Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir

by George Gonzalez

In March of 2016, following his primary victories in Mississippi and Michigan, now President and then Republican frontrunner, Donald J. Trump, held a primary night press conference which the New York Times referred to as a “prime time infomercial.” Peddling his Trump water, Trump Steaks, Trump magazine and Trump wine, Mr. Trump transformed a canned political event into consumerist pageantry. It made for titillating and confusing political theater. Ostensibly, the reality TV star and real estate mogul scripted the evening as a colorful response to his political rival, Mitt Romney, who had questioned Trump’s business record and business acumen. As it turned out, though, the steaks Trump positioned as emblems of his success were not actually Trump steaks but, rather, of a different brand altogether. His own steaks, in fact, had not been a commercial success. Nor does Trump own the Trump water and Trump wine he commandeered as props. In the end, it did not seem to matter, though; Trump was able to magically attach himself to these easily digestible signifiers of “success, luxury, abundance,” absorbing their discursive power for himself. Brands are bundles of metaphorical associations that are ritualized on, onto and through the bodies of consumers. They can break through the restrictions of instrumental calculus with ease.

Just like some consumers might double their monthly coffee bills to participate in the cosmopolitan romance of the Starbucks brand or others might wrap their social identities around the Harley-Davidson brand, Trump’s appeal had less to do with his resume and more to do with the stories his supporters were able to plug into. The power of charisma simply overwhelmed the facts. Like a punchline-worthy used car salesman, Trump had a bridge to sell us—himself.[1] While he might have boasted of having “big words,” Trump actually understands quite well that the semiotic power of his personal brand of magic depends bigly on his flaunting the social conventions of the people he effectively marginalizes as ‘liberal elites.’ He and his counselors know that Trumpism depends on, as Judith Butler explains, the mining and psychic liberation of our collective Id. The more technocratic and peppered with the professional language of officialdom the Clinton message became, the bigger Trump’s appeal among his supporters became. The election became an MMA grappling contest halfway through. And, in the end, magic trumped ‘rational’ debate, exploiting its narrative, bodily and psychic weaknesses by consistently shifting the terrain and rules of combat to favor ‘spiritualized’ and half-conscious (if that) longings for racial superiority, the dividends of patriarchal prerogatives, and capitalist success.

Much has rightly been written about the election of Trump as an effect of racial backlash, as the violent gasp of a masculinist, cis-gendered, Protestant, whiteness which has come to see itself as victimized by culture wars, tides of immigration, and the election of the first African-American President. There have also been lively debates about the degree to which Trump’s victory could be attributed to the economic disaffection of working class whites. Some has been rightly written about the role misogyny played in the public framing of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy (despite, in my view, her real flaws as a candidate who was committed to an updated neoliberal and neoconservative program). However, there has been dangerously little written about Trump as brand; of Trumpism as the branding of the American Presidency. If Mr. Trump and his advisors have their way, the brand takeover of government will indeed be televised (and re-tweeted). These days, repetition has the power to make its own truth. If reality is entertainment (and, rather fallaciously, entertainment becomes reality), why should politics be any different? The Frankfurt School thinkers saw Trump coming and knew well that the path to a specifically American totalitarianism necessarily cut through our innocent fun and games—our mediated spectacles.

Barely more than two months into the Trump presidency, we seem to have brands collectively on the mind. A reference to Melania Trump’s clothing line on QVC in her official White House bio was quickly removed out of an “abundance of caution” and due to fears that it might be seen as product endorsement. The President, who had previously singled out Boeing, Lockheed Martin and media outlets for criticism, scolded the chain department store, Nordstrom, accusing them of dropping Ivanka Trump’s brand for political reasons. Among other retailers, Belk and Neiman Marcus no longer carry Ivanka Trump merchandise. Senior White House adviser, KellyAnne Conway, was “counseled” about the ethical rules in place to prevent federal employees from endorsing products, after she promoted the Ivanka Trump brand in a televised interview from the White House. The Office of Government Ethics did end up suggesting that disciplinary action was warranted though a cynic might well wonder if such a response was, in fact, needed to preserve the prima facie integrity of the Trump Administration’s political brand.

Meanwhile, among other retailers, Belk and Neiman Marcus no longer carry Ivanka Trump merchandise. The #GrabYourWallet campaign has called for a consumer boycott of the Trump family brand and their partners. There is a web browser plugin that makes it easier to avoid Trump-related businesses online. L.L. Bean has been targeted by consumers angered by family member Linda Bean’s contributions to Trump’s super PAC during the campaign and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been forced to step down from Trump’s economic advisory council after taking heated criticism over his company’s attempt to profit from the protests of the Trump Administration’s travel ban.

The brand war just keeps escalating. Trump supporters are calling for a boycott of Starbucks because of CEO Harold Schulz’ promise to hire 10,000 refugees. A Neo-Nazi blogger declared New Balance the “official shoes of white people” and while New Balance founder and chairman, Jim Davis, donated $400, 000 to the Trump campaign, the company was forced to issue a statement distinguishing Davis’ personal support for Trump from a company endorsement. Enter, center-left—albeit somewhat late–the requisite ritual celebrity burning of Voldemort’s horcrux.

Partisan allegiance[2], activism, and social justice might be bigger sells today than sex. But what are the larger implications of this shopping for justice? How much damage can Samantha Bee’s ‘Nasty Woman’ tees and the ‘Future is Female’ haute couture really do to the systems of patriarchy in a society in which a hereto anonymous single mother can die in her car due to overwork and Muslim women who wear the veil are among the most vulnerable to physical violence in our brave new brand world? Although it has been dogged for decades by activists for its reliance upon highly feminized sweatshop labor, Reebok has begun selling prepackaged feminist rage at the current political situation.

NEW YORK, NY – FEBRUARY 12: A model walks the runway for the Prabal Gurung collection during, New York Fashion Week, February 2017 (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

What does justice mean when a celebrity shopping binge is legitimated as a form of protest? What becomes of democracy’s possibilities when multi-million dollar Super Bowl Sunday advertisements are the most talked about forms of social commentary and criticism? Certainly, as Lizbeth Cohen and others have discussed, the blending of consumption and politics (consumer and citizen) is not in of itself new. Nor are the structural inequalities exacerbated by consumption altogether new. What might be worth noting, however, are the ways in which Trumpism and many of its discontents have left behind the ethical niceties of republican virtues and the institutional autonomy of grassroots activism for the conveniences of corporate politics, which seem to be an all-time high. Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn, understanding Trump as a brand, wonders if “we’re not going to see a kind of consumer activism, identity politics, potentially a cohesion of the resistance or the opposition to Mr. Trump that actually has to do with an emerging patriotism?”

Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School philosopher, argued that Capitalism is “…a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology…Capitalism is the celebration of the cult sans rêve et sans merci.” There is no pretense of salvation from the cult; there is only further immersion within the cult. The cult makes room for competing accounts of the good so long as the ontological permanence of the cult itself is accepted. As we put our wallets where our mouths are, it also becomes imperative to speak in tongues. We ought to, as it were, consult foreign oracles. Not Putin, no. We need to conjure forth repressed, forgotten and oppressed ways of knowing and being that they might illuminate paths beyond the consumer activism and social justice as commodity.

I recently attended a performance in Brooklyn of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. The ritual—a kind of performance of secular church—was replete with song, costume and fiery oratory. In one of the homilies, a meditation on earth justice, the good preacher implored us to be in air….to be the air. I thought about a conversation I had with my students about Native American lifeways and the Hopi people, in particular, for whom the rain clouds are the ancestors. What a difference it would make if we understood the natural world as ancestors to whom we have special obligations and responsibilities rather than inert crude resources from which profit might be excised!

In the end, simply shopping for salvation will only intensify the historical conditions of Capitalism and the inequalities it reflects back to us as natural fact. Shopping always increases our systemic guilt because it reinforces a form of justice shorn of any transcendent ideal—a form of justice that has made practical peace with many of consumer Capitalism’s obligatory sins. There is no doubt that consumer society can also affect positive social change through its storytelling and ritualizing function but it always does so in ways that reproduce exclusions and inequality with the other hand. Shopping is never sufficient to settle accounts by the lights of Justice. This is why even ‘spiritual’, New Age brands can only but be the mignons of the demiurge.

Like Martin Luther King Jr., we can accept the power of consumer boycotts but dare, too, to dream from the mountainside. As Luis León argues turning to the life’s work of César Chávez as a case study, religious poetics can serve the needs of a critical political spirituality and a critique of consumption and the cause of social justice, more broadly. To do battle with the specters of consumer Capitalism (which is itself quite ‘spiritual’ and magical), we need to call on as much collective wisdom (sabiduría) and as many ancestors as possible.[3] In doing so, the negative space of an unmet and unimagined Justice must be preserved. The past has always been one of Capitalism’s most compelling and lucrative obsessions. As far as spirituality and history are concerned, the line between fetish and criticism is a tightrope which must be trod with an abundance of caution.

Reverend Billy told the gathered congregation of secular church that the choir’s aim is to render the “military consumer complex strange”. Shopping to deliver us from the tyrannies of a salesman? At a time when the culture industry seems to effortlessly alchemize his horror into monetized entertainment? At a historical moment when the health of the consumer marketplace for ‘good’ journalism depends on a full-throated assault on the very same thing, as the Executive Editor of the New York Times seemed to admit? Shopping for our salvation? Now that’s strange!

***

[1] Interestingly, some on the ‘left’ are calling for a serious consideration of Oprah Winfrey as a Presidential candidate, given her devoted following and patent markers of wealth and success. We might recall Kathryn Lofton’s prophetic Oprah—The Gospel of an Icon when attempting to make sense of this turn of events.

[2] Indeed, consumer markets in journalism being what they are, the same company might pitch and sell both ‘left’ and ‘right’ outrage via different URLs. The brand form can sometimes harbor competing ideological sympathies at once.

[3] For example, a colleague’s recent mural re-presents my university’s institutional history and, in doing so, has ignited a more robust conversation on campus about the goals of social justice and the role of higher education in its pursuit.

***

George González is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Monmouth University. His research interests lay in the sociocultural legislation of Western metaphysics and the concrete and specific form of power that has attached to liberalism, as a historically specific kind of cosmology.  He remains especially interested in approaching the study and criticism of postsecular, neoliberalism through the framework of religious social change. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital—Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project and is currently working on a multi-site ethnography and historiography of the ritualization of consumer capitalism and is set to begin fieldwork with the famed radical performance troupe, Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping in early 2017.

***

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

The post Shopping for Salvation in a Brand New World appeared first on The Revealer.

Lennart Nilsson

By Ann Neumann

Nothing has been as damaging to our cause as the advances in technology which have allowed pictures of the developing fetus, because people now talk about that fetus in much different terms than they did fifteen years ago. They talk about it as a human being, which is not something that I have an easy answer how to cure. —Harrison Hickman, Democratic pollster, at a 1989 conference of the National Rights Action League, via Priests for Life website

In 1965, a series of images by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson was published in Life magazine: “The Drama of Life Before Birth.” From sperm and egg to embryo to fully formed fetus, the photos represented a decade of Nilsson’s work to capture what the general public had never seen before. To create the images, Nilsson used a variety of innovative photographic methods and equipment which he developed over time, including fiber optics, color filters, and high-definition, three-dimensional ultrasound. The magazine issue sold out immediately. Nilsson’s subsequent work was turned in a book in 1965, A Child is Born, and two award-winning “Nova” specials on PBS: “The Miracle of Life,” in 1984 and “Odyssey of Life” in 1996.

The timing of Nilsson’s work couldn’t have been better for anti-abortion activists who immediately recognized the power of fetal imagery to convey, as words alone could not, the significance and inviolability of human life in the womb. Defeats in the lower courts and the ultimate passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 convinced the movement that it must take a longer view. Imagery allowed it to work in the cultural realm; if the courts were not on the path to ending abortion, perhaps popular culture was. “The strategy of antiabortionists to make fetal personhood a self-fulfilling prophecy by making the fetus a public presence addresses a visually oriented culture,” wrote Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, a professor at Hunter College, in “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction.”

By the 1980s, the anti-abortion movement had aligned itself with the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign of 1984 used the movement’s imagery in videos and TV ads. Televangelists took up photos and videos of fetuses as well—and swapped out the clinical fetus for baby.

The effect was, as Pollack Petchesky notes, to bring the images “to life” through photo and digital representation and to transform “antiabortion rhetoric from the mainly religious/mystical to a medical/technical mode.” Pro-choice advocates had no way to counter such a strong visual message. More than 50 years after Nilsson’s Life Magazine special, abortion advocates are still struggling to counter the new, independent context created by fetus imagery.

Looking at Nilsson’s series today (linked above in its original format), one image is recognizably iconic, that of an 18 week old fetus, radiant and floating in a bubble-like amniotic sac. Visible through the translucent skin on its arms, chest and head are a webwork of red veins. One perfect hand is raised to its perfect face, the thumb in its mouth. It is the image of a sleeping infant, eyes closed, head turned to the side, petite and glowing against a black background flecked with star-like matter.

Nilsson, the photographer who “unveiled the life of the invisible,” died last month in Stockholm at the age of 94, long after his technical and artistic photographs changed our conception of fetal life. Whether Nilsson had intended it or not—he never took a position on the legalization of abortion—his work profoundly contributed to the enduring politicization of the fetus in the United States.

The power of fetal imagery is its ability to move the anti-abortion conversation from the realm of religious belief to that of medicine and technology. Larger than life, Nilsson’s fetuses are mesmerizing in their biological significance; singular entities with autonomy and independence (thumb sucking, heart beating). For the first time, the fetus was divorced from women’s bodies, imbued with both personhood and— framed individually, alone—vulnerability. Against a black background, many of these images portray a singular entity, removed from a woman’s womb, floating in space almost like an astronaut.[1] Fresh, radiant, perfect, they capture our attention in a way that potential human life never had.

The elimination of women from the “life” of a fetus had profound significance. As Lisa Wade, a professor at Occidental College, wrote in 2014:

Once the fetus could be individualized, the idea that a woman and her fetus could have contrasting interests was easier to imagine. In many countries even today, the idea that helping pregnant women is helping fetuses and helping fetuses means helping pregnant women is still the dominant way of thinking about pregnancy…. There is power in visualization and its technological advance and these images were a boon to the pro-life cause.

Nilsson’s photographs, for many, were documentation—visual, portrait-like proof—of a demographic or category of human now under assault. Their scientific value undergirded religious groups’ moral argument against abortion, employing public and moral health narratives, not just for women and medical culture—but the nation at large.

The use of imagery by anti-abortion activists has taken various forms in the 43 years since the passage of Roe v. Wade. (Norma McCorvey, or Roe in the seminal case, who later shifted her position on abortion, also died in February.) Bloody images of aborted fetuses became the hallmark of protesters and activists across the country who characterized abortion—almost for any reason at any stage in pregnancy—as a holocaust, a genocide, the grand moral failing which led to America’s implicit downfall. Perhaps the most circulated bloody image is of an aborted fetus the anti-choice movement named Malachi, “my messenger.”

In a digitized three-fold pamphlet created by Texas-based Operation Save America, a color photo occupies the interior center panel. In it, the head, torso and dismembered limbs of a fetus are laid out on white operating cloth. A tape measure is draped along the cloth for scale. The fetus is dark in places, as if burned, severely bruised or decomposing. Blood stains the cloth, the fetus’s head, neck and limbs. It’s a jarring image, one that I recall seeing at an after church event as a young teen in the early 1980s. Adjacent text reads:

Words have failed and we need to see the horrible reality of what we are doing to the weakest among us in our nation. The pictures we carry provide a pictorial essay and a real warning of what horrors befall a culture that turns its back on a Holy God. Our children need to know that the choices they make and the actions they take have lasting consequences.

Fetuses like Malachi are God’s visceral message to us; their images have radicalized generations of activists, believers of all ages who raise enlarged photos above their heads in protest outside clinics across the country (at least the clinics that remain open). Such pamphlets are still handed out today, proof not only of the bloody, state-sanctioned horror that is abortion, but also of the defiant righteousness of the one who hands it.

What’s the origin of photos like that of the “Malachi” fetus? For a 2009 article and photo series for The New York Times, Damien Cave spoke with Monica Migliorino Miller, a professor at Madonna University in Michigan, who claims that “maybe 50 percent of the graphic images of abortion victims that you’ll find online are probably my photography.” Like Nilsson, Migliorino Miller unveils the invisible, but rather than use advanced technological equipment, she digs through medical facility trash. In 1988 alone, Migliorino Miller and her husband illegally retrieved thousands of fetuses from the loading dock of a facility in Chicago where they had been shipped from clinics across the nation. Cave writes:

Mrs. Migliorino Miller said the boxes filled spare rooms in her apartment and others for nearly a year. “We didn’t feel we could put them in storage,” she said. In 1988, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, archbishop of Chicago, presided over a funeral for around 2,000 of the fetuses. Activists buried many others.

Migliorino Miller “felt it was really important to make a record of the reality of abortion,” she told Cave. Although the “Malachi” photo was misleadingly taken of a fetus that had been kept in a freezer for at least a month and reassembled by a willing OBGYN—and was not taken by her—Migliorino Miller defends the photo because it shows “the humanity” of the fetus, she said. And yet, over the years, she has become more cautious about her own work, attempting to adhere to less misleading tactics (perhaps because of blowback and charges of inaccuracy from abortion supporters?). She avoids graphic images now and photographs younger fetuses because most abortions take place early in pregnancy (more than 80% of abortions occur before ten weeks, yet most images show late-term fetuses).

Another example of the de-contextualizing ability of images is a now-famous photo, taken in 1999 by Christian convert and photographer Michael Clancy. In the photo, gloved hands frame what the viewer realizes is a womb, bloody and round; blue surgical linens surround it. From a hole cut in the top of the womb a tiny hand has reached out and grasped one of the gloved fingers. Clancy took the image while on assignment; he was documenting a fetal surgery for spina bifida. (It is perhaps the best example of what Vienna University’s Ingrid Zechmeiser has called the “fetal patient,” no longer a part of or belonging to the mother but a ward of medicine and society. “Hence women become the object of medical surveillance.”[2])

Clancy publicly claimed that right before he took the photo he saw the uterus shake and the small hand reach out and grasp the doctor’s finger. It was “a slap in the face and a clear calling for a mission,” Clancy said. The doctor, however, refuted Clancy’s claims, stating that both the fetus and woman were under anesthesia and immobile.

Nonetheless, the image was published in USA Today that year and has been widely circulated among the anti-abortion movement ever since. Clancy’s image was powerful, but the message embraced by believers—that fetuses have a life of their own, a will to live, some sentience or awareness of danger and survival, a need for love and, perhaps even display an innate religious belief—is a projection.

“In fact, every image of a fetus we are shown, including The Silent Scream [a widely distributed anti-abortion documentary that used ultrasound from inside the uterus to show a live abortion], is viewed from the standpoint neither of the fetus nor of the pregnant woman but of the camera. The fetus as we know it is a fetish,” wrote Pollack Petchesky.

The anti-abortion movement’s reliance on graphic imagery may have subsided somewhat since the 1980s and 90s, but a new use of imagery has been resoundingly taken up. And not just by activists but also by legislators.

Although sonograms, internal images of a fetus that require special ultrasound equipment, are routinely used before abortions to check the development of the fetus, the power of sonogram images, first used in the late ‘70s, has encouraged anti-abortion activists to push for legislation that requires their mandatory use—and accompanying “counseling” for pregnant women. Sonograms are not medically necessary for these procedures, yet a wave of legislation over the past decade, according to Guttmacher Institute, regulates ultrasound services in 26 states. In fourteen states, ultrasound is mandatory and in four of those, must be shown to the woman. In another ten states the woman must be given the option of seeing the sonogram. The remaining states require that the woman must be given the opportunity to view a sonogram, should she want it.

In some states, the provider must describe the image; in others the woman must wait a period of time after being shown the sonogram. (See Guttmacher link above.) In 2013, a wave of laws requiring mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds (meaning an ultrasound wand is used internally) prior to abortion rightly received national attention. The laws were based on model legislation written by anti abortion organization Americans United for Life, which explained, “Medical evidence indicates that women feel bonded to their children after seeing them on the ultrasound screen. Once that bond is established, researchers argue, a woman no longer feels ambivalent toward her pregnancy and actually begins to feel invested in her unborn child.” Opponents, many of whom claimed the procedure amounted to state sanctioned rape, were largely successful in opposing the laws.

Fetal fetishization has also led to a variety of related anti-abortion legislation across the country: “Personhood” laws attempt to grant fetuses full constitutional rights, including the right to life; fetal pain laws use unsound research to establish pain sensory abilities for fetuses; and 20 week or “late term” abortion bans which use dramatic accounts of grotesque baby murders to enact further restrictions on when and how a woman may terminate a pregnancy, even if doing so will save her life. Yet only 1.3 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks.

The offer of sonograms to pregnant women is also the strategic obfuscation of Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Often located next to legitimate abortion providers, CPC’s mimic abortion providers in order to trick pregnant women into not terminating their pregnancies. Such centers use the semblance of medical provision—including the offering of sonograms (which require little training)—to promote their ideology about abortion.

Sonogram laws are admittedly only a part of the anti-abortion movement’s legislative assault on abortion access across the country—a total of 434 provisions have already been introduced this year; since 2010, hundreds have been—but sonograms are a strategic assault. Guttmacher writes that, “the requirements appear to be a veiled attempt to personify the fetus and dissuade a woman from obtaining an abortion.”

For some, the image of a fetus can have a mind-changing effect. “I saw this little hand with five fingers, and it was like he was reaching out and saying, ‘Please don’t hurt me,'” Charlotte, a 17 year old from Colorado Springs told Glamour Magazine’s Phoebe Zerwick in 2014. “It was life-changing.” Yet, most women well know when they seek an abortion that there are many—and often larger—issues at stake than what a fetus looks like.

Still, the effect of ultrasound imaging has long been acknowledged. A 1983 article in The New England Journal of Medicine documented two women who decided not to have abortions after viewing sonograms, wrote Sarah Ackley in a 2012 article for the online monthly journal Hypocrite Reader. “The power of images, fetal and otherwise, lies in their ability to communicate simple concepts, but such communication can also divorce them from their complex, real-life context,” Ackley writes.

This is, perhaps, the great achievement of fetal imagery: Its technological or seemingly scientific methods and tropes can very easily be used to further an explicitly religious and political agenda. Science (or pseudoscience) is then able to confer legitimacy on a “moral” conviction. Think of disreputable studies that link cancer to abortion or assign pain sensation to fetuses. Rather than rely on moral or religious arguments to make their case for forced pregnancy, abortion opponents understand that science, however flimsy, can lend their cause greater influence.

The power of fetal imagery—from photos to sonograms—has created a cultural environment in which it is possible to separate and mute the concerns and struggles of pregnant women from that of “their baby,” to prioritize fetal health over women’s and maternal health, and to shroud abortion in shame. That shame has, for generations, silenced women from voicing their own needs, like contraception, sex education, family planning options, and economic concerns. From Nilsson’s fiber optics and color filters to ultrasound wands wielded today under force of law, the power of the image remains the same, to a devastating effect. Pollack Petchesky writes, citing Roland Barthes:

…the power of the visual apparatus’s claim to be “an unreasoning machine” that produces “an unerring record”…derives from the peculiar capacity of photographic images to assume two distinct meanings, often simultaneously: an empirical (informational) and a mythical (or magical) meaning.

By making fetuses into autonomous “babies,” fetal imagery has masked the interdependent and consequential nature of pregnancy. Perhaps the very best example of images’ power to misrepresent, mystify and decontextualize the fetus is the backstory to Lennart Nilsson’s 1965 series in Life magazine. Exalted as a celebration of fetal life, the photos were predominantly of fetuses aborted under Sweden’s liberal laws.

“All but one of the fetuses pictured were photographed outside the womb and had been removed—or aborted—‘for a variety of medical reasons,’” Time notes in its online “100 Photos” collection. “In the years since Nilsson’s essay was published, the images have been widely appropriated without his permission. Antiabortion activists in particular have used them to advance their cause,” the brief caption notes.

***

[1] Ingrid Zechmeiser, “Foetal Images: The Power of Visual Technology in Antenatal Care and the Implications for Women’s Reproductive Freedom” (Health Care Analysis 9:387-400, 2001, Kluwer Academic Publishers, PDF https://student.cc.uoc.gr/uploadFiles/1110-ΑΕ09Κ/Zechmeister%20Foetal%20images.pdf): “The pregnant body has become a kind of ‘empty spaceship’ for the ‘cosmo-naut’ foetus or as expressed more extremely by Annas, stated by Callahan and Knight (1992: 233), the mother’s role is marginalized to being the “foetal container,” a vessel. This metaphor is expressed more clearly in scientific photographs of the foetus which have in common that they make the mother invisible by simultaneously bestowing a status of independence upon the foetus.”

[2]see above

***

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

***

Ann Neumann is author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon, 2016, now in paperback) 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 Visual Politics of Abortion appeared first on The Revealer.

Members of the clergy lay hands and pray over Donald Trump in September at the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

By Ryan T. Woods

“We murder to dissect,” Wordsworth declared, and his observation captures the artificiality of dividing the body politic into separate parts. So it is with the evangelical voting bloc. However familiar, the use of the term evangelical in popular currency and in public discourse obscures the definitional complexities supporting it. Consequently, the apparently straightforward datum, “Eighty-one percent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the general election” depends on a foundation of abstraction that can easily be lost on the casual observer. Evangelicals have never been a monolithic community. A designation that includes a Latino congregation speaking in tongues, an austere gathering of Dutch Reformed parishioners, a nondenominational megachurch meeting in a suburban office park, and a black Baptist service necessarily contains multitudes. Nor are they a static presence in the public square; their constituencies and causes shift over time. An investigation of this grouping, its genealogy, and its political behavior reveals both surprising continuity of the 2016 Presidential election with the past as well as signs of change on the horizon.

Classification never takes place in antiseptic neutrality. Labeling a voter “evangelical” depends on categories freighted with confessional, political, and historical valences. Gallup’s discussion of its criteria to identify evangelicals illustrates this complexity. Broadly speaking, Gallup pollsters employ at least two means to designate evangelicals: adherence to specific convictions and self-designation. Each strategy creates challenges for the taxonomist.

Evangelicals style themselves “believers” and emphasize their fidelity to historical orthodoxy, so conviction serves as an obvious point of embarkation. But starting here can sow as much confusion as clarity. Analysts are confronted with a staggering array of confessional tests for evangelicalism, each vulnerable to criticism. Depending on how broad or restrictive one makes these tests, the number of evangelicals might rise or fall dramatically. Barna employs a nine-point typology, and counts only 7% of the U.S. population as evangelicals; Gallup found nearly three times that number in a 2005 survey by adopting a more generous standard– a “born-again” experience, a desire to convert others to Jesus Christ, and belief in the Bible as the Word of God. Lack of consensus over which convictions mark the boundaries of evangelicalism complicates strictly confessional definitions to the point where they cannot be trusted to produce useable statistics.

Because categories based on conviction force the pollster to make the same judgments about beliefs insiders have to make, categorizing evangelicals by self-identification carries the appeal of letting the subjects rather than the analysts do the work of classification. Yet the responses to the self-definitional prompt, “Do you consider yourself evangelical or born-again?” have been equally problematic. This formula is elastic enough to accommodate those normally excluded from the category. Nearly one in five Catholics responded affirmatively to these propositions, a datum that sits uneasily with the historically Protestant roots of the movement. Consequently, Gallup excludes non-Protestants from the evangelical label.

Even among Protestants, self-definition can be deceptive. Fundamentalists, who tend to disengage from broader culture more sharply than evangelicals, might consent to this self-definition on their own terms. African American Christians also call themselves evangelicals in large numbers, but their social values have been shown to differ strikingly from those of their white counterparts. When polling for political purposes, therefore, Gallup segregates black “evangelicals” from white, because their voting habits inaccurately skew results.

***

Why is it so hard to identify an evangelical? The reasons are historical and institutional. Evangelicals have a complicated genealogy, and their mission has always transcended denominational boundaries. Most evangelicals trace their origins to the Protestant Reformation, when reforming movements emphasized the primacy of Scripture. Once kindled, the reforming impulse – with all its enthusiasm and internal tensions – became difficult to extinguish. Pietism created “little churches within the universal church” (ecclesiolae in ecclesia) and emphasized study of the Bible in small conventicles under the direction of a minister as well as private devotions. Revivalism stirred hearts on both sides of the Atlantic, but also replaced the orderly boundaries of the parish system with the voluntary principle: instead of attending the village church, congregants might now travel several towns over to hear a circuit preacher or a “New Light” luminary. Fired by religious enthusiasm, missionaries took the good news to the ends of their known world.

During the twentieth century, two further developments shaped American evangelicalism, leading to a period of withdrawal from and then reintegration with broader culture. As scholars made new scientific discoveries and pioneered critical methods of studying the Bible, tensions and contradictions surfaced between their findings and traditional convictions. Evangelicals and fundamentalists responded to these findings with varying degrees of nuance, from heresy trials and exodus from mainline institutions to learned broadsides like The Fundamentals and J. Gresham Machen’s polemic Christianity and Liberalism. Increasingly, evangelicalism became sidelined in higher culture, forced to create its own channels to broadcast its positions. Emblematic of this movement’s marginality in educated circles was the Scopes case. In this celebrated trial, the wizened advocate Clarence Darrow convincingly defended a Tennessee client discharged from his post as a science instructor for teaching biological evolution. Although Darrow lost the contest to former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (the decision was later overturned on a technicality), public opinion mounted against the evangelical cause.

But the cultural retreat of evangelicalism never became complete withdrawal, and the instinct to change the world rather than retire from it never dimmed. When fundamentalists segregated themselves from broader society, evangelicals decided to transform it – including the political realm. Their efforts centered around causes familiar to observers of the 2016 presidential election: national identity, economic liberalism, personal and public morality, and a definition of Christianity premised on whiteness.

***

The kind of evangelical involvement in the public square noted during the election was nothing new. Some of the antislavery movement’s most visible leaders – William Wilberforce and the Tappan brothers – were products of revivalist fervor. What receded from view in postbellum evangelicalism was its earlier radicalism. The sabbatarian and temperance movements became paradigmatic for an emphasis on religious principle and individual transformation rather than structural reform. Troubled by signs of urban anomie and dislocation, evangelicals sought to establish moral order for the masses, as Paul Boyer puts it in his illuminating study. The failure of organized labor to develop coherent political representation, which social historians termed “American exceptionalism,” owes something to the success of these efforts in alleviating misery, instilling bourgeois religious values, and suppressing proletarian unrest.

The New Deal marked a new stage in this development, cementing evangelical intuitions of themselves as embattled by a hostile secular government. In One Nation Under God, Kevin Kruse recounts how a diverse coalition of pastors, plutocrats, and politicians consolidated opposition to the creeping statism they saw in the government’s new initiatives. They sought to establish America’s stature as a chosen nation and highlight the religious foundations of economic and political liberty. During the Cold War, this mission took on a new significance and assumed new forms. Officials stamped the name of God on currency and included God in the pledge of allegiance, while religious lobbyists agitated for prayer in schools. Although politicians had long drawn upon the biblical traditions in their oratory, references to America’s exceptional status as a Christian nation and personal rectitude now became more ubiquitous in public discourse.

Commentators sometimes present the creation of the Religious Right in the last quarter of the 20^th century as a sharp break with the past, but this alliance of conservative Protestantism with conservative politics evolved organically as evangelical practitioners adapted their historic commitments to different circumstances. Changes in the cultural landscape created conditions receptive to this rightward movement: the realignment of American politics after the triumph of Civil Rights in the South, the deterioration of heavy industry in the Rust Belt, and demographic migrations to the South and the West.

Conventional wisdom holds that, in this milieu, the Religious Right coalesced around the galvanizing issue of abortion. This is only half true. This conventional wisdom turns on the firsthand testimony of its leaders, such as the response Jerry Falwell recorded later in life of reading a newspaper account of Roe v. Wade, and “growing more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” But as Randall Balmer has shown, immediate evangelical response to the ruling was muted, and even supportive of the high court’s opinion. This was consistent with the movement’s privileging of individual liberty over governmental fiat. A 1968 symposium sponsored by Christianity Today, the publication of note for mainstream evangelicals, pronounced abortion warranted in consideration of certain personal, family, and social consequences. Although some expressed criticism, many evangelical and fundamentalist leaders applauded the decision for its refusal to countenance state regulation of individual choice. Opposition to abortion was widely considered a Catholic cause.

Balmer suggests this movement had another central cause prior to abortion: religious liberty. And in earlier years, questions of “religious liberty” frequently served as a cipher for protecting de facto racial segregation of religious institutions. Sectarian schools and colleges proliferated in response to government mandates for integrating public education. When litigation against these “segregation academies” ensued, culminating in the landmark decision Green v. Coney, religious activists became increasingly concerned about how government regulation could circumscribe religious freedom. Failure to comply with legal orders to desegregate could result in revocation of tax exemptions, as happened with Bob Jones University in 1976.

Calls to rehabilitate segregationism, however, were political nonstarters for religious conservatives, so another cause had to be found to rally around. By now, reservations about abortion were mounting. Falwell and his retinue saw their opportunity. A private moral question with consequences for the family and society, requiring intervention against the encroachments of secular state, abortion provided the perfect focus for a devout conservative brand.

And so, opposition to abortion and concern for religious liberty birthed a new coalition of conservative evangelical voters. They viewed themselves as beleaguered but determined to reclaim America’s heritage as a guarantor of the sanctity of life and religious liberty. This voting bloc and its animating issues have proved surprisingly durable. Despite allegations that the Religious Right has become moribund, conservative Christian voters remain Republican stalwarts. In each of the past four Presidential elections, the GOP nominee has captured at least three quarters of the evangelical vote. These same issues remained paramount in the voting calculus of religious conservatives in 2016.

If last year’s election failed to destroy the coalition of conservative evangelical voters, it did fracture them along lines of race, ethnicity, and age. Although concern about race receded from the picture once abortion and religious liberty became favored rallying cries for the movement, it never disappeared completely – a fact reflected in the polling practices of excluding persons of color from political polls.

***

The demography of evangelicalism is changing just as surely as the demography of the nation. Weeks after the election, Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne published an editorial in the New York Times with the blunt title, “The Evangelicalism of Old White Men Is Dead.” The election, they contended, had exposed a widening rift among the faithful. Representatives of the movement who publicly endorsed Trump were disproportionately old and white. But the future of evangelicalism lies increasingly with young, hyphenated Americans – Black, Asian, Latino. Whatever conservative sympathies they might have, they were disenchanted with the white evangelical embrace of Trump. And they voted very differently from their white counterparts. These Christians expressed support for Clinton over Trump by a margin of 62% to 15%.

Their voice will continue to become more prominent. Depending on the definitional criteria, non-whites comprise as much as forty percent of all evangelicals, a contingent that will continue to grow. As Robert Jones of PRRI chronicles in his incisive study, The End of White Christian America, this development has dredged up white anxiety about displacement. The calls to defend America as a Christian nation, religious liberty, and moral order are familiar, even as they take on a new urgency in the face of sweeping demographic change. In many ways, the 2016 presidential election may signal the last paroxysm not of evangelicalism’s involvement in politics, but of its monochrome representation – and redefinition.

***

Ryan T. Woods earned his doctorate in religion at Emory University in 2013. As an undergraduate, he studied at Taylor University, a Christian college in Indiana. He now teaches at Georgia Gwinnett College, and serves as an Associate Editor for Marginalia Review of Books. His interests range from early Alexandrian Christianity to Cleveland sports.

***

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

The post The New (and Old) Politics of Evangelical Identification appeared first on The Revealer.

By Patrick Blanchfield

In his first address to Congress, our current President decided to offer his audience something more than just a view from the Oval Office: he conjured a view from heaven. Not a God’s eye view, though – Trump has a hard time talking about God – but the view from the eyes of a dead Navy SEAL, killed on a recent operation in Yemen, a raid which Trump had approved and that also resulted in the deaths of several civilians, including an eight-year old American girl. Never one to get bogged down with such gloomy details, the Commander-in-Chief focused on what he apparently decided was a positive: the SEAL, who had left behind a wife and multiple children, was nonetheless, per Trump, looking down “very happy” at receiving a supposedly record-breaking standing ovation.

But not all views from Heaven are so rosy, or so grotesque. Writing in 1940, in a Europe set ablaze by a fascist worship of violence that Trump’s own militarism distressingly resembles, the German Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin imagined a very different view from above. Two decades prior, Benjamin had acquired a small painting by the Swiss artist Paul Klee, a piece which became one of Benjamin’s most prized possessions, and which he kept hung in his office. That year, the same year in which he would later commit suicide while fleeing the Nazis, Benjamin wrote about the painting in lines that would make the artwork famous.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ fills the double function implied by the Greek word angelos, at once a witness and a messenger, reporting to us the message of what it is that it sees. Its message is brutal: where we perceive discrete events and causal relationships, the angel sees only a continuous churn of disaster. Conceptual distinctions and postulated narratives paper over one giant wound, a trauma.

To paraphrase and extrapolate from Tolstoy’s famous observation: Perhaps every happy era is the same and all of the miserable ones are different in their own horrific ways. Benjamin’s vision of the view from above seems entirely appropriate for a hunted man living in a time when one global war, the Great War, the supposed War to End All Wars, had bled so rapidly into yet another. And now, in our contemporary moment, we may all arguably have our own, different reasons for thinking that Progress is a kind of lie – Fake News about the Fakeness of the New, if you will.

One thing is certain: we need perspective, not from mystical angels or the apostrophized dead, but from more flesh-and-blood witnesses and reporters. Now is a time of many traumas, to be sure. But for many people, this is hardly news, and where some may perceive new developments, others recognize a continuation of catastrophes with which they have struggled for years. Against this backdrop, then, and in search of perspective to better understanding the suffering around us, we must ask difficult questions about testimony, authority, victimhood, complicity, and vulnerability. What authorizes, credentializes, or otherwise justifies telling the story of another individual’s trauma? Who can speak for whom – particularly across fraught categories of gender, race, religion, and nationality? What responsibilities, risks, and rewards come with such work? How might religion inform this enterprise, both for the people who undertake it, and for those whom they address?

To explore these questions and more, NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, in partnership with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Religious Studies Program, will be holding a public panel bring together academic, therapeutic, and journalistic perspectives on trauma. Our three panelists – Jade Davis, Eric Fair, and Liatz Katz – are each brilliant writers who have publicly tackled traumatic subjects and, in different ways, the subject of trauma itself. On the evening of March 31^st we’ll gather to talk about their work, about representations of trauma in our current moment, and more. Our goal will be to cultivate a perspective on suffering that is not just from above, but firmly anchored on the ground as well. Please join us, and share your perspective as well.

***

Patrick Blanchfield is the 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.

***

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

The post Recording Angels – An Invitation appeared first on The Revealer.