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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Jewish Solidarity with the Pro-Palestine Protests.”

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This summer, Oklahoma announced that it will require public school educators to teach the Bible in their classrooms. Louisiana declared that the Ten Commandments will be posted in public schools. These pronouncements come in response to social and racial justice movements and demographic changes. Candidates running for political office have articulated U.S. voters’ hopes and fears—many of them racialized—in terms of children and their futures. This is not the first time the United States has seen such moves. Yet, why and how have so many turned to U.S. public schools and children to articulate their visions for the future, many of them using religious rhetoric? In my recent book, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools, I explore this question in a specific time and place: New York City in the mid-twentieth century.

Below is an excerpt from the introduction and chapter six, where I set out the book’s aims and offer an example of how one educator engaged with religion and race to express her views on the possibilities of public education.

***

Educators reading the Public Schools of New York Staff Bulletin on September 9, 1963 encountered two pieces of seismic news. On the left side of the bulletin’s front page, an article announced that the city would follow the Supreme Court of the United States’ Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp rulings, which found school prayer and devotional Bible-reading unconstitutional in American public schools. On the right side of the page, a separate article laid out the city’s plan for racial integration. The side-by-side layout framed secularization and desegregation as separate stories, each of which related to public schools, but not to the other. However, it was no coincidence that public school secularization and desegregation were happening, and failing, simultaneously. Many of the programs and priorities of this era, from juvenile delinquency prevention to moral and spiritual values curricula and racial integration advocacy, straddled these supposedly distinct issues, tethered by the invented tradition—Judeo-Christianity—and its whiteness. Whiteness undergirded concepts of a “Judeo-Christian” America in areas relating overtly to religion, such as Bible-reading in schools, even as that religious tradition undergirded schools’ efforts focused on race, such as integration.

My work offers an as yet untold story about religion’s role in shaping twentieth-century American public education. Rather than existing in a separate sphere, religion structured government policies on race and everyday school practices before and after the 1962 and 1963 US Supreme Court decisions holding school prayer and Bible-reading unconstitutional. Using New York City as a window into a national story, I argue that these Supreme Court decisions failed to remove religion from public schools because religion—from the government-endorsed Judeo-Christianity to Pan-African theology—framed how Americans interacted with public schools far beyond prayer and Bible-reading, and continued to do so, through public education’s process of collective moral formation. Intersections of religion and race informed the major conversations about twentieth-century American public education, from school desegregation, youth crime, and multicultural education to government aid to religious schools, community control of education, and prayer and Bible-reading. Both secularization and desegregation in New York City public schools inculcated students into white Christian norms through a repertoire of ideas and practices, as part of their project of shaping students into citizens, at the same time that parents, teachers, and community members drew on, resisted, and reimagined that repertoire to create citizens of a different sort.

The history of race and religion in the urban North is the history of desegregation and secularization of public schools. Collective memory about desegregation and secularization of public schools often focuses on the southern United States. We hear about the (increasingly less) rogue school in the “Bible Belt” sponsoring prayer, or we read a sanitized history of Martin Luther King Jr.’s triumph over southern racism. The South shaped American racism and religiosity, but the South alone did not purvey white Christian supremacy. The North did, too, in its own way. Focusing only on the South reinforces stereotypes about Northern innocence, Southern religious fervor, and Black, southern, religious resistance.

Shifting attention to the North requires us to abandon stereotypes and to see how, while the contours differed, Americans revered the public school as a sacred site that produced religious and racial beings through educating the public. Recent decades have seen an influx in scholarship on the Northern Civil Rights Movement, centered in New York City. Reflecting national concerns about school inequality, New York City witnessed the largest school boycott of the American Civil Rights Movement, during which nearly half a million students stayed home. Moreover, a key way to understand racism in the North is to look at desegregation alongside efforts at secularization. Secularization efforts abounded outside the South, which showed that religion existed in public schools there, even as more than half the states had outlawed prayer and Bible-reading by the 1960s. The state-sponsored school prayer case, Engel, originated in New York State before landing at the US Supreme Court. The state’s governing educational body, the New York Board of Regents, had written the prayer at issue in Engel. The Bible-reading and prayer case, Schempp, consolidated cases from Pennsylvania and Maryland, the mid-Atlantic; not the Northeast, but not the South, either. Other significant mid-century Supreme Court religion and school cases began in Illinois and New Jersey.

As one of the most racially and religiously diverse, and one of the most segregated, cities in the country, New York City sheds light on a national story. The Great Migration of African Americans from the Jim Crow South, migration from Puerto Rico, and immigration from Caribbean countries earlier in the century had altered the city’s racial demographics. The racial diversity also contributed to the city’s religious diversity, with New Yorkers across racial demographics practicing Catholicism, Judaism, Yoruba traditions, Santería, Protestantism, religio-racial movements, various combinations of these traditions, and much more. Black Liberation Theology and Pan-Africanism also emerged in New York City, and some New Yorkers vibrantly practiced them. Few places had the demographics to test the American ideal of pluralism as New York did. Diversity in and of itself did not solve segregation or religious establishment, but it did shape their terms of engagement.

New York City also had the largest school system in the country, a complex institution where bureaucracy collided with public opinion. The common story of desegregation in New York City typically goes something like this: Following the US Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the New York City Board of Education (the Board) sponsored a Commission on Integration. The Commission developed ideas for zoning, curricula, hiring, and more, but the Board largely did not fund or actualize the ideas. Instead, the Board proposed insufficient plans to effect change. Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers organized the 1964 Freedom Day School Boycott for desegregation and school resources. When the Board still failed to make any changes, three districts experimented with controlling their own schools, having community boards responsible for curricula, hiring, and more. Teachers struck, leading to the longest boycott in the school system’s history. The strike laid bare existing racial tensions, as many teachers were white and Jewish, while many students were Black or Puerto Rican and not Jewish. To avoid further disruption, the Board decentralized the school system but maintained control over crucial decisions, including zoning districts. The Board remained decentralized until the early 2000s, when the Department of Education formed.

(Image source: New York Times)

Community control did not lead to desegregation or more equity across the city, so, until recently, scholars and the public have generally embraced the idea that community control failed. Yet, whether community control succeeded in New York City depends on how we understand its aims. Community control did not end segregation, but that was not the goal of its proponents; self-determination was. From that perspective, Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers successfully built grassroots alliances that fueled future social justice advocacy, even though the immediate goal of those groups, community control of public schools, ended. Even less frequently discussed than Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers’ successful coalition-building is that it was their understandings of community and freedom, drawing from Black churches, liberation theology, Pan-Africanism, and more, that helped to fuel the community control movement. While community control may have ended, it showed that another form of public education was possible, one where Black and Puerto Rican religious and racial worldviews were manifest in public education.

Take, for instance, the story of schoolteacher Edwina Chavers Johnson. Narratives of Black Americans as the true inheritors of the US nation were a form of religious and racial world-making that engaged national rituals and stories. Johnson may not have seemed like a candidate for a community control supporter given her widespread efforts to work with the government entities. If community control were only about separatism, she would not be. However, Chavers Johnson tried every strategy she could, and by the late 1960s she had become especially invested in educating Black teachers to teach Black children. She advocated for community control because, as she outlined in her 1968 essay, “An Alternative to Miseducation for the Afro-American People,” history taught her that the American educational system would rarely defend Black people’s place in American history and Black students’ place in public schools. So, she argued, Black people must create their own educational spaces.

Chavers Johnson’s project drew on religious dimensions of Black collective narration without being explicitly religious. Her 1963 “Guide for Teachers on Contributions of Afro-Americans to the American Culture” covered grades K-6. One activity encouraged third- and fourth-grade students at their desks, having read poems by Phyllis Wheatley and Gwendolyn Brooks, to write to the authors (even if Wheatley was no longer alive) or compose their own poems inspired by Wheatley and Brooks. This lesson positioned the authors as the students’ ancestors, elders with whom they could communicate. These American ancestors could give students their own narrative in the United States. As religious studies scholar Laurie Maffly-Kipp has shown, reconstructing history for a people wrongly called “historyless” was sacred work.

For Chavers Johnson, the public school proved a significant space for conveying a sacred race history because of its didactic structure and built-in futurity. Her approach saw time as supple, with the future intimately connected to the past. Her guide included a calendar with birth dates of important figures in Black history, so that children could mark Harriet Tubman’s leadership in March or Countee Cullen’s on his May 30 birthday. Through ritually memorializing ancestors, pupils guided by Chavers Johnson tapped into how sacred race histories were prominently transmitted: through “commemorations, ritualized feasts, fasts, and celebrations that captured stories of the collective past, present, and future.” Chavers Johnson planned lessons with overviews of Black figures’ contributions and activities related to the figures. Honoring Black figures in American history brought the past to the present, making these figures come alive as leaders for public school children. Rituals also brought the figures into the future through educating children who could create a new America.

Rituals associated with the school calendar restructured time so that a Black, rather than a white, collective defined America. In a piece she wrote for the African-American Teachers Association Forum, a pro-community control newspaper, called “Teacher, Put Some Black on That Calendar!,” Chavers Johnson referred to her earlier guide by contrast to the Judeo-Christian patriotic calendar that put aside time to honor former US presidents, the flag, brotherhood, and Christmas. Re-emphasizing the importance of dates, she pointed out how just in September, teachers could use the many “examples of how dates can be commemorated, taking a birth date of an important Afro-American and weaving the lessons and activities around that person’s life.” For instance, “September we can celebrate Owijira, the West African New Year. September we can dramatize Jesse Owens’ Olympic feats. September we can present Hiram Revels, the first Afro-American Senator, and James Forten who was an inventor and an abolitionist. September we can discuss Alain Locke and the Harlem Renaissance.” By punctuating the broad possibilities for just one month, her plan conveyed to students that Black accomplishment permeated an array of fields—sports, government, industry, and arts—across space and time. Instead of relegating Black history to a particular month, she aimed to saturate the curriculum with religious and racial world-making rituals to correct the notion that only white students ought to see people who looked like them in tales of historical figures. The world to be made was a new America, redeemed by Blackness.

Chavers Johnson’s religious and racial world threatened the centralized Board because its contents challenged the status quo. In her article for the Forum, she wrote, “the Board of Education of New York City,” i.e., the centralized generator of curriculum, “called me in for some meetings,—my work had stamina,—could it be an official document?” However, “That was a consideration which was squelched by some very well-executed Uncle Tomming,” i.e., by Black people whom she understood to be playing into white interests. The response further motivated her to work around educational bureaucracy: “I went into business” and “reached 32 of the 50 states in this country—from a small office which is in my home.” Because of her dedication to trying multiple strategies and her frustration with the Board, her support for community control emerged.

Chavers Johnson’s experience with the Board also inspired her focus on educating and activating Black teachers to better teach about Black history and culture. Community control became an opportunity to challenge the white Judeo-Christian norm. Following the confrontation, she shifted from her focus on all teachers to Black teachers because “Waiting for the Boards of Education or for the Bureaus of Curriculum or Title Projects to initiate action is to wait for the line-up to crematorium. Forget it.” Instead, she sought to identify resources within Black communities through working with the “talented, knowledgeable black educators WHO KNOW OUR HISTORY and who are not being recognized by us because they are not recognized by white people due to their unswerving, uncompromising attitudes.” She wanted to complete the work soon: “There is enough material called units or lesson plans written already by black people for us to put into our home libraries this forthcoming summer, pur [sic] over, and get going with a bang in September, 196[9].” Chavers Johnson organized Black communities because white (and some Black) people had rejected her ideas, not because she unilaterally rejected white people. For Chavers Johnson, solidifying Black people’s belonging in America created a world where Black children would facilitate Black history’s reproduction for future generations.

Seeing religion as part of New York City desegregation and community control through stories like Chavers Johnson’s helps us to shift the story from one of failure to one of complex negotiations and possibilities. The Board’s adoption of what it called “Judeo-Christianity” for teaching American history, preventing juvenile delinquency, and promoting integration as a value contributed to religion’s continuing presence in the schools. At the same time, it illuminates that the ongoing struggles around desegregation and community control resisted the schools’ Judeo-Christian white moral framework and produced original religious and racial worldviews that sustained educational justice efforts for decades to come. Black and Puerto Rican religious and racial creativity thus also continued in public schools following the early 1960s Supreme Court cases, and even beyond the late 1960s’ community control movement.

Leslie Ribovich is Director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Public Policy & Law at Trinity College.

The post Public Schools, Religion, and Race appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Raj Dhunna)

When Cantor Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) tells Carla Kessler O’Connor (Carol Kane) that she is a “funny lady” in Nathan Silver’s film Between the Temples, she asks, “then how come you don’t laugh at my jokes?” Ben replies, “It’s a different kind of funny.” This repartee between the two protagonists who rescue one another from grief and loneliness aptly characterizes the film itself. Between the Temples IS humorous, but its humor is part poignant, part acerbic. There’s plenty of Jewish funny business here, but Judaism is more than the butt of a joke. In sharp contrast to most other American Jewish movies featuring cantors or Jews coming of age, Between the Temples uses offbeat comedy to embrace Jewish practice.

The film opens with Ben’s moms telling their clearly depressed son that he needs to see a doctor. He assumes they are staging a psychological intervention that he knows he needs and acquiesces. A few minutes later, Dr. Plotnick—Rachel—arrives. Rather than a psychologist, she is an unattached facial surgeon, and Ben and the audience quickly come to understand that this is actually a dating set-up. These moms may be lesbian—a fact that refreshingly merits no commentary—but they have much in common with an earlier cinematic Jewish mother: Mrs. Stein in Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) who views even Yom Kippur services as a solemn occasion for matchmaking. When Rachel feels Ben’s face—she is, after all, a facial surgeon—she asks him if he cries a lot, a clear sign that there’s going to be more here than slapstick comedy courtesy of Jewish mothers.

(Movie poster for Between the Temples)

The source of Ben’s tears is the untimely death of his wife, a hard-drinking writer who died from a brain bleed after falling while drunk. Consumed by grief, he has lost his cantorial voice. Early on in the film, which premiered at Sundance, Ben returns to his synagogue to lead services after a considerable absence. Although he tries to open the Kabbalat Shabbat service with Yedid Nefesh, “My Soul’s Beloved,” he is unable to cough his way through more than the first notes. Fleeing the synagogue, he listens to the last voicemail his wife left him, then lies down in the street, clutches his tallit (prayer shawl), and waits for a truck to run over him. In the next scene, he is waving goodbye to the truck driver, who has dropped him off at a bar. There he will drink too many mudslides, pick a fight with a patron who punches him out, and then be rescued by his old music teacher, Mrs. O’Connor. She reveals herself to have been born Carla Kessler and now has a deep desire to have the bat mitzvah denied to her as a “Red diaper baby” (i.e., the daughter of Communist atheists).

Almost a century ago, a different loss of cantorial voice ushered in the talkie in movies. The Jazz Singer (1927) is the classic Hollywood assimilation story of a cantor’s son who realizes his dream of moving from the temple to the nightclub via blackface and faux jazz. In the 1980 version of that film, Neil Diamond’s belting out of “Coming to America” completes his journey from the synagogue to the stage. But in Between the Temples, assimilation doesn’t stand a chance against the enduring power of Jewish tradition. Rather than desiring to free himself of the cantorial yoke like his cinematic predecessors, Ben mourns his inability to perform ritually. By the end of the film, Ben finally recovers his voice during Carla’s bat mitzvah. Between the Temples powerfully reverses American Jewish cinematic history by combining a coming-of age ritual with a Jewish return to the cantorial fold.

Carla’s bat mitzvah takes place at the edge of the wilderness and is, not surprisingly, profoundly unorthodox. Of course, it’s worth remembering that the coming-of-age ritual for women is a modern phenomenon. Judith Kaplan, the daughter of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, was the first girl to have a bat mitzvah. In 1922, at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Reconstructionist Synagogue that Rabbi Kaplan founded, Judith was not allowed to read from the Torah scroll. Women were considered too impure to have direct access to such holiness, and there was a limit on rocking the boat. In her memories of what retrospectively turned into a revolutionary Jewish feminist development, Kaplan says her grandmothers were horrified and wanted to prevent the ritual display of gender equity from happening. Nonetheless, Judith’s Jewish womanhood was liturgically marked. As she recounted:

“l was signaled to step forward to a place below the bimah [platform in a synagogue] at a very respectable distance from the scroll of the Torah, which had already been rolled up and garbed in its mantle. I pronounced the first blessing, and from my own Humash [book containing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible] read the selection which Father had chosen for me, continued with the reading of the English translation, and concluded with the closing brakhah (blessing). That was it [sic] The scroll was returned to the ark with song and procession, and the service was resumed. No thunder sounded, no lightning struck. The institution of bat mitzvah had been born without incident, and the rest of the day was all rejoicing.”

The 1970s saw a rapid expansion of bat mitzvahs, and women who had not had the opportunity to have their Jewish womanhood ritually recognized in their youth began to train for and complete this ritual in adulthood, sometimes in late adulthood. Director Nathan Silver’s own mother, Cindy Silver, started this process in her 60s but did not complete it. But her experience and desire were the germ for this film. Silver reports that his mother, who has a small part in the movie, is the “only critic that counts,” and has “seen the film and gave it a good review.”

Carla recites some of this bat mitzvah history to Cantor Ben (she Googled it); however, in her version, the first coming-of-age ritual for women was conducted at Kaplan’s home rather than the synagogue. Ben repeats this alternative history at the end of the film when Carla chants Torah in the woods behind her home (accompanied only by Ben in fully restored cantorial voice). This historical revisionism honors the role of Judaic innovation that gave birth to the bat mitzvah and the adult bat mitzvah. But it also whitewashes the communal and public nature of the ceremony. The film further reinforces such American Jewish individualism when Ben intones “from here on out, what you do, what you are is up to you and only you.”

(Adult bat mitzvah. Image source: Rabbi Rosalind Glazer)

Just as Cantor Ben’s devotion to his vocation is cinematically unusual, so is Carla’s commitment to this ritual. In such bar mitzvah movies as Keeping Up with the Steins (2006) and A Serious Man (2009), the boys being Jewishly trained to become men are reluctant at best. In part, this stems from spiritually lifeless customs. The Hebrew school scene in A Serious Man reflects the excruciating Jewish educational experiences that too many young Jews endured. And in A Serious Man, bar mitzvah boy Danny chants his Torah portion while high. (Between the Temples recalls that scene when Cantor Ben accidentally drinks hallucinogenic tea and encounters his younger self). The much more earnest film Keeping Up with the Steins takes aim at the attitude that “it doesn’t matter what happens at the temple, it’s the party that counts.” In hopes that life might imitate art, some b’nai mitzvah programs use this film to refocus students on the spiritual dimensions of coming of age Jewishly.

More recently, there has been some much-needed on-screen representation of bat mitzvahs, but those, too, are largely depicted as burdens. In You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023), a competition between middle school best friends for the cute, vacuous boy that turns into afterparty drama drowns out most of the meaningful Jewish content in the film (the buzz around this middling bat mitzvah film indicates a hunger for Jewish female representation that merits note). In the miniseries Fleishman is in Trouble (2022), adapted from Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel of the same name, a bat mitzvah is aborted. Fleishman, the titular nebbish, is seen as a good father for not compelling his daughter to go through a ritual that has little meaning to her. And In Just Like That (2022), the sequel series to Sex and the City, Charlotte fulfills her dream of becoming an adult bat mitzvah, a revolutionary representation. However, this event only comes to pass because Charlotte takes the place of her nonbinary child Rock, who remains uncommitted to this coming-of-age ritual despite months of preparation.

In sharp contrast, Carla insists on a “shotgun bat mitzvah” after she suffers yet another ministroke (poignantly, Cantor Ben, rather than her son, is the one who sits with her at the hospital). Having this ritual affirmation of her too-long suppressed identity seems like a Jewish feminist declaration of independence. Her son, who professes to be an anti-antisemitic atheist, tries to dissuade her and invokes his dead father’s likely disapproval. But her will—and wit—win Cantor Ben over, and he concocts the prospect of a significant donation to get the rabbi to agree. Part of Cantor Ben’s job is to coach Carla not only in chanting Torah but also in basic Jewish literacy. In one bit between these two misfits who co-educate one another, Cantor Ben spits out a mouthful of hamburger when he learns there is cheese inside. Carla is perplexed and queries “lactose intolerant?” Ben responds, “no, kosher,” and then gives her—and viewers—a mini-lesson on Jewish dietary laws.

Between the Temples is committed not only to Jewish content but also to Jewish casting. In recent years, there’s been much attention paid to non-Jewish actors playing Jews—think Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, Rachel Brosnahan as Mrs. Maisel, Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer, and Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein to name just a few. Between the Temples explicitly references such ethnoreligious erasures: the rabbi’s daughter, designated as a “mess” and thus a viable catch for Ben, is an actor who keeps “auditioning for Jewish parts that went to shiksa actors” (“shiksa” is a derogatory term for non-Jewish women). However, in sharp contrast to the trend of too many small and big screen productions, the casting in Between the Temples is overwhelmingly Jewish. Jason Schwartzman describes himself as “half Polish-Jewish and half Italian,” and the press notes to the film indicate that making this movie expanded his Jewish knowledge base. Carol Kane as Carla was a particularly brilliant casting choice. Of course, her voice and acting chops lend themselves to the kooky sultriness that defines Carla. However, for Jewish film buffs, Kane will always be associated with her role as greenhorn Gitl who finds her own way to blend old worlds and new in Joan Micklin Silver’s classic Hester Street. Kane, too, says playing this Jewish role influenced her own sense of Jewish being and practice. In interviews, she talks with delight about her Jewish education during the film’s production, including learning to chant Torah and embracing Jewish pride: “It’s important to stand up and be proud of who you are. . . especially right now with the world in such chaos and pain. I don’t think you can crawl into a hole and hide. You have to claim who you are. You can’t control what the response to that will be.”

Perhaps especially post-October 7, Between the Temples is a Jewish cinematic gift. The clever title of the film points to its intermingled psychological and Jewish narrative. Of course, “between the temples” refers to the complexity of what happens in one’s head space, especially when one is dealing with grief and aging. But it also refers to the spiritual drama that occurs between the temple as institutional space, and the temple of one’s heart or soul, a spiritual space unique to individuals. In this film, American Jewish cinematic history becomes a usable tradition to illuminate that drama and to help tell a cross-generational Jewish love story. Between the Temples provides a lens on the sometimes messy, occasionally ridiculous, often poignant process of making Judaism and Jewishness one’s own. It also reminds us that movies themselves can serve as a lifecycle event.

Helene Meyers is Professor Emerita of English at Southwestern University. Her most recent book is Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition.

The post A Cantor and an Adult Bat Mitzvah Student Meet in a Bar appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Architect of the Capitol)

The following excerpt comes from the book Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism. Although many people associate Christian nationalism with evangelicals, the book explores the role mainline Protestants have played in promoting the idea of America as a Christian country.

The following excerpt comes from the book’s sixth chapter, “In God We Trust?”

***

An Uncivil Move

The preamble to the Constitution of the Confederate States of America framed the new breakaway country as a Christian nation. It noted the people of the Confederacy were “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God” to “ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.” It marked a substantive shift away from what some people called the “godless” Constitution of the U.S., which referred to religion in its original version only by prohibiting religious tests for public office. So as the Civil War started, some Christians in the North worried that God might favor the Confederates. This line of thinking suggested that they needed to do something to invoke—and perhaps even demand—God’s blessing on the side of the Union.

In the early months of the war, Rev. Mark Watkinson sent a letter dated November 13, 1861, to the U.S. secretary of the treasury with one such solution: put God on Mammon. And who was Watkinson? The pastor of First Particular Baptist Church (now known as Prospect Hill Baptist Church) in Prospect Park, Pennsylvania. The congregation is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA (who back then were known as Northern Baptists).

“One fact touching our currency has hitherto been seriously overlooked. I mean the recognition of the Almighty God in some form on our coins,” Watkinson wrote to the Treasury secretary. “You are probably a Christian. What if our Republic were not shattered beyond reconstruction? Would not the antiquaries of succeeding centuries rightly reason from our past that we were a heathen nation?”

Thus, Watkinson suggested a redesign that would include “God, Liberty, Law” stamped on the money. The minister even suggested it could help with the war effort.

“This would make a beautiful coin, to which no possible citizen could object,” he added in his letter. “This would relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism. This would place us openly under the Divine protection we have personally claimed. From my heart I have felt our national shame in disowning God as not the least of our present national disasters.”

Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase agreed with the general argument. A lifelong Episcopalian, Chase was raised in his teen years by his uncle, who was an Episcopal bishop. Chase wrote a November 20, 1861, memo to James Pollock, the director of the U.S. Mint, to find a suitable way to invoke God on the coins of the Union.

“No nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in his defense. The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins,” Chase wrote. “You will cause a device to be prepared without unnecessary delay with a motto expressing in the fewest and tersest words possible this national recognition.”

Pollock was of a similar mind as Watkinson the Baptist pastor and Chase the lay Episcopalian. The former governor of Pennsylvania, Pollock was a lifelong Presbyterian who served as an elder in his local church and while leading the Mint was vice president of the American Sunday School Union that promoted the creation of Sunday School programs in churches. Drawing from the last stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Pollock suggested the motto “In God Is Our Trust.” That song, of course, had also been penned during wartime as Francis Scott Key, an Episcopalian, composed it while witnessing the shelling of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812.

“We claim to be a Christian nation,” Pollock wrote in an 1863 report suggesting a conversion of the coin design to add his God motto. “Why should we not vindicate our character, by honoring the God of nations, in the exercise of our political sovereignty as a nation? Our national coinage should do this. Its legends and devices should declare our trust in God; in him who is the ‘King of kings and Lord of lords.’”

Like Watkinson and Chase, Pollock also tied the need to put God on the coins to the hope of winning the Civil War.

“The time for the introduction of this or a similar motto is propitious and appropriate,” he argued. “’Tis an hour of national peril and danger, an hour when man’s strength is weakness, when our strength and our nation’s strength and salvation must be in the God of battles and of nations. Let us reverently acknowledge his sovereignty, and let our coinage declare our trust in God.”

Chase liked the idea, but he crossed out the “is our” in Pollock’s motto and wrote “we.” The next year, 1864, Congress approved the new design, and “In God We Trust” showed up on two-cent coins as the war with Confederate forces continued. The slogan didn’t initially appear on all money, just on coins. And not everyone approved. A New York Times editorial in 1865 criticized “the enactment of this new form of national worship” as “improper.”17 The piece added, “Let us try to carry our religion—such as it is—in our hearts, and not in our pockets.” Others joked about trusting in God but demanding cash.

(Image source: Numismatic News)

President Theodore Roosevelt removed the phrase from coins in 1907 as part of an attempt to beautify the coins, but public outrage led to the slogan returning the next year. An Episcopal layman in Pennsylvania spearheaded the campaign to return God to the coins, and pastors across the country preached against Roosevelt’s redesign. Prominent critics of Roosevelt’s move included banker and Episcopalian J.P. Morgan, Democratic U.S. Rep. Morris Sheppard (a Methodist who later became known as “the father of Prohibition” for authoring the Eighteenth Amendment), and the vestry of the Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia (where Patrick Henry gave his famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech). Additionally, denominational groups passed resolutions calling on the return of God on U.S. coins, including the Episcopal Diocese of New York and the Presbyterian Brotherhood of America.

After first showing up during the Civil War (and surviving Roosevelt), the phrase “In God We Trust” eventually soared to national significance well beyond coins jingling in pockets. And another war provided the inspiration. The years just after World War II ushered in a golden age for Christian Nationalism in the United States. After the creation of the National Day of Prayer in 1952, the launch of the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953, and the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, the revival spread to feature “In God We Trust.” In 1955, Congress and President Dwight D. Eisenhower mandated its presence on all U.S. currency (not just coins). The next year, the leaders in Washington, D.C., adopted the phrase as the national motto.

An Enduring Legacy

When James Pollock, the head of the U.S. Mint during the Civil War, was a congressman in the 1840s, he supported the efforts of Samuel Morse in developing the telegraph. As Morse sent the first message, Pollock was in the room where it happened. From the U.S. Capitol, Morse sent a message to Baltimore: “What hath God wrought?” The phrase came from Numbers 23:23 in one of the messages of Balaam, the diviner with the talking donkey. Had Pollock been in the Capitol 177 years later, he might have seen several people carrying signs declaring “In God We Trust” as they stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And on the infamous gallows built just outside the Capitol as people chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” people wrote “Hang them for treason,” “God Bless the USA,” and “In God We Trust.”

Yet, even after that, some mainline Protestants continue to celebrate their role in helping establish this motto. Like Prospect Hill Baptist Church in Prospect Park, Pennsylvania, the church where Rev. Mark Watkinson served in 1861 as he started the push to put God on our money. With events being held outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a sign of nostalgia for Christian Nationalism even as progressive agendas were being advanced. For instance, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2022, people stood outside the church and read King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as part of a community emphasis on combating racism. Above the speakers, an old sign hung on the exterior wall of the building: “Historic site. Origin of In God We Trust.” In smaller text beneath an image of two coins, the sign notes that “from this church in 1861 the suggestion was made that recognition to the Almighty God be placed on the coins of our country.”

On a smaller scale, the website of First Presbyterian Church in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, brags on its history page that Pollock worshiped at the church early in his career before he later “originated” the effort to put “the motto, ‘In God We Trust,’ on the United States coins that went into the collection plates.” Aside from the fact that Chase, not Watkinson or Pollock, actually came up with the phrase “In God We Trust,” the sign and website show how the efforts to create a significant Christian Nationalistic symbol are celebrated even today at mainline Protestant congregations. Far from a reckoning, the phrase is still lifted up.

But while these churches were ministering during COVID-19 and celebrating Epiphany, others also heralded “In God We Trust” as they participated in the Capitol insurrection. Once mustered up during the Civil War and Cold War, “In God We Trust” has worked for decades to bolster a Christian Nationalistic worldview among some Americans with its presence on numerous official documents and governmental buildings. Preaching from courtrooms, schools, currency, and presidential remarks, the motto adopted in wars today continues to disciple Americans to view their nation and faith in particular ways.

The phrase has survived multiple legal challenges to maintain its official status, but this has not always been a victory for Christianity. For instance, a 1970 federal appellate decision on a case questioning the phrase on currency found it didn’t violate church-state separation because the phrase was just “of patriotic or ceremonial character” without “any religious significance” and “no theological or ritualistic impact.” And a 2005 appellate ruling rejected a challenge to government buildings posting the motto because the phrase had “a legitimate secular purpose.” Far from keeping God in society, by adopting “In God We Trust” our government managed to kick religion out of “God.”

That’s a key problem that ultimately emerges. In the quest to place “In God We Trust” in various public spaces, those pushing for it will argue it’s a generic, unifying patriotic statement. The attempts to declare that the phrase “In God We Trust” is a religiously neutral statement is offensive. But it is precisely by defining it as secular that courts have backed use of the phrase on coins and public buildings. It’s blasphemous to use that phrase as some broad, inclusive,

unifying, generic American statement. Who is this “god” that the state is telling us to trust? To believe in God is by definition not religiously neutral. To conflate being American with being Christian is to attempt to water down—and even attack—the basic teachings of Christianity. But that’s what Christian Nationalism does.

The phrase chosen during the Civil War to invoke God’s blessings on the Union during the bloody fight against the Confederacy found itself in the crowd along with waving Confederate flags during an attempt to overturn an election. The insurrectionists, like religious and political leaders during the Cold War, held up as their motto a phrase that claimed God was on their side instead of a motto about the many people of the nation coming together as one. What hath God’s people wrought?

Brian Kaylor is a Baptist minister with a Ph.D. in political communication. Beau Underwood is a minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and is pursuing a doctorate in public affairs. This piece is an excerpt from their new book, Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism.

The post Mainline Protestants and Christian Nationalism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast/Getty)

Back in the pre-pandemic days of 2018-2019 when I lived in Lusaka, Zambia — a country that was declared a “Christian nation” by Zambia’s then-President, Frederick Chiluba, in 1991 — it was evident that evangelical (particularly Pentecostal) Christianity made such a dent on the country’s culture that the lines between “religious” and secular” were nearly blurred out of existence. Shacks-for-businesses lined streets with signs like “God Knows Hair Salon” or “Jehovah Jirah (roughly meaning, “The Lord is My Provider”) Mechanics” that catered to a deeply Christian clientele. One moment in the mall while sipping coffee at a café, I could hear Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time” and the next hear Contemporary Christian Music’s titan Michael W. Smith’s “Place in This World.” In Zambia’s pop-culture, American televangelists like Joyce Mayer had as much clout as Beyoncé.

The prevalence of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in Zambia is not unique. Throughout many parts of the Global South – Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America – the pervasiveness of Christianity is on the rise, making religion an especially relevant factor in the world today – something Paul Seabright argues in his latest book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People from Princeton University Press.

The book opens with Seabright’s encounter with a twenty-four-year-old woman whom he refers to as “Grace,” who lives and works for substandard wages in Accra, Ghana. He questions why someone as poor as Grace continues to donate 12% of her income to her local church and her wealthy minister who pastors a “Prosperity-Gospel” church, teaching that truly faithful Christians will be monetarily blessed.

Seabright, an economics professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, contends that religious institutions and movements can be best understood as business platforms. In these religious platforms, people offer their time and finances to their religious institutions, while the religious institutions, in return, provide personal and professional networking, community, and meta-narratives about humanity’s purpose and origins that meet their members’ existential needs. In simple terms, it can be helpful to look at religion’s role in people’s lives as a “supply and demand” dynamic.

This isn’t exactly a novel argument, per se. Several studies exist on the “economics of religion” that examine the role of religion in exactly these terms. But what Seabright does with this book is examine how religions behave like business platforms — the ways that they have garnered “wealth, power, and people” — for better and for worse, and what that means for the United States and the world at large today.

***

Seabright asserts that religious movements are a type of business – a platform. He defines platforms as:

“Organizations that facilitate relationships that could not form, or could not function as effectively, in the platforms’ absence. Platforms reward those who create and manage them by appropriating some of the benefits those relationships make possible.”

Think of social-media sites like Facebook and X. These sites have facilitated personal and professional relationships in ways that wouldn’t have occurred in the pre-internet days. Seabright cites the quintessential “matchmaker” who connects two potential romantic mates, or the “market trader” who connects farmers and artisans with buyers, as platforms. Religious movements, according to Seabright, operate in the same way. They foster communities through a combination of organization and thoughtful strategizing that creates “enchantment” for their adherents. This “platform” aspect of religious movements, for Seabright, has become essential in our modern age, and an aspect of religion that Seabright explores throughout the book.

In defining “religion,” Seabright first describes two types of religion: “immanent religion” — religion that deals with correct procedures for interacting with invisible spirits here-and-now (like “animism,” a worldview that attributes a higher consciousness to animals, inanimate objects and weather patterns, as an example), and “transcendent religion” — religion that involves both a “hope of salvation from the human condition” and a more distant spiritual world (which presumably describes traditions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism). What immanent and transcendental religion have in common, according to Seabright, is that “they all appeal to the presence of spirits.”

Since “spirit” is a significant definitional word for the book’s argument, it’s worth pointing out that he defines “spirit” in broad strokes. His definition includes both “spirit” in the traditional sense—gods, angels, ghosts—as well as a more secular understanding (Seabright cites secular politicians, as an example, who refer to “destiny” or “the nation” as if those things are spirits themselves). This mingling of secular and spiritual definitions of religion allows for the book’s arguments to apply to not only religions as already aforementioned, but also “secular religions,” like American civil religion, or even “ideologies” — fascism, communism, or perhaps one that includes elements of both the secular and religious: Christian nationalism.

Quite a few pundits have suggested a “global decline of religion,” and there are certainly voices, especially from the more populist-conservative side, that bemoan a “decline of Christianity” in the United States and the Western world. Based on available census data and surveys (included in the book’s appendix), Seabright offers several conclusions about the state of religion in the modern world — a few of them worth dissecting further: one, both Christianity and Islam are actually growing in most regions in the world; and two, that while traditionally “mainstream” Christianity (mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity) is declining, evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity are increasing their share of the global Christian population.

South American Christianity is already shifting its demographics from the traditional-majority Roman Catholicism to a rapidly increasing Pentecostalism, which has ramifications for the continent’s political landscape  in years to come. Similar situations are taking place in Africa and Southeast Asia. Part of the explanation for evangelicalism and Pentecostalism’s rise, according to Seabright, can be better explained if one examines religion as business platforms. Seabright writes:

“Religious movements create communities, and communities function best when they operate as platforms. The platforms that Christian and Muslim communities have been able to construct help their members to navigate the challenges of the modern world, with its increased migration from the country to the city, its loosening of family ties, and its hazards of sickness, unemployment, and loneliness against which the traditional institutions of family, village, and folk religion can no longer help to protect them.”

The ramifications of globalization, along with the rise of technology have undoubtedly fueled the rise of religion, especially Christianity and Islam, in various parts of the Global South. For evangelicals, and particularly Pentecostals, technology has never been a threat. In fact, one feature of Pentecostals’ engagement with those outside the fold is their knack for utilizing the latest  social-media platforms and practices. Along with using recent technological trends, many of these churches serve as safety-nets for communities where the state either can’t or won’t serve, making evangelicalism and Pentecostalism competitive platforms vis-á-vis other forms of Christianity. In other words, these movements are winning in the marketplace of worldviews.

***

One of the key ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, besides the illnesses and deaths from the virus itself, was the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Some theories, like QAnon (the group promoting the idea that satanic pedophile elites — those who work in the media, entertainment and in politics, especially in the Democratic Party) are controlling a “deep state” government) have implicit and sometimes explicit religious themes and connections. In some ways, conspiracy theories share a similarity to religious movements in that a major driving force behind their followers is also one of the quintessential characteristics of human beings: the desire for narratives that bring order to a chaotic world.

For Seabright, what forms a crucial part in the draw toward religious movements, and thus is key to understanding, is “a willingness to tell grand and ambitious stories.” And a good narrative, according to Seabright, has two ingredients: one, that it conforms to notions of “commonsense causality” — a clear line between “cause” and “effect” that makes complete sense to the listener, especially as it relates to relatable motives of the characters within the narrative (Seabright offers the example of Macbeth – it’s much easier to believe Macbeth’s reason for killing Duncan is because of a desire to take over the crown, as opposed to simply dealing with “boredom”). And two, it contains what Seabright describes as “counterintuitive elements” — parts of the story that seem unusual or highly implausible or improbable to occur in daily life.

Of course, most religions contain seemingly implausible elements within their narratives: A crucified-and-resurrected rabbi in Christianity, or a single-evening’s trip from Mecca to Jerusalem and then an ascension into Heaven, according to Islam. These types of narratives, especially ones that speak about victory over defeat, can be empowering and a “subject of envy and emulation” for political leaders to utilize as a tool for mobilization because, historically, they work. After mentioning political narratives like America’s “Manifest Destiny,” “Lebenstaum” under Hitler’s Germany, or Russia’s “passionarnost” in its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Seabright writes:

“Narratives that tell the story of a nation or a political movement in terms designed to promise that initial suffering will eventually be crowned in glory have proved irresistible to ambitious leaders.”

During his recent court trials and ultimate conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to a porn star, former President Donald Trump has compared himself as a martyr a lá Jesus. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump-ally, also made the comparison at a rally: “The man that I worship was also a convicted felon.” Following Trump’s assassination attempt, some saw the event as a sign that he was “chosen by God” to save the United States. These Christian theological overtures and comparisons infer a narrative that Trump is not just “suffering” unfairly, but on behalf of others — in this case, his supporters. The implication is that, like Jesus resurrecting after his crucifixion and “defeating death,” Trump will also defeat his political enemies and regain the presidency.

The religious motifs within this political narrative are no accident, according to Seabright. In fact, wielding religious narratives and communities for political purposes is quite deliberate.

***

On January 4, 2020, during the 2020 election cycle and before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump presidential campaign launched its first “Evangelicals for Trump” rally in a Pentecostal/charismatic megachurch in Miami, Florida. One prominent photo from the rally captured notable evangelical leaders rallying around Trump on the stage; they laid their hands on him and prayed for a second-term win of the White House.

Seabright only minimally addresses American evangelical Christianity in his book (although he does include the aforementioned “Evangelicals for Trump” photograph). There is, however, one argument from the book that’s relevant in examining America’s relationship between religion and politics today.

Adam Smith, the economist of The Wealth of Nations repute, believed that the consequences of a religion-and-state partnership would, ultimately, lower the number of adherents and decrease that religion’s power. For Seabright, the picture is a bit more complex. Citing studies done on politics’ influence on religion, Seabright compares the religiosity levels of certain countries in Europe, like Ireland and Spain, to argue that changes in people’s political identities drive their perceived religious identity. For example, someone who holds conservative political views would more likely identify as religious (especially if the “religion” in question is associated with political conservatism) because of their conservative views than because of their religious views.

We’re seeing this play out in American evangelicalism in the United States today. Pew Research Center found in 2021 that a) American Evangelicalism actually grew from 2016 to 2020 during the Trump administration; and b), White Americans who supported Trump were far more likely than those who didn’t to identify as evangelical, with the inference that people were drawn to become evangelical Christian more because of its association with the GOP than because of theological convictions or a personal conversion experience.

Interestingly, Seabright doesn’t believe that conservative-leaning churches push political views on its members. He bases this assertion partially on a study done by himself and another economist by examining posts from roughly four-thousand Facebook accounts of churches from Democratic and Republican-leaning counties. Taken during the pandemic, they expected to find churches in Republican-leaning counties less likely than churches in Democratic-heavy counties to move their services online. They found no differences between the two groups in their willingness to move online. After Seabright says they found more political posts from churches in Democratic-counties than in Republican-counties during an on-going study, Seabright surmises:

“A better way to describe what has been happening in America is not that churches have been instrumentalizing politics, but that politicians have been instrumentalizing religion.”

While I certainly agree that politicians utilize religion to mobilize their supporters, the premise seems to follow from a flawed research method. An analysis of sermons, homilies, and teachings from a sample of churches would better reflect the political messaging of churches than social-media posts. While a sermon from far-right pastor Greg Locke saying that one “can’t be a Democrat and a Christian” might be more of an outlier, the lessons that religious leaders teach, and that their followers take to heart, reflect much better the political messaging they might or might not receive compared to simple memes and statuses posted on Facebook.

Nonetheless, Seabright’s canvas of the global religious landscape is painted with subtlety; the breadth of his book is global and draws from various episodes of world history and economic thought, yet his arguments offer insights on America’s political and religious climate at this moment. The question, especially for those who are combating anti-democratic forces in the U.S. and the world today, is whether they can compete in the marketplace of worldviews and mobilize a community with a much better story to tell.

Miguel Petrosky is an essayist, writer, and journalist based in Washington, D.C. and has written for The Revealer, Sojourners, Religion & Politics, and Christianity Today. You can follow him on Threads @miguelpetrosky.

The post Winning the Religious Marketplace appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Mina Le on YouTube)

Engage with Catholic-labeled content on TikTok for a few hours and you’ll see everything from sincere devotional posts to ex-Catholics lambasting the church. You might find funny skits by savvy priests or videos of girls showing you how to veil at Mass. But the one thing you’re guaranteed to encounter is a lot of talk about “aesthetics.”

Such posts feature cathedrals, rosaries, veils, and crucifixes with captions that read “Catholicism is a vibe, honestly” or “my fave aesthetic.” Social media platforms, especially TikTok, have popularized (or appropriated) language from drag culture, so Catholic tradition is often “giving realness” or “slaying”— the caption of one TikTok filmed inside a Spanish cathedral reads “catholicism really used to serve cunt” (a phrase meant to portray confidence or fierceness). Any way you put it, Catholic “tradition” is having a moment on social media.

Some influencers connect the popularity of Catholic aesthetics to the fashion world, citing the 2018 Met Gala’s theme of “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” or recent trends like the fraught “Catholic Mexican Girl” style. Others focus more on sociopolitical context as the driver, explaining the draw to traditional Catholic practices like Latin Mass and rosaries on disillusionment with modern capitalism and consumerism. Online content producers invoke Catholicism, especially that of medieval and early modern Europe, to construct ideas of “tradition” for a wide variety of purposes.

One specific stream of this Catholic social media content is “Coquette Catholic,” which adopts a “girly” Catholic aesthetic often featuring pink rosaries, bows, and vintage charm. Coquette content, created and consumed mostly by women, provides a prime example of a tradition-fueled Catholic aesthetic meeting a thoroughly modern moment shaped by digital hyperconnectivity.

(The author’s Pinterest board. Pinned images were tagged or titled with “coquette Catholic.”)

The rapid spread of this aesthetic offers a compelling case study in how algorithmically driven platforms, especially Instagram and TikTok, are not merely places where people “do” religion, but are actively redefining how people conceive of themselves as religious. Contrary to the notion that Gen Z dismisses tradition in favor of New Age spirituality, the Coquette Catholic trend demonstrates how young women strategically employ traditional elements for their own purposes.

And, importantly, trends like Coquette Catholicism highlight how the constant state of online connection is reshaping how we conceptualize religion and ourselves as religious subjects.

What is “Trad”?

The coquette moment fits within and alongside other “TradCath” content. “Trads,” or traditionalist Catholics, are Catholics who prefer the liturgy and social teaching from before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Some associate Trads with an affinity for the Latin Mass and Gregorian chant, while others focus on their often right-wing political leanings. Famous Trads include people like Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker and Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance, as well as right-wing media personality Candace Owens, who announced her conversion to Catholicism in April 2024.

Some Trads on social media share images of medieval martyrs and cathedrals, and valorize white “Western” civilization. Trad media geared toward men often features Crusader knights and fivefold crosses, while content geared to women often falls into the oft-contested “tradwife” category. Shorthand for traditional wife, this type of content features women performing “traditional gender roles” (however conceived).

(“Trad” content)

But Trads are no monolith. In addition to knights and tradwives, we also see traditionalist Catholics espousing political ideas from monarchism to libertarianism, from socialism to anarchism. From the U.S. to Brazil to Germany, online “Trads” draw upon different items from the archive of Catholicism’s past, often held together in tension with one another, some of which are authorized by the Church’s leadership while others are not.

Similar to but very different from the “tradwife” trend, young women online are drawing on images of medieval saints, Catholic objects and dress, and the current popularity of coquette fashion to create a different kind of trad girl. While the coquette Catholic is decidedly not a tradwife, the content does feature traditional Catholic piety, occasional mentions of Latin Mass, and ostentatious performances of “traditional” femininity.

(#coquette #catholic from Tiktok)

Coquettification of Catholicism

While Coquette Catholic shares some similarities with Trad, it also differs in clear ways. Unlike tradwives, for whom the idea of submission to a husband and having several kids is central, these younger, mostly single women are generally not interested in returning to the 1950s. Cigarettes, Amy Winehouse, and slinky silk nightgowns figure just as prominently as rosaries, pocket altars, and holy cards of St. Catherine of Siena. Pictures of the content creator attending a Latin Mass can be followed by a post that says “Oops! Accidentally slept with my Pilates instructor.” A bit more irreverent but not always insincere, this content does not demand sexual purity in the form of abstinence and heterosexuality (though it might cheekily apologize for being “bad”).

In addition to traditional Catholic piety, coquette Catholic content can draw on the broader coquette aesthetic (bows, hearts, babydoll dresses), southern gothic imagery (moody, disturbing), dark academia (New England prep with a touch of terror) and the internet sad girl of 2010s Tumblr (more on this below).

(Instagram)

Eliza McLamb, singer-songwriter and co-host of the Binchtopia podcast, explains her perception of this aesthetic in her Substack post “Coquette Inclination: A Meditation on Knockoff Tabis, Family, and Coming Back to Tradition.” Reflecting on her own personal journey of self-discovery while going to Mass with her family, McLamb confesses:

“I wear bows sometimes. One time I saw Lana del Rey at a diner in Hollywood and sat silently with tears streaming down my face, overcome with emotion and unwilling to approach her. Whether or not the [Coquette Catholic] movement is “over” or “cringe” or “out” at this juncture is something that I am unable to determine — I’ll leave that to the TikTok trend forecasters — but it’s clear that this cultural fascination, and its intersection with traditional lifestyles and hot-girl Catholicism, has been influential to The Girlies in the fashion realm and otherwise.” 

McLamb’s description touches on the malaise that many women who contribute to this aesthetic express in their posts. This melancholy trend, commonly called Sad Girl Culture, emerged on Tumblr during the first half of the 2010s and has had a resurgence on TikTok and Instagram in the last few years. In the original trend, girls shared photos of their bruises, their tears and smudged eyeliner, and sad quotes covered in glitter. This content picked up again with the rise of the broader coquette trend, romanticizing poor mental health, disordered eating, and self-destruction (Fleabag style).

(Coquette Catholic aesthetic and the romanticization of the Sad Girl on Pinterest)

Searches on Pinterest that combine “coquette” with “catholic trauma” or “catholic guilt” result in photos of girls in mini skirts and knit tights broadcasting their suffering, their loneliness, and the impending doom of 21st-century life. Unlike artists such as Madonna or Lady Gaga who have used Catholic material culture subversively, this aesthetic is more in line with Lana del Rey and Ethel Cain — not very orthodox, but also not insincere. In fact, the more you mention philosophy the better. Memes of this subgenre often feature the suffering and torment (both mental and physical) of medieval female saints like Hildegard of Bingen or Catherine of Siena.

(Meme featuring Catherine of Siena)

What can this tell us about Gen Z?

While some scholars and journalists have written about Gen Z rejecting tradition and instead embracing New Age spirituality, the Coquette Catholic trend shows us how young women are using tradition for their own social purposes. Many express the desire for something “real” or “time tested” (which should give us pause for concern since White western civilization tends to mean “tradition” while New Age stuff, often invoking “Eastern” cultures, are labeled as new-fangled).

Whether perceived to be genuine or ironic, the draw to “tradition” is clearly positioned over and against a mix-and-match kind of spirituality. The content largely expresses a desire to at least pretend to be governed or in some way determined (much like the Quantified Self, determined by self-tracking and data). Sometimes the creators themselves explain this as a reaction to hyperconsumerism. Other times they imply an exhaustion with the idea of the neoliberal sovereign self. Even if imagined, “tradition” stands in for constraint, not choice.

McLamb, in her aforementioned Substack, describes this feeling. Looking down during a Latin mass at the bows on her shoes, she writes that she feels like “a girl” trying to go “to the place where [she is] supposed to get better, to be good.” She talks about feeling aimless and overwhelmed in her twenties, musing that this might be why “the young people crave tradition and structure, apparently.” Dasha Nekrasova, actor and host of the “Red Scare” podcast, put it more plainly: “No hell, no dignity.”

But of course, there is choice. Despite being tied to what many describe as “a 2,000-year-old tradition” imagined as a stable institution across time and space, we don’t live in the Middle Ages. We have access to an endless stream of ideas, communities, and things.

McLamb describes the dizzying task of “finding oneself” in the age of the internet. “The classic advice for people,” she argues, “is to center your own experience, focus on developing your own desires, your own tastes. In combination with the internet, this has led to a deathly identity soup.”

On the other hand, algorithmic curation can make some of these choices for you. By analyzing data on user preferences and content performance, these algorithms prioritize content that is likely to be engaging and relevant. Upon searching Coquette Catholic on Pinterest, the algorithm recommended “ideas [I] might love,” including “Southern Gothic,” “Catholic guilt,” and “Just girly things.” TikTok’s algorithm requires even less choice, filling your feed without any active intervention.

Sometimes it feels like “the algorithm” might know you better than you know yourself. This sheer abundance of content and choice can make the idea of the algorithm performing the work of fashioning a self feel comforting. Coating this technodetermism with spiritual language comes naturally to some who have been desiring “tradition” and “constraint” in a liberal world of abundance. God works through the algorithm.

Sincerely held?

Some media outlets have characterized this and other Catholic content as Gen Z “embracing Catholicism,” while others debate their sincerity. But rather than scrutinize church attendance or correct beliefs, this trend shows that sincerity may no longer be the standard by which “authentic” religion is measured (at least for some).

Rather than finding a community (though some no doubt have), coquette Catholics have found a vibe—an aesthetic they connect with. The democratization (at least in the sense of the decline of gatekeepers) brought on by digital hyperconnectivity has not only challenged religious authority, but has also decentered correct “belief” as the main arbiter of religious authenticity. Coquette Catholics are not obligated to conform to previously-authenticated aesthetics approved by authorities to be heard.

For example, “Red Scare” podcast host Dasha Nekrasova has explained that she is Catholic “like Any Warhol.” When asked if her Catholic practice was ironic, Nekrasova answered in the affirmative, but also quipped that “it doesn’t matter because it still works.” Similarly, author Honor Levy argued that “you just do the rituals, and then it becomes real, even if you don’t believe in it.” Some corners of coquette Catholicism feature pictures and quotes from Nekrasova or Levy, drawing on their coquette fashion and their move beyond the ironic-sincere binary.

(Nekrosova on Instagram)

To some, this self-conscious performance might reflect young people’s reliance on aesthetics and trends to create a sense of self. But of course, this has always been the case. Performativity and the social formation of the self are not new concepts—we’ve long recognized how social performance and seeing oneself from the outside are central to identity formation. Digital hyperconnectivity has perhaps made this more obvious, but it has also intensified self-objectification. Sociologist Rogers Brubaker puts it like this:

“[Digital hyperconnectivity] has radically transformed how objects exist in the world and how one becomes an object to oneself, to others, and to suprahuman knowledge systems. In so doing, it has created an entirely new techno-social infrastructure of selfhood: an entirely new ecology within which selves are formed and reformed.”

Constant self-objectification and consumption can make some people question whether their identities are truly authentic, since they are often digitally curated and mediated by technology.

On the other hand, the ironic-versus-sincere binary has begun to crumble with a generation who has grown up with digital performance as a part of everyday life. This particular infrastructure of selfhood has challenged the common idea that authenticity means “unfiltered” or “unmediated”—it makes us hyperaware that everything is mediated. This always-on, always-connected universe of digital content is reshaping our selves and our social worlds, including how we see ourselves as “religious.”

Not all TikTok consumers are on board with the idea of “vibes Catholics,” and of course many condemn this presentation as impure, performative, or heretical. But coquette Catholic content shows that religion is changing.

Perhaps the question to ask, then, is not whether these creators are being ironic or sincere, but rather how platforms like Instagram and TikTok might be starting to reshape the concept of religion itself.

Lauren Horn Griffin is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Department of History at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England (2023) and is writing a book about Catholic traditionalists online. 

Nicole Phillips holds a B.A. in Philosophy and History from Louisiana State University. Her research interests include medieval piety and gender studies.

The post The Coquette Catholic Trend appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Drew Angerer for Getty Images)

The Schools

Every morning, five days a week, hundreds of yellow busses transport thousands of boys, all wearing the pais (side curls) and tzitzit (knotted tassels) that mark them as ultra-Orthodox Jews, to schools around New York and New Jersey.

These boys are now at the center of a legal and philosophical battle. On one side are people who believe that every American child is entitled to a basic education sufficient to allow them to make their way in the world. On the other are those who believe that parents in a religious community have unlimited rights to decide what their children learn.

All ultra-Orthodox children attend religious schools, called yeshivas. But within the Hasidic world, a subset of the ultra-Orthodox population, many boys attend schools in which the languages of instruction are Yiddish and Hebrew and few if any secular subjects are taught. In New York City alone, there are over 100 Hasidic schools in which over 50,000 boys are receiving inadequate secular education. The typical boy gets only 90 minutes of secular instruction, in English, four days a week, between 3^rd and 8^th grade. The remainder of the school day, which can stretch to ten hours, is focused on the study of Torah and rabbinic commentary. At least one Brooklyn school proudly teaches no secular subjects at all.

When these boys graduate, many are functionally illiterate in English and cannot pass the GED. Some only learn to write their names in English when it comes time for them to sign their marriage certificates. One parent told a reporter that her child could barely read the side of a cereal box. Another parent’s ten-year-old boy was told by his teacher that the planets revolve around the Earth. A father of three boys lamented that they were unable to read English street signs and cautionary signs at the zoo. Should these boys or young men wish to leave the Hassidic world, they have grave difficulties finding jobs. (Because girls are not expected to spend their days studying Torah, and because they are often the breadwinners and the ones who engage with the outside world, their English and secular education is somewhat more adequate.)

Historically, this was not the case. In the “Golden Age” of Hasidism in Europe in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Torah study was not a typical lifetime occupation. But by the second half of the 20^th century, immigration, pogroms, and, finally, the Holocaust, eradicated the Hasidic communities in Eastern Europe, whose remnants took root and flourished in the United States and Israel. In both countries, social welfare safety nets such as food stamps and housing subsidies enabled lifelong Torah study to become more normative. Men can have large families and still devote most of their time to Torah study, relying on a mix of spousal income, family and community support, and social services to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, however frugally. Many men do work within the community, for example as teachers.

Yeshiva education exists to support this way of life. Children of both sexes begin school early, at age three, in part to relieve parents of some of the burden of large families. For boys, instruction until the 4^th grade is entirely in Yiddish, and no secular subjects are taught. Between the ages of eight and thirteen, boys get ninety minutes of secular study a day, mostly in math and English, with no science or history. At age thirteen, secular study ends.

As Shulem Deen describes in his memoir of life in the Hasidic town of New Square, New York, All Who Go Do Not Return, even those ninety minutes are of poor quality, because the rebbes, the religious teachers who run the school and teach the religious classes, deride secular study as a waste of time. Some of the boys routinely leave school at the start of the secular class block, claiming that their parents forbade them to study English. Boys are allowed to “blow off” their secular studies, eating and chatting with their backs to the secular teacher, in contrast to their strict obedience to religious teachers. “Bedlam and general lack of cooperation” characterized classes taught by “outside” teachers, according to Robert Kamen, in Growing Up Hasidic: Education and Socialization in the Bobover Hasidic Community.

(Image source: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Unfortunately, lack of English makes employment difficult. As Deen watched a friend fail at a programming course because of his poor English, he wondered, “[W]as this to be my children’s fate, to be raised not only with rigidly defined roles but deprived of any ability to step out of them?”

The paucity of secular education for boys is compounded by the rigorous enforcement of cultural isolation. At the end of World War II, the tattered remnants of Hasidic communities faced a dilemma: where should they go to rebuild their lives? New York City was then home to the largest number of Jews in the non-communist world. Thus, to quote Kamen, it “offered the promise of regeneration to a confused and decimated culture.”

However, America also signified the dangers of assimilation. “Many of the new immigrants feared that what the death camps began, life in America would finish,” wrote Kamen. As he points out, the Hasidim are unique in their determination to resist integration into the prevailing culture, while settling down right in the middle of it. The Amish and Mennonites and other similar groups chose rural environments consonant with their largely agrarian lifestyle. Rejection of technology such as telephones and automobiles also served as a barrier to integration. But the average Hasid lives in a large American city and uses the subway to get to work, a mobile phone to stay in touch, and is likely benefiting from some form of public assistance. It is much more challenging under these circumstances to keep one’s metaphorical fences intact, and much easier for the Hasidic youngster to take the subway somewhere where no one knows her, and to sneak into a forbidden cinema or sample a forbidden food. Education of children becomes the primary means by which the group is held together.

The Legal Challenge

Until recently, little attention had been paid to these underperforming yeshivas.  However, in 2012, Naftuli Moster founded Young Advocates for Fairness in Education (YAFFED), whose mission is to ensure that yeshivas in New York deliver a sound basic education to their students. Moster was educated in Hasidic schools with limited secular education, and he struggled greatly when he left the community. He didn’t even realize that he did not have a high school diploma, and he had never heard the words “essay,” or “molecule.”

The last thirteen years have been a grueling legal battle in YAFFED’s fight to get yeshivas to comply with the law. New York Education Law Section 3204 mandates that non-public schools provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to those subjects offered in public schools, including English, math, social studies, and science. However, the city and state governments have shown little interest in enforcing this law. Hasidic communities are strong voting blocs and shielding yeshivas from oversight has become their primary issue.

Forcing the government to do its job is one of the hardest things to do legally, especially when it is almost impossible to find a complainant with “standing,” a person who is being hurt and in a position to bring forward a lawsuit. If it even appears that parents may be likely to complain, the school will simply dismiss the child. In any case, parents cannot logically bring suit against a private school for providing an inadequate education, as the obvious remedy is to send their child elsewhere. The more likely plaintiffs are divorced parents who have left the community and adopted more modern views on education, but whose children remain in the community with the custodial parent. However, these parents often find that even occasional visitation is precarious and are unwilling to take the risk.

In 2022, possibly in response to some revelatory New York Times reporting, the NYS Board of Regents finally enacted regulations meant to hold private schools to minimum standards. However, the enforcement mechanism is unclear and will likely be left to local school districts. The loopholes are legion. At this point, for the individual yeshiva boy, nothing has changed.

Children’s Rights to Free Exercise

Those who support the right of parents to send their children to these restrictive institutions rely on the free exercise clause of the Constitution, suggesting that religious communities should have the freedom to educate their children as they see fit. These include members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and conservatives who support a strong version of parental rights opposed to any state control over education.

The Hasidic attempt to enforce a pre-Enlightenment way of life raises philosophical challenges in 21^st-century United States, putting pressure on the perennial problem of how much toleration a liberal state should or must extend to an illiberal community in its midst. A religiously liberal society ought to support even religiously authoritarian communities or lose its claim to liberalism.  Communitarian philosopher William Galston, in his 1991 book Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State, claims that, “properly understood, liberalism is about the protection of diversity, not the valorization of choice. . . . To place an ideal of autonomous choice… at the core of liberalism is in fact to narrow the range of possibilities available within liberal societies.” In other words, to require that the Hasidim support their children’s ability to make autonomous choices when they become adults is to require that the Hasidim not be Hasidim. Hasidic values include religious observance, love of God, and conformity to community norms, the very opposite of autonomy.

On the other hand, these Hasidic boys are American children, with rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Surely it negates the free exercise clause if these children are denied the basic tools to make their way in the world because of their parents’ religious beliefs. How can we say that Hasidic children have fewer rights than other children? In America, parents have a great deal of sway over their families, but they do not own their children. When children come of age, they have the right to choose their own religion and their own way of life; if they do not have a basic education, that right becomes difficult if not impossible to exercise. Even Galston concedes that closed communities must provide exit ramps.

Whether they knew it or not, when the Hasidim made their way to America, they entered into a bargain. In America, Hasidic Jews have religious freedom to a degree unparalleled almost anywhere else. Their clothes, their synagogues, their language, their food, their Sabbath observance, are all peculiar to the typical American eye, but they go about their business largely undisturbed, and even supported.

But this freedom is a double-sided coin. In America, everyone is guaranteed religious liberty. Including children. Not, of course, that a Hasidic child, or any child, can decide on his own that he would rather not attend synagogue, or would prefer to sample the Catholic church down the road. But once that child becomes an adult, that is exactly what he can do.

The state has a powerful obligation to protect all children’s access to an education adequate enough to allow them to shape their own futures. The most compelling argument for this case relies on legal philosopher Joel Feinberg’s theory of a “child’s right to an open future.”

Feinberg believes that rights can ordinarily be divided into four kinds. There are rights that adults and children have in common (e.g., the right not to be killed). There are rights that are generally held only by children (or by dependent adults). These dependency rights derive from the child’s dependence on others for such basics as food, shelter, and protection. Third are rights that can only be exercised by adults, such as the right to marry or to practice the religion of one’s choice.  Finally, and most important for our purposes, are what Feinberg calls “rights-in-trust,” rights that are to be “saved for the child until he is an adult.” These rights can be violated by adults now, by acting in ways that cut off the possibility that the child, when it reaches adulthood, can exercise them. Child marriage is an example of adults making a decision that blocks the child’s ability to choose their own spouse upon attaining adulthood. Rights in this category include virtually all the important rights that we believe adults have, but which must be protected now if they are to be exercised later. Grouped together, these rights constitute what Feinberg calls “the child’s right to an open future.”

By refusing to educate their children to make their way in the outside world, Hasidic communities violate their children’s right to an open future. This, of course, is exactly their goal. The Hasidic ideal is to educate children to be righteous Jews, put family first, and comply with the norms of the community. And they have every right to advocate for those ideals and to model them for their children. But they also, as Americans, must allow their kids the basic tools to make other choices. It is the state’s responsibility to make sure that happens.

Dena S. Davis, J.D., PhD, is emerita Endowed Presidential Chair in Health and Professor of Religion Studies at Lehigh University. She currently resides in New York City.

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Dear Revealer readers,

Recently, a friend posted a picture to Instagram from a Zoom meeting she attended with Barbra Streisand. My friend and the mega-celebrity were participating in a “Jewish Americans for Kamala Harris” virtual event, one of several similar web meetings since Harris announced her intention to run for president in July. The first such gathering was “Black Women for Harris,” and it was wildly successful. Within a week, several other groups hosted similar Zoom calls with astounding attendance numbers, including “Black Men for Harris,” “White Women for Harris” and “Latinas for Harris.” As these meetings multiplied, a few people who I follow on social media reported that the “Evangelicals for Harris” call featured plenty of people who want to ensure Harris’s victory, but that the group could not be counted on to affirm queer evangelicals. And so, the number of Zoom groups increased even more, including a “Progressives for Harris” gathering, a “Latter-Day Saints for Harris” meeting, and a “Christians for Harris” call.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The momentum to elect Harris feels exceptionally electric. People who had been fine enough with Biden seem noticeably enthusiastic about Harris, like a bolt of new energy surges through them. And they are taking on the cause of electing the first female president at a time when the country faces challenges both massive and mundane. Indeed, we are embarking on a fall that could be profoundly chaotic. Between protests against the war in Gaza to concerns over maintaining an uncompromised electoral system, Americans are facing a fall full of significant issues and choices. And we will be confronting those issues as we also deal with the country’s everyday challenges.

The Revealer’s September issue is about the fall, a season of new school years, new election results, new trends, and, for some, new hope. The issue explores concerns on the national political stage as well as those at more local, everyday levels. Our September issue opens by taking a look at the new school year with “Hasidic Yeshivas and Children’s Rights,” where Dena Davis explores Hasidic schools in New York that fail to educate boys in English and secular subjects, thereby making it difficult for them to get jobs and leave their communities as adults. From there we turn to a new trend among Gen Z and young Millennials in “The Coquette Catholic Trend,” where Lauren Griffin considers how social media is transforming religion and reflects on young women who have embraced “traditional” Catholic aesthetics and have formed sizable social media communities. After that, in “Winning the Religious Marketplace,” Miguel Petrosky reviews the book The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People and considers how today’s rightwing conspiracy theories fill a need for many people that was formerly attributable to religion. Then, while thinking about the comingling of religion and politics, in “Mainline Protestants and Christian Nationalism,” an excerpt from Baptizing America, Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood contend that evangelicals alone are not to be blamed for the rise in Christian nationalism and suggest that mainline Protestants also bear responsibility. Next, with the Jewish High Holy Days on the horizon this fall, in “A Cantor and an Adult Bat Mitzvah Student Meet in a Bar,” Helene Meyers reviews the new film Between the Temples and reflects on the film’s unique contributions to movies about American Jews. And, in “Public Schools, Religion, and Race,” Leslie Ribovich returns our focus to schools with an excerpt from her book Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools, and reflects on state-enforced racial integration and the prohibition against school prayer as two intermingled phenomena with long-lasting consequences.

The September issue also includes the 50th episode of the Revealer podcast! We are thrilled to reach this milestone and to know our podcast is reaching so many listeners. For our 50^th episode, “Jewish Solidarity with the Pro-Palestine Protests,” Oren Kroll-Zeldin joins us to discuss American Jews who participate in activism to support justice for Palestinians. We explore how activists infuse Jewish teachings and customs into their pro-Palestinian protests, why the visible presence of Jews at the college encampments this spring was crucial, and what to expect this fall as students return to campus and as the situation in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank is far from resolved. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

This fall is a momentous one. In November, we may elect the first female president of the United States. We might also face election chaos if people loyal to Donald Trump refuse to certify the results. The threat of more political violence like January 6 looms over us. For now, we must educate ourselves, our friends, our families, and our neighbors. And each of us must find a part to play to ensure the United States has a healthy, functioning democracy.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

P.S. We are publishing The Revealer’s 2024 special issue, “The Threat of Christian Nationalism” the first week of October and you won’t want to miss it!

The post Editor’s Letter: A Fall Full of Significant Issues and Choices appeared first on The Revealer.