1) What Does the Russian Invasion Mean for Religious Minorities in Ukraine?
Anna Piela
Religion and Politics
Piela outlines the likely fate of Ukrainian religious minorities if Russia succeeds in its invasion. Through her analysis of how Russia has historically treated minority groups, she writes of her concern for Ukraine’s religious diversity and freedom.

2) A Twisted Love Story: How American Evangelicals Helped Make Putin’s Russia and How Russia Became the Darling of the American Right
Katherine Kelaidis
Religion Dispatches
In this alarming and fascinating piece, Kelaidis discusses how the relationship between Russia and the American Right has helped Putin to cement Russian Orthodoxy as the gold standard for conservative, traditional politics.

3) Also at Stake in Ukraine: the Future of Two Orthodox Churches
Andrew E. Kramer
The New York Times
Kramer lays out the likelihood of the Ukrainian Church surviving if Russia wins, and vice versa. In either case, he argues, one church is certain to be ejected from Ukraine.

4) Holy Wars: How a Cathedral of Guns and Glory Symbolizes Putin’s Russia
Lena Surzhko Harned
The Conversation
Harned employs the image of a single Russian cathedral, The Church of the Armed Forces, to act as a physical manifestation of Putin’s vision for the country: an interplay between the state, the military, and the Russian Orthodox Church.

5) Ukraine’s Jewish History is Filled with Trauma. But While the Past is Prologue, it’s Not Destiny.
Joshua Meyers
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
In his response to Putin’s claim of “denazifying” Ukraine, Meyers details the scope of this misconception. He argues for an understanding of modern Ukrainian religion and politics as a shift from its past, and writes of the country’s road to “self-improvement.”

6) What Putin’s “Denazification” of Ukraine Really Looks Like
Yair Rosenberg
The Atlantic
Rosenberg’s profile of a Ukrainian rabbi is a tender and moving tribute to the realities of being Jewish in Ukraine today.

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

The post In the News: Religion in Ukraine and Russia appeared first on The Revealer.

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

We hope you enjoy our newest episode: “Black Christians and Hip Hop.”

Happy listening!

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 22: Black Christians and Hip Hop appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: The Gospel Coalition)

The following excerpt comes from Erika Gault’s Networking the Black Church: Digital Black Christians and Hip Hop. The book explores how hip hop, social media, and new technologies have transformed the lives of young adult Black Christians.

The excerpt comes from the book’s preface.

***

My mother bought me my first writing tablet “for my thoughts” when I was about five or six. Even then, I felt “the call” to write. I wrote my first poem in the second grade for my teacher Mrs. Nesbit’s going away party:

I want you to go
I want you to go
but before you go
I want you to know
I love you so.

She bounded towards me with her arms flung open wide, enveloping my little brown self in her plump rosy arms. I was astounded. Till then, I had not known my words could inspire such emotion.

***

It was a small store front church in South Carolina that ran along the shabby end of Sumter’s more picturesque downtown. Sandwiched between a barbershop and beauty salon, it was the holiness Pentecostal church that my father pastored. Each summer, just prior to the start of the school year, our church hosted a revival. I hated it. The revivalists always stayed in our home, taking over the bedroom my sister and I shared. Past and present transgressions would be uncovered and used as cause for more tarrying— a process of mournful waiting and petitioning for the Holy Spirit’s presence—and fasting. Though less intrigued by the latter, tarrying was of some interest to me. I had seen other child seekers on bended knees before the altar repetitively calling on the name of Jesus as missionaries whispered words of encouragement and admonition in their ears. They often leapt to their feet shouting, smiling, and testifying about having been made new. More than anything, I was curious to know what that felt like.

***

“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” I shouted as loudly as my little lungs allowed.

“You got to call Him like you want Him!” the evangelist shouted into my ear just as loudly.

In the background, I could hear my father along with the other members of the congregation singing, “Come by here de Lo-ord, Come by here. Oh-oh- Lo-or-od come by here! Somebodies calling Lo-ord. Come by here. Oh-oh- Lo-or-od come by here.”

I was six years old and I desperately wanted to be saved “with” the Holy Ghost like other children. I had been tarrying for a week and had decided that I would receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost that very night. Finally, I felt a break between the physical and spiritual. “See him on that cross!” my father cried in my ear. And I could. As I focused on Christ, called his name, and considered the magnitude of his sacrifice for me, the tears begin to flow. I saw Him come down from the cross and begin walking toward me, just as my father had said He would. I called, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” louder and faster until he was near to me, standing in front of me, taking me up in his rapturous embrace. I cried, smiled, and jumped about just as the other children had. What joy! Never mind that throughout the entire experience Jesus was a white man with sandy-blonde locks.

***

Of my siblings, Pep was the cool one, Keya was the pretty one, and I was the smart one. As we grew up, we learned to fit into our roles with amazing precision. Based on these roles, my brother and sister soon developed a base of fairly popular friends, girlfriends, and boyfriends. And I worked on my book collection. While my parents encouraged me in such pursuits, I longed to sit at the cool kids’ table. Keya and Pep seemed to fit in so effortlessly, while I remained, well, bookish to say the least. Few things are as accessible to Black Christian kids growing up in strict households as style in language. If you could not look cool, at least you could talk cool, and what was cooler than rap music? We shared lyrics everywhere: on the school bus, in class, wrote them out on notepaper and hid them in our trapper keepers. One day in fifth grade, a white student was summoned to the principal’s office for sharing “explicit” lyrics. Upon the teacher’s interception of them, the wide-eyed student exclaimed, “It’s not mine!” “Well whose is it?” the teacher shot back. Later questions regarding rap’s ownership, even when played out in our little country town middle school, had racial undertones. Whose is it? Everyone knew rap belonged to Blacks. The two teachers I overheard gossiping about the incident were both white. They described rap music as a poison spreading throughout the school. Rap was bad. But to us, bad was cool. Everyone else had seen the lyrics by then, so I felt left out. Later that day at home as Keya and I sat on our parents’ front porch after school, she pulled another folded, much handled copy from her notebook. I voraciously read over her shoulder hoping to glean the epistemologies of cool. After all, what’s cooler than “Ice, Ice, Baby?” So much for Blacks owning hip hop, much less rap music.

***

Perhaps seeing the influence of rap music, my parents offered us an alternative. We were allowed to purchase Hammer’s new cassette single, “That’s Why We Pray.” When Kirk Franklin and the family appeared on Gospel music shelves in 1995, many staunch Christian family friends opined that his music “just went too far.” But by Christmas, all the churches that we visited in my father’s fellowship were singing “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” decked out in red and Black outfits just like Franklin’s own family. By the following year, Franklin was a staple in our household. Salt of Salt-n-Peppa and the whole Nu Nation crew bounced back and forth across our TV screen as Franklin proclaimed,

“For those of you that think gospel music has gone too far.
You think we’ve gotten too radical with our message.
Well I got news for you, you ain’t heard nothin yet,
and if you don’t know now you know. Glory, Glory!!”

By then, our family had moved to Rochester, New York. My grandmother, who had come up from South Carolina to visit us for the holidays, sat in my father’s recliner with her legs crossed at the ankles, her cane slumped against one knee, shaking her head. “Hump-humph-humph,” was all she said.

***

A family friend gifted me a number of CDs with a few new West Coast gospel rappers that I cannot remember now. By then I was fourteen. While my musical priorities were quite underdeveloped, I still knew: This. Was. Not. Hip hop. It lacked the driving lyrical flow I had heard from the Wu Tang Clan, the narrative style of Tupac, or the dope lyricism of Illamatic. Christian hip hop was mad corny!

***

(TLC. Image source: Blake Tyers for Associated Press)

Christmas 1995. Overalls, Flannel Shirt, Timberlands, and a First Down Bubble jacket. They felt much cooler on my fifteen-year-old body than they do laid out here in words on the page more than twenty years later. A string of female emcees had appeared over the course of the nineties who had toyed with notions of gender normativity and encouraged young Black girls from neighborhoods like mine to do the same. These otherwise masculine displays of sexuality were okay in my household, for they paralleled social norms regarding Christian modesty. Everything was covered. Somewhere in the middle of my teen years, I learned how to circumvent my strict Christian upbringing by selectively borrowing acceptable swatches of hip hop culture. Thank you Queen Latifah, MC Light, DaBrat, and TLC for giving us Black Christian girls a way into the culture.

***

Debt to Lauryn Hill,
Us dark skinned, nappy headed girls
felt and held your Ohh-oh-oh-ooooo-ohhhs
Those notes of hope
No Monica, Brandy or Bey (before Jay) you made night all right
You made being conscious cool
Talked of God and gods, earth and Earths
And it was cool
to hear someone I knew
In the music
Jill Scott, Macy Gray, Erkayh Badu.
Them sistas carried me through
High school
Taught me it was cool to be conscious,
had me woke
while my Black Church slept.

***

It was an evening class in the first year of college that got me serious about spoken word. Bryon Bain taught a class titled “The Spoken Word.” Very much influenced by the hip hop bent of the class, my rhymes began to take on more of the culture by making use of a beat, internal rhyme structure, and a celebration of hip hop in my prose. That year, I saw Sarah Jones three times, twice at P.S. 121, and then on campus at NYU. I began performing at open mics on campus, at the Nuyorican, and, in my sophomore year, with YouthSpeaks at another newly opened spot called the Bowery Cafe. By the time Jessica Care Moore performed “I’m a Hip Hop Cheerleader” at a NAACP student club event, I could confidently shout back “Hip Hop! Hip Hop!”

Spoken word and hip hop had become as integral to my Christian identity as being Black.

***

From where I lived in 2001 the architecture looked like one of those 3-D puzzles. The morning’s own sharp edges made it feel as if every one of the buildings’ dimensions were jutting out and moving in on me in jagged domino-like succession. If you cared to, by pushing your face all the way against the glass and craning your neck, from my apartment window you could peer all the way down the crooked side alley that ran just off Water Street to see them jumping off the towers. I did not care to.

***

My roommate and I left our apartment at about 9:20 a.m. that day. We were waiting for the bus, while others milled about. No one had yet mentioned the possibility of a terrorist attack. When the first tower fell and began rolling down our street, we started running. We had never really liked each other, but that day I remember catching her hand as we ran. I remember us trying to pull each other along to safety. I remember looking back for a brief second to catch a view that haunted me for years afterward. Scraps from the building wafted through the air toward us like tiny bits of paper. But behind us, there were many more people being enveloped by the debris. The smoke grew like a monstrous beast, falling over itself as it bounded down the street.

Afterward, we walked for nearly an hour trying to get to friends in the Village. Once we got to Broome Street, we sat on the side of a curb to rest. I had never seen Lower Manhattan like this before. The streets were desolate.

When I’m scared and uncertain, I joke. “It’s a good thing I wore my new Nikes. Didn’t know we’d be in a fifty-yard dash today.” We laughed. Then, she looked back and up from where we had just come and nodded for me to do the same.

“It’s falling.”

Two frightened Black girls, we watched the world change that day.

***

A friend from college came home with me that next spring break. She was a staunch conservative. I was staunchly in love with Black people. We watched the Iraqi invasion together with my parents. She bowed her head in prayer as the attack begin. As a Christian, she was firmly in support of the war. I wondered how a Black woman like herself could separate her race from her faith. As a Black Christian, I was firmly against Bush and Bush’s war. We had fought and healed over this issue before, though it remained an uneasy peace. I had been horrified by the anti-Muslim attacks and slurs that had become all too common in the City. I was confused when Bush had walked confidently to the podium back in September to declare war on terror. It felt too close to my own history, too close to the state-sponsored terror on Black men and women I was learning about in Robin Kelly’s class that semester. Later in the semester, he encouraged us to participate in Walkout Day against the war. I joined the protest and heard young people my age deliver impassioned speeches in Washington Square Park. There were some, like Shani, who continued to believe their faith called them to support the Bush administration. But many more of us became increasingly radicalized after that. By the time Bobby Seale and then Sistah Souljah came to the campus, I was torn. Was Shani right? How do I reconcile my religion and my growing Black militancy?

***

“I’m leaving the Church.” Those words had sat like four hard stones in my throat for some time. Yet I hadn’t felt relieved in telling my parents. I had just felt their disappointment. I had finished seminary and was working on my PhD, while simultaneously serving as Youth Pastor and chairing a host of church committees and Bible studies when needed. I felt drained. The church lacked relevance in my life. There was no socially conscious message coming from our pulpit or in our mission. Our senior bishop had recently called a meeting in which she condemned rap music, calling it “unintelligible” and “of the devil.” She urged us to avoid Facebook and read the “Word” instead. I was drawing different lines between what was sacred and secular than my parents had. I felt myself being pressed into something I no longer was. So, I left.

***

It’s funny who you meet when you hang out on the margins. I began conducting interviews of gospel rappers when I moved to Buffalo, New York as a way of studying the merger between sacred and secular (i.e. hip hop and religion). It was 2008, and most local rappers were using online tools to make connections and create and share music. Up until that point, most of the creative spaces I had explored in my research were connected to Black protestant houses of worship. There were the hip hop open mic sessions that took place in one church’s multi-purpose room. There were the gospel rap performances sponsored by another local Black Church. Even the daily Christian hip hop radio broadcast I studied was part of another church’s larger ministry. Online spaces, however, were not mediated by Black Churches. Along with generational differences in internet usage, Black pastors and leaders were less likely than whites to go online; uneven technological access among racial groups meant local Black Churches had little to no online presence. That online space was where I was now able to examine eighteen to thirty-five year-old gospel rappers’ religious interactions with each other and their personal attempts to articulate religious identity for themselves.

***

It was 2010, just before the formation of the American Academy of Religion’s Critical Approaches to Hip Hop and Religion unit co-founded by Monica Miller and Chris Driscoll. In 2012, Monica Miller’s book Hip Hop and Religion forced many of us young scholars to rethink such constrained binaries as sacred/secular. There was a growing similarity between those gospel rappers’ story and my own. All of us were in our early adulthood, and all of us felt like Black Church misfits. I watched as many of them began using the web to find a place of belonging and to get their work out there as artists. I logged on to the internet and then hung around on Myspace and Facebook doing what I soon learned was digital ethnography. Along the way, I began posting my own poetry performances on YouTube, developing a website, and staying connected with other digital Black Christians looking for a place to belong through social media.

***

Art. Performance. Hip Hop. Christian. Black. Urban. Woman. Every part of me seemed at odds with other parts of my identity, so I wrote myself into the text. I wrote about my hip hop identity in poems and performed it in churches. I wrote about what it meant for me to be a Christian and Black and female, and I started performing in slam competitions.

And then there was Ntare.

***

I met Ntare at a poetry performance hosted by my employer. Later, I signed up to compete in a slam poetry event that Ntare was hosting. He had learned to make use of many facets of hip hop culture by advertising events, by attracting members of the culture, and by using DJs and even dancers in his performances. He was later instrumental in connecting me with many of the emcees I interviewed for my dissertation. We talked about everything: God. Performance. Poetry. He knew a wealth of hip hop history, and via YouTube, iTunes, and MTV Soul he schooled me on the aspects of the culture that my strict Christian upbringing hadn’t afforded me. I knew all things Black Church. He knew all things hip hop. It was a marriage made in Black Christianity and hip hop. He, as did I, loved. My. Whole. Self.

***

Eight years later, I ended up joining one of the Black Churches that I had studied, Elim Christian Fellowship. Eventually, I became ordained as one of the church elders. It might seem that I joined The Establishment, but this does not debunk everything I have laid out here in talking about the new socio-temporal world that Digital Black Christians have configured for themselves. In fact, it adds weight to this book’s thesis, that Digital Black Christians, through their webwork (networked racial religious performativity), have created a new space in and beyond the Black Church, one that is linguistic and socio-temporal in design. In the process, they are changing physically located Black Churches, modes of church activism, communication practices around evangelism and Christian identity, and the transmission and consumption of Black Church cultural practices in popular culture. In short, they are rewiring The System.

Erika Gault is Assistant Professor in the Africana Studies Program at the University of Arizona and co-editor of Beyond Christian Hip Hop: A Move Towards Christians and Hip Hop.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out our conversation with Erika Gault in episode 22 of the Revealer Podcast: “Black Christians and Hip Hop.”

The post Finding My Way Back to the Black Church through Hip Hop appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image credit: Andrew Sullivan)

Nuns mystify. And, despite often being misunderstood, they continue to enchant. This past year, Roman Catholic religious sisters were a ubiquitous media topic. The Sundance documentary Rebel Hearts narrated a convent’s rebellion against the Los Angeles archbishop in 1969. iHeartRadio’s 10-part podcast The Turning, which debuted last spring and garnered significant media attention, described haunting stories of women who left Mother Teresa’s community of religious sisters. Former sisters told stories of lashing themselves nightly during prayer and sexual and emotional abuse by superiors. And summer brought Claire Luchette’s debut novel, Agatha of Little Neon, about a young defector from religious life who leaves her convent.

But none of these stories depicted religious sisters who stayed. Or even religious sisters who seemed to enjoy being sisters. So I wanted to hear from the sisters themselves about their media image. Of the nearly dozen sisters interviewed for this article, many found these stories trite or inaccurate. Most depictions of religious life caricaturize it as sexually repressed and coercive. Popular stories about religious sisters, like The Turning or Agatha of Little Neon, describe rigidly hierarchical environments. The Turning and Rebel Hearts focus on when things go wrong. But the essential motivation of what draws women to religious orders and why they stay somehow eludes popular media.

Religious sisters—women in the Catholic Church who vow themselves to communities that embrace poverty, chastity, and obedience—have undergone major changes in the past 60 years. Those changes have been underexamined by their own Church and by the media that tells their stories.

Pope Francis dedicated February 2022 as a month of prayer for religious sisters. In a video message broadcast by the Vatican, Francis highlighted the radical work of the sisters: caring for the poor, the marginalized, the trafficked. Although they no longer fill the staff lounges of Catholic schools or run Catholic hospitals, religious sisters play an important role in the ministry of the Catholic Church. They have, in a unique way, embraced many of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. They minister to those on the margins of society, and they are bridging the gap between traditional faith communities and digital natives looking for stability in the transitory and transactional internet age.

Religious Sisters’ History

Religious sisters have been a staple of popular media from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Sister Act. “Nuns” is a common word for women who take religious vows, but “nuns” actually refers specifically to women who live in a cloister, a monastic community committed to its own internal life of prayer and work instead of working in the world. Whether nuns or active sisters, communities of vowed religious women and their unique contributions are vital to understanding the story of the Catholic Church.

In the Catholic Church—both its Western and Eastern branches—monasticism became the ideal way to imitate Christ once Christianity became incorporated into the Roman Empire in the fourth century C.E. Male and female monks—known as anchorites—rejected citizenship in the empire and embraced a solitary life of prayer and fasting in the desert.

During the fall of the Roman Empire, the anchorites developed into communities of cenobites, monks who lived in the same community and vowed to the same rules. In 516, Benedict of Nursia wrote the famous Rule of Benedict for religious orders. His sister, Scholastica, founded the first cenobite community of women based on his rule. Today, many Catholic religious orders still follow Benedict’s 73-chapter rules for communal living. At the heart of religious life is the search for God, what Benedictines call quaerere Deum.

Second Vatican Council

There are approximately 40,000 women religious in the United States. Their numbers have dwindled since a record high of roughly 180,000 in 1965. Churchgoers who remember when habited sisters populated the staff lounges of Catholic parochial schools and tended to the sick in Catholic hospitals often bemoan the loss of the “golden age” of American religious life. But experts say that this boom in women joining religious congregations after World War II was an anomaly. “There were overflowing novitiates, overflowing seminaries after the War, and people talk about, ‘let’s go back to normal, to the 40s.’ But actually, that wasn’t normal at all,” said Kathleen Sprows Cummings, a professor of American religious history at the University of Notre Dame. Cummings and other experts attribute those overflowing convents to the general baby boom of the post-war years.

The Second Vatican Council, which consisted of meetings of lay and ordained theologians, bishops, and Protestant observers gathered in Rome from 1962-1965, sparked reforms in the Church that are still being debated, implemented, and resisted today. “It will probably take 100 more years to figure it out,” said Cummings with a wry chuckle over the phone. The Second Vatican Council’s mission was to “open the windows of the church.” During the European age of revolutions in the 19^th century, the first Vatican Council resisted changed and metaphorically closed the windows of the church to a changing world. It condemned liberalism and modernism as serious errors that threatened Christendom and papal power. The Second Vatican Council shifted the sails slightly, promoting an enculturated church: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age…these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ,” the council promised. The Second Vatican Council asked religious congregations to examine how their founders would respond to the world of the 1960s. Documents on the liturgy expanded the use of the laity’s mother tongue and changed the orientation of the priest at Mass. But changes in the language and the liturgy, which defines the weekly religious practice of one billion people, were difficult for many Catholics—particularly the clergy.

“For some priests, change was very difficult,” said Mary Southard, CSJ, a sister of St. Joseph LaGrange, Illinois. She joined the order after attending a high school staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Southard vividly recalls the difference between religious life when she entered and how the reforms of the Second Vatican Council transformed it.

“The first half-year was very difficult for me,” Southard recalled of when she joined in 1954, “In those days, the style formation was to bash the ego—it was an old kind of spirituality where you were put down.” By the time Southard had professed vows and was put in charge of sisters’ formation a decade later, she remembers devouring Vatican II documents excitedly, particularly Perfectae Caritatis, the constitution on religious life. “We read everything in sight,” she said with a giggle. The document directed congregations to examine the roots of their order and their founder’s original intent. They took up new ministries, serving the incarcerated, fighting for racial justice, and responding to the “griefs and anxieties” of the people of the modern age.

As Southard pointed out, the Second Vatican Council’s changes have continued to meet resistance. Many parishes that still cultivate a pre-Vatican II style of worship—all-male altar servers, communion received kneeling at a rail, copious Latin and incense—make prayers for vocations a staple of their Sunday worship. “Choose from our homes those who are needed for your work. Bring forth from our families, priests, and religious, obtain for us many more,” one prayer goes. Religious life was seen as one of the key collateral damages of the Second Vatican Council. Catholics yearned to see habited sisters staff schools and fill church pews once again—there was a nostalgia for this visible sign of an influential, “strong” Church.

But Cummings said that one of the points of Vatican II is an emphasis on the laity’s ownership and responsibility for the Church. “It’s time for the laity to take responsibility more for Catholic institutions,” she said. Religious sisters are part of the laity. They are not ordained ministers, like priests or part of the hierarchy of bishops. After the Second Vatican Council, many orders doffed medieval styles of habits as a result of their discernment discussions—they wanted to emphasize their place alongside the laity, as part of the people of God, not separate from it.

A Modern Spin on Religious Life

Popular media often focuses on the deprivation of religious life, what these women “give up.” Left out of the frame is what sisters gain. Before the 1960s, women – generally – did not have as many social options for their lives. Vowed religious life gave them an avenue to earn a degree and have a profession or ministry outside of the social structure of marriage and without being legally dependent on a man. So why, after cultural revolutions that have offered women a variety of options and a revolution in the Catholic Church that elevates the laity, do women still choose religious life?

“Why do you get married?” Linda Romey, a Benedictine sister in Eerie, Pennsylvania, shoots back. “You don’t know how it’s going to turn out.” Falling in love is at the heart of how Romey depicts religious life. Another, younger sister similarly describes the choice to commit oneself to poverty, chastity, and obedience as a deeply personal mystery. “It’s the mystery of how God calls the individual,” Sr. Virginia Joy said. She belongs to the Sisters of Life, founded in 1991 in New York City by Cardinal John O’Connor.

(Sisters of Life. Image source: sistersoflife.org)

Sr. Virginia Joy entered the Sisters of Life when she was in her early 30s. She grew up in South Carolina and was a practicing Catholic but did not know much about religious sisterhood. “I saw it in Sister Act and The Sound of Music, but it didn’t strike me as something people live, currently,” Sr. Virginia Joy said. She attended a Catholic college, became more involved in her faith, and joined the Sisters of Life several years later.

She describes religious vocation—hers and others—as a call that begins with God. “We believe baptized Catholics receive their unique vocations at the moment of their Baptism,” she said. The Sisters of Life are a habited order, but their mission is distinctly modern, as is the way they speak about vocations. The “universal call to holiness” was a key focus of the Second Vatican Council, particularly in the document Lumen Gentium, which describes all baptized persons as “consecrated” and “commissioned.” It puts the work of lay persons in the world on par with the work of vowed religious. “God created you for a reason, the world has a need of you, the world misses out if you don’t fulfill your purpose,” said Sr. Virginia Joy.

In the past 30 years, the Sisters of Life have grown from eight sisters to 120, in houses from Phoenix to Philadelphia. Most sisters are in their late twenties and early thirties. As their name suggests, they are staunch pro-life advocates. But their version of pro-life lobbying doesn’t focus on Washington politics. Some of their chief ministries are supporting young mothers or women experiencing difficult pregnancies. At one of their houses in Midtown Manhattan, nine sisters live alongside five young mothers who need a home for various reasons: an unsupportive family, shelter from an abusive partner, or lack of resources.

The rhythm of their day is set by the monastic liturgy of the hours. They have dinner with their female guests in a living room filled with baby toys. And they have a good amount of fun. “Come back for the cornhole tournament this weekend,” one sister says, grinning. And they do it all while wearing a distinctive blue and white habit designed by Cardinal O’Connor.

Religious habits have become divisive symbols in the post-Vatican II United States. Cummings describes them as “a lightning rod.” For some sisters, she says, the habits symbolize a regression to a former more hierarchical style of religious life. But, to others, they function as a beacon for people needing help, much like a priest’s collar. The Sisters of Life’s habits strike an emotional chord with many Catholics, the sisters say, particularly Catholics yearning for the Church of their youth. But the sisters themselves are quick to say that the habits don’t make them any better or more special than others. They see the dwindling numbers of some orders and the burgeoning numbers of others not as competition or replacement, but as the natural growth of a family. “Many older religious congregations recognize that new charisms will replace them,” said Virginia Joy. The Sisters of Life, she said, have benefited from the 30 years of discussion and experimentation that happened after the Second Vatican Council. “We stand on the shoulders of the sisters who came before us,” she said.

But one thing is for sure: the Sisters of Life draw millennials and Zoomers. Their community’s median age is in their 30s. Of the ten women who joined the order last fall, most are in their mid-twenties. Many digital natives, experts say, are often drawn to religious communities that have concrete traditions. They are searching for, “a real group or ‘tribe’ that they can be a part of,” said Read Mercer Schuchardt, professor of communications at Wheaton College via email. Schuchardt, who observes the effects of digital media upon his students, said that when knowledge is no longer passed down from books and professors but looked up on a Google search bar, young people begin to lose a sense of shared culture — “the things that we know on recall.” Some digital natives are seeking that tradition in religious sisters, even those who don’t identify as religious. 

Sisters and Seekers

“Tradition offers guard rails through which you can move through life,” said Katie Gordon, “and there’s often a lot of freedom in that paradigm.”

Gordon is, in many ways, your typical millennial woman. She grew up Catholic but identifies as agnostic. She is passionate about climate change and fighting for racial justice. And she lives in a Benedictine monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania.

She first encountered religious sisters when she worked in interfaith organizing with college students. At climate marches in Grand Rapids, she would notice Dominican Sisters. She struck up a conversation with one sister while holding a banner together at a climate march in 2015. “What drew me to nuns wasn’t their piety, but their prophecy of speaking up against injustices,” Gordon said in a phone interview. She began building a friendship with one of the Dominicans, and she realized that the college students and sisters had much in common and a lot to learn from one another. “Boy, I’ve really got to get these people together,” Gordon said. She organized conversation circles that became a movement: Nuns and Nones. Nuns and Nones, a loose, grassroots collective, brings agnostic young people and religious sisters into conversation to learn from one another. Gina Ciliberto, who helped the Dominican Sisters of Hope in New York’s Hudson Valley form a Nuns and Nones community, said the learning is mutual. “Millennials like me are asking very similar questions to the ones 70 or 80- or 90-year-old sisters are,” Ciliberto said. “It isn’t just the millennials who are curious and active. The nuns are curious and active!”

(Nuns and Nones gathering. Image source: nunsandnones.org)

Gordon said much of the sisters’ counter-cultural life resonates with the longings of millennials, particularly their commitment to community and vow of stability in an epidemic of loneliness and a culture constantly on the move. “Women religious have a model community that sustains a lifelong commitment to spirit and to social action. Their community life sustains them over a lifetime,” she said. This radical way of living resonates with young activists, she said, who are already burned out and exhausted from working for change. The sisters’ communal work for justice gives millennials a “longer window of the present,” said Gordon. They’re more connected to generations of the past and grounded in their identity as elders of the future.

Gordon reads the Rule of Benedict each morning with the community, which she calls “grounding” and has come to see freedom in the sisters’ vows. “If you’re living a life that is not attached to material objects so much more actually becomes possible. So much space is freed up in your life when you are able to commit to that,” said Gordon.

The questions asked of religious sisters, much like their depictions in media, often demonstrate the assumptions of the askers. Virginia Joy said the questions they receive about ordination, power, and the secular comforts they give up (like going out to restaurants), often say more about the mindset of the speaker and a patriarchal society than they do about the sisters.

People also often ask about how sisters view their position in the Catholic Church. When asked about her role in the hierarchy, Linda Romey, the Benedictine sister in Eerie, said, “I don’t really think about the Church much.” She clarifies: “I don’t think about the institution—I don’t dwell on it. I think of the church as the people of God who share their faith.”

But the institutional church is concerned about them. Pope Francis made amends with a congregation of nuns in France at the end of last year, apologizing for the Vatican’s mishandling of their reports of abuse within their order. He said the officials displayed “a lack of understanding of religious life.” Francis also recently appointed Sr. Nathalie Becquart of the French Congregation of Xavières to a powerful position in the Vatican Curia. He recently urged religious sisters to choose joy in the face of challenges. “The Spirit is inviting us amid our crises, and crises there are—our decreasing numbers—and our diminishing forces, to renew our lives and our communities,” Francis said to religious congregations in a Mass on World Day for Consecrated Life on February 2, 2022.

“Maybe our call is a sense of ambiguity, of not knowing the future,” said Sister Jane Herb, the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the United States. Religious life, even in its commitment to tradition and stability, continues to evolve. Francis remonstrated the religious orders in his homily, “We cannot pretend not to see these signs and go on as usual, doing the same old things, drifting back through inertia to the forms of the past, paralyzed by fear of change.” Sister Linda Romey echoes Francis’ sentiment: “Women religious show the church faithfulness over the long haul. They keep on keeping on, stand up for what they value, and find a community to help them do it.”

From the outside, Nuns and Nones and the Sisters of Life may not share much in common—one is a more traditional-looking habited congregation of sisters, another is a loose collection of nuns in street clothes dialoging with the disaffiliated. But both are living out the unique call of the Second Vatican Council to open the windows to the church to the joys and pains of the modern world. And both are beacons of light for young people seeking a commitment to justice rooted in lived community. They stand on the shoulders of a tradition, a way of life and culture of faith that is rooted and connected to the past—and something more. Romey believes the underlying desire that has led women to seek religious life will always remain a common human desire. “Benedict’s qualification for the monk was the desire to seek God,” she said, “And there will always be people who desire to seek God in this intense way.”

Renée Darline Roden is a freelance journalist covering religion. Her writing has appeared in the Associated Press, Religion News Service, Washington Post, and The Tablet.

The post Religious Sisters Respond appeared first on The Revealer.

(Israel and Palestine flags. Image source: iStock)

During most of my childhood in the 1970s and 80s, my father, a Reform rabbi, worked at the Reform movement’s New York headquarters, reporting to a building that displayed the movement’s mid-century motto to the passing world: “Do Justly. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly with Thy God.”

Carved in stone in the early 1950s, these words from Micah 6:8 were intended both as a timely assertion of Reform Judaism’s support for the emergent Civil Rights movement, and as an indelible testament to Reform Judaism’s elevation of social justice-oriented worldly values over traditional Jewish rituals.

Reform Judaism was at that point a new tradition, having emerged in Germany around 1800 in response to myriad internal and external pressures to demonstrate Judaism’s capacity for modern survival. Jewish continuity, in the minds of the Reformers, required an emphasis on the prophetic tradition, now reframed in quintessentially nineteenth-century terms as the Jewish people’s gift to the world. Historian Michael A. Meyer writes that, for the early Reform leaders, the biblical prophets became “the most viable and important component of Judaism. The Prophets’ concern for the poor and downtrodden, their contempt for ritual acts unaccompanied by social morality, and their vision of peace for all humanity—these made Amos, Isiah, Micah, and the others both timeless and contemporary.”

The Reform movement initially aimed to reshape all of Judaism in this modified prophetic image, but, facing resistance from more traditionalist community members, began to coalesce instead as a distinct denomination in the 1840s. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), its North American governing body now known as the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), was established in 1873.

The “Do Justly” inscription is emblematic of the prophetic tradition promoted by Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, the UAHC’s first President, who served from 1946 to 1973. As he wrote in 1956: “be it noted that in this exalted summation, ‘to do justly’ precedes even the command ‘to walk humbly before God.’”

However, by the time I had those words memorized as an under-supervised five-year-old tearing around my dad’s office, they were already becoming something of a relic of an earlier era. With the dissolution of the Civil Rights coalition, as Eisendrath himself commented in 1973, “Jewish out-reach ha[d] twisted—snail-like—around into itself.” With that inward turn, the organizational energy and moral urgency that had been directed to equal rights for people of color in the United States shifted toward the protection of a Jewish majority in Israel instead.

***

Reform Judaism’s support for Zionism was never a foregone conclusion. In its earliest days, the Reform movement specifically defined itself against Zionism as counter to its goal of peaceful coexistence with the non-Jewish world. As Meyer documents, a representative group of Reformers in Germany offered as one of their three guiding principles that, “We neither expect nor desire a messiah who is to lead the Israelites back to the land of Palestine; we recognize no fatherland other than that to which we belong by birth or civil status.”

For good if not great reasons, in the aftermath of World War II and the Jewish Holocaust, Zionism came to be accepted as a tool for Jewish self-defense, although neither universally nor instantaneously. Some groups such as the Satmar Hasidim and the Reform-founded (and subsequently Reform disavowed) American Council for Judaism, maintain a position of religious anti-Zionism today. Others more subtly declined and still decline to reorient their Judaism toward a new country in the Middle East.

(1970 meeting of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Image source: Dutch National Archives)

Today’s Reform establishment rarely acknowledges such heterogeneity. For example, my mainstream neighborhood Reform synagogue so completely assumes a Zionist consensus that it has in recent years distributed pledge cards in support of AIPAC (the influential pro-Israel lobby group) at High Holiday services, and led its religious school students in solemn renditions of “Hatikvah” (the Israeli national anthem). Synagogue leaders react with shock on the rare occasions when such actions are contested. Why are we at synagogue if not to praise Israel?

Less acknowledged still is the extent to which Zionism has replaced prophetic action as the agreed-upon cornerstone of Jewish survival. In the absence of any other articles of faith (a topic on which Reform Judaism is famously flexible), the religious work of Reform Judaism—its task of transmitting belief beyond reason—appears to have narrowed to the single endeavor of insulating the state of Israel from the claims of universal justice that were at one time the movement’s main focus.

As the Jewish denomination with the largest North American membership and among the smallest footprints in terms of numbers and influence within the state of Israel, Reform Judaism has solid moral and historical reasons for resisting Israel’s claims to Jewish exemplarity. Prophetic Reform Judaism would lose little, religiously speaking, by acknowledging the Palestinian people as among the “poor and downtrodden” and in need of immediate relief that diaspora Jews are well-positioned to provide.

Indeed, some mid-century Reform leaders, including Eisendrath (1902-1973) and Albert Vorspan (1924-2019), were, although self-identified Zionists, sufficiently rooted in the prophetic tradition to grapple publicly with the contrast between the utopian hope for Jewish safety that Zionism represented and the brutal reality of its execution on lands already inhabited by Palestinians.

In a 1970 essay excoriating American Jews for their unwillingness to criticize Israel’s actions, Eisendrath praised Israeli critics of Israeli policy for having the courage to ask “what will it profit us Jews if the State of Israel survive and Judaism lie dead on the field of battle [?]” In a similar vein, Vorspan, UAHC Vice President and social justice strategist from the 1950s to the early 1990s, published a still well-known 1988 essay wrestling with Israel’s brutal tactics for suppressing the first Palestinian Intifada, commenting that, “The moral equation has changed. Whether we accept it or not, every night’s television news confirms it: Israelis now seem the oppressors, Palestinians the victims.”

Such frank moral reckoning is in short supply today. Reform Judaism is coming increasingly to resemble contemporary Israel in its devotion to purifying its own ranks of dissent or doubt. In 2018, Israel drew international condemnation with the passage of its Nation-State Law, which defines the “right to national self-determination” within the state of Israel as “unique to the Jewish people” (and thus legally inaccessible to Palestinians). That same year, the URJ issued an official statement claiming “the Reform Movement fully and formally as a Zionist movement,” in a final, if belated, break from its non-Zionist past.

With these parallel exclusions, all previous tension between Reform Judaism and the Zionist project appears to have ceased. Human rights in Israel-Palestine are officially for Jews only, and Reform Judaism, acting in seeming concert with Israel’s own fascist slide, is for Zionists only.

***

Unable to erase its own history entirely, however, Reform Judaism operates today in a state of heightened contradiction.

(838 5th Avenue. Image source: StreetEasy)

The URJ’s New York operation no longer resides in the “Do Justly” building at 838 Fifth Avenue. The words are still there, but, in a metaphor too obvious to belabor, the structure itself now abides ever so humbly as luxury condominiums.

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC), established in Washington, D. C. in 1959, stands as Reform Judaism’s remaining working Civil Rights monument, having been the site where an interfaith group of leaders drafted both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Superficially at least, the RAC remains aligned with the prophetic tradition as Eisendrath and Vorspan viewed it, and strives to keep a version of prophetic language they favored in circulation in the form of print-on-demand signs for demonstrations in support of urgent moral issues like immigration justice and the sanctity of Black lives, reading “Do Justice, Love Mercy, March Proudly.”

However, this work is premised on the understanding that prophetic social justice principles will not be applied to Palestine. The RAC of today does not extend its concern about police abuse in the U.S. to the violent Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, well documented in the work of Palestinian scholars like Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and most recently in the 2022 Amnesty International Report, which describes “Israel’s widespread and systematic use of arbitrary arrest, administrative detention and torture on a large scale against Palestinians.”

Nor does the RAC’s advocacy on behalf of “family reunification, just and humane border security, and an end to immigrant detention” in the United States extend to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, where, according to both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, there has been “an effective freeze on family reunification over the past two decades.”

Manifesting a certain organizational sheepishness about all of this, the RAC website leads visitors through several layers of menus before offering a statement on “Israel Peace and Security” filed under “International Issues.” The substance makes clear that the Reform movement’s Israel agenda is not a social justice agenda, asserting instead “unequivocal and unconditional support of the State of Israel and her people.”

Under the Reform movement’s current thinking, the human costs of Israeli ethnonationalism are not up for serious discussion, but are rather matters over which Reform Jews are to feel, at most, impotent sorrow. For example, in response to the May 2021 escalation in Gaza, URJ President Rabbi Rick Jacobs published a deliberately self-contradictory blog post, tellingly titled “We Hold All of these Truths.” In it, Jacobs argues, among other things, that life in Gaza is unbearable, but that the Israeli siege is justified; that “innocent” Palestinians don’t deserve to suffer, but that Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza is morally correct; that the loss of Palestinian life in the Gaza assaults is regrettable, but that it is the fault of Hamas (the governing party in Gaza) for exposing civilians to the disproportionate firepower that Israel freely chooses to unleash.

(Image source: Getty Images)

Jacobs’s may be the most passive, but it is certainly not the most conservative response to the Gaza escalation from North American Jewry. Indeed, it can be easy to forget that Reform Judaism officially opposes the occupation and tends to confine its engagement with Israel and Israeli matters to lands within the internationally-recognized pre-1967 borders (thus excluding Gaza and the West Bank). The benefit of this approach is that Reform Judaism is not directly implicated in the enormity of illegal Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and evictions of Palestinians from East Jerusalem neighborhoods, financial and ideological support for which tends to issue from Orthodox Jewish and Evangelical Christian sources. But the cost is the collective delusion fostered by Reform Judaism’s insistence on the reality of a counterfactual, just-slightly-imperfectly liberal Israel. Reform Judaism’s idealized, surrogate Israel hides from view the actually-existing country that has always maintained its Jewish majority through the systematic abuse of Palestinians both inside and outside of its legal borders.

Reform Judaism’s refusal to look at Israel directly is manifested most recently in the URJ’s swift condemnatory response to the recent Amnesty International report, which joins a lengthening list of human rights organizations in describing the situation in Palestine as “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians.” The response, which was so carefully considered that it was released the day before the report’s official publication on February 1, 2022, warns that the Amnesty report contributes to antisemitism by unfairly comparing Israel’s actions to South Africa’s notorious “institutions of formal and rigid segregation, denial of political and social rights, and basic dehumanization.” But, of course, even the most cursory reading of the report reveals that Amnesty in fact uses the term “apartheid” not as an attention-grabbing metaphor, but rather as a condensed summary of the study’s findings concerning Israel’s actual “crimes against humanity.”

The fact that Jews are perpetrating these crimes doesn’t make their exposure antisemitic. It does make the crimes more shocking, however, when they are defended by an organization that once claimed (and still sort of believes itself) to be oriented toward a prophetic pursuit of justice.

***

Raised close to the center of the Reform movement as I was, I unfold all of this not out of special animus for the religious movement with which I still more or less identify, but rather to get at a moral irritant that I can’t seem to expel. It is precisely the strong imprint of Reform Judaism’s social justice ethos that makes Reform Judaism’s increasingly strident self-identification as “the largest religious and Zionist movement in Jewish life in North America” intolerable to me.

I do not deny that I approach all this as something of a failed—though invested and studious—subject. My social justice filter is strong enough that my only memory from tenth-grade confirmation class is that I was on the verge of quitting out of boredom until a rabbinical student reclaimed my attention with a presentation on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. Missing the point more completely still, when I made my first extended visit to Jerusalem as a young adult in 1989, I was horrified by the violence and inequity everywhere apparent, even though I had received close to two decades of diligent instruction about how inspired I was supposed to feel by the “miracle” of Jewish statehood.

My father and I are close, and we have periodic non-explosive conversations on his liberal Zionism versus my non-Zionism. But I am regularly assured by other rabbis, liberal Zionists, Gentile philosemites, and Israeli expatriates that mine is the childish and ignorant position. That I fail to appreciate “the complexity” of “the situation,” the understanding of which would persuade me to appreciate the necessity of Palestinian suffering for Jewish Israelis’ sake. They may well be correct, though I might blame my father, my Reform Jewish training, and everything else I have ever learned about language and ethics for failing to inform me that the first synonym of “complexity” was “willingness to inflict great pain.”

At the same time, I continue to seek and find meaning in Jewish communities. I am fortunate to be part of an active local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, where we discuss the question of Palestine and the obligation to work for justice with great care and commitment. I mourn the absence of a radical synagogue in my own city (such exist in the Reconstructionist tradition, such as Tzedek Chicago and Kol Tzedek in Philadelphia—note their common use of tzedek, the Hebrew word for justice—just not in South Florida). However, I find what I need at the local Reform synagogue, where my own teenage daughter tolerates confirmation class, and where surprising moments of solidarity can sometimes occur in the pews, such as the time during a Sunday school children’s service when another parent who, like me, had declined to stand for “Hatikvah,” looked me dead in the eye and asked “should we take a knee?”

***

As an academic, I should acknowledge that my training warns me against regarding Reform Judaism’s alignment with the prophetic tradition with undialectical literalism. Could not the Reform movement’s orientation toward the prophetic pursuit of justice be more a gesture of self-protection than of transcendence–of wishing to shave Judaism down to its most interculturally-acceptable elements in order to hide our strangeness from gentile proscription? Isn’t the Jewish Holocaust evidence that prophetic universalism wasn’t up to the job? Could the Reform leaders’ enthusiasm for the cause of Black civic equality be understood as a displacement of the Palestinian dispossession they were, in effect, cheering from afar? Isn’t the Jewish contribution to the Civil Rights movement generally romanticized and overstated by Jews?

There is truth in all of this, to be sure. But I prefer to view Reform Jewish history’s authentic moments of self-critical solidarity not as aberrations to be scorned or debunked, but rather as discarded possibilities to be rediscovered and nurtured into life. Eisendrath and Vorspan were (unsurprisingly) imperfect heroes, who failed to follow their searching questions with any usable guidance toward a more just path. In his anguished response to the spectacle of Israeli repression during the first Intifada, Vorspan asked, “Is this the fruition of Zionism?” But, appearing to find both possible responses intolerable, he declined to answer his own question.

Almost 35 years after that essay’s publication, the answer to Vorspan’s question matters less and less. Whether or not Zionism constitutes an essential commitment to disregard non-Jewish life is less important than its practical effects. I don’t believe there is a better Zionism lurking behind the one we have now. But, either way, reconnecting with these past gestures of solidarity—even when they were only gestures—can help us find the courage to refuse any concept of Jewish freedom that requires anyone else’s slavery.

Interestingly, what Reform Judaism tends to view as its signal discarded possibility—living in both the diaspora and in Israel/Palestine without the wish for a world without non-Jews—is still the easiest and most ethical adaptation we can make to the world we inhabit. In order to accomplish this, Reform Jews—all Jews—need to cease regarding ourselves as the fragile victors in a global tournament of minorities and turn our efforts instead toward living our lives in a way that aims toward liberation for all, not just for us.

Martha Schoolman is Associate Professor of English at Florida International University and author of Abolitionist Geographies (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). She is currently working on a second monograph titled Jamaica in 1850: Green Abolitionisms at Mid-Century.

***

The author wishes to thank her father Rabbi Leonard Schoolman, her cousin Debbie Nathan, and her Jewish Voice for Peace comrade Donna Nevel for many helpful conversations, though they of course bear no responsibility for this essay’s conclusions.

The post Prophetic Except for Palestine: On Social Justice and Reform Judaism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: uDiscoverMusic)

Las Vegas is measured out in neon signs and billboards. The public charter school where I teach English and Comparative Religions is eight miles from the iconic Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. It is three miles from “Vegas Vic,” the folksy neon cowboy on Fremont street. It is four miles from the Little Darlings strip club and its billion-bulb billboard, which in June of every year advertises employment opportunities to my graduating high school seniors: “Now hiring class of 20XX!”

But the most interesting billboard, to me, is the one for Tao Nightclub. A large image of the Buddha appears alongside the mysterious tagline, “Religious Nightlife.” A similar billboard for the same nightclub promises “Spiritual Dining,” whatever that is, and rather presumptuously states that “Your Prayers Have Been Answered.”

The Tao billboard is only one example of the ubiquity of religion on the Strip. The Bellagio Hotel and Casino features a golden Buddha statue. This Buddha is only one of many on the Strip, joining a sangha of Buddhas at Mandalay Bay and the Aria.

What would the Buddha think about his image being used to decorate these Temples of Tanha (sanskrit: “craving, thirst, longing, grasping, greed”)? Sidhartha Gautama, a prince who became the Buddha, rejected the lavish luxuries of his palatial childhood home; his great contribution to religious thought was that life’s suffering derives from our cravings. Extinguish these cravings, he realized, and suffering is also extinguished. That the Buddha should preside over clinking slot machines and bottomless mimosas and all-you-can-eat buffets is rich irony indeed. A widely published promo for Tao Nightclub celebrates indulgence of any craving, mood, or desire:

“Upon entry, guests are transported from the City of Sin to the Pacific Rim with Tao’s lush velvets and silks, waterfalls and century-old woods and stones. An extensive collection of Buddha statues watches over every corner of Tao, including a unique reclining Buddha and Tao’s signature 20-foot Buddha that “floats” peacefully above an infinity pool complete with Japanese koi. The nightclub is accented by a moat bar, adorned with breathtaking red chandeliers and a Monk Bar decorated with a wall of almost 300 hand carved monks and candles and nightlife reigns supreme at Tao with enticing options to indulge any mood.”

What purpose do these statues of the Buddha serve? Does the Buddha’s presence somehow sanction the activities in the nightclub and quiet the consciences of patrons? Does he give indulgence a patina of spirituality, of exotic culture, of cosmopolitan sophistication?

(Tao restaurant and nightclub. Image source: Getty Images)

While it is difficult to say how Buddha statues appeal to Tao’s patrons, it is clear that the Buddha is a mascot for a profitable form of Orientalism that has long been central to Tao’s marketing strategy. Before the Buddha adorned its billboards, Tao advertisements featured a bare woman’s back covered in Chinese tattoos alongside the text “Always a happy ending” — a euphemism for illicit sexual activity at massage parlors. Many were outraged at the unashamed racist stereotyping of Asian women. As one Chinese businesswoman told LA Weekly, “​​It’s disgusting. As an Asian American female who has had to grow up aware of stereotypes of Asian women in this context, it’s very insulting.” In the aftermath of the 2021 Atlanta Spa shootings, it is difficult to imagine such an oblivious billboard would adorn the Las Vegas skyline again.

The Buddha is far from the only religious icon on the Strip. Recently the Foundation Room nightclub at Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino removed a statue of Mahavira, venerated in the Jain tradition, in response to pressure from a diverse coalition of local religious leaders. The nightclub did not immediately respond to requests to remove statues of the Buddha and the Hindu deities Ganesha, Shiva, Rama and Hanuman. In a statement, the nightclub said that it is “​​reassessing the presence of all deities in our venues and engaging with the coalition and other religious experts to advise on next steps, including removal, relocation or other appropriate actions.”

(The Foundation Room at Mandalay Bay. Image source: Networking Vegas)

The Foundation Room is likely delaying the removal of these statues because religious language and iconography are central to the nightclub’s brand identity and marketing strategy. The suits who manage the Foundation Room surely recognize that removing the other icons would be a concession that would lead to an expensive rebranding project. The nightclub’s motto, after all, is “Good Karma Awaits.” Private dining rooms for VIP guests are called “Prayer rooms” — there is a Ganesh-themed prayer room as well as a Buddha-themed prayer room. A promotional photo shows two dancers in shimmery mini-skirts and fringe bras sitting on Lord Mahavira’s lap like he’s a strip mall Santa Claus. A second promotional photo for the Foundation Room shows a dancer in black lace panties and bra doing the splits in front of a statue of Lord Shiva, the Hindu god — her provocative pose a pervy parody of Shiva’s cosmic dance of creation and destruction. The club’s dancers are dubbed “Nightlife Goddesses.” Promotional materials invite you to “Immerse yourself in our DEITY dancer experience.”

Although Eastern religious imagery predominates in casinos and nightclubs, the booming Las Vegas wedding industry caters to those who desire the trappings of a Christian wedding. Off the strip is “Chapel Row,” where thousands of couples elope every year: The Little Vegas Chapel, Graceland Chapel, Chapel of the Flowers, A Little White Wedding Chapel. The chapels are church-y enough (with steeples and pews) to give a wedding the requisite gravitas without being too church-y (no priests asking prying questions).

It’s not just that religious icons and architecture adorn the Strip. The entire economic engine of Las Vegas depends on certain quasi-religious habits of mind: the superstitious rituals of the septuagenarian who will only play slots on a particular blinking Gilligan’s Island machine; the hundreds of Hawaiian pilgrims who travel to rub the belly of the “Happy Buddha” at the California Hotel and Casino; the sports better with his lucky colors and numbers.

For ancient religious peoples, there was no such thing as coincidence; chance was the language of the gods, and so cleromancy (divination by sortition or the drawing of lots) was common practice in ancient cultures everywhere. In Vegas, there’s a similarly religious belief that chance can be pressed into the service of one’s good fortune — that it can be channeled if the proper propitiations are made, and that it communicates something cosmic. Some scholars opine that the Urim & Thummim, that mysterious oracular device in the Hebrew Bible, might actually have been a pair of sacred dice. How very Vegas! As the Proverbs state, “We may throw the dice, but the LORD determines how they fall.”

Another major piston in Vegas’ economic engine is the music industry, which relies on the worshipful devotion of fans for musicians in residency. Camille Paglia has argued that since at least the twentieth century the relationship between the American public and celebrities has been, at root, religious: “The Hollywood studio system. . . projected its manufactured stars as simulacra of the pagan pantheon.” She points out that the word “fans” derives from the Latin fanatici, which originally referred to maddened worshippers of the goddess Cybele. Paglia elaborates: “Outbursts of quasi-religious emotion could be seen in the hysterical response of female fans to Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles. … The rumor that Elvis still lives is still stubbornly planted in the culture, as if he were a demigod who could conquer natural law.” Indeed, Elvis is Las Vegas’ tutelary deity. Dozens of incarnations of the immortal King can be seen strutting and thrusting on Las Vegas streets.

What Las Vegas offers is a theophany: a face-to-face encounter with goddesses Britney, Celine, and Mariah. Many fans were serious when, circa 2016, they rechristened Britney Spears (who performed at Planet Hollywood from 2013-2017) as “Godney” and “The Holy Spear-it.” In light of these devotional nicknames, the title of her Planet Hollywood show takes on a peculiarly eucharistic quality: Piece of Me. A-list celebrities like Britney used to tour the world, and the public’s only access to them was through Paparazzi photos in tabloid magazines and the off chance the tour bus would come to a nearby metropolis. Las Vegas invites us, like Moses invited the 70 elders, to scale Mount Sinai.

There’s also the multi-million dollar magic industry, which banks off the willing credulity of thousands of spectators every year and traffics in an explicit rhetoric of “belief.” Criss Angel, whose name has obvious religious connotations and who often wears a prominent cross on his neck, had a recent show called “Believe.” It was Angel who “walked on water” at a Las Vegas hotel pool. A segment of his more recent show “MindFreak” takes place against the projected backdrop of a crumbling interior of a gothic cathedral, a crucifix prominent at center stage. In one stunt, Criss suspends his body from a helicopter by fish hooks, a feat – being suspended by one’s skin – which has its origins in Native American and Hindu religious traditions.

Like religious mystics, many tourists to Las Vegas are seeking alternative forms of consciousness. While religious mystics use prayer and contemplation, tourists use weed or booze or both. But both mystics and tourists use music and dance. Like a whirling dervish, the bass-and-booze-bathed club-hopper can sometimes achieve a state of disembodied religious ecstasy, with individuality melting into the moshing multitude. Émile Durkheim believed this experience, which he called “collective effervescence,” to be the oldest and most original religious experience.

The famous music festival held each Spring outside of Las Vegas, the Electric Daisy Carnival or “EDC”, the largest electronic dance music festival in North America, seems to have its origin in Pagan spring equinox festivals, the Greek Bacchanal, the Roman Saturnalia, or the Hindu festival of Holi. These are festivals of reversal, in which stifling societal norms are temporarily suspended or inverted. EDC, like its religious predecessors, provides a cathartic release valve for the pent-up tensions of life. These festivals allow one to shirk off the burden and anxiety of individuality and become subsumed into some greater whole. First-time EDC attendees often use a convert’s language to describe their experience. “I will never forget the feeling I felt when I first entered EDC this year; it was a feeling of wholeness,” one person reflects. Some speak of EDC with a distinctly Millenarian hope: “In my opinion, music festivals are the only hope we have left at bringing peace to this world.” EDC is not simply a music festival, but a totalizing ethos summed up in raving culture with the acronym PLUR: peace, love, unity, and respect. In all these ways, the Pentecostal holy roller and the painted raver might be more closely related than either of them would like to admit.

***

Many people forget that people actually live in Las Vegas. But we do. We live in beige suburban homes and shop at chain grocery stores and go to school. And we worship. In synagogues and mosques and temples, we pray and prostrate and meditate.

(View of the Strip from a Las Vegas residential neighborhood. Image credit: Bizuayehu Tesfaye)

The Vegas economy depends on the labor of Christian card dealers who are personally opposed to gambling and Muslim taxi cab drivers who ferry customers to strip clubs they themselves would never attend. A Latter-day Saint father I know valets sexy luxury sports cars late at night so he can afford to drive his four kids around in an unsexy mid-size SUV during the day.

Religion in Las Vegas is incredibly diverse. One of the first assignments I give students in my high school Comparative Religions class is to map the religious diversity in our community. Of course there are hundreds of Christian churches in Las Vegas, but did you know there are also three Sikh temples? A Hindu temple and Jain center? Fourteen Jewish synagogues?

This religious diversity is also found in my classroom. There’s Maya, a Black Filipina and Evangelical Christian, who before attending my school attended a private Christian school, where (as she tells it) she learned to fear everything different as demonic: Pokémon, yoga, meditation. There is Katie, a Mexican freshman. Her family are devout Christians, but she considers herself “spiritual.” Her beliefs are a syncretic hodgepodge of Eastern religions and New Age spirituality. She is a discerning curator of the best TikToks related to religion and spirituality, and she will send me all of her best finds.

My student Karen came to the United States two years ago from Cuba. I’ve made friends with Karen’s family, and her mom invited my family to their home to share a meal. They regaled us with stories of the Yoruba pantheon as we ate mounds of papa rellena. A debate broke out between family members about whether all of the orishas are merely manifestations of the one high God Olodumare, or whether the orishas had a real and separate existence on their own. Karen’s mom made offerings of candy and cake to a representation of the orisha Eleguá that she keeps in her living room. I asked Karen to tell me some of the stories about their traditions, but she didn’t know them well enough to tell them to me. She would start, falter, and then ask her Mom to jump in and tell the story for her.

Carlos is agnostic. He’s convinced the great prophets and mystics were all “high off ‘shrooms or something.” Carlos is a novelist, and though he doesn’t believe in Christianity, he takes artistic inspiration from the Bible and Paradise Lost. Derrick, a Black musician with Beats headphones perched on top of his afro, believed in God until his mother died from cancer when he was nine; now, he’s not so sure. Daniela “failed” her Catholic communion “test” because she was busy working the night shift at Taco Bell, didn’t have time to memorize the Nicene Creed, and doesn’t believe any of it besides. Laura believes in the healing properties of energy crystals. Lizbeth goes to her grandma for limpias (spiritual cleansings) with sage; her grandma can discern if you have a negative presence in you by cracking an egg over your head and reading the color of the yolk inside.

Some of my students are creed-believing Christians. Jeremy, a spectacled Filipino and aspiring video game designer, is a well-informed and Biblically literate Seventh Day Adventist. But many students’ religious beliefs are more heterodox and syncretic. They believe or practice some things taught to them by their parents, and reject others. (They often reject their parents’ religions without knowing much at all about what it is they’re rejecting.) They may call themselves Catholic, but dabble in New Age spiritualism, use healing crystals, flirt with reincarnation, and talk about chakras. Almost all have firsthand ghost stories or stories about bruhas (witches). In a discussion about Macbeth in my English class, I asked if anyone had had experiences with ghosts. I was shocked at the number of students who claimed to have personally witnessed something paranormal, and the earnestness with which these stories were told. The most forthcoming storytellers were often the students who were most adamantly “secular” and irreligious.

My students are atheists who know their Zodiac signs and faithfully read the horoscopes. They are agnostics who swear by platitudes like, “Everything happens for a reason.” Very few of my students regularly attend church services. For these reasons, classifying my students into religious affiliations or denominations feels reductive.

The fact that my students live in Las Vegas is not incidental to their amorphous religious identities. They live, after all, in a city famous for a surfeit of choices— a city of buffets. The term “Cafeteria Catholic” is used disparagingly (usually by other, gate-keeping Catholics) to refer to those who “pick and choose” which doctrines and practices of the Church they want to believe and abide by. My students are unashamed “Buffet Believers,” and have no qualms about sampling entrées from many religious traditions, with little concern about coherence or contradiction.

The diversity in a tourist city like Las Vegas also impacts my students’ religious outlook. As my student Ximena puts it, “I personally view my religion as a big part of myself and my life, but I’m still able to connect with people of different religions or people who are not religious because Vegas’s diversity has allowed me to learn that people don’t have to be religious or the same religion as you in order for them to be good people.”

Nevada is a “purple” state and Las Vegas a hotbed of political contest and controversy. Many of my students have felt the need to create their own religious identities after feeling abandoned by a Christianity they see as too partisan and too closely allied to Republican politics and conservative social issues.

Las Vegas is also a town of transplants. Many of my students’ families immigrated to Las Vegas from Mexico. Because religious identity is frequently linked to particular locations, and is nourished in the young by the old, my students’ separation from their extended families in Mexico has had a formative impact, estranging them to one degree or another from the religions of their grandparents.

One student speculates that her turn away from Catholicism is related to her parents’ immigration to the United States. In Mexico, she explains, her family is very poor, and their poverty impels them to rely on God. When her father first immigrated to the United States, his economic uncertainty caused him to pray regularly and to teach his daughters to pray. As their economic situation improved, however, the frequency of prayer and God-talk diminished.

But my students are not entirely unique; the landscape of religious belief is changing for Gen Z as a whole. As of 2018, only 33% of Gen Z had “no doubts” about the existence of God. This is significantly lower than the Silent Generation (70%), Baby Boomers (59%), Gen X (52%), and even Millennials (44%). But it would be a mistake to read this data as a straightforward proof of steady generational secularization. My experience with my students leads me to believe that something more complicated is happening. Students aren’t becoming more secular; instead, they are swapping orthodox religious beliefs and practices for a somewhat haphazard spiritual potpourri.

Psychologist Clay Routledge has coined the term “religious substitution” to describe the phenomenon I am witnessing with my students. “Fewer people today may be identifying as religious and attending religious services, but there is scant evidence that they are abandoning spiritual pursuits and supernatural beliefs altogether,” he writes. “It would be more accurate to describe many current trends as evidence not of secularization, but of religious substitution.” So, belief in God and religious participation are declining, but three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal: ghosts, witchcraft, astrology, telepathy, clairvoyance, et cetera. And it is those who are least engaged in traditional religious practices (like regular church attendance) who are most likely to have paranormal beliefs.

My students’ religious identities are irreducibly multiple. Westerners aren’t typically accustomed to thinking of religious identity as multiple, but this is more common elsewhere. It has been said that the Chinese are Confucians at work, Daoists at play, and Buddhists at death. Or, according to a popular saying, “Every Chinese person wears a Confucian cap, a Daoist robe, and Buddhist sandals.” It may be that this multiplicity is the future of American religion. Indeed, if my students’ experiences may be read like tea leaves in a diviner’s cup, that future may be now.

To some, this may be an exciting picture: free-for-all spirituality, freed from the crushing conformity of creeds, can better serve the needs of the individual. Others might object that this grab bag style of spirituality provides no local community and makes no demands on the individual. What are the consequences if religion becomes so individual and idiosyncratic?

***

Perhaps it is not so surprising that the supposedly secular Las Vegas is profoundly religious in many ways: the great monotheisms were all born and nurtured in the desert, and many have postulated that desert ecosystems are especially hospitable for religious ways of thinking.

The Hebrews wandered for 40 years in the desert before God’s revelation at Sinai. Christianity was honed and refined by 3rd Century “Desert Fathers” who exiled themselves to the Egyptian desert for contemplation and prayer. “He who wishes to live in solitude in the desert is delivered from three conflicts: hearing, speech, and sight,” wrote Anthony the Great. “There is only one conflict for him and that is with fornication.” (Anthony would certainly find the Mojave Desert even less conducive to chastity than the Egyptian deserts.)

Indeed, there is something about the precarity of life in the desert, its unforgiving infertility, that fertilizes religious thinking. “The desert resembles dogma: it is dry, it is immovable,” as Richard Rodriguez once wrote in Harper’s.

Indeed, something about the miracle of a metropolis in the Mojave suggests, at once, both the exceptionality of human beings and their sinful hubris. (The Hoover Dam is proof of human exceptionalism; the rapidly drying Lake Mead, which provides Las Vegas with 90% of its water, is damning proof of human hubris.) To live in the desert is to experience a haunting sense of (spiritual) dislocation. Rodriguez, again: “The desert’s uninhabitability convinces Jew and Christian and Muslim that we are meant for another place.” Eden and Heaven are oases; the desert is the crucible of the soul.

(Mojave Desert. Image source: iStock)

But while Middle Eastern deserts birthed the monotheisms, the Mojave Desert has birthed a hydra of heterodoxies. My students, like many in their generational cohort, are straining against the practices and creeds that they’ve inherited. They like their religion a la carte and are unafraid to combine elements of traditional faith with tarot card reading, crystals, and divination. Some wonder: What chimera, what bastardized Franken-religion, are they creating in the process?

Was Yeats writing of my Mojave when he wrote of a monstrous new revelation rising up in the sands of the desert?

“Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

And yet, what is orthodoxy except heterodoxy that has been sanctified by time? Perhaps it is better to describe my students, as one researcher has done, as “spiritual explorers.” Or, it might be even better to describe them as religious reformers— as Luthers of a new Protestantism. And what are they protesting? Ask them, and they will tell you. Their grievances are many, but because they are unafraid to borrow from the wisdom of many traditions, their resources are bountiful.

My students will tell you that they are attracted to Buddhism because they have seen firsthand how greedy and grasping casinos exploit their mothers and aunts who work in the hotels as maids. They will tell you that they find Confucius’s emphasis on education inspiring because they know Nevada public schools perform abysmally. They will share their enthusiasm for the powerful female deities of Hinduism because in Las Vegas women and girls are so often objectified and treated as sexual commodities. They celebrate Daoism’s respect for nature because they are only too aware of how climate change and drought affect their city.

There will be no creeds or catechism in this new Protestantism. Instead, this new religion will make flexibility its watchword: it will encourage the shameless borrowing of concepts, rituals, beliefs, and ideas from any and all traditions. And this time, the Reformation starts not at Wittenberg, but in Sin City.

Corey Landon Wozniak lives with his wife and three sons in Las Vegas, NV. He teaches English and Comparative Religions at a public high school.

The post The Buddha at the Bellagio: (Teaching) Religion in Sin City appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source/credit: Arickx Photography)

Pope Francis has never had much of a filter, which has sometimes showcased his sardonic humor, as when he referred to an anti-vaccination Cardinal on a ventilator with Covid as “the irony of life.” At other times, however, his off the cuff comments about women, queer people, and gender issues have felt insulting. In January of this year, while speaking to an audience at the Vatican, the pope referred to the recent global birthdate drop as a “demographic winter.”

But Pope Francis, who’s written and spoken powerfully about the dangers of climate change and the catastrophic capitalist exploitation of the poor, didn’t blame population decline on those issues or even on the pandemic, which has led many people to reconsider the idea of starting a family. Instead, he blamed people who have pets instead of children.

The pope then dug in further, saying the choice not to have children is “selfish,” and that it “takes away our humanity.” According to Pope Francis, when cats and dogs replace children, it’s a slippery slope toward a bleak Children of Men-style future, and it’s the happy couples adopting pets instead of raising kids who are to blame.

It’s no secret that I’m one of those people who doesn’t have children, and I have long bemoaned the attitude that people without children, and women in particular, are acting selfishly. A recent anthology of essays by childless women entitled Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed illustrates the pervasiveness of this concept. The irony that the pope, who himself has chosen to forego having children, is finger-wagging people like me was not lost on social media, where queer couples, single men and women, and straight couples alike groused about his choice of words.

But, as it turns out, this isn’t the first time the pope has called childless people selfish. In a 2014 interview, he referred to people without children a “greedy generation” and a sign of a “depressed society,” and added that choosing not to have children is, you guessed it, selfish. People without children, according to the pope, will grow old and bitter from loneliness. Cats and dogs are easier to care for, he admitted, but the people who adopt them are rejecting the more complicated job of taking care of a child, all due to selfishness.

Again, ironic. And painful for many of us to hear. But some voices in Catholic media have urged us to reframe this conversation. In America magazine (full disclosure: I’m a contributing writer to America), editor-in-chief Father Matt Malone admitted that as an unmarried cleric he is an “imperfect messenger” on this topic, but argued that the pope is not talking about couples who can’t have children for biological issues or those who “lack the means to care for them properly.” The pope, he writes, was instead referring to financially comfortable couples who choose not to reproduce. These couples, according to Fr. Malone, are substituting a pet for a child. As a result, he argues, they are on a slippery slope toward thinking that adopting an animal is equal to raising a human child.

This is an interesting argument, but not a persuasive one. Although I know many people with pets, I have yet to meet a pet owner who seriously believes their dog or cat is, in any way, human. And yet, animals do express love and need care. Unlike people or the Catholic Church, pets don’t judge. When Saint Francis was discerning whether to retreat from the world or to keep preaching and his advisors encouraged him to keep preaching, his first sermon was delivered not to other people, but to a flock of birds. Today, “pet parent” is usually used in a joking way, but when a person (okay, this person is me) begins to project too much thinking or feeling onto their pet, they usually realize what’s happening and laugh it off. I’ve talked to my cats throughout the pandemic because I share my house with them, but I’ve never expected much in return except for warm feet when the cats cooperate by sitting on them.

I’m also cognizant of the fact that both Pope Francis and Fr. Malone are aware of the many reasons people cite for not having children, such as economic hardship, environmental danger, and political instability. But condemnations of childlessness coming from clergy also make it sound like not having children is sinful. Is it? And if so, is it something that needs to be forgiven?

Hamartiology, the branch of theology dedicated to the study of sin, is closely connected to ethics. And sin, loosely defined in a Christian context, is anything that goes against God’s will, or, in a secular sense, something that harms other people. But in both Christian and secular contexts, the person who chooses to have a child is rarely considered selfish, sinful, or bad, whereas the person who doesn’t is all of these things. Childless people are often accused of being self-obsessed and putting themselves first. But when a couple has a child to “save their marriage,” it is largely considered a reasonable decision even if that relationship is emotionally turbulent or even violent. In her book “Why Have Children?” philosopher Christine Overall points out that while a person who doesn’t have children is frequently interrogated about that decision, a pregnant person is rarely – if ever – asked why they got pregnant. “The choice to procreate,” she writes, “is not regarded as needing any thought or justification.”

But the choice to have children, Overall writes, is something we should think of as a moral and ethical choice rather than a simplistic matter of biology, that people should have kids because that’s what some bodies are made to do. When a child is born, according to Overall, “a new and vulnerable human being is brought into existence whose future may be at risk.” Oftentimes, people have children without thinking about the impact that child might have on the people around them, the economy, and the environment. This can also include not considering their own capacity to care for that child, or how they are contributing to overpopulation.

When Christians talk about having a child as a sinful act, they are usually referring to single parents having kids “out of wedlock.” The Catholic Church still teaches that giving birth outside of church-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage is sinful, but the culture has largely left that idea in the past. Times have changed since The Scarlet Letter, and most of us would agree today that single parents have not sinned and do not need to be forgiven. Sometimes God even makes bodies that can’t make babies, and there are plenty of childless people in the Bible, including that person named Jesus Christ. Does God think those people are selfish?

(Image credit: Remo Casillio for Reuters)

Amidst this debate we also have to acknowledge that the Catholic Church suffers from the problem of clericalism, where priests, bishops, cardinals and popes are seen as “special and superior to laypersons and their authority should be accepted without question,” according to psychiatrist Thomas Plante, who has written widely on sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Clericalism, Plante writes, leads to authoritarianism, narcissism, and a sense that the clergy are right while anyone who disagrees is wrong and must seek forgiveness. So clergy may not see their own childlessness as selfish because of their self-perceived specialness, but some of them will still cast aspersions on others who make the same choice. Clerical culture also leads celibate clergy to pretend they don’t have sexual impulses, which can contribute to “destructive coping strategies” (ahem, abuse crisis) and an unwillingness to ask for help because of a desire to maintain a facade of perfection.

But another fact about Catholic clergy is that they can be incredibly isolated and lonely. Members of many religious orders aren’t even allowed to have pets, and with the priest shortage in America, many priests live alone and have little to no sense of community. When they harangue others for not having children, we have to remember that they have also lost that possibility for themselves, sometimes even giving up the chance to have an animal companion. Could there perhaps be some jealousy involved, or some sense that because they gave up something for what they see as the greater good, anyone who doesn’t have children is selfish? From their perspective, childless couples are deliberately choosing the social, emotional and physical benefits of marriage without the burdens of child rearing.

I’m obviously not a Catholic priest (that pesky issue of being a woman!), but I do know a number of them fairly well and can see and hear what a difficult job they have, and how they’re not really encouraged to share their regrets about choosing vocation over family and losing out on the highs and lows of intimate partnership. I imagine the pope might feel that loss as well. He grew up in a large family home surrounded by siblings, and now lives alone in an apartment surrounded mostly by staff, not by friends and loved ones. I may not have children, but I can see whoever I want whenever I want, befriend people of every gender without worrying about it looking weird, babysit and take my nieces out to dinner, and generally go about my life with a greater degree of freedom than the pope or any priest in the Catholic church.

None of this means I’m selfish or sinful, and, in fact, much like a member of the clergy, my life overflows with responsibility for other people and occasions to take care of them. It’s just that those people aren’t my biological children. But we don’t go around calling priests selfish for choosing not to have kids, nor do we say these things about Jesus, who, as far as we know, never changed a diaper in his life. By persisting in this idea of childless couples as selfish, the pope reveals the overly narrow paths the church offers lay people: you can either commit to celibacy as a single person or you can get married, but you should only do the latter if you’re willing to procreate as much as humanly possible, because sex should always be potentially procreative. With this point of view, the pope demonstrates he’s much more conservative on issues of sex and relationships than he is on economics or the environment.

But to return to, and expand on, my original question: if people who are selfish need to be forgiven, does that mean that the pope, who chose not to have children, is also in need of forgiveness?

I don’t have a tidy answer to that question, but I do think that if the pope really believes that childless people are selfish and sinful and need forgiveness, he and every other member of the clergy should probably ask for forgiveness for the very same thing. Francis has often said that he too is a sinner, but has never really opened up about what it’s like to be an elderly man without children, nor have I ever heard a priest preach a sermon on this topic or even bring it up in conversation.

If the pope has regrets about not having children, ambivalent feelings about it, or is even happy he made that choice, opening up would be a radical act of solidarity that might make room for much more complex and enlightening conversations between those who have children and those who don’t, and enable us to develop language about the ethics of both of our choices, a language less focused on sin and forgiveness and more on mutual human struggle and compassion. Imagine hearing a priest preach about what it means to give up intimate relationships, or hearing bishops talk about the people under their care with the same compassion and understanding a parent ought to show their child. Maybe that kind of openness would mean we could even start to forgive one another for being so judgemental about a decision that is nobody’s business but our own. But that would also require the pope to understand that if he does not need forgiveness for not having children, neither does anyone else.

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

The post The Pope, Pets, and Childless Couples appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

While reading about the Russian attack on Ukraine, I recently stumbled on a buried news item that, given the global circumstances, justifiably received little attention: synagogues in the United States are facing a rabbi shortage. While the rabbi shortage does not compare to the horrors taking place in Ukraine, the story stayed with me and the situation struck me as symptomatic of religion in America.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Currently, the rabbi shortage is most concerning among the Conservative Movement, which accounts for about 15 percent of American Jews. Movement leaders predict that in 2022, more than 80 Conservative synagogues will have vacancies for rabbis. Not nearly enough rabbinical students are about to graduate to fill those positions, and too few current rabbis are looking to move into new congregational roles. This is not the first time the country has experienced a rabbi shortage. In the 1960s, as American Jews were increasingly accepted into mainstream society and moved to the suburbs in droves, the rapid building of synagogues outpaced the training of new rabbis. But today’s rabbi shortage is for different reasons.

For the past few decades, many American Jews have chosen not to affiliate with a synagogue even as they have maintained a strong connection to Jewish communities. Because belief is not central to Jewish identity, non-Orthodox Jews have found myriad ways to express their Jewishness and contribute to Jewish culture without saying prayers or going to temple. American rabbis have responded by creating opportunities for Jewish learning in many places: at community centers, on college campuses, in museums, and at publications. Additionally, because common Jewish rituals, from Passover seders and Shabbat dinners to lighting Hanukkah candles, take place at home, the synagogue has gradually become less central to American Jewish life. And now with the pandemic, congregational rabbis, like clergy in other religious traditions, are reporting high levels of burnout and have sought early retirement and rabbinic opportunities where they can have a better work-life balance. We are consequently at a place where many rabbis and countless American Jews prefer to participate in Jewish life outside of synagogues.

The shift away from places of worship as central to religion is happening not only among American Jews; observers have noted similar trends within numerous religious communities. With that in mind, this issue of the Revealer considers how people engage with religion outside of institutions and how religion functions beyond the walls of traditional worship spaces. Our March issue opens with the first installment of Kaya Oakes’ column “Not So Sorry,” where she considers how the pope’s declaration that childless couples are “selfish” will drive people away from the Church, and she suggests how Catholics should respond. Next, in “The Buddha and the Bellagio,” Corey Wozniak reflects on the abundance of religion within Las Vegas, from the Buddhist and Hindu statues that populate Vegas nightlife to the devotion to City of Sin celebrities like Britney (a.k.a. “Godney”) Spears, and what all of that reveals about religion in the twenty-first century. Next, in “Prophetic Except for Palestine,” Martha Schoolman describes how Reform Judaism, the largest branch of American Judaism, has promoted social justice activism as a key value for decades except when it comes to addressing the treatment of Palestinians. Then, in “Religious Sisters Respond,” Renée Roden interviews Catholic sisters to get their perspective on how the media portrays them and to understand how they view their work in connection to, or outside of, the institutional Catholic Church. And the issue contains an excerpt from Erika Gault’s new book Networking the Black Church, where she describes growing up as the daughter of a Black preacher, leaving the church, and finding her way back to it through hip hop, a path that she discovered is shared by many other Black Christians.

The March issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Black Christians and Hip Hop.” Erika Gault joins us to discuss how hip hop and social media have helped people who feel ostracized by traditional churches, the connections between Christian hip hop and racial justice activism, and what the prevalence of Christian hip hop tells us about the future of Black Christianity in America. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Religions change. People change. As this issue attests, constant change does not mean religion is fading. Religious communities have been reinventing themselves for centuries. So, rather than think of rabbi shortages, Catholic sister shortages, and people leaving the Black Church as signs of religious decay, we should instead pay attention to how those declining demographics are giving way to momentous religious innovations.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

P.S. Our issue also contains an “In the News” roundup of the best stories from around the web about religion in Ukraine and  religion’s place in the Russian attack on the Ukrainian people.

The post Editor’s Letter: The Rabbi Shortage and Religion Outside of Religious Institutions appeared first on The Revealer.