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This excerpt appears in the book’s fifth chapter, “The Conservative Center in Faith- and Character-Based Correctional Institutions.”

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The Faith- and Character-Based Correctional Institution (FCBI) dorm for women at Lowell Annex was the first female FCBI that I visited. After I met with the warden, he escorted me to the FCBI dorm, where I met Chaplain Faithe Liburd, the FCBI dorm’s primary administrator. Chaplain Liburd arranged for me to interview several of the incarcerated women, and most of them repeated the aforementioned theories of gender and sexuality without any prompting.

An incarcerated woman named Irene Wilson was the first woman I interviewed. She articulated a history of her childhood and adolescence that, combined with her experiences in prison and in the FCBI dorm, provided a familiar story that many of the women repeated, plus or minus a few details. As such, a detailed summary of her life and of her experience in the FCBI dorm is appropriate. At age fifty-seven, Irene is currently twenty-nine years into her life sentence for first-degree murder. She grew up in a Baptist family, although she did not see her biological parents very often, as both her parents worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. Instead, after school on most days her aunt took her to church, where she spent her evenings. It is not much of a stretch to say she literally grew up in church, and her Baptist faith played a central role in her upbringing. Not only did she spend most of her time in the church, but Sunday’s church services also provided the only chance for Irene to spend more than a few minutes with her mom, who worked as many as five jobs simultaneously.

Irene had a half-brother who lived with her grandma since before Irene was born. They had the same mom, but when their mom remarried, her brother went to live with her grandma, as Irene’s father did not think it appropriate to raise someone else’s son in his house. Irene said “there was a general consensus in the community that it would be wrong for the boy to live with the new family.” Irene’s faith began to be tested at the age of thirteen when three of her brother’s friends first sexually assaulted her. They raped her repeatedly over the next several years, but she did not tell anyone, as her community frowned upon premarital sex and she was embarrassed, ashamed, and fearful that she would be judged. The abuse stopped at age fifteen, but it came with a cost, as the abuse only ended after her brother was shot and killed. Her abusers simply stopped visiting the house. Irene described how she became angry, both because of her abuse and because of her dead brother, and God bore the brunt of her frustration. For the first time in her life, she resented her maker.

Irene finished high school several years later, and at age seventeen she married a man she had dated for two years. A year later she felt like her life was coming back together when she learned she was pregnant, but this optimism was short-lived after her baby son was born with a heart defect and died three days later. Her husband divorced her not long after, and she found herself an abused divorcee with a dead child. She dated the first man who expressed interest in her, but he, too, proved bad for Irene, as he was physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive. Irene recalled, “At first he told me what to wear, where to go, when I could leave the house, etc.” His yelling gave way to pushing which turned into slapping. On multiple occasions he even punched her.

The nadir of their relationship came one night when her boyfriend came home drunk and demanded sex. She told him that she was not in the mood, and unwilling to accept “no” for an answer, he chased her through the house. At some point in his pursuit, he grabbed a knife. He caught up with Irene and grabbed her by her hair, stabbed her in the back, and then bent her over and raped her at knifepoint while she bled from the new wound. This convinced Irene to end the relationship, but over the next several months, her now ex-boyfriend stalked and abused her. One night he found her at a local bar and dragged her outside, where he pinned her against a wall and choked her. She thought he was going to kill her right then and there, but a friend saved her.

She experienced a brief reprieve when he moved to the other side of Florida for a few months. This was a particularly dark period for Irene, as she worked during the days and then spent her evenings at home alone, where she drank excessively. “I didn’t trust nobody,” she said. Determined to get her life back together, she overcame the residual anger she held against God and she sobered up and went back to church. Things started looking better for Irene when her ex returned to town and promised to be the man she had always wanted, so they spent the weekend together. “It was so good,” she said, “I even skipped church.” A month later, however, the optimism faded as her boyfriend started abusing her again. She ended the relationship for good, although the ex-boyfriend continued to stalk her. Afraid that he might try to choke her again or worse, she made the decision she still regrets today—she bought a handgun.

Several days before Christmas in 1986, Irene went shopping to purchase Christmas gifts and then she went to a ball game. On her way home, she decided to stop at a fast food restaurant for dinner. As soon as she stepped out of her car, however, she saw her ex. More importantly, he saw her and, according to Irene, he ran toward her with a deranged look in his eyes. Irene grabbed the gun from her car, which she hoped would scare him. Instead, as Irene recalled, “Me ’n him started tussin’. Next thing I know, it went off.” She fled the scene and later learned that her ex-boyfriend died. The police arrested her the next day, and she has been incarcerated since.

(Women’s prison ministry. Photo courtesy of Prison Fellowship)

Today, Irene is an esteemed and trusted prison “mom” in the FCBI dorm at Lowell Annex, where she is an informal leader and comforter for the other women. “God loves them,” Irene said; “they’re daughters of the most high and they need to know that. I help them get rooted in God.” She continued, “A lot of these women were mistreated by drug dealers. You know, [they were] raped, abused, [and] prostituted, so I remind them the good news that they get a new body in Christ. There’s no more defilement! They’re new again. I tell them how to have godly relationships with men. I always tell them about Peter and being submissive to their husbands. And that means they need to first find godly men. When you’re submissive to a godly man, you find freedom in Christ.” As this suggests, Irene, who has never had a positive long-term relationship with a man, now teaches other abused women to submit to men. Ironically or not, her god and the men who abused her have similar expectations—they can be distant, they claim that suffering breeds strength, and they demand her submission and obedience.

In summary, Irene not only repeated the all-too-familiar tropes about gender that I learned to expect in the men’s facilities, but she also teaches them to younger women. Perhaps, I thought, she was the exception. Or maybe her positions were the norm? Subsequent interviews quickly confirmed the latter, as the women’s stories predictably contained some combination of sexual abuse, drug abuse, and negative relationships with men. Almost without exception, they also grew up in Christian families (both Protestant and Catholic) and considered themselves Christians when they committed their crimes. They now believe that true Christians do not commit crimes, so they reconcile this contradiction by retroactively denying the religiosity of their former selves. As one woman said, “I used to blame God for the victimization that led to my crimes, but I now realize it was my fault, not God’s. Had I been a better Christian, God wouldn’t have allowed those bad things to happen. God casts a protective umbrella over his true children.” Finally, the women also repeatedly told me that their god wants them to submit to godly men.

My experience in the FCBI dorm at Lowell Annex taught me not only that chaplains and incarcerated leaders in FCBIs teach women that God only sanctions patriarchal gender relations and heterosexual unions but that these ideas are more prevalent in the female facilities. To a certain extent, this is predictable, as the chaplains and the volunteers who teach classes at all FCBIs overwhelmingly mingle in the religious circles that teach and that circulate a core set of religious ideas—including gender submission—and they teach these ideas in various settings, including FCBIs. Incarcerated men in FCBIs learn that they will become heads of households, but women learn to become submissive, and they are also taught how to submit. They have to learn how to trust men, how to obey men, and how to interact with authoritative men—a recipe that has not served many of them well in the past. To break their old selves, the women learn repeatedly through intense socialization to embrace their new gendered ethics.

Brad Stoddard is assistant professor of religious studies at McDaniel College.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 13 of the Revealer podcast: “Faith-Based Prisons in the United States” with Brad Stoddard.

The post Faith-Based Prisons and Their Teachings about Gender appeared first on The Revealer.

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Every time I read a story about the border, or migration, or a hot-take about how we need to balance the needs of “the economy” with the needs of living, breathing, humans, I think of Rebecca Bartel’s book, Card-Carrying Christians: Debt and the Making of Free Market Spirituality in Colombia (University of California Press, 2021). Bartel draws us into the lives of a group of women staking their futures on debt and hope. The study — located in a mega-church, a multilevel marketing company, and a microloan venture — gives us an invaluable picture of what it’s like to have one’s sense of self defined by debt. By delving into the connections between Christian morality and the morality of finance capitalism, we not only come to understand religion and finance better, we also see more clearly how their power is connected. Card-Carrying Christians is innovative, deeply humane, and deserves to be read and taught widely.

Kali Handelman: I want to use the book’s title to set up our conversation and my first question. Most basically, it’s a two-part question: 1) Who are “card-carrying Christians? And 2) What are “free market spiritualities”? I’m hoping that, on our way to those definitions, you can also start to open up for our readers the ways you complicate and push back on assumed divisions between the categories of religion and economy. In the book you write about “finding the religious in the economic and the economic in the religious.” So, to bring that all together: what are the linked religious and economic ideas driving card-carrying Christians and free market spiritualities and why is it important to see the relationship (or lack of division) between them?

Rebecca Bartel: Let me begin with a vignette to answer those questions. At a mega-church the size of a small shopping mall, in the middle of cosmopolitan Bogotá, thousands of Christians flow through oversized glass doors every Sunday. At each of the church’s seven services, wireless credit card machines float about the faithful during scheduled offerings. Often with the lights dimmed, the worship band provides an emotive cadence to fervent praying, and at times weeping, with darkly clad ushers carrying credit card machines throughout the convention hall. They look like floating lights. As faithful tithers hail the ushers to their seat, the credit card machines illuminate the faces of the faithful as they enter their PIN and sign their receipts, with the usher always asking, “how many payments?” Electronic tithing often employs payment plans of up to 48 months with interest rates as high as 30%. These ushers ultimately add: “May God reward you one hundred-fold.”

This tiny gesture is the seemingly inevitable outgrowth of two interrelated developments. The first is that Colombia is now nearly 30% evangelical Christian, with new forms of Protestantism quickly changing the religious landscape of this longtime Roman Catholic country. At the center of this shift is something known as “Prosperity Christianity.” This is a set of beliefs that conflate God’s blessing and economic success. The second development is that Colombia is now all about credit. The most notable evidence is the rapid upsurge in credit card spending, which averages now approximately $2.5 million USD every hour. The net result is an ethnographic observation: debt is now central to Prosperity Christianity. Or as one Christian interlocutor told me, “Debt is a sign of faith.”

What drew me to studying Christianity and capitalism was a series of experiences like the one I just described, and the seemingly obvious entanglements between economic and religious forces. Yet, in the scholarly literature, time and again, religion and economics were held apart as independently operating spheres of human action – as though the profanity of the economic realm somehow tainted the sacred, or that the irrational sacred should not influence the supposedly “secular” economic realm. What I saw in the lived, everyday experiences of Colombian Christians was an intense muddling of these so-called discrete realms of practice. The religious and the economic were mutually influential in people’s lives.

In Colombia, Christianity is intimately entangled with economic and political webs of power. Throughout the book I explore how Christians understand themselves, their economic lives, and how their faith informs their financial practices. But also, importantly, how finance itself requires a certain kind of faith; a belief in the markets, in credit, and in debt. In that vein, the term “Card Carrying Christians” arises from the fact that the Christians I engaged with for this book both defined themselves as “authentic” Christians, but also use credit cards to put into work financialized practices of piety.

Central to the entanglements of these two concepts you ask about — religion and economics — are the practices that individual believers in Colombia put to work in their lived experience of late capitalism in the midst of ongoing civil war. The backdrop to my study is the five-decades long armed conflict that has generated over 200,000 deaths, millions of internal refugees, hundreds of thousands of disappeared bodies, and two generations of Colombians who have known their country in the shadow of war. I don’t focus on the war, in part because many excellent books have written specifically on the machinations of armed conflict in Colombia,[1] but also because I wanted to foreground the lives that continue in all their vibrancy, struggle, beauty, and, of course, debt.

Insofar as neoliberal political economies have sustained an economy of violence in Colombia, and in large part, prolonged the war as a source of profit, I found that beliefs in the possibility of peace and prosperity are often aligned with belief in the dominant economic form—financialized capitalism. For example, in one church service, the pastor preached, “God is rich! God is SO rich! And God wants to change Colombia. Colombia will be saved, Colombia will be a first-world nation, Colombia will be a rich nation.” This exhortation was followed by a call to make financial pacts with God. Many of the faithful present made those pacts on credit cards.

Financialized capitalism is currently the dominant form of capitalism, operating via credit-based forms of accumulation, rather than through material production. Debt is a source of profit. Credit card companies, banks, financial service providers, and other speculative economic forces gamble on future possibilities, and all invest in debt. Financial inclusion and financial education programs are becoming the focus for mainline educational institutions. In fact, one of the largest national banks in Colombia has taken over writing curriculum for an entire school district, with a focus on financial education. Opening a bank account is touted as a sign of modernization and moral responsibility. Financialization has become the animating force in the processes of capital accumulation, especially through the credit industry. The global shift towards deeper financialization is rooted in the neoliberal programs of deregulation and privatization of the 1980s and 1990s. Betting on futures and speculating on the profitability of debt is, of course, what led to the 2008 financial crash. Connecting these macro-economic shifts to the everyday financial practices of Colombian Prosperity Christians reveals an intimate link between belief and finance; the financial system requires belief. This is a central theme of the book: financialized capitalism requires enchanted systems of belief in order to function as it does, organizing not only our economic reality, but also our social and political worlds.

“Free Market Spiritualities,” then, are the social forms of late capitalism: aspirational, believing practices, and, fundamentally, going into debt whether by choice or by force.

KH: I’d like to pull on the thread about the link between credit and belief and ask about the relationship between debt and faith. When you engage with conversations — nationally and transnationally — about debt, do you see a religious logic at play? When we talk about Colombia, but also, say, about Haiti or student loans or microloans to women in the Global South? What kind of Christian morality is underwriting those conversations? (A side-note, I love your use of the term “underwriting” in the book. It does so much to subtly but powerfully activate the ways our vocabularies are saturated with financial, actuarial, logics!)

RB: Let’s begin with the notion of “debt-worthiness” or “credit-worthiness.” There is something innately predatory about these logics of indebtedness, given that there is an attached morality, and human “worth” tied to credit histories and economic practices that determine if a person is worthy of receiving a loan. As David Graeber carefully and thoroughly lays out in his history of debt, and Michel Feher has explained in his treatise on speculative capitalism and the “political ascendency of credit-worthiness,” credit and debt are two sides of the same coin. The valuation modes of global finance render certain individuals worthy and others not, and this is dictated by moral fictions of financial worth. In other words, your credit rating reflects some inner trait of your value as a person. In part this is in line with Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But if we track Weber’s analysis into the 21^st century, we encounter indebtedness as a practice of survival (i.e., going into credit card debt for groceries, qualifying for microcredit programs in order to sustain a small business, becoming saddled with insurmountable student debt in order to finish a university degree) and the double-edged sword of finance; prosperity requires debt yet prosperity is blocked by debt. This informs a kind of “cruel optimism,” following Lauren Berlant, that requires faith in a system designed to profit off the losses and desperation of lower classes.

I trace the imbrications of debt and faith to the roots of the concepts of credit and belief, both from the Latin word, credere. In the Western Christian tradition, credit and belief are related at a conceptual level. Weber makes the point of describing the “Spirit of Capitalism” as a specifically Christian endeavor, citing Benjamin Franklin’s admonitions about credit: “Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me interest, or so much as I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum where a man has good and large credit, and makes good use of it.” And again: “The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump. It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.” This is, of course, what we’ve come to refer to as the Protestant Ethic. The dominant, pervasive code that tells us that productivity, profit, and salvation are ineluctably connected.

Being worthy of credit is tied to specifically Western Christian ideas of morality, as credit scores determine our human worth. Slovenliness is anti-capitalist and, importantly, anti-Christian in Weber’s account. We have known that Christianity and capitalism are intimately related for a long time already. In my book, I extend and complicate these ideas by arguing that indebtedness has become a form of faithful practice in a new era of capitalism that is different from the industrial capitalism of Weber’s time. One of my principle interlocutors expressed to me that her debt was a sign of her faith. As the Christian micro-credit organization that I researched told their clients, paying back debts on time is a Christian virtue, and also a virtue that will guarantee future credits. The micro-credit organization requires clients to participate in life skills workshops that, they say, will allow individuals to act within their context and achieve the transformation of themselves, their families, their community, and their society. Such transformation efforts, of the self, family, community, and society, reveal the depths to which financialization reaches a cellular, all-encompasing degree of power. The Christian ideas that order these social and political realities sustain concepts of worth and value, creating economies of moral exchange wherein fiscal value is interchangeable with human value.

KH: Related to what you just said there about how finance renders some lives worthy and others unworthy, your book gives us a really useful new concept to think with: “necrofinance.” In adapting Achille Mbembe’s term, necropolitics (describing systems of power that operate by determining that some lives are disposable), you focus on how capitalism succeeds by marking some lives worthy of survival and thriving, and others as disposable. That is, as you say, “Necrofinance is imbued with the right to kill, if necessary, for financial gain.” Could you give us a sense of what that looks like on the ground in Colombia in the neighborhoods and communities whose stories you tell? 

RB: Necrofinance is the violent underside of late financial capitalism, and there are few parts of the world where the maneuverings of finance and violence are more clearly implicated than in Colombia. When fiscal value becomes interchangeable, or more accurately, prioritized above human value, the result is violence. To make this claim, I turn to Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics.” Necropolitics for Mbembe is a form of sovereignty that determines who can live and who should die. Mbembe suggests that politics in late modernity, especially in the post-colony, are a form of necropolitics that operate as a “work of death.” I suggest that finance in late capitalism operates according to the same logic: finance capitalism necessitates the work of death. This is necrofinance. Necrofinance arises out of late capitalist economic structures that generate systemic socio-economic precarity to the point of generating violence in order to generate profit.

The war that has raged for more than five decades in Colombia has been ordered by diverse regimes of violence. The political economy of violence has been a prominent driver of ongoing conflict in Colombia. Territory and land ownership are central factors in the prolongation of the violence. The land is fertile and rich in natural resources. Through colonial holdover and generations of violent dispossession, land ownership is extremely uneven, with a small percentage of the population owning the large majority of the land. Credits are required by small land owners in order to compete with the monopolies of agricultural production, the narco-industry, and the resource extraction industry that is accompanied by militarized security. The debts that are incurred by the most precarious classes in Colombia often become unpayable, while forced displacements from rural areas for economic interests of the agro-industry become necessary to maintain shareholder dividends. Much of the violence that takes place in rural Colombia is driven by economic interests in land and land speculation, but also by the struggle for control over strategic routes for trafficking drugs, weapons, and licit products like oil, gold, and gas. We know that upwards of 80% of forced displacements throughout Colombia take place in regions of the country that are the richest in natural resources and agro-industrial interest. These forced displacements have resulted in over 5 million internally displaced persons in Colombia, the largest in the hemisphere. This is a humanitarian crisis that has been created, in large part, by financial interests that have taken priority over the value of the lives of millions of human beings. This is one example of necrofinance. There are countless more, because, as I illustrate throughout the book, necrofinance is the constant companion of financial capitalism. Death is the inevitable consequence of an economic system that has shaped our conviction that profits are more valuable than human life.

KH: Finally, as we think about finance, life, and death, you describe the book as “an ethnography of aspiration” and demonstrate how central aspiration is to Christian faith and practices (of all denominations). Crucially, you explain that, “the connection between aspiration, breathing, and becoming lies in the metaphorical possibilities of resurrection and the new life that being born again promises.” I’m hoping that you can talk us through the significance of aspiration as a core concept in your book, so that we can then follow it through to your very powerful conclusion, where you write about how necrofinance is racialized and how it kills, centering the last words of Eric Garner and George Floyd: I can’t breathe. Reading these pages now, in 2021, I couldn’t help but think, too, of the millions of people who have died from COVID-19 — a respiratory disease. As you say in the book, financial capitalism and racial capitalism “take our breath away.” How do we think about the linked religious and economic logics of aspiration in this moment? And about how those logics are racialized and gendered? 

RB: Capitalism and Christianity traffic in hope. Yet hope, esperanza, can suggest passivity, as the Spanish root of “esperanza” is “esperar,” which means “to wait.” As one Colombian economist said, when asked where he finds hope in the midst of these political economies of violence, “We do not hope/esperar. We are not waiting, passively, for the war to end, for society to change. We have faith. We know and act with the knowledge that the war must end, that society will change.” This economist believed that Colombia could become a different country, with a new economy and new politics. Narratives of rebirth, thick with Christian imagery and symbolism, sustain a collective aspiration towards a new society, a peaceable society, and a new time. Yet, insofar as this aspiration is tied to an economic system that requires sacrifice, aspiration becomes increasingly illusive. I call my study an ethnography of aspiration because aspiring towards a new future was a social fact that presented in all of my research sites, in so many of my interactions, and was a central organizing social form that drove narratives of survival and gumption. Yet, as you mention, in my conclusion I call attention to the need for greater scholarly attention to the racialized forces of late capitalism and the racial capitalism that drives indebtedness and necrofinance.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has forced us, or should force us, to reckon with the racist and colonial violence that hold up our economic structures, especially as our economic structures are imbricated with our healthcare systems, and as the economy has so clearly been prioritized above the value of human life. In hoping for the pandemic to end, for bodies to heal, for breath to be returned to ventilated lungs, for racial reckoning, aspirational urges get caught in our throats. We are all experiencing the pressure of the pandemic, and the economic squeeze on livelihoods as the pressure to keep businesses open grinds against an already taxed healthcare system. But the pressures and challenges to aspirational visions of the future are not felt equally across society. When Los Angeles was running out of oxygen, in January of this year, Latinx patients were dying at triple the rate of white patients. There were not enough ventilators to assist the Latinx majority of COVID patients in LA County. COVID takes the breath of the most vulnerable. Millions still can’t breathe. The crushing proverbial knee of a white supremacist legal structure is sustained by racist social and economic forces that deprive BIPOC bodies of breath; aspiro.

Racial capitalism has contributed to the construction of race itself and the positioning of whiteness as not only a fabricated ethnicity, but more importantly a social and economic class. In order to dismantle white supremacy, as a transnational and transhistorial project, racial capitalism must also be dismantled. An ethnography of aspiration traces the ways that moral imaginaries for the future are entangled with structural realities of the present, and the different ways that historical injustices literally take breath away. Economic justice is intimately and inseparably connected to racial justice. To further understand how race and capital are related, following the groundbreaking work of Cedric J. Robinson, Nancy Leong, Rita Segato, and others, I hope my book encourages scholars to recognize and explore the religious worlds that uphold and, yes, underwrite these imbrications.

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.

Rebecca C. Bartel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Associate Director for the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University.

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[1] Martha Nubía Bello, Basta Ya! Colombia, Memorias de Guerra y Dignidad, (Bogotá, Colombia: Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013); Aldo Cívico, The Para-State: An Ethnography of Colombia’s Death Squads (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016); Alexander L. Fattal, Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Michael Taussig, Law in a lawless land: Diary of a “limpieza” in Colombia (New York, NY: New Press, 2003); Nubia Yaneth Ruiz Ruiz, Mercedes Castillo de Herrera, and Karen Forero Niño, Geopolítica Del Despojo: Minería y Violencia En Colombia (Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2018); Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence: the political economy of war and peace in Colombia (2nd ed.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013).

The post Credit Card Christianity, Debt, and Violence in Colombia appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo courtesy of INSAMER)

Over the past six months, the French government has gone on a multi-pronged offensive against Muslim collective life. State agencies unilaterally closed a number of mosques and Muslim charities. The government forced the French Collective Against Islamophobia (CCIF), the most prominent civil rights organization that combats anti-Muslim discrimination, to reincorporate outside of France, as they too were targeted for closure. Government officials developed sweeping new laws to regulate Muslim religious life, including a proposal to bar minors from wearing the headscarf. State actors have also been especially suspicious of links between French Muslims and decolonial thought and anti-racism organizing, calling for the investigation of critical race theory in academic contexts. These moves extend the surveillance of Muslim communities to include political organizing by communities of color more broadly.

In recent months, government agencies have placed the bank accounts of Muslim religious organizations, the schooling practices of Muslim families, and the research agendas of university faculty under more intense scrutiny. This surveillance, according to the French government, aims to identify a perceived Islamic “separatism” from French society that purportedly threatens “public order.” Over the past five years, “public order” has become the most prominent watchword for justifying surveillance of Muslims, superseding the legal framework of secularism, or laïcité. Anglophone observers often understand the special nature of French secularism as the philosophical reason underlying anti-Muslim policies. But French elected officials increasingly admit that secularism is inadequate to justify the measures they would like to take against the visibility of Islam in France. For example, the 2016 Jouanno Report argued for a new “expansive understanding of public order” to go beyond secularism as a justification for bans on Muslim women’s modest dress. The pretense of a uniquely French secularism that justifies specific attitudes towards religion, long threadbare, is now coming apart at the seams.

The centrist government of President Emmanuel Macron has taken the lead on the current wave of policies, anticipating a showdown with the far right in the 2022 presidential elections. The right has critiqued Macron’s policies as toothless, while the left has called them ineffectual. However, these critiques have not called into question the basic premise of the administration’s crackdown.

(France’s President Emmanuel Macron)

French officials have justified their policing of Muslim religious life as a response to recent acts of violence. But the true anxiety at the heart of the anti-Muslim witch hunt is not about fringe violent actors. Instead, it is about Muslim “integration” into French society — the fact that more and more descendants of immigrants are breaking glass ceilings in every domain of professional and cultural life, from elite French universities to journalism to law, while still claiming their Muslim identities and practices. Further, they are drawing on French norms and traditions to critique discrimination and colonial relationships of power. As sociologist Hichem Benaïssa put it, “Islam has progressively become a problem to the extent that it has become French.” It is precisely the increasing “integration” of Muslim immigrants and their descendants in France, and the way they claim republican values of liberty, equality, and fraternity on their own terms, that has provoked widespread concern from French elected officials and their supporters.

The recent wave of state action against “separatism” was prompted by a murder that horrified France. In October 2020, schoolteacher Samuel Paty was decapitated by Abdoullah Anzorov, an 18-year-old Russian who had come to France at the age of 6 as a refugee. Anzorov’s violence came in response to Paty’s decision to show caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of speech, recalling the violent attacks in 2015 at the offices of satirical newsweekly Charlie Hebdo, which had initially published the caricatures. Anzorov’s trajectory reveals an increasingly isolated individual. He sought online connections with fighters in Syria, but was not part of any network or organization. His family and peers reported that he had become reclusive in the months leading up to the murder. When an online campaign was started against Paty by a student’s father, who incorrectly believed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave class while he showed the caricatures, Anzorov latched onto the incident.

In stark contrast to the isolation of Anzorov and other violent actors, the government’s measures have deliberately targeted spaces of Muslim collective life as well as Muslim ideals of community and solidarity. As the government itself admitted, there is no relationship between the circumstances of the perpetrators of violence and the settings, people, or ideas that have become targets of state sanction. In the words of Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, the targeted communities and organizations were not necessarily linked with any act of violence, but were those “to whom we wanted to send a message.” Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer spoke of  so-called “Islamo-leftists” as “intellectually complicit” in Paty’s murder, arguing that scholars and activists should be targets of state intervention alongside perpetrators of violence.

At the same time, the state has insisted that any expressions of anti-Muslim racism, discrimination, or violence are exclusively the work of individuals, and therefore no one should interpret these acts collectively in terms of structural racism or “state racism.” To do so, they suggest in the new “Charter of Principles for French Imams,” would be, “like all victimizing postures,” an act of “defamation against France” — that is, a punishable crime. Racists can only be lone actors, and therefore anti-racist organizing and critical race theory is framed as a “victimizing posture,” creating divisions and threatening the very foundations of the Republic.

The perceived threat of fraternité

As with every other episode in France’s long history of constructing and managing racial and religious difference, the current measures are animated by a paranoia over “communalist” identity politics and “separatism” from the national body. Most often associated with ethnic enclaves or identity politics, “communalism” and “separatism” increasingly apply to all ethnically and religiously specific organizations, and to patterns of socialization within ethnic and religious groups. However, these terms never apply to the exclusive enclaves of the white or wealthy. This is in spite of the fact that research by demographer Patrick Simon has shown that on the whole, immigrants and their descendants are considerably more likely than the white French population to have close relationships with people of other races and ethnicities — it is the white French who are most likely to socialize exclusively with members of their own race. Communalism and separatism are terms of moral panic that serve to stigmatize and criminalize any space of gathering or shared consciousness among France’s non-white populations, Muslims in particular.

The idea of “communalism” presupposes a coherent “Muslim community” in France that competes with the national community for loyalty. As sociologists Marwan Mohamed and Julien Talpin put it, “Elected officials and state institutions bring ‘communities’ into existence in order to better control them.” Politicians constantly invoke the idea of a coherent “Muslim community” as a social problem in order to justify policies that aim to repress solidarity among Muslims and other communities of color.

The state does not, of course, have a monopoly on the idea of Muslim community. Many Muslims seek to build robust communities on their own terms. These collectives, including charities and consciousness-raising organizations as well as mosques, draw on the moral inheritance of fraternity and solidarity that is prominent in both republican and Islamic ethical traditions. The state perceives them as a threat precisely because they offer dynamic and visible alternatives to the state’s construction of “the Muslim community” as a homogenous and closed separatist movement. Community organizations like Lallab and Front de Mères highlight the intersection of gendered Islamophobia with other forms of discrimination, and they lead grassroots resistance efforts against the surveillance of Muslim, Arab, and Black people in France.

The civil society organizations that have been shut down over the past six months consistently articulated their work in terms of republican values: liberty, equality, and fraternity. For example, the French Collective Against Islamophobia (CCIF) gave free legal support to Muslims who were victims of violence and discrimination, defending civil liberties and equality before the law. The charity BarakaCity expressed the French value of fraternity through service to unhoused populations, refugees, and people in poverty around the world. Both were broad, multi-ethnic organizations that served populations in need regardless of their religious affiliation. The state perceived these organizations as threats to “republican principles” even though the organizations were motivated by these very principles. It was their success and their grassroots legitimacy, rather than any particular feature of their activities, that put CCIF and BarakaCity at the top of the list of places to which the state wanted to “send a message.” While the CCIF is working to reestablish itself in Europe, its operations in France are severely curtailed.

On February 16, 2021, the National Assembly passed a law “against separatism and for Republican principles,” currently being amended by the Senate. The law is the centerpiece of the state’s response to the murder of Samuel Paty. This impending law, widely known as the “separatism law,” targets Muslims in the name of rooting out “withdrawal into one’s community.” The “separatism law” tightens the web of penalization around mosques, Islamic schools, charities, and community centers that are made up of or serve largely Muslim populations — the very institutions that enact the values of fraternity and solidarity on the local level.

The most publicized provisions of the law include those regulating homeschooling, banning “virginity tests,” and the amendment added by the Senate that would disallow minors from wearing the headscarf, although this particular measure is unlikely to pass the National Assembly. These provisions invoke longstanding fears about Muslim families that animate the law, implying that children in “separatist” Muslim contexts are miseducated at home, that Muslim parents overly police young girls’ sexuality, and that Muslim girls are forced to wear the headscarf against their will.

The more technical provisions of the law have received less media attention, and yet this is where the law may have its greatest impact, revising the laws of 1901 and 1905 that regulate cultural and religious associations, under the heading of “Reinforcing the preservation of public order.” These associations will be required to submit to a government review of their bank accounts, and must declare all donations from non-French individuals or organizations for government approval. Religious and cultural organizations can be closed, temporarily or permanently, if they are deemed to host “discourse, ideas, theories, or activities that provoke hate or violence, or justify or encourage hate or violence.” The bill does not name the breadth of what might fall under “ideas or theories that provoke, justify, or encourage hate.” People who gather together in spite of of such closures face a 7500 euro fine and 6 months in prison.

A “pact” for “public order”

On January 18, 2021, the French Council for the Muslim Religion (CFCM) presented a “Charter of Principles for French Islam” to President Macron. This charter, solicited by the state, is intended by Macron to be the foundational document for the planned National Council of Imams, a state-run certification body for religious professionals. The CFCM is itself the product of an earlier wave of efforts at state management of Muslim populations. Founded by then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy in 2003, the CFCM is the outcome of the French government’s desire to have an “official” Muslim interlocutor as a means of regulating religious practices and defining an authorized “French Islam.” This project dates back at least to the 1980s, and continues the colonial management of North African populations through religion. The CFCM has little to no legitimacy among the majority of Muslims in France, whatever their relationship to religion. Most see it as an organ of the state, a bureaucratic arm for France’s “Muslim policies.”

The “Charter of Principles for French Islam” is organized through a fundamental division between the “national community” and the “Muslims of France.” It claims that “from a religious and ethical point of view, Muslims, whether citizens or foreign residents, are linked to France by a pact. This pact obliges them to respect national cohesion, public order, and the laws of the Republic.” The “pact” entails specific obligations on Muslims, and on Muslim clergy in particular, who are called to enter into this relationship with the state precisely “from a religious point of view,” in flagrant violation of the principle of secularism. The charter binds its signatories to “commit not to use, nor to allow others to use, Islam or the concept of umma (community of believers) with a political lens, whether local, national, or in the interests of a political agenda dictated by a foreign power.”

Both the charter of principles itself and its language of a “pact” to “respect national cohesion and public order” echo the famous Clerical Oath of Revolutionary France. In 1790, the government decreed that all members of the Catholic clergy swear a public loyalty oath to the Republic, establishing the primacy of their allegiance to the state before their religious convictions. This idea of a hierarchy of commitments, with one’s role as citizen always paramount, has been a hallmark of the French approach to religion since the Revolutionary era — long before the elaboration of state secularism at the dawn of the twentieth century. It has also been a persistent theme in France’s management of Islam and Muslims. The Charter of Principles for French Islam, as a prelude to Macron’s planned “Council of Imams,” is a clerical oath for the 21st century, demanding that religious officials as religious officials publicly avow their loyalty to public order, which their vocation is presumed to threaten. In response, a few prominent French imams are stepping down from their positions in protest.

From “Islamo-fascism” to “Islamo-leftism” 

Some French intellectuals, though not all, have challenged the government’s anti-Muslim measures. A range of academics and journalists, with and without personal ties to Islam and immigration, have drawn on the long tradition of francophone decolonial critique and anti-racist thought to historicize what Jean Beaman has called the “racial project of France.” Those on the left with the temerity to argue that anti-Muslim discrimination is a violation of the egalitarian principles of the Republic, or that France’s violent colonial past shapes its present, or that the nationalist myth of a colorblind society is just that — a myth — have found themselves targeted with a new epithet: “Islamo-leftists.”

French Minister of Higher Education Dominique Vidal recently elicited a furor when she called for an investigation into so-called “radical or activist Islamo-leftist ideas,” which she described as a “gangrene on society,” in order to “distinguish proper academic research from activism and opinion.” The response from France’s academic community was swift and overwhelmingly negative: the National Center for Scientific Research issued a statement flatly declaring that “Islamo-leftism does not correspond to any social-scientific reality,” and over 600 university faculty called for Vidal’s resignation.

(A march to protest Islamophobia in France)

And yet, Vidal is far from alone in advancing this rhetoric. President Macron asserted that “the academic world has been guilty. It has encouraged the ethnicization of social issues,“ citing intersectionality in particular as a theory that threatened to “divide the Republic in two.” The U.S. has become emblematic in French political discourse of the flourishing of identity politics, anti-racism, and decolonial thought, all understood as posing a fundamental threat to the universalist republican model. This invocation of the trans-Atlantic threat links foreign ideas with foreign bodies, in a mirror image of American political anxieties over the cultural threat posed by “French theory.”

Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer warned: “There’s a battle to be waged against an intellectual framework coming from American universities, intersectional theses that want to essentialize communities and identities . . . It is the breeding ground for a fragmentation of societies that converges with the Islamic model.” Elected officials feel particularly threatened by forms of social analysis that center any form of identity other than citizenship.

The French paranoia about Islam is in continuity with the long history of European and American anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiment. As historian Muriem Haleh Davis has observed, “Islamo-leftist” is eerily reminiscent of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” invoking earlier antisemitic ideas about a global leftist Jewish conspiracy. In this case, the foreign ties of Islamo-leftism are not to Russia, as they were with “Judeo-Bolshevism,” but to the United States. The government’s insistence on statements of loyalty to national cohesion, obsession with forms of collectivism that stand outside the nation, and claims that some groups possess an immutable genealogical inheritability of difference, all resonate with the racializing ideology of antisemitism. In Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, David Nirenberg notes the operation of “judaizing” — the ascription of Jewishness to all sorts of unrelated and even opposing things and people — as part of a conspiracy theory that waxes and wanes throughout Western modernity, and certainly in France. A parallel “Islamizing” logic underpins the rhetoric of “Islamo-leftism.” This rhetoric simultaneously construes Muslims as part of a left-wing conspiracy for cultural power, on the one hand, and attempts to taint leftist critique with the taboo of Muslimness, on the other.

In the face of this rampant stigmatization and surveillance, Muslim and decolonial activists are responding forcefully, with Muslim women at the forefront. The authoritarian measures being taken by the current administration have dire consequences for French communities of color. They betray the very republican values of liberty, equality, and fraternity that they claim to defend, and they expose how political claims of universalism so often depend on the rejection of ideals and practices of community and collective belonging. The question that remains is whether a broad enough coalition will join those who are resisting the surveillance of Muslims to shift the direction of policy and public discourse in France.

Kirsten Wesselhoeft is an ethnographer of Islam and intellectual culture, currently focused on France. She teaches religious studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

The post A French Inquisition: France’s Crackdown on Muslim Life in the Name of Public Order appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo courtesy of the Billy Graham Center)

You never learn your family’s history all at once. It comes to you piecemeal, out of chronological order. It starts with you asking your dad why he cooks eggs the way he does and by the end you find out that his first job in the United States was at a bowling alley and he fell in love with your mom at first sight and by the way his nickname in high school was “Mafalda.” From there, the stories repeat. You hear the same Mafalda story at birthdays, cookouts, after church services, when you ask to sleep over a friend’s house, and so on.

Other stories are harder to learn and often go intentionally unspoken. My mother told us that she came to the United States to escape the violence of the Salvadoran civil war — as did much of the Salvadoran diaspora — but I never asked about the war itself. As a child, I didn’t know what a civil war was or what it meant for a country to be at war with itself. In recollections, my mother described the mundane details of an event, like the time she broke a heel on a bus that was hijacked by paramilitary groups. As I got older, I wanted to know how she lived through these times when her life was in peril.

Her answer was that she had found Jesus. She found him as a teenager in evangelical Protestant big tent revivals in El Salvador during the early 1980s. She found him in a Bible with red letters she keeps to this day, well-worn and weathered. He was a comforting Jesus, one who gave her strength amid the social and political turmoil of her times. She clung to this version of Jesus, even as it alienated her from her Catholic family at a time when Catholic suspicion of Protestants grew across Latin America. This family rupture continued after she left El Salvador to the United States in 1983.

These tortured aspects of her spiritual and physical migration seep through when she shares stories about herself. But she also displayed those narratives as artifacts and tangible reminders in our home during the 1990s. I was raised among these items, including Bible verse posters and a collection of novels from the apocalyptic Left Behind series; VHS tapes of Psalty, a Christian children’s program; cassettes of Marcos Witt’s Spanish worship music; books by James Dobson, in English and in Spanish translation. We lived in a bilingual cabinet of evangelical curiosities that differed from my extended family’s Catholic and iconography-laden abodes.

Billy Graham with the author’s mother. (Photo courtesy of the author)

But most prominently among my immediate family’s archive was a framed photograph of my mom with Billy Graham.

This was one of my favorite pictures of my mom: dolled up in full glam with a gravity-defying perm, she appears tiny standing next to “America’s Pastor.” Despite Graham’s celebrity status, here he was, staring into the camera and forever commemorated in our home where he remains for posterity to this day. When I was growing up, I did not think of Graham as someone who was “famous” but as someone who was familiar — his picture in our living room standing next to my mom. Their photo was taken after my mom gave Graham one of several haircuts. Even evangelists need a trim.

My mom was a hairdresser at the Hyatt Regency salon on Capitol Hill in the 1990s. Given the salon’s prominent clientele, hairdressers often made house calls or went to congressional offices for quick appointments. Once my mom rushed to Senator Ted Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia for a quick manicure that she conducted as he ate lunch. Her boss noticed her meticulous and caregiving craft and soon recommended her to Billy Graham. Over the years, she would cut his hair when he traveled to D.C. But their professional interactions also had a deeper connection. As an evangelical convert, my mother had a spiritual connection to Graham and, I would later discover, an inadvertently political one as well.

Of course, Billy Graham is a ubiquitous and towering figure of postwar America. He is synonymous with contemporary U.S. Christianity and held a dominant moral presence in political life until his death in 2018. To many, he represents the modern and ecumenical iteration of old-time religion manifested in tent revivals, radio outreach, and direct evangelism. But to millions across the Global South who attended his crusades and supported his association, his impact was a symbol of evangelicalism’s international reach and a disruption to the Catholic majority in Latin America. To my family, he was a symbol of a faith that changed and traveled — from Catholic to evangelical, from El Salvador to the United States. But these global and intimate connections were possible only through American Cold War interventions that were, in large part, the reason for my own mother’s exile from El Salvador. 

Reagan, Religion, and Revolution

The late 1970s witnessed unprecedented religious transformations in El Salvador. While Catholic clergy, including notable figures such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, embraced and mobilized the tenets of liberation theology in support of disenfranchised indigenous, poor, and rural communities, an equally powerful charismatic and evangelical Protestant movement spread during this period. As historian David Stoll notes, the rapid expansion of evangelical conversion quadrupled and became one-fifth of El Salvador’s population by 1986. My mother was part of this movement. As she describes it, she came to the Lord first through a family member and then in fellowship with other young evangélicos. This new infrastructure of spiritual and communal belonging was crucial to her navigating tumultuous times in her country.

The growth of multifaceted “spirit-filled” forms of evangelical Christianity in El Salvador coincided with the eruption of a brutal civil war that was bolstered by a U.S.-backed right-wing government from 1980 until 1992. Salvadoran leftist guerrilla forces that comprised the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) engaged in armed resistance against the country’s conservative and military oligarchy who indiscriminately used violence against civilians and political challengers. Although the government targeted Catholic clergy for their suspected communist sympathies and their outspoken mobilization against human rights violations, Protestant evangelicals were also subject to violence if they did not express allegiance to the military and state. It was within this context that Graham’s influence, and U.S. evangelical involvement more broadly, thrived in Central America.

Photograph from the El Salvador civil war. (Photo courtesy of Getty Images)

U.S. intervention in El Salvador had disastrous effects on the region. Under the Reagan administration, the U.S. not only funded, supplied, and trained right-wing rebel groups, known as contras or death squads, the U.S. also diplomatically supported the military and government as it targeted civilians and the leftist FMLN insurgency. Faced with concerns about the rise of communism in the region, Reagan poured billions of dollars to support the Salvadoran state even as the military and its affiliates committed atrocities. Most notably, in 1981 the government’s Atlacatl battalion—trained at Fort Benning, Georgia— murdered over a thousand mostly evangelical and indigenous Pipil peoples in the massacre at El Mozote in Morazán. This massacre remains the largest in modern Latin American history. By the time it ended in 1992, the Salvadoran Civil War claimed over 75,000 lives.

The religious right in the United States, amid their newfound political ascendancy, played an important role in supporting and facilitating a foreign policy that contributed to the violence of the conflict. Moral Majority leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell both advocated for Congress to continue supporting the contras in El Salvador on the basis that the U.S. should cull the spread of communism and advance the cause of religious liberty, by which they meant the spread of Protestantism throughout Latin America. Robertson also donated millions through his ministry to the contras, whom he called ‘God’s Army.” A dual dynamic of increasingly radicalized Catholic clergy — Jesuits in particular — and repression of Protestant converts convinced many American evangelicals that El Salvador was not only a political frontier — it was a religious one.

Billy Graham, and U.S. Power, in El Salvador

But before Robertson and Falwell’s forays into El Salvador, Billy Graham had several decades of experience in Central America. His first time in the isthmus — and indeed all of Latin America —occurred during the Eisenhower administration in the winter of 1958 as part of his Caribbean Tour when he visited Barbados, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Jamaica, México, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Although he faced resistance from local governments and the Catholic religious establishment, Graham was welcomed with fanfare at airports, soccer stadiums, homes, missionary outposts, and among small Protestant convert populations. Similar receptions continued for decades.

Known as a proponent of non-partisanship and ecumenical efforts, Graham was often indifferent or at odds with his American counterparts on the religious right. He was outspoken about his purportedly apolitical stances and avoided endorsing policies or electoral candidates in his later years, preferring to lend spiritual support instead to leaders and laity. Indeed, many on the religious right accused Graham of being too ecumenical. Some maintain that this quietist approach guided Graham’s activities in Latin America wherein he avoided becoming politically imbricated in the violent theatre of the Cold War.

But Graham was not as politically uninvolved as he publicly let on. During the 1960s, the Billy Graham Evangelical Association (BGEA) collaborated with the U.S. State Department to share information on the region. Before and after his Andean tour to South America in 1962, he pressured President John F. Kennedy to advocate for Latin American Protestants as a foreign policy priority in the fight against godless communism. His militant anti-communism was not surprising given his religious convictions, but his belief that the expansion of Protestantism was key to winning the Cold War characterized his surreptitious political engagements.

Into the 1970s, socially-conscious Latin American evangelicals challenged the American approach to evangelization — for which Graham was a central figure — for not prioritizing issues around racial differences, social inequalities, and human rights. During the Graham-led global summit of evangelicals at the First International Congress on World Evangelization in 1974, progressive Latin American Protestants focused greater attention on social concerns, informed by liberation theology and the liberal Protestant tradition, by forging a ‘gospel for the poor.’ Progressive evangelicals in the United States supported them and critiqued not only the violent outcomes of U.S. involvement in Latin America — but also the role American evangelicals played in upholding these policies.

This divergence from progressive evangelicals emphasized a key aspect of Graham’s approach to Central America: his conspicuous silence. Despite his early experience in the region and the expansion of evangelicalism, he was not outspoken about the targeting of Catholic clergy in El Salvador or the massacre of evangelicals at El Mozote. He did not advocate for justice over the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered presiding over Mass in San Salvador. This silence becomes all the more glaring as his own son, Franklin Graham, trained chaplains to support the Nicaraguan contras during the same period. For a man known for unequivocal values and outspoken convictions, Billy Graham’s silence over El Salvador is deafening.

President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan with Billy Graham at the National Prayer Breakfast held at the Washington Hilton Hotel in 1981.

Graham’s reach was possible because of his protections as an American citizen and one with powerful friends. Although there were many in the region who referred to him as hermano (brother), his connections, friendships, and movements through Central America were not apolitical. His commitment to U.S. political leaders despite their disastrous policies that contributed to violence in the region and mass exile abroad was not nonpartisan. To claim neutrality as thousands of co-religionists died across the border as a result of U.S. intervention was a position aligned with the political effort to rid Latin America of communism rather than to protect Christians in the region.

The Pain and the Personal of the Archive

These entanglements between Billy Graham, global evangelicalism, the Reagan Administration, U.S. power, and the Cold War — like my own family history — also came to me piecemeal. While I learned about the horrors of the Salvadoran Civil War from my mother as I got older, I didn’t know about the role the U.S. played in fueling the conflict until adulthood. In fact, I first learned about American involvement in the war under seemingly innocuous circumstances and in one of the most ostensibly transparent of U.S. bureaucratic institutions — The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

During the fall of 2011, I decided to write my undergraduate capstone on the post-war settlement in El Salvador. My father and I drove to College Park, Maryland, where I got my picture taken and credentials registered as I headed into the natural light-filled research room on the second floor of our nation’s archive. After passing security checks and procuring approved pencils, I looked into the acid-free archival boxes I requested and reviewed intelligence correspondences, state department reports, and a cocktail of other official papers. Some documents were redacted beyond recognition, while others detailed U.S. interests and priorities in El Salvador during the 1980s. At the end of several days of this sterile and securitized process, I realized that the country to which my family migrated was also the same global power that subsidized the violence that forced them to leave Central America in the first place.

I also recognized that my family’s American evangelical co-religionists were complicit in fueling the wars that raged across Central America. Despite Graham’s reluctance or Falwell’s ignorance, they failed to condemn — or even acknowledge — the human rights violations that took place in Central America. Falwell and Graham never broke a heel on a bus that was hijacked on their way to work, never learned their family was held hostage, nor did they have to leave their country. There was no salvation in Reagan’s interventions and no political allyship among his white evangelical supporters for the more than one million Salvadoran asylees, refugees, and migrants from whom I am descended.

Framed picture of author’s mother with Billy Graham. (Photo courtesy of the author)

I reflect on these entangled pasts when I see the framed photo of Graham and my mother mounted in my family’s living room  — an artifact of paper, spirit, and flesh. I imagine the numerous times my mom faithfully manicured his hands, shaved his beard, or cut his hair. I think about the cruelty of historic circumstances that put them in the same room, at the same time, in Washington D.C. A man preaching deliverance, getting a haircut before walking through the halls of U.S. political power and a Salvadoran evangelical hairdresser who fled the violence he was too neutral to condemn.

Today, my mother is the only person who cuts my hair. It is a ritual she performs out of love and care. She repairs the broken ends of my locks and she works through them seamlessly out of familiarity. By removing my dead ends, she initiates a regenerative process in my body and it’s no wonder: she learned how to cut hair in El Salvador around the same time she became an evangelical and before she left her country. These two elements traveled with her from the homeland to diaspora. Maybe a haircut can be more than just grooming. Perhaps it is a healing process, a way to start anew.

Amy Fallas is a writer and historian from Washington D.C. She is the daughter of Central American immigrants and writes about religion.

The post How I Met My Mother (and Billy Graham) appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

For the past two weeks, more than 300,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 each day in India. Hospitals have run out of room and life-saving equipment. In several Indian states, people have been told they will have to manage their COVID symptoms on their own and hope for the best. The number of people dying daily from COVID is staggering. Entire fields have been filled with pyres to cremate the deceased. And although India is the world’s leading producer of vaccines, they are in desperate need of more COVID-19 vaccines to distribute to the country’s population.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The situation in India is an urgent global crisis, not a national one. The rapid spread of the virus could easily cause a mutation that will lead to a new COVID-19 variant. And that new variant could prove more powerful than our current vaccines. As vaccinated Americans rejoice in seeing their loved ones for the first time in a year, our efforts to remain safe could be undone if we do not prioritize sending relief to India. The virus does not care about borders or national loyalty. If we do not recognize our interconnected world and urge elected officials to do the same, our global pandemic could worsen quickly and come back into our neighborhoods with a vengeance.

The Revealer’s May issue considers how global issues transcend national boundaries. The issue opens with Amy Fallas’ “How I Met My Mother (and Billy Graham),” where she recounts the role Billy Graham played in the violence that tore apart her mother’s home nation of El Salvador and the role Graham played in her mother’s life when she became his hair stylist after she fled to the United States. Next, in “A French Inquisition: France’s Crackdown on Muslim Life in the Name of Public Order,” Kirsten Wesselhoeft investigates the concerning reasons why the French government implemented laws to put imams on a state registry and why it is monitoring the bank accounts of Muslim organizations and mosques. Then, in “Credit Card Christianity, Debt, and Violence in Colombia,” Kali Handelman interviews Rebecca Bartel about her new book, Card Carrying Christians, and what her research reveals about the commingling of religion, capitalism, and violence in Colombia and throughout the world.

Our May issue also explores a topic where the United States has no global competitor: mass incarceration. In an excerpt from his book Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida’s Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State, Brad Stoddard explores how “faith-based” correctional facilities try to teach female inmates that they should be submissive to men as a religious ideal that God wants.

Our May issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Faith-Based Prisons in the United States.” Brad Stoddard joins us to explain how states are running faith-based correctional facilities, what religious activities take place in these prisons, and how these institutions promote conservative religious ideas that often align with evangelical Protestant Christianity – despite America’s theoretical separation of church and state. You can listen to this fascinating episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As the pandemic improves in the United States, and as global travel opens up again, let us be more cognizant than we might have been before the emergence of COVID-19 that our shared world is fragile. All of us remain in jeopardy if the virus spreads rapidly in any other part of the world. Let us commit to acting in ways that show awareness of our global interconnectedness for the sake of the pandemic, the climate crisis, and in respect of our shared humanity.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Our Interconnected World appeared first on The Revealer.