Carmen Celistini on Wikileaks' October Surprise: Attempt to Smear Hillary Clinton with Charges of Witchcraft

Carmen Celestini situates Wikileaks' October surprise — the attempt to smear Hillary Clinton with charges of witchcraft by misrepresenting an email about Podesta and a Spirit Dinner — within a broader current of "improvisational conspiracies" that have energized right-wing Christian voters for years now:

Election Nears, and Charges Emerge That Hillary Clinton and Her Advisors Dabble in Satanic Rituals Using Semen, Blood, and Urine: Why?

Within days of a monumentally important U.S. election, Twitter is now blazing with comments about "spirit cooking" — about allegations that Hillary Clinton and her chief campaign advisors practice Satanic rituals involving liminal substances, semen, blood, and urine. This meme is being planted and hyped, of course, by the alt-right, and quite deliberately so.

End-of-Week Hodgepodge: On Defining Others, Bayard Rustin, Hate and Religion, Witches, and President-Elect of Conference of Catholic Superiors of Men

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "I Saw Goody Proctor with the Devil"

I love every comment in the thread responding to my post yesterday about the busy-busy "somebodies" and poison-pen "tipsters" who are poring over obituaries of late to try to entrap gay employees in Catholic institutions or suspected gay employees in Catholic institutions. Katy's send-up of the hysteria ("Real and suspected gay people are EVERYWHERE," and "I have in my pocket a list of gay folks . . .") is hilarious and spookily appropriate.

Thought for the Day: Christianity, Candles, and Witches

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Rome's Witch Hunt Against American Nuns: Women as Source of Vatican's Loss of Authority

When I first read about the recent Vatican announcement that there is to be a doctrinal investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) in the United States (here), I asked myself what sociological motives might lie behind this unprecedented attack on religious women in the U.S. I say “unprecedented” not because Rome cannot and does not investigate religious congregations, but because this is the second announcement in a matter of months that Rome has American religious women in its sights.

Last December, the Vatican congregation overseeing religious life announced an upcoming visitation of American religious women, to ascertain their “quality of life.” This latest announcement came from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) on 20 February, in a letter the officers of the LCWR received on 10 March. American nuns are now to be investigated on doctrinal grounds: are they upholding hard-line teaching about ordination (that is, hard-line teaching that ordination is to be forbidden to women) and homosexuality?

This is an unprecedented attack, then, because, to most of us observing the lives and activities of American nuns, nothing indicates the imperative need for not one but two investigations. American religious women are being used in some political game that transcends their own lives. Otherwise, there would not be the need to work up a case against this particular group of dedicated believers, at this particular time in history.

And as an aside, it bears noting that when a central investigating authority stages investigations of people or groups under its power, such an investigation always does constitute an attack. The very announcement that an investigation is underway is a form of an attack, an insinuation that something is there to be investigated. Powerful top-down systems of authority mount such investigations when they wish to give the signal that they are slapping down the person or group being investigated—and that this person or group is powerless to resist.

I have learned this lesson the hard way in academic life, when I was subjected on several occasions to “investigations” or “evaluations” that were all about consolidating the power of the big man/big woman on top. These “investigations” were always rigged. The person on top controlled them, feeding the “investigator” information, questions to ask, conclusions for his or her final report. There was no possibility at all to protest or to vindicate oneself, when the big woman/big man on top decided to mount such an investigation, since the point of the investigation was not to ascertain the truth about the one being investigated: it was to reinforce the power of the one on top.

As Colleen Kochvar-Baker points out in a thought-provoking commentary on the latest announcement (here), this attack on American nuns as possibly deficient both in the practice of religious life and in their doctrinal assertions is curious, to say the least, when the Legionaries of Christ, even after their founder was deposed following years of proven allegations that he abused seminarians in his community, are subject to only one investigation—and that reluctantly—and when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has never been investigated after it has come to light that a large majority of U.S. Catholic bishops have sheltered and re-assigned known sexual predators among the clergy. Colleen asks, “Why do American nuns merit two Vatican investigations when the Legion reluctantly only gets one, and the seminaries who cranked out all those abusers only got one?”

Why, indeed? Why this obsessive focus on refractory nuns now, when there have been almost no news stories in recent months about nuns attending women’s ordination ceremonies, or nuns speaking out publicly about the hot-button issues of ordination or homosexuality? Just nuns doing what they typically do: going about their ministries quietly, courageously, faithfully—teaching, healing the sick, caring for the indigent, praying, helping immigrants and street people and the elderly.

Nuns doing what they always do, suddenly in the sights of one of the most powerful religious juggernauts in the world, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: what’s going on here?

My first reaction, when I read about the doctrinal investigation, was to wonder on what grounds Rome is wagering it can score points by announcing a double investigation of American religious women in the absence of any strong indicators of serious problems to be investigated. There will inevitably be a very powerful sympathy factor at play in this investigation, one dangerous to the Vatican.

Women religious are aging. The women in religious congregations today have given their lives in service of the church. They have maintained schools across the United States, staffed the hospitals they have founded, operated and staffed nursing homes and countless other institutions serving the church and society in admirable, valuable ways. And they have done so without asking for anything. Many women’s communities today can barely make ends meet, as their members age and, in many cases, do not have access to social security benefits.

These are the new doctrinal bugbears of the Vatican’s CDF, these faithful and long-suffering women. These are the women who merit special attention from Rome, because of apparent lapses in how they are living their vows and in what they believe. It will be exceedingly difficult for Rome to paint its attack on these aging, devoted women who have been faithful to a fault as anything other than a witch hunt—to use the phrase highlighted by Joseph Leary in his blog’s summary of the Vatican initiative (here).

If the stakes are so high, why this witch hunt now, I have been asking myself? To me, the answer seems obvious—and lamentable. Women religious are being targeted because they are aging, and relatively powerless. And above all, because they are women.

Rome needs, quite simply, someone to bolster its power right now. Rome needs someone to bully, in order to demonstrate its power at a moment in which the Vatican has done just about everything possible in recent months to undermine its moral authority. Against the advice of many insightful advisors, Benedict chose to readmit the schismatic and anti-Semitic Society of St. Pius X to the Catholic church, without expecting that group to accept Vatican II as a precondition for readmission to communion. And when the Vatican made its announcement about this initiative, it noted that it timed the announcement to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the calling of Vatican II!

The reaction to the rehabilitation of SSPX—and how it was done—has been devastating in Catholic country after Catholic country. And the unilateral, anti-collegial appointment of a bishop for Linz, Austria—right-winger Gerhard Maria Wagner—on the heels of the SSPX initiative did not help matters, and caused the Vatican eventually to have to back down in this case. As the pope’s tone-deaf and counter-factual remark to reporters in mid-March questioning the efficacy of condoms in curbing the spread of AIDS also did not help . . . .

The church, in its institutional side, is clearly on the defensive. From an American standpoint (but one that also implicates Rome as well), the church’s unthinking alliance—in its institutional leadership side—with a single political party for decades now, and its unwillingness to accept and work with a new political majority, compounds the problems the church now faces. When a tiny, 106-year old American nun living in Rome endorses the president-to-be, calling him a “good man with a good private life,” at the very time in which powerful American bishops are suggesting that Mr. Obama is the incarnation of evil, things have clearly gotten out of hand (here), from Rome's viewpoint.

The men who rule us are losing moral authority. And they also appear to be losing what counts even more to them in the end: control. And they’re losing these weapons of the ruling elite rapidly, right before our very eyes.

It’s time for a witch hunt. It’s time to find some witches. I use Joseph O’Leary’s term here with full deliberation, because it’s a correct term. Read the discussion following the National Catholic Reporter’s story about the doctrinal investigation to which the first link above points, and you’ll see a troubling, surprising theme running through not a few postings. This is the claim that this particular witch hunt is necessary because, well, witches remain alive and well.

And they’re nuns. Those same elderly women who have worn themselves out teaching children, praying, tending to the sick, taking in orphans and the homeless.

The witch rhetoric is already running through what many Catholics of the far-right say about women in general and nuns in particular these days. And as Johann Hari’s article about the timeless allure of witch hunting at Slate’s website today reminds us (here), witch hunting—hunting, accusing, killing of women outrightly accused of witchcraft—is not even a thing of the past in some cultures in the world today. It’s still going on.

Hari notes that witch hunts break out particularly in times of trauma and stress. They are fueled by a deep sociological need of communities feeling out of control to find someone on whom to blame their problems—someone to scapegoat and sacrifice in order to reassert the illusion of control.

And those “someones” are almost always women, when it comes to witch-hunts. Hari notes the deep misogyny of Christian traditions about witches, which is strongly evident in the classic textbook for witch hunters, the 15th-century book Malleficus Maleficarum (Witches’ Hammer). As Hari notes, women are susceptible when powerful social groups seek a scapegoat in order to bolster the illusion of power of the men on top, because

Women are generally weaker than men. They are less able to defend themselves from braying mobs. They are easier to pin down and turn into a screaming, denying receptacle of evil. The mobs usually choose the weakest women of all—old women and little girls.

Are we correct to think that witch-hunting is a thing of the past today, a throwback to ancient prejudices that have disappeared from the enlightened Western world? Hari thinks not. As he notes, even a vice-presidential candidate in an American federal election—in this case, Sarah Palin—is apparently not immune to the suggestion that witches are still at work in the world. Hari notes that Palin has been prayed over for protection from witches by Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee.

No doubt about it: Rome is involved in a good old-fashioned witch hunt with women religious. And the claim that women religious have not been faithful enough in assisting the men who rule us to disseminate homophobia is part and parcel of the dynamics of slander and subordination that are driving this particular witch hunt. Though the rules are made by men in the church, and though ordained men claim absolute authority to enforce those rules, women religious are now to be slapped around for not leading the charge against gays and lesbians?

This stinks. To heaven. The use of women and gays as scapegoats by a Vatican increasingly isolated and robbed of moral authority by its own truculent refusal to dialogue with the people of God and to empower anyone other than itself is scandalous. It will only further erode the wavering authority Rome hopes to shore up, through this witch hunt.

The Churches and Counter-Cultural Witness? Florida's Anti-Gay Marriage Debate

As this week ends, I’m gathering some loose end of thought. One thread that particularly fascinates me is the attempt of Christian thinkers who are essentially apologists for neo-conservative political positions to co-opt the term “counter-cultural” for their theological and political viewpoint.

I critiqued the essay of United Methodist Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker entitled “The Church and Homosexuality” earlier in the week, precisely on this ground. In my view, Bishop Whitaker’s attempt to present the Methodist church’s stance on homosexuality as counter-cultural is not plausible.

To the contrary, in maintaining that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian faith, and in upholding structures of discrimination against (openly) gay persons in the church and its institutions, the United Methodist Church is applying cultural norms, rather than bringing the gospel critically to bear on cultural practices. The United Methodist Church and other churches do not pay a price for standing with culture when it legitimates discrimination against LGBT people.

The truth is that the churches pay a price when they do stand against this vicious form of social oppression. They do so by losing donations and support, by incurring the wrath of right-wing think tanks with deep pockets and strong influence in the controlling sectors of American economic and political life.

I argued earlier this week, and continue to argue, that in standing with discriminatory cultural practices regarding gay human beings, the churches are standing on the wrong side of a movement of liberation as significant in human history as the previous movements to set slaves free, to end segregation and apartheid, and to accord women full human status. The moral arc of the universe bends to justice, and if the churches expect to earn the title “counter-cultural,” they must follow that arc towards justice for every group of people in the world, for all of those shoved away from the table and dehumanized due to innate characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

Having offered this analysis of Bishop Whitaker’s essay “The Church and Homosexuality,” I find it fascinating to read that the group attempting to use gay human beings and gay marriage as political footballs to bring right-wing voters to the polls in Florida in the coming elections have just rolled out a new website to support their effort. To be specific, I find it fascinating that the new website and press announcements about it show an extremely close connection between this campaign to use and vilify a group of human beings and churches in Florida.

In an article entitled “Florida Amendment Sponsors Roll Out New Campaign of Hate” on the Bilerico Project blog yesterday (www.bilerico.com/2008/04/florida_amendment_sponsors_roll_out_new.php#more) Waymon Hudson Notes the strong connections between churches in Florida and this campaign of hate:

The group behind the Florida ‘Marriage Amendment’ has launched a new website and media blitz. Not surprising, all of the press conferences announcing the effort took place at churches around the state. It seems they aren't even trying to hide the purely religious basis for the amendment that would not only ban gay marriage and enshrine discrimination in the state constitution, but also take away domestic partnerships and other important rights and benefits.

As Hudson notes, “With links to ‘sample sermons for preachers’, ‘church action plans’, and ‘God's design’, it [the website] reads like a church bulletin instead of a substantive effort to pass legislation . . . . This is religious-based bigotry, pure and simple.”

I find it astonishing to read that, in announcing the new website, Rev. Hayes Wicker, a Southern Baptist minister, stated to the press, “This is a tremendous social crisis, greater even than the issue of slavery.”

This is a tremendous social crisis, greater even than the issue of slavery: opposing gay marriage is a social crisis equal to that faced by the churches when they upheld slavery!?

The mainstream white churches of the South defended slavery, though Rev. Wicker's comment seems to imply that they gave countercultural witness against slavery. Rev. Wicker seems to have forgotten that his own church, the Southern Baptist Church, was founded precisely because Baptists in the South wished to continue holding slaves.

Rev. Wicker seems not to remember that almost all white churches of the antebellum South defended slavery. How can opposing gay marriage be considered countercultural today, when the churches mounting that opposition are the same churches that once defended slavery?

There is something extremely dishonest in the way some Christians today are attempting to paint themselves as counter-cultural, in opposing gay rights and gay human beings. If Bishop Whitaker wants his United Methodist Church in Florida to fulfill John Wesley’s vision for the church—namely, that the church be an agent of healing for social wounds, of lifting up the downtrodden—it seems to me that United Methodists have much work to do in the state of Florida today, where gay human beings can be fired at the whim of employers simply because they are gay, where gay teens are being shot on the streets, and where many Christians are urging further social violence against gay people.

It would be refreshingly counter-cultural if the United Methodist Church in Florida used its Social Principles to counter this ugly form of social violence. It would be refreshing to see United Methodist institutions in Florida defying such indefensible prejudice by hiring and promoting openly gay employees skilled at addressing these issues and helping the church bring healing and redemption where there is such pain and violence.

For further reading about the co-opting of the term “counter-cultural” by churchmen today who essentially defend neo-conservative (and culturally entrenched) political and ethical norms, see “Politics of Methodist Appointment System” on the Deep Something blog at http://deep.mastersfamily.org/2005-06-05/politcs-of-methodist-appointment-system. As the author of this posting, a Florida Methodist named John Masters, demonstrates, it is entirely possible for church authorities to use people of color or women in appointments that purport to be cross-cultural, but to use these appointments (and these minority groups) to uphold positions that are anything but counter-cultural.

And since this posting is continuing previous reflections about the United Methodist Church’s stance regarding gay and lesbian human beings, I would also like to recommend a posting by John Aravosis this week on America Blog, entitled “Would Hilary Quit an Anti-Gay Church? How About a Pro-Life Church?” Aravosis is commenting on the critique of Barack Obama that asks why he did not leave his church when Rev. Wright inveighed against racism in terms some critics regard as excessive.

As he notes, it is curious that no one has asked Hilary Clinton what she would do if a minister in her United Methodist Church upheld an anti-gay position—such as the position of the UMC Book of Discipline that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian Faith. The article is at www.americablog.com/2008/04/would-hillary-quit-anti-gay-church-how.html.

Finally, I found Maura J. Casey’s op-ed piece entitled “Of Witches and the Wait for Justice” in the 13 April New York Times fascinating (www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/opinion/13sun2.html). The article looks back on a period of American history in which many churches not merely opposed witchcraft, but supported the execution of witches (almost all of whom were women).

In particular, this essay focuses on the attempt of a mother and daughter, Debra and Addie Avery, to have their ancestor Mary Sanford, who was executed for witchcraft in 1662 in Connecticut (she had drunk wine and danced around a bonfire), exonerated. To their surprise, their attempt to defend their ancestor, who was hanged at age 39, leaving a husband and five small children, has “taught them something, perhaps more than they wanted to know, about the mob mentality.”

After their move to exonerate their ancestor began to be discussed on the internet, the Averys found that commentators on various blogs fiercely opposed the attempt to examine the churches’ role in the witch-hunts of New England, and that they themselves were vilified for defending Mary Sanford. They learned, in short, that the mob mentality that justified the hanging of women for witchcraft remains alive and well in the 21^st century in other forms.

The Averys are undeterred. As Addie Avery, who is fourteen, concludes, “There are worse things than mockery. Now, I’m not afraid to stand up when I see something wrong.” Though the attempt to exonerate Mary Sanford of witchcraft comes some 340 years after her execution, “finally someone is speaking up for Mary Sanford.”

And this gives me courage to keep speaking, even if no one today listens. Down the road, I believe, people will look back at this point in human history and ask how the Christian churches and Christian people could ever have demonstrated such savagery to LBGT people, and have believed that in hating and oppressing, they were doing the will of Christ.