The Style of Sincerity

SINCERELY HELD: AMERICAN SECULARISM AND ITS BELIEVERS. By Charles McCrary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. [xiii] + 300. Hardcover, $95. Paper, $30. In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary approaches free exercise law in terms of a pervasive US obsession with sincerity. What is sincerity? On McCrary's account, it is an “epistemic knowledge regime” (8), a set of “affects” (234), a “common sense” (261), and—in a provocative formulation I want to linger on—“a matter of style” (39, 147). According to the author, what is most salient about style is its lack of concern for content in favor of how that content is expressed and perceived. To be sincere, it matters not what one believes so much as one performs the act of believing believably, that is, with feeling and with the persuasive effects on an audience already in mind. One must “look, act, and talk” (13) the part. Barack Obama's speeches on the 2008 campaign trail come to mind as exemplary of sincerity as a stylistic genre. With his shoulders back, rhythmic cadence, and gaze straight ahead, I believed him because I believed that he believed. While sincerity is a central aspect of American secularism today, it has its roots in individualistic strands of early modern Protestantism that require adherents to attend carefully to their interior states. United States v. Seeger (1965) was the legal turning point for sincerity as a style. Though United States v. Ballard (1944) had established the “sincerity test” as the measure for determining whether a belief is religious, without regard to its truth or falsity, Seeger entrenched sincerity in American law. In that odd decision, the court upheld the constitutionality of Daniel Seeger's conscientious objector status, even as a non-theist, on the grounds that his anti-war beliefs were “sincere and meaningful” (146) to the same extent as the belief in God is sincerely held by theists. McCrary argues that Seeger's logic had profound effects on religious freedom cases ever since, for it “redefined religious belief according to its style more than its content, so that religious belief was less about believing in a certain set of content called ‘religion’ and more about believing religiously. This redefinition is how sincerely held religious belief, individualized and deinstitutionalized, became such a flexible and capacious standard in the 1970s and beyond” (27). While Protestants may have invented sincerity centuries before, and it had already claimed a place in the American stylistic repertory, Seeger made the style into legal coin. McCrary's incisive observations about style raised more questions for me. How does a style operate? What are its powers and limitations? Can a person choose a style? Can one develop, nurture, or discipline it, or does one simply express it? How do styles change, and how hard or easy is it to effect those changes? Finding few theoretical discussions of “style” in religious studies, I pulled some old art history books off the shelf. The twentieth-century dispute between Heinrich Wölfflin and Ernst Gombrich seemed like a promising place to get some traction on the concept. Across his many works, including Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1950 [1915]), Wölfflin theorized “style” in historicist, broadly Hegelian, terms: style surfaces the cultural character of a period. Renaissance painting, for instance, was characterized stylistically by linearity and planar composition, reflecting trends in fifteenth-century Europe that valued rationality. When society changes, style changes. He thought that the Baroque—with its open forms, “painterly” (18ff.) brushstrokes, and fleshy figures—was expressive of the moodiness and drama of seventeenth-century Europe (which he saw as a moral degradation after the Renaissance). In his view, through style, artists could not help but reproduce the ethos that surrounded them. If Wölfflin were writing today, he might say that style is a material instantiation of an episteme or an ideology. Ernst Gombrich coolly eviscerated Wölflinn's view. In a short essay, “Style” (2009 [1968]), and in other moments in his career, Gombrich asserted that style is not necessarily shackled to history. This is because when an artist assumes a particular aesthetic of expression, he chooses it. He (for Gombrich, the artist is always a “he”) can elect to paint realistically or abstractly, for example. It is “only against the background of alternative choices can the distinctive way [i.e., the style] be seen as expressive” (130). Whatever one makes of Gombrich's emphasis on choice, I find something useful in his challenge to a Hegelian-inflected historicism in which a period's social circumstances, a sense of ethos, and its material expressions must all align harmoniously. He disrupts the “assumed interdependence of style and society” (136) and opens up a space to think of style as operating according to its own set of rules. What I find especially relevant for Sincerely Held are Gombrich's more passing observations about the importance of skill in a style's development. If the artist desires to paint in a certain manner, he must train in it over years. If style is a choice for Gombrich, it is not a spontaneous one but one that demands intensive practice. The art historian points to this fact in his discussion of forgery: the forger “may learn to understand a style from within, as it were, and reproduce it to perfection” (140). The centrality of repetition and rehearsal is present in the verb forms to style and to stylize, both of which connote the juicing up of something toward an anticipated outcome. For instance, I style myself when I attend the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (where I gave a version of these remarks). I “look, act, and talk” in ways that are not instinctive. Instead, I developed my manner at the conference podium through effortful emulation. The process involved troubleshooting. There were some grad-school-era missteps and false starts (Gombrich: “Corruption lurks close to perfection. An overdose of effects produces a hollow and affected style that lacks virility” [131]). With all of this in mind, I wondered if sincerity in Sincerely Held is more like a style as theorized by Wölfflin or Gombrich. Is it an articulation of an epistemic condition, or is it something manipulable and trainable? One site to glimpse these dynamics in action is McCrary's engagement with paperwork. A contribution to paperwork studies in the vein of scholars like Matthew Hull (2012), McCrary argues that paperwork proliferated after that pivotal Ballard (1944) decision, and he excavates the logic at play. If a religious belief is to be found sincere, then the authorities must investigate the believers. Investigation requires documents such as forms, interview transcripts, and the amassing of ever more paper-based evidence (82). The peculiar affordance of all this paperwork is that it rewards people who can use it to legibly articulate their beliefs as sincere. It enables punishment for those who cannot, or refuse, to do so. Paperwork, therefore, comprises part of the “regulatory” machinery of sincerity (143) and could be called “paperwork secularism” (82). With the old-guard art historians in mind, what I also detect in these reams and reams of papers are opportunities to enact one's skills—that is, to self-style through effort. Paperwork offers a stage for the form-fillers to perform, as an actor would, just how sincerely religious they are. For an example, McCrary observes that by the time Paul Tillich became a household name in the 1950s, petitioners seeking religious exemptions found ways to cite the German theologian and his language of “ultimate concern.” Some even quoted Tillich's passages “directly on their Form 150s, to argue that their views were truly religious” (178). These petitioners are worth pausing on. What were they doing? Wölfflin would say that this style of petition instantiated the views of religion at the time. Tillich was in the air, ergo, he proliferated on the forms. Gombrich would detect choice and training. The government saw “ultimate concern” as religion's purview, so it should surprise no one that petitioners, if they were savvy, input the jargon of the day into their forms. I think that academics are well positioned to understand style in Gombrich's sense, and no more so than when it comes to paperwork. As trenchantly analyzed by David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs (2018), academic life has been bureaucratized over the last decades. One of its aspects is how faculty members have been subjected to more and more paperwork to ensure that we remain deserving of our paychecks and resources. But, also, as any academic knows, while these forms aim to regulate and discipline us, they mostly fail to do so, or do so completely. This is because experience has taught us about the style that we must adopt when bent over these forms. In Graeber's blunt terms, we have figured out how to bullshit paperwork. Bullshitting is a skill that many workers across sectors have learned to perfect as they confront the swell of paperwork as part of a “bullshitization” (2018, 24) of American society more largely. For a personal example, to appear at the 2023 American Academy of Religion conference, I assembled an application for the “Provost's Faculty Travel Grant.” The provost's office at my university uses this paperwork to assess who among its employees is the most deserving to see some of their credit card debt discharged months later when reimbursements are processed (more paperwork!) as compensation for participating in a required part of our jobs. I know what to do with these documents. It is not enough to use the space of the text boxes to state that I wish to give a paper. What needs to be conveyed is persuasive bullshit: that I plan to network with collaborators, seeding initiatives that will result in specific publications, grants, and public-facing projects. I will welcome the opportunity to recruit graduate students. I look forward to bringing back the ideas from the conference into my undergraduate classrooms. And so on. As McCrary would observe, content does not play much of a role in these discursive acts. In fact, saying too much about the content of my paper or my real publication and teaching plans might not go over well. The point is to sound good. I need to give the sincere impression that I am doing it right, hitting my metrics like a productive person. Does this travel grant regulate and discipline me? Sort of. Like other beleaguered workers, I experience bureaucracy as more of a nuisance. It throws up more and more boxes to check, and I check them as if I internally comply with their regulations. Getting grants like these depends on the deployment of skills that I have now developed to the point that I can determine what a given form wants and dispatch with it. I retain too much distance to be subjectivated by the forms in the strong Asadian or Foucauldian sense, or so I like to think, aside from the issue of them wearing me out adrenally. (Every so often, I yearn to be sincere, honest, and real about why I need this money and not overpromise. I fantasize for a few seconds before blathering on.) However, I am trained. Sounding good is not easy. To do well, I have acquired a “feel for the game” to use Bourdieu's phrase (1990, 63). Unlike Bourdieu's use of the metaphor to mean the development of a “second nature” (ibid.), I want to retain the sense of artifice that “game” implies. What I mean is something closer to what Dana W. Logan describes in Awkward Rituals (2022), where she observes that early American Protestant rituals were “awkward” in that their participants more often experienced their own acts like they were playing roles as actors in a play, than they proceeded in a seamlessly disciplined manner. To get a feel for the academic game, and to be able to play it to win, is to be stylized in a sense that invites those feelings of disjuncture that Logan plumbs in ritual, as well as on the concept of skillful training that Gombrich brings to the fore. I am interested in what McCrary has to say about this art-historical analogy. Is the style of sincerity more aligned with Wölfflin or Gombrich? Is sincerity an epistemic condition, or is it something to be manipulated, played at, trained? One fascinating aspect of the American style of sincerity is how many of the figures in Sincerely Held refuse to perform despite the threats, some of them violent, of not doing so. Daniel Seeger of the famous Seeger case (1965) offers a compelling example. When he first completed his paperwork in 1957, he doctored the form asking petitioners to “Explain how, when, and from whom or from what source you received the training and acquired the belief” (116): he crossed out the words “training and,” and around the word “religion” he appended quotation marks (162). Seeger ended up passing the sincerity test! As McCrary observes, Seeger's positive results had much to do with his privileges of race and class. Still, given the stakes, his fiddling with the form is a risk I cannot imagine taking. Even nervier was a Jehovah's Witness from Montana, who returned a questionnaire without attempting the religion section at all, instead supplying this amazing line: “I am a Christian and not a religionist. All religion and all religionists are soon to be destroyed at Armageddon” (125). Bolder still was Frank Africa of MOVE, who lost his free exercise case Africa v. Pennsylvania (1981) by refusing to separate religion from nonreligion like a good secularist. Since everything he did was religion, on documents, he listed his religion as simply “Life” (222). While the Pennsylvania court found Africa to be sincere, they found him to be not religious and denied his petition for a special diet while incarcerated. I am left wondering what to make of these refusers. Is it that they were too sincere to perform in the way they were supposed to, but also, somehow, not sincere enough in the right ways? To act as a sincere believer virtually requires masquerade, whereas people who are judged to fail to meet the criteria of the sincere believer are those who may be the most sincere of all. Sincerity really becomes stranger and stranger the more we pull on it. Perhaps, as others in this forum have suggested, these complexities really boil down to the social factors of race, education, and class. Seeger may have felt emboldened to flout the paperwork because of his privilege, while Africa filled out his paperwork with integrity because he correctly foresaw that he could never win in the US legal system. In the epilogue, McCrary takes stock of these demands for sincere performance and asks what we should do. His suggestion is that, perhaps, we should lean into this style of sincerity. “Sincerity could bring us together,” he writes, earnestly (272). “It is, or could be, a democratic and communal way of thinking, feeling, and writing with others. Sincerity is a public ethic; the point is to be true to others” (ibid.). This note of optimism surprised me. If sincerity is a style in a Gombrichian vein, then it is only, in the most surface of ways, as McCrary claims at the end, “a marker of good faith and clear intention” (273). If American politics is deeply about style, and if, as I am suggesting, style is a form of training, then perhaps we can and should train ourselves in other ways. It is not too late. Styles change, even when they appear to be dominant to the point of supremacy at a given time. The Renaissance yielded to the Baroque. Flared jeans were discarded for skinny jeans, which were left behind for mom jeans. What are our alternatives to sincerity? What are the other styles in which we could train ourselves and become skilled

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Sincerity · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Psychology · Social Psychology

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• In Other Words

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