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(Homes burn in Philadelphia after the police dropped a bomb on the MOVE headquarters. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.)

Richard Kent Evans had me at “there is, to be clear, no such thing as a cult.”

In this groundbreaking book, MOVE: An American Religion, Evans insists that “cult” refers to the following:

“A way of policing the boundaries of the category of religion, of deciding which beliefs and practices are legitimate and which are not. We call groups ‘cults’ if they seem to be too controlling — as if real religions are defined by individual autonomy and free agency. We call groups “cults” if they strike us as especially dangerous — as if real religions do not engage in violent or threatening behavior. We call groups ‘cults’ if their teachings seem outlandish — as if real religions are true.”

In his analysis of MOVE, a Black religious movement that the Philadelphia Police Department bombed in 1985, Evans shows us in excruciating detail how violently Americans construct and constrain what counts as legitimate religion. His book forces us to consider what happens when a religion’s teachings feel too outlandish, when a group’s dynamics seem dangerous, when a member’s actions or thoughts appear too shaped by a community’s commitments. Through his analysis of the history, theology, and fate of MOVE, Evans illustrates how such a religion, group, or community gets labeled a cult.

Against Cults: How Not to Define American Religion(s)

I have done much public yelling on the subject of cults, a propensity to which anyone who follows me on Twitter can attest. The problem of calling something a “cult” is legion, but my primary objections to the term are threefold:

1) Cult = religion you don’t like

In what is now the United States, people use cult as a shorthand for what they perceive as religion done “wrong.” This usage smuggles in numerous assumptions about what religion done right should look like, and it just so happens religion “should” look like moderate white Christianity. We see this played out in courts, prisons, hospitals, popular media, and countless other places. In the case of MOVE, its members saw it as a religious community. But within Philadelphia’s legal and policing systems, MOVE was only ever a cult. As MOVE member Gerald Africa attested, “they [Philadelphia law enforcement, government officials, and the judicial system] just spit all over our religion like our religion didn’t count.”

2) Cult = predatory, abusive, irrational behaviors and practices

People aren’t always referring to explicitly religious practices or beliefs when they use the word cult, but they are building on the word’s religious genealogy. Historically, the term cult has been used to describe groups that people believe have exploited America’s professed commitment to religious freedom (terms and conditions may apply) to harm, mislead, violate, and/or fleece the more vulnerable and feeble-minded among us.

It is no accident, then, that countless Black-led religious innovations, women-led religious innovations, and especially Black women-led religious innovations have been criticized as cults. Non-white non-men who join these groups are often seen as less rational, weaker, and thus more susceptible to religious, as well as economic and sexual, manipulation. As Evans shows, critics attempted to discredit MOVE by accusing founder John Africa and his community of being abusive, disingenuous, irrational, and exploitative of the women and children in the community.

3) “Cult” = dangerous

Rather than confront abuse as endemic to American culture, “cult” makes abuse an issue of religion-done-wrong. The problem becomes specific religions, not abuse; and the solution is to insist that religion be done right (e. in ways approximating moderate white mainstream Christianity) or not at all. We say “cult” when we mean “dangerous religion,” and continuing to describe groups that make us uncomfortable as cults reinforces this distinction and the white supremacist, sexist, Christian imperialist assumptions it implies.

Labeling a group or organization a “cult” has justified state surveillance, law enforcement violence, and many, many violations of Americans’ civil rights. “Cult” gets used to mark certain groups as too different to be included in America’s alleged promise of religious freedom. Throughout the 20^th century, whites censored, vilified, and punished Black religious innovators and resistance groups by labeling them “cults.”

The state-sanctioned immolation of MOVE’s home is among the starkest and most gruesome annihilations of a so-called cult in the United States. Evans’s chronicle of MOVE’s history is both sorely needed and hauntingly timely.

Who Were MOVE?

MOVE: An American Religion is, to the best of my knowledge, the first and only monograph-length treatment of the group John Africa founded in 1972 as the Christian Movement for Life. MOVE wanted to live and raise their children in their best understanding of their natural world. Members signaled their commitment to a natural lifestyle by taking the surname Africa, in connection with the continent they called Mother. They resisted technology, medical science, and “progress” as unnatural and unhealthy, especially for Black people.

(Photo of MOVE members. Photo by Leif Skoogfors for Getty Images.)

At the time of MOVE’s founding, the state of North Carolina was still forcibly sterilizing Black women. The medical establishment consistently failed Black Americans; indeed, it continues to fail Black people today. Given these systemic racist problems, John Africa’s concerns were perhaps less radical and less irrational than Philadelphia law enforcement made them out to be, even as MOVE’s customs troubled their neighbors and provided a cover of excuses for police violence.

On May 13, 1985, Mayor Wilson Goode gave Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor permission to drop a makeshift bomb—an IED, one could say—on the building that was MOVE’s home. Flames quickly spread to adjoining rowhomes, and Sambor told firefighters to “let the fire burn.” Sixty-one houses were destroyed in the predominantly Black neighborhood of West Philadelphia; 250 people lost their homes. Police violence claimed eleven lives, including those of five Africa children.

(Photo of the bomb’s destruction. Photo by George Widman for Associated Press.)

University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Mann removed the remains of two of those children without MOVE survivors’ knowledge or permission from the city medical examiner’s office. Until April of this year, Penn Museum curator Janet Monge was using these children’s bones in a Princeton University online forensic anthropology course.

Princeton and the Penn Museum have since apologized for this desecration, for what it’s worth. It’s actually worth very little, especially following a Penn-funded independent investigation that condemned Mann and Monge for “extremely poor judgement and gross insensitivity,” but ultimately concluded neither anthropologist violated “any relevant professional, ethical, or legal standards.”

Given the infamy of other so-called cults’ demise—think Jonestown; think Waco; think Heaven’s Gate; the mental images are immediate, visceral, unsettling—it seems impossible that so violent and public a conflict could escape either public memory or academic scrutiny. And yet MOVE has largely done both until quite recently. Evans’s MOVE: An American Religion deftly blends the rich and largely overlooked history of John Africa’s family and the community he founded with a crucial theoretical intervention for how we think about religion, cults, and the space (if any) between the two.

Defining Religion

Through his painstaking engagement with MOVE’s history, Evans outlines the stakes of counting as a “real” religion in the United States. “Religion is a category of privilege, the ramifications of which, in MOVE’s case, were literally life and death,” he argues. We cannot understand MOVE as an organization or as a target of state-sanctioned violence if we do not account for religion’s weight, significance, and precarity.

MOVE had a sacred text, a prophetic and charismatic leader, an etiological worldview, and ritual practices; MOVE members called themselves a religion. Evans writes, “We see, in MOVE, people striving toward what they believed was a better world and grappling with what it means to be authentically human. We see the voiceless and the marginalized believing in their own agency. All of this — the pain and the joy, hypocrisy and commitment, violence and peace, despair and hope, life-giving and death-bringing — is precisely what religion is.”

But as Evans devastatingly illustrates, an American religion is defined not by its members but by its regulators. The bombing of MOVE’s home at 6621 Osage Avenue is best understood, he argues, “as the secular state preempting ‘illegitimate’ religious violence with ‘legitimate’ state violence.” In short: understanding MOVE as a cult, rather than as a religion, allowed Philadelphia officials to destroy the movement and murder several of its members with impunity. The homes of MOVE’s neighbors were collateral damage in a definitional war of religion.

***

“Cult,” as Princeton religion professor Judith Weisenfeld teaches us, says more about those who use the descriptor than about those so described. MOVE: An American Religion helps us see that “cult” represents not an empirical reality but a political battleground and a convenient vehicle for systemic racial and religious intolerance. Philadelphia law enforcement’s response to MOVE-as-cult tells us nominally secular institutions can, have, and will define and defend American religion in explosive, murderous ways. Evans’s evocative book denies us—as it should—any further claims to ignorance or indifference about the stakes of defining American religion.

Megan Goodwin is Program Director of Sacred Writes: Public Scholarship on Religion, co-host of  Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion Podcast, and the author of Abusing Religion (Rutgers 2020). Follow her on twitter @mpgphd.

The post Bombing American Religion to Save It appeared first on The Revealer.

The Apocalypse and the End of History is a rich inquiry into the history and current nature of political violence. Taking as its premise that to understand violence abroad, we have to take a much closer look at home, the book methodically explains the interwoven roles of religion, neoliberalism, democracy, economics, colonialism and media in producing not only “jihadi” violence, but drone strikes and mass shootings. The book is not about flat equivalences, but about asking challenging questions about how we got here and where we’re going. I always learn from my conversations with Schneider and am very glad that we had a chance to talk about her book on the occasion of its publication.

Kali Handelman: This might be a wildly unfair question, especially right out of the gate, but… If there were one thing you could change about the way we talk about jihad, what would it be?           

Suzanne Schneider: I know you said one thing, but I’m going to respond with two that are intimately linked (so it’s not quite cheating): first, jihad is not a singular phenomenon that assumes the same form over time, such that the ISIS jihad is not functionally the same thing as the Bosnian jihad in the early 1990s, which is itself very different than the one declared by the Ottoman Empire in 1914, which likewise differed from medieval declarations of jihad during the Crusades. Recognizing jihad as a diverse and historically evolving practice makes it possible to cast aside the biggest misconception in the West, namely that it is an instantiation of medieval barbarism left over from less enlightened times. On the contrary, and this is the second thing, I’ve come to the conclusion that should be far more unsettling, namely that today’s jihad–at least in its Islamic State guise (and I really want to underscore here that I am specifically talking about ISIS)–is a hypermodern phenomenon that has a great deal to teach us not about the past, but about a possible future.

KH: This book is, in a sense, a response to the question you pose in the introduction: “Why have the last several decades proven so generative for a particular type of religious militancy, and what does this fact indicate not merely about conditions ‘over there” but about those far closer to home?’ In responding, you argue convincingly that we are in the midst of a global change in our relationships to violence and thus, we need to consider much more deeply what you call an “uncomfortable proximity” between “home” and “over there” — that is, to put it bluntly, between mujahideen and mass shooters. There are a number of references to media, again, “ours” and “theirs,” in the book. Through these references, you put “our” Glenn Beck, Bill Maher, Braveheart, and Aladdin and “their” Dabiq and al-Naba in close proximity to one another. I wonder if you could put a finer point on the role of media — film, TV, news, marketing newsletters, etc. — as it impacts our changing relationship to violence? What does this media do? And what does it tell us about our “uncomfortable proximity”?

SS: I think readers of the Revealer probably already know this, but it is worth underscoring the extent to which new forms of spectacular violence exist in a relationship of codependence with the media channels that cover them. There are a number of facets to this relationship but we should note that it is bi-directional: Suicide attacks and on-screen excecutions are tailor-made for a world with instantaneous communication networks, a 24/7 news cycle, and globalized social media — but so too the profit model of capitalist journalism incentivizes sensational coverage. So there is something mutually constitutive in nature about contemporary terrorism, media, and spectacle — that is the first thing to note.

Looking at Islamic State media offers another point where we can and should push back against the idea that the group is “barbaric” or “medieval,” because the style of spectacular violence they embrace is in part determined by this media ecosystem. Moreover, a more nuanced reading of this violence reveals that far from being the polar opposite of “our” enlightened values, it is a dark mirror of capitalism’s inner logic. After all, as tragic as it may be in ethical terms, executing a hostage in the Syrian desert accomplishes very little if that video cannot be shared and watched the world over. It is certainly true that such executions offered the Islamic State unique opportunities to humiliate the world’s greatest superpower, inflicting a psychological blow that far exceeded the group’s material capacities.

(ISIS Fighters at the Syrian Border. Photo by Medyan Dairieh for ZUMA Press.)

Given the real asymmetries of power involved, politics here is largely reduced to spectacle and–perhaps most distressing from an ethical perspective–victims are regarded as props in the production of such spectacle. Nor is this merely a continuation of the forms of violence practiced by earlier generations of revolutionaries, who Brian Michael Jenkis aptly described in 1975 when he said “terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” Contrast this with a more recent Islamic State directive: “The objective of hostage-taking in the lands of disbelief—and specifically in relation to just terror operations—is not to hold large numbers of the kuffar (disbelievers) hostage in order to negotiate one’s demands. Rather, the objective is to create as much carnage and terror as one possibly can until Allah decrees his appointed time and the enemies of Allah storm his location or succeed in killing him.”

I find it noteworthy that the victims here are regarded as utterly disposable, which is part of why I think there is something nihilist about the Islamic State’s deployment of spectacular violence. However attention grabbing, such attacks are unable to replace secular modes of governance with the Caliphate; they will not conquer Rome (meaning the West more generally) or impose shari‘a globally. They are a means to an “end.” But that end is a tragic farce that bears no chance of realization.

Of course, it is not shari‘a that has bequeathed us with the idea of the disposable human body, but modern capitalism — a fact the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed in all its brutal force. That is to say, if there is something “barbaric” about the Islamic State, it is a barbarism that is also present in the broader world. I think many people in the West remain very uncomfortable with the idea that a group like the Islamic State might actually be a dark reflection of liberalism’s inner logic rather than its pure negation — a phenomenon that reveals what is latent in the present political, economic, and social order. In fact, not unlike other reactionary movements, there is a dual motion of mimicry and negation involved here whereby ISIS ostensibly rejects the principles of the prevailing (neo)liberal order all while it is unable to shake many of that system’s foundational assumptions and modes of mobilization.

Within this context, the idea of an absolute difference between “us” and “them,” or “our” violence and “theirs,” no doubt does some important psychological work, but it also is a crucial part of system preservation — of reassuring people that the Caliphate’s violence comes from somewhere foreign or exotic, the medieval world or the Islamic one — elsewhere in short. That is why cases involving mass shooters who have sworn allegiance to the Caliphate, such as the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, or the attack at a San Bernardino office building, are so challenging to process. The American public desperately wants some differentiation between such attacks and the rather frequent mass shootings by white, disaffected Christian men. And it is noteworthy that ISIS too wants differentiation, going so far as to instruct would-be assailants in Western countries to “leave some kind of evidence or insignia identifying the motive and allegiance to the Khalifah [Caliph]” lest “the operation be mistaken for one of the many random acts of violence that plague the West.”

KH: To come back more directly to religion, you write in the book about how “we might wonder how militants’ rather dim view of democracy intersects with the waning faith in that system in the west” and ask “what might the Islamic State’s approach to governance have to teach us about the changing nature of political life more broadly?” I wondered if we might think a bit more about what work the term “faith” is doing here. What does it mean, from a religious studies perspective, to have “faith” in a political system and how might that, too, be a discursive symptom of particular Protestant experience? What work does the word “faith” do in revealing or obscuring the role of religion and/or religious discourse in how we think about politics? And how might it help us better understand losses of faith, like, say, the January 6 Trumpist attack on the Capital?

SS: It’s an excellent and interesting question. I think the idioms of faith suggest themselves when talking about democracy because there are two primary ways of maintaining a state: legitimacy and coercion. There is a tendency to regard the former as having something to do with faith – i.e. for democracy to work, the people have to believe in it. We still have not exited the land of idealism here, which imagines that states and societies can be remade by altering the way people think about them. I’m being a little cheeky, of course, but only a little: this was the basic assumption that has undergirded countless democracy promotion programs in the Middle East and North Africa, and that was also central to imperial exploits like the Iraq war. It is an incredibly shallow view of democracy.

All that said, I don’t dismiss the idiom of faith entirely. Maintaining stable governments over time does require some sort of popular buy-in, belief even, in the legitimacy of the system in question. But people do not believe in democracy in an abstract ideological fashion as being “the best” style of government just because it is repeated ad nauseum, but because it delivers certain material benefits that are apparent in their everyday lives. Without such benefits, you are left with the hollowed-out shell of ideology, one that is increasingly contradicted by daily experience.

What does this look like in practice? Anecdotes are limited as analytic tools, but I’m going to offer one anyway because I think it does speak to something broader and more elemental. My mom is engaged in a dispute with Medicaid over receiving certain services for her sister, who is an 85-year old with severe cerebral palsy and who has few personal assets and lives in a nursing home. But the process of taking up a complaint with a government agency has all the joys of calling Verizon to haggle about your bill: the endless phone tree and web of people who lack the authority to actually help you. So she has taken to contacting her representative in Congress as well as the representative in my aunt’s district, writing and calling in almost weekly for well over a year to see if they can help with her dispute. She got a response from a staffer once, I believe, just to request more information, but it has otherwise been radio silence. Now, this is just a personal story, but it points to a substantive lack of democratic responsiveness when the mechanisms of government are just as opaque and unaccountable as a sprawling multinational corporation. Democracy is reduced to the ability to vote every two or four years for the person who will not respond to, to say nothing of address, your real needs.

This type of experience is corrosive to people’s “faith” in democracy because it reflects a material failure of democratic governance. This leaves the door open to entertaining various authoritarian alternatives: maybe the military would run the show with greater efficiency, or a swamp-drainer could Make Bureaucracy Great Again. It isn’t that ideology is unimportant, but it cannot be maintained without some degree of correspondence to people’s actual experiences. What’s happening in this case is a legitimation crisis, where belief in the capacity of the existing order to deliver anything of substance is wavering. And back to the original point, if this experience–it is really a loss of faith in some sense–becomes widely shared, it is detrimental to maintaining the present order other than through increased reliance on coercion.

KH: You make a really compelling argument in the book about neoliberalism as a “colonial blowback,” that is, something “prefigured — if not actively constructed — in the colonial world.” Which led me to want to ask you about decolonization. The attention you pay to clearly defining neoliberalism is so valuable — unpicking the elements of privatization, management, and individualism — in all its forms and impacts. If the goal is to build “a world safe from authoritarian politics and nihilist violence in all its guises” what role does decolonization play?

SS: Yes, it has been noteworthy to see how certain features of colonial life have become evident in advanced industrialized countries like the U.S. and U.K., whether it’s race-to-the-bottom tax avoidance schemes designed to lure major corporations or the increased presence of private security personnel guarding the estates of the very wealthy. The bigger picture here, and the reason that thinking in terms of colonial predecessors is useful, is one of state capture and redeployment as a tool for advancing capital. Perhaps the key function of the colonial state in a place like Nigeria or India was to undermine and/or punish any sort of democratic resistance to the violence–material, environmental, social–inherent in this order.

It might be tempting to contrast the present with the so-called “good old days” of earlier decades, when labor was strong and inequality was far less severe in Western Europe or the U.S. It is certainly the case that those years represented an instance of increased democratization of the state structure, which yielded expanded franchise, progressive taxation, and curtailed corporate power, and did enable certain gains for the white middle classes. Yet this accord still rested on a great deal of imperial violence abroad: witness the post-war oil politics in Nigeria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. This dynamic literally built the modern state of Saudi Arabia (as Robert Vitalis has vividly demonstrated in America’s Kingdom), deposed Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran, and propelled Nigeria into a non-sovereign state status, where the government largely acted to advance the interest Royal Dutch Shell regardless of the incredible environmental damage caused by oil production — from which until very recently, people have been blocked from seeking any redress. What we see in these latter instances, and I think have begun to see in the Global North as well, is the inability or unwillingness of the state to intervene on behalf of the public good. It is rather a mechanism for advancing private power and undermining any popular resistance to the vast inequities involved through violence.

Given this context, the idea and practice of decolonization can be helpful for a few reasons. First it demonstrates that the post-WWII period was not a Golden Age for all involved. Democratic gains and better material conditions in the Global North cannot be built upon the continued degradation of those in the Global South — and indeed, part of the conceptual task that decolonization can assist with is breaking away from the idea that human flourishing is a zero sum game with winners and losers. Certainly those of us in the West can learn from anti-colonial revolutions in Asia and Africa, where people expressed a clear desire to attain a state that could work to advance the public good by taming the rapacious power of capital. But we might also learn something about why some of these revolutionary projects faltered: how appeals to national unity can defer dealing with underlying structural inequalities or breed a new crop of authoritarian rulers.

Finally, and this brings us back to the question of state capacity, decolonization does not entail the abandonment of the state, but rather its subjection to democratic control. This would entail not only genuine public oversight over the use of violence, but the evolution of the state structure into a vehicle that could actively intervene on behalf of the public good. Decolonizing education, for instance, is not merely about diversifying syllabi or ensuring teachers take part in anti-bias training. These things can be good – but they can also be co-opted to forestall needed structural changes related to access, funding, facilities, staffing, and support services — not to mention how we envision the purpose of schooling, which has narrowed under neoliberalism so as to be basically market competitiveness and economic success.

To keep with this example, decolonizing education thus demands a few interlocking things: to articulate a far more capacious view of education and learning that currently in circulation, one that regards children as human beings rather than mere units of economic productivity; to redress the historic damage wrought by education–both the lack of it, and its provision (thinking of Lakota boarding schools in my home state of South Dakota)–within BIPOC communities; to wrestle with the legacies of white supremacy on both an epistemological and structural level; and to use the state as a vehicle for advancing democratic alternatives. Decolonization means living in a society where these aspirations are achievable — or at least deemed less utopian than establishing a Silicon Valley outpost on Mars.

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

Suzanne Schneider is Deputy Director and Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, specializing in the political and social history of the modern Middle East. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine and writes broadly about political violence, militancy, and American foreign policy.

The post Religious Militancy Overseas and Its Messages at Home appeared first on The Revealer.

This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

***

In 2019, evangelical psychologist James Dobson warned Colorado families that their “deeply held Christian convictions” were under attack. He was referring to a proposed bill to expand public school sex education programs, over which a heated debate had erupted in the state. Even though Colorado had previously banned abstinence-only education, the proposal to provide additional funding and add topics such as sexual consent to the already ex­isting comprehensive sexuality education programs led to an outpouring of opposition and support. Letters flooded in, citizens drove to the capital to testify for and against the bill, and legislators gave emotional pleas on each side. Now, over fifty years after the initial round of the sex education con­troversies in the United States, the debate is alive and well between those advocating comprehensive sexuality education and those who promote abstinence-only education. Even though many curricula actually provide a mixture of progressive and conservative messages, strong alignments with either approach have caused rifts and cultural confusion over whether young Americans need more or less information about sex.

Conservative evangelical Christians like James Dobson who championed the message of remaining abstinent until marriage have been the loudest religious voices within recent controversies, leading to the impression that “religion”—as if this were a unified concept—seeks to restrict sexual infor­mation. The association of sex education with the secular nature of public schools has contributed to this claim. However, a longer historical view challenges these simplifications, revealing that religious sex educators have shaped the movement for public sex education continuously since its roots in the late nineteenth-century United States. They co-founded the major organ­izations that guided sex education, including the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) in 1914 and the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in 1964. Since then, religious sex educators have worked continuously through or in partnership with these groups. Their advocacy paved the way for many types of sex education, some of which directly countered their goals for both religion and sexuality.

Before conservative Christians launched a series of attacks on sex educa­tion in the late 1960s, religious liberals—primarily liberal Protestants—set the tone for religion within public sex education. Those motivated by liberal religious interpretations pushed sex education in new directions and into dif­ferent public spaces, contributing to a number of substantial shifts in themes and instructional approaches. Ultimately, they created many of the terms on which recent sex education debates have been waged. Through engagement in sex education and acceptance as authorities on the moral dimensions of sexuality, they found opportunities to integrate their progressive religious worldviews and agendas with scientific and cultural understandings of sexuality. Encounters with medical and social scientific trends within sex education organizations inspired strategies for adapting Christianity to a quickly changing society, thereby showing its continued vitality.

The history of sex education therefore cannot be separated from the story of liberal Protestants in the United States. While some Protestant sex educators took part in more radical liberal religious movements such as Unitarianism and the Free Religious Association, most were of the moderate variety of Protestant liberalism affiliated with mainline denominations, es­pecially those that became members of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America (FCC) and its successor, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America (NCC). With di­verse Christian interpretations and motivations at the table, they found common ground in their interest in sex education as a way to guide children, strengthen marriages, and deepen America’s attention to morality. As liberal Protestants, they shared a commitment to adapting Christianity to modern culture. Anchoring their sex education work was a belief in the fundamental compatibility of religious and scientific truths and the ongoing revelation of God through the world over time. Because they believed God’s truths were revealed through both nature and society, science could help humans to know God better and social reform could bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. Many were influenced by the social gospel, a loosely organized Christian movement committed to social reforms in order to fulfill this pro­gressive religious vision for society. They promoted ecumenical cooperation and appreciated historical critical readings of the Bible that situated biblical truths within their historical contexts and literary genres. Liberal Protestant stances were increasingly defined in opposition to the Protestant fundamen­talist movement, which distanced itself from other Christians, mainstream scientific authority, and selective dimensions of secular culture.

Liberal Protestant sex educators invoked moral frameworks to both ex­pand instruction and inhibit sexual behavior, and these efforts, I argue, laid groundwork for the later emergence of both comprehensive sexuality edu­cation and abstinence-only education. While values deemed “liberal” and “conservative” within contemporary sex education disputes seem starkly opposed, that was not always the case. Throughout much of this history, contractive and expansive positions about sexuality were combined or existed alongside one another rather than being separated into opposing camps. Amalgamation was, in part, a way to gain cultural acceptance. Sex educators tempered more radical ideas of the time, including their basic goal of teaching sexual information to youth, with moderate and conservative messages, often strategically framing the former as in service to the latter. Religious language also softened the impersonal, detail-oriented termi­nology of science, which was sometimes viewed as too harsh or shocking for such a socially charged topic. Although scientifically trained sex educators argued that objective distance and precision could raise the subject out of the gutters and sanitize it, the question of obscenity continued to lurk near the surface. Liberal religious sex educators paired the “scientific exemption” that shielded most medical professionals from censorship on issues of sexuality with what I call the moral exemption that bolstered its protection as a topic addressed by respectable Christians.

Liberal religious people were well positioned to mediate the challenge of balancing change and continuity within sex education because of their in­terest in adapting religious traditions to modern conditions. They advanced conservative perspectives by teaching sex education as moral education and emphasizing premarital sexual purity, the restriction of sexual behavior to monogamous marriages between men and women, and the importance of framing sexuality by Christian family values. Attaching these stances to their cause leveraged significant cultural currency because the concept of fami­lies based around monogamous marriages had deep-seated connections to American culture. Through their prescriptive lessons, they also shaped constructions of heterosexuality and family life that took on hegemonic status by the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, religious sex educators developed progressive approaches that employed the concept of morality to promote frank public discourse, to broaden sexuality’s scope beyond physical intercourse, to advocate positive interpretations of sexuality, and to adapt to scientific advancements and societal changes. In the 1960s, some of them would also use the idea of the “new morality” to open conversations about sexual diversity.

Interest in morality, therefore, played a role in both progressive and re­strictive impulses within the sex education movement. While religious sex educators were certainly not the only ones advocating the moral dimension of sex education—many educators and physicians echoed these interests—those who actively identified their sex education work with religion were most vocal and persistent in keeping morality tied to the cause of sex ed­ucation. The framework of morality gained traction among scientific sex educators, many of whom were eager to disprove the notion that doctors condoned illicit sexual activity just because they offered “quick fixes” for preventing or treating venereal disease. A growing number of education experts within the movement, too, embraced it out of concern for developing morally responsible citizens.

As a desire to shape moral behavior permeated sex education, religious people had a diffuse but powerful avenue for advancing their values, one that simultaneously helped them to convince churches that sex educators were moral reformers. Liberal religious sex educators’ broad framing of morality rested on their belief in the goodness of human nature and the capability of humans to strive toward ethical actions. Because they viewed God as imma­nent in nature and society, the Bible was treated as one source of moral au­thority among many, and its lessons needed to be understood within their original contexts and adapted in order to be most useful. For sex educators, morality took on new meanings in different settings, from the push for moral education about character building to the later situation ethics of the “new morality,” becoming a catchall for introducing various religious concerns into the movement. As religious studies scholar Anthony Petro noted in his study of Christian responses to AIDS, “Few words have the potential to carry as much authority or to be as rhetorically flexible as morality.” As such, it has become an important “site of translation” between the religious and the secular.

In addition to the concept of morality, the ideal of nonsectarian Christianity facilitated the introduction of religious concerns into sec­ular versions of sex education. Instead of just secular and religious spheres, the liberal Protestants of early sex education divided their explicitly reli­gious efforts further between nonsectarian and denominational work. The boundaries between these categories required ongoing negotiations, espe­cially with the growing public awareness that “nonsectarian” approaches within public schools reflected strong Protestant biases and insufficiently accommodated Catholics and Jews—the religious “others” with whom Protestants most frequently interacted. Public schools became more as­sociated with secularism as explicit religious exercises were increasingly removed in the early twentieth century. Because sex education faced a slow and rocky start in schools (with the exception of colleges), most sex educa­tion work occurred through nonsectarian voluntary organizations that pro­moted a general but predominantly liberal view of Christianity—and, by the mid-twentieth century, a “Judeo-Christian” notion of religion—with which they believed almost all people could agree. From this foundation of nonsec­tarian voluntary work, religious leaders then brought sex education to their churches and denominations, where more specific theologies influenced the topic of sexuality.

Liberal Protestant sex educators celebrated this trifold division of labor between the secular, the nonsectarian, and denominations, seeing each arena as complementary and necessary to the others. When engaging the broader public beyond specific churches, they balanced between secular and non­sectarian values that they viewed as broadly acceptable to guide the public; this was one of their answers to accommodating religious pluralism in a country that separated church and state. After the 1960s, complementarity and cooperation between these three areas of sex education could no longer be assumed as sex education began to grow within public schools, which became more wary of both denominational and nonsectarian religious approaches. These alignments redistributed more of the liberal religious sex education work into denominations, leaving a public void that conservative Christians would fill with abstinence-only education.

Nonsectarian Christian versions of sex education flourished within or­ganizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Federal Council of Churches and its successor, the National Council of Churches, as well as through the military education provided by chaplains. Nonsectarian Christianity also operated quite freely within ASHA and the early days of SIECUS, mingling with and being supported by the scientific orientation of the movements. The strategy of masking Protestant distinctiveness in the framework of nonsectarian universality was an old one to gain religious con­sensus. In this case, it worked to integrate liberal Protestant values into a movement dominated by scientific professionals and education experts. At the same time, downplaying explicit markers of Protestantism such as the­ological doctrines, biblical passages, and evangelism in favor of general Christian ideas of morality and family values distanced sex educators from more conservative Protestants, who liberals scorned as promoting religious dogmas and the repression of sexuality.

Morality permeated many dimensions of sex education. Indeed, studies have noted a preoccupation with morals within every phase of its his­tory, which underscores the need for research on religious involvement. However, scholars’ primary interest in professionals of science, public health, education, or the government has produced academic interpretations of mo­rality as intrusive—a nuisance that tarnished secular plans. For example, in her history of the government’s hygiene campaigns, Alexandra Lord argued that moral frameworks prevented scientists and public health officials from effectively dealing with syphilis and gonorrhea. Many comprehensive sex­uality educators, too, have reinforced this narrative, lumping morality with the abstinence-only work that runs counter to their goals. While moral con­siderations undoubtedly informed and complicated scientific treatment of venereal diseases and the teaching of public sex education, they also moti­vated many sex educators, spurred public interest, provided legitimacy in the context of obscenity charges and cultural silences, and situated sex ed­ucation within a larger social matrix, expanding responsibility to individ­uals, parents, churches, schools, and government. By retelling the history of the sex education movement with a focus on religion, I contextualize morality’s entanglements with other agendas and elucidate its various uses and meanings. While morality was not merely a synonym for religion, reli­gious representatives maintained a strong claim to be the moral experts of the movement and left an imprint of religion on the term.

Liberal religious sex educators sought to improve morality at the na­tional level by acting outside of traditional religious institutions, as many Americans feared that churches were no longer the most effective instruments for influencing society. For Protestant sex educators, their work enacted the social gospel of building the Kingdom of God on earth through the improvement of society. Applying Christian messages to social problems beyond churches reaffirmed religion’s immediate significance. The work came full circle when Protestant sex educators brought the work back to their churches, transforming these institutions into tools for sex education. In the long term, however, religious contributors to the mainstream sex education movement created the terms of their own exit. By ceding certain authority to scientific experts and allowing denominations to take over the religious dimensions of sex education, liberal religious leadership in the secular realm of sex education became less visible.

Kristy Slominski is Assistant Professor of Religion, Science, and Health at the University of Arizona.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out our conversation with Kristy Slominski in episode 17 of the Revealer podcast: “Sex Education and Religion in Public Schools.”

The post Teaching America’s Adolescents about Sex appeared first on The Revealer.

(Rachel Sennott as Danielle in Shiva Baby)

The thing about Shiva Baby’s main character, Danielle, is that she’s not that nice. She’s petulant to her parents who ask her to come to a shiva (post-funeral Jewish mourning visit); she’s defensive to her ex-girlfriend Maya who is unexpectedly at the shiva and wants to reconnect; she’s petty to her parents’ friends who keep grabbing her cheeks, her clothes, her waist (“you’ve lost so much weight,” they say passive-aggressively); she’s downright rude to Kim, the sleek shiksa (non-Jewish) goddess who offers her a job. (“I’m not really into that girl-boss thing,” Dani sneers to Kim’s face.) And yet, she is utterly gripping. In this serpent coil of a film where every minute tightens the tension even more (and more, and more, to the point where the audience is about to break, let alone Dani herself) we can’t keep our eyes off of her. The film is enthralling partly because actor Rachel Sennott is brilliant in the lead role. But the main reason the film captivates is because Dani is familiar – for American Ashkenazi Jews, and for everyone who has ever encountered a stereotype of them.

While wildly different in post-millennial ways, Shiva Baby might remind viewers of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm. The whole set-up is an engaging combination of what people think they know about Jewish community and rituals and how Judaism actually works on the ground. As skin-crawling and uncomfortable as the entire “running-into-your-sugar-daddy-and-also-your-ex-girlfriend-while-comforting-mourners-with-your-anxious-parents” situation is, it’s also as comfortable as lox and cream cheese, intrusive relatives and squabbling parents, awkward exes and secret relationships – with a siddur (prayerbook), a hot rabbi, and a kaddish (mourning prayer) thrown in. The film both is and is not like your bubbe’s (grandmother’s) shiva (“poo poo poo god forbid.”)

Shiva Baby is 77 minutes of tension chronicling Danielle’s worst-ever day in the company of everyone her parents have ever known. It’s horror cringe comedy with Yiddish and bagels and a rabbi who looks like “Robert DeNiro and Gene Kelly had a Jewish baby.” Limping along toward her college degree in, as her mother predictably says, “something-gender-something-self-constructed,” it turns out that Dani has a side hustle to pay the bills, and it’s not, as she’s been telling her parents, babysitting. Well, not exactly. Dani rushed to the shiva from a sugar daddy date; her hair is less perfect than she’d like (and gets progressively frizzier throughout the film) and the contrast between the agency she exercises in her sex work and the grouch adolescent she immediately becomes in her parent’s home is stark. Dani’s failure to live up to her parents’ ideal, let alone her own, is underscored at the shiva when we see Dani with her successful ex-girlfriend Maya, there in all her straight-haired, law schooled glory. Of course, the last thing Dani wanted to do was bump into her ex-girlfriend at the shiva of someone she’s not even sure she knew. Scratch that: it’s the second-to-last thing she wanted. The last thing she wanted was to bump into her sugar daddy, an older man who secretly pays her for the pleasure of her company, intimacy, and body.

Dani got both, served with a side of rugalech (which shiksa goddess Kim calls “aruglah” and don’t think everyone didn’t notice and mock her), gossip, actually-not-well-meaning-advice, passive aggressive compliments about how thin she has become, and plenty of questions about what she is going to do after finishing a degree in Gender Studies. Like any Jewish daughter knows, the key to surviving these questions is lying, best with the help of a parental accomplice. Dani’s mother, a mash-up of every Jewish mother stereotype in one (to the point where maybe it’s a little painful, and definitely way too much), agrees (and okay maybe she suggests it), that they develop a “sound-bite” (Dani’s words) about all her upcoming job interviews and prospects. Of course, Dani is lying to her mother and father about her sex work, and her mother and father are lying to themselves about her bisexuality.

Soon after arriving to the shiva, Dani’s mother cautions her against any “funny business,” which we learn is code for queer intimacy. To her parents, Dani’s relationship with Maya was fine for high school, a shenanigan like studying gender or taking time off before law school. It’s not “real,” and it’s best left behind. Here we see both a denial of bisexuality as a “phase” and a deeper struggle with ambiguity: while progressive Jews have long supported gay marriage and LGBTQ rights, there is still a strong emphasis among American Jews to settle down with one person and to raise Jewish children, with a side of “gay relationships are fine for everyone else’s kids.” Dani’s mother would likely be horrified by homophobia in other people. But when it comes to her daughter, she is still waiting for Dani to settle down with a nice Jewish boy. Or maybe a nice Jewish girl, if she were forced in to it. But one or the other already, and really, a boy.

(Dianna Agron in Shiva Baby)

The film is filled with intertextuality: #actuallyJewish actress Dianna Agron, famous for her role as Quinn Fabray on Glee, has made a career playing shiksa princesses, a role she revives here with a wink of her perfectly naturally made-up eyes. A maybe-jealous Maya describes Kim as “Malibu Barbie;” a definitely jealous Dani responds that she’s “basic, generic, boring.” Kim is the outsider here, and she knows it, and she’s knows something is up with Dani but she can’t possibly guess what. Or can she? She knows for sure that Dani is no babysitter, but it’s not clear if she knows that Dani is actually a (sugar) baby with her husband.

Kim seems perfect, but she doesn’t know what to call things and she’s doesn’t know not to bring a baby to the shiva. (Though for the record I’ve been to plenty of shivas with babies: it’s fine, as long as they are quiet. This one wasn’t.) Dani’s getting everything wrong in her life, but she knows how to do a shiva right. She knows where to stand and when to get food and who to help and even to kiss the siddurim (prayer books) when they fall, though perhaps she doesn’t need to kiss them quite so slowly and one-by-one. Kim and Dani are both sides of the same coin: one messy, with brown curly hair that frizzes, and one with perfect long blonde hair and perfect skin and perfect clothes and a perfect job and a perfect life. Except both are sleeping with the same man, and he is lying to everyone.

But so is Dani. She’s lying to her parents about where she gets her money. She’s lying to Max, the sugar daddy she bumps into at the shiva: she’s not actually saving money for law school tuition. She’s lying to Maya: she doesn’t actually remember whose shiva it is (Uncle Morty’s second wife’s sister, for the record) and she isn’t really sad about that woman’s death. And she’s lying to herself: she misses Maya and she misses community and really, she doesn’t have anything figured out at all.

And it’s her messiness that ultimately makes her tolerable. She’s panicking, and she’s in pain, and she’s spiraling, and she’s losing. She’s losing her grip, and she’s losing the fight. We all know – now more than ever – what it means to lose our grip and lose the fight. We all know – now more than ever – what it means to sit in ever increasing tension and just let go with one long scream.

There’s no happy ending in this film, no nicely resolved package, but there are small moments of tenderness and love, and even, in the horror show that is the shiva itself, there is one long steady stream of care. Every pinch of the cheek, every wipe of schmutz (dirt) off her punim (face), even every intrusive question about jobs and futures and weight and love is a way of showing care, of taking care, of giving care. Dani rejects it with her abrupt answers and her insincere smiles and her offers of help designed to let her escape. But she also rejects it all because she can: these people, she knows, may – nay will – gossip about her behind her back (and to her face) and boy will her mother hear about it the next day, but they will all still be there.

I wouldn’t say that’s the enduring message of the movie, or even its goal. Originally a short film, Shiva Baby plays like a carefully constructed and tightly plotted stage play, with mounting tension and no breaks or relief. It could be too much at the 77-minute running time, but it works, partly because of the excellent acting and partly because the cultural stereotypes (which, for some, are especially familiar) provides a kind of comfort that serves to break it up. We may not know Dani or Maya or her parents, but we’ve seen them depicted before. And that might be a bit lazy and it might flit with some misogynistic tropes of the overbearing Jewish mother and the emasculated Jewish father; yet still, it works. We don’t quite laugh when Dani’s parents eye the crowd hungrily looking for who they know who might know someone who can give Dani a job. But we do roll our eyes knowingly, because of course that’s exactly what we imagine someone’s overbearing, squabbling, supportive, stereotypical Jewish parents would do at a shiva, along with whipping out photos and being embarrassing about sex in some way or other. Like the pithy quip that Catholics never talk about sex but are always having it; Jews, as the joke goes, are always talking about it (remember – Freud was Jewish!) but are never actually having it.

While the film gets a few things wrong about Jewish ritual life, it isn’t really a film about mourning rituals, or mourners at all. We don’t see the low-to-the-ground chairs that the principal mourners typically sit in, which would be rented from the funeral home and brought in a handy shiva-in-a-box kit along with a candle that burns for the duration of the shiva. We can’t tell if the mourners’ clothing is ripped or if they are wearing a ripped ribbon, but it is almost certainly the latter; ripping actual clothing (which would then be worn the entire week) is becoming increasingly rare outside of the Orthodox world. Indeed, much of the shiva rituals are designed to remove the obligation to vanity: principle mourners traditionally don’t greet guests, serve as hosts, prepare their own food, or worry about their appearance. But in the film, as is increasingly common, the mirrors remain resolutely uncovered, as we learn in a pivotal scene in the bathroom that hinges on Dani looking at her own reflection. Vanity, the film seems to say, is still very much present in this space.

Despite its name and the proliferation of people Dani has slept with, Shiva Baby is not a particularly erotic film; the specter of sex is more sketchy than sensual. But it is central. Dani’s parents play out a particular version of Jewish sexuality, with the anxious mother and the passive father and endless squabbling and love. If they are the boomer version, Dani’s the zoomer: a gender-studies-sex-worker-bisexual-lost-soul. But even as Dani and her mother are different, both women share anxiety and an aching awareness of how they appear to others. Dani’s bisexuality is a sticking point only insofar as it highlights her failed relationships and her search for connection; while there is a clear pressure on Dani to conform, of which heteronormativity is a part, her sex work is likely more problematic for her parents than her queerness. After all, her relationship with Maya wasn’t a secret to them or anyone else at the shiva, even if they refuse to accept it as meaningful. Which, in a way, Dani herself also refuses to do until, in the most touching scene of this not-particularly-touching film, Dani and Maya embrace, and we see, for the first time, Dani uncoils.

Well, maybe for the second time in the film. The first time is when Dani gives in to her – and the audience’s – impulse and begins to scream. We are all, in a way, waiting for it. But when it comes, it is no kind of release. That’s the thing about family and ritual and community and the people who have known you all your life: in the best-case scenario, even when they exacerbate everything you struggle with, they are there. They will offer you a lift home, albeit with your ex-girlfriend and your sugar daddy and his wife and baby crammed into a messy minivan. There is no release. But these kinds of family moments form their own kind of ritual within the larger life-cycle events that create and sustain community, Jewish or otherwise. And in that too can be comfort, even when it is challenging: you know exactly what to expect the next time you bump into your sugar daddy at a shiva: bagels and lox and pinches on the cheek and job offers and a siddur to kiss. And maybe a baby, if a shiksa goddess accidentally brings one to the shiva.

Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at Drexel University. Her most recent book is Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other. You can find clips of her freelance writing at www.sharronapearl.com.

The post A Baby at the Shiva appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image by Temi Oyelola)

When I was getting ready to graduate from high school, my parents gave me a ring with a beautiful pearl to wear on my left hand. They said it was important to “promise yourself to God,” and “be pure and holy,” clearly anxious about me leaving for college and what happens to many hormonal teenagers when they are crammed together in a small space. The moment wasn’t overtly ceremonial, but it stayed with me, even after I failed to keep the promise my first year in college. I kept the ring, but I never wore it.

My immigrant Korean parents were not technically evangelical, but our Protestant church mirrored the evangelical culture that surrounded us in Colorado Springs. The ring they gave me was an expression of both American evangelicalism and a purity culture that dictates the rules around gender and sex, a way of seeing the world that permeates the air, like a region’s climate — we breathe it, we consume it, and it dictates how we live and whose lives are worthy. In college, I joined several evangelical Christian groups even as I attended a less conservative local Presbyterian church. Each group had its own flavor, but they all touted similar ideas about sexual behavior: we must remain abstinent until marriage to stay pure.

But I began to see how purity wasn’t only about virginity. It was also about gender — men being “men” and women being “women,” with certain masculinities and femininities lifted up, each undergirding particular roles. Other sexual identities or orientations were not part of the equation because it was so far out of the realm of social or moral possibility. Although some Christian groups were more explicit in their teachings on the sin of homosexuality, others tried to soften the blow with a cliché of dubious origins that I eventually internalized: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

“Love the sinner, hate the sin” became a kind of mantra at the center of evangelical organizations when dealing with the “problem of homosexuality” as a deviant form of sexual behavior. The phrase addressed all manner of sins – gambling, lying, cheating – and emphasized that, like any other sin, homosexuality was simply a behavior that could be eliminated with intention and effort. But homosexuality, they warned, was a particularly pernicious sin and required special attention. Eternal salvation, as Sara Moslener explores in her book Virgin Nation, was tied to a person’s sexuality

The recently released Netflix documentary Pray Away shows us the violent consequences of this “love the sinner, hate the sin” perspective, and the years of trauma induced by people who insisted that one could literally “pray away the gay.” As the documentary highlights, evangelicals embraced conversion therapy — a “gay-cure therapy” that uses talk therapy and negative reinforcements to remove a person’s feelings of same-sex attraction and, hopefully, to force an attraction to the opposite sex. For transgender evangelicals, the goal of conversion therapy was to help people identify with their assigned birth sex.

Pray Away focuses on several former leaders of Exodus International, the once-largest ex-gay organization in the world. Julie Rodgers, one such leader, left the organization after recognizing the harm it caused so many people, including herself. She explains that she initially had a happy childhood. “I wanted to be good,” she said. But the messages about sexuality started early. “Everything in our life was conservative Christianity…My mom listened to all of [the main leaders] on the radio…the main messages I heard were ‘gays are really, really bad’—dirty, scary, bad.”

Interspersed with Rodgers’ story, the documentary cuts to clips of Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell speaking saying, “There’s a secular agenda and it’s coming for your kids…Homosexuality is moral perversion and always wrong. Period. Every scriptural statement on the subject is a statement of condemnation.”

Even as Rodgers struggled with same-sex attraction, she remained convinced that, “God would help me to lead a life of purity and holiness.” For evangelicals, purity is not simply about virginity; it is about upholding heterosexuality. Everything else is not only sinful, but a ticket straight to hell.

In 2012 then-president of Exodus International Alan Chambers renounced conversion therapy, and the following year, he closed the organization and apologized for the “pain and hurt” participants of their programs had experienced. This was a major rupture in the American evangelical world. It compounded the unraveling of a once-solid worldview for evangelicals. Many entered into a process called “deconstruction,” a re-examination of their faith that led them either to leave Christianity completely or to join more progressive Christian communities.

Other events in the last decade contributed to more evangelicals leaving the faith, including the election of Donald Trump, the #ChurchToo movement, which, building on the #MeToo movement, focused on the sexual abuse of minors and women by church leaders (both of these are indebted to sexual harassment survivor and activist Tarana Burke who coined the phrase #MeToo in 2006 and inspired #ChurchToo). All of this produced a kind of reckoning for many evangelicals to reflect on their participation in a tradition that was the cause of much harm and violence, especially toward LGBTQ people and people of color.

Evangelical Women Leaders Becoming LGBTQ Allies

As the reckoning unfolded, some evangelicals started to question the systems of purity that undergirded their “love the sinner, hate the sin” faith. A few evangelical leaders began to speak out – mostly women. Some are ordained clergy, while others have large platforms and substantial audiences of evangelicals who trust their perspectives on marriage, family, and faith. They became public allies for the LGBTQ community, a move that is changing the landscape of American Christianity even as these women have faced financial and professional backlash for their decisions.

One prominent evangelical ally is the highly sought out speaker, writer, and HGTV star, Jen Hatmaker. She came out in support of gay marriage and the inclusion of LGBTQ Christians in evangelical churches in the fall of 2016. She said in an interview, “From a civil rights and civil liberties side and from just a human being side, any two adults have the right to choose who they want to love. And they should be afforded the same legal protections as any of us. I would never wish anything less for my gay friends.” While she emphasized civil rights, Hatmaker had a theological basis for her allyship too, saying, “Not only are these our neighbors and friends, but they are brothers and sisters in Christ. They are adopted into the same family as the rest of us, and the church hasn’t treated the LGBT community like family. We have to do better.”

Hatmaker’s support for the LGBTQ community had immediate consequences. LifeWay Christian Stores, the large Southern Baptist bookseller that published Hatmaker’s 2012 bestseller 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess discontinued the sale of her books. In the evangelical world, this was not only a financial repercussion, but also a flat-out rejection of her as a respected Christian voice from an important evangelical institution.

Other evangelical women leaders came out in solidarity with Hatmaker, including Sarah Bessey, author of Jesus Feminist, Out of Sorts. Bessey, who first emerged during the Christian “Mommy Blogger” phenomenon that started around 2010, wrote a blog entry in support of Hatmaker‘s views. She said, “As someone that is a heterosexual evangelical Christian herself, I think that same-sex marriage should be legal — and I think that Christians, even those that believe homosexuality to be a sin, need to back off the issue.”

Like Hatmaker, Bessey emphasized civil rights. But she took things a step further by asserting her theological convictions: “The point of God, the point of Jesus, the point of the Holy Spirit is not to block same-sex legislation. The point of Christianity is not to create a theocratic Christian society. No one is won to Love by hate or legislation.”

(Christian event with Sarah Bessy on LGBTQ allyship)

In 2019, Bessey announced that she and her family were leaving their local church and no longer connected to one of the largest global evangelical networks, Vineyard Canada, explaining that they made the decision because of differences with the organization on LGBTQ inclusivity. Bessey writes, “GLBTQ disciples are among us — and always have been — as a faithful witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They are the church just as much as the rest of us, each deeply beloved by God and by their community.”

Today, Bessey is co-leader of Evolving Faith, an LGBTQ affirming gathering that makes space for Christians to question what they were taught about sexuality. “It exists to cultivate love and hope in the wilderness, pointing fellow wanderers and misfits to God as we embody resurrection for the sake of the world,” she said. Every year, Evolving Faith brings together thousands of Christians for its conferences and remains a major network for ex-evangelicals and other Christians.

Another high-profile evangelical LGBTQ ally is the Korean-American minister, Reverend Gail Song Bantum, the lead pastor of one of the largest multiethnic evangelical churches in the United States. She explained to me that she did not have a public “coming out” moment as an ally, saying, “I’m someone who names things as I grow and evolve and when the opportunity presents itself. I name what I don’t know, but I also name my convictions. I’ve never really carried things in my lifetime that required a big reveal … you just get what you see.” But she eventually had to clarify her position about LGBTQ Christians when her church put her up for consideration as the next senior pastor of her congregation. Her announcement that she viewed LGBTQ Christians as equal in God’s eyes became a major point of contention for the community. But she insisted she had to be transparent in order to be a different kind of leader for the church. “I’m not about bait and switch,” she said. “I’m also not desperate for power. I’m also not going to lead a church if I can’t operate with full integrity of conviction and action, with authenticity and transparency.”

The stakes are high for women clergy such as Song Bantum who work in denominations like the Evangelical Covenant Church that do not welcome LGBTQ Christians. But Song Bantum believes this is one way to enact change and enable inclusion of LGBTQ people. Such a position is risky because churches can be ejected from denominational membership and clergy can be stripped of their credentials, which is something Song Bantum currently faces. She posted on Instagram, “This time next year, I will most likely have my ordination credentials revoked and our beloved church removed from the denomination we belong to. I do not take the story of our church, the many relationships that have been fostered, the historic nature of my ordination as a Korean American woman and the multiracial church I have the privilege of leading lightly.”

Another prominent evangelical, and New York Times bestselling author, Rachel Held Evans became a public ally for LGBTQ people. She began to question much about her faith on her blog, especially around social justice issues. In 2014 Held Evans led a multi-week “book study” on her blog on Matthew Vines’ God and the Gay Christian, a popular book about what it means to reconcile Christianity and LGBTQ identities. In 2016 she wrote a post that outlined her own journey and clear pro-LGBTQ position. It was eventually published posthumously by her husband, Dan Evans. She announced, “I affirm LGBTQ people because they are human beings, created in the image of God. I affirm their sexual orientations and gender identities because they reflect the diversity of God’s good creation, where little fits into rigid binary categories. They are beloved children of God, just as God made you.”

One other notable evangelical ally is Cindy Wang Brandt. She developed a large following through her blog and social media where she was an outspoken advocate for the LGBTQ community. She says, “Although I was raised a conservative evangelical Christian and was taught traditional views of marriage, my brother came out as trans in 2008. This, as well as public Christian discourse on this issue over the past decade, threw me on the same trajectory as many of the prominent evangelical Christians who have changed their minds.” But the evangelical school where she worked forced her to change her public positions on LGBTQ issues or quit her job. She resigned.

After Wang Brandt quit her job, she spent her extra time writing. She began to invite other parents like herself to join her. All of them were LGBTQ allies, LGBTQ themselves, or parents of gay and transgender children. She eventually created a parenting network and compiled resources for people who want to leave the world of purity culture and “family values.”

Although she faced significant consequences for her allyship, she views it with gratitude, saying “By far the biggest gift I have received by being publicly gay-affirming has been to become a refuge for LGBTQ people, and especially Christians, who consider me a safe person with whom to share their lives.”

***

The presence of LGBTQ people in evangelical communities is undeniable. In 2016, Julie Rodgers shared a story: in 2014 she was surprisingly appointed as the first gay chaplain for Wheaton College, a major evangelical Christian institution. She had hoped this was a sign of meaningful change in the evangelical world. She even signed a pledge to commit to celibacy so that she did not violate the school’s expectations to reserve sex for heterosexual marriage. But the more conversations she had with the administration the more she realized she couldn’t fully be herself in that position, especially when the administration asked her to stop referring to herself as gay. Rodgers resigned a year later, saying, “My experience with the administration confirmed a quiet concern that had grown for years: that traditional views of marriage were often rooted in something other than sincere Christian convictions. If they couldn’t support someone committed to celibacy — someone who abided by their Community Covenant alongside every straight employee — I could only conclude that their anxiety wasn’t about my sex life. Their anxiety was about my existence.”

Following her resignation, many Christians, both LGBTQ and allies, came out in support of not only her existence, but her voice, perspective, and leadership. Eventually she shared her story in her memoir Outlove: A Queer Christian Survival Story. Rodgers continues to speak, write, and teach to evangelical and broader Christian communities. 

***

The shift each of these women made to move away from purity culture to affirm LGBTQ people caused shockwaves throughout evangelical Christian communities where many viewed it as a kind of betrayal. But these women leaders have offered a much more expansive view of Christianity. And so we are beginning to see their impact on institutions in helping to change what inclusion looks like in issues ranging from leadership to marriage to family. They are providing space for support and affirmation through the online communities they have developed, conferences they have organized, and they support groups they have sponsored. Slowly, we are seeing how these women are changing the landscape of American Christianity. Hopefully more male evangelical leaders will follow in their footsteps and step our meaningfully as LGBTQ allies soon.

***

I still have the ring my parents gave me – a reminder of the beliefs and stories that helped my family make sense of everything at the time. Might makes right. God helps those who help themselves. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Purity is everything. My parents were first-generation immigrants from a country that was heavily influenced by evangelical American Christianity, and we imbibed these notions as though they were sacraments necessary for our salvation.

I am now an ordained minister in a fairly progressive mainline denomination. And I’m a queer woman of color who is married to a straight man. I can relate to what it takes to let go of deeply held beliefs. I also acknowledge that the stories of these evangelical women leaders are not without flaws and complications. We need to keep pushing the boundaries of “inclusion” because there are still questions about how far their inclusion extends as some of them hold to or remain in traditions that only recognize monogamy as the legitimate form of intimacy — one has gone so far as to publicly affirm it. There is also a continuous need to consider the intersecting vectors of identity that are often overlooked in these conversations — not only gender and sexuality, but race, ability, immigration status, and economic status. But these women are not the only voices, and they are modeling a way to initiate leadership and change by amplifying others. There are so many stories out there, moving the needle within institutions and families, embodying alternative possibilities, and fostering wider, fuller possibilities for queer Christians in America.

Mihee Kim-Kort is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Indiana University. 

The post Evangelical Women Leaders as LGBTQ Allies appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo: Menahem Kahana for Getty Images)

I awoke during the church service, sweaty from the sun that hit the pews at noon every Sunday. My father, full of the spirit, was still singing—with tears in his eyes and sweat on his brow. He had one hand in the air and another on the microphone, leading la congregación in worship. His back was draped with a tallit, a prayer shawl typically worn by Jews, and a kippah that covered the crown of his head.

La Iglesia Evangélica Menonita was one of many Spanish-language evangelical churches in the Washington D.C. area that welcomed the Holy Ghost on a weekly basis. The parishioners not only welcomed it, they asked it to come—and to come in power. This power manifested itself in people’s bodies and in their speech, serving as proof that the spirit was real and working among us. Some congregants believed this power could be amplified through a special connection not only with God, but also through a connection with his chosen people, the Jews.

And so, some in my family’s church embraced a fusion of Judaism and Christianity in the form of Messianic Judaism while others adopted Jewish aesthetics, rituals, and practices. The church incorporated Jewish traditions and objects like the shofar into spirited worship services. Parishioners emphasized how these practices brought them closer to God, the Holy Spirit, and the Jewishness of the historical Jesus. But this Charismatic Jewish cosplay was often accompanied by sermons, videos, and presentations about the modern state of Israel and the end times.

(The author as a child with her father wearing a kippah in church. Photo courtesy of Amy Fallas.)

My own father was captivated by the incorporation of Jewish elements into his Christian worship, and he was equally inspired by the state of Israel. He started to wear a kippah at church and at home when he prayed. He searched for a possible Sephardic Jewish heritage within his ancestry. When I was young and scared at night, I would run to the living room calling for my dad. He told me I shouldn’t be afraid because the God who protected Israel during the Six Day War in 1967 was the same God who would protect me in my room at night. With this proof of divine protection, I learned from an early age to link my own comfort to that of the modern nation-state of Israel.

This is how our Spanish-speaking, Central American evangelical family became Christian Zionists. It happened gradually, without realizing it and without us naming it as such. In fact, my parents did not know the meaning of Christian Zionism as a term until decades after their experiences in La Iglesia Evangélica Menonita. Yet our religious and political commitments made our family but one of millions of Latino evangélicos who embraced Christian Zionist beliefs.

Christian Zionism

Christian Zionists believe that support for the modern state of Israel is a scriptural obligation with ramifications for the end of times. Although Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that began during the early nineteenth century, its emphasis on the apocalypse grew in popularity in the United States following the reunification of Jerusalem during the 1967 War. Prominent evangelical figures such as Hal Lindsay, John Hagee, and Pat Robertson preached that a rapture of believers and a reckoning with God’s chosen people will unfold in the state of Israel, the Promised Land. This Christian Zionist vision of the last days, and its attendant reliance on Israel, is most commonly associated today with white evangelicals.

But south of the U.S. border in early 2011, a much different group demonstrated its support and love for Israel at a Messianic evangelical concert. As worshippers enthusiastically welcomed a blast of shofars and fog machines, a heavy-handed percussion provided the baseline for the interweaving sounds of Paul Wilbur’s characteristic Hebraic style. Wilbur, a Jewish-American convert to Messianic Judaism, started his music ministry to reach Jews for Jesus in the United States. By the 1990s he was one of the most popular artists in Spanish-language worship music. Songs such as “El Shaddai,” “Baruch Adonai,” and “Levántate Señor” were in regular rotation in evangelical and Charismatic Latino churches across the hemisphere. With his growing popularity, Wilbur ultimately performed in every Spanish-speaking country from Cuba to Honduras and Mexico to Latino congregations in the United States. His embrace of Judaism and Christianity paired with his public support for Israel relayed social, political, and religious messages that reflected the beliefs and discourses of Latino evangélicos in the United States and abroad.

With increasing popularity since the 1990s, evangelical and spirit congregations in Latin America began adopting Jewish symbols like the menorah and Star of David to brand their churches. They started to conflate modern Israel with Judaism and claim allyship with the biblical ‘Pueblo de Israel’ (the people of Israel). While eschatology was one focal point of these changes, their understanding of Israel and Jews drew from eclectic sources and their reasons for embracing aspects of Christian Zionism were varied. Some Latino evangélicos began to speculate about their possible Jewish roots, while others wanted to satisfy their longing for biblical authenticity by emulating Jesus’ Jewishness. But most of them wanted to tap into the divine power and promised blessings of supporting God’s chosen people.

Although they see themselves as allies, the Christian Zionist support for Jews is often contingent and at times even antisemitic. Many proponents of Christian Zionism simultaneously believe that while Jews will not be spared Hell unless they accept Jesus as the Messiah, a global convergence of Jews in Jerusalem is a pre-requisite to Jesus’s second coming. For centuries before a formalized Christian Zionism took shape, Christians espoused forms of Judeophobia that considered Jews as Christ-killers, heretics to be converted, and as a group Christians had replaced as God’s covenantal people. In recent years, ‘new’ Christian Zionists have tried to distance themselves from these antisemitic origins and theologically self-serving views; yet they continue to prioritize allyship with certain Jewish groups (Messianic and Israeli Jews) over others (Orthodox and anti-Zionist Jews).

Although the adoption of Jewish customs and symbols for Latino evangélicos does not always translate to support of Christian Zionism, the shared aesthetics and tendency to equate Jewish and Israeli identities contributes significantly to how Latino evangélicos understand and articulate their religious and political relationship to Israel, Zionism, Judaism, and Christianity. Organizations like the Latino Coalition for Israel or Philos Latino specifically emphasize these commonalities to marshal Latin American and U.S.-based Latinos toward a pro-Israel position. Collapsed distinctions and reductive assumptions inform what Latino evangélicos believe about Israel and Jews, as they do in the broader U.S. evangelical context: that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous, that Jewish safety can only be guaranteed through the Israeli state, and that Jesus cannot come back unless Jews return to the Promised Land. As Latino evangelical communities continue to grow in size and influence in the United States, so too are these associations between supporting Jews and the state of Israel.

In the Land of Egypt

It wasn’t until I studied abroad in Egypt when I met a Palestinian Christian for the first time that I began to question what my family and so many Latino evangélicos believed was the Christian obligation to support Israel. As I sat in a classroom at the American University in Cairo during the Fall of 2010, a young, impassioned professor told us that the situation in Israel-Palestine was not thousands of years old. She told us that Zionism—the idea of a Jewish homeland, fashioned according to the parameters of a modern and Europe-styled nation-state—was relatively new. The seemingly forever wars in a forever conflict of a biblical Middle Eastern sibling rivalry from time immemorial, as I had been taught, was not the reason for the series of events in Israel and Palestine over the last one hundred years.

As the professor spoke, I uncharacteristically averted my eyes for fear that I would be called on to speak. I wanted to say so much and nothing at all. In earnest, I wanted to challenge her — to tell her that my parents said Isaac and Ishmael’s fight over their divine inheritance was the source of Palestinian-Israeli enmity. That God had promised this land to the Jews. That this promise had future ramifications. That Jesus would return to affirm himself as the Messiah. But more relevant to this academic context, I wanted to tell her that the Israelis in a “realpolitik” sense had legitimacy — that they conducted themselves as “proper” citizens of a nation-state in a world of nation-states.

I believed all of those things because questioning those teachings would bore into the foundation of my beliefs about myself, my faith, and the world. Beyond my own parents’ authority, questioning the Christian support of Israel meant I would have to question our religious exegesis, to consider that we might have misread prophesy or misunderstood God’s promises. I would have to wrestle with a worldview that had been uncontested for twenty years of my life.

It was during these class-time internal struggles that I learned about the rampant antisemitism Jews faced during the nineteenth century that contributed to the formation of Zionism. It had not been the treatment of Jews in the Middle East, but rather antisemitism in Europe that prompted European Jews to respond to their widespread discrimination and persecution with ideas of establishing a Jewish state. I learned that many Christian Europeans who supported a Jewish homeland did so in order to avoid including Jews in European nation-states—a hypocrisy German-Jewish theorist Hannah Arendt critiqued throughout the twentieth century. The United States also restricted Jewish migration, even asylum seekers during World War II as a threat to national security.

I also learned about Palestine for the first time while in Egypt. It was a glaring absence from my homeschooled-to-Christian college education. And it was here that I devoured new information that would transform my worldview. I learned that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of all faiths — Muslims, Christians, and Jews — had lived and prospered from Haifa to Jerusalem to Ramallah during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

But during World War I, the British made claims to Palestine, promising a Jewish homeland therein, and secretly agreeing to divide the Middle East into spheres of European control. Under the veneer of the authority of the League of Nations, the British appointed themselves as the legal stewards of Palestine following the war and imposed a system of semi-colonialism known as the Mandate for Palestine. Decades later, their withdrawal from Palestine came in conjunction with the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 that outlined a Palestinian and Israeli state—undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of Palestinians in the interest of Yishuv settlers.

When the professor talked about the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, it was like a language I had never before heard. I had previously learned about the Shoah (the Holocaust) during World War II and Hitler’s horrifying genocidal policies towards Jews. I had always assumed the Holocaust ultimately led to Israel’s formation. But I had never learned that when Holocaust survivors arrived in Israel—they were “scorned and laughed at” by Israelis, “seen as weak victims at a time when the state was being led by domineering fighters.”

Palestinians experienced 1948 as “the Nakba” (the catastrophe), an event that initiated an exodus of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes as a result of Zionist policies. Although the removal of Palestinians started before 1948, the creation of Israel accelerated the depopulation of Palestinian villages as Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) consolidated land and secured mobility within Israel. Among the most notorious incidents included operations Dani and Dekel, which authorized the removal of Palestinians in Lydda and Ramle—two towns that presented logistical barriers to Israeli transportation between their settlements. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and IDF deputy commander Yitzhak Rabin ordered the expulsion of 50,000-70,000 Palestinians in Lydda and Ramle in July 1948.

When I realized that my professor, a Palestinian Christian, did not accept the foundational assumptions of Christian Zionism, I started to question why I felt obligated to accept this ideology. How was I supposed to articulate a Biblical justification for the dispossession and displacement her Christian family experienced? As I started to learn about historic and contemporary Palestinian resistance to Zionism, I discovered it was not only possible to be Christian and reject this ideology—but that Christian communities in the very place where Jesus was born were some of the leaders of this approach. In contrast to what I had been taught in my evangelical Christian upbringing, the establishment of the state of Israel was not an immaculate conception; it was born out of violent displacement.

Christian Zionism between Latin America and the United States

In my mother’s home city of San Salvador, it is nearly impossible to drive anywhere without reading a reference to an Israeli city or to see Stars of David and menorahs with Hebrew letters on Protestant churches and religious complexes. The Tabernáculo Bíblico Bautista, for instance, is one of the dominant evangélico church networks with thousands of churches across the country. They became associated with Israel because of their church-sponsored trips to the Holy Land and the incorporation of “amigos de Israel” or “friends of Israel” as part of their ecclesiastical identity. Some of their religious complexes are huge, often including cafeterias, bookstores, schools, and recreation halls that pay visual homage to this desire to connect Latin America with Israel.

(Jewish iconography spotted in Latin America. Photo courtesy of Amy Fallas.)

Jewish and Israeli iconography is ubiquitous in Latin America and most commonly associated with the spread of evangelicalism. Yet explicitly pro-Israel views in places like El Salvador are most aligned with churches and parishioners of Pentecostal and charismatic traditions, a phenomenon that has grown in recent years. Historian Daniel Hummel notes that while white evangelicals were once the dominant group embracing Christian Zionism, this ideology is growing in popularity on an international scale.

Latino evangélicos have been actively targeted by Zionist organizations in the United States. The largest pro-Israel lobby groups such as Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have Latino and Hispanic outreach efforts, while more organizations have been established specifically to strengthen the Spanish-speaking community’s support for Israel. In 2019, the Latino Coalition for Israel (LCI) organized a summit in Jerusalem for approximately 200 Latino evangelical leaders. This gathering built on the heels of earlier efforts to bring Latino evangelicals and Israelis together, such as the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC)/Conela’s partnership with the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ).

Another prominent initiative known as “Philos Latino” was established by The Philos Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to “promoting positive Christian engagement in the Near East.” This outreach program targets the Latino community and offers educational resources, programming, and immersion trips to Israel. The most active component of the project is an online Spanish show called ‘Philos Conectam,” wherein the project’s director, Jesse Rojo, invites special guests to discuss issues related to their goals of promoting positive Christian engagement and pluralism in the Middle East.

Yet these seemingly innocuous, and even noble, efforts to educate and connect Latinos on issues related to the Middle East are overshadowed by its clear one-sided stance. Most of the topics of discussion on “Philos Conecta” are almost exclusively about, and in support of, Israel with little representation of alternate viewpoints. Over the course of 2021, the show’s episodes focused heavily on Guatemala’s positive diplomatic relations with Israel and their support of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, featuring conversations with the Guatemalan and Honduran Ambassador to Israel among other delegates and representatives. This programmatic focus is largely connected to the fact that the Philos Project was established with funds from pro-Israel philanthropist Paul Singer— demonstrating a clear set of interests given the organization’s funders, affiliates, and activities.

While these projects and outreach efforts illustrate a trend of Spanish-speaking evangelicals embracing Christian Zionism, this is not a monolithic view. According to a study conducted by Lifeway Research, Latino Christians do not consider Israel a major concern even as they hold generally favorable views of Israel. Also, even as Latino Christians view Israel favorably, a significant number of them “hold somewhat anti-Semitic views” – illustrating a familiar dynamic in which a pro-Israel perspective does not necessarily indicate a positive view or relationship with Jews.

And some Latino Christians, on the other hand, are openly critical of Zionism. In an interview with the current president of the Asociación Salvadoreña Palestina, Don Siman Khoury, said that his own family background as a Protestant and Orthodox Palestinian attests to the fact that Christian support for Israel is not a forgone conclusion. Salvadorans can be Christian, critical of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and purveyors of peace in the region. After all, Khoury said, “God is more than just a distributer of land.”

***

In May 2021, an unprecedented wave of popular support for Palestine emerged in response to Israeli settler and state violence against Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, Gaza, and the West Bank. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in cities across the world to demand Palestinian rights and to call upon foreign governments to stop supporting Israel’s aggression. Even more spoke up online across social media channels, through virtual teach-ins, and in op-eds to engage new and longstanding allies to rally in support of Palestinian sovereignty and lives. Even amid the outrage of witnessing Palestinians being forced from their homes in East Jerusalem and Israeli bombardments in Gaza, people felt things were changing. Moral authority was shifting in favor of Palestine.

As I marched alongside protesters at one of the many rallies in Washington D.C., I spotted a sea of usual suspects: college students, Palestinian activists, and representatives from advocacy organizations. But I also saw young families, interfaith religious leaders, and people of all backgrounds and walks of life. I spotted a sign: “Latinos for Palestine.” Not too far ahead of me, young Jewish students held another sign: “Jews against Zionism.” It was beautiful to march with Jewish, Latinx, Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian protesters. Maybe there were others in the crowd who shared my upbringing— Latino evangelicals taught to support Israel unequivocally — now dressed in the Palestinian keffiyeh with signs raised in solidarity with Palestine.

When I was young, I could not have imagined this kind of solidarity. That was, and is, a central shortcoming of Christian Zionism — its inability to imagine beyond a foretold future. As I marched across downtown D.C., I felt a renewed sense of hope — if I was able to re-evaluate my own position on Israel — surely more Latino evangélicos would find this path too. Maybe it was a renewed sense of hope. Maybe it was the spirit moving among us.

Amy Fallas is a writer, researcher, and Ph.D. Candidate in History from Washington D.C. She writes about religion and tweets @amy_fallas.

The post El Pueblo de Israel: Latino Evangélicos and Christian Zionism appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

I do not have children. But recent public conflicts have led me to think about children more regularly – not about having them, but about how frightening the world must seem for so many of them. The first conflict that has consumed me is the banning of mask mandates in school districts across the country. The pro-life and family values movements, self-described champions of protecting children, are leading the way to putting adolescents at risk. As the Delta variant surges, children under twelve are caught in a ridiculous conflict about whether or not masks prevent the spread of COVID-19 and if schools have the right to require masks to protect the community. The second issue occupying my attention is the conflict in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s quick takeover, and the image of parents handing off their children to people who were able to flee the country. I have watched the families torn apart with anguish and I worry for the parents who do not know what the future holds for the children still in Afghanistan as the conflict there continues.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

With these thoughts in mind, the Revealer’s September issue explores conflicts of many types: international, personal, political, racial, sexual, and familial. The issue opens with Amy Fallas’s “El Pueblo de Israel: Latino Evangélicos and Christian Zionism,” where she explores the prevalence of Christian Zionism among evangelical Latinos and why they support Israelis in their conflict with Palestinians. Then, in “Evangelical Women Leaders as LGBTQ Allies,” Mihee Kim-Kort examines the conflict among American evangelicals over LGBTQ Christians and reports on several women evangelical leaders who, despite financial and professional backlash, have come out as LGBTQ allies. Next, in “A Baby at the Shiva,” Sharrona Pearl offers a review of the film Shiva Baby and how it portrays intense familial and sexual tensions that can arise at a common Jewish mourning ritual. Kristy Slominski then continues the focus on sexual conflicts with an excerpt from her book Teaching Moral Sex, where she explores how competing religious leaders fought to control what adolescents learn about human sexuality. Next, Kali Handelman interviews Suzanne Schneider about her new book The Apocalypse and the End of History, and how the violence that ISIS enacts is not so different from violence here in the United States. Finally, in “Bombing American Religion to Save It,” Megan Goodwin reviews Richard Kent Evans’s book MOVE: An American Religion about the Black religious movement whose conflict with Philadelphia authorities in 1985 led the mayor, horrifically, to authorize the police to drop a bomb on MOVE’s headquarters.

The September issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Sex Education and Religion in Public Schools.” Kristy Slominski joins us to discuss why progressive Protestants fought to get sex education in America’s schools, what messages sex educators promoted about gender and monogamy, and why the Christian right’s push for abstinence-only education became so prominent throughout the country. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As children and young adults return to school this month, too many of them are entering a political battlefield where their health and emotional wellbeing, not to mention that of their teachers and professors, are of little importance to people who, eighteen months into a pandemic, still oppose mask mandates. The situation is absurd and criminal. Meanwhile, children and families fleeing Afghanistan must contend with becoming refugees while still trying to protect themselves from COVID-19. All of it seems daunting. And, as our September issue demonstrates, these are but two of the many possible conflicts facing people right now. I hope the articles in this issue give you, as they did me, insights to better understand our world and ideas for how to look to the future with hope.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: The Conflicts of Our Lives appeared first on The Revealer.