John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote our favorite (!) essay about religion and music, and he’s back this month with another gobsmacker:  In Memoriam: Lil Peep for GQ

For the generation coming up, the one I don’t really understand yet, this music speaks to them (to a lot of them), and maybe that’s partly why it speaks to me, because I want to understand them better. It’s awesome and awful, the world we’ve demanded they inherit—they are the children of the end of the world, the real end of the world this time, now that not just the prophets but the scientists are saying so—and the way these young people deal with that, stay human in the strangeness of having been born at that moment, seems a drama worth observing. Lil Peep, born Gustav Åhr, who was only 21 when he died last month but had been warning everyone he would die young since teenagerhood—he suffered under volcanic substance-abuse problems that he turned into performance art—was just such an end-times singer.

By now, you probably know we’re pretty interested in what’s going on with witches, which is why we were extremely grateful for this latest addition to the conversation, White Magic: Though it is the subtext of savagery that animates narratives around witches, white women who take up the mantle of witch magic rarely understand themselves to be engaging in Indian or savage play by Lou Cornum for The New Inquiry

Though it is the subtext of savagery (ascribed to both Indigenous and African-descendent peoples in the Americas) that animates narratives around witches, white women who take up the mantle of witch magic rarely understand themselves to be engaging in Indian or savage play. The turn to witchcraft as a trend (rather than a practice) is conditioned by white women’s desire to obfuscate the power begotten by their whiteness. The occult is after all definitionally about power that obscures its origin. In the current fashion and fashioning of witches, the historical connections between witches and racialized savages, however sublimated, continues to magnetize the appeal. I am sympathetic to this appeal even as I am suspicious of it; it marks a desire to be contrary to the colonial project, even if it does not always enact it.

The current trend in witch infatuation marks an alliance foreclosed. In the early days of America, when accusations of witchcraft were leveled at Indians, Black people, and settlers who strayed from the strict disciplining needed to create a cohesive sovereignty of one dominant nation, it was because witches were a threat. The representations of witches that dominate contemporary American cultural consciousness—the “Surprise, Bitch” meme from American Horror Story, Stevie Nicks, people who talk about healing stones a lot—betray the role witches could have played in undoing the nation.

Speaking of, well, sex and power and America, Jodi Eichler-Levine wrote about The long, nasty moral war over sexuality in America in her review of R. Marie Griffith‘s new book Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics for The Washington Post

“Moral Combat” is an impressive history of a massive fault line running through American history and politics: namely, sex. In eight rich chapters that span a century, Griffith traces the ridge where the tectonic plates of very different kinds of Christians have abutted, telling the “story of the steady breakdown, since the early twentieth century, of a onetime Christian consensus about sexual morality and gender roles and of the battles over sex among self-professed Christians — and between some groups of Christians and non-Christians — that resulted.”

And another professor of religious studies, Jessica Delgado weighed in powerfully on The Reckoning: Sexual harassment, #MeToo, and the pain of radical change for Public Seminar

So it is important, I believe, to remember what we are aiming for. We are aiming for a move toward wholeness. We are aiming toward reaffirming those broken friendships, those shattered social and professional networks, those damaged families — remaking them, rebuilding them in ways that affirm all of our humanity. We are aiming for a world — expressed in every corner of our lives — in which no one has to accept abuse to be employed, to create, to have an education, to be loved. This is a lofty goal, but this is really what all of these stories and the demands they imply are reaching for. Relationships or structures that include or require denial of anyone’s humanity contain a toxin that will eventually poison everyone involved. Survivors often survive, but we pay a heavy cost. We may not see the benefit of this moment of reckoning. But we speak anyway, because we know that others will. We also speak anyway, because doing so restores our humanity.

While two mainstays of The Revealer shared their takes on the other gigantic news story of the last cycle (or so) Michael Wolff‘s Fire and Fury 

With  Patrick Blanchfield on the Black Hole Sun God for n+1

Yet laid out in book-length prose, rather than telegraphed in 140 or 280-character bursts, the impact is like the distancing effect in Brechtian theater: we see what’s always been in front of us, but in a queasy new perspective and dilated temporality. Caught in the whiplash of headline after headline, we simply react and brace for what’s next; reading month after month as narrated by Wolff, we take a longer view, and the full insanity of what has come to constitute our new normal sinks in. We realize that Trump has always been what he is—and also that we have nonetheless always been looking for more. One of the more disturbing parts of the book is reading Trump’s transcribed speeches—off-the-cuff, rambling, incoherent, repetitive, crude. Rendered in blocky, disorienting, endless paragraphs, they are nonetheless entirely of a piece with his tweets at their epigrammatic worst. There is no between-the-lines, no secret code: it is all simply there, blatant, ugly, and stupid.

And Jeff Sharlet on The Value of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” for Bookforum

A number of my fellow journalists are saying privately and publicly that Michael Wolff’s book is no big deal—“nothing we didn’t know already.” This response makes me think of people who see some piece of modern art, a Jackson Pollock or an Ellsworth Kelly, and say, “I could do that.” Yeah, but did you?

I don’t mean to compare Wolff to a great artist, but what he’s done is triply valuable. The inside portrait of the Trump White House as workplace-from-hell may be “gossip,” but then, gossip has ever been the bile of the news—and remember, the body needs bile. 

Meanwhile, Sharlet’s longtime compatriot in religion writing, Peter Manseau wrote about Father Worship: Hamilton’s New World Scripture for The Baffler

The favored avatars of this faith may change with the times, but its creed does not. The birth of the nation remains our One True God. The Revolution, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers serve as something of a trinity establishing the culture’s unquittable cosmology and incontestable truth. Seen this way, Hamilton is less a new vision of the past than a translation of the sacred stories of American civil religion into the vernacular—in this case, the lingua franca of contemporary pop culture, a mashup of hiphop, R&B, rock, and show tune samples. And like any vernacular rendering of a text considered holy and immutable, it is at once radical on the surface and retrograde underneath—the best example in years of how a dominant worldview adapts to survive social change.

Brook Wilensky Lanford wrote about Jonas Bendiksen: Among the Messiahs for Guernica

INRI Cristo, 66 years old. INRI first had his revelation that he was Jesus Christ’s second coming in 1979. “INRI” are the initials that Pontius Pilate had written on top of Jesus’s cross. Brazil, 2014. Photograph by Jonas Bendiksen; from The Last Testament (Aperture, 2017).

If you had asked photographer Jonas Bendiksen four years ago if he ever thought he would meet Jesus, he might have given you a quizzical look. The award-winning  documentarian from Norway is a self-described “skeptic,” known for his ethereal images of abandoned technology in Central Asia in Satellites (Aperture, 2006), and his epic visual exploration of people and homes around the world in The Places We Live (Aperture, 2008). The premise of his new project is a departure from the secular: Bendiksen embeds himself in the lives and communities of men who claim to be the Second Coming of Christ. That’s right—men, plural: Bendiksen encounters six of these modern day Jesuses.

Bendiksen compiled his images, the writings of the six Jesuses, and narratives of his own experience into a 400-plus-page book called The Last Testament (Aperture, 2017). Though it would be easy to approach this material with tongue planted in cheek, the resulting work is not an exposé or a parody: Bendiksen takes each of his subject’s claims at face value, and approaches them with generosity. It is designed to be as immersive an experience as Bendiksen’s own in getting to know his six subjects. I was curious about every aspect of this project: Where do you find six people who claim to be Jesus? How do you approach them and their disciples? How do they approach you? And most of all, how does someone who grew up in what he calls a “godless” home end up in a years-long pilgrimage, and with what results? The following interview ranges from the practical to the theological, the ridiculous to the sublime, and back again. And every step along the way is surprising.

Sarah Posner, too, has been on the religion beat for a spell and is always worth reading. This month she’s got the story of the  Anti-Trans Bathroom Debate: How a Local Religious-Right Faction Launched a National Movement for Rolling Stone

Facing such political headwinds, Christian-right activists desperately needed a fresh strategy. Provoking fear of infringement on religious liberty would likely only gain traction among fellow believers. They soon found an alternative in Shackelford’s home state, whose largest city was, at the time, led by a lesbian Democratic mayor. There, in Houston, a small band of well-connected far-right activists was resurrecting an approach from the oldest anti-LGBTQ playbook: to transform the civic debate about homosexuality into a panic about predators. As national activists fretted at the Ritz-Carlton, Houston players had already sketched out a plan to turn voters against nondiscrimination ordinances by framing the debate as one about safety for women and girls. It proved so potent that it prompted a shift in legislative strategy across the country.

And one last Revealer,  Ann Neumann‘s phenomenal Omnipresence with photographs by Elizbeth Felicella for the Virginia Quarterly Review

You can argue that black bodies should not be criminalized for being in public: Eric Garner (July 17, 2014), Michael Brown (August 9, 2014), Black Lives Matter. Tough-on-crime adherents will point out “police assassinations”: Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos (December 20, 2014), Blue Lives Matter. Scott Downs at LawEnforcementToday.com writes that basically everybody is “fueling the fires of misinformation with unfounded, and subjective incendiary rhetoric placing the law enforcement community in harm’s way.” It’s the cops vs. everybody. It’s cops’ safety at any cost. “Omnipresence is based on an implemented theory that police presence deters criminal behavior,” Downs writes.

Omnipresence. That’s God, everywhere at once. The all-seeing eye. That’s what NYPD officers are when sitting in their satellite office on the back side of Red Hook West, Building 1, or in a car on the sidewalk at Ninth Street. Or when two officers huddle under generator lights. Omnipresence is the generator lights, shining in windows, their aluminum bowls reflecting sulfur-bright into the bedroom of a brown family, bleaching the night of color. The lights began here in Red Hook with Sandy, Nathan says. But all over the city, there are lights.

Also reporting from New York City on matters of religion, vulnerability, and state power,  Cinthya Santos Briones and Laura Gottesdiener for WNYC’s Midday about their series with Malav Kanuga about immigrants Finding Sanctuary for The Nation

It has been more than five months since Amanda Morales and her three children left behind their home on Long Island to take sanctuary in Holyrood Church in Washington Heights. The move happened quickly, in a matter of days, after Amanda learned that she would be deported to Guatemala. As she and her kids set about uprooting their lives—packing up their clothes, toys, and the pet fish—they got help from the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City, an interfaith network of congregations and activists helping immigrants resist detention and deportation. The coalition searched out a church where the family could live. They procured sleeping bag and other necessities. They connected Amanda with lawyers, who filed for a stay of removal and a petition to open an asylum case (both were denied and are now being appealed).

We’re here in NYC also, but our new favorite commuting escape is the new podcast from Roads & Kingdoms, The Trip. There are only three episodes so far, but they’ve already talked about a memorial ceremony in Madagascar and a trip to the Peruvian Amazon to do Ayahuasca, so fans of good stories about far flung things, take note.

When we get home from our commute (whenever that might be) we cross our fingers and hope that there will be a new episode of The Good Place to watch. The season just ended, though, so at least we could turn to Laura Turner‘s recent piece, Are You There, God? It’s Me, The Good Place atThe Outline for a well-analyzed fix.

The Good Place has succeeded where so many other television shows have tried and failed: It has become a cultural phenomena for the way it depicts religion as surprising and commonplace, funny and human. Anyone who watches the show can spot themselves in the characters — indeed, a popular quiz swept the internet a few weeks ago asking people to identify themselves as a combination of two of The Good Place’s protagonists. This is the reason for the show’s success: We all wonder what happens after we die, and we all hope that, despite our shortcomings, we will find ourselves among friends, still living in some fashion, still ourselves.

Maybe we should watch some movies, too?

Though, of course, not uncritically, thanks to work like  Shayna Weiss‘s critique of  “They Have Their Own Language, Literally”: A Review of One of Us  for In Geveb

I do not wish to list the mistakes of the filmmaker, for my concern is not solely a critique in search of authentic representation, but a critique of the style of filmmaking that flattens its rich subjects with an assumption of radical separation, accepting the insider-outsider binaries of the very community it seeks to interrogate. The filmmakers are gawkers, creating a documentary for a primarily secular audience, fascinated by the cultural other. Each character has a big reveal: Ari’s divulsion of his sexual assault, Luzer’s disclosure of an abandoned family, and the visual reveal of Etty’s face. The discovery of these secrets propels the narrative forward to maintain interest. Yet the narrowness of the filmmakers’ gaze obscures far more than it reveals, leaving the viewer only with the slightly inappropriate pleasure of discovering what is not meant to be seen, together with a sense of moral superiority.

Or read a book, maybe?

Philip Metres wrote Same As It Ever Was: Orientalism Forty Years Later for LitHub

Yet, despite the widening of the general frame, Orientalism still reigns; though it’s not as brazen, its subtle forms are everywhere. Consider the opening chapter of Adam Valen Levinson’s The Fine Art of Learning to Say Nothing in Arabic, recently published by W.W. Norton and appearing at this website in November 2017. The book is part travelogue and part exploration of Arabic language, written by a Jewish American. That fact in itself is fascinating, and though the first chapter doesn’t really make much of it, I imagine that a Jewish man—who may have received an extra dose of Orientalism given that he has relatives in Israel—who comes to study Arabic is a rather interesting person. Either he aspired to understand the other or spy on him, or both; either way, he’s taken a risk and I want to know more.

Also writing about the tangled history of religion and race, Judith Weisenfeld discusses her excellent new work in a conversation with Religion Dispatches, New World A-Coming: How Black Religion Helped Shape Racial Identity

I want readers to come away with an understanding of the complexity with which religion and racial identity have been intertwined for people of African descent in the United States. Religious ideas, practices, and institutions have contributed to the production and maintenance of racial categories across American history and, with these groups—which I call religio-racial movements—we have rich cases of black people challenging and reformulating racial identity through religious means.

By looking at how members of these groups understood religio-racial identity, we see that black people were not only subject to racial construction—that is, that white people produced and imposed categories and hierarchies—but contributed to racial thinking in American history, and religion was often central to these contributions. I also hope the book inspires readers to ask questions about the intersections of religion and race for other groups and at different moments in American history.

Or we could go to a museum? (or not?) Let’s take a look at Jill Hicks-Keeton‘s essay asking The Museum of Whose Bible? On the Perils of Turning Theology into History for The Ancient Jew Review 

In an ironic way, their very effort to perform neutrality advances an idea about the Bible that is most at home in the evangelical Christianity of the Greens: this notion that the Bible can be unmediated is rooted in Protestant faith claims around sola scriptura, the theological belief that the Bible is the full revelation of God to humans, who need no intermediary tradition to interpret it. Today I want to integrate this critique with a focus on a different Christian theological proposition that I will argue is animating the museum’s presentation of material, and particularly of the Jewish Bible: supersessionism—that is, the belief common among (though not exclusive to) evangelicals that Christians have superseded, or replaced, Jews in the view of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and, well…Jesus.

Want to read some more superb public writing by religious studies scholars? The Immanent Frame‘s “Is That All There Is” series continues with an incredible range of work by the likes of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan on Jesus in the Bardo, Martin Kavka‘s (Tell me one thing) More than this, Omri Elisha‘s For the Looking, Jodi Eichler-Levine‘s The needle and the planetarium, Anette Yoshiko Reed‘s Knowing our demons, and J.T. Roane‘s A riot in the social order. And that’s not even all there is (in the series). Check out the whole series, it’s so good.

Alas, late last year, one of the founders of the field of religious studies died. Here Russell T. McCutheon writes In Memoriam: Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017) for Religious Studies News

After all, as he himself reported, he went into the study of religion “[b]ecause they’re funny…. They relate to the world in which I live, but it’s like a fun house mirror: Something’s off. It’s not quite the world I live in, yet it’s recognizable. So that gap interested me” (see the previously cited Chicago Maroon interview). Religions, then, are both familiar and strange. So in the midst of the serious and erudite (for some, even intimidating) scholar who he was widely assumed to be (by all reports, though patient, he did not suffer fools gladly—to borrow an old phrase from 2 Corinthians 11:19) there remained the mischievous but often undetected jest. (For example, that often quoted line about religion being “the creation of the scholar’s study” is a crafty double entrendre that few, I think, detect, inasmuch as it references both our work and the place in which we do it—an effect also achieved by his preference for gerunds.) But none of these were simply a bon mot; instead, they were always indicative of some larger, theoretical point; they were each an e.g., as he might have phrased it: something interesting, not in and of itself (for, as he often remarked, nothing could be interesting, or even known, if it was so unique as to be self-contained), but only inasmuch as it pointed to something else, signifying its relationship to something that we, as scholars, have seen before, such as the playful (sometimes maddeningly so) ambiguity of language and of social life.

Thank goodness for folks like the  Religion and American Culture 2018 Young Scholars keeping the field moving forward.

And if you really, somehow, still need more to read, there’s hope! 3,500 Occult Manuscripts Will Be Digitized & Made Freely Available, Thanks to Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown announced Open Culture

Lastly, how about a few laughs before we go?

This imgur thread about When academics get pissed is good for a pretty solid belly laugh

We loved watching Colin Dickey brilliantly troll Andrew Sullivan on Twitter

And lastly, we’re really glad that Hamish Ridley-Steele shared this gem from his grandmother’s video tape collection:

And now, back to trying to keep our new year’s fitness resolutions.

***

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

The post In the News: Memorials, Museums, Magic and More! appeared first on The Revealer.

The Adorers of the Blood of Christ Chapel at Dawn.
Photograph by Anne Sensenig

“Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.” —Canticle of the Creatures, Francis of Assisi^[1] 

On November 16th, at a press conference held in Albany, NY by a group called the Sheridan Hollow Alliance for Renewable Energy, Reverence McKinley Johnson told attendees, “It’s a shame that we always, in our communities, seem to be the acceptable casualties, meaning that we don’t matter, it don’t make any difference because [it’s] what’s best for other people.” Johnson was condemning Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to convert an existing energy plant in Sheridan Hollow, a low-income community of color in a ravine north of downtown Albany, to fracked gas.

The energy from the factory conversion would be used to power Empire State Plaza, the site of several of the state government’s administrative buildings. It would also make use of fracked gas, a controversial and polluting fossil fuel piped in from other states. Fracking is currently banned in New York. Johnson, who is the president of the Albany African American Clergy United for Empowerment, a collective of 26 predominantly African American churches in New York’s state capital, called out to the press conference gathering, “It’s not right, it’s not right.” The crowd responded in unison, “Amen.”

Throughout the 1980s, the plant incinerated garbage, raining black ash down on Sheridan Hollow residents, until Mario Cuomo, the current governor’s father, closed it in 1994. Speakers at the conference speculated that more than a decade of pollution from the plant has caused high rates of cancer and other illnesses in the community.^[2]

As the Trump administration continues to strike climate change from one agency agenda after another, Christian faith leaders from various denominations are stepping up to denounce the effects of industrial pollution and energy generation on their communities, the country, and the world.^[3] From Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ encyclical to Reverend Johnson’s press conference statements, church leaders have decried the injustices of our current energy policies on the health of the human population, often noting the role that capitalism (the Pope) and racism (Johnson) play in energy infrastructure and generation.

These faith leaders are bringing a new moral weight to the conversation—if we could indeed say it’s a conversation in this highly politicized era—on the inequities of climate change. Rather than allow issues of pollution and energy infrastructure to be framed by corporate profit, faith leaders are identifying our current practices as immoral, unethical and detrimental to the most vulnerable.

This movement has proven to be nimble, able to partner with existing green or “outdoors” organizations and industries. As well, it has built on prominent themes that came out of the 2016 election campaign—namely racial and economic injustice—to identify and make personal the hazards of continuing current methods of energy consumption and production.

***

Last fall, CBS Religion & Culture produced a 30-minute series on the role of faith in combatting climate change, Protecting the Sacred: Water, the Environment, and Climate Change. Producer Liz Kineke interviewed scientists, theologians, and activists to examine how faith leaders have begun to address climate change. The documentary highlighted how Native faith guided tribes during the Standing Rock protests, when hundreds of people were assaulted and mistreated. Kineke also visited a group in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that is fighting the construction of a pipeline that will transport fracked gas to the Chesapeake Bay for export.

Lancaster Against the Pipeline Nonviolent Mass Action Training
(Photograph by Becky Gardner)

Lancaster Against Pipelines (LAP) was founded to prevent an Oklahoma-based corporation, Williams Partners, from seizing their private property for construction of a pipeline, cheerfully named the Atlantic Sunrise. Emboldened by lax energy policies, the easy co-optation of local and municipal resources, and the complicity of courts—Williams swept into the county relatively unchecked. Lancastrians who were unaware of the company’s methods, who had limited resources, and were intimidated by the company’s agents, were no match for the multibillion corporation. (See my full disclaimer in the footnote^[4] below.)

In Lancaster, one of the properties crossed by the Atlantic Sunrise is owned by a Catholic order of women religious, the Adorers of the Blood of Christ. They have lived on that land for more than 100 years.

The sisters have opposed the pipeline from the beginning, but their story highlights the ways in which corporations use complicated processes and eminent domain to get their way. Because the US government has favored increased fracked gas production, corporations, claiming public utility status, have been able to use eminent domain to override residents’ property rights. The sisters, like hundreds of other Lancastrians, thought that the pipeline couldn’t be built without their consent. They were wrong. The company has argued that the Sister’s lack of response to early requests for information was the same as consenting to the project.

Last fall, LAP and the Adorers built a prayer chapel in the path of the pipeline, which led to protests, dozens of arrests, and national media coverage.

The Adorers also filed a federal lawsuit, stating that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission violated their religious freedom by approving the construction of the pipeline across their property. Williams responded by beginning construction on the Adorers’ property first; if it’s already in the ground, what good is a pending lawsuit?

A Pennsylvania district judge, Jeffrey L. Schmehl, the same judge who approved Williams Corporations’s use of eminent domain to seize property for the pipeline, dismissed the Adorers’ lawsuit. They immediately appealed.

Oral arguments in their case were heard on Friday, January 19 in Philadelphia. “The Sisters are challenging the use of eminent domain for the Atlantic Sunrise fracked gas pipeline, since it’s forcing them to use their own land in direct violation of their deeply held religious convictions regarding the Earth,” read a statement on LAP’s Facebook page. The judges seemed, according to LAP members in attendance, unsympathetic to the Sisters’ religious convictions. One stated that he felt the Sisters should have opposed construction sooner—an acknowledgement on the court’s part that they do not understand the coercion and opacity of the pipeline corporation’s manipulation of the “permission” process. A decision on the case is still pending as of publication.

***

Pipeline construction continues, in Lancaster County and all across the country. Still, the addition of faith leaders to the ecological movement has significantly raised the visibility of such projects and made the immoral and unethical actions of such corporations’ starkly clear. The prominence of faith leaders’ voices undermines the Republican Party’s seeming cooptation of American religion for it’s own political purpose, thus eroding the party’s unfounded or overblown claims of progress, job creation, and safety. Faith voices also expose the human costs of the industry’s ruthless advancement.

Another effect of national religious efforts to stop pipelines, like the one in Lancaster, is the attention they’ve brought to the racially unjust practices and placement of the country’s energy infrastructure. As Mark Clatterbuck, one of the founders of LAP has pointed out, pipelines must travel from A to B and in doing so, they are not contained in minority communities but cross through neighborhoods both tawny and working class, white and minority, urban, suburban and rural. Opponents of these projects are forced to face the injustice of energy infrastructure in less privileged communities, and work with others outside their immediate racial or economic group, making economic and racial disparity starkly evident.

Like the plant in Sheridan Hollow, a low-income, minority community where opposition is hard to muster among residents who are already encumbered by the difficulties of daily living, and the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was rerouted through Native lands so that any spills, explosions or leaks would not affect the city of Bismark, the story of energy corporations’ absurdly enormous profits and decimating pollution is the story of systemic corporate and governmental injustice. When faith leaders proclaim such injustice as immoral, they tap into a grass-roots network already in existence, they make visible the devastating practices of the fossil fuel industry, and they highlight our country’s devastating complicity with unscrupulous corporations. They also undermine the current religious power dynamics in government.

At the same time, the Adorers and faith leaders like Johnson have made it harder for corporations (and their allies) to denigrate project opponents as crusty, granola-eating hippies of yore. And the credibility, rightly or wrongly, that they bring to the conversation about the industry’s practices have changed the dynamic in communities large and small.

Those effected by new projects are learning from LAP, making creative alliances, and employing more effective techniques to gather communities together to stop proposals before they start. But as we become increasingly aware of the ecological and safety hazards of wholesale destruction for corporate profit, we also realize how very entrenched political and corporate power are, unrestrained by our laws and regulations, making the “higher” power of religious communities one of the few sources of hope.

***

^[1] From Early Documents, vol. 1, New York-London-Manila, 1999, 113-114. Quoted in the opening paragraph of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care For Our Common Home,

^[2] For more information, you can call Cuomo’s office at 877-235-6537, a hotline set up by Sheridan Hollow Alliance for Renewable Energy (SHARE)

^[3] I’m specifically referring to Christian denominations for the purposes of this piece, but many other faith groups across the country are focusing on the dangers of climate change, like DC Green Muslims (http://dcgreenmuslims.blogspot.com), and the Buddhist organization The Earth Sangha (http://fore.yale.edu/religion/buddhism/projects/earth_sangha/).

^[4] Malinda and Mark Clatterbuck, two of the founders of Lancaster Against Pipelines, are my sister and brother in law. I spent much of last year working with LAP. Lancaster, Pennsylvania is my hometown.

***

Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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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.

***

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

The post Industrial Strength Moral Compass appeared first on The Revealer.

NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 26: Imam Asad Dandia from the Islamic Center at NYU leads prayers at the “Jummah Prayer: NoBanJFK, 1 Year Later” event in Washington Square Park in New York on Jan. 26, 2018. (Photo by Damon Dahlen/HuffPost)

Last spring, a 39 year-old Sikh man in Kent, Washington was standing in his driveway when a masked man drove up to him, shouted racial slurs (including “go back to your own country!”), and then shot him. Fortunately, he survived. But the story made national and international headlines as yet another example of xenophobic violence sweeping across America.

Most of the analysis about this shooting explained it as a product of Islamophobia fueled by “the Trump effect,” a term coined to describe the recent surge in bias-motivated hate incidents. But there are other dimensions to this story – and hundreds of stories like it – that remain under-covered and under-analyzed.

The mistreatment of Muslims, South Asians, and other brown-skinned people is not simply a product of the Trump presidency. America has a long history of discrimination against Brown Americans and historicizing these incidents helps us understand how they are connected to one another.

For instance, last year’s shooting in Kent, Washington is tied to the 1907 anti-Sikh race riots just 100 miles away in Bellingham, Washington. It is tied to the Chandler Roundup of 1997, in which hundreds of suspected undocumented immigrants – most of whom were Latinx – were detained in Chandler, Arizona, solely on the basis of their brown skin. And it is tied to the 2017 murder of Indian immigrant Srinivas Kuchibothla in Kansas by a man who yelled a similar phrase – “Get out of my country!” – before taking Kuchibothla’s life. And it is also tied to the Muslim woman who was attacked by young girls in Brooklyn this January who punched her while yelling “fucking terrorist!” These incidents range coast to coast and over the course of 100 years, but they are all related.

While these violent incidents took place in different parts of the country and targeted people of different backgrounds, each incident is the result of xenophobic prejudice triggered by Brownness. To many Americans, brown skin is a visible signal – perhaps more so than any other – that marks foreignness, otherness, and, ultimately, deviance. While the various communities described as brown may not identify as such, the imposed identity has become a reality for all those who live in brown skin day in and day out.

In our current context, the challenges that come with being brown are inseparable from anti-Muslim prejudice, a racialized bias that is predicated on bigoted ideas about both Islam and Brownness that have been carried forward, normalized, and institutionalized over time. These ideas require our close examination and interrogation if we are to make this country safe and fair for everyone.

The logics of racism and white supremacy rely on assumptions about what particular racial, ethnic, and religious communities are like, and who the people within them are. And the violence that stems from racism is not limited to momentary personal attacks – it also comes in the form of systemic discrimination and dehumanization enacted by the state.

Looking to the history of criminalization shows us how racial stereotypes based on these longstanding theories of race continue to devastate communities of color. The targeting of Black communities across the US by policies that are focused on, for instance, drugs and immigration have led to staggeringly disproportionate rates of incarceration and what many refer to as “The Lost Generation” of Black Americans.

Anti-Black racism deserves the highest levels of outrage and resistance. We should also expand work on the historical and political construction of Blackness to think about how Brownness has been positioned and constituted as similarly inferior to Whiteness. Just as we need to consider the specific, complicated histories of how both Black and White have been defined and differentiated, we should also attend to the unique history and experiences of those Americans considered to be Brown.

Brown communities have also been criminalized, both historically and presently. White Supremacists and White Nationalists, including President Trump, are advocating for a border wall and a Muslim Ban, actions born out of bias that would further criminalize brown-skinned immigrants.[1] The politics of white supremacy relies heavily on the politics of fear; we are taught to fear the violent crimes that Mexicans, Hondurans, and Arabs ostensibly commit, even though we know empirically that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.

This history is long and insidious. Rhetoric around the founding of America denigrated Native Americans as “brownies” and “savages.” After a violent race riot targeting the first South Asians to arrive and work in America, the Puget Sound American published an article with the headline: “Have we a dusky peril? Hindu Hordes Invading the State.” Donald Trump has notoriously described Mexicans as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists” and has re-tweeted far-right anti-Muslim propaganda videos. And, of course, we are constantly bombarded with messages that Muslims and Arabs are inherently prone to commit indiscriminate terrorist violence despite the fact that, since Trump took office, white American men have killed nearly twice as many people as Muslims have. All of this is directly tied to how we conceptualize the racial category of brownness in modern America.

I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, which is more than 60% Latinx. I had very few South Asian, Sikh, or Muslim friends there. Most of my friends identified as Black, White, or Hispanic, and no one I knew – myself included – identified as Brown. But over the past several years, and particularly since 9/11, I have come to realize that I share experiences with other people who look like me, primarily because of how we are perceived by those around us. As a turbaned Sikh American with brown skin and facial hair, these perceptions are typically tied to feelings of anti-Muslim animus. People see me, see me as a potential threat, and treat me accordingly. These interactions – both personal and collective – have helped me develop a deeper sense of kinship with Muslims (and those who look Muslim) than I ever had before. And from that sense of kinship, I’ve become interested in the much broader idea of Brownness, a category that includes Latinx people and Arabs and Native Americans and others who are broadly construed as having brown skin.

Our society is beginning to break down some of the problems of these racial stereotypes. For example, we have become aware that people from the countries targeted by the Muslim Ban and the border wall do not actually pose a significant threat of violence to American citizens. Similarly, many of us recognize now that the term “terrorist” is racially coded and typically only associated with attackers who have brown skin or “Muslim-sounding names.”

We are making progress in understanding the problematic ways in which white supremacy permeates our society and negatively affects us all. Yet, as we keep learning, we have much more work to do. It is with this in mind that NYU’s Center for Religion and Media will host a conversation with leading scholars, journalists, and activists on the topic of “Being Brown: Race, Religion, and Violence in Trump’s America.” Our five panelists – Khaled Beydoun, Laurie Goodstein, Amardeep Singh, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, and Jaweed Kaleem – are academics, journalists, and advocates who have worked at the intersection of religion and race in various ways and have an immense amount of knowledge and insights to contribute. On the evening of March 8, we will gather to think about brownness as a racial category and to reflect on what it is like to be brown in America, both historically and in our current moment. We invite you to join us for this timely and urgent conversation.

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[1] Our focus here on how issues like white supremacy and immigration affect Brown Americans is not intended to diminish the impact on other communities of color (e.g., the revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians).

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Simran Jeet Singh is a professor of religion at Trinity University and Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights organization based in New York City. This year, Simran serves as the Henry R. Luce Fellow for Religion and International Affairs at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media. He frequently contributes opinion pieces to various news outlets, and he has become a consistent expert for reporters around the world in television, radio, and print media. Simran is also on the board for Religion Newswriters Association, the premier organization for religion journalists in America,

The post Being Brown: An Invitation appeared first on The Revealer.

The Kaveri Riverbed (Photograph by Jay Ramesh)

The Kaveri river flows through central Tamil Nadu in South India. The photograph above shows the dry bed of the river in the height of summer in 2015. I took this picture while conducting research for my dissertation, which examines an extensive body of medieval and early modern literature devoted to sacred space in South India. For centuries, poets praised the Kaveri for its physical beauty and its capacity to sustain life in Tamil Nadu; it would not be an exaggeration to say that this river was the very heart of a Tamil Hindu sacred landscape.

Not only is the Kaveri lauded in religious panegyric, but it also serves an important ritual function, as pilgrims to the many temples constructed on its banks have traditionally bathed in the river and made offerings for deceased relatives. Its condition on that day in 2015 can be attributed not only to the heat of the Indian summer, but also to the fact that the river has been dammed in several places, which has led to a legal dispute over access to its waters between two state governments (Tamil Nadu and Karnataka) that has continued for nearly a century. Having spent much of the prior few years reading and thinking about the Kaveri’s sacrality, I could not help but feel a sense of loss as I stared at the sparse riverbed covered with a patchwork of weeds and trash.

In Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Nicolas Howe, an Assistant Professor at Williams College, explores the capacity of sacred landscapes to inspire such feelings – not only loss, alienation and injury, but also hope and communal belonging – in 20^th and 21^st century America. Howe’s work calls into question a particular common-sense approach to understanding the secular gaze, which he summarizes thus: “It is to see with a disenchanted eye, with the cold, disembodied gaze of self-sufficient reason.” Landscapes, when viewed through the secular eye, “can represent,” Howe continues, “but they cannot act.” In other words, landscapes can serve as symbols of the sacred, but are ultimately inert, possessing no internal agency of their own. What Howe demonstrates, through a detailed study of the history of Supreme Court cases that have dealt with sacred space, is that landscapes do possess such agency – rather than acting as mere symbols or objects of cognition, they have the capacity to affect us in tangible, visceral ways. This agency is, somewhat paradoxically, conditioned by the secular institution of the law.

Much of Howe’s book is a history of how American jurisprudence has dealt with sacred landscapes. In the first half of Landscapes of the Secular, he focuses on court cases that have considered the legality of public religious monuments (such as crosses erected at national parks and Decalogue displays on public property) in order to take up the question of agency directly; the plaintiffs and defendants in these cases debate the ability of public religious monuments to foster a sense of community or to exclude others. The second half of the book deals with the natural world, as American landscapes (such as mountains, forests, and rivers) have always been invested with sacrality by a variety of religious groups with whom the law has had to contend.

Consider, for instance, the 2005 case Van Orden v. Perry, in which the plaintiff argued that a display of the Ten Commandments located in the courtyard of the Texas State courthouse violated the establishment clause of the first amendment. The defendants argued that the display was not merely an affirmation of Judeo-Christian values, but also signified the logical underpinnings of American law itself. The Supreme Court ultimately sided with the defendants; concurring with the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas claimed “the only injury to [Van Orden] is that he takes offense at seeing the monument as he passes it on his way to the Texas Supreme Court Library. He need not stop to read it or even to look at it, let alone to express support for it or adopt the Commandments as guides for his life.” In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens claimed that, from the perspective of a reasonable nonadherent, the imposing monument, which displayed the words “I am the LORD thy God” at the eye-level of the viewer, signified a kind of exclusion.

At the heart of this case, and many others Howe discusses, are the feelings that a religious monument inspires in its viewers. He asks: What constitutes a reasonable observer, and what are the “right” ways of viewing monuments? Can such monuments truly cause “harm,” and is preventing such harm necessarily the purview of the law? Howe ultimately argues that, in engaging these questions, the law shapes our ways of viewing monuments and sacred landscapes more broadly. In his words, the law is a “performative medium,” and courts “provide a stage, an audience, and a set of specialized scripts.”

Thus, battles over public displays of nativity scenes, which have been fought in American courts since the 1950s, have come to be seen as part of the now perennial Wars on Christmas. A battle in which the law has conditioned both sides’ positions on the role of religion (and of Christianity in particular) in American life. According to Howe, opponents of these and other public Christian displays took issue with “their opponents’ ‘blind’ devotion to them, a devotion calculated to advance the geopolitical and economic interests of the ‘Christian Right’ or entrenched local powers.” On the other hand, defendants of such displays “portrayed themselves as victims of a Jacobin crusade to censor religious expression.” These cases hinge on the question of how one is reasonably[1] supposed to feel when seeing these displays, and the law thus plays an important role in conditioning an ideal civic religious vision. As Howe puts it “by dramatizing a conflict between civil and uncivil vision, law trains the eye to talk to the heart.” Furthermore, he argues, the law can also “enchant the material world,” imbuing objects (such as a Decalogue display) with “sacred and profane powers” – lending them the agency to endorse, acknowledge, insult, or exclude. In the case of the Decalogue display, the stone and the landscape in which it was situated were themselves made legal actors as the Supreme Court had to engage with the question of what exactly their affective capabilities were.

Yet Howe is also sensitive to the myriad ways in which the sacrality of landscapes has long been a central part of American religious life even prior to the intrusion of such legal discourse. The second half of his book explores how American courts have dealt with nature, as well as a wide variety of religious discourses – from the practices of Native American tribes in the American southwest to the Protestant environmentalism of John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club) – associated with the natural world. In such cases, those who make claims about the religious importance of landscapes often find themselves at odds with American law. In contrast to its treatment of landscapes that contain religious monuments, American jurisprudence has most often reflected an ambivalence (if not an outright hostility) to the sacrality of the natural world itself. Nowhere is this disadvantage clearer than in a longstanding dispute between the Snowbowl ski resort, located on the San Francisco peaks in northern Arizona, and several Native American tribes for whom the peaks are the abode of their ancestors and the site of many essential religious practices. In 2005, the resort set in motion plans to use purified sewage to make artificial snow, leading Native activists to sue in response; as one Hopi put it, the use of reclaimed sewage “will destroy everything we are as Hopi people and all people.”[2]

Photo by Deborah Lee Soltesz, October 8, 2015. Source: U.S. Forest Service, Coconino National Forest.

Much of the testimony in this case, as cited by Howe, makes it abundantly clear that the resort’s plan would cause significant harm to the Hopi and other tribes for whom the San Francisco peaks are of profound religious importance. The mountain is not a mere symbol of the sacred but, as the plaintiffs’ testimony repeatedly sought to demonstrate, is essential to their way of life. Yet the activists ultimately lost this particular case, as the law simply rejected their conceptualization of religion. Judge Carlos Bea of the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals argued that “the sole effect of the artificial snow is on the Plaintiffs’ subjective spiritual experience” and continued “respecting religious credos is one thing; requiring the government to change its conduct to avoid any perceived slight to them is quite another.” Howe sees this not only as “a failure of religious imagination,” but also as one of “geographical imagination, in its inability to conceive of landscape as anything more than property or, at best, as a symbolic accessory to spiritual life.” He argues that these landscapes are not merely “spiritual” – a term that, when applied to nature in the American context, often implies a kind of introspective, emotional romanticism[3] – but are living things that make practical demands on those for whom they are holy.

In his conclusion to Landscapes of the Secular, Howe asks “Can [secular liberalism] accept an environmental outlook that collapses the distinction between spirit and matter, that sees nature as the material embodiment of divinity, not its symbolic representation?” Howe further questions a narrowly aesthetic approach to understanding the sacrality of landscape, which would privilege descriptions of it in terms of the “picturesque” or the “sublime.” Howe pushes us to think of the sacrality of landscape beyond the visual apprehension of its beauty, claiming that, “as an emergent property of place, it embodies the full complexity of the social.” In other words, landscapes are places of lived experience, and are invested with the collective memories of the individuals and communities who dwell within them. What Howe ultimately demonstrates is that the secular institution of the law cannot easily contend with the material agency that this complexity affords landscapes.

As I read Howe’s conclusion, I thought of my experience at the Kaveri where my own feeling of loss was unquestionably rooted in aesthetics – in the distance between the poetic descriptions of the river that I had read in medieval Tamil texts, and the riverbed strewn with debris that lay before me. Howe effectively demonstrates the degree to which such an experience originates in certain strands of American religious culture that are reproduced in its legal frameworks. Despite the difference of contexts within which we work, reading Howe’s text reminds me to consider the much deeper loss experienced by those who regard the river itself as divine, who live in its proximity, and who depend on it for their material and spiritual well-being. Howe’s book draws from recent scholarly work that has revealed the problematic and contingent nature of “secularism,” (most notably, Talal Asad’s landmark work Formations of the Secular) while uniting these insights with a deep appreciation of American religious history and of the variety of ways in which people experience landscapes. A rich work of interdisciplinary scholarship, Landscapes of the Secular is essential reading for anyone interested in the complex relationships that secular actors and institutions have with sacred places.

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[1]   The history of “reasonability” as a legal standard is long and fraught. Howe explores how it is used in establishment clause cases, and the following podcast examines its use in police brutality cases, which often examine whether or not an individual is “reasonably” perceived as a threat, thus justifying the use of force. Radiolab has reported on this here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-more-perfect-mr-graham-reasonable-man/

[2]   For more about the 9^th circuit court ruling in 2008: Arizona Snowbowl can make snow with reclaimed wastewater, The Arizona Daily Sun, August 7, 2008

[3]   For a history of American religious attitudes toward nature, see John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Jay Ramesh is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His current research focuses on devotional poetry, written in Sanskrit and in Tamil, in early modern South India, and more broadly considers the relationship between space, literature, and memory. 

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

The post Landscapes of the Secular appeared first on The Revealer.

Serpent-handler pastor Randy “Mack” Wolford handles a venomous yellow timber rattlesnake during an outdoor homecoming worship service. Wolford devoted his life to keeping the Signs Following Faith alive and spreading it to new areas. (Photograph by Lauren Pond)

Lauren Pond‘s book Test of Faith: Signs, Serpents, Salvation (Duke University Press, November 2017) provides a deeply nuanced, personal look at serpent handling that not only invites greater understanding of a religious practice that has long faced derision and criticism; it also serves as a meditation on the photographic process, its ethics, and its capacity to generate empathy. Here, she speaks with The Revealer‘s editor, Kali Handelman, about the project and her ongoing work.

Revealer: How did you start out as a photographer?

I went to college to study print journalism. While I was there, I joined the college newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, as a beat reporter, and I often ended up shooting photos to accompany my written stories. I found that I really enjoyed doing this, so I started spending time with staff photographers, who taught me more about how to shoot and use different kinds of gear. That’s how I got my start, anyway; from there, I practiced a lot on my own and was eventually able to get photography internships and freelance assignments. I later went to graduate school to study photojournalism.

But more broadly speaking, I think I’ve always been a storyteller at heart, and the camera is a particularly powerful means to tell stories. There can be an immediacy and intimacy to photographs that you don’t always get with writing. I think I naturally gravitated toward photography for this reason.

Revealer: What has drawn you to religious subjects (in the sense, both, of people and of the topic)?

Some people think it’s ironic that I focus on religion, because I don’t come from a strong religious background, and I’m not religious myself. But I honestly think that’s why I’m drawn to religion: I’m curious about what’s unfamiliar to me. I’ve always wanted to understand what different people believe and why, and how belief shapes life and culture. When I picked up a camera, photography became my way of exploring these things.

I also think I just enjoy forming relationships with people of backgrounds different from my own. Doing so and documenting our shared experiences is a really rewarding process. And I hope that by capturing these different communities on a personal, human level, I can help others appreciate them, too.

Pastor Mack Wolford on a serpent hunt during a documentary film shoot, near Jolo, West Virginia, 2011. (Photograph by Lauren Pond)

Revealer: What drew you to the Signs Followers as subjects/ a subject?

I read about serpent handling in an anthropology class in 2010, and I was immediately captivated. Initially, I think this was mostly shock and mystery, as it is for many people. I had no idea that a practice like this existed in the United States, or how people were able to handle venomous snakes and remain unharmed. Also, not coming from a religious background, the idea that people would willingly risk their lives for their beliefs boggled my mind. I wanted to know more about this practice and why people did it.

At the same time, I was also pretty dissatisfied with existing coverage of serpent handling. All of the media clips I found seemed to focus on the snakes, with little information about cultural or environmental context. I wanted to know who the Signs Followers themselves were, and how their beliefs intersected with their lives. I could sense that there was a deeper story. Mack Wolford and his family were grateful for my interest, and welcomed me into their lives to document.

Mack’s death ultimately brought me a lot closer to the Wolfords and the Signs Following community. Sharing that difficult and intimate of an experience, you can’t help but bond. It’s a rich, meaningful relationship that I look forward to preserving.

Revealer: There were some big ethical dilemmas you encountered in making this work, I wonder if you could talk about that and share a bit of where you are now with those questions, now that the book is out?

Yes, there were definitely some major ethical dilemmas.

The first was the issue of whether or not to seek medical attention for Mack after he was bitten by the rattlesnake. At the time, I understood that Mack, like many serpent handlers, did not believe in seeking medical care for snake bites received during worship; he believed that if he was bitten while enacting the Word of God, then it was up to God to decide his fate. Like numerous other people there that day, including filmmakers and Mack’s family and friends, I did not call paramedics, because I did not feel it was my place. Mack was a competent adult who made a conscious decision not to seek care.

In retrospect, I still don’t think it would have been right for me to try to force medical treatment – to prioritize my own value system over his beliefs. However, if I were ever in a similar situation again, I would still make sure to have a discussion with family members about the person’s medical wishes and any potential options. Not long ago, I heard a Signs Following pastor say that if anyone were bitten at his church, he’d call paramedics; the victim could still decline treatment, but medical care would be available if desired. So that’s a possibility that has crossed my mind as well.

The other big ethical dilemma involved photographs of Mack’s death. When Mack was suffering at home after the snakebite, I photographed him without his shirt on, which his wife had asked me not to do. Pentecostal Holiness culture is very modest, and to be shirtless is essentially to be naked – but I did not understand this. At the time when I took these photos, I had been uncomfortably standing there and watching Mack suffer, and I did not know what to do; I turned to my camera, I think because it gave me a way to interact with a situation I otherwise didn’t know how to process. I felt I needed to keep documenting events as they unfolded, and because I thought Mack would still recover, I figured I could just discuss everything with him then.

And then, of course, he didn’t. As I describe in my book, I got sucked into a cycle of media pressure, and ended up feeling like I had a duty to tell the story – who Mack was, what he had believed, and why he died. I caved and published my photographs – including two that showed Mack’s bare back – without understanding how these might impact Mack’s family.

Taking and publishing those shirtless photographs is one of my biggest regrets. I really wish I had taken the time to try to understand this cultural sensitivity before I acted. I was young, naïve, and overwhelmed, and I unwittingly caused the Wolfords a lot of unnecessary additional pain.

However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Wolfords, it’s that there’s no point in dwelling on the past, only in learning from it. This mistake taught me an incredible amount, both about the Signs Following faith and my own photographic process. I now realize how important it is to build and maintain trust within communities, and to have open dialogue about issues of cultural sensitivity and representation.

Wolford’s mother, Vicie Haywood, strokes her son’s feet as he rests in his mother-in-law Pearl’s trailer after being fatally bitten by a yellow timber rattlesnake during an outdoor worship service. Vicie’s husband also died from a yellow timber rattlesnake bite. (Photograph by Lauren Pond)

Revealer: You wrote about how Mack Wolford “embraced coverage by the media” because he wanted to “open the eyes of as many people as he could” — did you think of your book as continuing his mission in any way?

I think Mack’s goal was to share the Gospel with as many people as he could, and the media was one vehicle for him to do so. I suppose that my book does further this mission in ways, as it’s a testament to some of the fundamental tenets of the Signs Following faith, including mercy and redemption. However, my goal was more to provide a human, personal perspective on Signs Followers and their beliefs – to open people’s eyes in that way.

Revealer: How has the family reacted to having his story published? I know you brought the book to them personally, what was it like to share the book with the family?

They’re very pleased. Chris, Mack’s brother, who now leads the church, has told me that he’s proud of the book and that Mack would have been, too. I think the Wolfords appreciate having something that is a testament to both Mack and the Signs Following faith, and that candidly shares our mutual story, including some of the challenging parts surrounding Mack’s death.

Sharing the book with the Wolfords was one of the most rewarding experiences of the publishing process: finally to be able to hand them something tangible after all these years. Also, this is a community that is used to being criticized and denigrated, so to have created something that they feel does them justice and portrays them fairly – it’s been a good feeling, for lack of better words. I gave the Wolfords almost all of my free author copies!

Mack’s mother, Vicie “Snook” Haywood, and Mack at a Bible study at Snook’s house, Bluefield, West Virginia, 2011. (Photograph by Lauren Pond)

Revealer: The Wolford’s live in a part of the country that has been very politicized in the last few years. I wonder how you think about the politics of representing rural, white, Appalachian people and if that thinking has changed at all over time?

When I first traveled to West Virginia in 2011, I saw what I think a lot of outsiders and journalists focus on in Appalachia: poverty and decay. In fact, I viewed serpent handling, and other local religious practices, as intimately tied to the struggles of the region: something people did just to give themselves hope amidst encroaching darkness. My early photographs I think reflected this rather reductive mindset, and I unwittingly contributed to the dominant narratives about struggling Appalachia – the same kinds that have been used to describe Trump’s popularity in the region.

However, as I’ve gotten to know the Wolfords, I’ve been able to witness the richness of serpent handling culture, the complexities of family life, the variations of interpretation and tradition. I’ve realized that serpent handling cannot be reduced to a simple explanation or description, and likewise, neither can Appalachia. To document the region responsibly requires time, nuance, and strong community relationships.

Revealer: Do you have any advice for scholars, journalists, or other photographers, who might be interested in working with the Signs Followers or other groups like them?

I think the biggest thing is to be willing to listen, and to treat community members as people, as equals, not just as “subjects.” Especially with marginalized groups like the serpent handlers, whose beliefs may seem exotic to many of us, I think the natural tendency is to want to remain at a distance. But being willing to engage with such communities on a human level can open doors to richer cultural appreciation, respect, and understanding – on both sides.

Also, photography in particular comes with an inherent power dynamic: The photographer is usually the one in control, and the one who decides how the story gets framed and told. If not used carefully, the camera can easily perpetuate of stereotypes or inflict damage and mistrust. When possible, I think it’s important to invite community members to be part of the conversation and the photographic process. It can empower them and ultimately lead to a more nuanced story.

Revealer: You write in the book that, on the day Mack Wolford died, there were other documentarians there with you. Do you know what has happened to their work? Were you working on something together, or was their project separate?

Yes, at the park where Mack was bitten, there were two videographers and one other still photographer. Our projects were all separate. As mentioned, Mack embraced media coverage, so he always seemed to have photographers and other documentarians around.

One of the videographers, Mark Brown, was there with me when Mack actually died at home later that night. He has since produced an award-winning short documentary about Mack, titled “Sermon of the Serpent.” It’s beautifully done. The other still photographer put some of his photographs into a slideshow for Mack’s family and made prints for them. I’m not sure what happened to the material that the other videographer captured; I haven’t heard from him.

Revealer: You also wrote that after his death, you became witness and an expert on call about the Signs Followers. What was that experience like?

It was a really difficult experience. After Mack died, a reporter I knew called newspapers to alert them, and then told editors I’d been a witness. I started getting calls from media outlets everywhere wanting to know what had happened and why Mack had died. At first, I had no desire to get involved in the news cycle or talk to anyone. But then, so much misinformation began to circulate that I felt I had a duty to speak out.

The news coverage and interview questions were, in my opinion, sensationalistic and insensitive, much like the previous coverage I’d seen of serpent handlers. It seemed like all anyone cared about was the snakes and the snakebite – not the fact that Mack had been an actual person, or that his family was grieving. That was one of the reasons I felt pushed to write a story of my own.

Old Yeller in Snook’s spare bedroom, Bluefield, West Virginia, 2013. (Photograph by Lauren Pond)

Revealer: Lastly, you wrote “I no longer see photography as a form of documentation, but as an opportunity for dialogue: a way to engage with others, to learn from them, and to form deeper understanding. The camera has become a means of listening, of sharing a story rather than telling one.” Where has this new approach led your work since this project?

In recent years, I’ve found myself collaborating a lot with religion scholars, ethnographers, and folklorists. The research methods used in these fields align well with my photographic approach: There is an emphasis on building long-term relationships with communities, and on participant-observation. Currently, I work as a multimedia producer in the Ohio State University’s Center for the Study of Religion. I’m collaborating with researchers to document religious communities through sound, and then editing this material into thematic essays and digital exhibits. I’ve also shot photographs for a couple of forthcoming scholarly books.

In my own time, I’ve also worked on a number of long-term documentary projects, often with a more participatory, ethnographic approach. For example, one of my projects looks at so-called “mobile chapels,” which are semi-tractor trailer chapels that are parked at truck stops across the country. I got to know some of the drivers who visit a mobile chapel in Ohio, then shadowed one of them, Pete Douglas, during his work and home life. I visited Pete and his family in Massachusetts; I also went on a run with Pete as he hauled a load of steel from the Cleveland area to upstate New York and back. Doing so helped me begin to appreciate the stresses and difficulties of working as a trucker, and the role of the mobile chapels in drivers’ lives.

Currently, I’m also working on projects about an Appalachian pagan family and Orthodox churches in immigrant communities, such as the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.

***

Lauren Pond is a documentary photographer who specializes in faith and religion. Lauren is best known for her work about Pentecostal serpent handling in Appalachia, which received the 2016 Duke Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. She is currently a multimedia producer for the Ohio State University’s Center for the Study of Religion, where she uses photography and sound to study Ohio’s diverse religious communities, including neopagan movements and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Lauren received dual Bachelor’s degrees in journalism and art from Northwestern University in 2009, and a Master’s degree in photojournalism from Ohio University in 2014.

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

The post Test of Faith: A Conversation with Photographer Lauren Pond appeared first on The Revealer.

The Revealer was originally started nearly 15 years ago, in September 2003. Since then, as the magnificent Internet Archive Way Back Machine will show you, the site has had its share of makeovers.

Today, we’re very excited to unveil (reveal? too much?) the newest version of the site, designed by the super talented Corey Tegeler (perhaps familiar from his work published in the magazine last summer) and supported by our generous grant from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

We had a few big goals for this new version of the site: To make it more hospitable to visual and multimedia work, to make it easier to read on mobile devices, and to make our archive (an astounding 3,635, posts and counting) an accessible, useful, and entertaining resource for our readers.

And we are so pleased with the results. The discover page that Corey designed is a veritable playground full of enticing portals into our massive trove of reporting, criticism, and analysis; Lauren Pond’s photographs don’t just look great, they are a challenging and insightful testament to the importance of images; And when we checked our phones this morning everything was as readable and easy to find as we’d hoped.

That being said, we are always a work in progress and the Internet has changed a lot since 2003 (heck, some people don’t even capitalize the damn word anymore), so a lot of links may leave you seeking and many images have been lost to media library purgatory. Which is to say, if you find something glaringly amiss, please do let us know and we’ll do our best to resurrect and redeem what we can.

In the meantime, welcome! Please come have a look around and let us know what you think.

The Revealer on Day One, September 30, 2003

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