Interview: Clayton Crockett

‌Clayton Crockett is Professor of Philosophy and Religion, and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. Clayton started teaching at UCA in 2003, and earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 2008. He is the author of three books, most recently Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a book comparing two French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou.

How do you characterise the present debate or dialogue concerning religion and the public sphere?

I guess I would say that it's a complex and contested debate that is marked by the breakdown of liberalism and also along with that the breakdown of normative secularism.  I don't endorse the term postsecular because I think that the secular is still vital and still very much a part of our world and in both positive and negative ways. But I see myself as endorsing a kind of postsecularism which is also a vantage point that allows us to see how the religious and the secular are not opposites but work together and interact in many ways, and again does in both positive and negative. So that's the short answer. Do you want me to expand on that?

Maybe let's try to break that down a bit. So are you basing those remarks on the contexts you see in the US, or is this the US and you think it's slightly different in other parts of the world?

That's a great point. I think that you have to pay attention to national and regional contexts, but at the same time there's a global aspect to this and this is connected to what's going on with global capitalism which I think is global and so there are regional differences and variations and political ones as well. So the form that this takes would be different in different places.

But I do think that there is a certain generality to these remarks. At the same time in the United States, religion is still highly politicised namely in terms of conservative Christianity, even though that's less overt. The overt religious right has waned a little bit, although in the States what's associated with the Tea Party movement appeals to some of the same values, but it makes less explicit reference to religion. But in a global sense what the sociologist Jose Casanova calls deprivatisation is occurring and has occurred in different ways with religion so that's not simply in the private sphere. It can't be limited to the private sphere and this takes different forms in different places around the world and sometimes religion is seen as a cause of certain things that are going on, and other times a symptom or a marker.

But I think it's implicated in all sort of discussions and debates, at least in terms of spiritual values and sometimes that's expressed as religious and sometimes not. So even if you wanted to think about the state of Islamic countries that were obviously religious but highly deprivatised and politicised and then think about a case like China where religion as such, at least institutionally, is much less a part of the public debate. Even here I would argue that there are still interesting connections and implications. 

Ok thank you very much. So I'm interested in the fact that you don't particularly feel like proving the word postsecular. I know that's not exactly what you're saying but you kind of sign up to a notion of something out there called postsecularism. I'm just wondering if in the work that you've been doing whether you've come across any other term to describe the complex relationship between the religious and the secular or the religious and the public. Are there any other terms that you may be think are better to use in this context, that you've used yourself, or that you're experimenting with? 

Right, I think postsecularism is a good word and it goes along with sort of more broadly speaking postmodern and postmodernism which is where I come from; i.e. a tradition of radical theology and postmodern theology and so this notion of radical theology or even in my book that I wrote called Radical Political Theology we can sort of see the return of political theology as a discourse in among you know philosophers and that's not necessarily the affirmation or the endorsement of this or that politics, or this or that theology. But it is seeing how, at a certain limit, these become intertwined and most of these discussions reference German jurist Carl Schmitt and his thinking about sovereignty. So for Schmitt sovereignty has to do with the decision about the exceptional case and so when we're looking at what's going on with sovereignty in the world today it's a very, again, complicated issue but we're dealing with some permutations and possibly even breakdowns of traditional notions of sovereignty and we're trying to find a language to talk and think and theorise about it. 

Are you, as a matter of interest, somebody who subscribes this notion that the 21st century is in a sense associated with the nation state as a kind of entity that holds the debate or the ring between the religious or the secular, or are these divisions and dynamics being played across nation state boundaries as it were?

I think both. I've been recently reading Kojin Karatani's work and his most recently translated book 'The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange'. He's broadly Marxist even though he's more into a revised Marx, and he talks about this trinity of capital, the nation, and the state, and you really can't have one without the other two. So it's not simply that you have capitalism and then the nation state or the state of the nation disappears or doesn't exist, because the state has always enforced and reinforced and supported capital and money and exchange as well as vice versa. I don't know what's going to happen. I think that nation states are still crucial and important although they're just one side of the picture. But I think we're reaching real limits to growth, in ecological and environmental and natural terms, and what we call capitalism doesn't exactly work without growth, and so that's why you're having these crises and a lot of these difficulties with the recession in 2007/2008 along with ecological issues. Obviously, climate change is huge but also energy shortages as well. 

I mean regarding that issue of the limits to growth, do you see religion or religious ideas or religious tropes as having some impact on that for better or for worse? I mean do you feel pessimistic or optimistic regarding the kind of role religion can play in this very important area? 

Well both. I mean religion is, it can be a sort of a free variable in these discussions. I think that obviously religious or sometimes what are called spiritual values are promoting environmentally responsible practices and viewpoints. I think that religion is also used certainly to deny or discredit progressive and environmentally sustainable practices and ideas. We’re seeing, again that's a complex relationship, but there's a certain sense in which religious fundamentalism both in the United States and in the say the Middle East is represented as the only alternative to contemporary capitalism and so in that sense it is hostile to a lot of these environmental questions and issues and possibilities but it's also almost set up as if it's the default. There's only a kind of secular progress which is presented in capitalist market terms, or religious fundamentalism and I think religion exceeds that limited alternative framework. 

Okay, thank you very much. Where do you think this debate is going to go in the next five to ten years, this debate over this relationship between religion and the secular or religion and the public sphere, religion/state? 

That's a great question. Personally I'm not very good at predicting and it's very dangerous to predict. We can look at certain trends and I think the trend that I'm most tracking is the trend of growth and the difficulty of growth. Also the role of energy and money in that. So what I see happening is that you have this extraordinary concentration of wealth both within countries and around the world. So the rich get richer, and we can think of Thomas Piketty's book that's been widely read, 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century', as showing the details and data for this. I think that's because if you can't grow in absolute terms the only way it can grow is in relative terms in order to keep things going. And this has great costs and so energy doesn't run out, but it becomes less cheap, it becomes more expensive, it becomes harder to get at. That creates more extreme gradient differences between the depletion of resources in the world and the need for that energy by the growing population of humanity, but also the difference between the rich, the wealthy, the one per cent, the ten per cent or however you want to look at it, and the rest of the people. Or even the divide between the North and the South with traditionally wealthy nations with a higher standard of living, a welfare state as being progressively dismantled, and then the poorer countries that have been sold this line of development that they could eventually catch up. It doesn't seem like that's possible physically and geologically. So what's the role of religion in that? In a very limited sense, especially in the United States, we've seen a backlash against evangelical Christianity in the form of a kind of New Atheism; this may be also occurring in Britain. We're seeing a kind of intensification of a spread of popular, mostly secular culture, and that's at the root of some of reactions by the traditional aspects of faith in this country. We're seeing religion or again more broadly spiritual values and practices being tied to various aspects of revolt and these tend to be very tentative and experimental trying to do things different, trying to imagine a different world, trying to imagine a world beyond contemporary neoliberalism and what we can say as violent and savage form of capitalism. 

Have you got an example of that you could give? When you talk about that kind of gentle and tentative experimentalism in different ways of social order, did you have anything particularly in mind?

In the United States there's this emergent Christianity there's a kind of neo-monasticism, and so these attempts to searchingly feel out alternative ways of doing and practising religion and ways to link up with their kinds of social and ecological.

And the reason why you think that's not a particularly strong or effective counter-measure necessarily. 

We'll it's not strong enough at this point. It's possible it could become so, but at least in the United States political and cultural landscape it seems to be fairly marginal. But I don't want to dismiss or denigrate that. I think that as things shift with capitalism, with the economy, and I think it's tighter and contemporary ways of doing things become less and less possible, we're going to need more and more alternatives. And so that's why I want to affirm that these kinds of experimental practices, even if you can't look at anyone and it's necessarily making enough of a difference at this moment. 

I think I suppose what some of us in the UK are reaching for and possibly overreaching for is this idea of grassroots and experimental communities may be coalescing with other progressive movements within the non-religious sphere shall we say. So there's a big middle ground. And some anecdotal evidence suggests that in these spaces of rapprochement, people who describe themselves as faith-based and people who don't are coming together in quite organic and creative ways. This may or may not presage some new form of postsecular citizenship if you like, whereby you have an identity and you have an ideology or ideological view of the world, but you separate them creatively in a way which allows space for others and discourses to shape yours and you contribute yours and so on. I suppose how do you these ideas of postsecular citizenship develop in five to ten years? What's your sense of that as a kind of phenomenon?

Well I think that religion is going to in ten years play a role. It's just a question of how sort of loose or tight it's defined. And you talk about again the openness of people to be able to work together and interact with others who may or may not be religious or have a religious identity. So the strictness of that identity versus loosening up of this identity, I think that where it's creative is when it's willing and able to not cling to a strict identity and that some of these identifications are kind of politicisations and even manipulations of religion for various cynical ends. So there's something honest and really encouraging about the kinds of grassroots movements that you're talking about. I just think that what's important is not to see religion as just this or that, as a sort of neatly defined this or that identity, this or that kind of institution, this or that kind of value, and more focusing on what it can do in the world. And what it can do is in both practical terms but also intellectual and theoretical terms. So for me, I'm a thinker, I'm a theorist, I'm a strange kind of radical theologian, but probably more easily to think of as a certain kind of philosophy of religion trying to explain and understand, but I find that I can't understand [religion] without also thinking about things like politics and economics and ecology and money. And sometimes religion is more powerful ... and meaningful and important when analysed in those terms than looking at what we can conventionally call ‘religion’. And so what I call postsecularism helps me in terms of opening up that space for complex interaction and engagement at theoretical level. 

I guess we come to question four now, which is anything else you'd like to comment or reflect upon that's not been covered so far in our discussion. Is there anything else you'd like to say about your understanding?

The one thing I haven't mentioned which I've done work with is this notion of the new materialism. Just because I think it provides a perspective. I mean words are somewhat arbitrary and materialism is a problematic word, but what I like about what’s called the new materialism is that it's not a reductionistic, atomic materialism. For me it's about energy transformation. And really what I'm interested in most recently is this critical category of energy. Not just in political and economic terms but also in cosmological terms and thermodynamic terms. For me what I like about energy is that it can evade this dichotomy of matter and spirit so you can think about energy as flowing material, you can also think about it as spiritual as well. The Chinese have this term chi they use to talk about energy and it is a material thing, it is a physical material thing, but it's also always dynamic and transformative and it becomes purified or verified and it takes on a kind of spiritual connotation as well. For me to think about religion and politics and the public spheres and spaces that we engage and live in and enter into, I want to think about energy as what makes all of that possible. In a sense without reducing everything to a kind of reductionistic, deterministic view of energy, but a more complex one that works. 

Okay, just very quickly on a question from my point of view. To what extent does that definition of energy coincide with the notion of effervescence and religion? Where do you see energy come from, is it intrinsic, is it extrinsic?

Well, ultimately we don't know. Energy is based on the first law of thermodynamics. We don't know where it comes from. When we talk about entropy, when we talk about a kind of dissipation or loss, what we call organisational structure, we say that according to the second law of thermodynamics that usable energy can degrade, but we don't know where is that original order or structure or low entropic state, where does that come from, how does that emerge? I mean ultimately you could go back to the Big Bang, and you could look at this in a lot of different ways. If we think about effervescence as something added to something else, then I guess I would not fully embrace that. But if we think about everything having an intrinsic effervescence, people too have effervescence intrinsic to people, body, movements, language, practices, relationships, love, care, then I would endorse that. 

That's great. Clayton thank you so much indeed. Thank you very much indeed, hope you enjoy the rest of your day.