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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: The Corporate Space Race and Religion.

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1) Each chapter in Samira Mehta’s beautiful collection of essays tells a personal story about the complications of race in the United States. She introduces readers to her mixed-race family, her experiences as a woman of color with white friends, and her conversion to Judaism. The writing is vivid, insightful, and at times quite humorous. Mehta is the author of the Revealer article about Christian-Jewish interfaith families, “The December Dilemma: Less Oy, More Joy.” Don’t miss her moving new book, out in January, The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging.

2) If personal stories about the current state of religion and politics interest you, we have the book you need. Before he became a religion scholar, Bradley Onishi was an evangelical youth pastor. He shares some of his background in his popular Revealer article “God is Ultimate Masculinity: Evangelical Visions of Manhood in the Wake of the Atlanta Massacre.” In his excellent new book, Onishi blends his expertise in religion with his personal experiences in evangelical communities to make sense of the January 6 attack and rising Christian nationalism. If you care about maintaining a separation between church and state, and if you want insights into those who do not, make sure to check out Onishi’s critically important and wonderfully written new book, out in January, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next.

3) Are you interested in the interplay of science and religion? Andrew Aghapour, author of the Revealer article, “My Brain on Muse, the Tech Meditation Headset,” teamed up with Revealer contributor Peter Manseau to write about how science and religion have influenced one another, especially through an examination of artifacts housed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Their book, Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Making Sense of Things, is both incisive and visually impressive.

4) While we’re on the topic of science and religion, you should read Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s excellent Revealer article, “The New Corporate Space Race: A Colonial Remix.” In her new book, Rubenstein builds on that article and weaves personal stories, pop culture, and expertise in religion to offer an accessible take on the many problems with corporations and billionaires colonizing the cosmos—and what all of that has to do with religion. Rubenstein offers a fresh, astute, and urgent take on why we need to care about the corporate space race and why it matters for our planet. Don’t miss her engaging and highly readable book, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race.

5) Have you ever reflected on your digital life? Chris Stedman, who writes about the internet and atheists in the Revealer article “Atheists, Social Media, and American Politics,” questions if our online selves are actually different from how we exist offline. Arguing that the distinction between “in real life” and online life is a false binary, Stedman offers a beautifully written reflection on the powerful role digital media plays in our lives, the problems with social media, and the digital world’s rich possibilities. Check out his astute, personal, and compelling book IRL: Finding Our Real Selves in a Digital World.

6) Our final recommendation is, we are proud to say, a national bestseller authored by frequent Revealer writer, Simran Singh. He is the author of multiple popular Revealer articles, including “Why Sikhs Serve” and “Why I Share My Story: Vulnerability, Representation, and Empowerment.” In his new book, Singh blends personal stories with his expertise in religion to offer a powerful introduction to the Sikh tradition. The writing is accessible, vivid, and punctuated by moving stories. Don’t miss Singh’s excellent book, The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life.

Happy reading!

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(Image source: California Business Journal)

On July 24, 1969, the day American astronauts safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after humankind’s first expedition to the Moon, Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist turned aerospace engineer and one of the architects of the American space program, addressed journalists—and the world—from the Madison County courthouse in Huntsville, Alabama. After a cheering crowd carried von Braun on their shoulders and set him down onto the courthouse steps, von Braun described the United States’ moonshot as an exercise of “genuine brotherhood with all nations.” The lunar landing, von Braun rhapsodized, represented more than technological prowess: it was symbolic of how “the ultimate destiny of man is no longer confined to the earth. I hope now that these brave Apollo eleven astronauts can be assured that their trip was not in vain, that our reach into space will be continued and that from their brief journey of exploration there will be a brighter future for mankind.”

And, in a soundbite that more than a half-century later still lingers as a challenge, von Braun observed that even though “the moon is still commuter traffic as far as the universe is concerned…like commuting from the suburbs to the city” there are other planets to conquer. Von Braun believed our next stop was so obvious that he prefaced his statement with “of course”: “there is the planet Mars.”

This flung gauntlet has famously been picked up by Elon Musk, one of humanity’s would-be astro-saviors profiled in Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. In her previous books, Rubenstein, professor of religion and science at Wesleyan University, has tackled everything from terrestrial pantheism to the multiverse. Her work is always delightfully readable and engagingly enlightening, but Astrotopia feels more immediate, because the message is both timely and urgent. A book of cultural criticism as well as consciousness raising, Astrotopia is meant to reach beyond the philosophers of religion and space historians to the interested layperson who needs to know how the world’s wealthiest people are “rehashing” themes of Christian conquest to justify their manifest destiny in space. If they succeed, Rubenstein warns, outer space—“once the stuff of infinite possibility”—will become “just another theater of greed and war.”

Astrotopia is a cautionary tale—which is a bit out of character for the field of space history, a genre that tends toward positivist and triumphalist narratives of conquest—about the power of tales, fables, and myths; namely, it is a reminder that, whether they are told as history or as legend, we should pay attention to stories that tell humans the whole universe is ours for the taking. In particular, we should be skeptical of billionaire space cowboys like Musk and Jeff Bezos, who tell exciting stories of rockets and space colonies and terraforming other planets, but leave out that this all comes at the expense of life on this one. So, on the one hand, Astrotopia is an introduction to the “NewSpace race,” which Rubenstein explains is “as much a mythological project as it is a political, economic, or scientific one,” as well as a handbook on how to resist the siren song of corporate cosmic saviors promising infinite wealth in the stars. On the other hand, it is also a reminder that just because a story is timeworn does not mean it’s true or right. For Rubenstein, this means that we must “unearth the old, destructive myths behind the escalating NewSpace race and let other myths guide us.”

With all this in mind, Rubenstein first introduces readers to Elon Musk and his delusions of Martian messianism. While today he is the most famous proponent of settling Mars, Musk’s plan for Mars is perhaps not what von Braun had in mind when he casually mentioned that Mars was humanity’s newest new frontier. Von Braun’s plans for Mars were scientific; all the way back in 1949 he proposed a purely empirical—not empire-building—mission to the red planet that would explore Mars from its poles to its equatorial canyons.

But Musk’s plans for Mars are considerably more pyrotechnic. Instead of landing on and studying the Martian poles, Musk proposes to—and he actually means this—“nuke Mars.” As Rubenstein explains, in the gospel according to Elon, all it takes to transform “a freezing, radioactive, blood-boiling planet and make it more like our life-loving Earth” is dropping some atomic bombs at the poles, which will immediately fill the atmosphere with moisture and thus jumpstart the process of making our neighboring planet habitable…theoretically. Should this mission happen to be accomplished, Musk has promised to then “build an interplanetary transportation system akin to the transcontinental railroad” in the spirit of nineteenth century American tycoons. The Martian Trail—which, as even Musk acknowledges, will be like an especially bummer version of the Oregon Trail, because “there’s a good chance you’ll die” (Musk quoted on page 15)—will involve a seven-month trip from Earth on what Musk calls the “Big Fucking Rocket”: a conveyance Musk describes so rapturously that it sounds like, in Rubenstein’s phrasing, “an astronautic Club Med.” The trip will cost upwards of $200,000 per person (a literally astronomical sum) and likely be staffed by indentured servants who are paying for their transport with their bondage. These first colonists will give way to more as humanity succeeds in what Muskivites describe as “hacking Mars”: transforming another planet to serve our terrestrial needs. Terraforming Mars is Musk’s version of salvation, which Rubenstein reads in his declarations that our future on Mars represents “duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.” (Musk quoted on 136).

When compared to Musk, Jeff Bezos’s plans for space seem almost reasonable. That is, of course, until Rubenstein exposes the sinister underbelly. Bezos, Rubenstein explains, got space religion when he was at Princeton in the 1980s. Bezos’s passion for moving off world began when he audited “the physicist-prophet” Gerard O’Neill’s seminars on “teaching the world’s future rulers how to expand their empires into space.” O’Neill’s famous late-1970s ruminations on mining other planets, moving heavy industry to low-Earth orbit, and creating extraterrestrial human habitats out of asteroids eventually blossomed into Bezos’s 21^st century prophecy of a future in space. Bezos’s proposal, unlike “nuking Mars,” is for the extraction of resources like rare-earth metals from asteroids or the Moon and space colonies that relocate most of humanity off-planet in torus-shaped “climate-controlled Edens.”

(Jeff Bezos laughing in a cowboy hat and spacesuit. Image source: Joe Raedle for Getty Images)

In Bezos’s millennialist vision, the finite resources of Earth—from fuel for energy to human brainpower—will inevitably spiral downward at some point in the near future. So, in Rubenstein’s interpretation, because Bezos wants humanity to “keep moving ‘forward’”—an adverb that in this case denotes “the relentless pursuit of profit” rather than directionality—he is “spending his money and time exporting the whole damned system into space.” Bezos’s plans for space reflect not only his engineering interests, but his feelings about Earth, as well. Because the wellspring of terrestrial resources is drying up, Bezos plans to save Earth by pillaging the cosmos.

“So these are the two utopias” presented by Musk and Bezos, Rubenstein explains: “‘fuck Earth and occupy Mars’ versus ‘save Earth by drilling the universe.’”

Astrotopia is downright fun when it’s centered on the two focus-pulling, spotlight-stealing, grand-gesturing, dueling ringmasters themselves—Musk and Bezos—mostly because Rubenstein’s tone as she recounts the litanies of their outsized ideas is that of an exasperated Greek chorus; you can almost hear her sigh in frustration as she explains in the introduction that, because of these guys and their ilk, space is literally and metaphorically “an absolute mess.” There are other performers in the NewSpace circus too, and Rubenstein traces a careful summary of their plans for space—commercial, capitalist, political, militaristic (why else a Space Force?!)—with an emphasis on corporate hopes and dreams of “converting the cosmos itself into capital and conquering space, the final frontier.”

Rubenstein is careful never to lose her larger message which, appropriately enough in a book about our future in the solar system, she returns to elliptically throughout, swinging wider with each pass. Rubenstein connects the current space race with historical explorations of Earth that began with the so-called conquest of the Americas that led to Biblically-sanctioned genocide and the obliteration of whole ecosystems, to the modern halo of garbage that has rendered near-Earth orbit a literal disaster—where “the stars (astra) are out of place, throwing everything out of order.” For Rubenstein, these cycles of religious, space, and cultural history represent the stories that need to be retold, the myths that need to be remade so we finally “stop pretending that escaping Earth is going to solve our problems…we’ll bring them all along with us one way or another.”

But what is the solution to this “cosmic messianism” of Musk, Bezos, et al.? For Rubenstein, the biggest problem with these astrotopians is that their seemingly beneficent goal to stop humanity’s pillaging of the Earth is really a cover for seeking “more land and resources to plunder in space.” But this is directly in conflict with all the people—the poor, the oppressed, the hungry—who do not want to transplant into the solar system the same power structures that enabled the ransacking of the Earth and the subjugation of whole societies. They want—and, Rubenstein argues, we should all want—a new paradigm. What this situation calls for, then, is to decolonize space, which Rubenstein establishes from the beginning as a movement that, in her words, centers:

“Black and Indigenous voices in all plans concerning extraterrestrial labor and territory, which must not be romanticized as ‘hard work’ and the ‘empty frontier.’ It would also mean refraining from polluting other planets (and the interplanetary spaceways), refraining from extracting ‘resources,’ refusing to commodify land, and subjecting private enterprises like SpaceX and Blue Origin to strict national and international regulation. In this way…space might escape its romantic but sinister designation as ‘the final frontier.’”

Or, in the words of the oft-quoted musician Sun Ra, decolonizing space would mean finally being able to see how the colonized on Earth are filled with “a burning need for something else.”

That “something else” Rubenstein finds not in the astrotopians’ visions of a “cosmic future” but in genres like Indigenous Futurism, which recovers “the deliberately erased histories of colonized and oppressed peoples [to] sift through them to find the most life-giving stories, and bundle them together with the mess of the modern world to imagine new ways of being.” Or the Afrofuturism movement, which is predicated on the fact that “African-descended people already know how to survive the apocalypse and live on other worlds.” Or literally any global institutional religion, nearly all of which, Rubenstein maintains, have long ago abandoned “imperial Christendom’s ‘human dominion’ line” for stewardship and social justice. The only people who haven’t, Rubenstein warns, are “atheist billionaires” who “insist that their investors’ bottom lines” are more important than the Earth and, to get us off it, are still “selling a Christian doctrine that even the Christians have abandoned.”

In other words, the only way to combat the old stories that justify mining the asteroids and “hacking” Mars is to find new stories. As Rubenstein explains, “if we want to get right with space, we’re going to have to get right with religion” by retelling stories of dominion and conquest as stories of conservation and harmony; exposing the bad mythologies behind modern science; finding new stories that “put caretaking over profit and harmony over ownership”; and creating stories that “tell us not how the universe might belong to us but how we might belong to the universe.”

One old story that the corporate cosmic messiahs should revisit is how their heroes of the first Space Age approached their task with humility and contemplation. At a prayer breakfast in April 1969, just three months before Apollo 11, von Braun—who clandestinely became a born-again Christian during his post-war years—cautioned that a balance must be struck between science and morality. While science can “enable us to fly to the moon” it does not provide any ethical guidance on whether humans should “destroy our home planet with the atom bomb [and] whether we should use the power at our disposal for good or evil.” Instead, the man who designed the original big f’ing rocket—the Saturn V—tells his listeners that the “guidelines of what we ought to do are furnished in the moral law of God.” We can believe a myth that tells us we should take godlike power for ourselves and plunder the solar system. Or, as von Braun says in the closing of his speech, rather than praying “that God may be with us on our side,” we should learn “to pray that we may be on God’s side.”

Catherine L. Newell is an associate professor of religion and science at the University of Miami. She is the author of Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and America’s Final Frontier (University of Pittsburgh Press 2019).

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 31 of the Revealer podcast: “The Corporate Space Race and Religion“.

The post The False Messiahs of Space Exploration appeared first on The Revealer.

(Buddhist monks in Thailand. Image source: Getty Images)

In March 2022, Thailand was abuzz with the story of a leaked audio recording that revealed the clandestine love affair of a 23-year-old Buddhist monk and a 37-year-old model. Phra Ponsakorn Chankeo, or “Phra Kato” as he was known to his many devoted followers, was the young, charismatic acting abbot of Wat Pen Yat temple in southern Thailand. Phra Kato, who, like all monks, took a vow of celibacy, ended up being another source of disappointment for Thai Buddhists, whose religion has been rattled with scandals in recent decades.

Since his ordination in 2017, Phra Kato was considered a rising monastic star who could invigorate Buddhism through his skilled use of social media. His good looks and entertaining talks gained him a huge following on YouTube and Facebook. Many monks at the higher levels of Thailand’s monastic administration, concerned with the declined interest in and practice of Buddhism, thought they had found someone who could appeal to the younger generation and revitalize Buddhist practice.

But this all came crashing down with the release of the audio tape. Adding fuel to the fire, Phra Kato had embezzled 600,000 Thai baht (around $16,000 USD) from his temple, giving half to silence his lover and the other half to silence a reporter. The scandal played out on social media for weeks. Phra Kato and the infamous location of his multiple liaisons, in the backseat of his lover’s parked car on the crest of the Kathoon dam, became a tourist attraction and a popular meme. Phra Kato left monastic life in disgrace, returned the money to the temple, and was charged with embezzlement. He apologized to his fans and asked forgiveness through a video post on his YouTube and Facebook pages. Phra Kato, now Ponsakorn, parlayed his notoriety into becoming a social media influencer.

Phra Kato’s sex scandal rekindled memories of the father (pun intended) of all monastic scandals that engulfed Thailand in the 1990s: Phra Yantra Amaro. There is not a Thai who lived through the 1990s who does not know the story of the meteoric rise and fall of the charismatic Phra Yantra. Ordained in 1974, he was well-known as a disciplined monk who practiced asceticism and intense periods of meditation. He also had a reputation for possessing supernatural powers. In 1993, after returning from a world tour where he gave talks on Buddhist teachings, several women lodged accusations with the Thai monastic administration’s governing council saying that he had had sexual relations with them. One woman also claimed that he fathered her child. She demanded that Phra Yantra have a DNA test to prove he was the father, which he refused. In 1994, the Phra Yantra scandal was Thailand’s most widely reported news story, equivalent to America’s OJ Simpson trial. By 1995, there was incontrovertible evidence that Phra Yantra engaged in sexual relations. He had used a credit card to pay for his visits to brothels on trips to Australia and New Zealand. The governing council announced that he must disrobe for violating sangha (“Buddhist monastic community”) rules and for breaking his vow of celibacy.

These monks’ sexual affairs were so significant because violating the rule against sexual intercourse is one of the four most serious rules for Theravada monks. A monk who breaks one of these rules must disrobe and can never ordain again.

(Phra Kato. Image source: The Times)

Phra Kato’s and Phra Yantra’s scandals were far from the first or last to befall Buddhist monks in Thailand. On the evening of August 29, 2021, seven monks–four of them abbots–were caught drinking beer and feasting on roasted pork in the sacred chanting hall of Wat Phan Sao in Chiang Mai. Monks in Thailand are not allowed to eat after noon, and alcohol is strictly prohibited. The monks were arrested for breaking COVID-19 protocols and expelled from the sangha for breaking their sacred vows.

Newspapers in the 1990s were filled with stories of monastic scandals. There were countless reports of sexual misconduct, drinking, gambling, stealing from temple bank accounts, using and selling drugs, and even murder. Now, in the age of social media, these scandals are even more widely publicized. Each time another scandal goes public, Thai lay Buddhists question the role of monks in society as monks themselves consider their own relationship to the sangha.

Parallels to the mistrust of the Catholic priesthood in the United States are instructive. The widely reported pedophile priest scandal has resulted in fewer ordinations and more “priestless parishes.” The current birth rate in Thailand is 1.51 children per mother, even lower than China. Each year there will be fewer and fewer boys who will reach the age of ordination. Parents must decide if they want their son, and it is usually their only son, to pursue the monastic path. These scandals and their amplification through social media mean that having one’s son ordained as a monk is not as prestigious, or as safe, as it once was. Parents may hesitate to entrust the care of their sons to monks whose reputation may not be exemplary.

These scandals are a threat to the compact that binds laity and the sangha. The laity offer food, material goods, and money to temples and their monks. In turn, the laity receive “merit,” which in the Thai Buddhist view negates the effects of “bad karma” – or past unwholesome acts. Although merit can be gained by giving to charities, traditionally, the greatest amount of merit can be gained by giving to monks. The higher the receiving monk’s status, the more merit is generated. When monks are perceived to neglect their part in this reciprocal merit economy by disobeying their rules of renunciation, the merit system is compromised.

How, then, have these monastic scandals, especially the explosive Phra Kato one, affected the daily lives of ordinary young monks? We posed this question to monks living in Chiang Mai, a Buddhist academic center with several monastic high schools and two Buddhist universities.

One monk told us that when he left his temple one day to collect his morning alms, which is one of the signature daily morning rituals of Theravada Buddhism, a group of women pointed at him and yelled “Kato, Kato!” Laypeople, even friends, treated him as the butt of jokes. Friends on Facebook would comment or message him calling him ‘Kato.’ Another monk, while also collecting donations outside his temple, heard lay people jokingly inquiring about monastic activities, while referring to the location of Phra Kato’s affair: “Have you been to the dam today?” This kind of teasing suggests that people believe all monks have secret transgressions and are not following the rules of monastic discipline.

The scandals have created specific concerns about sexual misconduct and male monks interacting with women. According to the Vinaya, the rules that guide monastic behavior and appearance, monks should avoid close contact with women. Yet meditation teacher Phra Kyo told us that he often finds himself teaching in a room with only female students. Phra Kyo is concerned that some people might find it inappropriate for monks to be seen in a room with only women without understanding the context. Monastic life today is now more complicated because of the laity’s judgmental gaze.

Phra Kasem, who lives in a temple in a suburb of Chiang Mai, believes that scandals did not impact his community’s support for him because of their close personal relationship. However, the scandals still affect his monastic life because people have less faith in monks they do not personally know. On the occasions when Phra Kasem is invited to chant at ceremonies away from his temple, his supporters warn him to be careful. They remind him that Phra Kato traveled to other temples, and will say, “look what happened to him!” They worry about the temptation and suspicions monks face outside of familiar surroundings.

Articles about misbehaving monks are not only read by laity, but by monks as well. Monks also read the myriad online comments decrying the decline of monastic purity. Student monks reported to us that they believe the authors of these comments must be lay people who have not studied Buddhist teachings. Because they read only bad news about monks, the student monks presume, such lay people are beginning to lose their faith in Buddhism. They also surmise that lay people who have studied Buddhism will maintain their faith, confident that Buddhism is not affected by a few bad monks. Although monastic misbehavior is a widespread issue, when trying to explain the proliferation of scandals, these monks focus on the “few bad apples” phenomenon. They see monastic training as important, though not always effective, and that some men simply are not ready for the monastic life, which makes the whole institution appear tainted.

The training monks receive is not consistent from temple to temple, which has contributed to ongoing monastic problems. Monks learn about monastic life and proper behavior as part of their training as novices, or for a short period before their ordination ceremonies. It is up to the individual temples and abbots to make sure each ordained male knows how to follow the rules. However, with over 33,000 active temples and approximately 300,000 monks, monastic regulation is uneven.

(Thai Buddhist monks. Image source: Giulio Di Sturco for the International Herald Tribune)

Because of frequent scandals and the reaction of the laity, monks are concerned about the future generation’s support for Buddhism and, indeed, the future of Thai Buddhist practice. Phra Panya shared with us that he has seen very few young people visit his temple, reasoning that the scandals have alienated them. And Phra Ananda told us he thinks the “new generation” believe they can be good people without guidance from monks or the Buddha’s teachings.

Monks who live and study in Chiang Mai agreed that as more of these scandals become known, fewer people go to temples. They report less participation in temple activities after the Phra Kato scandal broke, though they acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic is another factor. Monks typically receive many invitations for them to offer blessing rituals for new houses, cars, or businesses. Lay people would come to temples for their birthdays, anniversaries of funerals, or for ceremonies to increase one’s longevity. But many of these requests have stopped. Lay temple patrons who would typically host a funeral ceremony for several days have now been shortened to one. Chiang Mai monks report that they have received fewer invitations for ceremonies and lower attendance at major Buddhist holidays. Fewer ceremonies result in a decrease in donations. And with less financial support from the laity, student monks must find other means to pay for tuition and other necessary expenses.

Phra Ajarn Dr. Phaitoon, a professor at MahaChulalongkornrajavidyalaya Buddhist University in Wang Noi, outside of Bangkok, said that the Phra Kato scandal has resulted in rarer ordinations of novices and fewer monastic students coming through the “pipeline.” Wat Srisoda, a temple in Chiang Mai, usually has more than 600 novices joining their temple school each year, but those numbers have reduced sharply. Last year there were only 50 novices. This appears to be a trend all over Chiang Mai: Wat Pa Pao had more than 40 monastics a few years ago but now has only 10. Over the last five years the number of monastics at Wat Som Phao has reduced by two-thirds.

With the plethora of news about misbehaving monks, there is little room in social media for positive stories about good monks. The problem is that positive stories, such as monks helping to build schools, or providing food for poor families, have no “legs.” These positive articles, appearing in social media, are read by the general public once, but scandals such as Phra Kato’s play out for weeks. Phra Kato’s strong but local media presence was quickly outweighed by the deluge of posts concerning his transgressions.

In July 2022, the new abbot of Wat Phan Sao held a panel discussion to reestablish the relationship between the monks and lay community. One woman brought up the issue of monastic scandals. The panelists focused on looking forward. It is natural, they said, that some monks will not be able to maintain the entirety of the renunciant’s lifestyle necessary to keep the monastic rules. Instead of feeling concerned, one panelist explained, laity should feel relieved. When scandals occur, those who are unable to maintain the monastic life are revealed, and only those who are pure will stay.

While the scandals have had a negative effect on male monks, they have had a positive effect on the small number of female monks, known as bhikkhunis. Monks (bhikkhu) are required to be celibate, forswear intoxicants, and follow the 227 behavioral rules of the Vinaya—the rules that govern behavior and appearance. In contrast, female monks (bhikkhunis) have 311 behavioral rules, and nuns (mae chi) follow eight precepts. There have been, as yet, no reports of bhikkunis or mae chi involved in sexual scandals. However, there are less than 300 bhikkhunis and around 30,000 mae chi in comparison with 300,000 bhikkhus.

Bhikkhunis are not allowed to ordain in Thailand. Instead, candidates travel to Sri Lanka for their novice training and ordination. Although their status as bhikkhuni is not accepted by the Thai sangha administration, they receive much support from lay people throughout Thailand who are aware of their dedicated practice. At the same time, many senior male monastics disapprove of bhikkhuni, believing that the Theravada lineage of bhikkhuni died out in the 11^th century in Sri Lanka, and cannot be revived. Since there are fewer bhikkhuni and it takes great effort for them to ordain, they are, in general, committed to the proper practice of monasticism. Luang Mae Dhammananda, the first bhikkhuni in Thailand, feels that Thai Buddhists might be tiring of male monks and their scandals. She has observed an increasing number of supporters who only give alms to female monks and believes this could be attributed to their loss of trust for male monks.

The accumulated impact of these scandals is making Buddhism’s role in Thai society far more complicated. When monks are known to be in breach of their 227 rules there is less trust, more suspicion, and an increasingly fragile monastic-lay relationship. On the other hand, there are clear and prominent examples of dedicated and disciplined bhikkunis, who, although not uniformly accepted because they are women, point a way towards restoring Buddhism’s reputation in Thailand.

Brooke Schedneck is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of Religious Tourism in Northern Thailand: Encounters with Buddhist Monks, published by the University of Washington Press in 2021.

Steve Epstein is a visiting lecturer at the Chiang Mai campus of Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya Buddhist University in Thailand. He is the author of Lao Folktales, published by Silkworm Books.

The post Sex, Scandals, and Buddhist Monks in Thailand appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image: New York Daily News cover, May 20, 1992)

The following excerpt comes from Bradley Onishi’s forthcoming book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next, reprinted here with permission from Broadleaf Books copyright © 2023. The book explores the rise of White Christian nationalism over the past several decades leading up to the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol.

The excerpt is from the book’s sixth chapter, “The Pure American Body.”

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There was a lot riding on that kiss. More than usual for the first intimate moment of a high school romance. We knew it, too. Our relationship depended on it. Our families’ futures depended on it. More than anything, the fate of our nation depended on it.

One of the benefits of being a zealous teenage convert to evangelicalism is that your parents stop worrying about what’s happening behind your closed bedroom door when your girlfriend comes over. After dozens of Bible studies, prayer groups, and Christian concerts, they kind of just turn off the normal teenage-radar and let you do your thing. So when Alexis and I went up to my room at eleven that Friday night—me a high school senior, her a freshman in college—no one in my family even blinked. We’d been dating for almost three years by then and had done little more than hold hands and hug goodbye. Like me, she was a convert who took her faith to the extreme. We were an even match when it came to our devotion to God, to evangelism, and to cultivating a life marked by godly virtues such as patience, integrity, and, most of all, purity.

Though we planned to marry soon after I graduated high school, we decided that it would be best to have our first kiss intentionally, in a planned and disciplined way rather than a spur-of-the-moment temptation that could lead us down a lustful path.

According to the historian Sara Moslener, in April of 1993 the first True Love Waits Pledges were taken at a Southern Baptist conference at a local church in Texas. This was the Southern Baptist Convention’s test pilot of the program. It soon spread to other local churches throughout the denomination. The first rally was in 1994 in Washington, DC. At the gathering, evangelical luminaries delivered message after message to the teenagers in attendance that the most important part of their personal walk with God was remaining sexually “pure” before marriage. At the end of the rally, there was an altar call—a standard feature of evangelical meetings, going back to the Second Great Awakening. But this one was different. The call was to pledge oneself to a life of purity. Those who answered the call signed cards that were later delivered to the National Mall in Washington, DC.

My Straight White American Jesus podcast cohost Dan Miller pledged his purity on a True Love Waits card at his church in Colorado. For him, it was a promise to keep his mind and body free of sexual sin and to be part of a generation who would turn American culture around. His card was delivered to the National Mall in 1994. There was a clear message behind sending hundreds of thousands of cards to the nation’s capital: the pledge to develop and maintain pure teenage bodies was a pledge not only to obey God’s commands but to build national strength and integrity. Somehow, there was a connection between nation-building and the sexual abstinence of teenagers in Milwaukee and Tucson and Baton Rouge. By the time the cards were delivered in July 1994, more than two hundred thousand teenagers like Dan had pledged their commitment to be part of a new generation of young people willing to stand up for God, rage against the cultural tides, and say no to sexual licentiousness.

(Image: True Love Waits purity ring and prayer. Source: Medium.com)

When I converted soon thereafter, the currents of purity culture, as manifest in the True Love Waits movement, were sweeping through evangelical churches. On the surface, the message was straightforward. It went something like this: Since the 1960s, we have lived in a culture that celebrates sexual freedom in destructive ways. By obeying God and committing yourself to abstinence before marriage, you are a countercultural rebel who is going to have a loving, intimate, and healthy sex life once you enter the bonds of marriage. The emphasis, as usual in evangelicalism, was on individual piety. We were warned that sex outside of God’s plan would destroy us spiritually and physically. The inflictions would be swift and ferocious—depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, not to mention AIDS and syphilis. And unlike other sins, which God washed away as soon as we confessed, sexual sins would wreak permanent damage on ourselves and our marriage.

“See this piece of tape?” one of our youth leaders would say in front of the crowd at Bible study. “What happens when I put it on Jesse’s arm?” He would put the tape on Jesse and then rip it off, leading to a yelp from the poor volunteer and roaring laughter from the crowd. “Now, when I put the same piece of tape on Ben, it has lost its grip.” The sequence would continue down a line of volunteers on stage until the tape was mangled and thrown into the trash. “This is what your sexuality is like. If you keep attaching yourself physically to people, eventually you will be used up and thrown away.”

These lessons made me afraid. Unlike other sins, which would be forgiven and washed away by Christ, it seemed that sexual sin had lasting effects even after you repented. I had already experimented with sex before my conversion. In order to be right with God and ready for marriage, I decided that antisex militancy was the only path that would work. Alexis and I decided early on in our dating relationship that we wouldn’t kiss until marriage. In our minds, kissing would lead to more kissing, which would lead to temptations we didn’t want to have to face.

But as time went on, it became clear that there was more to the purity message than not giving in to bodily lust. Keeping our bodies pure was the way to renewing the purity of other bodies. Both Alexis and I had divorced families—“broken homes,” as they were known in evangelical circles. Few, if any, of our relatives were born-again Christians like we were. If we wanted to turn the generational ship around in order to create a family tree of God-fearing people, the first step was maintaining our relationship’s purity as the foundation for a pious genealogical legacy. The family is the vessel of godly instruction and formation, we learned. If the tree’s roots were rotten, how could we expect our children and their children to ever love God and find eternal salvation?

As young people, we knew that the stakes of individual purity extended even beyond the fate of our families to the fate of our nation. If we wanted to restore America’s glory, it would take a generation of godly families rooted in the pledge to purity. It would require seeing a connection between the purity of our teenaged bodies and purity of our body politic. As those massive mailings of purity pledge cards to the National Mall from that first rally suggest, True Love Waits was more than a movement to get kids to stop fooling around at Inspiration Point or prevent teen pregnancy. The organizers sent a clear message to our generation: sexual purity is the road to national renewal. It’s the frontline of the culture wars. And you are the soldiers.

Vice Presidents and Single Mothers

According to evangelical leaders during the eighties and early nineties, in order to see the rot creeping into American culture, all you had to do was turn on the television. While family-oriented programs like The Cosby Show and Family Ties still dominated the air-waves, these years also saw new representations of gender roles, sexual identities, and family types on the small screen. Three’s Company portrayed a supposedly gay man living with two women in the same apartment, and My Two Dads challenged conventional notions about healthy families and parental guidance. But the program that caused the most controversy was the ratings bonanza Murphy Brown, a show about a woman who decided to raise a child on her own while managing a successful career.

In 1992, then vice president Dan Quayle criticized Murphy Brown in a speech about family values: “Ultimately however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’”

Quayle links what he takes to be the decay of American culture to the breakdown of the nuclear family. He suggests that if single mothers who refuse partners and raise children without a male figure in the household are allowed to proceed without sanction, then the country will decline. By sounding this alarm, the vice president was tapping into a cultural current of the decay of White sexual ethics. In 1993, the libertarian author Charles Murray caused controversy when he published “The Coming White Underclass.” Murray begins the essay with a racist caricature of the Black American family characterized by out-of-wedlock children living in fatherless homes. He then paints with broad strokes to create a picture of Black life in urban areas as akin to “Lord of the Flies writ large,” where “the values of unsocialized male adolescents” are “physical violence, immediate gratification and predatory sex. That is the culture now taking over the black inner city.” In Murray’s mind there is a direct line between out-of-wedlock childbirth and social chaos. Even more frightening for Murray were the statistics that revealed that White Americans were having children out of wedlock at increasing rates. In Murray’s analysis, there is a one-to-one correlation between the destitution of Black life and the percentage of children born out of wedlock. If the number of “illegitimate” White children reached the same level, he suggested, it would create a White underclass similar to that of Black America. His concerns about marriage, sexual ethics, and the nuclear family were rooted in racist tropes about Black people and Black families.

(Left: Murphy Brown. Right: Dan Quayle)

Dan Quayle was nowhere near as controversial as Murray, but his thinking followed similar pathways. For Quayle, the route to national renewal was the nuclear family. Americans must return to the family values, which, for Christian nationalists, are the locus keeping the country connected to God: “So I think the time has come to renew our public commitment to our Judeo-Christian values—in our churches and synagogues, our civic organizations and our schools. We are, as our children recite each morning, ‘one nation under God.’ . . . If we lived more thoroughly by these values, we would live in a better society.”

The writers of Murphy Brown didn’t take the criticism lying down. In the opening episode of the following season, the main character, who is a newscaster, says into the fictional camera: “These are difficult times for our country, and in searching for the causes of our social ills we could choose to blame the media, or the Congress, or an administration that’s been in power for twelve years. Or we could blame me.”

Murphy Brown was singled out because the character represented multiple aberrations from the family structure and sexual ethics that Christian nationalists view as essential to American prosperity. She is a professional who prioritizes her career. She is a single woman who has autonomy over her sex life. She is a single mother who is intentionally raising her child without a male partner. To top it off, in the show Murphy Brown is a role model to others—a newscaster whose life and work are showcased on national television.

The show’s writers astutely identified the issue that Quayle and his ilk had with the character and the show. In Christian nationalists’ minds, there is a direct connection between “impure” sexual practices and “broken” family structures and the fate of the nation. They condemn the likes of Murphy Brown because they see in her character a representation of the sexual and familial waywardness they blame for destroying the nation from within. The fate of the nation depends, for the Christian nationalist, on sexual purity and proper familial structure. Without those, their story goes, we will be a nation of fatherless boys lacking proper masculine virtues and a society overrun by violence, aggression, and chaos.

Bradley Onishi is a scholar of religion and host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. His book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next, will be published by Broadleaf Books in January 2023.

The post Single Mothers, Sex, and Christian Nationalism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Lausanne)

This past June, I found myself standing in line in a progressive, independent bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan, thinking about irony: here I was, a once pro-life, deeply committed, conservative Christian, about to sign a reproductive-rights petition a few days after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion. I never would have believed that I would one day use my name, my voice, and my vote to advocate for reproductive freedom.

Until my mid-twenties, I lived in a family that followed the rules of Christian patriarchy, a fringe movement that promotes biblical literalism, discrete gender roles, purity culture, the unquestioned authority of fathers, and the submission of women. While patriarchal societies have existed since the beginning of civilization, this form of religious patriarchy has spread in the United States since the 1970s in reaction to second-wave feminism and the legalization of abortion.

Even though men benefit the most from patriarchal systems, white evangelical women were among the first to popularize the patriarchal lifestyle. In 1977, prominent evangelical Nancy Campbell started publishing a magazine called Above Rubies, which still runs today, that idealizes stay-at-home motherhood and discourages women from working outside the home. More than one hundred thousand people follow the Above Rubies Facebook page today, where posts encourage women to prioritize maternity above all else. One such post reads, “Motherhood is the only career that lasts for eternity. Don’t waste your life on things that you will leave behind.”

For the Christian patriarchy movement, feminism is a dangerous threat. In 1985, Mary Pride, an evangelical who was influential in the early homeschooling movement, wrote a book called The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality. Pride claimed she was a former feminist who found her way to Christianity. She was against all forms of birth control and believed women must let God decide how many children they should have.

The Christian patriarchy movement is not a centralized organization. Rather, it spans across various evangelical and Reformed Protestant churches, making it impossible to determine how many followers exist. And yet, the Christian patriarchy movement’s influence has become increasingly visible in national and local politics. Understanding the teachings and influence of Christian patriarchy is key to making sense of the rise of Christian nationalism within the Republican Party and the concurrent loss of civil liberties, such as reproductive rights, across the country.

Life under Christian Patriarchy

Growing up as a child in the Christian patriarchy movement, I was taught from an early age to believe that my calling in life was to get married, provide a sexual outlet for my husband, and have as many children as God would bless me with raising. I was not allowed to date, leave home after high school graduation, work for an employer who was not my father, or make life decisions independently. I was required to live with my parents until marriage, submitting to my father in all things.

I became what the Christian patriarchy movement calls a “stay-at-home daughter,” practicing my future of being a stay-at-home wife by being a daughter who served her father. My only way out was to marry a man who met with my father’s approval.

Because my parents homeschooled me, I received no sex education beyond the rule that I was not allowed to have sex until my wedding night. I do not remember ever being taught about the concept of consent. In fact, the patriarchal church we attended when I was a teenager considered my lack of autonomy and independence holy because it meant I had submitted to my father and to “God’s will.” If I were to exert any semblance of my own rights to my life and body, I would have been labeled sinful and possibly excommunicated. Fear of abandonment and exile kept me in check.

Church leaders in this movement condemned contraception as people’s “attempts to play God,” and many went as far as to say birth control was sinful. As an unmarried young woman, I was not allowed to receive the HPV vaccine and was discouraged from seeing an OB/GYN because it was presumed that I would be sexually inactive until marriage. Nothing was said about what would happen if I were raped, because according to the teachings of Christian patriarchy, girls who live under the protection of their fathers do not need to worry about that. If I were married in the movement, I would not have received any help for potential marital rape, as the concept was nonexistent in a world where women are to give all of themselves to their husbands in order to obey God.

(Image source: Rocco Fazzari)

I was taught that patriarchy would protect me, but I did not feel safe because I had no say in what that protection would look like. Instead of protecting me, my father controlled all aspects of my life and based his rules on the movement’s teachings. After I started to experience depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms, I began to understand that Christian patriarchy was a form of spiritual abuse.

I finally escaped at the age of twenty-five after finding the resources and supportive friends I needed to survive outside of the community. Even so, it took me years to process the trauma and powerlessness I had experienced in not having rights over my own body. In working through my time within Christian patriarchy, I came to see how the movement’s influence extends far beyond homes like my parents’ and into mainstream American politics.

Michigan’s Reproductive Freedom for All

Along with the more than 600 people who visited the bookstore that summer day, I signed the Reproductive Freedom for All petition to add a proposal for an amendment to the Michigan state constitution that would, in part, “establish new individual right to reproductive freedom, including right to make all decisions about pregnancy and abortion; allow state to regulate abortion in some cases; and forbid prosecution of individuals exercising established right.” Throughout the state, activists gathered 753,759 total signatures from voters in every county, 300,000 more than needed to ensure the proposal would be on the ballot in November.

After the overturning of Roe, Michigan was set to have a near-total abortion ban based on a 1931 law that predates oral contraceptive pills. Although a Michigan judge put a temporary hold on this ban, hundreds of thousands of Michiganders worried that reproductive rights were about to disappear.

When I first heard the Supreme Court’s decision, I was surprised by the bodily reaction I had. I could feel the ache of adrenaline in the back of my neck. My stomach rolled. My thoughts scattered, then focused on what this ruling would mean. My body knew what my mind had taken so long to understand: authoritarian control over our bodies is dehumanizing, disempowering, and dangerous.

With the overthrow of Roe, experts have warned that loss of bodily autonomy will cause more fatalities for pregnant people and more severe inequality throughout the country. This kind of inequality is nothing new, and many people already experience this in marginalized communities and high-control religious groups across the globe, including the United States. In fact, an estimated 45 percent of women worldwide, according to a 2021 report from the United Nations, lack bodily autonomy, which the report’s authors define as women’s “ability to make their own decisions on issues relating to health care, contraception and whether to have sex.”

(Rally in Michigan to support legal abortion. Image source: Emily Elconin for Getty Images)

I can attest to what it is like to be controlled in this way, to live without self-ownership. I now fear what our country will be like as Christian patriarchy principles are applied to laws that govern all of us.

Dominionism

To recognize how the ideas of Christian patriarchy are infiltrating American politics, we must understand the related ideology of dominionism, “the belief that Christians should take moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical control over society.” Christian patriarchy and dominionism both originate from the idea that the Bible is the inerrant, literal word of God and is meant to rule all aspects of society. In patriarchy, fathers rule the household; in dominionism, Christian men rule the church and government.

Children like me learned the principles of dominion theology through religion-based homeschooling curricula. One year, my history course consisted of listening to tapes from the Christian Reconstructionist R. J. Rushdoony, whose hefty Institutes of Biblical Law includes such ideas as this: “The social order which despises God’s law places itself on death row: it is marked for judgment.” Reconstructionism is a strict form of dominionism that promotes theonomy, a government that would be based on biblical law. In Rushdoony’s view, a government that does not obey biblical law would be subject to God’s judgment.

Rushdoony died in 2001, but his ideas and the teachings of other dominionists have been influential in the overlapping worlds of religious homeschooling and Christian patriarchy, and followers are working to impose their views on society.

Take for example the town of Moscow, Idaho, home of Doug Wilson’s Christ Church. Wilson is a highly recognized and admired pastor in the Christian patriarchy movement, and his empire-making machine of churches, a college, a publishing house, and a streaming service churn out content that gives his teachings of female subordination and male domination the facade of validity by showing the patriarchal lifestyle in an idealized, highly polished way.

Dominionism is a clear part of Wilson’s plan. According to an investigation conducted by The Guardian, “Christ Church has a stated goal to ‘make Moscow a Christian town’ and public records, interviews, and open source materials online show how its leadership has extended its power and activities in the town.” Ten percent of Moscow’s population are members of Christ Church and its affiliated churches, and the congregation has been known to gain influence by owning property and businesses and running for local political offices. While many of the other residents are resistant to Wilson’s ideology, his popularity continues to rise in conservative circles and has gained the attention of national media.

Another example is my own previous pastor, Kevin Swanson, who has long blurred the line between church and state. In 1994, he ran for governor of Colorado as part of the religious Constitution Party. Forty thousand residents voted for him, less than 4 percent of the total votes. But even though he failed in his political campaign, he worked to gain power in other ways, including becoming executive director of the statewide Christian homeschool organization, Christian Home Educators of Colorado. He later made national news when he spoke at a Republican political event in 2015 when he said that, according to the Bible, “homosexuals” should receive the death penalty.

Both Wilson and Swanson unsurprisingly hold anti-abortion views, but their perspectives extend beyond abortion to broader issues of bodily autonomy.

Wilson’s book Fidelity, for instance, presents a distorted view of sex. He writes that “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage.” Such a teaching about sex leaves no room for consent and could serve as justification for marital rape. As a woman who was taught this, I believed I would need to have sex with my husband whenever he wanted it.

Swanson similarly promotes patriarchy and the subordination of women. He once spread misinformation about contraceptives on his radio show Generations: “…these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.” This is a blatantly false claim, causing only more shame for women who seek to have some control over their reproductive health.

Post Roe

Understanding the ideology of dominionists like Wilson and Swanson is important if we are to recognize the antidemocracy tactics of politicians influenced by dominionism. We are already seeing a push to bring “biblical law” to bear on state and federal legislation. Ohio, Georgia, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and South Carolina have all introduced bills that give personhood to fetuses from the moment of conception, and Georgia’s has passed. In September 2022, Senator Lindsey Graham introduced a bill that would institute a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks. Other legislation on contraception access has been introduced as well.

While most politicians pushing this agenda are unlikely to use the term dominionism, some fall into the related category of Christian nationalism, which is the belief that “America is Christian, that the government should keep it that way.” The difference between dominionism and Christian nationalism is subtle. Religion scholar Dr. Clint Heacock argues that Christian nationalism is a form of dominionism in which “the theology of conversionism and world missions has slowly been replaced over the decades with a view that holds that political means are the way to establish dominion.” In place of sending missionaries around the globe to convert “heathens,” countless churches are turning their attention to spreading Christian authority by influencing American politics. Dominionism and Christian nationalism are part of the same spectrum of religious authoritarianism—both strive for control; both hold Christianity as the superior religion fit to govern all.

Historian Dr. Kristin Kobes DuMez spoke to PBS recently about how this ideology is gaining power in the United States and threatening the democratic process. She said, “for many Christian nationalists, democratic means won’t necessarily achieve their ends. And so we’re seeing voter suppression, denial of voter suppression—that that’s even happening, and, again, this erosion to the commitment of democracy, and it’s really quite alarming.”

For dominionists and people in the Christian patriarchy movement, the dismantling of democracy makes perfect sense. God, not the will of the people, should have dominion over every part of society. From this perspective, theocratic control is much more important than protecting people’s rights.

To understand how destructive Christian nationalism is to a democratic society, we must also recognize how it is entangled with a belief in white supremacy. Dr. Jemar Tisby, a historian of race and religion, wrote in a report released by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, “Unfortunately, the white Christian nationalist version of patriotism is racist, xenophobic, patriarchal, and exclusionary. Their vision of the nation conveniently puts white people­—especially men—who are politically conservative and who make some claim of Christian adherence at the top of the social hierarchy.” Christian nationalism upholds a belief in the supremacy of white masculinity and conservative white evangelicalism.

If leaders influenced by dominionism and Christian nationalism get their way in criminalizing abortion across the country, Roe is just the beginning of more legislation that will restrict civil liberties for all of us. Those on the margins of society will suffer the most, including people in abusive relationships, the LGBTQ community, and people of color. These politicians do not take issue with the government controlling contraceptives, ending marriage equality, or restricting LGBTQ rights. They will not stop at Roe.

With the uncertainty of reproductive rights burdening all of us, I know this to be true: a future without bodily autonomy is too much like the past to which I never want to return.

But just as I was able to fight for my personal freedom to escape a restrictive religious movement, Americans are fighting to protect their rights for the future. In the midterm election, nearly 2.5 million Michigan residents voted in favor of the Reproductive Freedom for All proposal, ensuring that reproductive freedom will now be protected in the state constitution. As much as I know that religious extremism in government and rising Christian nationalism are dangerous, more than ever I believe that our voices and our votes do matter.

Cait West is a writer and editor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with publications in Religion Dispatches, Fourth Genre, and Hawai`i Pacific Review, among others. She serves on the editorial board for Tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse, and her forthcoming memoir on escaping the Christian patriarchy movement will be published in 2024.

The post Bodily Autonomy, Reproductive Rights, and the Christian Patriarchy Movement appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image: The Muppet Christmas Carol movie poster)

I am a card-carrying member of the Muppet generation. That is to say: I was reared during the era of Peak Muppet. I was born in 1978. The Muppet Show aired every week during my early childhood, and the Sesame Street Muppets, born in 1969, had truly hit their stride — but had not yet been sullied by The Elmo Takeover.

One of my earliest memories is the CBS “eye” appearing on our living room television just before a drumroll heralded Kermit’s voice declaring, “It’s the Muppet show!” What followed was thirty minutes of the zaniest variety show ever, populated by Muppets and one celebrity human host.  The episode where Tony Randall turned Miss Piggy to stone reduced me to night terrors. But the Muppets were also my love language. Ernie and Bert soothed me while my mom applied antiseptic ointment after my first bee sting. Fozzie Bear could always make me laugh. I ate it all up. Creator Jim Henson was just reaching his creative best.

And then abruptly, in my ‘tween years, came the tragedy. On May 16, 1990, Henson died of complications from streptococcal pneumonia. He was only fifty-three years old. I hadn’t fully realized people could just die like that. They broadcast footage from his funeral on the news. I remember seeing bright colors—no darkness for Henson, whose instructions forbade anyone to wear black at his funeral — and delicate butterfly puppets waving among mourners in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I wept. I was twelve years old.

The Muppets could have ended then.

But they didn’t. Jim Henson’s son, Brian, took on the mantle of continuing his father’s legacy. Two years later, in December 1992, The Muppet Christmas Carol appeared in theaters. Kermit’s voice was different, and it wasn’t a runaway success — but it was enough. It was a Christmas miracle. Three decades later, there have now been more Muppet films without Jim Henson at the helm than with him.

The Muppets, it turned out, were eternal. Whether they are making rainbow connections or excited that there’s only one more sleep ‘till Christmas, Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo and Fozzie Bear all showed us how to believe in our common humanity and the wonder of the everyday. What could be more perfect for we late Gen X-ers — the children of the “spiritual but not religious” Baby Boomers and their marketplace of devotions, desperate for something to counter our cynicism, fearful that we might end up worse off than our parents? The Muppets are our spiritual lingua franca.

***

The most obvious Muppet Religion is in The Muppet Christmas Carol, which turns thirty years old this December. Last fall, I attended a panel to mark this occasion at D23 — the official Disney fan convention — in Anaheim, California. In a packed hall, I watched drag performer, author, and reality-TV-star Nina West (Andrew Levitt, also born in 1978), clad in a stunning Kermit-green dress, sing with several Muppets. Fake snow and greenery decorated the stage.

During the panel that followed, composer Paul Williams (who also worked on music for The Muppet Movie) told us, “I had a spiritual awakening” after giving up drinking — a change that happened just before he wrote for The Muppet Christmas Carol. After telling the story of his sobriety, Williams brought us into his creative process. “I get up in the morning and I say, ‘lead me where you need me.’  And I say, ‘surprise me God,’ because there’s something about surrendering to just the process of living life, and trying to do the right thing, and being of love and service, that just takes all the work out of it,” he explained.

This idea of surrender is a key feature of many religious traditions — particularly Christianity, which is foundational for twelve-step programs. In a Christian context, surrender means giving oneself over to a higher power, to — as Carrie Underwood puts it — let “Jesus take the wheel.” There is surrender, too, in the Muppets — a willingness to abandon the pretense of being “normal,” and instead to give oneself over to irreverence and community, however dysfunctional things might be backstage at The Muppet Show.

For Williams, Scrooge’s story of redemption resonated with his own. “It’s about a man who is addicted to finance… and suddenly has a spiritual awakening,” he continued. “He finds that he is part of the family of man, and he has awakened to a thankful heart. A perfect match of something to write about that I felt I had been gifted with myself.”

The idea that redemption is always available— that hope comes in the morning — is key to the immense popularity of A Christmas Carol. Dickens might have been British, but A Christmas Carol’s message of salvation is also baked into the DNA of U.S. Protestantisms—and into narratives of what America itself means. In The Muppet Christmas Carol, when Scrooge (Michael Caine) faces his own grave, he pleads with the Spirit of Christmas Future: “These events can be changed! A life can be made right!” These are folks who love a comeback story, whether it’s a redeemed politician or a former gang member turned evangelist. There are few more American moves than this promise: Americans long for what might be, for the change on every horizon.

The Muppets are felt-wrapped containers of unfettered possibility. At the close of The Muppet Movie, in a reprise of “The Rainbow Connection,” Kermit turns to the camera — breaking the fourth wall — and sings, “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending, keep believing, keep pretending.” It is a modern affirmation of faith in the regenerative power of creativity — and our control of our own destiny.

(Kermit. Image source: Mike Lawrie/Getty Images)

But this is not just a story of American individualism. Kermit sings on a soundstage where he is surrounded by dozens of other Muppets, in every shape and size. Even more than they are dreamers, the Muppets are a family. They are an emblem for all those who have had to forge their own chosen families — a hallmark of Generation X, which was perhaps the first cohort to celebrate “Friendsgiving,” and also of many LGBTQIA+ people (there are many excellent queer takes on the Muppets). Kermit’s dream lives because he shares it with other people. Catharsis only comes once you have a community.

***

The Muppet Christmas Carol is now a classic, but its spiritual wellspring is different from that of the Henson-era Muppets.

The Muppets’ roots owe much to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of religious experimentation, as Baby Boomers came of age amidst popular interest in Asian religions; as the Jesus movement spread among “hippie Christians” on the West Coast; and as feminism, Civil Rights, and environmentalism all influenced theologies and rituals. Experimentation was a hallmark of American religions in this era. (In The Muppet Movie, there is a running gag where every time any character says they are “lost,” another replies: “Have you tried Hare Krishna?”)

Jim Henson was influenced by that counterculture. Raised in a Christian Scientist family, he eventually left that tradition (Christian Science is one of many late-nineteenth century Christian revivals that could also be called countercultural). As an adult, he was influenced by the beatniks of the 1950s and the peace movements of the sixties and seventies. Many of Jim Henson’s quotes evoke the interconnectedness of all living things. “I believe in taking a positive attitude toward the world,” he said. “I try to tune myself into whatever it is that I’m supposed to be, and I try to think of myself as a part of all of us — all mankind and all life.”

(Jim Henson. Image source: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Attunement, a web of life, unity — this was the romantic hope left over from the 1960s that lingered during my late Cold War childhood (and also inspired Fraggle Rock). This language was passed down to liberal late Gen Xers and millennials through our parents’ nostalgia for the idealism of their youth. We imbibed it through popular culture. And in late capitalism, we are what we consume. To binge The Muppet Show or Fraggle Rock is to binge an entire ethos.

After Henson’s death, he was memorialized as a peaceful harbinger of hope. “I think what Jim really wanted to do was sing songs, and tell stories, teach children, promote peace, celebrate man, praise God, and be silly,” said Muppet writer Jerry Juhl at Henson’s memorial service. “That’s how I’ll remember Jim Henson — as a man who was balanced effortlessly and elegantly between the sacred and the silly.”

Silliness is sacred. Many anthropologists of religion have argued that “play,” or “ludic ritual,” is central to how religious behaviors work. It might seem counterintuitive, but wackiness and holiness often go together: just think of the revelry of St. Patrick’s Day, or the role reversals and crazy costumes on the Jewish holiday of Purim. Literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin made a similar argument about the “carnivalesque.” When things are topsy turvy — when our usual rules are suspended — we can stretch the boundaries of our identities or reverse our social roles. Peasants become queens; pigs become movie stars. It is on the strength of the absurd that we delve into hope and new ways of becoming.

This Hensonian “sacred play” is what made the Muppets so life changing for my generation. “I don’t think we love the Muppets simply because they came from our childhood,” writes Elizabeth Hyde Stevens. “We love the Muppets because they gave us a worldview — a profoundly idealistic, yet profoundly realistic worldview — that many of us carry into our adulthoods.”

***

Why do the Muppets work so well in an adaptation of A Christmas Carol? Victorian literature scholar Joshua Taft writes that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol combines “humanistic Christianity” with “a variety of secular enchantment.” Enchantment — or re-enchantment — is a crucial part of the Muppets’ appeal.

Philosopher Jane Bennett writes that enchantment entails “a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect or are not fully prepared to engage.” No one expects to see a frog playing the banjo, or Gonzo cast as Charles Dickens. This interrupts us, introduces “the unheimlich (uncanny),” gives us “a shot in the arm.”

The Muppets re-conjure the world. As puppets, uncanniness is already in their DNA. They are hybrid beings, animated by humans, seemingly independent within the frame of the television screen, but somehow just as believable when we can see the puppeteers beneath them.

Bennett notes the connection between “enchant” and the French word for singing: chanter. “To ‘en-chant’: to surround with song or incantation; hence to cast a spell with sounds, to make fall under the sway of a magical refrain, to carry away on a sonorous stream,” she writes. Fittingly, we find the deepest moments of Muppet enchantment in music.

At the D23 panel, Paul Williams discussed Gonzo’s “soulfulness,” which came out deeply in The Muppet Christmas Carol. But that sense of melancholy wonder was already a part of the character back in the 1970s. As Williams put it, “One of the most amazing experiences of my life was to hear Gonzo sing, ‘This looks familiar…’”

That’s the first line of “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday,” a ballad the blue and purple misfit sings in The Muppet Movie. As the Muppets sit around a campfire, Gonzo marvels at the stars. “I wish I had those balloons again,” he says, remembering a brief sojourn in the clouds. With Rowlf the dog playing a mournful harmonica, the song begins.

In the second verse, Gonzo sings, “Is that a song there, and do I belong there? I’ve never been there, but I know the way. I’m going to go back there someday.” It is a deeply mystical tune, rife with paradoxes. It is also a grounded song. It revels in our vulnerable intersubjectivity with other living beings. “There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met. Part heaven, part space, or have I found my place?” We might long for the sky, but it is the bonds forged below, around the campfire, that matter most.

(Image: Gonzo singing in The Muppet Movie)

Like Henson poised between “the sacred and the silly,” Gonzo is positioned on this same sublime hinge. As Gideon Haberkorn writes in Kermit Culture, “The Great Gonzo provides a situation for negotiating, questioning, and reinterpreting normality as such. His essence is the defiance of norms and boundaries, fervent commitment, and a strong belief in himself.”

Gonzo is the most “soulful” Muppet because he relishes in sacred play. We might dream of being carried away by a giant bouquet of balloons. Gonzo lives this dream.

***

For most of my life, Henson’s untimely demise was the celebrity death that haunted me the most. I’m not sure why. It might have been my age when it happened, on the cusp of being a teenager. The timing of Henson’s death also coincided with a rapid upswing in activism and awareness around the AIDS epidemic (another formative Gen X moment). On the personal front, my paternal grandparents died in the early 1990s. A dear friend lost her sister around the same time.

I had led a relatively sheltered childhood up to that point. In a way, Henson’s loss was the opening salvo in a deluge of deaths.

But perhaps the Muppets had already attuned me to death long ago. Recall Miss Piggy’s mishap with Tony Randall on the Muppet Show? When I first saw her changed to stone, I was certain he had killed her. Or something worse: provoked a kind of living death. She was an immobile statue, but occasionally her voice would shriek out, furious with her situation. It was the very worst kind of uncanny valley — a comingling of absence and presence, on the border between life and death.

Miss Piggy is turned to stone because she stumbles into Randall’s dressing room while he is messing around with a book of spells. He says an incantation out loud before checking to see what it does and — presto, chango! — every molecule of Miss Piggy is transformed. While we might long for enchantment, for Kermit singing about “magic in the air,” there is a danger in re-conjuring the world, too. For it is a fragile one.

The Muppet Christmas Carol acknowledges this fact of the worlds’ fragility and is both a delight and an elegy because of it. After all, Dickens’ original has always hinged on mortality. Scrooge is aghast when he sees the future in which Tiny Tim has died. In the film, he says, “Oh spirit. Must there be a Christmas that brings this awful scene? How can we endure it?” But there is another, more stoic possible take. In character as Bob Cratchit, Kermit tells his wife and children: “Life is made up of meetings and partings and that is the way of it.”

I think of what it must have meant for Jerry Juhl to write that line — which is not in the original —into the script, so soon after Henson’s death, and to give it to the Muppet who was the alter ego of his dear friend.

From “old friends who’ve just met” to “life is made up of meetings and partings.” Is this enchantment? It certainly stops us in our tracks. Lately, I find myself missing Jim Henson more than I ever have before. Henson’s manager and friend, Bernie Brillstein, eulogized him thusly: “In a business where the one who shouts the loudest usually gets the most attention, Jim Henson rarely spoke above a whisper.”

I long for a voice of quiet compassion here in the cruel chaos of a world where the loudest voices are so often vitriolic. Henson’s speaking voice was quiet. Yet the whole world heard him.

Some of us still do. Just ask the hundreds of fans crying buckets as we watched the Muppets in Anaheim last fall.

Jodi Eicher-Levine is the Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization and a professor of religion studies at Lehigh University. She is the author, most recently, of Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community, and is writing a book about religion and Disney.

The post Muppet Religion appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

With the end of 2022 on the horizon, I find myself reflecting on the past year. While this year has been filled with much to lament – from the overturning of Roe and legislative attacks on transgender Americans, to the rise in antisemitism and mistreatment of immigrants – I have been pushing myself to think about positive moments in 2022.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

For me, one source of encouragement has been the Revealer’s growth and new initiatives over the past twelve months. We continue to see our readership expand, and I am pleased so many people turn to our articles and the expertise our writers offer about critically important matters. In 2022, we launched several endeavors to offer our readers new features. In March, acclaimed religion writer Kaya Oakes joined the Revealer to write her “Not So Sorry” column, where she has addressed the Catholic church’s role in overturning Roe, sexual misconduct at Christianity Today, and more. In April, we began a three-part series on “Catholic Horrors,” which compares horror films and literature with real-life atrocities committed by the Catholic church. In October, we published a special issue on “Trans Lives and Religion,” which provides incisive articles on transgender and nonbinary Buddhists, Sikhs, and Muslims; gender diversity in the Talmud; how Christians can support transgender adolescents; and what we can learn from earlier anti-queer legislation to make sense of today’s anti-trans bills. And in November, we hosted a special virtual event with Bradley Onishi, author of the popular Revealer article “God is Ultimate Masculinity: Evangelical Visions of Manhood in the Wake of the Atlanta Massacre,” so readers could hear from, and pose questions to, Onishi about rising Christian nationalism. If you missed it, you can find a recording of the event here.

Amidst these new initiatives, we continued to publish ten issues of the Revealer and eleven episodes of the Revealer podcast. Through both, we covered such diverse topics as sex workers and religion, Black Buddhists and racism, changing stereotypes of South Asians on TV, and Jewish comedy in America. Our current issue is no different and addresses a wide range of subjects about religion, media, and society.

The December issue opens with Jodi Eichler-Levine’s “Muppet Religion,” where she uses the 30^th anniversary of The Muppet Christmas Carol to reflect on the Muppet’s spiritual messages and why they have remained popular for decades. Next, in “Bodily Autonomy, Reproductive Rights, and the Christian Patriarchy Movement,” Cait West shares her experiences growing up as a “stay-at-home daughter,” where her father had total control over decisions about her body, and warns about the movement’s growing presence within the Republican party. Connected to that, in “Single Mothers, Sex, and Christian Nationalism,” an excerpt from Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next, Bradley Onishi discusses the role purity culture plays in evangelical communities and how single mothers became a rallying point for the Christian right. Next, we head to another part of the world to explore a different area of religion and sexuality. In “Sex, Scandals, and Buddhists Monks in Thailand,” Brooke Schedneck and Steve Epstein investigate how the numerous scandals involving Thai Buddhists monks are transforming Buddhist practice in Thailand. Then, our articles conclude with a focus on books. In “The False Messiahs of Space Exploration,” Catherine L. Newell offers a review of Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s new book, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. And, in “Winter Reading Recommendations,” we offer, with much excitement, our annual list of recommended books.

The December issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “The Corporate Space Race and Religion.” Mary-Jane Rubenstein joins us to discuss why corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are invested in space exploration, how Christianity undergirds people’s support for colonizing the cosmos, and how some Indigenous religious traditions offer teachings that could help us reconsider our relationship to outer space and our planet. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As we take stock of what we have done this past year, I am pleased by the range of topics the Revealer has been able to cover about religion’s place in the world. I am grateful to everyone who has worked on the articles and podcast episodes. And I am especially appreciative to everyone who reads the Revealer and listens to our podcast! We are committed to providing you with the same high-caliber content in 2023.

May the remainder of 2022 be a good year for all of you.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post December Editor’s Letter: Looking Back on 2022 appeared first on The Revealer.