In an effort to make visible the affective dimension of intellectual work, Donovan Schaefer describes the satisfying feeling of “click” that motivates scholars to pursue discovery. In an affect economy, as described by Sara Ahmed, feelings circulate across bodies, concepts, space, and time to facilitate the maintenance of culture and society. What feelings, then, circulate in the study of the Far Christian Right? How do these feelings circulate between experienced scholars and beginners, like the undergraduates I teach?
After we finished reading Bradley Onishi’s Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism–and What Comes Next, a student made an insightful observation. He said, “Onishi describes the way fear is used to motivate Christian nationalism and then spends the last chapter describing why we should be afraid of Christian nationalism. Isn’t he doing the same thing to us that he criticises?” My student’s observation makes visible the affective dimension of scholarship and notes the way scholarship about the Christian Right participates in the affect economy that maintains the “us versus them” polarization of left versus right in the current moment.
This winter I’ve run the fourth-year course “Religion and Public Life” focusing on Christian Nationalism and the current conflict in Palestine/Israel. Each student is researching a Canadian religious/political organization and is writing a research paper. These organizations range from longstanding, widely accepted centre-right organizations like the Evangelical Canadian Fellowship or National Council of Christian Muslims to so-called “Maple MAGA” organizations like Action4Canada or Battle for Canada. These organizations elicit strong reactions: rage, disgust, and, as stated above, fear.
To navigate the heavy material, we have practiced sharing small joys and making jokes. We draw on feminist practices of situating ourselves. Who are we and what assumptions do we bring to this material? And, students have observed that the scholars they read in class are not without biases and starting places, either.
As my class finishes the semester, I’m watching the affect economy unfold. Fear wants to replicate itself reinforcing and reinscribing political polarization. Caring about political polarization, acknowledging that my class might impact students beyond the research skills gained in the classroom, admits that learning about religion is not a neutral or completely objective activity. If the classroom is not neutral, religiously, politically, and so many other ways, what do we do with it?
What will this classroom and our research look like if we think with Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s “paranoid reading” and “reparative reading?” Religious studies needs a little paranoia, a hermeneutics of suspicion. Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith says she is an agnostic and then starts citing the inherent rights of a human made in the “Creator’s” image. Did she convert to Christianity? Or is this part of a larger project driven by the far right Christians who funded her election?
And yet, Sedgewick cautions that just because you’re paranoid, “it doesn’t mean you don’t have enemies.” So perhaps paranoia is not how we get rid of enemies. Or in my classroom, perhaps a constant hermeneutics of suspicion is not how we shift an affect economy that wants to reproduce fear and polarization.
A reparative reading, Sedgwick argues “is additive and accretive,” gathering resources to attend to the problem at hand. I see a reparative impulse in archival work my students are doing to get to know individual organizations in their particularity, rather than as part of a category like “Christian Nationalism.” Can we avoid flattening the complex humanity out of the Christian right and also enumerate the threat to Canadian democracy posed by these communities?
In an effort to make visible the affective dimension of intellectual work, Donovan Schaefer describes the satisfying feeling of “click” that motivates scholars to pursue discovery. In an affect economy, as described by Sara Ahmed, feelings circulate across bodies, concepts, space, and time to facilitate the maintenance of culture and society. What feelings, then, circulate in the study of the Far Christian Right? How do these feelings circulate between experienced scholars and beginners, like the undergraduates I teach? If the classroom is not neutral, religiously, politically, or emotionally, what do we do with it? Can we avoid flattening the complex humanity out of the Christian right and also enumerate the threat to Canadian democracy posed by these communities?