Bialecki 2014 Anthropology of Consciousness

Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism?On Tanya Lurhmanns When God Talks Backand Bruno Latour1

j on b i a leck iUniversity of California San [email protected]

ab stract

In the anthropology of Christianity, and more broadly in the anthropology ofreligion, methodological atheism has foreclosed ethnographic description ofGod as a social actor. This prohibition is the product of certain ontologicalpresumptions regarding agency, an absence of autonomy of human creations,and a truncated conception of what can be said to exist. Reading TanyaLuhrmanns recent ethnography, When God Talks Back: Understanding theAmerican Evangelical Relationship with God (2012), in light of both theontological postulates of Object Orientated Ontology and the work of BrunoLatour, this article proposes an ontological framework that makes it is possibleto ethnographically describe God as a social actor without adoptingmethodological theism. This article also notes, however, that the ethnographicdescription of religious practice, found in studies of the Vineyard denominationsuch as Luhrmanns, challenge Latours own account of the difference betweenscience and religions as distinguishable enterprises.k e yword s : Tanya Luhrmann, Bruno Latour, ontology, anthropology of religion,pentecostal and charismatic christianity

Whats the use of doing any study in the anthropology of religion if you fix atthe beginning and say well, of course we know that all these fetishes are justrepresentations in the minds of people. - Bruno Latour2

God is real since he produces real effects. - William James3

Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 25, Issue 1, pp. 3252, ISSN 1053-4202, 2014 by theAmerican Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/anoc.12017

32

This is an article on how God is realanthropologically speaking that is andwhen viewed from a certain ontological perspective. This is a little bit unu-sual for a few reasons. The first reason is that I am in effect an atheist,though saying what it means to think that God is not real might have somedifferent connotations after this conversation is over. The second reason whythis might be a bit of a surprise is that with some very few exceptions, speak-ing of God is not common in anthropology generally and particularly, Iwould suggest, in the anthropology of religion, the one place where, inno-cently, one might expect it the most. This article takes up the issue of Godtoday because his absence is a lacuna that needs to be addressed in discus-sions in the anthropology of religion, in the anthropology of Christianity, andspecifically in the anthropology of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity,which is the target domain for much of this discussion. To be blunt, toignore God as an agent in the world is not just to ignore or belittle thebeliefs of many of our informants but to overlook an often vital mode of theirengagement with the world and specifically of the various objects in whichthey are enmeshed. This will not be a one-way conversation, however. Theprocess of consciously adopting an ontology to force anthropology to talkabout God will have effects that may suggest that ontologically based discus-sions will have to listen to anthropologys own god talk if it wants to be morecoherent as well.

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methodology

There are historical disciplinary reasons as to why God is absent as an actorin the anthropology of religion. At least as far as an intellectual history goes,this is in large part due to a disciplinary wide presumption of what Peter Ber-ger (1996 [1967]) called methodological atheism, the imperative that all reli-gious concepts and social institutions be considered human externalizations.While this does not preclude the possibility of these religious externalizationshaving a divine referent, it does bracket this possibility, focusing on how godsand devils are crafted from human ideational material. Now, methodologicalatheism is not the only methodology proposed in anthropology (Droogers1996; see also Yong 2012) and the wider social sciences (Poloma and Hood2008; see generally Porpora 2006). Nor does this mean that belief itself hasnot been interrogated as a possible engine of anthropological knowledge orbyproduct of ethnographic engagement (Favret-Saada1981; Ewing 1994), thatthere have not been anthropologists whose analytic programs were in dia-logue with their religious convictions (Engelke 2002; Howell 2007), or eventhat there have not been anthropologists who have either toyed with (Pels2003) or openly endorsed (Turner 2003) the reality of the supernatural agents

does god ex i s t i n methodolog ical athe i sm? 3 3

with which their informants claim to be interacting. Even Peter Berger him-self (1979) has backed away from methodological atheism by stating that thesecular social sciences are but one social formation, thereby relativizing whatwas already solely a methodological claim. For the most part, though, meth-odological atheism is the default position in the anthropology of religion (orat least appears to be, at the exoteric level of most anthropological texts). Inthis light, it is not surprising that God or gods should disappear from theanthropology of religion. If one is given the option of studying either a hypos-tatized externalization or the font of such creation, which would merit moreattention? If one must choose between an anagentive representation and ahuman whose agency is prometheanso promethean that she can evenchoose to alienate her agency in her own creationswhich would be themore natural object of study?These choices, though, are informed by a set of often unthought ontologi-

cal presumptions presupposing that questions of existence and nonexistenceare binary operations, that agency is to be located solely in human agents,and that human creations cannot exceed the capacities endowed by their cre-ators. This article wishes to tease open this set of ontological presuppositions.Now, ontology has always had an important place in anthropology. Its historyincludes long-running realism/nominalism tensions in the discipline thatcould be traced at least as far back as the Kroeber/Sapir debate about thesuper organic (Kroeber 1917, Sapir 1917); in different forms, ontology contin-ues in discussions of Amazonian perspectivalism by the likes of Vivieros deCastro (1998) and Philippe Descolas (2006) four-ontology critique of the nat-ure/culture divide. Recently, in large part because of figures such as Vivierosde Castro, ontology has been the object of intensified debate in anthropology(Laidlaw 2012; Pedersen 2012), and the intensity of such discussions has led towhat has been described as an ontological turn in the field (Course 2010).As this ad hoc conflation of the ethnographic and the theoretical suggests,

sometimes anthropological discussions of ontology are thought of as address-ing conceptions particular to some human collectivity that is being interro-gated, as in Descola, and sometimes as being addressed to our owndisciplinary presumptions about what is and is not real aside from any spe-cific ethnographic domain, as in the Sapir/Kroeber discussion (see Bialecki2013). And there are times, as in the discussion of Viveiros de Castros per-spectivalism, where it remains unclear at what level we are to place the nat-ure of the claims being made. As we will see, even while they are not of thesame cosmological order as perspectivism, the claims we are dealing with inthis article are of this latter variety, in which the ontological categories of theethnographer and the ontological imagination of her interlocutors in thefield to some degree are meshing.

3 4 anthropology of consc iousne s s 2 5 . 1

Without exception, the discussions of ontology that I have referenced herehave all had at least their proximate origins from within anthropology as adiscipline, though this is not always the case, as anyone familiar with anthro-pologys recent vociferous thirst for theoretical models from other disciplinesmight suspect. Thus, hopefully I will be forgiven for some filching fromanother domain, though, as we will see, at least one of the figures that weare smuggling into anthropology seems to already have had residencypapers within the discipline for quite a long while.

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ontology

The movement that I would like to invoke here is called object-orientedontology4; it is a loose confederation of authors from disparate disciplinarybackgrounds, including the political scientist Jane Bennett (2010),Anglophone continental philosophers such as Graham Harman (2011) andLevi Bryant (2011), theorists of technology like Ian Bogost (2012), critics of theconcept of nature such as Timothy Morton (2010), and most notably themost senior member and founding figure (in effect if not intention) BrunoLatour. While it would be a mistake to completely assimilate all theseauthors into one congealed mass of theoryand not all of these authorssee themselves as being engaged in the same projectusing some globaldescriptors and ascribing them some common traits is still a useful heuristic.5

The chief principle of an object-orientated ontology is rather unsurprising,given its name. What is central is the idea that what the world is composedof is not, say, subjects on one hand and noumenal objects on the other butrather of nothing but objects, animate and inanimate, human and nonhu-man, all of which have to be taken as agents (occasionally glossed asactants). This is usually taken at the crude level as an imperative to includematerial objects and nonhuman actors into accounts of human society, but ifa moment is taken to consider what is implicit in the postulate that allaccounts should be composed of objects instead of active subjects and passiveobjects, we see that by nature it has to be much more than that. This is alsonot to say that objects are not in some way decomposable. A common pre-sumption here is that all objects are composed of other constitutive elements.However, it is important to understand that these constitutive elements arethemselves categorized as objects with all the associated autonomy. At thesame time, these constitutive objects neither completely control the nature ofthe larger object (in that there could be specific and irreducible aspects ofthe larger total element absent from any of the comprising objects, due toemergent properties) nor the smaller composing elements being automati-cally governed by the larger system in which they are imbedded (as each of


these objects always has the potentiality to offer its own resistances and sur-prises).Several things follow from this presumption. First, this entails a flat ontol-

ogy6 in which all objects are said to exist equally or at least be granted thedignity of being named objects, regardless of compositional and scalar differ-ences. This also implies a suspicion of reductionist (or alternately, onto-theological) accounts, which would privilege one strata or framework aseither an explanatory site or engine; this would foreclose, for instance, expla-nations centered entirely on concepts such as discourse, society, or any kindof biological or psychic naturalism. Finally, in this mode of thought there isa tendency to think in terms not of global effects on collections of objects,which would again be the logic of reductionism, but (when it does not thinkof objects as entirely independent entities) to instead think that these objectinteract with each other in the form of networks, chains, or assemblages.This also often implies a different assessment of what counts as truth,though what that means of assessment would be, and why a different meansof assessment would be a sequela of these claims, is something that will beaddressed in detail later in this article.While all the proponents of object-orientated ontology have something to

contribute to a consideration of ontology in anthropology in general, and tothe anthropology of religion and of Christianity in particular, and we willcontinue to keep all these notions in mind, this article will focus mainly onLatour. His work has the widest reception in anthropology and out of allthese authors he has gone furthest in taking up the issue of religion firsthand. In fact, because Latour has had such a broad reception in anthropol-ogy, there may seem to be a coals-to-Newcastle element to my argument fornumerous reasons.The first reason that Latour might initially appear to be superfluous or

redundant has to do with anthropological conceptions of materiality andobjects. Generally speaking, concerns with material objects have been miss-ing in discussions of North American Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian-ity. This is perhaps due to the influence of Protestantism, the religion oftalk, on both how these forms of religiosity are conceived of by scholars andcarried out by practitioners. In these two arenas, the discursive aspects tendto be emphasized. However, this is not the overall case either in anthropol-ogy at large, which has had a long engagement with the circulation andcapacities of objects,7 or in other aspects of a larger anthropology of Chris-tianity.8 And while few of these works specifically cite Latour, the surface res-onances with his themes are obvious.However, Latours influence has been more direct than that, bringing us to

Latours second (illusionary) redundancy. To the degree that a field as newand heterogenous as the anthropology of Christianity has founding texts or a

36 anthropology of consc iousne s s 2 5 . 1

canon, one of the key works in the subdiscipline has been Webb KeanesChristian Moderns (2007). Keane sees his work as explaining in part Latours(1993) claims that the engine behind modernity is purification. For Latour,modernity is understood as being determined by two dichotomies. The first,which Latour calls purification, is the continuing attempt to disarticulate nat-ure from culture, human agency from dross materialism. The second dichot-omy is between the visible and the invisible, and is a function of the factthat, not only despite but because of this continuing process of purification,hybrid forms proliferate, strange mixtures of biology and culture, science andsociety; these hybrid forms, irreducible to any one of the categories favoredby the process of purification, exist in concatenated chains with other objectsand are effectively rendered unrecognizable, and hence effectively unregis-tered, by purification.Keanes project is to account for the existence of this double-pronged pro-

cess of purification. Noting that Latour gives no founding reason for purifica-tion, Keane proposes a genealogy that makes purification a sequella of theProtestant semiotic ideology, his name for a Calvinist-infused presumptionabout what is communicative and how communication functions. For Keane,Protestantism has a marked tendency to valorize the immaterial, the interior,the spontaneous, and the agentive aspects of speech, all of which works toimmunize the absolute, otherworldly God that Protestantism developed fromany contamination with either dross matter or mere human institutions.9 Ke-ane argues that it was this first separation of God from nature, and thehuman soul from the fleshy body, which was the germ of the latter, widerbifurcating process that is Latours purification.Now, it takes nothing away from the influence, importance, or utility of

Keanes work to observe this: Keanes work can be seen not as an anthropo-logical adoption of Latour but rather a domestication of him, and a momentof disconnection, rather than engagement, with Latours chief ontologicalclaims. Consider this: Keane is concerned primarily with how human sub-jects create, decode, and even identify what is construed as effective and ethi-cal communication. However, these metasemiotic operations, which havedifferent outcomes depending on the different semiotic ideologies to which asubject may be beholden, operate upon objects that are candidates for beingeither vehicles for, or a means of, semiosis. It is not that the materiality doesnot matterKeane is careful to attend to how the specific capacities of differ-ing forms of material are taken advantage of in semiosisbut attention tothe material aspect of mediation does not put subject and media on equalfooting. And while Keane is clear in saying that there is always a risk of a fail-ure of semiosis, these objects are effectively passive entities that are coloredby the action of human subjects rather than being ontologically coequalactorsor as Latour would say, actants, with their own autonomy and resis-

does god ex i s t i n methodolog ical athe i sm? 37

tances. This includes the way that Keane addresses the divine; ironically, inthe process of articulating how Protestants accuse others of engaging infetishism, Keane makes a fetish of the Protestant God as well, reducing thisGods capacities to merely what mechanically follows from His human pro-duction.The point here is not that Keane is running afoul of object-oriented

ontology or Latour but merely that we cannot look to him for a window intowhat an adoption of Latour as an ontologist (as opposed to a theorist ofmodernity or semiosis) might mean for an anthropology of religion or ofChristianity.10 In fact, the same observation could be made not just of Keanebut of any of the anthropological theorists of Christian materiality andobjects, to the degree that these theorists focus on human projections upon,or extraction of, ideational meaning or social connectivity from the passiveobjects that they utilize or create.

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rel ig io s i t y

If an anthropology of Christianity cannot concern itself with materiality or aratification of semiotic ideology as a privileged analytic from a Latour-infusedobject-oriented ontology, then what utility does this particular variant of anontological turn bring? Rather than emphasize these already thought-througharenas, I would suggest that it is the core ontological concepts of all objectsare equally objects and of flat ontology to which we should turn. Further-more, I suggest that if we take these categories seriously, then in societieswhere He is produced, we have to ethnographically include Godand spe-cifically, include him as a (potential) social actor.Let me explain. One of the things that is surprising is how rarely God

appears, as even a phantasmatic interlocutor, in ethnographies of NorthAmerican Pentecostals, charismatics, and Charismaticized Evangelicals. Letme take as an example a book I choose not because it is weak but because ithas so much to recommend it: Omri Elishas recent monograph, MoralAmbition (2011). Elishas book is a nuanced snapshot of Southern Evangeli-cals struggling to work through how they are supposed to practice and cam-paign for Christian charity in an age that is ideologically and structurallyneoliberal. Elisha depicts his informants as struggling against the constitutingbonds of their ethical individualism, their petit-bourgeoisie consumerist quiet-ism, and a salvation economy skeptical of the social and the institutional asthey attempt to imagine new forms of evangelical social action that wouldtake service to the poor and disenfranchised as a primary good.There is much to recommend in Elishas book and particularly in Elishas

meticulous portrait of his believers struggling to build the type of social


bonds and charitable initiatives that they feel compelled by God to carry out.But what is striking in Elishas work is that there is one entity missingGodhimself. We are given a great deal of description regarding how these peopleact out the convictions they have regarding God, but the phenomenal, evi-dential, or practice-based aspect of how they relate to, and interpret, Godthe source of that convictionare absent from Elishas account. Or to bemore exact, it is the question of how God works on them, which is absent.I mention this not because this is some kind of absence particular to Eli-

shas work but because it is a common elision in anthropological accounts ofPentecostal, charismatic, and Evangelical Christianity both globally and inthe United States. With one or two noted exceptions, the procedures throughwhich God is accessed by believers are not addressedand this is especiallythe case when dealing with modes where God is accessed in ways that arenot mediated by texts. Viewed in light of Latour, this is a telling omission.This is because Latours aforementioned work of purificationthe division ofsociety from nature, of the agentive from the materialhas an additionaldimension. Latour argues that this process also works to cross out God,removing him as an actor in that he can be thought of as transcending nat-ure yet not having any effect on natural laws, as metaphysically ordering soci-ety or human agency while at the same time being in effect little more thana private spirituality or a symbol, a fetish (Latour 1993:3225). This makes theethnographic absence of God as an actoreven an actor that must be pro-ducedall the more suspicious, the function of a very specific set of pre-sumptions about who (and what) are subjects, who (and what) are objects,and how the relations between nature, society, and transcendence arearranged.At this moment, I would like to take up the arguments of Tanya Luhr-

manns book, When God Talks Back (2012). Luhrmanns book takes at its taskdetermining how it is that well-educated suburban evangelicals learn to recal-ibrate their reflective sense of self so that they believe that an invisible god istheir sensorially apprehensible companion. I will show how her text breakswith this general trend of avoiding god as an ethnographic presence andalso how her work appears when we take a subtle shift from a psychology-ori-entated epistemology that is central to her project and reread it through thelens of a Latourian inflected ontology.Truth be told, there is another reason to think this project through Luhr-

manns ethnography. Luhrmann and I share a common, noncontigiousfield site: The Vineyard. The Vineyard is a Southern California based, butnow worldwide, denomination with roughly six hundred churches within theUnited States and well over a thousand internationally. It is characterized bya wealth of traits that, while no longer particular to the Vineyard, can argu-ably be said to have originated with them. These include a relative informal-


ity, a desire to be culturally current, and the adoption of a particular genreof praise music that is marked by its purposeful borrowing from pop musicin both musical form and lyrical content. But what the Vineyard is bestknown for is embracing intense, Pentecostal-style supernatural practices(often referred to as gifts) such as healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy,and deliverance from demons.However, the Vineyard carries out these Pentecostal-style practices differ-

ently than their Pentecostal brethren. There is something hesitant in the waythat the gifts work in the Vineyard, a phenomenon that Luhrmann refers toin her work as an as if sort of framing, where the boundary lines betweensupernatural action and subjective imagination are purposefully and con-sciously blurred, both as these Pentecostal practices are enacted and as theyare retrospectively recounted. In the Vineyard, explanations for charismaticactivity waiver between supernatural and naturalistic accounts, like a quan-tum object fluctuating between a particle and a wave. When discussing aninstance of demonic attack, people will one minute talk about it as a disrup-tive alien presence and at another moment as a kind of psychological actingout (Bialecki 2011b). When praying for healing, descriptions of the supernatu-ral intervention are so detailed and so couched in the language of naturalmedical processes they can be seen as a description of an already ongoingorganic process rather than a request for otherworldly intervention. Andwhen giving words of knowledge (also known as prophecy), they aredescribed as an image or an affect that bursts spontaneously into conscious-ness, as if from some other plane of reality, only to be repackaged again as aform of psychological intuitionas a response to subtle cues that, while notnecessary falling into the space of the consciousness, were still present, insist-ing (Bialecki n.d.).The specific aspect of this as-if phenomenon that Luhrmann focuses on in

her book is how this flutter in reality plays out in prayer. Luhrmann sees thiswavering state as a product of prayer, as a ludic, autopedagogical process inwhich individuals train their imaginative facilities and sensorium by repeat-edly playing at conversing with God, until the point is reached when that actno longer is effectively subjectively perceived as a form of play. It is impor-tant to note that the approach to this limit of a completely convincing senseof conversing with a real entity is asymptotic; as Luhrmann is careful to pointout, no matter how much seeming verisimilitude the phenomenon has,believers never get so caught up in the practice as to understanding it asbeing equivalent to conventional human interactions. This transformation isaccomplished not just by repetition (which is strongly recommended by thenumerous manuals on how to pray that Luhrmann relies on as diagrammaticrepresentatives of the practice) but is also supported by a series of materialprops, such as a second cup of coffee set out for God while talking to Him


in the morning or a journal where everything that He says in prayer is writ-ten down by His interlocutor. This is a state that Luhrmann likens as beingequivalent to having an imaginary friend, a framing that, when Luhrmannpresented it to Vineyard believers, they immediately denied, only to affirmbut with the proviso that it was the term imaginary that was the problem,and not the formal structure of the comparison itself.In explaining the psychological mechanisms that animate this process of

producing God as a spectral best friend, and also in accounting for the bene-ficial psychic effects that she sees as an oft realized potentially associated withsuch as if practices, Luhrmann turns to the psychoanalytic concept of thetransitional object. Now in this turn of phrase the word object means some-thing much different than it does when object-orientated ontology types useit. But despite that, thinking through God as an object in the second sense,to supplement the object-relations psychoanalytic theory sense in which Lu-hrmann uses the word, brings out a valuable strand in Luhrmanns ethnogra-phy that otherwise might be occluded. What does this phenomenon thatLuhrmann discusses look like when viewed from that vantage point where,without undoing any of Luhrmanns substantive claims, one shifts from anepistemological framing where one asks, how it is that something appears asreal? to the ontological question, what kind of being is that something?Viewed in this light, the first thing that stands out is that Luhrmanns

Vineyard informants are right to object to the description of God as an imag-inary friend, if imaginary is taken to be a synonym for not real. Because atleast in an ontological framing, even if God were to be nothing other than aphantasm, a phantasm is at least an object and therefore must be given thedignity of being seen as such; it must be conceived as being equivalent to allother objects in its potentiality of both affecting and being affected by allother objects, human and otherwise, with which it becomes entwined. Butalso note that to view God this way, as pure phantasm, would be to fall forthe work of purification, automatically situating an object on one side or theother of an agentive-immaterial/anagentive-material divide. When viewed thisway, God is in essence a hybrid object, composed of a series of heterogenousconstitutive objects set in relation to each other, such as space-holding itemslike the second coffee cup, as well as numerous productive and stabilizingtexts, such as the before-mentioned prayer manuals and handwritten journals.Even the neurological wet ware that serves as the supporting stratum allow-ing these imaginary practices to occur should be included. They are all sub-ordinate objects of various degrees and differing forms of materiality butunder the presumption of this analytic, of equal degrees of reality.The genius of Luhrmanns description is not the way in which God is

decomposed, however, but the way in which the decomposition process doesnot in the end undo God as a larger integrated object with which individuals


have relations. In fact, this decomposite nature is essential to the idea of Godas an object with a unity, not antithetical to it. This is because the heteroge-nous composition allows God to function as a constant source of surprise.While Luhrmann does not put this in the foreground of her ethnography,instead emphasizing a domesticating sense of familiarity when it comes toGod, it is the aspect of Charismatic surprise that allows for the sense thatone is dealing with an agentive alterity, of being confronted with somethingthat exceeds expectations (Bialecki 2009, Smith 2010). Surprise is importantbecause it helps address one of the chief issues that Luhrmanns believersstruggle with: creating a sensation that they are interacting with an autono-mous being with an independent will. God works through means of unantic-ipated coincidences: through the sudden production of an image or intuitionin the mind of a believer that conveys knowledge they would not normallypossess or informs the believer of a duty or obligation to which they wouldnot normally feel beholden. All of these events leave a psychic impression ofan encounter with an entity that very much has its own powers and inten-tions. If the contemporary God of Western Charismatic Christianity is merelyand solely a self-created phantasm, a product solely of ones own mind, thenproducing that element of surprise associated with alterityin what is, inessence, a solipsistic bubblewould seem to be a challenging proposition,one that may indeed presume fractures in the phantasizing self associatedwith the kinds of pathology of which Luhrmann is rightly skeptical. However,if God is built of unconnected heterogenous objects, each with different sub-strates from the grossly material to the subtlety neurological, each with itsown range of internal variability or degree of plasticity and each with its ownunconnected historical trajectory, then it is of little surprise that, as a greatercomposite object, God displays an effective will autonomous of those whoin effect produce Him. Different psychic, semiotic, material, and social sys-tems, each operating to their own ends, could not help but create patternsthat are both emergent and often novel.11 And this is important not becauseheterogony is unique to God but rather because this internal difference isnot unique. Conventional human actors are heterogonous as well, and it isthis shared commonality that makes this God seem all the more identifiable,and perhaps even relatable, as an agent.None of this is absent from either Luhrmanns ethnographic evidence or

from the substantive argument that she mobilizes this evidence to defend.But cast in the terms of experience and epistemology rather than ontology, itis the heterogenous nature of the composite object that is God that stands insharper relief in Luhrmanns work. While that is certainly an important con-tribution to make, an account of God as a heterogenous yet simultaneouslysingular and unified object allows us to think of Him as a social actorthatis, with a certain range of capacities that are a function of His composition


in the space where he is constructedand yet at the same time include anemergent capacity to escape prediction or control by those who fabricateHim. In short, as portrayed by Lurhmann and as articulated here, God actswith the same kind of stochastic wildness that is usually allocated to theother human agents who stand in the center of so much of contemporaryanthropological writing.Now, it is not clear what it would mean to insert God as an actor in social

networks, but one surprise might be that the accounts of social processeswithin ethnographies might come to more closely resemble the way thatthese movements are both understood and experienced by the ethnographerssubjects. This would also mean a break with how the divine is normally por-trayed in ethnographywhich is normally solely as a warrant for humanaction, reflexive and otherwiseand would therefore, to a degree, mean theend of a certain kind of humanism that is present in much of the best con-temporary ethnography, including the ethnography of American religion.Finally, this is a possibility that might exist as much under erasure as it doesas a presence ethnographically. There might be powerful reasons, having todo with the nature of authority, charisma, and institutional longevity, that allmitigate against God being present as a social actor, even in Charismatic/Pentecostal circles that specialize in producing Him. For instance, to returnto Elishas monograph as an example, we do not know if it is a sensual Godthat speaks directly to believersthrough affect, or perhaps even visionaryprocessesin the process of producing a conviction in them; or alternately ifit is God that is textually expressed, a logocentric deity created by and con-strained through hermeneutic imperatives that leave their mark, perhaps neg-atively, on these believers who struggle to break with a Christianindividualistic ethos. We know that they read texts, and we know that theyhave affects and sensibilities, but presenting all those things as the propertiesof humans, as opposed to a human constructed but nonfetishized God, pre-vents us from seeing all the agents that might be in play. Again, this is not tocriticize Elishaor any other anthropologistas lacking but instead to askwhat more could be done in the future by an anthropology that is willing toalso include entities beyond anthropos. But these are the sorts of issuesthat in some ways the anthropology of Christianity, and a wider anthropologyof religion, has yet to grapple with, or at least, had yet to grapple with beforeTanya Lurhmanns book.

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ver id i c a l i t y

Let me conclude by observing that this is not a one-way operation, however.As might be expected in a discussion about object-orientated ontology, the


collective object called anthropology has an agency of its own, working inde-pendent effects that are performed on the object called Latour. Specifically,there is an operation that is performed on Latours account of religion. Recallthat it was Latours attention to religion that recommended him to us in thefirst place, an attention that makes him unique among object-orientatedontologists. Latours account of religion, though, contains some surprisinginversions. He sees the religion/science distinction as one in essence betweenthe familiar terms of immanence and transcendence. This may seem to be arather tired opposition until one learns that religion is on the side of imma-nence and science on the side of transcendence. For Latour, science is tran-scendent because it is always attempting, through corralled chains of objects,to either be affected by or translate that which would escape human senses,such as the microscopic, the statistical, or the cosmological. By contrast, reli-gion is that which is directly and immediately apprehensible to the senses,without recourse to any prosthesis, and which produces no knowledge.Instead of an extension, religion is a revivification and an intensification ofan intimate knowledge already grasped but in danger of being forgotten.Despite this being a return, it is also a recreation, for it is being brought for-ward in new circumstances with each moment of the religious. In short,for Latour, religious practice is on the order of a performative, a statementthat functions to recreate a state of affairs through its declaration (Latour2001; see generally Miller 2013).Now, this may seem to be as a very particular and historically specific

imagination of what religion is and how it functions, and Latour wouldacknowledge this, stating that what he puts forward is a view of religionfrom his singular positionthat of a somewhat free thinking French Cathol-icism (Golinski 2010). But that specificity does not mean that Latour isagainst counting sheep and goats. For Latour, religion that does not followthis performative model runs the risk of being incorrect. An example of thiswould be certain forms of fundamentalism, particularly fundamentalismsthat aspire to the level of self-accredited certainty associated with science,such as young earth creationism (Latour 2005). With this type of religiosity,rather than focusing on the immanent, performative aspects of the practice,these forms of crypto-scientific faith attempt to create the kind of long refer-ential, transcendent chains associated with scientific enterprises. In short,they use religious texts either in the place of, or as supplements to, scien-tific prosthesis to interrogate things beyond the immediate sensory, cognitive,and affectual horizon. These forms of religiosity are targets of Latoursopprobrium because he claims that these chains failor rather, open them-selves up substantially to running the risks of failure. For Latour, makingthese sort of transcendent claims that exceed a space of immediacy andprivilege a referential over a performative content is dependent upon


ones capacity to establish the sort of long-running chains of objects forgedby scientific practices. The trouble is that this process is conducted withmaterial that is not scientific but rather religious in impetus, method, or ori-ginattempting to enchain the stars or the fossil record with sacred textsrather than scientific instruments. This risk is a serious one because it is amaxim for Latour that objects that are candidates for being caught up inthese religio-scientific assemblages, like any other object, may resist thisattempt to enchain them; these objects always have the potential to usetheir own agentive capacities to act in ways that may be independent of thereligio-scientific projects that motivate those chains (Latour 1988). The earthmay not want to be ten thousand years old as opposed to four and a halfbillion.What does failed enchainment mean? To the extent that these chains fail

to endure, to hold together, then according to Latour, they are not true. This,then, gives us a definition of truth that is first independent of the question ofexistence because these larger composite and collapsing objects are stillobjects; they are just not true object. Second, this is a form of truth that issituational, relative, and open, in that we can talk about how stable a particu-lar information transducing chain or assemblage is in relation to another,and we can still be open to the possibility that further events may strain a lar-ger composite object in ways that have not been anticipated, rendering itfalse at some future moment.But what might this relative and situational mode of truth/verification look

like in practiceand specifically, in religious practice? Now, certainly, thetotal catastrophic collapse of the chain of composite objects that fail to corralthe target objects that they address might be one of the forms that failure orfalsehood takes. One can think of instances of failed prognosticated apoca-lypses predicted using religious-originated assemblages (both Harold Camp-ing and William Miller come to mind). However, in citing young earthcreationism, a field that appears to always be leaning to one side without tip-ping over, Latour seems to suggest that there may be instances where ratherthan having the entire facade fall, you may get quivering instabilities asobjects such as the earths geology where fossils and carbon 14 atoms go oneway while other implementsinstrumental, but textual and human as wellstruggle vainly to lead them to another.This would create the appearance of a shimmer in the constitutive object,

as it starts to fly aside from centrifugal forces, only to be hesitantly and tem-porarily reassembled by centripetal work. Now, this shimmering is somethingalready encountered in this article: it can be seen in the Vineyard whereexplanations for Charismatic phenomena, such as prophecy and healing, flitbetween naturalistic and supernatural frameworks.


This is not to say that the God of the Vineyard is a false object, in theLatourian sense (especially because claims of truth or falsity are not of abinary nature, except in states of obvious collapse, but are rather relativeclaims). However, we should notice that this shimmering in Vineyard reli-giosity complicates an easy reading of religioneven proper religionasa pure, immanent performative that stands in a stark opposition to a tran-scendent science. These Vineyard Pentecostal practices can be conceivedof as transcendent in the Latourian meaning of the term, in that theycould be articulated as ways to capture knowledge or manipulate objectsthat would elude the immediate senses. However, Luhrmann follows theusual Vineyard framing of classifying these gifts as Signs and Wonders,where the supernatural aspect, regardless of the apparent utilitarian edgeinherent in some of the gifts, is ultimately destined to assist in belieftocreate the sense of certainty regarding the divine, solving what MatthewEngelke (2007) has called the problem of presence. They remind oneof what they already know, though in a novel waythat the believer hasa relationship with God. To the degree that this is the ultimate desidera-tum, then, these gifts follow in aspiration if not design the Latourian logicof an immanent performative rather than of a transcendental chain. Butdespite this supposed immanence, these Pentecostal-style religious practicesseem, to a degree, to be subject to falling apart, having the armature ofobjects that hold and represent it being reconstructed on the fly with theuse of entirely naturalistic objects. It seems to me that this means thatat least in some moments, even the seemingly most intimate of religiousacts such as these are not mere performatives but to an extent are alsoenchained objects. These religious objects differ from the objects intranscendent science not in the length of the proposed chains but inthe effective relations to which they give rise. These series of smallerobjects, such as material props, cultural practices, and neurological struc-tures, reach out and co-construct a God, but with the goal of not justgrasping some alterity but of allowing this form of alterity to reach backand seize the believer in turn. In short, the Pentecostal-style gifts in theVineyard, even if they are intended to act as immanent and immediatereminders of Gods love, reality, and power, do so only through extendedchains of objects that reach up to the heavens and back again, and there-fore run the risks of any other long, transcendent chain. And while it ishard to generalize from a single case, it may be that this is a risk by allchains that include something like the God of Abrahamic faithsLatoursGod included. This makes sense. In a world of nothing but objects, allobjects are vulnerable to separation and decomposition; and while thisreading might distress or annoy those who rely on long chains involvingor invoking God, those who do not rely on God as an object should


humbly remember that the chains they rely upon are in the end no moresecure, either.

&

note s

1. This paper was originally presented at Modern Christianities: ethnographic reflec-tions on religious publics and public religion, a panel organized by James Bielofor the 2012 American Ethnological Society meetings and at the 2012 ComparativeChristianities Conference at the University of California San Diego, organized byJoel Robbins, Naomi Haynes, and Leanne Williams. This paper benefited fromcomments by and conversation with Razvan Amironesel, Tom Boylston, CourtneyHandman, Naomi Haynes, Caroline Humphrey, Pamela Klassen, Judith Lihosit,Ian Lowrie, Joel Robbins, Bruno Reinhardt, Anthony Shenoda, and RupertStasch. I also thank Adam Miller for sharing his then in-press monograph withme. Finally, this paper obviously owes a great deal to my particular and long-run-ning conversation with/debt to Tanya Luhrman

2. Latour, Harman, and Erdelyi 2011:101

3. James 2008:374.

4. This should be separated from an overlapping, but non-identical, movement oftenreferred to as speculative realism that is more broadly concerned with criticallyinterrogating the Kantian Copernican Revolution and allowing for direct meta-physical speculation about aspects of reality that cannot be reduced to mere repre-sentations in human consciousness (Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011). The mostnotable figure in this broader movement is probably Quentin Meillassoux (2008).

5. The chief fault lines into the movement are whether or not one should foregroundobjects aside from, or embedded within, larger networks, as well as whether or notone should describe objects as having both virtual and actual components as opposedto merely conceiving of them as having multiple internal aspects, tensions, and polarities

6. While this concept is common in much of this school, the particular term is onethat Bryant (2011:112) has imported from DeLanda (2002).

7. A legacy that runs from Mauss (2000) to Appadurai (1988) and Strathern (1988),and continues with Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell (2007).

8. Eastern orthodoxy has been a particularly rich domain. For instance, work byHanganu (2010) on icons in Romania or Angie Heos (2012, 2013) recent pieces onthe circulation and visibility of relics and apparitions in Coptic Christianity. Clo-ser to forms of religiosity that are in identifiable dialogue with the North Ameri-can Pentecostal/Charismatic Christian scene are Fenella Cannells work on themateriality of Christianity both in Catholic Bicol (1999) and in the Utah-basedChurch of the Latter Day Saints (2005). We would also be remiss if we did notmention Britt Halvorsons (2012) work with the materiality of volunteer produced


medical devices in American-based but internationally directed Lutheran medicalmissions or, more importantly, Simon Colemans work (2004, 2006) on the mate-rialist and donative aspects of economic and linguistic exchange in The SwedishProsperity Gospel.

9. See also Robbins (2001), Engelke (2007), Bialecki (2011a), Bialecki and Hoenesdel Pinal (2011).

10. See Keane 2009, which seems to argue for a limitation of social/cultural varianceto different interpretations of realty rather than different projects, successful orotherwise, working toward assembling objects in particular, local manners in fur-therance of particular, local ends.

11. It should be noted that as the various elements of this assemblage are placed indifferent relations with each other, and as elements are added or subtracted, thecharacter, intensity, and speed of both production and transmission of surprisemay change, suggesting that Christian devotional and spiritual experience variesso much across differently constituted Christianities.

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Documents

Bialecki 2014 Anthropology of Consciousness