Volume 3, Winter 1999
Conference Keynote Essay

Although practices of this sort are usually identified with Catholicism or with popular expressions of world religions as yet unenlightened by Western missionaries (think of the contempt with which bhakti Hinduism, for example, has long been treated by American scholars), it is not difficult to find devotional practices among American Protestants. Protestants have brought urgent needs, fears, and hopes to Warner Sallman’s widely popular image of Jesus, for example, entering into relationships with this compassionate face that are like the connections women formed with Jude. But the embarrassment, anger, and—most importantly—defensiveness provoked by devotionalism or abuelita religion, whether these abuelitas are Mexican American, South Asian, or American Protestant, are clues that it is not simply a matter of denominational transposition to go from my work on women’s devotions to the interpretation of Protestant religious practice. For as we move from one to the other, we cross a complex terrain of denial, exclusion, disavowal, and repression, all fundamental to the way religion—as a category of study and as social practice—is rendered in the United States. Unless we unearth the grounds of these powerful prohibitions, Protestant practices will themselves inevitably be returned to the closet of American curiosities and we will not have challenged the limits of the tolerable in the study of American religions.

As I was writing Thank You, Saint Jude I was regularly visited by a host of imaginary critics and interlocutors; I never sought their presence and they were always unwelcome, but they were persistent. One regular visitor, representing the normative psychology of religion, came to remind me that the religion practiced by Jude’s devout was infantile, regressive, indicative of a lower stage of religious and emotional development. The evidence for this judgment was precisely the intensity of women’s imagining of Jude, the power of their need for him in desperate times, when the boundaries between themselves and the saint appeared to dissolve in terror and need. I was continually reminded that the normal developmental trajectory of religious maturation goes from the sort of thing that Jude’s devout—and other primitives—do, upward to genuinely mature faith, which is the normative, masculine faith I have described. Certainly, mature faith had nothing to do with kissing statues of a saint or rubbing holy oil on painful body parts. This interlocutor was occasionally joined by another, more political, visitor, who argued that women’s prayers to Saint Jude were examples of female passivity, helplessness, and self-annihilation in a social world dominated by husbands, sons, priests, and male doctors. Jude’s devout practiced magical thinking, evidence of a profound political alienation. Above all, religious studies is organized around absence—the language of symbols, cults, magic, superstition (which lies close at hand in discussions of devotionalism) encode a normative religious phenomenology of absence, in which gods, spirits, the dead, and so on, are mediated by symbol and metaphor. Jonathan Smith’s comment that the subject of religious studies is theory and Tomoko Masuzwa’s understanding that religious theory is the study of the play of signifiers are more recent expressions of the authority of absence in the discipline.

Pathetic women, passively, helplessly, and regressively clinging to an anthropomorphic sacred figure, whom they manipulated with magical rituals for delusional ends, as they deepened their own powerlessness and alienation— couldn’t I find a mature, contemplative or mystical woman political activist leading a campaign of social justice to study, my interlocutors wanted to know? When would these women—Jude’s devout—become religiously male: public, powerful, masterful, individual, positive, active?

So the very religiosity of Jude’s devout—their specific religious practices and the workings of their religious imagination—were disallowed by the theoretical apparatuses available to me in the discipline and dismissed by an implicit consensus, within the academy and without, of what real or good religion is, of what religion is worthy of study. I could critique women’s experience, unmask its politics and psychology, and expose its religious inadequacies, but built into the disciplinary traditions I was using to frame questions about women’s prayers to Saint Jude was an explicit judgment against them. This is why we don’t study certain forms of women’s religious experience and imagination, and this is why it is not a simple matter of going from work on Catholicism to other religious traditions.

One way of proceeding with the study of women’s religion is to practice a kind of theoretical transvestism and cloak women’s religious experience with the protective covering of the religiously tolerable. Those of us who study women’s devotionalism or piety in the United States—which is to say, those of us who must contend with the embedded presence of religious otherness as I have defined it—are put in the position of trying to redeem the other by lessening otherness, to make women’s religion acceptable within the normative account of religion. We become apologists, but this is homage paid to the power of the religiously normative. Instead, we should be able to study how women use religious power to destroy themselves and others as well as to heal, how women manipulate other women in religious settings; we should begin to think in more complicated, ambivalent, even contradictory ways about power and powerlessness, especially in religious contexts, and to recover dimensions of religious life disallowed by the canons of modernity. Without awareness of the force of the authority of religious otherness, gendered female, those of us who study devotionalism and women’s piety will be compelled by this authority to replicate it as we struggle to defend and exonerate women from the charges against them built into the discipline. Instead, we should be using women’s experience to recast the study of religion. But this is precisely the boundary so many stop at, in embarrassment, judgment, dismissal, and contempt.

I have come to think, finally, that the most intolerable aspect of the religion of abuelitas is that it approaches the contingencies of experience in an attitude more complex than mastery and triumph. American theories of religion and religious historiography are relentlessly comic; we insist on happy endings—all women are empowered, all men improved, children nurtured, the universe rendered meaningful. The alternative in popular imagination and in theory is not the tragic but the gothic: as Colleen McDannell shows in her paper for this meeting, commentators on James Dobson’s Focus on the Family are more comfortable presenting him as a gothic figure presiding over captive women and children than trying to understand the complex, everyday needs and hopes that women bring to his organization and what they all do with them there. In this culture of triumph, easy personal transformation, and endless celebration of mastery, there is a terror of the everyday tragic, or perhaps simply of the everyday, with its contingencies, disappointments, limitations. This is a place where religious theory and religious historiography seldom go, and this too is gendered female. The contingent dailyness of life is the realm of soap operas, of “my stories” as many women refer to these dramas; this is the space of devotionalism too. And we have trouble looking at women’s religious practice in the context of these stories. But what most impressed me about women’s devotion to Saint Jude was its realism about everyday life and its resolute religious engagement with its sorrows and trials.

In Person and God in a Spanish Valley, William Christian offers a moving portrait of the older women he saw praying in Spanish churches. “The ones I know,” he writes, “have become devotional, even theological, virtuosi. They are assiduous not only at public church functions, but also in the reading of prayer books, the performance of novenas . . . and private meditations. Some of them make a virtually total effort to live up to what they think a Christian should be. And in the process they have a good time. For [these women] religion is no morose, waiting thing. It is quickened with joy and discovery . . . religion is poetry, drama, mathematics . . . The older women become, in their own way, mistresses of a vast body of arcane lore and tradition, philosophers and technicians of the sacred, consultants to their daughters and granddaughters, to whom they pass on their personal patrons and their techniques for contacting and consulting with God.” This is not to say that there has not been oppression and violence in these women’s lives (in which sometimes religion has been complicit), nor that they have not made compromises or choices for religious reasons that hurt them. To approach the religious experience of little grandmothers, or their younger female kin, we have to overcome a complex of denials, exclusions, and omissions at the center of our theory and our public religion, and to learn to think across well-established theoretical, psychological, and cultural boundaries. The challenge is to imagine women’s religion in a way that is neither gothic nor comic, but human, engaged with the realities of everyday life, and then to turn back and challenge the theoretical and historiographical traditions in our discipline that cause us to be embarrassed by abuelita religion, or to deny it, or to defend it.

Notes

Jon Butler makes his radical proposal in “Historiographical Heresy: Catholicism as a Model for American Religious History,” in Thomas Kselman, ed., Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American History (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 286-309. For a short discussion of women’s centrality to Western devotional history in the early modern and modern periods, see Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789-1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 28-29; McLeod’s comment about Catholic anti-modernism is on p. 47. Susan Juster’s Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) helped me think about the politics of religious gendering in the early modern period. Waldie’s Good Friday memory is from Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 179; on American Protestants relationship with Saelman’s Jesus, see David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Edmundson discusses the American gothic imagination in Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). My thinking about anti-Catholicism has been profoundly influenced by Jenny Franchot’s Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Christian’s description of older women’s religion is from Person and God in a Spanish Valley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 160-161.

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