Religious Studies in a Billionaire's Era

Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, survey data emerged suggesting Americans love singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and Americans increasingly revile universities. (Brenan 2023; Dellatto 2023) Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, 10/7 occurred. Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, a pop queen got even more queenly, Americans started to dislike universities even more, and violence in the eastern Mediterranean demonstrated again the determining role of religion in political and economic life. Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections, I've been distracted. As of this writing, Taylor Swift is still on her unprecedented Eras Tour. She is slaying in every sense save the sashay. She can't dance very well but everything else she kills. I mean kills in all its senses; winning is something that always crushes something else. And Swift wins. She fills arenas on five continents, generates billions in consumer spending, and revitalizes local and national tourism industries. Onstage she serves nightly three-and-a-half hour performances to fans who sing along to every Swift-authored lyric and cheer her stage command. She dominates streaming services with new and re-recorded music. And in April 2024, one year after Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, she joined the Forbes World Billionaire's list, becoming one of the 2,781 people on the planet whose personal wealth is more than $1,000,000,000 (Martin 2024). Taylor Swift is among the most wealthy and popular Americans in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, Americans' confidence in higher education is at an all-time low. 32% of Americans have little or no confidence in higher education. When Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, 57% had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence, and 10% had little or none. Gallup draws from its polling that confidence has dropped among all key subgroups in the US population over the past two decades, but more so among Republicans. In 2023, all party groups showed some increase in the percentage with very little or no confidence and a decrease in the percentage saying they have some. Gallup explains that for those who lack confidence, their concerns lie in colleges pushing political agendas, not teaching relevant skills, and being overly expensive (Jones 2024). Students of religious studies have been thoughtful historians of conservative attacks on the political agendas of modern universities, situating these criticisms in a long arc of culture wars that began with colonization. Students of evangelicalism have had specific leadership in this analytic space since their scholarship repeatedly shows that being against higher education is a tentpole of the most statistically significant religious force in US history. “Great preachers cannot be made by technical pedagogy,” explained the evangelist Sam Jones' biographer, George Stuart, “Scholars, debaters, exegetes, and homilists may be produced in universities and theological seminaries, but preachers who reach and save men come from the school of experience which acquaints them with the varied heart throbs generated in the toil, hardships, sacrifices, and sufferings of themselves and their fellows.” While mainline Protestants built colleges and advocated their attendance to manufacture civil leaders of a not-yet civil country, evangelicals endorsed “Lessons From The School Of Experience” or the “university of rail splitting” (quoted in Lofton 2006, 100). Anti-intellectualism is central to evangelical politics and theological self-understanding, a subject Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1995) sought to redress. Scholars including Kate Bowler, Anthea Butler, Elesha Coffman, Darren Dochuk, Elizabeth Jemison, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Elizabeth Flowers, Emily Johnson, Gale Kenny, Matthew Sutton, Nicole Turner, Daniel Vaca, and Molly Worthen, have examined twentieth- and twenty-first-century Christian print culture, Christian political engagement, Christian race politics, and Christian gender politics, and, with overwhelming evidence, shown how anti-establishment and anti-intellectual performances define evangelical rhetoric, affect, and organization. None of these scholars has yet written about Taylor Swift, not least of which because Swift does not admit to evangelical belief, nor are her fans notably evangelical, though they are predominantly white and female-identified. The power of Swift, a white cisgender Christian-identified child of Tennessee, is inextricable from the country (country as in America and country as in genre of song) where she originated. Swift is not the only celebrity on the Forbes list. Forbes reports thirteen other celebrities—including Peter Jackson, Rihanna, Jay-Z, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey—whose profits from brand partnerships, percentage of gross sales, and media holdings achieve this tax bracket. What distinguishes Swift is the sense that her fans and she accomplished this power together. “Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I've never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans,” Swift says (TN Viral Desk 2024). Her fans provide the billions she earns through their devotional relationship to what she sings and how she shares herself in these songs and on social media. Taylor Swift does not perform tycoon. She acts toward her power like Princess Diana did before (Shome 2014). She's the people's billionaire. Among Swift's fans, also called Swifties, are undoubtedly those who agree that colleges push political agendas, don't teach relevant skills, and that college is too expensive. You can't have that much popularity and not represent among your followers a popular critique. Swift herself is no overt advocate for higher education, having eschewed it herself, creating another American exemplar for those who argue the skills universities teach don't help people really win. What interests me is how Swift's billionaire status lets scholars of the contemporary see what that emblem demands in a time when billionaires decide a great deal of media experience, political option, and academic life in the United States. Recently, billionaires have focused their capricious attentions specifically on higher education, offering criticisms of how institutions manage their populations to significant effect (Gura 2024). The billionaires are not only to blame for this stick-up since higher education has, for over fifty years, taken an increasing interest in private equity and venture capital, attaching its financial fortunes to their divinations (Wigglesworth 2024). Also, billionaires function as superhuman figures, and messing with earthly beings is what beings saturated with power mythically tend to do. What makes Taylor an amazing billionaire, for her fans, is how much she does the opposite of messing with them. She loves on them, giving them what they want. No star of stage or screen in history has better control over the mass distribution of their talent than Taylor Swift. To pair Taylor Swift and American universities as comparands is, therefore, a classic countering duo: one is what everyone delights to want; the other is what too many suffer to achieve. The payoff for universities isn't clear to anyone. The payoff for Taylor is felt immediately: she feels so her fans can feel it; she sings, and as she does, they feel more tuneful. The university has had moments of romantic attachment in its past, but such affinities seem now sepia delusions. The average cost of college tuition in the US for undergraduate students has more than tripled over the last sixty years. It's expensive, and it's unclear why. Paying for Eras tickets gives you a cathartic experience. Paying tuition leaves most American students in debt. Many humanities programs are facing existential threats, including religious studies. But beyond that there was already a developing rift between works that focus on the “lived religion” of people and works that focus on religion as a socially, even academically, constructed category. What are the stakes here? What is the core of the disagreement? In a field where theory has always been important, this debate at this moment seems especially resonant. In 1918, at the apex of his wealth, Ford was one of 18 billionaires in the United States (Peterson-Withorn 2017). In 2024, 806 individuals in the United States, including Taylor Swift, control more wealth than the 65 million or so households that make up the poorer half of the population (Mechanic 2024). Such inequality impacts every facet of American experience. Over the past fifteen years, as income inequality has soared in the United States, the power of American workers continues to diminish (Ghilarducci 2022). The minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1960s (Vega 2022). Poor people in the United States are poorer than they have ever been (Neate 2024). Most Americans believe the government should do more to address extreme wealth. The government never seems to organize any kind of a response to such a political call. Such federal flaccidity is no surprise. Consider, for example, recent interest in the movements of Taylor Swift's private plane. Tracking her private jet activity is, for her fans, an invasion of privacy and a misogynistic spotlight on a person who can't be individually to blame for fossil fuel emissions (Sung 2024). For environmental activists, billionaires are important to observe because they contribute a million times more carbon to the atmosphere than the average person. Congress agreed with the Swifties, including in the new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill, the option for private aircraft owners to request the government hide personally identifying information associated with their planes (Ropek 2024). Throughout history, celebrities have often been instruments of cultural fascism, normalizing the morality of individual profit and exacerbating social inequality. Billionaires are a genre of celebrity, famous for their capacity to get a lot of something, money, theologian Devin Singh argues has a long history of sacralization to support its gain (Singh 2018). A lot of people “wanna be a billionaire so fucking bad,” to quote Travie McCoy in his four-time platinum-certified single “Billionaire.” As a result, observers of billionaires who desire their ability to run the board rarely direct hate toward their dream occupation. Swift is a leader whose followers already established a unique commitment to her protection. They protect someone who reflects to them values they share. Any critics of Swift—whether those targeting her gender politics, lack of political involvement, or social privilege—are quickly attacked by Swifties. Taylor Swift gives already so much, so generously, her fans argue. Don't hate on a winner who doesn't hate. Engaging in substantive dialogue about their power is one thing billionaires rarely do. This is how they exist above the law and beyond legal and moral accountability; by being rich enough, they can buy exemptions, pressure, and shutter dissent. People sacralize billionaires because they hope to become one; billionaires dominate people, needing that domination to extract their monetary victory. Popular cultures, now largely owned by billionaire corporations, silence dissent, distract questions, and evade dialogue on the terms of its entertaining thrall. Popular cultures are also resources for inquiry and the resistance tough questions can represent. When I resist the distinction between lived religion and religion as a socially constructed category, it is because I think making such a distinction reveals more the latency of the shared evangelical epistemological heritage of scholars of religion in the US, where every land agreement embeds long Christian histories along the settler plot of capital gain. Evangelicals historically argue there is a real of experience that is opposed to the not real of academic knowledge. Such a distinction does not agree with the broad scholarly consensus in the study of religion, which is that critique and religion are synonymous. Tazeen Ali's The Women's Mosque of America (2022) offers vivid depictions of lived religion—of women working and worshipping in mosques. It simultaneously shows how those women engaged in the category of religion and understood it as something constructed by their imagination of authority. Joe Blankholm's The Secular Paradox (2022) carefully conveys how ambivalence about idea and practice organizes much secular community in America, how thinking and talking about religion is for many secular-identified people their lived religion. Scholars of religion repeatedly demonstrate that there is no practice of religion distinct from its practice of critique. Being evangelical is no less a critical posture than being Muslim or atheist—the difference is in the political sway of the critique. In the twenty-first century United States, electoral candidates worry much more about getting the Christian vote or the Swiftie vote than the Muslim or atheist vote. Why, then, does this divide persist between thinking there is a distinction between critique and practice? Nothing is more primary to the political dislike of universities than the sense that universities teach useless, politicized things, when what they ought to do is teach useful, real things. Why does this idea, this distinction between real and constructed, useful and useless, persist not only in conference prompts but also in congressional hallways and pundit panels? First and foremost, because among the many impoverished by American billionaires are college graduates saddled with loans (Elliott and Lewis 2013). Universities and colleges became unconscionably expensive, so hating them is isomorphic with hating the debt accrued to get jobs that yield nothing near to billionaire profits, much less a sustainable and nourished life. Second, because imagining that some people protect ideas and other people live real lives has long been a way to undermine the possibility that our lives could be otherwise. Evangelicals throughout American history have waged that personhood is a wrestle with something physical, real, challenging precisely because it is not ruled by human law. “To me,” said evangelist Sam Jones, “there is no better recommendation for a preacher than that he has raised the devil.” (quoted in Lofton 2006, 101) The scholar is a figure who takes up each of these words—me, recommendation, preacher, devil—and asks where they came from and why they are repeated. Scholars here do work historically connected across many geographies to forms called religion. The lived religion of the contemporary university is, among many other anthropological features, a situation of political attack. That this attack is buttressed by billionaires precisely arguing what scholars do is nothing but the social construction of things, and not real things, the real real things, is the reason why I invite scholars of religion now and in the future to work assiduously against the adaptation of such dichotomous thinking in our own. The habit of critique does not oppose the anthropology of the real. The real of religion, the part that takes off and becomes popular, is its critique. The thing about it people can't release because it makes them feel good. Feeling good is what people try to feel in all kinds of ways, and with all sorts of resultant measures. Swifties monitor critics of Swift as their own regular habit of religious criticism, defending their icon against outsider desecration. Nobody needs a university to teach them how to be a critic. Universities are simply one place where criticism is a devotional object. Departments are told their closures derive from budgetary concerns, sometimes deriving from claims about low enrollments. These are the terms of critics, which the study of religion knows is useful information to understand how religion operates. Citizens who pay for state-funded institutions and donors who contribute to public and private institutions often understand these closures as practical replies to contemporary realities, ceding a portrait of humanities departments as places that push political agendas, don't teach relevant skills, and are a luxury Americans can't afford. As departments of religious studies are being threatened by closures, the study of religion ought to historicize these reductions as a form of religious critique and religious intervention. American political life includes departments of religious studies as expendable in service to the really real that everyone needs to get wise to. Yet these closures could also be framed as the silencing of information, the silencing of criticism, those in power would rather not be heard. If departments of religious studies persist in universities and colleges, it will be a struggling survival, one that, at its best, would include louder counter-critique for the systems of power they occupy and the economic precarity power produces. The political location of departments of religious studies in the US demands serious study and real engagement, if only to observe how power shunts dissent. Salvaging religious studies from being yet another casualty of this, the age of billionaire worship, may not be possible. But as its diminishment occurs, students of religion have no better exhibit of their scholarly subject

Ancient history · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Race, History, and American Society

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