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We hope you enjoy this important and insightful episode: “Evangelical Masculinity.”

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(Tourists at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp)

The following excerpt comes from Daniel P. Reynolds’ book, Postcards from Auschwitz. Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance, published by NYU Press. The book explores what visitors encounter at places of Holocaust commemoration and why millions of people travel to Holocaust memorial sites and museums each year.

The excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

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The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum saw record attendance in 2016, receiving more than two million visitors from all over the world. There have been so many tourists to Auschwitz since its establishment as a memorial in 1947 that the concrete steps in the former barracks, now the main exhibition halls, have been worn smooth and concave from heavy foot traffic. Since 1999, when the memorial museum launched its website, the numbers of tourists to Auschwitz have climbed dramatically. Accommodating such numbers presents enormous logistical challenges for crowd control, for scheduling, and for the provision of personally guided tours in 17 different languages each day. In the face of such massive demand, how does the memorial provide its visitors a meaningful experience that amounts to more than macabre voyeurism, or crass consumerism? Despite the challenges in managing a site that was never intended to host crowds of tourists, the memorial’s mission to remember and prevent future barbarism attracts more people today than ever before. The museum’s director, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, explains the global lure and core message of Auschwitz in the present: “In an era of such rapid changes in culture and civilization, we must again recognize the limits beyond which the madness of organized hatred and blindness may again escape out of any control.” It is tempting to read Dr. Cywiński’s comment as self-referential, as if the description of controlled madness applies as much to Auschwitz tourism as to the events the museum commemorates and documents.

The first impressions at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum can indeed be chaotic, with long lines at the ticket windows, tour guides frantically rounding up their groups, a cacophony of languages, a parking lot full of busses entering and exiting. Tourists ostensibly come to learn about the perils of “organized hatred and blindness” that generated the Holocaust; they are challenged to put the values of tolerance into practice as they share limited space with one another. Sightseers vie for elbowroom to take photos of confiscated luggage, canisters of poison, prisoner uniforms, crematoria furnaces, and other reminders that more than 1.1 million people were murdered here between 1940 and 1945. They fill the museum bookstores, they stand in line to pay for refreshments and use the restrooms, and they crowd the post office window to mail postcards of the memorial to their friends and family back home. What remains to be seen is whether these visitors take any lessons with them after they leave.

It is this image of buying postcards at Auschwitz that I choose to represent the phenomenon at the heart of this book, “Holocaust tourism.” Sightseeing connected to the genocide of European Jews and the murder of millions of other victims will inevitably strike some as a cringe-worthy, inauthentic, and commercialized practice that has no place in connection to a history as inviolable as the Holocaust. After all, the problem of understanding the Nazi crimes through earnest scholarship or committed art is vexed enough without entering the profane realm of tourism. At first glance, postcards are emblematic of the tackier side of tourism, often depicting clichéd scenic views in garishly enhanced colors, so to discover their presence at the most notorious site of Nazi mass murder seems somewhere between distasteful and obscene. Postcards are emblematic of the presumed superficiality of tourism, a momentary and forgettable act of sharing an image. But postcards have a flip side, literally and figuratively, making them a good metaphor for tourism as a practice that allows for more sophistication than meets the eye. Postcards invite travelers to inscribe their own commentary on the back, to direct the images to a particular audience and accompany it with a commentary that may undercut the representation of the place the card is meant to promote. Postcards have the capacity to reveal more than the tourism industry authorizes, and offer a medium for tourists to exercise a degree of critical agency (if they so choose). In contrast to the medium’s cliché, postcards from Auschwitz usually exhibit muted tones and portray somber images, indicating a different mode of tourism that promotes reflection, even unease, over enjoyment. Tourists who send a postcard from a place of atrocity are likely to be more self-conscious about what they inscribe on the back, since their own text exposes them to critique by their readers. What could one say on the back of a postcard that could possibly be commensurate with the history of Auschwitz?

As valid as misgivings about postcards from Auschwitz and the phenomenon they represent may be, Holocaust tourism continues to flourish. The recurrence of genocide around the world should make us skeptical that such tourism has done anything to prevent the kind of insanity and violence that, more than seventy years ago, murdered six million European Jews; yet, visitors to Holocaust memorials typically express appreciation for the opportunity to learn important lessons about humanity and its capacity for violence. And they do so at a growing number of Holocaust memorial sites in places as far away from the original event as Sydney and Shanghai. Tourists in Washington, D.C. wait in long lines to secure limited passes to the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in similar numbers, with 1.62 million visitors in 2016. Since its completion in 2005, the number of visitors to the information center of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe has steadily increased from 360,000 to a record of 475,000 in 2015—a number that does not include the many visitors to the outdoor memorial who do not enter the information center. These numbers are part of a larger picture about tourism of all kinds, which UNESCO characterizes as the world’s largest industry and one that is expected to continue to grow globally. Our highly visual global culture seems increasingly obsessed with seeing that which most of us, thankfully, will never endure. It is the job of scholars to offer an account of tourism’s motivations and complexities, to take seriously its modalities of signification, to acknowledge both its appeal and its peril, and to put forth the questions that prompt deeper reflection.

At present, there has been little effort to take tourism’s role in Holocaust remembrance seriously and attempt to understand not only its popularity, but its possible value. The two terms—Holocaust and tourism—have only recently been brought together, usually in a context where the writer can disavow the phenomenon. Indeed, the study of tourism of any kind, let alone Holocaust tourism, is something of a marginal field of inquiry within the academy. Those who research tourism have struggled to have their inquiry taken seriously, combatting well-established attitudes within the realm of scholarship against that which is seen as commercial or frivolous. In contrast, the Holocaust occupies an overwhelming position in Western thought, having defined the trajectory of research in the humanities, social sciences, and even the natural sciences like no other event since 1945. Unlike the study of tourism, the study of the Holocaust has become so firmly established in the academy that some approaches have achieved the status of doctrine, for better or worse. In focusing on Holocaust tourism, this book questions the attitudes and beliefs that inform the study of both the Holocaust and tourism, asking if they are still adequate to address the continued prevalence of the Holocaust in the Western imagination, or to acknowledge the new realities of tourism as the world’s largest industry.

I enter this discussion as something of an outsider, trained in the field of German studies with a focus on literature. While the Holocaust occupies a central place in German studies, it is a field in its own right that draws on research from numerous other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. But it is safe to say that tourism has been, at best, a marginal topic in both German studies and Holocaust studies. To undertake an analysis of Holocaust-themed tourism, I have turned to work undertaken largely by anthropologists, whose questions about travelers have helped me immensely in framing my approach. Holocaust tourism is an unwieldy topic that challenges the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge while simultaneously challenging the boundaries of comfortable discourse. The topic fuses two realms of experience—that of the Holocaust as an unparalleled historical event, and that of tourism as a popular mode of intercultural encounter—that are generally kept separate. This book argues that anyone interested in understanding Holocaust tourism engages by necessity in a broadly interdisciplinary inquiry. This volume draws upon the numerous inquiries into both the Holocaust and tourism that, despite their abundance, have remained largely disconnected from one another. In connecting them, I also rely on personal experiences and observations shared by many Holocaust tourists, as well as my own. The goal here is not to “correct” either disciplinary or non-academic accounts of the Holocaust or tourism, but rather to engage in a conversation about both the pragmatics and the ethics of Holocaust tourism, to identify problems, and to acknowledge possibilities for contributing to public memory.

Before introducing the chapters ahead, it is important to outline the trends in scholarship on the Holocaust and tourism that inform this work and lay the intellectual foundations for this inquiry. The task of theorizing Holocaust tourism is daunting, not least because of the seemingly incommensurate loci of the Holocaust and of tourism in the imagination. In what follows, I chart how the disciplinary developments of Holocaust studies and tourism studies have generated insights and methodologies that have made sense within certain disciplinary confines. Holocaust tourism, however, challenges both fields by exposing the lacunae between the academic theory and an emerging form of practice that neither field has been particularly eager to address.

Daniel P. Reynolds is the Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages in the German Department at Grinnell College.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out Episode 15 of the Revealer podcast: “Holocaust Tourism” with Daniel P. Reynolds.

The post Holocaust Tourism’s Popularity appeared first on The Revealer.

(Illustration of Bangalore courtesy of Plenty Facts)

Chapter One of The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder opens with the eponymous scene. Author Tulasi Srinivas, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emerson College, is cajoling a cow into an elevator. The poor bovine is afraid of the glass-walled enclosure that will transport her to the eighth floor of a brand new luxury apartment complex where she is about to play the starring role in a house-blessing ceremony (grihapravesham) for a million-dollar penthouse. The owners had hired a priest to perform this traditional ritual so the sacred cow’s presence would make their home suitable for habitation and usher prosperity into it. This is a scene played out across hundreds of elevators in hundreds of high-rise apartment complexes that now dominate the skyline of Bangalore—India’s high-tech city. With the help of a few ripe bananas, the cow finally makes it to the penthouse.

Elsewhere in the city, a construction site is undergoing a similar kind of consecration ritual. On the grounds of what will soon be another high-rise apartment complex, a local Hindu priest performs a ground-blessing ceremony (bhoomi puja), creating a small Vedic fire altar and – with prayers to Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth) and Bhoomidevi (the earth who is a goddess) – seeks the removal of bad spirits from the area. A developer commissioned this ritual at the request of construction workers who live in makeshift housing on the building site and work all day climbing bamboo scaffolding without hard hats or shoes. They refuse to work on sites in which the earth has not been ritually placated for fear that scaffolding might collapse or machines might malfunction, causing injury or death. All across Bangalore, amidst the constant throng of bulldozers and cranes making way for new construction, harried priests move from site to site with mobile phones practically attached to their ears as they fulfill overwhelming numbers of requests to consecrate land and buildings with prayers for safety, prosperity, or both.

In her stunning and provocative book, Srinivas draws on twenty years of fieldwork to highlight such stark contrasts of life in twenty-first century Bangalore. Some are astonishing, like cows in elevators, temples on Facebook, gods waiting in traffic, and giant robotic deities. Others are despairing or subversive, like the ritual taming of hazardous construction sites and land-grabbing gods. This rapidly changing urban space is thoroughly animated by rituals that have been transformed by modern materials and infused with the hopes and dreams—along with the anxieties and fears—of life in this unstable and unpredictable world.

The creative uses of ritual, Srinivas argues, allow priests, ritual specialists, and devotees to co-create moments of wonder that help them address the emotional valences of their lives, conjuring moments of awe in which they may dwell, at least for the time being. Srinivas focuses particularly on how ritual draws on the “techniques, tools, and strategies of capitalism” in order to resist capitalist projects. But as Srivinas observes, in many cases these rituals end up reinvigorating capitalist ideas and practices even as they seeks to resist them.

Srinivas focuses on the chief priests and devotees of two Hindu temples in the neighborhood of Malleshwaram. This was once a neighborhood of small middle-class bungalows interspersed with streams, man-made lakes, and rocky outcrops. Developers bulldozed it in the 1990s in order to make way for sky-scraping complexes and shopping malls that would cater to the new “global software workforce,” or as it is also known, the “boomtown bourgeoisie.” Over the past few decades, Bangalore has become home to Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, among many other multinational corporations (MNCs) after India relaxed restrictions on foreign direct investments. What was formerly referred to as “the garden city” is now the “high-tech city” or even “India’s Silicon Valley.” Malleshwaram transformed from a neighborhood characterized by nature, leisureliness, and what one former inhabitant characterized as “mood,” to one that is highly securitized, impersonal, and traffic-laden.

(Bangalore at night)

Like urban spaces across the globe, Bangalore is permeated by both heightened hopes and heightened anxieties. The gap between rich and poor is widening. Yet even the upwardly mobile find themselves – as Srinivas puts it – “plagued by guilt, doubt, fear, and greed.” They witness the poor around them getting poorer, even as they aspire for more wealth. And they worry that the wealth they have may be here today but gone tomorrow. MNC jobs pay well, yet they do not promise security of rank, salary, or even permanent employment as family businesses and government work once did. Against this backdrop, Srinivas shows readers that the ritual creation of wonder is not a luxury for her interlocutors, but a means of survival. It is a way to harness radical hope in a very uncertain time.

Each chapter of the book examines a different aspect of city living – new building projects, traffic jams, cash, technological innovations, and experiences of time – to explore how each opens up new possibilities for thinking about, experiencing, and creating rituals that recast modern living in a new light. Let me turn to some further examples to illustrate.

Early in the book, Srinivas discusses the “Dead-Endu” Ganesha shrine that mysteriously appeared on a triangular plot of land owned by the city. Like many other public spaces, that plot had fallen into neglect and was used for both littering and public urination. Now that people worship a divine being at that site, it will be incredibly difficult for developers to build on it. As Srinivas explains, developers routinely hire thugs to bribe city officials and intimidate homeowners in order to buy up city land. But few would ever consider demolishing a place of worship. Any building taking its place would inevitably be tainted by the specter of a displeased deity and accompanying bad sprits. In a city of constant landgrabs, citizens (along with their god) have grabbed land in their own subversive way with Dead-Endu Ganesha, thus exercising some control over the future of their city – or at least one small triangle of it.

(Advertisement for a “vastu” consulting service)

Meanwhile, inhabitants of the city’s new high-rise apartment complexes enlist ritual specialists not only to bless their homes, but to provide vaastu (traditional Indian system of architecture) revisions to existing housing. These rituals correct “bad vibrations” in the construction that have brought misfortune. At the “Golden Orchards,” for example, when the residents living on the West and South sides of the complex began to run into problems with their businesses, they hired a vaastu specialist who informed them that it was the servants’ entrances rather than the main entrances to their homes that were the profitable ones. Residents were pleased with this finding and hired construction workers to switch the entrances. In another example, a routine vaastu checkup revealed that a family’s home was arranged in a way that was bad for their health – the kitchen must be moved from the north to the southwest corner, the master bedroom repositioned, and all of the cupboards and closets shifted in order to allow for optimum energy flow and to produce a “comfortable” life. Among many other ritual options, vaastu assures them happiness and prosperity if their living spaces allow for the harmonious balance of energies.

In another example, Srinivas turns to a Ganesha temple in the same neighborhood in which chief priest Dandu Shastri collects colorful paper currencies from across the globe. He strings them onto garlands for the deity, displaying green American dollars most prominently. Shiny coins in silver and gold adorn Ganesha, the other deities, and the walls surrounding them. While it is customary in Hindu temples for devotees to offer the gods material goods including food, flowers, incense, and money, this kind of ornamentation by cash is highly unusual. Here, the glitz and shine of money creates wonder, eliciting “oohs” and “aahs” from temple visitors and producing a large increase in footfall. Is money being worshipped here? No, Srinivas concludes. She argues, drawing on Joyce Flueckiger’s work on the goddess Gangamma, that an aesthetic of excess demonstrates god’s power. Cash-clad Ganesha, she writes, mirrors the infinite possibilities and mysterious power that devotees want to see in their own lives. Devotees across the class spectrum marvel at the wealth of the gods and it gives them hope that god/s can make them wealthy too. This awe in the power of money along with the desire for more of it is wrapped up in a dharmic philosophy which claims that if you are rich, you must have been blessed by god and if you are poor, it is because of what you did in a previous life. But there is hope. No matter your dharmic past, god can help in the here and now.

Srinivas argues that this novel use of money at the temple is a way of resisting the capitalist order. By taking money out of circulation and using is as an aesthetic and even moral object, money is transformed into something the capitalist order did not intend. Ritual here disrupts the capitalist project not by rejecting it, but by capturing or using the very object to which that project aspires.

But some devotees are suspicious of the priests’ motives as they appear to be caught up in the same neoliberal processes as everyone else in the city. They advertise their temples and resident deities by employing flashy marketing materials – here, in the form of cold hard cash. Elsewhere, they attract devotees to their rituals by creating animatronic gods with glowing eyes and moving weapons, and by hiring flower-discharging helicopters. This is a situation critiqued by many who accuse them of greed and manipulation. Srinivas points out the great irony in such sentiments. The devotees engaging in and experiencing wonder through these rituals are all seeking higher-paying jobs themselves. They all want to live in nicer apartments and vacation abroad. And they all use marketing techniques to sell their IT products. They just don’t want the priests to do the same. They repeat the sentiment we find in American public discourse that wants religion to occupy a realm completely separate from that of economic exchange even though it never has and never can. Srinivas brilliantly uses this discussion to examine the limits of wonder. When devotees distrust the priests, the wonder they produce becomes ineffective. Wonder needs trust to work.

Srinivas’s experienced and eloquent prose gives this book a rare combination of provocativeness and accessibility. As a result, I have been able to share her work with my University of Oklahoma students to very productive effect. They have been enthralled by their exposure to Hinduism as it is lived on the ground in a rapidly changing urban environment. There are many aspects of this environment unfamiliar to my mainly Oklahoman and north-Texan students, provoking some difficult but fruitful conversations. The grihapravesham attendees’ excitement at a pile of cow dung – a sacred substance – on the marble kitchen floor of the penthouse, for example, elicited a long discussion of the differences between Hindu concepts of purity, auspiciousness, and cleanliness. Other aspects of Bangalorean life are familiar to my students. “That sort of development is exactly what is happening in my hometown,” one student from rural Oklahoma averred. “It’s so sad.” Everyone everywhere in our globalized world is familiar with the destruction of old lifeworlds making way for new ones. And the use – the necessity – of wonder in coping with that destruction and the ensuing uncertainty it brings made my students think concretely about what hopes and wonder replace what has been destroyed. Among sleek new megachurches and incense-filled yoga studios is the promise of new jobs and the assurance that one can be “spiritual” and deeply fulfilled by working in them.

The Cow in the Elevator provides an intensely real and nuanced account of urban life in the twenty-first century. It settles for no simple critiques of individuals or classes of people, nor any simple solutions to the difficulties of our times. It will be of great interest to anyone who sees the world changing around them and wants to learn more about how others deal with such change and imagine different futures for themselves. While hope prevails, so do systems that perpetuate individual anxiety and social inequity. The experience of wonder gives us hope, but it does not solve our problems.

Deonnie Moodie is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. She is the author of The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently writing a book about the recent emergence of Hindu ideologies in Indian business schools and corporations.

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

The post Hindu Ritual in India’s High-Tech City appeared first on The Revealer.

(Painting by Jonathan Green)

One dreary winter’s evening, I cracked open a book of short stories that had been on my desk for months. Upon reading the opening pages of the first story, “Eula,” I knew this was a text unlike any I had encountered. There it was, in beautifully descriptive prose: the glory, the trauma, the joy, and the pain of my experience as a Black girl who grew up in the Afro-Protestant tradition. The book was Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. And as a dear friend recently said, “it’s still dealing with me.”

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is a collection of fictional stories that showcases the perspectives of Black women in what’s colloquially called “the Black Church.” Though history teaches us that there is no singular Black church and Black denominations vary greatly, Philyaw writes about how Black Christian women experience these communities. Addressing a range of topics from sexuality, gender, betrayal and sisterhood, to loneliness, grief and healing, Philyaw gives voice to the longings, desires, and dreams of Black women whose narratives have too often been kept at the margins.

Given the book’s astounding critical praise, awards – including the PEN/Faulkner Prize for Fiction – and the news that HBO Max will produce an onscreen adaptation of the book, it seems inconceivable that Philyaw originally had a difficult time finding a publisher. Facing rejection after rejection, Philyaw’s agent, Danielle Chicotti, mused that it was hard not to wonder why so many editors passed on the collection, with each insisting it wasn’t a “good fit.” But one small press said yes. West Virginia University Press gave Philyaw a book contract and the autonomy to write boldly without having to, in her words, “erase Blackness to recognize the universality of Black stories.”

Raised in Jacksonville, Florida amidst women similar to those she describes in her book, Philyaw’s upbringing in Black southern churches informs her work, even as she avoids direct depictions. She uses stories and memories from her youth in Jacksonville and adulthood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to enflesh fictionalized plots, while abiding by her own ethical standards to bring no harm to Black women.

With great care Philyaw explores the interior lives of Black women, the passions we are taught to hide, the things we are told not to want. She welcomes the reader into a sanctuary of communal witness, the truths of which, I believe, will resonate in the hearts and minds of those raised in, or in proximity to, Black Christian cultures. I had the opportunity to chat with Philyaw about these themes and more; our conversation has been edited for clarity.

Ambre Dromgoole: Tell me about the title of your book, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Who were you referring to and why was it important for you to write about them?

Deesha Philyaw: I wanted to write stories that explore how Black women grapple with getting free of the guilt and the shame and the fear that many of us are taught in church. And how we strive to live as our whole selves after being taught to reject or hide important parts of ourselves, such as our desires. I was writing about church ladies, these are women in the church, and people that I call “church lady adjacent.” When I say “church lady adjacent,” I’m referring to women who have someone in their life who is a church lady, someone close to them who influences them, a woman who has been and continues to be influenced by the church. I chose them because church ladies and church lady adjacents loomed large in my upbringing and, therefore, in my memories.

AD: The idea of church memories reminds me one of my favorite Aretha Franklin moments when she reflected on what church smelled like, which, for her, was “a lot of good fried chicken and homemade rolls and fried corn and things like that.” Can you describe some of your sensorial memories regarding Sundays and church services growing up? Is there anything that especially sticks out?

DP: What I remember most, of course, are the church ladies. In particular, a Sunday school teacher who wore stark whites when she was ushering. They would dress like nurses, because when somebody caught the Holy Ghost they had to catch them. They would even have on the white nurse shoes. It was just something about that whiteness, I mean it was spotless. Then, by contrast, she wore layers and layers of this Fashion Fair makeup. It was almost like seeing a balloon you’re worried is going to pop, for me it was like, “Oh my God. Is she gonna get makeup on that white?!” But it was always pristine. It was just something about that pristine whiteness and those layers of makeup that threatened the whiteness of her clothes. I would look at her and always wonder “what does she look like in jeans?”

Then there was another woman who was single and she was one of the people that carried the offering trays. This woman strutted! I mean she had a walk. As a kid I remember thinking of her as a peacock. Even though I learned later that peacocks are male and it’s right there in the name, the preening and the display that the peacock does. She was like that. Her makeup was on point. It didn’t seem heavy and caked on. She did the dramatic eye, and she was beautiful. She would always wear these beautiful dresses, but there was this one gorgeous cobalt blue that I can still see. I just remember falling in love with that color because of how she wore that dress. She had these heels that seemed impossibly high to me as a kid; they were probably stilettos. It was like the aisle of the church was her runway. She didn’t smile a lot, but she served face. She was absolutely beautiful and carried herself in this very carefree kind of manner that I didn’t always see at church, so it stood out to me. I was curious about her too. I could picture her in jeans, but I wondered if she was happy. 

AD: You’ve talked about “the Black Church” being a towering figure in Black culture, no matter if you are in the church or not, and we see that with the various characters in your book. Why do you think it’s such a significant site of cultural formation?

(Image courtesy of PBS)

DP: I believe it’s because the church was free Black people’s first institution of community and belonging. It’s all we had other than our immediate families. We found all this common good there, but that institution was also where we learned constricting binaries. There were these really tight rules of respectability concerning how, especially women, were to behave. This is where we got our very narrow definitions of goodness. Where we got a lot of shame and misinformation around sex and sexuality, and who women are; this is where we encountered double standards around gender that also played out in our home lives and were reinforced in the church. This is where we were also given hope in a world to come. It encouraged women in particular, not just Black people in general but Black women in particular, that any hardships you have, anything that’s unfair or uncomfortable, it’ll all be fine in the next life.

I didn’t feel like it was possible to talk about Black women getting free without the church, and the church’s role in what we’re trying to get free from being front and center. But not the church itself. It was really important for me that the women are the center and the churches were in their orbit, not the other way around.

AD: I co-facilitated a women’s book club on The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. While everyone adored it, some were troubled by what they saw as a negative portrayal of the church. What would you say to them?

DP: When we keep this stuff secret, that’s the prime condition for abuse to go unchecked, for hypocrisy and double standards to go unchecked. The church has done really well in not talking about it, not wanting to air it. In those dark conditions, in that secrecy the harm grows and flourishes.

I would say, as gently as I could, we could have these in-house conversations, sure, but we’re not. When people have been harmed in the church, the harm that the church does doesn’t stay in the church walls. It spills into the culture, so critique of it becomes fair game in the culture. Also, we have to stop worrying about how we appear to white people. My book isn’t the first book to talk about these things publicly and we have got to be more concerned that Black women are hurting than we are concerned about white people seeing that we’ve hurt Black women. We’ve got to care more about the women than appearances.

AD: Last year, in a conversation with Kiese Laymon, you talked about finding pleasure in the darkness of the Bible in reference to “Jael,” both the biblical story and your short story by the same name. Could you say more about why you love exploring this pleasure and darkness?

DP: The darkness, for me, is the mystery, the complexity, and the messiness that’s there. I was drawn to the very personal violence enacted by Jael, a woman who nails a man’s head to the ground! He’s an enemy army general who she pretends to give refuge to and then, in his sleep, she kills him. It’s so personal to kill someone like that. I was curious about her. Where did she get that? What drove her to do it? I get it, he’s the enemy; but that’s still very personal. The level of rage, the physicality of that act. What was the rest of her story? We get her in this moment in time and we don’t know what came before or what came after. I delight in these layers of complexity and subversion. We were told so much of life is off limits to us, so much of our bodies, ourselves, who we are. I take pleasure in looking at what happens if we peek in those places where we’re not supposed to look.

AD: The spirit of Audre Lorde hovers around this book. I’m reminded of a quote where she says “my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.” Similar themes surrounding joy, desire, satisfaction, and freedom show up again and again in your book. Why were they so important for you to portray?

DP: It’s because Black women aren’t encouraged enough to pursue joy and desire and satisfaction and pleasure and freedom in this life. Not for ourselves. We can be about it for the community, we can be about it for our children, we can encourage Black men, but somehow we get what’s left over; we get the dregs. So many of us need to be reminded and encouraged and, in some cases, given permission to pursue these things on behalf of ourselves and our own. We need someone to come along and say this is yours, this is for you. Audre Lorde said self-care isn’t indulgence; for Black women it’s political warfare.

AD: And it’s not always pretty. Sometimes self-care is literally fighting against all these “isms” that are forced on us daily. To say that I am worthy and righteous of being my full self, in spite of all of the things that are going to tell me I’m not.

DP: Including our internal narratives that we often get from our families, that we get from churches that tell us what we should desire, what we should prioritize. It costs us something to say, “No, I’m not going to live that way. Yes, I am going to pursue joy.” We could lose friends, we could lose loved ones, and we can lose our faith. It costs us something. If it didn’t, we’d all be free of it right now. Hopefully, through the characters in the stories, Black women can see that they’re not the only ones going through this and it’s worth it, you’re worth it, the freedom is worth it.

AD: Another theme in the book is that of “home,” whether finding home in someone, in your own body, or in a physical location. What does home mean to you?

DP: I think the short answer is that home is a shifting concept for me. The journey of coming to feel at home in my body – which shows up a lot in “How to Make Love to a Physicist” – that’s a journey that I have been on. I remember when I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, which was the first time I actually loved my body because I saw my body, not in terms of weight or anything like that, but in terms of what it could do. I was growing a human being. How could I do anything but love this body? Our bodies, all of them, are amazing and that was a very pivotal moment for me. This idea of being at home in your body, comfortable with your body: that’s not one that was easy for me. I had to come into that in my adulthood.

AD: When I asked the book club members if the church taught Black women to be at home in their own bodies, all of them, no matter whether they were defending the church or not, said “no, I have not been taught to be at home in my body.”

DP: We’ve talked about the way that the church views of our bodies and the body of Christ, but it’s never presented as a source of pleasure, except in Song of Solomon between two heterosexual married people in this very kind of limited way. It’s not pleasure for pleasure’s sake, not personal pleasure.

AD: One of my favorite stories in the collection is “Snowfall.” Without giving too much away, there’s a part where one of the characters, Rhonda, apologizes to her partner, LeeLee, by saying “just because. . . somebody hurt me doesn’t make it okay for me to hurt you, to not be there the way you need me to be,” which I found to be a powerful moment of recognition, reconciliation, and, later, restitution. Why did you include this moment?

DP: That saying “hurt people hurt people” is so true. In “Snowfall” this is a moment where someone is saying to someone she loves, “this is really hard, but it’s also really necessary for me to break this cycle.” All of us have been hurt or traumatized in some way. What it means to grow up and to do better and to heal involves a moment or moments where we can gather ourselves up in a way that says, “This stops with me.” This is an example of multiple things being true at once. Often it’s, “I was hurt in this way, so now I’m scared.” Or, “I was hurting this way, so I just can’t open up.” Or, “I was hurt in this way, so I can’t see anything but my hurt.” But being in relationship with people, being in healthy relationships requires us to look at our stuff and then to look at how we show up. In this collection I wanted to show that something beautiful was possible, that care was possible. But it’s complicated.

AD: If there’s ever an argument for therapy, it is that it holds a mirror to you. It’s often said that it is not your fault that you were hurt, but your healing is your business.

DP: The book that brought that idea home for me is called Fatherless Daughters. There’s a section where they talk about fatherless daughters in heterosexual romantic relationships, how we show up, what we need, who good partners are for us and what we need from them. One of the men who was interviewed about his relationship with his partner said exactly what you said, saying, “It’s not her fault that this happened to her and her healing is her responsibility, but it’s easier to heal with help and support.” That’s an essential piece. Yes, we’re responsible for our own healing. But are we surrounded by people who are going to support us through that healing?

AD: Healing is nurtured and fostered through community. It’s taking it out of the dark, damp place where bad bacteria can flourish and putting it in the light. You need people to be in that light with you. So I also want to ask you about grief. In “When Eddie Levert Comes,” grief shows up when a daughter is dealing with her mother’s chronic illness. The story shows that longing can be another aspect of grief; it’s grieving what a relationship could have been while illness takes its toll. What do you want people to take from how you address grief?

DP: My mom and my grandmother died in 2005; my father died the same year as well. That was also the year my first husband and I separated and later divorced, which was a lot of grief at once. Just an overwhelming amount of grief. It’s not like a moment in time; it’s ongoing. I still grieve those losses. One of the things that I hope these stories illustrate and that I wish more people understood is that grief shows up in a lot of different ways and it’s unhelpful to expect grieving people to grieve on a timeline. I wanted to show how grief lingers. I wanted people to know that it can show up unexpectedly and in forms we don’t anticipate, but that it’s all valid and, at the same time, see that we can show up better for people who are grieving.

AD: You recently won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In your remarks, you said “my stories are meaningful in this present moment because I’ve always looked to Black women to see what’s possible,” after which you named several authors whose footsteps you walk in. Could you say more about this? What possibilities have been revealed to you by looking and writing toward Black women?

DP: Black women writers have shown me how to be unapologetically Black in my work and in my life. That we are enough. They’ve shown me how to love us best of all. They’ve shown me that Black characters don’t have to be sinners or saints. They can be real, complicated, and messy. They can have desires, they can disappoint, and they can have those layers that we love so much. And they can be joyful. All of those things can be true. Even within the same story and even within the same character. Black women writers have shown me how to write fearlessly and when fear shows up, as it does, they’ve shown me how to keep writing anyway.

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

***

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

The post Black Women Getting Free appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image of Daniel José Camacho from 2013. Edited by Candace Sanders.)

When I was in high school, I had an imaginary “Council of Wisdom.” The council included intellectual figures I found inspiring and who I pretended to take on as mentors by reading their work. I started with a handful and kept expanding to ten, twelve, fifteen members. I’d doodle in class and draft philosophers and writers into the council, sometimes knocking one or two off in the process. One time I told a friend about my venerable Council of Wisdom. She mocked my list, pointing out that virtually all the members were white men. My most “diverse” member was Flannery O’Connor, a white disabled woman. In truth, I harbored unconscious reservations that a kid who looked like me could enter the rarefied air of intellectuals.

Adults started telling me about a place where I should go, a place where my curiosity would be rewarded. “Think about college,” my high school guidance counselor said dispassionately. “You have a decent reading and writing score on the SAT as a Latino male.” The heady interim pastor of the Baptist church I attended told me to stay away from fundamentalist Christian colleges. He had a Ph.D. and always welcomed my critical questions about faith after Sunday services. Whenever he talked about his “dissertation” and “grad school,” his voice took on a warm, oh-those-were-the-days tone. What he discussed—Karl Barth or the “Death of God” thesis—would often fly over my 16-year-old brain, but I was mesmerized by the image of a place where people could caress ideas day and night without inhibition. It hadn’t exactly worked out for him. The pastor lamented his bad luck with securing teaching positions. But there was an unspoken hope that I might have the chops to go on, not only to college, but to graduate school and then on to discussing these types of things forever.

If I wanted to spend the rest of my life around ideas and books, and around other people who cared about these things, there seemed to be a clear track. I started to follow it until the path no longer made sense to me and I felt more like a moth flying toward a shiny light that would obliterate me.

When I was completing my master’s degree in divinity between 2013-2017, I found a website called “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School.” Reading it became my preferred mode of procrastination. Why stress out about a paper or exam if my life no longer needed to revolve around producing the perfect grades and CV for acceptance into a top Ph.D. program? I could beat the whole rotten system before it destroyed me! I’d quit before even applying. My dream for an intellectual life would have to survive—if it could—beyond some academic fairytale.

The blog ruthlessly laid out in a series of posts all the reasons why one shouldn’t pursue a doctorate in the humanities or social sciences. Some of the reasons were obvious to me, like 8. There are very few jobs or 16. Where you live will be chosen for you. No offense to the states of Iowa or Nebraska, but I didn’t want to feel forced to move there if those were the only places that offered me a tenure-track professorship. And as someone who had tasted the difference between writing online for a general audience and presenting an academic paper to a room full of eight people with perhaps three interested in what you’re saying, I was sadly reminded that in academia 88. You are not paid for what you write and 89. Virtually no one reads what you write. Then, there were other reasons I hadn’t thought about before such as 44. Advisers can be tyrants or 45. Nice advisers can be worse.

When I was enrolled in my master’s program, I was in a serious relationship with someone on a totally different career track. So, thankfully, I could avoid reason 48. The two-body problem, which describes the improbability of two partnered Ph.D.’s both finding academic jobs within commuting distance of each other. But I was still potentially subject to 58. The one-body problem, which describes the difficulties faced by a couple where one person pursues a Ph.D. I was already tired of doing long-distance with my fiancée who lived in New York while I was doing my master’s in North Carolina. She was chasing her own dreams in a competitive profession that, unlike mine, was more likely to yield solid opportunities on the horizon. Would I try to rip her away from that or reduce our future marriage to semester breaks and a few weekends together a year, all for the sake of me resentfully grading student papers out of a decrepit van while making below minimum wage?

These are the thoughts that raced through my head. I knew the blog presented academia in the worst light. That’s what I wanted to see. I remember few students and professors around me having honest conversations about the dirty underbelly to the detached debates taking place in neogothic buildings overlooking green, immaculately manicured quads. In my world, people were applying to Ph.D.’s left and right. The problem of what to do with a humanities education was solved by getting more humanities education. The problem of what to do about your student debt was solved by becoming a student again and putting your loans in deferment. Still, I looked up to some of the well-positioned professors in my school. I was once like some of my googly-eyed classmates who sat enraptured, wanting to emulate the figures behind the lectern. But then I started to see them as the intellectual 1% who happened to win a lottery.

There were also costs for the ones who actually made it, costs that were compounded by discrimination. I was surprised when I heard that one of the superstar professors at my institution who was Black had bigoted white students who regularly complained to administration that he was unfit to teach their intro classes. He was one of the gentlest souls I’d ever met—even if you properly weighed my standards as a New Yorker living in the South. His work was winning awards and sending shockwaves within the field of Christian theology. He mentored students from all backgrounds and often sacrificed his time performing administrative duties for the school. I imagined that his academic co-workers would have his back. But all I can say for sure is that before I graduated, he was gone from the institution. Several brilliant Black professors, who had turned the school into a vibrant destination for students like me, were all gone in the span of a few years.

I saw, through how others were treated, that having a Ph.D. couldn’t protect me from people who held racist assumptions about my intellectual inferiority or who saw me as a threat. At the same time, I witnessed students and professors in academia lie about their identity or inflate their background and connections to particular communities for the sake of personal advancement or a weird inner rush. Somehow all of this could co-exist. Real discrimination persisted alongside rampant ethnic fraud.

91. Downward mobility is the norm. For the longest time, it seemed that getting a Ph.D. and becoming a professor was the only way to fulfill my desires for intellectual life. The idea that getting more education would automatically lead to a better life made sense within my immigrant household. Many first-generation students believe advanced degrees lead to abundant opportunities. Consequently, the economic realities of advanced degrees may come as a shock. As one Ph.D. candidate recently put it, “On my darkest days, I’m left with the feeling that no matter how hard I try to blaze a trail for myself and other first-generation students, the work I’ve been doing could lead me straight back to a life of little career opportunity and of economic instability—a life from which I once was sure higher education would rescue me.”

63. Your friends pass you by. I think of my old childhood friend Marvin. We grew up in the same neighborhood. The one where my mom taught me to keep my head in books and my butt in church pews and away from MS13 and Bloods and Crips. The intellectual curiosity I displayed through my questions about the Bible in Sunday school signaled to my elders that education was meant to be my salvation. My friend Marvin wasn’t necessarily lost in the streets, but his thing was cars. His eyes would light up in a driveway while talking about different models and rims. When I went away to a liberal arts college in Michigan, he stayed behind and kept doing stuff with cars. When I went to North Carolina for my master’s degree, he was making bank as a certified mechanic at a dealership. Next thing you know, I had accumulated all this debt and I’m pretty sure I saw him post something on Facebook about buying a house.

“Congratulations, you’re now—what I like to call—a thousandaire,” the financial aid adviser told me as I stood in front of her desk. I’ll never forget the moment. I wasn’t sure if she was throwing subtle shade at me or trying to inject some humor into an otherwise sad situation. There had been an issue with the federal loan I was trying to receive that semester. But now that the issue was addressed, my bank account would go from several hundreds of dollars to several thousands. I wasn’t at immediate risk of overdrafting again. I was a thousandaire.

54. “What do you do for a living?” In addition to the financial risks of non-wealthy people going for a Ph.D., there can be isolation in other people not understanding what this entails. “Danny, I can see you being a professor teaching kids in colleges,” my older sister who is a public elementary school teacher would tell me. “You would be so good at it!” She meant it with love. I thought, and still think, that I would enjoy it. But it was becoming increasingly hard for me see the traditional Ph.D. route as logistically possible without embracing extreme personal suffering. I forgave the relatives or friends who innocently asked me why I couldn’t try to become a professor as if it were as easy as applying to work at the local mall. It wasn’t worse than the naïve hope I used to hold.

Like many of my academically inclined peers, I used to think my goal was humble. I’m not asking for much, like teaching at Harvard or Yale or appearing on MSNBC. I would be happy to teach at a no-name school. I don’t have to redefine the field or publish tons of books. Even my personal research time could suffer. I just want to be surrounded by thoughtful colleagues, wear tweed jackets, talk about my favorite books and topics, and host adoring students for dinner conversations at my modest home while I have health insurance and the promise of employment for the foreseeable future. That’s all! Of course, I wasn’t the only one thinking this. And then I read that only an estimated 7 percent of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences get a tenure-track job. That’s all.

78. It takes a toll on your health. When people ask me today why I didn’t go on for a Ph.D., I typically say that I wanted to support my partner and that I wanted to continue to write and engage ideas within a broader context outside the ivory tower. That’s true. What I less often share is that I was also afraid of what pursuing a Ph.D. would do to my health. I already saw what a master’s degree could do to me. At one point, I had nearly dropped out of the program. Going straight into a master’s after undergrad, I was feeling burnt out. I was homesick. I lived with a housemate who I didn’t like, who didn’t clean, and whose room gave off a strong stench of what I imagine Doritos Cool Ranch would smell like if they grew wet and moldy. I missed my girlfriend/soon-to-be fiancée, proceeded to tell one of my friends at school that I had a crush on her, and then told my girlfriend who almost broke up with me. When I went to the campus counseling center, the psychologist asked me: “And when your mind drifts off into space during lecture, where does it go?” I replied, “Nowhere. I feel unmotivated, which is weird because I’m such a theology nerd. I feel nothing.” My grades weren’t suffering. I could still do the work. It was about what was happening to me.

A dean kindly accepted my request for a leave of absence. But I had to meet with someone in the registrar’s office who tried to talk me out of leaving. When she realized I wasn’t changing my mind, she said abruptly: “To be clear: You are, during your leave, by no means, allowed onto the premises of the school and you are prohibited from using the library.” I scrunched my face. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m going to be all the way in New York.”

Before I left campus, I had one more meeting with a professor I had long admired. He was one of the main reasons why I chose this school. When I emailed him as an undergrad, he wrote back and he even signed a book for me when he gave a visiting lecture in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Inside the book flap, he wrote: “To a great, young intellectual.” I stepped into his office in my jeans and hoodie trying my best to hold back tears. Here I was, yet another student eating up the time of a faculty member encumbered with unrealistic and unpaid mentoring expectations. I was slipping into the thing I thought students should never do: treating professors as their psychologists.

He listened to me as he sat stoically with his shiny bald head and circle-rimmed glasses. When he began to talk about his own journey and the conceit of other theologians, he burst into a deep belly laugh. It was a puzzling laugh that I had heard in his lectures. It’s like he was cracking himself up. The students, the audience—we weren’t in on the joke but along for the ride. He’d interrupt himself with laughs and then turn serious on a dime. I rocked back in a super comfortable chair in his office, sobbing: “I don’t know if I’ll amount to anything. What if I’m never a success?” He looked at me and said, “Daniel, you already are one.”

During my leave of absence, I moved back into my parent’s house on Long Island. I struggled with bouts of anger and finding a job. Nobody was getting back to me. Finally, I got called in for an interview at Barnes & Noble. I was excited. I’d get to spend time around books and could expertly organize their religion and philosophy section! Or so I thought. When I sat down for my interview with a store manager, she told me: “I’m sorry kid. The only opening we have at this store is for barista at the café.” I pleaded, “But I can eventually transition to the book floor?” “It depends,” she said. Then, the manager looked down at my resume again and mentioned my philosophy major. “Oh, you’re going to fit in just fine! I have a master’s degree in English literature. And Jolene and Terrence at the café are also humanities.”

After a year in New York, I went back to North Carolina to finish my master’s. But my mentality had changed. I was no longer dead set on going for a Ph.D. I was going to make school work for me rather than sacrifice all of myself at its altar. I started to blog and write articles on the side. I went to see a career counselor on campus who told me he rarely saw anyone from my program. I graduated with honors. I got married. I worked odd jobs while freelancing and slowly transitioned into writing and editing. I decided not to apply for a Ph.D, year after year.

Dear reader, this is the part of the essay where I’m supposed to tell you that I overcame my struggles. That I walked away from academia and successfully rebuilt my life around my passions, and you can too! This is where I could hyperlink you to an inspirational Instagram post that amounts to me screaming “LOOK AT ME NOW.” But that would be a simplistic narrative. If you know anything about the state of journalism and writerly compensations, it’s more like I escaped one fire only to jump into another one. The reality is that I still don’t know what will come of the path I’ve taken. I have my first book contract. But I’m not sure where my future paychecks will come from once the advance runs out. I’m lucky to have kind editors and various kinds of thinkers—even academics who overlook my lack of “the three magical letters”—who see me and value my work.

“I’m not going for a Ph.D.,” I’ve told my wife when she’s caught me scrolling yet again through academic departmental websites on my laptop, looking up doctoral requirements and the specializations of different faculty members. “Sure! I don’t know why you have to keep telling me so much.” She rolls her eyes at me and walks away. If I’ve sounded defensive when I’ve kept saying that I’m not going for a Ph.D., it’s because I must keep convincing myself. When Kendrick Lamar says, “Satan wanna put me in a bow tie,” I take that to mean that I must resist the temptation of applying for Ph.D. programs and finding my validation in becoming a professor.

Don’t get me wrong. I still read and cite plenty of scholars. I’m constantly engaging with professors on social media. If I were offered a reasonable teaching post in the future in a pleasant city, I wouldn’t necessarily turn it down. And for full disclosure: I would like to thank New York University for underwriting the Revealer, which is allowing me to publish these words. Academia is still a part of me. Far be it from me to act like some supposed radical influencer-thought-leader who says fuck the classist academy all the while accepting most of their speaking engagements on college campuses.

With that said, treating the Ph.D. as the only respectable route for pursuing one’s intellectual hunger is an approach that is setting too many people up for failure. Yes, ideally, it would be nice to live in a society that invested more in education and forgave student debt. We should strive for that. I could get on some secularized pulpit and preach to you about how the sin is capitalism, how the savior is democratic socialism, while making an altar call for everyone to organize and unionize. I applaud those values. All well and good. But what about the here and now? Until the revolution comes, or the Democratic Party gets its shit together, what should aspiring intellectuals do? In the longer history of the human species, would-be philosophers and storytellers had to express themselves in whatever ways they could, right?

Now that I’m 30 years old, I’m seeing more peers of my era starting to graduate with Ph.D.’s. Many of them won’t get tenure-track jobs. But some will and a few already have. I’m genuinely happy for them—or at least, I’m trying to be. I hope that others also find the teaching posts of their dreams. I can’t pretend that my own path is a prescription for others. But the exceptional cases are just that. It’s dangerous for an overwhelming number of people to continue to believe that they will make a living as professors.

In an old episode of The Simpsons, Marge tells Bart: “Don’t make fun of grad students, they just made a terrible life choice.” The episode continues to a scene depicting impoverished grad students flocking to eat breadcrumbs that Lisa is throwing out to geese at a park. I used to laugh so hard when I found this clip on YouTube. But it’s become harder for me to take it as an exaggeration after I learned about the case of Margaret Mary Vojtko, “an adjunct language instructor at Duquesne University who, despite twenty-five years of service, could not afford health care or even electricity,” and who died “at the age of eighty-three, having never earned more than twenty thousand dollars a year.” I learned about the harrowing case of Thea Hunter, a pioneering scholar who graduated from Columbia University but got trapped in an adjunct cycle that destroyed her. I read about the growth of “Alt-Ac” (Alternative Academic Careers) and “Post-Academic” literature. I see novelists depicting adjunct hell. I recall the man with a Ph.D. at my local church in North Carolina who asked the community to pray for his job search because he didn’t know how he was going to feed his kids.

Herb Childress eloquently describes one version of the heartache that’s happening to so many others:

“The grief of not finding a home in higher ed — of having done everything as well as I was capable of doing, and having it not pan out; of being told over and over how well I was doing and how much my contributions mattered, even as the prize was withheld — consumed more than a decade. It affected my physical health. It affected my mental health. It ended my first marriage. It reopened all my fears from childhood about abandonment and rejection. It was a chasm into which I fell during my job search of 1996-97, and from which I didn’t really fully emerge until I left higher education altogether, in 2013.”

We don’t yet know what the full fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic will be on the already bleak academic job market, and even on vulnerable faculty who have jobs. But what we do know is that declining birth rates are projected to lead to a dramatic falloff of college-age youth starting in the mid-2020s. (This is a projection that hasn’t factored in the future impact of declining births during the pandemic.) Schools that are already gutting their humanities departments, such as the University of Vermont which completely eliminated its religion department, will likely continue to make cuts in the future— if the schools don’t merge or close altogether. Considering all these conditions, I believe it is irresponsible, unconscionable, and downright cruel to provide false hope or bad advice that greases people’s lives as they slide down directly into a wreckage.

When I was on a writing retreat before the pandemic, I zealously talked about the “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School” blog with other attendees. One person looked down to the ground as if I was out to heartlessly stomp on people’s dreams. Another attendee used their phone to find the blog and squealed that the last entry stopped at 98. (98. Your family pays a price.). Maybe the author had succumbed to the horrendous conditions of academia and failed to outrun its shadow before completing the blog? As I write this, the anonymous author of the blog hasn’t posted another entry since 2018. I honestly don’t know what happened to the author. But I pray that they are staying alive and carving out their own path. Most of us have no other choice.

I recently moved to Houston, Texas for my wife’s work. In our apartment, I’ve thrown all my books—the ones not in storage—into a few bookcases from Ikea and have yet to organize them. “For in much wisdom is much grief,” an ancient writer once said. “And he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” As I stare at my collection, I think back to my training, to my old classes and conversations, which seem to no longer have any living context. I can’t let go entirely. All of this must have some use, I want to believe. My parents sacrificed so much to give me a chance. I don’t want to waste anything.

Daniel José Camacho is a columnist for the Revealer. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners. Writing with a focus on religion, race, and history, his work has appeared in publications such as Religion News Service, America Magazine, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post.

The post Grad School Blues appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo by Tomazl Levstek/Getty Images)

I have been in conversation with Liane Carlson for the better part of ten years. I can’t think of a topic we’ve come across where she hasn’t been able to pick it up, turn it around, see otherwise invisible facets, and describe what she sees in language that sparks with sharpness and clarity. Basically, she’s one of my favorite people to talk to, which is why I wanted to speak with her for this month’s issue about the pandemic so she can help us think through how the world has changed, what’s still changing, and what needs to change.

Kali Handelman: Your book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Experience and Meaning, was published exactly two years ago, in July 2019. Our lives — everyone’s lives — have changed an enormous amount since then. In the book, you seem to have had a kind of intuition that we need to think more, and differently, about the concept of contingency and the significance of touch in how we understand social relations. I would love it if you could summarize the book’s argument about the relationship between contingency and touch? How does touch, as the title tells us, shape experience and meaning?

Liane Carlson: I was seven or eight the first time I really remember sensing the problem of contingency. I have a strong memory of pausing for a moment in the upstairs hallway of our house, where something about the flutter of a curtain caught my eye. I had passed that spot a dozen times a day for nearly my entire life and it was very familiar to me—the exact shade of pink of the curtain, the texture of the wood floor under my feet, the slight grit that our dogs seemed to track in everywhere—but all at once it struck me as incredibly strange that this was my house, my life, my toes wriggling on the floor. That these people were my parents and not any other people, even that I had been born at all, when it so easily could have been otherwise, if only a few circumstances in my parent’s lives had been different. There are lots of different ways to define contingency, but it’s that very basic sense that things could be otherwise that has always interested me. That moment in the hallway was my first personal recognition of contingency.

The book came from that kind of experience; I was interested in the way those moments of dislocation ambushed people. After all, it’s theoretically always the case that our lives are fragile, tenuous, and capable of being upended at any moment, but we only really feel that to be the case on occasion. Mostly, we just carry on, locked in routine tasks, taking the basic contours of our lives for granted, even if we occasionally kick against them. So why is it that sometimes that sense of strangeness floors us?

And that’s really where touch comes in. There’s an old Christian theological tradition that sees contingency as the lot of mortal creatures. God, (or the God of philosophers, anyway), is changeless, immovable, immune from passions. But we are vulnerable, thrown into a world that batters us and tosses us about. The impulse to deny or minimize that vulnerability is strong; that’s really what the Stoics, Spinoza, and a whole host of other people were struggling with in the history of philosophy. It’s not possible to shut out recognition of our frailty and contingency altogether, though, because we have bodies. You simply can’t sustain the illusion that there’s some sort of unerring course for your life when at any moment you can be struck down by illness, wounded in battle, bleed to death after childbirth, and so on.

For the thinkers I’m looking at in the book—nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and German thinkers, writing in the wake of this Christian tradition—we are most open to the world through our sense of touch. In part, they’re playing on the etymological roots of contingency. Contingent comes from the Latin tangere, to touch. They’re also just building lovely, sensitive descriptions of what it feels like to touch and be touched. Someone grasps you, hard, for the first time by the arm and you realize in a rush that all the clauses of the social contract you’ve relied on your entire life are just a collective fiction that won’t save you; someone else (the same someone?) brushes a thumb over the back of your hand and a new life opens before you. Or, in 2020, you hug the wrong person and suddenly, like a friend of ours, you’re twenty-seven and suffering from a stroke in the aftermath of Covid.

KH: Talking to you has made me think about how, in the pandemic, touch became scary just as it also became precious in new ways. We’ve gone from advisories not to touch our faces or groceries, to months of isolation and new social negotiations around handshakes and hugs. So many norms have been exposed and disrupted. I wonder how contingency might help us to understand what’s been happening and, perhaps, offer a roadmap forward in this new landscape?

LC: Well, I think that recognition of contingency isn’t so abstract anymore. Someone went to a wet market seven thousand miles away and the whole world shut down. It’s hard to get a much clearer example of the contingency of our entire global order, of our lives, than that. The impact of Covid on our daily routines was huge, of course. Suddenly we had lockdowns, masks everywhere, schools going remote, cities emptying out. Worlds upended in a way that felt unbelievable when it started. At my office, we even left our plants because we figured…well, no one really knows what we figured. That it would have to be a blip? That we’d be back to our old routine in a week? That something so abnormal couldn’t last for so long?

But Covid also changed the way we touch each other and our surroundings. I would sometimes meet a friend of mine who is in her 80s in a local park over the last year. In normal times we would hug when we met. Maybe it would have been fine to hug her. Or maybe it would have killed her. That’s the sort of calculation we all found ourselves making over the past year, constantly.

If I learned anything from the various thinkers I studied in my book, it’s that touch shouldn’t count for so much, not regularly at least. It’s fine and normal for the occasional experience of touch to draw us in and engulf us. Kissing someone for the first time, sidling up to a partner on the couch, petting a dog—these are all very real pleasures, even necessities, as we learned. A huge, huge part of moving through the world with any level of confidence is the ability to turn off our awareness of touch, though. I want to be able to grab my keys, chop some vegetables, punch an elevator button without being overwhelmed by the awareness of the objects I grasp. I want to handle objects and tools, as if I have some level of control over my surroundings; I want to be able to touch things without feeling them touch me.

Covid challenged that, and not on an intellectual level. I would often go running during Covid on my lunch breaks. When I reached a certain spot, the edge of a pier, it was always my habit to slap the iron gate—just one of those little runner’s rituals. I kept doing it during Covid but the experience was different than it had been prior to the pandemic. I could never do it without feeling my fingers buzzing with the memory of that gate, its pebbled texture, the coolness of its metal. Or think of the way people punch elevator buttons with their knuckles, or the example of a man I saw the other day who held the door to my apartment building, using the very tippy end of his fingers, shielded by the scrunched-up fabric of his sleeve. The world touches us, whether we want it to or not, and it’s unsettling, even an attack on our basic ability to believe that we have some level of control over our environment. I sometimes think of this moment in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea when the narrator is struck down by horror at the feeling of a doorknob in his hand when he goes to open a door. “Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.”

KH: Yes, totally! That vibrating awareness of being touched or having touched something really resonates. I wonder if the world has always been like that for some people, though, and now the experience is becoming more widespread? That this sense of both vulnerability and responsibility (or even guilt) is/was universalized? In other words, are there ways the pandemic has revealed something that was already there?

LC: That widespread wariness is an example of how Covid let us see that our experience of touch is contingent. Touch is not just some natural, timeless way of accessing the world. It’s shaped by history, culture, science, and personal experience. In times of great turmoil, our experience of touch can change. Yet Covid also amplified pre-existing experiences of touch. It made clear, as you say, how precious it is and how debilitating it is to be denied the warmth of human contact. I don’t just mean that psychologically. It’s physically debilitating to be cut off from touch. You can find photos online of patients in comas with their hands cradled between two latex gloves filled with warm water. Nurses in Brazil came up with the idea because family and friends weren’t allowed to visit patients in the hospital. They thought the gloves would mimic the warmth of human touch and, by all accounts, it worked. Patients’ vital signs started picking up after they were given the gloves. And I’m sure the need for touch is why so many people got dogs. (Also, dogs are great.)

The past year also let us really feel what a risk touching someone for the first time can be. I live in New York City and my neighborhood emptied out more-or-less completely in the early months of the pandemic. Every day, I would go on my evening walk with my husband and my dog. Mostly we strolled by the river, next to empty tennis courts. One night, we saw a couple sitting on a bench. They had their backs to me and their heads turned to each other. I could just make out their profiles, silhouetted under the dim orange light against the river—her face, a little sharp and angular, his broad and blunted. As we passed, the two leaned in close and I saw his finger gently pull down her white, cotton mask. That’s when I turned away. I felt like I was watching something pornographically intimate. Who knows what that kiss was actually like for those two people. Maybe it was great and they’ll go on to live happily together until ripe old age. Maybe it was awful and she’ll spend years telling the story about how she chanced it all to kiss a boy during a plague year, only to feel his tongue flopping around in her mouth like a stranded trout. But I am sure a first kiss in an abandoned city during an uncontrolled pandemic must amplify the mixture of trepidation, desire, trust and doubt experienced during any first kiss. I’m sure in a hundred years people will be writing smutty historical fiction about two people kissing for the first time during Covid.

We’re in an interesting moment where things are rapidly returning to normal, at least in the U.S., but you can still see these lingering effects of the last year on how people move through their environments and touch the world. I had lunch with a friend recently who went to a conference in-person for the first time in a year. I asked him how everyone handled social distancing and he told me that it was mostly fine, but that he had someone stride up to him and stick his arm out to shake hands. Since he didn’t want to be rude, my friend shook the other guy’s hand, but spent the whole time mentally counting down until he could douse himself with Purell without being too obvious about it.

I think the pull to return to normalcy is very, very strong, but still our bodies remember the uncertainty.

KH: Yes, definitely, I think you’re right that we’re at an inflection point in assessing what “normal” was and what a “new normal” could, or ought, to be. Which makes me think about issues you’ve written about in the Revealer before, like the climate crisis, Me Too, apologies and forgiveness, and the precarity of intellectual life. How might these ideas about contingency and touch offer us further insights not just (just?!) about the pandemic, but these other interlocking issues?

LC: Arguably, a lot of people have been feeling how contingent their lives are for quite some time. If your ability to pay rent hinges on Uber tips, if you worry every time you drive a car that you might be pulled over by the police and shot, if you live in a flood zone or near forest fires, you already know on some level that all you need is one bad day and everything in your life could change. Even if you don’t face those immediate uncertainties, I do think there’s a more general sense of fragility in the air. A year or two ago I read Czeław Miłosz’s autobiography, Native Realm. He talks about living in Poland between WWI and WWII, and the whole country feeling certain that something awful was going to happen, just not knowing when or what, exactly. A few years earlier, I might have read it and thought, oh he’s claiming to be so prescient to make himself sound wiser and smarter. Now I read it and think, yes, exactly.

Covid really democratized that sense of contingency. It also shook up some of the gender dynamics of touch. When my friend was telling me about his experience with a handshake, I laughed. Partially because I could imagine exactly what he was feeling, but partially because he had perfectly described the mental process of a woman dating in her twenties—30% convinced that the boor standing next to her might kill her, but mostly worried about how to extricate herself without seeming rude.

I think a lot of people, particularly women, already knew how unsettling it can be to lack control over who and how they are touched, but a lot of people didn’t. When I was researching the book, I would constantly read these very clever arguments by French (male) thinkers, like Derrida, about how touching only ever touches the boundaries of another person’s skin, so, in a sense, touching never touches. And I would think, “Clearly this is a man who has never been groped on a subway.”

The question, of course, is whether any of these revelations of vulnerability will linger or result in any meaningful change in our attitudes toward others or toward our environment. I don’t know. I tend to think our capacity to bury unpleasant experiences or at least displace them elsewhere is tremendous. Think of how we essentially repressed the memory of the Spanish flu in our culture. Or look at the way people who don’t want to wear masks have picked up the language of “my body, my choice” from pro-choice advocates. They’re trolling the left by using that language, of course, but they might also be completely sincere about their fears of losing bodily autonomy. Covid hasn’t made it any easier to have a conversation about bodily autonomy, though. On the contrary, Roe vs. Wade is probably going to be overturned, or at least severely restricted, at exactly the moment the language of “my body, my choice” is everywhere.

I think academics, particularly in my world of continental philosophy of religion, spent a very, very long time assuming the sort of disruption and attack on our sense of certainty that we experience through contingency was obviously good, because it made us a little humbler and tore down old, ossified ways of being in the world. I’ve never been that confident that our experience of our own contingency is necessarily a good thing that opens space for a better world. That’s the problem with contingency—our experience of it is always contingent and so are our reactions to it.

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.

Liane Carlson has a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from Columbia University and has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and NYU. She currently lives and writes in New York, where she is working on a book tentatively titled Against Forgiveness. Her first book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience is available from Columbia University Press.

The post Touch, Contingent Lives, and the Pandemic: A Conversation with Liane Carlson appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image credit: Michele Constantini/Getty Images)

We passed a plain white sheet of paper around the study hall room. Most of us were fourteen. All of us were girls. The sheet traveled between the hands of my best friend who had two boyfriends at a nearby public school, onto the girl who asked during Bible class if the “M word” (masturbation) was a sin, and then to my own sweaty palms. After a minute or two, we handed it to the guest speaker, a male youth pastor with stiff gel hair and a gummy smile. He lifted his eyes, poised for a heavy message: “This paper represents your purity. Pass it around to any guy who asks for it and this is all you’ll have to offer your husband.” He lifted the now wrinkled sheet above his head like an oracle and crumpled it dramatically. “Nobody wants something dirty,” he finished, shooting the paper wad into the nearest trashcan.

Later that night I described the lesson to my friend in public school, a proud non-virgin. She cringed and said, “It’s creepy the adults care so much.” She was right. The adults at my evangelical school and church cared deeply about our sexuality. They had us write letters to our future husbands. We signed pledges promising our fathers we would stay pure. We wore silver rings to proclaim our virginity. We knew “how far was too far.” We were told our hard work would pay off when we could present our bodies to our husbands, untouched and pure as unused white paper.

Purity Culture Then

“Purity” is a term evangelicals use to describe sexual abstinence until heterosexual marriage. An entire purity culture has developed to instill in adolescents, especially teenage girls, the importance of virginity until marriage. I grew up in that culture: hair curled for Daddy Daughter Dances with a gel pen ready to sign the school-wide abstinence pact. I’ve since outgrown that world, joined the ranks of what’s now known as the ex-evangelical movement, but purity culture rages on—in church basements, in arenas, and most recently, on social media.

Eager to engage in conversations about the implications of purity culture, I watched the 2015 documentary Give Me Sex Jesus. The film opens with a simple prompt: “Talk to me about purity.” Some interviewees laugh. Others blush. One person recalls praying for God to allow him to live long enough to have sex. The film pulls back from personal narratives to explore the origins of evangelical purity culture. Historians, ex-church leaders, and current ministers shed light on how the movement swept the hearts of millions of teenagers at its peak in the 1990s and why it still resonates today.

One particular scholar in the film, Sarah Moslener, captured my attention. She agreed to a phone call the next week. It turned out that Moslener, author of Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, was just as engaging over the phone. She distilled all of purity culture in one, simple remark: “The whole point of purity culture is patriarchal power.” According to Moslener, regulating evangelicals’ sex lives is about keeping women submissive to their fathers and husbands. She went on saying, “The trick is getting people who don’t benefit from that power [women] to endorse it.” And women, despite it not being to their benefit, have become powerful proponents of purity culture.

The purity movement’s roots stretch back decades. Starting especially in the 1970s, following the rise of feminism and gay rights, white evangelicals became increasingly concerned about adolescents’ sexuality. Moslener says, “You go from the 70s, the whole ‘save the children from the gay people,’ into the pro-life movement, save the babies, so you’re positioning youth and innocence as the thing to be protected.” White evangelical leaders promoted anti-abortion and anti-homosexuality messages not only in their churches, but also publicly and with the help of the politicians they courted. In 1983 Ronald Reagan published his pro-life book Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation. He further demonstrated his support for evangelicals by funding abstinence-only education in public schools. For evangelicals, this relationship with political leaders was crucial because many believed, as Moslener says, “If you’re not protecting those things [like preventing abortion], God will turn his back from the nation.” And by the early 1990s, as the AIDS epidemic ravaged communities across the country, several evangelical leaders believed “sexually pure young people” could transform the nation from one of sin and plague into one of purity and God’s blessings.

In 1993 Richard Ross, a Southern Baptist youth pastor, inspired by “a whisper from God,” founded the True Love Waits Movement with the hope that adolescents could help save the soul of America through their sexual abstinence. Through True Love Waits, teenagers publicly signed pacts at purity rallies and in youth groups. The original pledge read, “Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, those I date, and my future mate to be sexually pure until the day I enter marriage.” The movement inspired young evangelicals, including the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato, and Miley Cyrus to sport silver rings as an outward sign of their commitment to sexual abstinence until marriage.

(Image: True Love Waits pledge cards on the National Mall in 1994. Photo courtesy of Baptist Press.)

In 1994 a True Love Waits rally on the National Mall attracted 25,000 evangelical teenagers. They placed 210,000 abstinence pledges that had been signed by teenagers from across the country in the ground in the space between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument. Purity had become cool. By 2000, thanks to the rise of Christian pop stars, the song “Wait for Me” by Rebecca St. James had become an unofficial purity culture anthem. Almost a decade after Ross’s whisper from God, in 2004, President George W. Bush increased funding for abstinence education that promoted “chastity” and “self-discipline.” In fact, funds attributed to abstinence-only education grew by 465% from the start to the end of his presidency.

Post-Purity Culture

As some of the virginity slogan t-shirt clad teenagers of the late 1990s grew up, the popularity of True Love Waits began to wane. Some of those teens came out as gay and felt isolated from their evangelical communities. Others believed purity culture had corrupted their ability to have healthy understandings of their own sexuality. In the wake of the purity culture movement, a new movement emerged, catalogued with its own hashtag on Twitter for the first time in 2016: ex-evangelicalism.

Ex-evangelicalism is an umbrella term for those who left evangelical churches in favor of other religious communities or who have abandoned religion entirely. After Trump’s election especially, countless people who had been raised in evangelical communities felt a need to proclaim an ex-evangelical identity publicly. Some prominent purity culture proponents like Joshua Harris, author of the canonic purity culture text I Kissed Dating Goodbye, even renounced their Christian faith.

Since the early 2010s, several ex-evangelicals have published personal accounts about the negative impact purity culture has had on their lives. After embracing the label “ex-evangelical,” Brian Chastain started a podcast under the same name, which now receives 13,000 downloads per month. Linda Kay Klein’s memoir Pure, published in 2018, has been the most commercially successful book in the subgenre. In an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Klein shared the shame she internalized and explained her own departure from evangelicalism, saying, “When I left, I thought that I was going to be completely free of sexual shame and fear and anxiety. I had so internalized the sexual shaming, that I no longer needed external shamers…I was more than capable of shaming myself.” Her story is similar to ex-evangelicals across the country.

Purity culture’s mass exodus even birthed a school of psychological analysis: deconstruction therapy. In stark contrast to the popularity of “Christian counseling” within evangelical communities, which usually does not draw from peer-reviewed research or require therapists to hold graduate degrees, deconstruction therapy has become a common next step for those who have found themselves with residual trauma from their evangelical upbringing. For some, purity culture left them with feelings of shame and self-hate about their sexual desires. Others report physical manifestations of trauma, including a condition known as vaginismus, a physical tightening of the pelvic floor that can be triggered by a psychological reaction to being taught to withhold sex.

While psychotherapy has been helpful for some ex-evangelicals, others have turned to newer approaches to healing. Allison Tash Montgomery and Hillary McBride have built prominent careers by helping ex-evangelicals overcome feelings of sexual shame. Montgomery is a queer ex-evangelical with a master’s degree in Gender Studies who offers coaching in one-on-one and group settings to help people process their experiences in purity culture and to build healthier sex lives. McBride has a Ph.D. in Psychology and hosts the popular podcast Other People’s Problems to help listeners unpack the sexual teaching they were taught from a young age in evangelical communities and to help them see their sexuality in a positive light.

Podcasts are only one way ex-evangelicals are connecting with one another. There are support groups, new graphic printed t-shirs with the message “Live, Laugh, Lust,” and in person meetups. The hashtag #PurityCulture has nearly 60 million views on TikTok. The hashtag #RecoveringEvangelical has 2.7 million views.

For ex-evangelical Blair Rabun, creator of the TikTok account Talk Purity to Me, the best approach to the trauma of purity culture has been through humor. She films herself candidly responding to media produced by pro-purity culture accounts, fashioning herself as a sort of ex-evangelical critic. Her remarks are snappy, mostly deadpan, and funny. “I think it’s really powerful to be able to laugh at how ridiculous it is,” she said in an interview. And it seems her 20,000 followers would agree.

“I’m more snarky than a lot of people in the community,” Blair went on to explain. Many of her videos are side by side reactions, called duets on TikTok, of conservative Christian videos about purity. Other posts include her own experience, like one where she says, “I had a panic attack the first time I held hands with a guy because I was convinced I had cheated on my future husband. That is a real thing that happened.” At first, Blair’s TikTok account was anonymous, since it’s “kind of a big deal to take on Christianity.” But then she reflected on the impact of personal experience. “At first I was talking about concepts of purity culture, but not about me.” In the future, Blair envisions doing more outreach for Talk Purity to Me by establishing peer support groups and events where people will have space to share their own stories.

Purity Culture Now

Ex-evangelicalism hasn’t eradicated purity culture entirely. Far from it. Purity rings still exist.There are YouTubers intent on sharing the value of waiting for sex, and Instagram-famous couples who broadcast their commitment to virginity until marriage. TikTok has become a mechanism ripe for evangelizing because of its algorithms the facilitate niche communities. And purity culture’s newest defenders have traded handing out Gospel tracts for filming front facing camera confessionals.

There’s Max Milton, a twenty-two year old in Florida with 181,000 TikTok followers. He started creating purity-centric content in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic. He describes his account as “goofy Christian content” that ranges from a video he plans to show his future wife to mini-sermons on self-worth. “I wanted to show people that pursuing purity was WORTH IT,” he wrote to me. Max runs a Zoom Bible study and calls himself “TikTok’s Big Bro.” In his neon-lit bedroom, promoting purity isn’t a side hustle. It’s his full-time job.

And there’s Emily Elizabeth with 194,000 TikTok followers, whose profile bio reads “Wildly in love with Jesus.” Her content focuses on what she describes as newfound freedom after her earlier life of sexual promiscuity. In TikTok clips, Emily nods as text describing her former life of drinking, taking Plan B, and living with her boyfriend flash across the screen. She looks morose, but confident. She believes redemption is coming. After five years “sex free,” she met an aspiring actor in Los Angeles who shares her sexual values. Her videos look like clips from a romantic comedy and serve as advice for other evangelicals, including why she and her boyfriend avoid napping in the same bed to keep temptation at bay, and how she resists sexual temptation with other people. While the couple waits patiently for marriage, they lip-sync to trending audio in promotion of purity.

Purity culture promoters on TikTok are spreading the same message as those at purity rallies in the 1990s, even as the presentation has evolved. When asked why TikTok over other outreach methods, Milton said, “TikTok isn’t the ideal platform in the sense that this message is the most celebrated, but it is ideal in the sense that is the most NEEDED. Being that TikTok is so fast-paced, it makes sense that it would be especially sexualized. The darker the room, the brighter that your light will shine.” In the dark world of quick sexual encounters, the brighter the purity culture light shines.

***

Purity rings. Pledges. Social media influencers. The virtue of a pure woman. These were the totems of an ideology I witnessed firsthand as a teenager that hinged on my abstaining from sex until marriage. The messages remain the same today for millions of evangelicals who have been told by pastors, parents, and TikTok stars that their self-worth is determined by their sexual choices. But others are coming forward to share their stories, talk about their trauma, and to imagine new sexual ethics. In large numbers, ex-evangelicals are breaking their silence, sharing their pain, and insisting there is a way forward—with each other—online and in-person.

Erika Veurink is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Iowa. She received her M.F.A. from Bennington College.

The post Post-Purity Culture: The New Online Frontier of Evangelical Sexual Ethics appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend the opening night of Shakespeare in the Park, a venerable New York City summer experience. The show, a reimagined Merry Wives of Windsor with an all-Black cast, was the first piece of theater I had seen since March 2020. To enter the outdoor venue in Central Park, my husband and I had to show proof of our COVID-19 vaccinations and wear masks as we walked to our seats. We were permitted to remove our masks once seated. But with strangers sitting next to, in front of, and behind me, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to remove my mask. Typically, I only wear masks indoors, but this was the first time I was in an outdoor crowd since I received the vaccine. Even though the CDC says the chance of outdoor COVID-19 transmission is unlikely, I wanted the extra protection that comes with wearing a mask. I kept mine on, as did several others, and thoroughly enjoyed the show. Before the performance began though, I wondered if I had become overly cautious. But the effects of living through the pandemic linger with me and I find them hard to shake. The pandemic remains part of me, not necessarily controlling me, but a factor in many of the decisions I make in this summer of returning to the traditions and experiences I have long loved. 

The Summer 2021 issue of the Revealer explores how things from our past stay with us and shape our lives. The issue opens with Erika Veurink’s “Post-Purity Culture: The New Online Frontier of Evangelical Sexual Ethics,” where she explores how both evangelicals and ex-evangelicals use social media to address the ideas they were taught about sex in adolescence and how those lessons frame their experiences in adulthood. Next, in “Touch, Contingent Lives, and the Pandemic,” Kali Handelman interviews Liane Carlson about the ways the pandemic continues to inform our daily practices, our sense of fragility, and our awareness of the necessity – and dangers – of touch. Then, in the newest installment of his “From the Margins” column, Daniel José Camacho writes in “Grad School Blues” about his decision to relinquish his dreams to pursue a Ph.D. and why that decision continues to vex him. Next, in “Black Women Getting Free,” Ambre Dromgoole interviews acclaimed author Deesha Philyaw about her award-winning book The Secret Lives of Church Ladies and how “the Black Church” continues to shape many Black women’s lives even if they have nothing to do with Christianity. Then, in “Hindu Ritual in India’s High-Tech City,” Deonnie Moodie reviews Tulasi Srinivas’s book The Cow in the Elevator and explores how people in Bangalore, India have re-imagined ancient rituals to meet their needs today in a rapidly-changing environment. And finally, in “Holocaust Tourism’s Popularity,” Daniel Reynolds shares an excerpt from his book Postcards from Auschwitz about why travel to Holocaust memorial sites has increased and what people learn about the past at former Nazi concentration camps.

Our Summer issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Evangelical Masculinity.’” Dr. Bradley Onishi, a scholar of religion and former evangelical pastor, joins us to discuss why evangelical men valorize aggressive masculinity, what evangelical men are taught about sexuality, and what evangelical ideas about masculinity have to do with America’s current political climate. You can listen to this fascinating and insightful episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As we navigate this summer, one with much promise for sociality, I hope we become kinder to one another and to ourselves about what we need in order to feel safe and comfortable. The pandemic is not in the past. And even if it were, like so many of our past experiences, it could still linger with us and shape how we interact with the world. I hope all of us show patience to ourselves and to others as we find new ways to live with the pasts that stay with us today.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

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