O, Nuwaubia!

Check out this piece about the Nuwaubians, an African-American sect that sprouted right here in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Basically, these cats have been led by the charismatic Malachi York since the 1970's. They started off as a sort of Nation of Islam spinoff, then became Black Hebrews, had an extra-terrestrial phase, became the Yamasee Nation of Native Americans and now are claiming a diplomatic immunity for their leader, saying he's a Liberian diplomat.

(Oh, yeah - York was imprisoned for about 130 years on child molestation charges in 2004.)

Followers of convicted child molester and sect leader Dwight "Malachi" York - some from Clarke County - are bombarding officials at a federal maximum security lock-up with fake documents that seek to free him from a 135-year prison term.

The documents, some stamped by Athens-Clarke notaries, claim York has been falsely imprisoned since 2004 and should be released because he is an African diplomat, officials said.

....

"I've never been able to rationalize how seemingly intelligent people would follow a man who started off saying he was an extraterrestrial, then changed to being a reincarnated pharaoh, then an American Indian chief, then head of all Shriners or Masons in the world," [Putnam County Sherriff Howard] Sills said. "He also claimed at one time to be a rabbi but was an Islamic imam to start with, then after the trial he ended up being a diplomat.

"You can rationalize how someone follows a charismatic leader if they maintain a consistent philosophy, but how to you go from being an Islamic imam to a rabbi?" he said. "First he came here on a space ship, and years later he came here from Liberia on a diplomatic passport."

I tried to do an in-depth story about them in 2004, following the conviction, but it was a disaster. True, the older cops had fantastic stories - how Nuwaubians "owned" about 6 square blocks of Bushwick and no one entered or left without their say so. Also, how the members ran these incredible criminal scams, and one of their premier cat burglars enjoyed a popular moment in the papers for his rooftop, "spider-man" escapes.

But no one else was very forthcoming. The neighbors still lived in fear, even though the bulk of the group had moved to Georgia in the 1990's. The one "expert" was jealously guarding her research, and tried to have me canned for publishing a piece on the web. The few Nuwaubians who stayed in Brooklyn weren't talking. I thought then that their "white man is the devil" tradition, but now I think it was a lazy lack of persistence.

A damn shame, because there's nothing I dig like new religions.

Religious splinters and new religions stem from serious dissatisfaction. They show fissures in the current paradigms. Nuwaubians are a case in point. It's a trope that the church anchors the African American community, but back in the 1960's and 70's, there was a serious rethinking of Christianity - which, let's face it, was a wholesale legacy of the African enslavement. You found the Nation of Islam, the Black Hebrews, (who still fight for their civil rights from their base in Dimona, Israel), a number of African-Americans who fled to Islam, or Baha'i traditions, or New Age practice. A blossoming of spiritual searching, probing questions, a taking of nothing for granted. Those moments are tough and gorgeous.

Then you found the innovators, who tried to integrate a history of rage and disempowerment into wholesale new cloth. Like Malachi York. Results may vary.

I keep waiting for the gay community to go through a similar moment. Of course, there's a huge gay presence in the New Age / New Thought world, in Kabbalah (tm), in Eastern traditions done western-style. And of course I'm a huge fan of the Radical Faeries. But the gays have yet to hit their stride as religion makers, I'm convinced. What will we see from a nation of spectacle makers, musicians, orgiasts and two-spirits?

The Gods of Gamblers

Check out this recent piece about a poker-playing priest:

The Rev. Andrew Trapp said he entered the PokerStars.net Million Dollar Challenge in hopes of putting St. Michael Catholic Church "super close" to its $5.5 million fundraising goal to build a new facility. He also wanted to strike a public relations blow for priests.

"At the very least, even if I didn't win any prize money, I was hoping it would help people to see that priests can have fun and be normal people and hopefully get a little bit of a fun twist on the image of the priesthood," the assistant pastor said Tuesday.

So the guy won $100,000 for the church building fund. Just ask comedian Steve Harvey to parse what a building fund is.

Why do I love this? The God and gambling nexus is totally gripping. If you ask me, Einstein was out of his gourd when he said that God does not play dice.

Personal bias - in my family's genetic tangle of the sublime and the ridiculous, both god and games play a huge role. My mother's two uncles helped build Las Vegas and were once, respectively, a pit boss at the Golden Nugget and a craps dealer at Binion's Horseshoe. My father was raised in a monastery by his uncle, a holy man named Parthenios (The Virgin). My mother's grandpa came to California to run an offshore gambling boat. My father's aunt was a prioress in a convent.

I could never choose sides. For about a year, I was simultaneously the (ghost) editor of America's oldest Christian magazine, and also one of the country's largest gambling magazines. Tough? Not as much as you'd think. The first month saw the crowning of Jerry Yang - the unlikeliest poker genius to ever win a WSOP bracelet and baffle Christians and gamblers alike.

Yang is a Hmong Laotian who started to teach himself poker near my hometown in California. He's a devoted Christian, prays before matches, and in two years, went from an online dabbler to the king of the green felt. When he sat at the World Series of Poker Final Table, he clearly had God on his side: In the final round, he pushed his chips all in on a pair of 8's, was quickly outmatched, then won by drawing an inside straight on the river, to win a pot worth $8.25 million. A feat of Biblical proportions. What did he do with it? He tithed to kids organizations.

Strangely, neither the Christians or the gamblers made him their poster boy. Go figure.

Kind of a shame. Gambling and prayer aren't as different as you might think. Lord knows, no one prays like a gambler with everything riding. Or as Dostoyevsky (a gambler, penitent and writer in that order) more delicately put it, "Can one even as much as touch a gambling table without immediately becoming infected with superstition?"

There is a good reason for these two activities are so closely tied, I like to think. There's a neat theory put forth by an old Oxford don and Hellenist, Gilbert Murray: Religion is how we think about what we don't know. When we find ourselves on the brink of the unknown - whether through joy, a personal crisis or any other mystical experience - we cast about for some way to understand what can't be understood. That language becomes religion.

Our drive to play games is willfully putting ourselves in that same brink: standing over the abyss, and, like Jerry Yang, letting it all ride. Mystics and gamblers share an adrenaline rush of looking out over the unknown, letting one foot hover over. It's the same rush.

And maybe Yang brought a closer synthesis from his homeland. There seems to be a much nearer nexus between the two in Asia. China, for instance, boasts Buddhism, Taoism and a baroque system of influencing luck at its spiritual center. Go to a Cantonese wedding, and the vows are barely finished before the gaming tables are brought out. Sic Bo and Bacarrat are national passtimes. A precursor of Keno helped build the wall of China.

And - to clarify the lead image above - there's a hugely popular Chinese movie genre which can be summed up as kung fu gambling. Spiritual adepts take their mastery to the gaming tables, and influence the fall of dice and the lay of cards through their spiritual perfection. A cool background here.

More and more American casinos, catering to the enormous Asian market, will hire Feng Shui experts. Entrances face east, walls are built with the soil layering practice of han-chiku and I Ching symbols abound. There's a buddhist shrine at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. A shrine. In a casino. No problem.

Which brings it back to us, I guess - Americans, and what we find holy. I've always been a fan of Vegas, ever since I moved there at 21 and worked the Strip while trying to find my own soul. Chuck Palahnuik wrote, "Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night." I agree. Built in 1946 by a nation wracked by Depression and Another Great War, the place remains, for better or worse, an American temple of the first order. Where there was a desert, we created a spring. Where there was scarcity, we created the groaning table of the casino buffet, presided over by the opulent fertility of the showgirl.

So what if these were vegas, or mirages. America has embraced this mirage as its own: that anyone can win, that anyone can be treated like royalty, that the next big hit has your name on it. It's our religion - the faith we hold when we look out into the unknown.

Catholic Girls Gone Bad

Two women on the road to sainthood and the future of the church.

Back in 2005 I was up for a Vatican gig, and I became a passionate Pope-watcher. It amazed me how many intrigues and internecine squabbles still gripped the Little City. Very interesting stuff. There is a Gossip Girls-type spinoff to be set there. Or maybe the last gasp of the reality show moment. Tons of bitchy dudes in skirts - what's not to love?

In any case, this week was a good week to speculate what's going on behind the gilt gates.

To catch you up: The numbers of Catholics are flagging, clearly, even dramatically in the western and developed world. The developing world are increasingly comprising an important faction, but are underrepresented in the halls of power. In the West, which Rome would like to keep, the church is facing a radical shortage of clergy, and the perennial issue of admitting women and married men has been on the front burner.

You can often trend-watch Catholicism by watching the saint machine (or the Offices of the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints). The two big names to come out in the heart of Advent this year seem to say a lot about Rome's evolving relationship with women... and troublemakers.

Mary Ward was a Yorkshire nun who founded what became the Congregation of Jesus and Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a radically liberated order for Catholic women for the 17th century. They attempted to buck the traditions of enclosure and cumbersome habits, wanted to educate young women, and in short tried to follow the extremely successful model of the Jesuits on the other side of the gender aisle. She was brought up for charges of heresy during her lifetime, and her order wasn't given the full go-ahead for a few hundred years.

Mary MacKillop followed a similar path in 19th century Australia, founding the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. She was actually full-on excommunicated, owing to the rule of life she devised for her order. (The excommunication was later lifted.)

Both women just had miracles approved in the past few days (#1 Ward and #2 for MacKillop). This paves the road for Ward to be beatified and MacKillop to become a saint - the first who was ever excommunicated during her lifetime.

Is the Holy See signaling a climate change for women in the church? Or is this a bone for restless nuns under the papacy of the conservative Pope Benedict XVI? Tune in next week.

Also - some of you know I'm working on a project about miracles. (A puppet show about miracles to be specific.) As I've mentioned to some of you, the Catholic Church maintains that we continue to live in a miraculous age. This was some of the reason behind JPII ramping up the saint machine to unprecedented levels - to say that we live in a time of holy people and miraculous acts.

For those of you curious about what these miracles entail nowadays, they're not all grilled-cheese Jesuses. Both Ward and MacKillop were credited with medical miracles (healing tumors and the like), far and away the most common kind to pass the rigorous testing of the Vatican's miracle office.

Re: the time lag. Sorry for the hiatus, readers. When I first started this blog, I was trying to pitch it to Time Inc, who was losing the religion blog war to the vastly superior Newsweek/WaPo "On Faith" nexus. Now, alas, souped up religion coverage seems a relic of the early post-9/11 years. So, I decided to revive this as a more personal forum. Hope you enjoy.

Where have you been?

Sorry! Been plugging away at work, which has involved a consuming piece about Bible translation and an interview with a septuagenarian astronaut. But stay tuned...

First Came Love...

This weekend I took a much-needed trip upstate, to the mountains, and in the process somehow ended up in the front row of a budding romance between two good friends. I know you've been there - potentially great, potentially awkward, right? What am I gonna do.

Complicating matters a little, one of them is a Muslim and the other one is a Mormon. At least, they were born into those clothes. Their respective lives as urban professionals, have sort of softened the edges I think. Still, cause for some 'splainin.

Summertime in the Catskills. Barbecues and trips to Woodstock. But for me, one of the highlights of the weekend happened on the porch - an all-out discussion of polygamy. Both of my friends had relatives in the not so distant past with plural marriages or multiple wives. And I wondered aloud how long it would be before we saw polygamy was having its moment of cultural acceptance.

I mean, why not? It's a heck of a lot more scriptural than gay marriage, and most of the objections to gay marriage seem to be based in scripture. The polygamous marriages among the jewish patriarchs - Abraham, Moses and David - seem to do OK, and polygamy is not illegal in Israel. Though I don't know a ton about the history among Christians, Wikipedia cheekily says that Martin Luther was a proponent.

Islam, of course, allows a man to take up to four wives, if he can provide for them materially and emotionally. Mormons officially only embraced polygamy between 1852 and 1890, but the practice lingers on, according to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune yesterday:

It only takes Sunday brunch to see this is a different kind of family. Four waffle makers work nonstop. Three dozen eggs are whipped and scrambled. Places are set for 25 — for “Gary,” his three wives and their 21 children....

Gary, 38, traces his polygamous heritage on one side in an unbroken chain back to Joseph Smith’s era. All of his wives grew up in plural families — and loved it.

“We were never alone or lonely,” said Valerie, who has 40 full and half siblings. “I didn’t even understand what that meant.”

They attended public schools, were doted on by their multiple mothers and grew up with the freedom to decide whether to embrace plural marriage.

Gary is the only one of his 18 siblings to do so. In Kaye’s family, three of 31 children entered plural marriages. About half of Vicki and Valerie’s siblings are in polygamous relationships.

As teenagers, they all dated in and outside their culture. Gary was 18 when he realized “I wasn’t going to be fulfilled [in monogamy]. There was more for me, not in terms of women, but what I wanted out of life.”

Gary even switched his college major from history to business, a more lucrative career for someone with plans for a big family.

The women describe a similar path to plural marriage, one that came after a “bunch of fun” dating but also serious reflection and prayer.

The tone the writer takes is easy and earnest. Oh, the joys and tribulations! They're just like us, except for the $1000 dollar grocery bill and a footlong "honey-do" list!

It reminds me of a piece that Time just ran about the accelerated pace of the acceptance of homosexuality - how the gay rights movement has covered ground faster because of the racial struggles of the Civil rights movement. There's a template in place. Friendly images in the media, and appeal to American equality. Wonder if polygamy will cover this ground?

And Once Again: The Virtual Church

In case you missed it:

"In Second Life, the online virtual universe that is attracting 3.7 million users, you can light virtual candles for Shabbat, teleport to a Buddhist temple or consult the oracle for some divine guidance.

Second Life is a three-dimensional, online game produced by San Francisco-based Linden Lab in which participants create a virtual world, buy and sell land and products and interact in all the usual ways.

Now religion has a growing presence there, too, users say, and religious diversity and participation have skyrocketed since last June, when basic membership to Second Life became free."

Thus begins the feature story in the Washington Post about Second life, and the role that religion plays therein.

It's a good story. Does it sound familiar? It might. Cathy Grossman over at USA today wrote an awesome version of the same story back in April. Then Stephanie Simon wrote an eerily similar piece in the LA Times. Now the Post is running the same story, courtesy of Shona Crabtree at Religion News Service. Yeah, Second Life is interesting, and a few tech-savvy people of faith are making a mark. But I mean, c'mon. Three times in two months?

And Cathy Grossman, who in my opinion does the most justice to the story, gives us this reason to scratch our heads:

"Statistically, denominational religion is still a speck in Second Life. In a typical week in late March, 451,000 avatars, nearly 9% of all registered users, visited Second Life. Leaders of Christian, Jewish and Muslim sites estimate about 1,000 avatars teleport into churches, synagogues or mosques on a regular basis. Hundreds more list themselves with Buddhist, pagan, Wiccan and other groups."

A thousand people get this kind of coverage? They must feel like the New Hampshire farmers under the old primary system.

What's so irresistible about writing this story?

There's the sexy technology angle - whenever old traditions venture into new media, that's a slam-dunk. There are the crazy outliers - the Second Life church of Elvis, the Church of Burgertime, etcetera - which are good for color. And the counter-story is going to write itself - in the end, just find a pastor or a convenient academic to say, "This is all interesting, but it's just a passing fad."

But there are interesting aspects to the story. And if - Elvis forbid - there's one more colorful feature about Second Life and religion in our future, I hope it addresses them.

America is a culture of increasingly private spirituality. The "unchurched," the "spiritual but not religious," are the fastest growing religious demographic in the country. People are finding their religious information and identies outside of the traditional church/community cultures.

As I blogged about a few months ago, a Danish researcher found that internet hits for "God" are outstripping internet searches for "sex." A tantalizing combination of these facts is this: Americans are turning away from churches and towards... the internet. I think this is one of the stories of the decade that isn't really being written. The Gutenberg Bible brought a democracy of information that shook the religious order of its day to its foundations. Is the same thing happening with the Web?

That might be a story worth reading three times.

Sex and the Modern Muslim

One of the few positive upshots of the President's clash with the Muslim world has been the education of the west about Islam. What do they believe? What is the Hajj? What is the difference between Sunni and Shiite? Why the hijab?

The Muslim education of America broke fresh ground this week. Yes, read further for the breaking news about sex and the the world's second-largest religion.

First off, Salon.com ran a massive piece about an Egyptian sex advisor. Here are some highlights:

[Dr. Heba] Kotb [pictured], the first licensed sexologist in Egypt, believes that sex is a gift Allah intended for humans; her divine mission is to make sure that they're enjoying it. Every week, viewers throughout the Muslim world flood her station with calls, hoping to have their most embarrassing and intimate questions answered on-air. All sorts of sexual queries are allowed, with one snag: Sexual relations outside of marriage are haram (prohibited by Islam) and not open to discussion. In fact, Kotb, a wife and mother of three, draws her sex advice directly from the Quran. According to hertextual analysis, the Prophet Mohammed encouraged frequent sex and foreplay and decreed that female pleasure is, um, actually kind of important.

And from the Q&A with Kotb. Both surprising...

Q:Is the Quran concerned with female pleasure?
A:Yes, it is. The biggest chapter of the Quran is called "The Cow." There is a verse talking about the woman's rising pleasure. It's an order to the man to give the woman the right to have pleasure -- it orders the man to give the woman foreplay and also to get the wife to have sex repeatedly and to not wait for the woman to ask because sometimes she's too shy to ask.

Q:Why is sex such a controversial topic in the Muslim world?
A:It's culture -- it's not Islam, whatsoever. Islam is a very liberal and progressive religion. It invites people to have sex, of course within the marital frame. Prophet Mohammed never showed any offense to anyone asking about sexuality. On the contrary, he responded to every single question. The thing is, the culture overwhelms this.

..and not so surprising...

Q:You have encouraged women to explore their bodies -- does that include masturbation?
A:The woman, by means of instinct, does not need masturbation. She's not like the man
whatsoever. It's not a call of nature for her. So that's why I'm not very sympathetic with young women and girls choosing to masturbate. They're ruining their sexual future -- a woman has to remain blank until she gets married and by masturbating she's forming her sexuality.

Q:What are your feelings on homosexuality?
A:[Laughs] Well, I have a very famous opinion about homosexuality. I'm totally against
homosexuality being considered a gene or natural. It's a sin -- they're just like the alcoholics and the drug-takers. I'm also the reason for a lot of patients to have been cured -- so, no, I can't believe that it is natural.

Also on the Muslim battle of the sexes, the NY Times ran an article by Michael Slackman yesterday about the proliferation of fatwas in Egypt. What's a fatwa?

...fatwas, or religious edicts, are the bridge between the principles of their faith and modern life. They are supposed to be issued by religious scholars who look to the Koran and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad for guidance. While the more sensational pronouncements grab attention, the bulk of the fatwas involve the routine of daily life. In Egypt alone, thousands are issued every month....

Technically, the fatwa is nonbinding and recipients are free to look elsewhere for a better ruling. In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees.

And what are the topics up for discussion? According to one sheik in the business...

...the vast majority of the visitors have asked [him] for help with their marriages.

“The greatest ill in society I observe is the lack of trust and knowledge between husband and wife,” he said. “A man will think masculinity is being a dictator.”

At 11:30 one recent morning, a young woman entered and sat in the chair opposite him. She held her son, about 4, on her knee as she explained that her husband had married another woman (four wives are allowed in Islam) and that the new wife was only 18. “He said he would spend five nights with her and one with me,” the woman complained. “Can I ask for a divorce?”

Under Islam, the sheik advised, all wives must be treated equally. So if she could not work the matter out “peacefully, then yes, she could ask for a divorce.”

That was her fatwa.

The fatwa that made it into the lede was one that has caused recent embarrasment in Egypt - one scholar wrote that because "there had been instances in the time of the prophet when adult women breast-fed adult men in order to avoid the need for women to wear a veil in front of them. 'Breast-feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,' wrote the scholar, Izat Atiyah. 'A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed.'

And, reaching a little farther into the archives, there was a great piece last October in Der Spigel about sex and Islam. One of the most interesting bits was how the Web is changing a world that had erected strict taboos around sex.

The Internet is a refuge for hidden desires, even though it offers only virtual relief. Google Trends, a new service offered by the search engine, provides a way to demonstrate how difficult it is to banish forbidden yearnings from the heads of Muslims. By entering the term "sex" into Google Trends, one obtains a ranked list of cities, countries and languages in which the term was entered most frequently. According to Google Trends, the Pakistanis search for "sex" most often, followed by the Egyptians. Iran and Morocco are in fourth and fifth, Indonesia is in seventh and Saudi Arabia in eighth place. The top city for "sex" searches is Cairo. When the terms "boy sex" or "man boy sex" are entered (many Internet filters catch the word "gay"), Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the first four countries listed.

All grist for international understanding and diplomacy. Maybe America has more in common with the Muslim world than we thought.