Dear Revealer readers,

This month marks one year since the first pandemic stay-at-home orders went into effect throughout the United States. Our once bustling offices, beloved restaurants, and cherished religious institutions shuttered as many of us moved our lives online. With these changes came new rituals and traditions. Countless religious leaders began to broadcast services online, a trend we at the Revealer described as the work of “reluctant televangelists.” Other religious groups took their gatherings outdoors where the risk of viral transmission lowered considerably. My own Upper West Side street turned into an outdoor Orthodox synagogue for the Jewish High Holy Days this past autumn. Meanwhile, others flaunted public health guidelines and sued for the right to pray indoors. And countless Americans searched for ways to grieve the dead when funerals were no longer possible.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

To mark the one-year anniversary of the pandemic upending our lives, the Revealer’s March issue opens with Abel Gomez’s “Postapocalyptic Communities: Tribal and Religious Organizations Respond to COVID-19,” where he explores how groups that survived near-genocide, including Indigenous Americans, Black Americans, and Jews, are reacting to COVID-19 and what they can teach us about making it through this crisis. Next, because the pandemic has kept many of us inside binge watching television, we are running two articles about religion in current TV and film. In “Good Places, Uploads, and Reimagining the Afterlife in Popular Culture,” Robert Repino examines how three recent television shows depict heavenly perfection as a less-than-ideal postmortem situation. And in “Just the Right Amount of Sugar,” Sharrona Pearl reviews Making Sweet Tea, a documentary about Black gay men in the South and their complicated, and often surprising, relationships with religion.

Another show that premiered during the pandemic that prominently featured religion, especially the gendered pressures Mormon women face, was the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. To explore Mormon ideas about gender in more depth, we are running an excerpt from Taylor Petrey’s newest book Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism, where he shares how longtime anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly partnered with Mormon leaders to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment and promote patriarchal nuclear families.

Our March issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Mormons and Changing Ideas about Gender and Sexuality.” Taylor Petrey joins us to discuss the current place of LGBTQ Mormons in the Church of Jesus Christ and Later Day Saints, tensions among Mormons about gender, and how Mormon leaders tried to teach parents to raise gender normative, heterosexual children. You can listen to this fascinating episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As we enter the second year of the pandemic, let us  acknowledge the more than half a million Americans who died from COVID-19 in the past twelve months. Far too many lost their lives not simply from a virus that wreaked havoc on their bodies, but from the negligence of government officials who eschewed science and who lied about the novel coronavirus’s dangers. Let us hope the months ahead bring less death, greater government competence, and with more Americans striving to keep one another safe so that we may live with greater peace of mind in a world where COVID-19 continues to exist.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.