Religious Covering
Although they are often pitted against each other, religionists and gays share a special bond. Like gays, religious minorities have been subjected to all three demands for assimilation -- conversion, passing, and covering. When Mormons led the charge against same-sex marriage in Hawaii in the 1990s, I was struck by how I could retell the history of Mormonism as I have retold the history of gays -- as a movement from coerced conversion, through passing, toward covering. In the nineteenth century, Mormons were forced to convert their religion by repudiating the practice of polygamy. Those who refused -- self-described Mormon fundamentalists cast off by the Mormon church -- went underground, practicing plural marriage in a form of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” More recently, authorities have turned a blind eye to polygamists who cover, reserving prosecutions for flaunters.
In the new millennium, many religious minorities are entering their covering phase. For many American Jews, the question has shifted from whether they should convert or pass to whether they are “Too Jewish?” -- the title of a museum exhibit that traveled the nation in 1997. Riv-Ellen Prell describes women who straighten their noses or hair to achieve a “Queen Elizabeth exterior” while retaining a “Jewish heart.” Abraham Korman recounts how Jewish men in corporate settings must “give up many of the symbolic behaviors that tie them to their Jewish heritage,” with the yarmulke having “particular significance as a symbol to be avoided.” Academics like Phyllis Chesler describe how Jews are sanctioned for writing on Jewish topics. And journalism professor Samuel Freedman notes in his book Jew vs. Jew that American Jews are increasingly breaking apart based on whether their primary associations are with gentiles or other Jews.
In the United States today, Muslims are the most visible targets of the religious covering demand. Soon after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, an article was published about Muslims in New York City. It reads like a covering ethnography. The piece reports that Muslim private schools are telling children to conceal “any religious emblems,” and that “some Muslim leaders are discussing plans for women to change the way they dress, perhaps exchanging headscarves for hats and turtleneck pullovers.” It depicts a woman who, “a day after the attack, arrived at a New York City Health Department office demanding bureaucrats change her son’s surname from ‘Mohammed’ to ‘Smith.’” The article also observes that “neighborhoods in New York where you were more likely to see Egyptian, Jordanian, or Syrian flags . . . are now covered in American flags, their Middle Eastern flags discreetly hidden for the time being. Finally, it notes that some Middle Easterners have confessed that they would be happy now to be mistaken for either Hispanics or African Americans.
Significant cases in which religious minorities who resisted the covering demand lost in court include Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), which concerned a Jewish Air Force officer and rabbi who was threatened with a court martial for failing to remove his yarmulke, and Employment Division v. Smith (1990), in which members of a Native American Church were denied unemployment benefits because they had smoked peyote for sacramental purposes.
