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{"id":4333,"date":"2011-05-29T22:31:15","date_gmt":"2011-05-30T02:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faithpromotingrumor.com\/?p=4333"},"modified":"2011-05-29T22:31:15","modified_gmt":"2011-05-30T02:31:15","slug":"my-private-obscene-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/faithpromotingrumor\/2011\/05\/my-private-obscene-secret\/","title":{"rendered":"My Private Obscene Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Zizek responds, \u201cWhat we are getting today is a kind of \u2018suspended\u2019 belief, a belief that can thrive as not fully (publicly) admitted, as a private obscene secret.\u201d (6). He speaks about the distancing from belief involved in those who follow the \u201ccustoms\u201d or \u201cculture\u201d of religion without really believing. Culture, he argues, is all of those things that we don\u2019t directly believe. In this regard, \u201cwe ultimately perceive as a threat to culture those who live their culture immediately, those who lack a distance toward it.\u201d (7) This assessment seems to perfectly capture the culture-wars internal to Mormonism, where each side perceives the other as a threat to the culture of Mormonism itself; one because it establishes a critical distance between the believer and the belief, and the other because it refuses to do so.<\/p>\n

The struggle between the immediacy of religious experience and the distance (or even disenchantment) defines the modern religious community. For Zizek, he sees three acceptable religious options in the postsecular world: 1) the return to polytheistic premodern religions where there is no cultural \u201cdistance\u201d between religion and the practitioner; 2) a sort of mysticism or vague spirituality rooted in Judaism or Gnostic Christianity that sees the divine as totally Other; and 3) what he sees as a Pauline organization of a community that is distanced from the historical Christ, seeing Christ as a set of fundamental principles. This last one he represents as the result of the Hegelian synthesis of the first two. Mormonism, one may say, is variously rooted in all three options, providing a reenchantment, a mysterium, and a community rooted in largely secular ethics. Yet, at the same time, Mormonism seems to reject all three as well. <\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s cut the crap. Is Mormonism necessarily premodern, offering unmediated access to an enchanted world that one either believes or doesn\u2019t (as Flake\u2019s formulation suggests)? Or, is Mormonism a source of a vague \u201cspirituality\u201d? For me, the answer is neither. But that third option is harder to articulate. In fact, this post has sat for a few months precisely because I can\u2019t yet articulate it. The answer is one that is situated in a postsecular openness to religion, but what hangs on the answer is more than just defining Mormonism, but rather religious subjectivity itself. Zizek seems to foreclose the option of \u201csuspended belief\u201d at the outset, but I\u2019m not so sure I am ready to give up that \u201cprivate obscene secret\u201d yet.I\u2019ve been rather fond of it. For me at least, there is a lot more crap to cut still. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"