The excerpt comes from the book’s preface and introduction.

***

There are almost eight billion people on the planet now. More than half of them are followers of one of the so-called Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That’s a lot of people.

And so the claim at the heart of this book is no small claim. It is positively audacious, even in an interpretative tradition like Judaism. My claim is that the God of the ancient Israelites—the God of Abraham, universally referred to in the masculine today—was originally understood to be a dual-gendered, male-female God. Half a lifetime of research and my own spiritual intuition have led me to this belief. My hope is that you will take this journey with me and judge for yourself.

The ancient four-letter personal name of God, YHWH, which many Jews refer to in Hebrew as HaShem, meaning THE NAME, or as Bible scholars refer to it, the tetragrammaton, has not with official warrant been pronounced in public for over two thousand years. Along the way, some have guessed that THE NAME might have been pronounced Jehovah or Yahweh. Many more assumed that the pronunciation of THE NAME had been lost forever. But I believe that I have found it and it was hiding in plain sight all these years.

***

How is it even possible that the holy name of God, the four Hebrew-letter tetragrammaton YHWH, whatever it meant and however it was pronounced, became lost? Let me say up front that I do not believe that THE NAME was ever lost, but more likely hidden by a small circle of priestly elites who kept the secret to themselves. We’ll get to the how and why in chapter 2. But first, the official story.

The official story of how and when THE NAME became unpronounceable is found in the Talmud, a compendium of laws, tales, and discussions written down by the rabbis (a class of scholars that arose in the late Second Temple period) over the course of some four hundred years. According to the rabbis of the Talmud, in the early days of Israel, common people pronounced THE NAME in their everyday greetings—certainly until 586 BCE, when the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Upon the Jews’ return from exile in Babylonia, increasingly restrictive prohibitions were said to have been instituted to guard against THE NAME’s frivolous or profanatory utterance. A new ruling prohibited the explicit pronunciation of THE NAME by commoners, restricting public expressions to the priests, who were said to have stood before the people, proclaiming THE NAME in a loud voice as they blessed them. In time, the priests began to lower their voices, mumbling THE NAME, allowing it to be drowned out by the Levitical choir so as to conceal it from those unworthy of hearing it. Then, with the death of the High Priest Simon the Just (Shimon ha-Tzaddik, ca. 200 BCE), THE NAME was no longer uttered by his brother priests. When the high priest pronounced it on Yom Kippur, he did so inaudibly.

Painting by David Roberts (1796-1849) depicting the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE

So how did the Israelites refer to God? Outside the Temple, everyone—priests and commoners alike—would, instead of saying THE NAME, employ the respectful substitute name Adonai (Lord). The secret expression of THE NAME was passed on by the Israelite sages to their disciples in Hebrew only once (some say twice) every seven years and was never divulged in commonly spoken Greek. Upon the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the rabbis no longer permitted THE NAME to be pronounced, other than when being transmitted from master to disciple, by anyone anywhere. Even the substitute Adonai had, by that time, become considered by many Jews too holy to be uttered, other than when one was praying or reading scripture aloud in a public gathering. The substitute HaShem, meaning THE NAME, became a way for Jews to refer to God in their everyday discourse.

Jehovah
But what about THE NAME Jehovah? How and when did that name arise? Why do some people say that was the way the unpronounceable name of God was pronounced?

The Torah was translated into Greek in Egypt in the third century BCE (the first-ever translation of the Torah, a work known as the Septuagint). In time, if perhaps not at first, the word Kurios (Greek for “Lord”) was employed by the rabbi-translators as a substitute for THE NAME.

By the fourth century, the Roman Catholic Church was in need of a Latin translation of scripture. In the year 382, Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome (later Saint Jerome) to create a standard official Latin Bible. This work—which came to be known as the common translation, versio vulgate, or Vulgate—continued the by-then time-honored practice of employing the term Lord as a substitute for THE NAME. Just as the Greek Bible had used the term Kurios (Kýrios), the new Latin Bible used the term Dominus. Meanwhile, in their public reading of scripture the Jews continued their custom of pronouncing Adonai whenever they came to THE NAME. No one was pronouncing—or attempting to pronounce—THE NAME. Kurios in Greek, Dominus in Latin, and Adonai in Hebrew all mean “Lord.” It seems that the actual pronunciation of THE NAME had been lost.

Sometime between 600 and 800 CE, academies of Jewish scholars known as Masoretes or “Masters of the Tradition” (Ba’alei Masorah in Hebrew) turned their attention to fixing for posterity the pronunciation of the Hebrew text of the Bible as it had come down to them. Hebrew was essentially a consonantal language, and so the Masoretes had to invent symbols—diacritic marks—to indicate the vowels. Those symbols were most often placed underneath the consonants, though sometimes above, to the side, or inside them.

The Masoretes had to decide what to do when they came to THE NAME. Should they, or should they not, write out the four letters of the unpronounceable name? Should they write them out but leave them without vowels? They made an interesting choice: they placed an approximation of the diacritic marks for the word Adonai below the consonants of the four letters YHWH as a mnemonic device intended to remind the reader not to attempt to pronounce the ineffable name but rather to say—in accord with the tradition, which by that time was already of very long standing—Adonai.

In time (we don’t know precisely when), non-Jewish clerics would attempt new translations of the Bible, not from the Greek Septuagint nor from the Latin Vulgate but directly from a Masoretic text. And when one non-Jewish cleric working with the Hebrew text encountered the four letters of THE NAME, he made an understandable mistake: he read the four consonants in combination with the vowels placed beneath them by the Masoretes as a mnemonic for Adonai. And so this cleric believed—quite mistakenly—that he had discovered the original pronunciation of THE NAME: Jehovah.

A page from The Great Bible (1540) with “Jehovah” in red

Bible scholars of an earlier generation believed Galatinus (the Franciscan Pietro Galatino) to have been the cleric who introduced the error in his 1516 work Concerning Secrets of the Universal Truth (De arcanis catholicae veritatis). But the error appeared much earlier than that in Porchetus de Salvaticis’s Victory against the Jews (Victoria contra Judaeos, 1303), as well as in some editions of the Catalan Dominican friar Raymund Martin’s work Dagger of Faith against the Moors and the Jews (Pugio fidei adversus Mauros et Judaeos, 1278). Whoever was responsible for the error first, it was, as Robert J. Wilkinson has observed, “hardly an error that needed to be invented, rather an inevitable mistake lying in wait.”

Martin Luther perpetuated the error in his 1526 German translation of the Bible, and William Tyndale did the same in his first-ever direct translation of the Bible from Hebrew into English in 1530. Tyndale’s translation became the basis for the appearance of Jehovah in the influential English King James Bible in the early 1600s. And that’s how the pronunciation Jehovah took hold.

Yahweh
Among Christians, few questioned the rendering of THE NAME as Jehovah until the nineteenth century, when the German Bible critic Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius popularized the hypothesized pronunciation Yahweh in his Hebrew and Aramaic Manual on the Old Testament (Hebräisches und Chaldäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament). A consensus was never reached in the scholarly community to support this. But Yahweh joined Jehovah as a second conjectured pronunciation.

Mark Sameth, named “one of America’s most inspiring rabbis” by The Forward (inaugural list, 2013), is featured in Jennifer Berne and R. O. Blechman’s God: 48 Famous and Fascinating Minds Talk about God. His published essays include “Is God Transgender?” in the New York Times. His book, “The Name: A History of the Dual-Gendered Hebrew Name for God” was published by Wipf & Stock in 2020. 

The post The Name: A History of the Dual-Gendered Hebrew Name for God appeared first on The Revealer.

Kali Handelman: Elayne, there are so many things I would love to talk to you about right now — the pandemic, the election, teaching during a pandemic and election — but I’m going to try to focus this month’s chat on something a little narrower. I want to think with you a bit about “religion and media,” the ever broad and capacious banner under which we have both thought and worked for a while.

First, and most pressingly close to your own research, I want to ask you about what’s been happening in France these last few weeks. In your forthcoming book, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris, you write about the series of events preceding the October 16, 2020, murder of the French middle school teacher, Samuel Paty. You write about the satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, why it published cartoons of Muhammed in 2006, and the response to the killings at the magazine’s office in 2015. Now that France is, once again, embroiled in a public, fraught conversation about Frenchness, secularism, and Islam (at least nominally), I wonder what questions you would invite readers to ask when they read news coverage about France right now? What is especially hard for American readers to understand about the terms and undercurrents of these debates and the discourses within them? I’m particularly interested in whether you could help us understand how these conversations center on Frenchness and how religion does — and doesn’t — figure into how it is defined.

Elayne Oliphant: Kali, it is wonderful to chat with you and thank you for the opportunity to turn our eyes to some unsettling events in France, given how singularly we have been focused on the United States in recent months. The killings of Samuel Paty outside of Paris and three people inside a Catholic cathedral in Nice have exacerbated a number of now fairly long-standing trends. First, the state has expanded its oppression and surveillance of Muslims. Second, there has been a doubling down on the right to offend minority groups as essential to French Republican democracy. Third, voices in the government have worked to tie these violent actors to the left and in particular to academics. I want to focus on these latter two trends, both because they are deeply worrying and because they point us toward thinking about some of the complex relationships between religion and media.

Many in France expressed outrage at the horrific violence of Paty’s killing, which was undeniably disturbing. Many, however, also returned to themes we heard at the time of the Charlie Hebdo killings: that the killer had also attacked the fundamental right of all French people to commit acts of offense against religious images, a right that must be defended at all costs. In France, there is an easily retrievable narrative that suggests these violent acts demonstrate a “savage” (a term that has come back with a vengeance in France recently) misunderstanding of the nature of objects and images, or, as we have come to think of them, religious media. In using this term, I am, of course, not referring to the news media, but to any object, image, or practice that serves as a site of mediation — between humans, between humans and gods, between humans and objects, between the living and the dead. Without attempting to analyze anything about how images of the Prophet Muhammad operate as religious media, I want to highlight how many of those who gathered in the streets to mourn Paty’s death did so in order to insist that modern, “civilized” actors are never unduly tied to objects and images. Such actors understand that such media have no agency and that no harm can be enacted against them, even objects, images, and practices considered sacred. And anyone who objects to the profanation of sacred images must be “savage.” I think we should be asking some questions about this assumption. What objects and images count as sacred? How is that sacrality articulated? Who has legitimate access to these sacred sites of mediation?

One of parallels I saw with the Charlie Hebdo killings was how many people expressed their mourning by occupying public space with signs of the normative majority. The sense that this violence can most effectively be critiqued by emphasizing the irreproachability and sacrality of French public space — a powerful site of mediation itself — by filling this space with the “true” French citizen (even during a pandemic) demonstrates the refusal of some claims to sacrality and the privileged taken-for-grantedness of others.

The cumulative effect of these responses is to deny the possibility that these violent actions are those of a very small group. They are instead taken as an expression of “Islam” broadly speaking. All Muslims are required to submit to the harm done to images of the Prophet, while also being reminded of their lack of legitimate access to the sacred French public sphere. If a public demonstration of the white, tacitly-Christian majority is a necessary response to these acts, then it says something about who can make a legitimate claim to occupy and take up public space.

In addition, I think it is important to remember that more explicitly Christian media play key roles in the affirmation of the morality of French public space. My experience of visiting some of the informal memorials that were installed following the 2015 shootings at the Bataclan is that, like in the U.S., these expressions of mourning had many Christian components. In France, this Christianity is Catholic. Votive candles tended to surround the memorials. And it was in Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral that politicians gathered to mourn those lost. They didn’t just gather in this space, they attended a full mass presided over by the archbishop. And, of course, we only have to remember the passionate response to the fire at Notre-Dame last year to recall the strength of the commitment to having Catholic symbols not simply occupy, but dominate French public space. Obviously, I can in no way address the thinking or intentions of the perpetrator of the violent acts in Nice, but it might be worth asking if, rather than an explicitly anti-Catholic statement, attacking this site was another means of critiquing the exclusions of France’s sacred public sphere more broadly. I was struck on the day when Biden’s victory was announced how church bells rang out throughout Paris, in essence reaffirming this overlap between Catholic and French Republican images, spaces, and sounds.

Notre Dame fire, 2019

In terms of the third trend, which American readers may not have heard as much about, in the weeks that have followed these violent attacks there has been a significant uptick in attacks by those in government against left-wing intellectuals. Like many on the right, they have turned to concepts that were developed to analyze racialized oppression and white privilege in the United States, but that have increasingly moved into French academic critiques. Concepts like “race” and “intersectionality” are, government officials argue, “communalist” and create rigid boundaries between groups, exacerbating Muslim violence. The minister of education has recently suggested a desire to limit academic freedom by requiring academics to conduct research in line with Republican norms, narrowly defined.

I was recently impressed by an interpretation of this response to the Paty killing made by a French political scientist, Samuel Hayat, in Bibliobs. He points in particular to the work has been accomplished by the use of a term that has no basis in reality, “Islamo-gauchisme” (Islamic-leftism). After carefully dismantling the existence of a coherent ideology conveyed by the addition of “ism” to these terms, Hayat explores the connections between how this term is used today and how a parallel term was used in the early 20th century: “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Both of the terms link up left-wing politics and left-wing intellectual work with a religious group deemed dangerous and deeply “other” to the nation. There are a number of fascinating parallels, such as how the terms imply that those on the left might be unwittingly controlled by these dangerous religions, potentially undermining the legitimacy of a leftist critique for those who might otherwise be persuaded by it.

The real insidiousness of both terms, however, lies in the way they take for granted the threatening outsider status of minority religious groups, and open a vast terrain for the expression of already “ambient” Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, respectively. We certainly saw that after Charlie Hebdo, and it is being even further encouraged by the right-wing government today. One powerful distinction between the two contexts that Hayat acknowledges is that there were, in fact, many Jews involved in Communist and Socialist groups of various kinds in the early 20th century; it says something about these movements that they were inclusive of those who were otherwise refused an equal voice in the public sphere. He also points out that it suggests something significantly lacking in left-wing groups today, which have not been nearly so inclusive and can point to very few Muslims among them.

My work leads me to focus on an additional point: the potential Christianity underlying the normative or legitimate voice that opposes these “isms” can both go unsaid and appear desirable. So, the public sphere and public space so long celebrated as the sources of Europe’s “enlightened” status are, in fact, far from neutral. They are themselves a form of religious (or sared) media, and a variety of other religious media remain powerfully present within them, both in terms of the celebrated and unthreatening Catholic media, and in the potentially threatening specter of the signs and actors associated with minority religious groups.

KH: Because your forthcoming book deals so deeply with the topics of banality and privilege, I wonder if you could give us a bit of a primer on how you have, first, defined these terms in your work, and second, how you find them useful for navigating the political questions of our present moment (whether that be the election, the pandemic, or other stories that maybe deserve but are not receiving the same levels of attention)?

EO: It is perhaps another expression of Murphy’s law that one only really comes to understand the terms one is using upon completing a book. I finished the copy-edits on the book over the summer, and so I was rereading my account of banality and privilege in light of the newly powerful expressions of Black Lives Matter protests that emphasized the banality, ubiquity, and perniciousness of white privilege in the U.S. Somewhat unusually for France, anti-racist protests also occurred there in the weeks following the police killing of George Floyd. While there has long been activism by Black anti-racist groups, especially between 1995 and 2005, the refusal to recognize racism in France is long-standing and anyone making a claim on the basis of racial discrimination tends to be dismissed as “racist” by even bringing the concept of “race” into public discourse.

As in the U.S., monuments to French historical figures connected to slavery and colonialism have been vandalized and critiqued during these protests, pointing to how the banality and privilege of white supremacy is expressed and reproduced through the occupation and design of public space. Let me turn to James Baldwin to help clarify what I meant by this. In a passage from “No Name in the Streets,” he described how

The South African coal miner . . . or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the cathedral at Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this history cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history’s arrogant and unjust judgment.

Baldwin highlighted the particularity and the violence of spaces that many privileged, white, and tacitly Christian viewers take for granted as self-evident and unproblematic expressions of “French civilization.” Scholarly accounts of religious media, however, need to do more to address his critique. Innumerable studies of Notre-Dame emphasize the space in terms of what David Graeber referred to as its “density,” or the layers of ritual action and history it appears to make accessible. In order to address the violence that Baldwin identified as inhering in the glorification of these spaces, I argue that we need to approach religious media in a very different vein. Rather than focus exclusively on its density, we need to pay more attention to its banality.

I take the term banal from the work of Hannah Arendt. She used it to describe how that which is otherwise deemed unthinkable comes to appear as self-evident. In secular France, all signs of religion are supposedly forbidden in public life. And yet, on the day of the Notre-Dame fire, President Macron could declare: “we will rebuild this cathedral, all together. Without a doubt, it is a part of the French destiny and the project that we will have for years to come.” How, precisely, is France’s future tied to the rebuilding of the cathedral? At first glance, Macron’s words may seem to respond in the affirmative to a question that, for many, has become rather tired: Is Europe Christian? The issue that interests me is not whether spaces like Notre-Dame or Europe are sufficiently Christian (they are both secular and Christian, and yet neither term is sufficient to capture how they operate), but how they uphold privilege by silencing the violence of the histories that went into their creation. In using the term banal, I aim to address not only how that that which is discursively problematic comes to appear as acceptable, but how the value and resonance of media that, at least in part, work to maintain the boundaries of the dominant group come to appear self-evident.

KH: Lastly, I’ve been struck recently by conversations with colleagues and friends about mask wearing — friends who have told me that they can feel the norms shifting around being a bit more covered in public, and I can’t help but think of the “veil debates” in France. How do these concepts — banality and privilege — help us understand what, on the face of it (forgive the pun please), really does just look like hypocrisy. In other words, how can the state go from telling Muslim women that it is “un-French” to cover their faces, and then tell the entire country that, in fact, they must cover their faces (which, of course, they really must). And that, maybe more interestingly, some non-Muslims are starting to find a feeling of freedom in being more covered in public. Even just typing all of this out, I feel like I’m missing the point, but I wonder if you can help me unpack what I’m missing and why?

EO: It does unquestionably reveal yet again the hypocrisy of the burqa law. But the hypocrisy has always been obvious and, perhaps, part of its point. What I think of as the banality of the privilege of Frenchness is affirmed in this blatant hypocrisy: that which is discursively abhorred becomes not only unproblematic, but the efforts aimed at maintaining the power of the dominant group come to resonate and appear valuable.

Image by Halisia Hubbard

I haven’t read much about finding new freedoms in the wearing of masks, but I’d be fascinated to learn more. Indeed, one of the things that felt so thrilling about the protests over the summer in the U.S. and France was how, coming as they did on the heels of massive shutdowns in which a great deal of what we had taken for granted had been utterly transformed, this might prove to be a moment in which violent norms might finally be shattered. And yet, white supremacy and white privilege have long proved to be powerfully tenacious.

One of the wackier points made in the parliamentary debates about the burqa law in 2010 was the suggestion that French artists were especially known for their portraiture and so the face is incredibly important to French “culture.” (As a very minor point, I think many art historians would suggest that English artists were far more obsessed with the portrait than French artists, but I digress). This is a weird leap of logic, but also something more than only that.

To link up French “culture” with that which is housed in the Louvre and Paris’s many, many museums is another way of insisting upon the whiteness of French “civilization.” There are other ways of viewing museums than as irreproachable straightforward expressions of European civilization. They might also be understood as expressions of the violent expropriation that occurred during the Napoleonic wars and French colonialism. A fascinating case just closed a few weeks ago in France in which a Congolese activist was found guilty of the attempted theft of a museum object. There was no doubt that this activist — Mwazulu Diyabanza — had attempted to remove an object from the Musée Quai Branly. This museum is France’s largest “ethnographic” museum that has been widely critiqued for reproducing racist stereotypes in its largely de-contextualized or weirdly contextualized display of objects that French colonialists, anthropologists, and collectors stole from spaces throughout its 19th century Empire. Diyabanza live streamed the act while explaining that he was simply taking back that which rightly belonged to Africa.

President Macron commissioned a report in 2017 asking how many objects held in France’s museums might have been taken through illegitimate means and what ought to be done with them. The answers to these questions articulated in the 2018 report was 90,000 and that they ought to be returned. The President has claimed he is committed to addressing this issue, but at this point only 27 such returns have been initiated. In taking the action that is clearly not going to be addressed by the government into his own hands, Diyabanza looked forward to the opportunity to bring France’s historical and present-day crimes into the courtroom. In order to effectively silence him, the prosecution reduced the potential punishment from €100,000 and 10 years in prison to a €1000 fine. The judge found him guilty with relative ease, explaining that he hoped to discourage others from following his lead. The hypocrisy that Diyabanza wanted to emphasize was silenced again by the refusal to make space for his critique.

I hope that the experience of living with a face-covering encourages people to stop obsessing about veiling in France, and allows them to see the world and these media in a new light. But there is a great deal of privilege to be upheld by reinforcing certain notions of France and Frenchness and the signaling of the virtue of that privilege through the undeniably contradictory responses to different religious media. Then again, the work of activists is unrelenting and powerful. I just read that Diyabanza has been arrested again for attempting to remove an 18th century Indonesian sculpture from the Louvre.

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 Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at NYU. Her first book, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2021.

The post On France, Violence, and Religious Media appeared first on The Revealer.

A 1911 illustration of Tisquantum

“The seeds of the Mayflower, wafted by the winds of Heaven, or borne in the Eagle’s beak, have been scattered far and wide over the Old World as well as over the New.”
–Rep. Robert Winthrop, Address to the New England Society of New York (1839)

“Let the children of the pilgrims blush, while the son of the forest drops a tear, and groans over the fact of his murdered and departed fathers. He would say to the sons of the pilgrims, (as Job said about his birthday), let the day be dark, the 22^nd day of December, 1620; let it be forgotten in your celebration, in your speeches, and by the burying of the Rock that you fathers first put their foot upon.”
–William Apess, Eulogy on King Philip (1836)

The Wampanoag Indian Tisquantum, whom posterity incorrectly remembers as the Squanto of Thanksgiving legend, lived in England before any Englishman had declared Massachusetts his home. Six years separates Tisquantum’s kidnapping and his subsequent sale into slavery, and the arrival of the first so-called Pilgrims at the armpit of Cape Cod peninsula and the ruins of his village Patuxet. In 1620, that Indian settlement was to be rechristened after the sleepy seaside village of the Pilgrim’s journey’s origin – Plymouth. The Tisquantum of reality is not the Squanto of myth. The latter is the eponymous “Noble Savage” of European fantasy, who fully inhabits this howling wilderness with a type of feral wisdom that can be imparted to the Englishmen, who will then be able to survive on America’s unforgiving terrain. “Squanto stayed with them and was their interpreter and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation,” wrote the first governor William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation. “He showed them how to plant corn . . . and guided them to unknown places, and never left them till he died.”

Central to the myth and “Squanto as a Noble Savage” is his impartation of knowledge that would save the suffering Pilgrims, assaulted by freezing New England nor’easters and the bracing, snowy winds of Atlantic squall. More used to parsing their Bibles than tilling fields, the Pilgrims relied on Squanto’s knowledge and instructions, such as burying decomposing fish heads with seeds and corn kernels so the rotting flesh would provide nutrients to the poor soil of New England. Popular historian Nathaniel Philbrick writes in his triumphalist Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War that “Squanto knew enough of their techniques to give the Pilgrims a crash course in Indian agriculture,” so that the Wampanoag “was on his way to becoming the one person in New England . . . [the Pilgrims] could not do without.” In American myth, Squanto is as the archangel Raphael is to Adam in John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost: an innocent and perfect being who arrives in Eden, though in this version the Indian conveniently takes leave of the story while the Pilgrims stay in Paradise. His life isn’t the stuff of national epic, however. Rather, the narrative of Tisquantum’s bondage and his ultimate emancipation, only to return to a home long since devastated by disease, is actually worthy of any melancholy seventeenth-century picaresque novel.

Pilfered from Massachusetts’ shores by John Smith, Tisquantum was first sold into slavery in Spain, where the English planned to trade human flesh alongside bacalao. He disembarked in Gibraltar and, according to the English slave trader who kidnapped him, Tisquantum was adopted by a group of Catholic friars so that he could be “instructed in the Christian Faith; and so disappointed this unworthy fellow of his hopes of gaine.” Eventually he went to England and would live in the house of a shipbuilder. By the time Tisquantum was able to return to Massachusetts, it was already six years after his seizure, and two years after the Mayflower had disembarked with 102 men, women, and children who would settle that place.

After six years away, Tisquantum discovered that rather than Algonquin land, this was now New England; rather than Patuxet, this was Plymouth; and rather than his fellow Wampanoag, this country was now claimed by those who had abducted him. Now it was a kingdom of bleached skulls and dried bones, what the colonist (and foe of the Puritans) Thomas Morton had described as “a new found Golgotha” as European microbes preceded European bullets. Bernard Bailyn writes in The Barbarous Years that “[d]eath was everywhere. America, for these hopeful utopians, had become a graveyard.” But this so-called “New World” was already a cemetery for its native inhabitants, long before the Pilgrims had discovered America and Tisquantum had already discovered England.

The tale of those hearty hundred Pilgrims, supposedly escaping an Old World where their piety was punished, and so absconding to a providential New World where they could construct an American Jerusalem, is the stuff of Thanksgiving pageants and documentary mythologizing, of elementary school construction-paper belt-buckled hats and cornucopias overflowing with autumnal squash. Such is, despite generations of historical scholarship that have placed the Pilgrims in a more complex and complete understanding – which includes not just denunciatory interpretations, but ones which give rightful consideration to the intellectual rigor of American Puritanism as well – the standard view which still filters out through American education, popular culture, and national self-definition. The nineteenth-century New Hampshire representative Daniel Webster valorized the Pilgrims for their “wise institutions, of liberty, and religion,” such that the “world has seen nothing like this,” and some variation of that maudlin sentiment still holds for many Americans today.

Plymouth Rock Landing On Us
Although this year is the 400^th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing, it seems strangely unremarked upon, perhaps because our present era of pandemic and racial strife is rightly more concerned with current events. The novel coronavirus has led to the cancellation of many planned commemorations, in Plymouth and elsewhere, even while the historical vultures of American history, such as myself, are preparing our editorials both contrary and conventional. There is something anticlimactic with the anniversary this year, coming only about fifteen months after the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved people in Jamestown, Virginia, an event that was recognized by the editors of the “1619 Project” at the New York Times, which popularized several decades of scholarship, a publication that caused great consternation among conservative commentators.

Poster for the 1619 Project

While the “1619 Project” wasn’t without criticism from some scholars, the bulk of opprobrium directed towards editors, such as the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, came from the precise sort of reactionary pundits and politicians who desperately cling to the mythic storytelling from which Mayflower creches are built. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingerich accused Hannah-Jones of “brainwashing” and “propaganda,” Senator Tom Cotton claimed the articles were “racially divisive and revisionist,” and in a statement that was only marginally inflected with logorrhea, Donald Trump said on Fox News Sunday, “I just look at – I look at school. I watch, I read, look at the stuff. Now they want to change – 1492, Columbus discovered America. You know, we grew up, you grew up, we all did, that what we learned. Now they want to make it the 1619 project. Where did that come from? What does it represent?” With refreshing (if accidental) honesty, Trump concluded, “I don’t even know.”

Assuming that Trump isn’t familiar with the criticisms leveled by historians Gordon Wood and James McPherson, it seems rather that his distaste is a seamlessly integrated combination of his bigotries and cold political calculation. No doubt that’s the gambit motivating the presidential “1776 Commission” established for the upcoming semiquincentenal of the American Revolution, so as to formulate guidelines for the Orwellian-sounding discipline of “Patriotic Education.” A cynical bit of politicking, since whole swaths of the American public already seem more than surprised to learn that the history of this land is less than pristine.

This has, however, been a season of awakening, where historical figures properly regarded as villains (such as the architects of the Confederacy) are joined by those more widely interpreted as heroes (like the signatories of the Constitution). When we acknowledge the four centuries since the landing of the Mayflower, we must speak of things ugly – genocide and ethnic cleansing, imperialism and colonialism, pandemic and erasure. There are, of course, rosier interpretations as well: that narrative of religious liberty and cultural syncretism which we ritualistically pantomime every November. Maybe that’s why the Mayflower anniversary rings hollow – we’re already exhausted by our ghosts, so that we’ve no desire to engage with some 130 more, whether to exorcize them or not. “For many years, orators, authors of textbooks, historians, politicians, and others have been serving the needs and desires of the present day by creating multiple pasts out of Puritan New England,” writes Abram Van Engen in City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, and in 2020 what it seems we might most want from Puritan New England is silence.

That would be a mistake, for what I wish we could hear may not be Bradford, or Miles Standish, or Richard Mather, but rather the cipher who lurks at the edge of Plymouth’s woods. No primary accounts of Tisquantum are rendered in his own voice; nothing can be said about his opinions beyond what others imparted to him, or what subsequent mythmakers invented on his behalf. We’ve no sense of Tisquantum’s depths of grief, or the pragmatic calculations that went into his advising the local chief Massasoit, as well as the English. Philbrick writes that though Massasoit had “been swayed by Squanto’s advice,” the Sachem was “loath to place his faith in the former captive, whom he regarded as a conniving cultural mongrel with dubious motives.” Tisquantum’s position was one of ambivalence, perhaps a hybridized man stuck between cultures, but not fully comfortable in either.

A statue of Chief Massasoit. (Photo: Marcio Silva)

A different version of this essay would have me tempted to claim that Tisquantum’s liminal position would qualify him as being the “First American.” That might be a clever claim to make, but an honest reckoning would have to conclude that it’s also an impossible one, or at least a thesis based not on evidence, but rather imagination. It would be to impart our own creative intent only to do what all mythmakers have done – deny Tisquantum his agency. Just because he is not here to define himself shouldn’t give me, or anyone else, the right to define him. Yet there has been a long history of doing just that, constructing phantasmagorias of mythic-history upon the most distant of events, because in controlling the past there is always the possibility of commandeering the future.

For the accumulated detritus of maudlin sentiment and popular history has accrued to the signifier of “Squanto,” so that he is forever enshrined as the uncomplicated man come from the wilderness to share his wisdom with the Pilgrims, only to depart back towards the West and (what was for the colonists wishing to claim this land) a convenient death. He is an archetype of the wise elder living seamlessly with nature, yet as Richard Drinnon makes clear in Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating & Empire Building, such sentimentalism is far from neutral. Describing the discourse of the “Noble Savage” or the “natural man,” Drinnon writes, “those deadly subtleties of white hostility that reduced native people to the level of the fauna and flora . . . It reduced all the diverse Native Americans to a single . . . nonwhite group.” Even more crucially, as Drinnon makes clear, that metaphor moves toward an irreducible logic of genocide, for fauna and flora are often intended to be “rooted out.”

In the context of that first Pilgrim winter in America, the agricultural metaphor is particularly ironic, since Tisquantum is forever associated with plant husbandry and the impartation of horticultural knowledge that preserved the English experiment. In this extended metaphor, the English would root in rocky soil, nutriated with rotting cod, while the Wampanoag would ultimately be treated as brush to be cleared away. In a cruel irony, an old legend makes Tisquantum an instrument of his people’s destruction, but one that can’t be blamed on anything Wampanoag. “By colonial standards,” writes Alan Taylor in American Colonies: The Settling of North America, “New England attracted an unusual set of emigrants: the sort of . . . prosperous people who ordinarily stayed at home rather than risk the . . . uncertainties of colonial life.” This over-educated coterie of ministers, professors, and lawyers was ill-equipped not just to Nor’easters and sweltering summers, but to farming more generally. They were, in a phrase, completely and totally out of their element. Tisquantum’s farming lesson, often presented as instruction in the natural wisdom of the Indians, was unknown among the Algonquin — but it was an English practice dating back to the Middle Ages. Undoubtedly, Tisquantum had learned of it while living in England, reflecting Nick Bunker’s point in Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World that Tisquantum had a fruitful “period in London, a city where he had probably spent more time than any of the surviving Pilgrims.”

That the pious subjects of New Jerusalem were too bookish to even recognize the working-class agricultural traditions of their own country speaks to the ironies of that bloody century, though perhaps little more. Crucially, there are unspoken stories, such as that of Tisquantum himself, forever preserved as more symbol than man. Richter reminds us that “stereotyped Indians… become central to the American story, but flesh-and-blood Indian people and the histories they made for themselves could not.” Even if we wished to make Tisquantum more human than metaphor, we don’t have his words that would make that possible.

An anecdote about some fish heads buried in the Massachusetts dirt, which Tisquantum first learned from whatever unnamed English farmer in the distant imperial capital, is a parable with an unclear lesson. I proffer no didacticism here and no intended meaning. My reasons for offering it are estimably humble – to present the strange, surprising, and unpredictable ways in which history manifests itself, and, far more importantly, to emphasize that all narrative is local. No matter what language we use, what models we embrace – whether our history is Whiggish or Marxist, materialist or hagiographical – history is ultimately composed of a seeming infinitude of stories which we’ll simply never know, whether in 1620 or now. The wisdom of understanding how somebody, how a Tisquantum, is able to make their negotiations with the world so that they may live within the midst of grief and terror is something that does not lend itself to simple encapsulation, and yet that seems to be what we demand of our symbols. It is to all our detriment that the man was erased while the legend is all that remains.

Ed Simon is a staff writer for The Millions. His most recent book is Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance’s Radicalism.

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

The post Elegy for Tisquantum: The Mayflower at 400 appeared first on The Revealer.

When a majority of white evangelicals aligned themselves with Trump in 2016, many people sought to explain the bizarre union with different theories. These are not genuine evangelicals, some protested. Others pointed to economic motivations or to the notion that most evangelicals simply held their nose to choose the lesser of two evils. Some people simply threw their hands up and charged evangelicals with rank hypocrisy. Yet none of these theories hold up strongly upon closer scrutiny. Before facing Hillary Clinton, Trump was able to beat out other Republicans in the primaries who seemed more favorable to evangelicals, like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. Du Mez thinks the theories miss something: “. . . for many evangelicals, Donald Trump did not represent the betrayal of many of the values they had come to hold dear. His testosterone-fueled masculinity aligned remarkably well with that long championed by conservative evangelicals.”

In order to make this case, Jesus and John Wayne provides an expansive account of how conservative white evangelicals embraced a rugged and violent form of masculinity since the middle of the 20^th century. The book looks at places like Colorado Springs, a hotbed of literal militancy where believers built organizational juggernauts and aggressively made inroads with the military. It covers the who’s who of patriarchal evangelicalism, including figures like Albert Mohler, Eric Metaxas, Oliver North, James Dobson, and the movement’s greatest hits like Wild at Heart and Left Behind. But it also features women like Phyllis Schlafly, who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, and Sarah Palin, who embodied a conservative feminine ideal that pleased evangelical men. Most importantly, the book sets all of these developments against a longer historical backdrop. In the western expansion of the United States, a new masculinity was forged predicated on a white armed protector bringing law and order to savagery. Here, John Wayne (1907–1979), the prolific actor who often played a cowboy fighting Native Americans in Westerns, towers above all.

Even though John Wayne wasn’t an evangelical, they fervently embraced him. Wayne came “to symbolize a different set of virtues — nostalgic yearning for a mythical ‘Christian America,’ a return to ‘traditional’ gender roles, and the reassertion of (white) patriarchal authority.” Du Mez’s emphasis on Wayne is apt. His name and persona come up over and over again among the evangelical men attempting to define “biblical” manhood. And Wayne proves how white evangelicals were willing to embrace an outsider to their faith, a politically incorrect strongman who could defend their values and vanquish their enemies, well before Trump.

Donald Trump at the John Wayne Museum in 2016

Conservative evangelicals’ affinity for a John Wayne or Donald Trump reveals the limits of reducing religion to beliefs. For a long time, evangelicals and historians of evangelicalism (and often people who were both) defined evangelicals by their professed theology. In 1989, David Bebbington famously characterized evangelicalism by four qualities: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The “Bebbington quadrilateral” became a popular way of describing evangelicals, and one that evangelicals themselves embraced. In this framework, the core of evangelicalism — its particular set of beliefs — is separable from its entanglement with polarized politics. But this seems to be an inadequate description of how religion works, of how belief coincides with and arises alongside various identities. For example, studies have shown that most white evangelicals today are highly motivated by racialized fears of cultural displacement. Considering that segregation was just as important as abortion to the rise of the Christian Right, and that this nation fought a civil war over slavery, would it be wrong to say that whiteness is a crucial component of evangelical identity today, and that this isn’t a new thing or some fall from a pristine tradition?

Du Mez rightfully understands evangelicalism as an interplay between belief and culture. Evangelical identity runs along multiple axes. As Du Mez describes it, this identity includes “a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism . . . intertwined with white racial identity.” Evangelicals are not only what they believe about the Bible and Jesus. Evangelicals are also communities and the subcultures they’ve created, the vast networks of Christian institutions they’ve built, which include schools, bookstores, parachurch organizations, and media ministries. If you pay attention to what evangelicals have consumed over the past several decades, like Du Mez assiduously does, then it doesn’t look like a coincidence that they could be attracted to someone like Trump.

In addition to seeing the hyper-masculinity around Trump and his supporters with a new pair of eyes, reading Jesus and John Wayne can give one a strange sense of déjà vu. Are evangelicals attempting to push Christian nationalist policies through the president’s administration? Well, we could go back to Billy Graham’s Christian nationalist influence on Dwight D. Eisenhower. Does Jerry Fallwell Jr.’s sex life make him a hypocrite given how he opposes the LGBTQ community? Before him there was Ted Haggard who was exposed in having a male escort while pushing for an anti-LGBTQ law, and a long list of other duplicitous men. Will evangelicals really go so far as to oppose democratic norms and support a foreign power known for undermining human rights? It didn’t stop them from supporting the Contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s and from supporting evangelical men like Oliver North who broke the law and lied to Congress about his involvement. The parallels can go on and on. Du Mez’s point about the politicization of evangelical masculinity is right. Even when conservative evangelical teachings about masculinity appeared to be simply personal and spiritual, they weren’t apolitical. The militant masculine ideal depended on adversaries, either foreign or domestic, and some type of war to fight.

Even if evangelicalism’s history leading up to Trump gives the impression of inevitability, Du Mez highlights episodes that show how things could have been otherwise. One chapter focuses on the Promise Keepers movement of the 1990s. The Promise Keepers held massive rallies in the nation’s capital and sports arenas around the country, attracting up to 700,000 men, in which they were encouraged to honor God, protect their families, and pursue virtue. These rallies often took on a highly emotional nature, featuring men crying and lifting their hands. They also started to emphasize the concept of “racial reconciliation,” and provided a platform for Black men like Tony Evans, Wellington Boone, and John Perkins. While some of the leaders in this movement held to traditional, hierarchical gender roles, some did not. For example, Gary Oliver published Real Men Have Feelings Too in 1993. At some points, it looked as though the Promise Keepers’ masculine ideal of the “tender warrior” could replace the more rigid and violent masculinity elevated within evangelicalism. So what happened?

The Promise Keepers’ alternative evangelical masculinity came apart both from the outside and from within. First, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, elicited calls for a tougher masculinity. Second, although Promise Keepers membership remained predominately white (90 percent according to one questionnaire), the group’s nods to diversity and inclusion seemed to have caused a racist backlash from white men. In 1996, 40 percent of complaints registered by conference participants were negative responses to the theme of racial reconciliation. Third, the Promise Keepers received a steady stream of criticism from evangelicals who considered it too soft and a Trojan horse for feminism and homosexuality. A rising-star pastor in the evangelical world named Mark Driscoll, then associated with Mars Hill Church in Seattle, called it “pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship . . .”

Du Mez provides fascinating profiles of the evangelical leaders who forged its militant masculinity. Perhaps giving away my age, I’ll say I was most familiar with Mark Driscoll and his “New Calvinist” colleagues who blew up in the 2000s. These Calvinists, who also sometimes went by the label “Reformed,” were a subset of the conservative evangelical movement who emphasized the “reformed” doctrines of John Calvin and others following him. During high school, I went through a Calvinist phase in which I habitually swallowed content from white evangelical pastors like Mark Driscoll, John Piper, Tim Keller, John MacArthur, R.C. Sproul, and others. For a season, they became my authorities on faith and masculinity. I’d never gone to a white evangelical church before and I hadn’t grown up around white evangelicals. I went through public schools on Long Island that were more than 90 percent people of color. So, you may be wondering, how did someone like me enter this world? To oversimplify my story, it was the podcasts, YouTube videos, blogs, and music that were readily available. When I embarked on spiritual quests by visiting Christian bookstores, I came across their work. I also listened to Christian hip-hop and my favorite rappers all referenced these white Calvinist men. My journey exemplifies what Du Mez describes as the “vast quantity of religious products” produced and consumed by evangelicals, and the degree to which “evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches.”

In 2011, the Christian hip-hop collective known as 116 Clique (named after Romans 1:16) released a song called “Man Up.” The music video, which has been viewed more than 5 million times, displays a group of young men of color running with a flag emblazoned with the letters “M” and “U.” They are symbolic torch bearers for the collective’s defiant manifesto on biblical masculinity. In his verse, the rapper KB says: “Instead of leading, no we ain’t leading we bump that / Basically little boys with muscles and a mustache / The femininity, we need a remedy / The God-Man a hundred percent masculinity.” To be fair, I think it’s hard to deny that Black men and men of color, in urban areas and otherwise, are in need of healing — like any other group of men. I’m not against messages that emphasize healthier masculinities or personal responsibility per se. But the masculinity promoted by this world of Christian hip-hop was often consonant with that of white evangelical pastors in the Calvinist/Reformed camp. Additionally, it overlapped with other variants of Black male empowerment that blamed broken homes and communities on matriarchy.

In another notable Christian rap song, a verse says, “I got a backpack full of tracts, plus I keep a Johnny Mac so we can pound it out.” Johnny Mac is a reference to the biblical commentary published by John MacArthur, which contained the following teaching: “A woman’s subordinate role did not result after the Fall as a cultural, chauvinistic corruption of God’s perfect design; rather, God established her role as part of His original creation.” In the 2017 article “Is Reformed theology for black people?,” Jemar Tisby, who headed the Reformed African American Network before it was rebranded as The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, confirmed that the rise of Christian hip-hop consciously drew from the teachings of white Reformed pastors and led to a surge of interest in Reformed theology among African Americans. In Christianity Today, evangelical professor Anthony Bradley said, “Reformed hip-hop is a theologically driven masculinity movement. It says no to the prom songs to Jesus in CCM, no to whiny emo Christian music for hipsters, and no to empty, shallow, individualistic Christian music lacking theological content produced out of Nashville.”

Regarding race and evangelical masculinities, Du Mez writes the following in her book:

“While dominant, the evangelical cult of masculinity does not define the whole of American evangelicalism. It is largely the creation of white evangelicals . . . With few exceptions, black men, Middle Eastern men, and Hispanic men are not called to a wild, militant masculinity. Their aggression, by contrast, is seen as dangerous, a threat to the stability of home and nation.”

I think this is slightly off the mark. Within the hierarchy of evangelical masculinities, are Black evangelical men and evangelical men of color subordinated to white evangelical men? Yes. Are Black men punished for striving toward a militant masculine ideal? It depends. As the Christian hip-hop movement of the early 21^st century demonstrated, Black evangelical men could pursue a hyper-masculine ideal — with the blessing and support of white evangelical leaders — as long as it was directed inwardly or toward their respective community. I recall James Baldwin, who was Black, queer, and a former preacher, saying: “In America I, precisely, am the flesh, which the Christians must mortify.” Black male aggression is seen as dangerous in relation to white women and white male authority. But in relation to Black women, trans people, or less-than-manly men, it’s another story.

White evangelicals created their John Wayne cult of hyper-masculinity, but they don’t have a monopoly on evangelical hyper-masculinities as such. Latino, African-American, or Asian pastors don’t need white evangelicals in order to have sexism in their churches. Trump’s administration received considerable support from conservative Latino pastors. And according to preliminary data from the 2020 presidential election, Trump gained ground with some Latino and African-American men. I’m not saying that white evangelical masculinities and these others occupy the same place within the hierarchy of evangelicalism. And Du Mez is correct to stress the particular power wielded and damage exerted by white evangelical men. But I don’t think the men of color who still orbit the evangelical world should be let off the hook. White evangelical men can make room for, and even work in tandem with, a Black hyper-masculinity (I’m picturing Voddie Baucham Jr. in my head) as long as white masculinity isn’t threatened by it.

In the song “Man Up,” the Christian rapper Lecrae says in his verse: “Momma want some Obama in me / The hood want ‘Pac hip-hop wanna see the Common in me / And since it’s a senseless contradiction / I end up a misfit tryna fit in.” By referencing Obama, Tupac, and Common, Lecrae is explicitly wrestling with different masculine role models in relationship to the “biblical” ideal championed in the song. His expression of being a misfit holds true in multiple ways for the trajectory of his career. As a Black evangelical, Lecrae has had to carve out his place both within evangelicalism and the wider music industry.

Rapper Lecrae of 116 Clique

Earlier this summer, Lecrae recorded a conversation with evangelical pastor Louie Giglio that sparked controversy. Giglio called slavery a “blessing” and expressed his preference for the term “white blessing” over “white privilege.” Lecrae was widely criticized for remaining silent and offering no push-back to Giglio, and later offered multiple apologies. When I watched the clip of the conversation, I had a strong visceral reaction. Maybe it was because it reminded me too much of my own youthful days as a conservative Calvinist. One part of me was shocked that Lecrae, a Houston-native and part of a generation of Christian rappers known for having sharp things to say about secular rappers and heresy, was silent in that moment. Another part of me recognized the dynamic. When I was a Calvinist, I internalized a certain kind of reverence for white evangelical pastors. Black men were supposed to be “biblically” hyper-masculine, but in relationship to white Christian men we were called to be properly docile. Or, thinking more cynically, it’s also a matter of access. Conservative evangelical men of color exist but occupy a tenuous space within the hierarchy of the evangelical world. They know, in one form another, that pastors like John Piper or Louie Giglio hold the resources and the keys. I can’t say what went down in Lecrae’s or Giglio’s hearts, but that conversation for me was emblematic of the kinds of negotiations that take place between white and Black evangelical men.

By the time you reach the end of Jesus and John Wayne, you get to see one of the major consequences reaped by evangelicals’ masculine ideal. That consequence is abuse. Many of the men that Du Mez profiles end up getting exposed or accused of various forms of abuse and toxic behavior. Male evangelical leaders may have once contented themselves by believing that this was mostly a Catholic problem, but over the last years major patterns of abuse have also been uncovered in evangelical church networks and ministries. Even moderate to progressive evangelicals, a smaller group in the evangelical universe, aren’t immune. Du Mez points to the sexual misconduct of Bill Hybels at Willow Creek Community Church. Then there is Chris Heuertz, a popularizer of the Enneagram who is facing several allegations of abuse. In 2018, Noel Castellanos of the Christian Community Development Association, a progressive evangelical organization, resigned as president. In this case, the abuse of power was not sexual in nature but several women accused Castellanos of a “toxic masculinity” that demeaned women and expressed itself through yelling and the slamming of fists on tables.

Is it time for more people to acknowledge problematic masculinities among progressive evangelicals? Conservative and progressive evangelical leaders can appear worlds apart, but in these situations, they can follow the same playbook. Men amass an inordinate amount of power within institutions that provide them little accountability, overseen by boards that are stacked with their own friends, exchanging favors within a network of male leaders who are also doing the same thing. It’s a recipe for tyrannical behavior. In the progressive evangelical version, the masculine ideal isn’t necessarily tied to a Macho Jesus who kicks ass. Maybe it’s Jesus the Charismatic Justice Activist who speaks on behalf of the “least of these” or the Spiritual Guru who monetizes wisdom learned in the slums of some “third-world” country. John Wayne fought Native Americans, but warrior ideals can come in many forms. One progressive Black evangelical has even held up Joshua, the biblical character who led the conquest and genocide of the Canaanites and became a favorite citation of modern settler-colonialists, as a template for Anti-Racist Warrior!

What does the election of Joe Biden mean for the future of white evangelicals’ militant masculinity? Du Mez asserts that this expression of masculinity didn’t begin with Trump and it won’t end with him. In fact, white evangelicals’ militancy has always required an ever-present sense of threat. She documents how it picked up steam during the Cold War and under the presidency of Barack Obama. Whether the threat is real, imagined, or completely fabricated, white evangelicals seem to get only more reactionary and violent when they perceive themselves to be losing their status. It’s unclear whether Biden’s expression of masculinity as a compassionate Catholic can shape those who reveled in Trump’s aggressions. Trump may have lost the election. The overwhelming support of evangelicals couldn’t save his political career this time. But there are plenty of reasons to remain concerned about what they could do moving forward.

Daniel José Camacho is a writer and editor. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Sojourners, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, and the Washington Post. He has a B.A. in Philosophy from Calvin College and an M.Div. from Duke Divinity School.

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

The post On Evangelical Masculinities appeared first on The Revealer.

Two of Breonna Taylor’s friends featured in “The New York Times Presents: The Killing of Breonna Taylor”

Last month I finally braved the widely promoted documentary “The New York Times Presents: The Killing of Breonna Taylor.” Having recently binged popular 1990s Black sitcom A Different World, Hulu’s over-eager streaming algorithm had me in its cross-hairs. But as a dark-skinned southern Black woman just six weeks Breonna’s senior, these consistent reminders of her state-sanctioned execution affected me in complex, yet exceedingly painful ways. It is probably safe to say that Hulu’s marketing division did not consider that these promotions would serve only as a reminder of my mortality. Somehow still letting my curiosity best my judgement, I scrolled back up my feed, selected the special, and stilled myself for what would follow. I paused several times as my heart and tear ducts disrupted my ability to witness yet another rendering of the fatal event. But although difficult, I found myself looking forward to hearing the memories her loved ones recounted about her life.

Breonna Taylor with a close friend

When details of the investigation and her murder tested my endurance, the love and care expressed in the voices of Breonna’s sister-cousins and early childhood friends Elysia, Preonia, and Katrina lifted my spirits. As the sun dissolved into a Kentucky waterfront, Elysia described how Breonna’s inspirational personality helped convince her to follow her dreams. Another scene featured Preonia and Katrina talking about their upcoming girls’ trip plans to Biloxi, Mississippi’s Black Beach festival. Instagram videos filled with their dancing, jokes, and laughter provided brief respites in an otherwise emotionally taxing portrayal. They brought humanity and life into a somber environment. Their memorial to her was the articulation of a life that encompassed much more than its tragic end. Breonna’s girlfriends painted a picture of vibrancy, graciously allowing viewers to see more than the systemic injustices that resulted in her untimely death — to see an existence filled with beauty.

Long after the credits finished rolling, I remained in my now dark living room reflecting on the significance of Black women’s friendships. Their ability to restore, revive, and resurrect a humanity too often forgotten in illustrations of violent encounters touched something deep in me. As someone who often writes and thinks about Black women and intimacy, seeing Breonna Taylor’s friends describe their relationship with her forced me to confront the ways that I sometimes sterilize the intimate bonds that add color to Black women’s lives. So I reoriented my gaze, actively looking for ways to practice the same type of care in my work as Breonna’s friends demonstrated in their segments.

I am currently researching the experiences of Black women in Gospel music. Thinking about Breonna’s friendships, I now viewed the subjects of my research – Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Roxie Ann Moore, and Marie Knight – differently. Not as separate entities making individual contributions to Black women’s history, but as friends who survived life’s twists and turns by affirming humanity in one another. Revisiting the ways that Roxie and Marie tended to Rosetta’s body, spirit, and legacy following her death in 1973 helped me pull back the layers of mutual tenderness and affection that had now become so essential to honoring Black women’s vibrant, multifaceted existence. Breonna Taylor’s friends revived a humanity overlooked in many recent media depictions and legal proceedings. And in doing so they inspired me to take similar care with Sister Rosetta Tharpe by centering her friendships with other Black women in my reflections.

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In the late 1930s, a former Pentecostal revival singer performed her first set at the Cotton Club, a New York City performance venue where Black people could take the stage, but not sit in the audience. In a long dress with guitar at the ready, sonic underpinnings of the blues wafted from her instrument as she accompanied herself to a mix of spiritual and secular songs. Having grown up in church environments where feelings and affect reigned supreme, she knew that the bounds between sacred and secular were fragile at best – that their limits could be crossed or transgressed with a simple guitar pick or strategically placed riff. With club dancers to the back of her and congregants to the front, the carefully cultivated skills and anointing of her Holiness-Pentecostal training transformed her voice and hands into sacred instruments in this allegedly profane space the likes of which neither church nor world would fully appreciate until decades later. This performer was Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973).

Sister Rosetta Tharpe in 1957

Rosetta was one of gospel music’s first international superstars. She performed blues, jazz, and spirituals in various venues, both baffling those familiar with her revival roots and intriguing audiences unaccustomed to her performance of bluesy songs with spiritual overtones like “That’s All” and “Strange Things Happening Every Day.” While her talent was rarely contested, her peculiar position straddling various spaces rendered her a conundrum to many. Was she a gospel or blues singer? Shouldn’t she be in a church? What do we make of a Black woman with a guitar? Was she truly religious or was it all an act? She reached her peak in the 1950s, before her novelty wore off and the music market trended in other directions. Blues and folk revivals in the U.K. kept her busy until sickness brought her stateside indefinitely. Though a slowed pace resulted in financial insecurity near her life’s end, she is remembered fondly today as the Godmother of Rock and Roll.

Rosetta’s two closest friends, Roxie Moore and Marie Knight, were what Southerners refer to as Rosetta’s “people.” Rosetta leaned on these women and stowed her confidence in them; she trusted them with her secrets, desires, dreams, and fears. Roxie Ann Moore (1916-2012), who befriended Rosetta as a teenager, was prolific in her musical writing practice, composing for such legendary acts as the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Golden Gate Quartet. She also lifted her voice and pen to speak out against the unjust treatment of women and misappropriation of funds in Afro-Protestant churches. After Rosetta was moved by Marie Knight’s (1920-2009) performance at a Mahalia Jackson concert, she convinced the gifted vocalist and musician to join her on subsequent tours where they’d perform as a duo. While she and Rosetta stuck to hymns and spirituals in their collaborations, Marie later struck out in pursuit of an R&B career. At various points, each of these women was estranged from the Pentecostal religious spaces where their talents were first recognized and developed. They had in common the gendered and racialized consequences of their misunderstood musical and spiritual strivings.

Though separated by several generations, the relationships between Breonna, Elysia, Preonia, and Katrina and between Rosetta, Roxie, and Marie illustrate the powerful impact of friendship and intimacy among Black women. They were able to see in each other a luminance unrecognized by the world. Just as the memeification of Breonna Taylor by individuals, corporations, and governing bodies detracts from the fullness of her humanity, narratives that focus on Rosetta’s financial precarity and later invisibility in the historical record present only one meager facet of what was a truly magnificent life. I find, instead, that these friendships demonstrate an ethics of care by practicing memorial recovery, by which I mean repainting Black women’s lives in ways that accurately display their expressiveness and expansiveness with an empathy typically withheld from the world. When hollow depictions of legacies, bereft of animation, liveliness, and levity are offered as the sole evidence of our existence, it is our friendships that lift us up a little higher to a much deserved place of eternal reverence.

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On October 15, 1973, Rosetta’s mourners processed towards North Philadelphia’s Bright Hope Baptist Church. While entering the sanctuary that fall, they turned to admire the ornate stained-glass window of a brown-skinned, brown-eyed Jesus with kinky hair dominating the far wall. A red cross frames him, its arms extending into royal blues, lavenders, burnt oranges, and teals. Upraised eyes would meet a wooden ceiling, its shape similar to that of a capsized ship. Horizontal beams spread across the vaulting look down on red velvet-lined pews. Church shoes sank into matching red carpet as parishioners walked down aisles to find their seats. Funeral programs collected in the vestibule and distributed by ushers throughout the service would list the order of those selected to participate in the ceremony. Rosetta’s loved ones would not be surprised to see both Marie and Roxie’s names included. Their significant roles were indicative of their close relationships with her as well as their individual talents.

In the contemplative vein of scholars Zora Neale Hurston and Saidiya Hartman, I imagine Marie prepared her songs in Bright Hope’s large fellowship hall or a choir room situated off the sanctuary. I visualize Roxie somewhere close by, reading and re-reading the eulogy she’d handwritten for her friend a few days prior. “Rosetta was a loving, kind, warm and generous person,” it begins, a testament to Rosetta’s lasting impact. Having attempted several times to convince Rosetta to slow down and pay closer attention to her health in those final years, Rosetta’s husband, Russell Morrison, thwarted Roxie’s attempts to intervene. Roxie recalls Russell saying, “you take care of Roxie, I’ll take care of Rosetta!” on one occasion when she called to check on her friend. While prevented from looking after Rosetta’s body in life, Roxie’s eulogy tended to Rosetta’s everlasting presence in the hearts and minds of those gathered. For one reason or another, neither Marie nor Roxie completely trusted Rosetta’s husband with the funeral arrangements. Perceived by friends and loved ones as having mishandled Rosetta’s final days by filling her performance schedule despite serious illness, Marie and Roxie rushed to Rosetta’s side upon news of her passing. “We lived our lives together. . . we shared with each other while she was alive. . . I only want[ed] to see her buried as the person she was,” Marie reflected.

Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight with fans in 1947

Similar to the testimonies of Breonna Taylor’s friends, Rosetta’s relationships with Marie and Roxie offer significant evidence of her life and creative expressiveness. I’m reminded of Toni Morrison’s words in Sula: “in the safe harbor of each other’s company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things.” With similar backgrounds as revivalists and evangelists in the Church of God in Christ, Rosetta saw herself reflected in Marie and Roxie. Their friendship was a “safe harbor” from the racist and sexist projections of the world. In death and life, Roxie and Marie were their sister’s keepers, keeping her confidences and shoring up her commemoration by historians and documentarians.

Marie sang Thomas Dorsey’s “Peace in the Valley” for the service, a beloved hymn Rosetta herself performed and recorded many times. After the funeral, Marie proceeded to Baker and Baker funeral home to fix Rosetta’s hair and makeup for burial. I imagine Marie taking her time with each brush and stroke. Wanting her friend to look like herself, to remember her one last time as the “person she was.” Normally the province of funeral attendants, Marie had asked to prepare the body herself. Rejected by church institutions that viewed her performance style as ungodly and an ever-evolving entertainment industry that failed to recognize the genius of her musical innovations until much later, there were precious few spaces that acknowledged Rosetta’s full essence. Marie’s decision to handle these final preparations was both a personal and political choice in a world that consistently branded Rosetta an outsider.

Roxie Moore’s position as eulogizer granted her the responsibility of presenting Rosetta’s life as a tale of hope and comfort, inspiring family and friends to continue on life’s journey. She had to acknowledge the hurt of those left behind, while assuring them of Rosetta’s eternal joy in the company of the God to whom she dedicated her life and career. “We are sure that she has found ‘Peace in the Valley,” said Roxie, alluding to Marie’s earlier musical selection. “Although she loved her husband dearly and desired to live because of him, she had to cross over to see her Lord, for all Jordan had to get back last Tuesday morning and let Rosetta cross over to see the man that she sang about in her Songs!” Roxie was responsible for assuring everyone that, though absent in the body, Rosetta’s soul was finally, peacefully at rest.

***

My attention to Rosetta, Roxie, and Marie’s interconnected lives is a direct result of the love and care I observed in Breonna Taylor’s childhood friends. As the symphony of public outrage crescendoed in response to Breonna’s murder and the subsequent coverups that followed, I turned inward as a means of survival. I don’t mean inward to suggest an internalized emotional response to traumatic situations. But inward to Black girl friendships, which I trusted to water my weary soul, a response to repeated emotional assaults. Instead of focusing on the external harm and trauma dealt to Black women by virtue of intersecting class, gender, racial, and sexual oppressions, I turned inward to the worlds Black women create for themselves, together.

In a country that sees the murders of Black women as forgettable, our abuse as justifiable, and our cultural output as freely appropriable — in a world in which we are too often, too quickly cast aside — I’ve found peace in meditating on Black women’s friendships. I’ve found refuge in reflecting on our love for one another and in the words of those who describe sacred commitments to our interconnectivity. In Toni Morrison’s “convent,” Saidiya Hartman’s “chorus,” Ntozake Shange’s collective, and Alice Walker’s garden. In my mother’s daily telephone calls, my sister Edlyn’s laughter, and my aunties’ recipes. A peace that surpasses all understanding, which replaces the chill of hopelessness with the warmth of possibility.

As I live through this time, the work I do has transformed. Instead of questioning the erasure of Black women from the historical record and the systems that profit from this unknowing, I search for the places that see Black women. I ask about the intimate bonds that sustain us in a world that constantly names our unworthiness. These bonds reflect our relations, and our survival. I ask: is there space for colored girls who no longer wish to beg our names said, but who prefer the recognition reflected in the love of other Black women — romantic, companionate, or otherwise?

I contemplate Black women and our love for one another and take seriously the ways that we care for each other. When state executions of Black women are met with silence and our activism in social movements go unacknowledged, this work aids in my revitalization. Pausing to meditate on when and where Black women find friendship, intimacy, and care, given our paradoxical existence of hyper-(in)visibility, is life-affirming. In a world that constantly presents narratives of our degradation, Black women’s intimate interpersonal ties paint a different image.

I don’t take for granted that the connection between these women is indicative of all Black women’s ability to garner safe and healthy relationships. To do so would be disingenuous and irresponsible. But I do choose to lean into tender moments, like when Roxie and Rosetta found a New York diner late in the evening following a performance and let the sun beat them home; like the secrets exchanged as Rosetta protected her ears from Marie’s hot comb; like in the moments following Rosetta’s death when Marie and Roxie saw after her one last time. In these moments, I see devotion that wasn’t begged. A love never stamped out. An unwavering connection. How they found “relief in each other’s personality” and “in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for . . .”

Until recently, Rosetta’s grave was difficult to locate. It was left unmarked after her burial in Philadelphia’s Northwood Cemetery in 1973, the same year Alice Walker would search for Zora Neale Hurston, finding her grave in a similar condition. Rosetta’s, however, would remain barren for another 35 years. Decades later, Rosetta’s name and contributions have been recovered and celebrated by musicians, scholars, and fans alike. Now there are books about her, she is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and her life has inspired several artistic projects. But even through all the posthumous international recognition, the epitaph on her recently identified grave is a selection from Roxie’s eulogy: “She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for joy. She helped to keep the saints alive and the saints rejoicing.” In the bonds of Rosetta, Roxie, and Marie, as well as Breonna, Preonia, Elysia, and Katrina, I find hope for a future where Black women are seen, heard, and celebrated in the complete essence of our beings. In our flaws, our genius, our full humanity. Where we may lift our hands, collectively rejoicing in the possibilities of a more peaceful reality.

Ambre Dromgoole is a Ph.D. Candidate in the combined program in African American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “There’s a Heaven Somewhere’: Itinerancy, Intimacy, and Performance in the Lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1983.”

***

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 What Breonna Taylor and Sister Rosetta Tharpe Taught Me About Black Women and Friendship appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

At the end of Tony Kushner’s epic play Angels in America, a nearly seven-hour, two-part show about the AIDS epidemic, religion, and politics in America, the play’s protagonist looks directly into the audience and says:

“This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens.
The time has come.
Bye now.
You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
And I bless you:  More Life.
The Great Work Begins.”

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

I found myself thinking about Kushner’s words this week as the United States both elected a new President and faced a record number of Americans infected with COVID-19. Like so many others, Biden’s victory sent me into the streets where thousands of people poured out of their homes to celebrate a new era. Finally, I thought, those who died from COVID-19 will be commemorated. Finally, I thought, scientists will be given respect so our country can take the necessary steps to curb the pandemic. Finally, I thought, this disease will not be the end of so many lives. Kushner’s pronouncement, “And I bless you: More Life” seemed like the appropriate, simple blessing for our complicated, tumultuous times.

But Kushner doesn’t end his play with a blessing; his final words are a call to action: “The Great Work Begins.” And so too for us now: we must focus our energies on the necessary work, the challenging work, the great work of improving this country. We must commit to racial equality, to ending anti-Muslim violence, to making the country safe for religious pluralism, to protecting our planet, to repairing our criminal justice system, to ending toxic masculinity, to celebrating gender and sexual diversity, to equalizing resources for Native American communities, to establishing healthcare for all, to ensuring economic security for everyone, and to much more. Yes, this is a daunting list. But this is our task and one we must accept. The Great Work Begins.

The articles in this issue start with the premise that we have much to do to make this a more equitable country. The November issue opens with Ambre Dromgoole’s “What Breonna Taylor and Sister Rosetta Tharpe Taught Me About Black Women and Friendship,” where she highlights how looking at Black women’s friendships – whether of a famous Gospel singer like Rosetta Tharpe or the unjustly murdered Breonna Taylor – can illuminate the too-often-overlooked humanity of Black women’s lives. Next, in “On Evangelical Masculinities,” Daniel José Camacho reflects on the links between evangelical Christianity, aggressive masculinity, and race by offering a review of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s new book Jesus and John Wayne. Then, in “Elegy for Tisquantum: The Mayflower at 400,” Ed Simon offers a new way to commemorate this month’s 400^th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth Rock by focusing not on the Puritans but on the indigenous Americans whose stories should be central to any narrative the United States proclaims about itself. Next, in “On France, Violence, and Religious Media” Contributing Editor Kali Handelman interviews Elayne Oliphant about the recent terror attacks in France and what responses to those violent acts reveal about race and religion in both France and the United States. And the issue concludes with an excerpt from Mark Sameth’s The Name: A History of the Dual-Gendered Hebrew Name for God where Sameth argues that, far from a modern interpretation driven by transgender politics, the ancient Israelites’ name for God reflected their belief that God was both male and female.

As the articles in this issue attest, we have great obstacles to overcome as a country. The anti-democratic forces of white supremacy and Christian nationalism are strong, their supporters are well organized, and many people are content with the status quo. But we know this can be a better nation. We know what is at stake for people of color, LGBTQ Americans, non-Christians, and many more vulnerable communities. So I say to you, dear readers, what the prolific queer Jewish playwright Tony Kushner declared to his Angels in America audiences decades ago: “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”

May this new era – one of great, important, and necessary work – begin.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

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