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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “The Spiritual Birthing Movement.”

Happy listening!

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The following excerpt comes from Ann Duncan’s book Sacred Pregnancy: Birth, Motherhood, and the Quest for Spiritual Community from Fortress Press. The book explores the spiritual birthing movement in the United States.

This excerpt comes from the book’s Introduction and introduces readers to various components of the spiritual birthing movement.

***

As one woman sings and plays guitar to set the mood, women enter a tent carefully decorated as the site of the sacred altar and creation of a sister circle. One by one, the pregnant women are blessed by their sisters through the laying on of hands, massage, and the feeding of fresh fruits. They then move to another tent where their bodies are transformed into those of mythical goddesses through adornment with paints, flowers, jewelry, and glitter before being photographed by the professional photographer on hand. Several times a year, pregnant women gather in locations throughout the world to engage in rituals such as these that affirm community, sisterhood, womanhood, and the sacredness of the rites of passage that are pregnancy and birth. More than just an isolated gathering of women interested in cultivating their spirituality, these rituals are part of a much larger movement that their creator, Anni Daulter, describes as potentially transformative not only for the women involved but for the world.

Though the rituals of the Sacred Living Movement may conjure associations with ancient rituals in tribal societies, they are, in fact, contemporary examples of a new form of religious and spiritual community in the United States. The rituals come from one of the many Sacred Pregnancy retreats offered by the Sacred Living Movement, a business and spiritual community providing online and live support, gatherings, and trainings seeking to bring community, ritual, and the sacred back to, among other things, the rites of passage that are pregnancy and birth.

***

In a small office in a suburb of Washington, D.C., a woman sits atop a wooden box fitted with a hole at the top and steaming apparatus inside. The woman sits, bare bottomed, above the hole, and receives a “womb steam” as a means of physical and spiritual renewal. During the steaming – a procedure designed to heal, cleanse, and rebalance the internal and external parts of a woman’s reproductive organs – the woman receives spiritual counseling from the Reverend High Priestess Thema Azize Serwa, a certified doula, reiki, aromatherapy, and herbalism practitioner.  A short drive away, Munera Fontaine offers Mother’s Blessings to facilitate a communal ritual to honor and bless an expectant mother and to prepare her for the rite of passage that is childbirth.

***

In online trainings and in-person workshops, Amy Wright Glenn—author, birth and death doula, hospital chaplain, and expert in the art of holding space—trains birth workers, doulas, chaplains, and others with an interest in how to create space, foster reflection, and guide others through life’s most dramatic transitions. Raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Glenn uses her own academic training in world religions to facilitate rites of passage and support during times of joy and loss in ways that integrate and respect the religious and spiritual worldview of the practitioner. With a particular interest in pregnancy and child loss, Glenn blends business with spirituality, an agnostic sensibility with an adaptability to a wide spectrum of religious and spiritual practice, as she trains and guides others in skills and services aimed at supporting individuals through the joys and sorrows of pregnancy, birth, and death.

***

Though geographically dispersed from Oregon to Florida to Washington, DC, and serving a broad spectrum of clientele, the work of Anni Daulter, Thema Azize Serwa, Munerra Fontaine and Amy Wright Glenn are but four examples of the growing number of movements that blend business with a spiritual approach to the reproductive health and rites of passage of women. The rituals, interpersonal connections, and communities emerging from these spiritual communities and practitioners provide these individuals with experiences that they are unable to find elsewhere and that are missing from modern society. Where once pregnancy and childbirth were the shared experience that bonded the pregnant and birthing people in a community together through the trials of the physical and temporal embodiment of these life stages, the enactment of physical and emotional support, and accompanying ritual and pregnancy, and the resulting childbirth have become individualistic, medicalized experiences and procedures. Whereas women once labored and birthed at home, surrounded by women from their families and communities, they now often birth in sterile hospital environments surrounded by doctors, nurses, and their partners. Whereas women once received care that was holistic, women’s reproductive health has been clinicalized and even ignored by medical establishment. Rather than moving through the birth process following the callings of one’s own body or guidance derived from the lived experience of older women, birthing women are directed to lie or stand, push, or refrain from pushing based on medical standards, a desire for expediency, and convenience for hospital staff and administrators.

Advocates of these new directions in spiritual reproductive services and communities for women argue that this cultural shift has effectively converted what was a natural, community-supported rite of passage to a sterilized and individual medical procedure. Postpartum mothers are given little attention regarding their own physical recovery and spiritual transformation as focus shifts to care for the newborn baby. Proponents of these services and movements toward more natural, person-centered pregnancy and birth experience argue that in addition to recent increases in maternal fatality rates, birthing individual’s experiences have been negatively affected, not just emotionally but also physically. For these practitioners, the rites of passage and experiences surrounding motherhood have the potential to be vehicles for religious or spiritual experience and the formation of community.

Contested Maternal Paradigms

In practice and in scholarship, refocusing attention on this facet of many women’s lives opens the door to an experience and set of experiences that have the potential to restrict, yes, but also to empower and to deepen the spectrum of emotions a woman experiences in her time on earth. As Anni Daulter, founder of the Sacred Living Movement, describes, “in the moment of birthing a baby, she is the most powerful woman in the world.” For those who experience childbirth as a rite of passage and opportunity for empowerment, it has evolved into what Robbie Davis-Floyd calls a “secret sisterhood.” Because birth is experienced by many as a fundamentally life-changing event but is not discussed as such, a void remains for women seeking connection with their sisters in this rite. This is but one manifestation of the systematic silence surrounding the experience of mothering that Susan Maushart terms the “mask of motherhood.” Daulter sees the Sacred Living Movement as a way to ensure that “no pregnant woman … feel[s] alone during such a life-altering experience.” For Muneera Fontaine, owner of Peaceful Earth Graceful Birth, a Washington, DC-based company focused on birth and postpartum support and womb healing, it is also an issue of basic rights: “Healthcare is a human right that should not be held in monopoly by those who can afford it.” Her commitment is to provide not only more meaningful and effective services but more accessible services as well.

In many ways, this rethinking of pregnancy, birth, and fetal or infant death as sites for sacred or religious ritual follows patterns in liberal Protestantism throughout American history. The use of ritual follows patterns that Pamela Klassen maps through the history of liberal Protestantism in North America. The ritual is a means by which these practitioners “evoke and articulate their religious blending.” Moreover, the use of ritual as an integral part of pregnancy and childbirth suggests a desire for practice that encourages the connections one desires with the transcendent.

This ritualization occurs outside the bounds of institutional religion as well. In her discussion of the commonalities between spirituality and religion in the context of the increasingly popular label “spiritual but not religious,” Linda Mercadante notes not only a belief in something greater and a desire for connection to it but also “the proportion of rituals and practices as an aid or witness to this connection.” This desire for ritual and connection, Mercadante argues, undermines another common misperception of the spiritual but not religious: that they desire individual practice apart from community. Instead, they desire community as a context in which to enact ritual.

Motherhood, Feminism, and the Sacred

It is to these new forms of spiritual community focused on pregnancy and birth that this book turns. Part a retrospective on evolving paradigms of and feminist discourse on motherhood, part sociological study of changing religious demographics and understandings of religious experience in the United States, and part ethnographic study of the Sacred Living Movement and other spiritual movements and spiritually guided reproductive health services, this book uses case studies to demonstrate the ways in which these rites of passage are powerful sites of spiritual and religious practice. That practice necessarily unsettles not only many maternal paradigms but also those of religion and spirituality in ways that attract many of the so-called religious nones and others unhappy with the strictures of traditional religion. The case studies are also an invitation to theorize further and investigate not only the social construction of motherhood but maternity itself as a window into the life experience of many women and a potential avenue to religious and spiritual practice.

Ann W. Duncan is a professor of American studies and religion at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 39 of the Revealer podcast: “The Spiritual Birthing Movement.”

The post Spiritual Reproductive Services appeared first on The Revealer.

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The biblical psalmist never tells us about her own children. But if you look for them, they are there.

The death of a child is intolerable. When an adult dies, especially if they have had a long, happy life, it is possible to say their death was a good one and mean it. When a child dies, the world comes undone. There is no schema of justice, meaning, or order that can hold the death of a child. Children shouldn’t die. They do, but they shouldn’t.

You would expect stories of infant and child death in the Bible — infant mortality during the centuries the Bible was written and edited was high, perhaps as high as fifty percent — but there are few. Biblical stories of barrenness and infertility are a dime a dozen, as are miraculous pregnancies, but little is said of babies and toddlers, and even less of babies and toddlers who die. I don’t know who taught me to think of this absence as indication that ancient people cared less about babies. Having had my own babies, I am sure this is wrong. Pain, not indifference, seems the likely explanation.

When the Bible gives us stories of child death, they are outrageous and extreme. War and famine, voracious gods, and the Lord’s terror. There are the two women who come to Solomon because one of them has smothered their baby (1 Kings 3:16-28). The stories of cannibalism when cities are besieged (2 Kings 6:24-30, Lamentations 4:10). The king of Moab who sacrifices his eldest son (2 Kings 3:27). Jephthah who sacrifices his only daughter (Judges 11:31).

Most outrageous is Psalm 137, its final blessing. “Happy is the one who takes and breaks your little ones against the rock.” This is the worst of it. The pebble in the shoe of the Bible. The verse that makes the whole thing suspect. “Brutality and exploitation….god is tied up in it to his neck,” writes Canadian poet and essayist Dionne Brand. Children shouldn’t die, but in the Bible God sometimes kills children and hears petitions from people who praise those who do. Maybe the best thing to do is to get out the scissors and remove that verse. The rest of Psalm 137 is hauntingly beautiful, sad and angry, but acceptably so. But that last line… The scholar Modupe Oduyoye calls it satanic, and maybe she is right.

***

“Happy is the one…”

What do we do with these words? It is easy to condemn them. They are so beyond the pale that condemnation is unlikely to cost you much. No one is going to remind you of that time you wished to dash babies against rocks.

And yet.

On May 27^th, 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced they had found the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Since then, unmarked graves have been found at residential schools across Canada and the search continues. Thousands of children who never came home.

***

Psalm 137 begins softly. “By Babylon’s rivers…” Its words are more widely known than most of the Bible’s psalms, because they have been put to music by a wide array of musicians.

By Babylon’s rivers,
there we sat, oh we wept,
when we remembered Zion.

It is a perfect poem, compact and mournful. Hebrew psalmody at its best.

On the willows in her midst,
We hung our harps.
For there they asked us, our captors: “Words of song!”
And our tormentors: “Mirth!”
“Sing for us some songs of Zion.” 

A relationship of exploitation and oppression, boiled down to short commands, sparse and careless: Mirth! Song!

How can we sing YHWH’s songs on foreign soil?
If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget.
May my tongue stick to my palate if I do not remember you,
If I do not raise Jerusalem above my highest joy.

It is an eloquent lament for a lost city. A lament made indignant by the demand that the old life, the music of Jerusalem, be turned into pageantry for the enemy. A lament embittered by the unsaid, that the god whose songs the tormentors demand didn’t save them. A sad song, but one that migrants and people living under occupation have found comforting.

***

The topic of Psalm 137 isn’t children, or at least not on the surface. For most of the psalm, the psalmist speaks of land, of Jerusalem. But when she turns to cursing, the language of children seeps through.

Remember, YHWH, against Edom’s sons, the day of Jerusalem.
The ones who said: Strip! Strip! Down to her foundation!
Daughter Babylon, the devastated.
Happy is the one who pays you back in kind for what you did to us.

“Edom’s sons” and “Daughter Babylon.” Common expressions, metaphors for whole populations, but taken together, “sons and daughters,” they form a pair that most often appear in the Bible’s genealogies. “He had other sons and daughters” (Gen. 5:4). In biblical genealogies, these words promise a future, more children than need be named, an excess of riches, life continuing on.

***

Edom’s sons and Daughter Babylon may be poetic circumlocutions for peoples and lands, but the last verse of the psalm cannot be explained in this way.

Happy is the one who takes and breaks your infants against the rock.

Most words in Biblical Hebrew that mean “child” have a lexical range that extends beyond childhood. “Son” and “daughter” describe relationships, not age, much like the words do in English. The word for a young boy, yeled, is used for anyone in a dependent position, including adult children and slaves. But there are a few words that unequivocally refer to children. There is the one the psalmist uses here, ‘olal, and its variant ‘olel, either from the verb ‘wl, to nurse and nourish, or ‘ll, to be mischievous. Yoneq and ‘ul both mean nursling; gamul, weaned child. And taf, so much like the English word toddler, is from the verb tafaf, to take little steps or to trip.

None of these words are frequent in the Hebrew Bible. The most common, taf, occurs fourty-one times. The others, taken together, appear only thirty-five times. So when the psalmist refers to the Babylonian children as ‘olalaik, your little ones, she has chosen with care. She means to speak of kids.

***

My life as a European in North America is built on a foundation of violence against children. “Everyone who calls Canada home is guilty,” writes Ray Aldred of the abuses suffered by Indigenous kids in residential schools. That shared communal guilt holds true for the United States as well. Violence against children does not show up in the history of North America as odd exceptions, but as part of the pattern.

The reason Psalm 137 is so easy to condemn is that we’re supposed to agree that harming children is always unacceptable. And yet some children are more important to us as a society than others. That’s not accidental, and we sleep quite well anyway. When I think of that, I think that maybe the right question is not, is the ending of Psalm 137 acceptable, but rather, who might need to say these kinds of words? It must be someone who has experienced excruciating loss, someone brought to extreme anger. So, I ask a new question: What is my responsibility in relation to that anger and to the people who feel it?

***

Psalm 137 is angry. Anger is a difficult emotion and also an important one. Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard writes that “in the context of ongoing settler-colonial injustice, Indigenous peoples’ anger and resentment can indicate a sign of moral protest and political outrage that we ought to at least take seriously, if not embrace as a sign of our critical consciousness.” But anger and resentment are rarely embraced in reconciliation politics, he writes, because “they sometimes can manifest themselves in unhealthy and disempowering ways.”

This ambivalence about anger — its importance and its dangers — runs through anti-colonial writings. Taiaiake Alfred calls destructive anger “an isolated, unfocused state of rage,” but he also notes the request from Patricia Montour-Angus that Native men “respect our [Native women’s] anger and work with us through it.” Raja Shehadesh, writing of his grief and anger at the encroachment of Israeli settlements on his Palestinian hills, says “I cannot continue in this stage of anger, otherwise it will consume all my energy and I shall waste my life in grumbling and regret.” Glen Coulthard describes the anger he seeks to cultivate as “an affective indication that we care deeply about ourselves, about our land and cultural communities, and about the rights and obligations we hold as First Peoples.” Audre Lorde writes that “anger expressed and translated into action” is an “act of clarification,” because it makes clear “who are our allies with whom we have great differences, and who are our genuine enemies.” Hatred is destructive, she says, but anger “is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”

The subtext of almost all commentaries on Psalm 137 is the question: “Is this an appropriate way to express anger?” Rather than explore that question, I am more interested in what it means to claim the right to judge someone else’s anger. It is easy for the question “is this an appropriate way to express anger?” to assume a moral high ground. Look at those violent Israelites! We know better now. Look at those violent school administrators and teachers, the nuns and the priests, the predators. That’s not me! But Coulthard’s catalogue of the contemporary oppressive relationship between the Canadian state and Indigenous nations – “poverty, unemployment, substandard housing conditions, infant mortality, morbidity, youth suicide, incarceration, women as victims of abuse and sexual violence, and child prostitution” – all affect children. Several include direct violence against children, and yet we tolerate it. Whether Psalm 137 is acceptable is not an important question. But given what as a society we do to children, how might we hear its anger in new ways? How might we be changed by its anger?

***

On July 22, 2011, I was at my cottage in Norway. I was not supposed to be there. I was about to start graduate school in the U.S. and had planned to leave earlier that month, but I had run into difficulties in getting my passport back from the U.S. embassy. So, on July 22, I was sitting with my family when I watched the news that a bomb had gone off in Norway’s government quarters. As the evening wore on, there were rumors of shots fired at Utøya, the island at which the Labour Party’s youth wing, AUF, holds its summer camp.

When I woke up the next morning, reporters said 80 people were dead, most of them teenagers.

***

A protracted siege, the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army, forms the background of Psalm 137. Scholars disagree about the length of the siege, 18 or 30 months, but either way, it was long. If the stories and poetry of the Bible are to be believed, the population of Jerusalem suffered extreme deprivation. “Lift your hands to [YHWH] for the life of your children [‘olalaik again, exactly as in Psalm 137], who are sick from famine” writes the poet of Lamentations (Lamentations 2:19). Then, turning to God, the poet accuses God of bringing famine so intense that women consumed their own children (Lamentations 2:20-21).

The biblical shorthand for siege warfare is “sword, famine, and plague.” Mass graves thought to date from Sennacherib’s campaigns in the 8^th century BCE have been excavated at Lachish, a city named in the Bible. They contained large numbers of women and children, most of whom, explains biblical scholar Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, have “no obvious injuries and so likely succumbed to dehydration, starvation, or illness.” If estimates for urban population density in the 8^th century are correct, the mass graves contain most of what would have been the city’s population. “Sword, famine, and plague” and whole populations dying sound biblical and ancient, but contemporary and ancient siege warfare share many features, because one of its primary weapons was and is hunger. During the 1941-44 siege of Leningrad, an estimated 37% of the city’s population died in the first eleven months, primarily from starvation. Bombings have been the main cause of civilian deaths in more recent sieges, like Aleppo in 2016 and Mariupol in 2022, but food and water shortages caused widespread suffering.

One of the tropes of siege literature from the ancient Near East is stories of parents eating their own children. In 2 Kings 6, two women make a pact to eat their sons. Less extreme, parents in Jerusalem and in Leningrad had to watch their children starve. Much more common than stories of cannibalism are stories of severely starved parents in Leningrad giving their last bread to their children. Historian Lisa A. Kirschenbaum reports that one survivor of the siege asked her mother, many years later, what was hardest for her during the siege, and she replied, “when you were begging me for something to eat.”

It is difficult to know if parents, ancient or modern, have eaten their kids in sieges – and nothing much would be gained by such knowledge. Rumors of cannibalism are (imagined?) responses to the question “what is the worst thing that can happen?” The books of the Bible are more or less unanimous in their answer: a siege-induced famine so severe that people eat their babies (Leviticus 26:29; Deuteronomy 28:53-57; Jeremiah 19:9; Ezekiel 5:10; Lamentations 4:10). After that, what is there to say? No one recovers.

Psalm 137, the siege of Leningrad. This poem, these events, might seem useless, things we can learn little from, ancient horrors and Nazi cruelties we no longer have to deal with. Do you know anyone who has been so desperate they have considered eating their own child? Me neither. But I also did not think someone, anyone, could spend an hour hunting down teenagers on an island. And although I know many teachers, I don’t know anyone who has, through abuse and neglect, caused the death of a student. But that happened in Canada, fairly recently. The last Canadian residential school closed in 1996.

To send your child to school and have your child not return: to demand healthy expressions of anger after that – what’s the point?

***

Another theme in debates about Psalm 137 is its therapeutic value. The basic argument is that it is better to share revenge fantasies with God than to act on them. Yes, anything is better than actually killing infants. But this feels like an argument about catharsis, and yet what words are sufficient to provide catharsis for the violent loss of a child? Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says:

Canada has become very good at responding to our pain by deploying the politics of grief: a set of tools the state uses to avoid structural changes and accountability by focusing on individual trauma rather than collective, community, or nation-based losses, by truncating historical injustice from the current structure and the ongoing functioning of settler colonialism, by avoiding discussions about substantive changes involving land and dispossession in favor of superficial status quo ones, and by turning to ‘lifestyle choices’ and victim blaming to further position the state as benevolent and caring…

As if the loss of children can be made up for by a lot of therapy.

I don’t think the anger of Psalm 137 is about catharsis. It is one thing to hope that by speaking of grief and trauma, one may heal from it. It is another to demand that healing of another. Perhaps speech is cathartic. But to demand it of someone else (don’t you feel better now?) is not kindness, but impatience, a desire to be done with recollections that bring shame.

***

When I place Utøya next to Psalm 137 and to Indigenous anger, I am not saying that this is how Indigenous anger might be expressed, so take caution. The Indigenous peoples of North America have not channeled their anger into violence against children. But white supremacists, in Europe and North America, have. The children of slaves, residential schools, terrorism, hate crimes, the school-to-prison pipeline, police brutality, the abysmal natal care offered Black women and their infants. Utøya was targeted because it was a youth camp. When I talk about anger as a white person, it is important to say that I have no right to judge the anger of others. It is also important to note that white anger is dangerous.

***

Psalm 137 is about children and it is also about land. The longing for Jerusalem is not evasion before we get to the heart of things. Violence against children in settler colonialism is also about land, about the ability of peoples to go on living on their land. The psalmist has seen her future destroyed in two ways. Her land has been torn apart and she has been exiled from it. And her children, who were to live on the land with her and after her, are dead. Residential schools did not have the explicit goal of killing children. Their aim was to kill the Indian and save the child. This way, there would be no Indian children who would become Indian adults who remembered and existed and insisted that this land is their land. No pesky Wet’suwet’en refusing to abandon their territories and their waters to gas companies.

Children and land belong together, because together they are a community’s future. Take away children and land, and you take away the future. Who will remember Jerusalem when the psalmist dies if her children are not there to carry on her memories? And where will the children live if they have no home to return to?

***

Anders Breivik, who murdered the teenagers on Utøya, said his goal for the July 22 massacre was to rid Norway of Muslim influence. He was inspired by the Eurabia genre, a right-wing conspiracy theory concerned with the idea that European elites are colluding with Muslim powers to promote Islamic colonization of Europe. Aspects of this idea can be found in mainstream newspapers and political discourse in Norway.

Despite this connection between Breivik’s ideology and public discourse in Norway, authors and journalists have emphasized Breivik’s troubled childhood and downplayed the ideological foundations of his acts. For example, the author Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote, “I do not believe that Breivik himself has anything to teach us. I believe that his life is a coincidence of unfortunate circumstances, and what he did was such an anomaly that it makes no sense even to guard ourselves against it.” Writer Åsne Seierstad emphasizes Norway’s innocence: “What could go so wrong in such a peaceful and harmonious country?”

But I can’t escape the sense that Breivik’s extremity has some connection to more socially appropriate forms of racism, what in Norway is called hverdagsrasisme, everyday racism. And this it seems worth being on guard against, even if what we are guarding against is in ourselves, not out there in the world.

***

What holds all this together? Why connect Psalm 137, the unmarked graves, and Utøya?

The final verse of Psalm 137 “happy is the one…” is almost always excluded when the psalm is put to music. Biblical scholar David W. Stowe writes: “There’s some irony here: a psalm centrally concerned with memory … has itself been partially suppressed because it expresses ideas that we would rather not remember.”

Both Utøya and the unmarked graves raise questions about historical memory and what we choose to notice and address. The events of July 22, 2011 are not in danger of being forgotten, but the ways the rest of us in Norway may have contributed to them by our participation in, or tolerance of, anti-Islamic rhetoric: that we are doing our best to forget.

And the unmarked graves. Indigenous communities across Canada requested that in 2021, Canadians not celebrate Canada Day, but instead join them in mourning. Most Canadians went ahead with celebrations. The conflict about whether to celebrate Canada Day is a conflict about how much the memory of the children should disrupt what white Canadians think of as normal life. About how central the memory of residential schools should be to Canadian identity. Are the graves anomalies or at the heart of the establishment and continuance of Canada?

The residential schools and Utøya are not the same. Residential schools were an act of genocide. Utøya was a terrorist attack. Residential schools gobbled up whole generations. Utøya was one devastating event. But both come out of the same thing. They are expressions of white supremacy, of a sense that white ways of doing things must be protected at all costs. Whiteness is more important than the lives of children, even if some of those children happen to be white.

There is, in a way, nothing to be said about Psalm 137. Only dismay, grief, silence. The world contains enough horrors that someone, but not everyone, needs to say this. That seems the important thing to think about now. That the world contains this, that I might be implicated in it, that the word “responsible” might apply to me in some way. Not in the way I am responsible to take out the garbage or responsible for the fact that I forgot to pay the energy bill last month. But definitely responsible in some way.

***

“At the end, I wanted to comfort him,” writes Amy Hempel in a short story. “But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arab proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it.”

The tormentors ask the exiles, “Sing for us some songs of Zion” (Psalm 137:3). And they do. Danger has come and continues to come, and they sing to it. But what a song. Psalm 137 does not fit in any of the known genres of biblical hymns. It borrows from laments, imprecatory psalms, and wisdom psalms, but looks like none of them. The best description of its genre, I think, is that it is an adaption of the Songs of Ascent, hymns sung on the approach to Jerusalem during religious festivals and times of sacrifice. Instead of “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of YHWH'” (Psalm 122:1[2]), we have “By Babylon’s rivers, there we sat, oh we wept” (Psalm 137:1). Instead of “happy is the man who has his quiver full of sons” (Psalm 127:3), we have “happy is the one who takes and breaks your little ones” (Psalm 137:9). A song of homecoming refashioned into a song of anger and exile. It is not a song I imagine the Babylonians would want to hear.

I think of it this way, Psalm 137 today: I am the danger approaching, we are. The danger that has come to stay. And they, the communities and nations whose children did not come home, are singing at the sight of us. Hard songs. Songs I often would prefer not to hear. But I am trying to listen. I am trying to listen to their songs, so that when we meet again (we live right next to each other, they must meet us whether they want to or not), the meeting might be something else than it is and has been. I am trying to listen so that we might become, with time, worthy of other songs.

Mari Joerstad teaches Hebrew Bible at the Vancouver School of Theology. Her research and writing focus on topics of ecology, land, and migration in the Bible and other literature of the ancient Near East.

The post Songs of Zion: Psalm 137, White Supremacy, and the Murder of Children appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image courtesy of Courtesy of Ashon T. Crawley, Ph.D.)

In 2022, Beyond Granite, a project re-imagining memorials and memorialization by the Monument Lab, asked a group of artists: what stories remain untold on the National Mall? They responded by designing temporary art installations that would tell such stories. Six were invited to transform their designs into monuments for Pulling Together, the first-ever curated, temporary exhibit hosted by the National Mall.

For artist and scholar Ashon T. Crawley, Beyond Granite’s question evoked thoughts of people from his youth whose stories could barely be spoken because they were shrouded in fear: Black, queer church musicians who died of AIDS. In the Blackpentecostal worlds of Crawley’s youth – Crawley uses “Blackpentecostal” to refer not only to the religious tradition but to its particular aesthetics, emotions, and sociality – these were the artistic geniuses who created musical spaces that allowed for spiritual communion with the Divine and with Black community. But they were also targets of condemnation and warning; condemnation for their presumed homosexuality and warning to anyone who may identify too strongly with them. In the 1980s and 90s, when Crawley was growing up, AIDS intensified the warning and robbed the church of these folks, their spiritual and musical gifts, and the opportunity to care for them in their illness and death.

Crawley is one of the artists who has a temporary installation at the National Mall. His piece, HOMEGOING, is “a sonic memorial to the AIDS crisis that honors fallen Black queer musicians and spirituality.” The installation uses space and sound to enact a funeral of sorts. It combines a built monument whose three sections spell out the Arabic word “Amin” – “let this prayer be accepted” – and a symphonic piece in six movements that accompanies visitors as they traverse the monument. Together, the built piece and sound create a memorial space on the National Mall for those lost and those who remember them – even if they are meeting them for the first time.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

***

Lynne Gerber: In the installation’s symphonic piece, in the second movement titled “Go Beyond Glory,” the choir sings “may our hearts be tangled with your hearts.” I am curious about how your heart is tangled with the hearts of the folks you are memorializing, which is also a way of asking how you came to create this work.

Ashon T. Crawley: I came to the project because I think my heart is tangled and what I mean is that my life is possible sonically. The way that I think about music and sound is because of my relationship to the Blackpentecostal tradition. I grew up Blackpentecostal. I was a singer, musician, the choir director, and I was going to be a preacher too, and decided against all of that. But the way that I came to sense the world, the way that I came to understand music and musicality, the way that I came to understand Black English or African-American Vernacular English, the way that I came to understand what it meant to be in community with others, with vibration that we call sound as the foundation of that gathering, was because of what I was experiencing immersed in the Blackpentecostal tradition. Going to my church, going to other churches within our fellowship of churches I was always really moved by the music, the Hammond organ, which is my favorite instrument. Musicians who were skilled always made me really happy. And seeing choir directors move the congregation and would require the flamboyance, the joy, the seriousness of their musical practice, their openness to music and music happening in them and through them. Noticing that at a very young age was very awe-inspiring to me.

(A segment of the HOMEGOING exhibit. Image by AJ Mitchell for Monument Lab.)

But also it was very, very scary because as a young person – I was born in 1980 – the AIDS crisis was happening alongside this musical genius and joy that was happening. A lot of the same musicians that taught me – and not like sitting me down and saying this is what you do, but just the gift of their presence taught me, by just noticing them – what it meant to be open to Spirit. What it meant to be open to music happening. What it meant for music to be connection. These people who were so beautiful in what they offered were also dying. They were dying unceremoniously. They were dying with sermons that were the soundtrack to their death. And the sermons that were the soundtrack were often sermons that castigated, sermons that used pejorative language to talk about the sins of the choir, the sins of the musician, the sins of the male singer. There was a lot of deep worry and anxiety around queerness and what queerness meant to these congregations. And so people would jump up and they would shout and they would speak in tongues and praise based on the choir singing and the musician playing the organ and the director directing the choir, getting everyone sort of enraptured in the Spirit. And then the sermonic content would often be castigating the men that just did that. And I could not understand why or how the ones that were actually causing all of this deep feeling in terms of the Spirit were being called out as a big problem to get rid of.

And so I arrived to this project because I’ve always been deeply connected to these musicians and could not figure out a way to honor them. I was afraid to be a musician as a young person because I thought the music was making them gay, and I thought that being gay was making them contract HIV and that their musicality was a portal to their sinfulness. And I didn’t want my life to be a portal to sinfulness and so I wanted to escape it as much as possible. So I tried to escape the music, but I was so deeply drawn to it. Drawn to it because it also felt like a space of freedom that wasn’t being felt in other kinds of registers and other kind of material ways. And so I was still drawn to the music even as these people were dying. And so when I say in the song “may our hearts be tangled,” it’s more an acknowledgment of the beauty that they were, a kind of beauty that made my openness to the world possible. Even when many of them who died would perhaps disagree with my theological understanding – or be offended, perhaps, even – of sexuality. But their livingness was a way for me to actually ask questions like why is there this deep chasm between what we say is wholly unacceptable and what these people are doing – and yet what they’re doing isn’t actually getting in the way of them producing this capacity to move the very ones that are saying that they’re a problem. They prompted in me a series of questions, a series of concerns, a series of difficulties. And so I feel tangled with them because I want to always be in relation with them. Always be in deep gratitude for them and also always wanting to honor them and say I’m not different from you. I am you.

LG: That juxtaposition of the choir and the sermon is a very powerful image. I would love to hear more about the musical genius of the folks that you are commemorating and how that genius was and is entangled with the spiritual genius of the Black church.

AC: I think the musical genius is that often these musicians were not classically trained. If they had any training, it might have been in a public school where they had some form of musical talent and a teacher in a music program might’ve given them some lessons. They might have known basic music theory. Oftentimes they knew no theory at all. Many could not read music. They couldn’t sight read. And yet they were creating forms of music that literally were at the foundation for church services. Churches would sing, and still do today, the songs that these musicians, these singers and choir directors created in terms of lyrical content, but also the harmonic and chordal changes that musicians would use on the Hammond organ, or on the piano. They were genius because they were able to take whatever constraints of the mechanical objects that they had, whether piano or Hammond organ or the directing of the choir, or the mechanical instruments of their voice, they were able to take that and to find a form that was appropriate to their individual self and use that to outpour toward the congregation, to move the congregation, to provide music for the congregation. These were not musicians recording on choir recordings. They weren’t necessarily on TV. They weren’t perhaps the most amazing musicians according to a logic of classical training, but they were amazing insofar as they provided music that moved their individual congregation. I’m not only talking about musicians who were playing for churches that had two thousand members. I’m mostly talking about musicians who played for their family churches with fifty members, sometimes a hundred members. And within that context, providing music for them where they weren’t seeking a career in music, but they were trying to be an instrument for their congregation, where they were trying to be instrumental in the entire congregation experiencing something of the divine. And so that, for me, is a practice of genius.

LG: Your written work dwells on the idea of “otherwise possibilities” – what you describe as “the fact of infinite alternatives to what is” – and how Black art and Blackpentecostal practices evoke such possibilities and can make them real, can make them discernible to us. I’m curious what AIDS was like for the folks that you’re memorializing and how it might have been otherwise for them and for the church.

AC: What I mean by otherwise possibility is that alternatives to the normative already exist. We don’t have to wait for some future moment to enact alternatives, to be different, to figure out a different path. There are already a multitude of paths that we can take. That we can think differently about all of these things. And so the things that have happened have been the result of political and economic choices or political and economic constraints. “Otherwise” just names the fact that alternatives exist without ever saying that all alternatives are also good. They are just alternatives and we still have to figure out a way that produces an ethics of care with the things that we select to do differently.

(A segment of the HOMEGOING exhibit. Image by AJ Mitchell for Monument Lab.)

For me, HOMEGOING is an attempt toward the practice of otherwise possibility because it’s trying to give an alternative with regard to care. It’s trying to actually give us a homegoing ceremony for musicians, singers, and choir directors who often died in silence, or whose queerness could never be spoken. Or whose queerness had to be re-narrated as something that they repented of, or that they gave up – my son wasn’t like that, as one person said at her son’s funeral – or the refusal to speak queerness and refusal to speak the public health crisis of AIDS. This is an attempt to say nope. We are speaking the word AIDS. We are unashamed about a public health crisis. We are unashamed, too, about the fact that people were queer. So we are speaking queerness very intentionally. These are already alternatives to what has happened in the past. But also the exhibit’s songs are written to and about the musicians, the singers, and the choir directors. They’re songs not about God. They are not to God. They are not to worship God. They are to say that the musicians, the people, the complex lives that were lost were so deeply beautiful that we have to honor them. Because not just them, but each life is so deeply complex and beautiful and each life should be honored. And so this is an attempt to produce music that honors, perhaps something like ancestor music. But it is not gospel music, it is not Christian music, even though the phonics, patterns, and forms are deeply informed by the Black church.

LG: In another movement the choir sings “we are your family now.” I was wondering what it means to claim these folks now when they were so often unclaimed in life. And what does it mean for you and for those of us remembering them to claim them as part of queer kin when they may not have claimed their sexuality and in some cases resisted it?

AC: If I am thinking about ancestor, I am thinking about a complex positionality that still learns, that still grows, that still changes even if not existing in the fleshly manifestation of personhood in ways that we call the human. That people can learn and grow, even when they ain’t here. That relation, that ancestor doesn’t mean a kind of inert object, that whatever it was that they thought at the moment of death is the thing that’s going to remain only ever unceasing. But instead: ancestor as dynamic, ancestor as literal relation. And so to say “we are your family now” is to say that we who are alive and remain, who want to offer ceremony, homegoing for you, would like to claim you as family, as queer kin. Please let us, if you would so allow us to. It is a non-coercive solicitation, a desire to be in deep relation, to say that we are family. Not based on blood, not based on ability, but certainly based on desire to be in relation.

To claim we are your family now is to say we are unashamed of queerness. We are unashamed of AIDS. The religious violence that you had to endure, we will speak it. We will and we will honor you. And so one of the lines is “we are your family, not one that is imposed, but one through choice composed.” We are choosing to compose family this way. It’s informed by ball culture. It’s informed by Black culture where the person down the street is your auntie. You don’t know if the person is related to you, but they are related to you because that’s my auntie. It’s not blood. It is practices of care. And this care is the root of our relationship. And to claim as family is to just say, we care about you. That song particularly, I think of it both as a song to those who have departed, but also to those who are alive, who are seeking community, seeking family, that one of the things we can offer to one another is care. We can become family with one another. And because family according to normative logic and political economic practice is such a site of violence. And so it is to reclaim family as important, but family that does not need to be on the side of violence and harm, but a family that can be a site of the proliferation of care, concern, joy, love, and patience.

LG: Your exhibit is part of a larger project rethinking memorials and memorialization. And the curators have clearly thought a great deal about the National Mall itself as a space of memorialization and the historic events that occurred there, such as Marian Anderson’s 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial and the 1987 display of the Names Quilt. I’m curious how you’ve imagined your piece in conversation with the other events on the National Mall as a way to rethink memorialization?

AC: I think that the publicness of a lot of what has happened on the National Mall previously has not had to deal with the question of anonymity, or the question of identification in the way that I’ve had to. So, for example, I get a lot of questions about the relationship between my work and the AIDS Quilt, a beautiful piece that honors people who were lost and their individuality. Sometimes it’s a picture of the person, the name of the person, sometimes there are musical notes, whatever a person wants to put on the square for a person who was lost. And so there’s not anonymity in that particular case.

The thing that I’m doing deals with the question of what happens when the musicians who died were also closeted or would not have claimed queerness. Or what are the ethics of naming? And beyond that, what happens in a situation where so many names remain unsaid because of shame around queerness, shame around the public health crisis of AIDS? What does one do? And so mine is in this relation and conversation with these other forms of monumentality and remembrance by saying or by asking the question, is there a way to produce memorial that also has to contend with the problem of naming, the problem of specific modes of identification? And can there still be a way to say what you did was important and necessary and righteous. It’s not the AIDS quilt, but it is still a stitching together of things.

***

Beyond Granite: Pulling Together is on public display at the National Mall in Washington DC from August 18 through September 18, 2023. On Saturday September 9 at 7:30 there will be a public event about HOMEGOING and a live performance of its music at the Sylvan Theater in Washington, DC.

Lynne Gerber is an independent scholar and the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Re-orientation in Evangelical America. Her current work is focused on religious responses to the emergence of AIDS in 1980s and 90s San Francisco.

Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility and The Lonely Letters.

The post HOMEGOING: Commemorating Black, Queer Church Musicians Lost to AIDS appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Paul Bergen for Getty Images)

“I had the incredible honour of sharing the stage and studio with the head chief many times, and she brought me on tour where I sat at her feet every night and watched in awe as she waked the dead and soared like an eagle, singing our ancestors alive, and fighting the eternal fight of good against evil. … She had the soul of a punk, fearless in what she believed in, and wielded her art like a sword to cut at the psychopaths of the earth…”
—Damien Dempsey

***

In 1990, the fabled music journalist Legs McNeil profiled Shuhada’ Sadaqat—then known as Sinéad O’Connor—for SPIN magazine, just weeks after her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, catapulted her to A-list celebrity status for her rendition of Prince’s ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U.” This was two years before O’Connor’s fame would evolve into infamy after she tore up her abusive mother’s photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live as she sang a rendition of Bob Marley’s “War.” McNeil’s essay was essentially a confession of love that feels slightly embarrassing to read: “Dazzling and captivating eyes, the most beautiful Irish brogue and skin that looked like it would melt butter. I wanted to stare at her but I was trying to be cool, you know, just catching glimpses of her when she wasn’t looking my way.” Long before we had the language of “parasocial relationships” with famous people, McNeil, like almost everyone I knew, was in love with Sinéad O’Connor. Legs McNeil might have been self-confident enough to say the quiet part out loud, but Sinéad O’Connor had the rare quality of making you want to cry, dance, and scream—all simultaneously and in equal measure.

McNeil interviewed O’Connor on the day she learned “Nothing Compares 2 U” had hit #1 on the U.S. singles chart. She was immediately reticent about the dangers of that level of celebrity: “I don’t want to be a rock star, I don’t want to be treated like one, and I don’t want any of the associations that go with it. I just want to be treated like an ordinary person, and I want people to remember that the most important things in my life are not making records and going around the world on tour. The most important thing is my family, and my spiritual beliefs. If I didn’t have those things, I wouldn’t be inspired to do anything.”

Nobody becomes that famous entirely by accident, or without wanting it at some level—you don’t just slip, trip, and inadvertently record a heartbreaking cover of a Prince song. But maybe akin to the 16^th century mystic Juan de la Cruz, who coined the term “dark night of the soul,” O’Connor was suspicious of the hazards of celebrity for one’s spiritual integrity—whether that celebrity was earned through MTV or renown as a contemplative monk.

Legs McNeil described Sinéad O’Connor as a kind of Joan of Arc figure, because she was, in his words, “a study in contradiction”—delicate yet feral. It was a comparison that would be made repeatedly over the years, partially due to the aesthetic similarities between the “Nothing Compares 2 U” music video and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). In her memoir, Rememberings, O’Connor claimed to have shaved her head to undermine the sexualization of her appearance by record label suits—which had the unintended effect of turning her exposed cranium into an icon of iconoclasm—the soon-to-be “avatar of a million dreamy rebellions.” It was also more complicated than that, tied to experiences of trauma, and joy, and freedom: later in life, O’Connor would elaborate on additional reasons for the cut, including painful reminders of her abusive mother and as a self-defense mechanism against the unwanted advances of industry creeps.

She violated every rule in the pop playbook: in addition to going bald and tearing up a picture of the pope on live television, she skipped the Grammy Awards in 1991 when she was a nominee, decrying the music industry as ethically perverted, corrupting what she saw as the artist’s vocation as spiritual healer. And that was two years after she’d performed at the Grammys with a temporary tattoo of Public Enemy’s crosshairs logo on her head to protest the racist exclusion of hip-hop from the ceremony—while also wearing her son Jake’s onesie from her belt loops to flip off record executives who’d told her motherhood would derail her career. She refused to let a stadium in New Jersey play the U.S. national anthem—or anyone’s national anthem—as the intro to her concert, which led an acrid Frank Sinatra to suggest she be deported.

Sinéad O’Connor was a genius at “show, don’t tell” tactics for her activism. An icon of the Gen X plain-text statement t-shirt—two of her greatest hits were poignant yet laconic: a black-text-on-white “RECOVERING CATHOLIC” slouchy and a “WEAR A CONDOM” crop top showing her exposed pregnant belly, barely years after Ireland had legalized contraception in 1980. And she had a compulsion towards picking fights with bullies—whether it be politicians, clerics, or other artists.

(Image source: Damien Storan for Reuters)

But O’Connor wasn’t impervious to the ire she drew for standing up against injustice—all you have to do is watch the video of her getting booed off stage during Bob Dylan’s 30^th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden two weeks after the SNL incident. Drowning out the boos with her own righteous indignation, she stands so tall with her jaw clenched, rips out her earpiece, and absolutely wails a piercing cut from Marley’s “War”—a callback to the SNL performance. But she crumples and starts convulsing as she leaves the stage, famously into the arms of Kris Kristofferson. In Rememberings, O’Connor recalls the event in explicitly theological terms:

Now I’m asking God what I should do. I keep pacing, which becomes uncomfortable for everyone backstage because the show’s got to go on as planned, so someone dispatches Kris Kristofferson (this he tells me later) to “get her off the stage.” As he’s making his way there, I get my answer from God: I’m going to do what Jesus would do. So I literally scream the biggest rage I can muster, the Bob Marley song “War” to which I tore up the pope’s picture. And then I almost get sick. 

I see Kristofferson walking up to me. I’m thinking, I don’t need a man to rescue me, thanks. It’s so embarrassing. “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” he says into my mike [sic]. And we go offstage and I almost barf on him as he gives me a hug. 

Afterward, I feel like Bob Dylan is the one who should have come out and told his audience to let me sing. And I’m pissed that he didn’t. So I glare at him in the wings as if he’s my big brother who’s just told my parents I skipped school. He stares back at me, baffled. He’s looking all handsome in his white shirt and pants. It’s the weirdest thirty seconds of my life.

My father, who was in the audience that night, advises me afterward that it might be time for me to reconsider college, because I just destroyed my career. He’s right. But I don’t care. Some things are worth losing your career for. And I don’t want a pop-star career anymore anyway because nobody knows me and I’m so lonely.

The scene is an excruciating video to watch—it feels like we’re audience to public spectacle violence, a crucifixion. But in retrospect, this assault and the longer-term fallout highlighted the contradiction between O’Connor’s values and the ways of the world: she would come to describe it as a redemptive moment; that the apparent obliteration of her career was actually what saved her spirit. It also didn’t shut her up: she continued to speak publicly about injustice, particularly on sexual and gender liberation, as well as the Catholic Church’s years of abuse—and increasingly opened up about her own experiences as a victim of the “Magdalene Laundries,” asylums where tens of thousands of “fallen women,” orphans, and “at-risk” girls were confined, abused, and conscripted into manual labor until 1996.

But perhaps this is why her death was mourned so publicly by Gen X and elder millennial social justice activists in the U.S.: they certainly remember her technical skill—that phenomenal, ethereal voice—in their bones. And they also remember watching her be pilloried on national television for her righteous outrage at racism and child abuse. LJ Amsterdam, an activist scholar and direct-action coordinator, captured the essence of this feeling in a pithy retrospective, following news of O’Connor’s death on July 26: “I remember seeing her on MTV when I was a kid. Her voice. Her vulnerability. Her menace.” adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, composed this epitaph, which begins:

what comes first
the madness of seeing thru
to the truth of an institution, a time
or the bravery to point
to show everyone what you see
i suspect it’s the survival
of a brutal childhood
& being told to recover
& being told you are resilient
& being told you are beautiful
when you already know the cost
of looking thru sweet fairy eyes
upon corruption

Sinéad O’Connor was someone we were all scared of, and scared for. She was also someone we wanted. In Kathryn Lofton’s book on Oprah and celebrity as a fundamentally religious phenomenon, she talks about how celebrity renders humans into commodities: we want to consume them—not just what they produce, but their actual being. We could write volumes chronicling the distinctions between Sinéad O’Connor and Oprah Winfrey, but one of the most fundamental elements to O’Connor’s attractiveness was the feeling that she really, authentically, felt uncomfortable with fame at her core, even if she found it sometimes-seductive. Unlike Oprah, or to stick with another one-named planetary celebrity from the great nation of Ireland, Bono—who seem so willing and easeful in their celebrity—we were always told that Sinéad didn’t want it, but did want to use her microphone with integrity.

Many of O’Connor’s obituaries have described her as prophetic about clerical child abuse within Catholicism—but that’s not entirely true. It has become normalized to date The Boston Globe’s 2002 “Spotlight” revelations as the watershed moment in public consciousness about the church’s history of sexual abuse, which is kind of true. However, there had been major news reporting about serial abuse and cover-ups for almost two decades by that point—Gilbert Gauthe in Louisiana being one of the prominent “early” clerical abusers, who was convicted in 1984 for abusing over thirty children. By 1990, just months after Legs McNeil wrote his SPIN profile, HBO premiered a documentary specifically about Gauthe. So it is fundamentally not true that the public didn’t know what was going on when Sinéad O’Connor took action. But that didn’t prevent Madonna and Joe Pesci from mocking and publicly joking about assaulting O’Connor without repercussion.

O’Connor ultimately found a safe haven in Islam. Her mentor, Shaykh Umar Al-Qadri, recalled her as “a wonderful person with a blessed soul,” who found a measure of peace in her new spiritual home. In her own words, she described her 2018 conversion as a “reversion”—because, as a lifelong theologian, “Islam feels like home.”

(Image source: Gus Stewart for Redferns)

Back in the 90s, countless headlines speculated about whether O’Connor was “crazy.” In 2020, Liza Lentini wrote retrospectively about “Saint Sinead” for SPIN and said that she was like “a lamb to the slaughter”—which of course in Christian-speak is a euphemism for calling her messianic. Lentini also compared her to Joan of Arc.

As with the saints, it’s enticing to sanitize her life and talk about how talented and brave she was without also remembering how scary she could be—her “menace,” as Amsterdam put it. Joan of Arc, a warrior who had visions and claimed to have been chosen by God, must also have been terrifying at times. In most iconography, she is cast in stone as dignified and stoic—but she was so much more than that. So as tempting as it is to canonize Sinéad O’Connor in death, and domesticate her memory, she deserves so much more than being retrospectively transfigured into a Francis of Assisi birdbath. Her dangerous memory needs to be protected, because so much of what made her prophetic was bound up in how badly the world treated her in life—and that should continue to implicate us, even as we grieve her departure.

Jack Lee Downey is John Henry Newman in Roman Catholic Studies at the University of Rochester. He is co-creator of Desolate Country, an experimental digital mapping project that tracks the history of clerical abuse in the United States.

The post I Want to Be Haunted by the Ghost appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image of a “Blue Mass” for the police. Image source: CBP photo by Jaime Rodriguez, Sr.)

In Stone Mountain, Georgia, a hulking police officer in riot gear fist bumps a militia member carrying an assault rifle during a far-right rally. Elsewhere, during a protest against police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a voice from a loudspeaker on an armored police vehicle broadcasts a message to militia members: “We appreciate you guys. We really do.”

These images of police fraternization with right-wing groups in the summer of 2020 brought the intimacy of American law enforcement and militias back to the public’s attention. The massive Black Lives Matter protests of that summer provoked far-right counter demonstrations and armed militia men claiming to assist the police. This relationship is not peculiar to the present day: the overlap between state security forces and irregular countersubversive militias was visible in the Red Summer of 1919 and the U.S. supported-mass killings of leftists and ethnic minorities in Indonesia in 1965.

In the United States, the relationship between the police and the far right has a long history, one that is entangled with the history of Christianity. Catholic churches in east coast cities have conducted Blue Masses, special church services dedicated to the police since the early decades of the 20^th century. In recent years, Evangelical outreach to law enforcement has taken the form of police-themed devotional retreats and the publication of police-centric Bibles. These phenomena past and present signal a symbiotic relationship between two institutions that see themselves as guardians of the traditional moral order.

Paranoia over perceived challenges to conservative Christianity’s comingling with the police has given rise to fascist organizing inside and outside of police departments. During the attempted coup on January 6^th, 2021, some police officers participated in the insurrection or leaked intelligence to the Proud Boys even as the Capitol Police were left exposed to the crowd’s violence. Throughout the country, police leadership have become aware of neo-Nazi infiltration within their ranks, but it remains incredibly difficult to remove these officers from the force. One persistent factor has been the inability of the police to police itself when it comes to far-right infiltration. The question of whether this is a bug or a feature of law enforcement remains relevant and suggests that looking to earlier contexts could be instructive.

(Image source: Elijah Nouvelage for Reuters)

From the summer of 1939 through February 1940, the New York City Police Department dealt with allegations from local residents and journalists that a Catholic fascist organization, the Christian Front, had broad support among the department’s rank-and-file. The Christian Front and its offshoots subjected Black and Jewish New Yorkers to frequent harassment and violence. Examining journalistic coverage of this phenomenon from New York’s Black and Jewish communities reveals serious concern over the NYPD’s white Catholic identity as fascism was spreading through Europe and into the United States. Given that the NYPD’s personnel was largely Catholic and that a fascist Catholic organization targeted those police for recruitment, how did reporters for Black and Jewish newspapers understand Catholicism’s role in this situation?

An early warning of the cozy relationship between the police and the Christian Front came in an article by James Wechsler in the July 22, 1939 issue of The Nation titled “The Coughlin Terror.” Wechsler reported on the violent influence of radio celebrity Father Coughlin across New York City. Coughlin, a Catholic priest based out of Royal Oak, Michigan, pushed antisemitic conspiracy theories, pro-Axis propaganda from Germany, Spain, and Italy, and Christian nationalism to millions on the airwaves and in his weekly newspaper, Social Justice. It was in the pages of this weekly that Coughlin’s East Coast emissary, the Brooklyn-based Father Edward Lodge Curran, called for the formation of a “Christian Front” to counter the anti-fascist Popular Front, a temporary alliance between Communists, socialists, and progressive liberals. Coughlin enthusiastically promoted this idea of militant Christians organizing together to use “the Franco way” to oppose “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

Across New York City, Social Justice salespeople harassed and abused Jews and leftists in subway cars, on subway platforms, and at major intersections. The Christian Front and an offshoot, the Christian Mobilizers, held street meetings proclaiming a cosmic battle between the Body of Christ and the Body of Satan. The appearance of these far-right Christian groups prompted condemnation from Jewish and Catholic intellectuals. One group of prominent New Yorkers, including Hubertus zu Loewenstein, Dorothy Parker, and Franz Boas, brought out the magazine Equality to be sold on the street as a direct refutation of Social Justice.

(Front page of Social Justice, September 1939. Image source: University of Detroit Mercy)

This war of words sparked physical violence on the streets and in subways throughout the summer of 1939, and it was at this point that the NYPD became part of the story. In “The Coughlin Terror,” Wechsler quoted anti-Coughlin protestors who said they did not feel protected by the police. Instead, they were told that there were thousands of members of the Christian Front in the police department and that soon they would “resign from the force and…settle the question our way.” Wechsler assured his readers that this was not “a blanket indictment” of the police. Nonetheless, a memo from the American Jewish Committee confirmed widespread police indifference to violence against anti-Coughlin protesters. The situation became urgent and required oversight from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

The impact of “The Coughlin Terror” rippled through New York City’s Yiddish presses. Two days later The Forward, the social-democratic Yiddish paper with the largest circulation in the country, adapted and commented on Wechsler’s piece. It was accompanied by an editorial “Duty of the Police—Nothing More,” urging Mayor La Guardia to insure police impartiality and fairness. The Forward’s editors were impatient with La Guardia for his unwillingness to crack down on Christian Front rallies across the city, which the mayor understood to be the free exercise of First Amendment rights. What they could not have known was that since April 1939, La Guardia had directed the NYPD’s Alien Squad to monitor Christian Front meetings. And the NYPD was not the only police agency focusing on the Christian Front; in December 1939, the FBI arrested 18 members of the group in Brooklyn for conspiring to overthrow the government. Two months later, in February of 1940, NYPD Commissioner Valentine ordered the rank and file of the NYPD to fill out a questionnaire to determine whether officers and employees were members of the Communist Party, the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, or the Christian Front. Initial reports from the FBI suggested that over one thousand NYPD personnel belonged to the Christian Front. On February 15^th, La Guardia released a statement that the majority of the department had completed the survey. Twenty-seven officers admitted to still being Front members and would have to quit the organization. La Guardia explained that the 407 officers who had been involved with the Front had done so under the mistaken impression that the Front was a religious organization and not a far-right political group. Once the officers realized the extremity of the Christian Front, he said, they quit.

A questionnaire, even with a high response rate, hardly qualified as a thorough internal investigation. The Yiddish press was not impressed. Hundreds of police officers had admitted to membership, after all. The Anarchist Fraye Arbayter Shtime [Free Voice of Labor] lamented the missed opportunity to “clean out” the right-wing “infestation” of the police. They believed this left the department as a “toy [shpilzeyg] in the hands of fascist bandits.” The situation meant that “decent people” [onshtendike menshn] would be obliged to organize their own self-defense since they could not rely on the police.

Perhaps the most intense example of improvised Jewish self-defense came in Newark, New Jersey, where the Christian Front and the German-American Bund were thriving. Local crime boss Abner “Longie” Zwillmann had recruited boxer Nat Arno in 1933 to organize a Jewish self-defense paramilitary, the Minutemen. Most likely these were not the “decent people” who the Yiddish paper had in mind, but the Minutemen battled fascists and faced off against police in their effort to discourage antisemitic political groups from expanding their foothold in Newark.

Refusing to be put on the defensive over the Christian Front’s relationship with the police department, Social Justice counter-attacked with a conspiracy theory of Communists taking over the NYPD. “The Christian stalwarts” and “blue coated warriors” in the NYPD were not at fault, but instead Mayor La Guardia and his head of the Civil Services Commission, Paul Kern. Kern had instituted a policy of awarding merit points for officers earning college credits. Robert Moses was Kern’s fierce rival and leaked information about the merit program. Social Justice ran with the story, reporting that Kern was establishing a secret police force patterned after the Soviet OGPU, disempowering the “boys from Cork and Galway and Yorkshire and Bavaria and Calabria” in favor of students from City College of New York, an institution known for its Jewish student body and left-wing politics.

New York City’s Black newspapers refuted the conspiracy theory. The New York Age reported on September 30, 1939 that Coughlin’s assertion that Communists were taking over the NYPD was “a campaign…aimed at barring Negroes and Jews from the New York City Police Department.” What’s striking about this statement is that Social Justice nowhere directly includes references to Black police recruits; its racial animus is explicitly directed against hypothetical Jewish recruits. And yet it is clear that the good Christians of the NYPD, according to Social Justice, were whites with European ancestry. This is not to say that Social Justice did not promote anti-Black racism in other stories it published, but it was not directly at the center of this one.

Claims that Kern’s program endangered Christian white ethnic domination of the NYPD were grossly exaggerated. Of the last round of candidates who qualified for the civil service in 1939, one third were Jews and five percent were African Americans. La Guardia’s reforms attempted to integrate the NYPD, but the results left Black police officers clustered in Black neighborhoods without any chance for promotion, preserving the racial hierarchy of the department.

Violence between white Catholics, especially Catholic police officers, and Black New Yorkers was nothing new, going back to the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1905, and provoked more recent unrest such as in Harlem on March 19, 1935. But the Christian Front was a new phenomenon. The New York Age reported attacks on Black youth in Washington Heights and called for a stronger Black police presence in August of 1939, even if the editors were normally against the segregation of Black police. Throughout the summer of 1939, the Black Communist Crusader Press Agency reporter Eugene Gordon counted at least five “Coughlinite” assaults on Black New Yorkers around Riverside Drive.

By and large, the stance of both Black and Jewish newspapers was that Coughlin and the Christian Front were not authentic representatives of Catholicism. In his column for the Amsterdam News, W.E.B Du Bois referred to Coughlin’s paramilitaries as “The Un-Christian Front.” Black papers mounted sharp criticism of the Catholic Church’s failures in opposing Jim Crow, lynching, and racial segregation in New York City, but they did not treat Coughlin as its legitimate representative.

Yiddish newspapers such as The Forward and the Communist Morgen Frayhayt also sought to marginalize Coughlin’s position in the Catholic Church, pointing out that prominent Catholics such as Cardinal Mundlein of Chicago and theologian John Ryan had denounced the radio priest. That did not mean, however, that they failed to take Coughlin’s power among Catholics seriously. Yiddish papers used the threat of the Christian Front to educate their readers about Catholic history and sociology, continuing the Jewish tradition of producing reliable representations of gentile communities in New York City for the purpose of navigating dangerous terrain.

The most striking example of this is the journalist A. Alterson’s weekly series that ran in the summer of 1939 in the Morgen Frayhayt,“Conversations with Catholic leaders.” Alterson interviewed local priests about Coughlin and the Christian Front. One priest, Father DeMaria, urged Jewish leaders to do more to counter antisemitic propaganda and, in the same conversation, asked Alterson if it were really true that all Jewish girls were sexually promiscuous. When a stunned Alterson asked the priest where he had heard such a thing, DeMaria sheepishly replied that a local police officer had told him. Another priest asserted that while forceful suppression was justified against “Godless Jews, the Bolsheviks,” the rest should be left alone.

Despite witnessing this frank affirmation of violence, Alterson maintained that outreach to Catholic clergy was all the more worthwhile because of the priests’ enormous influence in their parishes. Even more promising were his conversations with progressive Catholic activists, such as the Committee of Catholics to Combat anti-Semitism and the Catholic Worker Movement, who were organizing and publishing against Catholic antisemites locally and nationally. Writing for a radical Jewish audience, Alterson’s point was that many Catholics felt threatened by Coughlin and that Jewish-Catholic solidarity was possible, however unlikely it may have first appeared.

By spring 1940, the NYPD/Christian Front scandal seemed to evaporate, as the Justice Department’s case against the 17 accused Christian Front conspirators fell apart due to prosecutorial incompetence. After the acquittal of the 17 defendants in June 1940 it seemed like the Christian Front was a non-story, or if it were a story, it was about government overreach rather than impending fascist takeover. Indeed, historian Leo Ribuffo coined the term “the Brown Scare” to describe liberals’ exaggeration of the domestic far right’s danger to national security that justified FDR’s empowerment of the FBI to monitor and suppress isolationists in the buildup to the U.S.’s entry into WWII. Initially this targeted the right; after WWII, however, state power would busy itself with the infiltration and destruction of the left.

Eighty years later the specter of fascist conspiracy makes for good edutainment in the wake of the Trump presidency. The popularity of Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra, covering Nazi plots and the Christian Front, attests to this. The problem, according to labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, is that the domestic far right has become far stronger now than it ever was in the 1930s, and it got that way not through conspiracies but by building institutional power in the U.S. government, the kind of power deployed by J. Edgar Hoover in his counter-subversive dragnet.

And yet, the Christian Front’s attempts to recruit, infiltrate, or at least win the sympathy of the NYPD reveal the close proximity of the conspiratorial, street-level, and institutional forms of right-wing power. The Front did not cease to be a problem for the NYPD or for other police forces on the East Coast. During the Brooklyn sedition trial, John F. Cassidy testified that 500 NYPD officers had applied for membership in the Christian Front in Brooklyn alone. In April 1940, the FBI notified the mayor of Newark that 30 members of the Police Department were members of the Front. Mayor Ellenstein took over the Department and demoted and reassigned approximately 50 officers. Meanwhile, Boston’s police department turned a blind eye to intense antisemitic violence throughout the 1940s.

In 1943, the issue of NYPD tolerance of antisemitic violence reappeared as patrolman James Drew was accused of associating with the Christian Mobilizers and possessing seditionist Christian Front literature. Drew was acquitted and even appeared on La Guardia’s weekly radio broadcast, prompting outrage from local Jewish communities who were facing an uptick in street violence and racist graffiti on synagogues, schools, and shops. Despite persistent complaints from residents about antisemitic violence, neither the local police nor the New York Catholic archdiocese was inclined to take the situation seriously. La Guardia ordered the formation of a special division to combat antisemitism in the city after constant pressure from Jewish community members. It was in this same period, in 1944, when the violence reached such a crescendo in Washington Heights that local Catholic priests finally agreed to appear at an interfaith rally to condemn the attacks.

***

Fascist organizing and state violence feed off of each other, in the 1930s and in the present. One contributing factor is that the police are hardly monolithic. In New York some local precincts refused to take a firm hand against Christian-Front aligned street violence, even as another division of the NYPD was surveilling the Christian Front. That division, the “Alien Squad,” then opted not to share the intelligence it gathered with the FBI when the bureau was investigating the Front. The bureaucratic divisions and internal rivalries in U.S. law enforcement played a part in the duration of Christian Front activities. Moreover, the lack of political will to scrutinize the conditions that enabled Christian Front recruitment inside the NYPD left room for subsequent iterations of far-right organizing, such as the John Birch Society, the Law Enforcement Group (L.E.G.), and later, the Oath Keepers.

The story of the Christian Front and the NYPD represents both continuity and rupture in the police’s relationship with the far right. Then, as now, it remains difficult for the police to deal with far-right recruitment in their ranks. Church support for policing remains strong even as the power and influence of institutional Christianity has since waned. This combined with growing critical scrutiny of the police may even contribute to a closer relationship between the leadership of church and state security forces as both understand themselves to be pillars of the traditional moral order. The decline of the Yiddish press, the Black press, and local news in general represents a sharp contrast between the present and the New-Deal-era USA, not to mention an impoverishment of fine-grained local reporting and commentary. All the papers here display some level of ambivalence about policing. The Black papers, The New York Age in particular, wanted to see Black New Yorkers integrate the NYPD to build successful careers and influence city affairs, but they also never stopped reporting on police violence. The Forward urged neutrality and duty on the part of law enforcement while recognizing the weakness of the mayor’s efforts at oversight. Anarchist and Communist papers were more cynical (and arguably realistic) about the tight relationship between far-right groups and the police, but that alone did not entail abolitionism.

The far right’s attitude was somewhat less complicated, despite some rocky moments in its relationship with law enforcement. Social Justice consistently lavished praise on the police, and even after the Brooklyn trial Coughlin expressed sympathy for Hoover and his men, portraying them as the unwilling tools of unscrupulous politicians. The rank-and-file Fronters expressed their resentment of NYPD surveillance during street meetings but even this criticism was tempered by an apparent faith in the beat cops’ sympathy with their cause. The Christian Front recognized the necessity of the police for implementing their vision of an authoritarian, white-supremacist Christian state. Their hopes for swift realization of this project were obviously frustrated. But that goal remains central to far-right ambitions to this day. And sympathetic law enforcement personnel remain in high demand.

Klaus Yoder is a historian of Christianity and a podcaster for Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History of the Devil. He teaches in the Religion Department at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

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(Image by Riccardo Antimani)

Ten years into his papacy, Pope Francis has delivered a lot of apologies for clergy abuse. Most recently, during his trip to Portugal for World Youth Day in August, Francis met with survivors of abuse on his first day in the country. Earlier this year, a panel looking into the Portuguese church’s history of abuse found that more than 4,800 children may have been abused by Catholic clergy between 1950 and today. So the pope traveled to Portugal to apologize once again. But are the pope’s apologies actually good apologies? And what makes an apology worthwhile in the face of something as grim as clergy abuse?

As has repeatedly been the case elsewhere, the church hierarchy in Portugal downplayed and hid its abuse issues for decades. The church has paid a price for this, both literally in the form of payments to abuse victims, and figuratively in terms of the shrinking number of Catholics. Like many other European countries, Portugal has seen a decline in the number of practicing Catholics in the past few decades, and its abuse inquiry may exacerbate that decline.

After an hour-long meeting with victims, the pope said that “it is often accentuated by the disappointment and anger with which some people view the church, at times due to our poor witness and the scandals that have marred her face and call us to a humble and ongoing purification.” While the pope has repeatedly acknowledged the anger and suffering of abuse victims, there’s a lack of specificity in this statement about what actions the church will take in Portugal. Bishop José Ornelas, the head of the Portuguese Bishops Conference, said in February of this year that abuse “is an open wound which pains and embarrasses us.” It’s true that both the pope and Ornelas’ statements acknowledge that victims have suffered and that the church has done wrong. But is acknowledgment really an apology?

In January of this year, Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy published a book called Sorry, Sorry, Sorry: The Case for Good Apologies. The authors, who run a website tracking bad public apologies called SorryWatch.com, drew on psychology, sociology and law to come up with a six step process toward what they define as a good or worthwhile apology. The steps they offer include using the word “sorry” in your apology, being specific about what you’re apologizing for, showing you understand why it was bad, not making excuses, saying why it won’t happen again, and making reparations. If we apply this formula to most apologies for clergy abuse, we might get as far as number 1, after which many churches skip to #6 and offer a payment in order to move the problem along. Or, as has lately happened with increasing frequency, church dioceses declare bankruptcy to avoid paying reparations.

This is why many victims of clergy abuse cannot and should not offer forgiveness. An insincere, weak, or poorly formulated apology followed by an offer of money that is meant to essentially get them to go away does not facilitate any kind of psychological or spiritual healing, but instead sweeps the problem under the rug, and doesn’t guarantee the same thing won’t happen again in the future. The Greater Good Center at U.C. Berkeley explains that, in their research on forgiveness, one key element of a meaningful apology is explaining why an offense happened, “especially to convey that it was not intentional.” But when it comes to clergy abuse, the problem is that it is almost always intentional. No person in power abuses someone else by mistake.

***

After revelations of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention rocked America’s largest evangelical denomination, leaders of the church gathered in Anaheim, CA in 2022 to draft a series of reforms to try and prevent future abuse. Pastor Griffin Gullege said that in many cases, rather than apologizing, Baptist pastors who abused congregants and church staff would only admit to a “moral failing” before resigning, thus avoiding any consequences. The “resolution of lament and repentance” they drafted ultimately read, in part, that the SBC leadership:

“publicly apologize to and ask forgiveness from survivors of sexual abuse for our failure to care well for survivors, for our failure to hold perpetrators of sexual abuse adequately accountable in our churches and institutions, for our institutional responses which have prioritized the reputation of our institutions over protection and justice for survivors, and for the unspeakable harm this failure has caused to survivors through both our action and inaction.”

Unlike many of the apologies offered by the Catholic church, this statement at least admitted wrongdoing and did not offer excuses. But it never gave any specific next steps, nor did it explain why this abuse, the scale of which is still being investigated, was allowed to go on for so long. The scale of the abuse cover ups led to Russell Moore, one of the denomination’s most prominent public figures, to resign in disgust, and to refer to the abuse as apocalyptic for Southern Baptists.

In failing to be specific about next steps, the apology gave the SBC loopholes to return abusive pastors to the pulpit. Just a few months after it was issued, former SBC president Johnny Hunt, who was named as an abuser in the investigation, was cleared by the denomination to return to pastoral work.

***

Why are so many clergy apologies hollow and meaningless? The answer is connected to the concept of clericalism, which in the Catholic church has repeatedly been linked to the history of abuse. The Association of U.S. Catholic Priests issued a whitepaper in 2019 unpacking what clericalism means. Essentially, clericalism upholds the idea that clergy are special or above the laity to the degree that they aren’t questioned, or that they become so isolated that it can enable abuse. But this has dire consequences for both clergy and laypeople. For clergy, it can lead to narcissism, which in turn allows them to feel they can get away with, for example, spending thousands of dollars of parishioner’s donations on travel, remodeling rectories, or in the case of one bishop, providing cash gifts to Vatican higher ups.

Clericalism can also allow clergy to feel they can abuse people and not need to apologize for it. In some cases, parents tell children to “never question a priest,” which sounds like a red flag to many of us, but is a behavior that still persists today  in many churches. In the Catholic church, the shrinking number of seminarians means young priests can have their egos inflated by leadership and laity alike, which too can lead to their feeling that they don’t owe anyone apologies.

This isn’t just a Catholic church problem. The Secrets of Hillsong documentary, which aired earlier this summer, revealed that Fred Houston, who founded the evangelical megachurch in Australia in 1983, and Brian Houston, his son who helped grow the church into an international evangelical powerhouse, may have both sexually abused women. Brian Houston is currently  being charged with covering up his father’s abuse. But this was somewhat overshadowed by the downfall of Hillsong’s “hypepriest,” American pastor Carl Lentz, known for his tattoos, pricey sneakers, and friendships with celebrities from Justin Bieber to Kanye West. Lentz, who participated in the documentary, is being accused of sexual abuse by at least two women, accusations he claims are “categorically false.” Because of the scandal, Lentz was fired from Hillsong in 2020.

The apologies offered by both Lentz and Brian Houston are vague, and once again allow both men the loopholes they need if they someday want to return to ministry. In the documentary, Lentz says “I let down, genuinely, a lot of good people, and I can only apologize and change.” But how he will change and what that means in the case of the women and staff members he’s accused of abusing remains unclear. In terms of Brian Houston, who resigned from the church in 2022, Hillsong issued an apology the same year in which they stated that “we apologize unreservedly to the people affected by Pastor Brian’s actions and commit to being available for any further assistance we can provide.” In both cases, it’s unclear what, exactly, these two former pastors are going to do, and even more unclear what Hillsong will do.

Watching the Hillsong documentary, it’s easy to play armchair psychologist and see that both Houston and Lentz display characteristics of narcissism, which includes a grandiose sense of self-importance along with a lack of empathy and a tendency to use other people to the narcissist’s advantage. That same description might be applied to any number of Catholic or Southern Baptist Convention clergy who were abusers as well. And it’s likely that a narcissist cannot issue a meaningful apology because, given their ego inflation, they cannot see they have done anything wrong. Denial, excuses, and deflection are easier than owning up to abuse, explaining why it happened, and offering reparations.

Because abuse is so often about power, clergy abusers find it challenging to offer a good apology. Because apologizing means humbling yourself, it also means voluntarily letting go of the power you hold over other people. Clericalism doesn’t allow this to happen. But the exodus of believers from the Catholic church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and megachurches led by abusers like Hillsong, along with a series of shallow apologies may be enough to humble their leadership. That doesn’t guarantee their apologies will get any better. But at least more people will be aware they are owed one, and the more a meaningful apology is demanded, the more one might someday be offered.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post What Makes an Apology Worthwhile? appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

With Yom Kippur on the horizon, I have been thinking about apologies and accountability. According to the Jewish tradition, a person must seek out anyone they wronged in the past year to ask for forgiveness before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. According to the rabbis, not even God has the power to forgive someone for something they did to another person; only the aggrieved can grant forgiveness. But the rabbis also teach that no one is required to forgive if they do not believe an apology is genuine or if they do not think the harmful behavior will cease.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

I was reflecting on these ideas while I followed coverage of the Parliament of World Religions that took place a few weeks ago in Chicago. The event is a gathering of religious leaders from around the globe; the first such assembly took place in 1893. At this year’s conference, several people came together for a ceremony to repent for what humans have done to the planet. They offered prayers, engaged in rituals, and vowed to address the climate crisis. But, unsurprisingly, no one was at the ceremony who could receive the apology. And, really, who could take on that role? Children who will grow up on a different planet because of the climate crisis? Families who have lost loved ones to wild fires, extreme heat, or hurricanes? And just as there was no one to receive the group’s repentance, the clergy’s vows to combat climate change lacked what we desperately need, namely action from CEOs, government leaders, and large institutions. Reducing individuals’ carbon foot print, while worth cutting wherever possible, will not save us. We need to hold corporations and politicians accountable and demand large-scale action. They owe the apologies and they need to change their destructive behaviors. And none of us should be in a rush to grant them forgiveness.

With these thoughts in mind, this issue of The Revealer is about holding institutions, and the people who run them, accountable. The September issue opens with the newest installment of Kaya Oakes’s “Not So Sorry” column with “What Makes an Apology Worthwhile,” where she questions if the apologies offered by the Vatican and the Southern Baptist Convention over decades of abuse suggest that things will change in the future. Next, in “Catholic Fascists in the NYPD, 1939-1940,” Klaus Yoder looks at the relationship between religion, rightwing militias, and police departments and what a concerning incident from New York City’s police department decades ago can teach us about today. Then, in “I Want to Be Haunted by the Ghost,” Jack Downey offers an obituary of Sinéad O’Connor and reflects on her relationship with religion and her determination to hold institutions responsible for their sins. After that, in “Homegoing,” Lynne Gerber interviews Ashon Crawley about Crawley’s exhibit at the National Mall that honors the people that many churches condemned: Black, queer musicians with AIDS. Following that, in “Songs of Zion,” Mari Joerstad considers how a biblical passage, Psalm 137, might help us think about the connections between white supremacy and violence against children. And, in “Spiritual Reproductive Services,” an excerpt from the book Sacred Pregnancy, Ann W. Duncan explores how pregnant people are seeking out support that they aren’t finding in traditional medical or religious communities.

The September issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “The Spiritual Birthing Movement.” Ann Duncan joins us to discuss the organizations and businesses that imbue pregnancy with a sense of the sacred. We explore what these groups offer pregnant people that they aren’t finding in conventional medical settings or traditional religious communities, how they use rituals to help people cope with pregnancy, parenting, and the loss of a child, and what the presence of these companies reveals about social inequalities among pregnant people throughout the United States today. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As Yom Kippur approaches, I find myself thinking about one more aspect of the day. While in synagogue, Jews across the world will recite the Viddui prayer, a long public confession. Strikingly, the prayer is not written in language of individual atonement. Instead, most of the prayer is in the first-person plural: “We have sinned by…” The ancient rabbis wanted to instill the idea that our lives are intertwined. Each person may not have done everything mentioned in the prayer, but we exist as a collectivity and the rabbis believed we should hold one another accountable in order to repair what is broken in the world. A similar lesson can be found in several of the articles in this issue. Whether it is religious communities that have covered up abuse, government entities that have overlooked rightwing infiltration in policing, or media that reinforces white supremacy, we must consider if we played a part in supporting those institutions, how we can hold them accountable, and what we should do if they do not correct their damaging ways. These are difficult, but necessary, things to do. And, so, I close with something the rabbis wrote in the Talmud: “It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task of repairing the world. But neither may you refrain from starting it.”

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

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