Book Review & Analysis: The Making Of a Moonie by Eileen Barker

The Making Of a Moonie:

Brainwashing or Choice?

by Eileen Barker

      During the Cult Scare of the 1970s-80s, the Unification Church, otherwise known as the Moonies, were a lightning rod for controversy. Their interface with the public was through proselytizers with glassy eyes and smiles that were a little too big to be true. Accusations of kidnapping, con artistry, teaching false religious doctrines, deceptive recruiting techniques, and brainwashing were common. Those last two issues are examined in an academic study by the sociologist Eileen Barker in The Making Of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?

By the end of the 1970s, the Unification Church was spreading rapidly throughout North America, Western Europe, and Asia. Their belief system was ecumenical in its pursuit of uniting all religions into one under their leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a charismatic Protestant from South Korea. Church belief and ritual was syncretic, combining elements of Evangelical Christianity, Confucianism, Taoism, and Korean shamanism. Moon claimed to be the Messiah sent to Earth because previous leaders of world religions have failed to save humanity. The church was famous in those days for having mass weddings in which Moon chose brides and grooms at random to marry each other.

Sun Myung Moon had a colorful past. During the Korean War, he was tortured by the Chinese Communists in a prison camp. He claimed to have met Jesus Christ who told him that the crucifixion proved that he had failed as a messiah and it was Moon’s duty to pick up where he left off. After establishing the Unification Church in South Korea and Japan, Moon opened its world headquarters outside of New York City while overseeing a vast network of corporate businesses and real estate that included a weapons manufacturing plant and a newspaper with a right wing extremist editorial bias. Moon later went to prison in America for tax evasion and money laundering. Eileen Barker neglects to mention that Moon had worked for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and liaised with members of the American CIA during the era when they were conducting brainwashing experiments in the MK Ultra program. She also doesn’t mention that the Unification Church has deep financial ties to the Republican Party through lobbying and campaign contributions.

Eilen Barker’s goal is to investigate whether accusations of brainwashing are accurate or not. “Brainwashing”, as she defines it, means erasing the contents of a person’s mind and filling it with the authority’s chosen contents thereby turning people into robots who do whatever they are commanded to withlut question. I have immediate suspicions of her definition. It isn’t hard to disprove her definition of brainwashing becase it doesn’t define what is done during thought reform conditioning.

A point of comparison could be made with the training of soldiers in the military when they are taught to obey commands from officers and to do so without thought or hesitation. This is necessary because anybody with common sense would be reluctant to walk into a battlefield with people shooting and bombing each other unless they have a death wish. But soldiers learn to do this on command. This could be considered a form of brainwashing and yet those soldiers still have the ability to make choices. The number of soldiers who go AWOL proves this as well as what they do during leisure time. Plus soldiers can and sometimes do disobey orders with the caveat that they suffer consequences for it. So I’m not convinced that brainwashing entails the idea of turning people into mindless robots. People inside high pressure control groups can still think for themselves and make choices. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t authorities setting the parameters of what choices they are allowed to make though. I’m not comfortable with the term “brainwashing” anyhow. I much prefer something like “psychological/social conditioning”. So right off the bat, there are problems with Barker’s study.

The fieldwork was done using two methods. One was participant observation in which Barker attended Moonie recruitment workshops. The other was having workshop participants fill in surveys. The workshops were held in attractive-looking buildings in rural areas outside San Francisco and London. Participants are brought in from cities on buses owned by the Moonies. Initial workshops run for three days with subsequent workshops running for one week or one month before a member commits to joining full or part time. Barker makes the observation that no one tried to leave the workshops, disproving the accusation that the church holds people against their will during the recruitment process. But I find her conclusion to be hasty as I think something more subtle was going on. It may be true that anybody could leave the premises any time they wanted. The doors weren’t locked as she pointed out. But being in a rural area without transportation was a factor she didn’t consider. Most people would be smart enough not to walk the long distance back to the city, especially when they didn’t have sufficient directions. Hitchhiking might be an option, but by the end of the 70s, violent crimes against hitchikers had made the practice almost obsolete. It would make the most sense to put up with the remainder of the workshop and be taken back at the end. So yes, the individual who wantsedto leave had a choice, but the parameters of the choice were limited, something that Eilen Barker never took into consideration.

The workshops consisted of group discussions, meals, walking, game playing, singing, group prayers, and listening to sermons. Sleep time was limited and potential recruits were woken up early to walk and play sports before breakfast. All activities were closely monitored and guided by Unification Church recruiters. Critics of the cult have made accusations of sleep deprivation being used to make members too fatigued to think clearly. But Barker dismisses this by saying she didn’t see any evidence that workshop attendees weren’t thinking clearly. Of course, the attendees weren’t allowed to have any in depth conversations during the workshops so it is hard to know what evidence she based her conclusion on.

Another accusation made by critics is that the Moonies brainwash people by inducing altered states of consciousness. Barker also dismisses this by saying she saw no evidence. But she never operationalizes the concept of “altered states of consciousness”. She doesn’t consider that singing or praying in groups could fall into this category. During the act of singing, for instance, the individual’s ego can get dissolved into the collectivity of the group, making the individual more susceptible to peer pressure and suggestion from outside. That doesn’t mean every time people sing they are being brainwashed; it means by submitting to the activity they can be softened up and made more receptive to suggestions, some of which may not be in their best interest. Singing and prayer can also be a way of creating an emotional bond between the individual and the group as well as being a means for controlling and regulating moods and emotions. Something similar can be achieved through group prayer or playing team sports, activities in which the group’s solidarity supersedes the importance of the individual in a goal directed task. Combine sport activities with sleep deprivation and some people can be turned into putty in the hands of an authority figure. Sleep deprivation works in the military and it is commonly used in cults too.

Also the constant supervision and guidance of recruiters was dismissed by Barker as being harmless, but it is easy to see another perspective. Aside from maintaining regulation of the groups through a daily organized program of activities, recruiters monitored and guided conversations so that potential members couldn’t discuss and evaluate their situation freely without someone watching over them and steering the conversations. Barker didn’t feel this direct control over the socializing of attendees had any influence over whether or not they chose to join. Even if you take the subjectivity of each workshop attendee out of the equation, the strict scheduling of workshop activities without sufficient time for unguided socializing indicates a high level of environmental control on the part of the Moonies.

Eileen Barker’s other method of data collection involved surveys of participants in the Unification Church’s recruitment workshops. These surveys were given accodring to rigorous scientific standards, including control groups and peer review, and were, in my opinion, the strongest and most interesting part of her study. One survey petitioned participants to explain why they chose to join or not to join the Unification Church after having attended the workshops. The most common reason for those who joined was that it potentially would fulfill the spiritual purpose they felt they lacked outside the cult. Most of them were spiritual seekers. For those who refused to join, reasons varied so widely that it was difficult to draw a definite conclusion. But for Barker, the larger point is that they didn’t join which to her means that they weren’t brainwashed and, further, this means that the Unification Church never brainwashed anybody or even had any intentions of trying to brainwash members.

Of more interest, from a legitimate standpoint from my perspective, were the second set of surveys which categorized the personality types of people who did join the church. The majority of recruits were white, middle class or working class young people. They came from stable and comfortable homes, claiming to have had happy childhoods. Contrary to public perception, none of them suffered from mental illness or trauma. They tended to be religious but not fanatical. Most of them were unhappy with the wider society, but were too conservative to become part of the hippy movement. The ambiguities of life outside the comforts of their childhood homes caused them distress and they sought comfort and stability in a protective and tightly structured group that sheltered them from that outside world with its conflicts and uncertainties. They were people with a low tolerance for ambiguity. You could say they were people who weren’t well-prepared or tough enough for the world the rest of us live in.

While Eileen Barker raises some interesting counter-arguments to the accusation that the Unification Chrch brainwashes its members, her study seems naive and short-sighted. You could say that her study proves her conclusion according to her definition of brainwashing, but her argument is based on a false premise if you don’t accept her definition of brainwashing to begin with. I find her definition to be too narrow to be of use in a study of this kind. Her fieldwork and collection of data yield some significant insights, but she draws some hasty conclusions without fully examining the full range of possible explanations. For example, she claims that the large number of people who decided not to join the cult after the workshops proves that no brainwashing took place, but she doesn’t take some things into account like the possibilities that brainwashing is not effective 100 percent of the time, or that some people are resistant to it, or that the workshops might even be designed to weed out the people who don’t fit into the church’s social dynamics. In other words, it is possible that they don’t want everybody to join and limit their recruitment to finding those who fit a certain personality type. The fact that potential recruits are monitored so heavily during activities like sports or group discussions makes me question whether they apply recruitment pressure equally on all members of the workshop. Maybe they target certain individuals or even alter their approach to nudge potential members into joining while simply letting those who don’t fit well to leave without a fuss. In a cult based around mass conformity and mind control, they don’t want people who are going to go against the grain. On top of all that, from what I have read about other high control groups, the process of mind control is incremental. Social conditioning isn’t something done instantly. Barker’s conclusion that brainwashing didn’t take place is based on observations made of two different workshops and doesn’t take long range membership in the Moonies into consideration. From my perspective, it looks like the workshops are designed to lay the groundwork for stronger, long range conditioning and control over time and she says almost nothing about what happens to members once they have joined. Her study is like judging the quality of an 800 pages novel after only reading the first two pages.

The Making Of a Moonie is limited in its scope. The subject of whether or not the Unification Church brainwashes its members can’t be conclusive on her testimony alone. She doesn’t gather enough information to have a final say. Even if the Moonies don’t practice mind control, there are plenty of reasons to stay away from them. Like so many other versions of corporate Christianity, the church has been wracked with scandals including sexual abuse, fraud, and ties to extremist right wing politics. Sun Myung Moon died a few years ago and now the cult is run by his two sons who are fighting over who should inherit their father’s kingdom in just the way that sons of the Messiah would. Considering that Moon claimed Jesus Christ failed because he died, I wonder how they explain that the church is legitimate now that the Messiah Sun Myung Moon is dead. One son has formed a subsect of the Unification Church called the Rod of Iron. No that isn’t the title of a cheesy porno movie from the 1970s. It is a church that worships guns. You can watch their sermons on Youtube. The preacher wears a crown made of bullets and talks about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the need to end democracy in America delivered in a voice that alternates between a conversational tone and hysterical screaming. This church sent busloads of members to Washington D.C. for the attempted coup on January 6, claiming that the Democrats are controlled by demons. It’s best to stay away from these kooks. Nothing good can come from this.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Don't Call Me Brother by Austin Miles

Don't Call Me Brother:

A Ringmaster Escapes From the Pentecostal Church

by Austin Miles

      Pentecostal Christianity is just over one hundred years old. It originated in the post-Confederate South and emphasized the “presence of the Holy Spirit” as its followers would say. This includes music and singing, faith healing, and glossolalia or speaking in tongues, an altered state of consciousness in which a church-goer gets possessed by the Holy Spirit and vocalizes nonsensical sounds. Speaking in tongues is rooted in West African culture and is something that was brought over by slave communities then appropriated by white Christian Revivalists. All this is directed by the pastor of the church, a fiery speaker who brings the emotional pitch of the congregation up to an extreme. The circus, of course, is an entertainment tradition that dates back at least to the Roman Empire. The show is conducted by the ringmaster in tuxedo and stovepipe hat. So when a ringmaster becomes the preacher at a Pentecostal church, the lines between religion and entertainment get blurred. This is what happens in Austin Miles’ autobiography Don’t Call Me Brother.

Austin Miles had a miserable childhood. He came from a broken family in Indiana and ran away to join the circus when he was a teenager. As a clown, he took to the carny life with ease, being impressed with the showmanship and spectacle of the performances and the colorful characters who lived the transient circus life offstage. It was a traveling village of multi-ethnic misfits with talent. Miles moved on to become a ringmaster as he matured and again, he had a natural talent for it.

He met his wife Rose Marie in New York City. After marriage, they traveled to Switzerland to meet her aristocratic family who didn’t readily approve of him. These details of the marriage are interesting up to a point, but Miles dwells on his time in Switzerland with the family for far too long to serve the purposes of this story.

When they settle back in New York, Miles’ daughter from a previous marriage comes to live with them and everything is great, at least for a little while. Behind the scenes of the circus, a creepy German trapeze artist named Bobby Yerkes begins proselytizing Christianity to Austin Miles. Then something strange happens at a circus performance in the Bible Belt state of Tennessee. When the show is about to begin, a man in the audience has a heart attack. Being the good ringmaster he is, he asks the audience to pray for the victim’s recovery. Being a leader in such a venue means keeping the audience’s mind alert at down times like this so they don’t fret and ruin the whole show with a soured attitude. The next day, Miles learns the man recovered from his heat attack. The ringmaster attributes this to the prayer and then decides to convert to Christianity. Of course, not everybody who has a heart attack dies. But this is proof enough so Austin Miles approaches Bobby Yerkes and throws himself headfirst into the world of fundamentalist Christianity. He later learns that Yerkes is a pervert.

When the Assemblies of God ministries learn that a circus ringmaster has converted to Christianity, they see green and ask him to become a pastor. Enticed by the lure of the religious spotlight, Miles can’t resist. He meets with high level officials, let’s call them businessmen, and begins touring the country to give church services. Finally he meets up with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and becomes regular guest on their fledgling PTL Club TV show, helping to usher in the age of televangelists. The transition from circus performer to Christian evangelist is an easy one to see. In comparison to the dour and dust-dry congregations of the Protestant denominations and the solemn, downbeat masses of Catholicism, Charismatic Christianity offers an emotionally charged performance with audience participation, histrionic sermons, stimulating music, and intense visual displays of faith healing and glossolalia. The draw is that it is more of spectacle than traditional religions. Christian theology is never discussed. In a media and entertainment saturated culture like the United States of America, Pentecostalism has an advantage. The PTL Club becomes just one choice of TV shows out of a handful of others in the days when cable TV was beginning. Channel surfing rubes might pause as they run through their options when they see the showmanship of a faith healing, a band playing, or, an exorcism complete with demonic voices and foaming mouths straight out of The Exorcist.

Life starts going south for Austin Miles quickly. His wife Rose Marie rejects the Pentecostal church and eventually this drives a wedge between them that results in a nasty and humiliating divorce. His daughter converts to the church, but they later convince her that her father is satanic so she refuses to have anything to do with him.

Aside from the destruction of his family, Miles gets a behind-the-scenes view of what goes on in the shadows of Assemblies of God. The organization is little more than a Reagan era corporation complete with a board of directors and tax-free status because they are registered as a religious organization. The higher ups live lavishly in mansions, own private airplanes, and fleets of Mercedes Benzes. Miles’ work as a circus performer is cut out for him when they open Heritage U.S.A., a Disneyworld like theme park for born again Christians. By the end of the 1980s, financial scandals are tearing Assemblies of God apart; charges of tax evasion, fraud, and financial mishandling are rampant. Sexual scandals of all kinds are revealed too, including adultery, pedophilia, prostitution, wife swapping, and gay sex. Jim Bakker’s involvement in gay sex orgies and his affair with Jessica Hahn ruin his career.

Austin Miles has his own personal misgivings too. Tithing, or the donation of money to the church, is prioritized over all other religious practices. He learns that people being healed in faith healings are often shills. He also learns that ordinary stage magic is being used by some pastors to demonstrate their gift for performing miracles. With hindsight he knew all this is happening, but he doesn’t listen to his conscience because he feels he is doing something to help his congregations.

The darkest, and possibly the least credible, part of Miles’ story is that he thinks there is a conspiracy against him. For reasons he can’t understand, the Assemblies of God churches start to shun him. Vicious rumors about his immoral conduct spread and his engagements at preaching gigs are canceled one after the other. He believes he is being persecuted and blames the FBI. He claims his first wife, who he otherwise says nothing about, gave him a diary that proves the government assassinated Marilyn Monroe. That diary has since disappeared. Therefore the FBI is pulling strings with the Pentecostals to ruin his career as a pastor. This whole story sounds suspicious to me as if he is peddling a conspiracy theory to cover up some dirt he has in his past. This makes me wonder how much of his story is actually true. I suppose a lot of it is, considering the accusations he makes against Assemblies of God are easily corroborated in other sources, but I wonder if he isn’t being sufficiently forthright about other things he might have done. Anyhow, Austin Miles quits the church and successfully resumes his career as a ringmaster. If the FBI really wanted to ruin him, why didn’t they interfere with his circuses? Or true to form, why didn’t they just disappear him like you wold expect?

Aside from the conspiracy theory, possibly relayed in bad faith, the worst part of this book is its tendency to give long lists of bad things being done by the Pentecostals. Miles keeps repeating stories of scandals in different branches of the ministries, but it reads like the same story over and over again, just happening in different places with different people. Austin Miles also spends too much time on his private life outside the church. While his relations with his wife and family are relevant, the excessive detail he gives on these matters is overdone to the point where I just wish he would get on with the story and tell us about something more exciting.

The better side of this book is that it brings you close to the people caught in this Christian cult. It is an insider’s view of a lifestyle I can only see from an outsider’s view and. to be frank, I wouldn’t want to see this from the inside anyways. It is easy to dismiss Christian fundamentalists as a bunch of lunatics, but Miles shows us how even the worst of these grifters have a human side. They worry about their children’s future, they struggle with their marriages, they have health problems, a lot of them are having a hard time being comfortable with their sexual orientation. They care for each other and offer emotional support I times of distress. It shows how sad it is that so many gullible people get caught up in this religion-for-profit ponzi scheme. Some of them are born and raised with Evangelical Christianity. Some fall into it because the harsh circumstances of an uncertain world drive them to a place of comfort. Once inside that comfort zone, they are trapped by indoctrination, social conditioning, and the magical belief that giving all their money away will come back to them in the form of spiritual grace and healing. If they ever speak out against the wrong doings of the church, they get chewed up and spat out without mercy.

Assemblies of God and the PTL Club are a corporate den of thieves and the domain of narcissists and con men. It is an overblown version of the Southern revival tents which are only one step away from the carnival midway. The marks are unable or unwilling to admit that the pastor in the thousand dollar suit is a money grubbing charlatan just as much as the bearded lady in the circus sideshow is nothing more than a bearded man wearing make up and a dress.

The psychological profile we get of Austin Miles is interesting too. On one hand, he presents himself as a true believer in the gospel and someone who genuinely believes he is the only real person in a religion full of fakes. But having said that, you have to question why he played the game for so long. He is also quite an egomaniac who never shrinks from an opportunity to be in the spotlight whether that means preaching, being a ringmaster in the big top, doing radio interviews, or making television appearances with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. In one passage, it is the first Christmas Eve he spends alone because his wife Rose Marie has left him. To cheer himself up, he wraps Bibles in wrapping paper and walks around Times Square handing them out to needy looking people. One woman is shivering because her coat is too thin for the winter, but all Miles can think of is how grateful she and the other recipients are because he gave them a Bible. It’s little more than a big ego trip for him to show how generous he is for proselytizing his religion. I’m sure the woman would have been a lot more grateful if he had given her a coat that was heavy enough to keep her warm, but that thought probably never crossed his mind. He is the typical kind of person who seeks out fame and popularity because he didn’t feel loved when he was a child. Still, he isn’t an unsympathetic character. He certainly isn’t a bad person. He is more like a lost soul who thought he found himself and then suffered terribly when the illusion wore off. That could happen to any of us considering we can never know for sure if we are ultimately doing the right thing or not.

Don’t Call Me Brother is good for what it is. The story is predictable and Austin Miles is an amateurish writer. But the meaning of it rings true. In the year 2025 when Prosperity Gospel megachurches are fleecing people all around and the Pentecostals are in the White House whispering into the ear of the worst president in American history, it is a message that needs to be heard more than ever.

 

Book Review: Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint by H. Andrew Chesnut

Devoted to Death:

Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint

by H. Andrew Chesnut

Over the last two decades, interest in a skeleton saint has grown in both Mexico and Latino communities north of the border in the U.S.A. In fact, the popularity has begun to spread outside of Latino communities too as different ethnic groups become familiar with each other. This saint is called Santa Muerte and it has also begun to attract media attention because of its popularity with Mexican drug cartels and other people associated with the underworld. What the media doesn’t tell you is that Santa Muerte’s appeal is wider than realized and in fact most of her devotees are ordinary people without any nefarious intentions. Anthropologist R. Andrew Chesnut sets the record straight in his study of this fledgling religious movement in Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint.

After stating his intention to save the Santa Muerte community from negative publicity, Chesnut examines the history of this saint. He starts by discussing the Uto-Aztecan death goddesses. But he is more convinced that the image of Santa Muerte was not part of pre-Conquest culture and actually arrived with the Spanish invaders and the Catholic church. They brought over images of the Grim Reaper which sprung up during the Black Plague. The intention was to scare the people of Mexica into submission, but secretly some people were secretly putting the Grim Reaper on altars and making sacrifices to him for favors. Similar traditions have proliferated in Central America and Argentina, but these involved a male Grim Reaper and appear to be unrelated to the current phenomenon of Santa Muerte. In recent years, due to syncretism with African diaspora religions like Candomble, Vodou, and Santeria, Santa Muerte has emerged from hiding and taken on a new life.

In Mexico City, a grocery store with a shrine to Santa Muerte started attracting so much attention that the owner began offering monthly prayer and worship services complete with mariachi bands. Another chapel called the Temple of Death opened and the cult has been snowballing in membership ever since. Chesnut uses the word “cult” in the Latin sense of the word “cultus” which means “religious community” and in no way applies to the more current usage indicating authoritarian, high control groups led by charismatic leaders.

Each chapter in this book is about the different ways Santa Muerte is worshiped and petitioned for favors with some commentaries on who her devotees are along the way. Whether people are making offerings for money, work, love, or protection from harm, most ceremonies are relatively benign and innocent. Offerings of candles, incense, food, and drinks are common. The most controversial gifts include alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana. Animal and human sacrifices are mostly the stuff of urban legends and media sensationalism.

While there are Santa Muerte devotees from all walks of life, a quick survey of the book reveals that most of them are working class mestizos like truck drivers, small business owners, police, and prison guards. There are, however, some upper class and educated followers too. Some are lawyers, some are teachers, and some are celebrities or corporate businessmen. A couple people the author interviews are goths with black clothes, nose rings, and tattoos. It should be considered that some people from a counter-culture like that might be pre-disposed to being receptive to a saint whose appearance is that of the Grim Reaper in women’s dress. And while Chesnut does rightfully downplay the media’s negative association of Santa Muerte with criminal activity, he does provide a chapter detailing the appeal of Santa Muerte to drug cartel members and organized crime gangs since altars to the Mother of Death are commonly found on their premises during police raids.

While the author does provide a lot of details regarding the practices and culture of the Santa Muerte cult, he doesn’t do any heavy theorizing and there is only minimal explanation as to why it has grown in popularity. He does identify some causes though. One is that Santa Muerte is available to everybody regardless of class, gender, ethnicity, or position in life. Santa Muerte is also amoral in a way that has caused the Catholic church to condemn her; she is believed to do favors for good or bad purposes without passing judgment on the devotee and that is why doctors as well as drug kingpins can approach her. Santa Muerte has a strong presence in the ambient popular culture too. She appears in novels, TV shows, horror movies, song lyrics, tattoos, and t-shirts. Finally, Santa Muerte is believed to be more powerful than other saints, especially those approved of by the church.

Chesnut doesn’t explain much beyond that. You are left to your own thoughts as to the proliferation of the Skeleton Saint. Personally I feel that the issues of power and condemnation from religious leaders are a part of the appeal. The skeptic in me that doesn’t believe in magic says that there is an equal statistical chance of any saint, spirit, or deity delivering what a devotee asks for in exchange for ritual offerings. There would be a random chance of obtaining the desired outcome no matter who or what is prayed to. But the perception that any one of these supernatural entities is more powerful than the others is what matters to the believer. Therefore as more people align themselves with the cult of Santa Muerte the more stories of successful rituals will circulate socially making it appear that she is the most powerful of them all. Meanwhile, people are more likely to remain silent about the ceremonies that fail creating a socially derived illusion that Santa Muerte ceremonies have a higher rate of success than they really do.

There might also be a subversive element in the worship of Santa Muerte. Since she is not recognized by the church, interacting with her could be a way of rebelling against traditionally accepted authority. This trend might be wider than Santa Muerte since the author points out that Evangelical Christianity is currently catching up in popularity to the Catholic church while African diaspora religions and secular humanism are also making inroads into Mexican society. This would indicate that Mexico is in a time of social transition and attraction to Santa Muerte is one manifestation of that change in answering to people’s needs.

The issue of power might also say something about who follows Sants Muerte. Occupations involving criminal activities on both sides of the law are extremely high risk. Life is just as dangerous for prison guards as it is for prisoners. People who work in construction, poorly regulated factories, the sex industry, or the taxi business are risking their safety every time they go to work. An unemployed man on the verge of going homeless would have extreme levels of anxiety. Santa Muerte, the most powerful saint, often appeals to those whose lives have put them on the front line of danger or despair so it would make sense that they would petition and desire to placate the representative of death to bless them with the gift of life. As for more mundane concerns like winning a poker game, passing an exam, or attracting a lost lover back, those desiring such favors might as well turn to the most powerful saint available. Why turn towards weaker saints? But otherwise the widespread devotion and rapid spread of Santa Muerte’s cult might be an indication of growing social anxiety. If magic is about power and control, than the growing popularity of a religion involving magic might indicate that wide sectors of society feel as though they have little or no control over the circumstances of their lives. While that lack of control could be present at any given time throughout history, the beginning of a new cultural practice addressing that anxiety might be a sign that the old ways are failing and the younger generations are searching for something more effective. Widespread anxiety might be commonplace, but changing cultural practices could indicate that a precarious rupture with the past might be happening.

R. Andrew Chesnut’s intentions here are to clear up misconceptions about Santa Muerte and advocate for the variety of people who are attracted to her rising popularity. It is written for the general reader. This is good because clarifying the beliefs and practices should encourage people to tolerate something about Mexican culture that they don’t understand. It’s too bad Devoted to Death doesn’t go deeper into an analysis and explanation for what is happening on both the south and north sides of the border though. It would be nice to have heard a professional anthropologist’s views on what this says about Mexican society. He just leaves you hanging to draw your own conclusions.

Anyhow, the next time you see a veladora decorated with an image of Santa Muerte, probably beside candles depicting the Virgen de Guadalupe, in a grocery store, a market, or a bodega you can ask the people selling it how to do a ritual. My experience with Mexicans and Chicanos has been that they are usually eager to talk about their culture with non-Latinos like me if you show a sincere interest. You might open some doorways, make some new friends, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you might even be blessed with good fortunes from the Skeleton Saint herself.