Our new book, Religion Is Not Done With You, came out on Election Day—and what a day it was. We knew the title would be true no matter what happened, but YIKES. And sure enough, religion—specifically White Christian nationalism—is currently taking a victory lap all over our faces.
Religion Is Not Done with You
Or, the Hidden Power of Religion on Race, Maps, Bodies, and Law
Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin
Beacon Press
Paperback: Nov, 2024
Which is why we’d like to talk to you about calendars.
Wait, what?
Humor us for a minute. Whether you’re an Apple devotee or an Android dissident, your phone absolutely came with a calendar app. If you carry said phone in your pocket? Congrats—you’ve got religion in your pants.
We promise this isn’t just an attempt to make everything about religion. While calendars might seem neutral and innocuous, how we measure and enforce time can actually tell us a lot about what (and whom) we value as a society. Time—like gender or sexuality or race or, you guessed it, religion—is a social construct, a concept created and given meaning by people, even if it feels natural or self-evident. From the way we mark the passage of years to the holidays we observe, Christian worldviews and norms shape every moment of every day, all across the globe.
The year(s) of somebody’s LORD
We’re not just talking about the obvious stuff, like most American workers (Christian or not) getting a holiday for the Christ child’s birthday in December (even though that is almost certainly not when said child was born). Let’s start with the most glaring example: the fact that the entire world—roughly 74% of which is not Christian—agrees that we are closing out the year 2024.
Real ones know that we’ve moved away from an AD/BC model of counting years, but even those who have adopted this system often aren’t aware that AD stands for “anno domini,” literally “the year of the Lord” (i.e. the presumed birth year of the aforementioned Christ child, plus or minus five-ish years). While Common Era (CE) removes Jesus from the label, the metric remains the same: as a disgraced ginger comedian once put it, we’re all still counting up from “Jesus plus one.” Admittedly, other systems of annual reckoning absolutely exist. But any country or community that does business with or in the United States or Europe is still writing 2024 on their checks.
Every year is now the year of someone’s LORD because of a papal bull Gregory XIII issued to standardize, well, time. Much like Republican Senator Susan Collins in 2017, Gregory XIII was very concerned (the title of the bull, “Inter Gravissimas,” means “among our gravest worries”), except His Holiness was more focused on getting everybody to celebrate Easter at the same time than on getting a credibly accused rapist appointed to the Supreme Court for the rest of his life. To achieve his dream of paschal uniformity, Gregory XIII straight up eliminated a week and a half of October 1582. It’s good to be the Bishop of Rome, we guess?
Technically the Pope could only mandate his new calendar for the Roman Catholic Church and the Papal States, but Catholic sovereigns across Western Europe were quick to fall in line. Protestant-ruled countries held out for over a century, but by the 17th century they’d also implemented what we now know as the Gregorian calendar—and mandated calendar conformity as part of the “civilization” enforced throughout their colonies. Which means the year on your checks isn’t just a number: it’s a symptom of what political philosopher Frantz Fanon calls the “colonized mind,” the chronological legacy of White Christian imperialism’s violent successes all over the world.
Holidays for whomst?
Speaking of successful world domination, let’s talk about Google, the corporation that dropped “Don’t Be Evil” as its official motto back in 2015. Their calendar app has been downloaded half a BILLION times and is used by one-third of calendar app users on earth. All religions incorporate ways of observing seasonal changes and commemorating important days. Google Calendar’s holiday settings are country-specific and (as of 2021 at least) allow you to customize by checking or unchecking specific religious calendars, but the settings always seem to check the box for Christian holidays by default. (Checking “Public Holidays in the US,” for example, will always get you Christmas.) And attempts by companies like Apple to be more chronologically inclusive of religious diversity have met with, uh, some resistance.
We’re not arguing that Google or anyone else should leave Christmas off the calendar. It’s the same day every year and absolutely impossible to ignore in the US—trust us, we’ve tried. Drawing a big red circle around the 25th of December isn’t hurting anybody. What does cause harm is the invisibility and misrepresentation of other religions on our standard calendars.
Around one billion people celebrate Diwali every year. Nearly two billion Muslims observe Ramadan annually. Many of these folks live in the United States, but you’d never know it from most Americans’ calendars. Marking non-standard (that is: non-Christian) holidays usually requires a plug-in or subscription to something beyond the default. Google Calendar might include Rosh Hashanah, but only for a single day. The app doesn’t reflect that Jewish holidays run sundown to sundown, causing confusion for non-Jews trying to be respectful of their coworkers’ and community members’ obligations.
This might sound like nitpicking, but we promise it’s not. Calendars seem neutral, but these commonplace tools make choices about which information to include and whose events are worth observing. Those choices are political.
Calendars not only show us religious history but also religious inclusion and exclusion at work in our daily lives. If your religious holiday is the default for the whole country, you don’t need to use one of those two designated personal days to observe it—as Megan had to do for Samhain while working at Northeastern, for example. (And that doesn’t even get into whether a university or supervisor, however seemingly tolerant, is cool with you calling out witchy).
Religion is not done with calendars
Having to out yourself as being outside the norm is never entirely safe, and last month’s election made it more dangerous than ever. Of course, while many cultures and religious traditions mark time in non-Christian ways, even the Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia uses the Gregorian calendar these days. We’re obviously facing more pressing injustices than calendars in the months and years to come, yet there’s never been a more crucial time to pay attention to where and when White Christian worldviews aren’t merely presented as the default, but as neutral and innocuous.
In a country supposedly founded on religious freedom, it matters that our calendars make Christian ways of telling time invisible. Attempts to normalize Christian assumptions as good old American values are cumulative. Pay attention to organizations, devices, and institutions that want you to accept default Christian worldviews as normal, inevitable, not really worth addressing. Don’t comply in advance. Learning about other religions helps us take better care of one another. Refusing to schedule important meetings on Yom Kippur and making accommodations for folks fasting for Ramadan or seeing Diwali on a calendar so you can ask your coworker how their holiday went might not seem like much given the horrors we’re facing—but these are small, effective ways to disrupt the inevitability of Jesus-plus-one global domination.
