If I had to name one book I wish had been around when I was beginning graduate studies in South Asian Religion, it would be Peter Gottschalk’s Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India. Indeed, it would have helped me with the study of “religion” in general. I would have understood much sooner, and with much more empirical precision, how the modern notion of “religion” was developed in the interstices of Christianity and colonialism. Gottschalk’s primary contribution in this book is not so much theoretical insight as it is theoretical comprehensiveness. He has skillfully brought together the work of scholars of South Asian history and scholars of religion to offer an accessible, better-than-textbook-style reconstruction of how “religion” became the essential category through which British travelers, administrators, missionaries, ethnographers, and artists viewed the people and places of the subcontinent. He situates these accounts in useful theoretical frames, many indebted to the scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, that discuss historical systems of comparison and classification. In these theoretical interludes, Gottschalk discusses how medieval Christian systems of comparison and classification were in some cases replaced, and in others continued, through the systems developed in the wake of Enlightenment humanism. Exposing these sometimes subliminal continuities allows Gottschalk to reaffirm the historical links in Enlightenment Europe between “religion” and “science,” or what he calls “scientism.”

Scientism, simply put, was (and is) not only the belief that rationalism and empiricism were the dominant techniques of knowing, but also that such knowing could be entirely coherent, totalistic, and universally true. In this way, Gottschalk points out, scientism carried through the totalizing impulses of Christian religious systems of classification, endowing ideas deemed scientific with a universal authority that belied their historically and epistemologically particular origins. More specifically, scientism retained some of the same elements that characterized the medieval Christian classification of humanity, such as creating categories based on a particular essence believed to belong to different individuals, and insisting that each individual belonged to one and only one category. The ideology of scientism gradually displaced the authority of “religion” in Europe. At the same time, in imperial territories, scientism began to define religion as the essential characteristic of non-Western populations, thereby distancing them from Europeans and from modernity itself. The main thrust of this book, then, is to explore the centrality of religion to the systems of disciplinary knowledge that were applied and developed in the subcontinent. We know these disciplines today as cartography, anthropology, demographics, ethnology, folklore, archaeology, and the history of religions. Gottschalk describes the co-dependence between these disciplines and the growth of imperialism, their distinctive quality in comparison with older European and South Asian systems of knowledge, and the formation of new systems of information (especially taxonomies) to serve them. It is this nexus between knowledge and power that has characterized much scholarship on colonialism and religion since the writings of Michel Foucault and Edward Said. Gottschalk summarizes the last few decades of that scholarship with great acumen.

In the substantive remainder of the book, Gottschalk applies this understanding of the relationship between new systems of classification and imperial power in British India to discussing how a series of travellers, surveyors, artists, officials, and census enumerators ended up contributing to the systems of knowledge listed above. He locates most of these accounts in the village of Chainpur in present-day Bihar, a site of Gottschalk’s own fieldwork. Although a marginal locality in the state-centered history of India, Chainpur serves as a critical test-site for understanding how British systems of classification were put into practice. Gottschalk begins by exploring two kinds of travel writing, the Christian missionary and the humanist administrator/artist, and the differences and similarities within and between them. He then looks at how religion and caste were inscribed in the infamous census. The British census departed from earlier systems of gathering information, both because it used different sets of mutually exclusive categories (religion, caste, etc.), and because it was conducted under a new imperial paradigm influenced by the ideology of scientism. Gottschalk argues that the British imagined every individual Indian to be essentially associated with a mutually exclusive religious classification such as “Hindu” and “Muslim,” rather than, as he himself urges, understanding these labels to be fluid, shifting, and arbitrary. Connecting this study of the census with his overall discussion of scientism, Gottschalk goes on to assert: “The confidence in quantification, the interconnections to various disciplines, and the promise of a totalizing vision of society all represented the hallmarks of the scientistic vision of science.”

The next two chapters look at the disciplines of folklore, ethnology, and archaeology, paying special attention to museums and the memorialization of the past. Gottschalk shows how studies of folklore were predicated on a systematic ordering of the past, demonstrating the overlap between classification and narrative. Narratives about the past, moreover, frequently gave rise to teleologies, as much in humanistic ethnological accounts as in Christian travel writing. The ethnologist William Crooke, for example, mirrored many social scientists of his day in deriving from his studies of “folk” religion of northern India (the complex and compromised ethnographic methods of which Gottschalk details) a progressive narrative of religion from the primitive to the modern. These evolutionary metanarratives would continue in civilizational and biological formats, both of which contributed to “scientific” narratives of racial distribution, linguistic variation, caste origination, and religious formation. In the following chapter, Gottschalk provides an illuminating account of the history of the Archaeological Survey of India that demonstrates how historiographers differentiated themselves from local narrators of the past, in their scientistic trust in objective and universal methods. The final chapter takes Gottschalk to present-day Chainpur, to understand how or if these systems of classification have impacted local understandings of the town. Gottschalk finds a dialectic between British and nationalist historiographies and local memory, and holds up this tension to illustrate both the qualities and limits of scientism. Although at least one premodern narrative practice in Chainpur, the bardic tradition of performance, has been largely displaced, and schoolchildren learn the history of the nation through textbooks curated for them by a formal educational system, many continue to reconstruct the local past through inherited oral narratives.

Gottschalk’s book explores the startling rise to prominence of scientific methods of classification, the centrality of “religion” to practices of knowledge-power in the subcontinent, and the hegemony that such totalizing disciplinary practices acquired in both British and Indian official discourse. His aim is, nevertheless, in keeping with the scholarship by which the book is inspired (including his own previous book, Beyond Hindu and Muslim), to question the categorical presumptions of universal classification. In a world where such identitarian formations seem to have become an inevitable feature of political and social life, Gottschalk offers a salutary reminder of their contingent histories.

***

Anand Venkatkrishnan is a Junior Research Fellow in Classical Indology at Balliol College, Oxford. He received his PhD in South Asian Religion from Columbia University (2015). He also holds MA (2012) and MPhil (2013) degrees in South Asian Religion from Columbia, as well as BA in Classics from Stanford University (2010). Anand’s research interests include the intersection of religious movements and scholarly pedagogy, the social history of Sanskrit knowledge-systems, early modern South Asia, and Indian intellectual history more broadly. He also keeps a blog of Sanskrit poetry translations at http://apurvaracana.tumblr.com.

The post Review: Religion, Science, and Empire appeared first on The Revealer.

Joseph Massad describes the purpose of his Islam in Liberalism as an attempt “to understand how Islam became so central to liberalism as ideology and identity, indeed how liberalism as the antithesis of Islam became one of the key components of the very discourse through which Europe as a modern entity was conjured up.” This historical process involved the creation of dichotomies that positioned the US and Europe as sources for normative liberal values and Islam as a hostile and foreign “other.”

The framework that binds together Massad’s argument is articulated in chapter two and centers on three approaches to the study of Islam: culturalism, comparatism, and assimilationism.

Culturalism consists of the tendency to ascribe perceived differences between Western and Muslim societies “to cultural factors and explanations.” Violence against women, for example, is analyzed through a legal framework in a European context but treated as a cultural problem in a Muslim or Arab context (e.g., Saudi Arabia). In comparatism, “the West, or a fantastic version of it, is taken as a comparative reference point and the rest of the world is studied to identify how it converges with or diverges from it.” Thus, discussions of child marriages are nested within a human rights discourse indebted to liberal positions. Finally, assimilationism is the process by which liberal values are framed as universalist so that “Arab and Muslim culture must be brought in line with European and Euro-American cultural achievement to be tolerable.” This last approach presupposes culturalism and comparatism in its efforts to transform non-liberal societies into liberal ones.

These terms permeate all of Massad’s case studies as they highlight the hegemonic construction of a foreign Islam as the antithesis to an innately human liberal US and Europe.

Chapter one deconstructs the binary opposition of democracy and despotism in which the West’s claim of a democratic identity and championing of liberal values is predicated on the representation of Islam as “the origin of un-democracy, if not anti-democracy.” Once Muslim and Arab societies are categorized as such, resources are devoted to supporting “a liberal form of Islam, that is more in tune with US imperial designs, and which would approximate modern Western notions of religions and religious subjectivities, as well as Western liberal citizenship… while at the same time allowing the US to wage war against that other ‘Islam’ which continues to resist the Western (neo)liberal order.” The focus here is on the justification of multiple forms of intervention through the myth of an “Oriental despotism”.

Chapters two and three implicate human rights and development NGOs as instruments for the assimilationist agenda of liberal states.

In chapter two, Massad examines the “process of universalizing US and West European liberal feminisms on a global scale and the methods and tools by which they came to dominate the discourse and policies of emancipating Muslim women from gender-based discrimination in their societies and countries.” The key role is here played by human rights NGOs “whose normative agendas of intervention are invariably based on what is considered normative and civilized in white Protestant middle class society in the United States, and which they adopt and insist on disseminating across the globe.”

In chapter three, Massad returns to the subject of his previous book (Desiring Arabs, University of Chicago Press, 2007) criticizing the imposition of European and Euro-American notions of sexuality onto the study of Islam. He notes that

…deploying sexuality and sexual rights in the global arena” is “essential to the consolidation of European and Euro-American identity and the continuing presence of European ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ as liberal, hence tolerant, just, liberatory, progressive, and enlightened, in contrast to a dark unjust, intolerant, repressive world to which Europe and Euro-America are constitutionally oppose and which they are committed to enlighten.

As in previous chapters, the epistemology and values of liberal societies are “universalized a priori as human and not as products of particular histories.”

Chapter four engages critiques of Islamism formulated by Arab and European psychoanalysts. These scholars argue that “the only tolerable Islam is a liberal form of Islam that upholds all the liberal values of European maturity” and are “intolerant of the Islam of the Islamists whose values are said to oppose liberal values even when they do not.” Tolerance is thus only extended to those who appropriate purportedly liberal values (e.g., freedom or individualism) thereby perpetuating a “hegemonic form of liberal epistemology whose aim is the assimilation of the world in its own image.”

The final chapter traces the emergence of the notion of the Semite and anti-Semitism. Massad argues that the “act of inventing the Semite is the very act of inventing the carrier of the identity of the other… In this light Semitism has always been anti-Semitism.” Initially intended to distinguish the Jew and Arab from the Aryan, “Zionism split the Semite into two kinds in the twentieth century, setting one in alliance with, and the other in opposition to, the Aryan.” For Massad, it is this same binary that positions Islam in opposition to liberalism when, in reality, it is liberalism that is producing a particular reading of Islam.

So we are left with a series of examples wherein Islam is conjured in the imagination of a liberal Europe and United States as the paradigmatic other. This is not, in and of itself, a radical proposition. As Massad notes throughout his book, these ideas are deeply indebted to (among others) Talal Asad and Edward Said. Rather than break new ground, he offers case studies that reinforce the larger critique in an integrative manner not found in comparable works. The role of NGOs in the perpetuation of liberal hegemony, for example, is well-documented but the scope of Massad’s analysis, covering LGBT organizations, feminist groups, human rights advocates, and developmental agencies, is both insightful and ambitious. It is this breadth that is the true strength of the book.

In terms of argument and analysis, Massad displays an impressive command of a variety of fields, offering his own psychoanalysis of his psychoanalyst subjects in chapter four and routinely referencing the etymology of particular terms to reinforce his critique of translation. Another strength of the book lies in Massad’s engagement with and criticism of the arguments and perspectives of scholars ranging from Afsaneh Najmabadi and Fethi Benslama to Hannah Arendt and Louis Massignon. Massad is at his best in these passages as he exposes the structural assumptions of others that place a universalized liberalism in opposition to Islam. Finally, Massad’s discussion of sexuality (chapter three) is particularly well-developed as he draws on his earlier work to clarify his positions with greater nuance.[1]

A number of criticisms might be directed at Massad’s work.[2] Some of them are mentioned in other reviews published in this journal (Part 1 and Part 2). There is the critique of reductionism, which argues that the terms “liberal” and “Islam” are dynamic and require a more nuanced discussion that accounts for historical change. This, however, misreads Massad’s larger purpose which is not to deconstruct the meaning of these words but rather to emphasize the construction of one (Islam) by the other (liberal) in a process of self-definition. Put simply, Massad is not interested in Islam or liberalism but in the relationship between the two.

Another potential critique involves Massad’s use of binaries that elide potential gray areas or force figures into ossified categories. Are all aid workers or human rights advocates tools for liberal hegemony? Is there no room for nuance in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers or feminists? Perhaps there are more careful ways of deconstructing the views/agendas of these actors but this again seems outside Massad’s purview. This book is interested in exposing the ideological (and hegemonic) power of language and intellectual frameworks as opposed to teasing out intellectual gradations.

The problem with such critiques is not that they lack validity (some of the points are well-taken) but that they do not grasp Massad’s larger goal. He is applying a particular strain of analysis (in the tradition of Asad) to force readers to question deeply embedded assumptions. This is, by design, a reductionist project.

So what does Joseph Massad want from the reader? Is it a call to remain vigilant of the conceptual difficulties in the study of the Muslim world? Is it a demand to produce new imaginaries when engaging issues like democracy, feminism, and sexuality? Is it an effort to reject the dehumanizing of non-liberal societies by a dominant framework that only bestows humanity on liberal values? It is all of these. At a time when President Obama can casually criticize Iran for being “anti-Semitic” and refusing to honor “human rights” in an interview with Jon Stewart, it is certainly important to consider the ways in which these terms perpetuate a specific liberal hegemony.

The reason I am left weary by this book involves language and the tendency of power structures to appropriate it. This is best exemplified in chapter three, where Massad systematically deconstructs a series of terms (e.g., gay, queer, “men who have sex with men”) scholars use to discuss sexuality in Muslim societies. He notes the problems associated with each before calling for a “comprehensive project” of sexuality studies that is a prerequisite for understanding the “unconscious dynamics of epistemological and political complicity of many scholars with Western normativity.” I sympathize with this view but do not see a clear path towards a solution. How might scholars develop a way of speaking about these issues that avoids reproducing the same problematic power dynamics? This remains a question in need of answers.

***

[1] It is worth mentioning that this chapter includes Massad’s responses to negative critiques of his previous work that span pages and pages of footnotes. In some instances, these responses become quite personal in a manner that threatens to overshadow his larger argument.

[2] The following discussion omits criticism based on organization or structure. The book is often repetitive and redundant while the chapters sometimes resemble disjointed case studies. A conclusion that articulated a distinct unifying theoretical framework may have alleviated this seeming lack of cohesion.

***

Najam I. Haider is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College, where he teaches courses in Islamic studies and history. He completed his PhD at Princeton University, M.Phil. at Oxford University, and BA at Dartmouth College, and has published articles focusing on Islamic historiography and the emergence of sectarian identity. His research interests include Islamic law, Shī‘ism, and the impact of colonization on modern Islamic political and religious discourse. His book entitled The Origins of the Shī‘a: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in 8th century Kūfa was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. He is currently at work on his second book which will focus on the controversies of sectarian historiography.

The post Review: Islam in Liberalism (Part 3) appeared first on The Revealer.

Photo by Don Murray / Getty Images

By Ann Neumann

“Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.” Latin, meaning, “This is the place where death delights in helping life,” at one time, a common motto or inscription used by morgues.

As I write, two enormous beams of light pin a heavily quilted sky to the concrete and glass skyline of Manhattan at twilight. The lights are a mirage: two towers still standing. They tether (whatever we project onto) heaven to what was once, fourteen years ago, a hell on earth. The “Tribute in Light” shines each year for several days before the anniversary of the death of nearly 3,000 people whose names are now carved into the bronze walls of the memorial at Ground Zero.

The lights, the long moments of silence, the reading and listing of the names of those killed on September 11, 2001, are all part of an annual public ritual, a schedule or practice of repeated events that serve to give order to the chaos and evil of that day. They echo the accepted funeral practices that are used to mark death, but they are also in service to a national purpose. Their performance is a demonstration of the kind of culture we hope to embody as a nation. And they shape and confirm our worldview—that we mark and remember our dead because we are a moral people and a moral nation.

The recording of names of the dead is commonplace to us now, but states have not always kept track of deaths, their interests more engaged with the living (for taxes, for military conscription). It is a mass death that, in the 14th century, spurred states to first track the dead with lists. As Kathryn Schultz tells us in her 2014 article for The New Yorker, “Final Forms”:

The modern death certificate owes its existence to the cosmological, scientific, and political revolutions that eventually overturned this entire world order. But its prototype emerged in response to something else: death itself, on an epic and horrifying scale. In 1347, the Black Death broke out in Europe. By 1351, a third or more of all Europeans were dead. With a huge percentage of the remaining population infectious and the rest of it terrified, the plague turned the formerly private experience of death into a matter of (extreme) public concern. Italy responded by passing the first modern quarantine laws, tracking the living. England took a different route, and began tracking the dead.*

Until that time, she tells us, churches were, “interested in the fate of the soul, not the body.” Most of the population was illiterate, unable to read or record their dead. As a way to protect the health of its people, states began keeping track of those who died, at first recording only the daily count of the lives wiped out by the plague. Eventually, death certificates listed individuals by name and cause of death (which was, it’s worth noting, no longer fully attributed to the wrath of God). Death certificates became a bureaucratic tool, “the saddest of diplomas, the most mysterious of passports,” Schultz writes. In developed countries, death certificates are now commonplace. So are lists of the dead—on newspaper obituary pages and on memorials. The September 11th memorial’s list of names is also a tool, like the death certificate, a ritualized method of proclaiming our loss and, in turn, the hope for our recovery.

But what’s in a name? For the families and friends of those who died, it is an intimacy with their dead loved one, a specific name for their loss. A dead person’s name signifies all they were and once meant to us. Saying their name keeps them close, though their body may be gone. Too, names of the dead, like the lists on public memorials, signify living physical bodies, once like ours, as well as our social body, our fellow citizens. Despite our rational understanding of what happened to those lives—on September 11th they were brutally ended by a gross act of violence that disintegrated their bodies—recalling the dead by their names re-enchants them, makes them real to us again. We know they are dust. But we can remember and imagine their presence when we say their names. The ritual of name-saying, then, is a way of enchanting our world with their memories.

Photo: AP

On September 11th we were shocked and scared by the images (in person, in the media) of people like us jumping from buildings, bodies suspended in dusty air. We saw them massed along window sills and rooftop ledges. Our chaotic horror at the images and events of the day is again ordered by our collective participation in these ceremonial acts of remembrance; our anxiety is channeled by our ritual practices of grief. Grieving makes, according to Polish anthropologist Branislaw Malinowsky, “a social event out of a natural fact.” Or a seemingly unnatural fact, like September 11th.

The power of the memorial at Ground Zero is rooted, planted in the bodies of the people who died there. “A body’s materiality can be critical to its symbolic efficacy: unlike notions such as ‘patriotism’ or ‘civil society,’ for instance,” writes Katherine Verdery in “Dead Bodies Animate the Study of Politics.” “The significance of corpses has less to do with their concreteness than with how people think about them,” she writes, “A dead body is meaningful not in itself but through culturally established relations to death.”** We imbue a dead body, even a disintegrated body, with meanings that serve our grief.

The “Tribute of Light” makes various appeals to immortality on behalf of society—“Never forget” is the refrain most associated with the attacks. The memorial asserts that the towers and those who died in them will live forever in our memory. Their needless destruction has unified us in a collective acknowledgement and remembrance. The lights are an apparition of towers, now reborn, reaching from the rubble into the heavens. Not only are the towers invincible, immortal, resurrected, but so are our dead, in their names. And so is our nation.

***

The rituals of medicine before death help us to negotiate physical uncertainty and precariousness, just as the memorial rituals after death help us to negotiate our grief. End of life medicine falls exactly in that place between science and religion: the death ritual. A living body will soon no longer be living and we are left to mark this biological transition, often with formal services and traditional practices. Doing so in ways that are customary, orchestrated by professional doctors, nurses, morticians, clergy and hospital staff, helps us to make sense of death, to know how to prepare for it and to react to it. And it ameliorates loss by keeping our memories of the dying present. The ordinary becomes special, sacred, significant. Of course, God is most present in American culture around the death bed, animating our faith that the life we are about to see extinguished meant something, was not for naught, and that it has an afterlife somewhere—in heaven, in our memories, in an earthly legacy. Even avowed atheists will slip into spiritual and religious language or practices during those last weeks of life, theirs or their loved one’s.

Because of the medicalization of death, its removal from society and secreting behind hospital curtains, our fear of impending death has been eased by the ritual of medical practice. Hospitals are analogous to sacred spaces, like churches. Patients, like parishioners, look to the authority of doctors in white robes to make the best decisions for them, to guide them through their last days. To dictate their behavior. Despite our understanding of medicine as a science, secular in its methods and practices, a patient’s belief in the efficacy of medicine’s healing power is what animates the discipline. And it is our faith in medicine’s orderly routine at the end of life that helps us to make sense of death.

These rituals tell us what to do with the dead and with our grief: You’ve got this body. It is and is not the person you’ve known intimately. How do you reckon with its implications for your body? Rituals, with their vast religious inheritance, often guide those who are grieving through the first days and weeks of adjustment to a new world.

**

Wars, plagues, the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 90s, acts of terrorism like September 11th, even daily individual deaths, are all matters of public health. Why do we die the way we do and what are the medical ramifications for the public body? Fear of mortal danger, in whatever guise, often accompanies the fear of moral corruption. What have we done to bring this death on ourselves? What lesson are we to learn from it? What can we do in the future to prevent it? As Anthony Petro writes in After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion:

Moral claims can translate ideas about sinfulness into statements about health because morality cuts across modern American religious and secular vocabularies. Morality is what’s “good” about modern religion: it is also what leaves room to debate how people ought to act—and what their actions say about their humanity—in the seemingly disenchanted world of modern medicine.

Claims about our country’s moral health after September 11th have made it difficult to diagnose the cause of the attacks, if less so over time. Conflating the bodies of the dead with our national body muddies grief for those killed with flag-waving nationalism. “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum,” in Latin, means “Of the dead, nothing unless good.” The grief rituals we have employed for September 11th inform the story that we tell ourselves about the health of our country.

Throughout modern history, the work of medicine has been twofold: to prevent death, and to tell us why we die. The work of mourning is also preventative and explanatory. It ascribes meaning to death and, through ritualized memorials, prevents the dead from ever straying too far from us.

***

*With “this entire world order,” Schultz is referring to medicine’s disinterest in dead bodies: “Early medicine relied more on folklore than on physiology, and its practitioners were not in the habit of examining bodies, living or dead. Well into the nineteenth century, the limits of medical knowledge were such that doctors sometimes didn’t even know if someone had died, let alone how.” But also on the religious and “political irrelevance” of recording death.

**Verdery’s essay is published in the collection, Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader, from which the top quote also comes.

***

Past “The Patient Body” columns:

How Ethics Saved the Life of Medicine

Impossible Purity

In the Blood

Pathological Sex

Choosing Childlessness

Old Man in Winter

Oh Canada!

End-of-Life Books, 2014

The Great Organ Shortage

Tending to One Another

Moral Highs and Lows

Old Philosophical Certainties

On Suicide

Reading HuffPo’s “Hospice, Inc.”

The End of Eating

Wakeful Unawareness

Faith, a Chronic Condition

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

***

Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann‘s book, The Good Death, will be published by Beacon Press in February 2016.

The post Memorials and Body Counts appeared first on The Revealer.

The Pilgrims Going to Church, by George H. Boughton, 1867.

By Patrick Blanchfield

“But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”– Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness, it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

1. Shots Fired

Speaking at a San Francisco fundraising event in April of 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama ignited a firestorm of criticism by saying the following about middle-American Rust Belt attitudes towards faith, foreigners, and firearms:

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama’s remarks, captured on tape, immediately provoked criticism from across the political spectrum. His opponent in the Democratic Primaries, Hillary Clinton, then also a Senator, described his comments as “elitist and out-of-touch”; a spokesman for the leading Republican candidate, John McCain, blasted Obama as displaying “an elitism and condescension toward hard-working Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking.” A year later, from an altogether different corner entirely, the reconstituted Southern Rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd released an album entitled God and Guns. Striking a very different chord than Skynyrd’s 1974 single “Saturday Night Special” (‘Got a barrel that’s blue and cold / Ain’t no good for nothin’ / But put a man six feet in a hole’) God and Guns’s title track didn’t hold back: “God and guns / Keep us strong / That’s what this country / Was founded on / Well we might as well give up and run / If we let them take our God and guns.”

Setting aside both its lyrical merits and ideological upshot, of all responses to Obama’s remarks, Skynyrd’s song had the distinction of being perhaps the most honest – and, as a matter of simple description, the most analytically accurate. For the bare fact of the matter is that whatever you may think of God, or of guns, American history would be unrecognizable without the influence of both. God and machine, ever-in-tandem, producing a nation “strong” not just in the narrow sense of being powerful, but also in the etymological sense of resolute violence, of an abiding legacy of wreckage unparalleled by any other nation on Earth.

This essay is an attempt to sound that legacy, to trace the consistent themes and surprising reversals in the relationship between religion and guns in the North American continent. It is not an attempt to judge that history – God and guns have been levied to render more than enough judgments already. Because to the extent to which the colonization of the Americas was an enterprise founded upon genocidal violence and the wholesale exploitation of natural resources, both religiously sanctioned, guns have formed an inextricable part of the American story. Likewise, insofar as America is a nation where various religious and ethnic groups have arrived carrying raw memories of historical conflicts with them, those tensions have played out, time and again, on new shores, with new weapons. Finally, since America has also been the birthplace of three centuries of new religious movements, guns have at once been used to persecute and to protect from persecution, real and imagined.

Overall, surveying the religious history of guns in what would become America, and then in America itself, we confront two truths no less hard for their banality.

First: As material objects, firearms show loyalty to neither complexion nor creed; they circulate with little regard to the self-defined boundaries of peoples or their professions of faith. Guns can be sold or bought, traded or stolen, given as gifts or looted from corpses – and they were, all of these things, time and again, sometimes in the name of belief, other times, despite it.

In the mid-1600s, numerous Puritan communities in New England damned those who traded weapons with Native Americans, but this did not prevent many of their guns from winding up in Native American hands regardless. Meanwhile, savvy businessmen from the Netherlands had few scruples about arming thousands of Native American warriors even as official Dutch colonial authorities engaged in brutal massacres of so-called ‘friendly’ tribes. A century later, Catholic Frenchmen and Anglican Britishers saw little cognitive dissonance in sanctimoniously bemoaning the savage violence of Godless heathens, who must be converted, while also arming various peoples to fight and die unbaptized in proxy wars for them – conflicts that were at once about Old World creeds and New World territory. A zeal to convert may fire the energies of the pious, and their beliefs may take hold among new peoples, but the profit motive burns even hotter, and ideas do not change hands or travel with as predictable speed or dependable results as do guns and lead.

Second: despite an abiding human tendency toward magical thinking, bullets, balls, and shot are colorblind when it comes to perforating skin; they are ecumenical when it comes to claiming souls. Nemattanew, a leader among the Powhatan and advisor to Chief Wahunsenacawh, claimed imperviousness to the bullets of the Englishmen at Jamestown, and may well have believed it; as he lay dying, he begged the British field-hands who had shot him to bury him secretly and not reveal the true circumstances of his death to his people. Some devout early Mormons also believed their Temple Garments would ward off bullets, and lamented that Joseph Smith hadn’t been wearing his on the night he was shot to death, but even Brigham Young found such speculation dubious and distasteful. Later, as the pacifistic Ghost Dance religious movement spread from the Northern Paiute to the Lakota, and took on a moral martial tinge, Chief Matȟó Wanáȟtake, known to Whites as Kicking Bear, preached that Ghost Shirts would serve as bullet-deflecting armor for his followers, but such sacred raiment proved no match for the US 7^th Cavalry’s Hotchkiss M1875 Mountain Guns, which tore through hundreds of men, women, and children at Wounded Knee. Today, Kicking Bear’s own rifle, an elegantly decorated Winchester 1873 lever-action repeater, one of two weapon models frequently memorialized as “The Gun That Won The West” (the other being Colt’s so-called “Peacemaker”) is on display in the Smithsonian. During the Civil War, both Federal and Confederate soldiers took heart from stories of “Bullet-Puller” breast-pocket Bibles, and some even invested prophetic significance in the verses where Minié balls came to rest. Meanwhile, more jaded veterans observed that in chaotic flurries of volley fire, hardtack rations and decks of playing cards worked just as well, and just as arbitrarily, as New Testaments. Although the inhabitants of this continent have frequently taken refuge in the idea of faith-based exceptionalism from gunfire, material physics trumps metaphysics every time, and countless graves, marked and forgotten, testify to this in a mute yet irrefutable sermon.

Before beginning our survey, a caveat: the scope and ambition of even this most cursory of efforts is broad to the point of absurdity. A book could be written on the role of guns in the history of any one of the major religious traditions that came to America from Europe; sources permitting, a whole series of volumes could be penned about the significance of guns for Native American peoples; other books still could be composed about guns in the history of African-American churches or differing attitudes towards guns among contemporary believers, and more. Moreover, any such projects would be marked by near-insurmountable obstacles (missing archives, deliberately falsified records, lost testimonies, and the like), riven with technicalities that would frustrate specialists in religion and military history alike, and, given the state of contemporary debates over both guns and religion, inevitably produce a result that would be politically fraught, controversial, and suspect.

And yet the sheer absurdity of a short survey history of guns and religion in America is itself clarifying. Because what, on the one hand, could be simpler than the brute encounter between metal and flesh, a bullet meeting a body, tearing through it, and ending a life? Gazing point-blank down the barrel of a gun, it does not matter whether the weapon in question is a hand-gonne or matchlock or snaplock or wheelock or snaphaunce or doglock or miquelet or flintlock or caliver or rifled musket or derringer or revolver or polymer semiautomatic or AR-15. And a corpse is a corpse whether the person who once animated it was snuffed out in the name of faith or works or the Latin Rite or the White Race or the Lost Cause or the Glorious Future or Divine Providence itself. And yet, on the other hand, when we realize that, since the moment when the Old World first collided with the New, the number of shots fired and bodies dropped for all these reasons and more is overwhelmingly beyond our capacity to calculate, that entire peoples have been ground to dust beneath our feet, or thrown overboard at gunpoint into the dark seas off our shores, all forgotten and lost, then what in the American experience – not just in this survey – is not absurd? The best we can do is glimpse what we can, survey where we may, and beat our wings against the storm blowing us ever forward.

2. Into the Breech

Tracking the history of firearms from their genesis to their arrival on the New World’s shores and across the continent’s interior follows the arc of an ever-Westward explosion: history as ballistics. The murky peregrinations of the earliest gunpowder-based weapons from China through Central Asia and the Middle East are beyond the scope of our present inquiry, but it is significant that some of their very first recorded deployments in Europe occurred on the Iberian Peninsula in the 1300s. The military technologies and crusaderly zeal literally and metaphorically forged in the crucible of the Reconquista accompanied the first adventurers to the Americas. Columbus brought shipboard cannon and various rudimentary small arms with him on his voyages; the conquistadors who followed brought infantry trained in the use of the arquebus, a primitive long-gun that required the lighting of a wick to discharge.

It is commonly assumed that firearms were the most potent weapons in the Spanish arsenal, but this is not, strictly speaking, the case. Toledo-steel bladed weapons boasted a durability and sharpness unlikely anything Native Americans had encountered – as Columbus wrote of the Taíno: “They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance.” Of course, the Taíno and other Arawak peoples of the Caribbean would soon be disabused of this ignorance: woodcuts of Spaniards dismembering recalcitrant Native Americans accurately represent the devastating power of these weapons. Arquebuses, on the other hand, were woefully inaccurate, easily broken, hazardous to operate, and clumsy and slow to reload. Yet it would be wrong to underestimate the multisensory psychological impact of the smoke and thunder of these primitive firearms on those who had never seen them, or the terror of witnessing a comrade fall, miraculously struck down from a distance that no bow, spear, or atlatl could reach. Not for nothing did Columbus, in sailing away from Haiti, order his men to destroy the beached wreckage of the Santa Maria with a canon. The message to the non-Europeans ashore was clear: much like the Spanish had arrived from afar, they could strike from a distance, and land, like their artillery, without warning, and with devastation beyond imagining.

Illustration from Bartolome de las Casas’s The Devastation of the Indies

And, of course, they did. Firearms played an indispensable role in the campaigns of Cortés, Pizarro, Belalcázar, and other Spanish conquerors and explorers who toppled kingdoms and exterminated peoples for a slurry of motives that mixed god, gold, and glory in equal measure. Although the personal religiosity of these men is an open question, by the time the Spanish Colonial apparatus had more fully established itself, and moved from reliance on dubious adventurers to bureaucrats and prelates, the inextricability of Church and military administrations had been fully cemented. Profiling Father Junipero Serra (1713-1784), the Spanish Franciscan who oversaw the institution of a sophisticated infrastructure of Missions in what is now California, historian George Tinker acknowledges Serra’s best intentions while documenting their embeddedness within a system of brutal repression. For Tinker, Serra’s legacy includes:

“…forced conversions of native peoples to Christianity and the enforcement of those conversions by imprisonment; physical violence in the form of corporal punishment; the imposition of slave labor conditions on Indian converts for the support of the missions and accompanying military presidios; a living environment that was akin to a concentration camp and cycles of famine and constant poor nourishment that were both unprecedented among these native peoples [and] an extraordinary death rate among converts.”

While the contemporary Catholic Church, which beatified Serra in 1989, has sought to contextualize his actions by appealing to his understanding of Native Americans as “children” who required corporal punishment as a means of education, and to explain away the failures of his planned communities, built with forced labor, as misguided agricultural “experimentation,” controversy remains, particularly in the run-up to Pope Francis’s canonization of Serra during his visit to the United States. Bracketing the political debates over the meaning of Serra’s canonization today, reading historical accounts, it is impossible to overlook two things. First, Serra relied on soldiers to force members of the Acjachemen (Juaneño), Payomkowishum (Luiseño), and other peoples to attend mass at gunpoint, and to capture, imprison, and punish those who recanted their conversation and tried to flee the missions and return to their homes. Second, Serra literally integrated the ceremonial brandishing and discharge of muskets into liturgical services. Despite Pope Francis’s efforts to separate Serra’s activities from the Spanish colonialist enterprise (“[Serra] sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it,” says Francis), the reality remains that, not just in the missionary administration, but also in the Mass itself, the Cross and Gun were not opposed – in fact, quite the opposite.

Colonialist Spanish Catholics in the Caribbean and Southwest were not the only people that saw its conquest of North America through divinely-ordained crosshairs, nor even the only one that celebrated the presence of arms in its churches. Northern European Protestants of multiple persuasions saw in the depopulation of the continent by disease – a contagion that some epidemiologists estimate to have easily killed some 20 million people in North America alone – not tragic happenstance, but a Special Dispensation of Providence, a divinely vouchsafed territorial inheritance. As William W. Cook has compellingly documented, Biblical typologies offered a larder of go-to proof-texts to support the Protestant settler agenda: America was a kind of Second Garden, the site of a rebooted Covenant; etcetera. Of course, the facts that disease hadn’t done away with all the continent’s heathen inhabitants was not incompatible with this Covenantal vision. Those Native Americans who would not be traded with or evangelized could be liquidated. The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church expressly acknowledged a right to bear weapons, and the Jamestown settlers armed themselves with muskets accordingly. As conflicts with Powhattan Confederacy tribes escalated, flare-ups were interpreted as divine retribution for sinfulness (including the sin of teaching several Native American individuals how to shoot) and colonists vigorously atoned for these shortcomings through increasingly brutal bloodletting, both directly and by pitting tribes against one another.

Further north, Congregationalist Puritans added to the trope of Covenantal inheritance with imagery from Exodus: their escape from sectarian conflict in Europe mirrored the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt. Already an insular group accustomed to persecution, this self-identification came easily, as did correlative typologies. Sermon after sermon cast Native American peoples as Amalekites, the mortal enemies of the Israelites, who mercilessly attacked them without provocation in Exodus 17:8 and whom God Himself ordered Saul to eradicate entirely (1 Samuel 15:3). In practice, then, this meant that the “City upon a Hill” of Matthew 5:14 bled into the “Church Militant” of Ephesians 6:12 to produce something more closely resembling a fortress. The Puritan preoccupation with the threat of Native American attacks reached its apogee on the Sabbath: in communities from Massachusetts Bay to New Hampshire to Maine, men from each household were required to attend services armed and were fined if they did not; in some localities, Sentinels were set around the perimeter of meeting halls with wicks for their matchlocks kept constantly lit. Any trading of weapons with Native Americans was strictly forbidden and non-Puritan merchants who engaged in the practice were routinely expelled from Puritan strongholds. These attitudes were maintained even during periods of peace and alliance with local tribes, but fierce Native American backlash to colonial expansion, particularly after King Philip’s War (1675-1678), escalated the brutality on all sides. After British Colonial authorities encouraged colonists to shoot Native Americans for scalp bounties, Solomon Stoddard (1643-1729), Pastor of the Congregationalists in Northampton and grandfather to American theologian Jonathan Edwards, wrote to Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley requesting financial support to train dogs to help in such hunts: “They [the Indians] act like wolves and are to be dealt with all as wolves.” In their role as shepherds to their flocks, Puritan elders like Stoddard and Cotton Mather (1663-1728) saw wolfish threats everywhere in the woods around them: Mather viewed Catholics as “ravenous howling wolves” and enjoined his flock to “Wound them that they shall not be able to Arise.” Of course, the Puritan community’s vigilance towards outside threats could just as easily turn inwards on itself.

When an accidental misfire killed a Connecticut Puritan during a militia drill in Windsor in 1657, the man holding the musket in question was charged with murder “by misadventure” and fined – only to later see the charge voided and fee restored when a woman, Lydia Gilbert, was judged to have been the witch responsible for the event. Gilbert was sentenced to die, and although her precise fate is unknown, in the near certainty she was executed she was most likely not shot, but hanged.

By the eighteenth century, as the Colonies expanded and then became a fledging nation, certain trends grew more visible. On the one hand, increasing conflicts with Native Americans brought about by frontier expansion crystalized a loose but nonetheless very real pan-settler identification that bridged sectarian divisions within Christianity in the name of collective armament against non-Christian threats. Although militias mustered from within existing communities, and thus represented their demographics in sectarian terms, participation in militias was nonetheless increasingly seen as a fundamental duty of all Christian men broadly speaking, and an indispensable feature of any ‘Commonwealth.’ In his The Art of War Lawful and Necessary for a Christian People (1773), Congregationalist minister and later President of Yale Ezra Stiles (1727-1795) expanded upon a sermon delivered “To a Company of Youth, Voluntarily Engaged in Acquiring the Use of Arms” to argue that rigorous training in firearms was incumbent upon all youth: “Now then, in imitation of king David, we may say, let the children of New-England learn the use of the firelock, lest their brave commanders fall by the art of her enemies, on her pleasant mountains, in some future day; when, like David, too late to save our brave leaders, we bade teach the use of fire-arms, and art of war.” The advent of the Revolutionary War, which was promulgated from pulpits across denominational lines, further advanced this vision of a broadly Christian Commonwealth armed and vigorously militarized under divine blessing.

The increasing emphasis on bearing arms in the service of the Commonwealth coexisted uneasily with the inherently centrifugal tendencies of American Protestantism and inevitable friction between schismatic groups. This tension frequently translated into suspicion and contempt toward minority sects who did or did not arm themselves in ways the majority deemed appropriate. The pacifism of The Society of Friends, for example, was viewed by many as parasitic upon the sacrifices of frontiersmen and militia, and regularly condemned as unmanly or insincere – it was “lazy or Cowardly,” a “pretence of Conscience” put on as a “Masque” by “pious sheep.” But contrary to contemporary mythification, this pacifism was not, in fact, uniform: some Quakers carried guns, engaged in the arms trade, and, in one notable incident, mobilized into a rural militia of their own to protest their treatment by other Christians – including urban Quakers.

Although the violence associated with the First Great Awakening was largely rhetorical (involving fiery sermons, fits of fervor, and the like), that which accompanied the Second was quite real. Part of this was simply a function of the fact that, insofar as the phenomenon was particularly active on the frontier, and not in more established and staid New England urban centers, guns were omnipresent as a matter of course: John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes granted the legitimacy of lethal force in defense of person and property, and Methodist Circuit Riders, who had to face “ruffians,” hostile Native Americans, and hungry wildlife on their travels, carried pistols and long-guns. Another factor was that the Second Great Awakening mobilized constituencies, many of whom already had eminently legitimate reasons to arm themselves, by fostering a rhetoric of strident religious militancy. Moses “Father” Dickson (1824-1901), a free-born African-American who would go on to become a Pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, spent years in St. Louis organizing a well-armed militia of black abolitionists that named itself “The Knights of Liberty” and planned a march on Atlanta (he later abandoned these plans and encouraged the Knights to enlist in the Union Army instead.) Given that the issue of slavery had been a powder-keg ready to detonate since the nation’s founding, the Second Great Awakening’s emphasis on the purgation of sins, radical action, and apocalyptic expectations laid the groundwork for many to literally take up arms to eradicate it (and also, in the South, to defend it). As pro-slavery Missouri Ruffians and Free-Stater abolitionists (including the religiously zealous John Brown) squared off in “Bleeding Kansas,” the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1837) became quite taken with the innovative Sharps Model 1853 rifle. As a New York newspaper reported:

“He believed that the Sharps Rifle was a truly moral agency, and that there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas were concerned, than in a hundred Bibles. You might just as well… read the Bible to Buffaloes as to those fellows who follow [pro-slavery Missouri Senator David] Atchison and [Missouri Attorney General David] Stringfellow; but they have a supreme respect for the logic that is embodied in Sharp’s rifle.”

The Sharps weapon promptly took on the moniker “Beecher’s Bible,” and Beecher and others Northern abolitionists shipped the rifles westward by the crate. When outright war did come, countless Americans both on and off the battlefield saw the conflict in religious terms; Union chaplains were issued swords and pistols as part of their kit, and Confederate chaplains included figures like the Baptist Isaac Taylor Tichenor (1825-1902) who rallied the Seventeenth Alabama at Shiloh with his sharpshooting, where “with the coolness and intrepidity of a veteran killing with his rifle a colonel, a major, and four privates.” Tichenor’s conduct earned him a reprimand and led to his resignation, but many other “Fighting Chaplains” on both sides who took up arms with their flocks gained celebrity, not censure.

The label on a Browning gun from the Nauvoo period, stating: “Holiness to the Lord – Our Preservation.”

In the Nineteenth Century another durable theme becomes clearly and persistently visible: the almost organic link between millennial expectations, the experience of persecution, and the acquisition of arms. The example of Mormonism is illustrative. As a minority sect whose doctrines were deemed scandalous by their neighbors, the first Mormons suffered intense and violent persecution in Illinois and Missouri. In response, they armed themselves heavily. Joseph Smith’s bodyguard, Orrin Porter Rockwell (1815-1878), was a particularly colorful figure and is surrounded by rich legend. Baptized into the Church on the day of its founding, Rockwell supposedly carried nearly a dozen guns on his person and was declared to be mystically immune from bullets by Smith himself. Rockwell developed such a reputation as a marksman that despite being jailed on suspicion of involvement in the attempted assassination of anti-Mormon Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs in 1842, he walked away unindicted, thanks not only to an excellent defense and insufficient evidence, but also to his frank statement: “I’ve never shot at anybody. If I shoot, they get shot. He’s still alive, isn’t he?” On a group level, as the Mormons moved ever westward, the Church devoted immense energy to cultivating both a martial culture and infrastructure. As historian Harry Gibson has documented, this entailed more than just training a highly regimented militia, the Nauvoo Legion, and hosting dances for youth where the price of entry was cleaning a firearm. The Church also began to stockpile weapons as a collective property, including not just small arms but also cannons, importing guns from Europe as needed. Once in Utah – the territory theologically granted to it in the Doctrine and Covenants – the Church oversaw efforts to build armories and a sophisticated arsenal where workers on an assembly line could produce revolvers supposedly indistinguishable from the Colts from which they were copied. The Church also directed expeditions to find mines for bullet lead and to locate the chemicals necessary to produce its own gunpowder (although this latter effort ran into some complications when a Swiss chemist hired for the purpose also began distilling alcohol and had to be fired). In these efforts, the Church was aided by the expertise of a series of talented gunsmiths, including Jonathan Browning (1805-1879), an ingenious inventor whose guns, made largely in Illinois, bore a signature stamp that read: “Holiness to the Lord – Our Preservation.” After the Church’s conflicts with Washington de-escalated and Utah gained statehood, the need for Mormons to arm themselves diminished. Still, Browning’s grandson, John Moses Browning (1855-1926), went on to become arguably the most brilliant firearms designer of the twentieth century, and several models of his design are still in active use with the US military. The very arms-making savvy rooted in a history of resistance to governmental authority came full circle, put to work in supporting it.

3. Faith in Arms

Although the Mormons are in many ways unique, their example offers in précis the image of a cycle that by now should be familiar: a minority religious group claims a place in the American landscape as its right, covenantally inherited or otherwise granted by its doctrines. In the face of persecution from the outside, the group takes up arms to protect itself until it is granted the recognition and security it feels it is due.

At times, this persecution can be all too real. When Nativist arson attacks on Irish churches and homes reached an apogee in the Elections of 1844, the first Archbishop of New York, John “Dagger” Hughes (1797-1864), instructed the Ancient Order of Hibernians to station 3,000 armed civilians around the Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He then frankly informed the city’s Mayor that any of those men would turn New York into a “Second Moscow” if the Nativists didn’t back down. They did, but scores of dead Irish in Pennsylvania and elsewhere were not as fortunate, in no small likelihood because they lacked protectors as influential, organized, and intimidating as Hughes and his well-armed affiliates. Likewise, as Charles E. Cobb has amply chronicled, the commonly invoked image of the Civil Rights Movement as exclusively nonviolent in both its tactics and its religious sensibilities is, in multiple senses, a whitewash. As centers of black community life, churches were (and remain) prime targets for racist attacks, and in these circumstances, black Christians have not confined their use of Biblical typologies to Christ as passive Suffering Servant nor to Moses as Deliverer: they have also embraced the image of Divine retribution smashing Pharaoh’s armies. Indeed, although it does not fit the predominant contemporary media frame, history clearly reveals that African-Americans have indeed historically self-organized and armed themselves with guns to defended themselves and their churches throughout the South and elsewhere. One group of well-armed and disciplined self-defense activists, founded in 1965, was known as the “Deacons for Defense and Justice.” As Cobb writes:

“The precise reason for that choice of name is unclear. Some of the founding members may have actually been church deacons. When asked, [former Mississippi Director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)] Dave Dennis noted, “A number of these men were church-going folk, so people may have just begun calling them ‘the Deacons’” as a result. [Activist Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick], who later in his life launched a folk-singing career, wrote and recorded “The Deacons,” a song in which he offers a more calculated explanation: ‘Let’s call ourselves the Deacons and never have no fear / They will think we are from the church / Which has never done much / And gee, to our surprise it really worked.”

Unless one is operating from a position of hypocrisy or a profound lack of empathy, it is impossible to begrudge these efforts at self-defense, or to deny their effectiveness when successful. For some groups, the exercise of their First Amendment right to Free Exercise has only been secured and maintained by their exercise of the Second Amendment Right to bear arms. Some may not like to admit this, but it is true.

But there is a corollary to this truth, one that some might also prefer to avoid admitting. The experience of persecution against which believers may arm themselves does not have to be real to move them to violence. Theology and temperament exist in a complicated, hard-to-disentangle relationship, and the worldview that their interaction can produce may have little rapport with reality: lashing out in aggression can be perceived as acting in self-defense, and experiencing oneself as a threatened or aggrieved minority is not incompatible with actually being in a statistically and politically dominant majority. In fact, just the opposite: Elizabeth Castelli has compellingly documented how nearly two millennia of theological preoccupation with themes of martyrdom and persecution can not just co-exist with cultural dominance by the Church, but in fact license some Christians to persecute others even as they see themselves as aggrieved and threatened victims. Likewise, as scholars like Kelly Baker have decisively demonstrated, the Klansmen who lynched blacks and damned Catholics were not a minority group – their worldview was recognizably contiguous with mainstream white Protestantism, and there was little daylight between their commitment to virile chauvinist Nationalism and “moderate” whites who pooh-poohed violence as gauche but nonetheless agreed with their outlook in toto. Contemporary American neo-Nazis and Aryan Nations extremists are animated by religious beliefs that can range from from Christian Identity to pseudo-Norse Neo-Paganism to nothing at all, but guns are as central to their communities and practices as is the conviction that “Diversity is Code for White Genocide.”

And here is another corollary truth that is yet more uncomfortable: even when a group is in a minority, and even if their experience of persecution does have some basis in reality, the quintessentially American impulse to arm oneself can produce the very response it is intended to avoid. In the twentieth century, various new religious movements have come under scrutiny from the media and the Federal Government for “stockpiling” weapons. At first blush, this always seems ominous – what are these people hoarding weapons for? When their community practices offend predominant mores, suspicion only intensifies, and if their beliefs have anything in the way of a millennial character, another question immediately arises: is the group in question a violent “cult” stocking up on weapons not just to wait for the apocalypse, but to actively precipitate it? As we should by now recognize, however, these questions reveal an ignorance of traditions that date back to the first religious settlers in the Americas. Insular communities with antinomian practices that rely on weapons for subsistence and as a psychological buttress against fears of the outside world are nothing new. And even if the communities in question aren’t using the guns to hunt, the subsistence motive still obtains: guns retain value as investments, and can be traded for liquid cash on our nation’s largely unregulated secondary market – for those communities who wish to live cash-only, or otherwise off the grid, investing in guns makes perfect sense. But the IRS and the ATF are not sympathetic to these motivations, nor is 24-7 cable news, and although the analogy is imprecise, the blunt fact is that while in 1896 Mormons could trade some of their practices and productively re-channel their militarism in exchange for recognition from the Federal Government, the seventy-six charred bodies recovered from the siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas almost exactly a hundred years later testify to how much the times have changed.

Meir Kahane speaking in 1975 (Photo: EA Schwartz)

And here is one last truth, perhaps the most uncomfortable of all. Even when groups are in a minority, and there is no question of their historical victimization, the acquisition and use of arms draws upon a history that can exceed the intentions of those involved. For all his political influence in Israel, there is something fundamentally American about the figure of Meir Kahane (1932-1990), the Brooklyn-born founder of the Jewish Defense League, who advocated that American Jews embrace gun ownership with the famous catchphrase, “For every Jew, a .22.” Kahane was assassinated in a Manhattan Marriott in 1990, shot through the neck at close range. His killer was an Egyptian-born US citizen disguised as an Orthodox Jew; the gun he carried, a chrome .357 Ruger, was 100% Made-in-the-USA. Twenty-five years after his death, Kahane’s influence lives on. In a January 2015 Op-Ed entitled “Bring Your Gun to Synagogue,” a St. Louis attorney notes that he regularly brings his Glock 19 with him to shul, and he is not afraid to use it: “If, Heaven forbid, a Muslim or other anti-Semite were to enter the sanctuary and begin making threats, I’m confident the event would end rapidly – preferably peacefully, as just brandishing my weapon can defuse a situation. But if I had to engage to protect the congregation, I am confident I am prepared and trained to do so.” Note the writer’s elision of an entire identity into a persecutory orientation: “a Muslim or other anti-Semite.” Like Cotton Mather, like so many quintessentially pious Americans who advocated carrying guns into their places of worship, Kahane, whom the author praises, would also regularly lump together threats from the outside as Amalekites, the undifferentiated typologically malevolent Other whose obliteration was an imperative duty to God.

4. Storm from Paradise

John Milton Chivington (1821-1894) was a former Methodist pastor, seminary director, and Sunday School teacher who deferred an offer of a military chaplaincy in favor of active combat duty during the Civil War’s Western Campaigns; despite numerous red flags of unfitness for duty, by 1864 he had risen to command a force of Colorado militia. On November 29^th of that year, Chivington led a group of some 700 soldiers against a group of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho near Sand Creek. Most of the Native American men had gone hunting, leaving behind mainly elderly people, women, and children. Some of Chivington’s men refused to participate in what followed, noting that the Native Americans were there in accordance with a treaty, that most had already voluntary disarmed themselves, and that they were camped beneath a fluttering American flag besides. But Chivington would have none of it. “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”

The means under God’s heaven at Chivington’s disposal were sabers, revolvers, and breech-loading rifles. The blades were mostly put to use finishing off the wounded and collecting trophies: scalps, fetuses, genitals. The pistols were accurate, but only so far: the heavy six-shot cap and ball Colts his men carried had smooth barrels that lowered accuracy at range. They were adequate once the troops moved in, likely for killing the thirty or forty women who had taken refuge in a hole, for shooting the six-year-old girl the women had sent out carrying a white flag, for dispatching point-blank the five-year-old a pair of Cavalrymen found hiding beneath some sand and whom they dragged out by her arms. For the Native Americans who tried to flee, rifles were necessary. But the motley assortment of Sharps, Springfields, and Austrian models the soldiers carried were not always properly sighted in, and many of the men were drunk besides, and so they made a game of it. A Cavalryman who was there later testified about one such scene.

“There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, travelling in the sand. I saw one man get off his horse at a distance of about seventy-five yards and draw up his rifle and fire. He missed the child. Another man came up and said, ‘Let me try the son of a bitch. I can hit him.’ He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.”

Chivington initially reported the massacre as a hard-won military triumph; for a time, contemporary media reproduced and celebrated this account. Eventually, enough dissents surfaced for a Congressional Committee to conduct an investigation and label him a murderer. Apart from that ignomy, Chivington faced no actual charges. Twenty years after the massacre, when a group of former pioneers invited “The Fighting Parson” to an event commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the settling of Colorado, his message to them was simple: “I stand by Sand Creek.” The crowd responded by giving the Reverend Colonel Chivington an ovation. Several years before his death, the State named a town after him.

And this, ultimately, is the blunt truth of our Nation: although rivers of ink have been spilled in stipulating distinctions between missionary and heathen, between Elect and Damned, between Church and State, between mainstream faiths and dangerous cults, these distinctions all wash away, time and again, in an unending torrent of blood. And while our evergreen proclamations of equality and enfranchisement have been consistently flawed and aspirational at best, and grotesquely hypocritical at worst, when it comes to emancipating lethality, in giving butchery free reign over man, woman, and child, our track record as a democracy has been perfect and absolute. In America, Death is the most enfranchised and pious citizen of all.

***

Part II of “God and Guns” by Patrick Blanchfield can be found here.

***

Patrick Blanchfield holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com.

The post God and Guns appeared first on The Revealer.

The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are secure

On September 11^th, 2001, three thousand people died in New York and Washington – but in Texas, one life was saved. Jeffery Eugene Tucker’s lethal injection was scheduled to have taken place that day. Governor Rick Perry granted him a temporary reprieve. The closing of federal courts “would not have given Tucker full opportunity … for a last minute appeal,” explained the Hood County News.

In the Summer of 1988, when Rick Perry was still a state representative, and a democrat, Jeffery Eugene Tucker was looking for a way out. He’d been nabbed for marijuana in Collin County, jacked for forged checks in Tarrant, and sent up for auto-theft in Plano Pinto. He was through with Texas.

Allegedly, he made a plan.

Less than a month after being paroled, in the Summer of 1988, he combed through the classifieds in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, circling a few car notices before settling on an ad for a white GMC pickup truck and tan travel trailer. Using an assumed name, he made an appointment with its owners: Wilton and Peggy Humphreys.

The next morning, Tucker stopped in an Arlington pawnshop and bought a .38 caliber pistol. He lied on the necessary paperwork (Federal Form #4473), and paid with a stolen check. There was no waiting period.

Around three, Tucker arrived at the Laguna Tres development outside of Granbury, where the Humphreys lived. The couple had just purchased a recreational vehicle, they told him, making their old truck and trailer redundant. Wilton was a member of the Good Sam Club, an international association of R.V. owners, and a “wagonmaster” in his local chapter. He helped keep the Good Sams’ group camping trips comfortable and organized. After some visiting, and a test drive, Tucker agreed to take the truck. He and Wilton drove off for Granbury, to finalize the paperwork.

Just after four, that day, the body of Wilton J. Humphreys was discovered on Goforth Road in Parker County, Texas, between the towns of Aledo and Whiskey Flats. According to an account that appeared several days later in the Hood County News, penned by staff writers Leland Debusk, Lynna Kirkpatrick and Melissa Howell , he’d “been shot several times and run over repeatedly with some type of vehicle.”

The truck was gone, and so was Tucker.

It was the eleventh of July.

O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place

I am in the crowd, behind the police barricades, watching the protesters evangelize. It’s a cool afternoon in September, and I am standing in front of the World Trade Center PATH station, beside the equestrian statue built to commemorate the achievements of Special Forces units in Afghanistan. Behind me, tall fences enclose a wing-like structure of white beams, arching overhead like massive ribs. “Oculus,” Santiago Calatrava’s radical contribution to the WTC transit hub, is still under construction. Huge signs, hung on its surrounding wall, point the way to the memorial fountains. It is Friday, September 11^th, 2015.

The protesters are operating from behind a line of poster boards, spread flat on the asphalt: The WTC Debris Pattern… 9/11 and Iraq: The Elusive Link… EXPLOSIVE EVIDENCE! … Shouldn’t these Questions Have Answers?

A man with shoulder-length gray hair is addressing the crowd: Kevin Canada. “What’s that eyeball doing here?” he demands, indignant, indicating Calatrava’s pavilion. “These buildings are designed that way for a reason!”

“It’s all part of the effort to bring in the Satanic new world order!” he concludes. People hear him out, and a few accept his literature. Other protesters are more technical – they talk about structural engineering problems posed by the “official story,” about the melting point of steel and the physical evidence of thermite. Some are friendly, others intense. Canada, however, speaks casually — and with total conviction. He’s a poet.

“It was raining like crazy, the last two days,” he tells me. “I believe to keep people out of here.” Those in control, he says, have access to advanced nanotechnology and a network of clandestine satellites, capable of emitting dangerous energy. “We’re electromagnetic beings,” he says. “They’ve learned how to tap into our system.”

The signs, he explains, are everywhere. Goats and eyeballs. Satanic hand gestures. It’s in government, civil engineering – even in churches. “Our ministries ain’t what they used to be,” he sighs. “They’re 501cs, part of this illuminati… The C.I.A. has known for a long time that the best way to control people is through religion.”

The world Canada describes might be frightening, but at least it’s definitive. Its secret masters employ clear symbolism, announcing their plots to the public, albeit in elaborate code. “The date, the time – everything about this was significant,” he told me. “These fuckers are lying. They lied about the weapons of mass destruction and they’re lying about this.”

His eyes were steady – even grave. He spoke the truth: “I know we’re in a battle for this country,” he told me. “An epic battle.”

My days are passed, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart

While I was talking to Canada, Rick Perry was talking to the Eagle Forum in St. Louis. It was there, in a tent erected by a Marriot hotel, that the longest serving governor in Texas history called off his presidential bid.

Ben Carson and Lindsey Graham were there too, but neither one was ready to call it quits. And why would they? Carson is currently riding high in the polls, bolstered by his evangelical constituency. He also bragged about separating conjoined twins in front of Megyn Kelly and God at the first Republican primary debate. That same night, at the runner-up event for low-polling candidates, Graham promised that “ If I am president of the United States, we’re going to send soldiers back to Iraq,” which might be considered a gaffe if anybody, right or left, thought Lindsey Graham had a hope in hell of being president. He and Carson are still “serious” candidates – more or less. Only Rick Perry is considered an embarrassment.

For him, perhaps, the epic battle is over – but victory remains in question. After the expected political biography, Perry turned his remarks to a sentimental journey he undertook with his father: revisiting the old man’s corner of the Second World War. “Dad and I went back to his old air base in England for his first visit in 55 years,” said Perry. “Then we crossed the channel and visited the American cemetery that overlooks the bluffs at Omaha beach.”

“On that peaceful, wind-swept setting, there lie 9,000 graves,” the governor continued. “It struck me as I stood in the midst of those heroes that they look upon us in silent judgment.” What would they think of America today? “Are we worthy of their sacrifice?”

Barack Obama sure ain’t. Perry called him a “divider,” a cheap demagogue who achieved fame by enflaming economic and racial tensions. Again and again, Perry said, Obama has failed us all.

“We were told America needed to improve its reputation abroad. Now we are neither liked nor respected,” he said. Today, ”ISIS has ripped a swath through the Middle East as large as Great Britain,” all the result of “a naïve campaign promise took priority over stability.”

“Naïve policies gave us the Iranian nuclear deal,” Perry argued, calling it “an agreement that fuels Iran’s nuclear ambitions rather than prohibiting them.” Speaking of Obama’s economic policy and his use of executive power, Perry refrained from using “naïve” again. Those missteps, he implied, were the result of something more sinister: a consolidation of power under the federal government, to the detriment of the states.

“Each state should chart its own course,” he said. “I support the right of states to be wrong, like Colorado legalizing pot. I would rather one state get it wrong than the whole country.”

In Texas, under his fourteen-years of leadership, Perry claimed to have already solved the principle problems of the Obama administration. “There are two visions for America,” he said. “The government-run welfare state of Washington, New York and California, and the limited government freedom state pioneered in places like Texas.”

This fight is too important, Perry explained, to be left to any single campaign or personality. “2016 is the most important election of our lifetime,” he said, gravely. “I know we say this every election, but this time it is actually true.” The forces of “freedom” are contesting with the forces of control – and everything hangs in the balance.

In that existential struggle, the governor concluded, the name and reputation of Rick Perry don’t matter all that much – they’re dwarfed by the will of God. “ Today I submit that His will remains a mystery, but some things have become clear,” said Perry. “That is why […] I am suspending my campaign for the presidency of the United States.”

Perry’s “Remarks at the Eagle Forum” have gotten a respectable amount of press. Fittingly, most of it has been about Donald Trump.

Perry thumped the abstruse mogul on the way out the door, they say. And it’s true – the governor did devote some of his speech to chastising Trump for being more “rhetoric” than “record.” He took the frontrunner to task for indulging in “nativist appeals that divide the nation further.” Being from Texas, Perry’s approach to the Mexican border has always been more complicated than Trump’s — it has to be. But he’s still the governor who deployed the National Guard along the border last year, as an upswing of nativist paranoia was catching in the far right…

“Where I come from, talk is cheap,” he said, to the Eagle Forum. “And leadership is not what you say, but what you do.”

Indeed.

Should a wise man utter vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind?

I have a theory.

I don’t think Rick Perry dropped out of the race last Friday. I think he redefined the terms of his engagement, especially towards Donald trump. His attacks on the frontrunner were the same ones he’s been making for weeks, and the same ones that have consistently won Perry the few headlines his 2016 campaign has rated. At the Eagle Forum, however, he didn’t mention Trump’s name – but he did mention Obama’s. Perry didn’t couch his resignation in an admission of weakness, but in an assertion of strength. My policies, he said, my experience – these are the only things that can get America back from the black man who stole it. But my name? That doesn’t matter.

Rick Perry and Donald Trump have similar brands. Both of them see America as waning – in decline. And both of them promise a solution – and, primarily, an economic one. For Perry, it’s his record in Texas – For Trump, it’s his record in the private sector. Both of them throw sparks on the subject of the southern border, and both of them have worked to court the far-right without alienating the mainstream.

On August 6^th, when Perry plead his case at Fox’s consolation debate for low-pollers, he concluded with his typical argument – that he’d performed an economic miracle in Texas, and was ready to do so on a larger scale. “Our best days are in front of us,” he said. All we need is “a corporate executive type at the top who’s done it before.”

There’s already a “corporate executive type” at the top of the polls. Then, as now, Perry looked redundant to a lot of people – especially in his former base.

I think things are different, after the Eagle Forum. I think Perry is trying to publically divorce his experience from his political ambitions. He’s applying for a job – maybe the job – in the still unlikely Trump administration.

On Twitter, last Friday, the usually acerbic Trump was unusually respectful. “@GovernorPerry is a terrific guy and I wish him well,” wrote Trump. “I know he will have a great future!”

The signs are everywhere.

It all means something.

In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind

When Perry dropped out, I got a call from every Texan friend of mine who cares about politics – a small but meaningful cross section of the people I grew up with. None of us like the guy, exactly – but for fourteen years (the same fourteen years that have passed since the terrorist actions of 2001), Perry has been more than a governor in Texas. He played the state like a fiddle, and redefined his office in the process. When he lost the name of that department on the debate stage in 2011, we lost something too.

Perry, we thought, was a canny operator – the kind of guy capable of putting the entire apparatus of a massive state government under his heel. His policies may have been disastrous, his rhetoric embarrassing – but his skill, we believed, was beyond question. That changed after “oops.”

For brief, blinding instant Texans became aware of two realities: the first, in which Perry is a savvy politico, speaks relatively well of the people he’s manipulated. The second – in which Perry is the kind of ignoramus that leaves the fries out of a McDonalds order – was less complimentary. I’ve been trying to reconcile the two ever since, with little success.

I need my theories. I find the alternative unthinkable.

On Friday, I leave for Texas, to explore the issue further.

Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews

Trauma breeds religion. When the unthinkable arrives on a curtain of flame, or erupts from the barrel of a gun or seeps from the wound of some public embarrassment, people begin rethinking the boundaries and mechanics of reality. In a new cosmography, we hope, our pain can be transformed – or at least avoided.

On August 27^th, 1988, the Hood County News ran a brief story by Kathleen Buxton, recounting a recent outing of the Good Sam club. “Granbury Good Sams held their monthly campout July 21^st-31^st at Comanche Trails R.V. park in Comanche, Texas,” she wrote. “Twenty-one member rigs attended.”

There was barbeque. They played dominoes. “Several members also attended the rodeo in Brownwood.”

“The campout was saddened by the death of a Good Sam member, Wilton Humphreys,” Buxton reported. “In the words of the club members, ‘He was a good man, a good friend and a Good Sam. He will be missed by all who knew him.’”

On Sunday, their chaplain read selections from the Book of Job.

***

Illustrations for Salem 66 this week are by Don Jolly.

The post Dispatch #2 – September 14-20, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

First up, we’re inclined to agree with Secretary of State John Kerry in his editorial for America Magazine, “Religion and Diplomacy,” everyone should study religion. Or, you know, at least read about it every few weeks in The Revealer.

I often say that if I headed back to college today, I would major in comparative religions rather than political science. That is because religious actors and institutions are playing an influential role in every region of the world and on nearly every issue central to U.S. foreign policy.

Which isn’t to say religion itself is always the answer. (You’ll note we’re going to skip right over the whole Kim Davis situation and go straight for the commentary. If you want to get “Eye of the Tiger” stuck on angry repeat in your head be our guest, but we’re not going to inflict that on you directly).

“All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists“ by Lawrence M. Krauss in The New Yorker.

 In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.

Title page of first edition of Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits” by Increase Mather, 1693

Of course, singling out a single woman and blaming all of our problems on her has some pretty scary precedents. If you need a refresher (and want to take a moment to remember how amazing Puritan names are) we highly recommend Stacy Schiff‘s “The Witches of Salem” also in The New Yorker

What exactly was a witch? Any seventeenth-century New Englander could have told you. As workers of magic, witches and wizards extend as far back as recorded history. The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century, when sorcery and heresy moved closer together. She came into her own with the Inquisition, as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness. The western Alps introduced her to lurid orgies. Germany launched her into the air. As the magician molted into the witch, she also became predominately female, inherently more wicked and more susceptible to satanic overtures. An influential fifteenth-century text compressed a shelf of classical sources to make its point: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” As is often the case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the paranormal. Though weak willed, women could emerge as dangerously, insatiably commanding.

Which leads us, ever again, into thinking about relationships between religion and violence. In beautiful prose the two authors below each reflect on the ways that faith and arms affect our culture.

In “Fear” Marilynne Robinson considers the entanglement of weapons, law, and religion in America for The New York Review of Books.

I defer to no one in my love for America and for Christianity. I have devoted my life to the study of both of them. I have tried to live up to my association with them. And I take very seriously Jesus’s teachings, in this case his saying that those who live by the sword will also die by the sword. Something called Christianity has become entangled in exactly the strain of nationalism that is militaristic, ready to spend away the lives of our young, and that can only understand dissent from its views as a threat or a defection, a heresy in the most alienating and stigmatizing sense of the word.

And in “The Destroyer of Worlds in His Newfoundland” Ed Simon reflects on poetry and atoms in the mind of Robert Oppenheimer for the Journal of the Northern Renaissance. 

Indeed if America is the nation which may have provided the first actual means for a man-created apocalypse then Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” is an appropriate baptismal name for that moment zero in human history. As mentioned earlier, both Donne and Oppenheimer were fascinated with the transformation of space. The tiny and the large, the atomic and the cosmic, exist in a more malleable relationship than common sense would assume.

While, in much crasser news, David A. Graham has the story of “The First Christian Assault Rifle” for The Atlantic. 

As WTSP notes, a Florida man—of course it’s a Florida man—is marketing a Christian assault rifle. The gun, which of course is known as the “Crusader,” is your basic AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, but with a verse from Psalm 144 etched into the magazine:

“Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.”

The gun is also adorned with a cross and “Peace,” “War,” and “God Wills It” in both English and Latin. A spokesman for Spike’s Tactical, which is manufacturing the weapon, explained: “We wanted to make sure we built a weapon that would never be able to be used by Muslim terrorists to kill innocent people or advance their radical agenda.” The gun has a lifetime warranty, but there’s no indication whether you can take into the eternal afterlife, or whether the warranty would apply.

All pretty dark stuff. And yet, our current entertainment, too, can be a bit grim, itself. Kelly J. Baker has some thoughts on our popular apocalypticism in “There Be Monsters: A Warning” for Sacred Matters.

Zombies begged for cultural analysis. The fun they offered was not neutral, and I found that I had things to say as a scholar of apocalypticism, American culture, and religious studies. These monsters seemed to be the perfect case study to think through fictional ends in popular culture and their messages about particular moments in American history. If I turned away from doomsday prophets and end-times theologies and tuned into pop culture apocalypses, what might I uncover? What might be at stake in the celluloid, literary, and genre destructions of the nation and the world? Why was I unsettled when others were not? Fun appeared elusive while discomfort lingered.

How about a few items of more uplifting entertainment news, yeah?

First, “From Gandhi to a Sikh Cabbie: Ben Kingsley’s Groundbreaking Turn in ‘Learning to Drive’” by Pilar Belendez-DeSha for Vice.

The new movie Learning to Drive serves, in part, to educate viewers about what it means to be a Sikh while telling the story of Patricia Clarkson’s Wendy, a book critic whose husband leaves her for a younger woman. As part of her recovery, she initiates driving lessons from Darwan Singh, a taxi driver played by the legendary English actor Sir Ben Kingsley—representing the first time in history a Sikh character has been placed in a leading Hollywood role. The community’s response has been ecstatic.

“It is incredibly meaningful for the Sikh community to be featured prominently and positively on the big screen,” said Simran Jeet Singh, an assistant professor of religion at Trinity University and senior religion fellow for the Sikh Coalition.

Remember that fresco lady? Now she’s: “Something to sing about: ‘worst art restoration ever’ inspires an opera” by Ashifa Kassam for The Guardian.

The botched attempt at restoration catapulted Giménez into the public eye. “There were all these memes that were created – these crazy, crazy memes. The internet is a character in the opera, because it was really the internet that caused the sensation,” said Flack.

…While Giménez’s story is one of a kind, Flack said the story that underpins the opera is a universal one. “That a miracle can come from a disaster: that you can make lemons from lemonade,” he said. “Or that you make a terrible mistake on a fresco and it turns into something beneficial.”

And for something a little newer: “Meet the Guys Trying to Bring a Muslim Show to Netflix” by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh for MuslimGirl.Net.

It’s not Netflix’s role to promote or endorse any faith, but it would mean a lot if a major network would tell a story that includes Muslims without folding to the stereotypes that hate groups perpetuate. I want to make it clear that our show is not strictly about Muslims or for Muslims. It’s a very diverse show with diverse cultures and religions on full display. However, networks should not shy away from a good story because of the presence of a certain faith group. Netflix, and every other network, should approach our story as they would any other. They should ask the same questions they ask about other shows. “Is this a good story and will it resonate with people?” I believe that our show will and it’s finally time that it happens.

More of a book person? Ann Neumann has a fantastic tale to tell: “More Titillated Than Thou: How the Amish conquered the evangelical romance market.”

Whether readers are motivated by a hazy Luddism or a nostalgia for the old male-supremacist order of things, there’s no mistaking the potent commercial lure of the “bonnet books”—so called because of the young Amish women plastered on their covers. In less than a decade, bonnet titles have overtaken bestseller lists, Christian and non-Christian alike. More than eighty such books will be published in 2015, up from twelve titles in 2008. Three novelists, Beverly Lewis (who launched the genre in 1997 with The Shunning), Cindy Woodsmall, and Wanda Brunstetter, are together responsible for the sale of more than twenty-four million books. Today, there are approximately thirty-nine authors of Amish-themed fiction; their collective output works out to one Amish fiction book published every four days. Often wrongly called “bonnet rippers,” these novels seldom offer fare any more lurid than a much-regretted kiss. Sex is always offstage, and mere carnal longing is usually mastered by the more powerful desire to do God’s will.

Last month, Ann Neumann wrote about the invaluable contribution of doctors to our modern literary canon in her column here, “The Patient Body: How Ethics Saved the Life of Medicine.” Of all the writers she features, perhaps most popular and beloved was Oliver Sacks, who died on August 30th. Here is a lovely and topical remembrance from  S. Brent Plate for The Huffington Post, “The Religion of Oliver Sacks.”

Along the paths of many religious seekers before him, he journeyed, he experimented, he found new doors of perception in mind-altering substances, and enlightened visions as he spoke with his patients. An independent spirit, Sacks nonetheless entrusted himself to many guides along the way, elders who nudged, instructed, and shared their own stories. He took the insights he learned, and found ever new ways to apply them. From one guide along his path, he learned to always know the place you travel to, know something about its flora and fauna, and its geological history. It’s clear he applied this to his various environments, as well as to his patients: to know them and their history.

And one last somewhat religious reflection from Sacks himself in The New Yorker, “Filter Fish.”

But now, in what are (barring a miracle) my last weeks of life—so queasy that I am averse to almost every food, with difficulty swallowing anything except liquids or jellylike solids—I have rediscovered the joys of gefilte fish. 

Oliver Sacks

Forming a whole new kind of literary canon, there’s Twitter.

“Religious satire on Broadway” by Kathryn Reklis for The Christian Century.

In a first for a Broadway play, An Act of Godstarted as the Twitter account @TweetsofGod. Tweeter David Javer­baum personifies God as a cranky omni­scient father frustrated by the irresponsible behavior of his children. The tweets are mostly funny, in a cheeky and politically left way. (“I know I should stop appearing in Republicans’ dreams and saying ‘I command thee to run for President!’ but dammit, it’s so friggin’ fun.”) They are sometimes theologically provocative: “If you think atheism promotes a lack of moral responsibility, you should see what happens when my son takes the blame for all your sins.” Each tweet nails the genre: a momentary insight or a witty joke—and then done.

This style of humor is not new to American popular culture. The creators of The Book of Mormon made it common fare in South Park. Lewis Black embodies it in every Daily Show appearance. The Simpsons alludes to it in the antagonism between Homer and Ned Flanders.

But the humor is new to Broadway, and that’s worth paying attention to. With tickets averaging $150, producers and theater companies are loath to take a risk on anything that might not sell. But these plays sell: what once was an edgy form of humor celebrated only by rebellious teens is now attracting ticket-buying adults.

And we can thank Chris Cantwell for creating and “Introducing @Preacher_Bot: An Experiment in Evangelical Speechmaking” (for Religion in American History).

I decided to build a twitterbot that would interrogate the contours of American evangelical discourse. I built the bot using data journalistTom Meagher’s code, which generates tweets at random intervals using only the words and phrases of other active twitter users. The bot, in short, follows other people, takes what they tweet, and then remixes it to see what kind of insightful non sequiturs emerge from the mashing. For my source, I chose the top five most influential pastors on twitter as identified by Christianity Today. I wanted to include even more but these guys–and they’re all guys–are such voluminous tweeters that the weight of their discourse initially kept crashing the bot. So I settled on Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, John Piper, Max Lucado, and John Maxwell, plugged in their data, and set the program free.

You know what Twitter loves? Football. You know what else? The Pope. And you know what else? Controversy. Good thing this story’s got all three. Get those Twitter fingers ready: “Let’s Go Fightin’…Popes? Artist Subverts Mascot Issues With Surprising Helmets” by Wilhelm Murg for Indian Country Today. 

Matthew Bearden’s mixed media piece, “Cupo di Roma,” a football helmet with a picture of the Pope, has been getting a lot of attention at Oklahoma art shows this year. In fact, he was scheduled to have a booth at Indian Market in Santa Fe (which took place this past weekend), but canceled because his work is so hot right now that he had sold all his inventory. The helmet is part of his ongoing “Sacred Mascot” series, where Bearden, as a Citizen Potawatomi Nation member, turns the side of the football helmet into a medium not only to make a statement about mascots, but goes on to claim the space as a canvas for Native American art and culture.

Cupo di Roma by Matthew Bearden

And lastly, a journalist’s plea from Naomi Zeveloff for The Forward as she continues her “Quixotic Hunt for Bernie Sanders’ Kibbutz.”

If you have any idea which kibbutz Bernie Sanders volunteered at in 1964, or know someone who might, please help a reporter out and get in touch at zeveloff@forward.com.

See you again soon!

***

Past links round-ups can be found here:

Wax, Wits, William James, and more! (August 21, 2015)

Saints, Slavery, Celibacy, and more! (August 14, 2015)

Pundits, Prophets, Politics, and more! (August 7, 2015)

Senselessness, Stereotypes, Slayer, and more! (July 31, 2015)

Apps, Apologies, Apocalypse, and more! (July 15, 2015)

Heathens, Hymns, and Holy Men (July 8, 2015)

#LoveWins, #TakeItDown, #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches (July 2, 2015)

Racism, Ramadan, Romanian Witches, and more! (June 25, 2015)

Emanuel A.M.E., Encyclicals, Etsy, and more! (June 19, 2015)

Satanism, Sacred Music, Shasta Seekers, and more! (June 11, 2015)

Hip Hop, Hijabs, Hasidic Fashion, and more! (June 5, 2015)

TLC, THC, OMG! (May 29, 2015)

Mad Men, Mormons, Monks, and more! (May 22, 2015)

Candles, Kombucha, Crocodiles, and more! (May 15, 2015)

Lindsey Graham, Garland, TX, God’s Plaintiff, and more! (May 8, 2015)

Pamela Geller, Prophesy, PEN, and more! (May 1, 2015)

Talal Asad, Taylor Swift, Turbans, and more! (April 2015)

Passover, Prison, Pop Music, and more! (March 2015)

The Crusades, Anti-Vaxxers, Chocolate Gods, and  more! (February 2015)

Paris, Witches, the CNN Apocalypse, and more! (January 2015)

#black lives matter, #Illridewithyou, TL;DR Bible Stories, and more! (December 2014)

Hasidim, Mormons, Borges and more! (November 2014)

Wicca, Climate Change, Gaza, and more! (August 2014)

Prison Churches, Museums, and, of course, Hobby Lobby (July 2014)

***

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In The News: Poetry, Puritans, Politicians and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

The post Dispatch #1 – September 7-13, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.