What Would Jesus Read?: Scenes of Religious Reading and Writing in Contemporary America

Erin A. Smith

This paper is based on participant-observation of a religious reading group affiliated with a Unitarian Universalist church. It examines the ways individual readers take up mass-marketed books as resources for forming spiritual communities / support groups and for (re)creating class, gender, and religious identities. I am interested in the role of books and reading in creating what David D. Hall calls "lived religion" in America, and in investigating relationships among mysticism (personal experience of the sacred), organized religion, and the mass media.

Members of this reading group can be characterized as what Wade Clark Roof calls "spiritual seekers," individuals with fluid, dynamic religious styles who move freely in and out of congregations across the life course, cobbling together a set of spiritual practices by combining elements of various traditions. Seekers are disproportionately women, and they tend to be older, professional, well-educated, and have liberal political views. They often blend their religious/spiritual journeys with the study of art, philosophy, science, and psychology - synthesizing language and images from various sources into a distinct worldview.

Specifically, I investigate how discussion of popular titles related to "the new Gnosticism" - Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief (2004) and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) - allow readers to hash out - individually and collectively - what Nancy Ammerman has called religious identity narratives. Through these texts, readers explore what it means to be women in a patriarchal religious culture and what it means to be embattled religious liberals in the Bible belt. UU readers easily map their own sense of being a religious/intellectual aristocracy onto the early Christian heretics we know as the Gnostics. Popular (if sometimes inaccurate) readings of the Gnostic gospels recreate Christian tradition in ways that reclaim "heresy" as a profoundly ethical position of reasoned dissent from irrational, absolutist creeds.

These ways of creating a usable religious past have profound consequences for contemporary cultural politics. Although these religious liberals share many of the life circumstances of evangelical women discussed by scholars like R. Marie Griffith, Lynn Neal, Amy Johnson Frykholm, and others, they define themselves - to a person - against a conservative Christian "Other," whose unquestioning embrace of orthodoxy serves as a foil for their own courageous spiritual seeking. Nonetheless, their ways of reading, the therapeutic worldview that structures their discourses, and the ways they create religious communities overlap significantly. Religious liberals and evangelicals read different books for similar reasons - to (re)create religious identities, to restore women to the center of religious life, and to place themselves in history as important religious actors.