With an iconography drawn from the 14^th century plague fields of Europe, where she walked behind the name La Parca, and with an ever growing number of devotees drawn from societies marginalized and dispossessed, la Nina Bonita, the Beautiful Girl, has become one of the fastest growing spiritual powers in the 21^st century. To some she is known as la Poderosa Señora, the Powerful Lady, an untiring miracle worker and healer helping them to escape the ravages of poverty, sickness, violence and addiction that have become hallmarks of our time. To others, she is Nuestra Señora de las Sombras, Our Lady of the Shadows, an amoral and unflinching companion in their choice to pursue profits and power in the bloody worlds of drug trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, and murder. For those tied to orthodox religious groups and judiciary organizations she is a satanic usurper, a dark and vicious deceiver leading her millions of devotees down the fast road to hell.

Who is this alluring, conflicted and mysterious woman? If you have been paying attention to the news you might know her by her most common name – la Santa Muerte, Saint Death.

One can find signs of her cult in the Americas from the earliest days of the colonial period, with Inquisition reports mentioning local groups dedicated to Saint Death.[1] Her first 20^th century appearance in 1940’s anthropological reports show that Santa Muerte was largely sought out in issues of love, serving as a patroness of maligned wives and lovers seeking recompense from abusive or unfaithful men. Even today, her role as a love-magician still runs strong, and the red candles associated with Santa Muerte’s love magic remain top sellers in the spiritual supply market.[2]

Like many cults, Santa Muerte’s tradition has never had a central or overarching organization to perpetuate her following.[3] It is this decentralized and amorphous persona that has allowed her to move through history, taking on the needs of the time for those who seek her favors. Her ability to serve in such varied roles – fostering devotion among mistreated wives alongside kidnappers, gunmen, narco-traffickers and other criminal groups – means that we must be very cautious when asking how and why people use her image.

La Madre Poderosa (The Powerful Mother)

Santa Muerte’s followers are guided by chapbooks and manuals that consist almost entirely of prayers designed to get results. A focus on ethics, wisdom, and spiritual development remain part of her oral tradition, but they are not defined by these texts; It is up to each community’s own charismatic devotees to give them shape and meaning.

Original Artwork by David Metcalfe

From the marginalized to the upwardly mobile, those who seek out Santa Muerte do so because she is said to work with a power that is often seen as second only to the utmost divinity. In 14^th century Europe she was seen as an imminent herald of the end of days, and sought by some to stave off the ravaging effects of a plague that killed nearly a third of the population. In the 21^st century she is sought to help those facing the global tide of violence and displacement that comes in the wake of the massive social upheavals caused by globalization and technological development. For those outside the tradition, her association with amoral worldly power lends her a disconcerting similarity to Ezekiel’s description of Lucifer, the Sutric concept of Mara, and other spiritual figures that have less than lawful pedigrees. In its worst representations, the cult’s lack of an established orthodox tradition or codified practices and its members’ common focus on power relationships instead of theology are taken to be sinister signs of its true nature.

Despite the fact that her original oral tradition in the Americas is closely associated with the faith healing practices of curanderismo and Catholic folk traditions, as her devotees develop their own forms of worship, Santa Muerte’s role as a spiritual helper has changed to meet their personal needs. The space to interpret relationships with Santa Muerte on an individual basis has increased her appeal as a non-judgmental protectress at the expense of her image as an icon of strong moral guidance. What ethical considerations do emerge come from the mutual bond devotees feel towards one another as ‘hermosos y hermosas en la fe,’ or ‘brothers and sisters in the faith.’

Attempts to compare her worship with other religious traditions therefore prove problematic. Even comparisons with African, Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean traditions — although these traditions are also known for a focus on practical and experiential spirituality — are difficult. Their practices are interwoven with community based ethical and spiritual foundations that are much less common in Santa Muerte worship.

Many who try to understand the Santa Muerte phenomenon in contemporary Mexico are unfamiliar with folk spirituality and are confused by the elements of popular practical occultism that form the basis of her devotional practices. The scholarly drive to categorize runs head long into the ambiguity of spiritual practices that develop from personal experiences, epiphanies, and a concern with efficacy over ethics or spiritual development.

Academic attempts to understand the tradition through Jungian archetypes, secular spirituality, and scholarship on New Religious Movements, have been unable to deal with Saint Death’s street level reality. Nevertheless, as we will see in a couple of stories that follow, there have been crucial moments in which her subterranean devotion has emerged into the popular culture and which can give us important insight into what Santa Muerte represents.

A Glass Cabinet in Tepito

Until very recently Saint Death’s tradition was passed on in private initiations that tied devotees together in a bond strengthened by the fact that their object of veneration stood beyond the borders of orthodox faith. It was in 2001 on the streets of Tepito, a neighborhood in Mexico City that has hosted a thriving black market bazaar since the time of the Aztecs and is now one of Mexico City’s most violent neighborhoods, that her devotees first moved from the shadows of private worship into the public arena.

Enriqueta Romero Romero, affectionately known as Dona Queta, had been a devotee of La Nina Blanca since her aunt had initiated her into the tradition when she was a child. When a life size Santa Muerte icon she was given by her son drew so many devotional candles from passing devotees that it caused a fire in the kitchen of her enchilada stand, Dona Queta erected a public street-side shrine to the death saint. The statue of a large skeleton figure (now encased in glass) has become a center point for the solidification of Santa Muerte’s tradition beyond chapbook grimoires, private initiations, and novenas and into the wider world of global spirituality.

Original Artwork by David Metcalfe

Following the installation of Dona Queta’s public shrine, David Romo Guillén , Archbishop and Primate of a group calling itself the Mexican-U.S. Catholic Apostolic Traditional Church (Católica Apostólica Tradicional México-USA or la Iglesia Católica Tradicionalista Mex-USA),  brought Saint Death even further into the light when he sought to gain official government recognition for his church. The Mexican government denied the request, citing the fact that Santa Muerte was a central figure in the church’s devotions, and that she has been officially condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as a heretical, and even satanic, figure. Their denial was met with large-scale protests during which Guillen instructed his followers to vote against the officials responsible for the decision. The ensuing uproar in the Mexican media gave Santa Muerte another big push into the mainstream. Despite his failure to gain official institutional recognition,  Santa Muerte’s popularity has seen an exponential growth ever since. The fact that Guillen was convicted on kidnapping charges in 2011 and sentenced to an ironic 66 years in prison and fines totaling 666 times the minimum wage in Mexico City, has done little to curb the growth of Saint Death’s popularity.[4]

The lack of any central organizing element among her followers has meant that the fall of one charismatic leader merely sets the stage for new leaders to emerge. In many cases no leadership is needed at all as devotees gain access to the cult through the Santa Muerte’s ubiquitous presence in the spiritual marketplace and mainstream media.

Finding her outside the doors of any church or temple, followers are attracted to charismatic leaders that offer the spiritual services they require, or they discover an understanding through their own personal research into Santa Muerte that highlights the needs they would like met. Ambiguous and unmoored from any orthodoxy, Saint Death provides equal time to all who seek her potent intervention.

Today, rough estimates indicate that at least one million, some say three to five million, devotees pay homage to the skeleton saint in the Americas alone.⁽⁴⁾ Saint Death is one of the most powerful examples of how spirituality spreads through commercial interest. Her iconic Grim Reaperess image adorns t-shirts, tennis shoes, posters, craft beer labels, Tarot decks, pistol grips, and prayer cards, equally at home on items marketed for their cultic kitsch and items related to more practical spiritual pursuits. As she has become more and more popular, those living in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States have grown used to seeing her image on vehicle decals and at roadside shrines located along the major highways that cross the U.S./Mexico border.

Alleged in many media reports to be the premier “Narco-saint,” and associated with the most horrific elements of the drug war, in truth her devotees come from all walks of life and include lawyers, doctors, police officers, judges, popular celebrities, and politicians along with her more humbly employed followers and those devotees who are indeed drawn from criminal professions. For many in Mexico and the U.S. she has usurped orthodox icons such as the Virgin of Guadalupe as the go-to power when seeking supernatural intervention. This shift is in large part thanks to her amoral embrace and her alleged powerful miracle working abilities. In some surprising ways she is very similar to the forces evoked by evangelists of the prosperity gospel such as Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen and mirrors the popular global growth seen by Charismatic brands of Protestantism and Catholicism.

La Satisima Muerte (Most Holy Death)

I first encountered la Santa Muerte in 2005, four years after Dona Queta’s shrine sparked the opening of her tradition to public view. I was working at a marketing agency where one of my key roles was following the news for potentially relevant cultural trends. When articles started appearing on the rising popularity of a death cult in Mexico I was immediately intrigued – photographs of ardent devotees carrying icons of the grim reapress captured me just as quickly as they capture so many others who first encounter Saint Death through the image of her faithful humbling themselves before her grinning visage.

Seven years passed as I continued to look deeper into her tradition and popular growth. In 2012 Dr. Andrew Chesnut, Chair of Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, published Devoted to Death (Oxford University Press), his groundbreaking study of her rising popularity. I interviewed him for The Revealer and we became fast friends. Chesnut’s book remains the only in depth scholarly treatment of Santa Muerte published in English, and he and I have become research partners.

Over the years I’ve gotten to know quite a few of Santa Muerte’s followers, developing friendly acquaintances with leaders in the tradition such as Enriqueta “la Madrina” Vargas, Stephen Bragg, and Martin George. With Chesnut, I have become one of a handful of English speaking experts on the cult. Even so I find it hard to give a straight answer as to who or what Santa Muerte really is.

My area of expertise has been on the role of marketing, mass media and material culture in the cult’s growth, and on tracing its origins beyond the assumed ‘re-emergence of Aztec beliefs’ which marks its role in the Reconquista (Reconquest) cultural movement in Mexico. Most of my writing on Santa Muerte has focused on the mainstream media’s ignorant treatment of poverty and marginalization in her story. A death cult that seems to emerge from the violent conditions in Latin America is a tempting pulp cliché for the popular media, and she is a perfect lens to demonstrate the bias towards issues of class, race and the stark reality of global poverty.  As such, I have admittedly fallen into the habit of becoming an apologist for her more innocent face, but the multiplicity of her presence is a constant check on attempts to corner or codify her.

Previously, my research into Saint Death was focused on the positive aspects of her devotional tradition. Unfortunately, I have now personally begun to see the reality of what military and justice department analysts have warned about for years. There is a rising tide of darkness and violence that has no real precedent and the misunderstood iconographies of figures such as Saint Death are often at the forefront of a spirituality based on power and amoral efficacy

My attitude changed most drastically after I encountered Santa Muerte within the unlikely setting of a rural county jail in north Georgia. A routine address change with the DMV turned into 48 hours of incarceration when I discovered that a fax I had sent hadn’t gone through. This discovery came at a Sunday morning police roadblock and lead to my arrest on charges of driving on a suspended license. Even though it was a misdemeanor charge I was put in with the jail’s general population where I shared a cell with two gang affiliated meth dealers who enlightened me on the reality of what most religious scholars consider a contemporary myth. Thanks to the strange twists of local bureaucracy, I was at once given access to a world that scholars almost never see and given a place amongst those who the system swallows up without thought. Among society’s dead I learned many things about the Beautiful Girl that most of her devotees will never know.

The Dead Dream of Death

“Yeah, I OD’d man…just took too much and was DOA when they got me to the hospital. This figure appeared in the darkness when I was dead, I guess I was dead – it was just empty, hard to describe. The figure was calling me to it – it was covered in a huge robe, no eyes, like a skeleton or something…it was fucked up. Pulled me to its side and said that I’d been a good soldier, that I was worthy…I’d been working with some Mexicans…it was that thing they worship, you know, San Murtas or something.”

An odd conversation starter to be sure, but when you’re in a jail cell you can assume that the conversation isn’t going to be Sunday morning church talk. John, a name I’ll use for him, told me that in the months leading up to his arrest something had come over him – he was increasingly violent, having strange visions, and at the time of his OD had even become violent towards his wife and family, something he said he’d always avoided. Common signs of methamphetamine abuse, but the specificity of the visions was something else. When he described his near-death experience, a chill ran through me.

“You mean Santa Muerte?” I asked.

“Yeah man! That’s what they call it! How’d you know that? After I got out of the hospital I got a letter with a rosary, it said that I was moving up and there was a lot of work to do, that Santa Murta or whatever had a lot of work for good soldiers. Weird man, it was really weird.”

The other fellow in the cell with us, who I’ll call Sam, was covered head to foot with gang tattoos. Methodically punching the concrete walls as John told of his experience he began talking about how he always felt called by Satan, but hadn’t fully given in to it yet.

“I’ve left a bit of skin for him – wanted to get him right here on my chest, but every time I went to do it something happened and I never got the tattoo.”

They spoke of their families, of missing their mothers and grandmothers. Stories of how their lives in the shadows of the culture war had caused them to miss funerals for friends and family, lose relationships with their children and at times led them to commit acts of violence whose memory woke them up in the middle of the night chilled with sweat and  images of horror.  They spoke of the allure of violence and power, and the pain and confusion that follow. Both of them spoke of an active sense that ‘Satan’ was lord and master of the world in which they existed. Sam admitted he was nearly illiterate when John started to talk about reading the Bible more now that he was in prison.

“Never read the thing, I can’t read really, so…you know.”

John offered to help him read through it, he said he’d gone through a change of heart since the near-death vision and since being sentenced to 70 years for trafficking.

“It’s too much man, after I OD’d…I just don’t know what to think. It’s just too much.”

The Myth of Narco-Satanico

What was once the domain of urban myth – the idea of a semi-organized ‘Satanic’ criminality – has become a very real possibility as the darker aspects of Santa Muerte’s potential are realized by groups seeking a spiritual basis for their criminal activities.

Original Artwork by David Metcalfe

One of her first cameos in the mainstream media came with a single crime scene photo taken on May 6^th, 1989, 20 miles outside the Mexican city of Matamoros, at a compound named Rancho Santa Elena. Investigating the disappearance of a University of Texas pre-med student named Mark Kilroy, U.S. and Mexican authorities were lead to the ranch, a base of operations for Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo. Known in certain circles as the “Godfather of Matamoros”  — or more telling, “the Wizard,” — Contanzo was a sorcerer-for-hire working with a number of drug cartels to secure supernatural aid in their activities. By the late 80’s this aid included regular human sacrifices (12 bodies were found at the site, and members of the group indicated there had been many more killings that were not discovered) which would, Constanzo promised, provide magical protection, invisibility and even immunity to bullets for cartels willing to pay the incredibly high fees he charged for such a powerful and macabre working.[5]

Although news reports focus on the unorthodox contents of Constanzo’s Nganga (a ritual cauldron associated with the sorcerous tradition of Palo Mayombe  whose contents, in this case, included animal remains, human blood, and brains) it was a statue of a Grim Reaper figure located on one of the compound’s altars that gave a hint of what was to emerge as one of the fastest growing spiritual traditions in the world.[6] In just a little over a decade this small symbolic presence, easily overlooked amidst the grisly crime scene photos, would explode on the world stage as the patron saint of the marginal and dispossessed. Slipping from the shadows of oral tradition and folk practice she has silently become the most contested, controversial and complex spiritual traditions to gain a widespread following in the contemporary world.

Narco-Satanico was a term that became popularized during the media hype surrounding the Matamoros killings. Due to the difficulty in accessing the so-called criminal underworld scholars have treated the term with skepticism and indifference. While researchers such as FBI analyst Robert Bunker and those who work in jail based ministries have consistently sounded an alarm that there is a disturbing reality to these claims of “Satanic” criminality, most academics, including myself, have sought to relativize the threat as a somewhat paranoid misinterpretation of popular spirituality. It wasn’t until I came face to face with it in jail that my eyes were opened to the reality that there were many within the drug culture that felt they were doing “Satan’s will” and actively cultivating this as part of their lifestyle.

La Dama de la Narco-Cultura

Unlike academia, the media in the U.S. and Mexico has focused a lot of attention on the small percentage of followers dedicated to the narco-cultura (drug culture). Robert Bunker estimates that the criminal variant of her devotional community is definitely in the minority, but as violence in the Americas and around the world continues to escalate, it is growing quickly:

While this saint has been around for over five decades, a narco-criminal variant has since emerged that has elevated Santa Muerte into a dark and vengeful deity in her own right. This variant of Santa Muerte has nothing even remotely to do with Catholicism and is rapidly gaining adherents. The total number of Santa Muerte worshipers is somewhere in the low millions with the actual breakdown along the continuum of belief— traditional, gray area, and the darker narco-criminal variant— unknown. An educated guess would be that the traditional and gray area believers still dominate but as narcocultura spreads, especially amongst the young in Mexico, more worshipers will continue to gravitate to the harsher aspects of the faith.

Despite the fact that he cuts short Santa Muerte’s history by hundreds of years, Bunker’s point is important. Although they receive extensive media coverage, these ‘harsher aspects’ of her worship remain outside the direct experience of the majority of those reading about her or even among her devotees.  No matter how deeply new devotees go in their personal relationship with her, most never gain access to the underground and secret world where Santa Muerte’s presence is cloaked by blood and violence. Many U.S. devotees even reject the idea that this is a possibility.

As an FBI analyst providing intelligence to law enforcement and military officials Bunker’s analysis is precise, however one can see clearly how much is being left unsaid as soon as you consider these facts outside of their original, governmental, context. Through a wider lens, one can still see the allure of Santa Muerte’s allure to feminists, the LGBT community, neo-pagans, adventurous agnostics and the culturally curious who are also drawn to her in large numbers. Yet it cannot be denied that the criminal variant that Bunker identifies is also growing, and as the nature of criminality is to exist on the margins of visible culture it is necessary to take a serious look at what law enforcement analysts are encountering as her cultural presence develops.

Bunker describes this side of Santa Muerte as the ‘darker variant’ and is not wrong when he says that here blood sacrifice is at times seen as a more effective offering than the more common place offerings like candy and cigarettes.

What is known is that the darker variant of Santa Muerte is by no means benign and simple commodities are unacceptable as offerings. Dark altars laden with weapons, money, narcotics, and sometimes stained with blood have been identified. The stakes have been raised now that petitions to cause agonizing death to one‘s enemies and bless cartel operatives before battle are being made, in essence providing them spiritual armor against other criminal forces and Mexican authorities. Human body parts and bowls of blood left at Santa Muerte altars, both public and private, are becoming more common as are actual human sacrifices and the ritualized dismemberment of the dead.[7]

This side of her devotion is something that many academics interested in her role as a contemporary archetype are unable to grasp, and sensationalist media is all too eager to embrace. It cannot be ignored, but we have to take into account that her popular image has always stood outside of her connection to these darker elements and even now her role as a protectress of the weak is more prevalent than her iconographies used within the narco-culture.

Uneasy Conclusions

For some she is a savior who brings them out of lives of addiction, violence and desperation. For others she is a justification for the most inhuman acts of violence and blasphemy imaginable. Lyrics penned by the rap group La Coka Nostra for their 2012 song “The Eyes of Santa Muerte” provide a chilling sense of the contemporary environment in which Saint Death has found a home:

This is all there is now there ain’t shit left, it’s like I’m looking in the eyes of the saint of death. La Santa Muerte, these people fear me, I see murder, disease, it’s all near me…La Santa Muerte, I know you hear me, our world is fucked up you see it clearly.

Hearing the song after my experience in the county jail, the group’s lyrical celebration of Santa Muerte as the “Virgin of the incarcerated martyrs of Satan” now strikes a much stranger chord for me – a Godmother of those cast off from the safety of the status quo and an icon revered by those who seek power at any cost she is an eternal enigma, uncomfortably neutral, unquestionably powerful. Santa Muerte’s explosive growth on a global scale should be taken as a serious call for all of us to take a step back and look at the culture that is emerging around us. Amoral and unflinching, the empty eyes of the skeleton saint stare out on the pain, turmoil and confusion that ravage billions of lives around the globe. No government, religion or social organization offers a true solution to the question that Saint Death silently asks.

Moving through history, taking on the needs of those seeking her favors she shows partiality to the marginalized and dispossessed who look for salvation in her bony hands. She simply smiles at the corrupt systems and officials that justify the more malignant aspects of the Beautiful Girl’s allure and presents a Saturnine face of justice wielding a scythe and hour glass as she offers equal kindness to the judge and the condemned.  For all of her complexity, perhaps a devotee from the U.S. Armed Forces put it best when he told me, ‘more than anything, in a world like this, la Nina Bonita is simple, death just makes sense.’

***

[1] Bunker, Robert J. and JohnP. Sullivan, Extreme Barbarism, a Death Cult, and Holy Warriors in Mexico: Societal Warfare South of the Border?; Small Wars Journal

[2] Chesnut, R. Andrew, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint; Oxford University Press, 2012

[3] Using the word ‘cult’ should not be taken to indicate the more pejorative assumptions surrounding this term. In the decentralized practices of folk spirituality the word cult merely describes a basic set of practices centered on a specific iconography shared amongst followers.

[4] World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University

[5] Chesnut, R. Andrew, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint; University of Oxford Press, 2012  – Adolfo Constanzo’s actions as a sorcerer-for-hire fit within practices which are common in cultures where a strong folk spirituality exists alongside organized crime.

[6] Traditionally Palo Ngangas are similar to reliquaries and act as a gateway for practitioners to communicate with the spirit world. Any human remains they contain are on par with Catholic and Buddhist veneration of past practitioners, and are not taken from sacrificial victims. Human sacrifice is not considered an orthodox practice in Palo Mayombe.

[7] Bunker, Robert J. and John P. Sullivan, Extreme Barbarism, a Death Cult, and Holy Warriors in Mexico: Societal Warfare South of the Border?; Small Wars Journal

***

David Metcalfe is a researcher, writer and multimedia specialist focusing on the interrelation of art, culture, and consciousness. In 2011 he established the Liminal Analytics: Applied Research Collaborative to focus on testing and deploying a unique combination of applied scholarship, market intelligence, digital media and social network development in order to build strategic multidisciplinary lines of communication. He is a contributing editor for a number of popular web magazines dealing with alternative culture and is currently working on a long-term transmedia project with Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut, Chair of Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, to document the growth and global market presence of devotional traditions associated with Santa Muerte, and the sanctification of death, in the Americas. 

***

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

The post Santa Muerte: The Enigmatic Allure of the Beautiful Girl appeared first on The Revealer.

I’d say “let’s just get Trump out of the way early” but these two pieces are really smart and I think they’re actually worth whatever small sliver of bandwidth you might have left for the topic.

“Trump, ‘The Apprentice,’ and secular rapture” by Arlie Russell Hochschild  in The Boston Globe. 

Although Trump is nobody’s model Christian, he has uncannily managed to appropriate the iconography of belief: images of a long-awaited judgment soon to come, when merciless vengeance will be wreaked on evildoers, wrongs will be righted, and untold blessings delivered to the deserving. This hidden source of his powerful appeal is nothing less than a secular version of the Rapture.

And Diane Winston writes “‘There is Sin and Evil in the World’: Reagan, Trump, and the News Media” for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

How did a lying, philandering blowhard convince millions of Americans — including white evangelicals and the working poor — that he should be their president? I blame Ronald Reagan and the news media.

Going a bit further back in American history, Ann Neumann‘s latest in The Baffler is “Black Elk, Woke” is a must-read.

The history of America’s Indians makes for tricky storytelling, and the task is vastly complicated in this case by relaying the story through the life of a religious figure—one who had himself done a fair bit of self-mythologizing and religious self-editing when he sat down to speak with Neihardt. Even apart from the readerly challenges presented by its subject-cum-narrator, Black Elk Speaks now makes for anything but simple or solace-filled spiritual reading. Black Elk’s legacy has been stubbornly contested, and the contest remains unresolved. To those who saw his countercultural image as a permanent rebuke to American settlers’ domination, extermination, and marginalization of Native American peoples, Black Elk was a tragic prophet who channeled ecstatic visions of Indian pride and independence. Meanwhile, his fervent conversion to Catholicism—which took place in 1904, forty-six years before his death—seemed to Catholic missionaries and their adherents an inspiring proof that ancient and orthodox Christian principles could finally win over the hearts of the “savages.”

If those headlines have you asking, “Whose Utopia Is This Anyway,” then you should probably take a look at Kate Daloz‘s latest in The New Republic. 

The very nature of utopian living—experiment-as-critique—offers a window into culture and counterculture in one. The insistence among nineteenth-century groups on dignified labor and workdays that allowed individuals time for study and reflection reflected an anxiety about the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution. For the young communards of the ‘70s, the emphasis on extreme austerity and the preoccupation with freedom and self-expression revealed starkly how cluttered and stifling 1950s middle-class culture had felt to its children.

We also strongly recommend reading Ashley Makar‘s powerful “Aleppo is Us” in Killing the Buddha.

I’m glad these images reach and move so many people. They bring attention to the Syrian war and can motivate action: support for aid work in the Middle East and for refugee resettlement in the U.S. and Europe. But I worry that the way we consume these images make it hard to empathize with the people they portray. In a time when people from Muslim countries are seen as either victims or terrorists, we lose sight of the human beings they are.

We also really enjoyed a couple of recent pieces in The New Yorker.

First: “Where Germans Make Peace with their Dead” by Burkhard Bilger

Baring’s retreats usually last two days and include ten to fifteen patients, who take turns working with her and acting as stand-ins for one another. Each session follows roughly the same order, like a religious ritual: confession, supplication, revelation, reconciliation. A malfunctioning family is wrenched into working order. The whole process takes less than two hours—a quick fix as therapy goes, which may account for some of its appeal. 

And second, “The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale” from the always amazing Ariel Levy

Ayahuasca isn’t the only time-honored method of ritual self-mortification, of course; pilgrims seeking an encounter with the divine have a long history of fasting, hair shirts, and flagellation. But in the United States most ayahuasca users are seeking a post-religious kind of spiritualism—or, perhaps, pre-religious, a pagan worship of nature. The Scottish writer and ayahuasca devotee Graham Hancock told me that people from all over the world report similar encounters with the “spirit of the plant”: “She sometimes appears as a jungle cat, sometimes as a huge serpent.” Many speak about ayahuasca as though it were an actual female being: Grandmother.

Speaking of Ayahuasca, Sarah Laskow asks, “In 2016, the ‘First Legal Ayahuasca Church’ Got Shut Down. Was It a Scam — or a New Religion?” in Atlas Obscura.

If one of the markers of a traditional religion is that members believe in, trust and follow the guidance of their leader, the Ayahuasca Healings founders seemed to be having only mixed success. The retreat-goers had dramatically different ideas about whether they were participating in a religion. One guest, who had an overwhelmingly positive experience at the retreat, says she “definitely never thought that it was a religion.” Another, who was so uncomfortable with how the retreat was run that he left early, says he had initially been most excited about finally finding “something that fit what I believed.” One person who helped interview and approve applicants said that while “for me it certainly had a spiritual component…I always felt it was understood, though never mentioned, that the primary reason for calling it a religion was for legal purposes.”

An image search for “Ayahuasca Art”

Also in Atlas Obscura, Dan Nosowitz explores, “Why Linguists are Fascinated by the American Jewish Accent”

Scholars say, yes, there is an American Jewish accent, but it’s complicated. “Intonation has kind of been the red-headed stepchild of linguistics, where for a lot of time there was debate about whether or not it’s really part of the linguistic system, or whether it was something else overriding it, essentially,” says Burdin. It’s only been about 15 years since linguists—just a few of them, really—have begun systematically attempting to study the rhythm, timbre, intonations, stresses, and pauses of speech, and the study is still in its infancy. It is particularly murky territory in English, where melody is not as important as it is in other languages. But there are some groups whose speech, long having been described as sing-songy, is suddenly of interest to researchers breaking new ground in the study of prosody. Appalachian English is one of those. And Jewish English is another.

The accents aren’t heavy, but there’s no disputing the Jewishness of “Transparent.” Jodi Eichler-Levine writes about “Transparent Season 3: The Intersectional Messiah” in Religion Dispatches. 

Last Saturday night, many American Jews ushered in the fall High Holy Days of teshuvah, or repentance, by attending special selichot services, praying and heeding the call of the shofar. The rest of us? We were home watching the new season of Transparent.

From moving images to still, KC McGinnis writes about “Making Faith Visible: Picturing the Spiritual through the Ultimate Anguish” in Reading the Pictures. 

Stories about terminal illnesses are about more than death: they’re about family, medicine, finances, conflict, hope — and often, faith. Death is almost universally regarded as a topic of spiritual import, even for people who aren’t particularly religious. For a photographer telling an in-depth story where death is a primary character, faith plays a supporting role that can’t go ignored.

And Diaa Haddid‘s “Postcards from the Hajj” in The New York Times were one of our favorite things last month.

The whole endeavor was something of a journalistic experiment, as well as a personal journey. My editors and I decided to cover the pilgrimage not so much as a news event but as a first-person diary of observations and reflections. 

Far from Mecca but still very relevant, Ahmed Ali Akbar shared “This Photographer Is Capturing The Way Muslims Pray in Public” at Buzzfeed.

Places You’ll Pray is a photo series which captures the different places Americans Muslims perform their five daily prayers outside the mosque and home.

The photographer, Sana Ullah, told BuzzFeed in an email that she got the idea for the series when her family was at the mall during prayer time and prayed in a dressing room.

Emojis, on the other hand, are everywhere, as we learn in “There is no hijab emoji. This 15-year old is trying to change that” by Abby Ohlheiser in The Washington Post.

Still, Alhumedhi is anticipating that not everyone will be on board with her idea. “I know for sure that there will be people against this,” she said. “There will be people like, ‘It’s such a trivial topic, why are you worrying about this?’ But once you wrap your head around how influential and how impactful emoji are to today’s modern society, you’ll understand.”

“It’s everywhere,” she said. “Emoji are everywhere.”

We read two interesting stories about religion and technology in Asia this month, both in The New York Times. They’re even more fascinating when read side-by-side.

“China’s Tech-Savvy, Burned-Out and Spiritually Adrift, Turn to Buddhism” by Javier C. Hernandez

As a spiritual revival sweeps China, Longquan has become a haven for a distinct brand of Buddhism, one that preaches connectivity instead of seclusion and that emphasizes practical advice over deep philosophy.

The temple is run by what may be some of the most highly educated monks in the world: nuclear physicists, math prodigies and computer programmers who gave up lives steeped in precision to explore the ambiguities of the spiritual realm.

And: “Japan’s Newest Technology Innovation: Priest Delivery“ by Jonathan Soble

Speaking of science and religion: “The Modern Mosaic of Science and Religion” by Donovan Schaefer in the Marginalia Review of Books.

This is why the work of scholars in the field of science and religion studies is pressingly relevant. Mapping the interactions between science and religion is not only a theological exercise: it has direct ramifications for understanding problems in the political and social sciences. Peter Harrison’s The Territories of Science and Religion is atour de force contribution to this discussion, designed to reconstruct the intellectual foundations of the subfield while serving as a formidable work of intellectual history in its own right. 

If you need a break from reading, maybe take a moment to watch Brook Wilensky-Lanford featured in “In Search of Eden” on BBC4 or listen to Peter Bebergal interviewed about his book Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll. by Marc Maron on his podcast “WTF,” or listen to Kristian Peterson host”Josef Sorett on A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics” on his First Impressions. 

“Apocalypse Meow: How a Cult That Believes Cats Are Divine Beings Ended Up in Tennessee” by Bob Smietana in Nashville Scene.

“She died on the Winter Solstice,” Ruthven wrote in describing the founding of Eva’s Eden. “Death had come, now I needed to embrace Life. How does one explain such a love to a world that sees animals only as animals? As I had studied and taught my people that of Egyptian Alchemy, I grew in reverence for their beliefs of honoring the Felines as vessels that are able to guide us through our passageway of life.”

And: “Pope Francis Hosts Feathered Serpent God as Part of Deity Exchange Program” in The Onion.

In an effort to strengthen their relationship and foster interfaith dialogue, Pope Francis reportedly welcomed the winged Mayan snake god Kukulkan to the Vatican this week as part of a month-long deity exchange program. “We are excited to have the War Serpent staying here with us for the next four weeks, during which time he’ll be exposed to the rituals and customs of the Catholic Church, so that when he returns home he can share the experience with his adherents in Chichén Itzá and the surrounding Yucután communities,” said Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke, noting that the pontiff had taken Kukulkan out for pizza on the first night of the exchange before showing him around some of Rome’s most famous landmarks.

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-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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

The post In the News: Drugs! Trump! Emojis! Important Things That Aren’t Good Clickbait! appeared first on The Revealer.

By Suzanne Schneider

I was in my first weeks of college in New York City when the Twin Towers came down, a transplant from rural South Dakota who had never met a Muslim in my life, or at least that I was aware of. Islam was neither part of my material world nor conceptual reality, but soon—like the dust that settled eerily over the city that fall—its terms were everywhere. We were told that Al Qaeda had launched a jihad against America, and academics, retired intelligence officers, and terrorism experts lined up to explain to the mourning public precisely what that meant. We were told it was a holy war, a culturally specific and exotic phenomenon that was central to Islam. Scholars did their best to explain that the term jihad could and did mean many things related to the struggle for truth; they offered lessons in etymology and recounted a hadith in which Muhammad told his warriors that the lesser jihad is against the enemy, and the greater one against one’s own ego and desires. Even so, the general sense was that jihad was something that Muslims did for which we Westerners had no equivalent, and that we should approach it in theological rather than political terms.

Much has happened in the intervening fifteen years, but the emergence of a diverse new crop of militant groups, often with quite different aims, has not served to nuance our public thinking about the contemporary intersection between Islam and violence. Rather, Americans now face what seem to be an endless list of “jihadi” organizations, a sea of interchangeable acronyms that are all associated with terrorism. Much is lost in this blanket treatment – not only about the characteristics and aims of different, sometimes oppositional groups, but about jihad itself, whose one-dimensional association with “religious” violence or “holy war” does us a great disservice in trying to assess what the heck is going on in large swaths of the world.

In this article, the final installment of a three-part series on religious violence, I would like to suggest an alternate framework for grappling with what can sometimes seem like an unending stream of attacks, one that breaks away from the two most popular narratives: 1. That Islam is the problem, duh; or 2. That Islam is innocent because the underlying causes of violence are not truly religious, but rather socio-economic and political in nature. I find that both explanations are fraught with theoretical and empirical shortcomings.

On the one hand, those who favor theological explanations are unable to provide an account for the sudden proliferation of militant groups and insurgencies over the last three decades. If Islam is the problem, shouldn’t it always have been a problem? Conversely the materialist explanation—for which I have far greater sympathy—often comes tinged with apologetics in its suggestion that “genuine” Islam is something apart from practices associated with militants. In short, it asks that we do not take radical groups seriously when they explain their actions in a theological register, or worse, assert that theirs is just another case of false consciousness. In both explanations “Islam” remains a remarkably discrete, timeless, and conceptually stable entity rather than a materially and historically embedded one.

I argued in the second installment of this series that the tendency to view religion in these terms actually unites peoples with otherwise differing views on just about everything—ranging from Bill Maher to the Breitbart crew to President Obama himself. As Elayne Oliphant has recently noted, this unexpected overlap is symptomatic of a larger divide that separates public and academic treatments of religion, with the former generally assigning to “religion” some sort of conceptual fixity that scholars dedicate their careers to disputing. Thus unlike critical insights about race, gender, and sexuality that originated in academic settings and have slowly (albeit unevenly) found their way into mainstream thinking, public discussions about religion seem incredibly simplistic. Moreover, the dangers associated with this fact are not the stuff of scholastic hair-splitting, but rather relate to whether the United States or “the West” is at war with “Islam” and if so, how many ground troops we should send to which countries.

As a result, we have collectively spilled far too much ink debating the “religious” credentials of ISIS/Boko Haram/al-Shabbab/et al. and far too little trying to understand why, at this particular moment in time, they have come into existence. After all, the text of the Qur’an has been established for nearly 1400 years, and many commentaries about jihad date from the medieval period. Why then have we witnessed a surge of violence over the last three decades, often directed against civilians, justified through reference to these texts? Those who would argue that fanaticism is an inherent or stable component of Islam are unable to answer this question. This fact should point to the inadequacy of any attempt to account for contemporary violence as something wholly internal to the tradition or distinct from the larger conditions of modernity. In what follows I will try to sketch, in broad outlines, what a historically-oriented theory of contemporary Islamic violence might look like – and importantly, what becomes visible when we rethink jihad in more familiar terms.

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It has become something of a platitude to note that humans possess both an unquenchable thirst for “lessons” from history on one hand, and remarkably short historical memories on the other. For those of us whose adulthood has been shaped by the events of September 11, 2011, it may seem as though Islamic violence is a lasting feature of human existence. Yet for most of the 20^th century, this was not the case. My own research about religious education in Mandatory Palestine has revealed that, if anything, Islam was felt by many to represent a useful tool for cultivating civic obedience and fostering social and political stability. With this perspective in mind, what I find most remarkable about the current situation is the emergence of so many Islamic militant groups within a relatively concentrated period of time, beginning in the end of the twentieth century and continuing to the present. Here we can look not only to Islamic Jihad (est. 1979), al-Qaeda (1988), al-Shabaab (whose parent organization, the Islamic Courts Union, dates to the late 1990’s), or ISIS, but to the dizzying array of lesser-known groups that have been created in the last few years.

One of the best ways to understand the scale of this phenomenon is to visualize it. The Mapping Militant Organizations (MMO) project at Stanford University enables us to do so, at least for certain conflict regions. For example, they have charted the emergence of militant groups in Pakistan from 1950 (i.e. its first years of independence) to the present. Leaving aside the student wing of Pakistan’s major political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, the first group that makes a blip on the radar is the Balochistan Liberation Front (founded in 1964 and modeled along the lines of more familiar movements like the PLO), which MMO describes as “ethno-nationalist separatist military organization that is currently fighting against the Pakistani government for an independent Balochi state.” For anyone who lived through the 1960’s and 1970’s, this should sound familiar, and possibly even quaint given the situation today.

Things begin to change noticeably in the 1980’s with the emergence of a number of organizations that drew upon the language of Islam (e.g. Harakat ul-Jihadi al-Islami, Harakat ul-Mujahedeen) to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan on one hand, and against Indian control of Kashmir on the other. The upward trend continues through the 1990’s and then seems to explode during the first decade of the 21^st century, with approximately a dozen new groups founded since 2000. It is important to note that many militant groups currently operating in Pakistan were created as paramilitary forces to fight the Soviet Union and India, which gestures at the fact that the state, either explicitly or tacitly, ceded its own right to monopolize violence within its territorial boundaries. And indeed, if we consider the outlying areas that remained largely in control of semi-autonomous tribes, it becomes clear that the state never actually achieved this benchmark to begin with. As we will see, this is far from an incidental detail.

MMO charts similar phenomena in other countries as well, including Iraq and Syria. In both countries, the militant groups that operated prior to the 1980’s were affiliated with the struggle for an independent Kurdistan, but things change radically following the U.S. invasion in 2003, and the Arab Spring in 2011. In the Iraqi context, insurgent groups that deployed the language of Islam proliferated, yet their immediate goal was ridding Iraq of foreign troops. In Syria, the civil war has spawned over two-dozen new militant groups of various ideological persuasions, many of which are explicitly Islamist in outlook.

In interpreting this data, we might be tempted to attribute the proliferation of Islamic militant groups to the menacing “return of religion,” wherein the secular promise of an earlier time has been overrun. The idea of this return has been thoroughly dismantled by scholars (present company included), and seems to be built on the dubious assertion that Muslims were less “religious” in the past. Is this really so? From my own research, it rather seems that Muslims assumed different postures toward militancy previously than they do in many contemporary circles, which is not at all surprising if you treat religions as evolving practice rather than a fixed code of conduct or belief. Consequently, we need not set out to explain the move from secular peace to religious war, but the relative sway of different forms of religiosity.

An alternative way to interpret the proliferation of Islamic militant groups is sorely needed, but developing it requires first taking a detour through the concept of jihad. Insofar as we conceive of jihad as a “religious” obligation—at least in the way that Americans use the term “religion”—we miss the fact that jihad is a concept that has always been deeply entwined with politics, war, and the state, and is not a mere question of faith, religious conviction, or of an innate fanaticism to kill. As Faisal Devji has argued in his Landscapes of the Jihad:

The debate on jihad in the Muslim tradition is largely juridical in nature, concentrating upon attempts to define legitimate occasions for holy war, permitted rules of engagement and the like. There is for instance the distinction between the offensive war to spread Islam and the defensive one to protect it, as well as that between the greater or spiritual jihad against one’s own evil impulses and the lesser or military jihad against an internal enemy. For our purposes, however, what is of chief interest is the fact that this debate, like every legal discussion, is concerned primarily with the privileges of authority—in this case with reserving the jihad’s military function for the properly constituted authority of a state.[1]

One of the chief conceptual hurdles for Westerners acclimatized to conceiving of jihad in “religious” terms is that, as I detailed previously, the normative structures of the modern European state came into being through a process that involved inventing something called “religion” that would be private and peaceful while actual communities of believers were stripped of their right to use force. Only by redefining “religion” in apolitical terms could the right to violence be effectively (too effectively) concentrated in the hands of the state. Here it is useful to remember John Locke’s argument in “A Letter Concerning Toleration” that Catholics could not be tolerated because the Pope constituted a competing political sovereign who might compromise their loyalty to the state. Shades of this sentiment were still alive and well when John F. Kennedy made a campaign pit stop to assure Protestant ministers that his Catholicism did not represent a threat to national security.

The idea of jihad as a state obligation obviously reflects a very different conceptual configuration of political forms, but I would caution the reader against overstating this difference. Indeed, there is much to support the effort to familiarize jihad and situate it within the realm of Western political theory by arguing, as John Kelsay has done, that jihad should be understood an Islamic doctrine of just war. Classical texts on jihad, much like those written by Christian thinkers (Aquinas, for example), articulated a theory of just war that  assumes the existence of a state structure that is waging war on behalf of a collective, establishes the legitimate causes for war, and stipulates the rules of engagement.

Importantly, these juridical texts also specify the conditions under which this collective obligation passes to the individual, such as when the state structure is no longer operative or is unable to perform its protective function. Thus, if one lives in frontier region that has been invaded by non-Muslims, the obligation to wage jihad and defend one’s land becomes incumbent upon the individual, not merely a state-sponsored collective enterprise. In this sense, these texts have something in common with the work of later European writers like Thomas Hobbes, who argued that the individual regains his or her private right to violence if the state is no longer able to perform its protective functions. As he states in Leviathan, people enter into civil society to secure a greater chance of protection that they would enjoy the state of nature; this is the origin of the social contract. If the sovereign is no longer able to ensure this security, the subject consequently regains his or her right to private violence. “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power latest, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished.”[2]

By considering jihad alongside concepts like the just war and the social contract, I believe it is possible to approach the proliferation of Islamic militant groups in a very different fashion than currently prevails. If so much effort has gone into making violence the sole right of the modern state, what else can the sudden proliferation of non-state actors that appeal to Islam mean but the dissolution of the state itself? In what follows, I will briefly outline why I think that questions of individual authority and state legitimacy should be at the forefront in our attempts to understand contemporary jihad.

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It is often noted that classical Islamic theories of the state afforded rulers an extraordinary amount of power and commanded subjects to remain obedient even in the case of tyranny. The idea that individual Muslims could rebel against the authority of an unjust ruler was mostly unknown before the late 19^th century, when figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani tried to reconcile contemporary European political thought with classical Islamic theories of statehood by asserting that individuals did have the right to revolt against tyrants. Al-Afghani was one of Islam’s great liberal thinkers, and the idea as articulated here has a decidedly democratic ring. Twentieth century radicals such as Sayyid Qutb (an influential member of the Muslim Brotherhood) built upon this foundation to argue that the hypocrisy and indeed, apostasy, of contemporary Muslim rulers rendered them illegitimate and unworthy of obedience. In a remarkably liberationist tone, he states that Islam:

…is really a universal declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men and from servitude to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude; it is a declaration that sovereignty belongs to Allah alone and that He is the Lord of all the worlds. It means a challenge to all kinds and forms of systems which are based on the concept of the sovereignty of man; in other words, where man has usurped the Divine attribute…This declaration means that the usurped authority of Allah be returned to Him and the usurpers be thrown out – those who by themselves devise laws for others to follow, thus elevating themselves to the status of lords and reducing others to the status of slaves. In short, to proclaim the authority and sovereignty of Allah means to eliminate all human kingships and to announce the rule of the Sustainer of the universe over the entire earth.[3]

Given such view, the reader will probably not be surprised to hear that Qutb was convicted of plotting an assassination attempt against Jamal Abdel Nasser and executed by the Egyptian state in 1966.

Written against the backdrop of state persecution, a major theme of Qtub’s seminal work, Milestones, is the essential connection between Islam and human emancipation. Here he argues that the goal of jihad is to create the conditions of human freedom so that individuals are not artificially separated from Islam by social, political, or economic structures of oppression. Only then can they said to be truly free to either accept or reject Islam, and he does not assume that everyone will or must do so. But most noteworthy for our purposes, Qutb went one step further by linking the reality of unjust human sovereignty to the question of jihad. In light of the corrupt nature of Muslim rulers, he argued that the obligation to engage in jihad shifted from the collective to the individual:

They [the scholars] all agreed unanimously that Jihad is a fard kifayah [collective duty] imposed upon the Islamic Ummah in order to spread the call of Islam, and that Jihad is a fard ‘ayn [individual duty] if an enemy attacks Muslim lands. Today, my brother, the Muslims as you know are forced to be subservient before others and are ruled by disbelievers. Our lands have been besieged, and our personal possessions, respect, honour, dignity and privacy violated. Our enemies are overlooking our affairs, and the rites of our din [religion] are under their jurisdiction…Hence in this situation it becomes the duty of each and every Muslim to make Jihad. He should prepare himself mentally and physically such that when comes the decision of Allah, he will be ready.[4]

This radical upending of the link between state authority and jihad produces a very different kind of thinking, one in which the question of individual moral agency becomes paramount. That is, in an era characterized by corrupt and despotic regimes whose hold on authority is all but guaranteed through alliances with global superpowers, jihad is what provides the true believer an avenue for ethical action.

I want to highlight this emphasis on individual action—and indeed, violence—over and above the authority of the state. If we think through this assertion in terms borrowed from political theory, contesting the state’s right to monopolize violence (jihad as collective duty) signals the breakdown of the social contract itself. Whereas the modern state has been characterized by its attempt to wrest coercive power from religious communities so that it alone can be violent, the surge in Islamic militant groups can be understood as a refusal to accept the terms of this deal. In countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq—where the state structure is in disarray and not truly sovereign over its claimed territory—the proliferation of Islamic (and other) militant groups in fact reflect the dissolution of the social contract. But in less egregious cases, such as Pakistan or Egypt, it is not the total disintegration of the state but its perceived illegitimacy that becomes relevant. Besides the rhetoric of jihad, what militants in all five countries share is a refusal to acknowledge the state’s monopoly on violence.

In a related vein, we should cast a critical glance toward the recent gathering of Sunni Muslims in Chechnya—ostensibly to define “ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jama’ah,” the community of legitimate interpreters of Islam—in which participants condemned the Wahhabi variants of Islam that are associated with many militant groups. Beyond the logical and ethical inconsistencies in blaming Wahhabism for its exclusionary practices, and then claiming that its adherents are heretics who have corrupted “true” Islam, we should pay close attention to who convened this celebration of moderation: Ramzan Kadyrov, a strongman with close ties to Vladimir Putin. According to James Dorsey, other participants included Egyptian scholars (‘ulema) who support President al-Sisi, a “close confidante” of Bashar al-Assad, and the head of the Islamic Tabah Foundation, who maintains close ties to UAE Crown Prince Mohammad ibn Zayed al-Nahyan. The latter was created to help counter the influence of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi’s International Union of Muslim Scholars, which is widely held to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

I suppose we could look at this in celebratory terms as an instance of internal criticism, in which the Muslim community gathered to reject the politics of salafi extremism. But the shadows of Putin, al-Sisi, and al-Assad should give us pause as we ask who is interested in cultivating this “moderate” Islam and toward what end? Undermining the strength of groups that challenge the authority and legitimacy of despotic governments is a very smart political play; but it is unlikely to achieve its goal. Indeed, the more we examine the link between Islamic militancy and state authority, the harder it is to believe that states whose legitimacy has been so widely contested will ever find the “peace” they claim to seek.

Of course, the illegitimacy or disintegration of the state does not by itself explain why violence is often tied, both conceptually and materially, to Islam. Nor does it explain attacks against Western targets, though we should note that—media attention aside—most instances of Islamic violence are carried out within Muslim countries. This question deserves a more comprehensive response (I’m working on it), but here it is worth drawing attention to the fact that in many post-colonial Muslim states historically ruled by “secular” strongmen, Islam has become the politics of opposition, sometimes the only politics of opposition that could not be fully squashed – though regimes did try. Few figures bring this fact home better than the example of Sayyid Qutb addressed above.

As we saw in that discussion, thinking about jihad evolved drastically during the twentieth century against the background of political corruption. Far from representing a return to pre-modern times, contemporary calls for jihad seem to represent a mash-up of medieval commentaries about individual responsibility within the context of a disintegrating polity (i.e. during the Mongol invasion) with the wholly modern notion that a sovereign’s legitimacy is derived from the will of the governed. In this sense, contemporary jihads draw upon a certain strain of democratization, however counterintuitive that might seem. They are deeply intertwined with concerns over individual agency in the face of overwhelming systemic power, and are intimately concerned with who has the authority to be violent. And in rejecting the authority of established elites and traditional (often state-sponsored) clerics, they have a populist ring that is more suggestive of contemporary American politics than 7^th century Arabia. Is that too close to home?

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I admit that these reflections are admittedly incomplete, but I hope they are nonetheless suggestive of what an alternative treatment of Islamic violence might look like when we step away from the religion is bad/religion is good debate. In addition, and though I have not treated the issue here, we have good reason to suspect that challenges to state authority are running parallel to those directed toward another locus of traditional authority, that of the ‘ulema. Elsewhere, I have situated the current wave of Islamic violence in a “protestant” context wherein individuals dismiss the authority of ‘ulema and assert their own right to interpret shari’a. We would be well served to situate contemporary jihad in the context of these two related challenges to traditional sources of authority, whether we speak of the state’s monopoly on violence or the ‘ulema’s position as the privileged arbiter of Islamic law.

At this point in election season, I cannot with good faith claim that this populist impulse is a “Muslim world” phenomenon. Similarly, much as I would like to blame the Saudis and call it a day (though they certainly do deserve some credit), this inquiry points to a far more global renegotiation of state violence and individual agency than a Wahhabi-focused narrative allows. Rather than accepting the commonplace and even comforting notion that jihad is a throwback to medieval times, we might instead approach it as wholly symptomatic of post-modern ones.

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[1] Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 33.

[2] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. 147.

[3] Sayyid Qutb, Milestones , 67.

[4] Milestones, 235.

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This is part three of a series Suzanne Schneider has written on religious violence. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

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The post Getting off the Merry-Go-Round: Approaching Religious Violence, Part III appeared first on The Revealer.

Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell, Pantheon Books, 2016

“We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.”

– 1 Corinthians 4:9-13

Alone among the exalted choir of the saints are the apostles. While the subsequent hagiographies of the grand golden treasury written over the past twenty centuries contain stories as varied as Lucy (who carried her eyes on a platter) and Denis (who carried his severed head in his hands) only the apostles can tell tales of personally knowing Jesus.

Theologically, every saint’s story involving a Eucharistic miracle or a vision of the Christ is one in which they have experienced a man as well as God; technically these belated saints also know the physicality of Christ. The disciples, the list of whom varies across the synoptic gospels, are counted alongside Jesus’ family (of which James may be potentially included among both categories) in knowing Christ as not just God, but indeed as man. The apostles should be viewed through a more subtle, yet perhaps more meaningful distinction: they knew the material existence of Jesus the man not only through sacrament, but they indeed knew him as a friend. As writer Tom Bissell says in his beautiful, fascinating, exhaustive, and personal Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, “Jesus is not a ghost but something tangible – someone who could be held if you wanted to hold him or touched if you wanted to touch him.”

Understanding these men as Christ’s friends is not metaphor, or New Age feel-good gospel platitude about a personal relationship with Jesus; the nature of the apostles’ relationship is a very literal one threaded throughout the New Testament and the Apocrypha. Theologians know Christ through the mystery of hypostatic union, the Christological coequal relation of God and man; the canonized of the post-apostolic age experience Christ’s physicality through miracles of bone and flesh and sinew and cloth and blood; but it was the apostles who knew Jesus as a guy. Francis of Assisi and Catharine of Sienna may have had visions of Christ, but it was men like James, Philip, Peter, Thomas, and, of course, Judas, who were raised with him, broke bread with him, denied him, doubted him, and maybe most intimately of all, betrayed him. The Apostles knew Christ not as idea, but Jesus as man whose tallit could be touched; they knew Christ not as concept, but Jesus as human who they could wrap teffilin alongside. God is to be worshiped, but these were the men who lived, cohabited, ate, traveled, cried, and laughed with him. Bissell writes movingly of the Apostles that “to many believers, the interpersonal dynamics of the gospels were precisely that apparent. As apparent as every miracle, as every word of Jesus.” The Twelve are, of course, all the more human seeming because of it, in all their glorious imperfections and short-comings.

Tom Bissel’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010) is possibly his most widely read work, and is fast becoming the standard volume for a defense of the aesthetic virtues of a largely critically maligned medium. Apostle may seem to be a radical departure from that earlier book, but in it Bissell is returning to the genre of his first book and style for which the for which he has won the most critical acclaim. Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia (2003) was a culturally minded travelogue in which he evoked the stories of  Victorian gentleman who went to sundry and exotic locales so their readers wouldn’t have to.  That particular book drew upon Bissel’s Peace Corps experience in Uzbekistan in crafting one of the more insightful books by an American about the particularities of post-Soviet life. That same keen skill of analysis combined with empathy for the people he meets is marshaled to incredibly affect in his latest work in which he has penned an immensely affecting account of his travels among shrines to the Apostles, taking him from predictable pilgrimage sites like Jerusalem and Rome, to the more unexpected like Madras, India and Kyrgyzstan (the tombs, or place of death, for respectively Judas, Peter, Thomas, and Matthew).

In some sense it’s easier to explain what this book is not; it isn’t a work of Christian devotional tourist literature or a New Age Eat, Pray, Love for the spiritually disaffected Generation-Xer. Nor is it some New Atheist screed mocking the devotion of those penitents and pilgrims who journey to Patras or Tours. Bissell is a Michigan raised former altar boy, and while he tells us that his “loss of faith was… sudden and decisive” he refreshingly “never once looked back on those years with anything but fondness.” He explains that, “Even after I lost my religious faith, Christianity remained to me deeply and resonantly interesting.” Perhaps due to this sympathy, the author comprehends that basic axiom of true religious devotion, ignored by both the reductionisms of the fundamentalist and the snarling skeptic, that “belief and doubt are not always at war but kindred emotions within the same internal struggle.” Religion isn’t simply Summa Theologica, it’s also the arthritic hands fingering rosary beads; faith isn’t only Institutes of the Christian Religion, but also the voice of the gospel singer in harmony. Religion can never only be in the mind, or even only in the heart, but it must be felt in the body first and foremost.

If Apostle has a major theme it’s about the physicality of the divine as experience, of the bodily life of these twelve men and those who venerate them. Bissell is able to explain the intricacies of homoousian as explicated at the First Council of Nicaea and the metaphysics of Chalcedonian Christology, but he can also describe things like a “platter of candles… half of which were lit. As the candles wept wax tears, their stubborn little flames quivered in a draft I could not quite feel.” A humane perspective motivates Bissell’s journalistic endeavors, which when combined with an astute theological literacy results in an estimably unusual and rewarding book, equal-parts journalistic account, personal narrative, cultural critique, popular history, and theological treatise. Indeed, it’s rare to find the non-specialist writer who is so casually familiar (and good at explaining!) multisyllabic theological terms like Docetism, Monophysitism, Miaphysitism, Arianism, and Nestorianism, but Bissell’s erudition is obviously and charmingly conveyed by his immense curiosity.

Bissell has done  a massive amount of research, he is more than conversant with the scholarship of both theologians and historians of early Christianity like Michael Goulder, John Painter, Raymond F. Brown, R. Alan Culpepper, Bart Ehrman, and Richard Bauckham, with a veritable dissertations-worth of endnotes and works cited. But there is a difference between what Bissell accomplishes and that of his secondary sources, one illuminated by his own explanation of the respective strengths and weaknesses of Paul compared to the Gospel writers. He explains that Paul was the more theologically sophisticated, but that it was the Gospel writers who intuited the power of a good story told well. He explains that “Jesus is an idea in Paul,” but that he is a “character in the gospels,” demonstrating the important difference between ideas and stories. Bissell uses ideas, but he is very much telling a story.

The beautifully minimalist text of the New Testament does not provide any sort of straight-forward forensic account of the Apostles. As Bissell writes, “the Twelve Apostles have wandered a strange gloaming between history and belief,” indeed the very noun phrase that they are referred to appears in the Bible approximately once, in Matthew 10:2. That the gospels have broad contradictions in basic issues of narrative agreement – from Jesus’s genealogy, to details of certain events, to the very listing of the Apostle’s names (and their identities themselves) – is common knowledge. The only succor, for the literalist against such inconsistencies, are the contorted attempts at harmonization between the four accounts that have been attempted since they were written. That the gospels were directed to specific communities, Matthew to Jewish Christians, Luke to Gentiles and so on, is also widely accepted. As any close reader knows, the texture of literary difference can lead to profoundly different interpretations – in Matthew a distraught Judas returns his pieces of silver to the Temple priests and hangs himself in contrition, in Acts his festering and bloated body breaks open in a veritable explosion of divine retribution. Not a small contradiction. Certainly not a small one in matters of plot, but more importantly in emotional register as well, so that we are confronted with two radically different Judases, one a repentant suicide, the other a malignant demon struck down by the Lord. These subtle differences in emotional register need not be so dramatic, as Bissell explains, “Mark’s Peter is doltishly prone to misunderstanding; Matthew’s Peter is full of misplaced love.”

These subtle differences are explained by the author to the Sola Scriptura Evangelical Protestant from Tennessee whom Bissell shares several beers with after meeting in front of the tombs of Philip and James in Rome. The Tennessean may have discomfort with what he sees as the overreliance of traditionalism in the Church who maintain the shrine which he is visiting, but if we were to rely on the Bible alone we’d have a profound deficit of stores concerning the ciphers in the New Testament we call the Apostles. Bissell’s reliance on tradition has a long tradition in its own right of course, his Evangelical compatriot in Rome may blanche at the accumulated non-biblical accounts of Catholicism, but nobody really believes that tradition has no role in faith. After all, based on a reading of the Gospel accounts alone we have no idea if Jesus was crucified on a cross in the traditional shape, in the demeaning X of St. Andrew’s Cross, or if he was simply tied to a rectilinear post. And yet the biblical silence about something so fundamental as what the very instrument of death which killed the savior looks like hasn’t stopped the majority of denominations which hold sola Scriptura as a matter of doctrinal necessity from choosing some variation of the traditional cross as their symbol.  Even the pious Tennessean movingly admits the power of legend here in the crypt of Philip and James, telling Bissell that even if much of what we think we know about the Apostles comes not from the skeleton prose of the New Testament, but from human invention, that that’s no matter. For he explains they were still “my Savior’s friends and they died for him. They deserve our respect and our love.” Myth, legend, tradition, narrative, story, plot – these are the ingredients of faith. Fact is secondary to faith – that axiom can be interpreted many ways, but one way that it shouldn’t be understood is as a condemnation.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

Using scripture alone to write anything like a collective biography of the Apostles is to anatomize a shadow, or to weigh a ghost. Of course part of the brilliance of the Gospel accounts is their stunning restraint, what they pass over in silence is not a deficit of interiority, but rather the heavy intensity of things left unsaid. Bissell does not rely on scripture alone of course, he has two thousand years of tradition which accumulated around John, Jude, Andrew, Bartholomew and so on in which to present the multifaceted, fractal narrative associations which have accrued to these names. In traveling from the Jerusalem of Judas and his Field of Blood, to the catacombs carved out beneath St. Peter’s Basilica, the sun-drenched apocalyptic isles of Patmos’ Greece, and Thomas’ shrine in sweltering India, the author assembled a brief about the many post-biblical traditions concerning these people. While the literalist may deny the obvious, writing and living religion is very different from composing history. He explains that, “Storytelling has and always will have a corrective power less fragile than that of faith – less fragile because it is not vulnerable to mere fact.” This theme is threaded throughout Apostle; that the ecstatically irrational paradoxical truths of Christianity are greater than empirical data, and that even if the stories are embellished, exaggerated, or even fabricated, that they are still true in the grander sense. He explains, “indeed, most things – could be true and untrue at the same time, that the untrue could abide with the true as the believer abided with the believer.”

It may seem strange to compare a cheerful unbeliever like Bissell to that consummate proponent of orthodoxy C.S. Lewis, and yet both are partisans in embracing the conundrums of Christianity, and both of them spurn the inanities of either religious literalist or dismissive rationalist. The wisdom of Lewis’ trilemma which said that Christ was either liar, lunatic, or Lord, is that it doesn’t reduce the enigmatic and unknowable postulations of Christianity to mere ethics. Bissell is in agreement, understanding better than generations of well-meaning but milquetoast liberal Protestants that, “The moral teachings of a man named Jesus are not, and never have been, the defining component of Christianity.” Any ethical formulation of Christ’s that can be enacted by living men can be found in every major tradition, any ethical formulation of Christ’s which is novel is impossible for living men to implement. Concerning personal allegiances Lewis assents and Bissell declines. But whatever God may be, God is not reducible to mere reason, or even mere truth. God is bigger than “fact,” it is being beyond being. He writes, “What Christianity promises, I do not understand. What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine, not even when I was a Christian.” Fully lived, the religion is beyond understanding, want, and imagination, so that in some ways abandoning Christianity is its own type of Christianity. The author finds this among the churches, basilicas, shrines and mere holes where the Apostles lay, at these “coordinates of cosmic faith” that are “rationality’s cease-fire zones.” That Christianity is a stumbling block to some, and foolishness to others is not to say that the faith is secretly amenable to some cheap rational positivism, it’s to say that the center of Christianity is defined by the glorious paradox of the categories of man and God collapsing into one another. Faith is not reducible to an “Ergo,” but only an “Amen.”

And the beautiful, bloody, beating heart of the mystery of Christianity is in that physicality of God, which Bissell traces remnants of from the Mediterranean to Central Asia to India. In incarnating as man, Christ demonstrates not only the mystery of God, but indeed the mystery of us as well. Christ represents the single strangest and most inexplicable reality of what it means to be a human being born into a body that shall live, suffer, and die. The genius of Christianity is that it somehow physicalizes divinity while avoiding idolatry; and the profundity of Christianity is that it locates the sacred, at least in part, in this messy materiality. Bissell, reflecting upon the bloody and tortured reality of the crucifix, asks, “Had any other religion settled upon such a pessimistic, but demonstrably true, organizing symbol…?” There are the illusions of the empty cross and of Sunday, and the profound reality of the crucifix and Friday. What other religion, in its most profound implications, so completely admitted that God has died? But in dying, Christ affirms the profundity of physicality, which again lay at the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the sacred. The mystery of the incarnation demonstrates the mystery of physicality itself, what it means to be a ghost in a machine, the relationship between spirit and matter, the profound unusualness and perplexity of possessing a body, but also the profound beauty and wonder of what it means to have that same body. You cannot hold God’s hand, kiss God’s lips, embrace God, or wipe God’s tears away. The powerful beauty of the Christian message is that you can hold Jesus’s hand, kiss Jesus’s lips, embrace Jesus, and wipe Jesus’s tears away, and that this is somehow still an interaction with God. The full implication is that maybe any interaction with a fellow man or woman can be this interaction with God. For the Apostles, the person they loved may or may not have been God, but he was most definitely a man, and for their love of him we have come to love them, in all of their and God’s human fragility.

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Ed Simon Ed Simon is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Lehigh University, where he researches the religion, literature, and culture of the seventeenth-century. He has been widely published at a variety of sites, and can be followed on twitter @WithEdSimon, or at his website.

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

The post The Savior’s Friends: On Tom Bissell’s Apostle appeared first on The Revealer.

Randy R. Potts is a Texas based journalist, photographer, and writer. He is also a grandson of American televangelist and preacher, Oral Roberts. Potts’ new project, “The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean,” is a searing ‘reported memoir’ about his upbringing, Roberts’ legacy, sexual abuse, homosexuality, and memory, juxtaposed against 300 photographs taken over the past year in Oklahoma. You can read an excerpt from the project here. 

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Patrick Blanchfield: What was the initial impetus for the project? When did you first conceive of it? And what’s the significance of your choice of the mode of elegy specifically?

Randy R. Potts: have been writing portions of this work since 1990 when I was 15 years old. At age 20, while mowing my now-ex-stepfather-in-law’s lawn, I saw this project in a sort of vision: words and images balanced, like a scrolling graphic novel of sorts. Ten years ago, I began to formally write this work as a memoir without images but I was never happy with it. Two years ago, I began to experiment with what you might call short “longform” journalism on Instagram – inspired by the work of Jeff Sharlet and Neil Shea – and I eventually decided Instagram might be the closest platform to what I envisioned years before.

To describe it for others, I call @thebirdiejean a project or a memoir but, for myself, the best descriptor is elegy. The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean is a lament for the dead and, though it contains reported journalism and photography, its chief concerns are the concerns of poetry: the sensual: the unimaginable: the unreportable. The word elegy situates the work in a space we’re not used to journalism going, where, some say, journalism can’t go. I am convinced, however, that what we often dismissively call “poetry” *must* be part of journalism and the factual record. At some level, poetry and its concerns are the *only* record.

Blanchfield: “Birdie Jean” draws on some many genres and media. Interspersed with your recollections and photos, you have translations of poetry, sculptures, video, and more. What led to your choice of Instagram as a platform for it all, and what’s it been like to work with it? Do you see Instagram as another medium, a venue, or something else?

Potts: I see Instagram as a venue – a democratic stage, simultaneously global and local – and I see The Bible Went Down With The Birdie Jean as a performed elegy within the space defined as @thebirdiejean. I didn’t understand until recently how important it is that it is a serial. I am still changing photographs and editing and moving things around as my heart changes: cold, hot, hatred, love: all those things affect the reported material and how I choose to frame them.

Blanchfield: What’s the deal with the little plastic men in the orange jumpsuits, climbing the book sculptures? They look like convicts, but I’m not entirely sure?

Potts: I think of these as dioramas representing a landscape I both find myself within and simultaneously construct. The figures are convicts made for train sets; I’m using them to explore the nature of my own captivity in a mental, physical, intellectual, and temporal landscape.

Blanchfield: Part of what’s so arresting and urgent about your work is how it seems to disrupt settled (and often stifling and shaming) boundaries between public and private, the stories families tell versus the stories families try to hide or forget. Some of the material – about divorce, or sexual abuse – seems like it must be very challenging and require a lot of bravery to share. What has that experience been like for you? 

Potts: Hellish. I’ve been documenting the physical toll this project takes on my body, including: diarrhea, panic attacks, rashes, asthma, nausea, headaches, exhaustion, sleeplessness, nightmares, etc., none of which I normally experience regularly but many of which have been somewhat constant for the year I’ve been working on this project. These boundaries are there for a reason: they seem to literally constitute our link between our bodies and the outside world and at least some of my physical pain seems to be my body simultaneously purging and defending itself.

In this process I’ve been confronted with something missed by the modern incarnation of the LGBT rights movement: LGBT is, by definition, something that revolves around sex. On the one hand, the
marriage equality movement has it right: being LGBT *is* about love but, to convince heterosexuals of their cause, the modern movement has tried to remove all suggestions that this “love” we’re talking about involves physical bodies having sex – specifically, a *kind* of sex society continues to hide away. Homosexual people have long been placed in a ghetto: fearing for our physical safety, we are often forced to flirt and carry on romance on websites like Craigslist and apps like Grindr. One of my family’s most vocal complaints is that I have tied the memory of my uncle to “dirty” websites and “random people online.” This complaint misunderstands that there is no way to describe life in the ghetto without visiting the ghetto. There is no way to describe the LGBT experience without immersing yourself in what society has defined as “dirty.” The idea that I could “research” or understand my dead gay uncle’s story by speaking only with his straight family members is part of what constitutes the ghetto where my uncle found himself.

Blanchfield: Reading your writing, I have noticed how you also share the artifacts of your own *doing* that research in the present – the Craigslist postings you wrote while you were looking for people who may have known your Uncle, for example, which show up in your Guardian article. There seems to be something very profound at play in how your project investigating repressed relationships and erased communities in the past extends itself to building new communities and connections in the present – and doing so publicly, via social media in particular. What’s it been like to work in those worlds at once: unearthing private memories from decades ago, but in age of digital social media exposure? Is what’s happening in the here-and-now changing your sense of the past, and vice-versa?

Potts: This project is most closely being followed in Oklahoma; the second largest group of followers are accounts based in Russia and Ukraine. I’ve noticed that on social media my posts often make people uncomfortable. The “liberal” crowd, usually composed of people with college degrees or higher, want to mock Oral Roberts and conservative America. My work questions that disdain even while simultaneously notating and documenting the “sins” of a figure like Oral Roberts and conservative Christianity. What has been fascinating is that my readership (based on looking at how the account’s followers describe themselves on Instagram) is largely Oklahoma-based, Christian, and conservative. Meanwhile, I am openly discussing my sexual experiences with men and the harm that this Oklahoma community has wreaked on people like me.

Blanchfield: What can we look forward to in the next installments of the cycle?

Potts: Each cycle or “book” is dedicated to a person or place and will follow the same format as the first book. However, in the last two books, the project will begin to unravel as I deal with sexual abuse in Book VIII and especially as I say goodbye to my past self in Book IX. In terms of sexual abuse, I’ve decided to not name the individual responsible, though readers are free to make assumptions based on contextual clues. The statute of limitations in Oklahoma – where the abuse happened – runs out two years after a person turns 18; further, the abuser is, in my mind especially, a Monster, not a person. In the same way that a good horror film never shows the monster in full, this account won’t – can’t? – show the Monster as it actually exists in the person who abused me. This particular monster this project is dealing with is far less material and, seemingly, eternal.

Blanchfield: Lastly: What do you think your grandfather would think about the Birdie Jean project? What would you say to him, if you could say anything?

Potts: I am confident he would have publicly called this account an attack of the devil. Privately, I think he would have hung on every word – Oral was a closeted intellectual and it’s easy to imagine that his curiosity would have gotten the better of him. Because I never knew him well, this project would have had to speak for itself – I don’t imagine we would have ever discussed it – almost all the family drama I’m discussing in this work is drama that is never discussed. My family is Southern and, in the South, the past is buried: we address it only by erecting monuments. I think that, in many ways, @thebirdiejean is its own kind of monument.

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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.

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

The post Cycles of Memory: A Conversation between Randy R. Potts & Patrick Blanchfield appeared first on The Revealer.

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#AcrossThisBridge, 1/6

“In the winter, the whole hive forms into a ball around the queen and it moves the same way other herds do: migrating birds, buffalo, it’s all the same pattern: outside in. I got bees after Andrew. I think, well- it’s good to care for things.” Lori Wilfahrt and I had been talking for two hours at a cafe off Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis. I’d finally turned off my recorder. Lori had just been to the bathroom and when she came back I thought: she’s been crying. I put the recorder away. We sat across from each other quietly. The storm tapered off and, eventually, we talked about Lori’s bees: how do bees stay warm in Minnesota? In 2011, Cpl Andrew Wilfahrt died in Afghanistan: the last gay soldier, apparently, to die under DADT. My Munna also lost a gay son to war and I wanted to know: what was that like? // “After he came out he was like ‘Mom there’s a group that meets here, parents of gay kids, maybe you would go to something like that.’ I was like, I’m fine with you being gay! It’s cool. I’m fine. What I didn’t know was what a gay teenager could put themself through in their heads or what it was like outside the house. The house is fine. We’re fine. We’re not gonna kick you out. We love you. But outside of the house! It’s like – man, awful things. It’s better now, I think. I think he was bullied some. At some point, 17, he was like screw this, I’m telling people. He said he found out he had a lot more girlfriends, ‘this is a gay guy! It’s so cool’ but, there’s always jerks. Football team was pushing him around, he came home, ‘Mom I got a really funny story to tell ya. I was at my locker and a bunch of these football jerks started pushing me around and shoving me and then a couple of hockey guys came around the corner and the hockey team hates the football team so then they start fighting with each other, ‘leave him alone!’ pushing each other around and Andy said ‘and I just snuck away.’ He told it like a joke, so I was like, ‘that’s … pretty funny …. how often is that happening?’ I think at some point Andy became very tough about it, daring people. ‘What are you gonna do about it? I dare ya to do something about it.’

#AcrossThisBridge, 2/6

“I remember him telling my mom. After everybody knew, my mom still didn’t know. Andy loved my mom, he was so nice to her, such a big heart. So I asked my brother Dave, ‘should we tell her?’ So this is 1998, maybe, and he was like ‘naw, I don’t think you need to tell her.’ And that was bad advice. In my heart I wanted to tell her. She was always like ‘what’s going on with Andy? What’s bothering him?’ So, I told Andy, ‘I don’t think I want to tell my mom.’ He was like, ‘ok.’ So, every time we got together she would invariably say [in rural Minnesota accent] ‘so Andy, you got a girlfriend?’ and he would say ‘no, grandma’ and he’d shoot me a look, like, ugh. So one Easter Sunday we’re all at my mom’s, my brothers, their kids, their wives and we’re all talking and there’s this quiet moment and I’m like, here it comes. It’s coming. And sure enough, ‘so Andy, you got a girlfriend?’ and he takes a breath and I’m like ‘he’s gonna tell her.’ And he did. He said ‘grandma, I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I’m gay.” And there was a little silence, and everybody knows except her, and you can see it in her face, she’s just tumbling through this, doesn’t know what to say, and then my brother Steve says ‘so Andy, you got a boyfriend?’ And everybody starts to laugh. It’s just like that was the perfect thing to say, broke all that tension. Later on I called my mom, ‘so how are you doing with that news?’ ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it and I was so shocked! I was so shocked. But, he can’t help it, right? I mean, he was born like this, right?’ And I was like, right, you know in her simple way that was, like, ‘yup.’ The whole family was supportive. A couple of my nieces and nephews were like ‘oh Lori we always knew. He wanted to play Barbies with me when we were 5 and 6. And it’s true all the signs were there, the sensitive male, didn’t like sports, I guess those are stereotypes, but-”

“He’d be 37 now. A lot of the guys who got out after him, a lot of PTSD. I wonder what do they see every day, stuff they can’t talk about. What would he have been like if he’d come home?”

#AcrossThisBridge, 3/6

“Yeh. He was a lonely fella. Some people are just lonely. I don’t think he found people he could talk to really. His head was always somewhere else. I was looking through photos, all day, looking for photos of Peter before the wedding, and I’d see these pictures of Andy – a lot of pictures with Martha and Peter together, Andy wouldn’t be around. Or he’d be separate. Those two would be together in a group picture and he’d be here [points away from us]. He could keep up the small talk for awhile because he knew that was polite but he didn’t want to stay there very long, wanted to get into some crazy subject. I felt guilty about that for a long time. I tried to always let him know that I was there for him but intellectually we were not a match. I just couldn’t, he’d just go off somewhere and he’d say ‘you know what I’m talking about, Mom?’ and if I said ‘no’ he’d start all over again. It was like, this was hopeless, I am never gonna get what he’s talking about so it’s like ‘uhuh, yeh!’ – he knew darn well I didn’t. I sometimes felt kind of impatient too, it’s like ‘oh come on! This is exhausting!’ I felt bad about that. I don’t know that I feel like that anymore. It’s been five years now. I think after about three years of feeling numb I started to come out of my head.

“There wasn’t going to be a funeral. No way I was gonna do that. We had a party. My friend Anne, the day I told her: ‘what can I do?’ I knew she was an event planner. We went to the Ft. Snelling Officer’s Club, this 1940s-era club, she helped me figure out food, and time. So we had a big old party, lot of people came. Lot of weirdos came. People that I didn’t know, that didn’t know him. Lot of, random people. You know there was this receiving line that I didn’t want but it just happened and this lady came through, I was thinking ‘I don’t know who you are’ and she was you know, gave me a big hug and then she started praying really loud and she would not let me go and I’m like ‘oh my god oh my god oh my god get away from me!’ She was terrible. Get your voodoo away from me.

#AcrossThisBridge, 4/6

“Andy was into numerology. I grew up on 422 West Street and, now, I see the number 422 all the time. I will look at a clock many times during the week and it’s always 4:22. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and look at Jeff’s alarm clock and it’s 4:22. Or the number is there, on a street sign – there it is again! – and so, I’m just, you know early on I was just convinced, well, that’s Andy saying hi to me. That’s absurd! You know, I know it in my brain that’s absurd but I kind of like playing around with that and I like thinking that it’s him. It doesn’t hurt anything, but – stuff like that, spooky things have happened after he died. We went to see our son Peter about a month after Andy died. Peter was living in Chapel Hill. Jeff and I have been mushroom hunters since we were kids, we went out with our families all mushroom hunting. So, we were there first part of April and it was too early for mushroom season in Minnesota but it was warm there and we were walking up to Peter’s house and there’s three little Morel mushrooms growing out of the landscape timbers in his front yard. And we’re like, ‘look at that!’ Find out later that Morels do not grow in North Carolina, they are extremely rare in that part of North Carolina, so it’s like, ‘oh it’s Andy.’ Well, I don’t know. But it’s like, I want to believe that, that he’s still around tinkering, checking in, and yet, I don’t believe in that stuff, I pretty much think when you die it’s done. Turn the lights out, it’s over. I think people entertain themselves – not ‘entertain,’ that sounds frivolous – but they like thinking about things like that. I know my Mom after my brother died, she was 81, she said ‘I felt Steve today, I just felt like he was right behind me.’ And we all said ‘well maybe he was’ you know, because you want to believe that that person isn’t really gone. He’s gotta be somewhere.

#AcrossThisBridge, 5/6

It was a Sunday morning, February 27th, it was overcast. I read the newspaper. I was thinking ‘I’m gonna go to the mall today and buy some makeup.’ You know. I thought, I better eat a bowl of cereal before I go. The doorbell rings and it’s like, ‘who the heck is that,’ maybe a neighbor. And then I hear Jeff just going ‘Oh my god! Oh my god!’ and it’s like, I went around the corner and I saw these two Army guys and it’s like, I know what that means. But it’s like, ‘they have the wrong house.’ ‘This isn’t for us.’ ‘Who else would it be for?’ But I’m already like trying to work with that. It’s like no, no it’s not us. And Jeff is just reacting before he even opens the door. And they walk in and he just, you know, ‘we regret to inform you,’ and my god. Just local guys. And then I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if I have milk on my face?’ What a dumb thing to think about! I invited them in. They sat down. One guy looked so scared. The other guy was like a minister for the Army, a religious person, wanted to know if we wanted to pray with him and I said ‘no. No.’ And then, ‘do you want the press to be contacting you, or do you want us to block the press’ or something like that and Jeff said ‘yeh I don’t want the press involved in this!’ and I said ‘you know what, I do. I want people to know.’ And the whole time it’s like ‘what is happening?’ That really bothered me for a long time, that inability to think or make decisions, like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I go into a room and I don’t know why I’m here.’ Once all those phone calls were made, which were terrible to have to make, kids, my mom, Jeff’s parents, – once we all got together, the four of us, that was two weeks that were really pretty wonderful. We were all just in a terrible place but I mean we could laugh about him, and joke about him, and remember things, and Martha and Peter, they were really helpful to me. ‘Mom you gotta eat something.’ And Jeff too. Helping with decisions, how to honor him or celebrate him, you know, we weren’t church people.

#AcrossThisBridge, 6/6

They were out on a patrol. It was a Sunday morning and there was some call that somebody was seen doing something. They drove their vehicles to this bridge and, so it was three people in his vehicle and the guy who was driving said ‘you know, Wilfahrt your’e going on leave tomorrow so just stay here in the car’ and he’s like ‘no, I’m not gonna stay here.’ So, they went out and they were walking across this bridge and they were looking for some kind of IED I suppose and then they stopped, I don’t remember why they stopped, and then they went off, a couple of them went off, one was a dud and one was right underneath him and it was detonated remotely. Some dude somewhere with a cellphone contraption. They were watching. And then you play with that, too – ‘what are the chances of that! at that second, with him, right there, if he’d’ve been the last in line or the first in line or’ – you constantly play with that but there’s no – it’s unproductive, ’cause it’s already happened, and deep down you know ‘well somebody else would’ve died, somebody else’s kid would’ve died.’

So the day before he died – I’ll never forget this – I’m like ‘alright he’s coming home, I better bake some cookies and get some of the things he likes together’ so I was doing that and Jeff was in the other room, he had the same idea, so he was watching all these Afghanistan documentaries, Army things, like maybe he could relate to him or get an idea of what he’s been doing. And I was reading a book – when that French acrobatist strung the wire between the twin towers – and the chapter I read was all these moms had got together because all their sons had died in Vietnam – their grief, and how they could hardly keep it all together some days, and I was thinking, ‘I shouldn’t be reading this, this is not something I should be reading ever, not now’ and so I kept going back to that, almost like that caused it. I think we were twelve hours different, it might’ve been about the time that he was going on patrol, so I could play with that in my head: ‘it’s your fault, it’s my fault.’

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

The post The Bible Went Down with Birdie Jean: Book IV: my Munna appeared first on The Revealer.