78 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
of religion measured all other beliefs
and practices.
Take the German philologist Frie-
drich Max Müller. He was heralded as
an expert on India despite never hav-
ing been there, Subin points out, and
he helped create the discipline of reli-
gious studies, in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. Previously, Europeans had divided
the world into four religions: Christi-
anity, Judaism, Islam, and Paganism.
Müller added others, among them Hin-
duism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and
Taoism. He could make a religion out
of “anything that sufficiently resembled
Christianity,” Subin writes, whether or
not the culture it came from regarded
it as one faith or, for that matter, as a
religious faith at all.
So it was that one of the world’s old-
est, most varied systems of thought be-
came “Bramanismo” and “Gentooism”
and “Banian Religion,” then finally the
exonym Hinduism, a single label ap-
plied to the diverse beliefs of all the
people living around the Indus River,
who were then declared with Procrus-
tean zeal to have a trinity and to be in
need of a pope. “African” religion was
reduced to fetishism, with allegedly ar-
bitrary objects deemed sacred by be-
lievers who were seen as superstitious
rather than devout. Any kind of ritual
observance in any part of the world was
made to conform to belief of the creedal
kind, and every pantheon was contorted
to fit categories like prophet or saint,
with rigid distinctions like deity and
mortal imposed where they had never
existed before.
The same subjects who knelt before
their kings and sang hymns of praise to
their queens looked elsewhere and di-
agnosed all ritual practice as worship,
reducing every instance of veneration
to deification. The very scholars who
were doing that diagnosing were also
drawing new distinctions between the
religious and the secular, justifying po-
litical adoration while judging religious
zealotry. Post-Reformation Europe had
forced Catholicism and Protestantism
into an uncertain truce, with Enlight-
enment ideas of tolerance banishing
spiritual beliefs to the private sphere
while public life focussed on politics.
In this new order, Subin argues, de-
ification would become, at best, hereti-
cal and, at worst, nonsensical. “With
the rise of nationalism and liberation
movements in the twentieth century
come the politicians and activists, sec-ularists and modernists, who were dis-
mayed to learn of their own apotheo-
ses, as tales of their miracles contradicted
their political agendas,” she writes. Such
people expected political fealty, not re-
ligious faith. Their discomfort was born
partly of experience: Prime Ministers
Jawaharlal Nehru and Narendra Modi
were worshipped as Vishnu, but so was
Adolf Hitler. Leadership cults were both
agents of empire and agents of its de-
struction, and they were perceived as
dangerous by those for whom the pre-
ferred objects of devotion were entities
like the state or ideas like human rights.
It is in this same spirit that present-day
political commentators argue that Amer-
icans should exalt the Presidency, not
the President.
Yet even when these abstractions do
inspire devotion, they often take human
form. Thus was “The Apotheosis of
Washington” fresco added to the Cap-
itol dome at the end of the Civil War,
featuring the American Cincinnatus
being carried up to Heaven by the god-
desses Liberty and Victory, surrounded
by allegorical figures, including Free-
dom trampling Discord and Anger,
who appear in the form of Jefferson
Davis and Alexander Stephens, the de-
feated Confederate leaders. Likewise,
after the Partition of India, in 1948,
when millions of people had been dis-
placed and more than a million had
died in bursts of sectarian violence,
Gandhi’s cremated remains were scat-
tered like those of the Sacred Man of
the Rig Veda, with separate urns going
to every region of the country, in an ef-
fort to promote peace.B
ut were any of these modern lead-
ers truly worshipped? Venerated by
their fellow-citizens, yes, and also revered
across the globe, honored with name-
sakes and national shrines, mythologized
in tales of virtue and heroism, and com-
memorated with national holidays. But
were they considered literal gods or
merely figurative ones? Put differently,
what separates Bussa Krishna, who built
a temple in honor of Donald Trump out-
side Hyderabad, from the American par-
tisans who await the former President’s
every move and eagerly anticipate his re-
turn to power? One might be tempted
to regard this question as purely seman-
tic—the word for “god” exists in some“O.K., how about this: instead of assassinating her straight out,
we subject her to steam heat all winter, so her skin gets really
dry and she’s prone to nosebleeds and her eyes itch and she’s just
a little bit uncomfortable at all times for months on end?”