Witch Hunts

The first time I landed in the United States, I flew in to Idlewild Airport (now JFK) in New York. As I waited for my luggage it was hard to miss a huge billboard exhorting us to KEEP GOD IN AMERICA.  Was God about to hop the next flight out?

Over the years I have come to realize how ubiquitous this kind of easy religiosity is in the United States.  It is easy to proclaim KEEP GOD IN AMERICA, but what does that entail? I say easy because it seems to require little more than spouting simplistic aphorisms and feeling self-righteous.  It parrots mindless adages about morality and good and evil without actually considering the actions that would make them meaningful.  It is on a par with platitudes like “America, love it or leave it.” “America right or wrong.”  How do people think they are contributing to the well-being of their country or themselves with simplistic jingoism, be it religious or nationalistic?

Watching some films from the 1950s, I would guess that this kind of piety was considered quite attractive.  For instance, in An Affair to Remember Cary Grant realizes he is attracted to Deborah Kerr when he takes her to his grandmother’s chapel and watches her pray.  He falls in love with her piety.  She is also her church’s children choirmaster, making her not only pious but maternal.  There were numerous films made in this period about nuns and priests doing good in their hometowns and abroad, all promoting a simplified godliness and a benighted “other” who needed to be rectified.

The American school I attended in the 1950s in Iran was established by Christian missionaries, but for the most part the staff did not take the mission seriously.  Most of the teachers were exiles from Armenia, Russia, France or some other country with displaced citizens, and few were Americans, especially in the lower grades.  We attended chapel every morning, but the exiles were not interested in converting children and the American teachers were more interested in sightseeing than promoting Christianity.  In fourth grade, I had a teacher who did want to convert us.  She had us memorize Bible verses, rewarding us with gold stars, and taught us to pray to Jesus.  I became a quasi-believer, a hustler in wishes.  When my mother wanted something, I would pray for it, telling her that it would happen because I had asked Jesus.  Some years ago, I shared a house cleaner with an acquaintance, and when the cleaner decided to move on, the acquaintance told me she was praying to God about sending us a new house cleaner.  I thought that perhaps God might have more urgent matters to attend to, but it seemed that nothing was too trivial for divine intercession. These kinds of childish beliefs remind me of the level of belief now among the religious right in the U.S. It lacks depth and thoughtfulness.

When I first started attending college in New York, I understood very little about how government functioned in the U.S.  In a history class I was taking the professor said two things I still remember that were striking.  One was that we have a “peaceful revolution” in this country every four years.  New regimes are empowered with every election without any bloodshed, unlike in much of the rest of the world.  The other was that many people are under the misconception that we have majority rule.  He clarified that it is true that we have majority rule but with protections for the rights of the minority. That is an important clause.  Theoretically, the majority cannot ride roughshod over the minority.  Both these precepts have been turned on their head in the last two years.  The last election was certainly not a peaceful passing of power from one administration to the other, with the January 6^th, 2021 insurrection.  Furthermore, the only unelected branch of government, the judiciary, and specifically the Supreme Court, has turned the second precept around by ignoring the rights and the will of the majority of Americans by reversing the Roe v. Wade decision allowing access to abortions. A minority has been appeased, but the rights of the majority have been subsumed.

The U.S. went through a period of liberal thinking in the 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s but seems to have gradually reverted to a toxic form of intolerance which surpasses the relatively harmless naive religiosity of the 1950s.  The “Red Scare” perpetrated by Joseph McCarthy was certainly harmful, but it had political roots rather than religious ones.  Nobody assumes politics to be harmless, but people hope that religion would be comforting rather than punitive, at least in the 21^st century in the West.

Facile religion generally results in trying to coerce women into a role they do not choose for themselves.  Somehow when things go awry in society, they can invariably be fixed by “fixing” women.  We have come through a period of turmoil with a pandemic and a less-than-mediocre ex-president whose delusions have created untold chaos.  Somehow the Supreme Court, most Republican politicians and the far right have concluded that the antidote to all this turbulence is to deprive women of the freedom to make decisions about their own lives.  The Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be passed into law, and the right to abortion has catastrophically been suspended in many states. 

Blaming women is nothing new.  In a Lucy Worsley program on the Black Plague in the 14^th century, she mentions that slits or armpits that revealed the body’s shape in women’s clothing were called “windows into hell.” In another Lucy Worsley program, she discusses how witch hunts started in Scotland in the 16^th century and spread to England and the American colonies, resulting in hundreds of brutal deaths, mostly of women.  Agnes Sampson, a midwife and healer, was accused of being a witch both by people she healed and people she failed to heal.  She was also accused of endangering the king’s life by creating a storm (in the ever-turbulent North Sea) while James VI was on a ship.  She was arrested and interrogated by both the church and the court and tortured into a confession.  During this period in Europe, it was believed that women could be easily lured by the devil because they are hypersexual and want to become pregnant. The torture that was inflicted on Agnes was to shave all her bodily hair and have her “pricked,” driving three-inch nails into her body in order to find the “sign of the devil.”  After she was tortured, Agnes confessed to being a witch, implicated others and was first strangled then burnt.  One form of death apparently did not suffice.

As I write this, Iranian women are burning their headscarves in protest over the death of a young woman at the hands of the Morality Police (just this term should make us shudder) because she had not covered her hair sufficiently. There was more freedom for women in Iran in 1958 when I left the country than there is now.  There were no Morality Police and there were not strictures on what anyone wore. Women were harassed in the street regardless of what they had on, and apparently covering them in hijabs has not changed that practice--they are still harassed.  But in the 1960s and 1970s women could wear miniskirts and makeup and go dancing at discos, just as the young were doing in Europe and America.  Nowadays this kind of activity must take place covertly if it occurs at all.

This revolutionary movement in Iran is being initiated by women who have had enough of the Islamic clerics and their focus on depriving women of autonomy. After Khomeini came into power in 1979, one of the first restrictions he issued was to define women’s roles only in terms of members of a family and mothers.  He dictated that women should have no other function and repealed all the family rights laws that the Shah had instituted giving women a path to divorce and allowing them to sue for custody of their children.  Khomeini disallowed divorce for women and decreed that a “divorced” woman who remarried was in fact a prostitute. In the 1990s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad encouraged citizens to confront women who were deemed not to meet his dress code, thus creating a vigilante force to keep women in their place.  (Does that not echo what Texas has done regarding abortion, monetarily rewarding citizens who turn in anyone who is remotely connected with an abortion or an attempted abortion?)

In Geraldine Brooks’ book Nine Parts of Desire, she explores religious mores in Islamic countries. The title comes from a belief that "God created sexual desire in 10 parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.” (This remarkably echoes the belief in the Dark Ages that women can be lured by the devil because they are oversexed.) Somehow that translates into protecting women from their uncontrollable sexual desires by covering them in veils so they will not succumb to their urges.  I fail to see how that works, but I am sure some mullah can explain it. Should it not be the men who cover themselves in veils so they will not be so alluring to us nymphomaniacs?

Watching the Worsley programs, I was struck by the parallels between witch hunts and what is happening today in the U.S.  There is the belief that women are too sexually free and need to be reined in and that they also need to be punished for their hypersexuality.  In the Middle East, the constrictions and punishments are clear.  If women are not swathed in yards of material, then their hypersexuality kicks in and men, who seemingly have no control over their own impulses, are tempted by these sirens.  In the U.S., if women are too free with their sexuality, the punishment is that they are not allowed to determine what happens to them if they become pregnant.  If the zealous have their way, women will bear and birth children regardless of how they were conceived or if they are wanted or not.  Even before Roe v. Wade became law, abortion was allowed in cases where the woman’s life was at risk, but today’s true believers want to deny even that. Some even want to forbid the use of birth control so women are sure to get pregnant and are kept in their place. 

This is today’s witch hunt--the still-oversexed women are still in need of punishment.  

The weak make up for their inadequacies with a single-minded desire to control others. Their religion is not about faith or spirituality.  They lack empathy and compassion and compensate for this lack in vindictiveness and a desire to harm those who disagree with them. I am not condemning faith and religion, only the need to impose one’s brand of religion on everyone.  It is ironic that so many religious zealots claim to have a hotline to God, to know the one right way, yet each wants to impose a different version of faith on all of us.  I know most religious people do not feel that they need to interfere in anyone else’s life.  They do not think bumper sticker slogans are a true religion. They do not feel the need to be Morality Police.  Yet others do and they seem to be winning.   There is talk among some politicians now of recreating the U.S. as a Christian nation. Do we really want to follow the example of the Islamic Republic of Iran and become the Christian Republic of the United States of America? Surely there are better models for us to pursue; there was a time when it was the United States that was the model for democracy and freedom.  A Christian nation would certainly be the end of this bold democratic experiment we have called America.