RELIGION, LANGUAGE, AND AFFECT

Power is a thing of the senses. — Kathleen Stewart,Ordinary Affects

In God Is Not One, Boston University professor Stephen Prothero places religion on the dissection table and finds it to contain four parts: there is a problem, then a solution (the "goal" of any religion); there are techniques for reaching this goal and exemplars who lead the way. In Christianity, for instance, the problem is that the world is sinful; grace through Christ or faith or works is the solution and the practice; Jesus the mythological figure is the exemplar. Although Prothero acknowledges the usefulness of Ninian Smart's model of religion as constituted by multiple "dimensions," of which belief is only one, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that assessing all religions as beginning with problems fundamentally orients religion to a cognitive-linguistic axis. In such a scheme, language and power form a smooth, hydraulic system without remainder: "people act every day on the basis of religious beliefs and behaviors that outsiders see as foolish or dangerous or worse," Prothero writes. "Allah tells them to blow themselves up or to give to the poor, so they do. Jesus tells them to bomb an abortion clinic or to build a Habitat for Humanity house, so they do. Because God said so, Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe thatthis land is their land, so they fight for it in the name of G-d or Jesus or Allah." Religion, for Prothero, is a grid of linguistic commands, a current of force from concepts and beliefs to moving bodies.

This model is no doubt useful in many contexts, and Prothero is exactly right to push back on the tendency to extract religions from a historical frame by flattening their conceptual differences. But the problem-based model is also an illustration of the linguistic fallacy: Prothero locates power within symbol systems, of which religion is one example. In this, he builds on a linguistic template developed by religion theorist Jonathan Z. Smith that is in the background of several contemporary projects in religious studies. For Smith, the "human sciences" — including religious studies — become "conceptually possible largely through the acceptance of the argument that their objects of study are linguistic and language-like systems." This comes across in Smith's analyses of the zone of overlap between power and religion, which highlight how systems of power are led and maneuvered by symbol systems. Smith argues that religion is best understood as a worldview — "a culture's or an individual's symbolization of the cosmos and their place within it" — that is shaped by social processes. Smith imagines a speaking, thinking-knowing subject as the indivisible unit of systems of power. In Smith's