Elijah Siegler, Religious Studies Outside the Classroom

 

92-161. Elijah Siegler

SPEAKERS

Elijah Siegler, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Bill, hello and welcome to The 92 Report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Elijah Siegler, Elijah, welcome to the show. Thanks Will for having me So Elijah, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard. Sure.

 

Elijah Siegler  00:25

Well, I remember our graduation. I think most of us graduated on June 5, 1992 and I remember that that day, the Harrison Ford movie Patriot Games was opening, and on the busses driving around Harvard Square, there were these, you know, on the signs, there were these movie posters saying, on June 5, the games begin. And I thought that was a little ominous for our graduation day. So, because, indeed, we were kind of cast out into the world. And you know what I tell my own kids, and then my own students at where I teach is, you know, you don’t need to have your whole life post college figured out. You just need kind of like, one cool thing lined up and then that’ll lead to another cool thing and to another cool thing. And so I had one cool thing lined up after I graduated, and that was working at, let’s go the student travel guides. I was the editor of the Greece and Turkey book for the summer of 92 and it was called, let’s go Greece and Turkey, 1993 and that was an amazing summer job with many other members of the Class of 92 in that same office in the square. And of course, I didn’t know anything about Greece and Turkey. I think they there was a last minute cancelation or something, so they asked me to step in. And I certainly learned a lot, and then it didn’t actually lead to any other cool thing. So in September,

 

Will Bachman  01:53

had you done? Had you been a researcher in previous summers?

 

Elijah Siegler  01:57

I had been the summer after my freshman year. So summer of 89 I was a researcher for, let’s go Pacific Northwest. So I was like hitchhiking through Oregon and Washington So, and then sending in reports to the yard. And so I had applied to be, I think, the editor of the America guidebook or something. And they said, well, we need someone for Greece and Turkey. And, you know, I said, I really don’t know anything about Greece and Turkey. And they said, well, you’ll learn. And I did. So, yeah, so it was a great, I mean, you know, I but again, like I said, it didn’t really lead to anything after that. So I moved back home to my parents house in Toronto, Canada for the fall of 92 and spent a lot of time, I think, reading all the books that I wished I had read when I was at Harvard, but enough time to and went to see movies in the daytime, and kind of applied for a few jobs. And then kind of the next step of my journey was I sort of cashed in the graduation gift from my grandparents. My Harvard graduation present from them was a ticket to Israel. They wanted me to see the holy land. They were there. There. They were Jewish, and big supporters of Israel at the time, and so I visited. I spent about six months in the Middle East in early 1993 Israel, yes, but then while I was there, I also said, Well, I’m so close to Egypt and Greece and Turkey and Syria and Jordan. So I did a little solo tour of the of the Mediterranean. And I actually used my own guidebook for the Greece and Turkey parts of my trip, kind of test driving it, which was really fun. And I use, let’s go Israel and Egypt, which had been edited by Gary bass class of 92 I think might have been one of your very first podcast guests, if I’m right. He’s, I think, a professor at Princeton now, anyway, so

 

Will Bachman  04:01

he did not win his Pulitzer Prize for the let’s go book, although it has

 

Elijah Siegler  04:06

been that’s, it’s like I knew him when he was, yeah, just and that was a great book. You could tell he was a he was a great researcher and writer.

 

Will Bachman  04:14

I bet that was a very high standard. And what surprised you about Greece and Turkey having edited the travel book, when you finally go there in person, what, what was like, most amazing or surprising about about that trip?

 

Elijah Siegler  04:30

Well, I enjoyed both of them. What was surprise? I mean, I guess just how. I mean, when you’re looking at on the page, and you know, half the book is on Greece, and half the book is on Turkey. You know, they sort of seem almost interchangeable, but I guess, just what a wonderful I mean, I love traveling to Greece, and I’ve been there a couple times since with my children on vacation, but Turkey is really one of the great travel destinations of the world, which I didn’t realize editing the book. But be. Being there, it quickly became one of my very favorite places in the world.

 

Will Bachman  05:04

I recently learned, and you probably know this since you wrote the book, that Turkey is the fourth most visited country in the world, which is weird in the US, because not too often do I speak with someone and they say, Oh yeah, I just got back from Turkey. Like, at least in my social world, I don’t hear that a lot. Maybe it’s more European thing, yeah, I think that’s right, yeah. Like people all the time, oh, I just got back from Peru, from Japan, from Germany, France, London. But you don’t hear oh yeah, I just got back from Istanbul or from Smyrna or something.

 

Elijah Siegler  05:42

So, yeah, that’s, I think, our loss, because it is, I mean, it’s, it’s just the food is, is great. I mean, what you know, you kind of realize all you, all of your favorite Greek dishes, actually, originally, you know, because Greece was a occupied by the Ottoman Empire. So a lot of the a lot of what we associate as Greek food actually originated in Turkey, and sometimes it’s better and better value in Turkey.

 

Will Bachman  06:09

What were some of the highlights of that trip? I’m just so curious, after having, like, worked on the book and thought about it and imagine these places and edited the writing of it, to actually go there.

 

Elijah Siegler  06:20

Yeah, yeah. I like it, yeah. I think the Istanbul is one of the great, the great cities you know, of the world just wandering on. It’s one of those cities where you can just sort of wander around. And there’s something interesting in every corner. The central Turkey is amazing as well. The the these cave dwellings, I think the area is called Cappadocia. It’s called, and I think for some reason a lot of people like to take air balloons over Cappadocia, which is not something I did, because it seemed kind of extravagant, but, but just you can, you can at the time, you can stay very inexpensively in, I guess troglodyte housing, you know, basically kind of cave hotels. That was a really amazing experience. And in also in central Turkey, I spent a couple days in Konya, which is a kind of center for Sufi culture and religion, and that was that kind of stoked in me a lifelong, you know, interest in Islamic mysticism.

 

Will Bachman  07:26

All right, very cool. Okay, so you, so you take this amazing trip, which sounds incredible, six months in the Middle East, and Syria is maybe not such an easy place to go visit now. I mean,

 

Elijah Siegler  07:38

no and, and that was probably the biggest surprise, because, like, very few Americans go to Turkey, but basically no Americans ever go to Syria, even, you know, back then in 93 when it was relatively stable, you know, I met some. I was traveling with some Australians, and we met some, like, some very elderly Swiss women who were there and but what I mean, the culture there, the people, the food, everything. I mean, Syria was, was, was just such a an amazing country to visit. And it just, you know, when, when ashads, you know, and it was under the rule of a brutal dictator. And then I guess his, you know, his son took over, who turned out to be even more of a brutal dictator and and when the civil war started, you know, I just just, I just felt, I felt sort of so, so sad that all these wonderful cities like Aleppo and Damascus were being torn apart.

 

Will Bachman  08:38

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you’re taking, so you take this trip, and then what? What next?

 

Elijah Siegler  08:45

Well, again, I was hoping, well, this would lead to something cool, and maybe it did in the long run. But again, I wound up in, you know, I think I came home suddenly for a family wedding in the summer of 93 and then I wound up moving back home to Toronto, Canada, and just kind of reading a lot and watching movies and waiting for the next thing to come along. And that wound up being a job in the nonprofit sector in New York in early 1994 so I moved to New York and hung out with a lot of people from the class of 92 and just had kind of a regular office job. But it was very, very sort of temporary. And that was fun. I think, you know, every everyone should live in, like, New York City, you know, when, when they’re young. And I was living in a basement, subletting a basement in Chelsea, and there was a, you know, like a T shirt that you could buy on St Mark’s place that showed, like, you know, it had the word New York City. And then it was like a cartoon of a rat fighting a cockroach. And that was kind of my, my basement apartment was very much, you know, rats versus cockroaches. And then again, there was a kind of interlude where it didn’t really lead to anything, and then I decided to, I think I found it a very. Ticket to Japan. And I decided to travel to Asia by myself, kind of towards the end of 1994 and I had this plan of, like, going to a whole bunch of different Asian countries. I had mapped it out. I’m going to Burma and Laos and Indonesia. But then, while I was in Japan, I got a I got a telegram, of all things, a telegram,

 

Will Bachman  10:19

wait, a telegram. I don’t think I’ve ever know I don’t think I know anybody who’s got a telegram. I don’t think

 

Elijah Siegler  10:26

I’ve ever gotten one before or since. But this is from a friend of mine, from who I grew up with in an old high school friend I grew up with in Toronto, and he was teaching English in China, and 1994 there wasn’t there weren’t cell phones or email or anything. So the way for him to get word for me that he had a job for me in China was to send a telegram to my friend in Japan, who then relayed the message to me, okay, and said, you know, there’s a job in China if you want it. And so I took a I took a slow boat to China from from the port of Kobe to Shanghai, and then took a series of trains to the city of Chengdu, which is then where I was an English teacher for the next nine months in late 94 and 95 and China was really an exciting time. Then it was kind of like the Wild West. You know, things were opening up. There were, you know, not that many foreigners in Chengdu. Chengdu, you know, capital of Sichuan Province, known for, it’s the center of Daoism, which is the Chinese religion, which I’ll come back to in a second. Also, of course, for the for spicy food. And, you know, had a wonderful experience there, teaching and also traveling around and around that time. Oh yeah. So just to go back a little bit, one of the things I did in the fall of 1983 while, or 1993 while I was living at home in between the Middle East and New York was I started taking, I guess, for the second time, Tai Chi classes at the local Tai Chi center. And I learned that the the group there who were kind of, kind of a Taoist orientation, we’re going something, going to something called the world’s Parliament of Religions, which was taking place in Chicago in the fall of 1993 and this was the 100th anniversary of the original World Parliament of Religions, which took place in Chicago in 1893 and that’s something I had studied in my religious studies classes back at Harvard. And so I heard about that, and I said, Oh, I’m going to go. I have a cousin who lives in Chicago. I can sleep on his couch, and I’m just going to go volunteer at this parliament, you know? I mean, it was already sold out, and you have to be a delegate of an official religion, which I wasn’t. So I just said, Hey, can I just, like, move chairs around the stage and stuff? And this, you know, three or four day event was so amazing. I saw so many different, met so many different, you know, representatives of different religions. The Dalai Lama was there. The Cardinal berdeen, the Catholic Cardinal of Chicago at the time, was there, and then there were pagans and Nation of Islam, plus a lot of scholars this said, You know what? I was major at Harvard or concentrator, or whatever, but I wasn’t really interested in pursuing that. But at that Parliament, I was like, This is so fascinating. This is something I think I can study for the rest of my life. So that’s when I finally, kind of formulated a plan that maybe I wanted to go to grad school, which was not my original plan upon graduating. So while I was in China, I started applying for various grad school programs and then enrolled in an MA PhD program in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and I moved there in late 1995 you said it

 

Will Bachman  13:47

wasn’t your original plan. It sounds like your original plan was just to do one cool thing after graduating

 

Elijah Siegler  13:53

exactly and and hope, well, I had some plans. I mean, I was very involved in theater at Harvard and HRDC, so I applied for a few jobs to be like kind of a director trainee at various Shakespeare festivals. I had a I had a job interview in at the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington, DC. I think I wrote a letter to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, not far from where I grew up, and and then also I applied to Columbia Journalism School because I had written for the crimson and I was very interested in journalism, and I got accepted to that, and it was a very expensive tuition bill for just one year. So yeah, so gradually I said, you know, I’m going to try kind of the, you know, the academic side of things.

 

Will Bachman  14:38

All right, so roll on. Okay, so now you are starting grad school, yeah.

 

Elijah Siegler  14:42

And I was, you know, sent, you know, going to going to school in Santa Barbara, California. I don’t know if you’ve ever visited that place. It’s a big it’s a lot different than Cambridge, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got mountains, you’ve got beaches, you’ve got a lot of surfing culture, very laid back, but the Religious Studies Program. Program was very rigorous. I was there working with a couple of great scholars in American religion and in new religious movements, or what people would call cults and and it was just a great cohort of other of other scholars. I, you know, I that’s where I first started publishing stuff on religion and popular culture, which is one of my main areas of teaching and research, you know, for the past 30 years or so, and then I wound up doing my doctoral dissertation on Taoism in America, which kind of combined all my academic and personal interest.

 

Will Bachman  15:38

Okay, tell us a little bit more about your areas of research and and say more about that.

 

Elijah Siegler  15:45

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I’m interested in both academically and somewhat personally, interested in Taoism, which is kind of the indigenous religion of China. You know, I think I’d read the Tao Te Ching I was 14 or something. I didn’t really understand it, but I thought it was kind of cool. I read another great Taoist textbook, the Zhuangzi, in Harvard, and that certainly had been the most influential book of my life. And and then I also was very interested in kind of, like, non institutional forms of religion, sort of popular religion, and also what you might call alternative spirituality or New Age religion. And so doing a project on Taoism in America, which no one had really ever written before anything about seemed like the right the right thing. So I spent several years interviewing Chinese Taoist masters. Maybe you could call them self style, Daoist masters coming to America and then teaching Taoist techniques, which often took the form of things like martial arts or meditation or tai chi or Chinese medicine. Those were all vehicles for, sort of Dallas ideas and practices coming to America, and yeah. And then I, you know, wrote a PhD. And then once you’re on that track, and I know you’ve interviewed a lot of academics, you know, you, you, you finish your PhD, you try to get a job, you, you know, try to get a tenure track job, and then you kind of go from assistant to associate to full professor, and that’s what I’ve done. So that’s, you know, there might then, then my journey becomes fairly straightforward, although, of course, it’s taken a lot of twists and turns in terms of my, my, you know, teaching and research interests.

 

Will Bachman  17:33

Okay, so for listeners like me who have only the vaguest understanding or familiarity with Taoism, give us the professor’s kind of snapshot of what is Taoism, and then tell us a bit about Taoism in America. I and, and how is it connected or not connected to Confucianism? Yeah.

 

Elijah Siegler  17:57

I mean, great question. So like I said, Taoism is the indigenous religion of China. That means, unlike Buddhism, which came to China from India, you know, Taoism began in China, and unlike Confucianism, which is often, I mean, it, you know, there’s a big debate in Confucianism, is it a religion? Is it not Confucianism can sometimes be seen as a social, political or moral philosophy. I mean, there is definitely a religious aspect to it, but Taoism is unquestionably religious. Some some outdated scholarship divides Taoism into philosophical Taoism, religious Taoism. But really it’s all part of the same continuum. The main sort of religious idea in Taoism is the DAO, which literally means the way, and it suggests the kind of nameless and shapeless reality that forms all things. So it’s a kind of non personal divine force, and it’s something that a lot of Westerners feel, you know, once they learn about it, they see, oh, that really jives with my own personal view of spirituality. I believe there is this force out there, but, you know, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t quite jive with the kind of, you know, Western God, the Abrahamic God. So this Dao is quite a, quite an attractive concept, and like any other religion, like Catholicism, for example, you know, Daoism has evolved into lots of different rituals, and, you know holidays, and you know rules and regulations, like, like pretty much any other religion, but Taoism, I think, is quite unique in a lot of its religious ideas are expressed through physical practices, such as meditation, such as Tai Chi, such as martial arts, such as medical practices. So does that? Is that a little bit of a snapshot?

 

Will Bachman  19:45

Yeah, that’s good. And then tell us a bit about Taoism in America. I mean, certainly like Buddhism in America, I’m vaguely aware that it is somewhat distinct from the Buddhism that you would get in Asia. You sort of Americanized a bit. I don’t know anything about Taoism in America. Tell us about that. Yeah.

 

Elijah Siegler  20:07

No, you’re absolutely right that, you know, I mean, there’s a whole shelf of books about Buddhism in America by scholars and also by practitioners of Buddhism. In America, Taoism is much smaller and it’s much less well known. And that’s part of part of that is sort of that is sort of baked into what Daoism is. Buddhism is actually a missionary or Universalist religion like Christianity or Islam. So kind of baked into Buddhism is the idea to spread the teachings of the Buddha or the Dharma, you know, in other places in the world. So it’s sort of natural that Buddhism would come to America and would spread and, of course, change form. Taoism really doesn’t have that kind of missionary impulse. So, I mean, it’s a very it’s a religion that’s really been spread kind of indirectly, if you will. And like I said, a lot of that is through martial arts practices and Tai Chi. So my the basic hypothesis of my work is that people who became interested in Westerners, mostly like white Americans, I mean, not only, but who became interested in these Taoist ideas, actually did so through popular culture. So they’d watch the show, the 70s TV show called Kung Fu, or they’d read this popular book that came out in the 80s called The Tao of poo, which kind of explained Taoism through Winnie the Pooh, which was kind of a bestseller, kind of a alternative spirituality bestseller of the time. And it was something that people would come up to me, people, you know, friends of mine from business school, like, oh, man, have you read the Tao of poo? That really changed my life. And they so they already had these kind of ideas about what Taoism should be like. And then, so then Chinese Masters would come to come to the US from China, sometimes via Hong Kong or Taiwan, and they’d have, they would almost become, they’d kind of step into the role that was almost created by them by these pop culture representations. And they’d sort of become Taoist masters. And they’d start dressing in kind of traditional Dallas robes and and they’d, you know, start these organizations. And so that’s really what I was studying, this kind of idea of, like, how, how these ideas become transmitted, in part, through popular culture.

 

Will Bachman  22:14

It’s almost like you hear about, you know, some writers on sub stack, or we’ll get kind of they call it audience capture, where they start figuring out what resonates with their audience, and they start writing more of that kind of topic. It almost sounds like, did have it? Did you speak with the kind of Taoist masters who maybe reveal to you a little bit they’re like discomfort, like, well, you know, isn’t really the super legit, exact kind of Taoism that we practice over in China, but, you know, it’s kind of what the audience here wants. So I have to, yeah, people,

 

Elijah Siegler  22:52

I wish the Masters I talked to were that honest, but, you know, mostly, mostly they didn’t. But what I did get a lot of while I was doing research. Is this, you know, one, you know, a follower of one Taoist Master. Would ask me about the another Taoist Master. Is this the real? Is this guy real? Is this guy authentic, or is this guy a fake? So there’s this, like, worry within American Taoism about, like, who’s the real Taoist and who’s the fake Taoist? And if you go back to the ancient, you know, Taoist literature, you know, of the third or fourth century, because Taoism in China has a 2500 year history. They actually were worried about that too. So, you know, there’s always been this concern in Taoism, and I was an argue in most other religions, but particularly in Taoism, about, you know, who’s the real one and who’s the fake one, who has the genuine power, and who’s, you know, who’s a scam artist? And that’s not just an American phenomenon.

 

Will Bachman  23:41

Now, is there sort of an organizational structure like in the Catholic Church, you got the Pope, so there’s not a lot of question about, you know, who’s a legit Catholic priest? You can kind of find out, right? But is there, is it in Taoism, is there a structure like that, or is it more, you can just call yourself a master and and there you go. Yeah.

 

Elijah Siegler  24:02

Well, another excellent question. There are two main sort of Taoist organizations in in the Chinese world. One is more of a monastic form of Taoism, and one is kind of more a hereditary priesthood, where the priesthood often gets passed between father and son and what the the monastic form of Taoism, which? And if you visit China today, you know, you can go to Beijing or Shanghai, and you can go to a Taoist temple and see Taoist monks, you know, dressed in blue, and they have the top note, you know, those are, in some ways, you can say, well, these are the authentic Taoists. But that, that organization, like all religious organizations in China, is, is, you know, managed by the Chinese government, by the communist government. So some Americans would actually say, Well, we’re the real Daoist, because over there in China, they’re, you know, they’re, they’re living under communist conditions, and they’ve lost a great deal of knowledge, which is, in fact, the case. Yeah. And so my my kind of follow up to my research on American Taoism is actually what happens when American Taoist tour groups go to China and have encounters with more traditional Taoist monks. So this is a kind of a book that I co wrote, came out about eight years ago called Dream trippers. That’s really about this. And it’s called the subtitle is global Taoism and the predicament of modern spirituality. So it’s really about these, these, these fights are, you know what, what’s, where’s the real Dao? Is it in the institutional Taoism? Is it in kind of, like your personal feeling or your vibe, which a lot of Americans, you know, with kind of typical American arrogance, I guess, would say, Hey, I I feel like I’m a Taoist. I have it in my heart, so therefore I’m the real Taoist. And so we get into these kind of cross cultural conversations.

 

Will Bachman  25:50

Now, I’ve heard that, you know, some religions outside the Abrahamic religions are not so focused on belief, like we have Creed, Creed and Christianity, you accept it, or you don’t. Whereas in other religions, it might be more about your practices and the more social aspects of it and so forth. Tell us a little bit about Taoism. Is there like a the equivalent of the Nicene creed or or is it just more? Is it, you know, more open ended?

 

Elijah Siegler  26:21

Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And that’s, you know, that’s kind of what you just said that, you know, except for Christianity, most other religions of the world are much more based on practice or community, not so much. Unbelief is exactly what I get. Try to get across to my students when I, when I teach, you know, Intro to religion to them, which I’ve been doing for the past, you know, whatever. 2220 whatever, 2223 years in. But I mean, religions do have a creedal element to them. And in Taoism, there has been, over the years, various statements of belief. Like, here are the seven things, you know. But those aren’t really if you ask the average, I think the important part is, if you ask the average Chinese person, either, you know, with under communism or outside of communism, whether they’re living in Hong Kong or Taiwan or Singapore, you know, and you ask them, you what, what religion they believe in, that question really doesn’t make sense to them. So for, you know, a typical Chinese, and again, this has been true for 1000s of years. You know, it is about combining Taoism and Buddhism and Confucianism and popular Chinese religion. And, you know, they’re kind of like ritual and spiritual resources that are available to to them, and they can kind of pick and choose. So that idea that we have in the west of being, you know, I am Christian because I believe X, you know, is doesn’t really exist in in most other parts of the world, particularly in in China, where I’m most familiar, huh?

 

Will Bachman  27:47

And what, what parts of your research would Are you like most proud of, or would you say were kind of advanced the field, or differentiated? Yeah.

 

Elijah Siegler  28:05

I mean, obviously, like I said earlier, you know, just my initial doctoral research, doctoral research on Daoism in America was kind of a new topic. No one had ever, you know, people had studied Taoism and people studied, you know, let’s say Buddhism in America, or, you know, Islam in America, but Nona done Daoism in America. I mean, that was a while ago, so I’m not trying to rest on the laurels. But the book, The Dream trippers book that I alluded to earlier, I was pretty proud of, because it was a work of it took, you know, kind of 12 years of field work, and I did it with my old high school friend, the one that originally invited me to come teach English in in China back in 94 he turned out to become a professor of Chinese anthropology at Hong Kong University. And so we collaborate, and this was great, because we were old friends, and we got to get together and write this book together. His Chinese is perfect. So he would interview all these Taoist monks. I My Chinese is extremely limited. So I would interview the kind of Western I guess you want to call them New Age Dallas. And that book, you know, it’s taught in different universities around the world now, and it’s a pretty good read. So I’m sort of proud of that. It’s a kind of ethnography of two very different groups and how they come together and what they learn from each other, and also how they misunderstand and and we’re very upfront about how we’re involved, you know, we kind of, you know, there’s a lot of auto ethnography where we kind of reflect upon our own involvement in the project, so that, I think that’s that book kind of stands up. But I’m also proud of, over the years, I’ve probably written 10 or 12 different essays about religion and television, because I love watching TV, and so, you know, I kind of get to write about religious themes in television and how television is religious. And I have about, like I said, maybe 10 articles on that. And I’m, over the next couple years, I’m going to kind of smush them together a bit and publish kind of a whole book that’s kind of my, my overall. Theory of religion and television.

 

Will Bachman  30:04

What is one of your takes on religion and television?

 

Elijah Siegler  30:09

So I like to contrast, you know, there’s, again, it’s, there’s been, there’s quite a bit of work done on film and religion. That’s kind of a subfield, and there are a lot of classes and university, which I’ve taught myself on religion and film, and I think film, and I’ve also written several, several pieces on religion and film, but there’s a lot more out there. And I think, you know, one thing that a lot of people have said about how film works religiously is that it’s, it’s kind of modern myth that kind of recapitulates the hero’s journey, and sort of these ancient myths that, you know, people used to grow up with, you know, around the fire or whatever, now we get in a movie, because we get these stories of these superhuman beings that try to save humanity and so forth. And I talk about that, I teach about that. But television is very different than that, because it’s an it’s an it’s a it’s an open narrative. It doesn’t just tell one story. It kind of continues. Kind of continues on and on. So how does that work religiously? And I kind of argue that television is actually a really good place to look at religious change over the years. I mean, some of the best TV shows that deal with you know, if you think of like some of your favorite TV characters, the most complicated TV characters, most of them have had religious awakenings or crises of faith or religious conversions, or at least maybe the TV shows I look at, obviously I’m cherry picking, but it’s a really good place to show how religion changes over over time.

 

Will Bachman  31:35

Is the Mandalorian, a Daoist.

 

Elijah Siegler  31:38

That’s a great question. I have not watched any of the Star Wars TV shows, maybe because I’m too cheap to pay for Disney plus. But definitely, there’s a lot in the whole Star Wars world is kind of based on not only Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but also the DAO and concepts of their own. You know, a lot of people have said the force is the DAO and the Jedi are kind of like Taoist masters, and George Lucas has owned up to that himself. I mean, this is not just me, the scholar reading into it,

 

Will Bachman  32:07

right, right. Okay, yeah. I mean, when you, when you explain to me that the Tao means the way, I just, I’m thinking of the Mandalorian, this is the way. Okay, so, and, I mean, you mentioned, it’s somewhat auto ethnography. Is this something that you talk about or, I mean, am I? Am I allowed to ask someone about your own kind of beliefs and practices? Are you yourself, or are you, you mentioned earlier, interested in this kind of a Sufi mysticism? Tell us about your own kind of journey religiously and spiritually?

 

Elijah Siegler  32:42

Yeah, I’m happy to talk about that. And that’s something students ask me sometimes, and I usually say, you know, let’s save that for the last day of class. But I, you know, I grew up in a very secular Jewish household, so, you know, kind of identify as Jewish, ethnically and culturally. I think, like a lot of kind of modern, you know, Western Jews do, when I had kids, you kind of got to make the choice, you know, what do you raise your kids as? And if you raise them as nothing, that’s fine, but that’s a choice that you’re making, you know. But I decided to raise my kids as Jewish. They’re half Chinese. My wife is Chinese and grew up with no religion because she grew up in, you know, in China in the 70s and 80s, but, you know, so I became maybe a little bit more involved in Judaism as my kids grew up and they had their their bar mitzvahs. But yeah, Taoism has always been the religion that had the most kind of I’ve had the most affinity for, but I don’t call myself a Taoist, just because that’s kind of loaded, you know. You know, you know, there are a lot of Americans who do, but I went and I think, you know, Taoism requires some kind of like formal initiation to really be a Taoist, and which I have not had. And again, yeah, I’m interested in kind of, like meditative and mystical traditions from all over the world, like Sufism, you know, I guess some forms of paganism, or, you know, earth based spirituality, but those are more just kind of like interests and not part of my my own spiritual path. You know, a lot of people say, and this is something I study, you know, I teach a whole class on spirituality, where we study, you know, the large groups of Americans who say, Oh, I’m spiritual, but not religious. And I don’t say that about myself. I think people who say that are a little disingenuous, but I, you know, I guess as a religious studies professor, I’m sympathetic to religion and spirituality, but I’m, you know, the more I study different religions of the world, the more you know the heart you know, the the more I would just call myself a sympathetic bystander of all of all religious traditions.

 

Will Bachman  34:55

Say more about this spirituality class and this. Spiritual, but not religious. You just give us, give us a little bit of an extended take on on your perception of that whole phenomenon.

 

Elijah Siegler  35:09

Sure, yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s this class I’ve taught a couple times for the for religious studies graduating seniors, and it just, you know, it just kind of starts with the sociological observation that, you know, kind of the largest segment of the larger the religions that are the religion that’s growing the fastest, are the nones, that’s N, O, N, E. So people call it the rise. And then people who say, you know, who answer on a survey What religion are you? They say none. I’m no religion at all. But that doesn’t mean that they’re atheist or that they reject religion. That often just means they’re spiritual and they don’t, they don’t like to, you know, associate themselves with any one organized religion. So then what does that actually mean? And so I like to teach about, sort of the history of spirituality in America itself. Where does it come out of? And it comes out of people like William James, who I first read at Harvard, and, you know, took classes at William James Hall. It comes out of kind of liberal Protestant Protestantism. A lot of these ideas of spirituality are ideas that have been floating around

 

Elijah Siegler  36:20

aware of that of their own history.

 

Elijah Siegler  36:31

Yeah, well, I can’t hear you right now.

 

Will Bachman  36:33

Okay, all right, you cut out there. So you’re answering the question, then you just cut out. So I’m part of your answer to the question about the spirituality, so we can edit that section out a little bit. So okay, well, let’s turn to the next question. Then tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continued to resonate with you. I think you might have briefly alluded to some, but let’s get into that some Sure.

 

Elijah Siegler  37:03

Well, I was, I was in the comparative study of religion. That kind of like pretentious name, but that was, you know, drawn from other departments in the Divinity School, and the the professor that probably influenced me most was Diana Eck, who was the chair of that committee on the comparative study of religion. And she became very, very famous a little bit after I left. She started something called the pluralism project in 1991 and that summer, I was in the first cohort of student employees for that so I actually got paid to go to Los Angeles and study religious diversity there and inter religious dialog, and in particular, Buddhism. And so I visited Thai Buddhist temples and Chinese Buddhist temples and Japanese Buddhist temples, and it was such a great experience. And I think right around that same time, she offered a class for the first time called world religions in Boston, and and it was such a simple concept, but I don’t think anyone had ever really done that before in the early 90s, but it totally, you know, in I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for that class. And that’s the idea, let’s study world religions by visiting different churches in the Boston area. And so she, so I and then and then, I’ve been in touch with her off and on since she, she maybe two years ago. 2024 was the 50th anniversary of the study of religion at Harvard. So there was a little conference. And she and Diana Eck retired after 48 years at Harvard. She became a professor there in 1976 I think, and so it was nice to see her, and she’s still as sharp as ever in her 80s. So that, and I as a I kind of turned away from that model of pluralism or diversity because I thought it was a little simplistic. It was kind of like, you know, oh, isn’t it great? There are so many Hindus in Texas or something. And then, yes, it is great. But I mean to me, the academic study of religion has to be more than that, so I kind of turned away from that. In my studying for my doctoral dissertation, tried to be a little more sophisticated, or whatever. But recently, as a teacher, I realized that our students are so hungry for inter religious connection. Our students are just so they really need just to know that there are a lot of different religions live in America. They should know something about them. They should get to, you know, learn about them. And so I’ve been getting involved in the last 10 years or so in inter religious dialog in my in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, not my hometown, but where I got a job and where I’ve been living for the last 22 years.

 

Will Bachman  39:48

And that reminds me when we were chatting before we started recording, you mentioned some stuff on your faculty page and various events that you’re involved in. Let’s, let’s, let’s touch on that. Great.

 

Elijah Siegler  39:59

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, you can Google Elijah Siegler, Elijah Siegler College of Charleston, and you can find my faculty page. And you’ll, you’ll see some of the publications that I alluded to earlier. You can, you know, click on the books or articles that I wrote. But what I’m really excited about is that for I was very involved for many years, I’ve stepped back a little bit just this year from the Charleston inter religious council, and that’s a group that just, we have representatives of different religious traditions getting together, and we put on cultural and social and educational programming, and we try to get students involved. And, you know, I really think it’s, it’s such a value, like I said, the the grad school me would have kind of put my nose up at that. That’s not, that’s not real. You know, academics, that’s too touchy feely, but I think it’s so necessary in our world now, when, when, when we’re, when we, you know, we’re so bombarded by either ignorance or negative stereotypes of other religions that it’s great to get people together of different religions. So, you know, in starting in 2017 I started a Jewish Muslim dinner, which has been happening annually, and it’s, you know, just such a wonderful event. And then, with a friend of mine, who is a food journalist, I started something called spirited brunch, which is a once a year. It’s a self guided tour of different sacred spaces in downtown Charleston with snacks. And so it’s great because it’s you just have people walking from place to place. And a lot of people would never want to visit a mosque. They’d be scared or whatever. But if it’s part of a tour, and if you know there’s going to be snacks there, they’ll come in and they’ll get in to conversation with with our with local Muslims, and vice versa, you have Muslims visiting churches and synagogues. So it’s a wonderful afternoon. And our next version, our next edition of that, is Sunday May 3 So, and there’s a link to that in my in my bio page. So if anyone wants to come down to Charleston and or use the idea in your own hometown, please. You know this is there’s no this is a completely self sustaining non commercial event. So just take it and and have a spirited brunch wherever you live.

 

Will Bachman  42:07

Tell us a bit about how to set one of those up. What was, what were some lessons learned, and give us the details in case someone says, Yes, I want to do that. Right?

 

Elijah Siegler  42:17

Yeah. Well, I mean, Charleston has a walkable downtown, and so we have, we just contacted different clergy. So it’s good if you have some kind of interfaith organization with a list of clergy, although, again, that’s something you can google or AI or whatever, and call up people, get a database going and say, Hey, will you open up your church or your mosque or your synagogue, you know, for three hours. Sunday afternoon is usually a good time. And will you serve a snack that’s representative of your culture? So, you know, we have a German Lutheran Church, and they serve, you know, kind of German cake or whatever. The mosque will typically serve food from the Middle East or from South Asia and and then, in my case, I was partnering with a food journalist. So she, you know, had con, you know, she would sort of compile what food everyone was serving. And then, because I’m a professor, we used a space at the College of Charleston as a kind of off site place for people that didn’t have an actual physical footprint. For example, The Mormon Church, the Hindu temple of Charleston. They’re kind of off in the suburbs, so they kind of tabled in a, in a, in a reception hall at the college, which is also downtown. But yeah, I mean, if you’re, if you’re very interested, you know, just contact me, and I’d be happy to talk with you about

 

Will Bachman  43:40

so you’re not going and like and just sort of sitting in during a service.

 

Elijah Siegler  43:44

No, it’s you wander from place to place. And we usually have 20 or 25 different religious groups represented, and people go, can go to all of them, or they can just go to, you know, two or three. It’s completely self guided, but there’s usually a guidebook that kind of puts them all on the same page.

 

Will Bachman  44:01

Okay, so it’s like a self guided tour. It’s not like a big group is wandering around Exactly. We’ve also

 

Elijah Siegler  44:06

done guided tours of sacred space tour, you know, the inner the interfaith organization, where we’ll have, you know, for example, in downtown Charleston, there’s a synagogue, the one that I happen to belong to, right across the street from a very historic Catholic Church. So in the past, we’ve had tours of both going simultaneously, so you can go to both and kind of compare and contrast. So that’s a that’s another thing. But this is a self guided tour involving snacks. I like the

 

Will Bachman  44:31

snacks Part. Everyone loves the snacks. Yeah. And when, when people show up at the synagogue or the mosque or the church, are they is, are they getting like a, is there a talk from the religious leader? Or do they kind of wander around, look at the building itself? Or what do they get when they when they visit, right?

 

Elijah Siegler  44:54

They both of that. You know? I mean, we obviously tell people, please don’t proselytize. But you. There are, yeah, often the religious leaders there to answer any questions or might give guided tours of the sanctuary itself. You know, sometimes literature, they have literature to pass out. It really depends on the individual congregation. That’s what makes this so sort of self sustaining and self organizing. It really doesn’t cost, you know, it’s a kind of a money neutral thing. We don’t, we don’t make money off of it. We don’t really spend money off of it. And most, most, most of these groups are so happy to do that, you know, they have, they have volunteers to do the cooking and to do the touring, and the fact that it just becomes a big event, you know. And it’s very family friendly, it’s student friendly, you know, it’s become, over the last nine years since we’ve done it here in Charleston, it’s, you know, become kind of a, you know, a mainstay of the Charleston calendar. And I really hope that people would take it up and just do it in their own their own hometowns. Like, roughly,

 

Will Bachman  45:53

how many people do you think participated in some way?

 

Elijah Siegler  45:56

Yeah, it’s hard to keep track of numbers, but in the, you know, maybe the five to 600 people a year, yeah, yeah. And again, we usually have around 20 different religious congregations. And you know, it’s gotten, you know, sometimes it gets written up in the press. One year the mayor kind of did the tour, and, you know, things like that.

 

Will Bachman  46:17

Wow, that’s very cool. Like my my kids, one time, I went along as a parent chaperone, and they went to the the New York Islamic center, this big mosque, and it’s like a pretty big size mosque in the East Side of Manhattan. And, yeah, I probably would not normally have felt just comfortable walking on the door and knocking in, walking in myself, you know, but, but, you know, getting invited in and getting to see it and talk and kind of helps you just get exposed to other religions and you know, so that’s awesome that you’re doing that, and it sounds like a pretty cool adventure for people that you fed. So reach out to Elijah if you want to set up one in your own hometown, Elijah, we will share your link in the show notes for your faculty page. Thank you so much for joining today.

 

Elijah Siegler  47:12

Thank you. Well, it’s been a it’s been a real pleasure, and yeah, please be in touch.