Is the CIA a Religious Institution? Surveillance and the “Security” of Capitalist Christian White Supremacy
by Elayne Oliphant
In an essay entitled “The Birth of Christianity and the Origins of Christian Anti-Judaism,” Paula Fredriksen offers an analysis of how the gentile Christian appropriation of Jewish concepts, practices, and texts in the fourth century helped to bake a profound anti-Judaism into the very foundation of Christianity. Christian writers from the second century, such as Valentinus and Marcion of Sinope, now considered heretical, tended to dismiss the God of Genesis as a lower deity and did not think Christians needed to read the texts of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of much of the Hebrew Bible). In contrast, other second-century-Christian apologists, such as Justin Martyr, argued that, when read correctly, with “spiritual understanding” (kata pneuma), the Septuagint was in fact a Christian text. Fredriksen argues that the anti-Jewish position of Marcion and Valentinus was more consistent. In rejecting Jewish practice and laws, they also rejected Jewish texts. For Justin Martyr and the group of fourth-century Christians who would come to feel the support of the Roman Empire under Constantine, the effective appropriation of Jewish texts required the violent disparagement of Jews and their practices. And so began the process of insisting that in order for the Christian way to be right, the Jewish way must be false—found again and again in Christian writings, prayers, and practices.
I found myself thinking about this article while reading Michael Graziano’s book, in part because of a certain parallel in non-reflexive thinking in both twentieth-century-US surveillance actors and fourth-century Christians building a newly empowered Church under Constantine. Both began with the unquestioned assumption of the superiority of their worldview and way of life, and it was through that lens that they examined, disparaged, and worked to dismantle other lifeways. What makes Fredriksen’s text so unsettling is recognizing the profound longevity of such practices: when they are not reflected upon, assumptions of superiority can become baked into worldviews in ways that make violence seem necessary. This could, perhaps, be a working definition of the Cold War. As I concluded Graziano’s text, I found myself wanting to ask a version of the question with which Fredriksen concludes her essay: “What, knowing this history, is today’s Christian to do?” (30).
What, after coming to know the history of the significance of the category of “religion” in the OSS and CIA so powerfully and thoughtfully articulated by Graziano, is today’s scholar of religion to do? The world of anthropology has been shaken this year by the discovery that one of our more critical voices, James Scott, shared data he gathered in Indonesia with the CIA in the 1960s. As a field, anthropologists have taken clear stances in the last decade, demanding that all members refuse such work and emphasizing the absolute priority of the safety of those we study over the “security concerns” of the nations in which we live. I hadn’t anticipated how relevant that conversation also might be within the field of religious studies before reading the history Graziano offers. Perhaps our work as religious studies scholars, like anthropology and area studies, has been militarized since its inception. If the Iranian Revolution, as Graziano argues in his conclusion, forced intelligence experts to rethink the classic world religions paradigm, how are we to live with the fact that similar questions were being asked in the academic study of religion around the same time? How might the intelligence community not only be continually learning from our work but also shaping it? It’s a question that I have sat with uncomfortably since finishing this book—a tribute to the text’s power and significance.
One important insight this book offers is the significant role played by Catholicism in the Protestant-centric United States. Throughout the modern colonial and imperial era, Catholicism has served as the model of religion. This was certainly true in Catholic empires, beginning with the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with religions of the Americas. At times, Mayan and Aztec practices were taken to be mirror images of Catholicism that must have been established by the devil (Todorov, 1984). In nineteenth-century French empires, cathedrals were constructed on top of mosques in North Africa, and within the hexagon (the term to describe France as it appears within continental Europe), the state demanded that all religions create their own hierarchy in order to negotiate effectively with the state within France. Rabbis were encouraged to dress like priests and create a Jewish catechism (Arkin 2014). But Protestants have made effective use of the Catholic model as well. Within numerous Protestant imperial frameworks, Protestantism stood as the high benchmark of Enlightened religion, which most primitive religious forms could never hope to achieve. Presuming all other religions to be inferior, they were most often mapped onto Catholicism when they managed to escape complete dismissal as “pagan” or “primitive.” That is, many anthropologists would use the institutional structure of the Catholic Church—its priests, rituals, and rites—as a means of comprehending other religious practices in ways that would always make them both comprehensible and inferior to the rational, textual, and (seemingly) non-ritualized expressions of Protestantism (Larson 2014).
In this forum, however, I want to reflect on three themes that occupied the background in much of this book. First, I want to highlight the complexity of maintaining teleological thinking in light of revolutionary actions. Second, I wonder what it might look like to think about the OSS and CIA not as secular institutions aimed at protecting US security but as religious institutions aimed at maintaining White Protestant Christian supremacy. Finally, I want to ask what this book might look like if it were seen as an exploration of how the category of religion operates in the work of international surveillance.
Turning first to the question of temporality, I appreciate how the analysis found in Chapter 7 and the Conclusion points to the unquestioned commitment of the intelligence community in the twentieth century to a modern teleological notion of development. That there was one legitimate way “forward”—capitalism, modernity, and liberal Christianity or secularism—is significant, but so is the temporal assumption of a linear trajectory. Seeing how the world religions paradigm embedded in this linear trajectory failed to predict something that was neither “forward” in the liberal sense, nor static, in the way many presumed Islam to be (traditional, conservative, backwards), made me think about revolution in a new light. Scholars of Christianity have tried to understand the “radical rupture” many Christians describe as occurring in their lives after they convert to Christianity (Robbins 2007). Something about conversion, or being born again, makes both the past and future look different than they had before. And yet, as Augustine makes clear in his Confessions, most Christians continue to struggle to avoid sin after conversion. Rather than a radical rupture after which everything is different, a more dynamic experience of hope, failure, return, recommitment, and continued failure tends to occur (see Olivia Harris for more on the dynamism of religious conversion). Might it be helpful to think about revolution and teleology in similarly dynamic terms? Neither teleology nor revolution convey the complex dynamism of social worlds in which desires for real change and transformation—whether liberal or radical—continually fall short, and the work of maintaining the status quo can never be taken for granted, but instead requires significant violence, as the CIA’s very existence highlights.
Second, one critique of the text I would make is that Graziano could and should have foregrounded the violence of this organization more. It is, after all, the CIA. He acknowledges this violence numerous times throughout, but I wonder how the analysis might have shifted had he spent more time interrogating the category of “national security” so central to the analyses of the men whose work he uncovers. How might the interpretation have shifted if we were to think about the OSS and CIA not as secular institutions aimed at protecting American security, but as religious institutions aimed at maintaining White Protestant American supremacy? It would be productive to think of the CIA as a religious institution because, following Kathryn Lofton’s definition of religion, the CIA has been one of the key sites aimed at defending the way in which US social life is organized. Lofton wants us to remove religion from its compartmentalization in the world religions paradigm and use it as a tool to name our sociality, identifying and critically engaging those objects and practices that seem to stand at its center and through which we find ourselves renewed as a collective and as individuals (3). She encourages using the concept of religion to help identify how social lives are organized and how “we mass-produce relations of value” (2). How do the CIA and the concept of “security” look different in such a light? How is the work of the CIA that of reproducing the privilege of a particular form of American civil religion and repressing other religions—especially those that might upend the racial and class hierarchies so central to the American “way of life”? How might the CIA’s mode of producing, gathering, and interpreting “intelligence” aim at a global project of conversion to a particularly capitalist and White supremacist religion? What role did the world religions paradigm play in that process historically, and what role do attempts to rethink how religions are intertwined in social life in complex ways play in the ongoing prioritization of White, Protestant Christian, capitalist life in the present?
Finally, and in a related vein, it would be interesting to read this work in light of conversations occurring in the Black studies critical reformulation of surveillance studies: particularly the work of Carol Anderson (2014), Simone Browne (2015), Sylvester Johnson and Steven Weitzman (2017), and Lerone A. Martin (2018). I recognize that many of these texts focus on domestic surveillance rather than international surveillance, but we know that the two are deeply interconnected. In her groundbreaking text, Browne asks “what would happen if some of the ideas occurring in surveillance studies were put into conversation with the enduring archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, in this way making visible the ways that race continues to structure surveillance practices?” (11). How can Graziano’s unraveling of the history of the CIA’s engagement with religion contribute to this work? I appreciate the varied way in which he approaches religion: “as a personal affiliation and identity marker, as a category of human experience, as a weapon and a strategy, and as Cold Warriors’ assumed—and flawed—ideology” (8). What does religion look like when it is a weapon and a strategy put to the maintenance of racial capitalism and White Christian supremacy? This is a disturbingly relevant question, as it might not only allow us to view twentieth-century US American violence differently, but it may also to help us understand events as recent as the January 6th insurrection (including the fact that White supremacist groups and White Christian groups had not been taken seriously enough as a threat to garner the attention of the extensive surveillance apparatus in ways that could have foretold this act) and Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine.
I think Chapter 4’s analysis of Militant Liberty and the “religion approach” pushes in this direction. It may well be expanded in interesting ways if, rather than focusing on the characters and careers of the actors, which is undeniably a fascinating context, Graziano had put the effects of the violence of surveillance—as Candace Lukasik has suggested in her commentary in this roundtable—at the center. The book focuses primarily on the actions and writings of middling men, even if in a critical vein. What do phrases like “to the nation’s advantage” imply (31)? What kind of violence does that foretell? In their contribution to Johnson and Weitzman’s edited volume, Lerone Martin and Kathryn Gin Lum argue that the FBI “arose as a major effort by the federal government to establish racial, ethnic, economic, and social order” (2017, 31) and tended to see non-White, non-Christian, or non-liberal religion as a threat to that order. Like the CIA’s relationship with the Catholic International Press described by Graziano, the FBI created “alliances with those who would defend the social order or who sought to curb the moral ills of modern life” (2017, 31). When we move beyond the experiences of these individuals to the effects of the violence they made possible, how can we understand “Americans’ tendency to think themselves expert on religion no matter their expertise” (182) as itself an expression of surveillance in the service of White Christian supremacy? The racial disparities in COVID deaths have demonstrated, yet again, how, like the anti-Judaism articulated at Christianity’s foundations in the second and fourth centuries, white supremacy has proved to be remarkably persistent in the US. And just as Fredriksen provokes us to ask—what are we as scholars of religion to do with this knowledge—Graziano’s research forces us to sit with the knowledge that our work contributes to global policing and surveillance. In response, I argue, we need to do more to resist the analysis of religious life in ways that contribute to existing violence and inequalities and tackle more ways in which we can put it to the service of imagining the world otherwise.
Elayne Oliphant is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at New York University. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Oliphant is a scholar of the privilege and power of Christianity in Europe and has written numerous articles on the aesthetic, religious, and cultural practices through which this privilege is reproduced. She is the author of The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris.