Are you concerned about rising Christian nationalism, the separation of church and state, and the erosion of democracy? We have the event for you.

Dr. Bradley Onishi, author of the forthcoming book Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next will be in conversation with the Revealer’s editor, Dr. Brett Krutzsch. They will discuss Christian nationalism’s rising prominence, what to do about the threat of more violence like January 6, and what the midterm elections foretell about the 2024 race and the future of democracy in the U.S. An audience Q & A will follow.

Date: Tuesday, November 15

Time: 7:00pm EST

Register for the *free* virtual event here.

The post Revealer Event: Christian Nationalists, The Possibility of War, and the Future of American Democracy appeared first on The Revealer.

You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple 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: Atheists in America.

Happy listening!

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 30: Atheists in America appeared first on The Revealer.

(Amazon promotional image for A League of Their Own)

Like many lesbian women, I have found myself enamored with Amazon Prime’s newly reimagined A League of Their Own. The show, co-written and co-produced by comic thinkers Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) and Will Graham (Mozart in the Jungle, Onion News Network), premiered on August 12, 2022 with an eight-episode season. Like the 1992 film on which it is based, League’s first season takes place in 1943, at the height of WWII when men are being drafted in droves. The show follows the development of the Rockford Peaches, a woman’s professional baseball team that played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) from 1943 through 1954. Like the film, League is based on the historical Peaches, but broadcasting thirty years later has the cultural space to explore aspects of the AAGPBL and its players that the original movie could only hint at but not address: racial segregation, homosexuality, and gender bending. While the season explores these areas with considerable care and nuance, I am left questioning the role of Jewishness—or perhaps more rightly Jewish stereotypes—in the show’s 1940s setting.

To provide some background: Professional American baseball teams, in both the show and in actuality, were comprised of white and white-enough players. In the 1940s, Black American ballplayers were forced to play separately, in what was called the Negro League, until Jackie Robinson played as a Brooklyn Dodger in 1947 (the Negro league officially disbanded in 1948). While there are two Latinx players and one Jewish player on The Peaches in League, the rest, as far as we know in Season 1, are white as understood in mid-twentieth century United States.

Instead of following these players alone, League, unlike the film, also follows the Negro League, and focuses especially on Maxine Chapman (Chanté Adams), a Black pitcher who throws faster, harder, and has more passion for baseball than most of her male or female counterparts. Shortly into the series, we learn that Chapman is a lesbian who lands on the gender performance spectrum toward what we today might call a “Chapstick lesbian.” At one point in the show, in fact, she and Peaches player Carson Shaw discuss needing a term for lesbian women such as themselves—those who are neither butch nor femme, but rather somewhere in-between. At least there is a term now.

Shaw, played by Jacobson, is a catcher for the Peaches, and becomes the team’s coach when their assigned coach bails. Once she is on the team, she realizes quickly that, although married to a man, she is gay, and falls for fellow teammate, Greta Gill (D’Arcy Carden). Their feelings are mutual—Gill makes the first move, in fact—and viewers are invited to watch, alongside scenes of other lesbian players, the complexities of women loving women. There is friendship. There is flirting. And there is sex—lots of it.

League is not all fun and games, of course. After all, racism was rampant in 1940s America, and homosexuality was outlawed. Certain friendships, romantic partnerships, and family stories that showcase the broader world of gender nonconformity (Adams, for instance, has a transmasculine uncle, Bertie, played by Lea Robinson) unfold behind closed doors; fears of stepping out or getting caught are palatable. The Latinx players, too, discuss how they are treated differently from other players on the team. They have to act more “in line” in order to be treated with the same respect as their white teammates.

(A scene from A League of Their Own)

Engaging this kind of human and social complexity is what has granted the show much praise. As writer Katie Heaney reflects upon the show and an interview she conducted with series co-writer Abbi Jacobson, she attests:

“I’m happy to report the show is excellent. I expected to laugh, and did; I did not expect to cry, and did—a lot. Jacobson and Graham’s reboot is not, as so many reboots tend to be, an itchy, ill-fitting eye patch slapped over a beloved story’s blind spots. The queer and Black stories here aren’t supplemental to the story; they are the story.”

And as the story, the show makes clear that these characters are beloved. League displays the harshness of America’s historical reality, but it also celebrates those who have been historically harmed. It celebrates gay women. It celebrates women of color. It celebrates gender nonconformity. This kind of storytelling is powerful; it shows people the pains of reality, yes, but it does so while offering alternative possibilities to racist, sexist, and heteronormative worlds. By creating characters that are belovedly against-the-grain of the white, cisgender, straight norm, League creates avenues for viewers to push against their own worlds’ boundaries and, in turn, to celebrate new and diverse identities.

We have, in fact, already seen the effects of this work. Maybelle Blair, a player on the historical Peaches, came out publicly when the show was featured at a Tribeca theater in June 2022. She was 95 years old. I have no doubt other lesbian viewers, after seeing themselves on screen—seeing themselves loved on screen—will come out, too.

League, of course, cannot investigate the complexity of all human experiences—no show can. Still, though, I find myself wanting more. There is one character, in fact, that I find in desperate need of further exploration and nuance—further basic development, even. This character is Shirley Cohen (Kate Berlant), an eventual Peach we meet in the season’s first episode. Despite Cohen’s love of baseball, viewers quickly learn that her personality centers around something else: anxiety. Cohen is worried about everything, from germs to disease—especially botulism, for some reason—to the inevitability of death. She is so neurotic, in fact, that her anxiety bleeds into homophobia; she is afraid that homosexuality is contagious, and practices OCD-like rituals to protect herself from catching it.

Cohen is also the only known Jew on the team.

I find it noteworthy that, while many League characters are given thoughtful backstories, the Jewish one’s is sorely lacking. Cohen is, put simply, a walking (throwing? batting?) stereotype of anxious Jews. Even Cohen’s positive attributes are wrapped in anti-Jewish stereotypes: she is fantastic at calculating baseball statistics. Jews, in other words, may be over-the-top in their neurosis, but at least they are smart, especially when it comes to counting numbers.

Numbers.

Again, the show’s first season takes place in 1943. Surely there is a reason for Shirley’s anxiety. Surely the player knows that many Jews are being tattooed in preparation for mass extermination. After all, the entire backdrop of the show—the very reason these women are invited to play ball—is because men are being drafted for the Second World War.

And yet, not once does the show gesture toward the Holocaust. While Hitler’s name is mentioned, the extermination of millions, predominately Jews, is not. But maybe there is a reason for this. Maybe most Americans in 1943 did not yet know what was happening under the Third Reich. It is also possible that Cohen’s character has no personal ties to Europe; perhaps her knowledge of the war is dependent upon non-Jewish American conversations. It seems equally possible, though, that Cohen does have ties to Europe, and that her family in the States has lost contact with their loved ones overseas. It is also equally possible that Americans, regardless of their ethnic or religious background, did know about the ramifications of Hitler’s antisemitic nationalism.

(Shirley Cohen played by Kate Berlant in A League of Their Own)

Still, maybe Cohen’s anxiety need not be tied to WWII. Jews, after all, have been killed in masses long before the 1940s, so much so that critical race theorist J. Kameron Carter argues that racism originates in Christian anti-Judaism; in biologizing Jews as innately inferior—worthy of extermination in the minds of many throughout history—Christianity especially, Carter asserts, paved the way for the construct of race and, with it, racism. Perhaps, then, there are cultural and historical reasons for Jewish anxiety. Perhaps Cohen’s fear of botulism is a projected fear of historically plausible extermination, regardless of her knowledge of Third Reich practices. And perhaps that fear of extermination could have been explored in Cohen’s character.

Or maybe the show’s lack of Jewish exploration is purposeful. Co-writer Abbi Jacobson, after all, is Jewish. Maybe we are meant to live in the unexamined stereotype until next season when the psychology of Jewry will be revealed, thereby forcing us to confront whatever Season 1 stereotypes some viewers let roll by without question or critique.

Or maybe not. Many Jews have a habit of perpetuating Jewish deprecation, especially in comic circles. While, for example, Rachel Bloom’s and Aline Brosh McKenna’s award-winning—and very Jewish—Crazy Ex-Girlfriend makes productive space for non-conforming characters (among other things, it has been described as groundbreaking for casting a Filipino-American man as the show’s main love interest), it still leans into the idea that Jews are loud, neurotic, and overbearing (see, for instance, the musical number, “Where’s the Bathroom?”). And do I as a Jew enjoy this work? Yes. Extremely. I happen to be married to a Jewish comic, and find myself laughing hardest when she is making fun of Jews. I perpetuate this kind of thinking in my own world, too—that is, not just through my laughing at Jewish self-deprecation on screen or stage, but also in my use of it in social interactions. I self-deprecate the most, in fact, when I am in conversation with fellow progressives. I don’t want anyone to assume I have an endless flow of money or harbor hatred toward Palestinians, for instance, so I make fun of myself as a Jew in an effort to disarm them of their potential assumptions. If I laugh at myself for being an asthmatic anxious Jew with stomach problems living in a one-bedroom shtetl, surely they will know that I am not secretly running the world.

There are plenty of theories as to why Jewish self-deprecation is so prevalent, especially in Jewish comedy. Some of the most oft-noted ideas include: 1) Jewish self-deprecation creates room for self-reflection with a little more ease; 2) there is resilience in making fun of ourselves before others can; and/or 3) there is survival in claiming one’s Jewishness in a way that isn’t too Jewish (if we make fun of our Judaism, we get to name our Jewishness while also separating ourselves from it, thereby making us the “cool” Jew in a non-Jewish world).

I have to ask, though: what happens when Jewish characters are so often satirized on screen—by Jews, no less? Are we, in making fun of ourselves, even in our attempts to combat antisemitism, actually contributing to antisemitism? Are we, in our laughter, fostering the invisibility of Jews as a minoritized culture? Why, for instance, are Jews, even after centuries of being persecuted and in making up roughly 0.2% of the global population, so easily overlooked as a targeted group? Why do we dismiss so quickly anti-Jewish bigotry?

These questions are not unique; they have been asked and answered for decades by thinkers engaging an array of fields and subfields. I remain intrigued, however, by the psychological theory that internalized antisemitism is in part to blame. As psychologists Evelyn Torton Beck, Julie L. Goldberg, and L. Lee Knefelkamp explain:

“American Jews are not living in organized ghettos or camps like many of their Jewish ancestors, U.S. society as a whole has tended to trivialize and dismiss as insignificant the effects of centuries of historical and current anti-Semitism on Jews today and to ignore the importance of Jewish identity as a foundation for Jews’ psychological well-being…One powerful effect is the internalizing of anti-Semitism—a psychological process in which the vilifying, menacing messages of anti-Jewish oppression are absorbed and converted into self-hatred, shame, and fear of being identified with Jews.”

Indeed, as I’ve written elsewhere on this topic, the trivializing of Jewish Otherness is a form of antisemitism that paves the way for Jews to minimize and even mock their communal experiences. Anti-Jewish stereotypes are so ingrained into our beings that we cannot step away, so much so that we, in regurgitating our atmospheric bigotry, contribute to its repeated making—in our conversations, in our comedies, in our TV shows.

Let me be clear: I love—and I mean love—A League of Their Own. I extend profound gratitude to Jacobson and Graham and the entire production team for making this show. As a late-to-come-out lesbian, I crave stories like this. I think, in fact, that I would have known I was gay much earlier if I had grown up with more. For while lesbians like Shaw and Adams and Gills have always existed, they have historically been silenced—closeted. This has profound effects. Not only does it foster further silencing from lesbians like them, but it also leaves generations of people unsure or even unknowing of who they are. Lesbian stories—ones that are joyful and, if I may, hot—help audiences internalize that same-sex love is real and that our world has room for more. More love. More nuance. More complexity. More gay.

I do worry, though, about Shirley Cohen, and not just because she is ridden with psychic pain. I worry that she—or really rather we, as in we Jews—in creating or overlooking or laughing at antisemitic caricatures of ourselves such as Cohen, keep the world from celebrating us.

Sarah Emanuel is Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. She resides on the coast with her wife, Zoë, and their stereotypically lesbian farm of four dogs and two cats.

The post Jewish Comedy and Jewish Erasure on Amazon Prime’s A League of Their Own appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Getty Images)

Why is humor so synonymous with Jews? The association has become a badge of honor for many American Jews, but the history of how and why Jews became associated with humor leaves questions about how much of that association is real, and how much is mythic. Moreover, the question of what makes comedy “Jewish” is both impossible to answer and necessary when considering the relationship between Jews and humor in the United States.

American comedy, Steve Allen opined in his 1981 book Funny People, is “a sort of Jewish cottage industry.” Allen wasn’t Jewish, but he estimated, without any bitterness or resentment, that 80% of comedy professionals in this country were Jewish. As far as Allen and others were concerned, this was not news; he was just saying the quiet part out loud. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, that American comedy was Jewish comedy and vice versa. Sure, you had gentiles like Will Rogers and Mark Twain, but the kind of comedy Allen was discussing—TV, film, stand-up—was all Jews, all the time. American comedy insiders like Allen knew it in 1981. Non-American outsiders seemed to know it as well, at least to the extent that in 2004’s Spamalot, Britain’s Eric Idle cheekily observed that “you won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews.” And if you looked at bastions of American comedy like Saturday Night Live, you’d learn that SNL bandleader Paul Shaffer hosted a Passover seder for the disproportionately large Jewish cast and crew of the show, and that a seder at Sid Caesar’s house included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Jeffrey Ross, Lainie Kazan, and Estelle Harris among other Jewish comedy legends. Despite the fact that SNL has only done occasional Jewish sketches (including Adam Sandler’s now-iconic “Hanukkah Song”), and Sid Caesar’s most notable Jewish performances were on Chabad telethons, Jewish humor fans view both SNL and Caesar as examples of Jewish comedy.

In order to understand the many reasons why something may be considered Jewish humor, from being created by Jews to direct Jewish references, we need to look at some of the attempts to define Jewish humor and the types of jokes that are most commonly associated with Jewish comedy. By thinking through the history and meaning of Jewish humor, we can begin to untangle what the changing (and increasingly diverse) notion of American Jewish identity might do to our conception of Jews and humor.

***

Depending on who you ask, the purported relationship between American comedy and Jews has always been true, or has never been true. It is a truth universally acknowledged, or it is an antisemitic myth of Jewish media control.

Beyond the fact that the conflation of American humor and Jewish humor is more legend than reality, is the problem of trying to pin down what “Jewish humor” actually means. For one perspective, Jewish studies scholar Jeremy Dauber argues in Jewish Comedy: Serious Business that Jewish humor must be both created by Jews and “must have something to do with either contemporary Jewish living or historical Jewish existence.” The first part is simpler, although still not simple. There is no rubric for what makes someone “Jewish enough” for their comedy to be considered Jewish. The second part, however, is nearly impossible to quantify, which Dauber admits. Joseph Telushkin, in his book Jewish Humor: What the Best Jewish Jokes Say about the Jews describes this part of the equation as “Jewish sensibilities.” He argues that to be considered “Jewish” a joke must “apply to Jews” and express Jewish concerns, which range from anxiety about family or money to worries over antisemitism. He does not specify, as Dauber does, that a joke needs to be produced by Jews, but it seems he takes that part as self-evident.

If there is such a thing as Jewish humor, then its definition lies somewhere in this ephemeral collection of “Jewish sensibilities “or “the Jewish experience.” In the United States, until recently, “the Jewish experience” has generally meant the experiences of Jews whose families emigrated here from central or eastern Europe in the second half of the 19^th and the early 20^th centuries. This Ashkenazi—or Ashkenormative—history of American Jewry contributes to what linguists call “shm-reduplication” (a linguistic feature of Yiddish) as a constitutive element of Jewish humor. Jews, this thinking goes, came to this country speaking Yiddish, and Yiddish speakers who learned English developed certain linguistic habits. So, whether it is the shm-reduplication of “Joe Shmo” or the subject/verb inversion in jokes like the Jew on a desert island who built two synagogues because “in that one I pray, but in that one I wouldn’t set foot” there are linguistic habits common amongst eastern European Jews that have become synonymous with Jewish comedy as a whole.

(Image source: Getty Images)

Additionally, when we think about the different kinds of jokes that are common in contemporary comedy, several of them seem especially prevalent in Jewish humor. Defense mechanism humor is one example. There is an old joke about a Jewish man moving in next to notable antisemite Henry Ford. Ford accosts his new neighbor and says, “I bet you think that by moving here you’re as good as I am, don’t you?” The neighbor responds, “No, I think I am better than you are.” Ford apoplectically demands, “How do you figure that?” And the man replies, “Well for one thing I don’t live next door to a Jew.”

Defense mechanism humor is a major reason why people like Steve Allen think Jews are inherently funnier than other people. This is the same thing that has motivated generations of kids who feel bullied to make self-deprecating jokes before the bullies get a chance to make them. If you laugh at yourself first, you remove the power of others to make a joke at your expense. Many people see the history of Jewish persecution as an impetus for developing a cultural inclination toward self-deprecating, defensive humor. Or, as some call it, “relief humor.” This would be like the joke that all Jewish holidays are just variations of “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.” Whether Jews are using humor defensively or reflexively, many people see antisemitism as the root of Jewish humor.

Others, however, argue that the social status of Jews in American society is the driving force behind Jews’ dominance in American comedy. This theory argues that Jews occupied a special place in 19^th and early 20^th century America. As non-English speaking immigrants, they were outsiders. As a white-passing group, however, they benefited from many of the privileges extended to whites. Some saw in Jews the myth of the model minority who best adapted to American life; they learned English, gained an education, moved out of impoverished ethnic enclaves within one generation, and became “good Americans” faster than other non-WASP communities.

Those who see upward social mobility as part of the puzzle of Jewish humor point to Seinfeld and the many copycat sitcoms of the 1990s that featured Jewish stand-up comedians (including Paul Reiser’s Mad about You, Richard Lewis’ Anything but Love, and Fran Drescher’s The Nanny). These were all shows about middle or upper-middle class Jews living “average” sorts of lives, with only occasional, vague references to their Jewishness. Because Jews had joined the white majority, they could be considered just another white demographic that could lend color to an otherwise cookie-cutter sitcom. Networks were comfortable with an endless procession of shows about various white people (like Southerners in Grace under Fire or Designing Women, blue collar families on Roseanne or Everybody Loves Raymond, blended households like on Full House or Step by Step, etc.) but a network rarely aired more than one Black sitcom at the same time and shows featuring other people of color were nearly non-existent.

We must keep the history of Ashkenazi Jews moving from social outsiders to part of the white majority in mind to understand why some Jews see the Jewish association with humor as a point of pride. And that pride has contributed to even more comedy, what some call “superiority humor,” which comes from a sense of feeling, well, superior. Take, for example, the Three Stooges, who were all Jewish. When watching the Three Stooges everyone in the audience can, in theory, participate in the superiority of feeling smarter than the Stooges, of knowing you would not let yourself get into the situations in which the Stooges find themselves.

(The Three Stooges. Image source: Getty Images)

Some superiority humor comes from knowing that you have gotten a joke that not everyone will understand. If we return to the Three Stooges for a moment, other jokes in the Stooges’ repertoire were clearly not for everyone. Here the Stooges frequently threw in Yiddish words and phrases that the majority of the audience may have thought were just gibberish, but their Yiddish-aware audience would recognize. In 1940’s You Nazty Spy, for example, they use “shalom aleichem” (literally “peace to you,” a common Jewish greeting), exclaim “beblach” (“beans” in Yiddish), and when Moe is giving a dictatorial speech from a balcony at one point he says “in pupik gehabt haben” which is a borderline vulgar Yiddish phrase that translates to something like “I have had it in the bellybutton.” A tiny percentage of the Stooges’ audience would have spoken Yiddish, so this was the most insider of inside jokes, but that sort of superiority humor depends on making some segment of the audience feel as though they have been let in on a secret the rest of the audience has missed.

By the mid twentieth century Jews had become, broadly speaking, part of the American mainstream. They were one of the legs of Will Herberg’s tri-faith America in Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and they no longer stood as far outside the social norm as they had in the Marx Brothers’ heyday. Fewer and fewer American Jews knew Yiddish, so even the Three Stooges’ type of insider humor transitioned to broader references to Jewish holidays, foods, grandmothers, and guilt. These are the type of inside jokes that outsiders can still “get,” but where the insider will laugh harder or get it “more.” As jokes about hectoring Jewish mothers, raucous family seders, and awkward bar mitzvah parties became common, they functioned as jokes that most of American audiences would understand. Jews themselves got the small thrill of being more in on the joke than those who understand it only on an intellectual level. In turn, it became harder and harder to identify something as a “Jewish sensibility” when almost anyone in the audience can relate to it, even if Jews may relate a little more.

This subtle shift could help explain why the association between Jews and humor has been regarded as an early to mid-twentieth century phenomenon. As comedy has become more diverse, Jews are a less overwhelmingly pervasive demographic in comedy clubs and writers’ rooms. This is, of course, difficult to quantify. But if Steve Allen was right that Jews were 80% of comedy writers in 1981, then based on the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats – which profiles 100 comedians and comedy writers, of whom only about 40% are Jewish – the picture seems clear that the demographics of comedy are changing.

Today, our image of what “Jewish” means is becoming more diverse and less Ashkenormative. Are the “Jewish sensibilities” of an Eritrean Jew like Tiffany Haddish anything like those of a white, Ashkenazi Jew like Sarah Silverman? Eric Andre’s mother is Ashkenazi, but he grew up as a Black man in America, so will his experience of antisemitism resemble that of Jerry Seinfeld? Venezuelan Jewish comedian Joanna Hausmann has to balance her mother’s Venezuelan-Cuban background wither her Holocaust-survivor paternal grandparents. Her notion of what it means to not “look Jewish” is not going to be the same as someone who is blonde but still Ashkenazi, like Amy Schumer.

Our image of an increasingly diverse Jewish community can only be a good thing. The idea of “Jewish humor,” has long depended on the intangible sense of what “Jewish” means that stems from the overwhelmingly white, Ashkenazi American Jewish experience.

What is “Jewish humor” if “Jewish” and “Ashkenazi” stop being automatically synonymous? One answer is that “Jewish humor” will refer to humor produced by Jews that relates to the experiences of some Jews, even if it is not the experience of most Jews. Another possibility is that Jewish humor will become better known as a style of humor that is based on certain types of jokes or approaches to satire, but a style that can be done by anyone, Jewish or not. Jojo Rabbit and its ridiculous depiction of Hitler may be considered Jewish humor because writer/director/star Taika Waititi is Jewish. Is Inglorious Basterds Jewish humor because it is a similar form of revenge fantasy that reduces Nazis to ridiculous buffoons, or can it never be Jewish humor because the filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino, isn’t Jewish?

Insofar as there is no single understanding of what makes some humor Jewish, there will be no consensus on what the new frontier of Jewish humor will look like. Nevertheless, it seems clear that whatever it may signify, the label of “Jewish humor” will continue to be used, and the idea that Jews and comedy are intertwined will persist. After all, laughter is the best medicine. And if Jews know one thing, it’s medicine.

Jennifer Caplan is the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati Chair in Judaic Studies at The University of Cincinnati. Her book, Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from The Silent Generation to Millennials, will be published in March 2023 by Wayne State University Press.

The post The People of the Joke: American Jews and Comedy appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Getty Images)

First published in 2012, Chris Stedman’s Faitheist was part of a wave of reactions to what came to be called the “New Atheist” movement of the mid-2000s. New Atheists offered a condescending, defiant, and triumphalist vision of atheism’s future—often drawing on new scientific developments that they giddily hauled on stage to “disprove” religion. But Stedman and others transformed atheism in not only substance, but style. This new wave of atheist authors (referred to as “soft atheists” by anthropologist Matthew Engelke) was younger, more diverse, and more interested in building bridges than arming the border between the religious and the secular.

Stedman’s contribution was to speak from the perspective not only of a new generation, but of a queer ex-evangelical who had spent several years in interfaith activism and humanist chaplaincy. And like many in our generation, much of Stedman’s personal and intellectual formation took place online. Both the lead-up and the explosive response to Faitheist were no exception. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, this set the stage for Stedman’s increasing fascination with the prospect of developing a philosophy of the internet—a way of living online better. This became his follow-up book IRL, released in 2020, with a second edition—including new commentary on our digital lives during COVID—out now.

I interviewed Stedman about atheism in America, our extremely online lives, and the 10 years since Faitheist. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Connections between Faitheist and IRL

Donovan Schaefer: I’m consistently in awe of your voice when you’re writing, your gift for taking very ordinary things and making them intimate and insightful. When I think of books that are in the autobiographical genre, often they’re about exciting, rare experiences that people have. With your books it’s like I’m reading you talking about conversations that you’ve had with your friends.

One of the things that I’m interested in is the relationship between these two major books that you’ve written. Faitheist was a call for a new genre of atheist writing and movement-building, one that emphasized the ethical and community-forming aspects of atheism rather than its polemical dimensions. We’re at the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Faitheist and it seems to me when I run the numbers that there are about 7 years between the beginning of your writing Faitheist, and the beginning of you writing IRL. So, I wanted to ask you: what do you see as the relationship between these books? How do you see Faitheist leading into IRL? Or do you see a sharp break between them?

Chris Stedman: Faitheist had a complicated reception when it came out—there were some atheists who took issue with its arguments—but overall, it brought so many good things and people into my life, and I’m really grateful for that. Still, after a few years of the book being out, I found myself feeling like I could only be that guy—the queer atheist who advocates for atheist participation in interfaith dialogue. And, of course, you know, I’ve always been interested in more than just that.

About five years after Faitheist came out, I went through a lot of changes in my life, personally and professionally. But I wasn’t sure how much of that I could talk about online; I felt restricted in terms of what I could or should share, and pressure to be a good representative for the ideas that I was interested in. If I said something snarky, would it reflect poorly on my community or ideas? So I began to feel this tension between the full range of who I am, and this sense that I should just focus on this one area online. This led me to start reflecting on how we present and construct ourselves in virtual space, which ultimately led to IRL.

In other words, on a practical level there’s a bridge from Faitheist to IRL, because everything that followed Faitheist—the public image I had, and how it both connected me to others and made me feel boxed in—made me interested in exploring how the internet shapes our sense of who we are. But that’s sort of the simple answer. More centrally, I actually think Faitheist and IRL explore the same kinds of questions.

I’ve always been interested in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and in where our ideas about what matters to us come from. I can trace that interest all the way back to some of the stories I tell in Faitheist, about why I became a Christian as an adolescent and why I continued to wrestle with religion even after I left the faith. The questions that inspired my interest in religion—who am I? why do human beings do the things we do? what is my responsibility to the world around me?—are also some of the animating questions driving IRL. Questions like, how do we understand who we are, in light of our relationship to others? How are we shaped by the stories we inherit about who we’re supposed to be, as well as the ones we write for ourselves as we come to understand who we really are?

I believe you once wrote of Faitheist as a memoir of interconnected closets, LGBTQ and atheist. The story of coming out of a closet, while of course different in each case, is ultimately one of rejecting the narratives you’ve inherited about who you’re supposed to be, and forging your own story. My goal with both Faitheist and IRL has been to look at these big cultural narratives we inherit around religion and the internet, inspect them a little more closely from a number of angles, and invite people to consider that maybe we should tell a different story about them.

Politics and the Internet

DS: Both Faitheist and IRL are really about the transformation of our political and personal lives through our increasing immersion in the world the internet built. What do you see as the relationship between the internet and the current political climate?

CS: There’s a lot of alarmism about the internet right now. Much of it is justified, or at least well-placed, but I also think we actually have a lot more power in our online lives than it sometimes feels like we do.

There was, for example, this eight-year longitudinal study out of Brigham Young University that tracked people’s online experiences, which found that two people can spend the same amount of time online and have fundamentally different experiences. It came down to whether or not someone was being intentional about the needs they were trying to meet when they logged on.

Still, while we can become more intentional about what we’re using the internet for, we’re swimming upstream for the time being, because what feels like public space is actually private space. Our social internet is run by private corporations that ultimately operate in a way that’s designed to maximize profit. As a result, their algorithms boost whatever drives the most engagement. They don’t care if it’s positive or negative. So, if it’s easier to capture attention and keep people online by elevating content that polarizes and angers, that preys on our fears and insecurities and human vulnerabilities, then that’s the stuff that will rise to the top. A lot of misinformation and polarization balloons as a result of how these platforms operate.

One of the things that I focused on quite a bit while writing IRL is that many of us have walked away from various kinds of institutions—like religious institutions, obviously, as my main interest, but I think this is true in terms of many of our political institutions and others as well—or were never a part of them in the first place. We are now trying to meet the needs those institutions have often met for people on our own. We see ourselves, in a way, as rejecting the scripts of institutions altogether—maybe even rejecting scripts, period—and finding our own way. But really most of us are actually just sort of replacing those scripts with other ones. And online, that script is driven by capital.

Still, while I think that there’s much to be rightfully concerned about, I also don’t think the fate of the internet is set.

In our networks of relationships, we have strong ties—the people you’re closest to, often our best friends or family, if you have that kind of relationship with family. These are people with whom we will keep in touch no matter what technology is available to us. But most of our relationships aren’t like that. Most are weak ties, or people who we encounter at one point in our lives and then go our separate ways. Without the internet, you might not have kept in touch with most of these people. But because of social media, they can stay in our orbits now. And it turns out weak ties often have different views than our close ties, who are much more likely to see the world the way we do. So weak ties can put perspectives we might not otherwise come across—horizon-expanding perspectives—on our radar in a way close ties often can’t.

There’s a lot of talk about how we silo ourselves online, about the polarizing effects of these platforms, and those are really important conversations. But the internet also can help us encounter perspectives and develop relationships with people who have experiences that are different from our own, who we otherwise might not encounter—which was a big part of what I argued for in Faitheist when explaining why I think atheists should participate in interfaith dialogue. That horizon-expanding potential certainly has been a big part of my experience online. But again, I do think we’re swimming upstream with the platforms as they exist right now.

DS: To follow up on that, in IRL you talk about social media platforms as corporate entities. You make the argument that profit motive produces an overall toxic environment on social media because toxic politics drive clicks. I was getting a split screen effect in my head when I read that, and part of my brain was nodding along enthusiastically, while another part was skeptical. So I wanted to push back on that. An example that comes to mind, and that we’re seeing in more media discussions today, is the history of fascist movements. Fascist movements are incredibly effective at taking public space and using those public spaces as amplifiers for fascist political projects. Mussolini, who invented fascism, had an office overlooking the Piazza Venezia in central Rome—a massive public square. And he had a balcony installed on his office in front of this colossal nationalist monument. His addresses to the Italian people in this public space from that balcony were an incredibly important part of the story of how fascism rules. But he wasn’t using private space for that; he was using public space.

So we often hear this claim that it’s the profit motive of Facebook and Twitter as private corporations that leads to their capture by the politics of division and violence. But I’m not sure that holds weight historically. Social media elevates things that are getting a lot of reactions, but they would do just as well if the things that were getting reactions were just pictures of kittens and Live Laugh Love memes. The platforms are neutral. It’s the user base that is driving polarization. That’s coming from those of us who are circulating polarizing digital content. So, is it possible that the problem isn’t the corporations? Isn’t it really us?

CS: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think if there’s a core argument to IRL—and, you know, I really tried while writing it to not accidentally create a polemic with a really strong stance on the internet, because I think the internet is so incredibly complex—but I think if there is a central argument, it’s that I’m pushing back on this idea that online life isn’t real life, an idea that I think is very pernicious and subtle. And one of the big consequences of this way of thinking—that online life isn’t real, or is less real; that it “doesn’t count”—is that it creates a way for us to disassociate ourselves from the things that we say and do online. You hear a lot of people say, “Oh, I would never do that in real life, it’s just the internet.” And I think one of the consequences of that has been that the way people think about the internet gives them the sense they don’t have to be as responsible for the things they say or do online. I suspect one of the reasons that line of thinking has caught on is because, you know, if we see things that make us uncomfortable about ourselves in our online actions, then holding this mindset can be a way to disown those things and say, “Well, that’s not really me.” And I think there’s a sort of escalating effect to that—this is like when we talk about online radicalization and the pathways into more radical online spaces. It often starts with making jokes in this one forum, and then that leads you to this other forum, and before you know it, you’re suddenly involved in this community you would never have imagined yourself joining a few years earlier.

All of this is to say, the internet is something that we as human beings created. Anything that exists online is something that we’ve brought to the internet. So there is nothing online that isn’t real. Everything that we say or do online is a reflection of who we are. And if we see things online that are ugly or horrifying, those are reflections of who we are as human beings. In some ways, pinning everything on the platforms that we created can be a way of dodging blame.

(Image source: Alex Reyes)

I think it’s important to talk about the role of the platforms preying on and exacerbating some of our human vulnerabilities, which is an argument I build toward at the end of IRL, but putting all the blame on our technology—which, again, is something that we created—can be a kind of evasion from looking at what it is in human nature that technology simply shines a light on.

It actually reminds me of a line of thinking I would see in online New Atheist spaces, in conversations about religion. A lot of people would argue that without religion we wouldn’t have this problem or that problem—as if religion isn’t an expression of human thinking, human impulses. One of the things that has felt very bizarre to watch over the last few years is career atheists who would wield arguments like that against religion—who would focus a lot on homophobia in religious spaces, for example, using it as this sort of weapon against religion, to say, “Look at what religion does”—move from using those things as a kind of cudgel against religion to engaging in homophobia themselves as atheists, and changing their target from religion to “social justice warriors.” It’s been fascinating, because it shows that their understanding of religion was a really flawed one. It wasn’t rooted in a true curiosity about how religion operates, nor a true sense of empathy for folks who have been hurt by homophobia, sexism, or racism in religion. They just wanted to use it as a device to argue against religion.

Atheism on the Internet

DOS: That sets up the next question I want to ask you. One of the things I found really fascinating about IRL was your point that the rise in “nones,” or people with no religious affiliation—whether they are atheists, agnostics, or nothing-in-particulars—didn’t start with the rise of the New Atheist movement in the 2000s, but actually began in the early nineties. And you make the suggestion that the internet itself is one of the factors that has shaped the landscape of unbelief in the US. Could you say more about that?

CS: I remember when I was more involved in organized movement atheism, there was a lot of talk about the rise of the “nones,” and it was almost always referenced as a kind of victory for atheism. “Look, religion is declining! Nonreligion is on the rise!” There were a lot of people looking to take credit for that—to say it was because of the rise of New Atheism and these atheist polemics. But what I think is so interesting is that if you look at the data, you actually see that, yes, there’s been this explosion in terms of the number of people who don’t claim a religious affiliation. But the growth of people who say they are atheists has been comparatively quite small. Meanwhile, rates of self-reported belief in God or a higher power, or engagement in what we might consider to be religious practices, like prayer, have remained really high among the nonreligious. So it seems pretty obvious on its face that it really hasn’t been this rise of non-belief. Obviously, belief is a part of it, but that’s not the central story.

So what is it? I think it’s the move away from institutions.

People who leave religion or were never part of it still need community and meaning. But instead of looking to institutions for these things, they’re doing them in a DIY fashion, which I think is why we’ve seen a rise in interest in things like astrology, or an increasing number of people who consider themselves to be religiously-hybrid and drawing from multiple wisdom sources. That is much more what’s going on than a rejection of religious belief, which was a big part of the New Atheist line for years.

And, again, I think the internet has something to do with this. When I was younger and the internet wasn’t as much a part of my life, I wanted a space where I could explore big existential questions, and I found it in a church. But there were all kinds of negative things that came along with that, and I think a lot of people are now able to use the internet to explore those same things that brought me into church without having to navigate some of the negative stuff that can come with being a part of an institution like that.

That being said, I do think those institutions can lock us into uncomfortable conversations sometimes in ways that can be really powerful or constructive. Whereas online we do have the freedom to just click away—which again, I think, especially for marginalized people can be really important, but also, I think there is something lost there.

All of this is to say that I think the New Atheist story got it wrong.

A lot of those folks have moved on in their targets—religion is still in the mix for them, but for many it doesn’t even seem to be the main focus anymore. You see someone like Richard Dawkins, who really made a name for himself as this anti-religious stalwart, who has really shifted. I saw a tweet from him a couple years ago, I think, where he was basically making fun of people who were offended by others saying “Merry Christmas.” He was mocking efforts to be, as he saw it, overly inclusive around the holidays. Which is very much a Fox News kind of line. And it’s been so interesting to see someone like Dawkins start with being so anti-Christianity and moving to defending it, out of what feels like nothing more than a desire to be contrarian.

Really, I think if you look at the motivations underneath the surface, New Atheism wasn’t actually about religion at all—it was more about wanting to feel morally superior to religious people. That’s partly why I wrote this piece for VICE back in 2018, inspired by white supremacist Richard Spencer opening up about being an atheist, and the atheist movement not pushing back on that or really saying anything about it at all. I wanted to highlight some of the troubling trends in organized atheism. Not just the demographic overlap—a higher percentage of people involved in alt right and white supremacist movements are atheist or agnostic—but the cultural one, too. There’s this culture in movement atheism that sees atheism as the ultimate transgression, and atheists as being the last true defenders of free thought and irreverence. The ultimate truth-tellers and contrarians, for whom shattering taboos is the most important thing. So it’s not surprising to me that their contrarianism has shifted its focus from religion to “liberal norms” concerning sexuality, race, and gender.

Atheism and the Alt-Right

DOS: One of the things I find so powerful about Faitheist is how prescient it is. You saw the writing on the wall, that tendencies within New Atheism—Islamophobia, culture war conservatism, a kind of gleeful moral combat—were festering, and could potentially lead to sympathy with fascist movements, including, paradoxically, white Christian nationalism itself.

I don’t want to bundle all New Atheism together, since there’s already a lot of internal division within the group we now associate with that term, but there was a clear tendency to, as Enlightenment liberalism always does, present itself as progressive while also nurturing a dark, even violent edge. I think what you foresaw, the entanglement of New Atheism and white nationalism in the subsequent decade, has been borne out. What’s even more interesting is that we’re now seeing a coalescence between secular nationalism, including secular white nationalism, and white Christian nationalism—alliances that are being forged between people who identify as atheists but are building political coalitions with believers. What do you make of all that?

CS: I remember when Faitheist came out, there was a lot of intense pushback on my proposal that atheists partner with religious believers around shared values. Fast forward to today: a lot of those same critics are allying themselves with white Christian nationalists.

When I was first getting involved in movement atheism, one of the things that I resisted most—and one of the things that I found myself writing and speaking about most—was the presence of Islamophobia within the atheist movement. One of the first atheist conferences I attended was an American Atheists national convention, and at one point a group performed a song called “Back in their Burkas Again.” I think it was, on the surface, intended to be a critique of when women are forced to wear burqas against their will. But really the song ended up making those women the butt of the joke. And the jeers from the audience just made me ill. It did not feel like an expression of solidarity with people who experience repression in the name of religion. It felt like a way for everyone in the room, the majority of whom were white, to feel superior. Like they were too smart to fall for such stupid ideas.

I experienced something like this personally, too. A lot of the criticism I got from other atheists was couched in language that felt emasculating or even homophobic. Like when I went on Fox News, I saw a lot of atheists bemoaning that appearance because I made atheists look like “freaks,” essentially because they thought I look and sound gay. I would hear atheists in one breath say “look at all the harm religion does to LGBTQ people” and then call me “wimpy” or “weak” in the other. It just made their concerns about homophobia in religion feel empty. Especially when I knew so many religious people fighting against the anti-LGBTQ biases both within and outside of their own communities.

Just like my friends who belong to religious communities that perpetuate homophobia, who feel a sense of responsibility to speak out against it and to refuse to be complicit, I have felt a sense of responsibility as an atheist to speak out against problems I’ve seen in my community. Obviously, the racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and sexism that have been major issues within organized atheist communities aren’t inherent to atheism. But they do undermine the New Atheist argument that they’re inherent to religion.

One of the biggest problems that New Atheist attitudes have created among people involved in movement atheism is this idea that they’re somehow inoculated from the sorts of problems they associate religion as being responsible for—things like homophobia and sexism. “I can’t possibly be homophobic because I’m not religious. That’s a religious thing.” It hampers their ability to be self-critical, to be curious about how cultural forces may have influenced their own biases. This was, I think, the biggest irony I encountered in movement atheism—that there seemed to be so much resistance to the idea of turning the skepticism that so many people in the movement championed inward and being skeptical of ourselves, of our own ways of thinking, of our own ideas.

I think that resistance to being self-skeptical—which again is not an atheist problem, but a human one—is part of why white nationalism has taken root in movement atheism. Obviously, it was always there, but this may be part of why it was allowed to go un-interrogated by a wide range of people for so long, with the exception of activists who have been speaking out about it for years only to be marginalized.

Another thing I’ve thought about regularly is that, in the wake of New Atheism’s rise, there was this effort to erase some of the boundaries between atheism and secular humanism, a nontheistic ethical perspective on how to live one’s life. The American Humanist Association, which I’m a member of and have worked with for years, gave Richard Dawkins the Humanist of the Year award, for example—though they actually rescinded it recently, to some controversy, over his remarks on trans people. Richard Dawkins identifies as a humanist, but do some of his words and actions align with humanism? I don’t think so.

I remember going to humanist conferences and seeing the same slate of speakers I would see at an American Atheists conference. People like David Silverman, who was at the time the head of American Atheists, were really pushing for everyone—including humanists—to just use the word atheist instead, as if they were synonyms. And all of these organizations seemed to be much more focused on critiquing religious ideas than on promoting humanist ones.

One of the things I argued in Faitheist was that the atheist movement was spending way too much time focusing on where it disagrees with religious ideas, and not nearly enough time offering an alternative. And I think the watering down of humanism played a role in this dynamic. Take Richard Spencer. I can look at Richard Spencer’s interview where he talks about atheism and humanism, and compare those claims against the racist ideas he promotes and the violent way he moves through the world. I can compare his worldview against humanism and say “this doesn’t line up.” But I can’t say he’s not an atheist. Reaffirming the ethical side of humanism will help to make sure that nontheism stays firmly on the side of antiracist politics.

Donovan Schaefer is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke University Press, 2022).

Chris Stedman is writer, activist, and professor who teaches in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of IRL: Finding Our Real Selves in a Digital World and Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious, as well as the writer and host of Unread, named one of the best podcasts of 2021 by the Guardian, Vulture, HuffPost, Mashable, and the CBC, and honored by the 2022 Webby Awards. Previously the founding director of the Yale Humanist Community, he also served as a humanist chaplain at Harvard University.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 30 of the Revealer Podcast: “Atheists in America.”

The post Atheists, Social Media, and American Politics appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Katarzyna Bogdańska)

Elizabeth* finds dating anxiety-inducing, but nothing compared to her teenage years.

Now in her twenties, Elizabeth says, “I had a boyfriend in high school and I realize now there were situations where I felt uncomfortable and anxious because of what I’d been fed through church teachings.”

“Dating was not celebrated or seen as a good thing,” she says. “It was a thing to be afraid of, because of ‘temptation’, and what might happen. At the time, I thought the anxiety was hormones and everything was normal, asking: ‘Should I be doing this? Am I in the right place? Am I wearing the right thing?’ As an adult I can see it more clearly.”

Today, Elizabeth recalls dissociating during church teachings about sexuality. “I used to think I was ‘zoning out’ at the church youth group when subjects like ‘guarding your heart’ – gatekeeping your sexuality – came up that I found ‘sticky’ or difficult,” she says. “I realize now, that was dissociation.”

For Elizabeth, dissociating when thinking about sex did not end in youth group. “Detaching to protect myself like that,” she says, “has continued into adulthood and dating.”

According to Elizabeth, church leaders pulled young couples aside and delivered strict messages about dating. She recalls that “a lot of people in that setting wouldn’t even use the words ‘virginity’ or ‘sex’. But the message was ‘don’t have sex, stay pure, be a virgin’. That’s it. No discussion.”

Elizabeth saw several relationships crumble under the pressure to stay “pure” and prepare for marriage. “The expectation of getting married and starting a family young was very much ingrained at church, which just isn’t the reality of life,” she says. “Relationships are messy, and things go wrong. Seeing friends break up, and it being messy and distressing for them, showed me that that way of thinking was not healthy.”

“I definitely think there’s a collective trauma experience for people that have come out of purity culture,” Elizabeth insists.

“Purity culture” refers to conservative Christian teachings designed for teenagers that tells them sex outside of marriage is a uniquely bad sin and that, for the sake of their relationship with God and their future spouse, they must abstain from sex until marriage.

(Image source: Religion Media Centre)

Luke Dowding, 34, also grew up in a Christian community that promoted purity culture. He spent years abstaining from sexual relationships as he followed teachings at a Baptist church in the south of England. It was not until his early 20s when he finally broke with church doctrine.

While training for ordination, Luke was asked to sign standards of behavior, including one about sexuality. “There’s a clause in the rules of accreditation in the Baptist life that refers to – and it’s a crass phrase – ‘same-sex genital relations’,” Luke explains.

The rules forbid ministers from not only engaging in LGBTQ relationships, but also from supporting or accepting them. Luke says, “I made the decision that I couldn’t sign that. I wasn’t yet properly out, but I couldn’t sign that bit of paper.”

Religion has long been a significant part of Luke’s life. As a teenager, he met weekly with his Baptist peers, bringing their well-thumbed youth Bibles full of highlights, sticky notes, and underlined passages. Once a year, the youth minister passed around print-outs with stick figures and spoke awkwardly about the importance of abstinence.

“I remember him warning us about giving a significant part of ourselves to someone other than our spouses,” he says. “How you’ll never get it back. If you waste it, then not only are you harming yourself but you’re harming the other person and God.”

Luke says the messages he received about sex were stark. “It was: ‘This is the right way to be, and then the other way is wrong.’ It would be too generous to refer to it as ‘sex education’. It was ‘sex avoidance education’, ‘lust management education’. ‘Instruction’ is a better word. It wasn’t educational or informative.”

“Back then I couldn’t imagine a time I would want to have sex,” he says, “because the teaching was so uncomfortable.”

Luke’s teenage faith was complicated by the fact he is attracted to men.

He says that, “At church, the standard response to a statement like, ‘It doesn’t seem fair that gay people go to hell’, would be: ‘Pray for them, because that’s the consequence of sin.’”

“As a young teenager I would find ways of experimenting with my sexuality, and then go into these almost trance-like episodes afterwards,” he says. “On one occasion I kissed another boy. Afterwards I felt the need to go and wash my mouth. I had almost OCD-like obsessive responses to things: praying, physical cleanliness, and spiritual cleanliness. These were paired with constant mental berating: ‘You’re not good enough, why have you done this? You’ve slipped up again. Why have you let God down? Why have you let your church down?’”

Eventually, Luke suffered from disordered eating and anxiety, for which he sought treatment.

“Having been in therapy I understand the way that I’m wired now, and moments of anxiety that I still experience are rooted in this sense of impurity,” he says. “The need to constantly strive to be better than I am to overcome this impurity, through devotion and acts of service, was instilled in me during those years.”

***

Like Luke and Elizabeth, as a teenager I was taught that “true love waits,” a popular purity culture catch-phrase first coined by Southern Baptists in the 1990s. I distinctly recall a church youth leader who described sexuality as a pie chart, and drew a line down the middle. She said that if you have sex before marriage, you give less of yourself to your spouse (and a part of you permanently belongs to someone else). I also witnessed talks to teenagers at an evangelical conference where a speaker blamed herself for two sexual assaults.

As a former purity devotee, I was curious if Luke and Elizabeth’s assertions that purity culture negatively influenced their mental and physical health were common. And I wanted to know what other former evangelicals have been doing to bring these issues to light, and learn if they have found ways to heal.

Adolescence

“Purity culture” is well-accounted for as a phenomenon (not least by The Revealer), which reached its height in the 1990s and 2000s. Teachings apply to adolescents, but often weigh more heavily on girls because of assumptions that men’s sexual needs are greater, that sex is a wife’s obligation, and that women must gatekeep their sexuality from men. Within communities that promote purity culture, teenagers are encouraged to wear symbolic purity rings until marriage, and girls are encouraged to attend purity balls with their fathers to show their virginal loyalty to their dads until marriage.

In the United States, purity culture drove decisions on sex education in public schools for decades, a decision that proved to fail young Americans. In 2017, a review on the harms caused by this form of sex education in the Journal of Adolescent Health called for “abstinence-only until marriage” programs to be defunded. Several studies in the review showed an association between abstinence education policies and higher rates of teen births and chlamydia infections. Purity pledges, where teenagers sign a commitment to abstain from sex until marriage, were shown to increase clinical risks: as part of the same 2017 review, researchers found higher rates of human papillomavirus and nonmarital pregnancies among teen girls who took a virginity pledge compared with peers who did not.

Adulthood

Risks from purity culture are not limited to teen pregnancy and STIs. In 2021, a study by Sheila Wray Gregoire and colleagues of 20,000 married Christian women, of whom 77.5% were evangelical or formerly evangelical, found that 22.6% reported vaginismus or some other form of primary sexual dysfunction that makes penetration painful. (Prevalence is estimated to be 5-17% in clinical settings). For 6.8% of women surveyed, penetration was so painful it was impossible. Authors presented the study at the American Physiotherapy Convention, are seeking peer review, and have made the data publicly available.

The researchers also conducted one-on-one interviews with women for the book, The Great Sex Rescue. Many participants reported domestic assaults. One said her husband attacked her in the shower on their honeymoon. “We hadn’t had sex before we were married, and I wasn’t ready yet,” she told them. “I remember freaking out in my mind, crying and praying, ‘What is this? I can’t live with this for the rest of my life.’” And yet she didn’t think of it as an assault until she told her divorce lawyer.

The researchers found that 43% of respondents said they had been taught before they married that “a wife is obligated to give her husband sex when he wants it.”

Wray Gregoire, herself a former evangelical, says that, “The ‘obligation’ message given to women regarding sex is highly implicated in vaginismus, as are messages which take away a woman’s agency or bodily autonomy… Other peer reviewed literature has found that religiously conservative women of a variety of faiths have higher rates of dyspareunia [pain during or after sex], and we think this is the root of it.”

Wray Gregoire is not the first to explore how purity culture could contribute to sexual dysfunction and physiological problems. In 2018, Pure, by ex-evangelical author Linda Kay Klein, catapulted the harms of purity culture into U.S. bookstores. The book compiles stories about the mental and physical harms that dogged women after abstinence-only sex education.

Klein’s work is part of an emerging genre of non-fiction led by “purity survivors.” Popular examples include the books You Are Your Own by Jamie Finch (2019), Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber (2019), Talking Back to Purity Culture by Rachel Joy Welcher (2020) and Beyond Shame by Matthias Roberts (2020). The documentary Give Me Sex, Jesus (2015) and feature film Yes, God, Yes (2019) also illustrate the pressure teenagers face under purity culture.

Klein says that during the course of writing her book she heard accounts of women whose symptoms “mimicked the symptoms of PTSD,” and faced vaginismus, pelvic pain and primary sexual dysfunction, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, dissociation, and panic attacks. In one account a woman went into what seemed to be an anaphylactic shock during sex, despite the fact that she tested negative for allergies to several types of condoms, as well as more common allergens. Physical signs and symptoms of purity trauma, Klein says, are “abundant.”

Klein now works as a coach and runs Break Free Together, a non-profit for people recovering from religious trauma.

“There’s a lot of things that show up among purity culture survivors that confuse therapists, because therapists say: ‘You must have survived a capital-T sexual trauma,’ or ‘You must be a rape survivor,’ or ‘You must have experienced sexual abuse,’” she says. “In fact, many purity culture survivors have and don’t know it – a shocking number of people I work with over time are able to identify that they were sexually assaulted. Then there are other people who have not been assaulted, but who have so deeply internalized the teaching that it still shows up in their bodies.”

Treatment

Some therapists are already aware of the prevalence of anxiety and sexual dysfunction in some evangelical marriages. Rosie Tringham is a Christian relationship therapist in the U.K. She has worked with a number of married Christian women with vaginismus, and men with depression or anxiety symptoms around sex, such as panic attacks.

“When clients are disconnected from their bodies, they think that immediately on the honeymoon their sex life is going to start well,” she says. “There’s no reason they should think that – they’ve completely switched off.”

Anxiety symptoms can occur without physical abuse or assault, so Tringham considers them to be a trauma response to strict education around abstinence.

“As a psychosexual therapist I do a lot of work with the body in terms of trauma,” Tringham adds. “But I would say that sometimes when I ask a client [from an evangelical background] where they feel something in their body, a number of them say ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ After I explain, they may then start remembering that there were symptoms earlier on, but that at the time they detached from or suppressed their feelings.”

She says she has also seen clients who are unable to sustain relationships because of their church’s pressure to progress quickly to marriage. “There’s a lot of talk [in conservative Christian churches] about the body being the enemy, and you can’t trust it, and it must be punished and controlled,” she says. “We are wired for connection and yet people often spend years being separate, and not having it.”

Clinicians are beginning to look for signs of post-purity trauma too. At the nursing faculty at UCLA, Beth Schwartz is researching the effects of negative religious experiences on women – specifically purity culture – for a Ph.D. in nursing at Azusa Pacific University. Schwartz has personal experience of “deconstructing” purity teachings. Deconstruction (sometimes called “deconstruction therapy”) refers to a reflective practice whereby evangelicals re-evaluate long-held beliefs, often in the process of leaving evangelical Christianity.

She plans to develop a new theoretical framework for nursing that could provide screening tools and questionnaires for gynecological evaluations with purity survivors.

Meanwhile, experts from outside of the ex-evangelical community are starting to recognize how purity culture can contribute to physiological and psychological problems. At the University of Minnesota, behavioral health scientist Dr. Kristen Mark founded The Abstinence Project to do just that. Unlike many other researchers in this field, Dr. Mark does not come from a religious background.

The Abstinence Project aims to expose the harms of abstinence-only education through personal stories. Common themes include contracting STIs, dissociating during sex, and feelings of chronic guilt.

“Some other experiences that have struck me are things like feeling like the experience of sexual trauma was their own fault as a result of abstinence-only sex education, or feeling like having experienced sexual trauma meant they weren’t ‘worthy’ for another relationship,” Dr. Mark says. “Others include not getting any messages about anything other than sex for reproduction, so there have been stories submitted by gay men, for instance, about how they felt like their experience wasn’t ‘real’ sex.”

Recovery

Both Luke and Elizabeth have developed new attitudes about the teachings they were given as teenagers.

Elizabeth found a new church when she left home where she was able to deconstruct some of the teachings she’d learned as an adolescent. “Being in a more open space of conversation was quite healing,” she says. “But it was also bittersweet, because you see what you’ve experienced, earlier in life, and you realize: ‘That wasn’t OK’. I’m grieving for the hurt purity culture caused, and for what was lost.”

She continues to explore her faith and form new relationships. “I think dating is a great thing,” she says. “There is still that little bit of anxiety surrounding it, just because of things that are still internalized. Thoughts and feelings that I thought I’d figured out do sometimes crop back up. But it’s nowhere near as severe. I’m happy and comfortable with who I am now.”

Luke credits therapy as a useful process for learning more about the anxiety that had stuck with him into adulthood. He says, “I am married, I’m happy. These things still sit with me but they don’t have all the control anymore.”

He now works as the director for OneBodyOneFaith, formerly the United Kingdom’s Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. (Luke and his husband were also the first same-sex couple to be married in a Baptist church in the U.K.)

“There is always hope,” he says. “Yes, the Church needs to be held to account for the way that it harms people. But for those who are harmed, there is the possibility for something else, another life to be lived.”

Ellie Broughton is a writer in London. She has written for The Guardian, The Independent, the i paper, Vice, and others.

*Elizabeth used a pseudonym.

The post Tainted Love: Reckoning with the Damage of Purity Culture appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Getty Images)

In recent years, people at the university where I teach in California tried to address the fact that we work on land stolen from indigenous people by appending land acknowledgements to their email signatures. But the Ohlone people who had lived on the land where the university constructed its buildings had already been decimated and scattered. The emails may be sent from Ohlone land, but there are few Ohlone left to claim it.

Land acknowledgements are a kind of apology. But for white people, like sticking a Black Lives Matter sticker on their car, they are another performative gesture at trying to make amends for the sins of our ancestors. Whether your white ancestors arrived in America with the pilgrims or more recently like most white Californians, you have benefited from the conquering of lands that belonged to others. Native American activists have become increasingly vocal about this, and, gradually, white Americans have tried to offer apologies. But do these gestures really mean that Native Americans owe white people forgiveness? And after years of being told to “forgive and forget,” can the genocide of Native American people, or any people conquered by others, really ever be forgiven?

A 2015 study by psychologists on forgiveness found that most people forgive in two ways. The first, decisional forgiveness, is a conscious decision to let go of hurt feelings and move forward “free of the effects those feelings can bring.” The second, emotional forgiveness, involves replacing negative emotions toward someone who has wronged you with positive ones, like compassion or empathy. But while most psychologists argue that forgiving can help a person move past trauma, another study in 2011 found that being forgiving can perpetuate and excuse abusive behavior. The fact of the matter is that while forgiveness should theoretically prevent people from reoffending, in many cases, it actually gives them permission to do so—on both personal and communal levels. Indigenous Americans have suffered because of this.

***

California’s oldest standing buildings are the Missions, which were overseen by an ambitious Spanish Franciscan friar named Junipero Serra. Serra, who arrived in Baja California in the late 1760s, had a singular goal: to convert as many of the seemingly recalcitrant Native Californian people as humanly possible. Considering how many Native people ran away from missionaries, they weren’t so much recalcitrant as terrified. One indigenous family seeking help for their sick infant once brought the baby to Serra, who assumed they wanted it baptized, and then fled when it looked like Serra was about to drown their child.

As Serra slowly made his way up California, building missions as he went, more and more Native Californians converted to Christianity. But once they converted, rather than finding salvation, life often became desperate and unpleasant. Not allowed to leave the missions, they were separated from family members, stripped of their languages, rituals, and cultures, and forced to labor for the church. Disease and hunger were rampant. Missionaries beat, whipped, and treated Native Californians with a condescending, infantilizing attitude.

(Mission Santa Clara in California)

By the time I was born, California’s population had been reshaped many times over. Oakland, where I grew up, had gone from a city of Italian and Irish immigrants in the early 20^th century to a city with more than 50% Black population during the Great Migration. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America began to pour into California in the 1970s and 80s alongside people from Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. But there were always Native Californians, too. It’s just that, thanks to Serra, not many of them remained.

Our teachers, with a mind toward building a more diverse story of California, took us on field trips to see the Miwok Village at Point Reyes National Seashore alongside tours of missions. But for people who grew up in the 1980s and later, instead of hearing stories praising Serra, we began to hear other stories: of disease and death, of cultures wiped out, of people who had once been rich in land now homeless. We learned that some things are unforgivable.

Among those stories, one has stuck with me for fifty years as an example of what it means to decimate a group of people so utterly that there is no possibility of forgiveness. It has also defined both what it means to commit an unforgivable act, and how that act can have repercussions for generations.

On August 29, 1911, a starving Native man wandered into Oroville, California, where he was sent to the town jail. He was Yahi, a tribe that had been deliberately and violently massacred by white settlers. In the 1840s, there were approximately 400 Yahi living in Northern California. By 1911, there was one.

Desperate to get rid of this unwanted man, the town reached out to the University of California Museum of Anthropology, which was at that time located in San Francisco, seeking help for the visitor whose name was unknown. Alfred Kroeber, who ran the museum, proposed that the man be moved into the museum to live rather than repatriated to a reservation in Oklahoma. Because it was a Yahi custom not to speak his name to outsiders, Kroeber began calling him Ishi, meaning “man.” Ishi suffered from numerous health problems in the museum, where he lived for four and a half years. In one of the first photographs taken of Ishi, he is thin, covered in what looks like a loaned coat, and barefoot. The anthropologist James Clifford writes that this image, widely circulated when Ishi was “discovered,” was the beginning of Ishi’s story being stolen from him. “Stripped of any context, he is pure artifact, available for collection; pure victim, ready to be rescued.”

Kroeber considered Ishi a friend, and he and other UC anthropologists tried to learn Ishi’s language and customs, hoping to preserve them. But their methodology was, by today’s standards, dehumanizing. Ishi was advertised as “the last wild Indian in California,” and essentially put on display in the museum, where he would carve obsidian arrowheads and sing Yahi songs for crowds of tourists. Against his will, Ishi traveled with Kroeber to the site where his family was massacred to help Kroeber document Yahi life. Ishi’s narrative became Kroeber’s narrative, and Kroeber’s growing fame became dependent on Ishi.

(A photo of Ishi. Source: California Museum)

Ishi struggled in the museum, partly because he was surrounded by the remains of other Native Californians, and partly because he was not accustomed to living indoors or wearing Western clothing. He would sometimes be sighted hunting on nearby Mount Parnassus, but for the most part, he was confined indoors and forced to be a living exhibit. By many accounts, he was friendly, but one can only imagine what he went through psychologically spending nights surrounded by the bones of massacred relatives.

When tuberculosis swept through San Francisco in 1916, Ishi contracted it, probably from a curious museum visitor eager to see a live “wild Indian.” When he died, Kroeber initially opposed letting Ishi’s body be autopsied, but later agreed to have Ishi’s brain sent to the Smithsonian, where it remained until 2020.

By then, narratives about Ishi’s life had changed. Kroeber’s wife Theodora, also an anthropologist who studied Native Americans, wrote what was for many years considered the definitive book about Ishi’s life, Ishi in Two Worlds. But it was an imperfect book in many ways.

As a child, like many Californians, I was assigned a young reader’s version of Theodora Kroeber’s book in school, so the Ishi I knew was the Kroeber’s Ishi, not the Ishi who belongs to the Native Californians who would later spend decades fighting to reclaim his brain so they could lay it to rest with his ashes. Among the mythological stories the Kroebers created is that Ishi was the “last” Indian living wild in California, which is clearly not true: while Ishi’s tribe was wiped out, the descendants of many of the Indians who ran from Serra still live there today.

Even while it acknowledged the genocide of Native Americans and grappled with the trauma Ishi experienced when his family was massacred, Theodora Kroeber’s book also contributed to the mythology of the “healed” Native American. She created a narrative of a person who has been tortured but still manages to be able to move past pain and into forgiveness. Kroeber divides her book into two sections, “The Terror” for Ishi’s life before he arrived at the museum, and “The Healing” once he got there.

But the truth is much more complicated. Ishi will never be able to tell us if he forgave the people who slaughtered his family, if he forgave the seemingly well-meaning white anthropologists who placed him in a museum and exploited his story, or if he forgave Serra and gold prospectors and everyone else who has tried to reinvent California in their own image. Ishi will not even be able to tell us his real name, because it could only be spoken by another Yahi, and they are gone. The remains of Native people that so bothered Ishi when he lived at the Museum of Anthropology were moved along with the rest of the museum to the UC Berkeley campus soon after Ishi died. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff sit in classrooms and offices built over containers of those remains.

In 2015, despite protests from Native Americans, Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra in Washington, D.C. The pope described Serra as “excited” to learn Native customs and ways of life. But Native Americans disagreed. Five years later, as statues of Confederate generals, Christopher Columbus, and other disgraced historical figures were being toppled across the country in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Native activists knocked down a thirty-foot-tall statue of Serra in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Statues of Serra soon fell in Sacramento and Los Angeles as well. California governor Gavin Newsom had delivered a formal apology to California Native people in 2019, recognizing the history of genocide in the state. But for Native activist Morning Star Gali, “an apology is nothing without action,” and for her and other California Native people, statues of Serra were a reminder of a painful past and needed to go.

(Statue of Serra. Image source: Jaime Reina for Getty Images)

The Catholic Church disagreed. San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone did not apologize to Native activists for the damage the church had done to them throughout history. Instead, he called the activists a “mob,” accused them of “an act of sacrilege,” and called toppling the statue blasphemy. Cordileone performed an exorcism at the site of the statue, with his own film crew on hand, documenting the ceremony on YouTube, saying “evil has been done here” and calling Serra a hero. The statue, depicting Serra thrusting a cross forward with his arms spread wide, now dented and splattered with red paint, has been put in storage. The California legislature voted to replace it with a statue honoring Native Californians. To this day, such a statue does not exist.

***

In July of 2022, Pope Francis made what the Vatican described as a “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada. The history of Canadian residential schools became an international scandal as reports went public of thousands of unmarked graves of First Nations people on the sites of former schools. Led by missionaries from Catholic and Protestant denominations on the premise that they would educate First Nations children, Canadian residential schools instead performed what many Native people consider cultural genocide.

Effectively stealing, in most cases, First Nations children from their parents, missionaries who ran residential schools sexually, physically, and psychologically abused generations of Native Canadian children. And they learned how to do this from their American neighbors. Nicholas Flood Davin, a Canadian politician sent to the U.S. to study “industrial schools” for Native Americans, wrote in 1897 that “if anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him young.” To achieve the “aggressive civilization” desired by these politicians, missionaries separated siblings in the schools, weakening family ties, and stuck needles into the tongues of children caught speaking their indigenous languages.

First Nations religions, languages, and cultures were annihilated, and untold numbers of children died in residential schools. One report from 1907 estimated a quarter of previously healthy children died in the schools. And anywhere between half and three quarters of those sent to residential schools later died from suicide, addiction, or violence.

Residential schools still existed as recently as 1996, and the first apology for the Canadian government’s part in them occurred in 2008, when Stephen Harper, then the Prime Minister, offered a public apology before an audience of First Nations people. “The Government of Canada,” Harper said, “sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly.” Loraine Yuzicapi, who had been sent to a residential school in the 1950s and sat in the audience as Harper apologized, had a succinct response to a journalist’s question about Harper’s apology. “It wasn’t good enough,” she said.

(A Canadian residential school. Photo taken in 1940. Image source: Library and Archives Canada)

For people who were colonized or enslaved, as well as for their descendants, our growing understanding of trauma theory backs up what they have long said: apologies are not always enough to earn forgiveness, because violence, whether mental, physical or spiritual, can do damage that lasts generations. Residential schools may have been formed for what their founders saw as a meaningful purpose, the assimilation of indigenous people into white society and the salvation of their souls through forced conversions to Christianity, but anyone with even a cursory knowledge of missionary history is aware that violent white supremacy shaped those missions.

By the time Pope Francis arrived in Canada, First Nations people were understandingly skeptical. Calling the residential schools a “disastrous error” and “catastrophic,” the pope said he humbly begged forgiveness “for the evil committed against the Indigenous peoples.” But the pope also said missionaries were acting on behalf of the government, what he described as the “colonizing mentality.” Pope Francis did not ask forgiveness for the Catholic Church itself, but for its members who abused children. In doing so, the pope perpetuated the same patterns that made the sex abuse crisis possible.

By pointing the finger at individuals rather than the institution that enabled and even encouraged them, churches and governments alike involved in the residential schools have used the same “bad apples” excuse for generations. The problem is that this effectively allows the institution to call itself blameless. And that in turn increases the potential for the same abuses to happen again.

Murray Sinclair, an Ojibwe Canadian senator and the former head of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission, said that this deflection made the pope’s apology feel hollow. According to Sinclair, the pope’s words “left a deep hole in the acknowledgement of the full role of the church in the residential school system, by placing blame on individual members of the church.” For Sinclair and many other First Nations people, the pope’s apology was too little, too late. They would not be granting forgiveness.

***

In his book The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk writes that for the traumatized person, “the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.” Physical aftereffects of trauma become “visceral warning signs,” and survivors of trauma “become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside.” Van Der Kolk’s hypothesis is that this is another form of the fight or flight instinct experienced by people with anxiety and panic disorders. Because they’ve experienced trauma, they never feel safe, and as Van Der Kolk writes, “Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health.”

Many Americans have looked to Canada as a country with more exemplary social equity, and knowledge of the residential schools shattered that. Since we know America is not a safe country for women, people of color, queer people or, increasingly, children at risk of being shot at school, the question remains whether or not the United States, as a nation that has inflicted trauma on generations of people, is worthy of forgiveness.

In an article in Indian Country magazine, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a member of the Colville tribe, writes about attending a production of a play by a Native American writer. The play posed the question of whether or not Native Americans can forgive what was done to them by the United States, and at the end of the play, a non-Native audience member turned to Gilio-Whitaker and said “you have to forgive if you want to heal.” Gilio-Witaker, who says that she experienced domestic abuse, writes that granting forgiveness was not what she personally needed to overcome trauma. She needed to get away from the abuser. She adds that being taught that forgiveness was the only way to move past the abuse perpetuates a victim mentality for abuse survivors because they can be stuck in a perpetual experience of trauma while the abuser moves on.

On a collective level, after war or genocide or colonization, communities “face the extremely challenging prospects of having to rebuild,” while also coping with the psychological impact of violence. After a violent conflict, people on both sides have to find a way to exist alongside one another. Instead of asking people stuck together in the aftermath of violence whether they can forgive, Gilio-Whitaker suggests a better question: what will it take to heal historical wounds, and “heal the relationships between indigenous communities and settler governments and societies?” If we can move past an expectation of forgiveness, she writes, the oppressed are no longer “held to an impossible standard,” and we can also recognize that healing is a shared responsibility, and not an individual one.

Perhaps if we can let go of the idea that forgiveness might be possible after something as unfathomable as a genocide or war, or incest, domestic abuse, rape or a million other traumatizing acts, we might also be able to let victims and their descendants experience a sense of freedom since they no longer “owe” anyone. The Rev. Eric Atcheson, an Armenian-American whose ancestors survived the Armenian genocide, told me that he does not see it as his or any other Armenian person’s responsibility to be forgiving, because the people who could have offered forgiveness are now dead.

“If God wants to forgive culprits of a genocide,” he says, “that’s God’s affair. I don’t get to forgive them in my ancestors’ stead.” Rev. Atcheson adds that those who accuse the descendants of genocide or war to be “clinging to the past” by refusing to forgive are incorrect. In refusing to forgive or forget the Armenian genocide, Atcheson believes he is “setting [himself] free while the deniers remain burdened.” In many ways, this makes perfect sense. We are taught that forgiveness is an unburdening and a letting go, but what if realizing you cannot forgive someone or something is the actual unburdening? As Atcheson says, if it is God’s decision whether someone is forgiven, that can free us from the guilt of feeling like we are bad people when we cannot do the same.

And to reduce any group of people to their experience of suffering is also a form of dehumanization. It’s amazing to read that Ishi laughed, told jokes, and enjoyed walking around San Francisco and meeting people considering his entire family was massacred while he hid and watched. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was forgiving, but that like every other human being, he felt a range of emotions that extended beyond trauma and its impact on him. But he also continued to speak Yahi, to practice his tribal rituals, to hunt and carve arrowheads. Living in the museum may have felt like a trap, but when Kroeber wanted to take Ishi back to his home territory, Ishi did not want to go. To return meant returning to the site of the trauma. He was trapped in a liminal space, and that is where he died.

To imagine Ishi or any person who survived a mass slaughter laughing or smiling may tempt us to think they have “let go,” forgiven, or moved on. But anyone who’s been to a funeral knows that sometimes you laugh hard at funerals because this, too, is a release. That’s not the same as moving on or moving past something, but a momentary opportunity to feel something other than anxiety or grief. The person being asked for forgiveness, as Gilio-Whitaker writes, is also being “held to an impossible standard.” That, too, is turning human suffering into caricature, the “noble savage,” or the rape victim so holy she is willing to forgive the man who violated her, or the former slave who somehow forgives the person who owned and abused their body.

If we are called to be forgiving no matter what, many people who have been through hell will fail. Perhaps what needs to be forgiven is, instead, the inability to forgive.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

The post The Colonizing Catholic Church, Indigenous Americans, and Problems with Forgiveness appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

According to a Pew Research Center study that came out last month, 45% of Americans believe the United States should be a “Christian nation.” But, as Pew admits, many of the survey respondents differ on what constitutes a “Christian nation.” Even among those who think the country should be Christian, most do not want America to become a theocracy where our laws are established by religious leaders. Rather, most want “Christian values” to drive the nation’s work.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

What are these “Christian values,” you might ask? I do not know (although I have my guesses), but I do know the very idea makes me nervous. While I take some comfort in the fact that the majority of Pew’s respondents (55%) do not believe the U.S. should be a Christian country, the survey’s findings are but one piece in the growing body of evidence that points to rising Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism is a pan-denominational movement that supports Christian political and cultural dominance and white supremacy, even if not every Christian nationalist is white. Christian nationalism has enabled everything from abortion bans, critical race theory bans, and bans on supporting transgender youth. White Christian nationalism played a role in the violence on January 6, and many worry it will contribute to worse violence in the coming years.

Because of the danger Christian nationalism poses to the United States, the Revealer has run several articles about this growing movement and its insidious manifestations in our politics and culture. But this month, as part of our commitment to help everyone better understand pressing issues of religion in society, we are doing something new. The Revealer is hosting a virtual event on Christian nationalism that I hope you will attend. The event, “Christian Nationalists, The Possibility of War, and the Future of American Democracy” will feature Dr. Bradley Onishi, author of the popular Revealer article “God is Ultimate Masculinity: Evangelical Visions of Manhood in the Wake of the Atlanta Massacre.” His new book, out in January, is called Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—And What Comes Next. Our virtual event will feature a conversation with Onishi about Christian nationalism’s rise, what to do about the threat of more violence like January 6, and what the midterm elections foretell about the 2024 race and the future of democracy in America. An audience Q & A will follow so you can participate in the conversation. I hope you will join us. You can register for this important and free event here.

While our event looks directly at Christian nationalism, the Revealer’s November issue features articles about finding alternatives to Christian dominance. The issue opens with Kaya Oakes’s “The Colonizing Catholic Church, Indigenous Americans, and Problems with Forgiveness,” where she considers why Native Americans might refuse to forgive the church’s role in the torture and death of countless Indigenous people and how that might prevent future abuse in the name of religion. Next, in “Tainted Love: Reckoning with the Damage of Purity Culture,” Ellie Broughton investigates the physiological and psychological problems reported by people who have gone through purity culture, the evangelical Christian system that teaches teenagers that if they do not abstain from sex until marriage, they could ruin their relationships with God and their future spouse. Then, in “Atheists, Social Media, and American Politics,” Donovan Schaefer interviews Chris Stedman about his books Faitheist and IRL, what Stedman makes of both social media and religion in today’s polarized politics, and the place of atheists in the American alt-right.

While still thinking about alternatives to Christian dominance, but with a shift to a somewhat lighter note, our next two articles turn away from Christians and toward American Jews and their relationship to humor. In “The People of the Joke,” Jennifer Caplan explores the reasons why people tend to think of Jews as funny and as the group most likely to dominate the comedy industry. And, in “Jewish Comedy and Jewish Erasure in Amazon Prime’s A League of Their Own,” Sarah Emmanuel reviews the new series about the real-life women’s baseball league and considers why comedy by and about Jews so often relies on stereotypes of Jews as anxious and neurotic.

The November issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Atheists in America.” Chris Stedman joins us to discuss the 10^th anniversary of his book Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious. We explore stigmas atheists face, why some have been drawn to right-wing politics, and how atheists can respond to rising Christian nationalism. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As Christian nationalism becomes more prominent throughout the country, from school boards to the Senate, we are committed to providing you with expert information about this movement. I hope you will join us at our virtual event on November 15 to learn more about Christian nationalism, what you can do to prepare for the coming years, and how you can help protect democracy and religious pluralism in the United States.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Finding Alternatives to Christian Dominance and Christian Nationalism appeared first on The Revealer.