Through the years, Christian companies have varied widely on where to set boundaries between their businesses and their values. For every Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s cofounder and devout Catholic who donated so much money to anti-abortion groups in the 1980s that he triggered a pizza boycott from the National Organization for Women, or the Green family, who got the Supreme Court to carve out a right to religious freedom for Hobby Lobby by suing to overturn the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, there is a more subtle player. Take the Snyder family, owners of In-N-Out Burger, who for 40 years have done little beyond stamping Bible verse references onto various food and beverage packaging items. “There are lots of ways to be a Christian business,” says Jonathan Merritt, author of several books about Christianity, including A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars. “And some are riskier than others.”

Mariam Quraishi| Longreads | October 19, 2023 | 13 minutes (3,470 words)

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When I was little I remember trying to figure out what Allah looked like. There was a cassette in my grandparents’ room, on its cover an image of Masjid-e-Nabwi along with an extremely pious-looking man with a very large white beard. It had a lot of Arabic script on it—naturally this equated to religion. It might’ve been a cassette full of na’ats, I cannot say, but to me it looked Maximum Holy. I asked my Dadi if this man was what Allah looked like. Tobah! is all I got. I was probably 5 or 6, so I hope you’ll forgive my foolishness. Ariana Grande had not yet sung “God is a Woman.”

I was 10 when I declared to my Dadi that my future husband would have to cook meat as I’m simply too squeamish to, and besides, men should do housework too. She looked at me in horror and said I shouldn’t say such things. Dadi didn’t often display shock or anger toward me. I recalled the last shock I gave her was asking about Mr-Cassette-Not-God. I wondered if these two situations were worthy of equal outrage. That men are not gods was my takeaway from our cassette chat and I concluded that men certainly can cook meat. I learned to take her horror with a grain of salt, understanding hyperbole before even knowing what it was. Hyperbole is a particularly desi trait. Religion is filled with it. 

At age 4 I was sat down in a gorgeous silk gharara, glitter on my cheeks, and was told to place each hand on ladoos larger than my whole head. Dressed in silver leaf, they glowed like faraway stars. I nibbled bits of sweet, sweet, ladoo even though I was supposed to wait until the ceremony was over. It was my Bismillah, to celebrate that I would now learn to read the Quran. I can find no reason why I had ladoos under my palms. The internet has little to offer on this front, my parents even less so. This might mean it’s meaningless, it might mean I was a monarch for that day and the ladoos my orbs, it might mean that reading would open up something cosmic.

In college I watched a video by Charles and Ray Eames called Powers of Ten. It begins with an aerial view of a couple on a picnic blanket. They are surrounded by books and food, the day is sunny, the weather presumably picnic-worthy (dreamy by all accounts). The camera zooms out, as the name suggests, by a power of 10 every second. We zip past the atmosphere, our entire planet in full view. Eventually we move past our solar system until finally we see our ever-expanding universe at a field view of 100 million light years across. Suspended in this scene I was reminded of little me who often felt like a bit of flotsam trying to understand something about  nothing. 

As a child fighting sleep, I’d lay in bed and do a mental exercise to try to figure out nothingness. I would begin with images of Earth in my head like the ones you see in National Geographic. Then I would fly outward as though I were the fastest spaceship known to humankind. I would zip past planets, zoom zoom zoom, until I got to Pluto (RIP), and would continue on, past the boundaries of our solar system. I thought that if I got farther and farther distance might grant me understanding, only to realize that this distance packed more information into my field of vision. It was the opposite of nothing. Child me didn’t know what to do with this. I’d move on to picturing eclipsed planets, empty planets, moons with nothing but cheesy craters. This was not nothing either, so I’d move to the textbook definition of a big bang, to gasses. But gasses are things and I wanted to find nothing. Eventually sleep would overtake my musings. 

I would try to explain this strange sensation to my mother, of how imagining nothing made me feel like my body might be inside a fun house mirror. Unfortunately for me I am a youngest child and was told to please finish your food now, you are not a fasting Buddha under a tree, finish your roti, eat your boti. I thought if I found nothingness I might understand divine light. I might understand Noor. 

Usually my parents left religious musings up to me. Sometimes I’d ask questions  and receive vague, often frustrating answers. If my father could use droplets of water to teach me about surface tension on our kitchen table, why then couldn’t he tell me the exact source of Zamzam water and why we drank it like it might cure our every ailment?

My parents never asked me or my siblings if we had prayed or not. They seemed content to simply teach us the words and motions. When I got older, they cared more about whether my shoulders were showing. Head shoulders knees toes. What does divine light care for my silly shoulders? Haven’t you seen telescope images? There are planets that might have cats with feathered wings! Planets where they have no idea what a mango tastes like or have never experienced the delight of a gumball machine! Planets where there are things better than mangoes and gumballs! But your shoulders. This is planet Pakistan. Girls hide shoulders. Girls cook meat.

If humans colonize Mars, is a Ramadan fast the length of a day on Mars or on Earth? And which direction do you pray on Mars? And is Hajj compulsory if you’re on another planet? And if you can’t perform wudu because there’s no water on Mars, do you perform tayammum instead? When I was little and too lazy for wudu I’d do tayammum against a wall. Now that I’m older and lazy I just sit in my bed and read. 

Sometimes I wondered if my questions Went Too Far. What does it mean to talk freely about things with one’s family without fear of committing The World’s Biggest Sin? Or without fear of being seen as wanting, gross, or worse, simply receiving unhelpful answers? Imagine being raised learning about boundaries. Such luxury! Imagine no one bothering you about your shoulders, imagine your parents actually giving you “the talk,” the one about sex, not the one about bare shoulders. What an alien concept! Worse still, imagine talking to them about it. Otherworldly, unhinged. 

In the Eames’ video we return to the couple, then zoom really microscopically close. We see cells and atoms, the tiniest of the tiny. The strange sensation of being dwarfed by the massiveness of the universe is somehow mimicked in imagining its minuscule qualities as well. A sufi might tell you that Noor exists between all of this. Between the in between in between things, between nothingness. It is in fact something of nothingness and somethingness. Maybe it’s all just mindfulness in a Lululemon set. 

Maybe it’s one thing turning into another into another into another. The glass jug I dropped on my foot stopped time: it created a pool of water with blood swirled in, created tears, created a forever scar on my little foot, and a forever anxiety of carrying jugs of water to hard marble countertops. Really anything on a kitchen counter is primed against my feet. I convinced myself that had I said bismillah it wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have needed stitches (just two small ones—melodrama becomes a 9-year-old). And in that moment, I was convinced that I was cosmically (read: comically) predisposed to bad luck. Bismillah! No, we will not let you go. I could have avoided it all by weaving a net of good words around me. 

We like weaving words around things. I told an aunt who inquired about the nature of my duas that I was asking Allah to end all pollution, for the climate to stop warming, and for all children to be able to go to school and of course, have sturdy shoes while doing so (don’t mind little me, she was a saccharine do-gooder, a tattletale too). She said this wasn’t what dua was for. What else could dua be for? 

When I walk downstairs on Eid and Ammi sees my face and she recites Quranic ayats and blows air at me, up and down, transferring an energy of care (and also an energy of my own vanity). I know that in this moment I look beautiful enough to warrant divine protection, in spite of my curly hair that she has compared to rats’ tails, more coconut oil and brushing is what you need, in spite of my braces, in spite of my glasses, and in spite of my conviction that I look like a frog because a boy I rejected in middle school told his friends to call me that. Ammi loves my hair now. She pretends to forget the bit about ratty tails, bratty tales. I’ve learned a group of frogs is called an army. 

Sometimes, when this singular soldier frog walks a street alone at night she whispers duas for herself (increasingly less so—don’t tell!). The later the hour, the more forceful the dua and the more forceful the air phoof phoofs from my mouth. It’s like blowing a wish of safety onto an eyelash. What happens to wishes on eyelashes? 

I knew someone with a gray eyelash. We had mirroring moles on the lower lids of our eyes—I doubt he ever noticed. When we were together it felt like bubbles that catch on to each other. He noted that our lives had run in parallel lines; childhood summers in the city, our neighboring college towns, our neighboring neighborhoods in the Bay Area. It felt necessary then that we should intersect. By the end of it I wanted terribly for our lines to overlap. Men shouldn’t say romantic things if they don’t mean them. Men shouldn’t tell their mother about you if they don’t intend that you meet her. Men should cook meat. If I make a wish on a gray eyelash, does that wish come true? If you blow on an eyelash, all it does is blow away. I’m certain he under-seasons his meat. 

Planetary conjunctions are fleeting, maybe we are lines spiraling along different orbits. I have always been a drawer of lines. Drawn lines can converge at multiple points—sometimes it’s nice to pretend the universe is at my behest. I also have a degree in drawing, which is a strange thing to say, which is why I like to say it. I tried collaging and I realized I hate collage—forcing swatches of paper into a composition felt like the paper was controlling me—and as a person of a book I have enough paper controlling me, thank you very much. But line? Line is seduction. A line moves so fluidly between points negotiated within your mind. Sharing the things my brain scribbles inside itself feels mystical, where once there was nothing now there is something—of my making no less. Maybe I like lines because I like how easily I can control them and create boundaries, those things you never learn about as a Pakistani child even though our nation’s existence hinges on an imaginary one.

Boundary crossing is a thing my family seems particularly adept at. I mean in the migratory way—of course. From India to newly formed Pakistan, and thereafter to everywhere. Every grandparent I know has a Partition jinn story. Some helped them, some protected them, some double-crossed them. I’ve come to understand that jinns love migrants. I don’t believe any of these stories but the notion is a romantic one, that something of fire might help something of clay, as if we’re all in a great cosmic kiln. When you look through a fun house mirror you can see all sorts of things. Why not jinn too? 

It could be that here in Brooklyn there are jinn as well, sitting in trees, tripping you on subways, helping you with directions. If my musings seem indulgent, I hope you’ll forgive me—such is the mess of spring. I have lost my nose to some flowers. And it is Ramadan and I am hungry. The air is warming and I am glad to soon bare my shoulders to all the strangers in the world. Maybe one of them will be a future meat cooker or better yet, a jinn. On a particularly warm day I saw a singular soapy bubble round a street corner, evidence that children were nearby. I watched it float, slowly losing its multicolor sheen and then pop into nothingness. More bubbles followed, swirling through the air like heavenly bodies. But I saw no source. It was the first warm day in months. Brooklyn had brought her shorts out, her summer dresses, her picnic blankets, her corner musicians. I  saw no child, no person with a bubble wand. An act of god then? No, it turns out, a public service. I looked up to see an open window above the dry cleaners’ and in it a bubble machine stationed on the sill. No children in sight. Perhaps I am children. Perhaps the window owner fancies themselves a god. Astaghfirullah.

Growing up it was drilled in me that no word should touch the ground. Words are to be revered no matter what those words might mean. Once my Nana insisted my entire room be reorganized because my book shelf was stationed such that when I went to bed the backs of my feet faced the books like an insult. Years later I found myself in a hot yoga studio where our teacher was flanked by battery-powered candles and Hindu deities made of brass (Edward Said would roll in his grave). It occurred to me that when we would transition to corpse pose the soles of our feet would be pointing at someone else’s deities. The warmth of the studio, dank with its silence made me sick, but who gets to stand up for whom in this scripted space of yoga poses? We follow along as told. I learned to keep quiet about some things. Even in this place, one can commit The World’s Biggest Sin. 

In Brooklyn people will intermittently fast, they’ll practice manifestation, they’ll grow beards, they’ll experiment with polyamory. They’ll also tell you they won’t date you because you’re Muslim. Irony, it seems, is their favorite form of humor. 

In Brooklyn, if you tell someone bi you’re not dating them because you don’t see the world the same way, it’s probably because you’re a homophobe. In Brooklyn, if you tell a Muslim you’re not dating them because you don’t see the world the same way, it’s probably because you don’t see the world the same way! In this scenario you are not another kind of a ’phobe. Lucky for you, even I’m not convinced you’re one. These things, I understand, are not the same but the whiplash of alienation reminds me time and again of the imagined differences that permeate this space. 

Islamophobe is a word for the man on the subway who called me a terrorist (to be honest he might have said tourist and, in the interest of honesty, that’s not great either). I somehow imagine he wouldn’t judge me for wondering where the atoms that collided to make the soapy bubbly stuff of us came from. Would he judge me for calling that Allah? Unclear. The ones who would Absolutely Not Think Like That however have judged, even laughed at, and tried to question my logic, as though I may contain some form of scholarship to prove I know what I’m talking about. Sir, do you know what you’re talking about? I’m happy you read the Quran once. I started when I was 4. Do you understand it? I don’t.

On occasion I have been asked by these Not ’Phobes to explain my not drinking. Why it matters to so many what I put into my body is beyond reason—this is not a vaccine, this does not affect you. I’ve fantasized about telling these people that I am some years sober. This seems an easier, less judgmental route, albeit a dishonest one. How does one create an elevator pitch for 30 years of cultural conditioning so that you simply do not want to engage in liquid haram, even though you know with all the rationale you use to break the rules, that you could rationally break this one too? The Not ’Phobes, I have observed, cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. They say they don’t understand this while telling me about Christmas plans at home, but just so you know they don’t actually think it’s his birthday, it’s just something they’ve done since they were kids. I wish eternal flatulence upon them. 

Let’s not even start on the most haram-y haram: pork. This will break my brain, your brain, and the Not ’Phobes’ brains. All I will say on this subject is, if I don’t eat any, there will be plenty left for you. I don’t see why this is a problem. Why can’t we let things be? Acceptance is a dirty game, the pretense of it even dirtier. Like a labyrinth one must master, where you’re never sure if it’s the hedges that will devour you or if a Minotaur awaits you at your next turn.

The limits of their imagination draws lines around the fact of me, creates a fiction of me. Modulating their marks only when convenient for them. It adheres to my skin like the piss-thick air of a yoga studio but just like the imagined boundaries of my motherland, and like the lines I draw, these things are only pretend. They prime against me the thing they celebrate me for. The thing I cannot answer for. The thing I barely know; the nothing of my something. 

We are in the same fun house mirror but I am seen refracted through images of no connection to me; the domes of the Taj Mahal, the pantomimed shake of a snake charmer, or even more insipidly, the collective actions of entire Muslim nations—every image more on the nose than the last, you’d think I’d made it up but I’ve encountered this and worse. I had no idea I was so grandiose, so stately, so powerful, a marble mausoleum supposedly made for a favored wife dying in childbirth—a ridiculous comparison, I know.  What if I told you it reeks of the stench of a thousand naked feet?

Like a good independent woman, I contain multitudes but never the ones I’ve drawn for myself. This pot isn’t melting. This pot is molten. 

How does it come up that I am Muslim? Do I force it into conversation? Do I slip in the fact that I am from Pakistan, hoping that someone knows enough geopolitics to guess what that might mean about my upbringing? How do I tell them I come from an ugly place without them thinking something of that ugliness rubbed off on me? But also, it’s not an ugly place, it is just a place. A young place that is still bopping about trying to sort itself out, and hey, so am I. But the frustration of migration is being expected to know who you are at any given moment. And the beauty of it is in knowing that you’ll never know, and from it arises a fluidity of thought, a comfort in not knowing. 

For a long time, the label immigrant felt like sandpaper dragged across my brain. Between its little letters lay so much room for misunderstanding. I never thought of myself as one, until I spoke to too many a Brooklyn Male—in contrast to them I am glad to be other.

It feels as though I am regularly confronted with pigments my eye has not yet evolved to see, perhaps it never will. Or maybe it’s that I am the new pigment and they need to learn me but decide they’d rather not. Perhaps I’ll try and track and kern the letters of that silly word—immigrant—ever so closely, so that it stops meaning anything at all. Then my meaning will be obscured into a series of overlapping letters, a seamless unified form. They won’t be able to get me then. I will morph into bubble girl, impermeable to stupidity—until, inevitably, I pop to nothingness. 

Mariam Quraishi is an illustrator and writer, based in Brooklyn, NY. She has published two picture books, the most recent book was published with Malala Yousafzai called My Name is Malala (LBYR). followed by One Wish (HarperCollins). She has two forthcoming books titled Breath the Rhythm of Your Heart (Astra Publishers)  and Together on Eid (Chronicle Books). 

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

“In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Shiva wills it: He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing, He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fulness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and gives new rest. This is poetry; but none the less, science,” Coomaraswamy writes.

There has been a long line of physicists—Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, and many others—who, regardless of whether they are confounded or outraged or intrigued or inspired by Indian intellectual traditions, engage with its philosophies, texts, and practitioners. But it is not until Capra’s much-lauded and much-criticised 1975 book The Tao of Physics that the door to such crossovers is unlocked in the popular imagination. When a door is open, all sorts of things tend to blow in, but I digress.

In Bossier Parish schools, parents, teachers, and students told me, the court order stalled, but didn’t entirely stop, Christian prayer. Now, with a Supreme Court friendly to school prayer, educators and state lawmakers around the country are testing the limits of the strict separation of church and state written into the Constitution. In a handful of states, including Kentucky, Montana and Texas, lawmakers have recently proposed or passed measures attempting to promote faith in schools. In Kentucky, for example, the legislature passed a law in March that would allow teachers to share their religious beliefs in school. A Kentucky lawmaker who sponsored the House bill told local television station Lex 18 that he hoped the measure would “embolden these Christian teachers” who may have been afraid to express themselves in public schools.

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Samuel Ernest| Longreads | May 2, 2023 | 19 minutes (4,261 words)

for Josh

In the dorm, friends were playing the new record of a local band, Too Bright by Perfume Genius, and I couldn’t tell if I liked it. The songs were tender and fierce, sometimes one or the other, but often both at once, the singer’s voice trembling like someone who has ever only whispered learning to shout.

Having followed their career, I can now see how tenderness and ferocity have characterized all of Perfume Genius’ albums in different ways as their sound has grown louder — from their first album, Learning, with songs like memories overheard from another room, through the most recent, Ugly Season. Mike Hadreas, the lead singer, has risen from the keys where he used to sit hunched over during their shows. Now, he dances while he sings, almost crumpling under the weight of sound, sex, and spirit — exuberant and free.

But when I first heard their music, Perfume Genius threatened the tentative treaty I was negotiating between gayness and faith. It was too confident in refusing purity and cleanness and whatever I believed about sex. “Queen” and “My Body” swelled from the speakers, pounding into my own carefully guarded body. “No family is safe when I sashay.” A warning. “I wear my body like a rotted peach. / You can have it if you can handle the stink.” A curdled cruise. I didn’t listen long.

I called my pastor before I came out. The blog post was drafted — a carefully written confession and acceptance of my gay desire — but I was sitting on it, unsure. For years, I had cultivated about my person the opposite of obscenity. Coming out would sex myself in public. I feared that almost as much as I craved it. “Sometimes telling one story now prevents us from telling a better story later,” my pastor told me (pastor speak for don’t do it). It felt like a rebuke. Over ice cream, a lesbian friend told me to ignore that advice, so I posted it. The story received over 2000 views by the following morning, surely proof that what my pastor said had been wrong or irrelevant: It was a good story.

This was my sophomore year of college. But as I’ve reflected on my coming-out story a decade later — not the blog post so much as what writing it and sharing it did to me — something about his words seems true. I made a self, and since then, I have struggled to make sense of myself. The meaning I found in my coming-out story — in repeating it to my family, friends, professors, therapists, anyone who asked me to coffee at my college, and the anonymous cloud of blog readers — the story and its meaning came to feel final, resistant to reinterpretation.

In coming out, my life ended. It was a personal apocalypse of many smaller revelations. The struggle that had defined me had reached its denouement of freedom — and what comes after freedom?

My mother says that I kicked her gut to the beat of the church organ when she was pregnant with me. At 6, I started playing violin in church. By high school, middle-aged women were approaching me after the service to tell me how my playing had lifted their spirits, had been the Spirit to them.

None of them knew I had discovered gay porn around 12 or 13. According to the orthodoxies of evangelical porn literature, the brief clips I watched rewired my brain from straight to gay: So great is the power of men on couches and beds and in forests, so powerful the idolatrous iconography of dick and ass and big ol’ man tiddies. Growing up in a rural suburb of Grand Rapids, porn was the only place I could reliably see glimpses of men together in any desirous way. Easy to contain, easy to hide. And necessary to hide in a subculture built on concealing sex and desire behind a bridal veil, so I split myself in two. I hated my body.

Playing violin became the public counterpart to my private pleas that God would restore what I had ruined. When I prayed, I fell prostrate on my bedroom floor. God was a gentle pressure I felt surrounding my body, holding me together. When I played violin, God swept me into my sound, projecting me outward.

I experienced symptoms of anxiety throughout middle school and high school — sudden weight loss, mouthfuls of canker sores, spitting up bile — but the strain between my public and private lives pulled at my body in a new way during my freshman year of college. It came for my sound, my means of worship. Playing in the school orchestra or with piano accompaniment at department practicums, there were moments when I could hear nothing but my own instrument and heartbeat. The muscles in my bow arm would seize up, giving the graced and highly trained instrument of my wrist all the nuance of a falling ax, chopping out notes in a fucked forte.

Beta blockers calmed my heart, but they also wiped my memory. During a practicum performance of Tartini’s Violin Concerto in D minor, I forgot my cadenza — the second, long one. Although many are now codified in sheet music, historically, cadenzas are moments when the performer improvises, so I made up something on the spot. I followed an instinctive form of theme and variation, flowing through a modulation, out of D minor into D major. But I forgot to modulate back. The cadenza, intended to show off my mastery of technique in harmonic fireworks, ended on a wildly dissonant F#. To my shock and glee, no one noticed that I had accidentally performed my first true cadenza except for my accompanist, who drowned out my dissonance by pounding the tonic chord on her piano. It was both a failure and a discovery: Without my sheet music or memory, I could lurch forward anyway, relying on the technique I had spent most of my life internalizing.

Strike an A on the piano, and the third string of a well-tuned violin will sound. Or any two strings tuned to any one pitch. This is one way to check whether stringed instruments are in tune relative to each other. It’s called sympathetic resonance. Hermann von Helmholtz, a 19th-century German scientist who studied the physics of perception, offers a theory of it:

This phenomenon is always found in those bodies which when [] set in motion by any impulse, continue to perform a long series of vibrations before they come to rest. When these bodies are struck gently, but periodically, although each blow may be separately quite insufficient to produce a sensible motion in the vibratory body … very large and powerful oscillations may result.

“Vibratory body” sounds too accidentally animal to describe a musical instrument or a tuning fork, but animal bodies vibrate, too: At the gut punch of a loud bass, the fleshy viscera within you throb. Incidentally, violin strings were once made with catgut, and you can still buy catgut strings. The name is a misnomer (the biological material in the core of these strings typically comes from sheep or goats) but tell a kid bored by stringed instruments or classical music, “They used to make strings from catgut. Go ahead — pluck it.” It resonates.

A 2015 article at Audioholics summarizes studies of the physical sensations produced by low-frequency sounds. Seventeen-hertz (Hz) tones cause anxiety. At 18.98 Hz, the human eye resonates, causing some people to see ghosts. Around 1980, an Air Force laboratory in Ohio anesthetized some animals and discovered that dogs, when “subjected to frequencies from 0.5 Hz to 8 Hz” at around 172 decibels, experience decreased respiration. Below 1 Hz, their independent breathing ceases. “The animals were not suffocating,” the reviewer, James Larson, assures us. “What was occurring was the pressure waves were so large that air molecules were being exchanged between the ambient air and the lungs of the dog, so, in a manner of speaking, the sound waves were breathing for the dog.” Artificial ventilation, or a gentle pet for the lungs.

Listening to Perfume Genius wasn’t difficult because the sound was antagonistic. It was the music’s sympathy that I was afraid of, the way it breathed for me. Is there a frequency to loose faggotry coiled deep in the gut?

A former lover of mine, a beautiful poet, saw Perfume Genius perform with a friend when they toured with Too Bright. The bass of “My Body” rattled his friend.

I wear my body like a rotted peach. 

He couldn’t stand it.

You can have it if you handle the stink. 

The performance left him visibly uncomfortable.

I’m as open as a gutted pig.

I imagine the two of them standing together,

On the small of every back,

his friend wilting, shaken by the sex of it —

you’ll see a picture of me

my lover alert, life gurgling up from his bowels.

wearing my body.

Spring break freshman year, my dad and I took a road trip, winding down the West Coast’s wormy highways from Seattle to Los Angeles and back. I had told my parents over winter break that I was addicted to gay porn, and we had spent considerable time processing together. In the rental car, my dad played a sermon our pastor had given on God’s will.

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The sermon shifted something. I had always felt God’s will for me was in phantom futures: the violinist I could be, the straight man I could become. The relationship between now and then, a runaway train. But, according to the pastor, God’s will is not some rickety bridge we are to fear falling from. It is a field to enjoy.

I stopped praying for God to change me and started asking God to reveal to me who I am. I received the good news and began telling people I was gay. I shared my testimony. I came out again and again. My parents and friends didn’t disown me — I didn’t know that could happen. I began praying for God’s guidance in how to tell this story, and midway through my sophomore year, I wrote and shared the blog post. 

In coming out, I found some of the freedom I was supposed to find. A new orientation to the world, allowing myself to look at men outside a computer screen for the first time, and it was springtime in Seattle, cutoffs and muscle shirts exposing limbs, the college boys playing on the hill behind the dorm, the fit and furry young father wearing only short shorts, bicycling with his baby in tow across the Fremont Bridge. 

It wasn’t all revelation. I lost my sense of God’s close presence. At church, I no longer knew when to stand up and raise my hands in surrender to God, because I had surrendered the primary thing I believed that God had asked of me: the hatred of my body, my useless genitals and affections. I looked around the sanctuary, feeling odd, disconnected. My hands and arms could only pose.

I kept blogging for a while, but as I started to date, I became afraid to write about myself. Talking about my body, my love interests, my slow stumbling into sexual being would have scared away my audience. I was good at being respectable. A model gay Christian. An enthusiastic participant in college admissions panels. To say anything more would have discredited my experience as a godly one.

After college, I began my masters in religion and literature at a divinity school on the other coast. My divinity school was more mainline than evangelical. This made sense for me, as I had become an Episcopalian, but it felt strange not to speak regularly with others about my relationship with God. There was no appropriate occasion to share life stories with others, so the me who appeared in divinity classes was unknown and unconditioned by the story I had crafted. Starting over somewhere new could have been an opportunity for self-recreation, but I had just done that. My story was over. Life felt formless and void.

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It was strange to find myself still getting up and doing things, attending morning prayer, taking classes, experimenting with my wardrobe, getting on the hookup apps, meeting up with men, discovering I could be desired, wearing my body with increasing confidence, legs out, chest poppin’, pop music in my earbuds, pounding down the sidewalk like you knew I was fucking, returning stares with a glare of my own, on the way to Wednesday night mass in a frankly conservative wool pencil skirt that burst open as I carefully waddled up the div school stairs like a mermaid standing on her fins, my thighs, thick from exercise at the gym, escaping into their fullness, the mermaid tail torn in two. I had no idea how to make sense of who I was becoming. 

At my div school, most of the queer work happened in theology, so I gradually shifted disciplines. From literature, I had wanted a model. I wanted to find that someone had written my story so I could know what came next. I followed the protagonists of James Baldwin, John Rechy, Jeanette Winterson, and Andrew Holleran into cities and rooms and beds and arms I never would have found in following Jesus as a straight boy. But where Christianity is present in these books, it is something to leave, and its God is, if anything, a persistent ghost, and that never felt possible to me.

I was living in the divinity school’s apartments, starting to read theology in earnest, when No Shape came out and I tried listening to Perfume Genius again.

While recording the first song, “Otherside,” the band set up the recording studio like a church. Shawn Everett, the album’s sound engineer, says, “We talked about how it could feel like a lonely church up in the Ozarks, this sad church where most of the town had died. There’s a few remaining people sadly singing the songs they’ve been singing forever.” Hadreas says, “We arranged lines of chairs like pews and had each person sing seated, facing a microphone at the front of the room. Everyone in the studio sang, including some friends of the engineer that were nearby.” The space is set up like a church, the chairs like pews, but the singing is reverent, the sound is holy — metaphor disperses into actuality — the lyrics are a prayer.

“Otherside” was recorded using a piece of technology called a binaural head. It captures the spatiality of sound. With earphones in, one takes the place of the head, experiencing the sounds as they were imparted to it. It begins with piano. Muffled broken triads descend from above at the listener’s left. Then from all sides, the congregation sings paradoxes of faith: that one may be lost,

Even your going,

yet found;

let it find you.

that one may be alone,

Even in hiding,

yet known;

find it knows you.

that the one who finds and knows you

Rocking you to sleep

is of a different order, a different kind, a different kind of place.

from the Otherside.

There is a beat of silence, then an explosion of sound like creation.

Perfume Genius’s religious aesthetics and lyrics fascinate critics. In a 2015 interview, Randy Shulman tells Hadreas, “At times [your songs] reach almost ecclesiastic height. The thing that kept popping into mind listening to [Too Bright] especially was religion. The arrangements at times evolve into an almost spiritual, heavenly rapture. Why that style?” Hadreas responds, “I’ve always really responded to hymns, choral music and spiritual music. Even though I’m not Christian, I’ve listened to Christian music. It’s weird to have a taste for that, but to not feel included in it. And so, I reconcile that with the music I make. I make music that feels old or spiritual, but I am included in it, people like me are included in it.” E. Alex Jung asks a similar question of Hadreas in a 2017 interview titled “Perfume Genius Wants to Take You to Queer Church,” and Hadreas says, “I like when people are singing about God and death and the Devil and like fucking big shit.”

In some sense, then, the spiritual grandeur of “Otherside” is no surprise. Like many queer artists, Perfume Genius makes the stories and art that have been withheld from queer people — they make sacred music for faggots. Churches often attempt to sweep queer people from the margins into the center through rituals of transformation, paring down desire and excess through ex-gay therapy or celibacy or marriage. What can’t be cut off is covered, like robes for the choir. But Hadreas disrobes. He sings his hymns with those the church marks sexually unclean, those who remain resistant to the shapes of queer life legitimized by the church, the shapeless and the taking shape. There is access for them, too. For us. There is grace in strange places, and knowledge of this grace is the catgut core of Perfume Genius.

Critics and Hadreas agree that No Shape marked a new moment for the band. Owen Myers writes, “If Perfume Genius’s previous albums acknowledged the scars we bear from the heteropatriarchy, this new record gestures towards how we might carve out space within it and flourish anyway.” In addition, Hadreas’s spiritual vision approaches clarity through No Shape. Robin Hilton interviewed Hadreas for NPR upon the album’s release. The singer walks through the album, song by song, providing commentary and backstory. About “Otherside,” he says,

Hymns have always sounded like sung spells to me. I never felt included in the magic of the God songs I heard growing up—I knew I was going to hell before anyone ever told me that I was. People found comfort in this all-knowing source, but I felt frightened and found out. I developed some weird and very dramatic complexes. It took me a long time to not think of the universe as a judgmental debit-credit system. I haven’t completely shaken it, but I no longer think that I am overdrawn with God. Grace is not something you earn, it’s always there. I find this idea a lot more fun.

The fascination with hymns and the feelings of exclusion from their world are familiar from earlier interviews, but there’s a new thought here, as well, or a revision. A sense that a debt to God has vanished. Perfume Genius’ music and interviews began to represent for me the possibility of living beyond my inherited world of heterosexed faith and life. The second song on No Shape, especially.

Following “Otherside,” “Slip Away” thrums with the excitement of hiding, finding, and being carried by queer love on the peripheries of a straight world. Hadreas sings,

Don’t hold back

I want to break free—

God is singing through your body

and I’m carried by the sound.

The joy of it hit first. I danced in my div school apartment’s kitchen.

Every drum,

every single beat—

they were born from your body

and I’m carried by the sound.

Hadreas has described the song as his version of a Springsteen song. It rollicks, taking you with it.

Oh love,

They’ll never break the shape we take.

Oh

Baby let all them voices slip away.

If from literature I had wanted a model for gay life, with theology, I’ve wanted to learn how to live in the wake of theological models that never quite fit. I want to slip, rather, into a new configuration of faithful life and narrate what this new life is that I’ve found in emancipation from heterosexuality — not what new life in Christ should be, but what it actually has been and might be.

For Christians, the shape of new life is normed by the shape of one particular life. To be a Christian is to be remade in the shape of — did you know — Jesus Christ, both sacramentally, through participation in baptism and communion, as well as morally, through following his teachings. The goal is, in some way, to imitate Christ. But what does it look like to imitate Christ? It is not difficult to imagine the ways such a task could be either dangerous or, frankly, boring.

Around the time I was listening to “Slip Away” on repeat, I read Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology by Kathryn Tanner, one of my professors. In a chapter called “The Shape of Human Life,” Tanner says to imitate Christ does not mean replicating moments from Christ’s life or living by some formula. She writes,

We follow Christ where he leads in our own lives, shaped as those lives already are by the forces of contemporary times and cultures. Christ’s life is extended in new directions as it incorporates our lives within it. … exactly where we will be led in Christ is not easily foreseen from the specifics of Jesus’ own life as those reflect an historical distance of two thousand years. …  we must do as Jesus did and live out a union with God in ways appropriate to our own circumstances.

I find Tanner’s theology freeing, particularly her refusal of conformity to Christ as an imposition of a pre-known form and her insistence on context. She doesn’t sever the relationship between Jesus’ life and the contemporary Christian’s; rather, she suggests that faith may lead to unobvious lives, in which a person’s particularities are preserved, not obliterated. Being somewhere unexpected does not mean one has been hewn from the body of Christ, but that Christ’s body is found … somewhere unexpected.

Tanner’s theology describes a life of grace, not debt. For theologians, grace is what the created being finds in God and is given by God, including and beyond the gift of creation. It is not only a response to sin, but it is that, too. As Hadreas says, it is not earned. God’s gifts are all that God bestows upon creation and to all people, regardless of any thinkable hierarchies of deservingness and faithfulness. Receiving them does not place one in debt to God, because, Tanner writes, “The gift of salvation in Christ has no conditions; there is nothing we must do or be in particular.” We are not, in fact, overdrawn with God. The universe is not a “judgmental debit-credit system.” The only fitting response, according to Tanner, is to give of one’s goods freely to others. And the body is one such good.

Following the first chorus of “Slip Away,” the drums break into a pounding sprint. The lovers are in flight.

Don’t look back,

I want to break free—

If you never see ’em coming,

You never have to hide

.

Not only are the lovers carried by God’s song within them, they are fleeing someone.

Take my hand,

take my everything.

If we only got a moment,

give it to me now.

The future is unsure; but at least a moment can be secured, so the singer offers himself to his lover for what time they have. “Slip Away” ends with the carnivalesque jangling of a piano modified to sound like an unhinged harpsichord — even the instruments must be transformed to tell of this love.

I am four years into my doctoral program — a decade since I first heard Perfume Genius — and I had never seen them in concert until recently, when a queer friend from religious studies invited me to go with them and their friends. The stage was strewn with tufts of white tulle and a chair covered in knotted rope. During an extended instrumental, Mike Hadreas grabbed the tulle and wrapped his body in it, part mummy, part bride, part spirit, part priest. Muttering to himself, Hadreas wormed around the stage, lap danced the knotted chair, crawled under it, threw it aside, still shrouded. The audience watched, captive, some with confusion, many with wonder and love. It was a strange and intimate struggle, an ecstatic ascent and descent at the same time. When he finally shed his tufts of tulle, we all shrieked.

A week or two after the concert, I had a vision while walking my dog. I saw a cocoon of shining translucent fibers, and I knew I was inside of it. I felt the physical presence of the prayers of those who love me. I knew the cocoon’s fibers were God’s will. As I neared home, I expanded against the boundaries of my skin, pushing outwards but not fully out.

Every testimony, every coming-out story, attempts a transformation of life. But narration is not life itself, exactly, or its transformation; it is a cocooning. From it, a truer shape may emerge. Which means our stories don’t end like we think they will. In lieu of an end, grace brings revision, a conversion of form. I don’t know how to tell a life under grace, but I’ve been taking notes:

sex, grace, and sin don’t work by formula

coming out is a gradual reckoning with what desiring men might do to my life

conversion is a gradual reckoning with what desiring God might do to my life

the two create new circumstances for each other to make sense of

it is ok to pose, to try out new postures while you acclimate to new revelations

faith can look like this

as I walk, I bounce, chest out, wrist upturned, and a world hangs from it

Samuel Ernest resides in New Haven, CT. He is a doctoral candidate in theology at Yale. More of his work may be found at samuelernest.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

During Rosh Hashanah, when the shofar – the ram’s horn – had to be blown to inaugurate the new year, no one knew what sound to produce. A single, long blast? Several short ones? (Later, an audio tape arrived from overseas to solve that dilemma.) When Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, came around, and when Ben Avraham still owned no siddur, they read from the Book of Lamentations instead, because it felt appropriately bleak. On Hanukah, they lacked a dreidel, the four-sided spinning top that is part of a game played during the festival. “Instead,” Ben Avraham said, “we used the lid from a pen.”

Christine Grimaldi | The Atavist Magazine | January 2022 | 10 minutes (2,653 words)

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s issue no. 123, “The Shadow and the Ghost.” 

1.

Jennie Otranto slept on the same floors that she scrubbed clean. She was the Lord’s humble servant, too intimidated to ask her employer, the woman she called Reverend Mother, for a spare bedroom. Unlike the innkeeper in the story of Christ’s birth, Reverend Mother had ample space, especially compared with her parishioners, who lived in packed row houses and cold-water flats that rattled to the roll of Brooklyn’s elevated trains. Reverend Mother never even offered her maid a blanket. Jennie made do with her own coat and a small rug—if her minister-turned-master’s Scottish terrier and Siamese cat relinquished a favorite sleeping spot.

Come morning, Jennie shook out her coat and any fur that stuck to it. She smoothed the wrinkles left overnight in her clothes. Her scallop-edged top and skirt are crisp in a black-and-white photo old enough to be from her domestic tenure. In one hand, she clutches a box of Super Suds detergent, perhaps to wash dinner remnants off Reverend Mother’s plates or clothes—the brand’s tagline was “floods o’ suds for dishes and duds.” A fistful of Jennie’s hair is coiled around a barrette pinned just above her forehead, while the rest falls to her shoulders. The dark circles under her eyes seem to give the truth away: Jennie is a profile in exhaustion.

The circumstances of her employment amounted to forced labor. According to the 1940 census, 22-year-old Jennie earned $650 a year as a maid, and 54-year-old Reverend Mother made nothing as a pastor—a double-barreled lie meant to protect the person who told it. Jennie reaped no earthly rewards under the arrangement reached about a decade earlier between her mother, Serafina, and Reverend Mother. A friend had told Serafina about a woman who performed miracles out of a Pentecostal storefront church on 69th Street, also called Bay Ridge Avenue. It seemed as if only miracles could soothe Serafina’s arthritic joints, which confined the 40-something mother of six to bed for weeks at a time. So she went to the church, which largely drew from Brooklyn’s Italian immigrant enclave of Bensonhurst. As many as 200 self-proclaimed “full believers” sought cameos in Reverend Mother’s prayers and remedies from her “holy napkins,” pieces of cloth she anointed with oil over which she’d prayed. Reverend Mother preached that no other church in the world understood the Bible like La Cappella dei Miracoli (the Chapel of Miracles) did. And make no mistake: She was the church.

Reverend Mother expected full believers to pay for her grace, one way or another. Like many church leaders, she cited Bible verses to justify collecting a 10 percent tithe from her followers’ poverty-level wages. She went a step further, commissioning “scouts” to find families tending to dying relatives so that she could pray with them—and claim 10 percent on the relatives’ wills. But nothing was ever enough for Reverend Mother, and she levied the first of many egregious tolls on Serafina’s family around 1930. “After a while she had a stronger hold on us,” Jennie later wrote, “and decided that I should go live with her as her maid.” Serafina agreed. She considered her eldest daughter a gift to God.

Jennie’s delivery into involuntary servitude marked the end of her formal education. Eighth grade was as far as she’d go. Reverend Mother squeezed everything she could out of Jennie and her family. She once instructed Jennie to pull her mother aside after a church service to discuss Serafina’s life insurance policy. “Tell her, ‘Mom, God was good to you, why don’t you cash that policy and give the money to Reverend Mother?’ Letting it sound like it came from me,” Jennie recalled. The Great Depression plunged Jennie’s parents into darkness more than once when they couldn’t pay their electricity bill. Still, Serafina gave Reverend Mother the $200 or $250 her insurance policy was worth.

Teenage Jennie cleaned, cooked, and worshiped without complaint, but by the early 1940s, after a period in which she was sent back to her family, only to be enlisted as an unpaid maid again when it suited Reverend Mother, the twentysomething version of Jennie had to be stopped from testing the limits of her employer’s power. “As time wore on living under these conditions my patience was waning. One day, I don’t remember what happened. I might have answered her abruptly,” Jennie wrote. “She happened to have a metal can in her hand and banged it on my head.”

The can sliced into Jennie’s scalp. She pressed a Turkish towel to her head, but its fibers couldn’t absorb the blood flowing through her hair and down her neck. “Reverend Mother saw all this but did not try to help or even care,” Jennie wrote. “I then left her home without saying a word.”

It was nighttime. Where would she sleep? Grown women in Brooklyn often lived with their families until marriage, but Jennie’s parents would offer no refuge. Her father, Frank, was even more devoted to Reverend Mother than Serafina was. Reverend Mother regularly dispatched him to the homes of delinquent parishioners. “I would go and ask them how they felt and why they did not come to church,” he later told authorities. Jennie feared her father would force—or beat—her back into servitude. “Having no place to go, I rode the trains all night,” Jennie wrote.

The next morning, she went to see Serafina. Jennie mentioned only that she and Reverend Mother had had a “misunderstanding.” What happened next sounds a lot like love bombing—the showering of appreciation by abusers, narcissists, and cult leaders to overwhelm a target’s resistance. “When Reverend Mother realized where I was, she called and sweet talked me into going back,” Jennie wrote. “Why wouldn’t she? She missed having a good free maid.”

Jennie returned to work, but only in body. Her soul was her own. Reverend Mother, it seemed, had reached the limit of her power.

Nanny picked me up from elementary school every day of my childhood on Staten Island. The moms of my classmates idled outside their cars, gossiping. Nanny was the only grandmother in the crowd. We met each other with hugs and kisses, and our ride home never began until we raced to see whether Nanny’s automatic seat belt, a fixture of some 1990s cars, would cinch into place before I could latch my manual strap in the back seat. I inevitably won, but the thrill of my victory was never tainted by any agony of her defeat on her part. Nanny celebrated my safety.

Among my few after-school obligations were the weekly catechism classes that would rub off like a temporary tattoo once I got older. Nanny waited in her silver Toyota Camry while I was taught Catholicism’s particular brand of shame. She also took me to borrow books from the Great Kills Library, and to buy Archie comics at a store kitty-corner from a Sedutto ice cream shop. Occasionally, on the way home, we stopped by Dazzle Cleaners, where my parents, Nanny’s son and daughter-in-law, sweated as many as 14 hours a day, six days a week. But Mom and Dad preferred I stay away from their business, especially in the summer months, when the boilers spiked the heat index in the store, making it a sauna with none of the health benefits.

Home was in the Honey Bee Condominiums behind the Staten Island Mall. There, Nanny and I settled into our afternoon routines, starting with homework. I recited my vocabulary words, and she paged through a dictionary for the corresponding definitions. I wrote short stories, only remembering to cram in the assigned words at the end, while Nanny wrapped breaded chicken cutlets around cubes of mozzarella (mutzadell in Brooklynese) or formed tiny meatballs for minestrone soup. She could also put together a solid kids’ menu whenever my best friends, Andrea and Jen, came over to cosplay Buffy the Vampire Slayer with fake wooden stakes or Clueless with our teddy-bear backpacks. We loved Nanny’s English muffin pizzas with homemade sauce and her grilled cheese sandwiches made with Kraft Singles.

Depending on their nightly ETA, we ate dinner with one or both of my parents. Mom and Dad worked harder and longer than I ever have, or will, to fuel the last segment of their white flight from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey, a path worn by many Italian Americans before them. Living with my long-widowed paternal grandmother for six months was supposed to help our little family save for a house in the suburbs. We stayed for seven years.

From the time I was five through the summer after my twelfth birthday, Nanny was a constant in my life. I never missed one of her Saturday morning beauty parlor appointments at the Staten Island Mall. Weekday mornings, she power walked through the mall’s corridors with her septuagenarian friends. I gave Nanny a set of one-pound pink weights that she pumped through the Cinnabon-scented air, and during summer vacations I’d join the group now and then for a bialy in the food court. On many afternoons and evenings, fueled by homemade rugelach or pound cake, I was dealt in to card games with Nanny’s friends at our dining room table. Other nights, just the two of us, Nanny and I played round after round of Rummikub, the tile game that “brings people together.”

Oftentimes we snuggled on the den sofa to watch our shows: General Hospital bleeding into Oprah, and The Golden Girls in perpetual syndication. The sofa contained the folded-up mattress where Nanny slept after insisting that my parents take the only bedroom in her condo. It was there that we wore out The Goonies, Home Alone, and the rest of my VHS collection, supplementing them with Lifetime melodramas and the classics starring Audrey or Katharine Hepburn. On Friday nights, I’d curl into Nanny for an hour of Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. We were devoted to the golden era of 20/20, and to each other. “You’re my shadow,” Nanny would say.

Our bedtime routine was an exercise in role reversal: I tucked Nanny in with many kisses and traced the sign of the cross on her papery forehead, smoothing the wrinkles up, down, left, right, with my thumb. She smelled of Noxzema and hair spray. After I lay down in my bed in the windowless nook next to the den, I often snuck back into Nanny’s room, drawing close to check that she was still breathing. She was a generation older than my friends’ grandmothers. My copy of Claudia and the Sad Good-bye, the Baby-Sitters Club book about the death of the protagonist’s beloved grandmother, Mimi, was my only guide for navigating the inevitable.

My parents and I moved to New Jersey in 1998, and Nanny took over the sofa bed in our new house about five years later. We both had senioritis: I was 18, and she was 86. I was filling out college applications as her health was declining, due largely to congestive heart failure. Claudia and the Sad Good-bye was still wedged between the more mature literature on my bookshelf the night an ambulance arrived at our house. Something was wrong with Nanny. “Bring the living will!” she yelled at Dad as the medics prepared to take her to the hospital. Mom stayed behind and tried to prepare me for the worst. In a big teenage mood, I sobbed as much to drown her out as from sadness. Nanny was not going to die that night if I had anything to do with it.

I didn’t, of course, but she lived anyway. My teenage hubris validated, I made a deal with Nanny: She just had to make it to my college graduation. In retrospect, it was a cringeworthy framing her chronic illness as a battle to be won or lost. Yet Nanny’s health improved. We had four more years of summer vacations, secrets, and frank discussions about politics and sexuality. Nanny watched me take my first dose of birth control, and she opposed the Catholic Church’s anti-abortion teachings long before I rejected them. She was the most open-minded adult in my culturally conservative young life, which isn’t to say she was perfect. Though she never used the N-word or its Italian-American stand-in, derived from the word for eggplant, she occasionally toggled between color-blind and coded racism, which I in turn absorbed. She believed that in his twenties my father had lost out on a job because of affirmative action, though in truth Dad probably wasn’t qualified for the position, with his two semesters of college and a life that revolved around hanging out in bars and on street corners, where the police never bothered him and his friends.

I wish Nanny and I had discussed the things we were wrong about and why. But there wouldn’t be time. Nanny’s lungs started filling with liquid during the last semester of my senior year of college. I brought my cap and gown home so we could re-create the graduation ceremony she was too weak to attend. She died five months later, on October 14, 2008.

I had dreaded Nanny’s death for so long that when it happened, it didn’t seem real. I never cried. Tears flowed from small disappointments in newsroom jobs and from bigger ones I dated in my early twenties. It was easier to feel gutted over someone I thought was my soul mate than to recognize that my soul mate had come and gone.

I knew that Nanny and her younger siblings shared secrets. I had caught the occasional whisper about abuse: physical, emotional, spiritual. Then, a few years after Nanny died, I learned that these dark memories had been committed to paper.

At my great-uncle Joey’s urging, his three sisters had joined him in writing testimonials about their childhood. Late in life, Joey left Catholicism for an evangelical church and gave the testimonials to a fellow parishioner, who in turn produced a short, spiral-bound book called “Bazaar [sic] but True.” Apparently, Joey believed I could do a better job with the story the book told. He approached my mom about it before I left for college. She told him it was too much for me then, but I’d tell the story eventually. Later, when I started a graduate program in creative nonfiction, my dad’s cousin Patricia gave me copies of the testimonials.

In looping, spindly script, the documents revealed that, while I may have been Nanny’s shadow, she also had a ghost. Nanny, whose real name was Genevieve “Jennie” Grimaldi, née Otranto, was haunted her whole life by the specter of Josephine Carbone, a woman as cruel as she was charismatic. Carbone was better known, to both her followers and her critics, as Reverend Mother.

Nanny and I had talked about everything else—why not this? I summoned a memory, a Turkish towel soaked with blood, an echo from a phone conversation in a nearby room. My childhood instinct had been to file away such things instead of asking Nanny about them. But even if I had asked, I don’t know that she would have had the heart to tell me the truth.

A decade after Nanny died, I quit my latest journalism job, in no small part to investigate what happened to the love of my life. The testimonials were the starting point. With government records and newspaper clippings, the memories of the few churchgoers who are still alive and the descendants of those who aren’t, I pieced together the narrative of Reverend Mother’s rise to power and her eventual downfall. I learned the stories of families who, like the Otrantos, were all but destroyed by La Cappella dei Miracoli. In studying the one chapter of my grandmother’s life she never shared with me, I found a sense of purpose.

Nanny may have been shielding me from her pain, but in doing so she also gave me a final gift. Her secret was my inheritance.

“A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” That is the core tenet of the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory—and nearly one-fifth of Americans think it’s true. A recent poll shows that just 47 percent of the country believe the notion is false. The rest don’t know what to think.

Also baffled: the children of QAnon followers. Jesselyn Cook of HuffPost spoke to nine such people about the confusion and pain that comes with losing a parent to a right-wing cult. “Some are desperately trying to deradicalize their moms and dads—an agonizing process that can feel maddening, heartbreaking, and futile,” Cook writes. “Others believe their parents are already too far gone and have given up trying to help them. A few have made the painful decision to cut off contact entirely, for the sake of their own mental health.”

One of the children, Daniel (a pseudonym), described how his mom, a two-time Obama voter, lost her grasp on reality. He tried to fact check her, but it didn’t work. He tried listening to her calmly, only to find she wouldn’t do the same when the tables were turned. He was stymied:

When he spoke to his mom about it a couple of days later, she seemed unbothered by what had happened. Daniel couldn’t believe it. So he tried a new way to break through to her: telling her, candidly, exactly how her behavior was making him feel.

“I love you,” Daniel told his mother, “but with your inundation of fake news, you have created a reality for yourself that doesn’t exist, and by doing so, you are actively distancing yourself from your family. It is making it harder for us to connect with you because, unfortunately, we feel that you are just not living in the world that we live in, and it’s frightening for us.” 

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