The Review: When Harvard's president opposed a Satanic mass

Cancel culture, secularism, and the lures of Satan. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. In the [letters]( section of the most recent Harper’s, the Yale historian of religion Kathryn Lofton takes the journalist and intellectual Ian Buruma to task for having, in an [essay]( published last month, compared on- and off-campus “wokeness” to Puritan strains of Protestantism. Borrowing a page from Max Weber, Buruma argues that the punitive logic of early modern Puritanism has continued to provide the social and emotional structures within which some modern American group phenomena play out, in particular coerced public apologies in the wake of violations of etiquette around racial and sexual cultural politics. Lofton objects to this comparison on the grounds that it is both overspecific and not specific enough: “Many religious communities around the world include an injunction to acknowledge wrongdoing through expiation"; at the same time, “within Protestant sects, confession is a ritual that occurs in some but not all churches, and not always for the same reasons.” Buruma’s comparison of “cancellers to fundamentalists,” Lofton says, is less a real social theory than an expression of “the last acceptable prejudice,” that against the religious. I think the general analogy between some kinds of religious sentiment and some of the feelings undergirding the current wave of campus activism is more compelling than Lofton does; indeed, as I’ve [written]( before, Lofton’s own [scholarship]( on the Protestant character of American therapeutic culture — and the therapeutic character of much American Christianity — should be a key source for anyone hoping to take the measure of our moment. Nor do I think it’s fair to proscribe comparisons between religious fervor and the emotional intensities of supposedly nonreligious social movements. It’s especially strange coming from Lofton, whose first book, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, was devoted precisely to identifying what was religious — what “overspill[s] the imagined bounds of ‘economy’ and ‘popular culture’” — in the TV talk-show host’s charismatic success. Why not grant Buruma a similar right to analyze what, in today’s activist politics, likewise overspills secular institutions and social forces? In any event, one of the things “cancellers” and some of the religious have in common is that irreligion is not infrequently the thing being cancelled. I have reported on one such [recent]( incident — the attempt by Muslim students at Macalester College, in Minnesota, to get the Iranian artist Taravat Talepasand’s anticlerical exhibition closed on the grounds that it was offensive to Muslims. That case was interpreted by the protesting students, as well as by Macalester’s administrators, under the rubric of diversity, a plausible-enough lens with respect to Minnesota Muslims, who are both religious and ethnic minorities. The same cannot be said for the Catholics of Massachusetts — they are the [largest]( religious denomination in the state — but that didn’t prevent Catholic leadership from taking umbrage when, back in 2014, students at Harvard University proposed to perform a “Black Mass.” Drew Faust, Harvard’s president at the time, endorsed the criticisms of the students in her “Statement on ‘Black Mass’": “The decision by a student club to sponsor an enactment of this ritual is abhorrent; it represents a fundamental affront to the values of inclusion, belonging, and mutual respect that must define our community.” (It should be noted, though, that the Archdiocese of Boston did not see “inclusion, belonging, or mutual respect” as the issue; quite properly, he [restricted]( his concerns to “the danger of being naïve about or underestimating the power of Satan,” and accordingly asked Catholics to pray for the participants.) NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. Faust’s are strong words for what is essentially a theatrical project, and one wonders why they wouldn’t apply, say, to screenings of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which some Catholic leaders [considered]( blasphemous; or to Jesus Christ Superstar, which the Evangelical pastor Billy Graham [said]( was “bordering on blasphemy and sacrilege”; or, for that matter, to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which presumably gets taught sometimes at Harvard. To her credit, Faust didn’t attempt to actually censor the Black Mass. Instead, as she wrote, “I plan to attend a Eucharistic Holy Hour and Benediction at St. Paul’s Church on our campus on Monday evening in order to join others in reaffirming our respect for the Catholic faith at Harvard and to demonstrate that the most powerful response to offensive speech is not censorship, but reasoned discourse and robust dissent.” What if, instead of this expression of pious solidarity, Faust — who is, after all, a historian — had used the controversy as an occasion to teach some history? In its modern guise, the Black Mass can be traced to the imagination of the novelists and poets of the French [decadence](. The description of a modern-day Black Mass in J.K. Huysmans’s 1891 novel Là -Bas — one of the most splendidly insane documents of the period — has become the blueprint for most later representations, probably including the performance by the Harvard group. It’s great stuff, if you have a taste for that sort of thing. First, there’s a blasphemous sermon accusing Christ of being a “sacristy Shyster, huckster God!” Then, “while the choir boys gave themselves to the men, and while the woman who owned the chapel, mounted the altar [and] caught hold of the phallus of the Christ with one hand and with the other held a chalice between ‘His’ naked legs, a little girl, who hitherto had not budged, suddenly bent over forward and howled, howled like a dog.” And so on. (I have relied on Keene Wallace’s 1928 translation.) But parodic inversions of Christian ritual go back much further than this. In world literature, they appear most famously throughout Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, where they draw on the festive reversals of Mardi Gras. Behind those traditions, as Mikhail Bakhtin discusses in his classic study of Rabelais, lie even older ones: the “drunkards’ masses” and “gamblers’ masses” of the 12th and 13th centuries. Viewed from the right distance, the Harvard Black Mass was just a very recent instance of an extremely ancient tradition of ritual inversion internal to the history of Christianity itself. Nor would taking the long view have prevented Faust from discussing the ethics of the performance today. Faust might have suggested, for instance, that fantasies about a Black Mass had a very different political character in 19th-century France, where almost everyone was Catholic and the Church enjoyed great power and prestige, than in the pluralistic 21st-century United States. Huysmans, at any rate, became a Catholic at the end of his life. Who knows, maybe Faust’s attendance at St. Paul’s triggered some Harvard satanist’s conversion, too. 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Gordon [writes about]( Walter Benjamin’s career, from 1925-1933, as a radio broadcaster. Gordon’s review is occasioned by the publication of Benjamin’s radio transcripts in a new English volume edited by Lecia Rosenthal and translated by Jonathan Lutes, Diana Reese, and Lisa Harries Schumann. - “This was what we’d come to see: we’d spent an entire day in the heat and the rain, a little bored, in the hope that a twelve-thousand-pound fibreglass shark might briefly ascend toward space.” In The New Yorker, Zach Helfand [writes about]( monster trucks (and also drives one). - “The Freuds’ fifty-three years of marriage are reputed to have been exceptionally harmonious — one of their few disputes was said to have been about the correct way to cook mushrooms — but the couple’s divergent attitudes toward Judaism remained a source of underground conflict.” In Liberties, Daphne Merkin on the [life, mind, and religion]( of Martha Freud, née Bernays, Sigmund’s wife. 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