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

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “The Limits of Forgiveness.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 54: The Limits of Forgiveness appeared first on The Revealer.

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

We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Public School Secularization and Desegregation.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 53: Public School Secularization and Desegregation appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Adobe stock photo)

Are you looking for a few articles that manage to bring joy while also being insightful? Here are our *top three* favorite articles that we have published about the winter holidays:

1) “Muppet Religion”
by Jodi Eichler-Levine
Looking for some feel-good nostalgia? Indulge in this beautiful reflection on The Muppet Christmas Carol and the Muppets’ spiritual insights.

2) “Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas”
by Noah Berlatsky
Discover the beloved Christmas music created and performed by American Jews and poignant reflections on what that has to say about Jews in the United States.

3) “The December Dilemma: Less Oy, More Joy”
by Samira Mehta
With Hanukkah starting on December 25 this year, explore the myriad ways Jewish-Christian interfaith families navigate the winter holiday season.

Happy winter holidays!

The post Winter Holiday Articles We Love appeared first on The Revealer.

1) Are you looking for a powerful and moving memoir? Check out Cait West’s acclaimed new book about growing up, and leaving, a conservative evangelical home in the “stay-at-home-daughter movement.” She is the author of The Revealer article “Bodily Autonomy, Reproductive Rights, and the Christian Patriarchy Movement.” Check out her acclaimed new book, Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy.

2) If you enjoy poetry, check out Noah Berlatsky’s unique book of poetry “translations, appropriations, and alienations… and [a] unique examination of rootlessness and the need to belong.” Berlatsky is the author of several articles in The Revealer, including “Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas” and “Christian Science as Jewish Tradition.” Check out his intriguing new book, Not Akhmatova: Poems and Adaptations.

3) If you are looking for an accessible and at times humorous look at the ways religion, especially Christianity, permeates our culture, check out this new book by Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst. Goodwin is the author of multiple articles in The Revealer, including “Abusing Religion: Polygyny, Mormonisms, and Under the Banner of Heaven” and “Michelle Remembers and the Satanic Panic.” Don’t miss their important and highly readable book Religion Is Not Done with You: Or, The Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law.

4) If you are interested in a stirring memoir about immigration and defending democracy, check out the book co-authored by Aquilino Gonell and Susan Shapiro. Gonell came to the United States from the Dominican Republic, served in the military, and was a Capitol police officer during the January 6 insurrection. He wrote this memoir with acclaimed writer Susan Shapiro, who is the author of an award-winning article in The Revealer entitled “Forgiving the Unforgivable.” The paperback copy of their USA Today bestselling book came out this November: American Shield: The Immigrant Sergeant Who Defended Democracy.

5) If you are a fan of the acclaimed television show Transparent, or if you have an interest in Jewish culture or queer culture, we recommend this new book co-edited by Nora Rubel and The Revealer’s Editor Brett Krutzsch. Check out their anthology of essays Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family.

6) For our final recommendation, we would like to suggest (with great enthusiasm) the excellent books we profiled in 2024 on the Revealer podcast:

*The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon. Revealer podcast episode: “Ex-Evangelicals and U.S. Politics.”

*God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music by Leah Payne. Revealer podcast episode: “Contemporary Christian Music’s Political and Religious Messages.”

*Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right by Neil Young. Revealer podcast episode: “LGBTQ Republicans.”

*Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media by Rosemary Pennington. Revealer podcast episode: “Muslims in Pop Culture.”

*Sanctuary People: Faith-Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities by Gina Pérez. Revealer podcast episode: “Latino Faith-Based Activism and the New Sanctuary Movement.”

*Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy by Jonathan Branfman. Revealer podcast episode: “Jewish Bodies and Jewish Celebrities.”

*Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine by Oren Kroll-Zeldin. Revealer podcast episode: “Jewish Solidarity with the Pro-Palestine Protests.”

*The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy by Matthew D. Taylor. Revealer podcast episode: “Christian Nationalism, Charismatic Christians, and Political Violence.”

*The Contemporary Black Church: The New Dynamics of African American Religion by Jason E. Shelton. Revealer podcast episode: “The Changing Black Church.”

*Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools by Leslie Beth Ribovich. Revealer podcast episode: “Public School Secularization and Desegregation.”

*Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness by Kaya Oakes. Revealer podcast episode: “The Limits of Forgiveness.”

Happy reading!

The post The Revealer’s Winter Reading Recommendations appeared first on The Revealer.

(Scene of Maika Monroe in Longlegs)

When Longlegs, the Satanic horror thriller from writer-director Osgood Perkins, arrived in theaters in July 2024, many critics lauded it as the scariest movie of the year, even of the decade. But in a year that has seen record amounts of anti-trans legislation, the deaths of two pregnant women in Texas due to the state’s anti-abortion laws, and racist lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and sacrificing pets in Springfield, Ohio, I find Hollywood Satanism far less frightening than real-life Christian violence, and Longlegs notable not for its horror, but for the humor with which it skewers Christian conspiracy myths of evil.

As David Frankfurter points out in his book Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, cultures from the ancient Roman Empire to 20^th century Africa have believed in secret evil sects that ritualistically torture, cannibalize, and sacrifice children, often leading to violent scapegoating of vulnerable individuals. A Christian iteration of this myth swept the United States during the Satanic panic of the 1980s. Media, politicians, social workers, and law enforcement promoted the belief that Satanic cultists had infiltrated preschools and daycare centers and subjected children to Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) involving cannibalism, sacrilege, animal sacrifice, and sexual molestation. By 1994, 12,000 claims of SRA had been made, none of them substantiated. Queer people especially suffered, with four lesbian women in San Antonio and a gay 19-year-old teacher’s aide in Massachusetts falsely convicted of child sexual abuse. Some defendants accused of SRA, like New Jersey day care teacher Kelly Michaels, concealed same-sex relationships from juries even when it made their defense more difficult, given the erroneous cultural association of linking queerness with child abuse.

The panic had quieted by the mid-1990s, but many of its tropes resurfaced in 2017 with the QAnon conspiracy, which claimed Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities belonged to a cabal of Satanic pedophiles. A social media crackdown on QAnon-promoting accounts followed the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack, but the movement appears to have had a direct influence on paranoid right-wing narratives around LGBTQ “grooming” in public classrooms. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ press secretary Christina Pushaw framed his controversial 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” curriculum law as an “Anti-Grooming Bill,” and extremist websites like Patriot.win and news outlets like Fox News have accused parents and teachers who seek to validate trans children’s identities of being pedophiles.

Clearly, Christian myths of evil conspiracy have had a pervasive and damaging effect on our politics. Yet the entertainment industry often reifies these myths in religious horror movies.  Frankfurter theorizes that evil conspiracy myths arise when globalizing cultures, such as the Roman Empire, the Catholic church, or late capitalism, subsume local religious worlds, reinterpreting local experiences of suffering and misfortune within the framework of demonology. Codified in text, these demonologies become sources of authority for individuals entrusted with discerning and expunging evil. Satanic horror movies from The Exorcist to The Conjuring have perpetuated this myth for modern America, pitting heroic authorities—from Catholic priests to freelance occult investigators—against demonic forces.

At first, Longlegs seems as though it will follow this template. Clairvoyant FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned to investigate a mysterious, decades-long crime spree in which fathers are driven to kill their families and themselves. The mastermind behind the crimes leaves an occult-coded note at each scene, signed “Longlegs.” Through research and supernatural intuition, Harker unravels Longlegs’ identity: a freakish-looking, devil-worshipping, failed glam rocker named Dale Ferdinand Cobble (Nicholas Cage), who drives fathers to kill with black magic-infused dolls.

With her investigative prowess and stoic resolve, Harker at first seems to embody the archetype of expert “discerner of evil.” During the 1980s Satanic panic, such “experts” derived their authority from both secular and spiritual credentials. Evangelical and Catholic charismatic police officers—“cult cops”—claimed the ability to sense the presence of demons, while social workers and psychiatrists claimed expertise through “cursory research in old books on Devil-worship and human sacrifice,” recovered memory therapy techniques, and claims of firsthand victimization by Satanic cultists. Harker possesses many of these credentials: an FBI badge, apparent psychic gifts, familiarity with Biblical scripture and occult books, and firsthand victimization by Cobble, the memory of which she recovers late in the film, in a manner reminiscent of recovered memory therapy.

But in a grimly ironic twist, the movie denies the efficacy of any of these credentials. Harker discovers her outwardly pious mother is an accomplice to Cobble, and she is forced to kill her, while Cobble, who committed suicide to escape punishment, taunts her from beyond the grave, hinting that Satan has rewarded his crimes with immortality. Satan is not a cosmic combatant against God, but an omnipresent trickster spirit whose senseless cruelties cannot be averted by any authority, secular or religious. It is a nihilistic vision, but also a bitterly humorous one, satirizing the false comfort of Satanic panic narratives—the comfort of attributing suffering, including suffering inflicted by sacrosanct institutions like church, state, and family, to an organized conspiracy that can be identified and destroyed.

This subversive humor can also be found in Nicholas Cage’s performance. Frankfurter describes how myths of evil become “real” through the performances of individuals “who act ‘as if’ a Satanic or witch-conspiracy and its core atrocities were actually tangible”—the exorcist-priest performing an exorcism, or the possessed person performing possession—and that such performances inevitably veer into parody: “…the mimetic performance of evil is always parody—critique or caricature—in some sense, because it must operate at a critical distance from the mythic roles it brings into public presence. Distortion, exaggeration, and sometimes even comedy occur in the space of that distance.”

(Nicholas Cage in Longlegs)

Nicholas Cage fans tend to expect some degree of distortion, exaggeration, and comedy in his performances, and his turn as Cobble does not disappoint. Though the character unsettles with his powdered, plastic surgery-ruined face, wheedling voice, and creepy fixation with the “birthday” of any female character, Cage’s mannerisms often caused me to laugh out loud in the theater. While driving in silence down an ominous road through the woods, Cobble abruptly shrieks “Mommy! Daddy! Unmake me, and save me from the hell of living!” at the top of his lungs. The sentiment might be disturbing, but Cage exaggerates the volume and inflection to such an extent that it nearly breaks the fourth wall. In a flashback scene, Lee’s mother confronts Cobble for speaking to a young Lee, demanding to know who he is and what he wants with her daughter. Cage silently and dramatically holds up his hands, performing a series of slow, exaggerated, Tai Chi-like gestures before unexpectedly bursting into song. His lyrics are a chilling, cryptic message of warning, but his bizarre movements and affected vocals inspire laughter. And later, when Harker interrogates an arrested Cobble, Cage contorts and spins in his chair, as though attempting a possessed Linda Blair impression, then menacingly leans forward, adopting self-consciously “scary” voices as he delivers a vaguely sinister word-salad, concluding with a campy “Hail Satan.”

Far from just another hyperbolic display of Cage rage, these excesses arise from Cage performing as an awkward, isolated human character, Cobble, who is in turn seeking to “perform” the mythic role of Satanic killer. In his hideaway in the basement of Lee’s childhood home, we see Cobble engaged in Satanic dollmaking while surrounded by posters of T. Rex and Lou Reed, hinting at his loneliness and failed dreams while also recalling the Satanic panic’s association of rock music with demonic evil. By exaggerating Christian stereotypes of evil—changing voices, wild gesticulations, popular music as a gateway to Satanic crimes—Cage makes those stereotypes seem ridiculous, introducing a level of “critical distance” between the audience and the myth his character seeks to embody, thus making space for parodic humor.

Even so, for all its subversive elements, Longlegs’ conception of evil is disappointingly similar to that found in modern Christian conspiracy myths, from the 1980s panic to the current “groomer” fixation. As in these myths, Longlegs locates the source of evil not within social structures like the nuclear family, patriarchy, or capitalism, but in an omnipresent, irredeemably evil Other. Christian fathers kill their wives and daughters, but these crimes are ascribed to Satan, embodied by a deviant social outsider. The movie’s parodic humor therefore fails to subvert Christian myths of evil. Rather, it reshapes and revitalizes those myths for a disillusioned, secular modern audience.

Such a critique might seem unfairly burdensome for an escapist horror movie, but horror movies have played a considerable role in shaping modern American Christian conceptions of evil. In his book American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty, Michael W. Cuneo points out that demand for exorcisms increased dramatically after the 1970s, which saw the runaway success of films like The Exorcist and books like Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil. Such media influenced representations of the demonic are found in bestselling Satanic ritual abuse memoirs like Michelle Remembers and in the practices and beliefs of a wide range of Christian denominations. According to Cuneo, Catholic charismatic deliverance ministers Father Richard McAlear and Betty Brennan created the practice of “binding spirits” to discourage the Exorcist-influenced performances of their demonically-assailed clients, which tended to involve a great deal of spitting, swearing, and vomiting.

At a time when the Religious Right continues to weaponize such myths of evil against vulnerable populations, including LGBTQ people, horror movies can offer resistance, combatting reactionary discourses of evil with humanistic ones. The psychological horror of Skinamarink, the 2022 feature debut by Canadian filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball, offers an example of what such resistance might look like.

Like Longlegs, Skinamarink is set in the 1990s while playing with 1970s aesthetics, the hazy analog cinematography recalling low-budget horror from the era. Two small children, Kevin and Kaylee, awake in the middle of the night to find their parents missing, and the doors, windows, and objects in their suburban house disappearing. A seemingly supernatural entity has invaded, and subjects the children to escalating physical and emotional torture. Just as in Longlegs, evil triumphs at the end; the children remain trapped within the entity’s clutches, with no understanding of what it is, how to escape, or why it’s claimed them.

(Scene from Skinamarink)

Although the trope of a suburban home possessed by supernatural evil is familiar to the point of cliché, the film complicates the supernatural by depicting it as a psychological reality, rather than a literal one. An opening title card dating the movie to “1995,” coupled with murky visuals, shot from the children’s point of view, suggest a childhood nightmare recalled as an adult. In an early scene, their father mentions on a phone call that Kevin has hurt his head by “falling down the stairs,” leaving open the possibility that the ensuing dreamlike sequence of events expresses a fearful, injured, possibly abused child’s psyche.

The movie makes no references to religion. But the situation—two innocent children condemned to a loop of infinite torture for no discernible reason—reminded me of nothing so much as conceptions of hell, ancient and modern, from St. Augustine’s insistence on the damnation of unbaptized infants to infernally-obsessed denominations like the Westboro Baptist Church and Catholic Traditionalism. By grounding its vision of hell in the psyche rather than in an external, objective realm, the movie not only confronts audiences with the horror of that vision, but raises questions as to how it could come to exist in a child’s mind at all, forcing audiences to reckon with hell as a concept shaped by cultural discourses of evil, rather than as a literal reality.

Watching the descent of two small children into psychological torment, it is impossible not to consider the religious trauma doctrines of hell have inflicted upon queer children, or upon neurodivergent children, for whom ideas of eternal damnation can prove especially distressing. This in turn prompts the viewer to consider how churches can all too often use such concepts to mythologize human-made norms and social arrangements as divinely ordained, and enforce compliance and conformity. In this way, Skinamarink helps us to examine our cultural conceptions of evil with greater clarity, while Longlegs finds new ways to mystify them.

The Satanic panic may have been unfounded, but it led to real suffering, illustrating Frankfurter’s point that “the real atrocities of history seem to take place not in the perverse ceremonies of some evil cult but rather in the course of purging such cults from the world. Real evil happens when people speak of evil.” As Christian nationalism continues to gain power, horror movies like Skinamarink help us to examine how we speak of evil through the myths we take for granted, and thus prevent real evil from coming to pass.

Erik VanBezooijen is a Brooklyn-based journalist and fiction writer. His articles on religion, politics, and culture have appeared in America, Commonweal, Jacobin, and Sublation Magazine, and his fiction has appeared in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores and Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter.

The post Satanic Humor and Religious Horror appeared first on The Revealer.

(Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir in 2005. Image source: Revbilly.com)

I first encountered Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Church at a protest against the war in Iraq in New York City in early 2003. I had just moved from Vermont to intern at the War Resisters League, a secular pacifist organization. As a newcomer to the city, Reverend Billy, the pompadoured “priest,” and his colorful choir were not much stranger than other things I witnessed on New York City’s streets. But they definitely made an impression. Was he a “real” priest? Was this a “real church”? Who was I to say? My horizons were expanding as fast as George W. Bush was rushing the country into war.

While much time has passed since that first encounter, every few years I have seen Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Church again—at Occupy Wall Street, at Black Lives Matter protests, even once at the opening for an art exhibition—and I have remained curious about them. In the ensuing years, I also got a degree in religious studies and became part of The Revealer, where I got to know George González.

González, an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College and the CUNY Grad Center, began his field work with the Stop Shopping Church (SSC) in 2016, and spent four years interviewing, observing, and participating in actions with the group. His book, The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combating Consumerism and Climate Change through Performance (NYU Press, 2024), is richly observed, stylish, and incisive. This book and our conversation about it are connected to previous work we have highlighted in The Revealer about the relationship between both scholarship and activism (see my conversations with Laura McTighe and Janet Jakobsen) and religion and capitalism (see my conversations with Rebecca Bartel and Elayne Oliphant). For this conversation, I wanted to chat with González about the Stop Shopping Church’s unique approach to activism and how the group uses religion to broadcast its messages.

Kali Handelman: Let’s start by establishing some background about the Stop Shopping Church (SSC) and how you came to write a book about the group. What first drew you to the SSC, and what questions compelled your research about them?   

George González: The Stop Shopping Church (a.k.a. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping) refer to themselves as a radical performance community of singing activists. They were co-founded by William Talen, an actor and musician who has been performing as Reverend Billy since the 1990s, and Savitri D, a classically trained dancer and choreographer, who directs the group. The two are partners in art, politics, and life and are parents to a young teenage daughter.

In the group’s early days in the early aughts they were known as the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir. Talen’s original vision was to create a parodic Gospel Choir to accompany his anti-consumerist preaching as Reverend Billy. While they gained prominence as a “fake” choir that critiqued consumer capitalism with the flare of religious zeal, over time they developed into something of their own religious community. That is an important thread of the book.

The Stop Shopping Church is based out of New York City although a satellite group formed in the U.K. in 2022. Recruitment generally happens through word of mouth and through the group’s existing activist and artistic networks. At a minimum, active members of the Stop Shopping Choir commit to three Sunday rehearsals a month. Over the years, the group, whose cohort at any given time ranges between twenty-five and thirty active members, has been remarkably multiracial, queer, and multigenerational. They have sung with folks like Joan Baez and have toured with Pussy Riot and Neil Young. They have performed at festivals around the world; been the subject of the nationally released documentary, What Would Jesus Buy; and targeted the corporate practices of Disney, Starbucks, J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, Walmart, Amazon, and others through street theater, songful protest, and political vaudeville. They have been involved on the ground supporting emerging social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, as well as the protests in Ferguson and at Standing Rock. While maintaining an anti-consumerism core (one of the first members of the group I met told me she hadn’t used a credit card in ten years), today the community also prioritizes racial justice, queer liberation, justice and sanctuary for immigrants, First Amendment issues, the reclaiming of public space for use as the commons, and, most centrally, climate justice.

My interest in the group goes back to the late 1990s, give or take a couple of years. At the time, I was in my mid-20’s and living in NYC. As a young adult, I felt increasing unease about the creep of branding, advertising, and logos into everyday life. I remember having strong feelings that capitalism wanted more from me than I was comfortable giving. For example, in the 1990s, there was a sharp rise in the selling of progressive politics through consumption such as Absolut Vodka’s association with gay causes, a turn that unnerved me as someone who was increasingly interested in and aware of the structural problems and excesses of capitalism. Remember, too, that after 9/11, President Bush and corporate leaders told us that it was our patriotic duty to go shopping. Consumption was explicitly endowed with the obligations of sanctified citizenship. I continued to ponder how capitalism itself functioned as—or at least could be experienced—as religion, whatever that meant to me at the time.

In the book, I argue that, in their own grassroots and performative lingo, the Stop Shoppers have long noted (even before scholars) the co-implications and fusions of religion and economics that ground the cultural logic and authority of neoliberal capitalism. Reverend Billy’s religious drag, one that eventually became second skin, has served as a mirror, reflecting back nominally secular consumer capitalism’s religious appetites and zeal. An early anti-sweatshop action at the dawn of the new millennium had Reverend Billy and members of the Choir process to the flagship Disney Store carrying around large crucified Mickey and Minnie Mouse plush dolls on long sticks to draw attention to Disney’s exploitations.

More generally, though, why dress up as an anti-consumerist preacher, hail fiery sermons of condemnation at the likes of Starbucks and Chase bank, and sing songs about being flooded out of existence? It is to identify capitalism as a religious adversary whose ecological effects are apocalyptic.

I would say that the basic motivations of the book were to investigate why performances of religion became so central to the anti-capitalism of the Church of Stop Shopping to begin with; why religion continued to be the fulcrum that it has been for the group as its work has transformed from its foundational focus on anti-consumerism into a more capacious kind of political ecology; how the group’s relationship with religion has changed over time; and why and how the grassroots activists seem to have beaten most scholars to the punch when it comes to analyzing connections between religion and capitalism.

KH: Why do you think the form and idiom of religion has been so powerful—and challenging—for the Stop Shopping Church?

GG: Understanding the Stop Shopping Church’s powerful but thoroughly anxious attraction to religion is the key to making sense of their diagnoses of both what fundamentally ails society and what might still help turn us away from the abyss. And it is just as central to understanding personal and community tensions that have been there from the start.

It is important to go back to William Talen’s early development of the Reverend Billy character in the 1990s and Savitri D’s fascinating religious biography and childhood growing up in a commune in Taos, New Mexico. To make much longer stories short, Talen speaks openly about how and why he considers the Dutch Calvinist religious world he grew up in traumatic. Originally, the character of Reverend Billy was conceived as a spoof on conservative televangelists like Jimmy Swaggert, the rhetoric of Don Wildmon and the Moral Majority, and celebrity culture—the telegenic performances of Elvis, in particular. The goal was to grind together the two fundamentalisms Talen saw that drove American society: conservative Christian Evangelical Protestantism and celebrified consumerism. I read the parody—its exaggerated delivery, bright white preacher suit with boots for the battle, golden pompadour, fire and brimstone sermons about the evils of Mickey Mouse as the antichrist—as a strategy to bring attention to the religious character and passions of consumer capitalism. At first, Talen was hesitant, in his own words, to “even spoof a Christian” given his background. However, he eventually became so identified with Reverend Billy that even he and Savitri D eventually had to concede that, like it or not, he had in many ways transformed into the persona.

(Rev. Billy in 2011. Image Source: David Shankbone/Wikipedia)

Even though Revered Billy is not an ordained minister, people commonly treat him as such: mothers approach Reverend Billy to bless their children, progressive clergy invite him to join a confab at a rally for immigrant justice, frightened souls look to him for comfort in the immediate aftermath of tragedy.

Savitri D believes religion came upon Reverend Billy following things like 9/11 and the deep pain and suffering of the Great Recession in 2008. Such moments demanded care work that was “sincere” and “direct.” While he first came on the scene as a provocateur who poked fun at the spell capitalism hold over us, today Reverend Billy’s fiery sermons are an expression of the power of the group’s sincere ecological convictions and exhortations to change or be drowned out of existence.

For her part, Savitri D’s parents were Greenwich Village bohemian artists who, she will tell you, were proto-hippies who helped model a countercultural way of life that was later taken up by the Baby Boom generation. In 1967, Savitri D’s father, then known as Stephen Durkee, and her mother, then known as Barbara Durkee, co-founded the Lama Foundation, a New Age spiritual retreat center and intentional community near Taos, New Mexico. But her father eventually switched course, converted to Islam, separated from his wife, and founded a Sufi Islamic community. Savitri D’s mother, who adopted the name Asha Greer, stayed on at the Lama Foundation until she passed away a couple of years ago, and was known for blending hospice work and practices of meditative silence. Among other consequences and effects, Savitri D credits her experiences growing up at her parent’s commune among the Taos Pueblo with teaching her vital lessons about how to care for and sustain the natural world.

Today, Savitri D admits to having an inward-dwelling “spiritual life” but does not often talk about it in public so as not to distract from her activism. Nevertheless, she often grounds the work of the Stop Shopping Church in a respect for “the fabulous Unknown” and “living the question”: that is, the mysteries of life that remain at the limits of human understanding and control.

Life at the Church of Stop Shopping can look a lot like what one sees in a traditionally religious congregation. In addition to meeting for weekly rehearsals of their songs (what they call their “hymnal”), performing at festivals, and engaging in charged moments of political street theater to support their activist causes, the Stop Shoppers take care of one another. In addition to child care, moving assistance, professional networking help, and clothing swaps, I have seen the Choir perform and do service for each other. If a member is in the hospital or laid out low, other members will bring them food and books to read.  Savitri D and Reverend Billy have also established a modest emergency fund to assist Choir members with the kinds of dire financial emergencies that can arise so easily living in New York City.

Community life within the Stop Shopping Church presents other messy complications when it comes to religion. Members I interviewed identified themselves as Marxist atheists, “crystal-loving” New Ageists, cultural Jews, recovering Catholics, practicing Episcopalians, and “spiritual but not religious.” Some members want the community to lean further into its religious composition. There are also members who admit to holding personal trauma around their experiences with traditional religion, so much so that the very concept of “religion” can sometimes serve as a “trigger.” During the course of my fieldwork, it became clear to me that there is also always a worry among the group’s leadership that if they come across as too warm on religion, it runs the risk of alienating the old school activists who are the group’s core, most devoted audience.

All that said, the Stop Shoppers are keenly aware of the fact that the catastrophes before us, especially around climate, cannot be resolved by doubling down on scientific reason to the exclusion of art, emotional life, and ritual. The values and commitments that will need to drive the transformations of self and society around climate, the group believes, can only be brought into being ritually, within community, through the cultivation of new habits, and repeated social action in the world. The Stop Shoppers sometimes call themselves a “secular” church in order to signal to audiences who don’t know them yet that they are not a Christian group. If one pays close attention, however, it is clear the Church of Stop Shopping exists between religion and the secular. This is why they sometimes speak of themselves as working toward a “post-religious religious” future wherein a heretofore unknown “Earthy religion” corrects what consumerism has distorted and destroyed.

KH: Can you tell us about what the SSC calls the “Shopacalypse”? What is it, and how does it connect to their stated mission of Earth Justice?

GG: For the group, the Shopocalypse basically refers to the cultural system of consumer capitalism and calls our attention to the intoxicating and ecologically destructive way of life it ritualizes. With the fury of recent hurricanes like Helene and Milton, catastrophic drought in the Sudan, and the forest fires that perpetually threaten the Amazon, the Stop the Shoppers understand that the Shopocalypse is already here. We are living it, and the group is asking us what they take to be the most urgent questions: Do we want to survive it? If so, when will we choose to transform ourselves and our way of life since it is already the case that time has begun to run out? They themselves don’t aspire to enter the halls of institutional power but, rather, see their work as a provocation to reckon, at gut emotional levels, with our entanglements with the natural world. They seek to light the imaginative spark that leads to our personal and then collective transformations.

(What Would Jesus Buy movie poster. Image Source: Warrior Poets, 2007/Wikipedia)

In their estimation, the basic moral move of “Earth Justice,” humanity’s most fundamental liberation project, is to recognize that we are not separate from the natural world and that, as such, saving ourselves and adopting a position of justice for the Earth are actually one and the same thing. The Protestant and Protestant-informed secular assumption that humanity stands apart and above the natural world as its steward (and owner) is a logic that must be overcome. In his sermons, Reverend Billy prophetically hails these truths at his flock of consumers: we are the Category 5 storm threatening our complacent horizons; the ecological effects of our consumption boomerang back at us, bringing together nature, economy, and politics in a dangerous brew.

As a constellation of ideas, the Shopcalypse is also a bridge connecting the group’s early anti-consumerism with their focus today on what they call “Earth Justice and Extinction.” One obvious way this is the case is that they draw the necessary connections between carbon emissions, warming seas, extreme weather, extractive industry and species extinction, consumption, and the plastics that have made a home inside human lungs. Accompanying the transformation of the Choir and of Reverend Billy from their original grounding in parodic performance to today’s eco-sincerity, is a reorganization of categories and separations that we are culturally taught to take for granted: religion, art, politics, economy, and nature. The earlier, more parodic performances (like the ritual crucifixions of the Disney mice) sought to exorcise the demons of consumerism from our bodies. They were designed to make us step away from all the advertising. Today, when the group enters a Chase bank branch with a blue tarp and with it mimes the rhythms of the sea, they are ritually conjuring forth, not away. Their hope is to imaginatively reintroduce an awareness of the natural world back into our bodies and back into the scenes of nominally economic performances that ritualize a disappearance of financial capitalism’s implications with and disastrous effects on ecosystems.

KH:  After spending so much time observing and thinking about this group for the past several years, what do you think are some of their most important messages for today?

One very basic take-away is that grassroots activists can be brilliant theorizers, social critics, and organic intellectuals in their own right. The dichotomous idea that academics analyze and activists act is overdrawn from the start.

The almost quarter century legacy of the Church of Stop Shopping offers some important lessons for our moment today. Their primary insistence that consumption is a ritual technology of social control—religion as social control—reminds us that our fun and games are always and already political. The attachments of desire that connect us to Disney, Starbucks, and the cultural narratives of Chase Bank have powerful implications for the fates of global labor, geopolitics, and the environment. The group’s performances have always cut past the smokescreens that divide economics, politics, and entertainment from one another. The cultural form of contemporary neoliberal capitalism is, of course, branding, which represents the economy’s religious subsumption of aesthetics and psychology. The Stop Shoppers have been mapping and outlining the shape of branded “post-secular” capitalism for decades.

Trumpism, for example, represents the branding of the American presidency. While it is important to consider how Christian nationalism and historical and systemic racism and patriarchy have contributed to Trump’s ascendency for a second time to the Presidency, I think the Church of Stop Shopping’s focus on performance is vital to understanding Trump’s iconic power, to allude to religion scholar Kathryn Lofton’s analysis of “consuming religion.” The deep histories of race, gender, and class that we certainly need to analyze and engage are psychically and linguistically refracted through lived experience—which is also how branding works. While political commentary has often focused on “RACE! PATRIARCHY! CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM! CAPITALISM!” in the analysis of Trumpism, the lived meanings of all of these should be analyzed via the well-worn scripts that format our proliferating American cultural industries (for example, the spiritualized mythologies of the heroic, mold-breaking entrepreneur) and our basic human desire to belong, a fundamental need that Reverend Billy sermonizes actually stands behind much of our shopping behavior. We need to avoid too much arch abstraction in our social analysis and, as the Stop Shoppers have always done, engage with power as a sensuous practice—as the religion of everyday life.

Kali Handelman is an academic editor and writing coach based in New York City.

George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital: Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project.

The post Parodying and Using Religion to Try to Save the Planet appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: ACLU)

How many must suffer or die until reproductive healthcare is made available and legal to all? This question, powerfully present in the recent election, has been asked in various forms about contraception and abortion for well over a century in the United States. What’s more, making the harms caused by abortion bans and contraception bans visible has been a longstanding strategy in the ongoing campaign for reproductive freedoms. But this effort, today, as in the past, has taken place against the backdrop of pervasive hostility toward women and toward gender equality.

Earlier this year, the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2024 American Values Survey saw 44% of respondents agree or strongly agree that, “Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine.” Their findings were echoed by a CBS News/Yougov poll wherein 43% of men indicated that “efforts in the U.S to promote gender equality have gone too far.”

This misogyny informed the election and its outcome. Kamala Harris made restoring reproductive rights to American women a pillar of her presidential campaign. Her opponent gloated that he had overturned Roe v. Wade. Harris’ campaign spotlighted the physical and psychological harms inflicted upon women because of abortion restrictions. Her opponent simulated oral sex on a microphone during a rally but was silent on the public health crisis created by Dobbs v. Jackson.

The visibility given to abortion seekers and their suffering during this election season was unprecedented in the U.S. But the deliberate sharing of women’s stories in order to effect change has a long religious and feminist history. In 1967, for example, Christianity and Crisis published an article by the Reverend Howard Moody in which he railed against the country’s abortion restrictions. Moody gave powerful examples of how abortion laws punished sexual assault survivors and those with non-viable pregnancies.

(Rev. Howard Moody. Image source: Village Preservation)

To dramatize the barbarity of such laws, Moody envisioned a future in which abortion prohibitions no longer existed. A citizen of the 22nd century, he imagined, would come upon the “remains of American civilization” and be baffled and horrified by “archaic” abortion laws that “somehow seemed designed to protect human beings” but were in fact nothing more and nothing less than an “unforgivably cruel punishment” directed at women and “stemming from some inexplicable hostility on the part of men.”

An American Baptist, Moody was just one of many mainline Protestant and Jewish clergy who wrote and agitated against the “gross injustice of an inhuman” abortion law in the 1960s. These religious leaders were themselves participants in a wider conversation among journalists, lawyers, social workers, and politicians about how abortion laws created a sea of suffering and preventable deaths while making women into second-class citizens. And for decades prior, these same groups had called attention to the plight of women being denied contraception. Women’s emancipation, they knew, depended upon their reproductive freedom.

When Howard Moody called for the eradication of abortion laws in the pages of Christianity and Crisis, he was working within a religious tradition that taught people of faith to respond to injustice by bearing witness to and challenging the systems inflicting suffering. In the early 1960s, the suffering of both abortion seekers and those compelled to bear unwanted children was shrouded in silence and secrecy. Bringing these hidden harms to light, clergy believed, would provoke righteous indignation and social transformation. As one religious organization–the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion–put it, the aim was to “bring light and hope to the thousands of people who suffer — usually in quiet, and sometimes in death — the miseries and heartbreak of backstreet abortions.”

Such abortion rights efforts yielded victories, if uneven ones, first at the state level and then at the Supreme Court. After Roe, advocacy groups and scholars documented the not-so-hidden histories of how abortion restrictions violently impact women. The haunting images of women like Gerri Santoro—who died from a botched abortion in a motel room—have been ubiquitous for decades. Projects like Shout Your Abortion have painstakingly recorded women’s histories with abortion. And journalists have broadcast the perils of abortion seeking in a post-Dobbs world. The archive of suffering is vast and visible, and it is growing.

The process of bearing witness assumes that those who are forced to look at suffering will offer compassion. The abortion wars of the past half century have pivoted on the question of who should be given compassion, the mother or the fetus. Indeed, the anti-abortion movement has, through powerful visual rhetoric, literally foregrounded fetuses in hopes of erasing women from the picture.

But no amount of graphic fetal imagery has completely excised the grim and very-well-known truths about what happens to women when abortion is a crime. That the brutal consequences of abortion restrictions have been apparent and tolerable, if not desirable, to significant swaths of the American population brings us to a miserable and heartbreaking if obvious fact. Nested in the fetal images, which are meant to compel compassion toward the unborn, is a malignant hatred of women’s freedom.

The words of the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina made as much plain: “Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” And that misogyny, which was barely subtext before Dobbs, has erupted in the wake of the election. The phrase “Your body my choice”—a rebuttal of the reproductive rights mantra—has caught on in right wing circles in recent days.

More than half a century ago, it was revelatory when Howard Moody declared that abortion restrictions were “man’s vengeance on woman” even as he dreamed of a day when gender equality would prevail. With the election of a candidate whose abuse of women is well known, who campaigned on the fact that he engineered the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and who has returned to power promising his base that he would be their “warrior” and their agent of “retribution,” it is apparent that cruelty toward and the suffering of women is the point. A future in which misogyny and reproductive bondage are a thing of the past feels farther away than ever.

Gillian Frank is an Assistant Professor in the History of the Modern United States at Trinity College Dublin. His book, A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v Wade, is forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press.

The post This Future Must Not Be Forever appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Jorge Salcedo/Shutterstock)

“I used to say, ‘I’m a Republican – no ifs, ands, or buts,’” said Summer (pseudonyms used throughout this article), an evangelical Christian who runs a food pantry for resettled refugees in the Midwest. “Now, I don’t even know what I am,” she laughed. Summer started volunteering with a faith-based refugee resettlement agency over a decade ago. She has since helped to set up apartments for new arrivals, provided transportation to grocery stores and doctors’ appointments, and taught English to resettled refugees. Now, she runs the resettlement agency’s food pantry program, which provides culturally appropriate groceries for upwards of 60 families per month.

Recalling the array of anti-immigrant policies enacted during the first Trump presidential administration, she reflected, “I didn’t agree with how Trump was treating the immigrants, but then, I had friends that were like ‘well, he’s doing a good thing’ that go to the same church that I do.”

Summer says her experience with resettled refugees has changed the way that she thinks about immigration. “I grew up in a white town, a small town,” she explained. “A lot of white Christians stay in their own bubble, and they lose the empathy for people different than them because they isolate.” But after building relationships with resettled families from Sudan, Myanmar, and Cuba, Summer could not ignore the effects of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies on the lives of her immigrant friends—policies that sowed fear, stoked xenophobia, and further marginalized many, such as Muslim immigrants.

When Donald Trump ran again for president in 2020, Summer reconsidered her vote, and found that her political opinions differed significantly from close family and friends: “They’re like, ‘well, you’ve got to vote Republican’—and I’m like, ‘No, you don’t. You’ve got to think about everything, the [candidate], and what exactly they’re standing for.’”

While some American evangelical groups have welcomed refugees and other immigrants for decades, recent years have seen a hardening of political opinion on immigration in the U.S., with white evangelicals consistently polling as the demographic with the most restrictive and negative views. In 2016, nearly 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, a candidate synonymous with xenophobic rhetoric and restrictive immigration policies. Exit polling suggests that former President Trump received similar levels of electoral support from this demographic again in 2024. Yet across the country, evangelical Christians like Summer work to aid asylum seekers, welcome immigrants into their communities, and resettle refugees. These welcoming actions, often undertaken at significant cost to volunteers’ own time or financial resources, quietly complicate homogenous xenophobic characterizations of American evangelicalism and divisive national politics.

Since 2016, I have interviewed over 50 evangelical Christians who volunteer or are employed with refugee resettlement activities. What I have learned is that although the Biblical directive to “welcome the stranger” is clear, American evangelicals differ on what it looks like to obey this command today—and exactly who should be responsible for providing this “welcome.” They also wrestle with how their faith should affect their politics, often coming to divergent conclusions about how to weigh their experiences with immigrants as they formulate their political opinions about immigration policy.

***

The United States has historically hosted the largest refugee resettlement program in the world, working with the United Nations’ refugee agency to resettle some of the world’s most vulnerable refugees. Although refugee resettlement has enjoyed relative levels of support among most Americans since the 1980s, the U.S. resettlement program became increasingly politicized in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Following the onset of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, the number of people forcibly displaced by conflict around the world soared to record-breaking heights. By 2014, international news media was heralding a global “refugee crisis,” as thousands of refugees from North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean sought passage to Europe in search of safety. In response, President Obama announced in September 2015 that the United States would expand that year’s resettlement admissions ceiling to include 10,000 additional Syrian refugees.

In November 2015, a group of terrorists, some of whom entered the European Union falsely claiming to be Syrian refugees, perpetrated a devastating attack in Paris. Within days of the attack, 31 U.S. governors declared that their states would not accept Syrian refugees. Then-candidate Donald Trump seized on the chance to advance his anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric, characterizing Syrian refugees as a “great Trojan horse” and casting aspersions on the security of the refugee vetting process. A mere seven days after his 2016 presidential inauguration, President Trump issued a series of executive orders aimed at halting the refugee resettlement program and curtailing immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.

The so-called “Muslim Ban” sparked immediate controversy. Within hours, protests against the ban erupted in airports and major U.S. cities. Legal challenges to its implementation began immediately as advocacy groups filed suits against the administration to halt the order. Two days after the ban’s announcement, leaders of prominent evangelical groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals, the Wesleyan Church, and World Vision, among others, wrote an open letter to President Trump and Vice President Pence asking that the administration “reconsider” the policy, “allowing for resettlement of refugees to resume immediately.” Despite such pushback, Pew Research found that 76 percent of white evangelical Protestants approved of the ban, more than any other socio-religious group. Meanwhile, 59 percent of Americans opposed the ban.

Yet the Muslim Ban was not welcomed as a political victory by all evangelicals. Instead, many evangelicals responded by seeking to learn more about refugees to the United States, what happens once they arrive, and how to welcome them. World Relief, a national evangelical resettlement agency, reported over 6,000 new volunteer applications in 2017 alone. Jenny Yang, the organization’s former Vice President of Advocacy and Policy, described this “overwhelming response” as a result of “people desiring to act locally in response to the global refugee crisis.”

Other evangelical resettlement efforts experienced a similar surge in interest. I spoke with Naomi, a volunteer coordinator at a local evangelical organization in Kentucky that offered post-resettlement support to refugees. She recalled the tumultuous political environment of 2016, explaining that her organization had experienced an uptick in negative feedback via online comments and phone calls during the election season. Local detractors, many of them evangelicals, questioned why a Christian organization would spend time and money to welcome refugees from “Muslim countries” to their city.

Yet after the January 2017 Muslim Ban, the organization began to experience a significant increase in donations and volunteer interest from evangelical churches and individuals. “The Ban itself is a terrible thing,” Naomi said, but “we’ve had a lot more people wanting to get involved [in resettlement work].” She understood this shift to be a result of increased awareness about global displacement among evangelicals in her town: “[The] refugee crisis is more in the media, people have learned more about [refugees] and they’re just more empathetic toward refugees, so they’re more willing to give towards causes that help.”

By the end of 2017, the organization saw 55 congregations and over 750 new volunteers across Kentucky get involved in resettlement support work. Nathan, the organization’s director, viewed this new volunteer interest as directly related to recent attacks on refugees and the resettlement system during Trump’s first year in office. “We didn’t expect it to be like that, this kind of explosion of volunteers and people being willing to help,” he explained. In retrospect, he reasoned that the Trump administration’s polarizing rhetoric and anti-immigrant policies, like the Muslim Ban, had catalyzed more evangelicals to get involved with helping immigrants in their local communities. “Now people are like, ‘Okay, I have to make a decision now on how I feel about this, and I feel like I need to take some action.’” Yet in 2017, it remained unclear if this unprecedented outpouring of evangelical resettlement volunteerism would significantly influence white evangelicals’ electoral choices or political behavior.

***

As evangelicals across the country entered resettlement work to “take some action,” as Nathan put it, many encountered the difficult realities of resettlement for the first time, a far cry from the primarily white, suburban, evangelical circles in which most reside. Many evangelicals I talked to found it challenging to reflect on their experiences in resettlement without recounting how this work had shifted their perspectives on immigration.

Some, like Summer, have experienced a transformation in their political opinions after serving immigrants and refugees in their communities. Others, although moved to compassion, are reluctant to connect their experiences to any overt political stance.

Evelyn, an evangelical employee at a Christian resettlement non-profit in Illinois, shared her frustration that her family and friends have a “stigma” about immigrants. “I never really got that, because in the Bible there are so many important figures that were immigrants themselves, and refugees.”

Evelyn spends her days connecting refugee clients with employment opportunities and helps educate community members about resettlement. She shared that her faith values and a desire to help those in need motivated her work, and that she is frustrated by the lack of empathy for immigrants in her evangelical community. Instead of their shared faith informing how her family and friends see immigrants, she feels that politics hold sway instead. “Really, it’s [their] political view seeping into their faith. And that’s not how it should be.”

Although many evangelicals like Evelyn see a clear connection between the tenets of their Christian faith and their efforts to meet resettled refugees’ needs, few interpret the Biblical command to welcome the stranger as having implications for their political behavior.

When asked how her faith and resettlement experiences shape her opinions on immigration policy, she equivocated, saying instead, “God himself is not political. So why should I be political when it comes to that?”

(Image source: Adam McLane/Flickr)

Many evangelicals I talked to shared how their experiences with resettled refugees challenged them to reconsider their previous concerns about immigration. Trevor, a self-identified evangelical and law enforcement professional, volunteers regularly with a faith-based refugee resettlement agency in Iowa. “It is pretty polarized, even here,” he said. “Even in the church circles, people can be anti-refugee.” Reflecting on his volunteer experience, Trevor says he began with a “superficial level” of compassion. But once he began to connect with refugees and learn from their experiences, his concept of immigration evolved from an abstract understanding to one based in witnessing the challenges of resettlement firsthand—“It was theoretical before, [but] now it’s the real thing.”

While Trevor believes Christians have a moral responsibility to welcome immigrants, he is wary of policy changes that would seek to significantly increase the number of immigrants and refugees in the country. Like many other evangelicals, he supports the idea of compassionate immigration policy. “I am my brother’s keeper,” he quotes, echoing similar sentiments from dozens of others who spoke with me. But, as with many other evangelicals I met, Trevor remains undecided as to what this compassion should look like in practice. “You’ve got to embrace your limits. You can’t help everybody all the time,” he said, referring to the resettlement program.

Other evangelicals oppose policies that bring immigrants to the United States but choose to show hospitality to newcomers to their local communities nevertheless, welcoming refugees in spite of, rather than because of, their personal politics. Rachel, a volunteer with an evangelical resettlement organization in Illinois, was motivated to join resettlement efforts in her area following new waves of displaced people from Ukraine and Afghanistan as a result of escalating conflicts in those countries between 2021 and 2022.

Despite her desire to help refugees displaced by those violent conflicts, Rachel told me that she has serious concerns about security in the immigrant admissions process and wants to see “some sort of, throttle—to control, [not] letting [just] anyone in, because of the consequences to America, if just a billion people decide they want to live here.” She remained concerned that the resettlement process, especially for Afghans arriving on humanitarian visas, does not sufficiently vet the backgrounds and motivations of potential newcomers. “Just because they [Afghan refugees] helped America, they must be a good person […] that’s an inaccurate assumption,” she said.

Despite reservations about resettlement policy and concerns about security, she doesn’t believe her political opinions should influence her interactions with immigrants, nor do they prevent her from working to welcome recently arrived refugees as a volunteer. “I believe that regardless of how [refugees] got here, they are here. And they are not just in America. They are in my town,” she explained (emphasis original). She insisted that her politics do not govern the imperative to show hospitality to newcomers in Jesus’ name.

Rachel’s decision to volunteer with refugees has garnered mixed responses from her evangelical family and friends. “I haven’t had many people come out and say disparaging things,” she says, but, “political comments are made.” Her response? “I always go back to the fact that these are human beings that are here, regardless of how they got here.” Although emphasizing the humanity of resettled refugees, Rachel’s position sidesteps larger political implications by focusing on individualized, local needs rather than broader systemic causes or policies.

Like Rachel, some evangelicals ignore the political implications of their work, instead focusing on the physical and “spiritual” needs of refugees. Kate, an evangelical employee of a faith-based non-profit, told me that she was initially drawn to resettlement work because she imagined that she would have the opportunity to “spread the name of Jesus” among refugees who are arriving in the United States. However, after learning more about the resettlement process, she was quick to clarify that volunteers are not allowed to proselytize, which she defined as “[saying] ‘if you don’t believe what I believe, then I’m not going to help you,” Instead, Kate seeks to share her faith by “showing love,” but eschews any form of overt evangelism or coercion in her work, saying that such an approach would not be “Biblical” at all.

Regardless of how evangelicals make sense of their resettlement experiences, I found that few carry their convictions about immigration through to meaningful political action or advocacy, instead containing their experiences at the level of personal transformation rather than political engagement. These evangelicals argue that it is not the government but “the Church” (and “believers,” or evangelical Christians), who are best suited to welcome the stranger in the U.S. today, regardless of who wins an election.

Reuben, an evangelical pastor-turned-resettlement-entrepreneur, helps to run a post-resettlement support organization in the southeast United States. Reuben’s organization works to “fill the gaps” in the federal resettlement program by providing long-term support such as vocational training, language and citizenship classes, and continuing education to refugees. During Trump’s first administration, his organization grew significantly, working to welcome refugees into their local area despite significant cuts to the resettlement system and restrictive federal immigration policies.

While Reuben and his volunteers are well aware of the limitations of the federal resettlement program and the Trump administration’s disruptive executive actions, the organization’s ethos embodies a different response. Rather than advocate for better or more inclusive immigration and resettlement policy, Reuben does not believe the solutions lie in political action—instead, “the Church” should fill the gap. “There is no one who’s better equipped to show hospitality and welcome than a [Christian] believer,” he argues. Echoing a common refrain in evangelical theology, God has forgiven and “welcomed” people into his own family through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

In this view, resettlement agencies, government programs, and immigration policies should not ultimately be responsible for welcoming immigrants and meeting the needs of resettled refugees—instead, because Christian believers have “themselves been welcomed by God,” Reuben and other evangelicals I talked to argue that it is not primarily the responsibility of the government or of federal programs to welcome the stranger; rather, they interpret the Biblical directive to welcome the stranger as a command that has been given directly to Christians. “We just think that they [government programs] don’t have the capacity […] like a believer does,” Reuben explains.

***

In 2020, exit polls indicated sweeping support for then-candidate Trump among white evangelicals, with somewhere between 76 and 81 percent casting their vote for the former president. And in 2024, these levels of electoral support remained unchanged—nearly 81 percent of white evangelicals voted again for President Trump, preliminary polls show. Despite pushback from some evangelical leaders and institutions, and a surge of white evangelicals interested in welcoming immigrants during the first Trump administration, overall white evangelical support for Trump, and his exclusionary immigration policies, remains high.

Rather than voting for politicians and policies that would serve to better “welcome the stranger,” evangelicals involved in resettlement primarily choose to translate their convictions, concerns, and compassion about immigration issues into individual action that takes the form of localized volunteer efforts.

This type of resettlement work typically requires effort, a sacrifice of time and money, and a willingness to encounter and empathize with individuals from different backgrounds. And evangelicals who work closely with immigrants and refugees in these roles are quick to expound on how these encounters have changed their own lives and perspectives.

Yet even believers united by a shared faith and moved to take common action in the form of local resettlement work arrive at conflicting conclusions about what the Biblical command to “welcome the stranger” should mean personally and politically. For many white evangelicals, even profound personal experiences with immigrants and refugees do not appear to be enough to sever their ties with anti-immigrant Republican Party politics.

These differences point to the fact that appeals to common beliefs or even “Biblical directives” are not guaranteed to mobilize evangelicals to act on pro-immigrant politics or form a cohesive welcoming movement.

Emily Frazier is an assistant professor of human geography at Missouri State University. She researches and writes about refugee resettlement and faith-based humanitarianism in the United States, and her work has been published in multiple academic and public-facing outlets.

The post To Evangelical Christians, What Does it Mean to “Welcome the Stranger”? appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

On the first night of Hanukkah, which falls on December 25 this year, Jews around the world will recite the Shehecheyanu prayer, a blessing for special occasions. The short prayer expresses gratitude for “life… and for reaching this moment of joy.” The Shehecheyanu is my mom’s favorite prayer, even though she is not religious. When we light our candles “together” over FaceTime or Zoom with my husband, she is always the one who recites that blessing on the first night of Hanukkah. That moment is a special one for me. With the candle lighting that follows, it ritually marks the moment as unique and reminds me to be grateful for reaching it. Occurring as it does in the winter season, it often pushes me to reflect on the past (secular calendar) year and the coming new one.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The past year has been one of many challenges. From the horrific war in Gaza to the U.S. election, the past twelve months have been devastating for many. At the same time, for many people, this year was also one of hope where millions believed Vice President Kamala Harris would be our next President. Now, following the election, many people feel a sense of hopelessness. And while I understand that feeling, I have been trying to remind myself why I held on to hope in the first place and why so many others did the same. After all, fascism thrives when masses only feel despair, so I am refusing to give up hope even as I know the coming years will be difficult ones.

With those ideas in mind, The Revealer’s December issue is about taking stock of the past year and preparing for the next. The issue opens with Emily Frazier’s “To Evangelical Christians, What Does It Mean to ‘Welcome the Stranger’?” where she investigates the surge in white evangelicals who have been working to support immigrants to the United States, and whether or not that work has an impact on their politics. Next, in “This Future Must Not Be Forever,” Gillian Frank reflects on how the recent battles over abortion reveal a long history of cultural misogyny and distrust of women’s freedom that remains pervasive today. Then, in “Parodying and Using Religion to Try to Save the Planet,” Kali Handelman interviews George González about his new book, The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism, and what an anti-consumerism and anti-capitalism group can teach us about protecting our planet rather than worshipping at the altars of corporations. Next, in “Satanic Humor and Religious Horror,” Erik VanBezooijen explores the films Longlegs and Skinamarink, reflecting on what they might say about the real horrors of our day connected to Christian nationalism and conservative Christian conspiracy theories.

Our December issue also includes some recommendations. For the sixth year, we are happy to present our “Winter Reading Recommendations” of books by Revealer writers that we think you will enjoy. And, this year we also created a “Winter Articles We Love” list of our all-time favorite articles about the December holidays that we have published in The Revealer that remain relevant (and moving and insightful) today.

The December issue also includes two new episodes of the Revealer podcast. The first, “Public School Secularization and Desegregation” takes us on a history lesson to explore the Supreme Court decisions that outlawed prayer in public schools and racial segregation. Leslie Beth Ribovich joins us to discuss the legacies of those decisions, how religion remained in public schools, and what to make of current debates over religion and race in America’s schools. Then, in “The Limits of Forgiveness,” Kaya Oakes joins us to discuss the cultural pressures to forgive people who wronged us and Christianity’s connections to those pressures. We also explore how religious institutions, like the Catholic church and the Southern Baptist Convention, have sought forgiveness when they have harmed people. And we discuss possible models for forgiveness when one has been harmed by a religious institution or by another individual. You can listen to both episodes on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As 2024 comes to a close, and as my family lights our Hanukkah candles, I will heed the words of the Shehecheyanu blessing and be thankful for “reaching this moment of joy” even as the moment feels complicated. Rather than focus on despair, I shall take in the joy of being with loved ones and use that strength as we head into the new year. I will also take the insights from the articles and podcast episodes we have published in The Revealer this year as I think about how best to proceed in the next. And in doing those things, like the Hanukkah candles themselves, I hope to find, and I hope you find, light in the darkness.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

P.S. We do not publish a January issue, so we will be back in early February with a new issue of The Revealer!

The post Editor’s Letter: Taking Stock of the Past Year and Preparing for the Next appeared first on The Revealer.