Irreligion a Category of Analysis?
I’m returning to a book I found really exciting in grad school, to see if it has anything to tell me about how to do free thought history. Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History is a classic text; required reading for both historians and feminists. I was struck, both when researching and writing An Infidel Body-Snatcher, and in the way feminist secularists have responded to it, how closely tied the women’s movement and freethought had been throughout the period (late 18th to early 20th centuries in the Atlantic world) I’ve been studying. So I thought it would be interesting to see if Scott’s groundbreaking arguments about gender could tell me anything that would help me historicize secularism.
One of the things that impressed me most about Gender and the Politics of History was the idea Scott introduced in the first few pages, that a big part of her project was challenging “the reliability of terms that have been taken as self-evident by historicizing them” (6). The meanings of everyday concepts have “the appearance of fixity” and are often taken unconsciously as “normative definition[s]…used to justify oppression” (4, 5). The everyday concepts she was concerned with were gender identities — I want to use the same approach to find the ways religion (and particularly irreligion) have been excluded from the analysis of social change over time that we call history.
“Meanings are constructed through exclusions,” Scott said. “Positive definitions,” she continued, are built from these dualities, but “categorical oppositions repress the internal ambiguities of either category” (7). This is a fancy way of saying that reducing complex reality to simple binary pairs oversimplifies the elements at either pole of the opposition, and hides interactions and relationships between the polar elements that may actually be keys to understanding them.
Added to this problem of abstraction and oversimplification, Scott said, is a layer of politics that goes largely uncriticized — often even unnoticed. Politics “sets and enforces priorities, represses some subjects in the name of the greater importance of others, naturalizes certain categories and disqualifies others” (9). This seems a bit problematic to me. Certainly politics (defined as power relationships imposed to benefit one group at the expense of others) can set these agendas, but other factors can as well. Abstractions and “culture” are part of the way people relate to the world, and there’s a slippery slope separating the idea that culture is “constructed” for the benefit of a ruling class, from full-on conspiracy theory. Seems like the burden of proof is on the person claiming that an abstraction supports some type of systematic oppression. Of course, sometimes it does. The things nineteenth-century Americans in the South “knew” about the nature of black people supported slavery. The way we “know” gender supports keeping women in a secondary, unequal position in society. I’m a bit surprised that Scott wasn’t more interested in the ways this knowledge was institutionalized and transmitted. Religion, for example, was remarkably absent from a book concerned with the misrepresentation of gender in western culture.
But maybe you have to be outside the frame to see the picture. Feminist historians were in a position to do this with respect to “gendered” history, since the normative definitions used to justify oppression were all imposed by men. But standing outside the religious frame, I’m amazed how little Scott had to say about religion’s role in the construction of gender. Scott mentioned religion very briefly in the conclusion, when she criticized the Roman Catholic Church for opposing abortion in Poland (in Poland? They were doing the same in the US! 210). The other section that could have included a discussion of religion — where a treatment of religion would have been a no-brainer, doesn’t even bring it up.
Scott’s failure to mention religion in the chapter “Women in The Making of the English Working Class” is jarring. Yes, I understand she wanted to talk about gender, which she thought E. P. Thompson had left out. But failing to deal with the fact that most of the people she was writing about were notorious freethinkers is a problem. “Tom” Paine, Richard Carlile, and the female volunteers who were arrested when they kept Carlile’s (freethought) bookshop open, were all “infidels,” and their radical and feminist agendas were informed by their secularism. Scott didn’t just “repress” their identities, she redrew them “in the name of the greater importance” of her gender argument (77-9). Interestingly, in doing so she leaned on Barbara Taylor’s book on the intersection of radicalism and feminism, Eve and the New Jerusalem, which also (incredibly!) manages to sideline secular radicals in a story focused on one of the ultimate secular radicals, Robert Owen.
Now it’s entirely possible that Scott and Taylor just didn’t think organized religion has been subjugating women for the last few millennia. Or maybe it’s a relationship they weren’t well-positioned to see. Scott paraphrased Gareth Stedman Jones, saying “Class and class consciousness are the same thing” (56). Later, she attributed the fact that gender “seems so unambiguous to ordinary people” to the “repressive function of civilization” as described by Sigmund Freud a century earlier (202-3). I think you’re asking for trouble when you apply insights from an outside field to history, if they’re ideas most experts in that field think are out of date. But more important, I think the argument that gender has been confused and women repressed (clearly it has and they have) needs to be supported by a discussion of the actual, historical means of that repression on actual people rather than on Freud’s theories of the unconscious.
So what does this mean for me and freethought history? Well, the good news is that there’s a field for me to work in. The fact that historians like Scott have had other priorities and that others like Taylor have been unable to see the picture because they were standing inside the religious frame, means there are still histories for me to write. The thing I’ll need to remember is that it takes more than theories “to detect some logic…underlying the varied manifestations of human behavior” (202). The way to mitigate the fact that “history, through its practices, produces (rather than gathers or reflects) knowledge about the past,” I think, is to talk about actual people and events, rather than about abstractions (9). I’m unsatisfied with a history like Scott’s where the “objects of study are…epistemological phenomena, which include economics, industrialization, relations of production, factories, families, classes, genders, collective action, and political ideas, as well as one’s own interpretive categories” (5). Abstractions are great and we need to understand how they are constructed by people in relationship with cultures. But in the end, I prefer the people.