In The New Metaphysicals, Courtney Bender notes that defining spirituality is “like shoveling fog.” Indeed, a subject as intensely personal as spirituality tends to be subject to as many definitions as it has practitioners or adherents. And as Leigh Schmidt and other historians have shown, spirituality has appeared in myriad forms and meant many different things over many generations. Despite its resistance to concrete definition and operationalization, in its broadest sense the rubric “spirituality” has remained a decidedly steady component of the human condition. Thus “genealogy” seems an especially appropriate approach to Lofton and Modern’s effort to elucidate what spirituality is (and is not). Like any family tree, today’s manifestations of spirituality and its historical antecedents reach far and wide. Spirituality’s DNA also sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways. As anyone who has tried to unearth information about his or her forebears can attest, much can be learned from discovering—or even from searching unsuccessfully—for the branches of a family tree.

I also have been struck by the cleverness of Lofton and Modern’s self-presentation as “curators” of Frequencies, rather than editors or coordinators or some other boring, bureaucratic term. “Curate” is, of course, both a verb and a noun. Thus, Lofton and Modern have curated an art exhibition of sorts (in both content and form, with visual art accompanying each entry)—but even more profoundly, they have acted as curates, taking on responsibility for the care of souls. (I cannot resist noting that the World English Dictionary also lists “assistant barman” as an alternate definition of the noun “curate.”) Because spirituality embodies something so human and alive, it is eminently sensible that Frequencies should be presented in a soulful, considerate, and caretaking manner. In a meaningful sense, freq.uenci.es is akin to ancestry.com.

Lofton and Modern received contributions from observers ranging from senior academics to DJ Spooky. Their invitation called for “fragments in a dynamic, large-scale portrait” and was accompanied by a rather comprehensive list of potential topics. It is noteworthy in the context of genealogy that the contributors to Frequencies often chose to write about topics that diverged from the list provided by the curators, much like one often is surprised by discoveries about long-forgotten ancestors. I suspect that Frequencies offered similar surprises (and delights) to Lofton and Modern as their “large-scale portrait” developed. Frequencies is richer and truer because of the tremendous latitude afforded to its contributors; spirituality’s real family tree has been allowed to take shape.

Several entries are especially resonant (referencing another term carefully chosen by Lofton and Modern) with the notion of spirituality as profoundly connected with various understandings of family. Elijah Siegler’s entry titled “Automation” refers several times to the fact that unlike other academic subjects, “the word spirituality fills [him] with anxiety.” For me, this observation reflects all the worries so many people have about dealing with immediate family members, because, like studying spirituality, doing so often is fraught with complication. (I must note that Siegler’s hilarious book-title generator is well worth investigating as well.)  Darren Grem’s lamentation on the “Chicken Sandwich,” as purveyed by the popular fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, emphasizes the very particularist (evangelical Protestant) spirituality underlying a highly profitable business. Chick-fil-A is so profitable that it retains a longstanding policy  of closing on Sunday, a “decision [that] was as much practical as spiritual…. (A)ll franchised Chick-fil-A Operators and their Restaurant employees should have an opportunity to … spend time with family [emphasis mine] and friends.” In sharp contrast with the moral questions inherent in selling chicken sandwiches are Michael Gilmour’s observations about “Companion Animals.” As I write this with one of my feline family members asleep on my desk, Gilmour’s concluding remark resonates especially strongly: “For the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, all living things reveal the creator God, with each kingfisher and dragonfly—and let us add each companion animal—offering a glimpse of the divine.” And then there is Chip Callahan’s rendering of the “Highway,” that wonderful conduit of family road trips and maker of lifelong memories. In Callahan’s case, “In the summer of 1978 … my whole family packed into an Itasca motorhome and spent six weeks driving a loop around the country…. I was ten years old, and the trip … was discovery on multiple levels…. It was history and myth come alive as we drove, walked, and slept in places we’d [only] heard and read about.”

Family ties are bound up with a lifetime’s worth of anxieties, love, and memories—and with the loss thereof. So too spirituality is inextricable from how we deal with loss. Such themes appear again and again in Frequencies. We hear from Wendy Cadge about “Spiritual Care Services” in hospitals, whose “efforts are premised on the belief that everyone has some sense of spirituality that … chaplains can tap into and work with in their interactions with patients and their families [emphasis mine].” Sarah McFarland Taylor evokes the inherent sadness of an “Estate Sale,” at which she “did not expect the intimacy with which [she] would sift through peoples’ lives.” Various contributors to Frequencies grapple with the tension between spirituality and material items, but no one can deny the fact that the physical detritus of everyday life carries special meaning to the descendents of those who owned it—whether we want to preserve such items, sell them, or destroy them. Laura Marris offers two evocative poems under the heading “Loss,” both of which clearly allude both to loved ones and to the self in days gone by. The passage of a family member of a different sort is a theme of Pamela Klassen’s observations about Max Weber’s grave. Weber is a member of our collective academic family tree rather than our biological ones, and Klassen invites us to consider the memorial to him as well as the inherent spirituality of cemeteries in general.

In short, Frequencies goes a long way toward creating the “large-scale portrait” of spirituality that Lofton and Modern set out to assemble. The portrait is not defined by clean lines, but by a mixture of images and ideas. It is messy and surprising in a good way, as is any family tree. And for some reason Frequencies reminds me of one of my favorite moments in film: the closing scene of “A River Runs Through It.” This scene is glorious visually, musically, and spiritually, especially because it evokes the deeply personal complexity and pain of humans’ love for family. In the words of author and fly-fisher Norman Maclean, for whom a river is like the trunk of a family tree:

In the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

“I made a video asking people not to be scared, asking how long will we live in fear, that we should go to the streets and that there are plenty of men in Egypt, and we can protect ourselves from Mubarak’s thugs. Now I’m getting many threatening calls from Mubarak’s people ordering me not to leave my home, and saying that if I do I will be killed along with my family.”
——Asma Mahfouz, to BBC Arabic Television

A young Egyptian woman willing to put her life on the line used Facebook to issue this clarion call to her compatriots. On February 25, they went out by the thousands. During the following days, their numbers swelled into the millions. The Revolution of 2011 had started. On February 11, the eighteenth day of the Revolution, President Mubarak was ousted and the stage of building a new Egypt began.

The youth-driven Revolution of 2011, with its call for freedom and justice, is inscribing a new feminism, with a fresh lexicon and syntax. The new feminism—which does not go by the name “feminism,” but by its spirit—redefines the words freedom, liberation, justice, dignity, democracy, equality, and rights. It creates its own syntax, which, the dictionary reminds us, is the “arrangement of words to show their connection and relation.” It announces itself from deep within the Revolution, which aims to resurrect the fundamental principles and rights of citizens and human beings that were wantonly trampled down by the Mubarak government. The new feminism might be called, simply, “freedom, equality and justice for all.” It asserts itself in actions, straight-forwardness, and courage.

Over the course of eighteen days, Midan Tahrir, or Liberation Square, the geographical center of Cairo and the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, became a swirling kaleidoscope of images of freedom, equality, and justice in the making, with the whole world looking on. Saturday, February 12, the first day Egypt woke up without its harsh dictator of thirty years at the helm of a repressive regime, was the first day in the in the new life of this ancient country. Young women and men who had gone out to sweep away the tyrannies, inequalities, and injustices could be seen on this day with brooms in hand, now literally sweeping the streets clean. With bottles of detergent and brushes in hand, they wiped the walls around the square. They even scoured the pedestals of the lion statues at the Kasr al-Nil Bridge, where the “Battle of the Bridge” erupted on the first Friday of the Revolution, and where the police hurled tear gas at the peaceful demonstrators making their way to Midan Tahrir to practice democracy their own way, feet—not boots—on the ground, when all other avenues were blocked.

Embedded feminism

In the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the youth were joined by citizens of all ages—workers, students, professionals, women and men, Muslims and Christians. It was a populist movement mobilized in cyberspace and through local networks, and acted out on national soil. The new feminism is a feminism embedded in revolution. It is so fused with the revolution that to use the term “feminism” seems redundant or superfluous, even anachronistic, and we have just observed that the revolutionary actors themselves do not use it. Yet feminism possesses conceptual and explanatory power, and so we employ it analytically. At the core of feminism is a call for the practice of equality and justice for women, who as a group have suffered historically from systemic inequality and injustice. Women in different parts of the world—Egypt among them—have on many occasions organized to take for themselves the rights that have been withheld from them. They have done so both in their own feminist movements and within broader social and political movements and configurations. Early in the last century, for instance, Egyptian women formed the Egyptian Feminist Union, to fight for their rights as women while they worked simultaneously within the national liberation movement. In so doing, they set a precedent for multi-level activism. Egyptian feminists understood from the beginning that the equality and justice that they sought for women was of a piece with equality and justice for all.

Over the years, activists in Egypt seeking human rights, inclusive of women’s rights and social justice, pushed strenuously for reform. They tried to use classical methods—the vote, the press, television and radio, and public demonstrations—but elections were rigged, the media controlled, and public demonstrations met with violence, which for women often included sexual harassment, molestation, and rape. Reform movements typically involve campaigns focused on particular causes, including causes specific to women. In Egypt, as attempts to reform the existing political system were repeatedly thwarted—that is, brutally rendered impossible—by the state, revolution became the only way, and revolution demands a major overhaul of the political and social order, indeed, that the old system be swept away altogether.

In the twenty-first century, the tools of revolution have drastically changed, while the methods of state repression, as we have seen recently and vividly in Egypt, remain archaic and crude. The regime’s methods stemmed from the arrogant belief that an autocratic regime, with its vast power and violent means of repression, is unassailable. Autocrats take for granted that constitutions can be rewritten at will from on high to extend state power and impose their own rules for succession; that sham elections can produce compliant parliaments; and that the military, policy, intelligence, and security apparatuses possess limitless authority to muzzle citizens.

It is Egypt’s youth who have mastered the tools of the twenty-first century—information and communications technologies—and who are at home in cyberspace, a “country” in which they are free even while they remain shackled in their homeland. It is the youth who possess a belief in ideals, a vision, and a healthy impatience. Navigating the Internet, and with careful coordination on the ground, undaunted they mounted a peaceful assault upon the unmitigated, suffocating power of tyranny and oppression that had left no segment of society untouched.

Cairo’s Midan Tahrir has been called the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, whose topography extends to Alexandria, Suez, and cities and towns throughout the country, including even the oasis city of Kharga, deep in the Western Desert of Upper Egypt. The choreography of shouting, gesticulating, dancing young men and women, joined by Egyptians of all ages, was caught on live feeds and transmitted instantaneously across the globe. It was captured on film and videos and recorded on cell phones and digital cameras by demonstrators and reporters. This rich visual and oral album displays a gender pastiche of women and men side by side—clusters upon clusters of women amid seas of men, women and men shoulder to shoulder, and families with small children. The demonstrators and their supporters all craved the same thing: an end to the tyranny of the dictator and his corrupt regime, and the emergence of a free society with equal opportunity for all. They called for an end to the inequities of gender, class, and connection that formed the tight and insidious web of patriarchal hierarchy.

The downfall of authoritarianism and the building of a new egalitarian and just order

With the dismantling of the three-decade-old autocracy of Mubarak—itself a continuation of the previous autocracy—and the hierarchies that spawned spirals of injustice as people’s basic rights were hijacked, the people of Egypt, led by its youth, grabbed for themselves the chance to rebuild.

The builders of the new Egypt want nothing less than full equality in law and practice, justice, and dignity for all. As we speak, a special committee is drafting a new constitution (to supplant the previous one that was arbitrarily altered by Mubarak). Laws that undermine the equality, justice, and dignity of the citizens of Egypt must either go or be drastically overhauled. The Muslim Personal Status Code (also referred to as family law) structures a model of the family based on a patriarchal understanding of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This law, by formalizing male authority and power, shores up a system of gender inequality. The husband is cast as the head of family, with the attendant privileges and prerogatives, along with obligations of protection and support, while the wife, as subordinate, owes obedience to her husband and must render services in return for his support and protection, whether she wants it or not.

Feminists, as well as other reformers, have tried since the early twentieth century to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code. Over the years, they obtained only minor adjustments in the law, which did not disturb the patriarchal family model. A common excuse for this failure to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code is that it is religious law, part of the shar ‘iah, and therefore sacred and immutable. The confusion of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, which is man-made, with the shar ‘iah, which is the path to a virtuous life, ascertained from the Qur’an, has been a potent deterrent of change. However, it is possible to enact an egalitarian family law based in Islamic jurisprudence, as Morocco did in 2004, with the overhaul of the Mudawanna that recast husband and wife as equal heads of the family. It is also theoretically possible, if politically difficult, to enact into law a secular egalitarian model of the family that would reflect the spirit of religion and its ideals of equality, justice, and dignity, the ulemah, or religious scholars, in Turkey say their country’s secular family law does.

With the overthrow of the authoritarian state in Egypt and the dismantling of the buttresses of its power, and with legal reform already underway with the creation of the committee tasked with drafting a new constitution, equality and justice in law and practice now have a renewed chance at realization. The harsh inequities that authoritarianism enforces were there for all to see, in their starkest, most extreme form, in the practices of the regime that the youth eventually took down. Will the youth now be willing to accept patriarchal authoritarianism sustained by the old family law, a law so out of sync with contemporary social realities—with their own realities? It is very hard to see by what logic they could do so. Freedom, equality, and justice cannot be reserved for some only. For the youth, female and male, who raised this revolution, freedom, equality, and justice are surely non-negotiable, and dignity, the order of the day. This is the essence of the new feminism, call it what you will.

Palin’s popularity and notoriety has many sources, but one source of her Red America popularity has not been sufficiently well understood in the last three weeks: Her pro-family ideals and the more complicated realities of her family life make it easy for many working-class whites—especially evangelical Protestants—to identify with her. As a mayor and governor, Palin has established her socially conservative credentials by supporting a range of public policies—from abstinence education to legal limits on abortion—that underline her religiously-informed, pro-family ideals.

But the reality of Palin’s family life is a lot more complex than her socially conservative perspective might lead one to expect. On the one hand, consistent with the social views advanced by religiously conservative groups like Focus on the Family, this evangelical Protestant has been married to her husband, Todd, for twenty years, has five children, and carried her son, Trig, to term even after discovering that he had Down syndrome. On the other hand, Palin and her family are clearly products of the gender and family revolutions of the last half-century: she is a working mother, her teenage daughter, Bristol, is pregnant outside of marriage, and—judging by “Troopergate”—her extended family has felt the fallout of divorce.

Some journalists—from Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post to Ellen Goodman at the Boston Globe—have made much of the tensions between the realities of her family life and her socially conservative policy agenda and worldview. Ironically, and probably much to the surprise of progressive journalists like Marcus and Goodman, Palin only stands to benefit—politically at least—from the complex ways in which her socially conservative beliefs and personal biography do and do not mesh.

Why is this? Well, in many respects, the uneasy fit between ideals and realities embodied in Sarah Palin’s life mirrors the experience of many white evangelical Protestants, especially working-class white evangelicals in Red America. In a paper I wrote recently for the Russell Sage Foundation, I found that evangelical Protestants—who make up about one-quarter of the U.S. population—are markedly more likely than other Americans to embrace traditional views of family life; at the same time, they are also more likely than other Americans to have difficulty living up to those ideals—especially when it comes to teenage sex, working mothers, and divorce. In a word, evangelical Protestants typically talk right and, often unwittingly, stumble left.

Take their views toward divorce and premarital sex. In 2002, 70 percent of evangelical Protestants indicated that they thought divorce should be “more difficult to obtain,” compared to 41 percent of other Americans. Likewise, also in 2002, 57 percent of evangelical Protestants affirmed the view that premarital sex is “always wrong,” compared to 28 percent of other Americans. My book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago, 2004), reports a similar divide when it comes to gender attitudes, with evangelical Protestants reporting significantly higher levels of support for traditional gender roles than the rest of the American population.

But when it comes to putting these views into practice, the picture grows more complex. My research shows that evangelical Protestants are more likely to be married and to have larger families than other Americans, as one might expect. But on other fronts, American evangelicals have clearly been affected by the tidal wave of change associated with the family and gender revolutions of the last half century. On average, evangelical Protestant teens have sex at slightly earlier ages than their non-evangelical peers (respectively, 16.38 years-old versus 16.52 years-olds). Evangelical Protestant couples are also slightly more likely to divorce than non-evangelical couples. And, I have also found that evangelical mothers are actually more likely to work full-time outside of the home than their non-evangelical peers.

Class and culture both play a role in accounting for the gap between evangelical family ideals and evangelical family realities. Compared to the population at large, evangelicals are more likely to hail from working-class communities in the South. Because they have less education and income, on average, than the population at large, these evangelicals are more vulnerable to divorce and more likely to rely on a mother’s paycheck to make ends meet. Furthermore, many evangelicals are influenced by a “redneck” Scotch-Irish cultural inheritance that makes them more likely to engage in risky or violent behavior, which also helps to account for their distinctive patterns when it comes to teen sex and divorce.

Paradoxically, the disjunctions between evangelical ideals and practices only seem to make them more committed to their traditional vision of family life. Whether they have experienced a “fall from grace” in their own family life, or seen a friend or family member experience such a fall, many evangelicals view these family experiences as an occasion to redouble their support for religious and policy measures to strengthen the family. In their view, the best response to their own family failings or the family failings of their neighbor is heightened vigilance against what they see as the poisonous cultural fruits of late modernity. As Al Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Seminary, wrote in a New York Times guest editorial in 2000:

Southern Baptists experience family trouble like everyone else, but at least they know how God intended to order the family. In essence, Southern Baptists are engaged in a battle against modernity, earnestly contending for the truth and authority of an ancient faith.

This, then, is why so many white evangelicals can identify not only with Sarah Palin’s personal family life but also with her conservative views on social issues.

This is also partly why a charismatic and gifted Democratic politician like Barack Obama is having difficulty making inroads among white working-class Americans in Red America—particularly evangelical Protestants. Even though many of them are deeply dissatisfied with President George W. Bush’s leadership, and are losing ground in today’s information economy, many white working-class Americans in Red America are suspicious of a party that has generally dismissed their concerns about the drift of the culture, and of a political leader who speaks condescendingly of their “bitter” obsession with guns and God. (This is despite the fact that Obama—like much of Blue America—personally walks a conservative walk as a member of a prosperous, intact, married family.)

Moreover, much to the chagrin of the Obama campaign and their well-educated supporters in Blue America, Governor Sarah Palin has been remarkably successful in fueling the flames of suspicion about Obama in Red America with her discussion of candidates who “talk to us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.” In the near future, this suspicion is unlikely to be allayed until and unless the Democratic Party finds a candidate who is as gifted talking about working-class families’ cultural concerns as their economic concerns. Of course, given the predilection of most Democratic elites to talk left in public even as they walk right in private, it may be a while before the next William Jefferson Clinton emerges onto the Democratic stage.