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Subverting
the Holy Binary
by: Miranda Morris
“…one
informant said that the campiest thing he had seen recently was a
Midwestern football player in high drag at a Halloween ball.
He pointed out that the football player was seriously trying to be
a lady, and so his intent was not camp, but that the effect to the
observer was campy.”
Esther Newton relates this
anecdote in her 1972 classic, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in
America, in the context of explaining unintentional camp.
Camp, in Newton’s work, is characterized as the active
juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated things to generate a way of dealing
with an identity that is somehow problematic.
Newton’s text is focused on the relationship between gay male
performers and drag, with mixtures of masculine and feminine being the
most common. “But,” she
says, “any very incongruous contrast can be campy.
For instance, juxtapositions of high and low status, youth and old
age, profane and sacred functions or symbols, cheap and expensive articles
are frequently used for camp purposes.”
Imagine, in light of the image of the serious football player
trying to perform femininity, another deceptively serious image.
A group of people is gathered in a large convention hall or church.
They are there to worship God, in their nice clothing, ready to
sing hymns and experience their inclusiveness in a religious group.
The preacher begins to preach and bursts of laughter swell up from
the audience. Someone stands up and begins to swagger around, giggling, and
twitching. Peals of laughter
begin to spread through the whole place until the preacher’s words are
totally obscured in the noise. Then
the preacher begins laughing, and the music begins to play…
This is a common scene in
many Fundamentalist Christian congregations that are currently engaging in
the practice of Holy Laughter. In fact, this is most likely a rather tame example.
The juxtaposition of the serious reading of the scripture and the
dissolution into laughter is strangely evocative of Newton’s description
of the boy dressed in drag. These worshippers are deadly serious about their worship.
In fact, they find it to be, despite the entire word-oriented
tradition from which they spring, the only true way of experiencing the
Holy Spirit. Like the
football player, they are engaging in a rather convincing display of
unintentional camp. In the
case of each, it is only as an outsider looking in that the juxtaposition
that Newton speaks of becomes clear.
And it is in light of such drag theories as Newton’s that I am
interested in delving into some of the motivations of the Holy Laughter
movement and some of the surprising cultural work it is doing in terms of
subverting the mother of all binaries: that of the sacred and the profane.
Introduction
The
Holy Laughter movement has been variously described as contemptuous,
offensive, counterfeit, demonic, satanic, and evil, and holy, blessed,
authentic, angelic, and a gift from God.
In the ostensibly rigidly delineated binaristic world of modern
Christian fundamentalism, the movement has caused and continues to cause
tremendous dispute and division. Practitioners
are variously called charlatans, Satanists, possessed by demons, and
unholy, while they themselves appeal to the joy that they feel in these
experiences to assert that they are indeed of God.
So
what is this movement all about, exactly, and what are its historical and
theological foundations? The
Holy Laughter movement, as it will be understood in the course of this
paper, is characterized by uncontrollable outbursts of laughter often
caused through contact with a minister who has the Gift or through contact
with a congregation in which it manifests, believed by those who defend it
as being caused by the Holy Spirit visiting Itself upon a person.
Though this experience has its origins well before the current
revival, and though it has had occurrences at many different points
throughout history, this paper will focus on the most recent Holy Laughter
movement, as it is understood by many modern Christians, as being
associated with the Vineyard movement and the Toronto Blessing, and of
being typified by such congregations Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship
church and the followers of Rodney Howard-Browne and Benny Hinn.
Looking predominately at web pages that provide testimonials of
people involved as participants and as opponents, and dealing, to a
limited extent, with two personal interviews conducted with participants
in the movement, this paper will examine the Holy Laughter movement in its
context as a spiritual phenomenon in conjunction with similar bodily
manifestations of the Holy Spirit.
The
metaphors in which opponents to the movement speak, and the oppositions
that are set up by people on both sides of the movement are very
interesting in their similarity to the distinctions that recent postmodern
theorists like Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Helene Cixous have
worked to break down or subvert. This paper will examine the Holy Laughter
Movement through the lens of Drag and Queer Theory to show how the
movement has a spirit of a post-modern activism which has the effect of
dismantling the binary of the sacred and the profane in a way similar to
the way drag, feminist, and queer theories have worked to dismantle the
binaries of sex, gender, and performative sexualities.
My
goal in this paper is not to show any fundamental similarity
between drag and Holy Laughter. Rather,
I think that Queer theory and theories of drag have a lot to offer an
analysis of the Holy Laughter movement in terms of a discourse of binary
subversion within Fundamentalist Christianity that has barely been
explicitly acknowledged. I
will first of all provide a general overview into the way in which the
discourse of Holy Laughter can be read through Queer theory.
Using a model of compulsory sacredness that is based on
Judith Butler’s compulsory heterosexuality, I will trace the
Durkheimian notions of sacred and profane in the context of the current
manifestation of the Holy Laughter movement. Using Marjorie Garber’s theories on drag, I will examine
the presence of drag figures in Christian tradition itself and propose a
sort of postmodern quandary that has roots as far back as the instatement
of the unshakable holy binary itself.
The work that feminism has done in re-claiming the potential of
women’s laughter is a crucial theme in articulating the subversive
potential of the Holy Laughter movement Mary Daly’s and Helene Cixous’
work on women and laughter will provide a more specific gendered context
within which I will discuss metaphors and rumors that invoke the gender
binary in the context of these otherwise inarticulatable assaults to the
holy binary. Overall, I would
like to open up a discussion between the discourse that has proliferated
in Queer theories of drag and the subversive element of the Holy Laughter
movement within Christian Fundamentalism that can be read through those
theories. The cultural
studies process of articulation, wherein a new phenomenon is linked
to an already existing one is useful to this project because there is so
little discourse evaluating the intricacies and problems with the lack of
discourse in Fundamentalist Christianity.
Gender
Trouble looks at the
way in which gender is constituted through policing the boundaries of what
does not fit into its system of division.
Gender becomes, in Butler’s analysis, entirely
performative, depending on a core idea that can never exist.
It is, in fact, “a copy of a copy for which there is no
original.”
Discussing her ostensible lesbian identity, Judith Butler expresses
discomfort with the normative definition that identification produces.
“I’m permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them
to be invariable stumbling blocks, and understand them, even promote them
to be necessary sites of trouble.” Like all categories of
identification, gender is theorized as that which is dependent on the
simultaneous necessity and impossibility of correct performance.
The trouble comes in when these categories that are radically and
tenaciously inconsistent with the binary system of gender (i.e. drag,
lesbianism, etc.), that is categories of trouble
are theorized outside of insistence of naturalized notions of the gender
binary. These categories
constitute the gender trouble,
which Butler would claim, are often the more vibrant performances of any
given signifier. Drag, as the
parody of a parody, is often a more vibrant performance of femininity than
that which women perform. [And
I use the term women in this context very loosely.] Similarly, Judith Halberstam argues for a female masculinity
that is often a more vibrant performance of masculinity than male
masculinity.
The power of Cultural Studies analyses of such marginal expressions is
often its re-reading of dominant ideology through those non-normative
manifestations.
So
if gender trouble is the descriptive term for these marginal
sexualities that question and subvert the dominant hegemonic forms of
sexuality, how can we conceptualize these religious practices that
[deliberately or not] subvert dominant notions of the correct
performance of religious sacredness?
I shall refer to it in this paper as ‘holy trouble’ and the
‘holy binary,’ though these terms do not really fit, as they refer to
only one side of the binary and not the binary itself.
This brings up an interesting issue: why is there no specific
moniker for the sacred/profane binary as there is for the gender binary.
The lack of discourse in American Protestantism critiquing the holy
binary serves to simultaneously multiply the potential for proliferation
of subversive responses to it, even as it silences and cloaks the
discourse in which they are discussed.
Foucault discusses this property of discourse as being “both an
instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling
block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing
strategy. Discourse transmits
and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it,
renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.”
This strikes me as another crucial distinction between discourse on
gender and discourse on religion. While
the silence can be fairly said to have broken in talking about marginal
gender identities, within Fundamentalist Christianity, there is still a
great deal of silence and silencing in critically looking at the trouble
produced by a rigid and fundamentally incoherent binary system.
Drag performers have at least a decade of strong rhetoric to draw
on when asserting their ambiguous positionalities within the gender
binary, whereas these charismatic Christians are generally forced to
resort to trying to legitimate their expressions of the Holy in terms of
the fundamental logocentric discourses that are in place.
“…Silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its
prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively
obscure areas of tolerance.”
So maintaining its place within the logocentric rhetoric of
Fundamentalist Christianity, while it provides less opportunity for
subversive discourse, it often provides a greater opportunity for these
proliferations of subversive alternatives.
Certainly,
this synthesis of the practices of fundamentalist Christians and drag
queens and kings seems an unlikely pairing.
The fundamentalist Christians who primarily make up communities
that engage in such charismatic acts as Holy Laughter are arguably some of
the most fervent critics of gender blurring practices that queer theory
would promote. There are often strict hierarchies within the congregations
wherein men perform most of the ‘official’ blessings or casting-out of
demons, and women are the ones who exhibit the more extreme manifestations
of bodily spiritual experience.
And often the same scriptures are cited with equal fervency in
opposing or supporting the manifestations.
Many practitioners of Holy Laughter themselves offer scriptural
backing for their experiences, still maintaining that there is a true
and a false experience with God.
For them, though, the experience will ultimately be primary in constituting their
spirituality; the scriptures are often interpreted only as a secondary
support of the experiences.
On
a very basic level, the insistence on a lack
of logocentrism on the part of queer theory is, of course, directly
contradictory to the ultimate appeal to logocentrism within most Holy
Laughter communities. But
the way in which queer theory and theories of drag analyze the binary
system of gender within which they operate offers intriguing insight into
the way that the practice of Holy Laughter operates within the religious
context of the sacred and the profane.
And though it seems that the act of parody that drag embraces is
directly opposed to the deadly seriousness of the church, in fact I will
show how very similar acts of parody are absolutely necessary to the
functioning of the binary within which the church itself operates.
And
in fact, this act of parodying within the church is nothing new.
In the context of the church itself, while these sorts of blurrings
of the holy binary are considered unthinkable, they have existed
throughout history; the Inquisition and the legacy of witch-burnings can
certainly attest to that. So why, then, are there so many of these marginal figures throughout
the history of Christianity? Cross-dressing
female saints, clerics and priests in dresses with purses, etc. And yet it
is troubling that an institution that is so dependent on the gender
division in its hierarchical structure would be so plentiful in its
ambiguous performances of gender. Male
priests in feminine-style clothing seem to sanctify the blurring of the
very boundaries they consistently seek to uphold in their liturgy and
rhetoric, which I will go into in more detail later.
Analyzing
the motivations of these parodic blurrings through a Butlerian paradigm,
it seems clear that these ambiguities exist as necessities to define the
boundaries. In the same way
Butler argues that homosexuality is constructed only as something which
defines heterosexuality by opposing it, the construction of a
sort of “compulsory sacredness” within the church has depended on the
existence of profane things that stand within it as exceptions that prove
the rule of strictly defined binary divisions between appropriate and
inappropriate behavior. “Learning
what to do with emotions in church services is a new experience for many
Christians,” Dennis Pollock suggests, in a halfhearted explanation for
why these charismatics behave as they do.
They have simply not yet learned the boundaries “laid down by our
forefathers.”
General Secretary of the General Council of the Assemblies of God,
USA, George O. Wood cautions ministers to err on the side of caution when
dealing with these boundary-blurring manifestations.
“We would do well to remain within the circle of scriptural
safety, and not traverse into the danger zones of spiritual phenomena just
outside the circumference of God’s written word.”
He continuously cautions ministers to move back to the “center”
and re-affirm a manifestation’s “normativity” in deciding whether or
not to encourage or stifle it. “Sometimes
we need to call things by their real name: and I do not hesitate to say
that barking and roaring is ‘weird.’”
This kind of insistence on avoiding the dangerous boundaries of
what is right or wrong is characteristic of any dialectic system, and this
appeal to normativity, to the
ultimate weirdness of those
things that blur it, whether within the system of compulsory
heterosexuality or compulsory sacredness has defined the workings of the
holy binary and the gender binary alike.
Compulsory
Sacredness
The
history of Christianity is irrevocably wound up in the binary of the
sacred and the profane. From
the purity codes of the Old Testament to current theological debates about
the roles of men and women, these amorphous terms, sacred and profane, are
invoked as a priori truths that conclusively place something along one side of
the ‘god-like’ or the other. But
in the fragmented context of modern Christianity, their power to enforce
boundaries is destabilizing. The
concepts are still integral in discussing religious experiences, but their
a priori meanings are contested constantly.
No longer do the concepts have definite referents that can be
‘proven’ as one or the other, as holy or as profane [I’m
not sure one could argue that they ever did].
Modern religious critics are often very skeptical of the viability
of the concept of the sacred, due to its perceived emphasis on a
transcendent and unknowable
religious reality. As a
general adjective which is useful for describing certain behaviors and
ascribed qualities, however, it can be a very useful term. Without assuming any intrinsic value to the words, other than
that which is placed on them by those who use them, the sacred/profane (or
holy) binary will be a recurring theme in the course of this paper, used
as a “category of world classification and ritual behavior.”
In
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim identifies
the distinctive trait of religious thought as being this “division of
the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the
other all that is profane.”
Emphasizing the singular importance of these concepts in human
thought, Durkheim sees “no other example of two categories of things so
profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another.”
Durkheim gives us two contexts within which the term sacred is
used. The first is a
descriptive term referring to objects that are kept separate from everyday
life and contact with the mundane. The
second context, and the one which will be of greater concern in the scope
of this paper is that of sacred as part of the reciprocal pair, “sacred
and profane,” which are polarized as in constant dynamic opposition to
one another. He is careful,
though, to assert that the term sacred
will vary infinitely based on the context of the given religion.
Depending on its relationship to other things and the perspective
of the subject, anything can qualify as sacred.
Though the sacred and the profane are understood to be in drastic
and radical opposition, Durkheim also recognizes that the sacred depends
on the profane for its very purpose.
“If the profane could in no way enter into relations with the
sacred, this latter could be good for nothing.”
The sacred is defined only by its opposition to that which is
profane. In much the same way
as Judith Butler identifies gender as being determined through
“strategies of exclusion and hierarchy,”
the sacred has no meaning beyond policing the boundaries of the profane.
In
characterizing the concept of the sacred as in sacred
things, Durkheim distinguishes that this is a somewhat generic term
since the “nature of the
objects that are sacred is completely incidental to the fact that
they are sacred to some
group.”
It is interesting, then to
think of laughter as something which is generally understood to be mundane
at best and profane at worst, but in the contexts of these new revival
groups, it becomes sacred.
Laughing is not generally perceived as something holy.
It is other in most
serious religious or theological contexts.
But laughter has become something intrinsically
holy within this movement. “Objects
remain profane only as long as
they have not been ‘metamorphosed’ by ‘the religious imagination,’
and society can ‘constantly create sacred things out of ordinary
ones.’”
For
me, therefore, one of the most important aspects of cross-dressing is the
way in which it offers a challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting
into question the categories of “female” and “male,” whether they
are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural.
The current popularity of cross-dressing as a theme in art and
criticism represents, I think, an undertheorized recognition of the
necessary critique of binary thinking, whether particularized as male and
female, black and white, yes and no, Republican and Democrat, self and
other, or in any other way.
As
two somewhat intertwined binary systems, the gender binary and the holy
binary both manifest instances of radical subversions and manipulations of
their respective boundaries. Drag,
as Garber suggests, in its subversion of the gender binary (and indeed,
the very model of binaristic thinking) is representative of the problem
with these false dialectics in our cognitive constructs—a problem
difficult if not impossible to deconstruct with language.
Holy Laughter is itself a critique of this binaristic thinking in
the way it destabilizes comfortable notions of what is holy and what is
accepted in situations of sacredness.
It reveals the ambiguity of the boundaries that define religious
expression.
If we take the connection
between subversions of the gender binary and the holy binary even further,
a description of the performative aspects of each of the binaries becomes
useful in applying some of Butler’s binary-blurring analyses of gender
to current binary-blurring practices within Christianity.
For Butler, gender is purely performative—comprised not of any
biological core, but merely “…acts and gestures…[that] create the
illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion
discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality
within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.”
Failure to perform those expectations satisfactorily results in
anxiety. The rhetoric of the
Holy Laughter movement repeatedly brings up the issue of the ‘core’ of
the true Christian experience. Those
who oppose the movement claim that it is crucial that all experiences be
verified with Biblical scripture, and the apocalyptic nature of the way
they describe Laughter is highly indicative of spiritual anxiety.
Speaking of the movement as “deception in the church” or as the “counterfeit
revival,”
critics express tremendous anxiety with the concept of the holy binary
being blurred or subverted.
And it certainly can be
argued that the movement is undermining Durkheim’s “profoundly
differentiated” categories of classification. The Christian church has
historically been intended to be a place of purity and sacredness—a
place that is kept free of profane influences (menstruating women, for
example) that would pollute the spiritual atmosphere.
“I am the LORD your
God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am
holy.”
Historically, this separation has translated into keeping the
mundane out of worship. In
worship, you take off the vestments of everyday and put on a solemn visage
as you go into the house of the Lord to hear the Word.
Indeed, the word of God is the pinnacle of the holy in Christian
tradition. “Thou shalt not
take the lord God’s name in vain” is emblematic of the importance of
words and naming in early Christian tradition.
Christian services have always consisted of imparting the Holy word
on the listeners, at least to some degree.
Holy Laughter undermines this generally, placing the primary
emphasis on the experiencing of the Spirit, and often even parodying the
typical performance of a minister delivering the word.
During
a Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship meeting on August 1, 1997, John
Scotland, a man who claims to have been spiritually drunk for the last ten
years, decided to do a Bible reading, “for those of you who are into
those kind of things.” As
he meanders his way through a reading of Luke, Chapter1, he constantly
interrupts himself with chicken sounds and plays on words as he blatantly
parodies the usual performance of a sermon.
His comic portrayal of this ostensibly serious activity definitely
pushes the boundaries of what can be considered ‘appropriate’ in the
context. Within the strict
emphasis on the scripture and the Word, it is obvious how great of a
profanity this is in the context of the church, and yet to most of the
3,000 or so people in attendance, this message was accepted as holy and
even prophetic.
In wrestling with
signifiers, Butler identifies gender as an imitation of an imitation for
which there is no original. The
system of compulsory heterosexuality sets up a system wherein anything
that deviates from it is seen as opposed to and drastically outside of the
ideal. “Compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as the original,
the true, the authentic; the norm that determines the real…which will
always and only fail.” This
failure, ultimately a comic effort, for all its apparent seriousness, is
instilled in the very conceptualization of gender.
Precisely
because it is bound to fail, and yet endeavors to succeed, the project of
heterosexual identity is propelled into an endless repetition of itself.
Indeed, in its efforts to naturalize itself as the original,
heterosexuality must be understood as a compulsive and compulsory
repetition that can only produce the effect of its own originality….
The
system of compulsory sacredness in the holy binary works in the same way
as the gender binary, which Butler reveals as parody.
In setting up an ideal of holiness for which there is absolutely no
original, Christianity dooms itself to the same endless repetitions of
producing results of approximation. The
holy person is identified only in opposition to the unholy person.
As Durkheim pointed out, the two concepts are utterly dependent on
one another for coherence. And
in the same way Butler theorizes drag as to some extent being a closer
approximation of the “phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity”
than the ‘normative’ performances.
Similarly, Holy Laughter acts as a kind of response to the system
of compulsory sacredness, wherein an internally incoherent ideal is
constantly striven for, but never really achieved.
As a parodic inversion of the seriousness and emphasis on
scripture, Holy Laughter inhabits and defines the boundaries of what is
holy, even as it is a closer and more vibrant approximation to the ideal
than those more normative
Fundamentalist churches. To
re-appropriate Butler’s language, there is no original or primary
sacredness that Holy Laughter imitates, but
Holy Laughter is a kind of imitation for which there is no original;
‘in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the
original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
The earlier discussion of the power of the proliferation of
discourse to provide more potential for subversion brings up another
interesting distinction between the way the holy binary and the gender
binary work. The absolute unattainability of sacredness or of holiness is
explicit throughout the history of Protestantism. The power of the rhetoric of Original Sin and of assertions
that true holiness is an ideal that must be strived for but can never be
attained has been immense. In
light of Foucault’s theory that a lack of discourse leads to less
manifestations of subversive acts, the centuries of discourse around a
simultaneous insistence on and recognition of the impossibility of
sacredness has ultimately led to a greater proliferation of attempted
sacredness. The unspoken [until quite recently] unattainability of
the gender binary has to some degree caused fewer proliferations of
subversive cultural attempts due to the implicit understanding that there is
a normative sexuality which one should be achieving.
Mark
E. Howerter argues that there are many times when laughter in church is
not from God. “There is
always a counterfeit for everything real,” he claims.
But his only specific example of these ‘counterfeit’
manifestations of the original are when people try to ‘force it.’
That is to say, when laughter is not truly from God, then it is not
from God. The tautological
quandary which Butler traces in “Imitation and Gender Subordination”
is played out again and again as these groups insist on some sort of authentic
expression of holiness.
Transvestism,
Queerness, and Religion
Considering its professed aversion to ambiguous boundaries and
insistence on absolute answers,
it is interesting that the history of Christianity has such extensive
examples of transvestism. Cross-dressing
female saints like Joan of Arc, and the elaborate and femininely-styled
costumes of male priests and other dignitaries are multitudinous
throughout Christianity’s annals. Providing
a detailed account of this history, Marjorie Garber suggests that the
rigid oppositional structure of Western religion invites such parody
through its insistent distinguishing between insiders and outsiders.
Garber
offers a fascinating explanation as to the frequency of the occurrence of
such transvestite figures where it would seem otherwise inexplicable:
The
apparently spontaneous or unexpected or supplementary presence of a
transvestite figure in a text…that does not seem, thematically, to be
primarily concerned with gender difference or blurred gender indicates a category
crisis elsewhere, an irresolvable conflict or epistemological crux
that destabilizes comfortable binarity, and displaces the resulting
discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeed incarnates, the
margin.
[original italics]
Garber
describes the recurrence of transvestite figures—more often feminized
males, but occasionally butch females—in both the Christian and Jewish
churches. In the context of
Garber’s assertion that such seemingly unrelated figures are indicative
of a crisis elsewhere, the indication becomes that religion is, in and of
itself, a crisis of categorization. The
rigid delineation of sacred and profane depends on an objectivity that is
necessarily impossible within the very nature of religious practice. In a
realm within which there is intense pressure to conform and know one’s
place within rigid binaries of sacred/profane, pure/sinful, damned/saved,
the transvestite figure represents the discomfort of the impossibility of
these binaries.
With the significant
decrease in ritual in the American Protestant churches where the majority
of the Holy Laughter revivals are occurring, Garber’s theories bring up
an interesting question regarding the anxiety of religious categorization.
If these ritualistic transvestite figures have, throughout history,
expressed the tension in Christianity that the impossible binary systems
have imposed, how is that tension expressed in the generally
anti-ritualistic expressions of faith in American Protestantism?
Fundamentalist Christian groups, while they strongly retain the
rigid binary system of the Christian tradition, they also reject the
elaborate rituals and liturgy of the Catholic, Anglican, and even some
denominations of American Protestantism.
Mysticism generally, and laughter specifically, seems to serve the
same function within these churches as the transvestite figures do in more
ritualistic congregations. And
indeed, the practices do become very ritualized.
This
sort of re-ritualization of the anti-ritual brings up an interesting
question about why the current manifestations of Holy Laughter are so
profoundly varied in their attitude toward an ultimate subjectivity
regarding religious practice in comparison to previous historical
instances. Currently, even in
the most extreme congregations where manifestations of Laughter
practically supplant the traditional preaching, there is generally still
an appeal to some sort of logocentric truth. The primary distinction, however, between other
fundamentalist churches and previous historical instances of Holy Laughter
in America,
and this one is that current practitioners often assert that ultimate
authority for religious discernment lies in their experiences. This represents a significant split between other Protestant
manifestations of this experience that nearly always assert that ultimate
authority lies in interpreting the scripture.
I think the influence of postmodernism on popular culture’s
understanding of identity, sexuality, gender, and the nature/culture
question could provide some sort of insight into this.
On a surface level, it is easy to link the current wave of Holy
Laughter to historical manifestations, but I think there is definitely a
case to be made for this recurrence of the phenomena as being
fundamentally unique.
If
postmodern theory has maintained one consistent theme, it could be said to
be that of the de-centered subject. That
careful analysis of what are generally assumed to be “objective
truths” and peeling away at them to reveal the layers of subjectivity
that make them up often characterizes postmodern analyses.
The popular conception of the ‘postmodern sensibility,’
however, which could generally be described as that amorphous attitude
that is often conflated with the idea of the impossibility of
comprehending any kind of ultimate truth, dovetails beautifully with the
Christian skepticism toward the ability to really grasp the nature of the
divine. Whether or not it is
an accurate label to identify it as the “postmodern influence” is
certainly arguable. In fact,
in many ways, the way many theologians discuss postmodernism and
Christianity involves rejecting postmodernism’s fundamental tenet of the
ultimate construction of all
concepts of ultimate truth while
simultaneously adopting the postmodern method of critically analyzing
those most basic aspects of binaristic human experience.
Along these lines, Mark R. Schwenn makes the argument for a
“hermeneutics of suspicion” which he derives from a discussion of
postmodernism’s influence on Christian faith structure and the resulting
problems of identity:
…we
must hear again, with ears attuned in part by postmodernity, the
suggestion that we are finally enlightened by gifts of the spirit….The
myriad accounts offered by postmodernists about the relations between
words and things, signs and referent, language and extralinguistic
reality, even if we wish, as I would, to reject most of them, should have
at least made us ponder anew how difficult it is to believe any purely
naturalistic account of how human beings grow to speak, to understand one
another, and to grow intellectually, morally and spiritually.
The
influence of postmodernism on Christianity, however complex and
misappropriated it might be, I would argue, has given these ‘gifts of
the spirit’ which are under discussion, the greatest foothold they have
ever managed. Given that the
Enlightenment figure of the infinitely rational being who arrives at a
universal truth through his powers of analysis and logic has been largely
abandoned in favor of an almost uncompromising subjectivity, experiential
religion provides a postmodern grounding for faith that serves to further
fragment solid notions of universal truth in Christianity.
Because for the first time Christians are not necessarily under
constant demand to justify their experiences through ‘objective’
sources, such as Scripture and notions of propriety, the gifts of the
spirit have become grounding for faith in and of themselves.
And indeed, this is the source of the tension, in large part, with
practitioners and opponents of Holy Laughter.
Opponents demand scriptural proof of the godliness of the
experiences, and charismatics appeal to the experiences themselves and the
joy connected with them as authority enough.
Rodney
Howard-Browne, one of the most well-known figures in the movement, and
self-proclaimed ‘Holy-Ghost bartender,’often asks people to not
analyze what is happening, but rather to just surrender themselves to it.
“You really cannot understand what God is doing in these meetings
with an analytical mind,” Howard-Browne claims.
“It’s not a move of man, it’s a move of God.
The mind is never going to be able to understand what God’s
doing….”
Positioning laughter as the only true way to “understand what
God’s doing,” Holy Laughter figures put an incredible emphasis on the
subjectivity of religious experience and appeal to its ineffableness,
ultimately. Such leaders as
John Scotland attack the legalism in much of Christian practice,
emphasizing the important of feeling
the experiences with their emotions.
Laughter is cast as the expression of the feeling of joy that is
the pinnacle of Christian communion with the holy spirit.
“Words have become meaningless in our society,” Howard-Browne
claims, “Signs and Wonders are what must capture our attention.”
One woman describes the lack of discernment in a group that she was
a member of. “I think my
greatest gift is spiritual discernment, and there was no discernment
within this group….They insinuated that they were in possession of these
gifts, and that I hadn’t achieved them yet.”
The
crucial distinction comes up here once again, though of the general
insistence of Fundamentalist Christianity on an authentic
experience of God. Almost
invariably, churches that are heavily involved in receiving these Gifts of
the Spirit are also heavily involved in warfare, which involves battling
with the demonic forces which seek to distract and mislead the naďve
believer into profane and inauthentic experiences.
One woman described the demons that constantly seek to subvert the
holiness in the church in this way: “Usually,
you just see shadows of darkness. They
are small, usually, (she holds her hand about three and a half feet above
the ground). Demons are like
germs, really. Just a part of
life.”
This pre-supposes that there is
an authentic way in which holiness must be performed.
Many churches wind up splitting over certain seemingly arbitrary
boundaries, divided over seemingly profane things being done in the name
of God. For example, the
Association of Vineyard Fellowships expelled the Airport Vineyard
Fellowship of Toronto from the association for “‘going over the
edge’ in encouraging people to ‘bark like dogs, swoon to the floor and
laugh uncontrollably during its services.’”
This is just one of many examples indicative of the incredible
tension within these churches that simultaneously depend on the idea of a true
expression of religion at the same time they can never really achieve it
because it exists only in opposition to things that are inauthentic.
For the Vineyard association, in the context of the apocalyptic
specter of eternal damnation if one inaccurately performed holiness, there
was an intense need to label and police the boundaries of profanity.
Though the consequences of inaccurately performing one’s
designated gender are, perhaps, not as daunting as eternal damnation,
there are clearly connections in how the ideal masculinity or femininity
is utterly dependent on things that make up its boundaries.
The
nature/nurture question, long an issue of debate among queer theorists, is
something that, interestingly enough, comes up quite a lot in Holy
Laughter testimonials. There
is great anxiety in the church as people grapple with the fact that
instances of holy laughter seem to be contagious.
While it is supposed to be something that is entirely a gift of the
Holy Spirit, it tends to spread primarily through contact with
congregations that manifest it. Monsignor
Vincent M. Walsh describes his visit to a church where the well-known
South American evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne was preaching about and
among manifestations of Holy Laughter.
The Monsignor returned to his parish and showed a tape of the
revival to two “religious sisters,” and the sisters broke out into
Holy Laughter.
The deceptioninthechurch.com web site is an enterprise very
committed to disseminating information about the unholiness of the Holy
Laughter movement. One of
their 22 listed “unbiblical teachings” within the Holy Laughter
movement is that the manifestations are, in fact, transferable. This transference, in their analysis, involves trying to
somehow control the power of God, which is ineffable and uncontrollable.
More importantly, they offer scriptural analyses as to how this
transference is unbiblical, styling it as “fast food Christianity.”
That these experiences can be socially constructed or transferable,
contradicts the core of an essentially true
experience of the Holy Spirit, and are therefore suspect.
Holy
Laughter and Related Gifts of the Spirit
Laughter
itself is an object of fascination with philosophers of numerous
persuasions. It has been
suggested that laughter stems from everything from anxiety about uncertain
situations to the need to express triumph in a setting of brutality.
Laughter is generally perceived as an earthy activity, associated
with the loss of rational control and a sort of surrender to the emotions.
The inappropriateness of laughter in certain settings is well
established in terms of policing social boundaries.
The pathologizing of hysterics and the cliché of the taboo of
laughing at a funeral are only two of the numerous examples of the
boundaries imposed on laughing in public. Freud identified the repressed
nun as embodying hysteria.
The taboo against laughing in church is one that practitioners of
Holy Laughter are very conscious of defying.
During his speech at Toronto, John Scotland exhorts the listeners,
“Isn’t it great to shout in church?
It is isn’t it? It’s great—its, you know.
All these years you’ve been told when you walk into church, SHHH.
SHHH. You might wake
God up.”
Laughter
as a subversive element comes up again and again in the discussions of
marginal groups. Joseph
Boskin and Joseph Dorinson make the argument that marginalized groups,
such as immigrants and people of color, have often appropriated insulting
stereotypes and made them into humorous self-descriptors.
“Minority laughter affords insights into the constant and often
undignified struggle of upwardly striving Americans to achieve positive
definition and respectable status.”
In her discussion of women in comedic performances, Frances Gray
suggests, “Like sexuality,
laughter has been sometimes highly valued, sometimes denigrated; but like
sexuality—indeed with sexuality—laughter
has been closely wound up with power.”
Reading laughter as an action connoting agency and power, it
becomes interesting in the scope of this paper to look more specifically
at how particular gender notions get played out in the Holy Laughter
movement. The laughter of
women in the writings of Mary Daly and Helene Cixous are representative of
the power of laughter that feminist philosophers have theorized, and
reading the movement through Daly and Cixous provides a more focused
context for looking at how gender is conceptualized in the Holy Laughter
movement.
For
Daly, there are two fundamental kinds of laughter that women engage in:
tittering and roaring. Tittering
is that “nervous, affected, or restrained”
laughter that “self-loathing ladies” engage in.
“This is what they are made for and paid for.”
But roaring is the expression of women who have nothing to lose and
give vent to all their feelings of bitterness and joy.
“There is nothing like the sound of women laughing.
The roaring laughter of women is like the roaring of the eternal
sea.”
Be-Laughing is the Laughing Out
Loud of women that “breaks the looking-glass” of the dominant
patriarchy. “Be-Laughing,
then, is a Primal Act of Power. It
is breaking the taboo against elemental humor, which splits/cracks
man-made ‘reality,’ unveiling man’s mysteries.”
She conceptualizes laughter as breaking the “Terrible Taboo
against women Intimately/Ultimately Touching each other.”
Whatever we may want to say of Daly’s unapologetically
essentialist renderings of men and women, her theory of women’s laughter
is certainly consistent with historical responses.
And her use of it as a tool for mobilization and subversion is
provocative in her highly polemical writings.
The sexualization of laughter wherein it is set up as being
‘feminine’ and somehow at odds with the logocentric scriptural focus
of the faith is apparent in discussions of the Holy Laughter movement.
Critics of the movement repeat rumors they have heard conflating
lesbian activity and women’s sexual behaviors.
A woman who claims she has been called on by God to testify against
the movement describes having “heard (but only heard) of two women
kissing one another for more than an hour ‘in spirit.’”
Opponents also pathologize the practices and experiences in linking
them to hysteria and mental illness.
Greg DesVoignes describes the incontrollable tics and/or hysteria
that “people with neurological problems” exhibit, claiming that these
people would fervently like these uncontrollable manifestations to go
away. Wouldn’t a real
experience with God, he asks rhetorically, make these symptoms go away?
Similarly, Hank Hanegraaff, host of “Bible Answer Man” on over
100 Christian radio stations has dedicated much effort to discrediting the
movement. He describes it as
a “direct result of the socio-psychological manipulation tactics in
which people are worked into an altered state of consciousness.”
The experiences are often described in terms very similar to
psychoanalytic exercises of the hysterics.
Helene
Cixous talks about the hysterics and the production of ‘sexts.’ In
writing these texts, hysterics’ unconscious thoughts are written out by
their bodies. Cixous re-writes the hysterics, de-pathologizing them as she
casts them in roles of power through their surrender to laughter and
emotion. These “admirable
hysterics who made Freud succumb to many voluptuous moments impossible to
confess” are re-cast as powerful and in control.
The hysteric, in Cixous’ work, is “a divine spirit that is
always at the edge, the turning point…She’s the unorganizable
feminine construct….”
Traces of the revolution of the pathologized that Cixous imagines
can be found in the Holy Laughter movement, I would argue.
Though they are often not talked about that way, indeed, as I said
earlier, though they are often simply not talked about, subversions of the
holy binary are places where marginal displays of religious joy can take
place without being instantly condemned and pathologized by those present.
Helene
Cixous re-imagines the Laugh of the Medusa in this essay as something
beautiful. The Medusa was the
gorgon woman of Greek mythology who was cursed and made to be so hideous
that her gaze would turn men into stone.
The Medusa is one of two impossible options given to women. “We
have been frozen in our place between two terrifying myths: between the
Medusa and the abyss. It
would be enough to make half the world break out laughing, if it were not
still going on. …All you have to do to see the Medusa is look her in the
face: and she isn’t deadly. She
is beautiful and she laughs.” The laughter of women in
the face of these impossible choices and the laughter in the face of the
impossible holy binary is the same kind of response.
It is that response that Foucault gave in an interview with James
O’Higgins, upon being asked a question about stereotypes in lesbian vs.
gay relationships. “All I
can do is explode with laughter,” Foucault responds.
Foucault laughs, Judith Butler suggests, “because the question
instates the very binary that he seeks to displace, that dreary binary of
Same and Other that has plagued not only the legacy of dialectics, but the
dialectic of sex as well.”
The charismatics, because they cannot get at the impossibility of
the holy binary with words, in the wake of the loss of the ritualization
of the transvestite figures that have expressed the anxiety of the binary
historically, laugh hysterically as they parody the very binary in which
their discourse is steeped.
The
loss of the sense of ‘the normal,’… can be its own occasion for
laughter, especially when ‘the normal,’ ‘the original’ is revealed
to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can
embody. In this sense,
laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was
derived.”
Sex
itself, as in the act of sex, is arguably one of the more profane
phenomenon in Western religion. The
random correlations between sex and Holy Laughter are very interesting, in
that the conflation of the two represents a discursively impossible
scenario within the holy binary. Those
who oppose the movement use this as an extreme example of sacrilege; those
who practice it appeal to the joy
that authenticates the experiences, saying that just because a few people
go too far, that doesn’t mean that the entire experience is inauthentic.
Rodney Howard-Browne responds to these charges in proclaiming,
“I’d rather be in a church where the devil and the flesh are
manifesting than in a church where nothing is happening…Every time there
is a move of God, a few people will get excited, go overboard, and get in
the flesh….Don’t worry about it, either. Rejoice because at least
something is happening.”
The significance of the joy is often spoken of as eclipsing the
profaneness of any fleshly provocations that might manifest.
But
it is often these questionable performances of sexuality that most offend
opponents to the movement. Greg
DesVoignes, a columnist in the newsletter PropheZine, repeats a story
“one of [his] readers from California told [him that] his wife had
heard” that a woman had “had a sexual orgasm while under the
anointing.” He repeatedly
invokes the “sensual” aspect of the experience in pathologizing and
vilifying it.
Similarly, Pastor David L. Brown, Th.M. makes a more explicit
division between the flesh and the word: “If you are going to worship
God you must worship Him Biblically not carnally.
You cannot operate in the flesh and please God.”
The
kind of humor that sparks these mad fits of laughter is another
interesting link between the Holy Laughter movement and subversive drag
practices. Both seem to employ a kind of campy humor that might not
necessarily be funny out of their context.
The message of John Scotland is filled with puns and bursts of
song. Rodney Howard-Browne is
well known for the jokes and one-liners that he rattles off.
The little jokes that the people make about their drunkenness are
responded to with hilarious laughter that ends up “resemb[ling] a comedy
show at a theater.”
Drag performances often incorporate camp icons and use similar
sorts of not-quite-funny humor which ends up being all the more hilarious
in its self-awareness. This
sort of laughter is problematic for detractors of the Holy Laughter
movement. “Laughter is the
response to something funny, yet there is nothing humorous about people
laughing over nothing….The spectacles at Rodney Howard-Browne’s
crusades invite that kind of laughter from any who stumble upon them.”
Conclusion
Ultimately,
the Holy Laughter movement is working within the sacred/profane religious
binary similarly to the way drag is working within the male/female gender
binary. Jean Baudrillard
talks about how systems are all eventually overcome by laughter, not by
language. In both drag and
Holy Laughter, the two most fundamental, and in some ways inseparable
binaries are being subverted. In
the way drag can liberate people from the gender binary that has
determined their identity, Holy Laughter can liberate them from the
sacred/profane binary that has determined their spirituality.
And both recognize, on an intrinsic sort of level, the power of
laughter to express that which words cannot express.
Both use a unique sort of comedy and camp-ness to inspire the
viewers/participants to indulge in the laughter that breaks the hold of
the binaries in a way language cannot.
With
movies like Too Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar and
the Birdcage becoming such successful commercial successes, we are
left to question how drag, as a possible subversive sites working inside
the gender binary, is changed once it becomes mainstream.
Rodney
Howard-Browne generally speaks to packed auditoriums wherever he goes.
Benny Hinn has a successful ministry [and TV career] that attracts
scores of followers. These
manifestations are becoming more and more assimilated as they spread
throughout dramatically different congregations.
What
happens, then, we must ask, when the Laughter becomes mainstream?
As the margins move ever closer to the center, more and more
alternatives proliferate at the new boundaries. A few of these I have already alluded to: the manifesting of
animal noises, displays of drunkenness or paralysis, and inexplicable
bodily tics are only a few of the new manifestations that are continually
popping up. And this, I would
argue, is what makes this project so apropos.
Is there a difference, we must ask, from the mainstreaming of drag
and the mainstreaming of Holy Laughter?
Judith
Butler brings up a very important point regarding the importance of
theorizing subversive acts.
“Parody
by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what
makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly
troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and re-circulated as
instruments of cultural hegemony.”
While
in many cases, I think that drag has become a sort of domesticated
instrument of the gender binary, this has not been the case with Holy
Laughter. There comes a
point, I would argue, when the gender binary is simply not as serious a
matter as eternal damnation. The
laughter that comes from drag performances is a laughter of transgression,
of transgressing the normative gender boundaries, but not a laughter of
panicked transgression. Not a
laughter that is in any way a matter of life and death.
The deadly seriousness that surrounds the Holy Laughter movement,
even in the midst of its most seemingly absurd moments is not likely to
allow the practice to truly become mainstream.
Recently
the laughter has taken a beastly turn.
Now some people who get the Toronto Blessing are beginning to roar
like animals. Such fearsome
noise suggests possession by the Devil…This does not come from the Holy
Spirit, this comes from the unholy spirit and it is dangerous and deadly.
To the person who opens a doorway to the occult, it is a very, very
serious issue. It is
extremely serious.
So
much of this movement seems hopelessly conservative, knee-jerk, and
problematic, but there is very important cultural work being done in terms
of subverting a binary almost, if not more so, as entrenched in humans as
the gender binary. Despite
its somewhat logocentric and contradictory rhetoric, the Holy Laughter
movement cannot be simply dismissed, due to these complex aspects of
renewal and subversion that are intrinsic to its basic tenets.
Though
it is rarely addressed with language, Holy Trouble is a theme consistent
throughout religious history. How
can we as mortals continuously fail to achieve the ideal holiness that is
inscribed in our religious system from the beginning?
Theorizing the impossibility of the holy binary and interrogating
how holy trouble is expressed through such movements as Holy Laughter
provides a crucial beginning for a conversation around the crisis of
categorizations that is religion.
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