Series episode 1: Ex-Evangelicals and U.S. Politics
NPR’s political correspondent and author of The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, Sarah McCammon joins us to discuss ex-evangelicals’ insights into why so many evangelicals are primed to accept “alternative facts,” why most white evangelicals remain loyal to Trump, and what all of this portends about the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Series episode 2: Contemporary Christian Music’s Political and Religious Messages
Leah Payne, author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music, joins us to discuss the racial, religious, and nationalistic ideas this music promotes, and what it reveals about what conservative Protestants envision for the United States and what they want in the 2024 election.

Series episode 3: LGBTQ Republicans
Neil Young, author of Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right, joins us to discuss how gay Republicans responded to the rise of the anti-queer religious right in the GOP, how they worked to convince church-going Americans that it is okay to be gay, how they are responding to the current barrage of anti-trans legislation, and what they want for America as we head into the 2024 election.

If you’re looking for even more podcast episodes on conservative religion and politics, check out the following episodes from our full catalogue:
–The FBI and White Christian Nationalism
–Religion in the CIA
–Evangelical Masculinity
–For Putin, God, and Country: American Converts to the Russian Orthodox Church
–Faith-Based Prisons

You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Happy listening!

The post Podcast Series on Conservative Religion and Politics appeared first on The Revealer.

You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our monthly episodes.

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Latino Faith-Based Activism and the Sanctuary Movement.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 47: Latino Faith-Based Activism and the Sanctuary Movement appeared first on The Revealer.

(The Hernandez family staying at the Church of the Advocate in 2018. Image source: Sydney Schaefer / File Photo)

The following excerpt comes from Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities (New York University Press, 2024) by Gina M. Pérez. The book explores the work of the new sanctuary movement and faith-based activism within Latino communities in Ohio.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

***

On September 5, 2017, Edith Espinal entered into sanctuary in the Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio. On that bright morning, she stood before microphones in the parking lot leading to the entrance of the Clintonville neighborhood church, surrounded by her family, faith leaders, community activists, immigrant rights advocates, and members of the Columbus Mennonite Church and other faith communities who stood with her as she publicly entered into a church that would be her home for more than three years. As a longtime resident of the city, this immigrant rights activist, community member, and mother in a mixed-status household had tried unsuccessfully for years to regularize her citizenship status. Her decision to publicly seek sanctuary in a church was not one she made in haste. But the urgency of the moment—the shifting immigration enforcement landscape and rising anti-immigrant and white nationalist sentiment—led her and others across the nation to embrace a centuries-old strategy of turning to sacred spaces and houses of worship for protection, and in her case specifically, to shield her from deportation. During the press conference, Pastor Joel Miller of the Columbus Mennonite Church announced, “Today, we are welcoming Edith into sanctuary in our church building.” As Pastor Joel continued his comments, he described Edith’s long history of living and raising a family in Columbus. “Edith is a neighbor. Edith is a mother. Edith is a child of God who sought refuge in our country many years ago and now wishes to remain united with her family in this city which has become her home.”

By focusing on family, faith, and community, Pastor Joel was telling the story of what grounds Edith had in the local community, which also resonated with the experiences of a growing number of people seeking public sanctuary in churches across the country in 2017. Her strategy was concomitant with an increasing number of cities, counties, states, and even college campuses declaring themselves sanctuaries following the 2016 presidential election. The late Columbus-based community activist Ruben Castilla Herrera, for example, emphasized the significance of Edith’s entering into sanctuary to affirm the city’s commitment to immigrants when he somberly observed, “Today, Columbus, Ohio, truly became a sanctuary city, because sanctuary comes from the people.” Edith and her daughter, Stephanie, emphasized the importance of keeping families together and the ways sanctuary is a collective response to a shared experience of precarity. “I’d like to thank you for being here to listen to our story,” Edith somberly declared through an interpreter. “I’m fighting to keep my family united.” Stephanie conveyed the grief of the moment, one shared by so many other undocumented families, when she emotionally proclaimed, “I don’t want her to go or to leave us at all. It’s not just us. It’s more families that get separated every day. My mom means everything to me.”

While Edith Espinal’s was one of the most visible public sanctuary cases between 2017 and 2021, her story is part of a longer history of faith-based organizing and sanctuary practices in the United States that primarily include, but are not exclusive to, undocumented migrants. As many scholars have documented, sanctuary movements in the United States have involved organizing to support conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, Central American refugees in the United States during the 1980s, and, most recently, the New Sanctuary Movement beginning in the mid-2000s, which has focused on aiding undocumented individuals and families faced with deportation, often after residing for many years in local communities. These efforts have drawn on ancient Western traditions of sanctuary that, as anthropologist Linda Rabben has observed, have involved “social groups and individuals who mobilize to provide sanctuary often outside the law and at great risk.” In this way, invocations of sanctuary have emphasized appeals to a higher transcendent authority to justify the decision by communities of faith to offer refuge, safety, and protection to those who are most vulnerable to state power. Such evocations also affirm commitments to align one-self with others to challenge state power and to potentially endure state-sanctioned punishment and harm as a result.

Following the 2016 presidential election, sanctuary was clearly in the air. There were calls for sanctuary campuses, sanctuary cities, sanctuary streets, and, as the Quakers put forth succinctly and powerfully, “sanctuary everywhere.” This language of offering sanctuary to people in need suffused organizing and service work across the country. In Northeast Ohio, for example, faith communities, activists, community leaders, and service providers employed the language of sanctuary to characterize their responses to what felt like unrelenting instances of family separation, displacement, and increased economic and social vulnerability due to immigrant detention, natural disasters, and economic and political crises within Latina/o communities.  Following Hurricane María’s devastating impact in Puerto Rico in September 2017, people quickly mobilized to collect food, water, medical supplies, clothes, and money to send to the island and to help resettle hundreds of Puerto Rican families. In cities like Lorain, Ohio, just twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, Latina/o community members, faith leaders, and service workers framed their responses and support for Puerto Rican newcomers as providing refuge for displaced families facing unimaginable loss and uncertainty.

These same community members mobilized, once again, in June 2018 following workplace raids at Corso’s garden center in Sandusky, Ohio, where 114 workers were detained and faced deportation and family separation. In the days and weeks following the raids, faith and community leaders, activists, and service workers in Lorain organized food and clothing drives, collecting diapers and baby food, offering free legal advice about immigration, and even helping parents complete affidavits detailing instructions for care for their children in the event that they were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In press conferences, public speeches, and daily conversations, organizers and service providers framed their responses to detained migrants and their families as being similar to their approach to meeting the needs of migrants post-Hurricane María. As Victor Leandry, executive director of El Centro de Servicios Sociales in Lorain, observed about the children of detained parents, “These kids are going to need our help. This is not a new problem. Yes, it’s getting worse, but it is an ongoing problem.  Right now there are children taking care of children in Norwalk [Ohio, because their parents have been detained]. And just like we did after [Hurricane] María, [El Centro] will take care of people in need and find ways to help the community.”

Linking the fates of people displaced by Hurricane María with families ripped apart by immigration detention is a prescient, if grim, reminder of a shared precariousness defining the lives of many Latinas/os in Northeast Ohio. Organizations like El Centro have a long history of working with faith communities, social workers, mental health providers, and community activists to address the broad range of needs of people whose daily lives are constrained by draconian immigration policies, (un)natural disasters, economic dislocation, and punitive policing. And while, as Victor Leandry notes, these are not new problems, neither are the resources people draw on as they collectively respond to the challenges they face. Indeed, these long histories of organizing and struggle are precious resources that sustain and animate community responses today.

On the surface, organizing to relocate families fleeing natural disasters and supporting families ripped apart by deportation might not seem to fall within a shared framework of sanctuary. But drawing on my ongoing ethnographic work in Latina/o communities in Northeast Ohio—as well as reading the work of scholars, journalists, artists, community activists, and service workers—I argue that what binds these responses and experiences together is a commitment to become what Ruben Castilla Herrera referred to as “sanctuary people.” In a lecture at Oberlin College in the fall of 2018, Ruben discussed the intersectional organizing work that he and his fellow activists were involved in, including supporting people like Edith Espinal in public sanctuary through organizations like the Columbus Sanctuary Collective. But his work also included efforts to address racial profiling and the impact of police violence in Black communities and other communities of color in Columbus; supporting the integration of asylum seekers in the city; working with migrant workers throughout Ohio; and organizing with others to make Columbus a sanctuary city. All of these efforts, he argued, were key to making stronger, safer, and inclusive communities, and required all of us to become sanctuary people.

This book employs Ruben Castilla Herrera’s notion of sanctuary people to shed much-needed light onto myriad organizing efforts and resistance strategies that a diverse group of people employed following the 2016 presidential election. It examines the role that faith communities in Ohio have played in the development, proliferation, and strengthening of sanctuary practices and other forms of organizing connected to Latina/o communities and Latin American migrants. By focusing on efforts to help those affected by immigrant detention and Puerto Ricans displaced

in the wake of Hurricane María, this book reveals the ways faith com- munities, activists, and community leaders are creating new strategies to address the increasingly precarious contexts in which Latina/o people live, and how they are imagining and enacting new forms of solidarity. It also analyzes the distinct alliances, relationships, and ways of knowing and being that faith-based activists have employed to create places of safety. In doing so, this book seeks to center the role of faith-based organizing in these communities, contributes to a growing scholarly literature documenting these efforts, and reveals what Puerto Rican journalist Mari Mari Narváez describes as the need to “build a more horizontal society, a place for everyone to live and work and love in.”

Based on four years of ethnographic work, this book documents how for many, immigrant detention, natural disasters, and race-based violence are often viewed as intertwined experiences. In this context, practices of offering sanctuary and refuge bind up the diverse yet overlapping experiences of Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Central American families in moments of precarity, uncertainty, and vulnerability, and also point to the ways their shared precarity is connected to African American and other communities facing state-based violence and exclusion. By focusing on these seemingly disparate experiences, I argue that becoming sanctuary people requires building meaningful relationships and coalitions across differences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, religion, education, and citizenship status to strengthen and support Latina/o communities in a moment of uncertainty, danger, and hopeful possibilities.

Gina M. Pérez is Professor in the Department of Comparative American Studies in Oberlin College. She is the author of Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC and the American Dream.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 47 of the Revealer podcast: “Latino Faith-Based Activism and the Sanctuary Movement.”

The post Houses of Worship Protecting People from Deportation and Supporting Latino Communities appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

The following excerpt comes from The Religion of Whiteness: How Racism Distorts Christian Faith (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Michael O. Emerson and Glenn E. Bracey II. The book explores how the majority of white Christians—based on survey data, focus groups, and interviews over years—worship within and contribute to systems of racial inequality.

This excerpt comes from the book’s first chapter.

***

Why won’t racism and racial injustice just go away? Why have efforts to eradicate racism failed? We propose a novel argument: They won’t go away because race is tangled up with another crucial marker of American identity: religion. That is, race has become “religionized” in the United States; it has taken on transcendent qualities. But because we tend to study race and religion separately, we have missed this crucial fact, and thus have grossly underestimated the challenge we face as a nation.

In this book, we aim to offer a new way of looking at race and religion in America by bringing both into focus simultaneously, showing how they interact with and reinforce each other. We argue—and test the argument with data—that racism and racial injustice have not receded from American life because they are, in good part, the life-giving force of a dominant group’s religion. Put simply, we cannot understand racial injustice without understanding the religion that feeds on racial injustice.

The Contrast

On a bright, crisp, and colorful Saturday morning in October 2020, we set out by car from Chicago, Illinois to Delavan, Wisconsin, a journey of about one hundred miles. Fall had arrived after a long summer of racial tumult. The presidential election was on the horizon and on everyone’s minds. A close friend of ours, a white member of an overwhelmingly white megachurch, had sent us a link to a sermon from another predominantly white church on the East Coast. He had prefaced it by saying something like, “I wanted you to know the issues that matter to me and my community.”

A long car ride was an excellent time to listen to the sermon, which was well over an hour long, so we tuned in. It was entitled “The Election Sermon,” and it focused on how Christians should think about issues facing the nation and how they should vote to be consistent with their faith.

The pastor gave a repeated challenge: “Wake up!” He began, “I cannot be silent, I will not be silent, and neither should you.” There was a great deal of clapping from the congregation. He continued:

This is a battle. This is a war. This is not a game. It is a spiritual battle that we are facing for the heart and soul of America and for the heart and soul of the next generation. I have never felt as passionate for and concerned about America as I am today. We as the Church of Jesus Christ are God’s restraining force in the world today against evil.

The pastor then went on to explain what the proper purpose of government is and how Christians should think about it:

Look around at the issues of our day and ask yourself which policies and procedures as put forth by the two main parties in America will accomplish God’s purpose of government—cultivating the good and punishing the evil. We have to look at all these different issues that we are surrounded by and there’s a lot. We have to ask ourselves . . . how can we do our best to look at policies and procedures sepa­rated from personality contests and recognize what policies and procedures best come closest to, most represent our convictions with a biblical worldview in order for the government to advance the good and to punish the evil?

Getting down to specifics, he began naming what he believes are the most important issues facing the country and, in each case, which political party is more in line with “the biblical worldview.” As our friend suggested, the issues the pastor chose to highlight are important for understanding what matters to this community. The pastor named them, in order: religious freedom, marriage and sexuality, Israel, life, and the economy. But he didn’t just name them. He chose sides: The Democratic Party doesn’t care about religious freedom. They seek to destroy traditional marriage and sexual morality. Donald Trump showed who is Israel’s biggest supporter when he moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. Donald Trump is the most pro-life president of all time.

And on the economy, the least obviously “religious” issue on his list, he launched into a stemwinder. A biblical worldview, he argued, is one that values individual hard work and the willingness to be kind to the poor, but only voluntarily. Helping the poor is not the government’s role. The Democratic platform’s use of buzzwords such as “shared prosperity,” he claimed, is contrary to the biblical worldview. “That’s political speak; its socialism, it’s the redistribution of wealth.” He went on:

The Bible doesn’t teach socialism. You know what the Bible teaches? The Bible teaches that hard work will be rewarded, and the Bible teaches that we should also be mindful of the poor among us, because that also will be rewarded, if you’re kind to the poor. But not redistribute the wealth. That’s unbiblical [much clap­ping]. In Proverbs 13:4 it says that “But those who work hard will prosper,” and Proverbs 22:9 “He who has a generous eye will be blessed if he gives of his bread to the poor.” That’s the combination that works in America, and around the world. That’s God’s design. It’s not redistributing the wealth.

There were only two mentions of race in the talk. Both were references to African Americans who personally told the pastor that he is right: that he is being truly biblical, that all lives matter, that black people overwhelmingly vote Democratic because they don’t think about it—it’s just cultural and what is expected by other black people, and that if he just keeps teaching the Bible, the sin of racism will be eradicated because God will change the hearts and minds of the people. In short, the issues he identified as important are the same issues that are important to black people, at least those who understand scripture and can move beyond their cultural encapsulation.

He concluded: “Listen to me, I am going to speak truth to you. If you are a lifelong Democrat, your party has left you. That ship has sailed. [clapping] It’s true.” He went on to emphatically say he could not and would not vote for the Democratic Party candidates. The congregation erupted in cheers and shouts of encouragement.

The clarity of the sermon was inescapable. What is Christian, what is biblical, what is right had been laid bare, just as what is un-Christian, what is unbiblical, and what is wrong had been made clear. Republicans are the former; Democrats are the latter. Not surprisingly, two weeks later, white Christians overwhelmingly voted Republican for president and in most every other race across the nation.

By the time we set out for the return trip to Chicago that eve­ning, the weather had turned blustery and cold, with fallen leaves swirling in the darkness. Once again, a friend, this one African American, had some recommended listening for us: a new episode of the podcast “In the Light.” And once again, we used our one hundred miles of car captivity to listen in. Hosted by Dr. Anita Phillips, an African American Christian counselor, Instagrammer, and podcaster, the episode was entitled “Betrayal.”

Phillips opened the podcast by telling listeners that the episode would focus on racial division within the church. She had been receiving an ever-growing number of requests from African Americans asking for prayer and counseling “regarding the white-led racially mixed churches they attend and the completely absent or near-absent response to their lived experiences as black Americans. And the most heartbreaking elements of those talks have centered on the spiritual damage they have suffered.”

She then introduced the first of her two guests, a young African American woman who had, until recently, been a worship leader in a white-led racially diverse congregation. The guest, who grew up in a black church, was introduced as “anonymous” to protect her from backlash. She was asked to describe her experience in her most recent, white-led church.

The guest began by saying she continually noted she was not treated with gentleness or with grace. She said when she acted “too black,” as defined by the white leadership and members, she was told they “find it distracting.” She also said, “They continually ques­tioned my character, saying I was calling attention away from where the focus should be.”

These repeated occurrences led her to question herself and her faith. She reported experiencing nine separate anxiety attacks dur­ing her first year at the church. She became unsure of who she was or what she should be doing.

Earlier that year, Ahmaud Arbery, an African American man out for a jog, was murdered by two white men. The young woman said that this event had changed her, making her fearful for her safety: “I was running three miles every morning, and I stopped being able to run. I was eating only once every forty-eight hours and sleeping maybe two hours a night.” But at church, things seemed to be going along as usual—as if nothing had happened and the world had not changed. “And I realized, oh yes, your [white] world hasn’t changed. Everything is normal for you.” That realization crushed her. It meant she and her white parishioners really were not in this struggle together.

While the white congregants were going about their lives unchanged, the black community was grieving and hurting. This disconnect was deeply disturbing to the young woman. During this period, she had a severe anxiety attack while singing on stage with the worship team. “It was embarrassing, and it felt like no one understood why I was losing it.”

After the service, there was a debrief meeting of the worship team. Still trying desperately to hold it together, she spent much of the meeting looking down at her phone. A short while later, she texted the worship leader to apologize for being “out of it” during the meeting, noting that she was experiencing an anxiety attack. Rather than show any concern, the worship leader simply told her perhaps she would do better if she were not on her phone during such meetings. She was devastated. She told Phillips that she began to spiral, feeling disoriented and confused. She realized that people at the church did not have her back.

Then came the murder of George Floyd. There was no mention of the tragic event whatsoever. “I hit a point where I said, ‘OK, I can’t do this anymore.’” She soon left the church, as did at least eight other African Americans.

She reflected on her time at the church:

When they want diversity and representation in the choir, we are valued. But the moment we use the same voices to talk about Trump or other issues, then those voices need to be silenced immediately and we are no longer welcomed in this space. The moment that I started discussing, hey, this is racist behavior, [it was] “Hey, you cannot be part of teams anymore.”

Phillips asked her how she was doing now:

Spiritually, I don’t want to talk about Jesus or church. [Crying] I know what I know, the truth is unchanging, but I don’t have a desire to interact. I don’t want to go to a church, I don’t want it at all.

Phillips addressed the audience directly. We need to name this type of trauma, she told them. She noted that what is happening is something beyond racial trauma, something beyond religious trauma, and something beyond their overlap. It is a unique, egre­gious phenomenon. It is what she calls betrayal trauma. Taken from the work of psychologist Jennifer Freyd, it can be defined thusly:

Betrayal Trauma occurs when people or institutions on which a person depends significantly violate that person’s trust or well-being. The degree to which a negative event represents a betrayal by a trusted, needed other will influence the way in which that event is processed and remembered.

Because so many African Americans are so deeply spiritual, Phillips told her audience that being racially and religiously traumatized constitutes a betrayal by a needed other. “We need each other. Here where race, religion, and betrayal overlap we find the language” for this deep pain, shaking too many of us. “The trauma is real, and worthy to be given voice.” 

What Does It Mean?

In the course of one round trip on one October day, we experienced two distinct visions of race and faith in American life. They hardly encapsulate the entire range of views on these subjects; but they do reveal the vast gulf separating people who ostensibly share the same faith.

But this book is not about the gulf. It is about the deep damage it is doing to human beings—warping people, communities, and the nation. It is about what we describe as the grand betrayal perpetrated by many white Christians—overwhelmingly concerned with their own within-group issues and position—against Christians of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. It is about how and why many white Christians are rejecting their Christian family and the severe consequences that follow for the entire nation.

This is a book about naming reality—the architecture of race and religion—with the hope of changing it. We explore the gravity of the betrayal and ask why so many white Christians engage in it. Our answer is that many white people have an additional faith that serves to distort their Christian faith, what we call the Religion of Whiteness. We will not argue, as some have, that white Christianity is different from other forms of Christianity. Nor will we claim that white Christianity has racial prejudice or racism embedded within it. And we will not be making the claim sometimes made by still others: that Christianity is merely a cover for a political movement.

Rather, we argue that most white Christians in the United States— our best estimate based on empirical data is two-thirds—are faith­fully following what amounts to, in effect, a competing religion, or sect, or creed. This religion—the Religion of Whiteness—distorts people’s Christian commitments and raises race to creedal status over other aspects of historical Christianity. Once we come to see this competing religion for what it is, things that might have seemed confusing begin to make perfect sense. The seemingly endless contradictions disappear. And we begin to see racial injustice in a whole new light, which is hopefully a step toward overcoming it.

In short, we argue in this book that the problem of racial injustice in the United States cannot be addressed until we understand that we are not merely dealing with interpersonal racism, or marital racism, or Christian Nationalism, or the Christian Right. These all matter in vitally important ways, and we take them seriously. But we argue that something even larger is occurring. And that “some­thing larger”—that race is “religionized” and how it is so—must be understood before progress can be made. We as a nation must confront the distorting power of the Religion of Whiteness.

Michael O. Emerson is the author of more than 15 books and is the Chavanne Fellow in Religion and Public Policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Glenn E. Bracey II is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Villanova University.

The post Racism and Religion in America appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image: Scene from Killers of the Flower Moon)

“The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children—can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.” — James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

*** 

James Baldwin was deeply troubled by The Exorcist (1973), a film he insisted on seeing twice despite how much he despised it. His reflections on the film make up the last few pages of his 1975 book, The Devil Finds Work. He was “most concerned with the audience,” and “wondered what they were seeing, and what it meant to them.” Baldwin watching the audience watch The Exorcist led him to declare that the most terrifying thing about it was “the mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented” therein.

Two recent films—Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023), about a Nazi family’s life right outside Auschwitz—brought Baldwin’s striking turn of phrase back to my mind. At first glance it might sound more than a bit idiosyncratic to speak of two critically-acclaimed historical dramas in the same sentence as “the scariest movie of all time.” And yet, each is a meditation on evil; each was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards; and, surprising as it may seem, each has an element of Catholic horror to it as well.

As I’ve written elsewhere for The Revealer, “Catholic horror” is a subgenre that invokes demonic forces in order to reinforce the power of the divine and, by extension, the supernatural authority of the Catholic Church. It runs on nostalgia for an imagined past when people recognized the real presence of God (and the Devil) in their midst and lived accordingly. (This is why so much Catholic horror is framed as “based on a true story.”)

What is missing from most Catholic horror—what Baldwin critiqued as “mindless and hysterical banality”—is any real assessment of the frightening human capacity for evil. Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest accomplish this to devastating effect. And, it turns out, the central figures of both films happened to be Catholic. For this reason, I argue we should consider both to be Catholic horrors movies. If Catholic horror (singular) invokes supernatural evil to reinforce the authority of the Church, a Catholic horrors film (plural) reveals the human evil unleashed by Catholics and their Church in history.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s begin with a word on the ostensible subject of all three films: “evil.” The word has an absolutism about it. No ifs, ands, or buts, it seems to say. Things may be wrong, people may be bad (or very very wrong and very very bad), but evil is something else entirely. To call something “evil” is to comment on an exceptional quality, to place it beyond the pale and far past the point of redemption.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Evil (with a capital-E) is alive and well in horror. Horror fans can’t wait to watch irredeemably insidious, sinister, malignant, and barbaric figures wreak havoc on the world. In the nightmare realms of serial killing psychopaths and the supernaturally possessed, the Devil really does prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Weirdly, this is what makes such movies fun and reassuring. They operate with a kind of Manichean moral clarity. Evil is real. The point is to send it back to Hell, or, more modestly, to survive it.

All of which can feel too trite to be “high art.” Evil is the pulpy stuff of B-movies, par excellence. High-brow cinema (the literature of the multiplex) traffics, instead, in complexity and moral ambiguity. Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest buck this trend, though.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese adapted David Grann’s book of the same name and produced a harrowing portrayal of the Osage Reign of Terror in 1920s Oklahoma; the period in which white settlers conspired to murder over sixty Native Americans of the Osage nation in a plot to inherit their oil wealth. In The Zone of Interest, Glazer loosely adapted Martin Amis’s work of historical fiction to make a movie that follows a Nazi commandant’s family as they live a disturbingly ordinary existence just outside the walls of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

These unrelenting reflections on evil were two of the most critically acclaimed films of the past year. Killers was nominated for ten Academy Awards. Zone took home Oscars for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound. Neither invited sympathy nor explored complex motivations. They both projected evil onto the silver screen and insisted you watch without blinking. Quite like a horror movie. Indeed, the first time I saw Killers of the Flower Moon I thought to myself: “My god, that was a Catholic horror movie.”

Yet, as I alluded to earlier, “Catholic horror” wasn’t quite the right descriptor. The Exorcist is archetypal Catholic horror. Evil in the 1973 film is a personified physical force. It is not a symbol for human suffering or a metaphor for civil strife. As writer Patricia Lockwood recalls her father putting it to her when she was a child: “This story is absolutely true…This was not a psychological disturbance. This was not puberty. Don’t listen to the shrinks. This was the presence of evil, pure and simple.” (Her father happens to be a Roman Catholic priest.) Fifty years of Catholic horror followed in its footsteps and the subgenre continues to insist that evil is the demon possessing your daughter and your only hope is the compelling power of Christ.

Killers of the Flower Moon, in this sense, should not be considered Catholic horror. The evil presented is real, to be sure. It is no metaphor for Scorsese. Yet, the evil in this picture is decidedly human. White settlers unleashed it upon the Osage. White Catholic settlers, as a matter of fact. This is why I describe it as a Catholic horrors film. I doubt Scorsese would dispute the claim. He is, after all, a Catholic filmmaker whose commitment to narrating histories of violence is only matched by his commitment to cinematic spiritual exploration.

Killers of the Flower Moon is full of Catholics—whether we’re talking about the Osage themselves or key figures among the white settlers conspiring to kill them. Scorsese knows what he’s doing when he has Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman with headrights to oil money, ask Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), early on in their courtship, “What’s your religion?” Dumbfounded, he responds, “Catholic,” as if to say “What else would I be?” The film soon cuts to Mollie and Ernest attending Mass with the rest of the Osage community.

(Scorsese holds a pair of rosary beads in a pew next to Lily Gladstone on the set of the film’s chapel.)

Little has been made of the religiousness of the film’s villains. Ernest is a white Catholic who, over the course of the film, we watch rob a wealthy Osage couple at gunpoint; aid and abet the murder of Mollie’s sister Anna (Cara Jade Myers); arrange the bombing of the home of another one of Mollie’s sisters, Reta (Janae Collins); and even poison his own wife, Mollie; all for money. “I do love that money, Sir,” he exclaims at various points. Ernest, though, is just a blunt instrument in comparison to his scheming uncle. William K. Hale (Robert De Niro), the notorious “King of the Osage Hills,” conspired to murder Mollie’s mother and sisters to steal the rights to their family’s wealth. Hale speaks in a Biblical vernacular throughout, citing the Books of Exodus and Job as he surreptitiously orders assassinations, bombings, insurance fraud, and murder. Given the depths to which Hale embedded himself in the Osage community, he undoubtedly attended Catholic Masses and donated to Catholic schools, churches, and hospitals. (In the film we see him bear witness to Mollie and Ernest’s wedding.) Moreover, it appears that the historical Hale at the very least died a Catholic. A rosary was offered at his nursing home upon his death and his funeral was held at St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic church in Wichita.

Categorizing The Zone of Interest as a Catholic horrors movie might seem more of a stretch. It examines the bucolic life of the Höss family as they live Hitler’s Nazi dream as German settlers in Poland. Nevertheless, it takes only a little digging to discover that the historical Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, was Catholic too. In “Auschwitz in Retrospect,” Joseph Tenenbaum, a Jewish historian who survived Auschwitz, begins his brief biography of the mass murderer by noting that “Rudolf grew up full of piety and devotion to Church and authority” under “a morose, bigoted Catholic [father] who dreamed of making his son a God-fearing priest.” Rudolf’s childhood was “dedicated to the ‘work of God,’” or, at least, that was his father’s mission. He “spent much time with [Rudolf] talking about the miracles, and took him to the shrines of Germany, Switzerland and even to Lourdes.” Tenenbaum paints a portrait of a man whose religious and moral formation cannot be understood outside of his father’s Catholicism and his broad German Catholic foundation. When Höss joined the Nazi Party in 1922 he formally renounced the Roman Church, as was his duty, yet he returned to the fold shortly before his execution. Just days before his death by hanging in 1947, he received the sacraments of penance and the eucharist from a Polish Jesuit.

(Image: Scene from The Zone of Interest)

Now, I know what you may be thinking: “Hale and Höss were bad Catholics, clearly. Surely, we can’t learn anything about Catholics, Catholicism, or the Catholic Church from them.” I’ve argued elsewhere that this attempt to distance religious people and their institutions from evil is neither morally tenable nor historically accurate. For one, it risks “ignoring the crimes committed every day in the name of faith,” thus preventing us from reckoning with “the complicity of [religious] traditions and institutions in the sins of the world.” It also makes a categorical distinction that we’d be hard pressed to find in the historical sources themselves. For instance, the white Catholics who fiercely (and sometimes violently) resisted efforts to desegregate schools in the 1960s and 1970s understood themselves to be “real, good, and sincere Catholics” and drew on their religious formation to make their case.

If we’re courageous enough to think through some of the conclusions Killers and Zone offer up, these Catholic horrors films illuminate a particular kind of evil that we must reckon with. They portray what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Indeed, they seem to have returned her famous and somewhat controversial phrase to public discourse. As film critic Alissa Wilkinson put it when the films first debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year, “The banality of evil was hot at Cannes this year.” Robert De Niro preempted this framing when he answered a question about his character: “It’s the banality of evil. It’s the thing we have to watch out for.”

De Niro’s framing clearly stuck. To cite just a few reviews, Baltimore Magazine’s movie critic began: “Hannah Arendt’s phrase, ‘The banality of evil,’ kept popping into my head as I watched Martin Scorsese’s elegiac and powerful Killers of the Flower Moon.” The Tatler described how “Scorsese explores racism, the banality of evil and the greed in men’s hearts.” Anthony Lane, writing for The New Yorker, titled his essay: “‘The Zone of Interest’ Finds Banality in the Evil at Auschwitz.” IndieWire, too, called “Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust Anti-Drama … a Chilling Look at the Banality of Evil.”

Of course, I’m not the first to note the thematic similarities between these two films. As Alissa Wilkinson put it:

“Both are about mankind’s ability to exterminate one another while deluding themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing. Both are about atrocities so heinous they’re hard to wrap your mind around. And both feel eerily contemporary, in an age where prejudice, racism, and fascism are on the rise around the globe.”

(Along with Wilkinson’s full review of The Zone of Interest, I highly recommend Lyndsey Stonebridge’s and Charlotte Higgins’s review essays for insightful Arendtian readings of Zone.)

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in her coverage of Adolph Eichmann’s war crimes trial. Her reflections were revised and published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). As one might imagine, the use of the word “banal” to characterize Eichmann’s orchestration of the genocidal murder of six million Jews was controversial, to say the least. Herself a Jew who had to flee Europe, Arendt by no means meant to exculpate Eichmann or lessen our instinctive horror at his crimes. Much the opposite. While many had assumed that only monsters could be capable of evil on such an industrial scale, what she saw in Eichmann, instead, was a bumbling bureaucrat. “The trouble with Eichmann,” as she put it, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

It is not simply that the Eichmanns and Hösses (and Hales and Burkharts) of the world were “just following orders,” as it were. Arendt identified the ways in which certain societies had so thoroughly inverted moral order and dehumanized Others that “only ‘exceptions’ could be expected to react ‘normally.’” As I mentioned earlier, we tend to speak of “evil” as an exceptional quality, a term we use to describe people and actions we can scarcely imagine. But Arendt incisively identified how in Nazi Germany (or, we might add, among the white settlers of Osage County Oklahoma) evil had become the norm. It had become, in a word, banal.

“Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom…, and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”

In naming the “banality” of Eichmann’s evil, she indicted the society that had produced him.

Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest should do the same for us, as Americans and, indeed, as Catholics for those of us who identify as such (as I do). Both are about the ways people in power administer the extermination of others in order to plunder their wealth. This is, more or less, what Killers is about from start to finish. It is also the subject of two of the most chilling scenes in The Zone of Interest: one in which Rudolf Höss’s wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), tries on a fur coat and lipstick that have been stolen from a Jewish woman condemned to the death camps; the other, when Hedwig’s mother speculates that the Jewish neighbor she once cleaned for might be on the other side of the wall in Auschwitz and laments how she wasn’t able to win her drapes at an auction. Both scenes convey the normality of an inverted moral order.

The differences between the two films are instructive as well. Scorsese seems less focused on banality and more on the ubiquity of evil. While it brutally portrays the seeming passionless management of murder, it is more explicitly about how an entire community conspired to plunder and murder the Osage. In a chilling motif, Scorsese repeatedly walks the camera through crowds of predatory white settlers. They stare directly into the camera, which has the effect of rendering them as wolves preying on the Osage in their midst. By the end it is clear that not just Hale and the Burkhart brothers, but also the town’s doctors, sheriffs, salesmen, chauffeurs, lawyers, mothers, and daughters—in other words, all the white settlers—are in on the scheme to some extent. Not only that, the film also exposes Catholic horrors extending beyond the actions of a particular perpetrator and into the very institutions that participated in cultural genocide, as Delaney Coyne demonstrates in her powerful reading of the Catholic history behind the film for America Magazine.

The Zone of Interest, on the other hand, is effectively Arendt’s work translated into a taut horror film. While it is ostensibly adapted from Amis’s 2014 novel, Wilkinson argues that it is best understood as a “as a sidelong horror-film adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem.” When Rudolf (Christian Friedel) phones his wife and admits he was unable to enjoy a party because he was too preoccupied with the logistics of how best to gas the room full of partygoers, or, when we witness enterprising businessmen pitching the commandant on their top-of-the-line ovens, we see evil rendered as fastidious routine.

Which brings me back to where we began: “the mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist.” Rather than employ Arendt’s phrase in praise, James Baldwin wielded it to critique the horror classic’s naivete on the subject. Whether or not he would have appreciated Killers or Zone, Baldwin would have at the very least recognized the evil they presented. As he observes elsewhere in his essay:

“For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in the mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. This devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.”

Evil cannot be easily exorcized. It has, in no small part, made the world in which we live and move and have our being. Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest, like Baldwin and Arendt before them, insist that we see evil for what it is. It is only in recognizing it that we can do anything about it.

Matthew J. Cressler is an independent scholar of religion and chief of staff of the Corporation for Public Interest Technology. He is the author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migrations and the creator of Bad Catholics, Good Trouble, an educational webcomic series. He is currently co-writing Body & Blood: Catholic Horror in America with Jack Lee Downey, Kathleen Holscher, and Michael Pasquier.

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(Image of Mary Baker Eddy. Image source: ligonier.org/)

“It’s a good religion,” my grandmother liked to say to her daughter, my mother. Grandma Raedina was Jewish, as were all my relatives on both sides of the family. But in this case the religion she was touting wasn’t Judaism. It was Christian Science.

The connection between Jews and Christian Science has mostly been forgotten. But my grandmother’s flirtation with Christian Science wasn’t unusual. In the early years of the 20^th century, a substantial number of Jewish Americans, especially Jewish women, joined Christian Science churches, sometimes abandoning Judaism, but more often just adding Christian Science to their Jewish identities.

Jewish institutions and Jewish leaders have not been especially interested in discussing, much less celebrating, the connection between Judaism and Christian Science. Growing up, my mom occasionally mentioned that my grandmother had been interested in Christian Science. I had only the vaguest idea of what Christian Science was, and no way to know that it had attracted many Jews, not just Grandma Raedina. Christian Science seemed like my grandmother’s individual personality quirk, rather than an expression of a social trend, or of a certain kind of Jewish identity.

I only started thinking about my family’s relationship to Christian Science in the last few years, and especially in the last few months. Like many Jewish people in the United States, I’ve been forcibly reminded of how central Zionism is to American Jewish life. I’ve also been reminded of how alienating I find that centrality. I’ve never identified strongly with Israel, and to me its current actions in Gaza are unconscionable. My relatives were virtually all in the United States long before Israel existed—experimenting with Christian Science in some cases.

I can’t say I identity strongly with Christian Science either; I’m not much for faith healing. Finding alternatives to Zionism in Jewish life, though, means taking diaspora seriously, and that means finding a way to talk about assimilation, syncretism, and heterodoxy that doesn’t begin and end with disavowal. I don’t want to be a Christian Scientist. But I’ve been trying to find out why many American Jewish women like my grandmother, at least intermittently, did.

My Jewish Christian Scientist Ancestors

Christian Science was founded in the United States in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy. Eddy believed the physical world was essentially an illusion, created by the weakness of the human mind. Therefore illness and misfortune were a kind of unreal human projection. Through faith and prayer, Christian Scientists could cast aside the illusion of sickness and reestablish the real, authentic truth of health. Christian Scientists generally embraced faith healing, and often (though not always) refused to see traditional doctors.

How many Jewish people turned to Christian Science? Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but at the height of Christian Science’s growth in the early 20^th century, the number of Jewish adherents was probably in the thousands, and may have numbered as many as 40,000, according to Ellen M. Umansky’s 2005 monograph From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews. Even if Umansky’s highest estimate is accurate, Jewish converts to Christian Science involved at most 0.5 percent of the 3 million Jews living in the U.S. in the 1910s. Nonetheless, the rapid rise of Christian Science at the time alarmed many Jewish observers.

One of the Jews who embraced Christian Science was my great grandmother, Hattie Davidson. Born in the U.S. in 1887 to Samuel Davidson, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, and Sarah Masser, who immigrated from somewhere in Eastern Europe, Hattie was the eldest of eight siblings. Hattie’s husband Abe Davidson, a tailor and milliner, was born in Suwalk, Russia in 1883 and came to the U.S. 18 years later. The two met in Chicago, where Hattie grew up, and married in 1910. Raedina was born two years later, when Hattie would have been 25.

Hattie, according to family lore, was beautiful, intelligent, and for most of her life, very unhappy. She attended business school but rarely worked outside the home except for a short stint in an office job during World War II. She loathed housework and didn’t seem to like her marriage either. She stayed with my mother’s parents towards the end of her life in the early 1960s, and my mother remembers her as cranky and miserable, though that could have been in part due to her worsening health.

Why Christian Science?

Exactly how and when Hattie became involved in Christian Science is unclear. Since her sisters were also adherents, it’s possible that their mother introduced it to them when they were children.

Contemporary Jewish observers in the 1900s suggested that Jews were attracted to Christian Science as a way of assimilating and shedding the stigma and antisemitism associated with Jewish identity. Umansky quotes a hostile 1913 editorial in the American Hebrew which insists that Christian Science for Jews was a “fashionable fad adopted” by Jewish people because of its “social element.” In other words, Jewish people joined because the church allowed for upward mobility.

The transition to Christian Science was relatively easy in comparison to conversion to other Christian denominations. Christian Science didn’t require baptism, didn’t make much of the iconography of the cross, and didn’t have traditional clergy. As a new form of Christianity, it also didn’t have painful or historical associations with antisemitism: Christian Scientists had not burned and beaten Jews in Russian or Lithuanian pogroms. The emphasis on spirituality and healing allowed some Jewish people to convince themselves that Jesus wasn’t really central to the faith—though in fact Mary Baker Eddy’s devotion to Jesus pervaded Christian Science worship, and the church required members to forswear previous congregational affiliations, including to Jewish synagogues.

Christian Science, then, was a relatively painless way to negotiate a less Jewish identity that might be more acceptable in a society controlled by Christians. Umansky argues, though, that the emphasis on social climbing and assimilation has been overstated. “I have yet to find a letter, essay, or general testimonial that cites the social aspects of membership as the major reason, much less the sole reason, for joining Christian Science,” she wrote.

Instead, Umansky argues, most American Jews joined because they were attracted to Christian Science’s spirituality. In the United States, Orthodox synagogues often focused on ritual, while Reform synagogues centered social justice community work and ethics. Both struggled to address individual religious yearnings—at least according to Jewish leaders themselves.

Umansky quotes Rabbi Max Heller, who, in 1912, argued that “our pulpits and our religious schools lay too much stress on knowledge and conduct, too little on the spirituality that must underlie a mellowing atmosphere of strong faith.” Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York City’s Free Synagogue in a 1920 sermon suggested that “the inadequate spiritual character of the synagogue” had led to “a very real spiritual hunger and unrest.”

That hunger and unrest could be particularly acute among women. Umansky believes that some two-thirds of the Jews who embraced Christian Science were women, and the disproportionate appeal isn’t hard to explain. The first American woman rabbi wasn’t ordained until 1972; women in Judaism in the early 20^th century were expected to take a secondary role in the leadership and study of the tradition.

In contrast, Christian Science was founded by and led by a woman. It focused on lay leadership, and these lay leaders could be of any gender. Eddy emphasized a vision of God as mother, as well as father. A woman like Hattie Davidson, who chafed at the gendered expectations of domestic work and felt stifled by her marriage, might well have felt like Christian Science offered her a recognition and status that Judaism did not.

The appeal of Christian Science to Jewish women was so prominent that some Jewish leaders came together to create “Jewish Science,” a short-lived attempt to adapt Christian Science’s spiritual concerns and faith healing to a more exclusively Jewish context. They hoped this would keep more Jewish women within the fold. The practice never became very popular, though Umansky argues that it played a role in encouraging American Jewish rabbis to embrace more fully a role as spiritual counselors. It’s notable, too, that the first Jewish American woman to serve as leader of a congregation was Tehilla Lichtenstein, a practitioner of Jewish Science.

In addition to more space for women leaders, Christian Science’s promise to cure illness was probably appealing to Jewish women like Hattie. Hattie’s breathing troubles, diagnosed as emphysema, seem to have lasted much of her life, and doctors didn’t offer much relief. Her sister, Evelyn, had even worse emphysema, and was an even more devout Christian Scientist. My mother told me that Evelyn’s death may have been hastened by her refusal to see doctors—though her Christian Science commitments may have also been strengthened by the fact that the medical science of her day couldn’t help her.

Christian Scientist No More. Mostly. 

Christian Science’s growth slowed in the 1930s and 40s and declined thereafter, both among Christians and among Jews. The increasing efficacy of modern medicine, and disillusionment with the failures of faith healing may have played a role; greater opportunities for women in other denominations may have made Christian Science less attractive as well. In any case, Hattie’s children didn’t follow her into Christian Science. Raedina, my mother’s mother, married Milton Weinberger, an engineer and later a patent attorney, in 1935. While the family was not exactly devout, my mother, her sister, and her brother were raised Jewish.

Or mostly raised Jewish. Raedina was still interested in Christian Science and sent my mother, Theodora (or Teddi), to a Christian Science Sunday school circa 1947-48. “I felt [Teddi] learned many good principles” at the school, Raedina wrote in my mother’s baby book.

(Image: A note in the author’s mother’s baby book)

Eventually my grandfather put his foot down, and insisted that Teddi “must have a Jewish education,” as Raedina put it, though she added that, “There has been very little religious talk in the home.”

Still, Christian Science and its various meanings—assimilation, Americanization, spirituality—continued to hover around the edges of my family’s Jewish experience. My mom told me, to my surprise, that she had celebrated Christmas as a child—a fairly common tradition among German Jewish families, though less so among Eastern European Jews like my family. Raedina also successfully pushed Milton to change their last name; “Weinberger” was identifiably Jewish, and she felt it hindered his advancement as an army engineer, and later outside the service as a patent attorney.

Raedina would visit doctors, though she didn’t like it (who does?). She retained her skepticism towards modern medicine to her death in 2010 at the age of 98. She also held onto her mother’s Christian Science Bible, which included tabs collating passages related to Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings. “This Bible belonged to my mother,” Raedina wrote in a note to my aunt. “It is a very good one which I hope you will keep.”

Sunday School and family Bibles notwithstanding, I had never heard my mother or her siblings express much personal interest in Christian Science. So I was startled to find out that my mother had, in fact, attended at least a couple of Christian Science services as an adolescent. “I had this period where I was looking for something, I guess, more spiritual,” my mom told me. As part of her brief (and long since abandoned) quest for religious sustenance, she started attending other religious services. She had a Lutheran boyfriend, so she went to a Lutheran service. She went to a Catholic mass. She went to a Quaker meeting. And she had a friend who was a fairly devout Christian Scientist, so she went and prayed with the Christian Scientists.

What Kind of Christian Scientist Are You, Anyway?

My mother did not become a Christian Scientist, nor did she marry a Lutheran. Our family didn’t celebrate Christmas, and I went to Hebrew school and Jewish summer camp and activities at the Jewish Community Center in Northeastern Pennsylvania, where we grew up. Then I married a (very nominally) Christian woman, and my Jewish practice largely ceased to exist. My daughter didn’t go to temple or Hebrew school. At this point, even my parents don’t attend temple—not even for the High Holy Days.

Like many Jews in the U.S. and around the world, we’re a secular bunch—which makes my mother’s adolescent effort to find a more spiritual home a bit disorienting for me. Her sampling of various religions, though, is very American—and I think, in its way, very Jewish too.

Jewish people have spent a lot of our history living among others who aren’t us. Sometimes living among people who aren’t you means pogroms; sometimes it means turning inwards to preserve your culture and history. And sometimes it means learning from the people standing next to you.

Robert Zimmerman (better known as Bob Dylan) decided blues musician Blind Lemon Jefferson meant more to him than klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras. Raedina, my grandmother, taught tap dance into her 90s to senior citizens of various ethnic backgrounds; it never bothered her that tap has African-American and Irish American roots and little to do with Judaism. Lots of New York Jews decided that Chinese food was the best Christmas tradition. My mom dated a Lutheran and went to pray with him because she was curious about how Lutherans pray.

Jewish people have always been wary of assimilation; no rabbi is going to be sanguine about their congregation rushing off to follow Mary Baker Eddy through the back door to Jesus. As Shaul Magid has pointed out, many Zionists have seen Jews in the diaspora as weak, diseased, and sickly, and as evaporating through assimilation—a stereotype that fits uncomfortably onto someone like Hattie, seeking out a quasi-Christian cure for illness. My family’s experiments with Christian Science seem to confirm all of these worries and aspersions. Are you even really still Jewish if you’re celebrating Christmas, passing on Christian Bibles, and sending your child to learn Christian Science principles?

You can certainly frame these explorations and vacillations as a kind of betrayal if you want. You could also, though, see it as one way of getting to know your neighbors, which can also be a way of getting to know yourself. Diaspora (or at least one form of diaspora) is curious, syncretic, welcoming, and not especially judgmental. It sees Judaism not as a proscriptive test designed to keep some people out, but simply as what Jewish people do—which can include covering blues songs, tap dancing, erecting a Christmas tree, embracing Buddhism, and for some significant number of Jewish women in the early 1900s, exploring Christian Science. As my grandmother might say, the diaspora is a good religion. I’m grateful she passed it down to us.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He writes about culture, politics, music and other subjects at his substack, Everything Is Horrible.

The post Christian Science as Jewish Tradition appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

For the past several months, I have been thinking about how I do not know much about my mother’s family history. Because of my unique last name, my father’s family has been easier to trace. But my mom’s family name, Weiss, is more common. To learn a bit about them, I am traveling to the Alsace region of France this summer where they once lived, an area that went back and forth between French and German control multiple times. The region was once home to a sizable portion of France’s Jewish community. The Jews of Alsace faced persecution and pogroms in the Middle Ages, expulsion from the main city of Strasbourg, the ability to return to Strasbourg years later but with a prohibition from working most professions, citizenship under Napoleon, antisemitism under Napoleon when the Jewish community didn’t assimilate to his liking, and annexation by Germany during WWII. Although most of Alsace’s Jews fled, were deported, or were murdered during WWII, Alsace still has Jewish communities today. But my family lost its connection to Alsace when my great-great-grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 1880s. They embraced America; my great grandfather even became a “gentleman farmer” in Ohio when he retired from the company he ran. And now, decades later, I know almost nothing about any connections to their past in Alsace.

The June issue of The Revealer is about examining our pasts—personal pasts, national pasts, and religious pasts—to make better sense of our present. The issue opens with Noah Berlatsky’s “Christian Science as Jewish Tradition,” where he explores why so many American Jewish women, including several in his own family, embraced Christian Science at the start of the 20^th century and what that might tell us about assimilation and Jewish identity in the United States today. Then, in “On the Banality of Evil in Catholic Horrors Films,” Matthew Cressler looks at two recent films, Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest, to explore the Catholics in them who committed atrocities and what lessons these films hold for today’s world. Next, in “Racism and Religion in America,” an excerpt from The Religion of Whiteness: How Racism Distorts Christian Faith, Michael Emerson and Glenn Bracey investigate what has been happening in American Christianity historically and presently that can help explain why the United States continues to have such profound race problems and inequities. After that, in “Houses of Worship Supporting Latino Communities and Protecting People from Deportation,” an excerpt from Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities, Gina M. Pérez highlights religious communities that have offered sanctuary to immigrants facing deportation.

The June issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Latino Faith-Based Activism and the New Sanctuary Movement.” Gina Pérez joins us to discuss faith-based activism within Latino communities and the religious roots of the sanctuary movement to protect immigrants. We explore how faith communities are helping families after workplace raids and deportations, and what the possibility of Donald Trump’s reelection portends for Latinos in the United States. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

In this issue we are also spotlighting our recent three-part podcast series on “Conservative Religion and Politics in the United States.” The first episode, “Ex-Evangelicals and U.S. Politics,” featuring NPR’s Sarah McCammon, explores ex-evangelicals’ insights into why white evangelicals remain loyal to Trump and why they continue to move further to the political right. The second episode, “Contemporary Christian Music’s Political and Religious Messages,” featuring Dr. Leah Payne, examines the political and religious aspirations of conservative white Protestants over the past several decades through the Contemporary Christian Music industry. And the third episode, “LGBTQ Republicans,” featuring Dr. Neil Young, explores why LGBTQ Republicans have stayed within the GOP and what their affiliation with the anti-trans and anti-queer religious right reveals about today’s political coalitions.

As the articles and podcast episodes in this issue highlight, uncovering things from our past can be painful and disappointing, but they can also be sources of insight. As we head into the summer months, I hope our June issue inspires you to look into your own histories. And I hope more people take the time to appreciate why knowing our national, cultural, religious, and personal lineages is of great importance for addressing the pressing issues we face today.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D. 

P.S. We publish a combined July/August issue every summer. Look for The Revealer’s 2024 Summer issue the first week of August!

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