***

In March of 2019, the Catholic archbishop of Hartford, Connecticut, decided that a dramatic public statement needed to be made about the 48 priests in his diocese who had been accused of sexual abuse. Archbishop Blair held a special “Mass of Reparations” during which he told the congregation that he was there to ask forgiveness “especially of all the victims of sexual abuse and their families. I ask it for all the Church leadership has done or failed to do,” and he prostrated himself in a gesture of repentance. It was a vivid moment that received national press attention. But for many victims and their allies, it was just that: a moment.

For decades, Catholic dioceses throughout the country have had to embark on what can only be described as apology tours, during which clergy have again and again asked abuse victims for forgiveness. Nick Ingala, from the lay activist group Voice of the Faithful, told the New York Times that Archbishop Blair’s Reparations Mass was not going to be enough for many victims. “Apologies,” Ingala said, “will only go so far. Where is the responsibility? The accountability? You can’t say ‘I’m sorry’ over and over and over again.” Among the reader comments on the New York Times article, one of the most upvoted was from “Janet,” who stated that “apologies are fine,” but that “nothing, absolutely nothing, ever compensates enough for the heart-heavy, dirty-soul feeling that remains with [victims] until we die.”

While clergy abuse is not my primary focus as a journalist who writes about the Catholic Church, it is one that my colleagues and I have been forced to return to many times as continued revelations of abuse surface. In fact, every person who writes about the Catholic Church is a de facto reporter on abuse. Journalists often become victim advocates simply because we are the first people victims think to contact, especially when distrust of diocesan offices and the Church hierarchy is at an all-time high.

But in spite of the many cases of abuse coming to light around the world, the clerical impulse to plead for forgiveness, and what that does to victims, has rarely been discussed. In 2018, I pitched a story on the role of forgiveness in clergy abuse to a Catholic magazine for which I occasionally write. My hunch was that, like many of the women who were being asked to forgive abusive men as #MeToo revelations unfolded, many victims of clergy abuse might be hesitant to grant forgiveness to those who had violated them because of the corrosive nature of trauma.

Assuming that Catholics had written widely on clergy forgiveness, I spent a month researching the article. Yet I struggled to find any Catholic sources that specifically addressed what clergy abuse victims should do when the Church asks them for forgiveness. In fact, I found nothing. When my primary sources turned out to be mostly female Protestant clergy and Jewish rabbis who proposed that victims do not owe their abusers forgiveness, I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised when the Catholic magazine I wrote this article for decided not to publish it. Their concern was that the article would be perceived as anti-Catholic because, they insisted, Jesus tells his followers they need to forgive anyone who has wronged them. Although I later published the article in an interfaith magazine, the experience left me wondering why Catholics talk so much about forgiveness without a deeper conversation about what forgiveness actually means for victims of clergy sexual abuse.

***

There’s no statistical information available to show how many victims forgive their abusers, nor do we really know how many abusers ask for it. Given the layers of secrecy and shame around abuse, those statistics may never emerge. But it seems appropriate to ask the question: What do we mean when we talk about forgiveness?

A little more than a year ago, I was a guest with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, a prominent feminist rabbi, on an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio show Tapestry to discuss forgiveness. Rabbi Ruttenberg said that missing from most discussions of forgiveness are conversations about atonement and making amends. In the context of clergy sexual abuse, atonement can range from financial reparations to abusers entering therapy. Before discussions of forgiveness can begin, according to Rabbi Ruttenberg, the abuser and the institution they belong to both need to demonstrate that there is no chance they will abuse again. This process is neither quick nor easy. And it is the opposite of how the Catholic Church has typically handled abusive priests and bishops.

Atonement is the first step toward understanding that survivors do not, in fact, owe abusers anything. Abusers owe their victims much. The idea that clergy abusers should be able to ask for forgiveness and then jump back into a clerical office is one that could further damage victims. Yet most of the clerics in the Catholic Church were allowed right back into situations where they continued their abuse. Victims, re-traumatized after learning that their abusers also abused others, cannot in fact do enough healing to be capable of forgiveness because atonement never happened. Expecting people to grant forgiveness to an institution that hasn’t made legitimate amends does not suggest that institution is capable of real change.

Some of the most helpful discussions about forgiveness for abuse victims come from women scholars who are also Protestant clergy. While these women are not specifically addressing clergy abuse victims, they are writing and thinking about the nature of forgiveness in the Christian tradition. Particularly when it comes to sexual abuse, cultural pressures for victims to forgive their abusers in order to be “good” Christians can become a form of spiritual abuse. In her essay “Love Your Enemy,” Karen Lebacqz writes that the work of forgiveness is a justice issue where the rights of the abused need to be seen as more important than those of the abuser. And Marie Fortune writes that in order to understand what forgiveness is, we first need to understand what it is not. Forgiveness is not, she says, “condoning or pardoning harmful behavior, which is a sin.” Forgiveness, she adds, is not “always possible.”

***

As with too many others, this is a personal story. I’m not simply a journalist who covers the Catholic Church. I’m also a survivor of sexual abuse. Although I was never abused by clergy, an abusive incident took place at the Catholic elementary school I attended. The religious order that ran the school covered it up, and it’s likely that the person responsible went on to abuse more children. For me, this issue is so important because I have experienced it first-hand and know what kind of consequences are involved for victims.

I often think of Jesus’s crucifixion scene as the root of our incomplete understanding of forgiveness. In the Gospel of Luke, Christ looks down on his killers and says, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But for the cardinals and bishops and the popes who knew – who heard and saw what abusers were doing and relocated them or covered things up – and for the priests and nuns who knew – who knew about their colleagues’ abuses and did not tell, or who were abusers themselves – forced forgiveness would be a form of spiritual abuse.

The Church can write checks to its heart’s content, bankrupt dioceses, stage Reparation Masses, build “healing gardens,” and beg for forgiveness. But until it owns up to the fact that it has not allowed adequate space for victims to express themselves, confront their abusers, and thus begin to heal, no true acts of atonement have been performed. As of today, there is still no evidence that victims owe the Church any forgiveness. The Catholic Church has chosen to protect the institution at the victims’ expense over and over again. Asking victims to forgive an institution so deeply corrupted also asks them to relive horrific and painful experiences not for their own sake, but for the sake of their abusers who need to “move on.”

Many of us who write about abuse do so because we are Catholics ourselves, and for us this is an issue of justice. As the journalist Isabel Wilkerson has said, we strive to do this work not with pity, which is looking down on someone, but with empathy, which is moving into another person’s pain. This is the same understanding that helps us to know, according to the Catholic tradition, that only a God who suffers with victims can be capable of offering any kind of forgiveness, because God takes on the burden and does the work of forgiving on our behalf. In a theology that centers victims’ experiences, forgiveness is in the hands of a God who suffers, not a responsibility resting on the shoulders of those who have been abused.

Kaya Oakes is the author of four books, most recently including The Nones are Alright and Radical Reinvention. She teaches nonfiction writing at U.C. Berkeley. This essay was adapted from a talk given at the American Academy of Religion conference in November 2019.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs. 

The post From the Archive: On Forgiveness, Clergy Abuse, and the Need for New Understandings 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 our newest episode: “Hollywood, Movies, and American Jews.”

Happy listening!

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 21: Hollywood, Movies, and American Jews appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Washington Jewish Weekly)

The following excerpt comes from Helene Meyers’ Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition. The book explores depictions of Jews in American movies and how those films have influenced how Jews and others think about Jewish identity in the United States.

This excerpt comes from the book’s fifth chapter: “Assertively Jewish Onscreen.”

***

Like Keeping Up with the Steins, Zach Braff’s 2014 Wish I Was Here illuminates the challenges and the possibilities of making not only Jews but also Jewy movies. The production history of this film is arguably more well-known than the film itself, though the Jewishness of that history is too often overlooked. Braff, the director of the 2004 indie hit Garden State and the star of the long- running TV show Scrubs, wanted to make a “thematic” rather than a literal sequel to Garden State. While Garden State focused on the angst of twenty- somethings trying to find their way in the world, Wish I Was Here moves into the next decade of life. This film focuses on a still-aspiring actor—Aidan Bloom (played by Braff)—whose professional dreams are at odds with the needs of a family, which includes wife Sarah (Kate Hudson) and two children whose attendance at Jewish day school is subsidized by a dying observant grandfather (Gabe Bloom, played by Mandy Patinkin).

Braff’s vision for  this film was to explicitly engage the spiritual questions of those who were raised as traditional Jews but were trying to find their own spiritual paths as proud but overwhelmingly secular Jews. According to Braff, he and his brother Adam called upon their own experience in cowriting the script: “My parents force-fed me this religion, and there’s aspects of it [that] I love, but what is my spirituality right now? What do I believe? How can I reconcile my belief in science with faith? And gosh, once I start having children, what the hell am I going to teach them? We just thought that was a really interesting thing to write about, because no one else seemed to be making a movie about it.”

However, when this successful director/actor tried to get the financing for such a script, he found that the Jewiness of it was an insuperable impediment: “There was definitely the implication that the Judaism should be toned way down because it wouldn’t appeal to a broad audience.” Expanding on this point, Braff comments, “The studio system isn’t going to make a movie about a Jewish family. A financier wasn’t going to make a movie about a Jewish family. It’s very, very hard to get—we’re 2 percent and shrinking—a movie about Jewish people made. If I made this in the studio system, they’d be like ‘ix-nay on the ewish-jay.’ I’d have to [dial] it down.”

Rather than dial or tone down the Jewishness, he took the suggestion of producer Stacey Sher and opted to supplement his personal financial stake of $2 million with a Kickstarter campaign. Much to his surprise and delight, this “giant social experiment” of crowdfunding financing was wildly successful, with 46,250 people kicking in a total of more than $3 million. While this financing strategy provided Braff with the “creative freedom” he needed to make his vision of the film, it also created a public relations nightmare that impacted the critical reception of the film.

According to his critics, Zach Braff’s decision to use Kickstarter funds was the ultimate exercise of white privilege. Writing for Bitch, Lucy Vernasco identifies Braff as “not a struggling artist who can’t find the support of a traditional film studio, like many interesting and forward-thinking movies that turn to Kickstarter to get off the ground.” Rather, she classifies him as “a thirty- something white dude living in LA…[who] used all that support to follow his true passion of creating a movie that’s all about a thirty-something white dude living in LA following his dream.” Devin Faraci echoes Vernasco, accusing Braff of making “whitesploitation films”: “We all understand that you pay for these things the way movies are always paid for, not using the funding model for people who are outside of the system, people who face actual adversity when trying to get their vision accomplished. People who, basically, don’t have nine seasons of sitcom royalties. . . . He could get his movie made in the standard system—he just couldn’t get it made the way he wanted to get it made. . . .This is privilege. This is the face of privilege.” Interestingly enough, these two reviewers never use the “J” word; with that key omission, they conflate Jewishness and whiteness, while effectively denying that a specifically Jewish vision has any sort of legitimacy or claim to diversity.

However, the Kickstarter funds, along with the $2 million Braff himself put into the film, prevented the “privilege” of whitewashing Jewishness from Braff’s vision, which was picked up by Focus Features after a premiere at Sundance. There’s plenty of Jewish shtick here, including a dog called Kugel and a grizzled rabbi who rides a Segway in hospital corridors, bumping into walls as he seeks to fulfill his pastoral duties. Yet, there is also serious Jewish wrestling, notably represented when Aidan seeks out a younger rabbi for spiritual guidance. This sequence cuts from Aidan’s space superhero fantasies, his more customary cosmic wanderings, to his entrance into a Jewish space.

Struggling to come to terms with the impending death of his father as well as the gap between his Jewish-school-educated children (aka his “indoctrinated matzo balls”) and his own lapsed Jewish commitments, Aidan witnesses schoolboys singing “Oseh Shalom” in harmony. He then banters and reckons with a rabbi whom Braff has categorized “as the sort of fantasy rabbi I’ve never met.” Aidan tells the rabbi that he kept kosher until his bar mitzvah and that his becoming a man meant that his father allowed him to go his own way and eat a bacon cheeseburger. To the rabbi’s question about his current spiritual connections, Aidan responds with ideas of infinity represented by the sky. The rabbi sagely counsels him to “try not to get caught up in the God who wants you to be kosher and study the Torah. Start with the God of the infinite universe and imagine that force is trying to guide you through the most challenging part of your life, even if it has to appear to you in the form of a spaceman.” This “fantasy rabbi” meets Aidan where he is spiritually. As a result, Aidan figures out what he can teach his children: he recites poetry in the desert (certainly a space of Jewish wandering!) and, while he and his children are repairing the world of their backyard, identifies such recitation as “a prayer you’re not expecting anyone to answer.”

Helene Meyers is the author of four books and a public scholar who writes on Jewish culture, higher education, and humanities career pathways. She has bylines in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Tablet, Ms. Magazine Blog, and Lilith Magazine. Recently retired from Southwestern University, where she was Professor of English and McManis University Chair, she can be found on Twitter @helene_meyers and at https://helenemeyers.com/

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out the Revealer podcast episode with Helene Meyers: “Hollywood, Movies, and American Jews.”

The post Too Jewish for Hollywood? appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Twitter header for @sikharchive)

Dalip Singh Saund migrated from the Indian subcontinent to the United States after completing his undergraduate degree in mathematics. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in the same field from the University of California, Berkeley in 1924. For two years, Saund looked for teaching jobs. Despite his qualifications, Saund’s prospects were grim. He was not a U.S. citizen and could not expect to become one in the near future.

In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that Indians could not be naturalized as citizens because they were not white. Bhagat Singh Thind, one of the earliest migrants from South Asia, arrived in the United States in 1913. Thind became involved with the Ghadar Party, an organization founded by expatriate Indians to overthrow British rule in the Indian subcontinent, before enlisting in the U.S. Army. After six months of service, he applied for naturalization in Portland, Oregon. Though the examiner questioned his loyalty to the nation, Judge Charles E. Wolverton believed that Thind had demonstrated patriotism and granted him citizenship in 1920. However, the Departments of Labor and Justice advised the U.S. attorney in Portland to file a lawsuit to cancel Thind’s citizenship. The ruling of this now-famous case revoked Thind’s citizenship and led the Justice Department to extend the ruling to all Indians who had been naturalized. Indians remained ineligible for U.S. citizenship until 1946.

With no hope for citizenship, Indians like Dalip Singh Saund faced limited employment opportunities. After failing to secure a teaching position, Saund moved to Southern California in 1926 and began his life as a farmer. He spent his free time nurturing his interest in politics. Shortly after Congress passed the Luce Celler Act of 1946, which allowed Indians to immigrate to the U.S. and become naturalized, Saund became a citizen. He then embarked on his dream to become a politician. He began by serving his county in the office of judge of the justice court, then as county chairman of the Democratic Central Committee, and finally as the Democratic nominee for Congress. In 1956, Saund became the first South Asian American elected to the Congress of the United States.

***

Growing up in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, I often heard my parents tell stories about how they migrated to the United States. They came here with only eight dollars in their pockets, found employment at fast-food restaurants and as newspaper delivery people, and experienced racism in the workplace for wearing forehead marks, or chandlos. In school, I learned about the early history of the United States, slavery, and the wars the U.S. fought. But I never learned the stories of Thind and Saund in school. In fact, I never learned anything about South Asians. Not much has changed in the decades since I was in grade school.

But recently, organizations and individuals are working to bring South Asian histories to light by documenting stories of South Asians in America through social media accounts, websites, and podcasts. These platforms have become forerunners in documenting the histories of people who trace their origins to Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Their projects demonstrate that South Asian histories are American histories; and consequently, histories of the United States are incomplete without the stories of South Asians and their contributions to the nation. 

Our Stories

Efforts to reclaim South Asian histories often begin with individuals who want to learn more about their cultures, traditions, and backgrounds. One such effort is led by Samip Mallick, a second generation South Asian American, who founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). The non-profit organization is committed to creating an inclusive society by documenting, preserving, and sharing stories of South Asian Americans. SAADA’s early endeavors like the First Days Project invited people to collect and share photos and memories of their immigrant experiences. In July 2021, SAADA published a collection of those narratives in the book Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America.

(Our Stories book. Image source: saada.org)

Our Stories tells the history of the United States through the voices of South Asians. It draws particular attention to people who identify as working class, undocumented, LGBTQ+, Dalit, and Indo-Caribbean to highlight varied South Asian American experiences. Stories of people like “Sherry Singh,” who traveled from Guyana via the “backtrack” to the United States in 1996, present the multi-layered challenges that some face in establishing themselves here. Since childhood, Singh dreamt of becoming a lawyer, a profession not open to her because she did not have a social security number. But with the passing of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, “Sherry Singh,” along with 800,000 others, became eligible for a social security number, a driver’s license, and a work permit. Today, “Sherry Singh” works as a public school aide in Queens, New York.

The book also examines the lives of South Asians like Bhagat Singh Thind and Dalip Singh Saund before and after pivotal moments in the country’s history. It discusses the contributions South Asian Americans have made over the last half-century in the arts, religion, and civic engagement. Contributions include literary works by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri and the sacralizing of the American religious landscape through the construction of mosques, temples, and gurdwaras. And the book connects the past to the present by describing how Dalip Singh Saund paved the way for other South Asian Americans, such as Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, Raja Krishnamoorthi, and Ami Bera to hold prominent positions in Congress today.

Stories on Social Media

In the last five years, South Asians outside of formal organizations like SAADA have used social media to collect, preserve, and share our histories. Several popular Instagram and Twitter handles such as @brownhistory, @Sikharchive, and @Hindoohistory make histories of South Asians within and outside the United States publicly available. By featuring stories on social media, these projects meet many second and third-generation South Asians where they are – online. Social media posts, which usually include small images and short captions, provide followers with a starting point for studying important figures and their contributions to history, as well as documenting, preserving, and sharing their own family histories.

Created in 2019 by Ahsun Zafar, an electrical engineer in Canada, @brownhistory is a crowd-sourced digital archive with 1,800 posts and over 500,000 followers. Zafar’s Instagram account emerged from his interest in learning more about his background. Whereas Our Stories discusses the history of South Asians chronologically, @brownhistory adopts a more social strategy by posting excerpts of personal stories and interspersing those with narratives about the history, culture, and practices in South Asia. Posts often include stories of aristocrats, families, interreligious marriages, and the partition of India and Pakistan as retold by the descendants of those who witnessed these events. For example, a post about Princess Catherine Duleep Singh, the second daughter of Maharajah Duleep Singh of Lahore, describes her advocacy for women’s voting rights and her efforts to save the lives of Jewish families in Nazi Germany. Other posts begin with statements like, “…My late Grandfather’s parents…,” “…A sample from Dad’s record collection…,” and “…My father is a Bangladeshi Buddhist…,” and introduce family histories with photographs and personal narratives.

Part of @brownhistory’s mission involves centering the voices of women and illustrating how women-led movements brought attention to pressing social issues. For example, one post describes Asha Puthli, a prominent singer-songwriter and actress, who addressed climate change when she released “Chipko Chipko,” a cover of “Smooth Criminal” inspired by the Chipko Andolan, a tree-protecting movement initiated by rural women in Uttarakhand to prevent deforestation. Other South Asian women profiled on the account include those who protested outside of the United States Embassy in Delhi (1971) to demand the release of civil rights activist Angela Davis, and the women who became known as the “Sari Squad” (1984) for protesting against the deportations of South Asians in the United Kingdom.

(Image: photo of the “Sari Squad.” Photo source unknown)

Throughout @brownhistory, Zafar cites sources such as news media, academic studies, and personal stories in an attempt to equalize history-writing practices. Histories are often written by individuals in power. Zafar aims to rewrite history, labeling his account as “South Asian history retold by the Vanquished.” He reworks Winston Churchill’s famous saying, “History is written by the victors,” to highlight the benefits of writing histories from the bottom-up. He concludes most posts with a familiar request, “DM me your stories!” to add to this growing archive. And while people of lower socio-economic status without internet access are excluded from these conversations, for those who can access social media, @brownhistory raises awareness about South Asians’ historical worldwide contributions.

The desire to recover less commonly known histories underpins the work of @Hindoohistory and @Sikharchive. @Hindoohistory is an Instagram and Twitter handle maintained by attorney Vishal Ganesan that reports on American representations of Hindu traditions in news media. The term “Hindoo” was employed by British colonialists to refer to the people residing in the Indian subcontinent, thereby conflating religion and geography and obfuscating the differences between Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Hindus, and others. In the United States, the term “Hindoo,” often found in eighteenth and nineteenth-century news media, cemented differences between practitioners of Hindu traditions and Christians. The @Hindoohistory accounts appeal to those who want to learn more about how Hindu traditions developed in the United States and how Christian Americans reacted to them. Ganesan tweets stories of news clippings such as “Heathen Invasion,” that warns readers of how women are being spiritually corrupted by their irresistible attraction to “heathen propaganda” and their “embrac[e of] its strange mysteries.” Twentieth-century news media often depicted Hindu traditions as mysterious, exotic, fearsome, and not suitable in the United States. Largely absent from Ganesan’s project are the voices of Hindus themselves like Swami Vivekananda and Paramhansa Yogananada, who wrote or delivered speeches on Hindu traditions throughout the United States, as well as Hindu organizations that published pamphlets, newsletters, and magazines for their followers.

Similar projects to reclaim South Asian ethnic and religious histories, using different mediums, are developing in various parts of the world. Sukhraj Singh, a British Sikh who resides in Denmark, began his podcast @Sikharchive in 2020 with the intent of documenting the rich histories of Sikhs in Copenhagen. Since then, his podcast has evolved to include episodes from a range of experts, historians, and journalists on Sikh and Punjabi history. Like @brownhistory and @Hindoohistory, @Sikharchive shares a commitment to using personal stories and information from academics and news media to raise awareness among South Asians about their histories.

Reclaiming Histories  

SAADA, @brownhistory, @Hindoohistory, and @Sikharchive are participating in a wave of grassroots efforts to create self-histories of South Asians within and beyond the United States. Each project emerged, in part, as a personal journey, stemming from a desire to learn more about one’s own history, culture, religious traditions, and background. The founders’ journeys sought to fill gaps in their own knowledge of South Asian history – gaps often created by a lack of representation of South Asians in educational curriculums, incomplete accounts of family histories, and distance from their ancestral homes. The stories they have uncovered and the histories they have constructed are continually made available on public platforms. And since most history textbooks in the United States still do not showcase our rich history, these media platforms signal the urgency of preserving stories of South Asian people, communities, and religious traditions that would otherwise be lost with the passage of time.

Bhakti Mamtora is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Wooster and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. Her research examines orality, textuality, and canonization in transnational Hindu traditions.

***

This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post Making Marginalized History Mainstream: Collecting and Sharing South Asian Stories appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source/credit: Brian Wong for Getty Images/Xtra)

Mary of Egypt, a fourth-century woman venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, once stowed away on a boat bound for Jerusalem and proceeded to have sex with every man on the ship. Or so the legend goes—details about this oft-forgotten figure are transmitted with less-than-perfect consistency across scattered manuscripts. She is often identified as a prostitute, and like other reformed “holy harlots” and “loose women” of traditional hagiography her sanctity comes at the expense of precisely that which led her so deeply into sin, namely, her sexuality. Many artists present her bare chest flat like a man’s, underlining the extent to which Church authorities deemed it necessary to unsex her before she could be revered as a saint.

(Mary of Egypt by Jusepe de Ribera)

And yet, the legends make clear that Mary never fully took leave of her sexuality. When Zosima, an old ascetic monk in search of new feats to test his faith, searches for her in the desert, the first thing she arouses in him is desire. In such stories, her bodily vigor amplifies, rather than detracts from, her spiritual authority. Commenting on the legend as it appears in a definitive twelfth-century text, the medievalist Irina Dumitrescu observes that “there’s a sense [in the legend] that sexual love is a stepping-stone to love itself [i.e., to love of God], not its opposition.” What Mary learned in the desert, then, was a way to direct the voraciousness she once had for the sailors towards God instead.

In Mary of Egypt, the early Church held up for veneration a woman who knew sexual desire, shame, and grace – knew these things well – and whose past exploits provided the fertile soil out of which genuine spiritual wisdom was able to grow.

***

Prostitutes and sex workers are not likely to find the same kind of understanding from the Catholic Church today. The Church tends to think of sex workers chiefly in terms of their supposed sexual sin (in this they are similar to non-celibate queer people or to some extent the divorced and remarried). Their identity, often reduced to an act, obscures the full scope of their personhood and prevents their complete participation in the ecclesial community.

For this article, I spoke to a number of current or former sex workers as well as Catholic priests, nuns, and activists who are or have been involved in outreach to sex workers. Nearly all spoke to the feelings of shame and neglect that sex workers feel in typical church settings.

And yet, I also discovered that many sex workers have managed to make their own space in the Church, or at least to find their own way into some kind of spiritual practice. Unsurprisingly, plenty of sex workers have no interest in religion; indeed, many have good reason to be suspicious of or hostile towards organized religion. The Church should therefore rethink its language about and approach to sex workers, not only for the sake of better recognizing their inherent dignity, but also to absorb the lessons they can teach about the resilience of faith.

***

The inhospitality that many sex workers experience in Catholic communities comes about as a result of a twofold invisibility that is simultaneously theological and pastoral. According to standard Catholic theology, sex work contradicts the ideal moral order where sex is only permitted within procreative, marital unions. Pastorally, the Church only sees sex work as a form of exploitation, not as a legitimate type of labor one might willingly choose. This latter point presents an obstacle to Catholic support for basic worker safety guarantees, such as unionization, despite the Church’s avowed support for worker solidarity in other realms.

Sex workers therefore find themselves in a double bind: neither their “sex” nor their “work” is allowed the dignity these categories otherwise hold within Christian ethical thinking, since if they engaged in it willingly, then they are morally culpable, and otherwise they are seen only as victims. Hille Haker, a leading Catholic ethicist, notes in a recent study that within Christian approaches to sex work, “prostitutes are predominantly viewed as passive victims who are involuntarily engaged in sex work.” This view is summed up in a Vatican document that describes sex workers as “dead [both] psychologically and spiritually.”

There should be no doubt, of course, that a great many sex workers come to the job unwillingly. Large percentages of the women in prison for prostitution are also dealing with drug problems, mental health issues, or a history of sexual abuse (typically at the hands of fathers or husbands). A vicious cycle can develop in which sex work becomes a means to support a drug addiction, or drugs become a means of tolerating the demands of sex work. Edwina Gateley, a Christian theologian who worked with sex workers for decades in Chicago, told me that none of the women she met grew up “dream[ing] of being a prostitute.” And yet to describe these women as “spiritually dead,” as the Church does, only adds insult to injury. In fact, Gateley said these women often displayed a deep and “profound” awareness of God’s presence within them. “[They were] more spiritual than most Catholics I knew!” Gateley said. She recalls accompanying police on a raid of a busy Chicago brothel where she noticed small icons on some of the women’s bedside tables. “I ain’t got nothing,” one of the women told her, “but I got God and God’s going nowhere.”

(Image source: Aidan Jones)

For these sex workers, God is not an object out in the world—indeed it is “the world” that very often brings threats of violence, scorn, and judgment. Rather, God is an immediate and immanent reality, one that they place themselves in and in whom they find the peace of consolation, even a kind of acceptance. They’re drawn less to the formal rites and rituals of organized religion than to unselfconscious dialogue with God in prayer, although many did find the trappings of traditional religion helpful. An old rosary or a prayer card kept in a pocket helped center some women while they walked the street or waited for their next client. Faith sharing groups and prayer circles – whether these were self-organized or operated out of shelters like the one Gateley ran in Chicago – provided a chance for sex workers to share burdens and build solidarity. These women didn’t want to talk to a priest in a stuffy parish office, much less in a dark and lonely confessional, but they were comfortable talking to one another. Many sex workers also incorporated non-Western meditation and alternative rituals into their spiritual practices, especially those that offered to integrate body and spirit since their work often requires compartmentalizing these two aspects of one’s personality.

Most of the sex workers I met cared more about finding community and acceptance than participating in mass and the sacraments. The pomp and ceremony, some said, felt too much like an effort to impress or intimidate. When you spend all day dealing with clients who lie to you, pimps who manipulate and abuse you, and cops who threaten to arrest you, regulated worship can seem like one more performance you’re expected to give. Several of the Christian activists and pastors I spoke with explained that their emphasis when dealing with sex workers was one of accompaniment and advocacy, rather than proselytizing or attempting to “rescue” them (although the language of emancipation and rehabilitation remains the default within Christian ministries aimed at sex workers).

The sex workers with whom I spoke who describe themselves as Christian see God as love, but rarely find that love reflected in the Church, which they largely view as a place of judgement. It’s not that these individuals have no concept of sin—quite the contrary. But to their minds the stronger, more compelling message is grace. Reflecting on the women she’s worked with over the years, Gateley commented that, “They’ve got beyond the [message of] condemnation to the [message of] love.” In their persistent, even insistent, faith they challenge the Church to consider how it ostracizes the people it is trying to reach.

***

Of course, to speak of sex work in general terms always risks over-simplification. “Prostitution is not a single thing,” as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued in a classic article about the ethics of sex work. At some level, Nussbaum points out, every worker is engaged in the act of selling their body, whether on a factory floor, at a university lectern, or in a bordello bedroom. Moreover, there is a vast difference between the woman who has been the victim of human trafficking and forced into prostitution, the high-end escort who is hired out through an agency, and the middle-class college student who earns cash as a “cam-girl,” despite the fact that all of these could be described as sex workers (the latter category in particular exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the subscription service website OnlyFans growing 553% in 2020). Nussbaum’s point is that the stigma attached to prostitution obscures the real economic and social pressures (and incentives) that lead people into such work. Along with several other feminists, Nussbaum has argued for greater legal and social acceptance of prostitution. On the other side of such debates are so-called “radical feminists” – most famously Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon – who characterize all sex work as equivalent to rape and see no plausible degree of agency in such transactions.

It is ironic, to say the least, that the Catholic Church’s official thinking mirrors the radical feminist position, even while the Vatican elsewhere denounces the dangers of “radical feminism” and “gender theory” with a vengeance. In any event, both radical feminists and Vatican critics of sex work fail to distinguish between the diverse experiences of sex work, the different forms it can take, and the various economic factors involved.

When Covid-19 lockdowns all but eliminated in-person sex work during the early months of 2020, sex workers in New York quickly organized housing relief and emergency funds for one another, carrying on a long tradition of mutual aid in the sex work community that goes back to Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera, two transgender women of color. Many also pivoted to online platforms, which proved safer than meeting clients in person and in some cases allowed workers to earn more money than they had pre-pandemic. “I know 10 or 15 trans people making over $10,000 a month on OnlyFans,” one organizer from the Sex Workers Outreach Project told the New York Times last May, “and I’ve never known more than one trans person making that much a month in full-service [sex work] or porn or anything.” These are aspects of the industry that the Catholic Church fails to engage with in its condemnations of sex work.

One thing is clear: To the extent that Catholic attitudes towards sex work – including the idea that sex workers are spiritually “dead” – reinforce prevailing stigmas, they put the Church in a position of contributing to, rather than alleviating, the pressures sex workers face.

Another generalization haunting Christian approaches to sex work is the idea that it is only a women’s issue. The Gospels speak frequently of Jesus’ ministry to female prostitutes, so ecclesial outreach to “fallen women” can claim a scriptural basis; but no similar template exists for male prostitutes. Recent estimates put the number of male sex workers worldwide just north of eight million, accounting for some 20% of the global sex worker population.

The male sources I spoke to for this article highlighted different concerns than their female counterparts. In Latin America and parts of Europe, for instance, men may engage in sex work as a way of supporting their families, who are often in a different country. On the other hand, prostitution is sometimes one of the only means for young men in more repressive social settings to act on their same-sex attraction. Pimps are far less frequently found among male sex workers, as are friendships with other sex workers. The threat of physical violence (at least from clients) is less acute than it is for women, and male sex workers tend to age out of the business more quickly than women.

These and other factors can give male sex workers a greater sense of independence, but also intensify feelings of isolation and internalized shame. One priest I spoke to who ministered to sex workers in the global south observed that while brothel women tended to operate more like a unionized workforce and – at best – a kind of sisterhood, the men were akin to independent contractors. These facts are sometimes reflected in the spiritual practices of male sex workers, which could involve near-total disaffiliation from institutional religion, or a turn to nontheistic, individualized spirituality.

For his much-discussed study of homosexuality at the Vatican, the French author Frédéric Martel spoke to many of the young male escorts and street prostitutes of Rome. Martel told me that of those he asked about their faith, most were Muslim but “none” of them seemed to have a strong religious practice, or they were at least able to compartmentalize their sex work from their religious identities (especially as long as they refused to bottom, a refusal which allowed them to excuse themselves, in their minds, from the supposed sin of homosexuality). He recalled one particularly devout young man – a Romanian Orthodox Christian – who seemed to have “two lives:” one with his wife and daughter back home and another on the streets of Rome. Whatever else one might say about the approaches these men took to their sex work, they belie something other than the purely passive state of victimization that typical Church narratives of sex work promote.

***

As long as Catholic approaches to sex work amount to a uniform “shame and rescue” model, they fail to speak to the full range of humans who engage in this work. More to the point, such an approach fails to give sex workers what they often need, regardless of their particular experience: namely, a measure of acceptance and recognition of their dignity that they are unlikely to find in the wider society.

The Church could be a natural stage for this kind of recognition, but this would require that it commit itself to integrating such people more fully into its common life of worship, prayer, and witness. It would require finding creative ways to reflect on their experiences while meeting their spiritual and material needs. Most of all it would require recognizing the hard-won spiritual wisdom that such individuals can bring with them.

***

It is telling that one of the iconographic details usually associated with Mary of Egypt is a meagre ration of bread, which she was said to have brought with her into the wilderness and lived off of for many years. Prostitutes and sex workers today are likewise forced to live off scraps for their spiritual sustenance. But like Mary, the individuals I spoke with did not starve—and like her, their example provokes questions about where we expect to find signs of grace today.

Travis LaCouter is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross. His first book, Balthasar and Prayer, is out now with T&T Clark (Bloomsbury).

The post Sex Workers and Spirituality in the Catholic Church appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source/creator: Jamie Edler)

Like so many others, Rachel Joseph said goodbye to a parent dying of Covid-19 through a screen. Her father, Sauveur, a pastor and retired plumber, fell sick during the pandemic’s first surge through New Jersey. He was admitted to the same hospital where Rachel’s older sister worked; he was intubated soon after he arrived.

“Going through this felt like a nightmare,” Rachel said. “There was literally nothing I could do to help him or see him in person.” She likened the experience to a horror movie. A boogeyman hides behind a door; their victim approaches impending doom, opening the door despite your vocal protests from the other side of the screen. “Of course they can’t hear you.”

Sauveur Joseph died of Covid-19 on April 12, 2020: Easter Sunday. Rachel heard the news over the phone, and then dropped it.

A thirty-three-year-old Black woman from Livingston, New Jersey, who works as an administrative director for Cornell University, Rachel Joseph describes church and family as her most trusted networks. She attends Hope Church Jersey City—its 90-minute services are a welcome reprieve from her father’s hours-long sermons at Grace Ebenezer Baptist Church, a Haitian Baptist Church in East Orange, New Jersey. Rachel plays the bass guitar as part of the Hope Church worship band.

With places of worship closed throughout the first months of the pandemic, and with a pell-mell patchwork of technologies rushing to fill the gaps, Rachel was left to grieve without the communities and religious traditions that would have otherwise buoyed and held her through the loss of her father.

(Sauveur Joseph with his daughter Rachel Joseph. Image source: Rachel Joseph)

The pandemic forced people like Rachel to mourn not only the dead, but also the mourning rituals familiar to them. In turn, new models for mourning emerged as hundreds of thousands of people across the country confronted grief.

The Covid Grief Network, which integrates community organizers, spiritual care providers, and mental health professionals into a volunteer service for adults in their twenties and thirties who have experienced loss in the face of Covid-19, was a pivotal source of support for Rachel. Recognizing the racist and lethal effects of the pandemic, including unequal access to mental healthcare, the Covid Grief Network became an interreligious incubator for new and updated mourning rituals for grieving, marginalized people. Its members developed practices together, finding solace in cybernetic remembrance—sharing memories of a loved one with other pixelated, bereaved figures; noting the (liturgical) passage of time without the deceased; and silently meditating or praying before a Zoom room went dark.

***

At Sauveur Joseph’s service, Rachel and her relatives were forced to conduct a triage of their own. New Jersey public health officials capped funerals, even ones held outdoors, to ten attendees. Regulations also limited services to twenty minutes. Hugs were forbidden.

The family had to decide which relatives would attend Sauveur’s funeral in person. Rachel’s fiancé, Armando Sultan, a graphic designer, had developed a strong bond with Sauveur over hours-long theological conversations. He had to wait in the parking lot to make space for other family members at the funeral.

The funeral home lacked a WiFi connection, so the Josephs relied on a mobile hotspot for a Zoom-based funeral service. But cell-phone signal was spotty. The pastor for the funeral—who Zoomed in—delivered his remarks in patches. The audience witnessed a garbled, blurred funeral, while the Joseph family wrangled a frustrated, confused mass of spectators who sat on a screen. And then the Zoom room reached capacity, shipping scores of mourners to a purgatorial, virtual waiting room.

“I do not wish this on anyone who has a loss in their family,” Rachel said. “We had to rush through our grief.”

***

The notion of an exclusively virtual funeral is a “myth,” according to Dr. Tamara Kneese, a scholar of technology and mourning. The mortuary process doesn’t become more convenient through digital forms; family members and traditional figures still have to negotiate with a real-life corpse, regardless of the funeral’s ultimate venue. Yet, with the pandemic, crucial ancillary moments died off as physical grieving spaces closed and loved ones could no longer share food or hugs.

Kneese identified the technological management of Zoom funerals as a relatively new, and therefore potentially alienating, grief ritual. “These are not things that we’re used to having a strong attachment to,” she said.

Ylisse Bess, a chaplain at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Boston, believes the pandemic-induced interruption of mourning rituals has complicated survivors’ access to familiar forms of grief, while their age, identities, and class further determine their capacity for catharsis.

Within a racist medical system, and given astronomically higher Covid-19 death rates for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, many grieving people of color may question whether their loved one’s death was preventable, Bess said. She noted that people of color face systemic barriers to mental healthcare, and that employer-provided white therapists may dismiss the loss of chosen family or the rupture of kinship networks unfamiliar to them. To Bess, who is Black, grief work is justice work.

The algorithmic racism of life insurance can further upend the grieving process, says LaShaya Howie, who studies Black funeral homes. Racial capitalism means life insurance access mirrors more than income; policy rates vary by ZIP code, transmuting redlining into ostensibly neutral variables. While FEMA offers financial assistance for the funerals of people who have died from Covid-19, funerary expenses and attendant debts can aggrieve survivors by turning a funeral into a financial crisis. This pattern has spawned a tedious post-mortem ritual now all too common: GoFundMe campaigns for funerals, which, Kneese argues, allows “disparately located family and friends, as well as acquaintances or Internet strangers, to contribute to a person’s memorial fund, facilitating widespread, public participation.” The creators of these campaigns also leverage “practical knowledge of social media practices and other forms of online or marketing savvy” to convert digital compassion into sufficient funds. The latter imperative can shape imagined communities, connecting the deceased to similar victims—who died due to the pandemic, police violence, or environmental racism—as well as linking benefactors to one another, thereby channeling mourning into a movement.

(Image source: Matt Rourke for the Associated Press)

Experiences of grief care also vary by age. Most services are designed for older adults and young children as the primary mourners, with few tailored to those in between. Even in non-pandemic contexts, since few of their same-age peers have experienced the death of an immediate family member, adults in their twenties and thirties confront a distinctly isolated grieving process. Rising rates of depression, the fastest-growing health condition among millennials, further compound mental health issues within this age demographic, as do spiking healthcare costs, relatively low rates of insurance coverage, and stagnant wages.

With an especial lack of resources and outlets for processing grief, young adults are at risk of suffering long-term psychological and psychiatric effects, including depression, paranoia, and suicidal ideation. “It’s a lonely place to be: to have no one who’s able to just sit with you,” Bess said.

***

Few could sit with Rachel as she grieved. She faced pixelated, disconnected heads on a screen during Sauveur’s funeral, exacerbating a grief process that was already lacking in touch and tradition.

Compounded by the isolation and sedentary nature of a stay-at-home order, Rachel felt confined, locked into the same space where she first heard of her father’s death. Reflecting on the Christian hymn “It Is Well with My Soul,” she thought, “Well, it’s not well with me.” She spent several Sundays in a fetal position, reminded of losing her father on Easter Sunday. She described her distress like clockwork or a switch: Midnight would strike, and she could no longer leave her bed.

In May 2020 Rachel described her paralyzing grief to a close friend, who referred her to the Covid Grief Network. The Network’s first members, like Rachel, joined through word of mouth. They received six hour-long, one-on-one sessions with a volunteer grief worker over Zoom, and gained access to the Network’s Facebook group, through which they could share experiences and process their grief. To date, it has served 650 young adults from 44 states and 22 countries.

The Network’s co-founders—Noah Cochran, a clinical social worker, Ari Eisen, a non-profit manager, and Chloe Zelkha, a rabbinical student—offered in-person grief retreats in the Bay Area before the pandemic and realized days into lockdown that their former work would be on hold indefinitely. Many young people were about to move through grief in ways both familiar and wildly divergent from their own travails: Cochran and Zelkha both experienced the loss of parents when they were younger and encountered age-related gaps in grief care. With places of worship closed and hospitals overwhelmed, they sought to provide a place where others “joining the club” could commune and sit with their grief.

“My Judaism taught me the power of ritual,” Zelkha said. In grieving her father, she found solace in what she dubbed the “spiritual technologies” of her religion: the rhythms of sitting shiva, immersing in the mikvah, and saying the Mourner’s Kaddish, which offered “a road map” to express pain in grief, and to do so “without apology.” While all three co-founders are Jewish, they are careful to note that the Network is not a Jewish organization and is open to all.

(Image source: Covid Grief Network)

The first months of the pandemic involved mourning loved ones, daily life as we once knew it, and forms of grieving previously familiar to the living, said Cochran, who works as a therapist at Smith College. “People’s religious and spiritual practices, communities and lineages, traditions and rituals have been inaccessible or changed,” they said. With that shared understanding, the Network’s volunteers, who come from diverse religious backgrounds, often foreground the healing place of ritual in the grieving process. And, recognizing mental health care’s long history of racism, homophobia, sexism, and transphobia, the Network’s organizers connect members to volunteers who share their identities upon request.

Ylisse Bess, the Boston-based chaplain, volunteered for the Covid Grief Network and conducted one-on-one sessions with grieving people of color. She started each session with ritual: Deep breathing demarcated the beginning of their hour together, which was the grieving person’s to steer. In their first session, Bess would ask each person about their loved one: what their name was and who they were. She found that her grieving peers had acutely pent-up emotions; they negotiated mounting pressure to compartmentalize and, without irony, “live their lives” once the rest of the world reopened. The recognition of Covid-related deaths, and subsequent mourning, waned as conspiracies and vaccine determinism grew.

Bess believes the Network has been successful because it does not try to fix mourners’ grief. Such spiritual care diverged from her accustomed site of concern: the hospital. She witnessed a different life cycle to grief, meeting someone weeks or months into their processing, unlike her regular witness to grief’s genesis after a diagnosis or death.

“The Network has been an experiment in how to extend chaplaincy beyond the walls of the hospital, the military, the university, or the prison, where it usually lives,” said Zelkha. “We also decided to bring in a wide range of caregivers: not just chaplains or spiritual caregivers, but also therapists and coaches and beyond, so it’s also an experiment in expanding what chaplaincy is.”

Grieving people can largely choose from two options: clinical therapeutic help or nothing, argues Dr. Hannah Zeavin, author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy. Hybridized and adjunctive techniques like the Network’s fulfill a crucial niche. Its blend of pastoral care, mutual aid, and social work render it a religious and mediated cousin to the crisis hotline.

Bernard Duncan Mayes, who identified as a “queer Anglican priest,” founded San Francisco Suicide Prevention in 1961, the second hotline in the U.S. He looked to Samaritans, the world’s first crisis hotline, founded in 1953 by a British Anglican vicar, for inspiration, but Mayes consciously obfuscated his church affiliation so as to avoid excluding potential careseekers. The hotline sought to serve two marginalized groups: people struggling with suicidal thoughts as well as lesbian and gay people. Borrowing methodologies from both pastoral care and psychotherapy, Mayes derided churches and licensed psychiatrists alike for their forms of proselytizing—of the soul or wallet, respectively—as well as their pathologization of people in need through doctrine and diagnostic manuals.

The Covid Grief Network does not label itself as teletherapy, but the pandemic has shifted how mediated care work is approached, in part due to an exodus of in-person therapeutic care toward digital fora. “Teletherapy has been making its eventual grand debut for over 100 years now,” Zeavin said, framing Freud’s treatments by mail as the medium’s root.

***

In her Zoom-based sessions with a volunteer, Rachel Joseph started to approach her father’s loss and her own recovery from new angles. She learned to lean into healthy coping mechanisms: running, journaling, talking through her feelings with her fiancé Armando. She now treats Sundays as a day to remember Sauveur, though her grief isn’t complete or gone.

“He’s still with me in the spiritual sense, where even though his body isn’t here, I can still remember him,” she said. “He’s still in my heart, and he walks with me every day.”

She’s also invented rituals of remembrance. Her father used to drive the Joseph family around to look at Christmas lights; Rachel and her mother retraced those routes in December. Sauveur enjoyed Sunday meals at a Chinese buffet. Rachel and Armando revived that tradition, too, recalling his favorite dishes and classic Sunday outfit (a tie patterned with an American flag and eagle, and always the same hat). She found solace in going back to the times and places they shared.

The biggest milestone came when Rachel and Armando married without her father there. Armando had surprised her with a proposal in February 2020. The Joseph family—Rachel’s parents, two sisters, and brother—celebrated with the newly engaged couple over a loud, festive lunch. Armando notified Rachel’s notoriously loose-lipped relatives of the plan in advance. “They managed to keep it hush-hush,” she joked.

Sauveur remained a centerpiece of their wedding in August 2021. Armando assembled a remembrance table, which featured portraits of Rachel’s father, her brother, who passed away in 2011, as well as deceased grandparents from both Rachel’s and Armando’s sides of the family. Instead of the traditional father-daughter dance, Rachel danced with her surviving brother and cradled a framed picture of Sauveur.

And finally, with a slide show of family memories in the background, Rachel’s younger sister Anne performed “Peace,” an original song that had been part of her own grieving process.

“It is well with my soul,” she sang.

***

As the coronavirus mutates, defeating immunities and techno-fixes alike, leaving more dead and forcing countless others to say their goodbyes through a device and navigate a dissonant public, so too has the Covid Grief Network been reconfigured. In response to feedback from its members and volunteers, it has stopped offering one-on-one support and instead meets through 12-person cohorts.

The U.S. collectively lives (and dies) in what Hannah Zeavin, the teletherapy scholar, dubs a “state of suspended disbelief about death.” Many who survived pandemic-related deaths have seen public spaces, social networks, and economies drive themselves brutally toward “normalcy.” In the turmoil of wanting to sit with grief while the world “moves on,” and with most religious spaces reopened in some form, the Network’s organizers have found young adults most in need of solidarity and long-term community.

“I hope our world continues to move towards more community and collective holding of grief,” said Noah Cochran.

The Covid Grief Network continues to welcome new members and new rituals. In December 2021, Ylisse Bess, the chaplain, facilitated a group session over Zoom to mark Hanukkah. For many, this was their first winter holiday season without a loved one. Though many attendees came from backgrounds that varied from her own, Bess said that successful interreligious support involves showing up and letting others draw from their truths, including thousands-year-old traditions that connect individuals to their ancestors. “If that could get them through the Hebrew Bible, then maybe that can get them through 2021,” she said.

The Network looks to get through 2022 and other turmoil without losing sight of its main focus. “We orient towards Covid grief and loss in young adults in particular because we wanted to offer something particular and unique in this moment,” Cochran said. “We can’t do it all but we wanted to do one specific thing well, and that’s why we chose this particular niche.” It will live as long as it’s needed.

Adam Willems (@functionaladam) is a Seattle-based researcher and reporter. They write Divine Innovation, a newsletter on religion and technology.

The post Grief Reconfigured: Mourning Rituals and Interreligious Community Online appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source and credit: Jess Sutter for Reveal)

My introduction to the American televangelist and prosperity gospel preacher Kenneth Copeland, a member of former President Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board, was not through his sermons but through his laugh. The original video clip of Copeland mocking news outlets days after Joe Biden was declared President-elect went viral before the Big Lie that the election was stolen. After Trump supporters—including members of the far-right, all-male, loosely-knit organization the Proud Boys—stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the wealthiest pastor in the United States became a hit on the social media platform Telegram, through the channel “Proud Boys Uncensored” (later renamed “The Western Chauvinist”).

In a masterfully edited ten-second mashup, Copeland manically laughs from a pulpit in a suit and tie to a doom metal soundtrack, until a close-up of his face seamlessly morphs into a shot of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker feverishly laughing. A splotchy white face with greasy green hair and MAGA red lips sloppily painted into a funhouse grin quickly flashes onscreen then back to Copeland. This feedback loop of frenzied laughter returns to the Joker just before the entire sequence ends and the GIF replays from the beginning.

Leading up to his outburst, Copeland sermonized: “A misunderstanding of joy equates joy with happiness…at Johns Hopkins they scientifically proved that your natural being does not know the difference between a belly laugh and a put-on laugh. The devil said what? Ha ha ha. The media said what? Ha ha ha. The media said, ‘Joe Biden’s president,’ Haw haw haw haw.” Copeland’s guttural denial of Biden’s win is in keeping with the charismatic Word of Faith movement of which he is a part, wherein it is believed that Christians can access the power of faith through speech. Copeland exalts his audience through contagious laughter to enact what they desire—a Trump re-election. If believers can pray and speak into being what they want, then they can laugh in the face of political defeat and make it victory.

The Copeland GIF is an homage to and call for homegrown white terrorism in affectively arresting sound, voice, and imagery. The Joker’s uncontrollable laugh in the hysterical pitch of delusional male superiority and unchecked white supremacy visually synchs with Copeland’s joy and menacing drone music. On The Western Chauvinist, battle cries on behalf of white Christian nationalism are used to recruit men into fighting for a global fascist movement. The advantages to Telegram channels for public broadcasting purposes are multiple, with features that include the capacity for an unlimited number of subscribers, the ability to stream and archive large media files, and anonymous posting under the channel’s name. Administrators can also set messages to auto-delete in chats, groups, and channels. Telegram attracts users by advertising that they can delete messages without a trace.

Telegram was used by insurrectionists, including the Proud Boys, to mobilize for January 6^th. After the attempted coup, a social media clampdown on mis/disinformation and threats of violence led to the deplatforming of Trump, QAnon, and white nationalist accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Parler. A surge in Telegram downloads ensued. On January 12^th, the platform surpassed 500 million active users and announced that more than 25 million people from around the world had joined within 72 hours. In the aftermath of the insurrection, Founder and CEO Pavel Durov assured users that Telegram’s “freedom and privacy” promise would remain intact, meaning all client apps would be open source and every chat on the platform was encrypted.

In February 2021, The Western Chauvinist openly capitalized on the deplatforming of Trump and his followers. On February 25^th, a screenshot of the Anti-Fascist and Far Right Twitter account @FFRAFAction was posted on The Western Chauvinist: “Just to be clear, having hundreds of thousands of confused & emotionally distraught QAnon supporters on Telegram channels is a major worry rather than something for sneering hot takes. They are being targeted for blackpilling by Nazi accelerationists & other white supremacists.” Underneath is a taunt posted by The Western Chauvinist moderator: “Anti fascists are worried that MAGA normies are being radicalized on Telegram. Damn, who would’ve thought that physically attacking conservatives, getting them fired, and de-platforming them on social media would push them to the far right?” The next post to The Western Chauvinist was a meme of a man in a ballcap overlaid with the text, “people bitchin about gas prices,” sitting next to the Joker on a subway musing: “me realizing that America has already been destroyed and we’re all just going through the motions til the shooting starts.”

(Image source: Chandan Khanna for Getty Images)

The Western Chauvinist is not the only Proud Boys channel on Telegram, but to date it is the most successful, with over 50,000 subscribers and up to 40,000 views per post. By contrast, the self-named Proud Boys Telegram channel has fewer subscribers at 30,000, fewer daily posts, allows for public comments, and serves as a networking site for local chapters across the United States. On The Western Chauvinist, amateur video footage, news reports, tweets, TikTok videos, films, GIFs, and memes, are not open to subscribers’ comments. Instead of eliciting chatter, the channel engages viewers through fascist propaganda. The Western Chauvinist provides a public platform for fascists to network transnationally, to promote fascism as an ideology, and to advocate for revolutionary violence in plain sight. Posts are curated to incite conspiratorial thinking about existential enemies and to legitimize violent responses to fabricated threats.

A popular three-minute video on The Western Chauvinist exemplifies conspiratorial propaganda by demonizing Jews and decrying the fall of Western civilization. A narrator proclaims that “healthy norms” and “healthy nationalism” have been “replaced with guilt, ethnomasochism, self-hatred, apathy, degeneracy, pathological altruism. Traditionalism is labeled sick and outdated, views on parenting have changed significantly. Thanks to the cultural Marxist brainwashing, Europeans no longer believe their position in society will be improved by having offspring.” This white nationalist script is read over a melodramatic soundtrack. The caption below this propaganda film reads: “Tolerance for everything unholy has led us where we are today. Tolerance for all sin, waged upon us by our ‘allied’ enemies have brought us to the brink of civilizational collapse. This has always been much bigger than the fake two-party politics. It has always been a spiritual and physical war for the destruction of the West and her children. STAND UP IN POWER NOW OR GO EXTINCT FOREVER.”

Physical combat and spiritual warfare become entwined in the name of protecting white Christians of European descent from genocide. While this language may seem extreme, it is not unlike the political rhetoric used during a 2018 “state dinner” at the White House during the Trump administration, when 100 Evangelical leaders were hosted for a prayer-filled night akin to a campaign rally. Kenneth Copeland, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and conservative radio show host Eric Metaxas, hob-knobbed with Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump. “We are here today to celebrate America’s heritage of faith, family and freedom,” Trump told the crowd. “As you know in recent years, the government tried to undermine religious freedom but the attacks on communities of faith are over. We’ve ended it.” The president listed several ways he had protected religious liberty for conservatives against abortion and acted against the global persecution of Christians. His remarks concluded to applause and laughter, “Together we will uplift our nation in prayer, protect the sanctity of life, and forever proudly remain one nation, under God…the support you’ve given me has been incredible, but I really don’t feel guilty because I have given you a lot back, just about everything I’ve promised.” Jack Graham, the senior pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, and once-president of the Southern Baptist Convention responded, “We need to maintain our vigilance in the upcoming days [before the 2018 midterm election]. The concern is that this is a spiritual warfare, this is a battle.” The belief that a Democratic victory would lead to the religious persecution of white evangelicals was couched in terms of spiritual warfare and worldly battle by state and non-state actors who worked in concert for political power.

The Western Chauvinist digitally and viscerally amplifies this sense of persecution while calling for combat against clearly demarked enemies to enact a fascist plan to propagate white Christians and secure white male Christian dominance. In February 2021, one post has a cropped USA Today headline, “Christian nationalism is a threat, and not just from Capitol attackers invoking Jesus.” Underneath, the channel’s anonymous moderator writes, “So now not only are they saying nationalism is a crime but Christianity as well? These people want you and I dead so they can inhabit the corpse of our dying nation. But we are not going to give them the satisfaction. Loving your country and your Christian beliefs is no crime.” Another post announces that it is “time for Native born white Americans to advocate for their own interests and to have a viable political party that represents those interests. It is not a crime to not want to be a minority in your ancestral homeland.” In response, the National Justice Party, an American fascist political organization, recommends an “immigration moratorium.” The post contains a link to the National Justice Party Telegram channel, which boasts nearly 10,000 subscribers to date, a number that has doubled since February 2021. Several National Justice Party posts have as much engagement as any on The Western Chauvinist. Videos promoting the National Justice Party’s platform and activism against “anti-white terrorism” perpetrated by Black Lives Matter, “anti-white hate” in the form of critical race theory, and “white decline” due to a global “refugee crisis” created by Israel and celebrated by Jews, accrue between 20,000 to 80,000 views. The National Justice Party leaders openly and regularly post to The Western Chauvinist, enlisting Telegram’s social affordances to recruit followers and disseminate eye-popping propaganda. Scenes of chaos provide evidence of white genocide and aim to inspire revolutionary desire.

For example, The Western Chauvinist highlights news reports of white people killed by anyone who is not white to bolster the feeling that white Christians are targets of genocidal violence. The channel also circulates propaganda that depicts white people’s replacement and extinction. One post shows a Black man holding what appears to be a child who is multiracial with the caption, “This is the goal of the global political class. They want a single race that is cross bread [sic] with races proven to be low IQ and subservient to any master who promises them the crumbs from their plate. Is this what you want for your children? What will you do about it?” In other posts, the imperative to “make white babies” to protect “our people” from extinction is framed as tantamount. A picture of a blonde girl in a blue shirt and skirt standing in a city park reads: “The world you were raised to survive in no longer exists.” A photo of nine white girls, all blonde and dressed in white, is overlaid with the text: “A nation that can’t protect its children has no future” and the caption below states, “Fight to secure your children’s future. We are at war for the souls of our people, make sure you’re adequately contributing to the effort.” White Christian men are called to action to protect white families, white homelands, white civilization, white purity, white unity, and white dominance.

In April 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson validated these white nationalists’ fears of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory as fact in prime time. The great replacement, advanced by the French writer Renaud Camus in 2012, argues that white Christian populations are under threat of extinction due to (Muslim, non-white) mass migration and declining birthrates, both promoted by a global elite (often coded as Jewish). The Western Chauvinist posted messages that heralded Carlson as a heroic truth-teller. One screenshot of a New York Times tweet—“The Anti-Defamation League urged Tucker Carlson to resign on Friday, accusing the Fox News host in an open letter of giving ‘an impassioned defense’ of the replacement theory, a racist conspiracy belief popular in far-right circles”—was captioned: “White replacement is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Also, we need to replace whites.” A second post provided further evidence of a Jewish-led conspiracy to replace whites, this time with the screenshot of a New York Times Opinion headline, “We Can Replace Them” and the subheading, “In Georgia, a chance to rebuke white nationalism.” Below, columnist Michelle Goldberg’s last name is circled for emphasis.

Research has demonstrated that the storming of the Capitol on January 6^th was not a product of “the fringe” but rather “the mainstream,” meaning “over half of those who have been arrested are business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects,” whereas “13 percent of those nearly 700 arrested as of early December are members of extremist groups like the Proud Boys.” Political scientist Robert Pape says the thread that connects the “fringe” and “mainstream” is not their worship of Trump, but their belief in the great replacement. Pape states, “52 percent [of those arrested] are coming from counties that Biden won in the 2020 election. That is, more are coming from counties Biden won than Trump won…The No.1 feature of the county sending insurrectionists…is that these are the counties losing the most white population in the United States.” Pape adds:

“There is a right-wing conspiracy theory called the great replacement, which says that white people are being overtaken by minorities and that this is going to cause a loss of rights for white people. It used to be on the fringe…[but now] that that theory is embraced in full-throated fashion by major political leaders and also by major media figures…you see that that is head and shoulders the No. 1 belief that’s driving the difference…Yes, there are other beliefs: Many in the insurrectionist movement believe in the QAnon cult idea, that there is a satanic cult of pedophiles running the U.S. government. Many also fear loss of a job in the next 12 months. Many also believe that the second coming of Christ is happening within their lifetime. Many also think government is an enemy. But those are secondary factors. Head and shoulders, the leading factor is the belief in ‘the great replacement.’ Underneath that, the No. 1 factor that’s predicting whether someone believes in ‘the great replacement’ versus not is racial resentment—that is, specifically resentment of minorities who get what they see as special privileges. These fringe beliefs like ‘the great replacement’ are now no longer confined to the fringe. This is overall a mainstream political movement.”

Pape’s evidence suggests that calling the Proud Boys “extremist” is a misnomer and that white Christian nationalism is not simply about feelings of persecution or the belief that Trump is an agent of God, but the fear that white Christian male supremacy and American exceptionalism are no longer givens, fomenting an urgency to do spiritual and worldly battle against racial, gendered, and religious enemies—the collective conviction in the need for revolutionary violence.

(Image source: John Rudoff for Getty Images)

The Western Chauvinist demonstrates that the ideology of white Christian nationalism is not just a matter of religious symbols, practices, or beliefs. Jesus takes many forms on the channel, but he predominantly appears on the cross, his crucifixion glorified as the ultimate heroic sacrifice. A meme that declares, “Strength Through Christ: Perhaps the biggest mistake the ELITE do is to treat the rest of us like we are cattle. They have no remorse and take pleasure in watching us suffer,” speaks to a sense of collective persecution but also to the desire for populist revenge. An illustrated tribute to a Catholic priest who performed a field service on the Eastern Front in the summer of 1941 reads, “The Cross will not crush you; if its weight makes you stagger, its power will also sustain you.” A meme that plays off the “COEXIST” bumper sticker full of multi-faith symbols has this imagery crossed out and replaced underneath with “CONVERT” written in the same font, but with crosses and stick figures depicting Jesus’s crucifixion entwined in the letters.

The Western Chauvinist’s religious messages do not stop at victimhood and suffering; they conjure strength and aspirations to fight. On Easter Day in 2021, one post portrayed a buff Jesus with bulging veins and biceps in a white tank top at a table with a chalice of 100% Gain. Underneath, the joyful greeting reads, “Happy Easter, He is Risen!” A TikTok video of Christian crusaders outfitted in armor bearing shields etched with crosses reinforces the need to prepare for physical and spiritual war. These visuals depict hyperbolic masculinity in the face of religious sacrifice and combat-readiness for religious battle. They appeared between fundraising efforts on behalf of Proud Boys imprisoned for their participation in the January 6^th insurrection.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center has demonstrated, the Proud Boys played a pivotal role in the insurrection. On December 29, 2020, the group’s chairman, Enrique Tarrio, posted on social media that the Proud Boys planned to “turn out in record numbers on Jan 6th.” Between the 2020 presidential election and 2021 insurrection, Proud Boys encouraged others to attend “stop the steal” rallies. According to U.S. investigators, over 60 Proud Boys participated in encrypted Telegram message groups called “Boots on the Ground” and “New MOSD [Ministry Of Self-Defense],” where they raised funds for equipment and travel to Washington, D.C. and coordinated communication between members who planned to be at the “Save America” rally that immediately preceded the Capitol siege. At least 37 of those arrested in relation to the insurrection have ties to the Proud Boys, and at least nine of them are military veterans. Proud Boy leaders Ethan Nordean, Joseph Randall Biggs, Charles Donohoe, and Zach Rehl, are charged in an indictment with conspiring to disrupt Congress’s joint session and impede police.

More than 1,500 pages of Telegram chats recovered by the government indicate that Ethan Nordean led members “with specific plans to: split up into groups, attempt to break into the Capitol building from as many different points as possible, and prevent the joint session of Congress from certifying the Electoral College results.” According to court filings, Zach Rehl said on a December 30^th MOSD Telegram video call, “We’re not gonna be doing like a proud boy fuckin’ 8 o’clock at night march and flexing our [arms] and shit. We’re doing a completely different operation.” On January 4th, another MOSD member instructed the group to “drag them out by their fucking hair” if congressional members attempted to “steal” the election.

Prosecutors asked to revoke the pretrial release of Nordean because he endorsed violence in online videos, including a “1776”-style revolt. U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough alleged that Nordean was willing to sacrifice his marriage, family ties, and Seattle roots in the belief that he is a “patriot,” claiming that “Ethan Nordean planned, organized, fundraised and led others onto Capitol grounds on January 6…to obstruct the certification that was taking place that day, and in fact he and his co-conspirators were successful in that effort.”

After January 6^th, the Proud Boys appeared as though they were in jeopardy of decline and an irreparable split. Chairman Enrique Tarrio was arrested for burning a Black Lives Matter banner at a Washington D.C. church and was renounced by multiple chapters. Meanwhile, several individual members faced criminal charges for their participation in the insurrection.

However, the Proud Boys have proved resilient. Through their presence at local demonstrations and expansion on social media platforms like Telegram, the Proud Boys have recruited new members while showing their support for what the philosopher Jason Stanley calls America’s “fascism’s legal phase,” where Republican state legislators have introduced bills to criminalize protests like those led by Black Lives Matter activists, overturn electoral results, restrict anti-racist curriculum, and decimate abortion rights. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, green-lighted corporate spending in elections, opened the door to partisan gerrymandering, and undermined the bodily autonomy of anyone with a uterus. In turn, the Proud Boys have provided “security” for “the Church at Planned Parenthood,” who describe their actions near sexual health clinics as “a worship service outside the gates of Hell.” Local chapters of the Proud Boys have shown up at public gatherings in support of anti-critical race theory policies as well as anti-mask and anti-vaccination demonstrators, at times praying outside of school buildings and intimidatingly standing in the back of school board meetings.

After Trump did not pardon those charged with crimes in the wake of the insurrection, the Proud Boys felt betrayed and abandoned. Today, Proud Boys openly denounce Trump, calling him “a total failure,” “a shill,” and “extraordinarily weak.” This evidence suggests that devotion to Trump was not the primary motivation for the white terrorism of January 6^th, but rather the excuse. Instead of worshipping Trump like Jesus, the Proud Boys are set on revolutionary violence. This fascist holy war has less to do with Trump’s authority than the ascent and preservation of white Christian power. While Trump and others should be held accountable for planning a coup organized and led in his name, it carries on without him, as fascists within and outside the halls of government plot for permanent rule.

Jessica Johnson is a Visiting Scholar of Religious Studies at the College of William & Mary and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. Her ethnographic study of the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church in Seattle,  Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire, was published by Duke University Press in 2018.

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This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post Christian Fascism Online and Off: The Proud Boys, The Big Lie, and The Great Replacement appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Welcome to our first issue of 2022! I am excited to share some new features coming to the Revealer this year. First, I am thrilled to announce that Kaya Oakes, an esteemed and award-winning author, is joining the Revealer as a columnist. Oakes has authored multiple books about religion, including The Nones are Alright: A New Generation of Seekers, Believers, and Those In Between and The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In-Betweens to Remake the World. She also wrote a powerful personal essay for the Revealer’s special issue on Religion and Sex Abuse in 2020. Oakes’ new Revealer column, “Not So Sorry,” will explore forgiveness, especially as it relates to religious institutions. The column will make its debut next month in our March issue.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

I am also happy to announce that we are launching a new series this year. Starting in our April issue and continuing through June, we will publish a series of articles on “Catholic Horror.” The series will explore the Catholic horror genre that is popular in films like The Exorcist alongside actual atrocities committed by the Catholic Church. The series will offer an important examination about what these fictional and real-life horrors reveal about the Church and our broader culture.

In 2022, we are also committed to bringing you the high-quality articles and podcast episodes you have come to expect from the Revealer. Our February issue is no exception and explores topics of critical importance today. The issue opens with Jessica Johnson’s “Christian Fascism Online and Off,” where she explores how the Proud Boys use the social media platform Telegram to promote Christian fascism to tens of thousands of followers and how, since the January 6 insurrection, their influence has increased. Next, in “Grief Reconfigured,” Adam Willems profiles a virtual grief network that developed during the pandemic for people in their 20s and 30s that helps them mourn, find community, and develop rituals that offer solace.

Our February issue also covers topics not often explored elsewhere. In “Sex Workers and Spirituality,” Travis LaCouter interviews sex workers and Catholic leaders to highlight what sex workers – from street prostitutes to OnlyFans stars – can offer the Catholic Church if the Church would welcome them without judgment. Then, in “Making Marginalized History Mainstream,” Bhakti Mamtora reflects on the absence of South Asians in American history curriculum and investigates new forms of media that are working to showcase South Asians’ historical contributions to the United States. And, in an excerpt from her new book Movie-Made Jews, Helene Meyers recounts the obstacles actor Zach Braff faced when he pitched a movie that centered Jewish identity and what those hurdles reveal about American culture.

The February issue also features the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Hollywood, Movies, and American Jews.” Helene Meyers joins us to discuss the place of Jews in Hollywood and how movies can shape American Jewish identities. We explore the portrayal of Jews on screen, why Barbra Streisand has been a cinematic Jewish icon for decades,  whether non-Jewish actors should play Jewish parts today, and how movies can combat antisemitism. You can listen to this insightful episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As I think about the articles and podcast episode in this issue with topics that range from the rise in Christian fascism to the spiritual possibilities of sex workers, I am struck by the profoundly diverse ways religion influences our world – and the myriad means by which people influence religious institutions. Since change is constant, the Revealer is committed to adding new features, innovations, and contributors so that we can continue to offer fresh and important insights about religion’s place in our ever-changing world.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: New at the Revealer in 2022 appeared first on The Revealer.