Foolish Questions, Impolite Answers: Intellectuals and Religion1
Durre S. Ahmed

As a graduate student at an Ivy League University in the seventies, I frequently encountered the then prevailing academic response to religion which was quintessentially modern and could be summed up as: ‘those who think cannot believe and those who believe cannot think’. The fact that I was/am a believer (Muslim), was further compounded by the dominant ethos of a modernity that saw women and the ex-colonial as un-evolved beings.
This article is about the initial stages (1988-1991) of the changing academic attitudes towards religion in the American intellectual establishment, indicating the cognitive roots of biases inherent in the revival. In spite of numerous critiques of modernity and widely available feminist re-visionings of Judaism and Christianity, the patriarchal perspective continues to ignore the feminist contribution and dismiss western women’s spiritual search in alternatives such as The New Age movement.
The conceptual background to my analysis is located in the Jungian critique of Judaeo-Christianity and the loss of the Feminine in psycho-theology on the one hand, and the critique of science, western culture and modernity, on the other. Both suggest that the contemporary western psyche is dominated by a juvenile, ‘heroic’ masculinity. With its (Freudian) emphasis on will power and a narrowly conceived notion of reason, it remains prone to violence and misogyny.  Bordo refers to this as the ‘Cartesian masculinization of thought’E2 and in the context of academia, this male adolescent psyche has been referred to as ‘the rooster factor’ by the philosopher Jenny Teichman.E3  That is, rivalry between purportedly incommensurable theories is often only an illusion caused by rivalry between men. Postmodernism notwithstanding, current global events show how this modern mindset remains strong. 

Aca-Media and Religion
Consider a series of advertisements for the New Oxford Review, an American journal born in the late 80s, by which time the New Age movement could no longer be ignored or dismissed as faddish. Since 1989, the advertisements have appeared in numerous magazines and scholarly journals. The three which I will discuss were published in The New York Review of Books (NYR) and Harpers. As most U.S. intellectuals will testify, both publications are considered to be at the top of that prestigious scale where academia merges with mass media to form ‘aca-media’. Combined, the impact of ‘acamedia’ is self-evident and considerable, extending well beyond the ivory tower.
The first advertisement appeared in NYR in 1988 and by the end of 1989, bolder and more frequent announcements began to appear and continue to date. Although the samples overlap in many ways, a textual analysis offers some significant illustration of first, a confirmation of a genuine revival of religion at a broadbased ‘intellectual’ level, and second, academia’s belated response to this. Third, they encapsulate the intransigence of patriarchy and the paranoid delusions of grandeur of U.S. academia. Each ad begins with a bold caption. As reproduced below, the selected texts are in italics.

Advertisement #1: Religion and the Life of the Intellect. (NYR, 21.12.89)
Confirming the modern history of the western intellectuals’ view of religion, it begins with the statement that, in many intellectual circles the myth still circulates that religion is the preserve of the dimwitted and unlettered. (A subsequent adjectival addition was "irrational"). Suggesting that this is no longer true, it cites an article in the New York Times Magazine about the return to religion among intellectuals, thereby establishing the self reflexive and mutually reinforcing power of aca-media.
From Harvard to Berkley, states the text, and amid inquisitive people generally, there is an undeniable renewal of interest in the questions traditional religion raises and seeks to answer. This fascination is largely a result of the failures of secular substitutes for religion (such as rationalism, narcissism, technological utopianism, aestheticism, and extremist political ideologies) to give abidingly satisfying answers to the truly significant puzzles in life: goodness, suffering, love, death and the meaning of it all.
Familiar with the academic need to be ‘respectable’, the copy-writer(s) reassures the potential subscriber that this is not a marketing of New Age philosophies but something far more durable than those based on passing ideologies and enthusiasms. Similarly, while reflecting considerable awareness of the various debates in the academic world, the text takes pains to categorically state that nor does the new openness to religion signify a hostility to science, and technology. Thus far the text confirms the resurgence of religion in academic circles by the late 80s. However, having defended the possibility of the coexistence of religion and the life of the intellect, the last three paragraphs are typical of ‘acamedia’s’ self impressed arrogance: The New York Times Magazine article  discussed the New Oxford Review as part of this return  to religion and rightly so. We at the New Oxford Review are spearheading today’s intellectual engagement with what Daniel Bell terms “the sacred.”
Such statements are both amusing and infuriating.  Amusing, because there is the implication that by Daniel Bell having "termed" something, it therefore now exists and is worthy of serious attention. Never mind that both the term (the sacred) and its substance have self-evidently existed in the lives of the majority of humanity since time immemorial. Having divorced itself from the fact that religion is a vital part of one’s life, sensing the disastrous effects of this divorce, there is the attempt to re-invent, and claim such knowledge as originating (‘spearheading’) within the domain of western academic/intellectual activity. What is obscured is the fact that much of this production of knowledge is driven by a syndrome reflecting teenage male mores and games of one-upmanship, in this case, ‘publish or perish.’ Thus, turning to Daniel Bell’s ‘new’ terminology, can somehow render authentic the belated intellectual engagement with the sacred. (Since an ‘engagement’, intellectual or physical, implies two parties, one cannot help asking how the writers are sure whether the sacred is at all interested in showing up for such engagements, or similarly inspired quests for it?)
The point here is that religion seems to have become the latest game in an exclusively male arena. I am not so much lamenting the absence of women in the arena as simply noting, along with Teichman, that describing the inevitable nature of a romance in an all-male scenario is to be either impolite or politically incorrect.E1  But it is evident in the next ad.

Advertisement #2: Psst… Attracted by Religion but Afraid Someone will Find Out? (NYR, 16.08.90)
Without going into the details of Freud’s connections between paranoia and male homosexuality, one can note the metaphoric links with the ‘rooster factor’. The tone of the headline is reminiscent of the gay predicament of staying in (or coming out) of the closet and evocative of an existing paranoia about religion in general within academia.
Addressing itself to academics/intellectuals, the text states: But you’re a thinking person and you have been told by your peers that self-respecting intellects don't need "fairy tales" (sic). It goes onto urge that may be it’s time to think more deeply, cast off your inhibitions and probe the romance of religion. This can be done without feeling embarrassed if undertaken in the company of Bell, Lukacs, Lasch, Lerner, Cole and other path finders … who express themselves with passion, style and lucidity.
Apart from the homo-erotic undertones, one can perceive another particularly relevant fairy tale at work. It is the story of the Emperor who wore no clothes but who arranged things so that his subjects regularly applauded his magnificent ‘wardrobe’. Until one day a child witnessing one of these processions, blurted the truth. The posturings of western academia in the domain of knowledge about self, society -- and now increasingly religion, is quite similar to the self-impressed but naked emperor.  Journals such as the New Oxford Review, pander to, and sustain, the sense of grandiosity (‘spearheading pathfinders’). While the child(ren), in this instance, feminist theologians, scholars and Thirdworlders, continue to suggest a different  reality/perception.

Advertisement #3: Faith and Intelligence: Are They Compatible? (Harpers, November, 1991).
By 1991, the campaign had become committed to the proposition that faith and intelligence are decidedly compatible. The earlier tentativeness had given way to a confident and enthusiastic endorsement of an academic acceptance of religion. Thus, whereas earlier texts spoke of a religious renaissance from Harvard to Berkeley, now the movement extended from the Ivy League to Vanderbilt to Stanford. Similarly, earlier descriptions of the journal as an ecumenical monthly edited by lay Catholics have given way to an unabashed: A robustly Catholic monthly magazine, we support the teachings of the Holy Mother Church -- be they  doctrinal, sexual or social.
The point here is not to suggest that Catholicism per se is being ‘marketed’. Rather, it concerns the gradual emergence of religion from the academic closet and the change from being an almost persecuted/apologetic minority to almost aggressively (‘spearheading’), becoming "pathfinders" in a movement spanning the university spectrum. In the face of growing evidence about what had been denied/decried or ignored for decades; the subject of religion has now become profoundly important, fascinating, romantic to the extent of passion. And as the advertisements reassure us, we are in knowledgeable company. As always, one must rely on their specialization and expertise as sanctioned by the academic establishment and validated by the media.
Such intellectual somersaults are quite in keeping with the clinical criteria of paranoid delusions of grandeur. They are also reminiscent of a classic psychiatric tale about paranoia. A man believes he is dead. He says to his family, "I am dead". The family sends him to a specialist, at once the man and the doctor begin to argue. The doctor appeals to his feelings, about life and family. Then the doctor reasons with him showing the inherent contradiction in the statement ‘I am dead’; dead persons cannot say I am dead because that is what dead means. Finally, the doctor resorts to sensate evidence. He asks the man "Do dead men bleed?" "Of course not" says the patient, disdainful of the slow-witted simplicity of the scientific mind, "everyone knows dead men can’t bleed". At that, the doctor jabs the man’s thumb. Patient and doctor stare at the bubble of blood. "Well, whaddya know Doc", says the man, "dead men do bleed!"
In sum, the paranoid person is incorrigible.  Perceptions and reasoning support rather than contradict existing attitudes. And as the Bible of psychiatry tells us, "the permanent and unshakeable delusional system is accompanied by clear and orderly thinking."E1 As the texts suggest, while attitudes towards religion are changing, a basic arrogance regarding one’s capacities in knowledge of the subject, and oneself, remains the same. Hence the attempt to coopt/claim "the sacred" by citing Daniel Bell and a host of other high profile intellectuals such as Christopher Lasch and Robert Bellah.  By referring to them as pathfinders, the entire subject of a religious renaissance is coopted into the illusion of ‘new’ and ‘better’ information about it, provided that the experts remain in-charge. 
Finally, a personally paranoid postscript: A phrase common to all three texts is we are particularly interested in exploring religious commitments that yield humane social consequences, as exemplified by such giants as…. There follows a string of names, religious and secular, whose contributions are considered significant to the subject. Although it is a little odd for a non-westerner to find Moses, Jesus, St. Francis and Aquinas in the same league as Tolstoy, Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor, the list omits at least one name, which is highly significant. In the more than fifty names that the three advertisements refer to as having given us religious, literary and philosophical riches, the name of Mohammad, the prophet of Islam, does not appear even once. Similarly, there is not one writer, Muslim or otherwise, who is known for his scholarship on Islam. In short, on the face of it, the second largest religion in the world, having a billion plus adherents, simply does not exist or is not important enough in terms of religious social thought. While this may indeed be one’s personal paranoia, still, the omission of any reference to Islam is significant and noteworthy. Not least because the one indirect reference to it is in a negative context and dismissal of, the New Age movement: If you yearn to spring out of the iron cage of secularism -- but don’t want to land in the lap of the ayatollahs, cultists, or fundamentalists - subscribe today!

'Job' Description
The romance between the intellect and faith as advertised by the New Oxford Review is a romance between masculine academic fundamentalists and their theological counterparts. Two articles by Christopher Lasch in the same journal illustrate the dubious nature of this potentially dangerous, not to mention sterile, liaison.  The author of a number of academic best sellers, Lasch’s writings played a major role in the reconsideration of the Western ideals of progress and modernity.  Sharply critical of U.S. society, as in his best known book The Culture of Narcissism, he can be located at the intellectual forefront of the academic engagement with religion during the 80s and 90s.
In 1991, the New Oxford Review published a widely disseminated speech made by Lasch entitled "The Soul of Man under Secularism". Extracts were also published by Harpers under the title "Disillusionment with God" (July 1991). A critic of modernity and enthusiastically pro-religion, Lasch addressed himself to intellectuals and their notion of disillusionment as a sort of "maturity" which comes as a consequence of exposure to the "wintry blasts of modern critical thinking". As Lasch correctly points out, it is this experience of disillusionment more than anything else that has been held to distinguish the modern artist and intellectual from the "naive multitude":

… Unenlightened  ages past might be  forgiven  for believing things no educated person could, in the twentieth century still believe, or taking literally  mythologies better understood in a figurative or metaphorical sense ... but the bourgeois philistine lives in an  enlightened age, with  easy access to  enlightened culture, yet     deliberately chooses not to see the light. The intellectual alone looks straight into the light without blinking. Disillusioned but undaunted: Such  is the self image of modernity, so proud of its intellectual emancipation that it makes no effort to conceal the spiritual price  that has to be paid…

Lasch goes onto a powerful critique of the modernist mentality, especially its hubris about control over one's destiny and its juvenile insistence on the single minded pursuit of happiness: Unable to conceive of a God who does not regard human happiness as the be-all and end-all of creation, they cannot see the central paradox of religious faith: that the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.
By ruthlessly questioning, if not demolishing, the modernist position, Lasch does an excellent job of clearing away the debris and making a case for religious belief. But an examination of the elements of religion which are significant for Lasch leaves one with an eerie feeling of deja vu: Foremost in Lasch's conception of religion is the ideal of the God of Job: Religious faith asserts the goodness of being in the face of suffering and evil. Black despair and alienation -- which have their origin not in perceptions exclusively  modern  but in the bitterness always felt  towards a  God who allows evil and suffering to flourish... (my emphasis).
One can note here what perhaps, Lasch did not intend to bring to our attention. Not that  modernity is unique  in its existential angst, but the fact that in western-historical-intellectual  terms, it  seems to be  umbilically  connected  to "the  bitterness always  felt  towards a God". It should be noted that such bitterness is not endemic to adherents of all religions and one would be hard pressed to identify such an intense negative current in discourses within any other traditions apart from the Judaeo-Christian and its primarily masculinist interlocutors/interpreters.
For Lasch, the antidote to secular disillusionment is Faith/Fear.  In a strange way, he prescribes what he decries.  Initially he criticizes the modern intellect on priding itself for squarely facing "the wintry, blasts of modern critical thinking", which, he feels, has led it to an atheistic disillusionment mingled with "a black despair". Having done so, he then offers a view of religion which is so harsh that only the truly heroic would venture to explore it, leave alone adopt it as a way of life.
The modern world has no monopoly on the fear of death or alienation from God.  Alienation is the normal condition of human existence. Rebellion against     God is the natural reaction to the discovery that the world was not made for our personal convenience. The further discovery that suffering is visited on the just and unjust alike is hard to square with a belief in a benign Creator, as we know from the Book of Job (my emphasis).
As a Muslim, a woman and an Asian, there is much that can be disputed regarding what is 'normal' and 'natural'  about such matters. However, Islam is irrelevant to the present context.  There is no doubt that in the three monotheistic religions, God comes across as an all-powerful Creator whose prime concern is not the ideal of human happiness as exemplified in the U.S. Constitution. But to reduce the entire spectrum of Divinity and our religious faith(s) to a foundation of a seemingly senseless suffering and fear á la Job, is another matter. This simplification is of course not limited to just the academic world but permeates across so called thinking elements in the West, including the popular media. Time magazine (10.6.91) in its cover story on "Evil" posed the juvenile and simplistic proposition "God is all Powerful; God is all Good. Terrible Things Happen".
The statement is essentially descriptive of Job's predicament and beyond that is anchored in an infantile notion of religiosity. Ask a foolish question and get a foolish answer. The fact is that in no religion does God claim that S/He is exclusively just one quality. Similarly, as the very diversity of religions indicate, there are, infact, innumerable possibilities of style of relationship with the Creator, each emphasizing certain qualities/attributes in an overall Unity. Even the paradigmatic lives of the founders of religions suggest different emphases of relationship, divine/social, such as an eye for an eye versus turning the other cheek; or marriage versus celibacy.
An analysis of Lasch's view suggests that he considers the intellectual's salvation only in the psychological contemplation of that which faced Job. Overall, the article remains firmly within the context of faith-in-despair- and stoic suffering. As such there is nothing wrong in this approach to religion for those so inclined. But what interests me here, is the almost total lack of reference, not only to many other dimensions of the religious experience, but also to the emphasis on faith alone. Because when Fear dominates, there is no place for Love, Beauty, Wisdom, Compassion or Knowledge. One cannot 'see' too much else in "dark despair" or feel anything other than Fear.
Thus, after duly chastising his intellectual audience through an incisive postmortem of modernity, he suggests no way out other than to seek refuge in a dogged, and as such, a blind faith. Which is perhaps preferable to no faith at all and may well be the way of the ‘naive multitude’. But there is something amiss when such statements emerge from within an environment that lays claim to sole legitimacy in knowledge, what Addelson,E1 calls academia’s ‘cognitive authority’ on humans/society on the basis of extensive and specialized knowledge. But when it comes to religion, this authority/legitimacy relies only on our faith. Not only in its (academia’s) endeavors about secular knowledge but also, our faith in its approach to religious faith.
     Lasch's Creator is an exclusively male patriarch, stern, disciplinarian, vengeful; unwavering in His demand for human surrender to His Will, regardless of the fact that it is S/He who has also endowed us with numerous faculties, of logic, love, reason, humour and observations not to mention knowledge based on personal experience. Thus, one remains trapped in the same vicious circle: Whereas modernist rationality left no room for the religious impulse, Lasch's anti- modernity pro-religion stance leaves no room for reason and knowledge and remains firmly anchored in modern, Cartesian (masculine) modes of thought. That is, having defined rationality in a manner which demands certainty and singularity of meaning, and since the ego cannot give a 'rational' explanation for God, especially as He interacts with Job, will-power (faith) becomes paramount. Lasch's Deity leaves no room for the Feminine and is basically the fundamentalist view of God.


Pros and Cons: the Professor as Confessor
The arrogant attitude towards women’s spirituality is evident in another Lasch’s article titled "The New Age Movement: No Effort, No Truth, No Solutions."E1 It reflects the syndrome valorizing will-power, rationality, and the interminable heroic quest for final solutions. Appearing in the section on 'Religion and Philosophy' in another prestigious publication, the review of the article is authoritatively titled "New Age Nonsense."E2
Summarized briefly, both the review and the article suggest that the New Age Movement "invites a mixture of ridicule and alarm" but the discontent that the Movement addresses, is "supremely important". Not taking into consideration that the New Age has basically women at the vanguard, Lasch goes onto a description of the Movement but in a way that immediately reduces its legitimacy:
Actress-author Shirley MacLaine and other New Age enthusiasts have whipped up an eclectic mix of meditation, positive thinking, faith healing, environmentalism, mysticism, acupuncture, astrology, extra sensory perception, spiritualism, vegetarianism, organic gardening, ancient mythologies, chiropractic, herbal medicine and other ingredients.
As in the earlier article, Lasch again makes a strong case for the rejection of the modernist view, seeing the New Age Movement as a reaction to the rampant mechanistic materialism of western society. To this extent, he suggests that the "intuition" underlying the Movement must be taken seriously. However, he proceeds to dismiss the movement for being a "considerably adulterated" form of “a revival of the second-century heresy of Christian Gnosticism ...  the belief that the material world was created by evil deities and that salvation lies in the souls’ escape from the flesh into the spiritual realm whence it came.”
The definition of heresy depends on whose interpretation, whose hermeneutic one accepts.  In the context of Jewish/Christian orthodoxy, one can only point to some vivid images regarding heresy in the West as they are associated in popular consciousness:  Joan of Arc is one such image. As are those of women being burnt at the stake in sundry, literal "witch-hunts". Hans Duerr's scholarship casts significant light on the history of these witch hunts and their relationship with women and religion in the West.E1
Lasch's dismissal of New Age religions as a form of heresy is based on a narrow, typically academic view of Gnosticism. The dictionary defines gnosis as: "Superior wisdom, knowledge of mysteries and spiritual truths." It is frequently the experiential aspect to heresy and as such it has no 'history' and is present in every religion. Its "brief appearance" in the second century of Christianity does not automatically make it an event which occurred only then and peculiarly Christian.
Lasch's usage of these religious terms is reflective of the academic tendency to make categories for its own sake, similar to those which characterize the Orientalist venture regarding India and its philosophical, religious and ethnic diversity. Both the unique and universal dimensions of religion are made subservient to academic necessity, which is entangled and obfuscated in a knowledge that is both stultifying and worse, Euro Judaeo-Christian-Centric. Hence Lasch's understanding of Gnosticism as "an escape  from the flesh into the spiritual realm" is more informed by the Puritan horror of the body in general and the female in particular, rather than any understanding of  gnosis per se. In fact, as numerous scholars  have  shown, part of the problem with Christian heresy was its considerable emphasis on the sensuous. Similarly, as Spretnak has brilliantly argued about the significance of the New Age forms of goddess worship for women, among other things, it "celebrates the power of the erotic."

Spiritual Fitness
Lasch rejects the option of a compromise position in which faith and knowledge interpenetrate. This is unacceptable, because according to him, both New Age beliefs and fundamentalist Christianity have a "therapeutic" link with religion:
Both  rest on a therapeutic view  of religion, a belief  in its  immediate  power  to produce  health  and peace of mind... the  question is  not whether  New Age  therapies really  work but  whether  religion ought to be reduced  to a therapy. If it offers nothing more than a spiritual high, religion becomes another drug in a drug ridden society... the only corrective to the erastz religions of the New Age is to return to the real thing… (my emphasis).
    The problem lies not so much in gnosis/religion but in Lasch's modernist understanding and expectations of therapy: a therapy in which, western psychology/ psychiatry first market an inflated optimism and then strain to justify this optimism with unreal ideals of happiness and endless "emotional growth". While it is indeed foolish to expect a permanent 'high' from religion, this is very different from saying that religion has nothing to offer us by way of comfort and relief. Whether in secular therapy or in religion, the issue is not to find a total cure or 'final' answers/solutions but to find meaning, including, possibly an aesthetic awakening vis a vis our spirituality and life.
Secular therapy or religious systems provide frameworks of meaning in which we can make "sense" of our life. They provide a couch, so to speak, for especially those experiences which leave us feeling painfully raw and bruised. Thus, they enable us to cope, and not necessarily be 'cured', a desire which is a consequence of the absolutist illusions/expectations created by modern (heroic) medicine. One should not forget that while rejecting Judaism, Freud too offered a framework for meaning. The bleakness of Freud's vision, which Lasch deplores, is also traceable to Job. The only difference is that whereas Freud chose to rebel, Lasch suggests surrender -- but in both instances, it is rebellion/surrender from and to the God of Job.
The single minded focus on a stern, even cruel, facet of Divinity is evident from the contempt that Lasch has for the idea of New Age religion-as-therapy. Understandably so, since in the Yahweh/Job paradigm, there is no room for the concept of comfort or relief (nor laughter and humour), but just a masculine faith intent on proving its strength and stamina-in-suffering. While one can agree with Lasch's  view that the New Age movement lacks spiritual  discipline;  given the issues of  gnosis/heresy, women etc., it is more  logical that the  corrective balance be directed towards  a more rigorous  form of  gnosis. But Lasch rejects such a possibility, advocating instead what all fundamentalists urge: return to "the real thing". Thus, his understanding of "spiritual discipline" is essentially within the masculine/heroic framework of an extended spiritual-aerobics 'workout'. Similar to the modern medical view of fitness aiming to 'discipline' the body through extremely vigorous exercise: “Genuine religion aims  to produce  not inner  peace so much as a sense  of falling short -- the  result  being as much spiritual  discomfort and even  anguish  as emotional security”.
It should be clear that one is not suggesting that the philosophy of 'no-pain-no-gain' does not have a place within religion, New Age or Old. However, the notion of no-pain-no-gain in modern health systems is not a universally established law. Indian and Chinese systems such as yoga and Tai'Chi show that there are other, less brutal and more gentle and natural pathways to both physical and psychological health. The problem firstly lies in holding up Job's extreme distress as a model to the total exclusion of everything else. And secondly, it lies in the refusal to even acknowledge  that the feminist re-viewing  of 'the real thing', or the New Age  Movement, is in part, a response to precisely this sort of heroic, patriarchal, harsh, sadomasochistic, moral reductionism of the spiritual impulse. 

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
With Lasch's prescription of "the real thing" we come round full circle. It is forgotten that much of the feminist research into the symbolic and literal history of Judaism and Christianity was conducted precisely because the “real thing” did not provide a meaningful space for women's experience of spirituality. Radically re-visioned and re-examined feminist histories of these two religions, and the New Age Movement, obviously offer this space -- hence their popularity with many women. Similarly, whereas one can dismiss and even forgive the fundamentalist preacher's prescription of the 'real' thing as a view based on ignorance-leading-to-misogyny, Lasch's suggestion cannot be viewed in such a charitable manner. Academics have the required training, knowledge, exposure to fresh information etc. But in a situation of paranoia, facts have nothing to do with what is perceived. Rather than re-consider the 'real thing ' from these other, genuinely factual perspectives, Lasch's solution is to re-invent a prescriptive wheel which the Jewish/Christian fundamentalist preacher had never discarded:  Faith, plus Fear.
As a non-westerner, what I find amazing is the fact that in Lasch's suggestion to turn to the "real thing", whatever happened to the repositories of knowledge about almost everything under the sun that the modern academic institution/mind claims to base itself on?  If all we need is 'the real thing' which is obviously available, out there in the world of the priest/preacher and the Scriptures; what is the purpose of the considerable amount of re-search which has been done -- and continues to be done -- about different historical, cultural and psychological aspects of religion?  Apart from re-discovering and accepting suffering and pain (in the west), is there nothing else that the new found intellectual ‘compatibility’ and ‘romance’ with religion has to tell us? Fundamentalists presumably cannot think, but intellectuals are paid to do so. Is there ultimately no difference between the two? Do they (religion and intellect) simply co-exist, separately?  In a polite, grit-and-bear but basically baffled, stand-off? Is there any harmony? What about love which, if it is 'true', also invariably involves elements of knowledge, reason, laughter, compassion?
Such questions are perhaps irrelevant in the world of the "naive multitude" and to the fundamentalist, who, from the point of view of the intellectual is simple minded, and incapable of 'thinking things through'. But if the academic world is now laying claims to being "pathfinders" about religion while continuing to sustain  its (academia's) claims about knowledge  pertaining to  almost  every aspect  of  human life; then these questions need to be raised.
During the period in which religion and the life of the intellect were not considered compatible, many women were re-visioning western culture’s roots in Cartesianism and an excessively masculinized Judaeo-Christianity, and exploring the Alternative/New Age philosophies/variations. Much of this has essentially occurred outside the university. Now that it can no longer be ignored, and in the face of a reality of a steady decline of mainstream religion in the U.S., the academic mind has discovered his connections with faith. Thus, New Agers are told to return to the fold by those who originally sent them into exile.  It seems then, that dead men do bleed.
The increasing intellectual acceptance of religion has yet to absorb the feminist perspective and remains within the modernist paradigm. In many ways it is similar to the cooptation of the environmental movement by the same ideology against which it had initially arisen. As Sachs has observed, ‘survival of the planet’ is on its way to becoming the justification for a new wave of state interventions into peoples lives all over the world.E1
Freud’s exasperated question “what do women want?” awaits both a secular and spiritual answer from intellectuals. Whether the issue is environmental, sexual, emotional, physical or spiritual, the modern academic mentality manages to coopt it, thereby keeping alive the values and structures of its dominant concern: to perpetuate itself through a continuing upholding of patriarchy and power.

Endnotes:

*The paper is extracted from The Cultural Politics of Paranoia. Institute of Development Studies, University of Helsinki, 1991.