David Chidester and Edward Linenthal, eds., American Sacred Space (1995)
American Sacred Space, edited by David Chidester and Edward Linenthal, is a pioneering collection of essays about an overlooked topic in American religious history. Especially helpful is the editors’ thoughtful opening essay addressing the issue of what is “sacred” and “American” about American sacred space, why it is important for the study of religion, and how they depart from earlier approaches to the subject. The heart of their argument is that spaces are made sacred through human religious practice and cultural labor. Rejecting the “mystical intuitionism” of earlier theorists like Mircea Eliade, Chidester and Linenthal assert that the sacred is not a given or substantive quality in the world before human culture comes to bear on it. “Sacred”—as an adjective, never a noun—is always situational, enacted by a particular group people in a specific historical time and place (6). In this project, they echo J.Z. Smith and certain strands of Gerardus van der Leeuw.
Chidester and Linenthal describe three central modes of the production of sacred space: ritualization, interpretation, and contestation. First, sacred space is ritual space, a site of formalized and repeatable performances. Drawing on Bourdieu, the editors argue that space further comprises part of a habitus, in which occur disciplines, techniques, and gestures of the body. Puritans, for example, were careful custodians of their ritual spaces in the interests of maintaining purity (11). Second, sacred space is produced through a process of interpretation and a discernment of meaning. Cultural values are invested into the space, and the space is made to ventriloquize those meanings. In other words, space plays a central role in the symbolic ordering of the world. Third and finally, “sacred space is inevitably contested space” (15). The processes of ritualization and interpretation are rarely politically neutral; such processes often, whether intentionally or otherwise, stake claims to power. In the nineteenth-century, for example, the sacralization of American spaces was often used to justify conquest and promote nationalism.
The editors go on to describe what is distinctively American about American sacred space. Though they insist that each production of sacred space is particular and must be historicized, they think some generalizations can be made. They name seven: America is characterized by frontier situations of intercultural contact, a litigious spirit which often adjudicates sacrality in the courts, a “distinctive managerial ethos” related to the Christian ethic of stewardship, a drive towards commodification, the effects of the “information revolution” or cyberspace, a nationalistic orientation, and finally, a kind of public enactment of religious attitudes and practices, or civil religion.
All of the authors of the volume engage some of these motifs in one way or another. Robert Michaelsen summarizes Native American engagements with the American legal system in their campaign to reclaim sacred lands. Bron Taylor discusses the beliefs and rituals of pagan environmentalists like Earth First! and analyzes their public debate with Native American activists. Matthew Glass chronicles the cultural contest in the making of Mount Rushmore. Colleen McDannell posits that homeschooling American evangelicals limn a sacred space in the home. In an essay about the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Linenthal considers the bellicose discourse around its construction. Chidester’s contribution surveys the evolution of South African perspectives on America.
Rowland Sherrill offers a dissonant closing essay to the volume. His essay is a nostalgic and romantic lament over the “fragmentation of selfhood” in contemporary America, which in his mind has profaned our collective potential for appreciating sacred space, as well as diminished the possibility for a common identity and a shared sense of meaning. Everywhere in America today, Sherrill asserts, we see reminders of “something gone dreadfully wrong” (327). A recovery is needed of homo religiosus Americanus (331). He ends on a hopeful note, citing American resilience and ingenuity (336). This is a strange closing indeed for a collection that started by disdaining mystical intuitionism, distancing itself from Eliade (who coined the term "homo religiosus"), and declaring its skepticism for all ideological projects.
One thing that I found wanting in Chidester and Linenthal’s otherwise sophisticated opening essay was a discussion of the materiality of spatial environments. Indeed, Chidester and Linenthal, writing in 1995, seem to effortlessly align with the linguistic turn of poststructural analysis, in which everything functions as a sign or symbol, to be read for its "meaning." They write:
As an arena of signs and symbols, a sacred place is not a fixed point in space, but a point of departure for an endless multiplication of meaning. Since a sacred space could signify almost anything, its meaningful contours can become almost infinitely extended through the work of interpretation. In this respect, a sacred space is not defined by spatial limits; it is open to unlimited claims and counter-claims on its significance (18).
In their laudable aim to see sacred space as always made and remade by human actors, against the claims of Eliadians, Chidester and Linenthal have forgotten that humans are always acting within specific material worlds, which set limits and provoke certain kinds of behaviors, as well as provide continual fodder for human creativity. To stake a claim for materiality in this larger discussion of sacred space is one of the goals of my own research.
