Seminars

In this dissertation chapter, I consider how the "apostate" is a role that is constructed by religious institutions to structure social relations. Building on research on apostasy within NRM studies, I take up scholars' assertion that the "apostate" is a career role molded by the anti-cult movement and offer an alternative perspective examining how religious communities imagine their critics, particularly former members, as apostates. How do religious authorities endeavor to prevent apostasy, and how do they manage relationships with individuals who have committed apostasy? I explore these questions through the language and media produced by Jehovah's Witnesses that characterize the apostate figure. I argue that such voicing of the apostate not only constructs a figure to be shunned, but, through its contrasts, also shapes the conditions of speaking within the religious community.

How does a public street become sacred ground? And what does that transformation reveal about how secular governance spatially produces the very boundaries—between sacred and secular, public and private, licit and illicit intimacy—it treats as merely inherited or encountered? This chapter examines the 2009 Main Street Plaza incident in Salt Lake City, in which two men were handcuffed for a kiss on the cheek on a former public street that the LDS Church had purchased and converted into an “ecclesiastical park.” Building on Scott’s concept of sexularism and Mahmood’s analysis of secular governance, I propose “urban sexularism” to name the continuous spatial co-production of sacred, secular, and sexual boundaries through ordinary mechanisms of urban governance that claim institutional indifference toward religion and sexuality while actively distributing their proper locations, visibilities, and modes of conduct. By tracing how the public/private and family/market distinctions acquired spatial form through American zoning and constitutional doctrine of place, the chapter shows how property law, behavioral restrictions, and the elimination of a public easement produced sacred space through the very secular mechanisms that appeared merely to step aside. Religious authority over intimate conduct could then operate through the routine vocabulary of private property. A kiss deemed “out of place” made visible what the arrangement ordinarily renders unremarkable.