During its heyday from the 1890-1910, the newspaper engaged ordinary American Protestants from across the United States in philanthropic efforts to assuage all kinds of affliction: from hunger and homelessness among New York City’s unemployed, or poverty and lack of opportunity among formerly enslaved communities in the American South, to disease and destitution among survivors of massacres in Armenia, warfare in Cuba, and famine, flood, or earthquake in India, China, Scandinavia, Macedonia, Japan, Italy, and Mexico. No other aid agency in this period – not even the American Red Cross – came close to matching the Christian Herald’s fund-raising record or ability to arouse popular concern for suffering within the United States and around the globe.

By analyzing the strategies the publication employed to inspire sympathy, collect money, and provide relief for victims of political violence, economic crisis, and natural disaster, Holy Humanitarians offers an account of how evangelical media and its consumers contributed to the development of American philanthropy from the late nineteenth century to the present. Excerpted below are several pages from the book’s introduction.

***

On a steamy summer day in July 1866, fourteen-year-old Louis Klopsch stood in the middle of the Beaver Street cigar shop in lower Manhattan, his body covered with blood and drenched in sweat. Just after he had opened the store for business, an excited Klopsch told his employer, four men had tried to steal a large quantity of cigars. Not “the kind of chap to let such a proceeding go on without a protest,” the boy attacked the would-be robbers with a piece of broken glass and a desperate fight ensued. Eventually, he succeeded in driving the thieves out. Although the store was a mess, Klopsch was unharmed; and his grateful employer offered him a “handsome sum” of twenty-five dollars as a reward for his heroism.^[1]

Several days later, the burglars were back – this time in greater force. Undaunted, the courageous Klopsch grabbed a crowbar and beat the six intruders until he had “broken the skulls” of two men and chased them all off. Now, the shopkeeper became alarmed – perhaps these criminals intended personal violence against him. He called the police. When the investigators searched the premises, they discovered a suspicious sac that contained traces of blood hidden in the water closet. Putting this piece of evidence together with their doubts about Klopsch’s story, the police questioned the boy again. Realizing that he had been caught, the young man confessed to having “gone to a butcher’s shop, filled a bladder with blood, and, returning to the store, scattered it about the floor and walls.”^[2]

The tales of the attempted robberies were entirely false. Klopsch was arrested on a charge of malicious mischief and after a brief incarceration released into the care of his physician father, who blamed his son’s exploits on drinking too much strong coffee and reading newspapers that filled his mind with imaginings. He “thinks to be something large,” the elder Klopsch lamented – like the characters he encountered in the “liar books” that an irresponsible aunt gave him to read.^[3]

Despite his prodigal adolescence, which included several more run-ins with the law culminating in a two-year term in Sing Sing State Prison for forgery and insurance fraud, Louis Klopsch did become something large.^[4] By the time of his death in 1910, Klopsch was hailed as “one of the historic figures in the annals of civilization” – a “friend of all humanity” whose “genius in the organization of benevolences” made him “the greatest inspirational force in the Christian homes of America” and “a blessing to mankind.” As a pioneer in pictorial journalism and proprietor of the New York-based weekly newspaper the Christian Herald from 1890 onward, Klopsch took advantage of new printing and photographic technologies to publicize humanitarian crises at home and abroad. By deftly coupling vivid images and graphic narratives of suffering near and far with appeals to biblical injunctions about almsgiving and deep-seated millennial expectations about the United States’ role as a redeemer nation, Klopsch induced readers to open their “hearts . . . hands . . . purses . . . and granaries” to “feed the hungry, to send or carry aid to the sick, and to spread the Gospel message everywhere.”^[5]

With Klopsch at the helm, the Christian Herald became the most widely read religious newspaper in the world and “a chosen channel of individual and collective benevolence for the Lord’s people of all denominations,” raising millions of dollars for the suffering and needy of every land through a relentless succession of relief campaigns. For his work as “an almoner of nations in distress,” Klopsch was awarded the Kaiser I-Hind medal of the first class by King Edward of England in 1904 and decorated in 1907 by Emperor Meiji of Japan with the Order of the Rising Sun. His biographer described Klopsch’s life story as a “Romance of a Modern Knight of Mercy” that would inspire future generations of good Samaritans: “The voice that is silent yet speaks as with a thousand tongues through the good works that go on.”

***

Despite his extraordinary contributions to the fields of domestic charity and foreign aid, Louis Klopsch has been mostly overlooked by subsequent generations of philanthropists and scholars. Several studies do mention the Christian Herald’s involvement in international disaster assistance campaigns at the turn of the twentieth century, but few historians have recognized the newspaper as a major force in shaping the humanitarian sentiments and habits of the American public during this period of increasing globalization and United States expansionism.^[6]

This omission results in part from the fact that the relief and development work of rival aid agencies such as the American Red Cross (ARC) and large philanthropic institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation eventually overshadowed the Christian Herald’s endeavors to assuage affliction. The copious archives of these competing organizations and their leading lights – celebrated figures such as Clara Barton, Frederick Taylor Gates, and John D. Rockefeller – have provided scholars with abundant materials for charting their participation in the development of American humanitarianism. Other than copies of the newspaper itself, several laudatory biographies of Klopsch and his associates, and a few accounts scattered in government documents or other periodicals, records of the Christian Herald’s remarkably effective efforts to engage American Protestants in massive international relief campaigns and a wide array of domestic charities have not survived.[7]

Louis Klopsch

Although this paucity of sources makes chronicling the Christian Herald’s seminal role in the expansion of American benevolence challenging, recovering this history provides a corrective to scholarly narratives that stress the increasing secularization of philanthropy during the Progressive Era. According to many studies, the rising influence of scientific authority and emphasis on professional expertise resulted in the decline of traditional modes of religious charity around the turn of the twentieth century. Some historians have argued that with the establishment of corporate foundations, the growth of the welfare state, and the development of the humanitarian aid industry in subsequent decades, alleviating suffering became the province of wealthy donors, government officials, and trained social workers rather than the responsibility of local congregations, benevolent organizations, or Christian missionaries. Furthermore, as the United States became more religiously heterogeneous, secular relief and development agencies gained an advantage over sectarian charities and eventually came to dominate the fields of domestic philanthropy and foreign aid.[8]

By telling the forgotten story of the Bowery Mission’s benefactor and his efforts to assuage affliction both at home and abroad, this book offers an alternative account of American humanitarianism. Examining the benevolent enterprises of Louis Klopsch and his colleagues illumines the fascinating but unfamiliar figures who fostered a tremendously popular faith-based movement with an enduring influence on the practice of philanthropy. Although the Christian Herald’s relief campaigns may have been eclipsed by massive charitable foundations, professionalized social work, and state-sponsored aid programs, the newspaper’s grassroots, volunteer, and unapologetically evangelical approach to relieving suffering has remained compelling among a considerable portion of the American population to the present day.

Shedding light on the role of religious media in shaping the development of humanitarianism thus elucidates how and why ordinary people have engaged in efforts to aid the afflicted. Because so many scholars have focused on the work of corporate charities or government agencies in providing assistance for those in need, histories of American philanthropy have typically emphasized the contributions of business tycoons, social elites, and political leaders in founding prominent institutions: Andrew Carnegie and his various foundations for the advancement of education; Jane Addams and her settlement work at Hull House; or Herbert Hoover’s missions to aid starving Europeans after WWI through the American Relief Administration. Some accounts have analyzed the intellectual influences of social gospel theorists such as Walter Rauschenbusch or economic philosophers like Richard Ely. This study brings into view a different cast of characters. Tracing Louis Klopsch’s transformation from duplicitous convict to “captain of philanthropy” and proprietor of the world’s premier religious newspaper shows how an entrepreneurial publisher, his enterprising partners, and a diverse community of readers from all across the United States and every walk of life participated in the making of popular humanitarianism during a transitional period in American history.[9]

As the account of Klopsch’s youthful escapades suggests, his spectacular success in arousing sympathy for the poor, the downtrodden, and the distressed is anything but a straightforward saga of heroic self-sacrifice for the sake of suffering others. Like many tales of benevolent campaigns on behalf of “those less fortunate,” this history exposes how instances of exceptional generosity have been bound up with personal self-interest and broader political agendas; how charitable engagement has been shaped by a mix of sincere religious convictions, shrewd business calculations, and complex cultural presumptions; how even the best intentions often produce tragic outcomes; and how the practice of philanthropy has always involved the exercise of prejudice, privilege, and power.

***

[1] “Police Intelligence,” NYH, 12 August 1866: 5; and “Alleged Embezzlement and Forgery by a Boy,” NYH, 21 January 1867: 7.

[2] “Police Intelligence,” 5; and “Alleged Embezzlement,” 7.

[3] “Police Intelligence,” 5; and “Alleged Embezzlement,” 7.

[4] On Klopsch’s criminal record, see “Essex Market Police Court: A Life Insurance Swindle,” New York Herald, 6 January 1875: 11; “A Swindling Insurance Agent,” NYT, 7 January 1875: 10; “Louis Klopsch,” Inmate Admission Registers, 1865-1971, vol. 12 (January 1875) 120, Sing Sing Correctional Facility Institutional Records, NYSA; and Registers of Commitments to Prisons, 1842-1808, vol. 6 (January 1875), Records of the Governor’s Office, NYSA.

[5] “Dr. Klopsch Laid at Rest,” CH, March 23, 1910, p. 275-277 and 299-300; “Our Departed Chief,” CH, March 16, 1910, p. 256; “The Whole World Loved Him,” CH, March 30, 1910, p. 321 and 328, “Starving India’s Pitiful Cry for Bread,” CH, April 4, 1900, p. 286; “Louis Klopsch, Almoner,” Outlook, March 19, 1910, p. 94; “Dr. Klopsch Laid at Rest,” NYT, March 10, 1910, p. 9; and Charles M. Pepper, Life-work of Louis Klopsch: Romance of a Modern Knight of Mercy (New York: Christian Herald Association, 1910), 327.

[6] The most thorough discussion of the Christian Herald’s humanitarian work may be found in Merle Curti’s American Philanthropy Abroad: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963). Other studies that mention Klopsch and his associates include Julia Irwin, Making the World Safe: the American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Marian Moser Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Norris Magnuson, Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work, 1865-1920 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1977); George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century-Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Keith Pomakoy, Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011); Roger G. Robins, A.J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: the Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Ann Marie Wilson, “Taking Liberties Abroad: Americans and International Humanitarian Advocacy, 1821-1914” (PhD diss., Harvard, 2010).

[7] Important works in this vein include Foster Rhea Dulles, The American Red Cross: A History (New York: Harper, 1950); Irwin, Making the World Safe; Jones, American Red Cross; and Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the rise of American Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

[8] Literature on the histories of philanthropy, evangelical charity, and humanitarianism in the United States is well-developed and too extensive to cite comprehensively. While some scholars have differentiated among these terms, especially as their meanings changed over time, Klopsch and his associates used them interchangeably. Works that chart a shift from religious charity to scientific philanthropy, professional social work, and/or secular humanitarianism include Elizabeth N. Agnew, From Charity to Social Work: Mary E. Richmond and the Creation of an American Profession (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Jeremy Beer, The Philanthropic Revolution: An Alternative History of American Charity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Robert Bremner, American Philanthropy, 2^nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Peter Dobkin Hall, Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark McGarvie, eds., Charity, Philanthropy and Civility in American History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Brent Ruswick, Almost Worthy: the Poor, Paupers, and the Science of Charity in America, 1877-1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

[9] Studies that focus primarily on elites include Bremner, American Philanthropy; James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and many others. Curti’s American Philanthropy Abroad and Tyrrell’s Reforming the World are exceptions to this trend.

***

Heather D. Curtis is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at Tufts University, where she also holds adjunct appointments in History, American Studies, and the Tisch College of Civic Life. Curtis received her doctorate in the History of Christianity and American Religion from Harvard University. She is the author of Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860-1900 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) which was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer prize from the American Society of Church History for the best first book in the History of Christianity. Her recent book, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid (Harvard University Press, 2018) examines the crucial role popular religious media played in the extension of US aid at home and abroad from the late-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She is currently at work on a religious biography of Ida B. Wells. See heatherdcurtis.com for more details about her scholarship.

***

Excerpt adapted from Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid by Heather D. Curtis, published by Harvard University Press, Copyright ©2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The post Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid appeared first on The Revealer.

Steve Green in the basement of the Washington Design Center, which had recently been demolished as part of the construction for the Museum of the Bible. (The Washington Post via Getty Images.)

Opened in late 2017 near the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Museum of the Bible (MOTB) has alternately been a source of celebration or consternation among Bible experts nationwide. The museum has been mired in controversy for attempting to fuse evangelical Christian funding with a “non-sectarian” mission, being connected to illegal antiquities smuggling, and displaying forged Dead Sea Scrolls. The MOTB continues to draw attention not only from the popular press but also from biblical scholars, some of whom have been involved as advisors.

While the MOTB was once conceived as a missionary tool, in recent years the organization has presented itself principally as an educational and research institution that does not privilege any particular religious community. Many critics, including the present authors, have argued that despite MOTB leadership’s attempts to make it a “neutral” institution, the museum actually offers an evangelical understanding of the Bible. One might not be surprised, given that the principal funders and founders of the MOTB are the Green family, owners of craft store chain Hobby Lobby—well known for their evangelical beliefs and conservative political activism. Probably most famous for their Supreme Court victory against the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate in the U.S. Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), they now are up to more with the MOTB in tow.

In order to contextualize the MOTB in our present political moment, we must pay attention not only to what is in the museum or to the question of whether the MOTB is or can become “non-sectarian.” We must also be attuned to what is happening outside the museum walls. And, as we show in what follows, there is no question that the Greens are using the MOTB to make sectarian religious and political claims on the basis of the Bible. The MOTB as an institution is doing more than merely opening its doors to receive visitors interested in the Bible. It is also quietly supporting a new way to produce and legitimize claims of biblical expertise.

The Green family is using their patronage of the MOTB to authorize themselves as biblical interpreters in political and religious spheres, avoiding traditional forms of credentialing from church institutions or academic training.

While it might seem strange for the Greens to use philanthropy to make themselves biblical experts, such a project is the natural outgrowth of several trends within American evangelicalism. Evangelicals, like the early Protestant reformers, have long conceptualized the Bible as being able to speak directly to the individual believer, skirting officially sanctioned and trained church mediators. For some, this has created what Molly Worthen has called a “crisis of authority,” in which religious interpretations are validated through non-institutional mechanisms.

As the owners of a successful business, furthermore, the Greens are perceived by proponents of the Prosperity Gospel (a major segment of American Christianity) as uniquely blessed by God. As rich Christians who have used their wealth to support evangelical causes, the Greens have long been recognized as leaders within the evangelical movement, a fact well-documented by Candida Moss and Joel Baden.

The Green family is now leveraging their identity as “the founding family of the MOTB” to stake claims about the Bible in other spheres. More specifically, the Greens are using their roles in founding the museum as credentials to speak as experts on the Bible. In what follows, we show how various members of the Green family have used their connection to the MOTB to position themselves as experts who can speak authoritatively about the Bible in relation to high-stakes issues like the relationship between church and state, marriage, and gender roles.

***

In June 2018, to the outrage of many, then-attorney general Jeff Sessions invoked Romans 13 to justify the Trump administration’s child separation policy at the United States’ southern border.[1] One week prior to Sessions’ infamous Bible lesson, Michael McAfee, son-in-law to Steve Green and MOTB employee, delivered a speech on this same chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. He spoke at the Western Conservative Summit (WCS), an annual conference hosted by the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University, at which Sessions was also a featured speaker.

The WCS bills itself as “the largest gathering of conservatives outside of Washington, D.C. . . . All to advance faith, family, and freedom for our future.” The institute says that their mission is to foster the alliance between capitalism and evangelical Christianity and aims “[t]o impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, Biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, free markets, natural law, original intent of the Constitution and Western civilization.”

Michael McAfee speaking at the Western Conservative Summit in 2018

McAfee spoke alongside, in addition to Sessions, scandal-plagued member of the Trump administration, Scott Pruitt, Senator Corey Gardner, the NRA’s Dana Loesch, and the actor Kirk Cameron. He addressed the crowd at the WCS in his official capacity as a representative of the MOTB and was formally introduced as its Director of Community Initiatives. Among his opening words were “I bring you greetings from Museum of the Bible.”

He went on to identify himself as part of the Green family, whom he named as the museum’s “founding family.” His address to the conference was essentially a sermon. He invited audience members to open their Bibles as he framed the question he would seek to answer: “What does the Bible have to say about the government’s role?” Notice three significant unstated premises in McAfee’s question: he assumed that (1) the Bible has one perspective on government; (2) that perspective on government is relevant for the United States today; (3) he is someone qualified to articulate what that perspective is.

None of these premises is self-evident, however.

First, the Bible does not have one perspective on government. The collection of writings now deemed biblical contains a wide range of stories and teachings that speak to how people relate to state power and to how kings, judges, and emperors ought to comport themselves. Romans 13 is just one of many passages to which Christians can look (and have looked) when thinking about government. Romans 13, furthermore, is convoluted. Interpreters disagree on many issues, including whether the rulers Paul mentions are heavenly or earthly entities, what respect and honor he conceives to be due to rulers, how he thinks rulers relate to individual and collective morality, and whether or not the power of rulers is inflected by an expectation of the impending end of time. Because of these ambiguities, Christians have interpreted the passage in myriad ways—a fact about which McAfee seems uninformed. He presented his reading as the reading.

Second, the United States is governed by a representative democracy, a form of government with which ancient biblical authors would have had no experience. The very notion that the Bible has anything to say to citizens of a modern representative democracy needs to be argued for, rather than assumed.

Third, and most important for our purposes, neither the person who introduced McAfee on stage nor McAfee himself named any qualification for his presence and performance other than his affiliation with the MOTB. There are, in fact, several other ways by which McAfee’s participation at CWS could have been explained. He serves, for example, as a teaching pastor at Council Road Baptist Church in Oklahoma City. He is a PhD student in ethics and public policy at the fundamentalist Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. But it was the connection to the MOTB that was leveraged as authorizing him to speak. In other words, McAfee fashioned himself as an authoritative interpreter of the Bible’s relevance for contemporary politics because of his affiliation with the museum.

And what, we might ask, does the Bible say about government, according to the Museum of the Bible’s representative? With slippery use of the first person plural (“we”…Christians? “we”…Americans?), McAfee summarized his argument like this:

“We recognize God has all authority and we want to honor him in all we do. We recognize the United States people have been delegated authority from God to govern ourselves wisely. Third, we honor the government as an act of worship to God. And, fourth, but when the government asks us to violate God’s commands, we must honor God as primary. We must make our own appeal to heaven.”

McAfee went on to celebrate the fight Hobby Lobby won in the Supreme Court against the Affordable Care Act. This was his prime example of a proper Christian “appeal to heaven.”

McAfee’s interpretation of Romans 13, while internally contradictory, is not novel. It was the dominant reading of American revolutionaries, who saw Britain’s government as tyrannical and unjust. McAfee’s assertion that this reading is “what the Bible says” is surprising given that the museum in D.C. has an exhibit that re-stages a debate about obedience versus revolution between Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Seabury. Yet McAfee used his affiliation with the MOTB to assert the reading of Romans 13 that he believes in, rather than highlighting the ways in which people have debated the meaning of this passage.

While speaking as a representative of the MOTB, McAfee not only offered a normative reading of Romans 13, but he also presented the MOTB’s founding family as models for how to follow this “biblical” approach to citizenship and government.

***

Politics is not the only arena in which the Green family is intervening with their newfound biblical “expertise.” Jackie Green and Lauren Green McAfee have recently published a book entitled Only One Life: How a Woman’s Every Day Shapes an Eternal Legacy (Zondervan, 2018). In it, they prescribe fundamentalist gender roles based on their interpretations of the Bible.

As in Michael McAfee’s WCS speech, Jackie Green and Lauren McAfee authorize their biblical interpretations by tying themselves to the MOTB. In fact, the book was launched at the museum and the authors were given a slot in the MOTB’s official speaker series. It is currently featured prominently in the MOTB bookstore. Green and McAfee have also authored a related six-week Bible study for Lifeway, due out in May 2019, for which they have filmed accompanying “video vignettes” inside the D.C. museum. As a result, the museum exhibits will now virtually make their way into churches and Christian homes around the nation in explicit support of the Green family’s biblical interpretations.

Lauren McAfee’s Amazon.com “About the Author” page positions her in relationship to the MOTB: “While pursuing her graduate degrees in pastoral counseling and theology, Lauren worked for her father Steve Green as he founded Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC.” (As the bio goes on to explain, she now works for Hobby Lobby.)

Jackie Green’s author bio is an even more striking example of how the family’s patronage of the MOTB serves as a credentialing device. On the back of Only One Life we read: “Jackie Green, cofounder of Museum of the Bible with her husband and Hobby Lobby president, Steve Green, is an author, full-time homemaker, mother of six, and grandmother of four.”^[2] She is the matriarch of this family, keeper of the home. But the lead identifier—the main qualification that potential readers are presumed to need to know—is her position as cofounder of the museum. (In keeping with the relationship norms celebrated within the pages of this book, she is not identified without also mentioning her husband.)

Her Twitter profile reveals the same priorities: “Co-Founder, @museumofBible | Author, #onlyonelifebook & #thisdangerousbook | Wife to @stevegreenHL of @hobbylobby | Mom to 6 | GiGi to 4 | #mBible.” As with her bio for Only One Life, the sequence starts with her position as cofounder of the MOTB. The same phenomenon happens on Green’s Amazon.com “About the Author” page. It should be no surprise, then, that Green is introduced over and over again in promotional media interviews as cofounder of the MOTB.[3] She even writes in Only One Life: “some have called me ‘the first lady of the museum.’”

And what does the Bible say, according to the MOTB’s cofounder and her daughter? How does this book—launched by MOTB in multiple ways—mandate the expectations women should have for their lives? Two examples are particularly revealing: the authors’ treatment of ancient Israel’s only female judge Deborah (Judges 4-5), and their reading of Mary Magdalene, the first person to witness to Jesus’ empty tomb (as depicted in Luke 24).

Deborah is featured in Only One Life in a chapter on God’s gift of wisdom to women. “How does a woman rise to power, influence, and even military command in a male-dominated society?,” the authors ask. “The answer is simply wisdom.” In the book of Judges, Deborah functions as a prophetess who communicates that God will help the Israelites defeat the enemy general Sisera, whom God, she prophesies, “will sell into the hand of a woman” (Judges 4:9).

Green and McAfee don’t discuss that woman, though. That woman, who is arguably the actual heroine of this Bible story, is Jael, who quenches the general’s thirst and then speaks softly to him while he sleeps—right before driving a tent peg through his skull (Judges 4:21-22). Her cunning kill is then celebrated in the song of Deborah and Barak in the following chapter (Judges 5:24-31: “Most blessed of women be Jael”).

But Green and McAfee spotlight Deborah, in whom they see a model for women today. She is, they write, both a prophetess and a wife. They read a formulaic identifying comment from the narrator that Deborah was “the wife of Lappidoth” (Judges 4:4 [never to be mentioned again]) as evidence that women entering the public sphere should not do so at the expense of their marriage: “[The] Scriptures are intentional in recording [Deborah’s husband’s name]. Deborah’s rise to prominence was not at the cost of her marriage; she didn’t forget her ties to her husband. Instead both were wonderfully woven together—a celebration of her wisdom and her marriage.” This is, to say the least, a very odd lesson to learn from Judges 4-5.

Jael and Sisera, by Artemisia Gentileschi.

Mary Magdalene takes center stage in Only One Life in a section entitled “The Unique Witness of Women.” Green and McAfee narrate the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb by Mary and several other women in Luke 24 and then reflect on God’s choice of women (versus men) as witnesses.

The Bible intentionally highlights, our authors claim, an essential feature of gender difference: the women “feel,” while the men think. Women are “wired” with “emotion” and “compassion,” whereas men are logical. This reading lifts details from the plot of Luke 24 and interprets them as clues implanted by God in the text that instruct the reader on what characteristics are essential to men and women.

What ties these two examples to the overall argument of the book is their assumption of and advocacy for traditional gender norms and roles for women through a reading of the Bible.

In other parts of the book, Green and McAfee stigmatize divorce, valorize the hidden labor and self-sacrifice of women who support men’s public careers, and circumscribe the realms in which women’s influence ought to be active (“in our homes, our churches, our neighborhoods, and beyond”).

As in Michael McAfee’s WCS speech, Green and McAfee use their family as exemplars of “biblical” values, as they conceive them.

In a chapter on courage, Jackie likens herself to Esther, a biblical woman presented as extraordinarily brave, as she describes the courage she herself had to muster as she worked to help found MOTB: “I was pulled into the spotlight with [her husband Steve Green]…I helped organize women’s events, decorate, design gifts, choose menus, and do whatever was needed in the development years leading up to the opening.”

The biblical character of Esther navigates a frightening political landscape, risking her life to prevent the genocide of the Jewish people. Green sees the public spotlight and the homemaker skills she brought to planning the MOTB as somehow analogous.

***

The Bible has always played a part on both sides of the culture wars. The Greens have been fighting for years to push their conservative politics and evangelical brand of Christianity through their stores, advertisements, court appearances, and charitable contributions. Now that they are “the founding family” of a seemingly non-sectarian museum of the Bible, the Greens can present themselves as above the fray of partisan politics. They have authorized themselves to speak for the Bible and have the weight of a $500 million museum behind their readings—readings that are obvious to them but not to trained biblical scholars. It makes for a heavy thumb on the scale on their side of the political spectrum.

Note, too, that the Greens’ aim is not directed only to a broad public. They are using their newfound expertise to produce literature for Christian consumption. The thumb on the scale might also therefore tip the balance within American Christianity toward the Greens’ particular version of this religious tradition. Their views comprise only one of many ways in which Christians use, read, and venerate the Bible. Modern Christians do not universally hold the same views on government, marriage, or the family. The Museum of the Bible gives the Greens a chance to present their interpretation of the Bible to fellow Christians as though it is objective.

If past is prologue, the Greens will continue to speak as biblical experts. Steve Green has published his own history of the Bible in America and has co-written a book with Jackie on the nature of the Bible and how that shaped their choice to begin collecting biblical artifacts and, ultimately, found the MOTB. Michael and Lauren McAfee have recently announced the forthcoming publication of their own co-authored book, Not What You Think: Why the Bible Might Be Nothing We Expected Yet Everything We Need (Zondervan, 2019).

And now the Greens have a flashy Museum of the Bible, with its own research wing, to use as a platform, authorizing mechanism, and mega-phone. They are, after all, “the founding family.” They bought artifacts. They bought a building. What the Green family bought ultimately, it turns out, was expertise. If we don’t pay attention, this could come at a cost to us all.

***

[1] For a critique of Sessions’ use of Romans 13 from two biblical scholars who are also Christians, see this Washington Post piece by Margaret Aymer and Laura Nasrallah.

[2] To our knowledge, “author” here refers to her authorship of Only One Life and to her co-authorship, with Steve Green, of This Dangerous Book, the Greens’ account of the founding of the Museum of the Bible.

[3] We have observed this, for example, in appearances for Huckabee (June 9, 2018), PureTalk by PureFlix (broadcast live on July 1, 2018, from on-site at MOTB in D.C.), the podcast “Jesus Calling” (July 7, 2018), and social media of The 700 Club (August 31, 2018). She is likewise identified as cofounder of MOTB in conjunction with a guest post on the biblegateway.com blog with material adapted from Only One Life. More examples online can be found here, here, and here, including Jackie Green’s official Linked In career profile. The first word after her name is “Co-Founder.” Further down the page, under the “Experience” column, the first entry: “Co-Founder, Museum of the Bible.”

***

Jill Hicks-Keeton is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Arguing with Aseneth: Gentile Access to Israel’s Living God in Jewish Antiquity(Oxford University Press, 2018).

Cavan Concannon is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He is a specialist in early Christianity.  He is the author of ‘When you were Gentiles’: Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian Correspondence(Yale University Press, 2014) andAssembling Early Christianity: Trade, Networks, and the Letters of Dionysios of Corinth (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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

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Jean Améry

“Every morning when I get up,” the essayist and philosopher Jean Améry wrote, “I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm, something that touches the deepest and most closely intertwined roots of my existence; indeed I am not even sure if this is not my entire existence. Then I feel approximately as I did back then when I got a taste of the first blow from a policeman’s fist. Every day anew I lose my trust in the world.”

I have been rereading this passage—and Améry’s oeuvre as a whole, really—throughout the winter. These months have felt like a momentary lull in the endless stream of stories about famous men apologizing, or failing to apologize, or failing to apologize while apologizing.

In the last eighteen months a whole new genre of commentary has sprung up, analyzing all the ways famous men have botched their apologies.

There is Louis C.K.’s claim that it had never occurred to him that women in his profession might feel coerced when he asked to masturbate in front of them, which—if true—is so staggeringly oblivious that it might be worse than actual malice.

There is Dustin Hoffman’s insistence that he never even met the seventeen-year old girl he propositioned on the set of The Death of a Salesman (1985) with the quip that he’d have for breakfast “a hard-boiled egg … and a soft-boiled clitoris.” This, despite copies of letters she had sent to her sister at the time and a photograph of Hoffman with his arm draped around her.

Then there is Harvey Weinstein’s deranged, madcap ending to his apology, where he joked that he was going to channel his rage into the NRA. “I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. I’m going to do it at the same place I had my Bar Mitzvah.”

Mario Batali’s achingly stupid cinnamon bun recipe.

And on. And on. And on.

These apologies are the best documents we have to understand what it is like to be a powerful man who feels sexually entitled to anyone in his orbit. And it is not hard to sympathize with the impulse to tear apart these apologies and accuse their authors of insincerity or self-absorption or callous indifference to the women harmed.

It’s satisfying to read articles disemboweling these apologies because they are loathsome, these famous men, with their flippancy, their insouciance, their non-sequiturs that we are supposed to find cute. But in our single-minded focus on how the apologies have failed, we have allowed the experiences of the people receiving the apologies to recede out of sight. The whole problem has become one of finding the right words to say, not whether the injured party can or should accept the apology at all. The question of when we might refuse to forgive disappears altogether.

And that is where Améry comes in.

For there simply is no conversation about the refusal to forgive without Jean Améry. His essay “Resentments” is the single best piece of writing on the topic, and sooner or later anyone who thinks seriously about forgiveness has to deal with it.

He is never self-aggrandizing, nor is he prone to oversimplifications. He does not lay claim to heroism or virtue by dint of having suffered. Even in moments of self-pity he views his own weakness almost as scornfully as he views Germany’s forgetfulness about its recent past. Rather, he is an autodidact who binds his own memories together with philosophical reflections using wonderfully economical, balanced sentences, that hit like a mace crumpling a skull. He writes about the refusal to forgive as an act of time, ethics, and collective guilt. There is plenty for me, as a scholar of religion, to say about the coherence of his ethics or the theological lineage of his language.^[1] But the most interesting question he poses in passages like the one cited above, is often overlooked: “What is the role of the body in forgiveness?” It is a question religious studies, with its emphasis on ritual and cultivation of the self through habits, is particularly well-suited to address.

Améry wrote “Resentments” in the 1960s, just as the tacitly agreed upon silence surrounding the Holocaust was beginning to break. The piece starts out with a description of a trip through the countryside of a green and immaculate land. Everywhere he travels, he meets an “impressive combination of cosmopolitan modernity and wistful historical consciousness,” and he freely acknowledges that “the working man” thrives there. Gradually, though, a sense of unease stains his description of the landscape and Améry admits the real purpose of his essay. The land is Germany, he is an Auschwitz survivor, and his aim is to “speak as a victim and examine my resentments”—“No amusing enterprise, either for the reader or me,” he drily acknowledges.

Few people writing about forgiveness have had as much to resent as Améry.

He grew up in Austria, the son of a Jewish soldier killed in WWI and a Catholic mother. His upbringing had the cultural trappings of Christianity, complete with Christmas trees and carols, but was still considered Jewish enough by neighbors that he was taunted on the playground. His actual education was in a Realschule, a trade-oriented school, rather than the more intellectual Gymnasium, but Améry consistently hid that fact in later life, claiming to be university educated.

He was only twenty-three when Germany ratified the Nuremberg Laws, which would define much of his early life. Married to a Jewish woman against his mother’s wishes, he fled after the Anschluss, first to France, and then later to Belgium, with his young wife next to him and an old Jewish man in overlarge rubber shoes clinging to his belt, groaning and promising him “all the riches of the world if only I allowed him to hold on to me now.”

Once in Belgium, he joined the Resistance, papering the city at night with anti-Hitler leaflets. He describes his arrest, when it finally happened in 1943, as something between a noir film and a slapstick comedy. After the Gestapo came in and put Améry in handcuffs, the officer tersely ordered him away from the window, growling that he knew the trick prisoners played, where they wrenched open the window with their chained hands and fled on to the ledge. “I was certainly flattered that he credited me with so much determination and dexterity,” Améry wryly observed, “but, obeying the order, I politely gestured that it did not come into question. I gave him to understand that I had neither the physical prerequisites nor at all the intention to escape my fate in such an adventurous way.”

Torture followed arrest, and Auschwitz followed torture. Without any technical or medical skills, Améry was assigned to the most brutal, unskilled labor. He was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, freed when the war ended, and then spent the next two decades working as a journalist for a popular press. Only in 1964, after the Holocaust had finally entered public conversation in the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, did Améry begin to write about his time in the camps.

Améry’s work is sometimes framed as literature about trauma, most notably by W.G. Sebald in The Natural History of Destruction, but Améry himself rejects that diagnosis in his essays. At various moments in his writing he skewers the whole idea that his psychology could be reduced to a pathology or syndrome, insisting that the real pathology lies with the society that pretends nothing happened.

Instead, he argues that his resentment stems from the irreversibility of time. The natural direction of both time and society, Améry argues, is toward the soft dulling of forgetfulness. He, however, is pinned to the truth of the conflict, unable to forget what happened and “nailed to the cross of his ruined past.” It may be absurd, it may be a fruitless revolt against the past, but the victim holds the moral truth of the conflict.

The body is everywhere in Améry’s account of his life and continuing resentments, from his description of his arms twisting as he is strung up in torture, to his morning ritual of reading his tattoo, years after escaping Auschwitz.

Scholarly literature does have plenty to say about forgiveness and the body—at least, a certain understanding of the body.^[2] Want lower blood pressure? There’s a 2005 study linking lower blood pressure to forgiveness. Tired of feeling run down and sick? According to a 2001 study, forgiveness will boost your immune system. Cardiovascular health need a boost? Forgiveness can potentially offer that too through lower levels of cortisol, a 2011 study suggests. Depressed? Definitely try forgiveness, recommends one 2006 study. Afraid of the reaper? A survey of three separate studies tentatively concludes that your aging body can prompt reflection, leading to increased reflection, spirituality, and reconciliation with the past, potentially leading to improved health outcomes. Worried that your refusal to forgive makes you neurotic and disagreeable? Actually, you’re fine. The same 2011 study that linked lower cortisol levels to forgiveness tried and failed to find a correlation between a victim’s “levels of neuroticism and agreeableness” and “cortisol and forgiveness.” But remember, you’re on notice—someone got scientific funding to research whether you refused to move on because you’re just so unpleasant.

All of these studies are about the body and forgiveness, but they are based on a particular understanding of the body as a unit that can be measured and assessed for different health outcomes. It’s not that I want to write off such work as unsophisticated. There is actually an incredibly lively discussion about what constitutes forgiveness buried in these efforts to assess the impact of forgiveness on health.

Researchers are trying to pull apart the disposition to forgive (“forgivingness”) from the act of forgiving in a particular situation. They want to know if we refuse to forgive because certain wrongs are so egregious that we cannot or will not forgive them, or if we are the type of people who dislike forgiving. Other studies that attempt to isolate the positive health benefits of actively forgiving an offender (in the sense of condoning or reconciling with) from the improvements that come from reducing stress, resentment, and negative affects associated with holding a grudge. There are debates over whether forgiveness produces emotional changes in the forgiver, or proceeds from emotional changes toward the offender. All of these are worthwhile conversations, but they all share the same blindness: they only understand forgiveness as acting upon the body, not the body as acting upon forgiveness.

Jean Améry

This is because these pieces lack an understanding of the body as a site for habits—that is, of Améry’s body. When I talk about habits, I am not talking about the automatic way I stumble out of bed in the morning to find my coffee. Rather, I am drawing on the whole ethical-psychological tradition — stretching from Aristotle through Felix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Bourdieu — that understands character and disposition as shaped through repetitive bodily practices.

I am thinking again of Améry’s tattoo. The tattoo serves as a synecdoche for the whole brutal experience of dehumanization and cruelty, of course, but also for his identity: “On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information.”

But the prime significance of his tattoo is emotional. Émile Durkheim’s discussion of the totems in his canonical sociological text The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is helpful for thinking through Améry’s tattoo. Like the Durkheimian totem, the tattoo is a symbol. On its own, the tattoo and the totem are arbitrary lines. They are only given significance by their presence at the moment when all of the normal boundaries of behavior and relationships were suspended. The suspension of all laws meant different things to each man, of course. Durkheim was talking about the wild carnival atmosphere of festivals, when the collective energy of the tribe floods the individual with a sense of something higher and sacred, while Améry speaks of being overwhelmed by all the feelings of loneliness, fear, and violation present when his tattoo was inscribed in his flesh. But in both cases, the markings are imbued with the feelings surrounding the event. A glance at the sign is enough to bring those feelings back. For Améry, this means that even if he wanted to forget, to shake off the sense of unease that permeates his skin as he walks through a small German town, or the jolt of anxiety he feels when he passes a custom agent, the tattoo remains on his arm, ready to conjure up all the emotions attached to his memory. Like a talisman, it even becomes associated in Améry’s account with the refusal to forgive in the absence of justice. He must not forgive or forget: “The six-digit number on my forearm demands it.” The act of looking at the tattoo creates a habit of not forgiving.

Améry’s case is an extreme one, of course, but he is not an anomaly. People often carry traces of their past harms in their bodily comportment. The adult who flinches back from yelling after an emotionally tumultuous childhood, the sexual assault victim who dissociates from intimacy, the victim of a mugging who speeds up when she sees another person on a deserted street—these are all reactions to past injuries operating below the level of consciousness. They are ways of the body remembering, even if the conscious mind has pushed the injury aside.

All of which raises the question, who—or what—is the person who decides to forgive? Is the person who forgives reducible to the conscious mind, to the will that decides to forgive or not to forgive? Are they emotions, wrestled into a properly benevolent state? Are they some combination—a mind that vows to cease holding past transgressions against the offender, and consciously decides to disregard any lingering feelings of resentment? Or are they, as it seems to be in Améry’s case, some tangle of mind, emotions, and a body that encodes the harm in their very movements? And what happens if the mind agrees to forgive and forget, but the body still remembers? Is forgiveness an act of the will or an act of the body?

These questions matter for academic reasons, of course. There have been thinkers arguing for the integration of mind and body at least since Descartes sat in his study by the fire, examining melted candle wax and trying to define a substance. It is simply strange to have nearly four centuries worth of scholarship theorizing about the connection between mind and body, ranging from empiricism, to physiology, to phenomenology, to feminism, to affect theory, and to carry on all the while as if forgiveness could be some sovereign act of will.

The body, with all of its twitches and trauma, needs to be part of the conversation about forgiveness, otherwise we risk an empty ethics debate —one that is all about oughts and wants and trolley cars, but never about the physical experiences that make forgiveness possible.

But these questions about the body’s role in forgiveness also matter for the people who want to forgive or who feel shamed for their refusal to forgive. Forgiveness is simply a different process if it requires unlearning the habit of glancing at old scars or training oneself to walk boldly down a dark street. It becomes a different, darker, more complicated affair if we acknowledge the ways the wounds we carry on our bodies can undermine even our most resolute intention to forgive. All of the perky promises of heart health in the world won’t be enough to motivate a person to forgive if her morning rituals remind her of her wounds.

Most of all, this insight is what we are missing in all of our endless articles about whether some famous man has shown proper contrition through the right arrangement of words. The broad cultural focus on the men who apologize is many things—an effort to understand the psychology of abusers, a way of holding men accountable, an inadvertent practice of sidelining the experience of women—but it is also an act of profoundly unjustified optimism. Optimism that the right words can be found. Optimism that these famous men are the problem, not the economic system that made them untouchable. Optimism that the right apology will heal wounds. Optimism that victims will want apologies. Optimism that wounds can be healed at all.

No one knew that better than Améry. His essay collection, canonical as it is, would not be the last comment he would make on tattoos or the memory of flesh.

In the central cemetery of Vienna, there is a jagged rock, covered with ivy, erected the year Améry killed himself by overdosing on sleeping pills. It doesn’t mention either of his wives or his birth name or his profession. Instead, it simply reads:

Jean Améry

1912-1978

Auschwitz Nr 172364

***

^[1] In fact, I’ve written much more about this in my book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Experience and Meaning, which will be published later this year.

^[2] The studies that follow can all be read about in the following edited volume, Loren L. Toussaint, Everett L. Worthington, and David R. Williams, eds., Forgiveness and Health: Scientific Evidence and Theories Relating Forgiveness to Better Health (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015).

***
Liane Carlson is the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 2015. From 2015-2018 worked as the Stewart Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Her book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2019.  She is currently working on a new book on the refusal to forgive.
***

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

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The Fall of the Titans by Cornelius van Haarlem in (1588–1590)

In 310 BCE, Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, invaded North Africa. Burning his ships behind him, Agathocles and his army marched along the coast to Carthage, where they set up for a long siege.

According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (who wrote two and half centuries later), when the Phoenicians within Carthage saw the Sicilian Greeks encircling them, they took it as a sign of divine punishment, and sought to make religious amends.

Offerings were sent to Tyre, the city whence the Carthaginians had come as colonists, and sacrifices were made to its pantheon. But when these produced little result, the Carthaginians decided the arrival of their enemies was actually chastisement from one of their own gods, one of the oldest, whose cult they had of late been neglecting. Diodorus Siculus calls this god ‘Cronus’ — seeing him apparently as a kind of avatar of the god the Greek’s worshipped as the father of Zeus — but the Semitic-speaking Phoenicians themselves doubtless called him something else.

In any event, in the eyes of the Phoenicians, “Cronus had turned against them inasmuch as in former times they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons, but more recently, secretly buying and nurturing children, they had sent these to the sacrifice; and when an investigation was made, some of those who had been sacrificed were discovered to have been supposititious.” Cronus, in other words, demanded the sacrifice of children of noble blood; certain impious Carthaginian shirkers, however, had been passing off slave children as sacrifices instead. Two hundred noble children were thus seized and sacrificed; another three hundred supposedly volunteered and were killed as well. In Diodorus Siculus’ telling, the sacrifices were public, and performed in a striking fashion. “There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.”

The very idea of mass child sacrifice is appalling, and this particular image of the practice has, understandably, proven remarkably durable. The question of whether and to what extent Phoenician religious practice actually involved such child sacrifices, meanwhile, has long been an object of debate.

Like Agathocles — who lost two of his own sons in the process — other Greek and Roman figures regularly waged war on Carthage; the numerous references to Phoenician child sacrifice among classical Greek and Roman authors must thus be viewed with some skepticism, even as possible propaganda.

So too with other sources. The Phoenicians were a cosmopolitan people, with entrepots around the Mediterranean, and as the Canaanites they play a role in the Hebrew Bible. The Tanakh condemns them for sacrificing their children to Moloch (likely the god whom Diodorus Siculus mistook as Cronus), and repeatedly forbids the practice among Israelites. In Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the rejection of child sacrifice is presented as fundamental to Israelite self-definition, bound up (as the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 illustrates) in its divine covenant and territorial patrimony. As with Greek and Latin sources, a modern skeptic can thus be suspicious of ancient propaganda — or at least exaggeration — in Biblical descriptions of child sacrifice as well.

Debates rage among archaeologists too, with furor centering around the interpretation of abundant child remains found at special cemeteries known as tophets (a term with roots in the Biblical description of the practice, and often deployed as a synonym for “hell”). Some researchers have insisted that these remains are of miscarriages or children who had died from illness; more recent analysis suggests that they were indeed ritually sacrificed, in bids for divine favor or to fulfill past vows.

The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio (1590-1610)

No matter the latest findings or interpretations, the debates over bones and texts will likely rage on endlessly. Which in itself demonstrates the potent horror of the image of child sacrifice: it is an explosive thing to conjure, an ultimate image of depravity one can invoke. It defines and condemns the cultures and beliefs with which it is associated as backward, perverse, and barbaric. The image of child sacrifice correlatively functions to support narratives of how some superior societies supposedly have progress away from ancient depravity. By the same token, it also taps images of the most horrifying and comparative recent episodes of genocide and political violence. Thus, for example, Elie Wiesel, not long before his death, in a full-page open letter that appeared in numerous American and British newspapers in 2014, wrote in defense of IDF operations in Gaza: “In my own lifetime, I have seen Jewish children thrown into the fire. And now I have seen Muslim children used as human shields, in both cases, by worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from that of the Molochites.”

Scholars like Seth Sanders (writing in Religion Dispatches) have elegantly addressed Wiesel’s claim in both its theological and political context. The brilliant satirist Eli Valley has skewered its moral politics as well. For our purposes, what matters here is the simple fact of Wiesel’s making the argument in the first place, its immediate legibility in terms of the moral outrage it brings to bear on those it condemns, and the justification it correlatively furnishes on those it vindicates. After the immediate revulsion, the shock, that, These People kill their own children — the takeaway is simple. No matter the ultimate body count, or the technical question of whose weapons or tactical decisions do the actual killing, any group that could be said to willingly sacrifice its young must, like Carthage, be destroyed. They are an abomination; they must not be suffered to exist.

In this mode — as a synecdoche for depravity-that-must-be-stamped-out — the charge of child sacrifice thrives, with varying degrees of subtlety and transformation, in our contemporary discourse. First and foremost, the Blood Libel specifically — that longstanding Western tradition of accusing Jews of secret ritual killing of Christian babies — persists to this day, whether voiced as such by unreconstructed anti-Semites, or packaged, suitably tweaked and memefied, by alt-right activists and celebrities. This hoary conspiracy theory coexists with, and bleeds into, other narratives about elite corruption, a lexicon in which horrific violence against children regularly functions as a kind of Ultimate Horror and Primal Sin — the symbol and material correlative of unspeakable transgression, Satanic pacts, and The Evil That Goes On Behind Closed Doors.

From tales of Democratic National Committee members supposedly torturing children beneath Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington to the feverish predictions QAnon, the American right has proven a particularly welcome market for such thinking. Meanwhile, anti-abortion rhetoric painting Democrats as the party of “infanticide” has been renewed across the Republican mainstream.

In some instances, a fixation with child-murdering Death Cults can seem not just a primary feature of right-wing political expression, but its sole preoccupation, a frame for understanding everything else. Thus, for example, both the Green New Deal and pro-choice stances of politicians like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez can be exposed, one columnist at (erstwhile Tea Party clearing house) TownHall.Com argues, as expressing a single underlying evil: “When Democrats argue that abortion should be used as a means to improve modern weather, they are no different than the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas who called for the sacrifice of young children to improve the climate. Both have the same unrealistic intent — change bad weather; and, both have no comprehension of the brutality of murder and maiming of human children.”

What is less remarkable than the fact that such polemics about child sacrifice should continue to exist (how could they not, since they’re at least as old and as ingrained in Western culture as the Bible?) is that, in a truly gobsmacking way, they are entirely gratuitous compared with the actual, unvarnished truth.

One need not confabulate tales of cabals of authority figures secretly engaged in outlandish and heinous abuse; one need simply read the headlines. Consider the latest developments in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, a story which might strike those previously unaware of it as too grandiosely horrifying to be real, like a hideous mashup of the Marquis de Sade and feverish 4Chan speculation, playing out in the highest corridors of American power. Yet as documented in a devastating series in The Miami Herald, it is all too real. A hedge-fund manager worth $2 billion, Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted sex offender whom investigators — including the FBI — credibly contend has assaulted and/or raped hundreds of middle and high school age girls over the course of decades. A prominent socialite and political donor, Epstein apparently did all this while rubbing shoulders with friends including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz, the Duke of York, Kevin Spacey and other famous names, many of whom variously vacationed or travelled with Epstein on the jet he used to circulate between residences in Florida, New York, New Mexico, and a private island.

Through the efforts of a top-notch legal team (including both Dershowitz and Ken Starr), Epstein managed to avoid state charges for child prostitution. He even apparently helped draft his own federal indictment, securing a plea deal that immunized him and multiple accomplices from federal charges and resulted in a minimal sentence whereby he was allowed to spend up to twelve hours a day, six days a week, in his Malibu office, receiving visitors including young women. Now a free man, he continues to jet-set more or less at will.

Epstein’s deal was brokered by then-US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, who lied to Epstein’s victims about the deal’s existence while concluding it. Acosta is currently serving in Donald Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of Labor. He continues to hold this position despite the ruling of a Federal judge that Epstein’s deal broke the law.

Meanwhile, some of Epstein’s victims have alleged that he gave them to friends to abuse as well. “And then a pat on the back, You’ve done a really good job, thank you very much and here’s $200 dollars,” one victim, Virginia Roberts, told the Herald. “And before you know it I’m being lent out to politicians and to academics, to people that — to royalty! — people that you’d never think, like, How did you get into that position of power in the first place if you’re this disgusting, evil, decrepit person on the inside?”

Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya

There’s a reflexive temptation to take Virginia Roberts’ rhetorical question literally, and answer, That’s exactly how and why they get and keep their power to begin with. But this temptation is actually a bid to hide behind cynicism. Because Roberts, more than anyone, knows what’s she talking about. The full of force of her question lies in that she knows precisely how cruel and perverse abusive elites can be and she is still and even more shocked by the gap between their mainstream public respectability and their personal evil. Part of what shocks her, in other words, is not just the depravity of the powerful, or how much impunity wealth and influence can buy, but the way in which collective memory and public institutions seem incapable of integrating elite depravity and impunity into long-term consciousness or serious action.

Even for those with no reason to be shocked by anything, the dissonance still stupefies.

In June 2016, a California woman filed a lawsuit alleging that, in 1994, when she was 13 years old, Donald Trump raped her at a party at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan. Trump and Epstein are longtime associates. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years,” Trump told New York Magazine in 2002. “Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” The woman remained nameless, but announced she was coming forward for a press conference on November 2, the day before the election. She then cancelled her appearance and withdrew her lawsuit, citing threats to her life. Trump (and Epstein) have denied her story.

Some twenty women have accused President Trump of sexual misconduct. Several women who participated in a Miss Teen USA pageant Trump owned have also told stories of his walking in to inspect them as they changed in their dressing rooms backstage. “Don’t worry, ladies,” one recalled him saying during an episode in 1997, three years after the alleged child rape at Epstein’s, “I’ve seen it all before.” The girls present in this episode included one as young as fifteen.

The dissonance is stupefying. There is no need for tinfoil-hat messageboard speculation or Lovecraftian True-Detective-style secret conspiracies. The exploitation and abuse of minors is right there, as cruel and ghoulish as you could imagine, out in the open. They are everywhere, overwhelming. Any given allegation will be debated endlessly and then forgotten, such that, while all of them may seem entirely plausible, no single one ever seems to rise to the level of being the one that will push opinion (or prosecution) over the edge. No one story seems like it can ever make a difference, precisely because there are so many of them. Meanwhile, institutional inertia and blatant corruption continue to insulate the powerful from serious accountability. In other words, the very scale, horror, and obviousness of the abuse is so great, and the accountability so obviously lacking, that a profusion of allegations paradoxically inoculates the accused through sheer repetition.

Trump is not alone in enjoying this dynamic. Other individuals and institutions enjoy — and weaponize it — too. Speaking before an episcopal conference this February, Pope Francis spoke in broad terms of “the scourge of the sexual abuse of minors.” Drawing heated criticism from victims’ advocates, Francis resolutely spoke of sexual abuse in remarkably broad terms.

Finally pivoting to the question of abuse in the Church twelve paragraphs in, Pope Francis stated: “We are thus facing a universal problem, tragically present almost everywhere and affecting everyone. Yet we need to be clear, that while gravely affecting our societies as a whole, this evil is in no way less monstrous when it takes place within the Church.”

Diluting any specificity of clerical sexual abuse into the strange question of who might want to see abuse as less monstrous when it occurs within the Church, Francis gestured at the relation between power and abuse before promptly eliding any consideration of sexual abuse in the context of power dynamics within the Church in favor of talking about “abuse” writ large:

It is difficult to grasp the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors without considering power, since it is always the result of an abuse of power, an exploitation of the inferiority and vulnerability of the abused, which makes possible the manipulation of their conscience and of their psychological and physical weakness. The abuse of power is likewise present in the other forms of abuse affecting almost 85,000,000 children, forgotten by everyone: child soldiers, child prostitutes, starving children, children kidnapped and often victimized by the horrid commerce of human organs or enslaved, child victims of war, refugee children, aborted children and so many others.

Francis thus presented sexual abuse in terms of a kind of both transhistorical universality and eternal evil.

[This] is, and historically has been, a widespread phenomenon in all cultures and societies. Only in relatively recent times has it become the subject of systematic research, thanks to changes in public opinion regarding a problem that was previously considered taboo; everyone knew of its presence yet no one spoke of it. I am reminded too of the cruel religious practice, once widespread in certain cultures, of sacrificing human beings – frequently children – in pagan rites. … Before all this cruelty, all this idolatrous sacrifice of children to the god of power, money, pride and arrogance, empirical explanations alone are not sufficient….So what would be the existential “meaning” of this criminal phenomenon? In the light of its human breadth and depth, it is none other than the present-day manifestation of the spirit of evil. If we fail to take account of this dimension, we will remain far from the truth and lack real solutions.

Moloch reemerges here, as does the idea of atavistic, demonic evil, operating across human history through secrecy and depravity, surrounded by taboos. Yet, truth be told, there seems to have been little “taboo” about what the worshippers of Moloch did. They left frank inscriptions about what they did and why, the deals they hoped to secure, the promises they killed to fulfill. They may not have had a bronze statue of Cronus, but the sacrifices were public enough, not hidden. Indeed, as some interpreters have suggested, this public awareness may have been the whole point. Phoenician practices of child sacrifice, they suggest, functioned as a mechanism for ensuring social cohesion. Since each elite family would have to make a sacrifice, and thus be equally bound in the enterprise of state. The problem, as Diodorus Siculus himself hints, arose when some Carthaginians weren’t sacrificing their own kids, but disposable substitute ones, the kids of others, who came cheap. In other words, they committed the impiety not of duping the gods, but their own elite confederates. Certain pacts must be kept above all.

The Flight of Moloch by William Blake (1809)

Today, what is perhaps more amazing than the ubiquity of revelations of abuse around us that they are frequently not even revelations at all. From the Church to Trump to Epstein to Michael Jackson to R. Kelly, the stories seem to have been going on forever, and even the newest allegations are marked with a kind of already-anticipated, horrifying familiarity. Vindication, if any is to come, seems like it will only ever arrive too little, too late, in a different kind of fuzzy temporality altogether.

After so much impunity, horror behind closed doors can be easier to imagine, and to be seen as inevitable, than public justice. Which is all to say that, at least as far as the immiseration and abuse of children is concerned, the idea of “revelation” has lost its apocalyptic charge. Everything is shown – but what is revealed entails no prompt consequences, let alone justice. Meanwhile, written even more prominently than tales of abuse and conspiracies of exploitation, signs of another kind of apocalypse proceed apace. The climate assessments are clear. Even if we undertake massive efforts at social and economic reorganization, today’s children will inherit a world of unprecedented social dislocation, resource warfare, and mass die-offs. This future is already here, distributed disproportionately among the most globe’s vulnerable, and poised to steadily threaten even the most privileged – who are scrambling to insulate themselves as best and for as long as they can. As we marvel, stupefied, over the barbarity of ancient civilizations, or debate the supposed barbarity of present groups, our horrified, fixated cries of These people kill their own children, they deserve to be destroyed! carry an unspoken admission and correlative fear: As do we, and so do us.

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Patrick Blanchfield  is an Associate Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute Social Research. He is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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“Political Feelings” is a column by Patrick Blanchfield about stories, scenes, and studies of religion in American culture published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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