Theonormativity
I watched The Bucket List on the aeroplane back from Wuhan at the end of January. The pairing of Morgan Freeman as Christ-figure and Jack Nicholson as redeemable demon is painfully predictable, even if the film is charming. Morgan Freeman’s resonant, comforting everyman voice is wonderful for enouncing ordinary revelations, such as his gentle rejoinder to Nicholson’s agnosticism. Nicholson has no faith in anything; Freeman points out that this runs against 90% of humanity.
It’s a lie, of course. ‘Faith’ is a singularly Protestant notion, and survives within in the liberal humanism of modern Europe and its epistemological colonies because it helped organise those colonies. ‘Faith’ does double duty: it presumes a Protestant theological anthropology, and it relegates the knowledge of all Others to mere belief. Yet the category has become ubiquitous and indispensable. In the IUCN’s ontology of work—–here taking ‘ontology’ in the librarian’s way, a system for organising knowledge—‘faith’ is the term used for all sociopolitical institutions that must be comparable to Protestant Christianity, such as Islam (Sunni), Islam (Shia), Judaism, and so forth; like it or not, I have to deal with working groups that divide the world into ‘world religions’ and ‘other faiths’. As Adam Chau, Tim Fitzgerald, and a host of others have argued (including myself), this isn’t a description: it’s the first move in evangelical education towards conversion. For postcolonial politics in South Asia the term became useful as a way to push back against the colonial legacy, so from Vivekananda onwards there is a Hindu ‘faith’ even if, on the ground, there is precious little evidence for beliefs in the ordinary rituals and iconography of folk attending a Kṛṣṇa shrine.
I want to call this theonormativity. I have been mightily struck by the powerful language of ‘heteronormativity’ among Queer theorist colleagues: they’re on to something. If you’re not straight, then whatever you are is measured in terms of deviance form straight and explained in terms of straight. (‘What do they do?’, asks the polite participant at a conference just afterwards…) Theonormativity works the same way: everyone must have a religion; if you lack religion you’re just that strange 10%. It is an oppression and a distortion. It is everywhere, in the arrogant apologetics of Interfaith and the census forms and the IUCN, where we really should know better.
Yeah. We should know better.