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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Ex-Evangelicals and U.S. Politics.”

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I)

More than 400 years before the invention of Viagra, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne had a clever solution for his friend’s embarrassing impotence. On the night of his wedding, the groom got it into his head that an enemy at the wedding feast wished him harm and perhaps had even put a hex on him. When it was time to consummate his marriage, his manhood failed him, and he was humiliated. Sensing that this flaccidity was a function of his imagination rather than some real biological malady, Montaigne spontaneously invented an elaborate magical ritual to “counteract” the “hex”:

“[My instructions] were that…he should retire to make water, repeat certain prayers three times and go through certain motions. On each of these three occasions, he must tie round his waist the ribbon that I put in his hands and very carefully place the medal [talisman] which was attached to it over his kidneys with the figure in a certain position. After that, having made the ribbon quite tight so that it could not get untied or fall out of place, he should return to the business in hand, and not forget to throw my robe on the bed, so that it covered them both.”

The deception worked as intended, Montaigne explains, because of certain liabilities of human psychology: “These monkey-tricks play the main part in the matter, for we cannot get it out of our minds that such strange practices must be based on some occult knowledge. Their absurdity lends them weight and gains them respect.”

But erectile dysfunction is not the only problem to befall couples in the bedroom. Some families despair because they have a bushel of boys and no girls, or, vice versa, a gaggle of girls without a boy. And they are desperate, and willing to try anything, to fill the XX- or XY- shaped hole in their hearts (although, I note in passing, XX and XY are not the only chromosomal possibilities for humans). And these couples, like Montaigne’s credulous friend, are turning to magical solutions.

My wife and I count ourselves among these couples. When we faced our own challenges in family planning, we too ventured into the realm of magical solutions.

II)

Enter Kathryn Taylor and her “Babydust Method.” Taylor, who moderates a closed Facebook group with tens of thousands of followers, purports in her book, The Babydust Method: A Guide to Conceiving a Boy or a Girl, to show how you can “dramatically increase your chances of conceiving the sex of your choice.” Taylor claims an astonishing 87% success rate.

The Babydust Method focuses on the timing and frequency of intercourse in relation to ovulation. Taylor suggests monitoring luteinizing hormone (LH) levels using basic test strips twice a day for three menstrual cycles before attempting to conceive. By identifying a surge in LH levels, typically occurring around 24 hours before ovulation, one can better predict the timing of the next ovulation.

For those aiming to conceive a girl, Taylor recommends having intercourse once two-to-three days before ovulation. Alternatively, for those desiring a boy, having sex twice — once on the day of ovulation and a second time approximately 24 hours later — is the proposed method.

This timing allows the right sperm to reach its target at the right time. “Studies have shown that male sperm mature first, then die off, and then the female sperm mature and die off,” says Taylor.  “So having sex before ovulation allows the male sperm to mature and die before the egg is released, leaving mostly female sperm to mature and fertilize the egg.” And vice versa: having sex on the day of ovulation allows the mature male sperm the best chance to win the race.

Experts are skeptical. Speaking to Newsweek, Antoine Abu Musa, chief medical officer at online IVF clinic NOW-fertility, said of Babydust, “There is no scientific objective evidence that it works.” Dr. Evangelia Elenis, a gynecologist, agreed: “As far as I know, there is no conclusive scientific proof for the Babydust method.”

But Taylor is not a witch doctor or charlatan. She has a Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from UCLA. Except for her winking talk of “Babydust,” which conjures magical associations like pixie dust or fairy dust, her book is otherwise unapologetically scientific, chock-full of charts and talk of hormones and cervical mucus. Taylor strives for scientific objectivity, even if she might make overconfident claims unsupported by the current research.

But despite her attempts at scientific objectivity, what’s most fascinating to me, as someone who teaches about religion, is that Taylor’s social media followers have added all manner of superstitions and magical rituals to the Babydust regimen.

The Babydust Facebook group page, where Taylor is a moderator and admin, is full of women describing the magical measures they’ve added on top of the Babydust regimen to ensure their desired sex: women paint their nails blue or pink, put a blue or pink onesie under their mattress or on their door knob, eat blue or pink foods, wear pink rose quartz bracelets, or put blue or pink ribbons in their hair. It is not a few women who do this, but scores of women, pursuing even the wackiest solutions. Many of these women acknowledge that they feel silly engaging in these magic rituals, but also admit that they just can’t help themselves.

“I also did some other little things like wore a pink hair tie only and tried not to wear any blue,” one woman writes. “I felt crazy doing all this, but I am so happy it paid off! I know I probably didn’t need to do all of this, but I wanted to try everything.”

Another woman, hoping for a girl, exclusively used lavender shampoo, lavender detergent, lavender dish soap, lavender candles, lavender incense, lavender oil diffusers, lavender body scrub, lavender lotion, lavender cleaning products, lavender progesterone cream, lavender body spray, and lavender deodorant.

One woman’s “spiritual approaches” included making a “manifestation board”; engaging in visualization exercises; burning a lavender candle the week of intercourse; and wearing a rose quartz pendant.

III)

Students of religion and anthropology will recognize these practices as modern forms of “sympathetic magic.” Historian Will Durant gives several examples of how various peoples across the world have engaged in similar practices:

“The methods by which the spirits, and later the gods, were suborned to human purposes were for the most part “sympathetic magic” —  a desired action was suggested to the deities by a partial or imitative performance of the action by men. To make rain fall, some primitive magicians poured water out upon the ground, preferably from a tree. The Kaffirs, threatened by drought, asked a missionary to go into the fields with an open umbrella. In Sumatra a barren woman made an image of a child and held it in her lap, hoping thereby to become pregnant. In the Babar Archipelago, the would-be mother fashioned a doll out of red cotton, pretended to suckle it, and repeated a magic formula; then she sent word through the village that she was pregnant, and her friends came to congratulate her; only a very obstinate reality could refuse to emulate this imagination…”

The Biblical Patriarch Jacob engages in sympathetic magic. When Jacob cuts a deal with his cunning father-in-law Laban that he will only take the part of the flock that is spotted and speckled, Laban thinks he has gotten the better part of the deal, until Jacob ingeniously causes the she-goats to birth spotted kids by placing a speckled rod in front of the goats when they mate. The visual stimulus of the spotted rod magically inspired a sympathetic imitation by the embryo.

In the same spirit, one woman writes on the Babydust Facebook group that after intercourse she gave her undivided attention to a baby girl onesie, all while holding her legs straight up in the air. “This stuff doesn’t actually work but can’t hurt, right?” she writes. And then immediately shying away from her momentary skepticism, “Can I please have pink baby dust?” (On the Facebook group, women “send” pink or blue baby dust to one another— a kind of blessing or prayer that the sway be successful.)

Sometimes these rituals suggest an uncomfortable origin in regressive gender norms. For example, women in the Facebook group often claim that, to conceive a baby girl, it is best that the mother lie passively in the missionary position, and that she does not orgasm. A wooden spoon (a domestic implement of the kitchen) should be hung on the door. Historically, ideas about conception and gender were also sometimes bound up in patriarchal notions of gendered hierarchies. For example, “The Romans believed that a male child was produced with sperm from the right testicle, as this was higher than the left, befitting the male status in life compared to the female, who, it was believed, was conceived with sperm from the lower left testicle. To avoid having a female child a man was advised to tie a cord round his left testicle during intercourse.”

One of the most common magical rituals shared on the Facebook group, the practice of sleeping on a blue or pink baby outfit, also likely has historical precedent. When I visited the Museum of Magic, Fortune-telling & Witchcraft in Edinburgh this summer, I saw on display several small amulets and figurines that, according to the museum curators, were to be placed under the beds or mattresses of a woman hoping to conceive. Similarly, in his City of God, St. Augustine complained that Roman maidens would sit on (rather than sleep on) the erect member of the statue of the god Priapus as a means of getting pregnant.

In our age of gender-neutral toys and gender-neutral parenting, all the pink-and-blue pageantry on the Babydust Facebook group might rankle some people, for whom this color dichotomy is symbolic of harmful gender stereotypes and caricature. So, it is perhaps surprising that Taylor dedicates the foreword of her Babydust book to interrogating the misguided reasons readers might desire one sex more than another, and cautioning her readers against conflating gender and sex:

“Before we begin to discuss sex-selection, I encourage you now to think about why you want a girl or a boy. Do you want to dress your daughter up in cute outfits and bows and play dolls with her? Do you want to watch football with your son and wrestle with him? I can’t promise your child will do any of that. My daughter pulls the bows out of her hair one minute after I put them in. My son has no interest in even catching a ball, let alone sitting down to watch a football game. We’re only talking about the sex here, not the gender. The sex of your baby only pertains to which sex organs your baby will have and how your baby will procreate one day.”

Some critics might argue that Taylor’s framework remains too simplistic, especially as it assumes the existence of only two biological sexes. In any case, and notwithstanding Taylor’s explicit warnings, it is common to see successful girl “sways” celebrated in the Facebook group by feminine emojis (pink bows or pink flowers ), or successful boy “sways” celebrated with masculine emojis (blue ball caps , airplanes , shirts and ties , or cars ). It seems that for most people in the Facebook group, it is a deeply entrenched idea that sex=gender.

Another interesting pattern within the world of Babydust followers is the wry and winking playfulness with which the women engage in their magical rituals. When describing their magical regimens, they often use an ironic, self-deprecatory tone — and tease themselves for engaging in practices they “know” are foolish. It might be tempting to think, then, that the women are not engaging in authentic religious or magical practices — that these women are merely playing or being silly. But this assumes that all religious practices must be done in absolute credulity and earnestness.

But as Johan Huizinga argues in his classic 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, there has always been an element of “half-belief” or willful credulity inherent in religious rituals and practices. This half-belief or make-belief is rooted in the human instinct towards play; it’s this “ludic impulse” that is the root of all religious rituals. Huizinga writes that “a certain element of ‘make-believe’ is operative in all primitive [sic] religions. Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized one is always knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe. [There is a] partial consciousness of things ‘not being real’ in magic and supernatural phenomena generally…” But if Huizinga believed that this is true of only “primitive” religions (to use his infelicitous terminology) — those ancient, extinct religions or aboriginal religions supposedly “frozen in time” — my observations lead me to believe the same observation holds today, in our modern, “civilized” age. The modern women on the Facebook Babydust group both believe and disbelieve in the magic rituals they perform. But they always perform the rituals in a spirit of sheer playfulness. As one woman writes, “I also decided to do everything spiritual to make it fun!”

What are we to make of these modern magical practices or these modern adaptations of ancient ways of magical thinking? One takeaway might be an obvious one: We moderns have not outgrown magic. When we are desperate enough, we are willing to resort to any magical or superstitious solution. Even the cool-headed and dispassionate Joan Didion, in the aftermath of her husband’s death, indulged in her “Year of Magical Thinking.” In one of the most poignant moments in her memoir by that name, Didion struggles to give away her dead husband’s possessions. “I could not give away the rest of his shoes,” she writes. “I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return. The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.” It’s at the beginnings of life and the end of life — those thresholds where we are most clueless and impotent — where magical thinking has an almost irresistible appeal for all of us.

IV)

For our pregnancies, my wife and I had taken the Carrie Underwood approach: we went to bed and let, “Jesus, take the wheel!”

This had resulted in three very blond boys, back-to-back-to-back, and my wife wanted a daughter to dote on. Hence, we turned to The Babydust method.

Skeptically, but with the resignation that comes with desperation, we took the leap of faith.

The burden of close adherence to the method — the daily tracking of her ovulation and hormones, would fall on my wife. Still, I skimmed The Babydust Method for myself.

A glance at the bibliography did not inspire confidence. The first thing I noticed is that there seem to be many more studies about sex selection in animals than there are studies about sex selection in human beings. A quick skim might give one the impression they are looking at a zoology or veterinary textbook:

-“Litter sex ratios in the golden hamster vary with time of mating and litter size and are not binomially distributed.”

-“The effects of altering the pH of seminal fluid on the sex ratio of rabbit off-spring.”

-“Comparative motility of X and Y chromosome-bearing bovine sperm separated on the basis of DNA content by flow sorting.”

-“Changes in electrical resistance of the vagina during estrus in heifers.”

-“Sex ratio of white-tailed deer and the estrus cycle.”

-“Efficiency of the OVATEC unit for estrus detection and calf sex control in beef cows.”

If, based on the bibliography, you have a sneaking suspicion that getting pregnant through the Babydust method might be as uncomfortable, complicated, and aromantic as the artificial insemination of a cow by syringe at the hands of some rough-handed Midwestern farmer— well, you might not be that far off.

But we had fun with it anyway. We purchased an adorable little purple and pink dress and laid it out delicately under the mattress. For several weeks, we slept, like the Princess and the Pea, on top of that little dress. We festooned a wooden spoon with purple and pink ribbons and hung it on the doorknob. We made Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” our baby-making soundtrack. I only failed to subject myself to a grueling regimen of all sorts of pink potions and poultices. I did not drink lavender liquids, paint my nails pink, or use a Himalayan salt lamp. Only time would tell if there would be consequences for these failures of my faith.

Finally, the gender reveal. In the doctor’s office, the static-y picture of my wife’s womb. And there, where the little acorn penis had been in three previous sonograms, there was — a fourth.

Corey Landon Wozniak lives with his wife and three (soon to be four) sons in Las Vegas, NV. He teaches English and Comparative Religions at a public high school.

The post My Year of Magical Baby-Making appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Julstory)

Perhaps, as you sit down to read this, you find yourself distracted. You open The Revealer on your computer browser or your phone, but you instantly feel tugged toward another wormhole of information or entertainment. You glance at Instagram or the Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter and it is as though time folds in on itself. You open another tab or another app or another device entirely, and suddenly hours have passed in which you never made it past this introduction.

If that is the case, then you are not alone. We are all distracted and seemingly more pained than ever by that distraction. Seventy-five percent of us say that digital notifications make us distracted and unfocused both at home and at work, 57% of Americans feel addicted to their smartphone, and the average user (i.e., you and me) spends more than 10% of their day on social media.

But fear not! The Internet—arguably the source of this dissatisfaction—has a solution. Several solutions, actually, almost none of which involve logging off or putting down your phone for any substantive amount of time. No, the Internet’s trendiest solution to our distractive woes is a productivity hack titled “Monk Mode.”

Monk Mode is a practice (available as an app, a browser extension, or just as a personal exercise) that gamifies mindful concentration by aiding users in limiting or turning off digital distractions for “sprints”—discrete amounts of time lasting from minutes to months—to develop productive habits and improve focus. The practice trades on the idea that today, as one article puts it, “the average human finds themselves pushed around like a ragdoll by various stimuli”—such as texts, emails, social media posts, and breaking news announcements—and the only way to take back one’s attention is by silencing this literal and figurative virtual cacophony.

The term Monk Mode is a reference to the abstemious lifestyle monks live, which are presumably free from the mental strain of hyperconnectivity. In the Monk Mode influencer universe, “mode” means imitating Christian and Buddhist monastic lifestyles, both of which are considered equally fertile ground for this sincerest form of flattery. While the moniker (so to speak) dates back to the early 2000s, “monk mode as practice” got a lift from former Vedic monastic seeker Jay Shetty’s 2020 book, Think Like a Monk, and TikTok, where the hashtag “monk mode” has over 76 million views.

The exercise itself is predicated on what another article sums up in a catchy mnemonic as the “three i’s: introspection, isolation, and improvement,” where introspection means “fine-tuning your focus,” isolation is “giving yourself some space and freedom,” and improvement requires “formulating a plan of action.” Or, as the website for the web- and app-blocking software Freedom (which I employed while writing this article, by the way) puts it, “Monk Mode is, in essence, a deliberate practice of intense focus, self-discipline and a dash of isolation to spearhead one’s productivity and personal development.” Monk Mode can help users build the focused attention required to achieve individual goals such as weight loss, starting a business, or “finally mastering the art of homemade sourdough.”

Setting aside for now the idea that monastic living is about “fine-tuning focus” and “a dash of isolation” (I imagine this would be news to most monks), the ubiquity of this relatively new practice is also surprising. Beyond its coveted status as a popular social media hashtag, Monk Mode is available as an app or extension that can mute notifications, block specific websites, and track a user’s progress in beating back distraction. One iPhone app titled Monk Mode advertises itself as a means to, “Find Focus, Find Peace.” On the Apple Store, the app is described as “your ultimate companion for developing daily discipline and motivation…Monk Mode will help you cultivate the habits you need to live a healthier, more productive life.” Another app called Monk Mode Official describes itself as a method to “achieve your goals faster” and describes itself as “THE app to use for tracking your Monk Mode sprints.”

As TikTok trends go, Monk Mode is fairly innocuous. It doesn’t result in the kind of headlines that have plagued more dubious social media fads, like consuming toxic cleaning fluids for fun or conscripting grandparents into dance videos. Yet none of this—productivity optimization, self-enhancement, creating a “Zen” atmosphere—is the goal of either historical or contemporary monastic living. While what is contained in the suggestive title “monk mode” is a way of navigating our modern world, what is left out is the spiritual and ethical core of monastic experience: seeking enlightenment or finding salvation.

But to understand this phenomenon we need to think briefly about what, exactly, the point of this ersatz monasticism is. To understand this “why”—as in “why playact being a monk?”—it is useful to think through the elements of monastic living marshalled into the project of developing self-control and retraining attention. With this in mind, let us consider the ways—and the possible whys—of how Monk Mode co-opts three trans-religious elements of monastic life: solitude, asceticism, and discipline, which effectively map onto Monk Mode’s “three i’s” of isolation, improvement, and introspection.

The element of monastic experience most conspicuously adapted by Monk Mode is solitude, a concept whose appeal in our aggressively networked society is probably obvious. From monasticism’s earliest origins in Christian and Buddhist traditions, being solitary was a requisite for practice; one could not meditate on the meaning of life amidst the noise of civilization. Because of that, monastic solitude involves withdrawal. Both the Buddha and Jesus modeled the value of withdrawal, retreating to the forest and the desert (respectively) to meditate, to listen, and to finally transcend human existence itself. Like solitude, withdrawal has always been both metaphorical and literal, as with the early Christian desert fathers or the Tibetan Rongbuk Monastery nestled at 16,434 feet (5,009 meters) in the Dzakar Chu valley, just below Mount Everest.

(Image source: Simplish)

Withdrawal from the world today is less straightforward than previous eras, however, as physical solitude has increasingly become a luxury. A 2023 Vogue article titled, “Why Solitude Is Now the Most Coveted Commodity in Travel” explains that the “desire for solitude, coupled with the last few years of disrupted travel plans, health concerns, and a staggering increase in connectivity, [could] be leading to a desire for travelers to venture to more remote places.” But the travel experiences highlighted in the article—a beachside house in Mexico, a four-star mountain lodge in New Zealand, an extravagant villa in Chile’s Atacama Desert—range from $300 to $12,000 U.S.D. for a single night’s stay. Suffice to say, the Chilean villa is a far cry from the early Christians’ desert accommodations and an excursion most of us could not afford.

Being physically alone—literal solitude—is thus increasingly a function of finances, transportation, and access. And living in an era of never-ending pings, dings, and rings means we are tethered to our digital devices. These combined factors make our modern, secular solitude almost entirely metaphorical; today, being solitary means severing our connectivity.

In a viral speech titled “Solitude and Leadership,” literary scholar William Deresiewicz noted to an incoming plebe class at West Point Academy that modern solitude is as much about concentration as retreat from the world, because both require “gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input.” It stands to reason, then, that the average person, economically shut out from the physical solitude provided by posh resorts and remote beach houses, will try the metaphorical type of solitude—using quiet concentration to go “Monk Mode in the midst of chaos”—to combat this electronic scattering of the self.

Monk Mode also attempts to imitate another of monasticism’s most recognizable values: asceticism, the renouncing of physical pleasures. From ancient Vedic ascetics to Christian holy orders centered on living in imitation of Christ, one element many monastic communities have in common is a practice of intense abstention. As scholar of religion Stephen J. Davis writes, asceticism is “a term used even before the rise of formalized monastic communities to refer to individuals who engaged in rigorous practices of renunciation pertaining to money, food, sex, and other worldly attachments.”

The term asceticism comes from the Greek askesis, which literally means “exercise” or “training.” Christian monastic communities put this training to work by following Christ’s command to give away their earthly possessions and live in faithful poverty, while Buddhist monks adhere to exacting dietary restrictions. Monk Mode sprints also require asceticism, although often of a worldlier kind. Rather than an exercise in spiritual growth, Monk Mode ascetic sprints seek self-improvement through eliminating social media, improving physical health, or developing interpersonal skills. As one user writes of his half-year-long Monk Mode sprint, “I went celibate, joined the gym and did a lot of inner work. It was for 6 months, and man the growth was insane.” The Monk Moder explains that he “was eating right…I got rid of addictions, I stopped smoking and took a break from alcohol…My confidence after monk mode was through the roof, a lot of girls liked me…Got my dream job because of how much I was focused in improving my skills.”

This inward turn of asceticism and withdrawal in a Monk Mode sprint stands in stark contrast to real monastic life. Unlike monastic precepts that last an entire lifetime, when the sprint comes to an end the Monk Mode practitioner might find themselves back at square one. The same user writes that after his six-month sprint everything went sideways, culminating in losing his girlfriend and gaining weight. The solution, he writes, is to “go in another monk mode to get my life back on track, for a year this time.” With the main goal of “getting [his] confidence back,” this practitioner writes that “better versions of ourselves will take sacrifices but it will be worth it in the end.”

Finally, another common denominator in monastic communities around the world is self-discipline, which can include scholarly study and intense intellectual work. But Monk Mode is not necessarily concerned with the deep reflection we associate with monks scribbling away in their cells on theological treatises or contemplating Zen koans that help focus meditation and introspection. Instead, Monk Mode is frequently promoted as a “productivity hack”—a means of increasing an individual’s contributions to the modern workforce.

The term productivity, however, merits a brief definition, because while it gets tossed around a lot its actual meaning isn’t always clear. In simplest terms, productivity is, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “a ratio of output over input [where] the more we increase output relative to input, the more productivity increases.” Productivity is, generally speaking, a measure of economic performance—and represents the leveraging of a capitalist system. So, what do the purveyors of Monk Mode mean when they insist that the practice is good for productivity? And, perhaps most saliently, productivity for whom?

In Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, authors Jeremy R. Carrette and Richard King suggest reflecting on “the socio-political effects of the decision to classify specific practices or philosophies as ‘spiritual’” and ask “who benefits from such constructions?” Troublingly, they find that what “is being sold to us as radical, trendy, and transformative spirituality, in fact, produces little in the way of a significant change in one’s lifestyle or fundamental behavior patterns (with the possible exception of motivating the individual to be more efficient and productive at work).” In other words, these so-called “spiritual” trends that proliferate on social media prey on peoples’ (usually economic) fears and sell self-optimization for the literal profit of a capitalist system.

Similarly, Ronald Purser writes in McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality that mindfulness (a practice that anchors Monk Mode) might actually “be making things worse.” “Instead of encouraging radical action,” Purser writes, mindfulness “says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live.” As a practicing Buddhist himself, Purser believes that any version of meditation proffered as mindfulness—including Monk Mode—is “nothing more than basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings. What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help.” Rather than mindfulness and other quasi-spiritual practices “setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems.” Instead of reproaching the exploitive system of capitalism that benefits from our (distracted) labor and (anxious) self-optimization, participating in these self-improvement ventures perpetuates the notion that the problem is us.

But at the end of the day we might ask, well, what’s the harm? If Monk Mode makes people feel better, then why is all this shade thrown at a harmless self-improvement trend? But perhaps a more generative question is whether this practice is one of modern life’s most vilified and practiced arts: appropriation? If it is just a metaphor—“monk mode” as a casual description of a state of mind—then we can think of it as a kind of branding. Instead of using a tissue, I blow my nose with a Kleenex. Instead of concentrating by silencing my phone, I’m practicing Monk Mode. But what if the name of this practice is more than a metaphor? What if monasticism’s native lifestyle of discipline, meditative focus and deep study is about to go the way of yoga: stripped of both history and sacredness and put in the service of capitalism?

It’s probably too early to say, but the interesting fact remains that there are several important elements of monastic life completely left out—if not altogether rejected—by this contemporary simulation. For example, one element that unites monastic experiences across time and religion is community. With few exceptions, modern monastic communities live and practice together, sharing their lives and delegating duties amongst one another. They are a brotherhood, a sisterhood, and a shelter from the larger world. But aside from comments on TikTok and Reddit, Monk Mode does not seem to cultivate either virtual or real community.

Monasticism also represents service. There is the active service of the Jesuits—a monastic order in the Roman Catholic Church—who are known for their devotion to education and to social justice. There is also the quieter service of the Buddhist monks of the Sravasti Abbey in Washington state, who explain that because their monastic life is committed to voluntarily following “the Buddha’s guidelines to pacify body, speech and mind,” they are creating “peace in a chaotic world.” In either case, the service orientation of monastic communities is a telling contrast to a Monk Mode practice devoted to self-optimization. Monk Mode is intrinsically inward-looking and is therefore the diametric opposite of a life lived in service to others.

Finally, the richest irony in the branding and dissemination of Monk Mode as a productivity hack in our modern capitalist society is that monks themselves famously contemplated—and agonized over—their own distraction all the time. The “noonday demon” of distraction and self-doubt has always been an intimate part of monastic life. In her 2023 book, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction, historian Jaimie Blank writes that medieval Christian monks worried about distraction not because they were “simply trying to get more work done.” Rather, these “women and men were trying to align themselves with the ethics of salvation. The stakes could not have been more serious.” Concentration and attention were a way of life because they were the groundwork for redemption, not because they increased an individual’s self-control or productivity.

A central irony of Monk Mode—and there are many more than what I’ve highlighted here—is that it is premised on the seemingly unique attentional abilities of the monks of yore. But that focus and discipline, it turns out, are just as much of a fantasy as “going monk mode”—the monks are in on the joke. Monks perfected their attentive abilities because they have known for centuries that they—like every other human—are really bad at paying attention.

While monks have always known they were susceptible to distraction, they also understood that attention is one of our most valuable resources. As William James wrote in the chapter titled “Attention” in his classic The Principles of Psychology, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Monks choose a lifestyle in pursuit of sustained attention, even while recognizing how impossible a task it represents. For monks—and for all people living in monastic communities or who have taken holy orders—the power of their experience is what they have agreed to attend to for the rest of their lives: the divine, enlightenment, the cultivation of a luminous mind, spiritual liberation, care for their community, and ultimate concern.

With that in mind (as it were), it’s worth reflecting on what Monk Mode is cultivating with its casual appropriation of attentive and reflexive practices in the name of personal growth. What are we attending to when we practice Monk Mode in a capitalist system? Is it—as the Monk Mode app sells itself—helping us “adopt a new habit” because “Monk Mode has everything you need to stay on track”? Is it breaking our addictions to our phones and social media so we can concentrate better at work?

Or could Monk Mode be an expression of sublimated religious desire and a longing for the things our society seems to have lost, like community, peace of mind, and lovingkindness?

Catherine L. Newell is an associate professor of religion and science at the University of Miami. She is the author of the books Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier and Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating.

The post Monk Mode: Monastic Living for the Digital Age appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: The Stream)

The following excerpt comes from The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon. (Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.) The book explores the growing movement of people leaving evangelical Christianity, problems within evangelical communities, and connections between white evangelicals and rightwing politics.

This excerpt comes from chapter 13, “Suffer the Children.”

***

Once children are born in an evangelical family, they are to be guided with a firm hand.

Evangelical leaders teach young parents that it’s God’s will to guide kids’ minds, hearts, and souls in the way of Christ. To do that, the thinking goes, the Bible teaches that they must physically discipline their children as a means of training them for life and for eternity, preparing them to submit not just to the will of their parents but to the will of God. In the evangelical view of the Bible, the admonition in Proverbs that “whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them” must be taken literally.

Dobson’s Dare to Discipline is among the earliest and best-known examples of what became a genre of Christian parenting manuals offering an evangelical alternative to secular experts like

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose 1946 bestseller The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care became the parenting Bible for many families for decades. Dobson, and others who  would follow him, promised a vision of parenting rooted in Scripture, the guide for all aspects of life for evangelical Christians.

In retrospect, what these books were promoting was a culture of systematic and spiritualized child abuse. Along with other conservative Christian writers such as Michael and Debi Pearl, who came to prominence in the 1990s, many advocated spanking children as young as fifteen months old as an essential method of teaching appropriate behavior. In Dare to Discipline, while advising that discipline should be “administered in a calm and judicious manner” and cautioning against punishing children “too frequently or too severely,” Dobson nonetheless stresses that “the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.” Later, he says that if a child cries for longer than five minutes, the parent should “require him to stop the protest crying usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.”

Others, like the Pearls, took it further. On her blog in 2013, the late writer Rachel Held Evans, whose work inspired countless evangelical young adults to rethink their faith, wrote about the tactics advised in the Pearls’ guide to “biblical discipline,” To Train Up a Child. As Held Evans notes, the couple advocated spanking children with plastic tubes, and doing whatever was necessary to punish defiant children, even if it meant holding them down and sitting on them.  As the New York Times had reported in 2011, the Pearls’ methods came under heightened scrutiny after three children whose parents had been influenced by their teachings died of apparent abuse. The Pearls have insisted that they oppose disciplining children in anger or causing physical harm.

In “Ministry of Violence,” a three-part series published on Substack in 2021, writer Talia Lavin delves into the history—and longer-term impact—of teachings on discipline promoted by a host of conservative Christian writers and speakers, including Dobson and the Pearls. The response to a social media callout asking people from evangelical backgrounds to share their experiences as children on the literal receiving end of these teachings “was immediate, and wide-ranging, and intense,” Lavin writes. Lavin heard from scores of people ranging from their twenties to their sixties, expressing “so much candid anguish I marveled the words didn’t etch holes in my screen.”

They told Lavin about being spanked with wooden spoons and belts and hands, sometimes dozens of times, sometimes unclothed, sometimes leaving them bruised or even bleeding—all in the name of raising “godly” children.

Dobson had rightfully cautioned against the dangers of lashing out in anger and disciplining too harshly. But even for those whose parents never lost control or left them bloody, the carefully prescribed, intensely religious nature of the discipline could fuel feelings of confusion and shame.

Spanking, according to Dobson, was a unique tool to facilitate bonding and communication between parent and child: “The child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, loving arms. . . . You can tell him how much you love him, and how important he is to you. . . . This kind of communication is not made possible by other disciplinary measures” such as a time-out.

Most evangelical parents I’ve known would condemn child abuse per se as a betrayal of their God-given responsibility to care for their children. But spanking was viewed as something distinct—God-ordained, and therefore, by definition, not abuse. Abuse, I was told, often involved a parent losing control and becoming violent, rather than calmly and intentionally carrying out God’s instructions.

For the child, though, the experience of being hit by a parent, the person responsible for your very survival, was often a “violative and bewildering moment,” Lavin writes. “Memories of the infraction fade, but a sense of betrayal lingers, as well as the sense that love and pain flow from the same font.”

Hillary McBride, a Canadian trauma therapist who often works with patients from evangelical backgrounds, wrote in a thread on Twitter in October 2022 about repeatedly coming face-to-face with the impact of Dobson’s teachings: “On a full day last week, every single adult patient I saw happened to mention the prolific and enduring trauma they experienced because of how their parents disciplined them as children, as instructed by James Dobson. If you were a child parented under this absolute farce of psychological theory, I want you to know that your strong will, your clear bodily knowing, your powerful emotions, and your capacity to resist what you were being taught, was a resource and deserved to be protected.”

In an interview, McBride told me her patients often struggle with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, chronic overwork, and other coping mechanisms. She said she recently opened a ketamine clinic to better serve those and other patients. McBride said she’s hopeful; she believes “there’s no brain that can’t change.”

Emily Joy Allison, a writer living in Nashville, told me she experienced what she describes as “ritual physical abuse” for more than a decade, in part because of the influence that evangelical teachings about discipline had on her parents. For Allison, the author of #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing, the methodical nature of the discipline produced its own trauma.

“My parents never once flew off the handle and hit me. Never once was it anything like, ‘Oh, I got angry and smacked you,’ or something. I could forgive that, because that’s fucked up, but it’s human at the very least,” she said. “I felt like the way that they handled it was inhuman. They would only do it while they were calm. It was with a sanded-down two-by-four with Bible verses written on it—like literally hitting me with the Bible.”

For some, particularly women, that intertwining of love and pain—inflicted on an intimate area of the body—produced confusing, shameful feelings. Allison described the ritualized nature of the abuse as having a “psychosexual” undercurrent.

In Lavin’s series on evangelical discipline, a forty-year-old woman named Heather described the confusing, intrusive erotic feelings she experienced from being spanked by her parents:

“There’s something about being beaten in such a religious, ritualistic, intimate way that feels almost sexual, even if it’s not intended as such. Child me picked up on that too, and started having sensual feelings about it. And felt extremely guilty for that, and wanted it to stop, but those thoughts intruded in my head. So much that I asked God to kill me. He didn’t.”

There’s no way to know how common this experience is, but I do know that it is real—with lifelong implications.

Sarah McCammon is a National Political Correspondent for NPR and cohost of “The NPR Politics Podcast.” She is the author of The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 43 of the Revealer podcast: “Ex-Evangelicals and U.S. Politics.”

The post An Evangelical Culture of Child Discipline appeared first on The Revealer.

(Illustration of Elisabeth Elliot. Image source: East West Ministry)

Like many millennial evangelical women of the 2000s, I read Passion and Purity as a teenager, the memoir and advice book by purity culture pioneer, Elisabeth Elliot. Elliot’s 1984 epistolary account offers dating tips and tells the story of her courtship with Jim Elliot, her famed martyr husband who died of impalement at the hands of the “unreached” Waodani tribe in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956, while making passing references to the two husbands who followed him (she was widowed twice).

At 18, I consumed her words eagerly, hungry for romance, though I myself was single with no marriage prospects in sight. I loved her example of courtship, of “saving yourself” for ecstatic marital sex, of the hand of God directing a humble woman’s love life. But as much as I prayed to follow her example, it never worked for me.

Now, at age 36 and in a happy egalitarian marriage, I see her words differently. Today, I lean decidedly progressive in my politics and Christian beliefs, and so Elliot’s words seem not just dated or fantastical, but misogynistic.

I’m not the only one to find Elliot’s words polarizing. During her five-decades-long writing career—she published 48 books, spoke internationally at Christian churches and conferences, and gained household recognition through the 13-year run of her daily radio show—where she stoutly defended marital “complementarianism” as fundamental to the Christian faith. Complementarianism is a theological justification for patriarchal gender roles; it is the ideological underpinning of “purity culture,” a movement that taught teenagers that pre-marital sex will harm themselves and their future relationships and encouraged sexual repression (especially for queer and female teenagers). Like other purity culture leaders, Elliot emphasized marriage as the “penultimate human experience,” only topped by pregnancy for women or a life devoted to the church for men (even better: martyrdom for God). Elliot’s triangle of authority—God on top, then man, then woman—has resonated for decades within evangelical communities, influencing at least three generations toward conservative views on gender roles and sexuality.

Certainly, Elliot’s views have harmed women. Enforcing a culture of male dominance has consequences. Some of my friends have experienced marital rape and domestic violence in their evangelical marriages. Another friend found that her father expected her to become a “stay-at-home daughter,” and received limited education and even more limited freedom as a teenager. Others only recognized they were queer after they finally became sexually active in their heterosexual marriages.

Personally, Elliot’s teachings did not harm my sexuality as much as my sense of self. She taught that God was male. I took this to mean that men were holier and more like God, that I could never come close to the life demanded of me within the Scriptures, that I myself—my body, my femaleness—was inherently bad. As a result, I developed a binge eating disorder to hide myself, a disorder that I still struggle with to this day.

Because of Elliot’s prominence and ties to influential organizations and leaders, such as Bill Gothard of Shiny Happy People fame and James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Elliot became a controversial figure. Both conservative and liberal Christians made her a symbol of what’s right (or wrong) with Christianity’s relationship to women.

Yet as I read two recent Elliot biographies published in 2023, I did not see a symbol or figurehead, but a real live breathing woman. Lucy R.S. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (Crossway) released in June, and Ellen Vaughn’s Being Elisabeth Elliot (B&H Books), the second installment in a series on Elliot, came out in September. Elliot’s foundation and family commissioned Vaughn’s biographies and gained praise in conservative evangelical circles. Austen, on the other hand, undertook the task independently and earned praise from both the author of Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobez Dumez, a respected feminist historian of evangelicalism, and The Gospel Coalition, a conservative evangelical online magazine known for its support of traditional gender roles.

To my surprise, after spending nearly 900 pages absorbed in the life of Elisabeth Elliot, I found myself less disturbed by her ideas and more disturbed by the trajectory of her life. Widowed twice, a wife of three husbands in all, her marital relationships appeared to become more dysfunctional the older she got, culminating in a third marriage both biographers describe circumspectly as loveless, disappointing, and manipulative, to put it mildly. In fact, one question still haunts me about the life of Elliot, the woman so enamored with love as to make it her career: was Elisabeth Elliot abused by her third husband? And if so, how should we evaluate her life and work?

Who was Elisabeth Elliot?

Elisabeth Elliot (Betty to her family) rose to prominence after her husband Jim was murdered in 1956. The couple had been serving as Brethren missionaries in Ecuador, translating the New Testament for Indigenous tribes when Jim and a group of other young missionary men undertook a dangerous mission to meet with the Waodani tribe, an uncontacted and war-torn Amazonian tribe. The men were killed within days of landing in the tribe’s territory, each speared through with a lance. Though Elisabeth and Jim had “courted” for years, they had only been married for three; their daughter was barely ten-months-old at Jim’s death.

Suddenly, alongside managing her grief, Elisabeth needed to decide whether to stay or leave the region (to her family’s astonishment, she chose to stay to try and reach the tribe that had murdered her husband). She had to adjust to single parenting while responding to dozens of interview requests. The deaths of five American missionary men in South America made headlines, including as a feature story in Time magazine. The other widows elected Elliot as their spokesperson. Over the next decade, Elliot published several books about her husband Jim and their missionary team and became a sought-after speaker.

(Elisabeth Elliot. Image source: International Mission Board)

This Elliot was not the “toe the party line” Elisabeth Elliot of purity culture fame. No, this intellectual widow in her thirties taught the Bible to both men and women (though it was controversial for women to teach the Bible to men), left her daughter at home with a friend to travel for her career, moved freely amongst the New York City literati (she shared a literary agent with Robert Frost and Madeline L’Engle), and openly expressed disdain at Christian publishing for habitually making stories “neat and tidy.” This Elliot courted the ideas of feminism and gained a reputation as being argumentative and opinionated. In fact, during this period, Elliot even published a controversial novel, No Graven Image, that, in no uncertain terms, criticized the church’s idolization of missionaries. (She received very mixed reviews.)

So, how did this woman become the female figurehead of the complementarian evangelical movement of the 1970s to 2000s, warning against the influence of feminism on the church?

Becoming an Advocate for Traditional Gender Roles

The answer to Elliot’s transformation can be found in examining her love life. Each of her three marriages led Elliot toward increasingly conservative ideas about the role and function of women within the home and church.

First, Jim Elliot: his journals inspired her own work for decades, and their relationship came to serve as an example she held out for others to follow in the coming years.

Then, Addison Leitch: an older conservative Presbyterian seminary professor who the biographer Austen describes as “tradition[al],…against questioning, an institutionalist to the core” who once wrote that “the conversation around women’s liberation is ‘stupid.’” Before her second marriage, Elliot had openly expressed disgust at the way Christian institutions adopted legalistic rules and expectations, such as advocating temperance despite Jesus turning water to wine. She had also conversed curiously with feminist Christians. However, after marrying Leitch, friends and family noticed that her views rapidly shifted to match her new husband’s, taking on an institutional bent, and arguing alongside her husband for the “unconditional obedience” of wives.

Last, Lars Gren: here lies Elliot’s most disturbing theological turn. When cancer overtook Leitch in 1973, Elliot was again widowed. She remained unattached for five years even as Gren, a seminarian who had rented a room from the middle-aged author, pursued her. Eventually, he proposed, telling Elliot, “I want to build…fences around you, and I want to stand on all sides.” The fifty-year-old woman often felt overwhelmed by the demands of her career and interpreted Gren’s words as protective and supportive. Unfortunately, Elliot misunderstood the intention behind these words. Gren meant his words literally: he wanted to fence her in.

Biographer Ellen Vaughn describes the logic of Elliot’s third marriage like this: “I could see… Elisabeth’s understandable loneliness, deep need for affirmation, physical hunger, weariness, and desire to be ‘protected’ [that] gradually, insidiously, led her, step by cajoling step, into a difficult third marriage that confined and controlled her for the rest of her long life.” Elliot “exchange[d]…freedom for security. She became a person whose highest value was the desire to feel secure.” Unfortunately, Gren had no safety to offer, and his presence only exacerbated Elliot’s pain.

His intentions became clear immediately, and Elliot later admitted to close friends that within hours of their wedding ceremony she realized she’d made a mistake in marrying Gren. According to Austen’s biography, when Elliot and Gren returned to their home to pick up their luggage, Gren refused to leave for their honeymoon, “until he was good and ready.” Apparently, earlier that day, Elliot had guided the couple as they left the church sanctuary (she steered them the opposite direction that Gren was walking), causing their friends to chuckle. This supposed humiliation made Gren furious, and he reasserted his control. Gren’s anger would define their thirty-eight-year relationship.

(Elisabeth Elliot with her husband Lars Gren. Image source: Family Life Today)

Both biographers describe a dramatic curtailing of Elliot’s freedom after her third marriage. Gren decided when she drank a cup of tea, took a bath, and when she slept. He frequently checked her car’s odometer, double-checking that she hadn’t made any unplanned stops. He controlled the house thermostat. He listened in on her phone conversations and had the final say on whether she visited her friends, often declining invitations for her at the last minute. When he grew angry with his wife, he would refuse to speak to her for days. And most painful for Elliot, Gren “unpredictably denied her access to the daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren she loved,” Vaughn writes.

The manipulations worsened as Elliot’s husband took over management of “the Elisabeth Elliot industry,” as Austen termed it in an interview. Austen writes, “He introduced her at the podium, adjusted her microphone, managed the book table, and made sure she ate. He decided when she rested and when she worked and when she socialized…he berated her for errors in speaking…even critiquing her posture.” Gren kept up a grueling speaking schedule for the introverted Elliot, who often experienced nightmares about public speaking and would have preferred to retreat from public life in her later years. However, she submitted to Gren’s relentless expectations, and so her influence continued to grow (to her chagrin).

Elliot maintained a whirlwind of speaking engagements long after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the 1990s because of Gren—even after she’d lost the ability to speak. At least once, Gren had her sit on stage smiling while Gren played a tape of a speech she’d recorded years earlier. Only when a doctor ordered the end of her travel did she find relief from her husband’s demands.

“Obey Regardless of Your Feelings”

Elliot’s later theology reflected the authoritarianism of her third marriage. Both Gren and Elliot shared the conviction that a wife should subordinate herself to her husband. And so, a new theme emerged in Elliot’s writings: obey God regardless of your feelings. Elliot seemed to apply this statute liberally, seemingly substituting “Gren” for “God.”

For example, she attached significance to a moment when a friend told her to work harder at accepting her husband, sinner and all, after Elliot obliquely mentioned some marital troubles. “That instance was so sad,” Austen told me in an interview, “[That advice] would [have been] fine if the problem Elisabeth was dealing with in her marriage to Lars is that he loads the dishwasher differently. But it wasn’t.”

In fact, Elliot recounted the story of her friend’s advice to her newsletter readers, writing that her role was to “accept the divine order” and practice selfless love toward her husband, even when he had sinned against her. When women readers wrote her letters asking for advice about their abusive or dysfunctional relationships, Elliot wrote back, “Examine your own heart to see if there is ‘any way in which you are pushing your husband, challenging or aggravating him.”  Austen elaborates, “[This] advice [offered by Elliot]…reinforces the misconception that the victim is doing something to deserve abuse and the abuser is justified in lashing out.”

While records do exist of Elliot writing against abuse (“There are things which must be changed, such as the abuse of persons…,” and “I do not want to be understood as recommending a woman’s surrender to evils such as coercion…”), it’s hard to ignore the disturbing theme between her patriarchal theology and the facts of her abusive third marriage. Gren was a younger man who manipulated his famous, successful, and powerful wife until he controlled every minute of her time, attention, and work.

Domestic abuse addles the brain. A victim may begin to believe she deserves this kind of treatment, that she could perhaps stop the abuse by her own efforts—if only she were better, prettier, smarter, holier. Through this lens, I have begun to understand the complexity of this elderly woman whose livelihood depended on her teachings about marriage and whose theology shifted so that it matched her reality of suffering, obedience, and surrender. Perhaps she feared the consequences of divorce on her career or reputation.

An interview with Elliot in Christianity Today, the conservative Christian magazine founded by Billy Graham, just months after marrying Gren, sheds a light on this shift in her theology. She criticizes high American divorce rates, blaming couples for confusing the feelings of infatuation with the committed love of marriage, writing, “At a feminist convention I heard a woman say that marriage and motherhood are like deaths. She deplored this. But that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. When a woman marries, she dies to her past, her name, her other commitments, her identity, and herself.” And why? Because, “Jesus says he that loseth his life, shall find it.”

“Marriage as a death” gives us one explanation for Elliot’s troubling marriage to Gren. But why did she stay married for thirty-eight years? Those who knew her best undoubtedly asked themselves the same questions. Vaughn describes the mounting concern of friends and family about Gren, especially after her dementia diagnosis: “[They] worried that Elisabeth’s once-strong spirit had been crushed. [So,] the family staged an intervention, removing Elisabeth, who had agreed, to an undisclosed location outside the United States.” During that time, they asked Gren to change, to repent, to soften. To back off her speaking schedule. To give his wife rest. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that he listened, and the standoff only ended when “Elisabeth herself begged to go back to Lars. ‘He is my husband,’ she said, ‘He is my head.’”

Perhaps it would have been more accurate for Elliot to explain that without her husband, she had no identity, no purpose, no past. Because, to Elliot, marriage became a means of martyrdom. And submission—the total death of the self for the sake of God—became her life work.

The Truth Comes Out

For decades, my own grandmother, who I called Meema, was abused by her second husband, whom she married after the love of her life unexpectedly died of a heart attack at age 40. Weary of parenting twin girls alone, uncomfortable with her singleness, hopeful for companionship and needing help to pay her bills, she married a charming man in the 1960s. He met none of her expectations, and at seventy, she was hiding bruises on her arms under long sleeves. She refused to leave him or tell the other members of her church choir about the tumult of her home life. Only one dear friend knew the truth. Eventually, my grandmother was freed from her marriage when her husband entered a nursing home and passed away, leaving her decades of unhindered life to heal.

Why mention my grandmother’s story? Because she has helped me to understand Elisabeth Elliot. Elliot was not as lucky as my Meema. Elliot died first, in 2015, before her abuser. And lest we ask Elliot to speak from the grave, Gren burned many of the journals she’d filled during their years of marriage, leaving us with few records to decipher her last decades. As Alzheimer’s stripped language from the prolific author, Gren also erased her private voice, too: the final indignity for a writer.

I still disagree emphatically with Elliot’s conclusions about womanhood, yet Austen and Vaughn’s biographies offer a rare glimpse behind the curtain. There, we see a woman who, in seeking to offer healing and direction to readers, instead enabled perpetrators to thrive and upheld a culture that ignored the suffering and abuse of women. She was a woman seemingly unaware of the harm her words caused, unaware of the dissonance between the advice she upheld as the “ideal” and of the life she herself had lived, and unaware of the freedom that would have lain on the other side of a divorce.

In fact, she did not understand her own worth; she saw herself as a slave of men and God alike, subservient to their whims and feelings even as she suppressed her own.

My ambivalence became stronger, however, after talking with Lucy R.S. Austen about the woman in question. Austen told me that she began to see Elliot’s career as responsive. “She was always responding to what other people were asking of her,” she told me, “To some extent, I think she got backed into being ‘the Evangelical voice’ because people kept looking to her for answers…People were writing to her and she was getting 500, 1,000 letters a week asking, what do I do about my love life? What do I do about this difficult relationship? So, she was writing books to answer those questions. And she kept trying to say, Elisabeth Elliot isn’t the Bible and you should read your Bible instead of asking Elisabeth Elliot…but people just kept asking Elisabeth Elliot [anyway].” White American evangelicalism needed a symbol, a meek female voice seated at the patriarch’s table — and Elliot complied.

Now, I’m left pondering Elliot’s legacy. Consider how different her legacy would have been had she divorced her abusive husband. How would a celebrity divorce like Elliot’s have changed evangelicalism? How might Elliot herself have changed? In fact, how might evangelicalism be changed now by this revelation about Elliot? That is, if the public hears the truth at all.

As I read reviews of Austen’s and Vaughn’s biographies and interviews with the authors, I discovered a troubling trend: evangelical publications who reviewed the books—such as Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and World’s podcast and magazine—leave off mentioning Lars Gren. They never address the dissonance between Elliot’s teachings and her third marriage. Not one review uses the word “abuse.” In fact, both Elliot biographies omit the word, too.

What do evangelical institutions today gain by obscuring the truth about Elliot’s third marriage? What makes them so hesitant to admit the failures of their leaders when doing so might offer healing to their victims?

Perhaps they find the truth threatening. In her best moments, Elliot didn’t. She once wrote, “It is truth alone which liberates.”

I suggest we follow her advice.

Liz Charlotte Grant (on Threads, Instagram and Facebook @LizCharlotteGrant) is an award-winning freelance writer in Denver, Colorado whose newsletter, the Empathy List, has twice been nominated for a Webby Award. She’s published essays and op-eds at Religion News Service, Huffington Post, Sojourners, and elsewhere, and her debut book, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible, releases in 2024 with Eerdmans publishing.

The post Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image from The Essential Church documentary)

We are now familiar with the images of the Capitol rioters on January 6, 2021, praying on the floor of the Senate, claiming the mantle of God’s approval for their insurrection. The entire violent episode was bathed in Christian imagery. As one banner proclaimed: “Trump is president, Christ is King.”

Yet some evangelical Christians had a trial run at defying the government the summer before January 6, during the height of the second wave of the Covid pandemic.

On July 13, 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom declared the closure of venues and sectors that “promote the mixing of populations beyond households.” These included indoor dining, movie theaters, gyms, salons, museums, malls, and places of worship. A short while later, the state issued more specific limits that restricted indoor attendance “to 25% of building capacity or a maximum of 100 attendees, whichever is lower.” Grace Community Church in Los Angeles, with an average weekend attendance near 3,000 people and led by Pastor John MacArthur—one of Donald Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporters—made headlines for their refusal to abide by California’s restrictions on large indoor gatherings.

On July 24, the elders of Grace Church published an essay in response to the July 13 order titled, “Christ, not Caesar, Is Head of the Church,” which presented their case for “the biblical mandate to gather for corporate worship.” Two days later, on July 26, they met for their Sunday service in defiance of the state mandate to remain closed. This action prompted a legal standoff between the church and L.A. County. The case for Grace Church did not seem strong. The same day the church’s elders published their essay, the U.S. Supreme Court issued their second ruling of the year denying a church’s request for religious exemption from a state’s public health restriction on religious services.

That all changed on September 18, 2020, with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, the Court began issuing a string of decisions against state health mandates, declaring that they violated the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment. On February 5, 2021, the Court decided South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, which directly pertained to Grace Community Church. The decision enjoined the state of California from enforcing its protocols on places of worship—namely, limiting attendance to 25% of building capacity and placing bans on singing. On August 31 that year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to settle with Grace. Both the county and the state paid the church $400,000.

From the perspective of political pundits and everyday observers, the legal battles involving Grace and other churches were a minor storyline compared to the scale of the crisis posed by Covid and the presidential election.

But things look starkly different from within the world of American evangelicalism. For communities like Grace, their legal victory over L.A. County and Governor Newsom was nothing less than a divine vindication of their fidelity to Christ. In their minds, they were on the front lines in the war against Satan.

***

For evangelicals like Pastor John MacArthur, the battle between good and evil is waged in small, seemingly insignificant moments. As depicted in the recent documentary, The Essential Church, currently available on several streaming services, the gathering of Grace’s elders on July 23, 2020, was one such moment.

The film, created by Grace Productions, the video production ministry of Grace Community Church, documents efforts made by Reverend MacArthur and the church’s elders to gather regularly for in-person worship in violation of public health measures. The film also profiles two other ministers, James Coates (pastor of GraceLife Church of Edmonton) and Tim Stephens (senior pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary), who faced legal consequences and brief imprisonment for their attempts to do the same in Canada. These stories appear alongside historical references to the Scottish Covenanters’ opposition to the forced use of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer in the seventeenth century, weaving together a historically oriented thesis: “Satan has always used the power of governments to control the church. Nothing has changed, except his strategies.”

(Promotional material for The Essential Church)

In support of this thesis, the film highlights a key instigating moment for the Scottish Covenanters: when street vendor Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the Dean of St Giles Kirk in Edinburgh for reading out of the Anglican prayer book. The Scottish Covenanters resisted attempts to regulate worship by the King of England, Charles I—disputes that contributed to the First and Second English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century. The film plays up the fact that Geddes’s act of resistance occurred on July 23, 1637—the same date, separated by 383 years, as the gathering of Grace Church’s elders. The filmmakers are counting on viewers to see this as a sign of Satan’s repeated attacks on the church throughout history, as well as the enduring spiritual continuity of authentic Christians amidst oppression and persecution.

Watching this documentary will not give viewers an informed understanding of the legal and political conflicts of 2020 and 2021. The film almost completely ignores the details recounted above, such as the other churches who filed the original lawsuits and the importance of Justice Barrett’s appointment for the final outcome. The Essential Church, which so far has grossed over $400,000 according to IMDB, is not an educational film. It is a work of evangelical propaganda, a highly polished tract designed to convert viewers into cobelligerents.

Conversion is not too strong a word for it. In the final half-hour of the two-hour documentary, the interviewees—notably Ian Hamilton, president of Westminster Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Newcastle, England, Calvinist author and missionary Voddie T. Baucham, Jr. and MacArthur himself—begin preaching their understanding of the Christian gospel, according to the strict tenets of Calvinist doctrine. It is no accident that the beliefs of many Christian nationalists today are rooted in a narrow sectarian theology from the seventeenth century, which pictures God as absolutely sovereign over every domain, controlling every sphere of life in the fulfillment of God’s plan. For this reason, the filmmakers include explanations of several points of doctrine, including divine punishment, a hell of eternal conscious torment, and the authority of the Bible—all couched within the context of a cosmic war between Good and Evil. The film revels in the difficulty of their teachings, as if to show how seriously they take their faith in contrast to others.

These theological matters may seem obscure and disconnected from the topic of Covid health restrictions, but within the mindset of conservative American evangelicalism, everything is part of God’s grand strategy. What outsiders might see as conspiracy thinking is, for some evangelicals, simply a logical entailment of divine revelation.

***

The Essential Church places opposition to Covid-era mandates within an apocalyptic battle in which a righteous remnant of the ostensibly true church, as represented by Grace and the aforementioned Canadian pastors, has alone remained faithful to God, meaning that they see themselves as set apart from even other American evangelicals who adhered to government-issued orders against indoor worship.

For Grace, the application of public health measures to churches is an illegitimate government incursion into the life of the church. They believe their opposition to those ordinances is one of faithful Christians being sincerely obedient to Christ, who alone can be head of the church. The government should have no say in how Christians worship, and any attempt to do so reveals itself to be, according to Pastor Coates, the “spirit of Antichrist at work in the government.”

(Promotional material for The Essential Church)

It is worth noting that the “true church,” according to this film, is not just any church affected by Covid mandates or even any church that stands up to the government. The Essential Church is conspicuously uninterested in ecumenism. For the documentary’s creators, the true church requires true doctrine, hence the extensive discussion of Calvinist theology, as well as true practice, which in the documentary is limited to the practice of gathering weekly as a congregation to hear the preaching of the gospel.

For this reason, the documentary expresses no alliance or solidarity with the other churches involved in lawsuits against California, most of them Pentecostal, many with women in leadership roles. It matters not that they share a political agenda. Harvest Rock Church in nearby Pasadena is co-pastored by Ché Ahn (along with his wife Sue), a prominent member of the New Apostolic Reformation movement, who spoke at one of the “Stop the Steal” rallies shortly before the January 6 storming of the Capitol. You would never know from the film that Harvest Rock was one of the principal churches that sued California in the summer of 2020.

South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista—which was involved in two Supreme Court decisions, one before Justice Barrett joined the Court and the other after—is particularly notable because they were represented by the same law firm as Grace Community Church: the Thomas More Society, a conservative Roman Catholic public interest firm, showing that they are not above ecumenical alliances when it supports their cause. Even though South Bay’s decision was the one that paved the way for Grace’s final settlement, and despite sharing legal representation, The Essential Church acts as if they were nearly nonexistent, or of very little importance.

The documentary instead features Coates and Stephens because they share the same theological views as MacArthur: Coates earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees from MacArthur’s The Master’s Seminary, while Stephens is currently working on his doctoral degree at Master’s. Solidarity presupposes doctrinal uniformity.

In this respect, the film is a throwback to 1920s Scopes Trial–era fundamentalism, when believing in the right doctrine was what mattered. But the prominent role of the Thomas More Society in the documentary is a sign that we are very much in the 2020s.

The Thomas More Society gained notoriety later in 2020 for its role in filing lawsuits in several states challenging the presidential election results. Jenna Ellis, a special counsel for the Thomas More Society, not only represented MacArthur’s church but subsequently served as the senior legal adviser for Trump’s effort to overturn the election. The Essential Church was released in theaters on July 28, 2023. On August 14, Ellis and 18 other people were indicted by a Fulton County, Georgia grand jury, and on August 23 Ellis turned herself in at the Fulton County jail.

Ellis is a major presence in the film and is one of the main talking heads regarding the legal details of the Grace Church case, but her connection to Trump casts the rest of the documentary in a different light. The Essential Church studiously avoids references to January 6, but the links are impossible to ignore.

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Those profiled in the documentary appeal to “King Jesus” as the source and defender of their position. Heard against the backdrop of Scottish Covenanters’ opposition to the English crown, the language of “Christ as King” intentionally implies the illegitimacy of foreign power. Viewers are encouraged to draw the implications concerning state and federal governments in the United States. It becomes clear that while people within the documentary attempt to use the phrase to connote a sense that their faith is pure and apolitical, it is instead woven into the politics of the past and present. King Jesus here stands in opposition to CDC guidelines, as well as to the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Another example of the film’s connection to today’s right-wing politics is found in the documentary’s discussion of public health. When profiling Deena Hinshaw, who served as Chief Medical Officer of Health for the province of Alberta, Canada, the film insinuates that her training in public health means that she is not a real medical expert. The filmmakers interview Baucham, the evangelical author and missionary, who dismisses public health as a “neo-Marxist” field of study, along with women’s studies, Black studies, queer studies, and cultural studies—all of which are seen as part of a cultural (and spiritual) revolution waged by the forces of evil. Baucham is well known for his attacks on critical race theory in his book, Fault Lines. He was the featured speaker at a Heritage Foundation event in 2021 on the topic. While he may not be interested in partnering with those outside of his narrow Christian circle, Baucham’s rhetoric is strikingly similar to that of Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist who has targeted university leaders over their antiracist policies.

The Essential Church casts a group of sectarian Calvinists as warriors in a timeless spiritual battle against government, secularism, and Satan. In the film, MacArthur declares, “The church has become the main enemy of the government.” It’s an odd story at best, given that their victory is ultimately achieved by the same government institutions they claim are being used by the Antichrist. The narrative is riddled with contradictions and logical gaps.

Like any piece of propaganda, the documentarians’ message is based more on affect than reason. The film’s affect is one of conspiracist anxiety: the government is a Marxist cabal used by the Antichrist to persecute the truly faithful. The takeaway is that Christians must be prepared to resist the government—even to die trying. The film devotes several minutes to the Killing Time, when the Scottish Covenanters were executed for their rebellion. The filmmakers draw an explicit connection to the arrest of Pastors Coates and Stephens, comparing them not only to the Covenanters but also to John Bunyan, the persecuted Protestant writer who was arrested for preaching outside of a church in seventeenth-century England.

The film’s ultimate goal, and one that represents a broader trend within white American evangelicalism, is merely to confirm what its viewers likely already believe: if they feel “persecuted” for any reason, which now includes having to wear a mask, then they are authorized by God to resist.

The film closes by reminding viewers that what U.S. state and federal governments did during Covid amounted to a “battle against God.” It is a call to discern Satan’s shifting tactics within the state and to make a stand in public opposition.

In the case of these three churches, that meant attending Sunday worship against government orders. But on January 6, 2021, some took that lesson to mean storming the United States Capitol.

We do not know exactly what King Jesus’ vigilant defenders might see next, but it is clear that they are looking.

David Congdon is Senior Editor at the University Press of Kansas. He is the author most recently of Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture (Cambridge, 2024).

Jason Bruner is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He is author of Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There is a Global War against Their Faith (Rutgers, 2021) and co-editor of Global Visions of Violence: Agency and Persecution in World Christianity (Rutgers, 2022).

The post Evangelicals Make Themselves Essential to the Next Insurrection appeared first on The Revealer.

(Arkansas state capitol building. Image source: The Guardian)

What does it mean when a state plans to memorialize the unborn? For over half a century, anti-abortion activists have inserted their restrictive theology into the public square, social policy, and the intimate spaces of our reproductive lives. In so doing, these devout activists have attempted to control not just our bodies and our healthcare, but the stories we tell about them. Fetal imagery has been essential to this religious and political undertaking.

In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, and especially in states with abortion bans, the public culture of the anti-abortion movement is taking on new state-sponsored forms. As much is apparent in Arkansas, where the legislature recently approved plans for a memorial to “unborn children” terminated “during the era of Roe v Wade.” In the past, anti-abortion legislators have used fetal burial laws to compel health care providers and pregnant people to cremate or bury fetal remains rather than treating this tissue as medical waste. Critics have argued, often in court, that such funerary laws are meant to impose a religious viewpoint about fetal life and mandate a mourning ritual for aborted or miscarried “babies.” So too with Arkansas’ state-sponsored monument to the unborn, the first of its kind to be commissioned after Dobbs. The cenotaph, however, does more than magnify and legitimize the anti-abortion movement’s demand that we view abortion as a loss of human life. It also proclaims that “the natural state” is a Christian dominion.

The anti-abortion movement has long created a rich material culture in service of its doctrine that the fetus is a child and abortion is murder. Opponents of abortion unceasingly and graphically convey this belief in prefabricated packets for Sanctity of Life Sundays, white crosses on church lawns, signs carried by street preachers outside abortion clinics, billboards on the side of major thoroughfares, and countless other forms of ephemera. Through these fetal fetishes, anti-abortion activists invite us to join them in grieving the loss of human life and stopping an “abortion holocaust.” The movement’s dream was to see Roe v Wade overturned. Until then, proselytization was the name of the game.

But in Arkansas, where an abortion ban went into effect within hours of the Dobb’s ruling, “pro-life” partisans are no longer an oppositional force and no longer need only to proselytize. Now, they are stewards and defenders of a restrictive abortion law. The planned monument–an expression of “pro-life” triumphalism–is nothing less than an attempt to legitimize this new and restrictive reproductive regime. Memorials, after all, are powerful public statements. They convey an “official” story about our bodies, our selves, and our pasts even as they (literally!) concretize a select set of values for future generations. In the plans for a state-sponsored abortion memorial, we see an aspiration for an enduring Christian dominion over reproduction.

(One of the proposals for the memorial to the “unborn.” Image source: Arkansas Advocate)

The content and placement of this abortion memorial signal Arkansas’ enshrinement of a white Christian nationalist worldview. The monument will be located at Arkansas’ state capitol and will likely sit near a controversial statue of the Ten Commandments, and a Confederate War Memorial. Despite several design proposals that featured images of unborn bodies, there will be no graphic fetal iconography at the memorial. The current plans for the monument include a living wall of greenery that is intended, in the words of its designer, to “honor God, the Creator & the unborn.” It will also feature a plaque with scripture (Psalm 145:8, NAB) and a quote derived from Amendment 68 of the Arkansas Constitution, stating that it is “the policy of Arkansas to protect every unborn child from the moment of conception until birth.” The absence of fetal bodies–heretofore the centerpiece of the anti-abortion movement–is supplemented with religious text, which states, in effect, that there is no daylight between the beliefs of the anti-abortion movement and state policy.

As evidenced by the memorial, anti-abortion adherents proclaim that fetuses terminated during the Roe era were murdered children, and that the era of legal and accessible abortion is a thing of the past. But that explanation is far too tame. The monument aims to make concrete what the new abortion restrictions assume: that abortion is an atrocity of a recently bygone era that must never return. Arkansas State Representative Cindy Crawford summarized the monument’s mission in the following way: “We have to remember abortion in Arkansas so it won’t come back.”

Predictably, this monument, which emphasizes the unborn and not the bodies that carry them, also erases women, their reproductive histories, their urgent social and medical needs, their dreams, and their diminishing ability to freely author their reproductive futures in Arkansas.

The monument also excludes the many citizens who hold other faiths and believe that reproductive choice is sacred. It is not hard to see how the monument’s very location, its placement at the capitol, and its incorporation of scripture, all trumpet a conservative Evangelical vision. As such, literary scholar Courtney R. Baker’s insight into Confederate monuments holds true for the planned abortion memorial: “The dominant message does just that: it dominates. It does not necessarily convince.” Like the Confederate memorial it will neighbor, the memorial to the unborn is ultimately meant to ossify a slanted story about the past and to limit the possibilities of reproductive freedom in the future.

But this attempt to foreclose reproductive freedoms and erase the voices of dissenters is just that, an attempt. Even as the state of Arkansas is demanding that its citizens grieve the fetuses that were legally terminated during the Roe era, a referendum drive is underway to enshrine reproductive rights into Arkansas’ constitution. If it passes, the ballot initiative will prevent the state from being able to “prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion services within 18 weeks of fertilization.” It will also allow abortions to protect the health and life of the mother or in cases of incest, rape, or fatal fetal anomalies. In the words of one of the referendum organizers, “we are one step closer to restoring the freedom that was taken from individuals when Roe v. Wade was overturned.”

What does it mean then, that Arkansas’ Republican-dominated legislature plans to memorialize the unborn? Tombs, scholar Benedict Anderson once observed, are integral to nation-building projects. “No more arresting emblems” exist, he asserts, than such edifices, which are, “saturated with ghostly national imaginings.” Such shrines, he notes, invite citizens to sentimentally identify with cultural projects far larger than themselves. In Arkansas, the planned memorial to the “unborn” is meant to entomb abortion rights and raise the flag of Christian nationalism. But that burial is premature. The future of reproductive freedom is still uncertain. It remains unclear what the mourning after Dobbs will look like and what may yet emerge from the rubble of Roe.

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 The Mourning After appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Welcome to our first issue of 2024! We are excited to share some new things coming your way. Starting with this issue, we are welcoming a new columnist to The Revealer, Gillian Frank, whose column “More than Missionary” will explore issues of sexuality, gender, religion, and reproductive rights. Gillian has previously written for The Revealer on transgender youth and pro-choice clergy, and we are excited for the insights this column will spotlight about the interplay of religion, gender, and sexuality at a crucial time in the country’s history.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

While we will continue to publish articles and podcast episodes that cover a diverse range of topics, this year we are paying special attention to conservative religion and politics in light of the 2024 U.S. election. To that end, the Revealer podcast is starting the year with a three-part series on conservative Christianity and American politics. The series will explore the ex-evangelical movement and its insights about white evangelicals’ devotion to Trump, the role of contemporary Christian music and connections between conservative Christian pop culture and U.S. politics, and the place of LGBTQ Republicans alongside anti-queer religious groups within the party.

Our February issue, and our exploration of conservative religion and politics, opens with the first installment of our new “More than Missionary” column with Gillian Frank’s “The Mourning After,” where he explores a memorial the Arkansas government is erecting at the state capitol for aborted “children,” and what this new monument, placed next to a controversial statue of the Ten Commandments, reveals about today’s Christian nationalist movement. Next, in “Evangelicals Make Themselves Essential to the Next Insurrection,” David Congdon and Jason Bruner explore why white evangelicals are primed to resist government authority, from Covid-19 restrictions to accepting election results. After that, in “Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage,” Liz Charlotte Grant investigates why Elliot, the popular evangelical promoter of female submission, stayed with a controlling husband and how her teachings harmed countless evangelical women. Then, in “An Evangelical Culture of Child Discipline,” an excerpt from The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, Sarah McCammon spotlights parenting methods within evangelical communities that focus on physically punishing children and what various ex-evangelicals report that discipline did to them spiritually and emotionally. 

Our February issue is not only focused on conservative religion and politics; we are also featuring two articles that explore more playful sides of religion in popular culture. In “Monk Mode,” Catherine L. Newell questions why so many people are drawn to apps that promise to make them more productive and less distracted by instilling them with the qualities of monks, and what this monk marketing reveals about our lives under capitalism. And, in “My Year of Magical Baby Making,” Corey Wozniak investigates the popular “Babydust Method,” a series of techniques purported to ensure a future child’s biological sex, and compares these strategies to religious practices both ancient and modern.

The February issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Ex-Evangelicals and U.S. Politics.” Sarah McCammon joins us to discuss why so many people are leaving white evangelical Christianity and how that exodus is influencing the broader culture. We discuss ex-evangelicals’ insights about why most white evangelicals remain loyal to Trump, why so many evangelicals are primed to accept “alternative facts,” and what all of this portends about the 2024 U.S. presidential election. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As 2024 commences, The Revealer is committed to paying close attention to the influence of Christian nationalism and the prevalence of white Christian dominance throughout the country, a situation that long pre-dates the Trump presidency. And even as we focus on covering and analyzing conservative religious and political movements, we also remain committed to bringing you articles and podcast episodes about a wide spectrum of topics on religion around the world. We will provide you with both robust content about religion, in its many forms, and do our part to educate the public about the legitimate threat of Christian fascism in America. We can do both and we will do both.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

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