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Why Religious Literacy Requires Emotional Literacy

James K. Wellman Jr. & Mitu Choksi

To cite this article: James K. Wellman Jr. & Mitu Choksi (2020) Why Religious Literacy Requires Emotional Literacy, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 18:4, 99-104, DOI: 10.1080/15570274.2020.1835034

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2020.1835034

Published online: 02 Dec 2020.

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E S S A Y

WHY RELIGIOUS LITERACY REQUIRES EMOTIONAL

LITERACY By James K. Wellman, Jr. and Mitu Choksi

S ometimes you have to go across the world to discover the truth of what you’re looking for. Uzbekistan is literally on the other side of the globe and it was my

second time visiting. I (James Wellman) had lectured at the University of Tashkent before, and I had fallen in love with the land and people of that part of the world. On my second visit I traveled again from Tashkent to Samarkand. The first time I journeyed in a car on a dusty road that was built more for sheep than automobiles. But this time, a new train carried us to the city. These regions and their religions are not the subject of my studies, but perhaps precisely because of that they hold an appeal for their mystery and beauty. Islam has always fascinated me for its affective power. Like other major religious traditions, the emotional charge is what catches and keeps people in the faith.

When I encountered the extraordinary Islamic architecture in Registan square in Samarkand, it aesthetically and emotionally gripped me. It wasn’t just the splendor and dignity of these mosques or the diversity of their people that affected me, but this time I was also traveling with experts in Islamic history and piety. They were not only deeply educated in the religion of Islam, but also activists and teachers in the lived life of what it means to be a Muslim in the modern world. As we walked, talked and toured the various sites, these friends and scholars would also stop to perform salat, to pray one of the five times during the day as Muslims are

required to do. They turn their hearts and minds to the One. The peace and practice of their actions and demeanor beckoned me. At one point, I asked my friends if I could participate in the prayers, and they said, “Yes.”

As I went through the afternoon prayer session, I followed the lead of my comrades and then felt the power firsthand. A rush of peace embraced me as I genuflected and bowed my forehead to the ground. This daily action is a reminder of where we come from and where we are going. It is an act of total submission to Allah who is holy and good. This is not merely a mental exercise, but a physical and spiritual action that trains the self in order to fully experience the divine. I only joined them once in this process, but it struck me like a bell that was rung. I saw—and more importantly felt—the power of this act.

On the train ride back to Tashkent, I asked to sit with my new friend, Imam Talib Shareef.

Abstract: The experience of faith in its affective and aesthetic brilliance and profundity captures and moves people to care and serve. Religious literacy must go beyond the knowledge collected in books and must discover why people love and treasure their faith. It not only involves beliefs and acts of piety, but also how one is transformed in one’s heart, mind, and body. We use the embodied choice theory of religion to explain that humans combine emotion and choice in their religious lives. We combine this with Randall Collins’ work on interaction ritual chains to describe how emotional interactive ritual chains tie humans to each other and to God.

Keywords: religious affectivity, holy, visceral, aesthetic, emotion

© 2020 Institute for Global Engagement the review of faith & international affairs | 99

Shareef is the Imam ofWashington DC’s historic Nation’s Mosque, Masjid Muhammad. We sat together for the five-hour train ride and we shared our life stories. The more I heard the more in awe of him I became. We told our stories of conversion to faith. He spoke of his deep compassion for the poor in DC. He blended a sense of humility and brilliance. He raised a handful of his own children but fostered troubled young people as well. He then led his mosque to build a major housing development for the poor. He was honored by President Barack Obama and served on his presidential council. He walks in important circles, but my biggest takeaway was his humility and his love for faith and family. He lives in a commitment to faith and family and reaching out to the poor and to the outcast. At the end of our time together, we talked and wept together about our journeys in family, faith, death and life. He turned to me at one point, as I described the deep feelings that came up inside me as I prayed with him and his friends. He said, “Jim, remember, when you put your forehead to the ground, that motion is precisely the one experienced going through the birth canal.” And I thought, “Yes, that’s it, the feeling of letting oneself go, releasing one’s self to fall into who we are to become.”

That is what happened with me in Samarkand. I came to appreciate in a new and deeper way that to submit in the Muslim faith is to act, breath, and live into the will of Allah. I remain in my own Christian faith, submitting myself to Christ daily, but I also know the affective and aesthetic brilliance and profundity of another faith with a closer understanding of why it matters and how it captures and moves people to care and serve. Because of experiences like these, my religious literacy about Islam runs deeper than it would if it was based solely on my intellectual research as a professor of comparative religion at the University of Washington. Religious literacy must go beyond the knowledge picked up in books and must discover why people love and treasure their faith. It not only involves beliefs and acts of piety, but also how one is transformed in one’s heart, mind and body. These are the practices of the heart and soul, by which the person is spiritually transformed.

In a similar way I (Mitu Choksi) have found in my research on Eastern religious traditions an explicit stress on the importance of direct experience of the sacred over intellectual knowledge. In many instances, intellectual learning is a barrier to spiritual realization. Zen Buddhism, for example, holds that words, concepts, and the logic based on them impede authentic comprehension of the reality that exists beyond reason. This comprehension is not cerebral but ontological. It entails and even demands a transformation, and indeed, a dissolution of a disciple’s conditioned sense of self so that she may experience satori, the realization of the enlightened nature inherent in all human beings and a spontaneous comprehension of reality beyond verbal interpretations or dogmatic systems of belief. The experience of the holy is visceral and aesthetic: In daily life, it is evoked by a decaying flower in a cracked bamboo vase, by the irregularities of a clay tea bowl darkened with age, by all things that reveal the ephemeral and contingent nature of material existence. Although Zen’s spiritual means and ends differ from those the religions of the West, still the power of tradition concentrates in embodied transformation. The accumulation of facts about religion is useless and, absent affective experience, the mind can become a detour or even a block to experiencing enlightenment.

There is a saying that faith is caught, not taught, and it underscores our central point in this essay: Religious literacy is not just about “head” knowledge. One can intellectually acquire many “facts” about a tradition, but if you haven’t been “in” and “with” someone in their faith it is almost impossible to achieve any real form of religious literacy.

Religious literacy is too often framed using intellectual tools to repeat platitudes about comparative belief systems. Intellectually, this is important, but it is not sufficient. It misrepresents and distorts the power and affective design of these traditions. In any religious tradition, humans are not converted or even committed due to the intellectual arguments, but because they know in their “hearts” and feel in their “bodies” the efficacy

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and truth of these systems of belief and practice. To achieve literacy, we must begin to get at the embodiment of these systems of faith, otherwise they often can be seen as interchangeable or insignificant—that is, they are just one more way of knowing the world.

What is most significant is that these systems of belief are ways of being in the world, that transform the affective and inner life of the one who takes on this way of life. Religious literacy, therefore, must go beyond a mental clipboard and, as some evangelicals would say, become “heart knowledge.” Otherwise, we simply don’t take these systems seriously enough, and they become either interchangeable or forgettable and irrelevant when we are doing cross-cultural studies or even when we visit countries that have majority faith systems different from our own.

Understanding the affective dimension to religion is an essential, yet unfortunately still too often ignored, element of what it means to have genuine religious literacy. A growing number of academic and professional fields are acknowledging the need to invest in religious literacy education, but while this trend is encouraging, such efforts will not have an enduring cross-cultural impact if they focus only on intellectual “head knowledge” of religions. What’s needed alongside empirical knowledge is heart-level apprehension of the affective forces that consume and transform people’s lives, and that move human beings to worship in acts of piety and power.

To be sure, we are not suggesting the total abandonment of critical distance when studying a religious tradition, nor are we suggesting a posture of special pleading or naïve apologetics on behalf of the religion being studied. It’s abundantly clear that religions can be a source of conflict as much as a source of peace (see for instance Wellman 2007, 2011); these ambiguities and complexities always need to be acknowledged. Still, religious literacy, in its fullest sense, cannot be achieved without a degree of empathetic engagement and imagination vis-à-vis the religious other.

The Example of Evangelicalism As an illustration of the difference that this

holistic definition of religious literacy makes in understanding a religious tradition, consider the case of contemporary evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicalism is notoriously difficult to define, and can be found in myriad forms across many denominational bodies and representative associations. Broadly speaking it is a movement committed to the veracity and authority of the Bible, and to actively sharing the gospel in word and deed. However, evangelical identity is much more than simply intellectual assent to a set of doctrines regarding Biblicism and evangelism. Rather it is often at least as much a matter of

emotional experiences as of theological particularities.

A recent study of evangelical megachurches that I (James Wellman) co- authored with Katie Corcoran and Kate Stockly (2020) finds that the key to understanding such churches is their affective power and

comprehensive experience. In the study, we develop what can be called an embodied choice theory of religion. People make reasonable choices (consciously or unconsciously) based on the needs and demands of their complex human experience. They make choices that will increase their emotional energy, choices that will expand their access into helpful coalitions and mating markets, which we argue enhances their political and social capital. We have combined our work with Randall Collins’s (2005) theory of interactive ritual chains to describe the process by which humans experience, consume, and produce emotional energy. We argue that these processes are integral to the nature of what it means to be human. That is, humans are homo duplex, both absorbed and sometimes hobbled by selfish needs and interests, but also yearning, whether consciously or not, to be a part of a greater whole. Religion offers to communities large and small the lattice work of human community.

The theory of embodied choice dovetails with Collins’s work on the ingredients for rituals

SUCH EFFORTS WILL NOT

HAVE AN ENDURING CROSS-

CULTURAL IMPACT IF THEY

FOCUS ONLY ON

INTELLECTUAL “HEAD

KNOWLEDGE” OF RELIGIONS

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the review of faith & international affairs | 101

that are critical for the way human beings create emotional energy. The first is bodily assembly. Our study shows that megachurches are nothing if not places where bodily assembly is critical to the energy and sense that something is about to happen. Certainly, when a megachurch venue is packed, the energy in the room “feels” full. At these events, expectation is in the air; in fact, sometimes pastors, like any good entertainer, make the people wait, coming in just a tad late. In so doing, anticipation builds, and the emotional energy in the auditorium, is, as they say, lit. Crowds give the feeling of anticipation, that something is happening, and that you don’t want to miss it. By nature, humans find their emotions elevated and expectations increased as they gather for an event.

Collins’s next processual ingredient is barriers excluding outsiders. That is, emotional energy is normally heightened in the context where barriers exclude what are perceived as “outsiders.” In today’s world, these barriers often include race, religion, and class. We are rightfully troubled by these forms of exclusion. We expected to find these barriers in megachurches. But in general, what struck us was in fact lack of barriers in megachurches. In fact, wherever we visited a megachurch as part of our research, the message communicated was always “you are welcome.” No matter the venue, people were welcome, overflow spaces were available, no one was left out. In fact, in the two churches that were African American, and another that was Hispanic, we were struck that the welcome was overwhelming; it made us feel like we belonged.

Thus, while we found in our research on megachurches few physical or cultural barriers, there were religio-moral barriers. That is, to be a full member one must pledge one’s faith in Jesus Christ and a pledge to support the church monetarily in one’s service to the community. And, indeed, while the door may be open to all who want to come, it is also true that in nearly every megachurch we studied, there is discouragement or condemnation of gay relationships and the refusal to perform gay marriages. So, for LGBQT folks and their allies, these barriers are high and the “costs” are often, though not always, insurmountable. That being

said, even in these more conservative environments change is stirring, and some contemporary evangelical megachurches are slowly becoming more inclusive on LGBQT rights.

Indeed, one of the surprises about megachurches is that there is a wider diversity of positions on these more controversial issues. Even in churches where gay marriage is not celebrated, we’ve interviewed gay couples who attend and feel welcome even if their marriages are not. Perhaps if there is anything that excludes outsiders, it is the sense of whether one can feel the affective and emotional pull of the services. And to be sure, without meaning to, this can be either an attraction or a form of repulsion—that is, there are those who find this kind of intense emotional energy problematic.

The next of Collins’ ingredients is a shared emotional mood. If one doesn’t feel the sense of the crowd or doesn’t share the emotion of the group, a situation can quickly become excruciating, and those who are self-conscious quickly head for the exits. But for those who sense that this is their place and these are their people, there is almost nothing quite like participating in an ecstatic group in which you feel the emotions of inclusion and like- mindedness. As one megachurch goer explained, “The movement of the Holy Spirit goes through the crowd like a football team doing a wave. I could look up in the balcony and see it pass, and the people doing it. Hundreds get saved.” Indeed, in one megachurch we attended, the pastor would put up his Bible and then move it across the large sanctuary, and everywhere he would go, a wave of folks would rise and then sit as the Bible passed. It created enormous energy across the crowd and as the pastor’s Bible hovered over large swaths of people, the crowd became giddy as the wave initiated them in the reading of the scripture.

The fourth and final processual ingredient is a mutual focus of attention. As Collins (2005, 135) summarizes, “At peak moments, the pattern tends to be jointly shared among all participants: in high solidarity moments, bodies touch, eyes are aligned in the same direction, movements are rhythmically synchronized.” As if on cue, Collins

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describes the power of worship services in megachurches in which bodies are aligned, often moving, in rhythm with one another, to the song, and then with heads pointed forward, as the pastor begins to preach. Megachurch pastors are invariably charismatic figures, whom Collins calls energy stars. They take center stage and pastors at megachurches become the key focus of attention, and are critical to their church growth. There is really no way to overestimate the megachurch pastor’s impact on the vitality of these churches. In one case I visited the site of a megachurch where a former, longstanding charismatic pastor had been relieved of his duties a year earlier due to his confession of having had sexual relations outside his marriage. A new and much younger pastor had been called to the church. I visited to see how the church was faring; it was clear that the new pastor didn’t have the same charisma. The sanctuary, built to fit 8,000, had curtains cutting the seating in half, and the energy of the place felt depressed at best. I met the pastor afterwards, and my main reaction to him was that he was looking for reassurance. He was a dynamic young man but had stepped into shoes that he could not fill, and the experience seemed to drain him of energy— his emotional tone was depleted. I felt it and walked away feeling bad for him. This is not what one finds in energy stars.

Collins is correct; the emotional energy of these communal assemblies is critical to how they thrive, survive, and even die. As such, religious literacy about evangelicalism must include an emotional literacy about how affective bonds are formed and maintained.

Conclusion This has been a short and compact

exploration of why true religious literacy is not just our intellectual understanding of world religions. What we have argued is that emotion and affect are at the heart of the religious life, whether it is in a megachurch in America, a mosque in Samarkand, or the practice of Zen in Buddhism. This means that most of us receive our primary moral and spiritual traditions through our families and in our early learning cultural surrounds. It becomes who we are

because that is who our families are and who and what is in our culture. Conversions to religions in adulthood are rare, and for the most part humans stay with the religion of their childhood. And this only makes sense; it is the moral lens through which and from which we live, breath, and have our being.

For those of us in the intellectual life, we imagine that worldviews are chosen and adopted in our adulthood, but this is unusual. Studies show that the culture of our youth and what we experience in our families is for the most part what we believe and live out in our adulthood. That is, we find ourselves connected to the emotional trends and desires that are a part of our childhood cultures. We take on the interactive emotional chains of thought, action, and feeling that are a part of our family and culture. As scholars, who live to think about religion and culture; we are people who live in our heads. We often assume that most moral or religious systems are chosen in our adult life. This is rare at best.

Thus, we would argue that when we become more fluent in the interactive ritual chains of our culture, our knowledge of each other becomes more accurate and realistic. That is, to really understand another human being, we need to know what moves them and what inspires them in their emotional lives. It is not enough to know even about what one believes, but to find out what moves a person to act, love, hate, and be inspired. What is that deep track of interactive emotions that stimulates? What is our deepest thought and our deepest feeling?

Religion, for many, is the action of the heart in relation to that which is most profound, that which is deepest in us, and that to which we give our greatest loyalty. It’s tricky in part because it is often in a place that is below or beyond our articulation. And so, if we are to succeed in truly understanding each other—especially across faith traditions and most especially between people who are secular and those who are religious—we must grow in our sensitivity and not merely in our intellectual understanding.

Thus, it is our hope that emotional literacy in world religions becomes an important aspect of cross-cultural education, enabling us to

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remember that the secular perspective is hardly “the” perspective, and neither is the religious worldview “the” way to see reality. In that sense, we become people willing to take seriously the worldview of another, whether it be religious or secular. We must learn to take seriously the powerful notion that yes, we live in different worlds, and while this might be an obstacle to understanding one another it is also an enormous gift to another human being to say, “I see you, I hear and want to understand your life and belief system, and I acknowledge how important it is to you.” And this should not only be the attitude of secularists towards religionists, but

also for those who are religious to those who are secular.

In that sense we inhabit different worlds, and as such the task and call of traditionally liberal education is to enter “other” worlds, to understand them, to hear what they say, and to accept the diversity of our worlds. Perhaps, there is no greater moral task then to say to another: “I see and understand your world.” This does not mean we need to agree, but at least we should know what the other holds dear and be able to see all people, no matter our differences, as human beings who are in some way or another trying to work out their salvation in fear and trembling. v

About the Authors

James K. Wellman, Jr. is Professor and Chair of the Comparative Religion program and founder of the Global Christian Studies program at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. His books include Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence Across Time and Tradition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), Religion and Human Security: A Global Perspective (Oxford, 2012), Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford, 2008), Rob Bell and the New American Christianity, (Abingdon, 2012), and, High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America (Oxford, 2020).

Mitu Choksi completed her M.T.S. at Harvard Divinity School and an M.A. at Brown University. Her research interests lie in ancient Near Eastern religions and the phenomenology of religion. She is currently working with the Comparative Religion Department at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington.

References Collins, Randall. 2005. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wellman, James K. 2007. Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence Across Time and Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Wellman, James K. 2011. Religion and Human Security: A Global Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wellman, James K., Katie Corcoran, and Kate Stockly. 2020. High on God: How American Megachurches Won the Heart of America. New York: Oxford University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2020.1835034

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