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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “The FBI and White Christian Nationalism.”

Happy listening!

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Below are four articles published in January of 2023 that give us a clue as to what shape the interplay of religion, power, and race might take nationally and worldwide in the coming year.

1) How Students Could Give Ron DeSantis an African American History Lesson
Andre Henry
Religious News Service
After Florida governor DeSantis banned an AP high school course in African American studies, Black religious leaders and historians took the reins of educating state residents on the “people’s history.” Henry expands this movement by suggesting it is the actions of the students themselves that will keep Black history alive.

2) As a Religious Studies Professor I Disagreed with the Hamline Firing – But Now I’ve Changed My Mind 
Kate Blanchard
Religion Dispatches
Hamline University recently fired a professor for showing their students a devotional image of the Prophet Muhammad. Blanchard writes why she initially felt outrage, which then turned into agreement with Hamline’s president’s decision.

3) The Latest Crusade to Place Religion Over the Rest of Civil Society
Linda Greenhouse
New York Times
Greenhouse considers how the Supreme Court might be heading toward amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would allow employees to claim time off for religious observance. This might be yet another in a series of Supreme Court decisions that privileges “religious claims above all others.”

4) American Religion is Not Dead Yet
Wendy Cadge and Elan Babchuck
The Atlantic
Cadge and Babchuck dismantle the notion that dwindling church attendance means the “elimination” of religion in America. Instead, they write, spiritual practice has migrated toward more creative spaces that we must consider if we are to understand the place religion occupies in the United States and the power it holds.

Cameron Andersen is the Revealer’s editorial assistant. She is currently pursuing a dual degree with the NYU Religious Studies M.A. program and the Long Island University Library Sciences archival program.

The post In the News: Religion, Race, and Power appeared first on The Revealer.

(Scene from Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul)

Last August, the filmmaking sister duo Adamma and Adanne Ebo adapted their acclaimed short film into their first feature-length movie, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. The film is produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, a company known for creating the hottest recent horror movies like Get Out, Candyman, and Nope. Unlike those films, Honk for Jesus is a scathing satire set in the world of Atlanta’s Black megachurches. But Honk for Jesus still elicits its fair share of fear, shock, and disgust as it explores the dark underbelly of megachurch culture.

In the film, the fictional Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs and First Lady Trinitie Childs (played by Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall) attempt to restore their congregation and their reputation following a public scandal. A year before the film’s starting point, Lee-Curtis was accused of sexually abusing poor, underaged male members of Wander to Greater Paths Baptist Church.

The scandal, and Lee-Curtis’s character generally, draw inspiration from the real-life figure of Bishop Eddie Long, the former pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta. Like Long, in the film Lee-Curtis and his marriage became the object of national news and public scrutiny in the wake of sexual abuse accusations. Unlike its real-life equivalent, Lee-Curtis’s scandal emptied his five-thousand seat sanctuary to only five people.

Honk for Jesus begins as Lee-Curtis and Trinitie prepare to “reopen” the church. The couple enlists a documentary film crew to record what Trinitie hopes will be a carefully crafted narrative about their resurgence and not, as she suspects, a “mockumentary” that pries into Lee-Curtis’s predatory relationships or their fragile marriage. Lee-Curtis is less credulous. Convinced that the local community is clamoring for his return, and that the documentary will help jumpstart their comeback, he is ready to make a spectacle of himself (and Trinitie). His oblivious egotism and shenanigans—striking cheesy poses in front of the camera, stripping himself nearly naked to be “rebaptized,” and making his wife gospel mime on the side of the road—furnish the film’s awkward comedy.

But despite Lee-Curtis’s enthusiasm and Trinitie’s artificial cheerfulness, the Childses’ “resurrection” faces fresh challenges. Nearby, a rival church run by their former mentees threatens to upstage them. And Lee-Curtis’s scandal and ongoing legal settlements hover over them. His misdeeds continue to follow them, their marriage, and their ministry.

In real-life, megachurch pastors accused of infidelity or sexual misconduct have often maintained their congregations or recouped their images, but in Honk for Jesus, the Childses’ redemption narrative comes with a reckoning.

Honk for Jesus premiered to mixed reviews among clergy and churchgoers. Some viewers enjoyed the film’s commentary on gender and sexual politics in the church, and its critical, but comedic, take on prosperity gospel Christianity, the idea that wealth is a marker of divine favor and that poverty signals spiritual failure. Others argued that it portrays the Black Church in a negative light. Detractors contend that by satirizing the worst aspects of megachurches, the film draws attention away from the good qualities of small and mid-sized Black churches that belong to historically Black protestant denominations, often called “the Black Church.” Black megachurches, on the other hand, are large (over 2,000 members), independent congregations known more for their famed pastors than for their denominational affiliation. Critics of Honk for Jesus note that most Black churches are not megachurches, and that, unlike Lee-Curtis, the majority of Black pastors cannot afford to wear Prada or drive a Bugatti.

The statistics appear to bear out this narrative. In a recent poll by Pew Research Center, 47 percent of Black respondents said they attend churches where the average Sunday crowd is between 51 and 250 people. Almost a third of those polled (32 percent) said less than fifty people attend worship services at their church.

(Image source: David Goldman for the Associated Press)

Church finances are harder to survey, but a study based on a Gallup poll of Black clergy and lay leaders determined that the average annual church income from tithing was between $55,000 and $74,999. By comparison, a New Yorker article on World Changers Church, the Black megachurch pastored by Creflo Dollar, reported that the church had a budget of $80 million, a figure that exceeds the operating budgets of entire mainline Black denominations.

The numerical and financial disparity between megachurches and the average Black congregation suggests that Honk for Jesus’s Wander to Greater Paths Baptist Church reflects an image far removed from the experiences of most Black Christians. It is easy to assume, then, that the film’s commentary does not apply to most Black churches.

However, such an assumption dismisses megachurches’ influence. In an era of declining church attendance among millennial and Gen-Z worshippers, mainline denominations often use megachurches as the model for church growth and “resurrection.” Small and midsize Black churches increasingly take their aesthetic cues from megachurches on matters including worship style, branding, and how the congregational facilities should look. When COVID-19 forced churches to close their sanctuaries, megachurches were ahead of the curve. They already had systems in place for online worship and digital programming. If numbers and money constitute success, it is not surprising that megachurches’ accomplishments have others seeking to follow their lead and reproduce their strategies.

On the one hand, Honk for Jesus parodies the kind of success megachurches represent and their obvious identification with capitalism. Prosperity gospel is the beginning and end of Lee-Curtis’s sermons. He first appears on the screen preaching, “God favors those who favor him.” In one scene, he and Trinitie provide a tour of their walk-in closet filled with color-coded, designer clothes only for Lee-Curtis to declare that he must wear something “completely new” for the church’s reopening. Later, Trinitie tries on a hat with a $2,500 price tag and poses among their collection of luxury cars. These satirical visions of excess might be funny were they not so real. Instead, they call to mind unsettling memories of lavish gifts pastors have given their spouses, or church donations furnishing private jets.

But Honk for Jesus is also about the desire and aspiration for something beyond money. The Childses do not seek to recapture wealth. (They still appear to have plenty of it after years of accumulation.) What they want is to regain power. Their quest is a reminder that power is not contingent on wealth alone. It is an arrangement of factors and social positions that maximize a person’s authority and their ability to assert control over others. As ethicist Miranda Fricker puts it, power is “the socially-situated capacity to control others’ actions.”

In Honk for Jesus, Trinitie and Lee-Curtis are in pursuit of the religious and social dynamics that afford them control, privilege, and validation. When Lee-Curtis refers to himself as “the prophet with the beautiful wife and the gorgeous Bugatti,” he identifies four interrelated sources of power: class, gender, sexuality, and religion. As a “prophet” and pastor, he has the ability to leverage the Bible to influence others’ beliefs, behaviors, and morality, even if in harmful ways. His wealth and celebrity give him a platform to exert spiritual and material sway over his congregation, the public, and his victims. And his presumed heterosexuality and the image of his “good Christian marriage” augment his authority to wield religion as a weapon, especially against queer people. Lee-Curtis’s own attraction to men is as much the cause of the Childses’ fall from grace as his predation on poor young men, reflecting how an abuser’s perceived loss of power through sexual identity often commands more attention than the abuse of power itself.

These elements of power converge in a recording of Lee-Curtis standing at the pulpit to condemn the “homosexual agenda.” With Trinitie seated supportively behind him, he decries same-sex love as an attack on “the Word of God” and on the sanctity of his own heterosexual marriage. “It is man, and woman, and marriage,” Lee-Curtis proclaims from behind his sacred desk. “That is the only way to prosperity, and that is the only way into the kingdom of God,” he continues. The sermon elicits smiling applause from his wife and cries of “speak on it, pastor!” from the congregation, as the camera pans to a packed sanctuary.

The juxtaposition of this flashback and the film’s present highlights the discrepancy between Lee-Curtis’s words and his conduct, as well as how far he has fallen. Later in the movie, Lee-Curtis practices his sermon for the church’s grand reopening in front an empty sanctuary with only Trinitie in attendance. “God doesn’t make perfect men,” he offers, “But he can and does make great men.” When his sermon crescendos to its conclusion, Lee-Curtis is tearful and perhaps genuine for the first time in the film, but he is not contrite. There is no crowd to affirm his “greatness,” only ghostly silence. This time, Trinitie sits unimpressed with her hands folded. “That just doesn’t ring” she says. “See, you don’t quite acknowledge…” Her sentence trails off momentarily before she dismisses the sermon as “dry excuses.”

(Scene from Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul)

The scene is the closest Trinitie comes to holding Lee-Curtis accountable. For once, she is not playing the stereotyped role of the smiling First Lady who sits quietly, supportively, and even unquestioningly behind her husband. Now she is facing him, aligning herself with the unconvinced phantom audience that wants an explanation for Lee-Curtis’s harm. Trinitie occupies these dual positions throughout the film: she is both a victim of Lee-Curtis’s infidelity and misogyny, and a beneficiary of his power. Trinitie best captures the source of her and her husband’s authority when she summarizes their joint mission: “We need peace so that you can get back in that pulpit and preaching—and get me back on that stage.” As a first lady, Trinitie’s proximity to Lee-Curtis and her performance of the role of Christian woman is the way she accesses privilege. Trinitie portrays what scholar Tamura Lomax calls the archetype of the “Black woman of virtue,” whose merit is based on her sexual morality and her unimpeachable loyalty to Christianity and Black men. In exchange, she receives privilege and stardom in what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls the counterpublic of the Black Church—a social sphere where Black women can exert levels of influence that mainstream, white society does not afford them. Yet, Trinitie’s power is more precarious than her husband’s. As a “Christian woman,” her personal success depends on the success of her marriage—even if it is achieved at the expense of her own integrity, emotional fulfillment, and sexual satisfaction.

Megachurch pastors like Lee-Curtis may have uniquely “perfected” these classed, gendered, and sexualized configurations of religious power, but the configuration itself is not restricted to megachurches alone. Part of megachurches’ power, then, is the pressure they exert on other congregations that feel compelled to compete on the same terms without the same resources. The megachurch rubric informs churches’ increasing shift toward corporate-based financial, organizational, and leadership models. It is behind the rising industry of church consulting and Christian content marketing that views religion as a product for consumption and the pulpit, in Trinitie’s words, as a “stage.” And it reinforces the notion of the male celebrity pastor and his virtuous wife as both a moral good and a commercially profitable image.

The megachurch as the model for all twenty-first century Black churches plays out in Honk for Jesus through Keon and Shakura Sumpter, the Childses’ former mentees and co-pastors of Heaven’s House—a rival church that has grown in the aftermath of the Childses’ downfall. Heaven’s House is a midsized congregation with megachurch aspirations. The Sumpters do not question the Childses’ former power or hold them accountable for their abuse. Instead, they have seized the moment of the Childses’ demise to perpetuate and perfect the same formula for “success.” They want to replace Lee-Curtis and Trinitie as the premier pastor-first lady power couple so they can claim the Childses’ lost social and religious capital. Both couples think of the Atlanta church scene as a competitive marketplace with limited souls to go around.

The Sumpters are younger, and they have rebranded the roles of pastor and first lady into a co-pastor team, but they are not actually any different from the Childses. At best, the presumed feminism of their co-pastoral model is a marketing strategy that communicates the dominant cisgender, heterosexual, Christian norms with an egalitarian twist. At worst, it positions Shakura Sumpter, alongside her husband, to weaponize the same violent theology that Lee-Curtis espoused.

The film hints that what feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins calls the matrix of domination—the intersecting structures of class, gender, sexuality, and, in this case, religion—will replicate itself in the Sumpters just as it did in the Childses. When the couples meet in the marital counseling office at Heaven’s House to discuss their competing church openings, they appear as mirror images. In the Sumpters, the Childses face their younger selves and the symbol of their own irrelevance. Opposite them, the Sumpters are staring down the barrel of their own future, scandals included. The scene is a subtle, but haunting, reflection on the aspirational relationship between megachurches and their mid-sized counterparts.

Honk for Jesus is a cautionary tale about the consequences of the grasp for power in religious communities. As long as megachurches and their leaders are emblematic of power and “success” in ministry, then the values that create them and the desire to replicate them will stain broader church cultures. Honk for Jesus invites Christians to look more closely at those barometers of success, the desires they produce, and the price people pay for them. It questions the kind of religious power that dominates and exploits others while calling it, as Lee-Curtis does, “divine favor.” When such power is the object, victims of church abuse will continue to proliferate in the wake of the church’s ambitions. Without questioning the foundations of authority and the quest for power in religious institutions, figures like Lee-Curtis and Trinitie will only reproduce themselves, their harm, and their own demises.

Honk for Jesus may be a parody, but there is plenty of horror behind the laughs.

Ari Colston is a Ph.D. student in Religion at Princeton University where she studies African American religion, law, and Black geographies. Ari has written for Canopy Forum and Afropunk.

The post “Honk for Jesus” and the Influence of Black Megachurches Today appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Reuters / Stefano Rellandini)

On the eve of last fall’s Italian election, the result seemed all but certain. Giorgia Meloni and her Fratelli d’Italia party would surge to a commanding lead and build a coalition that would take the country further to the right than it had been in decades.

The foreknowledge of what was to come set off a mad dash among analysts to dissect the ideology of Meloni’s ragtag crew of partisans. Most settled on the label “post-fascist” — a word that tries to capture the political lineage that exists between her relatively new movement and the political parties built by the surviving remnants of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Meloni and her lieutenants have never fully disavowed that history. Meloni herself, as a young activist, called Mussolini a “great politician.” Her party has obstinately refused to drop the slogans and symbols of Mussolini’s heirs. And in her party’s back rooms, parliamentarians regularly mingle with far-right extremists and reactionary operatives who would revive the ideology of Mussolini’s ill-fated regime.

Yet on the eve of her historic victory, when the New York Times came to visit, Meloni offered a different story of her ideological education: her immersion in the work of British fantasy writer and conservative J.R.R. Tolkien.

Meloni has long harbored an obsession with the characters of Tolkien’s world. She first read his books at age 11. The political gatherings she organized in her high school days, book clubs where Tolkien’s works were read alongside the writings of European fascists and philosophers, were nicknamed “the call of the horn,” a reference to the iconic horn of Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring.

As she rose to prominence, Meloni continually alluded to the symbolism of The Lord of the Rings. When she was made Minister for Youth in 2008, she posed for photos alongside a statue of Gandalf. And as she took to the stage for her final rally this fall, she was introduced with a quote from Aragorn, the series’ mythic hero.

“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” Meloni told the Times that day in September. “I don’t consider The Lord of the Rings fantasy.”

(Image source: Lorenzo Matteucci)

For Meloni and many like her on the European far right, a deep love of Tolkien comes from more than just an appreciation of his rich fantasy world. Instead, it has become a kind of manifesto for an attitude and worldview that has long survived as an obscure undercurrent in Europe’s radical right-wing.

That worldview is the philosophy of Traditionalism, a spiritual doctrine based on a desire to return to a universal, primordial, and eternal Tradition that is in opposition to the individualism and progress of modernity. Though often marginal to far-right party politics, for generations, Traditionalism has furnished part of the ideological scaffolding of Europe’s right-wing militants and extremists.

Today, as it has mutated and shifted over the course of four generations, it’s easy to overstate the impact Traditionalism has had on the ideologies and attitudes of parties like Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, whose public platform contains a mix of “family values,” anti-immigration policies, and neoliberal economics that have become standard features of conservative politics around the world.

But among the newly empowered radical fringes of Europe’s far-right parties, including those at the margins of Meloni’s base, Traditionalism is key to understanding their reactionary worldview.

“Traditionalism has got to be part of the story, because Traditionalism is still part of that milieu,” said Mark Sedgwick, a scholar of Traditionalism at the Aarhus University in Denmark, in an interview. “Actually, I think, [it’s] increasingly part of that milieu.”

***

The origins of Traditionalism lie in the work of René Guénon, a turn-of-the-century French intellectual whose work grappled with the vast transformations wrought by the advent of the modern era.

Guénon’s output began with analyses of Eastern religious texts, then being translated and interpreted by anthropologists. Through these texts, Guénon constructed a notion of “Indian religion” as the repository of an ancient and unbroken Tradition (always capitalized) that embraced non-dualism, “pure intellectuality,” a cyclical understanding of time, and which predated modern ideas of individualism and historical progress.

In Guénon’s analysis, this Tradition had been expressed to various degrees of success across nearly all eras, cultures, faiths, and philosophies. His own convictions eventually led him to abandon Catholicism for Islam, which he viewed as a purer expression of monotheism. But it existed in stark opposition to the modern spirit of equanimity and individual freedom which had driven Europe forward since the French Revolution.

For Guénon, writing as Europe wrestled with rapid industrialization and socialist revolt, modernity was a uniquely Western sickness, accelerating the advent of a dark age. Individualism, capitalist consumption, democracy — all were proof that we were living through a “kali yuga,” a time of worsening crisis when, as he writes in his magnum opus Crisis of the Modern World, “the blind lead the blind… the inferior judges the superior… [and] nothing and nobody is any longer in the right place.”

For many of his age, Guénon’s writing tapped into a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the changes being wrought in society, “inverting,” in Sedgwick’s words, the rhetoric of inevitable human progress that defined modernism. “Once the modern world is understood in terms of decline rather than progress, almost everything else changes, and there are not many people left you can usefully talk to,” Sedgwick writes in Against the Modern World, the seminal study of the Traditionalist movement.

But confrontational as Guénon’s project was, it was also largely removed from political concerns. “Guenon never saw Traditionalism in a political way, he saw it in a spiritual way,” said Christian Giudice, an Italian scholar of Traditionalism. His politics were directed to the creation of “an intellectual elite,” Giudice says, “which could tell normal people … [how] to direct themselves in order to live a more authentic life.”

But Guénon’s spiritual project gained a political edge in the work of the Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola, whose oeuvre has had an outsized influence on the intellectual trajectory of Europe’s radical right. Emerging during the rise of fascism in the 1920s and ‘30s, Evola’s writing helped define a heroic, muscular self-image and theology for the right, even as it remained largely marginal to the fascist project in Italy.

Evola’s Traditionalism also came with real teeth. Whereas Guénon presented an esoteric strand of Traditionalism, Evola aligned himself with the kshatriyas, the Hindu warrior caste. His ideal, Giudice explains, was the Nordic Aryan warrior of Nazi propaganda, and his model society was powered by racial hierarchy, elitism, and a violent assertion of the will. In his writings, he imagined the “man of Tradition” as a member of a superior “spiritual race,” standing amid the ruins of the modern world, reconstituting for themselves a pre-modern society of enlightened rule guided by primordial Tradition.

As a philosopher of the radical right, Evola’s work was predictably hostile to women’s emancipation, psychoanalysis, and the “skin-deep reactivity” of modern man, echoing many of today’s conservative talking points. Perhaps less predictably, though like many on the far-right in his time, Evola was also opposed to the Catholic hierarchy and Christianity itself, preferring a revival of pagan spirituality as closer to the authentic Tradition of his “spiritual race.”

But Evola’s vision for society was never actually realized, and his philosophy became increasingly marginal to Mussolini’s fascist project, which made peace with Catholicism, valorized industry, and elevated the Italian “worker” in a manner deeply at odds with many Traditionalist beliefs. For Evola, the failure of fascism to live up to his ideal was simply further proof of Western society’s corruption and the evolution of the dark age. His subsequent work took on an increasingly pessimistic, accelerationist color.

“It might be better to contribute to the fall οf that which is already wavering and belongs to yesterday’s world,” Evola wrote in Ride the Tiger, one of his most influential post-war works, “than to try to prop it up and prolong its existence artificially.”

For both those disappointed by Mussolini’s fascism and those who had supported the regime only to see it crumble, Evola’s new tone resonated deeply. The next generation of partisans would take his words to heart — waging street battles and bombing train stations to try and push the country into crisis in Italy’s infamous “Years of Lead.”

***

Unlike Germany, Italy never underwent a process of “denazification” in the wake of the Second World War. As the country rebuilt from fascist devastation, Mussolini’s lieutenants were allowed to reconstitute their movement as the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), where Meloni chose to begin her political career.

MSI never achieved much by way of electoral success. In 1972, at the height of its power, it earned only 8.7% of the vote. But to look at its electoral performance alone is to greatly underestimate the influence of neo-fascist ideas in post-war Italy.

“They always had a double path,” explains Giulia Chielli, a doctoral researcher in far-right movements at the University of Toulouse and the University of Grenada. “One is the parliamentary path — the legal party, which aims to justify their politics, their policy. And the other part, which … supports and provides safe havens for these more extreme movements.”

Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, street violence routinely raged in Italy between paramilitaries of the radical right and radical left, known as the Years of Lead. On the right, these so-called “extra-parliamentary” movements, their ranks swelling with youth too radical for the MSI, took their ideology directly from Julius Evola. Continuing to hold court at his house in Rome as the “philosopher-king” of the far-right, Evola infused the movement with a heady mix of anti-democratic nihilism, aristocratic elitism, and racism.

Evola explicitly eschewed parliamentary politics, seeing it as a modern invention, and many of his followers swore off political participation in favor of nihilistic street violence, hoping to accelerate the collapse of democracy in Italy. But many could not swear off politics forever. Over the years, the far-right groups inspired by Evola would furnish many of the next generation’s parliamentary leaders.

In practice, while these politicians took pains to distance themselves from the partisans waging violence in the street, the distinction between these groups was “a theoretical and academic one,” the historian Elisabetta Cassina Wolff writes in her study of the period. “The very same people continuously went in and out” of both groups.

Though these years of extremist violence far predate Meloni and her party, many of those on which she today relies for counsel earned their stripes with exactly these kinds of movements. “People like [current President of the Italian Senate Ignazio] La Russa, people like [current Senate vice-president Maurizio] Gasparri, they were in the streets with molotov cocktails in the ‘70s,” Giudice says. “They were highly influenced by Julius Evola, and that entire milieu.”

But as the ‘70s wound on, the old symbols and street violence of fascism ceased to be as effective as they once were. The new younger members of Italy’s far-right began to look for renewal — and it was at this moment, of all moments, that the first Italian translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work appeared on the scene.

For those ensconced in the traditionalist worldview of Evola, Tolkien’s writing provided a new lexicon for describing the world of their fantasies. Young neo-fascists saw themselves as born kings like the dispossessed Aragorn, destined for aristocratic rule over a willing and worshipful populace. For those less grandiose, Tolkien’s simple Shire folk offered an archetype of agrarian, pre-modern life. Much was made of Tolkien’s own hostility to industrialization and racial essentialism in the text, where the camaraderie of simple, idealistic folk is pitched against Mordor’s industrialized, black hordes in an indisputable battle between an eternal good and a cancerous evil.

In 1977, the Fronte della Gioventù (Youth Front) — the MSI youth wing which Meloni would herself join just over a decade later — organized its first “Hobbit Camp”: a place that functioned, in Meloni’s words, as a “political laboratory,” where concepts and motifs from art, cinema, literature and politics were remixed and reinterpreted to generate a new vocabulary for the radical right.

(“Campo Hobbit.” Image source: Marina Simeone)

“You have a generation change,” says Sedgwick. “You get new guys who are not fascist — they were too young [during the war]. And simultaneously, we get the period where Evola starts being popular again.”

Italy’s right was not alone in reinventing its lexicon. At the same time, in France, Traditionalist ideas were undergoing a profound transformation into something more akin to the rhetoric of today’s radical right. Through his think-tank Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE), Alain de Benoist, a French white nationalist and journalist, undertook the work of translating Traditionalist teachings into political positions more palatable for a post-fascist Europe.

“He modernized Evola, and made his philosophy even more acceptable — something you could sell to the electorate,” Cassina Wolff explained to me. Retaining Evola’s nihilistic attitude to liberal democracy and Christianity, de Benoist had his greatest success in redefining Evola’s “spiritual racism” as “ethnopluralism,” the idea that ethnic groups should exist in homogeneous “ethno-cultural regions.” Playing on national pride and cultural exceptionalism at a time when France was facing waves of African immigration, de Benoist defined a language of racist xenophobia for a new generation of European voters. No amount of globalization, immigration, or multiculturalism could overcome cultural differences, he suggested — better just to keep the immigrants out.

The resulting movement, known as the “New Right,” has in the intervening decades paved the way for the revival of the right-wing electoral influence we are now witnessing. In the Italy of Meloni’s youth, where a country of emigrants had just begun to experience the immigration crises that now dominate headlines, these ideas found a captive audience. “The biological racism, which characterized parties like MSI, transitioned to cultural racism,” Cassina Wolff says. It was into this climate that Giorgia Meloni, the politician, was born.

***

As a 15-year-old growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Rome, Meloni was, by the early 1990s, already a contrarian. Rejecting the communist politics of her absentee father, she joined the Youth Front, still openly neofascist, and immediately began organizing against progressive education reforms with her student organization dubbed “The Ancestors.”

For twelve years she campaigned as a member of the MSI’s youth wing and its successor, Azione Giovane (Youth Action). She attended the various attempts to revive the Hobbit Camps of the 1970s, dressed in hobbit cosplay, but achieved more success with her own version, named “Atreju” after another hero of high fantasy who fights against encroaching darkness. It would later attract far-right luminaries like Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who came to Rome to bemoan the ills of liberal democracy.

But Meloni’s meteoric rise through the ranks of Italy’s post-fascist movement came as it was radically transforming its outward image and flirting with power in a way not previously possible.

From Guenon to De Benoist, Traditionalism’s reactionary spiritual worldview had engendered a deep hostility to many of the darlings of the post-Cold War consensus: capitalism, finance, globalization, representative democracy, America, and even the Catholic Church.

For a party that wanted to take its electoral chances seriously, the efforts to stake out a “third way” — a social and political model distinct from communism and capitalism — risked alienating a more moderate public. Under the leadership of Gianfranco Fini, considered by many to be Meloni’s “political father,” the MSI and its successive party, the Alleanza Nazionale, adopted a neoliberal economic and foreign policy.

With these changes in places, those who retained a desire to reconstitute an aristocratic society opposed to communism and capitalism left to join extra-parliamentary groups, like Forza Nuova and its successor CasaPound, named for the poet and fascist collaborator Ezra Pound. For these groups, Evola’s Traditionalism remained “some kind of religion,” according to Giovanni Baldini, a researcher with the anti-fascist group Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia. “You can study him, but not discuss it. He’s like a saint. A picture of Evola is often found in their offices.”

To this day, Meloni seems somewhat ambiguous about this shift in her own party. While supporting Fini at the time, she has since said he risked destroying the “glorious history” of the Italian Right. In 2012, Meloni left with her allies to form her own party, the Fratelli d’Italia, running on the fascist-era slogan of “God, Fatherland, Family” and a platform that was militant on immigration, opposed to EU integration, and reactionary on reproductive and LGBTQ rights.

“All the old guard of Alleanza Nazionale were very much influenced by Traditionalism, and Traditionalist ideas,” said Giudice. “When Meloni founded Fratelli d’Italia, they all moved with her…. So they probably saw something in Meloni that they did not see in [her rivals].”

***

Exactly how much of this obscured Traditionalist undercurrent has survived in the whirlpool of Italian politics is a matter of some debate. Meloni’s personal politics, as well as that of her “national conservative” movement, have not been entirely consistent on this front.

(Image source: Alessandro Bianchi for Reuters)

For Giudice, Meloni’s ideological lineage is too muddled to tie her to figures like Evola. What Traditional influences remain, he says, are “so fringe as to be almost considered negligible.”

Chielli, to some extent, agrees. “I think the Traditionalism that you can find is more in the propaganda and the external face that they present their electorate,” she says. “They see the Western societies as always in danger. [There is] always this need to protect Western society… [by] looking at the past.”

Exactly what is endangering Western society has shifted for Meloni over time. Previously, she railed against “nihilistic globalist elites, driven by international finance” — those who, she asserted, secretly encouraged illegal immigration “to destroy European identities.”

But today, though she continues to oppose immigration, her attitudes to international finance are more forgiving. Her party is now unabashed in support of neoliberal policies like trickle-down economics and the NATO alliance — a position that has risked alienating supporters, and even those coalition partners who find inspiration in autocratic Russia.

Meloni and her acolytes have also long departed from the anti-Christian attitudes that defined many Traditionalist icons. She and her party are unapologetically Catholic, even if they have at times clashed with the priorities of the current pope.

Employing rhetoric that would shock Guénon, Meloni has urged the defense of the Christian West against “Islamization” and supported the banning of new mosques. More recently, she’s employed similar rhetoric against the so-called “LGBT lobby,” which she accuses of trying to erase the traditional family and, with it, her identity as an “Italian, Christian, woman, [and] mother.”

For Sedgwick, even though this rhetoric comes from a place of far-right Catholicism, it “fits very nicely with Traditionalist ideas about modernity and tradition.” It takes aim at imagined enemies who would break down traditional societies and challenge immutable truths like gender, nationality, and family in the name of “progress.”

“What used to be an argument primarily fought about migration is currently changing shape to be about migration and LGBTQ [rights],” Sedgwick says, “and that while these appear to be quite separate issues, actually, in many ways, they’re not.”

In fact, Meloni’s muscular Catholicism may be an indication of a broader evolution underway in the Traditionalist current. Tobias Cremer, an Oxford-based researcher, recently noted that radical right movements across Europe “are intensifying their use of Christian symbols and language,” presenting a medieval-inspired Christian identity as a traditional contrast to the dominant secular culture of contemporary Europe.

“In times of decreasing religiosity and increasing distance from Christian traditions, religion is now experiencing such an unholy renaissance throughout Europe,” the political scientists Anja Hennig and Oliver Fernando Hidalgo write. “When churches speak about faith, right-wing populists speak about identity.”

This has caused some discomfort for the gatekeepers of Traditionalism’s legacy. De Benoist himself once said his New Right was more successful among Italians than in his native France; but faced with their refusal to disavow the Catholic Church, he denounced their views as a “misunderstanding” of his thought.

Yet, this kind of evolution has been central to elevating De Benoist’s biggest fans to the height of political influence in Europe. Meloni’s victory, analysts agree, is largely thanks to frustration with the existing governing parties — but it’s also a testament to her ability to avoid controversy. Meloni and her lieutenants have more explicit ties to fascism than any government in recent memory — and yet, Meloni has managed to praise former fascists’ “loyalty” to the cause while distancing herself from “nostalgic attitudes” to fascism.

Since becoming prime minister, hemmed in by European funding rules and fearful of international isolation, Meloni has been unable to stake out any but the most moderate of positions. It’s been a performance so mild, with its ideology so veiled, that some even wonder if her party’s neofascist spirit will survive a stint in government. “There are going to be very few traces left of the ideological positions which got the whole thing started,” Sedgwick says.

Chielli says it has been Meloni’s quality of ideological slipperiness, her ability to engage in a “double discourse” aimed at mainstream voters and Europe’s post-Traditionalist fringe right, that has been the key to her success. “It’s difficult actually to recognize just one origin [for her rhetoric], because it’s always a mix of things,” she says. “You cannot say it’s fascism, because it’s not completely fascist. You can’t say it’s Traditionalist, because it’s not completely Traditionalist. But I think … the key for the success of these parties is the way they mix these elements.”

Her interview with the New York Times is just one example. For many in America, where Tolkien’s work is not associated with far-right politics, her nerdy fandom is little more than a humanizing quirk.

But for Italians, it’s a dog whistle to an intellectual tradition that once informed the most militant partisans of the radical right.

John Last is a Canadian freelance writer, researcher and producer based in northern Italy.

The post Tracing the Spiritual Tradition of Italy’s New Far Right appeared first on The Revealer.

(Rev. Billy Graham with President Kennedy. Image source: LIFE Picture Gallery.)

The following excerpt comes from Lerone A. Martin’s book The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, reprinted here with permission from Princeton University Press copyright © 2023. The book explores J. Edgar Hoover’s role in using the FBI to promote and support white Christian nationalism.

The excerpt is from the book’s prologue, “Suing the FBI.”

***

I sued the FBI to write this book. On August 12, 2018, I filed suit against the US Department of Justice (DOJ) for FBI records on Billy Graham (Martin v. United States Department of Justice, 2018, Case Number 18-1885). I was convinced the preacher had an FBI file. No American in the mid-twentieth century could reach his level of fame, notoriety, and influence, yet manage to escape the vigilant, prying eyes of Hoover’s FBI. And no civilian was permitted into Hoover’s inner sanctum for a staged photograph without knowingly or unknowingly enduring a thorough background check. In one way or another, Graham was involved with the FBI, and I thought the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was the key to find out how. But I was wrong. The FBI played hardball, so I sued. It was my only recourse, a desperate attempt to force the FBI to abide by the FOIA.

Revelation is the purpose of the modern FOIA. President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law on Independence Day, 1966. LBJ publicly praised the bill, which gave Americans the opportunity to petition for records of US executive branch agencies. “This legislation springs from one of our most essential principles: a democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the Nation permits,” he proudly announced. Privately, however, the president despised the bill, allowing it to languish on his desk. Johnson finally signed “the fucking thing,” as he scornfully referred to it, after much persuasion, narrowly ducking its pocket veto. His reluctant attitude foreshadowed how executive branch agencies would execute the law.

My ordeal with Graham gave me firsthand experience with their approach. I made my original FOIA request on February 21, 2018. It was the day Graham died, and his legal privacy rights, at least in textual materials, went to the grave with him. The FBI acknowledged my FOIA request, yet failed to make a determination within the twenty-day statutory deadline mandated by Congress. The FBI did not bother to claim “unusual” or “exceptional” circumstances to excuse their malfeasance. They just ignored me. I heard from the Bureau almost two months later. The April letter was as bold as the typeface in which it was set. The Bureau did not concede breaking the law. They simply informed me they would not disclose or even acknowledge the existence of any records concerning Billy Graham and his relationship to law enforcement or national security. These were significant and ironic exclusions for Graham. The preacher had advised US presidents for more than half a century, advocating evangelical Christianity as the key to national security, yet there would be no disclosures. If the FBI determined there were files that resided outside of this broad purview, they pledged to make them public via their FOIA website at some undisclosed date in the future. Then, and only then, would I be informed. The Trump DOJ dug in their heels. This should not have been surprising. President Donald Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, was constantly lambasting the FOIA as a dangerous nuisance, that amounted to “constant harassment” of the DOJ. I decided to join the torrent of disturbance, filing suit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

The civil litigation produced a saga of hide and seek, lost and found. The FBI admitted a number of records on Graham had been destroyed in accordance with a 1986 court order. The ruling created the FBI Records Retention Plan, a rubric that assigns preservation schedules for FBI files based on their potential research value. More than three decades later, the same court informed me that records pertaining to the nation’s most famous evangelist had been legally destroyed by the FBI. What was valuable to me was deemed legally disposable by the FBI. Worse, the FBI testified that other files had been lost or were “unable to be located.” Judge Christopher R. Cooper, an Obama appointee, supervised the FBI as it located and turned over files on a rolling basis. The FBI produced a deluge of documents detailing investigations of deranged death threats targeting Graham, as well as an obsessive amount of newspaper clippings covering the preacher’s whereabouts and statements. However, there was nothing detailing Graham’s relationship to Hoover, the FBI, or any other executive agency.

(Rev. Billy Graham preaching in Berlin. Image source: Associated Press.)

The promised transparency of President Biden’s administration provided false hope. In July 2021, Kathleene Molen, Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, brought good tidings. AUSA Molen informed my counsel, Tuan Samahon, “the FBI has located a file that it had previously been unable to locate. The FBI indicates that the file is related to Billy Graham.” With no explanation, the FBI miraculously “found” a thirty-page file on Billy Graham. I did not care if it was the result of an actual miracle, political timing, or just the correction of incompetence: I counted it a godsend. But my joy was short-lived. The once lost, now found file was largely more of what I had already received.

But I refused to stop. The case was settled, with the DOJ agreeing to pay “for attorney fees and other litigation costs.” Upon turning my attention to Graham’s official archives, I quickly learned the FBI had a co-conspirator in its archival cover-up. Shortly after my public lawsuit, Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham, a staunch right-wing evangelist, announced Billy Graham’s archival holdings would be moved from their original longtime home of Wheaton College to North Carolina. This may not have been a coincidence. The FBI has a practice of releasing “High Visibility Memoranda,” warning various government and civic entities of a proposed release of high-profile files and the possible fallout. The Bureau denied the existence of such a memo in my case. However, the result was the same. Billy Graham’s family took cover, protecting Billy Graham’s legacy as the figurehead and proxy of modern white evangelicalism at all costs. Now Graham’s archival holdings, dating back to 1940, are under the complete control and supervision of the Graham family, specifically Franklin Graham, and cannot be accessed without his blessing.

The younger Graham is the latest in a long line of white evangelicals vying to protect and police the legacy of modern white evangelicalism and its complicated relationship with white Christian nationalism. Pioneering white evangelical institutions such as Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the National Religious Broadcasters have scrubbed detailed references to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI from their respective archives. The deafening silence led me to seek FBI files on the white evangelical world that surrounded Billy Graham—the clergy, churches, magazines, and organizations the evangelist helped to establish—the foundational entities of modern white evangelicalism.

My labor was not in vain. The pages that follow draw upon thousands of newly declassified and released FBI files. The revelations therein are enhanced by my interviews with FBI special agents who worked for Hoover. Together, they show that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were central to postwar religion and politics. Hoover’s FBI joined forces with the founding architects of white evangelicalism to aid and abet the rise of white Christian nationalism as a legitimate force in American politics. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover moves this partnership out of the shadows and into the light.

This discovery illuminates the past, helping to explain twenty-first century US religion and politics. Following a string of white Christian nationalist violence, most notably the January 6, 2021, attack on the nation’s Capitol, the FBI announced renewed efforts to squarely deal with the domestic security threat of white Christian nationalism. The Bureau’s mission will be hampered if it does not trace the multiple origins, dwelling places, and institutional expressions of the threat—even if that trail leads all the way back to FBI headquarters and field offices. Likewise, many prominent white evangelicals have stated a desire to better understand when and how white nationalism came to possess a large portion of the movement. They believe this quest will help exorcise the demons. This book calls them to reconsider the very foundations of modern white evangelicalism, to reckon with the fact that the groundwork was laid, in part, by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI.

Lerone A. Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 32 of the Revealer podcast with Lerone Martin: “The FBI and White Christian Nationalism.”

The post Suing the FBI and Uncovering a History of White Christian Nationalism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Qieer Wang)

“Purity culture parents, be warned: indoctrinating your daughters may cause religious trauma, … wild self-acceptance & naked frolicking through the desert,” Brenda Davies declared in an Instagram post in the fall of 2021. The host of the popular ex-vangelical podcast, God is Grey, had invited several women to join her in Joshua Tree National Park for a weekend of leisure and celebration. The group of women had all grown up in, but rejected, evangelical purity culture, including three who authored their own memoirs, with a fourth soon to be published.

(Screenshot by article author Sara Moslener of Brenda Davies’ Instagram post. https://www.instagram.com/p/CV5eWLbpEu7/. Image no longer available.)

Beginning in the 1990s, evangelical Christians preached that sexual abstinence until marriage was the most authentic mark of religious piety. It was also, according to its evangelists, the natural prophylactic against future marital strife because it prepared young people to enter marriage without the baggage of sexually transmitted infections or emotional disappointment. Sexual purity campaigns proliferated as millions of adolescents came under their thrall because of the promises offered: relief from heart break, hope for a fairy-tale marriage, and a satisfying sex life.

The women’s weekend in Joshua Tree was a unique group, not simply because they had rejected purity culture, but because many are public figures who use their platforms to decry purity teachings’ misogyny. Sexual purity teaches that women and girls are sexually passive and disinterested in sex, while men and boys are sexually aggressive and over-interested. As others have noted, this permits a rape culture within Christianity—the idea that sexual assault is a natural outgrowth of God-given gender roles.

For the past decade I have been researching people who have rejected evangelical purity teachings. I am also a product of white evangelicalism, and in 2015 I published my first book on the origins of “sexual purity” in the 19^th century and its connections to valorizing white womanhood. As I discuss in my book, white Christian women became the symbols of sexual purity and, concurrently, religious piety. But Black women like Sojourner Truth, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper took issue with white women’s exclusive claim to sexual respectability and called attention to the racism inherent in making white women the models of purity and piety.

With the resurgence of purity ideologies in the late twentieth century, Black women, again, were the first to push back. In 2011, The Crunk Feminist Collective published critiques of purity culture on the CFC blog, including the post, “Single Saved and Sexin’” by gender studies scholar Dr. Brittney Cooper. The post received such backlash that Cooper took two years to return to the topic. A few years later, Cooper’s essay, Grown Woman Theology, describes her experiences as a Black girl who grew up in white evangelicalism in the South. Her commitment to sexual purity was wrapped up in her desire to emulate the white girls whom she perceived as successful and well-respected. A conversation with her grandmother helped her recognize that sexual purity was not a formula for holiness, but white supremacy dressed up as Christian virtue.

By the time Cooper published that essay, white feminists Rachel Held Evans, Sarah Bessey and Elizabeth Esther launched a new conversation among white evangelicals about the inherent gender discrimination in purity teachings. The resistance reached its peak in 2019 with the hashtag #ChurchToo, when artist and activist Emily Joy Allison tweeted about being groomed as a teenager by an adult youth pastor, while simultaneously being taught to value her virginity above all else. Allison’s book #ChurchToo: How Purity Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing marked a significant shift in opposition to purity culture in that it offered incontrovertible evidence that connected purity culture and sexual abuse in evangelical communities.

(Image source: redletterchristians.org)

The group of women gathered in Joshua Tree in the fall of 2021 represented a fraction of the opposition to purity culture, one reserved for those with public platforms and influencer status. Among the group were podcasters, authors, actors, models, and even a former beauty queen. Despite their proximity to prestige-culture, the memoirs of two of the women present – Brenda Davies and Alice Greczyn – indicate that racial and class privilege do not exempt anyone from internalizing the evangelical teaching that their bodies’ sexual needs and desires are in conflict with godly behavior.

Not all the women present that weekend hold class and race privilege, nor did they all participate in the photo. But the photograph Davies posted, which included herself and Greczyn, reflected a group with access to many privileges, including close proximity to white beauty ideals, suggesting that white women are more likely to experience full recovery from purity culture.

Historian Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People, explains that our contemporary associations with beauty are deeply rooted in colonial histories and the creation of race as an identity category. European scholars who created race, “not only wanted the people they called ‘their women’ to be the most beautiful, and ‘their men’ to be the most virile. They wanted ‘their countries’ to have the best politics. So they wanted to have everything better. And that included beauty.” Origin stories of the racial category “Caucasian” suggest that 17^th century biologist Fredrich Blumenbach appropriated the term from people in the Caucasus region because he believed the women there to be the most beautiful. The white beauty ideal is not simply in the eyes of the beholder, but a feature of a white supremacist cultural norms.

Purity culture teaches that our physical bodies and our need for sexual pleasure cannot be trusted. The body, according to these teachings, leads people to sin. Rejecting those desires offers the assurance of eternal salvation. White women who have disavowed purity culture often report experiences of “disembodiment.” In her memoir, On Her Knees: Memoir of a Prayerful Jezebel, Davies defines disembodiment as “believing the flesh to be evil and the heart deceitful.” For her this meant asking God to save her from her own sexual desires, or to send her a message that having sex was permissible. On her second date with the man she would eventually marry, she heard an answer: his roommate, also a Christian, had just had sex for the first time and had no regrets. At that revelation, Davies was able to relinquish her commitment to sexual purity, because she now believed it impeded her body from embracing the pleasure God had designed for it.

In her own memoir, Wayward: A Memoir of Spiritual Warfare and Sexual Purity, Alice Greczyn describes discovering that her body held the key to her personal happiness. After rejecting Christianity for secular humanism, she found deep meaning in common physical pleasures that had been forbidden in her Christian family and community. She writes that, “I was taught to deny pleasures of the flesh…the physical, material world I was told to fear and abstain from was the very thing that made me want to live. Sex, food, drink, and nature. Music, dance, books, and kisses. Family, friends, animals, cuddles, and the belief-shattering salve of science. These were where I found peace and awe. These were where I found fulfillment and love.”

Like Davies and Greczyn, many in recovery from purity culture seek re-connection with their physical self through mental health therapy, embodiment coaching, and sexual experimentation. However, the dilemma of disembodiment in purity culture is not simply about sexuality. It is also about race.

Those of us raised in white evangelicalism have been socialized into color-blind racism, which allows white and white-passing people to maintain that racial difference and conflict is insignificant. Color-blind racism prioritizes the racial comfort of white people. It allows us to ignore our own racial identities and the long-standing histories of racial violence, which includes the origin of sexual purity.

In the introduction to her memoir, Davies demonstrates a color-blind perspective by asking, “How could I explain that whatever color, creed, sex, sexuality, religion—or lack thereof—you identify with, you might resonate with this book? The reason being, no matter how divided our life experience or ideology, there are universal themes—like fear, shame, and horniness (or the fear and shame that you never get horny)— that help us see one another.”

In seeking to connect across various forms of difference, Davies claims that her experience taps into a universal understanding that can bridge divides. To support her claim she draws upon the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writing, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” She continues, “When light is shined onto universal human experience—like love, sex, and relationships—we unify, not only with others, but within ourselves. We are meant to be whole.” Her comments dismiss the possibility of racial sexism, that racism impacts all aspects of our lives, including our intimate relationships. By doing so, Davies remains informed by the color-blind racism of her religious upbringing, focusing on unity, peace, and wholeness at the expense of a more accurate understanding of racial conflict. Unwittingly, she is performing another form of disembodiment, one afforded to white people that allows us to ignore our own racial identity and privilege.

Prominent voices, such as Davies and Greszyn, champion a post-purity narrative that prioritizes sexual agency and liberation. But it fails to acknowledge the diverse experiences within that narrative: Black women speaking about the history of resisting sexualized stereotypes, people with disabilities seeking visibility, or asexual people hoping to be taken seriously. All such voices are excluded from a post-purity narrative that takes it cues from second-wave feminism.

Launched in the late 1960s, second wave feminism failed to address the complexities of women’s lived experiences by focusing solely on the needs of straight, white, middle-class women. The voices of queer women and women of color were sequestered as a threat to the movement and feminist victories were marked by the expansion of white women’s successes alone.

In her book, White Women/ Brown Tears: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color, scholar and journalist, Ruby Hamad shows that the white woman’s dilemma is rooted in the brutal legacy of settler-colonialism. “White society marked the bodies of women of color as a receptacle for its sins so that it may claim innocence for itself, and, as the chosen symbol of the innocent perfection of whiteness, the white damsel with her tears of distress functions as both denial of and absolution for this violence.” She illustrates how in European colonies white women were used to exonerate the entire colonial project as it claimed to bring “civilization” to “barbarous” nations. In the United States, these same strategies became embedded in the project of sexual purity, utilized to justify racial-terror lynchings in the name of protecting innocent white women.

***

A month after Davies posted the group photo from Joshua Tree, she began receiving criticism from some of her followers. They noted that the women’s expression of bodily self-acceptance was achievable because they reflected white beauty ideals. One follower commented that she had been sitting in great discomfort with the photo for similar reasons; it did not reflect a thoughtful engagement with various forms of privilege, nor address the racial segregation that exists within post-purity recovery efforts.

Though the criticisms were offered with support and even celebration of the group’s activities,

Davies defended herself, intimating to her audience that as a mother of a vulnerable child (her toddler was sick at the time) people should extend her grace by minimizing their criticism. She deflected any call to confront the complex issues her followers raised, issues common in spaces where white women and women of color exchange ideas about liberating our bodies.

The ability to shield oneself from painful accountability is a racial habit of white womanhood. Pejoratively, this is referred to as “white women’s tears” because of how frequently people harmed by white women have to console those same women who use their gender-based vulnerability to plead innocence to wrong-doing. Davies’ response reinforced the right of white women to assert their own racial innocence in order to maintain the illusion of moral goodness.

Greczyn on the other hand, was not interested in vulnerability and penned a blog post to vent her frustration. Entitled, “The Photo: How a Girl’s Getaway to Joshua Tree Became a Symbol of White Supremacy and Why I’m Not Here to Do Better,” Greczyn initially articulated the critiques with clarity, “Our photo sent a silent message: You must still be a beautiful, white, and able-bodied woman to represent an ideal of deconstructed purity culture. In this way, our photo symbolized the continued upholding of white Christian supremacy in post-Christian spaces.” She astutely identified why people would object to the picture. Despite this, she went on to claim that while these criticisms were understandable, they were invalid. Greczyn leapt into an attack on “woke culture,” which she believes uses shaming tactics akin to her evangelical upbringing. “We were shamed for being light-skinned. We were shamed for appearing able-bodied. We were shamed for being attractive. We were shamed because I am not curvy, because Brenda is not Black, and because Sophia is not visibly disabled. If we were these, the shame would not have been hurled our way.” She goes on to denounce cancel culture as a secular form of the over-reaching, religious accountability she experienced in her early life. “Know what I think you really hate us for?” she writes, “Beauty privilege.”

She is correct—this is exactly what her critics were saying. Beauty is a racialized construct that exploits women by making us believe that our primary responsibility is to maintain our beauty or seek to achieve this amorphous ideal at all costs. Its power sits at the very nexus of misogyny, white supremacy, and ableism. The problem is not a person or photograph that approximates or achieves this ideal, but an uncritical investment in its meanings.

What is most telling in Greczyn’s post is her brief nod to the issue of race, writing, “I am as Korean as I am French, with so many other ethnicities mingling in my blood that to name them all would be boring. I will write more in the future on the topic of being mixed race and ethnically ambiguous. For now, my personal reckoning with my racial identity is still too fresh to share. Yeah blah yeah, light-skinned privilege and all that, go ahead, school me like I haven’t heard it before.”

Understanding one’s mixed-race identity in the U.S. racial landscape takes much work, especially given the insufficiency of our racial categories. Everyone has the right to pursue their understanding in their own time and way. But Greczyn’s comments belittle the topic altogether, fully rejecting the criticisms of women of color asking her and other members of their group to consider the overall impact of the photos’ racial representation. Though she raises thoughtful questions in the midst of her anger, Greczyn displays a form of racial fragility that is especially manifest among white and white-passing women who struggle to understand what it means to hold multiple social identities, some that confer privilege and others that designate vulnerability.

***

Sexual purity holds a racist legacy that many white women raised in evangelical purity culture were never taught to acknowledge. In our color-blind, white churches we learned to be obedient and demure, always deferring to people in power.

Today, some former evangelicals engage in robust conversations about the failure of white evangelicalism to address racism and how our experiences have been shaped by racial privilege and white supremacy. From this viewpoint, we see how sexual liberation is only one thread in a tapestry of collective freedom that must include an examination of how white supremacy informs our claims to sexual healing. Exploring how we, as survivors of sexual and religious trauma, remain tied to systems of privilege and oppression allows us to find healing from our own racist habits. More importantly, it allows us to see how whiteness intercepts our desires for clarity and compassion, distorting them into hardened ideologies and white-saviorism.

Rejection of and recovery from purity culture requires us to engage with intersecting forms of privilege and oppression. For white and white-passing women, this means understanding that efforts to achieve idealized versions of ourselves are not just projects in self-enhancement, but in maintaining the white racial privilege we have been trained to ignore. Being able to experience sexual pleasure after years of sex-negative indoctrination can be an act of resistance. But acts of personal resistance do not address purity culture’s collective harms. While leaving evangelicalism and purity culture may offer white women opportunities for achieving personal and sexual fulfillment, that does not equate to sexual, gender, or racial justice.

The critics of the Joshua Tree photo have taught us something important. The dilemma of white womanhood that we have inherited is the inability to see beyond our own well-being. Recovery from purity culture and its supporting ideologies is a multi-faceted project that requires attention to the historical and religious formation of our sexual and racial embodiment.

Sara Moslener is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion at Central Michigan University. She is currently writing her second book on evangelical purity culture focusing on the racial formation of white womanhood.

The post White Women’s Bodies and the Dilemma of Purity Culture Recovery appeared first on The Revealer.

(White Tantric Yoga. Image source: studentsofyogibhajan)

Between 1963 and 1965, two psychiatrists, Luis Schwartz and Stanton Fjeld, conducted an experiment on sixty-four people in Saint Louis, Missouri. One by one, Schwartz and Fjeld took them to a dark room lit by only a single, small lightbulb and had them stare at their reflection in a four-inch square mirror placed two feet in front of them for thirty minutes. As a tape recorder rolled, each participant reported on their experiences out loud to the psychiatrists.

A large number of the participants saw their reflections distort, disappear, move, or change color. An even higher percentage had intense emotional reactions, including fear, sadness, and aggression. Some felt these emotions within themselves or saw them happening in their reflection. Others had physical reactions and wept or shook. One person even vomited. About three-quarters of the subjects saw or felt a connection to “significant persons or important events in their lives” like a deceased relative or former lover.

The pair of researchers published their findings a few years later in an article titled “Illusions Induced by the Self-Reflected Image.” They were at a loss to explain why these things happened, but they were clear about the intensity of the effects. Staring at oneself in a dimly lit mirror for an extended period of time was comparable to taking hallucinogenic drugs.

Schwartz and Fjeld were neither the first nor the last scientists to research the distortions that occur when people stare for an extended time at themselves in a mirror, into the eyes of another, or at the portrait of someone else. For nearly a century these phenomena have been studied by scientists in Italy, Brazil, Peru, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere.

(Postcard depicting the folk practice of a woman gazing into a dimly-lit mirror on Halloween night to see her future husband. Circa 1900, collection of the author.)

People have also had profound religious experiences arise from staring at someone’s face and seeing it distort. Dick Anthony, a forensic psychologist who was prominent in debates over brainwashing in the 1980s, gazed at a photograph of the guru Meher Baba in 1967 while he was staying in a cabin as a graduate student. The image wavered and dissolved. Anthony then felt the “striking presence” of Meher Baba in the cabin with him and became a devotee. Years earlier in Harlem, a member of the Ethiopian Hebrew Commandment Keepers named Brother William testified to the congregation after Friday evening services that he saw their leader, Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew, “disappear with my own eyes.”

I had heard numerous stories like this within a group I have been researching and writing about for the last decade, the Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization, or 3HO, founded by the late Yogi Bhajan (1929-2004). When members of 3HO gazed into Yogi Bhajan’s photograph, a meditation they called “Tratakam,” they heard him speak or saw his face change expression. When they did “White Tantric Yoga,” a series of meditative exercises in pairs while staring into each other’s eyes, they saw their partner’s face change into another person or an animal.

These accounts were intriguing, and they motivated me to delve into the scientific research on face-gazing and to conduct a survey among members of 3HO. In time, I began to appreciate that these experiences were more than strange anecdotes, but were a powerful factor in the turbulent history of the organization. For many, they were a reason to remain in an abusive religious group long after it would seem sensible to stay.

The Weaver of Energy and Empire

Yogi Bhajan was a Punjabi Sikh born in modern day Pakistan. He worked as a customs agent at Palam Airport in Delhi and came to Los Angeles in late 1968 where he began to teach Kundalini Yoga, a form of yoga that he claimed was powerful and previously secret. He found an eager audience for his yoga with the hippie counterculture, and within a few years he had thousands of students who founded residential ashrams and small businesses across the United States and in Europe.

Yogi Bhajan’s teachings were an unusual amalgam of yoga, New Age philosophy, and a version of the Sikh religion. As a claimed spiritual master, Yogi Bhajan gave his students an all-encompassing prescriptive lifestyle complete with arranged marriages and instructions on when to wake up, what to eat, and how to dress (in all-white clothing).

He also assumed ownership of his students’ homes and businesses, including several that became massively successful like Yogi Tea and Akal Security. By the time of his death in 2004, Yogi Bhajan sat atop a spiritual and business empire worth millions. Over the decades, 3HO was consistently small in size—there were only several thousand committed members—but they were highly visible and left a large imprint on the yoga and business worlds.

(Yogi Bhajan. Image source: studentsofyogibhajan)

Claims of abuse and fraud shadowed Yogi Bhajan, but he and his organization largely avoided the label of “cult” and the scrutiny given to comparable groups such as the Unification Church and Hare Krishnas. This changed in early 2020 when a self-published memoir by one of Yogi Bhajan’s secretaries caused dozens of survivors to come forward and give accounts of abuse directly at Yogi Bhajan’s hands and within 3HO’s boarding schools in India.

That summer, a report commissioned by 3HO and carried out by An Olive Branch, a third-party consultancy, concluded that Yogi Bhajan “more likely than not” committed a range of abuses including rape, sexual assault, and physical assault, as well as psychological and spiritual abuse. 3HO has since admitted to harm done to its members and is currently the subject of lawsuits and undergoing a reparations program with hundreds of survivors.

Yogi Bhajan’s abusive behavior was not unique. He was one among many yoga teachers and charismatic religious leaders whose patterns of abuse and exploitation have come to light in recent years. But two things make Yogi Bhajan stand out from his peers.

Unlike other popular styles of yoga which share common postures and origins, Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga was an unusual combination of calisthenic-like exercises, intense breathing, mantras, meditation, and other, more bizarre elements like meditating with pieces of fruit. Where other styles of yoga have a set number of postures or a clearly defined series, Yogi Bhajan’s yoga consisted of an amorphous and ever-expanding number of meditations and sets of exercises he called kriyas that eventually numbered in the thousands. Without clear antecedents or ready comparisons, understanding Kundalini Yoga and how it worked depended on Yogi Bhajan himself.

The same was true of Yogi Bhajan’s claims of power and authority. His lectures were filled with stories of being able to control the rain and of guiding his students after their deaths. In the spring of 1971, Yogi Bhajan emerged from a morning meditation and told his students that the mantle of the “Mahan Tantric” had been passed to him through the ethers. As the sole living Mahan Tantric on earth, Yogi Bhajan was a “universal filter” and the only person capable of handling the power and force of White Tantric Yoga.

Two specific exercises, which both center on staring into the eyes of another person, highlight the peculiarity of Yogi Bhajan’s yoga and his claims to supernatural power and authority.

The first is known within 3HO as the Tratakam meditation, which is done with a specific photograph of Yogi Bhajan that is placed on an orange background and set so that the eyes in the portrait are at the same level as the eyes of the seated practitioner. The room is darkened, the portrait is lit by a candle, and the practitioner fixes their gaze into Yogi Bhajan’s eyes for a time between fifteen minutes to several hours. 

The second practice is White Tantric Yoga, where participants are paired up and sit across from each other in long rows and go through a series of often grueling exercises (such as holding your arms over your head) for 31 or 62 minutes each while staring into their partner’s eyes. White Tantric Yoga is done over the course of an entire day, or three consecutive days.

Both the Tratakam meditation and White Tantric Yoga are based on Yogi Bhajan’s claim to being the Mahan Tantric. The Tratakam meditation was said to have power because the particular photograph used was of Yogi Bhajan as the Mahan Tantric. Similarly, White Tantric Yoga was considered safe only under Yogi Bhajan’s direction and his abilities as the Mahan Tantric. (He presided over White Tantric Yoga in person until his health started to fail 1987 and then they were led by video tapes of him.)

(Advertisement of Yogi Bhajan using the future “Tratakam” image. July 16, 1969 UC Santa Barbara student Newspaper, El Gaucho.)

There are several problems with these claims. The most fundamental is the lack of evidence outside of Yogi Bhajan for the title’s existence. Another is timing. The photograph of Yogi Bhajan used for the Tratakam meditation was taken almost two years before he supposedly received the title of Mahan Tantric, and he similarly had his students do many of the same exercises as in White Tantric Yoga before he supposedly received the mantle.

Photographs That Talk, Portraits That Turn into Your Grandmother

Yet still, despite these inconsistencies, many students described having unusual and dramatic experiences while doing White Tantric Yoga and Tratakam meditation with yogi Bhajan’s portrait.

To understand why so many people found these experiences powerful and worth overlooking known concerns about Yogi Bhajan, in 2019 I asked people from several groups of Kundalini Yoga practitioners on social media to fill out a survey about their unusual experiences with the Tratakam meditation and White Tantric Yoga. Fifty-nine people responded. I compared their responses with scientific findings on face-gazing.

The most important finding was how common the uncommon was for practitioners of these two exercises. The vast majority, over 90%, saw or heard some sort of distortion. Of those who did the Tratakam meditation, half saw Yogi Bhajan’s image shift, move, or become three-dimensional, and about a quarter saw it distort, gesture at them, disappear, change into another face, or speak at them. Half of those who did White Tantric Yoga saw their partner’s face distort or transform into an unfamiliar face, and about a quarter saw their partner’s face disappear or change into someone familiar.

Comparing the visual and auditory distortions of 3HO members in these two meditations to earlier laboratory experiments revealed something striking. Respondents who did the Tratakam meditation had unusual experiences at nearly the same rate as people who gazed at a photograph in a 2000 scientific study (83% vs. 84%), and respondents who did White Tantric Yoga had unusual experiences almost as often as the participants who gazed into a mirror in the study by Schwartz and Fjeld (77% vs. 79%).

Put simply, the unusual and surprising things that happened to practitioners of the Tratakam meditation and White Tantric Yoga were not unusual or surprising. Hearing voices or seeing faces morph and disappear are normal and repeatable events that occur when we stare at the face of another for too long, and it does not matter whose face it is.

What was less predictable was the significance that respondents found with their experiences. There was no correlation between significance and any demographic information such as age, gender, or nationality, nor the length or intensity of someone’s practice of Kundalini Yoga. But still, nearly one-quarter of respondents described their unusual experiences as being highly significant, or something that was powerful, profound, or gave them deep insight or wisdom.

One American woman said that the portrait of Yogi Bhajan transformed into his person during the Tratakam meditation and yelled at her, “You ARE the Adi Shakti (primal feminine power). It’s time to own up to your power. Stop bullshitting!” before turning back into the portrait. Even though it had occurred a decade earlier she wrote, “I have spent the intervening time trying to live up to what he asked, and I will never forget that moment.”

Another woman from Europe who found only little significance with Tratakam meditation using the photograph of Yogi Bhajan had a life changing experience when she was gazing at a portrait of the third Sikh Guru, Guru Amar Das (1479-1574) hanging on her wall. The image smiled and then transformed into her beloved late grandmother. “At this moment,” she said in her response, “I thought I was such a bad person, and then I seriously began on my spiritual path. Now I am a Kundalini Yoga teacher.

Hallucinations Succeed Where Prophecy Fails

Both women described those two moments of speaking and morphing images as inexplicable, deeply personal, and fleeting. But experiences like theirs not only had explanations, but were common among many other members and were one factor among many that could explain the larger history of 3HO over the course of decades.

3HO has been consistently small throughout its history. Given that the group placed importance on its members having families and children, as well as its engagement with the public through Kundalini Yoga classes throughout the world, 3HO should have grown in size. But there have only ever been several thousand committed members from the 1970s to the present.

As people were born into 3HO or joined it as adults, others left. Some of the earliest studies of 3HO in the 1970s found that people regularly cycled in and out of the early residential ashrams. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were several waves of mass-defections when members learned of Yogi Bhajan’s illicit and abusive sexual activity, the involvement of high-ranking members in drug-smuggling, and the abuse and neglect of 3HO’s second generation in its India-based boarding schools.

It might be easier for those outside a marginal religious group to understand defectors than those who remain, like the several thousand people who stayed committed to 3HO after successive waves of scandal and rumors. Why did they stay? What keeps people in a group after they learn what inspired others to leave?

One of the most common explanations for why people would stay is cognitive dissonance, the theory from the social psychologist Leon Festinger that people faced with conflicting information would be motivated to reduce the tension. If they did not do it by changing their beliefs or behavior, they would by find ways to justify or ignore the source of the conflict.

The “Olive Branch” report commissioned by 3HO that came out in 2020 was filled with examples of cognitive dissonance. Supporters of Yogi Bhajan defended him against allegations of abuse by claiming that his behavior was enlightened and therefore inscrutable. He could read minds and see auras. He was like Jesus or the Buddha. Other supporters simply claimed that his accusers were resentful or trying to get money and were therefore unreliable.

Others have suggested that leaving high-demand religious groups can be compared to leaving a marriage, with similar patterns of initial commitment, gradual disillusionment, rational decision making, and finally disengagement.

The dozens of former 3HO members I interviewed spoke of a similar process. They weighed the risks and benefits of staying in the group or leaving it, and were keenly aware of the factors that allowed them to leave or kept them in. Some understood that leaving the group would mean a divorce and losing their children. Others with employable skills or money knew they were fortunate and had resources if they left. 

Many of those same former members also mentioned that they had unusual, inexplicable experiences that kept them in the group well after they were first disillusioned. One man remembered teaching free-wheeling Kundalini Yoga classes in Memphis, Tennessee in 1970 with spontaneous dancing, singing, and sermonizing. Even as he acknowledged what was harmful about Yogi Bhajan, he spoke with a sense of awe about the ecstasy and euphoria he felt during those classes. At one point, he shyly told me in a near-whisper, “It felt like the Pentecost.”

Another man I interviewed found something inexplicable and spiritually significant in the colors and flashes of light he saw dart across the room when he took yoga classes with Yogi Bhajan in the late-1960s. He stayed in 3HO for decades and witnessed abuse behavior for Yogi Bhajan numerous times before finally leaving. One of the reasons he stayed for so long was his visions of the colors and lights. He could not explain them away and thought they meant that “there was something real” behind Yogi Bhajan.

It would be easy to dismiss these ecstatic moments, but for those who lived them, they could be powerful and difficult to dismiss. They served as evidence for their beliefs that Yogi Bhajan had superhuman powers or that his students could reach otherworldly realms through his teachings. Many wrestled with the meaning of events like a photograph that spoke to them while they tried to justify or ignore the behavior of Yogi Bhajan and his associates, or assess the risks and benefits of leaving the group.

Those who find the greatest significance in the disappearance or distortion of a face tend to be those who have the greatest expectations of something miraculous. When Dick Anthony saw the image of Meher Baba dissolve, he had been trying to recreate a state he described as “a sort of enlightenment” that he had years earlier. The testimony that Rabbi Matthew could render himself invisible caused the congregation to rise and shout that “the Lord loves our teacher,” and was seen as immediate confirmation to the Commandment Keepers that they were “the chosen sons and daughters of Jehova [God].”

Members of 3HO had similar hopes. The initial crop of spiritual seekers Yogi Bhajan found in Los Angeles in the late 1960s were already eagerly looking for an enlightened master. Lola Williamson’s work on “Hindu Inspired Meditation Movements” found that the spiritual seekers she studied drew from the same eclectic pool of writings from figures such as Yogananda, Alan Watts, and Carlos Castaneda, that all emphasized the need for an enlightened master who was uniquely able to facilitate spiritual growth.

Many of the former 3HO members I interviewed explicitly said as much. One told me only half-jokingly that he was “guru-hunting” at the time of his first Kundalini Yoga class. Many of Yogi Bhajan’s early followers were so eager to see him as in this role that they willingly ceded control to him over their money, they identities, their lives, and in the case of the boarding schools in India, their own children. It was a miscalculation with devastating consequences for generations of people.

Today, there are reckonings for 3HO on many fronts. The organization is the subject of lawsuits, a reparations program, and numerous podcasts and documentaries. The community itself has broken into several camps of those who believe the testimony of survivors and have recently left, the “true” believers who adamantly deny everything that has come to light, and those who are somewhere in-between and attempting to carry on the yoga and community left behind by Yogi Bhajan by obscuring and deemphasizing his various abuses.

As a matter of open guilt, aggressive pride, or quiet discomfort, the various factions of 3HO all hold an awareness that if 3HO could not have existed without Yogi Bhajan, it also could not have existed without his followers.

Many charismatic figures are adept at using what their audience wants to hear to an advantage: the con artist who promises their victim an easy windfall or the politician who rallies their base by exaggerating the threat of a group already disliked and under suspicion. Under the surface of these manipulations is an awkward and unspoken partnership between the exploiter and the exploited.

In Yogi Bhajan, a former airport customs agent who covered himself in jewelry and was surrounded by suspicion and scandal, his students chose to see an enlightened master. It was not unlike seeing a distorted image in a photograph or another person’s face and choosing to see something miraculous.

Philip Deslippe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The post When Misseeing Is Believing: The Self-Reflected Image and Kundalini Yoga appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Welcome to our first issue in 2023! We have several exciting things in store for you this year, including celebrating our 20th anniversary this fall! But, as always, our first commitment is to provide you with incisive articles about religion’s place in today’s world.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

We are starting the year off by taking a look at issues of power and race within and beyond religious communities. Given recent events, including the Florida governor’s opposition to African American history and the prevalence of white Christian nationalists throughout the country, we are foregrounding connections between power, race, and religion.

Our February issue opens with Philip Deslippe’s “When Misseeing is Believing,” where he explores why people remained in a yoga community even though abuse was rampant, and how their reasons for staying shed light on the cognitive dissonance many people experience when they learn a leader – religious, political, or otherwise – who they revered is not as they had believed. Deslippe’s insights apply far beyond the religious community he studied. Next, in “White Women’s Bodies and the Dilemma of Purity Culture Recovery,” Sara Moslener examines the “post-purity culture” ex-evangelicals who encourage others to reject their churches’ teachings about sex. What she finds is a movement rooted in sexual liberation that is concurrently upholding ideals of white female beauty and unwittingly reinforcing white supremacy.

Our February issue then broadens out to consider white supremacy at the governmental level. In “Suing the FBI and Uncovering a History of White Christian Nationalism,” an excerpt from his new book The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover, Lerone A. Martin shows how the FBI partnered with religious communities for decades to make America a primarily white Christian nation. From there, we head to Europe where, in “Tracing the Spiritual Tradition of Italy’s New Far Right,” John Last provides keen observations about Italy’s recent election of a far-right government, the religious, racial, and philosophical underpinnings of this right-wing move, and how this election connects to broader global politics and, strangely enough, The Lord of the Rings.

The issue concludes by returning to the United States and looking at issues of religion, power, and race here. In “Honk for Jesus and the Influence of Black Megachurches Today,” Ari Colston reviews the movie Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, where she considers how the satirical film reveals real-life issues of corruption and abuse in megachurches and how, despite such scandals, megachurches continue to influence smaller Black Christian communities throughout the country. And in our “In the News” roundup, Cameron Andersen highlights some of the best writing about religion, power, and race so far in 2023.

Our February issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “The FBI and White Christian Nationalism.” Lerone Martin joins us to discuss the place of religion and race at the FBI. We explore why J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s long-serving director, believed a Christian America was a safer America, what he did to make that vision a reality, and how knowing that history can help us make sense of the rise in white Christian nationalism today. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As we settle into 2023, the Revealer remains steadfast in its commitment to exploring how people use religion as a source of power, as a cover for racism, and as a tool to influence laws and the broader culture. We are also committed to showing how religion is not inherently abusive, nor is religion the sole source of racism or white supremacy. We will bring you stories this year, as we always have, on religious communities and people who are working to address systemic racism and the influence of conservative religion in politics. And, as we have been doing for nearly 20 years, we will highlight the nuances and multiplicities of religion’s place in today’s world so all of us have a clearer understanding of what we are facing.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Power, Race, and Religion appeared first on The Revealer.