First, we’ve been a bit distracted from our usual reading rounds this month by The Immanent Frame‘s fantastic ongoing series “Is This All There Is” which, this month, included work by lots of Revealer friends, such as:

Liane Carlson‘s  “It was no way to die”

At the center of all of these arguments about the religious core to secularism is a belief in a Christian past that can neither be lost nor forgotten. Even when people have abandoned all of the internal and external markers of Christianity, even when they have given up belief and practice, even when they desperately try to distance themselves through polemics from their Christian heritage, Christianity’s influence persists in the faith they accord the sovereign, the arguments they use to bomb foreign countries, the wonder with which they face art. Secularism debates are an argument for history as haunting.

Laura McTighe‘s Many hands make light work

I emphasize this momentum, indeed obligation, to bring Black feminist theory into everyday practice in order to keep in check a certain romanticism. Truth-telling is bone-deep, essential work. It is also survival work. We must never mistake the work undertaken in order to persist for the world-building transformation of living and thriving. Grappling with this obligation to praxis in my own scholarship and activism has forced me to ask two questions: (1) How does one square the impulse to avoid reducing Black life to the quotidian terror that structures the everyday, with the brutal facticity of anti-Black violence and death revealed throughout history? And (2) at what points do attempts to imagine otherwise actually serve to undermine the ever-shifting intersections of intimate, community, and state violence? These questions require new answers every day.

Image credit: By Harvey Croze (Own work)

Elayne Oliphant‘s Clothing the emperor in medieval garb

The link between contemporary art and contemporary religiosity I am sketching here is that of permanent crisis. If both religion and art are reduced to visual spectacle and marketplace successes, then where in the immanent frame can we seek out that “fullness” described by Charles Taylor? One response to this experience of permanent crisis has been the rise in what many have described as an intellectualist turn in European Christianity. 

Anthony Petro‘s Camp conviction and the politics of religion: Or, that naked public square’s really a drag*

(*Correction: This piece actually appeared in The Immanent Frame’s terrific  “American religion, humility, and democracy.” series.)

Camp is about making fun, subverting meaning, mocking authority—not things most modern Americans or scholars of religious studies would align with “religion.” But it also requires deep attachment, even intimacy, with the thing that becomes the object of camp. Navarro’s drag re-signifies Jesus in at least two ways. He reclaims Jesus from Christian conservatives but also resurrects Jesus for queer and feminist activists. In his performance, Jesus becomes a figure to play with as well as one to aspire toward, even to inhabit. Navarro’s Chicano AIDS activist Jesus thus becomes not only another representation of the Son of God, but also a performance that makes Jesus present as a feminist and queer activist.

Ray Navarro as Jesus, “Like a Prayer,” DIVA TV (1990)

Anthea Butler‘s Space is all there is

I am sick of America’s racist history. I am sick of America’s racist present. I am sick of one nation under god. I actually do not think god wants much to do with this place, if god exists. I want to flee America’s racist future; I cannot imagine America not being anything but comfortable to white supremacists and well-meaning white liberal racists.

This is not my version of “Is this all there is.”

I want more.

Donovan Schaefer‘s Material mourning in the secular sculpture garden

The dead do not talk to us. Scattered reports of life-after-death communications or visions notwithstanding, our information about a world after life hovers at zero. To posit an afterlife is to believe, to deny is to disbelieve. But the seeming clarity of this crisp religion/secular divide is deceptive exactly because the register of stated belief is unjoined from the register of action, expression, and material culture. When we expand the one-dimensional frame of “what bodies think” to a more expansive attention to “what bodies do,” the difference all but vanishes. Secular and non-secular people—people announcing beliefs in diametric opposition to each other—treat the dead in strikingly similar ways.

Ruth Braunstein‘s Political  myopia and prophetic vision, and many others.

The men and women of Westeros learn the hard way that not all prophets, or at least not all visions, are to be trusted (RIP Shireen Baratheon). As in real life, there is a fine line between prophetic vision and delusion. But, also as in real life, it is difficult to know which is which, especially without the benefit of hindsight or dramatic irony. When prophetic visions advance the interests of those in power, they are often embraced along with their carriers (recall that the Red Priestess and her Lord of Light originally brought flattering news to Stannis Baratheon . . .).

Read the whole series!

Elsewhere, other friends had some important things to say, including Ed Simon eulogizing Our Last “Genius” Stephen Hawking is Gone… Cause for worry or inspiration over at Religion Dispatches

Genius, like all concepts, has a history—and a particularly recent one at that. If antiquity had her seers, her seekers, and her saints, then modernity rather enshrined the myth of the solitary and brilliant mind, who, through his very genius, could illuminate the contours of creation. As Denis Diderot wrote in his voluminous Encyclopedia, “the genius seems to change the very nature of things; his character envelops whatever it touches; he casts into the future his piercing lights; he leaps ahead of his century, and it is powerless to follow him.”

Adam Kotsko giving a great talk On Trump and Neoliberalism

And you can listen to Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft‘s talk Cultured Meat and the Three Futures for Flesh given at the Wolf Humanities Center. (For more from Wurgaft on lab-grown meat and religion, have a look back at his Revealer piece, But Will The Lab-Grown Meat Be Kosher?)

As a bonus, in the recording you’ll hear Wurgaft introduced by none-other than our favorite Twitterer, Emily Wilson.

https://soundcloud.com/wolf-humanities-center/benjamin-wurgaft-cultured-meat-and-the-three-futures-of-flesh

Back to reading, do check out Peter Manseau on The surprising religious backstory of ‘Black Panther’s’ Wakanda in The Washington Post

Lee and Kirby likely did not look to 19th-century newspapers or ethnographic reports to name their own abode of intrepid and courageous warriors. But by the time they introduced Black Panther and his kingdom, Wakanda lingered in parts of the United States as a haunting remnant of displaced languages and beliefs. As Wakanda, Wakonda, and Waconda, it had become a commonplace name throughout the Midwest, and, most intriguingly when considering its afterlife as the distant realm of superheroes, in the mid-20th century it was a popular name for summer camps in the mid-20th century, those ephemeral nations of experience that seemed to appear only when children fled the familiar to join a magical land.

Suzanne Schneider introducing her new book Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine over at Jadaliyya

I would like to think that the questions I raise in this book—informed by a close reading of sources ranging from archival documents to textbooks and short stories—are still quite fundamental: Is religion about faith or practice, individual salvation or communal responsibility? How is the religious sphere demarcated vis-à-vis material or social life? What are the political uses of religion, and what role do schools play therein? How do modern educational methods and pedagogy not just convey, but also actually shape, what we understand religion to be? Given this set of concerns, Mandatory Separation is not an institutional history of a particular type of schooling but rather a conceptually-driven study that tries to attend to the points of continuity and rupture among Palestine’s disparate, and increasingly antagonistic, communities. 

And Ann Neumann on The Narco Saint: How a Mexican folk idol got conscripted into the drug wars for The Baffler

Lindsay Ballant

Beloved by millions for her granting of daily needs and requests, Santa Muerte, the saint on altars of the poor, endangered, disenfranchised, and heartbroken, represents a principle of compassion and order within a socioeconomic hierarchy notably short on both. But she means something quite different to her adherents than she does to drug-warring governments. To police and military officials seeking to eradicate the violent scourge of black money, kidnappings, and violence that straddles the border, she is little short of the devil incarnate.

Meanwhile, we’d very much like to be friends with religion professor Kate Bowler was interviewed about her new book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, on Fresh Air, A Stage-4 Cancer Patient Shares The Pain And Clarity of Living ‘Scan-To-Scan’ and also wrote I’m a scholar of the “prosperity gospel.” It took cancer to show me I was in its grip. for Vox

I don’t think I knew enough about longing 10 years ago when I started investigating the prosperity gospel. I had just bought a little house with the man I love. I filled it with books, Ikea furniture, and a soft dog with legs as stout as soup cans. I was steeped in the lore of eternal youth. My life was something I could mold, or at least correct with a surge of determination. It was the same unlimited confidence that the prosperity gospel calls “victory.” Nothing was broken yet that could not be fixed.

And from UC Berkeley, we were very sad to learn of the death of esteemed professor Saba Mahmood.

Mahmood made path-breaking contributions to contemporary debates on secularism, opening up new ways of understanding religion in public life and contesting received assumptions about both religion and the secular.  Against an increasingly shrill scholarship denouncing Muslim societies, she brought a nuanced and educated understanding of Islam into discussions of feminist theory, ethics and politics. Her publications and presentations have reverberated throughout the humanities and social sciences, profoundly shaping the scholarship of a new generation of scholars as they develop a thoughtful, knowledgeable, and critical approach to religion in modernity.  As a scholar and teacher, she embodied and followed strong moral and political principles, offered keen analyses of colonial and capitalist power in her account of secularism’s modernity, and formulated new ways of understanding the subject of feminism, relational subjectivity, religious freedom, religious injury, the rights of religious minorities, and comparative legal analysis of religious and secular family law and sexual regulations.

We were also very glad to see Roberta Mazza talking about The Illegal Papyrus Trade and What Scholars Can Do to Stop It for Hyperallergic

We academics must help protect the objects we study. Some of my colleagues believe that scholarship comes first, or say that texts have no guilt, so we should be faithful to them. They publish what emerges from the market. I disagree. To publish papyri with suspicious — if not illegal — provenance is unethical. It lends a new identity to those artefacts and feeds the illicit market.

And are thinking of planning a pilgrimage north thanks to Dan Bilefsky recent piece, Is Leonard Cohen the New Secular Saint of Montreal? for The New York Times

In the pantheon of Montreal cultural figures, the soulful, self-effacing singer occupies exalted space. But befitting a spiritual man whose art was nourished by Judaism, Catholicism and Buddhism, Cohen attracts a form of devotion here that can border on the messianic.

A mural of Leonard Cohen on a Montreal building. Credit François Ollivier for The New York Times

While we’re on the topic of music, John Eligon wrote a very interesting post About That Song You’ve Heard, Kumbaya for The New York Times

Thanks to research and lobbying by residents of a coastal community descended from slaves, the origins and meaning of “Kumbaya” have been recognized in Congress, raising hopes that a fading culture might get a boost. The song may be sung more often than usual this month, especially in the part of Georgia where its soulful lyrics are said to have originated almost a century ago.

More in the mood for a movie? Samuel Ashworth wrote about how In the Dark All Katz are Grey: Notes on Jewish Nostalgia for Hazlitt

And this, finally, is why we look backwards. Because it’s not the meaning of the words that matters anymore (if you actually look at what Kaddish means, it has no reference to death or mourning; it’s just more kvelling about how swell God is), it’s the act of incantation. To sing a song whose words you do not understand, in a language you do not speak, and all the same to trust, to know in your very bones, that in singing this song you are bringing grace—that is faith. That is faith.

And we were really excited to learn more about Shterna Goldbloom‘s project Sitra Achra: the Ones Who Don’t Follow in this conversation with Diana Clarke at In Geveb

The best part of making work is having it resonate with people, and I love that you picked up on the intersection of losing something at the same time as purity, or kashrus is gained. Hair is a really important theme for me and also has a lot of significance in Jewish life and Jewish history: women cover their hair, boys cut their hair at the age of three, the Nazir can’t cut his hair and Shimshon loses his power when his hair is cut. A lot of different themes came together for me when I was conceptualizing this image. I was, in the first place, thinking about the roles of men and women in traditional Jewish life. We know of course that men have always created Halacha, or Jewish law, and this affects women’s lives and bodies in extraordinarily intimate ways. But I also know and have known so many women who feel purified, or “kosher” through these laws, and I wanted to think about female agency in interactions where men are making decisions about the female body. The meeting point of violence and redemption is so crucial for me. I think that hair is a really personal thing, and that even just a small change in someone’s hair style or hair length can change the way a person feels or is perceived and gendered.

Shecting by Shterna Goldbloom

Lastly, if you’ll allow me to shift out of our standard “Revealer We” and into the first person for a moment, I can’t pass up this chance to share a wonderful story my uncle, David Rubin, recently told about Befriending a Hockey Pro on the Neighborhood Ice on Bill Littlefield‘s Only A Game. 

“He asked me my name. I told him,” David says. “He then asked me — he said, ‘Are you Jewish?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Me, too. I’m Jewish, too.’ Just about at that point, handed me his hockey stick and his practice puck. And he said, ‘You take these.’ “

Thanks for listening and reading along with us (back to “we”) with us again this month. We’ll see you again soon!

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You can find previous “In the News” round-ups here.

The post In the News: From Santa Muerte to Saint Leonard Cohen appeared first on The Revealer.

Gilbert is a registered nurse and director of the Parish Nursing/Community Outreach Department of Sacred Heart Health Services, a Catholic hospital founded in 1912 by a monsignor and the Missionary Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart. Gilbert meets with patients in this coat-filled basement room every week to practice her version of holistic medicine, which is part first aid, part prayer, and part close listening. She is not Catholic, she tells me, so she is able to refer patients to whatever denominational services they desire. “The first question I ask,” Gilbert says of her approach to patients, “is ‘Tell me about your spiritual journey.’”

Parish Nursing is a movement nestled squarely within the Christian tradition of caring for the ill, a commitment that reaches back to Catholic “hospices” during the Crusades of the Middle Ages. This mission has led Christians of all denominations to the institutionalized operation of hospitals, care facilities, elder homes, and hospices across the country and the globe. It is impossible to understand modern medicine, its development, prejudices, practices and the complicated relationship between faith and science, without examining this history.

Parish Nursing is an international organization that employs RNs “concerned not only with the body and mind but also with the spirit,” according to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s website. Nurses of any (Judeo-Christian) denomination are encouraged to act as counselors and educators to their congregation and community, helping individuals to connect with local health resources, create support groups, train volunteers for outreach, and “clarify issues and or reinforce the strong tie between faith and health.” While parish nurse training programs exist across the country, the number of acting parish nurses is hard to estimate; some sources count them in the thousands. They are employed by their local churches, by hospitals’ community outreach programs, or by faith-based foundations.

The heart of the movement, however, is the life and teachings of Granger Westberg, who wrote the 1961 Minister and Doctor Meet, and the 1971 Good Grief: A Constructive Approach to the Problem of Loss, which sold more than two million copies. A 50th anniversary edition was published in 2010. Westberg served on both the medical and theological faculties of the University of Chicago.

He was the first hospital chaplain to formalize the role by emphasizing both clinical and theological training and is often wrongly credited with founding the College of Chaplains (today known as the Association of Professional Chaplains) in 1971, although the organization has existed since 1946. Westberg did, however, establish clear guidelines and accreditation for hospital chaplains through the College while serving as director.

At the time of her father’s death in 1999, Granger Westberg’s daughter Jane said, “Dad challenged the prevailing didactic model of theological education and proposed that theological education be a blend of theory and practice.” She continued, “Starting in their first year of seminary, Dad said that students should have clinical community-based educational experiences in churches, hospitals and other settings.” Granger Westberg’s legacy has been championed and expanded by Jane and his other daughter, Jill Westberg McNamara, who in 1990 coauthored The Parish Nurse: Providing a Minister of Health for Your Congregation with her father.

The Westberg Institute, located in Memphis, Tennessee has also continued his work training parish nurses. “Throughout scripture, God calls people of faith to healing,” the Westberg Institute’s website reads, “As an integral part of a healing ministry, faith community nursing is one of the best ways a congregation can promote health and wholeness.” After Westberg’s death, the Chicago Daily Herald estimated that more than 3,000 US nurses had been trained in parish nursing.

Today, the Parish Nursing movement provides a key to understanding the failures and achievements of the health care delivery system. Health care policy, as the current president quickly discovered, is complicated. Particularly when appropriate efforts must cross various service providers, like Medicare, Medicaid and other government entities, and attempt to simultaneously provide preventative care. When affordable housing, employment, accessible healthy food, and effective mental and drug addiction treatments are all necessary approaches to improving health care, institutions with limited resources and good intentions are most often left to make interventions that feel good, that sound good, but that do little to improve long-term health outcomes.

It’s not that the parish nursing movement is misguided, it’s that it lacks the muscle – or perhaps the will – to change policies that produce, for instance, homelessness, or unemployment, or any of the root problems faced by communities. The result can look a lot like the craven “prayer for porridge” programs of old. Prayer can be uplifting, but it won’t cure liver failure. And because parish nurses can lack a broader understanding of just how complex social service systems are, their efforts are limited to hearty prayer, warm coats, and immediate interventions that won’t cure longstanding and profound medical issues.

Furthermore, parish nursing is hindered by another structural flaw: the belief that charitable efforts can improve national health outcomes. Indeed, charity seems to be the go-to answer to today’s escalating poverty and all its attendant vagaries. Republican legislators like Paul Ryan, who ascribes to a Randian “you get what you deserve” philosophy that denies systemic inequality, have long harped on how community and faith-based charity are the answer to poverty, including health care inequality. He even penned an op-ed, with Wisconsin Republican Ron Jonson, for USA Today in 2016, that praises a charitable program, the Joseph Project, for bussing workers to their jobs, writing:

This is how you fight poverty: person to person. The Joseph Project is an example of what community leaders are doing across Wisconsin and America. They are developing homegrown solutions based on their neighbors’ unique needs — in this case, after noticing a shortage of workers in one place, a shortage of work in another. But to expand opportunity, the federal government needs to stop competing with these social entrepreneurs.

Notice what’s not mentioned in the op-ed: the federal policies—or lack thereof—that contribute to economic inequality. Instead Ryan prefers to consider the government as a benevolent business, charged with protecting its profit generators, businesses, and keeping its “competing” hands out of social services. Rather than address the root causes of poverty, legislators like Ryan emphasize local interventions that serves their laissez-faire ideology. (Of course no such local interventions regarding, say reproductive rights, would ever meet Ryan’s approval.) In this way, Ryan and his colleagues are able to simulate compassion for the ill without ever having to legislatively and meaningful address the policies and deregulation that have put so many Americans in crisis.

At the same time, Sessions-esque legislators are using their emphasis on charity as a cover for overt discrimination against minority groups defined by race, class, gender, sexual identity, or any other characteristic, like drug use, deemed politically expedient.

The crutch of charity is by no means used only by the right. Even left-leaning, tech-funded philanthropists, like Bill Gates, who buys immediate and limited relief for populations suffering from rising housing prices, for instance, lack the will or imagination to address political dysfunction. Government is seen as either too cumbersome or too dysfunctional to care for its people. By throwing bundles of cash at quick fixes rather than mass political and institutional change, they too are abetting a system predicated on feel-good works rather than lasting solutions.

Inadequately filling this compassionless maw are faith-groups, like parish nurses, left to rally whatever minimal resources they can from their generous congregations (and the government’s treacly faith-based condescension).

Today, Parish nursing is a “growing specialty” and it’s easy to understand why. On the demand-side of the equation, healthcare is increasingly becoming less affordable and less accessible at the same time that our elder population is rapidly increasing. And on the supply side, there aren’t enough doctors^[1] to go around—and nurses’ salaries are much lower than doctors’, making their employment more desirable to financially-strapped institutions.

What nurses are able to do, and do well, is get close to patients, something doctors can rarely offer with their high case loads and regulated billing hours. Nurses, particularly those embedded in grass-roots organizations like a church, can meet the needs of communities who lack health care (and the insurance or out-of-pocket wealth to access it), have minor health needs, and are on the front lines of medical access. Parish nursing makes a lot of sense in today’s medical landscape.

But what was made clear to me during my time in Deb’s little room is that no number of parish nurses can fill the void left in communities where gross inequality is created by a health care industry that has either abnegated its responsibility or been prevented by a callous government from fulfilling it. Deb may be efficient but she doesn’t have the resources the homeless around her suffer without—jobs, mental health care, rents that can be covered by unskilled (or even skilled) labor.

Healing a soul that has only a broken body for housing is a tall order. Our god may be awesome, but his mission to heal the sick is not getting through to Washington’s leaders, the only men (and a handful of women) too removed from the parish or the street to recognize their dire obligation.

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^[1]Although, some claim that the problem is not a shortage of physicians but their poor distribution.

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Ann Neumann is author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon, 2016) and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU.

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

The post Health and Salvation appeared first on The Revealer.

From Fenty Beauty’s Instagram

People often ask why I choose to write about makeup. Do I really think it’s that important? Makeup is superficial – literally. It is applied with brushes and sponges to sit on the surface of the skin, removed at the end of the day to leave a clean canvas for the next. Yet, the applications of makeup reach far beyond the outlines of the face and body.

I care about makeup because it is yet another institution where, because of the color of their skin, racial minorities are often excluded. The majority of cosmetic companies do not produce complexion products – such as foundation and concealer – in a range of pigments wide enough to work for people of color; most makeup is still made for light-skinned customers. It’s a perhaps subtle, but still insidious, way to perpetuate and uphold standards of beauty that exclude black and brown people.

Makeup matters, then, because representation matters. If commercial standards of beauty can evolve to include spokeswomen of color (Lupita Nyong’o for Lancôme) and men (Manny MUA for Maybelline), why is it still so hard for these companies to produce and market complexion makeup (foundations, concealers, etc.) for its black and brown skinned customers?

I would argue that we can answer these questions by looking at the twin forces of capitalism and religion as they have acted through American history and into the present moment. Here, religion becomes not so much belief and practice, as a way of understanding the ways in which our capitalist society is organized. It is a useful metaphorical lens for understanding how makeup brands can both perpetuate and combat racism.

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In her new book, Consuming Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Yale University historian of religion Kathryn Lofton explores how we can use religion to understand social life in a capitalist society. She argues that our society is based on producers’ and consumers’ desires and values. Producers of goods and services desire profits and determine the value of their products based on potential profit margins. Consumers can be a little more complex in that they express a desire to acquire those products, but can also express desires to influence certain industries through their purchasing habits: buying more products to support a brand, or boycotting their products when they do something objectionable. In other words, our feelings and political ideals not only shape our consumerist desires and values, but are a source of our power within our capitalist society.

“Corporations inscribe practices and promote worldviews beyond the applied scope of their product,” Lofton writes. These worldviews are the ways in which people conceptualize themselves in a society, a foundation for how they perceive and interact with the world. A worldview can be based on presumptions constructed through our experiences and can guide our ethical (and thus, consumer) judgments. Company employees, are indoctrinated with a perspective that they can then pass on to consumers. For instance, Apple’s corporate culture values simplicity. They instill in their employees the idea that even very advanced technology can be simple. Then, Apple workers create advertisements and work in retail stores, inspiring the same values in their customers. The values and desires of a corporation are meant to impact not only workers, but also the buying habits and beliefs of consumers. But those values are often much more complicated and insidious than just “simplicity.”

Rihanna at the launch for Fenty Beauty

The makeup industry has been shaped by the same white supremacist politics and histories as everything else in America. The lack of complexion products available to suit dark skin is the result of the makeup industry’s worldview. In this worldview white skin is beautiful, makeup is for women and thus, products are made for and marketed to a consumer base of white women. Makeup companies have a very long history of using their influence to further racist logics by which beauty belongs to those who are rich and pale.

For example, one might think of the ways in which paleness has been thought of as synonymous with beauty, and such pale beauty as indicative of purity. In the Victorian era, makeup was mostly worn by noble women. Upper class white women whitened their faces with lead-based powders to further distinguish themselves from lower-class (and enslaved) tanned, black, and brown people who labored outside in the sun. Their whitening complexion makeup also served to distinguish them from actresses and prostitutes whose more obvious makeup, rouge and lipstick, marked them as “impure” and lower-class.

Even as makeup became mass-produced and more affordable in the 1920s, black and brown people were still not given access to the cosmetic tools of white, upper-class beauty. In the early 20^th century, the justification was that black women did not have the money to buy makeup. Today, their exclusion has been justified on the grounds that black women, statistically, do not invest in makeup the same way they do in hair.[1]

But the logic here is circular: How can darker complexioned women buy foundations that are not produced in shades that match their skin? Of course they aren’t spending money on makeup if it doesn’t work for them.

Using Lofton’s argument to develop a deeper understanding of why makeup matters, I argue that makeup companies are projecting worldviews which consumers, particularly women of color, are empowered to either literally buy into, or reject. Moreover, as consumers become better able to engage with brands directly through social media and YouTube, new brands are constructing new worldviews.

In other words, there is a schism in the church of makeup and a reformation is well underway.

But let’s expand this religious analogy even further. Where is this church you may ask? The most well-known is Sephora, a cosmetic store chain that sells over 100 mid-tier and high-end makeup brands and has proselytized its way to 2,300 stores in 33 countries. The Catholics: mainstream cosmetic companies like Tarte (more on them in a moment). And Luther reemerges in Rihanna, the popstar from Barbados, and her revolutionary new cosmetics company, Fenty Beauty. Just as Luther used his printing press to spread his message, Rihanna has used a comparably revolutionary new medium, social media — particularly, YouTube — to share hers.

YouTube, as a video-based social media platform, provides a unique online community where subscribers can identify with others on a visual level and companies can literally hear feedback from consumers. The site has become a marketplace of its own, with endless opportunities for advertising and the potential for beauty gurus to become YouTube stars who even make it onto a Forbes list of top beauty influencers.

YouTube is now one of the main ways consumers engage with companies especially through review videos, a popular genre of beauty vlogging that has earned some channels as many as 5 million subscribers. Among these channels is one run by black beauty vlogger Nyma Tang. A Sudanese-American woman with a deep skin tone, Tang is part of a growing YouTube community that has highlighted the demand for makeup suitable for dark and deep skin. On her YouTube series “The Darkest Shade,” Tang tests out the darkest shade available in various makeup products to see if it will match her skin but, like many of her subscribers, she has struggled to find products that work for her. Though the problem is longstanding and persistent, opposition is growing and so is the worldview of this sect of consumers.

In response to their persistent economic and aesthetic marginalization, YouTube has facilitated the construction of an opposing worldview in which women of color can also be considered beautiful people who deserve to have options when it comes to makeup. In Lofton’s terms, makeup YouTubers have clearly stated their desire for an industry that values inclusivity.

There have been attempts to change the industry before. For example, Fashion Fair Cosmetics sold dark complexion products in the 1970s and 80s, proving for the first time that there was a market for them. Brands like Iman and Black Opal have since helped to develop a cosmetics counter-worldview in which black is indeed beautiful. But what YouTube (and the Internet generally) has done is allow consumers to hold mainstream cosmetics companies accountable, pushing them to change their exclusionary practices.

Nyma Tang on Fenty Beauty’s Instagram

The result is not simply an alternative sect, but a more organized means of critiquing the mainstream. For example, in early 2018, Tarte Cosmetics released their Shape Tape Foundation, a highly anticipated companion to their best-selling concealer. Foundation needs to match skin much more precisely than concealer does, but when Tarte released their new foundation in a range of 15 colors, only three of them were potential matches for medium tan and dark skin tones.

The backlash against Tarte was immediate and the controversy surrounding the product compelled popular beauty influencers to express their opinions, thereby enunciating their desires and values as the makeup industry’s consumers. Even beauty vloggers who could find their shade in the line refused to review the product. Those who were not able to find their shade pointedly promoted other companies. They not only reviewed better foundations, but other makeup products that could replace previously recommended Tarte lines, essentially calling for a full boycott of the company.

Their criticism and activism were evidence of the emerging makeup reformation. Tarte’s whitewashed beliefs and practices served as a modern example for the white-supremacist and exclusionary doctrine of the old makeup world order. And they were resoundingly rejected. It was evidence of a new worldview, and with that worldview, opening up a space for a new kind of brand. A brand like Fenty Beauty.

In her introduction to Consuming Religion, Lofton concisely explains how any product can have profound implications. She writes, “Access to consumer options creates contexts for education, empowerment, and progress.” The creation of Fenty Beauty is just such a new context for educating and empowering marginalized consumers and is a sign of political and social progress for black and brown people.

Debuting in September of 2017, the brand catalyzed a major paradigm shift. In its first product release, Fenty Beauty launched 40 foundation shades ranging from very fair to very deep. Compare that to Tarte’s measly 15? The line was instantly iconic. The brand has been at the forefront of defining a new standard of inclusivity in makeup where everyone is accounted for from the very beginning.

In her review, Nyma Tang recounts the excitement she felt when buying her shade at Sephora and seeing so many other people that looked like her find their shade as well. “That’s something I really appreciate. I love the fact that this product was available to so many people so fast.”

Fenty Beauty has been a huge success with a recorded $72 million in earned media value (non-paid advertising) in its first month. It has become an established leader of a new sect and made way for a new future for makeup. The brand has demonstrated that it values the inclusion of men and a plethora of skin tones through its promotional photos and reposts of people wearing their products on Instagram.

Image from Fenty Beauty Instagram

Its popularity has inspired a phenomenon dubbed “the Fenty effect” wherein other brands seek to emulate the same outstanding shade range, but are often still operating without the same desires and values that Fenty Beauty and its consumers both share. Companies such as Kylie Cosmetics and Huda Beauty have been seen by black beauty influencers as not showing a legitimate change in their worldview and rather, as transparently wishing to capitalize on good press solely to generate more profit. They are acting in bad faith, and the consumers have largely rejected them.

Considering makeup through the lens of religion can help makeup consumers understand the changes that are taking place and the power that they hold in affecting those changes. Though makeup is just a small part of the progress that needs to take place regarding race in our society, even the smallest changes can have a large impact. Those who had not previously given the makeup shade predicament much thought may see the industry as a more tangible example of institutional racism that they can literally see in stores; it does not merely exist in the depths of our government or our penal and educational systems. In capitalists societies today today, the power to affect change may not just lie in moral arguments, but also in consumers’ wallets.

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[1] Nielsen’s 2013 African-American Consumer Report lists ethnic hair products as the demographics’ most purchased category, and points to cosmetics as an area of untapped potential.

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Pitt Rivers Museum Facebook Cover Photo

The organizing principle for the collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England is simple: everything. Spawned from the personal collection of a pioneering 19^th Century British archaeologist and ethnologist, Augustus Pitt Rivers, the museum contains well over half a million artifacts.

Spread on multiple levels throughout a cavernous structure attached to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, these objects are arranged not by region of origin or era of construction, but instead categorized by use, as artifacts of different domains of human life, indexing various (ostensibly universal) activities and interest. A case labeled “Treatment of the Dead” thus includes both Victorian urns and Shinto shrines, Andaman skull relics and Medieval European memento mori; it sits beside another case (“Treatment of Dead Enemies” with similarly far-flung contents. And there are hundreds of such displays, encompassing a bewildering archive of human pursuits and proclivities: Whistling Arrows, Smoking and Stimulants, Bells, Rattles, and Xylophones, Puppets, Skis, Model Boats, Snuff-Taking Equipment, and Lutes. The collection of religious artifacts is particularly astounding: totems, idols, ritual masks, incense braziers, ritual knives, prayer rugs, sacred jewelry, etc. Amidst this profusion of objects, variously “primitive” and high-tech, are also a variety of scientific instruments: telescopes, microscopes, slides, dissection tools. Alongside all the rest, their presence makes a point that is simple yet profound: scientific inquiry, like religious devotion, is a human phenomenon and a material practice, something humans do that involves things that humans make. Their metaphysical propositions and disputes over descriptive accuracy set aside, science and religion are presented together, first and foremost as grounded in a shared materiality.

But this even-handed emphasis on science and religion’s shared grounding also disguises implicit hierarchy. Pitt Rivers was a devout adherent of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, a man who believed not just in assessing the adaptations and fitness of animals, but of weighing the superiority and decay of cultures and “the races.” Just because the display objects lie together, side-by-side does not mean they are equivalent – in fact, quite the opposite. They are artifacts of cultural adaptation and decline, and their proximity is meant to illustrate evolutionary narratives of improvement or stultification. Tracking these narratives was something the polymath Pitt Rivers saw as demanding dedicated interdisciplinary study, combining ethnology and anthropology and archaeology. It was also raison d’etre for his collection, and his museum. As he wrote:

The ethnologist and the anthropologist who has not studied the prehistoric archaeology of his own country compares the present condition of savages with that of the Europeans with whom they are brought in contact. He notices the vast disparity of intellect between them. He finds the savage incapable of education and of civilization, and evidently destined to fall away before the white man whenever the races meet, and he jumps at the conclusion that races so different in mental and physical characteristics, must have had a distinct origin, and be the offspring of separate creations. But the archaeologist traces back the arts and institutions of his own people and country until he finds that they once existed in a condition as low or lower than that of existing savages, having the same arts, and using precisely the same implements and weapons; and he arrives at the conclusion that the difference observable between existing races is one of divergence, and not of origin; that owing to causes worthy of being carefully studied and investigated, one race has improved, while another has progressed slowly or remained stationary.

Note Pitt Rivers’ phrasing about scholars comparing “the present condition of savages with that of the Europeans with whom they are brought in contact.” Pitt Rivers was a distinguished military officer, with a particularly keen interest in weapons; in his museum, walls of clubs and swords give way to muskets and then rifles. “Contact,” it seems, includes a lot of conquests – the outcomes of which vindicated white racial superiority. Quite un-self-consciously, Pitt Rivers’ museum was intended as a scientific archive of, and monument to, a global colonial empire, erected in the most erudite precinct of its metropolitan heart. The objects may share space in the same glass display cases, but what both separates and contains them is the purest kind of ideology.

Last July, not far from Pitt Rivers museum, at St. Anne’s College, a group of scientists, scholars, and clerics gathered together for a conference hosted by Oxford University’s Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion by the Templeton Foundation and the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). The meeting, “Religion, Society, and the Science of Life,” focused primarily on the implications of what has become known as “the New Biology.” As many of the conference participants and organizers quickly stipulated, the phrase “New Biology” is something of a misnomer, less the name for a new kind of discipline than it is a shorthand for a variety of new tools. These tools are hard to describe, let alone imagine fitting coherently in a museum display case. Technologies like CRISPR sequencing have allowed biologists to precisely edit gene sequences in specimen organisms, producing particular, quantifiable effects in terms of the expression of various traits; meanwhile, new techniques for exploring epigenetics have expanded scientific scrutiny into an entire register of heritable characteristics that operate at a level just above DNA itself. The adoption of these tools has help prompt a recent revival of what’s known as the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), a sort of grand-unifying working model for the evolution of living organisms that attempts to combine classical Darwinian and more recent evolutionary theory with new experimental data. In the words of Massimo Pigliucci, a proponent of the EES and one of the conference’s major speakers, these developments together mean that the idea of “life as an object of study” has undergone a distinct and dramatic change.

More granularly, a running theme through presentations and talks was how New Biology might affect, first and foremost, thinking about causality, and, second, undoing ideas of static organismic integrity in favor of multi-causal, interdependent systems. Dame Ottoline Leyser, a plant biologist and Professor of Plant Development at the University of Cambridge, illustrated this shift in perspective by asking her audience to consider a common specimen plant: the thale cress (Arabidopsis). Per Leyser, both scientific and popular considerations of such a plant inevitably proceed both in terms of linear narratives (from seed to plant, sprout to flower, etc.) and in terms of discrete levels of focus and scale (this is the function of the stem, this is the function of a petal, this is what roots do, etc.). Yet targeted interventions on the genetic and epigenetic level, reveal that linear narratives are insufficient, and that efforts at understanding biological processes at artificially constrained levels of scale fall short: organisms are dynamic, with their parts and environments in constant feedback with one another. “A cell is a dynamic self-organizing system of interacting molecules, sensitive to local and systemic inputs,” says Leyser. “And a meristem is a dynamic self-organizing system of interacting cells, sensitive to local and systemic inputs.” And thus: “A plant is a dynamic self-organizing system of interacting meristems, sensitive to local and systemic inputs.” Assessing her specimen plant as a specimen for an entire way of thinking, Leyser summed it all up: “The whole plant is a system that’s absolutely ridden with feedback, so I’m not that interested in [singular] causation.”

The idea of organisms as dynamic systems, and an emphasis on multi-factorial, interdependent processes rather than on singular causation was what, for most of the conference’s participants, activated the most religious resonances. Rather than upsetting many Western theological visions that emphasis God as First Cause or Prime Mover, the insights of the New Biology are taken as instead validating that premise. As Fraser Watts, an Anglican cleric and one of the event’s ISSR organizers put it, “For a Christian thinker, the living world seems increasingly to reflect the interdependence of Father, Son and Spirit.” Per Watts, the “holistic approach” of the new biology “takes a huge number of variables and tries to understand how they work,” thereby sidestepping tired debates over “monocauasal determinism.”.[1]

As the event proceeded, a certain ambiguity became visible. Although many participants would, in Q&As and casual conversation, attest to specific religious commitments, actual expressions of belief were kept to a minimum coming from the podiums. In fact, one of the most striking things in the first two days of dozens of talking about evolution in causality is that I never once heard the word “God.” And yet God was also ubiquitous – and not just God in the abstract. The implicit point of reference was, throughout, a very Christian, even specifically Protestant, notion of God as a Creator, with a plan for creaturely life and human transformation. The ISSR’s logo may feature symbols for a variety of traditions (the Star of David, a Sikh khanda, a Sanskrit om) but at this event at least there wasn’t much interrogation of how these traditions might frame the stakes of a “religion” versus “science” encounter differently. When one of the few Buddhists at the event did raise a post-lecture question, saying how, in his view, the world might be seen less as a dynamic system or divine creation than as “a torture device” intended to produce suffering, the response was sort of a sympathetic befuddlement. Interventions that did not deploy configurations of the discussion’s two operative dialectical terms – science on the one hand, and religion (read: Christianity) on the other – simply did not appear to compute.

But Christianity was not the only theme that was ubiquitous yet unspoken, determining certain dialogue outcomes even as it foreclosed others. What was also everywhere, but unspoken, were politics and money. As an event funded by the Templeton Organization, this conference depended on the largesse of an organization with a history of specific political commitments and policy agendas. Speaking off the named record, several participants stressed that support for conservative religious causes were no longer part of the organization’s culture, and that the independence of this event from any such considerations was sacrosanct. Yet, regardless, as with not naming God, the discussion of “dialogue” between science and religion proceeded without naming any of the material dimensions that made it possible in the first place. In one of the capstone lectures, a noted theologian and public intellectual described today’s youth as plagued by a sense of disconnection, a yearning for meaning and answers. This anomie, he suggested, meant millenials were a ripe audience for the insights of religious figures working in dialogue with scientists. When the question arose as to how those youth’s unhappiness might also relate to political uncertainty and their economic fortunes, consideration of how that might be germane was deferred in favor of starting “conversation.”

After four days of conversation, always positioned as conversations started towards opening-onto yet other, future conversation-to-come, it soon became clear: this was the purpose of the exercise, this was that conversation. An abstract dialogue between two abstractions (“religion” and “science”) as a dialogue meant, in practice, the interaction of representatives of various institutions (the academy, and certain specific established religions) obliged to continuously talk around the structures (capital, politics, disciplinarity) that were the conditions of possibility for the dialogue itself.

The conversation was certainly fascinating, and the atmosphere cordial, but it all felt, in its own way, on display, framed by and for a particular ideological gaze, an artifact of some obscure cultural purpose, in its own ideological glass case.

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[1] Not that certain types of determinism were entirely absent from the event: over lunch one day, a PhD student working in the philosophy of mind explained that in addition to being a Calvinist, he’s also a biological determinist. In other words, in his view, human are robots, all the way down and some of those robots are programmed to be the Elect while others, not so much.

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Patrick Blanchfield was the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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

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In 2016 Donald Trump made a promise. In churches and in schools, with celebrity preachers like Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell, Jr., and, most famously, on stage while accepting the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Trump vowed to do everything in his power to nullify the section of the 501(c)3 Internal Revenue Code commonly referred to as the Johnson Amendment.

Adopted in 1955 to little resistance or fanfare, the Johnson Amendment, on its most basic level, limits the political speech of not-for-profit organizations. Ever since then, non-profits have essentially traded their right to lobby and influence elections in exchange for tax exempt status. Of course, churches are included under this umbrella, but so are all other 501(c)3 organizations –schools and hospitals, the United Way and the Boys and Girls Club, the Rockefeller Foundation and the NFL.

The Johnson Amendment was originally intended to be one of a number of walls erected at mid-century in order to isolate – not necessarily to punish – non-profits as a developing “third sector” economic force in American society. It was a way to keep non-profits separate from for-profit industry as well as state and federal government. And though we are more accustomed to hearing him threaten to build walls than destroy them, Trump is merely the most recent in a long history of leaders who have attempted to topple this legal barrier.

At last year’s National Prayer Breakfast he promised attendees, “This financial threat against the faith community is over. You’re now in a position to say what you want to say…. No one should be censoring sermons or targeting pastors…. [I vow to] get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.” Despite countless reports that the Protestant ministers to whom many of these promises have been addressed couldn’t care much less about the amendment’s repeal, these promises have had a powerful pull on Republic lawmakers in Washington.

Every time the Republicans propose a new tax bill, they put the Johnson amendment on the block, and every time it makes headlines. When it came time for this past winter’s showdown over tax reform, the House did propose removing the limit on churches’ political speech from the revenue code – though in its final review, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the measure violated budgetary reconciliation procedure.

Nonetheless, using the Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty, President Trump has directed the Department of the Treasury to ensure that “churches…not be found guilty of implied endorsements where secular organizations would not be.” And, in doing so, he has formally entered into a decades-long debate over the rights and shifting corporate identities of not-for-profit institutions.

The irony in much of this is that the original legislation these battles are fought over was introduced and adopted without a hiccup in the 1950s.

Introduced in 1954 by then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, this amendment to the Internal Revenue Code was an act of political retribution. The measures came about immediately after a reelection campaign in which right-wing non-profits spent vast sums of money trying to unseat Johnson and install in his place the millionaire rancher and oil tycoon Dudley Dougherty. In response, Johnson’s proposed amendment struck at any organization exempt from federal taxation.

Under the law Johnson passed, churches and other non-profits “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” They can’t raise funds for political candidates and clergy can’t endorse particular parties from the pulpit. And while we think of the 1950s as a period of virulently anti-communistic politics – as the period in which a patriotic Judeo-Christian tri-faith model both hardened and flourished – it’s helpful to remember that this type of separation of institutions and “pure” market forces was seen by the majority of Americans as a very good thing, as a quality that separated the United States from “godless,” state-centric Soviet systems. The average American, as well as the average legislator, did not want Wall Street bankers, K Street lobbying firms, and Main Street churches involved in similar or overlapping activities. As evidenced by the easy and lasting acceptance of Johnson’s amendment, Americans at mid-century proclaimed – at least on one level – to prefer separate spheres of influence for different types of corporations.

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It may be obvious why, today, in an era of Citizens United and Super PACs, both sides of the political aisle are fighting over the tax status of churches and other not-for-profit groups and their abilities to lobby. What would happen, we might ask ourselves, if priests and rabbis could not only explicitly tell their congregants who to vote for, but could also collect money in service of particular candidates? In order to fully grasp what is at stake in this fight over the seemingly dry question of tax statutes, it helps to look more deeply at the history of non-profit family philanthropic foundations and the courses they set for themselves in navigating these issues related to politics, profit, and the legal limits of their influence. These foundations are absolutely central to the story of how religion, capital, and political power have never been fully separable within American politics.

In the teens and twenties, only a small number of philanthropic foundations filed for incorporation. But when the Revenue Acts of 1934 and 1935 passed, the philanthropic floodgates opened and a number of successful businessmen with conservative Protestant beliefs began to formalize their charitable giving through articles of incorporation, leaving behind their more personal, less “rationalized” forms[1] of charitable giving in the process. Luce, Lilly, Olin, Sloan, Ford, and Pew, among others, created foundations for the transfer, protection, and disbursement of their fortunes in ways that spoke directly to their political, economic, and religious interests. Newly-minted non-profit corporations could enjoy the same pooling of resources as for-profit corporations but with added tax benefits symptomatic of the state’s privileging of these benevolent organizations.

As the wealth kept by non-profits has ballooned throughout the twentieth century, they have, in exchange for such privileges, accepted certain limitations on the ways in which they can express themselves in the political sphere. And while these foundations may have bristled at particular tax burdens, even the most conservative politicians and businessmen in the country have thought that separating different types of institutions this way was prudent. Pew, Luce, and Lilly provide particularly vivid examples of the ways in which non-profits, revenue code, and the legislation surrounding our current tax regimes are not only influenced by religion, but are in fact saturated in it (something I am exploring at greater depth in my dissertation).

Among this cohort of defenders of a free and unfettered market, none was more conservative than J. Howard Pew. A graduate of Grove City College, Pew was a lifelong ally of Billy Graham and other members of the evangelical establishment. He supported the John Birch Society, the American Liberty League, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, and spent decades of his life drafting tirades against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. (Pew was against Roosevelt’s attempts to destroy what he saw as the divinely ordained perfect economic competition achieved through a combination of high taxes and the concomitant loopholes privileged free market players used to evade them.) His conservative bona fides were strong.

But in a way, his particular mid-century logic sheds light on how individuals across the political spectrum viewed the role of religion and religious institutions throughout much of the twentieth century. As an example, Howard Pew fought two telling legislative battles emblematic of this desire to keep separation between market and religious forces.

At the time, churches could own and earn tax-exempt income from businesses unrelated to the church itself – such as gas stations and factories. Pew’s first big legislative fight was to get rid of the tax exemption for those earnings. In the fall of 1955, Pew received a letter from one of his personal financial advisors at the Fidelity-Philadelphia Trust Company alerting him to the fact that the national offices of the Baptist Church had just purchased twelve filling stations in California. This letter came to Pew on the heels of news that the Catholic Church had recently secured the rights to a brick factory in Arizona, as well as a reminder from the Episcopal Church that its local parishes and national governing body owned acres on acres of rentable land in the hearts of some of America’s most expensive cities. And none of them were paying any income taxes on the revenue earned by these holdings.

For decades Howard Pew had overseen the enormous twentieth-century growth of his family business, Sun Oil, and along the way both created and managed countless charitable foundations and family trusts. The news about the Baptist Church’s new filling stations upset Pew in particular, though.

On the one hand, he found religious control of profit-making businesses distasteful and believed Presbyterians could enjoy a moral superiority by not engaging the practice. But on the other, the endowments of the Presbyterian Church and its eponymous foundation were falling behind those of other denominations.

Rather than try to win by joining the game, Pew went about trying to change the rules.

He organized a trans-denominational battle against tax-free church and charity ownership of unrelated businesses, helping to remove this popular tax exemption from the Internal Revenue Code that would have saved millions for the very charities and foundations that he designed and led.

The second battle Pew chose to fight was about how bequests to charitable organizations (both religious and otherwise) could be taxed. As one of the wealthiest men in America, Howard Pew would have had more reasons than many to wage a full-scale assault on the state and federal inheritance tax. But his family’s wealth was never a primary concern for Pew. While Rockefellers, Fords, and Luces before them worked to ensure the easy transfer of wealth and corporate control across generations, the Pews believed in the importance of the “self-made man” and cared less about securing the finances of future Pews.

In this fight, Pew had in mind the health of two different corporate bodies: the Pew family trusts, designed to collect family assets after each member’s death, and his own Presbyterian Church. In terms of the work that Pew was doing, the line between the two in was not always clear – often lessons learned on behalf of the Presbyterian Foundation could be applied to the family trusts by Pew, and vice versa. And ultimately, in this attempt to make it possible for as much gifted money as possible to go to the church, Pew did not fight inheritance tax as a concept. Rather he took issue with a particular code (the Pennsylvania Inheritance Tax on Charitable Bequests) that taxed both individual citizens and corporate persons who received monetary gifts after the death of a donor.

Believing the arrangement as it stood to be unjust to wealthy individuals and to their favored institutions, Pew set about to both change the law (with a multi-stage approach involving a public relations campaign, grooming state legislators, and gathering his friends in the business community around the cause) and to circumvent it through a novel financial device known as the Life Income Plan.

As I said, for the Pews, the act of endowment was always less about securing the future of their heirs and more focused on supporting the causes they held most dear while dodging the specter of government interference. So it was to these ends that Howard Pew created a financial instrument that would do just that: avoid any significant bequest benefits to blood relations while empowering the churches, charities, and philanthropic foundations closest to him through an innovative avoidance of state and federal taxation. The resultant Life Income Plan, a type of charitable gift-cum-annuity originally marketed to members of the Presbyterian Church, further exemplifies the slipperiness of the secular. Through it, a non-profit foundation owned by (but not itself) a church, could market a novel financial instrument for the tax-savvy investor to shield his assets from government’s intrusive and morally suspect Tax on Charitable Bequests.

And Pew eventually did win out in the Pennsylvania state legislature also, striking down the state’s tax on charitable bequests; any monetary gifts a Pennsylvania non-profit receives after a donor’s death has, since then, been tax-exempt. As a result, creating and giving to endowments has become both an act of political protest and an example of spiritual devotion (even if the pot is sweetened with quarterly dividends). Endowments afford individuals the ability to live on past death and to grant material power to individual or corporate bodies into perpetuity. And in that act of endowment, certain virtues – either genetic or moral – are rewarded.

Ultimately, the legislative line in the sand regarding charitable bequest taxation and the creation of the Life Income Plan both serve as evidence of Pew’s belief in a particular kind of religious freedom and his desire to limit the powers of the state in dictating the terms of religious and charitable giving.

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Historical developments like these help us to both make sense of a particular moment in time while also shining a brighter light on our current political environment. By paying close attention to Pew and men like him we learn even more about what it meant to be a political conservative in this mid-century moment of rabid anti-communism and corporate redefinition. By using tax law to perform their adherence to a web of Christian ideals – from charity and thrift to self-reliance and right stewardship – Pew and other conservative philanthropists of his time helped to define the proper role of the church in the political sphere and to dictate where the boundaries of the free market were to be drawn within a murky, purportedly secular, environment.

The Pews were neither the first nor the last to push the boundaries of for-profit and non, or charity and church, in order to gain the type of political influence they desired. Even without a change to the embattled Johnson Amendment, religious organizations and individuals still test the limits of political speech, often through ingeniously creative means and labyrinthine corporate structures. The Greene family of Hobby Lobby fame, for instance, has created a museum, a foundation, a for-profit crafting empire and a number of well-funded academic programs—from elementary school curricula through postdoctoral research fellowships—throughout the country. But the central location of their Museum of the Bible in the nation’s capital shows just how intent they are on inserting their opinions into the heart of a particular set of national debates.

At times, I think, it should be hard to feel more secular than one does when speaking about U.S. tax code or to feel more religious than when referencing the speech of churches. But revenue code has the ability to tell us a great deal about the webs of institutions and actors whose allegiances are rarely stable and whose privileges always evade simple labels. And within the same debates, the privileges of religious corporations can become powerful political pawns. During another historical moment at which what it means to be a Republican, or even a conservative, is up for debate, we owe it to ourselves to pay close attention to the ways in which our nation privileges particular types of speech at the expense of others and distributes both capital and power, influence and air time.

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[1] Here I’m making the distinction between earlier models of giving where individual donors simply gave to the causes they wanted when they wished to one more guided by a “science” of restrained, responsible giving and specialized armies of bureaucratic non-profit administrators.

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Andrew Jungclaus is a doctoral candidate in Columbia University’s Department of Religion. Andrew received his bachelor’s degree in American studies and English literature from the College of William and Mary, his master’s degree in theology and history from the University of Oxford, and holds master’s degrees from Columbia in the study of religion. Andrew previously worked as a research assistant at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, exploring the concept of theodicy within American civil rights struggles. Andrew’s dissertation research focuses on the evolution of philanthropic models within a history of capitalism.

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

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