The Hazards and Necessities of “Imaginative Sympathy”

Abstract

The Hazards and Necessities of "Imaginative Sympathy" Jenna Reinbold (bio) As a professor who teaches about religion and US law, with a particular emphasis on the role of same-sex marriage as a locus of today's "culture wars," I have had my work cut out for me in recent years. On the one hand, the past decade has given rise to a dramatic upsurge in American support for LGBTQ rights.1 On the other hand, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was made possible in part by the deployment of a language that portrays the rise of LGBTQ rights as an acute threat to the religious freedom of particular Christians.2 These facts combine to create some challenging pedagogical questions: How important is it to convey a robust understanding of the sense of righteous embattlement that is driving many Christians' support for Trump? If it is important, how does one cultivate this type of understanding without serving as a mouthpiece for anti-LGBTQ rhetoric? I have wrestled with such questions throughout my teaching career. As a humanities professor whose teaching focuses on the legal realm, I believe that an understanding of today's juridico-political battles over LGBTQ rights must go beyond a simple emphasis upon jurisprudence. Rather, I teach about this intersection of religion and law with the goal of making the anxieties and self-perceptions [End Page 111] of "traditional marriage" advocates deeply intelligible to my students. This type of teaching involves encouraging students to open their minds to others' closely held convictions in an effort to gain a robust understanding of the ways in which such convictions carry over into particular social and political practices. This approach rests upon a presumption that, in the words of David Frum, "you do not need to be a partisan of a political movement to write its history. But you do need enough imaginative sympathy to comprehend how it won its adherents and supporters."3 Of course, some calls for "imaginative sympathy" are easier to heed than others. My experience in the classroom attests to the immediate discomfort many people feel when called upon to do intellectual work that they perceive as lending legitimacy to discourses of oppression against LGBTQ people. This discomfort is entirely reasonable, but as a scholar of religion, I would propose that such discomfort should hardly spell the end of a rigorous inquiry into the religious lives of traditional marriage advocates. Indeed, we scholars of religion would do well to recognize the subtle ways in which today's discomforts with anti-LGBTQ discourse might tempt us to dismiss or estrange religious modalities that strike us as, simply put, "bad." In raising the specter of "bad religion," I refer to the work of, among others, Robert Orsi, who, in a very different context, has highlighted the perennial tendency among scholars of religion to "stop at the border of human practices that we scholars find disturbing, dangerous, or even morally repugnant."4 In an era in which a strong majority of Americans support not only same-sex marriage but also the government's right to require business owners to provide services to LGBTQ people even if they have religious objections, Donald Trump has arisen among dissenters as a vehicle of forceful religious protest.5 Trump's crudeness and flagrant biblical illiteracy have inspired many commentators to conclude that the American Christians who support him are little more than craven hypocrites. In the face of such characterizations, scholars of religion can do better. Let us set aside the fact that the appointment of religion-friendly Supreme Court nominees is one of the campaign promises that Trump has actually made good on, and that this development alone implicates a host of pressing questions of interest to religious studies. Beyond this fact, the dismissal or evasion of Trump-supporting Christians fails to provide students with any helpful information for making sense of a key segment of the contemporary religious landscape in America. [End Page 112] In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, Kathryn Lofton offered something of a preemptive admonition to people who study and teach religion: "what scholars of religion do is account for why groups of people consistently...