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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Muslims Using Female Pronouns for God.”

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

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Reagan’s Religious Vision for America and Its Legacy Today.”

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The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 37: Reagan’s Religious Vision for America and the Impact Today appeared first on The Revealer.

(President Reagan at a prayer breakfast in Dallas, Texas. Image source: American Rhetoric)

The following excerpt comes from the book Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision” by Diane Winston (published by the University of Chicago Press © 2023 by The University of Chicago. All Rights Reserved). The book explores how the media normalized Reagan’s evangelical vision for the country.

This excerpt introduces readers to Reagan’s “religious imaginary,” his fusion of evangelical Christianity, neoliberal economics, and conservative politics.

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A religious imaginary expresses a commonsensical, collective understanding of what matters and why. It accomplishes this by integrating metaphysical truths, ethical norms, and civic virtues into the core convictions and salient images defining a good citizen and a good society. In turn, these notions are expressed as a lived religion, the ways in which people enact ultimate concerns in their daily activities. These can range from preparing a Sabbath meal to confronting a cyberbully to participating in a Bible study group to voting. Daily activities both reflect and strengthen a religious imaginary; engaging in the activity reinforces the conviction, and the conviction gives meaning to the activity.

During the Reagan era, the specifics of the nation’s predominant religious imaginary shifted. Rooted in white Protestantism, the imaginary stipulates that America is special to God. Although other religious imaginaries reflect the theology and worldview of their faith groups’ relationship to the United States, the social, cultural, and political dominance of white Protestantism gives its imaginary preeminence. That’s why Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and even nonbelievers can have their own religious worldview yet also accept the confluence of religion, politics, and economics that defines the white Protestant imaginary.

Reagan did not set out to shift the religious imaginary; the very term likely would have puzzled him. But his core convictions, which contrasted with the principles that had guided the country since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, resonated with many Americans. Reagan put their fears, hopes, and desires into words. Those words, circulated by the news media, became tangible, and their expression—in everyday life as well as in governmental policies—altered how many Americans understood their civic identity and personal responsibilities. Reviving the conservative vision of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan called for less government and more individual accountability. Once elected, he converted these ideas into neoliberal policies. Ideologically, neoliberalism was a departure from the welfare liberalism espoused by Democrats since Roosevelt’s New Deal. Both ideologies support individual liberty and freedom, but the latter accepts restraints, such as regulations on business and a strong central government, to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens. Neoliberalism, in the name of maximizing individual freedom, advocates limited federal power and an unfettered marketplace, without concern for the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens. As a lived religion, or set of everyday practices for meaning making, neoliberalism is expressed through the logic and practices of the market. Under Reagan, these political and economic practices overlapped with expanding segments of American religion—specifically, conservative evangelicalism and the prosperity gospel. Decades before Reagan’s election, conservative Christian pastors and businessmen had asserted the connections among democracy, Christianity, and capitalism. Now the American president was singing the same tune while the news media circulated the lyrics.

The Reaganite religious imaginary rested on two convictions that were part of a conservative Protestant worldview: America is an exceptional country because it is God’s chosen nation, and God wants Americans to be free. The former validated America’s role as a world leader, and the latter confirmed the sanctity of the individual, made in God’s image, as a free agent. Over the centuries, successive generations shaped the divine covenant to reflect and to be reflected in the political and social currents of their day. Specifically, the Protestant religious imaginary has moved between poles of collective responsibility and of self-reliance. While the fundamentals of American identity remain the same—godly people doing God’s work in God’s country—public opinion and government policy mirrored changing perspectives on the philosophical and practical framework of a good and godly society. The Protestant imaginary, the shared framework for this virtuous society, has been communicated through news and entertainment media, textbooks and sermons, laws and legal rulings. It is embedded in daily life and manifested in everyday decisions ranging from hanging the flag on the Fourth of July, to promoting or opposing school prayer, to sending care packages to troops overseas.

Reagan and his supporters believed that America had lost its way: a bloated federal bureaucracy inhibited political freedom; an expanding welfare state choked the economy; government entitlements thwarted individual accountability; and secular humanism suppressed religion’s role in public life. Left unchecked, these trends would lead to communism, according to the Reaganites. In their view, a new paradigm was needed to secure Americans’ material freedom and to safeguard their spiritual wellbeing. Even as they acknowledged their country’s distinctiveness, Reaganites were less concerned with its citizens’ collective welfare than with the individual’s ability to live as freely as possible. This notion of self-reliance, based in equal parts on an Emersonian belief in the sanctity and integrity of the individual and on the Protestant conviction of “the priesthood of all believers,” lies at the heart of the Reagan-era religious imaginary. Its highest expression was the formation of virtuous citizen-consumers, each in God’s image, participating in a democracy that sustains free markets and unregulated capitalism. Reagan expressed this worldview in the idiom of evangelical Protestantism, but his emphasis on personal freedom and economic gain attracted Christians across the theological spectrum as well as members of other faiths and even nonbelievers.

The linkage of political, economic, and religious allegiances is a longstanding American trope. The Jacksonian era’s commitment to political democracy, individual salvation, and an imminent Kingdom of God, the Gilded Age’s fascination with Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic beliefs out- lined in his essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” and the Progressives’ articulation of the Social Gospel all expressed Americans’ desire to align their civic project with a higher calling. In the 1970s, the vision inspired by the Social Gospel and enacted through the welfare state and plans for the Great Society succumbed to the Vietnam War, economic decline, political scandal, and social upheaval. But in the next decade, Reagan linked spiritual values to economic success, social stability, and military strength. In a religiously diverse yet secular society, the new formulation was both more and less explicitly Christian than earlier iterations. Reagan put evangelical particularism in service to universal goals, speaking directly to religious conservatives with a message that also held wide appeal. Evangelicals heard a message of faith-based politics, but non-evangelicals heard a candidate promise to “make America great.”

The success of Reagan’s Protestant imaginary depended on its spread through tabloids and magazines, and its reiteration on large screens and small. It was voiced in bingo halls and book clubs, in schoolrooms and boardrooms, and in churches and civic groups. Reagan spoke in an evangelical Christian register, but his message of free people living in an exceptional nation resonated with many Americans. The religious imaginary embraced core evangelical tenets, but it also spoke to men and women who cared more about money and markets than about school prayer or safeguarding traditional families. And as it penetrated newsrooms from the 1980s on, the imaginary became central to many of the stories that explained and organized everyday life.

(Image source: Everett Collection)

In the pre-digital era, reading the morning newspaper—or listening to a morning radio or television show—was a secular ritual. Repeated daily, it oriented news consumers to their world. By telling them what they needed to know, news outlets defined and structured a collective reality, creating “imagined communities”—masses of people who, though they might never meet, were nevertheless connected by shared narratives of what mattered and why.

Leaders seek to rally these imagined communities, and Reagan excelled at it. Once he had access to the mainstream press, his deeply felt assumptions about meaning, purpose, and identity—that is, his religious imaginary—were woven into the news. Tweaking public opinion by normalizing these narratives, the media played a role in the rise of the religious Right, the emergence of a “new” patriotism, and an ambivalent recognition that “greed is good,” the mantra of Gordon Gekko, the rapacious investor in the 1987 movie Wall Street. By helping set the nation’s vision and values, Reagan’s Protestant imaginary, relayed by the media, shaped the lived religion of the American people.

I have posited a Protestant religious imaginary that alternates between two poles. During the twentieth century, one of these gave rise to a Social Gospel–inflected welfare state, while the other culminated in a spiritualized neoliberalism. Just as the Social Gospel, a product of liberal Protestantism, had provided a religious frame for the New Deal and the subsequent rise of the welfare state, so conservative evangelicalism supplied a vocabulary and worldview for neoliberalism. During the Reagan era, conservative white evangelicals seized the cultural moment, obscuring the political moderation and social progressivism of other white and many Black coreligionists. As a result, evangelical became a synonym for white conservatives committed to having their religious beliefs dominate the public square and determine public policy. The story of why and how this happened hinges on the connections among the baby boomers’ spiritual seeking, a new kind of evangelicalism, the Reagan-era religious imaginary, the rise of evangelical mass media, and the mainstream news media.

Diane Winston is associate professor of journalism and Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the University of Southern California. She is the author or editor of several books, including Religion in Los Angeles: Religious Activism, Innovation, and Diversity in the Global City.

***

Interested more in this topic? Check out our conversation with Diane Winston in episode 37 of the Revealer Podcast: “Reagan’s Religious Vision for America and the Impact Today.”

The post Establishing Reagan’s Religious Outlook for the U.S. appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Internet Archive)

In the wake of World War II, several high-profile teen murder cases in the United States sparked a moral panic over juvenile delinquency. Popular psychology books like Dr. Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and congressional hearings placed the blame squarely on horror and crime comic books like Tales from the Crypt. Hoping to save themselves from lawsuits and government regulation, established publishers created the self-censoring Comics Code Authority, banning depictions of sexuality, violence, drug use, dead bodies, and even horror staples like vampires and werewolves, giving rise to the modern dominance of superhero comics in the United States.

Starting in the 1960s, a generation of cartoonists – including household names like Robert Crumb and future Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman – who had grown up on the now defanged medium sought to rebel against the status quo and U.S. obscenity law with independently printed and distributed work that pushed the envelope of what was possible and publishable. Exerting an outsized influence on the then-emerging counterculture, these “underground” cartoonists encouraged each other to create increasingly more radical, pornographic, and psychedelic comics.

Against this backdrop, in 1972, a 40-page story emerged that helped change the history of the medium, inspiring the modern genre of autobiographical comics with perhaps the first spiritual memoir in comic form. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by the late Justin Green (1945 – 2022) helped demonstrate that radical vulnerability and the confession of one’s most personal secrets can be even more transgressive and transformative – for oneself and others – than the shock value of hyperviolence and lurid sexuality.

Raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father outside Chicago in the 1950s, Green attended Catholic school for some of his most formative years and suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder for his entire life (enduring decades without a diagnosis). Attending the Rhode Island School of Design in an era where his talent for representational art was overlooked as “illustration” in favor of the then-in-vogue Abstract Expressionism, Green spent his senior year abroad in Rome hoping to find inspiration. Unable to connect with the (primarily religious) masterpieces of Renaissance art, he had an epiphany at a local newsstand when he encountered reprinted American underground cartoons for the first time. He couldn’t stop laughing.

After moving to San Francisco, Green began to experiment with cartooning, contributing to prominent anthologies like Arcade, Bijou Funnies, The Yellow Dog and Laugh in the Dark, where the character of Binky Brown, a stand-in for Green narrating humiliating moments from his early adolescence, first appeared. Following some initial positive reactions to the short material, Green set out to write a longer piece, spending seven months hanging Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary page by completed page on a clothesline in his apartment kitchen.

This comic would go on to become one of the most famous and influential of its era, jump-starting the now pervasive genre of autobiographical comics and, most recently, helping earn its creator posthumous induction into the Eisner Award Hall of Fame at the 2023 San Diego Comic Con this past July.

Binky Brown and The Virgin Mary

A religious memoir in the form of a confession under torture – the first panel shows a naked, blindfolded Green suspended upside down from the ceiling by his arms like an inquisition victim, drawing panels onto a blank page with a pen in his teeth – Binky Brown is a tale of sickness and coming of age that blends a child’s perspective on Catholic dogma with an obsessive drive toward superstition and ritual. A therapeutic working through of some of his strangest delusions, Green, “gets so close to some combination of religious fervor and psychosis that… you can’t take your eyes away from it,” underground comics scholar and author of Rebel Visions, Patrick Rosenkranz, said in conversation for this article.

Starting at age 13, about the age OCD symptoms typically manifest, the “story” of Binky Brown is a catalogue of the character’s neuroses – from his concern about the right way to walk down the stairs to whether the atomic bomb is in fact a sign of the impending Final Judgement. Riddled with paranoia and anxiety, one of the opening incidents involves Binky being chastised by his mother for accidentally breaking a Madonna statue. Obsessed with the concept of sin and searching for hidden signs of his salvation or damnation, like receiving a black gumball from a machine, one of the central questions of the text is posed by a panel caption as the protagonist sits in a confessional: Is Binky Brown “Anal Compulsive or Mystic”?

(Interior panel of Binky Brown. Image source: Artist’s Edition Index)

Perhaps the most famous image from Binky Brown comes in the form of the destructive “rays” which extend from Binky’s penis, fingers, and feet—all of which appear to Binky as phalluses. A visualization of Green’s truly felt but otherwise invisible delusion – explained in text through the metaphor of single point perspective in drawing – the threat of intersection between these rays and statues of the Virgin Mary and Catholic churches is both existentially terrible and implicitly erotic. His fear of his own libidinal power and the possibility of its offense against both God and the mother of God becomes an oppressive burden, limiting his ability to move, think, or even pray for fear that the rays from his penis fingers might point in the wrong direction.

The final pages of Binky Brown focus on the now 26-year-old protagonist living in San Francisco, still grappling with his symptoms. Finding himself at the mercy of a Virgin Mary statue outside the Mission Dolores, Binky attempts to break her hold over him once and for all. Stripping down to his underwear in a circle of a dozen mass-produced Madonna statues, he declares his hands to be hands, his penis to be a penis, and the statues to be “matter, which I shatter,” smashing all the idols except for one which he misses in his madness. Placing it on his window ledge, he pledges to construct new, healthier beliefs around this Virgin.

According to Green, this event, like most other incidents from the story, was based on a real attempted ritual cure for his symptoms. According to Rosenkranz in our interview, however, “It didn’t work.”

Binky Brown Between Heaven and Earth

One of the most striking elements of Binky Brown that made it so powerful for contemporary readers who had grown up Catholic was the degree to which Green’s delusions aligned with what they had been taught in church and Catholic school. As Green described in an interview with Patrick Rosenkranz in 1973, “According to the Catholic religion the Virgin Mary is a physical entity existing in heaven… this is what I was taught as a kid.”

In his book Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, religious studies scholar Robert Orsi discusses the notion of divine presence in the images and veneration of the Virgin Mary within the American Catholic worldview of the 1950s. Per his description, “The Virgin Mary transforms looking into a devotional activity,” because of the promise of her immediate presence to her faithful through objects and practices from recitations of the rosary to the mass produced statues and shrines scattered across suburban yards and car dashboards. To believers, the Virgin is both in heaven and in her images, watching over them like a mother would, serving both as a protective power as well as a reminder of purity and chastity.

In a sense, Green’s symptoms – informed and shaped by his Catholic education – were theologically correct but torturous to live with. As Orsi describes in his discussion of Catholic education in the period, “The making of the realness of a religious world is not a benign process; religious reality achieved in children’s bodies (and reverberating in the memories of the adults these children become) did not make the world safer for these children, more comforting, or… more meaningful. It made it real.”

This awful proximity to and presence of the divine, in the form of The Virgin Mary, not only drove Green from the church but to inscribe his experiences on paper. The truth is that Binky Brown is not just a confession of his neuroses and symptoms. It, like its iconoclastic climax, is an attempt at ritual exorcism to drive the internalized Virgin from his mind. As his wife and fellow cartoonist Carol Tyler told me, “[this] was his attempt to try to gain control over the power [of the iconic].”

Tarot As Talisman

In his 1973 interview with Patrick Rosenkranz, Green acknowledged that the first parts of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary he completed were its front and back covers. Both borrow and play with the symbolism of Tarot cards (which Green described as “a multidimensional textbook of the occult sciences written in universal picture symbols” in his contribution to the anthology Occult Laff Parade the same year).

On the front, the Virgin Mary stands over a kneeling, grimacing Binky, urging him to confess his impure thoughts as a flesh-colored serpent passes between his legs. Per Green, this scene invokes the imagery of the Strength card, which usually depicts a maiden holding the jaws of a lion open. On the back cover, Binky has been replaced by a lion wearing a mantle marked with the letter ‘B’ and which bites the Virgin on the leg, causing her to drop her mask and reveal a wolf-faced boogeyman beneath. In the background, lightning strikes and destroys the striped bucket sign of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, an allusion to the Tarot’s Tower card, and a rich recurring image for Green for whom the fast-food franchise seems to serve as a secular metaphor for the organized mediation of spiritual experience. In the comic, Binky draws a cartoon for class comparing the effect of confession on sin to making sausage in a meat grinder, and Green’s later graphic work more than once features a grinning Colonel Sanders cutting off chicken heads.

The deliberate use and inversion of Tarot symbolism can be read as a coded or even talismanic intent behind the project. With this confession, Binky (Green) seeks to strike back and break the power the Virgin holds over him. However, as Carol Tyler makes clear, “[Justin] did not hate the Virgin… He hated what was going on in his head.” In his own account from 1973, Green seems to agree with this assessment, saying both that the Virgin had become conflated with his feminine self and that “I was not seeing her at all for what she was, but that I had a demonic vision of her that stemmed from my demonic vision of woman.” This is what he hoped to expel from inside himself by sharing with others.

Unfortunately, as his wife says, “There’s no end to the story. In reality, there was no final thing and it was over. OCD is lifelong.” Describing their lives together decades later, she said that Green never fully got over his fear of harming the Virgin Mary, taking long, winding routes on drives to avoid contact with any statues of the Madonna.

Eroticism of the Wound

Strikingly, the depiction of Binky’s rays in Binky Brown can be seen as a reversal of the stigmata—the miraculous appearance of Christ’s wounds on the body of saints—often depicted in Renaissance art as lines extending from heaven or angels to a holy person’s body, as in Giotto’s painting Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata.

This allusion appears to be intentional or at least unconsciously implicit, as Green explained in 1973, “I think the origin of my rays was from the sensuality that I was unable to suppress in a Christ-like fashion … One of the strong panels was the sequence where I was running on the hill with newly formed rays asking how could I reconcile the fact that my god had nails through his hands and feet and I had rays from mine.”

The connection between sensuality and wounding continues elsewhere in the text. One of the most interesting pages shows Binky’s first orgasm, induced by scratching off a toy pig’s pink coating and exposing the black rubber underneath after seeing a painting of Custer’s Last Stand. Custer’s scalped head at the center of the page’s top panel forms a familiar shape in Christian iconography: the ovular, vaginal vesica piscis, often used as a frame around apparitions of the Virgin Mary or to depict the side wound of Christ.

The wound may be seen as a sign of openness, a peeling back of the protective dermis to arrive at the vital, vulnerable interior. From another perspective, it can symbolize the penetration and permeation of another power into the material. In Orsi’s estimation, the truth is somewhere in between the two: meaning seeks to create “a story that is said to link heaven and earth…” and “meaning making is wounding.” For Green, who repeatedly fears impregnating the Virgin Mary, his painful, wounding rays seem to symbolize the mystic act of being penetrated by and penetrating into the divine.

By holding open his metaphorical wounds and outlandish perceptions to outsiders, Green puts himself on display in a manner akin to a kind of perversion, allowing others to see the depths of both his suffering and psychospiritual conflict. In committing this radically transgressive act of confession, perhaps the most transgressive act of all, Green not only stood out from his contemporary peers, he helped inspire new genres and generations.

The After Life of Binky Brown

As Green told Rosenkranz in 1973, “Binky Brown is dead.” Though compelled to publish Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, once finished, the energy drained from him. Despite a few further Binky Brown strips, such as the one collected in 1976’s The Sacred & Profane, Green mostly moved onto other projects perhaps out of the worry, “I might come to be identified as the neurotic Catholic cartoonist… and that just isn’t true.”

Although Green, who died in April 2022, eventually took up sign painting as a full-time profession, he never left comics, contributing funny and insightful entries to many noted anthologies, including Comix Book (Marvel’s short-lived experiment in publishing some of the highest profile underground creators), as well as publishing a monthly comic on his life and observations as a sign painter in trade magazine Signs of the Times for more than 20 years. Though he would delve into related metaphysical and spiritual themes, notably in his surreal and symbolically rich We Fellow Traveleers series from the mid-1970s, he never delved into the same realms as personally again.

(Justin Green painting. Image source: The Comics Journal)

“He was embarrassed by that comic,” recalled his wife, perhaps because of how much of himself he put into it. Or, in Patrick Rosenkranz’s view, “[Green] didn’t want to hear any more [about Binky Brown]… in some ways he felt it was like an albatross around his neck.”

Comics as Confessional

Green was far from the first or last to confront religion in comic form, even among the undergrounds. Two of the earliest underground comics from 1964 were religious parodies, God Nose by Jack “Jaxon” Jackson and The Adventures of Jesus by Foolbert Sturgeon. In 1973, the year after Binky Brown’s publication, Robert Crumb and others put out the famous (and filthy) anthology Tales from the Leather Nun. Focused on mocking religion as another method of social control, these texts may have had personal roots but were ultimately uninterested in personal spiritual or psychological reflection. This self-analytic impulse, according to Art Spiegelman, creator of the Holocaust memoir comic Maus, was Green’s greatest innovation and where his influence on the medium can be felt most clearly to this day.

Spiegelman cites Green as critical to his own move from raunchy parodies like “The Viper” to intensely personal work like Prisoner on the Hell Planet, which dealt with the fallout of a bad acid trip as well as his mother’s suicide. He notes, “Justin turned comic book boxes into intimate, secular confession booths and thereby profoundly changed the history of comics.”

The impulse to examine and unpack the personal has taken on a rich life in comics over the last 50 years, inspired both by Green and those who followed him, from his contemporaries like Spiegelman and the late Aline Kominsky-Crumb to the work of Alison Bechdel in Fun Home or Joe Matt’s Peepshow. Still, perhaps the most direct continuation of Binky Brown came in 2003’s Blankets by Craig Thompson – a personal memoir of sexuality, abuse, young love, and being raised Evangelical.

Like Green, Thompson grapples with the problem of “how can sexuality be reconciled with piety,” and Blankets is ultimately the story of his loss of faith, serving as a confession to his parents as to how and why he left Evangelical Christianity. As religious studies scholar Ken Koltun-Fromm notes in his book Drawing On Religion, both texts are ultimately about their creators’ transition from a child’s conception of religion to an adult’s ideas and the displacement of self that takes place along the way. In a very real sense, the loss of the child-like reality of God is the same as the end of faith for many people. Both Blankets and Binky Brown serve to demonstrate the trauma of the start and end of faith, the loss of innocence, and the human need to redefine meaning for oneself.

For all its unusual focus on penis rays and obsessive ritual action, the impact of Binky Brown comes from its common emotional core. Where many other contemporary works are less immediate to modern audiences who no longer remember the Vietnam War, the Nixon Administration, and when Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was considered vulgar, Justin Green’s personal exploration of shame, faith, and mental illness has only grown in relevance. His insight and his belief in cartooning’s capacity not just to titillate but to serve as a medium of mystical therapy generated a new genre of confessional cartooning, combining memoir and exhibitionism into a kind of self-crucifixion where the revelation of one’s pain and trauma can become transcendence.

Andrew Lenoir is a Brooklyn-based writer and the proprietor of Ellipsis Rare Books. A graduate from Brown University with an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, his work has appeared in America Magazine, The Brown Journal of History, Lovecraftian Proceedings, Atlas Obscura, All That’s Interesting, Mental Floss, Fine Books and Collections Magazine, Screenrant as well as the anthology Arthur Machen: Critical Essays.

The post The Mystic Torment of Binky Brown appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: TAB Media)

The following excerpt comes from The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke. (© Kelsy Burke, 2022. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury USA.)

This excerpt explores an evangelical Protestant church program that promotes overcoming pornography viewership through an addiction-model of recovery and through strengthening one’s Christian faith.

***

I arrived at Prairie Christian Church on a warm and humid summer evening. My directions first took me to the south parking lot, which was full even though it wasn’t Sunday; there must have been an event in the main sanctuary. When I drove around to the other side of the megachurch complex, I found the north parking lot mostly empty, but I could see lights on in the rooms in the north wing. I later learned that most rooms are occupied seven days a week, from six in the morning until late in the evening. There, church members and visitors can attend small groups and classes on a wide range of topics, from finance to Bible study. This wing of the church also contained a day care and preschool. My invitation to the church had come from Cheryl, a thin, petite white woman in her fifties with dyed black hair and matching eyeliner. For nearly a decade, Cheryl had been leading Redeemed! (a pseudonym), which uses the twelve-step model of addiction recovery with explicitly Christian language to treat and support people wishing to quit a wide range of behaviors, from drug abuse to pornography use to codependency. For a decade before leading the group, she was a regular and active participant in it, rarely missing a weekly meeting. Every Friday, Redeemed! has its public meeting, and once a month the meeting is preceded by a potluck; on the night of my visit, the potluck featured grocery store deli fried chicken and a crock pot of enchiladas. Knowing I was researching pornography addiction, Cheryl invited me to come hear Phil give his testimony. Curious about my background, she asked me about my life: what kind of addictions I might be confronting and whether I wanted to join the weekly women’s group, which met after the general meeting. She shared with me that her ex-husband had been an alcoholic, but that she attended Redeemed! herself because she struggled with an addiction to codependency.

“Don’t we all?” I asked, half joking.

“Mmm,” Cheryl said. “Codependency is just human nature without God,” she said earnestly. According to her evangelical beliefs, we are all born as sinners who need Jesus Christ to save us. “There’s messiness everywhere,” she continued. “Relationships, broken people with lots of scars from their childhood, a lot of behavioral issues. Addictions come from the hurt places. People do screwy things.”

When conducting research observations, I answer questions posed to me as honestly as I can, but without giving away too many details about my personal life. This is as much for me as for my research subjects—I want both of us to remember my role as a researcher, not a fellow participant. Somehow on this night, though, I ended up telling Cheryl that my dad was a recovered alcoholic who had spent months at rehab when I was twelve and who hadn’t had a drink since. He had “worked the steps” and attended AA meetings for years. Sometimes, he would agree to be somebody’s sponsor, and I remember answering collect phone calls and being instructed to accept the charges and hand the phone over to my dad.

“Sober twenty years,” I shared with her. “Praise God,” she said.

I suddenly and unexpectedly teared up. Cheryl hugged me, and I hugged her back. Then we walked together into a small sanctuary for praise and worship and to hear Phil’s testimony.

A small band (drum set, electric guitar, and keyboard) led us in a few songs of praise and worship, with the lyrics projected onto a screen partially obscured by the guitarist’s head. After singing, Cheryl gave her thanks to the band, made a few announcements about upcoming events, and then introduced the night’s speaker.

“My name is Phil,” he began, after making his way to the podium at the front of the room. “I’m a believer, and I struggle with an addiction to pornography and video games.”

“Hi, Phil,” the audience responded.

Phil looked down at a stack of notes, clutched in a somewhat shaky hand, and told his story: “I have struggled with pornography from the time I was in, like, seventh grade up through the first few years of my marriage. I always knew it was a problem, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I talked to a pastor and other people, because I didn’t know what to do. They told me to stop, but I couldn’t stop. I was always functional, but it was poisoning me and my marriage and poisoning my relationship with God.”

Phil continued, explaining how he took a leap of faith and trusted God, whom he felt was telling him to turn down what seemed at the time like a good job offer. In hindsight, Phil could see that this was the right decision, a turning point in his life and on his road to recovery. He found a different and better job, he was able to improve his physical health and eliminate his chronic back pain, and a friend introduced him to Redeemed! “Up until that point, I wasn’t really sure what sobriety meant.” Redeemed! helped him, he said, commit to “no porn and no masturbation,” as he put it. Phil’s recovery was not a straight path. After five years attending Redeemed!, and finally eliminating porn from his life for good, he started to fill the gap with computer games. “It took me a while to realize that was also a problem, that it was just an alternative addiction.” But he was able to bring this issue to his Redeemed! “family,” as he called them, and use the program to help make sense of how he was using both porn and video games to cope with outside stressors and internal shame and guilt. To end his testimony, he shared how he had channeled his compulsive porn use and gaming into an activity that he believed both healthy and godly: “I’ve memorized one new Bible verse a day for about two years.”

This wasn’t the first time Phil shared his story with the group, but it was the first time he weaved together the different elements having to do with both pornography and video games. Later, in an interview, I asked Phil what it was like when he shared his testimony for the first time. “I remember it going really well,” he said, “but I remember reading it and, about halfway through, thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud to a group of people.’ But at that point, I was like, ‘Let’s just get this over with,’ and I did. I had a lot of people come up to me afterward and say, ‘That was really brave.’ I just felt really honest, and that felt really good.”

The reason Phil has stayed involved in Redeemed! for all these years is because he feels it is a place for him. It doesn’t matter that his addictions are not the same as those for people struggling with drugs or alcoholism. The focus of the group is on the recovery process, which is the same regard- less of the addictive behavior.

Googling “how to quit porn” will inevitably, and ironically, result in myriad pornographic images and video clips. But below these, one will likely find among the first search results an article from Covenant Eyes, titled “How to Quit Porn: 6 Essential Steps.” The tag line for Covenant Eyes is “Quit porn. Win at life.” First step: You must want to quit. Second step: You need to find a different way from the unsuccessful strategies of the past. Third step: You have to be honest with at least one other person. Fourth and fifth steps: You have to get rid of all your porn and stop new porn from coming in. Sixth and final step: You need a friend to help you stay on track. The subtext is, of course, “Have you tried Covenant Eyes?”

It’s convincing marketing that reinforces the problem it claims to solve. And the problem, according to company messaging, is a serious one. Covenant Eyes stresses the physical impact pornography has on your brain—at one antiporn conference, I picked up a brain-shaped stress ball with the company logo from a table of swag—and so, it makes the damage of porn seem physical and hard to reverse. All the more important to sign up for a subscription! It costs about as much as a monthly subscription to Netflix or Hulu, and it is pitched similarly: $15.99 per month for the family plan, which includes unlimited devices and up to twelve users. In 2019, the company reported annual earnings of over $26 million.

Covenant Eyes software doesn’t just block pornographic content (though it does that, too, through a convenient “add-on” feature, for an additional fee); it also tracks websites that are used each day and then sends a report to an “ally” of your choosing. As the CEO of Covenant Eyes, Ron DeHaas, explains, “The best means of losing weight is to weigh yourself every day, and so the best means of fighting pornography is to have an accountability ally. That ally is the person that you depend on to monitor what you’re doing on the computer.” For most of the men I interviewed who used the software, they chose male friends whom they trusted and who were often themselves on the journey to quit porn. In one unusual example, one interview respondent, Brad, explained to me that after he was caught looking at porn at work, reports of his history went directly to his boss—which happened to be an evangelical church. Rather than firing him, his supervisors decided that he could continue his work so long as he installed the Covenant Eyes app on his work and home computers and attended weekly support groups at a neighboring church for men like him who struggled with pornography addiction.

DeHaas, a devout evangelical Christian himself, started Covenant Eyes in 2000 from his home office in a small Michigan town. As he describes it, a personal tragedy made him realize the importance of protecting the family. In 1992, his wife and two young children were killed when a tanker truck hit the family’s vehicle with them in it. DeHaas received over two million dollars in a settlement from the trucking company, and he decided to use it to start a company he believed in and that he believed the world needed. “I made the decision to spend all of my money,” he told one journalist, “I did not have anything left. I couldn’t afford a cup of coffee at McDonald’s.” With the help of a seventeen-year-old computer programmer, DeHaas developed the Covenant Eyes accountability software and made a deal with Promise Keepers, at the time the largest and most well-known evangelical organization for men’s fellowship. The company grew slowly but steadily, and since 2010, it has been recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. As of 2020, DeHaas has employed a staff of more than two hundred people who work in a forty-thousand-square-foot complex.

Beyond Covenant Eyes and Redeemed!, there are hundreds of products and resources (books, websites, support groups, apps, and software programs) to help young men avoid pornography. Fight the New Drug’s porn addiction recovery program, Fortify, is free for anyone under eighteen who can explain why they want to quit using porn. The app, normally costing $9.99 per month for adult users or $6.95 for college students, resembles countless other health and wellness programs, where users document daily habits in order to track incremental progress. Upon reaching milestones, such as thirty days without porn, users get coins, badges, or level-ups that offer a sense of pride and accomplishment. There are guided meditations, journal prompts, and opportunities to connect to other Fortify users, along with “allies” of your choosing, people in your real life who agree to support you on your recovery journey.

Though some porn addiction recovery resources like Fortify are not explicitly religious, evangelical Protestants more than any other religious denomination have dominated the pornography addiction recovery industry. In 2002, Craig Gross and Mike Foster, two young, hip white evangelical pastors, founded what they dubbed XXXchurch. The website advertised “Porn, Sex, Girls, Guys” on its home page to invite visitors who had no qualms about porn to read on to learn why they should avoid it. The organization now offers a software program similar to Covenant Eyes, called X3watch. One of its tag lines is “Jesus loves porn stars,” and today, a former performer, Brittni De La Mora, leads XXXchurch, along with her pastor husband. Together, they spearhead a project, Strip Church, that ministers to dancers in strip clubs. They also attend the AVN Awards each year to spread their Good News.

(Image source: XXXchurch)

Between 2006 and 2019, Pastor Gross publicly debated porn performer Ron Jeremy at universities across the country—“Porn Pastor versus Porn Star,” as the event was heralded. Typically, Jeremy mustered the louder applause from whooping college guys upon first entering the stage. Without similar celebrity status within the presumably liberal “hookup culture” of universities, “I’m by far the underdog,” Gross has reflected. He was always the one to present his position first, something that Jeremy demanded, since, in his words, “I have no problem with his career; he has a problem with my career.”

“I’m not about shutting down the porn industry,” Gross insisted to his audience at one event. “You have the right to view it.” Still, “the next time you’re tempted, you have a thought, you’re visiting a porn site, I would just ask yourself why. Take a beat and just think about it.”

Evangelicals are “cultural innovators,” in the words of sociologists Shayne Lee and Philip Luke Sinitiere, and thus have remained successful and salient in contemporary American culture, even when denominational church membership and attendance has declined. What emerged in the late twentieth century was a “spiritual marketplace,” where religions competed to produce innovative forms of worship and convince individuals that religion had a place for them. Evangelicals are successful in this marketplace because they are “in the world, but not of the world,” as a common saying goes, meaning that they participate in secular culture even while clinging to traditional and conservative beliefs. Some examples of successful evangelical enterprises include televangelism, Christian self-help books, Christian rock music and movies, and the emergence of gyms, day cares, and coffee shops within nondenominational megachurches. Yet evangelicals don’t see this as cultural appropriation, but rather, as cultural transformation. Craig Gross, onstage next to Ron Jeremy (with his slick, dyed black hair and pierced ears), epitomized this trend. Today, he leads an organization, Christian Cannabis, that promotes recreational marijuana as a spiritual practice.

Sociologist Jeremy Thomas has traced how Christianity Today, the largest evangelical periodical in the United States, started by Billy Graham in 1956, changed its coverage of pornography so that since the 1990s, an addiction framework has come to dominate. Before the mid-1980s, most articles relied on what Thomas calls the “narrative of traditional values” to discuss porn, with the articles centered on how pornography contributes to an overall moral decline of society along with the disintegration of the nuclear family. In the mid-1980s, influenced by the feminist antipornography movement, the narrative of public/performer harm (which centers on how pornography harms women both as porn performers and within the broader society) emerged. Around the same time, Thomas names the narrative of personal viewer harm (which emphasizes the harm pornography causes to individual consumers), which outlasts the public/performer narrative and has, indeed, shaped the antipornography movement into the twenty-first century.

By the 1980s, evangelicals could no longer pretend that pornography was a problem only outside their communities. Sex scandals involving televangelists Jim Bakker (who covered up a rape accusation by his secretary by paying $279,000 to the alleged victim) and Jimmy Swaggart (found to have paid prostitutes for sex) seemed evidence for a bumper sticker sold at the time: the moral majority is neither. But far from admitting defeat, evangelical leaders instead began acknowledging that pornography’s consumers were also Bible-believing men (and sometimes even women). Evangelicals confronted what they saw as the mistaken values and market of sexual liberation making their way into evangelicals’ lives and relation- ships. Some of the most prominent evangelical political activists—including Tim LaHaye, husband of Beverly LaHaye and founder of the secretive conservative networking group the Council for National Policy, and James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family—were also authors of bestselling Christian self-help and advice books. Their writing focused on how pornography harmed marital relationships and personal well-being, but at the same time acknowledged how devout Christian men might be tempted by it.

Sociologist Samuel Perry describes this as a shift from offense to defense—to defend against pornography addiction, which was perceived to be a threat to evangelical men. And in some ways, these evangelical leaders were right. Protestant men are more likely than any other groups, including those with no religious affiliation, to perceive themselves to be addicted to pornography. And yet, evangelical men as a whole actually watch less porn than their nonevangelical counterparts. In one national survey, about 25 percent of born-again Christian men reported that they had looked at porn in the past week, compared to nearly 50 percent of men who were not born-again. But those who look at porn are more likely to consider themselves addicted to it or to be troubled by their porn use than men who are less religious. Several studies have found that religious commitment is a better predictor of perceived porn addiction than actual porn use.

Kelsy Burke is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and the author of The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Christians under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet (University of California Press, 2016).

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 26 of the Revealer podcast with Kelsy Burke: “Religion and Pornography.”

The post Treating Pornography Viewership as an Addiction that Requires Faith appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Vogue)

The interplay between religion and fashion has long been a matter of public fascination. There are the obvious examples of religion inspiring fashion design, such as the Fontana sisters’ “Little Priest” dress (1955), the religious mosaics that adorned Dolce & Gabbana’s fall/winter 2013-14 collection, or the trending of modest fashion looks across global markets, such as ASOS Design pairing a pantsuit with a headscarf in its online catalog. The spectacle of religion-as-fashion draws quite the crowd, witnessed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2018 Heavenly Bodies, the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history, or the constant reel of coverage for Kanye West’s Sunday service at Paris Fashion Week 2020, where, as Steff Yokta put it, “all the prophets of fashion assembled.” And the religious establishment is not as ambivalent to fashion as one might assume. Although Pope Francis made quite the show of austerity with his rejection of Prada footwear at the beginning of his tenure, the Vatican did not hesitate to lend sacred artifacts to the Met’s Heavenly Bodies exhibition.

But what is beneath the surface of these highly visible displays of affection between religion and fashion? How does what we wear matter for accessing the sacred, shaping our deepest longings and convictions, seeking belonging or embodying dissent? What is at stake personally, politically, and spiritually in how we dress?

These deeper questions are at the heart of our collaboration between a designer and a theologian and the various projects that we collected in our edited volume Silhouettes of the Soul: Meditations on Fashion, Religion, and Subjectivity, which comes out in paperback this August with Bloomsbury Academic. The book challenges traditional religious and academic views. Along these lines, we ended each book section with an interview, which helped us bring in alternative voices, such as LGBTQ+ activist, monk, and makeup artist Kodo Mishimura. With the release of the paperback, we decided to revisit some of the collection’s themes, especially in light of recent religiously driven legal suppression of dress freedoms throughout the United States.

The following conversation was recorded via video conferencing and edited for clarity and depth.

***

Jeanine Viau: I thought it might be helpful at the start to talk about how both of us became interested in the relationship between religion and fashion, and how our experiences reveal why we think this conversation matters. I think back to my dissertation research with LGBTQ+ student activists at Catholic universities.

In almost every interview, these activists talked about how their personal aesthetics and attire help them explore their identities and experiences, express themselves, and think through who they are and what they desire. In addition to the campus programs they were creating – vigils, poetry readings, workshops, drag shows – what was also important to them was what they were wearing every day and how fashioning themselves becomes an intervention in the world.

They also had profoundly traumatic experiences related to clothing, such as bullying in their homes, in their schools, and in their religious spaces. One, for example, recalled a moment in Target when he chose a red t-shirt and his dad said no and used a homophobic expletive to describe the color red.

Hearing their stories, I was reminded that clothing is an issue of life and death, that fashioning oneself in the world is not a superficial thing. Learning about the power of dress inspired me to teach a class on fashion and social ethics where students examine and connect their personal longings and creativity to collective movements.

Otto, this is when I found your work.

I was really energized by the union of the personal and the political in your approach to design and teaching. Your definition of clothing as “the conflict-ridden interface” between human beings’ souls and the public realm offers a compelling starting point for discussions with my students and for us, you and me and the contributors to the book, to start thinking about the deeper dimensions of dress.

So, I want to ask you, when did you start thinking about religion and fashion?

Otto von Busch: I started approaching fashion from practice. I was sewing and altering clothes. And then I wrote my master’s thesis about fashion advertising. I was using the classical toolbox that academics taught me, most of it coming out of art history, with a focus on semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols. But I felt frustrated with that language. While it made sense analytically, it didn’t really help articulate a designer’s perspective or work.

I had long held an interest in alchemy, and there was something there that I found fascinating about the transformation of turning lead to gold, but also that the process of alchemy was about a corresponding inner transformation. The concepts and mystical framework around alchemy captured the idea that the transformation of fabric into fashion is something that is more than just a signifier, and there exists a more profound connection between the materiality of garments and the inner workings of our lives and emotions.

(Three examples of modest fashion. Images by @mademoisellememe on Instagram for Los Angeles Magazine)

I had felt held back by typical academic language, where fashion was primarily a form of communication, if not outright delusion or propaganda, and where the messages are already existing, ready to be transmitted by what clothes we wear. I was searching for ways to understand fashion as much more of an inner transformation, that the reasons we do care about how we dress is because it matters more deeply to us. In many ways, getting dressed can be a leap of faith – you put some inner aspects of yourself out there to be judged by others. Like any real transformation, it is a risky business.

JV: I really like this idea that an alchemy between religion and fashion, the mystical and the material, might move us beyond the limits of our academic toolboxes to something both deeper and more accessible. Along these lines, I want to ask you about defining fashion. You reference the concept of fashion as language. Other definitions, like those of Elizabeth Wilson and Joanne Entwistle, insist on defining fashion in relation to modern capitalism in the West.

But, reducing fashion to a phenomenon of modern capitalism is too limited for what we’ve attempted to do with the book and in our dialogues. As you say, these definitions will not provide the language or the techniques we need.

I wonder then how do you define fashion in a way that’s expansive enough for it to do the work that you just talked about?

OvB: Throughout my work, I’ve usually fallen back on a definition by the Swedish fashion journalist Suzanne Pagold, that “fashion is to dress like everyone else, but before everyone else.”

It’s a simple and playful way of defining fashion, pointing to it as an everyday phenomenon. It is not dependent on capitalism or the fashion system. It could exist in every culture, and it can thus be found, to some degree, in every cultural expression. So, fashion is commonly dispersed. It is about having a look before everyone else, but also to make sure that it’s not the wrong everyone. Take, for example, when a child comes from school and says that “everyone” has this or that garment. She doesn’t really mean everyone at the school, but everyone who matters, which are just a handful of people. But they are the important ones, the ones she looks up to.

This definition makes fashion a social phenomenon. And it is a useful definition as it bypasses the necessity of an industrial system of garment production, or capitalism, or media and celebrities, or most of the cultural components we may think are the center pieces in the way fashion operates.

But at the heart of it, I think fashion must also be defined by our yearning for connection. We, as humans, are wired to connect with others. We are born dependent on others to live. This need is also at the heart of fashion. This is also what makes the fashion industry so extremely powerful, that fashion manages to tap into a deep desire within us. Our hunger to belong. So, when fashion really works for us, it connects at a level beyond mere everyday communication. It is not merely a signal; that I am this or that. No, when fashion really works, someone sees something in us that we haven’t put in words, and someone acknowledges something unspoken within us. We see each other, and recognize each other, on a deeper level.

When this works, it is an extremely powerful revelation of two or more subjects meeting each other beyond words, affirming and energizing each other, adding vitality to each other’s lives. And this experience can be totally transformational. We can feel reborn. This is no small thing, not just a delusion or capitalist conspiracy.

JV: Yes, there is an aliveness to clothing and a dynamic of intelligibility, or revelation, as you say, that goes beyond what can be said. It’s more than just, “I have a slogan on my t-shirt.” It’s the texture of a person.

I am sitting here noticing and remembering what kinds of fabrics people choose. There’s a sense of feeling them in the relationship between who they are, what their affect is in the world, and what textures they choose to put on their bodies. And those textures are interfacing with others who are touching them or imagining touching them. It’s like touching the interior of a person sometimes, right?

(Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

I remember the first time we met and how impressed I was by the finely tailored, leather kilt you wore paired with a spare and elegant white shirt. I thought, “He is a Viking, literally.” Also though, the suppleness and movement of the leather showed the softness and flexibility of your interpersonal style, how hospitable and supportive you are.

Going back to Pagold’s definition of fashion, “to dress like everyone else, but before everyone else,” one thing I think that fashion does for religion, or why it matters to religion, is it really helps religion take itself less seriously in a way that makes it more serious. Engaging with fashion reminds religion of its own creativity and innovation. In a way, fashion gifts that to folks who are practicing or thinking about spirituality.

You mention the yearning for connection and belonging. This is really important in religion as well, but often belonging in religion is thought to come through conforming – to dress like everyone else, after everyone else. The biggest concern is carrying through the tradition, to worship or believe or practice like everyone else in a long lineage of practice and belief and worship.

But it doesn’t really work that way. Religion is constantly evolving. It is always creative, always responsive to and interacting with context, with society, with politics, with art, with expressions of beauty. Religion is made out of the conditions, materials, and ideas that are available to it in the moment.

When you said fashion is to dress like everyone else, just before everyone else, I immediately thought of the prophetic tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. To be prophetic is to think differently about what’s going on before everyone else is thinking about it. That is religion. That is what drives religion forward and continues to make it relevant, continues to convict people over and over again. People are recreating or creating new religions all the time. Young people and those on the margins of established practices are especially drawn to this freedom. They’re piecing together new things with the old, and that’s really exciting.

Sometimes in traditional religious studies and traditional religious communities, there’s a resistance to that, and even a denigration of that kind of creativity and evolution. Bringing fashion into a conversation with religion gives religion back its prophetic imagination, this consciousness of its own creativity, its own aliveness.

Religion is still alive. It’s not just a tired, old-fashioned pattern that we pass hand to hand and replicate, what Donna Haraway calls “the sacred image of the same.” Religion is a living, breathing thing that emerges from ourselves and that we put on our bodies and that gives us the courage to write new songs and poems and dance together.

OvB: Yes, I think this connection between fashion and religion appears in the two aspects of time the Greeks used: Kairos versus Chronos. Kairos is of the moment while Chronos is what we best know as the chronological, or chronic. A passion is of the moment, it cannot be chronic, and this emotional fire is an aspect of Kairos. Similarly, fashion is a passion and of the moment. On the other hand, style, dress, dress history, and where we may usually think of religious forms of dressing, are aspects of Chronos, expressions that endure over time. Kairos and the fashion of the moment are always of the now, and they have this promise of something to come, something that is just about to happen. And this is its prophetic potential.

The prophetic is what captures the moment, suggests something about the future, yet does so by articulating something that makes sense right now, using the language and images of the time. And this is how fashion works in our experience. Take for example, I come into a store and find a suit jacket, and it just feels there is something there, it reveals something to me. It may be how I would want to look a little bit like my father, or the image I have of him. Of course, the designer doesn’t know my father and knows nothing about this aspect of my life. But it is not the old jacket, but one of today, and I can see something in that jacket that just makes sense and captures some form of longing that speaks the aesthetic language of the day. This jacket puts a shape, or a silhouette, to an unspoken yearning in my inner life. And I can buy this object, and wear it, and make it mine.

In such occasions, the designer acts as a prophet of the moment and lights the way to a time to come. The look may share the zeitgeist, the “geist,” the spirit, or the aliveness of the current moment. And again, coming back to where you started, this is where fashion can come to express a deep, inner yearning, to connect to others and express something that means so much to them. Here fashion gives people a means to connect, just like poetry, music, or art, that probes and reveals a depth of the human soul.

JV: Yes, and circling back to fashion as a matter of life and death, my research with student activists began in 2010 during a surge in media attention to LGBTQ+ youth suicides and bullying, including Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign, which encouraged gay young people to wait out the hate and violence, and find other spaces of belonging. But how long do we have to wait? How many of us will die or lose our livelihoods or our faith before bullies, politicians, concerned parents, and faith leaders pay attention to new prophets?

Now, over a decade later, I teach and mentor trans and non-binary students in Florida, which has passed several laws prohibiting gender affirming care for young people and expanding laws that make public drag performances illegal. Instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation is now prohibited in grades K-12 in the state.

Why does fashion matter here? Because trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people are afraid to be themselves in public. Because we are living in a state where those in power are enforcing a religiously driven fascist policing of dress.

And this is not just a trans or non-binary or queer issue, not to disengage from the exceptional vulnerability of these folks, but prohibiting drag in public makes anyone whose personal style does not conform to a sex-gender-matchy-matchy uniform subject to sanctions. It wasn’t so long ago that public decency laws in America criminalized women for wearing trousers.

Recently, my mom told me how in 1970 she and her high school classmates organized a protest against the requirement that women had to wear skirts to school. They all wore pants to school on the same day and the policy changed. Sadly, the Catholic school that my parents sent me to only allowed girls to wear pants a few years ago.

Why are we so quick to forget our prophetic courage? Why do we continually revert to the false certainty of rules? Religion, I think, is still more rigid in what the rules are and who is authorized to make them. Fashion is more fluid. Fashion, I think, celebrates dissent in a way that religion needs at this moment. Lives depend on it.

OvB: Yes, I think we’re seeing this hierarchization of fashion in the emergence of new Haute Couture exhibitions at highly regarded cultural institutions. Take, for example, Heavenly Bodies at the Met. Here we could see Italian Haute Couture mixed with relics and the finest art of the Catholic Church, and it revealed how today’s belief systems easily intermix religious artifacts with the artifacts of the fashion system. I think this exhibition really caught on a certain reverence for the elevation and hierarchization of not only society at large, but of desires and the search for meaning in institutions too.

(Heavenly Bodies exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

But most importantly, the exhibition only focused on institutional types of fashion and belief. It did not capture the prophetic. While it may be pretty to view, it does not recognize where fashion really happens. It ignores everyday faith. The passion, the fire, of the prophetic is missing. Nothing is really at risk here.

In many ways, fashion is like music. It happens inward as much as outward. Think of a concert, where people move together to the tune of our time. There is a synchronization of movement and attention toward the performer but also to the others in the audience. By sharing the experience, we are together, and it produces this fantastic emotional sense of togetherness. We connect with each other around certain tunes and the excitement around our shared fandom. We come together in a common passion and in this rich emotional attunement. We become larger than ourselves. Just think of a love song that really works. It breaks our sense of isolation, that we are the only ones who suffer from a heartbreak. The emotional connection, singing it together, embracing these emotions of heartache, sharing it, that engages more than just language are more than just simple words. My whole body tunes into my inner yearnings and unfulfilled hunger for love. Garments, in a similar way, connect us together. I wear these clothes, but they are also part of a larger experience, attuning me and my yearnings to others.

I think this is what got me so fired up with our book, that fashion is part of a human phenomenon that religion is well accustomed to, and has rich languages and traditions to help us unpack. It has rituals and practices, in all kinds of different facets across cultures in the world, that tap into the deep yearnings of the soul and give them a shape that we can share together, bringing us closer to these experiences but also to each other.

At best, fashion is almost a mystical experience. A one-ness of sorts. It exposes us to all the different silhouettes of the soul. For those interested in reading more about different approaches to the relationship between religion and fashion, the anthology Silhouettes of the Soul is available to preorder in paperback from Bloomsbury Academic.

Jeanine Viau is Associate Lecturer of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida.

Otto Von Busch is Associate Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design.

The post Fashion and Religion appeared first on The Revealer.

(Phra Ajan Jerapunyo-Abbot of Watkungtaphao. Image source: Wikipedia Commons)

Last year Sam Greenberg, 32, took a two-month sabbatical from work with his boyfriend, Hillel Friedman, 29. As he waited for takeoff to their trip’s first location, he decided to look up meditation retreats.

“One of my goals for the sabbatical was to really recharge and relax after all the craziness of COVID, and working through all that time,” said Greenberg, who had participated in a meditation retreat once before, and generally believes his life would be better with more meditation and mindfulness built in. “And so we had been thinking for a while of doing some kind of meditation retreat while we were traveling.”

The two used their last moment of ground contact to find an upcoming program, advertised as a men-only retreat to celebrate joy and beauty, hosted by a Buddhist center. They signed up.

“Pretty quickly it began to dawn on us that what we thought was a meditation retreat for people of all backgrounds was actually a pretty serious Buddhist religious experience,” said Greenberg, describing how the two were picked up from the train station by a community member who immediately asked about their Buddhist practice, as well as what Buddhist communities they were involved with back home. On site, the sessions included offerings to Buddha statues and lectures on Buddhist beliefs. “We read the website and interpreted it as being something that did not require a deep commitment to Buddhism. And I think when we showed up, we were kind of surprised to find out that it was.”

Any Google search for “Buddhist meditation retreats” invariably turns up scores of programs promoting practices associated with Buddhism, but few teach these practices within a Buddhist traditional path. Most offer massages and facials, not sessions on comprehending the Four Noble truths.

As meditation and silent retreats became more popular in secular contexts – the wellness tourist industry has exploded in the past decade, and only become more mainstream in a post-COVID world – a new generation of Buddhist centers and teachers in the U.S. find themselves wanting to emphasize that meditation can be more than just a way to relax, recharge, or feel more centered in oneself.

But combatting decades of popular conception can be an uphill battle.

“Sometimes, it’s like everyone who comes here or gets in touch with me seems to already have an idea or a concept of what meditation is and what it will do for them,” said the Rev. Hugh Gould, who was ordained as a Buddhist monk in the Soto Zen tradition in 1988 and serves as the resident teacher and monk of the Eugene Buddhist Priory in Eugene, OR. “And they are often talking about how anxious they are, or dealing with nervousness and anxiety in their lives. Which, given what’s going on in the world, of course. But one of the things that I find most unfortunate is that people come to think this is what meditation is for.”

Situated near the University of Oregon, Gould often finds himself confronting assumptions about the purpose of meditation from students, many of whom have never been taught to see Buddhism as its own religious tradition.

“It is often students who come here thinking about it through that prism of therapy, or ‘I want to understand myself better,” he said. “They’ve heard that meditation can be useful or something. And then when they come on a Sunday, it’s very clear to them that this is a religious practice, and I’d say nine times out of 10, I don’t see them again.”

The Temple Forest Monastery in Temple, New Hampshire, where thirteen ordained monks in the Thai Forest tradition, and five novices, occupy several acres of land, has become more emphatic in how they advertise their retreats.

(Temple Forest Monastery. Photo by Elizabeth Frantz for the Concord Monitor)

“The Temple Forest Monastery is not a retreat or meditation center, but a monastery devoted to training monks in the Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism,” the website reads, detailing how visitors are expected to follow the Eight Precepts of Buddhism, and keep the monastic schedule: 5:00 AM group meditation, no eating from 12:00 PM lunch until 7:00 AM breakfast, and doing their share of chores.

Theravada is one of the major schools of Buddhist practice, rooted in the texts of the Pali canon, and includes the Thai Forest tradition, Burmese Buddhism, and other lineages. While all Buddhist traditions accept certain precepts, each lineage has its own emphasis and teachings, and each major school has its own focus. Theravada Buddhist traditions believe monastic practice is required to achieve enlightenment, and focus more heavily on attaining enlightenment, or liberating oneself from the cycle of death and rebirth. Mahayana Buddhism, another major school associated with the traditions of China, India, and Japan, among others, believes a layperson can achieve such a state, but with much more difficulty, and places more value on persisting in reincarnated states. All traditions accept that attachment leads to suffering, and to liberate oneself from want, or attachment, reduces suffering, as does accepting the impermanence of all things. Cultural, geographic, and theological differences lead to distinctions in how to get to such a state.

This diversity can make it hard to define the modern Buddhist tradition that has developed in the West, since there is no one set of practices or beliefs all Buddhists share.

“The thing to remember is Buddhism is a collective noun for many, many, many different forms of practice and teachings and experience and ritual over the course of more than 2,000 years, in many different cultural and geographical settings with many different languages.” said Evan Thompson, a philosopher who has written widely on Buddhism and teaches at the University of British Columbia. “So there’s no way to just use the word Buddhism and make it refer unequivocally to one thing.”

It can be a particularly intricate discussion for White Buddhist practitioners, many of whom seek teachers and training in the Asian countries which originated their particular lineage of Buddhist practice.

“Some Western Buddhist teachers will say ‘you really can’t be a Buddhist in a deep way without embracing the ideas of karma and rebirth,” Thompson said, referencing some of the metaphysical beliefs that underpin some sacred Buddhist texts. “And other Buddhist teachers will say, no you can either be agnostic, or you can actually not accept it and still be committed to a Buddhist way of life. So that’s a debate that happens within the Western Buddhist world. It was seen as something that could be understood or interpreted in a more psychological way rather than a metaphysical way.”

Even meditation itself, Thompson emphasized, was not always standard practice, despite its ubiquitous association with Buddhism today in the West.

For much of its history, meditation was seen in Buddhist traditions as a tool for monks and nuns alone, and far too dangerous for a layperson to take up without proper training. Meditation was not about relaxing or destressing after a packed work day, but a tool for achieving enlightenment. This required developing one’s comprehension of the Buddha’s teachings, and accepting some core Buddhist beliefs, including the idea that experience is suffering, or dukkah, and only overcoming attachment to the material world can free one from the cycle of death and birth.

In traditional Buddhist understanding, meditation is not meant to hone one’s productivity, or even make someone feel more at peace, though it can lead to those things. It can be scary, to accept and realize Buddhist truths about the world, especially without the guidance of a qualified teacher.

“When people come and say ‘I want to calm the mind,’ it is always more than they bargained for,” said Jack DeTar, executive director of Rangjung Yeshe Gomde California, a Buddhist retreat center in northern California, and International Coordinator of Shedrub, a global Buddhist organization, under the guidance of Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. “Because to calm the mind first you have to look at it.”

In fact, an emerging cadre of scientists, such as Jared Lindahl at the Varieties of Contemplative Experience Project at Brown University, have begun to track adverse mental health responses to meditation among those with no previous mental health issues, coming back to ancient concerns that such practices are tools for enlightenment, not to be undertaken lightly and without training, and definitely not simply relaxing experiences. A 2021 feature story in Harper’s Magazine chronicled these studies, bringing new attention to the cases of people who had negative mental experiences with “unlocking their minds.”

The narrow use of meditation began to change in the 19^th century, when meditation become a form of cultural resistance in many Southeast Asian countries, taken up by the laity of newly colonized countries such as Burma and Thailand to demonstrate pride in their heritage. The practice grew alongside developing discourse among Buddhist populations, aimed at British colonizers, which strove to explain Buddhism through the prism of Protestant values. This Buddhist discourse, proudly defined as counter to dogmatic Western religions but explained in the very language and values of those cultures, set the stage for its spread in the West as a counter-cultural spiritual practice.

In the 1960s, following a century of increased trade with Asia and newly revamped immigration policies (as well as ongoing intrigue in Hinduism), Western-oriented thinkers began to package and spread Buddhist teachings across the United States more widely, as part of a new mindfulness movement. Leaders like Jon Kabat-Zinn, famous for his stress reduction techniques and numerous books on mindfulness, believed Buddhist practices like those he learned from the Zen tradition would help people overcome suffering, but he knew they needed to be shorn of their religious origins and promoted as a form of mental health to be accessible to Americans. Around this time, beloved Vietnamese monk, activist, and leader Thich Nhat Hanh began to promote his vision of engaged Buddhism, publishing wildly popular books on how Buddhism can change people’s lives. As such trends took off, Buddhist practices began to meld with the medical profession and the messages of life coaches, wellness gurus, and others who saw them as the ideal way to optimize one’s life. It became the refuge of those looking to be spiritual but not practice the Christianity or Judaism they associated with conservative, restrictive ideas. The original goals of liberating oneself from want, and the dangers of such pursuits when done right, fell to the wayside.

(Kadampa Meditation Centert)

Today, one of the more well-known meditation practices is Vipassana, developed in Burma. Known for its austere and challenging demands, it is often practiced by non-Buddhists, and particularly beloved by Silicon Valley tech nerds and anyone who fancies themselves to be “intense.” Though emergent from Burmese Buddhism, it has become more about testing one’s limits, spreading alongside renewed interest in stoicism and physical feats of endurance. When Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, tweeted about his 10 day Vipassana retreat, it opened up new debates about the value of such experiences. But the appeal of Buddhist-based practices is only growing stronger: Meditation apps like Calm, Headspace, and others saw a collective increase of 2 million subscribers in the U.S. in the first two months of the pandemic alone, and “meditation pods” have begun to dot the wellness initiatives of top companies. More and more people are meditating, but not with the traditionally Buddhist goal of uprooting suffering by comprehending the Four Noble Truths, among others.

Many within the Buddhist community see this tradeoff – widespread popularity for loss of Buddhist particularism – as no longer maximizing the good Buddhist teachings can offer the world.

“From the Buddhist perspective, anything that helps reducing suffering in someone’s experience is good, so if these apps are helping people, that’s wonderful,” said Jack DeTar. “But there is a deeply powerful and significant experience of liberation that can occur as a result of the path under the guidance of a qualified teacher.”

Ajahn Cunda, based at Abhayagiri Monastery in northern California, a community in the Thai Forest Tradition of Ajahn Chah, emphasizes this point when he considers what it would mean for more people in the U.S. to reflect on the goals of meditation. “If we’re aiming at trying to ‘get something’ from meditation to make our lives easier, we’re just caught right back in the cycle of desires, filled with dukkha, or suffering, and not wanting to annihilate our whole selves,” he said.

Increasingly, Cunda finds that some of the people who visit the monastery have different goals in mind than what the Buddha originally prescribed for liberation. The goal of Buddhist practice, he explains, is ultimately to end the suffering and stress inherent to the cycle of birth and death. This comes about through the relinquishment of unwholesome desire and unwholesome practices through the Noble Eightfold Path, and to gain insight into the Four Noble Truths. “A problem some people have with meditation,” he says, “is believing the experience should be peaceful. But it can be difficult and unpleasant, at first.”

This is a new way of presenting itself for a tradition which is only recently reclaiming its religious framework, at a time when monasteries across traditions are finding their secular appeal to be newly valuable. Catholic monasteries and Christian retreat centers are likewise overrun with interest for silent stays and contemplative retreats, many from people who are not Christian, and not interested in deepening their relationship to Christ, but simply looking for a place to gather their minds. Popular books, such as Tibetian Buddhist master Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse’s 2008 What Makes You N0T A Buddhist, buck this trend of universalizing religious teachings, instead demonstrating the new instinct among some Buddhists to emphasize their particularism.

And many hope that people will realize being thrust from their comfort zone is not always bad. Greenberg, the retreat-goer, recalled how he had likewise been taken by surprise by his first silent retreat experience. “I definitely would not have gone had I known what I signed up for, because the idea of being mostly silent for a week is pretty terrifying, I think, to a lot of people,” he recalled. “In the end, I was so happy I did it. I just emerged so much calmer and more centered from that week. And that’s what sort of made me excited to try to do this again.”

While some want to ride the wave of popularity, many are excited to see who it will bring them.

Shira Telushkin writes on religion, art, culture, and the human search for meaning. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other publications. She teaches religion reporting at the Newmark Journalism School at CUNY. 

The post Putting Buddhism Back in Buddhist Meditation appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image by Catilin Connolly. Visit caitlinconnolly.com.)

On artist Brittany Nguyen’s Etsy site, there is a beautiful painting rich in blues and golds with a scene familiar to many viewers: a kneeling woman with a veil draped over her head holding a beatific baby Jesus sleeping in her lap. But in the top corner of the rendering, a haloed individual floats, reaching out a hand towards the infant. The mysterious God-like being is a representation of Heavenly Mother, an obscure figure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She’s recognized by Latter-day Saints (LDS) as a partner to the Heavenly Father, a spiritual mother to all, and a special role model for women. She is called Mother God, God their Eternal Mother, and Eternal Mother. Most often, though, She is Heavenly Mother, who some say is so precious and fragile, She must be kept hidden for Her own sake.

But some Mormon feminists, scholars, artists, and poets view this directive as unfounded, even patronizing, and advocate for a greater awareness of Her. They produce podcasts about Her, pen poetry collections dedicated to Her, and craft Instagram platforms around Her.  Emboldened by the democratizing force of social media, they dare speak Her name, to the occasional consternation of Church authorities.

LDS theology teaches that the godly and earthly realms mirror one another. In the divine realm, Heavenly Father, as Mormons typically refer to God, has a physical body––although unlike humans’, it is a flawless, immortal one––and is a literal patriarch to humanity and to Jesus, as well as the divine spouse of Heavenly Mother. He rules over His divine family unit in the way that a human man does his earthly family. For Latter-day Saints, earthly existence is a kind of rehearsal for the afterlife, during which they will be reunited with their families, provided they were “sealed” together in a Temple-based ritual during their lives (this is typically a marriage, but children can also be sealed to their parents if they were adopted or born before their parents were sealed). Latter-day Saints also maintain that humans can become God-like by emulating divine values here on earth, or they can more literally become a god in the afterlife. What all this amounts to is that in contemplating Heavenly Father, Latter-day Saint men are envisioning a very real role model for them, an opportunity some Latter-day Saint women crave and feel is unavailable.

Though there are no records of founding prophet Joseph Smith expounding on Heavenly Mother, there is anecdotal evidence that he confirmed Her existence privately. In one of the earliest and best known mentions, the Mormon poet Eliza R. Snow, who was married to Smith until his death in 1844, references Heavenly Mother in her 1845 verse “My Father in Heaven,” which became a popular hymn. “In the heav’ns are parents single?/No, the thought makes reason stare,” Snow wrote. “Truth is reason––truth eternal/Tells me I’ve a mother there.”

Latter-day Saint leaders openly acknowledge that Heavenly Mother exists: the single essay about Her on the Church’s website calls her “a cherished and distinctive belief.” But Church authorities have long dissuaded people from praying to Her or even speaking about Her. In a 1991 speech at General Conference, the biannual event when the highest echelons of the Church address the laity, then-First Counselor Gordon B. Hinckley declared that praying to Heavenly Mother was “inappropriate” and “misguided,” but added that this dictum “in no way belittles or denigrates her.” The idea that Heavenly Mother had to be sheltered for Her own sake had circulated for decades throughout the LDS world, though few people knew where this idea came from. These two things had a chilling effect: many Mormons who came of age around or before that time say they don’t remember any discussions of Heavenly Mother as young people. “The term ‘sacred silence’ is typically used, but I like calling it the unholy freeze,” the writer and Mormon scholar Katie Ludlow Rich said.

The idea that Heavenly Mother needs to be protected with silence is not based in Latter-day Saint scripture. Instead, its most likely origin is a Sunday school teacher named Melvin R. Brooks, who suggested in a mid-20^th century LDS reference book that Mormons so infrequently mention Heavenly Mother because She should be protected from having Her name profaned the way God and Jesus’s were so often. It’s unclear why Brooks thought this, or how his conjecture managed to spread so widely, but there are theories as to why it might have been appealing to the Church. Some feminists think that by endorsing a theological version of legal coverture, in which a wife’s legal identity is subsumed by her husband’s, the religion’s patriarchy was able to encourage its female members to remain quiet and docile; others theorized that merely acknowledging Heavenly Mother would make the faith look polytheistic and too distanced from mainstream Christianity. Defenders of Brooks’s sentiment argued that because Heavenly Mother isn’t mentioned at all in scripture, making Her a bigger part of religious worship would be tantamount to inventing new doctrine; they also echoed Hinckley in saying that because scripture explicitly dictates praying to Heavenly Father, one should never deviate from that.

(Image source: Francisco Kjolseth for The Salt Lake Tribune of the Painting “Crafting the Universe” by Lisa Aerin Collett.)

Those who defied the Church’s ruling after Hinckley’s speech faced harsh consequences. In 1995, Gail Turley Houston, an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, the Utah-based university closely affiliated with the Church, was fired because she had allegedly promoted praying to both Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, which the university said “publicly contradict[ed] fundamental Church doctrine and deliberately attack[ed] the Church.” At least three women have been severely reprimanded by or excommunicated from the Church over the course of its history for speaking out on the topic of Heavenly Mother. A number of women recounted to me that they feared being reproached for testifying about Heavenly Mother during services, or that they actually had been.

Even during the last decades’ “sacred silence,” though, people have discovered Her. Rich told me she found herself crying out to Heavenly Mother in the shower after the birth of her second child. She sensed something respond: “Who do you think can stop you from talking to me?”  Jessica Smith, a young mother who frequently posts content about Heavenly Mother on social media, first encountered Her while on her mission in Poland. She’d just found out her mother had cancer, and though she wasn’t praying directly to Heavenly Mother, she felt an “undeniable feminine presence” with her. “It was a woman’s voice in my mind, giving me counsel, giving me foresight of my own identity as a woman.” A few years after being thrown out of her house as a teenager by a mother who suffers from a delusional disorder, author Rachel Rueckert read Terry Tempest Williams’s book Refuge, in which Williams writes about connecting with Heavenly Mother after her own mother’s death. “For the first time ever, I uttered this prayer to a mother God,” Rueckert recalled. “To be able to imagine something different and someone who could love me and be so fierce and powerful in that way, it was really transformative to me.”

Over the last decade, there has been a greater acknowledgment of Heavenly Mother within LDS circles. The shift began around 2011, when BYU Studies, a well-regarded academic journal affiliated with the university, published an essay on Heavenly Mother. In it, authors David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido argued that contrary to popular conception, early Mormon dialogue around Heavenly Mother was quite fluid and generous. The essay opened up the topic for many members of the laity. In the past few years, as Covid kept worshippers away from their traditional places of worship, Heavenly Mother has become something of a cottage industry, with an explosion of books, artwork, and digital content––even downloadable coloring pages––about Her.

Perhaps as a reaction, the Church proper soon began to incorporate Heavenly Mother more into its environs and conversations. A painting by the well-known Mormon artist Caitlin Connolly depicting a male and a female figure atop a cascade of people, entitled “In Their Image,” has hung in the Church Historical Museum in Salt Lake City since 2019. That same year, the Young Women Theme––a short invocation said by preteen and teenaged girls at Sunday services—was changed by Church officials to include a reference to “Heavenly Parents” instead of Heavenly Father.

(“In Their Image” painting by Caitlin Connolly)

“Young Mormon children, they’re not having the experience me and my peers had,” Rachel Hunt Steenblik, who contributed research to the BYU Studies essay and has written two poetry books about Heavenly Mother, told me. “They’re learning it’s a normal part.”

But many feel the freeze hasn’t thawed yet; though it’s possible to talk about Heavenly Mother on Instagram, it’s less acceptable in official church settings. “You’ll rarely hear someone say ‘our heavenly parents’ plan for us’” at services, Jessica Smith says. “And it makes a difference for women. It makes a difference in how we view a divine being as wise, autonomous, creative, loving, involved.”

When Bethany Brady Spalding and McArthur Krishna began collaborating on books for young adults about Heavenly Mother, they were inspired to do so because they wanted their daughters (they have six between them) to be able to imagine themselves as divine. “If I’m going to raise girls in this faith, they will need and require and demand more,” Spalding told me. “I think our girls are growing in a world where they are limitless… they’re limitless in what they can be and become and see themselves as. And I feel like church is the one place where that is different and it doesn’t have to be.”

Heavenly Mother advocates––who are mostly, but not entirely, women––invoke Mormonism’s own theology as the strongest case for needing a Heavenly Mother: if Mormons are anticipating their afterlives here on earth within the confines of their church and in their families, then women deserve to envision what awaits them. The historical idea of Heavenly Mother gives women little to go on, but what it does give them––a figure so fragile, she’s in need of male protection––is unappealing to many. “This is the only thing we kind of know: she’s silent, she’s quiet. She can’t have a relationship with her children. Like, why would we want this? There’s nothing appealing about this for us,” Hunt Steenblik says. “It’s a matter of identity. What is our place? What will it be for us? Is it something we actually want? Because right now it looks like something we don’t want.”

The stereotype within the LDS world is that women who feel strongly about Heavenly Mother are radical feminists, to be viewed with suspicion. And some people who feel strongly about Heavenly Mother do hold progressive views about how the Church should adapt in a changing world. “I do want women to get the priesthood, partly because I think there’s not a way in the LDS Church currently for their voices to matter as much without it,” Hunt Steenblik said, referring to the rite given to males beginning around age 12, which accords them certain privileges and ritual duties. In research for her 2019 book The Next Mormons, Jana Riess, a senior correspondent for Religion News Service and a Latter-day Saint herself, found that the limited roles for women were among the top ten reasons millennials leave the Church, a marked contrast from boomers, for whom gender parity didn’t rank among the top ten. (Riess isn’t sure changes on this front are imminent: “Our prophet is 98 years old and he grew up in a very different America,” she said, referring to the current head of the Church, Russell M. Nelson. “I don’t think that change is going to come until the leaders who are growing up in this America are leaders.”)

Some also see in Heavenly Mother an opportunity to offer more diverse depictions of godly figures generally. When Krishna and Brady Spalding were commissioning art for their books, they used images that deviated from the “European Jesus” model, a helpful corrective considering the Church’s problematic history with Black members. Krishna’s daughters are biracial, and she wanted to be sure that when they picked up her books, “they could see Heavenly Mother in their own image.”

But for others, the journey to Heavenly mother is not one where institutional change is a priority. The artist Natalie Cosby, who co-hosts a podcast and organizes events on Heavenly Mother, prefers to encourage people to develop their own personal relationships to Heavenly Mother, through prayer or whatever means people find fruitful. “I think that at some point our personal spiritual authority and connection with the Divine has to transcend the institution of the Church,” Cosby wrote in an email. “I don’t believe that the institution of the Church or its leadership can provide all of the answers and nourishment each member needs… and I don’t think its members should depend on it to do so.”

In the spring of 2022, rumors began circulating on social media that one of the speakers at April’s General Conference was going to address the topic of Heavenly Mother. These turned out to be correct: in a speech at the women’s session of General Conference entitled “Your Divine Nature and Eternal Destiny,” Dale G. Renlund, one of the quorum of twelve apostles, who are the Church’s top authority figures, encouraged listeners to see themselves as the daughters of Heavenly Parents, but said all that was known of the matriarch could be found in the church’s essay on the topic, and that people shouldn’t hypothesize beyond that. “Seeking greater understanding is an important part of our spiritual development, but please be cautious,” he said. “Speculation will not lead to greater spiritual knowledge, but it can lead us to deception or divert our focus from what has been revealed.” He repeated the prohibition on praying directly to Her.

“I’ve basically been sad since that talk,” Hunt Steenblik said. “It didn’t give any room for women who want to know more. They didn’t say, okay, you can’t pray to her, but you can … pray to know more about Her.” She said she worried that it is replaying a similar pattern from the nineties, in which rising fear of doctrinal drift was followed by a censorious public statement and then, years later, by a wave of excommunications. Rueckert felt that Renlund’s sentiment was “in tension with Mormonism itself, which was just founded so much on radical questions and radical imagination.” Renlund’s directive revealed one of the deepest tensions within Latter-day Saint theology: the belief in continuing revelation, available to all the faithful, and a rigid hierarchical structure in which the leadership sets guidelines for the entire group. Rich, who wrote a gently critical essay in response for a Mormon feminist blog, contended that the talk tried to have it two ways by affirming Heavenly Mother’s reality and simultaneously enabling leaders to “police women’s thought and talk.”

Others, however, were buoyed by the speech. “I think Elder Renlund’s talk was fabulous,” Krishna said. To her, it provided valuable publicity for the Church’s official essay on Heavenly Mother, which many members around the globe had likely never encountered. Brady Spalding agreed: “I had lots of people come and speak to me afterwards and say, ‘Wow, it was powerful to hear an apostle talk about Heavenly Mother. It was beautiful to hear her name mentioned at General Conference, and it directed me to study her more.’”

Krishna and Spalding even wrote an op-ed for the Salt Lake Tribune to counteract the “doom and gloom,” as Krishna put it, that had dominated the online reaction to Renlund’s speech, and produced a video in which a diverse group of Mormons––young and old, Black and white, men and women––talk about what make Heavenly Mother important to them. “To hear Her mentioned openly in General Conference, it mattered to me,” one participant said.

Some people may imagine a surging grassroots movement around Heavenly Mother would cause a major shift in Church policy, like officially sanctioning praying to Her. But change within the Church doesn’t always come as a result of public pressure or societal trends. One possibility that Jana Riess sees, however, is that the Church might offer incremental changes, like it has done by allowing the children of LGBTQ couples to be baptized, for instance, but stopping short of performing weddings for gay couples. “One thing that I think is a possibility is that the Church might, in a limited fashion, give women some priesthood,” Riess said, particularly if swathes of people leave because of its treatment of Heavenly Mother and other gender-related concerns.

Whatever path the Church decides to take, it’s clear to many that Heavenly Mother can never go back to being solely the purview of fringe feminists anymore. “Technology has changed,” the Mormon scholar, Katie Ludlow Rich, said. “There’s Instagram, there’s Twitter. And people can have this ability to use their voice in a way that can’t be controlled. It can’t be correlated through priesthood.”

Even if there are greater opportunities for the Church to recognize Her, though, it isn’t clear that everyone I spoke to would feel unconflicted about that. Some seemed to worry that if the Church folded Her more into recognized doctrine, She might become limited to what they wanted Her to be. Maybe She’d start to look like the idealized Latter-day Saint woman so familiar from Mormon mom blogs: white, blond, ensconced in her home, surrounded by her many offspring, a supporting character, rather than the heroine. Some were blunt about the fact that relinquishing Her to a cadre of men would be tantamount to a loss. “I don’t want any more of my life regulated by the patriarchy,” Rueckert told me. Outside of institutional control, She could continue to be expansive, creative, open to interpretation. She could be whatever they wanted Her to be.

Kelsey Osgood is a writer based in the Bronx, whose first book, How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. Her writing has appeared online and/or in print in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Wired, among other outlets, and she’s currently at work on a book about religious conversion.

The post How They Met Their Mother appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

I’ve had the opportunity to do a bit of travel this summer and one thing that has struck me is that I can’t get away from noticing religion. It is everywhere. That fact, I should say, does not surprise me. I’ve asked students in several classes to do a religion mapping exercise where they write down every manifestation of religion they see or hear within four city blocks. Students have never returned with fewer than five examples. But as I found myself in rather diverse locations this summer – an island off the coast of Africa, continental Europe, the boroughs of New York City, and the American Midwest – I couldn’t help but notice religion’s pervasiveness. I witnessed religion on people’s phones, in a remote village church, on billboards, in popular streaming shows, in restaurant designs, in Supreme Court decisions, and countless other settings. As I observed religion in each location, I thought about how commonly religion changes. Religions transform because of geographic region, local culture, time period, and myriad other influences. Religion may be everywhere, but it is often in a different form.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The Revealer’s Summer issue explores religion in places where one might not typically look and religious ideas not commonly known. Our Summer issue starts with Kelsey Osgood’s “How They Met Their Mother,” where she investigates how Mormon women are turning to Instagram and podcasts to start conversations about Heavenly Mother, a little-discussed divine female figure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints. Then, in “Putting Buddhism Back in Buddhist Meditation,” Shira Telushkin explores how meditation centers, often thought of by secular Americans as places to relax and recharge, are now presenting Buddhist meditation as a way to overcome attachments and escape the cycle of rebirth, not as places to relieve one’s anxiety. Next, in “Fashion and Religion,” Jeanine Viau and Otto Von Busch turn our attention to clothing and have a conversation about why fashion matters if we hope to understand religion’s place in society. Then, in “Treating Pornography as an Addiction that Requires Faith,” an excerpt from The Pornography Wars, Kelsey Burke examines an evangelical church program that treats pornography viewership as an addiction that necessitates religious intervention. From there we take a different view of religion, sex, and mental health and turn to graphic novels in “The Mystic Torment of Binky Brown,” where Andrew Lenoir looks into a trailblazing publication that shaped generations of comic artists. And finally, in our exploration of religion in less-than-expected places, in “Establishing Reagan’s Religious Outlook for the U.S.,” an excerpt from Righting the American Dream, Diane Winston illustrates how mainstream news media normalized Ronald Reagan’s religious views and transformed the country in the process.

Our Summer issue also includes two episodes of the Revealer podcast. In the first, “Reagan’s Religious Vision for America and the Impact Today,” Diane Winston joins us to discuss Reagan’s religious views, how they shaped his politics, and how they transformed America in ways that are still felt today. In the second episode, “Muslims Using Female Pronouns for God,” we have a conversation with Hafsa Lodi about Muslim women who refer to Allah as “She,” what they believe doing that can achieve, and what conversations about pronouns and God can reveal about broader issues of gender within Islam today. You can listen to both episodes on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As this summer of constant climate crises continues around the globe, I hope the articles and podcast episodes in this issue help you think about the pervasiveness of religion in new ways. Religion is everywhere, which can be wonderful and horrifying. So, whether you find yourself traveling this summer or staying closer to home, I hope you remain safe, healthy, and better informed about religion’s many roles throughout our world.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Religion Is Everywhere appeared first on The Revealer.