At the Religion News Association’s annual awards ceremony on October 7, 2021, the RNA honored the Revealer with the award for “Excellence in Magazine Overall Religion Coverage,” the highest award for a print or online religion magazine.

The award for “Excellence in Magazine Overall Religion Coverage” honored work published in 2020. The awards jury highlighted the Revealer’s special issue from March 2020 titled “Religion and Sex Abuse Within and Beyond the Catholic Church.” The jury commented that the Revealer “succeeds in taking the much-scrutinized topic of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and extending the analysis to similar improprieties found in other diverse religious institutions. The Revealer mines new unexplored territory in the sadly continuing tale of sexual misconduct committed by those most trusted to lead and protect those who are most vulnerable.”

Congratulations to all of the writers in that special issue and to everyone who worked on the Revealer in 2020!

And we have even more good news to share from the 2021 Religion News Association awards: three Revealer writers swept the award category for “Excellence in Religion Commentary,” winning first, second, and third prizes. Congratulations to Kaya Oakes, Tia Pratt, and Rebecca Epstein-Levi for sweeping these awards!

We are thrilled with this recognition. And we are tremendously grateful to the Religion News Association, all of our writers, our staff, and our wonderful readers for their support!

The post Awards for the Revealer and Our Writers appeared first on The Revealer.

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

We hope you enjoy this fascinating episode: “Religion and the CIA.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 19: Religion and the CIA appeared first on The Revealer.

(CIA headquarters. Photo credit: Larry Downing for Reuters)

The following excerpt comes from Michael Graziano’s book Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA. (© 2021 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.) The book explores how the CIA sought to understand religion throughout the world, while often missing the mark in ways that led to disaster. This excerpt from the Introduction explores what the book, borrowing a term from World War II American spies, calls the “religious approach” to intelligence. The religious approach was shorthand for a wide-ranging set of assumptions about what religion was, how it functioned, and how its presumably universal appeal could be used to advance U.S. goals.

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More than half a century ago, Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956) described the plight of the New England Puritans, strangers on a strange shore, seeking to revive anew the mission to which they were sure their group was called. The Puritans felt a sense of disquiet and unease in a new wilderness as they began to understand themselves as a people apart from the England from which they came. In their own estimation, they had succeeded in their “errand” but, thanks to the English Civil War, no one back home was watching their city on a hill. It was a hollow victory. “There was nobody left at headquarters to whom reports could be sent,” Miller wrote in his book that would come to reshape the study of religion in America for the remainder of the century.

The idea for Miller’s book, according to the author’s preface in Errand, came to him while he stood on the banks of the Congo River. Much has been made of this moment, and its role in shaping American studies and US intellectual history. It is all the more telling, then, that the Congo story was at least partly fabricated. “Yes, there is a kind of truth in Perry’s romantic reference in Errand,” wrote Elizabeth Miller about her husband’s scene, “but Perry, who was a writer, was in part creating, after the fact, an effective anecdote as well as an explanation of why his own errand had been undertaken.” While the Congo story may not have been entirely true, Miller did have opportunities to see and think about the American mind in a global context. Miller worked for the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), during World War II in Germany where he specialized in psychological warfare, a domain that frequently applied the knowledge gained through the religious approach. The accuracy of Errand’s account was not nearly as important as how it was delivered and what it achieved. William Donovan, Miller’s boss and the director of the OSS, would have been proud.

Hundreds of miles to the south of Miller’s wartime operations, another OSS officer was hard at work in Rome. James Jesus Angleton would develop a reputation within OSS as an expert in counterintelligence—protecting against foreign espionage—in part through his policing of the religious approach’s limits at the Vatican. Like Miller, Angleton was a university man at heart, but unlike Miller—who, according to his OSS file, “wants to return to his position in the Harvard faculty as soon as possible”—Angleton stayed in intelligence work after the war. Angleton eventually became the CIA’s legendary counterintelligence chief. David Atlee Phillips, a career CIA officer, described Angleton as “CIA’s answer to the Delphic Oracle: seldom seen but with an awesome reputation nurtured over the years by word of mouth and intermediaries padding out of his office with pronouncements which we seldom professed to understand fully but accepted on faith anyway.” Both OSS officers, Miller and Angleton were tasked with understanding and manipulating the human mind. It was not easy. Angleton, quoting a verse from T.S. Eliot, described the business of espionage as a “wilderness of mirrors.” While their post-war careers led them to different institutions—the CIA for Angleton, Harvard for Miller—their work was not entirely dissimilar. They were experts at crafting a useful story to influence how others think about America in the world. They were both, in their own ways, masters of American studies.

Success in the war brought about different uncertainties, and the CIA was left alone with the world: a wilderness different in scale rather than kind. Empowered with considerable independence and little oversight, the CIA became the “headquarters” to which reports would be sent. While Miller never worked for the CIA, the strategies the Agency employed—like the religious approach to intelligence—were not all that different from the ones Miller used to understand the Puritans in 1956. Miller and the CIA took ideas seriously. Many of the intelligence officers in this book would likely have agreed with Miller’s confident pronouncement that “the mind of man is the most basic factor in human history.” If one could understand how humans thought, then one could understand how humans worked. Armed with this knowledge, one could influence people toward particular ends. The major question—and errand—of the religious approach to intelligence was to determine how the human mind could be used to shape the future of humanity, radiating from the United States outward into the world.

This confidence in America’s ability to understand and influence the world is at the core of the religious approach to intelligence. It was also sometimes wrapped up with a disregard for the consequences of these efforts to understand. “You have to understand the culture of the clandestine service,” former Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates explained. “You haven’t been through what they’ve been through. They’ve put their families through hell at times…some may eventually end up in London or Paris. But they start out in Third World hellholes without even a Western doctor when their kids get sick. They have a strong sense that almost no one understands them or what they do. So they feel defensive and misunderstood.”

And yet, they felt compelled to understand everyone and everything. To work for the CIA was to be part of an institution that saw knowledge of the world as one way to secure freedom in it. Carved in marble at the CIA’s original headquarters is the Agency’s unofficial motto, from the Gospel of John: “And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free.” The authors of the Gospel of John saw Jesus as the divine logos, revealing the divine order of the universe for all to see. The CIA had an errand in this new, postwar wilderness, bringing truth and freedom to other peoples beyond the borders of nation or religion. The Agency’s own accounting of the word made flesh sits across the lobby: 137 stars that make up the Memorial Wall, one for each CIA officer killed in the line of duty. This is one measure of the human costs of these efforts, but it is not the only one. As this book shows, the reality of intelligence operations was far more complicated, with profoundly troubling consequences for people around the globe.

(From the CIA’s original headquarters: A quote from from the Gospel of John carved into marble)

This book begins with the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, and its influential wartime leader, William Donovan. Under Donovan, the intelligence agency became a unique place to study religion, combining considerable financial resources, spotty oversight, and a desire to know everything about everywhere. William Casey, who got his start in Donovan’s OSS and went on to lead the CIA under President Reagan, explained that “Donovan’s grasp of this elusive, multiple yet crucial nature of intelligence led to the CIA…becoming not merely a spy outfit but one of the world’s great centers of learning and scholarship and having more PhDs and advanced scientific degrees than you’re likely to find anywhere else.” Those who served with Donovan viewed him as the demiurge of American spy craft, imbuing the OSS with the certainty that the world could be understood and manipulated according to American aims. “We can know,” OSS officer Stanley Lovell explained, “Iron curtains and Bamboo curtains are only impenetrable to those who will not open their eyes.” This story begins by charting the efforts of American intelligence officers, alone in a new wilderness, as they learned to see.

Michael Graziano is assistant professor of religion at University of Northern Iowa.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out our fascinating conversation with Michael Graziano in episode 19 of the Revealer podcast: Religion and the CIA.

The post The CIA’s Religious Approach to Espionage appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo courtesy of Sam Kestenbaum’s Twitter account)

Sam Kestenbaum is a too-rare thing these days: a religion reporter. There was once a time when most newspapers — national and local — had writers on the religion beat, but as bureaus shrank and publications shuttered, fewer papers and websites regularly published stories by journalists who, like Kestenbaum, have a practiced subject expertise. Of course, that doesn’t mean religion isn’t in the news. But it does mean that news writers don’t approach religion stories with the same nuance or historical perspective as a specialist.

Kestenbaum writes regularly about religion for the New York Times and other publications, and his work has been honored with several prestigious awards. I’ve followed his writing for a number of years. He has a particular talent for telling stories about complicated people with a kind of lucid nuance — taking them seriously without entirely taking them at their word. Not incidentally, that means he is also especially well-attuned to the relationship between religion and media in these stories, both how the media engages with figures and groups and how those groups engage with, and produce, their own media.

While religion is frequently in the news, I thought this month — one year out from the last U.S. presidential election and still very much in the midst of the pandemic — would be an especially good time to talk to Kestenbaum about what it’s like to cover religion in the United States, to try to get a sense of what makes for incisive religion reporting, and to glean what he has learned from his years of writing about religion in America.

Kali Handelman: Can you tell me about what drew you to the subject of religion and what’s kept you interested in it?

(Photo from Sam Kestenbaum’s website)

Sam Kestenbaum: There are a couple of ways to narrate that. The personal story: I grew up on a teeny island in Maine and was one of the only Jews there. I suspect this made me aware, as a young guy, of religious borders and what it feels like to move around and between them. (The first story I ever wrote for the New York Times was about this, actually.)

I spent several years doing journalism overseas, mostly in the Middle East, before returning to New York and focusing on domestic issues. As a writer, I’ve found religion to be an expansive and colorful and thorny subject, one way to try to understand America, and something I could be curious about professionally. I’ve been fortunate to make some sort of career doing that.

KH: That makes a lot of sense — and as a fellow rural New England Jew who chose to make a home in New York City, I can identify with that. I definitely see the curiosity you mention in how you approach New York, finding the far-flung and esoteric especially compelling, which makes me want to know how you do research for your stories. When you’re getting started on a new story, where do you go to start learning about a tradition or community you’re interested in?

SK: I’m going to say a bit about how I generate ideas and view journalism, as I think this might give a window into my process. It boils down to two things: studying the old stuff and hanging around interesting places and people. First, I find it really useful to see how journalists have seen and written about religion over time. Here, I’m looking not just at the raw content of their reporting, so to speak, but also tracking the shifting style, voice, and priorities of periodicals. I’m talking about things like old 1900s penny-press and broadsheets; lurid tabloids from the ’50s (I collect old National Enquirer copies); or zines and alt-weeklies from the ’90s. There’s such fun and punchy copy here, and so many great phrases to crib on just the level of language. Other sorts of questions I’m asking as I read: What type of religion gets approvingly written about, and what’s suspicious? What gets flashy cover treatment, and what’s tucked into the back page? What’s of interest in what time period, and why? As a journalist working on religion in America I see all of this material as an inheritance of sorts, something to contend with and draw from.

With all those historical echoes in mind I go out into the field and find the living people doing religion right now. I’m an evangelist for what journalist Gay Talese called the “art of hanging out,” and a longstanding practice of mine has been to drop in on churches, synagogues, temples, or tabernacles — attending backyard revivals, mega-congregations and anything in between. For a time, I would go to a new spot each week in New York City and meet Moors, Hebrew Israelites, Pentecostals, Hasidim, New Thoughters, Theosophists, whatever. I wouldn’t burst in as a reporter working on a story — though I would identify myself — but as a visitor. This would put people at (some) ease, plus give me the space to soak it all in.

If I felt there was some germ of a story to cultivate I would return, sometimes much later, notepad in hand. For example, one week I stumbled on a small storefront church in Brooklyn where the lead pastor, originally a Christian, was in the middle of adopting a long-forgotten 19th-century Spiritualist bible called the Oahspe, a unique kind of proto-sci-fi scripture chock full of things like lost continents and star ships. I would later write about the church’s metamorphosis for the Metropolitan section of the New York Times, but it all started with happening upon them that one weekend.

KH: I’d love to hear more about that process of “studying the old stuff.” It’s clearly not just part of your research, but also what you include in your stories. Why do you think it’s important to add this kind of historical context to your articles?

SK: It’s not something I want to pound over the reader’s head, but those historical echoes — if not exactly full blown genealogies — are something I try to layer into feature writing. Just as I reflect on my own reporter’s inheritance — those zines and tabs — I also think about my subjects in terms of the past. It can be a delicate thing. I want to show that there are always antecedents, but do this without undercutting the now-ness of the subject, or sounding snooty or condescending to readers. This means exploring what feels novel about, say, Pentecostal media mogul Stephen Strang promoting Trump prophecies, as well as showing the important history to unspool there. With that feature specifically I knew I wanted to place Strang and his company, Charisma Media, within a lineage of American Pentecostals working with media and blending earthly enterprise and eye-popping supernatural content. This meant I found myself revisiting not just old reporting on Pentecostals, but the media they produced themselves: pages of Aimee Semple McPherson’s newspapers she put out (they’re all digitized); old clips of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s shows; or watching Oral Roberts healing through the TV screen (YouTube is a treasure). Pointing to this heritage shouldn’t overwhelm or take away from the novelty of the overall Charisma Media story, but add a deeper resonance.

KH: Your work is consistently interested in what academics would mostly call New Religious Movements. You’ve also done a lot of writing about groups at the fringy-ier end of that spectrum, including some groups that have been called “cults” as well as the seers and prophets who lead them. What interests you about these communities, traditions, and practices? How do you approach new people respectfully?

SK: I often write about those religious groups or people that are seen as going against the grain, a little outré or maybe beyond some respectable bounds. What draws me to those sorts of subjects is this: I want to see, up close, how they do it, how they cultivate their intriguing image. What I mean is, would-be outsider groups can be experts at building their brands — playing up and into the theatrical, controversial, exotic, or zany. I don’t see anything haphazard here, but strategy — and, yes, that can apply to those groups called cults.

(Father Sebastiaan. Photo credit: Witch Con)

The credo in some circles, I know, is that “cult” is a straightforward pejorative that has no responsible use. But I’m struck by the number of times I’ve seen groups lean into the cult-y brand. As just one example: There was a self-styled vampire guru I spent time with as part of a feature for the Times. This fellow — his real name was Todd but he called himself Father Sebastiaan — was part forty-something one-time party kid, part religious entrepreneur, and had once presided over big occult bacchanals in downtown Manhattan. (They would do things like drag a coffin out onto the dance floor; it’s said people were drinking blood in kinky back rooms.) He and I spent time in his dim, cramped studio where he personally sculpted removable fangs into the mouths of customers who, once the teeth had been fitted, would recite an oath to his vampire clan. Was it foreboding ritual? Edgy joke or performance art? He would then, maybe with a fanged smile, boast that he was a kind of cult leader, growing his cult fandom person by person. I think those interactions offer a reminder that the brand of outsider is one that’s on offer — and sells! — on the market. I can’t say exactly how I manage to ingratiate myself to people like Father Sebastiaan, but I try to convey to folks that I’m interested in what they do and how they do it… and who doesn’t like talking about themselves?

KH: Most of these pieces are, in part, profiles. What is it about the individual leaders — Keano, Father Sebastiaan, Ryuho Okawa, Jonathan Cahn, Marianne Williamson — that interests you?

SK: I find that the character studies, looking at the people at the heart of these stories, are an interesting way to get at some of those dynamics I just mentioned. This doesn’t mean that I take religious leaders to be representative of movements, exactly, but that biography — and particularly the newspaper profile — is an interesting form to play with as a writer.

What’s appealing, I think, about individual portraits is that they give a way to show that people are always messy — revealing some things, hiding others, a jumble of the good, the ugly, foibles, hopes, aspirations, strategic choices, mercurial motivations. Exploring that, putting the lens tightly on the individual, can illuminate something about the religious, social, or professional worlds they inhabit, but it strikes me as a subtler way to back into those wider topics.

KH: Some of your recent work engages with electoral politics and current events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Your approach — focus on particular figures and organizations — offers something different to these frontpage subjects. What do you want readers to understand about the role of religion in American politics?

SK: There’s this idea, in the law and public, that religion and politics are disparate types of power that can (or ought to) be neatly untangled from each other. The anxiety about what happens when the two meet is what’s interesting to me, and how different people define each.

This past year I’ve spent a lot of time in anti-mask, anti-lockdown churches or gatherings in California, where pastors and leaders were making dramatic proclamations against state mandates or advocating for Gavin Newsom’s recall election — pretty political stuff, by most accounts. At the same time, I’ve had conversations with people in those same venues who tell me they’ve left their previous, more liberal congregations because they felt the churches had gone astray by approvingly preaching about things like Black Lives Matter, and took this, in their words, to be too political. We can agree or disagree with the assessment, sure, but what gets called politics and what gets called religion, and by whom, is worth paying attention to. The people I’m looking at, I think, highlight these ambiguities.

KH: Lastly, as we both know, there aren’t that many writers who are able to make religion their beat these days, which means that a lot of people wind up writing about religion whether or not they have any particular background or interest in the subject. Are there things you wish other writers would do more (or less) of in their writing about religion?

SK: I think often about the mantra: “The media doesn’t get religion.” Journalist Dean Baquet said this after Donald Trump’s upset victory; there’s the “Get Religion” commentary website co-founded by writer Terry Mattingly; versions of the same mantra are evoked in academic interventions, or by religious literacy advocates. But what does this mean to get religion? Do any of these people have a shared definition? Sometimes it seems like it’s about elevating particular theologies as representative, sometimes it means giving a platform to one group over the other, talking to not just experts but the right experts, and on and on.

What’s more, the idea that religious actors need the media to get them, in any fashion, is curious to me. Because I’m struck over and over by how religious people and groups are themselves media-makers, often really good media-makers. I mean, like, have you watched Sid Roth’s miracle reenactments? The 700 Club? Seen Sean Feucht work the crowd? Mennonites on TikTok? Hay House has had so many hits! These are not people sitting around in some backwater faraway place waiting for us to faithfully reproduce their never-before-seen image. They’re telling their own stories, expertly, and we’re the ones catching up. Marianne Williamson is an author and self-help star; Jonathan Cahn is a bestselling author of prophecy books; Ryuho Okawa’s Happy Science is an anime-and-book powerhouse. I might be covering these people, but they’re savvy content creators themselves, credit where it’s due.

So, we can think about how the media does or doesn’t get religion, whatever this means, yes! But I’m most interested in — if I may turn it — how religion “gets” media.

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

Sam Kestenbaum is a religion reporter who contributes to the New York Times. His work has won the Rockower Award for Excellence in Feature Writing and prizes from the Silurians Press Club and Society for Features Journalism.

The post Insights from a Religion Reporter appeared first on The Revealer.

(Movie poster for the film Black Easter)

One of the most jarring details in the New Testament is a fleeting mention in Mark’s gospel of a man streaking: “A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind” (Mark 14:51-52). Biblical scholars have long puzzled over this line. Some have speculated that this naked man was a disciple who eventually authored the Gospel of Mark. Others believe the sentence is a holdover from an earlier story that accidentally made it into this one. But a 2021 “faith-based” film called Black Easter has a different explanation. The streaker was actually a genius scientist named Ram Goldstein who, after accidentally inventing time travel, goes back in time from the contemporary United States to ancient Judea to save the world by foiling—I kid you not—an Islamic terrorist plot intent on killing Jesus with machine guns before the Romans can do it via crucifixion.

If this movie sounds to you like it shouldn’t exist, you are not alone. But it does. And both its existence and its commercial failure tell us much about conservative Christianity in the U.S. right now. The film aligns with several recent trends in hyper-masculine, nationalist Christianity. And yet, conservative Christian critics have complained that it trifles with the Bible’s account of Jesus. As a biblical scholar who writes on White evangelicalism, I can’t help but think that what actually bothers these critics is that the movie illustrates something more convenient for them to overlook: that conservative White Christianity and its politics are driven less by fidelity to the Bible than by White nationalist longing for Christian supremacy.

I also can’t help but be entertained by the whole saga. Black Easter is a lightly edited version of the 2020 film Assassin 33 A.D. but with an overwrought voiceover explaining the bits that might have seemed complicated in the first movie. The original version is the better film, but Black Easter is more easily accessible via mainstream streaming services. Both are written and directed by Jim Carroll, a Texas-based businessman, professional gambler, and dabbler in Christian media. “Writing this story,” he commented in one interview, “is just kind of my way of trying to express my heart toward God, in a fun way.” Carroll’s website markets him as an entrepreneur extraordinaire with tales of overcoming all manner of adversity and lists a range of previous ventures, including a reality television show called “Marriage Boot Camp,” a job as a bounty hunter, and award-winning forays into disco dancing. The site also proclaims that thrice-married Carroll “had many battles with crooked preachers” before joining a non-denominational church in Frisco, Texas.

Despite Carroll’s perceived marginalization of himself and his efforts, Christian ascendancy looms large as a theme in Black Easter. The film advances classic tropes of post-2001-era Christian nationalist Islamophobia, even as the dialogue works overtime to distinguish its villain as an “extremist.” Our mastermind bad guy is Ahmed, a Middle Eastern billionaire, played by Mexican American actor Gerardo Davila, who is now in the U.S. and financing top secret science experiments in his heavily surveilled lab. His parents, we learn in a flashback, were Christians murdered by Islamist extremists. Years later, defying logic, Ahmed seethes at Christianity. When a team of plucky young geniuses that he hired, led by Ram, makes time travel possible, Ahmed decides to eliminate Christianity from world history by shooting Jesus in a bid to thwart his earliest followers.

(A scene from Black Easter)

Here the film betrays a gross misunderstanding of Islamic teaching, which holds that the great prophet Jesus did not in fact die at all—by crucifixion or any other means—and was instead assumed into heaven. The film displays no real knowledge of Islam or Muslim ideas about Jesus. At one point, Ahmed says to Jesus, “I really would’ve liked to have killed you myself.” The film’s villains and their “evil plan” only make sense as a totalizing Christian fantasy in which Jesus, and by extension modern Christians, need defending against a world out to get them. For informed viewers, it will ring false. But Ahmed’s best line, delivered with near-comic gravity, could not be further from the truth: “A time machine…changes…everything.”

It is difficult to capture without spoiling too much just how funny this movie is, both when it means to be and when it’s so bad it’s good. In some scenes, I had a hard time telling the difference. To take one example: atheist Ram comforts a dying fellow scientist named Simon by speculating through sobs that heaven is “probably a frat house with lots of beer.” Though played for comedic relief, this line will not amuse viewers concerned about or harmed by hyper-masculine Christianity. The real gag here is that such a line made it onto the screen at all. The film never shows us what heaven is like. But we do get to see a short scene of the apocalyptic wasteland the world could have been if Christianity were erased from history. The world needs the resurrection.

Amidst all the absurdity, Black Easter also tackles serious issues as the movie explores themes of forgiveness and the human condition, advances reflections on theodicy, and simultaneously takes significant risks in how it plays with the New Testament’s stories about Jesus. Black Easter is a fascinating cultural product because of those risks.

Jesus on film is a touchy subject for Christians. Think of Christian protests of the depictions of Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) or Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). How do you depict a first-century Jewish man as both fully human and divine? How do you entertain without crossing a line of reverence or respect? Black Easter throws caution to the wind: Jesus, played by former American Idol contestant Jason Castro, is both savior of the world and mouthpiece for Terminator lines: “I’ll be back.”

(A scene from the 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian)

And indeed he does come back—despite all the odds this movie throws his way. Despite the enemy extremists’ efforts to prove he wasn’t God and wipe Christianity from existence. Despite the heroic Ram’s science-informed, atheist doubts about the very possibility of defeating death. Despite the efforts of sidekick scientist Simon to talk Jesus out of voluntarily submitting to a painful death. The film takes Jesus’s identity as God seriously.

The Bible, one might conclude, is treated with less gravity. While Black Easter overwhelms viewers with sub-plots of romance, revenge, childhood trauma, and male hubris, we find at its core a fantastical revision of how the Bible came to be, as we learn the “true” story behind what the New Testament gospels recount.

Let’s cut to the film’s resurrection scene to see how this works. Having failed to prevent the crucifixion (in the principal timeline), Ahmed materializes in the year 33 and now stands inside Jesus’s sealed cave-like tomb. Illuminated only by the green gleam of his military-grade chemical light sticks, he talks to Jesus’s dead body (“dead as dead can be”), wrapped in linens and lying behind him. “There will be nobody to remember you,” he threatens.

His plan to outpace the Romans in killing Jesus now foiled, Ahmed must improvise. He puts aside his trusty gun and suddenly plunges a syringe into Jesus’s body to take a sample for his lab, which he wants to use to prove to the world that Jesus was not divine. Before the viewer can finish wondering how Ahmed will get a DNA sample from God to debunk Jesus’s divine paternity, the ground starts shaking. The linens on Jesus’s body shine brightly. The stone in front of the tomb bursts into pieces (no rolling away in this telling like you’d find in Mark 16:4, Matt 28:2, Luke 24:2, and John 20:1), and the Roman soldiers standing guard are knocked down by the force.

At the same time, Ahmed uses a time retriever bracelet to go back to the future. As he disappears, the scene shifts to just outside the tomb to Ram, Simon, and their colleague Amy, who has played the stalwart believer throughout the film. “He is risen!” she exclaims, with obvious relief and characteristic vocal fry. Ram, still doubting, objects. Amy enjoins them to “go check it out.”

When Ram and Simon enter the tomb, there is no body. Only neatly folded white linens—and glow sticks. Ancient women, presumably those from the gospels who discover the empty tomb, enter and are startled to see these American youths—and glow sticks. Not knowing what else to do, Ram holds up the green lights and flatly rehearses a line he knows he is supposed to say in this moment but feels awkward about delivering: “He…is…risen…?”

So that’s who Mary Magdalene and the other women saw in the tomb! It was not, after all, angels (John 20:12) whose “appearance was like lightning” (Matt 28:2-3) or “two men in dazzling clothes” (Luke 23:55) as portrayed in the gospels. It was 21^st-century time travelers—with glow sticks!

This conceit plays out repeatedly, as modern Americans come to populate the ancient gospel stories narrating Jesus’s last days. We watch our scientist Simon become Simon of Cyrene, the man who carries Jesus’s cross in the New Testament (Mark 15:21 and parallels). A repentant henchman named Brandt, who has had a faith journey all his own, winds up on the cross beside Jesus and asks him for forgiveness, just like “the good thief” in the Gospel of Luke. Amy, like Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John, is the first to encounter the risen Jesus in the garden outside his empty tomb.

While a didactic description makes this plot device sound heavy-handed or even cheesy, the pacing of these moments turns their unfolding over the course of the film into opportunities for pleasure on the part of certain populations of viewers: those who are familiar enough with Bible stories to feel satisfaction as they puzzle out which time travelers become which biblical characters. The film invites viewers with this skill set into its own cleverness, rewarding an in-group who know their New Testament gospel stories well.

So, who exactly makes up Black Easter’s audience? Carroll’s film, in both iterations, has struggled for distribution. In a public social media post dated May 22, 2017, Carroll wrote that “Cinemark slammed the door” on the film, complaining that the movie theater chain “can’t think outside the box.” He reports that he aspired for the movie to be a sci-fi flick on par with blockbusters like The Exorcist and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but with Christian themes embedded. “I want to make something that everybody wants to go see,” he said, “and then, hey, I can stick my message in there and it doesn’t really offend anybody.” But Black Easter cannot appeal to a wide mainstream audience because of its transparent Christian supremacy and not-very-subtle apologetics for the existence and dominance of the Christian God.

Yet, as a recent movie parody of Christian filmmaking—appropriately titled Faith Based—deftly illustrates, there is money to be made and success to be had with movies aimed at conservative Christians that make them feel good about their beliefs and their perceived difference from “secular” culture. Bad movies can make for big business when marketed to evangelical Christians.

But Black Easter and Assassin 33 A.D. haven’t triumphed in that realm either. Neither has enjoyed the kinds of wild success that some independent faith-based movies have in recent years among Christian audiences. Take, for example, the massive God’s Not Dead franchise, now in its fourth installation. The original film in that series (2014) had a $2 million budget, pulled in over $9 million on opening weekend, and grossed nearly $65 million worldwide.

Details of how Black Easter was funded are scarce. A 2016 crowd-funding campaign on Carroll’s part to raise money from Christians to produce his movie ended unsuccessfully. With a total of just 11 backers, the campaign raised only $1,600 towards its $20,000 campaign goal, a fraction of the total advertised budget of $1 million. Two years later, a Facebook post on Carroll’s page solicited donations to help get his film in front of viewers as an evangelization effort. “The Christian distributors are scared to death of a movie that is outside the box,” the post reads.

In reality, Carroll’s film is too Jesus-y to be mainstream but also too heterodox for Christians who see the Bible as holy history. Christian film reviewers have criticized it harshly. A reviewer for an organization called the Dove Foundation, whose self-styled mission is to “encourage and promote the creation, production, distribution and consumption of wholesome family entertainment,” concluded that Assassin 33 A.D. is “Not Dove-approved.” Taking issue with what he sees as “theological confusion and biblical contradictories,” the reviewer writes that the movie “takes free reign [sic] to reinvent the Gospel story, but many of their reinventions contradict the power of Jesus and the authority of the Bible.” (The review also warns viewers about “nudity”— Ram becomes the Gospel of Mark’s partially naked man running away after he frantically disrobes to use his garments as makeshift tourniquets for Amy’s wounds.) Another reviewer has suggested that “The people who made Assassin 33 A.D. need to spend less time thumping their Bible and more time actually studying it.”

I wonder, though, if it is actually the Christians who reject Carroll’s movie as insufficiently Christian who are doing the Bible-thumping. They are, after all, judging Black Easter and Assassin 33 A.D. by a conservative standard that defines Christian orthodoxy by a particular brand of Bible-fidelity. Jesus-followers have not always seen the gospel stories as out of bounds for imaginative play or fictive speculation. Think of the ancient non-canonical Gospel of Peter, which fills out Jesus’s resurrection scene and famously depicts a walking, talking cross. Likewise, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas creatively supplies details of Jesus’s childhood that are missing from the Bible, including a scene in which the precocious savior-in-the-making becomes angry, kills a playmate, and then must bring him back to life. In the modern era, film classics like Ben-Hur (1959) and The Robe (1953) were welcomed by Christian audiences for their explorations of gospel-related characters.

Black Easter, by contrast, has not found a friendly reception among Christian critics because it rewrites, rather than supplements or expands, the Bible. Carroll takes liberties with the story of Jesus that reorient rather than organically expand the narrative. Ironically this move makes the film resemble the New Testament gospels themselves, which tell different stories of Jesus’s life that reflected the idiosyncrasies of their authors. The author of the Gospel of Luke, for example, tells us that he knew about other gospels, used them in his research, but ultimately arranged all the details of Jesus’s life in his own way, to make a pleasing story for his readers (Luke 1:1-3).

Perhaps we have not seen the end of Carroll’s Bible-themed filmmaking. Black Easter’s conclusion sets up a potential sequel, this time drawing on the book of Revelation and evangelical end times theology. Remember the DNA sample that Ahmed took from the tomb? In the final scenes, we discover that he has used it to clone Jesus, accidentally creating the Anti-Christ and, apparently, ushering in the end of this age. Carroll’s experience in bounty hunting, gambling, and identifying “crooked preachers” would probably come in handy here. Until then, we will have to find ourselves content with this daring Jesus film that failed on almost every front except imagination.

Jill Hicks-Keeton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Arguing with Aseneth: Gentile Access to Israel’s Living God in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2018) and coauthor with Cavan Concannon of Does Scripture Speak for Itself? The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is currently at work on a book entitled Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves. Find her on Twitter @JillHicksKeeton.

The post The Fascinating Jesus Film You Probably Haven’t Seen appeared first on The Revealer.

(Illustration source: iStockphoto)

“Humor is the almost-faithful, the work of the one who wants to believe.”
–Jeremy Dauber, Jewish Comedy: A Serious History

As Rachel Bloom, comic and erstwhile star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, danced onto stage in her light-up sneakers, I took a bite of licorice, a swig of root beer, and a deep breath. I’ve been a fan of Bloom’s for a while now; I even wrote an article on how the humor of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend relates to the Jewishness of the Gospel of Mark. It was an odd pairing, I know, but as a Jewish scholar of biblical studies and contemporary critical theory (e.g., humor theory), it was in my wheelhouse.

The show I attended, titled “Rachel Bloom is Rusty,” was Bloom’s first performance since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, hardly anything about the pandemic has been funny. And in fact, Bloom took the pandemic seriously by requiring audience members to show proof of vaccination, a negative Covid-19 test, and to wear face coverings unless consuming snacks sold by the venue. The performance itself looked at death and dying with a characteristically Jewish gallows humor, as Bloom told stories of personal pain while also showing us home videos of herself as a child learning about human suffering.

(Rachel Bloom. Photo credit: Emily Shur for the New York Times)

Akin to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, “Rachel Bloom is Rusty” touched on what journalist Susan Dominus has called “uncomfortable truths.” While storytelling is universally central to standup, the autobiographical experiences Bloom shared were nothing short of harrowing. Having delivered her first child at the start of the pandemic—a baby who fought for her health in the NICU while Bloom’s friend, fellow comedy actor Adam Schlesinger, was dying of Covid—Bloom let her audience know that she was struggling to find fun amidst the horror. Rather than shy away from her pain, she channeled it, layering fears of sickness and death upon every disrupting joke. This was not a set of meaningless slapstick. Instead, like the genre-bending specials of Tig Notaro and Hannah Gadsby—and, honestly, like most humor that engages the complexities of being human—this was real. And it was raw.

Looking back, I recall three autobiographical points that engaged this type of comic sensibility: Bloom’s childhood memories of the January 17, 1994 Northridge earthquake, Bloom’s Jewish atheism, and Bloom’s desire to “believe” despite her atheism.

Let me begin with the earthquake. For Bloom, the Northridge earthquake’s ruins turned into a local tourist attraction. As a child, her parents took her from site to site (read: collapsed buildings) as they explained in no happy terms how the buildings fell and how the people inside them died. Bloom shared home movies of the ordeal—clips of the young actor digesting her proximity to death and, with it, her own mortality. Throughout the screenings, Bloom commented on the absurdity of it all, including the bizarre stylings of her life-and-death lessons, as well as the toll those lessons took on her. There wasn’t a clear punch line to this—much of Bloom’s show was experimental—but the combination of horror and humor stuck with me.

(1994 Northridge earthquake. Photo source: David Butow/Corbis for Getty Images)

Bloom’s Northridge reflections flowed easily into her commentary on theology—or, more rightly, her lack of a theology. She noted that, aside from her cultural Judaism, she does not identify as religious. Her non-theistic orientation, she said, is what ultimately helped her overcome her fear of ghosts. In her mind, so long as she did not believe in a divine realm, ghosts could not exist. So those specters on Disney’s Haunted Mansion ghost train—the ones that claim to “follow you home” at the end of the ride? Not real. The ghosts lingering between the fallen debris at Northridge? Also not real.

For Bloom, though, a lack of faith did not guarantee a lack of fear. While ghosts may not be real, suffering and death and the worry of what happens after this life—or, in her mind, what doesn’t happen—still is. And how nice it would be, she reflected, to believe in something beyond the pain.

It was at this point that Bloom’s atheistic Judaism and hope for a belief in something more started to intertwine, at least for a fellow non-theistic Jew like me. Like Bloom, I often reflect upon my fears of death in relation to past experiences, including the times in which I was invited to convert to Christianity. Looking back, it’s an odd experience to have 16-year-old peers and their parents hand you Christ-centered books with personalized notes of encouragement, but it was normal to me. I had an approachable personality and was one of the only Jews in my school. Those aspects alone made me prime proselytizing bait.

I wasn’t the only bait, however. Jesus, too, was also being dangled as prime meat—a hearty specimen to chew and swallow as an ever-present sacrificial lamb for my salvation. But despite wanting to believe, I, like Bloom, could never take the bait. Like Bloom, I followed my own internal logic, and a Christ-following theology just didn’t add up. And this, for me, really sucked.

Allow me to explain:

It is common for modern Jews, especially for those not raised in Chasidic or Haredi households, to consider conceptions of heaven, hell, and the afterlife antithetical to Jewish thinking. Instead, contemporary Judaism’s focus is on the here and now—the Olam HaZeh—and the ways we can engage in tikkun olam (repairing the world). In other words, it’s not that conceptions of the afterlife are lacking; it’s that ideas of the afterlife are a non-starter. We don’t even go there. Spiritual conversations of death and dying—those that contemplate divinity or the cosmic realm in relation to death—are entirely irrelevant.

Again, as a Jew myself, I get it. Words such as “heaven,” “hell,” and “afterlife” were never ones I heard at Hebrew School or the many Shabbat services I spent at shul. But as a scholar of Christian origins and its relations to Jews in antiquity, I find this silence intriguing. The early Jesus movement, after all, was a Jewish one, and was deeply embedded in contemplations of messianism. To believe in Jesus as the Christos meant to believe in Jesus as the Moshiach—the Messiah—the one to inaugurate the messianic age (a.k.a. the world to come, a.k.a. the Olam HaBa). Theologies of an afterlife were central to this Jewish movement. Alongside these ideas were apocalyptic eschatologies, that is, ideas about the world being made up of suffering, and how in the end of days such suffering will be eradicated. These theologies were often responses to repeated Jewish hardships; life in antiquity, perhaps especially for Jews, was not easy. To believe in something beyond this life brought hope to those who experienced suffering.

Where did these Jewish concepts go, you might ask? By the fourth century of the Common Era, the Christ-following movement began to develop more widespread as something not Jewish—that is, as something not reliant upon Jewish ethnic participation (e.g., Sabbath observance, kosher dietary practices, male circumcision, etc.). Some theological connections remained, however. For example, while Gentile Christ-followers kept their foreskins, they also kept with them Jewish ideas about resurrection and the messianic age. It’s not necessarily that Rabbinic Judaism stopped engaging in such considerations, but that Rabbinic Jews, at least in practice, and as time pressed on, left behind discussions of resurrection and the end times. The reason for this is unclear, although many have hypothesized that Rabbinic Jews wanted to establish a clearer boundary between the Christ-followers and themselves. The Christ-following movement developed into a Gentile Christianity with an afterlife focus, and Judaism developed into a non-Jesus-focused tradition sans emphasis on the afterlife.

And so, I have to ask:

Did Rachel Bloom not just spend her entire set talking about death and dying paired with the hope for something better? Did she not carry throughout her comedic performance an apocalyptic mindset—an understanding that suffering is upon us all? What if Jewish conversations of death and dying haven’t actually gone away? What if, instead of being examined from the synagogue bima, they are now on a different sort of stage?

Rachel Bloom, after all, is not the only Jewish comic to flirt with eschatology or apocalyptic thinking. Alongside self-deprecation, Jewish comedy tends to highlight Jewish anxieties about human suffering. It is indeed a comedic trope of Jewish humorists to worry not only about pain, but about what happens to us next.

“I feel so short-changed,” fellow Jewish comedian Jenny Slate jests in her recent Netflix Special. While Christians seem to be in such good moods, not worrying, for example, about getting robbed on their way to midnight mass or Santa catching on fire going down the chimney, Jews are singing about collective grief and genocide without eschatological hope. Even the happiest of Chanukah songs is about a potato pancake getting fried in an oven!

(Photo source: Michael Rowe for Netflix)

Sarah Silverman is similarly famous for sharing the stage with the gallows. In one of her sets, she too focuses on what happens in the oven, although this time it’s not about the oil. She jests that, at least according to some versions of Christianity, all Hitler had to do was say 10 “Heil Marys” for what he did in the Holocaust, and he’d be good to go. While the punch of Silverman’s joke rests in the wordplay, she is still toying with otherworldliness. Silverman’s humor, though deeply political, is equally mystical, so much so that she frequently invites a resurrected Jesus to help spread the Good News of her comic feats. And, at the end of the day, who knows? Maybe add a few more “Heil Marys” and Hitler can help run heaven’s public speaking program.

A 2020 Op-ed by a Jewish Mark Jacobs echoes these sentiments. In response to his Covid-19 anxieties, he writes that “[a] couple of [his] Christian buddies, both Baptist pastors, instruct[ed] [him] that Isaiah offers a succinct guide for dealing with fear: ‘Do not be afraid, for I am with you always.’” As a more secular tribe member, relying on cozy biblical interpretation wasn’t enough. Instead, it was the apocalyptic, uncomfortable truths of Jewish comedy that spoke to him. It was the “crazy and outrageous commentary about human life,” the “irreverent, shocking and often hysterical” jabs about pain and suffering that helped him cope.

Although Jacobs doesn’t explain how Jewish comedy helped him, I have a hunch. Comedy, through hyperbole and absurdity, has the power to create alternative realities—ones that feel more bearable, even when it is the tragic that is being discussed. It also leaves room for us to discuss ideas that are often overlooked in everyday life. For Jews, this includes thoughts on human suffering, which of course is discussed in shul, but also includes anxieties about death, dying, and “what happens next” (even if—especially if?—what’s next is unconscious nothingness).

While Jewish humor may not have the answers, it does reveal that questions of death and dying and “what happens next” are still part of the Jewish psyche. After all, just because most rabbis don’t lead their congregants in deep conversations about death or post-death, this does not mean that Jews carry with them an “everything is great; everything is fine” sentiment. The stereotype, in fact, is very much the opposite.

So, getting back to Bloom (and perhaps it is high time we did): as I finished my root beer and chewed my last Red Vine, and as my colleague snuck away to grab her locally-sourced vegetables from the theater’s coat closet (it’s a long story), I kept thinking that Jewish contemplations of death and dying—contemplations that go beyond those of the here and now—haven’t actually gone away. They have just been channeled through a different medium: the Jewish comic. Through their wit and through our laughter, Jewish comics are helping us—the am-Israel—struggle just a little less with the world’s uncomfortable truths.

Sarah Emanuel is Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. She resides on the coast with her fiancée, Zoë, and their stereotypically lesbian farm of four dogs and two cats.

The post Why Jewish Comics are Obsessed with Suffering and Death appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Jody Mak and Michael Donohoe for Rest of World)

“You wanna see what kind of Muslim you really are? Watch what happens when Allah tests you, and Allah will test us with different things. For some people, when they’re looking to get married, they’re being tested.”

Baba Ali speaks about marriage with the passion of an imam, but the humor of a stand-up comedian. He’s the founder of Los Angeles-based Half Our Deen—a private matrimony website for Muslims—which he established in 2011 after witnessing how young Muslims were struggling to find compatible spouses.

Baba Ali rose to prominence in 2008 as one of YouTube’s biggest Muslim video bloggers. A stand-up comedy world tour followed, and Ali said he was approached for marriage advice after every show.

“Doing 400 shows all around the world, Muslim brothers and sisters would come up to me after the shows and want to talk about marriage. And I realized that this is still an issue the Muslim community hasn’t fixed. We don’t address it; there’s no Muslim matrimonial service at masjids [mosques]. We have Islamic school, we have Quran study, we have tajwid [learning proper pronunciation of Quranic words]. But we have nothing for single people looking to get married. Good luck.”

Baba Ali is not alone. Imam Ahmad Deeb, the Director of Religious Affairs at the Islamic Centre of Greater Toledo in Ohio, echoes a similar sentiment on what he sees as the crisis of marriage in Muslim communities and mosques’ inability to address it. He said to me, “Literally almost every single week someone is asking me ‘Imam, can you help me get married?’ Many of those young men and women are very accomplished. They’re successful, they’re religiously committed, but they’re struggling to find someone and get married.”

As Imam Deeb sees it, mosques are scrambling to find innovative ways to address the needs of their young congregants—who came of age in the Internet Era—to find suitable spouses as many of the older, more traditional avenues are being abandoned.

“Unfortunately, we’ve stigmatized tried and tested methods,” Imam Deeb laments. “People joke about the rishta [matchmaking] aunty. I’m not South Asian but I know that term because it’s so popular. As a Syrian we have something similar. Your mom goes to other aunties and searches for the best spouse for you. Ideally your mom really knows you and knows exactly what you want. Now, we make fun of these rishta aunties. We’ve gotten to the point now where we are unable to get creative…to help people get married.”

Yasmeena Menon is one such rishta aunty. Based in Toronto, she is the founder of the matchmaking site Muslim Matrimonial, which she runs with her husband. When she immigrated to Canada from India, Yasmeena found employment in the financial sector. But after establishing roots and building trust within Canada’s South Asian Muslim community, she decided to exit the corporate world and set up her own Muslim matchmaking venture. Initially she only took on a handful of clients. But as word spread and her matchmaking business grew, Yasmeena expanded her services across social media platforms, YouTube, and messaging apps where her clients could post profiles for themselves or their adult children.

Over time, her clients wanted more personalized attention to help them secure a spouse, which pushed Yasmeena to hire and train “marriage consultants.” Today, Yasmeena employs 40 marriage consultants who work one-on-one with their clients to find the best matches possible from Muslim Matrimonial’s pool of nearly 5,000 users.

(Source: Muslim Matchmaking by Veil)

One reason why young Muslims and their parents may be more drawn to services like Muslim Matrimonial is because they feel their local mosques have not prioritized helping Muslims meet compatible companions. According to the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, less than 30 percent of all adult mosque attendees in the U.S. are between the ages of 18 to 34, even though they make up 54 percent of the adult Muslim population. In Canada, less than half (48 percent) of the Muslim population attends mosque at least once a week, and only 22 percent report doing so for socializing and education purposes.

“The majority of young Muslims who want to get married are not coming into the mosque,” Imam Deeb explains. “It could be for multiple reasons: they’re not connecting with the leadership; most mosques’ organizational structures are extremely dysfunctional; the priorities of mosques are incredibly sporadic, chaotic, unstructured, and many times not even rooted in Muslim priorities. For example, according to Islam, helping people get married is what we call a fard kifayah, meaning communal obligation.”

Imam Deeb makes a distinction between immigrant Muslim mosques and Black Muslim mosques. He says Black American mosques are generally led by the imams, who decide the mosques’ priorities and lead with a team around them. In predominantly immigrant mosques, however, imams often serve as employees to lead prayers and give Friday sermons, so the mosque’s priorities are not shaped by an established religious leader.

Mosques’ priorities, Deeb says, “are informed by a board that is loosely democratically chosen, most of whom have no expertise in Islam or leading Muslim institutions. Board members can be engineers and physicians—the people who built the mosque. The fact that mosques are not dealing with the issue of marriage is because they don’t recognize that it’s a communal obligation. Most mosques have no idea what to do. They are seeing a culture that is rapidly changing every few years. We have dating apps now, like Tinder, which is about getting sex quickly. This is what people who are on these apps are telling me.”

Dating apps like Tinder didn’t exist in 2001 when Baba Ali of Half Our Deen turned to the internet after his two-year marriage ended in divorce. He discovered that few online services catered to the diverse range of religious practices within Muslim communities, so he set out to build his own. Several failed attempts to launch a site ensued, and the website cycled through different versions before Ali settled on the name Half Our Deen. In Arabic, “deen” means religion, and the site takes its name from the Islamic principle that marriage fulfills 50 percent of one’s religious duties in life.

I asked Ali why someone would use Half Our Deen over more well-known sites and apps, such as Minder or Muzmatch—two dating apps targeted at tech-savvy single Muslims. “Dating apps are copied over from non-Muslim sites,” Ali says. “We just changed one letter and went from Tinder to Minder.”

(Source: Half Our Deen)

The perceived non-Muslim nature of these dating apps is why Majid—an Indian immigrant living in Vancouver, Canada—turned to Half Our Deen when he wanted to get married. “I had associated Muzmatch and Minder as the Muslim versions of Tinder,” Majid told me over email. “Apps inspired by something haram [forbidden in Islam] were not my cup of tea. These apps explicitly call themselves ‘dating’ apps whereas I was looking for something exclusive for marriage. I never installed any of these apps.”

Negative connotations associated with the word “dating” in Muslim circles is something familiar to Annisa Rochadiat, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Stanislaus. Her research explores how Muslims—particularly Muslim women—use online dating and social media platforms for matchmaking purposes.

“When I launched my study of Muslim women’s use of dating sites, I encountered this difficulty because I didn’t realize how stigmatized the word ‘dating’ is,” Professor Rochadiat explains. “So when I was recruiting participants I didn’t really get any hits because recruiting people for using Muslim dating apps is almost like a contradiction. I had to scale back and reformulate my recruitment ad to say ‘Muslim matchmaking’ because I felt that was more neutral as it didn’t have that dating connotation.”

Rochadiat found that Muslim women often feel limited by traditional modes of seeking marriage—through the community, family, or the mosque—because of their communal nature where their marriage becomes many people’s concern. They felt a lack of privacy and agency over selecting their partners, and were more comfortable turning to online spaces where they could easily access “extractive information”— personal details on an individual—to filter out potential matches for themselves.

Services like Half Our Deen also allow users to self-report their level of religiosity and quantify their practices, including their observance of halal food restrictions and how often they pray. In offline settings this can be a lengthy process involving self-disclosure and back and forth conversations with a potential match.

“If you’re particularly observant of religious practices, you might have to get a third party involved because you have to do it in a public setting,” Professor Rochadiat elaborates. “That offers limitations too on the types of questions you can ask. The same goes for family meetings, so some information might be filtered out, which with online platforms is readily available. You can privately know more about an individual without any awkwardness. This is very new, something that technology provides for those seeking romantic relationships. Muslim women especially felt that technology allowed them to initiate contact without feeling brazen, which in an offline setting would feel unusual because it’s normally the men or the brothers…who would come forward and initiate contact.”

Professor Rochadiat also discovered that a large percentage of Muslim women who use online dating systems are converts to Islam. “This is related to extractive information,” she says. “So if someone contacts you, they already know you’re a convert which, in an offline setting, someone may not be able to tell. Muslim converts feel, more than born Muslims, the limitations of meeting someone offline.”

Tory, a white convert to Islam from Michigan, confirms Rochadiat’s findings. “Being a convert, I didn’t have an aunty network of people who were going to find me a spouse. By going to online networks, I could control the process and see how it goes. I could be more anonymous; I didn’t have to make this big announcement to my community that I was looking for a spouse.”

Tory wanted prospective matches to know about her love of road biking, so she posted a picture of herself in full bike gear on her Half Our Deen profile.

“I felt I could represent myself a little bit more,” she says. “It would help weed out people that would be naysayers. I never have to meet them or justify my life decisions, and on the flip side I could do that with the gentlemen too and read the things that they wrote.”

Single and divorced Muslim women in their 30s and 40s are another sizeable demographic using online matchmaking systems. Professor Rochadiat explains why they are turning to online sites: “When we look at dating apps in general, not just in Muslim communities, there are terms called the ‘dating market’ and people who belong to ‘thin markets’ which are because of limited social capital in the offline world. It includes people from sexual minorities, like LGBTQ people who are older [and] divorcees. So technology allows access for these individuals to seek out other people.” Muslim converts also fall in the category of “thin markets” because they do not have familial networks or social ties that typically facilitate marriages for other North American Muslims.

I asked Professor Rochadiat if she shares Imam Deeb’s opinion that a marriage crisis looms in Muslim communities across North America today. She thinks on it and replies, “There is some truism in what the Imam said, but more research would need to be conducted in terms of the percentages of people who are married or not.”

“I think we should be wary of using the language of crisis,” says Justine Howe, associate professor and chair of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her research focuses on Muslims in the United States. In her view, people use the language of crisis to talk about deeper worries about the place of Muslims in American society and tensions around assimilation. In Imam Deeb’s case, his real concern is about the place of the mosque and if it will remain the spiritual locus or center of authority in North American Muslim communities. Since younger Muslims have replaced traditional processes of finding a spouse with new technologies, some like Imam Deeb worry that such innovations are harbingers of even greater disruptions to Muslim life.

“There are now a wide range of Muslim authorities who weigh in on the context of marriage in the U.S.,” Professor Howe explains. “You have imams who are performing marriage counselling for couples before they get married, so they see the office of the imam as more of a pastoral role to congregants. But you also have a wide range of different scholars in both Canada and the U.S. who are offering guidance about how to get married. And these are not necessarily new initiatives.”

“So this question around who should be guiding couples to marriage is a live debate, and like everything in the landscape of U.S. Muslim communities, it’s all very diffuse and happening at the local level. So you might have in certain places or mosques that they really have robust programs to help with these questions, but in other local spaces you might not have as much or there might be a mismatch between the kind of guidance that’s being given and what the young adults actually are seeking.”

Historically, the mosque is just one place where North American Muslims have turned for guidance to find their spouses, but Professor Howe explains that there have always been a wide range of ways of going about matchmaking.

“The Muslim Students Association (of the U.S. and Canada) had marriage ads in local chapters, but also in Islamic Horizons and other publications going back to the 70s. Parents would post ads for their kids, which suggests that the usual channels of finding Muslim spouses perhaps weren’t working in the way they intended, so people turned to the 1980s version of the classifieds. ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) would hold various events and matchmaking conferences, and there would be workshops and seminars about finding a spouse.”

With this history in mind, it seems the move towards online platforms to find marriage and companionship—even in Muslim communities—is an organic evolution in step with the culture at large.

“I think this language of crisis of marriage is often because marriage is inflected in other, broader kinds of questions within Muslim communities—debates about race, gender, class; for converts the case of authenticity, and questions about the centrality of religious identity over other forms of identity,” Professor Howe says, offering a different take on the anxieties expressed about marriage by Imam Deeb and Baba Ali. “Marriage crisis—whether in Muslim communities or broader American society—these are anxieties about reproduction, the future of the community and what it should ideally look like. Some of the consternations that I have observed are about how marriage has been pushed back later, so as Muslim women are increasingly becoming more educated over the last few decades, taking on professional careers, much of the anxiety over marriage is ‘how do we get elite members of our community married?’”

For Muslim women in particular, turning to online spaces is a way to mitigate many of the challenges of seeking suitable companions as mosques may not offer the inclusive environments many women are seeking. Mosques often have a separate area for women, segregated from the rest of the congregation and hidden from view. Some mosques may not even offer such a space for women, or bar them from praying there altogether.

“One of the things I’ve noticed, which is really interesting, is groups of Muslim women forming halaqas [circles] offering online courses because they feel the masjid is a very masculine and male-oriented space,” Professor Rochadiat says of an emerging trend she’s witnessing.

With the right tools and leadership, community building can be done online. Mosques, along with other places of worship, are increasingly holding live streamed events, and people are becoming more comfortable adapting technology for religious purposes, which includes seeking romantic partners.

“The online world is kind of like a third space,” Professor Rochadiat concludes. “While it reflects much of the offline world, there are also some dynamics which are unique to online platforms because of certain characteristics of online communication. So we’re going to see more variation in terms of engagement as people find alternative ways to participate in religious life and experiences.”

The concerns of young, observant Muslims around the use of technology and how it affects their religious practices speaks to a broader trend about adapting to our changing world without losing one’s identity. For now, online platforms are helping young Muslims navigate the tricky terrain of religious observance with contemporary life. And in significant numbers, observant Millennial and Gen Z Muslims are turning to matrimonial apps to help them fulfill their religious obligation to marry.

Hina Husain is a freelance writer based in Toronto. She’s written for Foreign Policy, CBC, and Vice. You can find her on Twitter @HinaTweetsNow.

The post Muslim Marriage Matchmaking Goes Digital appeared first on The Revealer.

(Poster for Law & Order: SVU, one of the longest-running prime-time shows on television)

Even after the video circulated of George Floyd’s brutal murder on May 25, 2020, and the ensuing months of protests organized by the Movement for Black Lives, television shows that celebrate police have persisted in popularity. Although police procedural dramas have received critical attention for propping up the ideological foundation of police violence and mass incarceration, they have staying power. Over the past ten years, as many as 29% of all scripted dramas have been crime shows. Two of the longest-running series on the air (NCIS and Law and Order: SVU) are police procedurals, as were seven of the fifteen most watched dramas on television from 2019-2020.

Viewers of crime dramas, according to a recent study, are confident the criminal justice system works well and tend to support the death penalty, both views that correlate with political conservativism. This confidence is reinforced by the soothing routine of the police procedural. In the words of Guardian critic David Stubbs, “the detectives may trudge somberly from one improbable homicide scene to another, week in, week out, as the blue lights circle bleakly, but we, the viewers, sink gleefully into our sofas ready to drink it in like cocoa. It’s a parlour game, a ritual.”

By describing such shows as a “ritual,” what can we learn about the representation of law enforcement in popular media?

This question is important because police procedurals developed an abiding apologetics for the police by relying on Christian rhetoric. In turn, this apologetics shifted from television studio to the streets. The tropes of duty and self-sacrifice constantly churned out by The Police Tribunal, the national online news site of Blue Lives Matter, began in the writers’ rooms of police shows as far back as the 1950s. In developing that rhetoric, police procedurals adapted the Christian, and particularly Catholic, significance of duty and self-sacrifice from the vocation of the priesthood. To understand television’s enduring ideological support for law enforcement we need to scrutinize these religious undercurrents.

Paying attention to the police procedural’s use of priestly characteristics in the depiction of law enforcement enables us to better understand how this television genre has rendered the police as morally righteous, indispensable, and as a source of salvation for American society. These television dramas have centered the police in the country’s national mythology, which has made criticism and reform of law enforcement all the more difficult.

Rhetoric of sacred self-sacrifice appears not only in television shows about the police; it features heavily in patriotic narratives of fallen soldiers and in narratives of domestic policing in the wake of 9/11. The official Blue Lives Matter Facebook group dedicates itself to “the warriors who stand on this line, to those who wage war in the streets, to those we have lost and will lose.” This sense of inevitable self-sacrifice contributes to the pervasive notion that the police, like priests, are separate from the rest of society but also uniquely responsible for its salvation.

(Photo Source: Susan Walsh for the Associated Press)

Dragnet, the show that Law and Order producer Dick Wolf referred to as “the father of us all,” created strong associations between the police and the priesthood. The show began on the radio in 1949 and moved to television in the 1950s. Jack Webb, the show’s creator, producer, and star, developed a close working relationship with Chief William Parker of the Los Angeles Police Department, an early adopter of “the thin blue line” image which symbolizes the police’s essential role in society. Webb described the show as “entertainment with an ulterior motive” and agreed that Parker would have oversight over all the Dragnet scripts. The LAPD’s reputation was tarnished around the same time by the 1951 “Bloody Christmas” police riot as well as consistent complaints of racial bias. Webb, who was an experienced actor on hardboiled noir radio shows, applied the stripped-down, masculinist style of that genre to defend law enforcement. A key feature of the show was its attempts at realism, utilizing extensive technical input from LAPD experts. Webb cultivated the impression of verisimilitude, taking a “ripped-from-the-police-files” approach, and began each episode with the narrator’s declaration that “the story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Decades later, one Catholic intellectual praised Webb’s theological valorization of the police, describing the opening formula as “familiar as an oath, comforting as a prayer.”

One way to understand how police procedurals adapt the rhetoric of priestly duty is to examine moments when priests and police appear together in these shows. The presence of the priest in a procedural facilitates comparisons that sacralize law enforcement. This was true in the 1950s, but also recently: in 2015 the executive producer of the CBS series Blue Bloods described the show as an “interweaving of two tribes: cops and church.”

But why has the Catholic priest been so important for police shows in a country that has had its fair share of anti-Catholic prejudice? In police procedurals Catholicism connotes urban white ethnicity, specifically, that of Irish-Americans. Larger urban environments are the settings for many procedurals and there is a longstanding cultural assumption that Irish-Americans work as law enforcement in such cities. This ethnic and religious particularity humanizes the police, giving these primarily white figures greater depth while making them more than simply tools of the state. The association between the police, white ethnicity, and Catholicism also endows the police with a moral vocabulary of duty, self-sacrifice, and hierarchy that helps secure the police a righteous position in both national discourse and city budgets.

Policing as Sacred Duty in Dragnet

Dragnet goes out of its way to show the resemblance between the Catholic priesthood and the LAPD. In an episode from 1953, “The Big Little Jesus,” a crèche baby Jesus statue goes missing from a church on Christmas Eve. The priest who reports the theft remarks to Joe Friday (Jack Webb) that it is unfortunate how “in so short of a time men learn to steal.” Friday speaks to the priest as if they were colleagues: “But consider us, Father.” The priest is confused by the “us.” “If some of them didn’t, you and me would be out of work,” Friday explains. Priests and police exist to counter the sinful impulses of humanity.

As the series progressed, however, it became clear that the police might be outperforming the priests. In the 1969 episode “B.O.D.”, (Dragnet 27) a priest- journalist shadows the detectives as they pull a night shift at the Business Office Division. The priest, Father Barnes (Grant Williams), is consistently amazed at the LAPD’s combination of efficiency and respectful treatment of Los Angeles’s citizens. At the end, Father Barnes can finally do something the detectives can’t, as he rushes off to a hospital to assist in performing last rites for a fatally injured officer. When priests like Barnes appear in Dragnet, they are members of the same spiritual family as the police, yet less equipped to confront the moral problem of the age: modern crime. And yet, Father Barnes’ eagerness to perform last rites suggests a partnership, a shared commitment to making sacrifices for the sake of the community.

Police self-sacrifice in Dragnet frequently serves to justify the use of lethal force. This becomes clear in the season three episode “Public Affairs.” It first aired on September 19, 1968, just months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the uprisings in D.C., Chicago, and Baltimore, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and merely one month after the authoritarian crackdown on protests at the Chicago Democratic Convention. In this episode, Joe Friday and his partner Bill Gannon appear on a local television show to respond to criticism of law enforcement. Friday argues that the police preserve democracy by “bleeding for it,” all because they believe in law and order and “the idea that people are better than animals,” and loathe “the law of the jungle.” They sacrifice themselves for “the idea that a civilized nation is better than a jungle.”

Friday’s repeated references to the “jungle” take on a distinctly racist connotation as the next member of the audience mounts the podium, the dashiki-clad Mondo Mabamba (Dick Anthony Williams). Mabamba never removes his sunglasses, referencing the demonic Boss Godfrey, “the man with no eyes,” from Cool Hand Luke (1967). If police officers are offering themselves up as sacrifices for the common good, then Mondo Mabamba, as a Black nationalist, stands as their persecutor, accusing the LAPD of being second-rate Nazis. When Mabamba presses the detectives on the LAPD’s cowardly reliance on auto patrols, Friday responds that the department is considering foot patrols in the Black neighborhoods to establish trust. Mabamba sneers at his comrades in the front row, a signal that they will be ready when the beat cops come strolling by. The scene reinforces the implicit argument of the episode: a police officer is justified in taking the lives of dangerous people of color precisely because he is always ready to give his own.

(Left: Boss Godfrey in Cool Hand Luke; Right: Mondo Mabamba in “Public Affairs”)

Protecting the White Family in Contemporary Police Procedurals

Dragnet may have been the “father of them all” when it came to police procedurals, but pop culture representation of the police changed significantly in the ensuing decades as shows attempted to present more psychologically-developed characters struggling through the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. Friday’s lack of a personal life was the sign of his seriousness as a public servant. But following the publication of the 1971 novel The New Centurions by police-officer-turned-writer Joseph Wambaugh, the personal costs of policing became an abiding element in procedural storytelling for shows like Hillstreet Blues in the 1980s, NYPD Blues in the 1990s, and The Wire in the 2000s. In contrast to Dragnet, these series emphasize the pressures that “the job” exerts on the inner lives of complex characters. Police work often appears as tragically sisyphean and isolated in urban environments misgoverned by cynical elites.

Other prominent series continued the Dragnet tradition of deemphasizing the inner lives of their characters while emphasizing their role in investigative and legal procedures, most notably the Law and Order franchise. But there was no going back after the turn to the personal, and most shows fused soap-opera elements with the grind of crime-solving. As audiences were expected to care about the complex psychologies of characters in law enforcement, they were also being primed to identify police work with the military and counter-terrorist operations that followed 9/11. The patriotic rhetoric of self-sacrifice for the homeland began to reach a greater intensity than it ever achieved on Dragnet.

CBS’s Blue Bloods, which has aired since 2010, exemplifies this shift. Tom Selleck, iconic as the star of Magnum P.I., now plays the police chief of the New York Police Department as well as the patriarch of the Reagan family. His two sons, Danny (Donnie Wahlberg) and Jamie (Will Estes), have followed him into the family business, while his daughter Erin (Bridget Moynahan), works as a prosecutor for the district attorney. Danny, an Iraq War veteran with PTSD and a penchant for breaking the rules (and suspects’ faces), reinforces the link between the military and domestic law enforcement. Jamie is the youngest, a rookie beat patrol officer learning the basics after walking away from an elite legal career. Similar to Law and Order, Blue Bloods portrays the criminal justice system at each step, from the street to police headquarters and into the courtroom. But by making the NYPD into a family business, the show blurs the line between the personal interests of these characters and their official duties. The sacrifices they make for their careers, their family, and the public order become indistinguishable.

Blue Bloods plays up the Reagans’ Irish-Catholic roots, but we rarely see them in church. The ritual most important to the show is the weekly Sunday dinner during which the main themes of the episode are hashed over and usually resolved through Francis’ paternal guidance. By portraying Chief Francis as “more Catholic than the pope,” the show gives him a moral integrity that not only outstrips traditional religious leaders but also authorizes extra-judicial acts of violence.

The Reagans are not bound by the law, but have instead a deeper calling—defending the American family. In the contemporary police procedural there is a preoccupation with showing the police deeply sympathizing with the victims or, as the shows often call them, “vics.” This emotional connection fuels the detectives’ righteous pursuit of justice. The “vics” are mostly sympathetic characters with families depending on them. But who are the victims in these shows? Of the 26 police procedurals analyzed in Color of Change‘s “Normalizing Injustice” report, “the likelihood that primary crime victims were white men was 35%, white women 28%, men of color 22% (Black men 12%) and women of color 13%.” But in Blue Bloods, 78% of the victims were white, and 71% were male. While television’s most popular police dramas portray whites as the primary victims of crime, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that whites account for only 37% of the victims of violent crimes. Further, in Blue Bloods, Reagan family members and their acquaintances frequently appear as targets of violence. This connection shows the viewer whom the police ought to serve and protect—themselves, and by extension, other “real Americans.” The Reagans embody a fantasy of the victimized white-American family that is strong enough to strike back.

The theme of the vulnerable white police family received its most compelling treatment yet in HBO’s 2021 mini-series, The Mare of Easttown. The protagonist, detective Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet), lives and works in a suburb of Philadelphia hard-hit by the opioid crisis. Mare is traumatized by the suicides of close family members and haunted by the disappearance of young white women in her community. To close these cases, Mare consistently breaks from protocol and takes costly risks. And the costs are real: her relationship with friends and family and even the life of her coworker. The series excels at showing the viewer how much pain Mare has experienced—and how much she causes for the people in her life. But in the end she solves the mysteries and begins to heal, not only on her own, but along with the whole community.

Mare of Easttown’s final episode is titled “Sacrament,” suggesting the sacrament of reconciliation, and features another embattled character, Deacon Mark Burton (James McArdle). Cleared of murder charges, the deacon delivers a homily to a packed chapel in one of the series’ final scenes. Deacon Mark links his own rehabilitation in the community with a spiritual resurgence in Easttown, and invites the parishioners to reconcile with those who have been pushed “outside the circle.” Deacon Mark’s redemption parallels Mare’s. Previously she was the public face of the police’s inability to protect the young women of Easttown. But now Mare’s investigative competence and authentic connection to the people of her community have vindicated the police and given Deacon Mark another chance to minister to the parish. Even in this talent-packed, emotionally complex series, the partnership between the police and the priesthood as stewards and redeemers of a predominantly white community continues unabated.

The Police Procedural after Summer 2020

To open the fall 2020 television season, police procedurals aired season premiers that attempted to metabolize the protests of summer 2020 and address the debate about defunding the police. Blue Bloods responded defensively, portraying backlash against the police as a new opportunity for cynical criminals to get away with more. Black proponents of racial justice appear on the show as either unreasonably bitter or naive, oblivious to the unintended consequences of reforms to cash bail, such as the demoralization of the NYPD and the prospect of everyday New Yorkers being menaced by “criminals” unleashed on the streets. This echoes an established Republican talking point that has no basis in fact.

This context also affected the priestly dimension of the fictional police. The premiere of the twenty-second season of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, “Gladiators and Guardians,” is similar to Blue Blood’s opener in that it pushes the paranoid argument that the 2020 protests were a boon to criminals. It presents the public backlash against police violence as the trigger for sweeping “witch hunt” purges that could divide the NYPD. But it also triangulates, showing the detectives reflecting on their own susceptibility to unconscious racial bias. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) understands herself to be “biased for the victims” without realizing the impact of unconscious racial bias on her investigations. She requires the counseling of multiple Black officers and an unjustly treated Black civilian to grasp that she is not as “color blind” as she assumed. Here, Black police officers perform a clerical role for white officers: listening to confessions of racial bias and then expiating guilt.

Internal Affairs Captain Renee Curry (Aime Donna Kelly) questions Benson about her thought-process in the arrest of Jayvon Brown (Blake Morris) in an incident loosely based on the Central Park birdwatching incident of May 2020. When Benson denies acting out of racial bias, Curry stops audio-recording their interview and begins to educate Benson on how the well-intentioned “guardians” of public order need to take “a serious self-inventory.” The scene foregrounds Benson’s discomfort and shame. And yet Curry, a Black woman, is not only her inquisitor but a spiritual counselor, pushing Benson to examine herself in order to win back public trust. Later, Benson confesses her sins to Deputy Chief Garland (Demore Barnes), acknowledging that her unconscious racial bias is real and must be addressed. Garland listens patiently and instructs her to be wary of the NYPD’s institutional politics that will sacrifice white police like her in order to achieve better public relations without any concern for real reforms.

In both instances, Black police appear in a shifting clerical wardrobe, serving as inquisitors, confessors, and counselors. These priestly duties fall to Black characters who are now responsible for ministering to white sinners afflicted by unconscious racial bias. And yet the reforms these characters push for are all supposed to take place in the individual psyches of the detectives. Benson says as much when apologizing to Jayvon Brown at the end of the episode: “The NYPD…” She stops to correct herself, “I have a lot of work to do.” The emphasis rests on personal responsibility and self-scrutiny, rather than any structural changes to the criminal justice system.

***

The focus on individual “bad apples” seeks to deflect criticism from the police as an institution. Individual “maverick” detectives are at once the villains responsible for violent police abuse but also the heroes of this genre: think of Clint Eastwood as “Dirty Harry,” Mare Sheehan, or The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty. Police series center these rugged individuals, cloaking them in white-ethnic authenticity or, increasingly, principled Black patriotism.

By making the police-priesthood “colorblind,” police procedurals are merely updating their apologies for the white-supremacist violence of the current system. The figure of the priestly police officer continues to evolve in the television police procedural. But despite widespread criticism of American police departments, these shows still legitimize, heroize, and sacralize law enforcement in the United States.

Klaus Yoder is a historian of Christianity and a podcaster for Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History of the Devil. He teaches in the Religion Department at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

The post Cops and Clergy on TV: Catholicism and the Police Procedural Drama appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

I am happy to share some wonderful news. Last month, the Religion News Association, the largest professional organization for religion journalism in the United States, hosted its annual awards ceremony to honor work published in 2020. I am thrilled to announce that the Religion News Association honored the Revealer with “Excellence in Magazine Overall Religion Coverage,” the highest award for a print or online magazine.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

I am overjoyed that the Revealer received this recognition. Our writers, especially during 2020, displayed an extraordinary commitment to producing excellent work. In their remarks about the award, the Religion News Association specifically mentioned the Revealer’s special issue on “Religion and Sex Abuse Within and Beyond the Catholic Church” and reported that the Revealer “succeeds in taking the much-scrutinized topic of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and extending the analysis to similar improprieties found in other diverse religious institutions. The Revealer mines new unexplored territory.” I would like to thank the special issue’s writers as well as everyone who has worked to make the Revealer such a distinct and important publication.

In addition to this award, the Religion News Association honored three of our writers with awards for “Excellence in Religion Commentary.” Congratulations to Kaya Oakes, Tia Pratt, and Rebecca Epstein-Levi for sweeping this category! And, although it did not win, the Revealer Podcast was a Religion News Association finalist for best religion podcast. As they say, it is an honor to be nominated, especially for a podcast that only launched in 2020!

With all of this excitement for the Revealer, I am pleased to bring you our newest issue. Our November issue returns us to our roots with a focus on religion and multiple forms of media. The issue opens with Klaus Yoder’s “Cops and Clergy on TV” where he explores how, for decades, police procedural dramas have relied on Catholicism to portray police as sacred to America’s wellbeing, a trend that continues today in popular shows from Law and Order: SVU to Mare of Easttown despite widespread protests against the police. Next, in “Muslim Marriage Matchmaking Goes Digital,” Hina Husain investigates why young religious Muslims in North America are turning to matrimonial apps, rather than to their mosques or families, to find a spouse. Then, in “Why Jewish Comics are Obsessed with Suffering and Death,” Sarah Emmanuel reflects on Rachel Bloom’s newest stand-up show and the connection between Jewish humor and a preoccupation with death despite modern Judaism’s silence on what happens after we die. To follow that, in “The Fascinating Jesus Film You Probably Haven’t Seen,” Jill Hicks-Keeton reviews an unintentionally funny “faith-based” film and considers what its failures reveal about the world of conservative Christian media today.

Our November issue also includes an interview with journalist Sam Kestenbaum, where he chats with Contributing Editor Kali Handelman in “Insights from a Religion Reporter” about what he has learned covering religion in America for the New York Times. And, the issue features an excerpt from Michael Graziano’s book Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA, where Graziano describes the “religious approach” American spies undertook in their work overseas.

We are also excited to bring you the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Religion and the CIA.” Michael Graziano joins us with captivating stories about the role religion has played in CIA espionage. We explore how the CIA attempts to learn about religious traditions, what has happened when the CIA has tragically misunderstood religious practices across the globe, and how the CIA shifted its perspective on Islam following the end of the Cold War. You can listen to this fascinating episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The recognition the Revealer has received these past few weeks from the Religion News Association and elsewhere has been a delight. You have my commitment, dear readers, that we will continue to bring you the highest quality articles about religion. And we can’t wait for you to see what we have in store for the future!

Yours in appreciation,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Major Awards for the Revealer appeared first on The Revealer.