You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our monthly episodes.

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Evangelicals’ Anxieties and Their Politics.”

Happy listening!

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 34: Evangelicals’ Anxieties and Their Politics appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Vernon Bryant via Associated Press)

The following excerpt comes from Sarah Diefendorf’s book The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals. The book explores the concerns facing White Evangelicals at a large congregation in the Pacific Northwest and how they are responding to cultural changes.

This excerpt comes from the book’s first chapter, “Good and Godly in Trump’s America.”

***

On January 22, 2017, the Sunday morning after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a pastor at a predominantly White evangelical megachurch in the Pacific Northwest looked out onto his congregation with weary eyes. Two large screens on either side of the stage displayed a close up of his face as he began speaking. Pastor Dave started his sermon: “In the midst of this broken world, I keep envisioning one thing: our church is on the operating table.”

Pastor Dave’s words suggest a level of vulnerability that we do not often associate with White evangelicals in the United States, especially following the 2016 election of Donald Trump. The pastor’s opening statement acknowledges a broken world, but also implies that perhaps the church is part of that brokenness and needs to be repaired too. Pastor Dave elaborated on his first thoughts with, “We are living in a broken world. Sometimes the corrupt is all we see. The election cycle did not help with that!” Some people in the room of 500 or so congregants at this place I call Lakeview Church laughed, and others nodded along. “Those presidential debates were messy…but the world is not divided into good and evil.”

On this cold January day, the otherwise usually upbeat and smiley pastor seemed distracted and concerned. The 52-year-old White pastor continued his sermon and told his congregation that as a result of the brokenness of the world, he believes that Christians are suffering. Pastor Dave suggested to his congregation that they need to work through this suffering, and learn to respond to it not with ugliness, anger, bitterness, or madness, but “to react in a godly way.” Pastor Dave bowed his head and exited the stage.

Pastor Amy replaced Pastor Dave on the large stage. Pastor Amy is an Associate Pastor at Lakeview church. This job title includes assisting Pastor Dave, as the Lead Pastor, in religious services and other daily operations of the church. Pastor Amy is a 35-year-old White woman and mother whose young children would often accompany her on stage. This morning, however, Pastor Amy walked slowly to the front of the stage with two heavy, large green buckets. Pastor Amy lifted each of the two buckets up onto a stool, and the cameras zoomed in on the buckets, bringing them, along with the liquid in each of them, into focus on the screens at the back of the stage. Pastor Amy was wearing a wireless headset and microphone, barely visible under her blonde bob. Pastor Amy raised a large yellow sponge in the air and asked the congregation to identify the object in her hand. When they responded accordingly, Pastor Amy asked, “How do we find out what is inside the sponge?” Before the crowd responded again Pastor Amy excitedly yelled “Squeeze it!”

Pastor Amy dunked the sponge in the bucket of dark colored water and then removed it, squeezing it over the bucket for everyone to see. The camera zoomed in on her hands. Pastor Amy held the sponge as black liquid flowed from it.  She said, “This is you. We don’t like it. This is what the world does when it is hurt or pressed.”

Pastor Amy then dipped the sponge in the bucket of clear water and held it up to the crowd before squeezing it again and said, “But here is our challenge. When you’re pressed this is what happens. When you’re pressed it is rivers of living water that come forth. It’s not the suffering that gets us noticed, but how we react.” Clear water dripped down Pastor Amy’s arms as she continued to hold the sponge out above her. The worship team started to quietly play a new song on the stage behind her, and Pastor Amy joined in with the lyrics. She chanted, “I’m trading my sorrows. I’m trading my shame. I’m laying them down for the joy of the Lord…” as she vigorously squeezed the remaining clear, or “living” water out of the sponge for all in the room to see.

Pastor Dave returned to the stage to explain the meanings of the demonstrations to the congregation. Pastor Dave turned Pastor Amy’s elaborate and metaphorical demonstration into a clearly translated lesson for all watching: that they all need to learn to respond to their suffering without letting any ugliness show.

During the two years I spent conducting research at Lakeview Church, it became quite clear that “ugly” was a stand in for being marked as racist, sexist, and/or homophobic. Since the emergence of the culture wars in the United States in the 1970s, White evangelicals have come to political power and exuded great cultural influence through battles that privilege and protect the interests of White Christians, and most often White Christian men. Indeed, the lived experiences of White Christian men and women are often synonymous with, and the default category for what is understood to be American (Marti 2020). Now, religious affiliation is declining across the United States. Younger generations feel more abstract and unknown than ever as the social landscape shifts dramatically with the legalization of same-sex marriage, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the #MeToo movement, to name a few. The suffering the church perceives is directly tied to the status loss around White Christian manhood, and what it might mean for their longstanding cultural projects if many in the United States are unwilling to accept these identities as a default experience and, perhaps even worse for the church, unwilling to support the organizations that continue to protect these identities as a top priority.

(Image credit: Angela Hsieh)

Three months prior to Pastor Dave’s sermon, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton engaged in three presidential candidate debates that quickly became known for their unprecedented hostility. The New York Times referred to the debates as a “90-minute spectacle of character attacks.” Clinton referenced the leaked 2005 tape in which Trump referred to his ability to grope women because of his fame. Trump repeatedly brought up accusations that President Bill Clinton was abusive towards women, and that Hillary Clinton was also responsible for attacking those same women. Trump said, on air, that Hillary Clinton had “tremendous hate in her heart” and infamously referred to her as a “nasty woman,” which became the rallying cry and self-identification for many who organized against Trump.  In her book a year later, Hillary Clinton referred to the debates as experiences in which her “skin crawled.”  Pastor Dave, and many at Lakeview Church acknowledge the “messiness” of those debates while appearing to avoid taking a side. For a group of people who believe quite strongly in the binaries of sinner/savior, and heaven/hell, they recognize that, at the intersections of their religious beliefs, political beliefs, and own perceived need for change and growth, thinking in binary terms, or, in this case, “good and evil” doesn’t really work.  Instead, Pastor Dave, and Lakeview Church, see themselves in the messiness of those debates.

How do White evangelicals reconcile a need to grow and retain members in a rapidly changing social environment in which their beliefs, and by extension, their own sense of self, might be understood or labeled as “ugly?” What does it mean to react to this perceived suffering in a way that is, according to pastors Dave and Amy, godly and good, and what needs to happen on the metaphorical operating table for this to happen? How the church wrestles with these questions and navigates their responses are at the heart of this book.

This book documents the vulnerability, anxiety, and confusion that White evangelicals profess as they work to recreate themselves as good and godly, and to avoid being marked as ugly. I show how White evangelicals negotiate their personal beliefs around questions of gender, the family, race, and sexuality alongside the larger goals of the church of which they are a part. This book uncovers the ways in which a mega-church and its congregants seek to grow their membership, and, by logical extension, hold onto their cultural status. I illustrate the ways in which these goals work in tandem with continued White evangelical support for conservative politics, a longstanding relationship that continues to shape the social, cultural, and political landscape of the United States.

***

I entered Lakeview Church for the first time in late Fall 2015, with the goal of documenting the ways in which White evangelicals were debating questions related to gender and sexuality, especially after the federal legalization of same-sex marriage in June of 2015. However, in the two years I spent at Lakeview Church, the political landscape shifted around me.

On November 8^th, 2016, a year into my fieldwork, I found myself among those who reportedly voted Donald Trump into office. I was already documenting the daily life, rituals, and debates of Lakeview Church, many of which were related to gender, sexuality, the family, and questions about the state of the church in a nation perceived to be in a cultural moment of great upheaval and change. The goals of my initial research project that brought me to Lakeview, then, are different, and smaller, than the goals of this book. But they are connected.

White evangelicals are willing to work to change with the times in an effort to uphold their cultural relevance, especially around questions and beliefs related to gender, sexuality, and the White family. However, these changes come with increased anxiety and feelings of confusion and resentment. And these changes often reflect the goals of the church instead of the concerns for the livelihood of others, as church members and the organizations of which they are a part work to reconcile an ugly past while appealing to younger generations for a more sustainable future as a church.

To both illustrate and complicate this idea of change among White evangelicals, this book is oriented around a concept I call the imagined secular. I find that evangelicals at Lakeview talk about a range of liberal projects: topics like feminism, trans rights, reproductive justice, “deviant” sexuality, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The imagined secular encapsulates what White evangelicals imagine these liberal projects to be and shapes their responses to them.  Importantly, the imagined secular holds the feelings associated with these cultural changes in the United States as the church seeks to respond to and understand their own beliefs in relation to these topics. Conversations, debates, and concerns about the imagined secular occur among members in small groups within the church and are openly discussed by the pastoral team in Sunday sermons. These conversations encapsulate the very messiness to which Pastor Dave alludes, and they also show the church’s proverbial hand, as the content of these debates identify what the church thinks they need to engage with to be understood as good. In order to not be understood, or marked, as sexist, the church needs to talk about feminism. To avoid the label of racist, they need to talk about Black Lives Matter. And to no longer be the homophobes, the church needs to reconcile its position in response to the federal legalization of same-sex marriage.

The White evangelical church is facing dual projects: it needs to continue to grow its membership, and it needs to work to grow during a time in which rapid cultural shifts are illuminating the inequalities that form the pillars on which the church is built. In an effort to accomplish both of these intertwined goals—to appear welcoming and increase membership among younger generations—the church provides a space for the messy, varied responses to the components of the imagined secular world. However, I document the ways in which the church also engages in a bounded welcoming of components of the imagined secular: the church entertains conversations about feminism, Black Lives Matter, and same-sex marriage, but Lakeview Church is an organization governed by hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality; as such, the church engages with the imagined secular as an organization in a way that allows for (and really, encourages) inequalities to endure. How they respond to the imagined secular sheds light on the ways in which conservative politics endure even in the midst of engagement with these mass cultural movements and shifts.

This book documents how the church and its congregants claim feminism as part of the church’s beliefs while upholding gendered inequalities, how they reconcile and also reinforce White nationalist tendencies with the need to now reach across racial lines, and how evangelicals retain a privileged position around reinforcements of a heterosexual Christian family while jettisoning some of their former associations with homophobia. The church is finding a way to respond to the “suffering” that they perceive, and they are doing so, in line with the advice of Pastor Amy, without letting their “ugliness” show. But the individual engagement with the imagined secular reflects what I call an instrumental acceptance and forced excitement of these cultural shifts, paying lip service to the ideas and ideals that challenge the foundations of the church while also simultaneously retaining power central to the intersections of whiteness, Christianity, masculinity and heterosexuality.

In Trump, White evangelicals found a politician who could help them with this project, someone who could do the ugly work for them to maintain the status quo, halt progressive change and defend their faith while they continue to wrestle with a host of questions about their collective identity. The evangelicals at Lakeview Church did not necessarily vote for Donald Trump because of what he stands for. Rather, in many ways, Trump symbolizes his own type of wall that can hold the imagined secular at bay while the church regroups during a period of time in which they feel as though they are quickly losing cultural sway, especially among younger generations. Indeed, to Make America Great is to uphold a history of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, and to Keep America Great is to ensure that no one else receives access to the privileges long afforded White Christian Americans. Trump and his policies can publicly enforce what many White evangelicals would rather support in private. Trump represented one politician ready to support and manifest a White evangelical political and cultural project, but he is not the first nor the last.

Lakeview Church is located in the Pacific Northwest; as such, this research moves the focus on White evangelical support for Trump out of the geographic South—out of the working class, disillusioned communities who voted for him, as Arlie Hochschild documents, because they feel they have lost their spot in line for the American Dream (2016). Instead, this research centers those who embody the American Dream, and also voted for Trump. I investigate the “coastal elites”: the middle – and upper-middle-class suburban White evangelicals who live in one of the areas of the United States with the best quality of life, and who don’t want to lose it. This work expands our understandings of the enduring relationship between White evangelism and conservative politics by asking these questions in an area of the country where such a relationship is often presumed irrelevant.

Sarah Diefendorf is a visiting scholar at Indiana University.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 34 of the Revealer podcast: “Evangelicals’ Anxieties and Their Politics”

The post Worried White Evangelicals appeared first on The Revealer.

(Women Talking movie poster)

This review discusses sexual violence and trauma experienced by real women in an insular religious community in South America in the early 2000s. It is also an account of how these women and their stories are reimagined for film, a fictional narrative that considers how they respond to these events as individuals, listen to one another, and collectively determine whether it is possible to move forward with their faith intact.

1. Hayloft Assembly

A self-declared act of “female imagination,” Women Talking began as a novel by Miriam Toews before it became an Oscar-winning film adapted and directed by Sarah Polley. Both women, however, worked with knowledge that their art came from life: it really is true that more than 130 women and girls in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia were drugged with cow tranquilizer and raped by their male neighbors and kin between 2005-2009. It’s also true that eight men were convicted and sentenced to prison for these crimes in 2011 (with one still at large). Whether the survivors experienced justice or healing through these legal means is not a matter of public record.

“Where I come from,” the film’s narrator explains, “we [women] didn’t talk about our bodies. So when something like this happened there was no language for it.” Her words convey a reality of religious conservatism rendered more complicated given that the Mennonite women in Bolivia largely couldn’t speak Spanish like the men of their colony could. Unable to read or write even in their Low German language meant that these women couldn’t testify to local officials without mediation, let alone receive psychological treatment after the attacks.

But if brought together to discuss what really happened, what might these women say? Women Talking ventures a speculative answer, where catharsis takes shape in an intimate and unvarnished depiction of women not simply talking but collectively reimagining their future.

In the film, after two men from the community are caught trying to enter the room of a teenage girl (Neitje, played by Liv McNeil), they confess to the rapes and name the other men involved. The offenders are sent to jail, and the remaining men of the colony—with the exception of August (Ben Whishaw), a schoolteacher who recently returned to the community after his family had been excommunicated—follow them into the city to post their bail. The male elders have counselled the women to decide whether or not they will forgive their attackers. If they don’t, the elders warn, the women will be forced to leave the colony and be denied entry to heaven. With this ultimatum, the women take the unusual step of voting on their course of action: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. With the vote tied between fighting and leaving, and a mere 48 hours before the men return, the women turn to deliberation. They elect the women and girls of three families to assemble in the hayloft and make a decision for everyone.

The grandmothers start the proceeding with a quintessential ritual of Christian humility—a scene of foot-washing both gentle and playful. They are in no rush to gather their weapons or pack their bags. The girls in their braids giggle as the women wash their feet; the intimacy and vulnerability of hands stroking unadorned feet and pregnant bellies symbolizes the work of service that the women are about to perform. In this scene, Agata (Judith Ivey) dries and kisses the feet of her daughter Ona (Rooney Mara), an unmarried woman made pregnant by her rapist. She smiles at her mother as the camera narrows in on her stomach, signaling the intergenerational stakes of what is about to occur.

In encountering these moments, the viewer is not a voyeur or a fly on the wall, but intentionally positioned in situ. We are meant to sit among the women, meet their gaze, and see them as they saw each other—without makeup, unplucked eyebrows and all. Only then can they honestly share the grief that afflicts them. Director Sarah Polley accomplished this vulnerability by shooting dozens of—and in some cases over a hundred—takes of a single scene to capture each actor’s reactions. The shift in perspective allowed for subtle yet emotionally-driven character development and the illusion of movement in a film set largely in one location—a hayloft.

(A scene from Women Talking)

The film’s pacing is both conversational and consequential: the women talk, listen, and argue, taking breaks to milk the cows and feed the children, all while they debate the meaning of forgiveness and the possibility of salvation for a woman who withholds it. The viewer more accustomed to the pressures of car chases to move the plot along may start worrying that they’d better hurry up before the men get back. But the women take their time. They hear each other out, sometimes raising their voices in disagreement and other times turning to prayer and song to console each other. Finding a path of action that keeps the women and their children safe without violating their communal commitments to non-violence proves difficult, but it is a responsibility they take seriously. Their understanding of justice grows out of their willingness to change their minds to fulfil the duty of deliberation that the other women in their community gave to them. One woman’s salvation is therefore inextricably linked with her responsibility to her kin and her community.

Women Talking puts women at the center of the storytelling both on- and off-screen. Polley, who won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, worked alongside acclaimed producers Frances McDormand and Dede Gardner to lead a predominantly female cast (Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, Rooney Mara, Sheila McCarthy, and Frances McDormand, among others). Polley has repeatedly described the film as an act of community, including in her jubilant acceptance speech at the Oscars.

When asked to write and direct the film, Polley thought deliberately about how to avoid telling a story about sexual violence that viewers could distance themselves from by writing it off as merely a tale of religious conservatism. She did not want to give “a secular audience permission” to say that “this could never happen here.” For Polley, Women Talking is about all of us, not only Mennonites. Setting the film in an undisclosed locale in the year 2010, Polley portrays Toews’s novel in “the realm of a fable;” a fiction informed by her own understanding of gendered violence beyond the world built within the hayloft. A film about white Christian women that is written and performed by white women, Women Talking tells stories of sexual assault, victim blaming, and attempts to control women’s bodies through Christian stories of salvation.

Yet the film also asks audiences to withhold judgment. Religion in the film is both a source of pain and of possibility.

In working with an ensemble cast, Polley has been lauded for her “democratic method” on set, where she prioritized collaboration and good working conditions for the cast and crew. She hired an on-set therapist and ensured that each day of shooting ended at a reasonable hour so no one would have to miss time at home with their families. Polley’s feminist approach to filmmaking is born out of her own trauma as a child actor and a woman in an industry that often calls for its workforce to sacrifice their personal lives, and even their personal safety, for the sake of making a “good” film. (Polley’s recent memoir, Run Toward the Danger, reflects on these experiences).

2. The Mennonite Question

Though Polley chose to avoid direct reference to the Bolivian Mennonite community in Women Talking and did not use the word ‘Mennonite’ in the script, Toews playfully noted during the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere that “all Mennonites will know that they’re Mennonites.” Most viewers will also pick up on the women being some sort of Christian, but what does that mean?

Mennonites, like the Amish, are an Anabaptist strand of Christianity that formed during the Protestant reformation in Europe. Taking their name from an early leader, Menno Simons (1496-1561), the basic tenets of the faith are two-fold: (1) only mature, consenting adults can choose to be baptized and (2) one’s life should be guided by acts of service and pacifism, oriented by the idea that violence is unjust and that conflict should be peaceably resolved. Historically, both tenets set Mennonites at odds with the state and dominant church, and they sought out places to live where the ruling powers would grant them the privilege to practice their faith in relative isolation. Over time, they developed a reputation as good farmers because of their collective (but arguably still capitalist) social organization. Many waves of migration brought Mennonites from Prussia to Russia and then to Canada and the United States. By the nineteenth century, their agrarian prowess made them attractive immigrants who were often at the vanguard of settler-colonialism in North America.

Finding a context in which Mennonites could exercise their religious freedom without state intervention, fear of persecution, or risking cultural assimilation meant being a religion on the move. The Mennonite community in Bolivia where the “real story” occurred is called the Manitoba Colony. Its members are descendants of Russian Mennonites who first immigrated to Canada in the 1870s, settling as a block in the new province of Manitoba, which was Anishinaabe and Métis land. The Canadian government promised this Indigenous land to the Mennonites, along with a “Privilegium,” which guaranteed their autonomy to educate their children and abstain from military conscription.

By the 1920s, the government had decided that Mennonites should start sending their children to public schools, which were taught in English. This perceived imposition motivated many Manitoba Mennonites to move to Mexico, where the government allowed them to set up new reserves, or colonies, with increased autonomy (e.g., no police intervention in community matters) to work the land and preserve their German and Low German languages, while enforcing strict boundaries with the non-Mennonite world.

Inevitably, new disputes over “worldliness” and assimilation emerged within Mexican Mennonite communities, and splinter colonies multiplied. Mennonites sought out new states, including Bolivia, Belize, and Paraguay, that would grant them religious freedom in exchange for their agricultural skills; and so they continued to turn Indigenous lands into agrarian colonies.

The situation at the Manitoba Colony fell into the state’s domain when one woman accosted two men entering her home in June 2009. Those men confessed to the community rapes, and criminal proceedings took place after they named the other men involved. According to a journalist who covered the criminal trial in 2011, the Manitoba Colony was established in 1991 and is one of over seventy communities in Bolivia, many of which arrived as early as the 1960s.

(Mennonite women in Bolivia. Image source: Lisa Wiltse/Corbis via Getty Images)

Mennonite separation from “the world” has long depended on policing the bodies and minds of women. In these conservative South American communities, women’s isolation has been compounded by illiteracy, lack of Spanish speaking and reading skills, and the fact that elders forbid them from education and from marriage outside the community. As anthropologist Paola Canova has shown in her research on Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, men’s engagement with “the world” is less regulated than women’s and is facilitated by their literacy and knowledge of Spanish. Canova even details how Mennonite men regularly leave their colonies to seek out sex workers, mostly Indigenous Ayoreo women.

3. We are Bruised

When the women of Manitoba came forward to the community’s male leaders about their experiences of waking up bruised and bleeding in beds soiled with dirt, journalist Jean Friedman-Rudovsky explains that “the council of church ministers, a group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony,” dismissed their testimony on the basis that the women couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. Without men to blame, the women were led to believe they had imagined things or that possibly Satan, or ghosts, had done it. Media coverage of the Manitoba Colony leaned sensational, calling the attacks “ghost rapes.” Toews expressed her frustration with this epithet, arguing that “it’s not accurate and, obviously, it perpetuates what the elders were saying to the women. Some of the women had begun to think that way themselves: ‘Could it be demons? Satan? Punishment? Ghosts?’” Disabused of their body’s record of reality, the film’s narration frames this “gaping silence” as a “real horror” that the women were left to navigate on their own.

In the film, clarity comes from the women openly talking with each other about what actually happened. A powerful monologue from Salome Friesen (Claire Foy) exemplifies this. In the setup for this scene, Mariche Loewen (Jessie Buckley), asks the women to consider the possibility that the wrong men have been put in jail. A cynical mom of many children whose husband regularly beats her, Mariche at first mocks the deliberations as pointless, but eventually brings the other women to see their own complicity in the familial power relations that afflict them. Salome, enraged over the rape of her four-year-old daughter, responds to Mariche’s questioning of the men’s guilt: “No. No! That is not our responsibility, because we aren’t in charge of whether or not they are punished. We know that we have been attacked by men, not ghosts, or Satan, as we were led to believe for so long. We know that we have not imagined these attacks … We know that we are bruised,” Salome exclaims, “and pregnant, and infected, and terrified, and insane – and some of us are dead!” Jolting us back into the reality of what they must do, she reminds the women of what they already know as true: “We … must protect our children, regardless of who is guilty.”

There are limited flashback scenes depicting the women in the aftermath of having been raped while drugged unconscious. Avoiding voyeurism, the scenes focus not on the violent act but on the women’s coming to knowledge of it. Their pain and rage are evoked as much by their screams and cries, as by the blood that stains the pattern of a handmade quilt and the white of a cotton nightgown.

As the women dwell with the question of what they should do, they spin out a new theology. Salome’s sister Ona prompts the women to consider whether forgiveness that is forced is true forgiveness at all. Given the pacifist ethic of their community, this is a serious matter that can affect each woman’s status in heaven and in the eyes of God. They know they cannot stay and fight, for they might become murderers if they do. They will not flee in fear like animals nor can they ask all of the men, guilty or not, to leave. In fact, they laugh at the absurdity of it but realize that the men and boys will truly suffer without them. For many conservative Mennonites, the household dynamic remains tethered to traditional understandings of a man as the head of his household—a husband and father to whom one should submit because God ordains it that way. However, the elected women cannot overlook how they feel or what has been done to them. As one of the grandmothers, Greta (Sheila McCarthy) advises, the women must inhale and digest the violence into fuel—to be productive, as good Mennonites should.

4. “I am not Mennonite.”

In a radio interview for CBC’s Q with Tom Power, Sarah Polley reiterates a point she has made various times throughout the media circuit surrounding the promotion of her film: “I am not Mennonite.” This declaration is not meant to distance herself from these women’s experiences but rather to make a distinction in her approach to telling their stories. She is an outsider looking in, and her account is necessarily “different from Miriam [Toews] telling this story.” Toews based her novel on the real events that took place in Bolivia, while also drawing from her own Mennonite upbringing. Toews explains that she “felt an obligation, a need, to write about these women… I’m related to them. I could easily have been one of them.”

Toews, who was raised in Steinbach, a predominantly Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada, left the community to pursue a writing career. Her books, however, remain filled with Mennonite women talking. In her memory of the Mennonite women who raised her, Toews explains that “there’s a certain kind of natural, inherent storytelling capacity … Not to the point where they’re disobedient. They know their roles and they play them. But when they get together, there’s a lot of laughter and their own kind of coded, rebellious exchange.” It is a relational spirit and emotional release that she wanted to portray in her book, and something she asked Polley to preserve in the novel’s translation to the screen. Despite the grim nature of what happened to them, laughter is how these women survive and overcome their pain. “They need it,” Polley affirms.

In many ways, this still feels like a film about Mennonites. The women deliberate with reference to biblical passages and sing hymns, always centering forgiveness and fidelity to God. But the faithfulness of Polley’s storytelling is not only intellectual and theological, it is aesthetic as well: braided hair and flocks of children; matching mother and daughter homemade dresses; the strength required to haul water and harness horses; the gentleness and humility needed to crawl on the floor with a baby. Polley’s depiction of the women at work and play provides an infrastructure for hearing their stories.

Toews and other Mennonite consultants advised Polley during her script writing and offered suggestions on the fine details of the film’s production from set design to filming locations. Mennonite consultants also worked alongside Quita Alfred, the film’s costume designer. Together, they sewed dresses and sourced fabrics that were authentic to the community’s patterns and standards of “plain dress,” sold by Mennonite shopkeepers, and reflective of the different ages and personalities of each character. The wardrobe and cinematography are therefore key elements of the film’s design that are coded as theologically conservative, drawing on a markedly Mennonite aesthetic—an aesthetic also embodied through women’s relationships to each other and to their children. 

5. Reimagining the World

Critical responses to Women Talking abound. Reviews in the LA Times and the New York Times praised it as a brilliant ensemble piece evoking the “power of speech.” A New Yorker review was less convinced, suggesting that while the script is riveting, and the directing “skillful and sincere,” the film is too conventional, the soundtrack too distracting, and the performances too sentimental and dramatic. “As a result, the movie remains more of an admirable idea, an ambitious ideal, than an experience.”

Dismissal by way of conventionality speaks to a cultural tendency to belittle women’s stories and experiences for not being as momentous as they ought to be or could have been if done or said differently. Polley responded directly to this attitude with the making of Women Talking: “Actually,” she counters, “these women and this conversation, and their willingness and ability to change their minds and change each other’s minds and to listen, should be treated as though it’s the most important thing in the world. They are literally remaking their world, and …  the future for their kids.” The decision to leave a community in which their identities are so intricately woven, and their presence so integral to its ongoing survival, is not trivial or dramatic, it is life changing.

Mennonites too have offered their perspectives on the film. Many have praised its beauty, “hard questions,” and “larger truths.” Others note their own ethical qualms about telling a story of the sexual violence in the Manitoba Colony without directly speaking to the people who live there. An act of female imagination tethered to the lives of real women and communities, Women Talking has prompted many challenging conversations in its wake.

Yet, even with the laughter and hope portrayed in both Toews’ and Polley’s accounts of what happened, knowing that the real women of the Manitoba Colony never held such a meeting and never left homes to start anew adds a sense of gravity to the story. It reminds us that not every story is heard nor does every voice have the capacity to speak it. Even if these women talking are a figment of other women’s imaginations, we should listen.

Christina Pasqua is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion and in the Book History and Print Culture Program. Her research focuses on the role of creativity and craft in how comic book artists read, interpret, and illustrate biblical stories, particularly within the context of their own lives. She also writes about autobiography, aesthetics, and depictions of gendered bodies in the arts, film, and popular culture, more broadly.

Pamela Klassen is a professor who researches and teaches the study of religion in North America and Turtle Island at the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on colonialism, treaties, museums, and public memory. Her family roots are in Mennonite communities in Manitoba and she grew up attending a Mennonite church in Toronto, where she did a lot of talking and listening.

The post Women Talking and Reimagining the World appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Olivier Douliery for Getty Images)

On February 26, 2012, a neighborhood watch coordinator killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin while Martin was returning home with a bag of Skittles. On May 25, 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd with a knee to his neck for nine minutes. These killings of Black men transformed the discussion of race in the U.S. and beyond. They drew attention to the lingering effects of slavery in the present, and to the way that anti-Blackness affects the daily lives of Black Americans. The mass protests in responses to the killings of Martin and Floyd, along with a dozen other Black Americans whose names were mourned with hashtags, reminded Americans of all races that the civil rights movement had not solved the problem of racial injustice. Even after the election of a Black president, anti-Blackness persisted: among police, in the prison system, in the economy, in the workplace, in schools, in healthcare, in real estate – in every aspect of U.S. life.

During the civil rights movement, Christian clergy were on the frontlines, sometimes accompanied by their Jewish and Muslim counterparts. In the racial justice protests of the past decade, abbreviated with the label Black Lives Matter, clergy are often less visible. Young protesters, often female, often queer, voice suspicion of religion, and of Christianity in particular. Yet the role of religion in these two waves of Black justice movements does not contrast as starkly as it may seem. The grassroots organizers who fueled the civil rights movement a half-century ago were also often suspicious of religion (behind-the-scenes leader Ella Baker could best be described as a humanist in her religious orientation), and most Christian churches, even most Black Christian churches, did not support the movement. Religious ideas and practices swirl around Black Lives Matter organizing: languages of spirit, magic, and love; practices of prayer and political ritual; and religious leaders and institutions continue to provide critical infrastructures both in terms of organizing and theory.

Scholars of religion are taking note. They are asking: How does this most recent wave of Black justice movements make us understand Black religion and American religion in new ways? How do religious and political forms of imagination mingle in protest spaces? What new histories do we need to tell to make sense of the eclectic spirituality that we find around Black Lives Matter? And how do Black justice movements expose the limits to secular political horizons?

To address these questions, Terrence L. Johnson, a professor of African American religions at Harvard Divinity School, published We Testify with Our Lives: How Religion Transformed Radical Thought from Black Power to Black Lives Matter in 2021, and Vincent Lloyd, a professor of political theology at Villanova University, published Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination in 2022. While animated by similar questions, the two books take rather different stances toward religion and toward politics. In a series of conversations with one another, we probed these differences while also reflecting on the state of discourse about race, politics, and religion – in the academy but also in the world.

***

Vincent Lloyd: One of the things I particularly appreciate about your book, We Testify with Our Lives, is the way you unexpectedly shift focus. Instead of the civil rights era, your narrative centers the Black Power era. Implicitly, I think you are arguing that to understand our current, twenty-first century moment, to understand the Black Lives Matter era, we have to turn to Black Power. Further, you show how that Black Power period was not just about men: power does not equal patriarchy. And you show how there was a deep religious sensibility circulating in racial justice struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Various forms of spirituality and “sacred subjectivity,” as you call it, were inextricable from radical Black politics.

This is a hugely important contribution to both the study of Black religion and the study of Black politics. I was especially taken with an implication of using the approach you do: political liberalism – by which I mean a focus on rights, equality, and the incremental redress of injustice – is no longer the framework in which we must understand Black politics. You argue that scholars of the Black Power era have tried to squeeze the demands of those activists into a liberal framework, but by attending to the spiritual and ethical dimensions of Black Power, we can be more faithful to the political claims professed by its adherents. You vividly illustrate this point with meditations on, for example, how writer Toni Cade Bambara grounds her commitment to Black self-determination in her attention to spiritual healing.

I want to probe your thinking about the spiritual and ethical foundations of Black politics because I am broadly sympathetic to it – yet I remain hesitant about fully endorsing your argument. One hesitation I have is illustrated by what you have to say about Bambara: I struggle to see the radical potential in the discourse around healing – as in healing from social injustices. You argue that Black feminists in the 1970s demanded wholeness and health, individually and collectively, but those demands have been overshadowed by their male contemporaries’ demands for rights and power. One part of the healing discourse strikes me as compelling and correct: that individually and socially we suffer from grave diseases that require attention and care through creative response. But that formulation still feels like it is missing some essential political energy, some combustibility that is needed for radical change. And I worry that healing discourse in popular culture has been dramatically watered down over the last half century, and particularly in the last decade, with its political potential diluted.

Thinking about the politics in healing points to what I see as a deeper ambivalence I wonder about in your work. You are drawn to aspects of the Black tradition that promise radical transformation, not incremental change. And you are looking for religious resources in the Black tradition that can fuel that radical transformation. But how are we able to discern which political-theological tools will enable deep change?

Consider recent debates about prison abolition: should we demand the impossible, abolition, and only support reforms that shrink the system, or should we demand the possible, advocating for reforms that soften the suffering of those incarcerated even if those reforms might actually grow the prison system? These options map onto what some call the difference between a leftist ethos (abolition, in this case) and a liberal ethos (reform an imperfect system). While both a liberal and a leftist ethos appreciate the tragic nature of the world, what I would call the interlocking systems of domination that fill our world, the liberal commends developing tools to discern domination and respond rightly to it, pulling us toward equality and justice. The leftist feels that domination is an existential threat and envisions a world without domination. For the leftist, discerning and responding to domination is motivated by that conjured vision of another world, wholly other than the present. Because of this, the leftist is attuned to moments of surprise, when the unexpected erupts and transforms our horizon of possibility whereas the liberal pushes to expand the edges of the possible.

I would contend, therefore, that the leftist has a religious sensibility that the liberal lacks – and has hope. We only fully appreciate the nature of religion and the nature of politics when we believe they are both sites where the unexpected can interrupt the world, potentially changing things in the direction of justice. There can be a miracle, or a revolution!

Bringing this discussion into the present, in the case of Black Lives Matter, maybe that means believing that anti-Blackness needs to be uprooted by rethinking our political and social institutions from the ground up, interrupting our everyday routines, rather than growing diversity bureaucracies that offer patches and calm feelings. When I hear “religious left” these days, most of what it denotes is religious people who are liberals, who lack a full appreciation of the nature of religion and politics. I wonder whether your book might be complicating that association, opening readers to the possibility that there was a moment in U.S. history when there was a religious left that was genuinely leftist, genuinely invested in radical transformation, not plotting incremental change?

Terrence L. Johnson: Your question makes me think, first, of Joshua Cherniss’s highly engaging Liberalism in Dark Times, where he masterfully intervenes in debates on justice by examining how “tempered liberalism” is committed both to liberalism and confronting the horrors of political strife. Tempered liberalism employs political ethics as a framework for “shaping how individuals engage in politics.” Cherniss is committed to a liberalism rooted in individual rights, liberty, and equality, informed by gross inequalities and atrocities, and designed to offer an instructive tool, i.e., political ethics, to “inspire” political actors to engage politics with a deep understanding of suffering and evil in the world.

I differ from Cherniss. I attempted to argue in We Testify with Our Lives, that religion, institutionally and culturally, sets the stage for Black power and other forms of political resistance that transcended a singular voting-rights agenda. Toni Cade Bambara’s religious imaginary that you mentioned is not necessarily leftist but “multilingual” as described by Tracey Hucks and Dianne (Stewart) Diakite in their essay “Africana Religious Studies: Toward a Transdisciplinary Agenda in an Emerging Field.” As imagined in Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, religion emerges as competing and overlapping sites of discourse. At times, scripture is the source of religion or spirituality; in other instances, prayer circles led by non-Christian healers serve as the primary terrain of religion.

In your book, Black Dignity, you beautifully narrate the link between Christianity and African indigenous spirituality among the founders and many of the followers of the Black Lives Matter movement. You retrieve “Black magic” to characterize the spirituality and spiritual ethos guiding contemporary racial justice movements, and you suggest that the distinction between Christianity and Black magic is nominal. Your argument, which I think assumes practitioners retrieve both traditions in ways that signal they are far more compatible than not, appears to be in line with what Yvonne Chireau argues in her acclaimed Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. At issue is the potential meaning-making value of religion in Black political struggles.

Do you see any evidence of religion as a resource for changing the terms of political engagement or establishing new practices and languages within political struggles? As you know, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham framed the nineteenth-century Black church as a “counter-public,” where political, entrepreneurial, and civic concerns surfaced alongside religious and spiritual matters. She lifted a scholarly veil to examine the institutional and cultural practices fueling Black life in terms of spirituality, education, politics, and entrepreneurship. Do you see Black Lives Matter, and Black magic, as helpful resources for uncovering new vocabularies and complicating how we might understand Black politics in light of Black Lives Matter? I don’t think we give those traditions adequate attention in Black politics. We recognize religion as symbolically important for contextualizing Black freedom struggles, but I want to suggest that African American religions inform both leftist and conservative political traditions in Black life. The notion of self and communal critique as the starting point for engaging politics can be traced to Black religion. In this context, Black preaching and scripture are “talking” texts in which the “dialogue” aims to transgress and transform familiar and traditional boundaries. Political concepts, such as double consciousness and respectability politics, bear witness to this dialogical tradition.

VL: I think we’re getting right at the heart of things, where we both are trying to make our way through difficult territory.

We both think some quite fundamental changes are needed in the way the world, and the nation, are structured – not only along lines of race but also of economics and gender, and others as well. We also both value a tragic sensibility, appreciating that we cannot create a map from here to where we want to go, that we are inevitably missing some of the ills of the world in the present, and that our efforts to achieve a more just future will inevitably result in injustices that surprise us. These two sensibilities, the imperative to radical transformation and the humility called for by a tragic sensibility, are at odds with each other. I see you grappling with those tensions in your book and in your remarks on Cherniss.

I hear you calling this problem one of “political ethics,” and I hear you urging us to turn to religion and spirituality as essential resources for response. I hesitate, though, on both of these points.

I believe it is crucially important to preserve a domain of politics that is quite worldly and quite practical. We see a problem, we get together, we pool our resources and experiences, and we try to solve it. I think of that task as having a certain autonomy, and needing a certain autonomy, from questions of ethics. Yes, we should also reflect on deep ethical problems of how to live, how we harm each other, and how we are to hope, but clarity on these points also requires a degree of autonomy from the domain of the political. The imperatives to justice and the tragic sensibility that are developed in an ethical register ought to shape us as we move into questions of politics, but once we are in that political domain, we ought to be able to maneuver in ways that are context-dependent and strategic, not continually burdened by worries about deep philosophical questions. We should send the general into battle and let her do her thing rather than micromanaging her, and I worry that the “political ethics” framing leans in the latter direction.

Which brings us to religion and spirituality. You offer the evocative suggestion that religion and spirituality might open new horizons for politics impossible in a secular frame, and that this might be one of the legacies of not only the abolition and civil rights movements, but also the Black Power movement and Black Lives Matter. This view holds a lot of appeal for me. Believe in the impossible, and it will make new things possible! I love that paradox, and I think it is true. It is at the core of Black justice movements, and it is a claim that is illegible within a secular frame.

But here is the tricky part: it is not clear to me that refusing the terms of a secular frame and embracing any particular form of spirituality and religion are the same thing. (This has caused a good deal of largely unspoken confusion in the scholarship: it makes secular critics of secularism like Saba Mahmood, liberal critics of secularism like Charles Taylor, and conservative critics of secularism like Pope Benedict appear to be aligned.) Any particular historical manifestation of religion has a lot going on around it besides a belief in the impossible. How do we zero in on the relevant parts?

It may be that certain forms of practice and discipline are the relevant parts of religion, the ones that create that imperative to believe in the impossible. Such forms of practice and discipline are found in parts of life that aren’t necessarily labeled “religion,” such as in martial arts, on a basketball team, or during meditation. Secular political organizations of the hard left also reject a secular frame, though they wouldn’t call it that, and they believe in the impossible – through cultivating certain practices and forms of discipline. Here I think, for example, of the Black revolutionary political projects of James and Grace Lee Boggs, which included study and discussion groups, electoral campaigning, and urban agriculture. I am curious, then, whether your interest in religion as linking radical imperatives and tragic sensibilities is pragmatic – religion is what we have around us – or whether you also want to make claims about the particular power of religion?

Finally, I wonder if you see Blackness, as opposed to other categories of difference and sites of injustice, posing the problem we have been discussing in distinctive ways. While the view started among Afropessimists, it is common now in Black studies to talk about the distinctiveness of Blackness, how it is unlike other categories of difference and how it raises unique questions of justice. Translated into the terms we have been using: Blackness motivates a profound imperative toward transformation, so profound that it calls for “the end of the world.” And, because anti-Blackness trains us to misconstrue what counts as humanity, it impairs the ability of people of all races to rightly see themselves and the world. From the perspective of the present, with concepts and feelings ordered by whiteness, we can have minimal, if any, trust in our judgment. (Perhaps Blacks have more realization of these limits, of the friction that points to them.)

I am still thinking through my views on these issues myself. My instinct is to say that Blackness is especially powerful because it illuminates the dynamics of domination in a particularly pure form: it points us to mastery and servitude in laboratory conditions, as it were. But I hesitate to say that the force of the justice imperative and the tragic sensibility involved are qualitatively different in the case of Blackness.

TJ: I value the precision you bring to this conversation. The distinction between politics and spirituality is a necessary starting point for imagining entry points into public debates and communal conversations. I agree that when we identify a problem, we should examine it as a collective with agreed upon resources and commitments. But once we dive into the murky waters of the problem at hand, that distinction is nebulous. We enter spaces “burdened” by the complexities of competing social identities that signal social markers bearing witness to power, beauty, powerlessness, criminality, morality, the grotesque, and more. The domains we enter are erected from the bones and blood of the slaughtered, or at a very minimum carry the memories of generations before us. The political moment of today demands serious attention to overlooked and neglected pasts.

I do not see Blackness, heterosexuality, and Afro-Christianity as social or epistemic burdens. If used creatively and in nonsectarian ways, the thick and thin social markers we carry might disclose new possibilities for solving difficult debates. In other words, we are always navigating thorny issues that complicate and sometimes compromise aspects of our thicker commitments. When this happens, we need a framework, possibly political ethics, to discern or adjudicate the best path forward.

Here are two extreme examples to help tease out my argument. I discovered the force of ethics within theological thinking in Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness. He makes two points that signal the importance of theological or political ethics in social criticism: first, he criticizes “flat” and unnuanced interpretations of Blackness within Black theology of liberation; second, he introduces his reader to cultural criticism, an interpretive shift within Black theology that challenges the viability of liberation discourse for a people locked in what Delores Williams calls “perennial enslavement.” Anderson’s cultural criticism is guided by a kind of social or political ethics, a framework for reading and debunking static definitions of race and gender in favor of historically specific definitions that shift and expand based on the circumstances at hand.

On a personal note, my late grandmother, Mary Kate Johnson, seemed to always prioritize her broad understanding of community over and above other concerns, even when it meant chastising or disciplining her immediate children and siblings. She didn’t describe her decision-making process in analytic terms, but it resembled the kind of dialectics that one might find in political ethics.

In some instances, ethics is explicit in our thinking. We rely on, for example, Womanist ethics to guide scriptural interpretation or to expose gender violence. In other instances, ethics in African American contexts is a way of knowing and being that affirms, denies, or creates individual and collective norms. Kendrick Lamar’s “Auntie Diaries” is a great example of the kind of ethics I am imagining, where internal cultural norms inform our beliefs and practices. Lamar’s song explores the complicated ways Black communities confront LGBTQ+ issues. He raps:

My auntie is a man now
I watch him and his girl hold their hands down
Tip of the avenues under street lights made his
Thinkin’, “I want me a bad bitch when I get big”
They walk the corner like California king
Cold hand all up her skirt, cars whistling down the road
See, my auntie is a man now, slight bravado
Scratching the likes from lotto
Hoping that she pull up tomorrow
So I can hang out in the front seat
Six by nines, keeping the music up under me 

Lamar exposes the presence of trans life within Black communities without ignoring the painful existence of transphobia and homophobia. He sketches out the liminality of sexuality and gender performance in the hood, while punctuating the trauma of transgressing sexual norms. Neither denying nor justifying heteronormativity, Lamar reveals the open secret of Black sexuality and gender: it is as complicated and normal as any other community. Lamar’s biting lyricism is a form of social criticism akin to Anderson’s cultural criticism: exposing ways of existence that are too often ignored or taken for granted. Lamar complicates stereotypes of LGBTQ+ in Black communities by exposing the “normalcy” of trans-identity and LGBTQ+ communities in Black communal contexts.

This leads me to religion and secularism. Religion emerging from what my friend and colleague Dianne Stewart calls “African Heritage” religions, Afro-Christianity, and protest religions seems to support Saba Mahmood’s claim that the secular is neither a static category without a history nor a way of thinking about “religion” among so-called nonbelievers. Instead, the secular is an historically specific category replete with moral and political claims and beliefs. The force of secularism in liberal political contexts seems to coincide with increasing reliance on scientific racism, theological justifications for African enslavement, and individual liberty and rights. African American religions, then, are established and performed in ways that, on one hand, acknowledge the demise of religious authority in politics, and on the other hand, create the beliefs and practices designed to dismantle moral and religious justifications for slavery and segregation. The complicated nature of African American religions is the degree to which “the secular” is rejected, embraced, and recreated for theological and political purposes.

You are correct: in some instances, recent literature often assumes thinkers like Mahmood, Charles Taylor, and Pope Benedict are aligned on definitions of the secular and secularism. But this assumption takes for granted late 19^th and 20^th century African American literature and the scholarship in Black literary studies that acknowledged long ago that the secular and secularism inadequately characterized the tensions between the sacred and profane in African American religions as well as the rise of the liberalism and the liberal modern state. Your observation raises the importance of understanding how communities embrace and/or reject terms otherwise taken for granted as universal. Secularism seems to foreclose the possibility of hope and the role of faith in political struggle. Black leftist traditions like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) understood faith as the political agency exercised by African Americans.

Lastly, Blackness holds a unique space in Black studies as well as in African American religions. As recently as the U.S.-based Black Power movements in the late 1960s, theologians, scholars, and poets like Albert Cleage, James Cone, Lewis R. Gordon, the Last Poets, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, underscore in their writing (and singing) the fruitful ways blackness symbolizes previously ignored traditions and habits before Afropessimism dominated popular debates. Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks plays a critical role in Gordon’s scholarship, and to a lesser degree in Cone’s thinking as well.

Blackness, like double consciousness, respectability politics, and counter-public spheres, does a great deal of heavy lifting for many of us. It can be imprecise. It can be cumbersome. It can be confining. And Blackness is generating important historical and analytic work in contemporary Black and Africana Studies. A category that once reinforced our inhumanity and criminality is now appropriated, in many Black academic circles, to critically engage Black existence, sorrow, joy, and tragic sensibilities. In the best uses of the category, like Black preaching, jazz, and rap music, Blackness is improvisational, eccentric, and shifting. In some respects, Blackness will always point to the tragic history of African descendants. But new circumstances and conditions create different questions among intellectuals and activists. The category will take on new forms and meanings until it is no longer needed.

Terrence L. Johnson is Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. His interdisciplinary research weaves together African American religions, political theory, and American history.

Vincent Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University, where he also directs the Center for Political Theology. He writes about religious ethics, political theology, and the philosophy of race.

The post Tragedy, Spirituality, and Black Justice appeared first on The Revealer.

(Lillian Richter, “Spirituals” (1935-1943). Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, New York Public Library)

Judith Weisenfeld’s writings on African American religious history have been groundbreaking. Her research focuses on a range of topics, including the relation of religion to our understandings of race, the impact of urbanization on Black religious life, Black women’s religious experiences, religion in popular culture, and religion and medicine. Her next book will examine how mostly white psychiatrists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries diagnosed Black Americans as mentally ill because of their religious practices.

Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where she is also associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality. I had the pleasure of speaking with her about her work and about a new initiative to support others who are examining intersections of race and religion.

Kali Handelman: First, I’d love to know what you’re working on presently. I know you are helping to lead a new program called “The Crossroads Project” about the “role religion has played in shaping African American history, culture, economics, politics, and social life and how Black religions have contributed to American life and culture” along with Lerone Martin and Anthea Butler, both scholars of African American religious history. What kind of work are you hoping to support with Crossroads?

Judith Weisenfeld: The Crossroads Project grew out of many years of conversations with Anthea Butler and Lerone Martin about ways to honor the work of foundational scholars in African American history like Albert J. Raboteau, who was my graduate advisor, James Melvin Washington, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, David Wills, Randall Burkett, and others. With the crossroads metaphor – inspired by the BaKongo cosmogram and the idea of crossroads as a site of spiritual power and productivity – we hope to capture the crossroads of religious traditions, cultural groups, scholarly disciplines, and public venues as all vital for understanding the impact of Black religious histories, communities, and cultures. The Crossroads Project provides opportunities for scholars at all career stages, and in an array of disciplines, to discuss works in progress and to engage in mentoring. The grant also allows us to fund work by artists and members of local religious communities who are exploring African American and African diaspora religion, past and present.

The more proximate and urgent motivation for establishing the project was our sense that today’s political climate calls for new and public approaches to interpreting the historical context for, and contemporary impact of, diverse manifestations of African American religion in American public life. We’re motivated to understand the full range of religious, political, and social expressions, including Rev. Dr. William Barber’s Moral Mondays and Poor People’s Campaign, the appeal of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement among prominent hip hop artists, the African diasporic religious influences in Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the support of some Black clergy for the Trump administration, the spiritual dimensions of the Black Lives Matter movement, the increasing prominence of African and African diasporic traditions among young African Americans, and more. It feels like an important time to be engaging these questions in public, and a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation allows us to support innovative research and artistic and cultural projects. We’re enormously excited about this component of the project.

So far, we have funded a range of projects, including a Crossroads Arts Fellow who is creating a sound installation to honor the loss of Black church musicians to HIV/AIDS, and another who is making a documentary on contemporary conjure practices that explores how African diaspora spiritual practice, knowledge, and memory has helped to address trauma. Our Community Stories Fellows grants will support several oral history projects, including one on the Dar-ul-Islam movement in the United States and another on religion in Houston’s Pan-African community. Our Research Fellows’ projects focus on Gospel Blues women, oral histories capturing religious interpretations of a 1953 tornado in Waco, Texas as divine retribution for a 1916 lynching, and a mapping project of Black cemeteries in South Carolina that were flooded and submerged in the late 1930s in the creation of the state-owned hydro-electric utility. These are only a few of the innovative projects we’ve funded so far. We just announced a second cohort of fellows with wonderful projects in the works.

KH: I’m also hoping you might share a bit about your forthcoming book, Spiritual Madness: American Psychiatry, Race, and Black Religions. The book is about how psychiatrists (mostly white doctors “treating” Black patients) in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to categorize certain kinds of religious experiences as “Black” and, in doing so, to identify what they saw as “the Black mind.” This “Black mind” was then the basis for defining both mental normalcy and illness, and was used to shore up white supremacist power and limit Black Americans’ freedom. The book (like your others) balances the artful marshalling of vast types of evidence as it also reckons with what was left out of the archive. I had the honor of reading part of a manuscript draft and can’t wait for this book to be out in the world. For now, though, it would be great to learn a bit about how you came to the project, what kinds of questions you went into the research process with, and, of course, what kind of argument you are making in this book?

JW: Thanks for your enthusiasm for the project, which has been challenging in several ways. I came to it from my research for my last book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration and reading psychiatric studies from the 1930s about the mental health of followers of Father Divine in Harlem. Divine’s followers, mostly African Americans and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, affirmed him as God embodied and renounced family relations to live in sex-segregated, celibate residences as Father Divine’s children. New York City authorities called some of his followers to family court because of child or spousal abandonment and, in some cases, they were sent for psychiatric evaluation that then led to published case studies by the examining psychiatrists. I was struck by the presumption in these articles of a racial predisposition to excessive religious emotion and susceptibility to “religious excitement” that might precipitate mental illness, and I wondered whether there was a broader literature in which psychiatrists engaged Black religious practices in relations to ideas about mental normalcy.

(Father Divine leads a parade in Harlem, 1936. Source: Associated Press)

I found a substantial body of speeches and published studies going back to the late nineteenth-century, in the wake of slavery, where white physicians highlighted religion as a significant factor in the state of Black mental health. I started to see how they mobilized their narrow ideas about African American religion in the diagnostic process that sometimes resulted in a commitment to an expanding system of state asylums for the insane (to use the language of the day), mostly in the U.S. south where the majority of African Americans lived. Of course, the idea of religious excitement has a longer history and broader application than the context on which I’m focusing. What strikes me as unique, however, is the process of racialization of religious excitement as Black over the course of the late nineteenth-century. That is, when applied to white religious enthusiasts, religious excitement was framed as an individual experience or problem, but with respect to African Americans, late-nineteenth-century white psychiatrists characterized religious excitement as an innate racial trait or disposition. Such characterizations became authoritative and remained influential through the first decades of the twentieth century, and these arguments about Black people’s propensity for a disabling religious excitement were deployed as part of a larger set of political, religious, and social strategies to maintain white supremacy.

My goal for the book is to explore connections between psychiatric ideas about Black religion as superstitious, emotional, and fanatical – and racialized conceptions of normal and disordered minds. I’m also exploring the implications of these ideas about Black religions and insanity in the treatment of Black patients, and the influence of these theories in public and political culture from the late nineteenth-century through the 1940s when psychiatry begins to turn from explanations focused on race to attention on social context and environment. By the late 1930s, several Black psychiatrists were contributing to the literature about mental illness among African Americans, emphasizing environment and historical oppression, but also sometimes framing religious “excess” as a problem. While we see similar arguments in religious and social scientific contexts across this period, I’m grappling with the stakes of pathologizing Black people’s theologies, religious practices, and religious communities – including various modes of connecting the spiritual world through things like Holiness and Pentecostal worship, new religious movements, and the practice of conjure – with the authority of the medical field.

One of the things that has struck me most in my research is how many of the late-nineteenth-century white doctors in southern state hospitals for the insane grew up in families that enslaved Black people or were themselves enslavers, and that most were Protestant with strong connections to Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopal churches, missionary societies, and social reform committees. The social, racial, and religious locations of the white physicians who fashioned themselves as experts on Black mental health were not the only factors shaping their theories about religion. But their backgrounds and commitments certainly influenced their medical views of Black people in the years after the Civil War and emancipation. Highlighting their religious affiliations helps me to think about their understandings of religious norms and “proper” religion as they evaluated Black patients’ religious dispositions. This has me thinking about asylum medicine and early psychiatry as the engagement between two broad religious worldviews rather than a contest between white secular medical authority and Black religious ways of knowing.

In addition to reading published medical studies by white psychiatrists, I have been looking at legal paperwork through which people were committed to state hospitals and patient records, to the extent that they’ve been archived and made accessible. It is challenging to recover the perspectives of African Americans committed to hospitals and diagnosed with illness attributed to religion or “religious excitement.” Their voices are often absent in court testimony and medical records in which others characterize their behavior and state of being. It is humbling to bear witness to the fragmentary paper, or sometimes photographic record, of people in crisis or distress entering the legal and medical system, usually involuntarily, and whose lives and very being were interpreted through the lens of theories about the inherent disorder of Black religions. I have learned so much about the history of psychiatry in the United States, the infrastructure of state insane asylums, social science and statistical research about mental illness, and religious perspectives on diagnosis and care. What I hope the project will help people think about is how powerfully racialized ideas about religion, conveyed with medical authority, contributed to the social and political structures of white supremacy in the decades following the end of slavery as Black people were trying to make freedom a reality under new forms of oppression.

KH: While I was reading parts of your forthcoming book, I couldn’t help thinking about the present day (how many times do historians have to hear that? Do you get tired of it?), in particular, about the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams’s, recent announcement that the police will have the power and permission to involuntarily commit people they found to be mentally ill. There’s so much to unpack and rage at in this initiative — who gets to define mental illness? Who gets the power to, with that “diagnosis,” remove people from society and confine them? What kinds of histories of white supremacy, racism, criminalization, and “care” undergird these kinds of policies? But I wonder, given your current research, if you have any insights or questions that might help inform or inflect the conversation?

JW: There is so much enraging about the policy, not the least of which is the number of police shootings of people experiencing some sort of mental distress and how these intersect with police killings of people of color. In the case of the NYC policy, power is given to police who have demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to deescalate tense situations more generally and to act on the perception of mental illness as danger, even in the absence of a threat to self or others. And, of course, involuntary commitment of unhoused people while cutting the budget for broader support does more to criminalize mental illness than address it. More recently, the mayor has announced plans to expand mental health support in the city and there seems to be a recognition that policing is not care.

I’m not a public health expert or an expert on psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, but what I see from my research on psychiatric discourse about race and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century is how racialized conceptions of mental normalcy and disorder became arenas for projection about all sorts of social concerns. The African Americans who were diagnosed as insane because of “religious excitement” in this period reported, or were characterized as, experiencing auditory, visual, and sensory contact with divine and spiritual beings, belief in travel to spiritual realms, prophetic revelations, or directives from God. In most cases it is difficult to determine from the patient records or the transcripts of commitment hearings the broader context of these individuals’ religious lives that shaped their excited religious expressions, which in some contexts would be viewed as providing beneficial spiritual information.

Sometimes only a public display of religious enthusiasm or a claim to visionary power was necessary to gain the attention of authorities. I was struck in my research by the case of William Rice, a thirty-nine-year-old brick mason in Houston, who had come to the attention of authorities in 1911 because he had been digging for treasure in his yard at the direction of “the spirit,” who had come to him several times in dreams. Neighbors concerned about the size of the hole registered a complaint, and a lunacy hearing was ordered. According to a report in the Houston Post, Rice claimed that he and his wife Ella were in communication with God and Jesus through the power of what the press described as “a cross made out of ordinary tree limbs” and a fishing pole they carried. This testimony of communication with the divine was sufficient for the judge to find Rice “guilty of lunacy,” who committed him to a state asylum. Reporting on the case drew the attention of a reader of the Houston Post, who wrote with astonishment that a complaint of “an unusual religious belief” could result in a lunacy hearing and commitment to an asylum. The reader’s alarm that there was no evidence of social harm underscored the kind of public disciplining work such court proceedings and press coverage could accomplish. I think a lot about the public stigma of press reports on lunacy hearings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how this contributed to the pathologizing of African American religions. Of course, this disciplining was carried out most fully within the space of the insane asylum, which reminds us to think beyond the policy of disappearing people to what comes after their removal from the public eye.

KH: I think it’s probably clear to readers by this point that a core question running through your work is about where and how religion and race intersect in American history. With your most recently published book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017), you introduced the concept of “religio-racial” identity and movements as a way to name one of the ways religion and race have intersected. In the book’s introduction, you write that you use the term religio-racial to “capture the commitment of members of these groups [the Moorish Science Temple of America; Nation of Islam; Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation; and Peace Mission, respectively] to understanding individual and collective identity as constituted in the conjunction of religion and race, and I refer to groups organized around this form of understanding of self and people as religio-racial movements.” You further clarify that, “in some sense, all religious groups in the United States could be characterized as religio-racial ones, given the deeply powerful, if sometimes veiled, ways the American system of racial hierarchy has structured religious beliefs, practices, and institutions for all people in its frame,” but that you, “employ religio-racial in a more specific sense here, however, to designate a set of early twentieth-century black religious movements whose members believed that understanding black people’s true racial history and identity revealed their correct and divinely ordained religious orientation.” The concept — understandably — has had broad appeal and reach, some of which you’ve responded to formally (Roundtable: “Religio-Racial Identity” as Challenge and Critique) and informally. I’m interested in what it has been like to have the concept take off in this way — to see people thinking with it and using it in their own work — and if there any kinds of correctives or suggestions you might like to offer in guiding its direction from here?

JW: I’m surprised and humbled that people have found the term appealing and useful for their work on the intersections of race and religion. As I’ve said and written, the term came to me late in working on New World A-Coming as I struggled to find language to characterize the groups I was studying. Older literature framed them as “sects” or “cults,” which I do not find analytically useful, and the more recent language of New Religious Movements didn’t help me in framing the book’s animating interest, rooted in Black religious history in the U.S. In describing the groups as “religio-racial movements,” I wanted to highlight my interest in how religion and race functioned in them, but not argue for this as the only way to understand their goals or appeals. That is, one could (and scholars have), examine the Moorish Science Temple in the context of American Islamic groups, for example, and not foreground religio-racial identity. So, I didn’t want to foreclose other options for future scholarship.

I do get frustrated when I see “religio-racial” applied as a shorthand gesture to race without robust attention to the interaction between constructions of religion and constructions of race. As I use it, “religio-racial” is not a generic way of signaling the presence of race and religion in a particular context, but a concept that illustrates how the social actors being studied are actively engaging and building religious and racial identity together. To take the case of the Moorish Science Temple again, I came to understand their assertion of “Moorish Muslim,” or sometimes “Asiatic Muslim,” identity as rejecting long-standing American racial categories as imposed on them by white America and that bind them to a history of enslavement. Instead, they insist that they are not “Negro, “colored,” or “black,” and derive their racial identity from their understanding that Allah created them as Muslim. They also sought to locate their Moorish Muslim history in something like a “world religions” paradigm and to make thoughtful claims on religious freedom within the United States. For them, religion and race were intertwined and divinely constituted, and I explored that idea in several other groups that were part of the religious landscape of the early-twentieth-century urban North. The collectivity is also an important component of the historical context and for the religious actors whose work gave rise to the concept for me. In the groups I studied, religio-racial identity transformation incorporated individuals into the material worlds of specific communities, and the work of reconceiving the self within community and orienting that community toward a collective future was important.

In this way, “religio-racial” means more than simply Black people doing religious things, but shows active engagement with conceptions of race and religion in a given time and place. Of course, the concept does not have to apply only to people of African descent or to these new religious movements, but I hope the focus on categories of race and religion as a constructed category will avoid giving the impression of either religion or race as fixed. There is so much wonderful scholarship on race and religion being produced now that I take the adoption of the concept to be a mark of growing interest in the topic in ways that exceed the context of my own work. I have learned so much from how people have extended the concept into other arenas and my trepidation about the results of my having generated a theory or frame that people have taken up is mixed with delight and awe.

KH: Lastly, if I can continue with the slight provocations away from religious studies and history as such, I wonder what you’ve made of recent culture war maneuvers vis-à-vis curricula in American history? For instance, the total hollowing out of the AP African American Studies syllabus? Is there a way you’d like to see folks — in the academy and/or in the media — responding?

JW: There is actually a religious studies and American religious history angle to this story. The revised AP framework includes attention to religion, providing students with an introduction to various African cosmologies and a bit of history of religion in West and West Central Africa prior to the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, such as the history of Christianity in the Kingdom of Kongo. The course also explores the religious experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas, the development of Black church denominations in the antebellum North, the role of churches and religion in the abolition movement, Black church women’s racial uplift work, the significance of churches in the history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and religion in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. One thing I noted that was removed from the first draft of the AP African American Studies framework that the College Board circulated is mention of Black Liberation Theology and the work of James Cone and Jacqueline Grant within a unit on diversity in Black communities. Discussion of Black Liberation Theology has been replaced by attention to recent polling data indicating growing religious diversity in contemporary Black life. It seems to me that the result of this change is to obscure how Christian theology supported Black people’s claims to liberation from systems of racialized, gendered, and sexual oppression in the modern era in favor of a general portrait of diversity. This is part of the broader erasure of Black Lives Matter, Black queer history, and Black socialist perspectives, among other topics, from the final AP framework.

There have been excellent and robust responses to the changes and the pressure that the DeSantis administration exerted to make the course adhere more closely to the simplified American exceptionalist version of American history he is insisting on. I’ve been thinking about the way the focus on the Advanced Placement program, not available to all students, takes attention away from broader questions about school funding, resources, and curricula, and has allowed this controversy to set the terms of discussion about how African American history, African American religious history, and African American studies are represented. The AP story matters but, as we are seeing in Florida and other states’ anti-Critical Race Theory campaigns, there is much at stake in public schools at all levels regarding access to, and framing of, African American history, including religious history.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor based in New York City. She is also the Manager of Program Development and London Regional Director at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a Contributing Editor at the Revealer.

Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of several books, including most recently New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration, which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions.

The post Black Religion, Psychiatry, and the Crossroads Project with Judith Weisenfeld appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: André de Loba for UCLA’s Hammer Forum)

“Don’t tell your mother,” my father warned.

“Dad, how can she not know?” I whispered back, a knot of grief forming in my throat.

Both Hindu Brahmins, my parents had an arranged marriage. My mother wore her wedding vermillion on her forehead with pride. She prayed three times a day and could recite the Bhagavad Gita verbatim. She would never approve of what Dad wanted to do.

In April 2022, my 75-year-old dad complained that his right leg was “a bit weak.” A week after Father’s Day in June, it was immobile. On my parents’ wedding anniversary in August, my mother, brother, and I learned that my dad had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a terminal neurological disorder that progressively blocks all voluntary muscle movement. The debilitating ailment is commonly associated with scientist Stephen Hawking who lived with it for half a century, though the average prognosis is 3 to 5 years.

The diagnosis was dire enough, but my father’s proposal to deal (or not deal) with it crushed me. He wasn’t interested in a long goodbye. In Canada, where my parents had lived since 2002, “medical assistance in dying” (or “MAID”) is legal. Just a handful of states in the U.S. allow it, but only if death is imminent in six months, as Amy Bloom highlights in her beautiful memoir In Love. She recounts taking her husband, an Alzheimer’s patient, to Switzerland so he could die with dignity.

Dad wanted my help with the paperwork to end his life, without breathing a word to my mother. It wasn’t just because he was worried about her heart breaking. He also knew that she would consider assisted suicide against the Hindu principles of ahimsa or non-violence, and an offense to her religious convictions. My father saw himself as a man of science who wouldn’t be swayed by religious considerations in the face of this inescapable affliction. I was stuck between two stubborn people with very strong opinions.

I’d never paid much mind to my mother’s religious observance. Hindus do not have as many categories for the less-observant among us. While there have been reform movements within Hinduism, there isn’t a Hindu equivalent of Reform Judaism, for example. Like countless others, I was spiritual, not religious, relenting to elaborate rituals in front of shrines only when repeatedly coaxed. I’d participate in festivities and accompany my mother to the temple only if she threatened to get upset. So, it wasn’t religion that made me want to change my dad’s mind. I just wanted him to live for as long as possible.

(Lighting candles for the Hindu festival of Diwali)

On a video call from my apartment in New York, I demonstrated a motorized wheelchair for Dad so that he’d feel like he could be independently mobile.

“I say I should also try bungee jumping!” he glowered as he dragged his walker, flailing till Mom caught him. “Don’t you see? This only gets worse.”

As news of Dad’s condition reached our close-knit Indian community in Toronto, the doom-swirl of horrific patient stories engulfed us: Someone’s aunt couldn’t blink towards the end. Another’s father was bedridden for seven years before his lungs finally collapsed.

Terrified, I called my younger brother, PJ.

“Don’t you at least want to know what living with assisted devices might be like?” PJ asked. “Nowadays there is state-of-the-art everything – wheelchairs, speech aids – you name it. I will find it for you,” my tech geek brother pleaded.

“Can you bring my legs back?” Dad asked, irritated by our insistence.

Dad’s dogged determination formed early in life. Growing up poor in a village in western India, the youngest of seven children, he walked sixteen miles for school in the harsh Indian sun every day. Even with modest means, his mother performed a daily prayer ceremony for her shelves full of gods, convinced that her devotion ensured a better future for her children.

“As a child all I wanted was to have food and shelter for myself and my family,” Dad told us every time we gathered around the dinner table, grateful for what he’d accomplished. He earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and rose through the ranks at a power generation company.

When I came to New York at 20 for graduate school, my parents wanted to be closer to me. They moved from India to suburban Ontario where it was easier to emigrate.

Despite a long, bureaucratic process to get my father’s credentials recognized in North America, he achieved his humble childhood dream for financial security, twice – once in India and again in his new adopted country at age 55. A workaholic, Dad retired from his job with the Canadian government at seventy-four, way past the typical retirement age.

Religious rituals showed up in my life for all the important occasions, even though I rarely lit the customary incense at our home shrine. My husband and I were wedded in a three-hour long ceremony with traditions that came from the Rigveda, an ancient collection of Hindu texts. We separated in 2017 after a ten-year marriage with far less fanfare. I visited my parents often and they helped care for my three-year-old son, Ollie. Dad made Ollie cheese omelets every morning, took him to the park, and jumped into the swimming pool on summer weekends. He dressed in a medieval General’s clothes and held a regal plastic sword guarding Ollie-the-King’s room from “grown-ups.”

My brother and I rushed to our parents’ home in their leafy suburb to care for my dad. We resolved to convince him to live by showering him with care and technological assistance. My Dad had never asked us for help. Leaning too much on even those closest to him was against his values. Now he couldn’t go to the bathroom and wash up without assistance.

As soon as my mother stepped away for errands, Dad pushed me to connect him with a doctor who would assess his eligibility for medically-assisted death. I seethed like an irate teenager, but took some solace that the “Dying with Dignity” website mentioned a wait period of at least ninety days in case the patient had a change of heart. Surely once medical experts learned that it had only been a month since my dad’s diagnosis, they’d advise him to wait before pulling the lethal trigger on his own life.

“Mr. Mukherjee, have you looked into palliative care?” asked the handsome death doctor.

“I don’t want to,” Dad said, angry that this was taking a direction he hadn’t requested.

“I need to know you’ve received all the care you can possibly get before I approve you for the procedure,” the doctor said.

“I can’t go on. Please help me end my agony,” my stoic father begged – not for his life, but for his death.

A date was set for a week later.

“Don’t you recommend that he at least try to live with it?” I nearly shrieked. I didn’t see the point of staying calm anymore.

“He is lucid and very clear about what he wants,” the doctor, who did not appear to be on my side, said calmly.

My father was impatient. “Do you have an earlier date?” My eyes went blurry. Dad had always cared deeply about what the rest of us wanted. Why was he so focused on himself now? Why wouldn’t he give us a chance? He still hadn’t told my mother.

“If Mom finds out I helped you with this, she will never speak to me again,” I said, annoyed that I had to worry about this secret on top of the pain of losing Dad.

The following afternoon, after Mom fed Dad his favorite lunch of eggplant, fish curry, and rice, her cries pierced the walls of our house. “I will not let you go. You have a few more years,” she insisted, regaining her stubborn composure.

“Do you know how hard it is to care for a terminally ill patient? Your health isn’t good either,” my pragmatist father implored.

“I need to speak with Maharaj. He won’t allow it,” she said, her voice shaky, referring to the high priest and her guru at the Vedanta Society of Toronto. Dad struggled to rise from his chair, failed and sat back down. “We’ll fix this,” she said as she rushed to him and sat by his legs on the floor. He raised his weak hand to her head to comfort her.

Determined that a meeting with her guru would change everything, my mother arranged for a visit the very next day. Swami Kripamayananda arrived clad in his saffron robes. He sat opposite my father who was propped up on a living room chair with ample cushions.

“How will your family live without you? You are everything for them,” the Swami said, his face calm, his voice soothing.

“Everyone loses their parents, or partner. It will be hard for them no matter when I die,” my father said, looking Swamiji in the eye. “I will always be there for them,” he continued, turning his face to me.

The Swami was quiet for a moment.

“You sound like ancient Indian monks. They renounced their bodies when it was time to do so without letting worldly attachment get in the way,” the Swami said, filled with awe.

I knew my mother was destroyed inside, but the Swami’s endorsement of Dad’s decision was God’s will for her. I held her hand as she stayed silent, trying to accept her new reality.

My mother was among the Hindu majority in believing that suicide is atma-hatya, or soul murder, and unacceptable. However, as Deepak Sarma, Professor of Indian Religions at Case Western Reserve University notes, Hinduism offers a more nuanced examination of the topic. When one has fulfilled dharma, or their duties on earth, and suffers from an incurable disease at an advanced age, hastening death by giving up eating and drinking, or voluntary euthanasia is permissible. However, committing suicide out of heightened passion, despair, or anger is forbidden. Dad hadn’t factored religion into his chosen path out of this world. And it wasn’t the first thing to cross my mind either. But I welcomed the unexpected comfort that ancient Hindu texts offered.

Two days before his final one with us, a tense and morose silence descended on our home, the kind Dad knew how to break. As the three of us shuffled around him he said, “Hey, do you remember how Puloma played hide-and-seek as a five-year-old? She’d fit into a little corner of the house and say, ‘Dad, I am going to be hiding right here. I want you to look for me all over the house!’” Then he laughed at the memory he’d recounted thousands of times. We did, too.

“Remember that great New Yorker cartoon?”

“Which one, Dad?” I knew which one.

“A guy walks up to a man selling fish on a deserted island where there is literally nothing else and asks – are these fish local?” Dad chuckled loudly. I did too.

“I won’t succumb to this disability. I am lucky,” Dad consoled me on the last evening we spent together. “Remember me as a warrior, who left on his own terms.”

A burnt-orange sunset gleamed through the windows on Dad’s final car ride with my brother and me to the “MAID House,” from where he’d never return. Mom couldn’t bear to come. We helped him on to a chocolate brown reclining chair in a dark room. I held a blessed sunflower to his forehead and chanted “Hare Krishna-Hare Rama,” praying for his soul to go to heaven, as the doctor administered the injection into his arm. Dad’s eyes were closed, head bowed as if in prayer. He looked peaceful.

Five minutes in, somewhere mid-hymn, we heard the doctor say, “I am sorry. He’s gone.”

My brother and I held each other close, like little children. I only endured Dad’s final moments knowing it was how he’d wanted to go.

I began to see the virtue in Dad’s decision. He placed the family’s well-being over his own, as always. Scriptures and judgements aside, leaving behind all that he’d built and everyone he loved was an extraordinary final act of courage and selfless love, values he lived and died by.

Puloma Mukherjee is an immigrant writer and mother based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets & Writers, and in an anthology of short stories. She is currently working on her first novel.

The post My Father’s Hardest Fight: Assisted Suicide and Hinduism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source/credit: Getty/Dreamstime/Indiamart)

When Onali Ezazuddin Dholkawala and his business partner Iqbal Tinwala tried to purchase a store in the Indian state of Gujarat, he did not anticipate a battle with local authorities that would last more than seven years. Dholkawala had entered a mutual agreement to purchase the shop from Dinesh and Deepak Modi, who are Hindu. But Dholkawala is Muslim. Buying property in Gujarat has never been easy for the state’s nearly 5.8 million Muslims because of long standing prejudice. But now, Muslims like Dholkawala face an even more difficult challenge with a law that restricts the purchase of properties between people of different religious communities.

Titled the “Gujarat Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Property and Provision for Protection of Tenants from Eviction from Premises in Disturbed Areas Act,” the law is more popularly known as the “Disturbed Areas Act.” The law’s original intent was to prevent the distressed sale of property by those who were vulnerable to eviction after an episode of communal or interreligious violence. In the aftermath of riots in Gujarat in 1985, a growing number of people who were minorities in their neighborhoods started selling their properties so they could go live in neighborhoods where they would be part of a majority. One of the first of its kind in the country, this legislation came about to prevent segregation. But today, legislators use the law to promote segregation by creating a rigid divide between where Hindus and Muslims can purchase property, thereby ghettoizing the region’s Muslim minority.

Under this act, the district collector, a bureaucratic official in each county, has the power to decree a particular area as a “disturbed area,” usually if that neighborhood has had a history of communal violence. Once this classification is in place, people can only sell property to those outside of their religious community if they receive the collector’s approval. To do so, both the buyer and seller must file an application along with the seller’s affidavit stating that they sold the property of their own free will, and received a fair market price. The system leaves mixed-religion buyers and sellers at the mercy of a government official’s approval. And any violations of these stipulations lead to imprisonment and fines.

For people like Dholkawala, the ability to purchase property rests in the hands and whims of district collectors. In 2017, a deputy collector rejected Dholkawala’s purchase and ordered a police inquiry into the matter since the property was in a predominantly Hindu area. The collector ultimately rejected the application on the grounds that it was likely to “affect the balance in the majority Hindu/minority Muslim strength” and could develop into a “law and order problem.”

Not one to be deterred, Dholkawala took the matter to the courts, first appealing before the state’s special secretary of the revenue department (SSRD), and then the high court. In 2020, the Gujarat high court ruled in the favor of Dholkawala and his Muslim business partners. But they soon faced another set of hurdles from right-wing Hindu neighbors in the area adjacent to his shop.

“I bought the property in 2016, but it is only today in 2023 that I can finally use it,” Dholkawala told me during an interview for the Revealer. “The collector hadn’t given permission at first, saying that it would disturb the equilibrium of Hindus and Muslims in the area, that there would be an increase in Muslims in one neighborhood, and the number of Hindus might fall. Finally, we went to the high court, where the verdict was in our favor. But even after the court’s initial verdict, when we decided to work on repairs for this property, the locals of the neighborhood started threatening us, and we even filed a complaint with the police.”

Dholkawala adds, “We were told that Muslims have illegally acquired property amongst Hindus, even though the sellers had sold it to us of their own free volition. This law is such that even if the private parties relevant to a transaction agree, any random third party can complain despite having nothing to do with the sale!”

In February 2023, the high court imposed a fine on the Hindu locals who were harassing Dholkawala. But pervasive discrimination persists elsewhere in the state.

(Gujarat, India. Image source: Wikipedia Commons)

Since 1969, Gujarat has seen rising violence between Hindus and Muslims, culminating with the 2002 riots that disproportionately targeted Muslims across the state. Official estimates claim a death toll of nearly 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus, but unofficial figures from activists, lawyers, and others estimate over 2,000 deaths – Muslims being the most affected, despite accounting for less than 10% of the state’s total population.

Prior to the 2002 riots, however, relatively smaller-scale conflict also existed, including riots in Ahmedabad, the state capital, in 1985. “We do have a sense that Ahmedabad was not as segregated back then until the mid-1980s, when a continuous wave of riots took place, as much as it is now,” says Sharik Laliwala, a Ph.D. student and researcher at UC Berkeley.  “I grew up in the older part of Ahmedabad hearing stories from my parents and grandparents about our Hindu neighbors and they still meet at festivals and weddings.”

But the wave of violence from 1985 onwards marked a key change. “Hindu neighbors shifted out to Hindu-dominated parts certainly by the mid-to-late 1980s, while more Muslims took up their residences as they moved from Hindu-dominated localities for safety reasons,” Laliwala noted.

It was during that wave of violence, in 1986, that the government put in place the Disturbed Areas Act to protect individuals from the distressed sale of properties. This law was re-enacted in 1991, in its misused and current form

***

In 2018, far-right Hindu organizations spread rumors throughout Gujarat’s capital city of a purported “Land Jihad.” After a Muslim real estate developer was set to redesign a building where both Hindus and Muslims lived (albeit separately), far-right groups stopped his project, accusing the builder of trying to drive out Hindus from the area and committing “Land Jihad.”

The coinage of “Land Jihad” refers to the Islamophobic theory that Muslims “capture” residential and public properties to bring them under religious control, and to increase the Muslim population of a locality.

Conspiracy and Islamophobic theories such as this have become increasingly popular throughout India as the Hindu nationalist consolidation increases under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since 2021, the BJP-led government in the country’s northern state of Uttarakhand has been tracking “illegal land deals,” citing concerns around the “demographic change” in population.

Such a political climate has facilitated the presence of far-right groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (literally “World Council of Hindus”) to descend into vigilantism against Muslims and other minorities. These groups have also launched campaigns against interfaith relationships, which they call “Love Jihad,” and have promoted the falsehood that Muslim men can make Hindu women fall in love with them so they can convert them. As recently as February 2023, far-right Hindu groups in India’s cosmopolitan city of Mumbai rallied against Muslims, with slogans against so-called “Land Jihad” and “Love Jihad.”

The country has also witnessed a sharp spike in incidents of mob-lynchings and hate crimes against Muslims, including a wave of hate speeches and calls for the economic boycott of Muslim-owned shops and businesses by political leaders from the ruling party. Despite the Indian Supreme Court’s sharp criticisms, television channels also launch frequent anti-Muslim primetime debates, accusing innocent Muslims of committing various acts of “Jihad,” from spitting in peoples’ foods to molesting women, and more.

Meanwhile, the Disturbed Areas Act has become even more radical. A 2020 amendment allowed collectors to reject applications for property sales if there is any “likelihood of polarization,” “disturbance in demographic equilibrium,” or even the “likelihood of improper clustering,” based on religious or other identities.

(Image source: Getty/Dreamstime/Indiamart)

Lawyer Muhammad Tahir Hakim challenged these amendments as unlawful and finally succeeded after the state’s high court put a stay on them.

Hakim told me, “If you see the earlier, original Act, it is a bona fide piece of legislation. There’s no malafide intention. It was framed because of communal riots in Gujarat from 1985 until the demolition of Babri mosque in 1992. It was so that people do not sell off their properties under duress. If they still needed to sell it off, this helped protect the legitimate market value of their properties. Unfortunately, the act has been distorted to create ghettoization.”

***

Despite Hakim’s few legal wins, most other people are afraid to file discrimination lawsuits and are compelled to make do with the status quo. In Rajkot city, in the southern-central part of Gujarat, Amir Petiwala (name changed on request) has been struggling to buy a house for three years. Petiwala is a Shia Bohra Muslim and made an agreement to purchase land in December 2020. But in January 2021, state authorities added 28 upper-middle class and upscale housing societies in Rajkot under the ambit of the Disturbed Areas Act. This included the place Petiwala was planning to purchase.

“I successfully made an agreement of land purchase with the seller who belonged to an upper-caste Hindu background in December 2020,” Petiwala said. “This area where I intend to buy a piece of land is not even a really posh city area, but more a middle-class area. Now, someone like me needs to take permission from the collector of the city before making the registration of the property. And contrary to the name, this area did not have any disturbance at all and everyone lived in harmony!”

Petiwala’s difficulties to purchase a home reflect a larger problem. He says that even though he could afford to move to a nicer area, “the [Hindu] neighbors can unite and complain against us to any competent authority, which makes it impossible to buy a residence to live with a family with kids.” He adds that, “there are hundreds of other Muslims and some Hindus as well who are struggling to sell their properties from these areas. Hundreds of applications are pending or rejected by local police verification or local bureaucrats or district revenue authorities without any reason.”

Hakim echoes this sentiment. Even though the recent amendments have been stalled, the Act still allows for district authorities to reject property purchases if anyone complains or objects to it – for any reason. “At the ground level, what happens is that people either succumb to such objections raised by neighbors or by any rightwing Hindu third parties who are not privy to the sale, or they try to grease the palms of the persons who object,” he said.

The law mandates that an area can be declared “disturbed” only in cases of continuous riots and violence. In reality, even without such riots or violence, authorities have arbitrarily marked areas as disturbed.

“Today, despite the 2002 communal pogrom [over three days of communal violence in Gujarat, which left over a 1,000 people – primarily Muslims – dead] under then Chief Minister Narendra Modi, people push the image that Gujarat is one of the most peaceful states,” another lawyer told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If it is so peaceful then why do they need this law, and in so many places? It’s completely dichotomous! On one hand you say there are no communal tensions or riots, and on the other you go expanding the number of areas held to be ‘disturbed’ by communal violence.”

According to new research by scholar Sheba Tejani, the designated “disturbed areas” in Gujarat’s capital city of Ahmedabad grew by 51% between the period of 2013 to December 2019, now covering nearly 8.4% of the city’s total area. Pointing to the heightened religious segregation, Tejani highlights how the law has allowed for entire villages (and the fields surrounding these villages) to be designated as “disturbed,” without authorities providing any clear justification.

***

Writer and Amnesty International campaigner Aakar Patel draws parallels between Jim Crow-era laws in the United States and the present-day housing segregation in Gujarat. He emphasizes that “When segregation in the United States was legally ended in the 1960s, the government passed laws that sought to integrate the races, like the Fair Housing Act. It prevented discrimination in the buying and selling of properties which was keeping the races separate. All across Gujarat, in all major cities and in several towns, the government has done the opposite. Muslims are deliberately forced into ghettos through a law.”

One of the starkest examples of this forced ghettoization is in the neighborhood of Juhapura, often derided as the “mini-Pakistan” of Ahmedabad city because of its significant Muslim population. In reality, the neighborhood reflects the deep segregation of an embattled community, often denied housing and socio-economic upward mobility in the more upscale, largely Hindu-inhabited residential neighborhoods. Researcher Laliwala emphasized this, and pointed out how the Disturbed Areas Act has made Ahmedabad the most segregated city in India on Hindu-Muslim lines. “This is evidenced not only in the creation of a ghetto like Juhapura – perhaps one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in India in a single locality,” Laliwala noted.

It is amidst this climate of segregation that the state recently held elections in December 2022. No mainstream political party in Gujarat prioritized the state’s Muslims or the abject housing discrimination that persists. The lack of adequate political representation of Muslims, both in Gujarat and now increasingly at the national level across India, has compounded the problem. While the political erasure of the country’s Muslims from mainstream and secular political parties looms large, challenges to this law have come from a handful of human-rights activists, lawyers, and Muslim political factions.

But even as the fight against this legislation goes on, today, the situation looks bleak. A weary Amir Petiwala sums it up best: “The bottom line is, Muslims are being completely deprived of buying a place to live with their families in a decent area of mixed religions,” he says. “And the worst part is, there is absolutely no representation of our voice in the local political platform.”

And to many observers, the enforced religious segregation in Gujarat is only likely to expand throughout India.

Today, India’s mainstream news media is amplifying far-right allegations of “Land Jihad” across the country. In the country’s mountainous northern and north-eastern states of Uttarakhand and Assam, political leaders affiliated with the ruling BJP objected to Muslims buying property and accused them of trying to push Hindus out and capturing “their” land. In 2021, the cosmopolitan city of Gurugram, near the country’s capital, saw protests against allowing Muslims to pray in open spaces. Now, there are reportedly only six spots in the city where the prayers can be offered, down from 150 such spaces as of 2018.  With this increasing spatial segregation against Muslims, Gujarat’s story may be a bleak sign of things to come throughout India.

Sabah Gurmat is an independent journalist based in Mumbai, India. She writes on issues of human rights, law, tech and culture.

The post Forbidden Transactions Between Muslims and Hindus in Gujarat, India appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

This year, the holidays of Ramadan, Easter, and Passover overlap. In my house, we celebrate both Passover and Easter, although Passover typically requires more work. Before the pandemic, my husband and I hosted a large Passover seder every year. Our table always included people who were not Jewish, which I enjoyed because it meant we had to explain the rituals and traditions rather than take them for granted. The seder is well-suited for such an undertaking because it is a meal built around asking questions, telling stories, and talking with everyone assembled. I usually joke that Passover is one of my favorite holidays because it is based on eating. But the truth is that it opens up space for important conversations about society’s problems and a mandate to repair the world. The seder forces us to consider the plagues, literal and metaphorical, facing people today. And, in turn, we have conversations about what we can do in our communities to address such pressing matters. The process of asking questions and talking is literally the first step to taking action to improve our world.

It is in this spirit of thinking about the potential power that comes from conversations, and in the dangers that come from prohibiting such dialogue, that unites the articles in the Revealer’s April issue. The issue opens with an article examining an area of India where officials are trying to stop the intermingling of people from different religious communities. In “Forbidden Transactions Between Muslims and Hindus in Gujarat, India,” Sabah Gurmat investigates what is happening in one Indian state where officials can and do forbid Hindus and Muslims from selling property to each other – and what that law foretells about India’s future. Next, in “My Father’s Hardest Fight: Assisted Suicide and Hinduism” Puloma Mukherjee reflects on what happened when her father told her pious mother that he wanted to die, and what the entire family subsequently learned about Hindu positions on physician-assisted suicide. Then, in “Black Religion, Psychiatry, and the Crossroads Project,” contributing editor Kali Handelman has a conversation with distinguished scholar of African American religious history Judith Weisenfeld about Weisenfeld’s newest research on the history of white psychiatrists diagnosing Black Americans as mentally ill because of their religious experiences. Following that, in “Tragedy, Spirituality, and Black Justice” two scholars of African American religions, Vincent Lloyd and Terrence Johnson, have a conversation with each other about their recent books that explore religion within Black protest movements. Then, in “Women Talking and Reimagining the World,” Christina Pasqua and Pamela Klassen review the movie Women Talking and share why the film, focused mostly on scenes of women conversing in community, is so effective, and how it reflects and diverges from the real-life Mennonite community on which the movie is based. And, in “Worried White Evangelicals,” Sarah Diefendorf shares an excerpt from her book The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety among White Evangelicals, where an evangelical community comes together following Donald Trump’s inauguration with much to say and with many concerns.

Our April issue also includes a conversation with Sarah Diefendorf for the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Evangelicals’ Anxieties and Their Politics.” We discuss why many white evangelicals, despite their political power, feel threatened by feminism, LGBTQ progress, and movements for racial justice. We explore their image problem among younger Americans, how they are recruiting new people to join their churches, and how white evangelicals are responding to issues like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ equality today. You can listen to our conversation on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As I think about the topics raised in the April issue and the many conversations it contains, I am reminded of the reasons why the youngest person at each Passover seder asks the night’s main questions: to instill from an early age, first, the idea that questioning is the foundational step to improving the world and, second, that we must do the work of repairing society’s problems in community, not in isolation. We must come together to overcome today’s plagues.

I hope the articles and podcast in this issue inspire you to be in conversation with others and to ask even more questions.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Coming Together in Conversation appeared first on The Revealer.