On a phone call the other day with a new friend, Zay, we ended up on the topic of religion. “Did you attend madrasah?” I asked her, referring to the Arabic schools that offer primary and secondary education where subjects like the linguistic characteristics of Arabic and Islamic theology and jurisprudence are taught.

She responded yes, but that she no longer remembers most of the things she was taught there. “I can still write my name in Arabic, I can still write Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem, and oh, yeah, I can still write some of the 99 names of Allah,” Zay said.

Zay’s experience is reflective of people of my generation in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where I’m from. Most only attended madrasah when they were young, before dumping it when they emerged more fully into life. Some, like Zay, told me they ran away from madrasah because their teachers, or ustadhs, flogged them too fiercely. But others told me that they dropped out to focus on their Western education, which they knew was the more economically sound path.

For me, balancing these two schools of knowledge has always seemed normal and natural. Growing up, I attended Western school Monday through Friday and attended madrasah on Saturdays and Sundays. The reason my experience was different was thanks to my father, who spent his life promoting Arabic and Islamic learning in Nigeria. The more I’ve learned about his efforts, the more I’ve realized why it meant so much for him to encourage Nigerians to be proud to speak Arabic, and study at madrasah, rather than let this education fall by the wayside in a country where there is little profitable motivation to pursue it.

In the 1960s, the author’s father established the Arabic studies school at the family house in Iwo. Courtesy of author.

Growing up, I knew, even as much as my mother tried to conceal it from me, that my father had died when I was still in her stomach. As I got older, I started to ask for more information. When I was 10, she pointed at an old landscape photo that hung above the window of our living room. In the picture, my father, a Black, plump man, is standing amid Arab men, smiling. Later, when I was 15, I came across an undated, self-published book my father wrote, titled “The Presence of Arabic Language and the Religion of Islam in Southwest Nigeria.” In the introduction, he observed that Christian missionaries were “snatching the children of Muslims into their English schools in order to get them to abandon their religion and take up their religion or believe in any other religion.”

To understand what he meant by this, it’s important to understand the history of Islam and Christianity in Nigeria. Both are understood to be colonialist ideologies because Nigeria, before it became Nigeria, had its own traditions. But both belief systems have permeated Nigeria thoroughly (today approximately 51% of the country identifies as Muslim and 47% identifies as Christians).

My father was likely writing in the 1950s, at a time when more students began to leave Arabic schools for English schools. The Christian missionaries, my father posited, were able to sell them on a Western education because it promised them more opportunities for advancement. Arabic studies, at the time, only promised to teach a better understanding of how to worship God—seemingly at odds with a growing and modernizing economy. He recognized that if something didn’t change, it would put the study of Arabic and Islam on a path of gradual erasure in the Nigerian educational system. So, he thought: Let me establish something similar in Arabic so as to attract back the Muslim children.

In the 1960s, he began this work, establishing his own Arabic school, which originally started at the family house in Iwo, before it took on a modern classroom-based learning setting in 1962. He called the school, which I later attended, Markaz Shabaab–l–Islam, or the Islamic Youth Center. Other scholars in the region, like Sheikh Adam Al-Ilory, created similar educational programs to build standards and structure around Arabic studies at the time.

The author’s father (middle) with the students of his school. Courtesy of author.

Despite their work, the present structure of the Nigerian education system offers fewer and fewer opportunities for advancement for those who attend madrasah. That’s why, though the number of Arabic students produced every year in its junior schools equals, if not exceeds, the number of students produced in Western schools, the drop-off point that follows for secondary school is steep. Unlike madrasah, Western schooling offers students an opportunity to dream of, for instance, attaining government or white-collar jobs. When students finish madrasah, there should be something equivalent in the system which guarantees them an application to higher institutions, for instance, without sitting for external examinations, to incentivize further Arabic study.

I think about what it would look like if Nigeria valued Arabic education more and rewarded the efforts of those who are still passionate about learning the language. It is not about Islam, the religion, but Arabic itself, because faith is different from knowledge, just as a Western education is different from Christianity. The way I see it, for the Arabic language to have permeated our culture so thoroughly since its introduction in the 11th century through the northern part of the country, disseminating through trade and migration with North African countries like Egypt and Sudan, makes it even more deserving of study. This is especially the case in a complicated region like the southwest, where our Indigenous language—Yoruba—does not share similar phonemes with Arabic.

Though my father’s struggle was a long time ago, his determination inspires me today; he started his Arabic studies at a young age, learning the rudiments of the Qur’an from his paternal grandfather, Sheikh Bukhari. To learn modern Arabic, he traveled to different Arabic-speaking countries. His first trip, to Saudi Arabia in 1942, came at a time when such a trip necessitated taking camels and horses. When such transportation was not possible, he trekked on foot. What made it worth the struggle? I think the answer is that faith and a thirst for knowledge can be chronic.

Before I read my father’s book, I was unconsciously starting to throw myself wholly into Western education, because that’s understood to be the path to thrive in the country. But his writing has helped me recognize how important it is to not throw away his work, and this legacy of being a student of two schools of knowledge.

The final pages of my father’s book include three photographs. The first is a group picture of my father and his first set of students at the Islamic Youth Center. Tiny in the picture, he looks way younger than the photo my mother first showed me of him. The second picture is of him, flanked by older men, robed in Agbada, embroidered, traditional Yoruba attire. All of them wear caps and firmly-knotted turbans. The caption under this picture reads, “a picture taken by friends and well-wishers as send-off for Al-Hadj Ahmad Muhaly Al-Bukhary on his trip to Mecca and some Arab countries.” The third picture is an isolated picture of the first building in the school my father established. A wooden signpost rests against the wall of the building, the door and the windows shut. The caption below the picture reads, “Here is the picture of Islamic Youth Center in Iwo.”

Staring at these pictures, I wonder if my father knew that all his hard work would make a difference. But the more I look, the more I am certain he knew that the school he built would. It was his way of ensuring that he could share his wisdom and teachings with generations to come—offering inspiration to me and others who continue to matriculate through that door captured in the photograph.

The post My Father, the Madrasah, and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the beginning of Society of the Snow, Spain’s entry for Best International Feature Film for the upcoming Academy Awards, there is a scene in a Catholic church in Montevideo, Uruguay, where a priest can be heard stating that “Man does not live by bread alone.”

It’s the first indication that the film, about the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes, will be centered on the spiritual and explicitly religious dimension of the experience.

The story of the crash is, at this point, ingrained in the Uruguayan national memory: In October, 1972, a rugby team from Montevideo and their friends and family boarded a flight from Uruguay heading for a match in Chile. Severe weather in the Andes led the pilots to make a fatal mistake, clipping the top of a mountain and shearing off the plane’s wings and tail section, sending part of the fuselage sliding into a ravine. Of the 45 people who boarded the plane, only 16 survived 72 days in subfreezing temperatures before being rescued.

When the news broke in Uruguay that some passengers survived, reporters called what happened both “a tragedy and a miracle.” But after the survivors arrived safely in Chile, journalists started asking questions about how they lasted more than two months in the bleak environment without food. Papers in Chile and other countries blasted headlines of “cannibalism” across their front pages and printed stories insinuating that the “stronger” survivors overpowered and killed the weak, and that group solidarity had quickly devolved into selfishness and domination.

Only when the survivors made it home to Montevideo did one of them, Alfredo Delgado, finally address the accusations during a press conference. He framed it in religious terms. Amidst the silence of the mountains, he said, he and the others felt “the presence of God.”  Making a direct analogy to the Catholic Eucharist, he continued, “If Jesus at his last supper had shared his flesh and blood with his apostles, then it was a sign to us that we should do the same—take the flesh and blood as an intimate communion between us all.”

According to journalist Piers Paul Read’s book Alive, which inspired an earlier 1993 movie about the crash, what followed was stark silence—and then spontaneous applause from the audience. Back home among their fellow countrymen, Delgado and the others could speak honestly.

I was in the old city of Montevideo the weekend Society of the Snow premiered there, and I spoke with a number of people who had seen the new film, which was playing throughout the city. I was curious about their response to a new representation of an incident that is so well-known to all Uruguayans.

“At the end of the movie, people in the theater were crying,” Maya Smeding, a student at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, told me. “Uruguay is a small country and one of the important messages of the film is that if we don’t come together as a people, we cannot accomplish what we need to do.”

Sandra Henry, a landscape designer from Montevideo, was 12 years old when the crash occurred. “When I saw this movie, I understood with my soul what went into the choice they made,” she said.  “It was a human feeling that they needed to survive and return to their families.”

During my stay in Montevideo, I also visited the Museo Andes 1972, which is dedicated to the crash. Opened in 2013 and self-funded by Uruguayan businessman Jörg P.A. Thomsen, the nondescript museum is snuggled among the 19th and early 20th-century neo-classical and art-deco buildings that are common along the city’s narrow streets.

The Museo Andes 1972 exists for the survivors, but also to commemorate those who didn’t come home. “Some of those on the plane were rugby players,” said Thomsen, “but many were not. Many were Catholics, but others were not. Most were men, but Liliana Methol, who died in the avalanche, played a wonderful and important role.”

Thomsen told me that he wanted to document the story of what happened because it “says something positive about the Uruguayan national identity.”

Still from Society of the Snow (2023). Courtesy of Netflix.

In addition to the pictures, newspaper articles, and artifacts from the crash site held in the museum’s three floors are tools the survivors crafted out of the wreckage to survive. They turned shards of aluminum into water spouts to melt snow to drink and sewed cloth from the airplane seats into gloves and snow shoes. Insulation from the tail of the plane was sewn into a large sleeping bag that two of the men used on their ten-day trek over mountain peaks in search of help.

Their ingenuity, when menaced by the deadly cold, reminded me that there’s a connection between tool-making, survival, and the imagination. “To me,” Thomsen said, echoing Henry’s comment, “a key to their survival was knowing how their families would suffer if they did not return.”

Touring the museum, what seems to be left after more than 50 years is not condemnation or second-guessing of each other, which was common enough during their ordeal, but the solidarity and love that the survivors and those who died had demonstrated.

I finally watched Society of the Snow for myself when I returned home from Uruguay to Los Angeles. In the very first shot, the camera moves across a slate of vacant whiteness in the Andes, a suggestion that viewers, like the survivors, have the obligation to create our futures out of the emptiness that we will at times confront.

Uruguayan cinematographer Pedro Luque later told me he struggled with the fact that in a vast white landscape, visually determining distances was unreliable. “It was abstract because of the vastness of the landscape that entrapped them like a giant monster,” he said. “But at the same time, the whiteness allowed us to create striking compositions like Japanese calligraphy with simple but powerful visual strokes.”

If snow-bleached distances were abstract, living close to one another is what brought the survivors’ moral visions into focus, as they struggled to live after seeing their friends and relatives die.

Society of the Snow lingers on these spare moments, where survivors try to make sense of their extreme situation, and struggle to define what their values actually are, and how to make them real in their behavior toward one another.

In one of the scenes, Arturo Nogueira, who did not survive long enough to be rescued, explains that for him, God is not an abstraction but is present in the friends who try to keep him warm or bind his wounds.

I thought of a little red shoe in the museum that was brought back from the wreckage and donated. Purchased as a present for a relative’s newborn child, the survivors gave one shoe of the pair to anyone who was going on a dangerous search expedition with the idea that they would be sure to bring it back—a talisman of strength, memory, and return.

It’s still hard to imagine that this story took place, but it did. Society of the Snow’s director J.A. Bayona has spoken about it as a film about understanding that you and the other are the same, and about supporting one another for collective survival. He recently told the Buenos Aires Herald: “If you have the strongest legs you will walk for us, and if you need my body to survive, I will give it to you so you can return home.”

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan has written that if man does not live by bread alone, it is only because “bread is never alone.” The survivors of the 1972 crash have all asked themselves why they were spared, but also the unavoidable question of why the others were not. I think that Society of the Snow provides one among the many possible answers: They shared a faith in one another.

The post A ‘Tragedy and a Miracle’ in the Andes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In May 2022, a video depicting a 25-year-old man in Hyderabad being publicly murdered by his wife’s family members in retaliation for the couple’s interfaith relationship went viral on social media in India. In March 2023, a similarly shocking incident made headlines: In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, a man of the Nadar caste had killed his 27-year-old son and injured his daughter-in-law out of disapproval for his son marrying her, a woman of Scheduled Caste, often known as Dalits.

Beyond these two particularly gory cases, there are innumerable others in which individuals who have chosen partners across religious and caste boundaries have been harassed, humiliated, excommunicated, and murdered. A recent report by the Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network showed that in cases of intercaste marriages, violence is commonly perpetuated by powerful caste groups toward the marginalized Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes—official terminology employed by the Indian government and used commonly.

In a society that remains deeply divided along caste and religious lines, the stakes are high for young men and women in India who dare to transgress the socially-defined boundaries of love and family alliance. While Indian law gives all citizens the right to choose their partner, in practice, state actors often play a violent role in upholding conservative social norms. Caste, homophobia, patriarchy, religious bigotry, and state norms all nourish one another and accentuate the danger to the lives of non-normative couples.

Caste is a hierarchical system in which individuals are assigned an identity based on the social group into which they are born, and each caste group oppresses those below them while being oppressed by those above them. The caste location of an individual affects almost every aspect of their life, from their friendships to their educational opportunities, their job prospects to their voting behavior. The system operates through both force and consent, and Hindu religious scriptures support it.

Castes maintain themselves through the principle of endogamy, in which people belonging to a group are restricted in terms of their choice of partner to others from the same group. Any love or marital alliance that defies this boundary is seen as transgressing the institution. Historically, some forms of intercaste marriages have been dealt with more stringently than others. Hypergamy—marriage between a man of “higher” caste and woman of “lower” caste—has remained relatively acceptable, at least in India’s rural agrarian regions. This has never been the case with hypogamy—marriage between a man of a “lower” caste and woman of an “upper” caste—which is seen as a pollution of the bloodline and social standing.

While religion is not always birth-based in the same way as caste, discouraging social reproduction outside one’s religion is likewise a quintessential mechanism through which religions maintain their boundaries. Desiring the “other,” falling in love with them and marrying them has never been a regular feature of social life in India, and the idea of it has always been a cause of distress and animosity among caste and religious groups.

At a basic level, then, acts of violence against intercaste and inter-religious couples stems from anxiety within social groups about losing control over women’s sexual and romantic choices.

The Indian state condones and even facilitates the violence against couples who cross these socially-sanctioned lines. Legally, this shouldn’t be the case. When India gained independence and drafted its constitution in the 1940s, it established citizens’ right to choose partners beyond caste and religious boundaries. In 1948, the Hindu Code Bill enshrined for Hindu women the rights of divorce and property and the right to marry a partner of her choice. Subsequently, the Special Marriage Act (1954) and the Hindu Marriage Act (1955) were passed to realize these rights. Several state-sponsored programs have offered financial support to socially transgressive marital unions, and in some Indian states, courts have ordered the creation of shelters where vulnerable couples can seek police protection from angry relatives and community or religious groups.

Yet in practice, the state does not guarantee these rights. The bureaucratic process required to take advantage of the Special Marriage Act is onerous. One male partner of an interfaith couple told me that the process was so difficult that it seemed clearly designed to discourage inter-religious marriages. “We [have been] making rounds from one government office to another for months now,” he said. “Every time, they come up with a new loophole in our documents. This time, when nothing was left, they made an excuse out of the pixel size of our photographs.”

Another way that the state creates barriers to these relationships is through policing. In order to escape from the hostility of family members and others, couples often choose to elope and run away to seek state protection elsewhere. But a 2003 report by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights argued that more often than not, the state institutions charged with providing protection in such situations—particularly the police—side with the families of the eloped women. In some cases, state actors help families forge false cases against the couple, or bring couples out from hiding and hand them over to their families. The patriarchal ideology of “honor” and its “loss” holds sway over all social groups and compels members of the police, bureaucracy, and courts to have sympathy for the women’s parents and relatives.

Why does the state play this regressive role? India’s state machinery is predominantly represented by people from “upper” caste groups. The allegiance of the people sitting at the helm of power and running state institutions lies more towards their social identities, in other words, their caste and religion, rather than in favor of fair and equal rights.

Addressing these cultural and bureaucratic barriers is becoming all the more important as India faces a new political struggle: the nascent LGBTQIA+ movement’s efforts to seek recognition of same-sex marriage. In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India scrapped Section 377 of the colonial-era penal code, which criminalized homosexuality; a historic moment for Indians outside the country’s heteronormative social and legal orders. Now, the LGBTQIA+ movement has begun to seek the recognition of same-sex marriages through petitions to the country’s Supreme Court based on the Special Marriage Act. Yet even if those petitions are successful, same-sex couples might face similar obstacles to realizing their right to a relationship with the partner of their choice as current intercaste and interfaith couples have encountered.

To make life more viable for all, India’s state needs to address these structural barriers. The state needs to improve the process of registering a marriage under the Special Marriage Act, and to sensitize its bureaucratic agents—in particular, the Registrar of Marriages and the police. Couples who ask for police protection citing danger to their lives should be protected immediately, irrespective of whether they have obtained a marriage certificate or not. Protecting basic life choices of its citizens can be a small yet important litmus test for India’s democracy.

The post When ‘Honor’—and Bureaucracy—Stand in the Way of Marriage appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Hailed as a truth-teller and a champion of Black empowerment, disparaged as a hoodlum with a hot temper whose lyrics glorify violent behavior, the late rapper and actor Tupac Shakur continues to be remembered in contested ways, more than 25 years after his murder in a drive-by shooting. In 2023 alone, FX aired a five-part docuseries on him, at least three different writers authored books about him, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce awarded him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a long-overdue arrest and indictment has finally been made in his murder investigation.

I’ve thought a lot about Shakur, beginning in the 1990s when I was a teenage fan of his music and more recently during the four years I’ve spent researching, writing, and promoting my book, An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. During this time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the public continues to overlook Shakur’s greatest legacy: that of a messenger steeped in the Black prophetic tradition, blending spirituality and liberation theology with social justice advocacy—conveying principled messages meant to deliver Black people in this life and thereafter.

To be sure, Tupac Shakur was an imperfect messenger. He was brash, profane, and often vulgar. He faced repeated arrest and incarceration for alleged assault and other offenses. He drank liquor, smoked blunts, and celebrated promiscuity. But Shakur at the same time was a harsh critic of police brutality, he advocated for women’s reproductive rights, and condemned wealth inequality in America. More than anything, he was deeply committed to his core demographic: young Black men. To Shakur, young Black men were lost sheep in the wilderness of North America—banished and besieged, feared and misunderstood—and he longed to be their redeemer, even if it meant offering his own life as a cautionary tale.

If Shakur could be said to have a creed or doctrine, it would be the doctrine of Thug Life. Many people assumed he was promoting hooliganism, but, Shakur explained, Thug Life was an acronym for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody”—meaning the injustices children face at a young age have repercussions on society at large. Thug Life, to Shakur, was his way of reaching his folks where they were at, without judgment or reproach.

“Young Black males out there identify with Thug Life because I’m not trying to clean them up,” he said. “I am, but I’m not saying come to me clean. I’m saying come as you are.”

In 1962, over a decade before Shakur was born, the writer James Baldwin reflected on his brief stint as a child preacher at a Pentecostal church in Harlem. In his essay, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” first published by the New Yorker and later reprinted in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin describes what he’d perceived as the hypocrisy, arrogance, and gospel of submissiveness endorsed by the Black Church, and the feeling that the church had abandoned the urgent needs of the people, encouraging them “to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life.” He wondered why they couldn’t organize around something tangible, like “a rent strike,” and he asked: “Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?”

Thirty years later, Shakur’s 1993 song, “I Wonda if Heaven’s Got a Ghetto,” has clear parallels to Baldwin’s essay. The song, a B-side to his anthemic single “Keep Ya Head Up,” contrasts the pie-in-the-sky promises of the church to the real-life ills facing his community: police brutality, poverty, drug addiction, and other ills. Unlike Baldwin, though, Shakur seems to be asking not if heaven will replicate the same segregated and deplorable conditions as America’s inner cities, but whether heaven will welcome with open arms all the subjugated people who suffered, struggled, and rebelled against their conditions.

Early on in his career, Shakur realized that when the church fails to reach the people most in need, it’s the militants, hustlers, or entertainers who will fill that need, and he would embrace all three roles interchangeably. At the same time, Shakur didn’t shy away from rebuking the church for not doing enough to address his community’s needs. In a 1996 VIBE interview, he acts as an interrogator of the church and its function in society: “If the churches took half the money that they was making and gave it back to the community, we’d be a’ight,” Shakur says. “Have you seen one of these goddamn churches lately? It’s ones that take up the whole block in New York. It’s homeless people out here. Why ain’t God lettin’ them stay there? Why these n****s got gold ceilings and shit? Why God need gold ceilings to talk to me?”

Consciously or not, Shakur’s demands for the church and society at large to pay attention to the unmet needs of Black Americans links him directly to the Black prophetic tradition, exemplified not only by Baldwin, but also Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ida B. Wells, and many others. The Black prophetic tradition, with roots that date back to the arrival of enslaved Africans to the American colonies, is a rhetorical tradition, rooted in (but not confined by) the Black Church, bearing witness to injustice, speaking truth to power, and boldly condemning White supremacy. The role of the prophet—from the days of Jonah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and Daniel, to today—is not to mollify but to rebuke a nation that has deviated from principles of justice and righteousness. Black prophetic fire is a forewarning of grim and dire consequences, both for America and the world, if Black and other marginalized people continue to be persecuted. As the theologian James H. Cone writes in his 1970 book, A Black Theology of Liberation, “The black prophet is a rebel with a cause, the cause of over twenty-five million black Americans and all oppressed persons everywhere.”

This, to me, defines Tupac Shakur. In the many hours I’ve spent reexamining his music and listening closely to his words, I’ve come to appreciate him beyond his reputation as a brash and hotheaded young nihilist. The recent influx of products, programs, and conversations related to Shakur proves I’m not alone in this reconsideration and recognition. Shakur was a bearer of difficult truths, a fiery and zealous critic of injustice, and a fierce advocate for the liberation and deliverance of the downtrodden. These are the responsibilities of the prophet. The prophet’s role is not to power over the people but to empower people to better themselves and envision a better world. “I’m not saying I’m gonna change the world,” Shakur said, “but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world.”

‘Nearly three decades after his death, Shakur’s millions of listeners across the world—young fans and oldheads like myself—continue to parse Shakur’s words, as though conducting biblical exegesis, seeking meaning and inspiration in his lyrics and interviews. As Black American men are killed by police officers at a staggering rate, as the gulf between rich and poor grows wider, and as drug addiction and overdose deaths continue to disproportionately affect communities of color, Shakur’s words remain as relevant and important—indeed as prophetic—as ever before.

The post Tupac Was an Imperfect Prophet appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“This is my son’s taqdir,” said my father—my destiny. “If I kicked him out for being who he is, then I reject what Allah has destined for him, for my family.”

My father’s supportive words came eight years ago, when I started gender-affirming hormone therapy after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, confirming what I had known for a long time: that deeply I have always been a man.

It is a complicated and mixed reality to be queer in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population. But despite some conservative interpretations of Islam here, I have leaned into my faith and my family in order to understand my trans identity, and to practice an inclusive theology.

Because I grew up expected to be a girl by my family and society, I wore a hijab beginning in junior high school. Being dishonest and untruthful to myself was suffocating throughout my childhood—everything felt disoriented. I became riddled with anxiety and depression. I did not know who I was, and I did not understand why my body, my identity, and my faith felt disjointed.

I grew up in a traditional Muslim neighborhood in Java in the 1990s. Since 1973, my family has owned and operated an Islamic school. As a kid I stayed in a girls’ dormitory, engaging in religious activities both in and out of class: memorizing the Quran, performing tahajjud (prayer), attending Islamic studies classes, practicing the rebana (a traditional percussion instrument similar to a tambourine).

Apart from my confusion surrounding my gender identity, I enjoyed my experience growing up with rich Islamic and Indonesian traditions and I felt part of the ummah, the community of believers I called my chosen family.

At that time, people in Indonesia could not easily access information on gender and sexuality. It wasn’t until I attended a local college that I learned to think critically about gender in Islam. This was a turning point, for I started to understand that Islamic theology is not a monolith and to question faith-based queerphobia. Ultimately and inevitably, I began to accept my true gender identity.

Still, with this newfound clarity came more questions. I decided to seek out professional help.

It took me a while to find a queer-friendly psychologist capable of understanding my experience. Several told me I needed to be “cured,” that there was a demonic, monstrous desire within me that I had to dispel.

The legal dictates of queer life in Indonesia are a mixed bag. While same-sex marriage is illegal, Indonesia does not have a law that criminalizes gender and sexual minorities, despite attempts by conservative groups, including after a moral panic in 2016. But in December 2022, under strongarm President Joko Widodo, the newly revised criminal code limited various human rights and outlawed extramarital sex, which critics have argued will disproportionately affect LGBTQ people.

Indonesian families commonly force a therapy called “ruqyah” on queer people, wrongfully citing it as an Islamic practice of conversion therapy. A trans man friend of mine was abused through ruqyah, which used “corrective rape” as a method. The “therapy” was initiated by his own family.

I was scared to come out to my family. I thought my parents would disown me. Instead, things went unexpectedly. After I came out, my mom hugged me and said, “I love you more than before.” And I did not expect my father’s supportive words about my own taqdir.

Not everything went so smoothly, though. My brother and sister tried to discourage me from continuing my transition based on their religious and cultural understanding of how Islam interprets my identity. Eventually we agreed to disagree—except on the fact that we are family no matter what. They disagree with me but they support my right to live my life and to practice what I believe. “My duty as a brother is to support him,” my brother told BBC Indonesia in an interview. “And our duty as human beings is to be kind to one another.”

And my sister provided testimonial support during a court hearing to change my legal name. Indonesian people can submit an application to the local court to change their name and gender as long as their family provides witnesses to support the application—a doctor, a psychologist, and a theologian.  The first successful name and gender change in an Indonesian court took place in 1973 with an Islamic scholar’s support. But even today, many judges reject the gender and name change due to their personal religious views.

When people mocked and questioned my mom for accepting me, she always cited a Qur’an verse (36:82) that translates to: “All it takes, when Allah wills something to be, is simply to say to it: ‘Be!’ And it is!”

She died in 2018. This verse has a special place in my heart—because it shows how Allah created diversity and because it helps me to remember my mom’s love.

If it was not for my family’s acceptance, I would have left my religion. Instead, I am pursuing an academic career in theology and religious studies and have become firm in my faith and thinking about gender diversity in Islam. I always tell people that it is demeaning to believe that God could not create gender and sexual diversity. Faith communities of all kinds—particularly patriarchal ones—do not realize that these queerphobic narratives make their religion irrelevant, inhumane, and unjust.

Those of us who are part of such communities, or who have left them as a result, have let our faith give up when it can be a powerful source of solace and empowerment. It is thus a divine action to reclaim the narrative around queerness and make space for an inclusive theology where everyone, regardless of their gender identity, expression, and sexual orientation, is welcomed and embraced with full dignity and unconditional compassion.

Perhaps this is my taqdir.

The post Destined to Be Trans, Muslim, and Indonesian appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The school year is under way and the kids, we are told, are not all right.

America’s families are suffering through what a recent front-page story in the New York Times called a “Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens.” Rates of depression, anxiety, emergency room visits, and suicide rose by double-digit percentages in the past decade and worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a special adolescent mental health advisory issued late last year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of a “devastating” decline in youth mental health caused by an “unprecedented” array of challenges, including pandemic disruptions, political turmoil, social inequities, and escalating technology use.

My kids, Frannie and Benjamin, are 15 and 12. Our family lives in New York City, where we rode out the dark days of the pandemic in our house on 99th Street. My wife, Kate, is an Episcopal priest, and leads a medium-sized parish in Manhattan. I’m a part-time editor at Guideposts, a non-profit religion journalism magazine.

The pandemic exposed our kids to at least six of the nine mental health risk factors identified in the surgeon general’s advisory. Their school went remote and they lost in-person contact with teachers, coaches, and friends. People in our parish got sick. Some died. The church cemetery crematorium (which serves people from all of New York City, not just our parish) ran 18 hours a day, for months. White refrigerated trucks filled with dead bodies rumbled through our neighborhood, accompanied by a police escort.

We participated in protest marches after the death of George Floyd and saw wreckage after things turned violent. There was a stabbing around the corner from our house, and a shooting on our block. An unlocked garbage shed across the street became a popular place for people to hang out and use drugs. At one point, so many people fled our neighborhood, the kids played a game on dog walks, furnishing an imaginary apartment with all the furniture discarded on the sidewalks.

Yet, despite everything, our kids not only survived the pandemic, but thrived. Today, Frannie, who began 2020 as a socially insecure seventh grader, is a happy and well-adjusted sophomore in high school pursuing an interest in archeology and playing volleyball. Benjamin started seventh grade this year. Except for some eye-rolling at what he calls the “drama” of middle school life, he, too, is happy and engaged, focused on his scout troop, his schoolwork, and making Lego stop motion movies.

As a parent, I marveled at our kids’ resilience. As a journalist, I wondered where it came from. Kate and I are not particularly talented parents. There were no ingenious pandemic survival hacks in our household. We made it up day by day, just like everyone else.

One explanation emerged from stories I worked on, including one about resilience in a faith-based after-school program in Chicago. My reporting led me to Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion at the University of Notre Dame, who referred to what he called “gobs of work that shows the pro-social, pro-health, pro-everything effects of religion” on mental health.

I began to wonder whether growing up in church had helped our kids ride out the storm.

Kate and I are Christians. Kate grew up religious. I came to faith later in life. We have raised our kids in the various churches where Kate has served as a priest. Our family life is guided by our spiritual beliefs. We pray at meals, at bedtime, and before we make big decisions or undertake major endeavors. We keep a Sabbath on Saturday and spend a good portion of each Sunday at church. We try to think of our lives in terms of how we use our gifts to serve others. Note that I said try. Our family’s efforts to live up to our standards often fall comically short. As a wise friend of ours says, you can’t always do what you can sometimes do.

Research suggests we’re at least doing something. Recent studies at Stanford and Brigham Young universities found that religiously involved teens suffered lower rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, family instability, and school setbacks during the pandemic. A major survey of mental health research conducted before and during the pandemic by scholars at Harvard University came to similar conclusions. Frequent attendance at religious services, the survey found, correlates with elevated levels of personal well-being, happiness, and quality of life, and lower levels of depression and suicide. For adolescents specifically, religious service attendance correlates with lower rates of smoking, drinking, drug use, and risky sexual behavior.

Other recent studies have found that religious involvement helps lower-income boys succeed in school and endows teens of all backgrounds with what Columbia University researcher Lisa Miller calls a “spiritual wholeness” that guards against an array of mental health challenges.

“Kids who are religiously involved are doing way better than non-religious kids,” Notre Dame’s Smith told me. Smith and other experts attribute religion’s unique benefits to the combination of a larger spiritual perspective with the community support of regular service attendance. Spirituality alone or membership in a secular community organization don’t provide the same protective “spiritual wholeness.”

Our family’s church, St. Michael’s, is a 215-year-old congregation serving people from all strata of a diverse urban parish—lawyers, professors, social workers, semi-homeless drug users, public housing residents, elders on fixed incomes, descendants of Caribbean immigrants, and students. The building is a hive of activity, housing a Spanish-language preschool, a neighborhood feeding program, homework tutoring, an orchestra for underprivileged youth, 12-step groups, and other community programs. The prevailing mood is welcoming love combined with barely controlled chaos. It seems to have been a nourishing place to grow up.

Our kids don’t always welcome the ways Christianity (at least as it’s lived at St. Michael’s) pushes back against American individualism and consumerism, especially when, as the kids put it, our family “acts weird and can’t afford stuff.” Yet, faith has helped our kids bypass some of the crueler passages of adolescence. When things get rough at school, there are always church friends to fall back on. When problems seem insoluble, we close our eyes and picture placing the mess in God’s hands: “We’ve done what we can. God will have to handle the rest.” During the pandemic, we talked a lot about discerning the difference between things we can and can’t control. Despite everything they endured, our kids never seemed to doubt that, eventually, in ways they couldn’t foresee or put into words, they’d be okay.

Kids in the Chicago after-school program expressed similar thoughts. Fifteen-year-old Azariah Baker experienced even more of the surgeon general’s risk factors than my kids did. She lives in Austin, a neighborhood on Chicago’s west side where COVID-19 death rates were high and businesses reeled after looting during social justice protests. She also has asthma and worries about her mother, who, she said, “is really old.”

Yet, Azariah spent most of her conversation with me talking not about challenges but about her involvement with By the Hand Club, a faith-based provider of youth social services in Chicago public schools. With help from donors, the club bought a looted liquor store in Austin and turned it into a teen-run community produce market. “My resume is going to be buzzing,” Azariah said.

“God has always been a really important part of my life,” she told me. “It can get overwhelming sometimes…[and my mom] says, ‘Take it up with God. He’ll fix it in the end.’ My job as Azariah is to be kind to others and be Azariah, and everything else is God’s responsibility.”

Neither the surgeon general’s 53-page advisory nor the New York Times’ 3,800-word front-page story mentions religion. The omission is understandable, given America’s polarized views about faith.

As a religion journalist, I can attest that the landscape of faith in America is far larger and more compassionate than our nation’s inordinate focus on evangelicals would suggest (or than evangelicals themselves, perhaps, would wish). As a parent, I can attest that a loving, welcoming religious community can work wonders in kids’ lives.

Our family couldn’t have gotten through the pandemic—or the rest of life, for that matter—without it.

The post Keeping the Kids’ Faith appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Pickleball—an addictive mashup of tennis, badminton, and ping pong—is seemingly everywhere these days, and played by seemingly everyone.

There are now a whopping 4.8 million players in the U.S. (a number that’s almost doubled in the past five years), and professional competition is booming around the world. Broadcasters are televising pickleball matches. There are pickleball themed weddings, and celebrity endorsements, and lengthy think pieces about the sport showing up in prestigious magazines. In March, Washington governor Jay Inslee declared pickleball the official state sport.

The future of pickleball is lucrative. Its past, however, might hold its real value. Pickleball, at heart, is a homegrown game that celebrates fun, community, and inclusion. It is also a spiritual pursuit that brings people together and provides meaning beyond what most of us expect to get out of a sport. And on Washington’s Bainbridge Island, where the game was invented, it functions in some ways like a religion, providing fans a way to connect with its creation.

Like many successful religions and spiritual pursuits, pickleball’s origins are personal and human-scaled. In the mid 1960s, the story goes, some dads vacationing on this small island across the Puget Sound from Seattle needed to entertain their bored children. They improvised a new game using materials they had on hand—a badminton net, a wiffle ball, some ping pong paddles.

Because the sport is easy to learn and master, and traditionally not too expensive to play, regular folk take to it. It’s a famously friendly engine of social cohesion, bringing neighbors together and providing informal community bonds through park-based pickup games. In a society more apt to play individualized sports or focus on personal training and exercising, as sociologist Robert Putnam discovered, pickleball—which is primarily played recreationally with doubles—brings teamwork back into vogue.

I first played pickleball when I was living on Bainbridge Island during the pandemic; a friend unexpectedly invited me to join their game because they needed a fourth player. I’ve been playing ever since.

The way pickleball is played in a lot of places today, it is hardly recognizable as an improvised pastime. But every year at Bainbridge Island, locals, sport preservationists, and die-hard players gather for the Founders Tournament at Battle Point Park, a commemoration of pickleball’s historic origin—just down the road from the very court where the dads and kids first put paddle to ball.

This continued effort to preserve the old beginnings and on-the-ground ethos of the game reflects a human impulse that religion scholars have studied for decades. In the mid-20th century, Romanian thinker Mircea Eliade first observed how much people love to re-create creation stories throughout history.

Eliade, an interpreter of religious rituals best known for his 1957 masterwork The Sacred and the Profane, was interested specifically in the ways humans reenact religious myths. Around the globe, Eliade noticed rites of passage—including baptisms and other ceremonies surrounding birth—and recognized that these rituals imbued life with meaning. Ancient people oriented their lives through rituals that recapitulated the emergence of the world, giving certain days and time periods heightened meaning.

We still do this today. Each year, millions of Americans, whether they consider themselves religious or not, participate in New Year’s celebrations: marking a new beginning of time with renewed commitments to improve themselves, make better decisions, or simply be a better person. They watch the famous ball drop in Times Square, counting down to a reimagined creation spark. Such rituals, according to Eliade, are essential to human life. They forge purpose out of mundanity, and are universal around the globe.

As pickleball is inexorably sucked into America’s sports-industrial complex, the annual Founders Tournament, which I attended in August, offers a chance to reenact another creation, with equally powerful impact.

The tournament partnered with the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum to offer visits to Court One, the original backyard spot where the game first began on a badminton court. There, we learned about the founding story of pickleball, including its odd name, and were able to hit a few balls so we could proudly state we’d played at the sport’s axis mundi—the earliest center of the pickleball world. The other visitors—who came from as far away as Hawaii and Georgia—and I, just like pilgrims to other sacred sites such as Stonehenge or the Camino de Santiago, consulted historical notes and took pictures.  

Eliade’s work focuses on the grander creation of the cosmos. Still, he would have recognized our visit to pickleball’s origin site as representing “the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, ‘in the beginning’” (as he wrote in The Sacred and the Profane).

The Founders Tournament begins with a wooden paddle tournament, which emulates the earliest version of pickleball. Meshing 1960s equipment with the contemporary-style tournament weaves together the past with the present. Like Muslims who mimic the Prophet Muhammed’s actions during the Hajj, or Jews holding the Passover Seder to remember the liberation of Jewish people from Egyptian rule, these reenactments make the historical event real in the present-day world.

As entrepreneurs and fashionistas monetize the super competitive version of pickleball, people on Bainbridge Island are concerned about preserving a welcoming ethos around the recreation sport. They work to enshrine within the sport on the island opportunities for all people, of all skill levels—as the game did in its early days. Bainbridge Island locals are becoming pickleball evangelists, proclaiming the good news: Anyone can play pickleball, and all are welcome.

If he were here, Eliade would get what they’re up to right away. He argued, after all, that annual returns to origin stories allow people to “endure great historical pressures without despairing…or falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history.” In preserving the old beginnings of pickleball, the residents of Bainbridge Island, too, are remembering a beautiful past to work toward a rich future.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Praying to the Pickleball Gods appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We are on the lookout for that rare combination of creativity and clarity, excellence and evocation. The prize interprets “place” in many ways: A location may possess historical, cultural, political, or personal importance, and may be literal, imaginary, or metaphorical.

Our 12th annual winner will be selected by the Zócalo staff, working in conjunction with a poetry prize selection committee. The winner will receive $1,000 and will have the opportunity to deliver their poem at the Zócalo Book Prize event in the spring. Zócalo will also publish the poem on our site alongside an interview with the poet. In addition, we plan to recognize our honorable mention submissions.

Screenwriter and philanthropist Tim Disney returns to sponsor Zócalo’s literary prize program, which also includes the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize.

Please read and enjoy the poems from our 11 past winners, which travel to San Diego, Ohio, and Mexico, to a kitchen, a beach, and a gas station parking lot, and to the landscapes of these writers’ imaginations, memories, and dreams.

• Chelsea Rathburn, “8 a.m., Ocean Drive” (2022)
• Angelica Esquivel, “La Mujer” (2021)
• Jai Hamid Bashir, “Little Bones” (2020)
• Erica Goss, “The State of Jefferson” (2019)
• Charles Jensen, “Tucson” (2018)
• Matt Sumpter, “No World” (2017)
• Matt Phillips, “Crossing Coronado Bridge” (2016)
• Gillian Wegener, “The Old Mill Café” (2015)
• Amy Glynn, “Shoreline” (2014)
• Jia-Rui Chong Cook, “Fault” (2013)
• Jody Zorgdrager, “Coming Back, It Comes Back” (2012)

Submission Guidelines

For consideration, please send up to three poems to poetry@zocalopublicsquare.org.

Please attach your poem(s) as a single Word document to your email. Include your name, address, phone number, and email address on each poem. Personal identification will be removed prior to review by the judges. We will accept online submissions only, and receipt will be acknowledged at the time of submission.

Eligibility

Poems must be original and previously unpublished work. We accept up to three poems from each writer as well as simultaneous submissions; let us know immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.

Judging

Entries will be judged based on originality of ideas, theme, and style. Judging is at the sole discretion of Zócalo Public Square and our poetry prize committee. The winner will be announced in spring 2023, and the winning poet will receive $1,000, a published interview, and an opportunity for a public reading hosted by Zócalo. The winning poem will be published on zocalopublicsquare.org. We will also be celebrating our honorable mention submissions.

Conditions

The winning poem and honorable mentions become the property of Zócalo Public Square, but the writers may republish their poems at a later date with Zócalo’s permission. By entering the contest, the entrants grant Zócalo the right to publish and distribute their poems for media and publicity purposes, along with the poets’ name and photograph. Poets will be contacted by Zócalo before we publish any submission.

The post The 2023 Zócalo Poetry Prize Celebrates Poems of Place appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I will not give you back your heart,
I’ve wooed and fairly won it,
And sooner with my life I’ll part,
You may depend upon it.

Not content with mere verse, Noyes would go on to turn his emotional anguish into a theological critique of the institution of monogamous marriage itself (or as he once called it, “Egotism for Two”). Condemning monogamy as “simple” and replacing it with a more heavenly, polyamorous version that he called “complex marriage,” in 1848 he founded a religious sect based on his teachings: the Oneida Community in upstate New York. There, people would be stripped as much as possible of their worldly “I-spirit,” and have it replaced with the godlier “we-spirit” of genuine Christian fellowship. Only with this kind of radical reorientation, Noyes held, could believers experience community, family, and marriage in the way that God had intended them.

You may be feeling down about a lack of romantic fulfillment or a recent break-up this Valentine’s Day, or its succeeding “Singles Awareness Day.” But as Noyes’ story illustrates, you are hardly alone, among your contemporaries in 2022, or throughout human history. Three 19th-century American sects—the Oneida Pantogamists as well as Shaker celibates and Mormon polygamists—waged wars against the so-called selfishness of monogamous marriage. All viewed romantic exclusivity as sinful, a hindrance to creating a more universal love for a community of fellow believers.

Monogamy, of course, won out. Experiments like Noyes’ commune now seem distant, strange, and historically specific. And yet, there is something familiar and universal in them. They revolved, as we still often do, around heartbreak. What can they teach us about love and sex today?

We all search for meaning in the universe, and we all long for human intimacy—to know our place in the bigger picture, and to share that story with someone. These dual human drives are as old as the human species. Take the book of Genesis, for example. Before God created Eve, Adam knew his cosmic significance, walked with his Creator in Eden—yet was still lonely and bummed out.

Noyes could relate. “The next thing that a man wants after he has found the salvation of his soul,” he wrote, “is to find his Eve and his Paradise.” When his first love renounced their shared faith and then announced her engagement to another man, his universe came crashing down around him.

“John Humphrey Noyes.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

So he picked up the pieces and created a new one—without that sinful institution that had caused him so much pain: monogamy. Rather than becoming some kind of perpetual quasi-religious orgy, the Oneida Community was highly controlled. Prospective sexual partners had to arrange their liaisons—or “fellowships” as they called them—through the ministrations of a third party, sleep separately after the fellowshipping had concluded, and strive not to have the same partner too often in order to prevent the relationship from becoming exclusive. As Noyes knew from experience, the desire for exclusivity is one of the most powerful emotions that romanticized and sexualized human love can engender. Such passion could only bring spiritual ruin.

The Shakers, who were founded in mid-18th century England and reached the peak of their popularity in America between 1820 and 1860, similarly loathed the institutions of marriage and family for the sinful “natural affections” that accompanied them. Shaker villages were to be believers’ new families, complete with spiritual mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers all living together in harmony: worshipping the Lord, working hard for their bread, and waging a communal war against the flesh by abstaining from sex.

Over the Shakers, too, love’s pain hovered. Mother Ann Lee, the group’s founder, had tragic and traumatic experiences in childbirth, losing all four of her newborns—a fact to which later commentators point as the psychological source of her hatred of all sex.

The story of Steven Sutton, a new convert living in the Shaker village at Canterbury, New Hampshire in the 1780s, illustrates just how painful this struggle against exclusive love could be. His wife “was an amiable woman, and I loved her,” he wrote. But after joining the community, “now I must hate her … The leaders said, ‘She was my god.’” Separating the family proved to be too much for her, and when “she was buried,” Sutton continued, “I was ordered to cover the earth over her coffin, to show that I had no natural affections; this I did, when at the same time, I felt as though I should pitch into the grave with her.”

For Mormon polygamists the message was largely the same, even if the remedy was assuredly not, with religious leaders especially targeting women in their crusade against selfishness. “I am sure that, through the practice of this principle” of plural marriage, Elder George Q. Cannon wrote, “we shall have a purer community, a community more experienced, less selfish and with a higher knowledge of human nature than any other on the face of the earth.”

The words of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, plural widow of Joseph Smith and later apologist for Mormon polygamy, indicate that she had internalized this logic. Plural marriage “will exalt the human family,” she wrote in an 1882 letter, and “in the place of selfishness, patience and charity will find place in [plural wives’] hearts, driving therefrom all feelings of strife and discord.”

As with the Shakers and Oneidans, selfishness was the real enemy of the Mormon polygamists—an impediment to personal godliness and communal unity that could only be slain (for the plural wives) through the sacrifice of their exclusive claim to their husbands. These sacrifices were often truly painful for the adherents of all three sects, which is why leaders needed mechanisms of control to enforce the communities’ practices whenever individual discipline wavered. Although faithful, the believers struggled profoundly to extirpate the special love they had for others—a love they were told was selfish and sinful.

Why did Mormons, Shakers, and Oneidans all target even the exclusive romantic love found in the time tested, biblically sanctioned, and socially accepted institution of monogamous marriage?

Well, for starters, perhaps that institution was not so biblically bullet-proof as its defenders might have imagined. All three groups used the same verses from the Bible to attack it. “The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage,” Jesus proclaims in Luke 20:34-35, but those worthy to obtain “the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage.” Both the Shakers and the Oneidans referred to this straightforward proof text often in defending their decision to abolish monogamy.

For polygamous Mormon Saints, who place the institution of marriage and the obligation of reproduction through sex at the center of their story of eternity, it was a little different. They believed that more wives would mean more children for the paterfamilias both on earth and in the afterlife. Mormons countered those selfish, complaining, plural wives who wanted to be their husbands’ one and only with a heightened commitment to religious duty.

What also bound these three sects together was the time and place in which they rose, institutionalized, and fell, relatively simultaneously. In the 1830s, the federal government was weak, the American frontier seemingly endless, and the opportunities for sectarian start-ups equally boundless. By the 1880s, however, the federal government was strong and getting stronger, the frontier was rapidly disappearing, and the majority of Americans were increasingly intolerant of sexual and marital arrangements they believed corroded the nation’s morality.

By 1881, the Oneida Community had dissolved, the Shakers were losing members at an alarming rate (and obviously, failing to spawn new ones), and many Mormons were actively choosing monogamy over polygamy. The external environment that had once nurtured religious sexual experimentation had indeed turned from tolerable to toxic, and the internal desire of many sectarians to reject monogamy for something else had waned as well. Having originally condemned romantic exclusivity as sinful, over time more of them nevertheless wanted it.

We still grab at the romantic ring today, and it is understandable that we do, especially coming out of the shared solitary confinement we have all been through for the past two years. Adam wanted an Eve. John Humphrey Noyes wanted his lost beloved. My wife wants me to up my romantic game. If this Valentine’s Day you, too, are feeling particularly fired up by romantic disappointment, you can always take a page from Noyes, and write a poem about it. Noyes’ verse continues:

You say your heart is still your own,
But words will never prove it.
What God and you and I have done
Will stand; the world can’t move it.

Or maybe try launching an entirely new religio-sexual community, complete with a cosmology, hierarchy, institutions, and disciplinary apparatus. And buy my new book, Sex and Sects. It will show you how.

The post The Sects That Rejected 19th-Century Sex appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Bauer and some of her fellow Jan. 6, 2021 rioters have testified that they were divinely inspired to participate in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. They carried crosses and religiously themed posters and participated in a prayer on the Senate floor. Testifying to a congressional committee a few weeks after Bauer’s court appearance, District of Columbia police officer Daniel Hodges, who sustained wounds to the skull and attempts to gouge his eyes out, described seeing the Christian flag directly in front of him as an insurrectionist beat him with his own baton. Other signs read, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president” and “Jesus is king.”

The blending of Christian symbols with national imagery is not a new phenomenon in the United States. Some of the earliest European colonizers maintained that the formation of the U.S. was a divinely ordained set of events. But the type of white Christian nationalism witnessed on Jan. 6 is also a product of the Cold War.

In the 1950s, relations between the United States and the USSR dissolved into an arms race nursed by fears that World War II was just a prelude to a more cataclysmic war. Some evangelical leaders converted the political threat of communism into the detrimental religious threat to the very soul of the nation. Billy Graham, the late traveling evangelist and preacher, called on all Americans to engage in a “born again” experience in hopes of not just saving their personal souls for the afterlife but providing the United States spiritual warriors against the godless communists. In Graham’s theologizing of Cold War realpolitik, America was divinely good while the USSR was satanically evil. In one early sermon at his “Los Angeles Crusade,” Graham told his listeners: “Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed, and motivated by the Devil himself, who has declared war against Almighty God.”

From the white evangelical perspective, the divine protection from communism afforded to the United States required evangelicals’ ongoing religious and political labor. White evangelicals prayed for the nation within their homes and churches and galvanized their membership base. Billy Graham, by then pronounced the “preacher to the presidents,” met publicly and privately with each president starting in 1950 with Harry Truman.

As America was experiencing a post-war manufacturing boom, white evangelicals were manufacturing born-again souls. New evangelical denominations emerged in the religious marketplace along with mass publications, seminaries, and mission organizations, which yielded thousands of new converts. And while many children were under their desks practicing for a possible nuclear holocaust, white evangelicals were placing their faith in the divine as a security measure against the evil communist enemy.

A spiritual arms race for political superiority developed within the collective theology of white evangelicals. Within this construction, the war against communism and the atheist Soviet “Evil Empire” could only be won if the U.S. was a godly Christian nation. In 1954, the federal government revised the Pledge of Allegiance to this end—now, the United States was “one nation, under God.” Fearful of a nuclear holocaust, white evangelicals, as well as many other Americans, took solace in the fact that the U.S. had established itself as a god-protected nation.

Even though white evangelicals saw their interests manifest, there loomed below the surface a suspicion that godless conspirators would undermine their efforts. Developments in the political and social spheres affirmed this suspicion. The first crack in the godly shield emerged in 1962, when the Supreme Court banned public prayer in schools. The chaos and upheaval of the civil rights era solidified evangelical fears that the U.S. was straying from the divine purpose upon which it had been founded. They grew to despise the direction that liberalism and equity measures took the country.

In their fear and loathing, white evangelicals needed to blame someone, something, or a group of people for the ways in which the United States failed to align with their vision. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, white evangelicals turned their attentions to a list of internal threats—including liberals, secular humanists, LGBTQ people, the poor and disenfranchised, activist Hollywood actors and sports stars, the ACLU, and pro-choicers. The shorthand for these enemies remained “Commies.”

But even if the enemy has the same moniker, today’s white evangelicals are skeptical of the American government’s ability to properly filter out internal threats. In previous decades, white evangelicals relied heavily on government officials, like then Senator Joseph McCarthy, to do their bidding. Today, many white evangelicals think that elected officials are part of a covert attempt to instate eventual persecution of white evangelicals. One poll found that a majority of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump was working against a “deep state” network attempting to undermine his policies.

Paranoia in white evangelicalism has festered in recent decades. The number of those affiliating with white evangelicalism is shrinking. Prayer has not been reinstated in public schools, abortion remains legal, and evolution endures as a standard scientific explanation. This suspicion of the American government and fellow citizens creates a collective marginalization complex—white evangelicals think that they are under attack. This means some of them are willing to take matters into their own hands with spiritual and physical measures.

In a convoluted way, the Jan. 6 insurrection was an attack on communism, or at least what white evangelicals understand as communism within their country: an evil so persistent that they needed to defend the nation and themselves. “QAnon shaman” Jacob Chansley articulated this on the Senate floor, when he loudly thanked his god for “allow[ing] us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow the America, the American way of the United States of America, to go down.” For insurrectionists like Chansley and Bauer, our current federal government is godless, moving toward communism, and, thus, un-American. While Chansley has been sentenced to a 41-month prison term, he echoes a call to arms against the sentencing of America to damnation. These religious rioters seek a national conversion, even if it requires the use of spiritual and physical force. What remains to be determined since the insurrection is what needs saving—the church or the state.

The post God Save the Capitol appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.