Christmas eve: wishes from Tel Aviv

Dana Mills is chronicling what it means to an Israeli peace activist to live in the aftermath of the 10/7 attacks and the daily presence of no good news of so many hostages and Israel's Gaza war of vengeance. As it happens, she's what Erudite Partner calls "a hemi-semite," the offspring  of a Christian parent who identifies with the tribe of her Jewish parent and claims no religion for herself. (E.P. is a hemi-Semite too.) So Mills knows from Christmas having spent a lot of time around Christians.

She contemplates a very painful Christmas in the accursed "Holy Land". The small tribe of resident Palestinian Christians have called off what is usually their high season at the Biblical sites of the Incarnation.

... This year, I've heard from different Palestinian Christian friends that their communities are treating Christmas differently. The grief for the death toll in Gaza is tremendous, and the feeling of heaviness is everywhere in Palestinian communities. I told someone I know, a practicing Christian, and he said "I can understand why you wouldn't feel like celebrating Christmas". I don't think this captures the extent of the decision to not mark Christmas here, and the reason for that.

... The Christian Palestinian community is smaller than the Muslim one, yet the connection between this land to the sites to which Christians all around the world pray and long has sustained. Flying to Tel Aviv around this time always brought pilgrims and priests of various kinds on my flights (I recall one flight in which around 50 nuns were sitting on the plane and I felt like an extra in The Sound of Music). I always knew that for various people my homeland was "the Holy Land". I used to sign "regards from the not- very- holy-land" when visiting home.

... Yet, the decision to not have grand and open celebrations for Christmas here is a big one. It's not a matter of "not feeling like it". It's protesting on a symbolic plain that constitutes the ontological place in which the narrative of Christmas took place. It's removing the ground, quite literally, from the story of Christmas.

Living abroad added to my complexity of my feelings towards Christmas. I was shocked and appalled by the commercial nature of Christmas; most people around me mainly saw it as a time for shopping and a break from work. Very few people took interest in the holiday's meaning and symbols, and even the music and other cultural artifice around it.

So I'm both sad and also not surprised that the little town of Bethlehem is not on many peoples' minds this year, as they rush for Christmas shopping and overjoy in putting their autoreply on email. And so, even this act of protest, which is really what the Palestinian community has by way of power internationally, is perceived as "not feeling like celebration"; a personal, individualistic act rather than collective dissent. ...

... I wrote yesterday about realizing that I need to engage with social media in order to understand this war, how to campaign against it and how to engage with those who disagree with me around it. I've found recently that the people who upset me the most on social media are those who write hollow statements on everything I post, such as "praying for peace" or some such. Many of whom are also practicing Christians. The reality here is so horrendous that I find it offensive to see people cling on to slogans and words that bring them comfort while looking away from the world in all its gore. Of course, peace is what I-- many people around me--- strive towards, but in order to get even close to that, so much healing, restorative justice, and just a deep space of grief have to be held.

... Don't talk to me about peace on earth before you're willing to look at the pain and grief we're living through here, in your Holy Land. If I can force myself to look at Gaza instagrammers photos of ash clad children running to look for their families, so should a Christian who wants to see peace in any possible way come to this earth.

And so, I felt heavy hearing of the decision not to have big public events for Christmas yet understood it and felt the need to be in solidarity with it, from my bad-atheist-Jewess- half- Christian point of view.

This is a sad Christmas, whether you are interested in what had happened in the "Holy Land" million years ago, or not; take a stern look at what is happening here now, around the corner from the little town of Bethlehem.

My Christmas wish is for a ceasefire to finally be installed and last, for Israel to tend to its injured, dead and grieving, and focus on life not revenge; and Palestinian communities to receive solidarity not only as victims of atrocities but as a people who deserve -- like all of us -- the right to self-determination and cultural and political sovereignty.

My Christmas wish is for us to make the small, important step towards a just peace-- recognizing and acknowledging power disparities as well as the pain held by all communities on this land.

My Christmas wish is that we are able to look at the worlds inhabited around us, and that the world outside of these borders between the river and the sea looks at us and understands we are real people who wish to live, not die, and need solidarity in order to cease this senseless violence.

BETHLEHEM, OCCUPIED WEST BANK - DECEMBER 14, 2023: In Bethlehem, the Lutheran Church decided that its Christmas nativity scene this year would be different by placing the symbolic Baby Jesus in a manger of rubble and destruction to reflect the reality of Palestinian children living and being born today ... Thursday, Dec. 14, 2023. The pastor of the church is a Palestinian Christian theologian.

More from Dana Mills can be found at this link.

Kyiv Christmas tree shines light in darkness in wartime

Last Wednesday, December 6 -- St. Nicolas Day -- the embattled capital of Ukraine lit its civic Christmas tree. Nothing is entirely easy in that embattled country.

"We must follow the rules. At any moment an air alert can sound, and this means everyone must be in a shelter where it is safe." -- Mayor Vitali Klitschko

I was intrigued by the date. Until very recently, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) followed the Julian calendar, as do most Orthodox Christian churches. Those churches' Christmas will fall on January 7 on the Gregorian calendar which most of the world lives by. Launched in early modern Europe, use of the Gregorian dating system has gradually spread across the globe. 

The shift to the new dating system has not been without controversy in the OCU.

... the faithful in Ukraine use[d] the Julian calendar. The question of whether this was desirable arose after the Russians invaded Ukraine through a full-scale invasion. “Today, the Julian calendar is perceived as related to the culture of the Russian Church”, the Church stated, according to the Orthodox Times.

The Church made the decision to switch to a new calendar at the bishops’ council. Only one bishop out of 53 voted against the transition, and one more abstained....

The road to the calendar change was not a formality... It was a move discussed for decades, but people within the Church were afraid that the reform would not be accepted by the faithful. 

“Facebook activists will not go to churches”, the head of the newly created Church, Metropolitan Epiphany, said in 2019. The Church viewed the wish for a calendar transition as supported only by people who did not visit the Church. Therefore, the transition seemed a fantasy. 

... However, after the full-scale [Russian] invasion, the issue gained political weight, and most Ukrainians expressed their support for a calendar change.

It's hard to think of a change more wrenching than changing the dating of major religious holidays to which we are accustomed. 

The Russia/Ukraine war is not some exotic, if awful, border skirmish. It is about, and further encourages, deep changes in how people choose to live, of which the calendar change is just one manifestation.

Ukraine aims to control its own destiny as a part of a western-facing Europe.

A land holy or cursed?

Last Sunday, the prescribed Biblical passage from the Hebrew scriptures in the widely used (Christian) Revised Common Lectionary was not perhaps the most helpful for this moment. 

Joshua was the leader and prophet who led the wandering Israelites into the land Moses had assured them that their God had promised to them. In the Book of Joshua, chapter 24, the leading men of the people affirm their trust in that promise and agree to go forward.

Painting by Benjamin West, Joshua crossing the Jordan River, 1800

We didn't read all of the chapter on Sunday, but I couldn't get it out of my head that this bit of Bible includes Joshua reporting God saying this:

¹³ So I gave you a land on which you did not toil and cities you did not build; and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.’

And the people promise to serve this God and no other:

¹⁶ Then the people answered, “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods! ¹⁷ It was the Lord our God himself who brought us and our parents up out of Egypt, from that land of slavery, and performed those great signs before our eyes. He protected us on our entire journey and among all the nations through which we traveled. ¹⁸ And the Lord drove out before us all the nations, including the Amorites, who lived in the land. We too will serve the Lord, because he is our God.”

I'm not suggesting that the current conflict in Israel/Palestine is the continuation of this ancient conquest -- though there are undoubtedly misbegotten religious zealots on both sides who believe it is. 

And also legions of U.S.-based Christian evangelicals egging them on. "You and him fight ..."

The slaughter needs to end. I refuse to believe that murder, dispossession, and eradication of peoples is the purposeful end of any of these Gods ... but it is sure not surprising that we might wonder.

Good news that's been crowded out ....

Almost two weeks ago, voters in Poland unexpectedly used democratic means to stymie, at least temporarily, an illiberal populist turn in that European Union country. For at least a minute, democracy won.

Since this was an election, I'll outsource the story to DailyKos:

Opposition parties won a stunning victory amid record turnout in parliamentary elections on Sunday, ending eight years of authoritarian rule by the radical-right Law and Justice Party and its allies.

Law and Justice, known by the Polish acronym PiS, has for years undermined democracy, media freedom, and judicial independence in the European Union's fifth-largest member state. But despite its efforts to entrench itself in power, PiS lost to an alliance led by the centrist Civic Coalition that also includes two smaller blocs of parties—one to its left and another on the center-right.

Final results for the all-important lower chamber released on Tuesday showed this opposition alliance winning a 54-43 majority of votes over PiS and the far-right Confederation alliance, which could have kept PiS in power had the two won the most seats, but the opposition instead secured a 248-212 majority.

While Sunday's historic result pulls Poland's democracy back from the brink, there's still a long way to go before the winners can fully reverse the damage PiS has inflicted. President Andrzej Duda, who was elected as a PiS ally, still has two years left in his final term, and the incoming government will lack the three-fifths supermajority needed to override his vetoes. It will also have to contend with courts packed by the right.

However, the new government will have the chance to dismantle PiS' control over the media, prosecute political corruption, and strengthen Poland's support for its embattled neighbor, Ukraine.

People who actually know anything about Polish politics were more than a little thrilled. Anne Applebaum, the Atlantic journalist who is married to a democratic (small "d") Polish politician, has happily surprised. 

After democratic coalitions failed to defeat nationalist-conservative ruling parties in Hungary last year and in Turkey last May, and after elections in Israel brought a coalition of extremists to power, plenty of people feared that democratic change in Poland, too, was impossible. Against the odds, yesterday’s election has proved them wrong. Even if you don’t live in Poland, don’t care about Poland, and can’t find Poland on a map, take note: The victory of the Polish opposition proves that autocratic populism can be defeated, even after an unfair election. Nothing is inevitable about the rise of autocracy or the decline of democracy. Invest your time in political and civic organization if you want to create change, because sometimes it works.

That cheerleader for Central Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, also drew happy conclusions.

It seems young Poles finally understood that their future was at stake. Whatever happens next, this was a great democratic moment. The people spoke and said they wanted a different government.

Click to enlarge.

An insightful analysis of how this Polish turn came about comes from Anna Piela in Religion News Service: 

... Law and Justice’s tenure dovetails neatly with rapidly falling support for the Catholic Church, described in “Church in Poland 2023,” a report recently published by the Catholic Information Agency. The strong relationship between Law and Justice and the Catholic hierarchy is reflected by enormous financial support that the Polish state has given to the church, including $48 million to the Church Fund that pays for clergy’s social security contributions, in 2022 alone. The recent tightening of abortion restrictions instituted by Law and Justice was received with satisfaction by the Catholic clergy who had campaigned for it for years.

The party’s leadership openly embraced most of the church’s agenda in its public comments. “Christianity is a part of our national identity,” said Law and Justice’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, in 2019, conflating as usual Christianity and Catholicism. “The church wields the only system of values commonly known in Poland.”

... But Law and Justice’s identification with the church, which for years locked in rural and elderly urban voters, looks to have backfired. In recent polls, two groups — young adults and those living in larger cities — appear to have turned away from the church in overwhelming numbers. In 1992, 52% of those living in the large cities regularly practiced the Roman Catholic faith; in 2022 this share fell to 28%. Those who called themselves nonpracticing constituted 19% of the inhabitants of large cities 30 years ago; in 2022, they represent 38%.

It’s not hard to see the reason for these findings: Young Poles have abandoned the church in huge numbers. Adults aged 18-24 who participate regularly in religious services dropped from 43% to 22% in the eight years Law and Justice was in power, while the share of those who told pollsters they do not participate doubled from 18% to 41%.

Young adults said they dislike organized religion, citing pedophilia and sex scandals among the Catholic clergy. Said Lidia, 33, from Poznan in central Poland: “I voted for Civic Coalition. I am disgusted about everything about the Catholic Church. It is morally repugnant. Recently, a group of priests organized a party and hired a male sex worker. He passed out because they abused him so much. And then they refused to let the paramedics in after someone called the ambulance. … This kind of stuff. And then of course, the new ban on abortion.”

The right wing alliance with a corrupted church served it well -- until it proved a mill stone around its neck.

Marching on in faith

Monday, August 28, is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, remembered today for Dr. King's "I have a dream ..." proclamation. There will be commemorations, congratulations, and calls for renewed energy in the incomplete struggle for the freedom of all.

Inevitably looking back 60 years, we telescope events and markers of the Civil Rights movement era which actually spread from the late 1940s through at least 1968. The great march was not an end point, but perhaps a pivot point; what had been many localized eruptions became unequivocally national afterwards. A broad movement coalition was formed for the day; this won the grudging attention of the ruling Democratic Party powers-that-be ... and change followed.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph of UT-Austin describes the context. 

No major civil rights legislation passed in 1963, but it was the most important year in the decade that transformed America.... The forces that fueled segregation and racial hierarchy in America — and the forces that galvanized the political resistance to both — sped up that year. 

... The March for Jobs and Freedom, announced July 2, forged a new consensus across partisan divides by linking American traditions of freedom and democracy with the Black movement’s aspirational notions of dignity and citizenship.... Bayard Rustin — a Black, gay and radical social democrat who spent time in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II — led the organizing of the March On Washington at the behest of A. Philip Randolph, the legendary founder and labor leader who served as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin endured vicious homophobia within and outside of the movement. ...

Yet Rustin endured, making a final unstoppable comeback within movement circles through his ingenuous organizing skills that helped ensure the eclectic coalition of religious, labor, student, civil rights, business and civic groups were all there in Washington, equipped with buses, portable toilets, sandwiches, water fountains, chairs for dignitaries and more....

That's how a social movement gets things done: broad coalitions enabled by competent logistics. Or so I believe.

The minister of my Buffalo, NY, Episcopal parish attended; his daughter and I were envious. But supportive white northerners didn't think this was anything to take kids to -- sixteen years old was less mature in 1963 than it is today. In a distanced sense, far away parents knew the freedom struggle was no picnic, that violent pushback was always a possibility. As it was. As it is.

Ten years ago, in 2013, another commemoration of the great march took place in Washington. Via Religious News Service, comes this affirmation of the faith from those participants.

Edith Lee-Payne explains: "... it means to me - as a person of faith - a re-dedication that with God all things are possible. ... we knew that sometimes God takes us through some things ... [God] takes us through them to get us where God wants us to be."

He left a large swath ...

Thomas Cromwell served as English King Henry VIII's councilor -- a sort of chief of staff. He lost his head, literally, in 1540. So did an awful lot of notables of the volatile monarch's court, as a consequence of the deadly mix of greed, jealousy, state formation, wealth accumulation, international enmity, and religious Reformation in which they swam. 

Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography of the most successful and lastingly influential of these men (and a few women including Henry's six wives) is delicious fun, worth 21 hours of listening.

The historian credits Thomas Cromwell's machinations and his convictions with preparing the ground from what became the Anglican Church. Henry's daughter, Queen Elizabeth I built on Cromwell's foundation, avoiding trumpeting its source. MacCulloch identifies the woman who became head of the Church of England, like Cromwell himself, as what reforming Protestants called a "Nicodemite" -- someone who dissembled about their religious convictions for political reasons.

Elizabeth had good reason to detest the nexus of politicians with Cromwell at their centre who had first destroyed her mother and then tried to divert the succession from herself and her half-sister; yet she was irreversibly tied to them in her role as Europe's leading Protestant monarch ... Cromwell's evangelical religion had included a strange sort of Nicodemism, which ran alongside and contributed to the Reformation that he promoted openly and aggressively in the name of Henry VIII during the 1530s; it was hidden in plain sight. It's permanent results became apparent only after this death ... These later developments of the English Reformations ... [included] destruction of sacred imagery and the promotion of a sacramental theology which the old king had murderously loathed. Because of this posthumous result, Cromwell's religious programme must count as the most successful Nicodemite enterprise of the whole Reformation. 

Thomas Cromwell most likely could not recognize the belief structure of contemporary Anglican Christianity, but he would certainly recognize its unwieldy polity and shape, as well as its internal conflicts. Churches -- living human expressions a human yearning toward God -- take the shape of their time and place. We're human, bounded in time, after all.

Priest exiled

California was not always a blue -- progressive, Democratic -- state. Far from it. Until the turn of this century, California was often home to a multitude of regressive, conspiratorial right wing movements, often abetted by "respectable" business leaders. And most especially, the state was aggressively racist.

Forgotten now, was 1964's Prop. 14 which sought to stick a bar against laws ensuring non-discrimination in housing into the state constitution. Realtors and property owners wanted the right to openly discriminate against nonwhite people, especially Black individuals. Backed by realtors, the proposition was sold to white homeowners as a way to preserve the value of what was usually their sole asset, their new suburban houses, against threatened integration. And the campaign worked. Voters approved the measure with 65 percent of the vote.

It took until 1967 for the U.S. Supreme Court to excise this blemish from California's constitution. 

I was reminded of this very Californian struggle by this archival photo from Religion News Service.

The caption reads: Father John V. Coffield, pastor of Ascension church in Los Angeles, requested — and was granted — a “self-imposed exile” in Chicago for an indefinite period. He is shown here with Father Juan Soto, left, and a group of parishioners, on Dec. 29, 1964. Coffield, in announcing the exile, claimed he had been forbidden to preach out against racial problems by Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles. Coffield said he preferred the exile to maintaining “silence on racism,” and as a solution to “an impasse between my cardinal and myself.” Coffield also claimed he had been given an “enforced vacation of five months” from June to November after he had spoken out against a state proposition nullifying anti-discrimination laws in housing, later approved by voters. 

RNS credits the Presbyterian Historical Society for the image. 

UPDATE: An alert reader has pointed out that there is far more to the history of this peripatetic priest than RNS knew. Coffield died in 2005. He has been credibly accused of molesting a child.

Convenient for all concerned that he could be shipped off to the Midwest.

Some history of our lives as a wedge issue

For the pure pleasure of it, I'm reading Diarmaid MacCullough's Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life. This is an intricate story of how the first semi-modern European state came to be; I may write more as I go along. Or not. For now, I just want to pass along a tidbit that speaks to the ongoing struggle here and everywhere to win legal acceptance of those of us whose sexual and gender orientations strike our neighbors as non-conforming.

As is true about many things that make English history, legal repudiation of queers and queerness was tied into King Henry the Eighth's effort to escape his childless marriage to Katherine of Aragon. We got the Church of England as the island's quasi-contribution to the Reformation. We also got a legal prohibition of "buggery" by act of Parliament in 1534. 

... one of the earliest pieces of legislation, actually the first considered in the Lords after Parliament opened, was a curious initiative for which one would expect a history of previous public grievance or discussion, but there is little previous trace. It was a statute making buggery a felony, that is a criminal offence in common law, with the death penalty attached to it.

The annoyingly unnamed peer who advocated this Act for the Punishment of the Vice of Buggery linked it to the misuse of ecclesiastical sanctuary jurisdictions, which suggests a context: this was the first symptom of the new attack on Church privilege. The well-informed anonymous commentator on the Reformation whose fragmentary account remains in the Wyatt papers directly linked its enactment not just to the unnaturalness of clerical celibacy generally but to monastic corruption in particular, and so the buggery statute looks like a new try-out of Cromwell's program of intervention in the affairs of monasteries and friaries. 

Over the previous four years, William Tyndale [translator of the Bible to English] in his literary duel with [Sir Thomas] More had launched the long English Protestant tradition of linking sodomy to clerical celibacy. Yet the Act had a wider significance, quite apart from forming the basis of all punitive action in England against male homosexuals up to the nineteenth century. After the Papacy had created a body of canon law and church courts, such matters of morality as this had been the concern of church lawyers in the Western Church, and not the King's courts. The Act was the first major encroachment in England on that general principle, a phenomenon that occurred right across sixteenth-century Europe, Catholic and Protestant alike ...

That is -- LGBT people were a convenient foil for Cromwell's facilitation of Henry's power grab ...

Generational sea change (part 3): among Mormons

Yes -- watch the trends among Mormons!

Daniel Cox passes along that among adherents to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, though nearly all are consistent Republicans, Donald Trump is less and less popular. 

More than half (51 percent) of Latter-day Saints express negative views of the former president. They are also twice as likely to have a very unfavorable than a very favorable opinion of him. By way of comparison, two-thirds (67 percent) of white evangelical Protestants have favorable views of Trump.  In a head-to-head match-up with Biden, less than half (48 percent) of Latter-day Saints say they would vote for Trump ...

... More than anything else, what differentiates Latter-day Saints from white evangelical Protestants is their commitment to cultural pluralism and political tolerance. Sixty-one percent of Latter-day Saints say that America’s increasing racial and ethnic diversity is a good thing for society, a view shared by only 36 percent of white evangelical Protestants. Nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of church members believe the US should encourage more diversity as it fosters tolerance and understanding. Most white evangelicals reject this view. 

... Roughly two-thirds of Mormons believe that Muslims (68 percent) and Jews (65 percent) face a lot of discrimination in the US, while less than half of white evangelicals say this is true (46 percent and 45 percent, respectively). In fact, there is only one religious group that most white evangelicals believe experiences a lot of discrimination in America: Christians.

But change is happening, even here: 

Latter-day Saints remain a Republican constituency with conservative views on a host of issues from abortion to gay rights. There’s been some deterioration of Republican affiliation in the post-Trump era, but it remains modest. Gallup polls show 62 percent of church members are Republican or lean towards the Republican Party, down from 69 percent in 2016.  

Click to enlarge

Generational patterns suggest this drop may just be the beginning. In his Substack, Ryan Burge argues that a “seismic shift” is occurring in the politics of young Latter-day Saints. Young members are far less conservative and committed to the GOP than older members. Burge notes that less than half now identify as Republican. 

The theme I'm calling "generational sea change" (more here and more here) is that, quite simply, Republicans have lost the country's culture. Some are aggrieved and angry, many are just confused, and young people ask, "what's this all about?" Change is coming ...

Pernicious priests

San Francisco's Roman Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is a major character in Mary Jo McConahay's Playing God: American Catholic Bishops and The Far Right. Her considerable discussion of this monarchical figure does not mention what many of us in this city know him best for: setting his cathedral's timing on its sprinkler system to deluge homeless people seeking cover under its eaves. (Yes, on public exposure, the cathedral had to decency to turn off the the spigots.) Across the Bay in Oakland, Bishop Michael Barber is also a major character. He's best known at present for seeking to declare his diocese bankrupt in order to evade responsibility for 330 pending child sexual abuse claims against former priests.

This sort of clerical cruelty drives some faithful Catholics from their church and leaves the remainder keeping their heads down while quietly participating in the rites and good works that fly under the ecclesial radar. Bless 'em.

McConahay records how right wing operatives built the infrastructure -- political and organizational -- to take advantage of clerical backlash against the modernizing thrust of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) which aimed to bring Catholicism into the modern world. A couple of backward looking popes -- John Paul II and Benedict XVI -- appointed most of the current American bishops; the resulting American hierarchy is an outlier in the Catholic world, hidebound, uncharitable, and unable to come to terms with the lives of the faithful. These clerical princes loath Pope Francis; they cannot abide or survive openness to the world as it is. In particular, in this country, they are enemies of democracy and the separation of church and state, assured that they represent all morality and truth. As the wise Sister Joan Chichester laments: "Nothing really changed after Vatican II. ..."

This book is professional investigative journalism that seeks out connections that many of its actors would prefer to keep under cover. McConahay has explored the nooks and byways of Roman Catholic reaction, following the money from Catholic billionaires into a plethora of institutions, including of course the Supreme Court. She has earned a blurb from that essential secular expert on following the right wing money, New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer.

McConahay explains how she relates to her painfilled project:

I have no animus toward the Catholic Church or its bishops. As a lifelong Catholic, including years reporting from Latin America, I have seen the extent to which my coreligionists, including bishops, have gone, even to the point of martyrdom, on behalf of other people and of justice. At the same time, I have always believed that the institution of the Church was worth investigation and critique.

Like other Americans, I was shaken by the events of January 6, 2021. I saw those hours through the eyes and ears of a reporter who has covered war, religion, and politics, both at home and in autocracies abroad. Now, in my own nation's capital, I watched in horror and disbelief at one man's exhortation to loyalists to rise up and march with him to upturn the law. I saw crosses and Bibles side by side with Confederate flags ... [I saw] how the extremists among my coreligionists exuded a sense of embattled Christianity, expressed in comparisons of supposedly repressed U.S. believers with Jews killed by Hitler.

As a reporter, indeed as a Catholic, I felt it was time to look at the U.S. Church as a key instrument playing an outsize role in the current, dangerous political moment.

If you can stomach delving into the moral sewer which is much of the U.S. Roman Catholic episcopate, McConahay offers the goods -- and that's not even dwelling on their misogyny and sexual abuse. Jesus, save us from your priests.

No wonder old GOPers are so spooked

Click to enlarge. Just do it and come back for an explanation.

This chart displays several sets of information in parallel in a form which makes new meaning. I found the density here fascinating. Let's unpack it a bit.

The underlying data points are the relative percentages of U.S. adherents to six religious postures which are defined so as to include a racial component within those identifications. That is, we are characterized in percentages of white evangelicals, white mainline protestants, white Catholics, Christians of color, other religions (no implied race, probably mostly Jews, Muslims and perhaps Hindus?), religiously unaffiliated (no implied race), and other Christians (no implied race, perhaps Orthodox?). This is not exactly how we usually think of these divisions -- but the groups are not unrecognizable.

It would be possible, and perhaps conventional, to display the result in two separate charts.

One chart would compare the distribution of religious groups by age: 18-29, 30-49, 50-64, 65+.  Some numbers crunchers might quibble with the divisions, but this seems commonplace.

A second chart would compare these divisions by political party identification: Democrats and Republicans. Again commonplace.

But the creators of this chart (PRRI American Values Atlas) have combined the two charts in a visual form which suggests far more -- and had the decency to spell out what they are getting at in the accompanying caption:

... the Democratic Party looks like 20 year old America, while the Republican Party looks like 80 year old America.

No wonder old GOPers are so spooked. It's a new world they are living in.

Cruelty is repellent

Alejandra Molina, writing for Religion News Service, reports an intriguing development: In Florida, Latino evangelicals mobilize against DeSantis’ crackdown on immigrants.

(RNS) — After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered state regulators to deny licenses or renewals to those sheltering unaccompanied migrant children, more than 200 faith leaders and evangelical pastors of Spanish-speaking churches made their way to downtown Tallahassee last year in February to protest the governor for preventing them from doing the “work that God has called us do.”

Many of those shelters were housed in local Latino evangelical churches, according to the faith leaders who also demonstrated against a law that now forbids state and local governments from contracting with transportation companies that knowingly bring undocumented immigrants.

Now, as DeSantis prepares for a possible 2024 presidential bid and as he’s unveiled an immigration package that seeks to impose stiffer penalties for Floridians who “knowingly transport, conceal, or harbor” unauthorized immigrants, some Latino evangelical leaders say they’re willing to break the law if it’s enacted and are mobilizing their flocks — this time in larger numbers — to “fight against DeSantis.”

Much is made of DeSantis' success in winning Florida's Latino voters from the Democrats in his recent re-election. And the churches whose leaders have been riled by his anti-immigrant policies are very conservative -- happy enough with DeSantis' anti-LGBTQ initiatives and encouragement of a broad abortion ban. But there is such a thing as going too far ...

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who serves as president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said “there is angst in the Latino evangelical community” over DeSantis’ immigration proposal.

“Every Latino pastor in the state of Florida, every Latino pastor who pastors a Spanish-speaking ministry, if I were a betting man, we have undocumented individuals in each of these churches, bar none,” he said. ”So are you saying that the same Latino pastors that are pro-life, pro-religious liberty, biblical justice, no to socialism and communism and yes to parental rights —  that this leadership, that we are criminals?”

The pastor lauded DeSantis’ “outreach to the Hispanic evangelical community,” but said he is concerned about the third degree felony penalties for harboring someone who is undocumented as well as hospitals collecting immigration information. This doesn’t mean that Latino evangelicals favor President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration issues, he added.

One reason these doubts about DeSantis may be unlikely to have much immediate electoral impact in Florida is that even these pastors' church members who are citizens and could vote, very likely don't vote. Latinos notoriously participate at low rates. If they are also new citizens and thus newly eligible, it often takes people many years in their new country to get into the election habit.

But performative cruelty to the Spanish-speaking migrants can be felt as viscerally morally offensive. DeSantis is attacking deep communal values that are strongly held. The community gets by through communal care; they expect their politicians to have the same values.

In California thirty years ago, a majority of the Spanish-speaking community was turned for life against Republicans by Governor Pete Wilson's cruel anti-immigrant measures. A generation of Latino political leaders grew up determined to participate fully in the governance of the state. They became some of recent decades most notable politicians (for better and less good) -- Kevin de León, Xavier Becerra, Alex Padilla ...

In Philip Bump's new book The Aftermath, he quotes Lisa García Bedolla, a UC Berkeley political scientist, about the generally stand-offish posture of many (most?) potential Latino voters toward elections and the Democratic party:

“There’s growing independent identification in the United States, and especially among the immigrant-origin communities, so Asian Americans and Latinos are much more likely to be independent,” García Bedolla told me. “In a weird way, you know, the support for the Democratic Party is more, well, they [Republicans] hate us. So I guess we have to go over here.”

This dynamic seems to be what DeSantis is setting up. Florida is not California, but cruelty is cruelty and repellent everywhere. Inflicting moral injury has not ended well for Republicans.

Black patriotism should not be mistaken for Christian nationalism

A recent PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute)/Brookings study of the Threat of Christian Nationalism in the United States has been getting a good amount of mainstream media coverage. There probably are as many as thirty percent of us who proclaim their adherence to Christianity (usually of the white evangelical Protestant variety and its offspring) and combine that belief/culture with aggressive nationalism. These folks are a menace to their neighbors and to our democracy.

But I felt drawn to dig a little into the methodology of the study. Researchers used the answers to a battery of five questions to identify "adherents" and "sympathizers" with Christian nationalism. Did respondents agree or disagree with the following questions?

• The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
• U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
• If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
• Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
• God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

I have to admit that I have some sympathy with the second of these statements. I believe U.S. laws should be based on Christian values -- and Jewish values, and Muslim values, and Hindu values, and Buddhist values, and Wiccan values, and all other historic sources of morals -- because I think all religious traditions lead to reverence for humanity and the earth, whatever culture they derive from.

But obviously, I'm not a Christian nationalist sympathizer. I'm not a nationalist at all. But I'm not ready to deny that religions have some good ideas that might inform how we structure our lives together. 

I find it easy to imagine that a goodly lot of people who might have some sympathy for these statements might be far more nationalist than Christian. Researchers have documented that plenty of Trump and Republican supporters who loudly proclaim their Christianity aren't regularly to be found in churches.

Washington Post data journalist Philip Bump asks what seem to me a relevant question about the PRRI study:

What isn’t clear from the research is the extent to which these religious views are the motivator for political or cultural views. Are these Americans centering their beliefs on religion, or do their views broadly lead them to agree with questions centered on the primacy of Christianity? To put it another way, if Christian nationalism is the chicken and right-wing politics the egg, which comes first?

PRRI and Brookings may simply be measuring the same right-wing group in another way. Of course, this doesn’t diminish how unsettling the findings might be in the least.

One of the oddities of these PRRI findings is that, on this survey's metrics, Black Americans are no less likely to be Christian nationalist "adherents" or "sympathizers" with Christian nationalism than white evangelicals. That simply seems wrong. 

To PRRI's credit, they addressed this discordant finding with a short talk at the study's public launch event by Jemar Tisby, president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, where he writes about race, religion, and culture.  This is preaching to be savored ...

"White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to democracy and the witness of the Church in the United States today.

"I define Christian nationalism as an ethnographic-cultural ideology that uses Christian symbolism to create a permission structure for the acquisition of political power and social control.

"Black Americans as a group are a highly religious group. Ninety-seven percent of Black Americans believe in God or a higher power. And the vast majority of those folks are Christians, Protestant at that. ... it wouldn't surprise us that this language of God and Country resonates with Black people. ..

"The difference is, what do we mean? ... I contrast white Christian nationalism with Black Christian patriotism. ... When you are talking about white Christian nationalism it tends toward a rigid, narrow, authoritarian politics. When you are talking bout Black Christian patriotism, you are talking about an expansive, flexible, inclusive politics ... White Christian nationalism is the greatest threat to a multiracial inclusive democracy."

Not my kind of encounter with Jesus

If you watched the Stupor Bowl live, and didn't silence the commercials as you might ordinarily, you were treated to slickly produced ads from something called HeGetsUs.com. 

I figured I should suss out who is selling what kind of Jesus and pass the information on. Here's what CNN reports:

In between star-studded advertisements and a whole lot of football, this year’s Super Bowl watchers are being taken to church.

“He Gets Us,” a campaign to promote Jesus and Christianity, is running two ads during the game as part of a staggering $100 million media investment. ...

The chain of influence behind “He Gets Us” can be followed through public records and information on the campaign’s own site. The campaign is a subsidiary of The Servant Foundation, also known as the Signatry.

According to research compiled by Jacobin, a left-leaning news outlet, The Servant Foundation has donated tens of millions to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group. The ADF has been involved in several legislative pushes to curtail LGBTQ rights and quash non-discrimination legislation in the Supreme Court.

... While donors who support “He Gets Us” can choose to remain anonymous, Hobby Lobby co-founder David Green claims to be a big contributor to the campaign’s multi-million-dollar coffers. Hobby Lobby has famously been at the center of several legal controversies, including the support of anti-LGBTQ legislation and a successful years-long legal fight that eventually led to the Supreme Court allowing companies to deny medical coverage for contraception on the basis of religious beliefs.

It hurts when Jesus is used to belittle and repress people. I do not trust these sponsors.

Oh, I'm not not being entirely fair calling the big game "the Stupor Bowl." I just didn't have a horse in the race this year. But it was an entertaining game, unlike so many such contests.

What's with these people?

I think that, as the Republican Party has reconstituted itself (or been revealed?) as a vehicle for outright American semi-fascism in the years of Donald Trump, the rest of us can't stop taking an occasional pause to try to understand. What's with these people? Fruitful communication between those who are appalled and the adherents of the Orange God-King is usually impossible. The major media resorted to sending bemused reporters to diners to attempt to have the conversation. And there is a genre of books that take a stab at explanations, especially of this right wing plague's Christian component, such as Sarah Posner's Unholy and Robert P. Jones' White Too Long.

Angela Denker's Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump is a worthy contribution on this group. Her perspective is not what we get through the big media. She's a white, married, midwestern, middle-of-the-road Lutheran pastor who resides in Minnesota. She's got plenty of connections including family who have been Trump voters. And she's a former sportswriter who presents her travels to and among various Trump-sympathetic churches and venues as she might have written profiles of teams and athletes.

The book is a kind of pilgrimage between Christian institutions from Florida, through Orange County, on to Missouri, Appalachia, New England, with a smidgen of Texas thrown in, all to listen and attempt empathy with people whose sort of Christianity and whose politics are not hers, but whom she seeks to treat with respect.

Some of what she records we have gotten used to over the last six years. An awful lot of Trump-voting Christians simply found Hillary Clinton repulsive, not only because of her support for abortion, but in some deeper sense which remains opaque to me. (I'm no Hillary fan, but I never got the Hillary-hate.) Many of these folks feel that American culture has pushed them aside and they feel dissed by elites. We know that. And we know that there's plenty of racism behind the American authoritarian phenomenon. But just when I would think there's nothing new here, Denker would offer an observation I found thoughtful and broadening.

For example, at the anti-abortion DC March for Life in 2017, she mingled with the crowd as they listened to Trump orate on the Jumbotron:

Trump had the fortune of looking like a sheepish little boy in need of love, and even at his most offensive, I wondered if the women and mothers in the crowd who'd managed to vote for him had done so in the same way we excused our husbands and sons, think of grown men as petulant, overgrown little boys.

In Florida, she attended River at Tampa Bay Church whose worship leaders ostentatiously carry guns and preach fear of immanent attack ... by someone or something. This is worship shaped by paranoia. Denker has a very Lutheran take and writes:

Lost at the River [Church] is the biblical idea that we aren't the ones who are called to earn or defend our salvation. We are called instead to gratitude for life rather than ultimate fear of death, for Easter follows Good Friday, and eternal life follows death. But grace is unsatisfying in the winner-takes-all world of the River ....

Few of this author's red state Christians are this bellicose. But they are very much attuned to their respective American cultures.

Trump, with his own combination of bombast and celebrity, would not have appealed to conservative American Christians had they not first been warmed up bo the idea by conservative celebrity preachers, many of whom had their genesis in Orange County and Southern California. ... It's not surprising that American Evangelicals, thus desensitized, were willing to sacrifice purity for popularity. They'd already done so in the largest and most profitable and influential churches.

In the midwest and Appalachia, she delves into the feelings among white Christians of being left behind, perhaps as retribution for ancestral crimes which they could not bring themselves to recognize.

They had felt chastened by President Obama and by Democrats. They did not want to be called racist, but they hesitated to confront past instances of racism and injustice. ... The rural midwestern Americans I met carried a mix of pride and a sense of shame, a hesitation to admit America's original sins because their identity was tied so strongly to being an American and the pride that went along with it.

At ultra-conservative Roman Catholic Thomas More College in New Hampshire, where this Lutheran pastor felt herself very much an anomaly,

they fear their culture is being threatened. For the conservative Catholic families that send their children to Thomas More, the truths that have sustained their power are changing and they are losing their grip on Western society. Much of that fear is about changes in acceptable family structures and increased racial diversity, about the loss of absolute truth and what that means for a church that has been dependent on hierarchy and obedience.

Denker ends her odyssey among midwestern family, certain that what endures are the bonds we preserve, rather than those we sever. She is undoubtedly correct, and also aware that this stance may be easier for her than for others who enjoy less security,

This isn't a great book, but I found it a broadly helpful response for my question: What's with these people?

It's the less educated who are fleeing churches

Here's a contemporary oddment that may be unexpected. Vast quantities of ink and pixels are devoted by sociologists and apostles of church growth about the decline of institutional religious participation in US life. But until Daniel Cox passed along this, I hadn't been aware of the divide pictured in this graph. 

Cox equates the education gap with class status.

It has long been presumed, and in some cases feared, that higher education—and the widespread availability of information and knowledge via the Internet—would undermine religious commitments. Actual evidence for this is lacking. While religious doubting has grown in recent years, the most educated Americans show up to services most often. Even as they report less certainty in their religious beliefs, they participate more regularly in worship services. Higher education appears to reinforce regular religious participation.

He equates ongoing religious attendance with family stability (seems likely) and general engagement in community life.

One thing that seems clear is that the decline of churches will likely make inequality worse. College-educated Americans are more active and involved in every sphere of American social and civic life, from book clubs and PTA meetings, to sports leagues and town halls. On average, they have more friends, broader social networks, and more extensive ties to the places where they live. ... Churches offer one way to bridge the gap, but fewer Americans are turning to them.

What this description omits is that the clubby communal culture of institutions which reinforce the class values of the comfortable might be off-putting to the more precariously situated among us. Less education does correlate with less social stability for some people.

I feel abundantly grateful to have happened into a religious institution which knows itself to have a particular vocation to those who have little materially.

Giving up is not an option

Like Bill McKibben, who pointed me to this Pew Forum statistical picture of How Religion Intersects With Americans’ Views on the Environment, I experience the findings as more than a little demoralizing. 

Click to enlarge

In summary: 

... the survey ... finds that highly religious Americans (those who say they pray each day, regularly attend religious services and consider religion very important in their lives) are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about warming temperatures around the globe.

... The main driver of U.S. public opinion about the climate is political party, not religion. Highly religious Americans are more inclined than others to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and Republicans tend to be much less likely than Democrats to believe that human activity (such as burning fossil fuels) is warming the Earth or to consider climate change a serious problem.

Religious Americans who express little or no concern about climate change also give a variety of other explanations for their views, including that there are much bigger problems in the world today, that God is in control of the climate, and that they do not believe the climate actually is changing. In addition, many religious Americans voice concerns about the potential consequences of environmental regulations, such as a loss of individual freedoms, fewer jobs or higher energy prices. 

Finally, climate change does not seem to be a topic discussed much in religious congregations, either from the pulpit or in the pews. And few Americans view efforts to conserve energy and limit carbon emissions as moral issues.

Notably, among Christians, Historically Black Protestants are far and away the religious grouping most likely to consider climate change an urgent concern. This perhaps should not be a surprise, since people of color are often less insulated from climate-induced disasters than are more influential and affluent communities. Black Protestants. members of "other religions," and religiously unaffiliated people show similar levels of concern. And this is true, even though Black Christians reported similar levels of belief that we are living in "end times" to white evangelicals who doubt or are indifferent to the climate crisis.

Of course these Black Christians know, come what may, giving up is not an option. It's more than time for the rest of us to listen up.

Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to thought provoking commentary on the condition our condition is in. 

In the wake of the Dobbs decision which allowed states to ban abortion, Jessica Valenti is observing Republican legislators: "We are dying and they are laughing. How the fuck do you have a conversation about that?"

Sarah Chayes, former NPR journalist and later aid organizer among Kandahar Afghans during American's war:
"So. Ayman al-Zawahiri is killed at last. Ayman al-Zawahiri, mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, successor to Usama bin Laden at the helm of a limping version of the organization we chose to consider an existential threat 20 years ago, launching two ill-conceived wars that left millions of people worse off than they’d been before, tens of thousands of service-members injured, confused and embittered, and a handful of defense contractors immeasurably richer. ... A closure, of sorts, I suppose."

Race and class in the city by the Bay: “To be Black in San Francisco is to be very lonely.” 

Peter Beinart of Jewish Currents and CUNY looks at how race diversity plays among Republican leaders: "The GOP is capable of racial and ethnic inclusion. Jindal and Haley were popular with grassroots Republicans, and so were Ben Carson and Marco Rubio. Mayra Flores, a Mexican American woman elected earlier this year from South Texas, is the congressional GOP’s newest star. But it’s almost always a shared conservative Christianity that allows white Republicans to embrace Black, Hispanic, or Asian candidates. Which means conservative Christianity, which can foster racial and ethnic inclusion can foster religious exclusion at the same time."

Diana Butler Bass, a theologian who writes for and to Christians: "Christians must stand up, speak up, and do good right now. Civil war isn’t funny. We can’t let it happen. We don’t need purity. We need decency. And peaceable community."

Via writer Steven Beschloss, two powerful visions of purpose:  

Liz Cheney: “This is not a game. Every one of us must be committed to the eternal defense of this miraculous experiment called America and at the heart of our democratic process—our elections. They are the foundational principle of our Constitution. Two years ago, I won this primary with 73 percent of the vote. I could easily have done the same again. The path was clear, but it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. That was a path I could not and would not take…"

Joe Biden: “I swore an oath of office to you and to God to faithfully execute the duties of this sacred office. To me, the critical duty—the critical duty of the presidency is to defend what is best about America. And that’s not hyperbole. Defend what’s best about America. To pursue justice, to ensure fairness, and to deliver results that create possibilities—possibilities that all of us—all of us can live a life of consequence and prosperity in a nation that’s safe and secure. That’s the job. Fulfilling that pledge to you guides me every single hour of every single day in this job.”

New York Times columnist and resident explorer of U.S. history Jamelle Bouie is skeptical of third parties in this country. "The biggest problem with the Forward Party, however, is that its leaders — like so many failed reformers — seem to think that you can take the conflict out of politics. 'On every issue facing this nation,' they write, 'we can find a reasonable approach most Americans agree on.' "

Historian of Russia and Ukraine Timothy Snyder sees Russia's imperial invasion flailing: "Russia has reached the stage in the war in which it is fighting because not to fight would be embarrassing.  It has reached this stage quickly. ... Our job is incomparably easier than the Ukrainians'.  The Ukrainians have to demonstrate resolution of every kind.  All we have to do to see things as they are, show some patience, and support the democracy that is under attack -- with the right attitude, and the right weapons.  The outcome of the war might well depend upon our capacity to do that."

Jonathan V. Last, Republican anti-Trumper, at the The Bulwark, is tired: 

"Who wants to live like this? Can’t we go back to Republicans trying to pass corporate tax breaks and roll back the regulatory regime while Democrats push to increase social safety-net spending? 

"Bring back the dysfunctional politics of 1980 - 2015! 

"The problem is that exhaustion is part of the authoritarian’s tool kit. They want to exhaust you so that you’ll check out of politics and try to take refuge in other areas of life. And then they take over. 

"Don’t give in to the exhaustion."

 We can't give in to exhaustion. Let's smash the Republican fantasy world in the midterms and beyond. The people of this country can do it.

Hiding beneath the robes of a tame court?

California's Catholic bishops have run whining to the U.S. Supreme Court; the demonstrated deference the current justices show toward religious claims justifies my adjective in the headline. For these judges, the rights of religious institutions seem to override all other rights.

Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, CA

CalMatters explains the legal claim: 

Nine California Catholic dioceses and archdioceses have asked the nation’s highest court to review their case against a 2019 law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, which created a three-year window for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file legal claims against alleged perpetrators at school, church or elsewhere, regardless of when the alleged abuse occurred. The law also allowed defendants to be sued for a new offense: “cover up” activity. 

In the April 15 petition, which was first reported last week by the Catholic News Agency, lawyers for the Catholic bishops assert the law is unconstitutional because California already gave victims a chance to sue in 2002 — when it opened a one-year portal for sex abuse survivors to file claims with no time limit attached — and because it retroactively adds new liabilities.

The Survivors Network (SNAP) is having none of it:

We are not surprised that Catholic officials in California are fearful of the lawsuits that allow those who have been time-barred from justice access to the courts.  These suits represent transparency and honesty and would make it far more difficult to pretend that their abuse scandal is a thing of the past. Window legislation is allowing thousands of victims of abuse by Catholic clergy, nuns, religious brothers, and laity to come forward and expose these crimes. 

It is our firm belief that many, many more survivors who have been abused in the 1990s or early 2000 have yet to realize the damage done to them and remain silent in their pain. We know that window legislation exposes both predators and the institutions that covered up these horrific crimes. 

We urge the Court to throw out this meritless challenge.... 

BishopAccountability.org collects documentation on the sexual abuse crisis. They currently report 29 U.S. Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy protection because of the claims of survivors. The one recent(ish) such filing from California was of the Diocese of Stockton in 2014.

Will the Supremes ensure this is the last such accountability event from California?

It's Eastertide for most Ukrainians

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Because the Orthodox Church in most of its permutations tells time on the Julian calendar, Easter in Orthodox lands takes place this weekend, not last, as in the West. 

Russia's war in Ukraine reaches into the Orthodox church. While the Russian Patriarch Kirill is a fearsome supporter of Putin's invasion, some of his priests have protested:

More than 320 signed a letter last week accusing Kirill of “heresy” for his warmongering and demanding he be brought before an ecclesiastical tribunal to be deposed.

“Kirill committed moral crimes by blessing the war against Ukraine and fully supporting the aggressive actions of Russian troops on the Ukrainian territory,” they wrote. “It is impossible for us to remain in any form of canonical submission to the Patriarch of Moscow." (The political tensions between Russia and Ukraine had already led to a split within the latter’s Orthodox community, with some congregations no longer associating themselves with the Moscow patriarchate.)

Churches fracture. Nothing novel here, but part of religious life in a connected world.

Tom Nichols is a U.S. expert on Russia and an Orthodox Christian. He has spent a life trying to understand Russia's contradictions. His newsletter essay on the war is a remarkable, personal, account of love for Russians and Orthodoxy. And he reaches a painful conclusion about current developments:

The Western media, in my view, have not paid enough attention to the religious aspect of this war, and in particular Putin’s insistence that he is acting to unite something like an Orthodox Christian empire. ... The religious aspect of this war is difficult for Americans to understand, not only because Orthodoxy is a relatively small denomination in the United States, but because it is an explanation that runs counter to the various narratives of great power conflict, or civilizational clash, or academic realism, all of which to some extent have filled in as explanations for why Putin has launched a fratricidal war with the full approval of the Russian Patriarch. ... And so this week I will go to church, and pray for peace, and in penitence, I will pray for mercy—for me, for the victims of this slaughter, and for my brothers and sisters in my faith who are conducting, and cheering on, this obscene war.

Timothy Snyder, that seemingly omnipresent academic scholar of historical barbarism in Europe, also adds a dark vision of the religious element of the war.

A certain kind of focus on the death of Jesus has a way, in politics at least, of dissolving responsibility for action.  One convenient interpretation of Jesus dying for our sins is that we are innocent.  And then the question arises as to who "we" are.  Those within our group can be seen as free of sin, regardless of what we do, whereas the others can be seen as sinners, regardless of what they do. ...

... Putin’s rhetoric about this war make sense within such a framework.  In a rally, Putin quoted the Bible to celebrate the death of Russians in battle.  He said that their death had made the nation more unified than ever before.  

... May 9th, Putin’s deadline for victory in the Easter Offensive, is itself a kind of secular Easter: it is the day of commemoration of the Soviet victory in the Second World War, in which the death of millions of Soviet soldiers in the 1940s is presented as a permanent redemption of Russia — and a justification of Putin’s wars. When death supplies the meaning, more death supplies more meaning.

Jesus -- save us from your followers, and from our own worst selves.