13 dispatches from the forgotten frontiers, crooked paths, and cul-de-sacs of religion reporting in America.

By Jeff Sharlet

Last week, I rounded up my favorite religion-related stories of 2008, and, over at Religion Dispatches, my favorite religion-related books of 2008, along with "best of" lists from a number of Revealer contributors. For the quiet week between Christmas and New Year's Day, here's a list of 2008's 13 best Revealer links to the margins of faith, as found in compost, Tulsa, and other people's conversations. In chronological order:

1. "The Sodfather" -- I'm here to capture the rapture and the resurrection," says master composter Tim Dundon, self-proclaimed "guru of doo-doo." By Daniel Chamberlain, in Arthur.

2. "One Nation Under Elvis" -- "Elvis is God" stories are a staple of "wacky religion reporting. Contrarian prose-psalmist Rebecca Solnit dispenses with kitsch to seriously explore the theological paradoxes of rockabilly religion. In Orion.

3. "Master of the Orgasm" -- Gideon Lewis-Kraus resurrects Wilhelm Reich for Nextbook.

4. "God is a Monster" -- Gabriel McKee on sin and redemption in J.J. Abram's monster movie, Cloverfield, in Religion Dispatches. McKee's SF Gospel is the best source for religion in sci-fi/horror/superhero movies we know.

5. "Only Visiting This Planet" -- S. Brent Plate remembers when Christian rock was weird, on The Revealer.

6. "Fetal Rock" -- in which I argue here on The Revealer that Christian rock is getting weird again, with illustrations from Flyleaf and an album called Silent Screams.

7. "Bad Moon Rising" -- If Don Delillo had taken a lot of acid and grown a funny bone before he wrote Mao II, John Gorenfeld's fabulous investigation of the Reverend Moon is the book he might have come up with. Excerpted on Alternet.

8. "Blasphemous Lollipop" -- a Bloggingheads.tv "diavlog" with Daniel Radosh about his book, Rapture Ready, and sacred suckers.

9. "An 'Ooga Booga' Cleanse" -- NPR reporter Jennifer Sharpe describes a pleasant immersion in the cult of Father Yod. With musical slideshow.

10. "Tulsa, City of (Somebody's) Dreams" -- Akshay Ahuja on tour with Indian death metal band Cremated Souls. On Guernica, one of my favorite new online magazines.

11. "Can I Borrow a Feelin'?" -- God and the worst album covers ever, in the Florida Sun-Sentinel.

12. "Private Conversation" -- Kio Stark mistakes the most personal of intimacies for religion, and much more, on her fascinating new blog, Municipal Archive.

28 December 2008
11:52 AM: "It's not the vase, it's what you put in it." That's what Carlos Williams, the missionary hero of this WaPo story, tells a wino he wants to reel into his new church. It's not a bad motto for religion reporting, either. It's not the religion that matters, it's what you put into the story, the balance of doctrine and ethnography, sympathy and empathy, narrative and explication. Mollie Hemingway at GetReligion.org thinks WaPo reporter Michelle Boorstin gets it just about perfect in her portrait of a Pentecostal missionary family in a rough Washington neighborhood. It is an uncommonly good story -- strong on doctrine, sympathy, and narrative. It's the other side of the equation that's weak. In her admirable attempt to respectfully report on the Williams family's belief, Boorstin sleights the complications of introducing salvation-centered Pentecostal faith into a neighborhood with what seems to be a strong social gospel tradition. GetReligion's Hemingway notes that underexamined conflict, but she thinks Boorstin is balancing what she sees as mainstream media's preference for worldly religion, "without taking sides." But exploring multiple "sides" is one of the missions of mainstream media, and one worth preserving. Had Boorstin's story appeared in a Pentecostal publication, I'd flag it as first-rate religious reporting. In WaPo, it's simply well-written but one-sided religion reporting.

27 December 2008
4:30 PM: It should come as no surprise that The Wrestler is a religiously-inflected flick -- nearly every review uses "resurrected" to describe Mickey Rourke -- but Gabriel McKee connects the blood spatters on his SF Gospel blog.

4 December 2008
6:58 PM: Elizabeth Dwoskin details the collapse of a kosher empire for the Village Voice. This is one of the best reports on the Agriprocesser scandal we've seen, the only one to seriously venture into the Orthodox Jewish community's support for the kosher meat supplier following revelations of its brutal treatment of its workers. Some of the sourcing seems a bit thin, but the story is still superb -- a long, innovative, investigative feature in a paper that doesn't run many of them any more.

3 December 2008
10:39 AM: Odetta, 1930-2008. "Some folks sing songs," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "Odetta testified." But Corliss gets one thing wrong: Odetta didn't just want to "sing black truth to white power," she wanted to sing truth to whoever needed it. That's what testimony is. "When I discovered folk music, I suddenly saw how dreadful the world could be," she said in a 1960 interview with Time. Folk was for her its own testimony, a revelation; she turned into prophecy. Prophecy, after all, isn't so much about the future as the present and its evils. “The folk songs were — the anger,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. "She sang straight, no tricks," Pete Seeger said. Gawker, of all places, gets that, presenting three clips that give a glimpse of her range, from pure rage to gospel to the fierce humor that kept her alive.

1 December 2008
6:47 PM: Sharlet: Emergent evangelical writer Tony Jones, author of The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier responds to my essay for Dispatches from the Religious Left. (Maybe it's time to dispatch the term "dispatches.") Jones is skeptical of terms like right and left, and more interested in the tradition of progressive pragmatism he traces from Emerson to Dewey -- and maybe to Obama.

1 December 2008
1:51 AM: Marilynne Robinson's "extemporizing on, say, Karl Marx’s Capital is often punctuated with laughter and blithe phrases such as 'Oh, goody!' When a question gave her pause during our interview, she’d often shrug and say, 'Calvin again,' and then look away as if the sixteenth-century Frenchman were standing in the room waiting to give her advice." Sarah Fay interviews our greatest Calvinist novelist.

29 November 2008
4:53 PM: Gawker, as usual, brings us the religion news: The Rev. George M. Docherty, a Scotsman who advocated for adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance so that Americans sound like royal subjects who say "God save the Queen" -- I'm not making that up! -- has died at age 97. It was Docherty's idea, but the project of a number of conservative congressmen who saw the addition of those two words as a vaccine against communism. Michael Newdow, the earnest atheist who took the phrase all the way to the Supreme Court, is often ridiculed for fretting over a bit of symbolism. But that ridicule is a sign of how effective that symbolism has been at normalizing any number of theological concepts into our ostensibly secular nation. Not just the existence of God, but our submission to God; and not just individual submission, but national submission. "One nation, under God" implies that unity is only possible with that submission. The conservatives who longed for that acknowledgment may not have anticipated its consequences -- a big tent "God," vague enough for us all to ignore him or praise him as we please. Rev. Docherty, God-diluter, R.I.P.

29 November 2008
11:34 AM: Why didn't any editor at the NYT Book Review flag Virginia Heffernan's use of the term "Pentecostalist" to describe the religion of Sarah Vowell's youth as an anachronistic variation on "Pentecostal"? Does this oversight shed light on the Book Review's appointment of only two books with religion as a main subject to its list of 50 notable nonfiction titles for 2008?

25 November 2008
12:00 AM: Leftist blogger Frederick Clarkson is wondering why conservative columnist Kathleen Parker isn't being taken for the woodshed for her religious bigotry. Anti-Muslim? Dismissive of liberal Christians? A Wicca basher? None of the above. Parker is taking aim at "an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners," the "oogedy-boogedy Christians." What if a liberal columnist of similar popularity as Parker had said the same thing, Fred wonders. Of course, they have, in only slightly milder terms, but that doesn't make it any better when Parker does it. It is indeed bigotry; it's also classist claptrap.

24 November 2008
12:35 AM: A Texas megachurch pastor offers advice on "how to move from whining about the economy to whoopee!” Gretel Kovach for The New York Times reports. It's a decent little story, and that's its weakness. This sex story is too wholesome, a perfect example of the "innocuous spirituality" / "dangerous fanaticism" divide that marks so much religion reporting. Most American religion contains elements of both. At a time when gay marriage is the main battlefront of a culture war that's heating up just when it's supposed to be cooling down, couldn't the liberal NYT have spared a paragraph for this megachurch's views on the issue? It's "seven days of sex" program, we suspect, comes with some serious preconditions.

13 November 2008
10:09 AM: "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people," Patty Hearst, AKA "Tania" of the Symbionese Liberation Army, famously declared. Ann Coulter, on a vision quest to find the messiah who will resurrect the G.O.P., doesn't muster quite as much coherence: "Indeed, the only good thing about McCain is that he gave us a genuine conservative, Sarah Palin. He's like one of those insects that lives just long enough to reproduce so that the species can survive. That's why a lot of us are referring to Sarah as "The One" these days. Like Sarah Connor in 'The Terminator,' Sarah Palin is destined to give birth to a new movement. That's why the Democrats are trying to kill her. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is involved somehow, too. Good Lord, I'm tired."

31 October 2008
12:41 PM: Kathryn Joyce: The World Congress of Families, a right-wing "pro-family" group that I wrote about in a March cover story for The Nation ("Missing: The Right Babies"), severely misquoted me in a press release issued Oct. 30 to promote its documentary film, "Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family." They attributed a quote to me, falsely claiming I called them "racists" and "neo-Nazis," that was in fact written by their own PR officer, Don Feder, in an attack article he wrote about me after my article came out. My article was about the subtle nature of the "pro-family" movement's race-baiting in Europe, building upon immigration fears to import U.S.-style culture war tactics against abortion, family planning, gay rights and secularism, and contained no language of the sort. (Also in his article, Feder, ostensibly hoping to underscore the WCF's paternalistic, anti-woman credentials -- their anti-contraception, pro-patriarchy platform includes their definition of women's rights as limited to the right to give birth to, breastfeed, and raise children -- referred to me as "little Katie" lost "in a lefty version of 'The Wizard of Oz.'") The WCF's VP, Larry Jacobs, and Feder have both apologized to me for the misquote, have removed their webpage of the press release, and have promised a correction. In the meantime, if you'd like to read what I actually wrote, my article is here.

28 October 2008
10:44 AM: In his NYT column, Milton scholar Stanley Fish offers the first Obama/Jesus comparison that actually makes sense. Meanwhile, NYT's in-house pop conservative, David Brooks, tells The New Republic that he's thrilled that Bono is joining the papers stable of columnists -- yes, Bono -- because "he's taken time to think like a regular opinion person." Oh, Bono -- reduced to a "regular opinion person." One rises, One falls.

3 October 2008
11:01 AM: Plenty of pundits pounced on Palin's resurrection of failed Civil War general George McClellan in last night's debate (apparently, she meant General David McKiernan, who is alive), but not many noticed her erasure of near four centuries of history when she attributed John Winthrop's 1630 description of New England as "a City upon a Hill" to Ronald Reagan, who in his farewell address -- like many presidents before him -- declared the U.S. a "shining city upon a hill." Here's Palin: "And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here." Darn straight! We're rewriting history, and we are going to not let the "mainstream media" say we're sorry! According to Winthrop, though, it'll be the Lord who'll hold Sarah to account. His next sentence reads: "soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world."

16 September 2008
6:13 PM: Will McCain's Palin pick revive his once-high hopes of winning Latino votes? Will mainstream media be able to comprehend the overlap of the Latino, evangelical, and Pentecostal demographics? The answer to the first question, says B. Adriana Venegas-Chavez, is: Possibly. The answer to the second is to be found by inference from the links Venegas-Chavez gathers: Probably not.

10 September 2008
6:22 PM: "As the Bush era comes to a fitful close, and the American presidential elections approach, the Christian evangelical movement that brought the Republicans to power in 2000 is, to all outward appearances, losing its political influence. The strange spectacle of the past eight years, in which fire-breathing preachers from Colorado Springs and Lynchburg appeared to be crafting American policy, looks to be over. But Sharlet's book puts an end to any such thoughts." Josh Nathan-Kazis reviews The Family for Israel's oldest paper, Haaretz. My bet is that he wrote it before McCain picked Palin...

10 September 2008
11:10 AM: ABC reports that two of the books Palin's church allies in Wasilla may have singled out for censorship are Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous, and Pastor, I Am Gay, by a Wasilla area pastor named Howard Bess who describes himself as conservative. Go Ask Alice is well-known, a classic of campy anti-drug literature for teens believed to have been authored by a Mormon youth counselor named Beatrice Sparks. Plenty of sex and drugs, but not exactly liberal; and Sparks' next book, Jay's Journal, is the story of a boy who commits suicide after getting involved with the occult, a warning that may have been better received by members of Wasilla Assembly of God. Pastor, I Am Gay is another matter -- ABC interviews author Bess, but apparently nobody looked at the book. Librarians Against Palin reports that Bess says he donated two copies to the Wasilla library; they were stolen; and he donated more. What's the story of this book? (Here's a short review on a Christian website.) Why didn't ABC have someone read the books in question? At the very least, there's a new question of censoriousness that arises. It's bad enough to censor any book; even worse when the author is your neighbor.

9 September 2008
7:16 PM: Evangelical Palin's fans are comparing the governor to the biblical Queen Esther, whom her pastor said Palin took as her role model when she was elected. The Nation's Jon Weiner outlines some of the pitfalls of that parallel here. And, a few years ago, anthropologist Omri Elisha made an even more startling connection here on The Revealer: Bush is a Queen Esther, too.

9 September 2008
6:53 PM: The Family Research Council -- Washington's one-stop lobby shop for all things fundamentalist -- is warning McCain that picking Palin won't be enough to win evangelical loyalty unless he unpicks his media pals. Writes FRC leader Tony Perkins in an email blast just released, on the subject of what he sees as mainstream media bigotry directed toward Palin: "How the McCain campaign responds is critical in maintaining the intensity and enthusiasm that swept through social conservatives after Gov. Palin's selection as the VP nominee. In the past, there has been an overwhelming public backlash against those seeking to impose a religious litmus test on candidates and judicial nominees... The McCain campaign must stand firmly against efforts to make Gov. Palin's faith a disqualifier." Got that? If McCain wants his new friends to stick around, he'd better be a part of their anti-media backlash.

I believe that he [God] gives us opportunities every couple of years to communicate the gospel worldwide through secular media and we consistently blow it. A congressman in trouble, that's the time. A family member gets himself in horrible trouble, that's the time. A preacher gets himself in awful trouble, that's the time.

And Oxford Americanize your ears.

By Jeff Sharlet

Every year I plug the annual Oxford American Southern Music Issue here on The Revealer because A) I love it; B) I usually have a piece in it, which is independent of me loving the only music magazine that always cares as much about the words on the page as the notes in the song. Editor Marc Smirnoff created the first Southern Music issue ten years ago as the anti-Rolling Stone. What that meant to Smirnoff was “music writing that tried, perhaps foolishly, to tap into the cosmos, much as the music we love does.” Tap into the cosmos? That sounds like some kind of religion. Feels like it, too—the only religious writing I’ve ever done, I think (as opposed to writing about religion)—was about music, and most of it was for Oxford American. In fact, editor-at-large Paul Reyes—a Cuban-American from Miami, which is to the South as Motown is to the Midwestern sensibility—first recruited me after he read something I’d written about religion. He asked me to write about Al Green, once the sexiest man who ever sang bare-chested, now besuited and addressed as “Reverend.” This year, I got Dock Boggs, who pawned his banjo and spent thirty years hiding out from his music in church until it finally caught up with him and took him to his grave.

“It’s not altogether surprising,” writes Peter Guralnick in his cover story on Jerry Lee Lewis for this year’s double-CD, 10th anniversary special music edition, “that Jerry Lee Lewis’ art should ultimately rest on the same act that he has carried on his whole life, the same one on which so many other prodigious artists from John Donne to Little Richard have been suspended: a teetering balance between the sacred and the profane. Clearly the music of the church was a source of inspiration to him: it is at the heart of rock & roll.”

It’s there in the blues, too, and jazz, in country by the bucketful, rounding out hip hop, all over soul, the blood of R&B. It was Pythagoras who figured it all out, according to Van Dyke Parks, the master musician who contributes a foreword to Oxford American’s giant new Book of Great Music Writing: “How we could sing to the Gods and each other by codifying the modes. Some modes were rosy (‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ Ionian). Some were blue (‘My Yiddishe Mama,” Aeolian, now the modified Hungarian minor’).” And some are simply cosmic, not for the Gods or us, but by self-declared gods, such as Sun Ra’s “Travel the Spaceways,” from Oxford American’s 2006 sampler, or “Heat,” by Betty White, who with her 30-years-younger partner Elton reinvented herself in old age as a near-naked goddess of sex singing, replicating as purely as she was capable of – metaphorically, that is – the essence of orgasmic true love. “They were so horny,” writes novelist Kevin Brockmeier of Betty and Elton, the hedonistic saints of the Little Rock of his youth, “and they were so beautiful, and you never know if somebody is falling.”

That last phrase means something deep about Betty and Elton, and sex and love and probably religion, too, but you’ll have to tune in to find out. (That means buying it – the magazine’s accountant embezzled $100 k, and now they need to make some money.) There’s a lot of religion in this issue and on the two CDs that come with it, from Jerry Lee’s tightrope to the demons of Dock Boggs, a country blues singer from the 1920s whose music was so dark his songs would cast a shadow in a coal mine; from those who left religion for the rewards of soul, such as The “5” Royales (“The Slummer the Slum,” 1958) to those who never felt like they had to choose, such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe (“Rock Me,” 1941). If you know who these artists are, you need this magazine for the stories by writers such as Greil Marcus, Ron Carlson, Clyde Edgerton, and Patricia Spears Jones; if your first response to names such as Furry Lewis, Snookum Russell, The Insect Trust, Cousin Emmy, and Love… With Arthur Lee is “Who?” you need it first for the CDs, a guided tour through the spaceways of forgotten (or never really known) Southern sounds. “Everybody—believers in the Book of Revelation, the elderly, atheist Jews—is welcome to come,” as Mike Powell writes here of Sacred Harp singing. “No experience necessary, with singing or God.”

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Brown-Eyed Jewish Soul
A maverick Jewish record producer with an ear for black music teams up with artists considered behind the times to produce albums -- actual vinyl -- that reinvigorate mainstream pop. This isn't Cadillac Records... [ Continue reading: ]

But What If Jesus Was a Lumberjack?
Jack Black reprises his Mr. Show role as Jeepers Creepers -- aka Jesus -- in the all-star, too late, anti-Prop 8 musical. You can see both impersonations of the divine.. [ Continue reading: ]

A God Called Literary
In "Two Paths for the Novel," a recent New York Review of Books essay, novelist Zadie Smith hits it out of the park -- "it" being the massive cliche that is, according to her, Joseph O'Neill's acclaimed novel Netherland -- and then follows the ball into the darkness... [ Continue reading: ]

The Lost Twin
There's the ghost of a religion story in most memorials, and so it is with Jonathan Taylor's concise account in The Believer of "The Lost Twin: The Lone, Shrunken World Trade Center Tower in Oklahoma." Only this strange building, a half-size replica of half of the twin towers, wasn't built as a memorial but as an echo, and what's oddest about it is that it hasn't become a site of folk devotion. [ Continue reading: ]

God Bless Dolly Parton
Sharlet: I recently met an activist and memoirist named Michael Patrick McDonald, who for his second book, Easter Rising, got the only blurb I've ever truly been jealous of. He'd been trying to contact Patti Smith to win permission to quote a line from her amazing "Gloria" -- "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" in his memoir of punk and South Boston... [ Continue reading: ]

The Making of a Yiddish Translator
Introducing... Revealer fiction. Relax, fact fans, The Revealer isn't about to go all literary on you. But longtime Revealer collaborator and former West Coast editor Peter Manseau has recently published his first novel, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter. It's a murder mystery, a romance, and a meditation on religion and media... [ Continue reading: ]

11 Little Missionaries
Sharlet: One of the upcoming books I'm most excited about is Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, by former Revealer editor Kathryn Joyce. I was reminded of it this morning when I stumbled upon the blog of Jaynee Lockwood, a Quiverfull mom of 11 little missionaries... [ Continue reading: ]

Private Conversation
Sharlet: I'm using the thinnest of threads to tie my friend Kio's new blog, Municipal Archive, to The Revealer, a momentary mistaken notion of religion: "On a crowded corner," writes Kio, "there’s a young man with tight shoulders and clipped hair. Tourists surround him but he doesn’t see them, he’s staring out across the street into the far distance of his imagination. His hands are moving in a pattern that repeats, it seems for a moment like genuflection: father, son, holy ghost. But it’s not, the motions are more intricate and subtle than a hastily drawn cross. He flicks two fingers at his chin, and suddenly I see that his finger are talking, it’s sign language, and by the long stare it is clear that his hands are talking to himself. He says the same thing over and over until at last the light changes and his hands drop to his sides, his fingers still moving like pistons, muttering at the sidewalk." Municipal Archive is entirely comprised of such moments, real life scenes from the city of Ben Katchor's imagination, transmitted to experience by way of Vincent McHugh's ghostly inspiration, and transcribed by Kio. [ Continue reading: ]

Holy Ghost Hustle
There is no news, scholarly, or artistic value in this link. Just a glorious example of fundamentalist funk, Holy Ghost hustle, and evangelical locomotion. [ Continue reading: ]

Books Too Good for this Tawdry World
Every now and then, The Revealer receives some books for review that none of us are ever going to read. Well, actually we're never going to read most of the books we get for review, but I'm talking about those books that seem worthy, and admirable, and absolutely tedious. Not academically; morally... [ Continue reading: ]

Coming Attractions
We've got head hunters, big dams, holy Wal-Mart, and all kinds of Jesus, available to YOU, this fall, absolutely free but for subway fare to the greatest show on earth, "Culture, Religion, and the Politics of Change" division. We're talking about the fall schedule of the NYU Center for Religion and Media, publisher of The Revealer, of course... [ Continue reading: ]

Idol Music
Sharlet: An essay of mine from last year's Oxford American Southern Music Annual, "The People's Singer," made the cut for Da Capo Best Music Writing 2008, to be released in the beginning of October. My piece, about the forgotten folk singer Lee Hays -- he wrote the words to "If I Had a Hammer" and adapted lyrics to "Goodnight, Irene" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" -- is shaped by an undercurrent of religion, the sound of the spirituals Hays secularized. I'm not sure what else in this issue touches on music and religion, but the Idolator blog has done us all a favor by tracking down the online versions of 40 of the "Honorable Mention" essays listed in the back of the book; and I've sifted through them to see which, for the sake of Revealer readers, touch on the role of religion in popular music. Here's what I found... [ Continue reading: ]

Modified Christianity
A left critic on what secular humanists don't get about Christianity in America. By Robert Christgau. (Excerpted from Truthdig.com) [ Continue reading: ]

A New New Atheist
The "New Atheists," as writers such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens are known, are joined by a heavyweight of leftist philosophy and practice... [ Continue reading: ]

Wayward Sheep
Ashley Makar: I was late to my Egyptian baptism. Over twenty-four years and ten minutes late. It might have been my second rebirth by water. My dad—a Coptic Orthodox Christian by blood, a cut-throat pragmatic physician at heart—doesn't recall if I was baptized as a baby. All grown up, I helped myself to the blessings... [ Continue reading: ]

Tolerating Locke, Resurrecting Williams
John Locke, the 17th century philosopher most commonly associated with the concept of tolerance, "argues from Protestant premises most of the time. He seems uninterested in finding arguments for toleration that all citizens can share." Contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum much prefers Roger Williams... [ Continue reading: ]

After Michael Phelps
What are mainstream media's top three China talking points? 1. Good Olympics! Too bad about the little girl who sang the song. 2. Not so nice to the dissidents! 3. Hmm... there was something else, wasn't there? Oh, yeah -- Tibet! That darling Dalai Lama. He'll be back... [ Continue reading: ]

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