{"id":44514,"date":"2012-01-30T12:20:38","date_gmt":"2012-01-30T17:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=44514"},"modified":"2017-09-17T12:28:20","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T17:28:20","slug":"tebow-and-the-religious-body-politic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/01\/30\/tebow-and-the-religious-body-politic\/","title":{"rendered":"Tebow and the Religious Body (Politic)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Religion Bulletin<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Now that Denver has fallen out of the playoffs, I want to write an homage to a figure I, like so many others, find fascinating: Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.\u00a0 Carter Turner over at Religion Dispatches has suggested that\u00a0the \u201creal reason\u201d for \u201cTebow fever\u201d<\/a>\u00a0was the theological investment that atheists and theists alike had in watching Tebow succeed or fail.\u00a0 I think that\u2019s absolutely right: Tebow\u2019s body became a sort of theological battleground for broader religious and cultural forces.\u00a0 But I also think there\u2019s an even more elementary reason, one that becomes apparent when we think about Tebow not just as a proxy for doctrine, but as a\u00a0particular religious body<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Feminism, poststructuralism, and decolonial studies in the humanities have made scholars more and more aware of the importance of bodies.\u00a0 Whereas the logocentric western tradition focused on words — the creations of the intellect — 21st century global scholarship sees words as a secondary function of embodiment.\u00a0 In religious studies, scholars such as Talal Asad, Kimerer LaMothe, and Saba Mahmood have called on us to explore how bodies, through practices, are constituted as religious subjects.\u00a0 Bodies become religious through performance, through embodied exercises that, through repetition, inscribe us with the modalities of a religious \u201cethics.\u201d\u00a0 But embodiment is more than just practices.\u00a0 I here want to suggest a different direction for understanding the relationship between religion and bodies.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s something I often ask my students to do: Look at this body.\u00a0 How does religion converge on this body?<\/p>\n

Let me tell you what I see, using my own bodily practice, martial arts, as a lens.\u00a0 This is a body I would not want to fight.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just about dense muscle lines, the sheer evidence of physical strength, reach, and an intricately arranged posing that suggests bodily self-awareness and sharp muscular intelligence.\u00a0 This body is compelling.\u00a0 It draws the eye.\u00a0 You want to watch it.<\/p>\n

This is more dangerous than physical strength — the kind of strength you build on the bench press or the curl.\u00a0 It\u2019s a \u201cpresence.\u201d\u00a0 The kind of strength that stops bodies in their tracks without landing a punch.\u00a0 And the kind of strength that draws allies, that rewrites the broader bodily landscape on which conflict happens.\u00a0 This body has what we might call, following Max Weber, \u201ccharisma.\u201d<\/p>\n

This way of looking at bodies helps us think again about a fact that has become dramatically apparent in the past two years: Tebow is fascinating.\u00a0 People love to talk about him, love to love him, love to hate him.\u00a0 Tebow fever didn\u2019t just happen.\u00a0 It was and is something is felt\u2013viscerally\u2013by millions of bodies around the world.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, Tebow is a leader\u2013an emblematic body — for millions of Christians who see in him a dignification of their faith.\u00a0 Faith here is not an abstract personal belief.\u00a0 It is an identity formation, an\u00a0Us<\/em>.\u00a0 Tebow is the champion of a certain Christian\u00a0Us<\/em>, an embodiment of values and a leader who rallies the believers.\u00a0 As a champion, he doesn\u2019t win through debate, he wins through charisma.\u00a0 He is a\u00a0hero<\/em>, resplendent on the battlefield.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Tebow is fascinating to other groups — to other bodies — that are frustrated with or skeptical of the Christian Us — and particularly the Christian Us that has managed to insinuate itself into the corridors of power in America through one (but only one) of its instantiations, the Christian Right, a major driver in contemporary Republican politics.\u00a0 These bodies, as Turner pointed out, are interested in Tebow\u2019s failure, the fall of the enemy\u2019s flag.<\/p>\n

My argument, however, is this: this profile of the divergent responses to the nexus of religious and cultural forces that converge on the image of Tebow\u2019s body would be irrelevant and unread if Tim Tebow were a\u00a0schlub<\/em>\u2013a homely, uninteresting, modest body, the kind of body that bus drivers drive past at the bus stop.\u00a0 It is also an open question to me how we would be responding to Tebow if he were\u00a0not a white body<\/a>.\u00a0 Those who want to challenge Tebow, to fight Tebow, to talk about Tebow are drawn in by the seductions of this image\u2013the power of Tebow\u2019s body — no less than those who are so ardently admiring of Tebow that criticism of him becomes a political rallying cry.\u00a0 Tebow\u2019s body is a magnetic body, a charismatic body.\u00a0 It bends other bodies towards it\u2013in both positive and critical ways.<\/p>\n

This, then, is one of the main ways that religion happens — how identities, beliefs, and affects form and fuse: not through the advance of doctrine, but through the magnetism of religious bodies.<\/p>\n

Thanks to William Eric Pedersen for talking this post out with me and pointing me in the direction of the unanswered question on race.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Donovan O. Schaefer is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at Le Moyne College. His interests involve the relationship between religion, bodies, and emotion. In his dissertation, Animal Religion: Evolution, Affect, and Radical Embodiment<\/em>, he argues for understanding religion in terms of a set of affective bodily practices that are shared by human and non-human animals.<\/p>\n

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our\u00a0Guidelines for Guest Bloggers<\/a>.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Religion Bulletin. Now that Denver has fallen out of the playoffs, I want to write an homage to a figure I, like so many others, find fascinating: Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.\u00a0 Carter Turner over at Religion Dispatches has suggested that\u00a0the \u201creal reason\u201d for \u201cTebow fever\u201d\u00a0was the theological investment that atheists and theists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,329,285,42,37,108],"class_list":["post-44514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-emotion","tag-raceethnicity","tag-religion","tag-social-psychology","tag-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44514"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71419,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44514\/revisions\/71419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}