Monday Musings: Academia, Faith, and Secular Compartmentalization

Welcome to Monday Musings! I would like to start this series with a bit of an unusual post. While my other Blog days are more specifically oriented to certain kinds of content like books or film, this day is intended to be a bit more random. I have plans to cover things I have noticed about the world as well as some posts about this interesting academic world I find myself in at the moment and some posts offering advice on various parts of the degree process. Because I want to use this day to address the personal, religious, and academic, I wanted to start by spending some time discussing the divisions we tend to place between these kinds of topics. When I was planning this blog earlier this spring, a friend of mine recommended that I put my CV on this blog page. My first reaction was one of skepticism and hesitancy. I wasn't sure if I wanted people who knew my academic work to also know my reaction to certain books or my feelings about The Simpsons. I felt a divide and a part of me wanted to keep this divide in place. I decided in the end that I would merge things because while there are some differences between the way I might write for an academic audience as opposed to my more informal style, these are all my thoughts and I should be able to share all of the things I am thinking about without being too anxious about whether it belongs in Box A or Box B. Especially since thoughts tend to flow like a stream that may link together personal experiences, research, recent reading, video essays, prior knowledge, and even religious experiences. I don't think our minds have these boxes, even though our society certainly has divisions like this in place. So the question is, why do we go along with it?

I think there is a part of us that wants to be like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with a public face that can earn respectability and a more hidden part where we place the more controversial aspects of ourselves (This is not to say that the hidden part of ourselves is evil like Hyde, just that we keep it private and separate from our public personas at times). We may let some people learn about these more personal details, but not everyone. This public/private divide is part of it, but I think another part of this compartmentalization comes from secularism. While we generally put the secular as an opposite idea to what we may broadly consider as the religious sphere with things like the separation between church and state, I would say that the idea that the religious is incompatible with the political, academic, scientific, etc, is itself a secular idea. 

Recently I was reading from one of William Ellis' Missionary narratives Polynesian Researches, as part of my dissertation research. Ellis was a British missionary to Polynesia in the 1810s and 20s. While he and his companions wanted to convert the people of the various South Sea Islands to Christianity, he did not want to take over their government or other political structures. Because of this, the missionaries would direct any political questions to the ruling authorities. The people on the Islands pointed out that converting to Christianity had significant reverberations on their family structure, the justice system, and other parts of their social life. The changes in their religion came with changes to the other structures as well. It is clear from this interaction that the missionaries and the indigenous people had two different understandings of the interplay between religion and the secular. The missionaries expected that they could change the religion and nothing else, while the people did not share this division between religion and politics, so changing their religion meant changing everything.

Secularism has become a more common concept in my field of study because scholars today are working to question the assumption that the division between the political or social and the religious is the unquestioned norm. For instance, Lori Branch points out in her article on post secularism that people often assume that the secular is the default in literary studies because the people who initially developed this field did so as a space that was separate from the religious concerns. The problem is that so much of our literature addresses the spiritual. Like the mind, it does not have the same separations that we may want to impose on it. There are so many structures in place in our lives and culture that can easily go unquestioned unless we make it a point to challenge them. This is especially the case with things that we assume to be normal or a given. But I think that we ultimately gain more by questioning and investigating these supposed norms instead of just dwelling in the assumptions. Just because this division has been a major one over the past few years does not mean that this is the only way to analyze media or the world around us. I think we all should train ourselves to take a second look at these things, including our own assumptions.