The Revealer is partnering with Sacred Writes, a Henry R. Luce-grant funded initiative at Northeastern University, to fund TWO writing fellowships for scholars of religion to write for the Revealer on the topic(s) of their choosing. Each fellow will receive a $2,000 stipend. Here is all the information you need:

Sacred Writes is now accepting applications for a funded media partnership with the Revealer. Applicants must have training in religious studies, theology, biblical studies, or a related field. This partnership is open to faculty, independent scholars, and graduate students. Priority deadline for applications is July 15, 2021.

SCOPE

The Revealer invites applications for two writing fellowships. Each fellow will produce three articles on topics related to religion in the scholars’ areas of expertise. This fellowship is thematically open, provided the articles address religion, theology, or biblical studies. These three pieces may take the form of research essays, opinion pieces, or book/film/tv reviews. The Revealer prefers but does not require a variety of formats for these pieces.

Articles will be developed under the direction of Brett Krutzsch, Editor of the Revealer, and must be completed between August 2021 and May 2022. Production schedule will be set in consultation with the Editor and will account for the scholars’ pre-existing commitments. Sacred Writes will compensate each selected scholar with a $2,000 stipend.

TO APPLY

Please submit the following materials through the online form.

Cover letter (1-2 pages) explaining your scholarly expertise and a pitch for at least one piece (including a proposed title) that draws on your scholarly expertise

CV, including any relevant public scholarship experience

The post Media Partnership Application with Sacred Writes appeared first on The Revealer.

You can listen to the Revealer podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.  Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our monthly episodes.

We hope you enjoy this moving episode: “The AIDS Epidemic’s 40^th Anniversary and San Francisco’s ‘AIDS Church.’”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 14: San Francisco’s “AIDS Church” and the 40th Anniversary of HIV/AIDS appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image credit: Luis Vazquez/Gulf New)

When you think about religion in France, what comes to mind?

If you’re a regular reader of the news (or the Revealer), your answer likely has something to do with Islam and Islamophobia. I have discussed these undeniably urgent issues with Elayne Oliphant quite recently, but I wanted to bring her back for another conversation now because her just released book, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris (University of Chicago, 2021), invites us into the subject of French religion and politics from another, crucial angle that warrants attention: Catholicism. In a nation where the dominant discourse has, for so long, been about the separation of church and state, how and why do French Catholics and Catholicism still have so much power — and how is that power evident in Parisian art and architecture?

The Privilege of Being Banal invites the reader into a close-up examination of a big question: Why does France still need Catholicism? Oliphant’s meticulous, sensitive, and incisive ethnographic perspective offers us a way to understand the political landscape in France — the debates that are explicitly about religion, and the ones that aren’t so explicit — in immensely valuable new ways. Oliphant spent two years working at a contemporary Catholic culture space with a lofty mission. Through her interactions with patrons and visitors, and analysis of the exhibitions and events they attended, we begin to see much more clearly how and why French Catholicism is able to move in and out of view in ways nothing — and no one — else can.

Kali Handelman: Could you give us a sense of what the book is about and, in particular, how you define and connect the core concepts of Catholic materiality, banality, and privilege? How do these ideas help us to answer the question, as you put it in the introduction: “Why does France still need Catholicism?” 

Elayne Oliphant: I can’t thank you enough for these thought-provoking questions, and for investing so much thought and time in this book over the last few years. You were both a fabulous editor and an important collaborator. I miss walking down our short hallway to interrupt you in your office and share a thought or a quandary. Our conversations have been so vital in this process.

This is a book about how Catholic materiality — the objects, images, and spaces that mediate Catholic practice and fill French landscapes and museums — figures into the reproduction of inequality and of privilege. Initially, I was interested in how Catholicism did not appear to be a “problem” in France. Any writing, scholarly or otherwise, about the appropriate place of religion in France focuses disproportionately on Islam. And yet, so many symbols of France clearly have connections with a Catholic history that remains palpably present — just think of the attention Notre Dame received in 2019. Catholicism has not vanished, but it is taken for granted as self-evident and unproblematic.

The common assumption among White, tacitly Catholic French citizens is that France is a truly secular country (unlike, many people explained to me, the United States). Islam continues to appear in French news and political debates because so many French people believe Muslims fail to appreciate and assimilate into France’s “secular” culture. But what these debates and common assumptions miss is how so of Catholicism shapes public life in France — from its national holidays and key national symbols, to the way schools close on Wednesdays in order to accommodate Catholic catechism classes. In order to explain this phenomenon I turned to the concept of banality as developed by Hannah Arendt. Arendt uses the concept of banality to explain, first, how people can come to participate in actions which they would otherwise find problematic, and second, how such actions can come to be accepted as self-evident, both individually and collectively. I use it as a means of explaining how so many in France can both argue for the necessity of Catholic materiality in landscapes, museums, and public life, while also insisting upon France’s unblemished secularity without feeling the weight of that paradox.

In earlier iterations of this book, I relied on the concept of the “unmarked” to describe how Catholicism seems to fade into the background of public life in France. And yet, over time I realized that this concept wasn’t quite right. There are many different theories to help us think through the relationship between partial visibility and oppression, from the invisibility of some minority groups to the hypervisibility of others. Ralph Ellison used the word “unvisibility” to describe the unrecognizablity of Black humanity in the United States. But the relationship between partial visibility and privilege is not as well studied. The privilege of Catholic materiality in France is seen most readily in its ability to move between the background and the foreground, the unmarked and the monumental without causing consternation.

This is the “how” question that the book addresses: “How does Catholic materiality move between the background and the foreground in France?” A brilliant mentor, however, encouraged me to ask and answer another question: why? Why does France still need Catholicism? I am not asking here why some people still “choose” to be religious in a secular age; we’ve long ago rejected the secularization thesis that underlies that query. What I am asking is why does ostensibly secular France still need to do so much to support, expand, and celebrate Catholicism’s privilege?

It is not only the state that participates in these processes — many of France’s richest families gave shocking sums to rebuild Notre-Dame, for example — but the state continues to make choices that elevate Catholic “affordances.” For example, when a commission was formed to address the “crisis” of secularism in France in 2003, it offered numerous recommendations that would have corrected Catholicism’s excessive privilege in French public life, such as including a few holidays of other religions into the national calendar. However, the government refused all of the commission’s recommendations with the exception of one: banning headscarves in schools.

So, why does France still need Catholicism? The answer I came to is that Catholicism’s privilege helps to justify the fact that it has never achieved anything approaching the democratic equality imagined in its famed Revolution. France’s Catholic materiality — and, in particular, in medieval edifices — allow French residents to both celebrate the inequalities that were overturned and evade the need to dismantle others. It allows them to make space for some forms of inequality — between Muslims and Catholics, Black and White residents, as well as rich and poor — while celebrating the limited cessation of others.

Moreover, while Catholics are as diverse as any group, with various political persuasions and lifeways, the institutional Church — especially in Paris — has long been associated with elite groups. The privilege of these groups is maintained through this limited equality, which is aesthetically celebrated in part through the country’s Catholic medieval cathedrals like Notre-Dame and innumerable works of Catholic art that populate its museums, such as the Isenheim Altarpiece, and the medieval Catholic imagery that fills its literature, such as in the works of Victor Hugo.

My research focused primarily on how the institutional Church works to reproduce the banality of its materiality — encouraging people to view it as both the natural background of French life, and the marked spaces and objects that stand out and demand attention and support — because this banality secures Catholicism’s privilege. And I found a rather remarkable space in which it had powerfully committed both to amplifying the country’s medieval Catholic materiality and providing a space to celebrate its elite supporters. A few weeks before my research began in 2008, the archdiocese of Paris inaugurated the Collège des Bernardins. A former medieval monastery that had been expropriated by the state following the Revolution, the archdiocese bought the space back from the state in 2001 on the hunch that its very existence could make a powerful claim about the necessity of Catholicism in France in the present.

During its first two years of operation, this claim was made through a variety of elite, bourgeois practices, including contemporary art exhibitions, intellectual debates, and public theology classes. I ended up spending so much time in the space that when additional “mediators” for the contemporary art exhibits were needed, I seemed an obvious candidate.

These exhibits came to be central to my analysis of Catholic materiality because they showed the significant work required to maintain its banality and its privilege. In the inaugural exhibit, for example, an artist shattered row upon row of eight-foot-tall and one-inch-thick glass panels prior to the opening and glued them to the floor, leaving a mixture of jagged fragments and shattered pieces. Along one side of this glass maze, he also burned thousands of books through a technique that allowed the soot to settle in the shape of these books, creating a library of “shadows.” The responses to this exhibit were fierce, with most of the elite public despising it. And yet, they actually had far more in common with the artist than they would have imagined. They had come to this former medieval space looking for a glimpse of what I call “enlivened” medieval materiality — something of the presence of the original site transported into the present. The artist has long maintained a similar approach to medieval Catholic material forms. “If one were to make a hole in the wall of any medieval cathedral, blood would flow” he once declared, while “if one were to make a hole in the wall of a museum, nothing would come out.” Thus, while their goals were similar, the means of how to protect the enlivened value of Catholic medieval materiality was deeply contested precisely because the stakes — the reproduction of Catholic privilege — were so high.

KH: I’d love to hear more about how and why you approached this research ethnographically. In the book you argue that “ethnography does not allow the researcher to inhabit another’s point of view in any straightforward way” but that, instead, it is a way of “paying attention in a particular place and time, allowing the anthropologist to identify continuities, shifts, and contradictions in the social world they encounter.” You then go on to talk about Hannah Arendt’s “insistence that banality is that which lacks depth” and that “we might understand the exclusion that necessarily accompanies privilege as the refusal to imagine the experience of others and, therefore, to deny the diverse complexity of social worlds.” There seems to be a relationship there, something about empathy — about observing and imagining the complex social worlds of others. Do you see a connection between the work of ethnography and the task of critiquing banality?

EO: I’ve been thinking a lot about ethnography lately: about ethnography as a research method, about my own ethnography, about its potentials, and its limits. Ethnography can bring us powerfully into the minutiae of social life and, when applied to religious life, it is most often used to describe and analyze what David Graeber referred to as “density” — the rituals, images, and creative practices through which humans create other-than-human bonds. But Graeber worried that anthropologists’ penchant for density meant that we spent too little time addressing the less thrilling but equally important bureaucratic facets of our worlds. When applied to religious life, I find that this penchant encourages us to protect religious life from real scrutiny and critique. Another way of thinking about Graeber’s argument is to suggest that we need to pay more attention to the banality of religious life.

I realized pretty early on that — due to the elite status of those I was studying and my own lack of cultural capital in France (a problem that is the inverse of the more typical distinctions between anthropologists and their subjects) — I would not be able to access the density of their lives in ways that would allow for any kind of “thick” description. When I met them by attending church events, they tended to be more open to inviting me over for tea and an earnest conversation about the “oppression” of Catholicism in France. At the Collège, however, people rarely introduced themselves or offered any openings toward deeper relationships. My first extended conversation was with a woman who referred to me as “the foreigner.” As time passed and I developed connections with mediators and employees, I became even more invisible to the visiting public as I was clearly a low-level employee, and, even worse, one associated with the exhibits they despised.

At first, this was a source of a great deal of concern, but it did allow me to let go of certain fantasies I might have held about ethnographic research. Graeber has also argued that by paying too much attention to the density of privileged life ways, we may in fact exacerbate the disparities in empathy that have made White, Christian, Western social worlds appear far more human and worthy of celebration than the social worlds of other religious and racialized groups. Conducting ethnographic research among privileged groups, therefore, requires a particular approach. I found I needed to complement participant-observation with extensive study of secondary historical literature and archives in order to be able to push back on some of the assertions made by my interlocutors.

(Interior of Collège des Bernadins)

In something akin to the anthropologist John Jackson’s account of “thin description,” I found I had to turn to a variety of spaces in which claims about Catholicism’s necessity in France were being made, from museum exhibitions (and the history of the creation of museums in France following the Revolution) to works of fiction and political discourse. I tried to analyze the Collège from a variety of different perspectives: those of visitors, volunteers, low-level employees, artists, and managers. I examined Catholic materiality in a variety of different scales, as the basic building blocks of religious life, as a central theme in the European art canon, as objects of destruction during the Revolution, and as objects of transformative revival in French public life over the nineteenth century. I also looked at Catholic materiality through diverse registers, including how it can be experienced, variously, as sacred, enlivened, aesthetic, cultural, and fetishized. The fact that Catholic materiality can exist in so many registers without appearing contradictory is, in this case, an expression of its privilege. At the same time that Catholic materiality is being celebrated in such flexible ways, a variety of Muslim sites and spaces are surveilled and shuttered, taking for granted the singularity of Muslim life as only and excessively religious.

KH: Reading your book I was particularly struck by the tensions around “the medieval.” You write about how, on the one hand, Muslims are accused of being medieval in ways that make them “un-French” while, on the other — and at the same time — the Collège is able to leverage its ancientness to amplify its claims to Frenchness. I’m interested in how this double standard (to put it too mildly), pivots on relationships to materiality generally, and art specifically?

EO: I have continued to mull over this question since handing in the final manuscript. The conclusion I have come to in the months that have passed is that the medieval period is a particularly enticing one because it precedes 1492 and the beginning of Western Europe and the Catholic Church’s long-standing encounter with banality — of living with their most profound contradictions. And here I am not saying that Catholic materiality has become banal due to a process of secularization. Banalization is instead a process of living with and even celebrating practices that contradict how groups perceive themselves. How a place like France could both foreground its revolutionary call for equality and participate so actively in chattel slavery is a powerful contradiction. The medieval period in Europe had its fair share of violence, but a lot of scholars would point to the violence unleashed in 1492 as rather exceptional in human history. The materiality of the medieval period points to a time before European nations were also global empires that engaged in expansive and horrific systems of exploitation. It points to what appears to be a more coherent, innocent time in French history.

In the book, I emphasized how the desire for medieval Catholic materiality has been rather commonplace in France since at least the nineteenth century, and I have become increasingly interested in thinking through how that period coincides with the partial confrontation of the paradoxes of claiming equality while benefiting from slavery in the Caribbean. In light of the discomfort posed by these paradoxes, the attraction of the medieval as the true source of France’s genius — rather than the Enlightenment, Revolutionary, and modern periods in which the banality of these contradictions is written into so many texts, spaces, sculptures, and images — appears newly legible. Numerous paintings found in museums throughout the West, such as the frescos that adorn the rotunda of the old Paris grain exchange, take for granted the less than human status of Black slaves and depict their object status in ways that are deeply banal. In contrast, the material heritage of the medieval period offers a glimpse into a world prior to this history that few in France have shown any interest in confronting.

KH: For my last question, I want to ask something perhaps too broad, but that I imagine readers will really want to know. First, how do you hope your book will help us better understand current events in France right now and going forward? And second, how might we use the “banality of privilege” to think about inequality and justice work in the United States?  

EO: I hope my book encourages readers to approach material heritage with a bit more caution. I have a friend who — after I described my book to her — felt the need to tell me that she really loves medieval Cistercian monasteries. I had to chuckle because she was basically saying, “I love visiting these places; please don’t take them away from me.” With apologies to this dear friend, I do hope that we visit those places that call out to us for a variety of complex reasons with a more critical eye. This is not to say that Catholic materiality is only political and serves no other purposes, including religious purposes. Throughout the book, I resist trying to separate out the religious from the political. But it is to say that human relations — productive ones and violent ones — are grounded in material forms, including those we inherit from the past. And I hope my book offers another means by which to ask what kinds of human relationships are being forged in the maintenance and reproduction of these spaces.

The protests in the United States in summer 2020 were largely successful in getting a larger White public to consider how they may have been participating in structures of inequality and engaging in microaggressions. In part, I think, activists were highlighting the banality of the White lived experience in the US: how is it that we are able to live with the incoherence of a country that claims freedom and equality while so powerfully maintaining White supremacy? And a great deal of the focus of these protests came to land on material heritage.

Many similar protests have also been seen in France. On May 22, 2020, in the Overseas Department of Martinique — two days before the re-initiation of Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd — Black Martinican activists destroyed two statues of a White abolitionist, Victor Schoelcher. According to a Communiqué, the activists would no longer allow “plantations to erase the memory of our ancestors for the benefit of their torturers.”

In July 2020, an activist with the group “Brigade Anti-Négrophobie” spray-painted the words “state negrophobia” in broad daylight below the statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) that adorns the French National Assembly. Colbert was the architect of the “Code Noir” that laid out the laws governing French slavery. The activist’s bold gesture was captured on video, including the moment when two members of the national police rushed towards him, machine guns drawn. As the police jostled him, he managed to offer a remarkable two-minute speech in which he argued that the statue depicted someone who supported “the murder of Black people, the rape of Black people, and the torture of Black people (les noirs).” Instead of stopping this history, he declared, they came to stop him. “Instead of protecting me,” he said passionately, placing his hand expansively on his chest, “you protect these,” gesturing to the statue that rose above them. When one of the police officers began to explain that vandalism is forbidden, the activist argued that “no, it is racism that is forbidden,” and insisted that Colbert was an apologist for “negrophobia.” “Colbert industrialized and institutionalized negrophobia and the murder of Black people!”

I think there are a lot of questions to be asked about the banality of historical objects in French public life and in asking those questions, we can open ourselves up to much broader conversations about the ongoing limits of France’s Revolution, and the persistent myths of its equality. Religious life and material forms should not be exempt from these processes of critique. Just as religious life has always been deeply intermingled with political and economic forms, our attempts to strive toward futures that look very different from our pasts must also include religious actors, institutions, and objects. I hope my book participates in this process in some small way by highlighting how the Catholic materiality we take for granted as unproblematic may at times constrain our ability to imagine alternate futures.

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.

Elayne Oliphant is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at NYU. She is the author of the book, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris, from the University of Chicago Press.

The post The Power and Privilege of Catholicism in France appeared first on The Revealer.

The Jew as weird murderous alien goes back to the Middle Ages, at least. At that time, Christians accused Jews of causing the Black Death by poisoning wells. Gentiles also claimed that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their Passover rituals to make matzah—a conspiracy theory known as the blood libel.

Dracula (Image by Bran Castle)

The association of Jews with foreignness, disease, and ingesting blood was reworked by Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel Dracula. Stoker never specifically identified Dracula as Jewish, but Dracula has a stereotypically Jewish face: a hooked nose, prominent eyebrows, and ugly, sharp features. He is also a foreigner, concerned about his ability to pronounce English correctly, and bent on the appearance of assimilation, even as his fear of the cross demonstrates his inability to ever truly fit into a Christian society.

Dracula corrupts, weakens, and mesmerizes. He spreads a disease which looks like anemia, but which is actually a spiritual sickness. He is repulsive, but seduces women with the hypnotic lure of debasement and power. When Dracula needs to escape England, he turns to a “Hebrew” named Hildesheim, “with a nose like a sheep,” who Stoker depicts as greedy for money, in line with stereotypes of Jewish avarice.

The Nazis made the connection between Jews and vampires even more explicit. Hitler referred to Jews as bloodsuckers, vampires, and “that race which shuns the sunlight” in Mein Kampf. The infamous 1940 Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew used imagery comparing Jews to rats swarming on a ship, evoking the famous 1922 German vampire film Nosferatu. A 1943 antisemitic Nazi pamphlet was titled The Jewish Vampire Brings Chaos to the World. For the Nazis, the vampire encapsulated their fears of foreign corrupters disguised among the volk, plotting to bend weak minds to their will and leach away pure Aryan lifeblood.

***

The vision of vampiric Jews was consistent with stereotypical portrayals of Jews as bloodsucking capitalists, draining value from virtuous laborers. Ironically, Jews were also smeared as anti-capitalists at the same time. Antisemites like Henry Ford claimed that 75% of Communists were Jews. Hitler insisted the Russian Communist Revolution was a Jewish plot to take revenge on the Western Christian world.

Since anti-communism was so intertwined with anti-Jewish animus, it should not come as a surprise that Cold War science fiction often relied on vampiric antisemitic tropes to express U.S. antipathy to the Soviet Union. The most famous example is Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which spores from outer-space invade the earth—like those ugly rats in The Eternal Jew. The invaders rob their victims of initiative and emotion, bending them to an alien will.

Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel The Puppet Masters is even more explicit. The book is about disgusting vampiric alien invaders from Jupiter’s moon of Titan. They batten onto human backs and take over their minds in a plot to rule the world. Heinlein repeatedly compares the Titans to Communist Russia while describing them with antisemitic stereotypes. Heinlein says “…the titans have no true culture; they are parasitic even in that and merely adapt the culture they find to their own needs.” That’s a description that echoes Hitler’s claim that “The Jew was only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples….”

Did Heinlein intentionally echo antisemitic propaganda? It’s difficult to say. Antisemitic tropes became so embedded in science fiction representations of aliens that they were almost a default. The neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce took advantage of that in his infamous 1978 novel The Turner Diaries to stoke deliberate hatred of Jews; the book is about a white nationalist movement fighting manipulative Jews who are trying to weaken the United States. It reads much like Heinlein without the euphemism.

Other creators picked up the stereotypes unintentionally. John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live imagines that hideous aliens have infiltrated Earth, using mind control technology to appear human. They also control the media, broadcasting hidden messages in advertising and television that say, “OBEY. CONSUME. CONFORM.” A coalition of resistance fighters based in a church take a stand against the aliens. Carpenter intended the film to be a critique of Reagan-era capitalism. But by making the ruling class into alien infiltrators, he ended up tying into antisemitic narratives that portray capitalism as the imposition of wealthy Jewish bankers who could be defeated by Christians. Neo-Nazis adopted the film and its imagery as their own, much to Carpenter’s horror.

Another 1980s pop culture phenomenon that dabbles with the links between antisemitism and anti-capitalism, rather than anti-communism, is the television series V. The plot, which should by now be familiar, features lizard-like aliens wearing human skin-suits. They invade Earth and (as you have probably guessed) use mind control technology to take over the planet and strip it of its resources. Like vampires, the aliens feed on humans—though in V they eat the whole flesh, not only the blood.

V subverts its antisemitic implications to some degree. The series presents the invasion of the aliens, and the totalitarian society they impose, as fascist. One of the people who recognizes the danger most clearly is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. At the same time, it’s that survivor’s Jewish grandson who becomes the most visible collaborator with the aliens—motivated in part by his lust for a gentile woman. The confused mix of sympathetic and invidious portrayals of Jews is perhaps to be expected in a series that tries to use antisemitic tropes to delegitimize fascism.

Science fiction antisemitic alienness remains popular and continues to influence the broader political culture. One of the most disturbing recent examples is the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that Democrats are harvesting the glands of children to gain long life. This is an obvious and despicable science-fiction-influenced variation on the blood libel.

A less virulent instance can be found in the 2019 film Captain Marvel, which features yet more shape-shifting green aliens, known as the Skrulls. In this case though, the Skrulls aren’t the bad guys; instead, they’re being targeted for extermination by the superpowered, Aryan-like Kree. The film functions as a kind of gentile savior narrative, with the human Captain Marvel fighting to prevent a Skrull genocide.

It’s nice to see antisemitic stereotypes turned around in this way. But while the Skrull aren’t evil, they’re not the heroes either. Like the Jews in Schindler’s List and The Zookeeper’s Wife, they are portrayed mostly as victims. Vampires are evil, but at least they get to strike terror into the hearts of antisemitic Christians who hate them. Skrulls have to sit around and wait to be rescued.

***

Resident Alien offers another option for those of us who don’t want to be cultureless Titans or cowering Skrulls. The alien protagonist, Harry, is defined by many of the recognizable pulp antisemitic tropes. After he lands on earth, he immediately kills the original, human Harry and takes his face and life, like all those parasitic alien vampires before him. He also has mind manipulating technology, so everyone (or almost everyone) sees him as a normal human rather than a four-armed big-eyed vaguely reptilian monstrosity. And, again in line with alien infiltrators before him, Harry has come to Earth to destroy it—as soon as he finds his doomsday device, which he lost when he crash-landed in Patience, Colorado.

Usually alien mastermind’s don’t crash-land, or lose their doomsday devices. That’s an intentional joke. The show plays with expectations about super-intelligent alien masterminds, which are linked to expectations about hyper-intelligent alien Jewish schemers. Harry constantly says he’s smarter than everyone in Patience. “If the universe had a scale for intelligence, humans would land right below lizards,” he chuckles to himself. And he can come across as extremely clever; he’s quick to figure out how the former town doctor died, when the police are baffled.

But at other times Harry’s “intelligence” seems more like ego and bluster. He handles his duties as town doctor by frantically googling diagnoses on his phone; is he super-smart or is he just connected to the internet like everyone else? He also keeps going out on the glacier even though he’s warned over and over that the ice could cave in—which of course it eventually does. Is he a super-villain or a bumbling ignoramus?

Part of what the show is doing is mixing and matching alien puppet-master antisemitism with a different suite of Jewish stereotypes. Harry is sort of Dracula, but he’s also sort of George Costanza—nebbishy, awkward, and cranky. Alan Tudyk holds his face like it’s a mask that’s about to slip off over his skull and walks with the stiff gate of a man whose underwear is encroaching dangerously on his alien nether regions. His laugh is a sharp repetitive bark signaling social disaster. His dating life is about what you’d expect from someone with that laugh. After he kisses a woman for the first time, he exclaims, terrified, “Ah! It’s rigor mortis! My penis is dying!”

Stereotypes of unmanly Jewish failures are at this point as wearisome as stereotypes of invading vampiric parasites. But putting them together in the same person creates enjoyably odd juxtapositions. Harry may be socially awkward, but he’s also super strong and oddly attractive—like a much less restrained Mr. Spock. He’s planning to destroy the world, but he’s also geekily needy and vulnerable. And instead of being one of those alien predators determined to steal human women, he’s largely terrified of romantic entanglements, emotional or physical. Nonetheless, both are visited upon him when his estranged wife (Elvy Yost) shows up for a couple of episodes. “She had sex with me,” he whines. “On me, at me, in front of me….She made me watch!”

Harry, the human, before he was replaced by an alien, was something of an outsider himself. He was from New York vacationing in Colorado—the big city, big shot doctor slumming in the sticks. If that scenario sounds familiar, it may be because it echoes another beloved sitcom. Many critics have compared Resident Alien to the 1990s semi-classic Northern Exposure, which was about a Jewish doctor setting up practice in a rural Alaskan town.

Northern Exposure played on the quirky contrast between cosmopolitan Jewish New Yorker and rustic conservative Americana—a (much) less ugly form of the Jews-as-foreigners stereotype. Resident Alien at first seems to be about someone who is even more of a fish-out-of-water—or, given the creatures who we learn are Harry’s distant cousins, an octopus out of water.

But in fact Patience, Colorado is no bastion of uniformity. The town includes Black Americans and Muslims. Harry’s medical assistant Asta (Sara Tomko) belongs to Patience’s sizable Ute Native America community—and it’s suggested that her experience there is part of why she gets along with Harry so well. Also, though, she’s a bit of an oddball. “You’re just different. I know what that’s like,” she tells Harry. “Sometimes just feeling human is alien to me.”

In many pulp narratives that draw on antisemitic traditions, foreignness is terrifying. But on Resident Alien, Harry’s foreignness makes him relatable. To be human is to be out of place, which means that Harry is human because he’s an alien. “The human form is confusing,” he says in his clipped, flat tone. “I am often struck with a sharp emptiness inside me. I eat food, but the emptiness doesn’t go away.” You don’t need to be alien, or Jewish, to understand that.

Resident Alien, unfortunately, doesn’t always seem to believe in its own message that aliens are us precisely because they’re aliens. Harry’s people supposedly don’t have emotions, like the body snatchers before them. He has to learn about love and sorrow and loneliness by taking on human form. As with Data or Spock or the antisemitic stereotypes that are the Ferengi in Star Trek, the assimilationist assumption is that outsiders need to learn to be human (reluctantly or otherwise) in order to become better, more compassionate, more moral and more fully realized entities. From this perspective, aliens, robots, and vampires can be welcomed as long as they adapt themselves to America. But the idea that America might change to become more like the alien vampires is never really considered.

Since the show is reimagining antisemitic stereotypes to help define itself, it would be nice if it included a Jewish character or two. Who wouldn’t want to watch Tudyk trade quips with Winona Ryder? Maybe next season. In the meantime, despite a squishy tentacular misstep or two, Resident Alien remains one of the few science fiction shows that turns its back on the antisemitic tradition to embrace its parasitic alien infiltrators and all those who love them.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941/48. He lives in Chicago.

The post How Resident Alien Transforms Shapeshifting Antisemitic Stereotypes — For Good! appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo: Billie Holiday)

A handful of scenes in The United States vs. Billie Holiday evoke the singer as we see her in a luminous cache of rediscovered photographs by Jerry Dantzig. Taken in 1957, two years before Holiday’s death at age 44, the photos show a radiant artist at the top of her game. Holiday looks like visiting royalty, majestic and serene: here she is in mink, embracing a dazzled well-wisher; here adorned in jewels, commanding regally from the stage. The Dantzic photos inspired novelist Zadie Smith to write “Crazy They Call Me,” a short story told in Holiday’s voice. In the story Holiday contends with reporters and fans who want answers: which brutish man in her life goes with which song, whether heroin makes her voice rougher or sweeter, what went down in her most recent run-in with the law. She’ll entertain their dull questions, say something to make the haunting beauty of her singing accessible and plain. But Smith’s Holiday knows her art is more than the life of a victim, an addict, or a glamorous outlaw set to music. Motherfucker, she silently addresses a conniving journalist, I AM music.

I’d love to hear what this Billie Holiday thinks of British journalist Johann Hari.

Hari is an executive producer of The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, on which the film is based. The United States vs. Billie Holiday finds the key to understanding the singer’s life in the song “Strange Fruit,” her searing, graphic witness to lynching. The film takes and runs with Hari’s sensational claim that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics made it a priority of the government to silence “Strange Fruit” by silencing Billie Holiday, and hunted her to an early death to do it.

Why would the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, an arm of the U.S. Treasury Department, mount a murderous campaign to censor a song? In Hari’s telling, the Bureau’s first and longest-serving commissioner, Harry J. Anslinger, regarded drugs, jazz, and Black America as a single, hydra-headed evil. In 1939, nine years after Anslinger took office, Holiday performed “Strange Fruit” for the first time. According to Hari, Anslinger heard Holiday sing of lynched Black bodies—strange fruit hanging on Southern trees—and heard the opening salvo of the Civil Rights movement. Hari reports that Anslinger issued an order to Billie Holiday to stop singing “Strange Fruit,” and, on the pretext of a narcotics charge, arrested her the next day for defying it. After her release from jail, Hari says, Holiday continued to perform “Strange Fruit,” and Anslinger continued to hound her because of it. She grew ill under the the strain of relentless surveillance and repeated arrests, the last as she lay dying in an East Harlem hospital, liver and organs shot.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday puts the cartoonish Anslinger at the center of the history it invents for Holiday and “Strange Fruit.” Early in the film Anslinger huddles with Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and a pack of racist legislators who nod along to his plan: “That Holiday woman’s got to be stopped. She keeps singing this ‘Strange Fruit’ song!” Anslinger then manages to attend nearly every Holiday performance and stare her down from the front row. At the Earle Theater in Philadelphia, a phalanx of cops under Anslinger’s direction rush the stage as soon as Holiday defiantly cues the opening chords of “Strange Fruit.” A last-minute gag order from Anslinger strikes the song from the program of the triumphant Carnegie Hall concert she plays on her return from prison. To stay out of jail Holiday keeps mum, until a lynching she encounters on tour in the South steels her to defy the ever-vigilant Anslinger and return to performing “Strange Fruit.” The cat-and-mouse game ends at Holiday’s deathbed, where Anslinger arrests her on a trumped-up charge to make sure she never sings “Strange Fruit” again.

The drab effect of the film’s main conceit is to shortchange Holiday’s exquisite genius, identifying the whole of her artistry with the fictive career of a single, formidable song. The United States vs. Billie Holiday also shortchanges the struggle of which “Strange Fruit” is a part. It locates resistance to lynching in the singular heroine and spectacular gesture—if Billie Holiday doesn’t sing that song, a Black character wonders in the film, who will? In this it vastly diminishes the history and depth of Black responses to racist violence, from the dedication of organizers like Nannie Helen Burroughs and Ida B. Wells, to decades of anti-lynching activism by the NAACP, to the quotidian rebellions of all who dared to live lives of beauty, joy, and power, Holiday included, in the face of racial terror.

This much is undisputed: Anslinger’s war on drugs was predatory and racist, and Holiday was among its targets. A riveting film might be made about the parasitic affinity of his Bureau of Narcotics for the world of jazz and jazz artists, including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Anita O’Day, Dexter Gordon, and Ray Charles, all of whom fared brutally in Anslinger-era sweeps. So too might a drama of depth be made about the history of “Strange Fruit,” perhaps taking as starting points Joel Katz’s 2002 documentary and David Margolick’s 2001 biography of the song.

What The United States vs. Billie Holiday gives us instead is a new iteration of the myth of Billie Holiday, victim: the “tragic, ever-suffering black woman singer,” in Farah Jasmine Griffin’s description; “the ‘natural’ artist,” in Russell Banks’s account, “who pays for the gift with lifelong suffering and deprivation and, finally, with her life itself.” In The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Holiday suffers not for the gift of her talent—the film is hardly interested in her music—but for her refusal to stop singing “Strange Fruit.” The movie details her downfall in grim, fetishistic tableaux—here she is shooting up in a dive, getting hosed down in prison, weaving and passing out on the street. But it serves up her suffering inside a suspiciously palatable narrative of martyrdom: for defying government orders not to sing of Black lives snuffed out at white hands, Holiday sacrifices her own life.

(A scene from The United States vs. Billie Holiday)

What makes the fiction of Holiday’s sacrifice, centered on a song of extra-judicial killing—of crucifixion, as James Cone insists we see—so easy to believe? Brett Krutzsch alerts us to ways that deeply entrenched, implicitly Christian notions of redemptive suffering have been used to rehabilitate complicated queer lives for public consumption. Thus Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepherd, to be made relatable as fellow citizens whose lives and deaths matter, needed first to be imagined as martyrs whose violent murders somehow yield hope for a more egalitarian future. The United States vs. Billie Holiday likewise fits Holiday’s complicated queer life into a story of redemptive suffering, signposted with Christian symbols, and streamlined for secular audiences.

Let’s return to Hari’s claim that when Holiday “started to sing” the song “Strange Fruit” she was “ordered by the authorities to stop,” and that her “harassment by Harry [Anslinger]’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics began the next day.” Hari’s putative source is a 1947 piece in the music magazine Down Beat he cites at second hand, interprets with latitude, and resets chronologically in order to attach it to Holiday’s first performance of the song in 1939. The article in Down Beat is an interview with Holiday called “’Don’t Blame Show Biz!’—Billie: Daily Press Taking Usual Rap at Trade with Holiday Case.” The Holiday case turned on heroin found in a federal raid on the hotel where she stayed during a week-long run at Philadelphia’s Earle Theater. When the interview appeared Holiday had already been sentenced to jail for possession, but at press time it looked like she might avoid doing time. In the interview, Holiday speaks in her own voice, making the case for leniency. She lists exonerating factors: a desire to kick drugs, her mother’s recent death, the misery of her childhood, and the relentless wear and tear (“one thing after another”) of being Black in Jim Crow America. She adds: “I’ve made lots of enemies, too. Singing that ‘Strange Fruit’ hasn’t helped any, you know. I was doing it at the Earle ‘til they made me stop. Tonight they’re already talking about me. When I did ‘The Man I Love’ [at the New York club she was playing when the interview took place] I heard some woman say, ‘Hear he’s in the jug downtown’”—a reference to her companion Joe Guy, who was arrested with Holiday and held “in the jug” because he couldn’t make bail.

Hari infers from these few lines that it was the federal government, in the person of Anslinger, who ordered Holiday to stop singing “Strange Fruit” in Philadelphia that night, and that the order was or became government policy. But who does Holiday mean when she says “they” in the interview? “They’re already talking about me” sounds like press gossip, or chatter in the New York club where she’d sung that evening. “They made me stop” in the preceding sentence might refer to an unappreciative audience at the Earle (“as usual it only took one cracker in the audience to wreck things,” Holiday says in her 1956 autobiography). It might refer to the drug raid itself that brought her Philadelphia gig to a dramatic end. Elsewhere in the interview she mentions cops and “federal people.” But if federal agents had ordered Holiday to stop singing “Strange Fruit,” she would likely have said so in her autobiography, which she and co-writer William Dufty wrote in part by mining and embellishing the press pieces about Holiday they liked best, including this one.

Where else might Hari have gotten the idea that “Strange Fruit” made Holiday the government’s Public Enemy #1? He might have seen biographer Stuart Nicholson’s unsourced claim that “FBI agents leaned on” one New York City club owner to prevent Holiday from singing an “unpatriotic” anti-war song, “The Yanks Aren’t Coming,” in 1940. Nicholson misattributes authorship of “The Yanks Aren’t Coming” to Abel Meeropol, the Jewish schoolteacher and Communist party member who wrote “Strange Fruit.” Nicholson also claims that the FBI opened a file on Holiday in 1940, even though no items in Holiday’s declassified FBI file date from before 1949.

In 1940 “Strange Fruit” did draw government attention, not to Holiday but to Meeropol. In that year Meeropol was ordered to appear before the Rapp-Coudert Committee, a state senate committee bent on purging Communists from New York public schools. Soviet propaganda had been calling out the hypocrisy of Jim Crow for years—how could America claim to lead the free world with a boot on the neck of its Black citizens?—and the Communist International courted new members by promoting “self-determination in the Black belt.” The Rapp-Coudert committee asked Meeropol whether he wrote “Strange Fruit” at the Communist party’s behest. For his songwriting and activism Meeropol dodged subpoenas from the House Un-American Activities Committee for a decade. The United States vs. Billie Holiday is so careless of Meeropol that it mangles his pen name, Lewis Allan, attributing “Strange Fruit” to Allan Lewis in the closing credits.

According to a memo in Holiday’s FBI file, a confidential source in Anslinger’s office, perhaps Anslinger himself, said it was Holiday’s “notoriety” that brought her under federal surveillance. “The source states that because of the importance of Holiday it has been the policy of his bureau to discredit individuals of this caliber. Because of their notoriety it [sic] offers excuses to minor users.” The publicity-hungry Anslinger found himself making headlines by feeding a national appetite for what he called the “glamorous entertainment characters who have been involved in the sordid details of a narcotic case.” Billie Holiday fit the bill; as Charles Henri Ford wrote in his 1946 “Chanson pour Billie,” she was “hip . . . as a gangster,” “exciting as a holdup,” “disreputable as pleasure,” and “popular as crime.”

The cops and criminals drawn to Holiday could be hard to tell apart: they fraternized with one another, ganged up against her, and made deals. Her long-time manager Joe Glaser, whether for publicity or as part of a trade-off with the law—he had other drug users to protect among his talent—likely set up Holiday’s 1947 arrest. Another arrest two years later came about when her companion John Levy tipped off the Feds. In 1958 Holiday’s then-husband Louis McKay was caught on tape saying that drug charges against the pair in yet another arrest had already been beat in some kind of back-door exchange involving Holiday, and that since she was no longer an asset to him he wanted to see her in the East River. Her relationship with Black narcotics agent Jimmy Fletcher was friendly, if not the torrid romance the film depicts, and brought advantages to both of them. The point is that the men Holiday sought out as protectors, on either side of the law, helped her when it suited them and turned on her when it didn’t. Holiday’s drug arrests increased her notoriety, and her notoriety increased her value to cops and criminals alike as they maneuvered for their own gain. None of these men, Black or white, appear to have been moved in their actions by the anti-racist lyrics of “Strange Fruit.” They exploited her without regard for what she sang.

(Photo: Billie Holiday courtesy of Getty Images)

Holiday was victimized, but she did not allow her victimization to define her. Federal agent George White told an interviewer it was Holiday’s celebrity that made her interesting to the Feds. But White adds something else. “She flaunted her way of living, with her fancy coats and fancy automobiles, and her jewelry.” Holiday attracted federal attention because she dared to enjoy the fruits of her prodigious talent, to live an abundant life. Andra Day, whose credible performance as Holiday earned her a Golden Globe, hints at what the movie, shorn of its gimmick, might have been: “She’s a Black, queer woman in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and that—living in that and owning that in itself is defiance.”

This is the Billie Holiday of Dantzig’s photos, of Zadie Smith’s rendering of the singer in “Crazy They Call Me.” Heroin and the law hover just beyond the frame, gnawing at her life’s ragged edges, but what’s central is the artist’s craft—the “landing on an incidental note, a perfect addition, one you never put in that phrase before, and never heard anyone else do, and yet you can hear at once that it is perfection. Perfection!” But “in the end,” Smith’s Holiday says, “people don’t want to hear about” that. They want to know about the betrayals, the arrests, the beatings, the final agony. On this score The United States vs. Billie Holiday delivers.

According to screenwriter Suzan Lori-Parks, Holiday’s associates who betrayed her by tipping off the government “had to give her up like Jesus’ friend gave him up.” The film strains for a light touch with Christian symbolism, to sometimes weird effect. Some twenty minutes into the film we see Holiday weeping in church. Flickering candles surround a casket: someone has died, perhaps Holiday’s mother. The church is unmistakably Catholic. On first watch I’m thinking, things are getting interesting. I wrote a book about Billie Holiday and religion, and I know most biographers won’t go there—won’t wonder at, say, the fact that Holiday spent stretches of her childhood in a convent reformatory, where she sang the Latin chants of the Mass. Or that she never recorded gospel, a staple of the great Afro-Protestant woman singers of the twentieth century. Or that she sings “Strange Fruit” in the manner of Catholic, not Protestant images of crucifixion, the filled cross and not the empty cross, the broken body on the tree, not the gleaming triumph over death.

But Catholicism in this scene turns out to be a sight gag, no more: the funeral is a funeral for a dog. The nod to Holiday’s Catholicism is a head fake, a wink. It tells us that whatever role religion may have played for Billie Holiday, the fraught particulars of her Catholicism will not burden this telling of her life—no more than Harvey Milk’s Judaism, in Krutzsch’s reading, would come to matter for his memorialization as a gay Christ figure. In both cases, the religious formation with less cultural currency (secular Jewishness in Milk’s case, an ambivalent Catholicism in Holiday’s) dissolves in the light of the far more legible and potent Christian imagery of the crucified and resurrected savior.

Of this imagery The United States vs. Billie Holiday gives us plenty. When the cops come for Holiday in her apartment, she strips naked and extends her arms at right angles like the crucified Christ, a cross on the wall repeating the cruciform shape behind her. When Holiday stumbles on a lynching in the woods, the crucified Black body on the tree is a woman’s. Near the end of the film, at the very end of her life, Holiday decides she’s missed her calling: what she should have been singing all along is gospel. This least Black-churched among the century’s great women singers lights into her own rendition of “Can’t No Grave Hold My Body Down,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s rousing hymn of death and resurrection.

The point of making people into martyrs, Krutzsch reminds us, is to make martyrs do saving work: to attach unjustly curtailed lives to “the Christian idea that suffering and death can have a purpose, and that, like Christ’s suffering on the cross . . . one’s trials today can lead to a better tomorrow.” (Case in point: the notion that George Floyd “sacrific[ed his] life for justice.”) But, Krutzsch demurs, “there is no guarantee that traumas lead to anything better, individually or collectively.” The United States vs. Billie Holiday wants us to believe otherwise. “If we had listened to Billie Holiday, says Hari, “there would be a lot of Black people who were killed who’d still be alive, a lot of Black people who were imprisoned who would have lived free lives, and a lot of people who died of addictions who would have lived to recover and have good lives. I think it’s time we started really listening to Billie Holiday.”

We are listening. We’ve been listening. No one before Billie Holiday sounded remotely like her, and no jazz musician, no singer in any genre escapes her influence today. No government or other power could stop people from listening to Billie Holiday, then or now. But it will require more than listening to Billie Holiday to do what Hari imagines listening to Billie Holiday will accomplish. Let her provide the inspiration and a soundtrack, without making her life into the saving myth that does the work.

Tracy Fessenden is the Steve and Margaret Forster Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Religion Around Billie Holiday.

The post Billie Holiday, ‘Strange Fruit,’ and the Resilient Myth of Martyrdom appeared first on The Revealer.

(Photo: Fannie Lou Hamer)

One day in August 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer found herself in the hallway outside of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hotel suite in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Several national civil rights leaders and political operatives were crammed in his suite strategizing over Black representation at the Democratic National Convention. Prior to the convention, Hamer had helped to establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in order to challenge the Democrats’ all-white Mississippi delegation. Even though Hamer’s home state was under the spotlight, there was apparently no room for her in the talks. When an associate told Hamer that she should “listen to the leaders,” she asked: “Who [is] the leader?” The men around her with money and degrees actively tried to sideline her. Yet, it was Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper with limited formal education and limited financial resources, who ended up stealing the show at the convention and captivating the nation with an electrifying speech about voter suppression and state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans.

Hamer’s powerful oratory arose from a remarkable life that historian Keisha N. Blain covers in her latest book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. Although Hamer came to be defined by her speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, it was only one episode in a larger career in which she faced persecution and terror for her faith-inspired activism defending human rights.

Born on October 6, 1917, Hamer was the youngest of twenty children and was only six years olds when she began working in cotton fields. As an adult, through an encounter with activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she learned about the power of voting rights to effect change in the structural barriers that families like hers faced. Because of her views about Black Americans’ constitutional rights, Hamer experienced several harrowing attacks, including a drive-by shooting at a friend’s home and a brutal beating at the hands of police officers in Winona, Mississippi. On March 14, 1977, at the age of fifty-nine, Hamer died of health complications after continuing to face financial struggles and mounting medical debt.

Hamer anticipated and embodied what legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would call “intersectionality,” recognizing how gender oppression was tied to dimensions of race and class. She also understood liberation as something that connected all people, whether across racial lines in the United States or across borders in places like Vietnam. “Until I am free, you are not either,” Hamer once told a largely white audience. Blain’s stunning portrait of Fannie Lou Hamer forces us to ask: Who gets to “count” as an intellectual, as a bearer of knowledge and wisdom?

Daniel José Camacho: You’ve said that your intellectual encounter with Fannie Lou Hamer in your early twenties changed the course of your life. How so?

Keisha N. Blain: I first encountered Fannie Lou Hamer as an undergraduate student at Binghamton University. I was deeply inspired by her words and activism. Her ability to speak truth to power, the strength of her faith, and her unwavering commitment to civil and human rights are all traits that stood out to me then—as now. As a Black woman and first-generation college student attending a predominantly white institution, I often struggled with self-doubt. It was difficult then—and even later when I attended graduate school—to navigate spaces where so many others viewed me as an outsider. Reading about Fannie Lou Hamer resonated with me as student because I could relate in many ways.

As a Black disabled woman who had limited formal education and endured poverty during her life, Hamer did not fit the mold of what many expected a civil rights leader to look—and sound—like. Yet she never allowed others’ expectations to define her or cause her to doubt her calling. Her story lit a fire within me, and I remain encouraged—and deeply motivated—by the example she set. Learning about Hamer’s story helped me put aside my own self-doubt when I decided to embark on the journey to become a historian of the Black past. Her example has also guided my activist work. Like Hamer, I try to focus less on the seemingly insurmountable challenges ahead and instead try to come up with practical steps and solutions to make a difference in my own spheres of influence.

DJC: In researching and writing this book on Hamer, what surprised you the most about her?

KB: I was surprised by her consistency on the matter of leadership—even in the face of resistance. She had an expansive view of leadership and held fast to the belief that everyone had the potential to make a difference in their communities, regardless of their social background or education. As a result, Hamer rejected the charismatic leadership model that often dominates Black political organizations, and she always looked for ways to empower others to become leaders.

(Photo: Keisha Blain)

It’s not easy to stand by your convictions especially when you’re facing hell for holding those views. And it’s so difficult to hold fast to certain perspectives when others around you don’t take you seriously. There’s something really remarkable about how Hamer was able to push aside the criticisms and even the disdain from some of her colleagues and keep pushing ahead.

Here is where I think her faith played such an important role. She saw her calling as a divine one and so she spent little time worrying about what people had to say about her. As an intellectual historian who studies ideas over time, I was struck by how Hamer managed to hold fast to various perspectives from the start of her career to the very end. She was not the kind of political thinker who would easily buckle under the weight of pressure.

DJC: As you highlight, Hamer’s political work was explicitly motivated by her Christian faith. How did she understand and use Christianity in ways that ran counter to white supremacist expressions of Christianity?

KB: Hamer’s Christian faith shaped her commitment to human rights and her passionate rejection of white supremacy. She often drew parallels to Jesus, frequently quoting Luke 4:18: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.” This is a verse that encapsulates the mission and calling of Jesus, and Hamer was inspired by that verse because she saw her calling in a similar vein—to help those in need, to speak words of hope and empowerment, and to set people free from the chains of white supremacy.

She understood that the racial hierarchy enforced by white supremacists—in the Church and in society at large—ran counter to God’s will. She saw human rights and civil rights as God-given rights and those who stood in the way of equality and justice stood in the way of God’s plan. Ultimately, Hamer employed her Christian faith as a tool to counter white supremacy—in the tradition of so many Black activists and intellectuals, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray.

DJC: Hamer’s faith also motivated her to equate birth control and abortion with genocide. Another layer that informed her views on reproductive rights, as you argue, was her painful experience with a forced sterilization. Yet, Barbara Smith of the Combahee River Collective evoked Hamer’s forced sterilization while leading a mass protest in 1977 in support of abortion funding. Do you think that Hamer’s position was severely limited and in need of correction?

KB: As an intellectual historian, I try to approach my historical actors with a sense of curiosity—always seeking to understand what someone believed and why. I often find myself in disagreement with individuals of the past, but I see my task as simply to reveal the intricacies of someone’s perspectives so that others understand that person even if they wholly reject their ideas. I think Hamer’s ideas about abortion and birth control reflect her painful experiences and her own interpretation of scripture. Although the issue is still hotly contested, many Christians are against abortion and some even view birth control as contradictory to divine will. In that sense, I wouldn’t argue that Hamer needed to be corrected so much as she may have needed time to evolve on the matter.

The evolution of one’s ideas can be a complicated process and often it’s a long process guided by a myriad of factors. I think part of the beauty of this life’s journey is the ability to change—to refine one’s perspectives. Hamer struggled to view abortion rights and birth control rights as part of the larger fight for women’s empowerment, and we will never know if she would have changed her perspective. She might never have budged on the issue. But she might have also come to a different perspective. I think time could have made a difference. It’s important to remember that she died only a few years after the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

DJC: Right now, Republicans across the United States are passing or attempting to pass new voting restrictions at the state level. How does Hamer’s fight against the voting restrictions of her day relate to what we’re seeing today?

KB: Republicans are currently attempting to enshrine minority rule by limiting the pool of voters, and this is exactly what Hamer was fighting against in Mississippi during the 1960s. When she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) in 1962, she recognized the illegitimacy of elections that denied the majority of residents a chance to participate. By passing voter restrictions—and placing more power into the hands of state legislatures—Republicans today are trying to guarantee their control over government, and in the process, they are undermining the will of the people. Voter suppression tactics ultimately oppress those who are already marginalized in American society, including Black and Latinx people. These practices are much like the kinds of strategies that were employed during the Jim Crow era. Hamer fought during her lifetime to expand voting rights for all and today we have already seen those efforts undermined through developments such as the 2013 Shelby decision.

DJC: Hamer’s activism and lack of material resources as an adult, in addition to her experiences in childhood, took a toll on her health. You argue that she lived into a Christian ideal of sacrificing for others. Yet, in our own time, some activists might push back against the idea of “sacrifice” by emphasizing the importance of health and self-care and saying that we need more Black women like Fannie Lou Hamer to flourish rather than suffer. Does this tension challenge how her life can serve as a model for others?

KB: I think being an activist means that one must be willing to make sacrifices. That could mean sacrificing time and it could mean sacrificing money and other resources. When you’re deeply committed to a cause, you will ultimately make sacrifices. Hamer made many sacrifices in her lifetime to advance the cause of civil and human rights. Her sacrifices ultimately changed the nation. At the same time, I do think that we can view Hamer’s experiences as a cautionary tale—about the way activist work can take a physical and emotional toll on leaders. We should not discount the larger social and economic forces at play, but I think it’s important for leaders to be mindful of the importance of rest and self-care. The work of trying to dismantle racism and other systems of oppression is not easy—and it is impossible for one person to tackle it all. When we try to tackle it all, we ultimately undermine our own work. Taking care of one’s self is crucial and perhaps even more so as a leader.

Daniel José Camacho is a columnist for the Revealer. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners. Writing with a focus on religion, race, and history, his work has appeared in publications such as Religion News Service, America Magazine, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post.

Keisha N. Blain is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and President of the African American Intellectual History Society. Her latest books include the #1 New York Times Best Seller Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited with Ibram X. Kendi (Penguin Random House/One World). Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press) will be release October 5, 2021.

The post Fannie Lou Hamer’s Fight for Civil Rights and Her Message for Today appeared first on The Revealer.

Those unfamiliar with Evangelical eschatology, the study of the last days and God’s ultimate plan for humanity, might be forgiven for wondering what xenophobic conspiracy theories have to do with “Biblical prophecy.” Yet framing the “Chinese virus” as a step toward Armageddon exemplifies a century-old hermeneutical instinct amongst Evangelicals, one that frames “the East” as integral to the anti-God forces that will, sometime soon, spark the end of the world. The revival of this “sanctified Sinophobia,” my term for Christian-inspired anti-Chinese hostility, has fueled the hatred now directed at Asians in America and around the globe.

In response to this anti-Asian hate, I authored an open letter condemning the bond between American Sinophobic politicians and their pastoral leaders. Without intervention, their synergism is empowering the arsons, beatings, and murders besieging Asians in America, often inflicted in the name of religious righteousness.

***

It should come as no surprise to anyone observing the rise of Christian nationalism that Reverend Hotsenpiller’s xenophobic prophesying would find a ready audience. An ideology that sacralizes white America as the object of divine favor, Christian nationalism elevates white supremacy and patriarchal hierarchy as preconditions for maintaining God’s blessing on the nation. In their book Taking America Back For God, sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead show that Christian nationalists embrace “authoritarian measures . . . in service of realizing a more ‘Christian’ nation.” Thus, support for Trump’s border wall, as well as the belief that police shoot Black Americans more often than they do whites because of the former’s innate violent tendencies, define Christian nationalists as much as, if not more than, faith in Christ. So, too, do “fears about the moral decay of the nation, and belief that, following this decline into depravity, Jesus will literally whisk Christians into heaven.” Borders and blue lives must be defended precisely because, as history approaches its final chapter, they face a multiplying host of enemies.

More a political identity than a theological rallying point, Christian nationalism is hardly restricted to a fringe subculture. Perry and Whitehead distinguish between “accommodators,” who “lean towards accepting the Christian nation narrative” while not necessarily identifying as Christian nationalists, and “ambassadors,” those who display ardent enthusiasm for making America an avowedly Christian nation. In combination, they comprise some 52% of the entire American population. In a recent interview, Whitehead noted that this demographic even includes a not-insignificant amount of Americans who either adhere to a faith other than Christianity or hold no faith at all: while comparatively small in number, religiously unaffiliated ambassadors celebrate Christianity as upholding a “cultural framework of basically white, native-born, politically, maybe even religiously conservative Americans.” This contingent might not believe in a literal rapture, but their zealous support for Trump signals that they, too, see him as restraining an epic flood of moral pollution.

Insurrectionists carrying a cross to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A disturbingly large segment of America, then, entered the coronavirus era primed to perceive China as the source of that flood. It was against this backdrop that Trump’s loyal crusaders in the GOP immediately took cues from his choice to racialize the virus. Arizona representative and “proud Catholic” Paul Gosar practically invented use of the term “Wuhan coronavirus” on Twitter on March 8, 2020, an accomplishment he underscored by featuring the term three times on one subpage of his website. A day later, California representative and Southern Baptist Kevin McCarthy referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese Coronavirus,” subsequently calling it a “China borne disease” in a defiant non-apology. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a fervently evangelical Presbyterian, incited an “800 percent increase in [the online use of] the phrase [‘Wuhan coronavirus’]” after deploying it on March 20, 2020; he then unsuccessfully tried to strong arm the G7 into using the phrase. In the same month, Southern Baptist Senator Ted Cruz defended Trump against charges of mishandling the pandemic, quipping on his podcast that “at least [Trump] wasn’t serving bat soup in the Wuhan province.” Cruz had no quip a few days later, when a Hmong family in his state was stabbed, in the words of the perpetrator, for “looking Chinese.”

To the untrained eye, the relationship between these politicians’ Christianity and their racism might appear incidental, even irrelevant. The multiple studies that demonstrate the link between political rhetoric and increased anti-Asian sentiment do not foreground Christian nationalism. Nonetheless, while some politicians submerge that link in their language, others, like Methodist Senator Tom Cotton, have highlighted it proudly. “Do your part to arrest the spread of the China virus. And God bless our brave docs and nurses,” Cotton tweeted in late March. Praising Trump’s disaster declaration in response to tornadoes in Tennessee, Bill Hagerty wrote in early April, “Our local communities will now have more sources of federal funding to fight the Wuhan coronavirus. Thank you, Pres. Trump, for keeping TN in your thoughts — you are in our prayers during this difficult time!” In a campaign ad that Marjorie Taylor-Greene posted later that month, Taylor-Greene decried “fines for drive-in church” as manifestations of “Chinese-style socialism,” over images of a Chinese Communist Party meeting hall that prominently feature Chinese writing.

The calls for God to bless “our” doctors in the face of a foreign disease, the promises to offer “our” prayers for the “Wuhan coronavirus”-fighting President, the suggestions that China is persecuting American churchgoers via the Democratic party: these messages demonstrate how some government officials encourage hatred because of their faith, not in spite of it. Specifically, they subscribe to a faith that casts “godless Communist China” as a leviathan-sized menace to the God-fearing American heartland. In doing so, they speak to millions of believers whose apocalyptic proclivities have been enflamed by COVID-19. As social anthropologist Simon Dein has recently written, the pandemic inspired an efflorescence of fascination with the Book of Revelation, particularly the plagues promised at the end of times. Such doomsday enthusiasts are avidly listening to politicians who sermonize about the titanic battle between God’s elect and their Marx-worshipping, disease-spreading persecutors in Beijing.

The fevered homiletics about China and Armageddon from the past year have left their mark. An October 2020 study found that support of Christian nationalism strongly predicted “finding nothing racist about calling COVID-19 the ‘China Virus’.” That these defenders of God and country are translating resentment into action, particularly the whites who constitute 90 percent of all anti-Asian assailants, is evident from several incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate. One Internet commenter exclaimed “God bless Mr. Truman” in the course of insinuating that America should drop a bomb on China. An ongoing rash of vandalized Buddhist temples, including one perpetrator spraypainting “Jesus” onto a statue and another claiming that he acted in obedience to the Bible, further confirms the extent to which reactionary faith has supercharged anti-Asian hate.

To be sure, not all of those who commit hate crimes do so because they believe the Rapture is scheduled for next week. If pressed, they might not be sure what doctrinal position they hold at all. As Whitehead and Perry muse in their book, many American Christians hold incoherent beliefs about the End Times, with little regard for sorting out the contradictions. Yet Christian nationalism’s vision of a climactic contest between Good and Evil, which the “Yellow Peril” has accelerated, generates subliminal suggestions as much as it does direct motivation.

Indeed, throughout the rallies and news sites patronized by the Right, sanctified Sinophobia reaches its audience through the politicians who provide sound bites for those venues. Their status as highly public tithers means that those politicians are unlikely to meet resistance from ministries grateful for cash and proximity to power. Left unimpeded, the drumbeat of paranoid prejudice rings constantly in the ears of countless angry bigots, who may never fully understand their own reasons for lashing out.

To take one especially grotesque example, Evangelical eschatology and its attendant debasing of Asian people lurks in the background of the Atlanta spa massacre. Supposedly motivated by a need to purge his self-described “sex addiction,” the devout Christian killer imbibed a steady diet of apocalyptically tinged antipathy towards Asians and Asian culture at the church where he participated in ministry, Crabapple First Baptist. A February 2, 2021 sermon found Crabapple pastor Jerry Dockery describing Beirut, Singapore, and Beijing as places where he felt “not at home”; in his telling, these places’ putative hostility towards Americans represents “the world’s hostility towards people of Christian faith.” The next week, Dockery referred to China as an example of an authoritarian government, whom true believers, in the fashion of the martyrs who stoically endured Caesar’s persecution, must obey. Buddha and Confucius made cameo appearances alongside Muhammad in Dockery’s August 16, 2020 sermon on the Second Coming, as false teachers who will fail to offer salvation on Judgment Day. In the November 8, 2020 sermon, an associate pastor prayed for “the almost one billion Hindus” who are “going to hell if they don’t repent.”

These caricatures are only compounded by the racial politics of the Southern Baptist Convention, Crabapple’s denomination. Founded by slave owners, the SBC recently courted backlash when its leaders released a statement denouncing “critical race theory” as “unbiblical.” Such anti-anti-racist stances are precisely why Cruz and McCarthy, like a slew of other Republicans, consider the SBC their home. Seen in this context, then, the killer’s action do not merely originate in a repressive approach to sex. Dockery’s preoccupation with the final judgment, his cartoonish portrayals of Asia, the SBC’s rejection of racial progress, and the clout of deep-pocketed Southern Baptists like Cruz and McCarthy worked together to ensure that, from the killer’s perspective, Asian sex workers required nothing short of “elimination.”

In the last sermon preached at Crabapple before the massacre, Reverend Dockery unwittingly egged on that elimination by expounding on what the Second Coming would entail. Using language that would take on chilling overtones after the shootings, Dockery painted the returning Christ “as a military leader, upon a white horse, ready to wage war on all who have blasphemed his name.” Raised in a religious milieu dominated by xenophobia and apocalypticism, the killer heard no countervailing reflections on God’s love for all ethnicities, no commentary on the less-than-Christlike tenor of Cruz’s “bat soup” quip or McCarthy’s insistence on “Chinese coronavirus.” It was in the absence of any such influence that the killer decided to “wage war” on Asian women in a preview of his Messiah’s bloody return.

***

Ever since the 19th century, clergy and congressmen have amplified each other’s fears that Chinese emigrants to the West might annihilate Christian civilization, if not the world. Despite the protestations of sympathetic ministers in the late 19th century, pious nativists like the Jesuit Father Buchard ultimately won lawmakers to their side: denouncing the Chinese in San Francisco, Buchard called them “pagan . . . vicious . . . immoral creatures . . . incapable of rising to the virtue that is inculcated by the religion of Jesus Christ, the World’s Redeemer.” It was to preserve white America from a tsunami of spiritual corruption, not merely from competition for jobs, that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from immigrating.

In the twentieth century, the Cold War intensified the clerical impulse to depict “the Chinese” as harbingers of Biblical doom. As Paul Boyer documents in his book When Time Shall Be No More, painting China as a key player in fulfilling the Book of Revelation would characterize preachers and Bible study leaders throughout the 1970s and 1980s. With increasing specificity, a host of self-designated prophets mapped visions of “a huge Oriental army” and “an invasion of Asiatics” onto Revelation’s images of locusts, soldiers on horseback, and consuming fire. Amongst such jeremiads, evangelist Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, offered the most popular account of a Satanically empowered China. In this bestselling interpretation of Revelation, Lindsey includes a chapter literally titled “The Yellow Peril,” which identifies China with Revelation 16:12’s “kings of the East.” A faction whose bellicosity triggers Armageddon, the “kings of the East” command an army of 200 million (Rev. 9:16). This same number, Lindsey breathlessly reports, was cited in the 1966 documentary The Voice of the Dragon, as part of a “boast of the Chinese themselves” concerning the size of their “people’s army.” In prose that would be read by “Jesus people” in coffeehouses and communes throughout the 1970s, Lindsey concludes, “China alone will have the capacity to destroy one-third of the world’s population just as John predicted.”

Lindsey’s Sinophobia left an impression on Ronald Reagan, who invited the author to speak at the Pentagon. Former Naval intelligence officer George E. Lowe claims, based on his research, that Reagan read Lindsey’s book during its initial run in 1970; that timeline would provide context to his 1971 comment that the “Red Chinese” were a “bunch of murdering bums.” Biographer Lou Cannon recounts a 1989 conversation in which Reagan, famously obsessed with Armageddon, ventriloquized Lindsey’s exegesis by describing “an invading army from the Orient, 200 million strong.” The spectre of that Oriental army likely underpinned his resistance to his Secretary of State’s push for a “strategic association” with China, not to mention his first term’s belligerence towards Japan. Stephen O. Leary, a late scholar of apocalypticism in media, asserted that “every single one of Lindsey’s proposals for domestic and foreign policy was part of Reagan’s campaign platform.”

Today, almost half a century after Lindsey’s visions helped fuel the rise of the Religious Right, pastors and politicians echo each other’s fulminations against the Yellow Peril with ever-increasing fervor. Reviving Lindsey’s “200 million Chinese army” canard, Phil Hotsenpiller’s sermons on China exemplified this escalation: not content with granting “the kings of the East” a major role in the Armageddon scenario, as Lindsey did, Hotsenpiller implied that China is the Antichrist in collective form, the “man of peace” who unites the world under a false gospel before obliterating it. The solution, of course, is to support Christian soldiers who defend the true gospel. His news aggregator site, American Faith, juxtaposes fearmongering about China with headlines lauding Cotton, Cruz, and other anti-immigration hardliners.

Ted Cruz’s own belligerence towards China reflects the way that Christian nationalist politicians reciprocate pastors’ endorsements by acting out their theological fantasies. The senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, is a preacher who has called for Christians to occupy every branch of American government. Cruz Sr. argues that this occupation will culminate in the last days, when the faithful “transfer wealth” from the “wicked” to the “righteous.” He has also decried America’s current loss of resources to China. Seen in this light, Ted’s determination to hold China financially liable for all coronavirus deaths worldwide, as well as his desire to pass bills targeting “Chinese spies” for their alleged theft of American intellectual property, makes a kind of theological sense: he wants to reverse the flow of riches from Christians to Communists to hasten the economic restoration prophesied by his father.

These examples of clerical influence are disturbing. Yet the subtler manifestations of the collaboration between pastoral and political power are arguably more insidious. Sinophobic politicians proudly list their affiliated churches and pastors on their congressional websites; in turn, their spiritual advisors hold fawning interviews with them, defend them in print, or merely offer cover for bigotry through silence. Meanwhile, the same pastors rail against the coming creation of a “one world government,” as Ted Cruz’s pastor Gregg Matte recently did, leaving congregants to speculate about where this imminent global autocracy might originate. (Reverend Matte offered one clue by naming “China under Mao” as a notable forerunner of the Antichrist’s regime.)

To reduce the likelihood that those under Christian nationalism’s spell will strike out at its designated scapegoats, my open letter calls for politicians’ affiliated churches and denominations to urge them to repent for anti-Asian racism immediately. It also demands that those churches take disciplinary action in the absence of said repentance, up to and including excommunication. Signed by 600+ signatories, the letter calls for solidarity from members of these churches, including the withdrawal of material support for institutions that fail to take action. With such measures, we hope to delegitimize the venomous religiosity that reigns in America’s pulpits and congressional chambers.

Interrupting that reign might seem far-fetched, given the extent of damage that Christian nationalism has wreaked already. But if there’s one thing I’ve gleaned from sermons about the Day of Judgment, which comes “like a thief in the night,” it’s the value of expecting the unexpected.

Lucas Kwong is a writer, musician, and professor of English at CUNY. You can sign his open letter on anti-Asian racism and Christian nationalism at againstchristianxenophobia.com.

The post The Yellow Peril’s Second Coming appeared first on The Revealer.

That day he preached a sermon about the prophet Elijah’s death. The biblical story was one he thought spoke directly to living through the AIDS epidemic in 1980s and 90s San Francisco. But it had taken on new meaning since his diagnosis.

The story recounts Elijah’s travels with his student, Elisha, in the days before his death. At each stop, knowing he will die soon, Elijah tells Elisha he’s free to leave. And each time Elisha responds: “As God lives, and as you yourself live, I shall not leave you.”

When they reach the far side of the Jordan River, they know Elijah’s time is over. Elijah asks Elisha if there’s anything he can do for him before they’re separated. Elisha asks for a double share of the prophet’s spirit. Elijah responds “You have asked a hard thing. Yet if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be so for you.” Elisha then watches as a chariot of fire takes his friend up to heaven in a whirlwind.

Reverend Mitulski told the church that his stay in the hospital helped him see this story from Elijah’s perspective for the first time. For him, it was a story about the blessings that come when we stay together through times of change, death, and mystery. He recognized that people can’t always stay through such moments, that in a community beset by constant loss it’s sometimes too hard to stay. But if we can, that’s where gifts lie. “That’s it,’ he said. “That’s the theophany. That’s the whirlwind. That’s the still, small voice. When we’re able to stick through with each other in difficult times.”

The act of staying may seem modest compared to a whirlwind, a simple price for something as abundant as double blessings. But AIDS made two things clear. Staying with people whom we love and bearing witness to their suffering, knowing that we will lose them, is terribly hard. And doing it anyway has the potential to be transformative. For Mitulski, it became part of a personal and political theology of AIDS that informed his work as a minister to a community ravaged by the disease, as an HIV-positive gay preacher, and as a progressive coalition-based activist.

Many people turned away from AIDS in the 1980s and 90s. It was new, mysterious, and terrifying. The ways the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) attacked the immune system made people vulnerable to a range of illnesses, known as opportunistic infections, which were rare and fatal. It struck socially marginal people – mostly gay men and IV drug users – and stigmatized anyone with a diagnosis. Fears of contagion made people with AIDS targets of physical and social shunning. Nurses wouldn’t bring food into patients’ rooms. Parents turned away from children. People with AIDS were starved of human touch outside of medical settings. And families were burned out of homes and chased out of towns when neighbors discovered someone with AIDS lived nearby. Staying was neither easy nor assured.

The loudest religious voices of the time, mostly from the ascendant Christian right, encouraged flight. Prominent pastors proclaimed that AIDS was God’s vengeance on sinful people. Allied politicians opposed – and often halted – policies that would have eased the burdens of AIDS. Parishioners and supporters too often assented.

But there were other visions of God at work during those years – a God that stayed with the sick and dying while the world fled, a God that affirmed gay and lesbian love and the families they made, and a God that saw in AIDS the possibility for the liberation of all people. This was the God that Reverend Mitulski and the people of MCC San Francisco reached toward, the God they believed responded with double blessings and more.

***

Jim Mitulski grew up Catholic in Royal Oak, Michigan, a small city on the outskirts of Detroit known as the parish home of radio priest and notorious antisemite Father Charles Coughlin. But for Jim, it was the site of St. Dennis, a newer parish invigorated by Vatican II. Church was a space of safety for him, a refuge from a tumultuous family, and a place of liberal – if not liberation – politics.

His religious life grew through relationships with women. His grandmother, whom he describes as a “total religious fanatic, and eccentric, and kind,” belonged to five different parishes, visiting each weekly. She took Jim with her on these “rounds,” opening his eyes to different Catholic possibilities. As a teenager he became a protégé to Sister Melanie Chateau, a Dominican nun who served alongside two male priests at St. Dennis in an experiment parishioners thought would lead to women’s ordination.

Jim came out in high school in the mid-1970s, although he was never especially closeted. “I never wanted to not be gay,” he said. “I did try to pray for sexual control, but it never occurred to me to try to be straight.” He wrote gay rights editorials in an underground school newspaper and was part of an informal support group for gay teens organized by a lesbian teacher. But coming out escalated tensions in his family.

For guidance, they turned to church. The priests advised Jim’s father to accept his son and supported his mother in doing so. Their counsel gave Jim breathing room in his last years in their home. Smart, literary, and desperate to leave Michigan, he set his sights on Columbia University. He could not imagine a future in ministry as an out gay man, so he dreamed of becoming a poet. He arrived in New York in 1976, an 18-year-old “flaming radical homo feminist.”

***

In New York Jim experimented with bringing his faith, politics, intellect, and sexuality together. He studied religion with progressive pioneers like Carol Christ and Cornel West. He became committed to liberation theology, a Latin American tradition that views scripture from the perspective of the poor and works to free people from oppression. And he got involved in political organizing, holding “Gay is Good” posters at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and gathering signatures for the Equal Rights Amendment. He explored religious life in gay-supportive communities, worshipping with Dignity, a gay Catholic group, and at St. Mary’s Manhatanville, an Episcopal church that sponsored the ordination of Carter Heyward, which paved the way for women to become Episcopal priests. But his own path to ministry remained unclear.

Jim’s activism led him to participate in an annual political ritual of 1970s gay New York. For 15 years, a bill banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation went before the City Council. And each year there was a public hearing. At one of those hearings the tension between Jim’s sexuality and his religious life came to a head.

The people he found most morally compelling all supported the bill. But the religious people, with whom he wanted to identify, opposed it with vitriol. “I just fell apart in the hearing chamber,” he remembered. “I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I just thought I can’t be religious anymore.” As he cried, a group formed around him. They were from Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) New York, a church that believed in reconciling homosexuality and Christianity. They recognized his pain and invited him to their church.

The MCC denomination pre-dated Stonewall. It was founded in 1968 by Reverend Troy Perry. A gay, white man from the south, Perry was dismissed from two Pentecostal pulpits because of his sexuality. So he started a church where homosexuality would be seen as a gift from God and compatible with Christian life. MCC preached that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities were loved by God just as they were.

MCC also innovated practices that sanctified gay people and gay life. Holy Union, an early form of gay marriage, was a formal rite of the church. MCC congregations also practiced open communion, giving all believers access to the bread and wine shared ritually in remembrance of Jesus’s sacrifice of body and blood. Debate over participation in communion has been vivid throughout Christian history with those deemed sinful, like homosexuals, often excluded. But MCC opened communion to everyone and invited participants to receive it in same-sex pairs and queer kinship groups. This was highly meaningful to gay men and lesbians who had few forums in which their relationships were publicly visible.

MCC New York became the training ground for Jim’s ministry. He became student clergy under Reverend Karen Ziegler, and later an associate minister. Its affirmation of homosexuality put MCC on the fringes of American Christianity, but it was a space where Jim thrived. “The fringe is my home,” he says. “And it’s also where I believe Christianity is. That’s where it finds its meaning.” Working from the margins – rather than from within a larger denomination – allowed MCC to stop fighting over whether it was legitimate to be gay and Christian and build a community that was fully both.

Jim Mitulski in 1978. (Photo: Jim Mitulski’s personal archive)

Jim’s work with AIDS began when it first emerged in the early 1980s. MCC New York was a few blocks from St. Vincent’s, a Catholic hospital that saw many of the earliest cases. Because it was close, and because most of its members were gay, the church was called upon to visit people with AIDS, who were often alone. Jim was one of the team of MCC ministers who responded. In those first years, little was known about the disease and how it was transmitted. He was required to wear a full hazmat suit to enter hospital rooms – “you don’t really want to,” he recalls, “but you don’t know what you’re supposed to do so you put them on.” The disease itself was “painful, messy, ugly, horrible, and fatal.”

Its terror was compounded by the shame of what the disease disclosed about sex and sexuality. In the 1980s many gay men concealed their sexual orientation, including from their doctors. But an AIDS diagnosis laid that bare. Clergy visits to AIDS patients, when made at all, often involved trying to persuade people to repent of homosexuality before death to spare themselves further punishment in the afterlife. Jim and other MCC ministers tried to counter fear of impending damnation by affirming God’s love for gays and lesbians. And they tried to demonstrate it by just being present.

While journalists depicted AIDS as a disease of white gay men, Jim saw many young gay men of color in those rooms. He saw sex workers, people struggling with substance abuse, and people of ambiguous citizenship status. He started bringing a rosary to the hospital with him, visibly wearing it to forge a connection with patients whose languages he did not speak. AIDS showed him firsthand what he had learned from liberation theology – that all forms of oppression worked together and undoing one meant undoing all.

***

In 1986 Jim became pastor of MCC San Francisco. The congregation had been on its own journey to reconcile sexuality and religion since it began in a gay bar in 1970. The congregation purchased a building in the Castro, the city’s gay neighborhood, in 1979. In the year before Jim arrived, a team of laypeople led the congregation and built a religiously engaged community. When he arrived, the week before his 28th birthday, the congregation had about a hundred members and was looking for a leader that could help them navigate AIDS.

San Francisco’s gay community was different than the gay community in New York. So was AIDS. Both cities had large gay populations and neighborhoods where many gay people lived, but the percentage of gay people was higher in San Francisco and they lived in more concentrated neighborhoods. This density facilitated the spread of HIV; case maps consistently showed the Castro as the disease’s epicenter. A vibrant neighborhood in the 1970s, by the mid-1980s it was common to see people with AIDS walking with IV poles. “Now I was living in death village,” Jim says. “But it was not a terrible time.”

Five years into the epidemic, the church had experienced some deaths, but knew a tsunami was coming. The city had developed its eponymous model of AIDS care, relying on volunteer organizations such as the Shanti Project to provide emotional and pragmatic support to people with AIDS. Some of the city’s churches had responded as well – the Episcopal diocese held the first national conference on AIDS sponsored by a Christian denomination. But Shanti, despite roots in the Bay Area’s spiritual counterculture, was reluctant to address religion with its clients. And most church-based responses were tainted by profound ambivalence, at best, toward homosexuality. MCC San Francisco wanted to create a decidedly religious space for people to engage life and death questions of AIDS while countering the notion that people with AIDS were sinners receiving just desserts.

Jim shared that vision. In a city that, even at the time, was almost reflexively “spiritual but not religious,” he was spiritual and religious. As the epidemic unfolded, he saw that religion – gay-affirming, sex-positive religion – had an important part to play in helping the community through it. “Just like the Eucharist and the mass sustained people during the plague, I actually think it did that for us too during AIDS. We were not diseased bodies. We were not infected blood. We took those words [the body and the blood] and claimed them.” For the next fourteen years, Jim and the congregation worked together to respond religiously to AIDS.

***

By 1988 MCC San Francisco understood itself as a church with AIDS. “This doesn’t mean that our church will soon be dead and gone,” wrote Jim and student clergy Kittredge Cherry in an article for Christian Century. “No, in fact it means that we live more deeply.” At that point, two-thirds of the men in the congregation were believed to be HIV positive. And Jim needed to hold the congregation together through seemingly endless waves of grief and loss.

One place those waves hit was at funerals. AIDS complicated the ritual work of remembering the dead and comforting the grieving. Many families of the deceased did not admit publicly that their children were gay or died of AIDS. In traditional funerals, same-sex partners, lovers, and friends who were caregivers often went unacknowledged, their grief unrecognized. Because of its affirmation of homosexuality, MCC San Francisco became a place where people who died of AIDS were remembered more fully and the people who loved them recognized as rightful mourners.

The church did as many as four funerals a week in the 1980s and 90s. Its clergy, headed by Jim, worked to create rituals of memorial that honored people in their complexity. Memorial services became sites of queer ritual innovation that were often heartbreaking and sometimes fabulous. Jim did countless funerals for men he had married only days or weeks before, with their partner’s funeral following soon after. He conducted Richard O’Dell’s funeral where two lovers – one current, one former – were recognized from the pulpit as mourners and given time in the service to remember him. At Scott Galuteria’s funeral the city’s hula troupe danced as his native Hawaiian mother sang the gospel standard “I Come to the Garden Alone.” And Jim still preaches today about Bobby Kennedy’s memorial, where the altar featured the deceased’s prized collection of Fiestaware. Mourners were invited to express their collective anger about AIDS by smashing a dish in his memory.

But the sheer frequency of funerals threatened to drain any given one of its significance. And the compounding of grief could turn sorrow and anger into numbness. “Nothing ever prepared me to do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of those things.” Jim remembered, “And try to make them not appear like ‘am I doing this again, at two o’clock when I just did one at ten?’”

Grief was only one thing poised to pull the community apart. Fear of illness was another. In a community already stratified by race, class, and age, a new fault line emerged: sero-status – whether a person tested positive or negative for the HIV virus. This biological indicator became a salient social divide in the late 1980s when men tired of condom use sought partners of the same sero-status to minimize the risk of transmission. That divide threatened to become charged with moral significance, separating the perceived bad from the good, the dirty from the clean, and the sinner from the saint.

Rev. Jim Mitulski in San Francisco. (Photo: Jim Mitulski’s personal archive)

Jim warned of the dangers of such line-drawing from the pulpit. In 1992 he preached a sermon revealing that while he himself was HIV negative, he was caring for a beloved friend who was HIV positive and was not willing to let difference in sero-status hold them apart. “Positive or negative has a certain medical reality,” he preached. “It does not have to have a spiritual reality in a way that separates us one from the other. It does not have to have a political reality that says there are two kind of people in the world and they can never be together.” He supported separate support groups in the church for HIV-positive and HIV-negative people that addressed each group’s specific issues. But he believed those separate spaces had to encourage coming together and not allow fear, in the guise of righteousness, to pull the community apart.

This became more personal after his own sero-conversion. 1995 was late in the epidemic for San Francisco. People knew about condoms and had been using them for a long time. But grief, frustration, and despair had accumulated past what many could bear, leading to all kinds of risk-taking. “I could write an article just about this, ‘How I Became HIV Positive,’” Jim told me. “And I could write ten different stories and it could all be true.” Once he tested positive, Jim had to face how his diagnosis revealed the risks he had been taking – and to wrestle with internal and external judgment as he asked the congregation to stay with him.

Sero-conversion also galvanized him. It spurred him to write about HIV and call out the moralizing notion that “if you got AIDS early on, it is understandable but if you got it recently, you deserve only to be made an example.” It motivated him to make the connection between AIDS and other forms of marginalization more explicit. And it helped him see that a theology of staying, even through likely loss, offered political blessings as well as personal ones.

***

Jim saw in AIDS the basis for a liberation theology that could spiritually fund political work. AIDS was an opportunity to bring Christian gays and lesbians into broader progressive conversations – and for this largely white, very gay congregation to make common cause with African American churches that were also overwhelmed by the disease.

He preached on race and racism regularly and tried to build relationships with African American congregations affected by AIDS. Some of these early relationships proved too hard to hold. Theological differences on the moral status of homosexuality, the tidal wave of AIDS in the gay community, and other tidal waves, including the crack epidemic flooding Black neighborhoods, dissolved those fragile ties. But when he met Bishop Yvette Flunder, an African American lesbian minister, he recognized the potential for a spiritual friendship with real staying power between themselves, their congregations, and the religious worlds both were trying to change.

When they met, Flunder had just founded Ark of Refuge, one of the first AIDS projects to emerge from the Black church. She was on the ministerial staff of the Love Center, a Black Pentecostal church founded by brothers and music ministry giants Walter and Edwin Hawkins. The congregation drew many same-gender-loving people of color, but being fully out wasn’t an option. Flunder decided to give people that option, founding City of Refuge, which started meeting in the Castro in 1991. The two out pastors built their congregations alongside each other, in ongoing conversation about sexuality, Christianity, AIDS, and race.

When other African American religious leaders became more open in their support of gays and lesbians, Jim provided a pulpit from which they could stand together publicly. Reverend Amos Brown, pastor of one of San Francisco’s oldest African American churches, addressed the MCC congregation in 1996. Brown was a candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors but faced strong opposition from gay leaders. That changed after Jim had him preach; the sermon was powerful enough to secure Brown the support of the city’s largest gay newspaper. “I wouldn’t have done it,” Jim said, “if I didn’t believe in it. But I felt that the gay community was racist in the same ways that they were accusing the Black community of being homophobic.” He was one of the few gay leaders willing to say it.

Jim’s theology of staying in the face of loss meant staying with communities devastated by AIDS even after effective treatment changed the course of the disease for white gay men in the Castro. The AIDS cocktail, a combination of antiretroviral drugs made broadly available in 1996, was transformative. People at the edge of death returned to life. The hospice around the corner from MCC discharged patients for the first time. There was reason for celebration and a strong pull to move on.

But access to treatment was limited by social inequalities and AIDS persisted as an under-treated, fatal disease in many communities. Jim’s orientation toward coalition work combined with his recent diagnosis made him resist the temptation to step away from AIDS. In a sermon on Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day in 1999, three years after the cocktail, he made his position clear. “We who live in the Castro, who have access to medications may think that AIDS is changing, and it is. But thirty million people in the world do not think AIDS is over. Thirty million people who are lucky to see an aspirin for AIDS treatment do not think AIDS is over. We can’t forget and we must remember.”

***

On Jim’s last Sunday at MCC San Francisco in December of 2000, he preached on Elijah and Elisha again. His years in AIDS ministry had left him exhausted – at 42 he had performed more funerals than most clergy do in a career – and his health needed tending. In the sermon he recalled how people in the community had identified with Elisha in the years before treatment. Throughout the pair’s final journey, observers continually warned Elisha that his friend was dying. This dynamic was familiar to the congregation. Jim reminded them how “medical authorities with their best intentions would tell us in order to break through our denial: you’re going to lose your friend soon. The outlook is bleak. We listened,” he said, “and yet we would also respond as Elisha did to those well-meaning authorities. Shut up! You don’t know the whole story. You don’t know that love is stronger than death. You don’t know that love never ends.”

Then he reminded the congregation who and what to stay with. “We must care about racism and about sexism as much as we care about homophobia,” he said. “Those are our roots. That’s the foundation.” He told them to remember their obligations to other queer groups on the fringe. And he urged fidelity to the preferential option for the poor, an idea from liberation theology that calls for staying – and standing – with society’s most marginal.

“We received a double portion of spirit,” he told them, “because we saw what we were going through. We were attentive. We paid attention. We put our bodies with each other during difficult times of transition and we were blessed beautifully.” By naming the act of staying as the stuff of blessings, Jim recognized the holy sparks in this community’s daily efforts at holding themselves and their loved ones together, however flawed those efforts may have been. In urging them to stay with the people and issues he saw as inseparable from AIDS, he hoped their share of spirit would more than double and that those sparks would grow into flames of justice.

Lynne Gerber is an independent scholar in San Francisco. She is the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Re-orientation in Evangelical America from the University of Chicago Press.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Listen to this powerful episode of the Revealer podcast featuring Lynne Gerber: “San Francisco’s ‘AIDS Church’ and the 40th Anniversary of HIV/AIDS.”

The post AIDS and the Blessings of Staying: The Ministry of Reverend Jim Mitulski appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

For many Americans the month of June evokes associations with Pride, the yearly tribute to the 1969 Stonewall riots. Last year, countless Americans directed their attention to protests for racial justice that followed the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Now, June can serve as a rallying point for both queer liberation and the struggles for racial equality. As legislators in several states are concurrently working to disenfranchise people of color and strip rights from transgender Americans, more people will hopefully see racial justice and LGBTQ equality as pressing and overlapping issues that deserve our devoted attention.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

This issue of the Revealer considers how past struggles for inclusion remain with us today. The issue opens with Lynne Gerber’s “AIDS and the Blessings of Staying” where she recounts how the minister of a predominantly gay church in San Francisco helped his community respond to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. Next, in “The Yellow Peril’s Second Coming,” Lucas Kwong explores the history of anti-Asian Christian nationalism to help explain the current wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans. Then, in the newest installment of his “From the Margins” column, Daniel José Camacho interviews New York Times bestselling author Keisha Blain about her new book on Fannie Lou Hamer and what Hamer’s struggle for Black voting rights can teach us about today. In a similar vein, in “Billie Holiday, ‘Strange Fruit,’ and the Resilient Myth of Martyrdom,” Tracy Fessenden reviews The United States vs. Billie Holiday and offers a more nuanced portrayal of Holiday, her faith, and her role in fighting racism. And given the current rise in antisemitic incidents across the United States, Noah Berlatsky explores the history of antisemitic themes in science fiction and reviews the popular new SyFy series Resident Alien to see how that show inverts common antisemitic tropes. Finally, in “The Power and Privilege of Catholicism in France” Revealer contributing editor Kali Handelman interviews Elayne Oliphant about her new book The Privilege of Being Banal and what it reveals about Catholicism’s dominance in supposedly secular France and how that contributes to today’s social inequalities.

Our June issue also includes the newest, and already extremely popular, episode of the Revealer podcast: “San Francisco’s ‘AIDS Church’ and the 40^th Anniversary of HIV/AIDS.’” Lynne Gerber joins us to expand on her article from this issue, discuss how a church in San Francisco helped a gay community devastated by sickness, death and constant funerals, and why knowing this history about the AIDS epidemic matters today. You can listen to this powerful episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As we confront this newest tide of anti-transgender bigotry, racism, antisemitism, and general xenophobia, let us learn from the past to develop a fuller picture of what we are encountering today. None of these problems started during the pandemic or the Trump era, even though both exacerbated what we are witnessing. I hope the articles in our June issue give you a clearer vision of the world we occupy and how we can make it a more just place. Until then, let the protests continue.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: June as a Month for Protests appeared first on The Revealer.