Interviews
J.C. Hallman (June 2008)
J.C. Hallman is a graduate of the University of Iowa (M.F.A. in Creative Writing) and John Hopkins University (M.A. in Creative Writing). He has taught literature and writing at several colleges and universities, including two years as the Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College in Virginia.
To date, Hallman has published two books of nonfiction as well as a number of pieces in magazines and journals. His first book, The chess artist: genius, obsession, and the world's oldest game (St. Martin's Press, 2003), recounts the story of his friendship with chess player Glenn Umstead, whom he first met in Atlantic City. Together the two travelled to Russia and experienced a variety of adventures that reveal the peculiarities of the chess subculture. In his second book, The devil is a gentleman: exploring America's religious fringe (Random House, 2006), Hallman describes his intellectual apprenticeship with philosopher William James. Through visits to a number of offbeat present-day religious movements, during which he experiences a range of rites and rituals, Hallman explores the ways in which James’s thinking continues to inform America’s religious identity.
For more information about J.C. Hallman's work, including forthcoming books as well as links to his published articles and essays, visit www.jchallman.com.
WJC: Do you remember when you first encountered the writings of William James, and what you initially found appealing about his thought?
JCH: Well, my first encounter with James was in college – he was still, at that time, a staple of entry-level psychology, at least with the professor I had. I wasn't really ready for James, then, but enough stuck that when I later set off on what became the first chapter of The devil is a gentleman, he was somewhere there in the back of my mind, tinkering away. It occurred to me that perhaps James's bifurcation between sick souls and the healthy-minded folk might explain the difference between a couple odd groups I was visiting. That hypothesis turned out not to work, but when I returned to The varieties of religious experience I realized that James had probably been the reason I'd decided to visit the groups in the first place, that some part of him had informed my curiosity.
WJC: So reacquainting yourself with James's Varieties ultimately served as your compass in writing Devil. In particular, though, to what extent did this re-reading of Varieties influence your actual choice of religions to contact and include in your book?
JCH: A lot of factors came into play in deciding which groups to visit. You can't be comprehensive when it comes to something like religion, but you can at least aspire to a kind of representative portrait. I tried to pick a group that seemed a fair representation of alternative religion today. That was one factor. And James was another – not just in Varieties, but in all his work and letters. Seeing that James had a long history of working with dogs, and having dogs as pets, for example, led me to think that looking, through a Jamesian lens, at the Monks of New Skete, the dog-raising monastery of New York State, might be fruitful. Another example was a scholar's observation, thirty years ago, that William James was one of the sources that L. Rob Hubbard used in creating Scientology. (That turned out to be pretty far off the mark, but James sheds an interesting light on the Scientology phenomenon regardless.) Other times the connection was more ephemeral: just a small bit of research into the varied culture of Wicca put me in mind of the pluralism James described, and it was easy enough to take James's distaste for all things "big" and apply it to the megachurch movement that was, at least in part, behind the Christian Wrestling Federation.
WJC: Your description of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan – especially when seen through a Jamesian lens – was quite interesting. On the one hand, the Satanists appear to be very much in line with James's ideas, celebrating promethean individualism and engaging in religious ritual strictly for its pragmatic value. But on the other hand, they absolutely disavow and denigrate any kind of faith or spirituality. In fact, if I recall correctly, the High Priest of The Church of Satan, Peter H. Gilmore, when interviewed on Point of Inquiry, referred to LaVeyian Satanism as a "theatrical non-religion." When you interviewed the "Black Pope" for Devil, did he ever mention that he had read James?
JCH: They certainly seemed to have signed on to James's thinking – at least to a certain point. They grasped that the ideas we embrace should be the ones that "work," that have what James called "cash value." And it wasn't simply a performance for others, a theatre for others – it was internal discipline as well. Of course, there's a crucial difference between the Satanists and James: for James, this idea of ideas working led right back to God, and to actual belief. Belief, too, was an idea that worked. Indeed, this was where the real "strenuous" life lay (and in characterizing it in that way James was probably responding to Roosevelt's speech "The Strenuous Life").
I don't think Gilmore told me that he had read James, but he did, in our very first meeting, describe his faith as "satanic pragmatism," which turns out to be a fairly accurate way of describing what Satanism owes to James, and how it departs from him.
WJC: As well, what I realized when reading your chapter on the Church of Satan is that James's definition of religion – "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" – is broad enough to encompass even an atheistic or naturalistic point of view. In the case of the Satanists, the "carnal self" of every individual is what is considered divine.
JCH: Yes, and James described how people would be attracted to religions that appealed to their particular susceptibilities. Sometimes, obviously, that means people can be taken advantage of – and that's probably what we really mean, these days, when we use the word "cult." Satanism was somewhere in between, because I think that particularly in the early videos of LaVey as he articulated what he was doing, you can see he meant this earnestly, even as tongue in cheek as it was.
WJC: With regard to people's "susceptibilities," no doubt during your research for Devil you met individuals whose credulity was quite pronounced. In particular, I got the sense that this was the case for many of the members of Unarius, the UFO cult. I found the members of this group the most damaged – in profound spiritual and psychological need. For these persons, did you ever think the pragmatic benefits of their beliefs were at too high of a cost – the cost of suspending critical reasoning and of being stigmatized through association with a cult?
JCH: By my standards, yes. But not, I imagine, by their standards.
I didn't think of Unarius as a cult. Sure, it's a small peculiar religion, but smallness and peculiarity cannot be the criteria we use for cults. A better criteria, I think, is whether or not a religion permits or celebrates individuality and/or creativity. “Cults” suppress these things, but, as weird as it was, Unarius celebrated both.
I think your idea of pronounced credulity is, perhaps, another way a referring to James's healthy-minded folk. Is James being a little patronizing here? Probably. But we can't ignore that he paints these people as "well" and sick souls (including himself) as "unwell." It's more than just ignorance is bliss. The breaking of people into categories is James's acknowledgment of variety – people are different in terms of their credulity, and they need different things. The danger lies not in whether the religion is weird, or whether they suspend critical thinking (all religions do that), but in whether they become too large, or whether they wind up with a tyrannical God that inspires tyranny in life. That's a cult. And it's something I was much more willing to explore during my time investigating Scientology – arguably another UFO group.
WJC: I gathered from your chapter on the Church of Scientology that you were quite inimical to its methods. Of all the groups you visited, it's clearly the best example of what James called the "wrong side of religion's account." Did they pursue you after your encounter with them?
JCH: Yes, it's clear that they serve as kind of the villain of the book. They’re big, corporate – everything James was opposed to. The megachurch doesn't come off all that well, either. And I suggest that James – even as he couldn't have embraced the beliefs himself – would have approved of smaller religions like Unarius and the Christian Wrestling Federation.
The Scientologists pursued me for about six months with daily phone calls. Then it seemed I got referred to some department to handle difficult cases. I ignored it, and it tailed off after that. Interestingly, even though Scientology was the villain of my book, I think I gave them a more even-handed treatment than they have tended to received. Some, I'm sure, would conclude that I went too light on them. But the goal of the book is not to expose – it's intended as a literary endeavor, the story of an intellectual apprenticeship.
WJC: I have to admit that, of all the groups, the Christian Wrestling Federation was the one hardest for me to swallow. The theatrics of the "sport" are unarguably over the top, and combined with the religious element I found it even more farcical. When you say James would have approved of the Christian Wrestlers, I assume you're referring to the underlying meaning of their displays of physical struggle or "strenuousness?"
JCH: Yes, but only to the extent that that was a metaphor for their aggressive outreach. Even this can raise the hackles a bit, but at least they weren't knocking on doors or bugging you in airports. Their shows were a different kind of performance than you got in the megachurch they were loosely affiliated with. It felt more honest, even as – and perhaps because – it was more outrageous.
The Christian Wrestlers were a kind of technical challenge for me – a person who would otherwise never attend this kind of event. To write about it in such a way that you got a sense of how such a thing could be persuasive to someone else was both a literary and Jamesian exercise. The lengthy quotations James uses in Varieties from mystics have the same intent – to give us a glimpse of a life or an experience that we (and he) are unable to experience for ourselves. The religious pluralism James longed for demands that we figure out how to empathize even with that which is beyond our ken.
WJC: Ideally, how would you describe a religion that appeals to your own higher emotions and aesthetic sense? And, of the groups presented in Devil, which one, if even remotely, would you say comes nearest to your ideal?
JCH: In Varieties, James observes that the best practitioners of the "science of religions" he prescribes would be the people who were least likely to find a satisfactory faith for themselves. You have to read between the lines a little to see that he's talking about his own book, and himself. I'd echo that sentiment for my own attempt at understanding James and repeating his venture.
With a gun to my head, though, the answer is easy – the Monks of New Skete (and to a smaller extent, Wicca). I liked the life at New Skete, and I'm publishing an essay this fall in an anthology about writers and their dogs that goes into a little more depth than the book does on how I used my own experience of owning a German shepherd as inspiration for visiting the famous German shepherd-breeding monastery. So I was certainly personally susceptible to them. But any religion that preserves mystery and celebrates variety in the Jamesian sense is going to have a good shot with me – which is not to say I'm seeking. James himself, I've found, is quite enough.
WJC: To what extent does James figure in In eutopia, the book you're currently working on?
JCH: The new book's about modern utopian movements – in a variety of forms. Interestingly, I discuss in Devil James's distaste for utopian schemes. (He was friendly with H.G. Wells, however.) But he does pop up in the magazine version of the first chapter of the book, which is about Pleistocene Rewilding, an odd idea that comes out of conservation biology. It's in the May/June 2008 issue of Science and Spirit. I use James here to weigh in on the idea of conservation, and whether it should use science or religion to make its case most effectively. James would have been unequivocal on this point: science should be used to affirm what we understand about the universe intuitively – not as the means for determining our understanding in the first place. I'm sure that some would describe that idea itself as utopian.
WJC: Other than William James, what persons or persons' works have influenced your ideas?
JCH: It's all writers. Early on, it was Nathanael West and Franz Kafka, on an aesthetic level. Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and John Cheever were important, too. Lots of others, to a smaller extent. What's maybe interesting in this context is that Henry James was really my introduction (or my re-introduction) to William. In graduate school, I did a long study on The turn of the screw, which I'd already taught, but which kind of stuck in my craw. That study answered a lot of questions for me, in terms of how I approached my own life in fiction. And when I got serious about William James, I spent a lot of time with the correspondence of the two brothers. I can't think of two men who are both so influential for whom there is such a detailed record of correspondence. Truly a uniquely recorded relationship – and a great deal for me to mull over in terms of my initial reaction to Henry. In a very real way – and perhaps this can be said of all of us – I am a child of the James brothers.
WJC: Thanks J.C. for the engaging discussion, as well as your interest in the William James Cybrary.