(Image source: Illustration by Rick Szuecs for Christianity Today)

Many years ago, I was wandering around the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago when a pair of idols caught the corner of my eye. Passing the Lamassu, the immense Neo-Assyrian winged bull with a man’s head carved into limestone, I walked over and stood in front of a display, towering over two little men.

A gold man on the left was sitting, staring back at me with two empty eye sockets. One hand was chopped off. The other looked like it was holding a ping pong paddle. He was wearing a tall, funny hat, but had a superbly lined goatee. His eyebrows and lips were resting in a look of disappointment or senile exhaustion. The legs formed a perfect 90 degrees, draped in a skirt, resting on what previously must have been a throne but was now a wooden block that was part of the museum’s display. His chest was crumpling like an autumn leaf.

To the right of the gold man, there was a smaller, rusty figurine. He also had empty eye sockets, a missing hand, actually a missing arm, a slightly pointier hat, and a skirt. But this one looked like a younger man. He was shirtless, revealing ripped pectoral muscles. And he was standing—leaning forward with one leg in front of the other—raising his right fist in the air. The closed fist had a circular hole in the middle, the kind that my childhood action figures had for placing guns or lightsabers. Maybe this guy once carried a sword?

I looked down and read the descriptions at the bottom of the display.

21. Late Bronze Age II, ca. 1350-1200 B.C.

The conical hat on this seated figure identified it as El, the creator deity and supreme patriarch of the Canaanite pantheon. Cast in bronze and covered with gold leaf, this statuette is an idol of the type forbidden by the much later Hebrew prophets.

22. Late Bronze Age II, ca. 1550-1200 B.C.

This bronze figurine is believed to represent the Canaanite god Ba’al Hadad, son of the supreme deity El. Ba’al Hadad, identified as the god of fertility and storms, was among the most prominent of the Canaanite deities.

As a Christian, I had always been curious about these idols. I had read about them in the Bible where God’s people often cheated on him with idols like Ba’al. But this was the first time I had seen such false gods up close.

(Ba’al. Image source: Wikipedia Commons)

I was a freshman when these idols serendipitously entered my line of sight. During my first semester at Calvin College, I took a course that covered premodern history and art. I remember being happy when I learned that the course included a free field trip to a museum in Chicago. At the time, I was an evangelical Christian, wrestling with my faith as I became exposed to a more critical approach to understanding religion in the classroom.

Our class made the day trip from Grand Rapids to Chicago midway through the semester. Neo-Gothic towers protruded around the Oriental Institute, and red and yellow ivies devoured its somber stone walls as if it were a site of sacred skeletal remains, simultaneously dead and alive. The only thing I knew about the University of Chicago before this trip was that the fictional character of Indiana Jones was once an archeology professor and “obtainer of rare antiquities” there.

The Oriental Institute was founded in 1919 and its museum opened in 1931. This was after the upstart field of biblical archeology had become all the rage. In 1872, George Smith, a curator at the British Museum, made an announcement he believed would confirm the Bible’s history and shake the entire world. He had deciphered a recently discovered Assyrian tablet—a fragment from the Epic of Gilgamesh—that appeared to corroborate the historicity of the Genesis flood narrative. Smith allegedly went into a frenzy after he made his translation, jumping and stripping off his clothes in front of his colleagues.

Soon after, the British, the French, and eventually the Americans, entered an archeological race to excavate and acquire items in the Levant. At first, some archeologists thought they would prove and flesh out the historical narratives in the Bible. For example, the Bible talked about Jericho’s walls falling. And here were archeologists uncovering the ancient ruins of the city of Jericho. Over time, however, the mounting evidence created a more complicated picture of ancient Israelite religion, one that ran against traditional assumptions.

I wasn’t aware of this history when I stepped inside the sterile air of the Oriental Institute’s museum. Even the irony of its name—which enshrined a mistaken point of view, like Christopher Columbus discovering “Indians” in the Caribbean—didn’t register for me at the time. Instead, I burst into laughter and mocked the deities from behind the plexiglass. Shaking my head, I muttered to myself how silly it was that people could ever worship such things.

I thought about the story in 1 Kings where the prophet Elijah confronts the prophets of Jezebel, who was King Ahab’s pagan wife. Elijah preached that Yahweh, and Yahweh alone, was to be worshipped. The royal court sends Jezebel’s prophets, 450 devoted to the god Ba’al and 400 devoted to the goddess Asherah, to Mount Carmel where they engage in a prophetic duel with Elijah while a mob looks on. They kill two bulls, lay them side by side, and pray to see which God will miraculously burn their bull with fire. Ba’al’s prophets pray but nothing happens. Elijah prays and fire comes down from on high, consuming his bull. Elijah then orders the mob to seize the prophets of Ba’al and he slaughters all of them.

Although idolatry, technically, means the worship of idols, I had learned from Christian preachers to see idolatry in today’s world as existing beyond just physical deities. Idolatry could also mean pursuing the perfect body or securing one’s worth in wealth. But for me, nothing compared to the concreteness of coming face to face with idols that had been buried under thousands of years of dust.

We drove back to Grand Rapids in a crammed, 15-passanger van, and I remained transfixed on those two devilish figurines. They were testaments to humanity’s blindness. Like the Bible said, these idols had mouths but couldn’t speak, and eyes but couldn’t see.

***

I remember choosing Calvin over other Christian schools like Liberty University or Moody Bible Institute because I wanted a rigorous liberal arts education and not fundamentalist smoke and mirrors. I wanted to be Christian and cultured. At the time, Calvin’s faculty had a broad ideological range that included professors who were open to questioning the Bible. I didn’t mind the challenge. My faith still allowed me to absorb what I was learning. The Bible remained infallible in my view. I saw the evidence presented to me as validating it somehow.

As with any ambitious survey course, the premodern class felt like a sprint from cave paintings to the Renaissance. In the first weeks before the trip to Chicago, the art portion had me completely out of my element. I was drowning in slideshows of images I needed to memorize names and dates for, and every other woman or feminine statue was named something-something-Venus. The history portion on the “Ancient Near East” fascinated me. This is where humans invented the wheel, where the Sumerians created writing, where one of the earliest human civilizations blossomed, straddling the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, flourishing for three thousand years before Christ. Babylon, the ancient city-state located in this region, was also where Daniel, the Jewish prophet my mom named me after, came of age.

I took a special interest in this part of the class because the assignments directly related to the Bible. Professor Lim highlighted the parallels between the first chapters of Genesis and the much older Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish.

(Epic of Gilgamesh. Image source: Wikipedia Commons)

I asked questions about the bizarre giant beings that appear right before Noah begins to build an ark in Genesis 6.

“Who were the Nephilim and where did they come from? What happened to them during the flood?”

Professor Lim sighed, taking one step forward and bringing his fingertips together in front of his gut, hands rocking as if in some frustrated prayer.

“We can’t take Noah’s flood narrative in Genesis as providing reliable information about events in history.”

Another boy, turning slightly red, mustered: “Why can’t we trust what the Bible says about the flood?”

The conservative students in class were now taking risks, getting close to disrupting the elaborate dance we all did not to say or write anything that would step on our professors’ sensibilities in our march toward getting A’s.

Professor Lim was a charmer with slick black hair. He occasionally dressed down in a University of Michigan hoodie to remind others, or perhaps himself, that he had toiled away at a dissertation in Ann Arbor and survived to teach students like us. Sometimes he spoke to our class as if he were texting a friend. When the blond girl who sat in the front row would speak up, he’d say, “Ohhh, Meegaan,” in a Valley Girl accent. He entertained our thoughts and entertained us even when his questions drew blank faces. One day, he pointed at me while doing a slideshow on Late Antiquity. “Wow, Daniel. You have an eerie resemblance to Ambrose of Milan!”

But on that day in which we discussed Genesis, Professor Lim sounded stern. I wouldn’t blame him if he was annoyed. Many of us were accustomed to literal interpretations, but he wanted us to look at the Bible like any other book.

“The biblical writers didn’t simply record revelation that fell from the sky, but they wove narratives that had emerged from their surrounding culture.”

Back then, I quietly judged Professor Lim to be a liberal, the kind of academic who didn’t uphold the faith of Christian orthodoxy. He didn’t value the authority of Scripture as much as I did, but I thought he sounded smart and confident in his grasp of history. I figured I could still learn from him. I was open to conceding that the early parts of Genesis were metaphorical. The stories about Abraham and Moses were still historically accurate, right?

We soon learned the Babylonian tales of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish, and I digested them as foils to the truth.

The Epic of Gilgamesh may have been a gripping story about queer love, grief, and the failed quest for immortality—with a minor flood-related subplot. But I latched onto the diluvian character of Utnapishtim and saw any similarities he shared with Noah as proving a) the biblical narrative’s grounding in some real event, and b) the superiority of Noah’s story.

The Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, may have shown that the first chapters of Genesis were written in polemical dialogue with other creation myths. But, in my eyes, Genesis was still the true myth. If the biblical writers’ narrative reflected their surrounding culture, then God must have helped them shape the right narrative. Humans weren’t an afterthought for gods who fought and slept with each other like these other stories claimed. We were the pinnacle of creation, made in God’s image.

***

In 2019, a decade after my field trip to Chicago, I read disturbing reports about a Christian zealot who stole carved statues of Pachamama and threw them into the Tiber River. The statues, representing the goddess mother earth in Latin America, were a gift that Indigenous people presented to Pope Francis during the Amazon Synod at the Vatican. At another point in my life, I might have applauded this young man’s act. He later uploaded a confession on YouTube and claimed to be rooting out idolatry and protecting Christianity’s purity. When I saw the news, my heart sank in the way it does for people who hurt themselves, for those who destroy the very planet that gives them breath. Then, I remembered how I had taunted El and Ba’al at the Oriental Institute. They had been haunting me ever since.

(Pachamama. Image source: Paul Haring for Catholic News Service)

I used to see Christianity as bestowing an identity that trumped all cultural allegiances. But as I got older, I started to wonder why Christianity became so good at perpetrating racism. I began to explore my own identity and to imagine who my non-European ancestors may have worshipped before converting—or being forced to convert—to the Christian faith. From this vantage point, the Canaanite idols eventually took on a different appearance.

In those intervening years, my questions changed. I went into college wanting to become a popular Christian apologist like Tim Keller. My goal was to prove Christianity’s superiority. I had no interest in issues of “racism” or “diversity.” In fact, during my first year in college, I decided to live in a residence hall community for those pursuing academic honors. Out of the 40 students, almost everyone was white except for me. I didn’t want to be known for playing race cards but wanted to blow people away with my brilliance. My objective was to transcend identity, storm the heights of philosophy and theology, and earn the simple honorific of “Theologian” just as Aristotle earned the nickname “The Philosopher” in the eyes of Thomas Aquinas. My post-racial pretensions, however, quickly came crashing down. Even if I wasn’t interested in racism, I learned, over and over again, that racism was interested in me.

Someone drew Nazi swastikas in my dorm during my freshman year. The community’s common space had a table wrapped in white poster paper where people would doodle, leave notes, and write immature jokes. When I was coming back from class one day, the table was bare, and the floor was abuzz with whispers that someone had drawn swastikas. The RA had quickly taken down the poster, but it wasn’t clear who had drawn the symbols. I became the most vocal community member to call for further investigation and consequences. Some people around me openly defended it as “freedom of speech” and accused me of overreacting. I felt abandoned by the silences of my peers.

I intimately sensed a chasm. No matter how Christian I was or how much my theology resembled theirs, I wasn’t white. These sorts of incidents shifted something deep within me. I became less interested in proving Christianity’s sound doctrine to others than in asking how Christianity can be used as a weapon to justify oppression. Before college, it was easy for me to exoticize white people. The Long Island neighborhood, public schools, and churches I grew up in were heavily Black, Latinx, and immigrant. During my late teens, I emulated my favorite Christian rappers, from Cross Movement to Flame to Lecrae, ferociously consuming and referencing the work of white Calvinists from a segregated distance. But when I saw the social and political fruits of that ideology at close range, I was horrified.

Those feelings stayed with me and then boiled over when the vandal desecrated the Pachamama statues. It held a mirror to my confusions. In my early 20s, I still wanted to rescue a pure and pristine Christianity from the clutches of white supremacist malpractice. As a person of color, my initial protestations against racist Christians were about being included in Christian supremacy, not about fundamentally altering it. I wanted to believe that the problem with the fruits had never infected the roots. I wanted to redeem the master’s untainted tools.

The more that I read, the more I grew frustrated. It’s hard to protect Christianity’s purity because such purity is an illusion. What would this religion be without the influence of Jews, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans? If you want peace, there are verses for that. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” If you want war, there are verses for that. “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”

The charge of idolatry that I relished using against others like the worshippers of Ba’al, I later realized, is one that can easily be turned against me and against people of color. Historically, white Christians have demonized the spiritualities of people around the world as idolatrous. You want to smuggle in some Platonism, thinly veiled white barbarian solar holiday, or the Easter Bunny? No problem. Something revered by a non-European or melanin-endowed ancestor? Heretic!

My questions about Christianity, racism, and colonial violence kept growing as I progressed through undergrad, then divinity school, then a life of independent research and writing. It was this problem that drove me to revisit the biblical story of the ancient Israelite conquest of the Canaanites. I wanted to understand how Exodus’s God of liberation could turn around and become the God of genocide. In the process of writing on that, I learned that the story about the Canaanites was close to the hearts of modern Spanish and British colonizers who warmly cited it as they shed human blood in the Americas; for them, Native Americans were like Canaanites. Years ago, I reduced the Canaanites to one-dimensional villains who bowed before idols; I took the violence enacted against them in the Bible to be just. Now, I wanted to learn more about these El, Ba’al, and Asherah worshippers.

***

When I sifted through the prevailing critical scholarship on the Canaanite conquest story, it overturned everything I thought I knew. The ancient Israelites never carried out a genocidal campaign against the Canaanites like the book of Joshua says. According to the archeological, genetic, and even textual evidence within the Bible itself, the Canaanites were not wiped out. In fact, the Israelites were essentially a subset group of Canaanites, and shared their culture and religion. The fight between the Israelite one true God, Yahweh, and the Canaanite idols El and Ba’al, was more like an ongoing family dispute.

Why would the Bible include a conquest narrative that presented Canaanites as foreign idolaters who were slaughtered by the Israelites? This narrative was likely invented by polemical writers to provide a founding myth about the settling of the “promised land.” Once a militant, Yahweh-only group of Israelites became more powerful, they wanted to prevent others from returning to older Canaanite customs. Monotheism, the belief that only one God exists, was a later development. Most of the Hebrew Bible promotes monolatry, the worship of one God among many. For example, Psalm 82 says: “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.”

The Israelites denounced by the prophets for worshipping idols weren’t pursuing foreign gods as much as returning to old ones. But the old gods indelibly shaped the new god. Before God reveals his name as “Yahweh” to Moses, he is called “El.” El is often combined with another title such as El-Elyon, or God Most High. In the development of the biblical canon, the two names—Yahweh and El, which reflected two local deities within the region—eventually became interchangeable. They came to be identified as the same deity. The language and imagery of the Canaanite gods was absorbed. Yahweh is an “ancient of days” sitting on the throne just like the aged chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, El. Yahweh is a warrior and rides the clouds just like Ba’al. It’s “syncretism” all the way down.

The Canaanite legacy also extends beyond male gods. While Yahweh occasionally adopts the feminine imagery of motherhood, fertility, and breasts in the Hebrew Bible, traces of the goddess Asherah, the consort to El and sometimes Ba’al, are wiped out in the text. She is only mentioned when the prophets condemn Israelites who still worship her. Yet, an excavation in the Sinai desert that started in 1975 found evidence that suggests ongoing local worship of Asherah as Yahweh’s consort. Archeologists discovered a pottery sherd bearing an inscription about the blessings of “Yahweh and his Asherah.”

I spent four years at a liberal arts Christian college, three years at a divinity school, and no one bothered to tell me that God had a wife.

Orientalism is often presented as a problem of sight. Through its gaze, Westerners construct an East that’s inseparable from their prejudices and the assumptions of their own superiority. My old Christianity was also a problem of sight. My Christianity depended on being superior to every other story. It was a matter of spiritual conquest, not dialogue or exchange. Breaking out of this mentality required me to wrestle with the Bible and to accept it for what it is, not for the idealized constructions people want it to be. Otherwise, I’d see only what I’d want to see, whether that’s the one true narrative or a social justice textbook.

The historical-critical method, like museums and the discipline of archeology, has its racist and colonial baggage. Astonishingly, the Oriental Institute is still named the Oriental Institute. But asking people to choose between faith and the historical contextualization of religion is a false dichotomy. I’ve found that critically studying religion has only expanded my spirituality and my openness to the mysterious workings of the universe.

Christianity’s attempt to silence the voices within its texts mirrors the way some Christians have tried to silence the voices of real people throughout history. But the bodies buried beneath the texts linger. They leave traces of cultures that have stubbornly refused to be completely erased. And people continue to find meaning and inspiration for resistance even in the most problematic of sources. This messy history doesn’t disprove God, or something larger and sacred about this universe, as much as it disproves a rigid faith that’s ill-equipped to encounter surprises.

El. It’s a word I run into all the time. Pedestrian. In Spanish, it’s the definite article: the. El. I hear it and think back to the little gold man I mocked in Chicago. One of the easiest ways to see his legacy at work in the Bible is through its use of theophorics, or God-bearing names. Israel means “El wrestles.” Samuel means “El has heard.” In Hebrew, Daniel means “My judge is El.” I guess I know who’s having the last laugh.

Daniel José Camacho is working on a book about Christianity and the colonization of the Americas with Avid Reader Press. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at The Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners.

The post The False Gods That Changed My Mind appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image of Daniel José Camacho from 2013. Edited by Candace Sanders.)

When I was in high school, I had an imaginary “Council of Wisdom.” The council included intellectual figures I found inspiring and who I pretended to take on as mentors by reading their work. I started with a handful and kept expanding to ten, twelve, fifteen members. I’d doodle in class and draft philosophers and writers into the council, sometimes knocking one or two off in the process. One time I told a friend about my venerable Council of Wisdom. She mocked my list, pointing out that virtually all the members were white men. My most “diverse” member was Flannery O’Connor, a white disabled woman. In truth, I harbored unconscious reservations that a kid who looked like me could enter the rarefied air of intellectuals.

Adults started telling me about a place where I should go, a place where my curiosity would be rewarded. “Think about college,” my high school guidance counselor said dispassionately. “You have a decent reading and writing score on the SAT as a Latino male.” The heady interim pastor of the Baptist church I attended told me to stay away from fundamentalist Christian colleges. He had a Ph.D. and always welcomed my critical questions about faith after Sunday services. Whenever he talked about his “dissertation” and “grad school,” his voice took on a warm, oh-those-were-the-days tone. What he discussed—Karl Barth or the “Death of God” thesis—would often fly over my 16-year-old brain, but I was mesmerized by the image of a place where people could caress ideas day and night without inhibition. It hadn’t exactly worked out for him. The pastor lamented his bad luck with securing teaching positions. But there was an unspoken hope that I might have the chops to go on, not only to college, but to graduate school and then on to discussing these types of things forever.

If I wanted to spend the rest of my life around ideas and books, and around other people who cared about these things, there seemed to be a clear track. I started to follow it until the path no longer made sense to me and I felt more like a moth flying toward a shiny light that would obliterate me.

When I was completing my master’s degree in divinity between 2013-2017, I found a website called “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School.” Reading it became my preferred mode of procrastination. Why stress out about a paper or exam if my life no longer needed to revolve around producing the perfect grades and CV for acceptance into a top Ph.D. program? I could beat the whole rotten system before it destroyed me! I’d quit before even applying. My dream for an intellectual life would have to survive—if it could—beyond some academic fairytale.

The blog ruthlessly laid out in a series of posts all the reasons why one shouldn’t pursue a doctorate in the humanities or social sciences. Some of the reasons were obvious to me, like 8. There are very few jobs or 16. Where you live will be chosen for you. No offense to the states of Iowa or Nebraska, but I didn’t want to feel forced to move there if those were the only places that offered me a tenure-track professorship. And as someone who had tasted the difference between writing online for a general audience and presenting an academic paper to a room full of eight people with perhaps three interested in what you’re saying, I was sadly reminded that in academia 88. You are not paid for what you write and 89. Virtually no one reads what you write. Then, there were other reasons I hadn’t thought about before such as 44. Advisers can be tyrants or 45. Nice advisers can be worse.

When I was enrolled in my master’s program, I was in a serious relationship with someone on a totally different career track. So, thankfully, I could avoid reason 48. The two-body problem, which describes the improbability of two partnered Ph.D.’s both finding academic jobs within commuting distance of each other. But I was still potentially subject to 58. The one-body problem, which describes the difficulties faced by a couple where one person pursues a Ph.D. I was already tired of doing long-distance with my fiancée who lived in New York while I was doing my master’s in North Carolina. She was chasing her own dreams in a competitive profession that, unlike mine, was more likely to yield solid opportunities on the horizon. Would I try to rip her away from that or reduce our future marriage to semester breaks and a few weekends together a year, all for the sake of me resentfully grading student papers out of a decrepit van while making below minimum wage?

These are the thoughts that raced through my head. I knew the blog presented academia in the worst light. That’s what I wanted to see. I remember few students and professors around me having honest conversations about the dirty underbelly to the detached debates taking place in neogothic buildings overlooking green, immaculately manicured quads. In my world, people were applying to Ph.D.’s left and right. The problem of what to do with a humanities education was solved by getting more humanities education. The problem of what to do about your student debt was solved by becoming a student again and putting your loans in deferment. Still, I looked up to some of the well-positioned professors in my school. I was once like some of my googly-eyed classmates who sat enraptured, wanting to emulate the figures behind the lectern. But then I started to see them as the intellectual 1% who happened to win a lottery.

There were also costs for the ones who actually made it, costs that were compounded by discrimination. I was surprised when I heard that one of the superstar professors at my institution who was Black had bigoted white students who regularly complained to administration that he was unfit to teach their intro classes. He was one of the gentlest souls I’d ever met—even if you properly weighed my standards as a New Yorker living in the South. His work was winning awards and sending shockwaves within the field of Christian theology. He mentored students from all backgrounds and often sacrificed his time performing administrative duties for the school. I imagined that his academic co-workers would have his back. But all I can say for sure is that before I graduated, he was gone from the institution. Several brilliant Black professors, who had turned the school into a vibrant destination for students like me, were all gone in the span of a few years.

I saw, through how others were treated, that having a Ph.D. couldn’t protect me from people who held racist assumptions about my intellectual inferiority or who saw me as a threat. At the same time, I witnessed students and professors in academia lie about their identity or inflate their background and connections to particular communities for the sake of personal advancement or a weird inner rush. Somehow all of this could co-exist. Real discrimination persisted alongside rampant ethnic fraud.

91. Downward mobility is the norm. For the longest time, it seemed that getting a Ph.D. and becoming a professor was the only way to fulfill my desires for intellectual life. The idea that getting more education would automatically lead to a better life made sense within my immigrant household. Many first-generation students believe advanced degrees lead to abundant opportunities. Consequently, the economic realities of advanced degrees may come as a shock. As one Ph.D. candidate recently put it, “On my darkest days, I’m left with the feeling that no matter how hard I try to blaze a trail for myself and other first-generation students, the work I’ve been doing could lead me straight back to a life of little career opportunity and of economic instability—a life from which I once was sure higher education would rescue me.”

63. Your friends pass you by. I think of my old childhood friend Marvin. We grew up in the same neighborhood. The one where my mom taught me to keep my head in books and my butt in church pews and away from MS13 and Bloods and Crips. The intellectual curiosity I displayed through my questions about the Bible in Sunday school signaled to my elders that education was meant to be my salvation. My friend Marvin wasn’t necessarily lost in the streets, but his thing was cars. His eyes would light up in a driveway while talking about different models and rims. When I went away to a liberal arts college in Michigan, he stayed behind and kept doing stuff with cars. When I went to North Carolina for my master’s degree, he was making bank as a certified mechanic at a dealership. Next thing you know, I had accumulated all this debt and I’m pretty sure I saw him post something on Facebook about buying a house.

“Congratulations, you’re now—what I like to call—a thousandaire,” the financial aid adviser told me as I stood in front of her desk. I’ll never forget the moment. I wasn’t sure if she was throwing subtle shade at me or trying to inject some humor into an otherwise sad situation. There had been an issue with the federal loan I was trying to receive that semester. But now that the issue was addressed, my bank account would go from several hundreds of dollars to several thousands. I wasn’t at immediate risk of overdrafting again. I was a thousandaire.

54. “What do you do for a living?” In addition to the financial risks of non-wealthy people going for a Ph.D., there can be isolation in other people not understanding what this entails. “Danny, I can see you being a professor teaching kids in colleges,” my older sister who is a public elementary school teacher would tell me. “You would be so good at it!” She meant it with love. I thought, and still think, that I would enjoy it. But it was becoming increasingly hard for me see the traditional Ph.D. route as logistically possible without embracing extreme personal suffering. I forgave the relatives or friends who innocently asked me why I couldn’t try to become a professor as if it were as easy as applying to work at the local mall. It wasn’t worse than the naïve hope I used to hold.

Like many of my academically inclined peers, I used to think my goal was humble. I’m not asking for much, like teaching at Harvard or Yale or appearing on MSNBC. I would be happy to teach at a no-name school. I don’t have to redefine the field or publish tons of books. Even my personal research time could suffer. I just want to be surrounded by thoughtful colleagues, wear tweed jackets, talk about my favorite books and topics, and host adoring students for dinner conversations at my modest home while I have health insurance and the promise of employment for the foreseeable future. That’s all! Of course, I wasn’t the only one thinking this. And then I read that only an estimated 7 percent of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences get a tenure-track job. That’s all.

78. It takes a toll on your health. When people ask me today why I didn’t go on for a Ph.D., I typically say that I wanted to support my partner and that I wanted to continue to write and engage ideas within a broader context outside the ivory tower. That’s true. What I less often share is that I was also afraid of what pursuing a Ph.D. would do to my health. I already saw what a master’s degree could do to me. At one point, I had nearly dropped out of the program. Going straight into a master’s after undergrad, I was feeling burnt out. I was homesick. I lived with a housemate who I didn’t like, who didn’t clean, and whose room gave off a strong stench of what I imagine Doritos Cool Ranch would smell like if they grew wet and moldy. I missed my girlfriend/soon-to-be fiancée, proceeded to tell one of my friends at school that I had a crush on her, and then told my girlfriend who almost broke up with me. When I went to the campus counseling center, the psychologist asked me: “And when your mind drifts off into space during lecture, where does it go?” I replied, “Nowhere. I feel unmotivated, which is weird because I’m such a theology nerd. I feel nothing.” My grades weren’t suffering. I could still do the work. It was about what was happening to me.

A dean kindly accepted my request for a leave of absence. But I had to meet with someone in the registrar’s office who tried to talk me out of leaving. When she realized I wasn’t changing my mind, she said abruptly: “To be clear: You are, during your leave, by no means, allowed onto the premises of the school and you are prohibited from using the library.” I scrunched my face. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m going to be all the way in New York.”

Before I left campus, I had one more meeting with a professor I had long admired. He was one of the main reasons why I chose this school. When I emailed him as an undergrad, he wrote back and he even signed a book for me when he gave a visiting lecture in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Inside the book flap, he wrote: “To a great, young intellectual.” I stepped into his office in my jeans and hoodie trying my best to hold back tears. Here I was, yet another student eating up the time of a faculty member encumbered with unrealistic and unpaid mentoring expectations. I was slipping into the thing I thought students should never do: treating professors as their psychologists.

He listened to me as he sat stoically with his shiny bald head and circle-rimmed glasses. When he began to talk about his own journey and the conceit of other theologians, he burst into a deep belly laugh. It was a puzzling laugh that I had heard in his lectures. It’s like he was cracking himself up. The students, the audience—we weren’t in on the joke but along for the ride. He’d interrupt himself with laughs and then turn serious on a dime. I rocked back in a super comfortable chair in his office, sobbing: “I don’t know if I’ll amount to anything. What if I’m never a success?” He looked at me and said, “Daniel, you already are one.”

During my leave of absence, I moved back into my parent’s house on Long Island. I struggled with bouts of anger and finding a job. Nobody was getting back to me. Finally, I got called in for an interview at Barnes & Noble. I was excited. I’d get to spend time around books and could expertly organize their religion and philosophy section! Or so I thought. When I sat down for my interview with a store manager, she told me: “I’m sorry kid. The only opening we have at this store is for barista at the café.” I pleaded, “But I can eventually transition to the book floor?” “It depends,” she said. Then, the manager looked down at my resume again and mentioned my philosophy major. “Oh, you’re going to fit in just fine! I have a master’s degree in English literature. And Jolene and Terrence at the café are also humanities.”

After a year in New York, I went back to North Carolina to finish my master’s. But my mentality had changed. I was no longer dead set on going for a Ph.D. I was going to make school work for me rather than sacrifice all of myself at its altar. I started to blog and write articles on the side. I went to see a career counselor on campus who told me he rarely saw anyone from my program. I graduated with honors. I got married. I worked odd jobs while freelancing and slowly transitioned into writing and editing. I decided not to apply for a Ph.D, year after year.

Dear reader, this is the part of the essay where I’m supposed to tell you that I overcame my struggles. That I walked away from academia and successfully rebuilt my life around my passions, and you can too! This is where I could hyperlink you to an inspirational Instagram post that amounts to me screaming “LOOK AT ME NOW.” But that would be a simplistic narrative. If you know anything about the state of journalism and writerly compensations, it’s more like I escaped one fire only to jump into another one. The reality is that I still don’t know what will come of the path I’ve taken. I have my first book contract. But I’m not sure where my future paychecks will come from once the advance runs out. I’m lucky to have kind editors and various kinds of thinkers—even academics who overlook my lack of “the three magical letters”—who see me and value my work.

“I’m not going for a Ph.D.,” I’ve told my wife when she’s caught me scrolling yet again through academic departmental websites on my laptop, looking up doctoral requirements and the specializations of different faculty members. “Sure! I don’t know why you have to keep telling me so much.” She rolls her eyes at me and walks away. If I’ve sounded defensive when I’ve kept saying that I’m not going for a Ph.D., it’s because I must keep convincing myself. When Kendrick Lamar says, “Satan wanna put me in a bow tie,” I take that to mean that I must resist the temptation of applying for Ph.D. programs and finding my validation in becoming a professor.

Don’t get me wrong. I still read and cite plenty of scholars. I’m constantly engaging with professors on social media. If I were offered a reasonable teaching post in the future in a pleasant city, I wouldn’t necessarily turn it down. And for full disclosure: I would like to thank New York University for underwriting the Revealer, which is allowing me to publish these words. Academia is still a part of me. Far be it from me to act like some supposed radical influencer-thought-leader who says fuck the classist academy all the while accepting most of their speaking engagements on college campuses.

With that said, treating the Ph.D. as the only respectable route for pursuing one’s intellectual hunger is an approach that is setting too many people up for failure. Yes, ideally, it would be nice to live in a society that invested more in education and forgave student debt. We should strive for that. I could get on some secularized pulpit and preach to you about how the sin is capitalism, how the savior is democratic socialism, while making an altar call for everyone to organize and unionize. I applaud those values. All well and good. But what about the here and now? Until the revolution comes, or the Democratic Party gets its shit together, what should aspiring intellectuals do? In the longer history of the human species, would-be philosophers and storytellers had to express themselves in whatever ways they could, right?

Now that I’m 30 years old, I’m seeing more peers of my era starting to graduate with Ph.D.’s. Many of them won’t get tenure-track jobs. But some will and a few already have. I’m genuinely happy for them—or at least, I’m trying to be. I hope that others also find the teaching posts of their dreams. I can’t pretend that my own path is a prescription for others. But the exceptional cases are just that. It’s dangerous for an overwhelming number of people to continue to believe that they will make a living as professors.

In an old episode of The Simpsons, Marge tells Bart: “Don’t make fun of grad students, they just made a terrible life choice.” The episode continues to a scene depicting impoverished grad students flocking to eat breadcrumbs that Lisa is throwing out to geese at a park. I used to laugh so hard when I found this clip on YouTube. But it’s become harder for me to take it as an exaggeration after I learned about the case of Margaret Mary Vojtko, “an adjunct language instructor at Duquesne University who, despite twenty-five years of service, could not afford health care or even electricity,” and who died “at the age of eighty-three, having never earned more than twenty thousand dollars a year.” I learned about the harrowing case of Thea Hunter, a pioneering scholar who graduated from Columbia University but got trapped in an adjunct cycle that destroyed her. I read about the growth of “Alt-Ac” (Alternative Academic Careers) and “Post-Academic” literature. I see novelists depicting adjunct hell. I recall the man with a Ph.D. at my local church in North Carolina who asked the community to pray for his job search because he didn’t know how he was going to feed his kids.

Herb Childress eloquently describes one version of the heartache that’s happening to so many others:

“The grief of not finding a home in higher ed — of having done everything as well as I was capable of doing, and having it not pan out; of being told over and over how well I was doing and how much my contributions mattered, even as the prize was withheld — consumed more than a decade. It affected my physical health. It affected my mental health. It ended my first marriage. It reopened all my fears from childhood about abandonment and rejection. It was a chasm into which I fell during my job search of 1996-97, and from which I didn’t really fully emerge until I left higher education altogether, in 2013.”

We don’t yet know what the full fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic will be on the already bleak academic job market, and even on vulnerable faculty who have jobs. But what we do know is that declining birth rates are projected to lead to a dramatic falloff of college-age youth starting in the mid-2020s. (This is a projection that hasn’t factored in the future impact of declining births during the pandemic.) Schools that are already gutting their humanities departments, such as the University of Vermont which completely eliminated its religion department, will likely continue to make cuts in the future— if the schools don’t merge or close altogether. Considering all these conditions, I believe it is irresponsible, unconscionable, and downright cruel to provide false hope or bad advice that greases people’s lives as they slide down directly into a wreckage.

When I was on a writing retreat before the pandemic, I zealously talked about the “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School” blog with other attendees. One person looked down to the ground as if I was out to heartlessly stomp on people’s dreams. Another attendee used their phone to find the blog and squealed that the last entry stopped at 98. (98. Your family pays a price.). Maybe the author had succumbed to the horrendous conditions of academia and failed to outrun its shadow before completing the blog? As I write this, the anonymous author of the blog hasn’t posted another entry since 2018. I honestly don’t know what happened to the author. But I pray that they are staying alive and carving out their own path. Most of us have no other choice.

I recently moved to Houston, Texas for my wife’s work. In our apartment, I’ve thrown all my books—the ones not in storage—into a few bookcases from Ikea and have yet to organize them. “For in much wisdom is much grief,” an ancient writer once said. “And he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” As I stare at my collection, I think back to my training, to my old classes and conversations, which seem to no longer have any living context. I can’t let go entirely. All of this must have some use, I want to believe. My parents sacrificed so much to give me a chance. I don’t want to waste anything.

Daniel José Camacho is a columnist for the Revealer. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners. Writing with a focus on religion, race, and history, his work has appeared in publications such as Religion News Service, America Magazine, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post.

The post Grad School Blues appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo: Fannie Lou Hamer)

One day in August 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer found herself in the hallway outside of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel suite in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Several national civil rights leaders and political operatives were crammed in his suite strategizing over Black representation at the Democratic National Convention. Prior to the convention, Hamer had helped to establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in order to challenge the Democrats’ all-white Mississippi delegation. Even though Hamer’s home state was under the spotlight, there was apparently no room for her in the talks. When an associate told Hamer that she should “listen to the leaders,” she asked: “Who [is] the leader?” The men around her with money and degrees actively tried to sideline her. Yet, it was Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper with limited formal education and limited financial resources, who ended up stealing the show at the convention and captivating the nation with an electrifying speech about voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans.

Hamer’s powerful oratory arose from a remarkable life that historian Keisha N. Blain covers in her latest book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Although Hamer came to be defined by her speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, it was only one episode in a larger career in which she faced persecution and terror for her faith-inspired activism defending human rights.

Born on October 6, 1917, Hamer was the youngest of twenty children and was only six years olds when she began working in cotton fields. As an adult, through an encounter with activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she learned about the power of voting rights to effect change in the structural barriers that families like hers faced. Because of her views about Black Americans’ constitutional rights, Hamer experienced several harrowing attacks, including a drive-by shooting at a friend’s home and a brutal beating at the hands of police officers in Winona, Mississippi. On March 14, 1977, at the age of fifty-nine, Hamer died of health complications after continuing to face financial struggles and mounting medical debt.

Hamer anticipated and embodied what legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would call “intersectionality,” recognizing how gender oppression was tied to dimensions of race and class. She also understood liberation as something that connected all people, whether across racial lines in the United States or across borders in places like Vietnam. “Until I am free, you are not either,” Hamer once told a largely white audience. Blain’s stunning portrait of Fannie Lou Hamer forces us to ask: Who gets to “count” as an intellectual, as a bearer of knowledge and wisdom?

Daniel José Camacho: You’ve said that your intellectual encounter with Fannie Lou Hamer in your early twenties changed the course of your life. How so?

Keisha N. Blain: I first encountered Fannie Lou Hamer as an undergraduate student at Binghamton University. I was deeply inspired by her words and activism. Her ability to speak truth to power, the strength of her faith, and her unwavering commitment to civil and human rights are all traits that stood out to me then—as now. As a Black woman and first-generation college student attending a predominantly white institution, I often struggled with self-doubt. It was difficult then—and even later when I attended graduate school—to navigate spaces where so many others viewed me as an outsider. Reading about Fannie Lou Hamer resonated with me as student because I could relate in many ways.

As a Black disabled woman who had limited formal education and endured poverty during her life, Hamer did not fit the mold of what many expected a civil rights leader to look—and sound—like. Yet she never allowed others’ expectations to define her or cause her to doubt her calling. Her story lit a fire within me, and I remain encouraged—and deeply motivated—by the example she set. Learning about Hamer’s story helped me put aside my own self-doubt when I decided to embark on the journey to become a historian of the Black past. Her example has also guided my activist work. Like Hamer, I try to focus less on the seemingly insurmountable challenges ahead and instead try to come up with practical steps and solutions to make a difference in my own spheres of influence.

DJC: In researching and writing this book on Hamer, what surprised you the most about her?

KB: I was surprised by her consistency on the matter of leadership—even in the face of resistance. She had an expansive view of leadership and held fast to the belief that everyone had the potential to make a difference in their communities, regardless of their social background or education. As a result, Hamer rejected the charismatic leadership model that often dominates Black political organizations, and she always looked for ways to empower others to become leaders.

(Photo: Keisha Blain)

It’s not easy to stand by your convictions especially when you’re facing hell for holding those views. And it’s so difficult to hold fast to certain perspectives when others around you don’t take you seriously. There’s something really remarkable about how Hamer was able to push aside the criticisms and even the disdain from some of her colleagues and keep pushing ahead.

Here is where I think her faith played such an important role. She saw her calling as a divine one and so she spent little time worrying about what people had to say about her. As an intellectual historian who studies ideas over time, I was struck by how Hamer managed to hold fast to various perspectives from the start of her career to the very end. She was not the kind of political thinker who would easily buckle under the weight of pressure.

DJC: As you highlight, Hamer’s political work was explicitly motivated by her Christian faith. How did she understand and use Christianity in ways that ran counter to white supremacist expressions of Christianity?

KB: Hamer’s Christian faith shaped her commitment to human rights and her passionate rejection of white supremacy. She often drew parallels to Jesus, frequently quoting Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.” This is a verse that encapsulates the mission and calling of Jesus, and Hamer was inspired by that verse because she saw her calling in a similar vein—to help those in need, to speak words of hope and empowerment, and to set people free from the chains of white supremacy.

She understood that the racial hierarchy enforced by white supremacists—in the Church and in society at large—ran counter to God’s will. She saw human rights and civil rights as God-given rights and those who stood in the way of equality and justice stood in the way of God’s plan. Ultimately, Hamer employed her Christian faith as a tool to counter white supremacy—in the tradition of so many Black activists and intellectuals, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray.

DJC: Hamer’s faith also motivated her to equate birth control and abortion with genocide. Another layer that informed her views on reproductive rights, as you argue, was her painful experience with a forced sterilization. Yet, Barbara Smith of the Combahee River Collective evoked Hamer’s forced sterilization while leading a mass protest in 1977 in support of abortion funding. Do you think that Hamer’s position was severely limited and in need of correction?

KB: As an intellectual historian, I try to approach my historical actors with a sense of curiosity—always seeking to understand what someone believed and why. I often find myself in disagreement with individuals of the past, but I see my task as simply to reveal the intricacies of someone’s perspectives so that others understand that person even if they wholly reject their ideas. I think Hamer’s ideas about abortion and birth control reflect her painful experiences and her own interpretation of scripture. Although the issue is still hotly contested, many Christians are against abortion and some even view birth control as contradictory to divine will. In that sense, I wouldn’t argue that Hamer needed to be corrected so much as she may have needed time to evolve on the matter.

The evolution of one’s ideas can be a complicated process and often it’s a long process guided by a myriad of factors. I think part of the beauty of this life’s journey is the ability to change—to refine one’s perspectives. Hamer struggled to view abortion rights and birth control rights as part of the larger fight for women’s empowerment, and we will never know if she would have changed her perspective. She might never have budged on the issue. But she might have also come to a different perspective. I think time could have made a difference. It’s important to remember that she died only a few years after the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

DJC: Right now, Republicans across the United States are passing or attempting to pass new voting restrictions at the state level. How does Hamer’s fight against the voting restrictions of her day relate to what we’re seeing today?

KB: Republicans are currently attempting to enshrine minority rule by limiting the pool of voters, and this is exactly what Hamer was fighting against in Mississippi during the 1960s. When she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) in 1962, she recognized the illegitimacy of elections that denied the majority of residents a chance to participate. By passing voter restrictions—and placing more power into the hands of state legislatures—Republicans today are trying to guarantee their control over government, and in the process, they are undermining the will of the people. Voter suppression tactics ultimately oppress those who are already marginalized in American society, including Black and Latinx people. These practices are much like the kinds of strategies that were employed during the Jim Crow era. Hamer fought during her lifetime to expand voting rights for all and today we have already seen those efforts undermined through developments such as the 2013 Shelby decision.

DJC: Hamer’s activism and lack of material resources as an adult, in addition to her experiences in childhood, took a toll on her health. You argue that she lived into a Christian ideal of sacrificing for others. Yet, in our own time, some activists might push back against the idea of “sacrifice” by emphasizing the importance of health and self-care and saying that we need more Black women like Fannie Lou Hamer to flourish rather than suffer. Does this tension challenge how her life can serve as a model for others?

KB: I think being an activist means that one must be willing to make sacrifices. That could mean sacrificing time and it could mean sacrificing money and other resources. When you’re deeply committed to a cause, you will ultimately make sacrifices. Hamer made many sacrifices in her lifetime to advance the cause of civil and human rights. Her sacrifices ultimately changed the nation. At the same time, I do think that we can view Hamer’s experiences as a cautionary tale—about the way activist work can take a physical and emotional toll on leaders. We should not discount the larger social and economic forces at play, but I think it’s important for leaders to be mindful of the importance of rest and self-care. The work of trying to dismantle racism and other systems of oppression is not easy—and it is impossible for one person to tackle it all. When we try to tackle it all, we ultimately undermine our own work. Taking care of one’s self is crucial and perhaps even more so as a leader.

Daniel José Camacho is a columnist for the Revealer. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners. Writing with a focus on religion, race, and history, his work has appeared in publications such as Religion News Service, America Magazine, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post.

Keisha N. Blain is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and President of the African American Intellectual History Society. Her latest books include the #1 New York Times Best Seller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited with Ibram X. Kendi (Penguin Random House/One World). Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press) will be release October 5, 2021.

The post Fannie Lou Hamer’s Fight for Civil Rights and Her Message for Today appeared first on The Revealer.

I’ve tried to dial it back for the sake of my sanity. Within the past year, I’ve cut down my hours on social media, limited my subscriptions to a few publications that I trust and enjoy, and relied on a handful of newsletters that curate content into my inbox. The irony is that I’m a writer who also puts out content and fervently hopes that out of the 16k people who liked and shared someone else’s platitude-meme, at least four might read through my essay. It’s rough out here in this attention economy! There’s pressure to constantly consume and perform. I’ve started listening to self-help podcasts that guide me to slow down. When I discovered — while randomly scrolling — that internet users have a designated spiritual protector from the 6^th century, I decided: Why not look into this as well? Maybe the story of this information organizer from late antiquity could still have some relevance?

Isidore of Seville, the internet’s unofficial patron saint, was born around 560 CE. By all measures, Isidore, whose feast day is on April 4th, is an odd saint. He isn’t known for great miracles, acts of charity, or a dramatic personal life. Yet since the 1990s, several Catholics have looked to this Spaniard as a spiritual guide for navigating web surfing — or scrolling, as more people describe it today — and they sparked rumors that Pope John Paul II had officially elevated him to a patronage role. For Catholics, a patron saint is someone who provides heavenly intercession for a particular craft, group of people, or nation: St. Joseph for carpenters, St. Thomas Aquinas for academics, St. Rosa of Lima for Peru.

Carlo Acutis (Photo: Acutis family)

In 2020, the Catholic Church beatified (a preliminary step for sainthood) Carlo Acutis, another candidate for official internet patronage. Acutis, who is credited with performing a miracle in Brazil involving the healing of a 4-year-old boy with pancreatic malformation, was an Italian computer programmer and devout Catholic who died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of 15. Pope Francis declared that Acutis used the internet to “communicate values and beauty.” If Acutis does indeed become the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint and its official patron saint of the internet, this could be seen as an attempt by the Church to relate its faith to the day-to-day realities of contemporary Catholics.

Since I don’t consider myself a devout Catholic and I don’t necessarily believe in traditional saints, I have no stake in whether the Church officially elevates Isidore or Acutis as the patron saint of the internet. But as an internet user and as someone who came of age alongside the explosion of social media, I can appreciate things that provide perspective or distance to these pieces of technology that make me feel hyper-connected, lonely, and overwhelmed. In my case, I confess that I’m more intrigued by the decision of some Catholics to turn to Isidore than I am by a millennial computer programmer prodigy. What could someone who died 1,385 years ago possibly have to say to us? As I looked more into Isidore, I realized that his selection was apt in multiple ways. If there’s one figure in late antiquity credited for attempting to collect all of the world’s knowledge and preventing it from slipping into the oblivion of the so-called “Dark Ages,” it is Isidore of Seville, and his information age can still illuminate our own.

The “Wikipedia” of the Middle Ages

Isidore lived after the collapse of the western Roman Empire, in a Spain transitioning from Roman province to rule under the Visigoths. There are a few things that can be firmly established about his life. Isidore was born in the city of Cartagena to Hispano-Roman parents of high rank who fled to Seville after Byzantines invaded. His parents died while he was young, and he grew up with three talented siblings, including an older brother, Leander, who became a bishop and famously converted multiple Visigothic kings from Arian Christianity to Nicene Christianity. After Leander’s death, Isidore took over as bishop of Seville in 600 CE. He kept this post until his own death in 636 CE, presiding over Church synods and expanding the education of clergy during his tenure.

In the longer arc of history, Isidore has enjoyed strong audience engagement. He wrote one of the most widely-used textbooks throughout the Middle Ages. In Paradiso, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri put Isidore in the good place. For soccer aficionados cognizant of La Liga, Isidore can be spotted in his episcopal robes on the crest badge of Sevilla FC. There’s even an organization called the Order of Saint Isidore of Seville devoted to promoting Christian chivalry on the internet. It has a prayer to Isidore stating, “. . . during our journeys through the Internet we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.” An earnest reminder to those of us struggling with casual onsets of jealously and rage as we scroll through Instagram and Twitter.

A 1655 painting of Isidore of Seville by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

A 1655 painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo depicts a white-bearded Isidore in his bishop’s hat, hypnotically staring at a large book on his lap while seated next to other tomes. This rendition rings true for someone admired by contemporaries for his intellectual breadth. Isidore cemented his legacy through his research and literary output, bridging divides between the Hispano-Roman and Visigothic worlds. Among more than twenty works, Isidore published History of the Goths, which portrayed these “barbarians” in a more favorable light. According to punctuation expert Florence Hazrat, Isidore also invented the period, comma, and colon as we know them today. In terms of organizing texts and making them more readable this was huge we may take it for granted but this was in its own day the best thing next to the invention of spaces between words so if you have benefitted from modern grammar make sure to say this THANKYOUISIDORE

Isidore’s crowning achievement was The Etymologies (also known as The Origins). A sprawling encyclopedia written in accessible Latin, it covers a dizzying array of topics: all of the parts of speech, iron tools used in surgery, harmony and rhythm in music, the difference between natural and civil law, the Son of God, paneled ceilings, angels, tiny flying animals, the course of the stars, ship construction, upper eyelids, prophets, and chairs. Isidore intended it as a reference book for anything that clergy possibly needed to know, providing “SparkNotes” on various figures such as Aristotle and Cicero. Monks who later used The Etymologies sometimes changed Isidore’s ordering, scandalized that the work started with the liberal arts and not God. On one page, Isidore could be analyzing the books of the Bible and then swiftly transition to the history of libraries in Rome.

By understanding the roots of words, Isidore believed one could learn a great deal. For example, he says that penitence (poenitentia) overlaps with punishing (punier) because “they who truly do penance do nothing other than not permit what they have done wrong to go unpunished.” In a more playful entry, Isidore says: “Wine (vinum) is so called because a drink of it speedily replenishes the veins (vena) with blood. Some call it Lyaeus, because it loosens (solvere) us from care.” Many of the entries in The Etymologies still resonate. Isidore describes pestilence as “a contagion that as soon as it seizes on one person quickly spreads to many. It arises from corrupt air and maintains itself by penetrating the internal organs.” Other entries are inaccurate or badly dated: “All diseases come from the four humors, that is, from blood, bile, black bile, and phlegm.” Some topics are downright strange. In a long section on heresies, Isidore defines the “Nicolaites” sect as those following deacon Nicolas who “abandoned his wife because of her beauty, so that whoever wanted to might enjoy her; the practice turned into debauchery, with partners being exchanged in turn.” Today, some might call this, depending on one’s sexual ethics, swinging or pulling a Jerry Falwell, Jr.

Preserving Homo Sapiens

What can Isidore’s work suggest to us in our time? On the one hand, he evades any of our rigid religious/secular divisions of knowledge. The Etymologies are equally curious about worldly affairs as they are about divine matters. On the other hand, Isidore highlights the potential dangers of summarizers. Isidore wasn’t the first encyclopedist. He relied, rather unoriginally, on other proto-Wikipedia compilers such as Varro, Pliny the Elder, and Lactantius as sources for his work. Isidore translated the knowledge of the classical Greeks and Romans for Christians in a way that, intentionally or not, turned the philosophers he engaged into victims of his own success. Many Christians stopped copying the “pagan” works that he cited and read only Isidore instead. This fueled echo chambers of Christians reading about non-Christians and the past solely through the lens of Christian summaries, akin to learning about someone strictly through YouTube explainers made by their opponents.

Like algorithms constructed by humans, encyclopedias contain, for better and for worse, the prejudices of their makers. In The Etymologies, Isidore writes: “The name ‘Jew’ (Iudaeus) can be translated as “confessor” (confessor), for confession (confessio) catches up with many of those whom wrong belief possessed earlier.” The Fourth Council of Toledo, held in 633 CE and over which Isidore presided as bishop, passed anti-Jewish canons including one forbidding all Jews, and Christians of Jewish ancestry, from holding public office. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s decision to expel Jews from Spain in 1492 could plausibly be construed as the repercussions of a larger disinformation campaign stretching back to Isidore.

Speaking of disinformation, I, myself, struggled with this dynamic in the process of writing this essay. How do you know if something is true? If enough people share the same thing, does that make it true? Based on my internet searches, I initially thought that Pope John Paul II had, in fact, made Isidore the official patron saint of the internet. But upon further investigation, this turned out to be a rumor that, nevertheless, got picked up by The Atlantic, CNN, Gizmodo, and several Catholic sites such as Catholic.net. If scribe after scribe copies a falsehood or an error in a text, it eventually gathers the weight of consensus.

The problem in Isidore’s day was scarcity of information. Our problem, we like to say, is too much information. We have access to more at our fingertips than the ancients could have ever dreamed of. And yet, it’s easy to deceive ourselves. People believe in conspiracy theories today that are as wild as the most outdated entries in The Etymologies. All of Google’s digital scrolls, including most of your online documents, photos, and memories are stored in physical locations, in data centers containing servers subject to the whims of nature, the planet’s climate, or human attack. The truth is that even our cloud systems are mortal, like the papyri that burned in the library of Alexandria. History reminds us that the transmission of our species’ knowledge, along with empathy, isn’t a given but a continual – and vulnerable – task.

Daniel José Camacho is a columnist for the Revealer. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners. Writing with a focus on religion, race, and history, his work has appeared in publications such as Religion News Service, America Magazine, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post.

The post The Internet’s Unofficial Patron Saint appeared first on The Revealer.

Rioters storming past the gates of the U.S. Capitol Building on 1/6/2021. (Photo: Spencer Platt)

Beware. The barbarians are at the gate! For as long as the U.S. republic has existed, and ever since Edward Gibbon began publishing his six-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ancient Rome has served as an analogy for our nation’s greatness and, perhaps, its eventual demise. For some, today’s barbarian threat stems from an influx of immigrants, cultural shifts away from conservative Christian values, and the election of progressive Democratic politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Raphael Warnock. For others, the existential threat to our polity arises from Donald Trump, his Republican cronies who disregard democratic norms, and insurrectionists who want to impose their agenda by any means necessary.

The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, has become the symbolic equivalent to the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Goths on August 24, 410 CE. Ironically, the shocking footage and images of the breach of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., have displayed the brazen acts of Trump-supporting hordes who believe themselves to be saving America from radical Marxists. They see themselves as patriots at the gate. In one interpretation or another, barbarians are driving this nation to the brink. But the problem with many of these analogies is that the so-called barbarians who sacked Rome in 410 are emptied of historical concreteness and reduced to an archetype. We’re so used to hearing the parable of the barbarians at the gate that most of us know little or nothing about who these barbarians were and about what transpired during this period of the Roman Empire. What we may know is likely heavily skewed. Having a clearer understanding of this period can help us to understand the lies told about the Goths and the problem with imagining barbarian invasions today.

Historian Douglas Boin’s Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome provides a much-needed corrective. He makes deft use of scarce historical material on Alaric to reconstruct a glimpse of the man. The heart of the book is a wider cultural history of late 4^th/early 5^th century Rome that highlights the empire’s tensions with immigration and the political impact of fanatical Christians. Boin also recontextualizes the sack of Rome in 410, including the details about what happened in the three days of the breach. When Alaric and the Goths pillaged Rome, it sent shockwaves across the empire. Augustine claimed that people “in the farthest parts of the earth” were setting aside “days of public grief and mourning.” Jerome wrote, “The city that once captured the hearts and minds of the world has been captured!” However, the Goths’ occupation of Rome, which was accompanied by fires and the deaths of notable figures like Marcella of the Aventine Hill, appears to have been rather mild by the standards of the time. Boin suggests that Alaric’s attack on Rome was in retaliation for personally being denied citizenship and for the empire’s injustices against Goths.

Rome had sixteen main gates around its walls that were rigorously secured and patrolled by soldiers. These hadn’t been breached since the Gauls’ sack of Rome around 390 BCE. To pull off Alaric’s occupation required insider knowledge, which he possessed as a former Roman soldier, and probably some help from within the city. According to one account, Alaric spared any Romans who sought sanctuary in churches and commanded his men “that as far as possible, they must refrain from shedding blood in their hunger for booty.” By comparison, the destruction to the city caused by Nero’s fires was far worse. After a Gothic soldier encountered an elderly woman protecting the gold and silver vessels from St. Peter’s Basilica, Alaric “immediately ordered that all the vessels should be taken back, just as they had been found, to the basilica of the Apostle [Peter].” Both Romans and Goths “joined together in singing openly a hymn of praise to God.” Even Augustine, in City of God, wrote about “those very Romans, who were spared by the barbarians through their respect for Christ…”

The Romans borrowed the epithet barbarian from the Greeks to describe foreigners like the Goths, many of whom had lived within Rome’s borders and converted to Arian Christianity by the time Alaric sacked the city. Renaissance accounts of the Goths inaugurating the “dark ages” bequeathed to us an imagination of Goths as savages hell-bent on destroying Roman culture and institutions. Boin points out that archeologists in the early 20^th century like Rodolfo Lanciani continued to repeat smears against the Goths, interpreting “every broken pot in the city” as “proof of the crimes pinned on Goths.” But Goths’ relationship with Rome was more complicated, just like their relationship with Christianity, which embraced a different interpretation of Christ than that of the Nicene faith. At the Council of Nicaea convened by Emperor Constantine in 325 CE, Arius of Alexandria and his followers had proposed that Jesus and God were of a similar (homoios) substance. Those who opposed Arian Christians and argued that Jesus and God were of the same (homos) substance would eventually claim the mantle of “Nicene” and “orthodox” Christianity.

In terms of historical material, little is known about Alaric, who became the de facto leader of the Goths. But what Boin establishes about Alaric and his era significantly reframes the stereotypical narrative. As he puts it, “Alaric came of age at a time when high-placed politicians wanted Gothic boys like him dead, when few ordinary Romans cared to acknowledge the cruelties that had occurred at their own borders, and when even the casual comments of educated Romans dehumanized his people.” When Alaric breached Rome’s walls, he was no stranger to the empire. Born along the empire’s northern border with the Danube River, Alaric enlisted as a soldier for the Romans as a young man during the thawing of Gothic-Roman relations in the 390s; this provided great benefits, such as a stipend otherwise not available to him because he lacked Roman citizenship. Alaric was climbing the ranks of the Roman military when his position in Illyricum was suddenly terminated. His decision to invade Rome was preceded by failed attempts at negotiations with Rome’s ruling elites. The Goths demanded better treatment and land, and Alaric allegedly proposed that they wanted to “live with the Romans [so] that men might believe them both to be of one family or people.”

A depiction of Alaric the Goth

Immigrants and refugees had always been central to Rome’s history and its identity. Plutarch said that the city was founded as an asylum. Virgil described the hero of The Aeneid as a wanderer. In 212 CE, the Emperor Caracalla passed the significant Antonine Declaration, which granted citizenship to every free-born resident of a Roman province. Rome’s senate looked increasingly “multicultural” by our standards. Rome’s emperors, like Septimius Severus, could come from Roman territory in Africa, or, like Trajan and Hadrian, from the province of Spain. But for all its apparent inclusivity, the Roman Empire still harbored deep xenophobia. True belonging didn’t depend on legal citizenship but on Romanitas or how one dressed, spoke, and behaved. Ovid said of those at the edge of Rome’s borders, “They have more of cruel savagery than wolves.” According to Claudian, a Roman contemporary of Alaric, “Everyone insults the immigrant.”

In 235, Maximinus Thrax was the first foreigner with a “barbarian” background to become Roman emperor after being made a citizen through Caracalla’s law. But for traditionalists, Maximinus’ background was a strike against him. A group of senators stubbornly opposed him and called him a “Cyclops,” using Homeric language to depict him as a monster. His reign was short-lived. In 238, Maximinus was assassinated, and senators picked a replacement named Gordian who, according to Boin, signified an abrupt return to Rome’s “traditional ways.”

By the time Alaric sacked Rome in 410, around 30,000 Goths lived within the city and every Roman home was said to have at least one or two Gothic slaves. The Roman Empire had extended citizenship on a large scale at least three times in its history, culminating with Caracalla’s law. But the extension of citizenship had largely stalled in Alaric’s day and most Goths lacked citizenship and full legal protections. Around 377, Emperor Valens created a policy of forced relocation of young Gothic men in order to instill in them Roman values and prevent rebellion. In 408, after the execution of a Roman general who had roots in another barbarian group known as the Vandals, Romans indiscriminately attacked Gothic men, women, and children in the city. Thousands of Goths responded by pouring into the streets in protest.

An 1890 painting titled “Sack of Rome” by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre

Alaric’s sack didn’t emerge from a vacuum but from a cultural tinderbox related to Gothic and Roman relations. Goths who enlisted to fight for Rome didn’t always meet a better fate — as exemplified by Alaric’s situation and by Emperor Theodosius’ cold calculation to sacrifice thousands of Gothic soldiers on the front lines of the battlefield. And Christian attitudes on the Goths didn’t necessarily differ from that of their non-Christian counterparts. The Christian bishop Synesius maintained that the Gothic people were an animalistic race, and that the government should “admit no fellowship with these foreigners” but, rather, would do better to “disown their participation” in public life.

Christians of the Nicene camp were politically ascendant in this era. Many people attribute this to Emperor Constantine’s conversion and his legalization of Christianity in 313. But no emperor did more for Christians politically than Theodosius who made Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380, and whom Christians called “The Great.” Boin writes of Theodosius, “he used every tool available to an emperor — the laws, imperial decrees, a soft touch, veiled threats, and actual physical force — to implement his vision for a single-party Christian state.” Bishops like Ambrose of Milan preached that angels were fighting demons for control of the empire and that Theodosius deserved Christians’ unqualified support. Boin adds, “In 388, after Christians burned a [Jewish] synagogue at Callinicum, in Syria, no one was held accountable; Theodosius refused to punish the guilty faction of Christians because they counted among his most loyal supporters.” Fanatical Christians were emboldened under Theodosius’ reign. In 393, to their joy, Theodosius went as far as to criminalize nearly every aspect of pagan worship. Rome passed nearly twenty edicts against Paganism by the year 400.

The “Make Christianity Great” agenda of Theodosius and his Christian supporters was unsuccessfully opposed by several pagans and moderate Christians. Symmachus, a pagan senator, defended the freedom of religious pluralism, writing: “The truth of why things happen is hidden at the end of a multiplicity of roads and pathways.” Some Christians considered this approach dangerous. In Against Symmachus, the Christian poet Prudentius responded, “The windings of the labyrinth offer little but doubtful corners and the promise of more uncertainty.” Boin says, “Other Christians composed misleading prophecies, modeled after a collection of widely regarded pagan writings called The Sibylline Oracles, and shared them with other Christians to stoke anxiety about another coming age of persecution.” Christians like Lactantius, the tutor to Emperor Constantine’s children, described Theodosius’ supporters and the more fanatical Christians as Deliri or “crazies.”

Christian senators who tried to compromise with pagans were branded as “apostates” by other Christians. Theodosius’ Christian-supremacist rule inspired segments of the population to back usurpers such as Flavius Eugenius, a Christian who supported the right to open pagan worship. According to one account, members of the church told Eugenius that he was not a “real Christian.” Eugenius eventually faced off Theodosius in a civil war. Ultimately, Theodosius, while using Gothic troops on the frontlines, defeated Eugenius in 394. He impaled Eugenius’ head on a stick and displayed it around Italy. While orthodox Christians later mythologized Theodosius, highlighting stories such as his alleged public repentance before Ambrose for his responsibility in a massacre at Thessaloniki, Theodosius’ reign helped elevate the perspectives of Nicene Christian writers while erasing those of pagans and rival Christians. As the classicist Mary Beard puts it in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, “The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners.”

When Alaric and the Goths sacked Rome in August 410, Christians interpreted it in a number of ways. Within a month, some Christians compared it to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and saw an apocalyptic line in the book of Ezekiel about Gog as a warning about “the Goths.” In City of God, Augustine saw the sack as a disaster and used it as an opportunity to theologically bury Rome’s pagan gods — which according to him were really demons — once and for all. Although he acknowledges Alaric’s merciful behavior, Augustine credits God for bridling the “fierce and bloody minds” of the Arian Christian barbarians. Like eavesdropping on one side of a debate, City of God shows us Augustine setting up his arguments against pagan opponents who apparently blamed Christianity for the breach of Rome’s walls. Other Christians thought Alaric’s sack of Rome wasn’t a disaster or a big deal. In Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, Orosius, a Christian historian from Spain and a personal pupil of Augustine, parted ways with the gloomy outlook of Augustine and Jerome. Orosius wrote more sympathetically about the Goths, believed that Nero’s fires and the Gauls’ sack were worse than Alaric’s occupation, and shied away from more apocalyptic or theologically somber pronouncements.

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For more than a thousand years, we’ve inherited debates about the fall of the Roman Empire that lay all the blame at the feet of Christianity, or Paganism, or barbarians, or immigrants. Edward Gibbon, a masterful stylist, mostly blamed Christianity and barbarians in an account suggesting that empires rise and fall like the sun, due to “the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” Yet most historians today would avoid characterizing Rome’s collapse — or transition, transformation, etc. — as resulting from only a couple of factors. In fact, it’s become increasingly clear that other realities, like climate and disease, were also pivotal.

In The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Kyle Harper writes, “The fate of Rome was played out by emperors and barbarians, senators and generals, soldiers and slaves. But it was equally decided by bacteria and viruses, volcanoes and solar cycles.” Building on fascinating research that combines a scientific and humanistic approach, Harper argues that the Roman Empire emerged during a phase of warm, wet, and stable climate across much of the Mediterranean that he calls the “Roman Climate Optimum.” The “Little Ice Age” that resulted from volcanic activity in the 530s and 540s CE demonstrates how much climate could impact the empire’s agriculture and economic growth. “Even more consequentially,” according to Harper, “the Romans built an interconnected, urbanized empire on the fringes of the tropics, with tendrils creeping across the known world. In an unintended conspiracy with nature, the Romans created a disease ecology that unleashed the latent power of pathogen evolution. The Romans were soon engulfed by the overwhelming force of what we would today call emerging infectious diseases.”

Harper thinks that the explosion of plague and climate deterioration in the 6^th and 7^th centuries fueled apocalyptic angst within Christianity, Judaism, and eventually Islam. The Antonine Plague of 165-180 appears to have crippled civic polytheism in a way that opened the door to Christianity’s growth. In some early Christian legends, such as one about Gregory the Wonderworker, plagues provided a communal stage to display “the inefficacy of the ancestral gods” and “the virtues of the Christian faith.” While the public image of some ancient Christians may have benefited from the compassion they exhibited during pestilence, it could be harder for later historians to say the same about the Christians who packed churches and attempted to flout public health guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the U.S. republic declines and falls, it will — like Rome’s decline — be due to a number of converging factors. While the Roman Empire’s history provides important echoes and lessons, every apparent parallel is also accompanied by jarring reminders that ancient Rome’s context is not the U.S., and that the attack on the Capitol is not Alaric’s sack of Rome. But that won’t stop some people from seeing only what they want to see.

The battles between Romans and barbarians have often served as an elastic canvass onto which modern nationalists and white supremacists have tried to paint their racial fantasies. Just as some Europeans and Americans have associated Rome with “civilization” as such, others, at times, have flipped the symbolic sack by Alaric on its head and identified the barbarians with white people today. Starting in the 16^th century, German writers started to claim the Goths as their ancestors. This was based on the erroneous assumption that because the Gothic and German languages belonged to the same family, modern Germans were directly related to Goths by blood. (Most of Alaric’s descendants actually ended up in Spain and were later labeled “Visigoths” — but that’s another story.)

Netflix’s show Barbarians

A similar dynamic can be seen more recently in reactions to the German drama Barbarians on Netflix, which depicts the ancient Battle of Teutoburg Forest between Romans and Cherusci barbarians. Far-right nationalists in Germany have long used this battle as an ideological rallying point and today might interpret this drama’s presentation of barbarians fighting Romans as a parallel to their own battle against the multicultural “tyranny” of globalists and the European Union. But the show’s creators made great efforts to avoid this political spin. Matthias Wemhoff, the director of the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, has asserted that “there is no continuity” between the Cherusci and contemporary Germans.

Whether barbarians are turned into the villains or the heroes, modern racists have found multiple uses for them in stories that are only loosely connected to historical facts. The attack on the U.S. Capitol is now its own symbol. It has already produced divergent interpretations among extremists and will continue to do so. Nevertheless, several far-right Germans and Americans claim that they share a common cause in resisting so-called “white genocide” or the replacement of European populations by immigrants. Unlike the German context, however, in which white nationalists have attempted to racially reclaim the barbarians, the U.S. context has, more often than not, exclusively deployed the language of barbarian invaders against people of color.

The parable of the barbarians at the gate has been useful for those who warn about America’s downfall coming from some external, or alien-in-our-midst, threat, whether this be immigrants or socialists. It’s a less elucidating tale for addressing homegrown white supremacy, domestic terrorism, or inadequate human responses to the climate and to plagues. Even the real threat posed by Russian interference preys upon our nation’s internal problems. All of this brings to mind a poem written by C. P. Cavafy titled “Waiting for the Barbarians.” In it, an onlooker observes an unnamed emperor and group of political leaders as they take a series of dramatic steps in anticipation of barbarians marching to the gate of their city. The barbarians never arrive. Then, the onlooker concludes: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.”

Daniel José Camacho is a columnist for the Revealer. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners. Writing with a focus on religion, race, and history, his work has appeared in publications such as Religion News Service, America Magazine, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post.

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

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