Stephanie's closing unit

Engage:

Watch this clip of an interview with pastor Rick Warren (the guy who did the opening prayer at Obama's inauguration) talking about the need to resist one's impulses, even if they come from biological predisposition:



Next, this clip with Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, on using scripture to justify slavery, Christians changing their minds as the Holy Spirit leads them to different/better places:



Then finally, Jon Stewart and Bill Bennett mixing it up on gay marriage:



I'm still trying to figure out how we can talk about naturalizing and social constructions in relation to these clips. Seeing as this is potentially the wrap-up, we can hope that at this stage the students would have the skills to see how the speakers invoke concepts that they portray as irrefutably real and ahistorical: Warren is naturalizing maturity, character, “rightness” (“naturalizing” is sort of an ironic word in relation to this one, as the discussion is based on the idea that we must overcome “natural” impulses); Bennett naturalizes “family,” Stewart naturalizes “the human condition” and “progress”; we could probably even argue that Robinson naturalizes progress as well.

This is certainly a place where we could bring in hegemony and the “natural” authority of normativity. We get a glimpse here into how religion is used in political discourse to appeal to the notion of a reality that is above and beyond the political fray of the discussion. This begs the question of what political function that “higher reality” is serving. That question, it seems to me, touches on just about every thematic area we've identified as being important to AMS 100.

Primary:

Cheryl and I talked about the possibility of using some denominational position statements here (such as confessions of faith and the like), discussing how we might see such documents as a genre, and how that genre can be characterized. At this point the only such documents I'm familiar with are Mennonite ones, but I'll go digging. What often strikes me about these documents is how much they reflect the fractious political process of negotiation that goes into them, even if they are transparently trying to project unity. This is a good opportunity to challenge our students' analytical chops and push them to read beyond the text itself.

Secondary:

Have them read two chapters of Dawne Moon's God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies: “Debating Homosexuality” and “The Problem of Politics in Church.”

Discussion points:

--Moon makes a very nuanced argument about politics that differs considerably from the stance taken by the Christians whom she interviews. This is a good opportunity for them to both identify an argument and to sort out the author's interpretation of the issues at hand from the opinions of her interviewees (whom she quotes extensively). Having just taught these chapters, I'm finding that students have a surprising among of trouble sorting out who is arguing what.

--Talk about ethnographic methods and use of ethnographic evidence. How does the ethnographer position herself? Why do we need to understand anything about who the ethnographer is to interpret what she is telling us?

--Talk about contradictions and how they are embedded in what we so often think of as common sense (with a nod to Gramsci, if they end up reading him in Will's unit). The people in Moon's study draw on what they see as a commonly-understood separation between religion and politics. But Moon identifies how their very strategies of conflict avoidance (because they associate conflict with politics, and want to disassociate from that) perpetuate their conflicts.

--Moon's informants display a desire to be “unmarked” by politics when they are in a religious context. But the practical manifestation of this desire is a disassociation from difference. (“I have gay friends, but I don't make a big deal out of it. What they do in the bedroom is their business.”) Do we associate difference with “politics,” and thus with conflict? Hegemony and normativity again here—the normative has power because it is unmarked/invisible. So it doesn't get blamed for conflict, and in this context, that's a source of power.

Reflection:

Moon briefly identifies her methods as poststructuralist and uses Foucault in her description of power, and thus politics, as ubiquitous in human relations. Fortunately, she makes this pretty clear and gets it out of the way quickly. Again, seeing as this is the closing unit, presumably the students have already been doing some poststructuralist analysis, though I doubt we should make a big deal of calling it that. Instead, this might be a moment to say, Hey! Here she's doing what we've been doing all semester! Or something like that.

How might we take Moon's analysis of politics and apply it to other cultural material? How does this analysis tie in with all our big concepts: culture, power, difference?