In the preface, I told the story of an Orthodox priest who was convinced that the devil guided Karl Marx’s hand in writing Capital. When I told a young icon painter in Joshkar-Ola about this encounter, she neither derided the priest nor joined in his condemnation of the father of communism. Instead, she briefly paused to think, then asked if I thought Marx would have known. Another priest had once told her that a “spiritual person” (dukhovnyj chelovek) always knew “where his thoughts come from, which ones are his own, and which ones are induced from outside [vnushajutsja].” By implication, she was asking if I would credit Marx with the gift of spiritual discernment. If the devil had attempted to suggest ideas to him, would he have noticed, or would he have mistaken them for his own?
Few readers of this book are likely to worry about the devil’s capacity to infiltrate their thoughts. But the problem of discernment still stands as a challenge to any analysis that searches for similarities and changes across time periods or cultural domains. Borrowing Weber’s and Goethe’s concept of “elective affinity," I have pursued the spirit of didacticism through secularist and religious quests for transformation. As a way of mobilizing people into social activity through relationships of teaching and learning, didacticism involves a view of human beings as capable of the speedy and unlimited change of attitudes and behavior, and an understanding of objects, words, and practices as tools to induce such changes. Driven by activists who imbibed these principles during their Soviet secular training, religious revival in the post-Soviet era sometimes seeks to emulate and recreate Soviet educational networks, and sometimes keeps a tension-ridden distance. Throughout, it is clear that the religious and secular spheres are not governed by fundamentally different ethics or rationalities, but intersect in the lives of individuals and communities.
Acknowledging that the question of historical causality remains open, the point of positing an elective affinity between such phenomena as Protestant cell groups and Soviet study groups has been less to claim that one grows out of the other, than to look at how practices that have very different origins (or remote common roots) converge and give new meaning to each other. The Protestant-communist encounter in post-Soviet Russia is a new phase in a long dialogue between religious and political models for groups that are able to grow under legally, economically, or morally precarious conditions. In the cases of Russian Orthodoxy and Chimarij Paganism, by contrast, the didactic approaches that gained currency in Soviet secular culture influence religious traditions to which they had previously been less central, coming into friction with core assumptions about the means and ends of personal change. Understanding elective affinity as an ongoing interaction thus helps us to move away from the common narrative of the functional replacement of religious by secular elements and vice versa, asking instead what each sphere might owe to the other in a given situation.
In all cases, affinity is no harmonious give-and-take, but unfolds in a context of unequal relations between different religious communities and shifting secular powers. Even though the bloody persecutions ceased in the aftermath of the Second World War, the regulation of religious communities and intimidation of their members remained an integral part of Soviet secularism. And after the collapse of socialism, religious groups had very unequal room for maneuver when it came to deciding which elements of Soviet secular culture to use and to discard. But this is not a story of any one side imposing its standards and approaches on the others. Facilitated by a shared commitment to the human potential to grow over the course of a lifetime, transformational terms such as “spirit," “promise,” and “hope” travel across multiple religious-secular boundaries. In different historical traditions, they accumulate different meanings and values, but the common terms also create a field of intertextuality that makes conversations—including creative misunderstandings—possible.
Spirit is one of these traveling terms that stands simultaneously for the condition and the goal of transformation in a variety of traditions. For religious as well as secularist specialists, judgments about spirit are always to some extent open to doubt, because they require attention to the interplay of elements that make up a particular style. This is where the dilemmas of discernment experienced by religious and anti-religious practitioners intersect with those of less committed observers (Pels 2003). For example, when Weber asserts that the same “spirit" characterizes Protestant and capitalist asceticisms, he engages in a practice of discernment. When he first introduces the term “spirit of capitalism" in The Protestant Ethic, he characterizes it with the help of a “provisional illustration [provisorischen Veranschaulichung]” from the writings of Benjamin Franklin, but only after having noted that any representation of this spirit will necessarily be a creation of the scholar, “composed gradually out of its separate parts, which are to be taken from historical reality” (1922: 30). Later, Weber further decouples “spirit” from observable form by admitting that “the ‘capitalist' form of an economy and the spirit in which it is conducted generally stand in an ‘adequate' relation to each other, but not in a ‘law-bound' dependency" (49). Spirit is thus neither an abstract end point nor an observable fact, but a complex of qualities that scholars attempt to discern with something of the morphological interest which Goethe applies to plants, or church musicians to the unity of movement, mood, and purpose which they want a congregation to achieve.
Discerning a common spirit is always subject to disagreement, and such disagreements are as important an aspect of elective affinities as are resemblances. Throughout this book, we have encountered people who insisted that things that formally resembled each other were infused with a different spirit and, conversely, that outwardly very different things were manifestations of the same qualities. Where I saw a resemblance between communist study circles and Charismatic cell groups, church members insisted that the latter fostered qualities of leadership and responsibility that were the opposite of Soviet values. Where outsiders hailed ritual activity in Shorun'zha as an expression of the village’s enduring communal spirit, the collective farm chairman declared it to be a sad substitute for the cultural activities that once enlivened the Soviet countryside. Where atheist activists claimed that all religious liturgies equally overwhelmed the rational defenses of participants with a barrage of sensory stimuli, Orthodox theologians grouped Soviet events and Protestant worship together under the common label of “soulfulness,” in opposition to the spiritual serenity of Orthodox gatherings. From the perspective of engaged participants, affinity and perversion can lie very close together.
The distinctions made in these judgments can suggest alternative ways of drawing religious-secular boundaries. For example, where academic literature on secularism tends to treat it as an outgrowth of rationalistic modernity, some religious practitioners discern the spirit of secularism in the free rein it gives to the sensual imagination and the emotional attachment to human leaders. And while scholars sometimes shy away from criticizing religious commitments because this might distract from their aim to be self-critical about the social sciences' own roots in secularist paradigms, the vibrant inter-religious debates of the post-Soviet Volga region call into question the logic of that self-imposed restraint. Religious practitioners of various stripes can disagree with one another as vehemently as with their atheist opponents—and often on the subject of the “hows" of desirable transformations as much as the “whys" of doctrine. In this field of crisscrossing debate, scholars who reserve their critical faculties for the secularist side seem to absolutize the very division between secularity and religion they set out to question.
Among the concerns that unite all sides are the difficulties of learning discernment and of replicating this skill. Recall the Orthodox priest who bluntly stated that there was no way to teach someone to see the difference between a Chimarij sacrifice and an Orthodox liturgy through verbal explanation alone. Two converts between religious traditions—the bereaved mother who left the Baptist Church to become a Charismatic, and the Mari school principal who converted to Islam—mentioned a new capacity to discern the spiritual state of others as a sudden gift they received on conversion, through no learning effort of their own. From a secularist point of view, Theodor Adorno wrote that true learning consists of such skills as associating Henri Bergson’s philosophy with impressionist art, skills that are almost impossible to teach. Learning, for Adorno, has “no proper customs,” but depends most of all on the quality of “openness [Aufgeschlossenheit]” in the learner, “the ability to let something intellectual come close” (1971: 40).
If it is true that discernment defies methodical learning and explanation, but is always open to dispute, where does that leave the social scientist interested in how things diverge and converge over time? One could insist that historians and ethnographers only make analytic distinctions, while value judgments should be left to the lived worlds of our hosts and to the theologians of all sides. There were many moments during my research when I gratefully resorted to such professional self-limitation. It allowed me, for instance, to plead ignorance on the question of whether Marx would have known devilish whispers from his own thoughts.
But the boundary between the descriptive and the normative aspects of scholarly discernment is not always easy to maintain, and both secularist and religious movements often provoke more committed responses. The title of one history of Soviet science suggests that the Knowledge Society’s politically motivated popularizations constituted a “perversion of knowledge" (Birstein 2001). With the help of the deliberately mixed metaphors of “millennial capitalism" and “occult economies," John and Jean Comaroff (2000) identify affinities between emergent religious phenomena and neoliberal economies as based in a common perversion of previous ideals of social and economic emancipation. Whether the aim is a simple defense of the idea of scientific rationality or a dialectical critique of its shaky foundations, none of these scholars is afraid to evaluate the outcome of a transformative process nor to judge it for betraying important ideals.
Among scholars of postsecular religion, many are wary of such normativity In their understanding, the unexpected resurgence of public religion forces them to distrust their own capacities for discernment, because it challenges common narratives of modernity. Encounters with “the repugnant cultural other” (Harding 1991), the “docile agent” (Mahmood 2001), or with people who seem “at once too similar to anthropologists to be worthy of study and too meaningfully different to be easily made sense of” (Robbins 2003: 192), have led a number of anthropologists to adopt a stance of methodical distrust against their own intuitions.
Before falling into the extremes of either normative confidence in one’s own discerning capacities or systematic distrust of them, it may bear repeating that discernment is a difficult virtue in religious as well as secular traditions. One possible reason that it eludes methodical directives is that it depends on a kind of attention that does not result from being invited into a didactic public. The way of being attentive that Adorno calls “openness” is a virtue incumbent on the observer, not a response to active solicitation. Such uncalled-for attention can lead to observations that a historically informed anthropology is well equipped to make, such as noticing not-so-obvious connections across geographical and temporal divides, or looking for relevant differences behind claims of persistence.
In approaching materials from atheist and religious mobilizations, being attentive means questioning if secularism is always adequately described when it is equated with liberal modernity, and searching for broader comparative contexts among twentieth-century secularist projects. It means changing focus from general contrasts between secular and religious publics toward noting how atheist aspirations were transformed by the multireligious landscape of the Soviet Union even as they reshaped that landscape in their own image. Or, switching the scope of comparison once again, we might ask what happens to religious practice in various parts of the world as religious communities and religious entrepreneurs become the bearers of the transformative hopes that previous generations associated with secular institutions. Considering the powerful role that various forms of religious commitments play in politics both within and outside of North American academia, it may be justified to ask if some of the energy that currently goes into interrogating secularism would be better spent developing an equally sophisticated critique of the varieties of religious practice.
What follows from attention is not necessarily normative judgment, but rather interest, or, in the words of one of the characters who discuss chemical affinities in Goethe’s novel, the sympathetic sense of “participation” (Teilnahme) which grows in the process of attentive observation (1956 [1809]: 38). One might think of Hirokazu Miyazaki’s study of the hope of Fijian indigenous activists, where he warns that if the investigator simply seeks to replicate the hope of those studied, its forward movement becomes preempted into retrospective repetition (2004: 127). I have been pursuing the spirit of methodical didacticism through its fits and misfits with religious practices, above all because I place some hope in the human capacity to learn, a hope that I share with many of the people I encountered in the Mari republic, both in archival documents and in the flesh. If secular methodicians produced a distorted understanding of their religious competitors, one reason may be this very paradox of shared, but separate hope: in portraying the methods and goals of religious transformations as both overly similar and completely opposed to their own concerns, atheists strove to sustain the differences that would keep hope moving forward.