Why So Serious

Bibliographic Data

ID20172278
AuthorsJolyon Baraka Thomas (0009-0005-7395-6390, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia Pennsylvania 19104 USA, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume50
Issue3
Pages483-486
Publication date2024-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligious Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0319-485X • E-ISSN: 1748-0922
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/rsr.17445
OpenAlexW4405115346
LanguageEN
References cited19

SINCERELY HELD: AMERICAN SECULARISM AND ITS BELIEVERS. By Charles McCrary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. [xiii] + 300. Hardcover, $95. Paper, $30. Since the early 2000s, scholars of religion have been developing increasingly sophisticated tools for understanding secularism as a mode of political governance, as a type of public reason, or as an epistemological or affective orientation. The key takeaways of this internally diverse literature can be generally summarized as follows: (1) religion and not-religion are co-constitutive, (2) the legal project of separating religion from the state engenders questions even as it promises certainty, (3) political secularisms may be geographically specific but nevertheless share isomorphic features across national borders, and (4) secularism has a biopolitical aspect that insinuates the state in ostensibly private matters such as sex and reproduction (Asad 2003; Agrama 2012; Mahmood 2016; Scott 2018; Coviello 2019). This literature is compelling and exciting, if often quite distant from what most people mean when they use the words “secular” or “secularism.” In Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers, Charles McCrary brings these abstract and often counterintuitive ideas down to earth by highlighting the specific conflicts and compromises that have constructed the notion of “sincerely held belief” in the United States. From fortunetellers accused of “vagrancy” to incarcerated members of marginalized movements, McCrary describes the multifaceted and mercurial character of the “sincere believer.” Along the way, he shows that adjudicating veracity and duplicity often has dire consequences. Sincerely Held focuses extensively on law, beginning with the 1944 Supreme Court case that formally established the sincerity test in religious freedom jurisprudence (United States v. Ballard, 322 US 78). As McCrary suggests, examining law is ideal for studying secularism because courts and cops have to adjudicate what counts as religion and what does not (270n17).1 But law is not everything, and a virtue of this book is that it is bookended by chapters that do not involve litigation and law enforcement so directly. Chapter One, on Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, sets the stage for the book by showing how anxieties about truth and falsity permeate a novel that leaves the reader confused about who dissembles and who has been duped. Chapter Eight, on the kerfuffle surrounding Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis's refusal to generate marriage licenses for same-sex couples, deals with administrative law and the equally influential, if less official, court of public opinion. Meanwhile, the focus on bureaucracy that runs throughout the book is a welcome addition to the existing literature on law and religion, which has historically privileged litigation over focusing on law enforcement, despite the fact that constitutional protections are sometimes guaranteed (or thwarted) by bureaucracies and executive orders rather than court decisions (Tani 2019). Sincerely Held shows not only the pervasive influence but also the limits of “sincerity talk.” People can speak earnestly and apparently truthfully and still find their sincerity under question. McCrary shows this powerfully in Chapter Seven when he considers the case of Frank Africa, who was unable to gain dietary accommodations in prison that aligned with his sincere religious commitment to MOVE.2 Recognition as religion is a precondition for one's religious sincerity to be properly evaluated in court, and McCrary points out that it is usually association with a “church” that makes a person legible to the law (173n2; in Africa's case, it was the alleged lack of “structural characteristics” that made MOVE into not-religion). Sincerely held belief is, therefore, not just individual assent to a propositional statement of unprovable facticity, but assent to a propositional statement that others also demonstrably and respectably hold. Interiority is only legible, and conscience is only valid if it exists in a community of a particular type. One cannot just make stuff up. But membership in a community does not necessarily prove one's sincerity, either. In Chapter Six, on conscientious objectors and the draft, there is a tantalizing subplot about a Catholic man who tried to claim religious exemptions but frustrated his lawyers by insisting on appealing to ecclesial authorities rather than his inner conscience (196n68). He lost and was sentenced to prison because he tried to rely on community—the Catholic Church—when authorities were looking for incontrovertible evidence of sincere, individual, belief. Taking this example together with Frank Africa's case, we can see a sort of implicit “Goldilocks principle” (my term, not McCrary's) in the law whereby sincerity is individual, but not too much, and communal, but not too much. Interiority without community fails, but so does community without some degree of perceived “inner conscience.”3 McCrary rightly emphasizes that those who have most struggled to strike this balance in performing sincerity have often been nonwhite (200–202; 234–35). The aforementioned “Goldilocks principle” has a mildly disturbing origin story related to the academic study of religion. As McCrary argues in Chapter Six, conceptions of religion generated by theologians (Paul Tillich, Harvey Cox) and historians of religion (Sydney Ahlstrom) came to exert powerful influence on legal interpretations in court. The secularizing accounts offered by these scholars (and their contemporaries in the sociology of religion, such as Peter Berger) provided jurists with conceptual frameworks that allowed them to find religion where there was technically none (as in conscientious objector cases), applying the language of the First Amendment's free exercise clause even to people who claimed not to have religion by applying the Tillichian concept of “matters of ultimate concern.” The disturbing upshot of these scholarly contributions to jurisprudential reasoning was a form of racialization that marked specific forms of sincerity as legitimate while rendering others illegible. McCrary, therefore, gives readers a reason to reflect on the politics of religious studies, focusing attention on how our preferred categories may subtly reinforce existing hierarchies of race, gender, and class. The question about the effectiveness of sincerity claims in court also reminded me of Michael McNally's excellent 2020 book Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment, which included the somewhat counterintuitive argument that making religious freedom claims can actually work counter to Native interests that would superficially seem to be straightforward matters of religious free exercise (McNally 2020). If securing and retaining ongoing access to specific land for the purposes of ceremony is paramount, sometimes the best legal recourse is not to the “sincerely held belief” concept so central to free exercise but rather to other constitutionally protected rights. If law is a toolbox, then sincerity is a key tool, but it is not always the most appropriate one. That said, sincerity is pervasive in law and elsewhere, and McCrary's account of the ubiquity of sincerity claims is remarkably thorough. In Chapter Eight alone, he covers the advocacy of conservative Christian legal organizations, the afterlives of various state-level Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, the rise of complicity-based legal arguments (as in the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 US 682), US empire under the Trump administration, and sexuality. In less capable hands, this list might have felt unwieldy, but McCrary convincingly brings these threads together, highlighting how all of them index the question of sincerity. Nevertheless, it strikes me that one way to expand upon McCrary's work would be to account for silliness as much as earnestness. McCrary understandably focuses on dire situations, such as being sent off to fight in a deadly war, where conscientious objectors have to prove their sincerity to authorities as a matter of life and death. However, in other circumstances, people actually perform insincerity as a way of securing plausible deniability in environments where being seen as “too religious” can come with social costs. Take, for example, “anime sacred site pilgrimage” in Japan (also called “contents tourism,” see Seaton and Yamamura 2014). Fans may travel to a real-world site, such as a shrine that forms the basis for a setting in an animated television series, engaging in ritual practices that emulate and mimic the “formal” practices conducted at that shrine (Yamamura 2014). They may offer lavishly illustrated votive tablets (itaema) or venerate animated characters as deities (Andrews 2014). Religious organizations may also use parodic language to attract new audiences, displaying “sincere” religious messages with a playful wink and a nudge (Thomas 2015a). Such acts, which I have elsewhere termed “tongue in cheek religion” (Thomas 2015b), are arguably just as important for understanding the parameters of sincerely held belief as high-stakes court cases like Frank Africa's. Future research on secularist sincerity might, therefore, build on McCrary's excellent work to investigate performative actions like comedy, parody, and play. Researchers may also consider which analytical categories pair with “sincerely held belief” as conjoined terms that index neither dissimulation nor truthiness. Developing such a conceptual apparatus might help scholars in situations where we are inclined to take people at their word but must recognize at the same time that their actions bear an element of plausible deniability. I am thinking, for example, of Melissa Wilcox, who asks: “What would happen to the field if we took the [queer, noncelibate] Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence seriously as nuns?” (2019, 21). The question of sincerity is key to Wilcox's provocation and central to the lived religion approach now widely shared by many scholars of American religions, but the playful elements of the Sisters' public performances arguably require just as much attention as their serious understandings of themselves as nuns. While his content is generally quite serious and his tone rather sober, McCrary gives scholars of religion a valuable opportunity to rethink what it means to “take people seriously.” As he observes throughout, sincerity claims require legible performance of racial and class-based protocols rather than unambiguous disclosure of one's immutable personal identity (12–14; 234). Nobody can escape the demands to perform sincerely. McCrary knows this, and he leans into it. On the surface, Sincerely Held is a genealogy of US secularism that focuses on the concept of sincerely held belief in law and public commentary. But as its extensive discursive footnotes reveal, the book is also an extended meditation on the affective and performative aspects of scholarly inquiry. The book tells readers about the history of sincerely held belief in the United States, but it also shows them what it feels like to be secularist, and sincerely so at that.4 Throughout the book, McCrary pops the hood on his own investigation machine, providing an exploded view of its inner workings. His discursive footnotes are disarmingly earnest, and each chapter includes at least one note that models for the reader the sort of frank sincerity that McCrary envisions both as a desirable form of scholarly affect and as a promising mode of small-d democratic engagement (272–76). For all his criticisms of the pitfalls of sincerity talk, McCrary is a stunningly forthright author, and just as he dedicates the book to his friends, his citations reveal him to be a voracious and generous reader. As he puts it in the epilogue: “To be sincere ... [is] to craft a persona that matches one's private self. Underneath, behind, within the words of this book are the socialites that made it—my publics, my networks, my friends, and the institutions at which I've spent my entire adult life. The forms in which I've written this book reflect an authorial persona made up of other persons. I address certain audiences because I am bound up with them, attached to them” (273). Here and throughout, McCrary turns an obligatory performance of humility typically relegated to a book's acknowledgments section into a central aspect of his method, highlighting the unimpeachable scholarly ethics that animate his project. Every once in a while, an academic book comes along that crystallizes a broad scholarly conversation in a particularly artful way. Charles McCrary's Sincerely Held is such a book. He captures the best of the critical secularism studies conversation in engrossing prose while making productive contributions to scholarship on religion as it intersects with law, race, and class. The form of the book reinforces his compelling argument about how sincerity claims work, and he leaves readers with a burning question: If sincerity is impossible to measure, and if identity claims often reinforce orders of domination, then what analytical models of religion and belief would enable a more just future? McCrary does not directly answer this question, and no one person can answer it alone. But our guild is certainly better for him having asked it

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