Fabricating Origins; Russell T. McCutcheon

Edited by

Russell T. McCutcheon [+–]

University of Alabama

Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).

Fabricating Origins builds on a series of posts that originally appeared, in earlier forms, at the blog for Culture on the Edge. In these posts each member of the group focused on the problem of origins, examining how we repeatedly conjure up an authorized past that suits the needs of the continually changing present. Fabricating Origins presses these short studies further by inviting ten early career scholars to each work with Culture on the Edge by applying, extending, even critiquing the group, to further illustrate for readers how talk of origins in the present is so much more interesting that being preoccupied with long past origins themselves.

The volume, like all books in the Working with Culture on the Edge series, is introduced and concluded by original, theoretically challenging but engaging essays. It provides a selection of ten main articles which draw on a variety of examples to make the case, followed by original commentaries on each, all of which are pithy but substantive. Although not a textbook, and while challenging for any reader unaccustomed to making the switch from origins to the discourse on origins, Fabricating Origins is especially aimed at the early career reader. The volume therefore includes an annotated set of suggested readings on how to rethink origins as the product of contemporary and always tactically useful talk and action.

Series: Working with Culture on the Edge

Preliminaries

Preface [+–] ix-xi

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Building on a series of posts that originally appeared, in earlier forms, at the blog for Culture on the Edge—in which each member of the group focused on the problem of origins, examining how we repeatedly conjure up an authorized past that suits the needs of the continually changing present—Fabricating Origins presses these short studies further by inviting ten early career scholars to each work with Culture on the Edge by applying, extending, even critiquing the group, to further illustrate for readers how talk of origins in the present is so much more interesting that being preoccupied with long past origins themselves. The volume, like all books in the Working with Culture on the Edge series, is introduced and concluded by original, theoretically challenging but engaging essays, and provides a selection of ten main articles, all of which draw on a variety of examples to make the case, followed by original commentaries on each, all of which are pithy but substantive. Although not a textbook, and while challenging for any reader unaccustomed to making the switch from origins to the discourse on origins, Fabricating Origins is especially aimed at the early career reader. The volume therefore includes an annotated set of suggested readings on how to rethink origins as the product of contemporary and always tactically useful talk and action.

Introduction Midnight in the Study of Origins [+–] 1-8

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

An introduction to the book and the thoughts and ideas that lead to it being written.

1 Buying Origins

1. Our Sofas, Ourselves [+–] 9-11

Leslie Dorrough Smith

Avila University

Leslie Dorrough Smith is Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University and a member of the Women’s and Gender Studies faculty.

Of the myriad ways in which identities are constructed, telling the origin of something often acts as a natural authorizing statement.

2. Our Stuff, Our Stories [+–] 12-15

Kate Daley Bailey

We can be sure that both individually and socially we construct stories about ourselves and our society by tethering various meanings and values to the objects with which we surround ourselves.

2 Techniques of Then and Now

3. When the Stakes Are High [+–] 16-17

Vaia Touna

University of Alabama

Vaia Touna is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She is author of Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities (Brill, 2017) and editor of Strategic Acts in the Study of Identity: Towards a Dynamic Theory of People and Place (Equinox, 2019). Her research focuses on the sociology of religion, acts of identification and social formation, as well as methodological issues concerning the study of religion in the ancient Graeco-Roman world and of the past in general.

Individuals and groups resort to telling origins stories to secure a certain position—whether that is to gain a status of worthiness in relation to a friend and among family members or as groups in relation to other groups—when either the maintenance of the status is fragile or, threatened by another challenger (real or imagined).

4. High Stakes on the High Court [+–] 18-20

Mike Graziano

University of Northern Iowa

Michael Graziano specializes in American religious history. He teaches religious studies at the University of Northern Iowa.

In the past few years, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken on a number of high-profile cases, the justices have embraced cases that have high-stakes implications for American law. Though dealing with different issues, each case relied upon appeals to the historical origins of the Constitution—in theory, the supreme law of the land in the United States—in order to determine what rulings should be made in the present.

3 Pick a Past, Any Past

5. The Politics of Choice [+–] 21-23

Craig Martin

St. Thomas Aquinas College

Craig Martin, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College. He writes on discourse analysis and ideology critique; his most recent books include Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (Bloomsbury, 2014) and A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2017).

George Washington’s Sacred Fire (2006)—in which Peter A. Lilback argues that “founding father” George Washington was a Christian and not a deist—garnered a great deal of media attention when first published. Craig Martin discusses this book and uses it to consider different points of view.

6. The Origins Games [+–] 24-27

Karen de Vries

Karen de Vries proposes that we think of what Martin calls “individual readers’ sympathies” as a relationship between the origin story and the reception of that story as authoritative. Readers inclined to be persuaded by a particular version of a story are those who trust that a story (and its fabricator) conveys something they might call “the truth” or statements about the world that they consider reliable. Individuals sympathize with those they trust, and those one trusts are typically those perceived as protecting or advancing one’s interests in the game of life.

4 Selling Identities

7. One Coffee Bean at a Time [+–] 28-30

Monica R. Miller

Lehigh University

Monica R. Miller is Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University (Fall 2013) and among other publications, author of Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge). Miller currently serves as a Senior Research Fellow with The Institute for Humanist Studies
(Washington, DC), is Co-Chair and founder of Critical Approaches to the Study of Hip Hop and Religion Group (American Academy of Religion) and member of the Culture on the Edge scholarly collective (University of Alabama). Miller is co-author of forthcoming volumes, Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the New Terrain with Dr. Anthony B. Pinn and rapper Bun B (Bloomsbury Press), The Hip Hop and Religion Reader (with Dr. Anthony B. Pinn) (Routledge) as well as an edited volume on identity, Claiming Identity in the Study of Religion (Equinox). Her work has been featured in a host of regional and national print, radio, live video, and TV news outlets. She has presented her research at colleges, universities, and conferences throughout the U.S., Cuba and Canada.

Monica Miller considers the wording of an advert for coffee, seen while waiting in line for an americano, and asks How do you study origin narratives? Asked differently, where and when do your coffee beans grow?

8. Marketing Christian Roots [+–] 31-34

Steffen Führding

Leibniz University Hannover

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Steffen Führding teaches at the Department for the Study of Religion at Leibniz University Hannover. He has published on the history of the study of religion and theoretical debates within the discipline, including Jenseits von Religion (transcript, 2015).

Steffen Führding considers ‘What is Europe?’ after the headline of a newspaper article drew his attention – bold and in black letters you could read, that Angela Merkel, German chancellor then and now, was looking for Christian references in the constitutional treaty of the European Union.

5 We Are What We Choose to Recall

9. Remember the Ala-what-now? [+–] 35-37

K. Merinda Simmons

University of Alabama

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K. Merinda Simmons is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Director of the Religion in Culture MA Program at the University of Alabama. Her books include Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (Ohio State UP, 2014), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (co-edited with Houston A. Baker, Jr., Columbia UP, 2015), and Race and New Modernisms (co-authored with James A. Crank, Bloomsbury, 2019). She is editor of the book series Concepts in the Study of Religion: Critical Primers (Equinox).

What and how we remember appear to say way more about the person or people remembering than they do about the supposed “thing itself” being remembered.

10. We Are What Archive [+–] 38-41

Elonda Clay

Elonda’s research interests include bioscience, myth, and entertainment media; media portrayals of genetic ancestry and the genomic imaginary; Media, Religion, and Culture, Critical Approaches to Hip Hop and Religion, Africana religions and ecology, and U.S. African American religious thought. Clay holds graduate degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia (M.A., Library and Information Science), the Interdenominational Theological Center (M.Div.) and LSTC (M.Th.). She received her undergraduate degree from Kansas State University (B.S., Physical Science) and is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) Award, the Fund for Theological Education Doctoral Fellowship, the Woman of Color Scholarship (UMC), and the Summer Leadership Institute at Harvard University.

What ends up getting commemorated and what ends up fading from memory depends not on the key moments in an institution’s racial integration timeline, but rather on who is telling the story of how legal racial segregation ended and thus how they choose to reassemble the story’s details, where they filled in the gaps and with what.

6 Constituting and Contesting the Nation

11. Patricide and the Nation [+–] 42-44

Steven W Ramey

University of Alabama

Steven W. Ramey is a Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies Program.

Steven Ramey considers the founding of India and Pakistan and the violence that has resulted from this, including attacks in Pakistan the day before Fathers Day in the USA.

12. Our Disparate Fathers [+–] 45-47

Alexis Glenn

Instances of symbolic patricide, contends Alexis Glenn, do not constitute an ideological conflict over a singular, unified concept of the nation, but are, instead, representative of divergent understandings among individuals and between parties within “the nation.”

7 Knowing When Not to Laugh

13. Searching for Chimaeras [+–] 48-49

Vaia Touna

University of Alabama

What (or better phrased how, who, and towards what ends) makes certain chimaeras more real than others and therefore worth pursuing.

14. “A Joke’s a Very Serious Thing” [+–] 50-52

Tara Baldrick-Morrone

Florida State University

Tara Baldrick-Morrone is a Ph.D. candidate in Religions of Western Antiquity at Florida State University. Her research considers how early and modern Christian communities use discourse about abortion to create difference and define the boundaries of normative Christian identity.

Nietzsche does not make the move to say that the “evil” leaders and teachers prevail by masking the “new” as the “old,” Tara Baldrick-Morrone pushes his playful manipulation of what we understand as “good” and “evil” into new territory.

8 The Good Old Days

15. The Way We Were…? [+–] 53-55

K. Merinda Simmons

University of Alabama

View Website

K. Merinda Simmons considers how nostalgia sells, and the truth of what we are actually remembering.

16. The Way We Worked… [+–] 56-59

James Dennis LoRusso

Independent Scholar

James Dennis LoRusso currently serves as Vice President of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. He is a former Associate Research Scholar in the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, USA and is the author of Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business: The Neoliberal Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capital (Bloomsbury, 2017).

James Dennis LoRusso argues that the nostalgic views about “work” in Jerry Maguire are nothing new, but rather part of a much longer tradition of reimagining the meaning of “work” in American popular culture, evident particularly in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman.

9 A Little Ambiguity Goes a Long Way

17. Coloring Columbus [+–] 60-62

Leslie Dorrough Smith

Avila University

Leslie Dorrough Smith is Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University and a member of the Women’s and Gender Studies faculty.

I am the parent of three children, two of whom are elementary school-aged. As such, I have now twice been handed an line-drawn image of Christopher Columbus that they each have dutifully colored, which appears to be a requisite kindergarten activity at our local public school. Because of the historical evidence that details Columbus’s systematic torture and murder of the peoples whose lands he colonized, I have always found this exercise something akin to coloring a picture of Saddam Hussein or some other such figure.

18. Tracing the Visible and Invisible [+–] 63-69

Martha Smith Roberts

Fullerton College

Martha Smith Roberts is Assistant Professor of Religion at Fullerton College. Martha’s teaching covers all aspects of religion in culture and the diversity of religious traditions around the world. Her research and writing focus on North American religious diversity and pluralism, race and ethnicity, new religious movements, and religious studies pedagogy. She has written articles on hula hooping, communities of practice, antiracist pedagogy, and religious diversity and pluralism in the United States.

Smith’s discussion about, colouring Columbus, asks us to examine the representations of American history and identity that are presented as natural and neutral, especially those that we use to educate the next generation of Americans.

10 A Genealogy of the Past

19. Writing a History of Origins [+–] 70-73

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

How, then, do we write a history of origins? Well, start with whenever you hear, or whenever you read, “In the beginning…” (or any of its variants, such as “When I was a kid…,” “The Founding Fathers said…” or “The author intended…”), being sure to keep your eyes and ears on the storytellers, and the moves they make, and not get carried away by their tales.

20. Competing Christs [+–] 74-76

Brad Stoddard

McDaniel College, Westminster, Maryland

Brad Stoddard is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He has degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, Yale Divinity School, and Florida State University. His research explores religion and public policy, particularly as they relate to criminal justice policies in the era of faith-based initiatives.

It appears as though the search for the “historical Jesus” and American history are inseparably tethered to our present-day interests.

Afterword

Origins Today [+–] 77-92

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

What is origins today? I shall give at the outset a first, very simple answer: claims of origination are a form of speech or writing and, as such, they are acts in the present for social effect in that present situation’s imagined future.

End Matter

References [+–] 93-94

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Suggested Films [+–] 94-96

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Reviews

On the surface, the book appears more cultural studies than religious studies, but this is in fact the book's greatest strength: the essays force us not only to recognise the persuasiveness of origins narratives, but also to consider how intertwined religion is with the other social institutions.
Religious Studies Review