Dear Revealer readers,

When I first started teaching college students, back during the Obama presidency, I felt the need to make the argument to my overwhelmingly left-leaning classes that the march of time does not guarantee social progress. Several students countered my claims and pointed to advances they had witnessed in their own lives, such as greater rights for LGBTQ people and better representation of people of color in politics, as evidence that the present was better than the past. My fear, and the reason I proffered this argument every semester, was that I did not want students to think the changing of the calendar had anything to do with us moving closer to greater equality. I wanted students to see that social progress comes from activism, extensive work, and strategy, not from the Earth revolving around the sun. I even wrote about this idea at length in my book, where I devote half of one chapter to critiquing the once-massively popular It Gets Better project, an online campaign that promised LGBTQ adolescents life will improve simply because they get older.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

For the past few years, in what I can only describe as something that brings me sadness, I have not needed to make this argument to my students. They come into my classes worried about the American political structure, the climate crisis, and the backlash against the political advances my students in earlier years celebrated. Many are anxious about the country they are inheriting. My teaching, in turn, has taken on new urgency as I hope to provide students with the historical knowledge and analytical skills to better understand our society and the tools to improve it. As opposed to students from my first years of teaching, these students do not have much faith in the future, so I try to give them hope that the future does not have to be one of despair.

I suspect that many of you, too, feel like we are on the precipice of backsliding in several areas. For that reason, this issue of the Revealer considers our present political situation and what can be done to make sense of it. Our June issue opens with Anna Piela and Joanna Krotofil’s “What Poland’s Anti-Abortion Laws Foretell about the United States,” where they explain how Poland’s criminalization of abortion can provide a roadmap for what is about to happen in the United States and what activists in states where abortion will remain legal need to do now. Next, in “Pentecostals’ Political Warfare,” Miguel Petrosky explains how Pentecostal beliefs have influenced Republican Party politics, why many Pentecostals are ready for a spiritual and literal battle over elections, and what everyone needs to understand in order to quell potential violence. Then, in “Translating Religion for the Masses,” contributing editor Kali Handelman interviews Peter Manseau, Director of the Smithsonian’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History, to see what he thinks about the place of religion in U.S. history and how that influences our lives today.

Our June issue also considers intersections of religion, culture, and power. In the third installment of our Catholic Horrors series, Kathleen Holscher explores two films that use gothic horror techniques to shed light on abuses that took place at institutions run by Catholic leaders with the support of the government, like American Indian boarding schools. Next, Vani Kannan reviews the book Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance and considers what it means for a Black, queer woman to critique the white supremacy of yoga practice in America while also trying to avoid culturally appropriating South Asian traditions. And in “Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die,” Sharrona Pearl, a medical ethics expert, reviews the film The God Committee, which explores how hospitals decide who should receive life-saving organ transplants and the factors that complicate how to make those decisions fairly.

The June issue also features a special episode of the Revealer podcast: “Pray Away on Netflix, Conversion Therapy, and Ex-LGBTQ Ministries.” Kristine Stolakis, director of Netflix’s acclaimed documentary Pray Away, and Lynne Gerber, author of the book Seeking the Straight and Narrow, join us to discuss what happens when people go to Christian organizations that promise to change their sexuality or gender identity. We explore the beliefs these organizations promote, why such groups remain prominent today, and how to end conversion therapy for good. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As we wait to see how the Supreme Court rules on pressing matters like abortion and prayer in public schools, I am reminded of two things. First, as I taught my students years ago and as many of us now know, the future can be worse than the past. For those of us who care about equality, the road ahead will be one of struggle. Consequently, second, I hold onto a quote that Angela Zito, co-director of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media (and the Revealer’s publisher) shared with me that has informed how I teach college students and how I think about what the Revealer can offer our readers. The quote comes from Welsh writer Raymond Williams: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.”

May we continue to find hope in these complicated times and the fortitude to keep working for a better world.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.