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With “comfort culture” extra à la mode in 2020, Much Mucho Amor (dir. Cristina Costantini and Kareem Tabsch) could not have come at a better time. The comforts served up by this feature-length documentary film about astrologer Walter Mercado are manifold: gushing grannies, lavish costumes, and solid-if-sentimental life advice, never mind ambition, betrayal, a witch, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a Conchita-Wurst drag queen in a rockabilly dress with the Virgin of Guadalupe on the chest. Netflix has a knack for compulsive comforts. 

Much Mucho Amor joins a crop of pop-docs (2018’s Wild, Wild Country, 2020’s Tiger King) that repackage a sexually dubious eccentric as soothingly predictable home entertainment. This is an aesthetic achievement of sorts: we thrill to the danger of an Osho or a Joe Exotic, even while sinking into the couch, somehow reassured by his presence. Walter Mercado is an oddity of a different sort. Although he did, as it happens, know Osho (a.k.a. Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, the Indian “sex guru” whose Oregon commune was investigated by the FBI) he couldn’t be less threatening. Well before Netflix got ahold of him, he’d spent decades spinning his eccentricity into a comforting TV persona—making him the ideal patron saint for our annus horribilis.

And I do mean “saint.” Mercado, who died in 2019, was a religious figure, as comes through clearly in Mucho Mucho Amor. It’s not just that he “almost became like a religion” (as one acquaintance observes) or that “people started wanting to touch him as though he was holier than the Pope” (as another says). That much would be true of any celebrity. It’s that he talked about his astrology in explicitly religious terms. “Why do you mix so many religions?” asks one talk show host in an archival clip, listing off Santeria, Christianity, and “primitive religions” as among those absorbed by his astrology. “Nobody has a monopoly on God,” Mercado replies. He practices an “interfaith religion” that (in this interview at least) seems to consist mostly of the golden rule and the power of positive thinking. This might be New Age pabulum, but it is pure Mercado, parcel of his pleasing persona and key to his comforts. Who wouldn’t want to watch Walter intone his way through the Zodiac, waiting for him to forecast your future and infuse it with his reassuring authority.

Born and raised in rural Puerto Rico, Mercado was always different, a sensitive boy. After he brought a dead bird back to life through prayer, he became known as “Walter of the Miracles.” “This boy has grace of God to heal people,” remarked a neighbor. This otherworldly touch stayed with Walter through a youthful career in stage and film, ultimately landing him the role of a lifetime.

Mercado rose to fame in the 1970s and 80s. He started by giving short astrology reports on the local news—a sort of psychic meteorologist. Soon he had his own show, “Walter, the Stars, and You.” Then that show exploded. He was on Spanish-language TVs throughout the Americas. He developed a following in Brazil and Italy. By the early 1990s, he was becoming a crossover celebrity in the Anglo-U.S., where he was one of the founders of the Psychic Friends Network 1-900 number. Sally Jesse Rafael interviewed him (his perm could eat hers). Howard Stern pronounced him “bigger than Jesus.” He met Glenn Close. And Bill Clinton. He was, in other words, one of the brightest stars in the sky.

Then there was a fall (I’ll avoid spoilers), followed by a redemption. Now Mercado is a millennial darling, the face that launched a thousand memes of the “You know your mom is getting older when she gets a Walter Mercado haircut” variety. You can get Walter Mercado t-shirts and votive candles, and even order a Mercado-themed cocktail with a Tarot card attached.

I regret to say that I had not encountered Mercado prior to Mucho Mucho Amor. In this, I’m probably on par for my demographic: queer white Anglos just a hair older than the meme-hungry millennials. I am thus grateful to this documentary for all kinds of reasons, not least the pleasure of watching it dance with Mercado around the question of his sexuality. Throughout his career, Mercado went out of his way to avoid being labeled as gay. By prancing nimbly around that label—sort of out, sort of not— he somehow managed to become a beloved figure within what the documentary describes as a homophobic Latinx culture. (Without denying the cultural specificity of Puerto Rican homophobia, it bears noting that Anglo-U.S. homophobia was just as capable of constructing a both-out-and-in middlebrow celebrity: cue Liberace’s piano). “Growing up as a gay boy and watching Walter Mercado gave me hope,” explains LGBTQ activist Karlo Karlo. The documentary shares in this gratitude; it is a love letter to Walter, a confession of mucho mucho amor.

Sexual ambiguity of this sort can feel like a relic of a lost era. To describe Mercado as “gender non-conforming,” as a Miami museum does, is correct of course, as far as it goes. But it’s also to translate his late-20^th century sexuality into the terms of the 21^st. The same goes for “asexual,” a label placed on him at one point in the film. Our documentarians, Costantini and Tabsch, clearly want to respect Mercado’s right to set the terms of his own sexual identity. And yet their camera can’t resist the voyeuristic impulse to peer around his house, hunting for sexual clues—playing a visual game in which Mercado is a lively, if silent, participant. Clues abound: a Gay Planet DVD, a framed portrait of Oscar Wilde wittily flanking Walter’s own.

No voyeuristic revelation can begin to compete, however, with the audacious weirdness of what Mercado was already doing on TV. At one point, a talk show host asks him if he is a heterosexual. He replies (perhaps winkingly?) that sex for him is “sacred” and “spiritual.” “I have sex with life, I have sex with everything, with clothes, with beauty . . . I’m married to my public, to my people.” Did Mercado die a virgin? Who cares. The “sex” he’s having on screen is way more interesting.

It is impossible to approach this on-screen presence without coming up against the capes. They are central to Mercado’s charms. It would be worth inventing a time machine just to be able to witness in person the gleefully faux-serious catwalk of professional models who flitted across the galleries of the History-Miami Museum at the gala opening of its Mercado retrospective. “Things Just Got Weird,” wrote one attendee on Instagram. Yes, please.

The capes were also central to Mercado’s religious aura. A Miami Herald article that flashes onscreen in the documentary describes Mercado as “swami-like.” True enough. He apparently first sported a cape in the late 1960s, while playing “a Hindu prince” in a low-budget film. He kept up the look when he got his first gig as an astrologer in 1969.

Mercado (left) playing a Hindu prince

Later in life, in the midst of a legal battle over the commercial rights to his brand, Mercado officially changed his name to Shanti Ananda. He got the new moniker from none other than Osho—i.e., Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, back in his Poona period. Mercado’s wry take on Osho (and on the inimitable, if terrifying, Ma Anand Sheela) did not make the final cut of this documentary. But we do catch a glimpse of an Osho VHS tape in Walter’s living room. More to the point, at least a few of Mercado’s sparkly robes look like they could have been lifted from Osho’s closet.

Osho (a.k.a. Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh) sporting a cape

Clothing matters, the scholars tell us. It has certainly been central to how Hinduism entered global-popular culture, from Swami Vivekananda to Pierre Bernard (“the Omnipotent Oom”) and onto the red-clad Rajneeshis. Mercado, one could say, draws out the implicit camp of these earlier sartorial experiments.

And that’s not the half of it. Here’s Walter in his living room, a faded star ready for his last big interview:

On Walter’s right sit Ganesh and Hanuman; on his left, a jade Buddha and a Tibetan-style bronze of what may be Avalokiteshvara.[1] Behind him are paintings of a resplendent Virgin Mary and a trembling St. Sebastian (that perennial gay icon). Mercado’s sober and restrained taste is evident throughout, whether in the marble-inlay side tables (probably Indian imports) or the jauntily placed crown.

We already know about “guru English.” Here, we have a guru Spanish—or, better yet, a guru Spanglish, shaped profoundly by the cultural-linguistic politics of the Americas, even as it poaches on the postcolonial South Asian English of Osho and others. Mercado’s meteoric rise to fame rode the galactic currents of several empires, most notably that of the U.S., both in its first major phase of overseas expansion (claiming key island territories, like Puerto Rico, away from the Spanish Empire in 1898) and its second—when, after 1947, with the old European empires crumbling, it pivoted to a new model of empire that was primarily non-territorial and predicated on the global power of financial and media institutions (as well as the CIA). This imperially inflected late-modern mediascape structured much of Mercado’s career. He clearly wanted the prestige (and the money) that the status of an American “crossover” star could confer.

This documentary takes these accreted histories and bends them in the direction of Netflix—which is to say, in the general direction of San Jose, CA. The global media behemoth now produces content across a range of languages, including German (Dark), Brazilian Portuguese (3%), and Hindi (Sacred Games). That all three of these shows have either English or numeric titles indicates the extent to which English continues to assert its hegemonic status as “world language” with the backing of California capital. Spanish’s relationship to Silicon Valley English is both part of this general story and also more intimately particular—part of a local history of territorial annexation and settler colonialism. Mucho Mucho feels equally at home in both languages, with interviewees (including Mercado) opting for English regularly throughout. The film thus feels directed simultaneously at two audiences: Latinx viewers who already know and love Mercado, and Anglo viewers poised to fall for him for the first time.

The aesthetes will have gripes, of course. Like everything on Netflix, Mucho Mucho Amor is too long. It exists to eat time, and even at 96 minutes feels padded. Its Tarot-card themed chapter headings can be rather on-the-nose (e.g. “The Hermit”). Its narrative arc can get murky, especially in the second half, and its narrative beats can feel stale. The film opens by declaring a search for a reclusive kitsch celebrity (an arguable echo of the controversial 2017 podcast “Missing Richard Simmons”) before shifting to the familiar rise-and-fall rhythms of VH1’s “Behind the Music” and countless Hollywood biopics. (Like Bohemian Rhapsody’s Freddie Mercury, Mercado is brought down by a handsome-but-nefarious business manager). This version of that tale ends with redemptive angels, the most gloriously seraphic of which is Lin-Manuel Miranda, the superstar Hamilton creator. Miranda’s slightly maudlin gloss on Walter’s wonderful weirdness indicates a larger difficulty. Thanks to Mercado, he gushes, “we have greater acceptance for people around us.” Fair enough. But the kindergarten-comfort of this multiculturalist maxim arguably flattens the specificity that made Mercado a compelling figure in the first place.

Gripes aside, I think anyone interested in modern religion should see this film. I, at least, want Walter to be my spirit guide to the wide, weird world of late-modern religion. Astrology has made a major comeback in recent years among millennials keen for portents of an uncertain future. Now more than ever, we should be reading the history of religion via astrological enthusiasts from Nostradamus to Nancy Reagan. Nor is that all. So many questions echo over this film: What is the relationship between kitsch and camp? How do new media reshape old messages? Will the pandemic accelerate the collapse of everything into the digital?

In forecasting that future, dear reader, I commend you to Walter Mercado. May his stars shine a path through the darkness of our plague year.

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 thanks Dr. Sarah Richardson for help with an iconographic emergency; any errors in identification should be blamed on Mercado’s mood lighting.

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My family arrived to what is now Malaysia with the great wave of Chinese immigration at the turn of the 20th century. We settled among the indigenous populations of Dayaks, Malays, and South Asians in Sarawak, the largest state in Malaysia, located on Borneo island. The primary Chinese custom we kept up was the New Year and visiting my grandfather’s ten siblings. But when I was ten we stopped visiting their homes because my parents moved us from Malaysia to the United States so they could start a church. Our already vague relationships with these great aunts and uncles began to fade. But as we grew older, my mother began to speak of a twelfth sibling, one who never had a house that we could visit because Malaysian state officials killed her when my mother was in primary school.

Her name was Gan Ang Kiat (颜红结) in Hokkien, but my mom refers to her as Sei Ko, “youngest paternal aunt.” Sei Ko’s mother died months after her birth, and so her siblings raised her. As the youngest, she was the treasure of the family, a fact compounded when she graduated with a university degree—the first in the family to do so. She taught in a Chinese school. Until her death, she lived with her brothers, their families, and her father, who was a wealthy trader, in a large house surrounded by acres of land filled with bats, bullfrogs, and rabbits next to a whites-only colonial club.

Her nieces and nephews remember her as an independent, gentle, and generous aunty who bought them sweets and regularly threw parties with tapioca and sago kuih for her students. Sei Ko would tell them to “do good and be respectful to your elders.” They were shocked when they learned, after her death, that she had been involved in an underground, anti-colonial, communist secret society.

Today, my great aunt, the black sheep of my family, stares at me out of a 4×2 frame. She wears glasses with short curly hair not unlike my mother’s, dressed in a blouse and a long skirt. She sits in the middle of a white cabinet in my living room in Brooklyn, New York. The cabinet is bedecked with photos of deceased relatives, plants, incense sticks, and religious texts—my homage to my spiritual and ancestral saints.

She did not always occupy this hallowed position in my life. I had never met her, of course. And although I learned about her as a teenager, she claimed her place only after I came out as queer to my parents in my mid-twenties. They did not take the news well, and so I became the family’s new black sheep.

Coming out was an acculturation process. I left my parents’ church and started attending a progressive one. I marched with dykes down the streets of Manhattan, watched The L Word so I would understand in-group references, and went on day-trips with my partner to Fire Island. I immersed myself in the world that my religious upbringing had forbidden. But at the end of the day-trips and marches, I would take the subway back to my apartment, make a cup of tea, and think about how I missed my parents.

We were still close, but it was not the same. Something had severed, and it was not only the relationship between my parents and me. Like many second-generation immigrants, my parents were the gatekeepers to my home culture, language, and stories. Distancing myself from them meant distancing myself from the roots that grounded me in the strange land of America. The prospect of being cut off from a tree that had already been uprooted from its native soil terrified me. It did not help that I rarely saw a fellow Asian person in the queer spaces that were supposed to be my new home. Coming out felt like assimilation—stepping off a brown land into a sea of white.

And so I responded to these changes by obsessing about my ancestry. I exhaustively researched queer Asian histories and began looking for clues to understand my great aunt, the only other black sheep in my family’s annals. I wanted to find a spiritual connection without having to rely on my parents, to know if there was an ancestor out there who would be proud of me, my queerness, and my leftist politics included. I pored over academic articles, purchased obscure books, and interviewed family members so I could imagine the life of my great aunt and what motivated her double life.

I had the rough sketches of my great aunt’s life, so I began to fill in the gaps with historical materials. She was born in 1941, the year of Japan’s invasion of Borneo and the overthrow of British colonial troops. That incursion awakened Britain’s colonies to the fact that the Queen’s Empire was not, in fact, invincible, and after the war they began to clamor for independence. In Sarawak, Chinese schools — where my great aunt was educated — were the initial hotbeds for revolutionary politics; teachers and students alike were inspired by Mao’s re-making of China and anti-colonial revolutions in Asia. In 1963, while my great aunt was in university, Britain combined its colonies in Southeast Asia under one country, ‘Malaysia,’ in order to establish an anti-communist bulwark and ensure minimal disruption to its capital ownership of tin mines and rubber plantations. The communists saw Malaysia as a neo-colonial construction and fought as guerillas in the tropical jungles against the local government, which was supported by Britain, Australia, and the United States. The police tortured, deported, and imprisoned anyone upon mere suspicion that they were communist. The police commonly tied suspects to ice slabs until their skin went numb, and then poured warm water over them until they “confessed.”

Given that I couldn’t find any primary documents published by communists from Sarawak in English, my research remained a degree removed — I was reading about communists — until last fall when I finally got a chance to meet my great aunt’s former communist comrades in person.

It began with a phone number. I had read a profile of surviving communist guerillas in a newspaper, The Borneo Post. The journalist provided me their phone number, and after a few phone calls with my mom acting as translator (the irony was not lost on me), we scored an invitation to the communists’ daily breakfast gathering in an open-air market in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak and my family’s home.

When we got to their table, the group — mostly white-haired men in their eighties — seemed wary of us until they realized who my mother’s aunt was.

“We know her as Wang Ling (王玲),” they explained in Hokkien to my mother, who then translated. Given the state’s use of torture, once someone was initiated, they adopted a new name so that their personal identity, and family’s, couldn’t be revealed.

Most of them simply knew of her; only one of them had actually spent time with her — one of her former students. Her student, Mr. Boon, looked younger than the rest; he had a full head of black hair and spoke a little English. My great aunt taught him Malay and helped introduce him, at age 13, to communism. She hosted secret meetings with him and a few students.

“She was a very good teacher. She helped us students — we were all poor then — by buying us food, cakes to eat, and other things, because her family,” he paused to smile at me, “was quite rich.” He mentioned how close she was to her family and how “they really, really loved her.”

The next morning, while my mom boarded a plane back to New York, Mr. Boon offered to drive me to my great aunt’s grave 30 minutes away. On the way there, he pulled out a gift wrapped in wax paper: Bak Kwa, Chinese pork jerky, with its darkly sweet and charred flavors. I thanked him and smiled. Perhaps it was his way of paying back my great aunt. Mr. Boon began to tell me how he heard she was killed. It had to do with her glasses. They had fallen off during an early morning ambush by a river near her school, leading to her disorientation and a fatal bullet through her head.

***

My great aunt was the only one in her family to wear glasses. She was the intellectual who never wore makeup or dresses, and who was always engrossed in reading Mandarin books. (“She was brainwashed,” my parents would often say. They would later imply that I, too, had been “influenced by my peers” when I argued that it was theologically possible for me to be both Christian and queer.)

According to historian Seng Guo Quan, many Chinese students were radicalized through left-wing literature in the 1950s. They read Chinese newspapers about national liberation struggles against the West as well as cartoons and novels starring Chinese communist and Russian revolutionary soldiers who sacrificed their lives in war. Initially, most communist recruits came through the Sarawak Advanced Youth Association. According to communist documents captured by the police and published in a book, The Danger Within, students were recruited through “study cells, picnic parties, singing and dancing classes,” then groomed for absorption into the organization through ideological education. When my great aunt was admitted as a member, this was part of the oath she had to swear:

“I will completely and unconditionally yield myself to the interest of the organization . . . I will try my best to study the theories and principles of Marxism/Leninism and the ideology of Mao Tse Tung, and make use of what I have learnt to educate the masses . . . There is no more glorious title than being called a revolutionary . . . I offer my whole life without the slightest hesitation.”

What stands out to me about this oath is how much its language reminds me, perhaps ironically, of the religion of my youth. Back in Malaysia, my parents told me stories of Christians in Indonesia who were forced to deny their faith or be killed. The lesson was clear: never renounce Jesus. When I was baptized as a child, I dedicated my life to Christ, studied the Bible daily, and told myself that nothing was more important than evangelism. Everyone in my church did the same.

Maybe what evangelical Christianity gave my parents was what communist politics gave my great aunt? A child of an immigrant who was born into wealth, she seemed to want a life of significance. She stood out from the norm; most communists were poor and lived near jungles (the Hokkien term for communists translates to “jungle rats”). But as historian Seng Guo Quan told me, “It was the people with ‘bourgeois’ backgrounds like your great aunt, who were the most committed revolutionaries. They were the ones who bought into the utopian vision of absolute social equality and justice, in spite of how it logically went against their own class or familial interests.”

While attending Singapore’s Nanyang University, a hub of radical politics for the Chinese in Southeast Asia, my great aunt was part of a communist cell group within the Sarawak Liberation League. After graduating in 1964 — a year when there were mass arrests of leftist students at Nanyang — she worked as a teacher and later principal, and began to spend nights away from home. She came back only once a month, sometimes with a bandage over her hand. She was staying with friends in a jungle closer to where she taught, she would say. Her job allowed her to carry out her real responsibilities, which was organizing food and supplies from civilian supporters, especially among her school’s students and their families, and funneling them to guerrilla units.

Her siblings noticed that she was being followed by government spies and tried to warn her. But she ignored them, and they didn’t push too much — she was the respected and learned one, after all. One day, Kong Kong was reading the newspaper when he saw, on the front page, the name of his youngest sister.

“Two terrorists killed last weekend . . . had [sic] been positively identified,” the article started. “31-year-old Singapore Nanyang University graduate and former teacher of Kuching Chung Hua Middle School No. 4 Yuen Hung Kiet (female).” It was her name, rendered in an amalgamation of Mandarin and Hokkien, and the street — Bampfylde road — where her family lived. To the right was an article on Henry Kissinger’s meeting with North Vietnamese officials; it was July 1972, in the middle of the Cold War.

So little is known about my great aunt’s last moments, and as is often the case, those who survived cling to their own version of events. Her comrades claimed she was running away when she was shot, but the police said they shot her in response to her firing at them. One of my uncles believes the police’s version rings truer. “I tell you, she will never surrender. She is a tough lady. If she knows she is going to die, she will not run away, she will shoot back. She was the head of her unit, so I think she protected her friends and shot so they could escape,” he said. Many of my family members described her as a “sacrificial martyr,” which surprised me because martyrdom was how surviving communists also portrayed their slain comrades.

It was risky for families to claim bodies of dead communists because the state prosecuted anyone who aided the left. According to Professor Kee How Yong, the government rounded up 5,000 rural poor Hakka Chinese, who sometimes aided the guerrillas who hid in nearby jungles, and relocated them to ‘new villages,’ or concentration camps fenced with barbed wire. But my great aunt’s siblings claimed her body anyways. They did not bury her in the family plot, but in a Hakka cemetery with other slain communists. Her story remained hushed for decades, until long after communist resistance died down in the 1990s.

***

Mr. Boon drove us under a tall grimy archway, inscribed with Mandarin characters that said, “Fifth-mile-and-a-half Hakka Cemetery.” Our car was the only one there on a Wednesday afternoon. After parking, Mr. Boon got out and started walking towards the back of the cemetery. I followed him as we weaved through colorful curvy Chinese tombs scattered over hills thick with mosquitoes. I felt like a pilgrim, waiting to touch the relics of a saint. Finally, we reached my great aunt’s tombstone in the back. At the top was a photo of her in a university cap-and-gown, her glasses and a slight gap between her front teeth visible. At the bottom was a stone plaque:

In Loving Memory of Our Dear Sister
Gan Ang Kiat
Born 13-2-1941       Died 17-7-1972
Ever Remembered by Brothers & Sisters

Dazed, I sat down on the tiled steps leading up to her tombstone, unbothered by mosquitoes for the first time. She was a communist, yes, but a sister too, an aunt, a daughter. She was beloved and irrevocably gone. And although her family did not agree with her choices, they loved her and claimed her as theirs at great risk.

But it occurred to me that I could only find her gravesite because of her communist comrades. My mom and her cousins couldn’t remember the location. As much as her siblings loved their youngest sister, they hadn’t transmitted the tradition of QingMing — where Chinese families visit relatives’ graves annually to clean their tombs and honor them — to their children.

Tombstone of author’s great aunt, Gan Ang Kiat. (Photo: Sarah Ngu)

I looked up at Mr. Boon. He was taking a moment to pay his respects at the graves of other comrades, some of whom he had never met, bound together only by shared beliefs. These deaths had occurred decades ago, but he and his comrades remained steadfast and even did what some families had neglected to do: visit the gravesites every year to remember and honor their sacrifice. It was Mr. Boon and his comrades who raised funds to build graves for those unclaimed by their families. It was they who set up a welfare fund to assist comrades in need, especially those who were imprisoned for decades and released with little social support. It was they who led me to my great aunt’s grave.

I had searched for my great aunt to learn more about my family, but instead I met her chosen family — one that she had kept secret for so long. In the jungle, many communists had run away from their homes to enlist in war as teenagers. Some fell in love, got married, and even had children in the jungle. They possessed entire worlds unbeknownst to their families of origin. My great aunt had clearly cast her lot with her fellow comrades, but she kept a tether to her family’s world, showing up occasionally to play with her nieces and nephews and to eat with her older siblings. She was bonded by blood and by choice, straddling both worlds until the day she crumpled over, a bullet through her left eye.

I think about what she would say now, peering from her photo frame into my apartment. What would she think of my life? My partner and our cat? The mess of my bookshelf standing across from her, lined with photos of my family, Bibles, queer texts, Southeast Asian histories, and Communist memoirs — each of them worlds unto themselves?

Perhaps she would say, gently but firmly, “Sarah, you choose to whom you belong.”

Sarah Ngu is a writer born in Borneo, Malaysia, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Find them on Twitter (@sarahngu) and read their writing at sarahngu.com.

***

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

The post The Secret Life of My Communist Great Aunt: A Hagiography appeared first on The Revealer.

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Kali Handelman: First, I’d like to ask you about how the project took shape. What was the genesis? It feels like a project that was both cumulative and collaborative, that you are thinking with your partner, Christina Crosby, with your Love the Sin co-author, Ann Pellegrini, and with your comrades at the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and that doing so — writing it in this way — was a way of queering (to use the verb as you invite your reader to) the book writing and publishing process in order to make strong arguments and strong claims about how we can and should think and work together. The book also felt like a response to your years of movement work and to the present political moment — I’m thinking of how you critique liberal intellectuals like Thomas Frank and Andrew Sullivan who, frankly, seem to piss you off (as they do so many of us). I could imagine you reading the New York Times opinion section and, in productive pique, thinking to yourself, “there’s one for the book!” The book is also impressively accessible — written clearly, with strong metaphors, without compromising nuance and complexity — it seemed like you were aiming for a wide audience. To put all of this as a question: Can you tell us about how this project came to be?

Janet Jakobsen: I’d like to say thanks to you, Kali, for such a great reading of The Sex Obsession and to the Revealer for hosting this interview. You’re exactly right that this book was built through collaborations and relationships that go back a while now. I was trained in religious ethics and one of the prominent methods in the field is the study of practicing communities: How do people realize their ethical commitments in practice? What can we learn about ethical commitments by learning what people actually do? This method calls out for collaboration. I’ve been part of a range of interdisciplinary collaborative projects, including co-writing and co-editing (with Ann Pellegrini most often, and also with Elizabeth Castelli on religion and violence, historian Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, and now with Christina Crosby on disability and care). And, particularly through my work at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, I pursued this method by collaborating with activists and artists who were not just organizing for social justice, but also creating new knowledge, developing and elaborating paradigms for undertaking organizing and for social analysis — as Amber Hollibaugh, Catherine Sameh and I wrote for one project, knowledge can be part of “changing how change is made.”

One source of knowledge is actually anger. For example, anger can be an indicator of a moral intuition that something is not right or needs to change. My own approach in allowing anger to animate some parts of the book — which you so rightly recognize — is formed both by the movements I participated in and by feminist scholarship, such as Audre Lorde’s famous essay “The Uses of Anger,” which I read in her important essay collection, Sister Outsider, and which was powerfully influential in both organizing and scholarship. For me, an approach that values the uses of anger in movement work is always in relation to what might be called “joy in struggle.” Two of the movements that were highly influential in my life were my work with the Washington Office on Africa shortly after college in the 1980s when the Office was focused on anti-apartheid work, and then AIDS organizing when I was in graduate school — my lover at the time worked for a Community AIDS Network. It’s more than I can discuss at length here, but both of these movements were dealing with truly exigent circumstances, and yet there was some real joy in the work — and they both had some really, really good parties. That sensibility, combining a willingness to take on powerful forces of injustice, to “act up” with a sense of fabulousness — what Lisa Duggan has called, “the fun and the fury” — is central to my approach.

Your question about anger also brings to the fore the main public actors on whom I focus my critique. The Sex Obsession is an argument about how often gender and sexuality are invoked in political commentary and policymaking, and how frequently sex goes unnoticed — or if noticed, unremarked. So I’m challenging what passes as common sense in the U.S. The book is not focused on actors from what is often called the “religious right” (which for most commentators means specifically the “Christian right,” allowing the category of “religion” to slip into Christianity alone). I focus instead on mainstream and often liberal public discourse, not because the right wing is not part of the story, but because that part has been told and told well, including by Jeff Sharlet, formerly of the Revealer, who, for example, offered one of the few reports on Trump’s June rally in Tulsa that focused on the depth and breadth of his appeal to white Christian nationalism. But these rightwing commitments are certainly not the whole story, and the focus on the right and on the Christian right alone can also contribute to the idea that there is a liberal, secular culture in which the issues tied to the Christian right — racism, xenophobia, obsession with sexual politics — are utterly separate from the predominant secular culture of the United States. I’m not arguing that rightwing politics in the U.S. are not a problem, but rather that, in fact, rightwing politics might be more of a problem than is generally admitted precisely because liberal secular culture shares much of the common sense from which it wants to see itself as separate. Much like white Northerners who were able to understand themselves as separate from racism in the United States by focusing only on the South, liberal secularists like those I write about in the book want to distinguish themselves from racism, sexism, and Christian nationalism, even as they articulate positions dependent on the same underlying narratives.

The contribution of The Sex Obsession is to track the common sense of American politics, a common sense that is all too often shared by both mainstream liberal culture and rightwing culture and, in promoting those shared narratives, liberal discourse can help make it easier for rightwing culture to sustain itself. Some aspect of this shared common sense is the subject of each chapter: the idea that religion is the source of the sex obsession in American politics in the Introduction; the idea that religion and secularism are separate (rather than intertwined) in the first chapter; the idea that morality and materiality are separate or can be separated (rather than intertwined); the idea that the two major political parties in the U.S. are divided over sexual politics (when, in fact, Democratic and Republican ideas about sexual politics are shared on many issues, including material issues like economics); and the idea that the U.S. is a country of exceptional social progress in which democracy expands, instead of a country in which there may be mobility, but that mobility works to reinforce stasis as hierarchies persist.

And then, as you note, the book has been published in the midst of this very strange year, in which we see an intensification of many of the hierarchies the book talks about, particularly through the ways in which stark inequities, including in access to medical care, have meant that the coronavirus has differentially affected people of color. This is happening at the same time that racist police violence is once again at the fore. And the activist researchers at BCRW have been doing really important work on this issue, particularly through the “Interrupting Criminalization Project: Research in Action,” led by Mariame Kaba, with her work on prison abolition, and Andrea Ritchie, who published the important book Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. This summer has also emphasized the intensification of climate change and its effects, with both hurricanes and wild fires. And we’ve also seen the crystallization of movements to address these injustices, including the Movement for Black Lives.

One of the things the book tries to do is hold together the possible simultaneity of great discouragement with great hope, what I end up focusing on in the conclusion as “melancholy utopias.” Certainly there is much reason for despair right now, but there have also been these incredible glimmers of utopian possibility, such as the truly historic march for Black Trans Lives that brought out into the streets some 15,000 people in Brooklyn in June.

KH: If there was one line from your book I could emblazon on billboards across the think-piece-o-sphere, it would be: “Simply pointing out incoherence will not unravel the fabric.” We seem to put so much hope in pointing out, for instance, that poor people are voting against their material interests; or that there’s no such thing as being “fiscally conservative but socially progressive”; or that “Trump is a bad Christian because he’s a thrice married adulterer.” Then we hold our breath while we wait for the poor, the billionaire “progressives,” and the “good Christians” to rally together on the right side of history and when they don’t, we blame their willful false consciousness rather than considering that maybe the contradictions make (at least historical) sense. Which is my long-winded, frustrated, but grateful, way of asking, can you walk us through the concept of “productive incoherence” and how you use it in your analysis? 

 JJ: The assumption of coherence in social analysis, which often leads to a need to actively create such coherence, is particularly powerful and has important effects. We’ve seen these effects over the last few years as journalists often produce coherence out of the President’s incoherent statements: “what he seems to be saying is…” “what he might have meant…” “there’s not a plan, but the closest thing to a plan is…” These are just some standard practices as journalists try to explain what’s happening to their readers, but lately people have also been realizing that this effort can contribute to a failure to report the full extent of the incoherence of the administration. Social analysts, like me, often do something similar, where we produce coherence out of incoherence, and it can have similar effects. The drive toward coherence in social analysis reinforces habits of thought that tend to support already dominant narratives, particularly when those narratives also support dominant social relations and attendant hierarchies. What these habits of thought do is coordinate knowledge into already powerful narratives, so that counter evidence (or even just evidence of incoherence) is pushed aside. These habits of thought, thus, make it much harder to break through established narratives and attend to the complexity of social relations. As I argue in the book, incoherence needs to be reported because it is a political tool, and it is one that the current president deploys to great effect — it is a “productive incoherence.” If we could accept that incoherence can be a productive tactic of power, we could analyze and report on that, which is what I try to do.

How does it work that some conservative Christians are so deeply committed to a “thrice married adulterer” and the public articulation of that commitment is often specifically about sexual politics — about things like a conservative judiciary and restrictions on reproductive justice and cutting back on trans rights. Taking this incoherence seriously, rather than just attributing it to “false consciousness,” for example, can have important explanatory power. First, it’s important to say that this disjunction or incoherence is not new — the political avatar of “family values” from the 1990s, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is also a thrice married adulterer. Second, it is important to move away from personal hypocrisy as an adequate explanation. There may be a lot of hypocritical family-values politicians and public figures, but the repetition of the hypocrisy, even as those who are hypocritical often retain both their political power and their non-monogamous sexual practices, shows that hypocrisy cannot be all that’s at play. Rather, I argue that what’s happening is a commitment not to a personal sexual ethics, but to a nationalist Christian sexual politics. Political scientists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry argue that Christian nationalism is not just about religious belief, it can also be a form of secular politics. And, similarly, Christian nationalism can be a form of sexual politics — so the commitment is not to political leaders having a personal sexual ethics, but to policies on gender and sexuality that contribute to the constellation reinforcing nationalism. In the second chapter of the book, I synthesize histories of the 1970s to show how this constellation, which involves a range of issues — sexual politics, racial politics, Christian nationalism, anti-communism, and post-industrial economics — came together in the form that is still powerful today.

KH: I’d love to have you summarize the main argument of the book for us, and wondered if you might focus on how you ground the main subjects — common sense, values, and materiality — in the histories and discourses of Christianity, secularism, and Christian Secularism. Or, in other words, can you tell us what role religion has played in shaping American common sense ideas about sex? 

JJ: One of the counter-intuitive arguments in the book is that secular freedom is as important as religious conservatism to sexual regulation in the United States. This claim is built on the work that I did with Ann Pellegrini in Love the Sin and Secularisms, in which we lay out the ways in which religion and secularism are intertwined, and, thus, religious regulation and secular freedom are intertwined as well. The common sense in American politics supports both the idea that the United States is an exceptionally religious country — a Christian nation — as embodied by a conservative sexual ethic and also a global beacon of secular freedom as embodied by exceptional equity with respect to gender and sexuality. It’s not just that these two views of the essence of American politics are part of the same commonsense political discourse; they can easily be held and espoused by the same person. So, for example, George W. Bush maintained both that there should be an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage and that one of the reasons the U.S. was morally obligated to go to war in Afghanistan in 2001 was to save or even liberate women who were oppressed by the government of the Taliban. These two positions, religious regulation and secular freedom, are tied together through the underlying common sense, which Ann and I call “Christian secularism.” And we see the effects of this common sense continue in the current moment as the Trump Administration supports a negotiating process that is supposed to create peace in the long-running war in Afghanistan with little regard for its effects on women, even as the current administration also used the same trope of “saving women” in referring to honor crimes as part of the justification for its travel ban against mostly majority-Muslim countries; and the administration has invoked similar ideas about saving women in relation to the administration’s persistent hostility toward Iran. The incoherence between the idea of the U.S. as a Christian nation and also a beacon of secular freedom is sustained and made productive for holding gender and sexual hierarchies in place by holding them apart as separate issues and rarely tracking them together. In other words, the intertwining of religion and secularism produces an oscillation between political invocations of religious regulation and secular freedom as in Bush’s proclamations in one place about same-sex marriage and in another about women’s liberation.

Oscillation between supposedly opposing, but actually intertwined, positions is one mechanism of what I call “mobility-for-stasis.” Another is to move among issues, so as to reinforce common sense political narratives that sustain the status quo. This mobility is characteristic of the liberal commentary that you mentioned at the start of this interview, as liberals argue over whether voters in 2016 were driven more by “economic anxiety” or by “identity politics.” The data now available show that both were active and are, in fact, intertwined in the larger constellation of issues that drive the base of the current Republican Party. Nonetheless, political commentary repeatedly returns to the idea that a single issue — whatever it might be in the moment — is the key. Movement among these issues sets up a situation in which apparent coherence depends on recognizing only one issue as the motive power, while others remain operative, sometimes powerfully, while being shifted to the background. For example, one can claim to be focusing only on economic issues while actually using identity politics in the form of racism and sexism to reinforce existing power relations. For example, when Bill Clinton campaigned for the Presidency with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” while also banking on racist and sexist tropes about welfare recipients to support his economic policy of “ending welfare as we know it.”

I also look at a series of recent Supreme Court cases to demonstrate how issues move around each other in kaleidoscopic patterns. I contrast this kaleidoscopic movement and the stability it provides for social hierarchies with one of the major narratives of American politics, the assumption of historical progress in which democracy expands by way of stepping stones along the singular path of progress. So, the history of U.S. Supreme Court is often narrated as the institutional foundation of American progress in which the rights of one group after another are recognized. Another way to read this history, though, is that rights are recognized in kaleidoscopic patterns that may bring one or another issue to the fore — front and center in the pattern — but in which the other constitutional rights can then be returned to the background, never staying at the forefront long enough to be fully realized in action. Full equality is never accomplished and groups have to return to reclaim their rights over and over again. I look, for example, at 2013 cases that announced advances in LGBTQ rights in the same week as Shelby County v. Holder was announced as setting back the Voting Rights Act. Why a country dedicated to democracy and equality would need the Voting Rights Act passed in the 1960s, or would again be litigating Voting Rights in 2013 remains unasked. All the while, active, coordinated voter suppression is the great political game of 2020. The need to constantly return to these questions leads to a critique of the progress narrative and identifies the need to address persistent injustice. I suggest this can be done through kaleidoscopic analysis and action (which we can talk more about below).

KH: I really liked your use of the idiomatic “Because X” formulation to structure and link the chapters of the book: 1) Why Sex? 2) Because Religion 3) Because Morality, Because Materiality, 3) Because the Social, 4) Because Stasis. I remember reading an essay a few years ago that was written entirely in this form that I thought was funny, so I posted it on Facebook, and then my high school English teacher commented on it, saying something to the effect of “this person is a terrible writer” — entirely missing the joke. It was a very “okay, boomer” moment, avant la lettre. Which is all to say, what made you decide to use the formulation as part of the scaffolding for your book? 

JJ: So, having gotten a little of the fury out of the way, we can turn to some of the fun. First, “Because reasons” may be something of an “OK, Boomer” response (and I must admit to being a “boomer” — I was born in 1960), but I am charmed by the formulation, nonetheless. “Because reasons” seems like an all too appropriate summary of political discourse in which political leaders so often offer explanations for their actions that are really just lists, no matter the relevance or lack thereof, or in some cases no matter the utter lack of a factual basis for the claims. Why are so many really questionable things happening in political life? Because reasons. I’m also charmed by the popular connection of “because reasons” to the internet’s summary of Sarah Palin’s response when Katie Couric asked her to name the news publications she reads, “All of them, Katie.” Which reasons? All of them, Katie.

Katie Couric interviewing Sarah Palin in 2008

That said, I do live with an English Professor, Christina Crosby, and write with Ann Pellegrini, whose grammatical precision I find dazzling. So, embracing a grammatical error for my chapter titles was also a way (a fun way, admittedly) of highlighting the book’s argument that common sense is often reproduced by social analysis that is structured by the obverse of “all of them, Katie.” As we saw in the mobility-for-stasis examples above, social analyses often strive to find a single “reason” for any social phenomenon. In the case of the sex obsession, the answer would be something like: American politics is obsessed with gender and sex because of the Puritan heritage of the United States. Single variable, single cause, definable cause. I contrast this answer to the “why sex?” question, in part with help from historians of both sexuality and religion who show that Puritan heritage is not singularly explanatory of American politics. For example, it erases the indigenous peoples who were here when the Puritans arrived as well as overplaying their historical role. Nor can sexual politics be reduced to religious influence; one chapter traces the investments in sexual politics of secular policy-making across both Democratic and Republican administrations. And, once the analysis lets go of the single, Puritan explanation, there is so much to discuss that it takes the rest of the book. At one point I say, “Why sex? Because religion. Because sex. Because everything.”

I understand the desire to find that single answer that could provide a direct way of addressing various social problems, but I argue that it’s simply inadequate. In the chapter that really focuses on this epistemological question, I briefly look at one good faith effort at putting this kind of single variable social analysis into practice by a prosecutor in Wisconsin who wanted to address racial disparities in imprisonment and who worked with the Vera Center on a study that showed that the single most important variable in racial differential in sentencing was prosecutorial discretion. So, the prosecutor did a number of things to try to change practices and it did change discretionary actions of his office, but it had only a minor effect on differential imprisonment. The system was too complex for any single reform to make that significant of a difference. Black feminists have addressed some of the problems with this single variable approach through the concept of intersectionality, and I follow this strategy by taking a dynamically intersectional approach. I end up using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope in which not only do a number of different issues come together, they are also in motion in relation to each other. The chapters move kaleidoscopically among different answers that might be offered to the question of sex in public discourse, starting with religion, but then turning to ethics and economics, because religion is often taken to simply be a “symbolic” cover for more material economic concerns, and then moving on to sex and the social, and the way in which the single line of social progress is supposed to solve all problems.

KH: I want to think with you about the ways that sex is not just the object of your analysis but is, in fact, embedded in the conceptual framing of your argument. For instance, you model (and call for more) “theoretical promiscuity” and for “perverse justice.” I wonder if you could tell us more about what theoretical promiscuity means and, specifically, how your engagements (liaisons?) with religious studies have shaped your thinking? 

JJ: This is a really perceptive question. At the end of Love the Sin, Ann and I say that sex is a source of values. Such a claim seems completely counter-intuitive in current public discourse, where sex is taken to be opposed to values or needs to be controlled by values — or values voters. But sex is a material practice around which many people create what they value in life and in relation to which they organize much of their lives, whether familial lives, or religious lives committed to celibacy, or queer lives, or single lives, or some other form. Sex also makes connections among people which can be crucially important. The example we use in Love the Sin is that of the type of mutual aid developed in queer communities in response to the AIDS crisis.

I also think that sex is a source of knowledge. My book appears in NYU Press’s “Sexual Cultures” series, and my thinking has been formed by the idea that there are sexual cultures and that sex produces knowledge. If, as I mentioned at the beginning, knowledge is produced through practice, then sexual practice would produce certain forms of knowledge. So, in the current pandemic a set of questions about mutual aid and caring for each other have once again come to the fore, and the learning offered by the sexual culture that enabled mutual aid in response to AIDS can be helpful, as can a set of queer practices, in which, for example, people form social units that are not familial or extend beyond the familial, which in the pandemic are becoming pods, or quarenteams, or the like.

So, central concepts, like “theoretical promiscuity” and “perverse justice” are, in fact, grounded in sexual cultures. First, both concepts draw on a sense of non-normativity — whether gender or sexual non-normativity, or as I argue at one point, religious non-normativity in the midst of a predominantly secular politics. The world is complicated. Not everything fits together. Not all religions are particular instances of a general category called “religion,” and not all gendered lives conform to gendered categories (no matter how many such categories Facebook tries to produce). Theoretical promiscuity acknowledges that no single theory or framework is going to be adequate to the complexity of the world. In fact, one of the main reasons for the metaphor of the kaleidoscope is to try to move away from the metaphor of a framework as adequate to the complexity of the world. The world is dynamic and may look one way from one perspective and another way from a different perspective. One of the many important points about intersectionality is that it moves away from an “additive” approach to different perspectives on social analysis. So, unlike the metaphor of people trying to describe a phenomenon from different perspectives even though they cannot see the whole where the perspectives must be added together, one must also account for that which doesn’t just “add up,” which is, for example, both simultaneous and disjunctive. Similarly, with “perverse justice,” I am interested in building forms of justice that don’t imagine that everything can be justified or accounted for, forms which do not try to create or restore a holistic version of social relations, but which instead attend to grief and loss, even as they contribute to transformative responses and potentially joyful relations.

KH: Let’s talk about kaleidoscopes and reading and thinking kaleidoscopically. To me, it seems, you offer the kaleidoscope to your reader for two kinds of uses: first, as a way of organizing an understanding of history and politics — these are the actors, these are their interests, these are the kinds of power at play — so that we can see how they twist and turn, combine and recombine, shifting together over time and across issues. And second, as a way to think and critique these histories, these configurations of power, to try and twist them and refocus them and ourselves. It might be a bit too precious, but as I was reading, I was thinking of the little kaleidoscope toys I had as a child, full of beads and glitter and such, and how, if you pointed them at the light the right way, you were rewarded with a tube full of shimmering rainbow fragments. Not to totally femme up your metaphor, but I was seduced by the idea that if we used a kaleidoscope to read history, to read the news, we could flood it with useful distortions, with glitter and rainbows. Can you tell us how you came to this metaphor and how you envision it being used further? 

JJ: My initial response to this question was simply to write: Glitter is important — it is politically important.

It’s tempting to leave that response there for those who enjoy a femme sensibility in which sharing glitter with the world is part of making justice. But you’ve also given me an opportunity to talk a little more about what kaleidoscopic action might mean. As you point out, one of the projects of my book was to find another metaphor that might help to envision dynamic and potentially disjunctive social relations. I turn away from the idea of a framework as an epistemological metaphor and toward the idea of a kaleidoscope so as to articulate how multiple distinct aspects of social relations might come together to form patterns that are themselves changeable. And articulations across these patterns can be created if we as analysts are willing to attend to the multiplicity, variation, and gaps, in which not all pieces appear in all patterns or are always the same size. Hence, my idea of being able to build a universal from the multiple, incoherent realities in which people experience their everyday lives. It is somewhat akin to a Rawlsian idea of an overlapping consensus, but eschews the idea that these articulations necessarily overlap or lead to consensus — they may just be understandings across difference. Understanding need not be built on overlap. I appreciate the points at which people find unexpected overlap. I turn, for example, to Alison Kafer’s important reading of the ways in which trans activism and disability activism overlap around the role of bathrooms in public life. And, I am also interested in issues where overlap is harder to find, where connections need to be built or solidarity created. Most of all, I want to resist the sense that every phenomenon can be made to fit some coherent whole, because that is one of the ways people who are already marginalized, including queer, trans, and disabled people disappear from social analysis. Kaleidoscopic action allows for a dynamic sense of where people might find or even build connections — across communities, across issues, across intellectual, political, and religious traditions.

Kaleidoscopic action also allows for an appreciation of the relation between beauty, joy, and justice. I’ve talked some about the activists who work with BCRW and I’ve also had the chance to collaborate with artists who turn beauty into justice and justice into joy. Right now, for example, I’m working with Pamela Phillips at BCRW on a project called, “Changing the Narrative: A Public Housing Project.” It involves gathering community stories of people’s lives in New York public housing, so the housing residents interview each other about what they value. That project has also connected to a dance project with Sydnie Mosley, who leads Sydnie L. Mosley Dances and is a community engagement fellow at Lincoln Center. We held a workshop in which Sydnie translated stories from the senior center of Amsterdam Houses near Lincoln Center into a dance called “Purple.” Amsterdam Houses was created after New York City wrecked the existing neighborhoods around Lincoln Center for the sake of “urban renewal,” and many people lost their homes and had to relocate. “Purple” asks what kind of beauty can be made by embodying people’s stories of living on in the face of this kind of structural violence. Making art can be one way of documenting violence while refusing to accept a world without beauty. If my book can contribute to the sense that glitter is good — and perhaps even powerful — in the face of injustice, then I would be very happy. “Glitter Not Greed” is a fine summary of the book. So thank you for that reading.

KH: This all leads, for me, to what I found to be one of the most challenging parts of the book, which was your argument about universalism. The religious studies theory and methods canon today is a kind of (ironically) progressivist trip through history from 19th century universalism through to 1990s critiques of universalism — from Emile Durkheim to Talal Asad, basically. But you suggest that, in fact, “universal claims also allow for a vision of the world that creates possibilities for surviving and even thriving regardless of the prevailing hegemonic logic” that would help us build a “utopian, but melancholy, project of universal claims like ‘“no one is disposable.”’ Then, especially interestingly given the kind of religious studies theories and methods syllabus I just recited, you go on to say that, “The idea that a different type of universalism might be possible comes from a number of different sources, bringing together the religious studies critique of secularism with the queer critique of normativity.” So, I wanted to ask more about this kind of universalist thinking. How would you define it and what do you hope for from it? 

 JJ: With respect to universalism, I basically agree with your genealogy of the field, from 19^th century understandings of religion to the work of Talal Asad. This trajectory sees the field beginning from understanding religion as a particular social phenomenon within the universal (or soon to be universal) field of liberal secularism. As secularization proceeded, religion would be increasingly moved from the public sphere to a private matter or even fade away as more and more of the world accepted secularism as the framework of their lives and thus, secularism would be(come) universal. But, of course, the predicted uninterrupted path to secularization led to some bumps and roadblocks, particularly when the political import of religion became apparent in mainstream media and scholarship with both political Islam and the Iranian Revolution and conservative Christianity in the United States. The field then moved more toward a critique of secularism and of the categories of both religion and secularism. My question now is along the lines of: where does the field go from that point of critique? And, in answer, I take up the idea of a universalism that is built “from the ground up” in the conclusion of the book.

The idea of universalism that I turn to is not by any means a liberal or necessarily secular universalism — the book has a couple of projects related to this: first, I take up historian Anne Braude’s exhortation to find religion in unexpected places, including, of course, in various forms of activism for social justice, such as the inter-faith network of centers for workers whose jobs are not the focus of traditional labor organizing, or the type of support for asylum seekers that David Seitz documents in his book A House of Prayer for All People. Second, I am interested in what Melissa Wilcox points to as practices that are neither precisely religious or precisely secular, a move that is reflected not only in the practices of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence that Melissa tracks, but also in the kind of queer secular-religious ecstatic community that José Esteban Muñoz convokes in Cruising Utopia. Refusing to stick with the religion-secular binary or even the categories as we know them is one step/practice toward shifting these categories from their colonial meanings. Instead of a liberal universalism, I appeal to an idea of the universal that is multiple, fragmentary, aspirational, melancholy, contradictory, and built rather than found.

This conceptualization is built in part through my living with practices of universal access and universal design from disability studies and activism. In particular, there is no paradigmatic disabled person, so the idea of universal design immediately undercuts a liberal, secular idea of a normative universal human. And, in fact, many changes to the organization of the social world and built environment that might be helpful to one disabled person could make life harder for someone else. So, you can begin to get the idea of how universal design is fragmentary and contradictory and how creating a universal that encompasses everyone is — and will remain — an aspiration that cannot be achieved in practice. Hence, the melancholy. These challenges have led some disability activists to move away from the concept, but instead I move to embrace the conceptual complexity. I do this, in part, because the activists I work with continue to make universal claims and those claims are powerful. So, I think with the prison abolitionist claim made by trans activists, Tourmaline, and Dean Spade that “No one is disposable.”

This is a powerful claim and not one I would want to give up. For someone to be disposable is to my mind morally unacceptable. This activist claim, then, incites a rethinking of what a universal might be. And, indeed, religious studies, is helpful here, because religious people also often make universal claims. But the universal claims that ground different religious practices and different religious ethics are not all the same type of claim. As you might expect from my frequent refusal of coherence, I also refuse to put these different kinds of claims into either a single category or framework. As I have written elsewhere, religious universals are often treated as particular universals versus the universal universal of secularism. In my first book, Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference, and in various essays I have made an effort to show how (as with so much else) the claim to adjudicate among different types of universal claims, including religious claims, within a single secular framework tends to reiterate the hierarchies and exclusions that are the infrastructure of injustice — of the very injustice that secularism is supposed to resolve.

KH: Your book is written so clearly, and so compellingly, it made me itch to teach with it. That itch was particularly strong when I thought about the complaint students often levy against theory and critique, that our post-modern histories of social construction and discourse can make us feel stuck, unable to act in ways that affect real change. Sometimes I’m sympathetic to this frustration, at others it feels disingenuously unimaginative and ungenerous. But your book manages to be both theoretically and critically rich and is also explicitly prescriptive. You use your own work and the work of your comrades and collaborators to think toward new and better ways of doing the work of thinking and organizing — for “changing the conversation” and more. You write, “Developing new ways of being in the world requires new ways of thinking about and understanding that world. I am animated by the hopefulness of a perversely utopian justice that does not secure its borders, while I understand that universal inclusiveness can never be achieved. The question for activists is how to stick with enabling paradoxes like this one.” I was very taken with this idea of “perverse utopian justice.” Perversity, especially, seems like such a rich word — in terms of sex, in terms of religion — to hook into here. Can you tell us more about what “perversity” means to you, to this work, to this kind of utopian thinking and organizing? How might perversity help us feel less stuck? 

 JJ: I really cannot do justice to perversity. And this is for the reason that you say — perversity is rich with possibility.

One of the basic ethical questions for me is how to make a world that is different from what exists right now, pervaded as that world is by injustice. I turn to the slogan from the World Social Forum and the Occupy movement, “Another World is Possible.” It’s such an expansive, hopeful slogan. But how is another world possible? One of the things I’ve learned from my years of research is that those of us who start out trying to make another world, a different world, often end up, as I said in my first book, “reproducing the same.” Social movements can contribute to mobility-for-stasis. Social movements can build a future that is laid out by the past and all of its violence, rather than one that answers that violence. So, how does ethical action remain open to the world without avoiding, ignoring, or denying either its complexity or violence? One approach is not to stick to the future offered by the past, nor deny the material power and constraint of what has happened historically. Rather than denying history and its power, one can instead pervert its straight and narrow path.

This turning of the material world (and of materialism) toward possibility is for me an enabling paradox. How, for example, can we aspire to utopian possibility while recognizing the grief of living? I suggest that we can take up the somewhat perverse idea of a melancholy utopia, or of fun and fury, or of justice and joy, or of glitter as central to social analysis. Such is the perversity and possibility of both ethics and politics.

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.

Janet Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and author of the newly published, The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics and co-author with Ann Pellegrini of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance.

The post Secular Sex and Social Justice appeared first on The Revealer.

This excerpt comes from the book’s tenth chapter, “Theocracy from the Bench, or How to Establish Religion in the Name of ‘Religious Liberty.’”

***

Winter Garden seems a very unlikely place to have a religious war. A charming, family-friendly enclave just west of Orlando, the town has a population of 40,000 and is about 60 percent white, 25 percent of Latino origin and, as far as the eye can tell, moderately diverse in its religious and political perspectives. If you want to get certain things done through the city government, on the other hand, the peaceful appearance of religious pluralism dissipates quickly. Tim Grosshans and Joseph Richardson, two longtime residents with very different belief systems, know this aspect of life in Winter Garden very well.

Tim Grosshans, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Winter Garden, is a stout grandfather with a ready smile and a ruff of white hair encircling his bald pate. Notwithstanding his avuncular demeanor, Grosshans knows how to have a good time with the flashy and powerful. When Senator Marco Rubio, whose outreach director is a “personal friend,” invited Grosshans to President Trump’s State of the Union address, Grosshans apparently relished the opportunity to rub shoulders with local VIPs, including then reigning Miss America Cara Mund. “She was real chatty [and] having the time of her life,” Grosshans told a local newspaper. He also issued a favorable opinion on the physical attributes of the first lady: “She’s as good looking in person as she is on television.”

Joseph Richardson belongs to that group of Winter Garden residents who are unlikely to be found in churches like that of Pastor Grosshans. A software engineer in his mid-fifties, he identifies himself as a “freethinker” and is an active member of the Central Florida Freethought Community. A slim, pensive man, he left behind a childhood in the Assemblies of God church, a deeply conservative Pentecostal denomination; became an Episcopalian in college; and eventually made his departure from Christianity at forty-nine. His journey was prompted by his concerns about, among other things, the treatment of LGBT Americans. “The ‘love the sinner hate the sin’ language in the church never translated into action that made sense to me,” he says.

For several years Winter Garden has had a policy of opening certain official city meetings with an invocation or prayer. In the four years up through early 2019, the city opened eighty-four public meetings this way. One invocation came from a Jewish rabbi and one came from a Catholic priest. A third meeting commenced with a moment of silence, and in 2015, before the city adopted a restriction that invocators must represent a 501(c) (3) organization, a man who identifies as nonreligious was selected by the city commissioner to deliver an invocation that contained no reference to religion. The other eighty invocations were delivered by representatives of Protestant churches or religious groups, or by individuals or civic leaders delivering sectarian prayers.

Rev. Grosshans and Senator Rubio

Pastor Tim Grosshans alone accounted for three invocations, and other staff or members of his church contributed an additional five. Members of the First Baptist squad, like many of the other Protestant groups, seem proud of the explicitly sectarian character of their invocations. “It is in Jesus Christ’s name that we pray for our leadership. Amen,” said Jarian Felton, First Baptist Church’s director of worship.

Joseph Richardson first initiated a request for the opportunity to offer an invocation on May 9, 2014, four days after the Supreme Court issued its 5–4 decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway. The conservative majority in that case suggested that efforts to ban sectarian invocations at the start of official town meetings amounted to a violation of religious liberty, whereas such invocations posed no danger of establishing religion. Richardson’s experience over the subsequent four years could make a mockery of the Court’s reasoning. Indeed, it would be one of countless instances illustrating how Christian nationalists have gamed the American judicial system to advance an agenda of “religious liberty” that in reality serves to establish a very clear set of privileges for one variety of religion.

“I know they are sitting up there on that dais saying that what they’ve done is fair and equitable,” says Richardson. “But it’s obviously not. The spirit of the Greece v. Galloway decision was equal treatment. But the fact that the Supreme Court put their stamp of approval on sectarian invocation has made it so that legislators think they can insert their religious views into meetings and exclude the viewpoints of others who disagree with them.”

Religious activists outside the Supreme Court awaiting the Greece v. Galloway decision

Sectarian invocations before public meetings, like crosses placed on public lands, may appear to play a merely symbolic role in our governance and are therefore easily to dismiss. But they point to the broader privileging of conservative Christianity in America, including its superior access to sources of public money and the perversion of our most deeply held constitutional principles. They are part of the larger project to use the court system to “restore” a version of America that never was.

Not long after the election of Bill Clinton, Leonard Leo realized that the Christian right had little hope of winning the culture war at the ballot box. A Catholic ultraconservative, Leo was sure that the public, seduced by the shallow values of a liberalizing culture, would never voluntarily submit to the moral medicine needed to save the nation. The last best chance to rescue civilization, he concluded, was to take over the courts. If activists could funnel just enough true believers onto the bench, especially onto the Supreme Court, they just might be able to reverse the moral tide.

“He figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war,” said Leo’s former media relations director, Tom Carter. “Abortion, gay rights, contraception—conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts.”

Leo founded a student chapter of the Federalist Society while studying law at Cornell. In 1991 he went to work for the organization’s national office in Washington, D.C. He set about building the conservative legal movement, forging alliances with prospective jurists and Republican leaders. The Federalist Society, which received some early funding from right-wing donors including the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, and the free-market think tank Institute for Economic Affairs, became a kind of career center for the conservative young ideologues of the legal world. Undistinguished academic records might be forgiven provided an unwavering commitment to the cause could be verified. The best of the young talent was meticulously groomed through a program of rotating internships, clerkships, and interim appointments to the welcoming offices of plutocrat-funded think tanks and legal advocacy groups—“the carefully manicured terrarium of the conservative legal community,” as the journalist Charles P. Pierce has described it. “Federalist Society member? Check. Clerkships for conservative Supreme Court Justices? Check . . . Wingnut culture-war bona fides? Check.”

When George W. Bush was elected president, Leo began working as an outside advisor. According to a 2003 email by a White House aide that was sent to, among others, Brett Kavanaugh, Leo was characterized as a point person for “all outside coalition activity regarding judicial nominations.” He became known as a moneyman who could be relied upon to drum up funding for promotional activities on behalf of judicial appointees, providing media training for key pundits or creating grassroots support through advertising campaigns and other means. He also joined the boards of various right-wing and conservative religious organizations, including the Catholic Association Foundation, which funded campaigns to oppose same-sex marriage, and Reclaim New York, whose directors included then Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon and his billionaire backer Rebekah Mercer.

The Mercer family became major Federalist Society backers, too, donating nearly $6 million over a span of several years, according to the Washington Post. But even these munificent gifts were dwarfed by other contributions, often from unknown donors. Leo has advised or helped run over two dozen nonprofits, including the Freedom and Opportunity Fund, the BH Fund, and America Engaged. In 2016 and 2017 those three nonprofits, all of which named Leo as president in their tax filings, took in approximately $33 million. Some of the money was spent on the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association and groups in the Koch orbit, including FreedomWorks and the Center for Individual Freedom.

One of Leo’s guiding principles was a commitment to end abortion. The conservative legal activist Ed Whelan wrote, “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.” At a 2017 presentation at the Acton Institute outlining the Federalist Society’s strategy to remake the federal judiciary, Leo said, “I would love to see the courts unrecognizable.” Trump, he commented, is “the change we’ve been waiting for.”

In addition to advising Trump on his judicial picks, Leo and his allies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars—over $250 million between 2014 and 2017 alone, according to the Washington Post—in part to promote conservative policies, provide funding for right-wing TV pundits, and coordinate and finance campaigns for their judicial picks, including Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Leo’s work builds on that of other great minds of the Christian right’s legal juggernaut. In 1994, the Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom) was launched with the support of some of the heaviest hitters of the new Christian Right, including D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries; James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ International (now Cru); Larry Burkett, president of Christian Financial Concepts; Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association; and radio host Marlin Maddoux. The group secures its backing from financial heavy-weights of the movement—among them the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, the Bill and Berniece Grewcock Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the Bolthouse Foundation. They also receive substantial funding from the National Christian Foundation, a “donor-advised fund” that reportedly raised over $1.5 billion in 2017.

Protest sponsored by the Alliance Defending Freedom

Today, with an annual revenue of over $50 million, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a mainstay of the movement’s plans for dismantling the wall of separation between church and state. The ADF is a key actor behind nearly every major case in the United States that is attempting to expand special privileges for conservative Christians. Its trophies include: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.; Zubik v. Burwell; Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission; Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer; and, of course, Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

Katherine Stewart is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic. She is also the author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 7 of the Revealer podcast: “Christian Nationalism and the 2020 Election,” featuring a fascinating interview with Katherine Stewart.

The post The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism appeared first on The Revealer.

QAnon supporter at a rally for Donald Trump

In the 1920s, while the world was under siege by an influenza pandemic, the Ku Klux Klan was at its apogee of popularity and political power, spreading falsehoods about Jews taking over the world, Catholic nuns serving as sex slaves, and Black Americans destroying American culture. One hundred years later the world is in the throes of another pandemic; and while the KKK, which was once called the “Invisible Empire” because of its effective control of government, is still relevant, it is QAnon, a diffuse online-to-offline movement based on a network of conspiracy theories, that is now intertwined with much of the Republican Party. Certainly, QAnon’s worldview encompasses longstanding elements of the political far-right, including white nationalism, an anti-government stance, and bigotry — Islamophobia and antisemitism in particular.

The rise of QAnon is not an anomaly, but an extension of the insidiousness of systemic racism in the United States, which allows for both the flourishing of conspiracy theories and the denigration of people of color, immigrants, the politically progressive, and people who do not subscribe to a white, Christianist point of view. Resembling the strategy of the KKK before it, QAnon bifurcates people into two opposing groups: us versus them. Its central premise is that President Trump is leading a clandestine charge against an evil cabal of Satan-worshipping political and media elites plotting against him as part of the Deep State, led by Jews. These elites are believed to drink the blood of children to maintain their youth, not unlike earlier antisemitic blood libel accusations that Jews slaughtered Christian children in order to consume their blood during religious holidays. QAnon cultivates a narrative of white victims who are in danger because of people of color (including Muslims and Jews), immigrants, and liberal elites. In turn, Republican politicians aligned with QAnon are leveraging antisemitism as a virulent weapon for votes in the 2020 election, much like the KKK did one century ago.

QAnon: An Overview
First appearing in 2017 on 4chan, an online imageboard where people also post and share comments, and now present on more visible social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, QAnon’s name comes from the anonymous nature of the sites where it first appeared. Q, who may be a single person or a group of people, is the pseudonym of the unknown originator (or originators) claiming to be a high-ranking government official close to President Trump. Q also stands for Q access authorization, which is a security clearance level used by the U.S. Department of Energy, reinforcing the person’s (or people’s) status in the Trump administration. Q posts ambiguous apocalyptic messages, also known as Q drops, which buttress a conspiratorial worldview often laden with antisemitic tropes. Q drops are purportedly meant to be deciphered by adherents who are in fervent anticipation of The Storm, an event reminiscent of Christian End Times theology during which the corrupt elite making up the Deep State will be imprisoned for their moral failings and sexual depravity, and when QAnon followers will triumph.

QAnon and the Transnational Presidency of Donald Trump
In an internationally coordinated show of force, protestors in alignment with the political far-right, including QAnon adherents, marched in streets around the world on August 29, 2020. From Boston and Berlin to London and Paris, demonstrators flouted physical distancing measures recommended by the World Health Organization with signs declaring war on the political establishment: “Masks are Muzzles,” “Fight the Corona Dictatorship,” and “World Hoax Organisation.” They also carried banners with direct pleas to President Trump: “Please, Mr. President, Make Germany Great Again,” bookended with Qs. The German pleas to President Trump reflect the transnational acceptance of QAnon’s conspiracy theories. Though President Trump is a head of state and should be viewed as part of the same globalist government establishment that the movement rails against, QAnon has grown concomitant with his tenure as Commander-in-Chief. Its worldwide congregation of millions during his presidency can be attributed to the sizeable crossover of white evangelical Christians and its religion-like makeup. “Q” is a longtime staple on posters and T-shirts at Trump rallies. Adherents even revere Trump as an “angel,” the most likely candidate for the unidentified figure of Q, and their savior who will lead the charge to protect them during the imminent Storm.

Tellingly, of his own stance on QAnon and its constellation of conspiracy theories, President Trump has never discounted or negated such views. During a White House news conference in August 2020, President Trump suggested that QAnon followers were patriots, responding to a reporter, “I’ve heard these people love our country.” Furthermore, he flexes the full muscle of his bully pulpit by amplifying QAnon through retweeting related accounts hundreds of times. He also tweeted his endorsement of politicians aligned with QAnon, like businessperson Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he declared a “future Republican Star” and “real WINNER,” congratulating her ultimately successful 2020 Republic primary election campaign for Georgia’s 14^th congressional district. Greene, an adherent of QAnon since its inception, posted a YouTube video proclaiming her support of President Trump in 2017. In the video, she reiterates QAnon’s foundational postulation, “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.” In another video, she repeats an antisemitic conspiracy theory known as “The Great Replacement,” which erroneously claims that Jews are orchestrating the mass migration of people of color into majority-white nations to perpetuate white genocide. The video also quotes a Holocaust denier saying, “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.” Her general election victory in November 2020 to the U.S. House of Representatives is all but ensured given that, in addition to the Georgia district’s overwhelmingly Republican make-up, her opponent dropped out of the race in September of this year.

The Anti-Defamation League, the prominent international Jewish organization whose mission is to counter antisemitism, has stated that what it regards as Greene’s failure to disavow racism is “a moral failure and unbecoming of someone seeking elected office.” The Republican Jewish Coalition also issued a rare statement during Greene’s primary runoff that endorsed her Republican opponent. The statement maintained:

 “Dr. Cowan’s opponent, Marjorie Taylor Greene, would take our party in the wrong direction. Greene came to national attention for all the wrong reasons: repeatedly using offensive language in long online video diatribes, promoting bizarre political conspiracy theories, and refusing to admit a mistake after posing for photos smiling side by side with a long-time white supremacist leader.”

Notwithstanding such declarations, however, Republicans in Congress are doing little to thwart Greene’s campaign. While there are detractors within the GOP who are angered by QAnon and the subsequent splintering of the party, including U.S. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and U.S. Representatives Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, their stance is increasingly in the minority. As a bellweather of the future of the GOP, Greene is financially backed by major Republican leaders like Barb Van Andel-Gaby, chairperson of the board of the conservative American think tank The Heritage Foundation, as well as several Republican members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

QAnon, Orthodox Jews, and White Evangelicals
Despite Trump’s explicit endorsement of Greene and implicit support of QAnon, and the antisemitism of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, the majority of America’s Orthodox Jews have not yet signaled their disapproval of the President. A January 2020 poll of 1,264 Orthodox Jews in the United States conducted by Nishma Research found that Trump’s approval rating was 68% among the ultra-Orthodox and 36% amongst the modern Orthodox. (For comparison, his national approval rating in 2020 is 42% among all Americans surveyed and 64% amongst white evangelicals surveyed). Though a widely heterogenous group, American Orthodox Jews as a whole share a greater affinity with American white evangelicals than with American Reform, Conservative, and secular Jews on social issues and political views. Both Orthodox Jews and white evangelicals approved of Trump’s 2017 move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

This support is given despite President Trump’s antisemitism, which he himself both counters and promotes. In a speech to thousands of attendees at the 2019 Israeli-American Council National Summit, President Trump testified, “The Jewish state has never had a better friend in the White House than your president, Donald J. Trump.” Continuing, he described antisemitism as a “vile poison” and “venomous creed” that his administration “is committed to aggressively challenging and confronting … in every resource, and [by] using every single weapon at [its] disposal.” However, he countered this public display of support with derogatory comments in private. In 2020, he was reported to have privately commented after phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” repeating themes in his previous statements that Jews are not truly American.

Irrespective of this troubling dichotomy between his public persona and private thoughts, for many Orthodox Jews, President Trump’s antisemitism is secondary to his support of their religious ideals, including his support of Israel over Palestine. In this way they are similar to white evangelicals who take umbrage with President Trump’s personal foibles but continue to support him because of his commitment to white Christian nationalism.

QAnon, the KKK, and the American Presidency
One hundred years ago, the KKK’s racist and antisemitic worldview was espoused by a plethora of American political figures, much akin to QAnon’s prominence within current Republican campaign platforms across federal, state, and local levels. Several American presidents have endorsed the KKK. President Harry S. Truman was a paid member of the KKK, albeit briefly, and in 1915 President Woodrow Wilson validated the views of the KKK when he screened D.W. Griffith’s racist film “The Clansman,” now known as “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House. Praising it as “history written with lightning,” the film, which the KKK leveraged after its release as part of its successful recruiting drive, depicts racist tropes, including a scene in which a white heroine is rescued by a Klansman after being threatened by a predatory, intellectually inferior Black man, a racist portrayal widely – and erroneously — accepted since then as fact.

Wilson himself wrote of the KKK in laudatory terms in his 1902 multi-volume work History of the American People: “The white men were roused by an instinct of self-preservation . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan . . . to protect the Southern country.” It was during President Calvin Coolidge’s administration that more than 30,000 KKK members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House on August 8, 1925 in an eerie semblance of the transnational QAnon march in August 2020. Donned in robes, but with faces showing, in a powerful and almost militaristic display of unity, they foreshadowed President Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan by calling for “America for Americans,” meaning a United States inhabited and governed solely by white Protestants.

Even though President Coolidge refused to review the parade, the KKK was so mainstream that a journalist described it at the time as “the most vigorous, active and effective organization in American life.” Its members were white men and women in American cities, urban and rural, large and small. Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans’s portrait even made the cover of Time magazine in 1924. In October 1925, at the annual meeting of the American Legion in Omaha, Nebraska, perhaps in response to the KKK demonstration earlier that year, President Coolidge, arguably progressive even by modern standards, called for all U.S. citizens to be regarded as Americans with the following remarks: “whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years of the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of to​day is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.”

Nevertheless, despite such objections such as Coolidge’s, the KKK rebranded itself to the white American public in its second wave in the 1920s to reach an estimated four million members, or almost 4% of the population in the United States. Advanced not by overt racism, but by the insidious notion that to be a Klan member was to protect America for true (white) Americans, the KKK established urban centers in Detroit, Portland, Denver, and Indianapolis, each with tens of thousands of members, wielding significant political influence in government.

Notably, the percentage of Americans publicly affiliated with the KKK during its political zenith in the 1920s is nearly the same as the percentage of Americans today who agree with QAnon’s conspiratorial theories. According to a June 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 5% of American adults agree with QAnon’s conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was “intentionally planned by powerful people” as mostly or partly true. 20% of American adults believe it is probably true.

The KKK, QAnon, and the Media
Antisemitic conspiracy theories have always abounded through mass media — even before the tech giants created conspiracy theory-enabling environments, with endlessly reverberating echo chambers on Facebook and Twitter, as well as infinite, algorithm-driven rabbit holes on YouTube that are now weaponized by QAnon adherents. In 1924, influential business magnate Henry Ford praised the KKK in the New York Times as “a patriotic body, concerned with . . . the preservation of the supremacy of the true American in his own land.” In a move that received praised from Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published in 1920 one of the most antisemitic tracts in history, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as well as subsequent antisemitic articles such as “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” This latter title underscores the antisemitic belief that Jews are a stealth threat to global economic security, political stability, and social order. The fraudulent “Protocols” also advance this same theory by purporting to reveal an intricate plot by Jews planned at the World Zionist Congress in 1897 to overthrow ruling governments across the world and join with the Freemasons in eradicating Christianity.

 QAnon adherents continue to advance antisemitic accusations that Jews are working to take over governments around the globe. Previously called the New World Order or Zionist Occupied Government, the new antisemitic byword for Jews is “globalism,” which has been used repeatedly by President Trump, including when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019.

Antisemitism is a potent armament in the arsenal of political far-right organizations from the KKK to QAnon, even if brandished a century apart. Both organizations are tied to terrorism and pose national security threats to the United States. A 2019 FBI bulletin cites conspiracy theories, and organizations like QAnon that leverage them, as “very likely [to] motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to engage in criminal or violent activity.” There have been multiple incidents of violence in the United States associated with QAnon, from death threats and standoffs to murders. Moreover, in 2020, antisemitic violence sharply increased, shifting from offline to online attacks made capable by QAnon’s proliferation on social media. Correspondingly, American antisemitism in the first half of the twentieth century led not only to the murders of Jewish Americans, like the lynching of Leo Frank, but also to the failure of the United States to provide a haven to Jews desperately seeking to flee the Holocaust in Europe.

Facing History with Courage and Hope to Counter Antisemitism
As evidence of the exploitation of antisemitism by the KKK and QAnon for political power demonstrates, history repeats itself when we do not face it with courage. It is only appropriate, then, to look to history for solutions to present-day ills. Significantly, history teaches that the trajectory of the quintessential American experiment of democracy is at stake this election cycle, much like it was a century ago at the height of the KKK’s political power. In his prescient 1925 essay “The Shape of Fear,” sociologist and civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois sourced the symbiosis of the Ku Klux Klan and the American political landscape to the “leaders of the United States who have been willing to subscribe to a religious dogma that they did not honestly believe and yet which they were willing that the mass of people should think they were believing.” Almost one hundred years later, these words are strikingly apt. As if writing today, DuBois explains in part Trump’s equivocations, coded language, dog whistles, and overt antisemitism. These are all strategies to engage a mass of people in order for them to think he believes the same as they do. Trump wants his language to be interpreted by QAnon followers in a manner that suits their worldview. Much like Q drops and conspiracy theories themselves, his language is self-reinforcing. Just as each Q drop is regarded by adherents as confirming their allegations against the liberal elite, so, too, do President Trump’s words reify what adherents want to believe.

Prominent Democrats have decried Trump’s antisemitism, such as U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Despite these declarations, however, fewer than half of American adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center know that 6 million Jews were systematically murdered in the Holocaust. This ignorance perpetuates antisemitism, as does Holocaust denial. To refuse to acknowledge the existence of an event as devastating as the Holocaust is to be willfully blind to its causes.

An education addressing the different facets of antisemitism, from its history to its current manifestations, will make strides toward cultivating compassion and ensuring that the Holocaust is never denied nor forgotten. However, an education by itself is not enough. Indeed, despite education on the Holocaust in the United States and around the world, antisemitism has only increased. In America, institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. work to ensure the lessons of hatred that facilitated the Holocaust are learned in conjunction with other genocides like the one committed against the Batutsis and their political allies in Rwanda. Even in Germany, where students visit former Nazi concentration camps in order to witness history firsthand, antisemitism continues. Compounding the issue, Holocaust survivors who embody living history are passing away so what was once tangible is now consigned to history books to be retold, mistold, or forgotten.

In November 2014, author of Night and Nobel Peace Prize-winning Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who himself passed away in 2016, addressed an audience at The Cooper Union in New York City during a panel discussion entitled “Genocide and the Jews: A Never-Ending Problem.” At the beginning of his remarks, Wiesel observed, “Things change, anti-Semitism remains.” One hundred years have passed and antisemitism is still a potent weapon exercised for political power. Not only by the KKK in the 1920s and QAnon in the 2020s, but also by political parties in the United States and in many European countries that facilitated the Holocaust — from the Donald Trump-wing of the Republican Party to Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany). It is not a coincidence that as white nationalism is gaining traction in international geopolitics, so, too, is the rise of the antisemitism. The need to acknowledge, learn about, and address the systemic causes of antisemitism that allowed the Holocaust is more dire than ever.

Only by understanding how antisemitism is enabled by people and institutions can such messaging be effectively countered. Only by recognizing that silence is complicity will the full scope of the apparatus that permits antisemitism today be dismantled. Only by taking a stand against antisemitism with everyday choices in language and action will antisemitism be eradicated. The relentless lesson of history is that positive change toward peace has almost never come from the head of state or government, but has mostly been fomented by people on the ground.

Wiesel also spoke of the individual’s power to enact change, asking, “Can we really learn from each other? If not, what are we doing here? If we can, why don’t we?” He answered optimistically, even though he endured unimaginable horrors at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, “I believe we can. God has given man the power of words. With these words we can build castles. We can bring hope or despair — it’s always in our hands.” The choice is ours to make.

Americans face a critical juncture in November 2020 should the elections proceed and the results be validated: the path of equity and justice or the path of racism and fascism. By choosing the former, we will have finally faced history with courage and hope, rejecting antisemitism at the ballot box. If we choose the latter, not only are we are doomed to repeat history in despair, we will be complicit in the continuation of hate. I choose to vote for hope.

Sara Kamali, Ph.D. 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 QAnon, the KKK, and the Exploitation of Antisemitism for Political Power appeared first on The Revealer.

Vice President Joe Biden greets Indian Ambassador Nirupama Rao in 2012. (Photo: David Lienemann)

Of the 4 million Indian-Americans living in the United States, approximately 2.5 million are eligible to vote in the upcoming presidential election. 1.3 million of those reside in eight key battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. Considering that some of those states were won or lost by a few thousand votes in 2016, both Democrats and Republicans are paying increasing attention to this demographic.

Indian-Americans are among the most well-educated and wealthiest ethnic groups in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2015 52% had either a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree and their median household income was $100,000. Compare that to the national averages of about 30% and $60,000, respectively. Indian-Americans own a third of all Silicon Valley start-ups and lead 2% of American-origin Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft, IBM, and Alphabet. Yet caste, class, and religious divides heavily shape Indian-Americans’ access to both educational and economic resources. About half are Hindu, 18% Christian, 10% Muslim, 5% Sikh, and 2% Jain. Caste discrimination is an issue faced by many Indian-Americans – a reality confirmed by data collected by the Equality Lab in 2018, and by the recent lawsuit against Cisco in California in which an engineer alleges that he faced discrimination from two upper-caste supervisors.

In previous elections Indian-Americans have leaned left, with 77% voting for Clinton in 2016 and only 16% for Trump. But Indian-American support for the Republican Party, and Trump specifically, is growing. Al Mason has made the claim on a conservative media outlet that 50% of Indian-Americans living in swing states are shifting their support this year in favor of Trump. He does not substantiate this claim, and yet the potential for Indian-American voters to change allegiances in this election is one that is energizing both parties.

Over the past few months, both campaigns have launched ads aimed at capturing the Indian-American vote. The Trump ad features the president and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi walking hand-in-hand before roaring crowds of thousands in Houston and Ahmedabad for the “Howdy Modi” and “Namaste Trump” events. Biden’s ad features Indian-American voters pledging their support for him in multiple Indian languages. Biden also chose Kamala Harris – daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father whose name means “lotus flower” in Sanskrit – as his running mate.

‘From Lotus to POTUS’?
When Biden selected Harris as his running mate, Indian and Indian-American news media exploded with variations of the above headline, but without the qualifying question mark. Indian pundits started to ponder the potential benefits of her candidacy for India, while Indian-Americans celebrated the arrival of one of their own on the political scene – a hard fought battle in a nation where aspiring Asian politicians have for so long been read as “foreign,” no matter their country of origin. Various outlets have covered Harris’ Indian background as central to her upbringing, values, and dedication to democratic ideals (India is the world’s largest democracy). Her maternal grandfather worked for the Indian government and her parents met at Berkeley during the 1960s where they were both involved in the Civil Rights Movement. While Harris is a member of a Baptist Church, Hinduism was an important part of her upbringing. The New York Times reported that she asked her aunt in Chennai to complete a Hindu ritual in which 108 coconuts are broken for good luck in her race for California Attorney General. Some refer to her middle name “Devi” as further evidence of her Hindu heritage.

Harris with her mother in 2007

The official website for the Biden-Harris campaign outlines an “Agenda for the Indian American community” that includes many democratic platform issues, including rebuilding America’s middle class, ensuring access to health care and education, and providing paths for citizenship for illegal immigrants. But first and foremost, they pledge to stem the tide of hate and bigotry in the United States by focusing resources to combat hate crimes. Such crimes have increased since Trump’s election in 2016 according to the FBI’s statistics, and they disproportionately affect Black and Brown communities, including those of Indian-Americans. The Biden-Harris campaign promises to focus additional resources to combat hate crimes, increase sentences for hate crimes committed in houses of worship including gurdwaras, mandirs, and mosques, and fund federal security services for houses of worship.

Here are just a few examples of hate crimes reported by the Indian-American community in recent years: In 2012, in one of the deadliest hate crimes in recent history, a white supremacist with ties to neo-Nazi groups opened fire at a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people (Paramjit Kaur, Satwant Singh Kaleka, Prakash Singh, Sita Singh, Ranjit Singh, and Suveg Singh Khattra) and wounding another four. In 2017, Srinivas Kuchibhotia was killed and Alok Madasani injured when they were shot at a restaurant in Olate, Kansas, by a man who fired eight rounds after calling the men “terrorists,” and shouting “Get out of my country!” Earlier this year, vandals trashed an Indian restaurant in Santa Fe, graffitiing racist slogans such as “white power,” “go back,” alongside “Trump 2020” across the walls and causing over $100,000 in damages. These are not isolated incidents but part of a much broader trend in which Indian-Americans, be they Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, alongside Jewish, Latinx, and Black communities, are subject to taunts, bullying, and violence. The impact far outlasts the incidents themselves in the form of fear, isolation, and insecurity. Three days after the Oak Creek massacre, for example, a white man asked a Sikh cab driver in that town to roll down his window, pretended to shoot him, and said “This isn’t over.” Seven days after that, another Sikh man in Oak Creek, Dalbir Singh, was murdered while closing his store. Lawyer and civil rights activist Valarie Kaur remarked, “Like other racial and religious minorities in U.S. history, we are robbed of the opportunity to finish mourning; we must remain ever vigilant, ever waiting for the next act of violence.”

Biden and Harris’ agenda for a strong U.S.-India partnership similarly focuses on human rights, appealing to India and America’s “shared democratic values.” The campaign reminds voters of Biden’s long-standing support for a close relationship between the two nations, encapsulated in Biden’s 2006 statement as incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was working to finalize the India-U.S. nuclear agreement: “My dream is that in 2020, the two closest nations in the world will be India and the United States.”

In their “Agenda for Muslim-American Communities,” Biden and Harris explicitly denounce policies recently enacted by India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These include his recent revocation of Article 370, which removed the autonomous status of Muslim-majority Kashmir while shutting down all communication in the region and placing many dissidents under house arrest. Harris spoke about this directly earlier this year, remarking, “We have to remind the Kashmiris that they are not alone in the world. We are keeping track of the situation. There is a need to intervene if the situation demands.” The Biden-Harris campaign similarly denounces the Modi government’s creation of a National Register of Citizens [NRC] and the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act [CAA]. Together, these policies register the citizenship of every Indian and then allow those without birth certificates or other qualifying paperwork (in the eastern state of Assam where this project began, that was 10% of the population) a fast track to citizenship unless they are Muslim. This is the first time India has used religion as a criterion for citizenship in this, the world’s largest democracy. All three of these policies have been assailed by world leaders and human rights activists throughout India and internationally as anti-Muslim and as deeply concerning from a human rights perspective.

Trump Appeal
For the 15-20% of Indian-Americans who have supported the Republican Party in the past, promises of lower taxes and conservative family values hold more sway than the Democrats’ appeals. To the particularly wealthy among them, equality in education and health care reform sound like big government. They oppose paths to citizenship for illegal immigrants because they see themselves as having played by the rules and believe others should do the same. Many among this constituency do not see bigotry and hate crimes as issues requiring systemic change. Indian-American and former Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley (arguably Harris’ counterpart in the Republican Party as many touted her as a VP pick and, some now speculate, a future presidential candidate) assured viewers at the Republican National Convention in August that “America is not a racist country.” This remark was followed by her admission that she faced difficulties growing up as a Brown girl in the American South. Elsewhere she has spoken about the racism she faced as a Member of the House of Representatives and as Governor of South Carolina. Like many Trump Republicans, she sees these as isolated incidents. Complicating this stance on race is a strand of anti-Black racism that runs through Indian-American communities. It compels some to uphold a “model minority” status by distancing themselves from Black Americans and so-called “Black issues.” This strand also compels some to distance themselves from the Jamaican half of Harris’ lineage.

One might surmise that Trump’s “America first” and anti-immigrant platform would be off-putting to Indian-American voters. And yet, for many, it is one of his most attractive qualities. To understand this, one must first understand something about Indian politics. In India, social divides occur predominantly along lines of religious identity rather than race because of the way its previous colonial rulers classified Indian populations. India’s population breakdown by religion is currently 80% Hindu, 15% Muslim, and 5% other minorities. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has consistently won national elections since 2014 on a platform of majoritarian politics that appeals to upper-caste and upper-class Hindus as they combat what they see as unfair affirmative action policies (known as the “reservation system”) favoring Muslims as well as low-caste groups, and the immigration of Muslims from neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh (both part of India until 1947). The above-mentioned NRC, CAA, and revocation of Article 370 are touted by Modi’s supporters as evidence of his strong stance against Muslim incursions in a Hindu nation. Indian-American Trump supporters see the same in their president – a strongman willing to stamp out illegal immigration – especially from neighboring countries and from Muslims in particular. They are convinced by both leaders’ claims that such policies put their country and its citizens first and are effective at combating terrorism.

Trump and Modi have capitalized on their strong-man similarities at two recent events in Houston and Ahmedabad. In what the Washington Post describes as “the largest-ever gathering with a foreign political leader in the United States,” 50,000 people congregated in Houston last September to welcome Narendra Modi in the “Howdy, Modi!” event funded primarily by The Texas India Forum. There, Modi and Trump stood on stage hand-in-hand as Modi justified the revocation of Article 370 in order to ensure “equal rights” to Kashmiri citizens. Modi introduced Trump as “my friend, a friend of India, a great American President,” to loud applause. Trump responded in kind, calling Modi “one of America’s greatest, most devoted, and most loyal friends.” In February of this year, Trump visited Ahmedabad for the “Namaste Trump” event, drawing a crowd of 100,000. There, too, the leaders joined hands before lavishing praise upon one another from the podium. Unlike Biden and Harris, Trump has not criticized Modi’s actions in Kashmir and Assam. Instead, he has extolled their joint “ironclad resolve to defend our citizens from the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”

Trump and Modi

Indian-American voter Al Mason is explicit about what Trump has to offer Indian-Americans: respect. In his own synopsis of the commercial he created for the Trump campaign, he points to the Modi-Trump events and Trump’s lack of criticism over the Kashmir issue to argue: “Indian-Americans for the first time ever feel respected by the United States. No one has ever respected India, nor the Indian prime minister, nor the vast Indian-American community as much as President Trump has.” He does not cite former U.S. presidents’ numerous state visits to India, including Obama’s visit in 2009 when he met with then-prime minister Manmohan Singh after endorsing the nation’s plea for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, or in 2015 when he met with Modi and became the first U.S. president to participate in Republic Day celebrations, promising to increase bilateral trade between the two nations. It is Trump’s refusal to criticize the Indian prime minister and his policies that counts as respect.

This line of logic doesn’t sit well with other Indian-American voters. Nyla Ali Khan, granddaughter of the first prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir after India gained independence now resides — and votes — in Oklahoma. When the entire Kashmir Valley was put on lockdown after the revocation of Article 370, that included her family members (who are Muslim). Of Indian-American Trump supporters, she remarks: “These transnational subjects are safely ensconced in the U.S. and they remain unaffected by the wreckage caused by Modi’s policies, so they are uncritically loyal to the romanticized notion of the nation.” She warns against Hindutva nationalist groups in the U.S. who are “related to the invention, transmission, and revision of nationalist histories” that, in Kashmir, “justify repression of the Kashmiri populous, objectification of Kashmiri women, and humiliation of the people with the language of affirmative action and good governance.”

Lopamudra Basu, Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin who is Hindu by birth and who identifies as progressive in her politics similarly rejects Mason’s logic: “In spite of the optics of the camaraderie between Trump and Modi, the Trump administration has been devastating to Indians in its policies. It has slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from India and removed India’s status in the GSP (Generalized System of Preferences). In effect, it is conducting a mini trade war with India. Even more significantly, [the] U.S has reduced HI B visas, a category of work visas that Indians rely on in the path to immigration. I am hopeful that these empirical facts weigh more with the Indian-American electorate than a common xenophobia and ethnocentrism.”

2020 and Beyond
Whatever traction Trump gains among Indian-Americans, most will likely continue to hold democratic views and vote for Biden in the 2020 election. Valarie Kaur says the stakes for this election couldn’t be higher. A third-generation Indian-American, she calls on her religious community to remember the historical experience of Sikhs and core values of their tradition: “As Sikhs, we are called to love and serve one another — and fight for those in harm’s way. Right now, millions in this nation are suffering — from pandemic, climate catastrophe, police killings, poverty, and hate violence. Everything our Sikh ancestors fought for — a world of dignity, equality, and justice — is at stake. A Biden presidency would give us a chance to save our democracy, heal the earth, and begin to birth a world where we see no stranger.” Her nonprofit organization, The Revolutionary Love Project, has teamed up with Emgage, a Muslim-American advocacy group, to increase voter participation among MASA (Muslim, Arab, and South Asian) constituents in battleground states.

For Nyla Ali Khan, the stakes are indeed high, and yet this election is one small step in a much larger human rights project. She remarks: “We are witnessing a rise in religious majoritarianism and cultural-supremacist politics the world over, which is why the U.S. presidential election cannot be a stopping place for our thinking about a world radically transformed by struggles for autonomy and self-determination.”

It remains unclear what a Biden-Harris presidency would mean for Kashmir, specifically, or India as a whole, but for these and for most Indian-American voters, it is critical for America’s future.

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

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

The post Race, Religion, and the Indian-American Vote appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers

As I think back on the articles we have published this year, I am struck by the ways so many of them offer a vision for a better and more equitable world. In the past months, our articles have addressed Black Lives Matter protests, the treatment of essential workers, the climate crisis,  LGBTQ equality, and connections between Islamophobia and opposition to wearing face masks. From an editorial perspective, we have tried to offer our readers important insights about the issues facing our country. As the 2020 election approaches, it is clear that if we hope to live in a nation that addresses the issues we have covered, we must do something the Revealer has never before done: endorse a presidential candidate. For the possibility of racial equality, the security of our democracy, the safety of our planet, and the preservation of the separation of church and state, the Revealer endorses Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for President and Vice President of the United States.

In the coming weeks, other publications will offer their reasons for endorsing Biden and Harris. While I could write at length about the need to protect healthcare, combat gun violence, or the White House’s horrific response to the pandemic, I shall focus my attention here on religion. Quite simply, Donald Trump has tethered himself to a well-organized network of white Christian nationalists who want the laws of this country to reflect their religious views. Although a minority of the population, Christian nationalists and the “family values” Christians who support them seek to strip women of the right to control their own bodies. Should he stay in office, we will witness pro-life Christians celebrate the criminalization of abortion while they ignore police killings of Black Americans and the Trump administration’s violence against Black Lives Matter protestors. We will also see renewed efforts to undo the LGBTQ movement’s legal advances. Trump targeted transgender Americans soon after he entered office by prohibiting transgender people from serving in the military. He will not stop there. The white evangelicals and conservative Catholics who support him want more. With control of the courts, a second Trump term means the federal recognition of same-sex marriages will be in jeopardy. And while we witness the separation of church and state erode and far-right Christians use “religious freedom” laws to discriminate against all sorts of people in business, education, housing, and adoption, Trump will continue his discriminatory policies against people from Muslim-majority countries and deepen his support for racist and antisemitic white nationalists.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Although I am confident Biden and Harris have spent more time in churches than Trump, neither seeks to make the country a more avowedly Christian nation. Biden and Harris support women’s bodily autonomy and LGBTQ equality. They will undo the Islamophobic fervor that currently occupies the White House. They will work with progressive religious leaders and people with no religious affiliation to make the country more equitable for people of color and religious minority groups. And they will address the climate crisis and coronavirus pandemic without relinquishing their authority to the strangely married demands of corporate conservatives and anti-science Christians.

With the presidential election weeks away, we felt it necessary not only to endorse Biden and Harris but also to offer a series of articles about religion and politics in today’s world. Our October issue opens with Deonnie Moodie’s “Race, Religion, and the Indian-American Vote,” where she explores why some Indian-Americans are attracted to Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and how Kamala Harris’s Indian ancestry may help the Biden campaign. In “QAnon, the KKK, and the Exploitation of Antisemitism for Political Power,” Sara Kamali compares QAnon’s antisemitic conspiracy theories and popularity within the Republican Party to the KKK’s political influence during the pandemic of 1918. Next, in an excerpt from The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart considers how Christian nationalists have exploited the idea of religious freedom to make the country a more Christian nation. And in “Secular Sex and Social Justice,” Contributing Editor Kali Handelman interviews Janet Jakobsen about her book The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics and what it can teach us about today’s political situation.

For those who need a break from the current political climate, our October issue also includes two articles to give you that respite. In “The Secret Life of My Great Communist Aunt: A Hagiography,” Sarah Ngu travels to Malaysia to find a connection with a deceased relative who, like herself, became a family outcast. And in “Mucho Mucho Amor, Mucho Mucho Religion,” J. Barton Scott reviews Netflix’s documentary about Walter Mercado, the eccentric Puerto Rican celebrity astrologer who offers much to consider for those interested in religion.

The October issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Christian Nationalism and the 2020 Election.” Investigative journalist Katherine Stewart joins us to describe what Christian nationalists want if Trump stays in office, why many of them are comfortable with the erosion of democracy, and what people can do who oppose Christian nationalism. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As countless polls have shown, the majority of Americans do not like or support Donald Trump. The time has come for that majority to make sure he does not stay in office. The separation of church and state is on the line. Any hope for greater racial equality is on the line. Lives that could have been saved months ago from a pandemic are on the line. Sound the alarm. Get involved in our political process today, tomorrow, and everyday until each ballot is counted. Let none of us wake up in January 2021 and question if we could have done more to prevent a second Trump term. Let us instead awaken with Biden and Harris in office and with the energy to make this country live up to its promises of equality for all.

Yours in hope,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D., Editor
Angela Zito, Ph.D., Publisher

The post The Revealer endorses Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appeared first on The Revealer.