Pope Francis said at his evening Mass on Christmas Eve, “Tonight, our hearts are in Bethlehem, where the Prince of Peace is once more rejected by the futile logic of war, by the clash of arms that even today prevents him from finding room in the world.”

In Bethlehem itself, where Pastor Isaac preaches, the city elders canceled the Christmas parade and other festivities in commemoration of the shivering Palestinians a few miles away whose stomachs are being gnawed at by hunger and whose throats are raspy with thirst. Bethlehem is a town of some 25,000 in the Palestinian West Bank occupied militarily by Israeli troops. About 11,000 of its residents are Palestinian Christians, descendants of the Near Eastern pagans and Jews living under Roman rule who embraced the message of Jesus of Nazareth in his lifetime and after.

Bethlehem’s population is not being bombed from the sky the way the Palestinians of Gaza are, but they also suffer from Israeli occupation. According to a 2020 poll 80% of Palestinian Christians worry about being attacked by militant Israeli squatters, 83% worry that these colonizers will drive them from their homes, and 70% are concerned that the Israeli government will simply annex their land. Fully 62% of Palestinian Christians believe that the ultimate goal of the Israeli government is to expel Christians from their homeland. A good 14% have actually lost land to the Israelis, and 42% have to regularly go through Israeli security checkpoints, which have carved the West Bank up into cantons and make it difficult to get to hospital.

Aljazeera English: “‘No joy in our hearts’: Bethlehem’s Christians face heartbreak at Christmas ”

Although there are only about 800 Palestinian Christians in Gaza, they have suffered from Israeli bombardment, sniping attacks, and razing of civilian infrastructure. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem revealed in a letter last week that an Israeli army sniper “murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza”. It said that besieged mother and daughter Nahida and Samar “were shot and killed as they walked to the Sister’s Convent. One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety”.

They were among hundreds of Christians taking refuge in the Parish. The church had given the GPS coordinates of church properties in Gaza to the Israeli government in hopes they would be spared, but local Palestinians say that church building has been shelled by Israeli armor.

Pope Francis responded at that time, lamenting of the Israeli campaign against Gaza that “unarmed civilians are the targets of bombings and gunfire.” He condemned the assualt at the compound of the Catholic parish, “where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick and have disabilities, and nuns . . . A mother, Mrs. Nahida Khalil Anton, and her daughter, Samar Kamal Anton, were killed, and others were wounded by the shooters while they were going to the bathroom,” he announced.

The Pope continued, “Some say, ‘This is terrorism. This is war.’ Yes, it is war. It is terrorism . . . That is why the Scripture affirms that ‘God stops wars… breaks the bow, splinters the spear’ (Psalm 46:10). Let us pray to the Lord for peace.”

The Israeli army denied the charges and got in a snit about a “blood libel.” But when you are the 17th most powerful military in the world and you genocide 20,000 civilians in 11 weeks, there isn’t any libel involved. It is just blood.

Israelis with a conscience, such as activist Orly Noy, the chairman of the human rights organization, B’Tselem, in contrast called desperately for a ceasefire. This issue isn’t about Judaism or Islam or Christianity, since there are people from each of those traditions who are on opposite sides of it.

As for Lutheran Pastor Munther Isaac, on Friday he preached a sermon, “Christ in the Rubble.”

He cited the enormity of the death toll, including of thousands of children, and said that as in the case of South African Apartheid the theology of the state has been wielded against the helpless. Not even that some Palestinians are Christians has evoked sympathy in European and American Christians. “This war has confirmed to us that the world does not see us as equal. Maybe it is the color of our skin. Maybe it is because we are on the wrong side of the political equation. Even our kinship in Christ did not shield us. As they said, if it takes killing 100 Palestinians to get a single “Hamas militant” then so be it! We are not humans in their eyes. (But in God’s eyes… no one can tell us we are not!).”

He implicitly referred to US Evangelicals, many of whom have enthusiastically cheered on the Israeli army’s genocidal (my word) actions.

“I feel sorry for you. We will be ok. Despite the immense blow we have endured, we will recover. We will rise and stand up again from the midst of destruction, as we have always done as Palestinians, although this is by far the biggest blow we have received in a long time.

But again, for those who are complicit, I feel sorry for you. Will you ever recover from this?”

No, I don’t think this campaign’s supporters ever will regain their souls, which they have sold for the thirty silver coins of conformism, militarism, cowardice and Islamophobia.

Pastor Isaac went on:

“In our pain, anguish, and lament, we have searched for God, and found him under the rubble in Gaza. Jesus became the victim of the very same violence of the Empire. He was tortured. Crucified. He bled out as others watched. He was killed and cried out in pain – My God, where are you?

In Gaza today, God is under the rubble.

And in this Christmas season, as we search for Jesus, he is to be found not on the side of Rome, but our side of the wall. In a cave, with a simple family. Vulnerable. Barely, and miraculously surviving a massacre. Among a refugee family. This is where Jesus is found.”

So he inspired me to a digital painting. I’ll leave you with it.

“Gaza Guernica 19: Nativity,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v.3, PS Express, IbisPaint, 2023.

Book excerpt: A pastor comes to terms with the Church’s idols of Trump, money and power

Red State Christians:  A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage it leaves behind,” available everywhere books are sold.

( Minnesota Reformer ) – On Sunday, January 10, 2021, I woke up early, stepped out my back door into frigid, biting air, and drove from one America into another.

I drove from leafy, liberal southwest Minneapolis, west from metro Highway 62 onto US Route 212, which runs from Minnesota into South Dakota, dead-ending in Yellowstone National Park in wild, ultra-conservative Wyoming.

I wasn’t going that far today. Just fifty-five miles or so through purple Carver County, which flipped in 2020 to Biden from Trump in 2016, helping ensure that Minnesota stayed blue, into further west and rural McLeod County, where Donald Trump won 67 percent of the vote two months earlier.

I drove into red America to lead a tiny rural church in worship that Sunday morning, but before I did so, I took a deep breath and  told my church members about the time that I was a victim of right-wing white Christian terrorism.

Maybe terrorism is too strong a word, but I was terrified when Breitbart News took a screenshot of my interview on CNN in December 2019 and blasted it across their front page. They initially called me a “liberal pastor” who said American Christians had “lost the gospel of Jesus Christ” and instead embraced a gospel of wealth, power, and Christian nationalism.

Breitbart didn’t misquote me, but their framing of the interview led to a barrage of online harassment and threats, from the bizarre (a message suggesting my “swollen, lumpy throat” indicated cancer) to the scary (bleak and violent threats).

I combed my online presence and made sure my home address wasn’t visible anywhere. I ensured Facebook posts with pictures of my kids were no longer public for the most part. But Breitbart’s goal wasn’t actually to harm me or my family. 

It was to silence me. 

My clear analysis of the distortion of the gospel in American Christianity posed a threat to the right-wing white Christian empire of wealth and power, an empire encompassing publishing houses, TV networks, churches, colleges, universities, and schools. It shakes hands with corporate America to ensure that no one upsets the apple cart of an agreement first made in imperial Rome some 1,700 years ago, when Emperor Constantine first attempted to colonize Christianity under the guise of empire.

For all these years since, biblical Christianity — forged in the cross, humility, and poverty — has been at war with a co-opted Christianity that forgets Jesus’s gospel of liberation and instead seeks to use his story to entrench wealth and power in the hands of a few white men.

Click Here.

This battle has ebbed and flowed over the years through the Reformation in Europe and the colonization and subjugation of Africa by so-called Christian missionaries. It has continued through the rise of the Black Church in America, abolitionism and the Civil Rights Movement, the reckoning of clergy abuse crises in the Catholic church, to America in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with a white American Church that blatantly sold itself out on the altar of power and money, culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

My rural church members weren’t really thinking about any of this when they jammed their Trump flags into the ground next to their cornfields in September 2016. For them, mostly farmers, factory workers, medical workers, teachers, and police officers, voting for Trump was axiomatic. To be a rural, white American Christian obviously meant being a Republican. And Trump gave them permission to have a little fun, to stick their thumb in the eye of those annoying liberal elites in Minneapolis and Washington, DC, who had no idea how hard it really was to work for a living. 

For them, Trump wasn’t like that. He said the quiet parts out loud, cursed, and laughed. But also, they earnestly hoped, he prayed and really did care for the “rights of the unborn.”

With a halting voice, I told my congregation anyway how it felt when I watched would-be insurrectionists carry Bibles and Christian flags into the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, suggesting that their violent overthrow of a democratic election was God-ordained. 

I felt vulnerable saying these things, but I also trusted that my congregation would listen. We had a shared bond, a shared trust, a shared relationship. I baptized their babies and stood vigil in my clergy collar at the local cemetery as a military band played taps and a veteran’s ashes were laid to rest. I led prayer at the local Memorial Day picnic after rounds were fired into the air, the names of lives lost were read, and children scattered into the street to grab the spent bullets.

They knew that I’d marched with clergy for racial justice after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin just six miles from my home. They hadn’t all liked it very much that their pastor was out there supporting “the Blacks,” as some people put it. But others sent me messages about their Black family members and the racism they’d faced in rural Minnesota. They were glad I was bearing witness on behalf of a Savior who did not come to redeem only white Americans.

We’d settled into an uneasy truce, my church and I. They tolerated my NPR and CNN appearances, but they preferred it when I quoted country songs in my sermons and we could joke together about my former career as a sportswriter. Gingerly, we trusted each other, forgave each other, and listened to each other.

Even though I knew better — that the roots of rot in American Christianity went far deeper than Trump — I briefly retreated into my white, middle-class privilege and imagined that an election could make it all go away. 

When Joe Biden was finally declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election on November 7, 2020, four days after Election Day, I naively thought the raging battle could finally end. The big orange albatross around the neck of the American church could be sloughed off, and we could return to debates around liturgy and music. 

I knew deep down that what had been revealed in the past four years meant we could never return to what was, but nostalgia tempted me to believe that maybe the hatred and division and racism wrought into white American Christianity weren’t as bad as I had thought. The trouble in the church and in our country was somewhere else, some other Christians — but not most of us, or not the people and churches I knew. Surely, I could insulate myself from feeling further pain or distress, maybe pretend it had all been a bad dream.

On Sunday, January 10, I couldn’t believe that anymore. I’d known deep down that Trump was a symptom, not a cause. I’d known the idolatry of wealth and power had deep, deep roots in American Christianity, and that our worship of whiteness was just conveniently claimed by Trump, revealed by him, and that his absence from the Oval Office would not absolve our sins.

A part of me thought the very good Christians of my church’s little rural Midwestern town would take down their Trump flags on their own after the attempted insurrection. I thought they’d see the lives lost at the Capitol, the willful assault on American democracy, the shouts of the n-word at the Capitol police officers from the Trump-supporting rioters, and decide that simply wasn’t the association they wanted to claim any longer.

Like I said, I was naive. For many of the good white Christians I knew — not only in my church’s little town but across America, whom I’d interviewed for this book throughout 2018 — and for my dear friends and family members, January 6 was nothing to be ashamed of. Violence had always been necessary to sustain wealth and power for the white ruling class, and violence was also required to sustain the support of the rural white Christians who’d tied their fate to their economic overlords in New York City, California, and DC, with Rs behind their names.

As I concluded my story about the threats I’d received for simply suggesting that Jesus would not condone the violent and racist Christianity lifted by Trump and the Republican Party, I made a request of the Christians I loved in this little Midwestern church.

I asked them if now, two months post-election, maybe they’d consider taking down those Trump flags. I asked them if maybe they could see now what those flags had come to represent: much, much more than merely conservative politics. I asked them to see that by continuing to fly those flags, they were condoning violence and hatred.

They were saying to me, to Black people, to immigrants, to LGBTQ people, to anyone who didn’t fit into their desired white Christian box, that we did not belong and were not welcome in their town. I honestly didn’t think it was that much to ask. The election was long past. I’d spent a lot of time now not just in this little town but in red states and counties across America, and I’d trusted that the Christians and Christian leaders I’d met really didn’t want to send a message of violent exclusion and hatred. So, I thought if I could just explain it in the right way, show them how much it hurt ordinary people like me, for example, maybe the insanity could end. We could rebuild the American church again on the foundation of civil rights, and children’s rights, and the dignity of the human soul.

No one said much to me that Sunday. Most of the church was watching online due to the raging pandemic of COVID-19 that had hit our county hard. When it was time to go back home, I realized I was almost out of gas. There was a little double-sided pump just a block away from church, across from the Congregational church that no longer had a pastor, next to a vending machine that sold cans of pop to schoolkids who drove up on four-wheelers after class.

I pulled up to the pump and opened my door, aware of a prickly sensation running up and down my arms as I stepped out of the car. I shivered as the icy air hit my cheeks, but this feeling was not limited to the Minnesota winter weather. Here, in this little town where I knew almost everyone and almost everyone was related, across the street from the police station where I had the chief’s cell phone number, I tasted the bleak metallic tang of fear.

I’d just had the audacity — me, a woman pastor of all things — to suggest to these people that they needed to smash their idols, to tear down the objects in which they’d placed their faith. They wouldn’t like it. They’d be mad. They had guns.

Reading this now and thinking about the kindly elderly folks who attend my Bible study, I feel a little embarrassed that I was afraid. No one was going to do anything to me. Right? Right?

Probably not. But like Breitbart News, the intention of the still-flying Trump flags in this little town was not really to hurt me. It was to make me be quiet. To question my words. To refrain from telling the truth about what happened to the gospel in white Christian America.

I began writing the first version of this book almost four years ago, a year after leaving my Southern California megachurch, when it became clear that my writing critical of Trump would not be tolerated by my church’s biggest financial backers. I had approached my travels across red, conservative Christian America with an open heart and a desire for empathy, hoping that I would somehow find reason and understanding, common ground and forgiveness. I found those things in pieces: in a dying congregation while receiving the Eucharist in Appalachia; at a youth group worship service in tony Newport Coast; and finally, while praying with my own Trump-supporting family members in rural Missouri. 

Four years later, my earnest and open heart has been torn in two.

Bright red “Make America Great Again, Again!” signs are popping up all over my church’s little town. Two families, whose homes I’d visited earlier that year, left the church without telling me. They left for male pastors and a more conservative denomination, saying they just didn’t “connect” with me and the “politics” were always an undertone of discontent. 

No matter how many times I prayed for military members and law enforcement officers and veterans, it didn’t matter. I prayed “too much” for racial justice. I’d had the audacity to talk about the Trump signs two months after the election. I’d stepped out of my prescribed place, so there was no longer room for mutual understanding or shared peace.

Sunday after Sunday, I’ve come back anyway to bow at the altar and lead the confession and forgiveness, even on the Sunday after I presided over my unvaccinated forty-three-year-old brother-in-law’s funeral, after his death to COVID-19. In these years of white Christian denialism and betrayal, the smell of death hangs in the air of all white American churches.

At the front of the church, behind the simple wooden altar, is the simple wooden cross. A condemned and dying Jesus watches us worship and listens to our economic anxieties and fears for our children and our planet. He judges our anger and violence, even while he is righteously angry at a church that has bought and sold his image for fame, power, money, influence, and Twitter followers.

With this Jesus in mind, this Jesus who is decisively not American and wholly not white, I invite you to read the rest of this book with his instructions in mind: “See, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

When I first wrote this book, I asked liberal readers to open their hearts to understand conservative Christians. I also held out hope that conservative Christians would read this book, appreciate its empathy towards them, and consider its conviction that the white American church’s idolatry of money and power and white supremacy was taking it further away from Jesus.

Four years later, I no longer hold much of that hope. How can I think my writing will do what nearly one million American deaths due to COVID-19 have failed to do? How can I imagine that people unmoved by a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol and an attempted assassination of the vice president will somehow read this book and rethink their entire belief system?

No, I am resigned that many have become irredeemably lost, left only to the work of the Holy Spirit. My hope is for the rest of you. The ones who aren’t yet convinced that Christianity is a fairy tale devised only for the wealthy and powerful, who worship white Jesus on Sunday and steal from the poor on Monday. My hope is for those of you who have abandoned hope that your salvation lies in the American church, but who still believe that somehow, somewhere, love, hope, faith, and — ultimately — truth really do exist. 

Rev. Angela Denker is a Lutheran pastor and journalist based in Minneapolis. She has written for Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, and FORTUNE magazine. Denker has appeared on CNN, BBC, SkyNews, and NPR to share her research on politics and Christian Nationalism. Her book, “Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump,” was the 2019 Silver Foreword Indies award-winner for political and social sciences. Subscribe to Angela’s Substack, I’m Listening, at angeladenker.substack.com.

Minnesota Reformer

The development came in the same month that the seven million US Lutherans came to a similar conclusion.

Eric Ledermann and Greg Brekke writing in the Presbyterian Outlook quote commissioner Leslie Latham as saying that she was initially reluctant to use the word Apartheid, but at length became convinced: “I changed my mind. … I realized we have to use this word. But, we must realize that Jesus, when he spoke to his enemies, always loved them. Loved them. Loved them. Loved them. So, we speak the truth about what is happening in Israel and Palestine. We speak the truth about what is happening in our own nation, in our own backyard. But we always do it in love, and not as a weapon.”

The Outlook goes on to report,

“In other actions, the committee recommended approval with a 31-0 vote of INT-13, designating May 15th as Palestinian Nakba Remembrance Day, and INT-04 by a vote of 30-0, which, among other things, calls on the General Assembly to approve a statement about the humanitarian concerns regarding Israel and Palestine, reject the doctrines of Christian Zionism, repudiate all forms of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and repudiate the move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in 2018. The committee also recommended approval 31-0 of INT-10, calling for an end to the Israeli government’s siege of the Gaza Strip” [on the grounds that it is a form of collective punishment, which is not allowed in international law].

The committee’s actions do not pass without controversy in the wider Presbyterian Church, many of whose pastors are pro-Israel, while other Presbyterians are engaged in interfaith dialogue with Jews and fear the effect on that dialogue of taking such a stance. Ms. Latham appears initially to have shared that fear.

On the other hand, the Presbyterian Church’s vigorous missionary work has made it global, and its Global South members tend to see the situation in the Israeli-Occupied Palestinian West Bank as very much in the mold of Apartheid South Africa. Indeed, the new head of the World Council of Churches, which groups the liberal mainline denominations, is a Presbyterian minister from South Africa, Rev. Jerry Pillay. He has been frank about his views of the Occupation of Palestinians as a form of Apartheid, and I guess he should know. In the Religion News article to which I just linked, his Jewish critics slip from complaining about his critique of the Occupation policies to saying he is “anti-Zionist.” But Zionism existed for nearly a century before the 1967 seizure of the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli army, so the occupation can’t be that central to Zionism. Then they equate anti-Zionism (which they have merely imputed to him) to antisemitism, and voila, his stance for Palestinian human rights is by sleight of hand turned into bigotry against Jews. It is dispiriting that Religion News isn’t more careful about these rhetorical magic tricks of the Zionist far right.

Anyway, many high-ranking Presbyterians are keenly aware of the systemic discrimination under Israeli military rule against Palestinians on the basis of their race. The Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II, stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), provoked a storm of controversy in his 2016 Martin Luther King Day address, in which he not only characterized the system under which Palestinians live as Apartheid but went on to liken it to a modern form of “slavery.”

Rev. Nelson has a point. I have myself written that “Just as slaves do not securely own any property, so Palestinians under Israeli occupation can never be sure they actually own their own homes, or farms, or crops, or olive orchards, which can be sabotaged or taken away by the armed Israeli squatters or by the government that backs them, at any time.”

Outlook editor Teri McDowell recently interviewed Rev. Nelson, an African-American who grew up on Orangeburg, South Carolina. He explained the roots of his stance:

“The first time I went to Israel/Palestine was with World Mission, and it was fascinating — not in a good way. I’m looking at Orangeburg, South Carolina, in the 1960s. I’m looking at something even worse than that, to be honest with you. And we are bringing food and supplies and having conversations with both sides. We go around to see good sites and we talk about it and debrief and then we come back, and we do it again. So, my question becomes: when people are suffering like this, why do we keep coming back to see the same thing? And in between that, there doesn’t seem to be any organized way of even speaking to it.

One of the pieces that triggered me [was when] a gentleman … came in and we were “listening to both sides.” Okay. I grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina. There are no “both sides.” This is wrong. But I had to listen to him talk in a way that just totally disregarded the Palestinian people. And I was supposed to be leading that session. Yeah. I got up and I walked out. I just couldn’t take anymore. It was in that moment that I realized I don’t need to come back here. I need to do something about it. And that’s what I was doing when I made the statement.”

He explained his reference to the treatment of the Palestinians as a form of slavery, “I think the second piece that folks struggled with was the issue of my equating this to slavery. This is the nomenclature that we know in the United States of America. I’m not talking to people in Israel/Palestine. I’m writing this statement for the people here in the United States of America.”

In 2015, the denomination resolved to boycott Israeli products produced by Israeli squatter-settlers on usurped West Bank Palestinian land, and to disinvest from corporations that enabled this land theft.

The United Church of Christ is a major liberal Protestant denomination in the United States, with 1.2 million members. It came out of a union over time of sections of four major streams of Protestantism that include the British Puritan/Pilgrim or Congregationalist heritage, Geneva Calvinism, a faction of German Lutherans, and the 1810 “Christian Church” formed on the American frontier. By 1959 all had come together in the UCC.

The UCC has a history of taking progressive stances. It ordained an openly gay minister in 1972, voted to affirm gay marriage in 2005 and voted to divest from fossil fuel companies in 2013. Churches from which it descends had fought slavery, ordained a Black pastor in the 1780s, and ordained a woman pastor in 1853.

The church recognizes the independence of each congregation, who are linked in regional or state conferences, and elect delegates to meetings of the nationwide General Synod. It is this body that voted the statement.

The church newsletter observed, “The Declaration was adopted with overwhelming support (462 yeas-78 nays-18 abstentions).”

The G.S. said,

“We affirm that all people living in Palestine and Israel are created in the image of God
and that this bestows ultimate dignity and sacredness to all;

Therefore, we reject any laws and legal procedures which are used by one race or
religion or political entity to enshrine one people in a privileged legal position at the
expense of another, including Israel’s apartheid system of laws and legal procedures.”

The UCC delegates firmly rejected the claims of religious Zionism alleging that Jews have a God-given right to Palestinian property, which produced a lot of squawking from religious Zionists. They also spurned “Christian Zionism,” a movement within Evangelicalism that sees the foundation of Israel and the establishment of Jewish squatter-settlements in the Palestinian West Bank as presaging the return of Christ.

The UCC denounces anti-Semitism but forcefully disputes the allegation that any criticism of policies of the state of Israel can be equated with anti-Jewish bigotry.

The UCC statement said,

“we reject the use of Scripture to claim a divine right to the land as the rationale for Israel’s illegal seizure and annexation of Palestinian land as well as the imposition of so-called peace agreements by Israel or the United States through the exercise of political and military domination that leaves Palestinians without equal rights, full citizenship, and the opportunity to thrive religiously, culturally, politically, and economically.”

They roundly attack efforts of the Israel lobbies to quash free speech on Palestine in the US and attempts to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement against the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories:

“We affirm the First Amendment constitutional right to freedom of speech and assembly to protest the actions of the State of Israel and to uphold the rights of Palestinians, including the use of economic measures to support justice as a First Amendment right and joining the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement by individuals, institutions, corporations, and religious bodies that advocate peace with justice or participate in any aspect of the use of economic measures to support justice.

Therefore, we reject the idea that any criticism of policies of the State of Israel is inherently antisemitic, in confession that some criticism is antisemitic in intent or impact, and we oppose the efforts of U.S. federal and state governments to limit free speech on university campuses and to restrict or ban support of the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.”

The full text of the UCC General Synod motion is as follows:

1
2
Submitted By: 3
4
Shalom United Church of Christ, New Haven, Connecticut 5
6
With the Concurrence Of: 7
8
First Church, United Church of Christ, Guilford, Connecticut 9
First Congregational Church, UCC, Old Lyme, Connecticut 10
Meriden Congregational Church, UCC, Meriden, New Hampshire 11
Union Congregational Church, UCC, Angels Camp, California 12
Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Carlsbad, California 13
14
SUMMARY 15
16
The resolution calls on the General Synod to adopt a Declaration on the Requirements for a Just 17
Peace Between Palestine and Israel articulating the principles that must be in place and honored 18
in any future just and peaceful relationship between Israel and Palestine. The Declaration 19
affirms that justice, understood both as adherence to the message of the Hebrew prophets and the 20
life and teachings of Jesus, as well as to applicable international laws, is the fundamental and 21
requisite principle which must guide a peaceful future for Israel and Palestine. It rejects a future 22
imposed by military power, illegal occupation and dispossession, or unilateral annexation of land 23
and the use of an imperialistic theology as justification. The Declaration pronounces Israel’s 24
continued oppression of the Palestinian people a sin, incompatible with the Gospel. It further 25
calls upon Local Churches, Conferences, and Associations to adopt this Declaration as their 26
plumbline to guide their support for the aspirations of our partners in the region and their 27
advocacy with the United States’ government for policies consistent with these principles. 28
The resolution draws on over fifty years of General Synod actions, statements by UCC officers, 29
and actions by Global Ministries and its historic component bodies. It is informed by the witness 30
of ecumenical partners, including the National Council of Churches, USA, and the World 31
Council of Churches, and it responds to the witness of our Palestinian Christian partners, and in 32
particular Kairos Palestine: A Word of Faith, Hope, and Love From the Heart of Palestinian 33
Suffering (2009) and Kairos Palestine: Cry for Hope, A Call for Decisive Action (2020). 34
35
The Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ reminds us that “God calls the church to 36
accept the cost and joy of discipleship. . . and resist the powers of evil.” The Declaration calls on 37
the United Church of Christ to engage in a costly act of solidarity and accompaniment with the 38
Palestinian people and to resist the oppressive dispossession, occupation, and economic and 39
military oppression of Palestine. 40
41
42
43
2

BIBLICAL, HISTORICAL, THEOLOGICAL GROUNDING 44
45
In Kairos Palestine: A Word of Faith, Hope, and Love From the Heart of Palestinian Suffering 46
(2009), Palestinian Christians assert that 47
48
our land has a universal mission. In this universality, the meaning of the promises, of the 49
land, of the election, of the people of God open up to include all of humanity, starting 50
from all the peoples of this land. In light of the teachings of the Holy Bible, the promise 51
of the land has never been a political programme, but rather the prelude to complete 52
universal salvation. It was the initiation of the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God on 53
earth” (Kairos Palestine par. 2.3). 54
55
The promise of God regarding land and blessing in Genesis was ultimately not about possession 56
of land, but about the role of the people of Israel as a blessing that “all the families of the earth 57
shall be blessed” (Genesis 12.3). 58
59
United Church of Christ biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes that “the Torah and the 60
world it evokes are beyond a possessed land, and this notion links to ‘a true community of all’ 61
that transcends any tribalism” (Chosen? Reading the Bible Amid the Israeli-Palestinian 62
Conflict,” 2015, p. 37). He goes on to quote Jewish philosopher Martin Buber: “This entire 63
history of the road from Ur of the Chaldees to Sinai is a consequence of choices and partings, 64
events of history – tribal history and national history. But above them stands revelation [which] 65
gives them their meaning, points out to them their goal. For the end of all these partings is a true 66
community of all men.” 67
68
In 1987 the General Synod affirmed its recognition that God’s covenant with the Jewish people 69
has not been rescinded or abrogated by God, but remains in full force, inasmuch as “the gifts and 70
the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29) – a clear rejection of Christian supersessionist 71
theology. Along with this, however, the General Synod in 2003 rejected the theological claims 72
of Christian Zionism which seek to privilege Jews in the modern State of Israel over others who 73
share the land, and instead, while recognizing “the diversity of biblical perspectives on the 74
question of a Jewish homeland,” also “affirms that all such perspectives should be grounded in 75
the message of justice and peace taught by Jesus and the biblical prophets.” That message is 76
summarized in the passage from Isaiah that Jesus quotes in Nazareth to inaugurate his ministry: 77
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. 78
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the 79
oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Isaiah 61.1-2; Luke 4.18-19). 80
Isaiah reminds us that the mere accumulation of property at the expense of justice and 81
righteousness offers only a barren future: “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to 82
field, until there is room for no one but you and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land” 83
(Isaiah 5.8). 84
85
3

The United Church of Christ, through its mission agencies, has maintained a close relationship 86
with the Palestinian Christian community, as well as the wider Arab population of Palestine. For 87
decades it has supported churches and church-related agencies, as well as human rights, 88
humanitarian, and social justice organizations in Palestine and Israel to the end that God’s 89
blessings might be shared by all in the land and that the violence and oppression that have 90
afflicted the region for over seventy years may end. 91
92
Consistent with these understandings, the General Synod has repeatedly called for the 93
implementation of a vision of the future for Israel and Palestine based on justice and security for 94
all and the principle of self-determination. In 1973 the General Synod affirmed that “peace and 95
security can be attained only through a just and stable political settlement that takes into account 96
the legitimate aspirations of all the peoples in the area and, particularly, the right to existence of 97
the State of Israel and the rights of the Palestinian Arabs.” In 1997 the General Synod called for 98
a negotiated agreement on the status of Jerusalem “that respects the human and political rights of 99
both Palestinians and Israelis, as well as the rights of the three religious communities.” 100
101
In 2005 the General Synod called upon United Church of Christ settings and members “to use 102
economic leverage, including, but not limited to: advocating the reallocation of US foreign aid so 103
that the militarization of the Middle East is constrained; making positive contributions to groups 104
and partners committed to the non-violent resolution of the conflict; challenging the practices of 105
corporations that gain from the continuation of the conflict; and divesting from those companies 106
that refuse to change their practices of gain from the perpetuation of violence, including the 107
Occupation.” Further, the same Synod in a resolution on Israel’s construction of the separation 108
barrier, called upon the Israeli government “to cease the project to construct the barrier, tear 109
down the segments that have already been constructed, and make reparations to those who have 110
lost homes, fields, property, and/or lives and health due to the barrier and its effects.” 111
112
In 2015 the General Synod called on United Church of Christ settings “to divest any direct or 113
substantive indirect holdings in companies profiting from or complicit in human rights violations 114
arising from the occupation of the Palestinian Territories by the state of Israel” and to “boycott 115
goods identified as produced in or using the facilities of illegal settlements located in the 116
occupied Palestinian territories.” In 2017 the General Synod called on Israel to honor the United 117
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, calling attention to the practice of military 118
detention for Palestinian children, denial of access to legal assistance, and the use of physical and 119
emotional abuse. Most recently, in 2019 the General Synod called for advocacy for Palestinian 120
refugees specifically as stipulated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948), and for 121
continued US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. 122
123
TEXT OF THE MOTION 124
WHEREAS for over seventy years Palestinian people have faced dispossession of their land, 125
displacement from their homes, a harsh military occupation, severe restrictions on travel, the 126
military detention of their children, home demolitions – over 120,000 to date and the constant 127
4

threat of more – and vast inequities in access to natural, economic, and medical resources when 128
compared to that enjoyed by Israeli citizens living in illegal West Bank settlements, and also on a 129
daily basis face severe restrictions on access to their olive groves, farms, and holy sites; [1] and 130
WHEREAS there are more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees registered with the United 131
Nations Relief and Works Administration representing a global displacement of Palestinian 132
people dating back to 1948 whose future status remains unresolved; [2] and 133
WHEREAS the Israeli government has maintained an illegal military occupation of Palestinian 134
territories since 1967 that includes the establishment of illegal Jewish-only settlements 135
throughout the West Bank and more recently has enacted formal discrimination against its Arab 136
citizens through the passage of the Nation State Law in 2018; [3] and 137
WHEREAS provocative actions under the Trump administration, including moving the U.S. 138
embassy to Jerusalem, the suspension of humanitarian aid to the United Nations Relief and 139
Works Administration, and support for Israel’s proposed illegal annexation of land in the 140
occupied West Bank have further injured the Palestinian community and imposed serious road 141
blocks to peace; [4] and 142
WHEREAS the Trump Administration’s Department of Education has issued a rule labeling any 143
criticism of the State of Israel as an antisemitic act in order to suppress advocacy for Palestinian 144
rights on university campuses, and has joined many state governments in further suppressing 145
freedom of speech in support of Palestinian civil society’s call for boycotts, divestment, and 146
sanctions; [5] and 147
WHEREAS actions by Israel, with tacit and overt support from the United States government, 148
have established conditions comparable to those in force under Jim Crow in the United States 149
south between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, with segregation laws that 150
enshrined systematic domination and oppression by whites over blacks. Israel’s acts of 151
domination and oppression include, but are not limited to adoption of the Nation State Law in 152
2018, the building of the separation barrier, implementation of a restrictive pass system for 153
Palestinians, the creation of Israeli-only highways through the West Bank, and imposed military 154
detention of Palestinian children accused of crimes; and 155
WHEREAS the General Synod of the United Church of Christ and its officers have for over 156
fifty years advocated for a negotiated process leading to a just peace between Israel and Palestine 157
marked by adherence to international law and international standards of human rights and 158
honoring the principle of self-determination and the rights of Palestinian refugees; [6] and 159
WHEREAS, reminiscent of historical examples such as the United States, Canada, Australia, 160
and Southern Africa, Israel exhibits a current-day form of settler colonialism [7], actively 161
engaged in the removal and erasure of the indigenous Palestinian population, through a matrix of 162
control that includes: the imposition of a harsh military occupation; the de facto annexation of 163
Palestinian lands and threats of further annexation; the expansion of illegal Jewish only 164
settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank; the contraction of Palestinian-controlled land; 165
and the restriction of travel for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; 166
5

WHEREAS Cry for Hope: A Call for Decisive Action issued by Palestinian Christian leaders 167
and theologians in July, 2020 [8], states that “the very being of the church, the integrity of the 168
Christian faith, and the credibility of the Gospel is at stake. We declare that support for the 169
oppression of the Palestinian people, whether passive or active, through silence, word or deed, is 170
a sin. We assert that Christian support for Zionism as a theology and an ideology that legitimize 171
the right of one people to deny the human rights of another is incompatible with the Christian 172
faith and a grave misuse of the Bible”; 173
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Thirty-Third General Synod of the United Church 174
of Christ adopts the following Declaration: 175
1. We affirm that the continued oppression of the Palestinian people remains, after more 176
than five decades of oppression of the Palestinian people, a matter of theological urgency 177
and represents a sin in violation of the message of the biblical prophets and the Gospel, 178
and that all efforts to defend or legitimate the oppression of the Palestinian people, 179
whether passive or active, through silence, word, or deed by the Christian community, 180
represent a fundamental denial of the Gospel. 181
Therefore, we reject the notion that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a purely 182
political problem outside the concern of the church or that the oppression of the 183
Palestinian people is an inevitable consequence of global or regional geopolitical 184
interests. 185
2. We affirm that the biblical narrative beginning with creation and extending through the 186
calling of the Israelites, the corrective admonitions of the prophets, the incarnation and 187
ministry of Jesus and the witness of the apostles to the “ends of the earth” . . . speaks of 188
God’s blessing extending to “all the families of the earth.” (Genesis 12.3) 189
Therefore, we reject any theology or ideology including Christian Zionism, 190
Supercessionism, antisemitism or anti-Islam bias that would privilege or exclude 191
any one nation, race, culture, or religion within God’s universal economy of grace. 192
3. We affirm that all people living in Palestine and Israel are created in the image of God 193
and that this bestows ultimate dignity and sacredness to all; 194
Therefore, we reject any laws and legal procedures which are used by one race or 195
religion or political entity to enshrine one people in a privileged legal position at the 196
expense of another, including Israel’s apartheid system of laws and legal procedures. 197
4. We affirm that all peoples have the right to self-determination and to their aspirations for 198
sovereignty and statehood in the shaping of their corporate religious, cultural, and political 199
life, free from manipulation or pressure from outside powers, and that a just resolution of 200
conflicting claims is only achieved through the equal protection of civil rights, the fair and 201
just sharing of land and resources, and peaceful negotiation based on international law and 202
UN resolutions. 203
6

Therefore, we reject the use of Scripture to claim a divine right to the land as the 204
rationale for Israel’s illegal seizure and annexation of Palestinian land as well as the 205
imposition of so-called peace agreements by Israel or the United States through the 206
exercise of political and military domination that leaves Palestinians without equal 207
rights, full citizenship, and the opportunity to thrive religiously, culturally, 208
politically, and economically. 209
5. We affirm the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes if they so choose or 210
to be compensated for their loss of property, consistent with UN General Assembly 211
resolution 194 (1948). 212
Therefore, we reject the denial of this right, just as we reject efforts to manipulate 213
internationally-agreed upon definitions of refugees to attempt to erase this right 214
which extends across generations. 215
6. We affirm the First Amendment constitutional right to freedom of speech and assembly 216
to protest the actions of the State of Israel and to uphold the rights of Palestinians, 217
including the use of economic measures to support justice as a First Amendment right and 218
joining the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement by individuals, 219
institutions, corporations, and religious bodies that advocate peace with justice or 220
participate in any aspect of the use of economic measures to support justice. 221
Therefore, we reject the idea that any criticism of policies of the State of Israel is 222
inherently antisemitic, in confession that some criticism is antisemitic in intent or 223
impact, and we oppose the efforts of U.S. federal and state governments to limit free 224
speech on university campuses and to restrict or ban support of the international 225
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. 226
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that national setting of the United Church of Christ send the 227
text of this Declaration to Local Churches, Associations and Conferences; and 228
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that all settings of the United Church of Christ be encouraged 229
to receive this Declaration as a prophetic call for renewed and continued advocacy for a just 230
peace in Palestine and Israel and use it as a plumbline for taking action, including, for example: 231
a. Committing to hearing the voices of Palestinians regarding their situation, including the 232
voices of Palestinian Christians through the study of Palestine Liberation Theology, 233
attention to statements and appeals such as Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth (2009) 234
and a Cry for Hope (2020), participation in travel seminars that expose visitors to the 235
Palestinian community, and use of resources from Global Ministries of the United Church 236
of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). 237
b. Implementing the calls of prior General Synod resolutions, including the 2015 238
Resolution, “A Call for the United Church of Christ to Take Actions Toward a Just Peace 239
in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” and the 2017 Resolution, “A Call for the United 240
7

Church of Christ to Advocate for the Rights of Children Living Under Israeli Military 241
Occupation.” 242
c. Examining critically our use and interpretations of Scripture as well as liturgies and 243
hymns that equate ancient Biblical Israel with the modern state in ways that promote 244
settler colonialism and the dispossession of Palestinian land, rights, and cultural 245
expressions. 246
d. Offering support and encouragement to college students and faculty members as well as 247
the human rights groups (including Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for 248
Peace, American Muslims for Palestine, and many other allied groups), whose freedom to 249
speak, witness and advocate on university campuses is threatened in any way by state or 250
local governments, or by college administrators. 251
e. Advocating for the cessation of U.S. military aid to Israel until such time that Palestinian 252
human rights, civil rights, and self-determination are fully realized and protected in 253
compliance with international law, US laws on foreign military assistance, and the 254
principles of human rights. 255
f. Supporting the full restoration of US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works 256
Agency which carries out critical services by and for Palestinian refugees, and 257
encouraging continued support for UCC partners which serve Palestinian refugees. 258
g. Demanding that the plight of Palestinian refugees be addressed by Israel and the 259
international community based on United Nations Resolution 194 guaranteeing that 260
“refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should 261
be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid 262
for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property 263
which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the 264
Governments or authorities responsible.” 265
FUNDING: The funding for the implementation of the Resolution will be made in accordance 266
with the overall mandates of the affected agencies and the funds available. 267
IMPLEMENTATION: The Officers of the Church, in consultation with appropriate ministries 268
or other entities within the United Church of Christ, will determine the implementing body. 269
270
Footnotes 271
(1) Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions: https://icahd.org/ 272
(2) United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East: 273
https://www.unrwa.org/ 274
(3) https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-nation-state-law-bill-275
explained-apartheid-netanyahu-democracy 276
(4) https://www.globalministries.org/ecumenical_statement_on_current_u_s_policy_and_isra277
el_palestine 278
8

https://www.globalministries.org/ucc_disciples_leaders_issue_joint_statement_in_respon279
se_to_the_peace_and_prosperity_proposal 280
https://www.globalministries.org/not_peace_but_apartheid_b_tselem_s_brief_response_t281
o_the_trump_plan 282
https://www.globalministries.org/ucc_disciples_leaders_issue_statement_on_israeli_settl283
ements 284
(5) https://forward.com/fast-forward/410044/trump-education-dept-adopts-controversial-285
new-definition-of-anti-semitism/ 286
https://palestinelegal.org/news/2018/9/11/kenneth-marcus-adopts-controversial-287
antisemitism-definition-at-doe-with-no-public-notice-reopens-dismissed-rutgers-case-288
from-2014?rq=anti-semitism%20department%20of%20education 289
(6) https://www.globalministries.org/mee_resolutions 290
(7) https://www.wrmea.org/israel/palestine/how-settler-colonialism-can-help-us-understand-291
israel-and-the-us.html 292
https://www.globalministries.org/ameu_s_the_link_the_decolonizing_of_palestine_towar293
ds_a_one_state_solution_by_jeff_halper 294
(8) Kairos Palestine and Global Kairos for Justice: https://www.cryforhope.org/ 295

The Kairos Document, produced by Palestinian Christians in 2009, says,

““Our word is a cry of hope, with love, prayer and faith in God. We address it first of all to ourselves and then to all the churches and Christians in the world, asking them to stand against injustice and apartheid, urging them to work for a just peace.”

We proclaim our word based on our Christian faith and our sense of Palestinian belonging – a word of faith, hope and love.

We declare that the military occupation of Palestinian land constitutes a sin against God and humanity. Any theology that legitimizes the occupation and justifies crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people lies far from Christian teachings.

We urge the international community to stand with the Palestinian people in their struggle against oppression, displacement, and apartheid.

We demand that all people, political leaders and decision-makers put pressure on Israel and take legal measures in order to oblige its government to end its oppression and disregard for international law.

We hold a clear position that non-violent resistance to this injustice is a right and duty for all Palestinians, including Christians.

We support Palestinian civil society organizations, international NGOs and religious institutions that call on individuals, companies and states to engage in boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the Israeli occupation.”

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Rifat Kassis – Kairos Palestine for UCC PIN

White evangelicals fought fiercely for Republicans this year. They gave about 80 percent of their votes to President Trump and strongly favored conservatives in state elections. These born-again fundamentalists have shrunk to only 15 percent of America’s population, but they’re so politically intense that they were 28 percent of voters who went to the polls. Undoubtedly, they tipped some marginal states to the GOP, causing early Democratic consternation on election night. But they couldn’t swing the whole nation. And maybe – with the relentless decline of religion – they never can do so again. Let us hope.

The rise and fall of right-wing, born-again politics is a significant episode in America’s history. Until after World War II, many fundamentalists shunned government, choosing to ignore this world and focus on heaven and hell instead. But white evangelicals – the most racist element of society, some research says – were jolted by several breakthroughs that threatened their vision of America as a Christian “city on a hill” favored by God.

Victories by the civil rights movement and integration of public schools upset conservative white believers. So did the loss of tax exemption by Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist school that first banned blacks, then forbade interracial dating.

Halting of school prayer in the 1960s – followed by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision – coupled with the rise of feminism – and gays coming out of the closet – and the sexual revolution with racy magazines and movies – and the end of censorship and “blue laws” – these and more made white evangelicals feel their country had turned against them. It drove them into politics.

First, evangelist Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority to mobilize redneck religion behind the Republican Party. Then evangelist Pat Robertson followed with the Christian Coalition. Election after election, born-again white faith was turned into a huge political machine. GOP strategist Karl Rove helped spur this powerhouse to elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Later, it put George W. Bush into the White House.

In their heyday, around 1990, white evangelicals were one-fourth of America’s population. Their soaring political clout meshed well with the “southern strategy” of former President Richard Nixon, who exploited Dixie racism to shift Sunbelt states to the GOP.. The combination of Jesus and white supremacy produced a conservative political juggernaut.

However, a demographic tide began to flow left. America started losing its religion. People who say their faith is “none” became an amazing sociological phenomenon, suddenly doubling in the 1990s, then climbing rapidly to one-fourth of the populace. Among young adults under 40, the churchless ratio is much higher. This godless group generally holds compassionate, liberal political views and has become the largest faith segment in the Democratic Party base.

Meanwhile, religion suffered relentless decline. White evangelists fell from one-fourth to only 15 percent of the public. Respected “mainline” Protestants lost enormously, and Catholics were battered by never-ending pedophile scandals.

Rising “nones” and sinking born-agains have far-reaching political implications – boosting Democrats and eroding the GOP. Many researchers have traced this sociological shift.

Was 2020 a watershed point, when the “religious right” slipped too far downhill to be decisive in forthcoming elections? Keep your fingers crossed and hope that the future will confirm this blessed prospect.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Holy Koolaid: “Evangelicals Freak Out”

U.S. Christians, especially evangelical Christians, identify as environmentalists at very low rates compared to the general population. According to a Pew Research Center poll from May 2020, while 62% of religiously unaffiliated U.S. adults agree that the Earth is warming primarily due to human action, only 35% of U.S. Protestants do – including just 24% of white evangelical Protestants.

Politically powerful Christian interest groups publicly dispute the climate science consensus. A coalition of major evangelical groups, including Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, launched a movement opposing what they describe as “the false worldview” of environmentalism, which supposedly is “striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control.”

Studies show that belief in miracles and an afterlife is associated with lower estimates of the risks posed by climate change. This raises the question: Does religion itself predispose people against climate science?

Surveys of people around the world, as well as social science research on denial, suggest the answer to this question is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

Where religion and science can’t be reconciled

An automatic resistance to science would seem to make sense for some religious believers.

There are several ways that core aspects of modern scientific knowledge tend to undermine literalist or fundamentalist readings of religious texts. In particular, evolution by natural selection, the central concept underlying the biological sciences, is utterly incompatible with most creationist faith traditions.

Religion offers the comforts of a measure of control and reassurance via an omnipotent deity that can be placated by ritual. In contrast, the scientist’s naturalistic universe offers neither an intrinsic moral order nor a final reward, which can be unsettling for the devout and in conflict with their faith.

Because of these mismatches, one might expect those with a strong religious affiliation to be reflexively suspicious of scientific findings. Indeed, in a large international survey, 64% of those who described religion as an “important part” of their life said they would side with their religious teachings in a disagreement between science and their religion. Other studies find that, for the faithful, religion and science are at odds as ultimate explanations for natural phenomena.

Climate science denial may stem more from politics than religion

Social scientist Dan Kahan rejects the idea of an automatic link between religiosity and any anti-science bias. He argues that religiosity only incidentally tracks science denial because some scientific findings have become “culturally antagonistic” to some identity groups.

According to Kahan’s data, identification as a political conservative, and as white, is much more predictive of rejecting the climate consensus than overall religiosity. He argues that anti-science bias has to do with threats to values that define one’s cultural identity. There are all kinds of topic areas wherein people judge expert qualifications based on whether the “expert” confirms or contradicts the subject’s cherished view.

Social scientist Donald Braman agrees that science denial is context dependent. He points out that while conservative white males are more likely to be skeptics on global warming, different demographic groups disagree with experts on other particular topics.

For example, where a conservative person invested in the social and economic status quo might feel threatened by evidence for global warming, liberal egalitarians might be threatened by evidence, say, that nuclear waste could be safely stored underground.

As I explain in my book, “The Truth About Denial”, there’s ample evidence for a universal human tendency toward motivated reasoning when faced with facts that threaten one’s ideological worldview. The motivated reasoner begins with a conclusion to which he or she is committed, and assesses evidence or expertise according to whether it supports that conclusion.

White American evangelicals trend very strongly toward political conservatism. They also exhibit the strongest correlation, among any faith group, between religiosity and either climate science denial or a general anti-science bias.

Meanwhile, African-American Protestants, who are theologically aligned with evangelical Protestants but politically aligned with progressives, show some of the highest levels of climate concern.

North America is the only high-income region where people who follow a religion are substantially more likely to say they favor their religious teachings over science when disagreements arise. This finding is driven mainly by politically conservative U.S. religious denominations – including conservative Catholics.

A major new study looking at data from 60 countries showed that, while religiosity in the U.S. is correlated with more negative attitudes about science, you don’t see this kind of association in many other countries. Elsewhere, religiosity is sometimes even correlated with disproportionately positive attitudes about science.

And the U.S. is generally an outlier in terms of attitudes toward human-caused global warming: Fewer Americans accept the climate science consensus than residents of most other countries.

All this would suggest that climate science resistance has more to do with cultural identity politics than religiosity.

Which comes first?

But the available evidence cuts both ways. A landmark study from the 1980s suggested that fundamentalist religious traditions are associated with a commitment to human dominion over nature, and that this attitude may explain anti-environmentalist positions.

Even after controlling for political ideology, those committed to an “end-times theology” – like U.S. evangelicals – still show a greater tendency to oppose the scientific consensus on environmental issues.

[Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Perhaps some specific theologies bias the believer against the idea that human beings could be responsible for the end of humanity. This bias could show up as an automatic rejection of environmental science.

We are left with something of a “chicken and egg” problem: Do certain religious communities adopt politically conservative positions on climate change because of their religious tradition? Or do people adopt a religious tradition that stresses human dominion over nature because they were raised in a politically conservative community? The direction of causation here may be difficult to resolve.

It wouldn’t be surprising to find either religious dogmatism or political conservatism linked with anti-science attitudes – each tends to favor the status quo. Fundamentalist religious traditions are defined by their fixed doctrines. Political conservatives by definition favor the preservation of the traditional social and economic order.

Consider that perhaps the single essential aspect of the scientific method is that it has no respect for cultural traditions or received views. (Think of Galileo’s findings on the motion of the Earth, or Darwin on evolution.) Some would argue that scientific inquiry’s “constant onslaught on old orthodoxies” is the reason both conservatives and frequent churchgoers report a decreasing overall trust in science which continues to this day.

Even if politics and culture rather than religion itself may be driving climate science denial, religious communities – as some religious leaders, including the Roman Catholic Pope, have recognized – bear a responsibility to exercise some self-awareness and concern for well-being rather than blindly denying the overwhelming consensus on a civilization-ending threat like human-caused global warming.

Adrian Bardon, Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“He’s following the radical left agenda, take away your guns, destroy your second amendment, no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God … He’s against God,” President Donald Trump told supporters during a recent trip to Ohio.

Trump was speaking about Joe Biden, the Democrat challenger for the White House. Never mind that Biden, a Catholic, has spoken openly and often about how his faith helped him cope with family tragedy, and wears rosary beads that belonged to his late son, Beau.

Trump’s statement echoed a strategy that paid dividends in the 2016 election and he is clearly hoping will do so again: appeal to the nation’s evangelicals using a political agenda wrapped in the language of faith.

Although a highly complex term which doesn’t lend itself to an easy definition, evangelicals generally believe in the literal truth of the Bible. They believe that the only way to salvation is through belief in Jesus Christ, and that salvation can only come through individual acceptance of God – often through a conversion or “born again” experience.

Studies suggest around a quarter of Americans consider themselves to be evangelical, although estimates vary. Eight out of ten white evangelicals supported Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

From hands-off to front and centre

Those who sought to revive the common 19th-century name evangelical during the second world war were just as politically active as their more contemporary descendants. They testified before congressional committees, organised letter writing campaigns, and published editorials and articles in religious publications to support or criticise policies of the day.

But while their politics often leaned to the right, these founders of the modern evangelical movement largely eschewed party politics – as my own ongoing research is exploring. “We are rejoicing,” Clyde Taylor, secretary of public affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), one of the major evangelical organisations in the mid-20th century, told members in early 1953, that the organisation, “has never allowed itself to become entangled with the political influences and parties of Washington.”

All that changed in the 1980s when close connections between the evangelical-influenced religious right and the administration of Ronald Reagan were developed consciously by conservative activists, both secular and religious, who saw advantages to creating greater ties between faith and politics.

Since the late 1980s religious conservatives have built networks of political, legal and social activism which have aggressively, and successfully, pushed their agenda into mainstream American politics.

Anti-Trump evangelicals

A recent Pew Research Center poll indicated that although Trump’s approval ratings among white evangelicals have slipped slightly to 72%, eight out of ten still say they would vote for him again in November.

Yet given the focus on evangelical Trump supporters, it’s easy to overlook the 19% of white evangelicals, and those evangelicals of colour, who did not support Trump in 2016. Among the most prolific and high profile are John Fea, Messiah College professor of history, and Randall Balmer, professor of religion at Dartmouth College.

But there are others, such as the Red Letter Christians, a group who seek to “live out Jesus’ counter-cultural teachings” and whose focus on social justice tends to see them allied more often with the political left. In December 2019, even the leading evangelical publication Christianity Today published a widely reported editorial supporting Trump’s impeachment.

Although these divisions run deep within the evangelical community, they have scarcely caused a ripple in American culture more generally. So why has the political impact of these anti-Trump evangelicals been relatively small?

First, the “evangelical left” has always struggled to achieve political impact, often attracting enthusiastic support but not huge numbers. Second, the anti-Trump category is so large and diverse, and based on so many different issues, that it’s easy for any one group to be submerged into the larger howl of protest.

And third, evangelicals are a diverse group who disagree on many issues. Significant as it is within the evangelical community, the evangelical left is probably neither big enough nor sufficiently cohesive to have much of an electoral impact in November.

Ramping up the rhetoric

When commentators say Trump is speaking evangelicals’ language, what they mean is not the language of theology and faith, but the language of politicised religion that has come to form a large part of what’s now frequently referred to as the “culture wars” in America.

Trump began employing this language during the 2016 campaign and has continued throughout his term in office. He has consistently claimed that people of faith are “under siege,” language which pointedly echoes a common refrain from evangelical leaders.

He also promised to “totally destroy” the Johnson amendment which bars non-profit organisations such as churches from endorsing or opposing particular candidates – although he hasn’t done so. And he became the first sitting president to address the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in 2020.

In this light, Trump’s claim that Biden poses a threat to the American faithful is part of a much longer history of the politicisation of conservative Christianity. It’s increasingly associated with issues such as free market capitalism, support for the state of Israel, abortion, gun ownership and religious liberty rights. The rhetoric, promises and symbolism has far outstripped the reality of policy change, but that does not appear to matter a great deal.

Evangelicals who feel that “America is becoming a more difficult place for them to live,” believe Trump hears their fears, takes them seriously, and responds. And such symbolism is working: in March, 81% of white evangelicals said the Trump administration had helped their constituency.

As the November election nears with Trump behind in the polls, expect him to turn more and more to those within his constituency, both secular and religious, on whom he has relied for affirmation and support. It’s likely there will be more claims of religious liberty under threat and more merging of religion with issues such as gun control, abortion and economic policy.

But evangelicals might heed a warning issued in 1950 by then NAE president, Stephen Paine, that evangelicals should be wary of increasing engagement with the government. They risked the state filling “the place which the Lord should be,” and officials telling them what they wanted to hear while failing to provide real answers. Neither state nor faith benefited from their mingling, he argued. It’s a warning that clearly echoes in the 2020 campaign.

Emma Long, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, University of East Anglia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

TYT The Conversation: “Why White Evangelicals Support Trump”

Trump has never been exactly what you would call a church-going man, preferring seedy trysts with porn stars and Playboy bunnies and barging into the dressing rooms of unclothed beauty contestants. So his alleged concern for church openings isn’t moved by the holy spirit but more like the lowly spirit.

Moreover, Trump called the Charlottesville neo-Nazis “very fine people,” and said he wanted to stop Muslims from coming to the US, so the likelihood he stays up at night worrying whether synagogues and mosques are open is low.

I wrote this week at Tomdispatch.com about the way right wing religion has made the pandemic worse, whether by urging congregations to defy the odds of infection or denying that the coronavirus can strike the true believers.

As Aylin Woodward writes at Business Insider, places of worship have sometimes been super-spreader hotspots. She notes,

“In early March, a 57-year-old Arkansas pastor and his wife attended church events and a bible study group a few days before they developed coronavirus symptoms. Of the 92 people they came into contact with at the church, 35 got sick. Seven had to be hospitalized. Three died. Contact tracers from the Arkansas Department of Health then discovered 26 more cases and one other death among people who reported contact with the churchgoers.”

Church collection plates in Chicago produced a similar result.

There’s nothing special in this regard about churches, synagogues or mosques. Infectious diseases just like big gatherings of people. Just talking loudly can spew air out at high velocities and expose people being addressed to a high viral load. That is why the University of California is not opening this fall.

The Roman Catholic Church and most mainstream Protestant churches are following scientific advice about social distancing. It is mainly a segment of evangelicals who are agitating for services to resume.

So here are the real reasons Trump called for churches to be opened

1. White evangelicals are the only segment of the US public, at some 16% of the population, who have never wavered in strongly supporting Trump. This is because in part they are single-issue voters and believe Trump will stack the Supreme Court so as to overturn Roe v. Wade and hence outlaw abortion. It is in part because white evangelicalism is sometimes a form of latent white supremacy. Otherwise, why is there a white Southern Baptist Convention and a Black Baptist church? If they are all Baptists, why not worship together? Some do, of course, and some evangelicals vote Democratic, so by no means all of them are pro-Trump or racist. But there is a problem here. To the extent that Trump wants to please this constituency, he would make pretty much any announcement they want.

2. Although evangelicals had stuck with Trump unreservedly until this spring, even their patience has been tested by his incompetent, lackadaisical and sometimes inhumane response to the coronavirus crisis. From mid-March to early May, he lost 6 points among them on his handling of the issue. That Pew poll would have sent the White House and Trump reelection campaign into a panic. Friday’s declaration in favor of reopening churches was meant to erase that loss of confidence.

3. Tom Strode at the Baptist Press reports that Southern Baptist leaders in Minnesota and California have remonstrated with the governors of those states
about closure orders that have allowed some retail stores to open on a limited basis but not churches. Minnesota, e.g., allows retail stores to fill half their capacity, but only lets 10 people attend worship services. The Southern Baptists argue that the First Amendment should allow them to operate freely.

The First Amendment prevents the Federal government from “establishing” a state religion. State constitutions have mirrored that clause. But the only way for a governor’s closure order to violate the First Amendment or its state equivalent would be for the governor to favor one religious group over another, which Minnesota and California have not done.

Although I’m sure some of the church officials who are upset are convinced that they need to hold services for the spiritual good of their congregations, it is also the case that people don’t tend to give a lot of money to churches when they don’t attend them, and a lot of pastors have run into a money crunch.

In any case, the opportunity for Trump at least rhetorically to stand with Southern Baptists against Democratic governor Tim Walz couldn’t be passed up, since Minnesota is a swing state for the presidential election and is a state Trump barely lost* in 2016. Whipping up enthusiasm on the religious Right is important to Trump if he is to have any hope of reelection.

4. Right wing churches are, quite illegally, actually ongoing campaign rallies for Trump. Churches are given tax exemptions, in return for which they are supposed to stay out of politics. But a lot of evangelical churches have gladly taken our tax money but then turned around and openly supported Trump. For them to remain closed is very inconvenient for Trump’s reelection campaign, depriving him of a key set of megaphones.

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Bonus Video:

10 Tampa Bay: “‘We’re not ready’: Churches hesitant to open despite President Trump’s blessing”

*Error corrected; the original text said ‘barely won.’

This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time in two countries that think of themselves as polar opposites and enemies: Supreme Leader Ali Khameini’s Iran and Donald Trump’s America.

On the U.S. side of things, New Orleans pastor Tony Spell, for instance, has twice been arrested for holding church services without a hint of social distancing, despite a ban on such gatherings. His second arrest was for preaching while wearing an ankle monitor and despite the Covid-19 death of at least one of his church members.

The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s famed Origin of the Species, arguing as it did for natural selection (which many American evangelicals still reject), might be considered the origin point for the modern conflict between religious beliefs and science, a struggle that has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Unexpectedly, given Iran’s reputation for religious obscurantism, the science-minded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often took heart from a collection of Persian poems, the Rubáiyát, or “quatrains,” attributed to the medieval Iranian astronomer Omar Khayyam, who died in 1131.

Edward FitzGerald’s loose translation of those poems, also published in 1859, put Khayyam on the map as a medieval Muslim free-thinker and became a century-and-a-half-long sensation in the midst of heated debates about the relationship between science and faith in the West. Avowed atheist Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney at the 1925 “monkey trial” of a Tennessee educator who broke state law by teaching evolution, was typical in his love of the Rubáiyát. He often quoted it in his closing arguments, observing that for Khayyam the “mysticisms of philosophy and religion alike were hollow and bare.”

To be fair, some religious leaders, including Pope Francis and Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, have followed the most up-to-date science, as Covid-19 spread globally, by supporting social-distancing measures to deal with the virus. When he still went by the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and lived in Buenos Aires, the Pope earned a high school chemical technician’s diploma and actually knows something about science. Indeed, the Catholic Church in Brazil has impressively upheld the World Health Organization’s guidelines for dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, defying the secular government of far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, that country’s Donald Trump. Brazil’s president has notoriously ignored his nation’s public-health crisis, dismissed the coronavirus as a “little flu,” and tried to exempt churches from state government mandates that they close. The archbishop of the hard-hit city of Manaus in the Amazon region has, in fact, publicly complained that Brazilians are not taking the virus seriously enough as it runs rampant in the country. Church authorities worry about the strain government inaction is putting on Catholic hospitals and clinics, as well as the devastation the disease is wreaking in the region.

Here, we witness not a dispute between religion and science but between varieties of religion. Pope Francis’s Catholicism remains open to science, whereas Bolsonaro, although born a Catholic, became an evangelical and, in 2016, was even baptized as a pastor in the Jordan River. He now plays to the 22% of Brazilians who have adopted conservative Protestantism, as well as to Catholics who are substantially more conservative than the current pope. While some U.S. evangelicals are open to science, a Pew Charitable Trust poll found that they, too, are far more likely than the non-religious to reject the very idea of evolution, not to speak of the findings of climate science (action on which Pope Francis has supported in a big way).

Death in the Bible Belt

In the U.S., a variety of evangelical religious leaders have failed the test of reasoned public policy in outrageous ways. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, railing at “tyrannical government,” refused to close his mega-church in Florida until the local police arrested him in March. He even insisted that church members in those services of 500 or more true believers should continue to shake hands with one another because “we’re raising up revivalists, not pansies.”

As he saw it, his River Tampa Bay Church was the “safest place” around because it was the site of “salvation.” Only in early April did he finally move his services online and it probably wasn’t to protect the health of his congregation either. His insurance company had cancelled on him after his arrest and his continued defiance of local regulations.

Click here

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis muddied the waters further in early April by finally issuing a statewide shelter-in-place order that exempted churches as “essential services.” Then, after only a month, he abruptly reopened the state anyway. DeSantis, who had run a Facebook group dominated by racist comments and had risen on Donald Trump’s coattails, has a sizeable evangelical constituency and, in their actions, he and Pastor Howard-Browne have hardly been alone.

It tells you all you need to know that, by early May, more than 30 evangelical pastors had died of Covid-19 across the Bible Belt.

Two Epicenters of the Pandemic

In the Muslim equivalent of the Bible Belt, the clerical leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, stopped shaking hands and limited visits to his office in early February, but he let mass commemorations of the 41st anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Republic go forward unimpeded. Then, on February 24th, he also allowed national parliamentary elections to proceed on hopes of entrenching yet more of his hardline fundamentalist supporters — the equivalent of America’s evangelicals — in Iran’s legislature. Meanwhile, its other religious leaders continued to resist strong Covid-19 mitigation measures until late March, even as the country was besieged by the virus. Deputy Minister of Health Iraj Harirchi caught the spirit of the moment by rejecting social-distancing measures in February while downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak in his country, only to contract Covid-19 himself and die of it.

The virus initially exploded in the holy city of Qom, said to have been settled in the eighth century by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s filled with a myriad of religious seminaries and has a famed shrine to one of those descendants, Fatima Masoumeh. In late February, even after government officials began to urge that the shrine be closed, its clerical custodians continued to call for pilgrims to visit it. Those pilgrims typically touch the brass latticework around Fatima Masoumeh’s tomb and sometimes kiss it, a classic method for passing on the disease. Its custodians (like those American evangelical pastors) continued to believe that the holiness of the shrine would protect the pilgrims. They may also have been concerned about their loss of income if pilgrims from all over the world stopped showing up.

Despite having a theocratic government in which clerics wield disproportionate power, Iran also has a significant and powerful scientific and engineering establishment that looks at the world differently, even if some of them are also devout Shiite Muslims. In the end, as the virus gripped the country and deaths spiked, the scientists briefly won and the government of President Hassan Rouhani instituted some social-distancing measures for the public, including canceling Friday prayers and closing shrines in March, though — as in Florida — those measures did not last long.

In this way, as the U.S. emerged as the global epicenter of the pandemic, so Iran emerged as its Middle Eastern one. Call it an irony of curious affinity. Superstition was only part of the problem. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif blamed the Trump administration’s sanctions and financial blockade of the country for the government’s weak response, since the Iranians had difficulty even paying for much-needed imported medical equipment like ventilators. Indeed, the U.S. government has also had Iran kicked off global banking exchanges and threatened third-party sanctions against any companies doing business with it.

President Trump, however, denied that the U.S. had blockaded medical imports to that country, a statement that was technically true, but false in any other sense. The full range of U.S. sanctions had indeed erected a formidable barrier to Iran’s importation of medical equipment, despite attempts by the European Union (which opposes Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran) to allow companies to sell medical supplies to Tehran.

Still, as with Trump’s policies in the U.S. (including essentially ignoring the virus for months), Iranian government policy must be held significantly responsible for the failure to stem the coronavirus tide, which by early May had, according to official figures, resulted in more than 100,000 cases and some 7,000 deaths (numbers which will, in the end, undoubtedly prove significant undercounts).

A Rubáiyát World

Whether in America or Iran, fundamentalist religion (or, in the U.S. case, a Trumpian and Republican urge to curry favor with it) often made for dismally bad public policy during the first wave of Covid-19. Among other things, it encouraged people, whether in religious institutions in both countries or in American anti-shutdown protests, to engage in reckless behavior that endangered not just themselves but others. Ironically, the conflict in each country between defiant pastors or mullahs and scientists on this issue should bring to mind the culture wars of the early twentieth century and the place of the Iranian poetry of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam in what was then largely a Western debate.

That makes those poems worthy of reconsideration in this perilous moment of ours. As I wrote in the introduction to my new translation of the Rubáiyát:

“The message of the poems… is that life has no obvious meaning and is heartbreakingly short. Death is near and we might not live to exhale the breath we just took in. The afterlife is a fairy tale for children… The only way to get past this existential unfairness is to enjoy life, to love someone, and to get intimate with good wine. On the other hand, there is no reason to be mean-spirited to other people.”

Some of the appeal of this poetry to past millions came from the dim view it took of then (as now) robust religious obscurantism. The irreverent Mark Twain once marveled, “No poem had given me so much pleasure before… It is the only poem that I have ever carried about with me; it has not been from under my hand for 28 years.” Thomas Hardy, the British novelist and champion of Darwin, wove its themes into some of his best-known fiction. Robert Frost wrote his famous (and famously bleak) poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Night” with Khayyam’s quatrains in mind. Beat poet Jack Kerouac modeled Sal Paradise, the unconventional protagonist of his novel On the Road, on his idea of what Khayyam might have been like.

Although compilers have always attributed those poems to that great astronomer and mathematician of the Seljuk era, it’s clear that they were actually written by later Iranian figures who used Khayyam as a “frame author,” perhaps for fear of reaction to the religious skepticism deeply embedded in the poetry (in the same way that the Thousand and One Nights tales composed in Cairo, Aleppo, and Baghdad over centuries were all attributed to Scheherazade). The bulk of those verses first appeared at the time of the Mongol invasion of Iran in the 1200s, a bloody moment that threw the region into turmoil and paralysis just as Covid-19 has brought our world to an abrupt and chaotic halt.

As if the war’s urban destruction and piles of skulls weren’t enough, historians have argued that the Mongols, who opened up trade routes from Asia into the Middle East, also inadvertently facilitated the westward spread of the Yersina pestis bacillus that would cause the bubonic plague, or the Black Death, a pandemic that would wipe out nearly half of China’s population and a third of Europe’s.

A fifteenth-century scribe in the picturesque Iranian city of Shiraz would, in fact, create the first anthology of quatrains entitled The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, many composed during Mongol rule and the subsequent pandemic. The dangers of what we would now call religious fundamentalism, as opposed to an enlightened spirituality, were trumpeted throughout those poems:

In monasteries, temples, and retreats
they fear hellfire and look for paradise.
But those who know the mysteries of God
don’t let those seeds be planted in their hearts.

While some turn to theology for comfort during a disaster, those quatrains urged instead that all of us be aggressively here and now, trying to wring every last pleasure out of our worldly life before it abruptly vanishes:

A bottle of Shiraz and the lips of a lover, on the edge of a meadow —
are like cash in hand for me — and for you, credit toward paradise.
They’ve wagered that some go to heaven, and some to hell.
But whoever went to hell? And whoever came back from paradise?

The poetry ridicules some religious beliefs, using the fantasies of astrology as a proxy target for the fatalism of orthodox religion. The authors may have felt safer attacking horoscopes than directly taking on Iran’s powerful clergy. Astronomers know that the heavenly bodies, far from dictating the fate of others, revolve in orbits that make their future position easy to predict and so bear little relationship to the lives of complex and unpredictable human beings (just as, for instance, you could never have predicted that American evangelicals would opt to back a profane, womanizing, distinctly of-this-world orange-faced presidential candidate in 2016 and thereafter):

Don’t blame the stars for virtues or for faults,
or for the joy and grief decreed by fate!
For science holds the planets all to be
A thousand times more helpless than are we.

Wars and pandemics choose winners and losers and — as we’re learning all too grimly in the world of 2020 — the wealthy are generally so much better positioned to protect themselves from catastrophe than the poor. To its eternal credit, the Rubáiyát (unlike both the Trump administration and the Iranian religious leadership) took the side of the latter, pointing out that religious fatalism and superstitions like astrology are inherently supportive of a rotten status quo in which the poor are the first to be sacrificed, whether to pandemics or anything else:

Signs of the zodiac: You give something to every jackass.
You hand them fancy baths, millworks, and canals —
while noble souls must gamble, in hopes of winning their nightly bread.
Who would give a fart for such a constellation?

In our own perilous times, right-wing fundamentalist governments like those in Brazil and the United States, as well as religious fundamentalist ones as in Iran, have made the coronavirus outbreak far more virulent and dangerous by encouraging religious gatherings at a time when the pandemic’s curve could only be flattened by social distancing. Their willingness to blithely set aside reason and science out of a fatalistic and misguided faith in a supernatural providence that overrules natural law (or, in Donald Trump’s case, a fatalistic and misguided faith in his own ability to overrule natural laws, not to speak of providence) has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths around the world. Think of it as, in spirit, a fundamentalist version of genocide.

The pecuniary motives of some of this obscurantism are clear, as many churches and mosques depend on contributions from congregants at services for the livelihood of imams and pastors. Their willingness to prey on the gullibility of their followers in a bid to keep up their income stream should be considered the height of hypocrisy and speaks to the importance of people never surrendering their capacity for independent, critical reasoning.

Though you might not have noticed it on Donald Trump’s and Ali Khameini’s planet, religion seems to be in the process of collapsing, at least in the industrialized world. A third of the French say that they have no religion at all and just 45% consider themselves Catholic (with perhaps only half of those being relatively committed to the faith), while only 5% attend church regularly. A majority of young people in 12 European countries claim that they now have no religion, pointing to a secular future for much of the continent. Even in peculiarly religious America, self-identification as Christian has plunged to 65% of the population, down 12% in the past decade, while 26% of the population now disavows having a religion at all.

In post-pandemic Iran, don’t be surprised if similar feelings spread, given how the religious leadership functionally encouraged the devastation of Covid-19. In this way, despite military threats, economic sanctions, and everything else, Donald Trump’s America and Ali Khameini’s Iran truly have something in common. In the U.S., where it’s easier to measure what’s happening, evangelicals, more than a fifth of the population when George W. Bush was first elected president in 2000, are 16% of it two decades later.

Given the unpredictable nature of our world (as the emergence of Covid-19 has made all too clear), nothing, secularization included, is a one-way street. Religion is perfectly capable of experiencing revivals. Still, there is no surer way to tip the balance toward an Omar Khayyam-style skepticism than for prominent religious leaders to guide their faithful, and all those in contact with them, into a new wave of the pandemic.

Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. His new book is The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian (IB Tauris). He is also the author of Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment.

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Copyright 2020 Juan Cole