The Kaveri Riverbed (Photograph by Jay Ramesh)

The Kaveri river flows through central Tamil Nadu in South India. The photograph above shows the dry bed of the river in the height of summer in 2015. I took this picture while conducting research for my dissertation, which examines an extensive body of medieval and early modern literature devoted to sacred space in South India. For centuries, poets praised the Kaveri for its physical beauty and its capacity to sustain life in Tamil Nadu; it would not be an exaggeration to say that this river was the very heart of a Tamil Hindu sacred landscape.

Not only is the Kaveri lauded in religious panegyric, but it also serves an important ritual function, as pilgrims to the many temples constructed on its banks have traditionally bathed in the river and made offerings for deceased relatives. Its condition on that day in 2015 can be attributed not only to the heat of the Indian summer, but also to the fact that the river has been dammed in several places, which has led to a legal dispute over access to its waters between two state governments (Tamil Nadu and Karnataka) that has continued for nearly a century. Having spent much of the prior few years reading and thinking about the Kaveri’s sacrality, I could not help but feel a sense of loss as I stared at the sparse riverbed covered with a patchwork of weeds and trash.

In Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Nicolas Howe, an Assistant Professor at Williams College, explores the capacity of sacred landscapes to inspire such feelings – not only loss, alienation and injury, but also hope and communal belonging – in 20^th and 21^st century America. Howe’s work calls into question a particular common-sense approach to understanding the secular gaze, which he summarizes thus: “It is to see with a disenchanted eye, with the cold, disembodied gaze of self-sufficient reason.” Landscapes, when viewed through the secular eye, “can represent,” Howe continues, “but they cannot act.” In other words, landscapes can serve as symbols of the sacred, but are ultimately inert, possessing no internal agency of their own. What Howe demonstrates, through a detailed study of the history of Supreme Court cases that have dealt with sacred space, is that landscapes do possess such agency – rather than acting as mere symbols or objects of cognition, they have the capacity to affect us in tangible, visceral ways. This agency is, somewhat paradoxically, conditioned by the secular institution of the law.

Much of Howe’s book is a history of how American jurisprudence has dealt with sacred landscapes. In the first half of Landscapes of the Secular, he focuses on court cases that have considered the legality of public religious monuments (such as crosses erected at national parks and Decalogue displays on public property) in order to take up the question of agency directly; the plaintiffs and defendants in these cases debate the ability of public religious monuments to foster a sense of community or to exclude others. The second half of the book deals with the natural world, as American landscapes (such as mountains, forests, and rivers) have always been invested with sacrality by a variety of religious groups with whom the law has had to contend.

Consider, for instance, the 2005 case Van Orden v. Perry, in which the plaintiff argued that a display of the Ten Commandments located in the courtyard of the Texas State courthouse violated the establishment clause of the first amendment. The defendants argued that the display was not merely an affirmation of Judeo-Christian values, but also signified the logical underpinnings of American law itself. The Supreme Court ultimately sided with the defendants; concurring with the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas claimed “the only injury to [Van Orden] is that he takes offense at seeing the monument as he passes it on his way to the Texas Supreme Court Library. He need not stop to read it or even to look at it, let alone to express support for it or adopt the Commandments as guides for his life.” In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens claimed that, from the perspective of a reasonable nonadherent, the imposing monument, which displayed the words “I am the LORD thy God” at the eye-level of the viewer, signified a kind of exclusion.

At the heart of this case, and many others Howe discusses, are the feelings that a religious monument inspires in its viewers. He asks: What constitutes a reasonable observer, and what are the “right” ways of viewing monuments? Can such monuments truly cause “harm,” and is preventing such harm necessarily the purview of the law? Howe ultimately argues that, in engaging these questions, the law shapes our ways of viewing monuments and sacred landscapes more broadly. In his words, the law is a “performative medium,” and courts “provide a stage, an audience, and a set of specialized scripts.”

Thus, battles over public displays of nativity scenes, which have been fought in American courts since the 1950s, have come to be seen as part of the now perennial Wars on Christmas. A battle in which the law has conditioned both sides’ positions on the role of religion (and of Christianity in particular) in American life. According to Howe, opponents of these and other public Christian displays took issue with “their opponents’ ‘blind’ devotion to them, a devotion calculated to advance the geopolitical and economic interests of the ‘Christian Right’ or entrenched local powers.” On the other hand, defendants of such displays “portrayed themselves as victims of a Jacobin crusade to censor religious expression.” These cases hinge on the question of how one is reasonably[1] supposed to feel when seeing these displays, and the law thus plays an important role in conditioning an ideal civic religious vision. As Howe puts it “by dramatizing a conflict between civil and uncivil vision, law trains the eye to talk to the heart.” Furthermore, he argues, the law can also “enchant the material world,” imbuing objects (such as a Decalogue display) with “sacred and profane powers” – lending them the agency to endorse, acknowledge, insult, or exclude. In the case of the Decalogue display, the stone and the landscape in which it was situated were themselves made legal actors as the Supreme Court had to engage with the question of what exactly their affective capabilities were.

Yet Howe is also sensitive to the myriad ways in which the sacrality of landscapes has long been a central part of American religious life even prior to the intrusion of such legal discourse. The second half of his book explores how American courts have dealt with nature, as well as a wide variety of religious discourses – from the practices of Native American tribes in the American southwest to the Protestant environmentalism of John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club) – associated with the natural world. In such cases, those who make claims about the religious importance of landscapes often find themselves at odds with American law. In contrast to its treatment of landscapes that contain religious monuments, American jurisprudence has most often reflected an ambivalence (if not an outright hostility) to the sacrality of the natural world itself. Nowhere is this disadvantage clearer than in a longstanding dispute between the Snowbowl ski resort, located on the San Francisco peaks in northern Arizona, and several Native American tribes for whom the peaks are the abode of their ancestors and the site of many essential religious practices. In 2005, the resort set in motion plans to use purified sewage to make artificial snow, leading Native activists to sue in response; as one Hopi put it, the use of reclaimed sewage “will destroy everything we are as Hopi people and all people.”[2]

Photo by Deborah Lee Soltesz, October 8, 2015. Source: U.S. Forest Service, Coconino National Forest.

Much of the testimony in this case, as cited by Howe, makes it abundantly clear that the resort’s plan would cause significant harm to the Hopi and other tribes for whom the San Francisco peaks are of profound religious importance. The mountain is not a mere symbol of the sacred but, as the plaintiffs’ testimony repeatedly sought to demonstrate, is essential to their way of life. Yet the activists ultimately lost this particular case, as the law simply rejected their conceptualization of religion. Judge Carlos Bea of the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals argued that “the sole effect of the artificial snow is on the Plaintiffs’ subjective spiritual experience” and continued “respecting religious credos is one thing; requiring the government to change its conduct to avoid any perceived slight to them is quite another.” Howe sees this not only as “a failure of religious imagination,” but also as one of “geographical imagination, in its inability to conceive of landscape as anything more than property or, at best, as a symbolic accessory to spiritual life.” He argues that these landscapes are not merely “spiritual” – a term that, when applied to nature in the American context, often implies a kind of introspective, emotional romanticism[3] – but are living things that make practical demands on those for whom they are holy.

In his conclusion to Landscapes of the Secular, Howe asks “Can [secular liberalism] accept an environmental outlook that collapses the distinction between spirit and matter, that sees nature as the material embodiment of divinity, not its symbolic representation?” Howe further questions a narrowly aesthetic approach to understanding the sacrality of landscape, which would privilege descriptions of it in terms of the “picturesque” or the “sublime.” Howe pushes us to think of the sacrality of landscape beyond the visual apprehension of its beauty, claiming that, “as an emergent property of place, it embodies the full complexity of the social.” In other words, landscapes are places of lived experience, and are invested with the collective memories of the individuals and communities who dwell within them. What Howe ultimately demonstrates is that the secular institution of the law cannot easily contend with the material agency that this complexity affords landscapes.

As I read Howe’s conclusion, I thought of my experience at the Kaveri where my own feeling of loss was unquestionably rooted in aesthetics – in the distance between the poetic descriptions of the river that I had read in medieval Tamil texts, and the riverbed strewn with debris that lay before me. Howe effectively demonstrates the degree to which such an experience originates in certain strands of American religious culture that are reproduced in its legal frameworks. Despite the difference of contexts within which we work, reading Howe’s text reminds me to consider the much deeper loss experienced by those who regard the river itself as divine, who live in its proximity, and who depend on it for their material and spiritual well-being. Howe’s book draws from recent scholarly work that has revealed the problematic and contingent nature of “secularism,” (most notably, Talal Asad’s landmark work Formations of the Secular) while uniting these insights with a deep appreciation of American religious history and of the variety of ways in which people experience landscapes. A rich work of interdisciplinary scholarship, Landscapes of the Secular is essential reading for anyone interested in the complex relationships that secular actors and institutions have with sacred places.

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[1]   The history of “reasonability” as a legal standard is long and fraught. Howe explores how it is used in establishment clause cases, and the following podcast examines its use in police brutality cases, which often examine whether or not an individual is “reasonably” perceived as a threat, thus justifying the use of force. Radiolab has reported on this here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-more-perfect-mr-graham-reasonable-man/

[2]   For more about the 9^th circuit court ruling in 2008: Arizona Snowbowl can make snow with reclaimed wastewater, The Arizona Daily Sun, August 7, 2008

[3]   For a history of American religious attitudes toward nature, see John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Jay Ramesh is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His current research focuses on devotional poetry, written in Sanskrit and in Tamil, in early modern South India, and more broadly considers the relationship between space, literature, and memory. 

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.