| abstract |
This dissertation examines the status of truth in contemporary political discourse. Truth seems to either have no grounding in fact, becoming reduced to a "feeling-only truth;" or truth is reduced to a "crypto-fundamentalist version of the facts"—facts that carry no awareness of the power structures that seek to be manifest as first principles, anchoring truths that fix white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied men as the ideal citizen. I frame my project with case studies from fundamentalist Christianity at the Creation Museum in Boone County, KY and from charismatic-evangelical practice at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, MO. These examples, read in comparison to popular works on knowledge and to "radical" or "theology after the death of God," demonstrate that secular truth-making continues to rely on the modern liberal sovereign subject, who is presumed to be autonomous and free to make decisions about what is true.
I argue that effective truth is affective; it is conceptual but also exceptional, exciting the passions and breaking through the monotony of day-to-day life. Challenging the modern liberal subject, I argue that human beings come into subjectivity at the limits—at the limits of language and at the limits of power. I offer the revelation of an affected God: a God of the im/possible, simultaneously potential and limit. In turn, individual subjectivity is limited—affected by—the structures that reify white male supremacy in the U.S. At the same time, subjects are revealed as porous, as interdependent, and as open to change—albeit slow, incremental change. I propose a first principle of listening for political truth—listening for sense, listening with the senses, and for a sense of place. Critical listening therefore takes place. Listening is an event rooted in facts—but also a music-making that moves people, challenges systems, and performs truth. Performed truth, enacted truth, hopefully, is change.
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