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

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: Catholic Horror.

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 27: Catholic Horror appeared first on The Revealer.

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

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: Religion and Pornography.

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 26: Religion and Pornography appeared first on The Revealer.

(The Way Down poster. Image source HBO Max)

The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin debuted in the fall of 2021 and, if Twitter is any indication, the series received an enthusiastic, and somewhat perplexed, response from its audience of HBO Max subscribers. Chronicling the rise and literal fall (spoiler alert: the story ends in a fatal plane crash) of Shamblin’s world-renowned Weigh Down Workshop program and her church, Remnant Fellowship, the five-episode series takes a deep dive into the world of Christian diet culture. Viewers seemed taken aback by Shamblin’s signature ultra-teased bleach-blonde hair-do and confused that someone with such a unique style had amassed so many followers. But to understand Shamblin’s international popularity, we must start at the beginning with her upbringing in the 1950s and 60s by a white evangelical family in Memphis, Tennessee.

As one interviewee in the docuseries aptly describes, Shamblin was formed in a southern religious culture that lived by three tenants: “nobody else but Jesus, nobody even close; the Bible is literally true.” As members of the Church of Christ denomination, Shamblin’s family was guided by Restorationism, a theological movement founded in the 19th century that committed to practicing Christianity in its “purest” form or, as scholars Gerard Mannion and Lewis S. Mudge say, “practicing church the way it is perceived to have been done in the New Testament.” The Church of Christ is widely held as one of the most conservative evangelical denominations, even amongst its southern Protestant peers.

In college and graduate school, Shamblin studied dietetics and nutrition, a decision informed by a self-proclaimed “restless” relationship with food as a child. In 1986, after establishing a career as a registered dietitian, Shamblin started Weigh Down Workshop which was “originally founded as a secular program in Memphis,” according to religion scholar and author of Born Again Bodies, R. Marie Griffith.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Shamblin connected her ideas about nutrition to the theology of her youth. Shamblin began hosting her Weigh Down gatherings in churches and inflecting her curriculum with an evangelical bent. Groups that met to support each other through the program were now referred to as “bible studies,” and Shamblin prescribed prayer “for those in doubt about how much to eat.”

Following this shift, Shamblin’s movement quickly expanded, leading to the publication of her astoundingly successful book, Weigh Down Diet in 1997, which sold more than 1.2 million copies. The text combined “intuitive eating ideologies” that encourage people to listen to their bodies’ signals to properly assess their hunger and fullness with a “theology of thinness,” wherein a person’s morality and sense of worth is judged by their body size. Fat people, according to Shamblin, are not holy people.

Weigh Down was neither the first nor only Christian diet program to emerge at this time. Several others like Joan Cavanaugh’s More of Jesus, Less of Me and Slim for Him had circulated since the 1970s. The Southern Baptist Convention had also established its First Place program five years before Weigh Down Workshop and, similarly to Weigh Down, “reasoned that if, as believers, [Christians] could turn to God for a wide range of personal struggles, they should be able to call on him for help in the realm of fitness and weight loss,” writes religion scholar Lynn Gerber. Even Black mega-pastors, like T.D. Jakes, joined the fray. According to Griffith, Jakes’s Lay Aside the Weight borrowed from white Protestant theologies of bodily perfection. Influential church leaders across the country were figuratively and literally sharing recipes for thinness.

Though the Southern Baptist Convention’s First Place may have beat Weigh Down to the punch, Weigh Down Workshop far outpaced its competition. By 1998, Weigh Down Workshop developed a mega-following and hosted over 21,000 classes with more than 250,000 participants across the United States, Canada, and Europe. The Weigh Down Workshop’s popularity, and the Weigh Down Diet’s massive book sales, provided the foundation for Shamblin to establish her own church, Remnant Fellowship, in Franklin, Tennessee, about 40 minutes outside of Nashville.

Over the course of the docuseries, viewers watch scholars, clerics, and local residents discuss the church’s impact – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Ex-members describe an atmosphere that welcomed them with open arms, where everyone felt included. It seemed like the perfect, ready-made community, at least in the beginning. Several spoke of the impressive schedule of events curated to fill members’ social calendars. Seemingly kind and altruistic leaders provided encouragement and guidance to help people on their intermingled spiritual and weight loss journeys. However, somewhere along the way, that kindness turned into exploitation. Some would describe this experience as love-bombing, a strategy where people lavish others with attention and praise in order to manipulate them.

The documentarians behind The Way Down deployed this strategy to frame Remnant Fellowship as an abusive cult. Allegations of spiritual malpractice ranged from Shamblin blackmailing Weigh Down Workshop employees to her covering men’s legal fees when their wives wanted to leave the church and get a divorce. Several children were also allegedly abused by adult Remnant Fellowship members. Throughout its time, Remnant Fellowship made frequent headlines with abuse allegations, legal woes, and even claims of heresy from nearby pastors. In the end, things literally came crashing down when several Remnant Fellowship leaders, including Shamblin, died in plane crash piloted by Shamblin’s second husband.

***

As I watched the docuseries, I was most struck by the presence of Black interviewees who discussed their experiences as Weigh Down Workshop participants and Remnant Fellowship members. Both Weigh Down and Remnant Fellowship perpetuated anti-blackness, using language of “bondage,” “enslavement,” and “freedom” to describe relationships with God and food. And their standards of beauty and femininity clearly positioned white womanhood as the universal ideal.

As the series aired, Twitter users questioned why Black people became involved in such an organization.

“The Black lady on here says other Black people shouldn’t judge her because she was just looking for like minded people. I’m sorry but as a Black woman – white evangelicals could never be likeminded to me,” one person tweeted.

“How do Black people keep getting caught in these cults??? What is alluring about this?” asked another.

Glaringly absent from the documentary was any significant analysis of Black people’s participation in Remnant Fellowship and Weigh Down Workshop. The series made sure that Black people and people of color were represented throughout the episodes. But there was no mention of how Black people were groomed for this type of environment or the racial dynamics that occurred therein.

(Helen Byrd in The Way Down)

One example of this can be found in the portrayal of Helen Byrd, a Black woman profiled in the series. In an earlier podcast interview, Byrd said she joined Remnant Fellowship because she wanted to be connected with a community of Christian believers. Having relocated from New Orleans to Nashville in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, she longed for a personal relationship with God that was different from her Catholic upbringing.

With Byrd’s story as a case study, The Way Down’s documentarians could have offered viewers insight into why Black Americans like Byrd were drawn to Remnant Fellowship. For example, they could have highlighted New Orleans’s large Black Catholic population and the decades-long history of interracial worship there to help viewers understand why such Black Americans might feel comfortable in Gwen Shamblin’s congregation. They also could have explored whether or not Black Americans’ displacement from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and the ensuing desire for a new community with strong social ties, made people like Byrd vulnerable to being groomed for membership by Remnant Fellowship leaders.

As I reflected on Black Christians’ involvement with Remnant Fellowship, my mother reminded me that we attended a Weigh Down Workshop meeting at Remnant Fellowship when I was 11 years old. We were invited by the wife of mom’s long-time OBGYN. The gathering was not what my mom expected so we left with no intentions of returning (or really thinking about it ever again), that is until my mom received a letter from Remnant Fellowship saying the Lord really wanted her to be with them and that the “spirit of gluttony” was upon her – a common tactic they used to guilt people into joining. My mom took the letter to my grandmother, who told her to burn it. “Nothing that upsets your spirit should be kept in the house,” she said. That evening, my mother placed the letter on our grill, lit a match, and set it ablaze.

The “spirit of gluttony” accusation leveled at my mother by a leader of Remnant Fellowship cannot be divorced from its historical lineage, both inside and outside of Christian churches. Pervasive cultural stereotypes like that of the Black mammy figure rely on the idea that Black people are gluttonous. Remnant Fellowship used that rhetoric to convince Black Americans they needed them, all the while making it clear that some bodies (usually not Black ones) are better, thinner, and more desirable. As author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, Da’Shaun L Harrison, writes, “Pretty, Beauty, and Ugly are determined by the structures through which people are marginalized for their Blackness, their gender(lessness), and their bodies. Beauty standards, especially in the United States, are predicated on anti-blackness, anti-fatness, anti-disfiguredness, cisheterosexism, and ableism.” Remnant Fellowship tapped into anti-Black racism to proselytize Black Americans and to convince them they needed what Remnant Fellowship and Weigh Down Workshop had to offer.

***

As I reflect on my mother’s experience and on Twitter users condemning Helen Byrd and other Black Americans who joined Weigh Down Workshop, I am reminded once again of the lack of empathy that exists for fat Black women. In truth, the world of Weigh Down Workshop and Remnant Fellowship is indistinguishable from the anti-Black, anti-fat oppression that countless Black women, and other marginalized people, face on a daily basis.

By not unpacking the reasons for Black people’s experiences with Gwen Shamblin and Remnant Fellowship, the documentary opened Black interviewees like Byrd up to degradation instead of pointing out the constant surveillance and regulation of fat Black bodies that pervades our culture. Instead of questioning whether or not Black people should “know better” or enough to avoid these religious spaces, we should, instead, consider the conditions that make ripe our longings for social inclusion, for affirmations of bodies that are constantly critiqued, for worthiness. Our denigration has always been the active agent that solidifies the right(ous)ness of whiteness. When we orient ourselves from that viewpoint, it becomes clear the lengths to which some of us go in order to mitigate our suffering.

Ambre Dromgoole is a Ph.D. Candidate in the combined program in African American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “There’s a Heaven Somewhere’: Itinerancy, Intimacy, and Performance in the Lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1983.”

The post The Way Black: Considering Black Membership in the Cult of Gwen Shamblin appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo by Netflix and illustration by The Daily Beast)

“I grew up with God; he’s a douchebag, all right,” joked Taylor Tomlinson in her 2022 Netflix comedy special Look At You. “Did he tell you you were broken and you need him? That’s his move, that’s what he does. He says that to everybody. Don’t drink what he gives you. You drink that, next thing you know, you’re eating his body, the holy spirit’s inside you, it’s a whole system they have over at that frat house they call church. Who else uses Roman numerals?”

The 28-year-old comedian, raised in a devout Christian household, frequently calls out Christianity in her comedy, including in her earlier Netflix special Quarter-Life Crisis. But in Look At You, Tomlinson becomes one of the first female comedians to talk about living in conservative Christian communities where mental illness and female sexuality are stigmatized. This conflict shaped her outlook on life and her work on stage.

As opposed to comedic routines about sex and religion written by men, like Dana Carvey dressing up as a prudish Church Lady on Saturday Night Live, or John Mulaney cracking jokes about Catholic sexual guilt, Tomlinson finds success talking about religion and sex from a female point of view.

Tomlinson grew up in a religious community where Christianity touched every part of her life, often in damaging ways. Her comedy is a powerful tool for other religious trauma survivors, serving as a platform to introduce their experiences into the mainstream and to help them separate harmful beliefs from where they learned and internalized them.

Tomlinson says she first felt religion’s impact in her childhood. “I did not grow up in a household that was very mental health-conscious,” Tomlinson explains, “we were very religious.” Although a recent study shows that the vast majority of American adults agree that having a mental health disorder is nothing to be ashamed of, Tomlinson shares how this is not often the case in conservative religious spaces. In Christian communities like the one in which she was raised, people view mental illness as a sign of weakness, shame, or a defunct faith, founded on the belief that a person can “pray away” their mental health problems.

When Tomlinson was in high school and asked her dad about the panic attacks she was having, he gave her advice that made her feel like a werewolf. “All I can tell you,” she says mimicking her father’s low, raspy tone, “is that when you feel like this, get as far away from the people you care about as possible until you feel different.” As Tomlinson understood it, “just run into the woods ‘til you’re not a monster anymore.”

In addition to suffering from panic attacks, Tomlinson also has bipolar disorder. It was “a tough pill to swallow,” she laughed about receiving the diagnosis, “and I’ve swallowed a lot of pills.”

(Image: Tomlinson on stage for her Look at You tour)

“Being bipolar is like not knowing how to swim,” she says. “It might be embarrassing to tell people, and it might be hard to take you certain places, but they have arm floaties,” by which she means medication. “And if you just take your arm floaties, you can go wherever the hell you want.” Tomlinson uses the metaphor of needing arm floaties, and of drowning, to convey the danger behind the joke. When religious communities like hers stigmatize mental illness and provide no legitimate resources for people to get help, the threat of suicide and self-harm is frighteningly real.

Her story highlights how she wasn’t able to get help in her childhood home, in part because of her family’s religion. It’s hard to imagine if you live outside these systems, but Tomlinson didn’t have her parents’ support to seek out professional help, and even if she did, she lived in a community where people condemned anyone who turned to mental health services or who took medication for mental illness.

As someone who grew up in a similar religious environment, this was the first time I heard someone talk about the idea that mental illness is a struggle you fight alone, a struggle between you and God. Her comedy struck me because it speaks to how people live with the reverberations of these teachings, and the ensuing religious trauma, for years.

Tomlinson is also one of the first comedians I’ve encountered who explores issues of sexuality and conservative Christianity. “I’ve never seen a vagina, not even my own. I’m a Christian,” Tomlinson tartly remarks as she shifts to talk about her sexual experiences and purity culture.

Purity culture refers to a movement, especially popular among – although not limited to – white evangelical Christians, that tries to convince young people to remain abstinent until marriage. Adolescents, particularly young women, are taught that if they have sex or sexual thoughts before marriage, they not only disappoint God and their families, but that they are tarnished, used, and no longer pure. The movement reinforces traditional, binary gender roles and heterosexual attraction as God’s intended plan for everyone.

Tomlinson regales her audience with stories of youth groups where she learned, “it’s not the physical act of masturbating that’s the sin you guys, alright. It’s not even the orgasm. In fact, if you have a wet dream, thank God for the freebie and have an awesome day,” she kneels to kid eye-level and fist-bumps the air like a camp counselor. “But what are you thinking about while you’re doing that to yourself guys? That’s what the sin is. It’s the lust in your heart. It’s the impure thoughts in your head.”

Like many who grew up in communities that promoted purity culture, Tomlinson has suffered long-term consequences. “It gave me some serious trust issues,” she says. “And it just made me weird, growing up in church, in ways that I am still discovering. For example, I just found out that I masturbate wrong,” by which she means that years later she still believed she had to clear her mind when she wanted to be intimate with herself. “When I got to be an adult, and I wanted to masturbate, I was like, well, if I just don’t think about anything, I could probably still go to heaven, right? Just like clear your mind, get in there, get it done, see you soon Jesus, right?”

Tomlinson talks openly about her initial hesitancy to explore her own body through a funny anecdote about experiencing her first orgasm with her college boyfriend. “‘You’ve been here for 19 years, you never went poking around on your own?’”,  she pauses to mimic a realtor—a stand-in for her college boyfriend—leading her on a tour of her own downstairs. “I did once, but I thought Jesus would get mad. I don’t actually own this place, I’m just renting it from the guy upstairs. If I flood the basement, I do not get my security deposit back.”

What Tomlinson is talking about—feeling guilty about intimately knowing her own body—may seem outlandish: how or why would anyone believe or buy into these things? For those who were raised within the walls of these systems, it feels incredibly real. Central to purity culture is the idea that women do not control their sexuality. Men are in charge of women’s sexual experiences, reinforcing male ownership of female bodies. Tomlinson’s comedy reminds those of us who were once part of these communities, that it was real, and that others felt it too.

From the perspective of someone raised in these systems, her comedy is like hearing a Christian pop band cover your favorite church hymn. It feels familiar but not quite the same, because in that moment when you first hear it on Spotify you recognize that this song, like the lessons you learned, has power based on where you hear it. Outside of church, a space where these beliefs are unquestionable, they don’t have the same ring. On a comedy stage where nothing is sacred and nothing untouchable, Tomlinson upends beliefs I’ve only heard discussed in religious spaces, destabilizing their power by separating them from their context.

Often, we’re told that speaking something into existence gives it power, but it can sometimes do quite the opposite, as Tomlinson’s new special shows. Making religious trauma relatable through stories about werewolves, arm floaties, and masturbation helps her broader audience who was not raised in conservative Christian communities come closer to fostering empathy for the people they love who have lived through these things.

One of her most successful bits recalls the time her friend first learned that her parents weren’t divorced, but that her mom had actually died of cancer when she was eight. “Taylor, you told me your parents were separated,” Tomlinson recalls her friend saying. “And I was like, ‘Well, they were! By Jesus.’” Clearly, Tomlinson has found ways to use humor to help her make sense of religious teachings for many years. And now, she says about her mom, “she’s in Heaven, I’m on Netflix, it all worked out.”

Before she had Netflix specials, Tomlinson used comedy as a copying mechanism. “My parents don’t have a dark sense of humor, but I do,” Tomlinson explains, “and I’m glad I do because if you can laugh at the darkest stuff that’s ever happened to you while it’s still actively happening to you, sometimes that’s what gets you through it.” This perspective is part of what empowers her to talk about difficult topics, including conservative Christianity’s role in current U.S. politics.

“I don’t see God revamping His old shit, and let’s be honest,” Tomlinson jokes, “He probably should because the people who own it now suck.” Amid growing political power of the Christian Right surrounding reproductive rights and access to comprehensive healthcare, Tomlinson’s comedy sheds light on how the fight for bodily autonomy among conservative Christian communities is a deep-rooted issue years in the making. As her stories about purity culture demonstrate, conservative Christians aren’t going to stop with overturning Roe v. Wade; they want a Christian heteronormative nation.

Tomlinson’s comedy is meant to make her audience uncomfortable, but in a way that allows conservative religious experiences to feel funny. Her comedy also provides a space for fellow survivors of religious trauma to consider triggering experiences from a new angle, showing how their experiences are shared with countless others. Ultimately, she shows that religion is a lens through which she has lived her life, but not one that defines it – an incredibly freeing perspective for religious trauma survivors, and one that can foster empathy among those trying to understand their experiences.

Emma Cieslik is a freelance writer and museum professional based in Washington D.C.

The post Using Comedy to Talk about Religious Trauma appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image design by Jason Pooley)

I wasn’t in the real-life throng of 140,000 spectators in Austin, Texas, but through my TV screen, I attended an uncanny, high-octane revival on October 24, 2021.

On that date and over two days preceding it, Austin played host to the United States Formula One Grand Prix, the only U.S.-based pit stop for the world’s preeminent car racing league. Relatively unknown in the U.S. until recently, Formula One (F1) features superlatively skilled drivers maneuvering the world’s fastest race cars in locations spanning the globe. F1 is like Top Gun on wheels: The cars operate at speeds rivaling those of a fighter jet at takeoff, and the franchise has worldwide recognition with global viewership numbers hovering around 450 million per year. Racing teams draw seas of supporters at their home races. In other countries, individual racers like Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton are veritable household names, their portraits and team flags placed beside a home’s religious idols and family portraits.

F1 is a big-budget world tour of one-off (and very fancy) tent revivals: Locals and globetrotters come together in the name of championship glory and team loyalty, and, after the trademark champagne-soaked trophy lifting that marks the end of every grand prix weekend, the teams’ armada of logistics coordinators pack everything up and repeat the ritual somewhere else. They do this more than 20 times per year. Legions of F1 fans make multi-sited pilgrimages to the winding streets of Monaco, the luxurious but muggy harbor of Singapore, and the alpine splendor of Austria.

Unlike the F1 races that weave through public streets in locations like Monaco, the U.S. Grand Prix brings an otherwise austere concrete husk to life. Over the marquee event weekend in 2021, the Circuit of the Americas (COTA), a sprawling 1,500-acre compound with a meandering 3.41-mile racetrack at its center, hummed with record-breaking crowds. (The complex also features an amusement park.) More than 400,000 attendees gathered across three days of practice runs, qualifying sessions, and, finally, the race on Sunday.

(Image source: R. Kevin Butts photo – Courtesy of COTA)

Appropriate for a Sunday morning, the race’s TV coverage began with a sermon-esque video narrated by Willy T. Ribbs, the first Black man to drive an F1 race car. Ribbs’s introduction was like a charismatic and cowboy hat-festooned version of theologian Paul Tillich’s post-WWI sermon “The Shaking of the Foundations,” in which Tillich says that faith will swing humanity one way or another at its most decisive juncture: between inevitable destruction or eternal salvation. In an equally dramatic monologue, Ribbs detailed the unprecedented nature of the moment before us. Together in Austin on that day, we could witness the shattering of an F1 dynasty and the rise of a new order—or the solidification of the incumbent faction’s power. Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton was six points behind up-and-coming challenger Max Verstappen in the drivers’ championship. With only six races remaining in the season, a decisive win for Verstappen or Hamilton could cement a championship lead for either driver.

“Where better for the next showdown?” Ribbs asked, perched atop COTA’s 230-foot observation tower as the camera panned to the rest of the sun-kissed megaplex. “‘Cause everything’s bigger in Texas—right?”

The cliché wasn’t just a marketing ploy. There is arguably no place better for a massive automotive showdown than Austin, because the city and state made it so. Unlike Monaco or Singapore, Austin has used media and statecraft over decades to bill and build itself as a go-to destination for congregational economies, movements looking for physical space to come together temporarily.

One starting point for Texas’s congregational economics is in the 1980s; flagship music and tech festival South by Southwest (SXSW) has famously drawn hordes of conference-goers to Austin every March since then. Barring a downturn since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival has grown steadily—417,000 people attended in 2019—and, crucially, has encouraged a growing infrastructural footprint to sustain sudden surges of out-of-towners, including an 881,400-square-foot conference center and nearly 50,000 hotel beds.

Despite many trenchant political differences between them, local and state officials have often worked in lockstep to build this niche economic landscape. In the initial ten-year contract between the Formula One Group (F1’s parent company) and state and county leaders, the Texas State Legislature offered $250 million in public money, including $35 million in 2021 alone, in exchange for the right to host the only F1 race in the United States. With support from billionaire Red McCombs, investor Bobby Epstein constructed the COTA race course specifically for F1. His private investment firm, the holy-sounding Prophet Capital Management Ltd., owned the land on which COTA was built. Key stakeholders have touted the estimated tax and jobs windfalls of massive events like SXSW and F1’s Grand Prix over the years, implying that this economy fueled by state monies should not just continue, but grow in scale and frequency.

Other fandoms and movements have since flocked to Austin: a burgeoning tech scene, a Tesla Gigafactory, and a new Major League Soccer Stadium. These groups have left an indelible mark on the city and state, creating a mix of part-time jobs for stadium work as well as high-paying tech salaries, with very little in between. But the influence flows both ways. Austin and Texas have shaped these congregations in their own image, too.

***

The 2021 F1 race in Austin was unlike any other preceding it, and not only because of its “everything’s bigger in Texas”-sized crowds. It featured new, stereotypically American attractions that would not fly in F1’s more cosmopolitan venues across the pond: gimmicks like a Spam-eating contest and a DJ set by Shaquille O’Neal. Daniel Ricciardo, the affable Australian driver for the McLaren racing team, rocked a cowboy hat and spun donuts on the COTA racetrack in a vintage NASCAR muscle car. Detractors and boosters alike judged the weekend as the inaugural production of “Formula One: American Style.”

The Formula One Group has made use of cutting-edge technologies to tell its story since its founding in 1950. An expert in global supply-chain solutions, it masters air, land, and sea to transport multimillion-dollar vehicles, tools, paddock buildings, and other supporting infrastructure to make the physical plant of every race both standardized and locally distinct. The Group also sits at the forefront of live sports broadcasting; rather than mixing and broadcasting a single feed from the racetrack, it directs, produces, and transmits grand prix broadcasts from its headquarters south of London, receiving a whopping bandwidth of ultra-high-definition feeds from more than 100 on-track cameras and cutting them into a dramatic, curated feed on-site—tracking overtakes, following popular drivers’ on-board feeds and radio communications with their pit crew, and showing every angle of a crash. Dubbed the “World Feed,” these visuals cannot be altered by local TV networks so that F1 viewership is a uniform experience globally; local commentators dub the video in real time across more than 100 countries. All of this with only a seven-second delay between camera and TV screen. Eyeing F1’s narrative and technological promise, U.S.-based Liberty Media Corporation acquired the Formula One Group in 2017 for $4.4 billion. Liberty has redoubled F1’s investment in spectacle production and culture cultivation, tapping into American technologies and moneyed audiences in the process.

“We really invested and bought Formula One on the basis that there was enormous opportunity in the United States,” President and CEO of Liberty Media, Greg Maffei, said during an interview with Bloomberg in May. “The Austin race has gone from being something that had a hard time selling 80,000 tickets a few years back to doing over 400,000 this past October.” Surging U.S. interest also means that, after a three-year contract at $5 million per year, ESPN has recently renewed its F1 broadcasting rights with Liberty at a much higher rate, between $75 million and $90 million per annum.

Key to this surge in tickets and broadcasting rights is another U.S. invention: Netflix.

Drive to Survive, a TV series co-produced by the Formula One Group and Netflix, reveals the intrigue, danger, oligarchic grift, and manchild pettiness fueling this multibillion-dollar sports subculture. Launched in December 2019, the series has recently been renewed for a fifth season and has spurred interest in the sport among a younger demographic. The astounding privileges and constant danger that define the series—everything from drivers without billionaire parents struggling to secure a spot in the league to a petulant Swiss-French driver surviving a fireball explosion after crashing at the Bahrain Grand Prix—paired with actual F1 race highlights, have birthed a burgeoning meme culture and fandom around the sport.

Maffei said F1’s tie-up with Netflix is both an effort to Americanize the sport’s viewership as well to bring more age and gender diversity to the sport’s support base. Drive to Survive accomplishes this by converting online viewers into real-life attendees. The series has successfully yoked a youthful, flourishing F1 cyberculture to physical space. At the 2021 race in Austin, which was the first F1 grand prix to take place in the U.S. since Drive to Survive premiered, attendance was up 30% from five years earlier. Seventy percent of ticket-holders were first-timers.

“I think this is definitely our acceptance into the U.S.,” said Lewis Hamilton after the race, in which he placed second to Verstappen. (He would later lose the drivers’ championship to Verstappen in a highly controversial final race.)

The head of Red Bull’s racing team, Christian Horner, echoed Hamilton’s post-race sentiments. “Fantastic to see the American fans and public engaging in Formula One,” he said. “We can thank Netflix, but without great content then it’s not a good show, and I think the racing today really delivered and I think the fans are really engaging with what F1 can deliver.”

Other drivers reported being recognized in public more frequently than in prior years; and they were wowed by the race’s size and American flair. “The anthem at the beginning, that was cool and just seeing up the hill the sea of people in the crowd…” donut-spinning Daniel Ricciardo commented without finishing his thought. “[The race is] one of the cooler ones so I hope we keep coming back again and again.”

***

Watching F1 helped me see why so many people compare sports enthusiasm to religion, or call sports a religion tout court, despite critical, manifold differences between the two. Some argue in favor by highlighting lexical similarities: “faith, devotion, worship, ritual, dedication, sacrifice, commitment, spirit, prayer, suffering, festival, and celebration,” notes psychologist Dr. Daniel L. Wann. A different approach is more liturgical and takes major events like the Super Bowl to conclude that sports are something of a “civil religion” in the United States, forming one of the many unspoken religious practices defining the nation and its adherents. Others frame stadiums as a “sacred space,” mass gatherings and “powerful social experiences” a conduit for what sociologist Émile Durkheim calls “collective effervescence,” pre-game rituals a superstition, and so forth.

One could also take the view of scholars such as political theorist Dr. William E. Connolly to conclude that race weekends like the U.S. Grand Prix—laden with nation-worship rituals, celebrations of wealth, testimony to both individual agency (drivers’ decisions) and communal transcendence (being one of many spectators)—form part of what Connolly dubs in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style as “a spiral of resonances between evangelism and cowboy capitalism.” Complementing a network of “media, churches, electoral campaigns, and financial reporting to infiltrate the cultural unconscious,” this spiral imbues the religious right’s spiritualism into institutional practices by grafting those values onto what gets called “common sense.”

But it’s not just uncanny echoes driving congregational economies like the Grand Prix. Traceable institutional practices and finances can further shed light on their religiosity; Texas state politics help explain how Formula One is conferred many of the same tax and political privileges as organized Christian groups in the state—rights not bestowed upon small businesses or new religious movements.

The religious practices buttressing Austin’s congregational commerce are of a specific theopolitical strain. Texas sits at the forefront of contemporary white Christian nationalism for more reasons than just its size and electoral votes. Its history of frontierism, enslavement, organized white conservative Protestantism, and fiscal conservatism are decisive variables that make Lone Star State politics notably white Christian nationalist, according to Dr. Robert Wuthnow in Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State.

In the context of the Grand Prix, F1’s races create a mediated, imagined community centered around fast cars, and monetizes this demographic through a seemingly endless stream of ancillary services, ranging from exclusive streaming subscriptions to race day tickets typically costing hundreds of dollars. The league also transmutes its congregation of viewers into theopolitical power for investors and politicians. As Wuthnow contextualizes:

“The most neglected aspect of American religion occurs in the middle range at the level that bridges families and congregations with the nation… Families and congregations effectively combine and channel their interests through entities that are large enough to convey power and yet not so large as to be impersonally beyond reach. This is American federalism… Something similar characterizes American religion as well.”

In exchange for $250 million and tax-free status, the Texas state government has had the opportunity to broadcast its version of what exemplary Americanism should look like to F1’s hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide. With the world’s most advanced cars whizzing around a track, and with a high-profile list of attendees like Rory McIlroy, Megan Thee Stallion, Ben Stiller, and Serena Williams, lawmakers use the aesthetics and glamor of the Grand Prix to suggest that Texas’s theopolitical agenda isn’t just benign, but so futuristic that it attracts both tech and superstar prowess. And F1 continues to operate in a state governed by white Christian nationalists who are at the forefront of anti-abortion political schemes as well as lethal and racist anti-immigration enforcement.

Like many movements preceding it, F1 has used Texas as a spawning ground and is now spreading to other parts of the United States. The Miami Grand Prix joined the race calendar this year, making it the second U.S.-based race, and the second to be based in a state at the forefront of conservative Christian state politics. The Formula One Group also recently announced that it is adding Las Vegas as a third destination, meaning the U.S. will have more F1 races than any other country. The Austin race, while no longer the exclusive F1 event in the country, is retaining the right to be called the United States Grand Prix, which lets Texas broadcast its synecdochal relationship to Americanism.

U.S. and European media outlets have occasionally raised the thorny topic of F1’s place in politics, but have largely done so through an Orientalist lens. When asked by Bloomberg why Formula One continues to hold a Grand Prix in Saudi Arabia, which has been responsible for war crimes in Yemen, Liberty Media CEO Maffei said F1 “wouldn’t race anywhere” if they responded to every political complaint. “Maybe Norway,” he said sarcastically.

The reporter, tellingly, did not ask Maffei to justify F1’s races in the United States, despite an extensive history of human rights violations by U.S. state forces and settlers both domestically and abroad. Doing so could have raised uncomfortable questions about the political beliefs of the U.S. Grand Prix’s main benefactors as well as the consequences of their political efforts. COTA’s primary investor, Red McCombs, a billionaire who amassed his fortune by building a car sales empire, avidly supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, citing fiscal conservatism as the basis for his endorsement. “Not everything [Trump] says everyone agrees with. You don’t have to,” McCombs said in an interview. “But the big thing is we know he wants more sensible and stable taxing rates.” McCombs had previously supported Texas Senator Ted Cruz for President; McCombs said he “was on hands and knees for our great senator who would’ve been a great president.”

Reading between the lines of Maffei’s sassy retort, maybe F1 can only race in places with thorny, antidemocratic politics and histories, and, at least obliquely, enact the thepolitical beliefs of its white benefactors and traditionally white support base. Former kingpin of the Formula One Group, Bernie Ecclestone, certainly thinks so, telling news program “Good Morning Britain” in late June that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a first-class person” for whom he would “take a bullet.” Under Liberty’s ownership, the league did respond symbolically to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, removing the Russian Grand Prix from its race calendar and effectively kicking out the league’s sole Russian driver due to his (billionaire) father’s connections to the Kremlin. (Sanctions made things complicated, too.) The U.S. Grand Prix does not need to kick the hornet’s nest or make overt political or theological statements in favor of conservative agendas to have thepolitical effects, however: The money flows toward McCombs and his theopolitical slant whenever fans congregate at COTA and surrender to the enrapturing show.

***

I traveled to Austin in March to attend this year’s SXSW, the city’s most well-known congregational-economy event. Taking place before the crypto sector’s complete nosedive, the conference was overrun with crypto bros touting the future of NFTs and decentralized finance. At one panel I attended between networking events, one speaker channeled pseudo-manifest destiny thinking to describe the metaverse as “magic dust” that can rid the world of racism through virtual reality headsets.

I rented a car and drove out to COTA to nurse my spiking cortisol and F1 FOMO. Save for a sparse smattering of trees, the complex was devoid of life. Rows of port-a-potties, vacant parking lots, even a comatose roller coaster, suggested Texas pols were far from the “rational actors” driving the free-market capitalism they espouse. COTA is a waste: a destroyed grasslands designed for rare human use.

Much like Austin’s open relationship with different fandoms—from cryptoevangelists to car enthusiasts—little suggests F1 will stay faithful to the Lone Star State in the long run. If “Formula One: American Style” becomes less profitable, Liberty will pack up its caravan and find a new host for its moneyed revival. Austin’s marketed promise as a pilgrimage site of online fandoms is little more than a speedy race to the bottom, leaving Texas with an insatiable coterie of oligarchs gunning for another needless roadway.

Adam Willems (@functionaladam) reports on finance, technology, and religion from Seattle. They also write Divine Innovation, a newsletter on religion and technology.

The post The Religious Revival of American Formula One Racing appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Illustration by Rick Szuecs for Christianity Today)

Many years ago, I was wandering around the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago when a pair of idols caught the corner of my eye. Passing the Lamassu, the immense Neo-Assyrian winged bull with a man’s head carved into limestone, I walked over and stood in front of a display, towering over two little men.

A gold man on the left was sitting, staring back at me with two empty eye sockets. One hand was chopped off. The other looked like it was holding a ping pong paddle. He was wearing a tall, funny hat, but had a superbly lined goatee. His eyebrows and lips were resting in a look of disappointment or senile exhaustion. The legs formed a perfect 90 degrees, draped in a skirt, resting on what previously must have been a throne but was now a wooden block that was part of the museum’s display. His chest was crumpling like an autumn leaf.

To the right of the gold man, there was a smaller, rusty figurine. He also had empty eye sockets, a missing hand, actually a missing arm, a slightly pointier hat, and a skirt. But this one looked like a younger man. He was shirtless, revealing ripped pectoral muscles. And he was standing—leaning forward with one leg in front of the other—raising his right fist in the air. The closed fist had a circular hole in the middle, the kind that my childhood action figures had for placing guns or lightsabers. Maybe this guy once carried a sword?

I looked down and read the descriptions at the bottom of the display.

21. Late Bronze Age II, ca. 1350-1200 B.C.

The conical hat on this seated figure identified it as El, the creator deity and supreme patriarch of the Canaanite pantheon. Cast in bronze and covered with gold leaf, this statuette is an idol of the type forbidden by the much later Hebrew prophets.

22. Late Bronze Age II, ca. 1550-1200 B.C.

This bronze figurine is believed to represent the Canaanite god Ba’al Hadad, son of the supreme deity El. Ba’al Hadad, identified as the god of fertility and storms, was among the most prominent of the Canaanite deities.

As a Christian, I had always been curious about these idols. I had read about them in the Bible where God’s people often cheated on him with idols like Ba’al. But this was the first time I had seen such false gods up close.

(Ba’al. Image source: Wikipedia Commons)

I was a freshman when these idols serendipitously entered my line of sight. During my first semester at Calvin College, I took a course that covered premodern history and art. I remember being happy when I learned that the course included a free field trip to a museum in Chicago. At the time, I was an evangelical Christian, wrestling with my faith as I became exposed to a more critical approach to understanding religion in the classroom.

Our class made the day trip from Grand Rapids to Chicago midway through the semester. Neo-Gothic towers protruded around the Oriental Institute, and red and yellow ivies devoured its somber stone walls as if it were a site of sacred skeletal remains, simultaneously dead and alive. The only thing I knew about the University of Chicago before this trip was that the fictional character of Indiana Jones was once an archeology professor and “obtainer of rare antiquities” there.

The Oriental Institute was founded in 1919 and its museum opened in 1931. This was after the upstart field of biblical archeology had become all the rage. In 1872, George Smith, a curator at the British Museum, made an announcement he believed would confirm the Bible’s history and shake the entire world. He had deciphered a recently discovered Assyrian tablet—a fragment from the Epic of Gilgamesh—that appeared to corroborate the historicity of the Genesis flood narrative. Smith allegedly went into a frenzy after he made his translation, jumping and stripping off his clothes in front of his colleagues.

Soon after, the British, the French, and eventually the Americans, entered an archeological race to excavate and acquire items in the Levant. At first, some archeologists thought they would prove and flesh out the historical narratives in the Bible. For example, the Bible talked about Jericho’s walls falling. And here were archeologists uncovering the ancient ruins of the city of Jericho. Over time, however, the mounting evidence created a more complicated picture of ancient Israelite religion, one that ran against traditional assumptions.

I wasn’t aware of this history when I stepped inside the sterile air of the Oriental Institute’s museum. Even the irony of its name—which enshrined a mistaken point of view, like Christopher Columbus discovering “Indians” in the Caribbean—didn’t register for me at the time. Instead, I burst into laughter and mocked the deities from behind the plexiglass. Shaking my head, I muttered to myself how silly it was that people could ever worship such things.

I thought about the story in 1 Kings where the prophet Elijah confronts the prophets of Jezebel, who was King Ahab’s pagan wife. Elijah preached that Yahweh, and Yahweh alone, was to be worshipped. The royal court sends Jezebel’s prophets, 450 devoted to the god Ba’al and 400 devoted to the goddess Asherah, to Mount Carmel where they engage in a prophetic duel with Elijah while a mob looks on. They kill two bulls, lay them side by side, and pray to see which God will miraculously burn their bull with fire. Ba’al’s prophets pray but nothing happens. Elijah prays and fire comes down from on high, consuming his bull. Elijah then orders the mob to seize the prophets of Ba’al and he slaughters all of them.

Although idolatry, technically, means the worship of idols, I had learned from Christian preachers to see idolatry in today’s world as existing beyond just physical deities. Idolatry could also mean pursuing the perfect body or securing one’s worth in wealth. But for me, nothing compared to the concreteness of coming face to face with idols that had been buried under thousands of years of dust.

We drove back to Grand Rapids in a crammed, 15-passanger van, and I remained transfixed on those two devilish figurines. They were testaments to humanity’s blindness. Like the Bible said, these idols had mouths but couldn’t speak, and eyes but couldn’t see.

***

I remember choosing Calvin over other Christian schools like Liberty University or Moody Bible Institute because I wanted a rigorous liberal arts education and not fundamentalist smoke and mirrors. I wanted to be Christian and cultured. At the time, Calvin’s faculty had a broad ideological range that included professors who were open to questioning the Bible. I didn’t mind the challenge. My faith still allowed me to absorb what I was learning. The Bible remained infallible in my view. I saw the evidence presented to me as validating it somehow.

As with any ambitious survey course, the premodern class felt like a sprint from cave paintings to the Renaissance. In the first weeks before the trip to Chicago, the art portion had me completely out of my element. I was drowning in slideshows of images I needed to memorize names and dates for, and every other woman or feminine statue was named something-something-Venus. The history portion on the “Ancient Near East” fascinated me. This is where humans invented the wheel, where the Sumerians created writing, where one of the earliest human civilizations blossomed, straddling the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, flourishing for three thousand years before Christ. Babylon, the ancient city-state located in this region, was also where Daniel, the Jewish prophet my mom named me after, came of age.

I took a special interest in this part of the class because the assignments directly related to the Bible. Professor Lim highlighted the parallels between the first chapters of Genesis and the much older Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish.

(Epic of Gilgamesh. Image source: Wikipedia Commons)

I asked questions about the bizarre giant beings that appear right before Noah begins to build an ark in Genesis 6.

“Who were the Nephilim and where did they come from? What happened to them during the flood?”

Professor Lim sighed, taking one step forward and bringing his fingertips together in front of his gut, hands rocking as if in some frustrated prayer.

“We can’t take Noah’s flood narrative in Genesis as providing reliable information about events in history.”

Another boy, turning slightly red, mustered: “Why can’t we trust what the Bible says about the flood?”

The conservative students in class were now taking risks, getting close to disrupting the elaborate dance we all did not to say or write anything that would step on our professors’ sensibilities in our march toward getting A’s.

Professor Lim was a charmer with slick black hair. He occasionally dressed down in a University of Michigan hoodie to remind others, or perhaps himself, that he had toiled away at a dissertation in Ann Arbor and survived to teach students like us. Sometimes he spoke to our class as if he were texting a friend. When the blond girl who sat in the front row would speak up, he’d say, “Ohhh, Meegaan,” in a Valley Girl accent. He entertained our thoughts and entertained us even when his questions drew blank faces. One day, he pointed at me while doing a slideshow on Late Antiquity. “Wow, Daniel. You have an eerie resemblance to Ambrose of Milan!”

But on that day in which we discussed Genesis, Professor Lim sounded stern. I wouldn’t blame him if he was annoyed. Many of us were accustomed to literal interpretations, but he wanted us to look at the Bible like any other book.

“The biblical writers didn’t simply record revelation that fell from the sky, but they wove narratives that had emerged from their surrounding culture.”

Back then, I quietly judged Professor Lim to be a liberal, the kind of academic who didn’t uphold the faith of Christian orthodoxy. He didn’t value the authority of Scripture as much as I did, but I thought he sounded smart and confident in his grasp of history. I figured I could still learn from him. I was open to conceding that the early parts of Genesis were metaphorical. The stories about Abraham and Moses were still historically accurate, right?

We soon learned the Babylonian tales of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish, and I digested them as foils to the truth.

The Epic of Gilgamesh may have been a gripping story about queer love, grief, and the failed quest for immortality—with a minor flood-related subplot. But I latched onto the diluvian character of Utnapishtim and saw any similarities he shared with Noah as proving a) the biblical narrative’s grounding in some real event, and b) the superiority of Noah’s story.

The Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, may have shown that the first chapters of Genesis were written in polemical dialogue with other creation myths. But, in my eyes, Genesis was still the true myth. If the biblical writers’ narrative reflected their surrounding culture, then God must have helped them shape the right narrative. Humans weren’t an afterthought for gods who fought and slept with each other like these other stories claimed. We were the pinnacle of creation, made in God’s image.

***

In 2019, a decade after my field trip to Chicago, I read disturbing reports about a Christian zealot who stole carved statues of Pachamama and threw them into the Tiber River. The statues, representing the goddess mother earth in Latin America, were a gift that Indigenous people presented to Pope Francis during the Amazon Synod at the Vatican. At another point in my life, I might have applauded this young man’s act. He later uploaded a confession on YouTube and claimed to be rooting out idolatry and protecting Christianity’s purity. When I saw the news, my heart sank in the way it does for people who hurt themselves, for those who destroy the very planet that gives them breath. Then, I remembered how I had taunted El and Ba’al at the Oriental Institute. They had been haunting me ever since.

(Pachamama. Image source: Paul Haring for Catholic News Service)

I used to see Christianity as bestowing an identity that trumped all cultural allegiances. But as I got older, I started to wonder why Christianity became so good at perpetrating racism. I began to explore my own identity and to imagine who my non-European ancestors may have worshipped before converting—or being forced to convert—to the Christian faith. From this vantage point, the Canaanite idols eventually took on a different appearance.

In those intervening years, my questions changed. I went into college wanting to become a popular Christian apologist like Tim Keller. My goal was to prove Christianity’s superiority. I had no interest in issues of “racism” or “diversity.” In fact, during my first year in college, I decided to live in a residence hall community for those pursuing academic honors. Out of the 40 students, almost everyone was white except for me. I didn’t want to be known for playing race cards but wanted to blow people away with my brilliance. My objective was to transcend identity, storm the heights of philosophy and theology, and earn the simple honorific of “Theologian” just as Aristotle earned the nickname “The Philosopher” in the eyes of Thomas Aquinas. My post-racial pretensions, however, quickly came crashing down. Even if I wasn’t interested in racism, I learned, over and over again, that racism was interested in me.

Someone drew Nazi swastikas in my dorm during my freshman year. The community’s common space had a table wrapped in white poster paper where people would doodle, leave notes, and write immature jokes. When I was coming back from class one day, the table was bare, and the floor was abuzz with whispers that someone had drawn swastikas. The RA had quickly taken down the poster, but it wasn’t clear who had drawn the symbols. I became the most vocal community member to call for further investigation and consequences. Some people around me openly defended it as “freedom of speech” and accused me of overreacting. I felt abandoned by the silences of my peers.

I intimately sensed a chasm. No matter how Christian I was or how much my theology resembled theirs, I wasn’t white. These sorts of incidents shifted something deep within me. I became less interested in proving Christianity’s sound doctrine to others than in asking how Christianity can be used as a weapon to justify oppression. Before college, it was easy for me to exoticize white people. The Long Island neighborhood, public schools, and churches I grew up in were heavily Black, Latinx, and immigrant. During my late teens, I emulated my favorite Christian rappers, from Cross Movement to Flame to Lecrae, ferociously consuming and referencing the work of white Calvinists from a segregated distance. But when I saw the social and political fruits of that ideology at close range, I was horrified.

Those feelings stayed with me and then boiled over when the vandal desecrated the Pachamama statues. It held a mirror to my confusions. In my early 20s, I still wanted to rescue a pure and pristine Christianity from the clutches of white supremacist malpractice. As a person of color, my initial protestations against racist Christians were about being included in Christian supremacy, not about fundamentally altering it. I wanted to believe that the problem with the fruits had never infected the roots. I wanted to redeem the master’s untainted tools.

The more that I read, the more I grew frustrated. It’s hard to protect Christianity’s purity because such purity is an illusion. What would this religion be without the influence of Jews, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans? If you want peace, there are verses for that. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” If you want war, there are verses for that. “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”

The charge of idolatry that I relished using against others like the worshippers of Ba’al, I later realized, is one that can easily be turned against me and against people of color. Historically, white Christians have demonized the spiritualities of people around the world as idolatrous. You want to smuggle in some Platonism, thinly veiled white barbarian solar holiday, or the Easter Bunny? No problem. Something revered by a non-European or melanin-endowed ancestor? Heretic!

My questions about Christianity, racism, and colonial violence kept growing as I progressed through undergrad, then divinity school, then a life of independent research and writing. It was this problem that drove me to revisit the biblical story of the ancient Israelite conquest of the Canaanites. I wanted to understand how Exodus’s God of liberation could turn around and become the God of genocide. In the process of writing on that, I learned that the story about the Canaanites was close to the hearts of modern Spanish and British colonizers who warmly cited it as they shed human blood in the Americas; for them, Native Americans were like Canaanites. Years ago, I reduced the Canaanites to one-dimensional villains who bowed before idols; I took the violence enacted against them in the Bible to be just. Now, I wanted to learn more about these El, Ba’al, and Asherah worshippers.

***

When I sifted through the prevailing critical scholarship on the Canaanite conquest story, it overturned everything I thought I knew. The ancient Israelites never carried out a genocidal campaign against the Canaanites like the book of Joshua says. According to the archeological, genetic, and even textual evidence within the Bible itself, the Canaanites were not wiped out. In fact, the Israelites were essentially a subset group of Canaanites, and shared their culture and religion. The fight between the Israelite one true God, Yahweh, and the Canaanite idols El and Ba’al, was more like an ongoing family dispute.

Why would the Bible include a conquest narrative that presented Canaanites as foreign idolaters who were slaughtered by the Israelites? This narrative was likely invented by polemical writers to provide a founding myth about the settling of the “promised land.” Once a militant, Yahweh-only group of Israelites became more powerful, they wanted to prevent others from returning to older Canaanite customs. Monotheism, the belief that only one God exists, was a later development. Most of the Hebrew Bible promotes monolatry, the worship of one God among many. For example, Psalm 82 says: “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.”

The Israelites denounced by the prophets for worshipping idols weren’t pursuing foreign gods as much as returning to old ones. But the old gods indelibly shaped the new god. Before God reveals his name as “Yahweh” to Moses, he is called “El.” El is often combined with another title such as El-Elyon, or God Most High. In the development of the biblical canon, the two names—Yahweh and El, which reflected two local deities within the region—eventually became interchangeable. They came to be identified as the same deity. The language and imagery of the Canaanite gods was absorbed. Yahweh is an “ancient of days” sitting on the throne just like the aged chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, El. Yahweh is a warrior and rides the clouds just like Ba’al. It’s “syncretism” all the way down.

The Canaanite legacy also extends beyond male gods. While Yahweh occasionally adopts the feminine imagery of motherhood, fertility, and breasts in the Hebrew Bible, traces of the goddess Asherah, the consort to El and sometimes Ba’al, are wiped out in the text. She is only mentioned when the prophets condemn Israelites who still worship her. Yet, an excavation in the Sinai desert that started in 1975 found evidence that suggests ongoing local worship of Asherah as Yahweh’s consort. Archeologists discovered a pottery sherd bearing an inscription about the blessings of “Yahweh and his Asherah.”

I spent four years at a liberal arts Christian college, three years at a divinity school, and no one bothered to tell me that God had a wife.

Orientalism is often presented as a problem of sight. Through its gaze, Westerners construct an East that’s inseparable from their prejudices and the assumptions of their own superiority. My old Christianity was also a problem of sight. My Christianity depended on being superior to every other story. It was a matter of spiritual conquest, not dialogue or exchange. Breaking out of this mentality required me to wrestle with the Bible and to accept it for what it is, not for the idealized constructions people want it to be. Otherwise, I’d see only what I’d want to see, whether that’s the one true narrative or a social justice textbook.

The historical-critical method, like museums and the discipline of archeology, has its racist and colonial baggage. Astonishingly, the Oriental Institute is still named the Oriental Institute. But asking people to choose between faith and the historical contextualization of religion is a false dichotomy. I’ve found that critically studying religion has only expanded my spirituality and my openness to the mysterious workings of the universe.

Christianity’s attempt to silence the voices within its texts mirrors the way some Christians have tried to silence the voices of real people throughout history. But the bodies buried beneath the texts linger. They leave traces of cultures that have stubbornly refused to be completely erased. And people continue to find meaning and inspiration for resistance even in the most problematic of sources. This messy history doesn’t disprove God, or something larger and sacred about this universe, as much as it disproves a rigid faith that’s ill-equipped to encounter surprises.

El. It’s a word I run into all the time. Pedestrian. In Spanish, it’s the definite article: the. El. I hear it and think back to the little gold man I mocked in Chicago. One of the easiest ways to see his legacy at work in the Bible is through its use of theophorics, or God-bearing names. Israel means “El wrestles.” Samuel means “El has heard.” In Hebrew, Daniel means “My judge is El.” I guess I know who’s having the last laugh.

Daniel José Camacho is working on a book about Christianity and the colonization of the Americas with Avid Reader Press. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at The Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners.

The post The False Gods That Changed My Mind appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Jose Luis Magana for the Associated Press)

In 2009, a Brazilian man raped his nine-year-old stepdaughter and she became pregnant with twins. Her mother, panicked that her child would die as a result of the pregnancy, arranged for an emergency procedure to terminate the pregnancy. Abortion is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape and when the mother’s life is in danger – both true in this case – and up to 250,000 women a year there end up in emergency rooms because of botched illegal abortion procedures. Brazil’s population is more than half Roman Catholic, but even for the most faithful Catholics, what happened next was shocking.

The nine-year-old’s hips were so small they would have made the pregnancy dangerous, so an argument could have been made that the Catholic church would allow the pregnancy to be terminated to save the girl’s life because this was a case of “double effect.” Double effect is what the 13th century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas referred to as “causing a morally grave harm as a means of pursuing a good end.” Technically, under church canon law, anyone who aids in an abortion or participates in one is considered to be excommunicated latae sententiae, or automatically. For Catholics, excommunication means a person is banned from taking communion in any church until they go to confession and repent. But the priest or bishop they confess to is ultimately the person who decides whether or not a person is forgiven. However, when a pregnancy is terminated to save the mother’s life, as it was in the case of this pregnant child, the church can make an exception and not excommunicate her.

Because most abortions are private matters between a person and their doctor, it would be impossible for the church to know who has and hasn’t received one. But because the case in Brazil was so appalling, what happened next was international news that still resonates today. Archbishop Sobrinho of the city of Recife excommunicated the girl, her doctors, and her mother. At the time, he told Time magazine, “abortion is more serious than killing an adult.” Sobrinho said that anyone who disagreed with the church on his decision was not Catholic and should feel free to leave the church. “We want people who adhere to God’s laws,” he said.

(Protest in Brazil. Image source: Silvia Izquierdo for the AP.)

Catholic teaching on abortion has always been closely intertwined with ideas of sin, forgiveness, and repentance. Yes, the young girl, her mother, and the doctors who performed the procedure could go to confession, repent for their actions, be forgiven, and start receiving communion again. But did they really sin? And do people who have abortions really need to be forgiven? Those questions are rarely asked in the larger debates about what the end of Roe v. Wade will do to the Catholic church in America. But they are crucial to understanding why the case of the Brazilian girl offers us some clues about what may come next not only for those seeking abortions in the United States, but for the Catholic church too. It also raises uncomfortable questions about sin and forgiveness for the Catholic church and the people who belong to it.

***

Five decades of relentless focus on abortion above all other issues, compounded with ongoing fallout from the clergy abuse crisis, has driven many Catholics out of the church. Widely cited statistics about the demographic decline of Catholics in America are so familiar to some of us who cover the church that we can recite them by memory at this point. For every person who joins the Catholic church, six Catholics leave. There are now more ex-Catholics in America than practicing ones. And the end of legal abortion in America will likely mean even more attrition out of the church for the majority of Catholics who believe abortion should stay legal and therefore safe.

The concern of many, both Catholic and not, is that the conservative Catholics judges on the Supreme Court will use this ruling to erode additional rights that protect bodily autonomy, like the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage. Technically, these things are also off limits to Catholics as both are considered sinful, and one would need to repent to be forgiven of them. But along with abortions, which Catholic women have clearly been having for quite some time, contraception use and same-sex relationships are common among members of the church. The days of enormous Catholic families, which I frequently saw as a child, are long gone, belying the notion that American Catholics see contraceptive use, which Pope Pius XI once described as “stained by a great and mortal flaw,” as a sinful act in need of forgiveness. And given that anywhere between 30 and 75% of Catholic priests are gay men trapped in the closet, the idea, too, that same-sex relationships are sinful makes the whole church seem to reek of hypocrisy.

The history of how the Catholic church came to see abortion as a sin is long and complicated, but the debate has been consistently focused on two things: when life actually begins in the womb, and when the fetus achieves “ensoulment.” The idea of ensoulment goes all the way back to Aristotle, who believed ensoulment occurred around the 40th day of pregnancy for male fetuses and 90 days for female ones (and we can note that misogynistic ancient Greek views of women have certainly left an imprint on the Catholic Church). That belief was passed on to St. Augustine – who himself impregnated and abandoned a woman and the child of his she bore – and to St. Thomas Aquinas. The idea of delayed ensoulment persisted in church teaching until the 19th century, clouding the issue of when abortion was and wasn’t permissible. When more sophisticated science about pregnancy entered the picture in the 20th century, the church decided that ensoulment and life begin at the moment of conception.

Because the Church considers abortion at any stage of pregnancy an act of murder, Catholics are taught to believe that every moment of conception will lead to a viable life, even though a zygote and a 24-week-old fetus that can breathe on its own are not the same thing.  The church currently states that life beginning at conception is a “scientific fact,” but this too is debatable. Even with our more developed contemporary understanding of biology and embryology, scientists, ethicists, politicians, and theologians cannot agree when “personhood” begins. We know that not every fertilized egg implants, that miscarriages are common in the first part of pregnancy, and that in the vast majority of cases, people seek out abortions in the earliest stages of pregnancy. We also know that sometimes people need abortions in order to survive sepsis, cancer, and other things that can kill. So we have to ask, yet again: why is abortion considered so terrible a sin that it incurs excommunication every time it happens?

The church teaching on this is convoluted. In order for a person to incur excommunication, Canon Law 1323 specifies the person must be over the age of 16, aware of the punishment for their sin, and free from “grave fear.” Many real-world examples of abortion fall outside of those parameters. I attended Catholic schools for most of my elementary school years and went to a Catholic college, and while we were told that abortion was sinful, excommunication was never mentioned. Moreover, abortion was not the main focus of the Catholic Social Teaching I encountered in my youth. The death penalty, humanitarian crises around the world, nuclear threat, and the racism pervasive in our local community were usually treated as more urgent issues.

In the decades since Roe became law, however, the Catholic church in America has shifted its focus from issues of poverty, war, the death penalty, and the environment to eradicating abortion as its highest priority issue. Although beliefs about the legality of abortion are decidedly mixed among lay Catholics, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ relentless focus on ending Roe has led to what Catholic writer Garry Wills calls “the cult of the fetus,” in which the life of the unborn trumps the life of the mother every time. The bishops have long sponsored events like the annual March for Life in D.C. and have formed generations of priests in seminaries who see abortion as the church’s greatest concern. And there is no mistaking the fact that this campaign has primarily targeted Catholic women. Just before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone excommunicated Nancy Pelosi for her support of abortion rights, ostensibly to encourage her to “repent.” Pope Francis, meanwhile, has strongly advised that the eucharist should not be weaponized and used as a political tool. But the American bishops seem to have missed that message.

In an attempt to ease the pain of excommunication, in 2016, Pope Francis changed the manner in which excommunications are lifted for those who have had an abortion. In the past, a person seeking absolution for abortion would have to go to the bishop to get their excommunication lifted and to be absolved. Today, one can instead go straight to any parish priest. Unfortunately, however, most Catholics do not know about this change or the steps one can take to remain in the church after having an abortion because the church has barely broadcast this decision. Case in point: I was in Rome during the Jubilee Year of Mercy following Francis’s decree, and the topic of easing excommunication for those who have had an abortion was never mentioned in the seminar I attended for journalists covering the church. And even with this change, there is still no guarantee that if you go to confession the priest will absolve you.

Technically, anyone involved in an abortion needs to seek repentance, as in the case of the Brazilian girl’s mother and doctors. But rarely do we hear of men involved in abortions doing this. The face of the anti-abortion movement is typically not a man, but a woman, and not the low income mother who is the most likely person to seek one out. And you do not have to go far in Catholic whisper networks to hear of seminarians who impregnated girlfriends and procured abortions for them before going on to be ordained, priests doing the same, or the spotty history of popes with mistresses who more than likely sought out “assistance” from a local herbalist when one of those mistresses got into trouble.

Catholics who are now arguing that the church will be there to support pregnant women seem to have forgotten that the church had fifty years to build networks of community support, to lobby for family aid, and to provide viable alternatives for the babies they are so enthusiastic about welcoming. But in those fifty years, it has not done those things to a degree in any way adequate to the number of children who will soon be born into lives of violence, poverty, and hunger or the number of women who will get sick and die from a lack of abortion access. To truly be “pro-life” and “pro family,” the Catholic church could spend more money, provide more resources, and lobby harder for the lives of families. It does not, however, do these things to a degree that makes a demonstrable difference now, nor does it have concrete plans for the future, and millions of Americans are aware of this. So who is the real sinner here?

The fall of Roe and the celebratory nature of many Catholic responses to it may mean more Americans will finally leave the church. This happened in Brazil, where the number of Catholics was already declining when the nine-year-old girl was excommunicated, and many more have left since. In Ireland, another historically Catholic country, the death of a woman whose demise came as result of being denied an abortion to end her sepsis in 2012 created an international outcry. Ireland’s own clergy abuse crisis, which involved tens of thousands of “illegitimate” children being abused in industrial schools and even more “fallen women” sent to work in asylums which still operated into the 1990s, caused more and more Irish people to shake off the Catholic church’s grip on their bodies and minds. In 2018, Ireland voted to make abortion legal.

When it comes to sin and forgiveness, the church tends to gloss over its own teaching on conscience. In Gaudium et Spes, one of the documents that came out of Vatican II, the church teaches Catholics that “[a person] has in [their] heart a law written by God,” and that obeying our conscience is the thing from which our dignity arises. A person can seek out an abortion for a million reasons, but in each case, the decision as to whether or not it is a sin in need of forgiveness will happen in their conscience, not in the confessional, not in the chancery office, and not in the echoing hallways of the Vatican. For many in the coming weeks, months, and years who will see suffering and death wrought by the end of Roe, including another 10-year-old girl in Ohio, that same conscience may well lead them away from the church that brought about that end. And they will probably never forgive it.

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

The post Whose Sin Is It Anyway? Catholics, Abortion, and What Comes Next appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Earlier this summer my husband had an astute idea. He suggested that we not discuss politics for the entirety of our overseas vacation, a total of sixteen days. Whenever one of us slipped and mentioned something political, the other would simply say “politics,” and we shifted our conversation to another topic. I cannot convey how much I appreciated this brief, and undeniably privileged, respite from the political anxieties that typically occupy my daily life. The break from thinking about politics allowed me to revel in our travel experiences, appreciate my surroundings with a sense of gratitude, and – of great importance – relax.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

I share this experience because I know this summer has pushed many people to the brink of exhaustion and hopelessness. From the Supreme Court’s decisions about abortion, guns, and prayer in schools to new anti-LGBTQ legislation, devastating gun violence, and the Monkeypox epidemic, the summer of 2022 has been bleak. The road ahead to protect democracy, reproductive justice, racial equality, and more is a complicated and arduous one. We will need as much energy and mental acuity as we can muster. Therefore, dear reader, I say to you: take the time you need to have your own break from politics. Nothing bad will happen because you take a respite from reading the news or discussing the world’s current events. If a two-week break feels too long, take a weeklong pause. If that feels untenable, start with a day. Give yourself the space to think about other things. Find someone who will hold you accountable to your politics hiatus. And then after your reprieve, I suspect you will have greater emotional bandwidth to face our political realities and to implement plans for how you can contribute to improving them. With so much of our political world in upheaval, we need to encourage one another to find ways to rest so we can adequately address what our political crises demand.

With all of this in mind, the Revealer’s Summer 2022 issue examines matters pressing to our current political climate as well as issues beyond the realm of today’s politics. The issue opens with Kaya Oakes’ “Whose Sin Is It Anyway? Abortion, Catholics, and What Comes Next,” where Oakes reflects on how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will affect the Catholic church in America and questions if, as Catholic teachings dictate, people who get abortions actually need to seek forgiveness from a priest. Next, Daniel José Camacho returns with the newest installment of his “From the Margins” column with “The False Gods That Changed My Mind,” where he reflects on how learning about two “heretical” idols pushed him to reconsider Christianity and its role in promoting white supremacy. Then, in “The Religious Revival of American Formula One Racing,” Adam Willems considers how the surging popularity of F1 racing in the United States resonates with religious undercurrents and how the sports’ financiers collaborate with Christian nationalist politicians who ensure they will make huge profits. Next, in “Using Comedy to Talk about Religious Trauma,” Emma Cieslik reviews Taylor Tomlinson’s Nextflix comedy special and contemplates how humor can be an effective strategy for bringing mainstream attention to painful religious experiences. And, in “The Way Black: Considering Black Membership in the Cult of Gwen Shamblin,” Ambre Dromgoole reviews the HBO Max docuseries The Way Down and reflects on why some Black Americans were drawn to a white evangelical woman’s vision of ideal beauty and faith.

Our summer issue also includes not one, but two episodes of the Revealer podcast! First, in “Religion and Pornography,” Kelsy Burke, author of the forthcoming The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession, joins us to discuss battles over pornography. We explore why various religious communities oppose pornography, why evangelical Protestants in particular are anxious about masturbation and sex addiction, and what disputes over pornography reveal about today’s political climate. Then, in “Catholic Horror,” Jack Downey, Matthew Cressler, and Kathleen Holscher join us to compare horror films and novels to actual horrors committed by the Catholic church. We explore why Catholicism has been such a popular source of inspiration for horror filmmakers and writers, what the genre can reveal about contemporary society, and why examining it can help us make sense of the clergy abuse crisis and other atrocities committed by the Catholic church. You can listen to both episodes on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As the summer progresses and we look ahead to what this fall holds, I hope you give yourself permission to rest without guilt. Take the time you need to avoid the news cycle, social media, and political discussions. Allow yourself to feel joy and relaxation. Our democracy needs you revitalized and ready for what lies ahead.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: A Respite to Prepare for the Upcoming Political Battles appeared first on The Revealer.