This is another posting to recommend to readers some video resources in the area of religious studies (and politics) that I've run across lately. I have to admit failure (with apologies to Chris Morley, who recommended this series to me) at accessing the BBC series on Catholics in Britain I recommended to you all lately. For whatever reason, I cannot get my computer to download the software required to watch that series, and so I can't give you a report on it--though I very much appreciate the comments that both Phil Ewing and Terry Weldon made following that posting, to provide their own responses from inside England. And I also very much appreciate Chris for recommending the series.
The video at the top of this posting is from Dennis Kucinich's current campaign in Ohio. I'm offering it as a resource because I find it particularly inspiring--and Lord knows, I need inspiration these days, especially when it comes to the American political scene.
I know that some of the images and commentary in the video verge on the kitschy, but I appreciate Kucinich very much for offering this kind of inspirational ad in a campaign season marked, on the whole, by such toxic discourse and such dissemination of toxic disinformation by politicians on all sides. Kucinich manages to speak to and about the soul of America, about the place we're all trying to reach, in whatever fashion, with our political conversations--when those conversations aim at being constructive. And I appreciate the video for that reason.
I mentioned in a comment recently that another program Steve and I have watched in the past several weeks was the PBS "American Experience" documentary on the Amish in America. That documentary is online, and I do recommend it. It's well-done, and at times, lyrically beautiful with the images it captures. It also stands out in the field of American mainstream media commentary on religious topics for its generally well-informed perspective on the issues it addresses.
Steve and I did both find it erring somewhat on the hagiographical side, however. For Steve, it was painful to watch a documentary about a group of pious German Americans who resolutely step against mainstream culture for generations because, as he kept saying throughout the film, this could be his own Catholic family singing slightly different hymns. Several of his right-wing Catholic siblings have chosen to go a counter-cultural cultic religious route that is not strongly different from the sectarian and anti-intellectual route the Amish have chosen for generations, though their right-wing cultic sectarian German-American religiosity is Catholic instead of Protestant.
Yet in key respects, it mirrors the Amish approach to life--notably in the sharp gender distinctions it makes in the name of God. Steve's right-wing Catholic siblings insist that females, including their little daughters living on farms and doing farm chores, wear modest, all-enveloping dresses at all times. And so Steve's sisters and nieces in these rural cultic German Catholic enclaves might, to all intents and purposes, be Amish females without prayer caps. They are submissive to the men in their lives, and they dress to demonstrate their submission. They have, as several of Steve's aunts are not unafraid to say, put the clock (and rural German Catholic women) back a hundred years, after those aunts and Steve's mother struggled to emerge from the old-world mold of German Catholicism that made them adjuncts to and servants of the men in their patriarchal families.
And that's perhaps the area in which I most strongly fault this documentary about Amish life today: it does too little, in my opinion, to demonstrate the fault lines caused by rigid gender roles and male domination in Amish culture, in a society that increasingly questions these rigid roles and the male domination on which they're premised. There are sections of the film that do interview several women who address the struggles through which they have had to live in order either to break with their Amish upbringing in order to be their own persons, or, in one case, to submit obediently to the instructions of a local bishop when the woman in question told him her husband was abusing her, and the bishop asked her what she was doing to cause him to beat her.
This is a conversation that we need to have all across American religious and political life, of course, since subordination of women to men in the name of God is hardly confined to right-wing Catholicism or the Amish. Deborah Feldman is speaking out right now about her experiences growing up as a female expected to be under absolute male control in a Hasidic community in New York. She has published a book, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, about these experiences. I'm struck, as I read her testimony, by a point she makes recurrently: she says that the more women obtain autonomy and rights in society as a whole, the more determined Hasidic men become to shove women into even further subjection, while expanding their own range of rights as men. All in the name of God . . . .
And I suspect this is happening in patriarchal religious movements across the board these days, and in the political movements they spawn. If Mr. Limbaugh isn't an example of this dynamic of male entitlement expanding its claims in direct response to women's assertion of their humanity and rights, then I don't know what Mr. Limbaugh is.
And I'm thinking through these same dynamics lately from the context of yet another American religious tradition, the Mormon tradition, as I read David Ebershoff's novel The 19th Wife, with its back-and-forth account of the origins of polygamy among the Latter Day Saints, and the continued practice of polygamy (along with extreme assertion of male entitlement and the obligation of females to submit to males) in some sects of Mormonism even today.
And the final video resource I want to recommend to you today, Bob Simon's interview with Irish archbishop Diarmuid Martin this past Sunday on "60 Minutes," deserves a posting all to itself. I'll follow this posting with that one--with good wishes to all of you who watch any of these videos, that they turn out to be worth watching.
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