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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Religious Cultural Appropriation.”

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(Image source: Yoga Journal)

Over the last few years of the pandemic, as time both seemed to speed up and slow down, I started to mark the changing of the seasons by the holiday decorations displayed at my local grocery store. At some point during 2021, I began to notice a bizarre trend: leprechaun themed “yoga water,” an Easter Bunny in a yoga pose, a witch holding a sign that read “namaste,” turkeys meditating, and finally, a Christmas tree ornament shaped as a yoga mat with the word “yoga” painted on it in silver glitter for good measure. My partner got used to me buying these items, bringing them home, and lining them up on our dining table and studying them, like a mad scientist trying to crack a code.

These yoga-themed tchotchkes perplexed me. What was happening here? Who would be interested in buying these items? And perhaps most perplexing, how had yoga become tethered to U.S. and Christian seasonal products?

Recently, I brought this collection of trinkets to my undergraduate students and asked them to help me understand why people might buy, of all things, a figurine of an Easter Bunny doing yoga. In response, a heated debate ensued. One group of students felt strongly that this was disrespectful and an example of stealing the religious practices of Indians—that “commercializing” yoga in this way was inappropriate because it was an acute instance of “cultural appropriation.”

A separate and competing faction of students suggested that this sort of commercialism was “innocent,” especially since it was meant to be light-hearted and even humorous. These students argued that we should simply understand these items as a benign example of “cultural appreciation.” In fact, one student suggested that rather than read malintent into the production and consumption of these items, we should celebrate how yoga had become part of U.S. culture and its “melting pot.”

In truth, that conversation left me unsatisfied because, like many conversations about capitalism and culture in the U.S., the controversy seemed to center on whether or not adopting another community’s practices or objects, especially if associated with religion, was right or wrong. This sort of oversimplified right-or-wrong, innocent-or-guilty framing reflects a tendency to suggest that something is only harmful if or when there is an individual or group to whom we can assign blame.

Fortunately, Liz Bucar’s new book, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation, injects new life into what has become a stale discourse on the concept of “cultural appropriation.” Bringing together three disparate case studies, Bucar brilliantly demonstrates how definitions of religion fuse with practices of capitalism and ownership.

In the introduction, Bucar explains what she means by appropriation, especially religious appropriation. “Religious appropriation,” she writes, is “when individuals adopt religious practices without committing to religious doctrines, ethical values, systems of authority, or institutions, in ways that exacerbate existing systems of structural injustice.” By considering the way religious appropriation both creates and sustains forms of inequity, Bucar offers a compelling critique of secular liberalism, arguing that the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” excuses and perhaps even encourages acts of exploitation since secular liberalism suggests that everything should be available to everyone, even if it means usurping others’ cultures and religious traditions.

To support her claim, the first chapter explores how progressive political movements, like feminism, can perpetuate inequity through religious appropriation. Bucar examines the consequences when non-Muslim women have worn the hijab to show allyship with Muslim women. Bucar shows how, despite its good intentions, the adoption of the hijab as a political statement among non-Muslim women produces unintended consequences. For example, Bucar illuminates how white feminists in the U.S. failed to consider that their adoption of hijab could reinforce the false idea that all Muslim women wear veils. Highlighting the critiques of “solidarity hijab” that emerged from the Muslim community, Bucar explores how “some Muslim women experienced these well-meaning acts as exploitation…[and that] these expressions of liberal inclusion did not always have the effect of supporting Muslim women. In fact, just the opposite: in some cases, solidarity hijab contributed to the further racialization and subjugation of Muslim women.”

(Image source: dailysabah.com)

In the second chapter, “Playing Pilgrim,” Bucar explores the collision of U.S. evangelical Christianity, heritage tourism, and study abroad programs. Based on ethnographic research conducted with a study abroad program Bucar developed and led for years, the chapter focuses on the Catholic pilgrimage route in Spain known as the Camino de Santiago.

While the entire book is engaging, I must admit that this chapter has stayed with me for its insights on evangelical Christianity. The chapter explores how certain varieties of evangelical Protestants position themselves as superior and more righteous Christians than all others. Bucar shares how her evangelical Christian students engaged with the Camino as a Catholic practice, and behaved as though it was at odds with and ultimately inferior to their own belief systems. According to Bucar these students exhibited a sense of superiority when confronted with Catholic beliefs and practices on the Camino, revealing a kind of self-feeding narcissism among evangelical Protestants. Ultimately, Bucar’s analysis uncovers how evangelical Christianity fuses with white supremacy in terrifying ways, to this reader at least.

The third chapter focuses on Bucar’s time receiving teacher training at a Kripalu yoga retreat. The Kripalu center where Bucar underwent 200 hours of yoga training is one of the oldest in the United States. Through analysis of her time there, Bucar offers a deeply sensitive perspective of the somewhat common critique today that practicing yoga represents a form of cultural appropriation, especially among white Americans.

After a brief but thorough historical overview on how yoga emerged as a consumer wellness practice in the United States, the chapter explores the complex and at times contradictory ways individuals experience yoga as a spiritual practice. Bucar cleverly dubs the style of yoga common today “respite yoga,” which she defines as a form of yoga intended “to reduce stress and achieve well-being…marketed as vaguely spiritual and yet requires no religious commitments, making it accessible to everyone.” Bucar goes on to clarify:

“Respite yoga relies on practices, including physical postures, borrowed from devotional yoga, as a way to present itself as ancient, mystical, and powerful, but often without the larger systems of thought and belief they developed from, such as ethics and cosmologies. But modern respite yoga also adds new things to the mix to make the practice seem more ‘authentic,’ including the opening and closing of a class with namaste as a form of pseudo- liturgy. In other words, respite yoga depends on the appropriation of devotional yoga. It is just as much an invention of something new as the practice of something old.”

Bucar convincingly argues that respite yoga, as it is currently practiced, is a form of religious appropriation. In making this argument, however, Bucar deftly avoids indicting or absolving the people who practice yoga. Rather, her exploration of respite yoga’s success in the United States demonstrates how it operates as a direct byproduct of the formation of an Indian and majority Hindu nation-state after the fall of the British Empire and the new nation’s desire to export some of its traditions abroad.

The book concludes by zooming back out and connecting the three case studies to each other. Bucar weaves the case studies together to question how it might be possible to borrow from religious traditions responsibly and in ways that do not contribute to reinforcing social hierarchies.

To this reader, Stealing My Religion accomplishes what it sets out to do and then some. Bucar takes on a messy and often alienating topic – how we understand and make room for critical understandings of, and conversations about, religion in society. Bucar’s book helped me understand why, for example, the yoga seasonal trinkets in my grocery store exist and why people might want to buy them. She does so by explaining how common appropriation has become in our capitalist world, and how it, “relies on and contributes to existing forms of structural injustice.” Moreover, she shines a bright if uncomfortable light on how, as U.S. Americans, we are inured to this mechanism because most of us experience and consume appropriation as culture. Put another way, those yoga tchotchkes exist and might even sell because they meld symbols of white U.S. Christianity with Hinduism in a way that still keeps majoritarian Christian holidays at the center of how we organize time and our shared lives as members of a society.

Ultimately, Bucar imparts to her readers a clear and unsettling awareness of how fundamental religious appropriation is to U.S. forms of liberalism. And she offers us a path forward, reminding her readers in her conclusion that we can and should resist normalizing these sorts of everyday harms: “the ability to say ‘No, I shouldn’t do this [or buy this or support this] even though I know I can’ is a powerful acknowledgement of personal privilege and a commitment to not allowing inherited entitlement to continue unchecked.”

Rumya S. Putcha is an assistant professor of music and women’s studies at the University of Georgia. Her first book, The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke University Press), will be released in December 2022. Her next book, Namaste Nation: Orientalism and Yoga in the 21st Century, explores how ideas of health are performed as public expressions of identity.

The post The Ubiquity of Religious Appropriation appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Taylor Callery)

Two Emmy-nominated TV dramas from 2022 explore the birth of new religious movements in communities under duress: Yellowjackets and Severance.

Yellowjackets, streaming on Showtime, focuses on a girls’ high school soccer team from New Jersey who, together with the team’s male assistant coach and head coach’s two sons, survive a plane crash in the Canadian Rockies on their way to the 1996 championships. Stranded in primitive conditions for nineteen months, not all of them make it out alive. The ritualized cannibalistic survival tactics of those who do are the show’s main focus.

Severance, streaming on Apple TV, is set in an alternative version of our current reality and explores the alienating excesses of corporate capitalism. The show’s title refers to a procedure undergone by the main characters in which a chip inserted in their brains bifurcates their consciousness into a work self (or “innie”) and a personal self (or “outie”). The innies’ entire existence is confined to a sterile subterranean office, run by the megacorporation-cum-cult Lumon Industries, where innie workers perform tedious tasks to no clear purpose. When the workday ends, their outies move about the world freely, conducting their affairs unburdened by any work-related stress. But the outies also suffer confusion about the parameters of their freedom (which are, in fact, quite limited), and carry with them a debilitating, if vague, sense of loss.

On the surface, the two shows could not be more different. The crash survivors in Yellowjackets deal with threats to their existence: wild animals, cold weather, and a lack of food, water, and medical care. In Severance, the innies inhabit a pristine, nature-free world of fluorescent lights, computer screens, and key cards. But there are important similarities between the two programs. Severance alternates between the storylines of the severed characters’ innie and outie counterparts, presenting their struggles to find meaning and purpose as separate but linked. Yellowjackets also moves between two connected storylines, set 25 years apart. It juxtaposes the harsh wilderness reality of the crash survivors in 1996 against the materially comfortable existence of four who are still alive in 2021 suburban New Jersey. Now middle-aged women, they wrestle with the memories of their violent forest past as they navigate an equally bewildering present.

The shows’ creators explicitly deploy religion to explore these issues and, in the process, offer up an array of ideas about the role of religion in modern life. Both series present religion as something we turn to in moments of weakness or crisis, when we are forced to confront what nineteenth-century Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called our “absolute dependence.” Religion is also presented (à la Marx’s “opiate of the masses”) as a means of social control, rife with possibilities for manipulation and abuse. On Severance, Lumon Industries guises its self-serving mission to control all facets of its employees’ lives in grandiose pronouncements contained in a corporate handbook entitled Compliance and type-set like a Revised Standard Version Bible. The non-severed bosses quote it reverentially. On Yellowjackets, the cannibalistic cult that emerges has its sadistic enthusiasts even as it terrifies other participants.

Each show also presents religious experience as something psychosomatic, rooted in our body’s organs and chemistry. Such a view sets religion up as a sham to be exposed by rationality and science. Yet the very physicality of the characters’ mind-bending experiences on both shows also attests to such experiences’ inextirpable presence in their bodies. It is only natural, then, that the characters’ attempts to interpret such experiences become indelible features of their collective psyche.

Reviews of both shows have been overwhelmingly positive but the very same critics have often singled out these religious elements as weak links, not fully integral to the plot or characters. James Poniewozik of the New York Times calls the cultish features of Lumon on Severance the show’s one “misstep” and questions whether Yellowjackets really needs the supernatural dimension.

This assessment misses the point. While modern critics may want to ignore religion, Yellowjackets and Severance remind us that religion will not be ignored.

***

The first episode of Yellowjackets is interspersed with scenes in which one of the plane crash survivors (it is unclear who) is hunted, trapped, slaughtered, cooked, and consumed. This is not merely a matter of survival; the storyline presents this activity as part of an emerging cult, one in which some sinister but potentially protective forest forces are being placated through blood offerings. Lest modern audiences get too judgmental, the show’s first episode links the survivors’ participatory ingestion of these offerings to the Eucharist. Star soccer player and moody introvert Shauna Shipman, still in 1996 New Jersey and innocent of what fate has in store for her team, speaks to her friend of her fleeting desire to become Catholic: “I liked the saints. They were all so tragic.” Shortly thereafter, the show cuts to a scene of the young women in the snowy forest, unrecognizable in antler headdresses and fur hoods, as they rip into a ceremoniously presented platter of human meat.

Bodies and blood figure prominently in Yellowjackets, but not always in a Christian idiom. The show forces us to confront the links between menstruation, sexuality, birth, and death that have inspired countless religious regulations. When the teammates’ periods synchronize, the women wash and hang their bloody rags to dry in strips around their encampment, just to the side of the strips of bloody deer meat they are attempting to turn into jerky. One of the male survivors, the bereaved teenage hunk Travis whose father was killed in the crash, is disgusted by this. He argues with his romantic interest, tough-girl Natalie, in favor of reviving ancient practices of menstrual isolation. Their debate underscores the fact that their new reality is aligned with the bulk of human history, when sexuality was often deadly and its associated processes were feared (a reality recently revived in the United States for largely religious reasons). Indeed, would-be Catholic Shauna is secretly pregnant and it is her lack of a bloody strip hanging on the communal line that brings this information to light. Her pregnancy only increases the group’s anxiety about its circumstances.

Also of concern is the fact that the forest itself seems to have a hankering for human blood. During a mock séance that the team holds in an attempt at some traditional campfire levity, a force speaks through troubled rich-girl Lottie Mathews. In French, a language Lottie claims not to know, it informs the group that “it wants more blood.” This episode, entitled “Saints,” is when Lottie, who has been doubting the visions she’s been having, is baptized by her evangelical Christian teammate, Laura Lee, who interprets Lottie’s experiences as the descent of the Holy Spirit. (She also sees the plane crash as a punishment for the team members’ sins.) When Laura attempts to leave the forest to get help, she meets with a mysterious end. Laura’s death undoes Lottie’s temporary allegiance to Christianity and realigns her sympathies with the forest and its apparent claims on its residents. There are indications that the forest has made these claims before. The Yellowjackets find an abandoned house in the woods that contains some much-needed provisions but also the skeleton of its former inhabitant. There is a menacing symbol carved into the home’s beams and floorboards: a female stick-figure struck through by a diagonal line with a hook protruding from the bottom of her skirt. The symbol resonates with images, shown in fragmentary flashbacks throughout season one, of the team’s first sacrificial victim hung upside down by her legs as her blood drips onto the snow.

For some viewers, these aspects of Yellowjackets place it firmly in the horror genre. But guardian cults in which deities act simultaneously as threats and saviors pervade human history. This motif is found throughout the Bible as well as in south Indian forest cults and ancient Mayan rituals involving human sacrifice. Reciprocity between the realm of humans and that of the gods is fundamental to many religions. When we sacrifice to the gods, we give something valuable to get something valuable in return—and what could be more valuable than life? But even as the show reminds us of these ancient traditions (which persist, to varying degrees of literalness, in many religions today), the show also supplies our modern minds with potentially rational explanations: Lottie, who seems to communicate with the forest gods, takes prescribed psychiatric medication. As her supply dwindles, her propensity for hallucination increases.

In season one’s penultimate episode, the group throws a doomsday party where they seek temporary respite from their misery by consuming fermented berry juice. They also unwittingly consume a stew spiked with hallucinogenic mushrooms foraged by the team’s equipment manager, Misty. Misty had intended to use the mushrooms to take sexual advantage of the badly injured male coach, on whom she harbors a misguided crush. When the mushrooms accidentally get integrated into the main meal, what ensues is a night of revelry so frightening even Misty’s warped priorities pale in comparison. Setting the stage for the blood cult that emerges in the final episode, the drugged women hunt Travis and nearly slit his throat under Lottie’s direction. She claims that he “belongs” to the forest, that “it is coming”, and that the group “won’t be hungry for long.” The Yellowjackets’ minds are addled by hunger, drugs, alcohol, hormones, trauma, and toxic group dynamics. While this jumble of rationalizations for their gruesome behavior might be more than enough to preclude any supernatural explanation, the show’s equitable juxtaposition of all these possibilities renders its supernatural conceits more plausible. Unlike other shows that have trod similar terrain less coherently (e.g., ABC’s Lost or HBO’s The Leftovers), Yellowjackets effectively highlights reason’s inability to contend with our full lived experiences and levels the explanatory playing fields of psychology, biology, and bloodthirsty forest gods.

(Image source: Showtime/Ringer illustration)

The season ends by suggesting that this cult extends into the present day, where the survivors could be said, in modern parlance, to be processing their trauma. They do this in all the stereotypical ways—drugs, rehab, book clubs, and therapy—but to little effect. The four main characters—Shauna, Misty, Natalie, and Taissa—are resourceful, ironic, and often quite funny about their situation. This makes them as easy to relate to as their younger selves even as they scare us. Part of our fear is on their behalf, particularly the extent to which they are vulnerable to others’ coercion. But it also has to do with their enduring reliance on their forest ways of life. Taissa, a Black, openly gay lawyer running for state senate, is meant to stand for progress and pragmatism, two cornerstones of modernity. In the forest, she is the chief advocate for rational problem-solving. But in 2021 New Jersey, she has not fully abandoned the religion that helped her to survive, much as she works to suppress it. A shrine with fresh bloody offerings sits in the coal room of her basement, hidden not only from her wife and son, but even from her own conscious mind. She visits it only when sleepwalking.

What compels audiences to watch such television? The show’s conceit that primitive living will render us savages is clearly an enthralling view of human psychology. Yellowjackets accepts that our “primitive” views remain with us as modern people even as they strike us as unbecomingly savage. But the show also challenges us to rethink the modern myth of progress by reminding us not only that modernity coexists with—and often amplifies—our baser urges, it also has its own discernable end. Whether our circumstances be primitive or modern, we are all born to die.

***

Questioning the value of modern progress is at the heart of Severance, which focuses on how corporate capitalism controls every aspect of our lives. It presents mega-corporation Lumon Industries as a religious cult that masterfully manipulates its employees, both through a belief system that guises the company’s mission as one of “illumination” and through a patented surgical procedure that divides employees’ consciousness, rendering them incapable of real knowledge.

Severing employees’ minds keeps Lumon’s work product secret from society because, once severed employees leave the office, they cannot recall what they spent their day doing.  While the severed “outies” theoretically live on perpetual vacation, what “innie” workers get out of this arrangement is harder to discern. The four main innie characters who constitute Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement (MDR) Department have little insight into their tasks. They spend their days staring at computer screens full of random number sets coded to evoke certain emotions in them, based on which they then “refine” the data. These worker-consciousness innies have no idea whether their refining cleans the oceans, removes swear words from movies, or kills children, all of which are theories advanced by the show’s protagonists. Yet, thanks to Lumon’s lofty doctrines, which are presented as divine pronouncements from the founding CEO and which play on the human quest for meaning in the face of existential mystery, many of the innies buy in.

By linking contemporary capitalist culture to religion, Severance probes the question of why modern people, so invested in the idea of personal freedom, willingly submit to corporate controls. For much of the first season, the severance procedure is presented as voluntary yet controversial. The main character, Mark, opts to undergo it after his wife dies precisely so that his grief will be turned off for the eight-hour workday. If this strains credulity, think of the amount of time each of us spends daily in the alternate realities of the internet, hiding from our real-life problems. In addition to highlighting our contemporary tendency toward emotional anesthetization, the show is correct that mega-corporations own our psyches. Intimate details of our personal lives, including data about our physical and mental health and our private hopes and insecurities, have been made available for purchase by a range of actors who can now track and manipulate us. This may not be the result of a chip installed in our brains, but of a phone that the majority of us carry in our pockets, sleep with at our bedsides, and use to publicize images of our unwitting children who can then be similarly tracked. And many of us do this quite blithely.

Of course, not all of us are willing participants in these invasive and controlling structures. (They would not need to be invasive and controlling if we were.) The show’s innies have technically not chosen to spend their entire lives working in Lumon’s subterranean offices; their outie counterparts have. If an innie wants to quit Lumon, the rules stipulate that such a request be approved by one’s outie. These requests are routinely denied not only because Lumon insists, disingenuously, that the severance procedure is irreversible, but because the outies are callously indifferent to how truly miserable their innies’ lives are. Innies cannot sleep, see sunlight, take a trip, enjoy the weekend, eat at random times of day, or read anything besides corporate literature. When their bodies leave work, their consciousness does not and so it is like they are always in the office. They know nothing about their outer lives that might imbue their office lives with a sense of purpose. Whether or not they are partnered, have children, or enjoy hobbies is all closely guarded information, dispensed by Lumon during prescribed “wellness sessions” that are highly manipulative. The innies’ lives are torturous.

And yet, three of the four main innie characters initially refuse to admit this. The show opens with a new innie, named (unsubtly) Helly, undergoing her intake procedure. She cannot recall her own name, birthplace, or the color of her mother’s eyes. However, she can name a state–Delaware–indicating that the least interesting and most impersonal parts of her knowledge base are intact. Helly has been brought in to replace Petey, who has disappeared. Unbeknownst to his co-workers in MDR, Petey has had a Lumon defector hack his brain-chip to undo the severance procedure and is on the run from Lumon authorities. His disappearance makes his coworkers quite uneasy, but it is Helly’s arrival that disrupts the team’s stasis as she exposes and mocks their passivity.

Helly’s colleagues view their work at Lumon from different vantage points, influenced by their individual dispositions but also by the multifaceted nature of Lumon’s coercive control. There is Mark’s quiet resignation; Irving’s firm conviction in the importance, however unclear, of Lumon’s mission; and Dylan’s aggressive competitiveness about racking up quarterly numbers that will secure him the most rewards. (These include such flashy items as erasers and finger traps.) But Helly, who turns out to have been highly indoctrinated by Lumon prior to undergoing the severance procedure but who is also very privileged, balks at all of this. Ultimately, she convinces the others to balk, too.

Life for the outies is not much better as the reach of the company extends beyond the office walls. Mark’s neighbor in the outside world is also his boss. But he has no way of knowing this because he has no recollection of his life at Lumon. The bifurcated consciousness of the severed renders both innies and outies equally lacking in self-knowledge and it is this lack that enables Lumon to own them. One of the show’s richest themes is the role of memory in shaping human agency. Without a sense of history, it is hard to know how to act, which is exactly what Lumon Industries wants. This is made explicit in a quote by current CEO James Eagan, emblazoned on a wall of Lumon’s Perpetuity Wing where workers can go to immerse themselves in the grand ideas of the corporation-cum-cult’s leaders: “History lives in us whether we learn it or not.” In response, Helly quips, “It almost makes me wish I could remember my own childhood.” Yet, prior to undergoing his severance procedure, Mark had been a history professor. Apparently, knowledge of history proved useless in managing his grief and Mark was so tortured by memories of his wife, he chose to have them erased for eight hours a day. That said, Mark’s grieving outie is no better off; he spends much of his time crying and drinking.

Via such details, the show unearths the complex ways larger structural forces interact with our own worst tendencies, prompting us to choose ignorance over self-awareness. As in Severance, our global capitalist system uses our ‘ignorance’ of the true implications of our consumption patterns and other daily habits to undermine our moral agency. By farming out certain forms of labor to economically disadvantaged regions, global capitalism hides its worst features, such as human exploitation and environmental devastation, from the office workers located in the developed world. But it is also true that the ignorance of first-world office workers is largely willful, as we allow ourselves to be bought off by a seemingly infinite supply of cheap products, commendatory plaques, competitions of no real significance, and false notions of mission supplied by the corporations we work for. These easily accessible forms of comfort are extremely tainted, making capitalism in the developed world distinctively creepy. In contrast to the starkly gross moral universe of Yellowjackets, with its clear correspondence of victim to victor, the moral costs of modern capitalism are much murkier. They are so hard to keep track of, in fact, that most of us stop trying.

In the characters’ refusal to admit their lives are meaningless in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Severance highlights religion’s complex role in human life. While religion can be a force of coercion and control, it also reflects a basic need for self-understanding achieved in communion with others. This means that religion is both enlightening and deceptive, and always works in tandem with larger cultural dynamics.

By presenting Lumon Industries as it does, Severance reminds us of the religious roots of capitalism, helping to explain this system’s peculiar grip on our contemporary psyche. Viewers might wonder how twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber would react to seeing his theories about the Protestant work ethic presented in such a format. Like many Protestant churches, the cult of Lumon emphasizes doctrines and ideas, textual interpretation, and salvation through self-improvement born of the taming of inner demons. In Weber’s view, capitalism owes its existence to this understanding of the individual’s existential situation. In challenging Catholic Church leaders’ exclusive claim to a special vocation vis-à-vis God, the Protestant Reformation encouraged ordinary workers to invest their occupations with ultimate meaning and to elevate their work ethic to the fullest statement on their character. Such worldly asceticism elicited self-monitoring on the part of the general population and the accumulation of much societal wealth, both of which proved essential for capitalism. While we may struggle to relate to the religious motivations of such a worldview in its infancy, wherein the rewards were far off, these forces continue to lurk behind every corporate mission statement and in claims that our coworkers are our family. Even in the context of contemporary capitalism’s emphasis on immediate gratification, the true purpose of our lives remains mysterious.

In keeping with the show’s Protestant ethos, the characters debate the implications of Lumon’s scriptures. While this underscores just how much their moral agency is governed by the corporation they work for, it is also a sincere quest for meaning that is fundamental to the human mind. The show’s bleakness is mitigated by the rich connections that exist among the main characters. There is still love, humor, and physical attraction, even in the severed world. The psychological sustenance provided by such connection is evident in the four innies’ reactions to a cheesy self-help book that accidentally makes its way into the severed offices. Called The You You Are, it contains such wisdom-nuggets as “Destiny: An Acrostic Poem as Experienced by the Author” and “What separates man from machine is that machines […] are made of metal.” It is meant to be mocked, as is its author, Ricken, a fatuous self-promoter. But the solace Ricken’s words provide the innies is real and the contraband book becomes a source of genuine comfort to the MDR team. Ricken’s statements on camaraderie and the proper place of work in human life inspire Mark to lead a coup against the bosses, one that undoubtedly gives the team greater self-knowledge and augurs its own reformation.

Whether this reformation will effect real change or, as Yellowjackets would have it, simply repeat old patterns, remains to be seen in future seasons. One thing on which both shows agree: religion, as escape route or trap door, will be with us for a while.

Valerie Stoker is Professor of Religion and Associate Chair of the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. During the pandemic, she watched a lot of TV.

The post On Religion and Modern Life in Yellowjackets and Severance appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Kyle Marshall Choreography. Photo by David Gonsier)

In the United States, few modern dance choreographers have created memorable meditations on religion since Alvin Ailey’s masterwork Revelations, which premiered in 1960. But Kyle Marshall, an award-winning New York-based choreographer, is currently exploring how the dancing body, and especially the Black dancing body, becomes a vehicle for spiritual transcendence.

Writing for The New York Times in 2019, dance critic Siobhan Burke remarked that Marshall demonstrates “a choreographic voice like no one else’s,” and added that he is a “compelling, sensitive dancer.” In The Dance Enthusiast, Deirdre Towers called Marshall’s choreography “a treasure.” In an interview with The New York Times, Marshall shared how he “dances out his feelings about race and religion.” For Marshall, dance can make religious ecstasy, divine union, and spiritual community visible. In some of his works, Marshall examines the politics of religion and incorporates religious motifs from his African diasporic ancestry. In doing so, he shows how dance functions as a powerful point of entry into the sacred and the place of religion in Black American life.

Early Encounters with the Sacred 

As a young child growing up in the 1990s, Marshall danced at home and improvised his own choreography. Around age 5, he began formal training in ballet, tap, and jazz. In his youth, Marshall also participated in liturgical dance, a form of dance that is an act of worship in some church communities. As a child he danced at Fresh Anointing Christian Center in Philadelphia, and then as a teenager he continued liturgical dance at the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey. Marshall recounts that this exposure to liturgical dance “informed my understanding that my body could be used for praise, for worship, and to celebrate.”

Years later, Marshall went on to study modern dance at Rutgers University. He also began to dance professionally for acclaimed choreographers Doug Elkins, Trisha Brown, Tiffany Mills, and others. In college, Marshall started to experiment with choreography. In 2009, while still at Rutgers, he made a piece called The Wind Blew the Salt of the Earth, set to the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. For this dance, Marshall was inspired by the image of the pillar of salt from the Sodom and Gomorrah story. Marshall recalls devising several bowing and falling movements, as well as evoking a sense of an “Other,” or some mysterious presence hovering above the dancers. “That was the first time I was thinking about something like spirit, God, or something larger that way with my work,” Marshall reminisced to me.

(Image: Kyle Marshall. Image source: Dana Scruggs for the New York Times)

Religion had always been a powerful force in Marshall’s life. He attended a Baptist church every Sunday as a child and participated in Bible study. All of his grandparents were religious, and his paternal grandfather was a Pentecostal minister. “I have distinct memories of my grandmother shouting, and people catching the spirit,” Marshall recollects. Those early encounters with the sacred would inform Marshall’s choreography for years to come. 

Methods of an Artist-Scholar

In 2014, Marshall started his own professional dance company, Kyle Marshall Choreography. Marshall is both the resident choreographer and a dancer in his company. He takes a decidedly intellectual approach to choreography, embarking upon serious scholarly research in preparation for his works, thereby imbuing dance-making with intellectual insights. His longstanding interest in religion has informed much of his professional work. As Marshall explains, “I think that religion is a framework for faith and belief. And these frameworks are human-made. They are the human logic of understanding and creating a system with which we can organize our faith and beliefs. And that manifests itself in Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all of the religions.”

While many of Marshall’s works address spirituality in uplifting ways, he has also explored religion as a form of control and domination. In his 2019 work A.D., commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Marshall examines Christianity’s influence on the body. The dance features an electronic sound-sculpting instrument built by Cal Fish, which allows the voices of the performers to be amplified and recorded in real-time and played alongside a pre-recorded musical score.

(Photo from AD. Image source: Kyle Marshall Choreography)

Marshall explained to The New York Times that “I like to think that in building A.D. the audience can become a congregation. It can become a space where people can reflect. So it’s not just audience-performer. I think this work is calling for a different kind of attention.”

In rehearsals for A.D., Marshall integrated excerpts from the Bible. In the studio, Marshall and his dancers would speak the text. Then they improvised around it, experimenting with different movement styles and patterns. The dancers also discussed biblical passages, indicating whether or not they related to the words. “It definitely got heated,” Marshall remembers.

When preparing A.D., Marshall became interested in the Bible’s complex authorship. “These spiritual texts were then edited by mostly men and then put together as a holy book. And I found it really compelling what was there, what was left out, who decided, and when,” he told me. A.D. explores religion as a vehicle of social control.

As he studied the Bible more closely, Marshall became interested in apocryphal texts not included in the Protestant Bible. He began to read Gnostic texts, stories written in the early centuries of Christianity that often have a more radical take on Jesus and his disciples, including Judas and Mary Magdalene. At this time, Marshall studied religion scholar Elaine Pagels’ breakthrough book, The Gnostic Gospels. “I read Pagels’ work and didn’t realize how radical the Gnostics were for their time,” says Marshall. “And that was really compelling to me. How does a group that was once radical become a domineering group? How did the Roman Empire become the Catholic Church? All of these things really started to open me up a bit.”

Beyond textual evidence, A.D. and many of Marshall’s other works also derive inspiration from religious iconography. European Christian art often depicts angels as white and demons as black. Using primarily Black and brown dancers, Marshall challenges these paradigms to showcase the sanctity of blackness.

Marshall’s study of religious art seems to have enhanced his own dancing and that of his company members, as critics have remarked. Writing for The Dance Enthusiast, Deirdre Towers explains that in A.D. Marshall is “laconic, measured, he dances with the pacing of a pensive man. He walks tall, knowing that stance is a statement in itself. His dancers jump with a surprising lightness and stretch into arabesques with feline elasticity.” Like the saints and martyrs of antiquity, Marshall and his dancers are both strong and ethereal.

Revealing the Spirit: Joan (2021) 

Marshall often engages religious themes to show how the past is relevant to the present. This is especially true in Joan (2021), which is based on the life of Saint Joan of Arc (d. 1431). Marshall fell in love with a musical score by Julius Eastman (d. 1990) called The Holy Presence of Joan d’ Arc, and he proceeded to choreograph a duet in 2019. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston commissioned this work, and it featured live music performed by Castle of Our Skins, a Black-led chamber ensemble.

In 2020, the New World Symphony, based in Miami, commissioned a new version of the Joan of Arc piece. Marshall used this opportunity to expand the work into a quartet. At this time, he also received support from the prestigious Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, where he was a residential artist-scholar during the 2021-2022 academic year. Marshall’s dance company premiered Joan in New Brunswick in October 2021, and a week later the dancers performed the work in Miami.

Marshall was particularly interested in depicting Joan of Arc’s spirituality and triumph. Joan was a medieval French peasant who supposedly had visions of the saints. The saints prophesied that Joan would lead the king’s army to victory against the English, which she did. Joan was later captured by enemy forces, put on trial, and burned at the stake. She is now one of the patron saints of France and a feminist and queer icon. (Incidentally, documents from Joan’s trial mention dance, as they accuse Joan of engaging in superstitious, heretical activity that included dancing and singing around a fairy tree in her home village). Marshall saw in Joan an ideal medium for portraying revolution and resistance. “I found the story of a young woman determined to lead her people to victory to be very empowering. I was inspired by this story of victory over tyranny. And I was also interested in the spiritual element that involves the saints who visit her,” says Marshall.

Marshall’s representation of Joan of Arc also has a present-day and intercultural twist, as he integrates medieval French history with modern Black identity. As a Black man who works with primarily Black and brown artists, Marshall wanted the work to draw from his Black experience. “I am interested in how Black art-making is a wide spectrum of experience,” explains Marshall. When making Joan, Marshall reflected on his Jamaican heritage, and through his ensuing research, he discovered the history of the Maroons. The Maroons were enslaved Africans from eighteenth-century Jamaica who managed to escape their British enslavers by relocating to the mountains. They led a campaign against the British and won their freedom. “I found that story really empowering,” says Marshall. “We don’t always learn about liberation struggles in our history. We know that slavery happened but we don’t always know that people resisted.” The Maroons also had a female leader named Queen Nanny (d. 1733), which for Marshall became another point of connection with the Joan of Arc story.

(Image from Joan. Image source: Kyle Marshall Choreography)

The spiritual component of Joan’s story guided Marshall’s choreography. He wanted the dancers to embody aspects of the saints. In Joan, Marshall uses the stage in symbolic ways. To convey spiritual presence and divine-human communication, the dancers use the extreme sides of the stage, thus conjuring images of messengers and connections between large distances. Near the end of the piece, Joan stands in the center of the saintly figures, displaying strong, defiant port de bras (arms movements) and a warrior-like stance. Joan leaves us with an arresting tableau of the spirit’s triumph in the face of adversity. 

In a review of Joan in the New World Symphony News, Marci Falvey elaborates upon Marshall’s evocative choreography and musicality: “vigorous gestures and movements appeared to express oppression and conflict, with quieter moments suggesting her spiritual intimacy with the three saints. The muscular force of the dance worked well with the music, which, with its minimalist repetitive patterns provided ample space for action on stage.” As the critics suggest, Marshall integrates dance and spirituality so that the past collides with the present. Although a product of the Middle Ages, Joan, and her embodied interactions with the saints, speak to our own strategies of resistance, including struggles for racial equality.  

Staging Racial Uplift

Marshall’s identity as a Black man shapes how he thinks about religion and its relationship with dance. “I think Black culture and African diasporic culture do not see the body as sinful. The body is a place of celebration,” Marshall relates. Indeed, African cultures have a long history of integrating dance and drumming into religious rituals. The practice of dancing remains important for African diasporic communities, in which dance is a potent trigger for ancestral memory. The deeply rooted connection between dance and African culture informs Marshall’s work.

In recent years, Marshall has made works that simultaneously tap into religion and race. His 2017 work Colored reflects on how the Black body is viewed in dance, engaging issues of tokenism and appropriation. White audiences have been conditioned to see Black dancers as either highly virtuosic or hypersexualized. Marshall instead depicts a wider spectrum of blackness. The work suggests how central the Black Church is to the African American experience. Colored includes a section called “Gospel,” which uses an original piece of music by the Jamaican Pentecostal Pastor T.L. Barrett entitled “Father I Stretch My Hand.”

Commenting on Colored, Tresca Weinstein writes in The San Francisco Chronicle that Marshall plays with “preconceptions and [racial] stereotypes to create something wholly unexpected and unpredictable.” New York Times dance critic Siobhan Burke reflects on the complex constitution of Colored: “twists and contradictions take physical shape in the movement itself — its swerves from brashly sexy to subdued, from ecstatic to vigilant. . . . As if taking a collective breath, the dancers begin in a circle, holding hands and looking down.” Burke later recalled how Colored made “an instant, indelible impact” on viewers. Marshall’s movement draws from the vocabulary of modern dance, yet also evokes timeless and sacred forms, notably the circular formation. In doing so, he portrays blackness as having rich ancestral roots and highlights how diasporic communities engage in protest and change.

In 2018, Marshall took a different approach to religion and race with his piece King. Harlem Stage commissioned Marshall to create a solo dance to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s death. Instead of a traditional musical score, Marshall employed a sound score that excerpted 7 minutes of King’s final speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top.” This work caused Marshall to circle back to his fascination with religion. “I was thinking about the politics of religion, faith, and King. He was in a moral conversation and was trying to shift the moral imperative of Americans, and I found that very compelling,” Marshall remembers.

Marshall’s most recent exploration of blackness and spirituality is Rise, which premiered at The Shed in New York City in 2021. Rise exhibits how dance fosters interpersonal connections that facilitate spiritual growth. Writing for the Broad Street Review, Melissa Strong explains how Rise “affirms the power of shared humanity and the sacredness of gathering with others.” In her New York Times review, chief dance critic Gia Kourlas writes how Rise exudes “a sense of elation, of wonder.”

Interestingly, Marshall found inspiration for this work in nightclub culture and house music. Marshall believes that club dancing generates a kind of collective energy that connects us spiritually and generates a feeling of transcendence. Marshall also notes that DJ Frankie Knuckles (d. 2014), the originator of house music, said that this kind of music is “church for the dispossessed.”

According to Marshall, club dancing is especially meaningful for marginalized groups. “Having that space for Black, brown, and queer folks to also have a spiritual transcendence is necessary. We all want to feel that we are connected to something larger than ourselves, or that there is something supporting us,” he says. In this way, gathering in a nightclub constitutes a kind of ritual or sacred event.

The religious aspect of nightclubbing forms a direct connection with the history of the Black Church. As Marshall explains, “for Black folks, the Church was not just a spiritual experience, it was also a place they could gather, talk, get the news of the day, and exchange resources. My grandparents going to church was not just about them having a religious space but a community space.” When choreographing Rise, Marshall meditated on footwork, and he saw similarities between contemporary clubbing and the historical shout traditions of the Black Church, that is, spiritual shouting to Gospel music common in Pentecostalism. He even included a section in the performance inspired by the Ring Shout. Originating with enslaved Africans, the Ring Shout was an expression of spirituality that involved collective dance and music. Rise underscores the primacy of the body in human experience. “That elementalness is a grounding root for us,” says Marshall. “So, I think that already lends itself to dance being a direct connection to spirituality. I am using my body as a receptacle for something greater.”

In his future choreographic projects, Marshall envisions new explorations of religion and spirituality. Currently, he is devising a piece about Alice Coltrane (d. 2007), as well as a piece on Rock and Roll, which will be a comparison between the sacred and the profane. Jazz music is now inspiring Marshall to explore further themes of transcendence.

Highlighting the world of the spirit, Marshall believes his work reveals some of the quintessential aspects of humanity. “I think it’s the reason why we’re here,” Marshall reflects. “I think it’s the reason why we dance. The spirit is not just found in organized religion. Our bodies can be vessels of divinity.”

Kathryn Dickason (NYU alumna 2008) is a Public Relations Specialist at Simmons University in Boston. She has published numerous articles on religion, dance, and medieval European history, as well as a book entitled Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred (Oxford University Press, 2021).

The post Choreographing the Spirit: Kyle Marshall, Religion, and Race on the Dance Stage appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Netflix’s Keep Sweet, Pray, and Obey)

Part I

In 2003, Jeremy Kingston pled guilty before the Third District Court of Utah to an illegal sexual relationship with a minor. The “relationship,” more aptly described as ongoing rape, was between Kingston (then 24) and his 15-year-old cousin, LuAnn Kingston. During the trial, Kingston testified that “he had a sexual relationship with LuAnn Kingston starting when she was 15 and that she was his first cousin.” He further admitted that “his mother and LuAnn Kingston’s mother are sisters, and her father is his grandfather.” The trial ended with Kingston receiving a five-year prison sentence, of which he served a mere nine months.

Jeremy Kingston is a member of the Davis County Cooperative Society or “Kingston group,” a Mormon fundamentalist group with a history of incestuous marriage. Activists and scholars at the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented multiple cases of incest based on information from former community members. Rolling Stone reported similar cases, which recounted the group’s doctrinal justification for the abuse. For members of the faith, the practice is a matter of perceived necessity to retain a particular bloodline based on their belief that the group’s early leaders had a direct lineage with Jesus Christ.

Jeremy Kingston’s trial for felony incest made headlines for many reasons, including the rarity of the conviction. For years, former members of the Kingston group sought prosecution for incestuous marriages with little success. Jeremy Kingston’s prosecution offered brief hope. Around the time of the trial, former members of the community approached Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff about incest in the community and put together a “family tree” to document the crimes, saying they had “compiled enough incest evidence to lock” up the perpetrators “for life.” But no prosecutions took place.

In Jeremy Kingston’s case, the public’s main concern was the age of the young woman, not her familial relationship to the perpetrator. To the disappointment of survivors, incest never seemed to warrant its own prosecution. This too-common problem is rooted in the historic conflation between Mormon polygamy and incest, and media depictions of both. Scholars and activists have long discussed the issues that stem from the perception that Mormon polygamy and incest are one in the same. Consequently, prosecutors rarely take legal action to target incest within polygamous communities, allowing it to continue unpunished and with little legal recourse for survivors.

Part II

Beginning in the nineteenth century, American opponents of polygamy sought to conflate the practice with criminal behavior, such as incest, to portray Mormon plural marriage as inherently deviant, dangerous, and worthy of prosecution. Since 1933, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has not permitted polygamy. But polygamy remains a central tenet for many other communities that trace their founding to Joseph Smith. As opposed to the LDS Church, these communities believe they are upholding the fundamentals of Smith’s teachings, including polygamy, and are therefore commonly called Mormon “fundamentalists” to denote their separation from the LDS Church headquartered in Salt Lake City. Today’s debates over polygamy center on Mormon fundamentalists.

Legal prosecutions for polygamy have always been fraught, despite great efforts to imprison polygamists. There are many reasons for this, but one main reason is logistical. There are not enough police or prisons to prosecute the 35,000+ polygamists in the Intermountain West, and adding that level of policing is an unpopular public policy.

The concern over polygamy generally, and Mormonism specifically, stemmed from widespread concerns in 19^th-century America over “correct” and “civilized” marriage. From the onset of public debates over correct marriage, ministers and government leaders who were concerned with the morality of the nation questioned the permissibility of relationships between close family members. These debates sought to articulate a universal norm for marriage, which was complicated by biblical accounts of incest.

The earliest regulations over incest treated the practice as a sin, rather than a crime. Pulpits, not courtrooms, were the center of the debate, which included questioning which marriages constituted incest. Could an uncle marry his niece? Could two cousins marry one another? As religious leaders debated these questions, legislators rarely included incest in case law. Instead, for many Americans, incest was a disgrace relegated to the shadows that acted as a metaphor for a “bad marriage,” a “bad family,” and “bad religion.”

(Photo of an early polygamous family. Image source: The Guardian)

Mormons themselves were not part of these public debates. However, their polygamous marriage system soon became a central concern that escalated to the United States Congress and Supreme Court. It didn’t help that Mormons began practicing polygamy as the national debate over marriage reached its peak between 1842 and 1846. Some Mormon historians date the revival of plural marriage to 1831, the year Joseph Smith began studying the Old Testament and became intrigued with the biblical patriarchs’ practice of polygamy. Akin to the polygamous leaders of old, Smith believed he was called to reintroduce the practice as part of the “restoration of all things.” It was not until over a decade later, on July 12, 1843, that Smith recorded what became Doctrine and Covenants 132, which laid the foundation for Mormon polygamy and the idea that families are sealed in an eternal union. While Smith linked polygamy to the restoration of Abraham’s marriage system through the Law of Sarah, Smith’s teachings failed to mention one crucial thing: Sarah was Abraham’s half-sister. Even more, the presence of incestuous marriages in the Bible is extensive. For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising that Americans concerned with Mormon polygamy also came to associate the practice with incestuous marriage.

The first allegations of Mormon incest appeared in anti-Mormon accounts of the faith. Among the most significant cases were documented by Catherine Lewis, a woman who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in its earliest years and left when rumors circulated that others were practicing polygamy. In her 1848 exposé, she described a young woman pressured into an incestuous marriage who told Lewis, “I was young, and they [Mormon leaders] deceived me, by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it. I say again, I will never be sealed [married] to my Father; no, I will sooner be damned and go to hell, if I must.’” Tales like this fueled anti-Mormon sentiment across the country.

While salacious accounts of incestuous Mormon marriages circulated throughout the nation and its western territories, leaders of the Church soon made their own apologetic claims for the practice. Between 1852 and 1854, Brigham Young, the President of the LDS church following Smith’s death, made several statements that supported the possibility of incestuous marriage. In a February 22, 1852 sermon, Brigham Young explained, “This is something pertaining to our marriage relation. The whole world will think what an awful thing it is. What an awful thing it would be if the Mormons should just say we believe in marrying brothers and sisters. Well, we shall be under the necessity of doing it, because we cannot find anybody else to marry. The whole world are at the same thing, and will be as long as man exists upon the earth.” Following this pronouncement, incestuous marriage did not become a widespread practice, save for a handful of cases. But with these words, Bringham Young sanctioned the possibility.

In time, Young’s comments became proto-eugenic. The early Mormon church had taught that race was a sign of righteousness or wickedness, and the church encouraged “correct” marriages among whites. Mormon “sealing” was therefore not simply about marriage. It was about the ability to unite powerful, white families. Drawing on this, Young and others argued for a pure bloodline that stemmed from polygamous unions among and between influential Mormon families.

Young’s words and those of anti-Mormon detractors united polygamy with incest in the minds of many Americans. Outsiders invoked the “ultimate taboo” to disparage Mormonism and deride their controversial marriage practices. Whether or not Mormons participated in marriages with close family members was unimportant. The conflation between their marriage system and America’s most taboo sexual relationship ostracized Mormons and stigmatized them for decades.

Part III

Subsuming incest stories into accounts of polygamy did not end in the nineteenth century; it continues today. FX and Hulu’s recently released and Emmy-nominated series, Under the Banner of Heaven, is one such example.

Banner is based on the true-crime bestseller about Ron and Dan Lafferty, two brothers who made headlines after the 1984 double murder of their sister-in-law, Brenda Lafferty, and her infant daughter, Erica Lane Lafferty. The men were raised in the LDS Church. However, in the 1970s, the men joined a fringe Mormon group led by a man named Robert Crossfield (Prophet Onias), also a former member of the LDS Church. The group, called the School of the Prophets, understood itself to be an authentic remnant of the religion founded by Joseph Smith. They were one of the many Mormon fundamentalist groups to promote polygamy.

As the Lafferty brothers entered Robert Crossfield’s orbit, they became interested in polygamy and sought to practice the early Mormon doctrine. By the time of the murders, Crossfield advocated for incestuous marriage and married at least one of his biological children. At the time, this was not uncommon. Several Mormon fundamentalist leaders who emerged in the 1970s and 80s engaged in incestuous relationships. Most notably, Ross LeBaron and Fred Collier, men who led their own Mormon fundamentalist communities, justified incestuous marriage and became key figures in the argument that polygamy was merely incest by another name. In the revelation that catalyzed incest in his family, Robert Crossfield referred to his daughter as a “handmaid,” a term used in reference to Joseph Smith’s wife in Doctrine and Covenants 132. Crossfield used this language to justify marrying his daughter, a crime that still haunts Crossfield’s descendants.

Like Crossfield, Dan Lafferty’s attempt at a polygamous union involved grooming his own daughter to marry him. According to the book and series, Dan’s wife, Matilda, walked in on her husband giving a chiropractic adjustment to their daughter that concerned her. After confronting Dan, Matilda learned of Dan’s “vigorous sexual spirit” and his plan to marry their 12 and 14-year-old daughters as plural wives. Fearing for the fate of her daughters, Matilda snuck them out of their home. The local LDS leadership subsequently ex-communicated Dan. (Following the show’s release, Dan Lafferty’s daughter, Rebecca, announced her plans for a book that details her experience growing up under her father’s abusive family headship, where she witnessed her father sexually abuse her sisters.)

The disturbing realities of incest within the Lafferty story were mostly overshadowed by the murders, leaving other Lafferty victims in the shadows. In Banner and elsewhere, incest became a plot device that solidified a villain for the audience. This is not new. In media portrayals of polygamous Mormons, incestuous abuse often acts as a metaphor for human depravity and the outcome of polygamy’s slippery slope. The problem, in Banner and elsewhere, is that incest is not merely a plot device to signal a villain’s depravity. Incest is real, pervasive, and can be profoundly damaging.

Part IV 

In her reflections on Banner, Lindsay Hansen Park, a historical consultant for the show, explained, “The series isn’t an indictment on fundamentalism, but it is an indictment on secrets.” The persistence of incest in Mormon fundamentalism is one of those secrets.

While mainstream media has given some attention to fundamentalist Mormon incestuous marriages, too often, as with Banner, those media portrayals fail to center victims of incest or demonstrate why legal action is necessary. Most recently, Netflix’s docuseries Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey explores Elissa Wall’s experiences in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) and documents the lives of other survivors from the FLDS. The FLDS, led by Warren Jeffs, garnered media attention years ago following a widely televised raid on the community that was an attempt to save the children from polygamy. Jeffs faced allegations of incest. But those allegations were not prosecuted despite Elissa Wall’s testimony of forced marriage to her cousin at the hand of Jeffs in Nevada — a state where incestuous marriage is illegal.

***

In her writings about media portrayals of minority religious groups, religion scholar Megan Goodwin has argued that polygamy is not necessarily abusive. This is true. Nor is monogamy inherently free of abuse. But in the United States, polygamy is practically synonymous with harm and heinous behavior. This was the same rhetoric used to deride Mormons in the early decades of the new religion. And today, media accounts too often use polygamy and incest as a storyline device to bolster villain storylines. The conflation encourages gawking disapproval and nothing more.

As a country, both in our media and in our legal system, we have overlooked survivors of incest and kept the totality of their stories hidden from the public eye. Stories about polygamy collapse incestual abuse into a historically demonized marriage system, causing survivors of incest to disappear. Incest remains a widespread reality in insular polygamous communities. Taking survivors of incestuous abuse seriously requires untangling how the nation conflated abuse, marriage, religion, and family in our history and media.

In 2020, Utah took the first step toward this disentanglement. Senate Bill 102 effectively decriminalized polygamy, lowering the criminal status to an infraction if the participants are not involved in other criminal behavior. The legislation sought to end polygamy’s conflation with incest, as well as other crimes associated with these controversial marriages. The goal was increased reporting and access to social services for victims and survivors. Since the time of the bill’s passing, one non-profit stated that sexual abuse reporting doubled in the polygamous communities they serve. The numbers make tangible the gravity of the problem. Ending the conflation between polygamy and incest will begin the process of justice for survivors, and other states must do the same now.

Cristina Rosetti is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Utah Tech University. Her research focuses on the history and lived experience of Mormon fundamentalists in the Intermountain West.

The post Polygamy, Incest, and Mormons in the Media appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Later this month, together with Jews around the world, I will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. While Rosh Hashanah typically evokes images of people in synagogue for hours, or thoughts of the shofar’s sounds, my favorite moment of the holiday is dipping slices of apple in honey. That simple ritual is meant to signify hope that the coming year will be a sweet one. The custom starts the year on a positive note and reminds us to focus on life’s pleasures. Before delving into hours of introspection (a prominent aspect of Rosh Hashanah), the tradition directs one’s attention to the idea that life can contain countless simple blessings.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Religion, of course, is not simply a source of comfort; too often, religion brings pain as well. Accordingly, the September issue of the Revealer toggles between religion’s role in the suffering and joys of our world. The issue opens with religion as a source of pain in Cristina Rosetti’s “Polygamy, Incest, and Mormons in the Media,” where she explores why law enforcement officials have not prioritized prosecuting cases of known incest within fundamentalist Mormon communities, and why incest was even sanctioned by 19^th-century Mormon leaders in the first place. Then, in “Choreographing the Spirit,” Kathryn Dickason profiles prominent Black choreographer Kyle Marshall about the ways religion inspires his performances and how he sees dance as a vehicle for connecting with the divine. Next, in time for September’s Emmy awards, Valerie Stoker offers a review of two Emmy-nominated shows, Severance and Yellowjackets, and explores what each series has to say about religion’s place in modern life. And in “The Ubiquity of Religious Appropriation,” Rumya Putcha offers a review of Liz Bucar’s new book Stealing My Religion about people who borrow religious practices from various traditions to enhance their own lives without making a commitment to those religious communities.

The September issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Religious Cultural Appropriation.” Liz Bucar, author of Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation, join us to discuss religious appropriation and why it is so common today. We explore various types of appropriation, from non-Muslims wearing “solidarity hijab” to white Americans teaching yoga. And we consider if one can borrow practices from religious communities in respectful ways. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As the articles and podcast episode in this issue illustrate, religion can be a source of both remarkable comfort and abusive power. I hope our September issue offers you insights about religion’s many, and oftentimes conflicting, roles in today’s world. And I hope, as I will say while dipping apples in honey at the end of the month, that this coming year will be a sweet one for all of us.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Religion’s Role in the Joy and Pain of our World appeared first on The Revealer.