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Lately, my screen has been filled with Lovecraft Country, the 2020 HBO series by showrunner Misha Green, based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name. Part of the Black horror renaissance launched by the 2017 film Get Out (director Jordan Peele gets an executive producer credit here), the show narrates the pulp-fiction adventures of hero Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) and an amiable cast of supporting characters, each of whom gets a star turn in one of its ten hour-long episodes. Plot twists abound. The story begins with Atticus returning home from the Korean War to 1950s Chicago. It then proceeds to slowly pull back the onion-skin secrets of a multilayered mythology.

The title offers the first clue to cracking these coded mysteries, with its reference to the notoriously racist progenitor of modern horror fiction, H.P. Lovecraft. What and where is “Lovecraft Country”? Green’s show, I think, implies two answers to this question — one pertaining to its political mission, the other to its sly take on modern religion.

First, and most scathingly, “Lovecraft Country” is America, the white-dominated United States. It’s a place where hidden monsters lurk on every corner and even polite faces can turn deadly in an instant. As in the acclaimed Get Out, the horror genre becomes a means of expressing a very real sense of dread. Supernaturalisms are literalized metaphors. In whites-only “sundown towns,” night really does bring monsters. In redlined neighborhoods, houses really are haunted. Keenly interested in how Black bodies can safely navigate such spaces, Lovecraft Country spends much of its time on the road with Atticus’ uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) and aunt Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis), who publish a Safe Negro Travel Guide that alerts middle-class Black motorists to lurking dangers. This is a historically accurate detail, recalling the Negro Motorist Green Book. The show’s signature move is to overlay this history with supernatural horror, much as the Freemans’ daughter Dee (Jada Harris) draws literal monsters on her parents’ road map. She knows that supernaturalisms reveal reality like little else can.

Second, and just as centrally, “Lovecraft Country” names the world of speculative fiction, the cosmos conjured by Lovecraft and other genre writers. This territory, I would argue, strongly overlaps with the cosmos of comparative religion, the academic discipline. For the past century, pulp fiction has been a sponge for witches, sorcerers, gods, and other supernatural beings labeled as “magic,” “superstition,” or “folklore” and thus relegated to the sidelines of “religion” proper. It has also, if less frequently, creatively poached symbols and stories from canonical religious scriptures. Fiction writers even poach from scholarly tomes to construct their mysteriously mythographic worlds.

Writing in a moment when a man known as the “Q shaman” has just stormed the U.S. Capitol, it seems safe to say that “Lovecraft Country” and its conspiratorial religiosity are still with us. Who better than Lovecraft to decipher the arcane symbolic banners carried by the white-nationalist mob of January 6 — including, but not limited to, the banners dedicated to the semi-satirical alt-right deity Kek, a frog-headed “god of chaos and darkness.”

Racism was, after all, central to how Lovecraft wrote horror. His stories overflow with dusky-hued monsters, Black bodies subjected to Frankenstein experiments, and white men killing themselves at the faintest hint of a non-white ancestor. Even Cthulhu — a tentacled oceanic eruption now hailed by some as a restorative myth for the Anthropocene—first appears as a “fetish” object in a wild “Voodoo” ritual in Louisiana.

We should all cheer the World Fantasy Awards for, in 2015, getting Lovecraft’s racist head off the statuettes handed to acclaimed writers of speculative fiction.

Still, lopping off the head does not kill the hydra. Lovecraft’s stickily tentacular mind is so deeply entangled in contemporary horror that it may be impossible to extract. Recent writers have been opting instead to reshape it from within. Multi-award-winning sci-fi novelist N.K. Jemisin, for instance, intentionally centered her latest book, The City We Became (2020), on Lovecraftian themes, seeing it as a “kind of a deep dive into how pathological racists think” that could allow her, as a Black woman, to reinvent the genre from the ground up.

Does the academic discipline of comparative religion require similar treatment? Lovecraft’s borrowings from comparative religion are quite overt. Not only do his “weird tales” of the 1920s and 30s develop a pantheon of ancient gods or “Great Old Ones,” out of Egyptian, Druidic, and other mythologies. His most famous story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” even features a professor of Semitic languages obsessed with James Frazer’s Golden Bough, that classic tome.

Frazer and Lovecraft. They’re a perverse pair, but a telling one. Frazer — the armchair anthropologist whose grand narrative about human civilization progressing from “magic” to “religion” to “science” relied on imperial, racialized ideas about social evolution. Frazer — who, like Lovecraft, thought that even the most modern of men were haunted by the mad ghosts of ancient human sacrifice. Frazer — who twenty-first century scholars of religion have tried so hard to forget. Forgetting, alas, is not so easy. Tentacled minds live on. By the 1920s, The Golden Bough was a global literary sensation, so it is not particularly surprising that it makes a cameo appearance in “Cthulhu.” It is perhaps more surprising that the study of religion has, until recently, done so little to explore how Victorian comparative religion lived on in the world of imaginative literature even as it died out in academe. Standard histories of the discipline recount the rise and fall of university departments, where Frazer had mostly hit the dustbin by 1950, if not earlier. A whole counter-history of religious studies is suggested by the psychedelic 1971 Macmillan paperback edition[1] of The Golden Bough:

After watching Misha Green’s show, these peacenik pastels appear in a darker light. That unicorn looks out onto Lovecraft Country — a country unable to see, much less map, its own whiteness, which is what makes that whiteness so dangerous.

“Magic,” Frazer’s grand theme, looms large in Lovecraft Country. What is it? Who controls it? The show’s second episode culminates in a rite conducted by members of a secret society called the Order of the Ancient Dawn, who wear robes that are explicitly compared to those of the Ku Klux Klan. In an inversion of Lovecraftian miscegenation, the horror here is that Atticus is the lone surviving descendent of some kind of white supremacist mage, and that mage’s followers now need his blood for their dark ritual.

As we learn, the ritual is meant to restore the racial and gendered hierarchies that were disrupted when “that bitch Eve” ate the apple, reestablishing a white-supremacist, patriarchal Eden wherein Samuel Braithwhite, a leader of the Ancient Dawn, will be immortal, a new Adam. (Scandal fans will recognize Braithwhite as Tony Goldwyn, who played the star-crossed love to Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope, on the Shonda Rhimes series. Seeing him in those grand master robes feels like an intertextual gut punch).

The Order of the Ancient Dawn is a quintessentially Lovecraftian religion. Its name an apparent riff on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — the Victorian occult society that eventually counted among its members (actual or alleged) W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and Lovecraft himself — the group gestures to a whole universe of fin-de-siècle religious organizations like Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Lovecraft Country nails the aesthetic of this universe — equal parts occult mystery, weird science, and mundane bureaucracy. It also carefully flags occultism’s racial exclusions, as with the Prince Hall Freemasons. Were these what historian Judith Weisenfeld would call “religio-racial movements”? Perhaps. They certainly thought about religion in racialized terms, as with Blavatsky’s “root races” and “Great White Lodge.” So did the eclectic array of parallel movements in their general orbit, from Chicago’s Moorish Science Temple to, farther afield in British India, the anticolonial Arya Samaj.

Braithwhite’s daughter Christina (Abbey Lee Kershaw) describes the Order of the Ancient Dawn at one point as “a group of powerful men who wield magic. They don’t allow women to join.” Tellingly, she omits the word “white” — a slip not lost on her listener, Ruby Baptiste (Wunme Mosaku). Although outraged by the Order’s sexism, Christina wants nothing more than to join its whites-only club.

Green’s show thinks intersectionally, seeing race and gender oppressions as structurally intertwined, even as Christina refuses to. Throughout, it’s attuned to how race, gender, and sexuality overlap, and it allows its characters to slough identities in suggestive and sometimes grotesque ways. It even asks how U.S. racism has intersected with U.S. empire; there’s an entire episode set in U.S.-occupied Korea, scripted mostly in Korean and centering on a kumiho, a sort of fox-tailed incubus from Korean folklore.

Clearly, the show’s mythologies go way beyond the Garden of Eden. Although our characters occasionally attend church to affirm their faith in God, their affirmations feel sort of like the heteronormative marriages tacked on at the end of Shakespeare’s gender-bender plays. By paying lip service to orthodoxy, the show is giving us permission to delight in the transgressively heterodox supernaturalisms that it so clearly adores. Atticus may be hunting for the original Adam’s magical Book of Names, with its antique leather binding, but his real bibles are postwar paperbacks of Bram Stoker, Alexandre Dumas, and, yes, Lovecraft.

This is a love-hate relationship. Green and her team want to critique pulp fiction’s racist past while also delivering pulp’s trademark pleasures. That’s a hard tonal feat to pull off — and, I would add, to write about. Any show that veers from serious, almost-sacramental meditations on the 1921 Tulsa massacre and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till to playfully precise visual quotations from films like Indiana Jones and The Goonies is bound to be a bumpy ride.

Take, for example, the disorienting opening sequence, which begins with black-and-white footage of a soldier fighting his way through a World War I trench. He looks up to see a bomb exploding into bright orange and suddenly realizes that the sky above is pulsing not just with airplanes but also with UFOs and winged monsters, who belch technicolor flame onto a vast hellscape. Clambering out of the trench, he’s like Dorothy emerging into an unholy full-color Oz. There are no witches, but there is a fuchsia-skinned alien beamed down from a UFO in her green bikini and approaching him with an air of coy menace:

They briefly embrace before being interrupted by a giant tentacled creature.

A baseball player suddenly appears, rescuing the duo by smashing the monster into a puddle of green slime with his bat. “I gotcha, kid,” he says. He doesn’t. The green slime slurps itself back together, with the monster about to devour all three of them . . . when our dreamer awakens. Atticus is in the back seat of a segregated bus, crossing over the Kentucky border into the wheat fields of the nominally unsegregated Midwest. The soundtrack cuts to a 1950s classic: Sh-boom, sh-boom. Life could be a dream, sweetheart. It, most obviously, is not.

Three minutes into Lovecraft Country and its aesthetic pieces are in place. Wildly pulpy pastiche. Crazed anachronism. Symbols dense enough to need a decoder ring — or the internet. The baseball player, Dodgers jersey #42, is Jackie Robinson, the first Black American to play in the major league. The tentacled monster is clearly Cthulhu, who also slurpily reconstitutes himself when smashed. If the dream is allegory, the unkillable creature is white supremacism. Just when Robinson thinks he’s vanquished it, it returns. This is a calling card of sorts for Green’s show. It too is trying to slay Lovecraftian monsters. At the same time — and this gets at what’s jaggedly interesting here — it wants to keep them alive so they can continue to ooze narrative pleasures.

When Atticus wakes up, he has a copy of Edgar Rice Burrough’s A Princess of Mars on his lap. A lady seated near him asks (eyebrow raised) why he is reading a book about a Confederate officer who is magically transported to Mars by a sacred Apache cave. “Stories are like people,” Atticus replies. “Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You just try and cherish them, overlook their flaws.” “But the flaws are still there,” the lady counters. “Yeah they are, but I love pulp stories.” Lovecraft Country loves them too. It even loves Lovecraft (despite Green herself not being a “huge fan”).

“The past is a living thing,” remarks a character in Lovecraft Country. It is not, one might add, even past. In keeping with this claim, the show toggles not just between dreams and reality, but between historical periods. It is a televisual time machine, with a retro-futuristic steampunk aesthetic.

It is, in the first instance, a period piece set in 1950s Chicago, and it delights in the clothes, cars, and muted monochromes of that era. Its nerd-chic is perhaps best exemplified by Letitia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett), once “the only female member of the South Side Science Fiction Club” and now a glamorous romantic lead.

The Jim-Crow 1950s are just home base, however. Our postwar-chic gang of heroes stumbles into creepy Victorian mansions.

They also stumble forward in time— encountering, say, a seven-foot tall Afrofuturist robot uttering the God-like words “I am”:

These robots are a pulp fiction dream made real. Young Dee Freeman’s hobby is hand-drawing comic books centered on a blue-haired astronaut (actually drawn by Black-Native artist Afua Richardson).

Dee literally makes her own mythology, visualizing storylines that the postwar culture industry would never have dreamed up or even allowed. This show wants to give those dreams a home. That home, perversely, is Lovecraft Country.

If Lovecraft Country has a lesson, perhaps it’s that its titular terrain is a place we’ve never properly explored. Somebody needs to open its secret passages, brave its dark tunnels, and do their darndest to avoid the boobytraps.

To state the obvious (and belabor my metaphor), white people cannot be the ones holding the flashlight— or least need to be cautious when sharing the labor of doing so. We seldom see the monsters as we should and tend to take up a strangely large amount of space in the corridor. Fortunately Misha Green, like other Black creators of our moment, has already shined a light that anyone who reads, thinks, and writes about religion would do well to follow. One might even try to translate her thinking out of television and into some other medium (like, to take a not-entirely-random example, a review essay).

This is a show by, for, and about bookish nerds. It wants us to join it in its pulp reverie. I recommend giving in to its pleasures. Just don’t lose sight of the monster (or the riotous mob) creeping up behind you.

J. Barton Scott is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and the author of Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

***

[1] The author would like to thank Prof. Mimi Winick for bringing this image of the The Golden Bough into his life.

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Pastor Mary Cosby with her husband/former step-grandfather, Robert Cosby, Sr.

“She called me a grandfather fucker,” Mary Cosby, pastor of Salt Lake City’s Faith Temple Pentecostal Church, said of her Real Housewives co-star Jen Shah with whom she’d been in conflict since the series premiere. While Shah later admitted to hurling the statement at Cosby’s back in a fit of anger bolstered by intoxication, Season 1 episode 5 found Cosby seated opposite a different cast member turned temporary ally, Heather Gay, at a dimly lit restaurant reflecting, yet again, on the altercation. At their dinner Gay sought clarification, asking, “[your husband is] not your grandfather?”

“He’s not. No blood at all,” Cosby responded.

An emotional Cosby then relayed the details of her arranged marriage. “I did marry him [her step-grandfather]. I didn’t want to, Heather, that’s weird to me, but she [Cosby’s grandmother and his first wife] wanted it, she really did, and so I obeyed her, because I trusted every word. If she managed to bring this church this far, then she has to be right. And look at my life,” she said, gesturing at her monogrammed Louis Vuitton checkered cardigan with matching coat and pants. “You think I’m this high fashion Louis Vuitton . . . and maybe I am, but because I chose right.”

Prior to joining the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (RHSLC for short), Mary Cosby’s reputation preceded her. Rumors surrounding her family – and especially her grandmother, the late Pastor Rosemary Cosby – and her upbringing in her grandmother’s church spread like wildfire in Utah. “Everyone in Salt Lake City knows the story about Mary and her step-grandfather,” said fellow cast member Whitney Rose.

“When grandmother left, she left me her empire,” Cosby explained. “Homes, churches, daycares, a mortgage company, and her husband.”

According to Cosby, her inheritance came with the expectation that she marry her step-grandfather, her grandmother’s second husband who she left widowed after her death in 1997. “Before she passed she made it very clear that she wanted me to be the one to take her place in the church and inherit everything. That came with homes, money, our church and her husband . . . don’t think it wasn’t weird ‘cause it was, but I did it because I trusted my grandmother and I’m glad I did,” she insisted.

Mary Cosby and Robert Cosby, Sr., married one year after her grandmother’s death. The new bride said it took her another year to feel certain she had made the right decision, during which time she prayed to come to grips with the arrangement.

“I’m not gonna lie. It was all bizarre,” Cosby said in episode 3. “I was 22 when we got married. It split our church. My mom had a fit because she wanted my grandmother’s place. My mom felt like she was the one that should have been marrying Robert Sr. and the wedding night was . . . everything was weird.” When a RHSLC producer asked whether they slept together on their wedding night, Cosby replied, “No. Thank goodness I was on my period. I was on my period for two weeks . . . It got awkward . . . I stretched it out. I had to get past it.”

Cosby’s confessions about her marriage to her step-grandfather, from tearful descriptions of an uncomfortable wedding night to reckoning with her grandmother’s decision decades later, brings to light a little discussed facet of some Black Pentecostal traditions: arranged and coerced marriages of young adults in their late teens and early twenties. Though Cosby’s union with her step-grandfather is unconventional, many women raised in influential Black Pentecostal families can identify with the experience of being persuaded to participate in arranged marriages, even when their betrothed reveal themselves to be abusive, manipulative, or neglectful in the long run.

***

Like Cosby, I grew up in a Black Pentecostal church and was subject to its teachings. These churches often fall under the banner of “the Sanctified Church,” a term that originated in the early twentieth century to distinguish mainline Black Protestant denominations from more peripheral traditions that incorporate Black rural folk practices. Within these congregations, “sanctification,” sometimes referred to as “holiness,” is central and refers to the sustained outward practice of Christian Pentecostal devotion. This can take several forms from avoiding alcohol and drugs to distancing oneself from activities like gambling, partying (outside of church), and listening to secular music.

Within Black Pentecostal communities, sanctification can also include adherence to patriarchal ideologies like sexual purity, abstinence from premarital sexual activity, and women’s submission to male headship in church and marriage. However, alongside this patriarchal tradition, Black Pentecostal women have always held a significant amount of institutional power, even as their rights to ordination and ministerial office vary from church to church.

In her book about Black Pentecostal women, Dr. Judith Casselberry writes that though women in the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ (COOLJC), one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in the country, are often placed in subservient roles, their capacities as church mothers, missionaries, and teachers provide them with influence over church operations and ideologies. Women make up the majority of such congregations, and they typically develop and spread messages of female submissiveness and the importance of male-headship to other girls and women. This ultimately makes for “women-driven patriarchies.”

Against this backdrop of a divinely inspired gender hierarchy, Black women have founded a number of Pentecostal churches. Mary Cosby heads the church her grandmother founded and where she served as its inaugural pastor. But women-led Pentecostal churches are not free of patriarchal ideologies about female submission or sexual purity. In fact, the “power to submit” to male-headship has become an extraordinary mark of Pentecostal faith and belief.

“Marriage was not only about sex and procreation; it was also about one’s station in the church,” writes Dr. Anthea Butler in her history of women in the Church of God in Christ, one of the largest Black Pentecostal denominations in the world. “Arranging marriages became a way to keep prominent COGIC families in leadership positions.” One way that women gain influence in these churches is through marriage to authoritative male figures. Though the men are often significantly older, these marriages provide women with authority that they would not normally have through standard church participation.

Arranged marriages also function in Black Pentecostal communities as a way to control sexual urges. By restricting young women from casual dating and by urging them into arranged marriages, women are more likely to wed with their sexual purity intact. Consequently, arranged marriages serve the dual purpose of preventing sexual promiscuity and maintaining clerical hierarchies.

While several Black Pentecostal couples attest to the success of these arrangements, for others they have led to unhappy and, at times, physically and psychologically abusive situations. In Cosby’s case, even as she speaks of the spiritual and financial “blessings” from the marriage, she confessed to cast mate Meredith Marks that the current state of her relationship is shaky. “We became partners as opposed to marriage . . . I drifted into being a mom and he drifted into being Robert Sr.” By saying they are “partners as opposed to marriage,” Cosby is suggesting a type of union bereft of romantic engagement and emotional attachment.

Even standing in a 20,000 square foot mansion filled with Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, and Balmain, all thanks to a hefty inheritance uncommon for most Black Pentecostal women, Cosby remains less than satisfied with her situation. And yet, for other women the results can be far more disastrous.

***

As someone who researches and writes about Black women musicians in and around the Black Pentecostal tradition, I have found several stories of teenage and young adult women being married off to influential leaders. Many of those marriages ended in unhappy or abusive situations. At times, I have been overwhelmed by documents and interviews about young Black women who were intentionally placed in marital situations that lent themselves to intimate partner violence.

Roxie Moore, a musician and composer who grew up in early twentieth century Baltimore attending services at a Pentecostal church, descriptively detailed her marital experiences in a letter to COGIC Bishop O.T. Jones in the early 1970’s. She wrote, “I married twice because the saints picked my first husband, I didn’t even know him. He was supporting a girl’s baby right in the church and nobody told me. Because of jealousy he became very violent. I couldn’t live with him. After much fasting and praying, and agonizing . . . I found that Jesus would forgive a bad or wrong marriage and wipe the slate clean.” In documentary footage, she explains that her dear friend Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s first marriage was similar, though she didn’t elaborate. These are not exceptional stories. Influential young women like Moore, Tharpe, and Cosby are often ushered into arranged marriages by church leaders who believe it is those women’s responsibility to model proper Christian behavior for the congregation.

Rosetta Tharpe in 1957

While Cosby has stayed committed to her church, many other Black Pentecostal women in arranged marriages, like Moore and Tharpe, leave their religious communities, in no small part because of the harm they face in their marriages. The abuse Moore endured at the hands of her first husband, a minister, was the initial impetus for her ecclesial departure. She left because she feared for her safety, even leaving behind her eldest daughter who she believed her husband would harm had she tried to escape with her. She ultimately went to New York where she lived with Tharpe and Tharpe’s mother, Katie Bell Nubin, until she got back on her feet.

Moore paid a price for her freedom. Though having written music for legendary gospel groups like the Dixie Hummingbirds and The Golden Gate Quartet, her detachment from church institutions contributed to the erasure of her contributions from gospel music history. This is but one example of how Black Pentecostal leaders have silenced the voices of Black women dissenters, and it demonstrates how these leaders have allowed intimate partner violence and sexual abuse to continue unaddressed. Because of this, we have not heard enough of the voices, stories, and work of marginalized women. It places Black women in an impossible position: either conform to the given marital standards at the risk of less than ideal domestic situations like Cosby, or leave the church and have your work and contributions obscured like Moore.

***

The arranged marriage pipeline within Black Pentecostal communities has had a devastating effect on many. While stories of sexual impropriety occur in countless religious spaces, we must ask ourselves why the multitude of stories of Black girls and young women in damaging marriages has been swept under the rug. Unfortunately, instead of engaging Mary Cosby’s story with care for a young woman placed in a difficult position, her marriage — to cast and audience members alike — is often nothing more than an easy punch line and handy insult.

If Cosby’s childhood resembled mine, she grew up with teachings that pointed her towards marriage as the end goal for Godly women. When considering the influence of a grandmother that groomed her for succession, the potential of a massive inheritance, and a deep religious devotion that privileges marital commitment, I can empathize with Cosby’s decision to carry out her grandmother’s wishes. Even amongst smaller Black Pentecostal congregations with fewer financial holdings, arranged marriages are common. However, instead of ridiculing or blaming women for ending up in these situations, we should have empathy for those coerced into unhealthy unions under the guise of religious devotion.

Although there are cases where arranged marriages have led to successful lifelong partnerships with both parties expressing happiness and fulfillment, one cannot afford to ignore the amount that end in incompatibility, neglect, and abuse. It is devastating to consider the spiritual implications of believing that a harmful marriage is better than no marriage at all, and that the “blessings” of mediocre attachment supersede that of solitude. For those who submit their lives to religious adherence, arrangements that end in broken marriages cause more than heartbreak. They also lead to feelings of unworthiness and even unholiness. Pentecostal churches must amend teachings that ask young women to prove their faith by committing themselves to men who may not have their best interests at heart.

Mary Cosby’s repeated oscillations between disenchantment with her arranged marriage and contentment with the material “blessings” she inherited shows the complexity of such relationships. These mindsets are not cultivated instantaneously, but through lifelong church lessons that associate marriage with prosperity, favor, and high standing. We must re-examine messaging that tells women our worth is linked to heterosexual marital unions, and that our faith is somehow tainted by remaining single. But more importantly, we need to protect Black women from leaders and institutions that would rather see us abused, neglected, or silenced, than actively working to change the status quo by resisting traditions that lead to our demise.

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.

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In the following excerpt, Shapiro meets with a Holocaust survivor to learn about his experience and if he believes forgiveness is always possible.

***

“Susie, good to see you,” Manny said, using my old nickname. “Tell me about your Bosnia project.”

I’d been nervous to meet with Emanuel Mandel (a.k.a. Manny) at Sea Catch restaurant in Washington D.C., in November, 2010. He’d been a buddy of my father’s for half a century. I hadn’t seen him since my wedding sixteen years before. As a Hungarian Jew, he’d been the victim of ethnic cleansing. His mother was from the former Yugoslavia, which riveted me since I was working on a book with Kenan, a 12-year-old exile of the Bosnian war.

“Kenan’s like the Muslim Anne Frank who lived to tell the story,” I said, sitting down. “It’s shocking that most Americans don’t know there was another holocaust in Europe in 1993.”

“Well, we only use Holocaust for what happened to the Jews in Eastern Europe in World War II,” he corrected. “I survived Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died.”

Damn. In seconds I’d insulted a 74-year-old survivor, psychotherapist, and family friend. Growing up I’d found Manny intimidating, with his strong baritone voice. He was more erudite than other Midwest dads. He was the only person I knew, aside from Kenan, who’d escaped genocide as a kid and knew the Balkans. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I use genocide, not holocaust,” he clarified. “It’s despicable Serbs murdered their country-men. But in our case, Germans went into twenty other nations to kill Jews. Because of the number and magnitude of Hitler’s Final Solution, we feel proprietary about the word.”

As the waiter brought menus, I kept apologizing, but Manny said it wasn’t necessary. After falling out with my long-time mentor Dr. Winters and being enmeshed in Kenan’s history, I was consumed with questions of mortal sin and forgiveness. Here was someone who could tell me how he forgave, or lived without forgiving, the people who tried to annihilate our whole tribe.

Kenan’s tribe fought to call what happened to Bosnians a genocide. The Serb government claimed the dead were “war casualties,” as if the deliberate murder of 100,000 Muslim civilians killed didn’t qualify as genocidal. When I later emailed Kenan that Manny objected to the use of holocaust for the Bosnian massacres, Kenan found a dictionary showing the word’s derivation from the Greek holokauston (a burnt sacrificial offering) used to describe massacres since 1142.

A mass grave in Bosnia, 1993. (Photo courtesy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia)

“You’ve never called what happened in the Balkans a Holocaust,” I’d argued.

“But I want the option to,” Kenan admitted.

Was it human nature to compare tragedies, wanting yours to be worst? Interviewing those who’d endured horrible traumas about how they coped and forgave their offenders made it clear my own estrangement with Dr. Winters could be fixed — even if he couldn’t apologize. But I didn’t know how to forgive someone who showed no remorse. If anyone could teach me, it was a successful shrink who’d survived war atrocities.

I felt lucky to interview one of 500,000 survivors still alive. Manny looked younger than 74, slim with salt and pepper hair, bushy brows, brown eyes. At six feet, he was an inch taller than my dad. As a kid, when Dad called Manny “a Holocaust survivor,” I pictured piles of emaciated corpses from documentaries shown at Hebrew School, as if he’d been hiding there. As an adult, I’d avoided Manny’s invitations to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, where he volunteered. A friend at a program there said what happened to Hitler’s victims was reenacted; visitors were pinned with yellow “Juden” stars, asked to remove their shoes, given fake arm tattoos.

“I can’t go on a vacation that’ll give me nightmares,” I’d told my husband Aaron. I blamed my alienation on my childhood temple shoving the Holocaust down my throat, then felt guilty. Visiting Dachau on a high-school trip made me mistrust Germans and harbor ongoing suspicions of European anti-Semitism. Yet suddenly everything I’d found scary about my father’s friend Manny enthralled me.

“My parents knew all about your past?” I asked.

“I didn’t discuss it much, until the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in 1981,” Manny said. “At Central High in Philly, I played soccer with Charles Roger, a survivor from Brussels. It was never mentioned until we re-met at a commemoration five decades later. There was an irrational fear that once you started remembering, you couldn’t stop.”

We’d lived near Manny, his wife Adrienne, and their kids in Oak Park, Michigan, in the 1960s. A classmate of their daughter Lisa, I’d fixed her up with the guy she dated for four years. Before I’d taken the train that morning, I called my folks for their memories.

“Adrienne was funny, short, very pretty. She was the vivacious one,” said my pretty, charismatic mother. “Manny was drier, intellectual. He seemed European.”

“How did you first learn he was a survivor?”

Romanian synagogue on NYC’s Lower East Side

“He had an accent, so I asked where he was from,” Dad recalled. “My family was from the Ukraine, but came to America sooner. Turned out we both were bar mitzvahed on the Lower East Side, at the Orthodox Romanian Synagogue on Rivington Street. Manny’s dad was a cantor there.”

“An Orthodox temple? You weren’t religious,” I said.

“I played hooky and gambled, running a numbers game,” Dad admitted. “I got thrown out everywhere else. My grandfather made a deal with the Rabbi of Roumanishe Shul that I’d learn my Haftorah there.”

I relished hearing of his days as a troublemaker, before he’d become a staid Republican. “That was a bond between you and Manny?”

“Yeah. He was a better student,” Dad said. “We talked history. His dad was a cantor. I was impressed he knew the different cantorial schools in Europe.”

My parents, who’d hated anything personal I published, sounded gleeful that Jewish history was my new subject, as if I’d finally seen their light.

“Dad and Manny fought politics,” Mom piped in. “Manny was more liberal.”

“Now he’s less liberal, and I’m less conservative,” Dad said. He’d called Hillary and Bill “Bonnie and Clyde” and nicknamed Obama “Oprah.” This was less conservative?

“We shared an obsessive loathing for Nazis who got off too easy,” Dad went on. “The second A-bomb should have hit Germany, not Japan.”

Dad’s hyperbole underscored Manny’s understatement. But I didn’t want a history lesson from Dad. I wanted him to like me more and treat me the way he did my brothers.

“Manny confused me as a kid,” I admitted. “You were blunt, but he’d talk in a roundabout way I didn’t get.”

“He had a dry, ironic sensibility,” Dad said. “He was Talmudic. The commentators answer questions with other questions.”

“He had a sibling who died,” Mom said. “Ask him about that.”

Although Manny kept the laws of Kashrut at home, we ordered shrimp cocktails and lobster, which felt thrillingly illicit. I’d rarely had a meal alone with my dad. Reaching out to his friend made me feel closer to my father. “You’re from an Orthodox Hungarian family?”

“I was born on May 8 in 1936 in Riga, Latvia. We were observant Jews.”

“You’re Taurus the bull, like my mom,” I said, then felt like an air-brain for mentioning astrology.

“I am a Taurus in many ways,” he admitted, “horoscopes notwithstanding.”

Kenan, too, was stubborn. A survival technique for kids who’d survived wars? Manny’s mother’s father was a rabbi in Serbia. He was an only child who resembled her side. He pulled out pictures. “My dad was five foot seven, stocky, with black hair, brown eyes.”

The elder Mandel oddly resembled Hitler with his short, stubby mustache.

“He had a magnificent voice. He left Hungary to be a cantor in Riga in 1933. Mom went with him. Since you have to be born where your mother is, my birthplace was Riga. Then he took a position as a chief cantor in Budapest at the Romabach Street Synagogue there, where we lived. We were deported in 1944.”

“Were you aware of anti-Semitism?” I was eager to get to the forgiving part.

“I was in a bubble. I saw the yellow star I wore as heroic, since the adults wore it. I didn’t know it was demeaning,” he said. “At seven, I asked Dad for a new bicycle. He said no. Our building had old elevators. The machinists in factories were making guns and bombs, my father said. If the elevator broke, I’d have to carry my bike up five flights. Riding in the park with a yellow star was dangerous; we didn’t want more attention. No bike. That was my first clue.”

In a photo from age three, he was driving a toy car in a park in Budapest. The image conveyed wealth and privilege, and how beloved he was. My parents had grown up poor.

“After anti-Jewish laws in Hungary in 1938, Jews were harassed. A kid with a yellow star would be hit on the head, dumped in a gutter, left alone to die,” Manny added. “Dad was afraid someone might push me into traffic. He let me go to school four blocks away, but somebody walked me there. I was never alone. I went ice skating, wearing my yellow star. My father was there too, that made it secure.”

“How old was your mother when she had you?” I asked.

“Twenty-eight.” When our dinner came, I ate quickly, taking notes.

I flashed to Mom’s words. “Wasn’t that late for a rabbi’s daughter to have a first kid?”

“Oh, she’d married at twenty-two and had her first son, Rubin, at twenty-five,” Manny admitted. “He had enteritis. He couldn’t absorb food. He died at ten weeks. Now they’d give you a shot and pills and send you home to play baseball. I visited his grave, in Yugoslavia.”

No wonder he’d been so cherished by his parents.

Manny was seven when Germany occupied Budapest. He was sent to Bergen-Belsen in July 1944, on a Kasztner train transport, told it would be a rest stop before boarding a ship, fulfilling the Nazi plan to make Europe Judenrein, Jew-free. His father was sent to a different camp. For six months, Manny lived in a “family” barrack, sleeping on a bunk bed above his mother. He was afraid of the soldiers and barbed wire. For the first time he was hungry.

“We had two meals a day,” he said. “The first was black bread and a brown coffee-like liquid. In the afternoon, vats filled with soup, vegetables or horse meat. My mother, a great cook, brought three things with her to the camp — a jar of honey, chicken fat, and a slab of bacon. Weird for someone kosher. People told her these condiments could make the food edible. Bergen-Belsen wasn’t as bad as Auschwitz for us. We didn’t have numbers tattooed on our arms. In 1944, the war was ending. To save their skin, the Nazis kept us healthy as barter.”

“My grandpa used to say, ‘Nothing’s so bad it can’t be vorse,’” I said in a Yiddish accent.

“I was extremely blessed to always be with my mother,” he restated. “Many had it worse. For gold and loot, Adolf Eichman was coerced to transfer 1670 Jews to Bergen-Belsen. Unlike Auschwitz, it was an intern camp, not designed for extermination.”

A child walks past bodies at Bergen-Belsen, 1945. (Photo: George Rodger for Getty Images)

Manny and his mom were sent to Switzerland, where the Red Cross brought potatoes to their hotel. “We weren’t scarecrows, like others in the pictures.” They took a British troop ship to Palestine, where he reunited with his father after two years apart. “My mother’s parents and two brothers died in Auschwitz. To Nazis, the old and young were useless; they killed my little cousin Judy. Mom’s two sisters, strong and in their thirties, survived. My father lost his mother. He didn’t know what day she died, so he lit a Yahrzeit candle for her every Yom Kippur.”

It was poetic, picking the most sorrowful day to remember.

“My worst shock was in 1949, when my 34-year-old uncle, Dad’s youngest brother, died in Israel. It was a stroke or heart attack, but related to his concentration-camp stay. He left a wife and two babies. I was thirteen. I was living with my parents in New York on Barrow Street.”

“By me,” I said, amused to think of Manny living in the now hipster West Village.

“I was home alone when a telegram came: ‘Daniel died yesterday. He’ll be buried tomorrow.’ I didn’t know how to tell my parents,” Manny said. “I asked my father to get the mail with me where I gave him the bad news. We didn’t tell my mother until the next day, knowing she’d be grief-stricken.”

“What’s your worst loss from the war?” I asked.

“My whole family was shrunk forever. My mom was one of six kids who only had five offspring altogether. Nobody would bring another child into the world after the war. We didn’t madly procreate to repopulate our people, like some survivors.”

I wanted his reaction to the official apology in 1990 that read “East Germany’s first freely elected Parliament admits joint responsibility on behalf of the people for the humiliation, expulsion and murder of Jewish women, men and children. We feel sad and ashamed…Jews in all the world and the people of Israel are asked to forgive us for the wrongs they experienced.”

“It didn’t make the Germans who did this less guilty,” Manny said. “The murderers are dead. If I could get an apology from those criminals, that might mean something. For survivors, it’s hard not to have a long-term committed hatred of Nazi Germany.”

Interesting he wanted the late perpetrators to apologize, as did Kenan. “You found ways to live with your rage?”

“I wouldn’t call it rage,” he said. “Well, it was 10% rage and 90% thank God we’re still alive. Being here and successful said to Hitler: Up Yours! We refuse to let you control our life.”

I thought of George Herbert’s line, “Living well is the best revenge,” surprised by Manny’s lesson: Don’t forgive; find a way to thrive without granting mercy. Out of spite.

“You compartmentalize?”

“Ask yourself, ‘What’s enraging you?’ and ‘What do you want your life to be about?’” he said. “Then you find ways to lessen the pain or remove it, pebble by pebble.”

“Is that how you counseled patients who’d been through similar atrocities?”

“Hundreds of survivors came to my private practice,” he said. “Their problems seemed the same as anyone from Montana. The Holmes-Rahe’s studies show the worst stresses are death of a spouse, divorce, marital separation, detention in jail or another institution, major personal injury or illness, loss of job.”

I was stunned that Manny didn’t see his experience as singular. “Your treatment was the same for anybody who survived any war, illness, or a traumatic change?”

“The more we blame the past, the harder it is to move on. You can remember and understand trauma without dwelling on it. Feeling stuck without a choice is demeaning and devastating. In my career, I’ve spent forty years helping people learn they had choices.”

“How do you get unstuck?” That was my million-dollar question.

“Talk to someone you trust—a clergy, sponsor, therapist, or mentor,” he said.

“I fell out with a parental figure I admired for a long time,” I ventured. “I can’t get over it. Any advice?” I hope he didn’t mind me turning a forgiveness interview into therapy.

“You can get over anything,” he said. “Make art from your pain. Try a group, new interest, or mentor. Education helps. Do the Bosnia book. Anything to remove the barriers and offer fresh insight.”

“You’re behavioral, not Freudian?”

“If a patient in my office is bleeding, my job is to stop the blood,” he said. “Later I’ll ask ‘Where did the wound come from?’ Some Freudians focus on the wound’s origins as the patient bleeds out. I was lucky I didn’t lose my parents. We started over and were monetarily compensated.”

“How did they decide the amount?”

“It was complicated. My dad lost his pension and employment, though being a cantor was a portable profession. He got jobs in Israel and America.”

“How much difference did the financial restitution make?”

“I was given a one-time sum of $500 that paid for my honeymoon to the Concord Hotel in upstate New York,” Manny said. “That money didn’t restore anything. My murdered grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts perished. But my father received $1000 payments from the German government between 1950 and 1994, until he died. It meant a great deal to him. It allowed us to live better and move on. The last payment came after my father died. I returned it,” Manny said. “It didn’t belong to me.”

“Didn’t you want to keep it?” I asked. “Even after witnessing the worst atrocities of the century against you, you maintained a clear morality?”

“Not really. It would have been a hassle to cash. Not worth the trouble for $1000,” he said.

When the waiter brought our check, I took it, feeling very adult.

“My dad used to say, ‘If you have your mother’s love, you have everything.’ Freud agreed,” I said. “Is that why you healed and had a great life? Because you were the apple of your mom’s eye?”

“She had very few apples.” He smiled and told me how his work in the Peace Corps and running teen programs for B’nai B’rith gave him a sense of purpose. “When we met, Adrienne was her B’nai B’rith district president,” he said. “You were in a B’nai B’rith group in high school,” he remembered.

“I was president of my chapter,” I said. But at thirteen I was a chain-smoking troublemaker, like my dad. I’d get stoned and make out with my boyfriend on the camp retreats. “Did the war mean you couldn’t rebel?” I asked. I told Manny how upset Kenan had been when a dorm mate teased him, saying “You’re calling your mommy again? The whole point of college is to escape your family.”

“‘He had no idea the real enemies I escaped,’ Kenan said. ‘I thanked God every day my parents weren’t killed in war. I couldn’t relate to the superficial rebellions of my classmates.’”

“After what we went through, rebellion was not an option,” Manny agreed.

“Did you work in Jewish groups and help teens as a shrink to avenge the Holocaust?”

“Not that I’m conscious of,” he said. “Remember, I had it easier than most.”

Indeed, his mother adored him until her death, when he was thirty-one. Manny had his dad and stepmom until he was sixty.

“I love how you learned to have a great life without really forgiving anyone,” I said.

“Back in Germany for the sixty-fifth anniversary of Bergen-Belsen’s liberation five years ago, I visited Berlin as a tourist. A young guide, a history professor, said his grandmother was a proud card-carrying Nazi. I felt no animosity for him, though his grandmother was eligible for hatred.”

I showed Manny a controversial study from a research team at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital on “epigenetic inheritance” that found Holocaust survivors’ trauma was passed on in their children’s genes, affecting subsequent generations. “They say you can inherit a memory of trauma.”

“Legitimate researchers often prove whatever they wish to prove,” he said.

A week later, Manny’s granddaughter Gabrielle emailed. She was studying forensic science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice near us. Teenagers her age usually asked me about how to publish an article or a book. Gabrielle became entrenched in a conversation with my husband, who’d worked on Law & Order, about his interviews with forensic experts on serial killers.

“Strange obsession for a young girl,” I’d told Aaron later.

“Not if your grandfather was a Holocaust survivor,” he said.

Susan Shapiro, an award-winning writing professor, is the bestselling author of 13 books her family hates. This is an excerpt from her new memoir, The Forgiveness Tour: How to Find The Perfect Apology published by Skyhorse Press January 2021. You can follow her on Twitter @Susanshapironet or Instagram @Profsue123.

The post The Forgiveness Tour: Can You Forgive A Whole Continent Who Betrayed You? appeared first on The Revealer.

***

K. Handelman: Your book is a personal and scholarly exploration of how experiences of violence, trauma, and suffering can be connected to material objects. You write about how personal belongings have been transformed into legal evidence — like the sweatpants you were wearing the night you were violently raped when you were in graduate school studying theology — and into contested and precious historical artifacts, like the possessions of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. There is religion in both of these stories, even if it’s not the main subject. So, given our audience at the Revealer, and our own shared involvement in the field of religious studies, I wanted to ask you if you could say more about the role of religion — as history, as texts, as academic subject, as worldview — in your project. Particularly, you write about looking for both precedent and company in religion and I’d love to hear more about what religion is to you, as precedent, as company, or, maybe, as something else entirely?  

Laura Levitt: What is religion? This is a hard question even if I restrict my answer to the Jewish and Christian traditions I write about in my book. Once upon a time, I studied theology. It was then a way of thinking big, a meta-discourse that could contain all the ambiguities. It was a kind of grounding although, even then, I was not so sure. In the book I write about theology, a Jewish theology that I grappled with as a graduate student. Before I was raped, I thought that such a theology might have offered me some way to escape certain vulnerabilities. It did not. It could not do that for me. Instead, religion, or Judaism, has come to mean and to do something else. It is a community and a rich compendium of texts and practices that link me to other people, some from the past but mostly to those in the present and perhaps the future. Being able to engage with these communal legacies is what matters to me. As I demonstrate in the book, they need not offer answers to my questions; rather what they do is help me think through what I want and what I need in powerful ways that are not binding. This is what I do as I analyze a series of medieval Jewish texts in chapter one. Initially attracted to their vision of justice, I both engage and reject their conclusions.

Let me say this differently. Although I initially went to these texts looking for precedent, the weight and authority of the tradition to anchor my commitments and my desires, this is not what I found. Reading those texts closely allowed me to figure out what I do and what I do not want. They offered a kind of companionship. It was a gift to think with them even as I came to different conclusions. And I repeat this process when I write about being in the potter’s hands in chapter three. I returned to the biblical text to see how this trope of the potter and being in his hands figured there. And here too I read and engage with traditional texts, a series of specific biblical passages. And, even as I do not share their conclusions, I value the interaction. In a sense, I have traded a vision of authority or the authorization of my work through an engagement with classical sources for a kind of companionship that need not control or contain my musings. I have come to value the process more than the outcome.

KH: I’d love to build on this idea of looking for company and companionship in religion. Two big themes in this book are companionship and uncertainty — and I wanted to ask what it’s been like releasing this book in a year where so many are without their usual companions (or spending a lot of time in the company of only a few people) and are reckoning with an enormous amount of uncertainty on both daily and existential levels. Have you been able to connect to people in new ways through writing and sharing this book during this deeply, painfully strange last year?

Levitt: In many ways my book speaks directly to this moment for all of the reasons you cite. We are profoundly isolated, and we have had to live with unprecedented uncertainty. We are all learning how to do so at the same time. Given this, I hope that, even in some small way, my book might be a comfort. I hope that it might help others as they struggle to keep going. I cannot say that I find any of this easy and I know that I say this as a truly fortunate person. I have a job that I continue to do and love. I have an income and a home and good health insurance and many friends and family and colleagues and students who I see regularly via Zoom. Yet I have to say that all of this is hard, but it is not impossible. This is part of what the book has taught me.

I have been extremely fortunate in terms of the launch of this book. I am overwhelmed by how warmly the book has been received. I have gotten so many joyous pictures and texts with friends, colleagues, family members, children, dogs and cats posing with the book. I know it is in good hands and good paws. This warms my heart. But more than this, I have begun hearing from people who are reading the book and how it has spoken to them. My hope was that my book might offer some companionship for others who have suffered and hearing from readers for whom this is the case has been extremely humbling and rewarding. For me these connections are the most important thing. I am honored by them.

KH: Continuing on the theme of uncertainty, at the end of the book you say that you have learned to live amid uncertainty, but that you can’t live without wonder. What does wonder mean to you? And how might others use that idea in their own thinking and lives?

LL: The first section of the book is called “Sacred Texts: The Red Parts” and this includes not only explicitly Jewish and Christian texts, but also works by the writers Maggie Nelson and Edmund De Waal. The subtitle for the section comes directly from Maggie Nelson. “The Red Parts” figures in her book of poems, Jane: A Murder, and of course it is the title of her memoir, or what she later described as “an autobiography of a trial,” The Red Parts. I call the companionship I found in these texts a form of what literary theorist and artist Svetlana Boym called “diasporic intimacy” in her work The Future of Nostalgia. This may or may not be figured as religious. It was not how I thought about it while writing but I think this makes sense. It is one way of looking at the surprise of tenderness having lost everything.

As I read your questions, I was struck by how much of my book can be read as “religious.” For me there were a series of religious moments that include my rejection of theology, something I write about explicitly in chapter two where, in the process of reading Maggie Nelson, I tell my story, and later, in my coming to consider the objects that remain as both evidentiary and talismanic (in Nelson’s words), or what religious studies scholar Jennifer Schepper Hughes describes as “object-entities.” For me these insights led me to the language of relics. I was interested in the rites and rituals of holding and critical engagement as powerful practices that can be animating. Such tender regard, as I argue, is what breathes new life into what are otherwise inanimate objects. And that regard is bound to the painful narratives, the terrible stories these traces help us tell. These animating labors can happen in both police storage facilities and at places like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). This form of material religion spoke to me. And although the term “relic” gets thrown around a lot, it is usually figured in disparaging terms, like the way that Peter Novick deploys this language to dismiss practices of Holocaust commemoration that he finds objectionable. I stay with the relics and ask how they are alive, what kinds of things they can teach us about what we can and what we can never fully know about the horrors a child’s sweater, a wool jumper, or a pair of sweatpants witnessed. As object-entities, these things are not simple evidence, they have qualities that we cannot control or contain. And for me, this is both humbling and powerful.

Shoes at the Holocaust Memorial Museum

These insights led me to appreciate something else that happened over the many years I worked on this book. I became aware of how, in the process of writing itself, there were things that happened, coincidental, serendipitous meetings, conversations, references that steered my work. Like the detective that Maggie Nelson writes about who describes being guided by the hand of God in his investigation of her aunt Jane Mixer’s murder, I too felt that I was not alone in the work I was doing. Perhaps, albeit in a less overt manner, I too had been guided in my work by forces I cannot explain. Of course, for me these serendipitous moments and insights are more defuse. There is no single divine figure ordering or guiding my process. I cannot believe that. But there are forces beyond my control. Some are terrible. I do not know why I was raped and my life was threatened. That can never be, for me, a part of any divine plan. I reject such notions. And yet this is not the whole story.

Letting go of certitude is hard. It remains a struggle. I still often wish for more control, an answer to why this happened to me. But to have an answer is far worse, I have come to believe, than having to accept that I cannot know. This letting go has allowed me to appreciate and take seriously those often-surprising moments of insight and recognition as a kind of wonder. And this too came to me as I have learned to resist that desire to be in control. But I also want to say something else about control and certitude. For those of us who have been brutally violated, agency is critical; we need to regain a sense of control in our lives, to appreciate that we can make decisions and act on them. But agency is tricky. It cannot be absolute. When it is, it can come at the price of self-blame. If only I had double-checked the back door. If only I had left the house as soon as I heard a strange noise. This is something I continue to fight against, to resist. It remains alluring but, as I have learned, it is ultimately profoundly harmful. It was not my fault that I was raped. And that sentence still feels hard to write.

KH: Continuing our thinking about caring for objects, I wanted to ask you also about another rich term you work with in the book: holding. You write at one point that the book is about “how we hold sacred objects.” First, I wanted to ask you about the meaning here of sacred — what makes an object sacred? And second, I understood you to be making an argument about how institutions hold and care for sacred objects. Your focus in the book is primarily on the USHMM, but I found myself, perhaps because I’m in London, thinking about the British Museum and the controversies about who owns objects like the Parthenon (or Elgin) Marbles and the moai from Rapa Nui (Easter Island). You mention the British Museum briefly in the book but I hoped you might say more about how you think we might weave questions about colonialism and racism into the conversation about holding and holdings?

LL: This is such a rich question and I need to answer it in parts, first in terms of the objects I write about and then in contrast to how Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes about object in places like the British Museum. Objects held in police storage and in Holocaust collections are linked to the urgency of the violent crimes these artifacts witnessed and our need both to remember and to document these atrocities. My book attempts to make more explicit the compelling nature of material objects as holders of traumatic, painful, and violent memories. I am not interested in “national or communal treasures,” but rather tainted objects, once ordinary objects that, having been marked by violence become something else. The holding of such material traces in these collections enables forms of recognition, acknowledgement and critical engagement not once and for all time, but rather an ongoing process of reckoning. This process is what I talk about as “doing justice.” We do justice by continuing to tell stories. We return to these objects from an ever-shifting present. And, as such, these engagements are always only partial reckonings. Nevertheless, I believe they are necessary and important. We do justice to those who died and those who were violated, and we contribute to what Christina Crosby identifies as “a new horizon of justice and an underdetermined future.” 

Your question also makes me think about Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recent book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, where she addresses these questions explicitly in terms of plunder and demands a radical reckoning. Azoulay argues that institutions like museums and archives are built on imperial ways of ordering time, space, and politics. And, in so doing, they often celebrate the new while destroying what came before. I find Azoulay’s argument compelling, but I am also aware of a tension. Once in custody, in the care of these institutions, all kinds of objects are treated with a kind of respect, often a culturally inappropriate version of “reverence,” but they are, nevertheless, attended to. And reading Azoulay’s book and then watching the beautiful film she made in relation to this project, “Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay,” again I was reminded of this tension, the taking and then odd revering of so many of these objects. Seeing the objects beautifully filmed, even in captivity, and then surrounded by music in Azoulay’s documentary haunts me. These object-entities come to life. Despite the overt and compelling argument of the film and the book, the beauty and power of these object-entities were overpowering. These artifacts, often ritual and communal in nature, held against their will even still seemed to overpower the film’s political message. They are the stars. It was mesmerizing to watch and take in their beauty and power even in the context of the museums that hold them captive. The film is all about the objects and they are stunningly captured on film as they stand on display in so many European and American museums. But what I want to say is that the power of these object-entities exceeds the way that they were deployed even in this film. Their presence is what stays with me. And this is a kind of wonder. And to be clear, I am not advocating for these pieces to remain in captivity. I simply want to acknowledge how powerful they remain even in these settings and this too is a part of the story. These are evidence of imperial plunder but, at the same time, still sacred objects.

Protest at the Brooklyn Museum

KH: I have thought about your book a lot since I read it, and have been thinking in particular about the meaning of custody and custodianship as you write about them. You talk about custody as a form of “tender care” enacted by everyone from museum curators to cleaning staff. I thought of the multiple valences of custody and custodians — children, police, museums — again when, on January 7, I saw footage of the cleaning staff whose job it was to clean up after the mob who had attacked the Capitol Building the day before. Those images of Black people literally cleaning up after white supremacists were so symbolically and politically charged, and really, I just wanted to ask you to say more about custody, its different forms and valances — for yourself and as a way of looking at how we interact with one another and material objects. How might we take more tender care?

LL: I so love this question and wanted, throughout the book, to call attention to those who work behind the scenes, those who do the daily, repetitive custodial labors. These are necessary and essential practices that are often disparaged or over-looked and my hope was that in calling attention to them, I could make visible their power and importance. I am thinking of how the servant, Mrs. McNab, is so crucial to the restoration of order after “Time Passes” in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. During the pandemic, we have learned anew the importance of so many “essential workers” whose labors had been taken-for-granted or remained invisible and under-valued for far too long. I turned to Joan Scott and her account of “the logic of the supplement” as a way of appreciating this tension. The importance and necessity of this work but also the ways that it is also considered superfluous. And, as you note, these labors are often raced as well as gendered. My hope is that by highlighting the importance of this work and those who do it, my book might help chip away at this disparagement.

KH: You write with so much generosity and vulnerability in the book while also doing a great deal of rigorous and critical intellectual work. Discussing trauma and pain and memory in these ways is not, of course, standard convention in academia, and I wondered if, returning to the first question, you were also hoping to set an example or establish any kind of precedent yourself and of your own? What kind of work would you like to see come in response, or what kind of legacy would you like this book to have?

LL: This is the work I needed to do, that I was compelled to do. This is how I think and live and write and I wanted to share more fully my process with readers. I did this with the hope that some of what I had to say, and how I needed to say it, might resonate with other scholars and readers. I am not sure that everyone needs or wants or has to write like I do. What I want is more room for scholars to be able to write about what matters most to them in a mode that feels like their own. I want there to be space for writing that is not dictated by any one set of norms. I do not want to have only one form of scholarly writing. I think there are lots of different ways of writing and I want to respect that diversity. And I hope that writing like mine might be more a part of the mix.

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.

Laura Levitt is Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender. She is the author The Objects that Remain (2020); American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007); and Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (1997). She is a co-editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the Holocaust (2003) and Judaism Since Gender (1997). 

The post On Objects, Trauma, and Loss appeared first on The Revealer.

At twenty-eight, I was questioning the direction of my life and feeling lost. I turned deeper into spiritual practice. Though I’d grown up vaguely Methodist in Upstate New York, Buddhism felt like home. I’d begun “sitting around” searching for community when I took a class with a young Buddhist teacher. He was brilliant and around my age. He invited me to a break-off group he’d founded, and I was drawn to its vibrancy, the way it was filled with other young seekers.

“Come back again,” he said on my way out the door. A girl with a nose ring approached, planted a kiss on his cheek.

Three weeks later while checking email, I stopped scrolling at his name.

“I don’t know many poets on the path to talk shop with,” he wrote. He’d read my poetry online, and would I want to meet for tea?

I was flattered, and curious. We made plans for the following week.

Over dinner he told me about being raised in the same meditation community as Allen Ginsberg, a favorite poet. He also practiced yoga, like me.

“I didn’t expect us to have such a connection,” The Buddhist Teacher said.

“Me either,” I admitted. Naive, I wondered if this was a date. He ordered a slice of vegan pie — two forks — and afterward we took a walk. I felt shy as he turned toward me.

“Have you always been in my city?” he asked.

“My city,” I corrected. He moved to kiss me. I pushed away.

“I don’t want to lose this community,” I said. Everything went so fast. I was attracted to him, but something inside told me this might be a bad idea. What about the nose-ring girl? Was she his girlfriend? Was it even ethical for him to date a student?

“You won’t lose the group,” he said. “Anyway, I’m less a teacher and more a community organizer.” He put his arm around me. I pushed aside my inner doubts and turned toward my hope, and him. He walked me home.

As I closed my apartment door, my studio seemed to expand. Allen Ginsberg stared from his picture on my makeshift altar. He’d lived one block away and I liked thinking his energy was still around. Now I imagined he’d brought The Buddhist Teacher and I together.

Next to Allen’s portrait, I kept a framed black and white of my family’s farm. Beneath it I’d written the word ‘sangha,’ a Buddhist term typically reserved for spiritual communities of like heart – not blood families of origin.

***

That week The Buddhist Teacher filled my phone with digital love letters. I saved them all. Yet, as I’d feared, I felt self-conscious attending the group.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he whispered in my ear when I returned. He put my cushion next to his, in the front. From this spot I watched him teach. He was knowledgeable, helping people. I was moved.

Buddhism teaches that there are three refuges: sangha (community), dharma (teachings), and the Buddha. I’d found a fourth: love.

***

I’d never shared spiritual practices with someone. As a kid, my family had only sporadically gone to church, and often I was the one who asked to go. But as I grew older, I gravitated more toward yogic and Buddhist thought, a vegetarian teen protesting as cows mooed outside my window. At night, as my developmentally disabled brother raged in the bedroom next to mine, I dog-eared pages on Buddhism’s first noble truth: life was suffering. Check. I had recurring dreams with an unseen man, hearing a message as if in voiceover — you have to find someone who shares your view of God. Yet I’d felt alone. I took my spiritual interests as another stripe of adolescent alienation, another reason to fall into goth isolation.

I’d long assumed walking the Buddhist and yogic path would mean a solitary lifelong road trip. I completed silent meditation retreats alone. I traveled to Japan by myself, sat in temples, and joked about going monastic.

It was meaningful to think of not having to go it alone. Now my boyfriend and I sat side-by-side on meditation cushions, counting our breaths. With each one we grew more attached. He invited me to dinners with his family, made plans to see me almost every night. I wasn’t used to a man being so immediately inclusive. With him came a whole world: of friends, community, and purpose.

***

Then came the parties. An introvert, I had to pace myself for the revelry of the spiritual scene.

We had parties after performing community service, when members of our Buddhist group picked plastic bags off park trees. Parties filled with cheese and beer after fasts ended. Parties where practitioners displayed their art on the walls of the dharma hall with guest speakers – authors, and lineage holders — those who inherited and carried forth the teachings — visiting. Handing me the mic, The Buddhist Teacher asked me to read my poetry aloud, to everyone. When I finished, a DJ played music.

“Who knew Buddhists were such great dancers,” he said into the mic. Everyone cheered.

“Someday we can teach here together,” he said to me privately, later, hugging a wall. He put his arm around me. We looked out at the crowd as if they were our children.

***

The more parties I went to, the more I realized girls arrived and fell away again, as if they were apparitions. I barely got to know any of them. Sometimes I felt I had moved into a frat house.

“Guess which Master Teacher’s daughter gave me a blow job on retreat?” one of my boyfriend’s friends, a fellow young teacher, asked him, giving way to stories of sexual exploits.

“This group is the only way Buddhists can get laid,” another male practitioner said. I jolted, shocked and offended.

Alcohol flowed at these gatherings. I was the only sober one. A teacher repeatedly pressured me to drink, despite my objections. I didn’t understand how one could study or meditate with a clouded mind, but worried I appeared too Puritan.

But each question I had or offense I took was tampered every time we meditated. I felt that chime in my body — the one I associated with something Good. The Buddhist Teacher gave eloquent, layered, and helpful lectures about the dharma. We studied sutras, ancient Buddhist texts that resonated deeply with me. I pocketed my doubts and let myself be a new student, young in the tradition, grateful to have found the community.

I followed the Good.

***

When The Buddhist Teacher asked me to move in with him after a few months of dating, he held a single flower on a street corner.

“Should we wait a little longer?” I asked. Everything was going so fast.

But he reminded me — the only time is now.

In The Buddhist Teacher’s place — now our place — we meditated. Our breath, rising and falling together. I didn’t have the language for what happens in the brain when you combine neurochemicals of attraction, love, and spiritual insight, but I felt it.

I’d always fantasized about Buddhist vows, not marriage ones. Now I thought I might have both.

***

Yet as weeks went on, he grew more distant. A light had turned off. Looking at his profile at night, I had trouble making out his features. Yet in the morning The Buddhist Teacher’s face was everywhere — in magazines, on program flyers. The change in his private behavior was sudden and confusing.

I Googled contemplative courses to join away from our community, but felt too dulled to attend.

A few months later, I asked about our holiday plans.

“I’m going to my mom’s. How about you?” He asked.

I had a panic attack. Our living room spun, my heart leapt. It terrified me. After many nights of this, he said he was losing too much sleep, and needed rest to be present for his students. I could only have one anxiety attack a week, he demanded. As if I could portion out my panic. As things became strangely toxic privately, publicly he spoke eloquently on compassion — and I lost myself in cognitive dissonance. I wondered if I’d done something wrong, blamed myself. The Buddhist Teacher said he no longer recognized me. That made two of us. My panic attacks increased — I’d never before had anxiety like this.

Less than a year after moving in, he sat me down and said “we” should move out. “We” meant “me.” I watched him leave and walk to the meditation group without me.

***

He and I avoided each other while I packed my things. One night I came home to his open laptop and saw his messages with another student he was already pursuing. I scrolled, reading their sexual and romantic chat. He used some of the same phrases with her he’d used with me.

Then I found other messages where his teacher friends had written about “nice guy slut mode,” and “dharma sausage fests,” using their positions to get girls. He had forwarded private messages from me around to other men in the organization. I discovered his girlfriend before me had been a student too. I felt sick.

But when I confronted him, he threatened to ostracize me. “If you come to the group, I’m shutting it down,” he said. I went away.

I moved out, devastated. This man, I’d thought, had been different. He’d watched thoughts pass like clouds. I did not want to be a cloud.

I was determined not to lose my spiritual practice. I needed to meditate.

Yet each time I tried I was hit with a surprise — overwhelming anxiety and grief. The practice itself — even the language I’d once found grounding — was now infused with pain.

With Buddhism now triggering, I turned deeper into yoga. I signed up for teacher training at a studio and began teaching yoga at an all-girls elementary school. I tried to create a safe, empowering space for the girls. Still, each night I fell onto my own yoga mat feeling secretly broken.

“I remember you,” a yogi came up to me one night. “You used to go to the Buddhist group, right? I heard the teacher has a problem with monogamy.”

I learned more about The Buddhist Teacher’s lineage. The founder, alongside his books and teachings, had been an alcoholic and womanizer, pursuing sexual relationships with students. After he died, his successor also slept with students, knowingly passing on HIV. There had been a whole culture of crossed teacher/student boundaries, sexism, grooming, and power abuse. And silence.

The New York Times, 1989.

As I researched other communities, these stories were everywhere.

I gave up Buddhism, grieved it. I felt ashamed abandoning it, worried I was weak. I stayed alone, didn’t date. Now when I unrolled my yoga mat, it was often to escape. But the pain always came back. I wondered if you could get trapped in the pursuit of healing instead of transforming through it.

I was afraid to say anything or ask for guidance within mindfulness communities — my ex had done a good job connecting them through his work so none seemed neutral or safe. He was revered, and I worried about backlash even in asking questions. I turned into an urban ascetic — practicing and teaching yoga, praying, going home to my studio apartment just to wake up and repeat. The illumination I’d found in Buddhist teachings, along with my self-confidence, dimmed.

***

“Who digs Los Angeles, IS Los Angeles.” – Allen Ginsberg

When I was offered a job to help coordinate a university yoga program in Los Angeles, I grabbed the opportunity and left my life in New York.

There, on the other side of the continent, I’d start over. I’d be 3,000 miles away from this story.

The sun would be bright, the world changed.

Yet once I arrived I quickly encountered several local Buddhist and yoga communities also rocked with inappropriate teacher/student relationships, upsetting power dynamics, and outright sexual misconduct.

Here I was — gone — but the narrative wouldn’t leave me.

“In our community we need to prevent this” a colleague said. He mentioned the word “Brahmacharya,” a Sanskrit term and part of yoga’s ethical guidelines, meaning ‘sexual responsibility.’ But whose responsibility was it? Mine?

In what felt like karma, I was tasked with creating a code of conduct for our yoga program, including strict teacher/student protocols. I underwent Title IX training. In academic settings the boundaries were clear: the moment a student walked into a room with a teacher, power dynamics were at play. No official “vow” was needed to establish a teacher relationship; students are seeking and therefore vulnerable. I wanted the same clarity in spiritual spaces, where vulnerability was heightened, where not only an open mind was needed, but openness of spirit and, in yoga settings, the body too.

***

One day, a young female student came to see me.

“I’ve gotten myself into a situation,” she said, recounting a relationship with a teacher in her studio. The nuances were similar to my experience and others I’d witnessed.

I comforted her but was livid. Why were these indiscretions so common? Being a teacher myself, I now saw the issue from both sides. I understood the onus of boundaries was on the teacher, and I knew the long-term harm breeching them could cause. I knew how confusing this could be — as seekers we were taught to follow teachers, often over our own inner thoughts. We were told that was how we’d learn. I was grateful to be able to advocate on her behalf, but angry I had to do so. I listened to her.

I was proud to help, but secretly drained. After she left, I closed the door to my office and lay on a yoga mat to breathe.

Almost a decade after I’d walked into The Buddhist Teacher’s class, I decided to start speaking to other women about my experience. I was shocked — after years of feeling alone, I saw I wasn’t. These stories were incredibly common. All sorts of misconduct had been taking place. I began to see we were holding a lineage, too.

Then I reconnected with an old friend from the yoga studio where I’d found shelter after The Buddhist Teacher. I told her that place “saved” me. I was so glad it had been safe.

She told me it, too, had been rocked with sexual misconduct and was now closed.

***

Each night in L.A., I drove home past the SONY lot where they’d filmed the Wizard of Oz. I began to think about what was behind curtains. The university where I worked was Catholic — and I’d been well aware of sex scandals in the Catholic Church. In contrast, I had thought of Buddhism as inherently safe. I had so deeply wanted to believe places of healing were free from harm. As a new student I’d ignored my own doubts and deferred to those in power.

But now I understood: The Buddhist Teacher and others in leadership had an inherent responsibility not to abuse the power they had. Clear boundaries were part of the job.

As the New York Times broke the news that the head of my ex’s school had sexually assaulted his female students, I was upset but not surprised. This was a systemic issue of power abuse, generations old. I now understood my panic attacks had been a visceral reaction to a larger knowing — my body’s urge to get out.

As I drove past the Hollywood studios, I turned my car toward my new home, the Western sky wide and warm and different. I wasn’t on a solitary road trip at all. I was part of a powerful community of female seekers.

Maybe, in this case, healing wouldn’t come from sitting in meditative silence. It would come from speaking, and being heard.

Sarah Herrington is a writer, poet, and yogi. She helped establish the first Master of Arts in Yoga Studies in North America at Loyola Marymount University. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Yoga Journal, and she’s the author of four books on yoga. She is currently writing a memoir.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Lineage Holders: Gender, Blurred Boundaries, and Buddhism appeared first on The Revealer.

Rioters storming past the gates of the U.S. Capitol Building on 1/6/2021. (Photo: Spencer Platt)

Beware. The barbarians are at the gate! For as long as the U.S. republic has existed, and ever since Edward Gibbon began publishing his six-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ancient Rome has served as an analogy for our nation’s greatness and, perhaps, its eventual demise. For some, today’s barbarian threat stems from an influx of immigrants, cultural shifts away from conservative Christian values, and the election of progressive Democratic politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Raphael Warnock. For others, the existential threat to our polity arises from Donald Trump, his Republican cronies who disregard democratic norms, and insurrectionists who want to impose their agenda by any means necessary.

The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, has become the symbolic equivalent to the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Goths on August 24, 410 CE. Ironically, the shocking footage and images of the breach of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., have displayed the brazen acts of Trump-supporting hordes who believe themselves to be saving America from radical Marxists. They see themselves as patriots at the gate. In one interpretation or another, barbarians are driving this nation to the brink. But the problem with many of these analogies is that the so-called barbarians who sacked Rome in 410 are emptied of historical concreteness and reduced to an archetype. We’re so used to hearing the parable of the barbarians at the gate that most of us know little or nothing about who these barbarians were and about what transpired during this period of the Roman Empire. What we may know is likely heavily skewed. Having a clearer understanding of this period can help us to understand the lies told about the Goths and the problem with imagining barbarian invasions today.

Historian Douglas Boin’s Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome provides a much-needed corrective. He makes deft use of scarce historical material on Alaric to reconstruct a glimpse of the man. The heart of the book is a wider cultural history of late 4^th/early 5^th century Rome that highlights the empire’s tensions with immigration and the political impact of fanatical Christians. Boin also recontextualizes the sack of Rome in 410, including the details about what happened in the three days of the breach. When Alaric and the Goths pillaged Rome, it sent shockwaves across the empire. Augustine claimed that people “in the farthest parts of the earth” were setting aside “days of public grief and mourning.” Jerome wrote, “The city that once captured the hearts and minds of the world has been captured!” However, the Goths’ occupation of Rome, which was accompanied by fires and the deaths of notable figures like Marcella of the Aventine Hill, appears to have been rather mild by the standards of the time. Boin suggests that Alaric’s attack on Rome was in retaliation for personally being denied citizenship and for the empire’s injustices against Goths.

Rome had sixteen main gates around its walls that were rigorously secured and patrolled by soldiers. These hadn’t been breached since the Gauls’ sack of Rome around 390 BCE. To pull off Alaric’s occupation required insider knowledge, which he possessed as a former Roman soldier, and probably some help from within the city. According to one account, Alaric spared any Romans who sought sanctuary in churches and commanded his men “that as far as possible, they must refrain from shedding blood in their hunger for booty.” By comparison, the destruction to the city caused by Nero’s fires was far worse. After a Gothic soldier encountered an elderly woman protecting the gold and silver vessels from St. Peter’s Basilica, Alaric “immediately ordered that all the vessels should be taken back, just as they had been found, to the basilica of the Apostle [Peter].” Both Romans and Goths “joined together in singing openly a hymn of praise to God.” Even Augustine, in City of God, wrote about “those very Romans, who were spared by the barbarians through their respect for Christ…”

The Romans borrowed the epithet barbarian from the Greeks to describe foreigners like the Goths, many of whom had lived within Rome’s borders and converted to Arian Christianity by the time Alaric sacked the city. Renaissance accounts of the Goths inaugurating the “dark ages” bequeathed to us an imagination of Goths as savages hell-bent on destroying Roman culture and institutions. Boin points out that archeologists in the early 20^th century like Rodolfo Lanciani continued to repeat smears against the Goths, interpreting “every broken pot in the city” as “proof of the crimes pinned on Goths.” But Goths’ relationship with Rome was more complicated, just like their relationship with Christianity, which embraced a different interpretation of Christ than that of the Nicene faith. At the Council of Nicaea convened by Emperor Constantine in 325 CE, Arius of Alexandria and his followers had proposed that Jesus and God were of a similar (homoios) substance. Those who opposed Arian Christians and argued that Jesus and God were of the same (homos) substance would eventually claim the mantle of “Nicene” and “orthodox” Christianity.

In terms of historical material, little is known about Alaric, who became the de facto leader of the Goths. But what Boin establishes about Alaric and his era significantly reframes the stereotypical narrative. As he puts it, “Alaric came of age at a time when high-placed politicians wanted Gothic boys like him dead, when few ordinary Romans cared to acknowledge the cruelties that had occurred at their own borders, and when even the casual comments of educated Romans dehumanized his people.” When Alaric breached Rome’s walls, he was no stranger to the empire. Born along the empire’s northern border with the Danube River, Alaric enlisted as a soldier for the Romans as a young man during the thawing of Gothic-Roman relations in the 390s; this provided great benefits, such as a stipend otherwise not available to him because he lacked Roman citizenship. Alaric was climbing the ranks of the Roman military when his position in Illyricum was suddenly terminated. His decision to invade Rome was preceded by failed attempts at negotiations with Rome’s ruling elites. The Goths demanded better treatment and land, and Alaric allegedly proposed that they wanted to “live with the Romans [so] that men might believe them both to be of one family or people.”

A depiction of Alaric the Goth

Immigrants and refugees had always been central to Rome’s history and its identity. Plutarch said that the city was founded as an asylum. Virgil described the hero of The Aeneid as a wanderer. In 212 CE, the Emperor Caracalla passed the significant Antonine Declaration, which granted citizenship to every free-born resident of a Roman province. Rome’s senate looked increasingly “multicultural” by our standards. Rome’s emperors, like Septimius Severus, could come from Roman territory in Africa, or, like Trajan and Hadrian, from the province of Spain. But for all its apparent inclusivity, the Roman Empire still harbored deep xenophobia. True belonging didn’t depend on legal citizenship but on Romanitas or how one dressed, spoke, and behaved. Ovid said of those at the edge of Rome’s borders, “They have more of cruel savagery than wolves.” According to Claudian, a Roman contemporary of Alaric, “Everyone insults the immigrant.”

In 235, Maximinus Thrax was the first foreigner with a “barbarian” background to become Roman emperor after being made a citizen through Caracalla’s law. But for traditionalists, Maximinus’ background was a strike against him. A group of senators stubbornly opposed him and called him a “Cyclops,” using Homeric language to depict him as a monster. His reign was short-lived. In 238, Maximinus was assassinated, and senators picked a replacement named Gordian who, according to Boin, signified an abrupt return to Rome’s “traditional ways.”

By the time Alaric sacked Rome in 410, around 30,000 Goths lived within the city and every Roman home was said to have at least one or two Gothic slaves. The Roman Empire had extended citizenship on a large scale at least three times in its history, culminating with Caracalla’s law. But the extension of citizenship had largely stalled in Alaric’s day and most Goths lacked citizenship and full legal protections. Around 377, Emperor Valens created a policy of forced relocation of young Gothic men in order to instill in them Roman values and prevent rebellion. In 408, after the execution of a Roman general who had roots in another barbarian group known as the Vandals, Romans indiscriminately attacked Gothic men, women, and children in the city. Thousands of Goths responded by pouring into the streets in protest.

An 1890 painting titled “Sack of Rome” by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre

Alaric’s sack didn’t emerge from a vacuum but from a cultural tinderbox related to Gothic and Roman relations. Goths who enlisted to fight for Rome didn’t always meet a better fate — as exemplified by Alaric’s situation and by Emperor Theodosius’ cold calculation to sacrifice thousands of Gothic soldiers on the front lines of the battlefield. And Christian attitudes on the Goths didn’t necessarily differ from that of their non-Christian counterparts. The Christian bishop Synesius maintained that the Gothic people were an animalistic race, and that the government should “admit no fellowship with these foreigners” but, rather, would do better to “disown their participation” in public life.

Christians of the Nicene camp were politically ascendant in this era. Many people attribute this to Emperor Constantine’s conversion and his legalization of Christianity in 313. But no emperor did more for Christians politically than Theodosius who made Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380, and whom Christians called “The Great.” Boin writes of Theodosius, “he used every tool available to an emperor — the laws, imperial decrees, a soft touch, veiled threats, and actual physical force — to implement his vision for a single-party Christian state.” Bishops like Ambrose of Milan preached that angels were fighting demons for control of the empire and that Theodosius deserved Christians’ unqualified support. Boin adds, “In 388, after Christians burned a [Jewish] synagogue at Callinicum, in Syria, no one was held accountable; Theodosius refused to punish the guilty faction of Christians because they counted among his most loyal supporters.” Fanatical Christians were emboldened under Theodosius’ reign. In 393, to their joy, Theodosius went as far as to criminalize nearly every aspect of pagan worship. Rome passed nearly twenty edicts against Paganism by the year 400.

The “Make Christianity Great” agenda of Theodosius and his Christian supporters was unsuccessfully opposed by several pagans and moderate Christians. Symmachus, a pagan senator, defended the freedom of religious pluralism, writing: “The truth of why things happen is hidden at the end of a multiplicity of roads and pathways.” Some Christians considered this approach dangerous. In Against Symmachus, the Christian poet Prudentius responded, “The windings of the labyrinth offer little but doubtful corners and the promise of more uncertainty.” Boin says, “Other Christians composed misleading prophecies, modeled after a collection of widely regarded pagan writings called The Sibylline Oracles, and shared them with other Christians to stoke anxiety about another coming age of persecution.” Christians like Lactantius, the tutor to Emperor Constantine’s children, described Theodosius’ supporters and the more fanatical Christians as Deliri or “crazies.”

Christian senators who tried to compromise with pagans were branded as “apostates” by other Christians. Theodosius’ Christian-supremacist rule inspired segments of the population to back usurpers such as Flavius Eugenius, a Christian who supported the right to open pagan worship. According to one account, members of the church told Eugenius that he was not a “real Christian.” Eugenius eventually faced off Theodosius in a civil war. Ultimately, Theodosius, while using Gothic troops on the frontlines, defeated Eugenius in 394. He impaled Eugenius’ head on a stick and displayed it around Italy. While orthodox Christians later mythologized Theodosius, highlighting stories such as his alleged public repentance before Ambrose for his responsibility in a massacre at Thessaloniki, Theodosius’ reign helped elevate the perspectives of Nicene Christian writers while erasing those of pagans and rival Christians. As the classicist Mary Beard puts it in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, “The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners.”

When Alaric and the Goths sacked Rome in August 410, Christians interpreted it in a number of ways. Within a month, some Christians compared it to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and saw an apocalyptic line in the book of Ezekiel about Gog as a warning about “the Goths.” In City of God, Augustine saw the sack as a disaster and used it as an opportunity to theologically bury Rome’s pagan gods — which according to him were really demons — once and for all. Although he acknowledges Alaric’s merciful behavior, Augustine credits God for bridling the “fierce and bloody minds” of the Arian Christian barbarians. Like eavesdropping on one side of a debate, City of God shows us Augustine setting up his arguments against pagan opponents who apparently blamed Christianity for the breach of Rome’s walls. Other Christians thought Alaric’s sack of Rome wasn’t a disaster or a big deal. In Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, Orosius, a Christian historian from Spain and a personal pupil of Augustine, parted ways with the gloomy outlook of Augustine and Jerome. Orosius wrote more sympathetically about the Goths, believed that Nero’s fires and the Gauls’ sack were worse than Alaric’s occupation, and shied away from more apocalyptic or theologically somber pronouncements.

***

For more than a thousand years, we’ve inherited debates about the fall of the Roman Empire that lay all the blame at the feet of Christianity, or Paganism, or barbarians, or immigrants. Edward Gibbon, a masterful stylist, mostly blamed Christianity and barbarians in an account suggesting that empires rise and fall like the sun, due to “the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” Yet most historians today would avoid characterizing Rome’s collapse — or transition, transformation, etc. — as resulting from only a couple of factors. In fact, it’s become increasingly clear that other realities, like climate and disease, were also pivotal.

In The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Kyle Harper writes, “The fate of Rome was played out by emperors and barbarians, senators and generals, soldiers and slaves. But it was equally decided by bacteria and viruses, volcanoes and solar cycles.” Building on fascinating research that combines a scientific and humanistic approach, Harper argues that the Roman Empire emerged during a phase of warm, wet, and stable climate across much of the Mediterranean that he calls the “Roman Climate Optimum.” The “Little Ice Age” that resulted from volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE demonstrates how much climate could impact the empire’s agriculture and economic growth. “Even more consequentially,” according to Harper, “the Romans built an interconnected, urbanized empire on the fringes of the tropics, with tendrils creeping across the known world. In an unintended conspiracy with nature, the Romans created a disease ecology that unleashed the latent power of pathogen evolution. The Romans were soon engulfed by the overwhelming force of what we would today call emerging infectious diseases.”

Harper thinks that the explosion of plague and climate deterioration in the 6^th and 7^th centuries fueled apocalyptic angst within Christianity, Judaism, and eventually Islam. The Antonine Plague of 165-180 appears to have crippled civic polytheism in a way that opened the door to Christianity’s growth. In some early Christian legends, such as one about Gregory the Wonderworker, plagues provided a communal stage to display “the inefficacy of the ancestral gods” and “the virtues of the Christian faith.” While the public image of some ancient Christians may have benefited from the compassion they exhibited during pestilence, it could be harder for later historians to say the same about the Christians who packed churches and attempted to flout public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the U.S. republic declines and falls, it will — like Rome’s decline — be due to a number of converging factors. While the Roman Empire’s history provides important echoes and lessons, every apparent parallel is also accompanied by jarring reminders that ancient Rome’s context is not the U.S., and that the attack on the Capitol is not Alaric’s sack of Rome. But that won’t stop some people from seeing only what they want to see.

The battles between Romans and barbarians have often served as an elastic canvass onto which modern nationalists and white supremacists have tried to paint their racial fantasies. Just as some Europeans and Americans have associated Rome with “civilization” as such, others, at times, have flipped the symbolic sack by Alaric on its head and identified the barbarians with white people today. Starting in the 16^th century, German writers started to claim the Goths as their ancestors. This was based on the erroneous assumption that because the Gothic and German languages belonged to the same family, modern Germans were directly related to Goths by blood. (Most of Alaric’s descendants actually ended up in Spain and were later labeled “Visigoths” — but that’s another story.)

Netflix’s show Barbarians

A similar dynamic can be seen more recently in reactions to the German drama Barbarians on Netflix, which depicts the ancient Battle of Teutoburg Forest between Romans and Cherusci barbarians. Far-right nationalists in Germany have long used this battle as an ideological rallying point and today might interpret this drama’s presentation of barbarians fighting Romans as a parallel to their own battle against the multicultural “tyranny” of globalists and the European Union. But the show’s creators made great efforts to avoid this political spin. Matthias Wemhoff, the director of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, has asserted that “there is no continuity” between the Cherusci and contemporary Germans.

Whether barbarians are turned into the villains or the heroes, modern racists have found multiple uses for them in stories that are only loosely connected to historical facts. The attack on the U.S. Capitol is now its own symbol. It has already produced divergent interpretations among extremists and will continue to do so. Nevertheless, several far-right Germans and Americans claim that they share a common cause in resisting so-called “white genocide” or the replacement of European populations by immigrants. Unlike the German context, however, in which white nationalists have attempted to racially reclaim the barbarians, the U.S. context has, more often than not, exclusively deployed the language of barbarian invaders against people of color.

The parable of the barbarians at the gate has been useful for those who warn about America’s downfall coming from some external, or alien-in-our-midst, threat, whether this be immigrants or socialists. It’s a less elucidating tale for addressing homegrown white supremacy, domestic terrorism, or inadequate human responses to the climate and to plagues. Even the real threat posed by Russian interference preys upon our nation’s internal problems. All of this brings to mind a poem written by C. P. Cavafy titled “Waiting for the Barbarians.” In it, an onlooker observes an unnamed emperor and group of political leaders as they take a series of dramatic steps in anticipation of barbarians marching to the gate of their city. The barbarians never arrive. Then, the onlooker concludes: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.”

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.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Barbarians at the Gate: The Sack of Rome and the Attack on the U.S. Capitol appeared first on The Revealer.

Kevin Seefried stormed the Capitol with the Confederate flag in hand. (Photo: Saul Loeb for Getty Images)

In December 2020, instead of preparing to exit the White House gracefully, then-President Donald Trump tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest on January 6^th. Be there, will be wild!” In response, the FBI reported that online white nationalist groups planned and discussed violence, including posts such as, “Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa [sic] slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

On January 6, 2021, the U.S. Capitol was invaded in a coordinated attack along with state capitols across the country by white nationalist domestic terrorists. Lawmakers were the target. Indicating the level of preparation in advance of their mission, rioters, after successfully entering the Capitol, sent messages to Thomas Edward Caldwell, former Navy veteran and leader of the Oath Keepers, a white nationalist group. One read, “All members are in the tunnels under capital [sic] seal them in. Turn on gas.” The violence resulted in five deaths.

As a scholar of systemic racism, white nationalism, and militant Islamism, the U.S. Capitol attack was not surprising. It was also about more than a “stolen election.” Though many were quick to label Donald Trump as the cause of the white nationalist domestic terrorism, he is but a symptom of the centuries-long desire to maintain and reclaim the United States as a nation of white people, by white people, and for white people, which can be traced back to the nation’s founding. January 6, 2021 was a battle in defense of the white race against physical and cultural annihilation in the war to establish a white ethnostate.

As I discovered over the course of a decade researching my forthcoming book, Homegrown Hate: Why White Nationalists and Militant Islamists are Waging War against the United States, the constellation of white nationalist domestic terrorism is vast and complex, reflected by the seemingly diverse organizations present on January 6^th: Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, QAnon adherents, Ghost Skins (members of the law enforcement and armed forces) and others that share a singular ideology of white nationalism – the desire for a white ethnostsate. The book details the breadth and depth of their ideology, including how the facets of antigovernment beliefs, religion, racism, and conspiracy theories interact. The underlying worldview that unites the white nationalist individuals and groups I studied for my book and among those at the Capitol can be articulated by the “Fourteen Words.” Looking at the Fourteen Words will help clarify how religion and racism drive white nationalists, including the perpetrators of the January 6th attack.

To “Secure the Existence of Our People”
Originally penned in 1988 by David Lane, a prolific white nationalist ideologue who advocated for the United States to be a white ethnostate, the Fourteen Words declare, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” Also referred to as “14,” these words demonstrate how white nationalists see the world. “We” and “our people” are markers of exclusivity that bifurcate the world into “us” and “them.” “Our people” is made of whites and the out-group is everyone else. This racism reflects the views of many organizations Lane was involved with throughout his life, including the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Aryan Nations. For Lane, white people are a special race ordained by nature that must be set apart and preserved, as he writes in his tract, 88 Precepts. In fact, the very title of this work signals the conspiracy-minded elements threaded throughout white nationalism. “88” stands for “HH,” the eighth letter of the alphabet repeated twice. HH is the acronym for “Heil Hitler.” “88” has since become shorthand for the veneration of Nazi Germany, its virulent antisemitism, and its reverence of whiteness. 

Lane, like Hitler, was influenced by eugenics, or the pseudoscience of white supremacy that claims white people are biologically, physiologically, and culturally superior. Developed in the late 1800s, eugenics became popular in the 1920s and 1930s in both the United States and Europe. White racists have cited eugenics to justify colonialism, enslavement, the Holocaust, and the recent U.S. Capitol attacks. Others melded eugenics with racist readings of Christian scriptures that gave rise to new religious movements such as Christian Identity, which peaked in membership and political influence in the twentieth century and taught that God made whites superior.

Within the Fourteen Words, the phrase “must secure” points to the immediate recourse to militancy and a narrative of victimhood, which in turn legitimizes violence. The fear of annihilation as the pretext for militancy has long underpinned white nationalist thought. Decades before David Lane wrote his “White Genocide Manifesto” in prison, railing against relationships between white people and people of color, American eugenicist and lawyer Madison Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race. Published in 1916, this tome defended eugenics and went on to influence not only Adolf Hitler, but over time also members of the U.S. Congress and advisors to President Trump, such as Steve Bannon. Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist who murdered 51 people in New Zealand in 2019, went so far as to name his manifesto after Grant’s work.

According to the logic of white nationalism, there are many who constitute The Other, including Black people, Muslims (who may or may not themselves identify as white), people of color, and LGBTQ people (who also may or may not identify themselves as white). One other group has been a special obsession for white nationalists: Jews.

 Jews have long been targets of vitriol and violence, and scapegoated as the reason why white Christians need militaristic self-defense. One prominent antisemitic conspiracy grew out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a highly influential but fabricated text promulgated in the twentieth century by American business magnate Henry Ford and the Nazis. The Protocols claim Jews are exercising a covert conspiracy to take over the world’s financial institutions as part of a supranational government. Today, the coded term for such belief is to label someone, or an institution, as “globalist.”

In 1987, David Lane, as a member of the white nationalist group The Order, made up of people previously affiliated with a variety of similarly racist militant groups like the KKK, Posse Comitatus, and Aryan Nations, was sentenced to 190 years in prison in relation to the organization’s infamous1984 murder of Alan Berg, a well-known Jewish radio host popular for his brashness. In his autobiography, David Lane writes that Berg was “rabidly Jewish” and “had been a particularly vile, obnoxious and anti-White talk show personality on several Denver radio stations prior to his much deserved and little lamented departure from this mortal coil.” The reality was that Berg spoke out against what he saw as the absurd antisemitism of The Order and other groups that shared the racist religion of Christian Identity, particularly the view that Jews are the spawn of Satan and Eve rather than Adam and Eve like whites. In June 1984, Lane executed Berg with machine-gun style bullets. Berg was found in his driveway in Denver, steps away from his door. For Lane and other white nationalists, white people’s security and a future for white children can only — and must — be achieved through warfare.

The Order and The Deadliest Act of Domestic Terrorism To Date
The eponymous group to which Lane belonged was actually named after a fictional group in The Turner Diaries, written by white nationalist ideologue William Pierce under his pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. The protagonist of The Turner Diaries is Earl Turner who joins an organization called The Order with the intention of safeguarding white people against the tyranny of the federal government and people of color, especially Black people. Written as a novel, the book features an event called Day of the Rope, in which Black people and their white allies (“race traitors”) are hanged. The book closes with Turner embarking upon a suicide mission only to be executed and exalted as a martyr. First published in 1978, the book has been described as “the bible of the racist right” and continues to inspire white nationalists. On January 6, 2021, nooses were seen at the U.S. Capitol in a direct reference to The Day of the Rope. These symbols not only serve as death threats to Black Americans and people of color, but also as reminders of the horrific public lynchings throughout America’s history. The noose was also meant to terrorize anyone who denies white nationalists of their claim to the United States as a white ethnostate, in direct reference to the Day of the Rope imagery in Pierce’s revered work.

Oklahoma City bombing

Not only did The Turner Diaries inspire David Lane and fellow members of The (real-life) Order, many of whom were imprisoned because of crimes related to Alan Berg’s murder, the novel also inspired Timothy McVeigh to perpetrate the deadliest act of domestic terrorism to date, the Oklahoma City bombing. Much like Turner, McVeigh viewed the government as an antagonistic entity worthy of enmity. He targeted a federal building to showcase his disdain for the federal government. Often sending letters to vent his frustrations on topics such as the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, he wrote in a 1992 letter to the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal in New York, “Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that! But it might.” Three years later, it did. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols, both disgruntled U.S. Army veterans, eerily mimicked a car bombing described in The Turner Diaries, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Excerpts of Pierce’s book were found in the getaway car.

14 and Racist Religions
William Pierce and David Lane undoubtedly have an outsized influence on white nationalism because of their writings, political activities, and respective publishing houses, the 14 Word Press and National Vanguard Press. However, David Lane also drew on religion to further legitimize his Fourteen Words. While Timothy McVeigh was linked to a Christian Identity group in Elohim City, Oklahoma, and William Pierce himself started his own religion of Cosmotheism, Lane refashioned the Norse pagan religion, Odinism, into what he called Wotanism or Wotansvolk (Odin’s Folk), to further ingrain the Fourteen Words as the battle cry in the war to reclaim the United States for white people.

Lane’s purpose in developing this religion was to “expound our message of racial survival.” While Christian Identity was on the wane in the twenty-first century, and Cosmotheism never caught on despite Pierce’s pre-eminence in the canon of white nationalist ideology, Wotanism has endured. This can be attributed to Lane’s outreach efforts and the emphasis on race rather than worship. By fashioning a religion to support the Fourteen Words, Lane was able to succeed where Christian Identity and Cosmotheism could not.

For his religion, Lane specifically chose the acronym W.O.T.A.N. to stand for “Will of the Aryan Nation.” The primary tenet is the preservation of one own’s kind in accordance with the laws of Nature. As with his Fourteen Words, the concept of Wotanism is inherently militant. Lane understood how to leverage religion to sanctify violence in the pursuit of political aims. Notably, Wotanism is particularly evocative when describing the special status conferred to those who die in battle. Just as in traditional Odinism, the souls of those who die in battle will be greeted by the Valkyries, or lovely maidens, after their death. And only these warriors are entitled to the glories of Valhalla, the Odinist and Wotanist paradise made up of a grand banquet hall to honor the warriors who died in battle.

Harnessing the internet in its infancy, Lane developed an online network to promote his views while also running his publishing company from inside his cell at Leavenworth Penitentiary. While his wife Katja oversaw the physical publishing and dissemination of his writings, Lane’s pronouncement of the Fourteen Words and his proselytizing of Wotanism in prison served to convert thousands of prisoners to his belief system. After Lane’s death in 2007, Odinism and Lane’s militant expression of Wotanism are some of the fastest growing religions within American prisons. In a landmark 2005 case, testifying to the prevalence of such beliefs, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Cutter v Wilkinson to allow prisoners to wear Odinic runes and religious symbols such as Thor’s hammer, or Mjolnir, as a pendant.

Jake Angeli, a QAnon supporter storming the Capitol. (Photo: Saul Loeb for Getty Images)

People wearing these symbols were present at the January 6^th attack on the U.S. Capitol. The self-styled QAnon Shaman, or member of “QAnon & digital soldier,” Jake Angeli, perhaps one of the most photographed people that day, was tattooed with a variety of co-opted Odinist symbols that have become twisted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by European eugenicists and Nazis into well-known hate symbols still utilized by white nationalists. The Mjolnir is tattooed on his stomach, the Yggrasil, or Tree of Life, is on his left pectoral, and the valknut, or “knot of the slain,” is placed significantly above his heart. While not inherently racist, these symbols have been adopted by white nationalists calling upon association with Viking and Crusader iconographies, civilizations and time periods associated with the celebration of whiteness and the establishment of white ethnostates.

14 and the U.S. Capitol
By 2045, the United States will become “minority white” due to seismic demographic changes. Even though decades away, this shift caused by immigration and birth rate patterns has escalated the sense of victimhood underpinning white nationalist ideology. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan exploited this anxiety by calling to “Make America Great Again” after eight years of a Black president in the White House. Though the “Again” was initially interpreted as a dog whistle, four years later, the embroidered motto on red hats has become an overt symbol of white nationalism akin to a KKK hood. The number of white nationalist groups surged in response to President Obama’s election in 2008 and surged even greater when President Trump took office in 2016. The economic fallout and job losses from the coronavirus pandemic have only exacerbated the sense of threat that shapes the worldview of white nationalists.

The political violence waged by white Americans disallows the fallacy that terrorism is not an American enterprise. For most Americans, the reality of white nationalist domestic terrorism, which is now being recognized as the greatest national security threat to the U.S. by the Department of Homeland Security and President Biden, was brought into stark relief. What must also be acknowledged is the American history of denialism of white supremacy and the disregard for Black and brown lives that creates a culture of complicity allowing white people to storm the Capitol in a nation that also declares liberty and justice for all. For many Americans, January 6^th may have been the first battle to reclaim the United States as a White ethnostate. Until the underlying systemic inequities are addressed, it will not be the last.

Sara Kamali is the author of the forthcoming Homegrown Hate: Why White Nationalists and Militant Islamists Are Waging War against the United States (University of California Press, 2021) and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. You can subscribe to her newsletter through her website to receive updates and other writings every month, and follow her on Twitter @sarakamali.

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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 The Fourteen Words: Religion and Racism in White Nationalist Domestic Terrorism appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Welcome to our first issue in 2021! As we begin the new year, I have been reflecting on the Revealer’s many milestones from 2020. Last year, we launched our monthly podcast, sponsored three writing fellows, published two themed special issues, increased our readership, and provided important coverage of religion and the 2020 election, the pandemic, and movements for racial justice. We are committed to continuing this tradition of excellence in 2021.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

As we head into this year, we are excited to launch a new column: “From the Margins.” Every other month, our columnist Daniel José Camacho will explore often neglected voices in national conversations about religion. Camacho’s newest articles will join his excellent two earlier Revealer pieces: “Moses Speaks Spanglish” and “On Evangelical Masculinities.” We are excited for you to see what he has planned for us.

Our February issue opens with two reflections on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Sara Kamali leads the way with “The Fourteen Words: Religion and Racism in White Nationalist Domestic Terrorism,” where she explains some of the beliefs that are shared by several groups that stormed the Capitol. And in “The Barbarians at the Gate,” Daniel José Camacho compares the sack of Rome with the invasion of the Capitol.

The next three articles explore issues of justice and the complications of forgiveness. In her personal essay, “The Lineage Holders: Gender, Blurred Boundaries, and Buddhism,” Sarah Herrington recounts a fraught romantic relationship she had with a revered Buddhist teacher and the subsequent women she met in similar situations. In “On Objects, Trauma, and Loss,” Contributing Editor Kali Handelman interviews Laura Levitt about her new book The Objects that Remain and the power objects—from the clothing of a sexual assault survivor to the possessions of someone who died in the Holocaust—can posses. And in an excerpt from her new book The Forgiveness Tour, Susan Shapiro meets with a Holocaust survivor to discuss what he experienced at the hands of the Nazis and if he thinks forgiveness for such horrors is ever appropriate. (Shapiro previously published the American Jewish Press award-winning article “Forgiving the Unforgivable” in the Revealer‘s October 2019 issue.)

The February issue also features two articles about religion in current popular culture. In “Pastor Mary Cosby, Arranged Pentecostal Marriages, and the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” Ambre Dromgoole sheds light on the prevalence of arranged marriages within Black Pentecostal communities like the one depicted on the hit Bravo reality show. And in “Religion in Lovecraft Country,” J. Barton Scott reviews the racial and religious messages in HBO’s acclaimed new horror series.

We are also pleased to share the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Black Lives Matter and American Catholics.” Olga Segura joins us to discuss how the Catholic Church upholds white supremacy, why the Church should partner with Black Lives Matter, and how BLM’s priorities reflect Catholic social teachings. You can listen to this great episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As we head into a new year, one with promises of a vaccine to curb the pandemic, and one where our political divisions seem as prominent as ever, the Revealer remains committed to providing you with first-rate analysis about how religion shapes so much of our world. We’re glad you’re here with us.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: A New Year appeared first on The Revealer.