Ray Navarro’s Jesus Camp, AIDS Activist Video, and the “New Anti-Catholicism”

This essay examines the 1990 documentary Like a Prayer, emphasizing performances by Chicano AIDS activist Ray Navarro, to reassess two prevailing narratives in religion and politics. First, it challenges the culture wars distinction between secular progressivism and religious conservatism that haunts histories of religion and sexuality. It locates American AIDS activism at the center of religious and sexual narratives to question the range of subjects that become visible as “religious.” Second, reading Like a Prayer as part of the archive of modern Catholicism exposes scholarly assumptions about the relationships between religion and politics, sincerity and performance, religion and secularism. This essay expands the archive of the culture wars—and of queer and Catholic history—to include another form of religious engagement: the use of camp. Thinking with an analytics of camp suggests how AIDS activists employed religious imagery in ways that confound the very division between Catholic and anti-Catholic, religious and secular.