Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions

By Megan Goodwin

Sex abuse happens in all communities, but American minority religions often face disproportionate allegations of sexual abuse. Why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, do American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct?  Why does the American public presume to know “what’s really going on” in minority religious communities?  Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse? Abusing Religion argues that sex abuse in minority religious communities is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978807808

Book preview

ABUSING RELIGION

ABUSING RELIGION

Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions

MEGAN GOODWIN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goodwin, Megan, author.

Title: Abusing religion: literary persecution, sex scandals, and American minority religions / Megan Goodwin.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019037925 | ISBN 9781978807785 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978807792 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978807808 (epub) | ISBN 9781978807815 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978807822 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—Religion. | Sex crimes—Religious aspects—Public opinion. | Americans—Public opinion.

Classification: LCC BL2525 .G6635 2020 | DDC 201/.764—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037925

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Megan Goodwin

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For John

CONTENTS

Introduction: Contraceptive Nationalism

1 America’s Contraceptive Mentality: Catholic Co-belligerence and the New Christian Right

PART I: SEX, ABUSE,AND THE SATANIC PANIC

2 Satan Sellers: Michelle Remembersand the Making of a Sex Abuse Panic

3 Believe the Children? Catholicizing Public Morality

PART II: SEX, ABUSE, AND AMERICAN ISLAMOPHOBIA

4 Dark Religion for Dark People: Race, American Islam, andNot Without My Daughter

5 The War at Home: Muslim Masculinity as Domestic Violence

PART III: SEX, ABUSE, AND MORMONFUNDAMENTALISM

6 From Short Creek to Zion: Mormons, Polygyny, andUnder the Banner of Heaven

7 This Is Not about Religion: Raiding Zion to Save It

Conclusion: Religion, Sex, Abuse

Epilogue: Religion Trains Us Like Roses

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ABUSING RELIGION

INTRODUCTION

Contraceptive Nationalism

Nations provoke fantasy.

—Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy

The book might look like history. It is, and it isn’t.

—Mark Jordan, Recruiting Young Love

This book is about narratives that attempt to limit American religious and sexual difference since 1980—and specifically about stories that foster religious and sexual intolerance by perpetuating the incorrect but tenacious assumption that religious difference causes sexual abuse.¹ I analyze popular pulp nonfiction narratives about white American women and children abused and held captive by religious outsiders: Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003), which condemns Mormon fundamentalism for the practice of polygyny; Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987), which portrays Muslim men as violent and sexually coercive; and Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith’s Michelle Remembers (1980), the earliest and most influential memoir of satanic ritual abuse. Each of these books incited the dissemination of dozens—sometimes hundreds—of similar narratives and contributed to large-scale, lasting backlash against American minority religions.

Public outcry over sex abuse in minority religious communities is in staggering disproportion to the size and influence of American minority religions.² Public outrage about religious sex abuse also belies how often sex abuse happens in every American community, and how seldom Americans intervene to prevent or redress sex abuse. Americans abuse women and children with obscene frequency. One in five American women experiences sexual assault.³ One in nine girls and one in fifty-three boys in the United States experience sexual abuse.⁴ Our nation’s sexual abuse problem is enormous and endemic. Seldom, though, do stories about abuse inspire intervention at the state or national level. If the #MeToo movement has shown us anything, it is just how common sexual abuse and assault are—and how very little we as a country have done to correct or prevent these abusive behaviors or the systems that allow them to flourish.⁵ As journalist Megan Garber observes, It’s much easier, after all, not to believe that sexual abuse is so common.⁶

But audiences did believe Krakauer, Mahmoody, and Smith. (Many still do.) They believed Krakauer when he told them that polygamy is always abusive, and that Mormon fundamentalist women never enter plural marriages willingly. They believed Mahmoody when she said that Muslim men are inherently violent, bestial, and sexually predatory. They believed Smith and Pazder when the couple alleged that a global satanic cabal was conspiring to steal and defile thousands of North American children. The American public believed these stories so much that we responded by deploying armored personnel carriers, convening congressional hearings, broadcasting national news programs that reached millions of viewers, conducting a decade-long FBI investigation, and more.

On their surface, stories like Under the Banner of Heaven, Not Without My Daughter, and Michelle Remembers are calls to intervene, to prevent future abuses from happening. This is a laudable impulse: we should want and act to prevent abuse. But Americans seldom respond constructively to abuse survivors’ stories. Survivors are consistently and violently discouraged from disclosing their experiences. Those who do face public doubt, ridicule, and even death threats—as, for example, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford did in the fall of 2018 when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about being assaulted by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.⁷ According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, rape is the most under-reported crime; only 27 percent of abuse survivors report their assaults.⁸ The perpetrators of reported sexual assaults have a 0.4 percent chance of being incarcerated for their crimes.⁹ It is hard to overstate how hostile America is to most stories about sexual assault, how little America does to address sexual violence, how seldom Americans intervene in response to disclosures of abuse.

Abusing Religion asks why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct.¹⁰ Why does the American public presume to know what’s really going on in minority religious communities?¹¹ Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse?

Only certain kinds of stories about sex abuse, about certain kinds of survivors, seem to inspire action: the stories that reinscribe the exceptionalism, vulnerability, and fragility of white American womanhood; the stories that confirm Americans’ suspicions about the dangers of religious and sexual difference; the stories that prove women who do sex and religion differently must need saving. Stories, for example, about the sexual abuse of white American women and children in minority religious communities.

Americans did and do act in response to stories about Mormon fundamentalist polygamy and sexual coercion, Muslim men and domestic violence, diabolical plots to abduct and defile children. But the actions these stories provoke have done little to prevent systemic abuse while doing much harm to religious outsiders, abuse survivors among them. These responses include a decade-long, cripplingly expensive criminal prosecution that ended in no convictions, the deployment of U.S. troops against American citizens, state- and federal-level proceedings that cast aspersions on religious minorities, and the largest custodial seizure of children in American history. Such tales, intentionally or not, incite audiences to fear and punish religious and sexual difference.

CONTRACEPTIVE NATIONALISM

Narratives like the ones anchoring Abusing Religion characterize American religious outsiders as a sexual menace, a rhetorical strategy I call contraceptive nationalism. Contraceptive nationalism is a form of gendered white supremacist Christian nativism that minoritizes certain American religious traditions, compromising their legal protections, political influence, cultural cachet, and/or social credibility.¹² These kinds of stories are prophylactic, protecting the American body politic—allegorized as white womanhood and/or childhood—against insemination by religiosexual predators. They titillate audiences with gruesome depictions of sexual violation, reinforce anxieties about religious and sexual difference, and commodify violence against women and children while failing to meaningfully disrupt or prevent sex abuse. The moral of these kinds of stories is always the same: strange religions force and/or dupe white women and children into sexual depravity.

Stories about prurient religious outsiders holding white women and children captive are among Americans’ earliest myths; the genre remains popular among American readers.¹³ The basic formula: savage (that is, improperly- or non-Christian, often nonwhite, male) outsider lures or drags innocent (usually white, properly Christian woman) into abuse and ruin. White women’s bodies in these stories are particularly vulnerable to religious and sexual coercion, while religious outsiders are sexually ravenous and depraved men bent on pollution and conquest.

Books that depict religious minorities as sexual predators—books like Under the Banner of Heaven, Not Without My Daughter, and Michelle Remembers—are not merely texts. They are narrativizations, translations of lived experience into a coherent story arc that lend consequence and coherence to what literary scholar Hayden White calls the virtual chaos of ‘events.’ ¹⁴ To narrativize a real series of events, as Krakauer, Mahmoody, and Smith do, is didactic and moralistic; rather than simply relay facts (were that even possible), narrativizations supply the criteria by which the reader should evaluate the account.¹⁵ Narrativizations provide both ethical guidance for their readers and instructions for how readers should gauge the morality embedded within the narrative.

As a rhetorical strategy, contraceptive nationalism narrativizes accounts of religious outsiders sexually abusing American white women and children, identifying religious difference as the cause of that abuse. Abusing Religion engages white women’s stories marketed for popular consumption not because they are more important than those of other survivors, but because stories about abused white women and children more consistently motivate consumers toward action.¹⁶ White women and children are less likely than Black women and children, Indigenous women and children, women and children of color, or transgender people to experience sexual assault, but stories about white women and children suffering have proved effective at eliciting public response at local, state, and national levels.¹⁷ As I explore throughout this book, audience responses often privilege heteropatriarchal gender norms, bolster white supremacy, and collapse space for benign religious and sexual difference in the United States—while doing little to meaningfully prevent systemic sex abuse.

NOT ALL STORIES ABOUT WOMEN ARE FEMINIST STORIES

It is possible (and common) to read narratives of contraceptive nationalism as empowering of and liberating for women. Certainly, many have read Under the Banner of Heaven, Not Without My Daughter, and Michelle Remembers as liberatory and/or feminist texts—the Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature (2014) includes Not Without My Daughter in its Time Line of Major Works of Feminist Literature, for example.¹⁸ Krakauer, Mahmoody, and Smith and Pazder often use language about captivity and release, suggesting that they want to free white American women from the slavery of exploitative polygamy, foreign sexual voracity, or demonic sexual depravity.¹⁹ Contraceptive nationalist narratives are deeply invested in claims to religious and bodily freedoms.

But for all their invocations of freedom and liberty, these stories undermine female sexual and religious agency by reinforcing stereotypes of helpless women in need of rescue from exploitative religious groups. No matter how shocking or horrifying, narratives of contraceptive nationalism do not critique larger systemic inequalities, do not challenge cultural assumptions about women’s implicit physical and mental weakness. For this reason, sexual trauma tales (as sociologist Mary de Young calls them) are conservative and preservative. She continues: Their depiction of female victimization and helplessness so resoundingly resonates with dominant cultural ideologies that the stories, themselves, are pitiable yet provocative tales about the inevitability of sexual violence in the lives of females. As hegemonic tales, they offer no solutions, map out no trajectory for social change.²⁰ Intentionally or not, Krakauer, Mahmoody, and Smith and Pazder’s sexual trauma tales all draw on and reinscribe tropes about women’s implicit vulnerability, making the abuses they narrate seem inevitable—and the need for outside intervention into minority religious communities seem ethical and unavoidable.

Each of this project’s case-study narratives is an imperative to protect and liberate women and children from religiosexual peril, but the material effects of each story have been—as I show in subsequent chapters—more violence toward and less freedom for women and minority religions.²¹ The popularity of these pulp nonfictions suggests that while the American public is eager to commodify and consume stories about women’s suffering, the body politic is at best confused about how to meaningfully prevent violence against women and children.

Sexual trauma tales also limit acceptable American sexuality to sex that is heterosexual, moderately procreative, monogamous, and endogamous. While these kinds of stories seem to privilege white women’s voices and agency, they ultimately collapse conditions for both religious and sexual difference while reinforcing systemic gender and sexual inequalities. To illustrate: Jon Krakauer’s work on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and its offshoots only ever shows Mormon fundamentalist women and children as brainwashed into complicity or held against their will; Krakauer exclusively portrays plural marriage as abusive and damaging to women and children. Under the Banner of Heaven includes perishingly few voices of Mormon fundamentalist women; the text presents not one Mormon fundamentalist woman who willingly enters into plural marriage. Krakauer depicts FLDS men as savage, violent, manipulative, and disingenuous—drawing, consciously or not, on a rich genealogy of nineteenth-century anti-Mormon tropes.²² And like these earlier captivity narratives, Krakauer’s work informed public anti-Mormon responses, culminating in the 2008 raid on the FLDS Yearning for Zion community and the largest protective custody seizure in U.S. history.

I plumb the depths of Krakauer’s involvement with anti-Mormon fundamentalist actions and attitudes in chapters 6 and 7, but his influence on these events and sentiments also highlights a genre-specific curiosity about captivity narratives: a convention literary scholar Lorrayne Carroll calls rhetorical drag. Carroll notes that male authors have often used stories about women’s captivity for their own prescriptive and didactic purposes, relying on the provocative efficacy of stories about white women’s suffering to shape public attitudes and compel public response.²³

Under the Banner of Heaven uses detailed accounts of women’s sexual violation and physical suffering to caution readers against the dangers of polygamy, but Krakauer is the book’s sole author. He speaks for Mormon fundamentalist women, but seldom with them (and, it bears repeating, never to a Mormon fundamentalist woman who has entered into plural marriage willingly). Though written in the first person, Not Without My Daughter lists William Hoffer as a coauthor; more significantly, senators and even President Clinton invoked Mahmoody’s story to influence and justify federal legislation. Michelle Remembers is ostensibly an account of how Michelle Smith survived satanic ritual abuse, but it was her therapist, coauthor, and later husband Lawrence Pazder who broadly capitalized on her diagnosis and the memories of childhood trauma she allegedly recovered under his hypnotic direction.

In each of these cases and in numerous others, men profited from women’s stories while using these stories to demand social change without allowing the women to speak for themselves. There is tension here between woman-as-compelling-subject and woman-as-authoritative source (one quite observable in the American public’s largely skeptical reception of women survivors’ accounts of sexual violence, as I note above). This tension complicates a plain text reading of these narratives as simply feminist or liberatory. Atrocity tales like those shared by Krakauer, Mahmoody, and Pazder and Smith seem to be equal parts ventriloquism, provocation, and voyeurism.

PORNOGRAPHY OF PAIN: WATCH WHITENESS WORK24

For while the American public might bemoan the abuses alleged in these stories, condemning religious minorities for their supposed prurience, the same consumers linger over the stories’ shocking particulars.²⁵ These kinds of stories—captivity narratives, atrocity tales, hostage narratives, sexual trauma tales—luxuriate in the lascivious details of white women’s suffering with what religious studies scholar David Frankfurter calls voyeuristic complicity in their Grand Guignol depictions of violence and sexual violation.²⁶ Presumably the intention of these stories is to educate the public about the harsh realities of sex abuse within minority religious communities. But scholars have suggested that captivity narratives remain popular less for their didactic intent than for their salacious content.²⁷ (Satanic ritual abuse literature is rife with consistently pornographic imagery, for example.²⁸) Responses to these kinds of stories do not begin and end with audience titillation, however. Stories about the religiosexual peril of contact with outsiders foster anxieties within the body politic and encourage action to resolve those anxieties.

Stories of pronounced suffering structuring sentiment and provoking action is at the heart of what historian Karen Halttunen calls the pornography of pain.²⁹ This kind of literature presents female pain as both obscene and titillating, enthralling audiences with vivid accounts of white women violated by savage outsiders. One of the more succinct, if ridiculous, summaries of the pornography of pain comes through the character of Titus Andromedon in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a postcaptivity narrative situation comedy about a woman who survives kidnapping and imprisonment by the leader of an apocalyptic new religious movement.³⁰ In explaining why people consume stories about terrible things happening to women, Titus lays it plain: One, it’s titillating like a horror movie. Two, it makes them feel like a good person because they care about a stranger. Three, it makes people feel safe that it did not happen to them.³¹ These stories arouse public sympathy by seeming to collapse the distance between the public and the tormented—narratively drawing the audience closer to Krakauer’s Mormon fundamentalist polygynists, for example, or Smith’s tortured child self, inviting readers to imagine themselves in the position of the suffering protagonist(s). This proximity to erotic violence is ultimately an illusion, however, one that reassures consumers they are safe and fundamentally removed from the afflicted.³² Narratives of contraceptive nationalism are provocative and enticing; they make people feel safe for not falling victim to religiosexual predators; they evoke deep public sentiment and incite public responses without meaningfully disrupting established institutions or challenging structural inequalities.

In part, these narratives incite material responses from the American public because they privilege whiteness, specifically white sexual innocence or purity allegorized as white womanhood.³³ This is, of course, in keeping with the white supremacist tendencies of American media and American culture more broadly: in the United States and its territories, race operates as a force that maintains and justifies unearned, unequal, and hierarchical systemic advantages for those taught to believe they are white.³⁴ Privileging white innocence is one way narratives of contraceptive nationalism foster white supremacy, a term which here means not only the violent public extremism of groups like the Ku Klux Klan or the Proud Boys, but also the subtle and pervasive ways Americans privilege and have privileged whiteness above all other races at every conceivable social and institutional level.³⁵ Stories that signify whiteness as innocence help maintain white supremacy in the United States because eroticizing white suffering—especially white women’s suffering—structures public sentiment and provokes public action to maintain the privileging of American whiteness.³⁶

American whiteness constructs and sustains itself by asserting racial and religious supremacy over nonwhite, non- or improperly-Christian bodies; narratives of contraceptive nationalism reinforce and sustain the supremacy of whiteness-presumed-(properly) Christian. Stories about brutal American religious outsiders ravaging pure white Christian women justify what literary scholar Christopher Castiglia calls white Anglo-America’s expansionist racism.³⁷ Castiglia proposes that captivity narratives have proved so consistently popular with American audiences because they foster both prurient interest in the sexual exploits of the helpless white girl and hatred and fear of the brutal men of color.³⁸ That is: narratives of contraceptive nationalism appeal to the American public in part because these tales confirm consumers’ own white supremacist biases and religious intolerances.³⁹

While only Not Without My Daughter explicitly racializes its religious minority antagonists (i.e., Muslims), all three of Abusing Religion’s case studies privilege white American womanhood as imperiled, uniquely precious, and deserving of protection—making the sexual violation of white American women especially reprehensible.⁴⁰ Readers’ compassion for suffering white women subjects can, as American studies scholar Kevin Rozario proposes, become an alibi for other forms of oppression. This renders the antagonists of such stories (e.g., Mormon fundamentalists, Muslims, non-Christians) un-American and inhuman, justifying action against religious minorities while seeming to uphold American commitments to religious freedom.⁴¹ Consumers of contraceptive nationalist narratives sympathize and identify with the anguish of a white woman protagonist while confirming white supremacist suspicions toward American religious outsiders.

SEXING THE AMERICAN BODY POLITIC

But contraceptive nationalist narratives do more than garner sympathy for a white woman protagonist. Our pale, innocent heroine stands in for the American body politic—representing an imagined consensus on sexual morality, religious commitments, and American identity.⁴² The violation of her body is an allegorical violation of the country, and as Castligia observes, To the degree that the captive resists taking on the attributes of her captors, she represents the impermeable, defensible borders of the white, Anglo nation.⁴³ Her capture underscores the severity of the imagined threat to a heteropatriarchal, white Christian supremacist version of America; her inevitable escape defines return to and life in white, Anglo-America as ‘freedom.’ ⁴⁴ By symbolizing the American body politic as a white woman who successfully repulses religious outsiders’ sexual infiltration, narratives of contraceptive nationalism help create what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls a national symbolic.

Contraceptive nationalism attempts to protect and defend a specific and contested understanding of America as a singular entity, a national symbolic that Abusing Religion identifies as the American body politic. This national symbolic articulates itself through media—including the stories that anchor Abusing Religion, the hundreds of similar narratives those stories inspired, and the news and popular-culture treatments of these subjects—as well as through exercises of American political machinery, including social services, law enforcement, criminal prosecution, and congressional actions. Body politic here signals intimate and overt exercises of political and cultural force on individual American bodies and on the nation as a whole to discourage and discipline religious and sexual difference. The American body politic at work in contraceptive nationalism does not represent an actual American mainstream so much as an imagined consensus about religion and sexuality—one promoted by individuals, communities, and organizations with the means and motivation to offer their religiosexual worldview as essential to and representative of American identity. Narratives of contraceptive nationalism do more than merely promote the exclusion of religious and sexual outsiders: the American body politic constitutes itself by telling and retelling stories of what religious outsiders will do to us if given the chance.

These stories celebrate the (violated) body and (inviolable) spirit of a white female protagonist, who incorporates "the political space of the nation, that tangled cluster" of jurisprudence, territory, genetics, language, and experience that binds Americans together.⁴⁵ America is not merely a country, Berlant asserts, but an assumed relation, an explication of ongoing collective practices, and also an occasion for exploring what it means that national subjects already share not just a history, or a political allegiance, but a set of forms and the affect that makes these forms meaningful.⁴⁶ While Berlant’s analysis does not consider religion’s role in formulating the political space of America-as-nation, my understanding of an American body politic rejects religion and politics as discrete entities.⁴⁷ America is more than a nation: it is a way of making sense of the world, and a set of assumptions presumably distillable into what religious studies scholars Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini refer to as good old American values—values that recursively shape how Americans understand the boundaries of tolerable religion and sexuality (among other habits).⁴⁸

SMALL-C CHRISTIAN

Narratives of contraceptive nationalism foster an understanding of the American body politic as inherently christian, perhaps especially through means and institutions presumed areligious: news media, popular culture, social services, public policy, and jurisprudence, for example. Such means and institutions are, Pellegrini and Jakobsen contest, not secular at all.⁴⁹ While American courts, media outlets, law enforcement agencies, and other public institutions may not confess religious allegiances, religion—specifically Christianity shapes them all.⁵⁰ Max Weber famously theorized secularism as the diffusion, rather than the elimination, of religion into the secular state and elements of public and private life, extending Christian assumptions, worldviews, and ethics far beyond the reach of pre-Reformation ecclesiastical authority.⁵¹ Abusing Religion proposes that rhetorics of contraceptive nationalism are one means by which seemingly areligious institutions and media bolster christian sensibilities.

Small-c christian here refers to a circulation of religious attachments, moralities, and explanatory frameworks through ostensibly secular means. This conceit is a nod to Winnifred Sullivan’s theorization of small p-protestantism in The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005), which notes the authorization of unmarked and authoritative religious assumptions in the American public sphere.⁵² Sullivan’s protestantism proposes that Americans have absorbed and assimilated Protestant Christian commitments into a kind of nationalism, which, while religiously invisible, may have enforcement power through legislation.⁵³ Non-protestant behaviors and identities, Sullivan insists, have been carefully and systematically excluded, both rhetorically and legally, from modern public space.⁵⁴ Small-c christianity also draws upon Tracy Fessenden’s concept of public Protestantism, the normalization of Protestant ethics as nominally secular and explicitly American values, as well as Lynne Gerber’s observation that this normalization strengthens the impact of these protestant sensibilities by making them seem universal and inherently rational.⁵⁵

Small-c christian conventions inform American values, investments, and expressions of public interest; the regulation of sexuality renders American christian commitments especially visible. Americans signify and produce national values through sex, and regulate sex in ways that are crucially connected to their assumptions about religion.⁵⁶ Jakobsen and Pellegrini call this stealth Protestantism, proposing that the assumptions that underlie sexual regulation are so deeply embedded that people no longer recognize them as being derived from religious thought.⁵⁷ Conservative christian morality so informs the secular regulation of American sexuality that the secular state’s regulation of the sexual life of its citizens is actually religion by other means.⁵⁸ Narratives of contraceptive nationalism are only one of many presumptively secular vehicles that elide conservative christian sexual ethics and American morality.

Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Gerber, Fessenden, and Sullivan correctly observe the transmission and regulatory influence of christian values through ostensibly secular institutions and processes. But the concepts of stealth Protestantism, public Protestantism, and small-p protestantism fail to account for the significant role Roman Catholicism has played in shaping and regulating American values since the 1970s. Abusing Religion’s use of christian—and its glossing of contraceptive nationalism as christian discourse—should be understood to combine small-p protestantism and related terms with what I call the catholicization of public morality.

The catholicization of public morality gestures toward a normalization and diffusion of Roman Catholic sexual ethics into universalized American values, especially during and after the emergence of the so-called New Christian Right in the late 1970s.⁵⁹ (I detail the influence of Roman Catholic sexual morality on the American values articulated by the New Christian Right in the next chapter.) This formulation plays on the dual operation of c/Catholic: referring to the disciplines of the Roman Catholic Church in the uppercase, and denoting their universal—that is, catholic—influence in the lowercase. Significantly, American national values incorporate Roman Catholic ethics pertaining solely to sexuality, excluding other Catholic theological priorities like ecological preservation, immigration reform, or nuclear disarmament.⁶⁰ I explore the mechanics of American public morality’s catholicization explicitly in chapters 1 and 3, but each of Abusing Religion’s case studies demonstrates that Roman Catholic sexual ethics inform the way Americans understand moral sexuality, even if they themselves are not Catholic or Christian.

BEYOND AMERICA’S EROTIC DMZ

Small-c christianity shapes and has shaped American understandings of appropriate sexuality, even for those Americans who do not identify as Christian or religious. When Americans talk sex, whether we know it or not, we are always also talking about religion. This is not to say that all Americans explicitly espouse Christian sexual ethics. But through law enforcement, popular media, legislation, and jurisprudence (among other means), America disseminates an understanding of moral sexuality that is demonstrably christian. Accusations of sexual impropriety make christian assumptions about sex particularly visible, invoking a common decency rooted in a set of presumably shared priorities about proper, moral, acceptable (one might say orthodox?) sexual practices.⁶¹ The religious assumptions that shape American sexual regulation often present themselves as secular national values; at the same time, sexual acts and identities deemed tolerable by the American public meaningfully coincide with those deemed moral by mainstream American Christian sexual ethics.⁶² Identifying permissible sexual practices is a crucial means by which America constitutes itself as a nation—and more than that: as a nation apart, an exceptional, elect nation.⁶³

Americans have made sex the core of individual identity, the truth of ourselves. National belonging compels certain kinds of sexual