Against Interpretation and Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

More common in our own generation, particularly in America in the backwash of broken radical political enthusiasms, is a stance that can only be called religious fellow-travelling. This is a piety without content, a religiosity without either faith or observance. It includes in differing measures both nostalgia and relief: nostalgia over the loss of the sense of sacredness and relief that an intolerable burden has been lifted. (The conviction that what befell the old faiths could not be avoided was held with a nagging sense of impoverishment.) Unlike political fellow-travelling, religious fellow-travelling does not proceed from the attraction which a massive and increasingly successful idealism exercises, an attraction which is powerfully felt at the same time that one cannot completely identify with the movement. Rather, religious fellow-travelling proceeds from a sense of the weakness of religion: knowing the good old cause is down, it seems superfluous to kick it. Modern religious fellow-travelling is nourished on the awareness that the contemporary religious communities are on the defensive; thus to be anti-religious (like being a feminist) is old hat.