What’s religion? What’s a cult?
let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start)
Read my reflection on your responses
What we’re reading/listening to:
- Keeping It 101, “What the Heck is Religion?”
- Keeping It 101, “Cults”
- Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind”
Discussion prompts
- did this topic’s materials make you think differently about what “religion” or “cult” mean?
- What stood out to you about Baldwin’s essay? How do you think he’s understanding religion, what religion is or does, and why religion matters?
- How does Baldwin describe the relationship between religion and race in 20th century America? Why is that relationship important?
Confession
Y’all, I totally looked at the wrong podcast for this piece! I’ll do a quick thing about the “Who Gets Left Out of Religion” podcast before Tuesday. COVID-brain is real. Sorry!
Alright all you cool cats and kittens, welcome to “Cults and Sects.”
I’ll keep this short-ish, since I’ve already been mean enough to assign you real work for our first meeting. Presumably (don’t tell me if I’m wrong), you’ve listened to the podcasts and have a sense of how we’re understanding religion in this class / in the academic study of religion. Here are the broad strokes:
religion is what people do
As scholars of religion, it’s not our job to tell people HOW they should do their religion or that they shouldn’t do it at all. Religious studies is not prescriptive.
What we do in religious studies is think about and make sense of what people do when they say they’re doing religion, because our work is descriptive. It’s also analytical: religion isn’t JUST about folks very deliberately Doing Religion on Purpose. Religious people used (and use!) religious texts and religious thinking and religious ways of being to shape the world around them — and sometimes that’s been happening for so long that we don’t even recognize that our assumptions are based in a particular religious worldview.
how we think about “religion” is very extremely quite a lot shaped by white mainstream Christianity
The founders of what’s now the United States were mostly white european christians. The leaders of our country, states, and communities have overwhelmingly been white christians. Whether you’re religious or not, the world around you has been shaped by assumptions that religion looks and works and is a certain way, and that way is like-white-mainstream-christianity.
Even if we ourselves are not religious, America’s laws, courts, public spaces, schools, communities, etc. recognize some religious expression as more legitimate than other kinds.
not all religions are equal
Religious studies, like all fields of cultural studies, is about paying attention to power. No matter what it says in the Constitution, not all religious communities or people or groups get equal treatment under the law — and that unequal treatment (and unequal access to resources, and unequal opportunities to flourish) is compounded by other social inequalities, like gender, sexuality, and race.
Religious groups and religious individuals that either are white and christian OR are recognizable to (for example) judges and law enforcement officers AS religious because they’re pretty close to white mainstream christianity can usually claim religious rights and protections successfully. Groups and individuals that are less similar to white mainstream christianity have a harder time accessing those rights and protections.
This class is about those groups that have a harder time accessing religious rights and protections in what’s now the United States. Or as you might know them: “cults.”
If you’ve poked around this site, you already know I hate this word. In my professional opinion, the word “cult” is dangerous — because people use it to mean a particular group or way of thinking is exploitative, deceptive, coercive, stupid, and/or risky.
Intentionally or not, calling something a cult reinforces the idea that some kind of religion — and some kinds of religious people — are safe, acceptable, and deserving of rights…and others are not. Bad things happen when state and federal governments decide your group is a cult.
“Cult” has justified state surveillance, law enforcement violence, and many, many violations of Americans’ civil rights. And that’s the part we’re going to be talking about this semester: how the word “cult” gets used to mark certain groups as legitimate targets of state surveillance and violence, as too different to be included in America’s alleged promise of religious freedom.
We’re focusing explicitly on how the cult label has functioned to discourage, discipline, and punish Black religious innovation and resistance in the 20th century. Spoilers: this has happened A Lot, and at the very highest levels of our government and our law enforcement agencies. Stay tuned for some declassified FBI files, y’all.
So what does all this have to do with James Baldwin, I hear you asking? For starters, there is truly no consideration of American culture that is not improved by asking what James Baldwin would have thought about it — especially if you’re thinking about race and injustice in the 20th century U.S. Which it just so happens we are.
If you’re not familiar with his work, you don’t know what you’re missing. The documentary I Am Not Your Negro is streaming on Kanopy for free (if you have an NU login) and is a good place to start. The piece you read for today is among his more famous essays and provides an incredibly vivid picture of his religious upbringing in early 20th century Harlem and how he came to think about religion.
“The word ‘safety’ brings us to the real meaning of the word ‘religious’ as we use it.”
- James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind”
I told you to just read the whole thing, and I stand by that, because this essay is gorgeous and brilliant. But at the beginning of this class, I really want us to focus in on two key passages.
The first is the pull-quote above: “the word ‘safety’ brings us to the real meaning of the word ‘religious’ as we use it.” We often think about religion as something special, set apart, better than the everyday — and ultimately as something that can provide meaning, comfort, and (as Baldwin suggests) safety in a world that too often seems meaningless, cruel, and unsafe. In this piece, Baldwin lets us see into the church of his youth, a place that gave him purpose and authority and let him find his voice. Though he would soon leave this community, he speaks with great longing for the beauty, the connection, and the ecstasy he found there for a brief time:
There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to rock. Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word” — when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs — they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them-and their cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Yes, Lord’ ” and “Praise His name!” and “Preach it, brother!” sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar.
The ecstasy, the purpose, the connection to something larger and more significant than ourselves, the community and sense of belonging and rightness in the world that Baldwin describes here: that is why minoritized people join marginal religious communities (often called cults or sects). Baldwin left his church, but as he says, “It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will.”
As Baldwin grew into adulthood as an impoverished gay Black man in a city and a country that despised and tried to destroy Black people, queer people, poor people, and perhaps most especially poor queer Black people, Baldwin began to feel increasingly unsafe and unwelcome in the religious community of his youth — both because his church could not keep his poor gay Black self safe in a country and a city unsafe for poor gay Black people, nor did the church community value him in his full humanity.
Baldwin notes that despite a shared Christianity, Black and white Americans were not equal, and that his Christianity did not protect him from harm: “White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared.” And that the texts from which he drew his sermons were also rooted in white supremacy:
I realized that the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that, according to many Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave. This had nothing to do with anything I was, or contained, or could become; my fate had been sealed forever, from the beginning of time.
Baldwin details Christianity’s complicity in American racism, in European colonialism and imperialism, in centuries of violence and oppression — he underscores that religion is not merely belief, but political force that has largely worked to secure and sustain white Christian supremacist systems and institutions.
The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. The Muslims react to this fact by referring to the Negro as “the so-called American Negro” and substituting for the names inherited from slavery the letter “X.” It is a fact that every American Negro hears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is — a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as “three-fifths” of a man, and who, according to the Dred Scott decision, had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. And today, a hundred years after his technical emancipation, he remains — with the possible exception of the American Indian — the most despised creature in his country.
Baldwin says he initially dismissed the Nation of Islam — a group that understands Blackness as divine, equates whiteness with the devil, and met with state surveillance, criticism, and violence (and one that we’ll be thinking about a lot in the latter part of the semester). But two things made him pay closer attention to NOI: “the behavior of the police” toward NOI members and “the behavior of the crowd, its silent intensity…as though they were being jolted” in response to NOI messaging.
The Nation of Islam provides a religious framework for valuing Blackness, Black people, and Black lives. As Baldwin notes, these idea — that God is Black and that Blackness is something to be celebrated — were not new, nor were they unique to the Hon. Elijah Muhammad.
There is nothing new in this merciless formulation except the explicitness of its symbols and the candor of its hatred. Its emotional tone is as familiar to me as my own skin
[We’ll come back to this, but there’s never anything completely new or unique in new religious movements. Every new group borrows from everything that comes before it.] But for some reason (Baldwin attributes this to the historical moment), many Harlem-ites found the Nation of Islam a particularly compelling messenger for these ideas. And because many Black communities found NOI’s rejection of white supremacy compelling, the police considered NOI dangerous — they were, Baldwin says, “they were under orders and…they were afraid.”
What has James Baldwin to do with the study of cults? In this piece he gives us a sense of why and how a community might use religion to foster a sense of belonging, to provide purpose and meaning, to share comfort and connection. His understanding of god is precisely the understanding of the Divine many so-called cults have tried to live into, the kind of change many “cult” members try to create:
“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
- James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in My Mind”
This pull-quote is the second I want us to really sit with: the idea that the divine can be rethought, remade, reimagined in ways that make us “larger, freer, and more loving.” Oppressed people can be, as Baldwin suggests, “bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run;” he continues, “if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.”
Baldwin ultimately did not find the kind of communion and meaning and hope he sought in religion, but religion does provide that for many members of marginalized communities.
We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement. We have taken this journey and arrived at this place in God’s name. This, then, is the best that God (the white God) can do. If that is so, then it is time to replace Him — replace Him with what? And this void, this despair, this torment is felt everywhere in the West, from the streets of Stockholm to the churches of New Orleans and the sidewalks of Harlem.
God is black. All black men belong to Islam; they have been chosen And Islam shall rule the world. The dream, the sentiment is old; only the color is new. And it is this dream, this sweet possibility, that thousands of oppressed black men and women in this country now carry away with them after the Muslim minister has spoken, through the dark, noisome ghetto streets, into the hovels where so many have perished. The white God has not delivered them; perhaps the black God will.
Baldwin does not find the Nation of Islam’s solution to American racism and white supremacy compelling, but many others did and do. If God is Change, as Octavia Butler’s protagonist says, many groups that have been described as “cults” are trying to make change for the better possible — and have often been met with great force and violence when they tried to do so.
