VHS tapes are an alienated, and alienating, technology. They have the aesthetic of a Phililp K. Dick creation from the early seventies: dour, blue-black petrochemical rectangles with two ghost-white “eyes” in the rear of their casings, “played” by being fed into clacking machines whose guts (temporarily exposed in the act of loading) bristle with odd spindles and chrome. They are occult objects, a media that keeps its secrets.

I found “The Standard” last Christmas, in a Goodwill in Texas. Since that time I’ve done a lot of research. I now know, for instance, that Carman Licciardello, the artist behind the tape, was a major player in Christian Contemporary Music, or C.C.M. circles during the nineteen eighties and nineties. I know he was twice named artist of the year within that genre by Billboard magazine. I know, thanks to his website [http://www.carman.org/home.php]  that his show at Dallas’ Texas stadium show packed in more bodies than appearances by Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, and U2 at the same venue. I know that a marketer for the Carman camp, Chris Estes, when speaking to the Huffington Post last year, described the artist as “the Michael Jackson of Christian music in the 1980s,” at least in terms of scope and theatricality. I know, too, that on February 14th, 2013, Licciardello was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the blood and bone marrow. He went to Kickstarter, raising money for an expansive nation-wide tour. Thanks to a series of disarmingly personal “Countdown Diaries” [http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4AeBuDK4tJTh0PrQidiQHQ?feature=watch] released through Carman’s Youtube channel, I know some portion of his subsequent struggles with money, music and personal faith.

I know, also, that every ex-evangelical I’ve spoken Carman’s name to in the run-up to this column has been overpowered, sometimes for as long as half an hour, by a kind of intense, embarrassed nostalgia. Many of them didn’t even experience his music directly — one former Baptist used to suffer through preaching against the artist. Even so, Carman held a deep and difficult to identify significance for him. The question I’ve been asking since I first fed “The Standard” into the clunking toad/slide-projector of my VCR is what, precisely, that significance is.

“The Standard” tape is representative Carman. Released in 1994, it features music videos drawn from his album of the same name, issued the previous year. These songs share nothing in terms of either genre or style — there’s bombastic hip-hop, celebratory pop-country and even earnest political soliloquizing over yankee-doodle flute and percussion. What they do share is Carman himself, who commands the central space of each video with an easy, if somewhat affected, charisma. They also share a broadly Christian message with an occasional edge of right-wing activism.

The difficulty in addressing “The Standard,” however, is that summarizing its parts as an aesthetic or ideological wholes is deceptive. They’re music videos, and each of the six has some kind of internal consistency, but like many pop videos from the early nineties that consistency is sidelined in the favor of constant, jarring cuts from image to image. The eye never rests on one subject long enough to understand it fully. When the eight minute medieval epic that closes the tape, “Great God,” concludes, viewers are left sifting through a subliminal payload of fashions, dance moves, special effects and shouted theology. It’s a synecdochic work, where quick cuts and individual lyrics overpower the whole, muting “The Standard’s” religious content.

Take the video that opens the tape, “Who’s in the House?” Carman bounces through this one as an early-nineties rapper, dancing and strutting across a stage in a harmlessly dilapidated warehouse, answering the title’s question with repeated chants of “J.C.!” While Jesus is a preoccupation of the lyrics, the driving cuts focus on Carman alone: Carman in his purple shorts, Carman being leapfrogged by an enthusiastic dancer, Carman bumping fists with a nearly-unseen black man, scowling smugly, in a bizarre simulacrum of street cred. Visually it is Carman himself, rather than his faith, that is at the center of the piece. This makes “who’s in da house?” into a strangely ambiguous question.

This ambiguity continues in the tape’s second song, “Sunday School Rock,” a black and white tribute to 1950s teen-music showcases. Here Carman, as “Major C,” commands the frame with an incongruous tough-guy persona, running through Sunday school lessons in basic Christian practice. “To fear the Lord is wisdom,” he sings, “to serve the lord divine — but to really break it down just repeat these words of mine.” A dance party breaks out, of course, complete with screaming teenage girls —shades of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Carman’s persona, and the theological content of the lyrics, end up giving the video a similar arc to Nirvana’s kinescope video for “In Bloom,” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbgKEjNBHqM&feature=kp] where the 1950s aesthetic is contrasted both lovingly and ironically by the ideology of the performance. Given the contemporaneous releases of the two (“In Bloom’s” video was released two years earlier in 1992) I think the case for direct influence is strong.

Which highlights the cross-pressures at play in “The Standard.” Each of Carman’s videos are technically sophisticated mimics of American pop music, to the point where calling them “mimicry” seems inaccurate. The best comparison I can think of is the parodist Weird Al Yankovic, whose videos often replicate, exactly, the forms and conventions of the songs they’re meant to spoof, with the simple substitution of subject matter for humorous effect. Yankovic, in his “Smells Like Nirvana,” takes the aesthetic beats of the band’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and turns them into a paean to lyrical unintelligibility. Carman, in “Sunday School Rock,” does the same, using the aesthetic hits of his 1950s source material as a vehicle for communicating love and devotion to the personal salvation of Christ. The problem is that these adopted aesthetics make Carman, as the charismatic musician, into the focal point of the video, blunting its salvific message.

To a degree, this personal focus makes sense. Carman’s early success as a Christian musician occurred in Tulsa Oklahoma in the early 1980s, where he was part of the circle surrounding the Pentecostal minister and singer Carlton Pearson. In this context, as in evangelicalism as a whole, a charismatic approach to ministry would have been natural. The question Carman poses, through “the Standard,” is to what degree such charismatic ministry is compatible with the aesthetics of pop.

This tension is especially visible in the tape’s finale, “Great God.” The video’s narrative begins with a soft-focus close up of a young, heavily made-up high-school blonde. A hand snaps in front of her face, waking her from a daydream. We pull back, finding her in class. Her teacher, played by Carman, wants to know what she has learned about the “dark ages.”

“As the Grand Inquisitor would say ‘come lassie, tell us, what is your doctrine?” he intones, adopting a Scottish accent. The girl shakes her head, admitting ignorance, which prompts Carman to give a last-minute lecture about the infiltration of the medieval Catholic Church by “evil spiritual forces,” in preparation for “the big test.” During this speech, the girl drifts off into another daydream. At this point the video switches gears, becoming a fantasy of castles and wicked Catholics. The girl finds herself chained to a dungeon wall and dragged before an inquisitor. Carman reappears as a muscular, attractive ur-protestant, defeating a crowd of evil bishops with a Bible that, in an embarrassing special effect, transmutes into a sword. At the story’s end, the “evil spiritual forces” vanquished, Carman embraces the girl against a romantic backdrop of fiery skies and smashed castles. Back in the classroom, the girl enthusiastically finishes her test. A blade of straw, carried from the dungeon, falls from her hair. It was all a dream — or was it?

While “Great God” contains intriguing nubs of religious and historical arguments about the relationship between Catholicism, the Reformation and theodicy, its overpowering visual topic is, again, Carman. Carman dominates the classroom framing device as a wise, well-liked and charismatic teacher. He distinguishes himself in the fantasy as a cinematic sword-fighter, a grimy masculine ideal and, most uncomfortably, as a romantic interest for a girl half his age. None of this is to suggest ego on Carman’s part — rather, each of these elements is clearly drawn from “Great God’s” larger cultural milieu.

If we start by considering Michael Jackson as “the secular Carman,” we see an extremely prominent theme, within his video output, of singular, sharply dressed crusaders intervening against mobs. “Great God,” is, essentially, a riff on work such as Jackon’s “Smooth Criminal,” albeit with a sense of style more Lady Hawke than Maltese Falcon and, once again, religious content largely substituted for the romantic. Like “Smooth Criminal” or “Bad,” Carman’s “Great God” is an absorbing, cinematically realized video with a clear, if simple, narrative arc focused on a supernaturally cool protagonist. What’s different between the two is that one exists in a “buffered,” or “secular” space — a visual world where Jackson is allowed to be the ultimate example of “bad” because there is no diegetic evidence to argue the point. Carman, by opening his videos to God, and focusing their lyrical content on directing one’s devotional energies beyond the self, makes his personal dominance of the visuals difficult to parse.   It’s Carman, not God, who turns the Bible into a sword. It’s Carman who gets the girl. It’s Carman, at the end of the daydream, who controls the classroom. It’s an uncanny effect, and it’s tempting to read it as cynical. A similar problem occurs in Carman’s rhyming patriotic hymn, “America Again,” where right-wing talking points about prayer in school are intercut with footage of gay pride parades, African Americans sitting on street corners and protesters getting pummeled by police. These videos seem to indicate a reality beyond themselves without acceding Carman’s command of the visuals. My Baptist friend, the one whose preacher spoke out against Carman, detected many of these same problems. The dancing in “Sunday School Rock” was “too worldly,” he said, as was the “downbeat” construction of just about every song. Only the milquetoast piano ballad “Serve the Lord” passed muster for my friend as something that would have had a place in the church of his younger days.  Carman’s approach to C.C.M., using immaculate pop aesthetics to convey religious themes, only works if one assumes that these aesthetics do not compete or contradict in any way with the intended message.

This tension may be heightened by the video format. Carman’s live events, half expansive stage show and half tent revival, are defined by the moment where the performance stops and the audience streams to a “counseling center,” ready to be saved. According to his website, sometimes as many as 5,000 a night are moved in this way. For these young Christians, Carman’s aesthetic poses no problem. In fact, it offers a solution — directing them towards a singular religious experience, and a stronger identification with Christ, all through the precise deployment of pop theatricality. As I said, this is a significance that I find opaque. My experience of pop is different — more compartmentalized, more disposable, more grossly material. Carman approaches the same subject with different eyes.

VHS tapes are occult objects. They were expensive to produce, light on background materials and, with the exception of movies designed for the rental market, they have a tendency to present themselves matter-of-factly, with the implicit understanding that anyone considering a purchase will know what they are purchasing. “The Standard,” doesn’t explain itself — it just gives us Carman, and lets the audience decide what comes next.

For my part, I find that “The Standard” has left me with more questions than answers. I want to know where Carman places the line between “religious” and “secular.” I want to know how this division is operative in the lives of his fans. Most of all, I want to understand the complicated significance he seems to hold for those who have encountered him.

Luckily, this isn’t his only VHS.

Next month: “You’re breaking God’s heart, and a condom isn’t going to fix that.”

The post Carman appeared first on The Revealer.

Tamesha Means (via the ACLU)

By Ann Neumann

And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? Deuteronomy 18:21 KJV

Tamesha Means was eighteen weeks pregnant when her water broke. The nearest hospital, Mercy Health Partners, gave her Tylenol and sent her home. Twice. The staff at Mercy never told Means that the fetus she was carrying was no longer viable (could not be carried to term). They didn’t tell her that her health was in danger. When she returned a third time, in severe pain and with signs of an infection, again the hospital prepared to send her home. According to court documents, as she waited to be discharged “the fetus breached her cervix and she began to deliver. The baby died shortly after birth. MHP then told Ms. Means she needed to make funeral arrangements.”

An unprecedented case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Means at the end of 2013. Unprecedented because it doesn’t charge the attending doctor or even Mercy Health Partners with negligence. It charges the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Mercy is a Catholic hospital and therefore operates according to the Catholic Church’s Ethical and Religious Directives, seventy-two “laws” written by the USCCB and approved by the Vatican. The complaint reads:

Ms. Means brings this negligence action against Defendants for their roles in promulgating the Directives and directing MHP to adhere to them. As a direct result of these religious Directives, Ms. Means suffered severe, unnecessary, and foreseeable physical and emotional pain and suffering. She seeks both damages and a declaration that Defendants’ actions were negligent, not only to provide a remedy for the trauma she suffered, but also to prevent other women in her situation from suffering similar harm in the future.

A public health educator investigating Ms. Means’ case found four other such examples of substandard medical care at the Eastern Michigan hospital. When the educator asked why no attempt was made to ease Means’ pain or abort the fetus for the sake of her health, an MHP physician, according to the case, responded, “MHP’s decision not to induce labor was proper because Defendant USCCB’s Directives prohibited MHP from inducing labor in that situation.”

The enforcement of the USCCB’s Directives is not limited to Mercy and Means’ case is not isolated. There are almost 650 hospitals in the country operating under Catholic leadership–and therefore the Ethical and Religious Directives. (See Jill Filipovic’s recent article for Al Jazeera for other examples.) A new report released in December 2013 by the American Civil Liberties Union and MergerWatch, a nonprofit that monitors hospital consolidation, updates a similar report released in 2002 and illustrates not only the reach of the USCCB’s Directives but their exponential expansion as Catholic hospitals and health care networks acquire non-denominational facilities. (Means’ case is discussed in the report.)

In the decade between 2001 and 2011, the number of Catholic hospitals increased by sixteen percent, even while the number of other non-profit hospitals declined. In Washington state, for instance, where hospital mergers have sharply increased, one quarter of all hospitals are now Catholic. Ten of the top twenty-five health systems (hospital networks, such as health maintenance organizations (HMOs), that are organized under a unifying management) are Catholic, as the report notes, with $213.7 billion in gross patient revenue. These hospitals are all non-profit, meaning they receive huge tax breaks from state and local government while giving an average of only 2.8% of total patient revenue to charity. And yet, Catholic facilities receive negligible financial support from Catholic sources.

It’s important to note that the Ethical and Religious Directives, which I’ve written about elsewhere (see Guernica magazine, January 2013, and New York Law School Review, January 2014), apply to a range of standard (and legal) medical services, not just abortion. Sterilization (including tubal ligation), emergency contraception, fertility treatments for same-sex couples and counseling for STD or AIDS prevention are all restricted. Where Death with Dignity is legal (Washington, Oregon, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico) it is also prohibited by Catholic leaders. Indeed, even informing a patient about them or referring one to a facility that does provide them is prohibited.

Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which spurred Catholic and evangelical groups to combine forces to create the “pro-life” movement, U.S. law has accommodated or promoted religious ethics in medical practice. Once abortion was legal, laws were needed to “protect” such medical facilities from having to perform them. Since then, Catholic health care and standard medical practice have continued to diverge as medical advancements created new areas of “moral” contest.

Julia and Joseph Quinlan with a photo of their daughter Karen Ann.
(API Wide World Photos)

In 1976, when the parents of Karen Ann Quinlan, a young New Jersey woman who entered a persistent vegetative state, sued St. Clare’s Hospital to remove their daughter from a ventilator, they cited Catholic teachings to support the request. Quinlan’s condition was new, the result of medical advancements that upended existing definitions of death. Her case was groundbreaking. At the time, New Jersey Bishop Lawrence B. Case submitted an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief that recorded the answers of Pope Pius XII when he addressed the following question in 1957:

Does the anesthesiologist have the right, or is he bound, in all cases of deep unconsciousness, even in those that are completely hopeless in the opinion of the competent doctor, to use modern artificial respiration apparatus, even against the will of the family?

His answer made the following points:

1. In ordinary cases the doctor has the right to act in this manner, but is not bound to do so unless this is the only way of fulfilling another certain moral duty.

2. The doctor, however, has no right independent of the patient. He can act only if the patient explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly gives him the permission.

3. The treatment as described in the question constitutes extraordinary means of preserving life and so there is no obligation to use them nor to give the doctor permission to use them.

4. The rights and the duties of the family depend on the presumed will of the unconscious patient if he or she is of legal age, and the family, too, is bound to use only ordinary means.

5. This case is not to be considered euthanasia in any way; that would never be licit. The interruption of attempts at resuscitation, even when it causes the arrest of circulation, is not more than an indirect cause of the cessation of life, and we must apply in this case the principle of double effect. 

The family had received such support even before the case came to trial. Quinlan’s parents were Catholic and had consulted their local chaplain as they struggled with their decision. But by 1989, the Church had shifted its stance, isolating some treatments as “extraordinary means” and others, such as feeding tubes, as not. The Church filed an amicus brief opposing the removal of another young patient, Nancy Cruzan, from “life support,” this time a feeding tube. Writes William H. Colby, the Cruzans’ lawyer:

Richard Doerflinger, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, had emerged from a meeting in August where they discussed the Cruzan case and spoke to reporters. He said that the brief from the Bishops in Cruzan would urge the U.S. Supreme Court not to “constitutionalize” the right to die, as the right to abortion had been constitutionalized sixteen years earlier in Roe v. Wade, leaving “no room for the Catholic point of view.”^[1]

“The Catholic point of view,” Doerflinger implied, is directed by Church leadership, not individuals. This reasoning, that religious conscience resides with an institution, is at the heart of a host of health care controversies and has turned the guarantee of religious freedom in the US on its ear. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods, two corporations whose owners wish to legally deny their employees access to insurance coverage for contraception because they themselves disapprove of it are two examples of cases approaching the Supreme Court. Neither corporation is owned by Catholics but their cause, dictating the autonomy of their employees, is one that the Catholic Church has put its weight behind because it  enforces with their teachings.

One’s body, Doerflinger told me when I interviewed him in 2011, “isn’t one’s own.”  It’s a chilling statement, particularly for those who are not Catholic but, like Tamesha Means, find themselves in a facility that is bound to Catholic teaching. Moreover, it’s a statement that gets at the heart of discrepancies between Catholic hospital practices (as dictated by an employer) and those at nondenominational institutions. When do patients and their families have autonomy to make their own health care decisions? It goes without saying that the Catholic Church’s greatest limits to autonomy are reserved for the women whose potential role in reproduction has been prioritized over even her own health.  It’s not only important to ask what the Church’s objectives are, but why US law is protecting those objectives, even when applied to those opposed to them: Why is the non-Catholic public, with often no choice of which hospital to attend, subject to the religious regulations of non-profit health care providers?

In subsequent cases concerning the removal of “extraordinary means,” such as the 2005 case of Terri Schiavo, the courts have ruled against the Church. And yet, these are the cases that have made it to the courts and likely represent the very smallest percentage of cases where patients, without the knowledge or means to challenge a health care institution, are left with no choice. Over the last forty years, “pro-life” beliefs regarding patient autonomy have been forced into law across the country.

One recent case illustrates the long arm of Catholic influence. A Texas woman, Marlise Munoz, collapsed in her home and was resuscitated. When she arrived at a nearby hospital, John Peter Smith in Fort Worth, Texas, doctors there determined that she was fourteen weeks pregnant and could not be removed from a respirator because of a law in that state that overrides patient’s wishes regarding removal from “life support.” According to an August 2012 report by the Center for Women Policy Studies, Texas is only one of twelve states where a woman’s advance directive is automatically void if she is pregnant, whether the fetus is viable or not. A full thirty-seven states have enacted some form of exclusion for pregnancy to their advance directive status.

Marlise Munoz (family photo)

Another way the law has allowed religious concepts to affect standard medical treatment is by the passage of “conscience clauses” that prioritize the rights of medical staff and their employers over the rights of patients. (For more on the history of such clauses, see the 2010 report “In Good Conscience,” produced by Catholics for Choice.)

Americans’ idea of what religious freedom means has never been static, because conceptions of morality and personal autonomy have continued to shift. Who decides what is for the good of the public? Which beliefs are worthy of legal protection? Which lives are most valuable? Tamesha Means tragically found herself in danger because others had answered these questions and found their own conscience–or job–more important than her life.  The ACLU’s court case, on behalf of Means, states that Mercy Health Partners is required to follow the USCCB’s Directives on “condition of medical privileges and employment.” In other words, not only is Means subject to the authority of the Catholic bishops, but so are the doctors and health care providers–employee discrimination laws be damned–who work for Catholic institutions. Unless the courts begin to challenge Catholic authority, the autonomy, conscience, and rights of all of us will increasingly be secondary to those of the bishops.

***

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

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 Your Ethical and Religious Directives appeared first on The Revealer.

The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World by Daniel M. Bell Jr.

A theologian uses two exemplars of postmodernity to argue against capitalism

By Fred Folmer 

Talk about tapping into the zeitgeist: not long after his most recent book, Economies of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World (Baker Academic, 2012), was published, Methodist theologian Daniel Bell received a rather high-profile, if unwitting, endorsement of the most critical viewpoints he’d argued. While Bell’s work is not well known outside academic and professional religious circles, the name of Pope Francis is probably one of the most recognizable on Planet Earth.

And so when—in a recent exhortation entitled “Evangelii Gaudium (Joy of the Gospel)”—Francis assailed the strain of economic thought that claims that freeing up the markets will necessarily lead to social justice, he brought high-profile attention to Bell’s cause.

In his exhortation, the pope surprised (and/or delighted, confused or angered) many people by writing that such free-market philosophies express “a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.” Francis returns to the motif of free markets as false gods several times in the document. “We have created new idols,” he writes. “The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.” In such a circumstance, Francis argues, “man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.”

In a similar vein, Bell centers his own argument on the idea that capitalism, particularly in its contemporary free-market purist and neoliberal variants, assumes the form of a false god. He even includes a chapter entitled “Capitalist Theology” in which he details what he says are capitalism’s ontological and teleological claims about human beings, their social worlds and the nature of reality itself. Such claims, Bell argues, go against God’s intentions for how humans are to relate to one another and to God. For Pope Francis as well as Daniel Bell, free-market-purist forms of capitalism are, in a word, sin.

But whereas Francis utilizes a method of argument that primarily is designed to appeal to one’s moral sensibilities—“beliefs,” if you will—Bell further deploys the resources of postmodern thinkers to make his case. He does this in part because he seeks to oppose capitalism’s having become normative; for many people, capitalism’s ontological/teleological claims and prerogatives have become common-sensical, and therefore are bound up with their very personhood—structuring thought patterns, life choices of all kinds and, most crucially for Bell, desires. A change in human subjectivity toward the kinds of claims Bell offers as an alternative to capitalism would therefore have to come at the level of desire, and postmodern thought, in his reckoning, offers resources for his sought-after destabilization of capitalist desire.

That’s in part because postmodernists seek, among other things, to rethink long-held assumptions of modernity, particularly about the distinctive social locations of various “spheres,” such as religion, politics and economics. And so whereas modernist thought might posit a separation between, say, the political sphere and the domestic sphere, a postmodernist might regard such a separation as a line fabricated for purposes of maintaining power of some kind (gender, racial/ethnic, state, class, etc.). The postmodernist might, for instance, point out that the organization of families, gender roles, household structures and disciplines, daily habits, presumptions and beliefs, and so on actually have a great deal to do with the way the political sphere—governments, laws, etc.—are understood and lived out.

Similarly, a postmodernist might further break down lines between the sacred and the secular, noting that “religious life” is lived in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with theologians or churches; a modern focus on “beliefs” only scratches the surface of how religious sensibilities are formed, maintained and altered. Bell contends—correctly, I believe—that capitalism gains such a strong purchase on human personhood in part because these modern “spheres” (massive abstractions, all) are thought to be much more substantive than they actually are. This creates the widespread assumption that economic problems can have only economic solutions, and not, as Bell argues, solutions rooted in everyday human practices and desires. Since Bell’s strategy is, as he writes, to move “beyond beliefs to consider the fundamental human power that is desire,” he draws on postmodernists to help make his case.

From http://www.patheos.com/

Postmodern Theorizing

Bell’s postmodernists of choice are the French thinkers Michel Foucault, who developed theories about the history of sexuality and the intermingling of knowledge, power and social discipline, and Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher whose best-known work focuses on the constant breakdown, via ever-shifting and multifaceted human desires, of “totalizing” structures such as capitalism and the state. One key question of the book is the extent to which these philosophers, whose work is not theological in any traditional use of the term, can be used in the service of an argument that is unabashedly theological in its claims about a God who desires that human beings should live, organize and understand themselves in certain ways.

From the outset, the results are quite mixed. Readers who have a familiarity with Deleuze and/or Foucault, as well as the writings and theory of Karl Marx, may find themselves scratching their head in puzzlement early on, when Bell twice refers to the two postmodernists, without qualification, as Marxists. And while it’s true that Deleuze and Foucault share some of Marx’s concerns, neither argued that institutional power principally stems from economic activity, or that human social life revolves around how labor power is organized—both key indicators of Marxist thought.* At the very least, Bell ought to provide a definition of a “Marxist,” as he sees it, and then defend his contention that Foucault and Deleuze fit it. As it is, the claim doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in a reader that the two philosophers’ work is going to be represented accurately.

However, as the book begins Bell shows exactly how Foucault and Deleuze’s respective theories might provide ballast for his argument. He uses the work of both thinkers to challenge the idea that politics can be reduced to statecraft—that change comes from official channels, such as governmental organizations and laws, rather than from the huge array of minute desires from which people shape their selfhood. As Bell writes, Deleuze calls this arrangement the “micropolitics of desire.” In Deleuze’s line of thinking, the “organization of social space with the state at its summit,” Bell writes, “is not the natural, given order of things.” We have, according to Bell, “been captured by a statist habit of mind,” and so pushing people out of this frame of mind is a first step toward helping them contemplate a way of life beyond capitalism. For Deleuze, this means that “the fundamental character of reality,” in Bell’s description, must be rethought. And because “reality is constituted by desire,” human desires must be redirected. This idea dovetails with Deleuze’s contention that capitalist structures—which depend on a modern understanding of the state, and vice versa—are flows of human desire channeled in a particular way. And since, as Bell writes (referencing Deleuze), “any and every assembly or organization of desire is inherently unstable,” desires can always be pushed in a new direction.

To discuss particular ways that human desire is shaped through disciplines and habits, Bell turns to Foucault. As with Deleuze, Foucault argued that one needed to think beyond the state in order to understand how power operates. Rather, as Bell writes, Foucault believed that “power is better understood as omnipresent, as always already everywhere, with no single point of origin or source.” Foucault called this power “governmentality,” arguing that this entails the commingling of state power along with what he called “technologies of the self”—the myriad forms of public and private power in which personhood is shaped by forces that include, in Foucault’s words, “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions.” In one of Foucault’s most famous studies, Discipline and Punish, he argues that modern individuals internalize these forms of power, incorporating their dictates and prerogatives so that they cannot be separated from one’s own personhood. “Government surveillance” then becomes a matter of the self-policing that is part and parcel of one’s own psychic makeup. For Foucault, such is the “modern art of government,” in Bell’s words.

One of the effects of the governmentality of modernity, for Bell, is emergence of the conceptual individualism on which capitalism depends. Within this framework, individual interests can be understood to emerge completely apart from the control of states or any other social formations; rather, Bell writes, they are imagined to “naturally and spontaneously converge in the public interest.” The public good can then only be conceived in terms of private good, and the public good necessarily shatters into billions of private dreams molded on desires fueled by capital markets. Bell applies Foucault’s argument to what he calls today’s “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control,” in which market logic provides the terms for nearly every social setting or institution, be they churches, governments, hospitals, schools or organizations—a situation frequently called “neoliberalism.” Under this form of power, Bell writes, individuals “must submit every aspect of their lives to the logic of the economic; they must be entrepreneurs of themselves.” In effect, Bell writes, “we are governed through freedom,” a key aspect of which is the freedom to consume endlessly variegated commodities as unquenchably as the market can make them available.

Considering that Foucault’s subject was not capitalism per se but rather forms of power of which capitalism is only one aspect—making him, again, firmly not a Marxist—Bell provides some intriguing connections from Foucault’s thought to his own arguments about the emergence and presumed naturalness of capitalism. In particular, Bell makes strong use of Foucault’s genealogy of the supposedly self-governing, autonomous individual. Particularly when it is underscored by Bell’s discussion of Deleuze, Foucault’s account provides a compelling springboard into Bell’s own theological claims. And while many of these claims will not be anything new to many readers, they nonetheless register, to Bell’s credit, as assertions to take seriously anew.

(AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel)

Capitalism’s Claims

According to Bell, the choice between capitalism and Christianity is quite stark; it is a matter of choosing between two masters; as Matthew 6:24 states, “you cannot serve God and money.” Capitalism is its own ontological, moral and teleological system, brought on by the kinds of changes in modernity that Deleuze and Foucault describe; for Bell, “capitalism is nothing less than a theological revolution, involving radical changes not only in the circulation of material things but also in the nature of desire” (emphasis in original). What’s more, “every economic system rests on either an implicit or explicit theology.”

There are six aspects, according to Bell, of this capitalist theology. There’s the previously mentioned individualism; individuals are set apart from social groups, and capitalism severs many traditional ties. Second, these autonomous, self-governing individuals are free to make choices of their own, and for Bell, this is a “negative freedom” from authority and tradition. Third, individuals are “interest maximizers,” meeting their own needs first and foremost, absent of any sort of common good. Their desire is, fourth, “construed by capitalism as fundamentally insatiable”; it is ruled by the gospel of constant growth and the dictum that “more is better.” Fifth, the natural state of all of these interest-maximizing individuals is that of a “war of all  against all”; everyone is potentially a threat to the all-important pursuit of one’s own interests. And sixth, justice, rather than being seen as a socially important good, is “strictly personal” and based on the enforcement of legal contracts; therefore, like its conception of freedom, it is strictly negative, insisting “only on noninterference in the free choices of others.”

Underscoring all of this is the theology of the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, as famously theorized by Adam Smith; such an “invisible hand” indicates an understanding of a God that serves only to protect self-interests, not to promote social justice or point humans away from sin. If we are inescapably self-interested, as capitalist theorizers argued, this becomes “a claim that we will never be free from sin” (emphasis in original)—that scarcity and self-interest are simply the way of things and can never be redressed. Ultimately, Bell argues, this is a framework “founded on an idolatrous vision of God…that is atheistic, deistic, or Stoic.”

One thing that ought to be said in response to Bell’s argument is that while he cogently lays out the doctrines of capitalism as they are frequently articulated, actual human beings often do not live out these principles as completely as one might assume from reading the book. Traditional ties and group identities endure, despite capitalism’s depredations; varying conceptions of social or collective justice remain. One senses a tendency here to mistake official doctrine, as argued by Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek (or latter-day libertarians) for humans’ lived experience, which, more often than not, holds these things in tension rather than obliterating one for the other. To paraphrase scholar Bruno Latour, we are often not nearly as modern as we think we are. Nevertheless, when one considers how quickly many social formations and spaces are being privatized—and thus turned into commodities for consumption on the capitalist market—Bell’s argument seems not only persuasive but urgently needed.

A Theologian’s Response

Bell’s theological strategy is to more or less respond to “capitalist theology” point by point. Thus, where capitalist defenders would argue that we are conceptually and ontologically alone, Bell’s counterclaim is that “we are not alone”—and, further, the gathering of persons under God (“called the church,” Bell reminds us) provides the antidote for the what the author sees as the idolatrous notion of strict autonomy. “[B]y means of the divine things in our midst—Word and sacrament, catechesis, order, and discipline,” Bell writes, “human desire is being healed of its capitalist distortions and set free to partake of a different economic ordering.” What’s more, for Bell, the natural order of things is not of scarcity, as capitalism would have it, but of abundance. Even the usual narrative of the redemption on the cross, wherein Jesus “pays” for the sins of humanity, “reflects the ways that our imaginations have been so disciplined by the capitalist economy of desire.” The cross, Bell argues, is a demonstration of God’s economy of plenitude and generosity, which is boundless—a mirror image of the endless scarcity and self-interest promoted by capitalism’s defenders. Desiring communion with others called by God—whereby “the love of self and the love of others, including God, is a single, unified love”—replaces the inherent selfishness and conflict embedded in capitalist desire.

While all this has its undeniably compelling aspects—many people, whether Christian or not, are likely to be drawn in by such a noble vision—at the same time it may seem fairly foreign to non-Christians, and particularly those who do not subscribe to a worldview that depends upon claims about a God as an agent who calls humans together for a specific purpose. This may be especially problematic because Bell’s arguments apply not merely to Christians but rather try to articulate “a good that unites all of humanity.” Also, there really is no separating Bell’s ideas about humanity from his theological claims; one cannot have “communion” as he envisions it without an extrahuman agent that calls forth such a gathering. As with the aforementioned papal exhortation, there is a normative claim being made rather fervently, and if one does not accept it, one might find oneself consigned to a state of sin.

This is where Bell decisively parts company with Foucault and Deleuze, who, suffice it to say, did not make normative claims of this kind, as is typical of postmodern theorists whose project is to “deconstruct.” While this departure initially seems as though it can be harmonized with Deleuze and Foucault’s arguments—Bell’s arguments are “postmodern” insofar as they question and seek to push past the assumptions of modernity—ultimately their differences show them to be incompatible in other ways, leaving one to wonder whether Bell’s project of using them to make his argument was doomed from the start.

From http://www.stuffchristianculturelikes.com/

Desire and Power

Deleuze, though certainly an anticapitalist writer, makes no affirmative claims about what are appropriate kinds of desire; rather, his theories aim merely to describe how flows of human desire can destabilize centers of power, without articulating what an alternative should look like. In fact, Bell himself takes Deleuze to task for prescribing only further anarchy. “Deleuze’s madness,” he writes, “is not a break with capitalism but an intensification of it.” Unlike Marx—or Bell—Deleuze has no teleology; there is no endpoint or ideal toward which human beings need to strive. We keep spinning forward as flows of desire break down barriers and mutate endlessly, “rhizomatically,” to use Deleuze’s famous wording. And while one could argue that this is a conceptual problem in Deleuze’s thought, it nevertheless puts Bell’s use of Deleuze into question, because Bell has offered Deleuze as a credible source of evidence as to how desire “really” works. But in the end, Deleuze and Bell fundamentally disagree on the nature of human desire. Bell thinks that desire “really” works to the glory of God, whereas Deleuze’s work points to more or less the opposite claim—that “the glory of God” is a totalizing structure that can, and should, be destabilized.

The problems Bell has with Foucault are arguably even greater, because they illustrate Bell’s skirting, if not outright elision, of the issue of power in the “communion” he envisions. Like Deleuze, Foucault did not prescribe a particular teleology; he was interested in problematizing the modern categories that helped to constrain and discipline subjectivity, and gender and sexuality in particular. Let’s remember Foucault’s central formulation: power is everywhere, and perhaps especially emanates from systems of thought that make claims about human morality. In this aspect, Foucault followed one of his key intellectual progenitors, Nietzsche. For Foucault, the basic claims about human beings that Bell makes would fundamentally be claims about power—power on a human, not a theological, scale—putting the two at odds over a fundamental assumption in their respective arguments. How, Foucault might ask, does Bell’s “communion” happen? Only through what Foucault would call “capillary power”—the everyday work of shaping habits, sensibilities and, yes, desires to conform persons to a particular ontological/theological framework. In the end, Bell is asking readers to accept Foucault’s logic (of deconstructing operations of power), but then to abandon this logic once an optimal theological/ontological vision has been reached. Foucault would have had none of this. For Foucault, the operations of power in reaching such a vision are exactly what would need to be put under the microscope.

Along these lines, there are indications in the book that Bell has overlooked important historical issues of power and discipline. For instance, contending that Christianity has long been about desire at least as much as it has been about “beliefs,” Bell argues that “for much of its history, the church was understood as a workshop of desire, a hospital where desire that had been disordered by sin recovered its true direction toward God and the things of God.” But in this description of desire, Bell never mentions the very public acts that the pre-Reformation church took in securing those desires. As anthropologist Talal Asad argues in his important book Genealogies of Religion, in the middle ages it was power that nurtured “true Christian dispositions,” including “laws (imperial and ecclesiastical) and other sanctions (hellfire, death, salvation, good repute, peace) to the disciplinary activities of social institutions (family, school, city, church) and of human bodies (fasting, prayer, obedience, penance).

These variegated and far-reaching forms of power, Asad continues, “created the conditions for experiencing [religious] truth.” In other words, Asad’s argument implies, it was impossible to separate the political from the religious; these categories are creations of modernity, but would have been unintelligible in the pre-Reformation setting. And so if Bell seeks a return to a medieval understanding of Christianity as a model for how this tradition should shape human selfhood, his book would have been better served by articulating whether he thought this could be done absent the church’s public, “political” powers—and, if so, explaining why such measures were no longer necessary or relevant.

A telling moment illustrating this elision is found in a footnote at the end of a paragraph discussing the numerous medieval Christian works of mercy, such as hospices and hospitals; these works, he writes, “permeated Christian society.” In the footnote to this, he adds, “This is not to absolve medieval Christian practice of its failures and abuses.” But a logical question arises: whether such “failures and abuses” might have been part and parcel of the very power that the church wielded in fomenting certain kinds of human desire. We simply do not get a glimpse of what a contemporary Christianity rethought to mold “all of humanity” into a “communion” would have to be, in terms of public power. This omission might very well lead observers—whether non-Christians or simply Christians whose assumptions are different from Bell’s—to wonder whether Bell is really arguing that the only alternative to contemporary neoliberalism is a return to an authoritarian form of public religion that could brook no dissent (to say nothing of “pluralism,” a notion that is never mentioned in the book) in its pursuit of communion.

That’s not quite what Bell argues in the book, but given the implications of his arguments, the above wouldn’t be an illogical conclusion to infer. Bell would like us to think beyond the state in asking how human desires are formed, but then doesn’t provide a full picture of how power would circulate—what, exactly, “the state” (or whatever would replace it) would look like. One thing that mitigates this problem somewhat is that Bell’s actual practical prescriptions are frequently more modest than his argument might suggest or imply. Following Augustine, he argues that the job of Christians is to dwell within the “earthly cities” of “disordered desire,” serving as “nomads, refugees, exiles, sojourners, and pilgrims” whose task is to model Christian community and reform economic practice. As evidence that desire is “being healed of its capitalist distortions,” Bell cites several “glimpses of the kingdom in its pilgrim form”: the Catholic Worker Movement, New Monasticism and alternative fair-trade market practices. Change, he writes in the book’s closing pages, “may not be a matter of one great leap or stride but many steps, many very small steps.” We should start, in other words, with practice based on desiring this nexus of Christianity and economic/social justice, and then a new form of human co-existence could emerge; maybe, for all we know, “power” may be beside the point if such a community ever arose. Whatever questions may remain, there is no denying that there are compelling and challenging aspects to Bell’s vision, ones that stir the imagination to what could be, rather than what “is.” Still, given how tethered Bell’s arguments are to particular theological claims—and given how fundamentally plural the world as we now know it is—it is hard, if not impossible, for some of us to think past the practicalities, and power arrangements, of how such a vision could come to fruition.

Fred Folmer, a graduate of New York University’s M.A. program in Religious Studies, is a librarian at Connecticut College.

*Thanks to Jeremy Walton and Anthony Petro for their crucial thoughts on this particular point of discussion.

The post The Postmodern Gospel: A theologian uses two exemplars of postmodernity to argue against capitalism appeared first on The Revealer.

By Becky Garrison

When stand-up comedians Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones launched Sunday Assembly in London on January 6, 2013, they sought to establish an atheist church geared toward those who want to “live better, help often and wonder more” without the religious trappings associated with a Christian church. Almost immediately, they found themselves propelled into the global spotlight, and they used their background in event planning and publicity gained as professional performers to capitalize on this media exposure and promote their latest venture. Hence, Sunday Assembly garnered the lion’s share of the US media with the vast majority of journalists incorrectly labeling it as a new religious development. (A review of US church history notes the presence of non-theistic gatherings dating back to the Freethought Movement circa1850.)

Concurrent with the tendency to treat this latest incarnation of non-theistic churches as a new phenomenon, many in the media have also engaged in hyperbolic and at times inaccurate rhetoric in discussing the rise of Sunday Assembly. For example, Salon classified Sunday Assembly as a megachurch, though its London congregation averages 600 to 700 attendees. (According to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, the term megachurch generally refers to a congregation with a sustained average weekly attendance of 2,000 persons or more.) Also, the Daily Beast designated Sunday Assembly as “the fastest growing church” without citing any statistical evidence to back up this claim.  Along those same lines, Salon cites the organizers’ claims that “The 3,000 percent growth rate might make this non-religious Assembly the fastest growing church in the world” without verifying this statistic.

This media hype does at least serve to direct attention toward the cultural shift documented by Pew Research that indicates that one in five people in the United States now classify their religious affiliation as “none.” However, news analysis often fails to fully analyze the nuances that lie within this data. Giving the study its due would require assessing the overall movement away from institutional religious structures within which 88% of those who classify their religion as “none” importantly state that they are not looking to belong to any religious body.

Gretta Vosper, author, atheist, founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity, and minister in the United Church of Canada in Toronto, places this surge of interest in Sunday Assembly within the larger cultural shift she’s observed transpiring in more liberal Christian congregations. Over the past few decades, she’s witnessed a move away from the idea of God as a divine father figure into more metaphorical expressions about God among clergy and congregants. Even though emergent and progressive author/speakers like Lillian Daniels and Diana Butler Bass promote the notion that people seek experiences that are “spiritual but not religious,” their work presupposes that these seekers are looking for a more welcoming “Christian” community when, in fact, the Pew Research indicates only 12% of the nones are looking for a religion that may be right for them. Along those lines, Rachel Held Evans’ assertion on the CNN Belief blog that Millennials “need” the church ignores the glaring reality that over a third of young adults identify their religion as “none.”

When describing the ethos of Sunday Assembly, Jones paints with a broad brush. “I’d like to make this as un-atheistic as possible. Atheism is boring. We’re both post-religious.” By using this rather elusive term, Jones seems to be in tune with the Pew Research data indicating that 88 percent of these nones are not looking for a religion.

Media outlets like Newsweek who focus on the “atheistic” element of these churches fail to capture how Evans and Jones seek to deliver an inspirational message rather than bolster anti-God talk. In an email exchange Emery Emery, host of the LA based Ardent Atheist podcast analyzes Jones’ strategy in crafting large non-theistic gatherings.

[Jones] is no idiot and he is trying to build a community that is less vitriolic and seemingly, more accepting of all flavors of non-belief. His motivation seems to be numbers. He knows that the more butts in the seats, the more money in the basket. It’s clearly a numbers game for Jones and he has his sights set firmly on that prize.

This decision to veer clear of “atheist” talk created friction within the leadership behind the first Sunday Assembly church planted in New York on June 30, 2013. Michael Dorian, co-producer and co-director of the documentary Refusing My Religion, explained why the majority of the board members behind the launch of this particular church plant have since left the Sunday Assembly structure. “We didn’t feel we can have a godless congregation and not bring up religious issues like church-state separation or any religion-based issues that deny or diminish the importance of science in affairs of public policy or legislation. We need to talk about the advantages of living a good life without religion and Sanderson wants a happy uplifting service that doesn’t mention religion at all.” In an email exchange, Emery adds, “Atheists have been oppressed and marginalized for so long that Sunday Assembly’s desire to minimize the use of atheistic language felt like more of the same, so naturally, many in the community reacted with frustration and anger.”

Michael Dorian hosting December 2013 Godless Revival.

On October 15, 2013, Lee Moore, President of Atheist News Network and host of the NYC Sunday Assembly social media sites, announced via his Facebook page that he would now manage the social media for a new atheist group titled The Godless Revival. Dorian, who is co-launching this venture with Moore, describes The Godless Revival as “an atheist-friendly variety show with thought-provoking speakers.” So far their monthly gatherings have averaged over 80 people while the Meetup for the relaunched NYC Sunday Assembly lists 200 celebrators.

As NPR reported, the LA based Sunday Assembly appears to have gotten off the ground sans any schisms with around 400 people in attendance at their initial launch and 200 people continuing to return in the following months. Ian Dodd, one of the co-founders of LA’s Sunday Assembly chapter, described in an email his approach to building community. “I’ll be honest, I’m all about ripping off organized religion for the good parts, co-opting them and reclaiming them for the secular community. I’ve been reading The Purpose Driven Church by pastor Rick ‘Saddleback’ Warren and small groups is not the only thing we’ll be stealing from the Christian megachurches in the future.” Among the tactics they’re adopting include partnering with community service organizations, children’s programming during the services, and discussion groups between assemblies to be facilitated by Ian’s wife, who has experience with these types of groups.

But will people stay once Evans and Jones plant these Assemblies, especially in the United States? Fred Edwords, National Director, United Coalition of Reason, notes, “Many who have left religious institutions or have come to reject religious doctrines will find traditional congregational structures inappropriate. They will be the ones who stay away or only attend briefly as a novelty.” Perhaps revisiting these churches after a year’s time will indicate the level of long-term interest versus public curiosity to sample the latest popular fad garnering media buzz.

One might also ask how many people who consider themselves to be nonreligious want a gathering with a more atheistic bent such as that offered by the Godless Revival?  In a posting for CNN’s Belief blog, Katie Engelhart reports from London on her experiences attending Sunday Assembly, noting her disappointment as the church moved from a localized venture to a global entity.

Instead of a thoughtful sermon, I got a five-minute Wikipedia-esque lecture on the history of particle physics. Instead of receiving self-improvement nudges or engaging in conversation with strangers, I watched the founders fret (a lot) over technical glitches with the web streaming, talk about how hard they had worked to pull the service off, and try to sell me Sunday Assembly swag. What’s more, instead of just hop, skipping and jumping over to a local venue, as I once did, I now had to brave the tube and traverse the city.

In response to this posting which Evans and Jones described as somewhat shrill and alarmist, they summarily dismissed all critiques. Instead, they cited their positive attributes such as their charitable endeavors and the creation of 28 global Sunday Assemblies. In particular, they chose to focus on some of their better performing assemblies while dismissing the concerns behind the split within the NYC Sunday Assembly.

As of this writing, the long-term success for Sunday Assembly remains to be seen. They fell well short of their £500,000 target by raising less than £60k. However, Evans and Jones remain optimistic as they set their sights on launching an additional 100 churches come September 2014.

***

Becky Garrison contributes to a range of outlets including The Guardian, Religion Dispatches, The Humanist, Believe Out Loud, and American Atheist. Her seven books include Roger Williams’ Little Book of Virtues, and Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church.

The post The Sunday Assembly: Time for a Religion Free Megachurch Revival? appeared first on The Revealer.

Photography by Ryan Roco

Text by Bertil Lintner

“To be Kachin is to be Christian,” says Tsinyu Tanggun, an official at the Baptist church in Momauk, a small town in Burma’s northernmost Kachin State. More than 90 per cent of Burma’s one million Kachins are Christians while the rest follow pre-Christian Animist practices. Churches, most of them Baptist but also some Roman Catholic, can be seen in virtually every town and village. Christianity has become even more important among the Kachins since renewed fighting broke out between local guerrillas from the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Burmese government’s forces in June 2011.

Attacks by the government’s army ended seventeen years of ceasefire with the central authorities, and there are now more than 100,000 people in camps for “Internally Displaced Persons”, or IDPs, in Kachin State. A recent report by Human Rights Watch also outlines indiscriminate attacks by the Burmese army, including heinous acts of sexual violence and torture of villagers suspected of being KIA supporters.

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the Kachins see their struggle as a “Just War”, a fight to defend the interest of a mainly Christian people in a predominantly Buddhist nation. This is a concept that the KIA’s propaganda department has promoted through music and film that it distributes all over the state, and that is also what many Kachins told me when I visited rebel-held areas in December 2012, and government-controlled territory a year later.

The concept of a “Just War” also appears to have been sanctioned by the Kachin Baptist Convention, and preached by its pastors in their pulpits. “We pray for victory for the KIA,” said a pastor in Myitkyina, the Kachin State capital. I got the same message when I attended a Kachin service in a local Baptist church in Oakland, California, last Easter. They told me they collect money for the IDPs — and expressed their support for the KIA.

The Kachins, actually a group of people belonging to half-a-dozen different tribes, were converted to Christianity by American, mainly Baptist missionaries at the end of the 19^th and the beginning of the 20^th century. A hill people, they were seen as savages by the people of the central plains, and the Burmese king Mindon, who ruled in Mandalay from 1853 to 1878, even warned the first missionaries who had come to spread the gospel in the northern mountains: “So you are to teach the Kachins! Do you see my dogs over there? I tell you, it will be easier to convert and teach these dogs. You are wasting your life.”[1]

But the missionaries were not deterred, and the conversion rate among the Kachins soon became one of the highest among any foreign mission in Southeast Asia. The missionaries also Romanized the main Kachin dialect, Jingphaw. The Bible and Christian hymns were translated into Jinghpaw, and the “savages of the hills”, thanks to the church, now had their own written language.

The arrival of the missionaries in tribal areas in Southeast Asia fermented a social, cultural and economic transformation. Christianity gave many poor hill tribes, and the Kachins were one of them, a common creed instead of scattered beliefs in the power of spirits. With education came self-esteem and ethnic pride — and an entirely new national consciousness.

Since Christianity was introduced in the Kachin Hills more than a century ago, the new faith and traditional, ethnic identity have become inseparable. Almost inevitably, this resulted in a gap between the people of the hills and those in the central plains and has led to serious, seemingly never-ending conflicts. The Kachins are among more than a dozen hill peoples, who for decades have been fighting against Burma’s central government. The Karens, another people with a strong Baptist component, took up arms in 1949, only a year after Burma had become independent from its former colonial power, Great Britain. The Kachins resorted to armed struggle in 1961.

The Kachins, nevertheless, have faith in their ability to resist — and in the religion that more than a century ago have them a new life. “In the end, truth and justice will prevail,” a Kachin wrote to me in an email. “And we believe God will not abandon us.”

Ryan Roco is a researcher and photographer. His work from Burma and greater Asia has been published and exhibited internationally. Visit his website at www.ryanroco.com or follow him on Twitter @ryanroco.

Bertil Lintner is a journalist living in Thailand who has written seven books about Burma including “The Kachin: Lords of Burma’s Northern Frontier” and “Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948.

***

Q & A with photographer Ryan Roco

On February 7, 2014, Ryan Roco talked with The Revealer’s international editor, Natasja Sheriff, about his experiences documenting the conflict in Kachin State, northern Burma.

Natasja Sheriff: When did you go to Kachin for the first time? What drew you there?

Ryan Roco: I had moved from New York to Thailand to cover what I had understood to be civil war in Burma. As a photographer, I was there to take photos of what I had read about, the atrocities I had heard of, perpetrated in the context of conflict.

NS: You said you went to cover what you thought was civil war. You went expecting a certain kind of conflict, is that what you found?

RR: It was not a high intensity conflict, but it was one that often took place in areas that you just couldn’t reach. These were largely military positions, very few civilians; you just don’t have the type of urban destruction and fall out that you see in conflicts like we see in Syria and so many other conflicts. The terrain was extremely difficult. It started to make sense to me why there were so few images coming out of these areas compared to what had been written about the war.

In Karen and Shan states the conflict was more sporadic and certainly of lower intensity. While I was in Kachin, not only had I been granted access by the Kachin Independence Army to reach their most frontline positions but I was there at the time of one of the heaviest Burmese offensives, and it was incredible. The disproportionate amount of force was overwhelming. The artillery barrages would last for more than 30 minutes, constant, so much so that you can barely stick your head out to see what’s happening.

NS: How did the role of religion in daily life start to become part of the story you were trying to tell?

RR: I felt like my purpose was to show the reality of this civil war, of the infighting inside Burma, and to try and show it through a more cultural lens, to try and understand the Kachins as a people; that’s something I had the privilege to do because I was able to stay there for so many months consecutively.

I began to attend church services, to visit families and I began hanging out longer at the camps of the displaced instead of bouncing from frontline to frontline to get the dramatic images of the soldiers with guns, and all the sort of cliché images that we see from conflict.

As an outsider working there, the overlap between religion and the Kachin identity was something that was immediately apparent. If it’s not part of the story that people are telling when they go there, then it’s simply because they’re choosing not to tell it. Once I had moved past just looking at what I perceived to be conflict, I started to look more at the people, and then it was an obvious decision to start looking into religion.

I’m constantly critical of media coverage from these areas, maybe because they’re so close to my heart because I’ve spent so much time there. But I feel like religion is something that is used to dramatize narratives in Burma, often, rather than perhaps used to humanize them. I’m hoping that my photographs give a more human element to a narrative of conflict. The narrative is inherently dramatic, but open up the complexity and nuance to show what it looks like to be part of this minority group, in this oppressive country and to be at war.

Every so often you see Christian-based wire services report that a pastor was killed in Kachin state, or a church was burned or something happened in the context of a Christian setting; then it’s reported all over the internet as Christian persecution. I can’t say that in any of my time there that I witnessed anything that I would have called a direct religiously motivated type of persecution or violence. In that sense, I don’t think that religion is part of the conflict.

NS: You mentioned in our communication before this interview that religion has, in some ways, also become a justification for war, and part of the conflict itself?

RR: There was a point during my time there, when I realized that things I had perceived to be very separate—religion, ethnicity and nationalism—were impossible to break up. Some examples specifically, I’m debating if I want to call it propaganda, include media that is produced by the Kachin Independence Organization, featuring footage of Kachin Independence Army training, shots from various news reels and battle scenes, depicting the fighters in this glorious light. Yet, on this publicly distributed DVD, you also have this introduction that shows soldiers praying, families praying, images of Jesus and some songs about how we need to pray for our soldiers and how we need to pray for our battle and how, if we are right, we will be victorious.

NS: In our earlier communication, you talked about ‘Just War’. How did that emerge during your reporting?

RR: I arrived in Kachin for the first time three weeks after the fighting had started [in 2012]. There had been a [17-year] ceasefire before that, but I had not spent any time there. From that time until two years later, I noticed the distinct difference in the role, or at least the attitude, that the church and pastors had towards the war.

At the beginning, it seemed very easy for them to feel as if they were somewhat removed and insulated from the conflict, by the church. They said ‘we can’t take sides’, ‘we support the Kachin people but we can’t support this fighting’, ‘we hope for peace’, ‘we pray for peace’, ‘we also pray for the Burma army’, and ‘we pray that this country and that the Kachin people can be free and have rights’.

But in my later days there, speaking with these same pastors that I’d met two years previously, they no longer espoused these kind of ideas and this separation. It felt distinctly different, like there was now this endorsement [of the conflict]. And I remember having a conversation with a pastor about that, and whether it was something that they had identified as happening, and he spoke soberly about human rights abuse.

It became evident to me that, from his perspective, the war is justified, and it was because of these kinds of atrocities being perpetrated against innocent people, innocent Kachin civilians.

This interview has been edited and condensed for publication. 

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

The post Burma: Faith and Resistance in Kachin appeared first on The Revealer.

Jesse Bransford, “Talisman,” 2006, 12×12″, acrylic, watercolor, graphite on paper.

By Don Jolly

T. Peter Park is a retired librarian with a Ph.D. in European history from the University of Virginia. He has white hair and a round, red face. His eyes are perpetually-squinted half-moons, crowded by his smile. His shirtfront pocket is always overflowing with pens, in a dizzying array of colors, brands and points. He’s constantly writing.

“All my life, I’ve been kind of a bit omnivorous in my reading and research,” he told me when we met last January in a Madison Avenue bookstore. “I’ve always liked what most people would call reputable scholarly history and philosophy, but at the same time, ever since my early teens, I’ve liked reading about haunted houses and ghosts and ESP and UFOs and abductions and the Loch Ness Monster and sea serpents and Bigfoot and other ‘hairy hominids’ and so forth.”

It was a cold night, and the snow from a few days before had solidified into a slippery mess of ice-polyps, collected in the places where direct sunlight never fell. The shop, one cozy room lit by antique fixtures, was filling up with people who, like Peter and I, were waiting to hear Mitch Horowitz, editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin, Penguin Book’s metaphysical literature imprint, deliver a chapter from his book, One Simple Idea, a history of “positive thinking” in American culture, from the Reform minister Norman Vincent Peale to contemporary twelve-step programs.

Horowitz’s previous work, Occult America, released in 2009, had been a major hit with Park and his circle. It claimed to chart a hidden path through American history — leading readers into a world of spiritualist seances, hypnotic healings and ritual magic, stretching back further than the founding of the Republic. Since its publication, Horowitz has been known to lead the occasional walking tour of New York’s own occult landmarks, pointing out statues of Pagan gods, Egyptian obelisks and places where various fringe religionists once lived. Last fall, I met a woman who’d been on one of Horowitz’s tours. It changed her whole perspective, she said. The tour let her see how much energy there was in the city — magical energy — coursing below the streets. It was that energy that kept her here, that energy which was attracting others. An occult revival in New York, she told me, was underway.

Park, with his paranormal tastes, is undoubtedly a part of the movement. “I’ve always had a kind of omnivorous magpie-like curiosity about that sort of stuff,” he continued. “An old friend from the University of Virginia jocularly calls it ‘pig-hanging weird piss.’” Park laughed, closing his eyes completely. “I’ve always been a pig-hanging weird piss devotee!” he said.

Since we first met last fall, I’ve received at least an e-mail a day from T. Peter Park. Sometimes they’re long essays, sometimes forwarded links, sometimes tidbits pulled from out-of-the-way corners of the Internet. No matter the format, his messages are concerned with “the occult and esoteric as a problem in sociology.” His interest, like Horowitz’s, is in the liminal and the hidden – the idea that there is a secret order to the world which only select individuals have both the ability and inclination to understand. Park’s messages, which often begin with the salutation “Friends! Forteans! Thinkers!,” are aimed at this elect demographic.

His work began years ago, when Park started contributing to a few listserves that catalogue paranormal happenings in the style of Charles Fort, a pioneering American writer during the late 1920s and early 30s.

“I used to be the list-owner and co-founder of a now-defunct list called Mythfolk,” he said. “It still sort of exists, but has been taken over by pornography marketeers.” Park continues to contribute to another, still-extant, list called Forteana, and many items in his personal mailings are “carbon copies” of his contributions there.  When Park writes something he’s particularly proud of, he forwards it to a circle of friends and colleagues — including myself, Mitch Horowitz and “the whole Observatory crew,” a body of other occult practitioners and researchers loosely affiliated with The Observatory, a Brooklyn art and performance space which hosts lectures on ritual magic, spiritualism and other esoteric topics.

Recent messages have included an expansive discussion of the science fiction writer C.M. Kornbluth’s 1956 satire of positive thinking, “The Cosmic Charge Account,” a personal reflection on Scientology in the late 1970s, and a conjectural genealogy of the Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, whose ancestors, Park argues, likely practiced a “variegated, easy-going and eclectic ‘folk religion,’” complete with practical magic.

“I really take it very seriously,” he said. “It sometimes takes me several days, sometimes several weeks, to work on my essays. Generally I start them longhand, on legal pads, and then I type them up in my computer and edit them for a while. Then I broadcast them!”

“And you get responses?” I asked.

A shot of joy ran across his face. “I do!” he replied.

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“There’s been a magical revival happening in New York City for two to three years,” Damon Stang, the “shop witch” for Catland Books in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, told the New York Times last year. “I think it’s a nostalgia that people have for a sense of enchantment with the world.”

There is some material evidence that a new interest in magic and esoteric subjects is growing. Catland itself, an active center for pagan rites and magical ceremonies, opened last February. The Times article, which appeared ten months after opening, is an indication of that interest, although it was albeit a local-color piece called “Friday Night Rites”  in which the shop was erroneously located in  Williamsburg. More substantially, NYU hosted its first annual Occult Humanities Conference in October — a gathering of researchers, practitioners and artists from all over the world who engaged in work with the occult and esoteric. The Observatory, Park’s home base, has been offering well-attended lectures on magical topics since 2009, including a few by Mitch Horowitz.

I attended the NYU conference, just down the street from The Revealer’s office. It was there that I met Park, and others like him — including the conference’s organizers, Jesse Bransford, an artist, and Pam Grossman, a blogger and co-founder of The Observatory. Nearly everyone I talked to was invested in the idea that the “occult” was experiencing a kind of revival, globally and locally.

In the academic study of religion, “the occult” is neither settled as a term nor a community. At its most basic level, it indicates a kind of hiddenness — a concealed truth. In popular usage, this usually means pagan nature worship, witchcraft, spirit communication, magic and other fringe religious ideas. The scholar Catherine Albanese, in her magisterial A Republic of Mind and Spirit, investigated many American practitioners of these forms as “metaphysicals,” a particular variety of religious actor for whom the power of the mind and the existence of a concealed “energy” within the body and the world, are essential. It’s a useful term, but hardly ever applied outside of the academy. The people I met at the conference preferred the words “occult” and “esoteric” to describe their interests, often using them interchangeably. How can a revival be studied when it is unclear what, exactly, is being revived?

Maybe the answer can be found within “the occult” itself — in that fractured aesthetic of hidden powers and magical potentials — that variable doctrine of “energy.” At the conference, and in the months that followed, I sat down with both Grossman and Bransford, to ask them about their views on the matter and about the ways in which their occult pursuits might interface with my own study of religion. We never settled the revival question. Bransford and Grossman did, however, give me a better idea of what such a movement might look like.

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Jesse Bransford, Guardian (Mavors In Potentia), 2006, 65×41″, acrylic, watercolor, graphite on paper.

The wind was up, spinning leaves between the legs of the passing crowd, on the night I attended the opening gala of the NYU Occult Humanities Conference.

Several galleries and a classroom on the first floor of a richly antiquated building off of St. Mark’s had been reserved for the event. The largest room where the opening party was to take place had already filled with attendees and curious art students by the time I arrived. Grimoires, medieval books of spells, jockeyed for space on the cloth-draped vendors’ tables with collections of correspondence by the infamous twentieth-century magician Aleister Crowley. Wine and cheese were against the far wall. Art was everywhere, and the crowd was moving slowly from piece to piece.

Symbols drawn from Western divination blazed in red, black and yellow from Elijah Burgher’s man-sized canvases. Spiritualists and voodoo practitioners, their faces lost in a reverie of trance, stared out of blown-up portraits by the photographer Shannon Taggart. Jesse Bransford’s work  was delicately traced, spreading grids and curves and color in mathematical array, resembling the spirit alphabet revealed by angels in the 1580s to John Dee, the renaissance magician and philosopher.

“The arts and humanities are acutely interested in subjects related to the occult tradition,” read the program’s introduction. “Roughly defined, the occult tradition represents a series of culturally syncretic beliefs with related and overlapping visual histories.” These beliefs occur in almost every culture and era, continues the program. “Universal occult concerns often include some kind of magic; a longing to connect with an immaterial or trans-personal realm and a striving for inner knowledge.” The goal of the conference was to explore these themes through “research, scholarship and artistic practice.” The goal of opening night was to get everybody pleasantly drunk while Meredith Yayanos played the theremin.

Before the music started, I mingled with the crowd. It was a packed room, but ultimately, a small one. There were maybe a hundred people wending between the various exhibits. I wondered how universal the occult could really be, given that the attendees were predominately white, young and almost exclusively dressed in black.

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Pam Grossman is a significant figure in the New York occult circle. Her esoteric art blog, Phansmaphile, is one of the most popular of its type and she serves as associate editor of the Abraxas International Journal of Esoteric Studies, a publication which exists to document and advance what its press releases call “an increasing esoteric sensibility” in art and culture. The Observatory, the Brooklyn performance and lecture space which Grossman co-founded in 2009, along with seven other artists and bloggers, serves as an important hub for those in the New York area with an interest in the occult. It’s where Peter Park recruits for his mailing list.

I spoke with Grossman between sessions on the first full day of the conference, sharing adjacent seats in a temporarily abandoned lecture hall. Grossman a small woman with pale skin and dark hair that falls past her shoulders, speaks directly and affably, but with a certain practiced quality. She makes a good ambassador, and has been asked to play one on occasion, writing on esoteric topics for mainstream publications such as the Huffington Post. Within the world of the occult, Grossman’s resume is even more impressive. “I’ve been interested in esoteric subjects since before I even knew what the word esoteric meant,” she said. “Since childhood, I loved anything having to do with mythology, anything having to do with magic and fairy tales.  As I got older, I got deeper into the material.”

Eventually, this pursuit led Grossman into what she calls a “magical” or “imaginal” frame of mind. For her, everything is significant. There are no coincidences. “I do believe that there is some kind of a spirit you tap into that transcends whatever this material space is,” she said. “It’s allowed me to live life,or try to live life, with an almost mythical lens, to really follow signposts and synchronicities and symbols, what I often call the trail of cosmic breadcrumbs.”

“Do you think of that as a religious idea?” I asked, attempting to gauge her opinion of the term

Grossman paused. I could tell she was formulating a way to render her objections without giving offense. “Religion,” she began, slowly, “while I think it has its merits, buckets out content, first of all.” She meant that it provided its truth in discrete, and controlled, chunks. “Second, it highly encourages a mediator between you and the divine. You need a priest or a rabbi or what have you.” Not so with the esoteric, she said. “While there are certainly teachers you can study this material with,” she said, “I think one of the reasons people are gravitating toward it so much today is because you don’t really need a mediator.”

The necessity of this self-direction attracts certain personalities to the study, Grossman believed. “Most people here, I imagine, love to read,” she continued. “[The esoteric] really encourages that kind of bibliomania. And if you’re someone who loves to read, you’re also someone who is comfortable being an autodidact, comfortable seeking out knowledge externally and also within yourself.  And [you trust] the patterns that that weaves, as opposed to relying on someone else to tell you what wisdom is or what divinity is.” She sounded more like a protestant than a magician. Her calls for direct study of text and a personal relationship with the truth of the divine seemed, to me, definitely rooted in the thinking of Luther – with his criticisms of the Roman Church  as dogmatic, hierarchical and ultimately obfuscating expanded onto religion as a whole. There were some key differences, however. Luther argued for direct engagement with one book. Grossman, for her part, emphasizes engagement with books in general.

Naturally, this lead me to wonder what kind of texts she finds significant. “Is there anything different about an esoteric text, as opposed to a non-esoteric one?” I asked. Grossman shook her head. “For me, it’s not just text,” she said. “I suppose we’re using that word broadly because [the esoteric] is very image-based as well.” She began thinking out loud, mulling over the issue. “I’m kind of forming my thoughts as I’m talking,” she laughed. “But I do think that what’s powerful about the written word is that it allows for the exchange of knowledge, right?  I would argue that the Internet is just that, times a million.”

“When we all got started on [the Internet], we all assumed we were going to have avatars and we were going to pretend to be other people and it would be very veiled and very hidden,” she said. “In fact, the Internet has allowed us to be, for better or for worse, who we are and what we’re actually like.” For Grossman, the Internet works to reveal its users’ interiors, even certain things — like an interest in the esoteric — which might be harder to admit in polite, physical society. Digital spaces are excellent places for the construction of occult communities. “The beauty of the Internet is also that it allows you to ‘find the others,’” she continued, quoting Timothy Leary, the guru of  1960s acid culture. “We can find those people from the nether regions and bring them together in physical space.”

She looked around the room. Two attendees, white men in dark coats, were having an animated discussion by the fire escape. There was a murmur of conversation from the hall. “It’s been really heartening to me, even in the couple of hours since we’ve started, to hear the conversations and the cross-pollinations and links between people,” Grossman smiled. “And who knows what relationships are forming, what projects they’re going to do together? I mean, I love that.” I began to feel the conference might be the physical tip of largely digital iceberg. Again, I was reminded of Luther — and the centrality of the printing press to the reformation. Maybe an occult revival, in Grossman’s conception, required another leap-forward in information technology.

“I love that the Internet largely brought all these people together,” she said. “But that it comes full circle in the material world, person to person.”

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Jesse Bransford, Martian Spirits, 2006, 75×47″, acrylic, watercolor, graphite on paper.

A few weeks after the conference, on Armistice Day, I sat down with Jesse Bransford at a sandwich shop with a glass front in the East Village. It was the lunch rush, and the place was crammed with students. He ate while we talked.

Bransford is tall and pale, with long, straight blonde hair. His eyes looked thoughtfully out from behind thick glasses. He works for NYU, where he has been Undergraduate Director of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development since 2005. He’s been displaying at galleries, locally and internationally, since 1997. About ten years ago, he started a series of pieces on the theme of the seven visible planets. That’s what brought him to his current conception of the occult.

“I had gone through about three bodies of work up to that point,” he said. “I was trying to figure out what to do next. Until then, he told me, he’d been very “lighthearted in my approach.” He described doing a series of drawings based on his reading of the rock band Blue Oyster Cult through some of the twentieth century’s foremost intellectual voices, including Francis Yates, a historian whose pioneering work on Renaissance magic and the Rosicrucians helped legitimize the Academy’s study of “the esoteric.” It was  “real hi-low mash-up type stuff,” Bransford said. He soon abandoned Blue Oyster Cult, but not Francis Yates.

Her 1966 book, The Art of Memory, was especially key for Bransford. “It talks about creative intention and an ordering of the perceived universe, which bridged through this thing she called magic,” he said. His idea of this ordering wasn’t too far off from Grossman’s imaginal lens — a way to view the world as a series of significant symbols rather than dumb coincidences. “I realized pretty early on that these kinds of correspondences exist pan-culturally,” he continued. “I was like, ‘You know what I bet? That this set of phenomena are universal.’ And they of course, were.” He set out to explore this universal magic artistically. The planets were a natural subject. “Every cultural perspective you can look at has an attitude towards the seven visible planets,” he said.

Beginning with the sun, and taking around a year to produced and display each work, Bransford began his decade-long project. “As I kept working, things just started getting weird,” he said. “In every lecture I give about this, I talk about Robert Anton Wilson’s idea of ‘chapel perilous,’ which is the idea that if you’re courting a belief system or working within a belief system, at a certain point, that belief system will manifest itself in such a way that it’s reality becomes undeniable. And at that point, you’re either in or out.” Wilson, a writer and philosopher with an interest in conspiracies and the occult, first coined “chapel perilous” in his 1977 novel Cosmic Trigger. He used it to indicate an experience of the divine so powerful that the only two possible responses were agnosticism or paranoia. For Bransford, his encounter with “chapel perilous” occurred in 2005. He was working on Mars:

I was in Cologne, finishing up – preparing the exhibition. I was working late and a step-up transformer for an electrical conversion exploded, like right in the middle of where I was working. I got creeped out big time. It was late. It was after midnight. This thing exploded. The whole room filled with ozone. I was like, ‘That’s pretty telltale,’ – like in the reading that I’ve done, that’s a pretty telltale sign that something’s entered the space, right? So things like that kept happening. It kept amplifying and about half way through the project, I sort of made a decision to start really pushing things to see what happened. I went to Peru and worked with a shaman down there. From that point forward, it was: ‘magic is real and I have to deal with that now.’  There were telepathic experiences. There were – you just sort of fill in the blanks in terms of the strange tales, kind of like a romantic notion of seeing the other side.  All that stuff.

For Bransford, experience was a key component of his occult conception. Various texts he had been engaged with until that time served only as a prelude to his fateful encounter in Cologne. Even before reading Yates, Bransford had been interested in books of medieval and renaissance magic, particularly a book by the Renaissance magician Cornelius Aggripa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy. “Originally [I had] a sort of very analytical, almost anthropological take on the material. But now that I’ve started working with [it], I realize that I was only doing half of the job. It really comes alive when you actually work with it.” Work, in this case, meant the production of “talismanic” art, capable of effecting supernatural change. Until Bransford began experiencing such things directly, works like Aggripa’s were just flat, dead wood.

I repeated a question I’d asked Grossman. “Do you consider that religious?”

He thought. “One of the big mistakes that I think the mainstream press has made,” he said, “is that they call [the occult] religion-lite or spiritualism-lite or belief-lite or whatever. I think that’s a cheap shot. It ignores the fundamental distinction that this material tries to make.” The distinction being, in Bransford’s view, that occult productions aren’t afraid to openly incorporate, alter and recombine material from a wide range of texts, communities and practices. The occult, he said, is “the stuff that’s amalgamating and is very upfront about that amalgamation.” Of course, he acknowledged, all religious traditions are combinative in some capacity. The difference, for Bransford, is that the occult places the act of creative bricolage at its center.

“My take on it is, [occultists] aren’t necessarily interested in a truth or a singular truth,” he said. “I think they’re interested in a consensus-based or consensual, metaphorical set of constructs that become truth-like.” He viewed his community as being a place of infinite individual systems of reading, practice and belief — combined and coalesced only by their commitment to individual agency.

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One of the problems with being a scholar of religion is that your definition of the term comes colored by decades of debate and theory that are alien to most of its practitioners and adherents. Bransford and Grossman see “religion” as something to react against, a monolithic and disempowering system of control. Park, who approaches his messages with some version of the scholarly distance I share, thinks more broadly and is more forgiving. I think he’d probably agree with me that “the occult” is a specialized form of religious thinking, almost a set of aesthetic conventions within Albanese’s idea of the American metaphysical.

What stood out in my conversations with Bransford and Grossman was their mutual interest in affirming the religious agency of the individual. The communities they imagined and helped to create, were necessarily heterogenous places where clashing claims to truth were held side-by-side, allowing Bransford’s “truth-like” metaphorical constructs to emerge. The scholar Courtney Bender, in her 2010 study of a Cambridge “spiritual” community, The New Metaphysicals, documents such a group. As Bender notes, even calling them a “group” is a stretch. Although her subjects share a geographical location and commitment to respecting each other’s individual beliefs and practices, they share practically nothing else.

An occult revival, in New York or anywhere, would likely encounters similar problems with cohesion. Or, in keeping with the idea of an individuated truth, perhaps it’s best to say that New York’s “occult revival” is ongoing for those who find it necessary to go on.

Since I began working on this piece I’ve received eight messages from T. Peter Park — three of them about Hopi mysticism. It’s a lonely kind of revival.

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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. 

Jolly will be presenting at The Observatory on February 21st on one of his primary research interests, the Church of Scientology. More information on his “illustrated lecture” can be found here. Doors at eight, admission eight dollars. 

The post Chapel Perilous: Notes From The New York Occult Revival appeared first on The Revealer.

from GQ Magazine

In honor of the olympics, our friend Jeff Sharlet has a wonderful read at GQ titled “Being Gay in Russia.” The Nation has a piece on U.S. Evangelical influence on Russia’s “Pro-Family” Right. While at Guernica, Meara Sharma interviews Masha Gessen on “Putin, anti-queer campaigns and the ‘personal catastrophe’ of exile.

In memory of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, here is one of our favorite clips from The Master (2012), where Hoffman plays Lancaster Dodd, a fictional rendition of Scientology leader L. Ron Hubbard.

Philip Seymour Hoffman in “The Master”

Speaking of Scientology, watch the Scientology video ad that aired during the Super Bowl here.

At The Atlantic, Emma Green writes on a “Texas man’s lawsuit over the right to put up a religious billboard in a Lubbock county football stadium.” The ad, which features a tattooed Jesus (the word “Outcast” is inscribed on his chest), was produced by advertising firm RD Thomas and also features a website, Jesustattoo.com, where viewers can watch video testimonials on practicing Christians explaining their thoughts on their faith.

The NYTimes has a piece on the United States’s first Muslim fraternity. Also at the Times, Slawomir Sierakowski writes on the Polish Church’s problem with gender.

While speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama listed religious freedom as one of the primary tenets of U.S. foreign policy, the NYTimes also reports.

Didn’t watch the televised creationist vs. evolutionist debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham? Neither did we. Here’s a short recap from Time on what we missed.

Aljazeera has a great read on Hindu mythologies and their role in Indian T.V.

In Right Wing news, Pat Robertson explained “divine genocide” on this week’s The 700 Club, Jesse Lee Peterson, president of The Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (an American religious non-profit organization), referred to Obama as the “Son of Satan,” and talk show host Kevin Swanson condemned the Grammy’s as a “Satanic Pagan Orgy.”

On a lighter note, Vice published a photo-shoot titled “Sisters” which features “Nuns Decked out in Latex and Lace.

  **Keep an eye out for our February issue, out next week!**

The post Weekend Links: Tattooed Jesus, Putin’s Repression, the Mahabharat TV Series, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.