11 Questions: Provoking Religion by Anthony Petro

How can we survive and/or make sense of our current culture wars? One place to start is Anthony Petro’s new book, Provoking Religion. Petro writes about controversial late-twentieth-century artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Judy Chicago, Marlon Riggs, and David Wojnarowicz, and the fiery controversies that ignited around them. Instead of retelling a familiar story of religion vs. art, sacred vs. secular, etc., Petro explores the religious aspects of queer and feminist artists and art.

Describe your book in three adjectives! 

Nerdy, queer, provocative.

What is one of your favorite sentences from the book? 

“Riggs snapped back” (6). (That’s Marlon Riggs, and it makes more sense if you’ve seen Tongues Untied!)

Name a book or writer that inspired or guided you as you wrote. 

The impact is only indirect, but Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast. 

What is something you discovered in the process of writing this book? 

Feminist and queer art is even more haunting than I’d expected. 

What was challenging about the process? 

To do a responsible job with this material, I needed to read deeply in the histories of visual and performance art, fields that were new to me. It was absolutely enjoyable but also kind of like doing phd comp exams all over again …

What was sustaining about it? 

Learning about artists’ lives and their weird, amazing, diverging approaches to imagining the world—or inventing the world they wanted to see. 

What’s a song that would be on the book’s soundtrack? 

“Like a Prayer” seems too obvious so I will say … “The Tears of a Clown.” 

Who are some of the people you wrote this book for? 

My younger self who knew nothing about art; historians and sociologists of religion who sometimes need to be pushed to see the religious dimensions of feminist and queer people’s lives; and unsuspecting readers who may be surprised by some of the topics this book brings up, from biblical literalism and the aesthetics of the grid to what some conservatives dubbed “vaginas on plates.” 

What are some of the communities that shaped it? 

I’m lucky for the many academic communities that nurtured this book, from colleagues in my department at Boston University, to scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study, to members of the “pom” (pomodoro) squad who joined me for regular writing accountability, to fellow scholars of U.S. religion, who are some of the generous and constructive people one could ever know. And this book would not be possible without larger feminist and queer communities—including the scholars, artists, and activists who have made so much of this work thinkable. 

What kinds of work do you want your book to do in the world? What are your hopes for its afterlife?

I hope this book shifts how we talk about the culture wars. What I call the “culture wars narrative” is itself a cryptically conservative framing of cultural and political debates that too easily scripts progressives and radicals as secularist, relativistic, or nihilistic. We can write about conservative Christians without reducing feminist and queer artists to the ways those conservatives have talked about them. And we can see in feminist and queer art alternative ways of imagining and doing and undoing religion. 

What are you doing next? 

I’m working on a biography of the writer Kathryn Hulme, who joined a group of mostly lesbian, modernist writers living in Paris in the 1930s who found themselves entranced by the works of an itinerant mystic. Hulme also led postwar relief efforts in Europe after WWII, settled down with a former nun with whom she lived for the rest of her life, converted to Catholicism, and wrote the bestselling novel The Nun’s Story (based on the before-mentioned former nun), which was made into a film starring Audrey Hepburn in 1959.