The Albert Moore Memorial Lectures 2015: Brandzac Day: Consumerism, Materiality, the State Cult & the Hierophanic Shift

Brandzac Day: Consumerism, Materiality, the State Cult, and the

Hierophanic Shift Christopher Hartney Studies in Religion

University of Sydney

This spokesman for Carlton United Breweries…

…. also happens to be our Governor General

Raise a Glass! •  The “Anzac Act” of 1920 means that “Anzac” as a concept is strictly limited regards its commercial

application in Australia. Some level of agreement between the Returned Services League (RSL), The Minister for Veterans Affairs, and a commercial body must be established before the word “Anzac” can be used commercially. But it can be used commercially.

•  Since 2009, Carlton United Breweries (C.U.B) have established a charity link between themselves and the RSL. In 2012 they encouraged General Sir Peter Cosgrove to front adverts encouraging people to drink Victoria Bitter as a way of honouring the travails of those who had served.

•  Thus what is being sold is not only a beer, but a process of honouring the war dead, and those who presently serve. Both the beer and the experience are up for purchase. –  “The high-profile military figures, war widows and charities supporting the Raise a Glass

campaign did so for honourable reasons, including the rare opportunity to raise so much money for veterans. But at what cost? The campaign is a clear and concerning attempt to tie a commercial brand to Anzac Day.”

–  James Brown, The Long Shadow of Anzac, Blank Inc Books 2014. •  But as Brown makes clear not only does the campaign link this particular beer to Anzac Day, but

also with alcoholism rife in the armed services, and through this campaign through national rituals, perhaps this is not the perfect product to promote.

•  The deal is also complicated by being a bad one financially. Anzac can be bought pretty cheaply. Since 2009 the campaign has contributed $7 million to charity work with soldiers and their families. That’s a bit more than $1 million per Anzac Day to link the state cult to a beer. C.U.B directors chortle at board meetings that a spike in profits of up to $22 million occur around Anzac time.

•  But all this is considered acceptable…

Fresh in Our Memories

Woolworths “The Fresh Food People”

•  During the lead up to Anzac Day 2015, the supermarket chain Woolworths launched its “Fresh in Our Memories” campaign.

•  The campaign included a photo generator that allowed anyone to set up their photo on social media as if they were a ‘digger.’

•  Woolworths supported some charities connected to the military as a matter of course. But they did not seek specific permission from the RSL and the minister. They claimed that as “Fresh in Our Memories” was not a direct marketing campaign they did not have to do this…”

•  The tweets stormed in, a few examples of the massed outrage: –  Any marketing leveraging off Anzac Day in any way is grotesque. But

@Woolworths – that is the pits –  Good God @woolworths. I could deal with the biscuits, but the

#freshinourmemories is revolting. Will it be ANZAC figurines - 2 for $20 next?

Don’t miss out on ‘Digger’ Bear only $89.00 at your local Australia Post Outlet

•  James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession, 2014, 16–30.

•  Kate Aubusson, “Woolworths’ Fresh in Our Memories Debacle Puts Spotlight on Anzac Branding,” Sydney Morning Herald, April 16, 2015.

•  The 7.30 Report ‘Have Anzac Celebrations Become a Military Halloween?’ Broadcast 13 February 2014, On this program Brown says, “It tells us something about the importance of ANZAC in Australia that we’re spending 200 per cent more on commemorating the anniversary of the First World War than Britain is. Australia, a country that's trying to cut back spending in almost every other area of government policy, is spending money on an ANZAC arms race, looking for bigger and better ways to commemorate the service of our war dead.”

Camp Gallipoli https://www.campgallipoli.com.au/schools-group-offer-2/

•  In a series of historic locations around Australia and New Zealand, students, teachers and interested parents are invited to join in a special night of remembrance, entertainment, mateship and the birth of the ANZAC spirit. Each venue will have spaces set aside for camping using swags, just like the diggers did. There will be entertainment, special guests, movies, documentaries, great food options and a very special Dawn Service on Anzac day itself.

The Camp “Gallipoli” Swag - buy it now at Target

•  As the exclusive official partner to Camp Gallipoli, Target will donate all profits from the sale of merchandise to the Camp Gallipoli Foundation, with surpluses from the event going towards supporting the RSL & Legacy.

The 100th anniversary of Gallipoli is a moment in history to share with family and friends. Our camp Gallipoli range brings it all together in one remarkable event, embracing the ANZAC spirit in a night of remembrance and entertainment. This classic swag is a great way to be part of the commemorations and is a quality item for you or as a gift for friends and family.

•  http://www.target.com.au/p/camp-gallipoli-swag/57182827

What is being sold? •  In these examples (and many others) what is being sold is an experience of

remembrance and in a manner that suggests that this remembrance is a consumable product in its own right. Buying these products allows you to remember in a more authentic and genuine way.

•  What is also being sold is an opportunity for traffic and prestige. Target, Woolworths, Australia Post, C.U.B might donate some or all of the profits from these products but what they gain is foot traffic into their stores, the linking of their brand with the Anzac brand (and hence the “official” nature of state cult), and a chance to “mainline” and “Anzacify” the general name of the company. To buy into, in essence its ritual. I’m not sure that the RSL is smart enough to calculate the entire cost of what they are actually selling when they agree to endorse these vast numbers of, often tatty, schmaltzy, or (in the case of VB literally tasteless) products.

•  What is clear, if we note the Woolworths scandal, is that if one does not get Veterans’ approval one moves into the zone of scandal and blasphemy, but this is a blasphemy that clearly has a dollar amount and one can buy oneself out of the accusation of blasphemy if one agrees to go through the processes of agreeing to pay something. This, given C.U.B’s paltry contribution and massive gains, is not about the money, it is about acknowledging the right of Veterans’ organisations like the RSL to control brand Anzac.

But What is Really Being Sold? •  I hope you got the tone of despair in my voice about these deals with the national

cult as I have been describing them. •  There may be a national benefit from these products. Their incessant promotion

enables the sustenance and even the thriving of the national cult, adding a hysterical-like market and cultural saturation of Anzac in the lead up to 25 April.

•  I am not so naïve to think that money is not a vital part of the religious life of the world (in fact I am just about to argue that it is essential).

•  What worries me about these deals with Anzac products and the experiences they promise is that they are bad deals - selling short the sacrifice of the dead for tawdry cash amounts to charity that hide significant corporate gains.

•  Money is power and in my lecture yesterday I sought to highlight how the separation of religion from power structures is in itself a religious project when too eagerly enunciated by scholars. Similarly, studying religion without worrying deeply about where the money is going is also carrying out a religious, rather than a scholarly act.

•  So what happens when we follow the money regards “religion” in our modern secular state?

•  That is to what extent do we “consume” religion? Do we get our money’s worth?

Caodaism  道高台  

Religions Claim Sovereignty Over a Particular Worldview

•  In Discourse on Barbarity and Civility (Oxford 2009) Timothy Fitzgerald gives an extensive overview of, and delights in how, media reports of Muqtada al-Sadr (the ‘rebel’ imam) become confused because journalists could not settle on whether al-Sadr and his militia (during the Second Iraq Invasion) were a religious operation or a political operation. The answer: he was both simultaneously, but Western journalists had trouble dealing with this, and as a consequence did not get as close to the truth as they could have.

•  Similarly in my own cherished study – the religion of Caodaism (founded in Saigon 1926 and with about 4 million followers presently) – we find academics attacking its leaders particularly in scholarship from the 1950s and 60s for developing a ‘pretend’ religion and a real political movement. The answer – it was both simultaneously. And most recently, (e.g. Jammes 2006), scholars continue to have difficulty with Caodaism’s political role and address it with some amount of surprise (it ran its own army and had its own ministers in the imperial cabinet in the decade following World War II).

•  When we look at Dominialism in Christianity, the Islamic State, the idea of the enlightened ruler in Buddhism, we find a confusion of religious and political intent that in no way calms supports the strident attitude in the West that these ideas can never be fully addressed as simply political or simply religious.

•  What we find with religious movements – particularly those in Frontier areas (Caodaism), or at times of crisis (Sadr et al) or when negotiating a space in society for themselves because they are new (Scientology) that these movements will seek to take on the authority of the state if they can. Thus…

•  Religions need to be seen as alternate states of ultimate social meaning. •  That is, they make sovereign claims. They are manifestations of collective

subjunctivist (i.e. an unreal but hoped for) projections that re-arrange, challenge or even seek to obliterate the authority structure of the state. Unless they are, or very close to being, an established religion, religious systems contain claims to sovereignty that enable them to wrest sovereignty and authority from the state.

•  Movements that do not seem to have any structures in place or general concepts to assume ultimate authority (latent though these might be) and express their sovereignty should be regarded suspiciously when we try to insert them into the category of religion.

•  This alternate authority structure is indeed sacralised, but that does not mean that our secular world is not similarly sacralised.

•  Because of this, the ideal imaginings of any religion must be constantly interrupted and controlled by the state.

•  A religion is an authority structure that provides ultimate meaning for its adherents up to that point where the state interrupts it.

•  If the state cannot interrupt this claim to ultimacy, then the religion would be the state.

•  How then does the secular state prevent this from happening?

I interrupt this argument to bring you some Culture Jamming from the Jesus Christians

Jesus Christians: In a Nutshell Developed from an informal group c.1972 •  Led by Dave and Cherry McKay - Australian Citizens (ex U.S) •  Formally constituted as ‘Jesus Christians’ from 1982 •  Culture Jammers for Christ, graffiti artists, they distribute books on the end time, they

dumpster dive, travel in camper vans… •  Literalists not Fundamentalists – e.g. homosexuality – what did Jesus say about it? •  End-time focused. •  Encourage abandonment of quotidian modernist life and its complicity with mammon. •  Communal living and in poverty •  Refuse barcodes, identifying microchips and, of course, government funding… •  Sometimes donate kidneys to strangers •  Little in the way of institutions outside of their web presence. •  Opposed to ‘Churchies’ or Christians too deeply immured in the status quo. •  They represent for me the antithesis of what most religions are – and that groups who are

quite willing to make complicit the purity of their own claims for sovereignty by accepting the cash benefits and thus validation from the modern state.

Because the Jesus Christians remain diametrically opposed to negotiation with any government they get no funding. They get no legitimacy (they don’t want

it). But those religions who are willing to negotiate away their own sovereignty - these groups are rewarded handsomely.

As I mentioned yesterday most secular national constitutions mention religion – even if it is to describe religion as a zone upon which the state must not trespass. Ironically, this absence of control over religion must be negotiated through a whole range of interesting controls and definitions. But in the days when a “religion” was a “religion” implicit agreements between (mainly) Christian faiths and Western “secular” states were left generally unspoken.

Then came L.Ron Hubbard and Scientology which, operating as both a training centre and a religion, made quite explicit the relation between religion, power, and money, and the “Org” used its money to force nation states to define it as a religion. This is one of Scientology’s great legacies to the West – definitional transparency regards what a religion is at a legal level.

Hugh B. Urban: The Church of Scientology (Princeton 2013) tells the exciting story of how L.Ron. Hubbard took sovereignty into his own hands and launched a war on the Internal Revenue Service of the United States

Using legal and illegal means L. Ron Hubbard won that war. By feeding Scientologists undercover into the IRS, Scientology was able to spy on and influence this government department. It was an invasion from within – and it demonstrates how vulnerable a state can be (in this instance the most powerful state on the world stage) when sovereignty systems other than the state refuse to cede their claims of ultimacy and sovereignty, or make these complicit with the role of the state.

In Urban’s book - after considering if Scientology is a religion he writes: “I think the more profound questions here are (a) Who gets to define religion? And (b) just what is at stake in calling something “religion”? If we follow Bruce Lincoln… then religion is perhaps better understood not as a “thing” at all , but rather a particular kind of discourse that makes claim to a special kind of authority”

I would delete the word “special” from this quote, because the state, equally through its bureaucratic machinery, and through its civil religion equally makes claims to “special” kinds of authority – that is both a functional and an emotive authority.

He adds, “and even more interesting question is who gets to evaluate and pass judgement on one’s claims to religious status?” And “the most important question in all of this is really just what is at stake?” (Urban, The Church of Scientology, p.211 his italics).

(What is at stake? The State encourages religions to compromise their claims to Ultimacy/Sovereignty by

taking funding. •  The state offers religions massive tax concessions in many fields including

exceptions from land tax (which allow religions to maintain their high-status sites in the centre of our cities).

•  A reticence by the state to closely investigate the operations of an organisation that is “faith based.” (This can have tragic consequences - note the results, thus far, of the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse where abusers, and their church were more often than not protected by religious hierarchies).

•  Exclusion from particular legislation relating to Anti-discrimination. •  Significant direct funding for religious schools. •  Significant tax concessions for religious businesses (e.g. Sanitarium). •  That is, the state cedes some/a lot of its authority to the authority of the

religion (but why?) •  In this ceding of authority the state expects a certain complicity, whether

ethical or moral or definitional. This can be seen in the way states define religions and here I touch on three main Anglophone examples… Australia, the U.S and England and Wales.

Australia (from 1983) •  The Commissioner of Pay-Roll Tax in Victoria deemed that Scientology

was not a religion. That decision was upheld in the Supreme Court of Victoria and on appeal in the Victorian Full Court. This decision, however, was overturned in 1983 by the High Court of Australia and establishes a precise legal definition of religion.

•  Anthony Mason and Gerald Brennan gave the following ruling: “The mantle of immunity [from taxation] would soon be in tatters if it were

wrapped around beliefs, practices and observances of every kind whenever a group of adherents chose to call them a religion. A more objective criterion is required [so] for the purposes of the law, the criteria of religion are two-fold: first, belief in a supernatural Being, Thing of Principal; and second, the acceptance of canons of conduct in order to give effect to that belief, though canons of conduct which might offend against the ordinary laws are outside the area of any immunity, privilege or right conferred on the grounds of religion.”

•  Justices Ronald Wilson and William Deane gave a separate ruling urging the use of legal precedent to establish what constituted a religion including:

•  …belief in the supernatural, that is, belief that reality extended beyond that which was capable of perception by the senses; that the ideas related to man’s nature and place in the universe and his relations to things supernatural, that the ideas were accepted by adherents as requiring or encouraging them to observe particular practices having supernatural significance; and that, however loosely-knit and varying in beliefs and practices adherents might be, the constituted an identifiable group or identifiable groups.

•  Finally the more radical Lionel Murphy gave a ruling that ultimately suggested that a religion was a group who called themselves a religion and the court has no role to play in passing judgement on what constituted a valid belief system.

•  Thus an official Australian definition of religion can be built up from the process of

1.  Assessing how groups self-identify as religious 2.  Legal precedent 3.  Relation to the supernatural (see also Ian Ellis-Jones “Beyond the Scientology Case” PhD Thesis 2007 in

which he argues that the “supernatural cannot be proven in law”) 4. However, it remains the purview of the state to say what is and what is not a

religion, while the state itself operates its religion and seeks to satisfy the (religious) emotions of its citizenry, in certain scenes,

The United States •  A definition of religion is technically unconstitutional. •  Yet the offer of ceding authority to religions by the state as

an act of complicity must continue despite the legalities of the constitution – thus it is left to the IRS to “kind of” define religion…

•  Writes Urban: “Even the IRS, however, has no fixed standard definition of a “church” that it uses in tax-exemption requests. As Hopkins notes, “[J]ust as is the case with respect to the term religious there is no definition in the Internal revenue Code or in a currently applicable tax regulation of the term church. Again, a rigidly regulatory definition of the term church would undoubtedly be unconstitutional.”

From the Internal Revenue Service From the IRS website summarising Document 1828 Tax guide for Churches and Religious

Organisations.

Certain characteristics are generally attributed to churches. These attributes of a church have been developed by the IRS and by court decisions. They include:

•  Distinct legal existence •  Recognized creed and form of worship •  Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government •  Formal code of doctrine and discipline •  Distinct religious history •  Membership not associated with any other church or denomination •  Organization of ordained ministers •  Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study •  Literature of its own •  Established places of worship •  Regular congregations •  Regular religious services •  Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young •  Schools for the preparation of its members •  The IRS generally uses a combination of these characteristics, together with other facts and

circumstances, to determine whether an organization is considered a church for federal tax purposes.

But what’s more interesting are the moral and ethical codes of behaviour the IRS forces on religious

operatives •  Example 2: Minister B is the minister of Church K, a section 501(c)(3) organization, and is well

known in the community . Three weeks before the election, he attends a press conference at Candidate V’s campaign headquarters and states that Candidate V should be reelected . Minister B does not say he is speaking on behalf of Church K . His endorsement is reported on the front page of the local newspaper and he is identified in the article as the minister of Church K . Because Minister B did not make the endorsement at an official church function, in an official church publication or otherwise use the church’s assets, and did not state that he was speaking as a representative of Church K, his actions do not constitute political campaign intervention by Church K

•  Example 3: Minister C is the minister of Church I, a section 501(c)(3) organization . . Church I, publishes a monthly church newsletter that is distributed to all church members . In each issue, Minister C has a column titled “My Views .” The month before the election, Minister C states in the “My Views” column, “It is my personal opinion that Candidate U should be reelected .” For that one issue, Minister C pays from his personal funds the portion of the cost of the newsletter attributable to the “My Views” column . Even though he paid part of the cost of the newsletter, the newsletter is an official publication of the church . Because the endorsement appeared in an official publication of Church I, it constitutes political campaign intervention by Church I

•  That is, the IRS, as an arm of government dictates modes of ethical and moral behaviour to ministers who themselves exist as ethical and moral arbiters in society. Again the ultimacy claims of the state are upheld.

Finally, England and Wales Interestingly, the 2006 Charities Act does not define, or even mention “religion.” It does, however, establish a Charities Commission – something the Australian Parliament has recently developed under the agitation of Senator Nick Xenaphon and his Today Tonight, press officer who are scared of the influence of Scientology on the polity. If one proceeds to the Charity Commission’s website, one can find a document entitled The Advancement of Religion for the Public Benefit. Here in the preface the chair of the commission Dame Suzi Leather, and Chief Executive Andrew Hind explain the following,

From 2008 Religions have to demonstrate that they are for the public good…

•  Historically, the concept of charity has often been closely linked with a religious sense of duty about helping others. One of the reasons why the advancement of religion has been recognised as something that is for the public benefit is because of this connection between religion and charitable endeavour. Much of that charitable endeavour is now recognised in its own right in other charitable aims, such as the prevention or relief of poverty, but the advancement of religion for the public benefit is also a charitable aim.

•  Religious belief and faith has, by its nature, both personal and public dimensions. In relation to public benefit, it is the public dimension that is of primary importance. Where religion helps to provide a moral and ethical framework for people to live by it can play an important part in building a better society.

•  There are approximately 29,000 charities on the Charity Commission’s Register with aims that include advancing religion. This number will increase as those charities whose aims include advancing religion which were previously excepted from the requirement to register will shortly be required to register. Under the Charities Act 2006, all will have to demonstrate that the way in which they carry out their aims is for the public benefit, as do all other charities.

Thus a Religion that cannot demonstrate that it is willing to cede authority to the state for the “public good” cannot be granted tax-free status.

We should not forget that there are religions, including various interpretations of Christianity that do indeed refuse to negotiate their claims to ultimacy with the state.

But there are some, such as the Exclusive (Plymouth) Brethren who have sought to to everything they can to ensure they continue to get state funding.

Which Brings Us Back to Smith:

Jonathan Z. Smith: “Man, more precisely western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to

imagine religion. It is this act or second order, reflective imagination which must be the central occupation of any student of religion. That is to say, while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterised in one culture or another , as religious – there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytical purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalisation. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy… For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious.” (Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown1982 p.xi)

As Smith wrote that in 1982, I think we can forgive him the fact that “religion” as a concept has now become a state fact (see Definition the Third)

•  Using Smith as a way point of development we then arrive at Timothy Fitzgerald’s A Discourse on Barbarity and Civility (2007) which seeks to completely obliterate the category of religion.

Consequences •  Thus Fitzgerald suggests that Studies in Religion sanitizes

the public sphere from religion. •  That scholars of religion, implicit in the creation of false

categories (for the service of the state?) •  In opposition to his idea that we work to de-sanitize the

public sphere of the mythic and the sacred, other scholars, such as Marcel Gauchet (‘La religion dans la démocratie, 2005) stress how we are excluding religion from the social debate by sacralising the public sphere: With an oblique reference to Augustine he writes ‘La Cité de l’homme est l’œuvre de l’homme…[et] nous sommes devenus, en un mot, métaphysiquement démocrats.’

The Heirophanic Shift •  To save the freedom of the world, to save Liberty’s own self, to save

the honour of men and women and the innocence of children, everything that is noblest in Europe, everyone that puts principle above ease, and life itself beyond mere living, are banded in a great crusade – we cannot deny it – to kill Germans: to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant, who superintended the Armenian massacres, who sank the Lusitania, and who turned the machine-guns on the civilians of Aerschott and Louvain – and to kill them lest the civilization of the world itself be killed.

Bishop of London, Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram Westminster Abbey, 25 November 1915

t  

Rise of Materialism – as a path of enchantment (and salvation)

through ownership.  •  The Reformation (from 1517) •  Calvinism (predestination linked to

prosperity) •  Adam Smith Wealth of Nations (1776)

promoted pluralism in the marketplace and also in the market place of religious ideas.

•  Rise of the Railways and Speed (increasingly from the 1840s) - a central component of modernism is speed. The Futurist art movement of Tommasso Marinetti (early 20th Century) celebrated speed and the inhumanity of the machine and of the future. It gave rise to Fascism (itself a form of reenchantment).

•  Max Weber: The Protestant Work Ethic (1930)

•  David Lyons: Jesus in Disneyland (1999)

Conclusions 1 Again Reinforce Yesterday’s main points…

•  “For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious” (as Smith says) – that is, self-conscious of being a tool of the state at work to make particular religious history.

•  ‘Dieu et mon Droit’/’One Nation Under God’/’The Manifest Destiny of the United States’? ‘Deutschland über alles’ “Qu’un sang impur/Abreuve nos sillons!” That is, the state is regularly dressed in sacral garb. Why? And why do we play this down with our exclusivist definitions of what constitutes a religion?

Conclusion 2: What is it that we are Buying?

•  Through the tax system and the massive concessions we offer to competing sovereign systems the ”secular” state buys complicity in its project from other groups. That is, it buys us into a modern secular multi-faith state. It does so literally by purchasing other worldsystem’s claims to absolute sovereignty.

•  It is not strange then that at an individual level we access the sacred through purchasable items such as those I have been speaking about. The companies that I have mentioned did not invent this, they are just cannily seeking market share in the sacred trade.

•  What my research suggests is that we can purchase our way towards a deep sacred experience – certainly in the state cult – and that this dollar-process of accessing the more profound sacred experiences about us will become even more pronounced in the future.

•  How does this commercial structure then mesh with the sacrifice of those who died in Gallipoli and the Western Front for that does not seem and economic exchange at all, and tomorrow I will show why it is not.

•  Perhaps my conclusions are a little disheartening – perhaps now it would be just wonderful if we could purchase some silence.

•  Thankfully we can…

The Telstra Minute of Silence (Only $1.98 per minute)