The Religious Studies Project Podcast
Back in November during the AAR (the halcyon days when we could actually do conferences in person!), I sat down with Dr. Brett Esaki to talk about Faking Liberties. Dr. Esaki’s own interests in race and religion (see his book Enfolding Silence) guided our conversations, giving me a chance to reflect on the book about six months after its publication and just as the first bits of formal feedback were rolling in. We had a wide-ranging and very enjoyable conversation in which I said “sort of” a LOT. Nothing like podcasts to reveal one’s verbal tics. Anyway, the podcast is here:
I didn’t know that they would do it, but the RSP team also arranged for a couple of formal responses to the podcast. One response was by my long-term mentor at the University of Tokyo, FUJIWARA Satoko. Dr. Fujiwara hosted me when I was a PhD student working on the dissertation that became Faking Liberties; her comments on the podcast reflect an ongoing conversation we’ve been having about who pays the costs of critique. One of the things that comes through in her response is that many of my Japanese colleagues exhibit some discomfort with my assertions that governance during the Meiji Constitutional Period (1890–1945) was secularist. I’m comfortable making this assertion because I think that secularism is creepy; I’m also comfortable doing this because it’s my way of showing, in a roundabout way, that U.S. secularism has its own coercions and capitulations. (As Tōhoku University scholar Clinton Godart wrote to me on Twitter a while back, a fitting subtitle for the book might have been “A Critique of American Kokutai.”) Anyway, while Dr. Fujiwara and I don’t see exactly eye-to-eye on the political duties of scholars, I’ve learned so much from her critiques and they have significantly influenced the way I am writing my new book-in-progress. Because Difficult Subjects covers the period from 1945 to the present, in it I necessarily deal more directly with the various attempts on the part of the Japanese right to enshrine what Ernils Larsson calls “Shintō normativity” in Japanese law.
Speaking of Ernils Larsson, I’m deeply grateful to this brilliant scholar of Shintō, religion, and law for his generous review of Faking Liberties at H-Net and for his response to the podcast at the RSP. When Dr. Larsson and I were on a panel together at the 2018 AAR, I knew right away that we were intellectual kindred spirits. When I started reading his 2020 Uppsala University dissertation, I was instantly certain that his eventual book on Shintō and constitutional law will be epochal. Dr. Larsson is deeply steeped in the critical secularisms literature, legal studies, and Shintō studies. He’s got a fabulous perception of the conceptual and definitional problems related to constitutionalism and constitutional revision, and he is keenly aware of the political dynamics informing it all. (I highly recommend his 2017 Japan Review article on these topics.) Dr. Larsson’s response at the RSP productively built on my arguments in Faking Liberties and gave me much food for thought.
Like Professor Fujiwara, Dr. Larsson highlights the fact that many influential parties in contemporary Japan will take comfort in my assertion that shrine rites can be coded as non-religious. He is not alone in seeing groups on the Japanese “religious right” as hankering for a “return” to the wartime past. (Other scholars, such as Mark Mullins, have made similar claims.) I appreciate the concern but disagree about the desire to go back; I think that groups on the Japanese right rather use the language of recovering the past and reviving “Japanese traditions and culture” to lay the groundwork for a utopian future. Personally, I don’t particularly like the future they envision. It is characterized by some gender politics I find abhorrent and some cultural essentialist claims that I find specious (to name just two things from a much longer list of personal gripes). I agree that superficially it might seem like my work gives cover to groups like Nippon Kaigi and the Shintō Seiji Renmei, but I think that my assertion that secularism is creepy and coercive holds no matter which traditions get coded as “religious” and “non-religious.” Shintō normativity, Buddhist moral majoritarianism, and Protestantism-inflected U.S. secularism all harbor serious problems for minoritized groups. I want to pay attention to that, and part of the price is to take at least some of the claims of groups on the Japanese right seriously (and on their own terms) so that I can attend to the actual workings of how they are deploying vocabulary and concepts. This means setting aside the secularist presupposition that it is my job to isolate religion from politics in favor of the re-descriptive agenda of determining who is trying to isolate what as religion or not-religion and why. I’m reminded of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s admonition from her essay “The Impossibility of Religious Freedom” over at The Immanent Frame:
“You cannot both celebrate religious freedom and deny it to those whose religion you don’t like. Human history supports the idea that religion, small “r” religion, is a nearly ubiquitous and perhaps necessary part of human culture. Big “R” Religion, on the other hand, the Religion that is protected in constitutions and human rights law under liberal political theory, is not. Big “R” Religion is a modern invention, an invention designed to separate good religion from bad religion, orthodoxy from heresy—an invention whose legal and political use has arguably reached the end of its useful life.”
My new book project and related articles-in-progress engage more directly with the actions of right-leaning cultivation movements and religion-adjacent political lobbies, so I’ll save my detailed thoughts on those things for more formal publications. As a way of engaging with both scholars’ stimulating comments I just want to say in closing that I think one of the main tasks for critical scholars of Japanese secularisms (note the terminology) is to determine who plays the language games around “religion” and according to what rules. One fear that I have—a fear that I think comes through quite clearly in Faking Liberties—is that scholars of religion can be too confident that we know what “really” counts as religion and therefore what constitutes healthy secularist governance. This attitude can border on arrogance, and it can be shortsighted. I’m willing to err a little bit on the side of taking the normative claims of the Shintō secularists seriously if it means that I will do a better job of re-describing the ways various stakeholders, including scholars of religion, gerrymander certain aspects of social life under the adjective “religious.” But that’s very different from coming out in support the Shintō apologists’ politics.
I’m deeply grateful to both scholars for the engagement, as well as to Brett Esaki for the fabulous conversation.