Image from “Noah” directed by Darren Aronofsky.

by David Morgan

Darren Aronofsky’s new film, Noah, has not found many friends among the two audiences that are inclined for different reasons to be interested in its representation of a sacred subject: professors of religious studies and professors of conservative Christianity. But students of religious visual culture will find something to consider. The film demonstrates how modern cinematography exposes the artifice of biblical literalism. No wonder Fundamentalists are shrieking. They object to the film’s stark departure from the book they worship. But after seeing the film, I wonder if it might also be because the movies force them to confront the way in which the affordances of digital film making betray how much violence their reading of the Bible does to the collection of folk tales that make up the book of Genesis. Scholars are perhaps too willing to allow Fundamentalists to define “literalism.” As an interpretive strategy and ideology, literalism should be scrutinized for the important cultural work it does.

Aronofsky and his predecessors from Cecil B. DeMille to Mel Gibson have developed in the genre of the biblical epic an obsessively detailed form of spectacle that is more punctiliously faithful to a notion of representation than to the sacred texts it purports to bring to life. The problem is that bringing folklore to life means filling in countless gaps in a sparsely told tale. The economy of the original is often what made it a good story. It does not bother to answer the questions that Sunday school children weary their teachers with asking because that’s what good stories do: they provoke wonder and curiosity. But the microscopic naturalism of modern cinema and television wants to show everything as if it were unfolding before our eyes—blades slicing slowly through flesh, bones snapping, slaughter happening in slow motion. We have to see it or we don’t believe it. It is the cinematic dogma of everything visible. In recent years television police shows have even reached x-ray extremes, showing bullets passing through the interior of tissue and bone marrow. It’s a kind of medical pornography, fetishizing penetration in the most documentary fashion.

Literalism is a mode of interpretation that conceals behind the façade of scripture a much more extensive interpretive machinery whose purpose it is to generate a seamless fabric of reading from a spotty weave of text. A kind of factual shorthand, literalism is one way to make an entire world leap from a bit of story. You don’t need to specify all the details, just to assume that they are all there beneath the lapidary facts recorded in the account. Expanding the condensed format of the text is what the human imagination can do in devotional practice, homiletics, and pious illustration and art. And in cinematic Bible epics, where the multitude of enabling miracles, magic, and mythology are eminently portrayable.

Filmmakers from the earliest silent renditions of the life of Jesus to Aronofsky populate their religious works with details of figures, costume, setting, and motives that fill in the gaps and cover over the inconsistencies in the original texts. Even more than makers of Bible epic films before him, Aronofsky has stretched a simple morality tale into a genre of storytelling that the original was not made to fit. To manage that, he aggrandized the story by including the Creation myth and he morphed Noah into Abraham struggling over the sacrifice of Isaac, charging the film with a moral drama that the biblical story does not have. This sort of supersizing of a humble text is nothing new, of course. Creationists do it everyday by making an allegorical narrative about magic trees, a talking serpent, and a garden-sized deity into a science textbook account of how the universe got here. But the film helped me understand that folk tales work well when they do not press plausibility too far. Oral culture does not require a wealth of information. It relies on gesture and impression. The repetitive, formulaic quality of Genesis 6 and 7, where we read the brief story of Noah, retains the feel of performative storytelling. When pressed by modern film to show the convincing illusion of an ark filled with animals, when the film’s director has the technological means of creating the illusion, the medium makes demands on the text to which it is not equal. The conversion to film is more transformation than translation. The dimensions of the original story are outstripped by the cinematography. When they gaze into the night sky, no matter how Fundamentalist they may be, moderns do not see the same universe that ancients did. God sat just beyond the stars in that world. Billions of light years separate the stars from the earth today, and beyond them is exactly nothing. The difference was painfully apparent in Aronofsky’s clumsy attempt at intermingling the Big Bang theory and evolution into Noah’s recounting of the Creation myth to his family aboard the ark. They aren’t the same story. One needs a creator-god; the other does not.

Even where the film tries to be most accurate, that is, most literal, that is, most like what it thinks the text is saying, it necessarily misses the mark because it makes the text into something it never was in order to see the story that modern viewers want to behold. “Literalism” is a contrived ideal of faithfulness to a text by means of interpretive and technological devices that go far beyond it, replacing the text’s original circumstances and strange otherness with the presumption of what it ought to mean. Modern cinema in the form of Bible epic helps literalism accomplish that act of faith, but betrays the artifice of literalist interpretation in doing so. Literalism presses words uttered in an ancient setting into service in a radically different world. Thus, today’s opponents of same-sex marriage marshal the creation of Adam and Eve as proof that marriage is defined by God as the coupling of one man and one woman. But they don’t adduce the couple’s diet as evidence of the Almighty’s intention that humans eat vegan. Why not? Because literalism is a practice of determining what a scripture means in order to extract from it the meaning one wants.

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David Morgan is professor of religious studies and chair of the department of religious studies at Duke University. He is author of several books on the history of religious visual culture, including Visual Piety (1998), The Sacred Gaze (2005), and The Embodied Eye (2012).

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Please come back next month for more on Noah from Brook Wilensky-Lanford.

The post Noah: Story and Medium appeared first on The Revealer.

Students demonstrate against military rule on the campus of Al-Azhar University in Cairo in March, 2014.
(Photo by Jared Malsin)

By Jared Malsin

Dr. Ahmed Hosni sat in his office at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University behind an enormous wooden desk piled with documents, as he explained why the world’s oldest institution of Islamic learning recently built a wall around the administration building in which we now sat.

“We were going to be killed that day, except by the blessing of God, he saved us,” He said, recounting a day last October when, he said, student protesters attempted to storm the building.

Hosni, an administrator, wearing a dark suit, thick wire-frame glasses, and bureaucrat’s manner, was eager to justify the administration’s decision to ask government security forces to enter the campus to disperse the protesters. That October day was the first time police had entered the campus since they were banned by a court order in 2010. In November, a student was shot dead after security forces entered the campus during yet another demonstration. “There were professors calling for jihad and for entering the building. The only office that was saved from destruction was this one,” he said, chuckling.

As he spoke, on a warm day in mid-March, the sound of shouting filtered in through a window. Another protest was underway. Hosni motioned for me to go look for myself. “See? Are there any police?”

Al-Azhar is in many ways an institution in crisis. Founded in the 10^th Century, it has, since the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser, been effectively brought under state control. The current Sheikh Al-Azhar, Ahmad el-Tayeb, was appointed by ousted authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak, and before his appointment served on the Policies Committee of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. The university is a bastion of traditionalist Islam, an opponent of Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood, and its top leaders are all chosen in large part due to their friendly relations with the state.

But Al-Azhar is also a vast institution containing multitudes. The Azhar educational system, including several satellite colleges, elementary and high schools, includes a staggering 500,000 students, including 120,000 at the university’s flagship campus in Cairo’s Nasr City neighborhood. As a center of religious learning,  a great many of Azhar’s students are religious, and percentage of those adhere to some variant of political Islam.

Therefore, in July 2013, when the Egyptian military, following days of enormous protests, removed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi from power, it was a jolt to the Azhar system. Sheikh Ahmad el-Tayeb firmly supported the military, appearing alongside military chief Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in the dramatic July 3 news conference that heralded the end of Morsi’s rule.

But a large number of Azhar students backed Morsi and opposed the military coup. Many of them joined the two large protest camps the anti-military forces up last summer in opposition to Morsi’s removal. Since the new military-backed government has pursued a sweeping crackdown that has all but eliminated street demonstrations, university campuses have been one of the few remaining zones of protest, and among them, Al-Azhar has burned the hottest. The numbers are a matter of dispute, but at least four students are known to have been killed in clashes with security forces at the university dorms since November, and hundreds (possibly thousands, although no reliable numbers are available) have been detained. Dozens of students have been expelled over protest activities, and dozens of instructors have been suspended for allegedly inciting students to violence.

The demonstrations continue nearly every day both at the campus and the university dorms. Some students are afraid to attend classes for fear they’ll be targeted for arrest. Others are afraid to leave their dorm rooms during protests for fear of being hurt. “Now demonstrations are banned completely,” said E. an engineering student who asked not to have his name published for fear of retaliation from the security forces. E. is an unaffiliated student who said he used to join demonstrations but stopped after students were killed while protesting. “If you protest, they’ll attack,” he says. “I’m not so much scared as depressed. What’s the point anymore?”

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When my interview with Hosni ended, I left the building, passing through the black, steel gate the administration had installed to protect itself from its own students. Behind the building, a few dozen male students had gathered. They stood in a row, holding signs, chanting in the bright afternoon sun. The chant followed a call and response pattern, with a chant leader calling out a political stance, and the crowd responding “Azhari!” the Arabic term for an Azhar student or alumnus.

“Against the Interior Ministry!”
“Azhari!”

“And the thugs!”
“Azhari!”

Other chants had a bitter bite to them. Here’s how one goes in Arabic:

“Yani eh, ‘zabit Dakhaliya?’”
“Yani fashil Sanawiya!”

Which, in English, translates to:

“What does ‘Interior Ministry Officer’ mean?”
“It means someone who failed the college entrance exam!”

After a few minutes, the students gathered into a mass and set off marching, still chanting against the military and police. This was a demonstration organized by Students Against the Coup, a movement that formed in the protest camps after Morsi was removed. It is a branch of the larger “Anti-Coup” movement which coalesced last summer and persisted in the weeks and months after the military-backed government sent security forces into the protest camps, killing hundreds in Egypt’s deadliest week of political violence in recent history. The anti-coup movement still holds demonstrations, most of them small, a few of them sizable, mainly in forgotten Cairo neighborhoods and smaller cities across Egypt. The Anti-Coup movement is a coalition of parties and groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood, leading many Egyptians to dismiss it as a property of the widely discredited Brotherhood, but in fact, the protests are politically mixed. Often, more people who say there are non-Brotherhood members are to be found in such demonstrations than actual Brothers.

The Anti-Coup uses a hand-signal during demonstrations, a four-fingered solute, the “Rabaa hand,” a reference to Rabaa Al-Adawiya Square, the site of the vast protest camp that was obliterated by the security forces on August 14. After the massacre, securing accountability for the mass killings quickly replaced the cause of returning Morsi to power as the chief cause of the movement (though many members of the movement maintain that Morsi is still the legitimate president).

I was startled to see the students flashing the Rabaa hand. In fact, I was startled to see people protesting at all. Since the Rabaa killings, the state has cracked down so severely that the protests that were once a part of daily life in revolutionary Cairo have now become a rare sight in the capital’s central districts. Since the crackdown, the revolution itself—by which I mean a kind of daily and weekly practice of confronting the state through the bold, physical method of protest—has been driven underground. Such protests are now confined to isolated sites: university campuses, factory floors, and some of Cairo’s poorer, more marginal districts. In the years preceding the revolution, protests were also confined to such places. But the uprising altered the general public’s understanding of what is possible, and when workers and students protest, even in isolation, they often do so with revolution on their minds.

After a journalist had her iPad snatched during a demonstration at another Cairo university, the “anti-coup” group asked journalists to contact their media team in advance to arrange an “escort.” There would be no spontaneous reporting, it seemed. So when we arrived at the protest, my reporting partner and I called our contact in Students Against the Coup, Yousef Salhen, a 21-year-old student of Islamic Studies at Al-Azhar.

Salhen answered on the first ring and we found him in the crowd. A scruffy beard adorned his baby face. He wore a backpack and a bright blue “Muslim and Proud” T-shirt. Salhen participated alongside numerous non-Islamist protesters in the 2011 uprising that ended the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. A self-identified Islamist, he opposed the military’s removal of Morsi, and joined the protest camp in Rabaa Al-Adawiya Square. Now he is the English spokesperson of Students Against the Coup. “We used to have Tahrir and the squares,” he said. “Now the squares are too dangerous.” As he spoke, the crowd grew to several hundred. Other students scaled a nearby building, unfurling a banner reading “The Second Azhar Uprising.”

As the crowd roared in front of us, I asked Salhen about Sheikh El-Tayeb’s support for the coup. “That is a disaster for us,” he said. “We even call him the grand Imam of the Coup. In Arabic, Sheikh Al-Askar. [Sheikh of the military] He blessed the coup. He gave it religious authority.”

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The struggle for control over Al-Azhar predates the 2011 revolution by decades. The Egyptian state began attempting to bring Al-Azhar under its control during the Khedivate period in the 1860s, but it was not until 1961 when Gamal Abdel Nasser passed Law 103, that the entire institution was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. The law also decreed that Sheikh Al-Azhar would be appointed by the president. For decades, the institution stood as part of the state’s bulwark against Islamist opposition. “Clearly it’s not a religious institution. It’s a state institution,” says Ibrahim El Houdaiby, a researcher and graduate student at the American University in Cairo who studies Al-Azhar. “It has been a state institution for long decades, at least since the 1960s.”

Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments has long relied on Al-Azhar to train the imams that deliver the Friday sermons in mosques large and small throughout Egypt. As a result, control over Al-Azhar is not just a matter of scholarly prestige. It is a battle over control of one of the most influential political microphones that exists in Egypt.

Because of its potentially enormous political payoff, and because it is a natural arena for Islamists to organize, Al-Azhar as an institution has also long been sought after by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi movements. Particularly during the 1990s and the 2000s, both groups attempted to make inroads in the form of religious and political outreach, creating student groups, and other informal modes of organizing. “They attempted to control the other strong religious actor in society, Al-Azhar,” says Hodaibi.

Political graffiti marks the wall of a building on the campus of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, in March, 2014.
(Photo by Jared Malsin)

In the political chaos that followed the 2011 uprising, Al-Azhar grew in both autonomy and influence. Without the strong arm of the authoritarian presidency, state institutions, including the judiciary, Interior Ministry, and military, became untethered from centralized control, operating according to their own logic.

Al-Azhar was no exception. In fact, the military council that governed in the wake of Mubarak’s departure amended Law 103 to grant Al-Azhar effective autonomy. The constitution adopted in 2012 after a controversial drafting process dominated by Brotherhood and Salafi delegates also identified Al-Azhar “an encompassing independent Islamic institution with exclusive autonomy over its own affairs,” and mandated that a council of senior Azhar scholars be consulted on matters of Islamic law. The newly-reconstituted Council of Senior Scholars was also granted the power to name the Mufti, taming what had been a rival. Though the presidency retained a formal role in approving the Council’s choice, the shift meant that the other principle state-linked locus of religious authority had been effectively “brought within Azhar’s orbit,” as Nathan Brown, an expert on Egyptian politics at George Washington University recently wrote.

In spite of the potential for conflict, relations between the Al-Azhar and the Muslim Brotherhood remained calm throughout most of Mohamed Morsi’s year in power. Whatever doctrinal differences may have existed between the two organizations, it appears those were set aside, at least in the initial months. After all, the Brotherhood had also long demanded Azhar’s independence from the state and the restoration of its prestige.

Azhar leaders, and el-Tayeb in particular, were suspicious that Morsi aimed to “Brotherhoodize” key religious institutions. And it appears that there was some basis for those fears. Morsi did appoint Brotherhood figures to key positions in the Ministry of Religious Endowments. But if tensions existed, they did not result in confrontation until the very end of the Brotherhood’s rule.

Little is known about the precise sequence of events that led el-Tayeb to endorse the coup and join Sisi in the fateful June 3 news conference. It appears that the final split took place at least in part due to an act of overreaching by Morsi’s administration. In the late spring of 2013, the Ministry of Endowments held an important training session for new imams set to begin work in mosques throughout the country, but the organizers broke with convention, staffing the training not with Azhar sheikhs, but with prominent Salafi figures. Angered by the snub, el-Tayeb chose to boycott a speech Morsi gave in late June, days before the June 30 protests began. A few days later the sheikh appeared alongside Sisi, a partner in the military’s coalition against Morsi.

“He [el-Tayeb] fears a takeover from the Brotherhood, and he fears the democratization of the institution, because that would automatically lead to the ascent of Salafi voices,” says Hodaibi, who is himself the scion of a prominent Brotherhood family, but who resigned from the group in 2008 citing deep ideological differences.

The grand sheikh’s presence in that moment was crucial, granting the coup both a religious endorsement and an aura of social consensus. el-Tayeb took pains to frame the decision not as a political choice but as a continuation of Al-Azhar’s role as institution that operates above the fray of politics. “It was clear that we had to choose between two bitter choices,” el-Tayeb later said.

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The new regime’s pious politics

A week after my visit to Al-Azhar, the police again entered the campus, firing birdshot and teargas in an attempt to scatter student protesters. Students had been outraged by court rulings sentencing 33 Azhar students to long prison terms, up to 14 years, for participating in demonstrations in December. During the new protest, students succeeded in tearing down a portion of the new steel wall ringing the administration building.

When I visited the campus, the wall, like all the buildings at the Nasr City campus, was covered in graffiti denouncing the military-backed government and its de facto leader, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who recently resigned from the military in order to launch what is presumed to be an unstoppable bid for the presidency. “Sisi is a killer.” “Sisi is a traitor,” read the tags. Another slogan is scrawled across the main gate: Rajayeen wa al-bashawiyat fahmeen. The phrase is difficult to render in English, but a rough translation is: “We’re coming back, and the establishment knows it.”

The unrest among students at Al-Azhar shows no sign of abating. But in spite of the strife within the institution, Al-Azhar is set to assume a much more prominent role in the new political arrangement under the leadership of the military and  the presumptive future president, Sisi. By taking on a prominent role in the anti-Brotherhood coalition and backing the current government, Al-Azhar is positioning itself to become more powerful than it has been in decades. Moreover, it is likely to play a central role in the new regime’s attempts to mobilize religion in its effort to build legitimacy.

“The current government has been promoting a conception of ‘Egyptian Islam,’ that is skeptical of foreign influence. It’s a religious narrative that is there to give legitimacy to whatever the ruler is doing,” says Shadi Hamid, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center in Washington. “It’s based on the longstanding theological notion of obedience to the leader.

As a part of the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the new government has been centralizing control over the practice of Islam. Whereas under the old regime, Al-Azhar was subordinate to the Ministry of Endowments, there are signs that the ministry is now showing deference to Al-Azhar. In October, the minister of endowments, Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa began a process of shutting down private and unlicensed mosques, decreeing that only Azhar-qualified imams may preach.

The end of the Brotherhood-led government did not spell the end of religion in public life in Egypt. In fact, the post-Morsi political order is one in which religion and religious institutions play a central role. But, as George Washington University’s Nathan Brown writes, “the vision of Islam is emerging as more coherent and more susceptible to guidance by al-Azhar’s senior leadership.”

“It’s misleading to say that only the Muslim Brotherhood instrumentalizes religion,” says Shadi Hamid. “The military and its supporters do as well, but for their own particular political objectives, including shoring up popular support for an all-powerful state.”

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Jared Malsin is a journalist based in Cairo. He has contributed to TIME, VICE, The New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. He tweets at @jmalsin.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post Turmoil at Al-Azhar: Religion, Politics, and the Egyptian State appeared first on The Revealer.

Orthodox christian icon brought to Euromaidan Protests as a symbol of faith. Image by Mstyslav Chernov, via Wikicommons

By Irina Papkova

The ongoing political crisis in Ukraine has been punctuated by profound religious imagery. For several days in January 2014, three Orthodox monks prayed round-the-clock in the No-Man’s land separating the protesters on Kiev’s Maidan and the riot police, temporarily halting the spiraling cycle of violence. The same month, the Huffington Post ran a series of stunning photos depicting the heavy presence of Orthodox and Greek-Catholic priests among the protesters. Witnesses from the Maidan consistently reference the “religious spirit” of the gathering, exemplified by thousands of people coming together to sing the “Our Father” as they faced down the Yanukovich regime.

The sight of believers and clergy from various backgrounds demonstrating solidarity during the anti-Yanukovich protests highlighted the deeply religious character of Ukrainian society. It also belied the deeply divided nature of the country’s confessional landscape. Historically, Ukraine’s religious fissures paralleled the fundamental political cleavage running through the heart of the country, namely, the question of the place of Russia in Ukrainian self-identification.  As the revolutionary events of 2013-14 rolled forward, religious believers had to make potentially life or death decisions about whether to throw their weight behind an openly anti-Russian opposition.

For one confession at least, the choice has been an easy one.  The Eastern Rite Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, which accounts for about 10% of Ukraine’s population, has been unequivocally supportive of the Maidan and subsequent post-Yushchenko government.   This is unsurprising, given that the Greek-Catholics have historically been based in Western Ukraine, a part of the country traditionally oriented towards Europe rather than Russia. Ukrainian nationalism as a political idea has its roots in Western Ukraine, and there have been fleeting reports that Dmitro Yarosh, leader of the ultra-right nationalist party “Right Sector” is himself a member of the Greek-Catholic church. Moreover, the Greek-Catholics have deeply traumatic memories of forcible mass conversions to Orthodoxy under Stalin in the late 1940s, an event that could not but solidify their anti-Russian sentiments.  The church has positioned itself as thoroughly supportive of the revolution; for example, its head, Svyatoslav Shevchuk (Major Archbishop of Kiyv and Halych) has publicly appealed both to the European Union and to Pope Francis I to stand in solidarity first with the pro-European forces in Kiev.

The Greek-Catholics aside, Ukraine is an overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox country.  But the Orthodox community is split among three competing jurisdictions: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), the Kievan Patriarchate, and the more marginal Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. While the reasons for the division are beyond the scope of this article, it is sufficient to note here that both the Kievan Patriarchate and the Autocephalous Church have traditionally been associated with Ukrainian nationalism, defined by a rejection of ecclesiastical loyalty to Moscow.  The Kievan Patriarchate was particularly conspicuous in its support of the Maidan, for example by allowing protesters to use its nearby monastery of St. Michael as a dormitory and field hospital.

Together, the Kievan Patriarchate and Autocephalous Church account for perhaps 25% of Ukraine’s Orthodox believers. The remaining jurisdiction, the UOC-MP, is far larger (with approximately 50% of the faithful) and its complicated situation is of special concern as Ukraine faces the prospect of spreading communal violence between Ukrainians and ethnic Russians.  The church acknowledges the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, as its spiritual head. It has, in the past, openly supported pro-Moscow politicians in Ukraine, particularly in the presidential elections that originally brought Victor Yanukovich to power in 2010.  Among Ukrainian nationalists, the UOC-MP has been, in the past, viewed rather skeptically as the Kremlin’s fifth column.

However, contrary to expectations, historic ties with Moscow have not translated into unequivocally loyal support by the UOC-MP either for (former) Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich or for Putin’s annexation of Crimea.   Throughout the early months of the Maidan protests, the position of the UOC-MP was conciliatory. The church’s senior bishop, the elderly Metropolitan Volodymyr, called for a peaceful, dialogue-based resolution of the crisis; at the same time, he expressed approval for the protesting “young people” on the Maidan, praising them for caring about the future of their country.

As the situation in Kiev deteriorated in the first two months of 2014, so did metropolitan Volodymyr’s health.  On February 24^th, three days after Victor Yanukovich’s flight from Kiev, the Synod of the UOC-MP promoted Metropolitan Onufri of Chernovtsy and Bukovina to the position of acting senior bishop. Onufri’s first move as head of the UOC-MP was to send an open letter to patriarch Kirill asking him to intercede with Putin in favor of saving the territorial integrity of Ukraine.  In the meantime, lower level UOC-MP clergy throughout Ukraine demonstrated an increasing tendency to support Ukraine’s position against the Russian annexation of Crimea; over the first weeks of March, a number of priests demonstratively supported Ukrainian soldiers and sailors as they faced occupying Russian forces. Perhaps most tellingly, a number of UOC-MP bishops have been publicly critical of the Crimean takeover, with Metropolitan Sofronii of Cherkassk and Kanevsk calling Putin and his political supporters “bandits” on March 21^st. The picture is not entirely black and white: a number of UOC-MP bishops have made public statements in favor of the Russian position in the Ukrainian crisis. But the sentiment in the wider ranks of the church appears to be the one promoted by Metropolitan Onufri.

All of this poses interesting questions for the future of Ukraine’s relationship with Russia.  The UOC-MP accounts for approximately half of the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church; the anti-Putin sentiment prevalent among its ranks presents a challenge for the patriarch Kirill, as he seeks to maintain a positive relationship between his church and the Kremlin.  Metropolitan Onufri’s stance against the Crimean annexation cannot sit comfortably with Kirill, the more so since by ecclesiastical protocol Onufri is the second senior bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church, ranking only below the patriarch himself.

This may explain why patriarch Kirill has been entirely silent on the Crimean crisis, claiming ill health and excusing himself from the formal ceremonies accompanying the incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation. There is very real fear in Moscow that, as a result of Crimea, the Russian Orthodox Church will lose half of its parishes and thereby its status as the world’s largest and most powerful Orthodox community. The process may be irreversible: in February, the UOC-MP established a commission tasked with opening a dialogue with the Kievan Patriarchate, aimed ultimately at reconciling the two competing churches.  Since the Kievan Patriarchate has been unequivocal in its support for a Ukrainian Orthodox church fully independent from Moscow, patriarch Kirill is right to be concerned.

Irina Papkova is a Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkeley Center For Religion, Peace and World Affairs. She received her Ph.D. from Georgetown University and has previously taught at Georgetown and George Washington Universities. Her book, “The Orthodox Church and Russian Politics,” was published by Oxford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press in 2011.Irina’s current research includes religion and politics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Lebanon. She is a regular contributor to The Revealer.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

Image: By Mstyslav Chernov/Unfame/http://www.unframe.com/photographers/102-mstyslav-chernov.html (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The post Solidarity and Separation: Religious Spirit and the Euromaidan appeared first on The Revealer.

A piece of flesh, suitcase packed, waving goodbye and heading to NIH.

An excerpt from Cancer Doesn’t Give a Shit About Your Stupid Attitude: Reflections on Cancer and Catholicism (Kindle Edition, 49 pp.) by Mary Valle

Skin-punch biopsies in remembrance of Christ.

I’m undergoing biopsies as part of the clinical trial for the breast cancer vaccine. Here’s how the vaccination works: After “immunomodulatory doses of cyclophosphamide and doxorubcin,” I get twelve shots—four on each thigh and four on my right forearm. (Owing to the post-mastectomy risk of lymphedema, I am forevermore disallowed from having any “procedures” including blood pressure cuffs, blood draws, and anything involving a needle to my left arm.) The purpose of the injections is to introduce my body to several lines of breast cancer cells so that my body can recognize the cancer as “other.” The problem with cancer is that it’s made of you; your body doesn’t recognize it as invasive, and it grows, therefore, unchecked. Measuring my skin’s reaction to the injections and taking biopsies contributes to the knowledge of how the vaccine is working (since this is, after all, experimental).

Once my body has had a few days to respond to the injections (I’m one of the lucky ones who is only cast down with the charitably-named “flu-like” symptoms for a generous 24 hours.

Other test subjects don’t get off so easily: I’ve heard of head-to-toe boils and scalp welts), the research nurse uses a ballpoint pen to mark the radii of the resulting erythemas (Think of a three-inch wide mosquito bite. With a lot of bruising and a hard center. Which is simultaneously itchy and hotly painful.) and a measuring tape to see which one is biggest. She records the size of each. Being Boss Erthythema isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, however. It means that you are a marked spot. Marked for a skin-punch biopsy.

The skin-punch biopsy doesn’t sound all that bad and, relatively speaking, isn’t all that bad, but it’s still kinda bad. It involves a few shots of local anesthetic and then a thing like a hole-punch, which punches out about a pencil-eraser-sized plug of you. The first time the nurses did it, one asked me if I wanted to see it and I said yes. I also said yes when the original biopsies were performed on my now (and still) missing breast (That procedure involved me face down on a special torture table with my breast hanging out of a hole, not nearly enough painkillers, and a “needle” which made a loud “ka-chunk” sound very much like a staple gun. The result was a little petri dish filled with six cancerous snakes of me. I was too shocked (since I had had my first mammogram just that morning) to think anything other than, “Wow, they’re so tubular in the literal sense.”)

The tiny me-plug made me a little sad. It was barrel-shaped and kind of cute, if a little bloody. The biopsies on my thighs weren’t too gory, but I had one on my arm that bled copiously. I just remember both nurses with handfuls of blood-soaked gauze depositing them in the appropriate “red bag” trashcan. Somehow I got blood on my hands and had to wait until they were done with the surgery to wash them, and I felt the blood go from fresh to heavy and sticky while I waited, then pondered how hard it would be to scrub off.

The plug goes in a bag which goes in a little zippered insulated container, of the type you see people carrying lunch in, although it bears a biohazard symbol on the side. Hey! I think. Then, oh yeah. Guess who’s barred from donating blood to the Red Cross for the rest of her life? Moi. Farewell, little piece of me!, I think, as the nurse bears it away.

Where does it go? To the lab, where it is cut in half. Half goes in the freezer in case further study is needed. The other half is made into ten slides, which reveal lots about what my antibodies are up to in various parts of the immunization cycle. Is this a chance at scientific immortality? No. If humanity fails, so will our generators, and thus everything frozen or preserved in slides will decay, too.

I was raised in a religion that speaks a lot about the immortal, decay-proof body of our Savior, Jesus Christ. He sacrificed his own body for our salvation. We members of his church comprise his Mystical Body here on earth, and, in our rituals, we reenact his last meal, then consume it metaphorically and literally. The bread that Jesus offered, that we share in remembrance of him, is magically transformed into the actual Body of Christ.

I remember my whole class being brought to see the film Jesus at a local theater as a special treat. We were meant to see the Passion of Christ in blazing color and to experience our Lord’s suffering, which, after all, was all for us. My big question was, “How did they make the nails look so real?” Someone explained to me that they used real ones, only they were cut in half to look like they were piercing the actor’s hands.

I’ve always had a lot of questions about the Lord’s Passion. If Jesus knew that his dad/self was God, and that it was going to be over for good in three days, doesn’t that make it a little less impressive? I’m reminded of the Pulp song “Common People,” in which impoverished student Jarvis Cocker meets a rich girl from Greece who wants to slum it, recreationally, with the “common people.”

But you’ll never get it right
cause when you lay in bed at night
watching roaches climb the wall
if you called your dad he could stop it all yeah.

Not that Jesus did ask his dad to stop it all. But he could have! And God really didn’t forsake him because—guess what? Three days in the tomb and he was up and walking around feeling better than ever.

I don’t really understand why Jesus had to suffer and die for us. I’ve never wanted to be included in the “you” that Jesus suffered and died for. I would never wish suffering on anyone. I never asked Jesus to suffer on my behalf, yet I keep getting inculcated in his death simply by nature of being a human, and therefore a sinner. It’s always seemed to me that there’s enough actual suffering in the world. Why would someone suffer recreationally just to make a point? “To redeem our sins?” What the heck? We’re all still sinning, all the time. We’re killing large groups of ourselves and pillaging the environment and kidnapping 12-year-old girls and making them into sex slaves. We are a species of jerks. Now, if Jesus’ death had stopped war once and for all, I might be just a little more impressed. I just don’t see how it accomplished anything, other than the torture of children for generations to come with bizarre and boring rites every Sunday. We’re still the same assholes who nailed him to a cross and left him there. We’re still executing people all the time! Only the technology has changed!

I, meanwhile, am losing more parts of my body. I think I might safely assume that the cancer will be back if it isn’t already. But, if I can forestall the return of cancer by five, seven, ten years, then the technology will have changed accordingly and I’ll be in a better position to have it treated. This is the way you have to think: proactively. I don’t think that God has forsaken me; I just think that this is how life is. I guess what I’m getting at is that the whole crucifixion-and-rising-from-the-dead thing is, well, a little showy. But a useful metaphor, I suppose. My hair is growing back and at some point next year

I hope to have a reconstructed breast and possibly be as cancer-free as I can be. Maybe it won’t come back. Who knows? Regrowth, resurrection, all these things are possible. Maybe that’s the point of the story. It’s not the sins or the suffering, but the resurrection. I always enjoyed that clean, shiny feeling of Easter morning. Maybe my own Easter is imminent.

I remember when my second-grade class was studying for our first communion and one of the parish priests would come in and answer our questions. It was a lot to get one’s head around. Jesus died. Then he rose from the dead. Then he went to heaven. Now, at Mass, the priest recites special prayers, and a miracle called transubstantiation occurs. Wherein a small wafer becomes the actual Body of Christ. The Real Presence of God is in the waxy little circle (or chunk of brown bread if you’re at one of those kinds of Masses), which will then imbue you with God. We weren’t yet allowed to drink from the cup, and the offering of both species, the bread and the wine, was becoming a popular parish practice, along with other such post-Vatican-II practices as receiving Communion in the hand and standing while taking the Eucharist.

A kid raised his hand and asked why, if we were supposed to be partaking of the body and blood of Christ, and kids could only have the bread, then what gives? Weren’t we getting shortchanged? And the priest said no, it wasn’t a problem not taking the bread and the wine. Because, you see, the bread, as the flesh of Christ, contains both. He held out his forearm, exposed as it was in his short-sleeved clerical tunic (a garment not unlike the short-sleeved dentist’s smock). He acted as if he sliced a piece of flesh off of his arm, making a swipe at it with an imaginary knife. Holding up the imaginary fillet of priest’s arm, he asked us “Would there be blood in this piece of my arm?” We all nodded and said yes. So you see, he said, the host, or Body of Christ, contains the blood too.

Looking, again, at a little piece of me off for great adventures, I think, what do you know? Father Gonzalez was right. You take the flesh, you get the blood too.

***

Cancer Doesn’t Give a Shit About Your Stupid Attitude: Reflections on Cancer and Catholicism (2014, Kindle Edition, 49 pp.)  can be purchased in full on amazon.com. 

***

Mary Valle is a contributing editor to Killing the Buddha. Read her poetry here.  

The post Farewell, Little Piece of Me appeared first on The Revealer.

Sylvia Soddden and Joe Arrigo via The New York Post

By Ann Neumann

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul; Which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures. KJV

Each faith is unique. That this may be a result of our individualistic times, our contemporary emphasis on rights and conscience, or perhaps it’s an artifact of our snowflake brains doing their own unique things. Regardless, if you call yourself a Catholic, that identifier is fraught with nearly limitless qualifiers. You’re Catholic but you haven’t been to mass since high school. You’re Catholic but you take your birth control pill every day. There is an infinite number of ways that each of us can–and every day, do–interpret our faiths and live them out, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Pagan or whatever.

Take my own case in point. I was baptized in March of 1991, twenty-three years ago, in the distinctly 1960s-era sanctuary of Our Lady of the Visitation, a Catholic church overlooking my college campus. The dappled and diffused colors of stained glass were cast across my new life of faith, my very handsome Catholic boyfriend–and sponsor–was looking on. He had outbid the plain church of my family with the grandeur of Catholicism’s rituals. My young passion for the man intermingled with my young passion for the church. I loved the incense, the sitting and standing in unison, the ornate chapel and priests’ robes. The embrace of God’s love.

The passion has, over the years, faded. A few weeks ago I attended Ash Wednesday services at another Visitation church, this one in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I walked sheepishly home with an ashen cross smeared on my forehead, my first in about two decades, my early ecstasy for the church as distant as that early romance. Yet, I planned out my Lenten sacrifices. According to the church, I should have fasted on Ash Wednesday and should again on upcoming Good Friday. As well, the church calls for me to not eat meat on Fridays. While I did give up foods and habits for the Lenten period, I wouldn’t say that my sacrifices pass Vatican muster. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I flout the rules of the church and even my interpretation of them. Too, my reasons for (haphazardly) taking up Lenten sacrifices this year might not be what the Pope would want. (What can I say? I was eating too much butter.)

But that’s what believers do. All of us. We move in and out of proximity to the church, our church, either given or chosen. It can be the church of the high ritual or the church of the forest trail, but our relationship with those reverences is never static. Like the 78.2 million Catholics in the US, it’s kind of hard to make assumptions about what I believe based on what I call myself, even when I call myself Catholic.

As Peter Manseau wrote in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, the church is constantly changing, but there is one thing, he notes, that remains “a truth as old as the church itself: Despite its primary definition — universal — there is no universal agreement on what [Catholic] means.” Manseau continues:

Who is a Catholic? Is it a matter of baptism? Belief? Loyalty? Psychology? For some, the answer depends on tests of political purity. For others, who may no longer receive the sacraments but continue to identify with the faith, “once a Catholic, always Catholic” is not just a principle of canon law (semel catholicus, semper catholicus), but the diagnosis of a chronic condition.”

Catholic schmatholic, you may say, what does it matter how believers identify themselves? At least here, in the US.* What, in short, are the real-world consequences of how we name the state of our soul? Here’s one: Sylvia Sodden is being kept alive on artificial support because her sister, Esther Feigenbaum, says that Sodden was born an Orthodox Jew. She is prepared to do what it takes to ensure that Sodden dies one. According to Feigenbaum, that means keeping her 78 year old sister, who is reportedly in a vegetative state, on a respirator indefinitely.

Sodden converted to Catholicism on Christmas Day 1957, at the age of 20, a point no one contests. Her godson and fellow Catholic, Joe Arrigo, insists that Sodden would want her artificial support removed.

“Sylvia told me she didn’t want to end up like this” Arrigo told the New York Post.  “I don’t see how they can impose their religion on her. She hasn’t been Jewish in 58 years.”

The challenges of the case strike me as two-fold: What does religious affiliation mean and what is the definition of life? Is Sodden obligated to make medical decisions according to church dictates? Only if she chooses to. Regardless, she chose to name a medical proxy, Arrigo, to make her decisions for her. She asked him to exercise his conscience should she become incapacitated because she trusted he would do the right thing.

And yet, a New York judge has given credence to Feigenbaum’s claim that religious identity necessarily determines medical decisions. On the 18th of March, a Brooklyn judge sided with Feigenbaum. He removed Arrigo from medical proxy; Sodden had legally appointed Arrigo in 2011.

Does claiming a faith mean subscribing to the every dictate of the church’s leadership? Of course not, or there would be only a handful of Catholics in the world. Indeed, faith is doubt, denial, regret and return. No more do the teachings of a faith one happens to be born under–or like Sodden and I, one we adopted in our twenties–define our choices regarding health care than what we should eat on Fridays. We pick and choose what we believe will make us good believers. And increasingly, these decisions are leading each of us to à la carte religious adherences because we don’t think deviance from church doctrine will send us to hell. Apparently the Pope doesn’t either; “Who am I to judge?” he asked recently.

In other words, there is limited consensus on what it means to name your faith. And yet, it’s not uncommon to hear in the media or in general conversation that Catholics, for instance, don’t take birth control pills. Or don’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent. Or that Catholics believe in transubstantiation (that the Eucharist, bread and wine, become the body and blood of Christ, a concept that played a large role in the Protestant Reformation). To be honest, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Catholic who abides by all these doctrines. And yet, it is common as day to hear “Catholics believe…,” and “Muslims believe…” as if entire spectrums of human experience can be summed up in one religious identifier.

The vying for Sodden’s religious allegiance is fierce. The evidence that Arrigo’s mother, Gloria, a long-time friend of Sodden’s, provides as proof of the vegetative woman’s Catholic faith is also a claim of pure belief:

“When she prayed for something, it always seemed to happen in the right way. She was definitely very good Catholic people.”

All accounts of Sodden show that she felt free to choose her own belief structure, that doctrinal obedience wasn’t required to structure a faithful life. But those who want to keep Sodden “alive” on machines and those who don’t equally use their interpretation of her faithful adherence to such structures to prove their point.

The challenges of the case are problematically summed up by the New York Post and, sadly, have more to do with how each party understands the limits of medicine and the human body than it does their ideas of faith:

The two sides disagree over Sodden’s mental state–with Arrigo claiming she is in ‘a vegetative state’ and Feigenbaum saying she is a ‘living conscious adult with a right to remain living.’

Conscious or vegetative state? This determination, while not clearly documented in the media about the case, is not a matter of opinion–or even perception (Feigenbaum wrongly assumes that, because her sister’s “eyelids flutter periodically” she must be conscious)–but medical diagnosis. That the definition of life–when it begins and when it ends–could get mixed up inside the paradigm of a faith based on the death and resurrection of its holy leader, is not surprising. But in practical terms, in this country, in this era, medical science increasingly dominates our understanding of what life is. Still, nothing trumps science like an enthusiastic religious claim. In their grief, Arrigo and Feigenbaum have both developed clear ideas about what Sodden believed and what she would want, ideas that claim the authority of their respective belief systems. As Sodden’s legally designated medical proxy, it’s hard to not trust Arrigo when Sodden herself did.

In this contest, a New York judge erred on what some would call the “side of life,” clearly a politicized formation of patients’ rights that doesn’t acknowledge the costs of prolonging fragile, failing lives, but one the law continues to find the easiest to defend.

*Clearly, some religious identifications have significant consequences across the globe. Muslims in Russia. Christians in Egypt. Sikh’s in Arizona after September 11. My question is finer: How can US courts use individual religious identification to enforce medical decision-making?

***

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about the intersection of religion and medicine. Prior columns can be read here:

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

***

Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. Neumann is currently writing a book about a good death.

The post Faith, A Chronic Condition appeared first on The Revealer.

“To keep a person on the Scientology path, feed him a mystery sandwich.”

– L. Ron Hubbard,
– Revised Declaration of Hana Whitfield
– Church of Scientology vs. Steven Fishman and Uwe Geertz 

The Power of Source

In 1974, L. Ron Hubbard cut a record.

+++

It had rained that afternoon but by sundown the wind had risen, scattering the low, dark clouds. Night came on with stars and seabirds.

It was hot. May, 1974, just before the European Cup final which would see Atlético lose out, unexpectedly, to FC Bayern. We had hope, however, for a few more days — although we didn’t know it at the time. Talk of the game crackled in ever open-front cantina and every shady copse of palms. People were getting drunker than usual, staying out later. Business was good.

I had spent my day in the room, sitting against its broken heater, watching water carve diamond trails across the window and the bricks outside. I’d smoked a pack and a half of the new carton, made two pots of coffee on my little electric stove and moved, jerkily, most of the way through a French detective novel supposedly written by Orson Welles. When the rain stopped, and it grew too dark to read, I made one last search of the sixteen wallets which I’d draped like little tents along the rusted water-pipe along the eastern wall. Finding nothing, I took a leather-bound Belgian passport from one of the new acquisitions and filled my red “Coco-Cola” tin with cigarettes. The knife still bulged, cold and heavy, in the hidden pocket of my coat.

My shoes squeaked on the soaked boards as I walked along the water, looking out at the firefly clusters of passing ships. There was a new vessel at the seventh pier, a flat-bottomed ferry painted brilliant white and sparkling from the storm. “Apollo,” read the hull.

The voices of her crew were carried by the salt-breeze: loud, boisterous, American. I paused, lit a cigarette, and paced to the boardwalk’s railing. I spent a few minutes staring into the surf – with the Apollo in my peripheral. As I watched, a smiling crowd descended the gang-plank, as pretty and young as the cast of chewing gum advertisement. They were men and women, white and black. Their clothes, while variable, shared a similar sense of revolutionary chic then popular in the United States. A small cry came from the deck and the group froze, turning. An even younger girl, maybe fourteen, approached them with a slim, confidant stride. She was a wearing some variation of a white naval uniform, and spoke seriously to one of the men on the gangplank. My english was poor in those days, and the sea was heaving loudly. Still, I made out a few words in teen falsetto: “Fucking asshole.”

Wordlessly, the man followed the girl back to the ship, where they disappeared from view. The crowd continued on its way as if nothing had happened, heading along the boardwalk in the direction of the public bandstand. I kept them in sight as I finished my cigarette. It was then that I noticed the letters on the Apollo’s smokestack — “LRH.” Initials, I figured, although I couldn’t guess who they belonged to.

+++

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, took to sea in 1967, at the age of fifty-six. He traveled in a fleet of three vessels, initially known as the Enchanter, the Avon River and the Royal Scotsman, hoping to escape what he saw as a multinational anti-Scientology conspiracy. In America, an I.R.S. audit was underway, reviewing the Church of Scientology’s claim to tax exempt status. In Australia, practicing the religion had been banned in certain regions, and similar proposals were working toward law in England, New Zealand and South Africa. In this environment, escape seemed the only logical solution.

© Max McDermott

Accompanied by his newly-formed ecclesiastical authority, which was called the Sea Organization or Sea Org, Hubbard hit the waves with an open-ended mission: find a home for Scientology, evade the maneuvers of enemy governments and strike back for the cause of global sanity using any necessary means. What followed was nearly a decade of intermittently documented weirdness, whose true nature is caught between the glowing rhetoric of the Church of Scientology and the salacious accusations of its aggrieved ex-members. The one point upon which both sides agree is that Hubbard’s time on the water completely failed as a means to escape governmental suspicion and public controversy.

Less than a year into their travels, the Scientologists were denied safe harbor by Gibraltar during a dangerous storm. Afterwards, in 1968, England formally barred them from entering the country and branded Hubbard himself an “undesirable alien.” Between this time and the early seventies, the Enchanter, Avon River, and Royal Scotsman were involved in many murkily reported adventures across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, including an attempt to discredit the World Federation of Mental Health in Switzerland and a mysterious presence during the attempted coup d’etat against King Hassan II of Morocco. By 1970, the fleet’s infamy had already inspired a change of name: Enchanter to Diana, Avon River to Athena, and Royal Scotsman to Apollo. 

Despite these exterior difficulties, life in the Sea Org was informed by some sense of mutual commitment and fellow-feeling. Hubbard’s crews, overpoweringly young, counter-culture and American, reveled in living outside of traditional social roles even as Hubbard played disciplinarian, punishing any transgression of his complicated “ethics” through reportedly draconian means. The simplest punishment, claim some ex-Scientologists and one of the most common, was to throw the offender overboard — sometimes from a great height.

Still, they had their fun. Kate Bornstein, a former Sea Org member, recalled a particularly memorable incident aboard the Apollo on December 31, 1971. “It was a movable, drunken orgy,” she wrote, in her 2012 autobiography A Queer and Pleasant Danger. “Maybe a hundred Sea Org members were having sex everywhere from the topside boatdecks to the lowest holds of the ship.”

In sum, “one hell of a New Year’s Eve party.”

+++

The young Americans were laughing, holding hands, touching their bodies moving in the usual patterns of casual possessiveness. I followed, unhurried, keeping to the shadow of the closed shops. A large crowd had gathered at the bandstand. Locals, mostly, although there was the usual fringe of ex-pats and business travelers out for a walk from the León Rojo. On the stage, instruments stood in gleaming, brass array, crowded by the dark diagonals of wires and mic stands. Colored flags were strung from the tall streetlight in the middle of the stage, flapping languidly as they fell above the crowd. It looked like the empty framework of a circus tent.

I kept back, in the darkness, and smoked another cigarette, playing as if I was waiting for someone. As I watched, the Apollo crew filtered to the front of the assembly, beside the stage. Some of them climbed up, testing and tuning their instruments. Drums sounded spasmodically in the summered air. Saxophones began to speak, and then were silenced. Guitars were plucked, adjusted, plucked again. A band assembled, one by one. Finally, a man with shoulder-length hair and a fashionable mustache took up a position behind the foremost microphone. In halting Spanish he introduced himself as Craig, and the group as the “Apollo Stars.”

“We’re gonna play some new stuff, for you,” he said. “But, see, here’s the thing. We don’t want you to just listen here… We want you to get involved, really feel it… Music isn’t just mechanics, as a great man once said. It’s sound and emotional message — and you can do anything you want with it.” He checked with the assembly behind him. Drums okay, bass okay, sax okay, flute okay. “This is some Gershwin,” he said. “One, two, three, four.”

The bass came first, creeping feline into a mist of horns. Then, all at once, the sound exploded — “Summertime” in brilliant, syncopated bursts. The crowd cheered and started dancing, jumping and sweating, stifling the south wind. It was a good show, as it turned out — jazz with flashes of Davis and Burrell. I half-listened to the music as I went to work.

+++

Hubbard’s years at sea were pivotal ones for Scientology. It was this time which would cement the Sea Org as the guiding operational and ecclesiastical arm of Church, along with establishing its hierarchy and various subgroups. One such development was the founding of the Commodore’s Messenger Organization, or C.M.O. — initially, a small squad of young girls responsible for delivering Hubbard’s orders, complete with replicated diction and word choice, to the crew.

It was during this period that Hubbard fully delineated what he called “the wall of fire,” a set of teachings for advanced Scientologists which revealed the space-operatic past of the human race. This material concerned itself, primarily, with the vicissitudes of an intergalactic war. The result of this conflict had been the imprisonment of immortal, immaterial beings called “thetans” within human bodies — where they were later brainwashed into a doctrine of impotence.

Hubbard had recovered this data by organizing his “whole track” memories, or the experience of his thetan’s actions in past lives. Since its founding, Hubbard’s movement had based itself on a central ritual action, auditing, which allowed its practitioners to recover and release harmful memories. As Scientology evolved, these recovered experiences began to expand beyond what Hubbard termed each individual’s “time track,” the sequence of images, sensations and memories attached to any particular body or lifetime. Scientologists of sufficient skill commonly recalled the “whole track,” remembering actions undertaken by their thetan in other lifetimes, other bodies, arrayed within an infinite expanse of time.

© Max McDermott

“[This] system leaves plenty of space for the individual to experiment with whom he or she has been or wants to be in the future,” writes the religious scholar Dr. Dorthe Refslund Chistensen, in her 2009 essay Scientology and Self Narrativity. In the recall of whole track memories, she contends, a Scientologist has all the authorial license usually ascribed to an author of fiction. Hubbard, a prodigious and successful writer of pulp science-fiction and adventure stories, certainly had a tendency to recollect within those genres. In addition to formally revealing the intergalactic history of humanity during his years at sea, Hubbard commonly regaled his crew with tales of maritime derring-do undertaken by his previous incarnations. His “Mission Into Time,” chronicled in a book of the same name released in 1973, tracked the Apollo, Diana and Athena as they ferreted out the locations of buried ruins and treasure the author recalled from previous lifetimes.  If it hadn’t worked in the real world, it would have surely landed in the pages of Argosy, a top-quality market for early twentieth century adventure yarns.

In certain ways, Hubbard believed, there was a broad, atavistic shift underway within the world as a whole. In January of 1974, he began an extensive study of contemporary music from his office aboard the Apollo, analyzing “several thousand recordings,” according to the Church-sanctioned biographical coffee-table book Ron: Music Maker Composer and Performer. “Studying the more popular groups,” Hubbard wrote, “it became fairly visible, at least to me, that the sophisticated world was rolling back into the past and reaching for its tribal roots. The savage breast was stirred by rhythms mostly because they had very little in the way of instruments. But it seems the savage breast is with us again…”

Shortly thereafter, he composed an appropriate response.

+++

The Apollo Stars wound on, binding the dark with great red rivers of horn, propelled by quick percussion. There were some standards, sure — but a few originals, too. “We’re Moving In” was the best, a product of the collaboration between Craig Ferreira, the guitarist at the microphone, and Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, who he introduced as a “scientist, a philosopher and a dear, dear friend.” It was a sound of strange color, driven by apocalyptic percussion and the sonorous repetition of “we’re moving in, we’re moving in, we’re moving in.”

As a trumpet pierced the air, high and shrill, I retreated from the bounding throng. My tie was loose, my shirt soaking. I’d run out of room, and figured it was time to go. On the way out I backed into a solid wall of flesh, a severe, blonde-haired German of military bearing. He snarled at me like a black-gummed dog and I smiled, slipping away. In the darkness around the crowd I lit a third cigarette, pacing where the air was cooler.

The German was still watching me, discretely, so I tested him. When I receded, he advanced. When I moved East he did too, although he remained within the body of the crowd. Exhaling a ribbon of smoke, I considered the face in the lime-white light of the bandstand. It might have been familiar — but not overly so. It suggested no names.

Mine is a fine profession, I thought, but it makes its share of enemies. I hadn’t seen him earlier that day — I was sure of that. He wasn’t another squatter in the building, or one of the Thompson ring. He must’ve been a mark. It was the kind of coincidence which seemed bound to happen, once in a while, although I’d never heard of it happening precisely this way. On a whim I took the passport out of my coat-pocket, just to check. I saw the face in the crowd stare back at me from the laminated paper  — thinner, maybe, but with the same unmistakable sneer. My stomach flashed cold. The man, the Belgian, had moved a few steps beyond the dancers, standing with his back straight and his eyes on the sea. His right hand was jammed into the pocket of his coat. He was holding something there —something angular, something hard.

My cigarette was out. It had only burned halfway.

+++

Drawn from the body of professional and amateur musicians among the Sea Org members crewing the Apollo, “The Apollo Stars” were first assembled in 1973 for an impromptu performance at a Portuguese winter festival on the island of Maderia. Hubbard, their “musical director,” ran the group through a series of intense drills and daily practice routines, many of which were designed to increase the musician’s ability to capture various emotional tones. Following his research into contemporary music in 1974, Hubbard brought the Stars to a style of “savage” performance he dubbed “Star Sound.” The technique was “gregarious, heavily syncopated [and had] a strong reliance on percussion” according to Music Maker, which devotes a lavishly illustrated chapter to the topic.

From 1973 to 1975, as the Apollo moved from port to port, the Stars came with it, giving goodwill performances in Spain and Portugal and winning some degree of local radio play. Their only record, “Power of Source,” was issued in 1974 by Source Music, a Scientologist-run label operating out of Los Angeles. Despite its awkward cover of L. Ron and the Stars poking at underutilized recording equipment, it remains an effective and bizarre example of electric jazz. On the back of its sleeve, a few effusive paragraphs declare that “Radio, TV, and stage people have uniformly decreed that the Apollo Stars ARE a new and exciting sound in music. It is often repeated that the STARS are playing the music of the future.”

L. Ron Hubbard, the copy adds, “is an acknowledged professional in many fields.”

In October of 1974, around the time of the album’s release, the Apollo returned to the same port where the Stars had debuted, Maderia. As it pulled into dock, a crowd of locals began pelting the ship with stones. The Scientologists turned firehoses on the assembled Portuguese, who, in retaliation, cut the ship’s moorings and sent Hubbard back to sea.  The Apollo, according to a then-persistent rumor, was a ship of spies — a front for the CIA. It was expelled, under the same suspicion from Jamaica, Curacao and Barbados the following year. In 1976, his charm wound up, Hubbard returned to land for good.

The Apollo Stars came to be at a time when Scientology was, literally and figuratively, out to sea. “Power of Source,” their surviving musical statement, reveals a group whose incantatory vocals and psychedelic bass mingle with conservative rearrangements of George Gershwin and a cover of “Johnny Comes Marching Home.” It participates well in no wider discourse, either traditional or avant-garde. Instead, it chooses to operate primarily as an adolescent exercise in trying things on. “Music of the future” indeed.

Dr. Chistensen is right to point out that Scientology offers its adherents a chance to radically reinvent the narrative of their lives — past and future. In the early 1970s, this impulse revealed itself in various port cities, scattered from the Middle East to the Caribbean. It was a time of music and madness, violence and espionage — when everything was tried, nothing discarded, and the narrative of Scientology as a  both a movement and a cosmography was tantalizingly fluid. “Power of Source,” in its dark, wax grooves, captures some measure of that chaos.

It breeds stories of its own.

+++

There was no point in running.The boardwalk was clear all the way to the apartment house on the avendia, and the moon was full enough that no matter which way I broke he’d be able to track me. The beach was similarly hopeless. Even if I made it to the water, I’d never make it out, and the expression on the big man’s face assured me he’d have no problem ruining a suit, if it meant getting even with me. Still, I had a little bit of time.

© Max McDermott

The Apollo Stars were winding up, blazing through the Hubbard-Marple-Ferreira composition “Meu Querido Portugal.” The crowd, long since exhausted, took the sound in stride, weaving like seaweed in the emerald dark. If I ran, he’d fire. If I didn’t, he’d wait — probably for the people to disperse, for the young Americans to return to their ship. He was angry, but not stupid. He didn’t want to go to prison anymore than I wanted to get shot.

With the drums wagging in the air, I moved back in, strafing the assembly. The bongo player, Rodriguez, was leading the crowd in a steady, rhythmic chant. As I moved through that forest of grinning, sweat-slick faces, I was tracked by the steady eyes of the Belgian, like twin moons between the trees.

I ran into someone. Another American — portly, with red hair, deep jowls and half-moon eyes. Around his neck hung a few hundred dollars of fat camera. “Sorry,” I said.

“Quite alright,” he replied. On stage, the last note sounded brightly. The assembly clapped and whistled.

“Thank you! Thanks!” The musicians panted. A small queue formed for autographs.

“Are you… with the band?” I stammered, as the assembly began to dissolve.

“In a manner of speaking,” smiled the red headed man, in perfect spanish. “What did you think?”

“Good,” I said, sliding another cigarette from my Coco-Cola tin. My hands shook too much for matches.

“Here,” offered the stranger, striking a silver serviceman’s lighter. We stood beside each other for a moment, silently. “What, precisely, did you enjoy?” he demanded, blowing smoke from his wide, flaring nostrils.

I thought. “It was from another world,” I answered. This seemed to please him.

“Well said,” he smiled. One of the musicians called something from the stage, and my friend called back that he would be right there.

“Are you coming back?” I asked, hoping to delay him. “Are you coming back to play again?”

He grinned wider and caught my hand in a ursine grip. “It’s what we do,” he said. “Come back!” Then he laughed, and bounded for the bandstand

I took a breath, checking to make sure the Belgian was still behind me. I had half an hour, maybe, before the boardwalk would be clear. The only control I had left, I realized, was in the schedule of the thing.

I looked out at the water, where the moonlight made a rippling bridge. I lit my last cigarette and, in the process, moved the knife to the palm of my left hand. I’d try to catch him in the alley by the carnicería. Without looking back I left the light around the stage, and made for the darkness.

In twelve years, I would be born.

In thirty-nine, I’d buy the record.

***

Author’s Note

The illustrations above are by Max McDermott, an accomplished painter currently attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Special thanks are due to Donald Westbrook, who led me to sources and Shannon Taggart, who led me to “Power of Source” in the first place. 

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Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City. 

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The Brown Family of the TLC show “Sister Wives”

By Eden Consenstein

Kody Brown, a middle-aged man with an unruly mop of blond hair and a constant smile, is touring venues for his upcoming wedding. “Can you two share?” the party planner asks, handing two of the four women with Kody a copy of the venue’s information. “Oh, we’re used to sharing,” one woman responds, taking the pamphlet. “Yeah, you have no idea how much we share,” another chimes in. Knowing giggles ripple through the group. Three of the women touring venues have been “sharing” Kody, their husband, for the past sixteen years. The wedding they’re planning will welcome a fourth wife into their marriage.

Welcome to Sister Wives, The Learning Channel’s reality television blockbuster which follows Kody, his four wives and their seventeen children through the surprisingly familiar daily charms and challenges of polygamous life. For five seasons, the show’s creators have captured about two million viewers per episode, with close to two and a half million tuning in as each season draws to a close. The show is a huge success, but the sexualized intrigue of multiple wives that draws viewers isn’t what keeps them. Sister Wives attracts viewers by portraying the Browns as any other American family, struggling through familiar travails with extra spouses in tow. The Brown’s life away from the cameras, on the other hand, is anything but familiar to the average American.

Sister Wives’ half-hour pilot premiered in September 2010 with an opening scene from the Browns’ fourth wedding, where we meet the sprawling family. “I’m Kody Brown,” our patriarch announces over a smiling shot of himself dancing in tux, “and you’ve gotta meet my family. I’m a polygamist, but we’re not the polygamists you think you know.” The voiceover introduces us to each wife, Meri, Janelle, Christine and Robyn, the most recent. Kody dances effortlessly from woman to woman, taking each into his arms for a brief spin. In the background adults playfully scoop kids up into their arms and everyone jumps and smiles, exuding the comfortable physical intimacy of a close family.

“I like marriage, and I’m a repeat offender,” Kody chuckles later into the pilot. “I’ve adopted a faith that embraces that lifestyle. In fact, uh, it recommends it, and likes to reward good behavior, so if you’re good with one marriage they figure you’ll be good with two…” he trails off and smiles coyly. “I hope they think I’ll be good with four.” Polygamy is a titillating theme, no doubt drawing viewers who are looking for the lascivious image of one man surrounded by four fawning females. However, those who tune in for sex are surely and quickly disappointed. “We don’t go weird,” Meri announced in the pilot, assertively dismissing whatever we’ve imagined.

The Browns constantly emphasize that polygamous life is anything but debauched. For them it is about the joys of family time, an ethos of sharing and sacrifice, and going against the grain in pursuit of these noble convictions. Viewers looking for the cat fights and back stabbing characteristic of reality television will also be disappointed. All five adults constantly emphasize the importance of communication and compromise, resulting in a reality TV family that spends most of their on-screen time walking us through how they carry out uncontroversial, daily pursuits with twenty-two people in tow. “There is something, very, very, just, awesome about this lifestyle,” Robyn rambles effusively during the first season. “It rubs off all of your rough spots. It makes you become a better person. Kody is a better person now than when he married Christine.”

The Browns are depicted as unfalteringly earnest in their struggle to rub off the rough spots. Critics have consistently commended the show’s frankness, like Meri, Christine and Janelle’s candid admissions of jealously at the prospect of Kody taking a fourth wife. Moments like these show the Browns to be human and satisfyingly imperfect. Other than the family’s great size and Kody’s longer-than-average hair, Sister Wives goes to obvious lengths to prove that the Browns are an awful lot like their viewers. The clear effort to make the Browns sympathetic keeps their enduring off-screen controversies out of view, suggesting that viewers are not quite ready for an image of non-normative family life.

The Browns belong to the United Apostolic Brethren church, a fundamentalist off- shoot of the Church of Latter-Day Saints defined by their commitment to polygamy. Officially introduced into Mormon doctrine in 1843, shortly after the faith’s founding, polygamy has inspired controversy since it’s earliest moments. It was one cause of the widespread prejudice that marked early Mormon history, and provoked their famous westward trek. In Utah, which had yet to become a state, Mormons found privacy and distance from their detractors. Isolation allowed them to build a community dictated by their burgeoning faith.

Contemporary Mormons continue to tell the tale of how they “made the desert bloom,” successfully pioneering an orderly religious haven in remote, unwelcoming territory. In 1852 church leader Brigham Young proclaimed publicly that Mormons practiced polygamy, or “plural marriage,” and thrust his community into the forefront of the popular imagination and a years-long constitutional tussle. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which banned polygamy in United States territories. Meant more as a statement of disapproval than anything else, the Morrill Act went untried for another sixteen years until it was tested by Reynolds v. The United States in 1878. 

Mormon polygamist George Reynolds challenged the constitutionality of the Morrill Act by claiming it inhibited his right to free religious exercise. Reynolds was unsuccessful, and his case was defeated on the grounds that while religious belief is protected, the state has the right to limit questionable or dangerous religious practices. In the decision, polygamy was braided together with slavery as one of the “twin relics of barbarism” that the United States was in the throes of eradicating. Polygamy was a bold test to the constitution’s guarantees. For the early Mormon community, living in plural marriage meant that even when it came to the most basic trappings of daily life, they were beholden to the laws of heaven, not the laws of earth. Their legal defeat constituted an early measure of what our nation will and will not permit when it comes to religious practices that buck the moral norm.

Reynolds v. United States resulted in the Edmunds Act of 1882, which extended the Morrill Act to outlaw “polygamous co-habitation,” making any living arrangement involving one man and two or more women illegal. This act was imposed only in Utah and Arizona, where Mormons were a large percentage of the population.

In 1890, the Mormon church sacrificed polygamy for Utah statehood. After continued tension between the Latter-Day Saints and congress, church president Woodruff Wilson officially disavowed polygamy in what is known as “The Manifesto.” It had become amply clear that as long as plural marriage remained a part of Mormon doctrine, Utah would never become a state. Shortly after this doctrinal revision, Utah was inducted into the Union. This theological shift caused a religious schism, resulting in the creation of sects still committed to living in plural marriage. This split endures today, with fundamentalist congregations like the Browns’ holding fast to their polygamous tradition and the mainstream, centralized Mormon church opposing it vocally. Within this context Sister Wives is a lot more interesting than it appears. The Browns are participating in an ardent normalization of a practice that has historically tested the limits of what is socialysocially and religiously acceptable.

According to the “Polygamy Primer,” a sixty-eight-page guidebook for law enforcement and social service providers created by the Brown’s church, approximately thirty-seven thousand individuals in Utah and Arizona identify as Mormon fundamentalists, meaning that they are in some way dedicated to maintaining the practice of plural marriage. “Big difference between us and them,” Kody explains, appropriately disassociating himself from the LDS, “similar to uh, Protestants and Catholics.” This is a clunky comparison at best, and the closest we get to theology throughout the show.

Before heading to New York to appear on The Today Show in season two, Kody explains his family’s larger motivation for going public while living in a state where polygamy remains illegal: “The fundamentalist Mormon community and the polygamists have become secretive in such a way as to threaten the rest of America, even if it’s in their minds. And so to be transparent I believe makes us more safe to them.” However inarticulate, this is one of Kody’s first admissions that Sister Wives is only one part of a larger project to make a historically maligned religious tenant acceptable to the mainstream. That this project and it’s legacy exist largely off-screen is indicative of what it takes to make minority life appealing to the American TV viewership.

Immediately after “coming out” on The Today Show, their principled convictions earn them legal scrutiny, which comes in the form of an investigation that spooks the entire family. Ultimately the Browns must flee their home state of Utah for Nevada, where they are safe from proscriptions of the Edmunds Act.

In one scene we find Meri in her craft room, a nook cluttered with red, white and blue baubles, sewing seventeen sets of pajamas for Christmas gifts. A police car slows down under her window and she panics. “I immediately got on the phone to Kody, I started shaking.”

The tension between Meri’s charming task and the muscle of the state is stark. Later all four wives lament their growing mistrust of authority. “This isn’t the America I learned about in school,” Robyn weeps stoically. Mariah, one of the Brown’s oldest children says, “We’re not stealing or murdering and they think that they need to go after us because… why? They have no reason.”

The Brown’s flight from Utah turns out to be no moral defeat but a resounding success for polygamy. In Utah courts and away from cameras, the family challenges the standing Utah law that placed their lives under scrutiny. In season five, as the Browns are celebrating the purchase of four adjacent homes on a cul- de-sac in their new state, Utah strikes down crucial language in the Edmunds Act, thus making plural marriage virtually un-punishable.

In Brown v. Buhman, Kody and his wives, represented by constitutional law scholar John Turley, argue that banning “polygamous cohabitation” and “purported marriages” is unconstitutional. Unlike George Reynolds before them, the Browns won their case, and anti-polygamy legislation was weakened profoundly. In his ninety-one-page decision, Judge Clark Waddoups ruled that, unlike the backdrop against which Reynolds was ruled, “the Supreme Court has over decades assumed a general posture that is less inclined to allow majoritarian coercion of unpopular or disliked minority groups.” After five seasons of watching the Browns roll down grassy hills, tear up at high school graduations and shop at the mall, it ihas hard to imagine them as an “unpopular or disliked minority group,” and yet the legal realities that shape their story prove that they are, away from the cameras, just that.

Viewers who came for raunch or tension stay for the Sister Wives’ classic Americana, a wholesome, loving family oppressed by the powers of the state. The Browns turn out to be lovable underdogs whose bucolic world holds their nation to its promise of religious freedom. Their wholesome on-screen life acts as an argument for the unconventional marital practice they champion ini their real lives. Sister Wives is the story of an uncommon family claiming their share of the American dream, a claim they stake not only in the “reality” created within the show, but also in the success they have had in altering state law. Despite the Brown’s legal success, The Learning Channel’s heavy-handed efforts to make the Browns appear unexceptional provokes questions about just how acceptable different lifestyles have become. In order for the Browns to be palatable within the world of reality television, the show must locate them squarely at the center of the American norm. Their off-screen lives, however, situates them along a lineage of Americans who have vociferously challenged that same normativity.

***

Eden Consenstein was born and raised in New York City and is currently a Master’s student in the Religious Studies program at New York University. Her interests include religious diversity and new religious movements in the United States. Before starting at NYU Eden studied religion at the University of Toronto and interned at the Interfaith Center of New York. 

The post We Don’t Go Weird: Sister Wives Takes the Strange out of Polygamy appeared first on The Revealer.