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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Vodou, Gender Variance, and Black Politics.”

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(Manbo Vante’m Pa Fyem smiles as she participates in a Vodou ceremony. Image source: Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha)

The following excerpt comes from Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States by Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha. Copyright © 2023 by Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha and used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press.

The excerpt addresses the Vodou warrior goddess Ezili Dantò, the Vodou priestess Manbo Maude, and Maude’s child Vante’m Pa Fyem.

*** 

Ezili Dantò chose Vante’m Pa Fyem. When Manbo Maude became pregnant with her, she was already overwhelmed with the effort of raising two other children. The strain on her finances was so great she considered seeking an abortion to spare herself and her family the burden. That same night, as though summoned by Manbo Maude’s instinct to terminate the pregnancy, Dantò came to her nan dòmi. The spirit told her to keep the baby. Manbo Maude expressed her worries: she was exhausted, and another baby would further drain her depleted resources. Dantò was insistent. The child belongs to her, the deity said; the child was special. You need to keep her. I will provide for you. Manbo Maude was never one to refuse the will of the spirits, not when they reached out so purposefully. If Dantò’s words were true, her child was favored by the divine. Since that night, Manbo Maude says she never again suffered dire financial difficulties. Dantò kept her word.

Ezili Dantò’s history in Vodou is closely tied to the Haitian Revolution. Stories tell of a gruesome mutilation performed to ensure she would keep confidences: her tongue was cut out of her mouth, either by Black people who wanted to ensure she would never share the secrets of revolutionaries with enemies or by White people who wanted to hobble the massive rebellion. Centuries after the Revolution’s end, she is still incapable of speaking: her recognizable k kk kkkk kkkk sounds are only decipherable by practitioners through the aid of translators who follow her around the ceremony. In legend, Dantò has a cherished daughter named Anais who acts as her mouthpiece to the world, speaking the words her mother can no longer articulate. In ceremonies, the practitioners who keep close to Dantò, conveying her messages, play the role of her divine daughter. The story of a celestial daughter speaking for her mother resonates in the earthly realm of Manbo Maude’s temples, where Vante’m Pa Fyem often communicates Manbo Maude’s words and needs to others. Vante’m Pa Fyem frequently acts as one of the translators when Manbo Maude and others are mounted by Dantò, verbalizing whatever messages the deity is miming toward practitioners and audience members. She becomes Dantò’s mouthpiece.

Vodou en Vogue is my own attempt at translation—not of the words of a singular deity or Manbo but of the intricacies of the public ceremonies I witnessed and the stories I was told. Concluding with a neat statement seems ill-fitting for a book filled with stories about a Black woman as innovative as Manbo Maude and spirits as varied and dynamic as the Vodou pantheon. They are too lively to be captured fully within the confines of any conclusion. Instead, I offer a few dènye panse, Haitian Kreyòl for “last thoughts,” that articulate not only the knowledge my work has produced but also a sense of the inescapable shifts within Vodou itself. Vodou changes over time, just as all religions do; its practitioners and rituals cannot be held in stasis. Traditions are passed down through spiritual lineages, and with each successive transition they shift, accommodating new places, people, and experiences. Thus, these last thoughts cannot represent a definitive end for Manbo Maude or her communities, just a snapshot of where they are in a particular moment and the foreshadows of where they might go from here.

Throughout Vodou en Vogue, I emphasize the interplay between the spirits, practitioners, and audience, offering a new interpretation of the relationality within African Diasporic religions through the concept of spiritual vogue. It pulls together multiple influences—materiality, religion, race, queerness, sensation, and performance—that are arguably individually inherent to African Diasporic ceremonies yet together offer fascinating insights into the relationship between the people and spirits that bring life and meaning to religion. I make plain that the fashion showcased during Vodou ceremonies is indicative of an interactive process, the meaning of which is only evident through considering the practitioners, spirits, and audience as dependent on one another for successful ritual work. Material culture strengthens the beliefs of devotees and facilitates communication with the gods, a cyclical exchange that satisfies the spirits and guides practitioners. In addition to revealing the negotiations between deities and their devotees, spiritual vogue also underscores the practicalities of ceremonies, the friction caused by the intersection of faith and everyday social, economic, and cultural mores. Vodou ceremonies are animated by performance rituals that, through the lens of fashion, reveal fissures within the religious community, generating complex portraits of gendered possession practices, sexual intimacy with the divine, faith labor, and racial, sexual, and gender identities.

The concept of spiritual vogue, as well as the entirety of Vodou en Vogue, is rooted in the notion that religious fashion cannot be dismissed as a mere manifestation of conspicuous consumption. A simplistic dismissal of the material culture in Vodou and other African and African Diasporic religions misses vast cosmological traditions anchored in the everyday practices of lived religions and would ignore crucial conduits to the gods. The anecdotes, interviews, and theories I explore throughout this book clearly show the centrality of transnational material culture to Black practitioners’ ability to forge intimate and spiritually meaningful connections with the divine and with one another.

At the beginning of my research, that nexus between performance and fashion, alongside the valuable insights drawn from queer Black and Brown people in Ballroom culture, brought me to spiritual vogue. The communal systems shaping expressions of race, sexuality, and gender in Ballroom also appear within the structure of Vodou ceremonies, where performance rituals convey normative beliefs around gender, sexuality, and sex while simultaneously creating ruptures in those same perceptions. Spiritual vogue is not dependent on public-facing ceremonies—those are simply the religious events I had access to as a non-initiated researcher. The lack of insider access, far from restricting my work, narrowed my focus to the core intricacies of ceremonial spaces, directing my attention to the crucial connection between practitioners, spirits, and the audience. Instead of chasing the secrets of the initiated, I sought the overlooked knowledge on display in crowded temples, full of practitioners ready to speak with the spirits and one another. The triangulation of practitioners, spirits, and the audience is also applicable to more private affairs that still involve performance rituals carried out in front of witnesses within a religious community: certainly, the concept expands beyond Vodou into other African and African Diasporic religions such as Ifá, Candomblé, and Santería. At its center, the concept describes the ritualized performance of identity and piety in front of an audience, an idea that is expansive enough to elucidate the role of sensation and material culture in many religious traditions beyond Haitian Vodou.

(Manbo Maude. Image source: IMDB)

For more than a decade I attended Vodou ceremonies, in and outside Manbo Maude’s homes, building relationships with devotees and learning the purpose and practices of performance rituals. Focusing on Manbo Maude and her temples led me to the idea that the gods speak to their devotees through avenues they can understand, making room for the talents practitioners can then incorporate into their religious practices. Manbo Maude’s devotion shows in every seam, trim, and ruffle she dons during ceremonies. Her garments are evidence of her ability to communicate with the divine and a material tool through which she facilitates continued connection to the spirits for herself and other practitioners. The role of fashion in her religious practices is so foundational she has built it into the structure of her ceremonies, introducing stops and starts to showcase spiritually inspired outfits. My observations, theories, and conclusions are grounded within the communities that were generous enough to let me step into their temples.

Throughout Vodou en Vogue, I think largely within Black participants’ own words and descriptions, allowing my work to follow wherever their practices and stories led. Inevitably, the time I spent in Manbo Maude’s temples led me, again and again, to her youngest daughter Vante’m Pa Fyem. Of Manbo Maude’s three children, all of whom are initiated, Vante’m Pa Fyem is the most integrated into the workings of the temples. Her spiritual authority and her wealth of knowledge are rooted in her connection to Manbo Maude, a relationship that is often reinforced during ceremonies through their intentionally similar outfits. Tellingly, these clothes are similar, not identical. In part, this is a result of Manbo Maude’s more powerful position within the temples. Yet it also reflects the fact that Vante’m Pa Fyem is in the process of cultivating her own opinions on Vodou, fashion, religious ritual, and community that are influenced not only by her mother’s lifelong tutelage but also by her personal experiences as a young woman in the Haitian Dyaspora. She is an increasingly knowledgeable Manbo in her own right, learning from her mother while developing her personal understanding of how to serve the spirits. Her burgeoning opinions, potentially deviating from Manbo Maude’s, are indicative of Vodou’s essential capacity to change over time.

Vante’m Pa Fyem’s ability to innovate reflects the core characteristic that drew me to Manbo Maude’s temples at the start of my research. Manbo Maude’s homes caught my attention and held it, compelled by the distinctive use of fashion and how those expressions of material culture underline truths about African Diasporic religious practices and spiritual connection far beyond the thresholds of the temples in Jacmel and Mattapan. Manbo Maude, as individual as she and her communities are in their particulars, is indicative of concepts, principles, and trends that are occurring nearly everywhere Vodou is practiced. Sustaining both her temples for more than twenty years has given performance rituals the time to grow and evolve, reflecting changes within her life, her relationship with the divine, and the many people who seek meaning through her ceremonies. Spiritual garments are the physical manifestation of those changes, archiving Manbo Maude’s shifting perceptions on the proper way to serve the lwa: they are also one of the primary elements that have kept her temples alive for two decades. Vante’m Pa Fyem is also key to their survival and will be even more so in the future.

Manbo Maude chose Vante’m Pa Fyem to inherit her temples, yet the knowledge she is transferring to her daughter is not reserved solely for her biological descendants. All her ti feỳ, the initiates and practitioners who seek her guidance, are part of her legacy, perpetuating the traditions she passed down from her own spiritual mother, to whom Manbo Maude was not biologically related. Every time she designs a spiritual garment and dresses up with her practitioners in front of an audience, she both offers her beliefs about how to serve the spirits and facilitates communication with them. Manbo Maude preserves and articulates the foundations of Vodou through her religious practices while also innovating by embracing her creativity and the will of the spirits, crafting material items in conversation with the divine. Visual and material culture—the physical manifestations of the traditions being passed from one generation of practitioners to another—is integral to the propagation of religious belief. Vante’m Pa Fyem, in addition to playing a key role in the operation of Manbo Maude’s temples, is representative of the broader transference of knowledge, continuing her mother’s legacy. The fashion they share is one manifestation of their connection and is an essential part of how Manbo Maude is attempting to construct her legacy. That legacy has consequences not only for Vante’m Pa Fyem’s future but also for the people in Jacmel who rely on the funds generated by spiritual work, the Black practitioners and audience members searching for a genuine link to their African or Haitian heritage, and for the practice of Vodou. The spiritual children Manbo Maude trains may one day come to develop their own performance rituals, creating new traditions that bear the mark of her influence.

Vodou’s history as an oral tradition can give rise to the erroneous impression that it is a religion without structure, especially when it is simplified within binaries between written and oral customs. Comparing Vodou to the formally institutionalized hierarchy of the Catholic Church, for instance, distracts from the fact that the faith has rules, some of which are described in this book. Even when rituals and gods vary across region in Haiti, the same underlying standards and concepts hold everywhere, proving both the resilience and the organizing principles of the traditions disseminated through generations. At the same time, Vodou changes and adapts to the needs of its practitioners. The passing along of knowledge inevitably leads to change. Manbo Maude, for example, learned to perform rituals and serve the spirits from her spiritual mother, while also developing her personal ideas about the importance of style within those traditions. Her spiritual mother provided her with the structure of her religion, but once she was imbued with spiritual authority, she experimented, building her capacity to communicate with the divine on her own terms. Vante’m Pa Fyem and Manbo Maude’s other ti feỳ are set to trek that same path.

Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Miami.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 35 of the Revealer podcast: “Vodou, Gender Variance, and Black Politics Today.”

The post Vodou Fashion and Faith appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Awakening Music)

A groundbreaking music video opens with a shot of a spacious, tastefully decorated living room. Sunlight streams through the windows, enveloping the white furniture and modernist décor with an ethereal quality. A wavy-haired, bespectacled, handsome man – wearing stylish jeans and a t-shirt – walks across the room. He is inspecting a roll of film. The walls of the living room are filled with pictures of natural landscapes, urban architecture, and children – the young man is a photographer. Soft and slow music plays in the background – light hand-drums and the ooh-ing of male vocal harmonies. The opening sequence cuts to a close-up of the young man, singing to the camera. “We once had a teacher [who] changed the world for the better,” he begins, with gentle, melismatic vocals. But we’ve “wronged ourselves” and “strayed” from his teachings to make us “better creatures.” The teacher in the pop star’s lyrics is the Prophet Muhammad.

The song, “Al-Mu’allim” (The Teacher), is the title track from the debut album by the British Muslim singer Sami Yusuf, released in 2003. As opposed to other pop hits, it is not a ballad about hot-blooded heterosexual romance, but a yearning for the Prophet Muhammad. In the music video, only two women get airtime – the smiling, hijab-wearing mother whose hand Yusuf kisses reverentially before leaving the house, and a young girl in a group of children he plays with at the mosque after he performs his prayers. The video contains no dancing – not even the rhythmic swaying one might expect in a conventional pop video. Instead, the visuals are dominated by slow, lingering shots of Yusuf performing everyday good deeds like helping a blind man cross the road.

This portrayal of Islamic ideals via an attractive male, Muslim, musical messenger did not emerge in an ideological vacuum. Yusuf’s debut album was released in July 2003, three months after the illegal U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as part of its War on Terror. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Western media and political discourse were saturated with debates about whether Islam was inherently a violent religion, often accompanied by images of bearded Muslim male terrorists.

By contrast, Yusuf projected an image of tender, pious Muslim masculinity that comfortably navigated secular and religious settings. He represented Muslim men as agents of creativity and goodness, inspired directly by the teachings of their faith. His album and music videos were primarily marketed to Muslim audiences, initially in the Middle East and then globally. Within three years, he was dubbed “Islam’s biggest rock star” by TIME, “the biggest star in the Middle East” by The Guardian and the “King of Islamic Pop” by Al Jazeera.

The emergence of this musical genre and its effects on contemporary Islam are the focus of The Awakening of Islamic Pop Music by Jonas Otterbeck, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London. Otterbeck explores the rise of Islamic pop by telling the story of Awakening, the company that first signed Yusuf and subsequently other Muslim pop hitmakers. Otterbeck’s main argument is that Awakening was and remains a major player in “altering the very formulations of Islamic thought” through “popular culture and the creative arts.” Since Awakening has, to date, signed only male performers, Otterbeck argues that the style and substance of artists like Yusuf can be understood as carefully curated expressions of “ethical masculinity.” This concept refers to the expectation that artists will produce content that conforms with traditional Islamic teachings and project a “proper” Islamic image in their onstage personas and everyday interactions. More examples can be found in other Awakening artists such as the Lebanese-Swedish Maher Zain, the Egyptian-American Raef, the Turkish-Macedonian Mesut Kurtis, the Kuwaiti Humood AlKhuder, and the Libyan Ali Magrebi.

Awakening started in 2000 as a publishing house, with a biography of the Prophet Muhammad as its first project. It was founded in London by friends Sharif Banna and Wali-ur Rahman, later joined by Bara Kherigi and Wassim Malak. They were Sunni Muslim young men with a deep interest – and a couple of them with formal qualifications – in Islamic Studies. All were united by a common purpose to improve the quality of Islamic media products by publishing high-quality Islamic books. In 2003, Awakening initiated plans for its first music project and Kherigi began talking to his childhood friend – the Tehran-born Londoner Sami Yusuf.

The collaboration initially had all the intimacy of a start-up amongst friends. Yusuf’s album was recorded in a tiny studio in Manchester to which he had access through his father. Kherigi told Otterbeck that, back then, he “would be writing lyrics downstairs” while Yusuf was “recording upstairs.” The Awakening founders’ belief in Yusuf’s potential was so steadfast that to finance the video for “Al-Mu’allim,” they put in their own money, sold their possessions (including their cars), and borrowed the rest.

Everything paid off. Awakening convinced the Egyptian satellite music channel Melody Hits to air the video and Yusuf became an overnight superstar. While Yusuf would eventually have a public falling out with Awakening, the label kept expanding and catalyzed the growth of Islamic pop as a new musical genre.

Otterbeck’s own interest in Islamic pop was born out of analytical choice and chance. He is Swedish, and spent a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a tour guide in Egypt. When he started his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies in 1992, he initially focused on Islamic books and pamphlets. Then in 2008, at a conference in the Netherlands, he became curious about “a couple of hijab-wearing, teenage girls who tried out the screaming fan-girl role in an otherwise completely quiet, seated audience” during a musical performance. The audience gave them a collective death stare, and the girls slinked out of the auditorium in giggles.

The gig was by Hamza Robertson, an English convert to Islam whose first album, Something About Life, was released by Awakening in 2007. “Much to my surprise at the time,” Otterbeck writes, “the development of new devout musical expressions informed by Islam was taking place under my nose in Europe.”

Although much of Otterbeck’s book focuses on Muslim pop and consumer culture trends in Europe, he does not ignore interconnected developments elsewhere. Importantly, he acknowledges the phenomenon of Raihan, “the first Islamic boyband” from Malaysia, which achieved national stardom in the late 1990s and went on to dominate the global Islamic pop scene. In fact, Awakening’s early promotional strategy for Sami Yusuf included landing him a star-making gig as Raihan’s opening act when they toured the U.K. in the summer of 2003.

***

It might now come as a surprise that, according to many interpretations of Islam, music, musical instruments, and singing are strictly forbidden (haram). Yet the scope of this ruling remains inconclusive. Some Islamic scholars contend that drums are permissible but not wind or string instruments and that only female voices are taboo, which explains Awakening’s focus on signing only male artists so far. According to Otterbeck, the Islamic scholars whom Awakening consulted shifted the focus of permissibility from the use of instruments and singing to the underlying moral purpose of the music. To them, only “licentious music” – which encouraged free mixing of the sexes, dancing, and booze – was blameworthy, while music that facilitated religious devotion was praiseworthy.

Otterbeck’s book was personally a joy to read and to reflect on, especially since I was also part of the Malaysian pop music and theater scene during the period he discusses. I released my debut album Dilanda Cinta (Lovestruck) in 2005 and won the Best Male Vocal in an Album award the following year at the 13^th Music Industry Awards, the Malaysian equivalent of the Grammies. At the same time, I was cutting my teeth in human rights and social justice movements, including a brief stint as the executive director of the Malaysian section of Amnesty International. Through these roles, I witnessed and often responded to the many debates and controversies about politicized interpretations and impositions of Islamic morals in Malaysia, including on popular music. This is significant since, as Otterbeck notes, the country has been a major center of Islamic pop music.

In 2003, the same year Sami Yusuf signed his deal with Awakening (and I got signed to mine), another phenomenon took Malaysia by storm – the reality television competition Akademi Fantasia (AF). Based on the Mexican show La Academia, the program combined the competitive element of American Idol and the fly-on-the-wall, behind-the-scenes aspects of Big Brother. While American Idol was also popular in Malaysia at this time, cultural politics and demographic factors meant that it appealed to a smaller, English-speaking audience of diverse ethnicities. The Malay-language AF gained a much bigger fan base that was predominantly ethnic Malay.

(Akademi Fantasia album. Image source: Am CollectionZ on Facebook)

This language divide did not only map onto an ethnic division – it had religious dimensions, too. According to Malaysia’s Federal Constitution, a Malay is “a person who professes the religion of Islam, habitually speaks the Malay language, [and] conforms to Malay custom” (Article 160). The Constitution also enshrines a “special position” for Malays (Article 153) and establishes that “Islam is the religion of the Federation,” albeit “other religions can also be practiced safely and peacefully in any part of the Federation” (Article 3).

This legal fusion of Malay ethnicity and Islam is a relic of colonial British divide-and-rule policies and has had far-reaching consequences. Most significantly, several major political parties are organized solely along racial or religious lines, including the United Malays National Organization, the Malaysian Chinese Association, the Malaysian Indian Congress, and the Malaysian Islamic Party. On an interpersonal level, this has overtly politicized everyday life for Malaysia’s hugely diverse population through race or religion, or both.

This can most clearly be seen in the legal sphere; the country’s laws encompass secular provisions for all Malaysians but there are also Islamic laws that apply only to Muslims. The Islamic legal system – another legacy of British colonialism – includes enactments that mean, for example, adult Muslim men can be punished for not attending congregational Friday prayers. Drinking alcohol is a crime for Muslims – punishable by a fine, incarceration, or whipping – but not for non-Muslims. Khalwat – defined as “suspicious proximity” between unmarried straight Muslim couples – is also a crime. These regulations are enforced by Islamic moral police who have the power to arrest. It is almost routine now for them to barge into cheap hotels to detain unmarried Muslim couples sharing a room together, especially on Valentine’s Day.

Within this context, the law allows concerts and other music gigs to take place, but with several constraints on Muslim performers and audiences. For example, female performers – including non-Muslims – must not show any skin between shoulders and knees, especially cleavage. Because of this, top artists who have refused to comply with these regulations, such as Beyoncé, are banned from performing in the country. Chart hits are also routinely censored, including Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” because of its queer-friendly message. At the same time, Malaysia projects itself as a “moderate” or “model” Muslim nation-state and is a U.S. ally.

Against this cultural backdrop, the initial Akademi Fantasia seasons were wildly popular and defined by anxiety about proper representations of Islamic piety within the fresh format of reality TV. The first season was particularly controversial when some contestants started hugging those who were not of the same gender during the elimination episodes, raising the specter of “suspicious proximity.” Even the deputy prime minister (and now disgraced former premier) Najib Razak put in his two cents and said, “No hugging please, we are Muslims.” The show’s producers immediately clamped down on this, a ban that applied throughout future seasons.

The third season, AF3, which aired in 2005, became a gamechanger. The show’s surge in popularity could be attributed mostly to Mawi, the season’s eventual winner. Mawi (full name Asmawi Ani) was a hit amongst viewers because of his humble background from a Malay village, and for his conservative Islamic piety. It did not matter that Mawi was not as vocally accomplished as some of the other contestants, or even that he once flubbed his lyrics. These flaws only elevated his appeal.

There was no stopping the AF juggernaut and the Tsumawi (a fan-created portmanteau of “tsunami” and “Mawi”). His popularity was described in almost mystical terms in the Malay-language press, who waxed lyrical about his irresistible “aura.”

After winning AF3, Mawi went on to straddle the non-Islamic and Islamic Malay pop scene. At the height of his popularity, he collaborated with Raihan to produce several Islamic pop hits in Malay. He embodied a variation of ethical masculinity, appealing to his fans as a devout, rural Malay boy-next-door who could never have expected to become an overnight sensation. This narrative was captured in his songs and public image, and was reinforced in Malay-language gossip columns.

This version of ethical masculinity shaped, and was shaped by, a social context steeped in racial and religious politics and intensifying state-sanctioned moral policing. In February 2005, three months before AF3 went to air, Islamic religious enforcers courted controversy when they raided a top nightclub in Kuala Lumpur. More than 100 young Muslims were detained, and the women detainees complained that they were subjected to sexual harassment by the moral police. Eyewitnesses also reported violent behavior by the morality enforcers towards non-Muslim patrons. The heavy-handedness of these Islamic anti-vice agents was not new, but they usually only targeted Muslims from less privileged backgrounds. Yet by September that year, the state of Kelantan, governed by the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) – infamous for its lobbying to ban concerts – invited Mawi to perform at an official gig. While this stance was lambasted by PAS’s critics as hypocritical, it also echoed Awakening’s distinction between “licentious” and morally permissible music.

This is but one of several contradictions related to Islam that bookended Mawi mania in Malaysia. Several more controversies and moral panics have escalated since. The appeal of Mawi’s pious masculinity was part of a growing political trend to entrench a more conservative, assertive version of Islam in Malaysia. The fusion of racial and religious politics in Malaysia meant that his persona was qualitatively different from the Awakening artists’ ethical masculinity, which provided an idiom to resist the securitization of Islam in the West. Intentionally or not, Mawi’s down-to-earth Malay charm and Islamic piety became the softer face of a more aggressive and Islamically infused Malay nationalism.

Yet the politicized moral backdrop for Mawi’s stardom and the securitized context for the popularity of Awakening artists in the West are not distinct phenomena. They share a sense, as Otterbeck observes, that Islamic pop music empowers Muslims in diverse contexts to navigate the secular and religious aspects of their lives more confidently and less apologetically. At the same time, they are different variants of the genre’s cultivation of “ethical masculinity,” which can become a cultural resource to resist anti-Muslim agendas in some situations and to mask repressive interpretations of Islam in others. It is therefore more useful to regard them as tributaries within the larger flow of Islamic pop music.

Otterbeck is right to argue that Islamic pop music has had a profound influence on the development of contemporary expressions of Islam. I would add that this influence has different repercussions depending on each political context. Other cultural trends are also part of this development, including modest fashion, literature, television, and theater. An understanding of contemporary Islam is thus incomplete without a deeper look at how popular culture and the creative arts are transforming it from within.

Shanon Shah is the author of The Making of a Gay Muslim: Religion, Sexuality and Identity in Malaysia and Britain. He is Tutor in Islam at the University of London’s Divinity Programme, and a researcher at the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (Inform), based at King’s College London.

The post Awakening Islam through Pop Music appeared first on The Revealer.

(Ye with hands raised. Image source: Dimitrios Kambouris for Getty Images)

“I don’t hate Jewish people,” singer and rapper Ye declared last October. Far right conservative activist David Horowitz latched onto that statement as proof that Ye was not antisemitic. Then Ye directly praised Hitler, and even the David Horowitzes of the world mostly abandoned him.

Ye’s antisemitism is neither subtle nor in contention. But his somewhat contradictory statements raise questions about what antisemitism is and how it functions. Ye is probably to some degree lying, to himself and to others, when he declares “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.” But it’s also worth taking him seriously when he says he doesn’t feel like he hates Jews, even as he rants about Jewish influence in the media and praises the architect of Jewish genocide.

Antisemitism is often defined, or thought of, as hatred of Jewish people. But that can be misleading. Prejudice, discrimination, and even violence do not necessarily require animus. You don’t have to hate to hurt. Or, to put it another way, the internal state of the oppressor is not necessarily of that much relevance to the oppressed.

Ye might be one illustration of this point. But a more complicated and illuminating example is another, more distant musical icon: the early 20^th century Austrian composer Anton Webern. There’s much better evidence that Webern didn’t hate Jewish people. But we also know that he loved Hitler. By looking at Webern, we can see how those two things aren’t necessarily contradictory, and perhaps better understand Ye and the antisemitism of our current MAGA moment.

Webern vs. the Nazis

Today, to the extent people think about Webern’s politics, he’s generally known as someone who was a target of Nazis, rather than a supporter of them. Born in 1883 to a high-ranking civil servant, Webern was an intense, prickly, awkward man with high ideals and little practical sense. He was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he had a deep lifelong relationship characterized by an almost embarrassing reverence—his dedication to Schoenberg’s career often prevented him from composing his own work.

Schoenberg’s music was famously difficult, cacophonous, unmelodic, and resolutely anti-populist. In 1913, he conducted a program that included his own compositions and Webern’s, as well as that of others in their circle. The so-called Skandalkonzert provoked a riot, as lovers of traditional music became enraged by the experimental, ugly sounds. Audience members attacked the musicians and trashed the theater.

The violent public resistance to Schoenberg in the 1910s foreshadowed the Nazi response to his work. Schoenberg was Jewish, and the Nazis declared his music degenerate. He fled Germany for the United States in 1934.

(Anton Webern. Image source: Wikipedia Commons)

Webern, who was not Jewish and was living in Austria, stayed in the country even though his music was banned after Germany annexed Austria in 1938. The famous Jewish cultural critic Theodor Adorno, himself a student of Schoenberg, framed Webern’s short, abstract miniature arrangements as a kind of record of the composer’s own authoritarian banishment. “In Webern the musical subject, falling silent, abdicates; Webern abandons himself to the material, which assures him indeed of nothing more than the echo of muteness.”

Webern’s short compositions, teetering on the edge of silence, evoke yearning and pathos. The less than two-minute fourth of the 5 Movements for String Quartet from 1909, for instance, sounds like hushed breathing. The strings exhale in a long sigh interrupted by an occasional brave plunk; the ending is suspended, without a cadence. When you listen to it today, you can hear it as a record of lonely, romantic resistance to popular taste and to the state.

Supporting Hitler

The problem, though, is that Webern didn’t resist the Nazis. It’s true he had several Jewish friends, and unlike many at the time, he continued to associate with Jews personally and professionally. But he also supported Hitler. Perhaps in time he would have repudiated him, but he was accidentally shot and killed shortly after the end of the war, and never got a chance at even partial redemption.

Evidence for Webern’s support of Hitler and the Nazis isn’t secret or difficult to find; it’s well-documented by his biographers, including Malcolm Hayes (1995) and Kathryn Bailey (1998).

Webern’s son joined the Nazi party before the annexation of Austria, and his other children were for the most part similarly enthusiastic about Hitler. Webern may or may not have been a party member himself. But either way, he wrote enthusiastically about Nazi military victories. In May 1940, following Germany’s occupation of Norway and Denmark, he gushed in a letter (per Bailey’s translation):

“Though this is called unification, it also absolutely indicates a process of inner purification. That is Germany today! But only under National socialism!!! No other way! This is the new state, for which the country has been preparing for over twenty years.”

Even more disturbing, if possible, is Webern’s reaction after reading Mein Kampf, which he describes in a letter from March 1940.

“The book has brought me much enlightenment…What I believe I see at present makes me supremely confident! I see it coming, the pacification of the entire world. At first east of the Rhine as far as—yes, how far? This will depend on the USA. But probably as far as the Pacific Ocean! Yes, I believe this, I do believe, and I cannot see it another way!”

Webern read Hitler’s vicious, sustained, genocidal antisemitic rant, and came away dreaming of the Nazi “pacification of the entire world.”

Supporting Jewish People

Yet, somehow, there is every bit as much evidence for Webern’s personal opposition to antisemitism as there is for his support of the Nazis.

Early in his life, Webern did seem to harbor some prejudice against Jews. As a 20-year-old university student in 1903, he repeatedly denigrated Jewish classmates, referring to them as “unfriendly” and expressing shock and disgust that “every Jewish girl dares to judge the greatest artists.”

As an adult, though, Webern believed that many Jewish composers—Schoenberg, Mahler—were the greatest artists. His closest personal and professional relationships were with Jews.

Moreover, where some Nazi enthusiasts like Heidegger deliberately dropped their Jewish associates after Hitler’s rise, Webern never did. He continued to correspond with Schoenberg (who could not have been more explicit about his hatred of the Nazi regime.) And Webern went far beyond that, putting himself at real risk with his steadfast refusal to condone or participate in antisemitism. In 1934, when Nazi influence overshadowed Austria, he chose to perform a concert including Mendelssohns’ Violin Concerto on Austrian Radio. Mendelssohn was Jewish. In his biography, Hayes suggests the programming choice probably led to an unofficial blacklisting of Webern, who never conducted on Austrian Radio again.

(Illustration of Anton Webern. Image source: João Fazenda)

Webern was not deterred though. In 1936, he dedicated his Piano Variations to Eduard Steurmann, a Jewish pianist who had already fled the country. Its recital in 1937 was the last public performance of Webern’s work in Austria in his lifetime. After the German annexation in 1938, Webern helped a number of Jewish friends hide, including music instructor and theorist Josef Polnauer and Schoenberg’s son George.

Antisemitism Without Hatred

How could Webern at one and the same time fantasize about a Nazi conquest of the globe while celebrating Jewish musicians and defending Jewish people? Webern himself seems to have been unable to answer that question to his own satisfaction.

In 1936, the Russian-born, American Jewish violinist Louis Krasner came to Vienna to rehearse the last concerto of the recently deceased Alban Berg. Webern, Berg’s close friend, was to conduct the performance in Barcelona.

The two were going to travel to Spain together. But instead of going through Switzerland, the usual route, Webern insisted they take a train passing through Nazi Germany. In Munich, Webern demanded Krassner leave the train and join him for a beer in a dining hall, with the implicit goal of “proving” to Krassner that the Germans were not antisemitic. When they arrived safely in Barcelona, Webern declared, “There now, Krassner! Did anyone do anything to you?”

Sociologist Victor Ray notes that most common understandings of prejudice characterize racism as “a special category of meanness… perpetuated by bad, prejudiced individuals who hold negative ideas about a racial out-group.” Webern, by that definition, did not do anything antisemitic, because he did not feel hatred in his heart. Webern was traveling to a concert to work with a Jewish musician at some risk to his reputation and livelihood; he obviously wasn’t motivated by antisemitic animus.

And yet, it’s also obvious that forcing a Jewish person to travel into Nazi Germany in order to salve your conscience is an antisemitic act. Webern didn’t hate Krassner because he was a Jew, but he set up a situation where Krassner could have been harmed as a Jew—and a situation in which, as a Jew, Krassner had to have felt at least some discomfort and worry. There was not necessarily antisemitic intent, but there was an antisemitic outcome.

Feminist philosopher Kate Manne, in her book Down Girl, argues that focusing on the intent of bigots over the outcomes of bigotry is usually a way to excuse, or to bring about, those outcomes. When you obsess over whether (say) Donald Trump actually dislikes women, you are spending all your time centering his perspective, trying to read his mind and heart and understand what he is thinking. In contrast, when you shift to looking at the outcomes of oppression, “the focus…naturally shifts to misogyny’s targets or victims—that is, girls and women—and sources of hostility they face in the social world they navigate.”

Manne adds that “this shift helps us to do justice to forms of misogyny that (1) involve purely passive or structural power in operation, (2) are perpetrated by agents who are channeling and acting “under the influence” of wider social forces, rather than harboring the relevant hostilities more deeply.” Bigotry is not necessarily about the intent of bigots; it can also be about creating structures in which everyone, bigots and non-bigots alike, is empowered to harm a particular group.

Webern’s Ethnic Fundamentalism

From Manne’s perspective, Webern doesn’t have to hate Jewish people to drag Krassner into Germany as an experiment. Webern just needs to be acting in accord with “wider social forces.” In this case, we might call those wider social forces “German nationalism,” or, per historian Claudia Koonz, German “ethnic fundamentalism.”

Koonz is the author of The Nazi Conscience, a classic study of German public collaboration in the Third Reich. She argues that Hitler’s most virulent expressions of antisemitism were not very popular and threatened to alienate many Germans.

However, Koonz says, “a more sober form of racial thinking held the potential for mobilizing broad segments of the population.” This was “ethnic fundamentalism,” a blend of religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism.

Hitler’s ethnic fundamentalism claimed “to defend an ancient spiritual heritage against the corrosive values of industrialized urban society.” It also encouraged its followers to “seek vengeance for past wrongs” and “to forge a glorious future cleansed of ethnic aliens.”

Nazi ideology was framed around passionate, rabid hatred of outsiders (Jewish people) and a passionate commitment to insiders (the German volk.) The hatred and the love were structurally and intentionally inseparable; a belief in your own racial superiority requires there be someone to be superior to. But individuals could emphasize one side or the other, focusing on the racial regeneration and German pride while largely not noticing (or pretending not to notice) the consequences for the excluded. “They could become ‘yes but’ Nazis,” Koonz explains, and “welcome ethnic fundamentalism and economic recovery while dismissing Nazi crimes as incidental.”

That describes Webern perfectly. The composer was an ardent German nationalist, who framed his patriotism in metaphysical terms which both included and attempted to elevate xenophobic bigotry. In 1914 he wrote to Schoenberg to gush about his “unshakeable faith in the German spirit, which indeed has created, almost exclusively, the culture of mankind.”

This mystical faith in a Germanic soul permeates Webern’s work and life. Sometimes, it’s relatively innocuous, as in his lifelong admiration of the Austrian mountains. Sometimes it feels on the edge of tipping over into something darker, as in Webern’s 1938-39 song that uses the lyrics for Hildegard Jone’s poem “Zündender Lichtblitz des Lebens (Igniting flash of life)”. Here’s the translation by Sharon Krebs:

The furious lightning-flash of life
struck out of the cloud of the word.
Thunder, the heartbeat, follows,
until it ebbs away in peace.

The music includes dissonant, abrupt martial choral declarations. Is this about an inner experience of passion? Or is it related to Webern’s ecstatic post-Mein Kampf call for universal Nazi pacification?

There’s nothing antisemitic in Jone’s poem. But Webern’s intense commitment to German national traditions is embedded in a structure that allowed antisemitism to flourish, to say the least.

Tradition and the Individual Bigot

My favorite Webern recording is a 1950 album by Jewish avant garde conductor Rene Leibowitz, which emphasizes the music’s dry, startling, and playful abruptness. The “Concerto for Nine Instruments” sounds like the performers are wandering around with toy instruments, bumping into walls and tripping over honking waterfowl. It’s intentionally and gloriously cerebral and confrontational, a deconstruction of high Germanic pomp and seriousness. This is the decadent Webern that Hitler’s regime hated.

But in other recordings (and even in Leibowitz’s) you can hear Webern not as a refutation of pomp, but as a kind of quintessence of it. His most famous work, like his Five Pieces for Orchestra, pare away and pare away, leaving a hint of romantic melody, a flourish of a horn, a tinkling of bells. It’s like he’s seeking the essence of that great Viennese tradition, trying to strip away everything unnecessary and superfluous, finding a core of purity and truth.

It’s moving and beautiful. But also, you can’t help but feel there’s maybe something sinister when a Nazi-sympathizer seeks purity and essence by trying to eliminate unnecessary material.

Webern wasn’t intentionally composing music as a blueprint for genocide. But he was composing music as a German nationalist in a moment when German nationalism was marching towards horrific atrocities. Hate wasn’t in Webern or in his music, arguably. But an exclusionary hateful vision of national power and national identity shaped it, and him.

Ye’s identity too is shaped by an exclusionary Christian nationalism; he’s said that Jews should work for Christians. Similarly, Christians who advocate for prayer in public schools, or call for abortion bans that contradict Jewish teachings, don’t necessarily have personal animus towards Jews. Intense national racial/ethnic/religious pride doesn’t require hate from every adherent. But it creates a structure in which hate fits and works.

There is a lesson here in Webern’s life that speaks to today. Webern’s odd, quiet, questing compositions sometimes seem like they’re trying to escape from their own time and their own selves, vanishing into a private space where public obligations and pressures can’t find them.

But there is no such space. Webern is dead and doesn’t care about history’s judgment one way or the other. But his life, and his music, are a reminder that what you feel inside is often significantly less important than what you assent to in the name, ostensibly, of love.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He writes about fascism and other subjects at his substack, Everything Is Horrible.

The post Do You Have to Hate Jews to Be a Nazi? Ask Anton Webern appeared first on The Revealer.

(January 2023 riots in Brazil. Image source: Sergio Lima for Getty Images)

On January 8, 2023, supporters of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, rioted in the capital’s government buildings to try to retake the country and to encourage the Brazilian military to perform a coup d’etat on Bolsonaro’s behalf. The moment bared a striking resemblance to the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the United States, and left observers with a surreal and somber sense of déjà vu.

The ideological and personality commonalities between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are, themselves, uncanny: the two heads of state had public personas of “tell-it-like-it-is” macho-masculinity, they stoked right-wing populism to rise to power, and both instigated distrust of their countries’ electoral systems.

Bolsonaro and Trump also tapped into large swaths of conservative Christian voters to support their political rise. Both found overwhelming support among evangelicals and, specifically, among Pentecostals. Not only did many Pentecostals vote them into power, but they also gave Trumpism and Bolsonarismo a spiritual vigor that baptized their right-wing politics as a cosmic spiritual battle between forces of good and evil.

Brazil’s rioters, like many at the January 6 insurrection, brought religion with them that day. Some were on their knees praying, and others were holding banners with Bolsonaro’s image and the inscription Deus Acima de Todos – or “God above all.” Even in the months leading up to the January 8 riots, Bolsonaro supporters protested against the election results with religious acts, including the blowing of a shofar, a practice heralding spiritual warfare commonly found within many Pentecostal communities (and something also witnessed in the days leading up to the January 6 insurrection).

(January 2023 riots in Brazil. Image source: Sergio Lima for Getty Images)

Bolsonaro, a thrice-married, professed Roman Catholic and former military officer in the Brazilian army during the military’s 1964-1985 dictatorship, first became president of Brazil in 2019, before losing to former (and now current) president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (or “Lula”) in the 2022 election. His first campaign was successful, in large part, because of the support from Brazil’s evangelicals, especially from the country’s sizeable population of conservative Pentecostals.

Bolonsaro worked hard to garner their support. Baptized on live television by a prominent Pentecostal pastor, the politician, whose wife and son identify as evangelical, established deep ties with Brazil’s evangelical and Pentecostal communities. While Bolsonaro continued to identify as Catholic, his relationship with Brazil’s Catholic population deteriorated rapidly from his first presidential run in 2018 to now.

As voters, Brazilian Catholics tend to hold more liberal positions on abortion, same-sex marriage and premarital sex than Brazil’s evangelicals. And a third of Brazil’s Catholic Bishops openly criticized Bolsonaro in 2020 for his failures in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. While roughly half of Brazil’s Catholics voted for Bolsonaro in 2018, Catholic support for Bolsonaro dropped by almost half to 28% in his 2021 campaign run, overwhelmingly backing Lula.

Brazil is a deeply religious country. With a population of over 215 million people, it is currently the largest Roman Catholic country in the world, with Catholics making up roughly half of its population. Nevertheless, Brazil’s Pentecostals are the fastest growing religious group in the nation and have overtaken the religious landscape. In 2020, roughly 31% of Brazil’s population identified as “evangelical.” In the most recent and available data, Pentecostalism constitutes about 80% of Brazil’s evangelical Christians.

To be clear, not all evangelicals and Pentecostals are Bolsonaro supporters. Brazil’s evangelicals and Pentecostals were also key in Lula’s presidential wins in 2003, 2006 and 2021, and were part of grassroots efforts to prevent a Bolsonaro second term. Pentecostalism’s rapid rise, and its majority status within Brazil’s evangelical community, has made garnering Pentecostals’ political support even more vital for anyone hoping to work across Brazil’s political spectrum.

(Bolsonaro in January 2023. Image source: CNN)

“Brazil’s evangelicals were obviously instrumental in Bolsonaro’s rise and a key part of his multi-sectoral coalition to win the presidency,” said John Polga-Hecimovich, associate professor of Political Science at the U.S. Navel Academy, who specializes in Latin American politics.

“I think that one very important similarity, and that goes for all Latin America as well as the United States, is that Bolsonaro attracted evangelicals largely through his stance on social issues. And especially on LGBTQ politics.”

Bolsonaro, from as early as 2011, has made numerous incendiary remarks about those in the LGBTQ community. Along with these comments, Bolsonaro positioned his 2018 presidential campaign as a war against “gender ideology,” a vague term that conservative activists have used to describe the policies and activism of feminists, as well as LGBTQ communities. Combatting “gender ideology” also became a prominent battle cry with the rise of Pentecostalism in Brazil and the rest of Latin America.

While Brazil’s right-wing politicians and activists were fixated on opposing gender and LGBTQ+ rights, America’s right-wing was focused on abortion and overturning Roe V. Wade. Trump hardly took on LGBTQ issues in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and is noted for moderating the GOP’s stance toward LGBTQ communities. However, Trump’s 2024 campaign is currently making gender and sexuality key issues, in part, to re-galvanize the religious base who voted him into power in 2016 and who need a new rallying issue in a post-Dobbs America.

As Trump courts those in favor of Christian nationalism, an ideology that aims to establish America’s political identity as “Christian,” Bolsonaro and his supporters are doing something similar. But to understand Christian nationalism in Brazil, one needs to consider two factors that separate Brazil from the United States: the demographics that make up Bolsonaro’s supporters, especially his Pentecostal factions, and the history of Brazil itself.

***

Brazil, following its independence from Roman Catholic Portugal in 1822, maintained its own monarchy until 1889 when it officially became a republic. Between monarchies, republics, and military dictatorships, Brazil’s history throughout the late 19^th and 20^th centuries was rife with coups, authoritarian governments, and periods of democratic elections. Under Brazil’s patriarcalismo, post-independence, from the early 19^th-century up to its first Republic in 1889, the monarchy and regional oligarchical networks heavily enforced traditional gender norms and a racial hierarchy between Blacks and whites (slavery was not abolished until 1888). Decades later during the 1964-85 military dictatorship, the military justified its takeover through rhetoric of protecting “family values” that they said were under attack by 1960s counterculture and changing gender and sexual mores in Brazil.

Today’s right-wing in Brazil holds a similar yearning for an imagined period in Brazil’s past that was morally stringent. “We’re seeing in Brazil’s right-wing the construction of a kind of a nostalgia for a past that is mythologized as more godly, more moral, more hetero-patriarchal, and with a religious fervor,” said Benjamin Cowan, professor at University of California, San Diego, who specializes in Brazil’s post-Cold War history.

Although those on the right are turning to the past to remake Brazil today, right-wing Catholics and evangelicals sometimes look to different periods in Brazil’s history for what should serve as Brazil’s ideal, even as they often vote along similar lines.

“There is within Brazil’s right a faction that mythologizes and looks back toward that imperial period, and towards the monarchy itself, as a kind of fabled ‘high point’ of Brazilian society and civilization. It is not necessarily a Catholic position, but it’s deeply bound up with Catholicism,” Cowan said.

Many of Brazil’s evangelicals, including the Pentecostals, fondly remember the 1964-85 military dictatorship as a culturally stable period due to its anti-communist ethos and protections from social liberalism, despite its harsh repressions on basic human rights. Today, Brazil’s right-wing politicians, including Bolsonaro himself, have praised the 1964 military coup, arguing that the coup successfully prevented communism from taking over the country.

“One element of the idea in the myth-making task for the political right in Brazil — and particularly for religious conservatives — is the idea that communism is a threat to the faith and that communism has been enabled by the waning of authoritarianism since the dictatorship,” said Cowan.

In the United States, in addition to decrying communism, the religious right has described “political correctness,” the “gay agenda,” and “wokeism” as threats to the faith. Religious conservatives see these things as dangerous to “believers” and to the country’s moral standing before God. And for those on the religious far-right, they have framed these issues, and America’s political dynamics, as “spiritual warfare.”

In the Pentecostal orbit, spiritual warfare is an outlook based on the belief in a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, the existence of angels and demons who carry out this combat, and the belief that these forces shape humans in both individual and collective ways. In the United States, Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula-White Cain, who notoriously called for “angelic reinforcements” to combat “election fraud” following Trump’s 2020 election loss, is a classic example of how spiritual warfare plays out religiously and politically.

Brazil’s right-wing also utilizes spiritual warfare politically. But compared to the U.S. and the West more broadly (where institutional religion has been on a steady decline for decades), the practice and rhetoric of spiritual warfare in Brazil has spread in tandem with the rapid growth of Pentecostalism itself.

***

Pentecostalism is one of the U.S.’s most prominent religious exports. The movement, originating around the early 20^th century, initially emphasized practices and prohibitions that consecrate a dedicated religious lifestyle (such as wearing modest clothing and eschewing alcohol and tobacco), and emphasized an experiential relationship with God. The physical manifestation of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) as evidence of being filled with a divine presence via God’s third person of the Christian Trinity—the Holy Spirit, is one prominent example of this classical form of Pentecostalism.

The movement quickly spread globally, and travelled to Brazil through the efforts of American and European missionaries in the early half of the 20^th century. It was during this period when American Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) firmly established themselves in Brazil’s religious landscape. Brazil’s Assemblies of God is currently, by far, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the country with over 14 million members.

(Brazilian Pentecostals. Image source: Paulo Whitaker for Reuters)

In the 1970s and 80s, indigenous Pentecostal denominations and churches started to spring up around Brazil. Highly influential megachurches, including the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus), and the Reborn in Christ Church (Igreja Renascer em Cristo) originated during this period. Referred to in Latin America as “Neo-Pentecostalism,” this new iteration of Pentecostalism emphasized less on speaking in tongues and personal morality—like its traditional Pentecostal counterparts—and more on receiving God’s physical and financial favor as a sign of strong faith, a Christian theology typically called “prosperity gospel.” These Neo-Pentecostal leaders also emphasized spiritual warfare.

Spiritual warfare has deeply influenced political rhetoric in Brazil today. Bolsonaro framed his campaign against Lula as a battle between good and evil, with Bolsonaro as God’s standard-bearer. Even Lula claimed that Bolsonaro himself was “possessed by the devil” when Lula first began his campaign against him.

This blossoming of Neo-Pentecostalism in Brazil coincided with the 1985 fall of the military dictatorship and the start of Brazil’s fifth republic—a democratic government that finally allowed civil-society groups, including churches, to participate in Brazil’s political process. Evangelical churches began to endorse candidates and political parties publicly, and certain political parties intentionally aligned themselves with megachurches. For Pentecostals, Brazil’s new political process was the ideal moment to start influencing Brazil’s affairs and to carry out God’s orders.

“I see this political engagement in the 1980s and 90s as having its theological and political reasons, but it’s also this Pentecostal ‘coming of age’ — a lot of these churches have become influential, wealthy, and powerful,” said Virginia Garrard, a religious studies professor at the University of Texas, Austin who specializes in Latin American Pentecostalism.

This iteration of Pentecostalism – one that engages in spiritual warfare and aims to take “dominion” over the nation – is one that is both uniquely Brazilian, as well as an American export. In fact, from the 1980s to today, U.S. and Brazilian Pentecostals have influenced each other through the sharing of speakers in conference circuits, book-selling between their borders, and televangelism and social media. The Pentecostal bases behind Trump and Bolsonaro undoubtedly intermingled and shared similar information networks.

“Trump’s Pentecostal and Charismatic bases was/is transnational in its reach and in their ambition—they aimed to share their version of the gospel with the world, not just the United States, and their media networks are global. The same applies to many of Bolsonaro’s supporters,” said Leah Payne, associate professor of American religious history at George Fox University and Portland Seminary.

“They seem similar, in other words, because many key leaders are collaborating with one another.”

***

It’s easy to see such stark similarities between Trump and Bolsonaro’s Pentecostal bases and to forget that they are living and operating in completely different contexts, but some of America’s culture-war issues do not map onto Brazil’s religio-political scene perfectly.

Brazil’s evangelicals tend to hold more moderate positions than American evangelicals, who generally pick up their social policy cues directly from the Republican Party and Fox News. Brazil’s evangelicals hold views that, in the U.S., might be considered more centrist or left leaning. They generally have concerns about environmental issues and deforestation, and also tend to support welfare programs and affirmative action. The highly influential pastor of Brazil’s Universal Church and Bolsonaro supporter, Edir Macedo, publicly stated that legalizing abortion would ultimately prevent many of Brazil’s social ills, diseases, and deaths, a position not commonly held in evangelical Christian circles.

But race and class are key facets to understanding Brazil’s Pentecostals and their politics, especially those who are Bolsonaro supporters. While there are certainly Neo-Pentecostal megachurches that have achieved wealth and political influence, the majority of Brazil’s Pentecostals tend to be made up, by far, of poor, Black, and female members of society. And Brazil’s Pentecostal churches are most found in favelas—shantytowns and working-class neighborhoods in the outskirts of Brazil’s large cities, as well as in rural areas.

In the United States, support for Donald Trump and Christian nationalism is usually coded in terms of nativism and white supremacy, in part, because of the significant portions of white people who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020. In 2018, while Bolsonaro certainly polled at the top from white voters, he also polled as the top candidate by Black and mixed-race voters by 47%, compared to his left-wing opponent who polled around six digits below in these same demographics. Since Bolsonaro has a penchant for racist comments against Blacks and indigenous peoples, it might seem contradictory to see strong Bolsonaro support from minority groups. But the truth is that neither the political left nor right has earned the loyalty of Brazil’s marginalized because they have never historically served them.

Brazil’s society is plagued with an extreme wealth inequality gap with the second highest concentration of wealth in the world. In 2021, almost 30% of Brazilians received a monthly income per capita of roughly $99 USD. Brazil’s successive governments have failed to provide public goods (like education, investment in transportation, etc.), to marginalized populations, leaving millions to fall under the poverty line, especially those of Afro-Brazilian descent.

For Brazil’s marginalized, the state is absent; and where the state is absent, Pentecostal churches have filled in the gap. Pentecostal churches consistently provide support networks in Brazil’s favelas in the form of access to welfare and assistance for its members, as well as opportunities to serve the church irrespective of social-status or gender (a much different situation in Roman Catholicism, where it takes a considerable amount of time to receive ordination, and where women cannot become priests). The popularity of the “Prosperity Gospel” within Brazilian Pentecostalism — the belief that having faith in God will guarantee “blessings” in the form of financial success and physical health, imbues a vitality and hope within Brazil’s poorer communities where Pentecostalism is flourishing. And the idea that spiritual warfare can combat and expel the demons in one’s life that cause poverty, disease, and internal ennui, is especially empowering to those on the margins.

“From a certain standpoint, if you’re an impoverished Afro-descended Brazilian, and there has never been a ruling class, never been an institution, never been a government that has assisted you in any way—why not turn to Pentecostals?” Cowan rhetorically asked during our phone conversation.

“I think there’s a way in which there’s a white supremacy built into that the presumption is, ‘They’re not voting what’s in their vested interests.’ The truth is that even voting isn’t necessarily in the interests of poor Black or Brazilians because they have never really received the benefits of the state or society in any way.”

***

Brazil is no outlier vis-á-vis the rise of Pentecostal growth and its involvement in national politics. Pentecostalism has been on the rise in Latin America, and in other parts of the Global South, for decades, and is continuing to grow and weaken Roman Catholic dominance in Central and South America. And its growth is matched with its rising political clout throughout the Americas.

Costa Rica, in 2018, saw a Pentecostal candidate running on an anti-LGBTQ platform, winning 40% of the country’s vote in the presidential election. In Bolivia, following the resignation of left-wing president Evo Morales for accusations of manipulating electoral results following the 2019 presidential election, Neo-Pentecostal spiritual warfare rhetoric galvanized anti-Morales demonstrators. Jeanine Añez, the self-appointed interim president following Morales’ departure from the Bolivian presidency, held up a large Bible in her hand as she took office, telling Bolivians, “God has allowed the Bible to come back to the Palace.” Her brother is a pastor at a Neo-Pentecostal church.

“As those populations continue to grow, they’re going to make up a larger subset of the electorate and be more powerful, and they’re going be more powerful for the same way that it’s a powerful group in the United States — because they’re organized. Religious groups are organized,” Polga-Hecimovich told me over Zoom.

“Certainly, in the Americas, this is a voting block that is here to stay.”

Miguel Petrosky is an essayist, writer, and journalist based in Washington, D.C. and has written for The Revealer, Sojourners, Religion & Politics, and Christianity Today. You can follow him on Twitter @petrosky_miguel.

The post The Brazil Riots, Bolsonaro, and Spiritual Warfare appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: usip.org)

“Is Allah a man?”

It’s a question that Lamya H (a pseudonym), author of the new memoir, Hijab Butch Blues, asked her Qur’an teacher as a six-year-old child. “In my mind, Allah is a woman, floating and ethereal in the night sky,” she writes.

“Allah is not a man or a woman,” her teacher replied, giving a traditional Islamic response to such a question, before changing the subject.

Years later, at age 23 in New York, Lamya was at an event for Muslims where a woman spoke about using “she/her” pronouns for God, jarring and angering others who called it disrespectful, even blasphemous.

“All the Islamic feminists have been writing about it,” the woman explained. “It’s a really important way to fight the patriarchy.”

There is indeed a quiet revolution underway within the literary folds of Islamic feminism, wherein Muslim authors, academics, and activists are using female pronouns for Allah in an attempt to separate God from the idea of a “Divine patriarch.”

Many have been inspired by Muslim theologian amina wadud (who spells her name with lowercase letters). Her book, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, has been foundational to discussions on women’s rights and roles from progressive Muslim perspectives. wadud’s work has also introduced many to the vitality of Islamic feminism.

When I first spoke with wadud over Zoom, she told me she started diversifying Allah’s pronouns after teaching an undergraduate religious studies course at Virginia Commonwealth University in the late 1990s. wadud asked her students to explore the lyrics of Joan Osborne’s song, “What if God Was One of Us.” While discussing pronouns for God, the men in the class told her that they could relate to God when God was referred to as “He,” but not when God was referred to as “She.” In that moment, wadud decided to start using female pronouns for Allah, who, according to traditional Muslim teachings, transcends gender, yet has historically been described with male pronouns.

“It was not common then, and it is still fraught with lots of controversy now,” wadud tells me of the practice of calling God “She.” “People still get into a tizzy, and I think that’s worth exploring – why is there such a tizzy?”

Getting to the Bottom of Arabic Grammar

According to Islamic teachings, the Qur’an was revealed in Arabic and throughout most of the text, the masculine pronoun, Huwa, is used for Allah. Yet, the text also makes clear that Allah is neither male nor female.

“We are obsessed with the masculine pronoun as if it is a literal articulation of Allah, whom we also will say is beyond gender,” exclaims wadud.

wadud currently lives in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and tells me about the local language, Bahasa, which has only one pronoun. “Indonesians, on a regular basis will say things like ‘my husband, she’, or ‘my daughter, he’ because their minds are not used to choosing between these different pronouns in English, so they randomly choose one from their files,” she explains. Languages such as Bengali, Turkish, and Persian are similar.

The masculine pronoun has prevailed for so long in reference to Allah because it presents a literal translation of the Arabic language – the language of the Qur’an. However, wadud points out that there are some cases in the text when Allah uses “we,” a pronoun that typically denotes multiplicity and grammatically seems to clash with the concept of monotheism. Yet, Muslims rarely acknowledge the plural nature of “we” and instead choose to center the singular, masculine pronoun for Allah instead.

In his book Muhammad’s Body, Assistant Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida, Michael Muhammad Knight writes that modern Muslim discourses “often dismiss God’s masculine pronoun as a mere accident of Arab grammar, which lacks a gender-neutral pronoun and thereby requires the inscription of ‘he’ or ‘she’ on every noun.” He also notes that within developing, gender-progressive Muslim theologies, God’s “transcendence” of gender is a “prerequisite” for true monotheism. That’s because Allah’s tawhid, or one-ness, requires God to be beyond gender – and that any binary view of gender, or perceived preference for one over the other, would negate this concept of unity, which wadud calls “the tawhidic paradigm.”

(Page in the Quran. Image source: yaqeeninstitute.org)

Ayesha Chaudhry, Professor of Islamic Studies and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia, explains that all pronouns we use for God ultimately “misgender” God.

“Our language forces God to be constantly misgendered in order to be spoken about,” Chaudhry explains. She released her memoir, The Colour of God, in 2021, and in it, uses both masculine and feminine pronouns for Allah. “I use what feels right to me in context of my writing, and don’t restrict myself to one or the other,” she says. “If what we’re doing by gendering God is always misgendering God, then why misgender only one [way]?”

Author Camille Helminski, who is currently working on an English translation of the Qur’an, also avoids attributing only one gender to God. Helminski is a follower of Sufiism, the Islamic mystical tradition, and her book, The Way of Mary: Maryam, Beloved of God, is a comprehensive account of Jesus’s mother that draws on Christian and Islamic sources. When she translates verses of the Qur’an, she refers to God as “He/She,” embracing a  gender-inclusive outlook that is often more common in Sufi discourse than it is in orthodox interpretations of faith.

Balancing the Scale within the Framework of Islamic Theology

There have been centuries of debate within Sufism regarding God’s characteristics. Sufis often describe God through metaphors since, according to their teachings, our Earthly words cannot begin to reflect the sheer magnificence of the Divine. “Human language is basically a reflection of our imagination. And it can’t encompass God. So we’re doing our best,” explains Chaudhry.

Sofia Rehman, Islamic scholar, academic, and author of A Treasury of ‘A’ishah: A Guidance from the Beloved of the Beloved, agrees, deeming language – and any pronoun – to be “inept” and “inadequate” in capturing the totality of the Creator. “Allah is not imprisoned by the binary. Allah is a Oneness that none of us can experience,” she says.

Rehman first came across the possibility of using feminine pronouns for God in the 1990s when she was 12 and reading a coffee-table book authored by pop star Michael Jackson, who referred to God as “He/She.” Now, she leads a virtual book club that discusses inclusive and feminist Muslim texts. She says that she personally veers away from “He” and “She,” and uses “Allah,” “God,” and sometimes “They,” when a pronoun is necessary. “It’s the most gender-neutral pronoun that I could use in English – it’s a comfortable medium,” she explains.

Almost three decades after wadud first began proposing alternative pronouns for Allah, both Rehman and Chaudhry keep her practice alive. While teaching, both switch between pronouns – “He”, “She”, “They” and “It” – when discussing God, so students can critically analyze their allegiances to certain pronouns. “The classroom is such a beautiful place, kind of like a laboratory,” says Chaudhry, who has noticed squirming and physical discomfort around this topic, yet believes it’s an important learning moment, because analyzing this discomfort will reveal our beliefs and biases about gender.

In Islamic theology, a central approach to understanding God is through Allah’s 99 names – such as “The loving,” “The merciful,” and “The guide.” These names are categorised as either jamali (feminine) or jalali (masculine) attributes.

“Allah has both jamali and jalali attributes, meaning that Allah’s nature is inclusive, and not exclusive,” explains wadud. She adds that out of all these divine characteristics, two of the most frequent are Ar Rahman (the beneficent) and Ar Rahim (the merciful). These are jamali (feminine) descriptors, coming from the root word meaning “womb.”

“The Divine feminine nature is frequent and abundant – and yet when it comes to looking at how to refer to Allah, this fixation on the ‘He’ has proven that it is more than grammar, more than a literal reading; it’s also political,” says wadud.

Masculine Pronouns Manifest Patriarchy

Emphasizing God’s masculine attributes at the expense of God’s feminine qualities can have political implications. For instance, if Allah is deemed to be a supreme patriarch, being male can be seen as a prerequisite for religious authority. “When the religion is presented to you so patriarchally, at some subconscious level, Allah is being perceived as male, and that’s very problematic for so many reasons, not least because we also end up having religious leaders who are also always male,” points out Rehman. This has the reverse impression too – “if all authority in the human realm is male then all authority in the Divine realm will also be male,” she explains.

Because language is imbued with power, patriarchal authority manifests with zealousness in communities across the globe – from the oppressive regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan, to instances closer to home, where mosques often have all-male leadership and superior prayer spaces for men, instead of being inclusive houses of worship for Muslim women.

Last year, Assistant Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis Tazeen M. Ali published The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in US Islam, which examines how some American Muslim women have created their own worship spaces. Ali tells me that using female pronouns can serve as a “powerful corrective” to help “reclaim one’s faith.” She believes that those who use female pronouns for Allah do so in the pursuit of gender inclusivity in their theological understandings of God.

(Woman holding a Quran. Image source: yaqeeninstitute.org)

Female pronouns can center Allah’s loving, nurturing, and maternal qualities. Giving both pronouns equal weight can offer a more balanced idea of God’s jamali and jalali attributes, and also affirm the gender equality and justice that many Muslims believe is fundamental to their faith.

Yet, according to Rehman, the widespread skepticism associated with using feminine pronouns for God suggests an attitude of “gender contamination” – that associating Allah with the feminine is “an act of pollution.” Why are we uncomfortable with ‘She’ and not ‘He’? What is ‘She’ endowed with that ‘He’ is not endowed with?” she asks.

“For us to pretend that ‘He’ is neutral, and ‘She’ is necessarily tainted by gender – that’s a problem,” says wadud, who emphasizes that language is simply a symbolic means for communication. “It helps us express our understanding of what is beyond language, the prime and the sacred – and when we understand that, then we will not be so fixated on keeping the masculine translation.”

The Challenging Ordeal of Unlearning Language

While it’s mostly Muslim women who are using feminine pronouns for Allah, this movement is not something all Muslim women support. In fact, some find the pronoun switch to be quite destabilizing.

“Some people feel when they refer to God as ‘She,’ it might be disrespectful,” says Chaudhry, who explains that it can be “frightening” and “threatening” for women to have their assumptions about their Creator challenged. “You have an intimate connection: you’ve been talking to him five times a day, when you’re going to sleep, and when you’re scared, stressed out or happy, and this figure has a shape and form in your mind, as much as you don’t want to admit that. But then suddenly to think of this figure, with a different gender – I can understand that would be unsettling,” she says.

“Some women will resist because they want to stay within the fold as they understand it,” wadud tells me. “They have not examined how what we perceive and experience of Islam is all a part of a construct, and that language is one part of the construct.”

wadud converted to Islam 50 years ago, and over the course of her journey admits that she too has spent time in a comfort zone that is a part of this long-standing establishment. “I realized that if I want to free Allah from the box of patriarchy that’s been wrapped around Her, I have to be more radical about how I challenge some of what I considered to be the ‘generic’ when that generic is a construct of history and cultures,” she says.

Another reason why some Muslims may be resistant to using non-masculine pronouns for God is because of the wider debate about pronouns in relation to gender and queerness – a topic deemed firmly taboo in most orthodox Muslim circles.

“I think we’re occupying a political moment when there are so many anxieties around gender identity. There is this real reluctance to move beyond a rigid, binary understanding of gender, and as conversations about gender pronouns become more commonplace, there is pushback to these new practices,” explains Ali.

Ali believes that backlash to female pronouns for Allah is similar to the backlash associated with any developments pertaining to Muslim women – whether it’s the launch of a new inclusive mosque, such as The Women’s Mosque of America in Los Angeles, which is the case study of her book, or the occurrence of a woman-led prayer service, such as the one organised by Muslims for Progressive Values (MVP) for Eid in 2013, still heavily criticised on Twitter a decade later.

wadud is no stranger to this sort of controversy, having delivered a Friday khutbah, or sermon (a role traditionally only performed by Muslim men) in Cape Town in 1994, before leading a mixed-gender prayer gathering in New York in 2005, which stirred up heated debate within Muslim communities across the globe.

“We have to maintain our course, the course of Ar Rahman and Ar Rahim, and Al Wadud (the loving) and Al Karim (the bountiful), until it becomes something that everyone is acclimated to,” says wadud. “We need to correct the misunderstanding that somehow referring to Allah only as ‘He’ is gender-neutral, by increasing our use of ‘She,’ until it becomes comfortable. And when it becomes comfortable, more people will use it.”

She acknowledges, however, that progress takes baby steps, just like it does in the wider context of women’s rights across societies, both religious and secular. “Things like this take root slowly,” she says. According to wadud, recognising the patriarchal politicalization of God as masculine – and the repercussions this can have, is the first step. The second is being sensitized with the idea of the divine feminine – the jamali attributes of Allah, which are just as key to the Creator’s tawhid, or one-ness, as the jalali attributes.

Muslim women are increasingly asserting their religious authority, as can be attested by the publication of The Women’s Khutbah Book: Contemporary Sermons on Spirituality and Justice from Around the World edited by South African Muslim professors Sa’diyya Shaikh and Fatima Seedat, which highlights trailblazing female Muslims reclaiming their voices in religious spaces. Part and parcel of this movement is a linguistic upheaval of the pronouns that have traditionally been associated with Allah. Adamant that Islam values men and women equally, and that the Creator’s feminine attributes are just as integral as their masculine attributes, there is a growing number of Muslim women who will no longer tolerate their faith being cloaked in the garb – or language – of patriarchy.

“Language is powerful,” says Rehman. “I think the pronouns referring to God need to be disruptive, but claiming God’s female attributes will not be the end of the fight; it will just be the beginning.”

Yet, at the end of the day, Rehman says she will prioritize the content of her message over pronouns. “If I know that using ‘She’ means that people are going to shut their ears off to me, to hearing all the other stuff that I think is more important and that actually builds the foundation on which people will become more comfortable with using different pronouns, then I’m not going to use it just for the shock factor,” she explains.

Rehman adds that the Prophet Muhammad spoke to people at the level at which they would understand, “in the mode which would be most openly received by their hearts.” She believes that using this wisdom discretionarily is crucial when it comes to Allah’s pronouns.

Hafsa Lodi is an American-Pakistani writer with a B.A. in Journalism and M.A. in Islamic Law. Her debut non-fiction book, Modesty: A Fashion Paradox (Neem Tree Press: 2020), explores the global rise of the modest fashion movement from cultural, religious, political and feminist lenses.

The post The Muslim Women Using Feminine Pronouns for Allah appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Gareth Cattermole for Getty Images)

It’s 11:00pm on a Tuesday night in New Haven and I’m surrounded by over five hundred Taylor Swift fans, most of whom are screaming. Taylor herself is nowhere to be seen. Instead, an enthusiastic DJ in a knit crop top and high blonde ponytail spins Swift’s music, exclusively, from the stage. Sometimes she cuts the sound and everyone belts out the lyrics together. The fans have come from all over New England, some driving close to three hours to be here. A few got sold out of similar events in Boston, Providence, or Hartford. Most are young, under 25, but a solid quarter are in their 30s, or older. They are dressed in a variety of homemade outfits, each a reference to some Swift lyric, music video, or concert ensemble. They gush over each other’s outfits at the bar, coat check, or while snapping photos against the Taylor wall in the corner. They are here for the music, but also for each other. Most will stay until 3am.

This is a Taylor Swift dance party, one of hundreds which happen across the U.S. with surprising regularity. Hosted by a variety of groups and organizations, with no formal connection to Swift herself, they all give the people exactly what they want: A night to dance to Swift’s music, in community, with others who love her just as much.

“We sold out our first event in a venue that holds 500 people, and we sold it out fast,” said Brian Sikes Howe of the initial Swift-only party he threw in Pittsburgh in December 2021. “I’ve been hosting dance parties for nearly ten years, and it was common to maybe see 200 to 250 people for parties that we had been building for years. For a first-time event to double that, right when we announced it, was crazy.”

Within a few weeks he founded The Taylor Party, which was soon hosting six to eight events a weekend, employing a team of five DJs to play in cities across the country for audiences of up to 2,000. This year, The Taylor Party will host nearly 130 Taylor Swift dance parties alone.

Mackenzie Shrieve, a live music event organizer for Happy Clam in New York, had the idea to try out a Taylor Swift dance night for the first time in September 2021, capitalizing on a world returning to nightlife post-quarantine. That turned out to be the day of unexpected flash flooding in New York City, where subways shut down and people were urged to stay indoors.

“Almost every single ticket buyer still showed up,” she said of the event, which had sold out immediately. When they decided to end the night early so people could get home safely, the crowd booed. “That’s when we realized that the need to be in a room with people who love this artist as much as you do, and want to sing at the top of their lungs and release something in that way, was in very high demand.”

Her organization now hosts two Taylor Swift dance parties a month at the Bowery Electric in the West Village, with no sign of slackening interest. They are hardly the only game in town: On any given week in New York City, one could attend a Taylor Swift night in a winery, on a cruise, at a Brooklyn nightclub, or inside a candlelit church with her music played by a string quartet. (And that’s not even considering the Taylor Swift trivia nights). Crowds at these events around the country often consist of repeat customers.

(A Taylor Swift dance party. Image source: @tayswiftnight on Instagram)

No other artist generates this specific type of devotion. Sure, a club might host a Beyoncé dance party the weekend she drops a new album, or organize the occasional night dedicated to Harry Styles, Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Adele, or the ‘90s. But these are one-off events, and none have the staying power, or sheer manic energy, of a Taylor Swift dance night.

Why her? Why them? What is going on?

Some will point to the fact that Swift’s discography is huge, and she is constantly releasing new music. This means a club can host two parties a month for 24 months and still keep the playlist varied enough to stay interesting. In the past three years, Swift has released Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights albums, all on the heels of Lover, in addition to her rerecorded albums, and the songs from the vault, providing consistent opportunities for promotional nights. Few artists have enough music to sustain that sort of repeated venture, let alone enough music that is so well known to so many people.

These parties are also distinctly wholesome. Nobody is doing coke in the bathroom at a Taylor Swift dance party. People are handing out friendship bracelets to strangers and dancing like madmen with their friends to “Anti-Hero.” You might get some drinks from the bar, but you don’t go to get wasted or to pick up dates. There is almost no aggressive attention on the dance floor. (It is hard to creepily hit on a girl swaying to “Dear John” alongside hundreds of teary fans.) People tend to dress in fun rather than trendy outfits, and it is hard to feel out of place no matter what you are wearing. At one Bowery Electric party, I stood in the corner with my notebook while multiple people approached me throughout the night, asking if I had come alone and wanted to join their group, or beckoning me to jump into their dance circle. It was the friendliest, most astonishingly communal, dance floor I had ever witnessed in New York. An Ariana Grande or Lady Gaga night might attract fans, but the music won’t be so dramatically distinct from average club fare to make it a novelty all on its own. Taylor Swift nights have a unique niche, in that way.

But more than anything, people come because at some point in their lives, Taylor’s music gave them words for feelings they had. To sing those songs with others who shared that experience, without having to be embarrassed, can be exhilarating.

“Listening to those songs, I remember being on a train commuting to high school and hearing them for the first time, and I still remember those feelings, where I don’t know if I’ll ever feel okay again, but this song is sort of making it okay,” said Alexandra Ofer, 27, a physician assistant in New York with a musical theater background who found solace in Swift’s music after a breakup at 16. “I felt so connected to all of her lyrics because it was exactly how I felt and I wasn’t putting it into those words. And there was something about going to this Taylor Swift night and literally screaming to songs that made me feel like I was 14 or 16. I didn’t expect it. I’m not the person that’s following her religiously, either. But I think it was about that connection and the real love for the music and for all of the memories that are associated with that music, for me.”

Hope Hettrich, 19, a student in Wallingford, Connecticut who has been a dedicated fan since she was seven, when Swift’s music helped her process her parent’s divorce, agreed.

“She made me feel so seen and so heard, from miles and miles away, from songs she wrote with no other person in mind but her own experiences,” she said, recalling how moving it was to catch a wave from Taylor on the Red Tour, and have the singer see, even briefly, how much the music meant to her. “I know it is mildly embarrassing, but the first song I really connected to was Teardrops on My Guitar. In the song she talks about not feeling seen by Drew, and when I was little I thought wow, she gets me. I didn’t have a Drew, but my whole life kind of felt like Drew. I didn’t have a guitar either. But I certainly had tear drops. And the feelings she was describing resonated in the way that I needed them to. I would need to ‘trauma dump’ on Taylor to express to her everything her songs have meant to me.”

(Taylor Swift in concert. Image source: Gareth Cattermole for Getty Images)

The theme of shame, or mild embarrassment, comes up often. Ofer recalled how after that break up at 16, she set her AOL Instant Messenger status to Taylor Swift lyrics, which her ex saw and quickly mocked to his friends. “There was this feeling of embarrassment associated with it, at age 16,” she said, which she felt she could release now that she was 27. “I didn’t even realize I might have been holding that part of me back. And it felt really great to be recognized, and to admit how important this music was to me. And it obviously wasn’t just me, I think everyone was feeling that way too. I think maybe this overwhelming feeling of acceptance and belonging is what felt so special to me.”

Fans would often cover their faces when I asked them how many parties they had attended, or which songs of Swift’s meant something to them. This is part of the appeal, too; nobody has to be embarrassed to love Taylor Swift at a Taylor Swift dance party. It is another reason the casual lurker can stick out. This event is not for them; it is for the people who know what it means to be there.

“We’re all there, in an environment where you’re not judged for the sheer amount of enthusiasm that you have for this one artist,” said Kevin Christopher Robles, 25, who writes for the Jesuit magazine America. “It feels safe to be who you are when you’re there.”

“I always tell them at the beginning, this is not a place to feel judged for dancing crazy or feel weird for feeling all your emotions. We all are fans of this music, and we’ve all had emotional connections to it, so it’s just your night to let that fully out and be fully yourself,” said Allie Robertson, a DJ in San Diego who grew up “a huge Taylor Swift fan” in Alabama, and joined The Taylor Party in January 2023, where she has since spun 11 shows in venues everywhere from Omaha to Chicago to Albuquerque.

As a fan, she knew the community was just as important as the music.

“As much fun as the high energy songs are, it’s always been my dream to have, say, ‘Exile’ play on a Saturday night,” she said, naming one of Swift’s slower and more reflective, sad songs. “It’s something that you wouldn’t ever expect to hear outside of your bedroom, or outside of your car. And you get to bring that same energy into a space of hundreds of people, and all of these people have had this experience in their car or in their bedroom listening to this song, just totally enamored by it, and now they get to do that with a community of hundreds of people behind them.”

Every Taylor Swift party has a few throughlines. At some point, the DJ will play the 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” the expanded release of Taylor’s 2012 breakup anthem. Somebody will invariably request something totally obscure, such as the bonus track of a Christmas album that was only released at Target or something that has technically never been published, and more than half the crowd will know it by heart. There will be friends jumping in unison, and crying, and a few boyfriends milling around, trying their best to be supportive. Though the crowd is predominantly women, men are always significantly represented and integrate completely once they are established to be true fans. Every party will have at least a few groups of male friends who drove an hour or more to be there, rocking out to “Bad Blood” in their plaid shirts and baggy jeans, stoked to have a space where getting lost in your feelings is welcomed. There might be a few parents dotting the sidelines, watching the teenagers they drove. Many people will be wearing white t-shirts from the “22” music video that say “not a lot going on at the moment.” The range of emotions will be large, from joyous and thrilling to devastated and sad.

“I cannot speak to why Taylor’s relationship drama is more relatable than any other pop artist’s relationship drama,” said Jim Gallagher, who DJs the Bowery Electric parties in New York, and has played more than 30 Swift parties. “I can think of plenty of bands that I have been obsessed with at various points. But I know that whatever this is, it is something else. And one thing might be, though I know it is more than this, is that she’s very generous with her fans.”

Among many things, Taylor Swift is known for loving her fans. And fans tend to feel genuinely and truly appreciated by her. It is a fandom uniquely centered around obsession, and loyalty, and the object of that obsession never makes the fans feel too much, or too weird, or too intense for their devotion. This makes it feels more reciprocal. Taylor spends hours and hours hiding “Easter eggs” in her outfits, interviews, and promotional materials, and is known for scrolling fan pages for weeks before extending personal invites to her secret listen parties. You don’t have to feel stupid for loving Taylor Swift, because you know she loves you too. She doesn’t have the time or the capacity to meet every fan, but she does her absolute best to stay connected, and that comes off, as multiple people reflected to me, as “genuine.” She genuinely seems to share in the joy her music brings her fans, and recognize the responsibility she has as an artist to her fanbase. Her music comes from her and it is meant for you. And she works hard. She’s not a cool girl, bringing effortless chic to her every move. She goes big or goes home. Her voice is good, of course, but not unattainable. You can sing to it.

“Sometimes you look out, and you see so many people just having so much genuine fun. There’s no pretentious behavior. There’s no ‘too cool for school,’” said Howe, one of the founders of The Taylor Party. “I think most people that are fans of Taylor Swift music embrace the different levels of sometimes unintentional cringe that has been a part of her music throughout different eras, but everybody’s there for it. It’s very much ‘check your ego at the door.’ Come dance. Have a drink with your friends, if that’s your thing and if not, just dance the whole night anyways. And it is such a generous crowd. It’s really hard to pick the wrong Taylor Swift song in these events.”

***

A few weeks later I’m at a club in Brooklyn, where Swift songs are being spun against, confusingly, a backdrop of mismatched music videos. There are hundreds of people dancing. Two older women sit on wooden benches in the corner, eyes closed as they rock back and forth to “Wildest Dreams.” I speak to pairs of sisters, knots of friends, and two well-dressed Spanish men in their 50s, who sip whiskey in dark suits from an elevated bar. The Swift fandom is majority White, by and large, but there is often a significant Asian minority at these events too, as well as those of Indian and Middle Eastern descent, in addition to Black and Latinx fans. The dance floor is way too loud for conversations tonight, but once fans learn I am a reporter, they shout their favorite Swift lyrics to me, eager to explain what brings them out to these parties again and again.

Like many, most Swift fans found her music as an adolescent, where the songs and lyrics helped them feel seen, understood, not alone. They carried the lines from “Dear John,” “Teardrops on My Guitar,” “All Too Well,” “Enchanted,” “Fifteen,” “Red,” and so many others as they made sense of heartbreak, betrayal, joy, love, family pain, or tragedy. Many grew up alongside Swift, who has been in the public eye since she was 15, finding that in every new life stage there was Swift too, baring her soul and wanting everything – love, fame, friends – from life, even when her hopes were disappointed. She was relatable, familiar, authentic, sincere, even as her career took off. She got older, wiser, more cynical, more forgiving, just as they too matured into these new emotions. Other musicians had songs that soared, but Swift was a best friend, an older sister, a peer. When Swift released two albums during the pandemic, it affirmed for many that whatever was happening in the universe, no matter how bleak, Swift would be there to turn the emotions of the world into songs they could sing.

As I circle the floor, writing down the lyrics that fans cherish most closely, I am reminded of a church service I attended many years ago. The pastor stood up to read Psalm 23, asking those in the congregation to stand whenever she got to a line which had helped them at some point in their lives. The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. Some shuffling feet. Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me. More people rise. My cup runneth over. Look around, she said, at how many others have been held by these words. It was moving, startling to see a community recognize in one another the power of carrying within themselves lines which could serve as lifeboats. Words which came from elsewhere, and connected them to each other, never alone.

Taylor Swift dance parties are geared towards the devoted, who come to see and be seen by others who love Swift’s music. They understand each other, these fans who have never met before, because if this music means so much to each of them, then they must share some similar emotional orientation to the world. It makes for fast friendships, another part of the appeal. People often arrive on their own and leave making plans to attend another event with someone from the crowd.

“Anybody willing to spend $15 or $20 just to hear Taylor Swift, where she is not even going to be there, they understand the part of you that is so personal, and so criticized by other people from their lack of understanding.” said Hettrich, who regularly attends such events with friends around New England. “We don’t need to have anything else in common, because they get such a huge part of me that not a lot of other people can get.”

“It can be a lot for some people,” said Camryn Duckworth, 23, an actress and preschool teacher who lives on New York City’s Upper West Side, and ran several Taylor Swift fan accounts as a teenager in North Carolina. When her boyfriend offered to go with her to a dance party for her birthday, she gently dissuaded him. “I told him I might enjoy myself more if I wasn’t making sure he was comfortable. Sometimes my friends will say they want to go with me, and I tell them they don’t have to, simply because it is so extreme. As I try to explain to them, you might like Taylor Swift, but these people love Taylor Swift.”

Her friend, Andrew Rumney, 24, agreed.

“It is our emotional connection to the songs and to her as an artist,” he said. “But there’s also something very fun about being in that environment, when you know all the words and everybody else knows all the words, and everybody knows the nuanced things about the songs that non-super fans don’t know. There’s a bond that you have with those people right off the bat, because you both share that passion, and we make friends so easily.”

Duckworth and Rumney attend multiple Swift events a month, for reasons that sound not unlike why people go to church; there is a familiar liturgy that everyone in attendance knows all the words to, and it is nice to be plugged into a message you find meaningful, with others who find importance in the same experiences. It is also a place to make friends. The shared passion of the crowd, the shared knowledge and known etiquette about the rituals – the lines which are always screamed out loud in unison, the dance moves to certain lyrics, the hidden jokes everyone can recite on cue, the enthusiasm for Track Five songs – turn it into a unique, almost sacred, space, where one’s more palpable self, usually muted in public, can be revealed and celebrated.

“At one of my past shows, the bartender working the event came up to me afterwards, and she said, ‘You know, I didn’t really understand the hype of Taylor Swift, but now I understand,’” shared Robertson, the Taylor Party DJ. “People come, and it’s this kind of spiritual experience, where they let out all of their emotions, and they leave feeling lighter than when they walked in. And as an outsider looking in, I think she hit the nail on the head: This is why people come, because you get to let out all your emotions, and then you just leave feeling lighter than when you walked in.”

The urge to sing in community is as old as human civilization. Anthropologists posit that song is uniquely able to hold a large crowd in harmony, and thus keep massive groups from getting rowdy. The ability of sound and rhythm to transform a space has been utilized in religious rituals throughout history, from the ecstatic dance of Sufi Whirling Dervishes to the wordless melodies of Hasidic niggunim and Gregorian chants. We see this urge for public singing emerge time and again in the modern era, when music has become an unprecedently private activity: The Ashbury religious revival that just wrapped up in Kentucky, where students lingered after a Sunday service and stayed for more than two weeks in perpetual song and prayer, drawing over seven thousand souls to a town of two thousand to join them. The sheer popularity of secular spaces like the piano bar Marie’s Crisis, where group of strangers unite in their shared love of musicals, or Disney raves, where participants belt out their favorite Disney songs. A few weeks ago, I sent out an email to a group of friends asking if anyone would be interested if I planned a tisch, a traditional Shabbat gathering for singing songs, and the response was immediate and overwhelming. The appeal is the community, but also the ability to be an emotional self in that community. Like show tunes, or Swift, tisch songs are unapologetically emotional, intense, sincere. For many, it would be embarrassing to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve in this way in public. But the ritual of these spaces allows many to access an emotional intensity that feels safe, and can be borne.

“I think the word transcendent keeps coming into my head because there’s something about these songs that make you feel something, whatever that is, and I think there’s this recognition, without having to say it in words, that everyone else is feeling how you are,” said Ofer, reflecting on why every time she leaves a Swift dance party, she has the desire to do it again. “I think humans want to feel connected to something, and there’s something really special about feeling that without having to explain why; like, I know everyone in this room feels this connection.”

Shira Telushkin writes on religion, art, culture, and the human search for meaning. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other publications. She teaches religion reporting at the Newmark Journalism School at CUNY. 

The post The Church of Taylor Swift appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

In December 1999 I boarded a plane bound for Tel Aviv as reporters around the world worried that the coming New Year would herald a technological catastrophe. The impending doom, dubbed “Y2K,” was based on a concern that our computers and the systems that run on them would not be able to process a date that ends in two zeros and would, to everyone’s horror, crash at the stroke of midnight at the start of the new millennium. The internet had revolutionized the world at the end of the ‘90s, and people around the globe, now reliant on computers, panicked that no one had properly prepared for the fast-approaching 21^st century and those ominous double zeros.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

New Year’s Eve 1999 fell on a Friday, and I found myself in the Old City of Jerusalem. Y2K panic had reached a fever pitch and the Israelis were as concerned as the Americans that all computers were about to crash. But in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the rules of Shabbat dictated that no one could use technology and so a quiet peace had settled in the neighborhood. After dinner that night, my friends and I climbed the stairs to the roof of our apartment building so we could look out over Jerusalem as the 20^th century came to an end. A small group of Hasidic Jews was also on the roof enjoying a bottle of schnapps. As I was chatting with my friends, we discovered that none of us wore a watch and had no idea if we had missed midnight. But then, off in the distance, we heard church bells ringing and saw fireworks exploding: It was the year 2000 and the city of Bethlehem was celebrating. The Hasidic Jews turned to us – secular American college students in jeans and khakis – offered us some schnapps, put their arms around our shoulders, and started dancing in a circle while singing. I had no idea if computers around the world had crashed, but the new century was, at least to me, off to an unexpected start.

The next day I learned that Y2K did not happen. The massive, relatively new, phenomenon of the internet could continue to expand around the globe, making the world more interconnected than it had ever been – giving everyone immediate access to music, information, and communities of like-minded people. A global technological revolution was underway. The 21^st century had begun.

Our interconnected world and the global phenomena that traverse the planet are the focus of The Revealer’s May issue. The articles take us from the United States to Brazil and from Malaysia to Haiti. The May issue begins with a global phenomenon that has origins in Pennsylvania but that now spans countries worldwide: Taylor Swift. In “The Church of Taylor Swift,” Shira Telushkin investigates the incredible popularity of Taylor Swift dance parties where fans come together to dance exclusively to Swift’s music, where they join in community, and where their emotions run wild – all in what looks, and feels, like ecstatic religious experience. Then, in “The Muslim Women Using Feminine Pronouns for Allah,” Hafsa Lodi explores the growing global trend of Muslim women who describe God as “She” as a way to tap into the tradition’s teachings that God possesses feminine qualities. Next, in “The Brazil Riots, Bolsonaro, and Spiritual Warfare,” Miguel Petrosky explores the significant role Pentecostals played in the January 8, 2023 insurrection in Brazil, the growing place of Pentecostals in rightwing politics, and their connections to conservative politicians throughout the Americas. Then, in “Do You Have to Hate Jews to Be a Nazi? Ask Anton Webern,” Noah Berlatsky reflects on Kanye West’s antisemitism by turning to the Austrian composer Anton Webern, a Nazi sympathizer who remained close friends with Jews, to try to make sense of how someone can fail to see how they support hateful political movements. Following that, in “Awakening Islam through Pop Music,” Shanon Shah considers the global success of Muslim pop music and how it has changed the image of Islam, often in strategic ways. And finally, in “Vodou Fashion and Faith,” Eziaku Nwokocha shares an excerpt from her forthcoming book Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States, where she reflects on what clothing and “religious fashion” can reveal about Vodou practices.

Our May issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Vodou, Gender Variance, and Black Politics Today.” Eziaku Nwokocha joins us to discuss Vodou practices, especially as they relate to issues of gender, sexuality, and race. We explore how Vodou transcends gender and sexual binaries, how the gods of Vodou inhabit people’s lives and influence their decisions, and how Vodou helps Black Americans and others counter racism today. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We live in a deeply interconnected world where global phenomena travel rapidly. As the articles and podcast episode in this issue attest, that interconnectedness can be both beneficial and dangerous. Far-right politicians, as our piece on Pentecostals in Brazil describes, share strategies with like-minded people across national borders in an effort to remake not only their own countries, but the world. But others use today’s technological advances to create international progressive communities, like those in our article on Muslim women who use female pronouns for God. And still others come together virtually and in person to share their love for someone like Taylor Swift—in ways that are also political, also religious, and also an escape from those things.

Y2K did not bring an end to the internet or the global reliance on computer technologies. Let’s hope that’s for the best.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

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