the basis for radical critical thought. The essays presented in this volume explore the possibilities of a form of thought that is rooted in the religious experience of black traditions.238
It is not so much the particularities of “black traditions” that are important for Long. What matters is the universal religious “root meaning”—the “primordium”—which the modern academy discerns within and through those traditions, or any traditions for that matter. While Long recognizes the problematic nature of modern classificatory schemas, he nonetheless finds hope for their overcoming through the “opening” the Enlightenment created: religion. Long defines religion as “orientation”: “how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”239 Longian religion is non-transcendent; it is a product of the human quest for self-situatedness. Long maintains that “the religion of any people is . . . experience, expression, motivations, intentions, behaviors, styles, and rhythms.”240 Black theology, or any theology, is nothing more than human self-actualization. The “archaic critique” of religious studies discerns what was “actually taking place” in the spiritual experiences of various peoples.241 Instead of calling modern encyclopedic methodologies into question (as does Carter), Long has in effect upped the ante in their favor. For Long, the problem is not with the modern scholarly gaze, but that the intellectual quest has been distorted by what he calls “latent” power.242
More often than not, the differences that bring a culture or a people to the attention of the investigator are not simply formed from the point of view of the intellectual problematic; they are more often than not the nuances and latencies of that power which is part of the structure of the cultural contact itself manifesting itself as intellectual curiosity.243
Long implies that if the power differential could be accounted for, the “point of view of the intellectual problematic” could produce a pure form of “cultural contact.” This is epistemologically problematic to say the least. For Long, it is not the ability of the historian, scientist, anthropologist, sociologist, or religious scholar to arrive at a satisfactory observational knowledge of the “other” that is in question. Rather, the problem is that the “pure” empirical stance has not often been achieved because of the pursuit of power: desire for conquest was “masked by the intellectual desire for knowledge of the other.”244 Long maintains that by working to get behind “the creation of discourses of power,” “what really happened” will be recognizable in the obvious “facts of history.”245 Carter’s thesis suggests that Long’s approach drastically underestimates the power that is wielded through the modern presumption of the ability to “know” and “describe.”
Carter’s vision of a Pentecostal re-ordering of language within “impure” relations calls into question the ability of the observatory stance of the modern religious academy to adequately discern the voice of the other. Carter’s analysis suggests that the best that studies of “cultural contact” can achieve is a more “positive” evaluation of the particularities of the other (which is not a completely bad development). However, this reformist evaluative structure is less radical than mutual participation. The problematic nature of Long’s descriptive tendencies can be seen as he reflects:
For example, on the descriptive level, one cannot deny that there are peoples and cultures of dark-skinned, kinky-haired human beings who do not wear clothing in the manner of the cultures of the investigators, and, in addition, they express very different meanings regarding their orientations in their worlds. While this may be true on the descriptive and analytical levels, the fact that these characteristics were noted as the basis for significant differences is often unexplored. In other words, what leads one to locate the differences within what is the common?246
Long drastically under-emphasizes the significance of the comparative aesthetic judgments he is making. For Long, the evaluative ability of the observer is assumed; he sees the problem to be the assignation of comparative value. While he has a valid point regarding the problematic nature of maintaining a normalizing pole in cross-cultural encounters, what he takes to be analytically undeniable is itself an unrelenting aesthetic comparison that racializes the “other.” For example, do not designations such as “kinky” or “dark-skinned” in and of themselves introduce the “other” into a linguistic world in which the assignation of comparative value is made possible? Surely calling hair “kinky” is itself a value judgment that assumes straightness of hair to be “normal.” While descriptive words need not be as pejorative as “kinky,” description as a form of analysis is not exempt from making aesthetic value comparisons. In the descriptive project, the self-articulation of the “described” person is necessarily muted. Carter’s work leads to the conclusion that the discipline of religious studies would do well to recognize its limitations.
It is worth noting that Long’s religious studies methodology seems to have begun from a posture of vulnerability. He reveals the situatedness of his own inquiry as he relates that his “concern for the meaning of the religious reality of black Americans” stemmed not only from his “scholarly discipline” but also from his “desire to make sense of my life as a black person in the United States.”247 He found the “history of religions” to be “the only discipline” that “responded to the . . . expressions of my origins.” He purposed to “not begin with a methodology of pathology, one of the primary . . . cultural and social scientific languages about blacks.” Yet Long’s religious studies trajectory does not as sufficiently resist the problem of race as does Carter’s theological focus. As a discipline, religious studies remains beholden to the modern methodological stance that introduced conceptions of pathology into the academy. While Long admirably laments that “the actual situation of cultural contact itself is never brought to the fore within the context of intellectual formulations,”248 his epistemological humility collapses into the assumed objectivity of the disciplinary posture into which he is so clearly invested. Contrasting with Long, Carter presents a vision of mutual dependence in his language of miscegenation and linguistic interpenetration. Carter finds the methodological stance of religious studies to be central in the maintenance of the sociopolitical order of whiteness.
Long and the New God
Carter contends that Long’s relegation of theology to the role of answering discipline does not decenter Western primacy. Rather than an Enlightenment schema in which Christianity is the apex of a hierarchy of religions, Long has substituted an Enlightenment schema which identifies a universal humanist religious impulse undergirding all cultural expressions. Longian religious studies has retained and redirected the rationalist aesthetic of modernity.249 It is this stance that assumes a Kantian religious rationality which Carter will implicate in the construction of race. In this section, I will suggest that the religious studies enterprise is a reaction to deformities in the Christian tradition and offers a less satisfactory anthropology than Carter’s invocation of theology done on the underside of modernity.
Gavin D’Costa’s Theology in the Public Square is helpful in this regard.250 While D’Costa’s vision of a reenactment of classical “Christian culture”251 is problematic in ways that Carter identifies in his treatment of Milbank, D’Costa’s critique of secularization as the only acceptable public discourse is helpful in understanding Carter’s critique of Long. It provides a way to understand how Carter can implicate both religious studies and virtue ethics in the maintenance of whiteness. D’Costa maintains that a post-Christian ethos of secularization is not more open to other modes of thought than is the Western rationalized Christianity of modernity.252 Both are tied into the Enlightenment in ways that Christian theology need not be. D’Costa suggests that it is precisely from particular convictions devoutly held that genuine dialogue and mutuality can be had. It is genuine openness to the other in which true plurality is found, not in a universalizing religious impulse that rounds off the corners of religious doctrine in favor of a bland pluralism. What D’Costa defines as “the ideological nature” of “secularism” can be loosely correlated with how Carter reads Long’s religious studies discipline. It suggests that pluralism as a dogma is static in ways that a thick theology of the Incarnation resists. D’Costa’s recognition of
