“I Suppose” and What it Feels like to Hold Religious Feelings Sincerely

SINCERELY HELD: AMERICAN SECULARISM AND ITS BELIEVERS. By Charles McCrary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. [xiii] + 300. Hardcover, $95. Paper, $30. Sincerely Held's contribution to Religious Studies are many, but I want to focus on the book's special place at the intersection of affect studies and religious studies. When I think of scholarship that shows how the state instills feelings in its citizens, this principle is the common sense of a wide range of work, from Lauren Berlant's work that shows how fiction becomes a key site of national fantasy construction, to Robert Bellah in the 1960s describing civil rituals as cultivators of national commitment and solemnity (Bellah, 1988; Berlant, 1991). Charles McCrary, however, points out something that I do not think is common sense at all: that the state has come to demand a particular type of feeling from us when we talk about our religious commitments. Here he follows in the footsteps of Ann Pellegrini, who points out that “we cannot just say that all feelings are equal” (2009, 1348). Some feelings get you stuff. Courts and government agencies do not just demand civility or even a particular description of religion when we describe ourselves in order to exercise our religious liberty, they actually need one specific feeling from us: sincerity. Now, one might say sincerity is not a feeling; maybe it's more like a state of being or an ethic. But as McCrary shows in his history of “sincerely held religious belief,” the “held” is really just as important as the sincerity. It's the holding, a kind of confident cradling, of the sincerely held beliefs that I argue produces a regulated feeling. I cannot tell you how unsettling I find it to realize the state does not just need me to fantasize about it or be attached to it but also needs me to feel one very specific feeling. What other specific feelings will I be called upon to feel, and express precisely, in order to get things from the state? Sincerely held beliefs are a type of feeling McCrary shows, which destabilize the beliefs at the center of the phrase. In his introduction, he clarifies that the first premise of sincerely held beliefs is that the insides of a person must match their outsides, and this would theoretically (perhaps fantastically) produce a feeling of congruence and ease in the world (12). Those who walk around with sincerely held beliefs should not be confused, ambivalent, or unstable; they should be calm and content. As McCrary points out, someone who is sincere is not simulated (15). I think it follows that they also should not experience the disjointed feelings of simulation. I see a deep kinship here with the work of Sianne Ngai (whom McCrary references in particular in his Melville chapter) in that McCrary is showing how certain feelings become both constituent of a particular aesthetic moment/social/political/economic configuration and how the feelings become diagnostic of our own inability to escape the trap of our particular structural situation. McCrary starts his history of sincerely held beliefs with Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, much as Sianne Ngai starts her description of “ugly feelings” with Melville's Bartleby. “What,” Ngai asks, “if anything, is this inexpressive character feeling? Is Bartleby's unyielding passivity, even in the polemical act of withholding his labor (‘I prefer not to‘), radical or reactionary? Should we read his inertness as part of a volitional strategy that anticipates styles of nonviolent political activism to come, or merely as a sign of what we now call depression?” (2005, 1). Bartleby is, as a piece of art, a reflection on one's own uselessness. Similarly, The Confidence Man, McCrary argues, is a reflection on one's inability to sort out the modern self from all the projection around him. The novel “calls into question the very possibility of a sincere believer” (50). The confidence man doesn't have a personality so much as he has all the makings of what people would like from a personality. The confidence man “is a container for strange particles, an amalgamation of society” (50). But as McCrary points out, secular modernity cannot tolerate this galaxy-brain model of the self, that all of us who traffic in some sort of public persona must cultivate. Instead, secular modernity through the mechanism of law “aims to reign something in” as a “containment strategy” (53). I want to propose that McCrary is pointing to a set of conditions, in the same way that Ngai does, that set us up to have ugly feelings, both about ourselves and others. Sorting the strange particles of the self, cutting their tethers to society, is a kind of pruning that feels less like styling than it does like a bad trim. Similarly, it inspires a nosy debunking from others who cannot help but look for the disjuncture between inside and outside or before and after, which doesn't cultivate great feelings within the debunker. It is easy to confuse sleuthing with a form of connectivity. But really, as McCrary shows in his description of the debate around Kim Davis, debunking makes us moralistic and petty (259). Part of what I find thrilling about McCrary's work on feelings is that much of the work on feelings in the humanities has been done by people who write about art, and McCrary has an incredible example of a feeling that was cultivated and defined in the cultural sphere but ultimately has lodged itself into the mechanisms of governance. So, when Ngai describes “art's reflexive preoccupation with its own ‘powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world,’” she argues that this “is precisely what makes it capable of theorizing social powerlessness in a manner unrivaled by other forms of cultural praxis” (2005, 3). Could we perhaps say the opposite about the law? Law's reflexive preoccupation with its own dominance makes it not very smart about its own power and insufficiency? This is part of what I value about McCrary's book: law is an archive where certain feelings get produced and have enormous effect. Of course, “sincerely held beliefs” were concepts, stylistics, and feelings felt long before they were put into rulings, but the law is not quite the public sphere as described by Lauren Berlant (1997, 27). It is something more peculiar and parochial: it is made up of governing bodies that draws on cultural ideas but is defined by the odd dynamics of who happens to be present at that moment and what they're reading. In addition to the courts, McCrary's book usefully looks at governance structures such as local boards and committees that are filled with quirks and bureaucratic lag. The feelings produced in these types of bodies do not bounce back and forth between art and “the public sphere,” instead, McCrary usefully models how we might study affect through a focus on American secular governance's procedures and human managers. And further, it's interesting in the mood of Ngai, to consider why governance in America has cultivated a specific set of feelings that do not feel particularly good (Donovan Schaefer on the other hand has identified affects in American secularity that feel great) (2022). In some ways the most successful sincere believers in the book are the conscientious objectors to war, and I was particularly struck by the types of feelings they experienced in the bureaucratic procedures of trying to get out of the draft. Britt Peter, Arno Jakobson, and Dan Seeger faced a conundrum: they did not belong to churches and were claiming conscientious objection to the war, so how would they talk about themselves in forms and in the courts? Upon rereading this section of the book, I was flooded with memories of applying for jobs at religious universities that required faith statements and the awful feeling of miming a sort of religious commitment that would be legible to the job committee, while also trying to stay true to some actual beliefs, history, truth about myself. The principled thing would have been to not apply at all. But I really needed a job! And then I started to convince myself that maybe I actually could express my real feelings in this contrived manner; maybe this was a good exercise for self-knowing. Then I remembered that it was a fake exercise and I felt bad for pretending otherwise. I still submitted the application. This is the type of recursive feeling that I can imagine these principled people felt filling out Form 150. When Forest Britt Peter's case made it to the Ninth Circuit, he described a “belief in the mystery of the heart of [other living objects], the essence of being alive, and my respecting and loving this livingness in other objects and human beings” (151–152). I sense here that triangulation around theological concepts that you just can't really bring yourself to affirm out loud (I believe in God) for an audience that you know needs a test of orthodoxy. The words so carefully chosen, the attempt to use poetic language to build a bridge between yourself and others. And then the judge asks for clarification. Did he believe in a Supreme Being? “I suppose,” Peter responded, “you could call that a belief in the Supreme Being or God. These just do not happen to be the words I use” (152). Peter did so much to express himself authentically, to try and be honest in public, and then with the resigned “I suppose” you hear him give in, parrot the necessary language. That is the feeling of sincerely held belief: a resigned “fine,” I accept your predetermined language, I am secure enough materially to not be ruined by putting on this mask, but I have lost something in the process. As Sianne Ngai puts it, this is feeling bad about feeling bad. Ngai describes this as unpleasurable feeling about the feeling a reflexive response taking the form of “I feel ashamed about feeling envious” or “I feel anxious about my enviousness” (2005, 14). Peter here, I imagine, felt resigned to his participation in this process and sad that he could not think of another way to get the thing he needed and authentically be himself. “I suppose” is not just a clarification; it is an affective expression. It must have felt even worse when it didn't work. He was denied the exemption (152). McCrary's work makes me think about what Forest Britt Peter and Kim Davis have in common. Both of them had to find highly stylized ways to describe themselves that did not actually get at the highly connective, socially-situated conditions of their beliefs. Thinking war is bad or that you do not like gay people are not beliefs that either of these people got through carefully sitting down and deciding first that they believed in a Supreme Being and then referencing the relevant sacred texts associated with this Supreme Being. They were beliefs that they picked up through intimate relationships with friends and family, from reading and watching a particular type of media, through mixing and mingling with particular type of people in their particular locales. They were, in other words, social. This is one of the lessons of the book for me: that successfully having the feeling of sincerely held belief requires a self-conscious disconnection of yourself from your actual context and your actual story. It requires extracting the strange particles that have converged and made you a mish mash of cultural ideas and social projections. The presentation of this uniformed, streamlined-self then requires you to affirm that you were always this way, that you never even had to do the streamlining, and I hope by calling all of this a “feeling” instead of a “performance” I can communicate the toll that it takes on the person. It feels sad, even if you are victorious, to hold sincerity in this way

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feeling · Psychoanalysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Social Psychology

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