Response to Beyer and Gill

Abstract

The responses of Gill and Beyer in the previous articles represent two streams of intellectual engagement with religion and culture.' The first, which is employed by Gill, is rooted in liberal notions of religion and religious freedom and is increasingly problematic for reasons I will discuss below. The exact shape and naming of the particular parameters of liberalism remains an intellectual quagmire that is the terrain of political scientists and will not be pursued further here. The other intellectual stream, which is used by Beyer, is an approach rooted in the critical tradition. It insists on the grounded exploration of religious practices and symbols, and engages with a notion of the global in its articulation of religious It takes up the challenges presented by a postmodern and a postcolonial world. In short, Gill insists on a narrowing of the terms of reference of my argument, while Beyer suggests a broadening. I believe it is Beyer's approach that will better equip us to think about diversity.2 One of the paradoxes of modern liberalism, particularly in North America, is its insistence that citizens are free. The citizen thus makes responsibilized (Rose 1989:xxiii) in multiple forums. Democracy, the individual, rights, and autonomy are touchstone concepts of this version of freedom that is possible for all. Nikolas Rose calls the notion that we are all free the illusion of government through freedom. Should the reader wish to dismiss this as postmodern garble, enter de Toqueville, who made the related argument that all societies are authoritarian, the only question is the location of the dogmatic beliefs and opinions that govern any given society (Pangle 1996). Thus freedom is never unfettered, but, even beyond the tradeoffs of the social contract, is bounded in important, often obscured, ways. Rose identifies what he describes as the twin pathologies of freedom: conduct that is nonconsensual and conduct that is excessive. are the limits of the permissible and constitute the boundaries within which freedom can be exercised: These twin pathologies of freedom define the limits within which plurality, as choice and responsible exercise of will, may be tolerated-and indeed, where the exercise of the will in the shape of the construction of wants and the promises of their satisfaction is a vital new domain for commercial exploitation (1989:266). The citizen/consumer is free within the boundaries of the extremes of and Located at the edges of these are power relations and struggles over the definition of consent and of excess. What liberal theorists are less likely to talk about, or even admit, is the messiness of freedom for those who are on society's margins. Gays, lesbians, transgendered, women, people of color (both men and women), the poor, the disabled, and immigrants are bounded by limits on freedom that are glossed over in neoliberal defenses of democracy. Modern liberalism (neoliberalism?) thus takes on the distinct tone of a blame-the-victim approach that identifies individual inadequacies as the root of lack of access to equality. Structural disadvantage is either downplayed or dismissed and the victim is somehow transposed into the advantaged, part of an interest group that threatens to overtake the basic structure of society and threatens the core of liberal democracy. Groups are labeled interest groups when they are audacious enough to demand some meat on the bones of constitutional guarantees of equality through rights that are intended to act as the safeguard from the tyranny of the majority. The dominant liberal paradigm does not construct its own interests in maintaining privilege as interest group politics, but rather couches privilege in the language of democracy.