by the commonly held assumption that one can be judged only by oneself, any
other ‘gaze’ constituting an intolerable violation of one’s quality as a her-
metically sealed, yet vulnerable, ‘Other’. (The parallel claim that this ‘Otherness’
is socially constructed constitutes one of the many contradictions afoot in the
academic world). The practical consequences of these views is that, because
of their ‘difference’, confessional bodies can reject any questioning of their
practices, such questioning being dismissed as a survival of the much-maligned
eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Besides being made intellectually respectable,
this proliferation of orthodoxies can thrive because of the power exercised by
religious groups through their donations, which in some cases result in the
creation of endowed chairs, whose holders are expected not to offend the
sensibilities of the donors. In legal terms, these developments can take place
in the United States because the Civil Rights Act of 1991 nullified the
protections against discrimination based on, among other things, religion,
contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. According to the 1991
amendment:
it shall not be an unlawful employment practice for a school, college,
university, or other educational institution or institution of learning to hire
and employ employees of a particular religion if such school, college,
university, or other educational institution or institution of learning is, in
whole or in substantial part, owned, supported, controlled, or managed
by a particular religion or by a particular religious corporation, association,
or society, or if the curriculum of such school, college, university, or other
educational institution or institution of learning is directed toward the
propagation of a particular religion.
The fact that according to this legislation a university in the United States
of America may be involved in ‘the propagation of a particular religion’ and
may hire ‘employees’ on that basis, demonstrates that, in relation to religion,
the exercise of academic freedom is not to be taken for granted.
Despite the dangers that the developments mentioned above entail, scholars
of religion should not overlook that these trends allow them to observe at first
hand—in some cases at their own institutions—how religion actually functions.
To mention but one example: the current rediscovery of Catholic ‘identity’ on
the part of teaching institutions related to religious orders allows one to
witness the interplay between secularization and resacralization, an exercise
that is far more useful than merely following the repetitious debates about the
secularization thesis. Similarly, one’s reading of, for instance, Perez Zagorin’s
Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern
Europe(1990) can be fleshed out by contemporary cases of Nicodemism; that
is to say, by cases of academics, who because of their precarious employment
status—non-tenured, non-tenure track, part-time—may have to pretend to
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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
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30111
1
2
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4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
NORTH AMERICA
247
