Invisible Religion

Here is a great quote from a great essay on invisible religion by Marcia Ian:

# It would be truer to say that on the contrary America has marched from its founding vision of itself as a liberal society guided by the light of right reason, away from Puritan "abstractions concerning virtue," toward an ever more diffuse and yet ever more concretely embodied religion at once personal and global. [3] By concretely embodied, I mean "materialized" in ways intrinsic to consumer capitalism, with its tendency to worship the material as if it were spirit made manifest, and the spirit as if it were matter made immortal. What Colleen McDannell has called our "material Christianity" solidified during the 19th century. Material Christianity is "affectionate religion," Protestantism softened and sentimentalized, with its iconoclasm, its antipathy toward, and laws prohibiting, images, relaxed. During the nineteenth century, for example, the Holy Bible was re-invented and made available as a kitschy mass-market commodity, illustrated, commodified, and mass-produced. The family Bible linked faith to fantasy and commodity to spirit as "the saving text" evolved into the "saving object," a standard feature of most Protestant households, a sign at once of domestic sanctity, divine paternity, and mainstream American identity (McDannell 68, 73, 74).

# Such objects blur the boundary between sacred and secular, but in so doing they reproduce and re-iterate logos in commodity form; they perform for the zillionth time the original "blurring" putatively achieved by the Incarnation. A supposedly one-time event "infusing . . . the divine into one man," the incarnation theoretically made it possible for the divine and the human realms to become, if not exactly one, at least not discontinuous (McDannell 18-19). In Christ, the secular and the sacred melt into that uncanny proximity which Lacan calls the "extimate," namely the appearance of "the real in the symbolic" (Miller 75). Christ is "the real in the symbolic"; he embodies the extimate as the object of worship and the point of identification for the subject; he is the nonexistent point where one side of the möbius strip becomes continuous with the other; he is the immanent transcendence of material nature become the signifier of culture--American culture. I can think of no better apologist for this point than Henry James, Sr., known to most of us mainly as the father of William James the philosopher/psychologist, Henry James the novelist, and Alice James the diarist, but known during his own time as a prolific if idiosyncratic public intellectual, a Swedenborgian Christian mystic, and Fourierist proponent of radical spiritual democracy.