‘A world of crystal light, a land without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis.’

‘So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.’
-Genesis 3:24

‘I will build a great wall.’
-Donald Trump (2016)

Blazing alabaster white was the hue associated with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. A stunning marble-whiteness of plaster and cement, the buildings dappled in dazzling links of Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs. Charles Smith of the New York Daily Tribune extoled this “wonderful group of buildings . . . created as if by magic.” Commissioner of Paris’ Central Union of Decorative Arts, Andrew Bouilhet, celebrated the exposition’s “domes . . . its colonnades, its porticoes, its terraces, its gardens filled with statues.” In a city razed by fire only a few decades before rose this temporary metropolis along the Midway Plaisance, as much Xanadu as Illinois.

Upon its incorporation in 1837, Chicago’s population was slightly under 5,000. During the year of the Columbian Exposition it was two million, the second largest city in the United States and fifth in the world. Chicago’s gleaming “White City” represented a triumph, the metropolis of the Transwestern frontier and the spiritual capital of the United States’ ever westward expansion. A fantastic, if not magical, place sprouted from prairie dust. Supposedly, when L. Frank Baum saw the resplendent Chicago he imagined that the white city was emerald, and so the Land of Oz was born.

Frederick Jackson Turner

A no less fantastic concept was born only a few miles from the fair at a meeting of the American Historical Association. There, an obscure assistant professor from the University of Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a presentation with the staid title of “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The sparse audience had no questions for Turner, and, disappointed, he returned to Madison assuming that his radical hypothesis remained unheard. He had no such reason to fear, as Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” would become one of the central principles of nascent American Studies.

Yale University historian Greg Grandin explains Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” this way: As “the settlement line moved west . . . expansion came to be identified not just as a condition of freedom, but as freedom itself.” Turner’s frontier is meant to differentiate the United States from other nations, not just as a reality of the country’s geography, but as a type of consciousness too. Grandin writes that “only the United States has had a frontier, or at least a frontier that has served as a proxy for liberation . . . and held out as a model for the rest of the world to emulate.” Now, in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Grandin revises Turner’s thesis, judging not the accuracy of those claims, but asking whither the frontier today? And how do our fantasies endure in the Age of Trump? What Grandin has penned is effectively an obituary for American exceptionalism, or maybe more accurately a forensic pathology report about its demise.

Grandin is clear-eyed about how myths like the “Frontier” obscure the actual history of genocide and ethnic cleansing which marked Manifest Destiny, while also acknowledging what is useful in the metaphor. That Manifest Destiny has always meant barbarism, violence, and bloodshed is central to Grandin’s argument, and he enumerates in great detail the actual history of atrocity that marks movement towards the west. At the same time, the “Frontier” as a mythic concept separate from history could supply a potent vocabulary for democratic expansiveness. The End of the Myth is an astute, perceptive, sometimes inchoate but mostly well-argued account of how the “Frontier” and the “Border” have been held in contrast, and how we see the ascendancy of noxious fantasies which have replaced the frontier as unifying symbol. The demise of the “Frontier” as a metaphor – with connotations of freedom, mobility, and independence – has potentially profound cultural implications. Its replacement with the metaphor of the “Border” – with its connotations of enclosure, imprisonment, and surveillance – is even more disturbing.

When Turner delivered his paper in 1893, critical historiography as a quasi-scientific endeavor was new, theories of history less common than the Whiggish recounting of the great actions of great men. The nineteenth-century saw the development of more sophisticated scholarship, which considered social, economic, and cultural influences, and in imitation of the hard sciences (which the liberal arts increasingly looked up to as examples of progressive knowledge) developed models that explained the objective facts of history. Like many academic radicals, Turner was initiated into greatness by reacting to the stultifying orthodoxies of the late nineteenth-century; rather than standing on the shoulders of giants, Turner kicked out the shins of dwarves.

Turner was writing in response to “germ theory,” an explicitly elitist and racist account, which argued that our national qualities were an innate inheritance of ancient Teutonic peoples. Advocates like Hugh Henry Bancroft argued a white supremacist model of history, claiming that the “Aryan” peoples of northwestern Europe were genetically predisposed to qualities of individualism, freedom, and liberty. For Bancroft and other proponents of the germ theory (called as such since it saw WASP emigration to America like the spread of a benevolent bacillus), America’s national qualities were simply the result of unhampered white men. Whereas germ theorists held that the land was made by people, Turner inverted that contention.

Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” rejects racial essentialism to explain the “exemplary” qualities of Americans, arguing that it was the frontier which defined the nation and made it exceptional. Turner enumerates American qualities as including a “practical, inventive turn of mind . . .  masterful grasp of material things . . . restless, nervous energy . . . [the] buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” He claimed that such attributes have nothing to do with the “Saxon” origins of pioneers, but rather that the “peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to . . . crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness.” It is worth mentioning that only three years before Turner stood on that Chicago dais celebrating America, the U.S. government massacred three-hundred Lakota women, children, and men at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

Stripped of the actual people affected by settler colonialism, “Frontier” becomes an unclear understanding of western movement as an actual step towards a brighter future, where Grandin writes that “Facing west meant facing the Promised Land, an Edenic utopia.” Turner preferred abstractions to the reality of Manifest Destiny, even though as a boy he would have been witness to his father’s role in the expulsion of Wisconsin’s Indians toward the setting sun (the historian’s middle name was in honor of Andrew Jackson). Such contradictions have always been subsumed into the frontier, so that reality serves the purpose of myth; facts are sublimated by metaphor, and regardless of what may have happened at Wounded Knee, the concept has defined American culture.

Grandin explains that Turner’s thesis assumes a mechanism whereby a “constant fleeing forward allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence.” It’s an innovative and convincing explanation of why the United States, unique among all Western countries, has never had a successful socialist movement. The End of the Myth argues that all tensions within eastern American society were sublimated and projected westward, the frontier promising for every person (who is white and male) their own individualist kingdom.

The United States was little different from revolutionary Europe, but our working class simply pulled up stakes and went further west at the exact same time that the French and German proletariat gathered in barricades. The frontier denied a hideous reality whereby white men could “win a greater liberty by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to [them].” By providing analyses of both the Mexican War and the Spanish War, imperial wars that Americans high on their own sense of exceptionality know little about, The End of the Myth belies the point that the liberatory frontier was always that – a myth.

American stability was ensured by exporting violence into the ill-defined “Frontier,” and then redefining it as other things, from interstellar space to global markets. With no more frontier, the forces kept in check by our endless wanderings are unleashed at home, so that Grandin argues “Trumpism is extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.” The End of the Myth is particularly good at demonstrating how Trumpism is hardly sui generis, that the border has always been a counter-melody to the idea of the frontier, though lacking in the redemptive possibilities of later. Whatever the frontier has meant, Grandin argues that the metaphor itself is now dead. The frontier has been replaced. America’s new metaphor is “The Wall.”

Historically, we have seen the frontier in our politics and our popular culture; it has been the organizing principle of American identity, if not from the moment the Mayflower docked at Plymouth, then certainly from when Turner gave a language to describe the phenomenon, this “magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.” Such was Turner’s injunction that claimed individualism and political freedom “came out of the American forest and it gained strength each time it touched a new frontier,” though history teaches us that the model has flaws. After all, the new frontier was how President John F. Kennedy talked of outer space, though it was also how his administration talked about Vietnam.

There is a suggestion, however, that one dangerous faith can be replaced with a worse one. A paradise lost may have never been a paradise at all. But we should avoid replacing Eden with perdition. Turner argued that the days of the frontier were literally over, that the white space of terra incognita had been filled in; nothing was without jurisdiction, nothing wasn’t within a state or territory, nothing wasn’t administered by some authority. Over the following decades, frontier would come to signify variable and often opposed concepts, from civil rights to free market globalization. As an ideology, liberal universalism made use of “frontier Americanism,” a dogma of American exceptionalism.

U.S.-Mexico Border Wall

If triumphalists have historically configured America as a utopian religion, then we’ve entered an era of apostasy. Liberated from its historical exactitude by envisioning a frontier that existed everywhere, there was sometimes an emancipatory language that conceived of striving, yearning, and progress implicit within the concept. Now, we don’t even have the rhetoric; it’s been replaced with the authoritarian border. By claiming that the evaporation of the frontier mythos has abolished American exceptionalism, thus presenting an entry point for Trumpism, Grandin provides a map for how we got to this moment. Suddenly, our historical wars against Mexico and Spain, Cuba and the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq, come home in the form of a rising fascism that we long exported. As the frontier was once everywhere, we now find that the border is too.

For those of us opposed to this current season of revanchism, there should be no illusions anymore. All that was repressed is on the surface, all that was subtext is text, the dog whistles are just whistles. For an era so defined by fakery, illusion, and subterfuge, an ironic honesty reigns supreme, the better to take aim at the ghouls that are ascendant. While some pine for a return to “normalcy,” there is no going back. Grandin gestures towards a different frontier, paraphrasing Rosa Luxemburg by writing that “Coming generations will face a stark choice . . . between barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.” If the sun is not to set on the American experiment, we must admit that there is no more West towards which we can move, but that does not mean there aren’t new frontiers that we can discover. As Grandin’s stark choice between socialism and barbarism evidences, we can perhaps refigure the idea of the frontier into a new idiom, where that westward movement becomes a metaphor for increasing egalitarianism, justice, and democracy.

Ed Simon is a staff writer at The Millions and the Editor-at-Large of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University and is a frequent contributor at several different sites. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion was published by  Zero Books in 2018. He can be followed at his website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

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

The post With Limits: Dusk Sets on the American Frontier appeared first on The Revealer.

You begin by situating your story in a larger story. There’s creation, fall, redemption. Your creation story is a location. A way of situating yourself in a particular place, grounding the narrative arc.

Perry’s story follows this Christian formula. She’s a girl on the playground. She’s young. The attraction she has to women is longstanding. The force of those feelings is made visceral; they have the appearance of nature. She has a fleshly affinity to these desires, this label: lesbian.

But the natural world is not all there is. There is one who is above nature, who governs her story and gives her a new way to narrate herself. So, she renounces the natural, its force, its appetite and carnality  —  in short, its fleshliness  — in the name of that supernatural and sovereign God who reveals the sinfulness of this nature.

The force of conversion to this divinely ordered perception of the world is total. It is not the transformation of a part, but the whole. The story need not be pretty  —  indeed, the messier it appears, the more authentic the conversion it announces. What is non-negotiable, however, is the direction toward which it is oriented. Perry gives her entire self over. Where once fleshly feelings for women ruled her identity, now it is ruled by Christ. Her body is a living sacrifice. She works to make it holy and acceptable to God. This is the power of God. Through her conversion, Perry comes to see how her history and human history are governed by God. In the same way that a political sovereign rules over their domain, God’s rule over all of creation gives God the sovereign authority to invade a mind enslaved to sin and set it free. She embraces the renunciation of the flesh in the name of the Spirit who joins her together in a new family, gives her a new name, provides her with a new meaning to her life. This is the story of redemption.

***

There is not just one narrative in Perry’s story, just as there is not one meaning. While initially I was more intent on ignoring Perry’s story than challenging it, in scrolling to the end of the article my eye was caught by its final bookend: Perry’s portrait photo and the tags the editors of Christianity Today had used to index the article. Taken as a whole, framing the excerpt, the tags give tell to the common sense  —  the shared feelings  —  of the larger story within which they were situating Perry’s story: “African Americans, conversion, homosexuality.” Beginning the excerpt with an author photo and concluding it with these tags generates more meaning for her story. They provide one final set of implicit directions telling the reader how to read and think about her. How to situate the information she’s selected for sharing within a larger evangelical imagination. With and without her consent, Perry is woven into a theological story that is bigger than her. A story of white theology and its claims to authority.

The layers of discernment, authorship, editing, arrangement, and selection that governed the choice of this essay for publication are rendered invisible. The selection of this excerpt about her life serves to provide a narrative arc for the whole story given in Gay Girl, Good God.

The blurb on the back jacket of the book follows up on the excerpt’s invitation. Readers are meant to imagine Perry’s story with her and learn to make sense of their fallen flesh together: Read in order to understand. Read in order to hope. Or read in order, like Jackie, to be made new.

Reading in order is the key here. Without this sense of order, the story — its understanding, hope, and novelty — begins to break down. Like the tags and photo that bracket the Christianity Today excerpt, the blurb implies the proper direction in which to read Perry’s story. For it is only by reading the world in the proper order that one can perceive God’s governance of everything. Joined with Perry, readers journey to new feelings and understanding so that their desires can be shaped and, in turn, legitimated by this story. Reading with her, we are made analogous to Perry. Made new in this story. Together, we renounce the fleshly feelings of homosexuality and become straightened out, corrected, redeemed. It is only by reading in order that the meaning of our existence is secured against any threats.

This evangelical education in feeling depends on training one’s senses around the story of a sovereign God who requires a sacrifice in order to bring salvation. Perry’s sexual conversion is both an invitation and an instruction. She is teaching us how to properly read her flesh within this evangelical imagination. She makes this story real, enfleshes it with her hands and heart, and so it is real. Her story is an education in feeling, in the senses. Her common sense, her sense-perception, her sentiments are a form of knowing. What does she know? That God has extracted her from the sinful situation of enslavement to her flesh.

From slavery to freedom. From lesbian to straight. There is something familiar about the narrative power that drives her story. Perhaps this is why “African Americans, conversion, homosexuality” are tagged in this essay. Perhaps the conversion of the flesh is the link between God’s management of salvation and Christianity’s management of race and sexuality. Convert the flesh, black flesh, black lesbian flesh, into something to be overcome. Generate meaning from its marks, situate it within a larger story of God’s authority and rule that justifies the overcoming of the flesh. This is a romance, a reconciliation of race and sexuality in the straightness given by God. Reading the story of Perry’s black, once lesbian, now straight flesh, we too can be reconciled, united, married. We can find understanding. Hope. We can be made new.

Jackie Hill Perry

Perry situates herself within the story of a Good God whose authority comes to her, a Gay Girl, “not in a church, or through contact with Christians.” Instead, “God broke in and turned [her] heart toward Him right in [her] own bedroom in light of His gospel.” God’s divine authorization of this break-in apparently occurs without mediation by another. Yet Africans arrived in America precisely because black people were written into the Christian gospel as heathens in need of conversion. The fact of the matter is that God is able to break into her bedroom because European Christians tore into black flesh first.

In the inscription of her black flesh into a Christian world, Perry is not an excerpt or an exception. Her blackness, and the symbolic weight of slavery that it still carries, testifies to a Christian sense of flesh in need of conversion. From slavery to freedom, can this divine guidance of history and human lives justify even captivity in the name of freedom? For in a theological view that says that God is in control of everything that happens, slavery is just a hiccup on the way to redemption. An unfortunate sacrifice of black flesh that will resolve into something higher.

But maybe the violence justified by God’s sovereign governance of history has nothing to do with the story Perry is telling. Maybe her story isn’t about race. Still, the reading in order, the tags “African Americans, conversion, homosexuality” — her black flesh — leaves a trace of the racial transformations at the heart of evangelicalism.

***

One problem with sovereignty is that it is incommensurable with love. Mastery, governance, and rule are antithetical to the freedom that love enables. In our patriarchal society, the narrative of a lover breaking into one’s heart or room is meant to sound romantic, but such a story, in the absence of consent, is about trauma. Sovereignty, the renunciation of disorder in the name of control, is the ruination of love. But the evangelical education of feeling depends on reading God’s governance as supremely good regardless of what it justifies. This is the tautology that gives Perry’s story its ground. Displace it and what remains? Perhaps the flesh of Perry’s ex-girlfriend remains as an open question. A question she attempts to close with a sovereignty that would justify the renunciation of the flesh, a conversion. A disavowal.

Writing herself into this divinely arranged story does not require forgetting the flesh. Instead, remembering the flesh in order to repeatedly sacrifice it is what secures the order of this story. These mini crucifixions require a regular renunciation: surveil yourself, root out the vestiges of sin, the traces of desire, straighten yourself out. The readers are not meant to question how this interrogation of self might be an education in self-harm, in doing violence to one’s own flesh.

***

Perry’s renunciation of her lesbianism pivots on trading her fleshly identity as a lesbian for a Godly identity as a daughter of the ruler of all of creation. But perhaps this exchange is where the story falls apart. Perhaps lesbian is not an identity, or the hinge for making a story open, but a practice of questioning. Questioning the stories of desire that appear natural, that exert sovereign control over the flesh. Perhaps “lesbian” names a way of questioning the attempt to exhaust the meaning of my flesh, or another’s. And perhaps it is the attempt to become responsible for loving the flesh rather than renouncing it. To become responsible enough to name one’s desire, communicate it honestly, and hopefully find consenting flesh that wants to touch, be touched, feel the force of the flesh pressed into it. If only for a moment. That impression may not be lasting or significant. Or it just might change a life.

To confront the force of the flesh without recourse to a story of God’s, or an individual’s, sovereignty is not to disavow God. To confront the finitude of one’s own flesh demands reimagining God’s love in terms ungoverned by the justifications and harm that fleshly renunciation provides. Without sacrifice, surveillance, and straightness. To love the flesh is to renounce a God who breaks into our hearts and bedrooms, forcing Himself and his conversion on us. It is, instead, to embrace the force that is felt in the blackness of existence and the opacity of the flesh, God’s and ours. It is to stand in the face of a mystery and feel the unsovereign demand of love. Dark, lovely, flesh.

Amaryah Shaye Armstrong is Assistant Professor of Race in American Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. Her work brings together black feminist theory and black theology to examine the relationship between race, reproduction, and religion in the aftermath of the Middle Passage. She also co-hosts the ASSEMBLY podcast on the Political Theology Network and makes music at amaryahshaye.bandcamp.com.

The post Unsovereign Love: Thoughts on Race, Sex, and Undoing an Evangelical Education of Feeling appeared first on The Revealer.

This excerpt comes from the book’s Introduction.

***

 “It’s 3:23 in the morning and I’m awake.” A man sits up on the side of his bed with his head in his hands, running his fingers through his thick brown hair in frustration, and we as the viewers get the sense that he is being haunted by some unseen force. The eerie sounds of Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós front man Josí playing guitar strings with a rosined cello bow evoke the creaks and groans of calving glaciers. The scene shifts to the twinkling lights of the Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco night sky, and the man is now up and dressed, soberly staring unblinkingly at us. He explains: “I’m awake because my great-great-grandchildren won’t let me sleep.” Images of children playing on merry-go-rounds and swinging on swings sequence one after another. “My great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams,” he continues, “what did you do while the planet was plundered? What did you do when the earth was unrav­eling?” Images flash of power plants, polluted skies, melting arctic ice, seals searching in vain for land, sea birds blackened in crude oil, choked highways, burning oil fields, and bomber jets headed off to war in what appears to be the Middle East. The great-great-grandchildren’s ques­tions fill the man’s head and are unrelenting. They want to know of him, “Surely you did something as the seasons started failing? As the mam­mals, reptiles, and birds were all dying?” The children press further and demand, “Did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was sto­len?” Their final question hangs heavy in the air as a haunting refrain of accusation: “What did you do once you knew?”

How many of us imagine that we might adequately answer that weighty last question one day by responding, “Well, I made sure to shop for the right stuff. I bought green products, I shopped organic, I supported green capitalism, purchased ecologically mindful cell phone apps, a nice recycled beverage container, a hybrid vehicle, and generally consumed my way to helping solve global climate change and save the earth.” Would this satisfy the specters of our future offspring who wish to hold us morally accountable for the state of the earth they have inher­ited? And yet, much of the environmental messaging we encounter on a daily basis through marketing, advertising, and mediated popular cul­ture is simplistically reassuring and absolving. Shop for the right stuff, and it will all be okay.

The voiceover in the video recounted above, which was created by Bay Area–based spoken-word poet and filmmaker Drew Dellinger, fea­tures an excerpt from his longer poem, “Hieroglyphic Stairway,” drawn from his award-winning book of environmentally themed poetry, Love Letter to the Milky Way. Dellinger, who also holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and religion, jolts us awake from the complacent fantasy that we can sit back, make minimal changes, and it will all be okay. His video intervenes in these reassurances, telling a different story—one of late-night haunt­ings and the horror of deep regret as we are called on the carpet by our suffering descendants for failing to act when we might have. Dellinger’s video goes on to show hopeful images of protests filling the streets, of student activists braving pepper spray and police, and of arts and culture leading the way to a vibrant and sustaining ecological human culture. But the haunting question hovers, “What did you do once you knew?” The correlative question once was what will it take to ensure we never face the haunting questions this video conjures? But we are already being asked this question by children, not off in the future, but in the now. And yet, consumer culture repeatedly sets our minds at ease that in­dividual acts of environmental virtue will do the trick. Dellinger’s an­swer is broader ranging and calls for more—more imagination, more collaboration, more connection, and more coordinated acts of conscious collective social transformation. Borrowing a phrase from the work of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., the final words of the video appear as striking white letters glowing against a black screen: “Planetize the movement.”

Piety, Virtue, and Saving the Planet

“Eco-friendly,” “green,” “environmentally sustainable,” “ecologically mindful,” “earth-conscious,” “environmentally responsible,” “planet-friendly,” “eco-smart,” and even “eco-elegant” are just some of the sobriquets used in popular parlance and consumer marketing to signal products, services, acts, behaviors, or lifestyles associated with the prac­tice of a kind of environmental virtue, or “ecopiety.” Piety, a complex social, civic, philosophical, and religious designation, is classically con­sidered to be a virtue associated with the practice of appropriate duties or obligations. The Greek term “eusebeia” (“εὐσέβεια”) connotes rever­ence and respect in engaging in right behavior or service that pleases the gods. In the ancient world, the Roman ideal of pietas was associated with “dutifulness to parents, homeland, and emperor,” and with main­taining good relations with the gods—acts that if performed well were often credited for Roman empiric success. The proper performance and practice of pietas, in Roman terms, also suggestively correlated with the maintenance of order in the universe and the sustaining of the world. Some scholarship on religion in the ancient world has probed the com­plex sociopolitical and economic transactional value of pietas in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean “ideological marketplace.” This book explores the marketing, representation, and popular mediation of envi­ronmental piety in our own contemporary “ideological marketplace,” its contested cultural meanings, and its complex transactional value in the lives of North American consumers.

Eco Consumerism

“Ecopiety” is a shorthand term I use to refer to contemporary prac­tices of environmental (or “green”) virtue, through daily, voluntary works of duty and obligation—from recycling drink containers and re­ducing packaging to taking shorter showers and purchasing green prod­ucts. Practices of ecopiety evoke an idyllic harmonial model of proper relations cultivated between humans and the more-than-human earth. Much of the language used in the mediasphere to motivate practices of ecopiety speaks of “doing our part,” “saving the earth,” “shopping for change,” “buying green,” “going green,” “practicing earth care,” and “be­coming more sustainable”—with exhortations often promising at the same time that “every little act,” no matter how seemingly insignificant, “all adds up.” Works of popular culture and environmental marketing campaigns are rife with messages that reassure publics that personal, individual, private acts of ecopiety are efficacious remedies to address an overwhelming array of environmental ailments, if only everyone would virtuously do his or her bit.

Like so many other aspects of contemporary social and political ac­tivism, stories of ecopiety and how to practice it reflect and perpetu­ate the logics of global capitalism and market ideology. As marketed in the contemporary US context, the devotional practice of ecopiety most often requires the performance of a correlative “consumopiety,” or acts of “virtuous consumption.” This book is highly attentive to correspon­dences drawn between ecopiety and consumopiety and probes in depth what role media and culture play in their making. As media scholars Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser point out in their research on the mediation of commodity activism, “within contemporary cul­ture it is utterly unsurprising to participate in social activism by buying something.” Ecopiety thus thrives, this book argues, within the hospi­table conditions of a depoliticized marketplace environmentalism and mediasphere that generate story after story of privatized, small-scale, voluntary, individualized acts of “green virtue” as being utterly adequate to dealing with our monumental planetary challenges. Whether circu­lated via the adscape, reality television, popular books, films, games, or social media, these stories explicitly or implicitly promise publics that the practice of an individualized, consumer-based ecopiety holds the key to making things on earth right again. In so doing, these stories market an imagined moral economy, in which tiny acts of voluntary personal piety, such as recycling a plastic water bottle, or purchasing a green con­sumer item, can be exchanged as an “offset” to justify the continuance of current consumption patterns and volume. No need to make any fun­damental structural changes, implement public policy or legislation, or enforce stricter, much less existing, regulations. The trick is simply for the consumer to buy the right things, the eco-piously green things—to engage in individual simple acts to save the earth—and all will be well.

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In archiving and analyzing sightings of ecopiety, as observed mostly in and through North American consumer marketing and mediated popular culture, this book argues that fundamentally individualized, free-market, privatized, voluntary approaches—promoted as addressing the monumental environmental challenges facing us—are not simply inadequate to the task but in some cases are counterproductive in the worst possible ways. Ecopiety, as marketed, is both too dourly restric­tive in some ways and grossly facile in others. It simultaneously asks too much and expects too little, making pious actions taken on behalf of the environment grim, unappealing, onerous duties or obligations, on one hand, while they constitute superficial, perfunctory modes of practice that are by and large insignificant in terms of scale and scope of impact, on the other. In studying the concurrent dynamics of both too strict and too lenient jointly at work within certain religious institutions, sociologist Laurence Iannaccone famously labeled this combination the “worst-of-both-worlds position.” Messaging ecopiety as fun, playful, hip, sexy, and appealing, while also making it more rigorous, potent, systemic, policy linked, and effectual, is challenging but not impossible, as certain ecopiety sightings in this book illustrate. The contradictions and tensions between ideals and practices of ecopiety are explored in each chapter of this book, which also considers proposed alternatives, challenges, and creative cultural paths into the future, as conjured by various media works, practices, and narratives.

Sarah McFarland Taylor is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University, where she teaches the seminar, “Media, Earth, and Making a Difference.” She holds advanced degrees in Religious Studies and Media Studies, and is the award-winning author of Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue (2019, NYU Press).

The post Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue appeared first on The Revealer.

What If?

Every day at dawn, the 20 year old priest, Srikara Sudharshana, of the Gali Anjaneya temple in the high-tech city of Bengaluru (also known as Bangalore) in south India turns his back on the sacred Vrishabavathi River just beyond his temple walls, and instead fills buckets and bottles with water from the high-end filtration system in the temple. Filtering about 1,000 liters per day, the system makes the water, drawn from a deep well on the temple grounds, potable. Srikara Sudharshana uses the water for the daily ritual bath of the god, and he adds camphor and Tulasi (holy basil) leaves to transform it into thirtha, or holy water, for the devotees to consume.

The temple, dedicated to the Monkey God Hanuman (also known as Anjaneya), son of the wind god Gali, is covered with sculptured friezes of stories from the ancient, sacred Hindu epic, the Ramayana. The temple is often featured in Lonely Planet-style guidebooks as a “must see” historic site. Built in 1452 on a lush island in the Vrishabhavathi River by Sri Vyasa Raja — woodland sage, philosopher, and master teacher who was enamored of the Vrishabhavathi’s grandeur and importance as a source of water for the region — the temple honors the way the river has animated life through myth, ritual performance, and ecological presence.

But now, the lush island on which the temple stood is a mere memory. The channel that formed one arm of the river is now a highway — a maelstrom of trucks, cycles, bullock carts, buses, cars and scooters — that swirl by the temple entrance, horns honking and engines revving day and night. And the other arm of the river is a dirty concrete channel where stinking waste-water bubbles and froths behind high concrete walls.

Today, the priests are trapped between the highway and the drain. The burning stench of petrodust from the highway, and the rotten miasma from the drain, float through the temple all the time.

The existential questions that this pollution of the sacred river poses are: how to live when the river is a sewer? And how to survive physically and morally in an ecological, cosmological, and ethical breakdown, exacerbated by anthropogenic intervention?

Water is Divine
For the past several years I have been exploring the relationship between the practice of Hinduism and the sacred landscape of India. In the United States, belief in biblical inerrancy is related to decreased support for environmental protection policies and correlates with a denial of anthropogenic climate change. But at the same time, religious mobilizations are engaging in a variety of social movements supporting climate justice. From Pope Francis’ laudato si to the 2015 “Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change,” religious leaders and institutions are increasingly calling for action to curb pollution and reduce our carbon footprint.

Moreover, Hinduism is a religion rooted in natural topography. Gods are found in rocks, hillocks, woodlands and trees, rivers and rills. In religious texts and myths, water bodies in particular have an explicit ability to transform space, to extend or truncate time, and, most significantly, to manifest god’s paradoxical nature as simultaneously transcendent and immanent, independent and dependent, formless and formed. In practice, bodies of water are sacred places, held in special regard in processions and festivals not only because they sustain life, but because they are thought to be the seat of the gods.

In Hindu cosmology, the universe is thought to be a vast ocean on which the divine protector Vishnu floats sleepily on his divine serpent bed for eons. His consort Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, emerges seated on a lotus, a perishable flower that grows in water and responds to the sun. These realms of mythic reality instructed generations of Hindus on their custodianship of water resources.

As I learned from my parents and grandparents, and they from generations before them, in Hindu thought river waters represent purity and abundance and connect the twinned worldly and otherworldly landscapes. Rivers like the Vrishabhavathi and Ganges are thought to be Goddesses, made to descend from the heavens by human vows and penances, bringing abundant life to the arid earth of India through their pure waters. Water falling from heaven to earth —  the monsoon rains that soak the subcontinent and form rivers and lakes — is conceived of as a material and spiritual bridge between the two realms of life and afterlife. In the Hindu book of death, the Garuda Purana, all souls cross a sacred river in their journey towards the afterlife. Rivers mark the boundaries of sacred worlds, and their waters wash the soul clean.

In short, Hindus valorize water and its flow as a powerful medium of the imagination that shapes space, molds gods and goddesses, and births worshipful communities into existence. It is water, as it is poured ritually over a god during a bath and subsequently drunk by devotees as a consecrated offering, that awakens the god and purifies the devotee. This cycle of water remakes earth into heaven and heaven into earth; and it is part of the fragile cosmological and earthly ecosystem.

For Hindus, the pollution of India’s sacred waters would therefore, one assumes, raise some fundamental questions: Where can and do water gods go when the water is toxically inhospitable? What happens to a religious and moral imagination rooted in the natural world when the ecological landscape is rubbished? What do we do when a river is systematically killed?

Bathing the Gods in Bottled Water
The year 1975 was when Sudarshana’s grandfather remembers last going to the river bank to draw water from the sacred Vrishabhavathi to bathe the deity, drink, and wash the sacred temple vessels. But then the river water started “smelling bad” and became sludgy and grey. With great sadness, he decided he could not use the river water for ritual purification anymore.

Then there were years without rain in the 1980s and 1990s, and water became scarce in the temple and in the city. The priests gathered every morning at dawn to perform ritual invocations to bring the monsoon rains. But none came. The waste water in the channel grew low and the smell became acrid.

For those years, the priests of the temple bought expensive bottled water and saved tap water to bathe the god. Finally, after years of everyday drought, they raised the funds to deepen the well on the temple property and install a high-tech water filtration system some three years ago.

All of this was particularly, and painfully, ironic since one of the legends of the temple involved the gift of floods. During the monsoon rains, the legend went, the river waters would rise and flow into the temple, lapping the feet of the deity in small wavelets, a sign from the gods that it would be a bountiful year for the crops as the river silt spread all over the valley through the network of lakes and streams.

Today, monsoon season turns the temple into a hive of activity as priests and officiants anxiously build sand bag levees and quickly connect sump pumps and hoses to prevent the toxic river waters from entering the temple premises. In Bengaluru’s historic floods in 2017, when the river started to rise, the priests had to sweep away the toxic sludge all day and night, working with brooms and mops, for fear the water would slime the entire temple and dump toxic waste on the deity.

The priests watch the river with anxiety now. The flood is no longer a divine gift but a feared curse. Srikara Sudarshana and his fellow priests are, quite simply, afraid of the water.

Killing the River
The story of the Vrishabhavathi’s transformation, from pure bubbling sacred stream to its present incarnation as a stinking “nala,” or drainage channel for solid waste, is the stuff of Srikara Sudharshana’s nightmares.

Ancient stone edicts and colonial documents of the region mention the sparkling river Vrishabhavathi — “rising from a bull’s hoof” — as originating from the hoof of an ancient, sacred, monolithic bull sculpture in the south of the city. Another, lesser-known origin point of the river was a temple tank with an eternal stream also dedicated to the sacred bull, in the north of the city. After being forgotten for decades, the temple tank was accidentally unearthed in the late 1990s, when I happened to be in the city exploring the idea of wonder through ritual activity.

Until the 18^th century when the city was young, the river’s many tributaries, streams and rills formed a watery network as they flowed through Bengaluru, irrigating fields and providing drinking water for the inhabitants. But by the late 19th century, the city was a colonial center, and the river was mapped, dammed, and rechanneled by British colonial administrators to provide water for the mills and military encampments they located in Bengaluru.

With Indian Independence in 1947, Bengaluru became a growing center of science and technology development, manufacturing everything from rocket ships to watches. Today, Bengaluru is one of the fastest growing cities in Asia, home to the Tech industry, the “Silicon Valley” of India, and tagged number one as the “most dynamic city” by the World Economic Forum. Ringed by clogged highways leading to steel and glass “software parks” housing the global campuses of Fortune 500 companies, Bengaluru has doubled in size in 20 years, to over 12 million inhabitants. Bengaluru’s smokeless success, based on attracting global information and biotech companies, has been retold so frequently that it has taken on a magical, mythic quality of its own.

This growth has attracted migrants to Bengaluru and created conflicts between“newcomers,” who outnumber“locals”in the urban neighborhoods all over the city. To cater to these migrants, small industries and businesses such as car repair shops, beauty shops, restaurants, printing businesses, paper mills, cloth mills, chemical plants, plywood and soap factories, tanneries and distilleries, have sprung up everywhere. They are often unlicensed and unregulated.

Flooded temple

The Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board, overburdened by the city’s waste, has thoughtlessly connected the sewer lines to the river. Taking their cue from the city, the factories along the river’s banks in the Peenya Industrial estate upriver, silently release their effluents into the water at night, while they deny culpability to ecological watchdog groups in the day. Samples of water from the channel reveal evidence of heavy metals, toxic substances, and acids causing health concerns. Dead fish float on the dying river, and feral dogs roam its charred banks.

As city ecologist Harini Nagendra notes, these heartbreaking ecological violences including polluting of ground water, cutting of trees, water theft, and an escalating cycle of flood and drought, are leading to extreme water scarcity in Bengaluru. The city is predicted to face a water crisis of epic and incendiary proportions — a day zero when the water taps in the city are predicted to run dry) — in two short years.

This ecological evisceration of sacred water bodies is a global scourge that has accompanied development. Industrial capitalism, as sociologist Max Weber argued, relies on an extractive ethos that strips the world of its supernatural dimensions. Indeed, it seems that capitalism and development are stronger even than the divine power of Hindu gods and goddesses. Capitalism has rendered the priests’ rituals impotent and encouraged political corruption. With development there has been a loss of resources, of community stakeholdership, of responsibility, and of autonomy. And both together have made the waters of the Vrishabhavathi river undrinkable.

The Moral Justice of Thirst
A time of thirst is upon us all. Urban water scarcity is the biggest crisis of the Anthropocene. Cities with a majority poor population like Cape Town and Flint, and those that are growing rapidly like Los Angeles, Bengaluru, Beijing and London, are on the path to ongoing drought or violent floods. As Anna Tsing notes, we all live in a “disturbance regime” of “blasted landscapes.” The World Wildlife Fund estimates that by 2025 two thirds of the world population will face severe water shortages. The urgency of climate justice and water security concerns are obvious and looming.

On June 19, 2018, the National Institute for Transforming India (NITI), an Indian Government think tank, warned that India’s water shortage will worsen and is likely to adversely impact some 600 million people, most of them women and the poor. By 2030, India (home to one seventh of the world’s population) stands to double its yet unmet water needs. Water wars will undoubtedly erupt between those who have access to clean water and those who don’t, those who pollute common water sources like the Vrishabhavathi river and those who rely on them.

Today, the Vrishabhavathi river froths daily, its greenish-yellow suds popping, its banks squelchy with dark fluids. Residents south of the nala, who used to till small market gardens of vegetables in the water, now report falling ill frequently with gasteroenteritis, bronchitis, skin diseases, coughs and other lung diseases. They make sure their animals don’t go into the river. And nobody dares drink from the sacred river, regardless of how thirsty they might be.

Are we now in a permanently thirsty, fiery, post-ecological epoch as Greta Thunberg suggested at Davos 2020? Are we heading towards a post-life era? Can we begin the moral work of undoing toxic development?

Temples to Rubbish
Bengaluru is not an exception; all of India has a toxicity problem. Its cities quiver with mountains of rubbish, and its lakes, rivers and streams are awash with factory pollutants, detergent runoff and sewage sludge. At its inception, the Modi government used this encroaching dirt as a potent symbol, suggesting we “wipe India clean” with their  Swach Bharath campaign to make India “clean and pure” in the 21^st century. Photo ops of ministers symbolically sweeping city streets flooded the newspapers.

But six years since the Modi government took office, little has been done. Every day, new stories of land thieves and water pirates make headlines in newspapers as the commons are privatized for profit, particularly the forests and waters owned or utilized by poor and lower caste groups.

In the general election in 2018, the Modi government won a resounding majority by ignoring rising pollution. Rather, they politicized the scarcity of water resources as a soul-of-the-nation battle with Pakistan, and instead of focusing on the protection of Indian air and water resources —ecological custodianship implicit in Hinduism’s great myths and epics —  the government focused their blunt policies on Indian prosperity and development amid proud calls for “a new India” — an exclusively Hindu nation where non-Hindus would be marginalized—a Swacch Bharath of a different sort.

What Then?
In the six months since the election, the Modi government has been on a whirlwind cleaning project to build this “new India”— enacting and redacting constitutional laws in an attempt to delimit Indian citizenship. As a result, there have been riots in Assam, Kashmir has been cut off from the rest of the world, and student unrest has broken out all over the country.

In this chaotic world, the gods become more important. People pray, more fearful and uncertain of the future. In November 2019, an article in The Economic Times went viral with photos of devotees praying, knee deep in the Yamuna river near the capital city of Delhi, surrounded by growing clouds of toxic foam. At the same time, the air pollution in North India was so extreme that devotees dressed their deities in air filtration masks.

Is it surprising then, that in this new India, people are falling chronically ill? Is it surprising that the goddesses of water such as Ganga, and gods of the air like Vayu, are choking and sick? Maybe in this new India, the Hindu gods and goddesses will decide it just isn’t worth staying.

What then?

The Waters of Hope
I confess, I have family and friends who are torn over what they see as eroding Hindu pride. For in this new India, Hinduism is relegated to performing endless elaborate rituals and expressing a divisive, nationalistic rhetoric. It is not a vital theological or dynamic ecological construct, but a cramped and angry political and ideological tool used to (once more) divide neighbors and friends.

But now in this undeniably fulcrum moment I ask, could it be an opportunity to think of a different way to revitalize Hindu pride? Is it time to recognize that the waters and air of the earth are cosmological forces that, once spoiled, are irretrievable, and that in their presence they give and sustain life? Can these waters quench the fires of hatred and distrust, birth hope and flow to justice instead?

Indeed, I am hopeful that Hinduism can offer us a new imaginative geo-political theology for this growing eco-apocalypse. Hinduism can propose a language to think of this eco-catastrophe in religious terms, without being fatalistic or exclusionary. For the very essence of Hinduism— that of earthly custodianship and ecological care — is beyond any single religion, and vitalizes a pan-Indian culture that can emancipate us from the dangers of unthinking development and discrimination.

Tulasi Srinivas is Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at Emerson College in Boston. She is the author of several monographs including most recently, The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder (Duke University press, 2018). Her current research project is The Missing Goddess: Women, Water and Violence in Urban India. She has held recent fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute and the Luce-American Council of Learned Societies.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out this short documentary film, The Burning Lake, by Tulasi Srivinas.

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

The post Bathing the Gods in Bottled Water: An Account of Climate Change and Faith appeared first on The Revealer.

My book, Abusing Religion (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming July 2020), looks at stories about abuse in American minority religious groups. These stories share a common thread: they depict the violation of white American women and children at the hands of religious minorities. And they have inspired massive — indeed, staggeringly disproportionate — responses from the American public through law enforcement, media coverage, targeted legislation, and congressional actions.

This series for the Revealer introduces three stories of abuse in minority religious communities, how they caught the public’s attention, and why they still shape Americans’ thinking about religion and sexual violence. The first installment traced links between Mormon fundamentalists, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, and the American public’s fascination with polygyny.[1] The second considered American Muslims, race, and the “Not Without My Daughter problem.” This final piece explains how Michelle Remembers, a fantastic tale about one girl’s battle with Satan, ignited a global moral panic over religious difference and child sexual abuse.[2]

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In the 1980s and early 1990s, psychologists, law enforcement officials, nationally syndicated talk show hosts, and at least one sitting U.S. senator[3] believed Satanists were corrupting our nation’s youth through predatory childcare centers, encrypted rock music, and tabletop gaming systems that could serve as literal gateways to hell.

No, really.

Americans who did not live through the 1980s might be surprised to learn about our country’s decade-long, nationwide fascination with the occult, but it did happen.

There was widespread anxiety about sinister influences infiltrating childcare facilities, schools, the entertainment industry, and all levels of government. At the height of this moral panic, many otherwise-average Americans suspected wealthy and powerful figures of nefariously conspiring to abuse and abduct our nation’s youth for pornography, prostitution, and ritual sacrifices.[4]

The FBI spent nearly a decade and almost a million dollars investigating allegations that led to the so-called Satanic Panic – only to conclude that no evidence of satanic ritual abuse existed. How, then, could so many have been convinced of a global plot to harm children and recruit them to Satan’s service? Experts point to the publication of one woman’s recovered memories of abuse, Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder’s Michelle Remembers, as the origin point for America’s pernicious paranormal paranoia.

Pazder and Smith promoted Michelle Remembers across North America, led workshops for law enforcement, mental health providers, and social workers, and sparked a fear of Satan into the hearts of millions of Americans. This demonic phenomenon is seldom acknowledged today, much less recognized as a watershed in the history of American religions.[5] To understand how a Satanic Panic swept the nation only to be swept under the rug a few decades later, it’s important to know a bit about the political, religious, and popular culture landscape of the 1980s and early 1990s. 

SATANIC PANIC 

Anton LaVey

It’s no coincidence that Americans became fixated on cosmic struggles between Good and Evil in the 1980s. The 1960s and 1970s saw a dramatic spike in American religious innovation, including the emergence of many new religious movements (which outsiders often denounced as “cults”). These innovative religious groups included confessional Satanists, among which both Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan and its breakaway counterpart, Michael Aquino’s Temple of Set, were known for their publicity-grabbing antics.[6]

Unsurprisingly, religious Satanism was met with strenuous public opposition from conservative Christians – many of whom were building coalitions to flex unprecedented religious influence in the American political arena. As the New Christian Right, many conservative, primarily white Christians set themselves against what they perceived as national moral decline. They believed evil was at work in the world, evidenced in behaviors like unrepentant queerness, seeking access to contraception and abortion, working out of the home while female, and exhibiting a suspicious fondness for rock music or role-playing games, among other threats to national security.

We can see this Good (read: white conservative Christian) v. Evil (read: everyone else) mentality at work in Reagan’s “Evil Empire Speech” to the National Association of Evangelicals. These remarks include Reagan, whose election owed much to white conservative Christian politicking, calling the then-Soviet Union an “evil empire” and describing the tension between the US and the USSR as “the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” Reagan’s rhetoric reflected broader trends in New Christian Right fearmongering: televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell spoke of American Christians “fighting a holy war,” while author Hal Lindsey warned that Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. But concerns about demonic assaults on the American family were by no means limited to the New Christian Right or even solely to confessed Christians.

The Satanic Panic was a broad and pervasive cultural anxiety about the (presumably secular) interests, inclinations, and activities of young Americans. High-profile talk shows and nightly news programs warned parents about the dangers of hard rock and heavy metal music, commonly thought to contain “backmasked” messages that, when played in reverse, would encourage listeners to hail Satan. The popularity of tabletop gaming systems like Dungeons and Dragons was likewise suspect, as news programs like 20/20 cautioned that such games might actually be “intense occult training.” For many late twentieth century Americans, Evil was not an abstract ethical concept. Evil was a material reality, and it was coming for their kids.

At the same time, 1980s America also saw a sharp uptick in concern about child welfare, especially geared toward the prevention of child sexual abuse. Child abuse became a national issue in the early 1960s: both Newsweek and Time published stories on the domestic abuse of children in 1962; that same year, Congress amended the Social Security Act to include the first federal provisions for child protection.[7] Child sexual abuse would not garner substantive national attention until the late 1970s; according to sociologist David Finkelhor, “between 1977 and 1978 almost every national magazine had run a story highlighting the horrors of children’s sexual abuse.”[8]

But it was not until the 1980s that American media coverage and activist outreach began a sustained conversation about acknowledging and preventing the sexual abuse of children. Child abuse reports nearly doubled from the 1970s to the 1980s; this decade saw significant governmental and cultural resources directed toward the prevention of child sexual abuse.[9] Strangely, awareness and funding of these efforts owed much to the publication and dissemination of Michelle Smith’s account of surviving satanic ritual abuse, as presented in her book Michelle Remembers. Americans of the 1980s, it seems, were ready to credit and respond to accounts of child sexual abuse – so long as the alleged perpetrators were demonic cultists like the ones Smith “remembered.”

WHY MICHELLE MATTERS

Michelle Remembers (1980) was the earliest and most influential narrative of satanic ritual abuse. It is a firsthand account of how Michelle “Smith” survived captivity, torture, and molestation by a group of devil-worshipping cultists, including her mother, a local coven led by a man named Malachi, and the “Church of Satan.”[10] Smith “recovered” her memories of these atrocities under the guidance of her coauthor, therapist, and eventual husband, Dr. Lawrence Pazder. [11] Michelle Remembers would eventually sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Following the book’s publication, Smith and Pazder emerged as the world’s foremost specialists in satanic ritual abuse.

Scholars are nearly unanimous in identifying Michelle Remembers as the spark that lit the torches Americans would carry against their imaginary demonic foes. Pazder and Smith travelled across North American to promote their work, giving radio interviews and appearing on television talk shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Donahue, Geraldo, and 20/20. The authors directed seminars for mental healthcare professionals, who in turn diagnosed hundreds of women with ritual abuse-related maladies.

Pazder and Smith’s efforts to publicize their work directly contributed to the proliferation of satanic ritual abuse allegations. As Robert Hicks of the US Justice Department noted in a 1990 interview: “before Michelle Remembers there were no [s]atanic prosecutions involving children. Now the myth is everywhere.”^[12] Pazder and Smith trained social workers and law enforcement officers to look for satanic crimes, providing informational materials and leading workshops that popularized ritual abuse as a motive in hundreds of criminal investigations.

Pazder and Smith also served as expert witnesses on numerous — Pazder claimed upwards of one thousand — cases of alleged child ritual abuse. Smith gave expert testimony and guided psychological evaluations of children who, under intense interrogation by prosecutors and psychologists persuaded by Pazder and Smith’s work, bore witness to satanic ritual abuse. The most infamous of these cases was the McMartin Preschool Trial, which numbers among the longest and most expensive criminal trials in American history.

There was nothing of Satan in the allegations that inspired the initial McMartin Preschool inquest. Before Smith and Pazder involved themselves in the case, the McMartin parents primarily focused their allegations that Raymond Buckey had sexually assaulted one or more of the children enrolled at McMartin Preschool. But the case started receiving national attention in February 1984 – at which point Pazder and Smith offered their services, and the children’s testimony became decidedly demonic. Michelle Remembers and its authors shaped investigators’ questions, prosecutors’ agendas, and the public’s understanding of the case specifically in terms of ritual abuse.[13] Childcare professionals like Virginia McMartin, her daughter, and her son-in-law found themselves facing extensive and devastating lawsuits accusing them of abusing their charges for diabolical reasons.

McMartin became the first of more than one hundred cases in which children alleged coercion into “devil worship, open graves, cannibalism, airplane trips, nude photography, being urinated or defecated on, and murdering babies.”^[14] McMartin and her family all vehemently denied having abused the children in their care.^[15] No material evidenced ever surfaced to corroborate their child-accusers’ accounts.[16]

There is likewise no evidence to support Smith’s memories of being ritually abused by her mother or the Church of Satan.[17] Church of Satan founder and high priest Anton LaVey threatened the authors with a lawsuit for libel following the publication of Michelle Remembers. (Pazder withdrew the allegation.) The book is also riddled with inconsistencies. Maclean’s, a popular Canadian magazine, published a scathing debunking shortly after Michelle Remembers’ release, in which Smith’s father and sisters challenged and denounced Smith’s memories. But attempts to discredit the authors did little to diminish the work’s popularity – and their continued influence in law enforcement and mental health circles lent credibility to otherwise unbelievable accusations.[18]

AFTER MICHELLE

Fears of satanic machinations in American schools, daycare facilities, homes, and seats of government spread like wildfire throughout the 1980s. Many women publicly identified with Smith’s memories of ritual abuse, resulting in the publication of more than fifty first-person accounts of satanic ritual abuse, beginning in the late 1980s and continuing to this day.[19] The 1988 edition of The Courage to Heal, a popular self-help book most recently republished in 2008, suggested abuse survivors might repress traumatic memories only to recover them later in life, often with the help of a mental health professional. This version—and only this version—of The Courage to Heal also includes suggestions from “cult cop” Sandi Gallant on how to recognize satanic ritual abuse; Gallant identifies Pazder as the foremost expert on the ritual abuse phenomenon.

Despite widespread credence lent to these kinds of accusations, no evidence emerged to corroborate a single accusation of satanic ritual abuse. After eight years and $750,000 of taxpayer money, federal investigator Kenneth V. Lanning reported in 1992 that he could find no evidence of ritual abuse in the United States. Lanning expressed concern that the Satanic Panic would compromise the credibility of children’s sexual assault allegations and outrage that “individuals are getting away with molesting children because we cannot prove they are satanic devil worshipers who engage in brainwashing, human sacrifice, and cannibalism as part of a large conspiracy.”

This is one of the most challenging aspects of studying Michelle Remembers’ legacy: A ludicrous, unproveable story drew unprecedented and much needed attention to the crisis of child sex abuse. As Louise Armstrong notes in Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics, “it may have taken satanic images and triple sixes and cannibalized infants and pentagrams and chanting from the Dark Side—but we’d finally gotten the sense of something bad going on.” At the same time, the Satanic Panic diverted blame for child sex abuse away from its proven perpetrators—family members and acquaintances—onto a demonic global conspiracy. Or, as Armstrong puts it: “you could also look at it this way: the tormenting and raping of children by ordinary familial human agency just hadn’t been bad enough.” Despite an absolute absence of evidence, accusations of satanic ritual abuse had startling tenacity. In fact, attempts to debunk these accusations often led to further dissemination of the accusations – as is often the case with conspiracy theories.

Journalists and therapists who expressed skepticism about a global conspiracy that used animal mutilations, infant sacrifice, and child sex abuse faced ridicule and threats. Families of people who recovered memories of ritual abuse—mistakenly, it would now seem—were ripped apart. Hundreds of people accused of satanically-motivated crimes spent decades imprisoned under false pretenses and went bankrupt trying to prove their innocence.

In the wake of the McMartin Preschool trial, hundreds of other daycare workers were interrogated and dozens convicted for ritual abuse-related crimes, the only evidence for which was the coerced testimony of young children. Notably, in the cases of Kelly Michaels, Bernard Baran, and the San Antonio Four, a group of Texas women who spent nearly 15 years in prison following wrongful felony convictions for child sexual assault after a trial in which the prosecution cited the defendants’ homosexuality as further support for the accusations of ritual abuse. They were not released until 2016 and did not have their criminal records expunged until December 2018. The Satanic Panic might be over, but its memory continues to haunt the American political landscape.

Consider, for example, Pizzagate: the viral 2016 election cycle conspiracy theory that high-ranking members of the Clinton campaign were trafficking children through D.C. area pizzerias. (Again: really.) The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department thoroughly refuted Pizzagate, but disinformation from InfoWars, YouTube videos, and reddit threads (as well as convicted felon and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn)  spread this theory relentlessly. In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch fired an assault rifle into the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in response to Pizzagate fearmongering. Thousands of others like Welch remained convinced that DC pizza restaurants are trafficking kids. Comet Ping Pong still receives threatening phone calls about their supposed trafficking activities. With its lurid and incredible tales of children captured and subjected to unspeakable sex abuse, Pizzagate has inspired several think pieces on the legacy of the Satanic Panic.

These kinds of “strange, fevered imaginings,” like Pizzagate and the Satanic Panic, seem almost too incredible to believe – but they do happen. Shots are fired, people are imprisoned, families are destroyed because of the American public’s misplaced and willfully misinformed convictions that we abuse children, not in normal mainstream American households, but in the dark, shadowy recesses of our nation’s underbelly.

Michelle Remembers was that rarest of tales: a story about child sex abuse that is not only believed but inspires massive action to identify and prevent further sex abuse from happening. It is telling that a story involving the physical appearance of Satan himself seemed so credible to so many American readers, while hundreds of less fantastic accounts of sexual abuse go ignored for decades.

This case study, and Abusing Religion as a whole, asks us to consider which stories about abuse we believe, and more importantly, which stories about abuse we choose to act upon. As a nation, we protect ourselves (or think we do) by telling ourselves stories about what happens when we do sex and religion wrong. These kinds of stories make us feel safe, because—incredibly—it’s easier to believe in a global satanic conspiracy than to confront our own relatives, partners, and acquaintances as abusers.

Sex abuse is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one. The problem of religious sex abuse is so much bigger than religion. Religious belonging can make abusive situations and relationships harder to escape. Religion can make it harder to recognize abuse as such. Religious communities frequently protect abusers while denying and enabling abuse, creating conditions of possibility for abuse, allowing abuse to flourish.[20] But religion does not cause abuse.

Abuse is not something that only happens on the margins of our society. It happens everywhere. It happens always. It can happen to any of us—though some of us are more likely to be believed, more likely to survive abuse than others. We need to stop blaming abuse on religion, on anything other than people being willing to exploit other people’s vulnerabilities. We need to ask ourselves why only certain stories inspire action, and resist stories that make us feel safe because we imagine it could not happen to us.

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[1] Polygamy refers to any marriage of multiple partners and is the most common term used by outsiders to describe Mormon fundamentalist plural marriage. But Mormon fundamentalist plural marriages are exclusively polygynist, marriages of one man to multiple women. Mormon fundamentalist doctrine permits — and in some cases encourages — this form of “plural marriage” while proscribing polyandry, the marriage of one woman to multiple men. See Doctrine and Covenants 132: 54-55.

[2] “Moral panic” refers to an intense public reaction to an issue or group perceived to threat a culture’s social order. Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics in particular has shaped my understanding of these phenomena.

[3] Spoilers: it was Jesse Helms. In 1985, he played the entirety of 20/20’s “The Devil Worshippers: Exposing Satan’s Underground” for the US Senate in an attempt to ensure Congress would allot no federal funds nor afford tax-exempt status to “any cult, organization, or other group that has a purpose, or that has any interest in, the promoting of satanism or witchcraft.” See Senator Helms speaking on HR 3036, 99th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 131 (September 26, 1985): S 25077–25080.

[4] And some less ordinary Americans as well, including Joan Baez, who released an album and title track entitled “Play Me Backwards,” in reference to the ritual abuse scare; and Gloria Steinem, who donated to the McMartin Preschool investigation. Ms. Magazine, founded by Steinem, also ran a cover story called “Believe It! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists” in their January/February 1993 edition (though this volume is not available for purchase in the Feminist Majority’s archive).

[5] There are exceptions, of course: see Maurice Chammah’s work for the Marshall Project and Gary Cartwright’s 2009 update to his 1994 Texas Monthly article on Fran and Dan Keller, as well as Michael Hall’s “Hysteria” (2009, Texas Monthly).

[6] Not to be confused with the Satanic Temple, which publicly advocates for reproductive justice and state disestablishment.

[7] “When They’re Angry,” Newsweek, April 16, 1962; “Battered Child Syndrome,” Time, July 20, 1962.

[8] Content warning for explicit descriptions of child sexual abuse in Sexually Victimized Children, as you might imagine.

[9] This widespread concern about child abuse prevention is, by the way, why Big Bird’s historically imaginary friend Mr. Snuffleupagus became visible to Sesame Street’s non-avian residents in 1985: the show’s creators and producers worried a storyline that portrayed grownups not believing children might make think twice about reporting abuse. Illinois Public Media’s television program director conjectures that the show’s executive producer might have been directly responding to the McMartin Preschool Trial, but I’ve been unable to find further corroboration on this.

[10] Smith’s legal surname was Proby until she and Pazder divorced their respective spouses and married each other. The events Smith recalled would have taken place in 1954; Anton LaVey did not found the the Church of Satan until 1966.

[11] Psychogenic amnesia (better known as repressed memories) is a condition under which the patient suppresses traumatic memories. Psychiatric professionals are now more likely to diagnose patients with “false memory syndrome,” a condition often caused by repressed memory therapy that produces “memories” of events that never occurred.

[12] Allen and Midwinter, “Michelle Remembers: The Debunking of a Myth.”

[13] Police reports show that Pazder was convinced of a massive international satanic conspiracy: “anybody could be involved in this plot,” Pazder insisted, “including teachers, doctors, movie stars, merchants, even…members of the Anaheim Angels baseball team.” Ellis, Raising the Devil, 117.

[14] Wright, Remembering Satan, 73.

[15] Ibid., 40-1.

[16] Ibid., 116.

[17] While Smith’s “recovered” memories did not play a key role in the McMartin trial, by the end of the decade numerous women would claim to have recovered similar memories. Like Smith, these women recovered/created memories of satanic ritual abuse at the direction of mental health professionals – usually to their detriment. Relatively few psychologists and psychiatrists diagnosed patients with ritual abuse-related maladies. But those few therapists were responsible for hundreds of diagnoses, and their criteria for these diagnoses followed a script set by Smith, Pazder, and Michelle Remembers. See Goodwin, “They Couldn’t Get My Soul: Recovered Memories, Ritual Abuse, and the Specter(s) of Religious Difference.”

[18] Allegations included charges that McMartin employees had forced children in their care to participate in “the ritualistic ingestion of feces, urine, blood, semen, and human flesh; the disinterment and mutilation of corpses; the sacrifices of infants; and the orgies with their day care providers, costumed as devils and witches, in the classrooms, in tunnels under the center, and in car washes, airplanes, mansions, cemeteries, hotels, ranches, gourmet food stores, local gyms, churches, and hot air balloons.” de Young, “The Devil Goes to Day Care,” 21.

[19] Most of these come through cottage or vanity presses; many are of part of the growing industry in Christian “spiritual warfare.” But a handful have been published by credible scholarly presses, including the University of Toronto, Routledge, and Lexington.

[20] Sarah Imhoff, “The Myth of Secular Law as Savior,” The Immanent Frame, February 12, 2019, https://tif.ssrc.org/2019/02/12/the-myth-of-secular-law-as-savior/.

***

Megan Goodwin (Ph.D. UNC 2014) is a scholar of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and contemporary American minority religions. She is the Program Director of Sacred Writes: Public Scholarship in Religion, a Luce-funded project hosted by Northeastern University, committed to amplifying the voices of experts who often go unheard in public discourse. Her current book project,  Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religion (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming July 2020), explores the coding of religious difference as sexual danger. Her next project considers the ways contemporary American whiteness is (or feels) threatened by Muslims and Islam. Follow her on twitter at @mpgphd.

***

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

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Dear Revealer readers,

Welcome to our first issue of 2020! We have several exciting things planned for the new year to share with you.

First, this year the Revealer will publish two themed special issues. Our first special issue, “Religion and Sex Abuse: Within and Beyond the Catholic Church,” comes out in March 2020. The issue will feature eight articles that explore religion and sex abuse from angles not often covered elsewhere, such as a focus on race and abuse within the Catholic Church, the perspective of Native American Catholics, and the role the media has played in re-victimizing survivors. The issue will also examine complicated issues of sex abuse within American Protestant, Jewish, and Hindu communities. Taken together, we believe the special issue will illuminate important insights and raise the bar for how we discuss this pervasive crisis.

Our second special issue will take a different tone and focus on “Religion and Fashion.” Our fashion issue will come out in September and feature articles that address Black Muslim men’s fashion, conservative Christian clothing styles, the mainstreaming of the hijab, the queer religious aesthetics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and more.

Next, we are thrilled to announce the launch of the Revealer podcast! We are releasing the premiere episode the first week of April. Each episode will coincide with the publication of our online magazine. The podcast will feature conversations with Revealer writers and offer an additional way to bring you insights about religion and our world.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

In addition to these new developments, we are excited to continue publishing ten issues each year that provide in-depth analysis of crucial topics. Our February issue exemplifies the breadth of what the Revealer covers. In it, we feature the final installment of Megan Goodwin’s “Abusing Religion” series with “Michelle Remembers and the Satanic Panic,” an article about how Americans at the end of the twentieth century displaced blame for child abuse onto imagined Satanic cults.

We are also publishing two articles in this issue about a topic many consider the most pressing of our time: the climate crisis. In the article “Bathing the Gods in Bottled Water: An Account of Climate Change and Faith,” Tulasi Srinivas examines how Hindus in India are dealing with sacred rivers that long served as sites for the gods, but that are now too polluted for people. And, in an excerpt from her book, Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue, Sarah McFarland Taylor shows how popular culture, consumerism, and capitalism work together to make people feel like their individual acts of environmental virtue make a difference even though most evidence suggests we need vastly larger-scale government, corporate, and NGO actions to save our planet.

Our February issue also takes a look at the politics of race, religion, and Americanness. In “Unsovereign Love: Thoughts on Race, Sex, and Undoing an Evangelical Education of Feeling,” Amaryah Shaye Armstrong reflects on the racial dynamics at play in a recent, and extremely popular, story about an ex-lesbian evangelical Christian. And, in “With Limits: Dusk Sets on the American Frontier,” Ed Simon reviews Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America and considers how the lore of the American frontier promoted a white supremacist vision that gave way to today’s calls for a border wall.

The Revealer prides itself on showcasing topnotch commentary about religion by a wide range of experts, journalists, and scholars. We are excited to bring you our February issue about some of today’s pressing concerns and to provide you with new formats to engage with the Revealer.

Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: New Year, New Things, and Pressing Issues appeared first on The Revealer.