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 our newest episode: “Latino Americans and the Popularity of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism.”

Happy listening!

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 12: Latino Americans and the Popularity of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Malcolm X in Mecca, 1964)

From April 13th to May 13th this year, able-bodied Muslims around the world will abstain from food, drink, and sex, as well as baser instincts like anger, from sunrise to sunset for Ramadan, an annual religious obligation named for the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. April 13th also marks fifty-seven years since Malcolm X traveled to Saudi Arabia to take part in the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and sacred duty Muslims must carry out at least once in a lifetime if they have the means. The concurrence of these events offers an opportunity to re-examine Malcolm X’s words and work, which resonate now more than ever. The last ten months of his life, from April 1964 to February 1965, deserve particular attention. It was during this time that Malcolm X became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

The parallels between 1960s and 2020s America are depressingly inescapable. Communities of color, including Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latino Americans, continue to be disproportionately targeted by police brutality, health inequities, education disparities, housing discrimination and redlining, environmental injustice, and voter suppression. Moreover, the United States continues to be threatened by white nationalist terrorism, which relies on rhetoric of victimhood and hate to justify violence. No longer in the guise of white hoods and the KKK, this violence is now expressed by a complex constellation of groups and organizations targeting Asian, Pacific Islander, Black, Indigenous, and Latino Americans as well as Jews, Muslims, and queer people, all of whom are deemed sub-human and outside the spectrum of what it means to be American.

Dehumanization has long been part of the American story affecting historically marginalized people since the nation’s founding. Throughout his life, Malcolm X illuminated the disparities between these different Americas. As Malcolm X, he sought to center the stories of Black Americans and Black people around the world. As El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, he demanded recognition of the God-given dignity of all human beings. While El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s assassination at the age of 39 often overshadows the substance of his life, his religiously informed political agenda was based in the assumption that it is only when people respect each other’s humanity, only when people fulfill each other’s mutual rights, and only when people carry out equitable responsibilities toward each other, that “a society in which people can live like human beings on the basis of equality,” will be a reality. What Malik El-Shabazz sincerely wanted and worked tirelessly for was “nothing but freedom, justice, and equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people.” His exhortation for connection with all people is in stark contrast to the brash advocacy for violence, particularly against white people, that is a common – and erroneous – depiction of his life and legacy.

Misunderstanding Malcolm X
The mischaracterization of Malik El-Shabazz as a provocateur of “hate to meet hate” and as someone who called for indiscriminate acts of aggression acts against white people is the outcome of several factors, and not simply because he was killed before he could realize the aims of his work. Too often, he has been dismissed by being placed in convenient juxtaposition to his contemporary, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., rather than regarded singularly and in his full complexity. Moreover, while some of the milestones of his life are well-known, including the six-and-a-half years he spent in prison for robbery, what is less examined is the influence of his parents on his mission to link the civil rights of Black Americans to the human rights of Black people around the world. Both his mother and father were supporters of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican activist who advocated for pan-Africanism, which is the unification of people on the African continent with the African Diaspora. Moreover, scant context has been provided for his religious beliefs that undergirded his work, including the establishment of Black-centered institutions and what he called “the hypocrisy of democracy,” based on how Black people have been treated in America.

As with much of the public’s misunderstandings about Garvey, far too many people have a skewed vision of Malcolm X as an inciter of violence. His ideas have commonly been reduced to sound bites. When asked in January 1965 on The Pierre Berton Show whether he condones violence, he was clear that he did not. However, he did say that “the Black man in the United States and any human being anywhere is well within his right to do whatever is necessary by any means necessary to protect his life and property especially in a country where the federal government itself has proven that it is unwilling or unable to protect the lives and property of those beings.” Here, he was calling attention to the double standard that white people could defend themselves, while Black Americans could not without fear of appearing irrationally angry and inherently violent.

Malcolm X in 1964 (Photo: Truman Moore for Getty Images)

Similar misinterpretations existed during his lifetime. Astutely aware of the conflicting interpretations people had of him, he once commented, “For the Muslims, I’m too worldly. For other groups, I’m too religious. For militants, I’m too moderate. For moderates, I’m too militant. I feel like I’m on a tightrope.” In life and in death, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz has been considered a Black revolutionary. A human rights vanguard. An iconoclast. A political dissident. A statesman. A Sunni Muslim. A husband. A father. A brother. A human being. His self-described search for truth led him through several transformations, often marked by changes in his name. He went from Malcolm Little to his adopted nickname Detroit Red to Malcolm X to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. “El-Hajj” is the honorific bestowed upon people who complete the Islamic pilgrimage. “Malik El-Shabazz” signaled both his embrace of Sunni Islam and his break with the Nation of Islam, an organization to which he had dedicated twelve years of his life. It is in this last iteration, as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, where we can best understand Malcolm X. His ideas and activism during this period reflect his identities as a Sunni Muslim and as a Black man and as a human rights activist and as a statesman and as a husband, father, brother, and son.

The Hajj and the Human Family
On April 20, 1964, during the five-day Hajj, Malcolm X wrote a letter to a friend from Saudi Arabia describing his new worldview. For perhaps the first time in his life, soon-to-be-El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz regarded “every human being as a human being – neither white, black, brown, or red” as part of the “Human Family.” Sunni Islam did not share what he described as the Nation of Islam’s “strait-jacketed world” of white people as devils, but “already molded people of all colors into one vast family.” Witnessing the confluence of Muslims around the world during the Hajj, he began to internalize the Islamic concept of umma, or a singular community of believers, originating from the Arabic root for “mother.” As he and Alex Haley wrote in his autobiography, “Everything about the pilgrimage accented the Oneness of Man under God.” From this perspective, because God is One, so, too, is humanity one entity. After the Hajj, he felt that skin color was no longer a valid lens by which to judge people. Rather, a person should be judged by deeds and conscious behavior, and ultimately it is one’s intentions that God will judge.

One month after the Hajj, he wrote in a letter that Islam compels one “to take a stand on the side of those whose human rights are being violated, no matter what the religious persuasion of the victims is. Islam is a religion which concerns itself with the human rights of all mankind, despite race, color, or creed. It recognizes all (everyone) as part of one human family.” He wrote that letter in Nigeria as he traveled the African continent to meet with political leaders. As he wrote from Ghana during the same tour, his desire for the political, cultural, and economic harmony “between the Africans of the West and the Africans of the fatherland” of all religions was not antithetical to his practice of Islam, but because of it. The interlocking inequities of Black people, Muslims and non-Muslims, were religious obligations to address.

The OAAU and the Human Problem
In order to extricate Black people from the oppressive power dynamics of white institutions, Malik El-Shabazz established the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) a few months after the Hajj in 1964. He founded the organization to address Black unemployment, unlivable housing conditions, voter suppression, and to “decolonize” education curricula and the media. The OAAU was patterned in “letter and spirit” after the Organization of African Unity (OAU), an organization established in 1963 to eradicate colonialism and create political and economic ties across the African continent.

Malik El-Shabazz’s newfound belief in Sunni Islam compelled him to encourage other Black people, of all religious backgrounds, to stand up not only for their civil rights, but to join together in demanding their human rights. Domestically, the mission of the OAAU was to reconnect Black Americans with their African heritage, establish economic independence, and promote Black self-determination in order for Black people to have the access, benefits, and opportunities like their white counterparts. The OAAU worked for Black self-empowerment, self-defence, as well as political engagement – particularly voter registration and education. The OAAU also sought to bring charges against the U.S. government before the United Nations in violation of the human rights of the 22 million Black Americans.

Malik El-Shabazz’s experiences with Sunni Islam also changed his views on women’s role in organizational leadership. After the Hajj, he insisted that women were integral to the enlightenment and progression of any nation. The centrality of women in leadership positions within the OAAU was thus purposeful and included his wife Betty, his sister Ella Collins, acting chair Lynne Shifflett, Sara Mitchell, and Gloria Richardson. Indeed, these women ensured the OAAU continued after his death.

The ethos and scope of the OAAU reflected El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s post-Hajj shift from civil rights to human rights, from a singular focus on anti-Black racism to solidarity with every person who is targeted because of their skin color and physical appearance. This is evidenced by the links he forged with leaders of non-Black marginalized communities including Asians and Asian Americans, such as Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American civil rights activist who befriended Malik El-Shabazz’s in 1963 and who was present at the Audubon Ballroom when he was murdered.

During his final public talk, three days before his death on February 18, 1965 at Barnard College in New York City, Malik El-Shabazz articulated his global vision of solidarity: “It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing global rebellion of the oppression against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter. We are interested in practicing brotherhood with anyone really interested in living according to it.”

For Malik El-Shabazz, everyone is connected through what he called the “Human Family” and is therefore is obligated to correct the “Human Problem” of racism. The sole formula to address the oppression faced by various constituencies of the Human Family consists of “real meaningful actions, sincerely motivated by a deep sense of humanism and moral responsibility.” Malik El-Shabazz believed white people must exercise their privilege as allies by becoming “less vocal and more active against racism of their fellow whites.” Simultaneously, leaders within communities of color “must make their own people see that with equal rights also go equal responsibilities.” He also presciently called out what would be the riots in Black-majority cities across the 1960s that led to the 1968 Kerner Commission, protested the Vietnam War, and sought ties with the Reverend Dr. Marti Luther King, Jr. especially to promote voting rights.

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s Message for Today
Malik El-Shabazz’s message remains controversial because it calls for a revolution where skin color equity and justice will exist. As he wrote for the Egyptian Gazette in August 1964, “Once we have more knowledge (light) about each other we will stop condemning each other and a united front will be brought about … We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity.”

Sadly, today, almost six decades after his death, the right for people of color to exist equally and equitably with white people is still not recognized. The quest of the man who became El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and indeed the moral quest of each of us, is to respect and uplift, rather than dismiss and deny, each other’s humanness. Though there are differences in how to achieve this aim, Malcolm X as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz illuminated the path on which we must forge ahead as one human family if we are to change what he called “this miserable condition that exists on this earth.”

Dr. Sara Kamali is the author of  Homegrown Hate: Why White Nationalists and Militant Islamists Are Waging War against the United States (University of California Press, 2021) and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. You can subscribe to her newsletter through her website to receive updates and other writings every month, and follow her on Twitter @sarakamali. 

***

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

The post Malcolm X: Why El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Matters appeared first on The Revealer.

This excerpt comes from the book’s conclusion, “The Dream of Meritocracy.”

***

“Dios es bueno, hermanos,” Paulina said, as she took the microphone from Pastor Gielis and stood behind the pulpit. “God has been so . . .” she choked back tears as “Amens” echoed through the congregation in support and encouragement. “God has been so good to me. I have received more than I ever could have imagined. He has given me more than I could have ever asked for.” The congregation waited in silence as Paulina prepared to give her testimony.

Over two years passed since I first entered the world of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostals through Iglesia Cristiana del Padre in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had been invited back to attend a special service as the church inaugurated its new and larger location. The church’s place of worship was no longer a converted warehouse. An African American congregation was renting their space to Iglesia Cristiana del Padre in the late afternoons on Sundays. Paulina was honored with the opportunity to give her testimony at this special occasion. She stood before the congregation of over a hundred people. Many guests had come to celebrate. The room was full, and there were also children in the rooms adjacent to the meeting area. Unlike the original services I attended, Iglesia Cristiana del Padre now had simultaneous English translation for every part of the service because it was now an “international” ministry. Headphones were provided for all non-Spanish speakers, as the service was still unapologetically in Spanish. Paulina stood, full of emotion, yet confident, wearing a tan designer pantsuit; the original tag was still attached to one of the sleeves, perhaps intentionally to show the expensive brand. She looked out on the congregation while composing herself, then began to tell the congregation of her humble upbringing in Colombia.

She was uneducated and married very young. Her husband was physically and emotionally abusive. She was kept at home under the threat of violence while her husband was out womanizing. Life proved too much for young Paulina, and she tried to end it. She attempted suicide twice, at least once by slitting her wrists. She was found by a neighbor and saved in the nick of time. After each suicide attempt, her husband treated her better, but he soon went back to his old ways. When her daughter was born, Paulina realized that there was no future for them in Colombia. If her abusive husband did not kill her, she would have killed herself in another suicide attempt, leaving her daughter behind. She had no hope her husband would change, yet her family, steeped in the “machista” culture, had taken her husband’s side; they believed she should quietly serve him and raise their daughter without complaint. This was not surprising, since her father had behaved the same way toward her mother. One day, with the help of her sister in Virginia, she took her daughter and got on a plane. Mother and daughter landed in Washington, D.C., and were immediately driven to a town outside Charlottesville.

Paulina’s new life did not begin once she arrived in the States. Life was still hard. She lived in her sister’s trailer with her sister’s boyfriend and their three children. The place was crowded, and her sister pressured her to get a job. She also suggested that Paulina go to Iglesia Cristiana del Padre, where she heard new immigrants could receive help. And so, on her first Sunday in America, she did something she had never done before: she attended a Prosperity Gospel Pentecostal church. At the end of the service, unsure of what to do but extremely moved by the experience, she naively walked to the front when Pastor Gielis asked those who had a need to come forward. She did not know the Pentecostal tradition and was unaware that this was the time for healings and miracles. She recounted what happened when she walked up to Pastor Gielis:

The moment he put his hands on me, I fell to the ground and it was as if everything I had been carrying was lifted up. All the abuse I had endured, all the poverty I experienced, all the negative things, the stress, the fear, the anger, all the bad things were lifted up. And I felt loved. I felt that I was loved for the first time in my life! I wanted to give my life to the God who loved me like that, and I did. I gave my life to God; me and my daughter, we both gave our lives to God on that day. When we did that, our new lives began. The curse of the past was destroyed forever. Since then, I have been blessed with prosperity and abundance.

By almost any measure, Paulina has clearly been blessed with prosperity, and I have chronicled her rise from rags to riches. It was only my second week at Iglesia Cristiana del Padre when Paulina and her daughter, Gabriela, arrived at the church for the first time. I remember briefly meeting the shy and confused woman with a young daughter so scared that she would not leave her mother’s side to go with the other children. I wrote about them in my field notes, especially recording the distinctiveness of their humble Colombian village clothes. Their ignorance of Pentecostal church practices and mannerisms also made them stand out. The members of the church were welcoming and intentional about making them feel included. On her first Sunday, Paulina was quickly ushered to the area where other single mothers were sitting with their children, and the wives of the leaders of the church quickly sat around her.

Now, after two years, Paulina was standing on that pulpit as an exceptionally different woman.

She has bought a car, pays her own rent, and manages two other women in the home-cleaning business she started. Her daughter, who had grown into an outgoing thirteen-year-old, spoke English fluently (even better than her Spanish), wore only brand-name clothing, and sent text messages to her friends on her heavily decorated smartphone. Most importantly, Paulina now had a title in the church. She was a teacher, the highest rank endowed on a woman with her credentials (single mother and lower middle class). This title allowed her to take up the offering, help teach Bible studies (but not by herself), counsel other church members, and speak before the whole congregation at length, as she was doing on that special Sunday. She also traveled with Pastora Veronica, leading workshops and retreats for women titled La Reina en Ti (The Queen in You), La Belleza de Adentro Hacia Afuera (The Beauty Inside Facing Out), and Aprende tu Destino por la Obediencia (Learn Your Destiny Through Obedience). A brochure at the back of the church promoting La Reina en Ti stated that the day would be spent in “practical teaching for today’s women. Learning about finances, self-esteem, marriage, the Last Days, and much more.” Most importantly, the women of the church looked up to Paulina because she held the title of teacher. This form of social capital raised her status significantly; she was endowed with dignity and respect.

In her testimony, Paulina was intentional in shedding light on the details of how she procured her blessings from God. She explained how this church and Pastor Gielis specifically taught her about the biblical principles of finance and God’s will to have her prosper. As she learned the Prosperity Gospel formula, Paulina began to tithe even though she was earning little and was dependent on her sister and her boyfriend for many of her basic needs.

But more prosperity came to her as she “stepped out in faith,” taking risky actions in the Prosperity Gospel formula. Her first act of faith was moving out of her sister’s apartment. She explained that she had to move out because her sister “was living in sin” with her boyfriend, and God would not allow her to prosper her if she remained in that situation. She took a risk and signed a lease for her own apartment, and according to her testimony, she was soon blessed with many cleaning jobs, which helped her afford the rent. Paulina attended every Sunday service, Bible study, and prayer meeting at Iglesia Cristiana del Padre, and was an active participant in all the activities of the church. As she received more cleaning work, she began hiring other women to help with the business—first one person, then another. Her economic status began to rise. These younger women looked up to her as their boss. She spoke of generous bonuses she would receive from clients, always at a time when she needed it the most, always as an answer to her prayers, and always a direct result of her acts of faith.

Paulina had truly come a long way in only two years. She was confident, happy, and, compared to two years before, rich. But that is not why Paulina was asked to give her testimony on that particular Sunday. The sacrifices and acts of faith had earned her something: the greatest dream for many of the members of that church, and almost every undocumented immigrant. As Paulina was finishing her testimony, she pulled out a piece of paper from her Bible. It was a letter-size sheet of light green paper with a hint of pink on it. She carefully unfolded it and held it up to the congregation in silence. Then she said: “Hermanos, God is good to me. God is good to us. He listens to our prayers. He gives us more than we can imagine. I had everything I needed. He has already blessed me with prosperity. But last week I got this letter in the mail. My [immigration application] papers have been approved! They have been approved! God has blessed me with my [legal immigration] papers! I will be a citizen in this country!”

The congregation broke out in “hallelujahs” and “Amens,” and the band began to play as an impromptu party broke out in the church to celebrate this announcement. Omitted in her testimony was the fact that Paulina’s sister had previously been married to a U.S. citizen and received her citizenship years ago. She applied for Paulina’s legal residency before she came to the United States, but it was only recently approved. This did not mean that Paulina would get her residency card right away. The letter, which she showed me later, was legitimate. It stated that her application had been approved, but she would have to wait for an interview, which could be a long time coming. Plus, Paulina had to wait six years after receiving her residency status before she could apply for U.S. citizenship. But those details were irrelevant on this day. She held in her hand an official letter from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office declaring that her application had been approved. She would one day be a citizen of the United States of America. It did not matter how long she had to wait, because patience was part of the formula she employs regularly. As the congregation settled down, Paulina announced a final proclamation to her testimony: “Tomorrow, Pastora Veronica and I will be searching for homes with sister Yolanda (a real-estate agent). I dreamt about this before, but I dream no more because my dreams have come true!” The congregation broke out in applause and cheers. Having received her papers for legal residency, Paulina will take the greatest step toward achieving her American dream—home ownership—the ultimate visible sign of her invisible blessings.

Paulina’s story is rare, and is not the norm for most immigrants. Most do not obtain legal residency in this way—or at all. The fact that her non-Christian divorced sister was central in Paulina obtaining her residency was not mentioned in the testimony. It was only God, and God received all the credit. Yet the few wealthy people in the church are always lifted up as examples to the congregation. Her testimony was offered as an encouragement to the rest of the congregation: if they remain faithful to the formula, they too can achieve what Paulina did.

Tony Tian-Ren Lin is Vice President of Institutional Advancement and Research at New York Theological Seminary.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 12 of the Revealer podcast: “Latino Americans and the Popularity of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism” with Tony Tian-Ren Lin.

The post Latino Immigrants and the Promise of the Prosperity Gospel appeared first on The Revealer.

I’ve tried to dial it back for the sake of my sanity. Within the past year, I’ve cut down my hours on social media, limited my subscriptions to a few publications that I trust and enjoy, and relied on a handful of newsletters that curate content into my inbox. The irony is that I’m a writer who also puts out content and fervently hopes that out of the 16k people who liked and shared someone else’s platitude-meme, at least four might read through my essay. It’s rough out here in this attention economy! There’s pressure to constantly consume and perform. I’ve started listening to self-help podcasts that guide me to slow down. When I discovered — while randomly scrolling — that internet users have a designated spiritual protector from the 6^th century, I decided: Why not look into this as well? Maybe the story of this information organizer from late antiquity could still have some relevance?

Isidore of Seville, the internet’s unofficial patron saint, was born around 560 CE. By all measures, Isidore, whose feast day is on April 4th, is an odd saint. He isn’t known for great miracles, acts of charity, or a dramatic personal life. Yet since the 1990s, several Catholics have looked to this Spaniard as a spiritual guide for navigating web surfing — or scrolling, as more people describe it today — and they sparked rumors that Pope John Paul II had officially elevated him to a patronage role. For Catholics, a patron saint is someone who provides heavenly intercession for a particular craft, group of people, or nation: St. Joseph for carpenters, St. Thomas Aquinas for academics, St. Rosa of Lima for Peru.

Carlo Acutis (Photo: Acutis family)

In 2020, the Catholic Church beatified (a preliminary step for sainthood) Carlo Acutis, another candidate for official internet patronage. Acutis, who is credited with performing a miracle in Brazil involving the healing of a 4-year-old boy with pancreatic malformation, was an Italian computer programmer and devout Catholic who died of leukemia in 2006 at the age of 15. Pope Francis declared that Acutis used the internet to “communicate values and beauty.” If Acutis does indeed become the Catholic Church’s first millennial saint and its official patron saint of the internet, this could be seen as an attempt by the Church to relate its faith to the day-to-day realities of contemporary Catholics.

Since I don’t consider myself a devout Catholic and I don’t necessarily believe in traditional saints, I have no stake in whether the Church officially elevates Isidore or Acutis as the patron saint of the internet. But as an internet user and as someone who came of age alongside the explosion of social media, I can appreciate things that provide perspective or distance to these pieces of technology that make me feel hyper-connected, lonely, and overwhelmed. In my case, I confess that I’m more intrigued by the decision of some Catholics to turn to Isidore than I am by a millennial computer programmer prodigy. What could someone who died 1,385 years ago possibly have to say to us? As I looked more into Isidore, I realized that his selection was apt in multiple ways. If there’s one figure in late antiquity credited for attempting to collect all of the world’s knowledge and preventing it from slipping into the oblivion of the so-called “Dark Ages,” it is Isidore of Seville, and his information age can still illuminate our own.

The “Wikipedia” of the Middle Ages

Isidore lived after the collapse of the western Roman Empire, in a Spain transitioning from Roman province to rule under the Visigoths. There are a few things that can be firmly established about his life. Isidore was born in the city of Cartagena to Hispano-Roman parents of high rank who fled to Seville after Byzantines invaded. His parents died while he was young, and he grew up with three talented siblings, including an older brother, Leander, who became a bishop and famously converted multiple Visigothic kings from Arian Christianity to Nicene Christianity. After Leander’s death, Isidore took over as bishop of Seville in 600 CE. He kept this post until his own death in 636 CE, presiding over Church synods and expanding the education of clergy during his tenure.

In the longer arc of history, Isidore has enjoyed strong audience engagement. He wrote one of the most widely-used textbooks throughout the Middle Ages. In Paradiso, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri put Isidore in the good place. For soccer aficionados cognizant of La Liga, Isidore can be spotted in his episcopal robes on the crest badge of Sevilla FC. There’s even an organization called the Order of Saint Isidore of Seville devoted to promoting Christian chivalry on the internet. It has a prayer to Isidore stating, “. . . during our journeys through the Internet we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.” An earnest reminder to those of us struggling with casual onsets of jealously and rage as we scroll through Instagram and Twitter.

A 1655 painting of Isidore of Seville by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

A 1655 painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo depicts a white-bearded Isidore in his bishop’s hat, hypnotically staring at a large book on his lap while seated next to other tomes. This rendition rings true for someone admired by contemporaries for his intellectual breadth. Isidore cemented his legacy through his research and literary output, bridging divides between the Hispano-Roman and Visigothic worlds. Among more than twenty works, Isidore published History of the Goths, which portrayed these “barbarians” in a more favorable light. According to punctuation expert Florence Hazrat, Isidore also invented the period, comma, and colon as we know them today. In terms of organizing texts and making them more readable this was huge we may take it for granted but this was in its own day the best thing next to the invention of spaces between words so if you have benefitted from modern grammar make sure to say this THANKYOUISIDORE

Isidore’s crowning achievement was The Etymologies (also known as The Origins). A sprawling encyclopedia written in accessible Latin, it covers a dizzying array of topics: all of the parts of speech, iron tools used in surgery, harmony and rhythm in music, the difference between natural and civil law, the Son of God, paneled ceilings, angels, tiny flying animals, the course of the stars, ship construction, upper eyelids, prophets, and chairs. Isidore intended it as a reference book for anything that clergy possibly needed to know, providing “SparkNotes” on various figures such as Aristotle and Cicero. Monks who later used The Etymologies sometimes changed Isidore’s ordering, scandalized that the work started with the liberal arts and not God. On one page, Isidore could be analyzing the books of the Bible and then swiftly transition to the history of libraries in Rome.

By understanding the roots of words, Isidore believed one could learn a great deal. For example, he says that penitence (poenitentia) overlaps with punishing (punier) because “they who truly do penance do nothing other than not permit what they have done wrong to go unpunished.” In a more playful entry, Isidore says: “Wine (vinum) is so called because a drink of it speedily replenishes the veins (vena) with blood. Some call it Lyaeus, because it loosens (solvere) us from care.” Many of the entries in The Etymologies still resonate. Isidore describes pestilence as “a contagion that as soon as it seizes on one person quickly spreads to many. It arises from corrupt air and maintains itself by penetrating the internal organs.” Other entries are inaccurate or badly dated: “All diseases come from the four humors, that is, from blood, bile, black bile, and phlegm.” Some topics are downright strange. In a long section on heresies, Isidore defines the “Nicolaites” sect as those following deacon Nicolas who “abandoned his wife because of her beauty, so that whoever wanted to might enjoy her; the practice turned into debauchery, with partners being exchanged in turn.” Today, some might call this, depending on one’s sexual ethics, swinging or pulling a Jerry Falwell, Jr.

Preserving Homo Sapiens

What can Isidore’s work suggest to us in our time? On the one hand, he evades any of our rigid religious/secular divisions of knowledge. The Etymologies are equally curious about worldly affairs as they are about divine matters. On the other hand, Isidore highlights the potential dangers of summarizers. Isidore wasn’t the first encyclopedist. He relied, rather unoriginally, on other proto-Wikipedia compilers such as Varro, Pliny the Elder, and Lactantius as sources for his work. Isidore translated the knowledge of the classical Greeks and Romans for Christians in a way that, intentionally or not, turned the philosophers he engaged into victims of his own success. Many Christians stopped copying the “pagan” works that he cited and read only Isidore instead. This fueled echo chambers of Christians reading about non-Christians and the past solely through the lens of Christian summaries, akin to learning about someone strictly through YouTube explainers made by their opponents.

Like algorithms constructed by humans, encyclopedias contain, for better and for worse, the prejudices of their makers. In The Etymologies, Isidore writes: “The name ‘Jew’ (Iudaeus) can be translated as “confessor” (confessor), for confession (confessio) catches up with many of those whom wrong belief possessed earlier.” The Fourth Council of Toledo, held in 633 CE and over which Isidore presided as bishop, passed anti-Jewish canons including one forbidding all Jews, and Christians of Jewish ancestry, from holding public office. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s decision to expel Jews from Spain in 1492 could plausibly be construed as the repercussions of a larger disinformation campaign stretching back to Isidore.

Speaking of disinformation, I, myself, struggled with this dynamic in the process of writing this essay. How do you know if something is true? If enough people share the same thing, does that make it true? Based on my internet searches, I initially thought that Pope John Paul II had, in fact, made Isidore the official patron saint of the internet. But upon further investigation, this turned out to be a rumor that, nevertheless, got picked up by The Atlantic, CNN, Gizmodo, and several Catholic sites such as Catholic.net. If scribe after scribe copies a falsehood or an error in a text, it eventually gathers the weight of consensus.

The problem in Isidore’s day was scarcity of information. Our problem, we like to say, is too much information. We have access to more at our fingertips than the ancients could have ever dreamed of. And yet, it’s easy to deceive ourselves. People believe in conspiracy theories today that are as wild as the most outdated entries in The Etymologies. All of Google’s digital scrolls, including most of your online documents, photos, and memories are stored in physical locations, in data centers containing servers subject to the whims of nature, the planet’s climate, or human attack. The truth is that even our cloud systems are mortal, like the papyri that burned in the library of Alexandria. History reminds us that the transmission of our species’ knowledge, along with empathy, isn’t a given but a continual – and vulnerable – task.

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.

The post The Internet’s Unofficial Patron Saint appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image: NASA’s promotional design for the Artemis mission, 2020.)

On October 23, 2020, one day after the last presidential debate and seven months into an epidemiological nightmare that closed schools, crippled local businesses, and killed hundreds of thousands of disproportionately Black, Brown, Indigenous, old, poor, and incarcerated Americans, the G.O.P. tweeted a final distillation of its campaign platform:

Pres. Trump is fighting for YOU! Here are some of his priorities for a 2nd term:
*Establish Permanent Manned Presence on the Moon
*Send the 1^st Manned Mission to Mars

After the Moon and Mars came “Infrastructure” and “WiFi,” and then in a follow-up tweet, the G.O.P. promised a COVID vaccine, medical supplies, and pharmaceuticals. But they clearly wanted the Moon and Mars out front. Why worry about respirators when you could dream about rockets?

Although President Biden parts company with this predecessor on most areas of policy, space is not one of them. Almost immediately after his Press Secretary laughed it off, Biden affirmed his enthusiastic support for Trump’s absurdly conceived and murderously advertised Space Force and also announced his intentions to proceed with the Trump-Pence vision for NASA, perhaps with a slightly longer timeline. Meanwhile, Vice President Harris voiced her full support in a frankly beautiful video call with Victor Glover, the first African American astronaut to live on the International Space Station. So here’s the plan as it stands.

First, we’re going back to the Moon — permanently this time — and then we’re headed to Mars. It’s a mission that NASA calls Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the Moon, who also happened to be the twin sister of Apollo, the god of the Sun. NASA’s tagline, “Moon to Mars,” says it all: they’re building a lunar outpost, which will in turn serve as a launching pad to the Red Planet.

How will they do this? With the joint power of NASA and the so-called “NewSpace” industries: those telecommunications, tourism, space-mining, and aspirationally colonial corporations led by billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These corporations already carry astronauts and cargo for NASA. In the near future, they hope to mine asteroids and the Moon to produce the water, ore, and rare-earth metals necessary to create enough extra-terrestrial fuel and materials to get us to Mars. Investors will fund these endeavors thanks to Obama-era legislation that ensures corporations have the right to sell whatever they manage to plunder from planetary bodies and pass the profits to shareholders.

Jeff Bezos in front of a rocket owned by his company, Blue Origin (Photo: Blue Origin)

Why are they doing this? That’s a different question. What could they possibly be thinking, especially as Earth convulses with medical, ecological, military, and ideological disasters that arguably demand our energetic priority?

Well, if you ask Musk, the Moon-to-Mars plan is actually a result of these medical, ecological, military, and ideological disasters. Whether it’s a nuclear weapon, a killer virus, climate change, or an errant asteroid, something is bound to wipe out most of humanity soon, so we’d better start colonizing a back-up planet.

The snake-oil Musk is selling relies on an old-fashioned story of disaster and salvation. And it’s just one part of a powerful mythic resurrection, a techno-transnational remix of European-style colonialism: “resource” extraction; corporate-imperial cooperation; divine mandates; “empty” land; tall, thin structures stretching to the sky; and a remarkably resilient hierarchy of beings.

Unlike the corporate utopianism of Musk, the scientific militarism of Artemis and the Space Force downplays impending disaster and appeals instead to dusty tropes of the pioneering American spirit. As Trump declared in his last State of the Union address, we are going back to the Moon and then to Mars because space is “the next frontier” and it is our duty to “embrace . . . America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”

Manifest Destiny, we might recall, was the idea that God wanted European-descended Americans to occupy the whole North American continent. The doctrine found its fullest legal articulation in the 1862 Homestead Act, which parceled out Western land to non-treasonous citizens for $1.25 an acre. Of course, the U.S. government could only sell this land by taking it from Native Americans, who were murdered and displaced so that white Americans could answer their allegedly God-given calling on the frontier, which they proceeded to overfarm and pave over, strip-mine and strip-mall. In short, the former president’s invocation of Manifest Destiny is deeply troubling to those who object to the violence committed in its name against Indigenous peoples, their land, and the buffalo and other creatures who lived there.

In response to these sorts of arguments, leftish space enthusiasts tend to insist that the comparison of a Martian settlement to Manifest Destiny is strictly rhetorical, intended to stir the hearts of middle-class Americans with Davy Crockett nostalgia. But the projects, they argue, are completely different. After all, there are no people on Mars. Or the Moon. Or those ore-laden asteroids. No people, no trees, no animals — maybe microbes, but who’s going to argue that microbes have rights? So, unlike the earthly frontier, which Europeans mistakenly thought was empty, the final frontier of space is genuinely empty, and therefore ours for the taking.

As founder of the utopian Mars Society Bob Zubrin puts it, “On Mars, we have a chance to create something new with clean hands. We’re not going to Mars to steal other people’s property; we’re going to Mars to create — not just property but a society.” Or as astrobiologist David Grinspoon argues, “On Mars and beyond, we may have the opportunity to explore lands that are truly unoccupied, giving outlet to our need to explore without trampling on others.” All we’d be trampling on is dust, dirt, dead “earth,” or, in the words of whoever writes the official Mars Curiosity Rover’s Twitter feed, “a pile of rocks.” So, Grinspoon concludes, “Is Mars ours for the taking? . . . [I]f by ‘we,’ we mean ‘life,’ then yes, Mars belongs to us because this universe belongs to life. I mean, without us, what’s the point?”

Artistic depiction of future life on Mars (Image courtesy of National Geographic)

So the race to extract space resources and colonize other planets is on. China ended 2020 by collecting moon rocks and depositing them on Earth; NASA plans to send its first Artemis mission to the Moon in 2021 and to have a permanent outpost there by 2024 (when the UAE and Israel hope to arrive, as well); China’s space probe reached Mars just before NASA’s Perseverance, with the UAE and Virgin Galactic close behind; China is beginning construction of its own space station; Jeff Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon so he can spend more time moving heavy industry and most of the human population off the Earth (which he’ll rehearse this year through some civilian flights); Richard Branson has resumed ticket sales for his own tourist flights aboard Virgin Galactic; Axiom Space is selling $55 million-dollar passes for a 10-day civilian trip on a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station; some pop-up space outfit is suddenly promising a Ferris wheel-shaped space hotel by 2027; and Elon Musk wants to take a million human beings to the Red Planet’s hellscape surface beginning in 2030. Meanwhile, the military-communications industry has filled low Earth orbit with so much garbage (“we live in a corona of trash,” says the New Yorker) that some fear we won’t be able to launch anything in a few decades’ time. The pioneers had better move quickly.

Thus we find ourselves in an escalating transnational, corporate, cosmogonic clamor. A frenetic competition — not just to make money, but to make worlds. To create, like that old God of the Fathers, out of the infinite nothing of space. But where did we get the idea that there’s nothing in space, and that it’s therefore unworthy of ethical treatment? Where did we get the idea that the water on the Moon is lying in wait for humans to come take it, or that the rocks on Mars are “just” rocks?

“Isn’t it just the case?” you may ask. “Rocks can’t think, eat, or move; they have no will or desires; it’s objectively the case that rocks are just rocks.” But what I’d like to suggest is that it’s only subjectively the case that rocks are “just rocks.” It’s not pure science, pure empiricism, or pure anything at all; the ideas that rocks are just rocks and space is just space are true within the framework and legacy of Western monotheism.

Okay, what the hell am I talking about?

As it narrates the origins of the universe, Genesis 1 tells us three times that humans are made in the image of God. Consequently, we learn, humans are in charge of everything else:

“God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (1:28)

Genesis 2 and 3 sketch this cosmic hierarchy in more detail, with Adam in charge of Eve, both of them in charge of animals, and all of those beings eating the plants to which they’re superior. This sketch becomes the basis of what the medieval period called “The Great Chain of Being,” a comprehensive ordering of creation stretching from God and the angels down through man, beasts, plants, fire and, you’ve got it, rocks.

Now modern science has no use for God or angels, but it has fastidiously retained the rest of that order. Think of the five biological kingdoms as textbooks tend to diagram them: bacteria rank below fungus and vegetation, which rank below animals. Of the animals, humanity, often just called Man, is consistently said to be the most complex, the most advanced, most important, and most deserving of protection. And, of course, this scientific Man is not only primarily male, but primarily white. From phrenology to pharmaceutical testing and non-consensual surgeries, dark-skinned humans are consistently subjected to biomedical violences that serve the interests of a wealthy subset of light-skinned Man. The whole universe serves the interests of a wealthy subset of light-skinned Man, from BIPOC essential workers to women of color tumbling out of employment to factory-farmed animals to clear-cut forests to flash-frozen probiotics to rocks, which don’t even make it into the biological diagrams. (“Of course they’re not in the diagrams,” say the biologists, “rocks aren’t alive. Rocks are just rocks.”)

But what about cultures that don’t stem from Western monotheisms? Many of them teach that humans are not created by a transcendent God who stamps his image on them and gives them dominion over the Earth. Rather, other human communities are created by other sorts of beings — snakes and turtles and coyotes and women who dive to Earth from the sky. Under the sway of totally different creation stories, and totally different orders of creation, many non-Western and Indigenous cultures teach that (some) rocks are alive, or sacred, or both, and that they are therefore worthy of human respect and caretaking.

Take the example of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope on Hawai’i’s Mauna Kea. The University of Hawai‘i and NASA have been trying for years to construct it, despite the vigorous objections of Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians), who insist that the mountain is sacred and ought not to suffer any more damage at the hands of Western science. What do I mean by “more damage”? Well, it turns out there are other telescopes on this mountain — thirteen of them — each of which was said to be temporary at the time of its construction and each of which has stayed around, bringing traffic and environmental degradation to the mountain.

What do I mean by “sacred”? As anthropologist and Kanaka activist Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar explains, Mauna Kea is at once a temple, or house of worship; an ancestor; and a living relative of the Kanaka Maoli. The mountain is the place Hawaiians go to pay reverence to their origins and their family members, including the mountain itself, who is said to be the firstborn child of the Earth Mother and Sky Father and sibling to the creator of the stars, people, and vegetation. In the words of Noenoe Silva, “we are part of a family that includes the sun, stars, ocean, and everything else in the world.”

Protestors trying to protect Mauana Kea (Photo: Pu’uhonua o Pu’uhuluhulu)

Much like anyone else, the Kanaka Maoli are taught to care for their family members, and Mauna Kea is their family member. It’s not just a rock or a super-high place with a clear enough sky to see back in time through hundred-foot telescopes. It’s a living being, a temple, and the umbilical cord between the heavens and the Earth. When faced with objections to the construction of another telescope on Mauna Kea, the scientists tell the press that they’re facing backward, primitive people who don’t understand that a rock is just a rock, and who need to enter the 21^st century. The defenders, on the other hand, say they’re already living in the future and have no desire to subject their land to continued abuse at the hands of the people who’ve paved over, mined, and fracked so much of the globe in the name of modernity. And for the crime of protecting their land from such desecration, Kanaka elders have been carted away by the dozens in police vans.

We might also consider the Bawaka people of Australia’s Northern Territory, who are beginning to raise concerns about the industrial nations’ astronautic behavior. For these Aboriginal astronomers, what Westerners call “outer space” is Sky Country, where the ancestors live, and which is subject to the same respect and care as their land. Every person who dies is sent through ritual song on a journey from Earth to sky along the River of Stars, where they will continue to live and influence the affairs of their people. The Bawaka people are worried that escalating efforts to mine asteroids, conquer the Moon, and colonize Mars will not only pile even more garbage into the skies, but will also disrupt the passage of souls and the habitation of the ancestors. Space, in other words, is neither “outer” nor empty, but part of the everyday lifeworld of the community.

I haven’t yet heard of any official responses to this Bawaka concern. But when a small, tireless group of justice-seeking astronomers submitted a white paper arguing for an anticolonial exploration of space, they incurred the rage and disdain of Zubrin, the-well-funded Mars advocate, who accuses the authors of backwardness, irrationality, “wokeism,” and even “ancient pantheistic mysticism and postmodern social thought.” As for NASA and Bezos and Musk, they don’t even seem to be paying attention. But what if they did? What if the boards of directors at NASA and Blue Origin and SpaceX actually included native Hawaiians, Aboriginal Australians, the water-defending Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council — not for the purpose of taking multicultural Instagram shots before storming off to mine the universe, but in order to rethink our relation to it?

Are the heavens really empty? Are they really uninhabited? Do planetary bodies have any right to exist for their own sake, or are they just there for human consumption, recreation, and profit? What if the astronautical industry were simply to consider the teaching that there are people in the Milky Way, or histories in Martian rocks, or life in lunar water; how would it treat exploration differently? How would people whose communities have been decimated by settler colonialism go about settling or colonizing other planets? Or would they caution their fellow earthlings to stay the hell at home?

In the process of such a conversation, the good people of the space industry might realize they have their own reasons to proceed with respect and care. After all, whether they want to stay or go, no one wants Earth to be imprisoned in a corona of trash. Presumably, no one wants to be space-bombed by some renegade nation or corporation. And even the most adamant secularist would admit that the rocks on Mars hold histories we’re just beginning to understand. So it would behoove us not to destroy this extraterrestrial archaeological site by strip-mining, contaminating, or “nuking it.” (You know, says Musk, to warm it up.)

I’ll admit it: I’m not sure there is a way to explore “space” without exploiting it. But if we want to try to find one, we need first to acknowledge that the basic assumptions of astronomy, physics, militarism, and capitalism are just as mythologically produced as the accounts of Mauna Kea and the River of Stars. These Western-mythic assumptions include the inanimacy of minerals, the possibility of objectivity, the importance of dominance, the promise of profit, and the expansionist “destiny” of a chosen subsection of humankind. From this shared recognition, spacefarers could begin to ask not which myths are “true,” but which might ground thoughtful and sustainable ways of relating to the Earth we’re part of and the universe we’re trying to join. In other words, we don’t need to determine whether mountains are actually people, whether water is actually alive, or whether souls are actually residents of the stars. All we need to do is to ask how we’d act toward them if they were.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is the author, most recently, of Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination, with Thomas Carlson and Mark C. Taylor (University of Chicago Press, 2021). She teaches religion and science studies at Wesleyan University, has received support from Wesleyan’s College of the Environment, and is grateful for the early editorial help of Winfield Goodwin, Kēhaulani Kauanui, Ephraim Rubenstein, and Kenan Rubenstein.

The post The New Corporate Space Race: A Colonial Remix appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image: Cornerstone Church of Orangeburg, South Carolina’s “Biblical Masculinity Week,” May 12, 2019.)

“Isn’t this a blessed day?” Bill asked.

Eight of us were on a boat in the middle of Lake Mohave, wilting under the desert sun and bathing in an atmosphere of sunscreen and boat fumes. We were on a “retreat” for college-aged youth from our Southern California megachurch. Bill and two other dads were chaperones. All three of their twenty-year old sons were on the boat with us. My friend Dave was the pastor in charge of the retreat. I was the retreat’s speaker.

It was July 2005, my last month on staff at the church, just months before I would leave the church—and the faith—permanently. By that time, I was running on empty spiritually and emotionally, and ready to abscond to England for a fresh start. But Dave had convinced me to speak at the retreat, so there I was helping the young guys to wakeboard and chit chatting with Bill and the other dads. As we made our way to the middle of the lake, someone began to wave and yell to one side of the boat. We all looked up to see Bill’s wife driving their family boat with the other moms riding along with her. They wanted to surprise us by shuttling out to watch their sons wakeboard.

As they got close enough for us to yell across to each other, Bill’s face grew red. He turned and screamed over to her.

“Get out of here! What are you doing? You don’t know how to drive a boat. Take it back!”

He was waving his hands wildly, spit spraying from his mouth.

“GET OUT OF HERE! NOW!”

Dave and I glanced at each other. It was awkward. But we’d been around the church long enough to see men yelling at their wives in public like this.

Bill then turned to us and said, “What a blessed day! Am I right guys?”

Though he wasn’t a pastor at the church, Bill considered himself a spiritual guide within the community.

“Who wants to lead us in a prayer before we get the wakeboard in the water?” Bill asked the group.

Before Dave and I could even finish exchanging knowing glances with each other, Bill had morphed his face from misogynistic rage to prayerful delight, and started to gather the guys for an impromptu prayer circle.

“Lord,” Bill prayed. “Thank you for family, fellowship, and this wonderful time together.”

The transition was jarring, but not out of the ordinary. During my seven years in evangelical ministry I had learned that there was no disconnect between public wife-shaming and a man’s spiritual leadership. They went hand in hand.

***

Tragedy calls back memories and impressions in unexpected — and often involuntary — ways. When I heard the news of the massacre in Atlanta by a white man who had been steeped in evangelical culture, my mind reverted to episodes like this one from my time in the evangelical world. As a teenager, I learned that God is the Most Masculine Man. The one who takes what he wants. Acts without hesitation. And punishes the wayward and the sinful. Violence and domination were at the forefront of how my evangelical elders taught me to understand God’s — and by extension my — sense of masculinity. In the wake of the Atlanta shootings, I returned to this storehouse of memories — or it returned to me — which led me to reflect on the connections between evangelical conceptions of masculinity and violence against women.

***

My hometown, Yorba Linda, is a hamlet in the northeast corner of Orange County, California. Best known as Richard Nixon’s birthplace, Yorba Linda exists in the shadow of Disneyland, which is only fifteen minutes away by car. When I was growing up, the town, like the rest of Orange County, was a pocket of conservative politics and racial homogeneity (over two-thirds white). Throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, half the people in Orange County worked for the defense industry, so nationalism and patriotism were markers of manhood in my neighborhood and at my church. The men in my community touted conservative talking points and valorized the military.

As a teenager, I didn’t know any dads who were professors, writers, bureaucrats, or journalists. No orchestra professionals or playwrights. No dancers or singers, editors or artists. The men around me were like Bill (who was a successful salesman with a huge house that had a full basketball court and pool with a rock waterfall in the backyard): bankers, contractors, and small business owners who ran lucrative printing outfits or repair shops. The kinds of guys who vote Republican, drive trucks, wear flannel, but make well over six figures a year and probably have a boat docked at their family cabin. Few advanced degrees; many advanced bank accounts. They built housing complexes and strip malls, usually with a small army of undocumented workers who they needed, but would revile as “lazy illegals” when asked by their pals. Their heroes were not men of letters. I didn’t know what the New Yorker was until graduate school. Same goes for NPR.

The men who gained our respect as baseball coaches and community leaders were fashioned in the mold of figures like John Wayne, who was a local icon. The airport in Orange County was named after John Wayne in 1979. It was a testament to his years of political and cultural influence in the region. Wayne often made appearances in Orange County at rallies for candidates like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon, where he advocated for the staunch, and at times extremist, anti-communism efforts in the county.

Wayne emanated what historian Kristen Kobes du Mez calls in her compelling work Jesus and John Wayne, “cowboy masculinity.” On the screen, he depicted what many considered to be the archetypal American man — a self-reliant individualist who never shows his feelings and never apologizes. The type of dude who forgoes reflection for action; doesn’t ask for permission; who knows he’s a good guy and knows how to spot — and annihilate — the bad guys. Both on and off the screen, Wayne modeled a mode of American manhood based on imperialist ideals, the superiority of whites, and free-market capitalism.

***

One of the constant refrains I heard as a teenager at church was that we Christians were not “of this world.” It was a marker of Christian character to draw a distinction between yourself and the godless society around you. But as time went on, it became clear that the type of man who we looked up to at church was the same kind of man who was looked up to in my local community. The world and the church were pretty much the same when it came to manhood.

Our church’s John Wayne was a guy named James. His imposing physical presence somehow matched the magnetism of his persona. Standing about six foot one, he seemed as wide as he was tall. A former college linebacker, James had a buzz cut and handlebar moustache, making him the kind of guy that fourteen year-old boys instantly recognized as the one not to mess with. All of this made him an intimidating 9^th grade Sunday school teacher.

James was one of my first male Christian role models. After growing up in a non-religious household, and dabbling with sex, drugs, and other teenage vices in middle school, I converted to Evangelicalism at age fourteen. In a few short months, I went from a budding teenage rebel with green hair and a bad attitude to a “Jesus Freak” who carried a Bible wherever I went. On Sunday mornings, I attended the high school youth group at Rose Drive Friends, a megachurch about two miles from my house. There were about a hundred high schoolers in the group each Sunday. After some singing and announcements, we broke into groups according to grade and gender. James was my assigned small group leader.

“Most of you guys play sports, right?” he asked a group of eight of us. We nodded. We were sitting in a circle in one corner of the church gymnasium. It was 9:30am on a Sunday morning and we had huddled in our small group with James.

“When I played football,” he responded, “How do you think I showed my teammates and my opponents a Christ-like character?”

Fueled by a convert’s zeal, I answered first. “By being kind, patient, and caring at every moment,” I said. I was recalling the characteristics of love that I had read in I Corinthians 13.

“Maybe,” he said hesitantly. Then he said something like this: “But in football you have to be tough. Vicious even. I determined to hit the hardest. Go all out. And never let my opponent see me back down. By being the ultimate competitor, I was serving God.”

I was taken aback. From my reading of the New Testament it seemed that the most important Christian virtues didn’t have anything to do with hitting people. Or being vicious.

A short while later my friend Josh and I walked past Ron, a guy in his mid-twenties who competed in bodybuilding competitions all over Southern California, on the way into church service. When James saw us looking at him, he walked by and said, “I could take him. Those muscles are all fluff.” Josh and I laughed in adoration. James’s confidence and aggressiveness were hard not to admire.

James wasn’t on the pastoral staff at Rose Drive. He was, however, a core part of the congregation. His parents helped found the church in the 1960s, and so he’d been there since the beginning. A father of three kids (all were eventually in my youth group when I was the youth pastor), he was a successful contractor in town. Like many of the men I grew up around, he found an affluent career without an advanced degree or spending undue time studying. Books, libraries, philosophy — these were a waste of time. Like John Wayne, James was a man of action, not reflection.

Over the ten years I knew him, a few things came into focus. First, James was a gruff, speak-my-mind-even-if-it-hurts-your-feelings kind of dude. When I was 19, about five years after he was my ninth grade Sunday school teacher, he yelled at my colleagues and me because we had decided not to repeat a house-building mission trip to Mexico that the previous youth ministers had run. After suffering a public and brutal verbal takedown, I realized the most respected and “godly” men in the congregation were the ones who were most likely to tear your head off whenever they pleased.

I also began to understand that not being on staff actually freed James to be an emblem of Christian manhood in our community. He wasn’t burdened by pastoral responsibilities; didn’t have to be an empathetic counselor or constant listener; didn’t have to find the right words to broach difficult topics in sermons; never had to compromise with those he disagreed with on important church matters. James could speak his mind. Voice his opinion. And generally be the toughest, most intimidating guy in church. Not being the pastor allowed him to be the man we all looked up to.

It took me years to realize that the type of godly manhood modeled for us at church was the same model prevalent in most of American culture. There was little difference between them, other than the call for Christian men to serve God rather than themselves.

According to Pew, white Republican Evangelical men are more likely to own guns than members of any other religious group. In presidential elections, white Evangelicals have voted for the likes of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump. For many Evangelical men, figures like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama weren’t manly enough to be real leaders. They wanted an “Alpha” in the White House, one who would protect America’s borders with ferocity and force. Someone more like a shirtless Putin than a dad-jeans-wearing Obama.

But the evangelical models of masculinity I witnessed at church weren’t totally secular in origin. It’s not that Evangelical leaders didn’t turn to the Bible to create their sense of manhood. It’s that these leaders started from an ideal of masculinity offered by men like John Wayne, and then looked for those traits in God in order to provide a biblical justification for their vision of manhood.

Evangelicals like to repeat the biblical adage that God made humans in His image. But humans more often than not make the divine in theirs. The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach argued that people take all the traits considered honorable in humans and use them to create a deity from the ground up. The divine, in many cases, ends up being a projection of idealized human qualities. In my experience, John Wayne’s school of manhood served as the basis for biblical manhood. If cowboy masculinity is what you are looking for in the Bible, then cowboy masculinity is what you will find.

***

In graduate school one of my advisors gave me a peculiar book to read for one of my doctoral exams. In God’s Phallus, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz argues that the ancient Israelite conception of God as male had a profound effect on how Israelites approached gender and sexuality. If God is envisioned as male, and God has a metaphorical body — his hands and voice and mouth are all described in the Hebrew scriptures — then he must have metaphorical sex organs. Eilberg-Schwartz goes where most won’t by investigating what God’s metaphorical phallus might have meant to ancient Israelites. 

God’s Phallus opened my eyes to new “scholarly” issues. When entering a doctoral program in Religious Studies I never expected to Google “How big is God’s penis?” But the book brought back the lessons I had learned at evangelical church services, men’s retreats, and Sunday school small groups: God is the Most Masculine Man of All Men.

Though none of the biblical writers allude to divine genitals, it’s clear that God displays his masculinity by exerting dominion over the bodies of his people — especially their sex organs. This comes into focus in Genesis 12, when God calls on a man named Abram to leave his home and journey to the land of Canaan.

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

God promises Abraham (then named Abram) that if he is willing to obey, God will make his descendants into a great nation and Abram will be remembered forever as the blessed man at the head of the nation’s genealogy. He also promises to protect Abram.

“Every male among you shall be circumcised,” God commands, “You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you . . . Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

God’s deal with Abraham is based on the branding of every male Israelite’s sex organ. The mark of the covenant is made on the penis — a sign of the covenant, and more, a sign of God’s dominion over the fertility and sexuality of every male Israelite. God also exerts control over the womb. Female infertility coupled with divine intervention is a theme throughout the Hebrew Bible. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, wasn’t the only Israelite woman whose fertility challenges were solved miraculously by God. The message is clear: God controls the penis and the uterus; the semen and the womb. He is Israel’s maker and husband. The ultimate Daddy.

***

After studying the Bible and Christianity for two decades now, I have come to see Christian and Jewish monotheisms as forms of monogamy. In the Hebrew Bible, Israel is repeatedly framed as God’s wife. In the New Testament, Christians are called the Bride of Christ. When God demanded the Israelites swear off all other gods, He was asking for complete exclusivity. Other ancient peoples recognized the legitimacy of gods other than theirs while choosing to worship their own. The Israelites had to renounce the authority of any deity other than Yahweh, like a bride denouncing all other lovers except for her groom. In exchange for protecting Israel, providing her with food and shelter, God takes full control over her existence and destiny. Her life depends on Him.

This is clear in the book of Hosea. At this point in Israelite history, God is upset with Israel for having worshipped other gods. He compares Israel to a cheating wife who has emasculated her husband:

“Plead with your mother, plead — for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband — that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts, or I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and turn her into a parched land, and kill her with thirst. Upon her children also I will have no pity, because they are children of whoredom. For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully.”

Hosea contains perhaps the most extreme expressions of Yahweh’s jealousy and abuse. God likens Israel to a whore for worshipping other deities. For Yahweh, idolatry is adultery. He goes so far as to command Hosea to marry a promiscuous woman in order to illustrate to the Israelites how their worship of other gods has made Him the husband of a prostitute. Like an abusive spouse, Yahweh rages with anger, telling Hosea he will strip Israel naked and expose her as the adulterous whore she is.

“I will remove my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness,” Yahweh says in Hosea 2. “Now I shall uncover her genitals before the eyes of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her.”

God pledges vengeance on his spiritual wife, promising to expose her and leave her shamed and destitute. Following this cycle of abuse, he envisions reconciling with her once she has endured her punishment and shown penance for her unfaithfulness.

“Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her,” Yahweh says.

Biblical scholar Rhiannon Graybill observes that even though God turns from punishment to eroticization, “the desire to exercise control over it, however, remains the same.” Some of God’s anger stems from what He perceives as the breaking of the agreed covenant. But it really comes from a loss of control over her. In these passages, God’s masculinity is dependent on dominion — or domination. He is a bulldozer who displaces others in order to make a home for Israel in Canaan. A hero who rescues Israel from slavery in Egypt and exile in the desert. A knight in shining armor who promises not to allow anyone to take advantage of her, as long as he is her one and only in every sense of the word.

Yahweh never apologizes for stripping Israel naked in front of others, for abusing her, for treating her as something to dominate. He eventually softens and forgives, but treats the abuse as necessary for the relationship. It keeps her in line. Reminds her of who the man is — the one with power and authority.

The Bible is thousands of pages long. It contains a universe of stories, parables, and proverbs. There is an expansive matrix from which to construct ideals about sex, love, and gender. But Evangelical men hold fast to the image of the dominant God imposing his will on others. They prefer the angry God of Hosea over the turn-the-other-cheek Christ of Matthew.

***

As an Evangelical, Jesus was the most important thing to me. My personal relationship with God took place through the unconditional love of his Son. But when it came to figuring out how to be a godly man, my elders rarely used Jesus as the prime example.

Instead, the model for manhood was the God who destroyed his enemies, rescued Israel — the damsel in distress — from outsiders, and exerted control through a dominant sexuality and physical power. My leaders taught me that most of the Old Testament’s covenant was nullified by the life and death of Christ. The savior brought us a new relationship with God and thus a new set of rules on how to relate to him. At every turn, the new covenant of Jesus overshadowed the old one. And yet, when it came to masculinity, we turned from Christ back to the Most Masculine God in Genesis, Hosea, and other select parts of the Old Testament.

While I learned these lessons as a teenager at church from guys like Bill and James, they are also prevalent in evangelical resources about gender and sexuality. For example, in Gospel-Powered Parenting, Pastor William Farley teaches that God is “unadulterated masculinity.” As the model for the Christian father, Farley explains, God exemplifies the most important characteristic of being a man — acting first and refusing passivity.

“Although God does not have a male body,” Farley says, “He is the ultimate initiator. He is the ultimate servant-leader. In this sense, God the Father is absolute masculinity.”

Bestselling author John Eldredge takes it a step further in Wild at Heart. According to Eldredge, God made men like stallions — aggressive, dangerous, and wild: “A stallion is dangerous all right, but if you want the life he offers, you have to have the danger too,” Eldredge writes. “They go together.” Like many prominent Evangelical writers, Eldredge explains that God “hardwired” men to be aggressive. It’s their nature to run free, resist compliance, and buck authority. Sure, they might overstep their bounds once in a while. Yes, they will react with anger and violence from time to time. But isn’t that worth it in exchange for a passionate protector? A heroic character? An aggressive man’s man?

Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and perhaps the most influential Evangelical voice on issues related to gender and sexuality of the last half-century, explains in Bringing Up Boys that boys are designed to be disruptive and even violent. As a boy grows, Dobson says, “He loves to throw rocks, play with fire, and shatter glass. He also gets great pleasure out of irritating … other children. As he gets older, he is drawn to everything dangerous. At around sixteen, he and his buddies begin driving around town like kamikaze pilots on sake. It is a wonder any of them survive.”

Then there’s Mark Driscoll, the controversial — yet immensely popular—Evangelical megachurch pastor and author.

Mark Driscoll at his megachurch in 2014. (Photo: Scott Cohen/Associated Press)

“The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your penis,” Driscoll wrote in 2001. “Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while. While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wandering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.”

Men are an extension of God’s phallus. Women are penis homes. This is the crudest, and yet most honest expression of evangelical sexuality I can imagine.

***

As high schoolers, my friends in youth group avoided raunchy teen movies. Unlike our peers, we didn’t partake in the genre of film where teenagers engage in hijinks on the way to prom, get drunk at house parties, have awkward sex in the backseat of a car, or partake in other youthful frivolity. In our small groups, we policed ourselves to ensure no lust-inciting content crossed our respective paths.

Yet when it came to violence and gore, we actively encouraged each other to use on-screen warriors and combatants as the models we should emulate. Our favorite was Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart.” My male friends and I watched it almost every week. We could recite whole scenes by heart. If our dads were enthralled with John Wayne, we couldn’t get enough of Mel Gibson as William Wallace, the Scottish hero who drove out the English through sheer audacity and savagery. When Gibson rode his horse frenetically in front of a phalanx of loosely organized Scotsmen, riling them by explaining that all men die, but not all men truly live, we cheered. When he beckoned them to fight, screaming “Freedom!” at the top of his lungs, our faces glowed with admiration. When he avenged his wife’s death by ruthlessly murdering the perpetrators, we took notes. And when he went valiantly to his death without fear or remorse, we saw in William Wallace a Christ-like figure. I idolized William Wallace so much that on my first trip outside of North America in 2004, my group made a special trip to Stirling, Scotland, to see William Wallace’s sword.

I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.

“In your life you are William Wallace — who else could be?” John Eldredge writes in Wild at Heart, “You are the hero in your story. Not a bit player, not an extra, but the main man.” Mark Driscoll liked to use “William Wallace” as a pseudonym. Kobes du Mez points out that in 2006 he wrote on his church’s message board under the name “William Wallace II,” declaring, “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified.” When a woman from the church tried to ask about this statement, he responded that he doesn’t reply to women and thus she would be ignored.

***

In 2004, about a year before I left the church and Evangelicalism, I met Jim for the first time. Jim was the son of prominent members of our congregation and community. His dad was a county sheriff, and the family donated generously to the church. After growing up in the youth group, Jim came out as gay in college. Shunned by his family, he began a career in international business that took him to a different country every six weeks or so. He used to recount smoking cigarettes at outdoor cafes in Rome and having espressos in Parisian bistros. Eventually he wound up in Palm Springs with a long-term partner. The relationship deteriorated over time, leaving him financially destitute and personally broken. At a critical moment, he decided his misfortune was the result of his sinful gay lifestyle and resolved to come home.

After reconciling with his parents, re-committing his life to Christ, and swearing off his “deviant” sexuality, Jim soon became a leader among the young adults in our community. He enrolled in a seminary program and eventually became one of the “Singles and Young Adult” pastors at the church. One of the unspoken dynamics of Jim’s prodigal return was how he and the rest of the church community viewed the “formerly gay” guy’s masculinity. Jim seemed to understand intuitively that leaving behind his “sinful” lifestyle meant refashioning his masculine persona. Always a gregarious extrovert, he never missed a chance to show the rest of us that he had fully returned to Christ by becoming a red-blooded heterosexual American male. He began training for triathlons and bike races; became the most outspoken member of staff when it came to forming strong young men’s groups that would guide teenagers along the path to becoming godly adults; and, oh yeah, he started hunting a bear.

In the summer of 2004, Jim served as a summer camp counselor for several weeks at Quaker Meadow, the summer camp our church attended in the Sequoias. Since it was seven hours from Orange County, Jim stayed up at the camp on weekends with the permanent staff. That year a bear kept popping into camp at night to look for food, leaving overturned trash cans and scared campers in its wake. Jim decided that his mission would be to hunt and kill the bear, thereby saving camp from the intruder. He obtained a license from the state ranger’s office and then made sure everyone around him knew that he was the guy hunting the local monster. He showed off his rifle and recounted his most recent attempts to take down the furry menace. After several legendary run-ins, no doubt embellished by Jim and others, by the end of the summer Jim had hunted and killed the bear. He paraded pictures around the office, beaming with delight. It was more than a hunting trophy. It was proof that he was a real man. A bona fide “man’s man” who had shed his old sexual identity and become more like William Wallace than anyone else in our community. No one else had killed a bear. And thus no one could question Jim’s masculinity. Killing made him a godly example to us all.

***

Cowboy masculinity. Dominant sexuality. The virtues of violence and savagery. These were the foundations of manhood in my Evangelical community. When I heard the news that a white Evangelical man had killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, my mind raced. In the ensuing hours, I tried to weave together the threads of race, gun violence, purity culture, and masculinity in my mind. As an Asian American I lamented yet another instance of cruelty toward Asian and Asian American people. While all those threads remain salient in my thinking about this tragedy, my mind often wanders back to that day on the boat with Bill; that Sunday school group with James; the time at camp with Jim. I have been taken back to God as Ultimate Masculinity — the one who dominates immoral women and eliminates outsiders. Seeing the face of the Atlanta killer is haunting. More than anything, it makes me think that Feuerbach was right. We often forge the divine in our own image. And sometimes the gods we create are monsters.

Dr. Bradley B. Onishi is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. His work has appeared at the New York Times, Huffington Post, LA Review of Books, Religion News Service, Religion Dispatches, and other outlets.

The post God is Ultimate Masculinity: Evangelical Visions of Manhood in the Wake of the Atlanta Massacre appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

I am writing this letter soon after the eight-day festival of Passover concluded, as many Christians celebrated Easter, and as the month of Ramadan is about to begin. My mind, though, has not been on holidays. While my husband and I participated in a virtual Passover seder with friends, my thoughts have been preoccupied by other matters. Presently, I am eager to see if the COVID-19 vaccines bring an end to the pandemic, or if new variants and Americans’ unwillingness to wear masks and physically distance will prevent us from living like those in Australia, New Zealand, and Vietnam where the virus is under control. My thoughts have also been on the recent gun violence in the United States, especially the shootings in Atlanta where a white evangelical man targeted Asian women because he blamed them for the problems of his so-called sex addiction. And I have been concerned by the spate of tornadoes that have wreaked havoc throughout the American South, occurring so early – in late winter and the start of spring – as yet another symptom of our planet’s climate crisis.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The constant bombardment of pressing matters is the focus of the Revealer‘s April issue. The issue opens with Bradley Onishi’s “God is Ultimate Masculinity: Evangelical Visions of Manhood in the Wake of the Atlanta Massacre,” where he recounts the messages he learned as an adolescent, and then as a pastor, in evangelical megachurches about becoming a tough Christian man and how he sees resonances of those teachings in the recent Atlanta killing spree. Next, as the climate crisis worsens, the U.S. government and several billionaires have invested tremendous resources to travel to the Moon and Mars. In “The New Corporate Space Race,” Mary-Jane Rubenstein explores how the efforts to take over Mars represent a repackaged Manifest Destiny where often white Westerners believe they have the right to spread their dominion over the entire universe.

As scientists explore life beyond our planet, the United States is contending with a sizable population that doubts science and believes bogus internet conspiracy theories about vaccines and the “threat” of immigration. In the newest installment of his column “From the Margins,” Daniel José Camacho reflects in “The Internet’s Unofficial Patron Saint,” on a Church leader from centuries ago who wrote a much-read, and profoundly biased, encyclopedia and considers the process by which people historically and presently have embraced false information. Next, in an excerpt from Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream, Tony Tian-Ren Lin explores what Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism offers to Latino immigrants, many of whom have faced nightmarish situations.

The April issue also considers the place of religious leadership within challenging times such as these. In “Malcolm X: Why El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz Matters,” Sara Kamali explores Malcolm X’s teachings during the last ten months of his life after he converted to Sunni Islam and how those teachings can help us address today’s problems of racial injustice.

Our April issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Latino Americans and the Popularity of Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism.” Tony Tian-Ren Lin joins us to explain what the Prosperity Gospel entails, why it has been appealing to Latino Americans, and how the Prosperity Gospel gives people a feeling of control over their lives – particularly in the face of profound structural inequalities. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As we face the horrors of gun violence, toxic masculinity, racism, the climate crisis, and conspiracy theory-believers, I hope this issue’s articles give you insights into the inner workings of the many problems we must confront. Rather than paralyze you with fear, I hope these articles offer you thoughts on how to act. Our responsibility to take on these issues reminds me of one of the last lines I read at this year’s Passover seder, from the Talmud: “It is not incumbent upon us to finish the task of perfecting the world, but neither may we refrain from beginning it.”

Yours in hope,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: From Passover to the Problems Facing the U.S. appeared first on The Revealer.