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The Women With A Vision collective, co-founded by Danita Muse and Catherine Haywood, has been fighting for the liberation of their communities through reproductive justice, harm reduction, abolition feminism, racial justice, and sex workers’ rights since 1989. Deon Haywood (Ms. Catherine’s daughter) is a longtime activist and community leader who has been a member of WWAV for decades, and became the organization’s Executive Director in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Laura McTighe is an abolitionist ethnographer and organizer who has been a part of the movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons for more than twenty-five years. She is also an assistant professor of religion at Florida State University and the co-founder of Women With A Vision’s research arm, Front Porch Research Strategy, whose work centers collaborative knowledge production as both theory and a method for analyzing the violences of gendered racial capitalism in our everyday lives, and how to build the world otherwise. Laura has been an accomplice (a concept she will expand on further in our conversation) to WWAV’s work since 2008.

Fire Dreams is a groundbreaking book for many reasons. The book is co-authored by Laura with Women With A Vision, and Deon wrote the foreword. Its publication is part of a long process of collaboration that has prioritized finding new, more ethical ways for academics and activists to create and share knowledge together. It is a work of deep and rigorous scholarship, peer-reviewed and published by a prestigious academic press, that will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research. At the same time, and just as importantly, the book is written as a toolkit for activists and organizers working for justice, care, and freedom for their communities. It’s an extraordinary book — in no small part because it is also beautifully written. It’s a thrill to read Fire Dreams, and a thrill to get to talk to Laura and Deon about how they wrote this book and how they hope you, as readers, will use it.

Below, Deon and Laura discuss the history and current workings of WWAV, what it meant to co-author a book representing so many years of thinking and fighting together, and how they hope readers will find inspiration and tools to work and fight with them.

Kali Handelman: This book is being published in the lead-up to the 35th anniversary of Women A Vision’s (WWAV)’s founding. Could you tell us about the organization’s origins, who you are, and the work you do?

Deon Haywood: Thirty-five years ago during the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the War on Drug Users, a collective of Black women set out to counter the organized abandonment of our communities with care. They called themselves Women With A Vision.

At the time, the bulk of HIV/AIDS resources were going towards New Orleans’ white, gay community, while poor Black folks, the folks in the city’s public housing projects, were facing skyrocketing rates of infection without any real, concerted effort to meet our community’s needs. Danita Muse, who was a social worker in the city’s Office of Substance Abuse, had been working to start an organization to counter that deadly fact. The story goes that Danita and my mother Catherine Haywood, who was then working with the Children’s Pediatric AIDS Program, locked eyes across a crowded conference room and committed themselves to the sacred, lifesaving work Black feminists have been doing for generations—creating ways of survival so that one day we can thrive.

My mother always says this work is based on relationships. WWAV’s foremothers knew that it wasn’t just a lack of resources that contributed to the abysmal rates of HIV infection within Black communities; it was a lack of trust. Black New Orleanians, and this goes for Black Americans in general, had no reason to trust white institutions. Governmental agencies and non-profit organizations had long isolated, blamed, criminalized, erased, and taken from us. So when white institutions finally decided to do something about the HIV/AIDS crisis, they held no standing within our communities.

What WWAV’s foremothers did so brilliantly was to rely on the relationships they already had to disseminate information and resources, while continually building new ones. Our foremothers, and the women who have kept WWAV going over the last 35 years, were never in the business of “saving” folks; they were there to share life-saving information so that folks could make the decisions they deemed best for themselves. For the most part, we’re not the churchgoing types, so we don’t come from a place of fabricated moral authority and we’ve never had time to play respectability games. From day one, we knew that appearing more “respectable”—whether that be speaking a certain way, dressing a certain way, getting to a certain place on the economic ladder—wasn’t going to get us or the people we work with any freer.

(Image: Women With A Vision logo)

In a way, I grew up with WWAV, distributing condoms and sterile needles through street-based outreach with my family and holding house parties where we’d talk about safer sex practices and harm reduction around substance use. After Hurricane Katrina, I stepped into the role of Executive Director. Our people were hurting. The forces of white supremacy used the storm as an opportunity to permanently banish Black New Orleanians from what is the most African city in this country, a place that is sacred and is the cultural capital of Black America. And it was the folks that we work with—Black women, poor folks, sex workers, substance users, and queer folks—who were most at risk for displacement, criminalization, and death following the storm.

Our work post-Katrina grew in response to our community’s needs. When our clients came into our offices bearing licenses branded with “SEX OFFENDER” after being charged under the state’s Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) statute, we organized alongside them to put an end to the policy that turned survival sex work into a scarlett letter that barred women from taking their children to school, limited their housing options, and further prevented their entry into the formal economy. As our elected officials took aim at our community’s right to determine when or if to have children, we built out our reproductive justice program. And just as our foremothers nurtured me and instilled Black feminist learnings, we knew that we needed to nurture the next generation of Black feminists, and so we started our Young Women With A Vision program. Today Women With A Vision’s work includes integrated voter engagement, harm reduction and drug policy, HIV/AIDS education and prevention, reproductive justice, sex work decriminalization, and youth education and advocacy.

Kali: Building on the idea of centering relationships, could you share more about the process of writing this book? Laura, you wrote Fire Dreams with Deon and the entire Women With A Vision collective. Can you tell us what that means and why it was important to co-create Fire Dreams as a collective?

Laura McTighe: Like Deon shared, this work is based in relationships. Deon and I first met in 2008 at a small gathering that brought together AIDS activists and prison abolitionists to try to unite these two movements around the knowledge that mass criminalization was a structural driver of the HIV epidemic.

Over the coming year, Deon and I spent hours talking by phone. We were building a friendship, but she was also apprenticing me to the foundational methods that Danita and Catherine created through WWAV. The first time I came to New Orleans I was invited by Deon to facilitate a meeting that birthed the NO Justice Project. Through this project, WWAV organized to fight Louisiana’s use of the felony-level Crime Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) statute to criminalize sex work as a registerable sex offense. We partnered with a team of movement lawyers to bring a constitutional challenge of the statute, and won! – securing the removal of more than 800 people from the sex offender registry. Two months later, WWAV’s offices were firebombed and destroyed in direct retaliation for our work.

After the fire, city officials, the police, politicians – everyone tried to say this was an atypical, exceptional attack. But at WWAV we knew this wasn’t a singular attack on a single organization at a single moment in time. Fire means something in the South. It means something in the lives of Black and Brown and Indigenous people. It means something in the lives of Black women. So we had to dig deep into the theory and praxis of WWAV’s foremothers and of the generations who came before them.

Research became a tool of survival for us. We never set out to write a book. We were trying to rebuild an organization and recreate the archive that was destroyed in the attack. We began by collecting every life-giving ember we could find. That included handfuls of photographs, posters, and documents that had not gone up in flames, which are now preserved at WWAV’s offices on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. It also extended to new ways of recording our presence with one another and with our communities: life history interviews, collective storytelling sessions, and more.

Fire Dreams is a story that we have created in time and in space, through pictures and porch talks, in the context of our relationships as comrades, friends, and family. Our processes for committing this story to paper are as living as the relationships in which we do this work. At any given time, every member of the WWAV collective has their role. As one of the writers in the collective, my role has most often been to record the WWAV vision and practice, working closely with Deon and the rest of the WWAV leadership to refine the message that we share, and talking through drafts and dreams. As we say in the book, “the labor of writing is inseparable from the organizing and theorizing that we are writing about.’

Writing as a collective is a theoretical and methodological innovation. Through this approach, we are working to transform conceptions of who the “author” is as well as who the “subjects” are. Both, as we argue and show, are fundamentally authoritative in the telling of the story. And that is a really radical intervention. It’s supposed to be. As a collective, we examine the work of community building and organizing undertaken by Black women in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in the aftermath of what could have been a fatal arson attack, and we stitch our work to the freedom dreams of generations of Black women organizers in the South whose work we carry forward every day. In so doing, we destabilize neat boundaries around questions of authority and representation. We are one. By showing that and publishing this book with Duke University Press, we hope that Fire Dreams will open up new ways to think about academic authority, the division of labor in authorship, and the tools we use to evaluate academic work.

We desperately need to open up scholarship in this way because of the violence that academics have historically done in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities through extractive research practices that have mined community and ancestral knowledges; dispossessed members of their sacred objects, sites, and cosmologies; and perpetuated lethal stereotypes that are part of the ongoing legacies of chattel slavery and settler colonialism. In the book, we talk about how much violence these sorts of practices, usually shrouded in the myth of “objectivity” as the ideal research position, have done in our communities. In contrast, we work strongly in the lineage of Black feminist and abolitionist thinkers who have taught us that telling the stories about what we witness, theorize, envision, and practice is the most rigorous kind of knowledge we can make. They have also taught us about the love that needs to unite us and ground us in relationships in all that we do.

Deon: Racial capitalism destroys relationships and communities; it thrives off of individualism. Our work as a collective flies in the face of racial capitalism. We invest in each other and work collectively because that is what this work requires and because it is an act of protest. From day one our foremothers realized that this work was too big to hold alone. Black feminism is about building structures of care to ensure our survival in a world that wants us dead. Accompliceship is a challenge to build those structures of care, to build trusting relationships across identities to ensure our collective liberation. That’s not easy. This is deeper than a call for allyship. This is a demand that accomplices put real skin in the game and pour from themselves to aid in the liberation of all people.

Women With A Vision is a Black woman led organization. Our work has been and will always be in service of Black women, but we realize, as so many Black feminists who came before us, that true liberation requires us all. This work isn’t easy, but to get to where we are going, we’ve got to form and nurture loving, revolutionary relationships so that we can tackle systems of oppression together.

Kali: In the book’s Introduction, you tell readers that ​​it is “not simply a book to be read. It is a toolkit” and “a call to revolutionize that knowledge into praxis in order to build the world otherwise.” Could you tell us about some of the tools you offer readers and how you hope they will be used?

Deon: It’s only because of the generations of work done by our foremothers, both known and unknown, that we’re able to continue this work. So much theory and praxis has been passed onto us in books, articles, and speeches, but also through conversation and through the ways that Black women have made their way in the world at the intersections of white supremacy and the patriarchy.

Laura: That’s precisely why we call our work the “Born in Flames Living Archive.” We use the term “living archive” to center the relational practices through which our communities have shaped and passed down for generations what living freedom means amid constant surveillance. In other words, we center what we call their “theory on the ground,” which we define in the book as, “theory developed in the midst of lived struggle, which carries forward the deeply enduring resistant visions of generations past and grows them in and through the geographies of the present, toward new and more possible futures.”

You get one of the core tools we offer in the first pages of the book: the “racial capitalism playbook.” In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the police tried to blame WWAV and the communities we serve for the violence we survived. And we knew that response had a history, just like the arson attack itself and the organized abandonment that followed Hurricane Katrina. We distill the racial capitalism playbook into six steps:

ISOLATE people from necessary social services;
BLAME them for the abuse they survive;
CRIMINALIZE them for their survival;
DESTABILIZE  their communities;
ERASE them from the city of their birth; and then
TAKE their land

Those steps are ones that WWAV has used to understand, track, and build collective analysis about the violence we are living through, and also to understand and connect our present struggles to those of our ancestors. And we hope the racial capitalism playbook will be one tool our readers will use to understand and theorize these operations of racial capitalism in their daily lives and worlds. At the Born in Flames Living Archive, you can learn more about how we use the racial capitalism playbook in our work and also “talk back” and share insights from your own.

In the book, we also offer up WWAV’s four-part counter playbook for fighting racial capitalism and building a world in which it is possible to live and thrive, not just survive:

ACCOMPLICE – something we learn from Indigenous Action Media, active engagement, support, and organizing in loving partnership and solidarity on-the-ground to dismantle racial capitalism and make Black feminist liberation have “skin in the game”

REFUSAL – not allowing the logics, tactics, and violence of racial capitalism supremacy in one’s own life or community, daring to operate outside of the confines of the world as it is to build the world that must be

OTHERWISE – the possibility of a world beyond the violence of racial capitalism, the act of bringing forth this world first through imagination and then through action, the understanding that the world we are trying to build already exists in fragments and glimmers all around us

SPEECH – the refusal to be erased by continually speaking the truth of your community, the impacts of racial capitalism, and the possibility of a world otherwise, the knowledge that speech is a creative act: to speak into being

Each part of this counter playbook has been learned in community, on the ground, through decades of doing the work. And so we offer it to our readers as a discipline of hope. We are living through dark times, and we want to — we need to — see our movements grow. That can only happen by being in it, day after day, face to face, showing up for one another and continuing to speak the world that must be into being.

Deon: We also know that this work won’t be completed in our lifetimes so it’s essential that we continue in the tradition of sharing our knowledge and wisdom with the folks who will continue this work for generations to come.

Young people give me hope. I see their passion, their desire for liberation. I see how unapologetic they are. And just as this work was passed to me, I am one day going to pass the torch along to the next generation of Women With A Vision. Just as I can’t predict the future, I can’t tell the folks who are coming up exactly what tomorrow will require of them and our movement. What I can do is share what we know up until now—that is we can share the works that have shaped our thinking and ways of being and we can share what we’ve observed of our oppressors i.e., the racial capitalism playbook. And in sharing our counter playbook, we can point the next generation in the right direction, while allowing them to apply our strategies to their unique circumstances.

Kali: This book has something really important to say about religion. You critique reductive ideas about religion in the South and fight back against the religious roots of violent criminalization. You also say in the book that what WWAV does is sacred work in a place which is, itself, sacred. What does it mean for you to do this critical work as a sacred calling?

Deon: New Orleans is a place of seeming contradictions, pious and obscene at the same time. I think that what people often see is a city in the Deep South seemingly free from a lot of the judginess of our Bible-belt neighbors. And some would attribute that to the city’s Catholic tradition, which is true to some degree. But I would say, it has more to do with the city’s West African roots.

As I said earlier, New Orleans is the most African city in the United States. Our traditions, as people ripped from their communities in West Africa, endured here. Our music, our dance, our processionals, our masking traditions continue on to this day. There’s a popular song played by secondline bands here, I think originally written by Rebirth Brass Band, called “Do Whatcha Wanna.” Our ancestral traditions aren’t built on white supremacist, patriarchal, Western notions of morality. There’s space here for transgression. There’s a kind of “do whatcha wanna” attitude that is divorced from a lot of Western, white religiosity. We live in a city where men build stunning suits (Mardi Gras Indians), in a tradition rooted in our West African heritage paying homage to our maroon ancestors and the folks who helped them as they liberated themselves from the bonds of slavery, and call each other pretty. That’s radical.

Yes, there are challenges here. The white supremacists using their religion as cover seemingly have this place in a chokehold. But that’s not the full story. There is love and acceptance and a commitment to letting people live as they see fit, and I would say that is more radical than anything you’d find in whiter, more so-called progressive locales.

Laura: These are precisely the complexities of religion that we try to hold fully in Fire Dreams. And in doing that, we’re honoring the history of Black women’s theorizing about race and religion in the South. In the scholarly and popular imagination, the connection between race and religion is too often still presumed to cohere on Black women’s bodies through racist tropes around ecstatic forms of worship, singing, and dress that are rooted in the myths that Black religion is supposedly “primitive” compared to white religion and Black women are somehow “naturally” religious. So it was a really important intervention for us to write a public-facing religious studies book centered in a Black feminist collective in the South, led by a group of mostly non-churchgoing women who are working on the frontlines of struggles for harm reduction, reproductive justice, abolition feminism, HIV liberation, and more — and organizing daily against those racist tropes.

Throughout Fire Dreams, we lift up the precision of WWAV’s theorizing about white supremacist Christianity and our work to build otherwise. That comes through in so many places in the text –– from the moral panic around the early AIDS crisis, to the religious roots of the Crime Against Nature law, to the religious underpinnings of carceral feminism and the war against sex workers, to the vicious organizing against abortion and bodily autonomy.

And we also show how WWAV’s work is sacred work. Not just in the making of sacred space like front porches and WWAV’s office itself. But also in the ways we dream of a world otherwise and speak that work into being, in the ways we care for one another and honor the sacredness of Black livingness. To imagine, much less create, the world anew is profoundly rigorous work. And those sacred traditions run deep in the relational caverns in which Black radical thoughts, actions, and dreams have been kept safe for centuries, just like Deon explained.

That is the gift of Fire Dreams. It is an offering of love that honors the transformative religio-racial practices that generations have used to cross worlds, open portals, and conjure revolution. And it invites all of our readers into doing that work with us.

Kali: Finally, I want to ask you: what’s next for WWAV? In the book, Deon tells us that “the work will continue to get done, no matter what.” The final words of the book are, “forward ever”; and here, you’ve already spoken about how young people give you hope. What is your vision for moving forward? What do you see on the horizon? And how can others support and join you in that work?

Deon: In this moment post-Dobbs, with a governor hell bent on disappearing our community members behind bars, it’s time to get back to basics. I’m thinking a lot about what this present moment has in common with the era in which we were founded. WWAV’s foremothers started their work at the peak of the War on Drug Users, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and so-called tough-on-crime policies. We’ve got to apply their same tactics and strategies today. We’re focusing on applying harm reduction to everything we do. For our reproductive justice program that means getting our community members the information and resources they need in a state where abortion is banned outright. It means talking to our community members about how voting is not the end-all, be-all, but is a critical way to reduce harm for our most vulnerable neighbors. We’re focused on connecting the dots within our community so that we can continue to care for each other when local, state, and federal institutions abandon or outright attack us.

(Image source: Women With A Vision)

As we’ve talked about, this work is a sacred calling that must be passed on to the next generation. We’ve relaunched our Young Women With A Vision program so that young Black girls and femmes have a place where they are the architects of their own liberation.

We’re continuing our harm reduction and outreach services, working with the state to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and continuing to support our substance using community.

Laura: And we are using this book to support us doing this work and sharing WWAV’s hard-won strategies with our people locally and nationwide. This is also what it means for us to approach this work as a living archive. We honor the dreams of our foremothers by living them and by working together to build the world that must be.

Over the coming year, we’ll be partnering with movement organizations across the country to shore up our relationships and build community power at the intersections of struggles for harm reduction, reproductive justice, abolition feminism, and more. We launched this book with our community in New Orleans on the book’s publication day, March 5th. On March 22nd, we gathered with WWAV’s longtime Atlanta comrades at Access Reproductive Care-Southeast, Black Feminist Future, Feminist Women’s Health Center, The Georgia Harm Reduction Coalition, Project South, SisterLove, Inc., and SisterSong for a packed event at Charis Books and More. On April 2nd, we’ll be convening virtually with our partners at the Drug Policy Alliance to talk about drug criminalization, community-driven research, and more. And then, we’ll be hosting our next in-person gathering in Baltimore with The Bloom Collective for Black Maternal Health Week on April 16th. We are currently booked out through November, when we’ll look forward to engaging with religious studies scholars at the American Academy of Religion in San Diego for a porch talk organized by the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit and the Afro-American Religious History Unit.

As Deon says in her foreword and we repeat throughout the book: “The work will continue to get done, no matter what.” Forward Ever.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor and writing coach based in New York City. 

Laura McTighe is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University and the Cofounder of Women With A Vision’s research arm, Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans.

Deon Haywood is Executive Director of Women With A Vision, a New Orleans-based organization that has organized for Black feminist liberation in the South for decades.

The post The Fire to Create the World Anew appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Yara Nardi for Reuters)

Pope Francis acknowledges my gay identity more than my own grandmother – a surprising contrast, considering they are both devout Catholics of the same generation. Somehow, a childless monarch of the Vatican City State has been more accepting than a woman who helped raise me.

My grandmother loves me unconditionally but never utters the word “gay.” I’ve always interpreted her silence on the matter as a casualty of faith. Catholicism’s condemnation of homosexuality feels deeply ingrained in history and culture. And yet, Pope Francis has taken strides to make the church more accepting to LGBTQ people.

As someone who renounced Catholicism, I found it revolutionary that the most powerful voice in the Catholic church is working toward some form of LGBTQ inclusion. But to what extent? I needed to understand the pontiff’s views of queer people.

Fabio Marchese Ragona, author of the pope’s forthcoming official biography, Life: My Story Through History, told me that to grasp his pastoral leadership, often inaccurately perceived as excessively progressive compared to his predecessors, we must delve into his origins and upbringing.

Ragona, a Vatican correspondent for Mediaset, the largest commercial broadcaster in Italy, responded to my questions in Italian, mirroring his book’s text. I enlisted the help of the North American version’s translator, Aubrey Botsford. Ragona explains that the pope’s background in Latin America shaped his point of view, influenced by a “people’s theology,” which emphasizes a preferential option for the poor.

“Hence Francis’s strong focus on those at the bottom, the discarded, and his demand for an outward-bound church that does not close in on itself,” Ragona said. “He has spoken of a ‘globalization of indifference,’ and this statement undoubtedly arises out of a past – in Buenos Aires – he lived alongside the poor, those discarded by society who live in the villas miserias (shantytowns).”

The author doesn’t mince words: before the world called him Pope Francis, Jorge Bergoglio considered the church a home for everyone and worked to make that possible as a bishop, as an archbishop, and as a cardinal before taking the Vatican’s helm. “The pope doesn’t want privileges anymore; he wants the church to be a ‘field hospital,’” Ragona said, who believes Pope Francis is an emblem of the new wave of Catholic leadership working to break ties with a history of corruption, abuse and scandal, and return the people’s trust in the church by making it an institution for communal good.

Since taking office in 2013, Pope Francis has encouraged high-ranking church affiliates to limit luxuries and opt for modest housing to maximize funds for those in need. Some critics have accused him of peddling communism. But Ragona insists the church follows the gospel rather than political belief systems.

That doesn’t mean Pope Francis has shied away from political conversations or controversial opinions, such as his vocal rejection of marriage equality. Ragona excuses his stance as a matter of scripture. “Pope Francis has often said that people who form a civil partnership should have stronger and more appropriate legal protection,” he says.

Although Pope Francis didn’t affirm civil unions until 2020, the LGBTQ community held on to hope for more inclusion since a comment he made right after his selection as pope in 2013. After returning from his first trip abroad as pontiff, journalists inquired if there was a “gay lobby” in the Vatican. Pope Francis responded with a line that soon went viral around the world, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” Within that same interview, he advocated for a greater role for women in the church.

Optimism for change did not last long. As the pope soon shut the door on ordination for women, he condemned what he described as “lobbying by gay people,” suggesting that he did not approve of those who wanted the church to endorse marriage equality. But later that year, Pope Francis demonstrated a departure from his predecessors on homosexuality not just in tone, but also in action. Kairos, an organization of LGBTQ Catholics in Florence, Italy, reported receiving a handwritten note from the pope, marking the first time a pontiff communicated with an LGBTQ group.

The Italian group told a local newspaper, La Repubblica, that they wrote the pope to say his correspondence would help battle homophobia in the church. He unexpectedly wrote back, saying they had his blessing. Although he didn’t directly advocate for them, the respect he showed was groundbreaking enough for The Advocate, the largest queer publication at the time, to name him their 2013 Person of the Year.

Unfortunately, that did not deter Pope Francis from opposing the queer community on important issues.

While millions marched in Rome for marriage equality in 2014, the following day, Pope Francis delivered a speech to 25,000 people stressing the importance of children having heterosexual parents. It was a blow felt by queer Catholics who held onto the possibility that he would affirm their relationships and abilities to raise children.

This dichotomy continued in March 2015 when Pope Francis had unprecedented lunch with a group of about 90 prisoners in Naples, including ten from a ward that held inmates who are gay, transgender, or living with HIV/AIDS, once again showing his willingness to spend time with LGBTQ people. But the subsequent month saw the release of Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Sí. In paragraph 155, he critiques “gender theory,” a move interpreted by some as a condemnation of transgender identities. He compared the dangers of gender theory to nuclear weapons

Despite his apparent concerns about gender theory and children who do not have straight parents, the pontiff made headlines in 2015 during his first public visit to Paraguay when he met with a group of civil leaders, among them Simón Cazal, who had symbolically married his husband in Argentina and became the first LGBTQ activist to publicly meet with a pope. This historic moment was particularly significant in a country where no protections existed for LGBTQ people.

Cazal told me the meeting put him in the spotlight for a few months and consequently connected his activism with religious institutions, even if he didn’t identify as Catholic himself. “Pope Francis is a very intelligent leader who understands the boundaries, complexities, and challenges of navigating an institution as ancient as the Catholic church,” Cazal said. “I believe his personal inclination leans towards supporting science and acknowledging the evidence surrounding real issues that demand attention, such as climate change, inequality, the crumbling of democracies, and the rise of authoritarian philosophies spreading across our territories.”

Cazal ultimately believes Pope Francis is fostering a new culture that aligns with the spirit of Catholicism while also constructing universal bridges. “The efforts made by him and his team are extremely valuable and have the potential to change many hearts and minds globally,” added Cazal.

If anything, the pope’s approach to queer people was certainly turning heads in the press. From his meeting at the Vatican with a transgender man who was rejected by his local parish in Spain after undergoing gender-confirming surgery in 2015, to his summoning a French student who was severely injured while defending a gay couple in 2018, the risk of controversy did not deter him from dialogue.

Still, one of Pope Francis’ most contentious meetings did not unfold until October 2023.

The Executive Director of the LGBTQ advocacy group, New Ways Ministry, Francis DeBernardo, was invited to meet with the pope. DeBernardo helps lead education and advocacy efforts across churches in the U.S. for the inclusion and acceptance of queer people. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was shocked when Pope Francis responded to his letters and welcomed, if not summoned, his group to visit his Vatican office.

(Image: New Ways Ministry logo)

“I was anticipating trumpets and a grand announcement,” DeBernardo told me. Instead, he received only the nervous reaction of a colleague gesturing towards Pope Francis standing behind him. The head of the Catholic church extended his humble hand to DeBernardo and his three colleagues, followed by nearly an hour of his coveted time, DeBernardo recalls with pride and a smirk.

DeBernardo’s meeting with the pope raised eyebrows across oceans, with the press speculating about whether it solidified his solidarity with New Ways Ministry’s positions. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had previously censured the organization.

However, while journalists probed DeBernardo about the pope’s remarks to a group of Catholic LGBTQ educators, it was his group that did most of the talking. “He truly wanted to listen to us,” DeBernardo remarked. “It didn’t feel like a high-level organizational meeting but more like a pastoral visit.” The pope invited them to share their experiences.

When I questioned DeBernardo on whether the pope vocalized support for queer people, he stumbled on his words before saying that he and his colleagues certainly thanked the pontiff for his support. It was a thank you DeBernardo never expected to give the pope in his lifetime authentically, let alone in the flesh. DeBernardo believes Pope Francis has given the LGBTQ community “all he can,” in terms of public approval.

Pope Francis departed from the meeting with a quote from St. Paul: “Hope does not disappoint,” DeBernardo remembers, along with a prayer by St. Thomas More asking God for a sense of humor.

By that meeting in 2023, Pope Francis had officially endorsed a priest’s ministry to LGBTQ Catholics in writing, offered letters of support to people working with gay and transgender communities, encouraged parents to love and not condemn their children of different sexual orientations, denounced laws that criminalize LGBTQ people, and appointed multiple leadership roles to people with strong pro-LGBTQ records.

One month after meeting with the New Ways Ministry, the Vatican announced that transgender people could be baptized and serve as godparents. But officials clarified it did not equate to a policy change in the church.

DeBernardo draws a comparison between the influence and power of Pope Francis and that of the President of the United States. “The President can’t change laws but sets a tone, style, and an agenda on what issues will be worked on and what is more important,” DeBernardo said. “When the document Fidus Supplicans came out, it was unheard of for bishops to oppose the pope so publicly.”

Fidus Supplicans was a Vatican document released in December 2023 that shook the Catholic realm – for better or worse – as it endorsed blessings for LGBTQ individuals, arguably marking the pope’s boldest move to date. It allowed queer people to seek receiving the sign of the Holy Trinity from a priest, considered spiritual healing or good luck and often sought in times of hardship or illness.

When news first broke, the public misinterpreted the statement as a sign queer people would be able to get married by a priest in the church. However, the Vatican quickly clarified that the blessers are only allowed in informal settings and not for any special ceremonies. Still, certain generations of queer Catholics have been awaiting the affirmation of a blessing their entire lives.

Public historian Emma Cieslik shared that a blessing is a big deal at her Catholic parish in Washington, D.C. but that it’s not enough. This blessing does nothing to distinguish queer relationships, like straight ones, as sacred and special. “We provide blessings to animals and pets. There’s a day for that, where you bring all your animals, livestock, and pets to the church parking lot. And that’s a blessing that people give. We bless churches, which is incredibly meaningful. We bless religious spaces, religious people, and lay people.”

Cieslik can’t help but feel anger and frustration, even though she acknowledges the notion that it is the most Pope Francis can do right now – at least strategically to maintain an allegiance with both sides – because it doesn’t feel like enough. “So, he’s trying in his role to give these little breadcrumbs of, like, he ate pasta with a trans woman in the Vatican City,” says Cieslik. “And that’s important for visibility. He was saying kind words to gay men and children of gay parents. He’s trying his best in the ways that he knows to advocate for it.”

To further complicate the situation, Cieslik reflects on the most recent Catholic Synod on Synodality, in which a 41-page report on the progress of the church held no positive statement on LGBTQ issues — or even the term itself. New Ways Ministry released its own statement titled, “Synod Report Greatly Disappoints, But We Must Have Hope,” while Cieslik wrote an article reflecting on the high hopes she had before its publication.

Such setbacks worsen a broader problem within the Catholic church. The church has witnessed the steepest decline in membership in America in the past two decades compared to any other religious group.

Pope Francis understands that the Vatican stands at a crossroads, torn between traditional practices and the imperative to engage a new generation to sustain its legacy. However, Cieslik, who has personally chronicled the first history project focusing on LGBTQ Catholic leaders, believes that if this is what the church expects queer youth to understand as “growth or moving in a specific direction, it’s not fast enough.”

Pope Francis recently took his progress in the opposing direction by solidifying his long-held opposition to gender theory, calling it an “ugly ideology of our times, which cancels out the differences and makes everything the same.”

“Cancelling out the differences means canceling out humanity,” added Pope Francis in the statement.

Still, many Catholics believe there are long-term ripple effects to the allyship and empathy Pope Francis has shown, and that has taken root in religious spaces, even if they fear his predecessors will be less open-minded.

But for now, DeBernardo says there was one sentence in the pope’s sign-off in his correspondence to him that gives him hope and that could be seen as a message for the LGBTQ community at large: “I’m at your disposal.”

Jamie Valentino is a freelance journalist and columnist with bylines in Business Insider, HuffPost, Men’s Journal, Chicago Tribune, Slate, and dozens more. His work has been republished in over 100 newspapers internationally, translated into five languages, and placed as a finalist in multiple literary contests.

The post The Evolution of Pope Francis’s Stance on LGBTQ Rights appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Illustration by Texas Monthly; MAGA logo: Mark Wilson, Getty; hat: Getty)

A few days after the 2004 election, a group of gay Republicans recommitted themselves to their work of reaching out to people of faith across the country.

Many of them were believers themselves, and they bristled at how they felt a handful of fire-breathing fundamentalists had hijacked the Christian faith and the Republican Party. They were angry with how evangelical preachers and televangelist tyrants selectively used Scripture to misguide millions of Americans with harmful views of homosexuality that shaped their resistance to gay rights. But rather than vilifying or shaming them as bigots, these gay Republicans believed they needed to build bridges of connection through gentle messaging, factual information, and patient understanding. That strategy mirrored the way many of them had handled their own conservative friends and families when they had come out to them, and they felt it provided a blueprint for the nation. Through “one person at a time,” the gay Republicans’ planning document insisted, “education can create equality.”

Given the recent election results, that plan might have struck many as hopelessly naive. Voters in thirteen states had just overwhelmingly endorsed ballot initiatives to add amendments to their state constitutions that banned same-sex marriage. Many political observers believed Republican Party strategists had cynically worked to get the initiatives onto the ballots in order to boost white evangelical turnout in key battleground states and, thus, ensure George W. Bush’s re-election.

Election analysis would later show Bush probably hadn’t needed the gay marriage bans to bring about his win – it is generally hard to unseat an incumbent wartime president, after all – but the mobilization of voters through religious networks, especially evangelical churches, for the anti-gay-marriage laws seemed to provide yet the latest evidence of the increasingly tight bond between conservative religious voters and the GOP.

Homosexuality, perhaps more than any other issue, including abortion, had helped forge that connection. In the early 1990s, when a different Bush was in the White House and fears of HIV/AIDS had reinvigorated the worst moral condemnations of homosexuality, Reverend Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition explained the motivation to a reporter. Homosexuality “galvanizes our public more than right-to-life,” he said. “It is absolutely a vital issue to Bible-believing Christians.” Believing that homosexuality constituted an individual moral failure and an existential threat to the basic building block of society – that is, the patriarchal, monogamous heterosexual family unit – these Christian conservatives contended that granting basic rights to gay Americans would not only help legitimize homosexuality but also draw more people into it. Since, as they believed, homosexuality was a choice, then granting legal rights to gay people and increasing the cultural acceptance of homosexuality would work to encourage more people, especially impressionable children, into the deviant “gay lifestyle.”

And with the emergence of a small but growing movement for same-sex marriage rights in the late 1990s and early 2000s – one made real by significant legal developments in Hawaii and Massachusetts – religious right leaders and evangelical pastors warned their followers that liberal activists were trying to dramatically transform American society by “redefining” marriage. “It is hard to imagine a more radical concept than extending marriage to same sexes,” the Family Research Council’s Gary Bauer argued.

Yet the support for state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage showed that religious right-wingers weren’t the only ones who opposed granting a basic civil right to LGBTQ Americans. In twelve of the thirteen states where the initiatives were on the ballots, more people had endorsed the anti-gay-marriage proposals than had voted to re-elect Bush.

That support wasn’t unexpected given the polling around same-sex marriage. Through the previous decade, consistently less than a third of Americans said same-sex marriage should be legalized – and those numbers had barely budged by 2004.

At the same time, there were other poll numbers that gave the leaders of Log Cabin Republicans (LCR), the nation’s oldest and largest gay Republican organization with nearly 20,000 members by the mid-2000s, a glimmer of hope – and an idea. A survey taken near the time of the election had found that one’s position on same-sex marriage highly correlated with beliefs about the nature of sexual orientation. Among those Americans who thought sexual orientation was an in-born trait, 79 percent indicated their support for same-sex marriage. On the other hand, only 22 percent of Americans who believed that sexuality was a matter of “choice” said same-sex marriage should be made legal.

(Image source: Log Cabin Republicans of D.C.)

Gay Republicans viewed this disparity – nearly sixty percent – as an opportunity. The key to improving public attitudes about homosexuality and winning essential rights, especially marriage, they contended, could be accomplished by simply getting more Americans to understand that homosexuality had a biogenetic basis. Rather than arguing that LGBTQ persons had a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage, these gay Republicans dedicated themselves to reaching out and educating those who held negative opinions about homosexuality.

Through its sister organization, the Liberty Education Forum (LEF), Log Cabin Republicans in the mid-2000s launched its “Reaching the Heartland” program, a multi-pronged strategy aimed at areas of the country that showed the lowest support for homosexuality and gay rights. These gay Republicans felt that liberal activists had been successful in making both of the nation’s coasts “gay friendly.” Now, however, enough people in the Midwest, South, and Mountain West had to be persuaded to change their minds about homosexuality if gay rights, especially marriage, were to achieve sufficient support. Gay Republicans thought these were the areas of the country where they could be particularly effective. “Our challenge now is clear. We must move beyond the traditional gay meccas to conservative middle America,” a strategy document outlined. “Achieving full equality for gay and lesbian Americans depends on having more support for fairness among conservative voters and people of faith,” another planning memo maintained.

Building on the work they had begun in the previous decade, gay Republicans developed materials and sponsored programs specifically tailored to Christian audiences. Such efforts revealed gay Republicans’ abiding faith that reason and facts could be used to convince decent Americans to make the right political decisions, including on gay rights.

***

When small handfuls of out gay men started forming the first gay Republican clubs in the late 1970s, creating a loose network of grassroots groups that would ultimately coalesce into the national Log Cabin Republicans organization in the early 1990s, they were not a particularly religious lot. Even if one of the clubs in San Francisco had been founded by a former Pentecostal minister, and the San Diego group was led by a devout Catholic and former altar boy, the bulk of the membership tended to lean more libertarian – and often libertine – in their politics, philosophies, and personal proclivities.

When it came to religion in politics, these white gay Republican men (who overwhelmingly dominated the organization to the near total exclusion of lesbians and persons of color) wanted to stop what they saw as the attempt by religious extremists to impose their moral beliefs on the public square. The first gay Republican clubs had been formed in California to prevent the passage of Proposition 6, a 1978 state ballot initiative that would have made it illegal for any gay or lesbian person to work in the state’s public school system. John Briggs, a California state legislator from Orange County, had authored the proposal, which came to be popularly known as the Briggs Initiative. Briggs, a Catholic, worked closely with Southern Baptist and fundamentalist churches to build support for his proposal just as religious conservatives in California – and across the nation – were beginning to organize to gain control of the Republican Party.

The Log Cabin clubs set about to defeat the Briggs Initiative and to thwart the takeover of the GOP by religious conservatives. They would succeed at the former, but were outmatched when it came to stopping the Republican Party from becoming the home of the religious right, even if polls consistently showed more than a million LGBTQ persons belonging to the GOP and far more LGBTQ Americans – sometimes fifty percent – regularly voting for Republican candidates in any given election. But as religious conservatives, particularly white evangelicals along with conservative Catholics, became the base of the GOP and captured control of the party’s infrastructure in the 1980s and 1990s, gay Republicans adjusted their approach to dealing with their fellow Republicans. While they still regularly attacked prominent religious right figureheads like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as hateful demagogues, they made sure not to demonize churchgoing conservatives as intolerant bigots, as they felt the secular left typically characterized them.

This decision reflected gay Republicans’ general conservatism, part of the movement’s rightward shift in the 1990s. The HIV/AIDS crisis had been devastating for the Log Cabin clubs, killing a large portion of the original founders and members. The younger gay men who replaced them typically had grown up in Reagan-loving Republican families and retained more of their parents’ political and religious beliefs. Rather than seeing religious conservatives as strange interlopers in the Republican Party, as the gay Republicans of the 1970s and 1980s had, this new generation recognized them as their friends and family – the backbone of the party they loved. And these gay Republicans of the 1990s understood that beyond the religious right – and even the GOP – a broad swath of Americans held deep attachments to their religious faith. Working within rather than against this religiosity, gay Republicans believed, was essential to advancing LGBTQ equality, and such efforts required compassion and understanding, recognizing that many Americans had been misled by religious leaders they trusted. “Too often,” a “Reaching the Heartland” planning document argued, “negative views about gay people are based on ignorance, not anti-gay animus.”

Rich Tafel, Log Cabin’s president in the 1990s, was especially well positioned to present a different religious understanding of homosexuality. Raised in a devout Christian family in Pennsylvania, Tafel attended Harvard Divinity School, a time during which he came out as gay, and was ordained in the American Baptist Church. After briefly serving in the ministry, Tafel turned to politics, joining Republican Governor William Weld’s administration in Massachusetts before being tapped to run Log Cabin Republicans.

On political talk shows, Tafel regularly squared off against anti-gay religious leaders who he accused of selectively quoting Scripture out of context in order to condemn homosexuality. “I’m a Republican like you. I’m a Baptist like you,” Tafel said to Jerry Falwell on Larry King Live in 1992. “I wish you would stop assuming that you speak for all Christians when you say that, ‘as a Christian,’ it is wrong to be gay.”

Falwell responded that, unlike Tafel, he was a Christian who took the Bible literally. But Tafel wouldn’t budge. “No, you don’t,” he shot back. “Should slaves obey their masters? Should slaves obey their masters,” Tafel demanded Falwell answer about one of the Bible’s literal commands.

Tafel’s media appearances made it clear to the Log Cabin organization just how many Americans – both gay and straight – were looking for a different understanding of homosexuality than the loudest religious voices of homophobia were providing. Letters poured in from gay men and women who felt they’d had to abandon their religious faith upon coming out, and from parents who felt ill-equipped to defend their gay children at church and in their communities.

(Rich Tafel in 2016. Image source: Huffington Post)

Tafel and Log Cabin’s leaders were not the first to proclaim that Christianity and homosexuality were compatible. In fact, they valued Reverend Troy Perry’s Metropolitan Community Church for offering an affirming denominational home to LGBTQ Protestants for more than three decades, and they appreciated that the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign had their own outreach programs to religious communities. But they thought these hadn’t been enough to successfully challenge the far right’s framing of homosexuality as immoral and gay persons as degenerate. These gay Republicans understood that even if most Americans didn’t hold fundamentalist religious beliefs, their perspectives on homosexuality and LGBTQ people were inadvertently influenced by the theology of the radical religious types who dominated the public debate and exploited Americans’ fears over HIV/AIDS.

Even as fears of HIV/AIDS significantly subsided in the mid-2000s, the idea that homosexuality was immoral and a choice persisted among a large portion of Americans. Log Cabin and Liberty Education Forum’s “Reaching the Heartland” plan aimed to tackle both misperceptions.

On the matter of immorality, gay Republicans believed they could change public ideas, in part, by their own example. Clean-cut, gender-conforming, and well-dressed, Log Cabin’s leaders’ visible presence served to challenge anti-gay activists’ portrait of homosexuals as swishy and promiscuous. Organizational documents encouraged Log Cabin’s representatives to speak openly about their religious faith, as Tafel had always done, and to characterize their political activism as a moral project. By using the same language that so many Americans spoke – and the discourse they believed the religious right had coopted and corrupted – gay Republicans hoped to negate lingering notions of homosexuals as different and threatening.

Combatting Americans’ belief that homosexuality was a choice required more resources, but gay Republicans believed science and facts were on their side. To this end, Log Cabin recruited the gay journalist Chandler Burr to author a ten-page pamphlet on the scientific basis of sexuality. Burr, who described himself as a “hardcore Democrat,” had assumed the right wouldn’t like his 1996 book, A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation. He hadn’t been prepared, however, for attacks from some on the left who didn’t think homosexuality needed to be scientifically justified and who believed that biological explanations of human behavior could undermine movements for social progress. But to his happy surprise, Burr had found fans among Log Cabin Republicans who liked his empirical, data-driven study and believed it could be an effective message for reaching the middle ground of Americans who lacked clear information about homosexuality’s natural causes.

The document titled, “The Only Question That Matters: Do People Choose Their Sexual Orientation,” used an extended discussion of the trait profile of human handedness – whether one was right-handed or left-handed – to explain how scientists understood the biological basis of homosexuality. Just as no “gay gene” had been located, scientists could not pinpoint the genetic marker that determined handedness. Yet trait profiles of handedness showed remarkable similarity to ones compiled for sexual orientation, including comparable rates of left-handedness and homosexuality. Additionally, history provided another useful point of comparison. Left-handed people had once been regarded as evil and morally suspect and, up until the 1950s, had been forced to use their right hands to write in Catholic schools. Yet, Burr asserted, no one now would claim that “left-handedness is a ‘chosen alternative lifestyle’ because left-handedness isn’t seen as a moral issue – anymore.”

Log Cabin had thousands of Burr’s pamphlets printed. The organization’s chapters distributed them in churches, community events, and at state Republican Party conventions across the nation. The group also made sure every member of Congress received a copy and sent it to several state legislatures and city councils. Log Cabin contended that they had used the document in Indianapolis and Washington State to win important non-discrimination bills in both places by convincing enough legislators who had formerly opposed the bills to change their votes.

Log Cabin’s leaders understood that their plan to use scientific materials wasn’t likely to change the views of fundamentalists and most evangelicals about homosexuality. But they believed the document would work well with religious moderates, especially mainline Protestants. These moderates weren’t Biblical literalists and had a history of incorporating scientific findings into their religious understanding, such as they had with evolution.

To help facilitate this work, the “Reaching the Heartland” project hired the actor Bill Oberst, Jr., to tour churches and community centers throughout the South. Oberst was already known in such spaces from his popular one-man play on the life of Jesus that he had performed in over 500 congregations. His new show, “In His Image – Biology and Sexual Orientation from a Christian Perspective,” presented Burr’s scientific arguments along with Oberst’s own personal story as a Southern Presbyterian gay man and person of deep religious faith. In his telling, the biological proof of homosexuality only served to reinforce God’s role as the creator of a diverse and multifaceted universe, a stance agreeable to his audiences. “I believe that the book of science and the book of faith tell us the same thing,” Oberst would conclude his monologue. “That we are as God intended us to be. Made by Him. Made for Him.” The gay Republicans of the “Reaching the Heartland” project believed that getting more Americans to view being gay, like left-handedness, as simply part of God’s diverse design rather than a deviant choice was the first step in moving them towards acceptance of homosexuality and, eventually, support for same-sex marriage rights.

In addition to “In His Image” and “The Only Question That Matters,” “Reaching the Heartland’s” program helped fund the play “Altar Call” about a small Baptist church wrestling over the question of homosexuality that ran in midsize Midwestern cities, like Moline, Illinois. The project also formed a “speakers bureau” that trained and organized LGBTQ conservatives and straight allies on communicating with groups, including churches, in their communities that didn’t yet endorse gay equality, and hosted public conversations with supportive faith leaders. The speakers, outlined in a planning document, would make a “conservative case for basic fairness” to these groups, communicating in a familiar faith-centered language and traditionalist worldview.

Assessing the effectiveness of these various efforts among religious Americans raised challenges for “Reaching the Heartland’s” creators at the time – just as it does for a historian today. But their taking place within the same years that showed increasing acceptance in public attitudes around homosexuality was not merely coincidental. Years later, many LGBTQ activists, like the same-sex marriage advocate Evan Wolfson, would credit gay conservatives with developing a “vocabulary” that could speak to the majority of Americans who didn’t hold liberal views or use progressive language, such as positioning same-sex marriage as a matter of “fairness” rather than “equality.” Key to this, too, had been providing more Americans with ways to speak about gay and lesbian persons as decent, moral individuals and homosexuality as an innate characteristic rather than a choice.

Neil J. Young is the author of Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right. He lives in Los Angeles.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 45 of the Revealer podcast with Neil J. Young: “LGBTQ Republicans.”

The post Reaching the Heartland: Gay Republicans’ Message to Religious Americans appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Marcus Chin for UCSF Magazine)

Hannah remembers exactly where she was when she got the news her father was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Out for dinner and drinks with friends in Seattle, she noticed the missed call first. Then, the text messages from her older sister. When she stepped outside to talk to her mom on the phone, her father was already gone.

“I just stood there, frozen,” the 38-year-old said, “looking out and taking in the details. The way the sidewalk smelled after recent rain. The squeaking sound of the restaurant door as it swung open. The way a red light reflected off a puddle across the street. Every detail just singed into my memory.”

But Hannah could not remember the weeks and months that followed. “There was just a blur, a blank spot,” she said. There were family gatherings, a funeral, boxes of photos, and other details that Hannah struggled to recall.

Though the particulars were missing, the despair she felt only deepened. After a couple of years, her prolonged feelings of sadness and hopelessness drove her to seek therapy. She was prescribed antidepressants, but nothing seemed to help. Hannah withdrew from her church community and friends, developed anger management issues, and struggled with suicidal thoughts.

But then, Hannah came across a 2013 study from the University of South Florida about how psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in “magic mushrooms,” can stimulate nerve cell growth in parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory.

She sought out a counselor in Oregon who could guide her as she used psilocybin to access aspects of her memory she wanted to get in touch with again to help process the pain she continued to feel at the loss of her dad. More than psychological treatment, however, Hannah was also seeking spiritual solace. She did not want simply to recall the facts or feelings of her intense grief; Hannah was in search of something deeper: “I wanted to remember, to see how God was at work even then, in one of the darkest moments of my life.”

Now a spiritual director who offers similar services in the Seattle area, Hannah is part of a growing number of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others seeking out psychedelic-assisted chaplaincy and spiritual care to address psychological trauma and unanswered spiritual questions. Some, in search of mystical experiences, are also looking for unexplored avenues of spiritual connection to process suffering or to encounter the divine.

As part of a more general renaissance of interest in the potential medicinal and spiritual benefits psychedelics may provide, a slew of researchers, chaplains, theologians, and spiritual care professionals are asking questions about how substances like psilocybin connect the potency of mystical experience with the promise, and possibility, of mental healing.

They hope that in the next decade or so, new studies, therapies, and theological revolutions will lead to a breakthrough in the use of psychedelics for religious insight and remedial spiritual care.

A brief history of mind-blowing mysticism

Interest in the spiritual uses of mind-altering substances might be as old as religion itself. There is evidence that nomadic Scythians in western Eurasia used cannabis for ceremonial purposes in the 8^th century B.C.E. and that Sumerians revered Ninkasi, a tutelary goddess of beer, in the Bronze Age.

Perhaps more well-known is the use of peyote, a small, spineless cactus with psychoactive properties pre-Columbian indigenous communities in the Americas ingested as a conduit for contact with the spirit world and as a medicinal drug. From Mexico, the use of peyote spread to the Apache, Comanche, and other Plains Nations, coming to be used by more than 60 different tribes and nations. The spiritual use of Peyote is federally protected (under an extension of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act), and its sacramental ingestion remains part of the ritual rubric of the Native American Church, a spiritual movement that integrates Christianity with the traditions of various Indigenous cultures.

As part of the general social, cultural, and religious soul-searching of the 1960s and the expansion of U.S. counterculture, an interest arose in the spiritual uses of psychedelics and other entheogens (“generating the divine within”) — psychoactive substances used to enhance or instigate mystical experiences.

Famed from this period was Timothy Leary, the self-proclaimed “high priest” of the 1960s psychedelic counterculture. Leary inspired many “Boomers” to expand their minds through the use of LSD, mushrooms, or other mind-altering plants and chemicals. One of Leary’s disciples was Walter Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School. Under the supervision of Leary, Richard Alpert, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project, Pahnke designed an experiment for Good Friday, April 20, 1962, where he administered the psychedelic compound to a group of divinity student volunteers in what came to be known as the Marsh Chapel Experiment.

Most participants were from religious backgrounds where they were taught that drugs and religion did not mix, a suspicion that tracked with broader sociocultural and political assumptions about psychedelics and consigned their use to the margins. Nonetheless, each reported having a profound religious experience. One of those was Huston Smith, the famous religious studies scholar who wrote the experiment was “the most powerful cosmic homecoming” he ever experienced.

Despite the small sample size — there were just ten participants given psilocybin — there was a great deal of enthusiasm around the experiment. Many believed it provided empirical support that psychedelics could facilitate mind-expanding mystical encounters. But as Harvard got wind of it, they shut the project down, and in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, the U.S. government classified LSD, DMT, psilocybin, and other psychedelics as Schedule 1 substances, with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

In light of the classification, the use of psychedelics in religious institutions became anathema. Instead, psychedelics took root in anti-cultural movements.

Clinical transcendence

Although psychedelics still remain classified as having no medical use at the federal level, a burgeoning body of research over the last decade suggests they might have psychotherapeutic benefits in the treatment of a host of ailments, including but not limited to anxiety, depression, PTSD, and substance abuse disorders — as well as in palliative care.

Demonized for a generation, the excitement around compounds like LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin has re-emerged with a flourish. Fueled by an increasing number of studies showing the remarkable therapeutic potential of previously stigmatized substances, a number of prominent institutions currently host centers devoted to studying the mechanisms, effects, and efficacy of psychedelics. These include New York University’s (NYU) Center for Psychedelic Medicine, Johns Hopkins’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Then there are institutions anticipating the legal and cultural acceptance of psychedelics’ therapeutic value already offering certificate programs for clinicians and chaplains in psychedelic-assisted therapies, including the California Institute of Integral Studies and Naropa University. 

Meanwhile, the Transforming Chaplaincy Psychedelic Care Network was established in January 2022. Co-convened by Steve Lewis, a chaplain in San Diego, and Bonnie Glass-Coffin, an anthropology professor at Utah State University, the network brings together professional healthcare chaplains and researchers pursuing psychedelic-assisted therapies and those interested in them. Together, they explore spiritual caregivers’ potential role in providing support for people preparing for, undergoing, or integrating psychedelic experiences. And they address the associated challenges in creating psychedelic education and training opportunities for chaplains and clergy.

Amidst growing interest, the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality (ECPS) stands out for its focus on the use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to push the frontiers of spiritual health. Founded in 2022, the ECPS is a partnership between Emory Spiritual Health and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. The ECPS dubs itself the “world’s first center to fully integrate clinical and research-based expertise in psychiatry and spiritual health to better understand the therapeutic promise of psychedelic medicines.” They are already training chaplains to implement evidence-based and compassion-based practices for patients undergoing psychedelic-assisted care.

(Image source: Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality)

That development tracks with Hannah. When she first took psilocybin, she planned for skilled spiritual healers to be in the room with her. Their past experience with psychedelics was invaluable to her sense of safety during the journey. “Once psychedelics kick in, you can’t turn them off. You’re along for the ride,” she said. “That can feel scary, but skillful people can help you navigate it,” Hannah said. “You can feel scared, but you will be safe.”

Hannah said she is excited to hear about ECPS’ research on how chaplains and spiritual caregivers can better provide guidance and develop interventions at each stage of an individual’s journey with psychedelics – making referrals, preparing for a “trip,” at the bedside, in an outpatient setting or in follow-up afterward as patients seek to make meaning from and integrate their experience into everyday life. “This is where chaplains and spiritual directors can really come in,” she said. “It took me a long time to make sense of what happened to me, but that’s where the healing happens.”

Psychologist and theologian George Grant is one of ECPS’ co-founders. He said the nature of psychedelic medicine — its transformative, meaning-making, and mystical-experience-inducing properties — make it a natural fit for developing one’s spiritual well-being. But Grant also said it demands that he and his team are as systematic as they can be with such mystical moments.

For Grant, research on the intersection of chaplaincy and psychiatric care seemed necessary, even imperative. His team began a series of clinical trials blending together a focus on participants’ mental and spiritual health. Their innovation was the introduction of a triad model, where a spiritual health clinician, care seeker, and medical health practitioner are part of a three-pointed team working through a process of psychedelic-assisted care.

Two years into the research, Grant said their findings point to the importance of integrating spirituality and theology into psychedelic-assisted therapy. “It is necessary,” Grant said, “to ensure culturally competent, evidence-based treatment aligned with the highest standards of clinical care.”

“Neglecting these topics can detract from the care, put patients at risk, and potentially undermine the substance’s ability to help those undergoing treatment,” he said.

While Grant cautioned that there is much more research to be done, he underscored how important it is for spiritual caregivers and medical professionals to work together, learn from one another, and work alongside patients on their psychedelic journeys.

Binding the science with spirituality

Apprehension abounds in both medical and religious communities. On the one hand, Grant has found the healthcare industry can be suspicious of spiritual interventions and religious actors’ involvement in the re-emerging field. Hence the ECPS’s rigor in clinical trials, he said. On the other hand, religious communities often express fear about the use of mind-altering substances for spiritual purposes.

An Episcopal priest, Hunt Priest, works at the intersection of both medicine and religion, urging mental health professionals to be more open to psychedelics’ mystical properties and normalizing the conversation among Christians about their potential for healing and spiritual growth. Regarding the latter, he is helping clergy, lay people, and chaplains connect the psychological healing properties of psychedelics with their ability to prompt more mystical occasions.

Connection is at the heart of his organization’s name: Ligare, Latin for “binding” or “uniting.” The word also links to the origins of the word religion itself. “That’s what psychedelics can provide,” Priest said, “a rebinding with our source, a reconnection with the Divine.”

Priest’s journey into the psychedelic space began with his participation in a 2016 study involving two dozen clergy — pastors, priests, and rabbis — given controlled doses of psilocybin under the observation of researchers at Johns Hopkins University and NYU. In research that preceded the study, the project’s leader, Roland Redmond Griffiths, claimed: “When administered to volunteers under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences which were evaluated by volunteers as having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” Their results suggested that mystical encounters helped relief from anxiety and depression better stick and helped those trying to kick bad habits find more success. Griffiths later said the 2016 clergy study was meant to further probe the question, “can psilocybin even help deepen spiritual lives?” If clergy took a psilocybin journey, the study asked, how would they answer that question?

The results of that study are set to be published this year, but for Priest, the conclusions were immediately clear. He not only said he had a direct experience with the Holy Spirit, but he also received a kind of “ordination.” Having already served as an Episcopal priest for nearly two decades, this was no ordinary call. Instead, Priest felt summoned to start Ligare to encourage, equip, and train ambassadors for the integration of psychedelics into spiritual care.

“Mushrooms are not magic,” said Priest, “and the meaning-making process after a psychedelic experience can take years. This is where spiritual direction can come in, to ask the ‘what does this mean?’ question and provide a wealth of practices and disciplines to help people navigate around, within, and after the experience.”

For Rabbi Aura Ahuvia, a musician ordained as both a rabbi and spiritual director with ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, that process of integration begins with preparation, especially for those who have never used psychedelics. “We have no frame of reference for being under the influence of these substances,” she said, “so we need the right people and practices around us to be able to process what we are getting in touch with through psychedelics.”

Beyond having properly trained people in the room, Ahuvia said it can be relatively simple things that prove the most invaluable in an individual’s spiritual journey with psychedelics. “Most important is developing a practice of allowing and being with,” Ahuvia said, “cultivating these postures ahead of time with things like meditation, mindfulness, and breathing techniques.” These, she said, help seekers become what she called, “capable journeyers.”

It is impossible to summarize the spiritual elements of psychedelic trips. Researchers say the particulars vary according to context, upbringing, and a practitioners’ religious background. When Hannah used psilocybin, she found herself in a stained-glass sanctuary. Raised in a Lutheran household, the apertures seemed appropriate and inviting. More than that though, Hannah noticed, “the windows were moments from my life, shining, vibrant and detailed pictures of the things I’d forgotten,” she said. “Through them I could see the Spirit swirling in the background, weaving itself in and through each moment.” She continued, “I could literally see God with me in my grief – working with me the whole time.”

While Hannah said she does not plan to take another trip, her conceptions of spirituality changed forever after that moment. “It’s not something I feel I ever have to do again – though some people do,” she said. Since then, she’s returned to church. She still enjoys being part of what she called “a traditional, hymn-singing” religious community. But after Hannah added psychedelics to her list of sacraments, she said, “I came to regard psychedelics as sacred medicines that help us touch the holy.” Though she only shares her experience with trusted friends and confidants in her community, she hopes psychedelics will become banal parts of religious practice – Lutheran, Jewish, or otherwise – in the years to come.

Daan Keiman, a Buddhist and psychedelic chaplain with over 15 years of experience offering psychedelic harm reduction at festivals, seconded Hannah’s thoughts, saying that being grounded in a tradition is important. But being open to spiritual mystery might prove even more crucial for someone’s psychedelic journey, he said.

“It’s not about the shared religion, it’s not about the shared experience, it’s about the fact that, as humans, we come together and ask ourselves: What does it mean to be alive right now? And in asking it in a community, we’re also partly living that answer,” Keiman told Psychedelics Today.

Ahuvia also urged caution when it comes to centering the psychedelic experience as the be-all and end-all of one’s spiritual journey. She said no matter what kind of spectacular insights one feels they have. It’s her rule of thumb that no one makes major life decisions for a few weeks. “Afterwards, something shifts, there are these natural motivations that bubble up — suddenly people want to do these things,” she said. “But it’s important to take your time and give yourself the gift of space.”

Following her own encounters, Ahuvia cleared her calendar and spent time talking to her therapist and trusted friends. She also recommended going out in nature. “This can be a wondrous experience,” she said, “realizing the miraculousness of the natural world, unburying a sense of oneness with all beings, and unearthing a sense of belonging to the world around us.”

At a very elemental level, Ahuvia said such simple practices help reinforce the psychological, emotional, and spiritual reset that psychedelics can provide.

Did St. Paul take a trip?

But as simple as things may sound, the complications around psychedelic-assisted chaplaincy and spiritual care are myriad.

The first hurdle can be a theological one, said Priest. As more people have these experiences, and the more they become normalized, he believes serious conversations about the theological training of chaplains and pastors will need to take place. There remains a dearth of established theology on psychedelics and their place within Christian doctrine. But Priest points to some theologians who are systematic about the theological grounding of psychedelic usage among Christians like himself.

For example, Jaime Clark-Soles — a Baptist theologian at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology — not only shares her own experiences in the Johns Hopkins/NYU trials but researches the role out-of-body inspiration plays in the Bible. She told Baptist News Global she is particularly fascinated by the apostle Paul’s description of pain, ecstasy, and visions in his second letter to the Corinthian church. “He’s telling us that he regularly experienced visions and revelations where he encountered the divine that involved ecstatic states,” she said. The results of her research and reflections on Paul, John, and other scriptures are forthcoming in her book The Agony, the Ecstasy, and the Ordinary: Experiencing God in the New Testament.

Ron Cole-Turner, a retired theologian formerly of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, wrote in Christian Century that research like Clark-Soles’ could prompt Christians of all kinds to approach the Bible in a new way, with “experience informing interpretation.” He commented that for some Christians, “the Holy Spirit, the great theologians remind us, is present and active everywhere, renewing the whole creation while healing and transforming individuals. Encounters with the Spirit may range from the highly unusual to the just plain ordinary, but it is always the light of the Spirit that makes us spiritual.

“One thing psychedelic substances might teach us is that too often our brains screen us off from the sunbeam of the Spirit,” wrote Cole-Turner.

Christians are not alone in their theological wrangling. In his 2016 book Altered States, Douglas Osto, a Buddhist practitioner and religious studies professor in New Zealand, wrote about a range of differing perspectives among American Buddhists on the use of psychedelics. What he found were lively debates about the limits of the rational mind, the nature of subjectivity, and the tensions between the Buddhist emphasis on wakeful mindfulness and altered states of consciousness during mind-altering meditation.

Is psychedelic spiritual care worth the risk?

There are also an array of concerns and criticisms about the ethics of psychedelics and spiritual care. Some question whether popular media representations might promise too much at such an early stage of research and not give enough attention to power dynamics in trials and treatment. Others have criticized psychedelic research for cultural appropriation and ignoring the Indigenous history behind spirituality and drugs in medicine.

Then there’s Joe Welker, a pastor in northern Vermont who studied the intersection of religion and psychedelic research at Harvard Divinity School from 2022-2023. A self-described critic of contemporary psychedelic movements, he’s written multiple pieces about the Johns Hopkins/NYU study and Priest’s work with Ligare, opining that the high suggestibility of patients undergoing psychedelic drug treatment can leave them susceptible to the power of chaplains, researchers, and spiritual care providers who might “unethically induce belief changes.” To that end, he’s called for an investigation into Johns Hopkins’ conduct around what he calls the “heightened ethical concerns for high-suggestibility psychedelic drugs and belief transmission.”

But for Jack Krueger, a Lutheran pastor in central Arizona, the problem with psychedelic spiritual care is that it sidesteps what he sees as the tangible spiritual gifts already on offer to provide pastoral comfort to those in need. “Call me old-fashioned,” he said, “but I believe the only substances God gave us to be ‘in touch’ with him are his Word and Sacraments — Baptism and Holy Communion.”

Before Hannah took the plunge, she was aware of the criticisms and unanswered questions. Nonetheless, she started her journey into psychedelic spiritual care anyway. “I’d been in therapy for a decade and just kept hitting a wall,” Hannah said. “Initially I was worried what people might think and was skeptical myself.”

The experience transformed her life. “People use a lot of flowery language about psychedelics’ spiritual power,” Hannah said. “And it’s warranted.”

On whether or not greater research on the frontiers of psychedelic-assisted chaplaincy and spiritual care is worth it, she said, “absolutely, it cannot be that these substances exist, have so much potential, and yet remain inaccessible to hurting people searching for spiritual solace.” She continued, “For me, the shift was truly miraculous. Sacred medicines transformed my life. That’s all I needed to know.”

Ken Chitwood is a religion scholar and journalist based in Germany. His book AmeRícan Muslims: The Everyday Cosmopolitanism of Puerto Rican Converts to Islam, is under contract with University of Texas Press.

The post On the Frontiers of Psychedelic-Assisted Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Getty Images)

This past February, President Joe Biden offered a muddled statement on abortion. He disavowed “abortion on demand” because he’s a “practicing Catholic” but maintained that “Roe v Wade was right.” The President’s statement spurred a flurry of commentary that puzzled over his position on abortion and what he meant by the phrase “abortion on demand.”

While Biden’s tepid support of abortion rights has been apparent for years, the meaning of “abortion on demand” is less so. Some respondents, like the President of Planned Parenthood, condemned the phrase as “right-wing language.” More nuanced analyses note that the phrase “abortion on demand” originated with abortion rights activists and only later became a conservative phrase to repudiate abortion.

Yet, both perspectives misunderstand the more complicated political history of “abortion on demand” and its connections to religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Moreover, they miss out on the fact that the denigration of “abortion on demand” was and remains rooted in sexism that has spanned religious denominations, political affiliations, and both the anti-abortion and abortion rights movements.

A primer on the term’s complicated history is necessary, not just to understand President Biden’s utterances, but to better navigate the post-Dobbs landscape.

For over six decades, the struggle over the meaning of “abortion on demand” has reflected the fight over men’s ability to control women’s reproductive lives. In the early 1960s, state legislatures began to reconsider abortion restrictions amidst revelations of the high rates of criminal abortions and in the wake of thalidomide and rubella scares, which led to birth defects and infant deaths. Male medical experts, legal reformers, allied professionals, and religious leaders had an outsized voice in popularizing and shaping the meaning of “abortion on demand” – a phrase so foreign it needed to be put into quotations in expert and popular literature.

Media coverage in the early 1960s linked the foreignness of “abortion on demand” with actual foreign countries’ abortion policies. Japan, Hungary, and the Soviet Union were go-to examples because they permitted elective abortions. American commentators believed the United States was unlikely to adopt such alien practices. Such was the case in 1962, in discussions of the popular book The Abortionist by Lucy Freeman, which saw one of the earliest variations of this phrase in the American press. Amidst Cold War xenophobia, these foreign associations did little to help make the case for abortion on demand in the United States.

The landscape of reproductive rights, however, was rapidly shifting, and the foreign associations of abortion on demand would soon overlap with domestic debates within the growing American abortion rights movement. At first, the abortion rights movement was male-dominated and made up of “small, well-defined groups of elite professionals: public health officials, crusading attorneys, and prominent physicians.” By the mid-1960s, there were two major camps in the abortion rights movement: reformers and repealers. It was these two camps’ division over policy that would play a crucial role in shaping the political meaning of abortion on demand for decades to come.

The difference between supporters of reform and repeal was the degree of change they envisioned to abortion laws. Reformers called for a limited set of exceptions to these restrictions so that “deserving” women could access abortion. Rape, incest, fetal deformity, and the health and life of the mother, they believed, were among the grounds for terminating pregnancies. Repealers, meanwhile, wanted abortion to be elective—a private decision made by any woman for any reason. Abortion rights activists—reformers and repealers alike—used the phrase “abortion on demand” to signal the latter position.

At a moment when abortion laws, at their most permissive, allowed the procedure to save the life of the mother, reformers viewed themselves as political realists. While some reformers privately supported elective abortion, they believed the stigma surrounding the procedure meant that they could only ask for limited changes from state legislatures. Reform leaders like Dr. Alan Guttmacher maintained that the United States was “not ready” for the “abortion on demand” policies that existed in “iron curtain countries” because it would lead to an “ethical uproar.”

(Image source: Abortion On Demand)

What was often left unstated by reformers–because it was taken for granted–was that the ethical uproar had to do with distrusting women to control their reproduction. You can see the mistrust made explicit in a 1967 article by Dr. Eugene M. Diamond, a Catholic anti-abortion physician. Diamond declared that those “who propose abortion on demand” have “an inordinate confidence in the wisdom of the average woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy.” A number of reformers shared similar views about women’s capacity to make reproductive choices. Others strategically sought to appease chauvinistic politicians, physicians, and a wider public by proposing policies that mandated male medical and legal authorities deciding which women deserved abortion.

Abortion reformers presented this patronizing position as a reasonable compromise between absolute abortion prohibition and outright repeal. The tactic had broad appeal with politicians and with voters. As much was apparent in Washington State, which saw a successful referendum campaign for abortion reform take place in November 1970. There, the abortion rights campaign emphasized that their program was “not abortion on demand” and underscored that “the medical profession [would] deal responsibly with women in crisis.” At a moment when 92% of physicians in the country were male, reformers made abortion reform palatable by maintaining “responsible” male medical authority. The implication was that these physicians would ensure that women’s access to abortion would remain limited to the deserving few.

This emphasis by reformers on continued male medical authority over women’s reproductive lives was also attractive to the very Protestant denominations that would later join the anti-abortion religious coalition after Roe. In the early 1970s, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Seventh Day Adventists, among others, repudiated “abortion on demand” while accepting “therapeutic abortion based on approved medical indications.” So long as male medical authority over women’s reproduction was intact, these groups officially supported abortion reform. This paternalistic view of abortion would, within a few short years, also form the common ground between conservative Protestants and anti-choice Catholics.

If the paternalism of anti-abortion advocates and abortion reformers was axiomatic, the feminism of repealers was overt. Early proponents of repeal (a coterie of male doctors, lawyers, and mainline Protestant and Jewish religious leaders) insisted that abortion on demand was urgently necessary to “free women from a now needless form of slavery and let her become the master of her own body.” Some, like Episcopal Bishop James Pike, argued that “the right to decide must rest not with a doctor, or a judge, or any third party, but with the mother herself.” By 1967, with the flourishing of both liberal and radical feminism, the links between women’s emancipation and reproductive freedom became ever more apparent.

As women moved to the front lines of the abortion repeal movement, they made clear that abortion reform, in the words of Betty Friedan, was “something dreamed up by men” to keep women as “passive objects that must somehow be regulated.” These feminist ideas became highly visible, both in press coverage and in street protests. For example, in August 1970, over 30,000 women marched down 5^th Avenue in New York City to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of suffrage. This event, named the Women’s Strike for Equality, saw marchers carrying placards calling for “abortion on demand” alongside free daycare and equal opportunities in jobs and education.

Even as reformers and repealers debated how to transform abortion restrictions, opponents of abortion maintained that reform was a slippery slope to repeal. The Catholic Church dominated the early anti-abortion movement. Bishops and budding right-to-life groups in the United States with names like “Voice of the Unborn” linked abortion on demand with mass murder and a moral horror equivalent to the Holocaust. The phrase abortion on demand was still novel enough in the late 1960s that it sometimes warranted qualifying phrases like “so-called,” in the Catholic press. The denigration of “abortion on demand” by these opponents was helped along by the sexism of reformers and a history of press coverage that associated elective abortion with communist countries.

This Catholic-led attack on abortion rights grew louder and more organized from the early 1960s onward in response to the mounting successes of the abortion rights movement—both reform and repeal—in over a dozen states. Most states with reformed laws saw modest increases in abortion access. In contrast, the few states that repealed their abortion laws saw abortion access grow dramatically. In the eyes of Catholic anti-abortion crusaders, abortion access was no longer hypothetical nor confined to abstract policy debates. It was an expanding political and medical reality in the United States and abroad.

For politicians like Richard Nixon seeking to attract socially conservative Catholic voters away from the Democratic Party, the repudiation of abortion on demand would be instrumental in building a new right-wing interfaith coalition within the shell of a desiccated Republican Party.

Nixon’s 1972 campaign was novel, not just in the scope of its criminality, but because it hitched Republican politics to anti-abortion politics, profoundly changing the political landscape. President Nixon commenced his abbreviated second term on January 20, 1973, two days before the Supreme Court issued its ruling on Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton. In these decisions, the court codified many of the policy demands of the repeal movement and bounded them within a trimester framework. The triumph of repeal and the demise of reform placed reproductive choice in the hands of women and made abortion far more accessible, affordable, and frequent.

Though he campaigned adamantly against abortion to garner Catholic votes, Nixon had a myriad of other issues to contend with once in office, not the least of which was his impeachment. The anti-abortion movement, however, did not lose its focus. Instead, it rapidly adjusted to its new role, shifting from defenders of a restrictive status quo to vociferous opponents of radically expanded abortion access.

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which anti-feminism and misogyny mobilized the post-Roe anti-abortion movement. Roe and Doe repudiated the abortion reform movement and fragmented the interfaith and politically diverse coalition it had built.

The victory of abortion repeal through Roe and Doe was a major catalyst in driving conservative Protestants into the heretofore Catholic-dominated anti-abortion movement. Religious constituencies that had previously accepted abortion (so long as it was controlled by men and rarely granted to women) became unmoored from the abortion rights coalition. Abortion, for them, came to take on the very meanings Catholic abortion opponents had long proclaimed: mass murder, moral chaos, and the upending of gender roles. It is no coincidence that a major site of interfaith contact and religious cross-pollination during the 1970s was the anti-Equal Rights Amendment movement. Led by the devout Catholic Phyllis Schlafly, her vast organization became an interfaith melting pot for anti-feminist and anti-choice politics.

In the ensuing decades, with the rise of an ecumenical religious right and their family values politics, these negative associations of abortion on demand with the destruction of divinely ordained gender hierarchies would become articles of faith. And they would fuel Republican policies and politics for over a half-century.

Meanwhile, by bandying phrases like “safe, legal, and rare,” some Democratic politicians would, in the spirit of the reform movement, attempt to triangulate a rhetorical space between reproductive freedom and outright abortion bans.

Which brings us back to Joe Biden and his invocation of “abortion on demand.” Today, the meanings of “abortion on demand” are again unsettled because the laws themselves are in dramatic flux. Abortion remains legal and accessible in some states. A number of states now have total bans, 6-week bans, or 15-week bans. Some of these restrictive states only allow abortion to save the mother’s life. Others have 1960s-reform-like laws that permit abortions to preserve maternal health or because of non-viable fetuses. A few restrictive states allow for abortions in cases of rape or incest. Even with these chary allowances, women reckoning with tragic personal or medical circumstances have found it difficult if not impossible to get abortions locally.

Dobbs might have been the end of Roe. But it has not been the end of the fight for abortion rights or for women’s social equality. As in the past, competing visions over who deserves reproductive rights are now in play among abortion rights advocates. When the President disavowed abortion on demand, he invoked a historical debate within the abortion rights movement over who deserves abortion access and whether women can be trusted to decide their reproductive futures. That these policy debates are still playing out against the backdrop of a religious movement that would ban abortion points to the fact that women’s reproductive freedom is once again caught between tepid friends and declared enemies.

Gillian Frank is a historian of religion and sexuality who co-hosts the podcast Sexing History. His book, A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v Wade, is forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press.

The post Abortion On Demand appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

In December I was contacted by a reporter for CBS News to do an interview about the pope’s “comments about blessing same-sex couples.” When the reporter emailed, I was on the island of Saint Martin celebrating my 10^th wedding anniversary, my own same-sex union. My husband and I had agreed not to check our work email or read the news while away so we could enjoy some island tranquility. I missed the journalist’s request, and when we returned to New York City I learned that the world briefly thought Pope Francis had given his approval for priests to officiate Catholic same-sex wedding ceremonies, only to learn a couple of days later that he never sanctioned such rituals. Within a matter of days, LGBTQ Catholics experienced dramatic hope followed by great disappointment.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

For me, this saga epitomizes Pope Francis’s relationship with queer Catholics: small tokens of quasi-inclusion followed by no change to the church’s official practices. But even that reflection paints the pontiff in a possibly more affirming LGBTQ position than many believe he deserves. He has, after all, doubled down as recently as late last year on his claim that “gender theory” is as dangerous to the planet as nuclear weapons. But many people around the world continue to celebrate his insistence that Catholics should welcome LGBTQ people into their churches, and others hold out hope that he is slowly moving Roman Catholicism closer to accepting LGBTQ people as equals.

This cycle of one step forward, two steps back seems especially apt in our current milieu where, for instance, women in numerous states can no longer access abortion and reproductive healthcare. But what is true in both of these cases – that of queer Catholics and abortion access in the United States – is that large groups of activists have not let the male-dominated people in power have the final say. They continue to fight for their vision of a just and equitable world.

The April issue of The Revealer looks at multiple forms of activism and how people are trying to create better worlds than what they inherited. The issue opens with the newest installment of Gillian Frank’s “More than Missionary” column with “Abortion On Demand,” where Frank explores the surprising history of that term to help us make sense of the rhetoric in today’s abortion debates. Then, in “On the Frontiers of Psychedelic-Assisted Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care,” Ken Chitwood investigates chaplains and other religious leaders who are working to bring psychedelics like psilocybin into the people’s spiritual practices to help them heal from trauma and to connect with the divine. From there, Neil Young explores more conservative activism in “Reaching the Heartland: Gay Republicans’ Message to Religious Americans,” and recounts how gay Republicans tried to counter the rise of the religious right within the GOP and convince church-going Christians that it is okay to be gay. Following that, in “The Evolution of Pope Francis’s Stance on LGBTQ Rights,” Jamie Valentino charts the pope’s shifting positions on LGBTQ people and how queer Catholics have responded to him. And finally, in “The Fire to Create the World Anew,” Kali Handelman interviews Laura McTighe and Deon Haywood about their new book Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South and explores how the organization at the center of the book, Women With A Vision, has worked for decades to improve the lives of Black Americans in New Orleans and elsewhere.

The April issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “LGBTQ Republicans.” Neil Young joins us to discuss LGBTQ conservatives and their reasons for aligning themselves with Republican Party. We discuss their feelings about Trump, how they are responding to the current barrage of anti-trans legislation, and what they want for America as we head into the 2024 election. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

When the world briefly believed Pope Francis gave his approval for priests to bless same-sex marriages, many thought something truly monumental had occurred. But, as one of our articles highlights, the pontiff simply meant that priests could offer a prayer for gay couples, which is something priests are already permitted to do for people’s pets. So, while a Catholic priest offering a prayer for a queer couple is novel, countless Catholics believe much more work must be done beyond that. And many of them, like the activists fighting for abortion access and racial equality across the United States, continue the fight—knowing the struggle will likely not end in their lifetimes, but persisting on just the same so this world can be better, bit by bit.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

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