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We hope you enjoy this important episode: “For Putin, God, and Country: American Converts to the Russian Orthodox Church.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 23: “For Putin, God, and Country: American Converts to the Russian Orthodox Church” appeared first on The Revealer.

(Scene from the Disney film Spin)

In January 2022, HBO Max’s And Just Like That, the Sex and the City reboot, drew the attention and ire of many South Asians. In an episode titled, “Diwali,” the show’s main character, Carrie Bradshaw, visits a clothing shop to purchase a sari to wear to her realtor-turned-friend Seema Patel’s celebration of Diwali, a holy festival for Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Newar Buddhists. In perhaps the most memorable moment of the episode, Carrie descends the steps of her New York City apartment wearing a red and blue lehenga with a matching floral headpiece.

This episode received mixed reviews from Indians, some of whom applauded the show’s portrayal of Seema Patel as a powerful real estate agent. Others critiqued the episode for cultural ignorance when Carrie conflates a lehenga and sari. Before attending the celebration, Seema and Carrie visited a “sari shop” where the latter sought to find an appropriate outfit. Carrie repeatedly affirms her desire to wear a sari, a type of garment with several draped yards of fabric; however, when she arrives at Seema’s house, she is wearing a lehenga, an outfit with a blouse and ankle-length skirt. And Just Like That, produced twenty-four years after the first episode of Sex and the City, is more diverse than the original series and briefly explores Seema’s life as a single, middle-aged Indian American woman. But the show contains stereotypes, such as Seema’s parents pushing her to consider an arranged marriage, that are hardly more nuanced than those in 1990s popular culture.

In the 1990s, few shows featured South Asians. The Simpsons was a notable exception. Throughout the show, Homer, the main character, would visit Kwik-E-Mart, a convenience store owned by Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian American. Apu was an over-the-top Indian caricature, voiced by Hank Azaria, who spoke in a thick accent and was known for the way he bid his customers goodbye by saying, “Thank you, come again.” This type of brown-voice performance, media scholar Shilpa Dave notes, is a part of the legacy of British colonialism that has been carried over to the United States and that accentuates stereotypes about South Asians. In 2017, Indian American comedian Hari Kondabolu directed The Problem With Apu, a documentary exploring how Apu has perpetuated racism against South Asians.

In recent years, television and film industries have made significant strides to diversify the portrayal of South Asians on screen: first, by increasing the number of programs that feature South Asian actors, such as The Big Bang Theory (CBS) starring British comedian-actor of Indian descent, Kunal Nayyar, The Lovebirds (Netflix) starring Pakistani American actor, Kumail Nanjiani, Sunnyside (NBC), featuring Kal Penn, an American actor of Indian descent and Bridgerton (Netflix) starring British actresses of Indian descent, Simone Ashley and Charithra Chandran; and second, by producing programs that center Indian characters, such as Never Have I Ever (Netflix), Indian Sweets and Spices (Bleecker Street Films), and Spin (Disney).

In the last year alone, we’ve witnessed more developed portrayals of Indian Americans, as Indian Americans are scripting, directing, and producing programming that represent their experiences. The two that stand out to me, Never Have I Ever and Spin, showcase the complexities of Indian American women’s experiences while tackling issues of race, gender, class, and religion.

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Mindy Kaling, who starred as Kelly Kapoor in The Office, scripted and directed Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, which premiered in 2020. The coming-of-age comedy stars Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Devi, a fifteen-year-old in San Fernando Valley, California, and is loosely based on Kaling’s own childhood experiences. The show traces how Devi comes to terms with the sudden death of her father prior to the start of the school year at Sherman Oaks High.

(Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Devi in Never Have I Ever)

The series opens with Devi praying to Hindu deities in her household shrine. She asks the deities for popularity (being invited to parties, getting a hot boyfriend, and having thinner forearm hair). Season One tells Devi’s story as she adjusts to high school, strives for academic excellence, and navigates her familial and cultural identities as the daughter of Indian immigrants. When Never Have I Ever debuted, it garnered praise from second and third generation South Asians who could, perhaps for the first time, identify with a protagonist in American popular culture. Writer Aanika Eragam claims the show resonated with Hindus in the diaspora who perform puja, adorn saris, pursue romantic relationships, and learn to balance their identities.

Never Have I Ever should be commended for several things. First, the series has a cast of leading Indian women: Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (Devi), Poorna Jagannathan (Devi’s mother, Dr. Nalini Vishwakumar), and Richa Moorjani (Devi’s cousin, Kalama). Second, the show destigmatizes mental health concerns, a rarely acknowledged problem in Indian communities, by including scenes of Devi meeting with her therapist, Dr. Ryan (played by Niecy Nash). Initially, Devi seeks therapy to process the trauma of her father’s death. Over time, Devi’s meetings with Dr. Ryan address family dynamics, high school, and social relationships. In some Indian and South Asian households, the gravity of mental health concerns go unmentioned, especially for immigrant children. Never Have I Ever normalizes mental health, illustrating that therapy can help people work through the anxieties and frustrations of life.

Never Have I Ever also addresses social stigmas within some Indian communities, particularly around issues of suitable romantic relationships. In the show’s second season, Devi’s mother, Dr. Vishwakumar, considers a romantic relationship with a Black dermatologist, Dr. Jackson, played by Common. The portrayal of such a relationship is significant because historically, among some Hindu communities, widows were considered of low social status and were subject to practices such as widow immolation. During the nineteenth century, Hindu religious leaders and reformers such as Rammohan Roy and Swaminarayan condemned widow immolation and supported widow remarriage. In 1856, the British East India Company passed the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act and legalized the remarriage of widows. While attitudes towards widows in India have evolved since the nineteenth century, social and cultural stigmas continue to shape how individuals perceive widows today.

(A scene from Never Have I Ever)

The flirtation between Devi’s mom and Dr. Jackson also allows Never Have I Ever to address issues of interracial and interreligious relationships. Within some Indian communities, pressures to date or marry Indians of similar geographic, religious, and cultural backgrounds abound, as does anti-Black racism. As scholar and filmmaker Vivek Bald notes, even though some South Asians, including many Bengali Muslims, lived, worked, and shared experiences with Blacks during the early twentieth century, many are unaware of those histories and have contributed to racism against Black Americans. Never Have I Ever pushes against the pressures to avoid interracial and interreligious dating in Indian communities through the depictions of Dr. Vishwakumar’s encounters with Dr. Jackson.

Despite these important achievements, Never Have I Ever is not without flaws. For one, the series furthers the model minority myth, which characterizes South Asians, and Asian Americans more broadly, as hardworking law-abiding individuals, who have achieved a higher degree of success than other racial minorities. The show depicts South Asian Americans as students who excel academically, major in STEM fields, and pursue lucrative careers. The show’s first season obfuscates the diversity of the Indian American experience, especially since many Indian immigrants are from low-income backgrounds and support their families with blue collar jobs. By presenting Indians as a model minority, the show suggests that anyone can be successful if they work hard, thereby ignoring systemic racism and the centuries of laws enacted to keep people of color in poverty.

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Shifts in stereotypical portrayals of South Asians are not only occurring in television series, but also in films. One such film is Spin, a 2021 Disney Channel original movie, written by Josh A. Cagan and Carley Steiner and directed by Manjari Makijany. The film stars Avantika Vandanapu as Rhea Kumar, an Indian American teen living in a multi-generational household. She lives with her father, Arvind (Abhay Deol), her brother Rohan (Aryan Simhadri), and her maternal grandmother Asha (Meera Syal), in California where her family owns and manages a restaurant, “Spirit of India.” Rhea navigates the stressors of high school: balancing her studies, her family responsibilities of taking care of her father and the restaurant, and her social life, all while trying to pursue her passion for music.

Rhea and her friends, who are part of an after-school coding club, are preparing to host a Holi festival at their school. One Sunday while Rhea works the evening shift at her family’s restaurant, she meets Max, a transfer student from England, and his mother. After discovering their shared interest in music, Max (Michael Bishop) introduces Rhea to the world of disc-jockeying but grows increasingly jealous and intimidated by her when her natural talent outshines his. Meanwhile, Rhea’s teacher, Naomi (Kyana Teresa), worries Rhea is taking on too much responsibility and being robbed of her adolescence, a concern she shares with Arvind during a parent-teacher conference. Throughout the film, Rhea explores her musical interests, a talent she shares with her late mother, and wins a competition against Max who plagiarized her musical compositions.

Spin is to be commended for several reasons. First, Spin is the first Disney film that features a South Asian protagonist. Second, the film challenges the model minority myth by illustrating that South Asians pursue interests and potential careers outside of STEM fields. Third, Spin focuses on Rhea’s self-journey and her interests in music. Rhea seems to have a crush on Max, at least initially, but any hints of romance are absent for the remainder of the film. The coming-of-age story leads viewers to focus on Rhea and her development as an individual.

Significantly, Spin weaves Rhea’s Indian American identity seamlessly into her experience as a high school student through her selection of clothing and music. Subtle references made throughout the film, particularly concerning music and dress, ranging from her grandmother wearing a salwar kameez (tunic and trousers) and Rhea wearing kurtas (a long tunic) on top of jeans, or a lehenga top and a tika (forehead ornament) with pants for her competition, visually depict her hybrid identities as an Indian American. Rhea’s embrace of her Indian identity illustrates that migrants often resist assimilation into mainstream U.S. culture.

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Spin, like Never Have I Ever, participates in a broader shift in television and film that centers on South Asian cultures and traditions. For many individuals, television and film are among the primary means through which they learn about various cultures, religions, and traditions. In the 1990s, The Simpsons was one of the few shows through which viewers learned about Indian Americans and Hindu culture, albeit through stereotypes.

While much has been done to combat stereotypical portrayals of Indians on screen, much more can be done to nuance the depiction of South Asians in popular culture. First, television and film ought to represent the diversity of South Asian traditions broadly by casting actors of various backgrounds, including those from places other than India, like Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Second, television and film can continue to develop characters who come from various socio-economic backgrounds, dismantling presentations of South Asians as a model minority. Third, pop culture depictions of South Asians should explore issues of gender and sexuality beyond cisgender heterosexual romances so that they reflect a more accurate representation of South Asian Americans today.

Spin and Never Have I Ever are taking us in the right direction away from The Simpson’s Apu. But that is a low bar from three decades ago, and we still have a long way to go.

Bhakti Mamtora is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Wooster and a Sacred Writes/Revealer writing fellow. Her research examines orality, textuality, and canonization in South Asian and diasporic Hindu traditions.

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This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post Changing Stereotypes of South Asians on Screen appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: American Friends Service Committee)

One sign of our increasingly divided country is the reemergence of “sanctuary” as a political strategy. In response to concerns that Roe v. Wade might be overturned, California has launched a push to become an abortion sanctuary, ensuring that citizens of other states and its own have access to safe abortions. When asked to summarize the proposal, Governor Gavin Newsom quipped, “we’ll be a sanctuary.”

As a scholar of sanctuary movements and as an ordained minister serving a church in the New Sanctuary Movement, I have been tracing sanctuary’s increasing relevance with a mix of hope and caution. Addressing citizens’ fears that abortion could soon be illegal is an important component of California’s proposal. That makes sense, as calls for sanctuary are typically a response to a catastrophe that offers a space where laws might not apply. California’s proposal is no different, as it imagines a future in which abortion is no longer constitutionally protected.

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Sanctuary gets its start in the biblical tradition with the creation of altar sanctuaries, whereby a monarch might offer clemency to people in fear for their lives. In both cases where this takes place in the Bible (1 Kings 1:50; 1 Kings 2:28), the altar serves as a place where the normal laws do not apply and the monarch’s mercy can intercede (or not). By the 9^th century B.C.E. the aberrational space of altar sanctuary eventually developed into a system of cities of refuge, where those accused of accidental homicide could flee in order to escape vengeance.

In the Middle Ages, sanctuary enjoyed a resurgence as individual churches served as places to which accused criminals could flee for a period of time before submitting to authorities, joining a religious community as lay brothers, or entering a voluntary exile. This form of sanctuary remained in use until the 16^th century, when governments began to strive for more orderly and uniform law and sovereignty. Still, the tradition safeguarded asylees, giving them valuable time and space to discern their next course of action and even to save their lives through abjuration.

Modern sanctuary movements have marshaled the idea of houses of worship as safe places, where laws are symbolically, if not legally, annulled. During the Vietnam War a thriving sanctuary movement took root in the Bay Area as places of worship housed those who refused military service. Centered mainly on naval vessels in the Bay Area, churches came together to offer sanctuary in response to service members’ fears that they would be imprisoned or shunned. Houses of worship, demonstrators, and petition signers showed that the public cared about draft resisters and service members who refused to join the war, even enough to withstand threats of prosecution from the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco. Their fear transformed into solidarity. Acting as part of broader networks, such as the Stop Our Ship campaign and general resistance to the Vietnam War draft, religious leaders leveraged their privileged status to grant temporary safety for those resisting deployment.

Other moments of sanctuary during the Vietnam War assisted protestors and political radicals as opposed to service members. In 1969 in Cambridge, MA, a church housed Eric Mann, the leader of a radical anti-war organization, allowing him to give a speech condemning the Vietnam War before he gave himself up to authorities. The church also served as a sanctuary for those fleeing police during a Vietnam War protest in 1969 that dominated student life at Harvard University. Fear was a fundamental part of the Vietnam War sanctuary, as soldiers feared being forgotten, radicals feared prosecution and imprisonment, and protestors feared police beatings. The number of sanctuaries in the Vietnam War has not been counted, but houses of worship, cities, and campuses comprised the network. That network had an outsized importance in the sanctuary movement that would follow, as clergy took lessons from the 1960s and 70s and applied them to new contexts.

The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s began with compassion alongside fear. In 1980, Quaker Jim Corbett and Presbyterian minister John Fife encountered great suffering and death among Central Americans – largely Guatemalans and Salvadorans – who were attempting to cross the border into the United States. Corbett and Fife also found that asylum cases for Guatemalans and Salvadorans were denied at an astonishing rate, with judges unwilling to hear accounts of torture as part of the asylum process. What started with compassion evolved into a complex set of anti-interventionist aims, with about 500 houses of worship joining the movement.

(Image source: David Zalubowski for Associated Press)

Leaders of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement used the media to amplify their message, which started when Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson and five other congregations simultaneously declared their houses of worship as sanctuaries for Central Americans. Their media message was simple: places of worship would house “refugees,” the preferred term of activists, and give them a platform to share their stories in a publicized testimonio, often in local media. These narratives countered the Reagan administration’s propaganda about Guatemala and El Salvador and led to a groundswell of support. When appearing before the public, sanctuary recipients often wore a bandana to protect their identity, and were pictured front and center in many news articles of the time. In the Bay Area, those who took part in the sanctuary movement for service members in the Vietnam War took those lessons and applied them to this new crisis, citing their previous sanctuary experience as important preparation. Eventually, a change in administration and a key court victory guaranteeing a fairer asylum process – ABC v. Thornburgh in 1991 – meant the gradual winddown of the this iteration of sanctuary, but those same activists would later influence a new movement for undocumented immigrants.

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The New Sanctuary Movement claims many dates for its beginning, but 2006 saw the revival of the strategy. In August of that year, Elvira Arellano entered sanctuary in the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago. She did so to avoid deportation and separation from her children. From there, the movement spread to more cities, each mobilizing the tactics of the 1980s to fight against the United States’ immigration policy. Highlighting the cruelty of deportation, undocumented migrants took a lead by telling their stories and often using their real names. Churches provided them housing and relied on Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s rules against entering a church building to safeguard the undocumented. The New Sanctuary Movement’s strategy hinged on humanizing the immigration issue, a point Arellano highlights when she says, “We are tired of hearing so many lies about us. Our lives shouldn’t be talked about like game matches. This is a humanistic issue.” The New Sanctuary Movement continues in the present day and claims some 1,100 faith communities, including the one I serve as pastor.

What many miss about these movements is how central fear and catastrophe were to their genesis. For those about to be deployed to Vietnam, fear was understandable, but clergy and laypeople were concerned about a moral calamity befalling the nation. This sense of moral failing can be grasped from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” sermon, which he delivered to over 3,000 people at New York’s Riverside Church in 1965. In it, he says, “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.” In the face of a moral calamity, clergy who opened their doors chose action through sanctuary, forming a node in the religious anti-war nexus that included the Berrigan Brothers and Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam.

The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s was also fundamentally grounded in fear, since fear was the central qualifier for refugee status under the Refugee Act of 1980. Recipients of sanctuary gave testimonials in which they cited their own fear and indicted the United States’ complicity in supporting the regimes that caused them to flee their home country. These reports helped to mobilize religious liberals in opposition to Reagan’s policies, which they saw as a moral duty. Those religious liberals were often underestimated, as an FBI report of their activity reads: “Aside from the old people, most of them looked like the anti-Vietnam war protestors of the early 70s. In other words, political misfits.” Those “misfits” would go on to form a valuable volunteer corps of politically engaged activists.

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Sanctuary is intended to convert fear into action, which is certainly the case in California’s abortion sanctuary proposal. Abortion access is tightening across the United States. Fearing a change in federal policy, Governor Newsom convened The California Future of Abortion Council, which released some 45 recommendations in its December report. Like other sanctuary movements, it centers personal testimony about the coming catastrophe that abortion advocates worry will take place if the Supreme Court repeals Roe v. Wade.

One portion of the report, which quotes Senator Toni G. Atkins, Senate President pro Tempore of the California Senate, reads: “I talked directly with women who had found their way to our clinic for assistance because they lived in states with restricted access. I met a mother who lost her daughter due to an illegal abortion. We can’t afford to let extremists turn back the clock on our rights.” Much like the testimonio of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, the fear that sanctuary movements cite as their raison d’etre is both personalized and systemic. For California’s abortion sanctuary advocates, the erosion of the “constitutional right to abortion” will have catastrophic consequences “as other states adopt extreme bans on an essential health service.”

(Image source: Los Angeles Times)

California’s abortion sanctuary proposal presents many considerations. Perhaps the most important is the realization that the states surrounding California have either unclear or oppositional stances toward reproductive rights and some 1.4 million people will have California as their closest access point for abortion, a nearly 3,000% increase from the current situation. The proposal advocates for increased infrastructure, access, and equity within California’s system, as well as a removal of barriers for accessing reproductive care for those traveling from out of state. A recent proposal also calls for student loan forgiveness and help for healthcare providers that commit to performing abortions. Overall, advocates want California to be a place where getting an abortion is easier for residents and a place of refuge for those in other states where the right to abortion has been abrogated.

Clergy are not the current leaders of California’s abortion sanctuary movement, but the movement deploys similar strategies and utilizes the language of previous sanctuary movements. Far from a mere linguistic dependence, California’s proposal stands in a long line of activists who want to resist federal policy, even if that change in federal policy is only imagined at this point. As Roe v. Wade is still in effect, California’s abortion sanctuary proposal gives a glimpse into the fear that drives the creation of sanctuary activism.

Notably, faith leaders across the United States are mobilizing to protect access to abortion. At a recent national conference organized by Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity (SACRED), religious leaders described the need for a faith-based movement to protect the right to abortion. While sanctuary was not the term of choice for these activists, SACRED helps religious communities “make the sacred space safe” for those seeking reproductive care.

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Whether the activists are religious or not, sanctuary seeks to create spaces that symbolically annul federal policy. The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s did not enjoy legal protection from federal enforcement. Their protections instead relied on internal policy that agents exercise discretion when dealing with houses of worship. Such discretion did not, for instance, protect the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s from surveillance in churches or infiltration of the movement through undercover operatives under the code-name “Operation Sojourner.” In the same way, California’s proposals will not restore abortion access in other states, but it will offer tangible and symbolic resistance to the erosion of abortion access.

Sanctuary movements are built in the middle of crisis, and that crisis is not unique to progressive sensibilities – conservatives also utilize sanctuary as a strategy. Take, for instance, the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Movement, which seeks to use municipalities to annul state and federal protections for reproductive rights. Its legal innovations gave rise to Texas’ recent law that imposes civil penalties on those who facilitate abortions for pregnant people after 6 weeks – a time frame before many people know they are pregnant. Second Amendment advocates are also pioneering sanctuary strategies to fight back against state laws that restrict gun ownership. In both cases, the movements are grounded in fear of a coming catastrophe – one that would enable more access to abortion or less access to firearms.

The success of sanctuary movements is debatable and depends largely on how one judges sanctuary’s goals. For instance, the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s did generate media interest in Central America and produced measurable changes in the United States’ asylum policy. Its legacy lives on through sanctuary cities and sanctuary campuses that dot the American landscape. The New Sanctuary Movement similarly produced much media interest, but there have been no major changes in immigration law. What seems clear is that sanctuary is a strategy whereby activists create symbolic solidarity; those symbols have real power, but there are also limits to their effectiveness.

The effectiveness of sanctuary as a symbol lies in its ability to articulate the fears of any given moment and link inaction with complicity. Each movement is clear about the approaching catastrophe that a shift or entrenchment of laws might produce – a world that is less just, crueler, or more restrictive are common manifestations of this fear. But those apocalyptic visions often contradict one another, making sanctuaries sites of contest and struggle over what vision of America ought to be pursued. What seems clear to me as someone who has studied sanctuary movements for several years is that if one wants to trace the contours of fear at the heart of our polity, sanctuary is a good place to look. A common refrain among sanctuary activists is “sanctuary everywhere!” From the looks of it, that may be exactly what we will be experiencing. However, what that portends for our nation is an open question.

Michael Woolf is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School and the senior minister of Lake Street Church of Evanston, IL. He is an ordained American Baptist minister and holds a Doctor of Theology degree from Harvard Divinity School. He writes about sanctuary, theology, and reparations. Follow him on Twitter @RevMichaelWoolf.

The post A Sanctuary for Abortion: How Sanctuary Reveals the Fears of Our Time appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Alexey Nikolsky for Getty Images)

The following excerpt comes from Sarah Riccardi-Swartz’s book Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia, published by Fordham University Press. The book explores a community of American converts to the Russian Orthodox Church in West Virginia.

This excerpt comes from the book’s fifth chapter.

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Only ten miles separate the parish and the monastery, but in terms of support for Vladimir Putin, their reasons were often light years apart. While inhabitants of the monastery by and large seemed reticent, apart from Fr. Tryphon, to express political fealty to Putin, they often portrayed his role as almost apocalyptic in the future of global Christianity. Many monks drew upon the language of the Third Rome and the figure of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II to portend what could happen in the face of growing secularism, and how Putin’s push for Christianity in the public sphere might be the only thing that saves the world. In contrast, to some extent, members of St. John’s parish viewed the president of the Russian Federation ideologically as a good candidate to promote Christian values globally. They tended to focus on current events that they heard about through various Russian government–sponsored media outlets or via word of mouth from Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) clergy who frequently visited Russia. On the whole, both sets of converts supported Putin, but for different ideological reasons. Beyond the Orthodox convert community, most of the Woodford residents I spoke with were in no way aligned with Vladimir Putin or Russian political ideologies, yet they often spoke of him with fondness or, at the very least, admiration.

The town mayor, who moved to the area as a child from the Pennsylvania Rustbelt, was from an Orthodox Hungarian background. One afternoon I sat down with him to chat about the area. He greeted me at the Woodford City Hall in a T-shirt and jeans with grease-covered hands: “I’d shake your hand, but I’ve been out back changing the oil in the fire truck.” A tall man, balding, with a dark tan, he was a former small business owner who worked for a nickel plant in the largest city nearby. At just over a year in office, the mayor stumped door-to-door during his campaign to get to know the residents, stressing a platform of economic stimulation and increased focus on fixing the aging infrastructure of the town. Not just a man of words, the mayor went right to work after the election, meeting with the city council to cut spending and create a budget that took the town from red to black by targeting the out-of-date water pipeline system. The mayor, in a similar fashion to many folks in town, believed the infrastructure and economy in Woodford were symptomatic of a decline in American standards and progress. While Vladimir Putin was not a key political figure for non-Orthodox

Christians in the town, the mayor, who noted that most of the citizens of Woodford voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, believed that both politicians share values that people in the community, and in the region more broadly, desired in their elected officials.

“They’re a lot alike, ya know?” the mayor said to me, “Trump and Putin. They’re strong leaders. We need that. They get the job done. I don’t care what they do in their free time.”

The mayor’s statements echoed that of another elected official—at the state level—who was also from Woodford. A historian and member of the legislature, Edward lived in the area his entire life, growing up just down the road from the current location of the monastery. On a rainy spring day, we met at a local diner, one of the few that had signs out touting that their employees had received Hep-A vaccinations, a virus that was running rampant throughout the region at the time. In his early thirties, Edward’s buzzed black hair and large, round blue eyes gave him a youthful appearance. Over chili dogs, onion rings, and sweet tea we talked about the history of the county, particularly his publications about the formation of the towns and local government in the area, his job as a high school history teacher, the steady economic decline in West Virginia, and the sociality of mountain culture. As he fiddled with his high school ring and looked at the rain beating against the window, he recalled how regional views regarding the former Soviet Union were starting to change. During his youth, Russia was thought of in Cold War terms, with fear and apprehension surrounding anything to do with godless communism. In recent years, however, especially since the 2016 United States presidential election, as Edward specifically noted, the vocabulary regarding Russia was beginning to change. “My high school students say we should give him a chance,” Edward said in reference to Putin. “They’re getting that from someone, and it’s probably their parents.” Raised in the Church of Christ denomination, in a community not far from the diner, Edward noted that the region had always skewed conservative at the presidential level, but that right and alt-right ideologies were on the rise among youth. Harkening back to sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s study of moral rage in rural America, Edward’s stories indicated that the combination of poverty and isolation may have led to an increasingly politicized lifestyle.

Dean, a West Virginian ex-military convert to Russian Orthodoxy, husband to a Russian-born wife, and local schoolteacher, indicated that he had also seen a spike in conversations—both inside and outside of the classroom—about the importance of Vladimir Putin in global politics. Unlike his wife, Photini, who seemed reticent to support Putin wholeheartedly, Dean believed Putin might change the world for the better. Echoing the sentiments of Woodford’s mayor, Dean, who was a slender man in his early fifties with greying hair and glasses, suggested Putin provided a new form of conservative moral governance that would not back down in the face of modern secularism. Shy and uncomfortable with crowds, Dean tended to stand at the periphery during social occasions at the parish, talking with male congregants or simply people watching. One-on-one, however, he was a different man altogether. “I’m angry,” he yelled at me. “Do you want to know why?” Sitting at his dining room table in a craftsman style two-story house about forty minutes from the parish, he expressed his outrage at not being heard, being looked over as a white male in what he saw as an American progressive society too focused on minority rights. He was worried about the increased “diversity” in his neighborhood, and he was fed up with liberals. “I’m sick of it,” he said. “Do you know what I have upstairs? It might surprise you,” Dean smiled. Pointing to the ceiling right above the dining room table, he proudly proclaimed, “I have a safe full of weapons. There’s a war coming you know, and I want to be on the right side.” For Dean, who voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, Russia and Putin were the right side, for they represented a return of traditional masculinity to the political world, one that would bring with it Christian values and morality to the public sphere. While Dean was ready to take up arms for his adopted motherland, others seemed to have deep existential issues with understanding their place in the world. One parishioner mentioned that he would not know which side to fight for if a war broke out between Russia and the United States. Converts felt caught between two worlds in a tide of increasing political turmoil. Were they Russian? American?

(Image source: Mikhail Svetlov for Getty)

It was not only laypeople (non-clergy) who wrestled with these questions. One of the main figureheads of the Orthodox community was the abbot of the monastery, Fr. Spyridon. A midwestern convert by way of Catholicism, he was a Benedictine monk before he converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Fr. Spyridon drew on Cold War themes, noting how he believed that much of the issue surrounding Russia and Putin was Western liberal bias at play. I cite him here at length given the way in which he captured the sentiments of so many I spoke with over the course of my time in the community:

“It used to be in the past it was the conservatives who were anti-Russian and the liberals who were pro-Russian; now it’s all switched. A lot of it, as far as I’m concerned, is on a spiritual level. The two roles of our country, as I knew as a child in the fifties, have completely reversed. Our country now represents anti-Christianity and Russia represents Christianity. It’s really a complete reversal of roles. Russia is trying with all of its might to hold up Christian morality and Christian belief and defend Christians. President Putin is personally rebuilding all the churches in Syria that were destroyed. Not just Orthodox but Catholic and Uniates. He’s rebuilding all of the churches there. There’s no offer like that from America. There’s no one speaking up for persecuted Christians except for Russia. There really isn’t. But if Putin says something or Patriarch Kirill says something, the liberal press tears them apart: Who do you think you’re fooling? No one believes you. You’re just saying these things because you want to impress people. You want American evangelicals to support you. So, it’s a kinda of a no-win situation. No matter what Russia does, they’ll still tear them apart. If they do something good, they’ll say they’re fake. That’s the way the situation is now. We want to hear what they have to say, and if you’re really listening to what they are saying, and if you look at the evidence in their country, I don’t see how you can believe all these accusations against the Patriarch and against the president of Russia. I don’t see how you can believe it, because you look at how their country is living and how they’re turning their country away from . . . trying to turn it away from abortion, and sensuality, and immorality. You know, they’re trying very much to do all that. No one else is at all, but part of these issues that Russia stands for in terms of morality are issues that the liberal press holds very dear—transgender rights, gay marriages, women priests, and women bishops—these are all issues that are very important to the liberals and to liberal Christianity in the West. Russia is the opposite of that. It stands for traditional morality and traditional beliefs, and so they just don’t like Russia and they don’t like the Russian Church—not at all. They think the Russian Church is simply a tool of Putin’s government. They don’t see any sincerity at all. They look at our church and they look at our services and they don’t recognize anything, so they dismiss it. I don’t know what the future is gonna hold, if this thing doesn’t change and it keeps getting worse, I don’t know what that’s going to mean for us as Russian Orthodox Christians, as American converts to the Russian Church.”

Fr. Spyridon’s apocalyptic worries of persecution echoed that of most converts in Woodford, where it seemed as if the only Orthodox people not caught up in the grip of Putin fever were Russians themselves.

While communities of like-minded people often have overarching beliefs and ideologies, there are always dissenting opinions. With the case of Appalachian Russian Orthodox Christians, the dissenters came in the form of Russian-born believers. Photini—Dean’s wife—who immigrated to the United States in the early 2000s after receiving her doctorate, worried that Putin’s relationship with the Church was not as picturesque as religious leaders and Russian media outlets let on. Two other Russian women in the parish—Veronica and Masha—also worried that converts to the Russian Orthodox Church were too eager in their embrace of President Vladimir Putin and his political ideologies. Both women saw a turn for the worse in Russian economics, culture, and society since perestroika. Veronica, a former schoolteacher, moved from a small village in Russia to the United States for the sake of economic survival during Boris Yeltsin’s tenure. “I hate Yeltsin,” she said. “What he did to our country. . . .” In her late fifties, Veronica was a spry woman with short curly ash blonde hair, who favored turquoise jewelry and white lace outfits. At one of the biweekly summer gatherings of women at Masha’s house, I was the only other attendee besides the two women, since most of the female parishioners were either on vacation or attending a ROCOR summer camp with their children. Veronica and Masha decided to talk with me about their feelings surrounding convert beliefs, the relationship between Russia and the United States, and how they felt about Putin.

“It’s kind of weird,” Veronica chuckled in reference to Americans converting to Russian Orthodoxy. “Maybe it’s because it is just in our blood, in our bones.” Both women found, in some respects, a totalizing conversion—that of complete enculturation, political and otherwise—to be off-putting. Masha’s partner, Reynolds, converted to Orthodoxy after falling in love with her. However, his attraction to Russian political ideologies did not stem from his relationship with Masha, but rather his dedication to conservative values—political, moral, social, and economic. Whereas Reynolds saw Putin and, to a lesser extent, Trump, as strong figures with positive transformative social capabilities, Masha saw both leaders creating downward spirals for otherwise open, democratic cultures. For both Masha and Veronica, the Soviet Union was imperfect but supportive. “Things were so much better during the Soviet Union. I’m very disappointed in Putin,” Veronica sighed. The idea that converts could support monarchic theories and desire the return of tsarist Russia, even Tsar Putin, was appalling to both women. As Veronica poured rose-scented tea, she shook her head violently and said loudly, “The tsar is never coming back. Ridiculous.” One of the few Russians in the community who openly supported tsarist tendencies and Vladimir Putin’s ideologies was the parish priest’s wife—Matushka Olga—who immigrated from Kazakhstan as a young adult. After spending a year conversing with Matushka Olga, it was evident that her ideas about the Russian government and Putin were deeply affected by Father Cyril, a convert. Given the overall leeriness with which many Russian-born ROCOR members in this community approached Russia’s political regime, it begs the question as to why converts were so attracted to Vladimir Putin, his seemingly illiberal and or autocratic politics, and the potential return of kingship to Holy (adopted) Mother Russia.

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is the author of Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia and a postdoctoral fellow in the Recovering Truth: Religion, Journalism, and Democracy in a Post-Truth Era project at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out our fascinating conversation with Sarah Riccardi-Swartz in episode 23 of the Revealer podcast: “For the Love of Putin: American Converts to the Russian Orthodox Church.”

The post Putin’s Christian Russia as a Model for America appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: CNN)

Ann Neumann was the Revealer’s editor from 2010 to 2013, when she left to write her brilliant book, The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America. When I took over as editor of the magazine, Ann wrote 50 installments of “The Patient Body,” a monthly column from 2013 to 2018 about religion and medicine, on everything from organ donation to assisted suicide to Down’s syndrome. About halfway through that impressive run, she and I sat down for a conversation in which we discussed religion, the medical industry, and more. Coming into 2022, the Revealer’s current editor, Brett Krutzsch, had the idea for us to reconnect and talk about what Neumann’s been up to in the last few years. Unsurprisingly, she remains both busy and deeply committed to the issues she’s been writing about for years. She has also been covering fascinating and urgent new topics, taking her interests in healthcare, religion, and equity to issues occurring around the world.

Kali Handelman: It was so much fun to go back through the archive of your work at the Revealer and to start the process of catching up on your current writing — I loved seeing the ongoing themes — bodily autonomy, the brokenness of American healthcare, death and dying — and the new questions you’ve been pursuing. Can you tell us a bit about how you see that trajectory, where you left off with “The Patient Body” and The Good Death, and what you’re most excited about in your work now?

(Ann Neumann)

Ann Neumann: When I look at the expanse of the Patient Body series, I’m amazed by how much ground we covered. I think the column really benefited from our process: I’d suggest some curiosity like, What’s all this new legislation surrounding Down’s syndrome and neonatal testing? Then I would go find out what it was about. It’s to your credit that I was able to run with my own interests in that way, because you had to do a lot of shaping sometimes. You brought more disciplined thinking to the stories I was trying to tell. The combination of curious questioning and smart editing worked well. I think that’s how I still work best, following my curiosity. To be sure, it’s the least comfortable way to work because it’s always uncertain.

I was just talking about this with Kathryn Joyce, a brilliant investigative journalist who was once at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media (the Revealer’s publisher) and is now on staff at Salon. We were talking about how hard it is to write about something you’re an expert in, as if the more you know short circuits the fine craft of writing. Too much information gets in the way. But the uncertainty of new questions can bring it right back. It pays off in better writing to always be pushing out into new areas. Keep your key “old saws” close, know what they are, but always keep reaching out to new lenses, subjects, territories.

I have learned over the years that I am most grounded when my work is close to the body. Whether I’m writing about elder care or reporting on aid in dying, talking with others about their experiences, their embodiment, is what engages me. But I found about two years ago that having been on the same beat for so long, having established some kind of expertise in the subjects of death and dying, my writing was less interesting, more stagnant. I was giving talks, writing newsy pieces that were important but not exciting to me. I wanted to be reporting in a way that taught me things. I did some extensive nursing home work during the pandemic and that was good, but in the past year I’ve been pivoting to other areas that I know so little about. Areas where I am looking for the religion and the bodies.

KH: I love that — the religion and the bodies! I’m definitely going to ask you about that pivot to new work, but first, can you tell me more about how religion continues to play a part in your reporting?

AN: Religion will always be central to anything I do, not because of who I am but because — say it loud! — religion is at the core of our lives and cultures, our politics and geopolitics, certainly our health care and social services. Dare me to find the religion in almost any story!

Maybe the best way to describe how I think about religion is to start with how we currently talk about what is systemic. Recently, there’s been a lot of such talk, although askance. When we’re talking about Critical Race Theory, for instance, we’re debating what racism is and how it works in American society: is race a personal issue, how someone behaves, or is it a belief that’s been built into our systems? Clearly the latter. And it’s fair to say that religious ideas and preoccupations are also systemic, shaping our lives in incalculable ways. With religion, some of those ways are good, but clearly not all.

And this is something that Anthea Butler, the religion scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and author of White Evangelical Racism, gets so right: responsibility for injustice is not just individual but also collective. In this country we’re hung up on the I. I’m not racist, I’m hard working, I have black friends, I believe. In this way, we avoid culpability for entrenched injustices and even dismiss them as unimportant. No bad apple? No problem. Often those doing the dismissing are working within systems, within cultures deeply embedded with racism, like Evangelicalism, like the carceral system, like banking, like the healthcare system. Our supposed American self-reliance — I am my own self-made man — becomes an excuse to ignore our responsibility for systemic problems. This works historically as well. You see it again in the Critical Race Theory debates: that’s in the past, we’re not responsible, can’t you just let it go, you’re dividing us. Don’t fall for it! Personal responsibility, in the church or outside it, is not going to change corrupted systems.

This seems an impossible thing for us to learn because our sense of individual selves is so merged with our go-it-alone national identity, our national pride in reinvention (putting a slip on the past!), and innovation (always looking forward!). Indeed we’re quite good at forgetting our original sins — preferring to whip them into some shuffle of nostalgia and “tradition” — and at getting born again.

KH: Yes, I think you’re absolutely right. And I think we probably also see this focus on systems and responsibility in some of your recent work. You’ve done some really critical (in both senses of the word: essential and asking challenging questions) reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. You’ve written about everything from the plights of nursing home workers and the long history of pandemics, to the global drug supply chain and vaccine intellectual property. I’d be interested in hearing about how the work you did on death and dying has carried through into your perspective on the pandemic.

AN: This is so kind of you. I mean, part of the challenge of these overlapping Trump and pandemic years has been the feeling of futility. I was just starting a whole new project when COVID chased us into our homes and the work turned out to be very relevant to the moment. I had an editor at The Guardian call me in the fall of 2019 and ask if I wanted to look into a common narrative, one that had picked up speed in various media: nursing homes, particularly in rural areas, were closing en masse, scattering their residents to the wind, far from spouses and loved ones. But I turned the piece down. You just can’t write about nursing home care in the U.S. without knowing your shit on Medicare and Medicaid. But when she hit me up a few months later, I had been watching the industry for a little while and I had learned more. She made it clear that she wanted race and economic inequality (two foundational issues within healthcare that I always try to address in my work) to be a major part of the piece. I was hooked. I was reporting on nursing homes in Philadelphia, a city with one of the largest low-income elder populations in the country, in February 2020, weeks before the pandemic hit the U.S.

As we all watched news clips of bodies being wheeled out of nursing homes, what I knew to be truer than anything else was that these deaths were preventable. The industry had all the warning signs, years ago. Chronic problems like understaffing and other austerity practices directly led to the unfathomable number of COVID deaths inside facilities the country over. These deaths were preventable. But why weren’t they prevented?

That question has fueled almost everything I’ve done since the start of the pandemic. The drug supply chain, the intellectual property laws preventing governments outside the West from vaccinating their people? I want to know why the lives of some — a clearly identifiable some! — are structurally (systematically, again) less protected, less defended, less valued than other lives. We know the broad reasons — apathy, structural racism, corporate greed, the lack of profit in emergency planning — but if we know what the obstacles are, why are they still so insurmountable? Not claiming I have an answer, but that nursing home narrative about rampant closures? True. It checked out; there are a large number of facilities closing across the country. But it’s because there’s no buyer and seller oversight. Not only because reimbursement rates are low. In fact, studies show that when you raise Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates for nursing homes, the quality of care doesn’t improve. Private equity for the past decade or so has been coming in and sucking the life out of nursing home chains. Often these private equity firms buy facilities by the dozen, then sell the real estate out from under them, forcing the operators of the homes to pay rent. It’s a huge challenge because the margin in the nursing home business is already slim. Yes, state and federal funding should be higher, yes it’s a beleaguered industry, but government oversight could have stanched the problem. And when they didn’t, states could have stepped in. Nobody came for these people.

KH: Which leads naturally, and painfully, to my next question. While reading your recent work, it struck me that one of the deepest through lines is an interest in vulnerability. You write with deep sensitivity and outrage about the experiences of people whose lives are precarious because of poverty and illness, but also, importantly, the ways our systems not only fail to mitigate these harms, but in fact profit off of them. I would love to know if you see vulnerability as a central theme in your work and if so, why? How does that question motivate you and determine the stories you tell and the way you tell them?

AN: Woah, vulnerability! Seriously, I’ve always told myself that it was something much narrower motivating me: I thought it was unwanted pain I’ve been writing against. Unwanted pain and suffering. You’ve reminded me of this Revealer  article, in which I characterize the thankfully late Phyllis Schlafly, “Real women, unlike those whimpering feminists relentlessly proclaiming the cost of their labors, suffer and toil in silence.” There are dark and heavy moments in my personal history — and we all have them — that were deeply painful. That’s at least part of having a body, of embodiment, and yes, particularly a female body. So identifying — even anticipating — sources of pain seems like an outrageously obvious human imperative. The pain of others should outrage us. And when we are experiencing pain, others owe us outrage at what causes us pain.

But you’re onto something. Vulnerability is a precursor to pain, like a warning. It’s like what all the nursing home advocates were telling me about infection control weeks before COVID. Here are the vulnerabilities and the vulnerable, they said. Here is the pain, their illnesses and deaths, COVID said.

Vulnerability is generally really obvious. I mean we could, with broad strokes, identify the primary causes of pain and suffering in the world. Me and you, right now. We know who is vulnerable. Yet it’s a warning that we collectively have failed to heed. And you’re right, this is our inability to connect the personal to the system. Nursing home staff members do it better than anyone I know. A woman can be working a nursing home ward for 10 years, know all the people in it, and still provide poor care if she’s given too many patients. The problem isn’t the quality of her work, it’s the system that chooses to understaff the facility for profit, placing her care and that of her patients below the margin. The vulnerable register systemic pain and injustice in their bodies. Their caregivers can be the best in the country, but the system, predicated on austerity and designed by specialty accountants, as surgical as Robert McNamara at war, can still reach those residents.

(Image source: NY1)

Registering the vulnerable is also just a common precept of good journalism, which I try to practice: make large issues personal by following the life of an individual caught inside the problem. Ask them what hurts, what happened. Believe them when they tell you. What is more compelling than that? What is more human than that?

KH: Your ideas about systemic and personal vulnerability also makes me think about our many conversations over the years (I’m thinking in particular of this piece from the autumn of 2015, “Mortality and the American Dream”) about the particular, peculiar, power of “The American Dream.” This is a real softball question (I kid), but what do you think is the status of that dream right now? Where is it most alive? Where is it most frayed or fragile? How is that discourse being deployed? Does religion still play a big part in that deployment?

AN: Lordy that’s a rant! (Great art, by the way.) Yesterday The Baffler published a piece I wrote about chronic understaffing at hospitals, how and why understaffing persists. When I posted the piece on Facebook, a friend wrote to say that underpaid hospital jobs were all about choice. These poorly paid (predominantly Black and Latinx female) employees needed to make better choices. When I pushed back he did the predictable thing, used himself as an example, a guy who did well despite obstacles because he kept trying.

The American Dream stuff that made me so angry back in 2015 isn’t going anywhere soon. It’s still alive in Trumpland because that’s part of what Trumpland runs on, a mythic beautiful past that, when restored by moral behavior and hard work, will make America #1 in the beautiful future. But it’s also alive in regular good folks like my friend. And the less possible it is to bootstrap yourself out of debt or a 70 hour work week or rationing medication to feed your kids, the more tenaciously we seem to cling to the dream. I get hopeful when I see Starbucks and REI employees unionizing, and when I see cash bail and other carceral systems challenged. But, so many of our personal and political relationships are predicated on the kind of hierarchy — if you fail it’s your fault — that keeps the false dream alive. And let’s be clear, I’ve internalized the American Dream too. I feel like my successes are my own too often, that hard work will save me, that I’m behind if I’m not moving ahead.

Whenever we’re talking about morality in this country, I think we’re talking about a particular fusion of god and country. Today’s post-Trump patriot isn’t fighting for democracy and freedom (certainly not for freedom of the press or for personal freedoms), he’s fighting for economic austerity and a theocratic policing of the other, any other. He’s in a fight club for the fight. And he’s laser focused on limiting what country means (real Americans) and what god means (basically male-policed heteronormativity). Although our formulation is unique, we’re seeing the use of revanchist religiosity, austerity, and issues like racial and gender equality elsewhere in the world. In Putin’s Russia, certainly. The politics of nationalism tell us who among us deserves what they have, based on all kinds of measurements — race, age, beauty, education. This has so very little to do with moral behavior when the hardest working people are so clearly also the least able to get by financially.

Also in 2015 I wrote an article for my column about Sara Moslener’s book, Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, in which she neatly traces the idea that female morality was foundational to the success of the country. Moslener writes, “The progress of America as a nation-state… was dependent upon the proper negotiation of gendered roles and morality.” So every time you hear about evangelicals passing an anti-trans bill, an anti-abortion bill, an anti-childcare bill that will keep mothers at home, the goal is not only to elevate their own ideology but to do so in order to save this country. That’s some righteous shit. We laugh at Pat Robertson when he says the gays caused 9/11. But the man is a blunt voice saying the quiet part out loud.

KH: Honestly, “saying the quiet part out loud” is a pretty spot on summary of where we can find “the religion” these days. But rather than end on that doozy, I still want to hear more about what you’re working on next — where is your curiosity currently leading you?

AN: I’m working on a new book that is the perfect bridge between my death and dying work and more global interests. I feel like the Left has forgotten that the rest of the world exists and that disturbs me, when the rest of the world is so very close technologically, politically, culturally. The book begins with my father’s death (just like The Good Death) but takes another path, using grief as a catalyst for examining American identity, following a long trip I took after he died, while mourning and questioning my own identity. I say this all the time, but grief is inherently vain; we are reimagining ourselves in the absence of a person who meant so much to us. But travel, displacement from whatever we call home, is also a reimagining. How we are perceived becomes a vehicle, an assumption, a calculation of global hierarchies. With an American passport you can go many places others can’t. So what it means to be (it must be said) a small, blond, female American changes depending on where in the world you are.

The book is ostensibly about the actions of our myopic empire over the course of the past 60 years and the human and personal costs of our real and mythic well-being. This national narrative is very present, as I travel through Russia or Egypt or Tanzania, places where I am perhaps white first, female second, and American third. And therefore Christian. It’s been wonderful and absolutely unsettling to give up working within my own modest expertise, to venture out into physical and emotional areas I have been thinking about for a long time.

By the time this interview is published, I’ll be back from a four week trip to Cairo and Addis Ababa for two of my favorite outlets, Harper’s and The Baffler. For the former I’m writing about the war in Ethiopia — a country which has a personal resonance for me; my father was stationed in Eritrea, what was then Ethiopia, in the 1960s, on an American military base that was spying on the Russians, first their space program and then during the lead up to the Cold War. His work at “Stonehouse” was classified and he never talked about it. But Ethiopia stayed with him always. I have all his family letters and ephemera from that time. His story of “service” is a compelling insight into not only our country at that time, culturally and politically, but into Ethiopia. America’s presence there played a heavy role in the Eritrean war for independence from Ethiopian oppression, a war that birthed the country’s current president, perhaps one of the most authoritarian rulers in the world today. Ideas of cultural hierarchy, religious civilization, rights to bodies of humans, and water and land all come into play in this story.

Ethiopia and the United States’ relationship was forged in the post-WWII, pre-Cold War era, but the warped understanding our government had of Ethiopians — our lighter skinned Christian allies — long persisted, even thrived during the War on Terror. So much of this history is missing from news reports of the 15-month war there. I hope my piece will bring historical context and nuance back to the narrative of the Ethiopian war.

For the The Baffler I’m writing about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, built in Ethiopia to generate massive amounts of electricity, which the current prime minister promises will raise Ethiopians out of poverty. But ancient treaties, brokered by colonial powers, prevented Ethiopia from making use of the Nile for centuries. Ethiopia moved ahead with construction unilaterally and the dam has brought the historically fraught relations between Egypt and Ethiopia to a head. There are reports of Ethiopians being assaulted on the streets of Cairo. As you might guess, the U.S. has played a role in dam infrastructure in the Horn of Africa and Egypt.

Both of these stories are related to the book in expansive ways. It’s an ambitious project, an intimidating admission I don’t make to myself very often. But what book isn’t at the beginning?, I ask myself. Check back next spring and I’ll tell you where I am.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor based in London. 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.

Ann Neumann is author of The Good Death, published by Beacon Press.

The post Writing about Healthcare, Religion, and Equality appeared first on The Revealer.

(An image from the film Saint Maud)

“Presence is real, but not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, and it is rarely either good or bad…It is a dreadful thing to be in relationship with the gods really present. Painful and unexpected consequences may ensue. It is not safe to be so raw and vulnerable to real presences, to make desire and need so transparent.” – Robert Orsi

*This review contains spoilers of the film Saint Maud.

***

When I was a child, my Catholic mother implored me not to watch scary movies because she believed they would invite demons and evil spirits into our living room. If I played the tape, I might become a girl possessed.

But as scared as I was, I couldn’t resist. I ravenously consumed all of the horror I could get my hands on. I secretly watched The Shining and The Exorcist at Halloween. I rented Amityville Horror, Carrie, and Poltergeist from Blockbuster with my aunt for our summer sleepovers. And when I was in middle school, I persuaded my friends to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake in theaters instead of Elf.

I loved how real the supernatural elements of these movies felt, and how that feeling stuck with me afterward, while simultaneously empowering me to push back against my mother’s supplication with another version of reality, that these were just movies. Evil can’t befall those who watch horror flicks, right?

Such visceral responses to horror are not isolated to my own experience. At parties, friends and acquaintances, Catholic or not, have shared similar stories of parental chastisement and irrational fears of the paranormal breeching the normal.

Famously, the theatrical release of The Exorcist in 1973 prompted rumors about a curious onset of “severe physical reactions” from watching the movie, including vomiting, fainting, heart attacks, miscarriages, and seizures. Psychologists reported an uptick in patients who believed they were possessed. In more extreme cases, some viewers attempted suicide and murder.

Or take The Ring, a 2001 American remake of a Japanese film based on a novel about a cursed videotape, where bad things happen to unsuspecting people because they dared to engage with haunted media.

What these pop culture and anecdotal examples suggest is that the potential for, and fear of, something transferring, or moving, between realms is both a horror trope and a religious feeling.

The possibility of otherworldly presence, whether good or evil, is gripping, frightening even. It’s what makes religious horror sell to the masses and convinces young Catholics to fall in line. Horror’s intimacy with the tension between reality and fiction, and the viewer’s willingness to suspend her disbelief for the sake of a good scare, remain the source of my fascination with the genre to this day.

So, as all good horror movies should, Saint Maud (2021) plays with our sense of what is real by tapping into the perspective of its main character. It offers viewers the possibility that divine, rather than demonic, presence can be the source of a film’s terror: What happens when God is part of the reason why bad things happen to unsuspecting people?

This is the question that Saint Maud elicits, building on a history of Catholic supernatural and psychological horror. Forgoing the classic formula of a slasher or demon-possession film, Saint Maud challenges viewers to imagine a twenty-first-century world where a person can speak to God and where God speaks back. In a fleeting 84-minutes, it shows us that for some people, God is real. And that realness can lead to some pretty horrific places.

***

Saint Maud is the debut film from British writer-director Rose Glass. Through its exceptional curation of sound, visual effects, and religious imagery, the film explores the line between what is real and what is not, as told through the everyday experiences of a young hospice nurse named Maud (Morfydd Clark). Inspired by Roman Polanski’s 1965 arthouse horror film Repulsion and her own Catholic upbringing, Glass uses personal religious piety—from prayer to self-mortification—to build a narrative about Maud’s internal world and how it shapes her relationship with those around her.

In the opening scene, a pot of tomato soup bubbles while a couple fights in Maud’s neighboring apartment. Maud, a quiet woman in her mid-twenties and austere in both dress and demeanor, is in the middle of packing her things. A clock ticks loudly. To drown out the noise, Maud begins speaking to God. She asks him to watch over her and tells him the exact time she’ll have to wake in the morning to get ready for work. With a fluid voiceover and scene change, her prayer continues into the next day. She lists the supplements she had taken, what she ate for breakfast, how she feels, and even goes so far as to beg for a revelation, admitting to her growing impatience for divine intervention in the humdrum of her banal life. “I can’t shake the feeling that you must have saved me for something greater than this. Not that I’m complaining. Amen.”

After Maud moves into the guestroom of her new patient’s home, viewers are thrust into the minutiae of her job, including her patient’s ailing body, medical schedule, social life, career, and home. We watch and listen to every detail as if we are the god to whom Maud speaks.

The film’s voyeuristic intimacy builds as the audience encounters each character.

Maud’s new patient, Amanda Köhl (Jennifer Ehle), is a forty-nine-year-old American dancer succumbing to lymphoma in her British seaside home. She is elegant, adorning herself with wigs and luxurious robes, and forthright in character. She knows what she wants and is not afraid to ask for it, even if it means putting Maud on the spot. As we learn from Amanda’s last words to her hospice nurse, their tumultuous relationship was a distraction from death. “I’m so sorry I was unkind to you,” she said. “You made me think of things I didn’t want to.”

Amanda’s art is her life’s accomplishment, felt in the music that fills her home and the recordings of past performances that play on her television set. Based on the guests she entertains, the drinks she slugs, and her chain-smoking, it seems Amanda is not ready to let go of who she was. Her body is a source of pleasure not only because of what it can do as a dancer, but also as a lover, which the film explores through the character of Carol (Lily Frazer), a young sex worker and companion Amanda hired. Carol and Maud are lifelines in Amanda’s attempt to maintain some semblance of her life in her last days, vulnerable and utterly dependent on those who care for her physical and sexual needs.

(A scene from Saint Maud)

Most of the film takes place in Amanda’s home, which sits on a hill overlooking the sea. The interior is rich with dark wooden panels and ornate wallpapers. The windows are either stained or speckled glass and take various geometric shapes, echoing the architectural structures of a cathedral. Each room has a personality of its own. As the film progresses, the house becomes a stage for Maud’s divine and interpersonal drama. Without a church of her own, the kitchen and bedroom are where she privately burns, scratches, and picks at her skin, acts of self-harm that come after revelations, either to thank God or to punish herself for doing something wrong.

Take the following scene: After a late-night conversation with Amanda, Maud walks back to her room, breathing heavily. She struggles to make it up the stairs. A horn begins to sound. Clinging to the wall and smiling, Maud falls on her back, groping herself and the carpet. Electricity crackles and lights flicker overhead as she experiences her first ‘godgasm,’ an ecstatic release made all the more vivid as low hums and faint whispers surround her contorted body. It’s Maud’s reward from God for breaking through to Amanda.

Clark’s performance of the godgasm looks exactly how it sounds: joyful, pleasurable, sexual, yet agonizing. It’s an orgasm from God, not unlike the ecstasy medieval mystics experienced or that Renaissance artists depicted in their sculptures.

In an interview, Glass explained that the concept of a godgasm emerged as a way to express how Maud and God communicate without distracting the viewer with too much dialogue. She wanted their relationship to be relatable by showing how God “makes her feel really good,” in the same way drugs might.

Given the various Christian taboos that surround female sexuality, it’s no surprise that sex plays a frequent role in Catholic horror. But Glass’s concern with women whose bodies serve as witnesses to otherworldly presence is not limited to cinema and its sex obsession. It’s also the content that drives academic and theological podcasts and fuels ongoing debates on the extent to which religious experiences overlap with psychiatric disorders.

(A scene from Saint Maud)

Too often, horror films dismiss women’s experiences of unusual or supernatural events as figments of their imagination. Rosemary’s Baby and False Positive are but a few telling examples of how “hysteria” is handled at the narrative level. What Saint Maud does differently, though, is it invites us to straddle the dangers and ecstasies of religion when taken into a woman’s own hands, without judgment (at least until the film’s final act).

With a female writer-director behind the camera, and women in the leading and supporting roles, Saint Maud lends itself to a more complex representation of women in horror, a genre that has broadly been characterized by an overwhelmingly male gaze. The film takes women seriously and, in turn, takes God seriously, all without foreclosing the possibility that Maud’s encounters with God are actually a form of psychosis.

This is best portrayed through God himself, a character in the film who takes many forms: a wooden crucifix, a voice, and a feverish whirlwind. He even appears to Maud as a cockroach, speaking in Welsh from her bedroom wall, commanding her to perform a final test so they can “be together truly.” All versions of him are recognizable to Maud, but visually inconsistent to the viewer. These inconsistencies distance us from Maud’s dominating perspective, leading to other moments in the film where we question what we know as true. When she bumps into Joy (Lily Knight), an old colleague, we learn that Maud’s name is actually Katie. Later on, after Maud was fired by her employer, she calls Joy in a drunken stupor, asking her to come out for a drink. It seems that the conversation goes sour and that Joy refuses the invitation, but when she checks in on Maud toward the film’s end, it turns out that the two women had actually made plans to meet, but Joy never showed. “I tried to call, but you didn’t pick up,” Joy claims.

Once these bits of information are revealed, it’s hard not to go back to other instances in the story to figure out whose version of reality we’re actually experiencing. What really happened? How much of what we have seen is the true playing out of events?

There are moments in the film, though, where Maud’s reality becomes palpable to others, drawing attention to their plausibility and absurdity. One night, after getting drunk with a friend, Amanda asks Maud to stay by her bedside and begins to ask a series of questions: “How long have you been doing this? Have you seen a lot of death? What made you leave [your previous job]?”

Maud struggles with this last one, but her answer is God. “It’s what God wanted. When he came, everything changed.”

“So, this is a recent conversion?”

Maud nods.

“When you pray, do you get a response?”

“Sometimes he talks.”

“You hear his voice?” Amanda asks, with a slight smirk.

Maud nods, smiling. “Most of the time, it’s like he’s physically in me or around me. It’s how he guides me. Like when he’s pleased, it’s like a shiver or sometimes it’s like a pulsing. And it’s all, warm and good. And he’s just, there.”

Eventually, Amanda admits she is struggling with the uncertainties of death. “Nothing feels real anymore. I keep thinking about that last moment, and wondering what it will be like … will there be anyone else there … and then what … nothing? Tell me I’m wrong.”

This conversation is a turning point in their relationship.

In this moment of mutual vulnerability, Amanda names her hospice nurse her “saviour,” prompting Maud’s first godgasm, and with this external validation, God not only becomes more present in Maud’s life, but in Amanda’s too.

Maud now sees it as her responsibility to care for Amanda spiritually, to heal her by replacing her doubt with the firm conviction that God is real.

(A scene from Saint Maud)

A few days later, Amanda asks Maud to join her in the living room for breakfast. They sit side-by-side on the couch and as Maud begins to say grace quietly to herself, Amanda shuts off the television so Maud can pray openly. Maud smiles and accepts the invitation. But in this scene, Amanda’s reactions are quite different from the frankness she expressed when she spoke about death the previous night. She smiles, smirks, and scoffs at Maud. And yet, the two of them eventually feel God’s presence together. “He’s here. I feel it too,” Amanda says. The experience verges on orgasmic. Amanda looks to Maud, mirroring each gasp for air. She throws her head back in ecstasy and reaches for Maud’s hand.

Whether any of this was real to Amanda is questionable. Was she indulging Maud or genuinely experiencing God? You’ll have to watch the film to get your answer. Nevertheless, Maud’s desire for salvation becomes conflated with Amanda’s desire for connection, both attempting to escape her own loneliness. Each woman inhabits her version of reality while projecting her desires onto the other.

Although Saint Maud explores these multiple perspectives to tell its story, the film’s horror lies in the fact that, according to Maud, her relationship with God was always real. Glass observes that “we all live in the same world, but we’re all confined to our bodies and all experience reality subjectively. You never really know what’s going on in someone else’s head.” For this reason she finds it “lazy and quite dangerous … to dismiss people who do terrible things as just inherently bad or mad people.” Instead, Glass offers a nuanced look into the life of a woman so fiercely devoted to her soul-saving mission that it propels the film to its tragic end.

***

Depending on how you interpret it, Saint Maud can be a hagiography gone wrong, a profile of a hospice nurse intent on saving a soul, or a detailed account of a slow descent into psychosis. Nonetheless, it shows us that for some people God is real, a presence felt and experienced, a voice made audible, a presence that can feel really good, but can also cause people to do pretty horrific things (like self-inflicted harm and violence against others).

But Saint Maud may also be a commentary on how the Church has dealt with mental health historically. As Glass notes, there were times when if God spoke to you, like Joan of Arc, “you became a saint…but if you go around saying those things now, alarm bells start ringing.” It’s a line that the Vatican has treaded lightly, most notably in Pope Francis’ recent confession to seeing a psychotherapist. And, as Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada shows in her conversations with tattoo artists, the reality that “some Saints lived with mental illness” is not lost on laypeople and cultural Catholics — “‘a lot of the saint stuff is really dark … you’re like shit, they were not in a good way. It’s super fucked up.’”

It’s hard to watch Saint Maud and not see how Glass is tapping into this fuckedupness too, leaning on her own religious formation in a Catholic all-girls school and familiarity with the visual vocabularies of film, horror, art, and religion to establish the film’s Catholic mood.

Maud, after all, suffers a similar fate as St. Afra (who burned at the stake), the namesake of the hospital she worked at before going into private care. But unlike The Exorcist, there is no need for a priest to intercede and excise a demon on behalf of a helpless woman who wants her life to go back to normal. Maud is seemingly in control of her own end as a profoundly personal experience with God.

In the end, Maud was not a saint in the traditional sense (formally recognized by the Church), but she tried to live like one. Maud sought to redeem herself and others from sin by committing physical and spiritual acts that were intended to purify and save her soul. She communed with God and became his loyal servant. Through these acts, Glass shows us that interacting with God through a series of intense and recurring religious experiences is a real way of operating and existing in the world. Her caveat, however, is that it is not always safe to be so vulnerable.

Saint Maud, then, is not concerned with a medical explanation of what is going on with its anti-hero, nor with enlisting psychological interventions to help or dismiss her actions. Rather, Glass’s film presents us with the idea that presence, whether good or evil, real or imagined, is as transformational as it is horrific, and not just because our Catholic mothers told us so.

Christina Pasqua is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion and in the Book History and Print Culture Program. She is currently a dissertation fellow with the Louisville Institute, writing about American visual culture and translation practices through Bible comic books.

The post Saint Maud and the Terror of God’s Presence appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image credit: Ciaran Freeman for IMBD)

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 also 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. Through this series, they explore the intersections of horror as an aesthetic and as a way to analyze and confront the shadow side of Catholicism in North America.

***

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” – HP Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

On a crisp winter day in 1981 in Brookfield, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson stabbed his landlord Alan Bono to death with a pocketknife. Bono was a manager at Brookfield Boarding Kennels, where Johnson’s girlfriend, Debbie Glatzel, worked as a dog groomer. They’d gone as a group for a bite at a local pub called the Mug ‘N’ Munch. Bono had been drinking heavily throughout the meal and started behaving erratically, at one point aggressively grabbing ahold of Glatzel’s little sister. At this, Johnson began growling like a wild animal and sank his five-inch blade into Bono’s gut and chest several times. It was a shocking scene, but the incident only grew weirder. At the murder trial, Johnson’s lawyers claimed Johnson had been deranged by virtue of demonic possession.

The “Devil Made Me Do It” case, as it came to be known, drew international attention almost immediately, with its mix of alleged supernatural evil and homicidal gore. The New York Times reported the story as an Exorcist-style murder mystery, emerging “at a time when there is growing belief across the nation in various forms of the occult.” But, in Brookfield, some believed this tragedy had actually been a longtime coming. For upwards of a year, Debbie Glatzel’s brother, David, had been possessed by the very same demon. His Catholic family had gone to a local priest, who in turn enlisted the help of the clairvoyant/demonologist couple, Lorraine and Ed Warren. The Warrens concluded that the demon had attached to the Glatzel family during Debbie and her mother’s experimentation with witchcraft during a snowmobiling vacation. David was caught in a constant cycle of agony. Following several unsuccessful exorcisms, in a fit of sympathetic desperation, Arne Johnson challenged the demon to “Take me on instead of him.” As Ed Warren would later note, “It’s just one of those things you never do… Not if you know anything about this sort of thing.”

(Arne Johnson. Image source: Courant File Photo)

In the grainy black-and-white trial photos, Johnson looks like he could have been a middle-aged banker or local politician instead of a teenage landscaper. Dressed in a plaid blazer and slacks, and sporting a slightly-floofed helmet of blond Aqua Net hair, he seems an unlikely candidate for demonic possession – as unlikely as Brookfield, Connecticut seems a vortex for the malevolent supernatural. In the end, Johnson was convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to ten-to-twenty years in prison, and released after four. Although Johnson and Glatzel eventually disappeared from the spotlight, their story of demonic possession continued to haunt the public imagination and was recently revived in the third installment of the Conjuring film franchise, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021), starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as Lorraine and Ed Warren.

Catholicism has proven an enduring wellspring of dread in American culture. As sadistic villains and supernatural heroes, Catholics have been a primordial element in horror literature, cinema, and news media. Monster theorists (they exist) suggest that examining who and what a society deems “monstrous” is critical to understanding its values and preoccupations, and that the horror genre allows for the recognition of terrors that we conventionally repress precisely because they are so repellent. Film critic Robin Wood writes that, “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression.” Catholicism has been an object of both fascination and revulsion in American popular culture, and Catholic horror illuminates conventionally repressed anxieties about the presence of supernatural evil in the modern world, as well as how the Catholic Church perpetuates its own traditions of violence.

Terror Behind the Walls

“Infants were sometimes born in the convent: but they were always baptized and immediately strangled! This secured their everlasting happiness; for the baptism purified them from all sinfulness, and being sent out of the world before they had time to do any thing wrong, they were at once admitted into heaven. How happy, she exclaimed are those who secure immortal happiness to such little beings! Their little souls would thank those who kill their bodies, if they had it in their power!” – Maria Monk, The Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal

Stories of forced captivity have been essential to Catholic horror. In the antebellum period, as immigration from Europe – particularly Germany and Ireland – swelled, northeastern U.S. urban centers witnessed an exponential growth in Catholic population and civic power. This period of the so-called “Immigrant Church” was foundational for “ethnic white” Catholic identity, owing to both a surge in numbers and the concomitant xenophobic backlash it engendered.

As ascendant Catholic power grew, Protestant anxieties about invasive hordes of tired-hungry-poor foreigners disrupting the American way of life inspired creative anti-Catholic fantasies about diabolical and seditious papist conspiracies. Nerves occasionally boiled over into nativist riots, which included the arsons of two churches and the shelling of another during the Philadelphia summer of 1844. But the tactical predecessor of the Philadelphia church burnings was an assault on a convent in Boston, under the guise of rescuing a runaway nun who locals believed was being tortured just behind the enclosure’s walls.

The years that followed the siege of the convent witnessed a proliferation of convent captivity literature. This included Six Months in a Convent, a memoir by Rebecca Reed, an Episcopalian turned Catholic postulant with the Charlestown Ursulines. Reed’s tell-all, composed and circulated locally prior to the riot, and published just the year after (1835), depicted convent life as sadistically carceral and depraved. Reed’s memoir was a survivor’s warning against the allure of Roman Catholicism to unsuspecting Protestants: “If, in consequence of my having for a time strayed from the true religion, I am enabled to become an humble instrument in the hands of God in warning others of the errors of Romanism; and preventing even one from falling into its snares, and from being shrouded in its delusions, I shall feel richly rewarded.”

Six Months in a Convent was a runaway success, selling over 200,000 copies in its first month. However, it was eclipsed the following year by another convent captivity memoir, The Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, written under the nom de plume “Maria Monk.” The broad strokes of Monk’s tale mirrored Six Months: another young Protestant woman duped into converting to Catholicism and taking the veil, only to escape and expose the dark underbelly of popery. Awful Disclosures amplified the dramatic content, transfiguring the “Black Nuns” convent into a sex trafficking ring. Noncompliant sisters were punished by being thrown into solitary confinement in squalid subterranean cells, and upon pregnancy, carried their babies to term only to have them immediately baptized, strangled, and tossed into a lime pit in the convent basement. Priests used the confessional to groom victims, wielding the authority of their office: Monk said she was taught that priests could not sin, and therefore their commands were to be treated as God’s own, no matter how vile. It was a repulsive, terrifying depiction of Catholic religious life. And the American public lapped it up. Awful Disclosures moved more freight than any other book in the country’s history besides the Bible, at least until the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1850. Abhorrent as Monk’s descriptions of illicit Catholic sex and torture were, Protestants found them profoundly titillating.

Catholics had no monopoly on antebellum Protestant anxiety, but urban Catholics were proximate-other enough that their threat felt imminent. Catholics walked among Anglo-Protestants and might lure unsuspecting naïfs through convent walls, behind which all manner of danger – physical, psychological, spiritual, sexual – lurked. Catholic horrors were close. Although white Catholics might well pass as everyday Americans – and increasingly that’s exactly what they would become – white Protestants believed Catholic religious life was fraught with sexual deviance, gender ambiguity, sedition, and apostasy.

Catholic Heroes

 “Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from the windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion.” – HP Lovecraft, “The Horror of Red Hook”

As an NYPD detective, HP Lovecraft’s fictitious Thomas Malone gravitated towards life’s shadow side. The macabre of the everyday always felt close to him. And so it made perfect sense that he would be detailed to a phantasmagorical Red Hook, Brooklyn, a “tangle of material and spiritual putrescence” where “the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky.” But his investigation into a mysterious recluse named Robert Suydam would drag him down a rabbit hole that left Malone psychologically and spiritually frayed almost beyond recognition.

HP Lovecraft’s 1924 fictional short story “The Horror at Red Hook” is a satanic kidnapping and child-sacrifice mystery set on the Brooklyn waterfront. Its protagonist, the Dublin-born and implicitly Catholic Malone, is assigned to investigate rampant lawlessness among the throngs of uncivilized dark “Asiatics” who had transformed Red Hook into a den of vice and, Malone suspected, the occult. “The Horror at Red Hook” is not about Catholicism per se, but more broadly a work of creative xenophobic paranoia that deploys a liminal Irish Catholic cultural shapeshifter who moves between polite Anglo society and the “babel of sound and filth” that was the Brooklyn waterfront. As an Irishman congenitally disposed towards the paranormal, Malone was uniquely suited to investigate the “creatures” who gathered in underground caverns beneath a decrepit Catholic church.

Lovecraft, who stands alongside the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and William Peter Blatty in the pantheon of horror writers, was an unselfconscious bigot. NK Jemisin, author of The City We Became – conceived in conversation with Lovecraft – put it bluntly: “He was a notorious racist and horrible human being.” Lovecraft’s collected works and personal writings are littered with racial epithets and casual references to non-Anglos as ogrish and bestial. “The Horror at Red Hook” is the most bluntly racist of Lovecraft’s published stories. Recent years have seen the horror literature community reckon, sometimes quite publicly, with Lovecraft’s racist legacy. While Lovecraft is notorious for his existential contemplations of human insignificance, China Miéville sees Lovecraft’s racism as foundational to his full spectrum of creative writing: “[I]t is race hatred that raises in him the poetic trance … So, in other words, the antihumanism one finds so bracing in him is an antihumanism predicated on murderous race hatred.”

Lovecraft was a proud hibernophobe who mocked Irish sovereignty aspirations as the quixotic fever dreams of the Emerald Isle’s “brainless canaille.” Even so, he found Irish Americans useful inbetweeners – one foot in civilization, the other in the gutter. By the time Lovecraft penned “The Horror at Redhook,” Catholics had mainstreamed considerably, but not conclusively. Descendants of Potato Famine refugees assimilated into mainstream white society and gained political heft through their blood sacrifice in the Civil War, prodigious birthrates, labor monopolies, and unholy alliances like redlining. But three years after the publication of “The Horror at Redhook,” the first viable Catholic presidential candidate, Al Smith, would see his campaign shredded by suggestions that as a papist Smith was not, in fact, a free agent – even though he was famously illiterate on fundamental Catholic doctrine – charges that would be less successfully levied against John F. Kennedy thirty years later. But in the 1920s, the liminal Thomas Malone is Lovecraft’s upwardly-mobile infidel who is able to access a cosmic underworld of human sacrifice, psychedelic chaos, and undead resurrection. As a genre character, Malone is a transitionary figure, in which Catholics morph from vessels of supernatural evil to their adversaries. And yet, Red Hook remains immutable: “The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook’s legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss…”

A Different Kind of Captivity

By the tail end of the 1970s, Catholic supernaturalism dominated horror cinema. The 1973 film adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist cemented the demon-possession-as-spiritual-captivity-narrative trope and barnstormed American cinema as part of a quartet of blockbusting Catholic supernatural horror, alongside Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Omen (1976), and The Amityville Horror (1977). In pop imagination, Catholics, priests in particular, had been recast as the last line of defense against primitive evil – often unleashed from some arid far-off land – in an American culture that remained anxious about supernatural presence even as it nominally presumed to evolve beyond such superstition.

The knightly Catholic priest had become so integrated into the American collective unconscious by the first decade of the new millennium that director Scott Stewart was able to wield a $60M budget for a saga about a warrior-monk (named “Priest,” played by Paul Bettany) with a massive “cross potent” tattooed on his face. A dark, ragged, futuristically-steampunk supernatural western, Priest narrates a rescue mission, as Priest-and-company attempt to save his daughter from feral vampires. Adapted from a Korean manhwa comic and self-consciously styled after The Searchers (1956), Stewart constructed a desolate captivity narrative with vampires replacing the Comanche and a heavily armed cleric as liberator. Although Stewart claimed his film was not based on “this world’s Church,” he deployed Catholic symbolism – not just crosses, but Confession, rosaries, prayers, Communion – as a universally recognizable generic for militant supernaturalism, embodied by a mendicant vampire-slaying John Wayne.

For all its “vampocalyptic” theatrics, Priest was eclipsed in the box office by a series of films about a married couple from suburban Connecticut: the 1981 Arne Johnson murder trial made celebrities out of Ed and Lorraine Warren, and undergirded the Conjuring film franchise, which has grossed over $2 billion since 2013. As Vatican II-era paranormal detectives, the Warrens’ vocation to spiritual warfare fired American imaginative synapses, even, perhaps especially, among their many skeptics. Chronicler Gerald Brittle would describe the “Devil Made Me Do It” episode as “the worst case of their lives,” but it was also a career-maker, ultimately transforming the Warrens into icons of contemporary “based on a true story” horror. And as revelations of rampant clerical abuse have rendered the default setting of priest-as-hero increasingly noxious, the married couple has found a second life as family-next-door demon hunters.

It Happened Everywhere 

“We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this. We know some of you have heard some of it before. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.” – Report I of the 40^th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury (Pennsylvania)

In August 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report on the findings from its two-year long inquiry into sexual abuse perpetrated by Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania. The report covered six of the state’s eight dioceses – excluding the previously-investigated Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown. The report’s introduction was a graphic, visceral, and traumatized plea. The grand jury uncovered over a thousand child victims of abuse, and over three hundred “predator priests,” but stipulated that “[w]e believe that the real number – of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid to come forward – is in the thousands.” The text included anecdotal narratives – such as that of a priest who raped a convalescing child while visiting her in the hospital; and another who forced a nine-year-old to perform oral sex and then rinse his mouth out with holy water – before acknowledging an ominous conceit: “We should emphasize that, while the list of priests is long, we don’t think we got them all.”

(Photo credit: John Konstantaras/Chicago Tribune)

Even in the post-Spotlight “Catholic Abuse Crisis” world, the Pennsylvania grand jury report still stunned many with the revelation that sexual abuse and its cover-ups had been a norm, rather than an exception, in Catholic life. But of course not everyone was shocked. As Indian Country Today noted, “American Indians know all too well the devastating impacts of such institutional perversion, and as a result, express both empathy and sympathy for the victims of these heinous crimes.” Scholars of Catholicism, with few exceptions, have not been as discerning.

At a 2019 historian’s conference, William Cossen challenged the conventional wisdom to describe Maria Monk and other similar stories as simply a genre of “anti-Catholicism.” As a matter of course, scholars have roundly dismissed Monk and Rebecca Reed as fraudulent avatars for Protestant xenophobia. But in the wake of the Pennsylvania grand jury, Cossen questioned whether, in their reflexive deprecation of convent tales, historians had inadvertently served as “aiders and abettors” of abuse.

In this period of public attentiveness to clerical abuse, Catholic horror cinema has witnessed something of a return to form with priest villains counterbalancing the Exorcist-style cosmic superheroes. Although there continues to be an appetite for supernatural horror, as in the Conjuring trilogy, there has been a proliferation of dramas and biopics dramatizing the Church’s real-life terrors – most notoriously 2015’s Spotlight. But there have also been creative imaginings of Church institutional violence that reflect collective revulsion to the perpetually mounting documentary evidence. 2013’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls depicts St. Dymphna’s residential school on the fictionalized “Red Crow” Mi’kmaq reserve, where Indigenous children were tortured, sexually abused, and stripped of cultural connection and community. More recently, the miniseries Midnight Mass fuses Catholic horror blueprints by investigating the figure of the priest as both an agent of healing and death.

Contemporary Catholic captivity narratives – from tales of kidnapping to demonic possession – terrify and entertain, while also revealing something about both our existential dread and the monsters among us; beckoning us, in the words of philosopher Eugene Thacker, to “confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all.”

Jack Lee Downey is the John Henry Newman Professor in Roman Catholic Studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of The Bread of the Strong: Lacouturisme and the Folly of the Cross, 1910-1985 from Fordham University Press.

The post Catholic Monstrosities, Priests, and Supernatural Dread appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

For the past several weeks, the world has watched as Russia has shot missiles at buildings sheltering Ukrainian citizens. Not satisfied with only targeting the Ukrainian military, Russia has made a point of murdering the Ukrainian people. Each day, we read headlines that describe the situation as “horrific,” as a “nightmare,” and that label Vladimir Putin as a “monster.” The images out of Ukraine remind us that one need not turn to film to witness horror; the worst things one can imagine are happening right in front of us.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The war in Ukraine is but the most recent nightmare-inducing situation during the pandemic years. Perhaps for that reason, I have avoided all television shows, movies, and novels that are meant to frighten and disturb. The world is scary enough. But as I’ve learned from people who enjoy watching horror films, the horror genre can shine a light on how we are the monsters of our own worst nightmares. Horror can offer commentary on society, on the dangers of excess power, and on life’s vulnerabilities.

For these reasons and more, this issue of the Revealer is focusing on horror. Our April issue marks the launch of our three-part series on “Catholic Horrors” that we will publish over the next three months. The series will explore the genre of Catholic horror found in such films as The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby alongside actual horrors committed by the Catholic Church. Jack Downey opens the series with “Catholic Monsters, Priests, and Supernatural Dread,” where he looks at the history of Americans depicting Catholic priests and nuns as depraved, then as a source of protection against the occult, and finally with renewed skepticism as the sex abuse scandal unfolded. In the issue’s next article, Christina Pasqua reviews the horror film Saint Maud and considers if feeling God’s presence is a sign of mental illness or if it would feel as terrifying as demonic presence.

The issue also explores horrors unfolding in the present day. In an excerpt from her new book Between Heaven and Russia, Sarah Riccardi-Swartz investigates why American converts to Russian Orthodoxy are drawn to Vladimir Putin and his vision for a Christian nation. Next, in “Writing about Healthcare, Religion, and Equality” Kali Handelman interviews former Revealer editor (and acclaimed author) Ann Neumann about her work to expose inequities in nursing homes, the medical industry, and the systems that keep certain people perpetually vulnerable. Then, in “A Sanctuary for Abortion: How Sanctuary Reveals the Fears of Our Time,” Michael Woolf explores the history of sanctuary movements in the United States, from churches that protected Vietnam War resisters to California’s recent announcement that it will provide sanctuary to anyone seeking an abortion if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. And, in “Changing Stereotypes of South Asians On Screen,” Bhakti Mamtora reflects on the all-too-common painful stereotypes of South Asians and reviews two recent programs that are attempting to change how South Asians are portrayed on television.

The April issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “For Putin, God, and Country: American Converts to the Russian Orthodox Church.” Sarah Riccardi-Swartz joins us to discuss why Americans with no ethnic ties to Russia are converting to Russian Orthodoxy. We explore their political views, their frustrations with democracy, their love of Vladimir Putin, and what all of this means for America and the war in Ukraine today. You can listen to this important episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

For those who enjoy watching horror films, this issue has intriguing insights to offer. And for those like me who avoid such movies, the issue sheds light on the critical issues facing us today. If the classic impulse for viewers of horror films is to cover their eyes when the monster appears, the articles in this issue show us why that is the precise moment when we must watch what is happening. If we refuse to see the horror, we may never understand the problems of our world.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post April Editor’s Letter: Horror and Religion appeared first on The Revealer.