The Revealer: June 2005 Archives

Genuinely Innovative, Assuredly Radical
Sharlet: R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, takes on my recent Rolling Stone story on virgins in a lengthy rumination for Crosswalk.com, available at The Christian Post. Mohler, declared by Time the "reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S.," challenges my argument that Christian activists have politicized chastity to make it an organizing principle of the Christian Right... [ Continue reading: ]

Newsweek Is A Piece of Crap
"Great mane of white hair." "Piercing blue eyes." "Simple, unaffected." "In the twilight of his years." "His eyes shined." "American Christianity at its best." Want more? Cliches aplenty and a tin ear for the real fire at the heart of Billy Graham's gospel in Newsweek's double-barreled, deeply pandering appeal to conservative Christian readers, "Backstage at Billy Graham's Final Crusade," and "Behind Billy Graham's New York Crusade." Behind, in lockstep, that is.

If you prefer newsier fare, the magazine offers this in-depth health report on the power of prayer -- to help you shed pounds! Sample question: "Is a certain faith more metabolically effective than others?" We hear Islam as practiced at Gitmo is very slimming.

Newsweek knows when to pull its punches. For instance, in its report on Jeb Bush's decision to investigate Michael Schiavo, widely seen as a sop to Christian conservatives who feel betrayed by Jeb's brother on the issue, the magazine protects its sources from the powerful: "'This wasn't a position taken for the purpose of pandering,' says one political adviser who was surprised by Bush's intervention and who asked not to be named to avoid appearing disloyal. 'It's based entirely on his strong personal bias for protecting life.'" Phew! Heads would surely roll if Jeb knew who said he wants to protect life!

Newsweek has a lighter side when it comes to faith, too. "Actor Tom Cruise," jokes "funnyman" Andy Borowitz, "stunned the worlds of cinema and space travel today, bidding Earth farewell forever as he returned to his planet of origin." Tee-hee-hee! Do you get it? Scientology is weird!

It's a sad day when the only halfway decent religion journalism in a magazine comes from George Will, writing a decent high school book report on an eight-year-old text about the most over-covered religion story of the last century. [ Continue reading: ]

Night Train to Marrakech
Reza Aslan on the clash of monotheisms as seen from the cramped quarters of a sleeper car. [ Continue reading: ]

Losing Moses
Chris Hedges discusses Losing Moses on the Freeway, his new book of real life stories of the Ten Commandments in America, on WNYC's "Leonard Lopate Show."... [ Continue reading: ]

Not Another "Beliefs" Column
Diane Winston's occasional column on the gods of Los Angeles in The L.A. Times continues to be subtly subversive in the best fashion, offering quiet, compelling stories of lived religion around the city that reveal rather than declare the complexities... [ Continue reading: ]

Billy Graham Has Nice-Looking Posters
Billy Graham is back in New York City, for one last crusade. Cue the nostalgia; cue the clouds of forgetting... [ Continue reading: ]

This Is Not My Christian Nation
Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of conservative American evangelicalism,editorializes "the obvious": George W. Bush is not Lord, and "God Bless America" is not the Doxology. So far, so simple; but CT goes further, rebuking Christian Right oupost (their words) Family... [ Continue reading: ]

The Young and the Sexless
"What if the true face of the Christian right in America is not that of Dr. James Dobson or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson; not that of an aging, comb-over preacher orange with pancake makeup, smiling orca rows of ungodly... [ Continue reading: ]

Bordello of Prayer
Darcey Steinke: "Up until that year, my most developed internal incantations had to do with fantasizing about sex. Maybe because of this, my first attempts to pray resembled scenes from a Victorian bordello. My cloud was purple, like the purple smoke I’d once seen at a Prince concert, and I imagined myself lying in front of the swirling mass in a green velvet gown. I rested there on a warm blanket and was comforted by the idea that, though hidden in vapor, I was in the presence of God..." [ Continue reading: ]

If You Were a TV Producer
If you could produce a TV program about religion, what would it look like? Who would you interview? What questions would you ask? Think about it, and we'll pass on your suggestions to PBS producers looking for new ideas. What would make a good public programming about religion, any religion? [ Continue reading: ]

Sex as a Weapon
Decoding the Literature of the Christian Men's Movement By Jeff Sharlet (Published in Nerve, April 25, 2005) A discussion of the Christian men's movement — Iron John for fundamentalists, Promise Keepers to the tenth power — is best begun with... [ Continue reading: ]

Miracle Meter
Former Revealer Kathryn Joyce calls our attention to this startling "miracle" news: Ethiopian lions with feminist tendencies rescue 12-year-old girl from patriarchal folkways!

There's not really much to add to that, but we'll take the opportunity to announce a new Revealer project, Media Miracle Meter. The next time you read about a miracle, email us at the.revealer at nyu.edu. We'll keep count of the types of miracles the press loves to report most, and start developing a picture of the signs and wonders with which a rational press interprets an irrational world. [ Continue reading: ]

If George Washington Was Alive Today, He'd Be a Yankees Fan
The blogger responsible for the Ratzinger Fan Club -- a name he claimed before the object of his affection became Pope Benedict XVI -- presents a short investigation of the Catholic idea of "preferential option for the poor," from a... [ Continue reading: ]

The Gay Part
We're late in blogging Russell Shorto's fine NYT Magazine piece of this past Sunday, "What's Their Real Problem With Gay Marriage? (It's the Gay Part)." If you missed it, too, please read it. Shorto's doing some of the most honest mainstream press work on religious conservatism, from his piece on evangelism in the workplace to this one on anti-gay crusaders. In a long report, he gives his subjects plenty of room for their views. And he listens for the themes in their arguments, chief among them the antagonism of many toward homosexuality not just as a practice in itself, but as a symbol for all of secularism. The press has been quick to adopt evangelical phrasing such as "people of faith"; religion reporters would do well to follow Shorto's lead by adopting his unvarnished approach to the ideas that animate religious movements. [ Continue reading: ]

Fantastic Iraq
1,001 Nights in Iraq: Fantasy space stations and the "Book of Dragons" and Magic playing cards, amazing underwater military bases and "Resident Evil," and a dead geek from Iowa named John Wayne, who used to crawl under the covers at... [ Continue reading: ]

The Intimacy of Killing
Bloodlust, says historian Joanna Bourke, is a civilized affair. By Jeff Sharlet (Originally published as "Revealing the Intimacy of the Most Gruesome Part of War" in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 22, 1999). To start with, Joanna Bourke has... [ Continue reading: ]

Big World
How Clear Channel Programs America By Jeff Sharlet (Originally published in Harper's, Dec., 2003) illustration for Harper's by Brad YeoOn July 17, 2002, as a band called The Boils was preparing to play, seven men with badges, police officers and... [ Continue reading: ]

You Say Satan, I Say Seitan
Sharlet: Minor stir on the Godbeat around what can only be called a "human interest" story (it's not really "news") of the murder-by-crucixion of a Romanian nun by a priest and several other nuns, who say that the deceased was demonically possessed... [ Continue reading: ]

You Get the Gods You Deserve
Matt Taibbi as Jeremiah, with new Lamentations for the present moment: "America is dying. You could smell it at the Michael Jackson trial. Snapshot from the end of the case: It is early on a Tuesday morning on the last week of the proceedings. The verdict is days, perhaps hours, away. The courthouse compound is in an advanced zoolike state. The pro-Jackson crazies have descended en masse for the verdict, and they are fighting, in some cases with fists, to get places in front of the cameras. At the courthouse gates, a fat creep from Tennessee named BJ -- journalists have dubbed him 'Superfan' -- is pushing two Polish girls aside so that his weirdo buddies can dance, out of tune, to 'Black or White,' for the amusement of a row of mute European photographers. One of the shooters takes a place on the Tennessean's ladder, which he stands on every morning to cheer for Michael. 'Watch the fucking ladder!' BJ shouts... This is a deathbed scene." [ Continue reading: ]

Trust vs. Love: A Study of Faith-Based Initiatives

Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society / By Robert Wuthnow. Reviewed by Revealer books editor Scott Korb. [ Continue reading: ]

Daddy Dearest
What do the evangelical Promise Keepers (born yet again and coming to a city near you), Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March," Boston's recent Catholic Men's Conference (at which Passion star Jim Cavaziel and a Bush officials discussed their headships), and... [ Continue reading: ]

Democrats and Gothics
In a forthright 16-year-old girl from Queens, writes the NYT's Nina Bernstein, the FBI "met unsettling opinions and teenage defiance." Only one thing to do, of course -- kidnap the kid, refuse to tell her parents where she is for... [ Continue reading: ]

Eat God Now
Our favorite kind of religion is the kind you can eat. "And then God revealed to me how to barbecue,how to cook it, how to make the spices and everything," Pastor Clevester Williams tells BBQ devotee Patrick Hirsh. Hirsh declares L.A.'s finest that of Williams' "barbecue church" -- Prayer Assembly Church Of God In Christ -- a house of worship built on BBQ. On Weekend America (scroll down and listen). [ Continue reading: ]

Hunting Bubba
"'I got sick of preachers telling me how great Reagan was,'" Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, a man on a mission to win back rural voters, tells The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash. "'Jesus don't give endorsements,' Mudcat thunders. 'He don't give a... [ Continue reading: ]

Wisdom of the Well-Connected
"Charles Marsh would recall that the civil rights movement owes little but grief to conservative evangelicals and Niebuhrian realists. Indeed, as Marsh demonstrates in The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today, St. Reinhold himself, polestar of gravitas in the liberal firmament, urged a suffocating 'patience' on King and his movement, and was, thank God, rejected. Seldom has "realism" been so clearly exposed as the wisdom of the well-connected. Aiming squarely at the latest generation of pharisees, Marsh indicts their ministration to a twisted patriotism, 'a cult of self-worship consecrated by court prophets robed in pinstriped suits.'" Eugene McCarraher gives high praise to Marsh (and damns with faint praise Jim Wallis, reviewed above) in Books & Culture. Marsh may sound like he's talking about history, but the redefinition of MLK -- and, for that matter, Reinhold Neibuhr -- across the political spectrum is still news, and Marsh is a good man to bring it to us. More Marsh, on Killing the Buddha.< [ Continue reading: ]

I'm Ok, The Pope's Ok
Ann Rodgers, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's smart religion reporter, wrote yesterday that Pope Benedict XVI is proving less conservative than expected. But the main evidence, as we read it, is that the new pope, famed for his reserve, is patting little... [ Continue reading: ]

The Sun Shines on Eternity
The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky's young conservative daily, has yet to make the dent in The New York Times conservatives hoped it would; for better and worse, it's not another Washington Times. But like Lipsky's last effort, his revival of the old Yiddish Forverts as an English-language weekly, The Sun shines brightest at its most eccentric. Today's paper, for instance, features an op-ed on the nature of eternity by the conservative Jewish writer Hillel Halkin. But what makes it really weird is that Halkin states the case for the ancient pedigree of the conservative bete noire of "postmodernism," "moral relativism." [ Continue reading: ]

Feeling the Hate
Sharlet: Chris Hedges has covered more wars than nearly any journalist alive. Now, he's turning his attention toward America's "culture war," and he's not optimistic about what he sees. "Since the reelection of George W. Bush in November," he writes in "Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters" in Harper's, "the rhetoric on the Christian right has grown triumphal and proud; rumors of spiritual war are abroad in the heartland, and fervent whispers of revolution echo among the pews and folding chairs of the nation’s megachurches."

Such language on the part of Hedges might seem overly-bellicose itself were it not for the fact that this is a man who has witnessed firsthand, around the globe, the physical wars that all too often result from such rhetorical wars.

I don't think the term "fascist" is terribly useful anymore and I might argue with Chris over his use of the term "dominionism" to encompass so many on the Christian Right, not to mention his exclusion of Billy Graham -- whom I see as more theocratically-inclined than do his admirers -- from that company.

None of that changes the fact that this is great reporting. Apologists for the Christian Right like to point out that there's much more to it than what Chris shows us. That's true. But what Chris's shows us is there, and it's powerful. When this article appeared last month, paired with a story of mine about Colorado Springs, the wrath of the right seemed to concentrate on Chris. I'd like to think that's because I'm just so "fair and balanced" that it's hard to attack my writing, but I suspect that it may have been because Chris hit closer to home.
--Sharlet [ Continue reading: ]

The Yenta What
Schooled Her
Sharlet: In a few weeks I head up to Boston to answer a few questions for WGBH, one of the flagship PBS affiliates. "What should the American people know about religion?" "What do they want to know about religion?" "What do you think would make an interesting program?" Well, I have lots of answers, but given that I'm responsible for helping to steer the course of public television -- the fate of the nation! -- I keep it broad, so to speak. My answer to all three queries: Food. What we eat is what we believe. Which is why I find the timing of my comrades at Killing the Buddha (at which I've been downgraded to "editor-at-large," because I am, in fact, large, and because I'm too busy Revealing to kill many Buddhas) so perfectly apt. They've finally published the recipe for "Jewish-style Mulligatawny Soup" I've been waiting for, courtesy of Abigail Pickus, who makes it tasty with a tale of the yenta what schooled her: "She was not fat exactly, but zaftig: a token of too many helpings of brisket and kugel..." [ Continue reading: ]

The Kids Are Not Alright
What's most interesting about Geraldine Sealey's damning Rolling Stone report on the Bush administration's failure to live up to its promises to fund the fight against AIDS is not the information she presents -- most of it old news to... [ Continue reading: ]

Making Torture Beautiful
Will the Right cry sacrilege now that the artist who gave us "Piss Christ" has made U.S. foreign policy appear equally seductive? [ Continue reading: ]

The Runaway Bestseller You’ll Never Read
God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong, and the Left Doesn’t Get It / By Jim Wallis reviewed by Leora Bersohn

[ Continue reading: ]

The Church of No Questions
How do you get shown the door at one of America's most powerful megachurches? Easy -- just ask a question. [ Continue reading: ]

Jesus is Snippy
Saturday Night Live veteran
Julia Sweeney joined a Bible study to get right with God. But the Old Testament, she discovered, was not an antidote to moral relativism; it was moral relativism. She held out hope for the New Testament. "I could hardly wait to meet Jesus again. But, oh, dear. Well, First off, Jesus is much angrier than I expected him to be. I didn't know that he was so angry, so much of the time. And very impatient." And snippy, too. Hear, on last week's This American Life, "Godless America."

Sweeney also writes a blog where she complains about God. And -- get this, culture warriors! -- she's a writer on Desperate Housewives. [ Continue reading: ]

Geez
We recommend Geez, a new online hipster Mennonite magazine for theologically conservative activist Christian boycotters, AKA, "Christers" (see recent post on Christian conservative boycotters so-labeled). It's a bit wonky, but there's an interesting story happening in Geez. [ Continue reading: ]

Boycott Fundamentalism
There's just no good term for the cultural movement and political force variously referred to as the "Christian Right," or "fundamentalists." "Christian conservatives," the term The Revealer uses most often, has the advantage of inoffensiveness, which means it's also bland... [ Continue reading: ]

Sermons Most Peculiar
The Revealer's been sluggish of late, but we've a revival in the works. This fall, The Revealer will be going bi-coastal, drawing the on the combined powers of NYU's and USC's graduate journalism programs. In the meantime, summer updates will be slightly less frequent, but we'll be publishing some original work by young religion journalists that bears reading and consideration.

First, though, we've some catching up to do. Following are several chunks of religion journalism we've been pondering lately. "Religion"? "Journalism"? The terms are vague, which is why The Revealer continues to define them by way of collage, a great big clash of stories and genres and opinions and facts. The stuff of sermons, you might say, only lots more exciting.

1. In his new book, Led Zeppelin IV, techgnostic Erik Davis goes talmudic on the band of our youth. Davis, writes Revealer colleague Mark Dery, "follows the hyperlinks of his sprawling erudition and far-flung interests wherever they lead him, riffing on rock history, fan consciousness, a 632-page crackpot exegesis by a Zep fan-turned-born-again-Christian ('without a doubt the most exhaustive occult reading of Zep yet attempted'), the disembodiment of music in the age of mechanical reproduction, the creepily necromantic nature of dead voices resurrected by the phonograph needle, the 19th century occultist Austin Osman Spare (whose concept of the sigil unlocks the deeper meanings of those inscrutable Zoso glyphs), and the terrifying true nature (now it can be told!) of the 'five seconds of pulsating electronic spooge' that opens 'Black Dog.'"

If you dig terrifying true natures as much as we do, enter the sprawling erudition of Davis and Dery in conversation.

2. Speaking of terrifying true natures, few can compete with that of Dr. W. David Hager, a Bush health appointee, as revealed by Ayelish McGarvey in a recent edition of The Nation. What's so scary? "For... seven years Hager sodomized [his wife] without her consent while she slept roughly once a month until their divorce in 2002, she claims. 'My sense is that he saw [my narcolepsy] as an opportunity.'"

Yeah, that's scary. But why is it a religion story? Because Hager was and is a prominent Christian conservative speaker and, charges McGarvey, is also a Christian activist in what should be a realm of science -- the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. McGarvey should know -- she's a theologically conservative Christian herself, not to mention one of the most thorough journalists of religion around. This story leaves Hager nowhere to hide -- except for the mainstream press, which barely grazed the story, one of the most disturbing portraits of religious hypocrisy to come out of this administration.

3. Still not scared? Then how about... Satan! Only, it turns out that there's nothing less scary than Satanists in Manhattan. Jim Knipfel of Slackjaw fame celebrates the publication of a new edition of the Satanic Bible by visiting with a disconsolate member of the Church of Satan, recently relocated to Hell's Kitchen, in Manhattan. What seems to be the problem? New York isn't naughty anymore. Ok, agreed; Times Square has become the geographic equivalent of a handi-wipe, sterilizing our sin-natures in anti-septic oceans of advertising. But what's really interesting here is how blandly transparent Satanists turn out to be, lamenting the good old days just like Edith Bunker. This would not strike as unusual were it not for the fact that The Revealer receives at least one email a week accusing us of New York Citified, blue-state, hedonistic elitism. To which our most effective reply is: If this is as carnal as we can be, we've got nothing on Topeka.

4. Onto Lowell, MA, for "Nana Dharma": "Of his grandmother -- who hails from Jack Kerouac's hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts -- Mark DeCarteret says, "She knew 'beat' when it meant working in a mill at sixteen, the thundering of the factory obliterating any attempts at reflection. Her observations are Old World practicality cut with a near Zen detachment. But mostly they're just the words of an elderly woman who can't help thinking that no matter where you stand in this world, it always seems to be on fire..."

5. Also out of Lowell, a new radio show from Christopher Lydon, formerly of The Connection and David Miller: Open Source, one of the first episodes of which features Jeff Sharlet, Real Live Preacher, and Sarah Dylan Breuer, talking about God and godlessness online.

Open Source may soon be fully national, but right now it reaches an oddly select audience, airing on public radio stations in Boston, Seattle, and Salt Lake City.

Clearly, God has a mission for Jeff Sharlet in Salt Lake City: The very next day, he joined Nick Burns on Radio Free Utah's Radioactive to discuss his most recent Harper's story, "Soldiers of Christ" -- amped up on KRCL's website it should be noted, with the addition of "armed," "fundamentalist," and "extremist," which is, perhaps, a bit extreme, too. [ Continue reading: ]