Affect and Religion: What the Linguistic Fallacy Missed

In 1982 the scholar Jonathan Z. Smith published a book called Imagining Religion, and it became one of the most influential works in religious studies. Smith's core argument is deceptively simple: religion is not a natural kind. It is a classification scholars impose on behavior in order to understand it. The word "religion" does not carve nature at the joints; it is a scholar's tool, built through language and deployed through analysis.

In this post, the second in my series on affect theory, I will argue that the tradition built on Smith's insight rests on what Donovan Schaefer calls the linguistic fallacy, and that affect theory matters to religious studies precisely because it names what this fallacy obscured: the felt, embodied register through which religious power also moves.

Smith's move carried enormous consequences. It meant that Indigenous ceremonial practices were not automatically "religion" just because they involved spiritual content. It meant that the study of religion was not the study of universal human structures. It meant scholars had to attend to the history of the category itself, to how "religion" got made and who got to decide when something counted as religion and when it was superstition, custom, or crime.

Schaefer names the foundation of this whole project the "linguistic fallacy," and his complaint is precise: the fallacy assumes that the medium of power can only ever be linguistic. If power moves through language, then the study of power means studying texts, studying rhetoric, studying what gets said. Everything else falls away.^[1]

The linguistic fallacy did real work; it produced insights. But it also produced a blind spot, and that blind spot is where affect theory enters.

The Problem with Language-Only Power #

The linguistic fallacy assumes that when something is said, and when it is heard or read, power has been exercised. Foucault is the key reference here. His entire genealogy of sexuality, of the clinic, of the prison, turns on the idea that power produces knowledge and knowledge produces power, and this exchange happens through discourse. Foucault's power-knowledge is linguistic through and through.

This account is not wrong, exactly; it is incomplete. The trouble shows up most clearly when you try to explain why some messages land and others do not, why some rhetoric moves people to action while other, equally sophisticated rhetoric leaves them cold. If power is only linguistic, you have no way to account for the felt dimension of persuasion. You can analyze the argument; you cannot explain why it felt compelling.

Religious communities offer an acute version of this problem, and Schaefer's example is worth sitting with: a congregation gathers for prayer. What is the power at work? The linguistic account says: the words spoken, the narrative structure, the rhetoric that holds the community together. All true. But what about the coordination of breath, the synchrony of bodies, the particular way certain sensations move through the room? A well-conducted ritual creates affective states that precede any linguistic content. People enter the space differently because of how bodies are arranged, what sounds fill the room, which scents are present.

The linguistic fallacy would have you believe these registers are secondary, effects of the linguistic content rather than generators of power in their own right. Affect theory refuses that hierarchy. It asks: what if the felt dimension is not secondary? What if power moves first through the body, through sensation and intensity, and language comes after as a way of making sense of what has already happened?

The Archive of J. Z. Smith #

Here the story grows tricky, because Smith himself did not make this mistake fully; he was too good a scholar. But the tradition that built itself on Smith's work, the tradition that dominated religious studies for decades, did tend to treat the linguistic register as the locus of all significant meaning-making. The categories scholars developed, the frameworks for analysis, all of these were language-based tools applied to other people's practices.

The irony is that Smith's own work on ritual contains the seeds of a different approach. His essay on the Navajo night chant sits with the texture of ceremonial knowledge, the way the performance itself constitutes a kind of knowing that cannot be reduced to propositional content. But even Smith's most sophisticated work on ritual tends to frame the non-linguistic dimensions as expressions of the linguistic meaning underneath; the structure governs the surface.

Religious studies, following this logic, became a discipline oriented almost entirely toward interpretation. Texts, narratives, theologies: these counted as meaningful materials. The felt life of religious practice, the embodied texture of devotion, the way a body in prayer knows something different than a body reading about prayer, all of this registered as decorative, as interesting but not central to the real work of understanding what religion was or did.

What Affect Does Differently #

Schaefer's reformulation of Foucault's power-knowledge as "power-knowledge-affect" is not a minor update; it reorders the entire architecture. If you include affect in the account of how power operates, you can no longer treat affect as an effect of meaning-making. Affect becomes generative. The intensity that moves through a gathering, the texture of an encounter, the way a body resonates with other bodies in shared space: these become sites where power is actively produced.

This reordering carries immediate consequences for the study of religion. It means a ritual does not work because it encodes a meaning transmitted through language. It works because it organizes bodies in space, creates specific affective states, and produces intensities the bodies themselves respond to and amplify. The meaning comes after, as an attempt to articulate what has already been felt.

It also means the famous critical distance scholars have cultivated (the stance of standing outside and analyzing) becomes impossible to maintain in the same way. If you stand in a gathering where power is being affectively produced, you are not exempt from it. Your own body responds, feels, resonates. The cool analysis comes after, and it is always after the affect has already moved through you.

This admission does not make scholarship purely subjective. It means scholarship acknowledges what it was always doing anyway: being affected by the materials it studies. The linguistic fallacy allowed scholars to pretend they could analyze religious meaning while remaining untouched by religious feeling; affect theory says that pretense is no longer available. It also opens up new methods. If affect belongs to the account of how power works, then you need methods that can register affective intensity, not just linguistic content. Video, sound, the presence of the body in space, ethnographic attention to texture and timing: these become research tools, not decoration.

Back to Superstition #

This argument connects directly back to the problem I traced in the Superstition and Sovereignty series. When Voltaire built his taxonomy of bad religion (prejudice, faith, enthusiasm, superstition, fanaticism), he was doing linguistic work. He was creating categories through language. Fanaticism was defined by the linguistic proposition that the fanatic refused to hear reason. The category worked linguistically.

But the real grip fanaticism had, and has, is affective. The fanatic does not simply refuse language. The fanatic is moved by an intensity language cannot contain, that reason cannot touch, that exceeds the capacity of dialogue to resolve. For this reason Voltaire declared reasoning powerless against fanaticism. He was right, but not for the linguistic reason he gave. Reasoning is powerless because it operates in the wrong register; it addresses language to something that moves in the register of intensity and feeling.

Colonial administrators understood this intuitively, even if they could not theorize it. When they prohibited the Sun Dance, banned the practices of Indigenous conjurers, and set up courts to punish both, they were not simply regulating language or belief. They were attempting to control the affective intensities that gathered in ceremonial space. They were right to see these practices as threats, not because the words said something dangerous, but because the gathered bodies in ritual space created affective states that organized resistance, that produced alternative forms of power, that coordinated action in ways language alone could not capture.

Affect theory does not solve this problem, but it allows you to see the problem clearly for the first time. Power moves through language, yes; it also moves through the felt dimension that language can only approximate. Understanding how religious power works (what makes it compelling, what makes it dangerous, what makes it capable of moving bodies and communities to action) requires naming that affective dimension and taking it seriously as a site of struggle.

The linguistic fallacy obscured this dimension for decades. Insisting on the importance of language and meaning is not wrong; treating them as the only registers where power operates is. The revolution affect theory brings to religious studies is not the discovery of feeling. It is the recognition that feeling and power are inseparable, and that you cannot understand how religion works, in "America" or anywhere else, if you stand in the linguistic register alone.

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1. Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 6. Schaefer defines the linguistic fallacy as "the presupposition that the medium of power ... can only ever be a linguistic formation," which he associates with the influence of J. Z. Smith. ↩︎