So like, what do Trump and Jesus have in common?

On Wednesday, November 13, three panelists, a moderator, and a 30-person audience sat down in the Burke Library Reading Room at Union Theological Seminary for a conversation. The event featured Donovan Schaefer (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania), Emily D Crews (Executive Director of the Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School), and Pablo DeJesús (member of Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice). This particular event in the series titled “Shifting Paradigms of American Religion” was a sort of “bottom-up analysis” of the language of belief in the context of the field of Religious Studies and activism in religious spaces. The event also highlighted the broader consequences of the language of belief on a national and global scale. 

The moderator of the conversation, Justine Ellis (BC ’11), structured it into four broad questions, moving first from defining the language of belief to the concrete realities that belief creates in various contexts. 

The first topic of the discussion was the question (or rather, questions) of linguistic fallacy: is participating in institutional religion inherently an assertion of what one believes? Is belief given too much status in the religious studies field when it comes to defining a capital “R” Religion? In terms of the impact on the wider world, what can higher education institutions do in terms of reshaping a problematic discourse on the language of belief? 

Of course, these questions don’t have simple answers, but there were a few interesting points brought up by each panelist that each provided unique insights into the subject. Dr. Schaefer introduced the idea that belief, counterintuitively, lacks power; its unchangeable nature means that it also struggles to act as a catalyst for change. Dr. Crews further nuanced the conversation by highlighting the act of translation as another seemingly binary force (for a universal benefit or a universal detriment, she leaves it up to circumstance). She observed that members of the academic community tend to believe that the dissemination of knowledge is inherently good, and so any vehicle, especially that of translation, must be necessarily good as well. 

The second topic of the evening, the role and character of doubt in relation to religion, asked panelists to define the nature of doubt: is doubt always negative? Or is skepticism crucial to the public conversation and the individual confession of belief?

DeJesús reflected on his role as an organizer in coalition spaces, observing that the younger generation today (Gen Z) is moving away from institutional religion toward individual spirituality, yet still retaining that desire for what DeJesús called “fellowship.” As a result, there’s a trend of systemic doubt in America today. But that doubt, Schaefer and Crews agreed, can be valuable in the pedagogical sense: doubt can be disruptive and uncomfortable, but it forces people—especially students—to articulate their subconscious beliefs.

So there are these academic and institutional methods of defining belief in the vocabulary of doubt and knowledge. But what about those fringe conspiracies that link themselves to religion? The third topic of the evening addressed how belief could be defined in relation to conspiracy. 

Each panelist commented on the larger implications of conspiracies, most importantly, as a factor in and consequence of the recent 2024 Presidential Election. Schaefer began with the idea that conspiracies are frequently constructed to become instruments of mass falsification. Crews agreed, making reference to the “manosphere effect” as an example of the appeal of certain structures of belief: they feel good, comfortable, and as though they could reform the community that is gradually slipping from the public norm. 

The final topic of the evening asked panelists to speak on the manifestations of belief binaries in the current American political and social reality. How is the perpetual act of dehumanizing groups of people a reflection of the binary between reason and belief? 

Schaefer brought up the important idea that throughout history, the argument has been made that to be human is to be fully rational, so those who are not rational cannot be human (and therefore cannot have the same rights as other rational humans). The best example of this is the gender binary: for centuries, women have been cast as irrational beings, acting purely on emotion; this was the line demarcating human and non-human, man and woman. Panelists agreed that this rhetoric has punctuated Trump’s campaign. And yet, on the left as well, the rhetoric of labeling conservative talking points as “irrational” seemed to be an arrogant dismissal of what many Americans viewed as genuine problems. 

I spoke more with DeJesús toward the end of the evening about the anti-intellectual foundation of America and how it might contradict the historic trend toward intellectualism that happens in repeated eras of eschewing institutional religion. We ended our conversation on an open note: there are a wealth of factors beyond religion, belief, and intellectual definitions that pervade the American social consciousness—factors that were difficult to address within half an hour over a plate of vegan sushi. (Seriously, there was an entire platter of vegan sushi and I couldn’t tell that it was plant-based. Truly magical—a religious experience, if you will). The questions asked throughout the evening were, most importantly, questions of urgency: it’s easy to diminish religious factors as underlying or passive, but the political current of America is moved in loud and disruptive ways by religion.

Image via Columbia University Libraries