction with other seemingly carbon-based life forms. A good myth has gotta be out of this world just as it is graspable in the here and now. There is a delicate balance of push and pull between familiar and strange that stands at the heart of good stories, and thus good myths.

In turn, the new mashup then takes its place within cultural tradition, becoming part of the mythical storehouse that we collectively cull from in the ongoing religious processes of world making. That the Star Wars films have become so firmly embedded in the U.S. mythological fabric is evident in a variety of venues. With the emergence of The Phantom Menace (“Episode I”) in 1999, the conservative Christian publication The World ran a cover story and follow up essays looking slightly askew at the “spirituality” of George Lucas, and the relations of the films to political, cultural, and religious life today. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum ran an exhibition, “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,” confirming the importance of inspiring hero myths as a subject of cultural science. In its displays, the Smithsonian tracked how the Star Wars films have been able to construct origin stories for young aspiring astronauts, space travelers, and the like. Along the way, books by respectable publishers bear titles like: Star Wars and Philosophy, The Dharma of Star Wars, The Tao of Star Wars, Star Wars Jesus: A Spiritual Commentary on the Reality of the Force, and The Gospel According to Star Wars. Cultural, religious, and philosophical works have drawn on the power of the films to make connections with the lives of people in the here and now.

One example makes the point particularly clear. Sal Paolantonio’s book, How Football Explains America, discusses how that sport creates a uniquely United States mythology. Quarterbacks, the ESPN correspondent says, are heroes in the classical sense. But rather than using, say, Perseus or Heracles as points of comparison, he says quarterbacks are heroes because they are like Luke Skywalker. Thirty years ago some critics and scholars were at pains to show how Luke Skywalker embodied the hero myth. Now, Luke Skywalker simply becomes a hero. Popular culture has become mythic certitude. The aura has become incorporated.

To this day, I can talk with people roughly my age and we can recount where we were (and thus, say something about who we were) on the summer of Star Wars, thirty-five years ago now. A twinkle emerges in our eyes as we talk about “our firsts” with regard the film, a remembrance of things past: the fresh sounds of swooshing light sabers, the bright colored laser beams, James Earl Jones’ voice as Darth Vader, Leia’s hair buns, a young Harrison Ford’s cheeky rejoinders. It is a civil mythology for a civil religious culture.

I lied to a dying man, although I meant every word. It’s a strange thing, to say you intend to do something that you don’t really intend to do, yet feeling as though the words themselves are embraced in such uncompromised truth that they actually exceed their indexical meaning. If there is spirituality in promises, prayers, and praise, can there also be spirituality in the excellence of the lie?

I had known Phil for barely over a year, while doing ethnographic research with evangelicals in Knoxville, Tennessee. We became close friends, despite a four-decade generation gap and even wider cultural differences. I was a New York academic with an agenda; a secular Jew sojourning in the lives of church folk. Phil was a committed Christian, with a lifelong dedication to his church and a passion for ministries of evangelization. He was an endearingly calm, quick-witted Tennessean, and an ebullient father and grandfather. When I met him, he was already fighting for his life.

The lymphoma that eventually killed him was gaining ground, and Phil was undergoing a series of chemo treatments at a local hospital. He had a steady, seemingly endless stream of visitors; family, friends, coworkers. On the afternoon I visited he was uncharacteristically alone, but characteristically upbeat and talkative. As I approached his bed he sat up and smiled, barely showing a hint of fatigue or concern. “This sucks,” I said, gesturing at the wires, tubes, and monitors that surrounded him but clearly referring to something more. He tilted his head back and laughed. “Yeah, it does kinda suck,” he said, still smiling, “Thank you! You’re the first person to come out and say it since I’ve been here.”

We talked for several minutes, perhaps an hour, mostly about news and gossip in the community. We talked about my research, which Phil supported by helping me make contacts among local pastors and churchgoers and putting a little friendly pressure on those who never invited me to their Bible study groups. I used to joke with Phil that he was like “my personal mob boss” in the church. On more than one occasion he turned the table, calling me his “personal rabbi.” It was novelty that drew us to friendship in the first place; it was a shared sense of humor that kept us there.

As I prepared to leave Phil’s bedside that afternoon my heart was heavy and my hands turned cold. I knew what I was about to say. I didn’t plan it ahead of time, but I could see it coming and chose not to stand in its way. In my relations with people who were part of my research, I never wanted to feel like I misled or deceived anyone. But this instant just felt different. It called for something novel.

“I’ll pray for you.”

I said it.

Phil stared back stunned. In those fleeting seconds I imagine he was both shocked and pleased: There was hope for me yet. He was never the kind of guy to be smug or self-congratulatory about such a thought. There was undoubtedly a part of Phil that reveled in my words, but he was far too mature in character, and in his faith, to have settled on a triumphal reading of our exchange, as though my spiritual indifference was finally conquered and that was that.

And what of my character? I lied. I told someone that I would do something for him that I could not do. I didn’t plan to set aside time to petition God on Phil’s behalf, or “lift him up” as evangelicals say, at least not in any way consistent in form or content with the prayer practices of the faithful. Perhaps I should have simply said, “I’ll keep you in my thoughts, Phil”? Why even invite the pretense of religiosity? Was I so eager to make Phil happy? Did I think my words, my simple unexpected words, could actually save him?

The fact is, by telling Phil that I would pray for him I spoke something of an indirect truth. My sincerity rested not in the content of the statement but rather the sentiment that inspired it. It was a sentiment that called out to be expressed in prefabricated words, conveyed in what for me were new wineskins (to put it biblically). I wanted to enter a new level of social exchange, to give him an inalienable gift, however disquieting and self-alienating it may have felt. I wanted him to know that I cared about him that much.

In this sense I was perhaps more like Phil and his churchgoing friends than I had ever been before. Prayer is an act of private supplication and public worship, but that is not all it is. Prayer is an artifact of value, something given and received. It can circulate among friends and strangers like currency, sometimes in the form of an act, often in the form of a promise. “I’ll pray for you.” The words invoke piety, but they also signify sociality. They cannot be empty words. They have the power to create bonds, to forge narratives of belonging, to convey or reciprocate emotions. I suspect I’m not the first person to say those words without meaning them in a literal sense. There are many self-aware evangelicals, for example, who could probably admit to neglecting promised prayers at one point or another in their lives, either by failing to make time or forgetting altogether. But that’s not my main point. That’s not really the point at all.

I am often asked if I was ever moved spiritually during my fieldwork, whether I experienced a “God moment” akin to that famously described by Susan Harding, when she suddenly found herself interpellated by the conversionist discourse of her fundamentalist-Baptist interlocutors. Of course, such questions usually rely on assumptions as various as they are loaded, with regard to what exactly constitutes a “spiritual” experience. Nonetheless, on most occasions I feel obliged to respond in the negative. While I certainly experienced profound revelatory episodes, uncanny coincidences, and flashes of emotion with visceral intensity that I could have internalized in a spiritual idiom, I rarely felt inclined or compelled to do so. This response may be well received by certain scholars who would applaud me for holding my ground, for not allowing myself to “cross a line” from an intellectual position posited to be secular to the faith of my subjects. But that would be a misguided conclusion, misguided in that it presumes that the line between belief and disbelief (or better yet, between those who pray and mean it and those who don’t pray at all) is the only line there is to be crossed.

The reality is that there are many lines that can be crossed when an avowedly non-spiritual person interacts with “people of faith,” and not all of them have to do with spirituality as conventionally understood. Lines of sociality—that is, the terms of when and how we perform our relational affinities with other people—make up an intrinsic part of what it means to be evangelical. For all their individualist rhetoric, evangelicals are often intensely social people, who celebrate and affirm their interpersonal bonds with routine diligence. Negotiating those lines offers a different point of entry into the realm of evangelical spirituality, a moral disposition that, among other things, relies on the richly paradoxical claim of privileging “relationships over religion.”

So while I may not have flirted with conviction in theological terms, I explored a space of indeterminacy that in my experience was no less implicating. When I “lied” to Phil about praying for him I did not separate myself from his religious world, as one might critically accuse me of doing, so much as adopt a communicative cue derived from a mode of religious sociality in which stated affections, expectations, and courtesies—indeed, words themselves—provide the channels through which “authentic” spirituality is made to appear real and tangible.

Maybe I’m deceiving myself. Maybe I’ve done little more than try to resolve an ethical lapse with an intellectual conceit, a half-truth at best. Or maybe, as opposed to centuries of Christian teachings insistent on transparency and objective sincerity in religious language (as Webb Keane has described), there are parallel, unspoken values attached to the art of well-intentioned words. Maybe Phil really knew what I really meant, and if he were still alive would understand why the memory of that afternoon both exhilarates and haunts me. Maybe I’m praying for him right now.

For something that the vast majority of people have never actually seen, the double helix of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) certainly has broad recognition. We find it on corporate logos, academic organizations, and in popular culture. It is, as art historian Martin Kemp writes in his forthcoming book Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon, an icon of our times. As such it is an image of “terrific and enduring fame,” Kemp explained in a recent interview. Here on frequencies.ssrc.org, David Morgan offered another take. “[Icons] are special—they stand like mountaintops in a society, managing the flow of thought and feeling that constitutes the body of a culture.” Icons are symbols of tremendous weight, like the cross, the flag, or the wheel of dharma.

The double helix is certainly an icon, and a particularly apt one for today. It is, first and foremost, an icon of science. Since the eighteenth century, science has increasingly become the dominant means of relating to the world around us. It possesses power, authority, and conveys legitimacy onto everything it touches, as historian Daniel Patrick Thurs has written. We negotiate birth, disease, and death through science. We use science to sell products and decide policy—though we sometimes fight over whose science or which results to accept. While religious and non-scientific approaches to engaging the world exist, all such approaches butt against the pervasive explanatory power of science. The double helix emblazons this mantle of science.

The double helix icon sometimes also functions like another item of religious material culture, the talisman. Like the chamsa (Hand of Fatima), crucifix, or OM, the double helix is a marker of membership within a community: in this case, the community of science. Like any talisman the double helix conveys real power. Place a double helix on a product—perfume, for example—and it captures the legitimacy, authority, and cachet of science. Add the double helix to an article of clothing, and it marks the wearer as a priest—or at least a member of the congregation—in the church of science. The double helix as talisman transforms an object into an emblem of science, and with it all the qualities that we envision science as possessing, including the values of progress, truth, and empiricism.

The double helix, like other icons, inspires conflict as well as desire. This should not surprise us. People want to control, possess, and define the sacred. The double helix is no different. Competing companies use the icon to sell their products and convey the sense of authority that the double helix conveys. Proponents of everything from stem cell research to creationism have latched onto the image of the double helix. Secularist journals and Christian magazines all include illustrations of the double helix.

For nearly two years the Discovery Institute, known for its forceful advocacy for Intelligent Design and theistic alternatives to normative Western science, used a double helix as part of their logo. The Institute initially used as their logo an excerpt from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel—the famous scene of God touching Adam—but from October 1999 to August 2001 they replaced Adam with the double helix. The double helix made a return to the Institute’s logo again in July 2004, but paired with da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Why would an evangelical group like the Discovery Center not known for its endorsement of materialist science use this image? The science of genetics—one would think—offers particular threat to such Christians, since it represents the biological determinism and natural selection that they generally abhor.

The reason lies in the plasticity of the symbol. For the evangelicals who bear the double helix as their emblem, DNA represents an icon of order, and therefore what they consider evidence of intelligent design. No fixed meaning exists for icons like DNA. Unlike fossils or moon rocks, DNA is both omnipresent and cannot be directly observed. It is therefore more plastic as a symbol and can be deployed in nearly any circumstance. The double helix can represent Intelligent Design or evolution, scientific triumphalism or Christian resistance. It is a powerful symbol, but one whose multivalent power is neither stagnant nor fixed.

The double helix, with its multicolored nucleotides linking its two long strands, has taken on a reality beyond the illustrative one for which the symbol was intended. It has become more than merely an image. Since Watson and Crick first introduced it as a model of DNA, it has transformed in most people’s minds from an approximate model to an actual image, an imago biologica of the genetic code at the center of our biological lives. It is impossible to see it unmediated, but even with the aid of powerful microscopes DNA doesn’t look exactly like the double stranded molecule that we so often see in culture. Most people think it does. The signifier has become the signified. Chalk up some of this to scientific ignorance, but also to the fundamental way that icons and other images work. The same has happened with religious symbols as well. Warner Sallman’s famous painting Head of Christ has become for many American Christians the essentially true image of Jesus. (See David Morgan’s work for more on this.)

There is a term in religion for an image that really is what it represents: a murti. In the Hindu tradition a murti is not only an image of the divine, but the divine itself made manifest. Krishna, Shiva, Devi, or any other God manifests in the murti, and through ritual practice the image becomes that which it represents. Something similar has happened with the double helix. As a murti, the double helix of DNA functions as not only a symbol approximately representing our genetic code, but as a manifestation of those genes. When I asked students in my religious studies classes—a fair cross-section of students at the college—what DNA really looked like, they described the familiar multicolored ladder-shaped molecule. Like Sallman’s Head of Christ, Michelangelo’s work at the Sistine Chapel, and a myriad of other icons, the double helix has become a symbol as real as the idea that it represents.

The opening ritual of every First Place meeting is the weigh-in. First Place is a national Christian weight loss program sponsored in thousands of evangelical churches and private homes around the country. Before the meeting begins, group members line up to be weighed. The scale is typically located in a semi-private space: a church’s kitchen, a hallway, a small closet. The weigh-in itself is between the group member and the group leader alone, but the line is often bristling with conversation and often with tension. When being weighed, the member steps on the scale and recites the week’s scripture memory verse, one of nine commitments participants make for the duration of the thirteen-week program. The leader writes down the member’s weight in her book—it is almost always a her—along with the member’s success at recalling the verse. The fusion between religiosity and weight loss that marks First Place is exemplified in that moment where the member is held accountable to two sacred symbols of God’s power and will: scripture and the scale.

The weigh-in is constructed in First Place, as it is in many weight loss practices, as the time of judgment, where the truth of one’s adherence to the program will be revealed. There is an expectation of reward for the faithful and punishment for the transgressor: that the scale will be just in its pronouncement. But, as many dieters know, there is a great tension in almost all weight loss pursuits between what the mind wants and what the body does. In First Place that tension is sacralized in an ongoing contest between godly ideals and bodily realities. While the program celebrates thinness as God’s normative ideal, weight loss is in fact hard to come by, especially in diet-based programs like First Place. The scale’s authority as arbiter of fidelity to the virtues of weight loss, an authority established by the program and reinforced in American culture, is always at danger of being undermined by fat’s tenacity. Thus tension around the weigh-in is high, filled with fear of judgment and condemnation for failing at a project that is seen as reflective of God’s will yet is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. This tension needs to be managed if faith in the program, and, at some level, faith in God, is to be sustained, especially when the scale shows its disfavor and weight is not lost.

One way this tension is managed is through a regular, informal conversation that I observed regularly at the First Place group I attended and came to call “divining the scale.” After the weigh in was completed and participants settled in for the meeting, but before the meeting formally began, the group, often at the behest of the group leader, collectively discussed their weight loss results, interpreting them and discerning what they meant or didn’t mean about the women themselves, about their relationship to God, and about the program.

One conversation took place in the sixth of the group’s thirteen meetings. After everyone weighed in, but before the meeting formally began, Norma, a group leader in her mid-60s with short brown hair, a solid build, and sparkly eyes, asked everyone how they were doing. “Did you all have a really crappy week?” she asked. Someone in the group asked if Norma could give a tally of the weight lost. “This week it wouldn’t help,” she responded. “It was terrible. We’ve had one superstar, but I don’t want to say who so as not to jinx her.” “You don’t want to say cause she isn’t safe,” someone teased. “You know we’d kill her.” “But the rest of us,” Norma continued, “it’s pathetic. At least I’m the same, not up. But we’re up and down. Any idea what’s going on?”

In making the move to divine the scale’s message for its faithful but flawed supplicants, Norma raises questions about religion and food, eating and spiritual transgression, questions that have been of interest to Christians for a long time. And it raises a tension that stands at the heart of First Place’s project. The program believes that thinness is normative for the believer and that weight loss occurs when we are in physical, mental, spiritual and emotional harmony with God’s will. “As we put God in first place for our day and with our weight,” writes program director Carole Lewis, “then everything else falls into place.” The more one aligns with God’s will through adherence to First Place’s nine commitments, the more that alignment should be reflected on the scale.

But bodily realities and the limitations of dieting as a method of weight loss challenge this presumption and reality of weight’s persistence threatens to overrun the spiritual ideals that underpin the program and are the basis for its claim to efficacy. If people don’t lose weight after faithfully adhering to the program they may come to question its conflation of God’s bodily ideal with thinness and weight loss. Members need to be trained to read the persistence of weight not as a reflection itself of God’s will (if I’m trying and I don’t lose weight, maybe God doesn’t want me to), or the failure of dieting’s disciplines (if I keep doing this and it doesn’t work, maybe it just doesn’t work) but to attribute it to other causes.

The first response to Norma’s question came from Celeste, a small woman, also in her 60s, with dyed blond hair who converted to evangelical Christianity from Catholicism. She offered: “Satan and his dirty work.” Tessa, one of the group’s success stories, gave a more worldly explanation. “We get complacent at week six,” she said. “We started by doing everything we’re supposed to do. So this week, after not coming last week, I didn’t write anything down for CR [Commitment Report], didn’t open up the Bible study.” Norma then confessed her own complacency, saying “I’ve decided I didn’t need to do a CR because I haven’t been taking it with me.” “Mine is exercise,” offered Kathleen, a younger, larger woman with two small children at home. “All I can say is don’t think you’re a Lone Ranger.” Norma comforted, “We’re all not doing well.”

First Place’s program consists of nine spiritual and physical commitments. These commitments serve a range of purposes, but one, as we can see in this exchange, is an opportunity to defuse the tension between godly ideals and bodily realities. When beginning a thirteen-week session, First Place members commit to regular attendance at group meetings, adherence to the food plan, regular exercise, memorization of one scripture verse per week, daily bible reading, daily bible study (the two are different), daily “quiet time” in prayer, weekly encouragement of another group member (usually via email or phone), and faithful recording of adherence to these commitments, including every bit of food eaten, in what’s known as a Commitment Record or a CR. The CR is handed in to the group leader every week and she returns it at the next meeting with comments. Commitments are so numerous in part because the program aims to address the problem of weight loss physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. They also reflect an increasing tendency to see weight loss as a life altering pursuit that requires personal changes far more extensive than food restriction and increased exercise and a resultant proliferation of disciplines.

It is widely recognized and accepted that it is difficult if not impossible to meet all of these commitments at any one time, not to mention in an ongoing manner. But the virtual impossibility of ongoing, faithful adherence does not keep members from being held accountable to them, especially when weight loss is not achieved. The sheer number of commitments give First Place members a variety of ways to explain why weight loss has not occurred as hoped. Surely there is always something that members have not faithfully implemented in their lives during the previous week, especially as the thirteen-week session progresses. The proliferation of commitments provides a range of ways to assign individual responsibility for the lack of weight loss success, diverting attention from the shortcomings of dieting and from the possibility that God is the author of those failings which may themselves carry a message that participants could discern.

Frustration with the complexity of the program, and confusion over which aspects should be prioritized, was then voiced by Deborah, a medical professional with a teen-aged daughter who came to First Place in part to manage her diabetes. “But the program is about all emotions, spirituality. You should focus on exercise,” she told Kathleen, “and make that a focus. It’s hard to manage every piece of the program.” Norma used this comment to report on a conversation she heard at another church meeting that she and other First Place members attended the previous week. “I overheard, very recently, Deborah talking about the First Place group. Someone asked how are you doing. She goes, ‘Well, I’m doing really well spiritually, but not so much with losing weight.’” “I didn’t think I could do the Bible verses,” Deborah modestly replied. “She has the right idea,” Norma continued. “The bottom line is to keep the communication line open with God. Bible study forces us to be self-reflective and to get to the important stuff.”

First Place’s range of commitments reflects a central ambiguity in the program’s purpose: whether First Place is a weight loss program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of spiritual practices or whether it is a spiritual program whose value is enhanced by the inclusion of weight loss practices. This a live question that is often at play in First Place interactions, including this one. Ostensibly, the program positions itself as the first: as a weight loss program that is enhanced by spirituality. First Place is effective at weight loss, they claim, because it focuses on the whole person, integrating spiritual concerns into the heart of its practice. The absence of God is depicted as the problem in secular weight loss programs and First Place presents itself as filling that crucial void.

Yet there is reason to see First Place as primarily a program of Christian discipleship that instills spiritual practices by linking them to the popular goal of weight loss. Spiritual changes are often the changes celebrated in First Place literature and its spiritual disciplines inculcate Christian practices that are deeply valued yet quotidian in the evangelical subculture. To use a food metaphor, spirituality and weight loss are applesauce and pill, combined in First Place to make the vital but bitter one more palatable. The question is whether spirituality is the applesauce that makes the pill of weight loss go down more easily, or whether the possibility of weight loss is the appealing substance that allows Christian disciplines to slip in. If weight loss is the pill, the weigh-in is the moment where it should display its efficacy. But if spiritual discipline is the pill, the lack of weight loss threatens to keep people from eating the applesauce.

Most of the time this ambiguity is not an issue. Within this self-help landscape, weight loss aims and spiritual aims are seen as so vitally interconnected, so conflated, that there is no need to distinguish between the two. Thinness is God’s desire, and godly devotion will effect weight loss. But when the judgment of the scale threatens to reveal possible tensions between First Place’s spiritual and weight loss projects, distinguishing between the two can be helpful. First Place commitments are so extensive that most people need to prioritize one or two of them at any given time. Spiritual commitments have the advantages of being the clear priority in a faith-based program that, after all, puts God first and of being more easily attainable than weight loss. It is far easier to cultivate a regular prayer practice than to ensure that one’s body will respond to dietary disciplines in the desired way.

By reporting Deborah’s conversation as a positive example, Norma makes the distinction between the physical and spiritual aims of the program in order to place the importance clearly on the spiritual. Deborah is held up as a model for recognizing the importance of spiritual improvements made in the course of the program even when weight loss does not follow. This not only gives members a more attainable goal to focus one’s sights on, but defuses the power of the scale as the ultimate revelator of faithfulness. Members have a means of claiming success even when it’s not reflected in the numbers. This strategy is not without its risks: the promise of weight loss is what provides the opportunity for inculcating spiritual disciplines. Thus Norma can’t go so far as to say that weight loss is not a priority at all. But differentiating between the physical and spiritual aims of the program, and prioritizing the latter, is useful in deflecting attention from the limitations of weight loss by devaluing it as a goal in comparison to spiritual development.

The divining the scale exchange concluded with participants making confounding observations about the vagaries of weight loss. Caroline observed “It’s weird that the week I didn’t write the food down I lost a lot of weight. It’s weird.” Tessa seconded the weirdness of weight loss, saying “[. . .] Sometimes I feel the same way. I had a weight loss during a week when I ate the worst in years.” Celeste said, “I did well and gained a pound. I knew I was going to lose a pound this week but I didn’t.” Norma tried to reassure her, replying “Sometimes there’s a delay thing. You might lose three next week.” “Thanks for trying to make me feel better,” Celeste said, “but that won’t do it.”

The pursuit of weight loss is in almost all contexts something akin to evangelical religion. Both are based on a simple philosophy based on perceived common sense and easy-to-apply salvific formulas. Both value and cultivate a perception of the transparency and accessibility of its central authority, scripture or the scale, for those who seek answers there. Both present themselves as straightforward in theory yet are complicated in practice, continually threatened by lived experience which often seems to trump its claims. When it doesn’t all make the sense that it should, sometimes it’s best to simply contemplate the mystery.

The question Christian weight loss programs often poses for scholars of both religion and of dieting culture is similar to the ambiguity in First Place’s purpose: is Christian weight loss essentially a secular venture, luring believers into its programs by adding a spiritual varnish to a worldly practice, or is it merely explicating, marking or making clear the religious concerns that are at the heart of weight loss projects both sacred and secular? This is a question that is important to me and has informed a great deal of my writing about First Place. But First Place members don’t really care. They are much more taken with tension that mounts as the weigh-in progresses and their faithfulness is about to be measured by number. By collectively divining the scale in the wake of that judgment, the tension between godly ideals and bodily realities are eased and the program maintains its plausibility for another week.

The service was over in the Faith Dome and the Reverend Named Dollar had retreated to the comforts of the Executive Suite. Outside the buses were idling with their cabin lights on, waiting to take the Conventioneers back to their hotels, and the parking lots were already beginning to empty of the faithful. It had been a bountiful harvest that night—in newly anointed believers, in the offering buckets emblazoned with the logo of the church. The Seeker walked the grounds slowly, his notebook at the ready, trying to take everything in. The newest recruits emerged from the exits in single-file and volunteers in matching t-shirts were busy ushering them along a covered passageway to a Prayer Room on the second floor of an outbuilding. There were children as young as five or six; teenagers in baseball hats and braces; young couples holding hands; mothers holding infants; fathers carrying empty car seats; single women in business suits and raincoats, typing on their smart phones; there were men who looked dazed and bored, as if their hearts weren’t in it; the elderly in every possible condition, including wheelchairs. The Seeker haunted the walkway for a few minutes, watching the crowd keep coming, and coming. It comforted him to imagine them inside, among the ministers and the volunteers. They would kneel and they would pray. They would be forgiven for their flaws and their mistakes and their unpaid bills. And when they came out again, blinking their eyes and heading in the direction of their cars, they would have something to look forward to. A promise from the heavens, written on the dollar. A payment was due. Oh, yes: their payment had come due.

That chicken sandwich—floating, glowing, miraculous—was featured in a 2007 Forbes article on Chick-fil-A, an Atlanta-based restaurant chain that currently has about 1,600 separate locations in 39 states. Founded by S. Truett Cathy (also pictured above) and incorporated in 1964, Chick-fil-A is well-known in the South—and increasingly in other parts of the U.S.—for a menu that includes the standard fast-food fare of soda, milkshakes, and (waffle-cut) French fries as well as southern staples like sweet tea and carrot n’ raisin salad. But it is most well known for its signature chicken sandwich.

In real life, nothing about a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich makes it illuminate and levitate. Best I can tell, its culinary chemistry is as follows:

– Two buttered hamburger buns
– Two sliced dill pickles
– One boneless, skinless chicken breast, battered and pressure cooked
– Salt, pepper, and other “seasonings”

Nothing spiritual there. Again, best I can tell.

Still, Cathy has imbued his chicken sandwiches with a spiritual aura ever since his company started to grow by leaps and bounds in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s certainly one reason why an illustrator for Forbes saw fit to Photoshop a pietà of poultry for the magazine’s story on Cathy and Chick-fil-A. It matched the story that Cathy told about himself, his company, and his chicken sandwich.

The story goes something like this. Born poor (but not too poor) in rural Georgia, Cathy started up a small diner in a working-class neighborhood of Atlanta shortly after World War II. He then set up another diner, lost it to a fire, and switched up his business model to prioritize the selling of chicken sandwiches over burgers. He then moved his operation into the suburban mall market. Then he moved into the strip-mall market. Then he moved into the just-off-the-interstate-exit market. He is now a billionaire. Through it all, Cathy remained a faithful Baptist and a self-professed “born again” evangelical Christian. Thus, Cathy claimed that the success of his sandwiches came not just from good business decisions or favorable market conditions. God blessed his chicken sandwich because Cathy had been a wise and godly steward of his time and talent.

Out of gratitude for God’s gracious affirmation of Cathy’s efforts and ideas, Cathy decided to return the favor. For that reason and that reason alone (again, so goes the story), Chick-fil-A donates millions of dollars each year to youth programs, foster homes, and college scholarships. It sponsors marriage retreats and youth camps. It encourages “God-focused,” evangelical-style dedications at every franchise opening. And, most notably, it requires every Chick-fil-A franchise to close on Sunday.

That chicken sandwich—a product, in Cathy’s estimation, blessed by God because of Cathy’s own faith in the possibility of that work-derived blessing—made all this happen.

How should we interpret this? How do you write about a company that sees its signature product as a spiritualized “good,” in both senses of that word? How do we navigate such a spirituality in the marketplace?

There are a few options, but no matter how you look at it, Chick-fil-A and its chicken sandwich present some dilemmas.

The first is one of taxonomy. Chick-fil-A spirituality fits awkwardly within available definitions. Cathy and many of Chick-fil-A’s executives and employees are evangelicals. Many are classic institutionalists in that they attend churches regularly or support distinct evangelical denominations. And, of course, they work for an organized, bureaucratic institution—the corporation.

But they also exude a kind of non-sectarian spirituality that is highly individualistic, captured by notions of spiritual transcendence, and strongly informed by the possibility of participatory engagement with the divine or sacred or “authentic.” Moreover, their Jesus and God and Bible are not very specific in terms of moral injunctions or “truth” statements, although Chick-fil-A executives and customers vary on that point. Still, they generally eschew the us-versus-them worldview and turn-or-burn rhetoric of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Indeed, most affiliates of Chick-fil-A are quiet—or at least not very public—with such views, even if they hold them privately. As a result, only on rare occasions have they been cast and criticized as exclusivists with their religious or spiritual claims and practices.

More often than not, Chick-fil-A sees “faith” not as ammunition in a cultural war but an inspirational resource for personal uplift and empowerment. If it’s activism, it’s of a different type than the kind of explicit public politics of the Christian Right. It is instead a kind of nice-and-smiley spiritual activism. “Faith” means “having faith in faith” and using the power of positive thinking to self-actualize and attain personal purpose and, by proxy, broader social influence. Maybe all that doesn’t fit cleanly into a definition of spirituality, which can be—let’s admit it—a shifting, amorphous, “know it when you see it” kind of category. But it sure does seem like they are trying to be “spiritual but not religious”—or at least prioritize the “spiritual” over the “religious,” while maintaining a distinct sense of trying to change the world, one chicken sandwich at a time.

Another dilemma in our parsing of Chick-fil-A’s spirituality is the problem of misdirection. If we nod along with what Cathy claims about his sandwich and his company, we risk ignoring or downplaying or overlooking or justifying the processes that actually made the chicken. Skinless, boneless, battered, and butter-bunned chicken filets do not appear ex nihilo. Chicken farmers, sometimes in debt to large-scale processors and often struggling to make ends meet in the contemporary agricultural market, hatch and raise the company-owned chicks to maturity. Workers—often Latino, sometimes undocumented, usually uninsured and underpaid—in poultry plants wash, slice, and cut the live chickens for Chick-fil-A. Truckers drive the chickens to slaughter and then drive ready-to-cook cutlets to every Chick-fil-A distributor or franchise. Hourly part-time employees, often teenagers or college-age young adults, cook the chickens behind the counter at Chick-fil-A and then sell them to customers, who likewise invest whatever meaning or desire they want into the sandwich.

All of these people contributed their time and talent to the chicken sandwich, not just Cathy and certainly not some vague collusion of spiritual entities or forces. Some of these people contributed so much more.

ALBERTVILLE [AL]—The federal government has proposed $59,900 in fines for Wayne Farms LLC after a teenage worker died at its Albertville poultry-processing plant in April, labor officials said Wednesday. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s investigation of the accident found the worker, 17-year old Augustin Juan, was trying to free a stuck door on a bird cage when he was crushed between two cages. “These so-called ‘struck-by’ accidents are a leading cause of worker death in the Southeast,” said Roberto Sanchez, OSHA’s Birmingham-area director. . . . Company representatives could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
– The Gadsden Times, September 23, 2004

Wayne Farms LLC was—and still is—a major supplier of processed bird meat to Chick-Fil-A.

If there’s something spiritual to the sandwich, then it cannot become a glare that blinds us. Indeed, spirituality—something arguably protected by the First Amendment—potentially makes the corporate workplace a sacred site and, therefore, off limits to outsider involvement and critique. If anything can be claimed as spiritual in a work environment, then everything might be permissible, from beneficial social service to human catastrophe. That might sound alarmist. But it stands to reason that we should ask why a company might want to be the arbiter of spirituality and, therefore, a producer of the sacred that should be respected and accepted, more so or at least on par with those entrusted by the public to keep business within the limits of the law, as voted on and written. Indeed, the fact that many corporate CEOs liken notions of “spirituality” and “faith” as the key to “leadership” at work should make us pause and ask: Who made you God? If we understand spirituality in the marketplace as somehow divested from the marketplace and the people and decisions that make it up, then I’d argue we are not really doing our jobs. At best, we are studying hagiography. At worst, we might be enabling the use of “spirituality” by corporations as a kind of regulatory antidote.

What, then, are other options? I think any understanding of material goods made and sold by any company, especially self-declared “spiritual” companies doing “spiritual” business, needs to be grounded in the human element. It just has to be, whether it’s a copy of I Ching or a falafel or a “Jesus is My Boyfriend” T-Shirt or an iPhone 4S or a 3D-HDTV or a $35,000 industrial sprocket or a $35 shovel. That is not saying that we cynically dismiss the spiritual as de facto corporate cover—as merely the smoke and mirrors of the marketing and P.R. department. But we do have to recalibrate. Physical goods and personal services—and the men and women who make and price and value and sell them—are not quite like analyzing the “spiritual” in prophetic ecstasy or tribal song or mural-gazing or a contemplative moment by a lake. Material production and spiritual or quasi-spiritual fetish can and do intersect, just as Marx, Weber, and others have said.

But they also do not do so in simple, direct, and always predictable ways. The spiritual is not just a product of the material. The material is not quite a product of the spiritual. The chicken sandwich, again, stands before us with multiple and complex spiritual meanings which must be dealt with because they are there—stubbornly there—instead of not being there in the face of corporatization. Cathy’s chicken sandwich didn’t need to float and glow. Plenty of products and services are made, sold, and bought without overt spiritual overtones. Why Cathy and his company injects spirituality into the process of making and selling chicken sandwiches stands as a dilemma not quite explained by raising awareness about Chick-fil-A’s supply chain. Moreover, calling the company on the carpet for its lack of awareness or interest in that supply chain seems too easy, especially if we don’t seek to understand how Chick-fil-A’s spiritual affectations might hinder or enhance the company’s ability to be aware of or interested in those who sacrifice for its sandwich.

This circles us back to the question I raised earlier. How do we navigate spirituality in the marketplace? Let’s expand that question further by considering how we might address the movement in contemporary corporate America to bring spirituality into the workplace, a movement that Chick-fil-A certainly fits into. Whether you call it a “God at Work,” “Faith in the Workplace,” or “Spirituality in the Workplace,” there is an impetus toward making work mean “something” more than a means to profit-maximization. Why? To what end? By which means? In what ways? It’s also important to ask who is backing such initiatives and why. If Walmart and Tyson Foods are behind you, what does that mean for how we understand God-faith-spirituality at work?

Call it a movement devoted to delegitimizing regulation or killing unions or ensuring the docility of the employed (maybe it’s that). Or, call it a movement devoted to advancing personal self-satisfaction or revitalizing “business ethics” or “corporate social responsibility” (maybe it’s that too). Regardless, spirituality is there in certain corners of corporate America and it’s making singular and multiple, coherent and incoherent claims—while perhaps precluding other claims—about the value of work and human dignity, about the “essence” of the spiritual self, and about the possibilities of spiritual community through commodity-imagining, commodity-making, and commodity-buying.

We can’t take Chick-fil-A’s claims about its sandwich at face value because we lose something in the process. We lose the connection between spirituality and the people who make up the marketplace and the networks and chains that support contemporary capitalism. But we also can’t just dismiss these claims about the spirituality of work, of goods, of companies, of people—or stop with investigative exposés of how it has or has not filtered down to the bottom or up to the top of the corporate triangle. That doesn’t really dive into the messy endeavor to explain spirituality in the marketplace, either as a complicated and layered phenomenon or as an organized but diverse and divided movement.

I have my own thoughts about what history, as I understand it, has to say about the construction of spirituality in the world of buying and selling, of sweating and sacrificing, of hope and fear, of living and dying. I will share them and strive to sell them in the form of a niche or (fingers crossed) mass-market book. I will sell them as an extension of my scholarly persona in the marketplace of ideas. And, I will probably call my work a “spiritual” enterprise, intended to fill my own wants and needs, to better those around me, or to distract them from my own foibles and failures.

I suppose, then, I cannot saddle up on too much of a high horse when considering the chicken sandwich and those who spiritualize it, especially because I am captured in the same pushes and pulls of motive and morality and materiality in the contemporary market.

I also cannot do this because—despite what I have read and written, despite what I have averred, despite what I wish was and was not there –I must confess.

I have tasted and believed.

The Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich is like heaven on earth for less than five bucks.

In the summer of 2010, the rock band U2 was joined on tour by a retired pastor from Montana who, until not long before, had never heard of Bono and his fellow Dubliners. For most of his adult life, Eugene Peterson had worked as the pastor of a small church in Maryland and writer of Christian discipleship books that had many admirers but few readers. Then, in the early 1990s, Peterson began writing a paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, that would go on to sell multiple millions of copies. In 2001, Bono told Rolling Stone that The Message was among his favorite books, a fact which fans already knew from Bono’s onstage quoting of the text. He also began telling friends of his deep admiration for Peterson’s Run With the Horses, a reflection on the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. Eventually, some of those friends were mutual friends of Eugene Peterson. A backstage meeting in Dallas’ Cowboys Stadium was arranged, and the world’s most famous rock singer and his favorite writer—a flattered and slightly flummoxed 78 year-old man—were united for a couple cities on the U2 360 tour.

Any Christian U2 fan will tell you: this Bono-Eugene Peterson business is an evangelical dream come true. For several decades, one of the most palpable features of evangelicalism has been a desire to appeal to the secular world. As their consumer-conditioned megachurches and copycat culture products attest, evangelicals strive to be relevant to the world as they see it. (Not to put too fine a point on it, the flagship magazine of the young adult evangelical set is entitled Relevant.) The Message has been the perfect Bible for its evangelical moment because it reconditions scripture for laid-back modern ears. Peterson translates the twenty-third Psalm from “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” to “God, my shepherd! I don’t need a thing.” In the Lord’s Prayer, “Thine is the kingdom” becomes “You’re in charge!” and “Amen” becomes “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Peterson has called The Message an effort in relevance, and by one count, the pastor and his work are at the very heart of the American evangelical project in the contemporary era. His publisher has churned out countless derivatives—The Message for teens, for kids, etc.—and has made him a prominent figure within evangelical churches.

But as Peterson’s other writing has long attested, he’s never been at home in the evangelical world. And in the last half-decade, Peterson has become one of the most trenchant critics of the mainstream American church and its pursuit of relevance, and he has taken to publicly bemoaning the diminished spirituality contemporary churches have produced.

In 2005, Peterson published Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, the first of a five-volume series on what he calls “spiritual theology.” Each of the books takes on major Christian themes—Jesus, the Bible, the church, community—and reexamines them in light of a new—or, as Peterson would argue, ancient—conception of spirituality. The books aim to solve the problem of the evangelical church, to halt its attempts at cultural relevance, and to remedy the thin, consumption-driven spirituality recent evangelicalism has created.

Peterson historicizes the term “spiritual,” noting that St. Paul used it to describe personal actions and attitudes that emanate from the work of the Holy Spirit in all Christians. That’s “spirituality” as Peterson sees it—democratic, available, personal, grounded. But in the centuries after St. Paul, the term was bastardized. For the medieval monastics, “spiritual” described only the most perfect, most holy believers. In the early modern era, Catholic laity such as Madam Guyon tried to reclaim the term, arguing, writes Peterson, that “the monasteries had no corner on the Christian life well-lived.” But Mother Church rebuffed those efforts, and la spiritualite became “a term of derogation for laypeople who practiced their devotion too intensely.”

Peterson worries that in our day spirituality is too abstract. The term should call to mind things grounded—God in the details of grimy, gritty daily lives. “It’s just ordinary stuff,” Peterson writes. God’s work “is all being worked out in and under the conditions of our humanity: at picnics and around dinner tables, in conversations and while walking along roads, in puzzled questions and homely stories, with blind beggars and suppurating lepers, at weddings and funerals. Everything that Jesus does and says takes place within the limits and conditions of our humanity.” The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had it right—Christ plays in ten thousand places.

The problem with the American church, argues Peterson, is that it does not understand this spirituality. The pursuit of relevance has fostered a business-savvy, goal-driven, method-mad church that preaches the truth of Jesus while ignoring the way of Jesus. (One book in the spiritual theology series, The Jesus Way, is dedicated entirely to this problem.) Peterson calls the most successful Christian congregations “state-of-the-art consumer churches.” He writes of his dismay in finding “my Christian brothers and sisters uncritically embracing the ways and means practiced by the high-profile men and women who lead large corporations, congregations, nations, and causes, people who show us how to make money, win wars, manage people, sell products, manipulate emotions, and who then write books or give lectures telling us how we can do what they are doing.” In Peterson’s view, this is why the church is failing: “our religious institutions…prove disappointing to more and more people who find themselves zealously cultivated as consumers in a God-product marketplace or treated as exasperatingly slow students preparing for final exams on the ‘furniture of heaven and the temperature of hell.’”

The American church, Peterson argues, is not hospitable to spirituality because it is not hospitable to the unimpressive way of Jesus.

When Peterson set out to make the Bible relevant, he didn’t mean to make it hip, or even successful. He meant to make it ordinary—to make it spiritual. He meant to show people that spirituality is nothing special as we normally understand “special.” It’s the quotidian quality of Jesus. In Peterson’s straightforward words, “life, life, and more life.” Peterson is straining to help Christian believers to understand that that message is the message of God.

One of the risks of doing anthropological fieldwork among fundamental Baptists is that you might undergo spiritual experiences similar to theirs. This is simply because you spend a lot of time with them, doing the things they do, listening very carefully and as generously as possible to the things they say, and learning to converse with them in their own terms. That’s what fieldwork requires, and it amounts to a compressed version of how fundamental Baptists themselves come to have their spiritual experiences.

I have admitted having one such fundamental Baptist-like experience while doing fieldwork among the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s church people in Lynchburg during the 1980s. That was when “God spoke to me” and I “came under conviction.” But other experiences I have mostly kept to myself. Like the time the devil got a hold of me. Or the time I had a feature-length, technicolor, premillennialist vision of the end of the world. Nor do I much discuss the fact that, after I came under conviction, I was twice (or was it thrice?) stricken by a powerful spiritual hunger, a craving for “something more,” that each time possessed me for weeks (or was it months?).

I wrote about coming under conviction because it taught me so much about how some orthodox Protestants are “born again” and come to inhabit their spiritually specific world, but that was all I dared visit upon my colleagues and readers. I held my tongue partly because the severe secular scrupulosity that my chosen field site aroused made me wary of revealing my site-specific spiritual experiences, lest I lose my audience. I was also enacting a constituitive disavowal – the refusal to “go native,” especially where anything religious is concerned—that is intrinsic to the modern practice of ethnography.

The irony is that while I lived and worked among the fundamental Baptists I often mused that I was engaged in another kind of spiritual practice, albeit a secular one. Or more precisely, that the profession of anthropology had contrived a complex of practices called ethnographic fieldwork that cultivated a particular state of mind in the individuals carrying it out and that gave them special access to otherwise invisible realities, such as “ritual,” religion,” and “culture.” And it was that set of ethnographic practices that led me to interrupt and rework the inward effects of fundamental Baptist-like practices, saying to myself things like, “Oh, that’s what they mean when they say ‘God spoke to me’, or ‘the devil got a hold of me’, or ‘the end is near’, or ‘my soul yearns for God’, rather than saying something like ‘God is real’, or ‘I’ve got to get right with God now’.”

When I underwent these experiences I did not completely merge with them. I, or some part of me, remained “outside” them, shaken and confused, but detached, observing. I was eavesdropping on my fundamental Baptist-shaped experiences. I listened to them with a second pair of ears and looked at them with a second pair of eyes given me by my secular professional spiritual practices.

But what’s the point of thinking about the act of ethnography as a spiritual practice?

Not to suggest that it produces a truth or subjectivity that is somehow religious rather than secular, but to call attention to the resonance, the uncanny likeness, of some of the practices that produce those respective truths and subjectivities. Ethnography is a spiritual practice if by that we mean a pious practice, or an embodied discipline, that gives one entry into another reality and invisible realms and that produces a kind of subjectivity, a particular sense of “self” in the process. In these two senses, ethnography is like religious practices. But in the case of the anthropological ethnographic act, the reality and realms accessed and the subject who is produced by experiencing them is specifically “not religious,” hence, in that narrow sense of the term, “secular.”

When Harry West carried out fieldwork on the Mueda plateau in rural Mozambique, both he and Muedans noticed the resonance between his research practice and the sorcery and countersorcery practices he was studying. Sorcerers cross over into the invisible world and become or create “sorcery lions” that bring ruin on individuals in the visible world. Countersorcerers, or healers, also cross over into the invisible world but attempt to undo –invert, overturn, negate, or annul—a sorcerer’s destructive work. Both sorcerers and countersorcerers, “by rendering themselves invisible, [transcend] the world inhabited by ordinary people, producing and inhabiting an invisible realm from which they gain a powerful perspective on the visible.”

As West became more conversant in the language of sorcery, he began to hear people say of him, “That one knows a little something!,” a euphemism that indicated he was a sorcerer or a countersorcerer. Muedans recognized that the tools of West’s trade—pen, notebook, recorder, and camera—were different but that he shared with them an urge to get outside their life-world in order to gain a perspective on it. They contested his versions of what they were doing in sorcery, but at the same time he and they came to see the resemblance between his stories and theories and theirs. He and they both were trying to gain interpretive ascendancy in and over the world around them through what West calls transcendent maneuvers. Muedans were making and remaking their world in line with their vision of the forces defining visible and invisible domains, and West was (re)making Muedens and their world in the terms of a vision of his own elaboration. When they saw “sorcery lions,” he saw “embodied (or literal) metaphors.”

Other anthropologists have noted the resemblance between their own interpretive practice and the story telling, sorcery, witchcraft, shamanistic, and religious practices of the people they study, but Harry West pushed his insight further than most, even calling his book Ethnographic Sorcery. Still many more anthropologists acknowledge—in fact it’s all but required—moments of perceptual crisis in which one inhabits the world from the point of view of another culture. In our writing, such moments are sometimes fraught, especially when we find ourselves entangled with, or “caught” in, practices and perceptions that we have been trained to think of as religious. On the one hand, we are discovering for ourselves anthropology’s founding principle of cultural relativism. On the other, we must take a step back; we may not “go native.” We must somehow disavow the cultural other’s point of view that we have just discovered to be equally “valid” as our own. Thus it becomes a moment of tender yet fierce secular subject making—anthropology’s contribution to secular modernity as a way of being in the world.

Although some anthropologists may think that a secular (aka scientific or “outside”) point of view is the only alternative to going “going native” after undergoing culturally relativizing ethnographic experiences, it is not. Nor did anthropologists invent what we now call fieldwork. According to Christopher Herbert, evangelical Protestant missionaries, among others, invented the practice, along with the contradictory subjectivity that emerged from it and “the culture doctrine,” in the course of living among and writing copiously about the natives of Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, and other islands of the South Pacific in the early 19th century. Decades later, anthropologists would name and codify the concept of culture and fieldwork as a research practice, but early missionaries in their writings had already revealed an awareness that they were “unfolding a new technique of scientific study—one that made at best an uneasy fit with their mission as evangelizers.” The technique also led them to an unstated awareness of “the homology” of native superstitions and their own Protestant beliefs, and, inadvertently, to undermine the very doctrine of innate sinfulness that had led them into their mission fields.

Early 19th century Protestant missionaries went to the South Pacific not only to save souls but also to document and portray the natural depravity of savage life, of life without the saving grace of Jesus Christ. The missionaries documented what they called idolatry, superstitions, cannibalism, promiscuity, sadistic violence, infanticide, the ritual killing of widows and aged parents, and many other “abominations” as evidence of the unbridled passions, lust, wickedness, sensual appetites, and evil tendencies that guided the lives of savages. However, even as the missionaries clung to their doctrines of man’s “sin nature,” they produced de facto cultural accounts of the wretched practices they witnessed, and, in the process, they discovered the cultural sources of their own practices. In the words of the missionary Thomas Williams, for example, the Fijians were “a people living, for many generations, under the uninterrupted power of influences different from any which we daily feel” and were “strangers to those motives and forces which have, more than anything else, modified the development of our own individual and social character.”

The early missionaries’ apprehension of culture included the relativizing recognition of oneself as well as the native as culturally formed. The recognition emerged from their having to learn savage languages virtually from scratch over an extended period of time in order to spread the gospel of Christ. The experience of firsthand language learning and analysis immersed the missionaries in everyday native lives and “almost inescapably” required them “to begin to conceive the society in all its bearings as a ‘culture’ of inseparably interlocked symbolic elements and to think of the language and the whole economy of extralinguistic cultural materials…as exact equivalents of one another.” All the missionaries stressed that their accounts were based on knowledge acquired experientially and to varying degrees articulated the de facto method of modern fieldwork based on long-term immersion in the everyday life of natives, linguistic competence, minute and comprehensive descriptions of all customs, and verbatim quotation of native statements.

So there is nothing inherently secularizing in this mix of what Clifford Geertz called “experience near” (immersion/participation) and “experience far” (observation/description) research practice. Early 19th century evangelical missionaries came to a de facto cultural understanding of the different ways of life they investigated but still condemned those ways of life as morally depraved. Their meticulous accounts, at times filled with admiration for native imagination and ingenuity, were no less bent on justifying the rapid dismantling of local rites, customs, and taboos by colonial authorities. The missionaries were re-enacting in their mission fields their own struggle with and victory over the human capacity for sin.

This “conflicted emotional structure,” which Herbert argues is “the distinctive sign of a characteristic religious sensibility,” is later reworked by anthropologists as they name and codify the practice of “fieldwork” and the concept of “culture” as a “complex whole” that emerges from fieldwork. Instead of condemning native ways, anthropologists insist on their validity, struggle to accept them while they are in the field, write accounts bent on describing, explaining, understanding them as testaments to human diversity and creativity, and direct their critical ire at persons and forces who would diminish that diversity and creativity in any way. The object and effect of disavowal changes, but disavowal remains at the heart of the practice. The mission ethnographer had to come to know native life firsthand and reject it as evil. For him, ethnography was a religious practice, and it produced him as an evangelical missionary. The anthropological ethnographer has to come to know native culture firsthand and accept it as “equally valid” but reject it as her point of view on native life. Going native, that is, adopting native modes of interpretative ascendancy, is taboo for both evangelical and anthropological ethnographers. But anthropologists have a second disavowal tucked away in their validation of native cultures, namely, a disavowal of the Victorian evangelical Protestantism and its presumption of moral superiority, and that is the disavowal that produces us as specifically secular anthropologists.

It is this second disavowal that draws the thin line between evangelical and anthropological ethnography, and it was probably the way in which my fundamental Baptist project muddied that line that so agitated my colleagues. Harry West’s colleagues asked him repeatedly whether or not he “believed” in the sorcery he studied, and all of us who examine religious topics are scrutinized for any evidence that our interpretative maneuvers were inappropriately contaminated by our close encounter with religious others. But in my case, the obligation to construe my native culture as “equally valid” contradicted the disavowal of evangelicalism hidden in that obligation, and, I now think, made it harder to construe my project—and me—as properly secular.

Still, even though I was occasionally caught in fundamental Baptist-like experiences I was always more thoroughly caught, both in the field and when writing about fundamental Baptists, in an anthropological drive for an interpretative ascendency that was secular and secularizing. I tried to do so in ways that troubled the terms of modern secular hegemony, but, nonetheless, I (re)made fundamental Baptists and their world in terms of an intellectual vision that was specifically secular. I (re)produced them as objects of a secular gaze and myself as a secular subject, and I added a drop to the ocean of American secularity. We like to think of that ocean as naturally occurring, but it’s not. The secular world we swim in is produced by millions of little practices, and the anthropological ethnographic act is one of them.

When I began law school in 2008, both evangelicalism and law school attendance were on the rise in the United States. Though these trends generally got covered in different corners of the newspaper, I came to suspect a secret connection. A year or two at a fine American law school can leave the most hard-bitten among us longing for rebirth. St. Paul once wrote: “For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” It will come as no surprise to even the most unbiblical law student that Paul was once an attorney himself. Law school can cramp, as stilted policy discussions and four-hour exams chock full of outlandish narratives of wrongdoing seem unequal to the pleasures and pain of being human. Who we are gets buried beneath what we do. Pressed upon by prescribed forms, the doubtful legal journeyman or woman longs to break on through, to speak in tongues, to be born again.

Thanks to Paul, law students can rely on a strong precedent should they have a change of heart. If my generation seems to have a particular passion for law school, that may disguise a deeper passion for conversion. Late-night dive-bar conversations with dissatisfied summer associates are never fully consigned to hopelessness. In the complaints of the soon-to-be-professional, there always remains a glimmer of expectancy: Perhaps I will be transformed. Perhaps the law is not the final form my life will take—it may only be the shaping flame. Such a wayfarer takes the bar and trusts in grace.

Betting on epiphany is an old American tradition. From the one-time minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the tortured academic Thomas Kelly, to the mercurial insurance man Wallace Stevens, some of our greatest voices have used the grayscale world of professionalism as the background for their kaleidoscopic experiments with the spirit. Yet there is something cartoonish about turning the black-letter law-book into a springboard toward the Ultimate.

William Stringfellow, a great American lawyer and theologian, offered plenty of ammunition to the spiritually-dissatisfied law student. Yet he also criticized the flight from reality that frequently accompanies frustration with legal drudgery. On the one hand, his descriptions of his alma mater were unrelenting: “Initiation into the legal profession, as it is played out at a place like the Harvard Law School, is … elaborately mythologized, asserts an aura of tradition, and retains a reputation for civility. All of these insinuate that this process is benign, though, both empirically and in principle, it is demonic.” On the other hand, as much as Stringfellow condemned the cult of success and power he found at law school, he was also unimpressed by quick-and-dirty spiritual evasions. “Contemporary spirituality,” he explained, could only offer cheap escape from the here-and-now, not an alternative response to the human complexity with which legal systems must struggle. Where both legal education and contemporary spirituality went wrong, in his mind, was their idolization of personal efficacy at the expense of the true effectiveness of the Word of God.

Stringfellow was a Rhode Islander, and true to that state’s noble birth, he lived his own religion. He was an early adopter of the civil rights revolution; in the late 1940s, he sat down with some black students at a lunch counter in as-yet-desegregated Maine. After graduating from Bates College on a scholarship, he studied in London and briefly joined the Army. Stringfellow often said that by the time he enrolled in Harvard Law School, he knew he would never have a profession, only a vocation: to live in accord with the Word.

Throughout his life, Stringfellow contrasted “legal” advocacy with “biblical” advocacy, and “contemporary” spirituality with “biblical” spirituality. Biblical advocacy and biblical spirituality were really one and the same thing—a form of politics that recognized God as the only legitimate actor on the world stage. This form of politics was anathema both to the law school of Stringfellow’s youth and the modern spiritualisms he saw gaining in popularity all around him, from yoga to televangelism. What both realms had in common was their commitment to personal prowess through self-discipline. Where the law student was most exacting, where the modern spiritualist was most dedicated to “self-denial,” Stringfellow saw only “a matter of self-indulgence, a vainglorious idea.”

After Harvard, Stringfellow followed the Word of God to East Harlem, where he offered his legal services to penniless tenants and sex offenders, among other citizens of Babylon. Amidst the black-and-white 1950s, Stringfellow, a closeted gay man, made a lonely home for himself in a gray space beyond the margins of polite society. In 1962, however, Stringfellow met the love of his life, the poet Anthony Towne, and they moved into an apartment on West 79th Street. Stringfellow continued his legal work on the behalf of the urban poor, even as he extended his advocacy to the underground culture of gay New York.

However much the law provided an arena in which to intercede in the suffering of others, Stringfellow continued to find it a stumbling block. Legal advocacy was forever bound up within an “adversary system, with all its implications of competitiveness, aggression, facetious games, debater’s craft, and winning per se.” Late in his life, Stringfellow wrote, “I continue to be haunted by the ironic impression that I may have to renounce being a lawyer the better to be an advocate.”

Biblical spirituality demanded both self-sacrificing involvement with the world and an avoidance of the world’s emphasis on achievement, efficacy, and power, an emphasis particularly acute in the courtroom. Perhaps to ease the “relentless tension” between the words of the law and the Word of God, Stringfellow and Towne moved from the city to Block Island. While their departure from urban life may have looked to some like a flight from trouble, Stringfellow and Towne saw their new home, which they named “Eschaton,” as another station on the apocalyptic road. Far from the secular center of things, Stringfellow and Towne used Eschaton’s isolation to engage in new forms of biblical politics.

In 1970, they sheltered the Catholic poet and war-resister Daniel Berrigan. Two years earlier, along with eight others, Berrigan had entered a selective service office in Catonsville, Maryland and burned over three hundred draft cards with homemade napalm. Following his conviction for destruction of government property and interference with the draft, he went on the lam, denying the authority of the court to convict or imprison him. After a months-long search, the FBI arrested him at Eschaton.

Subsequent to the arrest, the government kept watch over Stringfellow and Towne’s modest island home and interrogated Stringfellow several times. During one interview, an FBI agent confronted Stringfellow with Chapter 13 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which Christians frequently interpret as a command to obey legal authority. At the time, Stringfellow was at work on a book—Conscience & Obedience—that would challenge this standard reading of Paul. The agent apparently got an earful. Stringfellow explained that Romans must be read in concert with the Book of Revelation, which pictures the demonic growth and final destruction of all worldly authority. Authority, Stringfellow assured the G-man, must only be obeyed to the extent that it cooperates with the Word of God.

Stringfellow returned to this story several times in his writing; he clearly felt it was a moment when he had struck the right balance between biblical and legal advocacy—speaking the Word of God to a government official. This strange balance, standing both inside and outside the law, speaking to one authority on behalf of another, was Stringfellow’s vision of authentic spiritual practice.

Currently, I am neither representing poor tenants nor sheltering fugitive war-resisters. Reading Stringfellow has in some ways been an escape for me, a hopeful daydream. His life is a hero’s journey. In law school, courtrooms, hospitals, churches, city streets, Stringfellow challenged authorities unmoored from God’s simplifying command. He once performed an exorcism of Richard Nixon on the Washington Mall. Behind my fascination with this crusading and converted lawyer lurks the question that occupies many law students: What am I doing here?

The fear, and the thrill, that something you are doing right now could be the first step of a glorious, or at least fulfilling, journey, puts a spring in the law school student’s step. Ever- expectant, my gait marries reaching for a prize and ducking a blow. Stringfellow’s way of dealing with this domination of the present by the future was in his account of ceaseless work of the Word of God. There are no ladders to climb, no lesser authorities to appease. As long as you recognize the presence of the Word of God the only thing to do is obey its command. Such higher obedience can be a spiritual and a legal decision, influencing one’s lawyerly practice as much as one’s inner life.

A new movement called “religious lawyering” is looking to bring something like Stringfellow’s biblical outlook to the halls of law schools and governments nationwide. The trans-denominational movement emerged in the 1990s, and there are now several professional organizations (such as the Christian Legal Society and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists) and institutes at Pepperdine and Fordham Law Schools devoted to integrating individual faith with legal practice. No longer does Paul need to leave his career behind. Religious lawyers, however, are not missionaries; they do not seek to propagate religious observance through their legal work. Rather, they hope to bring the moral sensitivity they cherish in their faith traditions to the complex human relationships that structure their professional lives. In the words of one of the movement’s eloquent defenders, the law professor Robert Vischer, “The concrete differences religious lawyering will make will tend to involve relational differences—i.e., seeing the client not simply as a source of predetermined legal instructions, but as a fellow human faced with circumstances brimming with moral significance.”

Though Stringfellow would have applauded this emphasis on the richness of human relationship, he might have questioned the relative ease with which some religious lawyers propose to negotiate the competing sovereignties of God, the state, and the marketplace. Stringfellow was anxious enough about the conflict between biblical and earthly advocacy when representing poor tenants. The religious lawyer’s search for God’s blessing in most any legal arena—whether corporate boardroom or prosecutor’s office—is probably a more liberal one than Stringfellow’s demanding Christ could allow.

Despite their differences, both Stringfellow’s biblical advocate and today’s religious lawyer come into the legal world ready to obey the Word. Their struggle to reconcile faith with worldly practice is one thing. The struggle to hear the Word to begin with is quite another. It would have been great if I could have gotten the major soul-searching out of the way before entering law school. Although a legal education can serve the young crusader well, it is better at inducing spiritual crises than resolving them.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a spiritual person.” This from a man I’d phoned as my expert witness on spirituality, Ray, a pastor I’d grown to adore and admire during my stint undercover at his church. “I don’t even like to say I’m religious.”

Well, great. When I’d emailed to see if Ray had any free time to tell me what spirituality was, he had kicked me a definition that lit up a rope of lights to the David Foster Wallace Kenyon College commencement address I so loved, and that connection had made me think he’d have answers.

The Kenyon address seemed to offer the antidote to the alienations of modern experience represented in such delectable detail in Wallace’s books—our love affairs with screens, the cognitive dissonance we construct to live with the senseless nightmares of existence: our appetites, pouring ceaselessly into the unfillable emptiness inside; the irrepressible feeling that we’re forever alone. The Kenyon address said, leverage up on something greater than yourself to meet those forces with a beam of compassion.

“What is spirituality?” Ray had written to me. “In short, the non-physical. Being spiritual means living for something larger than yourself.”

The echo there revived the hopeful feeling I’d had writing In the Land of Believers—that evangelical Christians and the rest of us were more the same than different.

But on the phone, Ray resisted talking to me about spirituality. Christianity, he told me, was “more like a relationship. Like the one I have with my wife. It’s a commitment to Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean I get everything that I want. There’s certainly been a lot of days and a lot of heartache, but I tell you I don’t know how people live without it, all alone. He never promises to take me out of pain, but He does promise to go with me.”

God’s thereness and its relation to spirituality—perhaps I’m the last person who should try cracking this stuff. I don’t believe in any supernatural-type situation, no kind god with soft hands or angry god with whirling hair, no presence, no powerful witch with the face of a spider, no pulsing orb that knows our secrets and accepts us still, and even after two years undercover at Jerry Falwell’s church I still don’t even know what anyone means by spirituality. Once, when I rolled my eyes at his friendly invitation to watch a Christmas movie starring Nicholas Cage, my stepdad told me I wasn’t a spiritual person. What was that supposed to mean? That I was a snob? I talked too much? Couldn’t experience mindless pleasure? Was I a cynic? A bad hugger?

When people tell me they are spiritual, first I think of healing crystals and astral charts, a lock of white hair tied to the end of a stick, drum circles and dreamcatchers, the cosmic juice between us all, man, synchronicity as a sign of some kind of, like, churning force!

Shaking off the stardust, I turn to thinking that the Spiritual Person probably has cobbled together a set of private beliefs they don’t really feel like explaining. After one of my best friends almost died in a car accident, he custom designed a personal program based on the Beatitudes, Buddhism, and Emerson. It verges on genius, and it is a spirituality. Religion is a form you sign; spirituality is ideas. But if we each get to decide what spirituality means, what the freak is spirituality?

See how terrible I am at this? Spirituality is one of those annoyingly flexible words like freedom, a blankness that invites our self-centered definition to scribble itself all over the big dry erase board of its name.

In Andre Comte-Sponville’s excellent morsel of meditation, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, he writes that “we are finite beings that open onto infinity.” That’s better. Let me request that you suppress the word spirituality for two seconds, and instead invite you to open onto the ethereal atmosphere between us, weather, vibes, the forever stuff, our flickering understanding of what connects us, and what connects us all to eternity. Sometimes it’s there, locking us into all the life around us, calling us to unbind the narrow corset of our own needs and serve the world with compassion, to transcend, to tap into what Wallace called the “mystical oneness”; sometimes it’s just us with our one aging slab of flesh and our bag of snack carrots and the flat screen in front of us.

Two questions: what does that unreliable connection thing do for us? And does a person need a higher power to stabilize it?

As far as I can tell, the main reason for finding a practice whereby you can refresh your connection to the forever stuff is that it sustains us in the bad places, and it helps us be resiliently our best compassionate selves, no matter what the circumstances. I struggle with this! Sometimes I feel downright selfish! Sometimes, when a person asks for a bite of my granola bar, this evil little voice inside says, What about ME?

The practice: I’m not about to throw down and say that religious people are any better at knifing their inner troll than the rest of us, but I can say that most of the people I’ve known who can levitate over their rolling moods and be the person they believe they ought to be practice religion. Ray was this way. He held out the same warm hand to everyone, always. When I told him I’d lied to him about being a Christian so that I could write a book about his church he was shocked, asked a few questions, sipped his soda, and forgave me. Maybe he could tell me about spirituality. Maybe he was the most spiritual person I’d ever known.

According to him, he wasn’t. But could he tell me—what was a spiritual person?

“A spiritual person is the searcher, the pioneer looking for the land of milk and honey. I’ve found the land of milk and honey, but I do have responsibility there. It’s hard! I’m not a robot. But when you’re committed, it’s easy to forgive. It’s easy to do the right thing.”

Can I extrapolate from this? Can I make an evangelical Christian’s version of spirituality approximate an atheist’s? I’ll try: maybe we can say that spirituality is the system we design to make doing the right thing feel easy.