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We hope you enjoy this special episode: Pray Away on Netflix, Conversion Therapy and Ex-LGBTQ Ministries.

The post Podcast Episode 25: Pray Away on Netflix, Conversion Therapy, and Ex-LGBTQ Ministries appeared first on The Revealer.

(A scene from The God Committee)

The 2021 film The God Committee should be riveting. The movie opens in 2014 when a soon-to-be recipient of a heart transplant dies and the intended heart is now available for someone else. Viewers learn that there is a state-wide waiting list with candidates in ranked order, but the heart has arrived at the hospital and the patient at the top of the list has died. Three possible recipients are in the hospital. None is a perfect recipient in a world – as this one is, as ours is – where there are not enough hearts to go around. Based on formulas designed to calculate the recipient’s long-term life expectancy post-transplant, none of the three would be at the top of the transplant list. One has a history of addiction, another lacks adequate insurance, and one has little family support. Under normal circumstances, one of the three would be disqualified outright, but he is, as we soon learn, the wealthiest. Given the urgency, one of them will get the heart or it will go to waste. The hospital transplant committee has only one hour to make a decision before the heart can no longer be used.

The committee responsible for making the difficult decision consists of five people: a hospital administrator, a priest, a psychiatrist, a transplant doctor, and a nurse. The transplant doctor, Jordan Taylor, is new, and thrown right into the deep end. She is replacing her (secret) lover and colleague, Andre Boxer, a senior superstar surgeon who is leaving for the private sector.

The film pivots between 2014 and a parallel situation seven years later, when Boxer himself needs a heart to live. He is also a less than ideal candidate. The ensuing real-time 2014 debate is filled with ethical conundrums: the youngest candidate is a drug addict, supposedly in recovery but likely relapsing. He should be excluded, but his wealthy father is a trustee of the hospital and has pledged a $25 million donation to save the faltering transplant program. The quid pro quo is clear, and, ethically, the committee should reject the offer. But $25 million would save several additional lives. The tension, such as it is, rests on whether the wealthy addict, Trip Granger, is truly in recovery, and to what extent the hospital administrator, Dr. Valerie Gilroy, is willing to lie to make sure he gets the heart so the hospital will get the money.

Such a dilemma, with only an hour to make a decision, is the stuff of great stories. It is also the stuff of great stage plays, as this, by Mark St. Germain’s, originally was. It’s the stuff – combined with a supremely talented cast including Julia Stiles, Kelsey Grammer, and Janeane Garafolo – of Oscar-worthy movies. But 2021’s The God Committee, directed by Austin Stark, disappoints despite the meaty issues of medical ethics it tackles: Why should one patient, Walter Curter, with less robust insurance be condemned to die? Why should patient Janet Pike die because she lacks family support? Will the rich really be able to buy their way out of this one? The movie is a glimpse into the difficult questions hospitals have to deal with every day, with unflinching honestly about the nature of profit-driven health care.

The film is also, honestly, kind of boring. Ponderous. It hits the viewer over the head with ethical questions without subtlety or nuance. That real-time decision is basically all there is. The characters are flat and one-dimensional; their relationships are peripheral; and when it comes to their secrets, despite Kelsey Grammer’s turn in playing a crotchety and ailing aging man, there is little reason for the audience to care about their lives.

While The God Committee is not a good film, in some basic workmanlike-ways, it is an informative one. As an expert on medical ethics, I would not recommend watching it to learn how transplant decisions actually get made. But it does highlight the complexities of these decisions. For example, it is not clear, even in this case, who the best candidate for the transplant is when there is only one heart. It is not even clear what constitutes “best.” Perhaps insurance should not matter, but given that the hospital needs money to function, it absolutely does. Perhaps counting lack of family support is punitive; it might also be pragmatic. Maybe being overweight is symptomatic of historically inaccessible health care and healthy food options outside the patient’s control. The film’s debates highlight the complex interplay between structural forces around access to resources, biological factors that influence the long-term success of transplants, medical factors that determine whether the patient will survive, and ethical factors about how to determine not only the best bet for the transplant but who deserves it most. There is no clear answer. And while the film highlights how the ethical choice might not be the pragmatic one, it also asks: if $25 million will save additional lives, is that not also a kind of ethical choice that deserves consideration?

In the real world, hospital committees rank their candidates for the transplant list with formulas and calculations to determine which recipients will have the best outcomes after the transplant. In stark terms, this means who will live the longest. Such metrics are biased toward younger patients, of course, but also toward those with fewer health challenges, more structural family support, better access to long-term healthcare, and fewer complicating health factors (like obesity, addiction, disability, and, as the pandemic has highlighted, chronic illness). These decisions often ignore why people might have additional health problems. While ideally, hospital committees ignore historical and structural issues that make some people less healthy and with less access to proper nutrition, sometimes decisions need to be made. And when ranking criteria are applied, disabled people rarely get prioritized. This has led, recently, to changes in these metrics, with life expectancy calculations looking at short-term rather than long-term outcomes. With a smaller set of expectations, people with shorter life expectancies because of disability and chronic illness are not immediately excluded from access to care.

The formulae are designed – rightly – to alleviate some of the impossible pressures on those making these decisions. The trauma for health care providers in making on-the-spot rationing decisions is immense, and we are only beginning to see these effects in places hardest hit by COVID triage. But these metrics not only punish disability, they fundamentally ignore what makes a life, and what makes a life valuable. The committee members, as we see in the film, are bound by their patients’ health metrics. But the committee members are also caregivers. They know these patients and care about them and advocate for them, because it is not only metrics that make a life. But in this film, and perhaps in life, the metrics and the money still matter most.

The God Committee does give viewers some brief details about each patient, but they are merely a highlight reel, with most attention to the rich one whose father will donate a massive amount of money that would save the faltering transplant program. But he is also an addict and maybe a terrible person. If this sounds like a litany of ableist, fatphobic, classist descriptors, it is. That’s kind of the point. That’s how these decisions are made. When there is not enough to go around, some kinds of bodies and people are prioritized over others. And time is of the essence. Emotion and relationships, the film argues, are only a distraction. We may wish for more advocacy and more engagement with what makes a life, but that only makes these necessary decisions harder.

It’s not only the patients who are shallowly drawn portraits in the film. In an unlikely and honestly rather silly pairing, Julia Stiles’ young and ambitious Dr. Jordan Taylor is having a secret affair (and eventual child) with Kelsey Grammer’s grouchy but idealistic transplant superstar Dr. Andre Boxer. Complications ensue and I’d tell you about them, but I mostly do not care and neither, I suspect, will you. This might be a deliberate move to emphasize that, much like with the transplant patients, inner lives do not contribute to the long-term metrics. And maybe that is right, but it also makes the film unnecessarily dull. And that is why it is also wrong; we do, in fact, need to care about people in order to advocate for them and to understand why they – why everyone – matters. And the film does make that point: In 2014, Dr. Taylor struggles with the committee’s relentless focus on metrics to decide who gets the heart. In 2021, when it is Boxer, her former lover, who needs a heart to save his life, Taylor again struggles with the metrics. Given Boxer’s condition, he will die in short order even with a new heart and would never qualify for a transplant. The only way to get one is illegal and unethical. Taylor goes that route anyway, not necessarily because of her love for him, but because of the transplant technology he’s developing, which could eliminate the need for donor hearts all together, saving untold numbers of lives. Such a breakthrough would also remove the pressure from these committees to play God.

In both cases – 2014 and 2021 – the film takes a strict utilitarian perspective: the heart should go to the person whose life will benefit the most people, the wealthy Trip Granger and surgeon-turned-inventor Andre Boxer, respectively. It is another way of saying hearts should go to the most deserving people, not because of their long-term life expectancy, but because of the lives that will be saved by saving theirs. It is a different way of measuring value. In Granger’s case this seems ethically bankrupt: he is, we learn, still using drugs. He is abusive. He is a bad person. By virtue of these restrictions, he absolutely does not qualify for the heart. His addiction will destroy the heart, and he will likely die soon after the transplant. It is a waste and will cost someone else the chance to live. But Gilroy, the hospital administrator, hides that evidence. And in so doing, she ensures that the hospital transplant program lives. How do we measure that question against the promised gift of twenty-five million dollars? That’s precisely the sort of temptation that the metrics are designed to guard against, and that’s precisely why Gilroy has to falsify records.

The Boxer example is designed to make us question the ease of our earlier convictions. Unlike Granger, whose value is measured in his father’s dollars, Boxer’s personal skill and merit – despite him also being a terrible man – is clear. It is because of who he is and what he can do and how many lives he could save that he, perhaps, deserves to live, even if only for a short time longer. But Boxer is an even worse transplant candidate than Granger; there is no way to falsify records, no possible cover-up within the system. So Taylor agrees to go outside the system and transplant a black market heart. She wants to save lives: Boxer’s and others. The financial backers in Boxer’s tech start-up company buy the heart; they probably just want to make money.

The legal and prevailing ethical framework of hospital transplant committees is that the money should not matter. The $25 million should not matter, even though insurance dollars very much do. But if, somehow, the committee can be convinced to know that the patient is not using, then he – young, rich, thin, (white), with a strong social and familial network and ample insurance support – is perhaps the perfect candidate in terms of those metrics. If he is not using, he will live the longest. So can the committee, in under an hour, find a way to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he is in recovery? Or, really, can Gilroy provide enough plausible deniability to the rest of the committee to believe in his recovery? She personally doesn’t care. She believes the lives saved by the $25 million far outweigh the benefits of any of the other patients getting this heart, even if, in the addict, the heart is likely wasted.

(Image source: Caitlin Hillyard/KHN illustration; Getty Images)

That is not how decisions should be made. And, to be fair to ethics committees that exist across the country making decisions like these, it is truly not how they are made. There is usually more time and more information. There are formulae that determine both the quantity and quality of life expectancy, with the additional nuance of debates that can alter what the formulae predict. And today these formulae are, quite rightly, changing because of the advocacy of disabled and marginalized communities. But in a profit-driven health care system, questions of cost and insurance are always at stake. It may not be $25 million, but money always comes up.

There is a powerful question here: what is the cost of playing God? The film does not take this up. But it could. This is a question that matters, and it emerges from decisions that hospitals make every day.

The God Committee mobilizes a powerful history of how modern clinical bioethics began. In 1961, the Seattle Artificial Kidney Center at Swedish Hospital established a seven-person committee to determine who should have access to the limited number of life-saving hemodialysis machines. The committee consisted of unpaid private citizens chosen by the King County Medical Society and included a lawyer, a minister, a banker, a housewife, a state government official, a labor leader, and a surgeon. The committee deliberated over each potential patient, following medical recommendations to exclude children and anyone over 45 but operating without any real guidelines. Designed to protect doctors from this terrible and awesome responsibility, the committee was, in many ways, playing God. Only later nicknamed “The God Committee,” the group’s work was chronicled in a 1962 article in Life magazine by Shana Alexander. Readers responded to the lack of clear framework by which the committee made decisions, particularly given the tremendous consequences to selection and exclusion. While more artificial kidney machines soon became available, making the work of the committee obsolete, the fundamental challenges of rationing remained, leading to the establishment of more robust bioethical criteria for practical allocation of scarce resources.

(Life magazine, 1962)

The film’s title is a nod to a key moment in bioethics and acknowledges that even with bioethical principles, criteria, and heuristics, decisions remain far from clear and open to debate. Committees are now comprised of people in the healthcare field who have received training in bioethics and rationing protocols. But they still have to make extremely difficult decisions with incredibly high stakes. People, even with guidelines and rules, are subject not only to avarice and competing motivations, but disparate moral codes.

The God Committee offers little critique and even fewer solutions for the main characters’ dubious ethical choices. It makes clear that buying a black market heart is concerning. It is not suggesting we sell or buy organs as a long-term solution. But, as the ethics of this film seem to suggest, anything might work in a pinch if the pinch is tight enough. It does not at all emphasize the problems with an organ market, and perhaps it sides with those who would support such an approach, ignoring the potential danger it poses to people who are already vulnerable.

A better, more feasible, and less dangerous solution for the scarcity of organs for transplant patients is for more people to become organ donors, to have an opt-out system rather than an opt-in system. But that is another topic this film does not address. I wish it spent more time on the costs of a healthcare system motivated by profit, and what the need to make money causes us to lose. And I wish it spent more time underscoring that everyone’s life is worthy of being saved, not because of the scale of the benefit their lives might bring, but simply because they are a life.

Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at Drexel University. Her most recent book is Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other. You can find clips of her freelance writing at www.sharronapearl.com.

The post Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? An Unethical Ethics Committee Decides appeared first on The Revealer.

(Jessamyn Stanley. Image source: Bobby Quillard and Jade Wilson)

In Jessamyn Stanley’s 2021 collection of autobiographical essays, Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, she recalls taking a class with a popular white yoga teacher in North Carolina and feeling uneasy. His arms were tattooed with Sanskrit, the ancient Indo-European language of classic yoga texts like the Yoga Sutras. She found herself increasingly uncomfortable as he encouraged his students to see themselves as part of a South Asian lineage of Classical yoga.

Stanley’s first book, Every Body Yoga, had just come out. She had made a name for herself as a “fat, Black, queer yoga teacher in a predominantly thin, White, and very straight yoga industry.” And she was growing increasingly uncomfortable with how white Americans—including the tattooed man leading this workshop—had taken up yoga.

Stanley found the courage to raise her hand. She knew she would likely be the sole dissenting voice in the room. When she had called out cultural appropriation and the lack of South Asian representation in her earlier yoga teacher training, none of the other trainees saw it as a problem. Stanley told the group she did not see herself as a Classical yoga practitioner. The teacher smirked, and told her that if she did not feel a connection to Classical yoga, it was because she did not know enough about the practice.

As Stanley writes in Yoke, “Classical yoga, the Vedas, and Sanskrit are rooted in South Asian culture, with particular connective tissue in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, among many other faiths.” For her, the teacher’s approach to yoga not only appropriated South Asian traditions, it also erased Stanley’s Black American lineage: “it made me feel as though I was being told to steal someone else’s cultural identity and nullify my own.”

When she walked out of the workshop, Stanley broke from what she calls the white American “yoga-industrial-complex.” For her, yoga in the U.S. is inextricably bound up in the country’s history of racism, capitalism, and settler colonialism. In Yoke, she grapples with the contradictions of practicing a South Asian tradition on U.S. soil, and she creates a spiritual practice of yoga that is uniquely her own.

***

The title of Stanley’s book, Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, references two things: 1) yoke, a Sanskrit word that connotes union, and 2) a typo in her first book. Following the publication of Every Body Yoga, a reader wrote to inform her that “yoke” appears erroneously as “yolk,” conjuring images of a runny egg rather than divine union. This typo sent Stanley into a tailspin of self-doubt and insecurity. She questioned her legitimacy as a public voice in yoga, a relatively new practitioner who rose to popularity as she chronicled her yoga poses on social media.

Stanley’s self-doubt resonated strongly with me. I used to perform kirtan, a South Asian devotional musical tradition. The band I worked with often performed in yoga studios and ashrams, leading call-and-response Hindu devotional songs with primarily-white audiences. Like Stanley, I encountered many white yoga practitioners who took on Indian names, wore South Asian fashion like saris and bindis, and adopted India as a spiritual homeland. And like Stanley, I felt insecure about my own legitimacy to call attention to the white entitlement that drives this behavior (in my case, I am half-Indian, born and raised in the U.S., and cannot neatly claim a “South Asian” identity).

By claiming South Asian practices as their own, Stanley argues, white Americans avoid dealing with the shame of their ancestors’ racist legacies. Rather than argue that people of color should feel as empowered as white people to adopt Classical yoga, Yoke contends that a deep practice of yoga can bring each of us closer to our own cultural and spiritual traditions. Some Black yogis, for example, practice Kemetic yoga, which traces its roots to Egypt. For Stanley, however, the practice of yoga has facilitated a process of personal reflection on her “very Black, very Southern, and exceedingly American” roots.

In Yoke, we learn what this lineage means to Stanley. She is a third-generation Bahá’í who left the religious tradition when she came out as queer and started to question the tradition of celibacy before marriage. In the years that followed, she carved out her own spiritual tradition. Along with yoga and meditation, her amalgam of spiritual touchstones has included tarot, marijuana, astrology, crystals, and the writings of James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Gary Zukav, Don Miguel Ruiz, Henry David Thoreau, Swami Vivekananda, Dr. Maya Angelou, and Kendrick Lamar, whose album good kid, m.A.A.d city is her favorite yoga soundtrack: “He and I don’t have the same story, but in his authentic truth I hear my own. And when I hear his music during my practice, I find my way back to myself.”

***

Stanley locates the problem of white yoga appropriation in American yoga’s hyper-focus on asana, or physical postures. Anyone who has attended a yoga class in the U.S. is familiar with asana, which may include sun salutations, body-pretzeling twists, and head stands. American yoga classes also typically touch on pranayama, or breathwork, though the focus is primarily on asana. In Classical yoga, asana is done in tandem with pranayama to prepare the body for meditation.

The American yoga market’s focus on asana has influenced Stanley’s career as a yoga teacher. She offers an important representation for those who felt alienated in majority-thin, white, straight yoga classes. And her physical strength and dexterity inspire those who were also trying to practice yoga at home, outside the “yoga-industrial-complex.” When I started following her account in 2016, I took screen-shots of her headstands as inspiration for my own practice.

Stanley aspired to be on the cover of Yoga Journal, one of the longest-running American yoga magazines. When she was invited to pose for the cover, it taught her that Yoga Journal was actually part of the “yoga-industrial-complex,” and her goal of being on the cover was tied to her desire for “mainstream acceptance (aka white acceptance).” In the end, Yoga Journal ran two covers—one featuring Stanley, the other featuring thin, light-skinned Yoga Works founder Maty Ezraty. Stanley felt her body had been tokenized, and that the magazine had run a double-cover because they were worried hers would not sell.

Stanley sees these spaces of profit-driven hyper-visibility—from Instagram to Yoga Journal—as contradicting the deeper spiritual lessons of yoga: to transcend mind/body dualism on a path towards spiritual enlightenment. Transcending mind/body dualism, for Stanley, means letting go of how the world encourages us to see ourselves. “Who are we,” she asks us, “when our definitions of who we are fall away?” Stanley refers to the yogic sense of selfhood as a “subtle body” that encompasses our full, spiritual selves. In other words, yoga can help us connect with a sense of selfhood that is not bound by worldly definition.

For Stanley, accessing the “subtle body” has helped her heal from trauma. In Yoke, she bravely chronicles experiences with sexual assault, and how meditation has allowed her to feel a difficult range of emotions: “my shame and my anger and my sadness and my frustration and my guilt and my malice and my vindictiveness and my hatred and my bloodlust and my grief.”

Unfortunately, in the “yoga-industrial-complex,” Stanley argues that this spiritual sense of selfhood becomes a tool to avoid difficult questions about oppression. If our definitions of who we are fall away, then what happens to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and size? Stanley’s writing reminds us that the rhetoric of connection and spiritual transcendence in American yoga studios too often masks the straightness, whiteness, and gender normativity of these spaces.

***

The context of the “yoga-industrial-complex” shapes not only how Black yoga practitioners interface with white American yoga spaces, but also how Black and South Asian people engage each other around questions of cultural appropriation and social justice.

In Yoke, Stanley recounts participating on a panel on cultural appropriation alongside a South Asian DJ who blends bhangra and hip hop. Stanley was prepared for the DJ to accuse her of cultural appropriating yoga from its South Asian roots. Instead, the conversation was a generative one, and it led Stanley to reflect on how both Black and South Asian people are “permanently affected by our collective history of white supremacy.”

Debates about yoga in recent years have focused not only on white supremacy, but also on the role of yoga in upholding caste discrimination. For example, at the height of the summer 2020 anti-racist protests, I joined a march in New York City and walked alongside a Black abolitionist activist. She recounted how her organization had tried to make yoga mats and classes accessible to incarcerated women. South Asian activists criticized the Black and Latinx organizers and drew attention to yoga’s complicity in caste and religious oppression in South Asia.

In recent years, the ruling Hindu party in India has taken up yoga as a way to push for global legitimacy through celebrations like “International Yoga Day,” which was formally adopted by the United Nations in 2015. South Asian organizers have drawn attention to the fact that dominant-caste Brahmins claim Sanskrit as a holy language that should not be spoken by those in marginalized castes. The language’s widespread use in white yoga spaces is thus not solely cultural appropriation, but also a replication of caste oppression.

This South Asian activism has shaped Stanley’s perspective on Sanskrit, even since the book’s release. In Yoke, she argues that we should “Respect the books. . . . Respect the history of Sanskrit. Respect South Asian culture.” However, in an interview following the book’s publication, she reports grappling with the language: “Sanskrit has been used in South Asia to control people and that it has become this whole issue of class and caste. It’s so deeply wrapped up in South Asian heritage and culture.”

The people who have pushed Stanley to rethink the politics of Sanskrit have done so out of an awareness of the economic links between the way yoga impacts marginalized people in both the U.S. and India. Yoga studios are often harbingers of gentrification that displace working-class and communities of color in the U.S. Likewise, in India, the government expropriates land from indigenous peoples for yogic leaders. The “yoga-industrial-complex,” in other words, is a transnational phenomenon that extends beyond American yoga.

***

In addition to greater awareness of yoga’s role in sustaining systems of marginalization, Stanley’s future writing could also engage more closely with allegations of sexual assault leveled at her primary reference point for yogic philosophy, Swami Satchidananda. Quotes from his translation of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali precede each of her chapters. Born in Tamil Nadu, India, Satchidananda traveled to New York in the 1960s and founded his first yoga studio in the U.S. in 1970. He was opening speaker at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in 1969 and played a central role in popularizing yoga in the U.S. Stanley could extend her important reckoning with the #MeToo movement to engage with South Asian yogic leaders, many of whom have profited from the “yoga-industrial-complex.”

Yoke offers a useful framework for holding these difficult truths in tandem. By sharing the struggle to see herself whole–trauma, contradictions, and insecurities included–Stanley invites us not only to do the same with our own selves, but with yoga itself. In future writing, she has an opportunity to extend her critique of the “yoga-industrial-complex” to the complicated transnational contexts that yoga inhabits.

Vani Kannan is an assistant professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY.

The post A Black, Queer Woman Breaking from the White American Yoga Industry appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Poster for the film The Devil’s Doorway)

About the Catholic Horrors Series: For the past two centuries, Catholicism has played a special role in American horror stories. During that time, the Catholic Church has been complicit in real-life horrors. In this three-part series, three scholars of American Catholicism – Jack Lee Downey, Matthew Cressler, and Kathleen Holscher – consider Catholic horror as a cinematic and literary genre alongside horrors committed by the Catholic Church and its leaders. In so doing, they explore horror as an aesthetic and as a way to analyze and confront the shadow side of Catholicism in North America. Read part one here and part two here. 

***

“The gruesome discovery took decades and for some survivors of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, the confirmation that children as young as 3 were buried on school grounds crystallizes the sorrow they have carried all their lives.” (CNN, June 1, 2021) 

“You ever see that hill up close? They cook Indian kids up there for that zombie priest! Normal zombies just eat anyone, but these religiofied zombies, they throw the kids down this hole to the cooker [..]. Why do you think so many kids go missing at St. D’s?” (Rhymes for Young Ghouls, 2013).

“The colonial world, as an offspring of democracy, was not the antithesis of the democratic order. It has always been [..] its nocturnal face.” (Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics)

I.

In October 1968, six months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a former Catholic school kid from the Bronx premiered a low budget film that changed American horror forever. With its apocalyptic legion of cannibalistic reanimated corpses, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead redefined the zombie flic. And with its protagonist Ben, a Black man who is murdered by police officers in a case of mistaken-for-a-zombie identity, Night of the Living Dead also became a template for generations of “social thrillers,” including Jordan Peele’s 2017 hit Get Out.

In the lull between Night of the Living Dead and its sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978), George Romero retired to his new hometown of Pittsburgh to make a film about a vampire. While the inspiration for the Night of the Living Dead’s ghouls might have sprung from the director’s Catholic imagination, his 1977 film Martin clearly did so. In Martin, the factories and midcentury-modern houses of Pittsburgh play backdrop for a story about an awkward youth who lives with his devoutly Catholic and ethnically Lithuanian uncle, Tateh Cuda. The young Martin understands himself to be an ancient Nosferatu, or vampire. He drugs and kills women, and drinks their blood. Part of the terror of Martin lies in the quiet sociopathy – and misogyny – of the title character’s acts. But Martin’s terror also comes from Romero’s decision to disrupt the declining industrial landscape of 1970s Pittsburgh with jarring black-and-white sequences and “old world” Catholic motifs to depict Martin’s vampiric memories (or are they only fantasies?). Although Romero is best-known for Night of the Living Dead, the director insisted that Martin was his favorite work.

The Catholic interludes that raise the vital question of Martin. – is he a vampire, or isn’t he? – are classic episodes of gothic horror. “We [..] know the Gothic when we see it,” writes media studies scholar Misha Kavka. In Martin, the gothic appears in dripping candle wax, fog, statues of the Virgin Mary, and in Uncle Cuda’s insistence that his soft-spoken nephew is a demon. “An old person needs a priest who [..] believes in the old ways,” Cuda tells a cleric visiting the family home one evening. “If our priests cannot save us from such things, [..] who can?”

In Martin and other movies, the gothic is a trick of time; it injects an often unspecified but affectively medieval past into the ordinariness of life: both the fictional “here and now” in film and the here-and-now of audiences who watch it. In American film, the Catholic-as-gothic shows up on screen as a courier of “the old ways,” with its weird aesthetics (blood and statues and veiled people), its differently ordered human relations (autocratic clerics and rule-bound nuns), and its porosity between natural and supernatural worlds. If a filmmaker does a good job, like Romero does in Martin, Catholic gothic interpolations sow doubts for film audiences—however half-formed, however nervously laughed off—about things that comprise the realities of our modern world.

When horror films go gothic like this, they riff on a way Americans parse time and tell stories about themselves. Americans enjoy stories that affirm their collective “here and now” – their government, their economy, their scientific achievements – by raising the specter of outmoded societies. From The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836) through Black Legend tales that circulated during the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, Catholic pasts—as conjured through American storytelling—have played a special role in this work. Set in the “old world” and stalled in the Middle Ages, these Catholic pasts bring hair-raising qualities—including brutality, authoritarianism, and superstition—that make them go-to resources for the “we are not them” and “they are not now” American brand of patriotic storytelling.

In American horror, the Catholic gothic works similarly. It haunts from faraway places and hearkens to bygone times that are stranger and scarier than the United States. Its terror is about its otherness – its spaces are never quite our spaces, its time is never our time, its subjects are never ourselves.

But what if the Catholic gothic haunted from within actual American space and time? What if its horrors were also problems of American history? Films from other parts of the world suggest that Catholicism haunts precisely like this. Both 2018’s The Devil’s Doorway from Ireland and 2013’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls from First Nations-Canada locate the gothic not in old world, pre-modern times, but in Catholic institutions that functioned recently – within the last century – in tandem with modern governments. In these films, the Catholic gothic haunts not as a ghost of difference (or at least not only as that), but to portray gruesome abuses that happened at Catholic-run institutions, and to explore the nature of their atrocities.

II.

The Devil’s Doorway is the debut of writer-director Aislinn Clarke, the first Irish woman to direct a feature-length horror film. The film takes place in 1960. Its setting is an unnamed Magdalene asylum (sometimes called a Magdalene laundry), one of the Catholic institutions that, in real life and with support from the Irish government, housed, confined, and extracted unpaid labor from approximately 10,000 women – including unwed mothers, sex workers, orphans, the mentally disabled, and other “socially unfit” females – across Ireland throughout most of the twentieth century. Employing the found footage technique popularized by horror films like The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2008), The Devil’s Doorway follows two priests – one with a 16 mm movie camera in tow – who enter the asylum to investigate reports of a miracle.

Once inside the building, Fathers Thomas Riley (an old priest) and John Thorton (a young priest) are confronted with accumulating horrors. Children’s disembodied chatter echoes through the mildewed halls of the asylum at midnight, religious statues hemorrhage blood, and the clerics discover a young, pregnant woman named Kathleen chained in a basement room with a dirt floor. Kathleen is diabolically possessed or psychologically damaged or both. As the asylum consumes the priests – and as they scramble to rescue Kathleen’s newborn – the clerics retreat further into its cellars and become lost in crumbling catacombs strewn with the skeletons of children. The film ends with the elder priest’s last confession, confided to the camera, and the climatic revelation of a “Satanic sanctuary,” deep in the bowels of the Earth. The Catholic sisters who run the asylum tend the Satanic shrine, and through it they have unleashed the demonic forces gripping the place.

(A scene from The Devil’s Doorway)

In The Devil’s Doorway, the gothic, animated by motifs of creaky architecture, ghostly hauntings, and female captivity, exposes viewers to the horrors of an actual twentieth-century Irish Catholic institution. “You send all the country’s dirty secrets here, here to my home,” the asylum’s mother superior snarls to the visiting priests. “Leave us to hide all the messes, and cover it all up. [..] Do you know how many of the babies born here had fathers who were fathers, Father?”

The historical abuses the movie confronts – from the lifelong confinement of women in asylums, to the physical beatings and sexual assaults that happened there – are palpable.

The film’s terror, however, curdles in the space between these human cruelties and the supernatural evil unleashed by the humans who commit them. For most of the movie, the elder Fr. Thomas doubts the asylum’s horrors exceed the work of human beings. “The evil I’ve seen has always been the human kind,” he tells his partner. “There’s no evil in the world that can surpass that done by human hand.” In the film’s final moments, however, Fr. Thomas stands face-to-face with the devil. At last, the magnitude of the asylum’s cruelty renders it incomprehensible, and – so Clarke suggests – the supernatural steps in as its new register.

The Devil’s Doorway self-consciously references American films like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973). Aislinn Clarke was raised Catholic and remembers watching The Exorcist as a seven-year-old alongside her devout father (who was also a horror fan). Like both Martin and The Exorcist, The Devil’s Doorway invokes the “hero priests” that Matthew Cressler describes as central to Catholic horror as a genre. “This is the logic that propels Catholic horror,” Cressler writes, “that the church and its clerics are the only forces with the power to go toe to toe with true Evil.” It feels familiar when, in The Devil’s Doorway, an intergenerational pair of clergy confront the devil. In Clarke’s Irish version of this contest, however, there is no Regan in her prim coat, kissing a priest’s collar at the film’s end. In the depths of the Magdalene asylum, it is the devil who wins the day.

***

The 2013 film Rhymes for Young Ghouls, by Listuguj Mi’gmaq (First Nations) writer-director Jeff Barnaby, draws on similar gothic motifs to depict a Canadian residential school. Like Magdalene asylums in Ireland, residential schools for First Nations children in Canada were predominantly Catholic institutions, managed and staffed by priests and sisters, and supported by the government. Like Magdalene asylums, the historical horrors of these schools—which include the forced removal of at least 150,000 children from their families, as well as endemic emotional, physical, sexual, and cultural abuse – lasted through most of the twentieth century.

While Barnaby has legitimate horror chops (see his 2019 zombie uprising film Blood Quantum), Rhymes for Young Ghouls is less horror flick and more residential school revenge fantasy. The film is set in 1976 on the fictional Red Crow Mi’kmaq Reserve, and its plot moves between the gothic tropes of St. Dymphna’s school, perched castle-like upon a nearby hill, and the drug addiction, imprisonment, and suicide wrought on the Mi’kmaq people living on the reservation below.

The film is “highly stylized with a dystopian tint,” and its protagonist Aila (played by Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs of Reservation Dogs) is a survivor but not a hero. Aila lost her mother to suicide and her father to prison. She sells drugs to fund bribe payments to the local Indian agent, Popper, that keep her out of St. Dymphna’s. When her scheme fails though, Aila is abducted and brought to the institution. A pair of nuns strip her naked. A priest shears her hair. Aila finds herself imprisoned in an underground cell (“the darkest deepest hole we’ve got,” Popper taunts her).

Unlike children who disappeared into St. Dymphna’s before her, however, Aila escapes, and back on the outside, she plots revenge. Outfitted in Halloween masks—including one in the likeness of a plague doctor—Aila and her friends sneak back into St. Dymphna’s at night. Like the priests in The Devils Doorway, the youth make their way through shadowy passages and descend to the dank recesses of the building’s basement. Rather than succumb to St. Dymphna’s evil, however, the kids use its subterranean chambers to exact their retribution. They pour feces into the building’s ancient pipes, and Popper gets a sickening surprise as he showers on a floor above.

(A scene from Rhymes for Young Ghouls)

Like The Devil’s Doorway, Rhymes for Young Ghouls relishes the gothic; both films lead viewers down spiral staircases and through underground tunnels, both include girls in dark cells, both depict the following-orders cruelty of Catholic nuns. And like The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, published nearly two centuries earlier, both give viewers earthen tombs strewn with the remains of children. As Aila sleeps in her cell, she dreams of the nearby cemetery, where her mother is buried in an unmarked grave. She watches the ground of the cemetery rupture to expose a yawning pit, filled with small bodies. “I wonder how many ghosts wander around down in this hole,” Aila narrates. “How the devil doesn’t let them go. Or how many got out that were ruined all the same.”

Beyond these similarities, however, the films diverge sharply. While the horrors of the Magdalene asylum destroy Fathers Thomas and John, Jeff Barnaby conjures St. Dymphna’s horrors in the service of imagining what it looks like for First Nations youth to survive on the other side of monstrosity. St. Dymphna’s is scary, yes, but its frayed seams also show. Its gothic verges on caricature; if it haunts residents of the reserve in 1976, it does so like a ghost who doesn’t know it is dead. And Aila is already over it, even as it tries to ruin her. She wears a gas mask throughout the film, both while she sits on couches in trailers dense with marijuana smoke, and while she raids St. Dymphna’s. “She’s gonna be eating people after the apocalypse,” Aila’s uncle muses.

III.

Both Jeff Barnaby and Aislinn Clarke use the gothic to show how the past haunts the present. But unlike Martin and other American horror films, Rhymes for Young Ghouls and The Devil’s Doorway conjure pasts that are still close-at-hand—that carry stories not of medieval terrors, but of twentieth century institutions that did gruesome things in consort with contemporary governments. The power of their unnerving subjects to haunt comes not only, or even mainly, from their strangeness. Rather, it extends from the trauma those subjects unleashed near to home, and the intergenerational scars their survivors carry.

Here in the United States, many types of Catholic institutions, including hospitals, orphanages, and schools, operated in the twentieth century with support from the government, and many performed work that aligned with state interests. Like their counterparts in Ireland and Canada, some of these American Catholic institutions had monstrous underbellies. For example, a U.S. order of Catholic women religious called the Sisters of the Good Shepherd ran “reformation houses.” These houses functioned as part of a “bifurcated system,” alongside women’s prisons, and involuntarily housed residents convicted by U.S. courts of sexual misconduct. We also know that Catholic religious orders ran dozens of U.S. boarding schools for Native children, partly funded by the federal government, and that abuse was rampant in those schools.

(American Indian boarding school. Image source: Wikipedia)

We need look no further than survivor accounts from American Indian boarding schools to find the gothic at work in the real and modern world. Barbara Charbonneau-Dahlen, a woman from the Yankton Sioux reservation who attended St. Paul’s Catholic boarding school during the 1950s, remembers a priest forcing her to perform oral sex in the basement of the church. “He would lift me up and set me in the coffins,” Charbonneau-Dahlen told a reporter. “It would always be, ‘if you ever tell, I’ll put you in here.’” Another abuse survivor at St. Paul’s recalls being beaten and stripped by nuns, and locked in an attic. A third describes being thrown down a “laundry chute, stuffed in a trash can and locked in an incinerator” for not speaking English.

Here in the United States gothic horror also exceeds Catholicism. Neither women’s prisons nor Native boarding schools are exclusively religious projects, and these institutions are also full of non-Catholic brutality. In the recently published first volume of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, the U.S. Department of the Interior identified more than four hundred federal Indian boarding schools, and noted that they regularly inflicted corporal punishments, including “withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing.” The Department’s investigation has also begun identifying burial sites at those schools. These government-run institutions exude the gothic; they captured children and buried them in unmarked graves too.

***

“Catholicism has proven and enduring wellspring of dread in American culture,” Jack Lee Downey reminds us. The catch is that, too often, Catholicism’s threats of authoritarianism, captivity, and blood – as well as its open channels to the supernatural – have been presented in U.S. culture as episodes of dreadful difference, as shadowy places we peek into with bated breath, and from which we exit into daylight, relieved they are not our own. At their best, these invocations of Catholicism leave us uneasy, haunted by new nightmares about what might dwell under the surface of things we know. But here is the rub: the Catholic gothic is already among us, a monster in our midst, embedded in American space and American time. This is a matter of history and not simply nightmarish wondering.

Kathleen Holscher is associate professor of religious studies and American studies, and holds the endowed chair in Roman Catholic studies, at the University of New Mexico. Among her other publications, she is the author of the Revealer article “Priests That Moved: Catholicism, Colonized Peoples, and Sex Abuse in the U.S. Southwest.”

The post Catholic Gothic Horror and the Monsters in Our Midst appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Liam James Doyle for NPR)

You have likely read something by the prolific writer Peter Manseau. If not, let me introduce him: Manseau holds a Ph.D. in religious studies and is the author of two novels, a memoir, a travelogue, several additional nonfiction books, and countless articles in publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is also the (first ever) Curator of Religion at the National Museum of American History and Director of the Smithsonian’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History. His career is inspiring; it provokes wonder at his vast abilities and, if I’m honest, some small envy — who wouldn’t want to go to work at the Smithsonian every day!

Running throughout Manseau’s impressive body of work is a longstanding interest in stories about religion. Manseau co-founded our comrade online publication, Killing the Buddha, along with the Revealer’s founding editor, Jeff Sharlet. Manseau has also written multiple pieces for the Revealer. Even the most cursory search through the Revealer’s archive (though I recommend doing more than a cursory search of his Revealer writings), brings to the surface myriad kinds of work. He has contributed everything from translations of Yiddish poetry to an excerpt from his memoir, and it would seem we rarely published an “In the News” round-up without mentioning something he had accomplished. In truth, I have been a fan of Manseau’s work since I first started writing about religion, but I had never had the chance to sit down with him for a one-on-one exchange. But last month I read Manseau’s impressive and enthralling new novel, The Maiden of All Our Desires, which gave us an occasion to have a conversation about his remarkable career and how his new novel, a story about a 14^th-century convent during the Black Plague, came to life.

Kali Handelman: First, I’d love to give readers a sense of the breadth of your work — in particular how the particular strands all fit together and inform one another. It seems to me that all of your work is concerned with storytelling, and I wonder if you could tell me more about how you think about storytelling — what makes it important and how do you approach it across these multiple forms of work?

Peter Manseau: When I wake up in the morning I rarely know exactly what’s going to occupy my mind through the day. My nine-to-five working hours are usually reserved for my day job (for the last six years as the Curator of Religion at the National Museum of American History, and now additionally as Director of the museum’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History), but I also tend to have a few books going at various stages of development, ranging from projects well underway to ideas I know I shouldn’t be thinking about until I move a few other things off my plate, as well as occasional op-eds and essays I write because putting a short piece out in the world can (momentarily) feel more satisfying than chipping away at a long manuscript for years on end.

In general, I’m drawn to stories first and then decide what format will be best for their telling, whether it’s an exhibition or a novel, a narrative nonfiction history, or a shorter essay. In that sense, yes, storytelling does pull the strands of my work together. But to be more precise about it, I tend to see the type of storytelling that most often engages me as a form of translation, serving as a bridge that allows certain narratives and information to reach audiences that might not otherwise have access to them.

In my Smithsonian work and historical writing, this is often translating scholarship for the general public, such as in the recent exhibit Discovery and Revelation, which distills the shifting paradigms of scholarly discourse on science and religion into a 1,200 square foot collection of objects and images geared toward tourists and school groups, or in my 2015 book One Nation Under Gods, which shares stories about the out-sized influence of minority religious groups in America that are totally non-controversial in academic history (the existence of Muslims in vast numbers among the U.S. enslaved population, for example) with audiences for whom they are entirely new and (I hope) revelatory. I have also explicitly made the various meanings of “translation” a theme in some of my work, as in my 2008 novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, which is presented as a translated Yiddish text studded with “translator’s notes” that become part of the story, and my 2009 travelogue Rag and Bone, which explored the role of religious relics in various traditions. In Christianity, the movement of relics from one site to another is sometimes known as “translation,” drawing on the original Latin sense of a word meaning “to carry across,” the literal movement of a sacred object across a threshold from an inner sanctum to the broader world. Those two books are now more than a decade old, but that’s still how I see much of my work.

KH: Your work is also deeply interested in history and how historical stories are told. When we spoke, you told me that you are interested in questions of who is remembered and who is forgotten, and similarly, who is taken too seriously and who isn’t taken seriously enough. I wonder how that perspective on the historical has informed your museum work?

PM: Long before I knew I’d be a writer or a museum curator, I wanted to be an archaeologist. From my first viewing of Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was six years old, I had romantic notions about what that work must entail – notions that weren’t really dispelled until I became an archaeology major in college and discovered how far the reality of that occupation was from my fantasy of it. But what I learned in that disillusionment was what I was really interested in was the possibility that there were mysterious mystical treasures buried all around us. What I wanted was to uncover those treasures, to make contact with those mysteries. I approach all my work now in much the same way. The stories we take for granted, and which all our assumptions rest upon, are the ground beneath our feet. But the ground can be deceiving. We tend to see an empty field and think it has always been an empty field. To find out otherwise you either need to ask questions or you need to dig; both are acts of uncovering things that once were obvious but over time became obscured. In all my work – as a novelist, a historian, a curator — I see my role as bringing those kinds of things to light. Very often this means the stories of people left out of most tellings of history – people on the margins whose experiences are dismissed, discounted, forgotten.

(Objects from the National Museum of American History. Image source: James Doyle for NPR)

In my museum work this has meant paying attention to what it means for communities or individuals to leave behind a material record that endures long enough to be studied or displayed. Though I’m drawn to the “stuff” of both religion and history, it’s also important to keep in mind that relying exclusively on objects can inadvertently limit the stories we’re able to learn and tell. Equally important to making use of material culture is paying attention to its absence, finding ways to tell the stories of those who have not had the privilege of leaving anything behind.

KH: So much of your work has been consistently interested in religion — from your academic training, to your news articles, to your memoir and your novels, and of course, your role at the Smithsonian. You told me at one point that thinking about religion is especially fruitful because it’s about taking seriously (to carry that through) the stories (to carry that through) people tell themselves. I wonder if you could elaborate on what that means as a kind of working definition of religion — religion as a way of understanding and thinking about the stories we tell ourselves?

PM: Like a lot of people who study religion, my interest in the subject began at home. Growing up in a thoroughly and pervasively religious family that was at once irrevocably a part of a spiritual tradition and undeniably separate from it gave me from an early age the insider/outsider perspective that has enabled the kind of “translation” my work involves.

As I wrote in my memoir Vows, my father was a Catholic priest and my mother was a nun when they met. They wanted desperately to raise a good Catholic family, but there was always an awareness of the transgression at the center of their lives together. Before I could’ve articulated this desire, I wanted to understand the bonds that at once lashed us to the church and kept us somehow separate from it. Taking seriously the idea that my parents, and by extension my siblings and I, could not leave this institution that did not want them was my earliest education in what I’ve come to think of as the power of the invisible, the forces that have power over human lives whether you believe in them or not. This perhaps makes my relationship with religion seem quite fraught, and truly that is not really (or not only) the case. Because at the same time as I was coming to terms with the power of the invisible in seeming to create a great deal of strain and sadness in my family, it was giving to me a vocabulary of wonder, a language of dreams, and a canon of stories that together conspired to make a writer.

Probably for these reasons, my working definition of religion became and remains very broad. It encompasses the kind of adherence to beliefs and practices with which I was raised (and whose analogues can be found in other traditions), and also the echoes of those traditionally “religious” markers as they move through culture and individual experiences, both within and apart from communities, as the stories we use to organize and give meaning to our lives. I tend to be impatient with data or trends that purport to show the “decline of religion” when describing falling rates of church attendance or affiliation; my understanding of religion as ultimately concerning collections of stories tells me it cannot decline; like language it transforms but it’s difficult to imagine its disappearance.

KH: Both history and religion are crucial elements of your superb new novel, The Maiden of All Our Desires, which tells the story of a 14th century convent during the Black Plague (that’s a criminally un-nuanced description of a very nuanced text, so please forgive the expediency). The novel takes up questions of who and what survives calamity and what those who do survive make out of their suffering. It’s also impossible to read a novel about building a wall (a key element of the plot that I don’t want to spoil) without thinking of recent U.S. political history (and the history of borders and wall-building much more broadly). While reading, I thought often about migrants, about climate catastrophe, about Covid — yet, you told me that you started this book more than 25 years ago! Can you tell me more about how you came to write and finish this book — both in the beginning and in the times of Trump and Covid — and what kinds of meaning this story has taken on for you now that so much of our public conversation is (or should be) about suffering and survival?

PM: The Maiden of All Our Desires began as a four-page story about a nun falling in love with the wind, written for an undergraduate creative writing class at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Around this time I was also in the throes of a monastic obsession – it’s impossible to say now which came first, the story or the obsession, but this was the year I discovered the mid-twentieth century Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton, who had ignited the possibility for me that there was something I had missed in my family’s faith. As I neared graduation and decided to develop my four pages of nun fiction into a novella as a thesis project, writing about life in a convent became for me a proxy and a cover for religious practice. I began to follow the Liturgy of the Hours, the monastic schedule of prayer in which psalms and hymns are chanted at regular intervals throughout the day, and soon that structure provided a scaffold for the story. I spent time in a Trappist monastery and told everyone I knew it was “research,” but really I was trying to sort out where the fiction I was writing ended and where my life began.

One hundred pages of a novel in progress I called The Liturgy of the Hours followed me around for decades. Through my twenties when I dreamed of being a writer, I was convinced this was the book that would get me there. As I began publishing, as I started a family of my own, as I went back to school and earned a doctorate in religion, and as I got my dream job as the Curator of Religion at the Smithsonian, the unfinished novel was in a plastic tub in my basement with old yearbooks and letters.

The Trump years inspired me to take another look at what I had written so long before; when I did so I was reminded that my four-page story had grown into a saga about a distant plague and a coming storm, full of characters seeking, providing, and denying refuge. It felt timely in ways it had not when I had first dreamed the story a quarter century ago. Perhaps as a distraction from the endless frustrations of those years, I decided to rewrite the book – doing with my own youthful work what I had done with other types of stories, pulling it up out of the ground where I’d buried it.

Revisiting a book I’d started at twenty years old was, I realize now, a kind of collaboration with my past self – an approach that allowed a certain innocence to remain even as I knew the story provided a way to write about issues we were then or soon would be experiencing: building walls and fearing sickness, surviving a plague and then somehow forgetting how unendurable the sense of loss had seemed. Crucially for me, the novel also became an exploration of what creation means during destructive times: What place does art have in all this madness? What good are stories – or prayers — as the world burns?

KH: Lastly, I want to ask a broader question, which is about America and American-ness. As the Curator of American Religious History, it strikes me that you probably have done a lot of thinking about what we talk about when we talk about America, and particularly, who and what are considered American and how religion has played a part in that kind of definitional work. And since your job requires thinking about these questions in terms of objects and stories, I wanted to ask you what, in your view, makes an object or a story American, and likewise, what makes an object or a story religious?  

​PM: The focus of my work for the past few years on the U.S. context has in some ways been a surprise. My writing that has reached the most readers has done so because it appeared in multiple languages and has explored themes that cross borders. I don’t like to think of my interests as being parochial in the way that being exclusively concerned with my own country suggests. But it is true that from the beginning (at least since Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, the weird religion road trip book I co-authored with Revealer founding editor Jeff Sharlet in 2004) I have been fascinated by the conundrum of America—its beauty, its ugliness, its past and its potential.

Part of what draws me to try to understand what both “American” and “religious” mean is that they each are constantly used as if their implications are obvious and yet they are notoriously difficult to define. Their meanings shift endlessly, in part depending on who is claiming them for themselves or applying them to others. In other words, they are terms that demand narrative explanations. You might say they are ‘story words’ — words that immediately venture into history, biography, cultural assumptions, and self-perception. They each present so many possibilities, some inspiring, some terrifying.

I’ve been struck throughout our recent gauntlet of insurrection and mass violence how quickly some have needed to say “This is not who we are. This is not what America is about.” The problem is, if it happened here, it obviously is who we are, it is what America is about. And yet I understand the impulse. A better response might be a question: “Is this all that we are?”, though unfortunately the answer to that is not always clear.

I keep coming back to stories that unfold in American contexts, in religious contexts, and in American religious contexts, because these are for me perfect laboratories for studying the themes that most interest me: the stubborn influence of tradition, the possibility of reinvention, the unexpected developments that occur when conflicting ideas collide. These are all factors that determine whether or not something is part of American religious history, and they’re broad enough that really anything can be, if seen a certain way. Perhaps I have an overly expansive understanding of my purview, but the question I often try to ask through my work is not if a story or object is part of American religious history, but how.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor based in New York City. She is also the Manager of Program Development and London Regional Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Contributing Editor at the Revealer.

Peter Manseau is a novelist, historian, museum curator, and founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History. His is a recipient of several awards for his writing, including the National Jewish Book Award and the Ribalow Prize for Fiction. His newest novel is The Maiden of All Our Desires.

The post Translating Religion for the Masses appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Win McNamee for Getty)

I took my first stroll around the Capitol Building on January 3, 2021, the day after I moved into the neighborhood. The air was misty and the sky was gray. While there were not many tourists or pedestrians in the area, a small crowd of worshippers caught my attention.

The group was playing contemporary Christian music and dancing. But this was not your average evangelical gathering. Several people wore Jewish prayer shawls, and one blew a shofar, a ram’s horn Jews use in the fall during the High Holy Days. Standing in front of them, in between the Capitol Building and the Supreme Court, I knew this was a particular, yet grossly misunderstood, subset of the evangelical umbrella: the Pentecostal-charismatic movement.

I knew this because I grew up as one.

And because I come from such a community, I knew why they had shofars, music, and dancing. They were engaged in religious rituals to keep Trump in power. What I did not realize was that their spiritual struggle would turn physical only a few days later.

***

In his analysis of the religious overtones of Trump’s hardcore support, never-Trumper conservative and evangelical commentator, David French, wrote:

“It’s no coincidence that Paula White, a pentecostal pastor herself, was Trump’s spiritual adviser. Trumpism penetrated pentecostalism early. I do not mean to say that all pentecostals are Trump supporters, much less Christian nationalists. But you can’t understand the Trumpist Christian core without understanding its pentecostal connection.” [Emphasis mine]

French is correct. Even more, Pentecostal support for Trump has not abated since he left office. To understand Pentecostals’ devotion to this New York real-estate billionaire and media mogul, irreverent playboy, and twice-impeached former president, one must take Pentecostal beliefs seriously. The key idea that undergirds many Pentecostals’ support for Trump, their willingness to storm the Capitol on January 6, and their broader Christian nationalist inclinations, is the Pentecostal-charismatic idea of “spiritual warfare.”

Spiritual warfare fuels their movement, and it could potentially fuel America’s demise.

“Blow the trumpet in Zion”: Spiritual Warfare and Shofars

One of my fondest religious memories growing up—and, in hindsight, a problematic aspect of my earlier faith—was holding a seder meal with my family every year during the Jewish festival of Passover. We were not Jewish. But similar to other Pentecostals (and sometimes even evangelical and Mainline Protestant Christians) we thought we were getting back to the “Jewish roots” of Jesus.

Growing up, my dad kept a shofar, the Jewish musical horn, in our house. While Jews traditionally use the shofar to announce the new year, Pentecostals use it to convey that a battle is taking place. Blowing the shofar, in the Pentecostal-charismatic orbit, is a call-to-arms to prepare for spiritual warfare. That is why some of the January 6 insurrectionists were carrying and blowing shofars as they stormed the Capitol.

(Image source: Loyd Wolf)

To understand what Pentecostals and charismatics mean by “spiritual warfare,” think of the overarching themes in fantasy novels and films like the Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series: There is a cosmic battle between the forces of “good” and “evil;” the forces of evil operate openly; a protagonist, destined by some sort of higher power, emerges to combat these dark forces from taking over the world; the narratives conclude in a final, climactic battle, a fight to the death, where good ultimately defeats evil.

For many within Pentecostal-charismatic circles, particularly those who were on Capitol Hill on January 6, this is how they see our world.

“January 6th revealed how very important the sacred myth of the U.S. is for Pentecostal and Charismatic Trump supporters. For them, the spiritual meaning of the nation is way more important than electoral votes or mundane policy shifts,” said Erica Ramirez, a scholar on Pentecostalism and director of applied research at Auburn Seminary.

“Charismatics are skilled at thinking on the scale of metanarrative. The election of Donald Trump became part of their sacred narrative in a manner that other presidents and elections did not.”

The spiritual warfare metanarrative derives from how Pentecostals and charismatics interpret the Christian Bible, a method in which Pentecostals and charismatics see themselves as the continuation of biblical narrative—or what Ramirez describes as the “perpetual now.” It’s foundational to Pentecostalism itself. As the Holy Spirit did at Pentecost when Christ’s disciples spoke in various unknown languages, the Holy Spirit continues to do so today. As miracles occurred throughout the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, so do they occur today. And as God judged nations in the Bible, so too does God judge nations today.

Drawing directly from Biblical accounts like Joshua—who God commanded to gather the Israelites to march around the Cannanite-occupied city of Jericho, blow their horns and shout to make the city’s walls collapse—the shofar has been a symbol of a Pentecostal spiritual (and political) war since roughly the 1960s.

All of these elements could be seen leading up to January 6th. The day before the insurrection, Trump supporters marched around the Capitol Building for a “Jericho march”—accompanied by contemporary worship music, red MAGA hats, and shofars. Following the Capitol assault, Pennsylvania GOP candidate for governor (and now official GOP nominee), Doug Mastriano–who is not Jewish—announced his candidacy with a man blowing a shofar while wearing a tallit, a traditionally Jewish prayer shawl. Around the same time, shofars were even blown in Canada during the Freedom Convoy in a series of aptly named “Jericho marches” in protests against the mandatory Covid vaccination requirement for Canadian truckers.

All of this reveals how Pentecostals and charismatics, once seen as fringe to American evangelicalism, have traversed beyond their churches and now influence how participants in right-wing movements see themselves. They view themselves as underdog protagonists in a type of sacred fantasy story where evil lurks all around them—in the media, in the business sector, and in the political sphere—and they must wage war in the spiritual and physical realms to overcome this evil.

For many Pentecostals and charismatics, spiritual warfare is but one component within a larger theological worldview, one that finds support in megachurch networks, in social media, and, more recently, within traditional media channels. The name for this theological and political worldview is “dominionism.”

Dominionism and Media Innovators

Dominionism holds that Christians are called by God to dominate every sphere of society to institute God’s complete rule on Earth, and to make humanity ready for the second coming of Christ.

Not all Pentecostals subscribe to this theology. Classical Pentecostalism originated with an emphasis on maintaining a life “set-apart” from the rest of the world vis-​​á-vis one’s personal conduct (no smoking, drinking, going to dances or movies, etc.), and a general distaste toward participating in the political process, which Pentecostals saw as corrupt and full of sinful politicians.

A later iteration of Pentecostalism, the “neocharismatics,” placed less stress on personal holiness and more on complex cosmologies in the spirit realm—particularly how demons and angels operate in today’s world in ways that dramatically affect individuals, communities, and entire countries.

The idea that demons and angels influence our political life could be seen most recently in a widely-shared video right after the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s spiritual advisor, charismatic pastor Paula White-Cain, called for “angelic reinforcements” from Africa and South America to help Trump win the election, a declaration she made in both English and in tongues.

For those paying attention, this is not a new phenomenon in American politics. At a prayer rally in 2011 for former Texas governor and 2012 GOP presidential candidate, Rick Perry (who himself has a deep connection with neo-charismatics), a self-proclaimed “apostle,” Alice Patterson, declared that “an invisible network of evil comprising an unholy structure” operated within the Democratic Party.

For the Pentecostals and charismatics who support such ideas, political disagreements are not mere debates; they are actual battles against evil. In turn, religious rhetoric about demons influencing American politics has helped fuel an ecosystem ripe for conspiratorial beliefs, particularly for the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that the Democratic Party and its leaders harbor a satanic ring of pedophiles. Trump, they believe, was called by the highest echelons of the U.S. military to run for president specifically to destroy this network.

While such beliefs, and support for conspiracy theories, have been most prominent among white Pentecostals and charismatics, there are some caveats. Black Pentecostals and charismatics, while socially conservative, tend to vote for the Democratic Party along with the majority of other Black Protestants. But Trump’s 2020 success with Latinx voters was, in part, due to the influx of Pentecostal and charismatic Latinx immigrants into the United States and the ways their religious outlooks affect their party allegiances.

Despite these distinctions along racial lines, Pentecostal and charismatic ideas about demonic forces influencing the Democratic Party and angelic forces anointing Republican candidates circulate far beyond church pulpits. Pentecostals and charismatics have a keen instinct for media entrepreneurship—utilizing the latest communication mediums to share their beliefs with the widest audiences possible. TikTok has become the most recent venue to promote Pentecostal messages to millions of people, especially to younger Millennials and to Gen Z. Gabe Poirot, a graduate of Kenneth Copeland Bible College, has over one million followers on TikTok, with videos ranging from calls to accept the gospel to clips decrying the evils of abortion.

The Pentecostal inclination to mass-appeal and the utilization of the latest media platforms also point to a lesser-known, yet key characteristic of, the Pentecostal-charismatic movement: its innate populism.

Populism and Pentecostalism

The Pentecostal and charismatic world, from the late 19^th century onward, is a movement that’s anti-elitist. From its origins, leaders in the movement railed against the white-collar class, professionalized clergy, popes, and politicians–all in equal measure. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the GOP’s embrace of right-wing populism, and the courting of American evangelicals—particularly Pentecostals and charismatics—occurred simultaneously.

During the 2008 presidential election, the late Senator John McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, picked a little-known former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running-mate—a choice that stunned pundits and political observers at the time. Palin had a Pentecostal background in the Assemblies of God denomination. Other Pentecostals started to compare Palin to the biblical character “Esther”—a Jew whose marriage and influence on the Persian king, Xerses, saved the exiled Jewish people from a genocidal plot within the kingdom.

With folksy yet pointed rhetoric that electrified the conservative base, along with clashes with mainstream media, Palin can be considered a “pre-Trump” figure. Her populist oratory, along with a background as a “hockey mom” and PTA president with working-class roots endeared her to the GOP conservative base, and especially to her Pentecostal and charismatic admirers, who viewed her as one of their own.

They would eventually view Trump as one of their own. Not because of a similar socio-economic background (he inherited his father’s real-estate empire), faith background (he identified, until a few years ago, as a Presbyterian), or because of a folksy manner of speech (he was born and raised in Manhattan). He was theirs because he made them promises about issues they cared about in language that translates well in the Pentecostal and charismatic orbit: grandiose and apocalyptical bombast coupled in zero-sum, Manichean “us vs. them” terms.

(Image source: John Lamparski for the Associate Press)

And one pertinent issue that he promised he would address was abortion.

Issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and even fears of creeping “Marxism,” have long been of concern to some factions of American conservatism. But in parts of the Pentecostal and charismatic world, these issues contain cosmic implications for the country’s relationship with God.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, each of Israel’s kings either “did what was right” or “did what was evil” in the eyes of God—with either blessings or curses for the kingdom. Since Pentecostals view themselves as being a continuation of the biblical narrative, they are certain God will judge America by the issues they view as straying from the Bible.

Their motivation is driven by an anxiety that God will bring about far worse crises than either a pandemic or political turmoil could bring. For that reason, in a country where roughly 70% of its population support same-sex marriage, and where about 61% support legal abortion, many Pentecostals and charismatics worry that American democracy and the “liberalization” of society will ruin America’s relationship with God.

According to Professor Ramirez, Pentecostals and charismatics do not consciously oppose democracy. Instead, they believe it’s imperative for this democracy to stay aligned with biblical norms.

“It’s key to understand Pentecostals’ genuine concern for the welfare of America. When Pentecostals feel biblical norms are falling by the cultural wayside, they look for a leader to right the course for the sake of the nation. They often give that leader an Old Testament nickname and narrative.”

The Pentecostal support for Donald Trump soon turned to Pentecostals describing him as a “King Cyrus” figure. Cyrus, a pagan King of Persia who is recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures favorably as “The Great,” allowed the Jews in exile to return to and rebuild Jerusalem. Tara Isabella Burton, a journalist who holds a Ph.D. in Theology from Oxford University, explains the Trump and Cyrus connection:

“While Cyrus is not Jewish and does not worship the God of Israel, he is nevertheless portrayed in Isaiah as an instrument of God — an unwitting conduit through which God effects his divine plan for history. Cyrus is, therefore, the archetype of the unlikely “vessel”: someone God has chosen for an important historical purpose, despite not looking like — or having the religious character of — an obvious man of God.”

In his single term in office, Trump filled fifty-four seats in the federal appellate courts—one less than his predecessor, Barack Obama, filled in twice the time. Most notably, he appointed three Supreme Court justices ages fifty-five and younger who will likely influence the court for the next two decades. Trump’s Supreme Court appointments have undoubtedly set the harbinger for the overturned Roe v. Wade draft opinion that was leaked in early May—something that Trump had always promised he would do.

Trump, for many Pentecostals and charismatics, and countless conservative Christians more broadly, was the vessel to save America and put it on a path of Christian righteousness. His combative and vicious antics made him their darling, irrespective of his personal moral failures or flaws. If anything, these things fueled his popularity and their devotion even more. In their sacred story, an unlikely protagonist with personal demons and a checkered past comes to their rescue. He was not only a fighter; he was their fighter. And most importantly, he was a fighter who delivered.

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Within the neo-charismatic world, this sacred-fantasy worldview mixes with Pentecostal populist inclinations to produce a hyper-combative and anti-democratic approach to American politics.

A notable example of this combative Christianity can be seen in Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Rev. Rafael Cruz—himself a dominionist preacher in Pentecostal-charismatic circles. At a pastor’s conference in 2016, Rafael Cruz recounted to the attendees the story of Pastor John Peter Muhlenberg, a colonial-era minister who brought three hundred men from his congregation on a Sunday morning to fight for American independence from Britain.

Cruz concluded his story by contrasting between a “non-political” church with a church that is willing to physically fight, with the latter being the exemplar Christian community. “That is our heritage,” Cruz said. His speech was met with applause, hollers, and hands raised toward heaven.

More people need to pay attention to this massive religious-political movement and its place in American politics. This Trumpist, Pentecostal crusade, if not addressed and taken seriously, will use the forces of Earth and heaven to push back against what stands in its way to keep America in God’s good graces. And what stands in its way right now is America’s commitment to democracy.

Miguel Petrosky is an essayist, writer, and journalist based in Washington, D.C. He has written for Sojourners, Religion & Politics, Christianity Today, and now for the Revealer. You can follow him on Twitter @petrosky_miguel.

The post Pentecostals’ Political Warfare appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Chip Somodevilla for Getty Images)

As the prospect of reversing Roe v. Wade unfolds in the United States, pro-choice advocates are simultaneously mobilized and despondent. This is true especially in states that have already introduced severe restrictions on abortion access and are looking to tighten them even further. In those places, travel to another state may soon become the only option to terminate a pregnancy. This is compounded by the fact that the capacity of abortion providers in pro-choice-majority states has not, on the whole, increased in anticipation of a potential surge of patients from states where new restrictions are expected.

Watching the United States reverse its legal protections for abortion reminds us of our native country, Poland, where conservative politicians and religious leaders aligned to effectively ban abortion. We are members of the first generation of Polish women since 1956 whose reproductive lives have been shaped by the looming possibility of being forced to carry pregnancies against our will. What we have witnessed in Poland provides important lessons for American pro-choice advocates and may foretell where the United States is heading as abortion access dramatically declines in some parts of the country.

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Poland has a volatile history of abortion laws. From 1956 until 1993, as a member of the Soviet bloc, Poland guaranteed relatively easy access to abortion. Yet, since the 1970s Polish Catholic organizations, supported by the Catholic Church, have lobbied to limit that access. In 1993, after the collapse of communism, democratic elections introduced conservative Catholic parties into the Polish parliament. Amid protests in major cities against the proposed legislation, they passed a bill that significantly restricted access to abortion, allowing for termination only in three cases: serious risk to the mother’s life or health; diagnosis of severe, permanent, or fatal malformations of the fetus; or pregnancy resulting from a criminal act, such as rape or incest (in this case, termination was allowed only until the 12th week of pregnancy and a prosecutor was required to confirm that a criminal act had occurred). Pro-choice advocates organized as the Federation for Women and Family Planning (FWFP), while Catholic organizations continued to advocate for a full abortion ban (even though, technically, Catholic Canon law allows prioritizing the life of the mother over the life of the fetus). The bill came to be known as the “abortion compromise,” reflecting the opposing views held by Catholic and conservative politicians who wanted a complete ban, and left-wing politicians who wanted to maintain broader access to abortion.

Prior to 1993, a family’s difficult socioeconomic situation was an acceptable reason to terminate a pregnancy. But since 1993, this consideration was no longer recognized as legitimate. People carrying out abortions or helping women access abortions that did not fall within one of the three legally-recognized exceptions faced up to three years in prison.

Notably, debates about the new abortion law were held in a parliament that was dominated by male politicians, with women holding only 10% of the seats. As many commentators observed, the legislators were not interested in women’s views on abortion and rejected calls for a national referendum on the matter. Women active in the opposition were politically disempowered after the collapse of communism. So-called “women’s issues” were not a priority in the dominant political agendas that focused on issues perceived as more important  — primarily, the preservation of the new, fragile democracy, “decommunization,” and economic reforms. At the time, a significant majority of Poles were fairly supportive of the right to abortion. However, their views gradually changed as conservative political and religious groups lobbied against abortion in the media (of which a significant proportion is influenced or controlled by the Catholic Church). Catholic teachings on the subject continued to influence Polish citizens through Catholic instruction in public schools. In 2006, for the first time, more Polish people expressed support for an abortion ban than the right to abortion.

In 2020, again amid mass protests, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (equivalent to the Supreme Court in the United States) issued a legally binding opinion that the diagnosis of a fetus with fatal malformations is not constitutional grounds to terminate a pregnancy, thereby tightening already severe restrictions. Catholic leaders celebrated this decision as a partial victory in a decades-long battle to ban abortion entirely. Many Protestant churches in Poland, including the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, the Polish Pentecostal Church, and the Baptist Church of Poland, also consider abortion a “sin” and have added their support to the ban.

(Image source: Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock)

1,076 “legal” abortions were carried out in Poland in 2020 before this new restriction went into place. The real number of pregnancy terminations is unknown. FWFP estimates it at 150 thousand annually. Women resort to underground abortions, buy abortion pills abroad, and travel to other countries for abortion procedures. A recent report estimates that 34 thousand women from Poland accessed abortion services abroad just in 2021. Even those who technically qualify for a legal abortion tend to prefer going abroad, given that Polish doctors and hospitals often create illegal red tape so they do not have to terminate a pregnancy. The criminal justice system also impedes abortion access by delaying the process that establishes whether the pregnancy is the result of a criminal act, which still constitutes grounds for a legal abortion in Poland.

In September 2021, a mother of three died as a result of being denied an abortion to which she had a legal right. Izabela (her surname was not disclosed by the media) carried a dead fetus in her body for nine days, as doctors driven by fear of breaking the new law refused to terminate the pregnancy. Izabela contracted sepsis and died. She lived a mere 40 miles from Ostrava in the Czech Republic, where women’s clinics advertise abortion services in Polish. According to FWFP, this was the first publicly known case of death resulting from the denial of abortion linked directly to the new law. There are no reliable statistics on the number of women who have died or become disabled in the aftermath of the 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling, but there have been several media reports of similar cases.

***

In neighboring Ukraine, abortion is more accessible. Abortion on request is free and legal until 12 weeks of pregnancy. Between 12 and 26 weeks, abortion is also permitted in cases of rape, incest, and fetal abnormalities. Abortion pills can be purchased in Ukrainian pharmacies over the counter.

Access to abortion has recently taken on new urgency for many Ukrainians and Ukrainian refugees. Since the Russian invasion began in February, Russian soldiers have sexually assaulted countless Ukrainian women and girls. The fate of women in the town of Bucha – gang-raped and raped in front of children – shocked the world. Anticipating that some of the refugees coming into Poland would have been raped, be pregnant and needing abortion, Polish pro-choice organizations brought this to the attention of the Polish government and appealed for better availability of care and an acknowledgement that abortions in Poland are legal for raped women. These voices were ignored. Consequently, some women who became pregnant after Russian soldiers raped them chose to stay in Ukraine, rather than flee to safety from the war, so they could terminate the pregnancies.

Between March 1 and April 20, 250 Ukrainian women who fled to Poland sought help accessing abortions from Polish pro-choice organizations. Some of them were able to acquire abortion pills; other were assisted with travel to Western Europe where abortion access is more readily available. The process is costly and the organizations are not able to help all women who need it. In addition, Polish activists assisting Ukrainian refugees do so at great personal risk – one of them, Justyna Wydrzyńska, was recently charged with illegally aiding an abortion and faces up to three years in prison.

Polish anti-abortion activists also raised alarm after the Russian invasion, correctly recognizing that unwanted pregnancies and demand for abortion increase during military conflict. The most notorious anti-abortion campaigner in Poland, Kaja Godek, is well known for attacking Polish feminist and LGBTQ organizations. Godek’s foundation, called Life and Family, distributed leaflets among Ukrainian refugees stating that “abortion is a murder and the worst crime.” The pamphlets encouraged women to call the police if anyone offered them abortion services, and featured pictures of bloodied, dismembered fetuses. The leaflets did not mention that Polish law allows for terminations resulting from rape. Feminist commentators noted that portraying abortion as the “worst crime” to women who had just escaped the brutality of war plays into the hands of Russian propaganda, which continually attempts to dismiss the atrocities the Russian military commits against Ukrainian civilians. A recent investigation conducted by Gazeta Wyborcza, one of the top Polish newspapers, revealed financial connections between a Russian oligarch close to Kremlin and the Polish ultraconservative organization Ordo Iuris, a close political ally of Kaja Godek.

Evidence suggests that most Polish citizens would support Ukrainian refugees’ right to an abortion. In 2020, directly after Poland restricted its abortion access further, 66% of Polish citizens agreed that women should have the right to abortion on demand for up to 12 weeks into the pregnancy. This suggests that the vast majority of Polish citizens, including those identifying as Catholic, would be sympathetic towards Ukrainian women seeking abortions in the aftermath of the Russian invasion. Although strong identification with Catholicism is commonly believed to be associated with anti-abortion views, Joanna Krotofil’s recent research shows that young Catholic mothers do not unanimously support the abortion ban. For the majority of Catholic women in Poland, abortion is a complex ethical issue that they do not believe should be regulated by a universally applicable, restrictive law. These women take into account the needs of other children in the family, health conditions of pregnant women (including mental health), and the lack of systemic support for parents raising disabled children when thinking about abortion. They conclude that women should have a choice.

***

The Russian invasion on Ukraine and the resulting exodus of refugees highlights, yet again, how women’s agency is constricted in times of both war and peace. Sanctuary for Ukrainian women and girls in Poland comes with restrictions that require personal calculations of risks to one’s physical survival. While politicians and Catholic leaders are touting the fact that Ukrainian refugees have found “dignified” shelter in Poland, with no detention centers or refugee camps, the country has ignored the difficulties of Ukrainian women seeking access to abortion.

Ukrainian refugees to the United States may soon face a similar fate. With the looming reversal of Roe, Ukrainian refugees, most of them women with children who have flown to Mexico in hopes of entering the United States (the U.S. government announced it would receive 100 thousand Ukrainian refugees), are likely to be confronted with a similar problem as in Poland. Which state they end up in may now have grave consequences for their ability to access reproductive help. While California may become a sanctuary for Ukrainian women in two ways – as a state that welcomes them and guarantees the right to abortion – states like Texas may ultimately become a dubious sanctuary, like Poland, where risk to life continues to exist in other ways, such as refusal to provide abortion access.

If the situation in Poland is a harbinger of things to come in the United States, states that support reproductive rights had better increase their abortion clinics’ capacity quickly. Countless mothers, daughters, and sisters living in places where access to abortion is likely to be restricted will die if other states do not make access to abortion much more readily available.

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Donation link for Poland’s Federacja: https://en.federa.org.pl/support-womens-rights/
Donation link for Planned Parenthood: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/get-involved/other-ways-give

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Anna Piela is a visiting scholar at the Department of Religion, Northwestern University. A native of Poland, she has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from the University of York (U.K.) and studies gender, race and religion. She tweets at @annapiela999.

Joanna Krotofil is an associate professor of religion at the Institute for the Study of Religion, Jagiellonian University, Poland. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, religion, and culture.

The post What Poland’s Anti-Abortion Laws Foretell about the United States appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

When I first started teaching college students, back during the Obama presidency, I felt the need to make the argument to my overwhelmingly left-leaning classes that the march of time does not guarantee social progress. Several students countered my claims and pointed to advances they had witnessed in their own lives, such as greater rights for LGBTQ people and better representation of people of color in politics, as evidence that the present was better than the past. My fear, and the reason I proffered this argument every semester, was that I did not want students to think the changing of the calendar had anything to do with us moving closer to greater equality. I wanted students to see that social progress comes from activism, extensive work, and strategy, not from the Earth revolving around the sun. I even wrote about this idea at length in my book, where I devote half of one chapter to critiquing the once-massively popular It Gets Better project, an online campaign that promised LGBTQ adolescents life will improve simply because they get older.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

For the past few years, in what I can only describe as something that brings me sadness, I have not needed to make this argument to my students. They come into my classes worried about the American political structure, the climate crisis, and the backlash against the political advances my students in earlier years celebrated. Many are anxious about the country they are inheriting. My teaching, in turn, has taken on new urgency as I hope to provide students with the historical knowledge and analytical skills to better understand our society and the tools to improve it. As opposed to students from my first years of teaching, these students do not have much faith in the future, so I try to give them hope that the future does not have to be one of despair.

I suspect that many of you, too, feel like we are on the precipice of backsliding in several areas. For that reason, this issue of the Revealer considers our present political situation and what can be done to make sense of it. Our June issue opens with Anna Piela and Joanna Krotofil’s “What Poland’s Anti-Abortion Laws Foretell about the United States,” where they explain how Poland’s criminalization of abortion can provide a roadmap for what is about to happen in the United States and what activists in states where abortion will remain legal need to do now. Next, in “Pentecostals’ Political Warfare,” Miguel Petrosky explains how Pentecostal beliefs have influenced Republican Party politics, why many Pentecostals are ready for a spiritual and literal battle over elections, and what everyone needs to understand in order to quell potential violence. Then, in “Translating Religion for the Masses,” contributing editor Kali Handelman interviews Peter Manseau, Director of the Smithsonian’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History, to see what he thinks about the place of religion in U.S. history and how that influences our lives today.

Our June issue also considers intersections of religion, culture, and power. In the third installment of our Catholic Horrors series, Kathleen Holscher explores two films that use gothic horror techniques to shed light on abuses that took place at institutions run by Catholic leaders with the support of the government, like American Indian boarding schools. Next, Vani Kannan reviews the book Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance and considers what it means for a Black, queer woman to critique the white supremacy of yoga practice in America while also trying to avoid culturally appropriating South Asian traditions. And in “Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die,” Sharrona Pearl, a medical ethics expert, reviews the film The God Committee, which explores how hospitals decide who should receive life-saving organ transplants and the factors that complicate how to make those decisions fairly.

The June issue also features a special episode of the Revealer podcast: “Pray Away on Netflix, Conversion Therapy, and Ex-LGBTQ Ministries.” Kristine Stolakis, director of Netflix’s acclaimed documentary Pray Away, and Lynne Gerber, author of the book Seeking the Straight and Narrow, join us to discuss what happens when people go to Christian organizations that promise to change their sexuality or gender identity. We explore the beliefs these organizations promote, why such groups remain prominent today, and how to end conversion therapy for good. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As we wait to see how the Supreme Court rules on pressing matters like abortion and prayer in public schools, I am reminded of two things. First, as I taught my students years ago and as many of us now know, the future can be worse than the past. For those of us who care about equality, the road ahead will be one of struggle. Consequently, second, I hold onto a quote that Angela Zito, co-director of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media (and the Revealer’s publisher) shared with me that has informed how I teach college students and how I think about what the Revealer can offer our readers. The quote comes from Welsh writer Raymond Williams: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”

May we continue to find hope in these complicated times and the fortitude to keep working for a better world.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: On Social Regression and Still Finding Hope appeared first on The Revealer.